C. Russell Price joins us for the Breaking Form Interview and talks doom, Designing Women, and why you should never read the comments on the internet.

Price is the author of Oh, You Thought This was a Date?!: Apocalypse Poems, which can be purchased from Northwestern University Press here. Their chapbook, Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other, is available from Sibling Rivalry Press here.

Read here the entire text of How To Stay Politically Active While Fucking The Existential Dread Away (first published in Pank; scroll down).

Watch this short (~7 min) reading by C. Russell while they were a Lambda Literary Fellow.

Read Claudia Rankine’s Open Letter: A Dialogue on Race and Poetry here. The Academy notes: “This conversation was presented by the Academy of American Poets at the Associated Writing Programs Conference on February 4, 2011. Claudia Rankine began her talk with a reading of Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change." She then presented the following dialogue.”

James’s favorite Jessica Simpson song is “I Wanna Love You Forever.” Watch the official music video for that song here (4:18). 

4 Non Blondes was an American alternative rock band active from 1989-1994. Their only album, Bigger, Better, Faster, More!, spent 59 weeks on the Billboard 200 and sold 1.5 million copies. You can watch the video for their smash ICONIC hit, “What’s Up,” here. Linda Perry wrote and sang lead on that hit.

Watch some of the best Golden Girls moments here (~43 min). And then watch some of Designing Women’s best moments here (~23 min).

Gay codes have included a handkerchief code, a whole language called Polari, and symbols (elucidated here by a 1985 issue of Sappho Speaks). You can watch a short film, “Putting on the Dish,” written in Polari here (~6:30 min). 

Important resources for survivors of sexual assault and abuse can be found at RAINN. Peer resources for trans and nonbinary people can be found at the Trans Lifeline, which is divested from police and run entirely by trans folks.

When James says that gender is a copy for which there is no original, he is paraphrasing Judith Butler’s argument in her article, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” which argues that gender and sexuality are always performative and also always being performed. The repeated acts that encode gender are like a script, and that script gets copied and passed around, but there is no original script. “In other words,” Butler writes, “the naturalistic effects of heterosexualized genders are produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexual identity, one that is produced by the imitation as its effect.” You can read the whole (short) essay here.