I guess I lied about titling. "Today" seems apt for everyday. Every time I use the title "Today" on a blog post I am reminded of the glorious opening of Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina: "Today is a day only suicides use." I write about this in Heroines, so writing about it now reeks of self-promotion. It's not, actually, it's that it's still true, that I am still reminded of this, that it still runs through my head whenever I type these words into Blogger's title. I used to think that by writing something I would somehow exhume it. Maybe because writing about my mother somehow made a catharsis out of my grief. (can you make a catharsis? I wanted to verb "catharsis" and then thought of "catalyze" but knew that was wrong, in essence, I don't know English). Yet I wrote a book about the girl, and cannot seem to exhume my girlhood. I wrote a book about memoir, and still I am obsessed. Perhaps sometimes writing something can exhaust a subject - I think that is a wonderful thing. Other times, perhaps, the act of writing it is an act of repetition, and as long as there is trauma there will be circling, still. And yet I'm still traumatized by my mother - yet somehow I was able to exhaust myself, like a child crying, in writing of her illness and death, in the mss. that isn't published (This too reeks of publicity, me stating this, it's just a fact, and it's something also I obsess over: whether it's not published because it's not good, which is also a question of memoir, Rebecca Wolff at Fence read it and said she was trying not to publish the autobiographical in their prose. I said okay. She also really didn't like Green Girl so oh well. I mean though like 200 places rejected Green Girl. Like a joke. Like the girl-inhabitant of the novel. I sent her 20 pages a long time ago and she said she didn't think the mixing of the classic with the contemporary worked, like New Wave cinema with the celebutante, that it was a stylistic confusion or something. I'm not trying to alienate Rebecca Wolff - I think she is absolutely fierce and triumphant. I met her at this year's AWP, loitering outside the Fence table because I had heard that maybe she might be reading my mss. -she said, we met before. I said, no, but I was on the Millay Colony jury thing with your husband. She said - oh maybe it's that you really look like your author photo. I said, you really look like your author photo too. And she does. Why am I writing about someone I don't know? Perhaps because whoever rejects me, and there are many, constantly, they haunt me too, they are like figures populating my constant imagination, I think that's like a superego, they sit over my shoulder when I write things and say: No that's very derivative.)
Anyway. Today again I was all alone, in like this vaccuum of heat and summer and North Carolina and no-John. Today I ate: the rest of the exorbitantly expensive cherries, a sprouted wheat bagel with dill cashew cream cheese, sprouts and tomatoes, for breakfast and lunch, and half a container of chocolate coconut milk ice cream. Genet is outside barking at ghosts like the psychotic puppy that he is. I read some Kathy Acker after all, but like in a hurried way, in between Drop Dead Diva, which isn't even good, I don't even know why I watch it, I don't write trash theory, I simply watch trash, and True Blood. I flipped through the Acker more than read it deeply. Don Quixote and Great Expectations. I mean, I love Acker. But sometimes I feel one can read Acker more like a collage, in a flipping way, or all over the place, as opposed to in a narrative way. I also read a PDF of Ariana Reines' translation of Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for Theories of a Young Girl on my computer, that Hedi at Semiotext(e) sent me but made me promise I wouldn't circulate. It's interesting. I mean, in many ways it reminds me of my own Green Girl - this sort of Arcades Project of the cliched girl - and I know there's the greater capitalist and social critique, about commodified and comformist selves, yet I feel it's also a lot like Simone de B's chapter on the Young Girl in The Second Sex, and like that chapter, I don't feel they allow the young girl to be anything but awash in her own banality, as the ultimate consumer/consumed. There's no space for revolt on her part. I'm also tired of philosophers using the young girl and then taking her body away - saying the young girl is a symbol, but she's not only feminine, etc., like D&G do with becoming-woman. Anyway. I think Genet is barking at the cat who sometimes lives under our porch. On Wikipedia today while looking at the Tiqqun I looked up "Spectacle" i.e. in the Situationist sense, and "reification." I get bored with everyone who always uses the old terms. I also began watching the first 10 minutes of the documentary on Francesca Woodman on Netflix streaming, where her father is being interviewed about his daughter's provocativeness juxtaposed with an uncanny striptease of Francesca writing her name on wax paper and then tearing it open to reveal her naked body. I also compiled 70 pages of notes for a 6,000-8,000 word essay. Most of it other people's words. Now I guess I have to come up with mine.
Also - okay I'm still absent-mindedly screening this doc - I understand that her father and mother are famous artists, but it's creepy that her father is pronouncing this sort of psychoanalytic intent over her work. I mean, I've watched 2 minutes of the video. It reminds me - even more than before - of the editing behind the photographer Alix Roubaud's notebook, she who also committed suicide young and photographed herself in beautifully elusive fragments - the introduction by her more famous husband Jacques. OH MY GOD IF I BECOME A BRILLIANT ARTIST AND DIE IN SOME TRAGIC WAY SELF-INFLICTED THROUGH INTENSE LIVING OR WHATEVER AND THEY INTERVIEW MY FATHER OR HUSBAND AS THE MAIN NARRATIVE VOICE FOR MY DOCUMENTARY A LA PAUL BOWLES TOO WITH MILLICENT DILLON'S BIO OF JANE YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO DIG ME UP AND RE-KILL ME.
