In seventh grade I was sent to the principal’s office for making posters and taping them up in the hallways of my school. The posters deplored sexism in some way; maybe there was some school policy that I found sexist. I wish I remembered the details. I do remember finding it maddening and a little bit funny that the “reason” I got in trouble was that the posters hadn’t passed through the correct bureaucratic process before I’d put them up: it turned out that if you wanted to put up posters, you had to ask permission from some arm of the Student-Teacher Association or the Student Council, some puppets or other of adult authority. The real reason of course was the posters’ content, which was a mean joke at the expense of whoever or whatever the “sexist” thing was. I think ankhs were involved in the design.
I was so upset about this sexist thing, whatever it was, because it affected me personally. I was pretending to be angry about the larger implications of the person or policy, on behalf of all my fellow oppressed seventh grade girls, but really I was angry that there was something I wasn’t allowed to do or someone who was getting something I wasn’t getting. In other words, I was jealous. And I knew that I could make other people pay attention to my jealousy by calling it feminism. In this respect, if no other, I was a bit of a prodigy.
Taking everything super personally remains my métier. Lately, however, I have begun to doubt its effectiveness as an activist strategy. I still believe with all my heart that the personal is political, that privacy is a patriarchal construct designed to keep women from telling the truth about their circumstances, and that “when a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” And I also think anger can be a powerful engine of action and change. But finally I’m realizing that walking around all the time feeling overwhelmed with anger and jealousy can interfere with your ability and your will to tell the entire truth, in ways than my 12 year old self could never have imagined.
Last night when I was taking out the trash I heard the song “You Oughta Know” spilling out of the bar downstairs. People in the bar were singing along, as people often do when this song is played. It was a rainy, gross night but I stood under the awning for a moment and listened. Okay, I was smoking a cigarette, which I almost never do anymore, but I’d had a couple of glasses of wine. I blame Mad Men. Because I almost never smoke (and because of the wine) I felt high from the first hit of nicotine, and all my limbs felt heavy all of a sudden and I realized how tired I was and I became glued to the spot, leaning against the building and feeling the thrum of the music coming through the wall. The words of the song were just an indistinct buzz from that distance but it didn’t matter; like everyone my age, I know them all by heart.
Well I’m here
To remind you
Of the mess you left when you went away
It’s not fair
To deny me
The cross I bear that you gave to me
You, you, you oughta know
If you’d asked me whether I loved this song when it was dominating the airwaves, a few years after the poster incident, I’d have told you NO FUCKING WAY! I HATED this song, man. I knew that MTV thought it was speaking to me via this person. But I was so much smarter than that, I knew this music was a commercialized, manufactured, dumbed-down version of the riot-grrrl real thing. I wasn’t buying that Lilith Fair crap. I loved Liz Phair, not Sheryl Crow. I loved Bratmobile, not the Indigo Girls or Sarah McLachlan.
It wouldn’t take long, of course, for such fine distinctions to start seeming petty: after Britney hit, Alanis and Bikini Kill alike were relegated to the miscellaneous yesterday’s-news rack at Tower Records, and girls like me, if we had a shred of self-awareness, started feeling maybe a little guilty about how we should have reveled in our cultural moment while we had the chance. Why hadn’t I embraced Alanis and her mainstream girl-power ilk? Mainly for the simple reason that there’s almost nothing more irksome than seeing a writ-large version of yourself that, inevitably, gets the portrayal just slightly wrong.
Ironically – or, ahem, Alanically – You Oughta Know actually addresses this kind of narcissism-of-small-differences directly. The singer imagines her ex’s new lover:
Another version of me?
Is she perverted like me?
Admitting to being jealous of someone who you then accuse of being “another version of [you]” is really not a cute look. This line pulls off the neat trick of being both super pathetic and incredibly self-aggrandizing. I wish I could say that it describes a sentiment that is totally alien to me, but unfortunately I have been feeling exactly that icky strain of jealousy lately – not in my personal life, but in my professional life. I know this is ridiculous, but at 30, I feel usurped by young comers. I feel like I wrote and said a lot of unpopular things, things that I took truckloads of shit for, that are now accepted as commonplaces.
I try to curb these feelings by reassuring myself with a rotating assortment of pep talks, some of which can temporarily seem to work. One of them goes: “a rising tide floats all boats!” Another one goes: “put your head down and do your work. No one can be better than you are at being you. “ Above all, I try to convince myself that the idea that there are limited opportunities available to women is a big fat lie that the men who control most culture industries would love to have us believe, so we’ll keep ourselves occupied getting into Twitter wars instead of making art. There are as many spots available as we create for ourselves.
But then there’s this other part: this feeling that I have lost the impulse described by the song I heard last night. For the most part, I no longer feel like You Oughta Know. I feel like: I have sort of forgotten what I ever thought the point of telling you anything might be. Did I expect you to be forgiving, understanding, sympathetic? Did I think you’d feel guilty for being so mean and making me feel so bad? Was I fucking retarded? You never really cared. You just wanted a distraction, and maybe someone to compare yourself to, so that you could feel superior. Well, someone else can be that for you, now. Does she speak eloquently? Seriously, fuck you both.
This morning I woke up with another song in my (throbbing) head: the Liz Phair song “Money,” an early demo that became the Whitechocolatespaceegg track “Shitloads of Money.” In both versions this song goes: “It’s nice to be liked, but it’s better by far to get paid. I know that most of the friends that I have don’t really see it that way. But if you could give ‘em each one wish, how much do you want to bet/they’d wish success for themselves and their friends, and that would include lots of money.”
Liz’s career path is instructive in complicated ways. First she made three albums that sounded like the fulfillment of a totally uncompromised creative vision. I love them more than I can say. A lot of women and even some men say that these albums changed their lives. (“It’s nice to be liked.”) But they didn’t make Liz rich, so she made three more albums that had radio-friendly hooks and slick production values. They had just enough real Liz in them to prevent them from being really hugely popular, but they did have movie-soundtrack hits on them, and if Liz’s true-blue fans made fun of their weak, unworthy songs and wrote about how betrayed they felt, Liz made, one hopes, enough money from them that she didn’t care. (“It’s better by far to get paid.”)
The dream, of course, is to somehow pull off the trick of doing both of those things simultaneously. Right now I’m not doing either. But I haven’t given up hope yet of someday being able to do at least one or the other. I know/hope/imagine that I’ll get there by learning, finally, how to zoom out past personal resentment and see the big picture, and not only how some aspect of the unjust world affects me me me.
 “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.
**
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).
|
|
