Steve Halle reviews my essay "Slapping Clark Gable" in MAKE

A really really great write-up by Steve Halle of my recent essay in MAKE magazine (along with a review of the issue in which it appears). The essay, "Slapping Clark Gable," deals with masochism and my obsession with bodice rippers including a specific one called The Demon Lover/Gone with the Wind and rape fantasy. Steve also reviews my reading of O Fallen Angel at AWP. Steve and I met and we discovered we went to the same northwest suburban Catholic high school, which is amazing, two experimental writers out of that banal surroundings.  So we are basically spiritual twins. Although I need to note one thing: Mommy in O Fallen Angel is the polar opposite of who my actual mother was! Mommy is based on a composite, yes, women I have known. I write about my mother in my nonfiction manuscript Book of Mutter, as a Joan Crawford/Katherine Hepburn figure, a "Clytaemnestra in chinos and feathered hair." My mother was a bold, stern, passionate, complex, sometimes furious woman. Very opposite of Mommy. There is a specific woman Mommy is very based on but if I say I might get in trouble. So I will say it's a composite.

But Steve is quite right in that part of my inspiration for O Fallen Angel (as well as the essay) is what he calls my (our) panopticonic childhood. My mother did watch over me incessantly, I always had guards at my door, every day after school the schoolbag on the kitchen counter, she went through every paper. I write about this in Book of Mutter, especially in the section entitled "Weather Reports," which also deals heavily with Henry Darger's childhood, as well as his journals. My mother named Gale, a gale and a gael. So much pressure, to be good, to be succeed, until of course I imploded (now I prefer to explode). 

This is what Steve writes:

As for the issue's content, I was drawn immediately to Kate Zambreno's nonfiction piece "Slapping Clark Gable." I'd been following Kate's blog Frances Farmer is My Sister for a while (especially interested in her theory of anorexic and bulimic writing) and connected with her at the AWP (the Les Figues/Chiasmus/Fairy Tale Review readings at Thin Man in Denver was worth the trip alone and Zambreno's reading mesmerized me: raw and invested in themes my work returns to like religion and sexuality).

"Slapping Clark Gable" is nonfiction in the lineage of confessional writing (see especially Plath) and excess, informed by Zambreno's fave theorists like Artaud, Bataille, etc. It is bald, sexual, shockingly honest:

Although I would be a virgin until twenty, I began masturbating furiously at a young age. I would lie on my belly and rub my fingers against my underwear. I needed friction to get off (still do). I know what you're doing, my mother once said from the foot of the stairs as I pretended to watch TV. This best sums up the exchanges I had with my mother about sex. The implication of surveillance, the undertones of guilt.

After the aforementioned reading at AWP, I told Kate in passing that she was my unofficial autobiographer, based on the excerpt she read from her Chiasmus novel O Fallen Angel. Devouring passages like the above on the plane home from Denver just reiterated that compliment. Although my parents were not quite as panopticonic as Zambreno's mother described above, I felt the pressure to behave (whatever that means) and succeed (whatever that means), which are as much about my Catholic upbringing as a dissonant counterpoint to my own oxymoronic flaw of perfectionism. Zambreno captures these notes perfectly here, hinting at the roots of her attraction to the taboo, to stoically brutal lovers. I think of my own attractions to junk, ruin(s), tabloids, and garbage. A great read.

Sleep Surreal: Ambien and Two Serious Ladies

Lately I have been fuguer, staggering through my life. Exhausted, weak, confused. I go to the doctor yesterday, finally. About the fatigue. I wonder sometimes if I'm a hypochondriac or the opposite of a hypochondriac. Daphne Merkin recently reviewed a cultural history of hypochondria I found it very interesting. Interesting how Darwin or Emily Bronte could be classified as hypochondriacs, but this is the way they maintained themselves, were able to renew themselves, a culturally acceptable way to take to bed and recharge. I think I do that. I think this has been a similar argument recently about how depression helps creativity. I certainly can take to bed during the day, and it is like a dream state for me, I sleep with my thoughts and desires and wishes and come out ready to begin a project.

But I also think I might be the opposite of a hypochondriac, in that I'll ignore symptoms for a while, because I attribute everything to depression or anxiety or stress. I who wear stress so panicked on my body like the overgrown puppy beyond the wall its hysterical yelps outside the door. So if I'm feeling terrible and sluggish for a while it takes a while for me to realize there might be something organic maybe wrong with me.

I hate my doctor in Akron. He's very much a country doctor, everyone says Akron's a city, but it's not. First of all, he is very slow and looks like an animatronic Orville Redenbacher. And he always uses the same metaphor about my anemia: "It's like you're running a car with a 1/3 tank less of gas." And I hate how gendered the magazines are in waiting offices in Akron. Only the dentist has People or Entertainment Weekly. Everything else is either ESPN or car magazines or Lady's Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. Of course I come out of looking at those women's magazines wanting to tear off my bra my clothes and burn myself in effigy.

Also the damn nurses always tell me what my weight is even though I tell them I don't want to know. And they weigh me everytime I set my foot over the threshold. It's like when I was in college and the student health center would give every woman a pregnancy test. My weight is always the same, I eat very healthy, I exercise frequently but not too much, and I don't care what my damn weight is, as long as my clothes fit and I like my muscles I like that I have muscles that I exercise now for quality of life not for weight loss. Put that number inside my head and I'll obsess about it, and I'd rather not add that poison into my life. I had a mother who was extraordinarily thin and disordered with her eating, and wanted us to be hypervigilant with our weight. The word Fat was bandied about often in my childhood even though my sister and I were fit, strong.  I don't often remember my mother eating an actual meal. Even my overweight father recently asked me if I remembered when Mom gained a lot of weight (and the weight he said she was at when she was allegedly so heavy I think I topped out at in high school). Poison. But the nurses still always tell me. Because they're idiots and I hate them. She especially she chuckles nervously and asks why don't I want to know and I tell her because it's not important, what I weigh, and I had lost two pounds one time because I was having indigestion problems, and she said "see, you lost weight? that's a good thing, right?" Why is it always a good thing to lose weight? Why are women praised for taking up as little space as possible? Why are we always trying to reduce who we are?

The "Power" yoga studio where John and I take classes (the only option, and we drive on the highway 30 minutes for it) is especially toxic regarding body weight and women. The opposite of yoga. To be told in the middle of an intense posture or core work: Ladies, you need to look good in your bikinis! Fellows, this will be good for your golf swing! The other day the owner of the studio was teaching the class, everyone is blonde, fit, snug, in immaculate yoga clothes, and she coaxed a woman into an inversion by saying: You weigh like, what 12 pounds? I wish I weighed 12 pounds! And sometimes I am the opposite of yoga because fury is coursing through me absurdity and fury mingled and I think, "If you fucking weighed 12 pounds you'd be like, five months old. Why the fuck would a grown woman want to be an infant?" Don't answer this.

Oh and the same nurse who always tells me my weight told me today, as I'm seeing the young(er) doctor: He's cute. As if she wants to fucking set us up. Then she pauses. But he's married. Oh, okay, I say. So you can look but you can't touch! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE. Oh, I was really looking forward to molesting the testicles of my new doctor while obviously limp with fatigue. I was hoping for a zipless fuck sort of quickie in the examination room. 

But anyone. I don't know why I'm blathering symptomalogy. The doctor gives me a shot in my ass for allergies and a week prescription for Ambien. He says I have a transient sleep disorder. That I am extremely sleep deprived, that even though I am trying to sleep more I am probably only getting five hours a night, and it's built, and now I'm exhausted. So I take the Ambien and pass out  and I am feeling recharged, like I have actually slept through an entire night. 

**
Also so potent: I am rereading Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies. I recently reread Nightwood which I meant to write more on and then things got in the way! Soon! And I think Nightwood and Two Serious Ladies are two of the most marvelous, strange, yes queer texts, queer not only in terms of experience but aesthetic. I am prone to lists so I think my favorite novels are: Good Morning, Midnight or Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys, Nightwood, Two Serious Ladies, Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. But I slumped down in a featureless chair in the campus library yesterday I had 30 minutes before I went and babbled about Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine and I was absolutely magnetized. Jane Bowles oh Jane Bowles I think of her notebooks she kept for 30 years she was unable to rescue a story out of it why hasn't anyone published Jane Bowles' notebook like Alix Roubaud's? Jane Bowles who wrote such marvelously weird characterizations, her characters are stilted, surreal, they are shiny-eyed mystics, entranced by seediness, by slumming. Both Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles write about strange intimacies between women, incestuous intimacies, in a way, like the sisters in Bowles' story "Camp Cataract" (who also remind me of the sisters in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, or the sisters in Barnes' play The Antiphon, or the mother/daughter in The Piano Teacher.)

When I wrote Green Girl I wanted to write of a sort of incestuous friendship between two women, queer in a way but with these two characters who identified themselves as intensely heterosexual and very involved in the hook-up culture I know so well from my days (god I sound so old!) Agnes and Ruth, best friends, an ambivalence and intensity that mirrors at times a love affair, that is tinged with eroticism. Of course I got nowhere close to Nightwood or Two Serious Ladies, I lack their language, although I reference  Nightwood in the book (the character Agnes, who is always styling herself like in a film, a series of costumes, wears a circus outfit like an unsexed doll to a dress-up party, a description close to the aerial performer Frau Mann).

But oh I have just begun Two Serious Ladies and I am basking in it. It's that delicious. Christina Goering is a character to me much like Djuna Barnes' Jenny Petherbridge or Nora Flood, these women who are off-kilter, somehow, aristocrats almost who exist on the margins, who become obsessed with others, cling to others (would be a description of Nightwood as well). The panic of their hysterical infatuations. Oh there's no more vicious and grotesque characterization than Jenny Petherbridge in "The Squatter" section of Nightwood. Petherbridge is the "squatter" she has "squatted" in on the intense love affair of Nora Flood and Robin Vote, has stolen Robin and is insanely jealous of her past, loves, like a cuckoo bird. Everything is vicious and hilarious:

She writhed under the necessity of being unable to wear anything becoming, being one of those panicky little women who, no matter what they put on, look like a child under penance.

 or

One inevitably thought of her in the act of love emitting florid commedia dell'arte ejaculations; one should not have thought of her in the act of love at all. She thought of little else, and though always submitting to the act, spoke of and desired the spirit of love; yet was unable to attain it.

Barnes sentences are baroque sometimes rich chewy hilarious strange gorgeous delightful. And all of her uncomfortable dyads and triads. And Bowles has that too. Bowles' writing is even more eccentric, strange, surprising. The intensity in which the characters cling to each other, these tempestuous love affairs between women often unrequieted.

Two Serious Ladies begins with one of the serious ladies, Christina Goering's outcasted childhood, Christina Goering who plays "moral" games like a hairshirt-wearing saint:

Even then she wore the look of certain fanatics who think of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being.

I can identify with this in my childhood. When I was younger I didn't have friends, sometimes my siblings.I would play games when I pretended I was Mother Nature, talking to ants I gathered in my red wagon, trees, the air. I would pretend in school that I was really the heir to the throne of England. My childhood filled with these fantasies, a way to buoy my strangeness I never could shake off.

"I always think, said Miss Goering, "that the driver is only waiting for the passengers to become absorbed in conversation in order to shoot down some street, to an inaccessible and lonely place where he will either torture or murder them. I am certain that most people feel the same way about it that I do, but they have the good taste not to mention it."

I love the stilted, queer dialogue between characters in Jane Bowles. Sped-up, no one saying quite what they mean (queer is a term used often in Bowles), characters prone to obsessive compulsions.

"I know how you feel," Miss Gamelon said to her.

"I don't particularly enjoy it," said Miss Goering, "but I expect in the future to be under control."

When Jane was experiencing terrible writer's block her husband Paul (who decided to write his Sheltering Sky, mirroring the same events as Two Serious Ladies, a desert, a marriage, while editing Bowles' book, and some have seen his success as hampering her sense of herself as a writer) would tell her: Just have a character walk into a room and say something. And Jane would say, "That's how you do things. That's not how I do things."