After a week of feeling like I was stuck in an airless, small room, mourning John's absence immensely and not being able to leave the house because of the intense temperatures, I find myself relaxing this Sunday. Yesterday I was uneasy and yellow-eyed, as violent as the night storms that made me worried a tree was going to fall on the house Friday night, making it impossible for me to sleep until almost dawn.
I have been worried - too worried maybe - about my fate, my future, what I hope to accomplish as a writer. Feeling intensely isolated here, now in an almost artificial sense, as John is gone for the month, with no one to talk to except online or during our hourly night conversation over Facetime. Yesterday - don't laugh - I began to worry that I needed to be someone who KNEW Marx, well, or KNEW all of psychoanalysis quite well, or at least could completely understand Deleuze & Guattari. For a while I had excused my unscholarliness by thinking of Chris Kraus - and how she notes in I Love Dick that people always thought she was dumb, at the time, because she didn't use critical or theoretical language. But the truth is, there's probably very few American critics or scholars as well-read as Chris Kraus, in theory and literature. So I began to think I've given myself a gigantic out, watching shows on ABC Family and reading romance novels, when I should have been reading Capital. I really started freaking out about this. Worse too that I had convinced myself for my essay I told n+1 I'd try to write, that I needed to completely understand affect theory, which means I started re-reading Lauren Berlant's dazzling new work in her national sentimentality cycle, Cruel Optimism. To read even interviewswith Berlant - as I did all day yesterday - is to witness an intellectual who can powerfully be in dialogue with all of the great past and present intellectuals, and in her work, as she has said, she is in fact revising Foucault, looking at emotions, as opposed to sexuality, as what is seen as inherent to the modern subject.
Anyway. I don't really still understand affect theory, and am not sure I should use it in any essay that I write. And it's strange, to feel such a powerful shadow - I guess a Bloomian anxiety of influence - with Kraus and Berlant, as they are two of probably the most influential intellectuals on the emotions and the self working today, and both of whom have in a way mentored me, but in tough-love ways, the first as an editor and the second as the adviser for my long-ago master's thesis on schadenfreude in talk-show TV, both of whom I have had brief meetings with in person, both experiences initially devastating but ultimately transformative, trying to push me to be a more interesting and more thorough and more circumspect essayist. In fact, this sounds weird - but they're probably the only two writers who have ever mentored me at all, even if briefly - like literally looked at my writing and told me what I should change, or how my thinking should be more original, etc.
But what I think is interesting about affect theory is the notion of intensity. And when I think about the literature and film I am drawn to, it is more on the scale of intensity rather than craft or even beauty. And I don't mean *feeling* in the sense of works of the human heart, as the novelist Steve Tomasula once phrased it to me in an email, that elicit a comfortable recognition, like the contemporary really inspired by the stories of Lorrie Moore or things often published in The New Yorker, which I often think of when I think of this conversation about New Sincerity. I'm not sure I'm interested in the idea of the "truth" of a subject, the "heart" of it all, or even questions of "reality" or authenticity. In prose, in the messy-essays I'm drawn to and in the baggy-monstered novels, I'm drawn to works that are defined by their intensity. I'm drawn by works that trigger a discomfort, or joy, or even boredom, if it's intense. In works that are faked, theatrical, cruel. So I'm less interested in The New Sincerity but more The New Psychotic, or The New Fraudulent, or The New Histrionic.
Two works really make me think of this - because of an article in the Sunday times this morning, am thinking again of one of my favorite all-time films - the Czech New Wave Daisies by Vera Chytilova - which if I wanted to say everything that I look for and intensely love about literature, it would be exhibited in this film.
Two girl-libertines, one Seberg blonde with a First Communion flower wreath on her head, the other an Anna Karina brunette with pigtails, both named Marie (the good girl turned bad—“We’ve gone bad, haven’t we!”). The girl as the bomb, they make sport in terrorizing dirty old men by playing wide eyed lolitas they play a game throughout the film a Svengali buys dinner for the brunette, sexier Marie, the blonde Marie shows up, they devour the feast (they are always eating devouring they are bulimic), and then they send off the old cooter on the train, while the brunette Marie slips out. They do this because they are bored. They do this to fuck with the idea of being the “girl” who whores herself out for dinner.
They consider themselves in the process of posing, they fix themselves up constantly, they know how to pout and preen like green girls do, pouty mouth nymphets, but they fuck with everything, drawing on eyeliner grossly like raccoons over their doe-doll eyes. They play their part archly, coyly—they bounce around and speak in simpering tittering little-girl voices as they wreak havoc, lolita hoodlums (and wasn’t Nabokov’s lolita a bit of a hoodlum too? that scene that screams to me of Humbert Humbert, the blonde Marie is fucking with another man (let’s call him John…he is in a way their john, their trick) and she is naked positioning herself delightfully with his framed butterfly specimens. That fantastic scene where they go to the club watching the couple do the Charleston, the woman pantomining like Clara Bow, they make themselves the real spectacle, they drink Pilsner coquettishly blowing bubbles bouncing up and down on their seats, they are kicked out, they mimic the flapper’s jerky rhythms as they make their loopy exit. They are green girls who are aware of the camera total SPAZZES they get off on their delicious violence. I think of myself at that age, we were always partner in crimes, two for one, a package deal, we were bored too, the blue wig that I would wear, how we would pose for photos at the photobooth, we knew how to pose. They are polymorphously perverse amoral libertines. Blonde Marie answers the phone: “Rehabilitation Center:? And then: “Die! Die! Die!” They are Alices tumbling down a hill they dance with chairs they delight in their own vivid tableaux they are living sculptures. They set their room on fire with sparklers, they eat feasts of grotesque overconsumption, all of Chytiolva’s witty visual jokes, they eat pickles sausages bananas with scissors in their room, the castrators, “another piece of meat,” they say. They devour with knives pieces of voluptuous watermelon while showing the camera their tender flesh. They are aware of themselves as objects, they cut themselves up as collages, quite literally, in one surreal scene. But they refuse to be passive dolls, they are possessed dolls, they are bad girls. Whores of attention. They are Kate Durbin’s possessed teenage girls par excellence, girls whose life is their art, frauds, pubescent practitioners of body and shock art.
And thinking too how the girls who played Marie were originally,non-actresses, I think coat-check girls or maybe one of them was a waitress...
That last fantastic scene of anarchy. They follow the sign that says “nourishment.” They find a banquet with an elaborately laid out feast. Which they proceed to, gleefully, destroy, like little children or feral animals, they refuse to have manners, to be polite, to be good girls or citizens, the cake fight the runway walk/strip tease stomping on plates with their high heels. At the end, swinging from a chandelier which descends cut with a scene from an atomic bomb explosion. A brief fantasy at the end: they are robotic good girls, now wearing uniforms made from newspapers, they fix up the room, they put back together the plates, they are rehabilitated, “we’ll be hard-working and enjoy everything we’ll be clean,” like the Communist youth party. But we know this is a lie, at least for now. In this brief space of youth, they are ambivalent, piggy, slutty,girl- libertines who feed on feasts of food and upon their own violence.
But what I love about the ending of the film is you have no idea whether the bomb at the end is a call to absolute anarchy or perhaps an apologia for bad behavior (is it sincere? of course it's not sincere. but is it? is it lying? who wants to be sincere? sincerity sounds like being good, cute, behaved, everything a girl should be and these girls aren't.) This is too what I look for in literature - amateur, INTENSE, sometimes revolting, fucked, destructive, psychotic. Our ladies of the flowers.
Sincere seems to have something to do with being real, or authentic, or having truth to it. Lately I've been more interested in literature that is hybrid, framed - that crosses a boundary between fiction and nonfiction - like reality TV, at once full of intense emotions but also totally melodramatic (Zipper Mouth, Zazen, Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?, "Adrienne Eisen's" Making Scenes, Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, Colette's The Pure and the Impure).
I should add - Kathy Acker's slippery self-portraits, her fucking with and prisming of the Kunstleroman, all of Dennis Cooper, especially the fraudulence of the "truth" of the murder-narrative taking place in online chat rooms in The Sluts and the psychosis of George Miles, Dodie Bellamy's Letters of Mina Harker.
Sincere seems to have something to do with being real, or authentic, or having truth to it. Lately I've been more interested in literature that is hybrid, framed - that crosses a boundary between fiction and nonfiction - like reality TV, at once full of intense emotions but also totally melodramatic (Zipper Mouth, Zazen, Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?, "Adrienne Eisen's" Making Scenes, Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, Colette's The Pure and the Impure).
I should add - Kathy Acker's slippery self-portraits, her fucking with and prisming of the Kunstleroman, all of Dennis Cooper, especially the fraudulence of the "truth" of the murder-narrative taking place in online chat rooms in The Sluts and the psychosis of George Miles, Dodie Bellamy's Letters of Mina Harker.
I'm reading Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado now, lying on the couch on a dog-hair-covered pillow cradling a snoring Genet - such a saucy, sexy, hilarious, totally amazing novel - an American flaneuse with pink hair in 1960s Paris Left Bank has hilarious existential conniptions - like a manic Jean Rhys, and I'm seeing some comparisons in a way to Daisies, its wildness, its promiscuity, both with the main character as well as something with the rhythm and flow and bulimia of it. Even though it's a more traditional workl - with a wild girl-first-person however, like a precursor to Zazen or Zipper Mouth - I love how excessive and theatrical the narrator is. She is not sincere, she lies often, she takes on personas with her pink hair, she is overly dramatic, wearing a costume of identity that changes. This is what I want literature to be like. I want literature to be like the girl. In all of her excessive, intense ambivalence.
