Do Your Own Damn Laundry
Suzanne Stein, Steve Benson
2019
Gauss PDF (free); lulu.com (paper:
$10.00)
301 pp
Reviewed by Clara B. Jones in The
Fanzine, September 2019
“Even the innocuous news reports and
weather are loaded with fact, fear, and emotion, making us aware that
language is never simply an innocent carrier of meaning but is widely
variable depending upon context and framing.” Poetry Magazine
(Endnote, July/August 2009)
“Since spoken language contains no
punctuation, what choices go into the act of transcription?”
Kenneth Goldsmith (2010)
Do Your Own Damn Laundry
[hereafter, DYODL] is an inspired hybrid project formulated by
Suzanne Stein and Steve Benson [the “actors”]. Both artists are
widely-known and highly-regarded in avant garde circles in the
U.S. Stein is a publisher, editor, poet, performer, and curator in
California, while Benson is a poet, performance artist, and clinical
psychologist in Maine. On her webpage, Stein says that the actors'
theatrical performance, DYODL, delivered in book form by
GaussPDF and lulu.com, “documents the improvisational dialogues we
performed together between 2011 and 2012” [for a total of 36
“chats”]. In what must have been a monumental and time-consuming
organizational and strategic effort, Stein and Benson “chose
CoveritLive—a social media tool typically used for informal
sportscasting and business-to-business conferencing. This platform
would allow us to perform a textual dialogue live to an online
audience, share administrative management of the account, and archive
the results, with each entry date-, and time-stamped. We embedded the
CiL platform on a page in Suzanne's blog, where readers could read
and watch the performances as they happened or scroll at their own
pace through the archive.” [DYODL, p 299]. The project,
then, was presented to two audiences: readers, as well as,
reader-viewers—the latter mode, presumably, having an auditory
component, also.
In a literary sense, and like a
theatrical drama, DYODL displays discursive tension of an
interpersonal nature as each author exerts their identity and agency
in a process moving from relative strangers to, more or less,
intimate partners. The text is divided into four sections, each
section sub-divided into sessions of varying length that increases,
on average, over time. Italics distinguish Stein's words from
Benson's, and the performance's impact is enhanced by the uniqueness,
as well as, the complementarity of the actors' “voices” and
personalities. Throughout this review I will emphasize the ways that
Stein's and Benson's personas evolve throughout the process of
familiarization that highlights the identity-based nature of
language—having the potential to reflect both positive and negative
aspects and functions of personality. When reading the “script,”
I became, particularly, interested in the heteronormative* features
of interactions, as well as, how these features might have related to
power relations between the actors. As Ferdinand de Saussure argued,
identity is relational in ways that modify the personal via
interactions with an “other,” in this case, interactions between
Stein and Benson.
Section One comprises a single, brief
session on 5/8/2011 initiating the actors' intermittent conversations
that would be recorded until the final session of the whole
performance on 8/10/2012 in Section Four. A definition of effective
communication employed by linguists is termed, “active
listening”—a technique requiring the listener to fully
concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said
[definition via google.com]. Initially, when reading the
script, it was not clear to me that Benson was listening to Stein.
Attempting to document my impression, I counted the number of times
each speaker used the word, “I.” The results clearly showed that,
in this initial performance, Benson was seemingly self-centered,
using “I” 71% of the time out of all utterances of “I” [N= 91
total “I”s in Section One]. Indeed, in this section, Stein [in
italics throughout the book] assumed a supportive role as if she
detected Benson's possible discomfort, anxiety, hesitance, or
insecurity [“Queasy is a wonderful way to be. At first when I read
it here I thought you had misspelled it. So I think my own inner
unacknowledged queasiness misspelled it for me, at first...Have I
lost the thread? No / we're both here. / I'm still
here...” [pp 8-9]. Though one cannot be certain, it might be argued
that Stein and Benson are adopting traditional sex roles throughout
this and following sections—the male relying on the female to do
“emotional work” [note, for example, Stein's use of the
inclusive, “we” and her provision of calming support—“we're
both here”]. It might, also, be suggested that Benson's
overwhelming use of “I” represents his attempt to assert power
during the discourse; but, other explanations cannot be discounted
(e.g., anxiety, insecurity, ambivalence, etc.). Additional patterns
from section to section, as the interactions proceeded, need to be
evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively.
In Section Two [5/16 – 8/29/2011],
the rudiments of “active listening” are apparent, though it is
important to note that the actors communicated with each other
between sections and, presumably, sessions [sub-sections]—no doubt
enhancing mutual familiarity and coordination. As in Section One,
Stein and Benson are given to speaking over each other [a type of
erasure and, with pauses, a type of “white space”], suggesting
that concentration is less than optimal. Indeed, throughout all four
sections of the composed performance, Benson seems to be frequently
distracted, as in this exchange on p 19 [recall that Stein's words
appear in italics throughout the book]:
“When we are about to start the
screen goes /
white, but also there is this message,
/
prompting us to begin to 'provide
content.' /
As it turns out, I don't mind
'anticipation' /
I feel like I am in another world. Is
this the /
future? We can't pretend it is not us.
We expect /
to be living in the future, and
suddenly we are. /
the screen hesitates, suggesting
'the writer' /
will provide content”
Although Benson may still be seeking
support from Stein, it is, nevertheless, evident in this exchange and
many others throughout the transcription, that both actors are poets,
and, on p 286, Benson makes direct reference to the genre: “Dogs
are scavengers. / Poets are scavengers, too. / Dogs are mere pets. /
'Pets' is in 'Poets.'” Kenneth Goldsmith, Benjamin Zephaniah,
Nikita Gill, and others, have asked, “What does it take to be a
poet in the internet age?” Using modern technology, Stein and
Benson transcribe and broadcast conversations into verse, including,
meter, rhythm, and play, and, like many examples of Modernist
and Post-modernist innovative poetry, repetition is employed
to unify the text from what may appear to be disparate elements from
section to section [e.g., in the present case, references to
swimming, diving, weather, illness, as well as, physical and psychic
well-being].
Section Three [10/10/2011 – 2/6/2012]
reveals that “active listening” is well-developed, evinced by
coordinated and correlated “cutting off,” suggesting that actors
are responding to each other intentionally. Also, Stein and Benson
sometimes finish each others' sentences—indicating familiarity
[“I'm sorry, that gave me pause. / uncertainty / I heard
the sound of breaking glass. / attention to the / light
shining on a shattering mirror. / sound listing in the direction
/ aimless listening.” [p 162]. Despite disjunct elements,
this section includes examples of true conversations, reflection, and
lengthy statements [e.g., pp 123-124], and empathy is apparent as a
signature of the actors' interactions, suggesting, burgeoning
intimacy [e.g., p 156]. By Section Three of the performance, Stein
and Benson have a functioning relationship—even demonstrating signs
of vulnerability and attraction, as in these exchanges:
“i'm not well-rested and keeping
making an /
error. /
And keep making mistakes. /
That's okay with me. It doesn't to me
come /
between us. /
Nothing to you comes between us.”
[p 136]
***
“We're already working together.
/
Or so it seemed. /
It seems so now, more than ever, to me.
/
I was working hard to get to this
sense, of /
working together. /
I could sense that.” [p 140]
“Active listening” is fully
developed by the long Section Four [12/1 – 10/2012], and extended
passages occur without including the self-directed pronoun “I”
[pp 217, 231-236, 291]. Remarkably, in this final section, compared
to Section One, Stein and Benson use “I” in statistically equal
proportions [Stein, 49%; Benson, 51%: 894 total “I”s in this
section], showing that the relationship, over time, has become less
one-sided. Nonetheless, it appears that, in this and other parts of
the text, Stein sometimes uses “one” in place of the less formal
and less direct, “I,” supporting a notion that females, at least,
heterosexual females, may be more behaviorally and verbally
deferential compared to males—a stereotype open to empirical
investigation. As an aside, DYODL could be used as a valuable
research document by linguists using “textual analysis” to
analyze patterns of speech relative to subject matter and context.
Consistent with my impression that
Stein and Benson seem to be displaying traditional sex roles
[possibly, as a mode of flirtation?] is the observation that he
becomes the information-provider [especially regarding psychology,
health, and movies], she, the student and information-seeker [e.g.,
pp 240-241]. Nonetheless, Section Four, also, demonstrates that
conversations are more substantive, including less “chit-chat”
and banality. In addition, the actors have become comfortable
challenging each other [p 227] and demonstrate facility with
conflict-resolution [p 244]. Clearly, by the final transcriptions,
Stein and Benson have become emotionally invested in each other.
Thus, pp 273-274:
“Even though often we are the same
person we /
had an impression already that we
had been. /
I don't have a preference about the
ways we /
don't know who we are going to be
next /
I wish this could go on forever
/
I am aware /
I think about that more lately too /
I want to know more about you”
But, in stereotypically male, more
pragmatic, fashion, Benson goes on to say, “Unfortunately, I also,
have other passions and / fascinations beside this one.”
Notwithstanding Benson's capacity for reality-orientation, one feels
deeply for Stein's willingness and capacity for emotional
vulnerability.
Throughout the book, I was struck by
the remarkable lack of controversial material [say, politics,
religion, sex], leading me to wonder what the specific prior
agreements were between the actors, despite their claim that the
conversations were “improvised.”. Furthermore, transcription
requires erasure based upon value judgments, and it would be
interesting to understand more about Stein's and Benson's beliefs,
attitudes, and opinions. In particular, what audience[s] did the
performers have in mind when they decided that their manuscript was
ready for publication? Who were they hoping to attract to their work?
Despite these lingering reservations and questions, Do Your Own
Damn Laundry fulfills many formalist criteria, including, in my
opinion, the most fundamental one—“interpretive power.” Kenneth
Goldsmith has lauded work that is “provocative and challenging,”
and this composition is a tour-de-force that will remain,
indefinitely, in the mind of any reader having an appreciation for
collaborative experimental literature.
*That each actor is
heterosexual was determined by their self-references on websites and
in the text of DYODL.
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