By Lauren Zazzara
Associate Editor
Speaking about her book “E! Entertainment,” Kate Durbin, a Los Angeles-based writer, curator and visual artist, said, “It’s exciting because the pages are pink…It’s actually not any more expensive than it is to have white pages. It’s just like in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when you think it’s going to be black and white but it’s color and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh! What else is possible?’”
Durbin, dressed in a bright yellow coat covered in floral print with flouncy sleeves and sparkly sneakers—which had eye appliques on the toes—read from “E! Entertainment” Tuesday night in The Loft of The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. The book is a collection of transcriptions from reality TV shows.
“I would watch a few seconds of a show, pause and write down everything that happened, everything that I saw on the screen,” Durbin said.
She added it took her three years to complete a transcription of one episode of the show “The Hills.”
“It was a lot of work, but it was kind of soothing,” she said. “Like I compare it to sculpting or painting or something, where you’re looking at the same thing for a really long time and you’re just slowly, slowly filling it in.”
Durbin first read a poem from a new project she’s working on that follows the royal family. She said it was created from what she came across in a Google search, and the poem sounded like a list of headlines pitting Kate Middleton against Princess Diana; one line said, “Fashion Wars: Kate Middleton versus Princess Diana,” and it ended with admitting that the comparison isn’t fair, “but it’s unavoidable.”
Then she read from “E! Entertainment,” beginning with poems about the Playboy Mansion. She said in some of these poems, she removed all of the people. She said since the women in the Playboy Mansion are so objectified, she wanted to remove them so the objects in the house took on a life of their own.
She proceeded to read from her transcription of “The Hills,” which she said she first saw while sitting in a Planned Parenthood. She said she was fascinated with how unscripted the show seemed to be, so she went home and researched it. The poem she read is a narration of every second, with exact details, of the episode, which she read in a Southern Californian, “ditsy” voice.
“I was really interested in the way women are portrayed in reality TV; by interested, I mean disturbed and saddened by it,” Durbin said. “But what particularly disturbed me was how comfortable even really smart people, sometimes people who would call themselves feminists, had no problem trashing these women and saying really negative things about them, calling them bimbos, all that sort of thing.”
As a Southern California girl, Durbin said she felt a sort of bond with the women portrayed in these reality TV shows, and she didn’t like how the public perceived them.
She said she began thinking about how reality TV itself causes these judgments.
“I started thinking about how the medium itself sets people up to become jokes or clowns or to fail, and I wanted to explore that in my book, and I wanted to do it in a way where I didn’t wag my finger at people and tell them what to think, but where I created a set of writing constraints for myself, that kind of forced the shows to critique themselves in a way,” she said. “So the book uses no judgmental language at all; the transcriptions are really true to the show, what I was watching.”
Durbin ended the reading with a performance of the “Anna Nicole clown video.” She described how this video of Anna Nicole Smith and her family was used in court after her death. Her boyfriend was accused of keeping her in a drugged-stupor, but his lawyers said since it was reality TV, it had to be fake. Durbin said she found this to be the dark side of reality TV: exploitation.
Durbin said she first found her interest in writing when she was young, feeling trapped by her inability to do all the things adults could do.
“I would often read stories and then add myself into a book I was reading,” she said. “At end of the chapter I would continue the chapter for however much white space there was in the book…I just felt like there was a lot of freedom in writing, and I was also bored and a kid, so I fell in love with it then and decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.”
She said it’s interesting that “E! Entertainment” is so much about entrapment when she finds so much freedom in writing, “but I guess it’s sort of me struggling against that, or trying to find a way through it and out the other side,” she said.
Durbin said, besides shedding light on how women are entrapped and negatively perceived in reality TV, she also hopes her work can show the importance of pop culture.
“…Pop culture can be such rich material for art and writing and all of that,” she said. “It’s something I always hope to inspire people with, because I know that sometimes when it comes to poetry, especially, people feel like they can only write about subjects that are considered important. And it’s not true; you can write about anything.”
zazzarlm13@bonaventure.edu
