WHAT THE FUCK IS A NOVEL/HOW DO I DESTROY IT

Since turning in the final version of Mutter on Sunday, I have gone back into Novel Mode. This work that is the work I have been thinking about, dreaming about,trying to write for now years and years. I think I was working on it when I first started this blog. My Monkey in the cage. The psychotic girl. I love her.

I am grateful to be back into a mode of writing a novel, even if it's a bad novel, or a novel that attempts to destroy something, or a messy novel, or a wrong novel, or a failed novel. Because I think it's a distance I need right now - away from the first-person-naked, from the autobiographical. It feels I've been in that mode for a couple of years now and I need a break from it. Feel like pulling away, but in a good way. I went back on social media - last week? Facebook and Twitter but think I'm going to go off again. Mostly because it's incredibly repetitive and boring.

I have not seen much art here but I went and looked at the Dieter Roth exhibit at the MOMA a week ago and was really inspired by his project SNOW, his primal primitive book that's not a book, a trash-collage.

It made me think of James Castle, and then also Jean Genet writing on the back of paper bags in the jail cell.

It made me want to write a book, that had language, but that was a book like this. One where the author hallucinates the girl. Can one write a book like this, with words?

happy mother's day

Finishing Book of Mutter, the mother text, the monster text, to turn in today. Appropriate yet somehow very intense.

on kittens

It has been a strange, exhausting couple of days, but one in which I felt quite alive and open. It's a scary feeling for me often—openness—sometimes it's one I shutter, because of a wariness that I am only beginning to understand.

It was a really fun and energizing Guillotine event at Melville House—I loved hearing Bojan Louis talk and read from his text on censorship and Arizona, and was really revitalized by his anger and activism. Sarah, Bojan and I spoke about anger in our respective writing after our readings, about Jamaica Kincaid's awesome interview in The American Reader where she notes:

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.  But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do. But if they’re white, they won’t say it. I used to just pretend I didn’t notice it, and now I just think I don’t care.

There are all sorts of reasons not to like my writing. But that’s not one of them. Saying something is angry is not a criticism. It’s not valid. It’s not a valid observation in terms of criticism. You can list it as something that’s true. But it’s not critical.

You may not like it because it makes you uneasy—and you can say that. But to damn it because it’s angry…. They always say that about black people: “those angry black people.” And why? You’re afraid that there might be some truth to their anger. It might be justified.

We talked about "rants" - a word I think I am reclaiming in the Guillotine text - I love actually the performativity of the rant, like Close to the Knives, the need for rage to find a form...the monologic like Thomas Bernhard or the Croatian writer Vedrana Rudan's Night—it is some of my favorite writing. But I think "rant" can be a term used to dismiss writing, seen as unformed, or as pathological, obscuring reason or truth...A text I keep on returning to again and again is Anne Carson's "Gender of Sound," I think because she is isolating something from ancient Greece, from the dawn of Western patriarchy, that exists still in our rhetoric and language, the privileging of sophrosyne, the masculine (colonialist, white) mode of self-control, versus the idea of the feminine (subaltern, in various forms) mode of outsized, outside emotions. And I think Jamaica Kincaid is speaking to this sort of disciplining - to label a woman, a black woman, or a man of color, or a queer person, "angry," (or a killjoy) is an attempt to silence them, to negate their justified anger, to negate as well their logic, or the way they've made an argument through more emotive energy.

And then Sarah asked us about the term "revolutionary nonfiction." And I said I thought it had something to do with trauma or rupture, admitting that there is trauma (national trauma, cultural trauma, individual trauma), circling around it perhaps, but not packaging it up at the end, not insisting on total healing, because is total healing ever possible? I think (and I've been thinking about this a lot) that the market forms of the memoir, or memoiristic writing, often beautifully written pieces, are structured towards making the reader feel okay about everything at the end. I'm okay, you're okay, we're okay. Or this is fucked up, but we (the liberal reader) are the good people. Something like that.

I think this is something I agitate against in my writing, and I think that's often why my writing is called "angry" because I don't attempt healing. Except I think of Ntozake Shange, a huge influence on me when I was in college, calling for a healing moment at the end of a work. I think in Heroines I attempt some sort of healing and call for community. My end of O Fallen Angel is extremely nihilistic, as the ending of Green Girl could also be interpreted as, to a lesser extent. I am finishing Mutter now, have to turn it in at the end of this weekend, and I end again on somewhat of a healing note, but trying to go against the sentimental, still wanting to end with a note of ambivalence. Ambivalence is not what the mainstream reader wants. Ambivalence is sometimes not what I want, in my life, in my reading. We often want a happy ending. Despite this, I think radical works frustrate these expectations.

As I was leaving the Melville House space in DUMBO John and I see a little creature scurrying past us. We follow it, as it looks like a kitten. A little terrified street urchin. We took the baby home, bathed it, cleaned it up,  took him to the vet yesterday, put some pictures of the kitten online, and as of this morning Melville (as we were calling him) has been adopted by a couple in Ditmas Park who lost their 19-year-old cat two years ago. Yesterday was delightful, if exhausting, playing with a one-pound ball of fluff while wrangling my 20-lb puppy, who wanted to play with the kitten like a puppy plays. The kitten decided to reside almost entirely on my chest and under my chin, while purring rapturously.

Anyway. I felt so -happy and open - about rescuing the kitten, taking him home, getting him adopted. I wanted that happy ending. I wanted the sentimentality. I wanted to play with a kitten as opposed to wrestling with my manuscript that is basically an atrocity catalogue, a collage-opera of memories. Dont' most of us prefer looking at kittens on the Internet, at least sometimes?

melville the muffin

disrupting genre

Course description for Fall Graduate Craft Class I'm teaching in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence in the fall (I might teach Tao Lin's newest instead, but haven't read it yet. And when I say "more political," I'm asking that as a question, I think.)

Fiction Craft Class: Disrupting Genre

In this Graduate Craft Class we will explore emerging literary forms that disrupt our concepts of what fiction should be, through works that cross between and infuriate genre, still daring to call themselves novels, while incorporating memoir, criticism, biography, scholarship, theory, and poetics. We will be reading many examples of the nonfiction novel, the contemporary examples inspired by reality TV and the Internet as well as their more (perhaps) political predecessors including New Narrative and associated works, with their stewing in gossip, anecdote, literature and theory. We will also be reading one work of genre-bending criticism. While reading and talking about how to discuss these works, we will examine ways in which these texts experiment not only with genre but also with narrative, structure, characterization, and plot. I will assign short instigating exercises each week, where we will play with anecdote and aphorism and write real lives as fiction and vice versa, culminating in a disruptive revision. Is the novel as we know it dead? Let’s celebrate, gleefully, in its wake.

Speedboat by Renata Adler
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum
To After That (Toaf) by Renee Gladman
A Century of Clouds by Bruce Boone
My Paris by Gail Scott
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
I am Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning
How Should a Person Be? By Sheila Heti
Shoplifting at American Apparel by Tao Lin
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

duras and doubt

There's a graduate creative nonfiction workshop apparently reading Heroines in Atlanta, Georgia, that I am going to be Skyping with in a couple of weeks (a week? god I need to keep a calendar) and the instructor, a writer named Jamie who I met while doing the Southern tour with Ms. Gina A., told me they're also reading my blog. I hear this, that teachers have assigned my blog to read, and I feel worried about the whole thing. Especially lately, my blog has been so...negative, and cataloging a depression specific to moving to a chaotic city as well as reopening a manuscript that circles around a giant wound.

I have been reading and using in little cut-up pieces Anne Carson's essay on the gendering of sound for Mutter, and think of it as well as the ethos behind this blog - the idea of wearing emotions on the outside, not the inside (and the language and ideology of self-control, or sophrosyne in Greek, part of patriarchal rhetoric.) Carson who describes Echo as the girl with no door to her mouth. I think I'm interested in the aesthetic of this, never more so than in Mutter.

I will be teaching creative writing now, again, at Sarah Lawrence, maybe somewhere else, a graduate craft class in the fall and an undergraduate workshop in the spring, so I am thinking, more than ever, about what I have to offer, in the way of advice, regarding the practice of writing. I have also been reading a little collection of lectures/essays on writing by Marguerite Duras that were written and filmed into documentaries at the end of her life.

According to Duras, one learns to write by learning and channeling solitude. There is the physical solitude, the retreat, and then this other (more spiritual?) solitude. And she writes that the experience of doubt is essential to this solitude, essential to being a writer. But that also one must be physically strong when writing, one must somehow keep this strength...

She also writes to deal with solitude always travel with a bottle of whisky. And never show your books to your lovers. 

a bit like being in the matrix

There's that wonderful line in Renata Adler's Speedboat, where she quips that the writers she knows don't really write (I am too lazy to look it up, it's underlined I know in my copy)—but basically that writers talk about writing, writers procrastinate, go to parties, but don't actually write. I think this is largely very true.

But there are those times when you are so sucked into it. I haven't felt like this since that period of rewriting Heroines. I have begged for one more extension for Mutter, I have now less than two weeks to turn it in, and I am writing, reworking, reforming, adding more space and silence, focusing on rhythm. It's a very difficult book to reside in, and in the work I reflect on the difficulty of being in the space of the text, which for this text is the space of memory, or not wanting to remember. Today I went through the rather hysterical section (after Barthes: history is hysterical) where I relive something pretty traumatic, and then think about the idea of atrocity museums, of icons of horror, why we have this ritualistic need to go through the stations.

It was pretty agonizing, but then also something so exquisite about being so stuck in it, and something mad as well, and wonderful, to exist within the chantlike rhythms and incantations of this section. John's been very gentle with me, because of how difficult this text is–he has been reading it as well at night, making his crystalline notes, helping me listen to it (he calls it a collage-opera, I like that, I think that's probably true). I told him today, it's like being in the Matrix. You know when Keanu Reeves as Neo can't be stuck into it for too long, or his real self will start frothing or shutting down? It's kind of like that.

Every hour I would unplug and have to watch sitcoms online.

I always think a writer talking about writing is a bit of a humblebrag, probably because I'm usually anxious when I'm not writing I hate sometimes hearing writers go off about how romantic and sacred their writing rituals are. I never really feel that pure of a writer.

I feel some anxiety about turning this book in—it is much too long, they asked me to go back in and rewrite, and work, and add research and more figures, more books, more references—and now it's huge, I mean it's the longest book I've ever written. And then I wonder - who would want to read an atrocity museum, or a collage opera? It's hard to know. I feel compelled to write it, and hope people will want to read it.

Oh also Elisa Gabbert wrote a really amazing feat of criticism here - that revolves around two reviews of Heroines—but I think stands on its own as a call for more careful, more worthwhile criticism.

I went back on Facebook to promote it, because it's a really great essay, and I wanted to shout it out, and someone asked me - Are you back now? I don't know. I don't know if I'm back. What does that mean?

The thing is I am too attracted to social media - I go on it far too often when I'm logged on. I need to perennially deactivate FB because I will go on it 70 times a day. I asked John to change my password to Twitter and not tell me until this book is turned in but still I am constantly going there, reading it, which is a lot harder if you're not actually inside the thing.

dunked my face in a bowl of ice water

Then took a scalding hot shower and am feeling better.

I am not going to erase the previous post. I will not feel shame. I will try not to feel shame.

This book.

When I teach the undergrad creative writing workshop in the spring I should maybe think of really talking to student-writers on ways to be a writer. Which are kind of like ways of living. How to write in a notebook. How to not go online to an extreme extent or let others' words about your writing poison you. How to exist in a room. How to exist in an uncomfortable space. How to take walks and baths to think through these things.

Actually, I need to take a class on this.