I wonder if, on some level, humans possess a similar predisposition to cram our minds with information; perhaps the bottomless shining vat of the Internet targets our brain-stems in the same way a plate of cookies does. We can’t out-read the Internet, but every day we try. There are always more photos to attach captions to, more blogs to reference, there is always one more comment on Tumblr. We post and re-pin our recipes, Autocorrects, and Texts From Last Night rather effortlessly, but we continue hungering for more. We know they are there, waiting to be consumed.

Irish author Mark O’Connell is interested in and troubled by what he calls this “frictionless sharing and flattening of affect,” particularly when it comes to what Internet inside jokes have nicknamed Epic Fails. You know the mascots: The Monkey Jesus Fresco, R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet, “Friday” (the official Epic Fail anthem). He’s written an e-book, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever, published last month on The Millions, that dives into the surprisingly deep history behind our hunger for “disasterpieces,” and our often callous public treatment of the people who were unlucky enough to create them. This snickering ironic phenomenon, that one might imagine shares a birthday with 4Chan, can actually trace its roots back to Shakespeare, god-awful Victorian poets, and a haughty Irish novelist who inspired ironic fan clubs among Britain’s literary heavyweights. O’Connell connects these historic precursors to the current “You’re Doing it Wrong” memes, giving the lie to the truism that snark was spontaneously born online, but also illustrating the ways in which the the Internet has indeed altered the way we share and consume our snarkiness.

Epic Fail is fresh, funny, sharp-eyed, and challenging. You’ll never look at YouTube parodies the same way again.

*** 

The Rumpus: How did the idea for Epic Fail arise?

Mark O’Connell: It basically started with Amanda McKittrick Ros. I came across a reference to her in late 2011, and became quite taken with the idea of this early 20th Century novelist who attained a kind of cult celebrity from the sheer awfulness of her books. I was fascinated not so much by Ros herself, as by the idea that people like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien became obsessed with her, pressed her books into their friends’ hands, and held competitions at Oxford to see who could read from her work for the longest without laughing. This kind of ironic celebration of bad art was always something that I unthinkingly assumed was more or less contemporary—or post-Susan Sontag, at least. So, from there, I became interested in looking at people who became viral celebrities before there was such a thing as viral celebrity. And that became a sort of historical back door into a discussion of Internet culture, or of certain cultural tendencies that have been foregrounded by the Internet.

Rumpus: When doing your research and working through this book, did anything surprise you? Were there conclusions you came to that you didn’t expect to arrive at? Or patterns you found that you hadn’t considered?

O’Connell: The really interesting and surprising thing was the way that the parameters of the topic itself kept expanding as I was writing about it. Not just in the narrow sense of researching a thing and realizing how deep it goes, but in the sense that new examples of the phenomenon kept cropping up as I was writing it. Like, the book starts with Cecilia Giménez and the Spanish Jesus fresco, which now seems almost the quintessential example of the way the Internet cultivates this interest in disastrous art and the people who make it. That actually happened when I was quite close to finishing the project, but it would have seemed kind of absurd not to discuss it, so I had to go back and write Giménez into the thing.

That also happened in a slightly different way with historical “epic fail” figures. I’d tell people I was working on this subject, and they’d assure me that there was no way I could write about this stuff without discussing X or Y person. I’d never heard of William McGonagall (the famously terrible Victorian Scottish poet) when I started writing this, but a friend of mine, whose fiancée claims to be a descendant of his, told me about him and insisted that there was no way I could leave him out. Obviously he was one hundred percent right. That happened quite a bit, so that was really interesting.

Rumpus: Were there any primary or secondary sources you came upon that you’d recommend to us readers? (To be enjoyed either earnestly or ironically?)

O’Connell: Most of the things that I read while researching the topic made it into the book in some form or other. Some didn’t, though. I read a very interesting and seriously entertaining book called Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, by a Canadian writer named Carl Wilson. It’s about Celine Dion, and more specifically about her album Let’s Talk About Love. Basically, he despises Dion’s music, but the book is about him trying to get to a position where he can appreciate it, and see the kind of value it might have for the gazillions of people who love it. I found that really fascinating and inspiring. I also read a lot of Susan Sontag, whose critical persona and voice I pretty much fell in love with while I was writing this. And then I read Claire Colebrook’s book Irony, which is a kind of short history of the topic, and has some really interesting things to say about how our understanding of the concept has changed and evolved.

Rumpus: I’ve been thinking about the line you draw between ridiculing the artist and ridiculing the failed art, and it led me to ponder Birdemic, which was called 2011′s The Room. I’m wondering if you’ve seen it. Also set in the Bay Area, it’s a slog of a low-budget, poorly-edited, and terribly-scripted film, about a flock of eagles that attack a sleepy seaside inlet as revenge for global warming. RiffTrax recently riffed on it live in theatres, including some pretty low blows at the film’s director. I wonder what it’s like to make an incredibly earnest environmentalist film like that, albeit a terribly-made one, and be mocked thusly. Then again, once you release your art into the world, I think to a certain extent you relinquish interpretation and ownership of it. I don’t know; what do you think?

O’Connell: I’ve never seen Birdemic, but I remember seeing the trailer when it came out. With the CGI birds that looked like something out of a Sega Megadrive game, and the low-grade eco-didactic dialogue. That looked truly terrible.

Actually, this might sound weird, but I don’t really find that kind of stuff all that amusing myself. The truth is I never would have watched The Room, say, if I hadn’t forced myself to sit through it in order to write about it for Epic Fail. And I actually found it unbelievably grueling to sit through. It was just not in any way a fun experience. Maybe that was because I watched it by myself, completely sober, at two-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon while taking notes, which is probably not the recommended mode of experiencing something like that. It’s funnier to read about or think about, than it is an experience per se. I found Tom Bissell’s profile of Tommy Wiseau way more interesting and entertaining an experience than The Room itself, for example. Same with Amanda McKittrick Ros. I wouldn’t go back to those books if you paid me to. (That’s not strictly true, actually. Can you pay me? How much? Let’s talk shop.)

But that doesn’t even begin to answer your question at all, I see. It’s a tricky question, and in a way it’s the question I try to answer in the book. And the problem, I think, is the ease with which laughing at a ridiculous film—or song, or poem, or whatever—shades into laughing at the person who made it. It seems pretty clear to me that the target of the ridicule provoked by, say, Rebecca Black’s song “Friday,” wasn’t so much “Friday” as it was Rebecca Black herself. And that’s obviously an extreme example, because she was so young, and because the whole thing was so stunningly vicious, but I think there’s an element of that to most instances of Internet viral fame. Even with Cecilia Giménez, I think a big part of the world’s love affair with the Jesus fresco was the idea that it was made by this hapless octogenarian churchgoing lady. That was a major aspect of the comic appeal of the thing, and she herself was inevitably affected by that attention. I mean, what an incredibly awful existential fate that would be—to achieve that kind of fame for those kinds of reasons. And it’s so completely random. So to an extent, I agree that when you release your art into the world, you relinquish ownership of it, but that’s quite a different thing to submitting to being washed away by a global tide of ridicule.

Rumpus: Also, when you raise the question of whether Tommy Wiseau knows he’s a joke or not, you bring up another kind of irony that these situations employ: dramatic irony, where the audience knows something the character does not. In the case of The Room screenings where Tommy Wiseau was present, the situation is supposed to be comical because Wiseau appears unaware of how the audience perceives him and his art. He thinks they’re taking it seriously, but we, the audience, know he’s the butt of a joke. But you open up the dramatic irony lens even wider so that the caustic questioners become the clueless performers, and the readers of your book become the clued-in, winked-at audience. It’s like the Greek dissemblance of irony can peel apart endlessly like an onion.

O’Connell: I suppose in a way, the idea of dramatic irony is actually pretty central to the book. Without wanting to sound overly conceptual—or, to hell with it, outright pretentious—part of what I wanted to do in Epic Fail was talk about the way the ironic position is so vulnerable to being ironized from other, “higher” positions. And I wanted to make it clear, in writing, how vulnerable my own irony in the book is, authorial and otherwise. The moment when you think you’re at your most commandingly self-aware is often exactly when you’re most susceptible to being ironized. I’m not fully confident that that makes sense. But sometimes contemporary culture, Internet culture particularly, seems like a kind of Mexican standoff of weaponized irony.

The most powerful ironization of the whole concept of irony I’ve ever encountered, by the way, is Zbigniew Herbert’s prose poem “From Mythology,” which finishes like this:

At the end only superstitious neurotics carried in their pockets little statues of salt, representing the god of irony. There was no greater god at that time. Then came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes.

To which my only possible critical response is, “Wow…” (Although you know what’s even more ironic? The fact that, if you include that in the interview, the Herbert estate could end up crushing The Rumpus under its heels and adding it to their dishes. Probably not, I don’t know. Maybe they’re one of the good-guy literary estates.)

Rumpus: What do you think of the semi-ironic/semi-serious critical exegesis and analysis that has proliferated in response to Rebecca Black’s “Friday”?

O’Connell: Actually I haven’t read much of it. I’m aware that it exists, and I looked into some of it, but it seemed pretty uninteresting. And sort of comically redundant, really. For me, there’s something almost poignant about the idea of someone sitting down and writing a critical commentary on Rebecca Black’s “Friday” for ironic shits and giggles. That’s the kind of situation where irony tends to rear up and bite the would-be ironist in the ass. There’s often a pretty serious lack of self-awareness with that stuff.

Rumpus: You seem to imply that perhaps we, as a culture, should check ourselves before unleashing such prolific ridicule on all these failed artists. The anecdote you tell about your boyhood experience crank-calling an amateur rapper called “The Executioner,” and the shame that memory still brings you, is so poignant. Do you have any ideas for how we can retain our ironic awe/glee at these “disasterpieces” while extending respect towards their auteurs, or is such a feat impossible?

O’Connell: That’s a really tough question. In a way, it’s quite hard to talk about this stuff without seeming preachy or prescriptive, and I was quite wary of slipping into that when I was writing. I mean, to the extent that the book is funny, it’s largely funny because of the inherent humor in the topic, and so I’m aware that what I’m doing here is always in danger of sailing a little close to the winds of hypocrisy. Or trying to have my moral cake and eat it. (Would you care for some more metaphors in your mixed metaphor salad, by the way?)

I guess what I’m talking about has in some sense to do with degrees or gradations of ridicule. Like the part of the book where I write about crank-calling “The Executioner” as a teenager was pretty obviously a case of overstepping a boundary. And that moment seems really stark to me in retrospect, because I was very explicitly stepping across a line separating, on one side, an ironic appreciation of a bad rap album from, on the other, an actual interaction with the guy behind it. And that now seems like almost another cultural era—not pre-Internet, but pre-social media. So now that line is nowhere near as clear. In some sense, it’s not even a line anymore at all. We’re now in an era of frictionless sharing of malice, amongst other things. So maybe the answer to your question, actually, is that this has indeed become impossible.

Rumpus: I wonder if all of this is the inevitable result of late capitalism. There is so much information, so much art, entertainment, and media, that almost everything references something else. We sort of view the whole body of work of human culture as our raw materials to deconstruct and work with, because so much is so readily accessible.

O’Connell: That’s largely true, I think. There’s just this ceaseless turnover now of “content,” this endless stream of decontextualized experience. This could be purely personal or idiosyncratic, but one of the things that strikes me about spending a lot of time online is that there’s this sort of flattening of affect that comes from being exposed to all this weird shit all the time. So a result of having this endlessly self-renewing source of diversion in our lives is that we’re never bored, and if we’re never bored, then in some paradoxical but fundamental way we’re always bored.

On a shallow, surface level, I’m totally amused by whatever latest hilarious thing—this amazing Tumblr, or that ingenious YouTube clip, or whatever—but on a deeper level, not even very much deeper, it makes me feel nothing at all. The same is true for things that are outrageous or terrible or wrong in some real and serious way. Being enraged by a new thing every day is, in effect, not that different to never actually experiencing anger at all.

I find I have to be constantly vigilant when it comes to this kind of corrosive dispassion, this leveling out of affect, that seems to go along with spending a lot of time online. There’s a point where frictionless sharing can lead to a frictionlessness of experience. I think that this inevitably has to have an affect on the way that we experience culture, and I worry about its leading to a political apathy, as well. By which I mean, obviously, that I would worry, if I weren’t so apathetic.

Rumpus: Wow, there’s something very Situationist about that insight. Guy Debord and Gang of Four would nod in agreement, I think.

O’Connell: I’m very taken with that idea.

Rumpus: You quote a passage by Elias Canetti, on the evolutionary nature of laughter. We laugh at someone because we can’t hunt them and eat them. Is there any science to back that up? Do you think it’s true?

O’Connell: I think Crowds and Power, as a whole, is at its most powerful when its claims amount to a kind of poetic truth. It’d be very difficult to justify any of it from a scientific standpoint, and I don’t think he means any of it to be taken that way. It’s like an appalled explication of human behavior that uses philosophy and sociology as masks for its own horror. It’s a hell of a book, but it has its own internal logic that’s much more poetic than scientific.

I don’t think there’s anything at all to back up Canetti’s explanation for why we laugh, but there’s still a very powerful feeling of visionary truth to it. In one sense I do agree with what he says, because it seems very obvious that a lot of laughter is sublimated aggression or violence. In another sense, I don’t agree at all, because laughing is also among the most human and most humane things we can do. Canetti seems to think about laughter symbolically. That passage that I quote near the end of the book is powerful, I think, because of how it works in an almost cinematic way, as though it were cutting back and forth between the image of one human being laughing at another and the image of a predatory beast eating its prey. So there’s a symbolic truth to it, that works by a sort of dreamlike association. As to whether it’s grounded in any solid scientific bedrock, I’d say surely not. Christ, I certainly hope not.

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The events of the evening included a poetry reading by Kate, in which she sat on a large plush pillow under a wall of cascading fake hair sprinkled with neon barrettes and fascinators, and read from her chapbook, E! Entertainment. She invited volunteers from the audience to curl up on the pillow beside her and join her in dramatic readings of scenes from “The Hills” and “Dynasty.”

Kate Durbin’s poetry and performance art focus on female archetypes like princesses, witches, and pop stars. She dives into the cesspools of modern culture without shame, resurfacing to present us with glittering treasures from the depths. Her poetry has a dark, urgent pulse, whether she’s describing the haunting experience of learning to read (“The words told me what the good and bad witches wanted them to. I listened to them all”) or transcribing scenes from reality TV shows. The latter populates her newest forthcoming book, E! Entertainment Diamond Edition. The transcriptions of Kim Kardashian’s wedding, Amanda Knox’s trial, and reality TV shows about wives gather mythological weight with each repetition, like an incantation or an origin story.

Kate is a Los Angeles-based poet, performance artist, and teacher. She is the author of five chapbooks, a book of poems (The Ravenous Audience), and E! Entertainment Diamond Edition, a collection of short stories and prose poems forthcoming from Insert Blanc Press. She is also the founding editor of Gaga Stigmata, an online journal devoted to critical writing on the work of Lady Gaga. This winter, Zg Books will publish a collection of creative critical essays and visual art about the website and Lady Gaga.

There’s something about being in Kate Durbin’s blue-walled Pasadena apartment, with its fridge covered in plastic fruit magnets and its beauty salon posters from the 1980s, that makes you want to endlessly discuss the bizarre history of American monsters and femininities over tea. Which is what she and I did during the height of the Los Angeles September heatwave.

***

The Rumpus: Why are you drawn to pop culture—why reality TV, Tumblr, pop music, etc.?

Kate Durbin: My initial question is always why are we so drawn to this, why are we creating this? What purpose is it serving for us culturally, not so much individually? When I took my first poetry workshop in grad school, I asked my teacher, the Nigerian poet and novelist Chris Abani, if there was something wrong with me because everyone in workshop was writing about their personal life, their family histories, and I was transcribing French films by Catherine Breillat about really violent sex, and I’ve never even had violent sex.

I guess I’ve always been drawn toward those things that we bury under the rug because they are considered “dark” or fucked up. I think taboo touches upon such important philosophical and cultural questions. The cultural consciousness is so fascinating. I try to tap into that and go down as deep as I can. And speaking of the taboo, I actually think there are many realms of pop culture that are considered totally taboo to take seriously as an artist—it makes you look stupid if you care or think it’s interesting or complex in any way. People often look at me funny when I say reality TV is a brilliant medium or that teenagers on tumblr are geniuses. But anything that we consider shallow and is yet so ubiquitous can’t really be shallow or meaningless. It has to be really important for us to create it and sustain it for so long.

Rumpus: I’ve been saying for awhile that practically anything humans produce is worth studying, because even if it’s something as inane as Two and a Half Men, we can still possibly learn something about our culture, what makes us tick. Why do we make the things we make and what does that say about where we’re going?

Durbin: I also think intellectuals often possess a tremendous slowness when it comes to new interfaces, new mediums, etc., when the general public and kids especially are so much more open and quick to play! (By the way, my teacher was very gracious and said there was nothing wrong with me when I was writing those poems—he thought I was ahead of the curve, and he actually ended up publishing my first book with Akashic, which had those French film poems in it.)

My work often re-emphasizes repetition, which is the heartbeat of pop culture. Ever since my first book came out, I’ve been interested in narratives that we tell ourselves, in particular those we inscribe upon women’s bodies over and over. These keep getting repeated through time. So my first book, The Ravenous Audience, dealt with fairy tales and ancient biblical archetypes.

E! Entertainment Diamond Edition, which is my forthcoming full-length book of reality TV conceptual writing, has an affinity to The Ravenous Audience because you see the same myths playing out, only televised in a very contemporary way. I wrote a short story in the book of Kim Kardashian’s “Fairy Tale” wedding, so there’s a focus on marital and other major rites and life rituals. And the interesting thing about those rituals being made into reality TV shows is that the meaning really starts to break down when you see it presented in that way, with all the cameras and interview snippets and everything. As I’m watching it, I am thinking, “This is so meaningless. Not because Kim Kardashian is doing it, but in and of itself.” Weddings are so weird. These rituals we go through in our culture are very strange and very repetitive. Why do we keep repeating ourselves? Especially when we’re not particularly satisfied with the end result? We all know what happened to Kim after her fairy tale wedding!

Rumpus: Why are you so interested in repetition?

Durbin: Repetition, when it becomes aware of itself, promotes the collapse, as it shows the cracks in the structures we have built for ourselves. In the most hopeful way, I want to promote the collapse.

There’s another section in E! Entertainment called “Wives Shows” that fuses together in a really fun to read, trashy pop narrative, five of the different shows from the “Wives” genre of reality TV: Basketball Wives, Married to Rock, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Sister Wives, and Mob Wives. So, again, dealing with repetition and the Wife myth over and over. What’s funny is a lot of those women aren’t even wives on those shows. They are like, the daughter of a famous mobster, or the ex-girlfriend of a famous NBA player. The whole “Wife” stamp is just a signifier.

Rumpus: Wife shows are so ubiquitous. My women’s studies professor in college was obsessed with the show Wife Swap. It was a show were two households, usually as far apart culturally as the producers could make them (like an heiress and a school bus driver, or storm-chasers vs. artistic psychics) would trade wives for two weeks. And then hilarity would ensue! And drama.

Every week my professor would start class by saying, “Let me tell you what happened on Wife Swap last night!” She wanted us to see how the theories we were studying were manifesting themselves beyond the textbook. She insisted that Wife Swap was a fascinating study on American gender roles. It emphasized that the roles of “wife” and “mother” are really like full-time jobs that women are constantly evaluated on, and navigating family responsibilities isn’t that different than navigating workplace culture.

Durbin: I need to watch Wife Swap! I should probably also mention that I love watching reality TV; I relate to a lot of these women. So, like all my projects, I’m not coming at this from a condescending or purely critical perspective, per se. I just want to meditate on this thing—reality TV—that we’ve made and sustained, to play with it a little bit, to poke around. I think reality TV is totally fascinating, the most brilliant of all genres of television, because it has the potential to reveal our own construction of ourselves to ourselves so profoundly. I mean, look at the first reality TV moment—the Rodney King beating. That reality TV moment showed the world to itself and as a result the world set itself on fire.

Rumpus: Tell me about the Women as Objects Tumblr project.

Durbin: Women as Objects is a Tumblr project where I follow teen girl bloggers and re-blog all their heartfelt and ridiculous and offensive and amazing text posts and images. I do tend to follow girls with a certain pastel goth aesthetic, just because I’m really drawn to it visually, but otherwise the only criteria is teenage-seeming and female-identifying. In a way, I see this as a sort of pop cultural anthropological project, but an impure one, because I do interact with the girls sometimes and I have no specific end goal. Eventually I’d really like to do a book, a performance in a gallery, and a documentary.

The phenomenon of Tumblr is really exciting to me, because it reveals how visual our culture currently is, and how malleable and easy it is to shape it if you speak that visual language fluently. Kids who would normally be affecting fashion, for example, from the streets up, can now take high fashion and rob it directly, with all their fake Chanel. Plus, I’ve been following the high fashion collections and they are ripping off these Internet kids so hard—it’s easy to see where the real inspiration and ideas are coming from.

In a way, I guess I want to give these kids some credit for the amazing things they’ve done with this interface. I love the ability of teenagers to take something over, like an alien invasion, and just reclaim it. And yet because these cultural shifts are coming from teenagers, people don’t want to give the kids credit or don’t take the phenomenon of tumblr very seriously. My goal with W.A.O. is to take what the kids were doing seriously. In this way, it’s similar to my goal in starting Gaga Stigmata. If people take it seriously they might realize their own potential to change and shape culture through new mediums.

The name “Women as Objects” relates to the often-amazing, sometimes-disturbing things these girls are doing with their second-bodies via the Internet. Objectifying themselves but in really bizarre and self-empowering ways, or in rather abject ways that shove our bullshit cultural beauty ideals back in our faces. They don’t, for example, hide their cuts and bruises—they turn them into glittering .gifs. I felt like this phenomenon was worth taking notice of because it seems rife with culture-shifting potential to me and is just interesting in general because girls are interesting in general.

Rumpus: Your work makes many references to princesses, dolls, whores, starlets, etc. What is it about these models of femininity that fascinates you?

Durbin: To be perfectly honest, I like glitter and female objects because I am one.

Rumpus: What gave rise to the creation of Gaga Stigmata? What can we learn from Lady Gaga?

Durbin: There was a period of time in 2009 and 2010 where I was really fascinated, watching everything that Gaga was doing. I thought, “Who is this person?” She’s not just a pop star, she’s kind of a performance artist, and yet she’s totally embodying the role of pop star. She’s truly famous, on the national stage as a pop star. I’m always drawn to people who do things in new spheres. She’s a meta-pop star, and she was especially performing that role when she first came on to the music scene.

No one had performed fame like that. Warhol had put pop in the museum. Some pop singers and musicians had commented upon the nature of fame in individual songs — everyone from Bowie to Britney– but not so consistently, intelligently, or so thoroughly publicly. It wasn’t their primary thrust. No one had an album called The Fame and then further evolved that concept into The Fame Monster.

And then Gaga had her 2009 MTV Video Music Awards performance where she bled to death on stage while singing “Paparazzi.” It blew my mind because I thought it was one of the most amazing art performances I’d ever seen, rivaling some of my favorites like Schneeman, Finley, Beecroft, Abramovic, and ORLAN, and yet it was on MTV. That made it even more exciting to me, the fact that it wasn’t in a museum or gallery or even a “street” space or a community space, but rather this pop space that had been relegated by the fine arts world to shallow, commercial, irredeemable trash.

Rumpus: I remember feeling that way, too, when I watched the “Paparazzi” video. Gaga embodies many of the common signifiers of the sexy female pop star, but she consistently makes herself ugly, too. And not a lot of women are allowed to do that, while still being considered successful and desirable. Women aren’t really given the space to be ugly, or weird, or grotesque. Riot Grrrl certainly reached for that—like Kathleen Hanna scrawling “Incest?” across her chest in Sharpie. It was a “fuck you and your beauty standards” kind of aesthetic. But Gaga seems to be actively sexualizing monstrousness like she’s trying to synthesize it with those beauty standards. Like instead of telling the Hollywood-Porn-Beauty-Factory to go fuck itself, she’s walking right inside and saying, “Weirdness is sexy now, FYI.”

Durbin: That’s a good point. Gaga has gotten away with looking incredibly grotesque for a female pop singer, and she’s really shifted our cultural perception of beauty. The “Paparazzi” video was one of the reasons I started to poke around on the internet. I was curious to see if anyone was writing about her, any critics or scholars. I wasn’t finding a lot, but I found this one woman, Meghan Vicks, who I invited to be my co-editor at Gaga Stigmata. She was a doctoral student at the time and she wrote this critical breakdown of Gaga’s “Telephone” piece with her boyfriend Eddie McCaffrey, which Lady Gaga tweeted about.

My desire was to have critical exegesis of Gaga’s work in one place, to follow and participate in her project, especially knowing that she would probably read and respond to the work on Gaga Stigmata because she’s so tech savvy (she is the most tech-savvy of all the pop stars) and so interlinked with her fans. She really allows her fans and their desires to shape her destiny; this is a huge part of her success, this symbiotic relationship between Gaga and her monsters. I mean, she says her fans created her.

So these desires led me to my concept for Gaga Stigmata. I wanted to build a space that was like Lady Gaga, where it’s a new space to perform criticism, pushing the limits of what is possible in criticism, interpreting and changing popular culture in a very immediate way. Not a journal where we’re talking about what this person did two years ago, but we’re tracking what she does as she goes, kind of banking on her, like an investment.

I called the journal Gaga Stigmata because I thought of Gaga as a pop martyr, bleeding our cultural wounds for us. The 2009 bleeding bodysuit V.M.A. performance partly inspired the name. That performance was so much about making us face our unconscious desire for the downfall of the female celebrity, our taste for her blood.

Rumpus: Definitely. Considering the lyrics to “Paparazzi,” Gaga could have made a video that was all glamour and stopped there. But instead she took the celebrity-obsession trope to its logical conclusion of stalking, violence, and death. And she comes back basically eroticizing disfigurement but in this disturbing way, with her slow death walk in leg braces up the red carpet as she sings, “I’ll follow you until you love me.” Maybe in that moment she isn’t speaking as the obsessed fan anymore, but as the female starlet, on the lengths women feel we must go to, to be recognized, wanted and loved. We have to metaphorically and literally disfigure ourselves in order to be seen, to be desired. We have to follow the patriarchy until it loves us!

Durbin: Gaga Stigmata is also about Gaga bleeding our wounds and us bleeding hers—that symbiotic relationship again. Because of the potentials of technology in this day and age, we no longer live in a closed system. Our criticism affects pop, and vice versa.

Rumpus: It’s like you become blood sisters. In fact, most of your projects focus on women in the public sphere. You also have the Kept Women Series.

Durbin: Kept Women is a collection of poems forthcoming from the Parrot Series with Insert Press. The poems are also collected in the Diamond Edition of E! Entertainment, my forthcoming second full-length book from the same press. Kept Women is a series of poem-rooms inspired by the rooms in the Playboy mansion and Hugh Hefner’s live-in girlfriends. The language is inspired by crime scene investigations and decorating magazines.

Rumpus: What do you find exciting about contemporary poetry right now?

Durbin: The tumblr girls I follow are my favorite contemporary poets. Their text poems are so raw and honest and innovative—I have used them as material for my video art pieces, “Tumblr is the Only Place I Don’t Pretend I’m Okay” and “iPrincess.” Maybe they don’t think of themselves as poets, but these girls often play with text in a concrete poetry meets Sylvia Plath meets Cher from Clueless kind of way that is just perfect. You can find them by following my Tumblr.

Rumpus: What inspires you?

Durbin: New technologies inspire me, teenagers inspire me, reality TV, tumblr, the Internet, Gaga, pop culture, Disney, the iPhone, royalty, the Kardashians, Playboy bunnies.

Right now I am moving into a period where I feel very inspired by Los Angeles. I am starting to explore all of LA’s luxury hotels, to go to all the cocktail lounges and swimming pools. I’ve also been getting really into cult science fiction novels like The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin, and visually poetic sci-fi films like Beyond the Black Rainbow.

Rumpus: You’re also a teacher. Do you see parallels between your pedagogy and your poetry or performance art?

Durbin: I do gravitate toward teaching subjects that allow my students to analyze the cultural unconscious, like many of my art and writing projects. My favorite course to teach is at Whittier College, a literature and writing course on monster theory. In that course, we examine the fears and desires of the cultures that spawn particular monsters, and how our monsters carry our cultural shadow for us. I really, really love monsters, and horror as a genre. All the pop genres are so much more interesting to me than “serious” art or literary realms, because they are so much more philosophically complicated, more free from the burden of being taken so seriously and therefore so much more revealing.

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It seemed fitting. Except Becca Klaver came “back East,” leaving Los Angeles, whereas I’m about to set up shop there.

In L.A. Liminal, she examines Los Angeles with frenetic yet focused obsession. The volume opens with a poem deliciously titled, “The Mexico it would take,” in which the speaker warns the reader up front that her memory is not to be trusted: “I’ve treated it with so many mythovarnish coats by now.” If confronted with an alternate interpretation, “I would listen closely to your fiction,” she concedes, “I would drink it in.” The memory of Los Angeles becomes a box that “shook and whirled and edged along the sand, heave-ho-ing clothesdryer,” exactly what the book is about to do to the reader.

If there were a literary version of the film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Klaver’s book could find a place alongside Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler and Francesca Lia Block. Los Angeles becomes a character in these poems, as much a character as the young liminal speaker, the off-again/on-again lover, and the “friends of the moment.” Klaver attacks the “glitzy-glatz” metropolis from all sides, from all tenses, but never reaches a center, only sprawl. Los Angeles appears in her dreams as an IMAX documentary and a post-nuclear apocalypse prom; it’s Persephone’s underworld, it’s a “monomyth,” a fairy tale gone absurdist. She quotes Baudrillard, naming L.A. as “a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions,” then imagines how the city would be described in a textbook from Saturn.

The poems themselves have fabulous proportions, borrowing from formalism one moment (she manages a kickass sestina–eat your heart out, Elizabeth Bishop) and asserting their own unpunctuated enjambed freeverse the next. I personally was more drawn to the lyrical shortlined poems than to the talky narratives, but there is a compelling untitled prose poem threading through the book. The work is a pop culture goldmine (or landfill? Klaver claims both), chock full of nods to Lynch, Didion, Warhol, Arrested Development, and Buffy Summers. By the time I found the Neko Case epigraph, I was hooked.

Places stick inside us perhaps just as much, or more, than people do. Like lovers, they become symbols that represent our past and/or future selves, as they give sensual definition to our identities. Klaver’s speaker has not left Los Angeles unchanged; it crept under her skin– “you bet paradise haunts me,” she admits in the closing poem. Klaver is well aware of the cliché pioneer story in which the East Coast transplants conquer and rebuild the West. In L.A. Liminal, it is the speaker who is rebuilt, who is tossed a broken mirror that both enchants and repulses her enough to escape the city, but dwell on it in poem after poem. Steeped in the dominant cultural narrative, her work reads like the self-conscious cautionary tale of a woman who failed Manifest Destiny.

This is not exactly the California of white fantasy: “I woke from the dream where the West became innocuous . . . Gave up the dream of writing myself into a scene to be remembered by.” Klaver wrestles with what L.A. means, never quite landing on an answer, like an ex-lover who’s denied her post-mortem. The title poem warns us that “once you split your self, you do not get whole again.” The koan of a bicoastal upwardly mobile woman in her 20s, for sure. There is loss in what the speaker has gained, which makes her, like this collection, fragmented, multiplicitous and shining.

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