Kristyn Dunnionâs dystopic Tarry This Night made CBCâs top 20 fall fiction list and Bitchâs November must reads. The Dirt Chronicles (also with Arsenal Pulp Press) was a 2012 Lambda Literary Award finalist and ALA Over the Rainbow selection. Recent fiction appears in The New Guard, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Tahoma Literary Review. A performance artist and local musician, Dunnionâs provocative work incites critical questions about identity, justice, and power.
Thank you, itâs such a pleasure to be here tonight to help celebrate your recent success. Special thanks to Dr. Keith Cole â Iâve been a long-time fan of your workâand to the incredible Dean of the Faculty of Performance Art, Dr. Shannon Cochrane.
Tonightâs ceremony is a way to recognize the time commitment and efforts made by the graduates. We mark this occasion because we value these things: reading books, drinking wine, meeting in person to talk about books, and drinking more wine. Also, we celebrate the lost art of listening, which is more than half of what it means to communicate, is the secret to building relationship and community, and which seems to be the biggest casualty in todayâs social media wars.
Youâve worked hard. With busy lives, itâs challenging to commit to a month of Tuesdays â to reading a very thick book, completing homework assignments, and showing up every week. Itâs a very different impulse to share physical space with strangers on a king size bed in a motel room on Spadina Avenue, than it is to scroll comments online, liking stuff. Graduates, you chose to engage in meaningful dialogue in the flesh. Itâs remarkable, given todayâs technological advantages. In other parts of your lives, some of you teach. Some are students. But in this setting we follow a different social contract: this is knowledge exchange and we are all participating and learning. Some of you organized this project and others came strictly as guests â but we all performed roles. This is really exciting.
Specifically we honour a book written more than fifty years ago by Jacqueline Susann: a bestseller, blockbuster, and inspiration for the film we will be watching in a few moments: the Valley of the Dolls. Is it a work of art in the great literary tradition? Absolutely not. But it is more than mere commodity. You were asked: what does this book mean to us now? Is it still relevant?
For me to answer that, I need to take a step back in time. Please indulge me!
I was born and raised in a one-stoplight town at the Southern most tip of Canada.
We have tornados, organized crime, every Fundamentalist Christian movement imaginable, and quick sand. I barely made it out alive! Raise your hand if youâre from a small town. Shout it out! Okay suburbs, too, a different kind of soul death.
We have this in common: aspiration, desperation, desire. We abandoned local expectation to enter into a magical place â urban, fictional, where we could become someone completely new. Or completely Gay. Just like us, the main characters come from shitty little towns to The Big City. So far, how is this different from our own stories? Even Lyon, the fictional British stud, is actually from an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, England.
We create Self and community. We continue to create, and then comes secondary wants: money, love, fame. Sometimes, we recreate a status quo: hard rules based on competition, insecurity, internalized bigotry, capitalist greed. Because somewhere along the line we try to make art for a buck in this Vampire Economy. In the Valley of the Dolls they get rich. The rest of us just get notorious. (if weâre lucky!)
Knowing this book celebrates high camp, I thought it would be fun to read.
I suspect reading this book as a woman is quite different than reading it as not a woman. Men make the rules and men benefit from them. Men also sacrifice a domestic or sustainable romantic life in order to play the game, but they donât pay the ultimate price. What about Tony, you say? Privately perceived to be a damaged man, less of a man than others, heâs used much like a woman in this book. Heâs a child man, almost equal to a woman. But his manager/sister never betrays him; he wins privacy and dignity, which is robbed from all of the females without exception.
The currency for most transactions in the book is female bodies. Oh thereâs money money money. But womenâs bodies, and ultimately their minds, are the collateral damage for fame and fortune. Or, for a simple escape from insufferable small town life.
Each beautiful woman in this book is a stand in for all those other beautiful women. Theyâre on billboards, magazines, movie screens, television. We read Jennifer North and think Marilyn. Sharon, Whitney. Anna Nicole. Reading Neely we think Judy Garland. Frances Farmer. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Rose McGowan. Anne Welles could be Princess Di, living a lie, wealthy and famous and starved for affection. Hungry. And if this is the outcome for the most culturally valued, famous, wealthy and privileged white women, what about the rest of us?
Professor Cole mentioned how Jennifer Northâs death scene haunted him for years. For me the passages describing Neelyâs incarceration in the sanatorium were terrifying. How many dissatisfied wives or reluctant girls or lesbians or latent witches or Indigenous or free thinking females were incarcerated just so, because they would not or could not play the limited roles allotted to them in their particular time? How many are still there now?
Is this book relevant? I donât know what you decided in class, but I will say, sadly, yes. Because we canât go one day without another famous entertainer stepping forward to talk about sexual misconduct or violence she endured during attempts to get work, maintain contracts, and grow a career.
Hell, never mind Hollywood. You might be amazed to learn as I did, that behind each little poem in practically any college literary magazine lies a blow job. A dusty, alcohol induced, sloppy, end of the night blow job. You can hardly break into the regional and non-glamorous world of Canadian literature without banging some old drunk. And for what? A royalty cheque that barely covers a monthâs rent in any major city. Never mind the cost of the prescription youâll need to clear up the STI that poet gave you! Is there no end to the sense of entitlement held by these bearded unwashed creeps? What exactly fuels their narcissism and desperation for artistic recognition? And more important, Who Cares!?
While in the asylum and afterward, Neely speaks about her changed body with the assumption that gaining weight is a death sentence for pleasure and affection. Lyonâs hateful words about her size are fuelled with a violence and disgust that leap from the page â from a page already soaked in violence and disgust! And isnât he the first guy on top of her, as soon as she starts popping those diet pills again? Creep.
Even the richest woman in New York, in the world, goes to bed hungry at night, afraid of expanding her waistline.
So, what has changed in the past 50 years?
In many respects, not much. The demise of the women in this book is all too real.
Have we at least evolved with regards to this deep body shaming, this dismissal of unconventional female beauty and power? Can we â queers, activists, artists, witches, people of size, black, indigenous, trans and disabled people â can we break this mold once and for all?
Self medicate. Like the precious white women in this book. Pop your pills and dull your pain, buffer yourself from the injustice surrounding you.
OR wake up, and dismantle it, piece by piece.
Write your own scripts, your own plays and musicals. Start your own band, make your own film. Write your damn poetry and print it or publish it yourselves. Use your cell phones, for Godâs sake, and maybe, if we stop taking selfies, stop skimming and scrolling and liking things long enough, we can even use them to take down the government!
Where will be fifty years from now? Whoâs to say. But hopefully by then we can finally talk about the real main characters, the Dolls themselves. Pills for diets, pills for beauty sleep. Pills for heartache and physical pain and depression and grief, for the deep emotional wounds that will not heal. The benzos of 1960âs Hollywood may as well be the Oxys, Percs and Fentynal of the current western world. The dolls are everywhere. The Tabloid story that remains untold is the one about the wealthy, mostly-white men who make the dolls, who market and prescribe the dolls, and get even richer from the dolls. They are the ones whose reckoning shall one day come.
My final words to you, courageous graduates: (Donna Martin Graduates!)
Every Cock Counts. (Chanting with everyone!)
If youâre going to suck it, suck it good. But never forget what else youâve got in that mouth: teeth. A toast to one day biting down!
Youâve go to climb to the top of Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls. Itâs a brutal climb to reach that peak which so few have seen. You never knew what was really up there, but the last thing you expected to find was the Valley of the Dolls. You stand there, waiting for the rush of exhilaration you though youâd feelâbut it doesnât come. Youâre too far away to hear the applause and take your bows. And thereâs no place left to climb.
Fifty years ago, Jacqueline Susann wrote these opening lines in The Valley of the Dolls, what would become one of the most successful books of its time (with over 31 million copies sold, and counting) making Susann a household name (even if many still read her book under the covers in secret) and bestowing her with the honour of being the first author in history to have three consecutive books in the #1 position on the New York Times bestsellers list. Some might remember the Valley of the Dolls best as the cinematic vehicle for a pill and booze soaked cautionary tale of female ambition, fame, fortune and failure. Despite this, fifty years later the story is still relevant, telling us as much about celebrity culture today and it forewarned us then.
Youâre got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to see the Valley of the Dolls, and youâre invited to take this journey with Torontoâs very own performance provocateur Keith Cole in a 5-session book club-cum-academic master class. The first 4 sessions take place in a sprawling hotel room. In Session 5, book club attendees gather with audience to watch a screening of the 1967 film directed by Mark Robson, listen to a key note speech by a secret special guest, and receive their âV of the Dâ diplomas.
This Performance Club 2 provides participants with a survey of a range of theories and opinions about how we engage, understand and re-evaluate, literary works of art from the past. How do we talk about, feel and learn from a work of art that is still celebrated fifty years after its first release? Our lives are increasingly dominated by visual images on screens but what about the act of reading? The act of discussion? The act of listening? The act of offering up opinions? Have we globally lost the inter-personal understanding of the importance of ideas, the circulation of information and the importance of coming together to identify, contextualize and analyze literary works of art?
The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann refers to many performance and non-performance outlets. Namely popular entertainment and academic forms ranging from fine art, television, Hollywood, cabaret, camp, feminism, fashion, musical theatre, drug culture, power dynamics and gender politics. All of which will be analyzed in this participant lead Performance Club.
In order to reach a greater understanding of how meaning circulates through our diverse and hectic lives Performance Club participants must first come to terms with 4 items of importance:
reading is crucial
participation is mandatory
attendance counts
opinions matter
There is limited enrolment to attend all 4 sessions. The first eight participants enrolled for all sessions will receive a FREE softcover copy of the book. Each week, there will be a limited number of audited spots to attend a single session. These spots also require registration. These spots are PWYC. Auditors attend single sessions and BYOB (Bring Your Own Book).
EVENT & SCREENING February 27, 2018 The Commons @ 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto 7:00pm: Keynote by Kristyn Dunnion & Graduation 8:00pm: Screening of The Valley of the Dolls
Performance Yellow
This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?
