That is Marlene Dumas, the painter Jelinek, whose images were so important to me when I was writing O Fallen Angel, her images and Durer's Wing of A Roller that became the cover and of course Francis Bacon's triptychs. About five people showed up at the reading last night at Bluestockings, but I still read and tried to enjoy it and at least be bemused at the poor showing. It's character building I said to Masha Tupitsyn, who so graciously read with me, also Kim Rosenfield. It's demoralizing she joked (?) I have a long long essay brewing on this weekend and the subject of class and celebrity and New York and Wonderful Wonderful Times and the Bell Jar and Jean Rhys as a working-class writer and Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer being my sister and so much more. But wanted to share this quote. Why I write I think. And some images by Dumas that I looked at while writing. And to share that I went to see Anne Carson read from Nox and she had green toenail polish and was reserved yet of course awesome and I bought a copy of the book in a box about her dead brother and thought about Book of Mutter the book that is in a box as well a coffin of unpublished but is about my dead mother and I went to the Marina Abramovic another mother and stood in line but didn't choose to stay in line as I hate waiting from the trauma of waiting at the Marshall Fields on State Street for Santa Claus as a child it was a conscious decision not to wait but I stood and watched her I was so close to her she was like a goddess demonic snow queen sweaty cadaver and I felt awed and also yes bemused by the experience. So much casual nakedness the naked woman humping the skeleton isn't that a metaphor I thought a metaphor yes this goes back to the book as box, book as coffin. Also that there's something strange about restaging what once was, that moment in time, the performance that by its nature can't be repeated, that's what's so amazing about performance, so vital, as Marina would have said then, but now she is the ghost of performances past and you can visit her and have your picture taken and be a celebrity yourself as well, and then I thought of Yayoi Kusama's polka dotted protests outside of the MOMA, she called it the Moratorium of Modern Art (right?) which it is in a way yes but then during the short time I stayed in New York at the Webster like Plath on an internship the Yayoi Kusama retrospective blew my mind she had by then been granted a retrospective she had been institutionalized yes and then Yayoi is still institutionalized and I have always been afraid of being institutionalized and as the crowd at Bluestockings tells me I have a long way to go before being afraid of that before reading somewhere where there's prosecco served afterwards and polite mikes and my New Directions publisher can sit in and talk about my process and work.
this reads Measuring your Own Grave.
Dead Marilyn the painting of Marilyn Monroe's cadaver. I hate the word cadaver. It makes me shudder.
this one is called Banality of Evil. A subject I meditated on and I read the Hannah Arendt book about the Eichmann trial while writing O Fallen Angel, and my new in-progress, Under the Shadow of My Roof, also very inspired by the Eichmann trials.
