erasure

If you blinked and missed it, I wrote an epic epic long thing today that I started tapping at around 8:30am and ended at 10am and then all afternoon and even when John came home from lunch I was tapping at, responding to, and then I took it all down. Sometimes it's too much, to keep up this public composure and correspondence. The post began initially with me attempting to sort out my feelings and thoughts regarding a review of O Fallen Angel that came out today that even though it engaged with what I was doing with cliche, basically seemed to me to state that the text was without humor, social critique, wordplay, and worst sin of all, was boring. I think what I wrote was cogent. I actually feel this was "logical" me writing, mostly, trying to wrestle with my feelings towards publicness, how Virginia Woolf would take to bed awaiting her reviews, the dangers of both a too-glowing review and one that's incendiary, too much fire on either side, too self-immolating, like Emily Dickinson wrote of fame, also that it's: a fickle food, a bee, etc., not that I'm famous, but this sense of being sort of critiqued publicly, which led into more musings about the workshop experience, why more than anything reading the review I was glad as a sort of self-protective mechanism (of myself, my texts) that I was basically self-taught, except for what I read, etc. And then for a while I held court, and engaged, mostly with people who I admire and respect who disagreed with me, whether the review was negative, I did make the assertion that it seemed the reviewer was hungering for psychological complexity a la Franzen, some disagreed with me, there was a lengthy back-and-forth about insiderness versus outsiderness. And it became way too overwhelming for me, and I felt way too exposed, and I felt then that it seemed like I was complaining because of the negative review, and I took it down. What was essentially like 5-6 pages of text.

So interesting the Internet and erasure. How you can erase it, how it can erase you.

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Also, I will point you elsewhere. In my now-non-text about what I think a review should perform, I lamented the lack of context in the review that I don't wish to talk about, that the book wasn't placed within any sort of tradition (of experimental writing, or other writers who wrote cliches, like Flaubert-VDubs-Jelinek, or I don't know.) And also wrote a bit about the inauthenticity of a review that only  lavishes praise,  as well as one that seems to find a book without merit, these twin poles, neither balanced. Please go read Ariana Reines' comment on Emily Gould's review of Eileen Myles' Inferno published by The Poetry Foundation (read the post and scroll down.) In it Ariana takes issue with this review, however glowing, for not being written with more care and research, and laments that Emily Gould mostly focuses on Myles' public persona (and lingers, not surprisingly, on the comment war involving Eileen Myles that happened on Jezebel.com after one of Ariana's readings, this is not surprising because I'm imagining that's the main reason Poetry Foundation assigned this article, its sexiness, since Emily Gould is a former editor of the Gawker empire and wrote that memoir about being young and hurtful and tattooed, which then Bookforum also assigned the former Wonkette to review, all of these sexy celebrity pairings for book reviews are so tabloid/reality TV I think.)