 “Writing about the buddist here has been public display, of course, but it’s been a public display of trying to figure something out, I’m not sure what it is – something about desire, obviously, and the trajectory of mourning – but also about boundaries, about secret/public, about embodiment and meaning, and the fragility of the ego, about the embarrassment and shame of being left or rejected, about pushing myself into ever uncomfortable spaces in writing. I’m not talking about my life here because it’s particularly interesting, it’s more the whole ‘push the personal until it’s universal’ cliché, though of course nothing is ever universal. I’m not an essentialist.” […]
“But I’ve had enough of my cyber vulnerability and honesty. It’s time to direct these forces into book projects I want to finish. So, I’m saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here. I already said that, but I mean it this time. Any more I’d have to say about this stuff needs the intense focus and discipline of Real Writing to tease it out,” Dodie Bellamy writes, in one of the blog posts that became her book the buddhist. This post comes about halfway through the book.
Luckily (and obviously) she does not make good on her promise to “say goodbye to the buddhist vein,” and in her next post she revisits this question of blog writing versus “Real Writing.” “I’ve always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets’ insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they’re such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny?” In the post after that one, she explains the idea of the “extradiegetic” while drinking “organic unfiltered sake, the creamy white kind” (these details are so important to the Dodieness of Dodie’s writing that I can’t leave them out). “Intradiegetic refers to the reality that exists within the narrative of a movie or fiction” – plot, characters, dialogue, first-person narration – while “extradiegetic refers to elements that exist outside that narrative” – third-person narration, the musical score of a film, the audience’s preexisting knowledge of the ‘real life’ a narrative is based on, the audience’s knowledge about the lives of actors who play characters in a film. The example that Dodie gives is how Heath Ledger’s death “added a frisson” to The Dark Knight.
The example that springs most easily to my mind is: the first time I heard the song “Video Games” I was lying in savasana at Go Yoga in Williamsburg. Continue reading Laughing and crying
This is for the person who searched for “Why did Emily Gould delete Things I Ate That I Love”? I didn’t, I just changed its URL (stupidly, I think now) to http://emilygould.tumblr.com. I wanted it to be clearer it was me when I reblogged or left a note on something, was part of my thinking? This will be gobbledygook to anyone who doesn’t have a Tumblr. Anyway, it’s all still there, very much so. Someone else has scooped up thingsiatethatilove and is squatting on it, which is weird. Stop living in my old house, squatter, or if you’re gonna live there, at least repaint it.
Lately because of Emily Books I’ve been trying to anatomize my own taste. It’s not that I have to figure out why I like the things I do but it would probably be helpful to understand my impulses as I try again and again to explain what these books do that’s different from what other books do. (You know: “branding.”) To market Emily Books, in emails and blog posts and interviews, I’ve used words like “gross” “kinky” “transgressive” “feminist” “weird” “strange” “fascinating” “riveting” “first-person” “autobiographical fiction,” “weird sex” “sexual weirdness” “queer” “mind-blowing” “consciousness-shifting” “druggy” ”outsider art” “documentary” “druglike” “life-changing” “funny” “hilarious” “oddball” “lesbian” et cetera. All of these words apply but none of them really convey what I mean.
I read a blog post over the weekend that reminded me about the idea of a continuum that connects all the different writing that I like. The reason the blog post triggered this obsession was that I felt like the writer either didn’t know her work was part of a tradition or was willfully feigning ignorance of that tradition. I want to locate her story in a tradition because for years I didn’t understand that my own writing was part of a tradition. Maybe a name exists in literary theory but outside academia there is not a mainstream accepted satisfying name for this tradition. But there are exemplars of it and I want to force the world to read their books, so I have to figure out what this tradition encompasses and what to call it.
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Toward the end of my doomed stint at Kenyon College I spray-painted the word “slut” on the dorm room door of a boy who, for the purposes of this story, I’ll call Dave (okay, that was his real name, but it’s also the name of almost all other white dudes his age so I feel okay about using it). It was green spray paint, and I remember thinking that almost any other color would have been more appropriate, more violent and emphatic. “Slut” the color of springtime leaves. Like everything else about the gesture, it needs a lot of context to make any sense.
Continue reading Our graffiti
The Art of Fielding is a great book and a popular book — an odd and miraculous-seeming combination! Chad Harbach is a great person and now, after years of hard work and no ego rewards, also a successful person. Another too-rare combination.
Hemp protein powder, yogurt, agave syrup and oats are also weirdish things to combine but these protein bars came out mostly okay. Recipe here, should you wish to cook along at home.
I read JD Samson’s post about the crappiness of having to psychologically and practically reconcile her early financial success with her current financial struggles with cringey mixed feelings. It reminded me of a post I wrote for the Hairpin about a year ago. I am so embarrassed by this post that I can’t even reread it now but I think it was about how the mere existence of Tavi’s internet enterprise is somehow unfair to writers who are twice her age because, basically, it’s annoying that we’ve worked hard in various ways for years and now a teenager is judging our worthiness. I wrote it at my desk at my temp job. You can absolutely tell. You don’t have to do much reading between the lines to get that what I was really saying was: “I’m temping and broke and so confused and bitter about how I got here from the places where I’ve been, I thought I was done with this but apparently I will spend the rest of my life struggling, I don’t deserve this, how did this happen?”
When you’re any kind of artist and you’re having your first taste of success, it’s easy to forget that financial success and artistic success don’t often go hand in hand—that, actually, it is super rare for someone who does work in any artistic discipline to be paid what that work is worth. Some of the people whose writing and music have changed my life and many other people’s lives are living in rental apartments with pee-smelling hallways or drafty houses in cold upstate college towns. Some of them are living in Greenwich Village brownstones. There’s no logic behind who gets what; we want to believe that there is because it makes us feel like we’re in control, but we’re mostly not. Sometimes, some people will draw a winning hand. The Internet will reliably get its collective panties in a twist whenever an author, god forbid, gets paid six figures (of which 15% goes to his agent and 25% goes to the IRS) for the novel he’s spent years working on. When hedge fund criminals make that same amount of money in a lucky minute, it’s not the same people who get riled up, if anyone even gets riled up.
Even if you’re a big fan of capitalism, you’ll at least concede that its greatest strength is probably not its capacity to reward artistic virtue fairly. It’s important for artists to remember this—and then it’s important for us to stop dwelling on it. “I can’t make coffee,” Samson writes; this was probably where I sympathized with her–and also cringed–most. I spent a lot of the past year trying to figure out what, besides writing, I could do to make money. Besides temping, I tried to trick myself into thinking that I was on the verge of becoming various kinds of consultant. I do teach yoga, but the kind I teach is not really a cash cow. (Cash cat-cow? Yoga joke.) I had lunches and informational interviews. I found out about the viability of selling my eggs (I have one more year!) I kicked myself for not taking freelance assignments that would have been right for 25 year old me but would have been torture for present-day me (“Interview your exes about what went wrong” was a memorable one). Mostly, though, I wrote things no one paid me to write and borrowed lots of money just to be able to live. Sometimes I bailed on plans with more financially stable friends because I knew we’d end up eating food I’d be paying 16% APR on for years to come. Other times, I didn’t bail, then didn’t enjoy my friends because I was thinking about money the whole time. I complained, complained, complained about it all to anyone who would listen (mostly Keith and Ruth, and also my therapist, to whom I also owe money.)
And then finally, long after I had given up, I had the idea for a business!(that will probably not make money anytime soon.) But just realizing that there was something I am capable of doing besides writing was enough to give me hope that I will, piece by piece, begin to figure out the rest of my life.
Financial self-sufficiency is a big deal, especially for women, whose liberation has historically coincided with their financial freedom. It takes courage to admit that you’re not doing okay, and to begin doing something about it. It’s complicated, though, because I’m not at all saying “get a day job!” to people like JD who feel like making art is the only thing they’re capable of doing. I’m more saying, keep your mind open about what you might be capable of doing. A lot of us grew up hearing “Do what you love and the money will follow,” which is great advice for people who love neurosurgery or filing briefs. “Do what you love 70% of the time and spend the rest of the time doing various things you hate, or that are difficult for you, and see what happens,” might be better advice. It was for me, I think. I don’t know! I’ll keep you posted.
I’m told that I mispronounced “rugelach” throughout this episode but otherwise I think this is a good one. Thanks as always to Val and Andrew and very special thanks to honorary associate producer Kate Gould, who provided moral support, cleanup and pizza on the day of filming (also gave birth to me, rendering this entire enterprise possible).
After you watch Bryan Charles’ Cooking the Books you should spend some time poking around the new Blip show-page. It is nice there but it kind of has the eerie empty-building feel of a website that is unused to receiving visitors. Like, there is one comment on any of the videos and I believe that comment is “first!” We cooked a Mark Bittman recipe that involved frying pieces of chicken and their skin separately, to create crunchy chicken-skin topping. We learned that I need to sharpen my knife. Bryan’s book is sold here and no chickens were harmed in its manufacture.
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“Writing about the buddist here has been public display, of course, but it’s been a public display of trying to figure something out, I’m not sure what it is – something about desire, obviously, and the trajectory of mourning – but also about boundaries, about secret/public, about embodiment and meaning, and the fragility of the ego, about the embarrassment and shame of being left or rejected, about pushing myself into ever uncomfortable spaces in writing. I’m not talking about my life here because it’s particularly interesting, it’s more the whole ‘push the personal until it’s universal’ cliché, though of course nothing is ever universal. I’m not an essentialist.” […]
