I have utmost respect for you but in that moment if I were to get out of your way instead of walking up the stairs to my home I would have no respect for myself. I didn’t know why you couldn’t understand this when I told you. Instead you screamed at me and told me I was rude. And then you said someone of my age should know meaning that you were adding to my crime the fact that I am older than you. What am I to do. How many days have passed and I have no reason to think that your ancestors were stolen from their home in A- frica and because of my not knowing that this is true but thinking that it is possible it makes me certain that respect next time would be for me to step around. Maybe I could say quietly joining you for a moment in your vast and ancient sorrow that was my home
- Eileen Myles
• Anthony Friedkin - Jim and Valerie, Trouper’s Hall, Hollywood, 1970
Eileen Myles is an acclaimed poet and writer who has published over twenty works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and libretto. Their prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital grant, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Right now, Greenport Long Island. The water is right there.
What’s kept you sane this year?
Yoga, reading, lifting weights, long phone conversations writing poems. My dog.
What are 3 books you always recommend to people?
La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc; Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks; The Book of Frank by CAConrad.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
Laurence Sterne, Cesar Aira, Chantal Ackerman.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
Swan Place, it would be on the island in Spy Pond in Arlington, Massachusetts. Frank B. Wilderson III’s Red White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.
“‘What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?’ For this isn’t just a matter of how to write good criticism, or how to keep criticism in its allegedly proper place (i.e., subservient to the genius art that gives it rise). It’s also an ethical matter, insofar as Sontag’s question reminds us that the world doesn’t exist to amplify our own preexisting tastes, values, or predilections. It simply exists. We don’t have to like all of it, or remain mute in the face of our discontent. But there’s a difference between going to art with the hope that it will reify a belief or value we already hold, and feeling angry or punitive when it doesn’t, and going to art to see what it’s doing, what’s going on, treating it as a place to get 'the real and irregular news of how others around us think and feel,’ as Eileen Myles once put it.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
