| Title | : | Girls, Visions and Everything |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1580050220 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781580050227 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 178 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1986 |
Girls, Visions and Everything Reviews
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hot queer shit !!!!
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Some thoughts...
I enjoyed this a lot. It's more of a series of encounters and experiences rather than a plot-driven story, which I'm fine with, but it means that it's a bit more of a challenging read. The main character talks a lot about(and reads) 'On the Road' and there is a similarity of style between the beat classic and 'Girls, Visions and Everything', except, notably there's no road, there's just New York City in the early 80s and gentrification and a slice of real life and times. Schulman writes in the introduction that she wrote it in response to Jack Kerouac:
'I was insisting on the experience of community in the trajectory of popular American heroism and therefore asserting that fiction with primary lesbian content should be recognized as an integral part of American literature. If I could stretch to universalize to Jack Kerouac, then the dominant-culture reader must be able to reciprocate by universalizing me. This last goal has not yet been realized.'
which is great and also really interesting...
So. I guess it's a sort of lesbian Kerouac (actually, thinking about it it's reminiscent of Jan Kerouac's style in
Baby Driver: A Story About Myself which I'm a huge fan of and was written in the early 80s too) and a precursor to some of the writers I love, like Michelle Tea and Eileen Myles.
couple of quotes I liked -
'I'm not falling in love until 1990. I refuse to be romantic during the Reagan era.'
and
'They tried out a few creative slogans, since slogan writing is second nature to urban lesbians.
"Cruise People, Not Missiles"
"More Dykes, No Nukes."'
and
'Do you think gay people will ever be safe? Emily asked.' -
"[...] Since gay people as a group change very quickly and things become dated, then nostalgic, then historic, in a matter of months. As Helen Hayes had put it, 'Today's kitsch is tomorrow's collectible.'"
Sarah Schulman's early novel Girls, Visions, and Everything is in retrospect a nostalgic and historic romp through the early gentrification of the East Village, seen through the eyes of a small group of lesbian writers and artists at The Kitsch-Inn. Schulman makes you long for a New York that no longer exists, even as she underscores the precarity with which the marginalized denizens of the then already-disappearing era lived. In conversation with her novels that followed - After Delores, People in Trouble, Empathy, Rat Bohemia - Schulman has written an essential history of the creeping destruction wrought by gentrification through the 1980s and 1990s leading to the current playground for rich kids that Manhattan has become. -
my favorite sarah schulman yet, and will probably become one of my favorite novels ever. a very life affirming novel, for us girls without a context.
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In Girls, Visions, and Everything, we meet protagonist Lila Futuransky, an aspiring writer and Jack Kerouac fan, who ponders, as the novel itself does, what freedom and being an outlaw mean. Does the outlaw sensibility and freedom from conventional life espoused by the Beats translate to a group of art dykes living in New York’s gentrifying East Village in the 1980s? The answer, of course, is both yes and no. Mostly no, because these women are more about community obligation, and their freedom is constrained by discrimination and harassment. Lila’s world is not the open road—it’s ten city blocks in a New York not as siloed as it is today by disparities in wealth. It’s a place where “the men in [Lila’s] life” are three homeless guys on her street with whom she has daily interactions. It is a mixed social world where lesbians are intersectional in their politics and polyamorous. It’s an art world devoid of ambition where poor lesbians work crappy day jobs and make art for themselves and each other—a campy version of A Streetcar Named Desire; a festival of deliberately bad performance art; and a short story about being rejected, which Lila shoves under the door of the woman who rejected her. Their art, unlike those of the Beats, couldn’t be commodified, but the women don’t care so much—they are preoccupied by rising rents and love affairs. Big-hearted Lila is falling in love with a high-strung costume designer and soon may have to choose between the freedom to love many, and the responsibility of cherishing one. This is a charming tender-queer novel that nicely captures the near-past.
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Sarah Schulman writes a love story? I started to get nervous about it. Thank God for the last couple of chapters--you restored my faith in the cynical, snarky, overwhelming and gut-wrenching Schulman.
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I enjoyed this book and, as other reviewers have mentioned, there are a lot of great quotes. I also appreciated the insights provided in this book. There are beautiful, funny, and dark moments, all wrapped up into one. Sarah Schulman’s preface at the beginning is excellent.
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Das lustigste Dykebuch, das ich bisher gelesen habe
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I'm unsure about this. I certainly enjoyed reading it quite a lot, but I can't tell whether I think it's well-written. Also: what was that ending? I wish we had some more explanation. But overall, enjoyable to read and detailing a very important part of LGTBQ (mostly lesbian) life in New York in the 80s.
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I found this book in my local Little Free Library, and what a treat! Very well written and intriguing. I really enjoyed the evolution of the main character, Lila, from the beginning to the end of the novel.
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Girls, Visions, and Everything might be lacking in plot, but how it packs a punch in a series of vignettes that serve as a throwback of 80's NYC when it was gritty, dangerous, and full of chutzpa with seedy characters that were as risk-taking as they were beloved. Lila Futuranksy is a Jack Kerouac-esque dyke about town who always has a copy of ON THE ROAD in tow and an elusive crush on the horizon. She and numerous queer characters from lesbians to gay and bisexual men color this nostalgic, breezy read of a book. Again, the story here is barely-there and pretty loose, but the characters are so charming, interesting, and natural that you get a real sense that they represent Sarah Schulman and the people she knew from a New York City of long-ago. When you look back on the author's work and how she has long fought for queer liberation (especially through the HIV/AIDS movement through ACT UP), it makes even more sense why Girls, Visions, and Everything feels like a time capsule of maybe Sarah's younger-days as a wise, wide-eyed activist who had a lot to say about gentrification, feminism, politics, pop culture, sex, and same-sex love, but also knew how to have a good carefree time, as did everyone back in those days. This book above all was truly a delight and will have you wishing, even if only for a moment, that we'd have for one last time that NYC of yesteryear that the author experienced first-hand. Plus, I LOVED the ending which was surprising, yet not surprising, and yet a very thrilling way nonetheless to finish off this super-queer, very 80's piece.
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This book was fine, I didn't hate it like the two stars might suggest; I just didn't get a whole lot from it. I never got close to the characters despite the explicit intimacy of their physical relationships and some of their deepest fears being shared on the pages. The sharing was very casual. I didn't understand the protagonist's motivations at all. The ending really took me by surprise. It's uneventful, generally, more of a musing over a series of moments relating to love and sex, with some 80s queer politics thrown in.
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“Isabel, when God tells you that you can have anything you want, what are you going to ask for?”
“I don’t know.” Isabel answered, scratching her head. “I wouldn’t want to get any of the things that I want too suddenly, because then the fun and the search and the dreams would all be over. It’s not the satisfaction I’m after. I like thinking about new ways of doing things and then making up shows about the trying. Do you think God could give me something like that?”
“You’ve already got that.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, how about health insurance?” -
Schulman often talks about not receiving any formal training in novel writing, just writing what she knows and feels. Her raw, experimental style is perfectly suited to what she is writing about. There is a real immediacy to the writing and the characters jump off the page. I wouldn’t say this book is perfect, but it is brilliant.
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bit of a depresso read in the sense that the negative themes of this book (gentrification, homophobia, racism etc) continue to pervade while the romantic downtown queer community of the 80’s and 90’s surely hasn’t survived
funny tho -
I read this book for an undergraduate class and here is my brief review:
It's heartbreaking to read a person in love with a place and a lifestyle and believe they are losing something essential when it feels more like they're growing up -
Read MHC’s copy, gift of JEB ‘66. Loved loved loved. What words are there? So enjoyable. So funny! More than I had hoped for. At the end I thought don’t do it Lila!!! Schulman’s description of spring was perfect.
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Eccentric and beautiful book . Pulled me in and wouldnt let me go .
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i loooooved this book, actually forced myself not to read it too quickly bc i knew i would hate when it was over
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Absolutely invigorating, familiar, unfamiliar—the version of On the Road that On the Road thinks it is and even horrible New York City is appealing through Lila’s eyes
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How did I sleep on this book so long? It’s entertaining, poignant, uniquely of its moment, timeless, and prophetic all at once.
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absolutely no plot just hot lesbian vibes!
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holy shit. this thing. damn.
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Stunning wet beautiful spectacle of new york city dykery
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I took notes on my phone so I could remember things from the book! Progress.
My edition of this book was plucked out of a community fair book sale, along with a Muriel Spark book and a collection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Not a bad haul. It's a love story (for a girl, or several) in an elegy or an elegy (for NYC) as a love story, but I hesitate to say it's elegaic in tone, because one of the great things about reading this was reading the accounts of happy moments, and one of the themes is staying happy even if some of your life sucks. Schulman gets the heat of summer just right, the happiness of wandering around on your own with nothing to do but the drive to walk, and the feeling of slowly noticing that someone you've been acquainted with for a while is really beautiful.
I would love to see Lila played by Krysten Ritter in a well-done movie version...
Also, I feel like this could definitely be an influence on a book coming out this year, Nevada by Imogen Binnie, but who knows.
Quotez:
"Everything was getting computerized by the summer of '84, and it was happening so fast, a social critic could hardly keep up with it. Lila was having a hard time building a plot around a WANG word processor. This realization, in turn, stimulated a long rumination on the poor clerical of the future, trapped in her living room with a screaming baby, an unemployed husband and a radiating personal computer through which her invisible boss could monitor every key stroke." p. 48-9
PRESCIENT, RIGHT?
"Soon she was stumbling down Sixth Street where she found Sally Liberty putting up tie-dyed curtains on her big green school bus. Sally was getting ready to leave that very evening for The Rainbow Gathering. For one Jack Kerouac-second, Lila considered going along too, what the fuck. But then... she remembered those other things like having no money, and the chance to enjoy the last days of the neighborhood. Lila knew that New York was closed; once she gave up an apartment she'd never find another one." (50).
Also:
"'No moving around like the old days. New York is closed. Pretty soon it's just going to be bag ladies and rich people stepping over them, plus a few old timers hiding out in their rent-controlled apartments hoping no one's gonna notice. For everybody else, the city is closed.'" (105).
But there are funny/hopeful-sad things too:
"'I'm not falling in love until 1990. I refuse to be romantic during the Reagan era.'" (107).
"They watched [A Streetcar Named Desire] and both agreed that the message was too sad. It said that life is a trap and anyone who tries to create their own magic will be destroyed. ...Even when life is sad, people still have a good time. That's what these women and all their friends were trying to say everyday, in their different ways." (107)
"'The whole thing makes me think,' Sheena said, 'that sometimes love means finding out more about yourself than you ever really wanted to know.'
Emily was busy gluing and didn't pay attention, so only Lila agreed." (147) -
loved this. now entered on my "books of honor" list. love the bygone era captured, all of her kerouac references. on a personal level, the book i needed to read just then. it gave me that beautiful feeling of hearing the universe speak to me.
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"Isabel, when God tells you that you can have anything you want, what are you going to ask for?"
"I don't know." Isabel answered, scratching her head. "I wouldn't want to get any of the things that I want to suddenly, because then the fun and the search and the dreams would all be over. It's not the satisfaction I'm after. I like thinking about new ways of doing things and then making up shows about the trying. Do you think God could give me something like that?"
"You've already got that."
"Oh, yeah. Well, how about health insurance?"
Sharp, tart, and funny - and Romantic. I would have liked it more if the ur-text for American artistry weren't On the Road, or, I guess, if I were the sort of person who cared about Beat poets or thought they were . . . worth . . . very . . . much . . . mmmmm. But the book overcame that, I mean, I spend a lot of Emma rolling my eyes at Emma, too, so it's not an insurmountable issue. -
This is a story of a young woman in NYC who is out for adventure but wants to have it without leaving the Lower East Side. Throughout the story she wanders around, has sex, talks to drug dealers, plays hooky from work, and gets a girlfriend. While doing this, she reflects on gentrification (a lot), relationships, the lesbian community, and race. The character had such interesting thoughts, and there were many parts I wanted to underline or copy down somewhere. I loved that it felt light and then slammed me with an insight. But it was overdone - for example, the character of Linda seems to exist solely to make a statement about codependence, and Sally exists just to make a point about how black authors all get lumped together. So that felt heavy handed and a little artificial to me, but overall I loved the book.
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Set in 1980s New York, and is about a young woman,a writer, who experiences life with a day-to-day, carefree struggle. She had me wanting to play hooky from work and enjoy spontaneous randomness. Her interactions with other characters were real and the explorations of her thoughts, sexy and admirably poignant. I liked the all-female avant-garde production of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Unexpectedly creative...
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Girls, visions, everything, like Daviel's manuscript, traveling with me for nearly three months. Thinking of: relationship trials, hiking trails, structuring a novel and contributing to this category of trying to write while working a day job, especially in the office. Rewrote the last chapter of this book so that the first paragraph is the final paragraph. Where is Lila Futuransky going? Tbc
