Today

I guess I'm going to continue with these diaristic posts for a while...I don't know why. The blog is supposed to be essays about literature. A sense of being in a void, a need to have a voice. Why why why am  I such a narcissist. It is so contagious, to write in such a forum and to be read. Rilke is unhappy with me. Perhaps I should reevaluate this and stop writing this, and only write about literature and film. I will have to think abut this.

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There is a large tree outside in my front yard with a very creepy hole in the tree that squirrels live in. John tells me squirrels don't live in there but I know it's true. I just saw a squirrel climb out of there. Ever since moving to Akron I've developed a nausea around trees. It's not a phobia. I will walk around trees, I can cohabitat with trees. I thought I liked trees, that I was a hugger of trees. But it's like a horror, almost, the spasms of nausea Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror. For trees. Especially trees that look like dying old men. With gnarly holes and tumors. Sometimes I look at this hole in the outside tree and I start gagging and a shudder runs through me and I want to shave my head. There's something so fucking disgusting about the suburbs, I think, even though Akron self-identifies as a city not a suburb but anyway. Also: dryer lint.

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This morning I decided to be industrious I was up half the night with insomnia but I woke after John had left around 9am and decided to throw in some laundry downstairs. I couldn't then because there was an extremely large man blocking my path on the 1st floor, passed out completely drunk while my neighbor absent-mindedly kicked him and began to implore him to get up once she saw me. I am pretty sure he doesn't live there. They are bartenders downstairs and lifelong townies I believe and throw big wild parties and sometimes at 4am they will be playing Celebration by Kool and the Gang on their jukebox. John and I sometimes wonder if they're meth-heads, as there's always an extremely strong smell emitting from their door that is not pot, but it's hard to tell, I think they are just drunks. And I think they're too sloppy to be meth heads. I don't know who bothers me more, the yuppies on the other side of the wall with their dinner parties and mammoth yelping dog or the drunks blasting Kool and the Gang. These are my two sets of neighbors.


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Last night I laid in bed and wrestled with my life, demons, the sheets, the coldness, the hotness, shorts to pajama pants, AC off and on...John luckily stayed up with me for half the night as I was a complete mess. I sobbed and imagined funerals. I laid in bed and thought of trauma theory, Cathy Caruth writing about Hiroshima mon Amour, which I channel in Book of Mutter. I am going through something...it's not mania, it's trauma, brought on by my uncle's disintegration, my call to witness it, and how much it mirrors my mother's illness, the hospital, the doctors, now at home, with visiting nurses, while his siblings work the graveyard shift, they are still pushing for more chemo, they are still pushing, pushing...I fear for my father, we are bonded to each other like we've been in a war, and sometimes we get stuck in the past, reminiscing my mother's illness, we two who were closer to her than anyone...and now my father going through this with his identical twin, and it's all unravelling, unravelling, and without giving up too much I fear for my family's sanity, and I fear for my own sanity unburying all of this. For years I would wake up in the night with flashes of my mother, on her deathbed, in her grave, in the hospital, all in these abject poses,  for about 6 years, the hot panics in the middle of the night, the sudden terrors. And after I wrote Book of Mutter I was able to purge myself of it, and now these images, are revisiting me, different faces but the same brutalized body...

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I laid in bed last night and thought of all the countries I want to visit, and how I long to live abroad again, and how stuck I feel, knowing no languages, having no path, and how I will have to get some sort of profession...I am emailing people and asking them about their graduate schools, and I feel so uncertain. Creative Writing Ph.D. or Lit Ph.D, if I can manage to get into a Lit Ph.D, I haven't yet, or an MFA. I need to do one of these as my job possibilities now are insane, and by that I mean not sustainable. I'm doing a 7am class next semester teaching argumentative essays, which I have no idea how to teach, I choke on the word pedagogy, and then I'm driving to another state to teach a workshop. All this and I'm making about $8,000 a year, maybe. It's insane. Every time I think I figured it out I get lost again. And then how to prolong a partnership, this very important safe haven for me, if I have to move to whatever graduate school I get into? And that's not worth it to me. And this is all  besides the point  because I've never managed to get in anywhere. And then I think of submitting some of my writing to a creative writing program and I feel sick, because I don't want to be judged, in that way, to be worked in a shop, and then I think of trying to get hired as a creative writing professor someday, and don't think with what I write about, my subject material, that would be possible. So maybe the lit path, if I can manage to, but that's 7 years, and I cannot speak in the language of the academic....This is the circular path.

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I am in the editing stage of the Semiotext(e) book and it makes me feel fragmented, like a deKooning' Woman. I sent Kate D. and Roz the introduction to the book and then retracted it saying I don't want to change! This is the problem with all of this, maybe. My desire not to change. I am also supposed to be getting together Shadow to maybe send off to Action Books and talking to a designer...instead I inserted a paragraph based on the article on Tiger Woods from Vanity Fair, it's so salacious! the suburban details! how he was banging the hostess at the Perkin's, and the only thing he ever bought her was a sandwich once from Subway! I make it a meat grinder.

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Yesterday I laid around and looked through Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas, his fictitious encyclopedia of writers, a sort of family history, it was one of John's books. I thought it was very clever, the conceit, but I couldn't get into it. But it felt good to be reading, again.