documentary of the dumb cunt

Today I feel absolutely stricken with doubt, as to what the fuck I am doing. I have been inhaling the works of Mary Gaitskill. This makes me unbearably happy, to inhabit inside of her worlds. This morning also I read Lauren Berlant's chapter on Two Girls Fat and Thin in her new book Cruel Optimism that John finally got for me interlibrary loan - which made clear to me not one but two projects. Berlant writes, "We cannot underestimate the gendered divisions that subject the girls to the thought that love plots, intellectual and sexual, will emancipate them from the deadening space of their own worlds." Berlant then goes on to write of a more formalized S/M, such as one of the girls is drawn into, is a an almost natural extension of the "pedagogy of feminine suffering" girls are subjected to during their youth (Anne Frank, etc.) Of Gaitskill's character (a Justine, like Kirsten Dunst's in Melancholia, both named, curiously, after the virtuous detested heroine of Sade), Berlant writes:

Like loneliness, S/M performs for her the unnaturalness of normal intimacy by eroticizing form and boundary. It takes up the aspects of grandiose suffering she already associates with love and rescue plots...

This reminds me as well of Bovary, and the concept of Bovarizing, or creating an identity through romance narratives. This is kind of what I wanted to write about in Slapping Clark Gable, but I'm feeling today like I live a completely ludicrous existence. Like, as opposed to writing weird-monstrous-essays, perhaps I should try to take classes in order to try to get a Ph.D.? So I can get a job? Or, as opposed to writing weird-monstrous-essays, I should try to train myself on Mary Gaitskill, and try to become a GOOD fiction writer? Who writes characters, etc.? As opposed to working on the other project, which is a weird-monstrous-not-really-novel? Write things that either elevate me in society or that people actually want to read? I remember when Green Girl was in the Tournament of Books a commenter wrote - "this reminded me of Mary Gaitskill but obviously less good than Mary Gaitskill." I mean, I'm absolutely sure that's true. I read Mary Gaitskill and I see an absolute master in the form, someone who creates these gorgeously detailed and specific interiorities. I guess this all extends to the fact that I'm not interested in, or probably capable of, mastering anything. I like being a fuck-up, I think.

I guess what I'm saying - is there a value in being a public intellectual, who's only quasi-public, i.e. doesn't write for Harper's? Doesn't have a full-time teaching job? Doesn't make any money? Is not extremely authoritative on anything? Is really craving to read a romance novel or cannot wait until Drop Dead Diva returns? Who only read half of Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, but if broached about in public, would pretend she read the entire book? Who all the scholars and writers she's glowing on right now have all declined to blurb her various books, including Heroines, and still she keeps on sending them her books, with her cursivey dedication, all because she just wants them to love her? Who would rather talk about what she had for breakfast (greasy potatoes and cherries) then ideas sometimes? Or books sometimes? And mispronounces: Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, and probably lots of other names? Why am I spending hours every day reading and taking notes for a book of essays I have no publisher for, and might have extreme difficulty publishing?

Maybe I should worry less about books then, and writing and finishing books, and more about just reading. I would like to have a career as a reader of things, but not an expert on anything.What I plan to read in the next weeks: The Dud Avocado, Making Scenes (republished as an ebook by Emily Books), Sheila Heti's new documentary/fiction book I asked for a galley of, even though I'm not really a reviewer, June Arnold's Applesauce, more Mary Gaitskill, maybe getting back into Acker, and then theory of some sort unless I can't do it anymore.

Also I've had a migraine two days in a row, once I took the medicine that paralyzes me and then makes me pass out, the second time, last night, I managed to pass out myself, curled up in a fetal ball at the foot of the bed. So I'm probably quite stormy and moody. Sometimes I think though - what a ridiculous girl I am. And yet I turn 35 in December.