This is a fun little interview where Genet gets really cranky with his interviewers and accuses them of acting as “interrogators,” and keeps directly asking the film crew why they put up with standing there, listening to all the stupid things he has to say. Why don’t they resist the unpardonably static setup of the filmmaking process? http://bbc.in/ZliWbD

Today for no particular reason I kept thinking about a book I loved in college, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, and so I wanted to use the posting this week to search around and find what kinds of work have been done with it of late. I landed on this piece by Jonathan Kemp, which looks at the book as a representation of a particular way of…[Read more]

I found this text when I was working on some Commedia research for my clowns class with McCoy. This book by Louise Peacock examines at length the nature and effects of slapstick violence as a comedic device, citing commedia as the first fully-realized location of slapstick, and examining its practice from the Renaissance through the present.…[Read more]

Since we had such a great trip to the archives this week, I thought I’d pass along an NYPL archive that Jason Baumann suggested to me. Attached is the file list for the Charles Busch papers in their collection. If you aren’t familiar with Busch, he’s a New York playwright and drag artist who has, in my opinion, done some of the most interesting…[Read more]

This examination by Elise Kramer looks at the kinds of rhetorical conversations ordinary people take part in surrounding jokes about rape on internet forums. She starts with the idea that such conversations take on typical, predictable forms, and that they recur seemingly ad infinitum, to the point that it feels almost like a futile exercise. The…[Read more]

This week I went to a talk at the GC on bigotry in science fiction publishing, and one of the presenters, Andre Carrington, looked at the way in which those fighting against diversity in science fiction today talk about it as a politicization and corruption of a previously “pure” form. As part of his response, he was looking at the ways in which…[Read more]

Lockyer and Pickering perform a linguistic analysis of the kinds of metaphorical language people use when writing letters of complaint to a particular satirical magazine, Private Eye. They find that complaints often seek metaphors of high/low that imply a kind of binary opposition between what is and is not acceptable, which reveals their purpose…[Read more]

UCLA has been digitizing their recordings of public events from throughout their history, and this is a talk given by Lenny Bruce in 1966. I accessed it via UCLA’s library website, but the recordings are up on youtube, so I’ll give you a link to the channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5zrXo0H-GugDtgkMIyBUHoUQEmJjJm3A I’m going…[Read more]

Since I uploaded an article on punk scenes, I thought I should highlight a punk archive for my nugget. Collections like this one are a godsend for me in terms of my interest in cultures of small-scale performance, because they preserve records of not only these ephemeral performances themselves, but also of the ways in which the communities…[Read more]