My essay Slapping Clark Gable which was published in Make magazine is now online. It deals with my childhood obsession with Vivien Leigh and my particular sexuality vitalis originating with Gone with the Wind, both the book and the film. And about Rousseau being whipped and lubricating on library books. It's a fun read, I think. I don't know. I'm appropriating some of it for my chapter on abjection in the essay collection.
Also, Bett Williams has a post up on her blog about O Fallen Angel, and I really love how personal the review is, that's what reviews should be, one's encounters with not only the book but one's world one's interior landscape dream landscape all of it. I love how she characterizes Maggie as a Midwestern gothic chick, which of course she is. But also she really made me think about the blog, this blog. Bett writes:
Her Blog voice is so wild, vulnerable and revealing that I imagine most people experience an exaggerated sense of intimacy in regards to Kate.
This is really interesting! I love it of course. But this ties into a discussion John and I were having driving into Chicago today, the arid as always 6 hour drive from Ohio. I was worrying wondering whether I should be more independent, whether I should travel more by myself, although I hate traveling, next weekend New York for the Belladonna/Dusie reading and John is coming with, and I wonder whether I should be someone who travels alone more often, and then the reading in Los Angeles in October, I want him to come with as well. And John wondered whether perhaps I like him to come with as a sort of shield, a fear of intimacy, in person, a desire to have a sort of buffer. I think that's true. A way to calm social anxiety. But here in this space I feel a wonderful, safe intimacy. And that's what I tried to write to in the essay collection, I don't know if that came across, both of which Bett writes to in this review. Arguing for an emotional response, a personal and intimate response to literature, and then celebrating a sense of community, of intimacy, among fellow readers.
