@daughteroffury you don't have to follow me

I decided like 5 minutes ago to tweet again, which means I have to start up my whole account and refollow people, which sounds like a lot of fucking work. So I followed like the first 10 people off the top of my head (an interesting exercise) and so far have tweeted about Meg Ryan. Follow me if you want, but it probably will be boring. I promise to not be insightful, witty, or provoking. However unlike here I promise to be laconic, or at least semi-laconic.

mini-rant-fragment which tells me I should probably abandon Blogger for Twitter or Tumblr again

I am not interested in GOOD writing. I am not interested in well-wrought fiction. I am not interested in craft, or mastery. I find discussions of craft or mastery terribly fucking boring. Good writing can be hegemonic and boring. Good writing is behaving. So if I say I find a piece of writing interesting, that doesn't mean I'm saying whether it's "good" or "masterful."

Also I keep on getting shit for writing about MC, which I think is holding me back from working on this essay, where her writing and reception is just one small part of these ideas I'm interested in. I think writing about MC or Lena Dunham should come with its own trigger warning. But I also don't want to be somehow disciplined or controlled from writing about artists and ideas that I find interesting.

INTERESTING.
Not GOOD.
Who wants to be GOOD?
It's so much more interesting to be BAD.

OH MY GOD I NEED AN INTERVENTION I HAVE TO STOP FUCKING GOOGLING MYSELF.

"Kate Zambreno thinks Marie Calloway is a good writer."

It reminds me a lot of the intense hysteria and fervor over anyone claiming Zelda Fitzgerald had brilliance to her, everyone hedge-hedging but-buting BUT HER HUSBAND WAS THE TRUE GENIUS HE WAS A MASTER STORYTELLER. Jesus. What is being controlled? Contained? What is such a risk? A contagion? That is what I find interesting.

I'm interested in a new hysterical realism.
By the way James Wood since you're reading this you really annoyed me with your review of Sheila Heti's book.
And "mumblecore lit." What the fuck? 

vanity, insecurity - okay I will still title things when the title comes to mind and is not forced

At this point I almost feel the aesthetic of indecision and doubt on this blog has become almost kitschy, like I'm too aware that that's what I come here and blog about. Like a Woody Allen tic or something. I've spent time thinking about the blog lately, maybe too much time, because it's become this - thing - it's become this tentacled monster-thing that people write about, as something that I do, as this project that's a writing project, like the other writing, maybe more than the other writing. I wonder if I, too, have become this tentacled monster-thing. I think perhaps I have. Sometimes I would love to set myself on fire, and everything I've ever written, and then come back, to the world, to start again, post-immolation, and try to be a writer. Every day I wake up and try to be a writer. Most of the time I fail, miserably. Really. But it's weird because there's this conception in the world that I am perhaps already a writer - this is an incorrect perception - one is not a writer unless you have written something that day, otherwise, you perceive yourself as a total failure. Or at least I do. Today I sat with the 70-pages of notes for the essay I'm working on for (yes - 70 pages - like I'm a text-equivalent of Michelle Duggar) hmm, maybe 40 minutes, before I began to twitch about the Dior palettes used on me during the Jezebel shoot, and I had to go put a full face of makeup on, and take pictures of myself with it to see if I could put makeup on the way they did during the shoot, and then go on Makeup alley, and read reviews of blushes, which I can sometimes spend hours on. I am fascinated with the idea of the gpoy - the Tumblr term for gratuitous picture of yourself -I would add - gratuitous PRETTY picture of yourself -  but most of the time am too embarrassed to post any, I'm interested however in that embarrassment. I think in another life I was a beauty editor of a magazine - the writers online I have become fascinated by lately are/were beauty editors, like Cat Marnell, formerly at xoJane, or, in a very different but still fascinating confessional mode, Kara Jesella, who I wrote a fan note to on Facebook last night, which has been embarrassing me completely. At Oxford I guess the female scholars John's hanging out tease him because he knows so much about skincare - it's because of me - I mean I've been using undereye moisturizer since I was probably 12 - makeup was literally a regime in my house, we were schooled and trained on it. Anyway. I wish in Green Girl I had done a better critique/meditation of cosmetics and the hole and consumption and desire. I tried.

I am SUPPOSED to be working on this essay, which is self-generated by me, I mean, technically, I have a place that's willing to publish it, but I KNOW or at least I FEEL, that this place wouldn't want to publish what I'm actually trying to write. I feel I'm supposed to be objective and reporterly and circumspect and SUMMARIZE things and when I killed that journalist-girl long ago, she really died, I mean I have become almost unreadable.

I also think because this is a high-profile publication I feel completely paralyzed with anxiety - and know it will be the subject of intense scrutiny, and I'm totally psyching myself out.

I am in this strange sort of island situation - I am a cosmetic ridiculous Robinson Crusoe - being all alone in the cottage in the dangerous heat, with just the psychotic puppy tearing up the cream-colored carpetting, he's been tearing at it more it seems since I've been home, which makes me worry it's  like some interior decorating version of trichotillomania, although I guess that's stupid, because he's destroying other things, he's not destroying himself, which I think is a better model for living. Perhaps being all alone is making me feel like this blog is an echo chamber - I guess I mean less that it's a monologue - but the idea lately in general that people might defacto like me or tolerate me because I have written things - I hate that idea - it's really gross/alienating to me. It becomes less about me, the person, and it's just about my existence based on what I have written, what I continue to write. Which means, also, that when I don't write, or dont' write well, or sometimes don't think through all my ideas like for instance when a  cursory BLOG POST of mine gets republished by a hipster online magazine with a high circulation, I have to constantly be reminded that I am a bad thinker, a lazy thinker, an unfeminist thinker, a too feminist thinker, an uninteresting thinker, a wrong thinker, whatever. People blogging they "HATE" me or "LOVE" me based on something I've written, when that serves only to exacerbate the notion that I am the sum total of simply what I have written, and that I don't have worth or value outside of it, or even separation outside of it. Whenever I go out into the "literary" world - which is rare - I feel some people might already have this concept of me - that's the strangest fucking thing in the world for me. I think part of this might be my isolation in North Carolina - literally, since our mail's still on hold because I'm not supposed to be here I don't talk to anyone in person save the people with dogs on the same mile circuit I walk Genet every morning and evening. In usual circumstances I at least say hi to the postman everyday. His name is Steve. This is easy for me to remember because Steve's the name of my high school boyfriend who became a schizophrenic vampire. I wonder sometimes if I was in a city - what would be different. Would I feel more like a writer? Would I feel less like a writer? Would I feel all puffed up and egotastic? Or even more a minority/invisible?

This is probably just all neurosis before Heroines comes out. So, it's this weird cycle of self-promotion-seeking visibility/despising myself for self-promotion and wanting to be invisible. I should stop telling people I'm a writer. I will once I become something else and have something else going on. I was up past midnight last night, in my little bed, with Genet curled around me, worried that I have no backup plan. Think of this like a tribute scene in a Nora Ephron film, albeit badly lit, unromantically angsty, and with absolutely no dialogue. I have no fucking backup plan at all. I cannot get into a Ph.D. program, and I feel like an asshole about it, like now I don't want to, I don't want to start using more institutionalized language, I will probably never get an agent or published by a major trade, so I will never make any money as a writer, and there's nothing else. There's seeming nothing else. And I am far too fucking old to work retail - old in so many ways - like I'd probably get fired in an hour. And that's not longterm sustainable anyway.

I am considering maybe turning off the comments? Mostly because I look for confirmation in the comments, I realize, when I used to look for dialogue. I don't know. Bhanu doesn't have comments on her blog. But perhaps turning off the comments would make me feel even more alone?Of course I moan and bitch when I write something that I don't get comments on.But maybe that's the desire to remove them: because that impulse, to write in order to have that instant gratification - isn't the best urge. Than why am I writing on the Internet?

Also: can anyone confirm: I read on an old Livejournal thread from 2008 that TMI was originally a military acronym. I mean, I could call the Duke library or something and ask them to help me but I'm feeling terribly, terribly lazy.

Okay to counteract all my negativity I'll post a Gratuitous Puppy Picture, which is in some ways a GPOY, although I wonder if it's gratuitous as it's HIGHLIGHTING the thesis of this post (ha, thesis). But I couldn't get Genet to be still, because he's in Psychosis 10:59 (AM). It shows him in darling profile however. You cannot see the growing skunk streak on the top of his head, which I love.

Oh, also my self-mythologized shoes have broken for the final time - the platform wraparound sandals I bought in Copenhagen that I conjure up for the last paragraph of Heroines as an urging forth of those who feel silenced to write - that I say that I put on and stand in the mirror when I'm trying to psyche myself to write something and intone to the mirror - You're a Fucking Genius. They just came undone. Fucking glued-on cheapass shoes, which were NOT CHEAP, well, mostly because a coffee in Scandinavia is like $10. But what does this mean? That they're broken? My shoes of swag and fuck-me heroism? Should I not read too much into it? Okay. I still can't manage to throw them out. Achilles High Heel. Something like that.

What song lyric is in my head with the words "Vanity, Insecurity"? That keeps on going around and around: "Vanity, Insecurity". Oh wait - Molly Ringwald's diamond earring, Judd Nelson's fingerless glove, I remember. I once auditioned for a stage version of The Breakfast Club at university, and out of a fuckload of people was one of two people in running to play the Ally Sheedy role - but a slim modelly type got it, who was the director's girlfriend.  I was, of course, a Method Actress of a Basketcase at the time (at the time). This was the same year I played Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (all these Northwestern kids obviously were into adapting screen-to-stage). I wish I still had pictures. I remember one with me being all red pouty insouciance - I think when I was younger I was better at posing.