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steve_urick's review
4.0
Feminist, activist, plain-spoken, eclectic, sexual, down-to-earth writing. I enjoyed this book, even though my reading of it included a long pause.
steveurick's review
4.0
Feminist, activist, plain-spoken, eclectic, sexual, down-to-earth writing. I enjoyed this book, even though my reading of it included a long pause.
jheinemann287's review
4.0
At first I really didn't "get" this book, but after talking through "Whistle While You Dixie" and beginning to notice ties between the various essays, I've grown to really appreciate the collection. It's weird and dense and beautiful. "Phone Home" is my favorite. Bellamy writes about ET and how she processed her grief after her mother's death. I also really liked "The Bandage Lady," "July 4, 2011," and "The Beating of Our Hearts." There are certainly others that I still don't "get" though. This is not a collection for the faint of heart.
samaykay912's review
3.0
I liked some of these essays, didn't like others. It took me forever to read this, because I kept putting it off. Thus the reason why it's three stars. I enjoyed it but didn't seek it out.
jimmylorunning's review
4.0
In the best of these essays, I never know where she's going to go next. And her style is such that she CAN go anywhere from anywhere. There's no slow build-up, no conventional progression, just sentences one after another driven by sound and sense and an unquenchable curious intellect. I love her voice. She's funny and she's not afraid to make Snow White and the seven dwarves into an all out no-holes-barred furry fuckfest.
"Whistle While you Dixie" - 5/5 I was hooked to her voice immediately, I mean, within the first few sentences. I love essays like this, ones that take a personal obsession or repulsion (in this case, whistling) and through curiosity alone keeps digging deeper and deeper to figure out where it is that this phenomenon occupies in the world at large and in the author's personal mythology. I love how you never know which direction she's going to take you, starting with the sexual innuendo of Snow White's dwarves and ending up hitchhiking across the country and baking a peach cobbler. I'm in capable hands. Dodie Bellamy can write, and command my attention with humor and shock and entertain and educate.
"When the Sick Rule the World" 4/5 - this one doesn't go as deep. There's a little personal scene setting, but then it goes into a poetic incantation, a mixture of a current reality of the sick, the allergic, the hypochondriac, a picture of those who are always avoiding everything because of potential toxicity instead of living, and a future she paints where these sick rule the world. It's interesting except I don't think she takes it far enough, and the essay ends before it reaches that next level.
"Rascal Guru" 3/5 - kind of a list poem, interesting to a degree
"Barf Manifesto" 5/5 - another amazing essay. She talks about an Eileen Myle's piece I have not read yet called "Everyday Barf" and relates it to a whole bunch of things, both personal experiences and artistic theory. She starts by saying that Eileen's piece is impossible to summarize, and so is this one here. It makes no sense yet it has its own logic, it goes around and around in circles building on tiny little things and themes that it created into some kind of as yet undiscovered meaning. I want to read Eileen's piece and re-read this.
"Girl Body" - 4/5 - another list-poem kinda deal, but this one much better, less predictable, as she said in Barf Manifesto, she does really well with the libidinal themes. I love how she connects the libidinal with nature in this almost storybook way, like in the first essay, and here with the bear familiar, dog familiar, cat familiar (I mean, what the fuck was that? But yeah!)
"Bandaged Girl" 5/5 - her pieces keep revolving and evolving, going around in circles yet going forward also. Probably like an inward or outward or downward spiral. I loved this one, which gives voice to the artwork that Tariq Alvi made of Dodie Bellamy and then gave to Bellamy. It is this artwork which is speaking, but it is not corny.
"Phone Home" 3.5/5 - her most conventional essay so far, but solidly so, talking about her mother's death and the parallels she forms with the movie ET.
"The Center of Gravity" 3 - about steel and the escapism of art. Could have been developed a bit more.
"Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff" 3.5/5 - would probably be more interesting if I had read Kathy Acker before.
"July 4, 2011" 4.5/5 - I really like this kind of juxtaposition-minus-exposition style she does here. This one's about screens and violence.
"The Beating of Our Hearts" - 3.5/5 Dodie Bellamy must hate small talk. She's so good at cutting right to the chase, again and again. No softly submerging the reader into her topics, you're dumped straight into the deep end, in media res motherfucker. I love it. This essay, in particular, is at first glance about political protest in art and poetry. Pretty much anything political written a few years ago (2015!!!) seems quaint now, with lines like "We didn't believe that George Bush could get elected. But he did." Ha ha. It's about Obama, Romney, and the Occupy movement, which in retrospect seems like an experiment in positive thinking--liberals think we're winning because of their positions, what they don't realize is that Obama is an exception, and overall we're losing quite badly. But wait, this piece isn't really about politics, it's about art: a faith I find quite misplaced considering how many people read poetry anymore, quoting Spahr and Clover, "that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture," (really? or wishful thinking by poets?). But wait, it's not really about art, it's about perception and time and awareness within the distorting lens of protest and art. Hmm, interesting angle, didn't think it'd end there.
"I Must Not Forget What I Already Know" - ??/5 - I don't know what I think of this.
"In the Shadow of Twitter Towers" - 2.5/5 - Good essay in theory about technology companies and their role in gentrification and homelessness and general shitty attitudes towards the homeless. A bit long winded, though, and I wasn't really into it by this time in the book.
"Whistle While you Dixie" - 5/5 I was hooked to her voice immediately, I mean, within the first few sentences. I love essays like this, ones that take a personal obsession or repulsion (in this case, whistling) and through curiosity alone keeps digging deeper and deeper to figure out where it is that this phenomenon occupies in the world at large and in the author's personal mythology. I love how you never know which direction she's going to take you, starting with the sexual innuendo of Snow White's dwarves and ending up hitchhiking across the country and baking a peach cobbler. I'm in capable hands. Dodie Bellamy can write, and command my attention with humor and shock and entertain and educate.
"When the Sick Rule the World" 4/5 - this one doesn't go as deep. There's a little personal scene setting, but then it goes into a poetic incantation, a mixture of a current reality of the sick, the allergic, the hypochondriac, a picture of those who are always avoiding everything because of potential toxicity instead of living, and a future she paints where these sick rule the world. It's interesting except I don't think she takes it far enough, and the essay ends before it reaches that next level.
"Rascal Guru" 3/5 - kind of a list poem, interesting to a degree
"Barf Manifesto" 5/5 - another amazing essay. She talks about an Eileen Myle's piece I have not read yet called "Everyday Barf" and relates it to a whole bunch of things, both personal experiences and artistic theory. She starts by saying that Eileen's piece is impossible to summarize, and so is this one here. It makes no sense yet it has its own logic, it goes around and around in circles building on tiny little things and themes that it created into some kind of as yet undiscovered meaning. I want to read Eileen's piece and re-read this.
"Girl Body" - 4/5 - another list-poem kinda deal, but this one much better, less predictable, as she said in Barf Manifesto, she does really well with the libidinal themes. I love how she connects the libidinal with nature in this almost storybook way, like in the first essay, and here with the bear familiar, dog familiar, cat familiar (I mean, what the fuck was that? But yeah!)
"Bandaged Girl" 5/5 - her pieces keep revolving and evolving, going around in circles yet going forward also. Probably like an inward or outward or downward spiral. I loved this one, which gives voice to the artwork that Tariq Alvi made of Dodie Bellamy and then gave to Bellamy. It is this artwork which is speaking, but it is not corny.
"Phone Home" 3.5/5 - her most conventional essay so far, but solidly so, talking about her mother's death and the parallels she forms with the movie ET.
"The Center of Gravity" 3 - about steel and the escapism of art. Could have been developed a bit more.
"Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff" 3.5/5 - would probably be more interesting if I had read Kathy Acker before.
"July 4, 2011" 4.5/5 - I really like this kind of juxtaposition-minus-exposition style she does here. This one's about screens and violence.
"The Beating of Our Hearts" - 3.5/5 Dodie Bellamy must hate small talk. She's so good at cutting right to the chase, again and again. No softly submerging the reader into her topics, you're dumped straight into the deep end, in media res motherfucker. I love it. This essay, in particular, is at first glance about political protest in art and poetry. Pretty much anything political written a few years ago (2015!!!) seems quaint now, with lines like "We didn't believe that George Bush could get elected. But he did." Ha ha. It's about Obama, Romney, and the Occupy movement, which in retrospect seems like an experiment in positive thinking--liberals think we're winning because of their positions, what they don't realize is that Obama is an exception, and overall we're losing quite badly. But wait, this piece isn't really about politics, it's about art: a faith I find quite misplaced considering how many people read poetry anymore, quoting Spahr and Clover, "that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture," (really? or wishful thinking by poets?). But wait, it's not really about art, it's about perception and time and awareness within the distorting lens of protest and art. Hmm, interesting angle, didn't think it'd end there.
"I Must Not Forget What I Already Know" - ??/5 - I don't know what I think of this.
"In the Shadow of Twitter Towers" - 2.5/5 - Good essay in theory about technology companies and their role in gentrification and homelessness and general shitty attitudes towards the homeless. A bit long winded, though, and I wasn't really into it by this time in the book.
meganmilks's review
5.0
New favorite. Essays on ET, barfy writing, gentrification in SF, illness communities--each one a surge, a mad rush of images and ideas. [8/22/2016]
//edit 10/10/2018 -- recently reread and was again impressed and inspired, thoroughly and on every page. One of my favorite collections of writing.
//edit 10/10/2018 -- recently reread and was again impressed and inspired, thoroughly and on every page. One of my favorite collections of writing.