Laura Mullen Quotes

#1. Though we don't have a cure for cancer we at least have stopped being too ashamed to even say the name of the disease - and the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic is edifying, isn't it? Shame shuts down productive thinking, and I'd like to open the doors. It's a first step.

Laura Mullen

#2. The performance group The Ant Farm redoing JFK's assassination in Dallas was an event that struck a chord with me, especially when one of the members said they'd only intended to do it once, but the Dallas audience insisted they repeat the performance.

Laura Mullen

#3. I hope, by being honest about what happened to me, to help nourish a culture of honesty that might make something different - and better - possible. We really need to squarely face the issue of child abuse in America, and to look at our perversity, our illness.

Laura Mullen

#4. And Complicated Grief is a text that announces, from the start, in its citation of influence, dense intertextuality and hybridity, a failure of some apparent or usual protections, and a need to re-examine "identity" in the light of an acknowledgement of our entanglements and interdependence.

Laura Mullen

#5. If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed to) tell, then the canon emerges as something to examine very carefully.

Laura Mullen

#6. Admitting how ill we are, how deep the damage goes, how constantly the abuse cycle is repeated and how horribly we have failed those who most deserve our care and protection.

Laura Mullen

#7. Given our examination of the behavior of our police forces at this moment the question of protection has an extra resonance, yes?

Laura Mullen

#8. "Influence" is itself influenced, coming from an Italian word for the outbreak of a disease (influenza, outbreak). Influence is that which flows across - permeates - the boundaries of the self.

Laura Mullen

#9. Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)

Laura Mullen

#10. In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.

Laura Mullen

#11. I'm interested in finding new and more humane modes of safety, and in exposing the arbitrary and superficial protections that have failed us.

Laura Mullen

#12. When I encountered "The Lady of Shallot" (to take a "for instance" allusion from the many in the book, this one from the "Etiology" section) it was still considered a "great poem." What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman?

Laura Mullen

#13. Wherever something is "pinned down" there's a little hole - at least one - more likely many.

Laura Mullen

#14. In Frankenstein there is a transfer first of life into death (in the creation and animation of the monster), and then of death into life, as the monster takes his revenge on the father who gave him life but withheld recognition.

Laura Mullen

#15. The boundary between expert and amateur was an imposed social-cultural "protection" which actually exposed a number of women to a fatal disease, because decaying matter, as the fireman said of fire (cited in the book's final piece, "Torch Song") "ain't got no rules on it."

Laura Mullen

#16. Her hair, brown.
Her speciality, damage.

Laura Mullen

#17. So when we're told to "move on" or "let go," we should take a look at who is saying it and why, and when we see repetition happening it's worth trying to understand it before attempting to shut it down.

Laura Mullen

#18. The failure of protection, the importance of recognizing the ways in which we influence (and infect) each other - the fact that being an "individual" can't protect you - these are issues I've been thinking about for a while.

Laura Mullen

#19. With Complicated Grief I can say that there was a certain simplification in the process. Getting older means less wasted effort, things are clearer earlier. Being young meant flailing around a lot, especially as I was trying to invent new shapes without a ton of models.

Laura Mullen

#20. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.

Laura Mullen

#21. It is worth asking who decides what's an "obsession" and where it differs from meditation or the kind of deep dwelling on a subject we see in philosophy or the work of Robert Wilson, for instance?

Laura Mullen

#22. There's a nice clear difference between real protection (wash your hands, or wear a condom) and the fake protection offered by institutions which often come, finally and sadly, to be much too interested first of all in protecting their own power.

Laura Mullen

#23. Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.

Laura Mullen

#24. One might say that "Torch Song" is, in part, about the urgency of the effort to pin things down and what wild dart throwing that desire leads to.

Laura Mullen