Sick Fest - Liz Henry
Channel: Sick Fest Oakland 2016
Date: 2016-12-06

Footage from Sick Fest in Oakland 2016. More information on sickfest.org

Full Transcript at: http://sickfest.org/#transcript-and-videos

Partial transcript follows (more at SickFest.org due to space constraints): 

Catherine: Our next speaker is going to be Liz Henry.

So, Liz Henry (thank you), is a blogger, technologist, literary translator and activist in San Francisco. She works for Mozilla as Firefox Release Manager, and is part of the Noisebridge and Double Union hackerspaces, San Francisco’s first feminist hackerspace, which is how I met Liz. Her latest book, “Unruly Islands,” is a collection of poetry about robots, feminism, wheelchairs, utopia, and the internet.

Liz: Hi.

Yes, I can’t remember if I had mentioned the book? You can get in on Amazon, it’s from Aqueduct Press, which is a small feminist science fiction press in Seattle.

Ok.

So I’m going to read a poem from the book called “I Wake Up As A Giant Robot.”

Giant robot woman thing, no wait, you know what? First I’m not going to read that poem, because I don’t have the right glasses on.
This is that moment when I have to switch glasses because of the low light and I’m old.

‘I wake up as a giant robot
 
giant robot woman thing tit curve I’ve dreamed to be inside you pincer clawed desirable sexoskeleton I can pick up cars and throw them to flame and scrap I’m  a beetle hot kitetinelectro silicone armed hard on I’m tits padded soft to the underwire bones of me and the sentences that drive my wild code fire logic flash memory chip heart oh neuro wire cyber finger twitch soul room of my own transformer super alien machine buckles that nick brand to time warp jet pack knuckles kapow oh fuck I can do anything in this wild body’

I really would love to know the reverse translation of that from ASL into English!  

And another thing to read here which is sort of about bodies and politics. I thought it would fit. It’s also kind of bullshit, but entertaining and it’s called “Zombie Party.”

‘if we were zombies we’d write about that we’d show off our scabs and rotting wounds maybe I’m something like that what if we accept our chaotic constant death I’m a home for busy microbes matrix of the world the way compost heaps doing our work are steaming hot thread through my silica creating a home for bugs and worms if a piece of my body fell off so what finger painting with the messy evidence joyous and decay we’re all a giant mess there isn’t any order to disrupt when the hero in the story is wounded in the mountains her soul bonded wolf just like bring her some raw liver and she eats in the snow and gets up from her deathbed to stagger onwards interdependence is like that but there’s no fucking wolf necessary we already encompass animal-hood interdependence means I hand you a chunk of my own messy internal organs our words are blood and snot and we eat each others’ brains 

she signs away her right to be stripped down to a spinal cord and brain the spaceship shell around her and her sisters is made of knives and glory spliced and soldered bathed in nutrients and starlight there’s still something in the system that produces some kind of smelly  messy shit no matter how much laser fire power her ship has she invites the brain plague into her cerebral spinal fluid the microbes  fuck and fight and party and govern they are her parallel processors her rebels her friends her heretics her noisy co-inhabitants this plot could go anywhere the way the cool grit of the floor welcomes your cheek when you have no choice but to lie down we fall apart and make art with the pieces we welcome the world support what I have to give is judged to be enough that’s radical what I’m taking is radical too in this case I maybe something akin to a zombie eating your brains and by the way and I would prefer you cook and serve them hot with all the things fixing for delicious brain tacos we crawl under the train take off our own arms and jam them into the machinery like branches made of juicy messy bones we’re gross machines sell em for tourism zombies inviting everyone to the party.’ 

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