Asked to write a paper on alternative forms of memoir for the 2007 Modern Language Association conference, Bellamy wrote an admiring analysis of “Everyday Barf,” the essay that concludes Eileen Myles’s recent poetry collection Sorry, Tree. Bellamy’s talk, “MLA Barf,” became a rousing defense of the “barf” as a literary form. Here “MLA Barf” is joined by its sequel, “CCA Barf,” delivered as a lecture at the California College of the Arts some months later. Together the two talks celebrate Eileen Myles—especially her genius for bringing the body into writing—as well as the conceptual practices of two British visual artists, Tariq Alvi and Bridget Riley. In addition, Barf Manifesto, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, is an intimate account of a long, sometimes tortured, but enduring friendship between two female writers. In the words of critic Ramsey Scott, “Bellamy asks us: how can sloppiness become an intellectual stance, a methodology with its own aesthetic and political priorities? How might a permeable editorial screen that allows for error, parataxis, and the non sequitur serve as the basis for a hybrid kind of writing that is at once critical and autobiographical, factual and fictional? What does it mean to insist upon the disorderly as a means of cultural critique and political engagement?”

This essay has been reprinted in Dodie Bellamy’s collection When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e), 2015), available here.