oversharing as a radical act

reading: (in most cases, re-reading)
Making Scenes by Adrienne Eisen (just purchased on Emily Books, which is becoming a great catalogue of my favorite radical female literary tastes)
The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy
Great Expectations by Kathy Acker
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
Don Quixote by Kathy Acker
Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy(to read in Paris!)
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Because They Wanted To: Stories by Mary Gaitskill
Glaciers by Alexis Smith (two good readers have recommended this to me)
A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning by Catherine Mavrikakis (BEST EVER)
Anything I can get my hands on about Sophie Calle (I REALLY want the book about her email break-up, but it's like $70)
Animal Shelter Vol 1 and Vol 2 edited by Hedi el Kholti (Semiotext(e))
a PDF galley of Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of a Young Girl (translated by Ariana Reines, published by Semiotext(e))

(just)read:
Marie Calloway's two recent pieces, "Insufferable" and "Cybersex" (that I thought were really fascinating, and have been thinking about how the Internet has always been a part of her work)
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy (purchased on Emily Books)
 Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
Humiliation by Wayne Kosetenbaum
Volatile Bodies by Elizabeth Grosz
The Freudian Body by Leo Bersani
"Is the Rectum a Grave?" by Leo Bersani

Regardless of what they asked for, or what we talked about, this is the stuff I'm ruminating on for my essay on Girls, which is turning more into an essay on girls, and really about an essay about boundaries and the girly and radical, risky oversharing. And this idea of the taboo and danger of fluidity, which is the feminine. And maybe also the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. This is what I'm feeling today. If they turn it down and say - too weird, too messy - I will be fine, because at least the deadline has enabled me to really begin. I have three essays to write this summer. I leave in a week for three weeks abroad, where I will still be blogging. And then three weeks home alone, crawling at the ceilings.

Sometimes I fear my only worth as a writer is telling people what else they should be reading. Like I am always a bookseller. That said, you should read read Catherine Mavrikakis' A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning - I cannot believe I have never written about it before. Well, it was in the first draft of Heroines when it wasn't really Heroines and just me trying to transfer a blog to a book.  I would recommend anything on this list, actually. Also: Two Girls Fat and Thin.

saturday

John is working today, one of the weekends he has to be at the library, so I am giving myself permission to be slow and indulgent and working without really working. I walked to the farmer's market myself and because I was so early this time - around 8:30 - there were loads of flowers left. I have developed such a keen for farmer's market flowers - most likely because even though I love gardens I would hate doing anything so slow and repetitive - but I get very anxious about the process of picking out flowers. I always second-guess my choices afterwards, how obvious of a color palette I went with, why I always do bunches of single flowers, or go with an already prepared bouquet as opposed to making one myself. Today I bought two bunches of bright-pink-orange godetia, that are colloquially known, the person at the stand told me, as satin flowers, but I thought looked a lot like the bougainvilla that grows near my sister's cottage in Los Angeles. Then I picked out ten zinnias of different colors - which are now sitting in a mason jar on my desk. Sometimes I buy flowers for my office in the hope that it will allow me to relax and actually inhabit my office.

I also bought various vegetables to make a farmstand stew today, with basil-walnut-pesto. And black raspberries, that are sweet as jam, that I am eating slowly out of one hand, gently and almost fetishistically, while wearing a blue cotton kimono, which I can wear today, as it's unusually cool, only late 70s, although still humid, as always.I will post a picture here, even though one of the things I love and hate equally is some sort of meme on Facebook where everyone posts gorgeous new vegetables freshly picked from their garden, cradled against their hand, moist and raw with dirt and work. I love these pictures for their quotidian beauty and also find them sort of precious and smug. Probably because I am not a very hard worker. Someone who gardens and writes and, say, parents and jobs, is a much harder worker than I am, who is sometimes more dreamy Lol Stein than Duras the writer. Did Duras garden? I think of Duras just like sitting outside in a garden doing some hard drinking and bitching and writing and reading.I don't know. I've always been a bit ambivalent with the earth mother archetype, even though certainly with my veganism and natural deodorant and, other things I'm sure, could be accused of as embodying it, maybe because all these fairly impotent intellectuals I dated always went from me to earth mothers.

I am not writing. I am answering emails. I am reading - yesterday I finished Two Girls Fat and Thin - which is still staying with me - how she goes inside of their bodies, their interiorities, and writes this dirty girl Valhalla of childhood - and I also read Sheila Heti's nonfiction novel How Should a Person Be? which I enjoyed very much, and liked how it crossed boundaries, but also like the Gaitskill was about a messy, complex female friendship, and the self-awareness in documenting that friendship reminded me of Chris and Sylvere's letters and faxes in I Love Dick. Today I hope to reread Dodie Bellamy's Letters of Mina Harker, which actually will probably resound as well, the merging of fiction and nonfiction, the idea of a work about community, about friendship.

This is a terrible blog post.


I love how raspberries and blackberries, which I originally thought these were, are like mini-universes.