in related news, i am reading with danielle for her chicago debut of S P R A W L at women & children first in andersonville on friday september 24 at 7:30pm. here's the link to the reading on the women&children website. it actually will be somewhat of a themed reading in a way, how our books work off each other, danielle's is this brilliant hallucinogenic essay-novel about a woman drifting in suburbia, my o fallen angel....deals with the suburbs and feminine identity in much more of a brutal crayon-drawing sort of way.
i was thinking of making like a flier for it...or get up the energy to make a facebook invite...but i am exhausted and today i slept for 10 hours trying trying to catch up on missed sleep the past two weeks and have only time to do one thing, which is to read through chapter 1 of the essay collection draft and start thinking about how the hell to completely, completely, rewrite it, and not make it seem so illiterate, basically. so that is what i will do. john's buying bagels. tonight i am going to see an actual dance performance in akron, at this place called the ice house, which was a former ice house and is really cold, we went last year when this troupe came into town and they were fantastic, we are going this year with the curator of the akron art museum, as well as her artist-partner who teaches at the university, it is very appropriate and bourgeois of us, and all i can think of how the temperature has dropped now 30 degrees and what can i wear to look casual yet...yet...urban, last year i wore my vivienne westwood dress the black cotton one with the weird collar of ruffles because i was so excited to do a city-cultural thing here, and everyone was wearing blue jeans. i haven't met the people we're going with in person so i hope i can be social and strike the appropriate seasoned tone and not just bowled over by fatigue. anyone have advice for ways to not be terribly tired that is not caffeine-focused? or drug-focused? that takes no time whatsoever. i've tried: switching out coffee for oolong tea, absent-minded masturbation...that's it, basically.
i am also reading in los angeles october 2, with jen karmin and cara benson for mommy, mommy! if you are in la would love to see you. i will also be in la that weekend to meet with chris and go over the draft, to plan out rewrite, and i promised chapter 1 beheaded and new head sprouted anew and delivered to her on a tray - this is an elaborate and completely unnecessary use of biblical imagery - and now i am scared, scared that i am teaching too much to accomplish even just that.
last night tried to reread renata adler's speedboat a book that i love and will try to write more articulately about later, i am trying to write a letter to her to ask if i can reprint the book for nightboat, it is a book that i think about along with elizabeth hardwick's sleepless nights, both these essayistic gorgeously lucid series of miniatures/travelogues by women who are better known as journalists and reviewers, so the works function as these meditations on what it means to be a woman writing, these elliptical reveries from an entire life lived, an entire career. i refuse adamantly to call it didion-esque because i think adler in speedboat and elizabeth hardwick in sleepless nights distill an entire life into one book, i would say it transcends even didion, who i love.
circumspect. i am supposed to be more circumspect. to let back in the journalist. like hardwick, like adler, like didion. but i feel like an id, like a Monkey, frothing, running herself into circles, spinning her wheels.
this is from speedboat:
That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
Yes, Yes. Truism. That.
