Loser Art and Other Queers

Teresa Carmody 

This talk was written and presented at Symposium for Queer Poetics, Naropa University, March 18, 2014. “Pantry” and “Front Foyer” are excerpted from Maison Femme: a fiction, Bon Aire Projects, 2015. “Pantry” has been published in Faultline 24, 2015.

I want to talk about Loser Art. Loser Art is work that doesn’t sell for several reasons and not because the writing is bad. Although let’s be honest: bad writing exists. Some people even say that Les Figues publishes bad writing. We received this feedback from two different NEA panel reviews; one panelist was quite adamant that we publish bad writing, while another said that while we’ve published important books in the past, the new work isn’t as compelling. And so we no longer receive the NEA Art Works grant. There is also a blogger in Colorado who thinks we publish bad books; he calls them stupid. Obviously, I don’t agree. I think bad writing is something else, something I know I’ve read even before I’ve read it, compulsively conventional in language, structure, and ideas. In this sense, we could say bad writing is heteronormative. It does what readers expect writing to do—with less or more sophistication—it fulfills readers’ desires, provides cathartic release, and confirms that which readers easily believe to be true. In this sense, some gay writing can be heteronormative, especially if it is friendly. Les Figues does not publish friendly or bad writing, but we do publish Loser Art because we publish books that won’t sell. This is not true for all the books we publish, but it is true for some of them. Books that won’t sell are not heteronormative because they don’t act like proper books: they’re not easily absorbed, at least in part, and they are written, or compiled, by people who are often looked over, then overlooked. These are books that fuck with the reader’s sense of self, and they are termed loser because they don’t (won’t) “work” for the heteronormative reader. This, to me, is queer writing, though queer has become a word almost too friendly. And I don’t know what the other word is, the word for writing that is so dumb and devastating and dislocating that you are undone and deconstructed, which means that maybe another life—other lives—can be. I’m going to use the word queer since that’s the word that brought us here tonight.

But I don’t want to talk solely about publishing. Right now, I am writing fiction about being a publisher. Or rather, I am writing fiction about two women who live in a house, and in their house, there is also a publicly owned organization. That is, there is a nonprofit publishing house inside the house, much like Les Figues. I am using the structure of the house as the structure of the fiction. Here is a section called “Pantry”:

Pantry

Marie looked out the pantry window. The neighbor had painted his house electric blue, stopping just below the attic window and leaving the top part unpainted. Mrs. Whittle said that’s where the neighbor’s ladder stopped, but Marie did not agree. The paint was chipped and unevenly faded; if Marie squinted her eyes, the house looked like a painting.

Marie was in the pantry because that’s where they kept the garden party supplies, along with many other rarely used but periodically useful objects: an ice-cream maker, a bamboo mat, puzzles and board games, the children’s box of art materials. Marie and Louise were hosting a garden party that day as a fundraiser, and Marie thought about inviting her neighbor. She would have liked to have her neighbor there, but then again, she did not want to charge her neighbor the door fee and her neighbor might not like the writers. He would not like their writing and he would not know anyone or have anyone to talk to. If her neighbor came to the party, Marie would feel like a good neighborly person, but doing something in order to see and be seen as a good person was a rather self-centered reason, and Marie did not want to be selfish. In the pantry, she found the punch bowl and several clear plastic serving trays.

Perhaps, thought Marie, she was being too quick a judge, for a person never could tell what she might herself like one day, and this sounded like Zola in Nana. Zola wanted to write every thing about every kind of person and life, so he described monstrous-enormous-swelling lesbians at a lesbian bar in Paris; Marie had heard that his book, published in 1880, was the very first scene of a lesbian bar in mainstream European literature. Marie liked poetry readings and literary events more than lesbian bars; she liked reading more than drinking though she would definitely drink a glass or more of spiked strawberry lemonade at the garden party, where there would be many lesbians of varying shapes and sizes, plus gay boys and other homos, married poets, unspecified straights, and, as part of a performance, women who would tie themselves to each other with thick ropes as they sang words from an anthology of women’s writing. If Marie were to describe such a scene, should and could she try to include every kind of person present, how many details would make for a description as real and naturalistic as Zola, and when would details swell it into something gruesome, frightening, and obviously fake?

Marie liked to consider these kinds of questions, and she also liked to talk with her neighbor, who had served both in the Navy and in the Marines. He had worked, too, for the VA doing construction, and when it came to the VA, he had, quite understandably, very many complaints. On the front of his electric blue house hung a Purple Heart flag, and sometimes he wore a Buffalo Soldier t-shirt; sometimes, he told Marie about the fun-trouble he had while enlisted, and he liked to say he was still following orders, but now the must-dos came from his wife.

One good thing about being a publisher is that we receive a steady supply of wooden pallets. I like to give these pallets to our neighbor, who turns them into sawdust for his garden. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the wood being treated, but our neighbor says wooden pallets are basically chem-free. We receive many wooden pallets because we print offset, which means our basement is full of boxes of books, and as I said before, some of these books don’t sell, or rather, they sell very few copies. Here are two indicators that a book won’t sell:

1. Is it a book of poetry? Poetry sells less than prose. Poetry that doesn’t look like poetry sells even less.
2. Is it written by somebody nobody cares about? Or, to restate this question: is it written by someone who has very little cultural capital? If so, it won’t sell, and not just because people care so much about cultural capital, which they do, but also because they must (must!) consider their time and attention, and because there are so many people and so very many books to read, how does a person choose her reading material? As we know, cultural capital is invested in or marked by a person’s name, and it is accumulated through things like universities, teachers, media, money, grants, friends, Twitter feeds, and Facebook.

Two years ago, Les Figues published Words of Love, and this book is a good example of Loser Art. It’s the book the blogger in Colorado called stupid, stupid like Les Figues. This made me proud, like a queer who’s here. Words of Love is by Mark Rutkoski; he’s an artist who works as a painting restorer, and he learned about Les Figues from someone at an art book fair, sending us the manuscript blind. Mark makes excellent cross-medium work—literary + visual—but he doesn’t have a big following in the art world, and he is certainly unknown in poetry communities. He’s not young; he’s not particularly outrageous. His book is an index of the words in Shakespeare’s sonnets, listed in alphabetical order and in their frequency. The words are interesting because they are Shakespeare’s (the big name in the bind), meaning also that they are generally very good words, words with a lot of cultural capital. But Mark has taken the poems apart as if they were buildings or clocks and used their material—their words—to build something else: visual art in book form. He did the rearranging by hand, starting with Sonnet 1 and working his way through, until Will is re-embodied as a list of words that simultaneously destroys and reifies the poet and his poems. Words of Love opens up Shakespeare’s poems, literally and all together. Here is a list of words used by Shakespeare, which you can use too:

pace
pace
pace
page
paid
pain
pain
pain
pain
pain
painful
painted
painted
painted
painted
painted
painter
painter
painter’s
painting
painting
painting
painting
painting
painting
palate
palate
pale
pale
paper
papers
parallels
pardon
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part
part

Publishing is, in part, the ability to say this is art and poetry, and here are the non-heteronormative reasons, i.e., the queer reading that provides the frame. Here are three more things about Loser Art:

1. Loser Art provides an opportunity for small points of resistance. To publish something that will not sell—despite its merit—is to insist on values other than commercial viability and cultural capital. I admire, for example, Jill Johnston’s (can I call it queer) instinct “to fuck things up,” and I admire writing that poses unanswerable questions.
2. One way to insist on something else mattering is by making that something else. Publishing is another kind of making. It’s a practice. It can be a queering practice, like describing the writing in Sawako Nakayasu’s The Ants as neither poetry nor fiction, but ants. Sawako wrote ants, and Les Figues published them.
3. This leads me to the social imaginary, which Charles Taylor, in Modern Social Imaginaries, defines as, “The way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others,” and how these imaginings are expressed in stories, images, and legends. Artist-run presses—especially presses run by critically engaged artists—are in a unique position to affect the social imaginary through the material they publish. Some kinds of work become increasingly publishable the more that kind of work is published (just as things get less queer and more heteronomative the more they become like what’s expected). Sometimes a writer accretes cultural capital, but that does not necessarily mean her Loser Art is more widely read. Many people, including myself, have opinions about books they haven’t read, and I think it’s worth asking: what’s making up my mind?

In conclusion, I will read you one more small section from the fiction I am writing about women and publishing:

Front Foyer

“This is a photo of a dodo,” said Marie. She pointed to a photograph of a dodo drawn in pencil, and Mina Loy looked. Above the photograph hung the dodo drawing, set in double glass and framed in wood. Mina Loy was visiting from a small town full of lesbians and loggers; the women stood together in the foyer and the walls were full of art. “The artist,” said Marie, “likes to use a material that rhymes with what it is.” “This is not strange,” said Mina Loy, “rhyme is a very good reason.” Marie and Mina Loy liked to discuss this question together: “What are people not supposed to do in life and writing?” “They are not supposed to write a book made of only one sentence,” said Mina Loy. “If they are women,” said Marie, “they are not supposed to violently disagree, at least not face-to-face.”

“Art,” said Marie, “used to feel like a very strange reason.” Art was like racehorse breeds and fancy cheese. Marie had grown up in a small town in the middle of the country, a town surrounded by small farms and a general feeling that farmers’ daughters aren’t supposed to be artists, for except in some country music songs, farmers’ daughters are wholesome and clean, and horses just pull things. Long ago, before Marie and Louise were Marie and Louise, Mina Loy told Marie to read Louise’s sentence. “It is best to read it in one sitting,” said Mina Loy, “and it is best to find a setting as uncomfortable as the sentence.” In the sentence, a legless soldier narrates his final night, for come the dawn he will die, and death is also a sentence for you and me. Long ago, Louise was in a weekly writing group, but when she gave the sentence to the other writers, they asked her to leave. “The sentence makes us angry,” said one of the weekly writers. They liked to know exactly what meaning was happening, but the sentence fell and bled and held the phrase crisis jubilee.

“Word play is a very good reason,” said Mina Loy, who was quite fond of Pierre de Bourdeilles’s donna con donna. “Do you know,” she told Marie, “there are lesbian weasels, which is why lesbians were represented by weasels in times before.” “The dodo was extinct before the camera was invented, which is why the artist needed to draw a dodo to make her photo.” A writing teacher told Louise she wrote too much like a man and this was a problem; another professor asked her if she was writing in drag. “I have known some lesbians who are very much like men,” said Marie, but when she later considered this statement, she did not know what it could mean. In the foyer, Mina Loy placed her keys on Louise’s grandmother’s writing desk, which was kidney shaped and made of tulip wood. “We know someone who asked her students to punctuate the sentence,” said Marie, “and there was such disagreement about which clauses belonged together, it proved the sentence’s grammatical truth.”

“Dodos and weasels and lesbians and loggers,” sighed Mina Loy. “What would you like to drink?”