wunderkammer

WUNDERKAMMER THEME WEEK: Gently Stalking Janice-Katie

Gently Stalking Janice-Katie
(an encore presentation of the live show at the Chicago reading series, Reconstruction Room)

curated by Kathryn Regina

 

 “I am Mrs. Beck,” said the older woman uncertainly, throat moving. She stared at Janice-Katie. “And you are…?”

Janice-Katie laughed, as if carefree. She said, “I am Janice-Depressive, you know, like ‘manic-depressive’?”

Mrs. Beck frowned.

--excerpt from The Girl with Brown Fur by Stacey Levine

Stout women with a hatred of twilight are difficult to trail. But a character as curious as Janice-Katie is worth an ardent shadowing. In her book of short stories The Girl with Brown Fur, Stacey Levine reveals a glimpse of this moonfaced outer space hater: Her face is so wide because of her stomach medicine. As a child she believed that the sun is the size of a person’s hand. Spring is the time she feels most alone, and she carries herself as if in need of coddling. Don’t you love her? Don’t you want to discretely follow her vehicle, keeping at least two cars between you? So do we. That’s why our group of gumshoe writers, artists and musicians have been gently stalking her en masse. And my god, have we got stories to tell. Tune in everyday to Wunderkammer to learn all about the previously undiscovered life of one of fiction’s most beguiling characters: Janice-Katie.

Always stalking,
Kathryn

P.S. The Girl With Brown Fur will be officially released by Starcherone/Dzanc in May 2011. Verse Chorus Press also just re-released Stacey's novel Frances Johnson. Highly recommended!

******: The Arch-Villain, **** *** *****, Monologues his Last (in Neurotic Allegory Form)

by Baron Von *****_*********

Imagine: There’s this bar. It’s active, upper class. Red velour hangs from the ceilings breaking the walls into luscious panels of smoky amber light. The warmth of these uncharted crimson folds is dizzying and unfathomable. I’m in this bar. And so are you. And so is anyone else you can imagine. Just stop yourself, right now, and let thirty names roll into your head. 

Go ahead. I can wait. 

The first thirty names, any thirty names. 

But every one of the first thirty names that rolls into your head. You can’t cheat and—say when your high school bully’s name suddenly shows up on the list—scratch a name off because that person suddenly becomes undesirable. This bar, while the physical space looks perfect, it’s just like every other bar in the country. It’s filled with a couple people you know, people you’d like to know, people you’re desperately avoiding, and more than a few total strangers you’ll never once think to say hello to. So it doesn’t matter for shit if your high school bully is in there or not: this bar is just like any other, and that means that there are just going to be some people you don’t want to deal with in here.

They’re mixing drinks, the old school stuff like Sidecars and Harvey Wallbangers and real martinis—not those bullshit candy concoctions they serve up in theme bars that predicate themselves on false nostalgias for a hipper era. They’re mixing drinks and everyone is gobbing them up like fishes, gabbing with the local celebrities, and sizing one another up with quiet and reserved glances. 

You notice that they’re all dressed pretty well, and I make this observation, too. “Wow, look at this place,” you say. “Yeah,” I sputter, throwing my two sarcastic cents in, “can you believe it? It’s like Gap suddenly decided, ‘Everybody in Tux.’” 

******: Three Shorts

by Notthomas Bernhard

TORONTO—A 23 year old woman admitted today to shaving her head and eyebrows, plucking out all of her eyelashes and starving herself for several weeks in an attempt to convince the world she was dying of cancer. She told reporters this morning that she just wanted to be “noticed” by her estranged ex-husband and eight children, all of whom she had tried to murder weeks before by planting a bomb under the back seat of their Prius. After weeks of attending fundraising events organized by local volunteers, the woman was flown to Disney World to fulfill her dying wish.  Her family refused to attend, claiming that although she was dying, it was not worth the trip.  Upon arrival in The Magic Kingdom, she went straight for the teacups where she remains today, eating and throwing up cotton candy as she spins.

RHODE ISLAND—State employees received the day off today to celebrate V-J Day, a holiday that honors the anniversary of the World War II victory over Japan.  The governor held a barbeque outside his mansion where employees ate bloody, underdone sausages, played cornhole, drank “atomic bombs” (canned Budweiser with a splash of whisky) and listened to remixes of “Taps” on repeat before passing out on the lawn.  Rhode Island veterans have been protesting attempts to eliminate the holiday in their fair state all summer by sneaking pornography onto the film reels prior to “Movies in the Park” events and parading around town naked, having painted themselves red white and blue.  The last state to discontinue this holiday was Arkansas in 1975.

LONDON—A band of poet-thieves broke into Oxford University Press’s offices on Tuesday and burglarized the vault where words deemed unsuitable for inclusion in the OED are stored.  Here, words such as “cankles,” “tanorexic” and others deemed “too odd” to be considered commonly used, are filed alphabetically on neat white index cards. Allegedly, the renegade poets were only interested in perlustrating the vault in search of difficult words to mark themselves as superior logodaedalists during pretentious interviews and dinner party conversations.  The poet-thieves are currently being kept at Sing-Sing in “classroom-cells” with aspiring rap artists and have been offered stipends to help the artists improve the precision of word choice in their rhymes. 

 

**k***: #stuartwouldpainttheeye

by @alma_crow

******: The Draft Wherein (the subject works)

by florence 

It works. Could she, exactly, folded away with

brains. It works if you read it all together, I think. 

I think you could put it together pretty fast: 

It was really important for me to tell you that. 

And this is one. Reason. I guess I got choked up. 

But I did. We did the conversation. It was easy. 

I could feel my body was into it. And my heart, which 

is big, as in good. It made me glow. Whatever. 

Talking made everything easier. Or better, at last. 

I felt disturbing. And do. It gets old really quick to 

be around me, sure. I think you know what I mean. 

I really want you to get this, though: I’m not lying.  

Balls: everywhere bouncing. Lots. The balls are green 

and red and are rubber.  I noticed that. I saw them. 

It was important for me to write it down for you. 

What if that were true? What if I wouldn’t let go 

of that detail? That was the position you, Cynthia,

found yourself in one Friday night (Bitch)) (ha): 

I can already imagine you sitting under the terrible lighting 

at your table and listening to me blather on and on. Let me 

enumerate the cons of waking up: 

*****!: iPainting #4

by Frank Vanhook

 

*****: Ghost

by Four Worn

I am a ghost moving through our home.

This is not a metaphor.

You may feel me sometimes

in the prickle of arm hair

in the shortness of breath which comes

in the presence of other who is not other.

You may sense that I am here

but you do not see me.

I am a distant memory, an echo,

a summer’s day you turn in your head

was it real?  was I living?  was it just a dream, again?

I stand in line with Krishna and Lennon

proof of my existence has been grandly overstated

and you go on washing the dishes, combing your hair

as I pace from one room to the next. 

******: Yellow Mail

by Vincente Van Go

 

******: What I have to say

by goosebeard

Help helps helping helper

Fuck fucker

Fucking fucker

Shit shits shitting

Shitter

Everything down the shitter

Down down down

To chinatown

Town towns

Townie

Downer

Drowner drowning

Drown drowns

****s*: iPainting #3

by Frank Vanhook