instead of yoga I am thinking about this

Some quick sketchy probably obnoxious notes after reading this DT Max interview on The Believer Tumblr re: the DFW bio:

- Bio endlessly written about in the literary equivalent of a news cycle. Angles manufactured and repeated. DFW death like a literary 9/11. We must talk about him endlessly or the terrorists have won. Maybe that's sacrosanct to think about it like that.

-On Twitter I noted how the trailer for the bio has an editor at Harper's opining: "If the human race survives, he will have had something to do with it." And I'm like, seriously, what the fuck. The project of canonization is more than nauseating. It's somehow totally separate from the work. It adds a veneer of kitsch to the proceedings. Because the conversation is now on the life, it looks at the work through the narrative of sentimentality and the human heart, and I'm not an expert on the writer, but I think there's a lot more interesting stuff/cultural commentary going on in the work itself besides that.

-I do find it intriguing that he voted for Reagan, but I also think there's something bizarre that we care. He was not a soothsayer of our time. I don't think.

-All the conversations ("news cycle") on Brett Easton Ellis/David Foster Wallace feud makes me realize how much the literary conversation pivots around a lot of dicks.

-I think it's right on to characterize Franzen/DFW as "literary athletes." I thought about this some more. I think there's a strain of athleticism in our current culture of "genius" novelists - which tends to be most male-identified except for I would add Zadie Smith. I don't think the idea of "athleticism" in fiction deals with the adjective "muscular," which I've never understood, but instead perhaps a hyperattention to language. But I also don't think I like athletic fiction. That seems like it's trying to pole-vault or win something. I am more interested in abjectness and failure.

-I think once we give up the idea of ever being geniuses our work can actually go to a more open space. I can't think of anything more oppressive and caging than the notion of genius. I used to want to be a genius. Now I'm glad I'm not. More interested in the amateur, in play, in failure, in messiness.

-That said, not all geniuses are oppressed, I don't think. Anne Carson. And her work functions in that sense of impossibility and almost in opposition to the market. But I think if you're aware or sure you're a genius, if you're so protective of your genius, that you will want to decimate anyone else breaching on your territory, well, I can't think of anything more depressing than that. Perhaps the way our culture makes and appoints geniuses needs to be examined. Perhaps those who are not appointed geniuses can just be freed up to experiment and fail.

ok I shouldn't end on such a downer point

I know I said I would try not to promote myself on the blog anymore, but I feel I'm really promoting Tamara Faith Berger, whose excellent, eviscerating Maidenhead is a novel all of you should read. Anyway, Tamara is reading tonight in NYC for the Emily Books anniversary party, and on Thursday at 7pm at Bluestockings on the LES we will be reading a bit from our newest novels and then having a longer talk about: the teenage girl, theory, porn, shame, writing. Hopefully I will not be boring. Or if I am boring, it will be in an interesting, meditative way, so that you can be open to the lulls in between speaking, like listening to Terry Grossy. Or how my students feel when I go on fifteen-minute tangents trying to theorize the shape of the trajectory of history + activism, as I did yesterday, circling around it the whole time my ambivalence towards feminism, while they're like: For fuck's sake this is an intro class drop some dates and tell us to read Elizabeth Cady, who the hell is this woman Michel Foucault?

So please come!

Here is my attempt to think about Maidenhead: notes for the discussion: which I thought I'd share, which should show my inability to string together anything coherent as of late:

-postmodern girl Bataille, like if Blue of Noon was narrated by a teenage girl who gets full and sick on reading Bataille+Simone Weil and developing her own theory of the abject. Blue of Noon if set half in a Florida tourist trap and half in Toronto.
-Reminds me of Elfriede Jelinek's Wonderful, Wonderful Times, although about a very contemporary now—as opposed to post-WWII consciousness dealing with race + class consciousness in its connection to sex and porn
-Not correct to think of it as pornography—instead, like Jelinek or Breillat, Berger subverts and questions and plays with ideas of pornography, with even ideas of rape. 

no one wants to read essays

After writing this calm reflective post on Monday about how enlightened and detached I've become, I did the neurotic depressive's equivalent of going off the wagon (following the AA metaphor through completely, replace druggy bender with zombie-ing out on the latter-day, bad seasons of Gilmore Girls for two straight days not leaving the couch, and refusing to go work out. Alas, I am never anonymous.) The most literal reason is that the community center pool where I swim along with elderly ladies doing water aerobics is closed this week for cleaning.

So, I fell off the schedule. I'm also stressed out about so much traveling this week - New York for a day, and then Chicago (family) for the weekend. And I'm completing and anticipating interviews for Heroines. I feel I've become a really sucky interviewee. Or perhaps I've always been. No, I think I've always been. A writer I know in the area who I sometimes hang out with lectured me a few months ago regarding this aspect of my being-interviewed style. We were getting our toenails painted at the time, at the truly gross place in the strip mall in Chapel Hill, which I want to write about someday, how gross and gothic the nail salons are here, and there's so few of them, and they're these oozey intimate disgusting experiences that I kind of crave and love, and how they're these grotesque mise-en-scenes of late capitalism/hoarding. Anyway, my friend said, "No one wants to read essays." She might not have been talking explicitly about the interviews I have given but it was kind of there. We were talking about Sheila Heti, how talented she is in the art of the interview, both giving and receiving, how she listens, and asks questions, even when she's being interviewed, how light and clever they are, exactly what people want to read in an online format.

By contrast, I feel I'm always lecturing when I'm being interviewed, like trying to explain the book against detractors. I also am always asked very intense philosophical questions. One of these days I want someone to ask me about how teen soap operas regularly delve into the Fitzgerald myth (Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl.) I feel I come off fairly humorless and heavy in interviews, I mean I always write a fucking book. This is something I need to go into an addiction group about: my addiction to thinking everything I write has to be a fucking book. I think this was the one point in the Bookforum review that I think hit home—her characterization of Heroines as lacking in wit, at times. It was something I was very aware of when I was writing it, and reading it. There are acerbic or light moments in it—but it's written in a depressive mode, mostly. I am beginning to wonder how to get out of writing in that mode. I am beginning to wonder how to get out of that mode, in general.

I had a lot more to write, but think I'll end here. No one wants to read essays, anyway.