Her gayety seemed like jewels on a skull.

Hear the bones humming.

2012-02-25T23:53:00.001-08:00

I will be AWP-less this year because I have been too ill of health to risk the travel. Specifically, I'm having anxiety problems. I bring this up for a few reasons, even though I'm usually really disinclined to bring it up: I should be more okay than I am with feeling like an acute anxiety attack is a valid reason for wanting to take it easy (I don't allow myself that usually, which is how the attacks get worse or don't go away swiftly) and I need to remember for the next time this happens that this was significant enough that I had to cancel big plans. My anxiety attacking is typical of major upheaval and positive change (go figure!). Because I don't have any kind of an anxious disposition, these episodes are always a shock and unwieldy, and I do everything I can to dismiss them and move on, which doesn't always have the intended affect. I need to take care of myself when something of this nature strikes. And that's what I'm going to do: I've got Twin Peaks and no day-work for a week.

Bright side: I approved the web proof of my little prose piece "Van's Friend in the City" for Anomalous this past week! Anomalous Press is beautiful, I can't wait to see the new issue (their first anniversary issue!) and I am filled with the vastly preferable anticipation-esque anxiety for their future projects. Also, my remark about Tiny Furniture is appearing soon on the Rumpus! I wouldn't call it a review, and I intend to expound on my feelings about the film here after it goes up. I'm afraid the piece comes off as negative, but I really enjoyed what the film provoked in my viewing of it and am grateful for the occasion to explore the issues it raised for me.

Lastly and most ravishingly I begin soon not only the very very beautiful new full-time job I have mentioned before but also now I am a payrolled part-time writer/reporter! I am going to roll out the details once I've put myself in order. I am so lucky. When I left my badge at the security desk at my now ex-job on Friday, I was the envy of all, and they didn't even know where I was headed.

Book Challenge 23.

2012-02-14T21:07:00.000-08:00

For gramarye, the root word of glamour, also gave birth to the word grammar.

2012-02-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

1. I reviewed Glamorous Freak by Roxanne Carter and the rave is up at Anobium and I could not mean anything more strongly than when I say I love love love this book. Roxanne is one of my absolutely favorite contemporary writers and Debra di Blasi/Jaded Ibis did a brilliant job with Roxanne's images. Technically though you should not buy it yet because Jaded Ibis has a pre-order gift that will blow minds.

I have enjoyed so many absurdly beautiful books lately and I'm looking forward to raving about each of them in the coming months: Tantra Bensko's Lucid Membrane, Karen Lillis' Watch the Doors as They Close, Gina Abelkop's Darling Beastlettes (one-sitting RAVENOUS read), Joyelle McSweeney's the Necropastoral, Arielle Guy's Three Geogaophies, Susana Gardner's Herso, and oh - ohhhh! - What Was the Hipster?

2. MY STORY "CELLAR HOLLER" IS ON AT SPORK and more pointedly the press announced it via Facebook with "This is love," making me melt all over the sushi my mother bought me (and my boyfriend) for VD. I hope you read it. I hope you enjoy it. My experience with Spork and Caketrain have been the most intense as far as editing goes. Being an editor myself I really enjoy the process of giving my work up completely, not thinking about it, and seeing what comes out of that level of sophisticated collaboration. One can be sure if one is working with the editors of Spork or Caketrain, one is working with somebody totally committed and brilliant at what they do. I am so proud Spork loves my story so dearly and I hope it does inspire other loves.

3. My latest job, though it enabled me to move and heightened the quality of most facets of my life, I enjoy less than I've enjoyed almost anything I've ever done, and this week I was granted the privilege of leaving to do something I absolutely love! My jaw's perfectly happy to never be hinged again. I will start right after AWP! And so my jaunt with Chicago will be a million times more of a celebration. A million!

Also, WE ARE THE FUN PERCENT is still very much open to submissions, blisteringly, until the end of March! Don't waste time! Just 500 words on how you are thwarting the encroaching grimitude with your ingenuity, like Rachel Rosenfelt and Gaby Dunn.

(Post title blithely via the Beheld.)

Editions I didn't know existed.

2012-02-07T23:52:00.000-08:00

"She came to my work after the reveal. She asked me to sign her diary."

I have never cried so hard. Laura Albert changed my life as a child and keeps doing so.

WE ARE THE FUN PERCENT.

2012-01-31T22:14:00.000-08:00

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

THE FUN PERCENT

an anthology edited by Kari Larsen and Colette Newby

What have you been doing with this weird time? This liminal space where markets are shifting, jobs are scarce, and the issue of money/debt is omnipresent? How are you having fun?

Have you started a small press or an online magazine? Have you written a book? Have you made an online comic? Have you gotten totally obsessed with somebody's tumblr? Have you found a zoological garden obscured in the wilds of your mountain town? How do you seek joy? How do you have fun?

How are you taking advantage of the contemporary world for maximum enjoyment? Essays in the form of words (500 min.), video and art are welcome for consideration. Questions can be directed here on this post or to Kari.Lee.Larsen@Gmail.com, where submissions can go as well. The deadline is the last day of March. Please submit and please reblog!

Midnight party.

2012-01-26T22:30:00.000-08:00

I wrote a loving tribute to collagist/photographer Colette Saint Yves for Anobium and despite linking to her various media haunts within the feature, called "Midnight Party", I really can't emphasize the brilliance that is her 8Track enough, nor can I stop listening to "Mustafa" by Bebi Dol.

The beautiful Prick of the Spindle has accepted my short story, "Lamping," for publication, and my heart is singing "Hello ma Baby" in a top hat! "Lamping" is really dear to me and was rejected from many places with extremely good feedback. Certain criticisms I took very gleefully but ultimately I knew the piece was just tough and in most cases nobody got it, and it is a piece that exists very much for those who are going to dig it deep. It is based on a few true stories, ends in a hallucination, and is really about self-loathing and internalized misogyny. Its sister has not found publication yet, although it's been under consideration from the journal I want it to live in since September!

Since AWP 2012 is SOLD OUT I am extra pumped to be going to Chicago just to go to Chicago! I think I may be appearing in the book fair - "appearing," I mean very much in the way of an apparition - and frolicking with Gina Abelkop and Kristen Stone and Anobium and my buddy Maria. Which is all I want, besides a vacation. I feel silly for wanting one all ready, but I do have a very demanding day job. And Chicago has some of the best coffee in the world. My decision has been made for me.

Sparkling, natural.

2012-01-18T20:01:00.000-08:00

1. Anobium's website has blossomed into something pristine and Audrey II-esque. It now features reviews, editorials, interviews, et al, and my enfeebled praise of Laynie Browne's Roseate, Points of Gold is alive there now! I had the most beautiful, slow, undulant time with this book. On its own it is excellent, but I recommend reading it in the blue hour. For a while I was waking up and getting into the city outrageously early per a murderous commute because I had to make sure I was in the city for when I needed to be, which was not quite at dawn, and so I read this and listened to jazz in what became a nightclub in the evening but was the only place I could find that opened for breakfast. I am glad to have had that time, and even more glad to have lately discovered a real breakfast spot, Little Amps. I need to know if they will take coffee across the river. I need to know.

2. The interview I conducted with Eric Papenfuse, owner of the Midtown Scholar and editor/publisher of the Midtown Scholar Press, is strutting its stuff right here. I am so proud. The article has gotten so much positive attention all ready. We met up and the interview was so lovely and the book sounded SO ASTOUNDING - the book being City Contented, City Discontented by Paul Beers, the Midtown Scholar Press' first title - that even though I had every intention of reading it anyway, I decided absolutely to read it and conflate the article with my review of the book. And the book turned out to be even more beautiful than I anticipated, and so I felt obligated to finish it so I could really deliver some Quality Thoughts. My hopes for this are not too high - I only hope I stirred up more of a fervor for the store and the press and the book.

Also, If you're a person that hates beautiful things and don't want to visit the Scholar for a copy, you can buy it from the Wegmans in Mechanicsburg.

3. THIS! FOREVER!

Laura Beth Davis wrote a feature on the ModCloth blog called "Busy Bibliophile? Try a Poetry Chapbook!" focused on the glorious, glorious efforts of Dancing Girl Press, Birds of Lace Press and Blood Pudding Press!!! Exclamation! Points! For! All! There are few finer enterprise-runners than Kristy Bowen, Gina Abelkop and Juliet Cook and their wares deserve such a spotlight. I love to see books de-sconced from lists and libraries and contextualized by the world. Everybody should have a heap of chapbooks on them all the time. That would be among my campaign promises - chapbooks for every man, woman and child, and a garage to accommodate them all.

I have many fake books since I'm a leprechaun farmer who's a gambler.

2012-01-12T21:17:00.000-08:00

I moved! Onto the banks of the mighty Susquehanna - now literally. I'm a block from the river. I am just now reunited with the internet and have spent the past few days in a heap of ache on my new sprawling mattress barely looking up to see Breillat's Bluebeard.

I am skittering to catch up on my obligations and overcome with inspiration and sticking my neck out for something that makes me sick and excited and way too crazy to get anything done. So I've been hiding in Twitter and aggregating my favorite citizens thereof. Twittizens.

Natalie Dee @NatalieDee: "I asked my kid what my name is (you know, since it's not actually mom) and she said my name is DOCTOR PLAYGROUND."
Drew @DrewToothPaste: "Republicans: "Beginning tomorrow, everyone's going to get fucked by shovels." Democrats: "We're working hard to downgrade that to brooms.""
David Lynch @David_Lynch: "Dear Twitter Friends, Happy New Year, 2012. I hope it's a great year for you all. Your friend, David."
Joey Comeau @JoeyComeau: "I had a dream where I won some kind of award for prime number based sex patterns!"
Supervert @Supervert: "William Burroughs put a curse on Truman Capote."
Lesley Kinzel @52Stations: "IT HAPPENED TO ME: I GOT FAT-SHAMED BY MY XBOX."
Mary Kim Arnold @MKimArnold: "Oh, stop yr cheering, people. This is a total travesty."
Seth Morris @BobDucca: "Never underestimate the healing power of screaming at yourself in a mirror."
Litsa Dremousis @LitsaDremousis: "Prime Ministers for Greece & Italy have resigned this month due, basically, to general lunacy. Hey, guys: PennState needs a new president."
Nalini Abhiraman @_Nalini_: "Sometimes my Mexico obsession reminds me of that special ilk of creepster white person who's way too into India."
Sadie Stein @SadieStein: "Spinach gnocchi disaster last night. Green-flecked hilarity ensued! We laughed and laughed. Hahaha. Haha. Oh, and I was by myself."
Kristine Ong Muslim @KristineMuslim: "Over the last few days I learned from Twitter the ff things: "bukakke" and "Maria Ozawa." I think the world is really going to end in 2012."
Lena Dunham @LenaDunham: "I wish that new movie was called We Need To Talk Shit About Kevin."
Marie Calloway @Marie_Calloway: "Aggressive cat literary agent asking how he can claw that check from the publishing house."
Rohin Guha @OhRohin: "WHY YES, I AM LISTENING TO ALL OF SARAH MCLACHLAN'S 1997 OPUS 'SURFACING'."
Amelia Gray @GrayAmelia: "Saying "my hands are really dry" and then going into the other room to fart surreptitiously is my new seduction technique."
Kristen Stone @_KristenStone: "Running late for therapy is a net loss, anxiety-wise."
Gina Abelkop @TheMoonStop: "There is an elementary school next to my house + I can hear a bunch of children singing along to Madonna's "Like a Virgin" #yikes."
Carolee Wheeler @SuperDilettante: "Suddenly there is a lot of Ayn Rand all over Tumblr and I don't know why and I'm frightened. WHAT IS THIS REALITY."

This is not even comprehensive and does not include institutions. A room full of these people talking would be a miracle.

The art of tango is to relinquish control to your dance-partner and trust that he will bravely carry you across the floor.

2012-01-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

(The title is from Amanda Palmer's blog post about her wedding - the second thing that made me cry in 2012, after Helen Mirren's monologue to the corpse in the Cook the Thief his Wife and her Lover.)

I am relieved in looking back that I've never had a better year than this past year. My best friend to whom I am the closest's birthday is the day after new year's and wishing her happy birthday - having known her since I was a sophomore in high school - I was really thrilled to see how miniscule and distant a lot of the extreme nonsense is.

Irinia Ionesco was among the things

I enjoyed most in 2011, although not

how her work is completely

inaccessible beyond tumblr.

Rather than taking stock in concrete and traceable achievements - which are so-manied it would take too long to collect them, since I have so much yet to do that are not yet things I have achieved, but things suspended and kind of mounting and making me feel, as the days pass, manically inadequate (which, since mania is supposed to be a grandeur-trip, I wholly resent this) - I'll salute what I'm looking forward to the most this year: my new apartment on the river, AWP with Maria, Enigma Machine, my birthday in New York, the romantic weekend my boyfriend's parents procured for us in Gettysburg, and the unforeseeable business that will blindside me with excitement when it happens. It always does.

I hope this year follows last year's trend of my getting at least a crack at better jobs. I am grateful for the one I have now because it is perfectly tolerable work for very much a living wage in an atmosphere of encouragement and support. My supervisor called me into a meeting last week to give me a pep talk about looking for jobs in my field. That is pretty excellent.

I also hope this year brings answers for the wayfaring Googlers who happen upon this site. I don't know if Frances Bean Cobain has a boyfriend, but I can confirm for you that Jean-Claude Brialy is gay. Godspeed.

Hollywood on rollerskates.

2011-12-22T20:07:00.000-08:00

Deluged by gifts from the universe!

I have a story forthcoming in Spork! It is called "Cellar Holler." It and "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" and "Wing Beat" are of a piece. I am so proud of it and so ecstatic that it will have such a glorious home. This threw me. I made a grave misstep in accidentally sending Spork two pieces. I felt like an idiot and expected to be totally ignored. The warm reception from Joel Smith severed my nerves completely from the ill-effects of my day job. There is no greater present than that.

Or is there?

The selfsame New Inquiry that I referred to yesterday has an ongoing series of spotlights on Un(der)known Writers and I have a tiny bit on Anna Kavan in it. It isn't a me-thing, it's an Anna Kavan thing, and if you, wayfaring Googler, have never had the pleasure, it features a strapping excerpt from her story "the Birthmark," which may be my favorite (of hers, of anybody's, of anything).

This made today a really good day, but I actually had a visceral near-tears (maybe tears) reaction to some beautiful words directed towards me by someone for whom I have the most tremendous respect and admire so intensely. As a writer, an editor - she is luminous! That gave me profoundly beautiful, beautiful feelings.

Pushing paper typing pouring coffee counts: Solidarity on the literary frontier.

2011-12-21T22:05:00.000-08:00

Literary Cubs

A few weeks ago the New York Times published this article in the Fashion & Style section. It's a newspaper article focused chiefly on the salon-scene that the young men and women associated with the new critical journal the New Inquiry are kindling, to which a few people with whom I'm friends posted bemused reactions.

The New Inquiry is not referred to as a literary journal but the word "literary" is SEO-woven into the article. It is also compared to the Paris Review, which "look[s]...like a beach read" beside the New Inquiry, which is itself (the New Inq, that is) a journal of cultural criticism. Be-headlining a group of critics the new literary elite is a distressing move when one considers all the very brilliant literary journals that begin the same way, of the same dynamism, borne of the same unfortunate circumstances. What is admirable here is how much of a collective effort this is, how many people are working together very hard to make this a very good magazine. This is fandom, and

A high level of connoisseurship is as vital to art as the artists.

A high level of connoisseurship is as vital to art as the artists.

A high level of connoisseurship is as vital to art as the artists.

(paraphrased, Fran Lebowitz, emphasis ripped off Linda Kunhardt)

I am disappointed to see anyone - the NY Times style section is the least of the problem - not as alert to current goings-on in actual literary writing, as opposed to the bigger little publishing modes (the efforts of New Directions to continue being excellent, eReaders, etc) and the trappings of the fantasy external glamor haze of Literature. The New Inquiry addresses some excellent things: the Consultant Procedural and its demonstration of the "ladder-to-nowhere," demystifying mastery, and the necessity of scenes, to say nothing of the groundedness and determinedness they demonstrate in their reaction to the NY Times article and the reactionary articles that have sprung up around it, which makes me so happy.

But what troubles me is: this is establishment versus the Dream, the Dream as embodied by the "young and unmoored." If an establishment can't accommodate you, this is what you should do, you should start a journal, although the average sensitive, impressionable young reader who is also encumbered by student loan debt, who could use the inspiration that the very act of the New Inquiry should impart, may still be pummeled by the glitz: the Ivy league degrees, the smart circle of smartly-dressed friends, New York City, Brazenhead Books (although any mention of that makes me beam).

Additionally, it is sad to see only one feature so far, on the brilliant the Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, has anything to do with contemporary literary writers. Hopefully there will be more on writers who are more the peers of the New Inq staff, and hopefully it will be of the same caliber as this piece on the New Girl.

Never Let Anyone Profile You in the Style Section

Gawker's reaction to the NYT article is framed within their ecstatically articulated repulsion with the Style Section but fails to comment upon the actual phenomenon. The tone and focus of the article is another spot of decay on the corpse. The journalistic irresponsibility of the romanticized trappings is made explicit, but in the end, the New Inquiry itself is dismissed along with it. Max Read is not wrong: "For hundreds of years, unbearable young people have tried to hang out with other unbearable young people." However unbearable young people may be, it is whatever they are creating that is of concern, and what they are doing is something very positive. But leaving it up to the NYT to decide that is part of the problem, ultimately, and he is right to assert that people will believe it is right-hand-up-to-god legit because of its place in the Style Section.

Name Dropping

This though I do love. I have a lot of notes in my off-brand spiral-bound inspired by the Marriage Plot about the camped-out drag-vibe I get from balls-out pretentiousness that I really love. This, I am aware, comes entirely from an incubated little lifetime of having extremely smart friends in a remote, rural village where there is nobody to impress and our only concern as teenagers was having fun with what we liked. So the anxiety and competition, though I'm aware of it, I wish it could just melt away and these parties could be like karaoke discotheques.

VIDA-Diss

After reading the NYT article and the Gawker reaction, I found this post on the Lavin Agency's tumblr about (New Inquiry founder, Lavin Agency employee) Rachel Rosenfelt's address to Book Expo America. When asked to present on the VIDA count, she responded "forget the pie charts" and opted to focus on the New Inquiry. While her assertion that women founding magazines is central to upending the reality revealed by the count, she could have established that within the context of the given topic and demonstrated solidarity. While it is good to see the New Inquiry's staff's dedication to espousing cooperation, as Managing Editor Malcolm Harris cites in his book Share or Die: Youth in Recession, this was a bummer to see. VIDA is made up of incredible, hard-working writers. VIDA Press Officer Ana Božičević's "Working Poet's Manifesto" is one of my favorite things I read all year, and her point needs to be perpetuated as badly: to make art, you have to work hard, you have to sacrifice, you have to do what it takes. When you are working that dismal office job, you can go home and hand-bind your friends' books for cheap or start a website.

I am glad this is the time I'm in.

You're a gentleman and a scholar.

2011-12-19T23:19:00.000-08:00

1. I interviewed Eric Papenfuse, owner of the Midtown Scholar and editor of Midtown Scholar Press this past week. The Press, which swung out the gate this winter with City Contented, City Discontented, a history of Harrisburg, is bursting with life. While they are wisely approaching the publishing of titles on the intimate basis of one title every other year to afford maximum promotion-time, Mr. Papenfuse ecstatically expressed his desire to see manuscripts. Fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction are very much of interest to the Press. Although you could mail your mss to 1302 North Third Street, Harrisburg PA 17102, you would be cheating yourself out of an opportunity to visit the most gorgeous bookstore on Earth (and the biggest between New York and Chicago).

2. My boyfriend and I were getting coffee and the barister and I got into a conversation. He asked me what I do and I said, I'm a writer. This may have been the first time I've done that. I tell people often - virtually as often as the subject of vocation arises in any context - that I write. But I don't think I've ever done that in the sanctified noun-way. It felt good - reactionary, defiant-good. I was beating up myself earlier in the week for not achieving enough, which is stupid. I did the old spiel that I have to do like Franny does the Jesus prayer, about how achievement is a totally subjective thing (some days I hear a crowd and there is no crowd).

The impulse to do this came after re-watching Kicking and Screaming, which I could barely watch in college and have avoided since graduating. For all the parts that I enjoy - like the completely literal innuendos - watching all that inertia in the wrong mood is pulverizing. I've been in the wrong mood for inertia for three years and counting. There is a scene when, after lamenting that he wishes he was going off to war after a lifetime of hard work, Chris Eigeman's character addresses himself in the mirror and declares that mere weeks ago he was Max Belmont, philosophy major, and now he is Max Belmont who does nothing.

I am grateful that the experience of college reasserted to me how in my basic state I do nothing, and since graduating I have managed to only do nothing for about two days, both of them lately. I am really busy, my life is very full, I write and edit every day, and the only thing that makes me very sore is the idea of not being able to work any harder. Despite conditions I persist in working harder, though, and this coming year will make last year look like a nap. This year will be a nap on the bus - mouth open, slumped against the window: total defiance.

3. The new issue of Anomalous is out and it features Joanna Howard and I am so awestruck. I adore her work so madly and I am so overwhelmed to be in the next issue! I have to record my piece before leaving for AWP, to which I will travel with my friend Maria, herself a brilliant poet! I have never been to Chicago and plan first and foremost on going to Intelligentsia Coffee. Then doing a windmill high-five at the Anobium table. Speaking of which, Anobium is looking for new contributors to the new website! It will be radiant. I have a Vision stockpiled on one of my favorite contemporary artists who I found through tumblr.

Cacciato.

2011-12-06T21:30:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the Midtown Scholar, Harrisburg had its second annual Book Fair last month. I was all over it. It is all over HMag.

The building in which the Scholar resides used to be an olde theatre of the variety Lincoln was shot in, and it is the largest used bookstore between New York and Chicago and it has big-box-store hours. Since I keep silly hours, my boyfriend goes and drinks coffee and wanders their underground expanse of history texts until I get off and articulate my envy. The owners just inaugurated a press, and I can't wait to talk all about it!

Or about these Dusie books, specifically Roseate, Points of Gold by Laynie Browne, Three Geogaophies: a Milkmaid's Grimoire by Arielle Guy, and Herso by editor Susana Gardner, from Black Radish.

Or about this:

That's my best friend Gretchen hanging out at her house with Tim O'Brien. I don't need to talk about that, though, because that smile speaks for itself.

Do You Know How Diamonds Get to Us: my life and Green Girl.

2011-12-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

Not a review in the classic sense. This is why my life is a good place for this text to hang out/vice-versa:

When I was first starting reading (in life) I only read about the psychology of trauma and film theory. Anything that takes me back to these days gets me on an indetectibly sentimental level. I would have loved Green Girl even if I came to it a different way.

Nothing has been as good for my state of mind as discovering that the things I think matter weren't flash-in-the-pan. Like writing. There is no evidence of this around me. No literary activity that engages the community. I didn't do anything for a long time but stay in my room watching movies. A long incubation period. I had to get wrapped up in the editing, the decisions made with sound, the use of actors to get my mind off things. It is still the only way I can get my mind off things. It still makes me yearn for context. Mostly I feel remote, like no matter how much reaching out I do I will not touch anything.

I live in a rural village. I ride to work at dawn. Since graduating I've been switching jobs and focused so intensely on getting to this point that I work in the city for a living wage that I stopped doing a lot of things that give me pleasure, like listening to Amanda Palmer. I have been catching up on her album Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under. There is a song on the album called "Australia" with a torrential sweeping wistful refrain where, after she asserts that instead of doing some mundane deadening chore that feebly reinforces her competency, she says, "or I could go to Australia." It looks totally powerless. You have to hear her sing it. When she does I cry thinking of curling up in my room watching Michael Haneke's Seventh Continent. A family flushes all their money down the toilet in a long unbroken take with no faces. They lethally inject their daughter. They react strongly before doing so to themselves. They tell everyone they're emigrating to Australia. I don't mean to do that to myself every morning. I want to feel very strong about all my decisions and appreciate my luck. I can take dozens of interviews for amazing jobs that I don't get. I should be able to take the odd observation that I am settling by taking the job I have, that I am not lucky but lazy. I know this isn't true.

So I want to hide in something. I used to sit up and read Amanda Palmer's blog for nights and nights. I still do. It was the resemblance in tone and power to hers that I started to read and love Kate Zambreno's blog. Getting an ARC copy of Green Girl was one of the best parts of this past year. Because of the gesture, because it is an important work, because of the horribly subjective phenomena I'm addressing here in my online diary. I persist in habitually referring to it as my online diary. I only call it a blog in job interviews.

Green Girl is a tactile pleasure, first. Not glassy like plastic. If I am at all gross it will show up on this book as I handle it. The first thing learned is consideration, close scrutiny, the imparting of recognition from a figure fixed above. Glass, Irony & God holds the same texture, figuratively, literally.

Green Girl takes place in London, but it isn't right to start out that way. It takes place pretty strictly in moldy rooms where men are not allowed and department stores. Something Kate Zambreno has down that has a tremendous impact on the book is what she emphasizes on and off the clock. It is like you are in two different spaces. This is very subtle. It IS like you go from room to room and your outfit changes like Helen Mirren's in the Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. This kind of sophisticated relationship to space acknowledges way more the complexity and intelligence and strength of yearning possessed by Ruth. Ruth is your girl in the book, and there is nothing protecting her from the infiltrating army of intoxicating friends, a mortifying sales job, and her own forebearer.

(from Anne Carson)

For someone hooked up to Thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

The same things that alienate me keep me safe in another color. When I was working in a bookstore I would hide in the backroom dripping and red in the same black dress every day and I would go to other bookstores and pretend to do research, would point out the anthology edited by my old employer, would fawn over Bettina Rheims monographs with black coffee in heels and gloves and I was obsessed with this. With proving to myself that I could be more than a wreck breaking espresso machines and selling zero rewards cards this quarter. When my strengths are buried under a pile of barren opportunities strictly in sales. Watching Ruth go from Horrids to Liberty made that recognitive click that I get when I know this girl I've just met, she and I can be friends, she possesses a central necessity. It is she in the space, how she feels in the space, that matters. Not the trite detail of how they are both department stores. It is all about context. I wonder how other people feel about this. Hypothetical girl probably does not know this.

My ice girl. I carve her into a swan.

I can't believe I found a copy of Bookforum with James Greer's review of Green Girl (in the capital area). He says the affection the narrator demonstrates for Ruth transcends the tone of her comments, the punishing tableaux. He says right. This part of the text turns the infrared on my massive insecurities. You know the ones that are never a problem and never a problem and one day they are the trash-filled sinkhole of your psyche, bringing the property value down, full of the weirdest things. Lately the thoughts I have given to the person in my life who has provided me with the greatest guidance have contributed to some mental disintegration - not to paint a portrait of myself as in crisis, but I am tremendously vulnerable. If I dwell at all I should dwell on how I have been strengthened and armed and ready. This is not about seeking approval. I have the attitude about approval that a television show would reconfigure into an eating disorder or academic perfectionism. Once I got the approval of a person I respected and per our professional relationship he did not know me. Not beyond what he needed to know. I am ejected from nightmares as if by a livid shake, in a state of emergency, when I dream about him being disappointed in me. This is not a real-life scenario. He would not condemn me. He would not harm me. This is internalized pressure. And the intense yearning of guidance that stringent. That I did not/do not believe I deserve. But I got it. I should get over it. Get in transit. Watch my reflection. Don't think about it.

I went to see Melancholia this past weekend. The first I saw of it was the poster on Kate Zambreno's briefly-lit tumblr. I was done unto as the rogue planet Melancholia did unto Earth.

I was going to be the maid of honor in a wedding this past summer. I was so close to this girl. I loved her so much. She was in a lot of pain the whole time. She is a tough person. She was muscling through it. I was not. I was caving everywhere. I didn't have any money. All my free waking hours were dedicated to getting myself out of disaster upon disaster. I was printing her save the dates and invitations and I kept encountering problems with the printing service. My computer had full motherboard failure in the middle of this. Other things. When I'm not performing to the standards of others - unwilling to talk, financially naked, falling asleep - I don't go out. I wasn't in good shape. She got very angry. We went to the beach. She and I and others. I spent the entire time in my room, crying. I didn't want to put anybody through me.

Many of the reviews I've read of Melancholia seem to have been written by people who have no frame of reference with regards to depression. That Justine's behavior comes off as dissatisfaction with the opulent wedding makes me feel even more grateful that art exists. All I could do when my friend - even if she did understand, that didn't matter - terminated our association with each other was watch Last Year at Marienbad. Why should I try to articulate what's wrong, Delphine Seyrig says, when I can show you, when I can turn all your words against you with the power of my images. There is a great power struggle between word and image in that film. She is unsure, though, of her kingdom. When she has a little downtime, she reads. She wishes she could be in control of the words, too, even though we're watching a movie, even though by controlling the image she wins (I believe she does). If I knew Ruth I would try to take her to see Last Year at Marienbad. If I succeeded, she might never speak to me again, but I'd feel good about succeeding.

In my own things I think of the refraction, the image of the self, as - because for me it is - a social anxiety, a yearning for solidarity, friendship, compassion in the minefield of girls. Control the image. The consistency is maddening among the faces, especially when it is all you. The quality of Ruth and Agnes' friendship is captured so exactly. I think it is stranger to yearn for friendship than for a sexual relationship. There is more at risk, more to alienate. Less is socially acceptable to articulate. When someone is after you for sex/intoxication/validation, that is so black and white to me. Friendship is so gray as to be sinister.

All I want desperately in the world is to hear someone else sing this song when they think they're alone in a hallway, on the bus, any place around me:

(from the Jane Austen Argument, "Bad Wine and Lemon Cake")
I want to rent a wife
then rent a husband to keep her for life.
The three of us, we could be so happy -
them, with each other,
me, with company.

I love that in the moment the Green Girl sex scene is just what would be made note of in that mindset, suddenly aware of your body as a performing body, of so many rules and shallow details. When Ruth walks past a phantom train, when the cold air baptizes her, that is when the naked Olly looked through her at Agnes. Only at Agnes. I've read/watched/overheard a lot of sex. This is the first depiction of a sexual incident in which I beheld anything really of my own experience that was not intangible. Not just a feeling. I feel days like a character of Dennis Cooper's. I feel days like Alfred Hitchcock. These outnumber the rare cool nights I feel like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de jour. Like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de jour's fantasies. Really it is just like Green Girl. Really Green Girl is so dead on.

(Anne Carson again, as Catherine Deneuve)
Do you know how diamonds get to us? Three hundred miles underground are heats and pressures that crush carbon into sparkling shapes, driven for months or days or hours along hotel corridors called diamond pipes until they erupt in a pile of taffeta and chocolate some moonlit afternoon...

I wish I could write reviews like Jeanette Winterson. I wish I could say something about Green Girl with the concise impact of her assessment of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood:

...reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.

These kind of feelings from me are never concise or so elegant. I wrote a real grown-up review of Green Girl that was rejected by several reputable publications. This was a really special lesson in humiliation. But it didn't say what I wanted it to say anyway. I wanted to address the intersection of my life and the book.

My life isn't even in perfect condition to receive the book. Instead of Amanda Palmer, I should be listening to PJ Harvey. Nothing penetrates me like White Chalk. I have to be careful about listening to it. Certain songs make me useless because they for their duration just live for me. They take care of everything and feel the last shred of feeling I've got to such an exact extent that I'm like, whatever. Like "To Talk to You." "To Talk to You" is about a girl's dead grandmother. She says she wants to talk to her because she has always been lonely. All my life - so this is not a single isolated incident, I am not freaking out over nothing. Says the narrator. She tried to give herself to someone and it didn't work. She wishes she was with her grandmother. She would have something special to impart. If they were talking, she would come up with something far more profound and cathartic than just this wish for this conversation the quality of which could never exist. Grandmothers are great platforms for projection. Kate wrote a post addressing a central challenge of the art form that is the blog before she erased it. There is no aesthetic distance in the blog. The internet is so interior. The impact when there is one is so atomic. In the times of Melancholia when one is in need of the planet-colliding power of someone's words, Kate Zambreno's blog really does it. And I think it was Amanda Palmer who says - who works so impossibly hard to keep her career she and the fans forever, who sweats blood for the people who buy her brilliant work - she says she wishes people would say "I love the album Who Killed Amanda Palmer" or "I love 'Good Day'" instead of "I love Amanda Palmer." I think it bears repeating that it is the artist's work that we need to be in dialogue with, that we need to hold up and praise. That would be easy if all the work produced by artists matched Green Girl in magnitude.

Get Green Girl in your life. This is my conclusion. I was forever failing easy papers in school because I cannot produce conclusions. In the writing of literature, meanwhile, I feel like conclusions are much more concrete things and it is a matter of finding that logical end as opposed to finding some false way of closing an argument. There is no argument here, to me, you should be reading Green Girl. The ineffectiveness of this is a great testament to why I write fiction and not criticism. If this were a story, it would end with me limping into a far-flung designated break-space in gigantic hyper-corporate agency headquarters, exhaling with a force to fog up my glasses, opening the book, resting on my dewclaw, exiting my life and entering Green Girl.

Lights! Camera!

2011-11-22T17:52:00.000-08:00

But no action just yet (Jean-Claude Brialy demonstrates appropriate affect).

Happening on my desktop now: proper gut-wrenching soul-bearing review of Kate Zambreno's Green Girl, HMag story about Harrisburg's second annual Book Fair, gushings about recent books from the Dusie Kollektiv, my date with Sebastian's Relativity, wonkily formatted proof of riding the lace barometer that needs to be de-wonked and on its way to ISMs headquarters yesterday, my own weird things. So I am not too, too happening on the internet.

I struggle to think about anything but the outrageously perfect cover art my best friend Kara has created for Say you're a fiction. I am all a-throb with it.

When I was young, coach called me the Tiger.

2011-11-14T19:52:00.000-08:00

I have an office in my home. Soon I'll be moving, and the space into which I move will become entirely my office. For now I'm fortunate to have this little space. In my office I have a white board where I have listed ten goal publications. They've been there for over a year now, and I'm crossing one out today, all mad and ecstatic and sassy.

I am super proud to be included in issue 10 of Caketrain, coming out around this time next year. The story they've accepted is called "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and it's among my favorite things I've ever done. It accomplished everything I wanted it to in this grim, tight coil and I was so excited to send it to them. I met Amanda and Joseph last October and got to purchase a mess of their wares in person (I can't get over - as someone who really loves roving bookstores and hiding and reading and reveling in the solitude of this pursuit - how completely amazing it is buying books from presses and authors and wish that could be all it is all the time). This bore no influence over their decision, since they'd forgotten my name, which made me feel - yes! - awesome because I got in on the merit of the work! And I really believe in my work and the work is what counts! My heart is coming out of my clothes! They said "The story is just amazing. It practically stood up and demanded to be published." That really means everything to me. It's been a crazy year. This was just the flavor of high-five I needed.

In about the same breath, I received a rejection from Birkensnake. I have been rejected by them three times, but this most recent time came with an "almost" - almost! Which is so exciting! Even though individual issues are available on their website, I cannot stress the pleasure that comes with handling the Chemlawn covers - the texture and the craftsmaniship is so enjoyable itself. They are at the top of my list and it is my infinite pleasure to continue shooting for them. I prefer this feeling in the face of rejection, that "this is why I'm doing this!" that I feel going for a goal publication vs. "why am I doing this." No question mark because it thuds at the end, that lament. Some days. Not today.

Last, quick: My goodbye to Borders at HMag.

Sebastian's Relativity.

2011-11-10T22:05:00.000-08:00

Anobium's first chapbook title found its way to me today. Sebastian's Relativity by Jonathan Greenhause is one of the most achingly fetching little books I've held in my hands in recent memory. I'm going to read it in bed, but I'm excited enough about the design to mention it prematurely.

Maybe you write brilliant poetry that deserves to be wrapped in such beautiful gauze? Get cozy with Anobium. I am totally stunned by this work.

Who's afraid of life without false illusions?

2011-11-07T17:12:00.000-08:00

1. I lied. I planned on seeing Zoe Boekbinder, but instead my boyfriend and I had a crazy couples' night with my best friend Clare and her boyfriend. We watched DS9. When I was awake in her house alone at 5 a.m., I took a hot-tub-bubble-bath and read the Purity Myth, which Clare is loaning me, which I cannot put down.

2. In a job orientation today, when asked to produce an interesting personal fact, I brought up the chapbook to applause. Say you're a fiction! July 2012!

3. I read about an acceptance of one of my favorite pieces of a new work to Anomalous Press while I was eating an outrageous hummus pita. Given its chronological proximity the Jessica Valenti hot-tub-bubble-bath, I refuse to speculate that I'm hoarding all the good in the universe. I choose to see this as the initiation of an undying trend. I love Anomalous, and the little story of mine they're going to feature was inspired by the Cocteau Twin's "Pearly Dew-Drop's Drops."

Typewriter girl.

2011-11-03T18:41:00.000-07:00

Zoe Boekbinder, singer of my favorite song, "Typewriter Girl," is playing tomorrow night in Baltimore at Space 2640, and I'm going to be there, freaking out.

Book Challenge 22.

2011-11-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

Small pressing matters.

2011-10-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

Seven Kitchens Press is releasing Erin M Bertram's new collage/chapbook monster the Vanishing of Camille Claudel and I am all over it! I am formulating the cover and will be tackling the layout, too, in addition to creating some promotional materials that will appear here as well as on the new www.SevenKitchensPress.com (which is new in the sense that it's never been a dot com before, but soon it will look like a whole new site, too). I love Erin's poetry and working on her December 09 SK title Inland Sea was glorious!

I don't think I mentioned also how amazing it was to meet Pedro Ponce at &Now. His talk about panoptic fiction, the "form" of surveillance, was riveting even in the face of constant near-unconsciousness that plagued me late in the afternoon every day of the festival. I am madly ecstatic that he loved the design of his Homeland: a Panorama so much! I am outrageously lucky to have gotten to handle that release! AND to have the help of Roxanne Carter in making the cover beautiful.

Anobium is STILL OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS to issue the second to be released in the spring! This is such a miraculous issue! I'm really proud of it and really excited to be involved in its release! I guess it should be out sometime around AWP. Like AWP 2012, Anobium is in Chicago, and I will be, too. Meanwhile, the first Anobium chapbook, Sebastian's Relativity, has raked in over $1000 on Kickstarter (twice our goal!) and five days still remain to donate to the project. Copies will fly into the arms of their intendeds the last day of this month, otherwise only a few less than fifty copies remain. I really can't wait to see where the chapbook series heads.

Slightly earlier in 2012 than AWP, Riding the Lace Barometer by j/j hastain will be out from ISMs Press, and it is looking delirious! I am finishing up the formatting and design. I just figured out the specs and am printing proofs. Next weekend. After I celebrate Halloween with my college buddies. But this is a really beautiful little book. ISMs also recently worked with Tantra Bensko, my roommate from &Now on the Cabinet of What You Don't See. She is a radiant human being and her writing is crazy and fun and it is a joyous scene here at ISMs.

This is a lot to look forward to. I'm going to sleep until then. I can't stand the excitement!

Laura, don't go there! Leo, no!

2011-10-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Juliet Cook's killer Thirteen Myna Birds, the new issue is celebrating Halloween with three poems from Say you're a fiction! Thirteen Myna Birds is a Twin Peaks reference. My best friend Clare is being Laura Palmer for Halloween. Among my favorite moments from &Now included Roxanne, Tantra, Kara and I collectively yessing and squealing over Twin Peaks. My boyfriend and I are halfway through the second season. This is our second viewing, and we're dedicating this one to the composition of a spontaneously imagined Cooper/Truman fanfiction.

In conclusion: an extreme thumbs-up to Thirteen Myna Birds.

Ex machina.

2011-10-23T23:56:00.000-07:00

Women's Quarterly Conversation - a site I love full of interviews with poets (like Juliet Cook, editor of Blood Pudding Press and Thirteen Myna Birds, where pretty soon more parts of Say you're a fiction will be available) has linked to me as Enigma Machine. I am very proud of this, and it was nice to be reminded again how continuously excited to embark on Enigma Machine. And how happy I am to be being slow about it. I'm relentlessly miserable at practicing restraint when it comes to fun. And reading submissions is my idea of fun. Submissions will be open in May, right after my birthday. I am all ready devastatingly proud of it. I won't say anything more until the new year. It isn't very far away at all. I'm pretty overwhelmed at that.

Sandwich panel.

2011-10-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

I sometimes get off work at six and now it is dark when I leave, and the weather is perfect and breezy. There's a cafe I like to go to during the day and one I like to go to at night. The night cafe is courthouse-themed and their menu reads like "sandwich panel" and "gluten-free litigators." Under penalty of law I admit to making up one of those.

Also from &Now that I thought about winding through streets: Lucy Corin's voice shaking as she read what felt like page after brilliantly horrible page of dead baby jokes. Danielle Vogel's powerful vulnerability addressing ritual, writing, and the absence of Selah Saterstrom. Bhanu Kapil recorded some wonderful moments on her blog.

The New Fraktur Arts Journal has a new website! And if you click on that third issue, you can check out Diablerie, the mammoth synopsis of the the movie the characters are making in my chapbook Say you're a fiction. You can purchase New Fraktur III in the flesh online on the selfsame site or by visiting Emmaus, PA. I wound up in Emmaus on my way back from seeing Metropolis when the restored print came to Philadelphia.

Diablerie is called "a film in a novel" because Say you're a fiction was initially conceived as a much more gigantic project. Someday it might be. Now I am content to be very, very proud of it for the chapbook that it is. It's on the bigger side, almost 40 pages. It will feel so good in your hands.

At Amanda Palmer's blog she is addressing the blog vs her own art, as are Niina Pollari and Autumn Giles on the podcast I'm listening to. From the comments on AFP's blog:

I've just started studying English Language and Literature at Oxford University and in our first class last week we were given anonymous extracts of writing and were asked the question "What is literature?" We identified most of the extracts from the start, but still we unanimously put each piece in the literature pile. These included great poetry, novels, television scripts, diaries, speeches, greetings card verses, bible passages, conversation transcripts...and blogs. We discussed how, in 400 years time, any writing from today has the potential of being studied as literature or art and how Shakespeare was not considered art at the time. We also talked about how these were all literature, but not necessarily *good* literature. All art is subjective and in my opinion anything that either intends to be or is interpreted as art, is art, blogs and tweets obviously included. But that does not mean we have to like it.

Amanda Palmer has brought so many good things to me, including Zoe Boekbinder, singer of "Typewriter Girl," who I'm going to see at Space 2640 (Baltimore) with my best friend Clare in November. I hope we will be cold and I hope Zoe will hug us.

More &Now.

2011-10-19T13:20:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to see much of the Montevidayo crowd, but every time Joyelle McSweeney was in the room, everything was electrified with happiness. She almost ran squarely into me outside a bathroom and did a wonderful, graceful twirl to turn it into a dance.

I missed that panel to go to the New Media & Collaborative Performance panel.

You understand.

I also had to miss most les Figues action, but that did not stop Vanessa Place's severity from being one of my favorite parts of the shebang. Her joke at the Matters of Mind panel was my favorite. Just my favorite.

Tantra Bensko was an unbelievably kind, flexible, patient, fun, glorious roommate. It was a mad, infinite pleasure meeting and speaking sparing to Roxanne and Kate Z. I was very comforted not to be alone in half-finished thoughts and total pulverization by the weather, the campus, and the crowds. It was so so worth it to hear pieces of Heroines and Glamorous Freak. Now my body demands that walk from the hotel to the campus. Even though I was so rancid, that movement was stunning. I am made for treks like that.

I'm still waiting for my synapses to start speaking again. Whole thoughts forthcoming. I learned today how rotten this blog looks on a PC.

Death, sleep & the traveler.

2011-10-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

&NOW TOP 5

EXCESSIVE JOY

Kate Zambreno, Kate Durbin, Bhanu Kapil, Amaranth Borsuk and Johannes Göransson each individually KNOCKED ME OUT. Kate Z read from Heroines and from that sliver it totally engorged my excitement over that book to throbbing proportions; Kate D's whoremoans went audaciously unpardoned; Bhanu lit herself on fire then doused it out with Chanel no. 5 (at least, that is the history that I am waiting to see repeated); Amaranth's reading voice became my favorite extent thing besides Between Page and Screen; Johannes' version of the Lion King is now the only version. This panel was so full of joy and excitement and vigor and beautiful people and while my archivist impulses are really, really not great, I did record the audio. The mic was shy, so the audio is extra not great, and it is in two very lopsided parts (the entire panel proper is in the first file, the q&a populates the second) but it is worth it.

Piss Lisas

Niina Pollari's presentation about Tytti Heikkinen was perfect in all ways: Niina is a beautiful and awesome person and it was intensely delightful to meet her; I would have paid as much as I did for the Lincoln Towncar that dragged my poor, poor body back to San Diego International for the photocopy of "Anal Sex Throughout the Ages" and the Pissis diagram. Action Books is releasing Niina's translation of Heikkinen's Fatty XL poems this coming year and how that is going to be among my favorite favorite books ever I cannot qualify/quantify - I would have to demonstrate and that would involve so many unsightly gestures. On this note I'm glad the heat/the uphill-both-ways quality of la Jolla prevented me from presenting too glamorized a version of myself at &Now. I think I came off like this (that is: alternately floored as if I'd been plugged three times, or adorably senile).

OMGCaroleMasoCaroleMasoCaroleMasoOMG

I did not even mention this in my post about why I wanted to go to &Now but reading that Carole Maso was delivering the keynote address was the factor that pushed me over the edge into deciding to go. Her speech was on the first night. I arrived the night before and Kara and I got pho for dinner. The pho was huge, so I wanted to finish it for dinner the next night. After all the panels I was broken and sopping and dragged myself back to the hotel to finish my pho, even knowing how the walk back to campus would amplify how totally rancid I was. I did it. I found the ballroom where the speech was to be given and after the speech and her reading from Mother and Child that I was SO SO thrilled about and could have listened to her read from forever I got to speak to her and told her oh, I came all the way from Pennsylvania to see you here! Here being this once and a lifetime assemblage of brilliant and beautiful writers. But of course this elicited a giggle and knowing shake of the head and she went "oh Kari I live in Rhode Island" which was pretty great. ALSO it was not as if I was expecting that anyone would do this but I was so pleased (am so pleased) to be ready for the question "have you published anything?" with "YES I HAVE" which is better than "no...no..." with emphases on the ellipses. The one time I was asked was by Carole Maso. "Yes, I have a chapbook coming out from Dancing Girl," I said, and all at once she congratulated me and validated all my recent decisions (pho, working instead of going to school, the Man Ray monograph, etc, everything was cast in the glow of her).

People

Oh just everybody. Everybody! Amina Cain and Anna Joy Springer for writing rollicking books and putting &Now together with their bare hands. Roxanne Carter for the shred of Glamorous Freak footage and the incredible/sad story about her diaries magically turning into ramen. Tantra Bensko for being a cheerful and incredible roommate. Joanna Ruocco for the allusion to the Kari Festival (a real thing that happens in Norway) in her very gracious autograph. I swooned all over San Diego getting to see and sometimes speak to so many amazing writers who inspire and overwhelm me. I had the extreme privilege of talking to Amaranth Borsuk a tiny bit outside Atkinson Hall (everyone is fortunate not to have engaged in any more than a tiny bit of talk with me - I would have fallen asleep on them) and I told her that as soon as two years ago maybe I thought all writers were dead or - I don't know - Susan Orlean. Someone totally ensconced in a platinum swank job with an institutional affiliation and there was no visible struggle to me or small fervid ecstatic subculture as I was used to digging in music and art.

New Work

I missed the first panels the first two days being a wreck and needing coffee despite waking up dehydrated. But the last day I was not into that and took a cab to campus and I was so overjoyed that I did because current grad students at Brown were giving a tiny, intimate reading. I was really really hoping to see brand new people (to me) reading brand new work and it was not loud and I was just waking up and it was perfect beyond hyperbole. Especially Mary Wilson's poem made out of Nicki Minaj lyrics.

You'll miss me honey certains des jours.

2011-10-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving for &Now tomorrow night! I am a little scrambled. Last week at work, the engineer leaned over and said, "Kari, Kari - I think great minds are really tortured." That didn't flow appropriately, those statements, but I didn't want to forget about it.

I mean to say I'm scrambled as a segue to assert how I have not properly freaked out about Say you're a fiction. I didn't even use the possessive in my announcement. Say you're a fiction is MY little book of twenty-eight poems and two epigraphs and a lot of references to the Tempest. One long poem occupies seven pages. This is the poem appearing in the New Fraktur Arts Journal vol. III, which comes out while I'm at &Now. The Pittsburgh Small Press Festival was this past weekend. I had to miss it this year because my boyfriend's brother had his wedding. But I went last year with Ron Mohring and talked about the character/s that Anna Karina plays in the films of Godard, how interested I am in that story of that character. Working in the classroom we'd take over to make books, I think I handled Alluvium, Erin Bertram's Dancing Girl title, I was definitely aware of it. And I thought yes! This is an aesthetic I want to be involved in. I love the form of the chapbook. It is responsible for ninety-eight percent of the good time I had in college. And I think I'm going to be reading in Pittsburgh. I don't know when. But all of that is so perfect.

I do not get publicly fired up about my ambition but this fulfills one of the rigid and unreasonable goals I had set for myself upon graduating and I did it! I really want to celebrate with my boyfriend by making gin and tonics out of the gin he was given as a gift for his role in the wedding. Its label describes how strange it is and says enjoyed by a tiny handful of people all over the world - we're not for everyone!

Book Challenge 21.

2011-10-06T19:32:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 20.

2011-10-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the future?

2011-10-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

1. I went to see Tabloid with my boyfriend. We were in line for tickets when I saw a poster for Miranda July's the Future in front of which stood an elderly gentleman waiting for the bathroom. I pointed and yelled "THE FUTURE" and the old man, frightened out of his senses, flew out of its way.

2. Anobium has a $500 Kickstarter campaign happening as we speak. That amount goes a long, long way on a little venture like Anobium. The campaign is in support of our first chapbook, Sebastian's Relativity by Jonathan Greenhause. Rosebud Ben-Oni gave to it, and I would encourage you to follow her example in all things. She is appearing in the forthcoming and unreasonably gorgeous Anobium vol II, due out in the spring, and is among the chief reasons for its gorgeousness. Submissions are still on.

3. Tabloid was so great. I avoided reading anything about it or the case involved before watching. I just knew it was lurid. The way it started with Joyce McKinney in a wispy princess in the woods by a brook seventies white dress situation reading from her very special love story drove me wild - and the face that the film went in some somewhat satisfying directions, which were fascinating (beyond hyperbole), but not what I was yearning for after that opening, have me thinking about it continuously. I love its porousness and lack of psychological investigation. I love the guy obsessed with the term "spread-eagled." I love that each individual who participated in the film was so obsessed with a particular aspect to the story that no one was presiding over its arc, what it all could mean. Even the director was so excited to get to the part about cloning dogs that little was done to effectively marry the first part to that part. I love that it was called a cross between Rashomon and Looney Tunes.

Tomorrowland Forever!

2011-09-28T00:39:00.000-07:00

The festival is in sixteen days. Kara just told me there's a Whole Foods by the hotel, and I'm freaking out all over again. I am always nervous going somewhere new, not knowing where to buy sushi. My protein situation is dire.

Some of the panels and panel-dwellers I am most thrilled to see:

Prose Poetry/Flash Fiction: the Orphic Genre with Alta Ifland, Joanna Howard, Joanna Ruocco, Anthony Tognazzini, and Peter Grandbois

Our panel seeks to explore the narrative possibilities of highly condensed prose modeled on the Orphic descent as opposed to the dominant model of the Freytag ascent in western literature.

I love Joanna Ruocco's writing. I reviewed her Man's Companions for a forthcoming issue of Prick of the Spindle but the review is really just a meek plea to check every available thing by her out. She and Joanna Howard addressing this topic is a dream. The pieces of a Compendium of Domestic Incidents that were in Web Conjunctions completely knocked me out with how massively the mood ulcerates in such a tiny space. "Josephine's Father" is just badass. That's how I really review.

What's That Mess? It's Excess! with Kate Durbin, Kate Zambreno, Amaranth Borsuk, Bhanu Kapil, and Johannes Göransson

This panel enacts and explodes the history of aesthetic excess as it pertains to experimental literature, in particular the literature of madness, the internet/technology, and the feminine. Excess may not belong in the institution, yet it seeps out of the cracks in the walls.

Every single person on this panel blows me away. If you are someone who found this googling the phrase tattooed on Frances Bean Cobain's back, take heed: Kate Durbin just heaped hundreds of panties onto Sunset Boulevard. Kate Zambreno's Green Girl is out in four weeks and it will do such things to you maybe you will never say them because they'll live in you forever because she said them so perfectly (although the book she will read from in this panel is Heroines for which I am so excited - I have not been this excited for a book since Nabokov's the Original of Laura which was just a fetish object that I needed to clutch and cry at college because I was so weird, going crazy the senior year that turned into my junior year). Amaranth Borsuk co-authored the forthcoming Excess Exhibit with the aforementioned Ms. Durbin and as we speak is teaching the coolest classes at MIT. I recently contributed to public transit's culture of total discomfort by crying like an idiot reading Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: a Space for Monsters and her Schizophrene just came out and I can't wait to cry over that, too. Johannes Göransson is in this month's Evening Will Come and I will get to in a little how jazzed beyond reason I am about Montevidayo. This is an arena rock concert. Not "the literary equivalent of" or anything like that. I hope I'm not the only one ripping my top off. I expect a lot out of the UCSD crowd.

"Guarding the Fort," which consists of Borderland in Panopticon: all parts of the interior visible from a single point with Chris Mazza, On Pornography and Common Sense with Rob Halpern, Homeland Insecurity: Panoptic Fictions with Pedro Ponce, and Cascadian Poetics y Haibun de la Serna with Paul E. Nelson

An exploration of surveillance as a metaphor and structuring device for narrative.

Yes! Mr. Pedro Ponce is a Seven Kitchens author and his book, Homeland: a Panorama in 50 States is my favorite 7K title ever! I got to spend a year with its proofs and the mad mad ravishing Roxanne Carter, of whom I'll speak in a second, lent her photography to the cover. They are such flamboyantly uneasy stories! So funny and awful and abruptly cold and visible everywhere.

Seeing Stars with Tisa Bryant, Roxanne Carter, Masha Tupitsyn, Ronaldo Wilson, and Kate Zambreno

For this creative panel, we will celebrate our own literary works that are star-struck, rapturous and consumptive about not only these images that flicker and grace our screens but also the embodiment of the stars that play these myths, examining ourselves and our own ambivalences, our simultaneous roles as fans as well as critics.

Maybe this is the rock concert. Tisa Bryant is one of the editors of one of my favorite projects living today, the Encyclopedia Project, and is one of the people about whom I know less and am all the more excited to see live. I love falling for art in person. I went to see Amanda Palmer in Philadelphia in the winter of 2008 and her opening bands were Vermillion Lies and the Builders and the Butchers and I am fervently, voraciously, soul-crushingly in love with their music and it hitting me right there in the crowd for the first time was revelatory. Roxanne Carter's Glamorous Freak is due out soon. It cannot come out soon enough because everything she has published of it is maze-like and mesmerizing and that Jaded Ibis rocks enough to feature all of the gorgeous photographs that accompany the work makes me dread not being able to afford the limited-art-edition of it. Since I was unfamiliar with Masha Tupitsyn I googled her and her latest book, Laconia, came out ten days after my birthday and is about "whether we can any longer truly see corporatized cities like LA and NY other than in old movies, how to understand David Lynch's women, and whether there is any real possibility for connection in social media, or for that matter, in watching films," so the fact that I am not all ready a gigantic fan is offensive to me. Here is where Kate Zambreno will read from Green Girl and that all these works of art are being read together is the most unreasonably perfect thing. I am so proud of the time I live in that this art is happening, that this is the art of my time on Earth.

"Women on Women and Bodies," which consists of a Curious Body: Shelley Jackson's 'My Body' with CA Schaefer, a Species Spectacle: the Hybrid Body Narratives of Djuna Barnes and Bhanu Kapil with Cristina Milletti and Christine Hume, Interlacings: Rae Armantrout and Susan Howe's Filigree-Work with Elisabeth Joyce, and Banal new world: Fatty XL and narratorship in the work of Finnish Poet Tytti Heikkinen with Niina Pollari

Tytti Heikkinen's Fatty XL represents a new kind of narrator - one who has no desire to grow despite the public backlash against her for it.

Being a massive fan of the work of Shelley Jackson, Djuna Barnes, Bhanu Kapil, and Susan Howe, I am still looking forward to Niina Pollari on Tytti Heikkinen most of all. Niina is a Birds of Lace author and I love the juxtaposition of "no desire to grow" with the name Fatty XL.

21st Century Lit as Mashup with Roxanne Carter, Janice Lee, John Dermot Woods, c. vance, Christopher Grimes, and Doug Rice

Jaded Ibis Press authors discuss their perspectives on the convergence of their literary manuscripts with visual art, music and video, focusing on what these collaborations tell them about interpretations of their own writing and what they see as future creative possibilities provided by the Press' multiple-edition/multimedia collaborative structure.

Jaded Ibis' vision is utopian and I love their promotion of a new generation of art collectors. Everything about it from the commitment to print-on-demand to the authors they've worked with so far - I am sad Anna Joy Springer isn't here but she is in charge of the entire festival, so slack is cut - this is what it all ought to look like, publishing, all this joy.

Montevidayo Omnibus Reading with Sarah Fox, Johannes Göransson, Lucas de Lima, Joyelle McSweeney, Monica Mody, and Megan Milks

This panel showcases the creative work of six Montevidayo contributors to highlight the ways in which the aesthetic ideas developed on the blog - which include the necropastoral, atrocity kitsch, ghost theory, and queer, carnal, and animal poetics - are exercised in their writing.

This was the only spot where I was split squarely between two panels but I don't think I can pass this up. I had a really bleak week recently where I stayed in and read Montevidayo, grateful to the marrow that it was free and even if I didn't now have this fuzzy attachment to it, necropastoral is a powerful bargaining chip. Sad that Danielle Pafunda isn't here, she's my favorite contributor, but I think I would cross the US just to see this, anyway. Sans everything else I've just talked about.

Also my festival roommate, Tantra Bensko, will be reading - I don't know where or when, but I am intensely looking forward to that, too. And partying in the Whole Foods parking lot with my best friend the farthest away from Pennsylvania that I've ever been.

When you see your own photo, do you say you’re a fiction?

2011-09-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

Say you're a fiction is forthcoming in the summer of 2012 from Dancing Girl Press! If you like your poetry full of assassinations, lavaliers of talking portraits, and Alfa Romeos, Say you're a fiction is the ride for you!

A tsunami-sized psychic squeeze for Kristy Bowen whose response time was really like lightning, and also for accepting Andrea Quinlan's We Speak Girl. 2012's got the radiance.

Life is a dream when you're reeling.

2011-09-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

I am in rare form tonight! Capturing thoughts so lucidly! I've been a mess at communicating lately. Misspelling names I'm perfectly familiar with. Reproducing "I read this study of..."-stories full of inadequate insights. I heard myself do that today in the office and was like ugh you are the worst.

I edited an entry by an intern for an ezine. I taught him how to pronounce "ezine." I edited the entry. I got some glowing observations from my coworkers about my approach, my attempt to have some impact on the way he writes vs. making sure there are no embarrassing spelling errors. My greatest strength as an editor comes from my highly specialized intellect - that is, whatever I'm reading about, it's madly likely it's not anything I know about. What I know a lot about is pretty finite. But if I am reading an entry for an ezine and I do not understand what it's about, you've failed me. You've failed to teach me about the intersection of sports grills, new media, and effective marketing. And I will take your face to school.

I persist in gold-medalling the "you know what I'm talking about so I'm just going to omit the subject from the body of my statement and intuit it via your undoubtedly perfect recall of our last conversation four months ago that was half on Twitter and half in the hallway during break at work and your well-honed psychic skills" category. I need to demand of myself WHAT ARE YOU DOING all the time. Leave no chance utterance unmonitored.

&Now is so close. Three weeks. I am so grateful one of my best friends is going with me. And it is the first time I will travel a significant distance, the second time I've ever been on a plane, my first time to California - where my dad is from. Kara and I got seats together and traded off window seats and she is bringing her sketchpad. I anticipate falling asleep on her shoulder and enjoying a good, neurotic, hopefully mute sob because I am so lucky. That this exists - this is a fucking rock concert of awesome, and all I want to do is fangirl and rip my intellectual top off and TAKE IT IN, the treasure of people writing real good important glorious radiant things now while I'm alive, things that matter to me in ways that are really altering things that badly need altering - and that I can afford to go, this marks a significant development in my life that still feels otherwise like a suspiciously long vacation. Because it is fall and it's been flooding here and I've had pangs of gloom and panic my whole person is convinced I am still in Williamsport and I am sleeping through class and I will wake up in the awful weather and desolate, empty town alone with the knowledge of my ruptured GPA. That this trip is in October is so perfectly what I need to reinforce to myself: I did sleep in, I missed a 3.0 by one point, and it is still totally fine.

Please I want so badly for the good things to happen.

2011-09-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

Quoth Plath.

Up to my eyelashes in action.

1. There is a local press that put up a notice for part-time copy editors months ago. I responded, and even though I wasn't selected, the publisher responded saying he'd keep my CV on file. I got one or two other emails subsequently, alerting me of editorial vacancies that were out of my league or area of specialization. One day I received an email about a part-time, paid vacancy for a nonfiction editor with a very tiny window of opportunity to submit. I responded and the next day got a notification that I was selected from over a hundred applicants to interview for this position. I am still proud of this. I didn't get the position because although I impressed the publisher on many levels, there is nothing about my professional history that screams I can edit the face off of nonfiction. Still an excellent experience that entrenched me ever deeper into this man's mind with the phrase "paid editorial assistant." Someday.

2. I came home from my boyfriend's Sunday night to find stacked up on my bed packages containing an advanced copy of Kate Zambreno's Green Girl from Emergency Press, an extra copy of Joanna Howard's In the Colorless Round from Noemi Press (I ordered this earlier in the month, it arrived safely, so safely it's here again!), business- and postcards from Anobium to distribute at &Now, and the new issue of Poetry. On top of all of these (none of which I paid for, except Poetry, to which I subscribed during their sale) was a self-help book of my mother's about controlling one's desire for material objects. I thought this was great. I explained to my mom that I didn't do any reckless spending in pursuit of those items when what should turn up on my doorstep but a copy of Laurie Weeks' Zipper Mouth that I clearly ordered from Amazon (it came a month early, just to sabotage me).

3. On Zipper Mouth: "My copy arrived early! I don't want to do anything but fall in and out of sleep all day, waking only to parts of this book. Ugh, desire." Abitha Denton on me on Zipper Mouth: "I thought you said '...waking only to part this book' and thought, oh, awesomely graphic metaphor for that cover."

It's like sex it's like my daughter.

2011-09-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

Anne Sexton is excellent company on my rough rough morning (see also).

SteelStacks.

2011-09-12T19:23:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend's brother is getting married in a few weeks. To celebrate, we went with he and his fiancee to the arts space at SteelStacks in the old Bethlehem Steel plant. The arts center is across from the ruins, which they illumine after dark.

We went to see the Found Footage Festival, which is one of the favorite things of my boyfriend and his brother. The guys responsible for FFF, Joe and Nick, were getting food at the Mike & Ike Bistro (whaat) when we arrived, getting in line behind them, then ultimately sitting next to them in an otherwise gigantic, vacant lobby. So I thought my boyfriend knew they were there. He did not. We could take alcohol into the theatre. Something happens to me when I see Bob Odenkirk that happens when I see no other human.

Press.

2011-09-07T18:20:00.000-07:00

All this plus my ability to carve out a plan of action for Enigma Machine. So I want to say: the ideology behind this project is my love of new writing, of writers, of perpetuating and encouraging. I want to pay to read the work I love. I set the compensation for $50 per contributor now with submissions to open in May, which is half of what I was hoping to provide but this is safe for now since I can definitely pay $50 on my own, so with absolutely no help I can do that, and with donations, more. And people can order copies, and copies will be lovingly printed, probably with some hand-written annotation like a notebook passed around in high school, but no copies will be printed without a home to go to. Every book a wanted book. And hopefully individualized ebook-format archives. All I care about is having fun and reading things and supporting people who do work that delights and inspires me with a little more than a congratulations. I'm a poor congratulator. I think it is my distrust of language.

I also understood right from the start that it would take everything.

2011-09-05T20:56:00.000-07:00

For the amount of jobs to which I've applied in the last year, I have interviewed for slightly less than half of them. A few of these interviews were for jobs - bill-paying, full-time - with some editorial responsibility, but most of them were not. They were all local, and this not being any kind of hub of printed writing, I'm pretty impressed with that. In virtually every interview, though, I was asked how I prioritized writing and how I managed this responsibility versus working. This question has come from a place of spontaneous curiosity and respect on the part of the interviewer. This question has been met with relentless shock and awkwardness on the part of the interviewee. I find I volley veiled insults and defensive attitudes with practiced ease.

One interviewer, gravely put off by my experience managing a staff and proofreading manuscripts, oblivious to my recent experience in programming and technical assistance (for a job that required both varieties of experience), asked me three times in the course of a half-hour - riding all the way an ascending current of totally annoyed with talking to me - why I majored in English, of all things. I was genuinely mean. It felt right to assert my dissatisfaction with her questions.

A trap I fall into - as distinguished from traps that I am inured to spotting, which don't really exist - is such: I go in for a job I can definitely perform, way below my skill level, met with some enthusiasm by the interviewer. Interviewer launches battery of enthused inquiries about writing, editing, publishing. I talk myself into oblivion about it. I vanish. No conclusions have been drawn about my ability to code medical insurance information or answer phones, but I feel awesome and rare.

After competently establishing the service-oriented-nature of my employment history, a recent interviewer who had made me feel very human asked me about writing, what my goals were, if I wanted to pursue graduate study. We got into it, and my hands went into grave-digging convulsions. I was completely honest about it. I usually take this position when I decide I want the interviewer to rue the day she/he met me. This was the job I got. In the interview.

The pay is so good I can self-finance Enigma Machine. Kara, the Production Designer, is coming with me to &Now, and our registrations are in and our room is set thanks (forever and ever and ever) to ISMs author Tantra Bensko. And the time is reserved from work. And I am finally prepared to get some elementary design happening on the website. Because I have a job. And I really put my life on hold in all ways and just held my breath waiting for that to happen with utter conviction that I wasn't going to die doing that. Or that I would annihilate myself in a conflation of my desire to pay off my student debt (that is not of unfathomable immensity but is real and finite and all ready a year behind me, a year during which I got so many other things accomplished so I can do this) with my desire to develop as a professional in a less-than-traditional manner, with my disdain for "professional" where art is concern where I'd prefer there be ardency, longing, obsessive enthusiasm and adrenaline-slicked, relentless work writing, editing, designing, printing, and my tendency to mix up "conflation" with "conflagration." Immolate my determination with my desire, and vice-versa.

I don't pit these necessities against each other. What I do for money right now is not my foremost concern. What I do with it comes in just behind what I can accomplish during my waking hours and that is what is important to me now. Shamefully under several other things is where I rank the getting of sufficient sleep (I am actively reshuffling).

I don't see why I would pit these necessities against each other to claim my place on the plateau of having professionalized my writing/attained the safety of a well-paying career. No one's making me pit these necessities against each other, either. I have spent a lot of time lately trying to locate that pressure. Part of it comes from my education. I think I got an incredible education at an extremely reasonable rate. I feel amazing every week setting that money aside to pay for it because I really feel daily the tremendous effects of it, how worth it it was, even the parts that I can't communicate efficiently on a CV, like my failing of Chaucer. I failed it. I'd fail it again. I want to excel and go back and tell the small people who made the strange decision to study writing in the kind of place that can kick off a Shining-esque psychotic break with all its isolation and dreariness what kinds of skills they are equipping themselves with, what kinds of things they can do with them. I don't want to reassure. Reassurance is poisonous. Any amount of firing-up, ignition, conflagration goes so far there. It's closed, it's small, it's far from everything. So I feel that.

This interview with Carole Maso, during whose keynote speech at &Now I will cry forever, which I read the day I got my new job, made me feel exponentially better, so amazing, not only because MOTHER & CHILD will be out in the spring. I always wrote and always strictly with the utmost irritating seriousness to myself, for myself, because I wanted to be good, I wanted to impress myself and make work I wanted to read, and that was all. To study it didn't occur to me until I liked it, I saw how it helped me, not as a writer alone but as a student and I felt proud of myself and learned how to place and achieve goals (time-wise, particularly) and that was, I think, the most important thing I've ever learned. To finish things. And she says: I also understood right from the start that it would take everything. I felt this. When I talk about writing, studying writing doesn't make one a writer, but tuition is a serious investment, and I knew if I did that, whatever I studied, I had to love it, I had to live up to it, and I knew I wasn't giving up writing anyway so I didn't go to it immediately. It felt more right than anything to go to it. It wasn't a lifelong dream...I had no romantic notions about it. I love it all - all the weird and terrible things. To become familiar with her and her work has been the foremost inspiring thing for me since finding Dennis Cooper when I was in middle school. Her total adherence to it at the expense of looking like the standard college-graduate success - commit to it, stick to it, love it. And Sing Heavenly Muse! That is the best.

I feel good about everything. Everything makes me feel good.

Il meglio albergo! Il meglio, il meglio!

2011-08-31T18:04:00.000-07:00

It is perfect that elimae is publishing my poem "Hot Light" because it explicitly references the movie the characters are making, Diablerie, and the "Synopsis of Diablerie" is forthcoming from New Fraktur. That is perfect! I say this now because the good Mr. Renner is putting it in the September issue which goes up tomorrow. Even though there is a lot of news I haven't gotten to yet because it's hanging in the balance of other things. This is plenty to be happy about.

One thing: I will be making more money now and I am going to get that Day-by-Day Les Figues membership. I want those TrenchArt titles!

Book Challenge 19.

2011-08-30T18:34:00.000-07:00

In today's room with today's view.

2011-08-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

This week's started off with a downturn to rival last week's radiance. I'm all right with that, because last week was still stunning, and I am still overwhelmingly happy about it all because I have it.

The first journal to accept my fiction, Sein und Werden, is published by the press ISMs, and I'm editing there now and hoping to enhance its web presence. Shine it up. I hope submissions are open. I'm fairly certain, since I'm editing something newly submitted right now, but I hope to read scores of gorgeous fiction and outfit it accordingly.

The phones in my house are set up, between upstairs and downstairs, to ring in a call-and-response manner. Whoever is responsible for this is my new arch rival.

The surrounding hullaballoo.

2011-08-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Things keep happening. I'm not caught up.

Last month I won $75 from Anobium Books, a very new Chicago press. I don't take charity gracefully, and to pay them back, I've joined their masthead. I'm working on networking Anobium's way into the heart of east coast bookstores and libraries. Their submissions period for issue two is ON.

Every time I think I've processed everything I am overwhelmed anew: the program schedule for &Now is out. I am so lucky to go to this. I wouldn't have the time or money if I was in school.

Set the house on fire.

2011-08-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

This week is action-packed. I am going to focus on one thing at a time. That is my new thing, my biggest new thing: not being all over the place.

The first thing - the biggest thing, I retract my previous statement - is that I love, am all a-throb and heatedly and voraciously and viciously a fan of all the art that Kate Zambreno makes.

I like a lot of writing, I like the act of reading. I have a lot of books and I spend a harrowingly comparable amount of time reading writing online as well as in print. Of all the books I have, there is a shelving unit in my office where I have approximately five cubbies - there are twelve that make up the whole unit - filled with the books I find vital. A quick survey: Sylvia Plath is dead, Colette is dead, Anais Nin and the anonymous author of Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. Anne Carson is still alive, and so is Carole Maso with two unreleased books in her queue, and Katherine Dunn had a story in the Paris Review this past year and that is all since Geek Love. Anna Kavan is dead, Kathy Acker is dead, Shirley Jackson, Clarice Lispector. AM Homes I won't buy another book from since she disowned authorship of the one I love. Mortality aside, of these, only three oeuvres get touted around by me fanatically, commitedly, inspire me endlessly: Plath, Carson and Kavan. When I read them I feel a constant yes. I feel at turns placated, understood, outdone in every capacity - it's all the other books, all the other stuff by everybody else that I read for a second, put away and write instead. When I read Plath, Carson and Kavan, it is all but then I saw the face of God and took the whole arm off.

Kate Zambreno is more important to me than them. It is different - I can enjoy an ultra-enmeshed relationship with reading Plath. I kept a copy of the Bell Jar - not my own copy - as a diary one year in college. But Kate Zambreno is making art that to me operates at that solar-white-blinding level of revelatory, and reading her - her blog, her fiction, her nonfiction - makes me feel the way I felt when I was fourteen, discovering Dennis Cooper. That was pivotal, discovering what fiction was capable of - but this was different, reading Kate Zambreno for the first time, discovering that fiction could be as staggeringly formed and speak to my experience. Which is to say: with Plath I feel the predilection for self-alienation, the apoplectic frustration with wording dread, Carson is distant and stellar and all the stuff about her father, ahhhh, and Kavan is void, the things that speak to her do so in a language that, in her translation, come across as paranoid and crazy, but her translation places her vulnerability to this, her mastery of this, at the forefront, and these are all important things to me, to see someone experience, but they are very different from me. And not that I am so insufferably singular - the experience of a girl who's been a teenage girl and been angry and had problems with the space she's occupied is pervasive and Kate Zambreno SINGS TO THAT.

One of my best friends and I went out to dinner and she told me about how, at her office, a female coworker constantly sexually harasses her, making the most audacious comments, and when my friend shut her down, there was an abrupt complaint to management that my friend dressed too provocatively. The next day, a male coworker made an unwanted advance, and when my friend, distraught, talked to one of her coworkers about it, this coworker advised her to just put up with it, since the recent managerial alert to her provocative dress would just prove that she was too much of a tart to let anyone get any work done. I told her: you need to read Kate Zambreno. This was my first impulse. This is the sign. This is all I want to do with art, that I can never do with art: say, with all conviction in every particle of my being: THESE WORDS HAVE THE POWER TO SAVE YOU.

And so when another of my best friends posted a Venn diagram marginalizing the work of Sylvia Plath that was constructed by the same individual who created one marginalizing Kate Zambreno, I - I did not say, I demonstrated, using the much more effective words of Kate and Jackie Wang how wrong that thinking is. Girl = emotional, girl = weak, girl = bad. I was repulsed. And I wanted to tell Kate Zambreno that she's my heroine, because I believe the work she does is important. And she has a book coming out this coming year called Heroines and it is the kind of book that I can't believe does not exist, that has to exist, that I am going to be giving to everyone I meet, as it looks like I might have a real, well-paying job soon it is really too soon to say and that is part of more news I plan on sharing in another post but so many books - the great great fucking miraculous King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes that really held me and rocked me gently after my college meltdown over how my paper on feminist writing and problems of autobiography turned into a grueling, graphic justification on why such a paper should exist, and Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy which frightens me constantly with how much I see its contents every day all around me - so many books I would like to turn everyone onto but Heroines is not just accurate or timely but VITAL. And Green Girl is coming out circa &Now when I will see Kate read and I am beside myself with excitement, for how it's all come together and I have a room and wonderful roommates and money and freedom to travel that I am celebrating with this trip. And I wanted to say something about this, and I did, and Kate had seen my tumblr, and thanked me, and said you are my heroine and linked my tumblr on her blog. And my hands are still shaking.

That is so cool.

My tumblr, my feelings about the form of the tumblr (which are lavish), and a lot of other news is forthcoming. So much. An avalanche.

L'art est la Solution au Chaos.

2011-08-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

Niina Pollari wrote wonderfully about the physical property of Courtney Love's singing and perpetuated the chain of Love as I spent my Friday listening to My Body, the Hand Grenade. A large part of my heart is allocated to the first half of that album, which are most of Hole's pre-Pretty on the Inside singles and the rage is bottomless.

I looked up and loved the lyrics before I heard the music because they reminded me of Sylvia Plath. I was eleven, and I learned "Cut" by heart. I never looked up the word in it I didn't know, trepanned, and the other day I was reading "Cut" while my boyfriend talked to his brother, during which he yelled, "You're getting trepanned for that," and explained it before I had to ask. My boyfriend is an amazing person.

We had just been bemoaning the telltale signs of store-death in Barnes & Noble and I bought the latest issue of Bitch wherein there is an article - "Nobody's Mother" - about the lineage of Elsie Fox -> Paula Fox -> Linda Carroll -> Courtney Love -> Frances Bean Cobain. All lyrics managed to be misquoted (except from "Softer, Softest") and the article was trashy. It flirted with the way each woman faced conspicuously the same struggle to be recognized as artists, but sopped that up with how it came at the expense of being mothers which I found distasteful. I would have rather heard more about their art. Then I ran into the Heidi Slimane pictures of Frances Bean on tumblr.

Right under a remark made by one of my best friends about how Sylvia Plath was a terrible mother.

Book Challenge 18.

2011-08-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

I was following the I.

2011-08-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

The entire novel has "fictional frills and timeline-rearrangements," not just the chapters dealing with "her breakdown, suicide attempt, and hospitalization and recovery." Coming from me this may be surprising but one must be careful when writing about Sylvia Plath and Esther Greenwood; one must be careful not to overly relate the writer and her creation. There are many instances where similar, real-life experiences took place but it is not one-to-one. For example, by all reports Plath could cook quite well, whereas Esther Greenwood lists the ability to cook as something she could not do.

Make my sleep his song.

2011-08-06T21:19:00.000-07:00

Broadcast and the Focus Group's "Make my Sleep his Song," set to Jean Renoir's "La Fille de L'eau."

And I cannot embed them, but this lovely girl with the wonderful tumblr Atelier Tovar reading Story of the Eye is the greatest thing to me, immobile with a barometric pressure headache on my first day off since October.

The throes of an invented situation.

2011-08-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

Or obliterating discourse. Solidarity, solidarity.

"An unparalleled muse who carefully rendered complex female characters and their most intimate relationships, she left behind a literary legacy that testifies to our shared struggles and to the threadbare connection between art and life." - jacket copy from Counterpoint's 2010 Caroline Blackwood collection Never Breathe a Word

In the poet Honor Moore's 2002 introduction to a reprinting of Blackwood's novel Great Granny Webster, she cites that the novel was a finalist for the Booker Prize, but lost solely on the grounds that—according to the single man who voted against it—"a tale so autobiographical could not stand as fiction."

"…when women include themselves as a character in their own work, the work is read as autobiography. When men do it—say Milan Kundera or Paul Auster—it is read as metafiction….Men are imaginative. Women write testimony and confessional." - Jeanette Winterson's introduction to Essential Acker: the Selected Writings of Kathy Acker

In a 1968 interview with the Paris Review, in response to being asked why it took her thirty years to begin writing, Anne Sexton said "I didn't know I had any creative depths." Sexton's attending physician informed her that the value of her poems lay in what was springing forth without her knowledge—the secrets she was too damaged to appreciate, that she had any depths at all—and not the skill with which they were crafted.

"After she finished "Medusa," Plath realized how little its strategy resembled that of her other October poems. Unlike "Bees," in which apparent autobiography is really calculated melodrama, or "Daddy" and "The Applicant," in which apparent autobiography is really black farce, "Medusa" relies for success on its artful construction: an imagined narrator, placed in the throes of an invented situation, responds in direct and emotional language….At no stage in her career did Plath engage in writing strict autobiography. Yet the strained voice of "Medusa"'s narrator echoed the pain Plath felt as she wrote the poem." - Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: a Biography of Sylvia Plath

My senior thesis on the problem of autobiography in literature written by women would not have gotten an A if it hadn't been graded by a man who makes his students' fathers cry. "I had no idea that female writers faced such a problem," he explained, and I had to present a defense with all the brutal statistics. You had no idea? Holy shit.

Book Challenge 17.

2011-08-04T17:48:00.000-07:00

It was the sound of her writing that woke me. Since you ask, this is what I remember. Her desk is just outside my room. Some days I hear sounds too loud. Some days I hear a crowd and there is no crowd.

Adult Books I don't understand.

2011-08-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

Because they circled me so assertively on Google+, I pre-ordered the first issue of Anobium and, in doing so, won a $75 gift card to Amazon! That $75 is now Kristeva's Black Sun and the gigantic Henry Darger monograph put together by the MOMA curator that is half for me and half for my boyfriend, whose birthday was yesterday, and who also has a brand new Abraham Lincoln coffee mug waiting for him.

The Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel has very kindly made mention of me on their site. I read "Diablerie" there on Thursday at my friend Maria's birthday reading. I didn't plan on reading anything, and I jotted down the details of its publication on a torn out piece of the mss the poem's from. I didn't provide my blog address or contextualize the poem - it's proper name is "Synopsis of Diablerie" as it is the synopsis of a film - I am a closed loop.

I was roundly advised to get business cards. This seems sound. Killer watermark ahoy.

I was reading the Bell Jar at 40 essay the other day when I ran across somewhere on some social network someone saying what a drag it was to be online-friends with so many writers; writing and that culture is all they talk about, as I was about to post a link to the essay. I have in my physical, tactile life one person I can talk to and two people I know personally at all with whom I can just strike up a conversation, segue-less, about critical poetics. Or Virginie Despentes. Or buying a Colette in translation from the nineteen-sixties. Or even making a jaunty Samuel Beckett allusion. About, I don't know, the tedium of the workday. Something you'd want to be haughty and pithy about when it's over because it's awful. People not just understanding aside - I understand the culture of the Nascar fan, even if I do not get a reference, I can pick up on the context of the allusion - it's the lack of solidarity. It's nice to feel a sense of place within something, and even if it's only a procession of links, it's reinforcing and justifying the validity of something I love. All that desire for that kind of context could inspire intense burn-out, too. This I acknowledge. But I am freshly riveted.

Also: I didn't know Richard Ayoade directed a movie. Precocious British kids give me dry heaves, but my love for Richard Ayoade mandates a fair shake - typewriters and rainslickers aside, why can't one of these movies be about a weird girl who likes a standoffish, interesting boy? Or will that just be myself and Mr. Ayoade, forever. No question mark.

Book Challenge 16.

2011-07-30T18:38:00.000-07:00

~~Day 01 – The best book you read this year~~
~~Day 02 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times~~
~~Day 03 – Your favorite series~~
~~Day 04 – Favorite book of your favorite series~~
~~Day 05 – A book that makes you happy~~
~~Day 06 – A book that makes you sad~~
~~Day 07 – Most underrated book~~
~~Day 08 – Most overrated book~~
~~Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving~~
~~Day 10 – Favorite classic book~~
~~Day 11 – A book you hated~~
~~Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore~~
~~Day 13 – Your favorite writer~~
~~Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer~~
~~Day 15 – Favorite male character~~
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Day 16.

Too time-worn to be a whim, I think - I was telling my boyfriend tonight about how I've been handling stress because I assimilate it well. I keep busying myself. This feels fulfilling and refreshing like I cannot communicate after doing nothing, not being able to do anything, for a long time. The drawbacks of busy-ness aren't the ones I know, and I prefer them. Forcing myself to calm down is uncomfortable, though. I've been rereading Valley of the Dolls in the bath. I've been losing sleep, but as long as I have heat insomnia (since I was eleven, so I don't see it giving up soon), that's how I'd like to spend my extra time. I read it for the first time in one sitting because I knew it was one of Courtney Love's favorite books, another of which is Geek Love which was all ready my favorite book, and so being of the same mind I was freaking out about Valley of the Dolls like I was freaking out about finding babydoll dresses and filling up notebooks. I was never a voracious note-taker before reading somewhere that Courtney Love spent her time as a twenty-something in the UK filling up notebooks full of ideas and poems and pitches and that was my main labor by the end of high school. I think I started Valley of the Dolls late in the afternoon and read it until I had a therapy appointment the next day, and in the thick of it at 3 or 4 a.m. I put Simon & Garfunkel on my record player. I would have drank if I knew there was so much wine in my basement.

I fetishized Anne Welles. I could detect by then that people like Neely O'Hara and Jennifer North were my friends, which is the kind of thing I detect easily. But my thing about Anne bothered me - I really wanted to have something in common with someone, which, had I any insight, I would have known it was ambition, but "want" seemed too mutable and I was too uncomfortable with myself - all I wanted was to start looking like someone I admired, to get adjusted, and to see: she did this, I can do this, I see my desire resembles that desire. Hence the babydoll dresses that I did find and still wear. If Courtney Love was a character in a book, she would be my favorite, which was certainly where the "Bone Flute" impulse came from. Facts themselves aside, I like the making of one's own history vs. the intrusion of the media, the tension created when a personal fiction is quilted into the public imagination. Her big scandal came just before the internet, and so the depth of the intrusion was of a different sort than it would be now (not deeper or more shallow - that's not something anyone but her should judge) - it would be now more viral. Karen Lillis, a writer and librarian in Pittsburgh, wrote recently about grad students now studying librarianship, how the volume of them face an utterly barren job market. I think something to consider, with tools like Storify, et al, is the need there will be to archive and organize per organization meaningful clips of social media: tweets, statuses. How many times a link was shared. This is nebulous but I do consider all the time how nice it would be to have that resource.

Anne has a BA in English from Radcliffe and even though she gets the job in the entertainment law office without a proper interview, her qualifications are still called into question. In the movie - not in the book - a secretary skims her resume and declares that being a Radcliffe alum, she should lend the office tone. After this bump, she gets break upon break because of her beauty and a city block of deus ex machinas. Spoiler: it ends well for no one.

My kinship with her in that moment of doubt is still tempered by fetishism. The game is different now than the 1940s when the first part of the book takes place - it is different from when I read the book for the first time a decade ago - but the wish to have an item that bespoke my ability to innovate (which I perceive as being what my degree would say about me in a perfect world, but I am just fine justifying that) is still pretty crushing. That is a book I am all over for the characters. Anne is my favorite, but that has not stopped most days when the chasm between my ego and status glares most harshly from my going home, throwing my bag on the floor and screaming, fists shaking, NEELY O'HARA! Neely is Courtney Love's favorite.

Also covered in the same conversation with my boyfriend was Sally Bowles, who might actually win, for her green fingernails and her unsettling singing and endless assertiveness. Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Notebooks is lurid and vulnerable and not elevated by a great gift or romance. Her story, along with Breakfast at Tiffany's, are so achingly perfect as narratives of friendship with complex women that their reduction to simpering romances where the emphasis is blindingly on the girls' beauty is really sick and embarrassing, more than it is when a character is created for that, but when great characters are manipulated into that - ! I have strong feelings like this about Sookie Stackhouse, too. I have no frame of reference with regards to the books, but at the beginning of the TV show, Sookie's telepathy is used allegorically like vampirism/homosexuality - Sookie can hear, unfiltered, the opinions and fantasies of men who want to rape her and women who think she's retarded and she is appropriately socially isolated by that knowledge - as a child, she knew her uncle wanted to molest her, and she did not escape it for the overwhelming knowing: a very typical experience exaggerated to become something one can understand without having been through a similar event. When she finds a relationship in which she feels safe, it is healthy and mature and sexual, and when she feels her trust is misused, she shuts it down. I think to begin with True Blood handled its allegories admirably but that isn't its sole objective, obviously. I am still disappointed in it.

Favorite female character: in deliberation.

Melts me into the world.

2011-07-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

1. One of my proudest achievements is being in Gina Abelkop's blogroll. She is the editor of Birds of Lace, a literary bouquet of the distinct and subversive and fun, and she was also featured in delirious hem's continuously incredible SEAM RIPPER series of which I am deliriously proud to have been a part! Her entry, amidst all the outrageously wonderful, exciting entries, is probably my favorite.

2. Gaga Stigmata has a creative editor and the promise of more content - of any kind really, creative or otherwise - knocks me the hell out (like old Pheobe's pajamas knock Holden Caulfield out, just that way - kind of lurid? Innocent, really?). I spend my down time at work (I will not state how much that is) reading Gaga Stigmata intently. As someone who is extremely busy, who implements projects, I love and am indebted to anything that makes me nothing but a rabid, voracious viewer and fan. I do not easily become a fan of things, and it is even more difficult if the thing has anything to do with writing because that's what I do - I can't stop being critical. But Gaga Stigmata is the intersection of everything I love that is beyond what I do, but it is writing and it is brilliant and exciting and my critical impulse can nap and I can do nothing but enjoy myself all over it. With the aid of it. Just like Holden and old Phoebe, I think (I totally read it that way).

3. Tumblr is my favorite social media tool. For its being compared to a stream of consciousness, a perpetual "yes" machine, and its focus on links, pictures, video and audio rather than text - for heightening the awareness of how text is positioned and used in its relation to the rest of the content (not in every tumblr, but you know) - it is what I care about sharing, what I want to share on a widespread scale, as opposed to what other social media is engineered to share. As far as my own goes - Typewriter Girl, so named for the Zoe Boekbinder classic (the Shoestrings EP version) - I operate it like a home-delivery system for research and ideas, not something as strict as aggregation but amassment, real-time brainstorming, relieved from text, purely ideas that shift and change depending on when I look at an image, whether I see it in context or on my page, on someone else's page - I love that. My favorite tumblr belongs to Batarde who posts quotes from Kristeva's Black Sun, like: If one were to identify that woman and her love one would have to look for her in the secret cellar where there is no one, except for the sparking eyes of Nevers’ cats and the catastrophic anguish of the young woman who merges with them.

4. Attending a reading tomorrow night of Maria James-Thiaw, who I profiled in ye olde HMag. I love hearing her read, but I've never seen her in performance mode - I've just eked it out of her in cafes. There is an open mic afterward. I might read. I might, I might. "Diablerie," or else a prose shred.

5. THIS THIS I AM GOING. The &NOW Festival of New Writing TOMORROWLAND FOREVER. I AM GOING. I was jilted of my vacation time and promised time off in October, so this is perfect. All three days. Carole Maso speaking. Kate Durbin, Kate Zambreno, Roxanne Carter. That is half the amazing factor, for me the other vital half is relaxing the way I relax when I'm someplace alien. I might bring my brother, who just wants to go somewhere, who will not want to go watch anyone read but will be happy just to sleep and walk around (if he can by then, he had a wild surgery on his leg and I invited him because he is just now mobile and needs to enjoy it). One of my best friends is a west coast resident and when she came back here to visit I went with her to Spoutwood for the Faery Festival (not bad at all, and I am so uppity about those things), so it is my turn. Yes. Perpetual yes-machine.

Ghost in the machine.

2011-07-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

My best friend, Kara, and I are starting a small press called Enigma Machine.

We're nothing yet. We will be a journal first, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. We got approved, the process of which gave me a twenty-four-hour petit mal when I realized one does not just create a profile, indeed there is an approval process. And we were approved! We've got it all: finite objective, material compensation for donors, and soon, a flash video. And soon, a press.

We're zygotic, but I bring it up because the Machine is moving (badum-TISH) and I would not do this without Kara. If not for her partnership, I would do a tiny something, but not something that, though tiny, could be great and something more than pleasantly time-consuming because she is a brilliant designer.

I've had a weird few weeks trying to prioritize my energy effectively. I saw a wild turkey yesterday. I believe I did, that is - it was so hot.

Book Challenge 15.

2011-07-17T21:25:00.000-07:00

Meet solid bodies and glissade right through.

2011-07-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

I.

My profile of the poet Maria James-Thiaw is alive at HMag. A poem of hers, composed in Auvillar, "le Fleur," is enclosed and demonstrates her rollicking skills. She imitated for me the subject of the poem as he romanced the titular botanical AND a local schizophrenic. We first met when I made coffee for a living, and I made a joke about Winnie the Pooh and she ran with it - this is all I remember, except we became feeble but fervid correspondents and I read her manuscript that makes me shrink and faint with its greatness. Her greatness is amplified for how she withstood my journalism, the school of which is ajournalistic or even antijournalistic in its approach to the subject, the way I wrote down only names and no other details and bolted into the night. But I am genuinely trying to get good at this.

II.

I have ten outstanding submissions. I have a manuscript of prose poems, a draft of which is done. I have a finished small novel. I have my sights on a collection of short stories, half of which are written. I am a quarter of the way through a novel draft. I am launching what I want to be a series, if not one weird, giant book. I am doing this while I write for HMag, while I am applying again to graduate programs, while I am applying for and interviewing for jobs, while I have a serious relationship with a non-cohabitant, while I contribute design to Seven Kitchens, while I engineer my own professional projects. While I have a book review due this coming month!

I was thinking of this in an interview yesterday when asked how I prioritize. Instinct. My lack of a day-planner is offensive to me. I never needed one in school, not even in college. My days were so regimented by external factors. It made me feel like a child to not need a day-planner, but I feel even more adult now. Now that I don't have one and I'm malting from the stress. Nothing makes one an adult like losing feathers.

III.

I bought giant card prints of Henry Darger's work in New York. Tonight I finally framed several of them. The frame is hulking and the pictures are sweetly lopsided. The whole thing is propped on a rack-like thing that, like most of what populates this house, was not really meant for any kind of functionality. This has the appropriate effect on me.

Book Challenge 14.

2011-07-11T20:35:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 13.

2011-07-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

Volcanoes on my lands.

2011-06-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

I think less about the nature of my desires than I do desire, period, need and fulfillment, which, you can imagine the end of that. Not very fulfilling.

I know very well the things I have to do and that's not a problem, but I don't query myself all that much about what I want really past the very base: I want to do whatever it takes so I don't have to sacrifice writing. So: I don't want to be a vagrant. I would have to have a drug problem, too, if writing was to totally drop off all priorities. That's not really desire. That's utility. Why am I weird about that?

Envy isn't something I feel. It isn't part of my essential makeup. I do not have an envious disposition. This comes from having an intense disposition, I think, one not easily distracted by the shininess of another. I've felt envy twice. The first was stupid - over a girl my first real boyfriend seemed to prefer over me. There were other girls he preferred over me but I knew them, knew what they were like and what he was like, and that didn't bother me because I was a teenager and I knew what our relationship was. But this girl made me wild because I recognized that she was beautiful. And I didn't know her. So she still populates my writing sporadically, because that time was so charged.

So when it comes to desire about what I want to do - if you were to ask me, I would say, I want to work so I can write. But that is not my double rainbow. Writing is, innately, and that's not a problem. That will never be a problem. But in terms of contribution, emotional/financial transaction with the world, I want to build, and the idea of not building something significant makes me want to shrivel and disintegrate.

Where I am, where I sit and write and apply to jobs, is at a wide computer and right behind that is a wall of books. Spine after spine. I am flanked from both sides, too. Two stacks on each side. More on the pull-out surfaces, more on a shelf on the floor that I think was intended for nicknacks (nothing fits in that weird thing but books lying down). I won't pretend to know what goes on inside Target's head. Annie Dillard in the Writing Life advises one to eliminate from the office space a window out of which to dream. That's what the books obstruct. I look up and I see all the small insignias of the individual publishers. I have piles of forms and papers about foundations and centers and festivals. When the impulse moves me to look up and find a window, I hit this, and it turns over and over in my mind: I want to do what you do. I want to provide opportunities for people. I want to make things. I want to provide an important service. I don't want to dwell at the bottom, providing the least and getting the least. I want my returns to come from the impact I make and I want that to be distinct and positive.

I'm trying to teach myself to articulate this. I go to write cover letters for lofty jobs that, even if I do qualify, I won't get, and I find I don't have the language to express why I want these opportunities. It isn't insignificance, a sense like I can't do it or they wouldn't take me seriously. It is definitely a complete ignorance about how to write cover letters. It's not worry. I'm surprised sometimes to find I'm not complacent. I really incubated in complacency until I had a rudimentary understanding of what I wanted. Sometimes I rake myself over the volcano glass for not catching on earlier in a heated, professional manner, which is stupid to do. It is easier to wish I'd done things than to get up and do things. Theoretically. If it were not such a stress to imagine young-me doing anything but what I did, which I believe, really, when I get to thinking about it, was all to my benefit.

Book Challenge 12.

2011-06-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 11.

2011-06-27T15:37:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 10.

2011-06-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 9.

2011-06-21T19:20:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 8.

2011-06-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

I am kissing you all over.

2011-06-19T20:31:00.000-07:00

The great people of the Blind Willow Bookshop in Emmaus, PA, have an art journal, New Fraktur, and so great are they, they have accepted something of mine for its forthcoming third issue. That something is part of a small book of prose poems inspired by the character/s played by Anna Karina in the films of Jean Luc Godard - Bande a Part, une Femme est une Femme, Alphaville, Vivre sa Vie, Pierrot le Fou, and Made in USA. The piece that will be in New Fraktur is a synopsis of Diablerie, the film the characters are making in the book, and it appears to be a film, although the line breaks are only there to manipulate - isolate some parts and insinuate relationships between words - as edits do in film. I have had a hell of a week and that was awesome news.

Book Challenge 7.

2011-06-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 6.

2011-06-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

Book Challenge 5.

2011-06-14T15:19:00.000-07:00

~~Day 01 – The best book you read this year~~
~~Day 02 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times~~
~~Day 03 – Your favorite series~~
~~Day 04 – Favorite book of your favorite series~~
Day 05 – A book that makes you happy
Day 06 – A book that makes you sad
Day 07 – Most underrated book
Day 08 – Most overrated book
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favorite classic book
Day 11 – A book you hated
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore
Day 13 – Your favorite writer
Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer
Day 15 – Favorite male character
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Day 5.

I need this today. Most books I like because they put me in a state - I like to be bothered, agitated and bewildered by books. I love to be disturbed and awestruck. This comes from being generally very happy. But when I am very sad and I need to be made happy, I turn to John Waters. I picked up Shock Value in New York and it is so brazen! His voice is unflaggingly vivid - he always sounds like himself, and that is someone who makes me feel empowered and inspired and excited about all the things that really excite me. Shock Value isn't the book, though - it's Role Models. Role Models is a masterpiece. Fran Lebowitz characterizes her writing as art history and I believe they are in the same genre. In Role Models, John Waters addresses fascinating figures from his childhood and books and art buoyantly as he ever does but with more authority than when he was young - a relaxed, confident authority that puts me totally at ease no matter what's troubling me. I once made an intricate wish-fulfillment-family-tree in which he was my uncle. David Lynch was my grandfather, Werner Herzog was my father, Isabella Rossellini was my mother, Dita Von Teese was my aunt, and Amanda Palmer was my aunt's cool ex-girlfriend who I idolize and who "liked" my Facebook statuses sometimes.

Book Challenge 4.

2011-06-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

~~Day 01 – The best book you read this year~~
~~Day 02 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times~~
~~Day 03 – Your favorite series~~
Day 04 – Favorite book of your favorite series
Day 05 – A book that makes you happy
Day 06 – A book that makes you sad
Day 07 – Most underrated book
Day 08 – Most overrated book
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favorite classic book
Day 11 – A book you hated
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore
Day 13 – Your favorite writer
Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer
Day 15 – Favorite male character
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Day 4.

My favorite book in my favorite series, and the reason I did not delve into Dennis Cooper yesterday, is mutable - I think it's Try because the main character's zine about sexual abuse is called I Apologize and that is so fucked up, but then I think of what a revelation Period was and how it excited me so much to see a story told like that, about a person vanishing within a narrative because he kept being invoked, dissolved into obsession. Closer really romanced me, and I kept loaning Frisk to people in high school, hoping they would get too scared of me to talk to me again. I think Guide was the one of the five I grasped less and I would rank it still above so many other books.

Book Challenge 3.

2011-06-12T20:34:00.000-07:00

~~Day 01 – The best book you read this year~~
~~Day 02 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times~~
Day 03 – Your favorite series
Day 04 – Favorite book of your favorite series
Day 05 – A book that makes you happy
Day 06 – A book that makes you sad
Day 07 – Most underrated book
Day 08 – Most overrated book
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favorite classic book
Day 11 – A book you hated
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore
Day 13 – Your favorite writer
Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer
Day 15 – Favorite male character
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Day 3.

My favorite series is the George Miles Cycle, consisting of Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and Period by Dennis Cooper. The Claudines of Colette make rank, too, but they did not have so extremely much to do with the formation of my perception of literature. Dennis Cooper made me love books like no other author. I liked a few stray books but I did not like books before I found out books could be like his.

Book Challenge 2.

2011-06-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

~~Day 01 – The best book you read this year~~
Day 02 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times
Day 03 – Your favorite series
Day 04 – Favorite book of your favorite series
Day 05 – A book that makes you happy
Day 06 – A book that makes you sad
Day 07 – Most underrated book
Day 08 – Most overrated book
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favorite classic book
Day 11 – A book you hated
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore
Day 13 – Your favorite writer
Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer
Day 15 – Favorite male character
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Day 2.

I have read the Bell Jar more than three times. I've read a lot of books more than three times, especially before I had a lot of exposure to good books, but three of the times I read the Bell Jar marked important steps for me. The first time, it was among the only books I owned, Girl, Interrupted being my favorite. I was recommended it by a bookseller and didn't get into it because it wasn't twisted enough, but the language stayed with me enough to spark my interest in Sylvia Plath's poetry. I read it again in college - I didn't have my copy and had to take it out of the library - and cried over it because I was having a time of small things sucking the vigor from me and my endeavors (I was failing a literature class when I became a writing major and had that professor sign me into the course of study). The last time was my senior year, tanked, lying on my bed and listening to Maggie Gyllenhaal's reading of it so I could justify its inclusion in my big senior research project and check a few quotes without giving myself textual vertigo. I couldn't even stand up that day. I had six gin & tonics, which contributed to the stomach cancer of John Gardner, and that was the last thing I learned in college.

Book Challenge 1.

2011-06-07T16:15:00.000-07:00

Day 01 – The best book you read this year
Day 02 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times
Day 03 – Your favorite series
Day 04 – Favorite book of your favorite series
Day 05 – A book that makes you happy
Day 06 – A book that makes you sad
Day 07 – Most underrated book
Day 08 – Most overrated book
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favorite classic book
Day 11 – A book you hated
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore
Day 13 – Your favorite writer
Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer
Day 15 – Favorite male character
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Day 1.

The best book I read this year was Fleur Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline. I think it's a perfect book. The voice, the length, the feelings, the setting are all perfect - it made up for not being kinky and impressed me a vast times past that.

Suspicion of Bears.

2011-06-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

Available to own now: Pedro Ponce's Homeland: a Panorama in 50 States, brought to you by Seven Kitchens Press.

Photograph by Roxanne Carter. Design by moi.

Seven Kitchens is operated by Ron Mohring, who adjuncted at the school where I was a student, and along with my fellow interns we converted a spare room in the offices into a party every Tuesday and Thursday. Being referred to as amazing with regards to any work I contribute is as wholly, eminently satisfying as being paid, and I am reassured again I'm in the right line of work. Homeland is my favorite title on Seven Kitchens - its form is more mutable, and it's a mystery! I have not stopped trying to figure out which poem is about which state. There are many delicious references to bears (my favorite, a part of the "Persons of Interest" sequence, is available to be read at the Hotel St. George - it's #2). It is a vital little book.

I've also designed other titles:

Photograph by Kris Sanford.

Each are $7, hand-sewn, and fetching as hell. The cute factor at Seven Kitchens is a notch below cat videos.

Anno.

2011-05-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

I graduated a year ago this past week from a tiny liberal arts college in the very center of the state. I did not pay as much for that education as a lot of people do for theirs - I am in a very reasonable amount of debt. Before transferring from community college (where I had a weird time; I'm glad I did it financially, and because I was as passionate about hating high school as I am about the things I genuinely enjoy, so I got ambivalence out of my system in a cheap way) I studied psychology because I liked its theory and history and how it has evolved - something one does not learn studying psychology as an undergraduate. Graduating with my degree from the college I went to then is one of my favorite decisions, up there with my fixations on Sailor Moon and Courtney Love and my mystifying discovery of Geek Love at eleven. I studied writing incidentally because it fulfilled my desire of higher education: I learned to better communicate my ideas, articulate my suspicions, manage teams, assert myself, implement changes to the institutions I was directly involved in, read what I wouldn't have arrived at independently with at least one person who really likes it or is paid an appealing sum to fake enthusiasm, and - very importantly, to me - feel a sense of accomplishment within a community that has identifiable limits, something I could wrap my head around. I'm not a competitive person. Writing itself is an edifying process and it was never the ultimate thing once something of mine was done to get acclaim for it. I was not exposed to that possibility when I was younger. By virtue of participating in class I received the first positive feedback for doing my favorite thing (and not doing it very well) and I needed that. I felt secure enough to hope to get the editorship at the school's literary journal, and I did. For this I had a perfect college experience, with enough unnerving misadventure and poor dark alleys to insure I would also never want to relive it.

After I graduated, I wrote a short novel. I've done a lot of things, but I made a mad dash to draft that thoroughly before I started working full time, and finished it completely once I started dating my boyfriend. I had pieces of it and had worked on it as an idea since I was in high school. I've sent it four places (three presses and a contest), three of which rejected it. I haven't heard from the last place and it has been a quarter of a year, which I'd think is not unusual for a book, but is a long time to wait for a rejection I'm reasonably certain will be flippant, not because I expect this from this press but because it is the kind of book you kick away. It's weird. Rape, incest, molestation, trauma (personal, national), public execution and murder come up but do not make up the subject of it, and it is such a slight book. And it is a good book. I'm amazed to read it now because it is my first big work and I would read it if it wasn't mine. It does what I want it to do. I fixed the last few things about it that really bothered me today, so now I do not intend to alter it again.

I lose perspective easily. To say I do not dwell on what I've done is offensively off the mark - I don't really notice for more than a minute before I hole back up in the black abyss of what I want to accomplish, what I haven't reached yet. Generally this works for me, but sometimes it makes me sick and crazy, particularly in such situations as I'm in right now where maintaining perspective is vital. My state is so liminal. I think I am unreasonable to feel a trajectory should be more comfortable, but I should definitely recognize that I am on one even if it is vertiginous. I do not always recognize this. Reading my little book made me feel better about this. To have produced something I believe in so much, I should give myself more credit. I have done a lot in a year.

Brain Storm.

2011-05-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

This is no assumption: I know I strike a great many of those whose opinions impact me as, if not lazy, terminally steady. I give off a gleaming vibe of competency, but also a troubling little psychic bleat about being too relaxed. Something like that which is borne out of not being an anxious person, having a tough time on occasion with anxious people, and so I use myself as a weapon against generating more anxiety than needs to fill a space that could otherwise include a Klaus Nomi impression. This belies a torrential, churning hurricane of nonstopped-ness that I don't believe to be unique to me. I note it because I've been freaking out more than usual about things beyond my control, things that, three weeks ago, were of no concern to me. This getting freaked out does nothing to bring me closer to achieving my goals, so I reason, and go to strip off the anxious-pants with a few episodes of Mad Men and a sixteen hour nap, thereby perpetuating my famed relaxedness. I don't think 'balanced' looks comely on me. Neither does a carousel of self-criticisms. My mother and I got into an absurd pep talk/argument during which she pointed out that worrying was silly because nothing has ever failed to work out for me, which I told her was a major part of my anxiety: I know that is not how all things go. I'm doing much better now that I've spent my last knot of nervous energy and am looking forward to redefining the parameters of aproductivity for maybe the rest of May. I should eek along the assembly of my portfolio and do only fun things. That might make my anxiety jealous, though, and it would impress upon me to let it return. I could always become a true failure and then ambition - the frothy, rabid heart of any anxious energy I possess - would turn on its heels.

This whimsical curmudgeonry is brought to you by my spontaneous re-viewing of Public Speaking on Monday. Whereas Tina Fey's past and my own share some uncanny moments, so my life and that of Fran Lebowitz's straddles the Twilight Zone. Maybe, having never been exposed to it in such doses, I lack the digestive enzyme for empathy.

I am glad I have the radiance.

2011-05-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

1. As soon as I got back home from the trip, my mother asked, "How was the Gonque?" Waiting to check in in the Algonquin lobby blew my mind as much as getting lost in the Met and winding up in the regal bedrooms. I did not know the hallways were wallpapered with New Yorker cartoons. We paid $300 and got a suite with an unquantifiable bed, a bathtub the depth of which was almost to my knees, a separate living room with a couch and desk, and two TVS! I've never stayed in a real hotel over night anywhere. A great deal of that thrill had nothing to do with New York. It was so amazing that I was overjoyed to stop jetting and curl up there at eight on the night of my birthday.

2. My boyfriend and I went to the American Folk Art Museum, the MoMA, the Neue Galerie and the Met. The Folk Art Museum had two floors closed and so cut admission in half, so communing with Henry Darger cost me $6. I was out of my skull right away. I swooned all over the MoMA. My boyfriend and I unanimously agreed upon the German Expressionism: the Graphic Impulse exhibit as our favorite part of the trip. I fell in hard, mad love with Egon Schiele.

The Neue Galerie is on 5th Avenue, we were on 6th, and the vast difference in house number made no impact on me as we hiked forty blocks first thing Saturday morning with no breakfast. It made the Cafe Sabarsky that much more unfathomably perfectly fin-de-siecle-ly Viennese perfect. I almost cried when I noticed the reproduction of Freud's couch. It was like coming home. Also: Egon everywhere. The Met came as a pleasant surprise. I had never gone that far uptown, did not realize it was across the street, and when we noticed the Alexander McQueen exhibit was on, holy shit -

My boyfriend charmed my face off by whispering to me how cute he feels I'd look in the Widows of Culloden dresses. His charms are unfathomable. He also reacted with complete calm and appropriate assertiveness when Google Maps deposited us twelve blocks from where we needed to be upon first arriving. Not freaking out is something I am not used to in traveling companions - keeping calm is typically my responsibility. He was so cool about just being there, and that alone made every facet of the weekend radiant.

3. It was the maitre d's birthday at the Jewel of India, too! We did not make it to Big Gay Ice Cream, but we did find the Macaron Cafe, and I had a matcha-chestnut macaron that I miss like a lover.

4. My boyfriend works in downtown Harrisburg and has a permit to park on City Island. We left the car there and walked at 4 a.m. across the bridge, downtown, to the train station. His sleeping the whole way with his gorgeous head on my shoulder and the train-speed scenery blurring and Fleet Foxes' new album provided me with the greatest dawn I've ever experienced.

5. John Waters curated a table at the Strand. We have Siamese brains. Other organs, too, have at least psychic linkage. That link does not provide the full list, but I went batshit buying his recommendations that I did not all ready have and thrust voraciously at acquaintances. My boyfriend gave me his presents Thursday night - Dalkey Archive and New Directions books he picked out of my wishlist, Zizek's Living in the End Times, which I fondle any time we go anywhere, and SQUEE!, which I never picked up when I was in high school and have always regretted it. I wanted to hug these on the train ride at least, but I thought better of it, and I am grateful - no self-control was exercised in my attack on museum shops and bookstores. My very favorite book purchases were Mel Gordon's Feral House titles Voluptuous Panic and the Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber.

Now I am twenty-four, and I have the day off from work tomorrow to convince my body that it's getting rest.

L'anniversaire!

2011-05-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

My birthday is this Friday! I'm getting up before dawn to get on the train. The train will deposit me and my boyfriend in New York where we're going to curl up in the Algonquin and go back to sleep. I've never had the opportunity to sleep in New York. I am as excited about this as the Macaron Cafe and Big Gay Ice Cream. I wish a fellow happy birthday in advance to those with whom I share May 6th - Freud and Orson Welles - as they will be as busy as I am on Friday, I'm sure. Hiding in sewers in Vienna.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Fransisco.

2011-04-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

I finished Ann Quinn's Berg last night and between she and Kavan and Carson I feel finally this coruscation of my idealized literature in real extant literature. I felt that way discovering Hole. Hole is my idea of the rock band, the archetypal band, the band that had to exist or I would have never made it to music. I did not like music before I was thirteen (it was no way to live). I liked reading but started to get manic, clinically nuts about it around that time because I had an intellectual growth spurt thereabouts and started to hate the books I'd always read. I exhibited ritualistic, grim trauma-reliving behavior with books, reading them again and again until I memorized long passages. The idea of abandoning a book to take up another was anxiety-inducing. Still now it feels liberating to finish a book and pick up another. And to encounter a contingent of Kurt-was-murdered advocates.

I also inhaled Bossypants this weekend and was pleased to learn Tina Fey and I have enough in common to generate some queasy I've-seen-my-doppelganger moments. As I read it alone at 2 a.m. I kept wanting to text my friends and justify these feelings by have them go "ah! crazy!" but blacked out before I could even think better of it. I'm anticipating another sweet, all engulfing-wave of anticonsciousness (beyond unconsciousness - which I love to see people confuse with the subconscious, as much as I love the classic asocial/antisocial conundrum) virtually any moment now.
The languid rubber-glove snap (you know the one!) of anticipation is the avatar on the Livejournal of my life right now. That was supposed to be a metaphor, but the extent to which it did not read as one bespeaks my desperate state too effectively for me to erase it. I am all wound up but, as you might have noted my use of the word languid, events are not, and I have to respect that. I keep forgetting that my outward appearance as feisty, go-getting, vivacious or vigorous does trick onlookers. If I can sucker myself into thinking I am that dynamic, surely I can see myself safely to reality, where I am cartoon depiction of an escargot (who wishes she were being played by Isabella Rossellini).

In closing: bat bomb.

Where the woodbine twines.

2011-04-20T17:13:00.000-07:00

Sometime a very short time from now I'll be running a column on HarrisburgMagazine.com. The column will be about what is happening - psychically, emotionally, irrationally and otherwise - to/in the Harrisburg area. If you are unfamiliar with Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, it isn't Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. It manages to be both the capital of the state and the home of the Farm Show complex: Pennsylvania's self-flagellating idea of what it is to marry business and pleasure. It's also inhabited by the largest independent bookstore on the east coast, extraordinary economic disparity, and enough tenacity and scrappy-upstartdom to occupy innumerable short-run cult TV series.

This marks a pretty positive turn of events. If conditions persist, my bookshelf should clean itself soon. My office is packed to the periphery of my computer with books. To my immediate left is my favorite purchase from my employee discount days: the Paris Review Interviews vols. I-IV. My favorite interview therein is with Ted Hughes. Associations aside, as a writer I like very much that, Cambridge education and all, he was not advantaged: his family worked even though they were of affluent descent, he did not primarily study Literature, he had a rough time getting a job after graduating, and he worked tremendously hard. He and Plath both did. I love to read about how they had to borrow money from her mother and live with friends. It is encouraging and comforting. Carole Maso, also. She spent a decade after deciding she wanted to write writing furiously while working as a model, waitress, fencing instructor, and persevering awesomely. After that she published a lot of books - a ton, to me, having a thing for writers who manage out one or two perfect things before disintegrating. She has nine, with two forthcoming, one of which I just discovered since finding her website.

I am all about silly-job-solidarity, especially given the opportunity to do some work that's genuinely fun. I can't wait to start my column!

You made the cover of the Midnight.

2011-04-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

My boyfriends parents took us on a flash-trip to Inner Harbor this morning so he could share with me one of his favorite places, the American Visionary Art Museum. I was familiar with it in name only, having a giant art-crush on Henry Darger.

And anyplace that claims a giant rotating Divine in its permanent collection is the capitol of my heart.

The current exhibition is "What Makes us Smile," which is quite consistent with what makes me smile: looming Abe Lincoln, bedazzled bears, and Elsa Lanchester's naked rear. My absolute favorite artist whose work was featured was Lisa Snellings - all that exquisite wire-work and warm, burnt bronze.

Shelter of the alphabet.

2011-04-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

GLORY: I have a piece in SEAM RIPPER: Women on Textual and Sartorial Style, a series curated by Kate Durbin and Becca Klaver at the poetics journal Delirious Hem. Its name is a line of Anne Carson's and the central image is a Twilight Zone reference (and addresses my lust for Rod Serling). It ably surpasses every other accomplishment of mine so far, since I love Delirious Hem, and Kate Durbin is one of my very very favorite contemporary poets. I was totally overwhelmed, getting word of it right as I was headed to bed, and took the time to note the occasion on Facebook before I did because I am still a trite-bit (tritetritetrite) miffed about a note written by a friend about his feelings about writing versus performing, casting it in a weird, blame-shifting way - he would like to be a writer and always liked to read then studied literature and, oh, writing is so dead, it just sits there and it's over, and it's even worse online. It was irritating to read, since his medium is one that needs bolstering-from-within more than it does muckraking, but the acceptance from Seam Ripper overrode all negativity.

I don't write to be paid for it - if I ever want to be paid to write, I need to get much better at it than I am. To do that, I have to practice. As much as I do, I would love to utilize it to connect to others. Publishing does this. It exposes one to new criticism, new writers, relationships with publishers, interesting opportunities. I can empathize with a dislike for reading things on a screen, but writing is never less dead than when it is prone to access by millions. If not for the internet I would not like literature. Besides all the young, active writers I admire who I would have never, ever found my way to were it not for the internet, I would never have had the means to research and discover virtually any author whose work I enjoy because none of it is commercially available where I live.

Performance, meanwhile - and this is as subjective as it gets - puts me off. That is not to say I am opposed to performance of any kind but live performance, especially as crowd-intimacy increases and there is more potential for interaction, repels me. I have to have more aesthetic distance than most people to become fully involved with something. I ravenously lovelovelove reading and watching movies but I cannot sit and watch a play, especially a musical. I can't watch musicals at all. On film they mostly annoy me, but I can't sit and see them live at all because there is so little aesthetic distance. If I'm being confronted with the psychology of another, if my reaction is exposed and becomes part of the transaction, I can't appreciate what the artist is trying to do. I need the work to inhabit me - not another person. That's another variety of intimacy for me. It's so vividly that, too, that I wonder what it would be like to be someone who enjoys spectatorship of live performance - it seems so so lurid to me.

There are plenty of reasons I am glad not to be a performer, but I don't disparage the discipline at all. I get huffy when I encounter criticism of writing - of learning to write, of being a beginner, of trying - because I see so much of it come from writers who are starting out, out of school, or facing rejection from a program. It feels like I'm watching someone go over a precipice - losing a peer. I am exhilarated when I meet people with whom I think I'm on the same page - loving to write, working hard, connecting, persisting, engaged in the process - and then they're not.

Silly billies (having seen now the entirety of "Venture Bros." I find that phrase so sinister - also there is a local independent ice cream vendor named Silly Billy who drives a rape van and blasts the nursery-chime music - "silly billy" is totally the province of the child murderer).

Arch of Hysteria.

2011-04-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

If one pedals on down to the center of the page one can now have the pleasure of meeting my short story "Wingbeat" in the new edition of the Bicycle Review. It's about a girl in a private hospital who was sequestered in the basement of a maniac. It is from the point of view of her psychologist, who has escapist tendencies when confronted with such an atrocity and will beat around sympathizing to editorialize on the goings-on of the hospital staff as a means to avoid confrontation with the girl, of whom she is ultimately very scared.

Earlier this year my story "Bone Flute" got cozy at Sein und Werden. It is the manic recollections of a badass whose husband has committed suicide an indeterminate amount of time ago as she is slowly snake-charming herself out of paralysis. She has a small daughter. Patti Smith's "Ghost Dance" figures significantly into the ambiance.

Otherwise, since I cannot leave it out, there is my first contribution to literary-anything: my poem "My Aura" in Gloom Cupboard, which is not very long and worth the consideration.

The occasion for this self-congratulatory aggregation: I think there is one. I have to see it form in order to properly assess it. Meanwhile I'm going to wile away my excitement into a cool haze by reading Steven Pinker in the bathtub.

Trilling.

2011-04-06T19:08:00.000-07:00

My office is messier than I even like it to be. It is continuously fulfilling on so many planes: aesthetically, looking at All My Books, feeling the infinite-pleasure, the pleasure of the infinite that Umberto Eco studied at the Louvre and wrote about in the Infinity of Lists which I always misremember as an Infinity of Lists, as if infinity were a form. I am fetishistic about lists. In order to admire, I aggregate. I used to take rigorous inventory of my media when I was little and it all fit in one shelving unit anyway. My office is the first real clean visual listmaking endeavor I've gotten to undertake since my room is the size of a fist. But since I have space now I fill it, and there are too many books in here. The Joel-Peter Witkin monograph Disciple and Master and the Persistence of Vision Kenneth Anger volume Moonchild which I remembered was the real name of the Childlike Empress from the Neverending Story, the first work in translation I ever read, which hatched my concept of translation. My boyfriend was talking about it. I have been in many a situation where I gleefully watched a roomful of friends try and fail to remember the name of the dragon but my boyfriend is incredible (limitlessly) enough that I offered over, very easily, Falcor.

Those books I am reading for research on my current long work. Art, magic, illusion, film, escapism, the Freudian psychosexual fairytale, the economy, the home. I am pretty scattered about the work but the work is knitting itself up nice and well. I have also the columns of, like, King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes and Female Chauvinist Pigs and things that conflagrated my senior-thesis which I was encouraged by my advisor to revise and publish. It was really a jumbled mess of thesis statements, each their own, and a long interlude about Last Year at Marienbad. The Marienbad interlude was the best part, even though much of my insight is my arriving independently and inarticulately at very established forms of all kinds of criticism. I am very great - great! - about never shelving anything indefinitely. I take old plots and characters and obsessions out and walk them with some regularity. I can trace the ancestry of current projects back as far as the beginning of my thing for writing. So I am not as neurotic as I should be about setting that aside. I only graduated a year ago.

Two typewriters reside with me here, very stately and well-preserved - they make me think of someone freaking out over Nietzsche's aphorisms, the spawn of his move from longhand to typewritten composition - his ideas became more concisely delivered and that was viewed as a negative. I have in my room in my other bookshelf my one completed long work that is currently looking for a home at a press printed out and staring at me. I love to hold it and flip through it. I only printed one copy on flimsy bleached printer paper to edit it once, and this is my only other copy, on resume paper, thick and glorious and so innately rewarding. If I could operate one of my typewriters and face draft after draft and feel the thickening as it occurred - I am lucky to be doing what I do now. Or I would be doing that all day.

The snows of the Tyrol the clear beer of Vienna.

2011-04-05T17:48:00.000-07:00

The girl who sits beside me at work dropped out of high school. Anticipating an utterance, she'll stare at me for several minutes before asking me a question. One day it was about the book I was reading, Ice by Anna Kavan. I told her Anna Kavan usually writes about girls going insane, even though that isn't what Ice is about. Today she asked me about my shirt, and I told her, it's a first-print cover of the Bell Jar, which she had never heard of. She asked me what it was about, and I told her it's about a girl going insane. So far this is almost all I've said aloud at my job.

A gradual dazzle.

2011-03-31T17:33:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to get up at 5 in the morning since I've started working full time. I reread almost weekly the first chapter of Paul Alexander's Rough Magic about Sylvia Plath getting up with a fever at 4 a.m. every morning in the English winter to write while her children slept. I have time after work, when my thinking is murdered and my thing for hypotaxis twineth around my ability to articulate with much clarity, but that is one thing I envy.

"Black Moon" is coming to Criterion; that and everything by Anne Carson is making my depressive episode even more stupid. I love a sinister French countryside. I love an institution of shadows on a street black as windows.

Edit: I never saw this and today was the perfect day to see it!

Beauty is each culture's peculiar fiction.

2011-03-21T19:48:00.000-07:00

Joel-Peter Witkin references Walker Evans' holy vision in "Disciple and Master." References - does not discuss - amidst remarking that Arbus et al were spiritual primitives. Somehow this is what shone out of this book for me. I had twisted it into something, I think, about his own capacity to see what is holy. That's what I want out of my artists. "Fire Walk With Me"-mystical, revelatory. "But then I saw the face of God and took the whole arm off."