If you date a writer, they’re going to write about you: brutal honesty as performative writing
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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Mark Borchardt & Mike Schank on Influence
Mark: Hey, man, you ripped that one song off, I hate to tell you, from Black Sabbath.
Mike: I didn’t. I wrote all the words.
Mark: Yeah, but, dude, I’m saying there’s an unconscious influence.
Mike: Yeah, but all your ideas come from somewhere else, Mark. You can’t make up an idea by yourself.
Mark: No, dude.
Mike: It’s gotta come from somewhere.
Mark: Yeah, but… Have you listened to the tune? That’s an exact copy.
Mike: No, it’s not though.
Mark: You changed one word.
Mike: I changed all… I used one word. I used the word “insane,” and that’s it.
[noise occurs off camera in the house]
Mike: What’s that?
Mark: The Ghost of Christmas Past.
Mike: …
Mark: You have to whisper, okay?
Mike: All right.
Mark: ‘Cause otherwise, we’ll get into trouble.
[from American Movie, 1999]
“At age eleven, McGraw discovered his birth certificate while searching his mother’s closet to find pictures for a school project.”
All history is alternative history. But some history is more alternative than others. But some history is altercation with Others. What I really mean to say is every history has little moments that are suggestions into other stories for purposes of maximizing the story’s use of your storymaking brain. Things that “make the world” of the story “come alive.” Another way of thinking about this is that analogies often ask us to imagine some crazy shit. But only for as long as it takes to make the analogy work. For example, I’ve heard the chemical effect of coffee on the brain described as putting a brick under your brake pedal. “Okay, check.” We use our imagination to produce a feeling or an understanding (every image is its own feeling), and then we put that feeling/understanding in a suitcase and take it back to our original parameters. “Oh, coffee! So that’s how coffee works on the brain, okay.” Meanwhile, we’ve discarded the continuation of a very interesting (maybe?) story in its own right: driving around with a brick under your brake pedal. READ MORE >
Fire Beats Art
This morning, I heard a story on NPR about the wildfires in Russia.
Among the stories of the tragic loss of life and home was one about a woman in a small village who attempted to save her house from the flames by standing out front holding up a Russian Orthodox religious icon. One could react to this in a number of ways. This could be an opportunity to deride religious faith or a point in the “God is dead or never was” column. This could be seen as a cautionary tale about the right and wrong kind of fire extinguisher a person should have on hand in their home. Or this could be, for artists, a time to offer an apology.
To the extent that I might or might not be an “artist,” and bearing in mind the fact that, even if I could be considered an “artist,” the community of artists is likely never going to vote me in as their spokesman, I would still like to apologize to this Russian woman for the failure of the religious icon to stop the fire from consuming her house.
I realize that when holding up the icon against the fire, the woman was thinking of it as a lens through which to focus her religious faith, and hoped that through her faith her home would be spared. It was a religious icon being held up to beat back the fire, not, say, a de Kooning print or a copy of Joshua Cohen’s new novel Witz*. But religious proxy or not, it was still a piece of art, and it still failed to save her house.
Frankly, artists should be thanking this woman. She has a—probably misplaced—faith in art**. A faith most artists certainly don’t have***. She tried to hold back the destruction of her home with art and art failed her.
And when art fails, it is because the artist failed.
Go ahead and complain that the woman did not use art as directed. Try to find some clever loophole to absolve yourself of the guilt. Deep down, though, we know what we did. Or what we failed to do, anyway. Shame on us.
Russian lady: we’re sorry****.
* Have you readers heard anything about this book? Anywhere?
** And—possibly misplaced—faith in God. But who am I to judge?
*** Cynical, cynical bunch.
**** And those of us who aren’t should be.
Sean Lovelace—
Does anyone here give a flying fuck about copyright when they make copies of _______ to teach students?
86
5 creature mouths or moths dripping
5. A class reading list, to be good, really needs to elicit only one thought from the student (s): I didn’t even know you could write this way. I mean to say the list should liberate.
14. New Diagram. It smells crunchy and tastes like running past goats.
3. Godin is coming out of retirement so watch your face.
99. When people are crimped in one of the various poetry scams, is it best to tell them or best to let them purchase a framed copy/recording/anthology/conference fee? Do scams have validating aspects? I used to tell people. I now let them fall into the web because I feel the web is pretty harmless (no one is actually eaten) and they usually struggle their little selves out eventually and maybe realize spiders will poison and mummify self-esteem, naivete, and cash.
1. Opinion: People just don’t get Krazy Kat.
Reading to people
Monday night, I did a reading to promote Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2010 collection. It was nice. Dave Rowley and Christine Hartzler read, too. It was sunny out, so not a lot of people were out to see the reading. That’s okay.
I read CAVES. Or, well, most of CAVES. See, something happened.
I was reading CAVES, and figured I had enough time to read the whole thing. And had intended to read the whole thing.
But then, I stopped. At section 16, I stopped reading and paused. READ MORE >
On Begetting
Sorry, the Bible’s a really rad book. It’s really funny. I wish I’d written it. I feel like if like Action Books or Dalkey Archive had published the Bible instead of whoever it would be a really respected work: I mean, respected by atheists who think the Bible is dumb and only like like poetry by James Tate or something. I read a whole bunch of the Bible the other week in the swimming pool. It was my sister’s copy from when she got baptized I think. She hadn’t touched it since then. I think I have one from that day too but I think it’s buried in a closet somewhere. I got a bunch of poolwater on the book and later my mom told me not to do that because my sister would probably want it. I can’t imagine my sister wanting the Bible. Somebody should make the Bible into a cool movie or like a reality show.
Today I found a website that has a bunch of Sacred Texts, which features holy books of everything from the bible to wicca to Nostradamus to Tolkien to the Book of Shadows to deleted scenes from the Bible, all kinds of stuff. It’s Sacred-Texts.com: how’s that for marketing. One could spend probably years here, on this one site. It’s a popular hit for a lot of searches on google. I found it googling ‘ham begat’.
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August 24th, 2010 / 3:04 pm
August 24th, 2010 / 3:04 pm