Channeling the Alien-Plath Girl: Emotional Drag/Porn/Excess

I actually stumbled upon this picture after writing my post completely. How weirdly appropriate.

I heard Dodie Bellamy use the terms “emotional porn” and “operatic suffering” recently on her blog and I love that. I recently wrote on my blog about “emotional excess” in relation to the films of Andrzej Żuławski, and I’ve just been thinking–I love things that are flamboyantly and unapologetically emotional. It makes me think of teenagers. Since crossing over into my 20s, I look at teenagers and feel kind of embarrassed for them. They lack emotional filters. They’re so direct about their suffering. They’re making themselves look pathetic. But really–I kind of envy them, their lack of restraint. It must be really freeing to be that open without feeling the urge to censor yourself.

When I was in high school, I used to call a certain type of girl a “Plath Girl.” For me, the Plath Girl was white, upper-middle class, educated, a perfectionist, melodramatic, mean, and incapable of feeling joy. I guess I still used this term in college…isn’t that fucked up? This is my therapeutic admission of my fucked-upness. Yes, now I remember. There was a girl I thought was cute and I asked her on a date. She always wore black eyeliner and had a Virginia Woolf tattoo. I thought we could go to the airport and watch the planes take off but she was like, why don’t you just come to my room? When I went to her room, she did lines of coke off her desk while ranting about how much she hated everyone, how depressed she was at school, and before I knew it, she had left me so she could hang with other people. When my friends asked me about the date, I think I just said, “turns out she’s quite the Plath Girl.” (But was this an incorrect categorization? Did the tattoo mean she was actually a Woolf Girl?) Really, I think the Plath Girl is kind of sexy. She has direct access to her emotions and isn’t ashamed to show her bitterness or depression. (I am also involuntarily turned on by emotionally volatile people that can sometimes be cold to me. Perhaps it is a masochistic impulse.) There is certainly a performative element that pervades this kind of outward display of emotion, but that doesn’t mean it’s just some stupid act.

READ MORE >

Craft Notes & Random / 31 Comments
October 19th, 2010 / 3:13 am

{LMC}: On Bradford Tice’s “How to Be an American Boy”

Ed: You can read a PDF of this story, here, so you can better participate. Buy NY Tyrant.

Even with broken parts, you can build a functional machine. Take a bent manifold, a rusty chain and suddenly you have a robot that walks only into walls, a radio playing only silence, furniture that won’t talk. Likewise, some writer’s can weld together adolescence’s great banalities, its cliches and tritenesses, into really satisfying fiction. Bradford Tice’s “How to Become An American Boy,” an awkwardly told coming-out tale of one queer youth in flyover U.S.A., is a perfect example.

From the title on, the story begs for derision. It is broken into eight segments, four goals (with titles like “Goal Three: Find a male role model” and “Goal Four: Be Stoic in the Face of Disaster”), each followed by a “Self-Actualization Scene.” To enhance the general PSA atmosphere, each of the Goal segments takes place primarily in a psychiatrist’s chair. There’s a shadowy expectation of hate crimes or sexual violence. Moreover, it’s written in the second person future. That “You” is the main character, and that this is the story of what “You” will do, could almost justify total dismissal of the work, but, happily, that reaction is precisely the gasoline on which this machine runs.

READ MORE >

Literary Magazine Club / 5 Comments
October 18th, 2010 / 4:45 pm

{LMC}: And So We Begin

I’ve written quite a few times about how lamentations and garment rending over the death of literature, the literary, publishing, and the written word have been premature. No one can dispute that the publishing industry is changing, that our culture is evolving, that we are facing certain challenges when it comes to encouraging the general public to read when, it would seem, people would rather watch television or stare at the Internet, or do anything but read. A difficult path, however, is not an impassable one.

Publishing is dying! Publishing is dying! Publishing is dying! Go ahead, say it three times. You’ll feel better but chanting those words will not nor cannot make them true.

We have a fetish for sifting through the proverbial ashes of publishing, the age of letters, a culture of intellect, as if all hope is lost, as if all we have left is the faint memory of a time when we sat in parlors on velvet lined couches and discussed literature while smoking tightly rolled French cigarettes. We sniff with disdain when confronted with mass market paperbacks or pablum like Jersey Shore and big budget films that inexplicably gross $50 million (ahem, Jackass 3D). These “cultural abominations” (which are, in fact, not abominations at all) are more than some of us can bear. We begrudge their existence as if they are taking the place, in our hearts and minds, of the next staggering work of literary genius. We blame these distractions for the demise of all things literary and intellectual as if we must choose between the charms of The Situation and Snooki or Johnny Knoxville and the charms of, say, Adam Levin or Jonathan Franzen or Marcy Dermansky or Grace Krilanovich. I’ve said it before, but I will say it again—I choose both.

READ MORE >

Literary Magazine Club / 23 Comments
October 18th, 2010 / 4:36 pm

HTMLGIANT Features

Neck Goozle or Adult Acne: An Interview with Lindsay Hunter

This Fall saw the release of the debut collection from one Lindsay Hunter, aptly and majestically titled Daddy’s. If you’ve ever seen Lindsay read in person you probably were hiding in your closet with your head between your legs covering your junk quivering about this monster, a collection of short texts trapped inside a tackle box. Lindsay’s language is somehow both frightening, gut-bunching, weirdo, home, cover your face, open your mouth, transcendent, and of heaving sound. At times like if Gummo turned into words and date-raped Mary Gaitskill’s language then went to the gas station to buy tissues to clean up the messies and bought you a snack of discount heat lamp chicken. Underneath it all, this weird American convulsive heart that sounds like someone if we haven’t been, at least we remember getting beaten up in middle school.

Over email, so as to not get bit, I traded q’s with Ms. Hunter re: the book, humor, music, inspiration, fear, performance, and all the rest.

BB: I love how Daddy’s operates in reading almost as a series of rotations in a brain of what some would call trash life: each of the stories in the collection often concerns sex, food, and body fluids. The sky is referred to in turns from piece to piece as if it is shifting through a section of a place that does not change: and yet each story feels so singular. Was this variation something you were super aware of while you were writing the stories, or did the voices just keep coming out? By what means was this book written?

LH: I don’t know that I was aware of this as I was writing each story, but looking at the book as a whole, it definitely feels like there is a town in which these people live and it is the same town. I generally start with the first line of something and then see where that leads me. I’ll have first lines in my head for days, or sometimes I’ll get one and I’ll need to sit down and just fucking follow it. Every now and again I’ll have an idea for a story, like some kind of situation or glimpse–like in “That Baby” I wanted to write about the jealousy of babies–and I’ll wedge my way in and try to write what I see.

I think these stories are what they are because I tend to go sentence by sentence and edit as I’m writing–I can’t move on until each sentence is just right, and if I’m bored by a line it feels wonderful just to delete it and start over. That’s my main thing–I hate boredom and being bored and boring writing and cliches and puns and double entendres and cleverness. So I try to eviscerate all of that. But watch, I’ll open up my book and see the phrase “and that was the end of that” or “new lease on life” or “make love” and I’ll have to face some pretty ugly truths about my inner life.

READ MORE >

22 Comments
October 18th, 2010 / 12:16 pm

Reviews

A Metaphysics of Emma: Madame Bovary Today (NB: spoilers near the end)

Frederic Jameson, reviewing Sartre’s The Family Idiot for the NYT in 1981:

Sartre had always seen literary works as responses to concrete situations, responses that become intelligible only when grasped within those situations. He now draws the unexpected consequences: Like tools, literary works outlive the situations for which they were intended, and they are passed down with a new material inertia. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations,’ Marx said, ‘weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ The artists of Flaubert’s generation had no way of understanding the practical purposes for which the older generation had invented their now inert themes: critical negativity, misanthropy, the ideal of classlessness, the defense of the autonomy of the intellectual (which will now be ‘mistranslated’ as art for art’s sake), and a quasi-religious conviction of the nothingness of the world and the emptiness of life. Crippled by the themes of their predecessors, the following generation became artists without inspiration. This was not a subjective matter, a lack of talent or vocation. Rather, Sartre’s idea of the practico-inert -the weight of so many dead artistic ideologies from an incomprehensible past – suggests a situation in which it was objectively impossible for them to have something to say.

This nothing-to-say–the trajectory of an incomprehensible past–will be our focus in the beginning. First there is the fact of time. There is its sense. Space becomes subordinated to time in Madame Bovary; space is now the reflection of time’s passage, its here-and-there deposit, its surplus. But there is another mistake of time: the time of Madame Bovary, in contrast with time in Madame Bovary.

Madame Bovary is first serialized in 1857. Lydia Davis’s translation–if not a watershed moment then an event, or a watershed of an event of some sort–appears in 2010. Davis wants to reproduce Flaubert’s style, which is his novel’s vocation and substance, in English: his quirks of tense, the intensities of his adverbs, the subtleties of his free indirect style. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Davis’s task is to mirror the French, but faithfulness is indeed a primary concern of hers. How does Madame Bovary change through time? Moreover: how, and with what appurtenances, with what way of reading, do we understand Emma’s caresses, her infidelities and her ennui, in October 2010?

READ MORE >

8 Comments
October 18th, 2010 / 11:02 am

Color Plates by Adam Golaski

A brief review.

Random / 1 Comment
October 18th, 2010 / 10:32 am

Bill Evans On Writing


“It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”

“Intuition has to lead knowledge, but it can’t be out there alone.” READ MORE >

Craft Notes / 7 Comments
October 17th, 2010 / 10:09 pm
—

What book made you want to write? What book made you want to quit writing?

51

Wittgenstein Tweets

“Russell wants me to provide ‘arguments’ for my positions
i.e. he wants me to spoil their beauty.”
(1912, aged 23)

The aim of Wittgenstein Tweets is to introduce the entire life of Ludwig Wittgenstein in around 500 tweets over 6 months.   Yes, a silly project, and one which Wittgenstein himself would have almost certainly loathed.

I am doing it purely because I find Ray Monk’s biography (1990) of Wittgenstein so captivating and hilarious that I want more people to get to know him. No love for or knowledge of Wittgenstein is necessary.

via Zeph Auerbach

Random / 7 Comments
October 17th, 2010 / 10:38 am
—

Ghost Machine by Ben Mirov is a soft, looping, erased-De Kooning that searches for someone it lost. Really sad. Very good. Read it.

6