First of all, if anyone sees me in the next few days, which is TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE I LIVE ON AN ISLAND CALLED NORTH CAROLINA, and I have bruises under my eyes, this is not because of elongated S/M play or domestic abuse or sloppy mascara rending, but because I have just fucking RUN INTO A DOOR. I have a bruise on my nose and my forehead. Luckily this made me feel dramatic, after I was done being on the floor sobbing in a showy way because I wanted Genet to crawl all over me in concern like I assumed canine companions were supposed to do, but Genet is a lot like his namesake with Janey Smith in Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, cruel and always putting me in the abject position. So I went and put half of my jewelry on and my new, large and floppy, extremely showy black and white striped summer hat. And am sitting outside, typing this. Also in skinny capri jeans with zippers on the side and black-heeled boots, despite the muggy heat, because I'm going now for a look, some wounded and cinematic heroine.
Running into a door though is very madcap postfeminist heroine, though isn't it, all Anthropologie dresses and clumsiness.
I am sitting outside now and have been reading Mary Gaitskill's story collection Bad Behavior and it is BLOWING MY MIND. It is everything that I wanted Lena Dunham's Girls to be, I know that's unfair, but it's true. How oozey and perceptive and gorgeous it is, her dingy worlds of fuck-ups trying to escape their stuckness through desperate contact with cruel yet never unfeeling people. I wonder if it's partially because Gaitskill was documenting a New York where it was possible to be broke and fucked-up and lost, where I'm not sure that city really allows for that possibility anymore, that you have to somehow be a mover and a shaker to exist there, and for me, movers and shakers are not the most interesting characters in fiction. Although (maybe I'll get in trouble here) I'm actually really taken by this sense that the descendants to Mary Gaitskill are Tao Lin, and also some of the writers he publishes, like Megan Boyle and Marie Calloway, because more than anything Gaitskill's stories are about people caught in absolute tedium, a desire to lay waste to the day, and chronicling how they fill up their days, through drugs or falling in love or fucking, and how empty it all is.
I received a few emails, from people I love, even though I'm not sure they know how special I think they are, with words of encouragement towards my current state, as I was more than a little I suppose self-pitying in my last post when I stated I did not consider myself a genius. NO I do not consider myself a genius - that is still my gut reply - but then I remember the end of Heroines is actually a tribute to all girl-writers, all writers who are unpublished, that they need to have a belief in their own genius, and how I end saying that I tell myself I am a fucking genius in the mirror, wearing absurd platform high heels and usually eating something. So I suppose I am a mess of contradictions. I guess I'm saying - I was saying - I'm glad I'm not a high-functioning thinker of original thought - as I think that would be exhausting. I'm more the type of person who slinks around and considers, who is low-functioning, always dreamy, who might never invent a new form or pioneer a new concept - that maybe I could be that person, but I would have to be a completely different person, one who was able to work all day on ideas, and to me there is a sort of purity to that, and I'm glad I'm impure, I really am, I'm only interested in notions of the impure, I watch and read junk, I toxify I detox, when I skim theory I usually FEEL it more than UNDERSTAND it, or I understand it through feeling it, when I have been in an institution of higher learning, always as a vagabond, I tended to babble in the classroom environment and make little sense at all, but there's this part of me, a huge part of me, that takes pride in it, that chooses to be an outlaw, that likes being a failure, that cultivates myself as a failure, who is now writing a BONKERS essay about Girls that is now not about Girls at all, and some part of me would like it to be rejected, so I can just publish it on my blog.
In short: you should read Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior. Mix in some Leo Bersani's The Freudian Body. Don't run into doors. Drink lots of iced tea in the heat.
xo
Friday, May 25, 2012
fragment
Sometimes I honestly wish I was a genius. I am not asking for any sort of affirmation - I know we all have our special genius, and that genius is perhaps, as Joyelle McSweeney has been writing so brilliantly lately, a fucked-up concept meant to be done away with. Perhaps genius is too related to mastery, and since I'm beginning to slowly realize I'm not interested in mastery - as Johannes has written about lately, as Eileen Myles recently said in a wonderful interview - I'm not perhaps interested in like sharpening my craft or something. But sometimes I wish I had that MIND. I am reading theory now. Like yesterday. A little amazed at myself that this, this is what I want to be reading. I've discovered Alphonso Lingis, who I know the poets love and have written about before. Alphonso Lingis! A wild mind. And Elizabeth Grosz! And Leo Bersani! And Lauren Berlant! And Wayne Koestenbaum! And Avital Ronell! These thinkers have such a special genius to them. And yet they are also quite powerful, these thinkers, within their institutions. I am not powerful.
I am currently unemployed. I know I say this ad nauseum, but it is - there- an abject state- an interesting state. Obviously at this point a very privileged state. Two years ago it would have been impossible - IMPOSSIBLE - for me to be as little employed as I am, but now, where I am, working a little, it's slightly possible but not ideal. I mean, for most of my writing life, which I guess is a decade, I have been OVERemployed, which is the state of most of my writer-friends, working three jobs, when we were last in Akron I taught five classes and even drove out of state for one. But for the first eight months I was here, desperately trying to rewrite Heroines while Green Girl had just come out I was grateful I couldn't find classes - but now - no matter what happens to me, no matter who contacts me, or who is interested in receiving a copy of Heroines, I have no idea why I just decided to italicize Heroines, like I'm going to start writing professionally on this blog now, no matter that Meghan O'Rourke or an editor at the NYRB got back to me, I am still unemployed, that state is the main state I see as defining me. The only time I felt okay with it was when we were in Bergen, Norway last summer, and even though John was at another of his academic conferences people actually were willing to chat with me and recognize me as something other than just-spouse, and I remember an American friend of John's who was now living in Norway shrugged his shoulders at this state of stuckness of mine, of not-having-a-job, and didn't think much of it, and I felt very grateful for that. The worst thing about being an unemployed writer is that when you meet strangers, which is rarely, lately, and they ask what you do, you cannot hide behind the classes you teach, you have to tell them YOU ARE A WRITER, and then you have to have THAT CONVERSATION. Sometimes I hide and say I don't do anything, which people take for me having a bit of lip, which I suppose I do, but it annoys John when I say I don't do anything. Or I mention the one class I'm teaching a semester. Although to be true, most days I don't do anything, I stew and I flit about on screen, and sometimes I flip, and I scribble some notes, and that's it. Those are good days, actually.
I am also beginning to feel bad about how GOOD I am at publicity, how much I work at it, how much I work at contacting people to receive copies of my book, or to be invited to read at a university, or please let me read at your bookstore or series, or please interview me, or to please read my mss. to consider publishing me, Book of Mutter is being read now, my orphaned texts of orphans, and I believe at this point it's been rejected like at least 50-60 times, and I can't help but thinking that the genius writers don't have to work so hard, that they get asked to do things, they don't ask if they can do things, I am beginning to feel publicizing myself cheapens myself, makes me less of a writer, more of a music man, until I think of Whitman, although of course I am not Whitman. But that there is an impurity to being so self-promoting, and having to ask. Everything I've gotten, for the most part, I've asked for. I've asked for and I've followed up and I've asked for again. I guess in lieu of having a real job I've made this writing thing my job.
But this post was about my desire for genius. Maybe a desire for genius is a desire for institutionalized power. But no that cannot be it. For certainly Henry Darger was a genius, Barbara Loden was a genius, and they did not have institutionalized power. Well Barbara Loden did because of Elia Kazan but not very much. There is a desire to have doors opened for me. I thought while reading yesterday perhaps I would try -AGAIN - the third time the charm to apply to Ph.D. programs, if I can audit the Grosz seminars at Duke next year. But my wish if I got a Ph.D. would not to be a theoretical genius -but to squeak through - to get hired somewhere. To maybe be able to continue to teach these other, texts of genius.
But in truth maybe I do not want to be a genius. Sometimes I am grateful I am quite lazy. I think if you are Lauren Berlant or Elizabeth Grosz you are always thinking - you are thinking at a high level - you are reading 10 books a day - you are having erudite and scintillating conversations with everyone - you are inspiring those you teach, the mentoring that is a muscle - you are not having days where you can be depressed and read pulp novels and eat chocolate almond-milk ice cream and cannot wait for your partner to come home because you'd promise to wait until he did to watch the series finale of Revenge, and that is, in some ways, the crown of your day, the crown of your previous day being when you sat outside on the porch with the puppy and watched the onslaught of rain, and felt glad that you allowed yourself to leave the house alone, even though you didnt' really leave the house, you just sat on your porch.
I am currently unemployed. I know I say this ad nauseum, but it is - there- an abject state- an interesting state. Obviously at this point a very privileged state. Two years ago it would have been impossible - IMPOSSIBLE - for me to be as little employed as I am, but now, where I am, working a little, it's slightly possible but not ideal. I mean, for most of my writing life, which I guess is a decade, I have been OVERemployed, which is the state of most of my writer-friends, working three jobs, when we were last in Akron I taught five classes and even drove out of state for one. But for the first eight months I was here, desperately trying to rewrite Heroines while Green Girl had just come out I was grateful I couldn't find classes - but now - no matter what happens to me, no matter who contacts me, or who is interested in receiving a copy of Heroines, I have no idea why I just decided to italicize Heroines, like I'm going to start writing professionally on this blog now, no matter that Meghan O'Rourke or an editor at the NYRB got back to me, I am still unemployed, that state is the main state I see as defining me. The only time I felt okay with it was when we were in Bergen, Norway last summer, and even though John was at another of his academic conferences people actually were willing to chat with me and recognize me as something other than just-spouse, and I remember an American friend of John's who was now living in Norway shrugged his shoulders at this state of stuckness of mine, of not-having-a-job, and didn't think much of it, and I felt very grateful for that. The worst thing about being an unemployed writer is that when you meet strangers, which is rarely, lately, and they ask what you do, you cannot hide behind the classes you teach, you have to tell them YOU ARE A WRITER, and then you have to have THAT CONVERSATION. Sometimes I hide and say I don't do anything, which people take for me having a bit of lip, which I suppose I do, but it annoys John when I say I don't do anything. Or I mention the one class I'm teaching a semester. Although to be true, most days I don't do anything, I stew and I flit about on screen, and sometimes I flip, and I scribble some notes, and that's it. Those are good days, actually.
I am also beginning to feel bad about how GOOD I am at publicity, how much I work at it, how much I work at contacting people to receive copies of my book, or to be invited to read at a university, or please let me read at your bookstore or series, or please interview me, or to please read my mss. to consider publishing me, Book of Mutter is being read now, my orphaned texts of orphans, and I believe at this point it's been rejected like at least 50-60 times, and I can't help but thinking that the genius writers don't have to work so hard, that they get asked to do things, they don't ask if they can do things, I am beginning to feel publicizing myself cheapens myself, makes me less of a writer, more of a music man, until I think of Whitman, although of course I am not Whitman. But that there is an impurity to being so self-promoting, and having to ask. Everything I've gotten, for the most part, I've asked for. I've asked for and I've followed up and I've asked for again. I guess in lieu of having a real job I've made this writing thing my job.
But this post was about my desire for genius. Maybe a desire for genius is a desire for institutionalized power. But no that cannot be it. For certainly Henry Darger was a genius, Barbara Loden was a genius, and they did not have institutionalized power. Well Barbara Loden did because of Elia Kazan but not very much. There is a desire to have doors opened for me. I thought while reading yesterday perhaps I would try -AGAIN - the third time the charm to apply to Ph.D. programs, if I can audit the Grosz seminars at Duke next year. But my wish if I got a Ph.D. would not to be a theoretical genius -but to squeak through - to get hired somewhere. To maybe be able to continue to teach these other, texts of genius.
But in truth maybe I do not want to be a genius. Sometimes I am grateful I am quite lazy. I think if you are Lauren Berlant or Elizabeth Grosz you are always thinking - you are thinking at a high level - you are reading 10 books a day - you are having erudite and scintillating conversations with everyone - you are inspiring those you teach, the mentoring that is a muscle - you are not having days where you can be depressed and read pulp novels and eat chocolate almond-milk ice cream and cannot wait for your partner to come home because you'd promise to wait until he did to watch the series finale of Revenge, and that is, in some ways, the crown of your day, the crown of your previous day being when you sat outside on the porch with the puppy and watched the onslaught of rain, and felt glad that you allowed yourself to leave the house alone, even though you didnt' really leave the house, you just sat on your porch.
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