Barf Manifesto
Dodie Bellamy
January 2008
Passion in writing or art—or in a lover—can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it.
Barf has never looked so good.
Michael Miller
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.
About the Author
Dodie Bellamy’s writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. She is the 2018-19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. She has published The TV Sutras and Barf Manifesto, both with UDP, and When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e)). Her essay, “The Beating of Our Hearts,” was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killlian, she also edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (Nightboat Books).
Praise
Her verbal upchuck could have become a mess, but the shifts are so exquisitely structured that they rarely fail to marvel. When one steps back from Bellamy’s narrative, her discrete thoughts somehow contrast and interact like the dots on a Seurat canvas, forming a vivid portrait of art and friendship. You’ll wonder how she did it. Barf has never looked so good.
Michael Miller
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles from Dodie Bellamy here
Publication Details
Chapbook
Saddle-Stitched. 30 pp, 5.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: January 03 2008
Distribution: Direct Only
Series: Dossier