After a day at the Walker Art Museum and Sculpture Garden, liars and fools think its time for reflection. Honest woman that I am, I will instead cork it, and do an arbitrary task that will make me feel like I did something more than blahblahblog and skip across a soggy field under the caressing sun catching splatter from a large cherry balanced precariously atop an extra bendy spoon. The task is to mark every chapter that looks ripe within five books on surrealism and women that I am adding to my personal stacks.
(Maybe a constant desire to be surrounded by books is more of a disorder than a passion–maybe if I sleep with them under my pillows and clutched to my bosom I will be able to absorb more through some sort of osmosis while I sleep. Maybe if I eat the brains of their authors [flatworm style {beginning with Whitney Chadwick}] I will be able to save myself the back ache of carrying them around [the books-not the authors or their brains].)
The books and noted chapters are the following, in the arbitrary order which they were removed from the all knowing bag:
Feminist subjects, multi-media : cultural methodologies edited by Penny Florence and Dee Reynolds.
Chapter 2. Frida Kahlo’s grotesque bodies / Kate Chedgzoy
Chapter 3. Women and surrealism / Frances Presley
Chapter 12. Psychoanalysis and the imaginary body / Elizabeth Grosz
Women artists and the surrealist movement by Whitney Chadwick.
maybe Chapter 3. Revolution and Sexuality (Hey Dr. Chadwick. You’re the worst. No thanks at all for the organization of this book. I guess in 1985 it must have been fashionable to write [LaHONG] chapters with broad topics and expect the [tired undergraduate] reader to wade on through. Thing is, its no longer fashionable, and here we are together anyways. And no, [jerk], I’m not lazy… I’m efficient.)
Mirror images : women, surrealism, and self-representation edited by Whitney Chadwick ; essays by Dawn Ades … [et al.]
Chapter 5. Orbits of the Savage Moon / Dawn Ades
Chapter 6. Dialogue and Double Allegiance / Susan Rubin Suleiman
Chapter 4. Frida Kahlo / Salomon Grimberg
Chapter 1. An Infinite Play of Empty Mirrors / Whitney Chadwick (ps. Thanks to Whitney Chadwick for learning about chapters. Kudos. I dig. [I probably won't read your chapter anyways because I'm still just a little bit irked about the table of contents in your last book {see above}])
Automatic woman : the representation of woman in surrealism by Katharine Conley.
Chapter 2. Beyond the Border: Leonora Carrington’s Terrible Journey
The beribboned bomb : the image of woman in male surrealist art by Robert Belton.
Chapter 1. A Synoptic History of Surrealism
Chapter 4.3. Nietzsche
Chapter 5.1. Tradition and the Ineffable States
Chapter 5.4 Agriculture and Earth-Mothers
Chapter 5.5 Alchemy and Androgynes
Chapter 6.3 “A Ribbon Around a Bomb”
(Oh that Chadwick and Belton would go lawn bowling and banter about organizing a book properly. Thanks Belton, let me know what you two come up with.)
I have finished my arbitrary task–and I can begin to assign myself readings that seem worthy of my time. Ahh, so refreshing this research maneuver–a smooth green frog slipping into a clear pond am I.
