Slack Pussy reading group will map out a can(y)on of trans and queer living writers. We will be reading in a chain. The first text we will read is an extract from Eileen Myles’s autobiographical novel, Chelsea Girls (1994). Eileen will begin the chain by recommending a text by an author of her choice, who will in turn recommend the next, and so on…
Sessions are held monthly, and texts will be made available by email. We ask you to read the text in advance of the session.To join our mailing list email: slackpuss.rg [AT] gmail.com
No prior knowledge is necessary – and all are welcome. You can join at any point in the chain. If you have missed past sessions and you would like to catch up, please let us know.
CHAIN THREE (2020–)
Session 1: 7pm, Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE (2019)
Wednesday 11th November 2020, on Zoom
(please email slackpuss.rg@gmail.com to book a place)
We will start a new chain by reading Shola von Reinhold’s novel LOTE (2019) – a decadent queer literary debut, that interrogates the removal of black figures from history. More here. Please read the whole novel!
Session 2: Wednesday 16 December 2020, 7pm on Zoom
Faggots & Their Friends Between the Revolutions
by Larry Mitchell (1977)
(please email slackpuss.rg@gmail.com to book a place)
We invited Shola von Reinhold to choose the next book in the chain, and they have recommended Larry Mitchell’s queer manifesto Faggots & Their Friends Between the Revolutions (1977).
This is what Shola has to say:
“So my choice isn’t strictly a book by a living author but I thought it could be interesting for the group to read Faggots & Their Friends Between the Revolutions and then have the writer and filmmaker Tourmaline, who does the preface to the Nightboat Books edition, pick the next book? From her preface: ‘I am still here because I have also been held, in these moments of despair, by lilac and pine tree and moonbeam and loose tomato and hollyhock […] the faggots have helped me believe that if we are ever to make it to that next revolution it will be through becoming undone, an undoing that touches ourselves and touches each other and all the brokenness we are.’ The combination of Tourmaline – whose work I love but don’t yet have words for -– and this book, is dizzying! “
Please read the whole book (it’s quite short). The new edition, with Tourmaline’s introduction, is published by Nightboat and is widely available.
Session 3: Wednesday 10 March 2021, 7pmon Zoom
Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie (2019)
(please email slackpuss.rg@gmail.com to book a place)
This month we’re reading a second book recommended by Shola – Irenosen Okojie’s short story collection, Nudibranch (2019). This is what Shola has to say:
“I feel like Okojie’s work is hugely important in and of itself, but also when taking stock of British experimental/innovative writing – I’m interested in how when it comes to the contemplation of such spaces, Black women in Britain continue to be neglected, despite not only having always made work which is innovative, but also influencing the white work which comes to be categorised as such… I suspect this has a lot to do with the policing of the ‘brows’ and the long history of divesting Black art of intentionality, consciousness, self-consciousness, whilst conversely overinvesting, overdetermining even the most tedious white mark-making with the promise of limitless unplumbed cognitive vistas!”
Please read the collection if possible! No prior knowledge is necessary and all are welcome to join.
CHAIN TWO (2019-)
Session 3: 7pm, Wednesday 25th March
Jonny Appleseed (2018) by Joshua Whitehead
Jonny Appleseed.pdf
We invited Larissa Lai to choose the next book in the chain, and she recommended Joshua Whitehead’s queer Indigenous novel Jonny Appleseed (2018). This is what Lai has to say:
“Joshua Whitehead, a rising star in Canadian/Turtle Island literature. Jonny Appleseed tells the story of a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer NDN glitterprincess looking for love while trying to survive in the streets of big city Winnipeg in the week before his stepfather’s funeral on the rez. Sexy, unsettling and very down to earth, this novel is really important for the way it captures contemporary queer Indigenous life. This is a story that, until this moment, has been deeply repressed. The writing is witty and biting, and the story is told unflinchingly.”
We have scanned the first few chapters – but please buy the book if you can, and read as much as possible!
Session 2: 7pm, Thursday 12 December
The Tiger Flu (2018) by Larissa Lai
Tiger Flu.pdf
We invited Jordy Rosenberg to choose the next book in the chain, and he recommended Larissa Lai’s queer sci-fi novel The Tiger Flu (2018). This is what Rosenberg has to say:
“Masterful, breathtaking, fucking genius work of fantasy-tinged lesbian feminist sci-fi that is also and inescapably poetry. Unsurprising, because Lai is also a highly lauded poet (I loved her Automaton Biographies). This book is so expert at summoning an imaginative world of lesbian-feminist near future collectives, technology-that-is-so-omnipresent-and-totalizing-that-it-becomes-both-weather-and-crumbling-infrastructure-at-the-same-time, and a revolutionary stand against corporate pharma, that it manages to capture you from the first sentence, and for this reason The Tiger Flu is equally a lesson in how to write (I’ve perseverated on the first two pages for great lengths of time, trying to map out a blueprint of Lai’s writing technique to derive lessons from it) and a captivating meteor of a story.”
We have scanned the first four chapters, but please buy the book if you can.
Session 1: 7pm, Wednesday 16 October
Confessions of the Fox (2018) by Jordy Rosenberg
Confessions of the Fox.pdf
We invited queer theorist and historian Jordy Rosenberg to begin a new Slack Pussy chain. We will start by reading his novel Confessions of the Fox (2018), a queer retelling of the life of an 18th century pick pocket. Here is what one writer has to say:
“Confessions of the Fox is so goddammed good. Reading it was like an out-of-body experience. I want to run through the streets screaming about it. It should be in the personal canon of every Queer & Non-Cis person. Read it.” (Carmen Maria Machado)
We will be reading the entire book.
CHAIN ONE (2017-2018)
Session 1: 7pm, Wednesday 16 November
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles (1994)
Eileen Myles- Chelsea Girls pdf
Poet and novelist Eileen Myles is one of the most influential living lesbian writers. She is also one of the coolest women on the planet. Born in Boston in 1949, she has published over 20 volumes of poetry and prose.
We invited Myles to be the first in the Slack Pussy chain, and, following her suggestion, we will begin by reading the chapter ‘Robin’ from Chelsea Girls, her autobiographical novel written in 1994 – an account of a brief, and intensely sexual, love affair. From the back of the book:
From the back of the book:
“Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles’s 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed “lesbianity”, and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York.”
Session 2: 7pm, Wednesday 14 December
Calamities by Renee Gladman (2016). Recommended by Eileen Myles.
Renne Gladman-Calamities pdf
In the words of Myles: ‘I love her writing always have because there’s a peculiar collective in her individual.’
Gladman is a poet, novelist, essayist and teacher who has published ten books to date. She is best known for ‘The Ravicka Novels’ trilogy, in which she writes about an invented city-state called Ravicka, ‘a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.’
We will be reading extracts from her latest fragmented essay Calamaties, published by Wave Books.
Calamaties reflects – among other things – on lesbian relationships, the experience of being a woman of colour in a predominantly white US university system, and what it means to write, investigating social structures on the level of the sentence.
Session 3: 7pm Wednesday 18 January
All We Know: Three Lives (2012) by Lisa Cohen. Recommended by Renee Gladman
This is what Gladman says:
‘I’d like to recommend Lisa Cohen’s All We Know, which is a book of literary biography focused on the lives of three queer women living in New York in the early 20th century, women (mostly) unwritten in history, who were fiercely creative and independent, who lived rich social lives, and sometimes failed in their endeavors, but always wholly as themselves. This book brings to life a vibrant, intellectual underground of women artists, designers, and writers. It is gorgeously written and engaging’
The book is made up of three discreet biographies of queer women living in early 20th century America: Madge Garland (editor of British Vogue); Mercedes de Acosta (“the first celebrity stalker”); and Esther Murphy (“spell-binding conversationalist”). The entire book is well worth a read, but we have chosen the section on Esther Murphy for Slack Pussy. It runs 147 pages – read what you can!
Session 4: 7pm Thursday 16 February
American Romances (2009) by Rebecca Brown. Recommended by Lisa Cohen Rebecca Brown-Invisible pdf
This is what Cohen says:
“In Rebecca Brown’s American Romances, to be “American” (and a writer) is to be a reader: of Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde, of abandoned books and other losses, of the Puritans and pop music, of Ralph Ellison and B movies. It is to be guided by the power of juxtaposition; to understand that violence and intractable invisibilities are constitutive of this place; to insist that the footnotes are not an afterthought. It is to ask, repeatedly: “Who is it we’re not seeing now?” In this book, an essay is a wild thing.”
We will be reading the essay Invisible.
Session 5: 7pm Wednesday 15 March
The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson. Recommended by Rebecca Brown.
This is what Brown says:
“I think you all should read Maggie Nelson’s THE ARGONAUTS. This is such a smart, daring book and Nelson has not only read really widely and thoughtfully, but also lived (and lives) experientially with questions of language, identity, gender, history, art and responsibility to self and world. It’s great and she’s great.”
We will be reading the entire book.
Session 6: Thursday 20 April, 7pm
Testo Junkie (2008) by Paul B. Preciado. Recommended by Maggie Nelson.
Paul.B Preciado- Testo Junkie PDF
This is what Nelson says:
“TESTO JUNKIE is a wild and edifying ride, and presses hard on and sometimes through presumptions about gender, desire, feminism, lesbian/gay intersections, and queer pasts, presents, and futures. It’s literary, academic, complex, rip-roaring, controversial, and often quite hot.”
We will be reading three chapters, “Testogel”, “The History of Technosexuality” and “In Which The Body Of VD Becomes An Element In An Experimental Context”.
The extract is available as a PDF (above).
Session 7: Wednesday 1 November, 7pm.
“After Kathy Acker” (2017) by Chris Kraus. Chosen by Paul B. Preciado.
Chris Kraus- After Kathy Acker PDF
“‘To lie is to try,’ Chris Kraus writes in this examination of the various personae of Kathy Acker, the fucked-up girl from high school who, through lying and trying, became an experimental writer of rare courage and vision. In some ways a contemporary and in some ways as far off as the days when people moved to New York and San Francisco for the cheap rent, Acker needed a key, and Chris Kraus provides it.” (Benjamin Moser).
We will be reading the first three chapters of Chis Kraus new book, “After Kathy Acker” (2016).
The extract is available as a PDF (above). Read as much as you can.
Session 8: Wednesday 14 February, 7pm.
“Trans: A memoir” (2015) by Juliet Jacques. Chosen by Chris Kraus.
This is what Kraus says:
“Juliet Jacques is a generally brilliant person, and I’ve just watched her new film, ‘You Will Be Free’, and found it devastating… but the reason I suggested ‘Trans: A Memoir’, the reason it sticks in my mind, is that it’s the most writerly treatment on the subject of transitioning – and the most writerly recent memoir – I know. By that I mean that Jacques is never self-serving; she is truly interrogatory, and not afraid of irresolution – the book ends in a place of hauntingly life-like ambivalence.”
We have selected three chapters to read in advance. Please mail slackpuss.rg[AT]gmail if you’d like to receive a copy.
Session 9: Wednesday 25 April, 7pm
“The Lonely City” (2016) by Olivia Laing. Chosen by Juliet Jacques
This is what Jacques says:
“Olivia Laing is such an interesting queer/feminist voice: you can really see the legacy of Hélène Cixous in her work, in the combination of personal and cultural reflections, which tap into the hybrid memoir/criticism style that so many writers are doing well right now, but comes out in a way that feels utterly unique. The Lonely City presents a take on post-war New York, and its queer art, that really stands out from the (numerous) other works on the subject.”
We encourage you to read the whole book, if you can. We have a pdf of chapter 4, on the photographer and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz; please contact slackpuss.rg[AT]gmail.com for a copy.
Session 10: 30th June 2018, 7pm
“Girl Meets Boy” (2007) by Ali Smith. Chosen by Olivia Laing.
This is what Laing says:
“Girl Meets Boy is a dazzling love story about corporate defiance and gender instability. A radical retelling of the myth of Iphis, it’s like a modern day Orlando, if Orlando was Scottish and worked in a dismal marketing department selling bottled water. I love the way Smith dissolves boundaries and dispels borders: “She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy.”
We will be reading the entire novel (176 pages). It should be easy to hold of, but do get in touch if you’d like to borrow our copy.
Session 11: 17th October, 7pm
Attrib. and other stories (2017) by Eley Williams.
Chosen by Ali Smith.
Attrib. and Other Stories by Eley Williams PDF
This is what Smith says:
“I’m going to recommend Attrib., a collection of stories by Eley Williams that’s so playful and thoughtful and full of possibilities that it makes things more open and more multiple with each story you read. The intelligence opens, the so-called structures of things open, the notions of gender open – the words open, the world opens.”
The first story is can be found on this page.
Session 12: 29th November, 7pm
Correspondences (2016) by Nisha Ramayya
Chosen by Eley Williams.
This is what Williams says:
“I’d like to recommend Nisha Ramayya’s pamphlet of poems ‘Correspondences’. It considers our age of connectivity and seeks to parse its networks: ‘Tantra may be understood as the knowledge that spreads.’ Much of the power in Ramayya’s second poetry chapbook lies its scouring and teasing of etymologies and the writer’s skilful pursuit of the routes and roots and routs of words. What is it to profess or pursue ownership over words and their exchange?”