So much depends
upon
L. Richardson posing near
the red leaves.
Seeing the splinters on the door, we felt the same strange urge and withdrew our judgments of Sleeping Beauty. Why not prick your finger on a spindle or jump from a great height? Between the decision and the pain is the most powerful feeling. When it seems like you could sleep for a hundred years or that the wind might catch you.
​
Image: "Home is where the heart is," Bríd Moynahan
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It is, instead, the moment you
Notice a loose screen flapping.
The faintest light in the window
Across the street and down three stories.
The sound of wheels, the sudden smell
Of winter.
excerpt from The Poet and the Madman (in progress)
Djuna Barnes' Antihumanist Reproduction
Anti-teleological reproduction is a Barnesian aesthetic that bridges both content and practice in Djuna Barnes’ late work. Contrary to a scholastic tradition that reads Barnes’ revision practices as barriers to her success as an author, this essay understands her obsessive relationship with iteration as a key component of her oeuvre. In its refusal of traditional goals of authorship, namely completion and publishing, Barnes’ late work betrays the Enlightenment expectation that literature and its authors conform to models of progress, teleology, and rationality in the realm of aesthetics and public persona. These characteristics emerge in Barnes’ late play The Antiphon (1958), where the compulsive restaging of an original trauma abjures catharsis in favour of ‘pointless’, antihumanist reproductions.