process

I have three Word documents, at least, open on my computer, all dealing with more or less the same essay, one that is probably like 97 Word and the other the more modern docx that I can't fucking figure out. I am making very weird lists and outlines of ideas, like I'm in some experimental-essayist version of that film where Russell Crowe was a schizophrenic genius and imagined good-looking blonde men conversing with him. I am actually feeling involved with it, this list-making, these separate documents, the shuffling and copying and pasting, the separation anxiety of what goes where in what essay. Here is one example of notes:

The passive self-destructive girl-libertine

Meditating on the body

Meditating on the confessional, within the space of the confessional

Meditating on boundaries

Meditating on the abject, how abject is crossing boundaries

How being a girl is being a mess, a failure

The girl-auteur

and then, bizarrely:

Getting pedicure – how gross it is

Sex as a sort of currency

and then:

Films: Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Fat Girl, maybe the novels of Elfriede Jelinek? The Sadean woman? I don’t know. I Love Dick – Chris’ S/M. Last Tango in Paris – O Fallen Angel. Varda’s Cleo and Vagabonde?  Unica Zurn’s body. The flapper and Laure. Coeur de Lion. Nightwood? Marina Abramovic?

All this, strangely. Making sense to me. In short, I've begun officially work on Slapping Clark Gable, which might be a text that might exist in the world, that doesn't mean anyone will want to publish it, but that's something at least. And I'm approaching it, or trying to, with the jouissance of blogging. I've promised to submit essays to various places but as I plan to make these planned essays intensely memoiristic and fragmented, I'm imagining that might not go over too well. On FB this morning I status-updated:

The fear of being solicited to write something or pitching something and having that pitch accepted and then when you write it it will get rejected. I'm feeling that pretty huge right now. The fear of the unwritten.

And then I liked it so much I copied and pasted it somewhere in my BLOB of notes, which I've also managed to transcribe the first five episode of Girls, for whatever reason, I have no clue. This was the first status update I've written in a while. Actually, this morning I updated that I actually thought the new Great Gatsby trailer looked pretty exciting, but erased that, because that's too embarrassing.

I want my piece on Girls and Francesca Woodman and Marina Abramovic and other things to be called DOCUMENTARY OF THE DUMB CUNT. Or: the CUNTSLERROMAN. But I'm imagining my editor at the place I'm potentially writing it for won't like that.  Actually, I can't figure out whether to write about the notion of abject love in Girls or more the notion of confessionalism, of boundaries, of crossing these boundaries. I mean, I think they are separate essays.

What I think is exciting about Girls is all the criticism written by women about Girls, which is this unusual instance of these public spaces, and sometimes these public quite professional spaces, becoming a discourse about female desire, and messiness. It's pretty awesome. Like the roundtable going on on Slate.com. Or the recent piece in the NYRB. I've also loved Kari Larsen's write-ups of Girls. I realized like yesterday I cannot write a straight essay about Lena Dunham. Everything interesting about Girls has already been written, is being written, by very brilliant women. Also, Dunham's own discourse and commentary on the show. I think, like with everything, I will circle around it, claim it for a figure, like I'm fucking Pierre Guyotat with my "figures."

Recently I wrote a very professional-ish essay because someone asked me to, in response to someone else's essay they wrote. It was professional-ish on my terms, even though I still included a paragraph about Genet getting neutered. I thought it was, like, maybe a metaphor. The piece was on the Internet and book culture. I was pro. It's not up yet or being published. Maybe it won't be. I don't know. I asked if I could publish it on my blog, because that's where I'm used to writing things. They said maybe it had to be peer-reviewed. What the fuck why? I said. (not actual discourse, as this was through emailing, with me being bubbly and polite, as I have learned to do by ending every email: "xo" the girl's nice address, the Elle Woods winking sign-off.) After all, I'm not a scholar (things I'm reminded of: not a scholar, fiction writer, really, or poet. I don't know if the powers-that-be consider me much of an essayist. I am a blogger however.)

I don't get the idea of being peer-reviewed. Isn't being read, in short, that?

Anyway.   

Also I now have an author site. I'm hoping to take all the buy-me hullaballoo off of Frances Farmer, and making it more of a commerce-free space, less of a promotional space. Don't think this actually has anything to do with me becoming more polished or professional. Never that.

Also I read some of Wayne Koestenbaum's Humiliation this morning and it was the perfect thing for me to be reading.