#1
Post rating: +
I was listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard

Cohen in order to think about

You for literary purposes


ariana reines doesn't understand men. but she's got a pair of eyes, her wits about her, a mountain of insecurity, an intimidating intellectual foundation, bouts of sexual confidence, and a way with line breaks. and so she might be the most terrifying thing in the world to a man. she writes: "when you read this, you will probably hate me." she's probably right. her book coeur de lion takes the form of a letter to a former lover. its principle motif, in my own 'insecurely masculine' reading, is an inversion of masculinity and femininity: reines fully embodies her 'female-ness' as a poet, though she's writing in a form generally dominated by men. and so something very interesting happens: where a man's 'love poem' is meant to allure, seduce, and melt, reines' 'love poem' is almost sexually repulsive - everybody involved knows the entire time that should the addressee of her poem be real, he will no doubt ask her to 'never contact me again.' but why? i can anticipate a response that calls on patriarchal gender norms to explain that a woman in a masculine role comes across as vulgar to the unenlightened (and indeed the poem is vulgar too), or perhaps a response that calls my own character into question: but no, there is something inherently terrifying in this book.



of course, by inverting the gender dynamic reines also to an extent inverts the relationship between the subject and the object. contrary to literary expectations, the male is suddenly the bizarre sex object with a range of expected and occasionally surprising responses:

When I finally got away

From Alain Badiou, who was

Explaining something

About set theory and making his obscene laugh

That strange ejaculation that comes out of his mouth

When he speaks as a man who is sure that he is right

And he sticks his long tongue out and nearly gasps

My heart was beating.

We went into the stall

And you slammed me against the wall

And everything was possible

Your cock grew in my hand

And I sucked it

And you came

or perhaps:

Her), you and Sinan have nothing

In common at all, nothing except

For me. Up in the mountains I

Wrote about loving your body

And the way you moan when

You fuck, about loving the way

You say Oh my god Oh my god,

And your face goes limp and your eyes

Shine. About being a little jealous

And scared you might be more perverse

Than me. While I was writing what I

Wrote about your and my perversion Slavoj

Zizek paraphrased Freud: "The melancholic

Loses the object of desire while the object

Is still there."

there's a lot going on here. i made sure to choose passages that were heavily and obviously allusive even as they do that scary thing reines does so well and repeatedly in her book. as a male reader it feels a little bit like you're being manipulated with tools, lightly hammered here or there, unable to escape at the same time, so you're not actually being hammered but you're stuck in a vise that's tightened a little more with every weird little line. reines' "you," like the male reader, is also stuck: an object who can 'slam the writer against the wall' but do nothing else but sit and be analyzed, whose cock grows, whose face goes limp, whose eyes shine, but in the end is little more than the literary 'object' in a mangled zizek quote that is meant to be deep and against the odds actually is.

reines is a woman. but she's also a male writer. when she writes 'I' the word sits snugly in a masculine literary narrative tradition; when she refers to her male 'you' the word doesn't reflect any sort of tradition, but is quite simply the female object that mopes around and glides through all of those thousands of books written by men, the object of desire, sucker of affections, the irrational monster of whimsy and caprice. even though that 'you' is a man, is the male reader, and is in fact wholly masculine:



I don't know why

You sat down next to me

And grabbed me

In the first place.

I don't know why the next night

I looked at you and said something

About accepting your psychic powers

And when you were strangling

Me and kissing me

I thought it:

I accept.

I accept.



i quote this only to demonstrate that reines knows exactly what she's doing: her gender binaries swirl around each other in a disorienting flurry. there's never a moment in the 90 pages of the short book that you doubt it's a woman writing this, but all the same the narration is unsettlingly masculine. perhaps reines' insecurities are infectious, or perhaps universal: a man is happy if he's remembered by the women in his life, but he's terrified if they take the further step of analysis. but what can the writer do except for analyse? do we ask simply to be recounted? even then the writer's subjectivity will tell more than enough to get the neurotic impulses ticking. maybe, when it comes to relationships, it'd be better if nobody wrote anything at all, especially not women. unluckily for me, reines seems to anticipate this train of thought:



I guess there is no point saying

These things we did. We know

What we did. But stating them

Is like reinstating them

Inside me. It causes me some pain.

I want to feel this pain

Cos it helps me remember

Things. I am trying to decide

If the things humans emit

Between themselves

Have any reason. I am trying to decide

If the state of thought

Knows anything about

The intensity I felt

With you. Maybe these poems

Are an excess of certain

Fleeting sensations, and I should

Just, I don't know, get high or go

Out dancing; try to make

Something of myself. Even now

As I look at them, and it hasn't even

Been a week, you aren't very clear

In my mind at all and I have no idea

What I miss or what I want, if

Anything. It is so over

Between us, I guess. I see your face

receding into coffee-colored

Light. I see ochres

And resins in a richness that I can only

Imagine tonight. I am writing this

In order to lose you



damn. this is a good book, you should read it. some more ancillary notes:

-reines' brilliance and accuracy in describing 'relationship moments' - disturbing
-check out badiou's recounting of 'ariane' in being and event
-accomplished writing
-self-pubbed
-i am now more scared of jewish women



in reines' own words:

I am such a shitty

Woman.

Edited by blinkandwheeze ()

#2
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good shit, do u got links to more of her stuff?
#3
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oh yea there was a bunch of shit i wanted to say about class but i totally forgot lmao
#4
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aerdil posted:
good shit, do u got links to more of her stuff?

i've only read some of her other poems that my friends have sent me, and generally i haven't liked her readings because of how mumbly she is. she is clearly , uh, not 'confident' in her work in a way that a person who likes to get up and read their own shitty poetry is 'confident' in their work, though obviously her work exudes a ton of confidence among the insecurity valleys or whatever

#5
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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whats she look like
#6
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she looks like a mousy hipster girl, so what you'd expect
#7
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hi impper. hows drug lyfe treating you
#8
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it's treating me well. thanks actually i feel a lot better today
#9
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sounds cool. basically the only poetry ive liked in a while is noah cicero's so i never seek it out
#10
Poronto
Post rating: ~
how wrong is it to be excited by her armpit stubble
#11
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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littlegreenpills posted:
how wrong is it to be excited by her armpit stubble



very. VERY very

#12
penitent
Post rating: ~
ahahahaha this looks awesome
#13
penitent
Post rating: +
zizek and fucking and pointlessness. yeah i kinda see what you meant when you said her poetry is like my posts lol.
#14
penitent
Post rating: ~
the last book of poetry i read was from unincorporated territory [saina] by perez for this postcolonial lit class..... it had its moments but it was so fuckin pomo
#15
lame
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littlegreenpills posted:
how wrong is it to be excited by her armpit stubble



mentioning it is pretty gauche

#16
lame
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also all men find feminine intellect terrifying
#17
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lol that's not true. jeez.
#18
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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futurewidow posted:
also all men find feminine intellect terrifying



now when you say this do you mean "intellect, residing in females" or "the intellect specifically OF females"

#19
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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although tbqh i find neither one of them particularly terrifying, considering they are not bees or aliens
#20
penitent
Post rating: +
im not afraid to admit im always slightly terrified by strong female intellects, and i tend to deal with this by turning it into a sexually attractive characteristic so i can reassert conventional gender relations + deal with the fact of her intellect rather than its content too much...... nice try escaping from the prism of objectification babe, better luck next time
#21
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futurewidow posted:
also all men find feminine intellect terrifying

check your premises

#22
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ha and deadken rolls up to prove the exact thought i'm thinking--if you have an easy time with women because they find your character and demeanor attractive you're probably going to have weird issues about female intelligence

probably goes back to freudian shit about which parent was intellectually dominant

Edited by thirdplace ()

#23
penitent
Post rating: ~
well my mum was always more intellectual i guess but i wouldnt say dominant...... she borrowed my copy of ulysses and gave it back like a week later lol. owned, mum. i dont think this is remotely relevant really, im a smart dude and i like smart girls but im also a Known Wddp Sexist so there you go

bees

fat bees

fluttering around me in the sun

fat bees in furred vests
16 Apr 2012 / 5 notes
#24
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
i like to sensually rub my intellect against the intellects of women by having playful but contentious arguments with them for hours at a time, gently probing and echolocating where they stand on the issues with a mixture faux-disingenuous sincerity and impossibly-held opinions
#25
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
just now this very second coming to the realization that i would rather me and a woman masturbate at each other mid-borderline-argument-conversation than engage in actual penetrative sex. hmmm, p weird bro
#26
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my dad was intellectually cominant but also an ex-junkie liberal which as im typing this makes me realize i am my dad and will become him in the future oh god oh god
#27
FLAWDA
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female intellect is terrifying because when they have brains and sex organs they've got way more GOODS than me
my white privilege will be useless at that point
#28
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Buy that poet an account
#29
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deadken posted:
zizek and fucking and pointlessness. yeah i kinda see what you meant when you said her poetry is like my posts lol.

yep she really is the female jewish neurotic to your male jewish neurotic

#30
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i deal well with really brilliant girls in general, but at the same time they're probably the only girls i've had relationships with which could be labelled 'disastrous', 'catastrophic', 'apocalyptic' or some variation thereof. but it never has anything to do with the intellect
#31
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Meursault posted:
Buy that poet an account

i hear she does talk to people who read her stuff but im not gona do this

#32
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there's another interesting aspect of this book in that the 'you' she addresses is also a writer, and she takes a clear position of literary superiority to him; she constantly calls his book bad, makes fun of his writing, wonders if he's a 'bad writer'. im not sure what that means but i liked it
#33
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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Impper posted:
i deal well with really brilliant girls in general, but at the same time they're probably the only girls i've had relationships with which could be labelled 'disastrous', 'catastrophic', 'apocalyptic' or some variation thereof. but it never has anything to do with the intellect



intelligence allows women to wield the vast powers of relationshippery they have over us in a deliberate, territory-grabbing way, rather than haphazardly and easily counteractably

#34
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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also sometimes it makes them smart enough not to put up with our SHIT
#35
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Superabound posted:

Impper posted:
i deal well with really brilliant girls in general, but at the same time they're probably the only girls i've had relationships with which could be labelled 'disastrous', 'catastrophic', 'apocalyptic' or some variation thereof. but it never has anything to do with the intellect

intelligence allows women to wield the vast powers of relationshippery they have over us in a deliberate, territory-grabbing way, rather than haphazardly and easily counteractably

eh not really in that way either

#36
Post rating: +
guys that like girls to act dumb are pathetic pieces of shit
#37
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
a young Arthur just before he reaches for the sword
#38
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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Meursault posted:
guys that like girls to act dumb are pathetic pieces of shit



what about guys that think girls that act dumb are pathetic pieces of shit? thats probably just as bad but i wont deny being one

#39
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Meursault posted:
guys that like girls to act dumb are pathetic pieces of shit



what do you mean by 'act dumb?'

#40
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ive decided that i need to be more of an asshole to women if i want a relationship since apparently we're acculturated to find that an attractive trait, especially intelligent women