Day: February 6, 2005

This is a siren song, this is a promise of poetry. I’m a sucker for well put words. I do my best to smile but I can’t help but care. I want to forge my hair into silver and wrap it around them like rings. Taste the weight of these letters as they flow from the tongue, listen to how the shape of my lips changes to birth them.

Tonight I’m going to Thundering Word Heard. T. Paul is hosting and I’ve heard rumour that he’s going off with Cirque Du Soliex in a bit. Have to catch him before I miss him. Certain scenes are going to fall apart in a big way without him. Nobody else is willing to do the work or even knows how for some of it. Might as well jaunt down tonight, when his shiny 50’s hair is still visible in the stage lights locally. I plan next sunday gets game night and Sanctuary with Bobbi. (Which reminds me – Is there anyone interested in going who would be able to heft someone out of a wheelchair at the end of the night? We keep him up, we have to be able to help him into bed.) In spite of knowing about it from night one, I’ve never been to Thundering Word. I admit I’m fairly curious as to who will be there.

I plucked this off the BadSignal list. It’s something Warren got in an e-mail. I thought it sounded like it could be rather fascinating, so I’m passing it on. I know there’s writers and artists here.

We are trying to reach graphic novel-comic-hybrid image fiction makers to call for graphic works. I am a digital media professor / artist at Hunter College, NYC, and i’m working on a collection of fiction and theory called _reskin_ with my collaborator austin booth (to be published with the academic publisher MIT Press this year). We mix fiction and theoretical works in the book dealing with body modification, skin, and technologies of the crossing of boundaries: transgender, transpecies, virtual and physical… the volume explores the fluidity-permeability between categories relating to skin and the body, especially how technology plays a role in these crossings. We’re especially interested on issues of race and technology. The current table of contents (sans graphic work) is located below…

We would love to include a graphic novel excerpt or short piece with the other works in the collection. There are some other visual works in the volume, such as the tattoo novel project in which participants in her large scale literary work tattooed themselves with an individual from the work; she then photographed the words on skin… Unf. MIT only publishes in B/W

We’d like to publish 1-2 excerpts or entire works of 3-20 pages in the _reskin_ collection.

As we’re working with a nonprofit publisher, the benefit to the artist would be exposure to your work in artistic, literary, and academic circles and hopefully more attention to the work of graphic novelists/storytellers in general. MIT Press has probably not published any graphic fiction and our collection could pave the way for more blurring of genre boundaries between art, literature, fiction, and theory.

We are also seeking pieces which explore the act of computer programming for a future volume called re:CODE; in this volume, we’re especially interested in the act of programming, the way the programmer makes worlds.

Please send links to work for either project (urls are best) to

mary.flanagan@hunter.cuny.edu

deadline for consideration is February 25th 2005.

many thanks all,
mary flanagan

_______

Reskin Table of Contents:

I. Inside, Outside, Surface
(non fiction) Alicia Imperiale, “Seminal Space: Getting Under the Digital Skin”
(fiction) L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Man Who Was Plugged In”
(non fiction) Melinda Rackham, “Soft Skinned Species”
(non fiction) Bernadette Wegenstein, “Making Room for the Body: From Fragmentation to Mediation” (non fiction) Vivian Sobchack, “On Morphological Criticism”
(fiction) Raphael Carter “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation”

II. Transgression
(fiction / non fiction) Sara Diamond, “Fur Manifesto”
(fiction) Nalo Hopkinson, “Ganger”
(non fiction) Rebecca Cannon, “Perfect Twins: Transgender Avatars”
(fiction) Jewelle Gomez, “Lynx and Strand”
(fiction) Elisabeth Vonarburg, “Readers of the Lost Art”

III. Mapping

(non fiction) Christina Lammer, “Eye Contact: Fine Moving Hands and the Flesh and Flood of Image Fabrication in the Operating Theatres of Interventional Radiology”
(fiction / non fiction) Shelley Jackson, “SKIN”
(non fiction) Mary Flanagan, “Reskinning the Everyday”

My bed is made of pillows piled, velvet colours against brilliant feather filled silk. Fushsia moments of vibrant purple and embroidered flowers to catch on my hair. I’m alone, a sadly unexpected course of events. I’m feeling like I should be used to it, absence being my usual dine in fare, but somehow it’s a weight. I can feel an invisible body, cells dividing in every breath. Voices have nothing on this. My hands are sliced, cut from broken glass. I broke my lamp earlier tonight, the bulb shattering hard on my little side table.

My music reflects little impact moments, refracting time spent wondering and waiting up again. No matter how high I turn it up, it won’t drown this feeling out. A song of connection, never tearing from my throat to come pouring out my eyes. It’s not my game, it’s not my anti-drug. This is a powder I shake to the table and gather in the palm of my hand because this is your heart and I hold it. I want to transmit the scent of dying roses and let it gleam for just a moment in your eyes when my lips finally part.

There’s no freedom or justice here, but a quiet flying fuck of desire and twilight. I know it’s possible for me to spend days alone together only with my computer. I’m sure I’ve done it, easily fourty-eight hours with no human contact that wasn’t filtered through a machine, but it’s not healthy because sometimes late at night it’s like I’m the only person left alive. I woke up and missed the disaster, now I can walk out on perpetually empty streets and eventually die, watching for people to crawl out from their hiding holes.

I should take a picture to seduce you with. Clear a swath with my razorblade gray eyes. You’ll never think of anything else again when you think of gunmetal blue. It’s getting colder as the city flickers out one light at a time, the creatures going finally to bed. Nervous system on hold, pause, repeat. Sleep-mode across the border, the sun is coming up in England as I type this.