Paying to be fooled

Having recently returned to school as a mature student, once a week I drive from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi on my way to campus, about a three-hour drive. Most of my commute takes place along Interstate 55, along which I often see a truck from one of the Sanderson Farms chicken plants in nearby Hammond, Louisiana, or McComb, Mississippi. These trucks are loaded up with thousands of live birds, their crowded cages stacked ten rows high and twenty rows deep, likely on their final journey ever taken in the open air. 

It’s no secret where those trucks are headed, yet what always strikes me as I come up alongside them is the disparity between the messy, earthy business of food production — the feathers, dirt, and droppings striking my windshield as I pass, not to mention what happens inside those plants — and the sanitized, shrink-wrapped package later found in the poultry aisle. There’s a shell game being played, a strategy of diversion so common to capitalism: look over here at this hand (the shiny merchandise, the glossy image) while the other hand performs the action (the slaughter, the exploitation, the extraction). As consumers, we pay not just for the product, but also to be fooled, to draw a veil over the suffering and the blood. Our ignorance is part of our purchase.

Which is why I am so grateful for Laura Mullen’s new book EtC (Solid Objects, 2023), for the way it pulls back that veil both from the ways corporate entities are always seeking to promote certain realities while concealing others, as well as our complicated, entangled relationships with those companies. That entanglement is often mediated by brands: after all, brands do not just advance corporate narratives; they also create new discursive spaces for those narratives. The task of the artist is thus to slow the sleight-of-hand down, to flip the table on which the game is played to expose whatever artifice supports it. To do so, EtC takes as its subject an iconic bovine mascot who has lived one of the longest and strangest lives of any corporate emblem in history — and whom Mullen here examines in a collection that serves equally as send-up, as critique, and as lament, but above all as trip through the capitalist funhouse: a trip in which, with the knives out and sharpened, we discover there is very little fun to be had after all. 

Over a series of emails this past spring, Mullen was gracious enough to field a few questions about EtC, its origins and its poetic project, and about the spokescow inside us all.  

— Benjamin Morris

***

Benjamin Morris: The world first got a glimpse of the Elsie project eight years ago, when you gave a reading at the first-ever New Orleans Poetry Festival in 2016, a recording of which is still available on YouTube. I remember being there that night — we were spellbound, taken on a journey that was equal parts hilarious and terrifying. At that time EtC was wild and sprawling, but the core throughlines of the book were still there. What first drew your attention to Elsie as a subject? 

Laura Mullen: Of her sighting of the “subject” of a book Virginia Woolf wrote: “I see a fin in the water.” I’ve always loved that: porpoise or shark (or orca), something (mostly obscured by ocean) becomes visible to the artist at a distance, a force, a hunger, and a direction or trajectory; a life. And T.S. Eliot’s idea of the catalyst, though constrained and mechanical, is not a bad image for thinking through what happens when a particular recognition charges us with energy. But I would want to borrow, with respect and tenderness, something from Christina Sharpe’s discussion of what she calls “the weather” in her wonderful book In the Wake. “In my text,” she writes, “the weather is the totality of our environments…” Our energized recognitions are determined (shaped and marked) by what Sharpe calls “the total climate,” they are atmospheric: “Elsie” arrives as perfect storm. 

To gesture toward the climate in which Elsie develops, I’d note that my mother (whose fierce, alcohol-fueled grief made our relationship horrific) died suddenly in the fall of 2015, while I was dealing with betrayals — constant, painful — by (mostly female) colleagues and students at the university where I had taken on an administrative role. I was not just isolated: I became the Department scapegoat (the sacrificial animal — goat or sheep or, as in John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” cow). Too, the election cycle was on, and, like many of us, I was caught between my dislike and distrust of Hillary Clinton and my horror at Donald Trump. Also part of the storm system was the William Carlos Williams poem (“To Elsie”: “The pure products of America / go crazy—”), and other encounters with that name (a dear friend lives on “Elsie Street”). But the subject really gets organized (as we say of a storm) in the move from anger at a problematic person (“I can’t write about her,” I said to myself…and heard myself answer, “But she’s such a COW!”) toward the cultural / institutional situation that gave her power — at which point I could begin to see myself as deeply involved: wasn’t I also a “spokescow”?! 

The book wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t stayed with my hurt — and my anger. Anger, pushing into clear speech, is, as the song says, an energy. “When we turn from anger,” Audre Lorde writes (in “Uses of Anger”), “we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.” And I was angry: ever more awake to the ways academia — increasingly corporate — was (is) failing those who (I speak of the students) inhabit the intense duality of being both customer and product. The luck of receiving — through the work of writers (Claudia Rankine, Sarah Ahmed, Myung Mi Kim, Bhanu Kapil, and Marthe Reed to name a few), and the visionary Black Lives Matter and Take ‘Em Down NOLA activists — an education in racism and social injustice, and activist anger, was amplified by the daily lessons provided by life in New Orleans. A swirling collection of figures and forces led to an interrogation of privilege and what I call (in “Cow Hide Brief Case”) “milk white womanhood.” “Elsie” is a hurricane, or “red wind” (like the Santa Anas of my west coast childhood: usually pushing fire) — a charged confluence of conditions and influences. “Anger,” this is Lorde again (same essay) “is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”

Morris: That weather you describe includes another driving factor, which is — and we have to look this straight in the eye — the effects of the current stage of capitalism we’re in, both their sorrows and their absurdities. In poems like “The Imaginary Begins,” “Her Head Begins to Float,” “Spilt,” and of course, the closing jeremiad/indictment/keening wail of “Lactorium” you read exploitation and surrealism not as polarities but as intertwined realities. Did you see this coming or was this a discovery in the process of writing?

Mullen: Don’t you love the way that writing makes present and visible what you already know (and what you didn’t know you knew) and — as process — exposes holes, gaps, and blind-spots, sending you off into further research, deeper inquiry, making you aware of what you have to learn? Of course, there’s personal history (I had a grandmother who was blacklisted when she refused to give up her friends to HUAC) grounding my exploration, but I don’t write what I know (as the worn-out craft advice puts it), or knowledge is just a starting place, and I’m making discoveries that seem necessary. Trying to figure out how to survive what Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, calls “Disaster Capitalism” seems ever more urgent. Writing is a way of expanding and complicating understanding: one of the important aspects of composing and revising EtC was the ongoing recognition of the way in which what appears to be capitalist polarities are actually entwined, as you say: entangled and interdependent.

So EtC begins with a poem about the 1930 “milk wars” and cites the activist/organizer Archie Wright,^[1] answering the question we are asking ourselves all the time: What do we have to do to live? Which is to say that the book opens with a renewal of vows, as it were, to both critical analysis and responsibility. “Lactorium,” the book’s climax, is structured — as I know you know — around Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” or “Deathfugue”: that extraordinary admission of complicity, in the body. The cup cannot be taken away: we have to “drink” the brimming horror of our moment, we have to take it in. This vision of what you call the intertwined/entangled realities is part of our poetic tradition, along with (and this is addressed in the book’s final poem, “Goodnight Moo”) our awareness of the long history of injustice and the oppressive crushing of alternate political and economic possibilities. James Baldwin said that the proof of his love for America was precisely his critique of the country, and I am grateful to be able to echo his wise and deeply loving words: we can look, we can think, and — in our critical stance — we can become more open-hearted, inclusive, and committed to justice and equality. The huge — ongoing — error is to think that we can thrive (or survive) by pretending things are already peachy.

Morris: I could not agree more: in our polarized age Baldwin’s notion of critique to improve rather than to destroy is needed more than ever. And yet the ironies and contradictions of that complicity remain fundamentally enmeshed in our system: in his thoughtful review of EtC in the Cleveland Review of Books, Cary Stough recently picked up on this point, noting that “the cow often repeats such injunctions of the market in which she is perceived to be enslaved.” 

In Elsie’s case, I see this refracted through a unique lens, the lens of what we consider sacred. There are two competing visions here: first, you have the Company itself as deified, as an ultimate authority whose will and purposes (i.e., profit) are absolute, and which exercises its divine right to ensure its name is not blasphemed. But you also have Elsie herself as an emblem of that authority: the avatar who wears a Byzantine “halo / of yellow flowers”, who is several times described as a “goddess,” even as she resists and subverts the role. She is the fatted calf, but she is also the hand (the hoof?) that lifts the knife to slaughter it. How do we understand this tension?

Mullen: In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, the critic and philosopher Giorgio Agamben surfaces a meaning for the “sacred” that is possibly not what we usually have in mind, but opens up a way to understand the “tension” that interests you. Pressing on the question of representation, Agamben identifies what happens when our ability to see humanity is blunted or absent, and people fall into unrecognizability:

When their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when human beings are truly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in the Roman law of the archaic period: doomed to death.

Noting that “what is new in our time is that growing sections of humankind are no longer representable inside the nation-state,” the figure of the refugee becomes — for Agamben — “a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories…”^[2] Let me pull that language closer to my own by saying that the refugee (and you should have a certain song by Tom Petty in your head here — I can’t afford to quote it) is our opportunity to recognize shared humanity across all kinds of differences, and to extend care toward the other. Who here isn’t — or isn’t going to be — a refugee? That question haunted me in Louisiana as corporate polluters, climate change, and right-wing politics are transforming citizens into refugees or — as the title of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s superb book puts it — Strangers in Their Own Land. 

But to wade deeper into your question, I wonder if we can say that the relationship between company and the logo which reifies the brand is somewhat akin to the relationship between the church and … Well, isn’t that cross the best logo ever? Is Christianity a/the brand? In EtC, the boundaries between secular and religious logos blur more than once — perhaps most obviously when someone attempts to tell me that Elsie, “died for our sins.” “We’re bigger than Jesus Christ now,” John Lennon famously said — which got him in a whole lot of trouble. (We might say that, in exile in New York, Lennon was “sacred”?) The dyslexia which allows me to mix letters up (so sacred and scared are interchangeable), folds Agamben into the work without direct citation: “’Sacred, scared / Scarred…’” Both Christianity and capitalism are invested in the gesture you identify in your introduction: the denial of the reality and the protection of the (fantastic) image. There’s a brilliant essay by Samuel P. Catlin in Parapraxis, “The Campus Does Not Exist,” which breaks down what he calls “campus panic” step by step, showing us exactly how the machinery of substitution works. The university (its real estate grabs and other investment strategies, its tiered and unjust hiring practices, its inflated administrative salaries, and the impact of its increasing cost for students) disappears behind “The Campus” which — because it is imaginary — can be manipulated and policed while serving to distract us from the real issues with higher education in this country. I think one could use this essay to clarify some other potent kinds of sleight-of-hand: “The Family Does Not Exist,” for instance, might help us think through the ways we are letting living people come to enormous grief under laws that enforce sentimental fantasies around conception and the fetus. The double-think required to accept someone else’s bad dream as your (limited) life is producing a strange, strained music — where the harm in harmony is revealed. In Revenge of the Scapegoat, Caren Beilin scores it for us: “In the arc of American civilization at this moment we’ve never been more openly ambivalent … such that the ethos of care and the ethos of abuse begin humming together and producing a third harmony that is reducible perhaps neither to the family nor to murder but might be opening on a generalized psychosis of the social field.”

Morris: Reflecting on Catlin’s point, there’s no doubt that we’re approaching new versions or incarnations of dystopia with each new year (hell, each new week). But every dystopia has its pet absurdities too. It’s funny — on my commutes to Jackson, alongside those chicken trucks from Sanderson Farms, I also frequently see milk trucks bearing the massive face of the spokescow, an inescapable presence your book makes me see as Panopticon, thought police or Big Sister, watching my every move. 

It’s a dark humor to be sure, but a core part of EtC’s critique is its humor: this is a deeply funny book. Wordplay and puns are everywhere (as you note above, the word “brand” gets particular mileage), to the point that under the thumb of our capitalist overlords, I began to realize that the pun was not just wordplay for its own sake: it was a coping mechanism. You do not laugh or cry, you laugh and cry in the same breath. In ElsieWorld, it’s a means of survival.

Mullen: Lyn Hejinian (in “The Rejection of Closure”) continues Gertrude Stein’s work to readjust our sense of the value of the materiality of language, in part by focusing on puns. Hejinian identified their semantic excess as a freeing of energies, as well as a call to attentive and curious reading/listening. The chance to enjoy a mistake, and to laugh (not at but with), is an opportunity to let go of self-righteous rigidity and to be repositioned, one among others (to use the C.D. Wright title) in community. I’ve never forgotten that John Ashbery said — in an interview — that he tried to make sure there was always one mistake in his outfit when he dressed up. Puns open opportunities (as Stein said about verbs) for error, which is such a wonderful necessity in every exploration. Jorie Graham made sure her students looked at and thought about what the painter Francis Bacon had to say about his use of accidental marks, and when Ronaldo V. Wilson visited an undergraduate class at LSU he told them (I loved this moment) to “have an accident.” I’m not sure what my students did with that — but it did lower the tension in the class, and I got a lot out of that advice. Some of the puns and humor (generally) in EtC come from errors and slippages. (I’m dyslexic, mostly I try to hide that, but leaning into it got me the “Diary” “Diary” confusion which allowed me to take on Academia and what we call PoBiz: “the Diary Industry.”) Confusion is a place of energetic hesitation where the materiality of language reminds us of its uncontrollable or barely controlled wildness — it’s a place where something escapes … (as in the moment of semantic saturation in “On Meaning”) — that escape is crucial, isn’t it?

Morris: It is — escape is an irresistible trajectory, one that I believe is lodged deep in the human heart: the desire not necessarily for more but for better. For a reality that is both more sane and more liberated at the same time. At present it’s hard to see that taking shape, but we must, as Cormac McCarthy writes, keep “carrying the fire” even in the darkest of our political nights. 

Now, one of the main evils that EtC explores is the commodification of the body. Late capital is famous for viewing bodies as objects, and in a surprising twist Elsie occasionally takes part in this process, even as she is its victim. Think of those “Hair Club for Men” product ads from the ’90s: “I’m not only the president, I’m also a client!” How do you understand her complicity?

Mullen: In their book Crimes of the Powerful, “compliance, support, and complacency” are terms Dawn L. Rothe and David Kauzularich use to describe victim complicity. I think you find examples of all three in Elsie’s behavior and language. Perhaps the poem “Let Them Eat Cow” might be a sort of touchstone for this, where Marie Antoinette is deployed as an exemplary complicit victim: providing a figure for the way a particular body grounds and locates guilt? What you call the “shell game” of capitalism depends heavily on racism and class warfare and misogyny. Anti-feminist scapegoating, or “Bitch-washing” — my term — is ongoing: over and over we see the power play in which getting rid of a woman seems (for a moment) like it might restore some balance. (Think Salem witch trials, etc., or take the recent congressional trials of college presidents, please.) So Elsie prances onstage as the beheaded queen, an illustration of the double bind of feminism, where power makes you a distrusted target and every silver cloud has a bruised purple lining of betrayals and backlash. I hope Elsie usefully brings the conjunction of those positions into visibility and gives us a better sense of what it costs to “go along to get along…”

As a persona, Elsie would be impossible without John Berryman’s “Henry” (from the Dream Songs), the work of artists like Sophie Calle and Janine Antoni, the persona poems of Frank Bidart (especially “Ellen West” and “Herbert White”), and the political activism of The Yes Men. The Yes Men practice what they call “identity correction,” impersonating the powerful in order to expose dubious corporate practices and dangerous hypocrisy around the exploitation of shared and limited resources. Elsie functions as that kind of “hide”: I put on her skin (and she got under mine) in order to surface blindness and delusions of power as well as self-pity. Because that seems always like the thing we need to watch out for most intensely: the self-pity of the abuser which is mobilized to excuse violence and violation.

Could we call EtC “Songs of Victimhood and Complicity” — to riff on William Blake? Viewing bodies as objects — viewing our own bodies as objects — is something women are trained to do from early on (John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, is illuminating on this): not much of a surprise there. There’s a poem I took out of the book that — too directly — addresses this; let’s throw it back in here:

Elsie Doesn’t Mind
If the men she passes
Make comments Nice tits
Nice ass shake it baby etc
She laughs and says it’s just
Their way of saying hello
To her as their way of saying
Hello to Bill or Pill were she
With her husband would be
An admiring but respectful
Silence she thinks it’s nice
To be noticed doesn’t see
Why the things they’re
Saying freak me out Don’t
Have a cow she’s sure
I must be jealous as we
Walk in a kind of hot
Tunnel of glances and
On-going commentary only
As she explains her due
Nice pot-roast sexy rib-eye
Just a sign of appreciation
Awesome flank steak mama
C’mon my filet mignon

Cow, butcher, cook, waitress, and “dish,” Elsie’s effort to (happily) participate in the system that accords power to men and rewards good marketing and obedience in women makes her a smug and defensive (gaslit) participant. “You know” (I could say, thinking of Audre Lorde’s famous dictum), “…Elsie IS the Master’s tool!” We want women to have power — but that power is modeled on male power — and then it turns out their (our) successes are costly in all the old ways. Meanwhile, she doesn’t escape the harm she enables. 

So, I hear your question as (correctly) identifying Elsie’s “victimplicity” — to add another neologism to those found in the text: “commodi(e)ty” or “congratu-dolences.” Neologisms (which get at intertwined realities, like puns) crash the barriers and blinders we use to protect a false picture of reality in which the President ISN’T the client: in which he doesn’t have to drink the water or breathe the air he’s helping the corporation pollute. What’s he gonna do instead — go to the moon? That’s the problematic aspect of the desire for escape…

Morris: As consumers, it makes me wonder how we avoid or untangle our status as “victim-plicit” — perhaps only process, not outcomes, will save us. So let me ask you about craft. I’m entranced by the many different approaches to lineation you undertake in the book: for non-poetry nerds, the places where you end your lines. This is hardly ever accidental: poets choose where the stanzas need to draw breath, where they want their readers to pause and think, and where they might be trying to say something underneath or beyond the words on the page. 

The lineation in EtC occupies an enormous spectrum, from traditional free verse to prose-poem (“Playing the Cow Palace”) to a staccato breathlessness (“Cow Hide Brief Case”) to lines whose arrangement undertakes an entirely different project altogether, becoming part of the concept (“Elsie the Twisted Shape”), a musical echo of the indictment in the piece. Some poets pursue a form of lineation and commit to it almost exclusively (e.g. C.K. Williams with his famously long line) — how important was it to you to pursue this expanded range? Was it intentional from the outset, or did the poems reveal themselves one by one in different forms? 

Mullen: 

“Nothing makes any difference as long as someone is listening while they are talking. If the same person is doing the talking and the listening why so much the better there is just by so much the greater concentration...” (Gertrude Stein, Writings 1932–1946, New York 1998, p. 290)

Gertrude Stein said that “the essence ... of being most intensely alive … is being one who is at the same time talking and listening.” That’s the key to all of my formal experiments: I have to create while attending to the information received in the act of creation — letting the work tell me what shape it wants to take. (“The poem is smarter than you are,” Jorie Graham both admonished and encouraged her students. “Let it tell you what it wants to be.”) And the Language Poets underlined and torqued that lesson: I admire their constant investigation of the unexamined ideas about form which constrict exploration and limit discoveries. Too, your mention of C.K. Williams is exactly right (he chose my first book for the National Poetry Series, way back when I was reading his work intensely): Williams made an impressive leap forward as a writer when he let his lines have the breathing room they needed. It also meant a lot to me to learn that Susan Howe had put up big pages on her walls and let single words or just a few words sit there: scale is so incredibly revealing (if you want to really test a line put it on a page by itself…), so that when I (belatedly) read Charles Olson quoting Robert Creeley (form is content) I was primed to agree. 

I write poetry because form means, and I read form carefully when I read poetry. But there’s nothing forced about my experimental urges: the way I write comes out of the way my mind works. Of course, it’s one kind of fun sometimes to try to get thinking into a received form — it’s a bit like drag or dressing-for-success or kink, maybe? Working with specific expectations means you can transform or widen them or do a deliberate upset and those in the know (and loose enough to like some playfulness) will recognize, maybe appreciate, your jazzy riff on the standard. But letting the poem find its own path involves attention and invention, it’s both creative and critical. And I like the fact that there’s no safe word, as it were: you just have to be as aware as you can be, and as true as you can be, to the experience as it develops … Present. Fully present. I think what Graham was telling her students is that we were — by writing — opening ourselves to something huge (the history each word contains, the long and disparate traditions in which we were immersed, whether or not we knew them, just by the act of putting word next to word). Trying to say something that feels both beautiful and true for more than a hot minute, we enter into communion with intense energies at once ancient and contemporary. Note: “communion” isn’t likeness and shouldn’t require imitation (of self or other).  

But the way we (mostly) do life in this country is so much a matter of conformity and copying, which is, given our resources, a huge, tedious disappointment … take housing (because I’m looking for a place to live right now), please! Who waved the magic wand and declared, “ALL COUNTERTOPS MUST BE GRANITE!” — ignoring or not caring about the fact that cutting stone is toxic work? All the ways America limits, channels toward destruction, and forces into reiteration our human needs and desires — that’s something I am pushing against as a writer as well as a renter. Because I don’t see the difference between art and life: both are creative (and critical) activities distorted by the pressure to write uplifting narrative poems, or to view stainless steel appliances (and that awful grey vinyl wood flooring) as a sign of good taste. Why in the world would we want things, places, people … to look or be the same? I avoid franchises as much as possible: that’s one of the things I adore about New Orleans — all those original, local delights! Why aren’t we thrilled by unique things — and specific histories? Wherever I am, I want to be there — not in some replicated nowhere. As a writer, that means I’m in love with materials: sound, meaning, breath, syntax, and the chance or possibility (if we pay attention and we’re brave) of surprising and delighting ourselves, and others. And, at this point (I mean, I’ve been writing this way for over 40 years) I rarely find myself messing with or questioning the form: the work comes into existence because I recognized a specific impulse and gave it room — whatever kind of room it seemed to want and need. 

Morris: “Letting the poem find its own path”: absolutely. So often the poem tells you what it wants to do, rather than the other way around. Thinking about the room poems ask for, and a few of those prose-poems (“On Meaning,” “Confessional Poem,” “Love in English Lit,” and others) in particular, I couldn’t help but notice a shadow thread of your own biography within the book: the poet as professor and activist and lover. You’ve said that EtC was written primarily from 2016–2021: as you and Elsie journeyed together for those five years, in which we see upheavals, relocation, and other milestones, what was it like to have her as your traveling companion? Was she a Sibyl figure serving as a guide, a foil for your own experience, or something else entirely?

Mullen: “Elsie” is a composite figure: a charged mixture (atmospheric, as we discussed earlier) of self and other (real other, literary other, and logo): the poems use the energy of fact to fuel fiction and vice versa — imagination, as per usual, informs the actual. But I’m interested in your imagined possible roles: given the choice of “Sibyl” and “foil,” one answer might collapse them, “Both and neither”! But I have a feeling you are offering two possibilities that are critical, in that they might be really useful to consider as a reader? Perhaps, for instance, one might come at the book through an examination of the way in which brand has displaced character, and logos replace, or function as, “Sibyls” for contemporary audiences? 

On another note, I wonder if a poem like “Can U C Thru” complicates the question of how Elsie serves as a “foil” and for whom? That “C”/see linkage is possibly rewarding also as a line of inquiry? “Elsie” is (in the poem “‘But…’”) written as “L see.” So, another way of thinking of her is as a spectacle serving as spectacles? She’s a looking glass. A product of the “unforgiving mirror” (p. 50) or a Doppelganger — the classic literary trope that is a reflection or copy of the self, usually evil. (The question of copying is urgent throughout the text — and the tension in the American pressure to be unique but not different is one of the book’s subjects.) In the West we like to divide people into good and evil, so the Doppelganger is invented in response to the need to distance ourselves from (some) desires and impulses — and maybe we open that distance precisely in order to experience its collapse.

Over the course of the writing of the book, poetry moved me from rejection to acceptance: Elsie c’est moi, of course. You ask about biography — so much of EtC is just straight up nonfiction, personal and/or (in a poem like “Love in English Lit”) crowdsourced: I can’t pull apart shadow and light in the text. Is the warp fact? Is the weft fiction? Or are the threads running in both directions wound extensions, unevenly blended, of the two? Once we turn what happened into language those distinctions become very very tricky. “All ‘description’” (so the artist Eleanor Antin said), “is a form of creation.”

Morris: And yet that act of creation can be fraught with peril. On the cusp of publication, you and your publisher grappled with the possibility of EtC attracting the attention of various corporations and worked carefully to make sure the text was free of brand names. Can you speak about those revisions?

Mullen: This is a tricky question for a number of reasons, but I can contextualize the concerns shaping the prepublication edits by talking, briefly, about Todd Haynes’ great movie Karen Carpenter, Superstar. In that film, Haynes used what looked like Barbie dolls to make the singer-songwriter’s eating disorder vivid, and he also used the Carpenters’ music — without permission. Haynes was able to prove to Mattel that the dolls were Barbie knock-offs, but Richard Carpenter, despite the crucial social work the Haynes film was doing, made sure it couldn’t be seen. Given the Carpenters’ songs perhaps that isn’t surprising: what Haynes surfaced was the way in which a syrupy imitation of happiness was being poured out of and over a young woman who was — visibly — killing herself in the quest to be perfect. But if Haynes’ film were as readily available as last year’s Barbie, I think we’d see a serious up-tick in the health of young American women.

That censorship story haunted me — not more than, but with, my indelible memory of Hayne’s film (which I was lucky enough to see on the big screen when it was released), and when my subject matter shifted from the university toward an international industry, I was working with a new level of fear. In the final stages of publication lawyers were consulted and precautions were taken (including the removal of corporation/brand names): my publishers had concerns I understood, and asked for changes — which I made. That censoring pressure actually fed creativity — as I decided to mark excisions with information about why (see pages 3-4 for instance) the names were removed. Honesty is always such a relief.

I should say that I often see — as a teacher — women (mostly) having difficulties writing and/or anxiety about publishing nonfiction work which, because of its direct treatment of experience, might be socially costly or lead to some kind of familial rupture. Raised by alcoholics, I got early lessons in the ways that speaking your truth will get you punished (those lessons stick, but they don’t change my behavior: to say what I think and feel is too much of a life-expanding relief). But the work I did to get past the usual creative nonfiction problem (“Oh no, I’m going to lose relationships!”) at first diffused, then increased the danger: social ties are a matter of the heart, corporate reputations are a matter of the wallet — but in America, especially after the passage of Citizens United, it’s easy to confuse the two? The 2010 ruling that gave corporations the right to contribute unlimited funds to political action committees gives personhood to businesses and protects special interests (and the potential for corruption) as some new version of free speech. EtC became an exploration of the implications of treating corporations like people (and people like products): an examination of contemporary American selfhood, socially mediated and economically motivated, within a system where we learn to see and represent ourselves as one marketable image among many, where the corporal and corporate intersect. 

My hope is that the spectacle of our anti-heroine exercising her fraught and limited freedoms (in the context of cultural, social, and environmental disasters) might open space for critique, and give us a chance to readjust the values shaping our very short lives on this small shared planet.

EtC by Laura Mullen is available from Solid Objects Press.

^[2]Means Without End, pp 20-22