J. Wang is a writer, artist, and musician based out of planet earth. Her writings on literature, art, film, music, theory, politics, and culture can be read on her blog Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns. Email her at loneberry (at) gmail (dot) com.
Celebrating Norman Mailer
I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure–that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.
–Norman Mailer
Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.
–Alejandro Jodorowsky
With them that day were various members of [Salvador] Dalì’s Divine Court: Gala, his muse, coiffed and rouged like a ventriloquist’s dummy; Prince Dado Ruspoli, famed as having the largest penis in Europe; Princess Nanita Kalaschnikoff, with her celebrated Louis XIV profile; the collector Sir Edward James; painter Léonor Fini and the unimaginably gorgeous Amanda Lear who, like Léonor, could not paint, as Kirk Douglas learned from his host, because genius is only found in the balls.
‘Paint is about time, space and balls. And Amanda doesn’t have any,’ said Dalì, bringing his palms together as if in them he held two bricks.
‘Genius,’ she [Léonor Fini] screamed. ‘Is in the slit.’
(From here)
The winners of the Norman Mailer Nonfiction Writing Awards were just announced. A lucky college student will be now be $10,000 richer. Since the awards are intended to honor the legacy of Norman Mailer, now seems like an appropriate time to defame his name by remembering what a sexist asshole he was. Thinking about Norman Mailer’s legacy, I am reminded of the way in which he advanced what I call the Testicular Theory of Talent (TTT).
Not my knee, but might as well be
Jackie Wang here. New around these parts. I write the blog Serbian Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns. There you can find my writings on literature, film, art, theory, politics, music, and culture. My blog is named after a phrase written by Refbatch, a schizophrenic Russian woman who has posted around 12,000 YouTube videos online. She is perhaps my biggest inspiration. You can see a website I made for her here. I also do Eggs I Would like to Fuck. You can listen to my music here.
I am a Chinese-Italian (spaghetti-rice) hybrid and my writing is hybrid; I like to combine memoir, criticism and theory. I am against aestheticized indifference and for over-investment and brutal honesty. Jack Halberstam’s theories of negative feminism and antisocial queer theory describes two types of negativity: one characterized by “fatigue, ennui, boredom, indifference, ironic distancing, indirectness, arch dismissal, insincerity” and another characterized by “rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, over-investment, incivility….” I am of the the second camp. I would say that New Narrative writers like Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, and Chris Kraus (honorary member) are of this camp as well. (Speaking of brutal honesty, have you read the new Eileen Myles book? She talks a lot of shit on Kathy Acker. Even though I love Kathy, it’s kind of great.) I suppose this is a good segue into the issue I came here to discuss, namely the topic of brutal honesty as a specifically performative kind of writing and a way to undermine literary boundaries.
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