Attractive & Nutty & A Whole Bunch of Other Things About Me You Wouldn’t Even Know

A friend of mine sent me a link some time ago (I tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore it) from a listserv that is devoted to discussions of the Author and the Author’s body of work and so on. The particular thread my friend sent, in which my blog was mentioned, was dated over a year ago. For a whole bunch of reasons, I don’t read the listserv, and it’s probably good that I don’t, because after someone mentioned my blog, someone else asked if I was “for real” (which I guess I could be making it all up, but I would sure have hoped to improve upon quite a lot in that case), and this query goes on until someone else—someone who claims to have known me “for real” comes on to clarify that I am indeed “for real”. Not only that, but he (the listserv participant) was actually there at the movies with the Author and me way back in whatever year that was. Pre-9/11.

And then this guy adds a few extra notes about me, including but not limited to the following: that I am nutty; that I am attractive.

The thing about being called nutty—and let’s just acknowledge that this misogynistic trope has been used to dismiss a woman’s voice/agency/credibility since the Greeks & their famous Wandering Womb--well, whatever. Nearly all of my most favorite people (artists/writers/actors/seekers) in this world or no longer in this world (DFW among them) could be described as nutty, and worse. So I’ll take it as a compliment, even if that wasn’t the spirit in which it was offered. It’s that old Kerouac quote which I, not at all a fan of Kerouac, still love:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

But to be called attractive—which is clearly not the same as being called pretty*—is what really hurt my feelings. (I’m not going to say that I would have preferred to be called unattractive or ugly; I suppose that might have hurt my feelings more.) But the thing is, it wasn’t a compliment. What the writer meant was that my attractiveness alone could explain why such an estimable man as the Author would be spending time with such an otherwise-worthless woman. Basically, the writer noted that I was attractive in order to forward his opinion (without knowing me at all, I should add) that my worth as a person is reducible to my looks/my fuckability.

I have no idea who this person is; I have no memory of meeting him or introducing him to DFW, as he claims I did. I’m not saying he’s lying; I’m just saying that clearly we didn’t have much of a relationship.

Still, this guy decided that he knew me well enough to know that my looks were clearly the only thing even remotely redeeming about me. This is what he felt confident in asserting to the DFW message-boards.

I know I shouldn’t care. Because anyone who has and does know me knows that, um, there is maybe a little more to me. (And also, that I’m not always attractive. Which, whatever.) But I would like to submit here that his summation of me-as-my-looks is further misogyny of the rankest order (which even our Author would find horrific) and is why I personally have never been entirely comfortable being called pretty or hot or attractive or whatever else women in their twenties get called. It’s not that being attractive doesn’t have its occasional advantages; it’s that it is such a limited way of understanding a person, a way that promises only to disappoint (the subject and the object) eventually. You have to come to like more of me if you are going to spend any time with me. (And, for the record, DFW noted that I was, while pretty, sort of funny looking. Which I am. That there was something off about me. He said this empathically, and that it was true for him, too. Maybe it was that we both had an underbite.)

The other thing this guy states without knowing me at all is that my entire way of being w/ DFW was as a hanger-on. I’d never heard this term and so looked it up on Urban Dictionary, where it was defined as a sychophant (does anyone really think Hanger-On is an improvement? Sycophant is such a good word.). I’ve hung on to a lot of people in my life, I guess. I’ve also let a lot of people hang on to me (but only certain people). I particularly hung on throughout college and (yes) grad school when I was searching for role models and teachers and mentors. I needed guidance. And I was lucky enough to go to schools where there were amazing people. Yes, I went to grad school there almost entirely because he was teaching there. As did most of my classmates at the time. Is that surprising? There weren’t many other reasons to move to a second-tier state school in Central Illinois. (Okay, there were a few other reasons.) But for most of us, his being on faculty there was huge. And he was well aware of this. He wasn’t always generous about it, either. He called someone I knew and liked “a sycophant” to my face—which I found rather rude, given the power dynamics involved and the fact that we, students and admirers, could hardly not come off as sycophantish. On the other hand, I didn’t go to grad school expecting to go to the movies with him. I didn’t expect to have conversations with him about taking Nardil, or about eating tapioca on the fifth floor. But I did. So sue me. I liked him. We liked each other. I knew he’d been involved with lots of women, including another female student who is likely the “three-day-weekend” the writer ruefully mentions. But you know, I wasn’t a baby. I’d had lots of serious boyfriends before I met him. I don’t regret it, certainly. You know that thing Freud once said about love and work? Well, he was right. Nothing else matters.




*Like, for example: they called Sarah Palin attractive.

To Run Away

I have a love-hate relationship with teaching. And the thing is, when it's hate, it is really hate. There are these moments of extreme existential despair. As in: here are all of these minds/selves in the room with me and not one seems to give a whit for what I'm going on and on about. Or that whole thing where I am the ONLY person in the room w/ any energy/interest/enthusiasm AT ALL for the subject. And even if I'm faking it, I'm the only one faking it. I realize all teachers face this. But often times, it functions as this microcosm of the world-at-large, reminding me again of why I have long desired only to remove myself from the world-at-large.

Someone referred me recently to this great interview with Jean-Philippe Toussaint in which he is asked "What is the role of the artist in society?" and his (perfect) answer? "To run away."

Which is what I want to do. I want to run away. I think I'd prefer to spend the rest of my life in a mental hospital; that is, if it wasn't really a mental hospital, but instead was some sort of utopian alterna-space, of true asylum. The mental hospital, of course, only operates/functions as yet one more microcosm. It hardly provides freedom, as I once romantically imagined.

But so I've been thinking of all this because we were reading bell hooks' essays, and I love me some bell hooks, including that essay on Do the Right Thing in which she argues that--contrary to popular/commercial marketing strategies--the film is NOT counterhegemonic art; it is indeed, quite conservative, "a good capitalist product" she even calls it.

It's not that I expect my students to agree w/ her points, though I do expect open minds. And the thing is it just seemed so typical and predictable and sad that the white boys in the (urban, Chicago) classroom were so offended by hooks, what with all her mentioning of the WHITE SUPREMACIST CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY, and worse than that was that after watching the film, that one white boy would argue that it was Buggin' Out's fault, that Sal shouldn't have to hang pictures of African-Americans in his shop; that it was his shop and therefore he was justifiably right to hang photos of Italian-Americans. And then the one (very brave) black guy in the class responded--and this was the first time ever that he spoke in a class discussion--that well excuse me but why couldn't Sal hang pictures of African-Americans when after all only black people ate in his restaurant?

And then the way that the film sort of reaffirms this nihilistic idea that everyone should just stay in their own neighborhoods (which, in Chicago, they do) and also that everyone is racist.

And that was as far as we got. Honestly. And there's me trying to de-center the classroom, and etc. But still I am not bell hooks and I wish I could be her. Because she would surely have moved this discussion along more effectively than I did. And she likely would not have hung her head in despair after the end of the class.

I think I'm going to find a new job. Or maybe start teaching little kids, before they've decided that they know everything and therefore become unteachable. I remember DFW saying that this is why he didn't like teaching grad students--they know everything, or think they do--and I agree. Though I think Jr/Srs in college can be the same way.

Honestly

I would like to update this blog more frequently, but I don't know what that would mean. How one updates a blog frequently. And I am writing now, editing and finishing and revising a manuscript, and it feels like wow. Like how could I blog also too (as Goo says: also too; "I'm tall also too, Mommy!")? My friend says the blog-voice feels atavistic and false when she switches to it from poetry writing and that is how I feel also too. But also too everything I ever write feels atavistic and false. I am atavistic and false.

I've been thinking a lot about Clarice Lispector. I have a huge crush on her, again. But it is a bigger crush this time. I am reading her stories, slowly, one at a time, and they haunt me. Such as one I read today called "For the Time Being". That's it. We are all for the time being.

The other thing that haunts me lately, speaking of our time-being-ness, is The Death of Ivan Illych, which I read and then wrote a cover of for my own book. It probably sucks, my cover, but I was so haunted by Ivan Illych that I had to cover it. And I'm not even going to say anything about how the book put me in mind of a certain person who was the one who first ever told me to read the book. I'm not going to say it. I will say that I was thinking of Sontag quite a bit, and got out the old copy of Illness as Metaphor even, which was maybe the first Sontag I ever read, way back when I was a school girl, speaking of crushes. And me old also too.

xoxoxo

Desire (I) (from a work in progress)

The biggest problem now that you are dead is that I can talk about you. And it is unseemly to talk about you. But I have been talking. Because once I made a list of all the people I'd ever slept with. We were all making lists then. My list was in the double digits, eleven I think, and it made me feel strange until my friend Lisa said her list was in the forties. She lost count. And she was younger than me. But I could name every person on my list even if it had only been a one time thing and that revealed something about me she said. And you were on the list. And it was after you died, after I heard you'd died, that I returned to the list and it was true. You were the only dead one. The only dead one on the list. Someday others on the list will be dead.

There is one who is old, older than you were even, and so I imagine he will be the next dead. For now he is married to a woman my age to a woman who is an actress sometimes he tells me to a woman with a father who is also an alcoholic and isn't that a coincidence he says, winking, in the way one can wink in an email. I didn't know your husband was Jewish he writes with an exclamation point. It is unseemly.

These exclamation points.

But not as unseemly as your death which was gruesome we were all thinking about you and your belt and I'm not supposed to talk about it for days and nights though it was none of our business though you are allowed. Though we have to allow it of you though we revere you for it now though you make us sick and we love you now with an intensity that embarrasses us. The intensity we reserve for the dead for our love of the dead. You were beautiful we realize now and it sickens us. That we'd forgotten or hadn't noticed. And here I am with you on my list thinking of the time and the desire. Desire was you sitting next to me offering me a Ritz cracker you spitting in your cup but desire was also the man at home the man in my bed that night. Desire was the way we kissed each other as if looking for something else not the other and it made us both sad. But we were already sad. That was desire. Desire was the way you liked that there was a man in my house if not my bed and you liked that I left his sweatpants at your house one day and desire was you feeding the man's pants to your dog. That was desire.

And desire was the way you took me to the grocery store in your new car and desire was you telling me "you're hot" and me oh is he just like all the rest I must have thought because you did say hot you called me hot and you even you.

Desire was also the way you came over with your dogs and we walked around the park and you told me about your tennis match. Desire was the way you followed certain conventions and ignored others. Desire was the way you said I can't be your thesis advisor because I want to date you. It was funny how you used the word date. We both laughed. It was funny how you opened doors for me. It was funny that when I commented on the insistent opening of doors you said that your mother had taught you. To open doors. It was funny that I knew then that I would teach my son the same thing. It was funny how you brought gifts.

Desire was me not caring and knowing it would break me open but also knowing that I needed to be broken open that I needed to die. And that you were the one who would take me there.

And we ate Chinese food and it wasn't good Chinese food because we were in central Illinois. And my stomach hurt it was indigestion and I shouldn't have told you but I did and you were so kind. Me gassy and you and I wasn't embarrassed and that was desire.

Desire was your shirt that I wore that you wanted back that I wouldn't give back because fuck you. And me sitting on your couch watching Alien and then Aliens on your VHS player because you couldn't believe I hadn't seen one or the other while you wrote letters you signed with smiley faces to all of the people who loved you.

I turned thirty. You turned forty. I thought you were old and even that was desire.

I told Lisa that I'd never slept with someone who killed himself. Or was it that no one I'd ever slept with had killed himself. Or that of all the people I'd ever slept with, you were the only one to be dead. To be now dead. To be dead because he killed himself. It was wrong, the way I put it, because there is no way to put it, but she knew what I meant. And after I heard about you I found my list and I wrote to everyone left alive on my list and I asked each one to promise me that he would never kill himself. And no one wrote back. It had nothing to do with me, I realize. It had nothing to do with anyone.

Desire was the way I could say things to you as if we believed in language and we did. But it wasn't desire when you gave me a card it was my birthday with two kitty cats cuddling. They wore birthday hats and it wasn't desire any longer but it said anyway, “Happy birthday. You don't have to spend it alone.” Love, Me. You wrote. And you gave me a present. And I was afraid of language. But I told you something about what had to happen. You told me that I didn't really want it to happen. You said I was self-destructive. I said It takes one to know one. I said you don't understand. You said I didn't understand. You said it was a grave misperception. You were right. It was grave. It was a misperception. You were right.

Things I See on TV at the Gym

So this is going to be a very negative post. And I’m sure that has a lot do do with Cymbalta or some other pharmaceutical that I am not taking now. At the gym this morning I saw another Cymbalta commercial. It wasn’t the one with the woman with the wind up thing on her back. It was another one. There were many women in this commercial, one woman had a daughter and another woman had a dog. When the woman with the dog felt better, post-Cymbalta presumably, she took the dog for a walk in her lovely leafy neighborhood. There was a very handsome African-American man with a wife who was worried about him. Everyone was in bed. Everyone stayed in bed. Many of the women in bed had very good hair. One woman had shiny black hair and a nice haircut with bangs. I could never wear bangs. They would look funny on me. I want to be a woman who can wear bangs. But it’s not a major concern. The woman with the good hair wore grey sweatpants and a purple shirt. I remember when I was in the hospital I wore grey sweatpants, nearly every day. I had at least three different pairs of grey sweatpants. At some point in my life I stopped having sweatpants at all, though for most of my life I had sweatpants. I wore sweatpants through my twenties. I can not recall wearing sweatpants in my thirties, not even when I was 31, for example. I am still in my thirties and I do not own a single pair of sweatpants. I own these like sweatsuit type things, like track suits. I don’t know what they are called but I started wearing them when I was 33. I have one particular brown velour track suit that I became famous for on our campus in Istanbul—that’s how much I wore it—but then I wore it so much after Magoo was born that there are literally holes in it and I keep saying that I will burn it but I haven’t. I can’t quite burn it. Once at the gym I saw a reality television show hosted by Tori Spelling who was on a diet and after she lost weight she burned her Spanx. And other things that disgusted her. But Tori Spelling is rich and I am not rich and so I can’t readily burn perfectly fine clothes, even Spanx. Though I do not wear Spanx. Because yuck.

On another Tori Spelling program that I saw at the gym Tori was pregnant with her second child and she went to find out the gender and she said to her husband who is Canadian I really hope it’s a girl. And then when the doctor said it was a girl she cried and she told the camera that it had always been her dream to have a girl. After I saw that program I told D. that I wanted to have another child, a girl, because it had always been my dream to have a girl. Tori told the camera that she was hoping to repair something of her difficult relationship with her own mother, to heal through having her own daughter. I told D. that I wanted to have a girl so that I could heal from the loss of my own mother. I told him it had always been my dream. He told me that I was not allowed to quote Tori Spelling.

I think that was the last time I watched Tori Spelling at the gym. I want to emphasize that I have never watched Tori Spelling at home. I love the part in Susan Sontag’s 9/11 essay where she notes that she has never owned a TV set in America but she does watch TV when abroad. I did not watch much TV when abroad because it was mostly in Turkish. But I did watch this one reality television show, Survivor, where they pit young Greeks against young Turks. I could understand it because they had to speak in English to one another. Most Greeks don’t know Turkish and vice versa. The producers obviously wanted the Greeks and the Turks to hate each other (via history) but what happened was that they didn’t. And then at night they had parties and drank raki (Ouzo) and ate the same foods that they eat but have different names for (tzatziki, etc.) and then they did the same Ottoman-era traditional dances. One Greek guy told a Turkish guy that his family was from Constantinople and the Turkish guy said that’s in Turkey. Istanbul. These were the best moments.

I thought this was going to be a negative post because I didn’t sleep last night and my head was racing with worrisome thoughts about Magoo’s school. We went to a Sukkot party at his school last night and met the parents of his classmates. We liked maybe one parent. And then when we got home we googled the other parents and it turns out everyone works some corporate job and duh because how else are they so rich. We are the only parents who are not rich. Well there is also my friend whose daughter is in the classroom next door. I saw her as we were all walking out to the Sukkah and because she had been a teacher in New York City Public schools she said “I am just blown away by the privilege here.” “What do you mean?” I said. “Everyone has two parents, for example.” And then I thought yes. There were lots of two parents. And most of the parents were white. In Goo’s class, there are two not-white kids but one has a white mom and the other has two white moms.

D. loved the party because they sang all of these Hebrew songs that brought him back to his childhood. And so I am trying very hard not to be negative about the school. I am trying not to feel inferior to all of the rich people with their enormous SUVs and three children families and single-family homes in Lakeview. I am also trying not to judge them for being rich. I am trying to do the thing in This Is Water where I imagine that they need their SUVs in the city for various complicated reasons re poor health. Or something. It must be the Cymbalta though, because I was up at 4 in the morning thinking about how awful the school is and wondering if L. is really happy there and then deciding that maybe I could not work next semester and that way we couldn’t even afford the school. But in order for me to be that kind of stay-at-home—the kind who arranges playdates and activities and crafts—I’d have to go back on the Cymbalta.

Also, I forgot to mention: everyone in the Cymbalta commercial had a really nice well-appointed house on a leafy street with lots of outdoor space, patios and backyards. That kind of thing.

What I'm Reading (life after Jest)

There was this moment where I thought I would never blog again. But that moment passed. Which doesn't mean I have much to say. I'm Real Writing again. Which means, blog silence. Unless I'm trying to avoid Real Writing, like right now, which means Hello, Blog!

So what have I read since finishing Infinite Jest? Well, weirdly, I re-read Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. I did not plan to read a book by a DFW-era writer (someone he admired) about the pathology of addiction. I didn't plan it but it has been a lovely variation on one or two of the themes of Infinite Jest (namely: addiction, the cage, spiritual seeking). It is one of those books that I was taught many times; that was recommended to me by many people/writers whom I admire; and still. I never really could love it. I even wondered why everyone loved it so much. But this time, I'm into it. I get it. I almost love it. I have many moments of shivering & goosebumps. And I have joined the ranks marveling at its construction, wondering Now how did he make a drug addict so sympathetic? And also: how does this simple, very small, seemingly unfinished collection of stories become so powerful? Because it does. Unreliable narrator and all.



And speaking of addicted (unreliable) narrators, the other book I happened to read (last night in bed) is Stephen Elliot's The Adderall Diaries. It came in the mail, part of his Lending Library thing. Stephen Elliot is very kind and always signs his emails with xoxo. Which gives me a warm feeling. Also, I like The Rumpus. The book is a mess, and I like that. There is also this incredible tension between the confessional/suicidal narrative and the investigative. There are moments where I feel simply that he is maybe the bravest writer alive. (It's not just all that he reveals about his sex life/mental illness/psychiatric history; he also talks about money, i.e. that he made 10,000.00 dollars last year. I know few people willing to admit such a fact.) He quotes Sontag on Simone Weil at one point (he references many of my favorite people, from Sontag to Plath to Janet Malcolm), but doesn't get to her great line:

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live.

Elliot doesn't quite put himself in Weil's company, in the company of the "repetitive, obsessive, and impolite" but I'll put him there; it's where he belongs.

Sadism pronounced Saddism

So I’m done.

The book got really sad for me at the end. Barry Loach’s soul sprouting “little fungal patches of necrotic rot”, Hal, Orin in his jar, Gately in his cage. Everyone in his/her cage. There’s a tiny part of me that’s simply relieved to be done, to put the book back on the shelf for a while, to recall that there are other world views (even if so many will lead me back to this one: I can’t keep from inserting an IJ/DFW reference in nearly every class this term.) But I’ve been this way with DFW since I first read him way back in the nineties. I get obsessed to the point of distraction, and then I let go. Step away. Until I come back. Which I always do.

It started to get excruciating for me in the 700s, with Avril explaining to Mario:

My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally…The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful (766-7).

And it wasn’t just that by the 8 and 900s the humor had disappeared, though it had.

It was also something about those final appearances of Hal, all distant and detached. He’d gone all Bartleby: “I would on the whole have preferred not to play (954)” but it was worse, I think, because I expected more from Hal; or maybe I just really wanted to connect. And there he was, lying on the floor, emptied out, detached.

I just knew I was going to feel empty, once it was over.

The strange thing is that with Hal’s final narration we move into one of the few first person narratives, which brings an expectation of intimacy. Instead, we come face to face with that very disassociation (anhedonia) that Avril has described. Though intellectually I was impressed by how The Author did that (The Disassociated Narrator), another part of me was just hurt. Sad. Lonely.

If you’ve ever been with someone who has/is disassociated you know how lonely it can be. I think that’s sort of how I felt as a reader. I felt rejected.

Maybe it was also that I knew the end was coming; I’ve never been good with endings. Maybe I wanted to reject the book before it rejected me.

By the end I was revising/updating my Saddest Lines of the Book list. This made the list: “It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep” (973) but the one that killed me, that is still haunting me, came on the last page just before that much lauded last line:

Gately thinks sadism is pronounced ‘saddism.’ (981)

***

I’ve never pretended to have anything like objectivity when it comes to this book or this author*. Doubtful Geste, one of my favorite Infinite Summer members (I feel very attached to these people; it’s kind of embarrassing), referred to himself as one of the "annoying" and "evangelistic" types. I’m definitely in that camp, if not for IJ, then for the author himself.

Which doesn’t mean that I can’t hear criticism and haven’t learned from it. I reread the final post from Infinite Detox and came to understand, even agree with some of what he wrote. (For example, that the men’s meeting is a total send up of gooey sincerity if there ever was one. It always really annoyed me, that scene. I still don't like it.) I also understand what he and others are saying about the ending. But then, my expectations were different. I don’t need to know what happens to Kate Gompert or Joelle or even Hal (though I’m in the “nothing happened to him” camp for now) to know that it’s not good. It was just worth it to spend time with them.

So my plan today, now that it’s over? I’m going to listen to a lot of Barbara Streisand. Tonight we’re going to the see a play. I can’t wait.


Many thanks to Matthew Baldwin and the many others for this whole thing (easily the best thing I’ve ever done on the Interwebs. I mean, I had goosebumps on more than one occasion, reading these posts). I couldn’t (wouldn’t) have done it without you.




*Which not even to bring up all the problematic ways the book reminded me of the author himself, so for example when Hal mentions the Hagia Sophia, I recall the last thing he ever wrote to me, as a postscript to a postcard (I was in Istanbul, pursuing my own interest in Byzantine erotica): “I hope the Hagia Sophia is as beautiful in real life as it is in photos.”

And by the way: It’s actually not as beautiful, but it is better in real life. Isn’t everything.