fourmothers

"Have you blogged today?" John asks me in Gchat. Like it's a bodily movement (it is).

Yes I am blogging twice. To get out all the toxicity.

So, I have been thinking how - inexact - I can be in interviews, which I should think about, probably, as it suggests probably a messy and inexact mind. Something has been bothering me about my answer to a question Jenna posed for me in the Bookforum interview, when she asked about how I've been influenced and perhaps catalyzed by writers such as (she named) Eileen Myles and Dodie Bellamy and Kathy Acker and (I added) Chris Kraus. And I said that they were "foremothers" to me, in a way.

The truth is, to call a living - I mean really living and still working and innovating writer - a foremother is an atrocious act. If I am even like 80 and still writing somehow and someone called me a "foremother" I'd kind of want to kick them in the teeth with my arthritic yet surprisingly agile limbs. It reminds me of Louise Bourgeois saying that she didn't want to be anyone's mother. I have been carrying this around with me, but it has felt fertile, meditating on this. I know I've blogged about this many times before on this blog, a discomfort and ambivalence towards the Oedipal/maternal model that feminism in general has set up (which has been articulated quite lucidly by Jack Halberstam in response to that Susan Faludi mess published in Harper's a while ago). I think I'm equally uncomfortable with this idea in terms of a genealogy of women writers, no matter how much I publicly and repetitively call attention to this genealogy, a move that Woolf first does in Chapter 4 of A Room of One's Own, wondering about women who lacked a literary tradition.

The problem with calling a woman writer a "foremother" - and there are probably many - but for one it suggests that women who are writers also have to be maternal and nurturing somehow to younger writers, which is an unbearable pressure, a false ideal, and isn't how I would describe any of the relationships/connections that I've had. It also suggests that somehow the foremother must be annihilated, or that the daughter must somehow overthrow her or face paralysis and stagnation. So yes, the issue with the Oedipal model, which Gilbert/Gubar articulate in their book on Victorian women writers and the characters they breed (even what I just did, the idea of the woman writer as pregnant, this metaphor of maternity/pregnancy, echoed by Artaud, Miller, etc., is kind of fucked when the woman writer does it).

What I guess I should have said is that I hope to somehow fit into the tradition of these named and extraordinarily influential writers (not just for me, but for many many other writers), and my own work has been inspired by how they have innovated and subverted the inclusion of the confessional and autobiographical in their novels. Although for many years as I was writing - and finishing my own novels - the only one of these writers I had really read was Acker. But I owe a debt-  and I think these four writers are quite integral to a crop of writing that's going on online and elsewhere, and have given huge amounts of permission.

CUNT-LER-ROMAN (bad horrible title)

I am home again, from visiting John in London, alone for one more week. The heat has broken here, with much rain, but in my cottage I feel the bliss of such a day. And I love days when I allow myself to be gentle on myself - these days I find I get more "work" done than other days actually - today things I can read/watch: Elia Kazan's The Arrangement and Barbara Loden's Wanda, to think about my essay that mostly revolves around Loden, Bunheads/Pretty Little Liars, and the new July Emily Books, Muriel Sparks, Loitering with Intent (and maybe more Muriel Sparks? What should I read?) I am lazy today - have not yet taken the baby anarchist for a walk, but this too, feels okay. Otherwise in London I eschewed Tate Modern to get Mia Farrow-ed, bought a too-expensive scarf at Liberty as well as a lipstick from the makeup counter, and otherwise felt extremely haunted by my novel Green Girl.

From a journal entry while in London, scribbled while at the cafe at the British Library, a familiar scene:

I feel pretty sure I might be the only one ever applying her make-up at the ladies room of the British Library. No, I'm SURE that's absolutely untrue but what is correct perhaps is my feeling. Doll eyes, gloss. Like yesterday watching the girl grotesquely slather make-up on her face, sitting across from her on the tube. God I loved her. The thick tannish stripes of foundation carving out chin, nose, cheeks. I sit on the trains here and watch and watch. I would write a million novels about female beauty and watching if I lived here. The Roma girls with chipped glitter nails and pearly cheap bows in their hair. One has a dot of mascara goop in her corner eye. Also hanging on to the rail with them an older woman in a green gauzey veil, secured with one pink pin. I stand there, swaying, and meditate on the pearly pinkness of the pin, this touching, frivolous detail.

Just met for a quick scalding cup of tea with the whipsmart Lauren Elkin, writer and critic who I share a Jean Rhys obsession with. She pronounces it "Reese" - the "s" sharply which I'm sure is correct. We talked about the paranoid experience of teaching Good Morning, Midnight, how much we hated the quasi-plagiarism of the recent biography of her, and the pathologizing of the Carole Angier bio. She is writing what looks to be a brilliant popular study of the flaneuse. Since she has lived in Paris ten years, she pronounces it correctly. I stutter when I say Kuntslerroman as we're discussing Sheila Heti. Reminded me of my childhood speech impediment, how I read more than spoke. I tell her of the wild FB debacle re: my verbing flaneuse in Heroines, how so many proper French speakers/translators convinced me this was an atrocious act. She finds this funny, and then says she thinks the invention of "flaneuse" as a verb would have worked, yet I took it out. Things I repeat too often, to everyone: my book deals with this. My book is about.

Intense familiarity in this space, a haunting. The sense of being prohibited, or perhaps a self-prohibition. Everyone in the cafe carrying their plastic baggies bearing laptop, pencils. Lunch over these laptops. Remembering days notebooking here about the novel, really my experiences in the city, not even having a proper diary practice yet, following John here while he did scholarly work, or sitting next to him at a cubicle in the reading room deciding to read all of Anna Kavan, or flipping through Elizabeth Smart's journals she cowrote with George Barker.

Sometimes I would like to know, to know what others know, to attempt to speak their language. I feel there's a level of certainty in that discourse I am curious about, like staunch believers in a religion. Is this what they refer to when they refer to epistemology? Structures of knowing. I don't feel like I know anything. A new feminine (or feminist?) epistemology? Or Chris Kraus' "lonely girl epistemology" - much more brilliant. Yesterday at the newly moved philosophy department of Foyles - writing down titles - to read for Shadow, to become again more...political. Theoretical? Politically theoretical? Remember how before Heroines rewrite began I was reading (trying to) Dialectic of Enlightenment and considering Sade's feud with Rousseau he carries out in the works that are works of political theory masquerading as pornographic novels. I downloaded Ugly Feelings on Kindle but haven't read it. Perhaps I should became an undergrad-like again and attempt the Frankfurt School. 

Sometimes I feel my talent is actually not my mind or language but my moods and need to distill them, sometimes philosophize and externalize them. Maybe a tenderness and sensitivity towards misfits.  A need to expose viscera of alienation.

John is texting me directions how I can meet him at Oxford Circus. Turn left at the library...

 Is it wrong to be naive with one's thinking? To arrive at conclusions of more pedigreed & cultivated men, albeit intuitively and with a vernacular language?

Can one reclaim the body of the girl from D&G, Tiqqun, others?

We discuss how when Woolf is older, she is less visible, able to "haunt the streets." This fact depresses yet thrills me.

(note later scribbled down, on train):

Writing quickly on train: Would rather write in woman's bathroom, watching girls and women come in and glance nervously at mirror, or in pigstye toilet or tearoom of Maison Bertaux. What I have perhaps is my feralness.