What Goes Here

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe: Readers confirmed for "the nerdiest protest ever"

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:22:53 -0500

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe: Readers confirmed for "the nerdiest protest ever":

Wow, do I ever wish I could be in town for this.

Thursday, November 10, 3PM, marathon reading of Bartleby, the Scrivener at the public atrium at 60 Wall Street (near Zuccotti Park). More readers to come. All are welcome to listen and/or read; if you want to just show up we’ll have sections available to read. Organized by Justin Taylor,…

This is the press that Jess Arndt, Sara Jaffe, Jason Daniel...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:44:44 -0400

This is the press that Jess Arndt, Sara Jaffe, Jason Daniel Schwartz, and I do! Please come to our party.

newherringpress:

THE RUN IS IN!

NEW HERRING RELEASE PARTY!

Nov. 13th, 4-6 PM (early!)

at The Drink
228 Manhattan Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(between Maujer St & Grand St, L to Graham)

Readings by Lynne Tillman
and by NHP friends Nitsuh Abebe, Amanda Davidson, Frances Richard and Parul Sehgal
plus very special guests…

Also:
Punch bowls!
Chapbooks for sale!
Piano-based revelry!

Come wassail with us! We are tickled pink!

(And a HUGE thank you for all of your support!)

xxNHPxx

It’s been awhile since I’ve been somewhere that such...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:39:48 -0400

It’s been awhile since I’ve been somewhere that such a sign would have been helpful, but oh, I remember.

wkcmusic:

Laughing Horse Books, Portland, OR

C-SPAN for Radicals

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:39:42 -0400

lareviewofbooks:

SARA MARCUS
Sara Marcus
Monday, October 17: It is 12:30 AM on the dot. The live video feed from Zuccotti Park has just frozen, as it does from time to time. At last there is silence in my apartment, and I can begin to write.

I keep the video window open despite the interruption, but some apparently do not: The odometer at the bottom of the frame, measuring the number of real-time viewers, cascades downward, spinning like a dying slot machine. Livestream viewers are an impatient bunch, it seems. When the plummet slows, though, it turns out that only a hundred or so have left, of over a thousand people. The rest of us would rather watch a blank screen, waiting for the stream to return, than give up hope.

Read More

POINT OF DISCUSSION: Forcing writers and editors to constantly market their own content on a piecemeal basis has, for a host of reasons, been bad for discourse all around.

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 12:19:52 -0400

maura:

(Not going to use “the worst” because I am anti-hyperbole. But it’s pretty bad!)

y/n?

I touched on this ever so briefly in my Willis piece for LARB, and now it seems I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m glad that my writing career right now consists of getting to spend 2-3 weeks thinking about a book review. I feel good about the things I’m writing and the arguments I’m giving myself the time and space to develop. But of course this kind of work pays poorly, which means I need other means of making money; and every time I try to imagine how the money and the good work could converge, I just come up empty.

Sometimes I think this might just represent a failure of imagination on my part. But lately (and maybe it’s just lately because I’ve started asking everybody within earshot for input on this point) I’ve been hearing more and more people referring to “back when you could make a living as a freelance writer.” I’d love to see somebody actually do a piece breaking down the economics of that: How many magazines were paying how much a word in this or that year versus today, etc. Of course, that would be yet another poorly paying mission, since it’s not of mass interest. And here we go again.

Cherry Bomb

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:46:18 -0400

lareviewofbooks:

SARA MARCUS

on Ellen Willis’s escape from the music ghetto.
© Nona Willis Aronowitz 2011
Courtesy of University of Minnesota Press
Ellen Willis
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
University of Minnesota Press, May 2011. 272 pp.

For a universal language, music can feel downright limiting sometimes. When I was 26 and reviewing records for Time Out New York (the weekly magazine’s pop section was then in its golden age) and The Advocate (the gay one) and a few smaller rags besides, my then boyfriend, a noise guitarist, bought me a copy of the writings of Lester Bangs. “You can’t be a rock critic without reading this,” he decreed.

I had never meant to become a rock critic — my bandmate and I moved to Philadelphia after college, and when I presented myself to the alt-weekly there as an aspiring political journalist, the editor-in-chief zeroed in on the two record reviews in my file of clips and shunted me over to the music section. In the four years since that development, I had read Greil Marcus’s (no relation) marvelous postpunk reviews, collected as In the Fascist Bathroom, and not much other music journalism at all. It seemed to me that most contemporary rock magazines were propagating an artless scorecard-genealogy version of criticism, treating music in isolation from other art, culture, and political realities. And I had certainly never read Bangs, whose irascible, rambling rock-crit from the 1970s many considered to be classic examples of the genre. I gave him a solid try, but every page I opened to just turned me off. This was the canon? If all those dudes at Rolling Stone and Spin were taking their cues from a nihilistic, homophobic, apolitical speed freak, it was no wonder the whole game left me cold.

Shortly afterward, I visited the apartment of a friend of a friend, an older critic of some renown, to take a bunch of old jazz cassettes off his hands. He asked me what I wrote. Mostly record reviews now, I told him, but I planned to expand my purview, write more about politics, teenagers, women…

The critic gave a small snort. “Good luck getting out of the music ghetto,” he said.

His tone spooked me. I took my plastic spork and started digging an escape tunnel right then. That tunnel led to the writing of my first book, Girls to the Front, a history of Riot Grrrl, a feminist movement of young women. It always gets shelved in the music section.

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The Material World: On "Black Swan" and "Girls To The Front"

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:57:20 -0400

The Material World: On "Black Swan" and "Girls To The Front":

All hail Dan Fishback!

thematerialworld:

Sooo, I saw Black Swan, but only so I would understand the parody event SWAN!, which I attended directly afterwards. It was strange to sit and grapple with the same story for so many hours. I’d been warned, via Facebook postings from Holly Hughes and Deb Margolin, that it was a sexist…

Stand Up For Women's Health: LINEUP SO FAR FOR THE RALLY

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:26:38 -0500

Stand Up For Women's Health: LINEUP SO FAR FOR THE RALLY:

Foley Square, NYC, Saturday 2/26, 1-3 PM.

Facebook link here: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=189460984407552

standupforwomen:

Musicians:

Nellie McKay*Solo Set from the Mountain Goats*Maddy Wyatt*Rude Mechanical Orchestra

Notable Speakers:

Gloria Steinem*Kathleen Turner*Kathleen Hanna*Amanda Marcotte*Cecile Richards

Elected Officials:

Senator Charles…

Belated Tour Diary

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:47:52 -0500

I’ve been pretty good at setting up interesting book tour events and pretty terrible, so far, at keeping a tour diary. I tend to get home and get immediately swept up in the next round of things. But I’m on a quasi retreat right now (family stuff), which is giving me the space to reflect on recent events.

Last week, I did a two-day stint at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. On day 1, I gave a presentation hosted by the women’s studies department and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, or IRWG—which I later found out, to my delight, is pronounced “earwig.”

I thought about posting an image of an earwig here but it’s actually just too awful, so I will spare you.

This was only my second time presenting in a straight-up academic context, and I wrote a whole new talk for it. Representative sentence:

The notion that Riot Grrrl was principally touring musicians in their twenties and their implicitly younger fans—i.e., passive, girlish, consumerist, not themselves creative—rehearses a pervasive inability to take seriously the cultural work of female adolescence, an inability common even among feminists, an inability that has resulted in a particular and infuriating (to me) selective amnesia about Riot Grrrl that I saw becoming calcified in the two decades following its efflorescence, and that finally spurred me to tackle the story myself.

For awhile, I thought that the only way to learn to think in a more advanced fashion would be to go to a PhD program, which I was resistant to because the idea of spending a lot of time writing things that would be read by only three people made no sense to me. (Before you fire up your snarky e-mail, I don’t mean journal articles and academic books—I know those can have several thousand readers—I mean papers for class.) It turned out, apparently, that working for a magazine whose writers are mostly professors has had a deep impact on the range of modes in which I feel comfortable thinking and writing.

After the talk was over, I realized that there were quite a few teenagers present—not just college-student teenagers, but kids who were in high school. A few of the kids were part of something called RIOT YOUTH. It’s a group of LGBTQQA youth (the second Q is “questioning”; the A is “allies”; you know you’ve gotten old when the next generation’s acronyms are mysteries to you) that’s part support and social group, part activist group.

They bought a copy of the book for their Riot Youth library and agreed to pose with it for me.

They all told me their names, grades, and pronouns, and I thought about the line in my book where I talk about the riot grrrls feeling themselves kindreds of the older feminist activists and at the same time feeling miles out ahead of them. And I also thought about Jessica Hopper writing “BLAZE THE FUCK PAST US.”

I asked the Riot Youth what they are working on, activist-wise. They said, “We’re doing a lot of safe schools stuff, mostly around antibullying. We have a Gayrilla Theater troupe—we did an assessment and then we wrote a script dramatizing the main issues and performed it for administrators and counselors and principals, and we’re working now on writing a new script to perform for peers. It’s a really good script.”

Oh. Well, okay. Um, what am I working on, then?

The next morning I had breakfast with my dear friend Ilana, whom I was staying with, and her friend Akiva. Akiva and I have a million friends and acquaintances in common in the New York magazine/writer/whatever world so we just gossiped all through breakfast. Here is a photo of me and him looking quasi-mistrustful and smug, respectively. I’m partial to the light coming in; I feel like some kind of medieval saint.

We ate at Fleetwood Diner, which is known for a vegetarian dish called Hippie Hash. You can see it on my plate above, but here’s a close-up that I pulled from Google Images.

I somehow didn’t realize until later, when my strength began fading and I thought back on it, that Hippie Hash contains no protein other than like half an ounce of crumbled feta cheese. Maybe it’s called Hippie Hash because after you eat it, you feel sluggish and slow like somebody who has smoked too much pot.

Walking back to Akiva’s car after breakfast, we were discussing the recent VIDA survey showing how women’s writing is published in major magazines far less often than men’s. Many theories about why this is the case involve the idea that women are less ambitious in their pitches—that perhaps we’re more inclined to stick with assignments from an editor who likes us, say, rather than plotting our next move proactively. I asked Akiva what publications he would be pitching if he were me, if he had just written the book I wrote. I thought maybe he, as a man, would have more ambitious ideas, and then I could act on them, become masculinely ambitious, and buck the Vida-documented trend.

But as soon as he started giving his ideas, I started arguing with him and talking about which sorts of pitches and publications would be better than the ones he was suggesting to me.

Maybe the most helpful thing for the women whose absence is mapped by the Vida study, these women who (it’s implied) aren’t being published as “well” or “ambitiously” as they ought to or could be, would be a male friend to argue with.

This is a flippant thought, and I hope to take it up in greater detail later, but I’m tired and the above mentioned family stuff is super draining, so for now I’m going to leave it at that.

After the Hippie Hash breakfast, I was interviewed on a radio show on WCBN called Living Writers, during which I apologized for being such a bad blogger and refused to make up for it by singing opera on the air. I haven’t listened to the show yet, but you can find a link to it here.

Then I had lunch and then I did some work and then I gave a reading sponsored by the creative writing department and then we all went to dinner and then I went to sleep and then I woke up very very early and flew home. And I love Ilana. The End.

I feel bad about my desk

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:28:21 -0500

Not really! It’s just a joke (a bad one). A blog asked me for photos and thoughts on the desk where I do my writing. I wrote Girls to the Front at a number of desks, and they were all wonderful, so I put together a blog post about all of them, which you can read here:

http://fromyourdesks.com/2011/02/17/sara-marcus/

Here’s a preview (sorry about the sideways bulletin board):

Among the people currently reading my book is, apparently, the...

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:21:22 -0500

Among the people currently reading my book is, apparently, the lead singer of the band Paramore; she blogged about it. I’m looking forward to a cover medley of “Rebel Girl” and “Shaved Pussy Poetry” on the next Paramore record. Hayley! Drop me a line. Let’s get a soda and talk revolution. http://www.girlstothefront.com

yelyahwilliams:

New reading material.

Last night I moderated a panel, “Revolution Girl Style Again,”...

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:56:26 -0500

Last night I moderated a panel, “Revolution Girl Style Again,” at the Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. The panelists were Kathleen Hanna, Katy Otto, and Beth Warshaw-Duncan. And the video is already online!

It starts with intros, and with me reading from Girls to the Front’s preface. The discussion begins around 16:40, and it covers such issues as princess culture, HR 3, why a Girls’ Rock Camp is different from a Girls’ Chess Camp, the perks and pitfalls of identity politics, how the Internet helps and hinders political organizing, the benefits of overt conflict in band dynamics, and more.

If you would rather just download the audio and put it on your iPod, here’s the link for that:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/writershouse/11A/Girls-to-the-Front_Panel-discussion_KWH-UPenn_2-8-2011.mp3

I reviewed Adrienne Rich's "NO POETRY WILL SERVE" in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:52:10 -0500

I reviewed Adrienne Rich's "NO POETRY WILL SERVE" in the San Francisco Chronicle.:

“The words are maps,” Rich wrote in 1972, but these new poems continually wonder: Is language—especially the detached language of grammatical studies, or of much poetry—sufficient to chart out the spiritual rubble of marathon wars, to apprehend what our collective acceptance of unspeakable acts is doing to us? [Click the heading to read the rest.]

There was an article in the New York Times when Backlash came...

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:32:36 -0500

There was an article in the New York Times when Backlash came out, about how the book was popping up as a prop in tons of movies and TV shows and how this was proof of how Faludi had really captured/crafted a zeitgeist—if a character was supposed to be seen as a feminist, she had Backlash on her bedside table.

So what does it mean that my book is popping up as a prop on Facebook with people’s dads and babies? Okay, so far I’ve seen only one dad and one baby. Have you seen any others? Three’s a trend, as we all know, and then I could send smoke signals to my friends who write Times trend pieces and we could really be onto something.

My big crazy weekend in feminist art

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:03:22 -0500

http://www.artforum.com/diary/#entry27014

I went to see my friends do great things all weekend long and then I got to write something about how much I love them, basically.

I have some ideas to share about nepotism, community, engaged reportage, and other things, but they’ll have to wait.

But I’m happy about this

and also about all of this.

And now, I go off to weep a bit in the bathroom

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:50:55 -0500

“Your book really hit a spot for me. I was involved in riot grrrl after the fact, I was younger, but I didn’t know it had pretty much wrapped up elsewhere. I commuted a half hour from a small town in massachusetts to go to the boston meetings. It was amazingly helpful being an artsy outcast from a small town. Of course it was also so much more than that. My best friend, who ended up running the riot grrrl boston chapter for awhile, was repeatedly attempting suicide when we were in junior high. When she found riot grrrl, it was the first time she began productively dealing with her issues, as opposed to hurting herself, which I have always been really grateful for.

“I went to art school and have always had dreams of being an artist in new york city, but when I got here and realized I needed to make a living to survive and I couldn’t just sit and make things all day, I ended up with a job at a modeling agency. I was skeptical, but it was somewhat creative, and it paid. I have now been here for 3 years. Your book reminded me that this is not something I can do. That I can’t just ignore the total abandonment of all of my morals in order to make a buck. I am now reconsidering everything and applying for jobs in the art world , figuring out ways to accomplish what I always wanted to instead of just sitting back and accepting this job as something I need to do to be a grown up. Your book pushed me. It reminded me that I really want to make my younger self proud. Thank you for that.”

simplesocial: Riot Grrrl: Traces of a Movement This Saturday at...

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:07:16 -0400

simplesocial:

Riot Grrrl: Traces of a Movement This Saturday at the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.

Riot Grrrl is a feminist movement that rose during the mid-1990s and is closely associated with punk rock, radical politics, and DIY ethics. Its participants left behind a lengthy paper trail of film, photography, art, video, music, and zines, a selection of which have recently entered the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. This panel of artists, musicians, and writers will discuss the history and cultural artifacts of the movement.

Participants include:
Lisa Darms, Fales Library; Jenna Freedman, Barnard College Library; Sara Marcus,
Molly Neuman. Moderated by Gretchen Wagner.

ALSO 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Experimental Libraries and Reading Rooms with Wendy Yao from Ooga Booga!

I really do not know how this happened

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:55:26 -0400

and I am not the responsible party

Frl. Schrödinger, who are you?

Click here to listen to Starring

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:27:00 -0400

Click here to listen to Starring:

Last night I had the privilege to share an event with my college chums (most of whom I did not actually know during college) in the band STARRING. All day today I was like “Damn, why does my neck hurt” and then finally I remembered I had spent their whole set headbanging.

This song, the title track from their recently released album Wife of God, is amazing. The band is amazing. Go see them whenever you have a chance, which is not often since their violist is currently teaching college in Virginia. Apparently their next show is Nov. 20 at Cake Shop. Mark your calendars.

I’m a little late in posting this video of Kathleen Hanna...

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:19:00 -0400

I’m a little late in posting this video of Kathleen Hanna talking at my book release party two weeks ago. In fact, a couple other blogs and Facebook pages have gotten to it first. I was incredibly overwhelmed on the night of the party. A lot of it passed by in a blur. But this got through to me: Just before Kathleen spoke, I had read a section of the book that quoted her, and then she got up and quoted me.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple weeks about growing up, by which I mean becoming peers with the people you’ve admired not by tearing them down (as I’ve seen some people attempt) but by giving yourself permission to expand. Throughout this book tour, especially in the Northwest, I’ve been seeing people I first met when I was 17 or 18 or 19—people I met as a “fan,” as a teenage girl showing up asking if I could help carry their amps or hand-deliver an essay I’d written for French class about them (o yes.) or, a little later, to set up a show for them.

But everybody was so committed in that moment to not relegating me or anyone else to just being a “fan.” There was no space for anybody to feel settled in that role. The whole scene was about validating whatever cultural production anybody in the room was taking part in—not only validating it but demanding it. Assuming, expecting, that of course I was more than just an audience member.

Last night there were all these fierce, amazing young people at the reading in Iowa City. (I wanted to insert a photo of them here, but tumblr won’t let me, it seems. I’ll do it later.) One of them is going to send me her zine. Others promised to mail me letters about the book. I can’t wait to see the incredible work they are destined to do.