AD Jameson and Agnès Varda

I love AD Jameson's expert write-ups on film at Big Other. Wonderful distance learning for me. Check out his exhaustive post on experimental film (and even more amazing he's dug up links,  to some of my favorites, Joseph Cornell's blue-tinged fetish film Rose Hobart! Maya Deren! Shirley Clarke!, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures! read this poem by James Pate, Meat Joy! Jonas Mekas! Mary Ellen Bute!) Anyway, I want to take a class with him on experimental film.

I also love how he champions women filmmakers, like Barbara Loden's Wanda or his recent piece on Agnès Varda's Vagabond (the French title Sans Toi ni loit, without roof or law), actually the two films have so much in common, as they are about female drifters & wanderers bruised by their existence.

I agree with Jameson that Varda is one of the great auteurs. In a way her career reminds me of Louise Bourgeois'. Both at first associated with a major art movement (Bourgeois with Surrealism, then later with minimalism, Varda with the New Wave) and then later in life, at an older age, making some of the most exciting works of their career (Bourgeois' Cells, Varda's cinematic essays), and works that change their medium (sculpture, film).

And I personally don't think anyone's making cinematic essays like Varda is now (I much prefer hers to Godard's). They are political (especially Gleaners) but that element of play and self-reflexivity I think makes them stand apart. I love Cleo, I love Vagabond, Gleaners, Beaches. Gleaners to me is an extraordinary essay, it is perfect - her meditation on creativity (this act of gleaning), the political message, the ruminations about art, aging, the pulsing feeling of life and joy pouring through her works. I loved Beaches as well, although it felt messier, yet maybe more ludic. I leave watching her later works wanting to live life in a different way, appreciating spaces, the outside, life, in a different way. I last saw Beaches & I wanted to move somewhere, anywhere, and live life as fully as Varda does.

Although I have to say if I have to pick my favorite Varda I have a special spot for her Cleo from 5 to 7 (referring to a recent post of mine, did you know Madonna wanted to remake it in the 80s, making the test Cleo would be awaiting an AIDS test?) My novel Green Girl is directly inspired by Cleo, also about a beautiful blonde walking the streets, the consumer-shopper as well as always aware of being the spectacle, the object of the gaze. I love Corinne Marchand's fragility in the later scenes, when she takes off the wig, her slow coming into a sort of consciousness. Some feminist critics have been down on Cleo for not being feminist enough (because the character doesn't have any real awakening in the film). I think that's ridiculous. On the other hand Vagabond is widely seen as a feminist film. I wonder whether there is that wide of a difference. Although the visual elements are so different (Cleo is so glossy, Vagabond all gritty realism), both are basically existentialist films about women and what everyone projects onto them, and how they must pander to others to survive. And Varda was very inspired by Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, this meditation on identity and consciousness pervades her fictional work (and like Cleo, the person in the city, in Paris).

 

On a more superficial, fashionable level, I love all the touches in Varda's films that can be seen as feminine, how she occupies her interior spaces. The necklaces hanging up in Cleo's studio that were Varda's own necklaces. All of the fetish objects in Gleaners, the postcards. I even love the boots in Vagabond.

I also love the stripe in her hair in Beaches.

Camera Less Lucida: The Author Photo

I am working on a post in my head about Kathy Acker. But when I think of Kathy Acker, I think of Kathy Acker's image. Kathy Acker is an author who I really associate with her image. Kathy Acker my ideal-I. My mirror image of a writer. Kathy Acker.

This is interesting because Kathy Acker's works were about the dissolution of identity, all of her persona writing. The "I" is always unstable inside, although outside the image of Kathy Acker stares at us from those metallic pastel Grove Press covers, so solidified as to be almost coherent, crimson-lipped and peroxide-butched. It's an interesting tension there.

Now I am thinking of two quotes. One by Daniel Tiffany, recently quoted in Exoskeleton: "An image is a tranvestite of the word." Which is crazy-sexy-brilliant. Another, my man Roland Barthes, that I quote in my novel Green Girl (very much about identity and the image, how my ingenue-characters construct their identity through film and fashion magazines, the main character Ruth is always being compared to various movie stars, from Catherine Deneuve to Jean Seberg):

Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing," I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself into an image.

I *think* in Camera Lucida Roland Barthes is talking about loss, which is very psychoanalytic, I guess, the idea of the image signifying loss, a sort of suture hiding trauma, Lacan's mirror stage, the imago, hiding an internal rupture (Am I talking total fucking gibberish here? yes! I feel like I'm in my seminar on the Fetish at U of C a decade ago again, trying to describe how Derrida on Genet made me feel, while everyone stared at me blankly.) 

Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that's what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned. But what  it reminded me of again was how mercantile and dirty fiction has become to me, the business of books, that's why I'm so glad my first publisher is Chiasmus Press, Lidia Yuknavitch author extraordinaire is definitely an activist fighting against the idea of literature as a market form. But I thought of matchsticks, and that I will be at readings behind a table selling these books, like a matchstick girl or a violet seller or a girl selling oranges. And it made me melancholy. And Lily Hoang (who chose my book! Lily Hoang is my fairy godmother, or something less maternal and trite, and more kick-ass) quoting on HTML Giant today Baudelaire's saying that all art is prostitution.

But the books are beautiful. The only thing I didn't dig was my author photo, which is a bit over-saturated, probably for the rainbow Durer's wing on the cover. Anyway, the author photo makes me look like I'm wearing red lipstick, which kind of bothers me. Like it unintentionally tarts me up. Don't get me wrong. I have red lipstick, I wear red lipstick, occasionally, although I've stopped wearing make-up because when I put it on I get bored, and forget, and stop before finishing, and I'll be halfway through the day and realize I have a clown streak of lipstick across my face, for I am absent-minded, and by that I mean half the time I am absent a mind, or at least half a mind. And lately I am having days where I feel like I need to wear a helmet.

But I really wanted to look butch in my author photo. I wanted to look severe and masculine and intellectual. When the wonderful photographer who took my photo asked me to send the author photos I wanted to look like, this is who I sent:

 

  

 

I wanted to be as butch as Beckett, Beckett by way of Artaud. I wanted to look old & weary & bear suffering on my face. And then I wanted to have Gertrude Stein's severity. I think the photographer thought I was truly crazy. I think of all of these my favorite author photo is Ann Quin's. This to me is the image of the author. Her sad, serious eyes. What is she staring at? What is she thinking? Oh I love Ann Quin. I do. I want to reread Three and think of Ann Quin. I think of Ann Quin out at sea. I think of BS Johnson in the bathtub. I want to read Ann Quin in the bathtub and think about drowning.


But. Perhaps I should get somewhere, perhaps I should say something about the author photo. I think as a woman, I didn't want to invite the male gaze in my author photo (did I want to invite the female gaze?) Because then you're given shit (read Leigh Stein's remarks about that nasty Zelda post, which got nastier in the comments section, and Leigh was criticized for being too attractive in her photo, or somehow posing too sexily).

As Leigh writes on her blog:

Zelda is a famous woman, a famous literary woman, on a blog "about" literature, and it isn't fair to reduce her to a picture of her body. It isn't fair to reduce me to a picture of my face. What picture should I post of my face? Should I look uglier? Should I wear a mustache? How can I prevent my radiating sexiness from compromising my hard-headed opinions?

In this stupid sexist literary world, if a woman is seen as too attractive she's not taken seriously. Or she's criticized as prostituting herself, as setting herself up as an object of consumption/woman-to-be-looked-at to be all Laura Mulvey about it. (Zadie Smith, umm who else? Oh a young Sontag. A young Didion. Once you're older it's okay to be sexy and a woman writer, but if you're young and a sexy woman writer then you're a mindless whore. I think it was Hemingway who said that. I'm joking.)

I didn't want to smile in my author photo. Because for a while I always smiled, and this was something I wanted to resist. But all the pressures a woman writer has to go through! She can't be seen as too attractive, too come-hither, too sexy, or she won't be taken seriously. It's the classic double-bind. Unless you're Acker. Unless there's a performative element to your writing.

But looking at my author photo, at the book, at the image. I felt a loss. As I am still posing (for all photography is posing, a spectacle of the self).


This is me (or is it?)

Advertisements of Myself

In Under the Shadow of My Roof, the kind-of inside joke for me is that Monkey, the teenage libertine trapped in the cellar by her father, imagines herself as an author. So I can pour out all of my ideation and self-loathing about authorship. She wants to be a writer, but she doesn't have an agent, and she wants to go on Oprah, etc. And then when she gets out of the cellar she gets a six-figure book deal. Anyway. Here is a passage where she agonizes over her identity as a writer:

i don't want to prostitute myself or self-promote. do i write out of an internal need & live as an anchoress? do i smile for photographs or glare, stonily.

or i could be a writer-whore and give interviews to terry grossy and get write-ups in bookforum and send out perennial status updates about my book!