literary jennifers
Saturday 9 February 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
I’ve long had a theory about them, though now that I’m finally committing it to print, I can’t remember a single one—a literary Jennifer, that is. The only one springing immediately to mind is, unfortunately, Anne Shirley’s student nemesis, Jen Pringle (LM Montgomery, anyone?). Oh, and one in fellow Old Girtonian Rosamund Lehmann’s 1927 Dusty Answer: “In Cambridge, with the normal bisexuality of the emotionally unsophisticated, she loved the dazzling and enigmatic Jennifer Baird.” Ha ha! Ha ha! Ha! Ha. Dazzling and enigmatic, eh? Another reviewer denominates this Jennifer “beautiful and wild.”
Well, and so, my theory is that Jennifers in literature are always, always spectacularly unreliable. They are usually on the vapid side of pretty, captivating in their way. They are decidedly Gay. Their laughter is like the merry tinkling of little bells. They are charming, charismatic even, but desperately frivolous—and usually come to some tragic, even tubercular end; or are eventually discredited and discarded. (Jens are different, per Ms. Pringle—they’re usually just mean and small-minded; whereas Jennys are either simple-minded rural folk or else terribly noble and virtuous, like the antecedent heroine of that ridiculous sixties fiction Love Story.) (Per What’s Up, Doc?—Ryan O’Neal: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Barbra Streisand: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”)
I wonder if the deeply faithless reader finally begins to Get It. Your narrator’s unreliability isn’t limited to the irregular posting of hogwash, tripe, bullshit and other words for first-person offal and/or organ meats. Nor is it limited to disappearing for weeks on end and then splattering posts everywhere, only to vanish once more into the aether, muttering excuses about short February days, ungraded papers and spending too much time looking at handmade soap on Etsy. Finally, unreliability certainly doesn’t stop with failing to thank people properly, in a kairotic fashion, or indeed at all, for their patient generosity. Mes amis, we are talking fundamentally unreliable—not someone anyone can count on, for anything. For help, for love, for real friendship, for book reviews (due a week ago) or chapbook galleys (due February 1) or comments on papers (due last Thursday) or returning emails (131 at last count, plus another dozen in Facebook) or taking prompt turns at Scrabble or sweeping the goddamned kitchen floor, which is suddenly covered with leaves and tiny clumps of mud. Or taking a bloody shower, apparently.
Does not work and play well with others. Does not pay attention, talks during class. Fails to complete assignments. Unable to organize time wisely.
My grandfather’s childhood nickname for me was The Piddler. I was forever lost in minutiae, the unimportant, even while playing: forever folding little bits of paper and glueing them to popsicle sticks, getting distracted and making little houses out of leaves and sticks and pebbles, then wandering away from that and fixing up a shoebox house for fairies in the backyard (oddly, they never moved in; I worried it was because their taste was too refined for my clumsy interior decorating skills), then going back in to paint and draw.
Isn’t that just what children do, though? you sigh and shift impatiently.
Well, I suppose so. But don’t they usually stop doing it at a certain age and more or less learn to sit still at their desks and do math homework?
My young parents, tired of repetition, once made a tape recording of themselves and turned it on for me as I sat dithering and doodling in my little high chair. Over and over their canned voices prompted, “Eat your dinner! Stop playing with your food! Hello? Hey there? Yes, you! What are you doing? Finish your dinner!” And so on. But apparently the only outcome was that I laughed and laughed and still did not eat my dinner.
I don’t think you’re getting it. Listen carefully. Eat your dinner—
So in DBT we spent a long time studying the difference between guilt and shame. Shame is when (I are an English teacher)—you feel shame when you believe the self to be fundamentally flawed and inadequate. “I am a terrible person”—that’s shame. (Stay with me.) And the action urge for shame is to hide away from people. I recognized this immediately—when I miss deadlines, I often literally crawl under my desk. I think I did this more than once at the Alt Weekly, surreptitiously. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed. Maybe the Cool Arts Editor. (I once took an artful picture of my chair legs and feet from this sad angle, on the camera phone which later fell into a glass of beer at the Brujo’s Miles Davis concert and was destroyed.) Sometimes I have crawled between the mattress and wall, or mattress and box springs, or literally done a Homer Simpson and hidden under a pile of laundry. So I easily recognize shame—by its accompanying compulsion to conceal the self from others.
Guilt, on the other hand, is accompanied by regret, remorse, and the action urge to set things right with the injured parties. So if I didn’t thank someone for mailing me a box of the best damn toffee I’ve ever had in my entire life (“Why do people ever want to eat anything else?!” I manage to ask the Brujo, bug-eyed, mouth full. “It’s like a rat pressing the pleasure lever. Honestly? I could happily eat nothing but this toffee until I eventually fall over dead”)— when I don’t thank that person, then I feel guilty, and want to repair the damage by doing something nice for him. —Or when, for example, someone buys me lunch, a day in a national park, and a bicycle; and I still never send the thank-you note that’s been folded in my desk drawer since last August. In instances such as these, I’ve transgressed my own values and thus—
The Brujo has been in the back yard for hours raking leaves, mowing grass and picking up dog crap. I stagger out occasionally in dirty sweatpants, hair wild and unwashed, torso folded in the middle and back stooped like an old woman’s from uterine discomfort. “I can help!” I say feebly, push the mower for half-a-yard, then meekly surrender it. Do I feel guilty? Or ashamed? Guilty, I think, because I keep trying to help, or do something useful. Take out the trash! Pick up wet leaves from the kitchen floor! Mark the fucking papers!
But instead I hide in my blog—it must be shame, then. (And he looks so sexy in sunglasses and stubble, a dark green t-shirt and a businesslike frown.)
The point, since I’m sure you gave up wondering what that might be several hundred entries ago—well, the point made by DBT is that when you’re completely preoccupied being convulsed by shame, you can’t do anything about your guilt. If you jump straight from “I never thanked the Gorgon for buying us lunch” to “I’m a terrible person and an archetypical instance of the remorseless literary Jennifer”—then you don’t ever set things right. You never are motivated to make the necessary reparations—you just feel even more ashamed, and perpetuate the cycle of self-loathing and under-desk lurking.
Now you get it, right? Now you see why this entire website full of writing, to say nothing of several unpublished books of poetry and about sixty scribbled-in journals, is all one giant sleight-of-hand, a sly prosy hand-to-brow technique for continuing to be ashamed, depressed, and—I suddenly can’t think of the English word—inutile, en français. I’m so Eustace, I used to say miserably to the Physicist, meaning useless. Un-re-li-a-ble. Would rather be crazy and ineffectual and full of several thousand words of excuses than—than not to have spent an hour writing this, and instead made a couple of urgent-for-a-month-now calls (the bank, the phone company, my mother, the collection agency, my best friend, my other best friend), sent a few urgent-for-months-now emails (thanking Mandarin’s mum for another three boxes of fabric, thanking Mandarin for Jewel Cat stickers, thanking the Professoressa for ten thousand things), and then started tackling the overdue book review and the overdue paper grading. And the poem revisions, both for Monday workshop? Right, poetry. That thing I’m supposed to be here to do.
Having dragged the Brujo with me. As if on cue he blunders in, shedding more leaves everywhere, his brown hair errumpent and dishevelled. “I have to go somewhere tomorrow,” he says emphatically, looking wild. He means, to wander in the desert staring at the ground looking for near-invisible spiny friends. “Can you come with me?” I think: book review, grade papers, write poem revisions, finish galley proofs, email 131 people, call a dozen places of business, call my mom, make a nice snug little pantyhose noose and—”I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. We look at each other, our faces blank. And he knows why. Because I could get all this done today and spend tomorrow with him but instead I’m probably going to procrastinate, I’ll piddle around and do nothing and make tiny little matchbook notebooks out of bits of paper for people I’ve never even met and enter all the lotteries online for free handmade soap samples and write a ridiculous self-indulgent blog entry and—
Why. Am I. This way. Why. Didn’t my parents. Teach me to be disciplined. Why did they “home-school” me. Why let me get away with bloody underfunctioning murder, year after year. Why did I ever start to let myself go—stop showering, stop answering the phone sometime in 1989. Why do I let myself get away with this shit.
In my head the DBT surveys me sternly, but smiling. “Why is not an interesting question. We can’t answer it anyway. The question is—NOW WHAT?!? What are you going to do now?”
Well, frankly, it’s a toss-up between the pantyhose and going to see if any soap samples came in the mail. Fionnula barked a few minutes ago, probably at our mail carrier. The Brujo goes back out, pulling on gloves; I hear the relentless scrape of his leaf-raking. My uterus cramps. I feel like sobbing but the tears are throttled up somewhere in the region of my stomach—
Please, sane people of this world, your efforts are bootless. Please stop counting on me for anything other than tiresome, infrequent blog entries and, eventually if we’re all lucky, a really fun funeral with lots of music and food, where you can all shake your heads over the foolish waste of a mostly literary, seldom present, nearly-writer and almost-friend. Can you believe that last sentence?! Who the hell is writing this, much less hitting the button that says “Publish”? Why do they let people like me even have blogs? I’ve finally stopped checking Sitemeter to see if the Librarian reads, because I can’t bear the way he always checks to see if I’ve posted any poetry, and I can’t bear imagining the look on his face, the magnitude of his electronic eyerolls and airbreaks, when he finds himself to his horror reading pseudo-psychoreactive claptrap like this. Maybe I should ask him to kill me—
“Just stop,” pleaded the Young Monk, distraught, his tears falling hotly down onto my collarbone as I raved and struggled beneath his restraining grip, the kitchen knife somewhere behind us on the carpet, me fulminating and hyperverbalizing and frothing at the mouth about what an incorrigible, unsalvageable, incurable, intractable, inveterate, irredeemable, irreparable, recidivous, unreformable bitch I was (“Your efforts are wasted,” said drunk Berryman, face-down on the bed, to Saul Bellow: “We are unregenerate”) (that’s the word I was looking for), because how else could I stand to be doing this to him? I can’t even remember what he’d said or done to get me to that place, if anything other than my own mental interestingness could have been blamed for it. “Please. Please. Please.” Through the haze of adrenaline and anguish and rage I couldn’t hear him but I could feel that single tear, hot and wet, sliding down the side of my neck. “Just stop it. Stop it.”
So I stopped.
3 cookies in the jar
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But but but … these days why is “Jennifer” such a popular name for an actress? Doesn’t the name signify “glamorous yet user-friendly” (e.g., Beals, Coolidge, Aniston, Garner, Love Hewitt, Lopez, Ehle, Hudson, Jason Leigh, Connelly)? Is there a post-1968 place for the iconic “Jennifer Juniper” of the Donovan song?
And thank you for the light bulb that came on with “the action urge for shame is to hide away from people.”
Dear Literary J: You did thank me right there in this post, like I knew you would one day without prompting. And if you think you’re not posting enough, may the goddesses preserve me from my own slothlike inanition. As to the confectionary tidbit, Kath & I make about 20 lbs of that stuff every holiday and fling it as far as we can from ourselves, for the obvious reasons. We’re pleased you found it palatable. Now let’s see what we can do about that getting on with living thang.
And if I may add, Kath, upon hearing a reading of your encomium to her ALMOND ROCA smiled a brief, serious smile, which is about the closest anyone is ever going to get to an acknowledgment that she may have done something positive and pleasing and helpful to/for someone with whom she has no concrete, direct, certifiable genetic or economic ties. Not that I see any parallels with that businesslike frown or those 131 unanswered emails, but definitely, she’s in the same boat. Whereas I am blissfully, blissfully, immune to the call of duty. As the angelic Lawrence Ferlinghetti put it in JUNKMAN’S OBBLIGATO: let them come / and take it away / whatever it was / we were paying for / and us with it
http://www.angelfire.com/oh/BringUsAnotherBeer/junkman.html
yr lefty bud, F