Fit of Pleasure: Sara Jane Stoner's Experience in the Medium of Destruction

At The Diagram issue 15.2, a review of Sara Jane Stoner's Experience in the Medium of Destruction (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015)! A great book which deserved more attention this year (Publisher's Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it an "extraordinary debut"). "Sara Jane Stoner—with the incisive language of a lyric naturalist—seems to nominate the platypus as a mascot of queer discourse." Well! "By watching the watching of the platypus, Stoner is able to supervise the blindster's daft perception of the queer body. It becomes applied pedagogy akin to inoculation of the platypus. Needless to say, Stoner is not just talking about the platypus." Keep going:

Like Gertrude Stein, a comparison blurbed by Wayne Koestenbaum on the book's back, Stoner is a total addresser and caresser of nouns.2 As with her description of the platypus, Stoner's one-two methodology is to evade then confront, eliminate then replace, liquefy then solidify. The void from all this destruction is a crater into which she may reconstruct the most elaborate totems. The "cock eroded naturally" is displaced by:

The split wave of the cunt / with its shaggy foam. The / holiday of the body. Of the / skin of the inside meeting / the skin of the outside / at the ocean.

A parody of masculinity—a Dos Equis construction of "I haven't always been a man but when I am"—yields the capsaicin-burning urethra and desire for straight edge sluts, but this is expertly jettisoned for less comical notions of sex, personal and real:

How it the fuck can be a burn, a smear of grounds, a windy overfull, slow pull of ice. Slit, mounted callus, seam of red glisten, you grow planes and edges with what additive.

If it's true, as Stoner purports, that "good art humiliates women in a way that makes her feel in control for a minute," then this book is composed of many strung-together minutes, carefully chaotic, chaotically careful, and the action that propels it forward is best described by Stoner herself: it is "the fit of pleasure that comes with a task."

Read the full review at The Diagram.