The Embrace of Impurity
Eva Hesse - Hang Up, 1966
Friday, May 4, 2012 ——–
It was 2012, or maybe the slightly distant future or past. Actually it must have been 2011, because for part of the time I was back in Germany. It was a systematic thing that was unclear. When you divulge into your consciousness, things happen that don’t seem to matter, and you wake up in a state—economic, emotional, sexual, political. Wake up may not be the right term, and, for these purposes, it’s actually the complete wrong term. More it is a sense of acceptance, wild, trusting and illusory. You grind your teeth, you wipe your face and scratch your sides until they become raw. It was the fall or summer, spring, sometimes winter that day. Surrounded by people you used to know and maybe still do.
Land of Enchantment, or, Fairy Tale Review
I live in New Mexico: The Land of Enchantment.
Most of us have wanted enchantment since we were kids. And if not enchantment, magic. Fairy tales. The stuff of Disney. And then we grew up and figured out Disney dreams are problematic, reinforcing heteronormativity, etc. Maybe not. But I think we all still want magic. And violence. And even more magic. Just look at the two Snow White remakes within 2012 for proof, each one portrays Snow White as a warrior. (Maybe “warrior” is too strong of a word.) But she’s no longer helpless. She’s in there, fighting, and looking hella glamorous.
So, if you’re keen on magic and fairy tales and enchantment, write something. And submit it to Fairy Tale Review. Our submissions are open until May 31, and what’s up? I’m guest editing. In the past, we’ve published people like: Kim Addonizio, Rikki Ducornet, Johannes Goransson, Lydia Millet, Joyelle McSweeney, Mary Caponegro, Francine Prose, Stacey Levine, etc.
Reading Matthew Stokoe’s High Life
I finished reading Matthew Stokoe’s High Life
Let’s talk about James Merrill
James Merrill died in Tucson. Tucson is a city where men walk around with Rottweilers and wheelbarrows. Sometimes inside the wheelbarrow will rest a console television. These men do not wear shirts.
Some writers were afraid of James Merrill. It’s like that time Dick Cavett interviewed Marlon Brando. (Go to 5:45 for some inspiring tension) Cavett was shaking. He was addled and rattled. He was overwhelmed by the Hugeness of this Thing, Brando.
Factoid: People think Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr. is all that, but James Merrill was the first to sing, “Come dusk lime juice and gin.”
Remember to remember!
James Merrill’s most famous quote is obviously, “Life is fiction in disguise.” I’m trying to decide if John Gardner would approve. Oh, fuck Gardner, man. I just realized Hemingway is always talking about how he doesn’t like to talk about writing, and even saying that is talking about writing and anyway Hemingway actually wrote and talked about writing all of the time. But I digress. Better quotes from Merrill would be, “I’ve watered the geraniums, the pot of basil + the pot of pot” or “If nobody ever wrote a book, do you imagine it would be possible to catch up?”
Or
Then I addressed to a closed door a little speech about how the Great Ideas, far from being the achievement of men of genius (or look what happens when they are—Nietzsche + Hitler, Einstein + Hiroshima), are the work of thousands of anonymous generations, and take the form of those brain-coral reefs, slow myths + taboos, which keep the shark from the shallows our children swim in, and now if you don’t mind I have taken a pill and must try to get some sleep.
One time James Merrill made a concrete poem in the shape of a Christmas tree. I find concrete poetry as sort of airbrush T-shirt level of entertainment.
Champagne. Mythology. Technical mastery. Memory. Atomic science. The big bang and black holes. Quatrains. Environmental degradation. Key West. AIDS. Neckties. Similes. Flashlights. Elizabeth Bishop. Small mirrors. The Piano. Good outdoor lighting (example, Peru). Waving through windows at people. O’Keeffe paintings. Dogs. A well-considered title.
I don’t like titles that applaud the author’s seriousness or whatever, titles like “Necessities of Life” or even, forgive me, “Responsibilities.”
Many lovers.
Sometimes, while rereading Changing Light at Sandover, the irony keeps me at a distance, but then again it might just be something I ate.
Factoid: You can say what you want about Dick Cavett, but in 1969 Jefferson Airplane sang on his show and it was the first time the word “fuck” was uttered on live television.
We’re going to spend a lot of our life alone in rooms.
Why Do we Like Marie Calloway?
This is a good question to ask because: she has written only four stories and has appeared on Vice and has had requests from agents to represent her. Even though many writers in the online literary world, such as Elizabeth Ellen or Sam Pink have been writing for years before good things started to happen. And I don’t know if either of them even have agents.
So what is about Marie Calloway’s stories that make them so desired? Why would an agent assume she could write a book that would sell 100s of thousands?
To use Occam’s Razor to get to the simplest explanation, which I think explains the agent: is that Marie Calloway’s writing is about a young girl having sex. Which people love. Men love imagining a young woman having sex and young women want to read about other young women having sex. The writing is sensational, she uses famous people’s names, a young woman/girl has sex, she goes to fabulous cities like New York City or London. She mentions porn’s influence on male sexual behavior. She has sex with an older slightly famous writer who is married. She loses her virginity before marriage, has promiscuous sex. She is topical, she is sexual. She is Star/Enquirer magazine/Harlequin mixed with alt-lit.
My Expectations, Fulfilled or Un
This may be obvious, sure, but my expectations for fiction have changed, and I’m not so sure I like it. I remember being a student, encountering new modes of fiction for the first time – new to me, old to others – and every time, I’d say to myself: Wow, I didn’t know I could do that. I didn’t know fiction could do that.
Opening the cover of Finnegans Wake and pages and pages of onomatopoeia.
Opening Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, metafiction and movement on the page! Poetry does that, sure, but fiction? Amazing.
Opening Dubravka Urgesic’s Museum of Unconditional Surrender, my first modular novel.
Opening Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red or Michael Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid.
The Morning After I Died
“It’s the morning after I died / it’s the morning after I died” is the refrain from the opening track of a Bones cassette tape my friend Matthew P sent me. It fits the realization I had today—that I must write a simple book that strives for nothing. Tonight the 2am radio plays low as I sit in the backseat of a van I have no right to be riding in. I don’t want to convey anything except a sense of peace with what has happened. I don’t want to amplify it. I would like to state it without judgment, without qualifying it to death despite the fact that it knocked the wind out of me. I would like to let it be small, to protect the quietude from the crowding out effect of inflated emotion. Writer-consciousness is hell but I don’t have to tell you that. It’s like the internet, the way it mediates everything.
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Crushed & Filled with All
“I’ve dipped a stranger’s sores in my fat; they require brute force because I love them.” — Sean Kilpatrick
Here is the scene: episode three, season four, Breaking Bad. Jesse Pinkman pulls up to his house, gets out of his little red Toyota Tercel, and walks up to the front door. Exterior. Night. White guy with dreadlocks exits Jesse’s house carrying a red toaster oven. “Check it out,” the dreadlocked white guy says to Jesse, “score, yo!”
Preceding this scene, another scene, the two scenes form a sequence bridged by Fever Ray’s “If I Had A Heart.”