Thoughts on cooking pasta
Anyone who likes spaghetti thicker than I prefer is a boor and a barbarian; anyone who likes it thinner than I prefer is an effete poseur.
Reading and listening
I read two (2) books this week, and they had some thematic similarities I probably wouldn’t have thought about had I not read them simultaneously. Both of them are very good and you should read them if they sound at all interesting to you.
The first is Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father and Me. Calhoun set out to write a fairly conventional book about poet Frank O’Hara by finishing a project her father, the well-known art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had started in the 1970s when Calhoun was a child. O’Hara was already dead then, so Schjeldahl invested in the best battery-powered tape recorder he could find and interviewed all of O’Hara’s friends, lovers, and rivals. But when she isn’t able to get the rights from O’Hara’s overprotective sister to reprint his poems or letters, Calhoun’s book turns into something more interesting as she foregrounds her relationship with her father. The book becomes more about the difficulty of growing up with a father devoted to writing above all; and the often childish interpersonal dynamics of clique, coterie, and scene—and who pays the price.
Which is the main point of comparison with the other book I read this week, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus. Marcus’s book is explicitly about “scene” and about how a small group of young women who were sick of sexism, angry at the lack of agency and safety in their lives found a nationwide network of other girls and women who felt the same way.
Calhoun’s original topic, the New York School poets and painters of the 1960s, was a famously volatile group of artists dedicated to self-expression through art, alcohol, and sex, damn the consequences. Riot Grrrl seemed to never be able to reconcile its desire to proclaim a revolution with the difficulty of leadership, goals, organization, and so on. I think that both the New York School and Riot Grrrl may have been mostly about personal, individual revolution, but where the poets and artists of the 1960s were focused on themselves, the musicians and zinesters of the 90s were hoping to spark the revolution inside of millions of women and girls. Example:
Both books also concern some of the disappointment of missing out on the scene. Calhoun’s father was born a bit too late, arriving in New York in time to get to meet his hero before O’Hara died at the age of 40 in 1966, but not able to really join in a group whose best days were behind them. Sarah Marcus begins her book saying “I missed out on the first few years of Riot Grrrl,” in an author’s note titled “I Was Going to be One of Them.” The note is an origin story of sorts, telling how she attended a meeting at the Washington DC Positive Force house in 1994, which had been hosting Riot Grrrl gatherings for a few years at that point. Marcus found a large filing cabinet full of phone lists, meeting minutes, fliers, original zines and photographs.
I stared at their faces in the quite minutes before the meetings began. Who were they? What had become of the people on the phone list? What had happened to the other chapters? These files haunted me. The newest items in the drawers were perhaps six months old; the other dated back a couple of years at the most. Yet the past they hinted at felt long gone: half legend, half mirage.
Schjeldahl gets to New York just too late and too young to join the club, so he gets out the tape recorder ten years later to reconstruct the life of the man he hoped would be his friend and mentor. Calhoun feels like the private eye who knows shes on to something, but shows up just to late to catch anyone red-handed.
I can relate, having tried with some small success in the 1990s to be part of the larger zine scene that also included Riot Grrrl; and then again (with more success) in the 2000s and 2010s to be part of a library blogger/online scene. Both periods were enormously important in my life and have through-lines to this day. Neither scene was exactly what I thought I was going to be, nor was I entirely happy with my contribution. I think for anyone but the most grounded saint or narcissistic sociopath, trying to make one’s way in a community of creative, driven people is bound to result in feelings of uncertainty, regret and self-doubt.
Coda
I don’t usually read books’ acknowledgement sections, but in the acknowledgements for Also a Poet, Ada Calhoun expresses “special thanks to Kathleen Hanna for taking my author photo and serving as my book tour entourage of one.” Kathleen Hanna is the main singer and lyricist for the most important Riot Grrrl band, Bikini Kill (seen and heard in the video above, and pictured on the front of Marcus’s book with the rest of the band). Born in 1976, Calhoun would have been sixteen years old when Bikini Kill released their first record. I wonder if she was part of that scene, or if she just missed it.
You don't usually read acknowledgments?!? Why not???