video of us dancing on Everyday Genius

So Friday Adam Robinson sent out a call for valentines for Everyday Genius, where one person wrote something and their Valentine responded, so John and I pulled a page from  Heroines and then video-d us dancing in the kitchen with our puppy Genet, which the passage kind of references. I will say even though this is of course staged, in that we're aware or were we were being video-d, dancing in the kitchen is a regular thing for us and we were basically like "Fuck it" and put the camera on as soon as we got home. Which is why my trench coat is still on. Also: This is a different kitchen and location than described in the piece, which was set in the apartment in Akron, and we are now in the cottage in North Carolina.

(neurasthenia) today

Today I feel fractured and fragmented. Today I feel sore and worn. I am sick - we are sick  - we are possibly sick or perhaps are psychically sick and we have scratchy throats and feverish foreheads because of it. I feel I'm posting too much online, and not at all here. I joined Twitter two days ago and posted like 100 tweets and tweeted through Gossip Girl and that was fun and now I'm bored of it and want to go away and disappear. Such a strong feeling of ambivalence - of wanting to be heard, of wanting to disappear. I wonder if I'll look back on these few months and realize that I am always the most unstable and useless when I am in between projects. I feel whenever I'm interviewed about Green Girl I just quote from Heroines because it was so huge - it was so huge and inside of me - that I feel completely wrung out and extinguished from it. When anyone wants to have a conversation - I just want to hand them the 150 mss. pages that still don't have copy-editing changes added and say - here. I once was lucid. I once read literary things. I once had something to say. Please read this - please read this book - as a stand-in for my real self, who will be huddled alone in a dark room. My sacrophogus. I would feel that way about Green Girl too except I don't really remember it. I'm kidding. Kind of. I have swallowed it whole. But I haven't read it in a while. But that's the past, I think. I have already written it. I am feeling so unsure lately about what to write - about how to be a writer - more than I have been in years.

Last night during an impassioned, energetic, lecture on the Victorian language of nerves and the cult of femininity of the time, a student interrupts me: Why are you wearing all black today?  (A line often thrown at me, that I plopped down in the midst of a lunchbreak conversation in Green Girl, interspersed with Hamlet: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?)

My morning in melancholia. This AM I looked through Alice James' letters. We spoke about her last night. How overjoyed she was when she was diagnosed with cancer. "To him who waits, all things come!" she bubbles over in a letter to a friend. "My aspirations may have been eccentric, but I cannot complain now, that they have not been brilliantly fulfilled." Not perhaps a drive towards death, as the editor of her letters surmises, but a relief after twenty years of medical men to have been given something REAL. How worried women have been of the fictional. Of being called actresses. Of this idea of invisible suffering. I totally understand this. Last night I lectured on the psyche and the soma, I spoke about chronic fatigue syndrome, which Elaine Showalter dismisses in Hystories as neurasthenia, of fibromyalgia, on the mysteries that is somatization, but even if women are more apt to somatize, that doesn't make it less real. I invoked another Elaine, Elaine Scarry's The body in pain, that we never can really inhabit another's body, we can never really understand the pain of another.

I wonder if I should attempt to write an essay on all this, but I feel too tired to attempt it. Or wonder - why? What a tremendous downer this all is perhaps. Instead I will feed the puppy and take a bowl of brown rice and leftover delicious daal into bed and attempt to read Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land without spontaneously combusting.

caitlin flanagan does not understand teenage girls

This weekend, read through Elaine Showalter's Hystories, making notes on multiple personality for Shadow as well as thinking of notions of contemporary hysteria for my Women and Madness class. Also ordered up a book about the Salem witch trials from the local bookstore, thinking about the possessed girls, thinking about The Crucible. This morning I read Caitlin Flanagan's op-ed in the NYT regarding the groups of girls ("cheerleaders" she distinguishes) who were diagnosed with hysteria in upstate New York. I began reading it and thinking, wow, weird, she is not, so far, fucking it up TOO MUCH. But then of course, whoops:

Much on their minds is their new potential for childbearing, an event that for most of human history has been fraught with physical peril.

 OMG Caitlin Flanagan you are too correct that is totally why teenage girls are fucked and freaky. Very observant. It's like the character in Wittgenstein's Mistress menstruating on every page. All I thought about as a girl was my new potential for childbearing.

No mention of course how iatrogenic (co-produced by therapists, media) hysteria has been historically, no distinction made of course that during the Middle Ages and then the witch trials there wasn't a medical notion of hysteria.

Seriously, why is Caitlin Flanagan now the authority of teenage girls? Those I'd rather see write a book on the teenage girl, off the top of my head: The Rejectionist, Marie Calloway, Kate Durbin, Kristen Stone, Mairead Case. I am maybe writing a book somewhat dealing with it. What is this thing now - that the only pop-culture feminists have to be in essentializing anti-feminists? I know this has been repeated ad nauseum, but what does this say about our culture?

It appears her general thesis is that girls just need to go to their rooms. 

(related: for an excellent takedown, heather havrilesky's review of caitlin flanagan's girly opus in the most recent bookforum)

Also, my ire against the CF has made me spontaneously launch a Twitter account - so far I'm following 7 people and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing - but follow me! @daughteroffury. More spontaneous rants from reading the New York Times, like that stand-up comedian Fred Armisen plays on SNL. 

sunday

I am in bed reading David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, one of John's favorite books (along with Ava by Carole Maso, another book I haven't been able really to access yet, although admire). It is only at 7pm that I am able to try reading - it's been a non-day, a day when time has been erased by absolute necessity, perhaps appropriate then to be reading a novel where the madness of the central, and solitary heroine is defined by being out of time. Hang-over today - from two glasses of wine yesterday while reading out with John at a local cafe, as he is helping me give a final look-through of Heroines - a cafe that serves mostly coffee and wine (very very good coffee, and very very good wine) and because I'm not supposed to be drinking coffee (migraines, insomina) I chose wine. Very very good wine. I always forget how that makes me feel the next day. The depths and dregs. A line from Green Girl that's taken from my life, post-Ruth's Ecstasy scene: All the joy had crept out of her body. And then last night, sleepless, I then took an Ambien, stupid, didn't realize what a depressive effect that would have, the combination. So today, when wasn't totally the High Priestess of Catatonia, when that wore off, walked in sunshine, played with puppy, watched Helena Bonham Carter in Wings of the Dove, and now, finally, reading. And ordering cheese pizza for delivery. Despite being vegan sometimes cheese pizza is the only remedy. I am yelling into the other room about Wittgenstein's Mistress, a conversation John and I have had forever, that I'm uncomfortable with this portrayal of female madness by a male author, which is why it's taken me so long to try to read it, although I've started many times.


Me: The grammar is very Wittgenstein-like.
J: Yes, the syntax he creates, it's the only reference I think to Wittgenstein in the book.
Me: I like it. (Pauses) It reminds me of Gail Scott's My Paris.
J: Yeah, that makes sense.


Me: I am uncomfortable that he is making her menstruate in the second page.
J: Is it uncomfortable the way he describes her menstruating?
Me: No, no. Just that she's this female character he already has menstruate on the second page. (Reads more). I think I don't like him writing her menstruating at all. I don't like that he claims to know her body.
(John doesn't say anything)
Me: I mean, I have a point, right?
J: Totally.

Me: So why is she allowed to start a fire in the Louvre?
J: She's the only woman around. It's an apocalyptic setting.
Me: Oh, right. Sorry. I'm reading it too lightly.

(Pause, I'm only on like third page)
Me: "For a moment I walked to the dunes to urinate." See, that wouldn't happen. Women wouldn't walk to the dunes to urinate.
J: I've seen women go into the woods to urinate.
Me: You can, but it's not easy. A man just wrote that description.
J: But you can do it.
Me: Like if you had a roll of toilet paper. But he makes the description so easy. It's too easy. Usually when women squat and pee it all just gets everywhere and sogs up their pubic hair.

Me: How does she get from the Met to the Louvre if there's no one else around?
J: Doesn't she have a truck?
Me: From the Met to the Louvre?
J: I don't know. I think it's potentially supposed to be a bizarre hallucination.
Me: Huh.

I am on page 4.

and...

I am feeling a bit better. I am sleeping now, at night. We have kicked puppy out of bed. All of his wriggling and rearranging constantly at night. Miracles that can perform. I took down my last post, because, I don't know...it felt too much. Perhaps I will erase every post now after I write it. Possible. Today is 70 degrees in North Carolina. Out to lunch I wear my weird black trenchcoat (intermittent rain) and my black jeggings and my platformed heels, in order for one day to expose my red toenails. Perhaps it is a false spring. But things feel more...possible today. Today notes about multiple personality disorder in the dark green notebook, for Shadow. Forms of hysteria. Perhaps I am more than a little hysterical myself. Do I somatize everything or is there an organic source? The mysteries of our bodies. The dog is sunning himself outside. I am typing this on the back porch.

Girl, Interrupted

 the girl who cried Woolf

happy birthday, Virginia

My mind lately has been almost completely blank. This is probably why I have not written here, not here, anywhere, in fact. There have been some good things going on  - I was offered a special section of Women and Madness at a local university at the last minute - and it's glorious to be teaching again, driving to Raleigh once a week. For reading: Wide Sargasso Sea, The Yellow Wallpaper, a bit of Nadja, Freud's Dora and Anna O., Cixous and Clement's sparring over the hysterics in Newly Born Woman, Lisa Appignanesi's Mad Bad and Sad (which I don't love, and disagree with often, but is less dated than Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady or Phyllis Chesler, both of which I teach through, as well as obviously Foucault and some Ian Hacking), Gilbert and Gubar, The Bluest Eye, The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, Marcia Angell on the medical model in the NYRB, Marsha Linehan, Bhanu's Schizophrene, an ethnography of Malaysian female factory workers and possession, Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa. Basically a lot of it is Heroines, I am lecturing in some way through Heroines. Last night I taught the Jean Rhys - and was reminded again what a perfect text it is. I prefer, personally, the ecstatic nihilism of Good Morning, Midnight, I think, but what Rhys accomplishes, what she performs in the novel is everything to me that literature should be, everything I feel I've failed at as a writer, failed at but am still trying at—what an amazing FEAT of empathy the work is, in so many ways. What a self-immolation. What a glorious song. And yesterday I thought about madness and language, how madness is silence, suppression, and the violence within the text—and also the violence in general of naming, of renaming, how that can surgically alter identity. And then I read this fantastic blog post by Bhanu, Schizophrenia and the Institution, that made me think of these ideas more.

There are a lot of things now that cannot be said, easily, maybe. Not trying to be too cryptic. My health problems have become more chronic, and the migraines that were symptomatic are now becoming absolutely pervasive, daily. Today I sat in the office of Specialist # 3, the ENT miracle man, whose nurses were amazing grandma types who asked me if I needed the lights out and gave me Jolly Ranchers. I sat and waited and reread Eula Biss' The Pain Scale on my iPhone. Tests and more tests. New medicines compounded. Referral for a neurologist, for biofeedback. This morning, earlier, maybe the worst headache of my life. And then now I have been regularly dosing myself to make the headaches go away, which has been obliterating. I think I'm going to write an essay on all of this, about these experiences I have barely spoken about on the blog, which maybe in some ways has made me feel alienated from the blog. As if I am being only selectively selectively authentic culling from my life. I'm sick of being a sick person. I'm sick of being a sick woman. I keep on saying I will write an essay on all this, on illness and creativity, on immune system disorders, on inheritance and mothers and our narratives of our bodies, and I order up Flannery O'Connor's, Carson MccCullers bios from the library, I read a not-very-good bio on Mary Shelley, all these women and their sick private parts, but I cannot read because I am too fatigued lately, too sickly, I cannot summon myself, I cannot be summoned, most of the time. I am depressing myself with this line of thinking. Things are not so bad. Some really wonderful things have been happening. People are reading and talking about Green Girl, which thrills me. I am going to be participating in a symposium on Violence and Community at Naropa, where I will have to give a performance or put up an installation, as well as a talk and being on a panel, and that feels like really exciting scary new territory for me. There is this class. There is the possibility now of other work, maybe even a slight possibility of permanent work, which would be extraordinary. I will be doing a reading in Asheville soon, and two readings in New York, and I will be back in Chicago for AWP.

Also, also, I went back and forth over email with the whipwhipsmart blogger The Rejectionist over literatures of the girl, and Green Girl specifically, and it was wonderful discoursing with such a keen hilarious mind. The interview's over at The Rejectionist.

the creative process

I have been cycling through very old email, in an attempt to find notes for something, and I was really struck by how many times I pitched Green Girl, the current novel that's out, to countless countless agents published writers editors, etc. for like YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS. It's kind of funny and depressing. I thought I'd share with you my very first pitch, written months after I moved back from London, a little over 6 years ago. Maybe this is gratuitous, I don't know. I would finish some form of the draft about five years ago, and the novel, basically remained the same. Except Italian puppeteer became a Scottish ex-divinity school student, even though in real life at some point there was an Italian puppeteer. And I took out the mother-daughter grief stuff, and maybe crucially  at some point added in this character of the maternal yet mean narrator. And I didn't think of her as suffering from a PTSD. And she never returns home in the novel. And Agnes became a barista not an art student. (I also got better I think at writing pitch letters. Obviously here I thought I had to dictate everything that happens in the book). It's AMAZING to me though that I pitched an agent after working on it seriously for one month (after accruing notes for the year in London). This was I think a week or two after I decided to quit my holiday retail job at Club Monaco at the Old Orchard Mall, and say, fuck it, I'm either going to be poor and write books or be a little less poor and not write books. A lot of the retail experience channeled in the novel was from that holiday job, especially the high-street clothing store at the end of the novel (although I also worked for like a day at the Body Shop on Oxford Street, and regularly went to the Topshop at Oxford Circus).

From: Kate Zambreno [mailto:XXXXXX]
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 6:21 PM
To: BIG IMPORTANT AGENT
Subject: you told me to let you know if I was working on a novel...

Hi BIG IMPORTANT AGENT -

I don't know if you remember me, but two Junes ago I sent you several of my columns I wrote for the alternative weekly Newcity magazine. The columns were entitled "Fresh Hell," and they were written under the pseudonym Janey Smith. I was curious whether the columns could ever be translated into book form, and had contacted you because I researched literary agents on the Internet and respected some of the female writers you represent. You had said that although you enjoyed reading the columns, the voice of the narrator was too frantic for you to see them translate into book form, and to contact you again when I was working on a longer project.

Well, that September I moved to London for a year, with my husband, who was attending a year-long graduate program. During that time I worked in the fiction department at Foyle's Bookshop, running the cult fiction department, read a lot of  modernist women writers such as Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Anna Kavan (a long essay on her work that I wrote is coming out in Dalkey Archive's CONTEXT this month), as well as contemporary writers such as Elfriede Jelinek, Deborah Levy and Christine Schutt, and worked on notes for two novels. That year I learned a lot about fiction, about writing fiction, and about what kind of fiction I wanted to write.

I've been back in Chicago since September, where I've been teaching classes on Women Writing and Contemporary Culture at a local communitycollege. The past month I have really dug into my first novel, working from notes. I have about 10,000 words so far, and wanted to know whether you would be willing to take a look at it, and what length you would be willing to take a look at it.

The novel is currently called "Green Girl," named after the line in "Hamlet" where Polonius calls Ophelia that. It can best be descibed as a much more dark and hopefully poetic Fresh Hell, third-person interior, but less frantically paced or glib. It is not as autobiographical as Fresh Hell, however, although there are of course autobiographical elements. The central character is a girl in her twenties named Ruth, an American who works in the fragrance department at Harrod's in London (she calls it Horrid's), but who aspires to work in the make-up department. She's a bit of a depressive, a bit of a dreamer, and suffering from what can best be described as a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, along with an obsessive fear of death, and continually flashes back to scenes of her mother's illness and death the previous year, all mixed in with a cruel affair she had with a boy in Chicago.

In London while living in a woman's dorm, she sleeps far too much, works in a sex shop which she promptly quits, starts a toxic friendship with an Australian art student named Agnes, who has conversations by describing films from beginning to end and who Ruth later moves in with to a dingy flat on the East End, develops a fascination for the Hari Krishnas, rides the train a lot and walks around in central London, deals with a mean clique of girls at Harrod's, buys a very expensive dress that she cannot afford, develops crushes on two men because they vaguely remind her of the boy in Chicago,  begins a platonic yet intense relationship with an Italian puppeteer,  and cuts her hair off to look like Jean Seberg in "Breathless" but has the unconscious effect of resembling her cancer-stricken mother. The novel ends with her returning home to Chicago for the one-year anniversary of her mother's death. It hopefully will deal with the themes of home versus away, being a tourist in a stranger land, of death and desire, of grief, on a certain type of girl caught in the rabbit hole, and their friendships with each other, and on mother/daugher relationships in general. And, of course, it's about make-up, which is kind of a central metaphor in the book. Even though I'm writing about shopping and cosmetics and love affairs, it will hopefully not be perceived as "chick lit," I am definitely  aiming for something much more literary like Jean Rhys.

I know I should not be worried about publishing this novel before I finish it, and you are the only agent I have ever contacted. I just think the novel has the potential to be good, and I wanted to know what you thought about it.

Please let me know if I can send something to you. And if so, at what length and to what address.

Best

Kate Zambreno