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Rachel Zolf
Reads at Spartacus Books
Friday, May 131, 2007
Authors who read on this date:
Mark Wallace
Rachel Zolf
Programme
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Part
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Rachel Zolf
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Introduction by Michael Barnholden |
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Zolf, whole reading |
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Mark Wallace
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Introduction by Nicholas Perrin |
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Wallace, part A |
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Wallace, part B |
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Wallace, part C |
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Wallace, whole reading |
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Context |
" If MARK WALLACE did the comedy circuit, all that big hair and those sweet drinks would riot in the streets. Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn't There is a series of one to six line stanzas all revamping the idea of the one-liner. But the joke is always frightening, a world where the 2x4s pounding the cat are hitting our heads and they hurt damn it, as they always make us stop and consider what we are. He is the existential joker: if Batman met the poet and it was for real."
--Juliana Spahr
RACHEL ZOLF writes of her most recent book, Human Resources: "Human Resources makes a vain attempt to answer Anne Carson's question around Paul Celan's poetry: "What is lost when words are wasted and where is the human store to which such goods are gathered in?" The subject of the book, a poet, wastes words writing "plain language" marketing and employee communications for pay, turning into a kind of writing (or rhetoric) machine in the process. As the two worlds of poetry and plain language collide, overlap and merge in the book, we enter a nonsense state of fractured subjectivity, experiencing the psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Psychoanalytic, general-economic and transmission-theory rhetorics fed into the writing machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, art production and communication. In the end, the new-look body without organs organizing the text is semi-recuperated through ethical confrontations with the multiple voices within and without her, while her book-machine frame crumbles before it can really form."
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