12-step program for Author Ego

I wrote a rather raw post yesterday and promptly deleted it. The post basically circled around & tried to interrogate why I sometimes need to engage in risky behavior online, especially when I'm feeling bruised or too close to things, why I need to confess this risky behavior, these feelings that may or may not be paranoid. I read somewhere, in Harper's, I think, that the newest paranoia is imagining a blog post is written about you. But what if it is, quite often? It's a strange thing, being a writer who writes online, it makes it difficult sometimes, to recalibrate yourself or attain the proper boundaries or critical distance, it all feels immense, too much. And I tend to go into a reactive mode when I feel like censoring extreme or excessive feelings online—I am interested in the performance of vulnerability, of even inappropriateness, of pushing against a self-shaming or silencing—but it can cause so much discombulation, constructing yourself online, as opposed to repairing offline, meditating, thinking through. In an essay on Heroines that came out today, the writer wonders about my project of confessionalism, and championing it: "Sometimes withholding is more powerful than disclosure." I think this is so interesting, and brilliant, and is definitely an idea I'm thinking about lately - how the confessional is commodified in our culture, especially the (white, privileged, hetero, cis) female first-person, also the therapeutic culture around the confessional, with its end of neat epiphanies and (perhaps?) conforming (like this blog post, which is super self-helpy, therapeutic.) 


In my deleted post I also thought about the rather utopian concept of community that I write to at the end of Heroines, and not knowing what I thought about it now, wondering whether this was false or in bad faith, wondering whether I could achieve any critical distance thinking about the book at all. I felt a sort of distancing from so many writers who I had met online, and was beginning to project my anxieties about the book's reception upon what I perceive as a breaking down of friendships. I even emailed two friends yesterday and tried to ask them whether they had liked the book - I was unsure whether these two specifically had, and I think it was a worry that I carried with me. I'm realizing again, as I write to in Heroines, that it can be difficult being friends with other writers, especially women, I don't know why, although these friendships & intimacy are so important and so valuable, to guard against or reclaim feelings of marginalization in the mainstream. And I wonder if that marginalization or dismissal is part of the reason these friendships can be so fraught - not wanting comparison, not wanting to stand too close to the flame. That I was the flame, this unstable, unwieldy chaos, like Viv Eliot with the knife at the dinner party, who spoke back to critics, who was upset in public ways, who reacted, who was reactive. That other writers did not want to consider themselves in community with me. I think friendships with other writers/artists can be fraught - we are all trying to carve out our visions, we are all trying to be read/heard, there is so much envy and insecurity and projection and I think general weirdness with someone who is getting attention, even if a lot of the attention is negative.

And there's something here too about feminism, how exclusionary feminism can be—I'm thinking of Audre Lorde speaking out against being the token black, queer writer at the feminist conference, writing against this so marvelously in her essay on the master's tools—how racist, classist, transphobic, and yes, sexist, feminism has been historically, still is, obviously (I have been trying to get my hands on Mimi Thi Nguyen's essay on racism and riot grrl in the punk issue of Women & Performance, I think her work is so vital and interesting, I'm so grateful that Sarah M. introduced me to her work). How exclusionary radical thinkers can be (I'm thinking Shulamith Firestone's racism in her book on revolution, The Dialectic of Sex.) But also how excluded and alienated Shulie was from radical feminism, I have been thinking about this lately, circling around this, not knowing what I think about it, not wanting to draw any conclusions. In reference to Lorde, there were really important interventions/essays, like from Subashini, calling attention to the other silencing that was in Heroines, a book about silencing - how I omitted any discussion of how modernism also silenced and othered and fetishized writers of color, also less of a focus on queerness and class. I think this is so important, something I'm thinking about now, wanting to improve upon for the future, I think in our feminist texts we have holes, flaws, mistakes, blind spots, it is important these are brought up, discussed, to not repeat history/the past/patriarchy.

But I think I feel ultimately unsure about Heroines, what it was, as a text, I have no distance from it, there was so much...ambivalence about it, it's hard not to feel I did something *bad* or shameful writing it, or that it's a bad book, a flawed book, a failed book, without value, I know that might seem silly, but the feeling is there more than anything. I like the idea of a feminist epistemology that is one of unknowing, one of failure, I think that's the spirit in which I wrote the book, but it was read by so many different sorts who demanded rigorous conclusions and strict research/impeccable theory...I don't have these. I only ever had questions. And it's hard not to feel - somehow prickly or burned - that so many of my harshest, most dismissive reviews, were from other women, were from those who identify as feminists, and what does *that* mean. How do we feed on each other, as opposed to blaming those in power. And how did I let my ego in the way of honestly taking criticism, such as the way I omitted race from the discussion, or didn't comment enough on privilege. But also how some of this criticism *felt* personal. It felt personal, but about someone who wasn't me. I don't know if this makes sense. But if I champion emotions in criticism - why shouldn't I embrace commentaries and responses that were passionate, heated, angry? The killjoys?

But I'm realizing, ultimately, I need to get over myself. The book is there, it's in the world, and it succeeded in some ways, I think by triggering so many intense responses, and it failed in others. I can't help but feeling this giant sense of failure about the book. That the book wasn't appreciated enough for what I was trying to do formally, stylistically...as I wrote in the blog post that I deleted, I only ever wanted the respect of my peers, and I used to think this was a healthy, manageable goal. But...it's tricky. I think I just am feeling wobbly about moving on, about writing this wild novel I've been working on forever, thinking of even writing more essays. I think I've become fearful of the reception of my work, which is the worst type of faith to be in as a writer. It is I think responsible for the block I've felt ever since Green Girl was first published, and went out in the world.

But I don't know if I'm going to be able to take an adequate measure of Heroines. And I can't think about the book based on what everyone else is saying about it. If I listened to that, it would be entirely crazy-making - it has really catalyzed quite superlative reactions, positive and negative. Lately though people have contacted me to say that reading the work has legitimized their own work of feminist retelling or alternative histories, even when they are reacting against me. This thoughtful essay that came out today said something similar. And I guess if I've contributed to a conversation. I guess if the book inspires others to continue their writing - then maybe that was the point of the book. Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's its legacy. I think, thinking back, that was always its intention. I don't need to be seen as a genius. I might never be. I don't need to be legitimated by those who have power. I just need to write, and fail, and realize others are writing, and failing. And that is the work. And the work is also within me, trying to understand what stops me.

I'll end with Cixous:

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women—female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.

Thomas Bernhard for the win

John hands me this passage of Bernhard's Frost, in the midst of a lazy conversation we were having about artists (writers) and the difficulty (sometimes) of maintaining friendships with artists (writers) w/ egos, jealousies, competitiveness, etc. It is too perfect. I need to quote some of it:

"You know," the painter said, "that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always founds that repelling: those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy...Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything...I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions...

(it goes on and on and on, as he does, amazingly)

WHAT THE FUCK IS A NOVEL/HOW DO I DESTROY IT

Since turning in the final version of Mutter on Sunday, I have gone back into Novel Mode. This work that is the work I have been thinking about, dreaming about,trying to write for now years and years. I think I was working on it when I first started this blog. My Monkey in the cage. The psychotic girl. I love her.

I am grateful to be back into a mode of writing a novel, even if it's a bad novel, or a novel that attempts to destroy something, or a messy novel, or a wrong novel, or a failed novel. Because I think it's a distance I need right now - away from the first-person-naked, from the autobiographical. It feels I've been in that mode for a couple of years now and I need a break from it. Feel like pulling away, but in a good way. I went back on social media - last week? Facebook and Twitter but think I'm going to go off again. Mostly because it's incredibly repetitive and boring.

I have not seen much art here but I went and looked at the Dieter Roth exhibit at the MOMA a week ago and was really inspired by his project SNOW, his primal primitive book that's not a book, a trash-collage.

It made me think of James Castle, and then also Jean Genet writing on the back of paper bags in the jail cell.

It made me want to write a book, that had language, but that was a book like this. One where the author hallucinates the girl. Can one write a book like this, with words?

happy mother's day

Finishing Book of Mutter, the mother text, the monster text, to turn in today. Appropriate yet somehow very intense.

on kittens

It has been a strange, exhausting couple of days, but one in which I felt quite alive and open. It's a scary feeling for me often—openness—sometimes it's one I shutter, because of a wariness that I am only beginning to understand.

It was a really fun and energizing Guillotine event at Melville House—I loved hearing Bojan Louis talk and read from his text on censorship and Arizona, and was really revitalized by his anger and activism. Sarah, Bojan and I spoke about anger in our respective writing after our readings, about Jamaica Kincaid's awesome interview in The American Reader where she notes:

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.  But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do. But if they’re white, they won’t say it. I used to just pretend I didn’t notice it, and now I just think I don’t care.

There are all sorts of reasons not to like my writing. But that’s not one of them. Saying something is angry is not a criticism. It’s not valid. It’s not a valid observation in terms of criticism. You can list it as something that’s true. But it’s not critical.

You may not like it because it makes you uneasy—and you can say that. But to damn it because it’s angry…. They always say that about black people: “those angry black people.” And why? You’re afraid that there might be some truth to their anger. It might be justified.

We talked about "rants" - a word I think I am reclaiming in the Guillotine text - I love actually the performativity of the rant, like Close to the Knives, the need for rage to find a form...the monologic like Thomas Bernhard or the Croatian writer Vedrana Rudan's Night—it is some of my favorite writing. But I think "rant" can be a term used to dismiss writing, seen as unformed, or as pathological, obscuring reason or truth...A text I keep on returning to again and again is Anne Carson's "Gender of Sound," I think because she is isolating something from ancient Greece, from the dawn of Western patriarchy, that exists still in our rhetoric and language, the privileging of sophrosyne, the masculine (colonialist, white) mode of self-control, versus the idea of the feminine (subaltern, in various forms) mode of outsized, outside emotions. And I think Jamaica Kincaid is speaking to this sort of disciplining - to label a woman, a black woman, or a man of color, or a queer person, "angry," (or a killjoy) is an attempt to silence them, to negate their justified anger, to negate as well their logic, or the way they've made an argument through more emotive energy.

And then Sarah asked us about the term "revolutionary nonfiction." And I said I thought it had something to do with trauma or rupture, admitting that there is trauma (national trauma, cultural trauma, individual trauma), circling around it perhaps, but not packaging it up at the end, not insisting on total healing, because is total healing ever possible? I think (and I've been thinking about this a lot) that the market forms of the memoir, or memoiristic writing, often beautifully written pieces, are structured towards making the reader feel okay about everything at the end. I'm okay, you're okay, we're okay. Or this is fucked up, but we (the liberal reader) are the good people. Something like that.

I think this is something I agitate against in my writing, and I think that's often why my writing is called "angry" because I don't attempt healing. Except I think of Ntozake Shange, a huge influence on me when I was in college, calling for a healing moment at the end of a work. I think in Heroines I attempt some sort of healing and call for community. My end of O Fallen Angel is extremely nihilistic, as the ending of Green Girl could also be interpreted as, to a lesser extent. I am finishing Mutter now, have to turn it in at the end of this weekend, and I end again on somewhat of a healing note, but trying to go against the sentimental, still wanting to end with a note of ambivalence. Ambivalence is not what the mainstream reader wants. Ambivalence is sometimes not what I want, in my life, in my reading. We often want a happy ending. Despite this, I think radical works frustrate these expectations.

As I was leaving the Melville House space in DUMBO John and I see a little creature scurrying past us. We follow it, as it looks like a kitten. A little terrified street urchin. We took the baby home, bathed it, cleaned it up,  took him to the vet yesterday, put some pictures of the kitten online, and as of this morning Melville (as we were calling him) has been adopted by a couple in Ditmas Park who lost their 19-year-old cat two years ago. Yesterday was delightful, if exhausting, playing with a one-pound ball of fluff while wrangling my 20-lb puppy, who wanted to play with the kitten like a puppy plays. The kitten decided to reside almost entirely on my chest and under my chin, while purring rapturously.

Anyway. I felt so -happy and open - about rescuing the kitten, taking him home, getting him adopted. I wanted that happy ending. I wanted the sentimentality. I wanted to play with a kitten as opposed to wrestling with my manuscript that is basically an atrocity catalogue, a collage-opera of memories. Dont' most of us prefer looking at kittens on the Internet, at least sometimes?

melville the muffin

disrupting genre

Course description for Fall Graduate Craft Class I'm teaching in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence in the fall (I might teach Tao Lin's newest instead, but haven't read it yet. And when I say "more political," I'm asking that as a question, I think.)

Fiction Craft Class: Disrupting Genre

In this Graduate Craft Class we will explore emerging literary forms that disrupt our concepts of what fiction should be, through works that cross between and infuriate genre, still daring to call themselves novels, while incorporating memoir, criticism, biography, scholarship, theory, and poetics. We will be reading many examples of the nonfiction novel, the contemporary examples inspired by reality TV and the Internet as well as their more (perhaps) political predecessors including New Narrative and associated works, with their stewing in gossip, anecdote, literature and theory. We will also be reading one work of genre-bending criticism. While reading and talking about how to discuss these works, we will examine ways in which these texts experiment not only with genre but also with narrative, structure, characterization, and plot. I will assign short instigating exercises each week, where we will play with anecdote and aphorism and write real lives as fiction and vice versa, culminating in a disruptive revision. Is the novel as we know it dead? Let’s celebrate, gleefully, in its wake.

Speedboat by Renata Adler
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum
To After That (Toaf) by Renee Gladman
A Century of Clouds by Bruce Boone
My Paris by Gail Scott
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
I am Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning
How Should a Person Be? By Sheila Heti
Shoplifting at American Apparel by Tao Lin
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

duras and doubt

There's a graduate creative nonfiction workshop apparently reading Heroines in Atlanta, Georgia, that I am going to be Skyping with in a couple of weeks (a week? god I need to keep a calendar) and the instructor, a writer named Jamie who I met while doing the Southern tour with Ms. Gina A., told me they're also reading my blog. I hear this, that teachers have assigned my blog to read, and I feel worried about the whole thing. Especially lately, my blog has been so...negative, and cataloging a depression specific to moving to a chaotic city as well as reopening a manuscript that circles around a giant wound.

I have been reading and using in little cut-up pieces Anne Carson's essay on the gendering of sound for Mutter, and think of it as well as the ethos behind this blog - the idea of wearing emotions on the outside, not the inside (and the language and ideology of self-control, or sophrosyne in Greek, part of patriarchal rhetoric.) Carson who describes Echo as the girl with no door to her mouth. I think I'm interested in the aesthetic of this, never more so than in Mutter.

I will be teaching creative writing now, again, at Sarah Lawrence, maybe somewhere else, a graduate craft class in the fall and an undergraduate workshop in the spring, so I am thinking, more than ever, about what I have to offer, in the way of advice, regarding the practice of writing. I have also been reading a little collection of lectures/essays on writing by Marguerite Duras that were written and filmed into documentaries at the end of her life.

According to Duras, one learns to write by learning and channeling solitude. There is the physical solitude, the retreat, and then this other (more spiritual?) solitude. And she writes that the experience of doubt is essential to this solitude, essential to being a writer. But that also one must be physically strong when writing, one must somehow keep this strength...

She also writes to deal with solitude always travel with a bottle of whisky. And never show your books to your lovers.