Frances Farmer Is My Sister

and...

2012-01-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

I am feeling a bit better. I am sleeping now, at night. We have kicked puppy out of bed. All of his wriggling and rearranging constantly at night. Miracles that can perform. I took down my last post, because, I don't know...it felt too much. Perhaps I will erase every post now after I write it. Possible. Today is 70 degrees in North Carolina. Out to lunch I wear my weird black trenchcoat (intermittent rain) and my black jeggings and my platformed heels, in order for one day to expose my red toenails. Perhaps it is a false spring. But things feel more...possible today. Today notes about multiple personality disorder in the dark green notebook, for Shadow. Forms of hysteria. Perhaps I am more than a little hysterical myself. Do I somatize everything or is there an organic source? The mysteries of our bodies. The dog is sunning himself outside. I am typing this on the back porch.

Girl, Interrupted

2012-01-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

the girl who cried Woolf

happy birthday, Virginia

My mind lately has been almost completely blank. This is probably why I have not written here, not here, anywhere, in fact. There have been some good things going on - I was offered a special section of Women and Madness at a local university at the last minute - and it's glorious to be teaching again, driving to Raleigh once a week. For reading: Wide Sargasso Sea, The Yellow Wallpaper, a bit of Nadja, Freud's Dora and Anna O., Cixous and Clement's sparring over the hysterics in Newly Born Woman, Lisa Appignanesi's Mad Bad and Sad (which I don't love, and disagree with often, but is less dated than Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady or Phyllis Chesler, both of which I teach through, as well as obviously Foucault and some Ian Hacking), Gilbert and Gubar, The Bluest Eye, The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, Marcia Angell on the medical model in the NYRB, Marsha Linehan, Bhanu's Schizophrene, an ethnography of Malaysian female factory workers and possession, Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa. Basically a lot of it is Heroines, I am lecturing in some way through Heroines. Last night I taught the Jean Rhys - and was reminded again what a perfect text it is. I prefer, personally, the ecstatic nihilism of Good Morning, Midnight, I think, but what Rhys accomplishes, what she performs in the novel is everything to me that literature should be, everything I feel I've failed at as a writer, failed at but am still trying at—what an amazing FEAT of empathy the work is, in so many ways. What a self-immolation. What a glorious song. And yesterday I thought about madness and language, how madness is silence, suppression, and the violence within the text—and also the violence in general of naming, of renaming, how that can surgically alter identity. And then I read this fantastic blog post by Bhanu, Schizophrenia and the Institution, that made me think of these ideas more.

There are a lot of things now that cannot be said, easily, maybe. Not trying to be too cryptic. My health problems have become more chronic, and the migraines that were symptomatic are now becoming absolutely pervasive, daily. Today I sat in the office of Specialist # 3, the ENT miracle man, whose nurses were amazing grandma types who asked me if I needed the lights out and gave me Jolly Ranchers. I sat and waited and reread Eula Biss' The Pain Scale on my iPhone. Tests and more tests. New medicines compounded. Referral for a neurologist, for biofeedback. This morning, earlier, maybe the worst headache of my life. And then now I have been regularly dosing myself to make the headaches go away, which has been obliterating. I think I'm going to write an essay on all of this, about these experiences I have barely spoken about on the blog, which maybe in some ways has made me feel alienated from the blog. As if I am being only selectively selectively authentic culling from my life. I'm sick of being a sick person. I'm sick of being a sick woman. I keep on saying I will write an essay on all this, on illness and creativity, on immune system disorders, on inheritance and mothers and our narratives of our bodies, and I order up Flannery O'Connor's, Carson MccCullers bios from the library, I read a not-very-good bio on Mary Shelley, all these women and their sick private parts, but I cannot read because I am too fatigued lately, too sickly, I cannot summon myself, I cannot be summoned, most of the time. I am depressing myself with this line of thinking. Things are not so bad. Some really wonderful things have been happening. People are reading and talking about Green Girl, which thrills me. I am going to be participating in a symposium on Violence and Community at Naropa, where I will have to give a performance or put up an installation, as well as a talk and being on a panel, and that feels like really exciting scary new territory for me. There is this class. There is the possibility now of other work, maybe even a slight possibility of permanent work, which would be extraordinary. I will be doing a reading in Asheville soon, and two readings in New York, and I will be back in Chicago for AWP.

Also, also, I went back and forth over email with the whipwhipsmart blogger The Rejectionist over literatures of the girl, and Green Girl specifically, and it was wonderful discoursing with such a keen hilarious mind. The interview's over at The Rejectionist.

the creative process

2012-01-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

I have been cycling through very old email, in an attempt to find notes for something, and I was really struck by how many times I pitched Green Girl, the current novel that's out, to countless countless agents published writers editors, etc. for like YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS. It's kind of funny and depressing. I thought I'd share with you my very first pitch, written months after I moved back from London, a little over 6 years ago. Maybe this is gratuitous, I don't know. I would finish some form of the draft about five years ago, and the novel, basically remained the same. Except Italian puppeteer became a Scottish ex-divinity school student, even though in real life at some point there was an Italian puppeteer. And I took out the mother-daughter grief stuff, and maybe crucially at some point added in this character of the maternal yet mean narrator. And I didn't think of her as suffering from a PTSD. And she never returns home in the novel. And Agnes became a barista not an art student. (I also got better I think at writing pitch letters. Obviously here I thought I had to dictate everything that happens in the book). It's AMAZING to me though that I pitched an agent after working on it seriously for one month (after accruing notes for the year in London). This was I think a week or two after I decided to quit my holiday retail job at Club Monaco at the Old Orchard Mall, and say, fuck it, I'm either going to be poor and write books or be a little less poor and not write books. A lot of the retail experience channeled in the novel was from that holiday job, especially the high-street clothing store at the end of the novel (although I also worked for like a day at the Body Shop on Oxford Street, and regularly went to the Topshop at Oxford Circus).

From: Kate Zambreno [mailto:XXXXXX]
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 6:21 PM
To: BIG IMPORTANT AGENT
Subject: you told me to let you know if I was working on a novel...

Hi BIG IMPORTANT AGENT -

I don't know if you remember me, but two Junes ago I sent you several of my columns I wrote for the alternative weekly Newcity magazine. The columns were entitled "Fresh Hell," and they were written under the pseudonym Janey Smith. I was curious whether the columns could ever be translated into book form, and had contacted you because I researched literary agents on the Internet and respected some of the female writers you represent. You had said that although you enjoyed reading the columns, the voice of the narrator was too frantic for you to see them translate into book form, and to contact you again when I was working on a longer project.

Well, that September I moved to London for a year, with my husband, who was attending a year-long graduate program. During that time I worked in the fiction department at Foyle's Bookshop, running the cult fiction department, read a lot of modernist women writers such as Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Anna Kavan (a long essay on her work that I wrote is coming out in Dalkey Archive's CONTEXT this month), as well as contemporary writers such as Elfriede Jelinek, Deborah Levy and Christine Schutt, and worked on notes for two novels. That year I learned a lot about fiction, about writing fiction, and about what kind of fiction I wanted to write.

I've been back in Chicago since September, where I've been teaching classes on Women Writing and Contemporary Culture at a local communitycollege. The past month I have really dug into my first novel, working from notes. I have about 10,000 words so far, and wanted to know whether you would be willing to take a look at it, and what length you would be willing to take a look at it.

The novel is currently called "Green Girl," named after the line in "Hamlet" where Polonius calls Ophelia that. It can best be descibed as a much more dark and hopefully poetic Fresh Hell, third-person interior, but less frantically paced or glib. It is not as autobiographical as Fresh Hell, however, although there are of course autobiographical elements. The central character is a girl in her twenties named Ruth, an American who works in the fragrance department at Harrod's in London (she calls it Horrid's), but who aspires to work in the make-up department. She's a bit of a depressive, a bit of a dreamer, and suffering from what can best be described as a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, along with an obsessive fear of death, and continually flashes back to scenes of her mother's illness and death the previous year, all mixed in with a cruel affair she had with a boy in Chicago.

In London while living in a woman's dorm, she sleeps far too much, works in a sex shop which she promptly quits, starts a toxic friendship with an Australian art student named Agnes, who has conversations by describing films from beginning to end and who Ruth later moves in with to a dingy flat on the East End, develops a fascination for the Hari Krishnas, rides the train a lot and walks around in central London, deals with a mean clique of girls at Harrod's, buys a very expensive dress that she cannot afford, develops crushes on two men because they vaguely remind her of the boy in Chicago, begins a platonic yet intense relationship with an Italian puppeteer, and cuts her hair off to look like Jean Seberg in "Breathless" but has the unconscious effect of resembling her cancer-stricken mother. The novel ends with her returning home to Chicago for the one-year anniversary of her mother's death. It hopefully will deal with the themes of home versus away, being a tourist in a stranger land, of death and desire, of grief, on a certain type of girl caught in the rabbit hole, and their friendships with each other, and on mother/daugher relationships in general. And, of course, it's about make-up, which is kind of a central metaphor in the book. Even though I'm writing about shopping and cosmetics and love affairs, it will hopefully not be perceived as "chick lit," I am definitely aiming for something much more literary like Jean Rhys.

I know I should not be worried about publishing this novel before I finish it, and you are the only agent I have ever contacted. I just think the novel has the potential to be good, and I wanted to know what you thought about it.

Please let me know if I can send something to you. And if so, at what length and to what address.

Best

Kate Zambreno

this

2012-01-16T18:36:00.000-08:00

is raw and emotional and I love it. the rejectionist is my new favorite essay-blogger. we had a conversation about books that she might be posting in a few days, but I feel what she writes about here, sometimes, the sense of blah-blah-blah talking about books we've already written, books we are going to be written, blah-blah-blah. Better to talk about other people's books. When I have been invited to dinner parties (rarely) I go straight to the books, I have conversations instead with the bookshelves. Speaking of which, just booked my tix today for AWP.

funny

2012-01-11T07:17:00.000-08:00

So...Green Girl was chosen as one of the 16 books in The Morning News/Powell's Tournament of Books where "a ridiculously small and poorly informed group of TMN editors and contributors have chosen 16 of the most cherished, hyped, ignored, and/or enthusiastically praised books of the year to enter into a month-long tournament, NCAA-basketball-madness style, beginning March 7, 2012." This is very fun and bizarre. The winner gets a live rooster.

You can also vote in what they call their zombie poll, where the reader favorite gets an extra life or something. Click here to vote! You just have to click on a radio button. Easy-peasy.

Hopefully this gets more people to read the book?! I guess people write about it and the judges write about reading it so that will all be quite interesting and fun. In the semifinals, Green Girl is up against Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, judged by Edith Zimmerman of The Hairpin! So that's exciting.

Caitlin Flanagan

2012-01-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

Writes about Joan Didion in The Atlantic and can you guys read it so I have someone to discuss it with? It's strange today I'm searching the ubiquity of The Virgin Suicides on Tumblr and pondering the appeal of this melancholy, deeply romanticized text of girlhood, both the book and the film, and I started thinking about Joan Didion, and how I should reread Joan Didion, because in the whole recent brouhaha on girl-memoiring everyone kept on citing Didion like a saint and I kept on thinking that this is the effect of canonization, and here comes this Caitlin Flanagan essay, and everyone's posting it on Facebook, but it comes off like all of Caitlin Flanagan's work so essentialist of this "eternal girlhood" stuff that it makes me uneasy.

I once watched a hysterically sycophantic male academic ask Didion about her description of what she wore in Haight-Ashbury so that she could pass with both the straights and the freaks. “I’m not good with clothes,” he admitted, “so I don’t remember what it was.”

Not remembering what Joan wore in the Haight (a skirt with a leotard and stockings) is like not remembering what Ahab was trying to kill in Moby-Dick.

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair.

I mean, I get her point, and I probably have made the same assertion about Jean Rhys (but more, girls should read Jean Rhys, not girls do read Jean Rhys, the difference seems crucial). And I adore Didion - I mean, I am a writer who went to a sport-competitive journalism school, the New Journalists were my literary lifeline. But my early twenties was way more gonzo and tequila than flowers in my fucking hair - I mean, I am and was drawn to Didion because she was a basketcase who made lists of her clothes, also because she's a brilliant, beautiful writer, and yet... Flanagan seems to dismiss Didion the writer and suggest that like Plath Didion is idolized for a persona, one she characterizes as that of the depressive pixie dream girl:

Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

This reminds me to order up Flanagan's new Girl Land from the library. I'm stewing in these things and wondering what's there-there.

Tim Jones-Yelvington on Green Girl

2012-01-04T05:44:00.000-08:00

The always erudite Tim Jones-Yelvington recommends Green Girl over at The Lit Pub. I really enjoyed reading his essay, as Tim really pokes into what I was attempting with the novel. I love especially what he has to say about writing into, as opposed to counter to, abjection, as well as the psychic and physical alienation of the retail experience.

I have been meditating lately about the aesthetics of depression, which in some way I attempt in Green Girl - although the "breakdown" scene is much shorter in the published version that it was in previous drafts, originally I had Ruth kind of stay inside and sleep all day for at least 30 pages, it was argued to me time and time again that this was boring, but I wanted to somehow convey the banality and cruelty of being depressed. I have been rather, voluptuously, intensely depressed the past week, although it's more complex I suppose, this vicious cycle of this illness I've been suffering from the past year or two, my flare-ups, my Flannery O'Connor invalidism. When I can stay awake I have been cycling through the entire oeuvre of Kirsten Dunst, and making notes about depression in cinema, in thinking about Melancholia. This will form an essay, eventually, about the "manic-depressive pixie dream girl." I think I'm going to take on this trope of the "manic pixie dream girl" everyone has been throwing around lately as what should not be represented (in cinema, in literature). I will argue that underneath the surface in reality the dream girl is quite depressed, and to fold this into a discussion of the actress, the ontology of cinema, and representations of female depression, and how this all relates to the star system and the genealogy of actresses, and women, unraveling. The term originated with Nathan Rabin reviewing Kirsten Dunst's performance in Elizabethtown in the A/V club, but has come to stand in for the lack of inner life of a female character. But I find it really intriguing that Kirsten's breakdown and subsequent entering of rehab for depression came around this time.Anyway. Overall I think the essay will be a close reading of Melancholia. I am thinking this essay might be for Slapping Clark Gable, or I might try to publish it somewhere, where, I do not know, it doesn't matter, perhaps.

Anyway. I'm also reading Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles - I love, anything Thomas Bernhard - and meditating on what would it look like if I wrote an entire book in which the main character was depressed - where would be the movement, would it be readable. Less about the machinery of depression - the medicalized patient - but more about a woman in a room. Where would the urge and viscera come from, as issued from a static body.

My Top Twenty Posts of FFIMS over Past Two Years

2012-01-02T07:45:00.000-08:00

Hello readers new and old! Some of my favorite or most remarked upon posts the past two years of FFIMS, w/commentary.Somewhat emphasizing the early stuff, when I was really trying to essay, some of the oomph or viscera at least or feeling behind it going into the book Heroines, out in September.

1. 12/31/2009. The first one. Titled "My Vomitous Blog Manifesto." Basically meta about the whole experience, and gets into Dodie Bellamy's essay "Barf Manifesto," hence, title. Really quite ejaculatory but ecstatic I think. At this point I had no idea how to write a blog, and every time I typed a title, I linked to it on Amazon, which I don't really do, anymore.

2. 1/2/2010. The second one. "Consciousness is a Surface: Literary Style Icons (Part One)". I think I like these earlier few posts the most, the essay-posts kind of stopped except sporadically when I got heated over something once I was assigned the Semiotext(e) book. Also notable: this is the post where I first met Kate Durbin in the comments, who at one later point in the comments sections agreed that if I die young (youngish, I turn 34 tomorrow) she will curate an exhibit of my clothes, like Louise Bourgeois did with herself or Dodie Bellamy did with Kathy Acker.

3. 1/8/2010. "The Anorexic Text: Consciousness is a Surface (Part Two)." This was the post where I began to theorize my ideas of the "anorexic" or the "bulimic text." I have since revised these ideas, I now think of it as the "implicit" versus the "explicit" text. But I think what I was really trying to figure out was the male modernist's male experimentalist's absolutely ego-strewn bravado, and something about automatic writing, who practiced it, who was allowed.

4. 1/12/2010. "Were the male Surrealists bulimic? were they feminine? are these stupid questions?". Began rereading Blue of Noon and discoursing on Tropic of Cancer.

5. 1/22/2010. Tis Pity She's a Whore: The Prostitute in Henry Miller & Sade + Best Cinematic Hookers. This is when I, once again, abandoned Mad Wife, a project I had worked on for years, and began working again on my triptych of an American Fritzl, Under the Shadow of My Rooof. I'm still really interested in these ideas. This is also the day I got into a kerfuffle on HTML Giant regarding Jimmy Chen's post on Zelda Fitzgerald, which has since been taken down.

6. 1/31/2010. The Mother-Lover. This post marks being first friends with S. at Repat Blues, and us exchanging Duras and Collobert, and my first meditations on not only the jouissance of discovery and reading but also trying to theorize this feminine community online.

7. 2/4/2010. Borderline/Feels Like I'm Going to Lose My Mind. I like this post because on one hand it's my reading of Bracha Ettinger's Matrixial Borderspace, but it's really about how flittingly and promiscuously and emotionally I read theory.

8. 2/26/2010. We Wear the Red Garbs of Criminals. On violence + the Papin Sisters, etc. Also the rant is kind of violent.

9. 3/21/2010. Working. Meditating on class issues and a sense of being outside. I think again at this point I was shut out of Ph.D. programs the second year in a row.

10. 4/1/2010. To collect the fragments of the afternoon. Meditations on the hysteric, using a hysterical style.

11. 4/11/2010. Denver: Notebook. This is when I start to break down and freak out about being an author, a minor minor invisible one at that, as I attend the AWP conference in Denver. Kind of a twin with the previous post, Terminal. At this point the dread of my author-function begins to filter into everything I write.

12. 4/23/2010. Yes I am Frump. You can Go Fuck Yourself. Simone De Beauvoir's ass is also in Heroines.

13. 5/4/2010. What does this Represent, What do You Represent. Young nubile Hannah Wilke versus older bloated cancered Hannah Wilke, Marina Abramovic, Sasha Grey, the novels of Elfriede Jelinek. I'm still really interested in these ideas for a few essay book I call Slapping Clark Gable.

14. 6/2/2010. List-less. Rallying against the New Yorkers 30 under 30 issue.

(NOTE: At this point, in the summer of 2010, my uncle, my dad's identical twin is dying, and I'm shuttling to Chicago every weekend to help take care of him, I'm fucking up the first draft of the Semiotext(e) book, and the blog turns into a short, clipped journal of sorts, for the most part, with occasional essays. At this point I also start to question the blog constantly.)

15. 8/30/2010. Coming to Writing(Again). My uncle dies. The book is turned in yet fucked. I start to write blog posts again.

16. 12/9/2010 Flattened. On rejection.

Most of the posts in 2011 are very bloggy, as I was deep at work reading for the rewrite of the Semiotext(e) book, now called Heroines. Although there are some essays in the midst of the diary writing and blogginess.

17. 3/27/2011. O Face: Poetry and Fashion and Oprah's Magazine. This was one of those posts where I was responding to a controversy in the lit scene, namely, the recent spread in O Magazine starring young female poets, but really made me want to dialogue about a lot of the anti-fashion vibes I was getting in response to this, wanting to create a continuum with these modernist women I was working with.

18. 6/7/2011. The Golden Age. Ranting against Woody Allen's new film and the general mythology of authordom versus musedom, a kind of ranty version of what I write in Heroines.

19. 11/21/2011. Why I Am Afraid Of Being Institutionalized. My response to J.S.A. Lowe's amazing essay in HTML Giant about being outed as a blogger at her creative writing Ph.D., looking at these personal literary blogs as form.

20. 12/24/2011. All the Sad Young Pretty Girls. On Cum-On-His-Face-Gate.

bonne anniversaire

2011-12-30T08:47:00.000-08:00

Marilyn as Clara Bow for Life magazine

So I'm thinking here today about two birthdays. One, I turned 34 today. I am one year away from a personal scary age (all the 5s and 10s are scary to me, I am one of those people who mourn and turn inwards on birthdays, immersing myself in all of these philosophical inquiries about identity and life, probably too because it's the day before the end of the year). It is strange to celebrate a birthday when one is technically unemployed - in some ways I feel I'm accomplishing what I want to so far, as a writer, or feel okay where I'm at, in other ways I feel I still have to figure out how to basically survive at life. I am seriously considering enrolling as an undergraduate at the university here in the fall, to intensely take languages and see if I can maybe get into a comp lit program here, also because of a fierce desire to live abroad, or at least travel more abroad, and also to translate. I am thinking of taking intense French and German in the summer, I also want to take: Swedish, Italian, Portuguese (Portuguese for Lispector, Swedish because of the amazing-sounding women writers Johannes Goransson writes about.) I know it might seem to late to embark on these endeavors, but I've always been a late bloomer. If I do reenroll as an undergrad I also want to potentially take world religion classes, or at least go to a temple, as in my twenties I learned my mother was Jewish and I've never even been inside of a temple. More goals, some surface, others vague: to finish or figure out my American Fritzl triptych; to begin work on my post-feminist essays set in the South, which will involve rereading all of Kathy Acker and spending time in the Acker archive at Duke; to finish doing readings for Green Girl and embark on the Heroines tour without having it eat my soul; to continue to grow my hair out so that I look like St. Vincent or Maya Deren (my hair's like an inch long now, it'll take a while); oh, to fucking get some PAYING work here. Also: in 2012 I will try my damnedest to not read anything toxic or negative on the Internet (especially about anything I have written). I will try not to get into any more Internet altercations. They are exhausting and draining.

Tomorrow it will also be the two year anniversary of Frances Farmer is My Sister. Two years ago tomorrow, on December 31, 2009, I was bored in Akron, Ohio, and had just the day before turned 32, and was reading Tropic of Cancer again for the first time since I was in my early 20s, and wanted to talk to someone about it, and thought, hmm, I should start writing essays for such-and-such-a-place, I liked this idea, of trying to write essays about literature, and instead I opened up a Blogger account and John quickly put together the header with Frances Farmer kicking and screaming and I started typing into a void, not really editing myself in any way, not even really understanding the subculture or subsubcultures of the Interwebs. I wrote these posts fueled not like Kerouac on speed and split pea, but by a sort of anarchy and fervent belief in my own anonymity. Then one or two months later Chris Kraus contacted me about maybe trying to write a book about the women of modernism for Semiotext(e) (that sounds like a calendar: Djuna would be January, of course, Jean Rhys would be April, no Vivien(ne), would be crueller). And that's that. Then my blog totally sucked and has been limping along broken and barking out the quotidian the next one year and 7 months while I freaked out and tried to write a book that combined criticism and memoir. I'm kidding. Kind of.

I have been putting together a list of my favorite posts of the past two years, I'll post it soon.

I hope the New Year brings you anarchy or calm, whatever you desire.

books + pictures of the books

2011-12-28T07:44:00.000-08:00

I have the most monster massive sinus headache today, which seems to just be constant lately. So much so I dreamed I had a brain tumor. Which I'm sure I don't. I wish I could be like Simone Weil with my sinus headaches, working tirelessly in the fields and arranging worker protests and writing crystalline fragments in my notebook, but instead I'm like Vivien(ne) Eliot. Although with the weird deer (one of my nicknames for Jean Genet, I also call him Jelinek, little deer, I call him so many things he doesn't probably know what the fuck his name is) it is impossible to be bedded, as I would like, to go out all Bronte, and I have to run around picking up after him and telling him not to chew everything, he has an especial taste for our vintage modern furniture, like the two wooden Eames chairs we got at the antique mall in Akron. I think perhaps I'm allergic to the dog. Anyway. I'm allergic to work today. I was thinking of books I want to read in the future, that I want to buy, so here's the most banal post ever, here are the books I want to read, buy, that I have been reading about. If I had a book review I would assign these to be reviewed, I haven't read them reviewed most places. Does anyone want to design my book review? Like very professionally? I probably need that first.

Body Sweats, the "Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven" (MIT Press)

who I actually write about in detail in Heroines, imagining if she lived in Ohio like I was at the time (blah, blah, blah, me, blah blah blah)

Soulstorm by Clarice Lispector, a collection (New Directions)

I need to totally get into more Clarice Lispector, I mean Hour of the Star is a major

inspiration for me, as well as her cronicas, but I need to get more deeply into the oeuvre of Clarice L. New Directions is publishing new translations of her work in the spring. I emailed Bookforum and said I would do like a long essay on Lispector's work, but they never got back to me. I would still like to, just to read and thoughtfully consider, which I guess I can do anyway. The process of essaying helps sometimes. I knew a boy in grad school who later became a Lispector scholar, and we were intense intimates for a while, even sleeping in the same bed, without sex. I think the biggest Lispector scholar, or one of the biggest, is here at UNC-Chapel Hill actually. Anyway. Jackie Wang told me I should read this, along with Barbara Comyn, who is also on my list.

I really want to read this, and the author is a professor of ethics and women's studies at Duke. By the way, my puppy totally has pica. He's obsessed with chewing on wheels and anything metal. It's bizarre.

This is a bad image. Sorry. It's called Scenes of Seduction, about prostitution and hysteria in 19th century France. I've read some of it, her chapter on Hersilie Rouy, which is fucking fantastic. I'm really interested in sentimental portraits of prostitutes in the 19th century.

new.inquiry

2011-12-27T06:40:00.000-08:00

Sitting here with a dyspeptic Jean Genet on my lap, trying to type. We've had to take away his food for 12 hours, as he's been ill (god, one becomes so familiar with the kitschy language of bowel movements having a baby-anything, the petsitter who comes and leaves notes for "Jean Genet's diary" (which cracks me up every time, my canine thief's journal, all poo-poo and pee-pee, #1 and #2, etc). So now he's sweet and lethargic and sleepy, when often at this time of day he's a terrorist befitting his namesake. I joked to John, we should do this all the time! Then realized of course this was the operating ethos of many a mental asylum - keep the patients limp and tractable.

Where was I? I think I missed closing a parenthetical there. Fuck it.

Oh, I wrote an addendum to the last post, at the bottom of the post, with some links. I've agreed to let Thought Catalog republish the post, after some thought of my own. So there's that. I guess the first excerpt from Heroines out in the world. I've definitely been thinking a lot since all of this Marie Calloway hullabaloo, thinking about the sex/post-f's book Slapping Clark Gable that I wrote a proposal for last month, it's currently being read by an agent, although I wonder whether I will ever have an agent, perhaps there's something untouchable about my writing, perhaps that's okay, and it needs to remain that way. But the book will deal with fucking and rape fantasy and romance novels and Sasha Grey and Last Tango in Paris and Gone with the Wind and Joyce Carol Oates and the rhetoric behind SlutWalk and Marina Abramovic/other gorgeous performance artists, and the novels of Kathy Acker and Elfriede Jelinek, and...etc....Basically looking at the messiness of my current, and other's contemporary feminisms, the messiness of our desires.

Oh, I was thinking maybe I should start my own online journal, maybe in place of FFIMS, which I wonder if it's run its course, for me. Like my own attempt at Thought Catalogue or HTML Giant or New Inquiry (the journal not-referenced, consistently referenced around this whole MC hullabaloo). About pop culture, literature, politics, etc. A public intellectual journal, with a feminist/queer slant/attention, or at least consciousness. More formalized/finished essay pieces. Reviews, long-form essays. Highlighting what I see as a new form of criticism, not the old traditional academic guard. I don't know. It sounds like a lot of work. But that's what I've been thinking today. Thoughts on this? I would do it if I meditated on it and realized there was a need for it in the culture. To represent and meditate on subcultures and mainstream culture. There is Montevidayo, one of my favorite sites, with beyond brilliant critics (I wrote a list in Heroines of my favorite online essayists, and realized later a good quarter of them publish on that space), but often the conversation there, however rigorous, turns back to the question of aesthetics, often poetry, which is needed and necessary, etc., but I'm interested perhaps in an inquiry that goes outwards, as opposed to inwards. Does that make sense?

meditating on various boys' clubs, when coming in over the transom...Helen Frankenthaler, RIP. I think she was one of my favorite Abstract Expressionists.This is her "Red Sea."

All the Sad Young Pretty Girls

2011-12-24T07:17:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning feeling a bit flattened and depressed. I don't know why. I think it's because I was disturbed or agitated by what I was reading last night, and perhaps the only way to get it out there is to write about it here, attempt to formulate more of a theory or thesis or answer (I was interviewed for a teaching job last week, over the phone. I was asked about Heroines, what my thesis was, by the interviewer, a male philosopher. After some stuttering about various feminisms and girls, I finally answered: my writing doesn't have a thesis). Last night I lay in bed and read all about the hullabaloo surrounding this young writer who goes by the pseudonym of Marie Calloway, who has written pieces about her sexual exploits before on Thought Catalog, usually with accompanying, femme-enfant portraits despite her otherwise anonymity. She recently published a long memoir piece on her Tumblr, since deleted, detailing explicitly a weekend interlude with a male intellectual about twice her age, whose name is pretty easy to discern and even though I had never heard of him before is apparently some major presence in the Internet intelligentsia, for lack of a better phrase. This memoir piece was originally accompanied, allegedly, with a grainy camera photo of Marie with this guys' cum on her face, an event detailed within the piece. Later Tao Lin published the story on Muumuu House, and in the process certain facts were left out, and the guy's name was changed, hilariously, to Adrien Brody.

the author known as Marie Calloway

All this was enough to create something like a shitstorm in the online literary world at least, with a frenzy of pieces written about this, and around this, including a large profile of Marie Calloway in the New York Observer, an essay by Roxane Gay on HTML Giant wondering about the ethics of confessionalism, and another essay by Emily Gould on her Emily Magazine placing Marie Calloway in a literary tradition of explicit writers of the self (and sex) like Dodie Bellamy's The Buddhist and Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, which I certainly don't disagree with, although I have some issue with the notion that Marie wasn't herself aware of a female literary tradition (which is more of a philosophical concern regarding our usual cultural assumption that the girl is naive or intuitive). The essays I read around this piece were thoughtful, although many of the comments around this were demoralizing to me and painful to read, mostly because of the assumption that "Adrien Brody" lacked literary merit: her story read only as a non-self-aware "true confessions," read only as the diary-blog of a young, cute, fuckable and fucked girl. An assessment I definitely do not agree with.

Perhaps I was feeling sore because of a recent review of Green Girl, my recently out novel that certainly details the ambivalent messy sexual exploits of a pretty young ingenue, obsessed with the French New Wave, but more Jean Seberg or Catherine Deneuve to Marie Calloway's Anna Karina (as the New York Observer describes her, although if Marie Calloway is a New Wave muse, she is one by way of Sasha Grey, the extremely literate porn star referenced in "Adrien Brody," who once said her favorite scene from film is that scene in Pierrot le Fou where Anna Karina turns to Jean-Paul Belmondo as they're lying on the beach and says simply: Fuck Me). In this recent review, the reviewer took issue with my taking on the existential crises of a PYT (her phrase) as a subject of literature, at all, in some ways echoing some of the uninspired discourse around Marie Calloway's story. The reviewer writes:

Sometimes a book’s idea, not its execution, can throw you into a rant. Isn’t this angsty-PYT stuff boring to anyone else? Stories of big-city-living with usually white, early-20s, sexually active, generally confused women can be unparalleled in how rote they are. It doesn’t matter if the woman at the center of it is quirky, tragically clueless, impossibly squeamish, or whatever endearing personality trait you’d like to affix onto her. It can be a boring story, where nothing surprising happens and no one learns anything. And when coming-of-age stories are boring, they are less palatable to people who aren’t going or haven’t gone through the exact same things at the exact same time.

I'm actually surprised I didn't get a lot more reviews like this of Green Girl - it was actually what I was expecting, because historically, the novel of the girl has already been dismissed, her coming-of-age is not seen as important philosophical stuff for literature (too frivolous, or too boring). This doesn't only come out of the dominant discourse about what literature should be, who should be allowed to write it, how it should behave, swallowing T.S. Eliot's New Criticism and Flaubert's idea of the novel, but has also been echoed historically by the Second Wave feminists, who look down on heroines who dare to be ambiguous and not empowered. (Angela Carter looking down on Jean Rhys' "dippy dames" - I consider Jean Rhys the ancestor of a writer like Marie Calloway, albeit one who has edited her work intensely to be as elegant and economical as possible). In Heroines, I take issue with Simone De B's dismissal of women writing literature as well as her wholesale dismissal of the girl. I try to relocate the girls' diary, and then now of course the girls' public diary, her Tumblr, her blog, as not only a mode that allows her to come to writing, but also as a theater of potentially great feeling and discovery, of experimentalism and play. I write in Heroines: "Disgust for Anais Nin is a disgust for the girls with their Livejournals."

In the Observer profile Marie is quoted as saying, “I wrote to express my worldview/subjectivity because it felt then that no one had any idea." Isn't this why people write? Why is her crisis not read as existential? Because she writes about Forever 21 or hot shorts or nail polish or wanting to look cute, amidst all of her agony of wanting to be seen by this intellectual father-figure, and I say father-figure in terms of her desire to be a writer, to be taken seriously, to be read, to be part of the conversation? In Green Girl I cast Ruth as the blonde idealized naif, who is seen as the ultimate cipher in society, a sort of false cultural ideal, cast in films, literature, as mute. We may not like her, but she is what we have been given by the culture, and what we all must recognize with and against, and for some, through. We're bombarded with images of the pretty young girl, and if she's only an image, and never given a voice, even a flawed, imperfect, bad-faithed perspective, this is a huge fucking problem. (Of course, we need a diversity of voices, and a greater recognition of the diversity of female experiences, but that shouldn't take off the table the subverting of this glossy image that the dominant culture itself has created, even as a subject of literature. I am struck by how many girls of all backgrounds and positions have written to me that they saw a mirror of themselves in my Ruth, which reminds me how much this narrative of the girl by the girl is actually lacking in our culture. Girls write to me, hungry and deprived, of these narratives, that I urge them to write as well, themselves. I am not bored of reading these narratives, theories of the girl written by Ariana Reines, Kristen Stone, Marie Calloway, Jackie Wang, Megan Boyle, and then, more from the distance of memory, by Suzanne Scanlon, Chris Kraus, poets of the Gurlesque. I crave to read more of them. I wish I had these narratives when I was 21, that I had read Chris Kraus, or Kathy Acker, or Ariana Reines and what I did have were Anais Nin's journals.)

Here's a passage from Heroines that I think speaks to this:

I think about Jean Seberg’s character Patricia Francini in Godard’s Breathless, the girl-reporter who wants to write novels and not be a sidekick in some film noir. I wonder if Godard was conscious when making the film how much he makes Patricia a cipher, and shows this blank character who is searching for an identity, for a self outside of men, but is never really able to escape it. She wants to write novels, someday, like Faulkner, but she needs to sleep with her editor to write articles, and she must be a muse-baby for the famous novelist in order to get his attention. And her self-worth is completely bound up in how others see her, through another's gaze, and like a Jean Rhys heroine part of her only wants a Dior dress and the man who loves her, but there's this other part, that's just forming, that is having a complete identity crisis, that is Simone de Beauvoir's woman questioning her immanence, questioning her lack of freedom, wanting something more, feeling dreadfully incomplete.

Yet Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex doesn’t have much respect for the existential crisis of the girl. She sees her alienation, her sense of apartness, as frivolous, showy, without reflection: “Oppressed and submerged, she becomes a stranger to herself because she is a stranger to the rest of the world.” To her the young girl is doomed to immanence, she is Emma Bovary as Flaubert not Mary McCarthy has imagined her, enraptured by herself as her own heroine in the fantasies she has concocted.

There has been no female Trial or Ulysses, deB writes in The Second Sex, because women writers don’t interrogate the human condition. “A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognized the anguish of Man driven from paradise.” “Man” is the capitalized eternal, the transcendant—the woman has already been driven away, has always been excluded from this category.

Perhaps the woman cannot recognize the alienation of Man, but she certainly can understand Eve, and what it means to be rewritten.

Claude Cahun’s series of monologues entitled Heroines, where she takes fictional characters such as Eve or Salome and gives their mythologies a hilarious, contemporary gloss, revisioning them as both flappers and aborted authors. She dedicates these pieces to girls everywhere.

In her girl portraits often published in “pulp” (hence not literary) journals like College Humor, Zelda writes of the young girl perennially imagining herself as a character, performance artists of surface and frivolity, although inside is this sense of apartness, of unexpressed sadness. There is a loneliness and lament to these pretty girls. Throughout the author-narrator watches these girls, from a distance, perhaps the distance of the former self. There is Gay, in “The Original Follies Girl”: “The thing that made you first notice Gay was that manner she had, as though she was masquerading as herself.”

She isn’t writing the American Dream perhaps, but the Frivolous Girl Dream.
Fitzgerald of course dismissed Zelda’s stories as not saying anything greater about the human condition: “Did she have anything to say? No she has not anything to say.”

The difference is privileging in literature a hero as opposed to a heroine. The difference is dismissing anguish that is seen as feminine, and not “universal” (i.e. masculine). Perhaps Gregor Samsas also take the form, in literature, of 18-year-old chorus girls, or unraveling divorcees, or suicidal overachievers from a prestigious woman’s college.

This is an issue I have with some feminists in the Second Wave and how they often read writers of the girl—for one, they often dismiss the idea that these writers are actually philosophers of the girl, just like the Professor Xs do. They neglect the concept that a philosophy of the girl is even possible. But also, there is this sense reading deBeauvoir and others that the woman writer must write an empowered woman, like Jo in Little Women or something. Maybe these women writers’ heroines or antiheroines are not empowered—but maybe they render honestly a flawed and skewed subjectivity. My main problem with deBeauvoir is that she seemingly doesn’t give the silly girl any space to revolt. Maybe the girl seeks revenge by wedging herself into the larger cultural conversation.

When I was reading all of the comments surrounding this Marie Calloway story and Marie Calloway, this figure, this girl-author, I kept on thinking about the major canonization going on of Ben Lerner's poet's-novel Leaving the Atocha Station, a novel about a young privileged white neurotic man on a Fulbright in Spain who basically stays inside his apartment, looks up porn on the Internet, gets high, takes benzos, fucks pretty Spanish intellectuals who he doesn't even try to get to know, and is basically feted in the novel for his poetry. The brilliance of the novel is how aware the character is of his own fraudulence - his poetry, the way he treats women in his life, his English-language, American-culture imperialism. My god though has this book been feted - written about rapturously in The New Yorker, in The New York Review of Books, etc. Since Ben Lerner himself went on a Fulbright to Spain, etc., had the same background as his character, a la Christopher Isherwood in The Berlin Stories, we perhaps can assume the novel is at least semi-autobiographical. But no one asks about his ethics behind writing these encounters with girls he basically falls into and fucks around with, like some sort of Ivy League Kerouac. I don't argue that there is an ethics for writing the autobiographical. However, those who are all agog that Marie C. wrote about a real, locatable person, insular in a literary scene, must not remember or know the history of modern literature, where this happened all the fucking time (D.H. Lawrence sending up Bloomsbury in Women in Love, Mary McCarthy writing of her affairs, Robert Lowell's The Dolphin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Beats, I mean, I could go on and on and on. And most of the time in modern literature it is the more famous man writing about his wife or mistress). What I don't understand, or rather, I do understand all too well, and don't like, iswhy in these situations it is almost always the girl branded as the criminal for the "confessional" and asked to feel bad, to feel guilt or shame for writing the truths of their experiences, are sometimes even diagnosed as being borderline, inappropriate, toxic, messy, etc., while men have written of their affairs and sexual relationships always and their ethics are rarely questioned. This to me is a form of discipline and punishment that we internalize, which is why so many women writers self-censor. You know what it's called when male writers write of their sexual exploits? LITERATURE. And I kept on thinking reading through all the comments, essays, dialogues, etc., around this one girl and her story, a dialogue that was mostly moralizing or dismissive, as if her youth was a disease she would outgrow someday, is that if the Guy in question - the Marxist scholar, the pop-intellectual, had written his version, it would have been published in the best locales and feted. We would never have been questioning his ethics. We would never worry or wonder that he was writing these female writers or artists as ciphers, as muses, as opposed to embodied women. In Heroines I write, in a long section discoursing on "confessionalism":

Yet of course HE can write the autobiographical, but his work is read as aspiring to something greater. The ruins of his self are the ruins of post-war society. SHE is read as simply writing herself, her toxic, messy self, and her self is not seen as legitimate as literature according to the theories their husbands themselves espoused.

One of the major strands around Marie Calloway, brought up in the Observer piece, is whether Marie Calloway is a feminist, whether her writing is feminist. This should not be the point. It does not matter whether the story is feminist, whether the writer is feminist. She should not have to shoulder that burden, while writing, to speak for others, to try to pretend empowerment. What I liked about the story - and if I hadn't said so - I really liked it, so much so that I'm surprised by its wholesale dismissal - was how flawed and vain and messy and toxic, yet totally self-aware, the character is. No the story's not perfect, yes, it could be edited , but I liked the vernacular it was written in, and I wasn't bored, or if I was bored, I think tedium was kind of the point, an atmospheric decision. I think the character was "bored and vapid," more than the story was, and I think there's some commentary there, the beauty stuff, the routine sex going through the cum-on-my-face rituals, I think the tedium conjured was actually very successful to the piece. In terms of style, there did seem to be some sort of Tao Lin-mimicry, a flatness that I didn't think benefited the story, Tao Lin also like this god-figure looming above the story, Marie's story, her character's story, like this Marxist Internet intellectual, just like Ford Madox Ford edited and shaped Jean Rhys's diaries (but she's a young, obviously talented and brave writer. Let her find her own voice, however she must). It seems to me that Marie's story could be read in a way as a take down, or discourse, about Marxism, which is a conversational strand in the piece, at one point in the story Marie asks Adrien whether he's an idealist or a materialist, and he notes that she's definitely a materialist, because she's a Marxist. I do think she seems to be sending up herself as well as this other character, their pseudo-intellectual conversations undercut by their banal sexual encounters, in a way that reminds me of All the King's Horses, the bubbly roman a clef by Michele Bernstein, Guy DeBord's wife, that parodies in some way the father of Situationism and their daily lives that reads instead like an episode of Gossip Girl. The piece reads to me like a delicious revenge piece, the cipher-girl taking back her story, telling her own perspective, and a kind of "dumb cunt" answer to the great male intellectuals - I'm stealing that phrase from Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, and I do see the correlation Emily Gould makes, it's a good one, between Dodie's The Buddhist and Chris' text, because both are writing back, against their toxic obsessions and affairs with these male intellectuals, and in doing so, are refusing to be erased or silenced, and privileging writing the explicit and emotional, and yes, sexual (bodily, materialist) self. That is perhaps the feminism of such a project here - the reclaiming of the confessional, the refusal to be silent, the decision to write the body.

Against accusations that my reading of Marie Calloway is hyperbolic - I would say - it's totally obvious she's talented, and I really enjoyed this story. I also think I have pretty good taste. Also, my essays are often spirited, rants, and that's because my criticism, the way I read, comes from a place of deep feeling, and I experienced intense emotions reading all of this, all of the fucknotery of the whole thing, measured against what I still argue is an interesting, often beautiful story. But beyond that, if a student had showed this to me in a workshop, I would doubtless have praised and encouraged them as well, and seen total promise. I would have been thrilled to have seen this story in workshop (is this why I can't get a job teaching? maybe, I don't know.) The rules stories like this break are exciting to me - even though I will agree, and have said, there appears to be a certain sameness of style with the writers associated with Muumuu House and Tao Lin- or perhaps it's a school, young writers raised on texting and livejournal etc. who write of their emotions and their quotidians, their anxieties that are somehow tampered by drugs illegal and legal - like a Xanax school of writers, I'd even fit Ben Lerner's book into that, I'm sure he'd hate that, although Leaving the Atocha Station isn't as Facebook or social networking aware. But more than this - more than this - it is a massive part of my belief system - I believe in championing young women writers, and supporting them, and believing in them, and learning from them, and viewing them not only as mentees but more often than not as slightly younger peers, not chopping them down to size, because that's what obviously happening anyway in the culture. If Marie Calloway had emailed me her story I would have told her as I'm writing here - this is good, this is really freaking good. And more than that, this is important, to write our lives, to attempt to measure them out, in any way, in pills, in fucks, in fashion hauls, in toxic holiday dinners, in coffee spoons. Despite what they say, we have just as much a right to attempt to make our existences and our observations into literature as anyone else does.

It does not matter whether Marie Calloway propositioned this writer for the sake of a story, or for an experience - this is something some girls do. When I was a young 20-something I did most everything, including sexual exploits, for the sake of "experience," but more than that, because I did see myself as an author, and wanted to write someday about these experiences, I didn't know how, and I didn't have predecessors at the time to give me permission to write about being a messy, fucked-up girl. There is a performance to this sort of confessional writing - the performance and testing of the self, of limits and boundaries, not only what one could do, but whether one has the nerve or dumbness to write about it, to publish it - so besides Anais Nin and Jean Rhys, Dodie Bellamy and Chris Kraus, Marie's piece also reminded me of a young Sophie Calle or Tracey Emin or Marina Abramovic, fucking for sport, performance, commentary. Certainly she's being talked about. I just worry about the conversation.

Updates:
Here's a blog post by Marie where she delineates some of her ideas for the character of Marie Calloway in "Adrien Brody," and her ideas behind the story
Here's Kristen Stone writing about it
Here's Zoe Zolbrod
Here's Tao Lin

God, this piece and its blowup/blowout has really made us all talk and think and dissect and engage what we want out of literature...that's something, isn't it? That said, I've spent lots of time today responding to emails and comments, engaging in dialogue...it was all fun, and hopefully productive, but I'm out in terms of publishing or answering more comments regarding it. This piece will be reprinted in Thought Catalog, which I agreed to because I really hate the idea of all this vitriol leveled against this writer, who more than anything I think has loads of promise, if she's not defeated by this whole public experience.

2011-12-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

What does it mean, I wonder, that three of the primary blogs I speak to and reference and circle around at the end of Heroines, Bhanu Kapil's, Roz Ito's, and Repat Blues, are either a)indefinitely on hiatus, b)taken down, or c)password-protected? Perhaps it speaks to the ephemerality of the form, how this is an experiment, writing in public space, in outer space, that can't go on indefinitely.

In bed with Jean Genet, the anarchist, monster puppy, as he naps adorably and I try to recover from a headache in order to have people over tonight and attempt to be cogent. Today: Did a phone interview for a full-time job, I think it went well, but just *minutes* before read a negative review online of Green Girl, a review that raises some interesting questions, but was maybe not the best thing to read before I have to put myself out there and attempt, again, cogency and coherence.

I probably won't post for a while, at least until 2012, I too want to give some time to think about this form, about this blog, wondering whether the experiment is at an end. I hope your end of years is joyful and not too stressful, that you are surrounded by beautiful things.

reading (notes)

2011-12-19T06:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I want to get back to reading, but feel so paralyzed in a way, how infinite it all is, when you're not so focused closely on one project. I'm feeling drawn lately to delicious gothic interiors by women writers - Jackie W. recommended The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns after she read Green Girl, and I also want to read Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which Danielle D. at the Dorothy Project recently republished. I want to go back to Caroline Blackwood's novels, Jean Stafford's, both published by the NYRB, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers. Maybe also Herta Muller? (What Herta Muller should I read?) Some of these authors/books are kind of comingling for me into an essay on the South and the grotesque and illness and writing the body, although part of me doesn't know whether I should issue a personal ban on essay-writing, as I'm still fact-checking Heroines (it's taking me like a half-hour to fact-check one page, part puppy, part puppy brain, part the slowness of such an endeavor). Or: maybe: I should just read to be a reader, for the pleasure and stimulation of it. What a fucking novel idea.

!!!!

2011-12-15T18:47:00.000-08:00

HEROINES IS DONE! IT IS TURNED IN! IT HAS BEEN ACCEPTED! IT WILL LIVE!

I am feeling all kinds of exclamatory right now. Or, more specifically: light. relieved. Of course minutes before getting Chris' email Jean Genet flung shit all over his crate John and I put him in for ten minutes so we could finally have sex. So, you know. Ups and downs.

the two jean genets

2011-12-08T07:39:00.000-08:00

The similarity is remarkable. Or perhaps the French writer looks like a puppy. The sweater is entirely because he was shaking like a little leaf outside in the cold. He is only 5lbs. Last night as he got used to my office, nosing around in my boxes, he paid particular attention to my archive boxes of Under the Shadow notes. I took this as some sort of external validation. He too is needy, constantly searching, wanting, wanting attention, up all night. Totally a writer-dog.

Also: Fun! Masha Tupitsyn is blogging. (And the title of her Tumblr, keeping with the day's theme: Love Dog).

Kristen Stone on a queer girl poetics, porn, publicity

2011-12-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

This is beautiful and inspiring, as I sit in bed attempting to smooth out my thoughts on the blog form and the public-girl-writer-self for the finale of Heroines. Puppy Jean Genet comes tonight. I am nervous yet excited. There are strange beautiful pastel flowers growing on the Christmas cactus plant I've had for a year now, which makes me feel full of possibility. Today I have decided not to try to open a boutique, but to attempt to study German and French and apply for Ph.Ds in comp lit programs in a couple of years. Of course I have had two years of being shut out from Ph.D. programs entirely, but maybe now I'm ready, maybe I can make myself into a good enough candidate. And those were English programs, anyway. I will write my dissertation on the Vienna Group and Bernhard, Handke, and Jelinek, as that's a book I'd like to write anyway. It is a strange warm-up here in December, 70 degrees yesterday and today. Humid. Christmas cactus. I've been kind of in heat.

Why I Write Such Horrible Blog Posts

2011-12-05T04:46:00.000-08:00

I was remembering last night that my first blog post ever, when I was still hazy about the nebulous definitions that is the literary, for lack of a better word, sphere of the Interwebs, was entitled "Why I Write Such Excellent Blog Posts." Such cheek I had then. Now I'm starting to feel weirdness and shame about the blog, for reasons which I'll get into next, but I wanted to come here and write about Kari Larsen's oozey, personal, essay she wrote about Green Girl on her blog, that I woke up and read this morning and was really gratified by. I have to do this very early because I've been begging John to take my iphone and the entire Internet cord to work with him, which he did all last week, to force myself to get a peanut of work done, as the book is supposed to be finished this week (my self-mandates) and I'm still writing long meandering notes about the blog form, the section I really have to finish, like what I'm doing here, letting it all expand and it's all just kind of girly and messy at this point, and I chatted on Gmail with Jackie Wang for hours on Friday, filling me with more ideas, and I just have to write a few lines and finish and not try to write the Thesis of the Blog or whathaveyou, as it's changing.
So anyway I have to write this post now before the Internet goes away. But it never goes away. Does it.

Kari in her essay talks about the humiliating experience of trying to get a review of my novel published and being rejected several places. She had emailed me about it, and I was like, just write about it on your blog. Or maybe I didn't say that, but I knew she wanted to write about the book, and I've urged others to write reviews on their personal blogs. What I like about this: online we read and write like girls, often prone to passion and superlatives, passing around books like love letters in the mail. Now I am quoting from Heroines. It is too early to be doubly original. But I loved this piece Kari wrote about Green Girl. Not only was it deeply personal and beautiful, but it was actually such a perceptive and generous reading of the book, that gets at aspects of the book that I intended as a writer, like the palpable sense of space in the book, as Kari writes:

Green Girl takes place in London, but it isn't right to start out that way. It takes place pretty strictly in moldy rooms where men are not allowed and department stores.

And as Kari notes, which is definitely something I wanted communicated, it is strange and not-strange that Ruth when off-the-clock from Horrids, one department store, obsessively visits Liberty, another department store. As she writes, "It is she in the space, how she feels in the space, that matters. Not the trite detail of how they are both department stores." And I love love what Kari writes about the friendship between Ruth and Agnes, connecting this to her own friendships with girls, that longing, that desire:

In my own things I think of the refraction, the image of the self, as - because for me it is - a social anxiety, a yearning for solidarity, friendship, compassion in the minefield of girls. Control the image. The consistency is maddening among the faces, especially when it is all you. The quality of Ruth and Agnes' friendship is captured so exactly. I think it is stranger to yearn for friendship than for a sexual relationship. There is more at risk, more to alienate. Less is socially acceptable to articulate. When someone is after you for sex/intoxication/validation, that is so black and white to me. Friendship is so gray as to be sinister.

I really love that. Now I'll write about my own experience with abjection, to tie into Kari's maybe. Of bloggishness and girlishness. As I've alluded after J. Lowe's brilliant essay on blogging and institutional status, which I think I'm going to write about in Heroines, if I can be concise and succinct, I was worried/wondering that I too had lost work because of some aspect of my writing-self. I say this because I was always able to get adjunct work before, but except for a semester that predates my entrance as a published self. I interviewed for a job teaching first-year writing at Duke, that would have been a boon, something, very well-paid, for part-time and one class, and after it looked like I was going to be offered it....I wasn't. The person who interviewed me wrote me an email saying she was sorry it didn't work out, she'd love to have a fiction writer on staff someday, maybe in the future. At a get-together this weekend, one of the first times I've been social in the year I've been here, I met a lovely fiction writer who had just moved here from NYC, and when I asked her what she did she told me she just got hired to teach in the same program. Now, we could have been interviewed at the same time, but it didn't seem like it, actually. I know this because I was totally embarassing and inappropriate and when she told me I was like - Oh I interviewed there. But they didn't hire me. Something you're not supposed to say. It's total possible and likely this other candidate was more qualified than me - maybe more substantial teaching experience, a terminal degree. But it got me feeling itchy, as it had when I was first not offered the work, the weird change-around, a tonal thing, that the person interviewing me had discovered my blog OR even read some comments I've written online (because I am not smart enough to disguise myself even in that forum, I think I'm just learning the Internet), or even, read one of my books, which depict things like bored threesomes, etc. (John and I were having a discussion this weekend about Ntozake Shange's statement that a woman writer should feature hope at the end of her works. And John was like, your works arent' that pessimistic. And I was like - Almost everyone kills themself at the end of O Fallen Angel, but anyway.)

Anyway, I started feeling massively panic-attacky that this was not the case of where I lived now, that even if I was in a major city again, at this stage in my writing-self, I would still be unhygenic and unhireable. I mean - who writes about stuff like this in the Internet? It's immature maybe, and it's definitively unprofessional. And yet I can't help but do it, a sort of compulsion/desire. And it's freaking me out. I thought - Karen Finley worked as a bartender at the Danceteria, she didn't try to teach, now of course she's at NYU. But I'm too OLD and ASTHMATIC and needing to get in bed by 10am to be a bartender, and there's no Danceteria here. But then I also thought of how Kate Chopin was ostracized after writing The Awakening, I'm not Kate Chopin, and I've never written The Awakening, but it's still something I think about. Or I could just have an entire complex that's not validated by anything that's happening in reality. But I can't get hired anywhere- security guard, bookstore job, teaching job. All while I can't seem to kick what's becoming a bad clothes habit, a constant sense of WANTING, a HOLE. John and I started talking - what else I can do here - and then we started thinking maybe we could plug into a small business loan, open some sort of boutique, like a very accessible clothes and design shop that also sells small-press books, and vintage furniture, and we would have pictures in the store of Gertrude Stein wearing Balmain and Elfriede Jelinek wearing Yves St. Laurent and Cixous in one of her gorgeous costumes, and keep the beginning of the boutique for a pop-up space and gallery and reading space, but I started looking online and realized if I ever sold clothes for a living I would seriously just buy everything. And so yesterday I just banged my head against a table and moaned - What Am I Doing With My Life?

I know what I am doing this week - attempting to finish the book while attempting to housetrain a puppy, who is coming tomorrow or Wednesday, a 7-week-old rescue puppy, half Shih Tzu, half Boston Terrier, who we're calling Jean Genet (because he looks like an old Genet, and because of my incessant desire to put him in a sailor sweater).

In her essay, Kari Larsen wrote about Melancholia, and I cannot wait to see it, and it's not in the Triangle area yet. I think of Kirsten Dunst in this movie, the glimpses I've seen, as a Ruth figure. And actually, as I was writing the book, the Kirsten Dunst persona she plays in say Sofia Coppola movies was a major influence. She is exactly who I'd picture playing Ruth in a not-going-to-happen film of Green Girl. This film poster actually references a painting that's also referenced in Green Girl, Millais' Ophelia, which hangs at the Tate Britain.

Also, oh wait, my Google Analytics just kicked in, and the wonderful, generous Roxane Gay, who just wrote about Green Girl in this essay on The Rumpus about lists of best books, writes an essay on the "garish, gorgeous spectacles" of both Ruth in Green Girl and Joan Didion's heroines in Play It As It Lays and the women of reality TV and the performance of gender, bringing in Judith Butler, in an essay in the new issue of Bookslut. In the essay she brings in Cixous' essay "Laugh of the Medusa," a very important rallying cry for me:

In Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous states that, “Woman must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.” Green Girl is fascinating for the ways Zambreno puts woman into the text, physically and emotionally. “Ruth wants to escape. She wants to escape outside of herself. Everywhere she goes she wants to confide: Do you know what it’s like not to be able to shake your own quality? She doesn’t want to live. She wants to lose herself, lose herself in the crowd. She is somehow numbed to the horrors of everyday. Images, other images haunt her brain. The violence of life, she observes blankly.”

More than anything, Green Girl is relentless in what it reveals about the green girl and her inner life, the emptiness and loneliness, the naked violence of it, how she must swallow it, “deep deep inside.”

Thank you Kari. Thank you Roxane. It's a really strange paradox I feel my life is right now. To be read and to have your writing exist in a dialogue with other works and the thoughts of other writers is the most intimate, privileged, kind of communication. Then other times, in my fleshly existence, outside of my domestic dyad, I feel such a chill, or an invisibility.

this is me:

you are a fucking genius

2011-11-27T06:07:00.000-08:00

Friends, fellow writers...I am going a bit through a bell jar/bat shit stage (these are not synonymous terms, I'm just somewhere on this continuum) after looking long and hard at my rewrite of Part Two of Heroines and realizing I'm still not getting it, the syntax, the flow, it's too constipated still, not right. At the end of Heroines I extort young girls when writing to tell themselves they are fucking geniuses...I wish I could do that to myself now. But I can't somehow.

Recently because I was so blocked from the last rewrite of Part Two, I went to a therapist I found online, whose practice was called something like "Towards a Healthy Mind." I need that, I thought. Despite the cheesiness I went. She didn't understand why someone would be afraid to write. The fear of failure. So what if you fail she said? What are you so afraid of she said? She was a bit disgusted with me. This was way too easy for her. The thing is, some things are easy for some people and not for others. I think that is what distinguishes me sometimes from others - I suffer, I am strained, I am stopped, at events or casualties that others can shrug off. I have never been able to shrug anything off.

And yet sometimes I burn, an excitement, that I could write this well. If I had the confidence. If I had the audacity, the certainty. The flow. FLOW-bert. Jack Kerouac and his benzos. Sometimes I think that is the only thing that divides me from being successful. Sometimes I write instead with one eye open, scared out of my mind. Or I ostrich madly, procrastinating.

Why is writing sometimes so painful? And impossible?

buy nothing/tiny rant about la bibliotheque

2011-11-26T07:43:00.000-08:00

As you may know, my partner's a librarian, and I am in love with libraries and the people who work there - places where access to books and information is still seen as a fundamental aspect of an engaged citizenry. One of the best things you can do to support small-press literary authors is to urge your library to acquire a copy of their books. Libraries buy what their community wants, and so if they have a budget to buy books often they're quite happy to place an order for a book upon a patron's request. I'm going by my local library this week to request copies of some of my favorite small press books that have come out lately (like Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene or Pam Lu's Ambient Parking Lot.)

So, let's say you read Green Girl and O Fallen Angel and loved them, and want others to have access to these books, or want to read either to see what you think of them but don't want to or can't buy them. Or any other small-press book that's come out in the past couple of years. I encourage you to go to your public library (or, potentially your university library, especially if you are an adjunct or full professor), look it up in the database, and fill out a request for them to carry it. Books should be available to everyone. O Fallen Angel has been out forever at Amazon, but libraries should be able to order it on Small Press Distribution. The main distributors for Green Girl are Ingram, Baker&Taylor, and Bookazine.

I'm also today sending copies of my books to the Occupy Wall Street People's Library (along with one of my editor's copies of Bhanu's Schizophrene.) Hopefully not to be destroyed by Bloomsburg's machines. If you are an author, I invite you to do the same. Books can be sent to:

The UPS Store
RE: Occupy Wall Street
Attn: The People's Library
118 A Fulton Street #205
New York, NY 10038

Am brewing an essay on Leaving the Atocha Station and existential novels by men and by women, but have to force myself to finish my rewrite of Part Two of Heroines first. As in, I've now forced myself to reread my recent rewrite, which is a rewrite of a rewrite, which I think is actually a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite, and it's Just. Not. Good. Enough. So I'm going to start from a blank screen with a mess a mass of pages and rewrite. Hopefully this week. If I can push myself enough. For sometimes I am so afraid, to dig deep, to push myself, I'm afraid - of what? I suppose I'm afraid I will crack somehow.

lady lazaruses

2011-11-24T06:54:00.000-08:00

This morning hit with a feeling of something, I've decided - who am I to say what's writing or not? And if I speak and write and echo others on blogs as this emerging form, then it would be wrong to abandon it. I cannot abandon it, I feel. So I'm not going to stop blogging. I don't think I can. But I might still close down FFIMS, and maybe like Bhanu, revolutionize the blog, come up with a different blog. I don't know. Will have to meditate. I don't think I could write daily of sex acts, maybe a couple times of week...I'm joking. You'll have to go read Bhanu's blog to get what I mean. But something. Maybe a different frame.

I already posted this on Facebook, but yesterday, so deep within Heroines revisions, trying to make Part One stick less, feel less stiff at times, I am sitting outside at the community market, drinking a cup of decaf, which I've started to do, liking the taste of coffee but not being able to be that caffeinated, and as I write the word VAMPIRE in caps on a page of the manuscript I mutter the word out loud in a sort of creepy voice, and I only realize this after I do it. The good people of Carrboro, who I have started to adore, well used to eccentrities, look up briefly at the strange writer woman and then continue their conversation.

Maybe my blog will be about vampires.

I've also decided to get a dog, probably, finally, a rescued puppy John and I will have to drive almost five hours to a suburb of DC to get, a Shih Tzu Boston Terrier mix. That I will put in sweaters. I have the urge to put small warm bodies in sweaters - is that maternal? My blog will definitely not be about that.

I am thankful for all of you.

ritual

2011-11-23T06:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. She would have been - let's see - she would have been 64. This upcoming spring it will be 10 years she has been gone. At some point it becomes more difficult to keep count. Although I always know she was almost exactly 30 years older than me, just like my paternal grandmother was almost exactly 60 years older than me. And they're gone now. As well as my father's identical twin, my favorite uncle, a more recent soreness. It seems that almost everyone is gone now. It feels sometimes, in late fall especially, that I have become way too acquainted with loss.

Yesterday to commemorate I biked out to the community market, and bought a slice of (vegan) apple pie which they put on a tiny paper plate for me, that I heated up for too long in the communal microwave, and I ate that outside with a cup of coffee, even applying darker lipstick in the bathroom before so I could see the traces of lipstick on the cup, like hers, and I thought of my mother. That is how I memorialize her, by eating a slice of apple pie. My rail-thin mother who inhaled anything sweet, wouldn't eat real food most of the time, but nothing she liked better than a diner, a bowl of soup, a piece of pie out of the case.

About the lipstick: the memories of stealing into my mother's bathroom, and it was stealing, it was an inner sanctum, the bedroom, and opening up the mirrored doors and inhaling the smell of her Clinique loose powder, running my finger along the curve of her coral lipstick. I used to think writing about these experiences were cliche, these girl-experiences, but I am realizing we have been taught to be embarassed about these rituals between daughter and mother, or between sisters, these sense-memories of girlhood. They are not cliche. They are communally felt.

Yesterday I thought again about The Book of Mutter, where I attempt to somehow exorcise the trauma of my mother, my childhood, and the idea of the American orphan. In some ways it is my favorite book, but it remains, still, mostly private, except for the chunk published online. Perhaps it will never be published in book form. Or I could make, I don't know, an art project out of it, too bad I'm really piss-poor at actually making anything.

At the Mutter Museum they had a small exhibit of books bound in human skin. The collection they had were made by two doctors in Vermont (?) who used the skin of patients who donated their bodies for their research, as a form of memoriam. Although John tells me that this was also an occurrence in France, after criminals gave their confession before execution, their confessions would often be bound in their skin. He told me that he thought the criminals volunteered their skin for this use, as a form of purging. Maybe I'm getting this all wrong. Maybe Book of Mutter should be bound in human skin. A strange thought from a strict vegetarian. But perhaps it's already bound in human skin - this book of the body. The Mutter Museum already is in the book - I use an image of two fetal skeleton Siamese twins from the collection as an important repetition.

I am beginning to worry about my career, for lack of a better word, as a writer. This is coming now at the end of this fall tour trying to thrust Green Girl out into the world, at times succeeding, at other times failing. Also because as I'm ending rewriting the essay book I'm really hit in a dull way with the fact that I am totally unemployed, and I have no classes offered to me for the spring, and I have to find some ways to support us, to support myself. In some ways this worry that has evolved into a constant nag, a fearfulness in the night that might be perceived as laughable, as I got my copy of Bookforum yesterday, and my name was on the front cover as a book reviewed, almost like I was someone, was a known, right next to Ben Marcus, lower right hand bottom (Ben Marcus muttering to himself: Who?) But there are still such moments of amateur-abjection lately, like when John and I went into McNally Jackson, a bookstore downtown in New York, and since I've never actually seen any of my books in a New York bookstore, and I love this bookstore, me asking the person at the front desk whether I could leave a free copy of Green Girl for the fiction buyer, to consider to stock my book, me mumbling, it's been reviewed in some places, and the person behind the counter treating me like I'm self-published, not that there's anything wrong with being self-published, and John becoming lawyer-partner, and saying, "She has a large review in Bookforum this month" and then the person saying something like, Well, if the buyer wanted to buy the book, they would have, or something, and my face all enflamed, I mumbled a thanks and left. I'm beginning to realize perhaps I will always be outside - of the institutions. Like with Book of Mutter - I tried so so intensely to get that book published, even placing as a finalist in a big contest, but to no avail. I cannot even get someone in a position of power to really speak to me of the book. But this isn't about the book. I mean, I've come to terms with the fact that it might never get published. Perhaps it was more important, I mean, that it was written.

My orphans.

Now I must work on Heroines - I said it was done and I lied. I read Part Two and I thought - this is terrible. I can do better. I must do better. So I must do better. I am trying. Sometimes I feel entirely inept as a writer. Maybe that's part of the process of writing. Like everyone, the ineptness, and then pushing, laboring to communicate. Or do others feel quicksilver on their fingers like on their tongues? Do the words, the rhythms, come easier? Perhaps that's what it feels like to be a poet. I don't know. I'm not a poet.

Why I am afraid of being institutionalized

2011-11-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

I just landed home from NYC, an amazing reading last night (thank you, Sunday Salon!), which was nice because there have been a few readings lately where I've been mostly met with dead air and polite applause, which makes me feel all of five inches tall.

Anyway. I have been home like 30 minutes and went on the various social networks and saw JSA Lowe's brilliant, brave, necessary essay "Blog is Still a Four-Letter Word" on HTML Giant, where she writes about administrators at the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Houston disciplining her, and yes, shaming her, for the confessional nature of her blog, building this incident into a reflection about this emerging form, and the oft-threatened position of the confessional woman writer within these institutions, and even broader than that, the feelings of shame and smallness women writers can carry around with them, the self-censoring violence. I read it like five times, made John read it, John and I both got so furious and enraged, and my mind is whirling, and so this will probably not make much sense, but I need to respond.

This is the first, childish, thing I have to say: THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON, PLEASE GO FUCK YOURSELVES. This is the second, childish thing I have to say: WHATEVER STUDENT DARED COMPLAIN ABOUT LOWE'S HEARTFELT, POETIC BLOG OF THE QUOTIDIAN, PLEASE go fuck yourself, then finish out your Ph.D. program with a dutifully well-crafted book, go deaden and manipulate and mercilessly bore classrooms of students for eternity, while knowing in your heart of hearts that you will NEVER write anything as urgent or as honest or as thoughtful as a single one of her blog posts. Okay, the caps have petered off, my rant has ended, and I can continue.

The thing is, this is a serious issue. But even though as Lowe rightly states, the blog is an emerging literary form, this question of women swallowing panic about the autobiographical, and often censoring themselves, or being asked to censor themselves, is not new. Heroines actually *tries* to answer some of the questions Lowe poses so thoughtfully, trying to trace the disciplining of women writers, especially in the last hundred years, but especially back to the founding myths of Western culture, also a self-disciplining that then goes on, an internalizing of this shame and disgust and guilt about writing the truths of our lives that Lowe verbalizes so gorgeously. And I also bring in Anais Nin, but also really focus on the case of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, how their autobiographical writings (Zelda's novel Save me the Waltz, where she attempted to write about her asylum experiences, versus Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up) were treated differently within the culture. I also try to get at this seeming-truth about writing we seem to hold dear, that writing the self is indulgent or narcissistic, especially if it's the truth of a woman's body or experience.

I'm writing the end now, reworking it, which is all about blogs, and not only that, specifically about the community of mostly women-penned literary blogs that Lowe is in the community of, along with FFIMS, Repat Blues, everything on my blogroll. Some of what I write at the end echoes what Lowe is saying here, blogging as a performance, blogging as an extremely meta-form, blogging as playing out this battle between public and private, it's giving me so much more food for thought, maybe even some concern, that I'm not GETTING IT RIGHT.

Lowe mentions me in the essay, along with other bloggers - I will say as a correction - I am not institutionally affiliated. I haven't been able to find work here where I live now, and yes, I am pretty sure I didn't get the last job I applied for, an adjunct gig at Duke, because of my blog, and not only my blog, but because I write about, well, drugs and fucking and madness and taboo things, in the books. I was interviewed, almost damn near offered it, and it was mysteriously then not offered to me. Also when I was writing the first draft of the essay book my editor was worried that me writing in an autobiographical sense - without the veil of "fiction" - about an experience with psychiatry where I was almost institutionalized - would also sully my employment chances. I snorted and said: Chris, I'm already pretty unhirable, as O Fallen Angel had just came out, and believe me, when you're applying for fiction jobs without a terminal degree and the book you have is a cruel little novella that features the phrase "Fuck'n'Run" you don't have great chances of even getting past the first pile. Lowe also mentions Dodie Bellamy. Although I believe Dodie does teach creative writing in San Francisco (I don't know her personally, am just a fan of her writing, so know her narrative through the essays), in her book Academonia she explicitly writes about not being considered for full-time positions because of what she writes about, how she writes so explicitly about emotions and the body.

But here is my thinking. Here it is. You can NOT write worried about your employment opportunities, because then you've already made your writing safe and hygienic, which I find problematic about writing by committee, to begin with. I'm not saying you need to alienate everyone around you, or give out personal details that would humiliate others, but more than anything I think what is vital, what Lowe performs in this essay and in her other writing, is writing the fucking TRUTH OF HER EXPERIENCE. And we live in a culture that punishes and tries to discipline the messy woman, and a literary culture that punishes and disciplines the overtly autobiographical, we get this from T.S. Eliot and New Criticism, maybe earlier to the depersonalized theories of Flaubert. WE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES. What Lowe is describing having happened to her at Houston is a form of OBLITERATURE. It's totally bullshit.

I realize I haven't written anything except gestured to the book I haven't finished. It's true, as JSA Lowe writes in her essay, that I will be taking the blog down. I was actually planning on doing it today but that seems like horrible timing with this essay. For me it was a performance, and it has ended, for now, and other versions of it might pop up in its place. I will definitely keep an archive. But for now, I'm sure this will be a continuing conversation and dialogue in many sections on the Internet, now I want to end with this quote, which I quoted from in my very first post on the blog, by Helene Cixous, which I quote from at the end of Heroines:

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women- female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.

James Greer reviews Bookforum

2011-11-18T04:33:00.001-08:00

In Print and Online. Thank you, James, for such a thoughtful review. Very exciting.

2011-11-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

First off, I have the FLU. The wanting to sleep in the bathroom sort of FLU. I feel often, a compulsion, to announce my digestive problems. Anyway. My lover is off to the store to get me organic sprite and bland things that I can eat, because I'm having trouble keeping anything down.

But! I leave tomorrow for Philadelphia, to read at the Mole not Molars series, and despite being fluish I'm really looking forward to it. Will then also be taking the train up to NYC, to read at the Sunday Salon series Sunday night, with more Men Undressed contributors, where I will read either the bartender scene that makes people really really uncomfortable, but that I very much enjoy reading, or another series of saucy scenes from the novel.

So, if you're in Philly or NYC, please come on out! I haven't exactly been reading at packed events. So if you think to yourself - I don't need to come out, there will be people there - not true! Come out! Okay, that's as much energetic trying as I can do, while prone and really excited to watch Revenge.

Oh, and I finished the rewrite! For now! We'll see! Hopefully this is it! I cut out 9,000 words, not exactly 10, but close. I am starting to feel very strongly about it.

Umm. What else. There have been some very positive reviews of the novel. Two from UK publications. This one here, this one here, this one here, and Kristen S. wrote an amazing Goodreads review, and Andrea Q wrote an amazing Amazon review, and it's nice to read reviews of the book by girls and boys. It's weird too although reviews have been gratifyingly positive, there keeps on repeating this strand that Ruth is a really tormented unstable heroine. I guess I don't really see this. I mean, it's not a melodrama or real tragedy. She's a toxic girl. She's forming.

Oh and James Greer reviews Green Girl in this month's Bookforum! Which I have not yet seen but am very excited to! If you are on one of the coasts or whatever and have seen the review, let me know! I haven't gotten my subscriber copy yet. Allegedly there's a tote bag involved this month. I love tote bags!

One more thing - the wonderful Chicago-based Make magazine, which published my essay Slapping Clark Gable, is offering a deal for Make subscribers - being able to purchase Green Girl, and other works by Make contributors, for an amazing deal (if you subscribe to Make, you can get Green Girl for $8. Also, if you already subscribe, you can get Green Girl for half the cover price.)

excerpt from Green Girl and Self-Interview posted at The Nervous Breakdown

2011-11-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

Here's the self-interview. I had some fun with the form, and was quite bitchy to myself. The excerpt is kind of a stand-alone scene, it's my thesis of the psychology of the cosmetics counter.

And what does this have to do with the narrator?
The narrator is her former self, in a way. At the beginning she gives birth to her. She watches over her. But she is not literally the mother. She is kind of like a god figure. I modeled this somewhat on Clarice Lispector’s male author-narrator in The Hour of the Star, who creates and imagines a horrorshow ending for his mystic-girl Macabea. Instead of Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe my Ruth has Julie Christie in Darling and Green and Blacks chocolate and a penchant for fucking strangers.

So, is the narrator you? Or are you Ruth? Or both? How much is the novel drawn from your real life?
Again, a brutally uninteresting question.

kindred

2011-11-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

At HTML, Roxane Gay interviews a poet named Gregory Sherl, and this interview made me really want to read his book, as well as to watch all episodes of Felicity.

What is your obsession as a writer?
Trying to stop myself from being so desperately aware that I’m a writer. Or maybe my obsession is figuring out how to pay for healthcare when my only income comes from being an Adjunct English Instructor. Or maybe it’s me obsessing over obsessing about the fact that I need to apply for my MFA like today but not doing it because writing new poems is better than putting old poems together in a packet with some stamps on it. Or maybe it’s watching the doctor try to figure out the right cocktail of medication so I don’t sleep nineteen hours in one day. Or maybe it’s trying to watch Felicity in its entirety as quickly as possible (a little over two weeks, I believe). Or maybe these aren’t my obsessions as a writer but my obsessions as me but I’m a writer so I think it fits.

At the Skylight Reading the bookstore person who was MC-ing it asked me and Kate afterwards what our process was like. And I was like, half-jokingly "Well I used to wake up at dawn and write for five hours or I wasn't complete, but now I lay around all day and watch stuff on my computer like Pretty Little Liars." But oh Felicity. I LOVED Felicity.

Now I have to go bang out this motherfucking outline if it's the last thing I do.

Pictures from the Two Kates reading at Skylight in LA

2011-11-09T08:34:00.000-08:00

I know people thought perhaps me and Kate Durbin were the same person, because we rarely appear in public together. This is photographic proof that we are in fact two individual people. (I'm joking, it's become my running joke that Kate and I are twins because we obviously look so much alike, but it's one of those jokes where noone else laughs but I still think it's funny).

These photos make me happy and I'm trying to be happy today, and trying not to lay around moaning and sobbing like a kiddie contestant on Toddlers and Tiaras (substitute not wanting to start a rewrite with not wanting to put on my sparkling dress and baby-platforms). So I thought I'd show them here. Kate, hope that's okay. Today I'm listening to St. Vincent on repeat and walking around my front yard with the gorgeous autumn leaves and waving my hands in the air, like I did as a child, when I thought I was perhaps Mother Nature or an emissary of Mother Nature, and I am eating orange marmalade on toast. I am trying today. I am trying to be okay.

I am talking in almost every picture. At the reading I talked about how I felt such a kinship with Kate that in a way mirrors the kinship Ruth feels for Agnes in Green Girl, especially around film. There's a scene in the book where Ruth is at a nail shop, and she wants to ask the manicurist jokingly for "Tiger Red" a reference to George Cukor's film The Women, but she feels only Agnes would get that joke. I know Kate would get it, especially since her famous gold lame hot shorts costume is called the Crystal Allen, after the Joan Crawford femme fatale-shopgirl in the film.

Kate read from her amazing meticulous slow-down of The Hills, collected in E! Entertainment, and had various people read the dialogue parts, further highlighting their painful banality as well as the real pathos of everything. This is me and Kate's friend Sam. I really love my dress, even though I'm realizing looking at these pictures it isn't the most body-flattering dress in the world. But I still love it. My affection and love for my individual garments often transcends whether they're actually the most ideally flattering on me.

For some reason during my reading of the bartender scene in Green Girl I began to feel two rather warm flags of red on my cheeks. I think it's because I brought sparkling wine beforehand for the audience to drink, and I drank a cup, even though I have been trying not to drink lately, as a)it makes my digestive system super fucked up and b)even a glass of something makes me unbelievably depressed the next day. It looks like blush. I told this to Amina Cain afterwards. She said something like, I thought you were just really into it. Although I was really into that passage, which I like reading even though sometimes I can tell audience members dislike it or it makes them uncomfortable. It's really surprised me how much I love reading from Green Girl, even though it's not as performative of a text as O Fallen Angel. Although I read some from O Fallen Angel at CalArts, as well as Green Girl and Heroines, and I was surprised how much I missed the rhythms of that book, the rapid-fire way I do Mommy, the painful eye-rolling deliciousness of Maggie.

Today

2011-11-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

Writing seems impossible today. I am an absolute mess today. Like sobbing, won't leave house, can't leave house, won't write, can't write, today. I have noticed I cycle like this. I need to have a day of absolutely freaking out after days of being a shut-in before I sit down and write and just fucking do what I need to do and it's fine.

But today I'm not convinced I will get this book done by deadline, which is soon, very soon. Today I am not convinced I am a writer and that I will ever again write something worthwhile, or even slightly lucid or coherent, and the past where I somehow have written something worthwhile, seems like a completely different lifetime ago and a completely different person. Although I have the notes, other people's notes, my notes...I have 40,000 words of rough draft for this section I need to basically cut in half.

But nothing will happen today. Lately I feel even good news, mostly surrounding the works that are already out, is making me break down. Like it's all too much fucking pressure sometimes. To write sometimes feels like the most unlikely thing. To actually confront blankness and turn it into words, thoughts, to attempt to externalize the fucking milkshake of my mind. I finally made myself shower today after days of not doing it, not being able to, needing to have an extra skin of safety, and I discovered a large rash had broken out on my leg. I took a picture of it and sent it to John. I googled: Lupus. Stress. Skin Rash on Leg. As I'm convinced I'm developing lupus, have gone to doctors for this, who have given me all the tests, and said: Yeah, maybe something borderline but probably no. Maybe it's dry skin John said. And it's true I put lotion on it and it went away but I wanted to have some physical manifestation of my stress, to show, to say, look at this I'm freaking out.So I didn't tell him that. I wanted some sort of pity, I think.

I am such an abject girl. This is totally not an appropriate thing to post. This is not a cry for help. Maybe it's a cry for help. For comfort or community. I don't know.

I felt I needed to vent. Does anyone ever feel this? Plus I only have like two weeks to whip this section into submission. When I feel I want to sleep a week after getting back from traveling.

I am so unprofessional. This is why I can't get hired anywhere. I am supposed to be working on letters for jobs I am applying for that I'll never get but I wonder how I can actually attempt to form and mold my messy innards and messy emotions and messy body into some sort of shape in order to actually appear in public, present myself as a polished, coherent self, although days ago I was doing just that, reading and smiling and performing. But now I'm exhausted and I don't want to go outside again.

This column on the left of my blog is the ooze. The column on the right of my blog is all fake and a lie, the polished image, the author photo, the blurbs, the reviews, the exclamatory publicity.

I will probably erase this.

treat

2011-11-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

Today, I treat myself. All aspects of myself I will only approach with kid gloves. I will not be harsh. I will be kind. Calm. Mellow. I will not be stressed out or surround myself with stressful people or situations. Today I am back from California, having miraculously not gotten sick despite encroaching sinus problems, due to a constant intake of homeopathics, vitamins, kombucha, nasal rinses with the Neti Pot, macrobiotic food, and a comically constant use of hand sanitizer in public situations. I am acting like I am some sort of athlete - like a marathon runner. Today I start work again on the rewrite. I have given myself two weeks to completely rewrite Part Two. Now it's been a month and I look at it and I think - wow, yeah, this all mostly needs to go. This is so rough, etc. Yeah, I get it. As a writer I can be very limited - I can only change when I actually see the problems myself. But can I do it? Can I be clear? Can I be brave? Can I be disciplined? I will try. I cannot fuck around. Today I surrounded myself in my office with at least 52 blue post-it notes that are some sort of map posts to this future, better, book. I have just looked over Suzanne's notes on my manuscript - her exclamation points and smiley faces. Before that John's notes: his YES-es in the margin. It's wonderful to have people who love you enough to write smiley faces and YES in the margins. Like cheering me on.

It is lovely to be home - towering trees outside my office window with their brilliant reds and yellows. I am drinking red tea. I am still totally unemployed, but I will think of that when this book is turned in. I did not get the class at Duke. I did not even get the security aide position at John's library. I am totally unhirable, maybe. I will consider getting a job at Whole Foods in the spring. I told all this to Christine Wertheim, after my CalArts reading, I had just met her, she was wearing this kind of magnificent red spidery shawl. I feel like I vomited out my life story to her, very quickly. Afterwards she said to me: You live a very charmed life. I do? I said. I didn't know what she meant. Maybe she was talking about privilege. Because yes I am absolutely privileged. To be able to write anything at all. To now have time and space to write. I didn't always. But now I do. I know this. I do know this. Charmed I do not know about. But lucky - yes. I think she actually meant that I was prolific. But the truth is that I tried to get Green Girl published for several years, no one wanted it, no one wanted me, I was desperate for it to be published. And to have two novels come out a year after each other - it just happened, I guess, that way.

Also: Roxane Gay wrote this essay at The Rumpus on idealism and politics and other things that like all of her essay writing is incredibly profound and sharp, and at the end she references the abortion scene in Green Girl, which made me happy, because it is one of my favorite scenes in the work, although the opinions expressed by Ruth and Agnes about the experience do not reflect the opinions, you know, of the author, as Ruth and Agnes are extremely apathetic and passionate only about the primacy of the self, and I hope, I hope, that I have learned to be a better citizen of the world.

three, two

2011-11-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in my sister's bedroom, in Laurel Canyon near West Hollywood. One of my favorite sensations is to be jet-lagged. The type that makes you get up at Plath hours. You think, this is how it will be from now on, I will write tortured early-AM texts and listen to the world wake up. Of course it always passes. I could be reading now - I brought with me Lady Caroline Blackwood's novel Corrigan, I thought I should try to read her novels now that I am rewriting Heroines, as I get so into the writing and criticism of Elizabeth Hardwick in those pages, Robert Lowell's second wife, and only really mention his first and third wife, Jean Stafford and Blackwood, both writers as well. All three published by the New York Review of Books, all three of Lowell's writer-wives. On my bookshelf at home I place them together, this gives me a perverse satisfaction, I put them into conversation. My bookshelves at home are mostly arranged by literary gossip.

Tonight is the reading of the two Kates at Skylight Books, at 5pm. I might be talking in a throaty voice, as I have that sinus-sickness I get with jet lag that is really kind of delicious, it slows everything down. I am taking homeopathic vitamins and nasal spray and rinsing my nose out with a Neti pot and today before the reading I will go have bibimbap, and hope that it is very spicy.

I don't think I'm very California. Or my experiences here (I've now been here three times in the past few months) are always colored by the slowness of jetlag.

self-congratulatory

2011-11-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

Shit, I'm putting this on my CV. So I was googling myself because there might be a review of GG coming out that I'm a bit anxious to see, and I see that Slapping Clark Gable, which appeared in Make magazine, was selected as a "Notable" essay of 2010 in Best American Essays. Just click on "Notable" and then "Z," and my name's there. I had no idea the essay was submitted for consideration - thanks Make magazine!

It is, I should add, a VERY long list of notables. Whatever, it's been a bad couple of days. I'm totally taking it. And I fucking love that essay. It's the one I'm playing with turning into a book as soon as I write more fiction and lift my interior ban on essay-writing post-Heroines. Thanks to Kathleen Rooney for asking me if I wanted to write an essay for their Myth issue, because otherwise I wouldn't have written it!

up-updates

2011-11-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

Chicago-landed people: The marvelous Suzanne Scanlon is a finalist for the Guild Complex Prose Award. Be there tomorrow night, 7:30pm, the Chopin Theater, to watch her read from her short story and vote for her!

Southern California-oriented people: I am typing away on my talk for CalArts, which I think at this moment is 3 hours long. I will be somehow trying to execute reading from O Fallen Angel, Green Girl, and Heroines, while being semi-coherent about something. I am there Thursday night. And then also, reading with the magnificent Kate Durbin Saturday at 5pm at Skylight Books. We are reading at an early-bird special time but I am excited. Although this morning I checked the weather in Los Angeles and I was going to wear a wonderful crazy dress in some way to try to come close to the unparalleled fashion performances of Kate, but you know what, it's going to be too fucking cold. One of the two rotating tops I keep on wearing for readings, then.

dilettante

2011-10-31T12:56:00.000-07:00

I am home for two days. From Chicago. Going (again) to Los Angeles. Everything here is so autumnal and calm that I feel meditative and inside of myself, at least for a bit. After bleary-eyed flight at 7:30am. This afternoon I sat on my porch for a bit and read. Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene - a notebook circling around an other, epic, failed text, the one that would *explain*, and this work doesn't explain, instead it listens, swirls, secretes, traces, trauma and memory. I've placed it here next on top of the Artforum that came today in my rather old-fashioned mailbox, a tribute to Cy Twombly. Rohini Kapil's beautiful partitioned garden image next to one of Twombly's luscious flowers. Next to my golden white tea, my silver needle. And then just the lip of the gold of the pine needles in my front yard. It seems right. I read Artforum for the ads. And I lament that I cannot focus enough to read the articles, any articles anymore, except on a plane. And wish I had access to more underground films. This afternoon I bought flour sack tea towels on Amazon and bought the new St. Vincent, which I'm listening to now. "I've told whole lies with a half smile." This past weekend two readings. I felt strong, reading. I felt almost voluptuous or dangerous, reading. And then in two days LA, CalArts, Kate D. and Skylight. Then Philadelphia and NYC later in November and THAT'S IT. For a while at least. Until I finish this book. And all I long to do is return to my fiction. Perhaps that's a safer space for me right now. A realm where I can cavort around in my fucked-up id.

I want to get back, to burrow under. Back to writing. Or maybe actually just back to reading. Perhaps one becomes a writer in order to just participate in the conversation about what is read. Today I read Kristen Stone's text, part of which is published here on Montevidayo, and also Gina Abelkop's essay on Anna Joy Springer's new book, here on HTML Giant. Both Gina and Kristen seemed to have bitten the top off of something so urgent and important, and I read each of their pieces several times, like Bhanu's book, which is the first time today I've read in the book form, which absolutes, baptizes a work somehow, it's a different way of seeing, or maybe it doesn't, I have been having an internal debate with myself this weekend or last week or some prolonged time, about the book, and whether I write books, or I write here, or about books, what is a book, do we need to write books, the book is a form, yes, but a commodity, sure, and it goes through a machine to get born, a machine that can be one of the violence of smiles and half-lies. Or something. I haven't thought it through yet.

I also saw Suzanne this weekend, we sat with John at her kitchen table drinking red wine and mint tea and spreading out the pages of my book which made me feel pale and vulnerable and like I was sitting with my legs spread while also extremely lucky to have two such brilliant readers considering and discussing what I was trying to say, maybe about the tyranny of the novel, or the girl as character and author, and the rewrite will be a reconsideration, I need to do it, here, tomorrow, there, the next three weeks. But thinking of Suzanne's writing of the girl, and Kristen's, and Gina's, and Anna Joy's, and Lidia Y's, and Laurie Weeks, and Bhanu's, and Jackie Wang's, and Kate D's, and Angela Simione's, and others, yes, others, there's something extraordinarily exciting going on, what either Jackie or Bhanu call the writing or resurrecting of an extreme girlhood, I don't remember,the trauma and messes and revolutions, and I like to think perhaps I'm contributing too, or if not, reading and witnessing. It is not epic but it traces the epic and is lyric because of her winnowed-down, nervous body, but it's messy and devouring too. And so much of this beginning in these online notebook spaces, at least the newer generation of these writings.

Perhaps though my role is to read. Reading so much brilliance online lately, I'm realizing that I am being repetitive here. This is something I've been meditating on - a lot. Too much. The blog. I've become too self-aware of myself here. Roz would maybe say that I'm too aware or self-conscious of my author-function. I think that's true. It can be oppressive, publicness, mirroring what it's like to be a woman to begin with, who is watched, who watches herself. Reading all the texts I circle around above I realize after this rewrite is over (December) and this first real thrust of readings is done I will need to shed another skin. Meditate, go inwards. Try to figure out what kind of writing I want to do, now, try to push myself. For my own writing here, there's been an automaticness lately that I think has stood in the way of me really reconsidering or working on my own writing, along with my desire for an instant recognition.Which is why I stopped writing for the weekly.

But what is the writing? What is the work? It's so hard to know. I have had several, several, readers point out to me, or at times lament, that my early blog posts were attempts at criticism, and I suppose they were, essays, attempts in a girl-Montaigne sense, and then when I took on this book project, all the essaying went out the window or onto those pages, and what went up in its place was an experimental diary project, where I wanted to consider my role in the public versus private, and toy with how much I would confess, or admit to, in public, while considering my self as a writer. All of that was fruitful I think. But I think I'm bored with the idea of diarying online, or for me, my own practice and process at it has grown stale. It's too much for me, to live in this other space. I suppose maybe I revealed too much, and then it became difficult, to occupy a public space, with being known but absolutely not known, which I guess is some mirror of how anyone feels anyway. I think the reason I haven't been able to pull away is this desire to be known - especially feeling absolutely isolated - but I think this is a failed project anyway, and interesting project, this attempt, but ultimately impossible. For of course I censor myself here. Of course this is only one self I have presented, and I think as opposed to my reader self, which is where the blog began, it's been my author self, a self I'm not even sure if I like. Or it's been the twining or twinning between the two.

When is a blog done? Can it be a project, with an end, like a book? Is it an endless, dizzying scroll? In my own fiction(al) works I always abided by Kathy Acker's rule - that she knew she was done when she grew bored. Perhaps that's something. I am not bored with the reading, but bored, terribly bored with myself, and I want to recreate a new self, push the limits of what I can write or what should be written, and I don't want to feel limited by this voice, this perspective, this space. I'm feeling limited.

I am sitting outside now because I am expecting trick-or-treaters. But there are no trick-or-treaters. Instead I am cold. The cold mechanical laptop against the backdrop of an organic space. This is the first time ever I have bought Halloween candy - little squares of dark chocolate I will probably eat myself, vegan gummy bunnies from Whole Foods. I am feeling like the strange childless woman in the neighborhood. Isn't that funny? I don't know when I became so aware of that. Very recently. Perhaps it's this neighborhood, which I love, but is family-oriented, albeit progressive-family-oriented. Just before writing this blog post or considering whether or not to do it - every day I think, should I write a blog post, I'm playing chicken with myself - I got an email that the class I was maybe going to be offered to teach that I interviewed for a week ago is no longer available. For a blip I felt paranoid - and worried whether what I wrote or the content of my writings somehow made me absolutely barren here, unhireable. And of course I cried because I cry about everything. Even though I think I have only really cried openly in front of John. Crying is a form of cleansing for me, I feel empty if I don't weep or sob fairly regularly, usually in private. I am really an excessively emotional person, but in public I feel removed, distanced, as blank as my character Ruth in the novel. My sunglasses a shield. I am an actress outside with lace edges. Perhaps everyone feels like this. It is entirely possible.

Now in the spring I am hoping to get a job where I sit at the desk of John's library, for $10 an hour, and remind people not to drink water. I am actually thinking this could be a romantic position. It's only in the afternoons, I will write or try to write in the morning, and then I will sit at a desk and read.

I should have said - I have decided with the blog that in the next couple of months I'm going to archive it. By that I mean it will be password-protected. I will also be eventually getting rid of my Frances Farmer email. You can email me once I set it up, and I will give you the password, if for any reason you wanted access to the archives, for classes or for your own personal whatever or desire. I am doing this because there has been some interest in this. I will not be updating that blog afterwards. By the time I archive FF there will hopefully be one of those author's websites in place, or if not then, soon afterwards. I've decided Frances Farmer was a performance of sorts, at least for myself, and like a performance I want to archive it, at least for my personal use, to think about any sort of evolution or devolution over a year or two. I think if I decided I wanted to essay again, or diary again publicly, blog again, I would probably just start another blog.

Today I am both absolutely melancholy and starved yet bursting with love.

I am now realizing I think trick-or-treating was yesterday.

purification rites

2011-10-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

Chicago this weekend lying baldly to a man in a dress as he spoke of the devil and the glamours of sin and exorcisms. Next weekend Chicago. Two reading dates. Will you come. Will I see you there. I hope to see you there. And then Los Angeles the next weekend, CalArts and Skylight with Kate D. It has been suggested to me recently that I need to be more positive here, on this blog, I need to have more fun, in this whole process. As opposed to representing the struggle of the tour, or the ambivalence of having a book come out, I need to enjoy myself and people will gravitate towards my positive thinking.

Problem is, if I had a more positive attitude I wouldn't remotely write anything that I write now. Instead I would be a completely radically different person. I wouldn't recognize this person. I am the personality opposite of yoga. I am mostly not very calm. I am on the whole not terribly sunny. I do not often try to positively engage people. I do not and will not smile if you tell me to. Or play nice. I have never been very good at playing nice. Or when I do play nice I hate myself for playing nice. If this prohibits me from being a certain person or going certain places it has always, it will always, I am not changing now, if anything I want to get angrier, I want my writing especially to be more filled with rage, especially when i read Close to the Knives, I want to be more of an asshole, more critical, less nice. When the man on the street tells me to smile, instead I snarl. Instead I snarl. Or I smile and inside I snarl. That's kind of the novel that's out now. The girl always told to smile, to be nice, to be the equivalent of working in customer service. How this sickens her. How she longs to revolt from this.

Perhaps the goal here if there is any goal here is to represent the process of what's going on, in public, as well as inside. To be as brutally honest as possible. That's what I've always done, here, on the blog, or in my own private diary. I cannot sugarcoat or censor. I will not. Perhaps I'm done here. On this blog. This particular space. I don't know. It's becoming all impossible to negotiate, the self on the reading tour, with the writing self. Why do these need to be different selves?

Anyway, I used to write essays here. And then the Semiotext(e) book came and I have been working on that for two years and I was essaying there as opposed to here. And then this became like a journal of sorts. Maybe I am swimming sort of in my own stew here, maybe it's not a worthwhile space anymore. I will meditate on this and try not to act too impulsively. But perhaps I need to slowly make peace with this online space, realizing unlike a book it will never be technically finished, but perhaps it is finished, perhaps I have finished it.

I apologize for this mini-exorcism. Or rather I don't. And that is the point.

fuck yeah anne yoder

2011-10-24T06:36:00.000-07:00

Anne Yoder has a short story in the newest issue of Fence. You can read it here.

new york new york

2011-10-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

Was short but sweet. Was wonderful to hear Laurie Weeks read - she is a total rock star, that one. I was quite happy to be her opening act. What a virtuosic feat Zipper Mouth is. Most of the other time in the 30 hours I was there I hung out with my sister and brother-in-law and held my baby goddaughter sleeping (the one morning free I had, I had the choice between going to the deKooning show at the MOMA and helping Vera with her bath, I chose of course playing with the baby, have I grown soft? That milk-drunk look on her face after she's fed, or the way she grows silent and calm when water is being poured over her head, there's nothing more beautiful.) This weekend in Chicago for her christening, next weekend in Chicago again for two great readings on the North Side.

Anyway, so Green Girl is officially out. So there's that. Although it says there's only two left at Amazon, but who the fuck knows with Amazon. I need to consider my policy of linking to Amazon - it makes everything so sellable that I'm talking about. I sound like a broken record, but if you read the book and dug it, please consider rating it and/or reviewing it on Goodreads, or on Amazon. That way other people can learn about the book. It's the wave of the future, folks.

I will hopefully write something less boring soon. I read Close to the Knives on the plane, then switched over to a beyond-bad romance novel. Then switched back. Pablum mixed with rage. Sometimes one cannot be completely disintegrating, one craves instead to be falsely whole.

travel diary: and now, and then, etc.

2011-10-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

I have been carrying around my black Moleskine journal all around the past 10 days and except for writing little exhaustive fragments on Amtraks or a clothing list a la Joan Didion I haven't been able to write anything. I told myself, you will write down thoughts for yourself before you think of thoughts for others. To no avail. Perhaps I have no self anymore if not mediated by readers. Frightening thought. Or: some freedom the white space of Blogger. Automatic writing then Publish. Perhaps this is basically boiling down to the ease with which I can type versus handwrite. I could try to keep a diary on my computer but that feels wrong as well. When I think of it I hear the Doogie Howser Casio theme song in my head.

I have been traveling through the beginning of this tour feeling a heaviness, a blankness. I found myself getting terribly lost and finding myself in unsafe situations, which I still experienced with a passivity, like I was myself a character. John and I finding ourself on a bridge without pedestrian sidewalks late at night in Portland. Wandering around in 102 degree heat on Sunset Boulevard, in tight black jeans, finding myself at a fairly swank spa that seemed out of place on that particular stretch, getting my toenails painted, slowly, dark green, by a 23-year-old who just moved to LA from New Jersey three weeks ago and told me about her problems with her roommates in her cramped place in Studio City and confessed to me she once wanted to write, although she didn't know what, that's what she'd be doing, if she wasn't doing this, shrugging to the place, my toes, and also telling me she longed to cut off all of her long glossy brown hair. All while I watched Sunset Boulevard silently (apropos) play above the receptionist desk, it was that kind of place, gesturing to an old glamour without really reaching it, and wondered how many people in the salon, empty except for the hairstylists outfitted in black and the lower-caste in white, knew what film it was, or whether they just saw an old movie and old people. And felt rather like I was in the novel I've been traveling places to read from and blear on about.

More high-risk situations. I found myself, again, in the heat in San Diego, getting lost walking from the Sheraton to the campus. Several times. Couldn't make it up the hill. The heat, I think. A disorientation. Once I ended up on the other side of the campus with my books in tow, having been given scarecrow-directions by UCSD students. A kind employee in a facilities truck gave me a lift to Atkinson. That night walking to dinner with Bhanu, again, lost. We hitched a ride with a student in the dentistry school, literally, hitched a ride, thumbs out. If someone picks us up we're still young and attractive Bhanu decided. She made her British accent more accentuated for the dentistry student, who was quite amiable, so he would think at least one of us had the appearance of elegance and nonchalance, like hitching is completely appropriate in other environments. She told him that I was a very famous writer, hilariously, totally of course wrongly. When it was everyone there who couldn't wait to see her, to hear from her, myself included. It was lovely getting lost with Bhanu. She who singed her hair at the Excess panel in lieu of reading from her talk or Schizophrene. I told her earlier via email when she was telling me of her San Diego plans that I wish I was someone who went swimming in the sea, like her, like others at the conference.

And then the third time, with Kate Durbin, after the Excess panel, I went last and read overlong, it was naked, vulnerable, weird, reading from Heroines, this work I've cooped up in myself for so long. And I read a passage of spousal madness, of the sometimes violence of a dyad, and felt guilty about this, because I missed John so longingly, but he had helped me pick out the passage. I don't know what anyone thought of Heroines, honestly. There was kind of a silence afterwards. And then someone asked me if hysteria was real, and if evil was real. Or maybe they asked Johannes or Kate if evil was real. What is evil I wondered. I am still wondering this. I guess I don't believe in evil. I guess evil is a moral explanation for systems and phenomena that are extremely complex and transcend the individual. I guess I've always felt evil is besides the point, or isn't a good enough explanation. I believe in fascism. I think Heroines is entirely about fascism, which I see constructed through language and relationships. But anyway after the panel I wandered a bit with Amaranth, who I was so glad to meet, and Kate D., sorry to miss their gorgeous freakish newspaper twinning performance the next day. Kate D and I wandered around campus foraging for healthy food, and then decided to head back to the parking lot. Again we had to be Blanche DuBoises and accept a ride up the hill, this time on a motorized cart, Kate D with her painted on black eye and bleeding nose, and her Victorian costume, me hanging on in back, clutching my now-warm ginger Kombucha with one hand.

About the conference. Such obviously brilliant and accomplished people. I would like to have had tea with many of them one on one. But I think people who really dig such mass gatherings, like in their bloodstream, are people who went to camp as children. I never went to camp as a child. In the summer instead I played with my two siblings, all of us a year apart, and when we weren't hitting each other or lost in our solitary reveries around the house we were engaged in games of magical imaginary. There is something there I think. At the mixer Friday night after the Stars panel, where I read from Green Girl, the scene where Ruth cuts off all her hair, a tragedy becoming a frothy comedy, for a while I sat alone at a table and ate from a small square of vegan tiramisu and the complimentary kombucha, two of my favorite things. Of course since it was my only dinner I proceeded to get violently ill afterwards, which prompted me switching my tickets back home so I could rest and restore for two days before heading to New York tomorrow morning for the reading with Laurie Weeks. On an aside, I've truly become a 65-year-old woman. IBS which becomes much worse when I'm traveling really does make one feel like a hag, no longer a girl. In all of these situations where I've found myself surrounded by beautiful and intelligent people, fellow writers, in fact, for once, I most of the time was trying my best not to let an explosive attack of gas escape me, or playing with my waistband because my constipation was bloating me so much that I felt 5 months pregnant. Seriously. That's basically what I have done the entire tour so far. This is where I was at this mixer, doubled over with horrible cramps, smiling and trying to make some sort of conversation, conversation that sometimes felt like an explanation of why one was worthy to sit at the table. I didn't try to sit with people, later Tim Jones-Yelvington and Megan Milks sat with me, both who I find kindred and always enjoy talking to. And lovely students from Cal Arts who later gave me a ride home. But I realized at that moment that it is difficult for me to be a physical body in these larger gatherings. Also that I'm not entirely socialized, and I've actually become less and less socialized.

At home yesterday I felt completely fine and restored almost immediately. Back to solitary or the dyad. My comfort zone. John had to work yesterday afternoon, so after a lovely morning sitting out on the porch reading the Sunday times and drinking endless tea I spent the afternoon researching various spicy sauces to mimic the food I ate in Portland.

Excuse me now my toilet's all stopped up. I've been plunging it all morning.

quick tour update

2011-10-14T23:50:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to quickly update that at the last minute I've decided to cancel my readings in the Bay Area. I'm in San Diego now, having finished my two panels today for the &Now conference (more on everything soon), preparing to get on a plane early tomorrow for San Francisco, and found myself feeling pretty ill when I returned home to the hotel tonight. I think this traveling so many days straight has just been pushing myself too hard. In order to sustain myself during these readings and make it to my New York reading in one piece I had to make a call what was best for my health. I am super bummed I'm not going to see some of my favorite Internet folks in San Francisco.

Update update: If you came specifically to see me at the reading in SF or Santa Cruz and I wasn't there, I would like to send you a copy of Green Girl (it will be an ARC, which is basically the same thing except there's a few typos in it and an extra sliver of white space on the cover). I have 3 I can send out. So email me at francesfarmerismysister@gmail.com and let me know and I'll send out books to the first three who email me.

Update update update: Because of my desire to see some of my favorite writers and readers that are in the Bay Area, I am going to try my best to actually get to the Bay Area to do a reading in the spring from Green Girl. If anyone has suggestions for bookstores or series that you think might be interested, let me know!

The shopgirl and Kirkus

2011-10-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

Jessa Crispin interviewed me about Green Girl for Kirkus Reviews, and her questions were an absolute delight to answer. From her intro about the book: "It cracks, it zings. It makes you call your girlfriend and read sections aloud over the phone." Jessa also posted a bonus q&a bout the epigraphs in the novel on her Bookslut blog. Also the novel is available and shipping from Amazon, birdies have told me, even though it's still technically not released yet (the official release date is October 18, the day I read with Laurie Weeks in NYC).

lazy tour diary

2011-10-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

I was about sure that I was going to write something like an immense tour diary, or I was going to write absolutely nothing. Instead I feel I can sort of lay fragments down, a map, a cry. I am realizing as I go forth into this public space I should never tell people I am a writer. It seems an obvious thing to do because it describes the state of my propulsion into these different cities. I am supposed to be public and publicizing. But it's a difficult thing to admit. Everyone has such a sense of what a writer is, and the great fat majority of the time, I do not fit anywhere within that context. In Seattle I read to a table of a fellow reader's extended family, with a few others. No one bought my book, although I signed a few that were previously given away. Although John and I had drinks afterwards with the writers Richard Chiem and Frances Dinger, a lovely young couple based in Seattle, and talked about writing. Although I didnt' drink, I had ginger brew, as all of this traveling is making me fussy over my stomach. But that day and the next morning John and I went to the Chapel of St. Ignatius, a beautiful modern building on Seattle University's campus, and sat in the pew and stared at all of the brilliantly colored rays of light coming through at different angles, and I sat in the room with the Beckettian tree sculpture and the orange light, and felt like I was having something of a sacred experience. I began crying in fact, not because of the religiosity of it all, but because I couldn't remember the last time a work of art had really moved me in such a way. I lit candles for my mother and my grandmother and my uncle, all the people who I have loved who have died, and that felt like a remnant from my childhood and reassuring and renewing. The next morning after the reading the writer's mother posted on a comments thread on Facebook that she (her daughter) was obviously the best reader there. Which I suppose is a mother's prerogative to say. I scanned this accidentally as I was looking at Facebook while on Amtrak from Seattle to Portland. I didn't take it as a review of my performance. It was fun and rather freeing to read actually.There was a large crowd the next evening at Portland, which was affirming, although I'm fairly sure most of them were not there to see me, but I took them anyway. I read with my publisher of O Fallen Angel, Lidia Yuknavitch, reading in her man's suit and still voice and lovely sentences and beautiful blonde hair. It is good to feel affinity with another writer. Hillary Boles, the young Portland artist whose self-portrait is on the cover of Green Girl, came to the reading, which made me so happy. Then she told me she actually worked in a department store, which made me ecstatic. I loved the shopgirls in Portland. They were all super well-read and gorgeous. I love going to boutiques, because the young women who work there are always impeccably dressed, especially in the exquisitively edited boutiques, but then you ask to use their bathroom and without fail it's always a piggy girl-stye, cigarettes and fast food wrappers on the floor, no toilet paper. I love that. I want to give every shopgirl my novel for free and that's it. That's what I want. At Powell's I felt certain that I was a writer, perhaps, I even signed ten copies for their stock. Then the next morning I went to look for my book there, as I have still never had the experience of wandering past my book at a bookstore, I suppose that wouldn't be that experience entirely, but I was willing to fake it. But I couldn't find it. Embarrassed, I asked the bookstore employee at the Info Desk. He said it was supposed to be in the Featured Titles in the Small Press Section. I looked for it and didn't see it but there on the lowest shelf of the regular Small Press Section unscannable to the passing eye I saw them. Quickly I moved a face-out over to the featured section. As I was making my getaway I looked back and saw the bookstore employee and another one at my new display I had made, and then them looking at me. I went and hid in Thrillers and texted John on my phone to come and get me. What else? I want to move to Portland, tomorrow. A mecca for so many things. The best vegan food of my life. I kept on eating and eating although my stomach was cramping and I was bowled over slurping up red rice with delicious spicy sauce. I forget I am not supposed to write about being a vegan because that's annoying. I wonder what's more annoying - writing about my vegan diet or my irritable bowel. I was ecstatic in Portland, when John and I weren't getting lost and walking on a highway or down deserted alleyways in late at night or stalled at a crazy Walgreen's waiting for a bus forever because that's where Google Maps was sending us. On the plane to Los Angeles now solo I read Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, I had heard him read in Portland. It is a beyond beautiful book, a portrait of a poet on a Fulbright in Spain, but also about poetry and art and searching for a higher level of experience and numbness. Reminiscent of my favorites - Bernhard and Sebald and Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. This last book I mentioned to the writer as I asked him to sign my book after the reading, which embarrassed me, asking him, but I guess I did it because I wanted to introduce myself or tell him I was moved by his reading, which is rare for me, because most of the time I am bored at readings, especially poetry readings, and instead watch the crowd for their studied and solemn reaction, and try to think about what they're taking from the words which I have trouble stringing together, if I can hear the words during a reading, and actually have basic comprehension, I consider it a triumph. Anyway Lerner writes to this in his poet's novel but in a much more meaningful way. Anyway, he politely asked whether I wrote. I said yes, I had just actually read the night before. He asked my name. I told him. He looked embarrassed. Maybe for me. I am not really up on other contemporary writing he said. That's okay. I told him. I don't expect you to know who I am. If he did I would maybe have been the one embarrassed. Now I am in my sister's house in Los Angeles, writing this on my sister's bed, she is not here, I will be seeing her and the baby in New York in just a week, and then again at the christening in Chicago a few days later as I am the godmother, I know, me, half feral kitten half monster, a godmother, I am tickled at it, I have been thinking of babies lately, and I think the only way I could have a baby and be a mother is if I lived in Portland and ran an artist books' space with John, although this is all hypothetical, as I'm not convinced I'm really female or even human and could incubate a human baby. I am going to camp out here and work on interviews I have to do, for the novel, and attempt to force myself to reread and reevaluate Part Two of Heroines, and prepare for &Now, and try to be invisible, more purposefully invisible, for a few days.

inappropriate

2011-10-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

Louise Bourgeois, with her pencilled fragments, her text-woven art works, is one of my favorite writers (I know we share this, Angela Simione) and I remember reading her saying that whenever she traveled she packed weird clothes. I always think of this. I am preparing to basically have a house on my back (or wheeled, cannot decide carry-on luggage) for two straight weeks, my most intense part of the tour that will involve 10 days without John, the longest, by far, by far we've ever been without each other, and I'm afraid by the end of not seeing him and plugging into his body (I don't mean that sexually, the plug-in happens on the side, usually) I will be a wilted one-inch piece of lettuce someone will sweep into a gutter. Or I'll be fine and reinvigorated. It's difficult to say. I am still feeling some post-surgical fatigue which I'm treating with watching early AM Gossip Girl on the Internet as opposed to preparing for my quasi-thesis-defense with Chris at noon, and getting into involved phone conversations with salon owners about how my bangs (fringe) wasn't up to par with the last haircut, and yes, I'd like a do-over, sorry to be a pain, I know I am painful, at these times I am my mother resurrected, the one who takes no bullshit who barters who haggles and I wonder if that makes me a hag. I am also treating my post-surgical fatigue with vegan chocolate cupcakes which I inhale one a day, this is sexual, I blatantly lick the skirt of the cupcake afterwards, trying to tease out any excess crumbs, and refreshing my browser for coverage of Foxy Knoxy. Oh I'm so glad I'm beginning my tour in the land of Frances Farmer and Amanda Knox! This feels apt. John will be with me in Seattle and Portland we plan to absolutely pig out on vegan food. And I would love to wander around and follow the camped-out media gypsies from Stockholm and London outside of Knox's family home. I'm kidding. I'm not really kidding.

My loves, my loves, will I post here in the next two weeks? I would imagine I will post either diarrheatically or not at all. That is my guess. If you come to a reading (view sidebar) dont' feel it's wrong to ask if I'd like to have a beer or a salad with you, or to offer to drive me to the nearest Whole Foods. I will ask where the nearest kombucha on tap is. If you live in Los Angeles and want to see me you are welcome to pick me up in Laurel Canyon, where I will be camped, out carless. I know a very good or pretty good Indian restaurant in West Hollywood. If I see you in San Diego I might be white-sheeted exhausted, having Amtraked across our great West Coast a few times, and perhaps we can have lunch? You will drive? That would be lovely. You see, I have my 4-inch suede heeled boots on John has told me not to pack, and we keep on getting into *conversations* about it, because they won't fit into any carry-on I own with my practical boots and California sandals and slip-ons, but I need to pack them because they make me almost 6 feet tall and I walk with a sort of stoop in them and I looovve them. If I see you in New York I might be trembling and shaky or I might be absolutely fine. If I see you in Chicago, hope to see you in Chicago...The last two weeks of October will be spent somehow completely rewriting Part Two of Heroines, to get to Chris by November, to get to MIT Press by Christmas, I will be in Chicago both weekends Week 3 my goddaughter's (!) christening, Week 4 two readings, then first week of November Los Angeles again....sometimes I feel like I'm being slowly, slowly, roasted on a spit. I just ate a bowl of soy yogurt and granola and then found myself banging my head against the front windowed door. I found the repetitive motion quite soothing. Please in your reread of this blog post take out all references to vegan food as Chris tells me it makes me sound annoying. I answered: But I am annoying, Chris. It's one of my undoubtable character traits. She laughed.

amazing review of green girl

2011-10-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

On Bookslut, Lightsey Darst writes a HILARIOUS, dead-on, gorgeous, engaged, beyond-brilliant review of Green Girl, so many morsels, have to quote this: "reading this book is like eating Oreos, if Oreos could be filled with spiders and simultaneously retain their addictive power." And by the way, Bookslut, the love is totally mutual.

Also, from Bookslut, New Directions issuing new translations of Clarice Lispector? With the four books coming together to form a picture of her face? Massive, massive boner here about that. I'm really really hoping for a poster.

tour

2011-10-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

I've updated the tour specifics for October. Heading off soon. If you're in Seattle, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago in October, please come out! Tell your friends!

I'm picking readings right now for the tour, it's *hard* to come up with 10-15 minutes bits from an entire novel.

Also I'm supposed to notify you all that Green Girl is now available for order as an ebook. It's also available at the end of the week on Amazon. OR, you can come to one of my readings and I or the bookstore I will be reading at will sell you an early-bird copy!

I need to rethink seriously my relationship to exclamation points.

vomit

2011-09-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was such a dark Bronte day. I hid under the covers, despite the sun. Part of the reason was my feelings of intense nausea, both physical and existential. The former to do partially with the idea that I decided to start taking a bunch of herbs - names like willow root, triphala, ashwangandha root - in the attempt to be a more full of light and active and present person, and not always feeling so cramped and sick all the time. But ridiculously I took all of these capsules with loads of vitamins and so then I really felt like I was going to die. Later in the afternoon I vomited and I felt actually much better, strangely cleansed. I'm going much much slower on the herbs from now on until my body can handle it.

And then this morning I was sane - wonderfully sane - didn't check my email until noon - but then when I did - I got a message from Chris - apparently she's been trying to call me all month of September while reading the manuscript! Of course I started hyperventilating. I called back. No she called back. I don't remember. She loved, she said, Part One, which is gratifying and very good. So much she said that when she got to the end she started hyperventilating. Which is funny that I've used the word hyperventilating twice but with different meanings each time. They loved it. Part Two she felt lost something somehow. So they could either chop the book in half and publish it in another series, or I need to work on Part Two. I'm going to work on Part Two. I believe in it. I need to cut 10,000 words off 40,000, which is the length of Part Two. Which will involve a complete overhaul, rewrite, of the second part. I am prepared to do it. I want to do it. I feel so intensely that what I attempt to communicate in Part Two - all the stuff about the girl, the contemporary, blogging, authorship - is necessary, important, vital, or I want it to be so. But how? I leave next Wednesday for Seattle and then I'm gone, gone, gone, doing the stuff of touring and reading. I might be editing in hotel rooms. But this book needs to be perfect. I need it to be perfect. It will feel like surgery, like amputation, but I need to do it. But then after our conversation I ate one of my most recent weird weird garbage salads in my new high-raw health brigade - mustard greens, red leaf, green leaf, romaine, millet made with coconut oil, live pickles, avocado, hummus, hemp seeds - but now I feel like puking again. Whether it's the herbs or the stringy avocado or my nerves I don't know.

And now I've just eaten an entire chocolate bar. So much for feeling cleansed. Although perhaps it's impossible for me to not be toxic - the toxins are so intrinsically wrapped up in my identity, in my unsafe body.

Also, I would like some input, as I obviously am lacking in real, live girlfriends here, although I've made some but not any I would feel comfortable asking this - I have been trying to grow my hair out like Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon or St. Vincent, I have a phase now of it being short frizzy and totally bizarre, do I go all sleek gamine again for the tour or just grow it out all frizzy? Any input would be nice. Yes, I'm soliciting input about my hair on my blog. Ruth in Green Girl cuts all of her hair off a la Seberg, maybe it would be tonally good, or tonally weird, like the author is the character or something.

gg reviewed in bust

2011-09-26T19:24:00.000-07:00

Tonight was at the check-out line of my new grocery store and picked up the new issue of Bust with Mindy Kaling on the cover. Inside is a great review of Green Girl by Molly Labell, which examines the novel's ancestry in Mrs. Dalloway and The Bell Jar.

P in V (this blog post was titled after the fact)

2011-09-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

Dear all - I've reintroduced my body to coffee this morning, so the rhythm and speed of my writing will be best described with the adjective caffeinated. This morning I awoke with the sun streaming in through my windows (!) and J was in the shower and I felt dead-alive, dirt-level, like very umph, I will not function if I am not coffeed today. Like the sun and the pines and oh-glorious but - urggh, umph, in this street scene I am playing a zombie commuter, or the pale blonde UNC students trudging to 9am classes in mass droves that I had to remind myself not to barrel down as I dropped J off at work - we will be bicycling, soon, but not the morning after the move, the bikes' are in the shop, etc. Time for good new rituals but not yet. That sort of thing. More good rituals - we are not going to have the Internet installed in our lovely cottage in the semi-woods, which is why as soon as I dropped John off at work in the car we're not going to drive I beelined to coffee and Wifi, as there's all these lovely comments here I haven't replied to and more action in my inbox! and I'm starting to answer emails communally, like here, as well as respond or initiate personal correspondence in this public space, which is I suppose wrong or oozey, but oh well, it is this new movement though, maybe because of limited time or something, as opposed to writing highly specific letters to my pen pals, I write you all, here.

Let me set the scene - I am outside, bottomless cup, the Weaver Street Market in my new town of Carrboro, which is this wonderful communal gathering space, dirt-and-wood-chips, filthy sexy philosophers and graduate students on laptops, arguing eccentrics, feral children, very hairy armpit and hippies. I LOVE it here. It is a long walk or bike ride (with bike lanes) from my new home, the modernized mill house/cottage we are renting, with the eternal pine trees out front. And I find myself acting completely different- like an old self - in this new space, much more relaxed, freer, less suffocated, urban claustrophobe. There was so much ugliness where I last lived. My behavior is so different - yesterday our first day, everything still in boxes inside, sitting on the steps of the front porch, just watching the cars swim past, staring, thinking, not fixated negatively on any one thing. Or eating soup on our tremendous back patio last night, watching all the fauna, the bat up above, the orange tabby cat cross the street, the deer with antlers posed underneath the yellow deer crossing sign almost insouciantly. I am happy here. I forgot how incredibly shaped I am by space. I feel sane again, wise again, calm again, the good self again, the one not fixated as much on things or people but again on ideas or just even, thankfully sometimes, on nothing.

Although (always although) I'm fighting another aspect of myself, how much my body has changed lately, I am still struggling against some surgical pain, made worse by the boxes I wasn't supposed to lift but did, occasionally, this weekend, and the one main flaw of our new bathroom is it is ENTIRELY covered with mirrors, so much so that you watch yourself on the toilet and watch your pale wrinkled plump ass bend over as you apply yet another eternal maxi-pad to your panties because you have not stopped bleeding black gunk since the surgery and watch yourself soap up while showering, as I'm trying to escape myself and be more at peace I am only surrounded by myself (oh and also that there's a fancy modern shower as opposed to a bathtub, one of the only ways I've ever learned to soothe myself in a healthy way, barring romance novels, shopping, masturbation, or TV on the Internet. Oh, wait, masturbation's healthy. Although I'm not allowed to do that yet, not really, which is now making me want to grind myself against a tree. NO P IN V, that's the online community slogan for recovery from surgery of the girly parts (how heteronormative is that, I know), the length of which is up for debate, it's either two weeks (today) or four weeks or six weeks. The first thing I asked the student nurse upon coming to post-surgery was whether I could masturbate, as that's always been the way I've dealt with at least menstrual pain. NO P IN V but what about clitoral stimulation I asked. (In reality one does not want to put anything in one's vagina, or at least I didn't for the first two weeks, as I walked around strangely feeling I was being still scoped by something cold and metal at the behest of small silver aliens, although now I am feeling rather randy, perhaps this is why I'm writing so fucking much, some form of sublimation, although for some reason some joyful visitation came over us the day before my surgery, and we had sex like five times, in various positions and stations throughout the loft, the kind of athletic sex where you begin counting the number of times, like a game, except unlike horseshoes almost does still count, us an old married couple of almost a decade acting like giggling kids, usually in such situations the nurse the night before barks at you No P in V but they either neglected to mention or it wasn't the case here, and we were curious whether the marks of such activity would show up as impressions on my uterus in the high-def photos the surgeon showed J afterwards while I was still knocked out, disgusting photos of an oozing ovarian cyst my lover still bizarrely insists on saving, stored along the last Xray of my metallic post-human body that so fascinates him, all rods and screws and bolts in my back.) So all is mirrors and my body feels monstrous and distorted, I realized showering yesterday I still had all the black scuff marks from surgical bandages all over my body, and I also went on the patch three weeks ago because of these issues, and I had still the sticky black scuff from that, and my abdomen is still hard and sore and bloated, also because I've been quite sedentary for the past month, When Can I Do Pilates Again? When Can I Fit Into My Jeans Again? whine the women in the hys-sisters forums or the lap forms or the endo forums and I rolled my eyes and thought Gosh How Bourgeois And Vain but this morning I tried to struggle into my black jeans which wouldn't even button still bloated and sore and because of the patch my body and breasts are swollen almost beyond recognition, so much so that I couldn't fit into my bra post-surgery, and when I do now it leaves red welted marks around my body, and my breasts could NOT stand to get any fucking bigger, as I already wear military grade equipment to corral them, and I think I'm just nervous and concerned because I will be doing these readings and I had all of these outfits planned, and I wanted to project an image of polish and glamour and poise, yet I will probably be wearing stretch leggings and baggy Tshirts, like Miranda going to Reno in Sex and the City, yes, yes, yes, I just made that reference. It's horrible to be so concerned about fatness, and I realize this is a feminist issue, and I look at other women and think - how beautiful and varied their shapes and bodies are, and I'm usually not so obsessed with being slender, and I don't mean to be insensitive and triggering, but this is something I sometimes think about it, and my body doesn't feel or look like my own right now, I write to this, a bit in Heroines, how Ford Madox Ford with his wheezing old walrus body didn't worry about whether his ass looked fat in jeans and that's what allowed him to write his tomes and not worry. And I think more than anything this is an age issue - the sense that I am outgrowing a girl body, and becoming a hag, and a fear of being excessive - that my body, my hormones, are out of control, that I'm not seemingly linear and uncomplicated.

It is clear, I think, that even in the most sedate and calming setting I will always find a way to become negatively fixated on something. Which is probably why I need these tranquil settings, to take me down a notch.

Oh and this: I AM MADAME OVARY. I have been wanting to write this somewhere for two weeks.

No P in V. The remarkably perceptive Kristen Stone and I have been having an exchange about Green Girl, and because I asked her to she posted some of her email to me on her blog, and I just wrote her a book in reply to a really wonderful question she asked me about the role of sexuality in Green Girl, made even more prescient to me because I am just beginning to think about what I'm going to read on the tour, and I didn't realize it but apparently the Seattle reading will deal with sex, so I should read a passage about that, and I don't know whether I should read passages dealing with sex for the readings I'm doing with the Men Undressed anthology, which would be in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, two in Chicago, one in New York (Nov), and that makes me reflect about sexuality as I represent it in Green Girl, in particular Ruth's sexuality, which is quite messy and complicated, as all of our positions are, if we're honest to ourselves, I don't ascribe to the belief that even heterosexuality is straight, and any pretense to straightness is all ideological campaign pretenses. And the anthology, which I'm not in, deals with women writing male sexuality, which I am not doing, or much of in Green Girl. But anyway. In response to my affirmation of my idea of Green Girl in *some* ways being a queer text, KS asked me about the role of sex in the book. She wrote (hope it's okay, KS, I'm make a private correspondence public, it's oozey and wrong perhaps):

have a question about green girl. in your blog you referenced there being an 'awkward threesome', and then there is the scene with rhys, where he says no, no no and she does him anyway, and it just kind of seems like none of the sex is consented to, right, in the whole book, even the scene where she wakes up with agnes stroking her belly. so i guess the question is: is/can consent even be a question in the emotional landscape of the green girl, and is sex that just happens and is traumatizing, like is that rape//does the green girl see herself as having been victimized? i'm thinking of the scene in ghost dance, where the narrator is beaten by the man until she passes out. green girl made me think a lot of carole maso.

I really loved this question. Blake also got to some of this in his essay dealing with GG, when he describes a sex scenes as, I believe, beyond cold, in which Ruth fucks a bartender while at a bar in a kind of why-not scenario, or more accurately allows herself to be fucked, while internally channeling Deneuve in Belle de Jour as well as a girl on the cover of a Maxim-like magazine. I wouldn't consider the sex in GG to be rape, or nonconsensual, at all, Ruth consents to everything, in a passive way in which she sometimes victimizes herself, sex is something she lets herself of her, like images from a TV. But I think I was trying to explore something in my own sexuality when I was in my early twenties, as well as what I've observed in terms of a contemporary hook-up culture, which is how deadening it can be, but combined with a desire to not exist so one is a sort of self-effacing, the other is a desire for that, a more active awareness for self-annihilation or abjection, but a consciousness that is not empowered, in fact is the opposite of empowerment, and for Ruth her sexuality is really about the desire to fragment, to not be empowered, some of that is entirely passive, and a bit of that is actively, awarely passive. I think how my representation or interest in sexuality links to queer theory, like as written about by Lauren Berlant, who I think of as a mentor, or Leo Bersani in The Freudian Body, and extremely integral and important text to me, albeit one I read post-GG, but is huge for my book-in-progress Under the Shadow of My Roof, is the idea of sexuality or desire itself as being fragmenting, and messy. In the world of Green Girl there are the fuckers and the fucked, and for most of the book, Ruth is the fucked, sometimes this is from a libidinal position, such as her memories of The One, and how he bruised and brutalized her body, but remembering that with a jouissance, but sometimes she is the fucked as a default position, because she does not know how to say no, and that describes a lot of the sex in the book, and Ruth's identity throughout the book, which is the position of passivity, her literary ancestors are Jean Rhys' younger heroines, Marya in Quartet and Anna in Voyage in the Dark. So for a lot of the book Ruth is an object of exchange, and that is how sex functions, as it does in Rhys' novels. But other times she desires to be destroyed, and that links to her obsession with the medieval Christian female mystics. What she craves is to be penetrated, and it's more than anything a spiritual penetration she desires. Only once in the book, the position changes, although it's still the duality of fucked-fucker, when Ruth wrestles with Rhys and makes him have sex with her, she is the sadist here, the fucker, and this is emphasized by her putting make-up on him and being generally cruel and abusive to him, a position she abandons and grows bored of, because it is not what she desires. So it is less about P in V but it is about some sort of hole, this is how I've always thought of Molly Bloom's sexuality, when she remembers her first sexual experience she thinks "Is that it?" and for the most of the monologue she just wonders and wanders about at her hole. The desire to be filled. The desire to be empty. The desire to be shattered. The desire to be the one who shatters.

Thank you for reading my disgusting, oozey, horny, excessive, totally unnecessary blog post. I am reclaiming myself as a hormonal blogger, writing from my sticky, stitched up cunt. If I haven't replied to your comments or emails yet, know a)I love you and b)I will reply post-haste.

moving

2011-09-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

I think it's good to be humbled but there are different sorts of humbling, and the Oedipal ones attached to institutions are profoundly demoralizing. Lately I walk around and I feel profoundly demoralized, and I think in some ways this is a positive sign, because it means I'm still changing and growing and I'm not really invested in this cult of the self-as-author (this is another sort of cult of the author, where one believes the hype, which is all that it is, hype and smoke, there are no authors really in this society unless one lives in Brooklyn and has the first name of Jonathan, although there are editor pants one can buy at Express). Whenever I feel the slightest bit blown up - like I as a named entity exist in the world - something happens exactly at the same time to deflate me so sorely and so instantly that I am almost glad for it. Yesterday I reread Dennis Cooper's Closer - which is one of the core texts I remember reading *before* I was a reader, if that makes sense, when I was just a blobby bag of intense emotion, and it is still so clear, his vision, his style. Although this didn't make me feel demoralized - it made me feel lovely to read, although I did scribble something childish in my journal afterwards about how I'm a photocopy of a photocopy and I'll just ever hope to rip off Cooper or Acker or all the greats and HOW to be original, and can one be original anymore? Sometimes I still write such funny super emotional juvenalia. A lot of the art writing in Closer, and position in a particular time and place and scene, flew over my head when I read it when I was oh, 21, because I was a very young 21, and not the brilliant and precocious twenty-something of so many fellow writers I am meeting. I feel I just started to gain consciousness, like, last year, actually. Actually I think I go in and out of consciousness. My new resolution is to attempt to stay alert.

If anything has come out of publishing it is a valuable, wonderful, one-on-one communion with fellow delicate and uncertain souls, that fills me with such immensity, and makes me think about this notion of writing or making things as a gift, which is ultimately I think how I think about it, a gift and a form of communion/communication. That is why I go here, to this white box of space and write. Communion/communication. Sometimes fervent and desperate yet uncertain and tentative. I am so lucky to have met recent brilliant ones - like Kari L or Kristen S who write me emails/communiques that I cherish. Kristen S started reading my blog because Bhanu told her it was a model of doubt, I think, which made me think of this space in a new way, and I do like that, the model of doubt, I think Heroines too is a book of profound doubt as to my own authorship and a sort of cherishing in that as well. (By the way - Bhanu's -Schizophrene - available now - glorious, glorious, glorious.) One of the books that is most profound to me that I reference over and over again in Heroines is Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina - if you have not read it, you MUST stop reading this and go to the library and read it, because every writer should read it, I think - it is referenced often because John and I reference it often as some sort of standard in our own relationship and M/F power struggle - it is also maybe John's favorite book, if it is in my top ten, and for a while I refused to finish it, because I was so jealous of how in love John was with Ingeborg Bachmann, and he wrote me notes in the text that referenced our own relationship, which I write to in Heroines.

But anyway to me Malina is among many other things - a work of delayed memory and trauma, both personal and historical and how the two conflate - a novel about being a woman writer, but in Bachmann's case a fictionalized version of being a well-known writer, as Bachmann was in her time, quite the blonde mermaid celebrity, and what publicity does to privacy. I think in some ways, if Heroines succeeds, which I'm not sure it does, it's the opposite - it's a nonfiction novel about an anonymous woman writer, who is enthralled to her own minor status and certain disappearance. Or maybe that's the work I will write at another time. Heroines is not a nonfiction novel. I think, it is a tract combined with a memoir. It is nothing. It doesn't really exist. Or won't until it gets final, editorial, approval, which it might not, and if so, I might go totally bag-lady crazy and photocopy it and walk the world the rest of my existence muttering lines from The Waste Land and giving it away for free. Perhaps I will become a bag lady outside of The Bodeleian in Oxford, where Viv's papers are ostensibly housed, and I will distribute my writing there. I will become known as that bizarre lady with the frizzy hair who has various conspiracy theories about the Fitzgeralds and Eliots, and who apparently once published a novel, if you believe her, it's ranked 1 million on Amazon.

This morning in my inbox I got an email from KS that is such a deeply personal and pitch-perfect and thankfully queer reading of Green Girl (and no one else has mentioned this to me before, what I have always felt was so apparent in the text, the queerness and erotic subtext in the relationship between the two ostensibly "straight" toxic girls that is in some ways tacit and in other ways aggressive) that I felt warmed all over and known, yes, read. I once read an interview with Danielle Dutton before I had met her in person but was so thrown by what she did in Attempts at a Life (still am, still thrown by everything she writes) where she spoke about the immense gift of publishing, that is starting to have readers. I agree. I think about that - the surprise of being read, of being engaged with, of entering into another dialogue where others write their own beautiful stories on top of my own, and it becomes almost this patchwork of stories that spin off from each other. I love that. It's a profound gift of publishing, as opposed to I suppose being Pessoa and writing on one's scraps in a box and storing it for an eventual later when one is no longer alive - although to be fair that is not exactly what Fernando Pessoa did but anyway. Everything, everything else about it really sucks though I think. I know not the best attitude to have before launching on some sort of wandering reading tour, but if there's anything I'm sure is fairly central about my being, and has been since probably birth, is that I have a terribly bad attitude.

I found out yesterday about a creative writing position available here, and since I have not been able to find a lick of work, thought perhaps I might try to apply for it, despite my lack of a terminal degree, which yes, always makes me think of death and dying. But then I have like 0% chance of getting it, for a variety of reasons, and then I talk myself out of it. I have to get a number of recommendations for it, and the first person I asked- the department head at a school where I adjuncted in the past - told me she didnt' remember me enough to write a substantial letter towards me, and she's sorry I couldn't find adjunct work, but without an MFA or a Ph.D. or a MAJOR publication it was frankly impossible, as everything's so competitive, despite me finding a fair wealth of work in both Ohio, most recently, and Chicago, prior, even though I wasnt' even remotely published in Chicago prior. And then I realize we still have this notion of major/minor from modernism, and I want to Xerox this email (because everything is retrograde to me today, why am I talking about photocopying? everything is digital I feel hopelessly analogue) and show it to Chris when we argued at her kitchen table in Los Angeles that there is no notion of the major or minor in writing today and I said back, Of course there is, and felt I had to write an entire book to prove this point.

We are moving to the cottage tomorrow and we are not nearly packed. John is more laissez-faire about such things, I become like the chick in Election when moving, with lists and clipboards, but since I am still so post-surgical, I am having to relent and do nothing and hope it will happen, somehow. The week we moved out of Chicago a man was murdered across the street from our apartment in Pilsen. I open Heroines writing about it. Last night John and I were exiting our loft building when we saw a man running at us, fast, he was only inches from us and we turned and saw a running police officer pointing a gun at us and screaming to stop or he'll shoot. The other man leapt into our back patio where we leapt into the neighboring patio - literally leapt - and hid under our neighbor's patio furniture while the cop tackled the guy and it was all very dramatic, and then later our back patio turned into a crime scene, with sniffing dogs, etc. And I have a dramatic abrasion on my wrist from leaping over the concrete wall. Funny since I'm not supposed to exercise, I wonder if the sort of fight or flight physicality is included, or there are exceptions from trying to dodge outside of the line of fire. It shook us. I am having some flashes this morning, as I tend to go very OCD in circumstances like this, it's just a startle, I'll close my eyes and see a man running, like at me. But obviously we always need some sort of rupture to shake us out of a quiescence. A violence to moving.

2011-09-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Through the center of everything, absolute chaos. And throughout I am expected to keep still. I am being absolutely literal here, at least, I think I am. Currently I am sitting in bed because, well, I am recovering from minor-major abdominal surgery and that is what one is supposed to do at Day #8 or something. And yet a complete tornado through everything, everything upheaved and strewn, as we are moving in like three days to a cottage nearer to John's work, in Carrboro, which I guess I would describe as faded hippie, in my front yard there will be massive pines upon which I will eventually fix bird feeders, and I will have an actual office with a window. But I am not technically supposed to be lifting anything, although I often amble out of bed, make a pot of lentil-millet-collard soup, freak out, try to pack a suitcase, strain something, and then go nap for an hour. Or watch things on my computer. God, I am watching things on my computer like I have a career in it. TV and BBC costume dramas. And yet my Internet is glacial - glacial - and next week I don't think our Internet will even be installed yet, so I am also preparing myself that this is the end of something. It must be the end of something, for things cannot continue as they are, and in my life, they never can, and I am aware that there are many, many, most, who continue as they are, yet I think for me the only way to make any progress is to continually upheave and agitate and shed skin every year or so.

Even though I'm in some sort of enforced surgical bell jar which is very close to feeling depressed I am making some thought-progress. I am thinking, mostly, I hate everything dealing with the Internet, and I just wrote a book dealing with the Internet, and celebrating a community here, which I do still celebrate, but basically it doesn't feed me and if anything is like a bad, bad boyfriend who I am stalking. Like Mr. Rochester. I watched the new Jane Eyre last night, which was basically comatose Bronte. But, god, Mr. Rochester is such a psychotic asshole fuck-me lover. Does he ever toy with poor Jane, yet he gets away with it because he's male and wealthy and Jane's got such a humble boner for him.

Anyway. I go on Facebook all day - and just scroll - and read about people's minituia (did I spell that right? no) and then realize I hate basically everything about it and it makes me miserable and god, I wish I could quit it. We all just slump around and stalk each other. Or I do. God, I need to seriously get a life. Also the past month I've been feeling poorly because another writer was not nice to me, and said, I don't want to be friends with you anymore, which made me feel like an entire community eshewed me, I guess I could say, and I was all mopey about it, and lately as I've been feeling like the jaws of life are tearing me asunder I've thought to myself, Kate Zambreno - You Need to Get a Fucking Life. Seriously. Everything for me has been so small - and I need to enlarge and think bigger, grander, not just write a book and then camp out at my screen wondering what people have said about me. Like Jane Eyre at the window, wanting a bigger life. That is what I want. I am thinking this year after I finish Shadow and make it as honest-wrenching as can be coupled with my greatest wish, to be weirdo-pervy, I will try to write plays. I will try to fucking write plays and get a fucking life.

DC on Green Girl

2011-09-17T06:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks Dennis Cooper for naming Green Girl as one of the books you have loved recently! Your George Miles cycle as well as The Sluts sit smack-dab in the center of my current sick-girl table. Also: this makes me happy.

hospital

2011-09-12T05:19:00.000-07:00

Across the street, after the large mosque, is the massive London Royal Hospital. People here do not go to the hospital. They go to hospital, like it's a state of being. A warm day. Almost spring. Patients in robes and various states of undress, bruised arms pulling on their IV bags, sitting in their wheelchairs, on the steps, having a cigarette or talking on their mobile phones. Others, flanked by attendants in hospital scrubs, stand on the steps, staring, staring into the street. - from Green Girl

anaesthesia

2011-09-08T06:48:00.000-07:00

I would like to reconfigure Blogger so there's NO titles. My titling lately has seemed banal and accidental and reminds me of when I worked at the arts magazine run by the PBS station or at the alt-weekly - the quippy two word title. No thanks. Same with tags. I used to do tags, and sometimes I lazily tag, and I have been told I would have more readers if I tag, but still I, for some reason, revolt against that system. I am in a state of stasis. Of waiting. I have to have this dumb procedure done on Monday, what will amount to minor abdominal surgery, so instead of just taking it as part of my week, and just dealing with it, and being all buddhist about it, I've halted all production on life, basically, and am just waiting around for it, and treating myself extra-special and careful.

I ordered books - the entire George Miles cycle by DC, The Orange Eats Creeps - and have told myself - when you are in bed recovering for the two days or whatever (HOW I ask myself, is this going to be different from lately) you will read and get into the dark dark space you need to get to work on your hiddengirl-tryptych. But instead I will probably just watch TV on my computer. Right? I feel I'm *always* wrestling with the ideal writer-I I'd like to be - kind of the Simone deBeauvoir model of writer, waking in the AM, working in the morning, taking a lunch and stroll, returning to work and writing and reading until late in the PM, etc., and there's the writer I actually am when I have leisure time, which is all I have here in NC because I can't find any work, and in the past week since I've finished Heroines - which is basically very very close to being a depressive. Squint maybe and you'll see a difference. She's occasionally taking a note. Maybe that's it. Yet when my occupation was college-student depressive, or waitress-depressive, I also took notes. Maybe there's no difference.

The anaesthesia's office informs me I need to take off my newly done bright yellow toenail polish for the procedure, which irritates me. Which makes me realize I haven't gone under for twenty years, maybe almost exactly, almost exactly to the month twenty years, when I had my scoliosis operation at 13, and then I was under for like 9 hours or something ridiculous like that. Yes twenty years end of July, and if my mother was alive that would be something I could remark on, really, to someone, as our anniversary was always our special day, for the first decade that's the day we'd visit the orthopedic surgeon, and then after that even she'd still take me out to lunch on my anniversary, as she called it. But remembering too that the day before my surgery my mother took me to her hairdresser's, and had her do this immaculate French braid (do they still do French braids? I remember their perfection, their hurt) as I wouldn't be able to wash my hair for a week or something, and then got my nails painted a hot bubble-gum pink with sparkles, and the AM of the surgery, having them insist on undoing the intricate plait, and removing the nail polish, that same hurt and humiliation when the nuns would do it, the angry march to the girls' room, gripping and reddening, and I remember just sobbing, just sobbing, I think mostly more than anything because I felt my mother was upset, because I appreciated the ritual, the concern, and I felt this was undoing everything. I have strongly resisted that feeling, of everything come undone, while simultaneously cultivating it.

Instead of being a writer lately I've become my own office worker, firing off emails for Green Girl, working on all the publicity for that, figuring out stuff for the ebook for OFA that it looks like is coming out in the fall, entering Book of Mutter into *one more contest* (always always one more contest), submitting the first chapter Rooms by request to a journal (perhaps I can just publish all the sections, and then post the links online, and readers can just piece together the whole book, an alternate type of publishing). Gah. I'm good at all this but it's again this other person, this other person I can be, the pitbull, and it always has interfered with again this ideal writerly-I. One of the main reasons I quit the alt-weekly is because I knew that the powerbroker me was at odds with the space and wait needed to learn to be a writer. I still think that's true. I dont' know if that's true. Maybe that's true. I need to go under in order to write. But all October and November will be about is bobbing to the surface. My tour is ornate, for me at least, ornate and expensive and a bit hyperventilating (as an adj.) I will be on tour living out of a backpack for 14 days straight. I will need to pack clothes for 14 days straight. I refuse to bring a heavy suitcase, as it's bad for my back and my neck and I like to be minimal, my model of being is the style hunter in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, her clothes from Muji with the tags cut off, so everything will have to be out of my carry-on sized backpack that I took to Scandinavia. No fancy dresses then for that leg. T-shirts. Pants that can roll. I rehearse the packing list in my head the past few days. I am ridiculous. Like Louise Bourgeois who once wrote that when she travels she dresses strange. I do that too. It is like I am readying to clothe myself for the outside world. So for now I stay, like a mole, in the dark, prepared to go under.

epiphany

2011-09-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

I've realized that two of my works, both my collage-work Book of Mutter, still unpublished, and the novel Green Girl are proto-Tumblr, or if not before Tumblr, per se, written in concurrence with but ignorant of this online creative explosion. Book of Mutter because I often collage from and plagiarize film stills and quotes from other sources, and I think also in general because of its repetitive as well as cinephilic nature. Green Girl because of the epigraphs from New Wave films and authors like Clarice Lispector or Rilke that mark the rhythm of my own text - my informed aesthetic at the time was both Benjamin's Arcades Project as well as a girl at her locker. I am really blown away how these Tumblrs are like these endless Arcades Projects. I could write an aesthetic philosophy dealing with Tumblr, so much of it I'm fascinated by and drawn to (such as the fetishization of the handwritten note in so many Tumblr posts, I've always been drawn to textworks of the plaintive scribble, by Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin and even more currently, Angela Simione). But I'd rather exist, within that space, and attempt to draw from and learn as much as possible. I knew this to an extent in Heroines, where the second section already drew from the rhythm of a Tumblr, as well as scrapbook works such as Renata Adler's Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, stringing together fragments, observations, quotes, biographical portraits, etc. In fact I drew on the rhythm of the Tumblr to attempt to describe both online notebooking and a new theory of the girl writing, a new sort of contemporary l'ecriture feminine: in Heroines I wrote: "The girl's Tumblr–that movement. This is how we write. Collaging and collecting. Tumbling, tumbling, down the rabbit hole." But now that I am more than an outside observer I feel this even more intensely.

Also thinking today how much Kathy Acker would have loved Tumblr, I think. All the irreverence and emo intensity and porniness, the homage and plagiarism as its dominating ethos.

spill

2011-09-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

I am having a massive coronary of extreme love and affection and respect for these girls and their Tumblrs. I feel like this entire Library of Lovely Babble has opened up to me. I had no idea. I imagined, but I had no idea how vast and anarchic and desire-filled and violent and sentimental and intensely self-critical and broken and brave and brilliant these spaces were as well as their authors. It has been a joy. I just want to exist in that world, forever. I am also struck by how many suicide Tumblrs there are.

Anyway. I also just booked THE TOUR for GREEN GIRL. Yikes. Having heart-attacks on that as well. If anyone who I've communicated with here or elsewhere has a guest room in Seattle, Portland, or Philadelphia and wouldn't mind having me and my partner John stay with you please email me/let me know. I want to do hotel, as we're trying to make it a holiday (SEA/PDX, as we've never been), but I'm also hyperventilating over the priciness. I am both a spendthrift and cheap. Wait, does a spendthrift mean cheap? The opposite of a spendthrift. A lush. Also, if anyone has a place I can crash solo in San Fran or San Diego please also give me a holler. I will give you a book (two books!) and read to you and...cook you a vegetarian meal. And try my best to be both tiptoey and charmant. I just got Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian over the weekend, because I feel I should become a domestic goddess in between projects, in lieu of me being lazy and John cooking everything, and instead I am hyperventilating because it's too much, too vast and encyclopedic. I bought French lentils this morning and sherry vinegar and good bread because I planned to whip up a simple French repast for myself, as Bittman says to do, but instead I am Tumbling and blogging and just eating plain bread. Although my favorite part of cooking lentils is spilling the dried beans out on a kitchen towel, and sifting through them with my hands to check for rocks, how soothing it is, and this time I bought the more-expensive green Puy ones, because I felt that seemed extra-something, and waiting for the mosaic to appear.

Love you all. Be patient for me in this next few months of me-me-me touring booking editing etc. crisis.

Also, one last thing: check out this new press A Bolha Editora just launched in Rio by the brilliant writer Rachel Gontijo De Araujo (who I published a text from when I curated Everyday Genius last year). They will be translating into Portuguese works by, seriously, my favorite contemporary writers - the Bhanu Kapil, Nath Stephens, Douglas Martin, and Gail Scott. Also an upcoming project with Nightboat which I know nothing about but I'm sure will be fantastic.

tumbling, tumbling, tumbleweed

2011-09-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, folks, I have started TUMBLING as a sort of curatorial project for Green Girl. FOLLOW ME PLEASE. I will be spending most of my time at the Tumblr site, as opposed to here. Maybe longer posts here, etc. Love you!

why am i so sensitive

2011-09-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

My whole life I've been told to get a thicker skin. What does this skin look like? For others must have it if everyone is advocating it. It seems this is something one can apparently grow, yet others are born thin-skinned, deficient. Is it scaly? Is it covered with plush fur? Does it not reflect veins? Goosebumps? Scar tissue? Does it respond to cold as well as to heat? Does it shiver? Does it sweat?

I allude to this in a scene in Green Girl, between alpha Agnes, the sexpot Australian, and Ruth, the socially awkward anti-heroine who has just confided to Agnes about her most recent entanglement with the tribe of terrible girls, who work with her at Horrid's, the department store where she sprays perfume, talking about her while she was in a toilet stall, mimicking her. Agnes and her are putting on make-up in the mirror and discussing themselves:

Anyway, you’re really sensitive, you know. Ruth watches Agnes apply black liquid eyeliner, swooping up like cat’s claws. Glaring haughtily in her compact mirror.

Am I sensitive? I don’t think I’m too sensitive. Ruth studies herself in the mirror.

No, no, you are.

What do you mean, exactly?

Well, it’s like, you feel things really strongly, and you can see it on your face.

Oh. Ruth concentrates on a lip gloss. The same moment of hurt, then smoothed over like a shovel on wet sand.

I mean, fuck, who cares? Says Agnes. Who is now looking at Ruth looking at herself in the mirror.

Are you mad? Agnes asks but the way she asks seems to imply that Ruth should not be mad.

Ruth is pouting with her lip gloss, like behind a veneer of glass.

Agnes (as if in consolation): You know who you remind me of?
Ruth: No, who?
This is a favorite game that green girls play.
Agnes: You know who you so are? You are so Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.

And Ruth has heard this before. In fact, she has heard this so many times before that now she finds herself playing Catherine Deneuve, her impenetrability.

I think it was Meryl Streep who said, real life is not like college, real life is like high school. It's so true. Sometimes I'm still the girl who perennially tried to fit her whole head into the envelope opening of her schoolgirl desk, in order to attempt to mask my tears, like some sort of weird ostrich. But I'm pretty sure I don't want to be someone with a thick skin.

Yesterday I wore to bed a blue T-shirt I had bought in New York for $15. I woke up and my whole body and half my face and my sheets and pillows were covered in blue. Just blue, blue, blue. Like I was some sort of alien. It was so difficult to wash off.

I/storm

2011-08-30T07:03:00.000-07:00

I was in New York this weekend, visiting my sister who had a baby in that short period between an earthquake and a tropical storm. We had the tickets already booked - the plan was before to leave me there, so I would teach at The New School, instead a while ago I canceled the classes and rebooked a one-way ticket back home, because it was the only thing that really makes sense to me right now, that my home is with him and not away, always grasping to return. I held the three-day-old baby in my arms - it was the second time in a week I had held a sleeping niece, only months apart - and touched her growing fingernails and her downy cheek and thought about life and how magical it can sometimes be, even in my occasional antihumanism, which I am beginning to realize might be more of an ambivalent humanism. Or, no that's not right. More of a belief in human beings that is undercut by a certainty of how shadowed and hidden we are as well - maybe that's it. I don't know if I can think of one adjective to describe that. In finishing the essay collection I have developed a case of aphonia like Anna O. - I cannot articulate myself lucidly at all, I have a toybox of language now that I rearrange in my mouth and attempt to spit out (mixed metaphor, I believe, if I knew of such things). I began reading Vanessa Veselka's Zazen on the plane ride home, and even though I am digging the what of the book - all the stuff she gets into, a political rant inside a deeply felt and riveting novel about consumerism, anarchism, veganism, all the isms, it was the how I was blown away by - the mad rhythm and burn of Veselka's language that made me nod intently while reading. I have been reading some other contemporary novels lately, one especially that is this year's so popular, so popular that I got to a point where I needed to read it to peel open its secrets and attempt to understand what was inside the narrative that was feeding so many, was it fast food or an intricate gourmet, both impulses I understand. I am struck by how made for HBO so many contemporary novels are that are feted in the Times and such - this new model of the prize-winning novel that then becomes an HBO series - and I love narrative TV series that cast film actors tearing up the scenery - but wonder why this is the new model for literature, because the books that excite me are the ones that do what TV cannot, I suppose that's in the words on the page and the burn and the rhythm and the voice (I just read something by someone, forgot who, kind of ripping into this idea of applauding the voice in a novel, when my favorite works are marked by this, I think this extends beyond the artifice of the interior narration of a first-person, and is something about the vitality and rhythm of the whole thing and how it zings inside your head, Vanessa Veselka has mad voice, I feel this way reading Zazen that I did reading Laurie Weeks' Zipper Mouth, both works that write a sort of clear-eyed mania in the way that a film or TV show can never do, not even with a canned voiceover or Diablo Cody dialogue.).

Anyway, I am in a strange book state. I am slowly coming out of my reading anorexia that marks when I am deep within a project - I just ordered up The Orange Eats Creeps and cannot wait to read that, plus Blake Butler's novel, Pam Lu's Ambient Parking Lot. I crave the contemporary. I want to read Maggie Nelson's and Wayne Koestenbaum's new nonfiction books, both I have been putting off. I think because my natural intelligence is defined by my ability to be a sponge - and I cannot read anything or watch anything without wanting to throw everything in what I'm writing. John and I had a conversation about intelligence, specifically mine or my lack of last night as we were blaghed and blearied from traveled and I was hunched over Whole Foods guacomole. He said I'm self-deprecating about my intelligence, that this comes through in my writing, whether here or in the essay book. I don't know. I think this is a purposeful move, that I don't want to act like I know, because I don't, if anything I often feel I am just a tiny baby crawling in the dark, trying to figure out basic concepts. But I also think this is a circling around a childhood trauma, namely, we were all expected to be extremely accelerated, by we I mean my siblings, this was a known-known in our schools, how the Zambreno children were, the tiny runts of the litter, how they were expected to win all the academic prizes, I did but fell a little short, I never reached and was never expected to reach the prodigious accomplishments on the part of my brother, who was always considered a math&science genius and still is, and how that sort of intelligence was the only kind considered growing up, it wasn't until I got to university that I became aware that anyone would consider me smart or talented, and I think I'm still quite skeptical of this. I always had an extremely good, almost photographic memory, and I think I was aware that I memorized everything as opposed to really knowing or understanding things. Plus I had various learning issues with language growing up, I was in speech therapy for years. I'm not particularly intelligent I said to John. I possess an emotional intelligence. I am also often emotionally and socially retarded. I believe these two attributes make me want to figure things out by writing about them. Anyway what is intelligence? I was once asked this in a job interview to be the managing editor of a trade pub about theater - what is intelligence? I fucking hate those kind of creative job interviews. I remember saying: I don't know. I wasn't trying to be witty. I really don't know. I still don't know. I didn't get the job, obviously. I love in Zazen how the main character, a science Ph.D turned waitress at vegan restaurant, is both obviously an obsessive genius as well asemotionally and socially retarded. Maybe obsession has something to do with intelligence. Or maybe intelligence is the absence of obsession. A fully formedness. I don't know. Emersonian. (What terrified me about my one year at graduate school is that intelligence was defined by the ability to remember and spout tidbits and theses of great thinkers, and form it into an aggressive argument, which seems like a general pitbull theory of regurgitation, when I regurgitated it was usually some sort of vomit, not linear and neat and forceful.)

I honestly have no idea what I'm writing here. I think actually I came here today to tear down the blog, or announce I'm quitting the blog, or reflect on the why of the blog, perhaps have a discussion how to archive the blog, because to me I am now conscious of it as a promotional tool, now that Green Girl's coming out in a month or so. And this space here was never meant for that. I wonder if I should just tear this down and put up an author's site and be more plain with it. And I am wondering whether it's run its course, and needs to be put down. To be resurrected elsewhere or not. Instead I am writing a damn novel here. I am afflicted with Artaud's glossolalia.

I feel strangely relaxed from the weekend in New York. Everything was the momentousness of the baby, the possible momentousness of the storm, running around, stocking up, standing in eternal grocery lines. John and I holed up in a hotel in the 70s and slept and ate and watched bad movies on cable and I felt oddly elated. I realize I haven't really let myself go in so long. Or I am always letting myself go - procrastinating - but to relax and not feel guilt or shame - this is entirely novel. I need to do more of this. We ordered in breakfast from the diner next door who was still delivering, even the morning of the storm - I had an egg-white omelet - the first eggs I've had in years, I am slowly starting to add back some animal protein a few times a week, eggs and fish, to see if it's giving me more energy, which it is, actually. I need to do this more. Just be. Just relax. I am experiencing some strange melancholy - post finishing the book, pre-awaiting the second novel to come out. I can play the game of publicizing myself but ultimately it fills me with intense self-loathing. I just want the works to speak for themselves. Spit or vomit or articulate or not. I want to begin again. I need to return to the novel I abandoned when I began the Semiotext(e) book - Under the Shadow - my hidden girl and her hidden family - but I want to throw everything away and completely begin again. I feel this time - this time I will succeed. In communicating something. This time I will burn and not self-immolate.

The day after the storm the streets were slightly wet but it was sun and beautiful. We wandered around downtown before our flight, I bought a Panama hat from a boutique in Chinatown to shield myself from the sun, almost exactly like the one the girl wears in Duras' The Lover, except I am not Jodie-Foster jailbait, I am now I guess the woman who looks back and remembers.

Mike Kitchell on Green Girl

2011-08-29T18:35:00.001-07:00

Mike Kitchell writes about Green Girl in a longer essay dealing with foreign places, Letters to Wendy's, horror films and orgies (and actually there's an orgy in Green Girl...well more like an awkward threesome, with Ruth the shy one).

NO MORE ESSAYS

2011-08-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

and yet I feel so drawn to the life and work of Carson McCullers, again, so I supposed redrawn. I am so glad I was not redrawn to the life and work of Carson McCullers while finishing the mss. of HEROINES which is TURNED IN (!) on the very same day as my sister gave birth, in fact, after an almost 9 month gestation of a rewrite on my part. It made me ponder things like the metaphor of birth when dealing with writing books, and how this is further complicated when you are a woman. I am glad I was not redrawn because I always want to throw everything into everything I write, like a pot of soup or something. In fact, the day I turned in the mss. Megan Fox announced she was removing her Marilyn Monroe tattoo because Marilyn Monroe "was bipolar and had personality disorders" and I felt at the time that was PERFECT to what I was writing towards in the end, and so I had to somehow plug that in. I am going to go see my baby niece in New York tomorrow, and I want to reread everything by Carson McCullers. But all the bookstores here don't have her. It's terrible. She's canonical, Carson, isn't she? Should be if not. I want to reread Member of the Wedding which I read when I was 16 - and blew my fucking head off - all I remember is the cover with the girl with the shorn bright red hair and how it clashed with her quaint pink dress and a mood, something like a burning melancholy. And I reread a few years ago The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and the Ballad of the Sad Cafe and I want to read that novel that was made into the movie with Brando, what is it called again.

I think I'm drawn to her especially because in the narrative of her timeline her illnesses are always highlighted (she suffered from rheumatic fever, pleurisy, a series of strokes), and I'm wondering how the narrative of illness, that trajectory, infected and impacted and altered her writing, and it's something I've been thinking about, the idea of the Southern grotesque as written by women that seems so based in the body, and two of my favorite practitioners, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, suffering from auto-immune illnesses that are persistent, pernicious, and absolutely mysterious (O'Connor with lupus, McCullers with a cluster of things), something I am beginning to know a bit of myself, and I have been thinking of the body and the sick body and how the sick body can write and how an altered body, a different body, a more daily suffering body, can somehow channel that through the texts, with characterization, mood - how? I don't have a handle on it yet. Which makes me think of Jane Bowles stroked out in Malaga, Spain, and Clarice Lispector writing The Hour of the Star while dying. Or Barbara Loden unable to finish her screenplay for The Awakening because she too was dying. I would like to write an essay about all this but I don't feel strong enough. You must be strong enough to be able to meditate, to access, although the experience sometimes - of weakness, of alteration, of suffering - I feel sure does something to break through into a consciousness that can be something like making art. I don't know if any of this makes sense. This is what I have been thinking - or more like feeling lately. These reflections more felt than thought. But we are always told - admonished - not to write about illness and the abject body. Told that that is bad. I remember when I found out my mother was diagnosed with Stage Late Late Lung Cancer and dying and everything and the word metastatic could also be used to describe how immense and engulfing my grief was, growing, growing, threatening to swallow me whole, and I remember sitting in the car with a fellow coworker at the alt-weekly where I was an editor at the time, a guy writer who always tried to Svengali me despite my resistence -and I remember him saying - as a way to comfort me - Just don't write a book about cancer. Can you believe that? My experiences were already commodified for him in a potential experience to cull from, and he had already deemed the truth of my mother's body, the truth of my body, a cliche, invalid, so to speak.

And I'm in bed with my mango kimono typing this and looking up Carson McCullers online instead of showering and getting ready to get my haircut and I have to leave in like 15 minutes. I always do this - wait wait until the last minute, when I have to go somewhere.

Blake Butler on Green Girl

2011-08-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, obviously my brief spell of not linking to HTML Giant is over. Hope you don't judge me for ending it to link to this really thoughtful essay/review Blake Butler writes about Green Girl. I am humbled and happy to be considered in the company of the wonderful Wayne Koestenbaum. This is the first "review" of Green Girl! It's exciting. In terrible news today, my platform heels from Copenhagen broke. BROKE. In the middle of the fucking mall. But my American Vogue arrived today! AM I A METHOD WRITER OR WHAT?

(btw, Green Girl is available for pre-order on Amazon and B&N, I'm not going to link to B&N because I went to the Southpoint one today to get a novel by Carson McCullers and they didn't have ANY. We should have some the info desk guy said. Yes you should I said, very primly. I got A Visit to the Goon Squad instead. I am about to enter a "pleasure reading" period as I'm sending the mss. off to Chris - tonight!).

writing like a girl

2011-08-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

Has anyone read Maud Newton's thing in the NYT mag (available online) about how David Foster Wallace's essays, their casual, informal language, are in some way the ancestor to the blog? I just read it and I want to talk about it. I disagree really that DFW is the link to a lot of the writing online, at least that I admire - or I think stylistically his essays might be, in terms of formal innovation, or perhaps blogging's highly self-conscious nature. I don't think any of that though is a bad thing. At all. But when Maud Newton is talking about the casual language of the internet, which she sees borrowing from or heavily influenced by DFW's "rhetorical postures," a sort of folksiness, I didn't get it. Or I agreed but I see it in a different way. What she is describing I would call instead writing like a girl. And why is that bad? If the alternative is rigid academic objectivist prose, I'd rather writing be casual and unformed and vernacular. I don't think there always needs to be an argument made - sometimes I think intellectual writing can be discursive, can dance, can present dialectical ideas without having a "thesis" or "conclusion." And there's really great criticism happening online, personal, ecstatic, messy criticism, whether Jackie Wang or Roz Ito or Dodie Bellamy or everything up at Montevidayo or many other spaces.

but you don't look sick they say

2011-08-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

This is me doing my best impression of Clara Bow, and I'm probably too old to pose like this. I used to have a best toxic girl-friend who I would pose for countless photobooth pictures at the Rainbo in Chicago, and we were so aware of our to-be-looked-at-ness, we posed in a particular way, I think this is me rewording a Barthes quote. I conjure this up in Green Girl. This is me after going to the Chanel counter, where the wife of one of John's colleagues works and yes I sometimes go in order to chat with someone about girly things. She painted my mouth a Clara-bow and put gobs of eyemakeup on me and I bought the red lips (coco line) and the lipliner and bought an eye liner from Sephora and I have actually been leaving the house like this, when I leave the house, like I'm trying to be all silent film star. John's like, It's a nice nighttime look. I have been thinking of getting a job at the Chanel counter in lieu of others but that would be hilarious - publishing a novel about working at a make-up counter, then getting a job at one, like a cheesy headline, and to me perhaps that would be too much Veronica Lake folding towels at the Martha Washington. Or Frances Farmer and the same in the Seattle hotel. Not that I'm either of these, neither starlet, nor muse. I think that's rewording a Robert Lowell line about Lady Caroline Blackwood. I have been thinking lately in my ill health how makeup has become this elaborate protection and barrier for me when I occasionally try to exist in the outside world. This is me in my citrus silk kimono from Anthropologie that I basically live in when I'm at home (my nod to the post-crime Papin Sisters, yet here I am attempting the polish, not the inner unravel). Yesterday went for more tests. All this testing. Heroines is almost done. I go to New York next weekend. My sister's about to give birth. I am still not reading. I am watching countless episodes of Entourage, especially the ones with Sasha Grey, and I write a counternarrative. I am building so many books without any builder. I am writing notes like Camus- all these ideas for novels and books I have no energy lately to write. No energy lately for everything. Let's talk about your depression the doctor said yesterday. Of course I'm depressed I say. I'm always depressed. It is de facto that I'm depressed. But this fatigue - this crushing, numbing fatigue - it's not depression. But of course I am still acting. I purposefully didn't wear my 4-inch platform sandals to the doctor's office, because I wanted to be taken seriously in my role of sick person. I will probably erase this post, like I did my last one.

GREEN GIRL AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER

2011-08-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

at Amazon, and at Barnes and Noble.com. You save $6! Order now!

Also, if you look to the right of this lovely blog-page, you can see that I'm traveling lots this October-November for readings for Green Girl. I will be out West! Out East! For a time in the Midwest! And then hopefully South/Southwest/Southeast in the springish time. Book your calendars!

Also: I am fact-checking Heroines this week, and editing and copy-editing Heroines this week, and now John's involved, every day and together every night for hours and hours poring over the book, tweezing and picking away, and it's making me feel full and nauseous and depleted and shaky. It's almost done. At least this stage in the process, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully. Lately I have been thinking about the essay book I want to write next about sex& messy girl-feminists & Gone with the Wind & the Duke Fuck List & Acker & Jelinek and Sasha Grey on Entourage & vampire YA novels & the Brontes & Bataille and Colette Peignot and in which I will talk about what I really think about this new ubiquitous Nicholson Baker kitschy-sex book and the reviews surrounding it and I will call it SLAPPING CLARK GABLE which was the name of an essay I once wrote but this would be a different style and motion but seriously seriously friends if I say in the next two years I'm going to write another essay book you need to seriously commit me. Or, okay, one year. Six months. That reminds me of the beginning of Dodie Bellamy's Barf Manifesto, when she tells herself how she told herself No More Essays. Perhaps it is a compulsion, this essay writing, even when we all do it here, in this more informal casual space.

This is the hardest thing I have ever written. Hopefully it has borne fruitfulness. No, not this blog post. Obviously I've spent no time on this blog post and boy you can tell.

We Wear the Red Garb of Criminals

2011-08-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is from Jean Genet's play The Maids, about The Papin Sisters, Christine and Lea, showed here in Before and After, the French maids who brutally murdered their female employer and her daughter. All the French intellectuals were obsessed with The Papin Sisters - Simone de B and Jean-Paul Sartre looked at the case as one of class warfare, the Surrealists claimed them as the emblem of the female criminal and printed their After photo, them no longer good girls, bonnes, but now wild-eyed in kimonos, on the cover of one of their journals. I write about this in the book, somewhat, one of the theories about The Papin Sisters is that they were on their period and I look at I guess a social fascination with and repulsion for female criminals once the mask falls off, and our eagerness to attribute this to hormones. Hopefully I get into this in a more sophisticated way there. These Befores and Afters: Frances Farmer no longer smooth golden girl of Hollywood, now carried away kicking and screaming. The Medusa striptease of Plath's "Lady Lazarus." One of the central tenets of Heroines is modernism's fascination with and horror of the excessive, the feminine excessive, her body, her emotions, embodied to me by the mad wives, Vivien(ne) Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald, who were disciplined and policed by both the literary theories their husbands espoused as well as psychiatry (not only how women should behave, but how literature should behave).

The pithy punchline bully of HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen, who I first engaged with when he posted a jerky quippy yet ultimately dumb piece about Zelda, has grafted some sort of chart of Internet personas where he has named me, as well as a handful of others, as excessive "menstrual" bloggers (on the opposite end of the spectrum, the "douches"). I could spend a class hour lecturing a lad like him about the hierarchical and dangerous thinking behind these stereotypical slurs, both which draw from the female body. But I don't think it'd ever get through to him. I think there should be some sort of required summer camp of Radical Feminism and Queer Theory for jackasses, but alas, there is not. I am not going to link to the piece, as I am not going to link to HTML Giant again, if I can help it. That is my small "boycott." I did comment one small comment by telling Jimmy I thought he was a bully, while realizing any comment like that, of hurt or pain, only fuels bullies. I will say that realizing I was publicly being made fun of came at a particularly hilarious or cruel moment yesterday, depending how you look at it, as I have been having serious health problems related to, yes my reproductive and endocrine system, and I have been bleeding so intensely, through the sheets on the hour, that I might have to have a blood transfusion in the next couple of days, and will definitely have exploratory surgery as soon as this damn book is finished, hopefully in the next two weeks. So maybe I am, ultimately, yes, an extremely menstrual blogger. Maybe my style is hormonal (what does this mean? too confessional? moody? emotionally charged? female? irrational?) What can I say. I was bullied a lot when I was growing up, and I think a bully's goal is to discipline, to make someone smaller whose behavior is seen as outsized, as taking up too much space, and all I can do is keep writing and working on what I'm doing, and try not to be humiliated into submission or silence.

(update: Becca Klaver and Jackie Wang on the post).

the bj

2011-08-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

I cannot bring myself to really read any of these journo-crit pieces about The Bell Jar and its 40th anniversary. There's one here, there's one on HTML Giant, there's probably more. I'm doing that squinty thing where I'm reading every other line of this piece. Okay. I've made myself go back and read it. Kind of. I will say that there's so much here that I write about in Heroines, so much of the way Plath's novel and her life and her career are characterized in these pieces and the comments for these pieces. Like, the "legitimacy" of Plath's mental illness somehow determining our reading of the text, and reviews of the work that latch onto it for autobiographical tidbits, this is what happens when we read women, like the personal way critics read Kate Chopin's The Awakening versus how they read Flaubert's Madame Bovary. I can't *really* get into it now because I am editing the work now to send it off to Chris and my god editing is painful and bloody enough as is. When I edit or am edited I feel like I want to fucking die.

Little question though (just mini as opposed to maxi-rant) I don't know who wrote the subhead for the PoFo piece but: Why, exactly, do we need the modifier of "YA" to Plath's novel? I know it's for the soft-quip to go with middle-age - ha- yes- I get it. I am announcing, however, I will from now on only refer to This Side of Paradise as Fitzgerald's "YA" novel and Infinite Jest as David Foster Wallace's "YA" novel. Because it's about young adults, right? That's why you're characterizing it as YA? Funny how the branding of "YA" or "chicklit" (hence not literary, right?) doesn't happen as much to male coming-of-age narratives. Carson McCullers, Plath's The Bell Jar, Shirley Jackson, all lumped into young adult. As if the female coming-of-age experience is somehow more frivolous or less rending, less existential, than the male one, that it's not all the stuff of literature. Just literature. It's just fucking literature people. I can dig some YA books, and I do, just like I dig some books dubbed chick lit, but these are marketing terms. When we talk about literature we don't need to use the language capitalism and divisions at publishing companies have given us. We can use our own.

And why did the Poetry Foundation have someone write a piece on The Bell Jar who obviously didn't like The Bell Jar, and dismissively refers to the online adoration for Sylvia Plath, as opposed to engaging with the idea that this novel has spoken for and spoken to so many of us, yes as young girls (or boys), but also now, as discerning, passionate, literate adults? God, the disdain our culture directs towards novels that young girls read. It's already a novel that hasn't been legitimized, despite what the author of the piece states about the overvaluation of the novel, so why not actually assign a piece where you're reevaluating the work, yes, the work, not only reading the work for the author's posthumous cult status or combing through it for biography?

Gosh, and the author of the PoFo piece had just accepted my friend request on Facebook. Oh, well.

yearning

2011-08-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago I had a dream that I was staying in Kathy Acker's apartment, assumedly on the Lower East Side. The apartment looked like it could have been on an episode of Hoarders - it was filled with, things, detritus, cereal boxes, books. I slept on an old designer leather chair. I know that in my mind I based the home on someone else's place I once stayed at in Pittsburgh who used to also live there, whose home was kind of like a museum to the LES. Anyway, I asked Kathy about living in New York. She didn't have much time for me. She was dealing with instead a rotating door of lovers. I stayed on the chair and flipped through a couple of books. Everything felt chaotic. I felt like perhaps I wasn't even there at all.

And then actually the next day or maybe the next it became clear to me that New York was not going to work out, not now. Because of the stress of it, because it stopped adding up or making sense, because I have a book to finish and one to promote in the fall. So I got out of all my commitments in time. I am saddened by this, in a way. Some sort of marred dream. I don't know. I also feel a lot of relief. I wasn't excited about the idea of throwing myself into this tumultuous existence of always traveling and being away from anything that felt like home.

I think what was sadder about my dream was the sense that Kathy Acker wouldn't give a shit about me now. I'm not sure she'd let me stay at her place. What I guess I desire more than anything is just to work on projects, just to write. I feel if I keep writing then someday I will break through into some membrane, where I feel I will be really doing something radical. But I suppose this is a different desire than publicity, stardom.

Yet I yearn sometimes to be outside.

When my mother died the woman who came and flushed the medications down the toilet left a pamphlet about How to Deal with Loss. One symptom was Yearning. I always thought that was funny. Like some sort of country song. The burning, yearning, burning, of my grief.

anthropology

2011-07-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

a series of completely broken thoughts

-Yesterday I was ill, I have been increasingly more ill every month, that's a euphemism, it looks like I might have to have some sort of surgery to remove all of the scarred lining from inside. It's possible I might have to have it soon - when? sandwiched between finishing a mss. on deadline and moving to NYC in a month? Terrible pains in the night, John even stayed home from work to take care of me. This is exposition I totally didn't want to do. But it's done. There. It's done. Ridiculous.

-So we went to the mall in the afternoon, it was a 90 degree day, which here means here the HEAT HAS BROKEN, and I needed to buy myself a bag, which in Zambreno female terminology, means a present, when one is ill or in mourning, mourning of something, sometimes just the day. The women in my family communicate with gifts, usually of make-up. The ones that are left - there are almost none left. Last time I was in NYC, the Sephora at Columbus Circle, my sister buys me a lipgloss (Clinique Raspberry Supergloss). Which reminds me of the morning after our mother died when she bought me a pair of Olsen-esque sunglasses at the Marshall Field's counter. And then a pedicure. All day long she just bought me things. I suppose I am easily bought.

-I remember talking about bags with my uncle as he was dying last year, and he thought it was perhaps an Italian custom, or Italian-American. I don't know. My grandmother's bags were usually candy. Boxes of Fannie May.

-I bought a mango-colored silk kimono robe at Anthropologie, because that is what I needed to imagine myself in a New York sublet, the single air-conditioner blowing, me at a little table, alone, writing. I need always some sort of imagined costume to propel myself into new situations.

-I tried on a few dresses, with no desire to buy any of them, as Anthropologie is on the whole a bit too frilly for me. But the shopgirls kept on bringing me these wide belts. Why does everyone try to force wide belts on me? I feel there's some sort of conspiracy with this.

-I laid in bed and read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yesterday I thought about all the projects I want to write, essays maybe, books, I dont' know what they are. This I hope will help me, propel me to finish. There's the book on girl libertinage I want to write, that will focus on Gone with the Wind, and also vampire YA novels, and Sade and cruelty and Amanda Knox. There's the small book I want to write about the actress-filmmaker Barbara Loden, who I've written about in every book I've basically ever written, and last night I discover through Wikipedia, my portal for all things, that she was born in North Carolina, and so this feels like twinning, kismet.

And then lately I've become obsessed with Mary Shelley and also all these anonymous women of the Romantic poets who all died these gruesome deaths in childbirth or killed themselves lovetorn. Mary Shelley who started writing Frankenstein when she was fucking 17. Which is like obscene. And I really want to conjure up a teenage Mary Shelley. And her series of miscarriages. Her life dealing with so much illness and death. I laid in bed yesterday cramped and woozy from the half of the muscle relaxer I took in a panic in the middle of the night and thought of monsters, when our bodies turn us into monsters. I want to write a book about a girl-monster, Mary Shelley. A hybrid monster book. Maybe Shelley Jackson already did that with Patchwork Girl. And this morning, reading an interview with Lidia Yuknavitch, this line: "And this, which Mary Shelley told me in a dream when I was 14: You are not a monster."

ERRATA

2011-07-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

ERRATA sounds like EROTICS.
the weakness the failures the fissions.
anyway, if you received an ARC of Green Girl and you are a friend, and you have read it, and you find something that rolls around weird in your mouth (an error, a missed comma, what-have-you), can you email me and let me know?

My favorite, courtesy of Rebecca Loudon.

"The panting hung in the Tate Britain."

I am reading the novel now. Reading your own words in this new object-setting is like recycling a dream you once had. It's weird.

girl in bed

2011-07-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

This is Girl in Bed by Lucien Freud, the painter who was also related to another big-daddy, one of the biggest big-daddies, Sigmund Freud.

Girl in Bed could be the name of my portrait today that no one is painting.

Lucien Freud is dead and he was very old and his paintings sold for a lot and so everyone is popping up on Facebook being all like "RIP Lucien Freud." Which I would do too until I thought about it and didn't want to. This happened last week or whatever when Cy Twombly died. Don't get me wrong. Cy Twombly and Lucien Freud are two of my favorite painters. But I had this great immense feeling about all of this that I needed to get out. There's something about the *meme* that annoys me, even though I too have participated in it.

Don't you think in a way these great big institutions are already dead? I think so. I don't know if I know exactly what I mean by this. I guess I mean - they are hung on great massive canvases in museums and sold for millions at Sotheby's and that is already kind of dead.

I love that story about Cy Twombly the woman who kissed one of his paintings. Her big red Chanel lips.

RIP - I feel this has already been painted there.

Okay. So this is what gets me the wrong way. Maybe. The painting above is called "Girl in Bed." The girl in the painting's name was Lady Caroline Blackwood, and she was also this wickedly funny novelist, but is best known for being a famous beauty and a muse and marrying Freud and then later Robert Lowell (Cal/Caligula/Caliban). Lowell who made a muse of her in "The Dolphin," she the golden-haired mermaid in the poems that also plagiarized from the phone calls and letters of his first wife he left for Caroline, Elizabeth Hardwick.

I do like Lucien Freud's women lying in bed - they all look like an advertisement for Paxil. I noticed that about the Munch's too when I was in Norway.

I don't really have a point. I always notice in encyclopedic museums they put the Lucien Freuds with the Francis Bacons, and then there's always like an anorexic Giacometti loitering about. The boy's club back again. That makes me think of Isabel Rawsthorne, who was the mistress to Giacometti and Bacon painted her too and even though he was queer had fucked her, or he would announce this at cocktail parties. Picasso painted her too.

Someone wrote at the opening of Rawsthorne's Wikipedia entry: "The life which became famous for its love affairs with extraordinary artists was governed by a love affair with art itself."

I've done most of my research for this book on Wikipedia. I'm kind of kidding.

I wanted to find out more about Rawsthorne but there's not much.

The women trapped in the paintings become ciphers.

She is dead too. The rest of them are long dead. And the painter still remains.

I think about all the Great Men that live these long, certain lives.

What is there to mourn? Who is there?

all art is a form of prostitution says baudelaire

2011-07-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

So this makes me feel like when Edmund Wilson mentioned Anais Nin's self-published debut in The New Yorker. How cool and weird. Although *I* think having Jessa Crispin namecheck you in The Guardian is much cooler and better than Edmund Wilson and The New Yorker (I have a thing against Bunny for how he treated Mary McCarthy). I think theoretically this means I would be considered for the longlist of the First Book Prize, but since OFA was not published in the UK, probably not. I don't know. And there's 0 books available on Amazon. So, there you go.

signs

2011-07-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

I am in the woods of Virginia, at a writer's retreat in a big old house. I am at my desk looking out at all the trees, feeling a bit like Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil. On the bookshelf in my room: Streetcar Named Desire, The Family Reunion by T.S. Eliot (his play in which Viv is the murdered wife who ghosts the main character), the letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This feels like some sort of sign.

"to attack the family is to flirt with the world of unreason"

2011-07-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

This is Foucault, somewhere around the 17th century in his History of Madness. I quote from it in Book of Mutter, and look, oh, right, yes, I'm quoting from it in Heroines. I get stuck on quotes that I become fascinated by that I want to just suck on and roll around in my mouth and I paper everywhere. Two nights ago I laid in bed and tried - TRIED - to think of a way to give me the nerve to rewrite this mss for now the 4th time, as it must be done. And the line came into my head, something like (but not actually like): "We are always moving, moving, fleeing like from some scene of a crime." I thought, hey that's pretty good, but it sounds so familiar, another quote that I've rolled around in my mouth. I thought did someone else write that? That eerie, unfamiliar feeling. And then I thought: did I write that? So I went into the Green Girl doc. and entered it into Find and there it was - in the third person.

Right. I am beginning to repeat myself.

I feel like I should warn people that the book isn't going to be like the blog. Maybe the blog's better. There's some energy, some informality, to a blog, you know? This book has ideas I want to order and so it's less a ramble maybe. I don't know. It isn't very good. Yet. It will get better! I hope.

I am thinking of getting rid of this blog and having like an author page. Which I know is a different thing. But I kind of feel it's done. The only reason I don't get rid of it is out of some weird sense of guilt and betrayal. Like I would somehow betray you. Who are you. Most of you. The invisible/visible you. I almost feel sometimes I want to be absolved of quitting the blog. Like I want to be forgiven somehow. I think after this book is done I will need to put this away, and think of it like a notebook for a project, maybe. I don't have the stamina to keep it up anymore.

This fall will be insane. More insane than usual. I'm now teaching PT at The New School in NYC - so I will be renting a room there hopefully if I can find something sane and safe and then will be flying home to John, and John will be flying to me, and I am preparing myself for one massive sort of permanent coronary the entire time we will be separated from each other, but I know too it might be good, for us, to learn to be away. I didn't see him for about a week and a half in June and he's going away next week to Rare Books Camp and the first day it's awful, like I can't breathe, and then it loosens and gets better.

I am teaching a First Year Writing seminar on "Madness and the Modern."

I have been vain, too vain here, because I think the other book's coming out and I'm apprehensive about it. I have been the opposite of vain in my physical life. I won't cut my hair or wax my upper lip or eyebrows or anything until this fucking draft is done. Like a girl version of not shaving a beard. I need to get into form. Instead I watched an ABC family show on Youtube which led me to Raven-Symone's TV pilot which has a similar conceit as Green Girl (at least the opening, a girl at a department store spraying celebrity perfume).

statistics

2011-07-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

It is impossible for me to concentrate. There is the heat, the Southern heat, that makes one breathe differently, carry one's weight differently. Then all these other things keep on coming up. I need to be disciplined and whittled down to a pin of pure brilliance to write, and instead I am sludgy and slow. Today I went to the Behavior Sciences Library on John's campus and attempted to research statistics on women and mental illness, or just mental illness diagnosis in general, epidemiology, that is the word. Ironic in a way since I almost failed social science statistics at university. Anyway. And then John ran into a tall muscular young person on the streets near the Whole Foods this weekend, who wants to be a dancer, who has a bright yellow mohawk and painted gold nails, whose father is a minister who works at McDonalds and kicked him out because he was gay. It turns out he has been homeless for months, and now John and I have been running around back and forth and knocking into each other trying to figure out a way to help him, to get him into a sustainable situation, and last night when it was pouring holy-moly we got so upset at the thought of him sleeping on the streets with the blanket and sheet we bought for him at Target that we drove around the streets looking for him. His 60 days at the shelter expired a month ago and there's no where else to go, really, and he had his identification stolen, which means right now he has nothing, he is nothing. And when you start to help it's impossible to stop, once you realize no one else is helping. And he's kind and sensitive and says he wants nothing more than to be a ballet dancer, and he recited to us a spoken-word poem he wrote. And he's such a survivor, in the way that I know I am not. And tonight we put him up at a budget motel, because he asked us to, because he had not showered in too long and the YMCA wouldn't let him take a shower there, we drove him there and the windows were all broken and it was unbelievably sketchy, and at first we drove away, saying we'd find some place betterand he said to us, You know I'm from the ghetto right? I can close my door, it's fine. This is my life now, worrying about this young person who wants to be famous above all else and be on So You Think You Can Dance. This is what he tells me today. We had taken him to McDonalds even though perhaps hilariously or eyerollingly I tried to convince him to go somewhere else, I didn't want to support McDonalds, but it's what he wanted, he said, I'll get apples instead of fries, and then that made me feel super-awful, like I was proselytzing some unrealistic lifestyle. I say, Isn't it a better goal to be happy? To be safe? To be warm? And he said, yeah, he guesses so. It is a strange situation, I guess only strange because of how we have suddenly inserted ourselves in it. Every night since we met him John and I worry out loud and research possible shelters or programs and drink beer and fall asleep and feel utterly useless and like we're doing too much and also like we're not doing enough, and we're more than a little obsessed with the situation, attempting to find a solution, trying to go through all the processes to rebuild his identification in the world, and we meet him every day and nothing gets done, and it's insane to me how much society can choose to pretend someone doesn't exist, and how our institutions and practices both discipline and demonize.

And, fuck, I have to write this book.

this post is a parking space

2011-06-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, all I want to do is move to California and make movies. No one's ever wanted to do that before, right? At least I will be some sort of pioneer. With the novel being sent out and coming out and whatnot, I realize I am only really interested in an overwrought and distraught juvenalia. Like a dirty poor Sofia Coppola. Except I cannot make movies - not yet - I have two months to write some sort of heartbreaking staggering work, or if not heartbreaking and staggering, at least semi-sane and standing upright. Funny how my due date coincides with my sister's. I think I need to at some point examine the birth metaphor for women writers. My incubation is metastatic, ecstatic. In Copenhagen I bought a pair of 4-inch platform heels I've been wearing with skinny jeans, which makes me look like a bloated once-starlet. I feel they are my shoes of nerves. You know how Eileen Myles recently wrote that thing about how whenever she writes she tells herself she is loved? I really liked that. My ritual in the past few months has been different. I stand in front of my floorlength mirror in the bedroom - sometimes while scooping up chocolate almond milk ice cream - and stare at myself, and say to myself, out loud: "You're a fucking genius." I say it in a tone that's almost hostile. I know I'm - what's the word - psyching myself up. I don't actually think of myself as a genius, because I don't believe in geniuses, and if I did believe in writers who were geniuses, I would think of those who had a singular obsession and an all-encompassing gift - not those who spend as much time thinking about shoes as they do about the book they are now dangerously on deadline for. But anyway. That's what I do. I say it in a Bette Davis intonation. You're a fucking genius. I keep on repeating it until I feel some confidence seep in through my bones. And then I sit down and try to write something. Since I've been back I've gotten dressed every day in skinny jeans and platform heels and full-make-up - and I intone that in front of the mirror. You're a fucking genius. No writing has come yet but hopefully the nerves. Because for this project on nervous women the ancestors and the contemporary girls a different sort of nerves is needed.

If I am a good girl I will not write in this space for two months. We'll see about this. I think I checked Facebook today about 60 times. Facebook is my new cigarette.

lagged

2011-06-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

Jet lag is making me unbearably, almost voluptuously sad, and slow. On Wednesday I was en route from Bergen, Norway to Durham for 27 straight hours. I endured. I have been learning endurance. Tonight I leave to go to Los Angeles for the weekend, to attend my sister's shower, to see Kate Durbin. I wish I had more time to rest. I do not. Today I am attempting to keep still, to not move. To exist.

Scandinavia was - exhausting, rigorous, illuminating, beautiful, foreign, familiar. Blonde - oh so so blonde. I felt swarthy and squat amidst cool and lean and impossibly glamorous shopgirls (as I was abroad I began to receive news that review copies of Green Girl had been received, this felt appropriate, as it is my ode to alienation and the blonde shopgirl). Our travel was switched so many times. The bus to the wrong airport, ending us in southern Sweden. The fire at the train station which upended our Norway plans. We spent time searching out warm meals and finding places to rest. As I wrote in a postcard to Rebecca L, I began to recall again, to revisit, the self that is the traveling self, that somehow lies dormant all the rest of the time.

When I was away I received an email from Chris reminding me that the mss. is due at the end of August. Upon the return of my seemingly month-long travels I will have two months to completely rewrite. I was able to spend time journaling on the book, to have distance from it, and now I feel it is possible I can make it something great.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this blog. Because John was at a conference on electronic literature and I was tagging along, the wife-figure. But still having lunchtime conversations about blogs and livejournals and I filed it all away. But I realize too I have felt unsafe lately in this online space, in so many ways. I have felt way too alert to how my identity is composed online, in public. Noticing when I am not noticed. Noticing when I am noticed. All this can make you paranoid. Maybe this is because I'm rereading Unica Zurn's The Man of Jasmine. Maybe this is because I know people have received Green Girl, and are reading it, and I feel this is so immensely personal, so intimate, and it scares me. I feel I am presenting myself to be loved, in this ritualistic and extraordinarily public way, and I am beginning to fold down, bodily, after all the little tremors of rejection. I think I need to end it. Of course in a way I cannot, as the novel is coming out, so I feel a pressure to continue. It's become a burden. I do not like who I have become anymore. Someone sent me an email with the subject hed: If you want to communicate, you need to learn how to write. And then the body of the email said: If you keep a blog, you should learn how to write. This bothered me terribly. I have no idea if it was spam, or what. Sometimes I think I am too exquisitively sensitive for publicness.

girl gang

2011-06-10T05:40:00.000-07:00

Has anyone read the newest Bookforum? The reviewer compares Maggie Nelson's Art of Cruelty to a Tumblr feed (in her mind, this is not a compliment). I say: Fuck yeah, that's the new criticism. I don't know. Perhaps the old guard doesn't get the girls. Andrea pointed me to this Tumblr of modernist women: love this image of a coltish Jean Rhys!

I leave for Scandinavia this weekend. My flight plan is INSANE. I plan to be passive, to allow it to happen to me. Going home for instance: leave at dawn from Bergen, fly to Oslo, fly to Copenhagen, stew around the airport a few hours, leave for JFK, hold-over, fly to Detroit, fly to Raleigh-Durham. 36-hours later get on a plane and fly to LA. If I don't come out of this a ghost I don't know what. Am excited for Bergen especially - John will be at his conference/lecture/rock-star thing, and I will be strolling around the Norwegian city myself, where Ibsen once lived. Also: the fjords and the train from Oslo to Bergen. There will be only 5 hours of darkness a day when we're there. My hope is for a healthy and ludic trip.

Also: (I keep adding on to the post, completely taking any shape out of it): it looks like I will be traveling for Green Girl. In October will read in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, maybe New York, if New York will have me. Maybe Los Angeles, if Los Angeles will have me. More info on that soon. Also review copies of Green Girl have gone out, if you are a friend/blogger/reviewer and receive it, as opposed to a reviewer/not friend, and you're reading it, please let me know if you catch any typos! Strange thought, while I am gone, off the grid, people might be reading the novel.

the golden age

2011-06-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

Saw Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris at a late-night showing in a tiny theater on the Upper West Side, waited in line with New Yorkers clutching plastic bags of movie snacks. This felt very Woody Allen to me and I totally appreciated it. Also found myself complaining to John and my sister that I didn't want to go to the film if it meant I was going to miss the previews - this was of course so Annie Hall that I had to google it but that scene occurred somewhere in the 90s. It turned out that showing was sold out anyway and so we had to catch the one a half hour later, where we still had to stand in line for seats. This was not my first film nerd moment that day - the first was when we were handed a flier nearby for that film where Michelle Williams plays Marilyn Monroe, and my sister was telling me they were shooting the film in London when they were shooting the one she co-produced, and it was about Marilyn having an affair with the third DA of a film she shot in London , and I said, well, that has to be The Prince and the Showgirl, and then proceeded to spout off trivia like Vivien Leigh's hysterical pregnancy produced to deter Olivier from Marilyn Monroe, or perhaps as a result of jealousy that the role she originated on stage was replaced by this blonde breathy upstart, of course though this is all gossip and demonology - it's probably totally false. On the flight to NYC I found myself gobbling up Laurie Week's Zipper Mouth - which I have been rapturously anticipating since reading an excerpt in Vice years ago, that snippet a series of high-school letters to Sylvia Plath, but the character in the novel is also obsessed with Vivien Leigh and that felt like kinship. The book is totally Burroughs-femme, bonkers, amazeballs - it comes out the same day as Green Girl - everyone who reads this blog should read it. Absolutely. Everyone. There is not one of you who won't buy it and fall madly in love with it and be like - fuck, yeah, yes, all of that. I might be reviewing it and then I will properly contextualize it - but it's like gonzo-Beats-queer-feminine-druggy-ecstasy. It is one of the best novels about a fucked-up girl written from her perspective I have ever read, if not the best. Period. It is the kind of book I keep on saying should be written and read.

I HATED the film. HATED it. However, it is sometimes quite enjoyable to hate something. I kept on making a repetitive head-shaking motion throughout it and John kept on looking at me and laughing. The Woody Allen-alterego Owen Wilson plays is a hack-screenwriter who wants to write a Great American Novel, which in Allen's perception (as well as the mainstream canonical perception) is exclusively male and connects of course to Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The character enters some sort of campy dreamscape at midnight while wandering around Paris where he finds himself suddenly in the Lost Generation's 20s, and Gertrude Stein played by Kathy Bates who plays Gertrude Stein like she's a gregarious yet butchy Minnesota housewife reads his tepid realistic novel about a nostalgia shop, and he hangs out with Hemingway and Zelda and Scott, and a femme-enfant played by Marion Cotillard who is Picasso's mistress. Allen treats these figures of modernism like a Disneyworld exhibit, like It's A Small World Afterall or some nonsense, they're played for campy jokes and one-liners, which is fine, in the case of Dali, who babbles about rhinoceros for a few minutes on screen, but in the case of Stein and the Fitzgeralds, who have repeated scenes, comes off as really grossly laughable and not saying anything particuarly interesting about that period or the human condition or why we cling to these myths. Zelda is played rather brothily by the actress Allison Pill, and Allen of course just replays all the easy myths - she is depicted as not even charming but just off her meds, at one point in the film Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard find her dippy self about to jump into the Seine, no real reason is given, except that she's a crazy chick, and she babbles something about how Scott doesn't love her anymore, and Wilson steps in and firmly hands her shoulders and is all like - No, Scott only has eyes for you, I know that - and the joke is supposed to be that Wilson as a contemporary reader understands the Fitzgerald mythology, even though even Scott's biographer would admit that Scott totally played around and fucked actresses, etc., and the idea that Zelda's scenes she threw was only due to some girlish jealousy is really quite bogus, a word she would have used. The scene with them and Hemingway is so ridiculous, and I feel like Woody Allen read Hemingway's A Movable Feast on the toilet or something and went with that. Zelda is all like (to Hemingway) Did you read my story? Like a dumb girl, and Hemingway didn't, of course, and Scott weakly protests to him that she has talent, as if Scott was Zelda's agent or something, and she storms off, and Hemingway tells Scott that Zelda is standing in the way of his talent, and then later on Owen Wilson is remembering the evening, and remembering that Hemingway is right - that Zelda stood in the way of Scott's genius, but of course he was so in love with her the Wilson romantic understood. The idea that these women stood in the way of their husband's masterpieces, as opposed to midwifing them and helping steward them along, serving not only as inspiration but copyeditors, etc., is so much part of our contemporary romantic consciousness and Allen's film is just a microwaved version of these stories that brew inside the men who have the confidence to want to be the Next Big Thing, while girls just want to go throw themselves into a great body of water and wash away. And Djuna Barnes appears as a punchline - Owen Wilson is Charlstoning with some women, it is pointed out to him that it was her, and he says, "No wonder why she wants to lead," and Alice B. Toklas answers the door but isn't even given a line.

Of course I probably have a heated reaction because I'm stalling in my second rewrite of a whole goddamn book on the subject, but there you go.

It is weird though - the epiphany Owen Wilson's character gets at the end of the film - that the 20s Paris was his desired Golden Age but that as an artist he needs to find his own time and city, etc. - is one that I reached while strolling around New York solo this week. I think I've been carrying around in my head so long a romanticizing of not only 20s Paris and the modernist period but also the 70s/80s downtown New York period, the literary underground, that Weeks is a part of, and like Patti Smith and David Wojnarowicz and like Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles, and these figures are now being canonized and you know teaching or reading at universities and if they're dead having anthologies and biographies come out, but I'm realizing that the New York of then is not the New York of now, and perhaps it's not the best city to be a working writer in. These cities and time periods we hold in our head, that we want to return to.

Next, we think we're going to pick a city we want to live and move there. One that's walkable, livable, breathable. We're thinking maybe East Coast.

where am i/where i am

2011-05-31T06:08:00.000-07:00

I think this is one of those "diary" entries. I packed my actual diary in my backpack to take with me to New York, where I will be again for the week, visiting my sister. It felt strange packing the diary, like a remnant from the past. I thought, Yes, I will be alone this week, so I will write in it. In truth, I haven't written in the diary because I have been working on the book. Plus Durham has not been a good city in which to diary in. For the most part I do not diary at home, I must be out alone in the world, and that has not happened here. It is 98 degrees here today. So I will stay inside the air-conditioning and do that thing I do, where I rock forth that seashell, assume the fetal. It is my necessary self-protective shell before I go on trips. I wonder at this aspect of myself, that I both desire adventure and methodically and insistently need stability and constancy in order to stay sane. I suppose the thing is that I still force myself out there—to change, to be unsettled. I have started traveling only with a carry-on backpack, so everything will be light, so I can come and go more easily. For however I have bitched and moaned about moving across the country a couple times now I think I like to assume this almost constant pose of the foreigner. I like to be in transit. I like that I have an Ohio phone number and North Carolina plates and an Illinois drivers' license. But there is a schizophrenia to it all.

This month, June, I will be in New York a week, Scandinavia for two and Los Angeles potentially for a weekend. This is the most I think I have traveled in maybe 7 years. It is too much. And it is so strange when I have been so still for so long working on this book. I wonder whether this is destructive towards the project, and hence, self-destructive, as it's due the end of the summer, although I finished a second draft of Heroines this Sunday. It is far too long - it is hilariously too long - I will have to rewrite it. But I am hoping - I am hoping - the bones are there, the structure's in place. This Sunday I wrote the furious crescendo, the end, a manifesto to a certain sort of writing and living and being. I don't know. I'm starting to realize stuff about myself as reflected in my personality as a writer. Like as a writer I hate to edit, I hate to examine what I have written so intensely, yet I have had to force myself to be methodical, to be more circumspect. I am afraid today to open it up, to read it. I think because I am getting on a plane tonight I won't have to. I don't know. And then I am planning on getting work done this week, in a more unfamiliar space, in a different city. Perhaps I am hoping myself in a new place will allow me to look at the manuscript with new eyes.

I feel I have been the essayist-me for so long. I crave to be the id again, I think that is how I feel in the beginning of everything, where it's all joyful notetaking and inventing. I long to go back to the novel. This weekend I made notes for a couple of performance/installation pieces I hope to do in the next year. I am ready to move on. Yet I need to for a few more months - concentrate, be constant - while never standing still.

Green Girl

2011-05-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

Coming in October! Reviewers should get their ARC in a week or so. Cover courtesy of Dakota Brown (designer) and the photograph is by Hillary Boles. Boles is a Portland-based photographer who does all of these wonderful self-portraits and photos of her friends - I discovered her work through Christopher Higgs' wonderful visual notebook Bright Stupid Confetti.

(yes it's another white book, what can I say, I love white books, we were going for a kind of Godard poster feel)

today: notes

2011-05-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day in a really long time I haven't been able to make myself work on the book. I was up most of the night with a sinus headache/migraine. So today I feel weak as a kitten, strangely blank and mellow. I'm into the final last real dart to the finish of this other draft (I'm sure there will be at least 3 or 4 more), but where I have to really get fired up and be energized and full of myself and these women, and I cannot. I cannot today. So I am watching episodes of Drop Dead Diva online, only because it is a show I think is passable and I haven't watched it. And I seem to have watched everything lately. My mind has become colonized by TV while working on this book project. But now everything has had its season finale, so I won't have anything to watch, no screens soon to hide behind.

When in New York before the Prose Event I am wandering around downtown with John, feeling stressed, frazzled, rained-on, and extremely frumpy (as I have as of late, I get like this whenever I'm deep inside of a book project, mostly I think because I stop exercising and leaving the house). I went to Bloomingdales on Broadway and had my make-up done by the NARS makeup artist. God, I miss really capable makeup artists. It reminds me of when I lived in London, and I would go to the NARS counter at Liberty and buy everything, storing in my head the experience for Green Girl. I just bought the lipgloss but my makeup artist Nikki wrote everything she used on me down and she just emailed me to say thanks. I know this is a business tactic, but it reminds me of what I love about makeup counters - these interactions of affirmation, of recognition, that have at times bumped me up when I've felt frumpy or down. I know of course the problematics of such an exchange, and the hole created in our self-confidence for us to desire this outside recognition. But what can I say? It brings me intense pleasure.

I didn't realize the new Woody Allen movie involved timetravel to Paris in the 20s and featured Scott and Zelda as characters. All these references to the Fitzes lately - on the season finale of Gossip Girl, Serena - already written as a sort of Fitzgerald golden girl/muse to Dan's writer hero - is in California and walks by a boy reading The Beautiful and the Damned. Turns out he's an assistant to the filmmaker David O. Russell, making a totally weird cameo here, who's going to turn it into a film. I love that book Serena says in her sort of mumbly goddess way. I relate to it more than I should.

I just want to point to that and make that my book. Somehow.

travel diary

2011-05-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

I am sensing a sort of communal malaise about this online notebooking experience - maybe I'm imagining it. I am feeling it too. Sometimes there seems to be so much dialogue and activity and feverish writing in this public space, and sometimes it seems to retreat. Perhaps there's an ebb and flow to this sort of writing in public. I have been thinking of this rhythm outside of this space, off-stage so to speak, for the book. A book that is in some ways an ode to this sort of messy, immediate essaying. An ode to the outsider. If I can manage to write it as I've thought it fluidly, sometimes, in my head.

I was just in New York this week, and now I am back in North Carolina actually in bed exhausted to the point of feeling almost broken, as we got up at 5:00am to make the public transport to JFK. Oftena feeling of depression sets in when I leave to come back here, or a place like here, the place I lived before, but today it was almost like a green blank slate, warm and womblike. I need the retreat now like I need it sometimes here. And yet the compulsion to see and be seen guides my desire to be - out there - to be a person, a name, a face, something. To wear one's clothes and know and be known. Strange that most of the time I see no one but John but on these short trips I see so many I would love to have long luxurious conversations with.

I walked hard these past few days, as I always tend to do in New York - stomping around until I cannot stand up anymore, almost as if to make up for too much time spent inside. So much art - the only show that was extremely revelatory for me was the Glenn Ligon at the Whitney, which was mind-blowing and radical and so textual and urgent. I am seriously considering trying to go to art school -not for writing - I don't want to do that, to study that on that level, as for me I feel it would deflate the real intense joy and discovery and fucking up and failure I feel from the process, at this stage I am with the process (and this is just so specific and personal to me). But the thought - of more formally making textual things that are framed differently, of realizing myself as a performance artist,, having already studied so much of the theory and history, of working in a different space and for a different audience, also while writing, is starting to feel like a natural and really organic continuation of where I'm going now. I have so many ideas now for projects, but what I will have to overcome is my lack of technical training, although the work I'm interested in isn't really about the technically proficient (but of course I will have to learn things, and take some basic art classes I'm assuming even to get a portfolio to apply to schools). Also thinking that there's nothing that gets me off like seeing art, that that is all I think about and take pilgrimmages to, and the thought of doing that, and struggling with that, while also being a writer, fills me with such a sense of, almost, truancy, a wonderful truancy, an escape, a hatch, or a window. And I only want to push myself to do things that make me want to vomit, in a good way, not out of dread, but a fear that is really an attempt to open up the self.

I was thinking this week seeing art in New York - including the Francis Alys show, which was totally underwhelming, maybe because I saw a show of his at the Ren in Chicago that was very very good and this show felt messy and over the place and not really hitting at the impact or experience of his work - about curating and collaborating as a form of artistic practice. Also with the Glenn Ligon show as well. And last night the Prose Event #2 - with Amina Renee and Danielle, all three writers who have such sensitivity and insight and depth with both their practice as well as the works themselves, all three activist-curators as well. The reading was wonderful, because of them, and afterwards we talked about the flaneur haunted and resurrected and newly gendered from modernism, and how all three of them write the banal and the quotidian in such urgent and revelatory ways. And as an introduction Rachel Levitsky said something about the writer Gail Scott being in the house, and I thought she meant, of course, spiritually in the house, like under the sign of, as her work My Paris is really the vanguard of this question of essay and fiction, as well as the urban female flaneur, which not only is Green Girl hugely inspired by but also Mad Wife which has now become Heroines the essay-novel-that-is-a-novel-but-is-not-a-novel but no I realized later that she meant physically, she was visiting New York, - and I got to meet her afterward and I felt very fangirlish afterwards, and we talked about the possibility of there being a Prose Event in Montreal. Which I went to once as a child, and I long again to circle around those cobblestoned streets.

i want to be your dog

2011-05-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Man, girl can't catch a break sometimes. I am the girl here. Girlish. Girl enough. Who brushed off her shopgirl-CV a la Clara Bow in order to try to get SOME sort of employment here in North Carolina. Today the bookstore where I applied at called to say I was hired - yay! - and then when I expressed some conflict over scheduling that I made clear in the interview, circling around said-book-I-am-on-deadline-for, they called back and said that they're offering the gig to someone else, because I obviously wasn't in the "spirit" of the position and couldn't give it my "all" if I had other responsibilities. I totally forgot what that was like. To be the supplicant in customer service. Because I realized I was supposed to probably be completely passive and smile and say yes. And I couldn't. I had issues. I expressed them. I guess I can't go back to being that girl again. The New York Times in some piece this weekend assured me lots of writers work in bookstores in New York - I would love to work at those places - but I can't I guess be a subaltern countergirl anymore in just any place. My dance card is bizarrely too full and yet I'm standing still in real space and time.

diary

2011-05-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

I feel I need some sort of space-holder here, and I erased my last, angst-ridden post as that didn't feel right having that stay in. Leonard Woolf reading his wife's Virginia's journal says that diarists only write in one mood. I don't know if that's true. Maybe it's true. I guess I tend to write when I feel most the desire to communicate. But when I choose to write here...I don't know. When I choose to write here versus just inside a notebook.

Anyway. I am attempting to move into Part Two of the book, ignoring the trainwreck behind me. It is set in the South and the present-day. There should be something reinvigorating about that. Yesterday at the Durham's farmer's market I bought cornflowers (which the woman behind me in the tomato line told me are called 'bachelor's buttons') and sweet williams. Some sort of theme, of courtship or something.

I interviewed for a bookstore job last week, I don't know if I'm going to get it because realizing I need to continue to work full-time on the book this summer, that I'm not as far ahead as I would have liked. It's a used-bookstore in Chapel Hill. The manager who interviewed me told me about the section called "toxic books" that she likened to the "cult fiction" selection at Foyles that I looked over when I was there. "Toxic books." I like that. I think I write those. I think I am interested in those. Funny to interview for the position - they asked for a service CV, they weren't interested in any teaching or writing or editing stuff. They wanted me in my early-to-mid-twenties. I gave her that girl. A sort of lightness but then perhaps alienation.

Next weekend John and I will be in New York at the Prose Event. We plan to gorge ourselves on art in three days - Alexander McQueen at the Met, the Glenn Lignon at the Whitney, the New Museum, the Francis Alys at the MOMA, then tons of gallery shows: deKooning and Bourgeois' fabric and Bacon and Picasso's mistress at the Gagosian. We have been planning for Scandinavia, I hope to hell I am done with the book by then. I can see myself: in the Norwegian town of Bergen while John is at his meetings, walking around and thinking of Ibsen's women. Also: Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, the train from Oslo to Bergen, the fjords. I haven't left the country in years. I wish this book was done so I would be lighter, able to feel like I could explore new territory, exist in new space. I feel I must be the same person until the book is done.

THE BLOOD JET

2011-05-03T09:39:00.001-07:00

Isn't always the BEST of things when you have a specified word count. Yet there seems to be no stopping it. Until I have to stop it.

Today, I am officially a CULT author

2011-05-02T13:07:00.000-07:00

There are '0' copies available of O Fallen Angel on Small Press Distribution and Amazon. I've known about SPD for about a month, I didn't realize this about Amazon.

Hard sometimes not to feel under the threat of disappearance amidst gigantic canonization of say DFW's Pale King. Hard not to find it humorous. Hard not to find it something as I'm writing to it in the book! Me cultivating the pose of the outsider writer.

Oh it looks like Powells has one.

Seriously, though, if you want to purchase a copy of the book, contact me and we'll figure something out. I have some copies laying around somewhere.

NAKED

2011-05-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

KATE DURBIN COMMUNES WITH MASTERS AND MOTHERS AND GHOSTS.

Colette Peignot: “The poetic work is sacred in that it is the creation of a topical event, ‘communication’ experienced as nakedness.”

We need to all get naked on the Internet.

what is?

2011-04-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

So down today, down down down, like at the point of downness that you can do nothing else but pick yourself up again and return to some sort of living, so this afternoon I dried the tears away and put on my new silk dress and went out walking with John. Because it's hot, and I felt a desire to feel the heat on my skin. I went to a show of German art at the Ackland, but I just walked through, I didn't really stop, it's so seldom there's an art show I want to see here, and I almost felt I didn't want to see it all at once. I did like looking at Martin Kippenberger's hotel stationary drawings. I ate a pomegranate popsicle (Locopops). I sat at a bar and drank a ginger lemonade while John had a martini (sometimes it is necessary to pretend one is on holiday when things seem so desperate and sad). I went to the Walgreen's in Chapel Hill to get my new passport photo taken (I lost said passport in move, or something, I don't know, and I need it for Scandinavia). I did my classic pursed lips swivel. To the Walgreens boy who was kind of sexy in an unwashed collegiate way. I guess I mean if I was a decade younger I would have fallen in love with him and he would have ignored me. He said, "Ma'am, you're going to have to look straight on." I adjust, slightly. Later at home I admire the photo. John says, "You're always doing that same pose when you take a photo, what is that?" I said: "It's my sexy pose." He says: "You know I think you're beautiful, but you always look like you're going to answer a question on Jeopardy when you pose like that."

What is?
What is?

I don't know. Tonight I'm going to watch Isabelle Huppert in Violette and think about her saucy flapperness. Isabelle Huppert, my favorite actress who plays my favorite criminals (Emma B and Violette in the Claude Chabrol films, she is Erika in The Piano Teacher).

And then tomorrow I'm going to meditate as I have been for months on this woman question, this question of escape, the possibility of escape.

What is?

I don't know.
Can you repeat the question?

Or maybe I'll just go to bed early. I don't know.

Super Massive Big-Ups

2011-04-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

To my lovely and wonderful friend Suzanne Scanlon, who I mention here often and link to often, and who I'm actually dedicating Heroines to, whose story "Her Thirty-Seventh Year: An Index" is the runner-up for the Iowa Review Prize, which gets her $500 and publication in the journal! I'm so overjoyed. Someone, please, stat, get this woman a book deal. I see her as the next Mary McCarthy. Or like a Colette from Chicago.

block

2011-04-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

Strangely, I am blocked in writing this blog right now. I wonder if this means I should stop or keep on eking out these little fragments? (do you eke? eek? is this even a word?) Yet I am spurting forth today, the essay book. Actually this is causing me some anxiety, the flow. I am dangerously writing TOO much, I am being TOO excessive, this book about the excessive. Although to me the flow the purge is better than the block. At least psychically. Yesterday....NOTHING came. And I wrapped myself in melancholy, I sobbed in the shower, I went to the Whole Foods and sat outside in the 80-something heat and ate vegan egg rolls. I bought guacomole and almond milk chocolate ice cream. I think I'm getting my period. But sometimes this life of being alone and writing is absolutely agonizing. I want to be done with the book, and take a break, and go to coffeeshops and read. That's all I want to do, is go to a coffeeshop and read Thomas Bernhard novels or something. I'm not very good at working too much, staying disciplined for too long. Like today, I had a good day, then I crawled in bed and watched Glee. I don't even like Glee.

I am looking to see if I can post something from what I wrote today...it all feels too new, now.Okay something very small:

The hysteric nonetheless told stories. That’s what I need to do here. Tell stories. She told stories and they were woven into something else. A sort of alchemy: art, science.

Another passage from in-progress heroines

2011-04-25T07:34:00.000-07:00

For Suzanne:

To be so compelled to save a heroine in a book that it makes you want to throw a book across the room. I feel this for: Breton's Nadja, Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. I feel this when I read the biographies of the great men that must declare a victim and a victor (as all biographies do), their pathologizing, constructing language. Sometimes I still read these biographies, and hone my fury, a bit like listening to right-wing talk radio. The desire to throw a book across the room. That gesture. Which is really an impotent gesture to commit violence, revenge (it is almost impossible to write in such states, to do so is a revenge.)

Three Images are worth 70,000 words

2011-04-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

Popping my head out for a second, just to tell all who wonder that I am alive, I am down under, in that tunnel, a good Alice, writing down what She Said, etc. I am working! I am INSIDE the thing itself. Tunneling away. It has resembled at times a rabbit hole. Some days are more clear than others. I hope in several months to return, again a smiling woman. Some days it is spring and I still smile. Perhaps the belljar can also be a productive chaos! And Sylvia in her gleaming blondeness is the carciature for April for my NYRB calendar. April isn't always cruel.

(jpegs saved, respectively, belljar, belljar1, belljar2)

Lidia Yuknavith on HTML Giant

2011-04-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

The force I will heretofore refer to as The Lidia - publisher, writer extraordinaire, whose anti-memoir The Chronology of Water drops today - interviewed by Chris Higgs as part of his 5 Questions on Experimental Writing asked to Women.

I do believe that everyone who complains about the state of writing today should be an activist like Lidia and start their own press, like she has done with Chiasmus (publisher of O Fallen Angel, and honestly the only press I considered sending it to). As she says of the press:

It means that while we DO work to get authors and their words circulating within commodity culture, we do NOT do it to promote commodity. We do it to infiltrate consumer culture with radical little art attacks.

Ergo, Ego

2011-04-01T05:32:00.000-07:00

I am in the outlining stage of HEROINES now. The real, oh-my-god, I will soon have an outline that is more than me throwing together words and phrases onto a sort of mood board (like I write my longer blog posts). Right now it's 15 pages which is way too long of an outline but anyway. I have been chipping away at this outline for days, because I know once I start - ATTEMPTING - once I start - ESSAYING - then whatever is in my mind at the time will go into the next draft. That is terrifying to me. I'm not ready, I feel. Although I've been ready for a while. To essay on these women. But what I need I realize is a terrific jolt of ego. I need Henry Miller-style ego. F. Scott Fitzgerald-caliber ego. Andre Breton-matter ego. The tremendous and terrifying ego to say - Yes - I have Something to Write - Yes - Something that I think You should Read.

On his side: ego. On her side: self-indulgence.

Today's Inspiration

2011-03-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

I AM THE FEMME FATALE

(5150 Psychiatric Hold at 27 that was publicly televised)

I AM THE FEMME FATALE

(after movie career arrested several times for drunk and disorderly conduct, was a barmaid)

I AM THE FEMME FATALE

(institutionalized at 30)

I AM THE FEMME FATALE

(addiction, jailtime before 25)

I AM THE FEMME FATALE

(TB at 30)

First line for Heroines

2011-03-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

"At the beginning, I think of endings."

Okay, great, this baby should write itself now. Right? Right?

Am in bed with my third cup of Silver Needle white tea, rain pouring on the roof, I am going to sit here in bed and MAKE myself reread Elaine Showalter's "The Female Malady: Women, Madness, English Culture, 1830-1980" (a must-read if you're interested in who makes and writes the girl-crazy), have just woken up at 7:30am, researched books about English bowling for my sister, made gluten-free vegan zucchini muffins that will almost certainly be bad but I find the process of baking soothing even if I don't follow the directions (no ginger, so ginger candy on top). Tonight going to see the Nederlans Dans Theater (here is them wonderfully performing Gertrude Stein's "Shutter Shut.") I think I've watched that clip like 10 times. I would embed it here but I am a)lazy or b)a bit of a dummy on such things. Either I don't know which one.

Perhaps this will happen. Soon. And I will meditate this morning on possession, the model of the writer as one possessed.

Procrastination Voodoo

2011-03-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to measure my life not by semesters anymore (as I am an unemployed adjunct, what a terrible thing to taste in one's mouth), but by the ebb and flow of television seasons. Seasons change and end. I have now moved on in my viewing habits from young ingenues with the quotidian traumas of revolving boyfriends, back-stabbing best friends, all embedded within mystery (Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars), to that of Showtime tales of train-wreck middle-aged women with various maladies that would be found readily on the DSM-IV played by fascinating and dimensional actresses (The United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie). This feels, even though it's intense and thorough procrastination, like the movement of my book, from the young nubile girl-as-character, to the hag-writer who is deemed mentally ill. So it feels like progress, even though today I am only on page 10 reading through my 600-pages of notes, attempting to find some sort of order/outline (a woman's body will emerge). I am literally, through my TV watching on my computer, tracing the movement of Heroines.

Come one! Come all! (and Pass it Around!)

2011-03-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, May 17, 2011; 7 pm PROSE EVENT
With readings by Renee Gladman, Danielle Dutton and Amina Cain.

This is the second of the Belladonna* Collaborative PROSE EVENTS. Each is a reading and conversation with prose writers who write at the intersection of fiction and the essay, producing texts that are urgent and often unclassifiable. We will be especially interested in exploring the idea of the walker as essayist, flaneuring through city and suburban space, skirting around the crosswalks or margins of genre.

Renee Gladman is the author of four works of prose, most recently To After That (TOAF) and Event Factory (Dorothy) and one collection of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Since 2005, she has operated Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought-projects based in the sentence, making occasional forays into poetry. She teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University, and lives in Massachusetts.

Danielle Dutton is the author of two books — S P R A W L and Attempts at a Life — and her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Harper's, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail. She designs books at Dalkey Archive Press; teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa; and edits Dorothy, a publishing project.

Amina Cain is the author of the short story collection I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009), and an upcoming chapbook, Tramps Everywhere (Insert Press/PARROT SERIES). She is also a curator/organizer, and a teacher of creative writing/literature. Her writing has appeared in publications such as 3rd bed, Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, Dewclaw, Encyclopedia Project (F-K), LRL, onedit, and Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers, and has been translated into Polish on MINIMALBOOKS. She lives in Los Angeles.

Curated by Kate Zambreno. Kate Zambreno is the author of O Fallen Angel, which won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel—First Book Contest.” Another novel, Green Girl, will be published by Emergency Press in Fall 2011. A nonfiction book revolving around the women of modernism, Heroines, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2012. She writes the blog Frances Farmer is My Sister. She is also an editor at Nightboat Books.

Location: Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street; New York, NY
Admission: $6

(from www.belladonnaseries.org)