Elizabeth Frankie Rollins
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading and why. One Note 013: Elizabeth Rollins, Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Elizabeth Frankie Rollins.
I wanted beautiful writing and something surprising, so when I went to the library, I checked out The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition by Rikki Ducornet, whose works I have not yet finished, but always love. Surprising, it turns out, is not the only word. Delightful. Naughty. Moving. Hilarious. The book opens with “A fan is like the thighs of a woman: it opens and closes… It produces its own weather__a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.” Here’s some mastery right away: a book itself is a fan! Opens and shuts. Bears the papery la feuille, also known as the mount. Inside this book, scenes fold within scenes revealing erotic art, masochism, hungers, pruderies, sex, bloody beheadings. This is a rousing text. Not only is there is a recipe for buttered and roasted pope, but a strident call for human rights rises from between the legs of this fan. The book, built in letters, recounted stories, the texts of other books, is about the integral human right to our lives and stories. No matter how obscene, how cruel, how tortuous or revelatory, we have a right to tell it. “A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space.” And it is our right to tell it in the language and image we choose: Ducornet’s Marquis de Sade, champion libertine, puts it this way, “ink and fuck have always been the glue that holds my mind together.”
Elizabeth Frankie Rollins’ work has appeared in Conjunctions, Green Mountains Review, Trickhouse, Tarpaulin Sky, The New England Review and The Cincinnati Review, among others. A forthcoming excerpt from her novel, Origin, will be appearing in Drunken Boat. She is the author of The Sin Eater, Corvid Press, 2004. She’s received a NJ Prose Fellowship and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. You can find links to her work and her novel installments/collaboration experiment with Origin on www.madamekaramazov.com. She writes and teaches in Tucson, AZ.
