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Thursday 7 May 2009 | 24 cookies in the jar

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24 cookies in the jar

  1. unnarrator said on Thursday 7 May 2009 at 11.26 am:

    Though I have to admit this is actually my favorite by them. The jangling Johhny Marresque guitars! The blissfully soaring wordless bridge!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRheskVG_s

    Well, or, okay, “My Finest Hour,” as creepy Nabokovian persona poem. I always wanted to find a pound on the Underground. Or, you know, a tenner.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y38_SOsZKOU
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sEySjrFp0I

  2. doeneedscousins said on Thursday 7 May 2009 at 7.18 pm:

    but the only thing I ever really wanted to say was wrong, was wrong, was wrong…

    …surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise

  3. unnarrator said on Thursday 7 May 2009 at 11.21 pm:

    …it’s that little souvenir of a terrible year!

    (but for an embarrassingly long time I thought she was saying, a colorful year, which works just as well I suppose—)

    Oh Doe needs cousins now does she, mysterious commenter? Hm. Well, we’ll just have to see what we can do about that OVER THE SUMMER!!! Dance of liberative joy…. Though technically (or, okay, literally) I still have a bumping huge paper to write, and about 32 of the suckers to grade. And various other neglected duties. Not least of which this here blog-shaped object.

  4. houseneedssiblings said on Friday 8 May 2009 at 2.45 pm:

    you can do it

  5. unnarrator said on Saturday 9 May 2009 at 10.22 am:

    Cousins, siblings; time to get jiggy wid it, apparently.

    What about you…any progeny planned this summer?

  6. jezebelneedssisters said on Saturday 9 May 2009 at 12.02 pm:

    you can do eeeeeeet!

  7. shouldbetonguetied said on Sunday 10 May 2009 at 3.50 pm:

    meant to be encouraging, not (mockable) patronizing, but can’t ever seem to reach that clear tone

    blog (Vancouver!), notebooks, lyrics (both senses), all matter

    just lonely (as writer) — nothing fresh enough to count

    back to the silent (dunce) corner and wishing (you) well

  8. unnarrator said on Sunday 10 May 2009 at 4.09 pm:

    O(ka)y! Tone is a bitch on teh webbernets. We all just do the best we can. Even the Brujo, who is admittedly an asshole; but we love him for it.

    For, truly, everyone’s welcome to this crazy online party—the red velvet cupcakes are overcooked but the commenters are not infrequently bloody geniuses—so pick a handle, stick around! (Might help with the whole tone thing, too.) Otherwise I probably will (sadly) stop approving your comments, because, in the immortal words of CJ Cregg, you’re FREAKING ME OUT.

    Viz.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM

  9. blockthistoyourheart'scontentandpleaseerasealltracesofmefromthisspaceifyouwill said on Sunday 10 May 2009 at 6.47 pm:

    my fault, yes, for not knowing how to party or play the parlor game right

    sorry, and done (for absolute silent non-lurking good this time, I do so hope and swear, if I can just get atop this privileged silly excruciating loneliness)

    godspeed dear unnarrator

  10. unnarrator said on Monday 11 May 2009 at 10.47 am:

    Hm, so that’s who you are. Well I’ll be damned. I guess not surprised, though.

    As far as mockery—the Brujo informed me gleefully last night that he was only quoting, and believe me when I say this is difficult to type, Rob Schneider, from, um, The Waterboy. You’ll know when the Brujo’s really mocking you. Which he isn’t.

    (“You didn’t tell me you called me an asshole!”
    “Do you deny it?”
    “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole!”*
    “Not in New York.”)

    Writing (and relationship) is a game, but not one for parlors. One of high seriousness. I think you know this already.

    I also think labelling loneliness as “silly” is not going to get you very far in making friends with it. Or that “getting on top of” it’s going to work either. Don’t get me wrong—I’m the queen of namecalling my own grief “white-person problems”; but that’s not my self in recovery talking.

    You’re not at fault. Never were. And I still wish you well—from here. Having found the position.

    Please forgive me and excuse me now—I have papers to grade, papers to write, and a need to not have my heart be pounding every time I open my comment stream.

    *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYAcX9hA_ak

  11. tailbetweenlegsandoffoverthehillstohaulstonesfromoneendofafieldtoanother said on Tuesday 12 May 2009 at 3.35 pm:

    o well. embarrassing to be a parody of a parody of a parody of…

    been down with fever-flu. no excuse, I know. The writing isn’t working and I get so [whatever adjective you think most appropriate here] lonely and I stare at the ceiling and get stupid(er).

    please don’t make me choose a single moniker.

    anyway, I’ll try to stay away, or stay silent, really, after this thread is played out, honest to goodness, forever and a day and some pounding heartbeats longer than that if need be, because I can’t control my bray. Never was any good at this kind of chumming and you (or someone) will most certainly end up (justifiably) mocking me in the end.

    And o how I miss you (or maybe [and who ever would have thought] just the books you brought)…

  12. waitingtobekickedorholleredat said on Tuesday 12 May 2009 at 4.26 pm:

    o, and, I do think he was in fact mocking me and if he ever shows his face around me again, I’ll, (I will!), I’ll tell him what a nice guy everyone says he is.

    and I’m not supposed to be here. I swore to myself and everyone better than me that I wouldn’t come here to this patch of sunlight. And here I am looking around like I belong or something, as if there weren’t passages in all of this (again, whatever recovery-adjective you want to insert here) unreliability that don’t freak me and my loved ones and a friend or two out, and as if you haven’t set up pointers elsewhere on the web we’re all weaving from about-me to about-you for strangers to follow (it’s happened), and as if any of that matters, you have love and I have love and we’re the lucky ones, mentally interesting or not, and do write something other than landfill-bound papers on mediocre writers (invisible man excluded) or exhaustive care-tending on student efforts or facebooky jabber (although you are the finest or next-to-finest at it and she’s grateful and she’s so alive and she’s so altogether worthwhile)…

  13. unnarrator said on Tuesday 12 May 2009 at 6.49 pm:

    Well, double-dumb on me. Because, LOL! as they say—you’re not who I thought you were. Sigh, this is all so difficult.

    But I promise there’s not a mocking bone in his body. Well, or maybe, only if you’re Wynton Marsalis. (How funny would it be if HE read my blog! Like Mandarin and I used to have this joke about Ralph Fiennes discovering our blog—and then he’d knock mournfully and lornfully on my Tesuque door one night in the snow, etc.)

    I doubt Wynton Marsalis spends that much time online, though.

    ANYWAY…well, so obviously there are pointers of some kind; only I certainly didn’t set them up, and in fact have gone to an awful lot of electronically astute trouble to eliminate all of them (or what I plainly just thought were all of them). I have other people to protect (my parents) and would do anything—have done everything I could think of—to keep this work separate from my other work.

    I should’ve known it was you, though; who else is gonna hector me about not writing enough. (JOKE.) (Sort of.)

    The ISP from which (apparently) you read and (recently) write has another city’s name attached to it, other than the one I associate with you, and so I genuinely had no idea who you were; and honestly I have too many on-again-off-again readers to know, ever, who they/you all are. Besides which, the main part of my practice anyway has been to write in such a ruthlessly limited-first-person, transparently fallible overshare that (with the exception of the two people I’ve just mentioned) it wouldn’t matter who found this. That if they got freaked out, that reaction would be…well, up to them. Frankly even the Physicist and the Parisienne are on their own recognizance on this one. Other people haven’t been happy about it but they’ve either dealt with it or have shrugged me off in disgust. It’s been good practice for me, too, in really not caring (anyway caring to the point of self-harm or self-silencing) what readers think of me—whether they thought I was complaining too much and not writing enough for example. As for my parents…well, they’re in their sixties and their worldviews have always been kind of…fragile. It’s not like I don’t lose sleep over it. But I’ve come, or had thought I had come, to some peace about it all.

    Because of course I’m honored to write for that landfill (cue chorus “Publication is the Auction – “). I’d gratefully write nothing else for the rest of my few days. Don’t start with me about what a crock this is or how ambitious I am for readership, because you have no idea. I seem to have only very recently ceased being in it for some illusory permanence, or for anything other than the fact that, when I don’t do it, I suffer slightly more than when I do.

    So you know, I’m tempted to say: Just tell me where the holes are and I will close them and we can be done with this (actually I think I’m lookin’ at one now, and whapping myself upside the haid over it—I was just trying to give you TRAFFIC! Why didn’t you SAY something?! sheeit).

    But frankly, here’s the thing: My next entry would be, curiously, the thousandth post. Given this turn of events, I’m feeling pretty dang tempted just to stop blogging here, which I’ve been considering anyway. I’d leave the archives up in perpetuity, in honor of the fragile faithless-reader community which (astonishingly) arose and briefly (wittily, beautifully, gamely, honestly) flourished. Mandarin, the Brujo, Miss Bovary, Oleoptene, Repat Blues, Flipper, Bête Grise, Kimba, Votergirl, the Almost Right Word, Drian Biamond, Ms. Z, J., Lise, Jenzai, Patrick, Karen, Don, and all the other beloveds who stopped by and left thoughts or disagreements or complicating reflections or just shared in the occasional high hilarity. Including the dozens who emailed me when they were too shy to say anything out loud. And the scores who remained silent but returned.

    (Besides I’m still the number-one hit for both “edna krabapple porn” and “metahemeralism.” Can’t just walk away from that.)

    But I’d stop adding new posts. And then I’d simply relocate full-time to my website, where anyone who wants to comment would be jubilantly welcomed as always, as long as they did so using their double-handled legal name. The new posts would need to have most of the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll removed from them, to one degree or another. There wouldn’t be nearly as many mentally interesting screeds; or posts grappling with romantic/relationship angst (of, for example, this very kind); or mention of recovery from DBT/Xianity/Zen/various exes (convenient, really, because I seem to be on an involuntary happy hiatus from all these hobbies for the time being). And, perforce, there really couldn’t be ANY mention of students or co-workers or mental health-care providers, ever, period. No more pseudonyms means no more protection for them, even the (apparently) flimsy kind of protection which you’ve busted; so that’d be over.

    There would be, instead, mostly (still lively, I’d hope) discussion of cultural artifacts and the processes by which they are made, i.e. books and movies and music. And all the not-fit-for-a-wider-public stuff that’s had an outlet here—I’m not so stupid as to think that now, having been somewhat let out, it could just be turned off again. It would instead have to be trammelled back into quote literature unquote—where often, as the Duende correctly notes, it’s curiously safely disguised. (“It’s amazing—if it says ‘poem’ on it? Most people won’t even read it, much less ever figure out it’s about them.”) This is where the typewriter comes in. (And you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you…?)

    Maybe that’s what this unexpected turn of events is telling me. To seal off the leaks permanently. Because freaking you out is one thing; but freaking out your loved ones/friends/once-and-future colleagues is another altogether, I guess.

    Or maybe I should just tighten the tap all the way—stop the drip-drip and turn off the online faucet altogether. Slink back into the closet of landfill-generating literature where my kind belong. (No shit it’s lonely in there. I’m sure you take a dim view of my having teased open a brief window to the outside. Anyway it would be in character with what I knew of you.)

    The person to consult about this decision, though, probably isn’t you. This wasn’t written for you (sometimes it was written in defiance of you, co-opter of sorites—or anyway my internalized version of you) and you haven’t participated in its creation. Whereas a couple dozen others really have.

    So I guess I wonder what the rest of you guys would think about moving the party. Because it seems like the neighbors are bangin’ on the door and asking us politely to turn it down. Plus, we might be keeping my parents awake. Plus, I should maybe shut the hell up anyway and write a fucking novel.

    —Oh, and speaking of which, David Markson changed my life. I’m reading Broch now.

  14. abouttofallbackintobedandgofetalfromprolixity said on Tuesday 12 May 2009 at 6.51 pm:

    these are (sort of) like those amaranthine footnotes from that perversely talented (but non-fraudulent) writer* who is no longer here, he just isn’t

    “…better than me” [sic(k)]

    “It’s happened” (it has happened once, very recently, a way overzealous stranger apparently putting several things together from … to … to … to un and finding me in all my pseudonymic shame and perplexity among your masque of characters—I must admit he’s no ordinary sleuth or [unnerving] fan—but don’t worry, I don’t think he lives in Vancouver—wait, perhaps you can tell me where he lives).

    And perhaps very soon I’ll no longer hold the job amid the parquet and you can untag me then (and her, as surely-rating-more-than-Ms.-job appendage), if you’d be so kind, if you’re seeking accuracy, although I might not want to be summed up by my next punishment either, and she deserves something shimmering, does she not?

    this is fun, this trying to stay uncensored by you as you nimbly avoid the over-actual, like striking your own name after the “dear” (rendering the “dear” homeless and ordinary)

    I know, I know, you’re thinking (as is anyone else following this dialogue of old collaborators that is fast becoming a monologue of [failing to out-un the un] anecdotal miserabilia): “get well soon” and “get back to your own pages”

    yes, enough, way more than enough, I-don’t-know-how-you-do-it-this-is-exhausting enough

    * did I ever tell you I met him once, atop the hill, and his hair was short and unhidden and he was in a button-up shirt and khakis and he was distinctly a gentleman (as in better than I, as in my thinking: “I wish I could exude even a fraction of that frank kindness”)?

  15. unnarrator said on Tuesday 12 May 2009 at 7.00 pm:

    Yeah, you never could keep up, really. It’s just your Y chromosome.

    Well, I was gonna make you the Modernist; but it just never stuck, somehow.

    Whoever he was, he’s apparently gotta lotta time on his hands! A writer, obviously. I would be angry with this person but to be honest I kind of marvel at and admire the ingenuity.

    Can’t chat now, busy plugging the leaks.

    * OF COURSE YOU DID.

  16. (nay) née Modernist said on Wednesday 13 May 2009 at 8.39 am:

    I don’t rate a vote regarding 1000 or beyond, considering this is only my second foray into your heady fray (Kafka’s “The Bridge,” that small page of singular bliss, flushed me out of the pantry once before).

    This time—and perhaps of undeniable prescient significance—it was one of my favorite pop songs: “Here’s Where the Story Ends”

    I think you should write whatever and wherever you most want to write. If this is the space, so be it. It’s obviously brought a lot of people lots of pleasure. Still, your other website, with real names and real faces and the invited potential of shared voices, still whimsical and visceral and plucky, that sounds grand, too.

    Whatever you do, don’t turn off the tap. Bust the dam.

    Sleepwalkers or Guiltless or Death of Virgil? The latter, of course—why have I always insisted on asking you rhetorical questions?

  17. unnarrator said on Wednesday 13 May 2009 at 10.12 am:

    Oh, that was you on the Kafka. But I thought you hated the Sundays! And I also thought you had such seething, effervescent literary contempt for this whole frog-bloggy enterprise that you haughtily ignored it altogether. Except on holidays. And when you have the flu.

    This is not what I meant at all, at all. Or intended. I certainly never thought rabid strangers would re-assemble carefully shredded data like the crazed biographers in Possession. I didn’t think anyone would care that much. Bugger.

    I also freely admit that I have been utter crap at finding even marginally appropriate pseudonyms. Bluh.

    Finally, not only all that, but let it also number among my multifarious sins that I’m officially the slowest paper-grader in Christendom. It’s nearly 10 am and I’ve been up since six, here in this ugly office with helicopters slavering overhead like it’s in COMPTON or something (because today is graduation at the State School and we have this rather famous commencement speaker), and I’ve graded how many? SIX PAPERS. Bargh.

    As for dam-busting, however, don’t you worry your fevered brow about it. I’m not a drowning man, I’m a tumbler! Born under punches. Take a look at these hands.

    This whole unreliable thing, though, is finally, IM not so HO, completely frustrating. It has defied me and turned writhing and mutinous on its creator, as I should have known it would do, because such ingrate behavior is a definitional property of writing.

    (I think, by the way, that the words you were groping for, there in those parentheses above, to modify “unreliability”? Were possibly, for example, “bloody irresponsible.”)

    Alors: What [to quote a non-gentleman] Is To Be Done?

    Yes, the latter. Could it be because it mimics an attempt at genuine inquiry?

    (I’m just lamely trying to be [rhetorically interrogative and] funny…anyway I find myself asking “questions” of my students when I’m trying to trick them into thinking they’re being invited to a genuine discussion, instead of furtively trying to subject them to a crypto-lecture. It always leaves me feeling befouled afterward. As in, after every class.)

    * “who is no longer here, he just isn’t”…are you on the wallace-l listserv too?! Or did I write this also somewhere else.

    And you didn’t answer my question about the typewriter. I noticed that.

  18. unnarrator said on Wednesday 13 May 2009 at 10.21 am:

    PS—getting copyedited here is actually an honor. When I don’t emend people’s em-dashes and italics…it’s pretty much a sign of my dim view of their, ah, output. Which is why your first posts didn’t get edited. Because I thought you were youthfully pseudo-monastic. So I was being extremely generous with the rope payout. As it were.

  19. neverasfarbackinthetreesasyoutendtothink said on Wednesday 13 May 2009 at 7.36 pm:

    I don’t suppose I do much care for blogdom or cyberswirl. Kafka? Kafka I care about. Or, more accurately, much of what Kafka dispensed, or just the inviolate fact or miracle that he managed to muster anything at all. Same for Agee. Melville. Dickinson. Hopkins. Woolf. Stein, Beckett, Joyce—that unholy trinity. Faulkner. Mann. James. Lawrence. O’Connor. Conrad. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Chekhov and Turgenev. Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. Camus. Stevens. Robbe-Grillet. Pavese. Musil. Broch. Donne. Blake. Lao-Tzu. Shakespeare. This list grows ever longer and stretches out into the night. All the way back to Homer and Plato and all the way forward to Wittgenstein and Derrida, to Markson and Marias and you (I’m really not as narrow or elitist as your newest unreliable nametag for me suggests). I put “you” since I can’t type your four-letter name in this space with any hope of it staying where it belongs.

    You? At the risk of having to hear your eyes roll from all the way across this desert that separates us (as well it should): you I care about. I’ve thought about you every day for more than four years and I’ll think about you every day for four or forty more, whatever my allotment, as long as I think. There is nothing special about this. It just happens to be so (if you’ll excuse my hyperbole regarding all tomorrows, since the future is undoubtedly inscrutable).

    Somehow, astonishingly, there appears to be harmony and balance in our worlds. We aren’t alone (thank the fates or the gods or Nature), despite the constant inherent loneliness (see “silly” or perhaps “excruciating”). We have times and opportunities to create. Good people have our interests at heart (and we theirs). All I need now and then is to know you’re more or less okay (regardless of life’s inescapable horrors). The steady blip from secondhand radar seems to be just enough for my equilibrium. Please stay in range.

    All right. Time to drift back into the shadows. This private ping-pong thread needs to be put to bed. Would it be okay if I were to occasionally allow myself to think of myself as (ahem) that gracefully aging older poet (I’m no poet) from your proximal dream? Might I earn and hold some measure of your respect? This would make me happy (happier).

    PS The lowercase stiltedness was intentional, of course, a mask among too many masks, but thanks for all of the tidying nonetheless—if you only knew under what antiquated coal-mining conditions I labor—and the DFW reference was simply me mocking you (I have half of a sternum and a femur or two of mockery in this body, alas).

    PPS Your question about the typewriter was too allusive for my feeble fever-ridden mind to contemplate.

  20. forgoodnesssake said on Wednesday 13 May 2009 at 7.43 pm:

    PPS Would you please put something like @#$% after the godspeed pruning way up above so “dear” reverts to its proper adjectival sincerity and doesn’t sit there for all eternity flashing its nouny pet-name saccharine-ness?

  21. unnarrator said on Wednesday 13 May 2009 at 8.11 pm:

    “I don’t suppose I do much care for blogdom or cyberswirl.” Well, see, now I actually feel better; because I rode my bike home today all indignant in the afternoon swelter, thinking Now HANG on just a minute! Just a gosh-darned MINUTE here! Since when did this, this Person become all mellow and easygoing and accepting of precisely the kind of writing concerning which Person used to give every impression of taking a pretty dim damn view of?!? Of meticulously and methodically expressing Person’s educated distaste for the purpler tropes, more tortuous metaphors, fits of stylistic hysteria and just generally insufficiently classically cool approach to an already overwrought subject material—in short, pretty much the ENTIRETY of an unreliable (and therefore presumably wrong about this too) narrator’s work? So much so, in fact, that an altogether unholy amount of airtime has gone toward demolishing the internalized bad parent of such well-intentioned but not infrequently blistering-on-the-receiving-end feedback? And now Person is just going to fold its hands and say all meekly “I think you should write whatever and wherever you most want to write”?! In which case a) WTF; and b) have I been defiantly all-capping my wavering storm-tossed yet fiercely bloggerating écriture feminine against the indifferent imago (gray toe etc.) ALL THIS TIME FOR NOTHING?!

    I always answer my own questions, too.

    The typewriter thing was only because right after I posted that link, someone *bought* it before I could. And I got very grumpy and/or paranoid. But this is our cyberswirl.

    Well, and he isn’t here. And I went to Tucson and he also wasn’t there. Some who knew him are having a really hard time with his recent persistence in non-existing. And I just wish I could do something about that.

    And for that record which no one is keeping and few of us even think to consult anyway: I roll only my eyes at people who think Sideways is a good movie. Not at love.

  22. Oleoptene said on Sunday 17 May 2009 at 5.13 pm:

    Was that a sincere asking for input up in the middle of all of that? Because I do feel a perhaps illegitimate sense of investment in the unreliable narrator, and have for five days been recoiling at the notion of it being shuttered (which I keep typoing shuddered) and have been privately wrestling with the question of why a proposed move to non-sobriqueted full disclosure and narrowing of discussion feels like such a loss.

    It’s not my own privacy I am worried about—having no non-bloggy connection with you, it’s fine for me that oleoptene is everywhere but here connected to my name. Still—I probably am more candid here than I am on my own blog because this is not connected with my more-prominent-than-me husband, because I don’t think of clients of his doing searches on him and arriving here.

    The loss, I think would be a sense of you filtering, performing for an audience who wanted you to be something different than you are here—without saying that the voice of this blog is pure unperformed candor, it would be like, like—seeing my father performing in his job as teacher—the same face, voice, stories and so forth but turned to this other purpose of educating these other kids and somehow not-my-father? I’m not sure that the projection for students and colleagues and mentors and family members wouldn’t somehow change not just what you talked about but how you talked altogether?

    But maybe I think what I haven’t wholly untangled is the knot of privacy versus shame versus protection of the innocent versus security in an age of freaks, creeps and stalkers versus the privilege of knowing that Superman is walking in the front door of the Daily Planet right now, cleverly disguised with a pair of glasses—that the layer of secrecy is enticing, a little, when we can hide our deepest secrets in plain sight?

    Or maybe I just have a case of the May maudlins and really hate even the most inevitable of changes in something I love, something that is important to me.

  23. unnarrator said on Monday 18 May 2009 at 12.06 pm:

    Yeah, it was definitely a sincere asking; and I keep meaning to post a link to all this on the front page, and invite anyone who still hangs around and/or cares to join it; but “keep meaning to” has devolved, like almost every other social/public obligation/intention in my life, into “remind myself in the middle of the night that I must do, and then forget about during the day, other than intermitten twinges of guilt, until the next night.” Some of these have been going on for years now.

    But oh, Ms. O, am I glad to see you here! In my head I privately refer to all this as the Real Name™ problem, (no) apologies to Am•z•n. And I completely agree—I’m sure it would change how I wrote as much as/more than what I wrote about. And then I also consider 1) how much I leave out now anyway, since some of those who read this share offices and houses and lunches and dinners and workshops and ex-husbands and hometowns and genetic material with me. And 2) that I wouldn’t stop writing the (relatively?) unfiltered stuff, but in fact the filter would change, would turn fictive, and there would just be a long time before the next post. Say, two or three years. For example.

    It’s still stuck for me on this arm-wrestling between the practical idealism of the non-zero-sum game/the interwoven feeding-into-each other art forms, and the Realpolitik of being finite and not having met any of my fortieth-birthday literary, um, goals. Though this sounds so silly when I type it that I actually laugh aloud, and just think of the father in The Road looking at his son in amused disbelief, when the kid asks, “What are our long-term goals?”

    I’m starting to think this is the kind of decision that I can’t make in suburban Tartarus. I walked last night around our neighborhood’s sidewalks until my feet in their sandals were blistered and hot, and my limbs were heavy, and yet I felt no sense of relief from my oppressive thoughts. Not to sound like I’m in a Jack London novel or anything. I just feel really, really fucking stuck, which surprises me, because I also don’t really think any of this matters, either in the small local how-do-I-best-do-writing sense, or the large universal the-sun-will-explode-and-eat-our-books-and-cities sense.

    Some as-yet-undifferentiated or at least -articulated chunk of it comes down to a kind of “Good Old Neon” sense of my own pervasive, profound fraudulence, as well. Which is where the (poor, unwitting) Postmodernist’s introject comes in, pointing out to me meticulously just where I am Swiss cheese. Nonetheless it feels like real information; it doesn’t feel like just random blips of premenstrual self-loathing and rancour and recrimination. But the Professoressa says, when you feel like you are being given real information, stop anyway, and wait, and wait some more. Before you do anything, listen. Wait. And—her favorite two pieces of advice—drink lots of water and go on lots of long walks.

    Thinking about a quick escape to Santa Fe or Flagstaff or ANYWHERE BUT HERE to do just that. The Brujo still has three weeks left to teach and we don’t go to LA until June—oh! And I forgot to tell you—I finally got an idea for Ignite Tartarus! “WHY WE STILL NEED FEMINISM.” With charts and graphs and brutal inescapable statistics, heh heh.

    I got the May maudlins real bad, honey. And when you have them, by the way? Probably best NOT to reread The House of Mirth. Holy fucking EDITH that book is just UNRELIEVED TRAGEDY page after page after page. It’s positively FRENCH in the totality of its merciless stripping-away of any single advantage the protagonist temporarily possesses. While doing so in such staggeringly brilliant prose as makes me place my head in my hands and moan aloud in envy and greed. E.g.:

    “…and Percy, whose sense of duty was not inferior to his mother’s, spent all his week days in the handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation.” OH SNAP.

    The best is that I bought this copy from Cursie’s, the thrift store across the street, for 25¢, and it’s an edition from the fifties which comes with the handwriting of the original owner in the front:

    Susan Hughes
    Chi Omega House
    p. 101 trapped by society

    Miss Hughes appears not to have noticed any irony in thus dedicating her book. I treasure it inordinately.

    Okay, sorry, this should all go on goodreads anyway. Social networking, you are KILLING ME. Or at least entangling me in your knot and confusing me greatly.

    And another thing playing into all this—a speech the Professoressa gave last year at the Women’s College convocation, in which she said:

    Be cautious about markets. Protect yourself and those you care for from too much vulnerability in markets. They are seeping deep into our society into arenas where they have never been allowed to operate before. Pay attention to this. I also try to take all the admonitions about making myself competitive in the marketplace with more than a grain of salt; I ration my exposure to such messages and try to keep my balance when they seem unusually loud or pervasive. In Plan B, one shapes a life, not a career. A good life requires good work, because, as someone said, “work is your love for your community made visible.” And only you, not the marketplace, know what is your good work.

    This (and all the rest of her brilliant shadow-address, in which she functions as the psychological priest of the college by reminding two thousand insanely ambitious women of the importance of surrender, openness, and Plan B) is swirling around in my brain along with Wharton, Martin Eden, Jude Hawley and Sue Bridehead (“It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one”), Paul Fussell, Living by Fiction, Invisible Man, Sontag’s Salmagundi interview, the agonizingly bad essay I read last night on Melville, and great indigestible gobs of Wallace. But this is what I came to grad school for, right? To have all the certainties messed up and moved around and rearranged and disarranged and complicated insolubly?

    Plan B. What is Plan B? I’m going for another walk.

  24. unnarrator said on Thursday 15 Oct 2009 at 5.27 pm:

    No one said anything else, after this.

    I still read this thread sometimes, though, and try to figure out what if anything it all meant. I miss the Postmodernist. And I seem to have decided to blog again, despite myself, or because of myself, however ongoingly unreliable I continue to be, sub specie aeternitatus.


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