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.

“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. This was during the month that Ruth and I were doing vinyasa yoga every day in an attempt to keep from going insane as we launched Emily Books. During that month we comparison-shopped for discount class deals in a way that I, as a sometimes yoga teacher, find obnoxious, but what can you do?  It was the only way to afford it.  In the end it was fun to experience a lot of different styles and I ended up finding out that I like dancey sweaty vinyasa more than I’d thought, even though it sometimes contradicts my training and even though I am (though I  tell students there’s no such thing as “bad at yoga”) not, uh, naturally inclined towards graceful movement, let’s put it that way.

Lying on the floor and hearing this song turned out to be an amazing stroke of good luck.  Having my initial experience of this stupidly controversial musician’s hit occur in a situation that was so distant from any context gave me the opportunity to know what I really thought of the song. Lana Del Rey has had so many people’s worst tendencies projected onto her that now she’s interesting for that reason alone, but as I lay there, distracted from my single-pointed relaxation by those melodramatic churchbells and catchy “Honey, is that true?s,” I made a point of memorizing enough of the lyrics so that I could Google them when I got home. And that’s how I know there’s something to her music besides blog-churned controversy and images of images of images, whereas if I’d learned the other stuff first – if my experience of Video Games had been tempered by extradiegetic factors — I’d probably be more inclined to agree with the haters.  This concludes the one and only thing I will ever say about Lana Del Rey, because mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors are boring, and there are still many beautiful flowers that haven’t yet been pressed between the pages of the Internet and I am determined to pluck as many of them as I can right now before this coffee wears off.

I loved learning the word “extradiegetic” because it allows me to explain something about blogs that I hadn’t been able to, before. Last week Molly Fischer’s essay about “ladyblogs” got way under my skin, and I dashed off a quick response to it on my blog and thought I’d be able to leave it there, but then I woke up still thinking about it the next morning, and that night I went to a party and had a fight with someone I think of as a peer but who is a lot younger than me, a fight I tried to end by saying, “Well I’m 30, so I win!”  (Getting to the point where you say this is an absolute guarantee that you didn’t just win, in case you’re wondering.)  We were fighting about the short memory of the Internet, and how it might legitimately be possible for something that seems so obviously like an evolution to me to seem like a devolution to someone younger.  I was reminded that it’s hard for women five years younger than I am to imagine growing up in a time when the only information about being a woman came to teenaged you via a pile of dogeared Sassys in the corner of the public library.  And during this fight, I started to realize that I was jealous of these young women, and maybe clinging to something that it’s time to release.

I liked that Fischer celebrated the tits-out, smelly-tamponed era at the dawn of Jezebel, which for a time was genuinely radical.  I love Moe’s lost-tampon post so much. But how, I wondered, could Fischer have missed noticing that this golden age was quickly corrupted?  Gawker Media employees were rewarded financially at that time based on pageviews. The line between posting your goriest, druggiest, drunkest humiliations because you’re giving everyone permission to let go of their shame around these behaviors and doing so because you’re being paid more to write about that stuff is thinner than the thinnest bloodied maxipad imaginable.   Fischer sees things as going downhill from there – she focuses on the cute-overload, whimsical aspects of The Hairpin and Rookie, quoting their silliest posts, calling them conformist and slumber-partyish, missing the ways that they’re heirs to radical-era Jezebel’s most fearless, honest aspects.  I didn’t pause to consider that a lot of the information that informs my opinion about these blogs is – you guessed it – extradiagetic.  I only know about the circumstances surrounding Jezebel’s beautiful, bloody birth because I worked at Gawker while it was happening and because I felt the same strange tension between feeling free to (here it comes) overshare and being egged on towards it.  Let me just pause to make clear that no one ever told me to do it, my bosses explicitly told me NOT to do it, and I’m sure no one encouraged Moe or Tracie to do it either. But we could see the numbers; how could we not have been influenced by them?

Also: I tend to forgive blogs their sillier moments because I understand the exigencies of being an editor tasked with pumping out a day’s worth of content and this makes me sympathetic to the idea that a blog is less a text to be teased apart the way you’d dissect a novel but a performance to be critiqued based on its peak moments.

But there’s more to it than that. I stayed so upset about this.  A few days later Keith and I were talking about the essay in the kitchen and I was trying to explain what I appreciate about the Hairpin. Specifically I was trying to explain why Edith is a genius.  (For the record: I’ve met Edith maybe … three times?) I said that creating a new comedic aesthetic – a new style of being funny – is a huge achievement, one Fischer didn’t give her enough credit for.  We were still having a normal conversation at that point, not a fight. I started talking about the post “Women Laughing Alone With Salad,” a very popular Hairpin post Fischer dismisses in passing as representative of the Hairpin’s “observational, peculiar, and irrefutable” brand of media criticism. This post has zero text. It’s just stock photos of women, laughing, alone, with salad.  There are a ton of them. They look familiar to anyone who has ever seen any advertising.  “Molly Fischer reads that post as mere absurdist humor, pure whimsy,” I said.  I think this is approximately when I started shouting in a tremulous, high-pitched voice:

“But HOW. Can ANY WOMAN. NOT UNDERSTAND. HOW THAT IS A COMMENTARY ON THE FACT! THAT THE REASON! THERE ARE SO MANY STOCK PHOTOS OF WOMEN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD! IS BECAUSE WOMEN ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO BE SHOWN AS HAPPY!!! WHILE THEY’RE EATING!!! IF THEY’RE EATING SOMETHING “GUILT-FREE”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Stop yelling at me! You’re scaring me!” said Keith. “I’M NOT YELLING AT YOU!” I yelled.  A minute later I was sobbing.  “I’m just so angry,” I told him.  “What are you angry at?” “At everything,” I sobbed.  “Well, you have to find a way to hold onto that,” he said. “I would rather not!” I sobbed.

Those photos of women finding salad hilarious are absurd, but they’re also, depending on how you look at them, a symptom of a serious horrible malevolent force in our culture that hurts and even sometimes kills (yes! kills!) women.   But instead of calling them out in the classical Jezebel style of LOOK AT HOW THIS TERRIBLE THING HARMS WOMEN, GET ANGRY AND COMMENT, Edith just stacked them up in a big pile. The overall effect of this post is so subtle and so hilarious that these images’ power– instead of being exaggerated because now we’re all up in arms! comment!! — was diffused in an instant.  A reader – well, let’s not generalize, this reader– goes, in those ten seconds of scrolling, from feeling secretly obscurely injured by a giant force outside her control to snickering at that force, which is revealed as idiotic and petty.  That is genius. It’s also something only the blog medium, which is what Edith’s a genius of, can achieve.

What’s extradiagetic here: being aware, on some level, that a lot of the stuff that filters in through the periphery of our cultural consciousness is telling women to hate and hurt ourselves.  And if Fischer and women Fischer’s age aren’t aware of this, why try to teach them how to be? If they’re not in pain, if they’re not enraged, why tell them they ought to be?  Maybe I’m too attached to my anger and my pain.  Maybe a lot of us are.  The girls and teenagers who are growing up now with Rookie tutorials on masturbation and exhortations never to fake an orgasm at their fingertips – maybe they won’t “get” Women Laughing Alone At Salad, either. I desperately that hope they don’t, but I’m also glad it’s there for them if they need it.

I talked on the phone yesterday to an author whose book I hope we’re going to feature as an Emily Books pick soon, someone whose autobiographical novel, written in the first person, is full of lucid, skillful, sometimes frankly horrifying descriptions of exploitative sex and bulimia.  “Do you think you’re crazy? I’m crazy,” she told me.  “I … try to keep the different aspects of myself in balance. I like that you’re crazy,” I told her. And then I said something that I didn’t realize I believed until I said it out loud. “Women who don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them are crazy.  But men who don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them are … just men.”

Obviously many men give a fuck what people think about them. But if they don’t, it doesn’t mean they’re insane. Whereas for a woman not to care – that’s actually pathological, self-destructive behavior, in the context of our culture. I love and valorize this kind of female craziness and the art it produces – I created a business to celebrate these women and their art. But I fear not giving a fuck, for myself.  I wonder what it would be like to let go that much.

Today I went to PS1, which longtime readers of this blog will recognize as something I tend to do in melancholy moods. This particular museum often works for me as a way of scraping something off the lens of my whole perceptual apparatus.  Something about the incredible old building it’s in and the way that building is situated — the views out its windows of ugly-gorgeous Long Island City’s big skies and schizoid new-old building hodgepodge – works for me. And I love the ancient classrooms and the ghosts of all the work that’s been in them; they ennoble whatever’s there and endow it with extra art-oomph.

I started on the second floor, enticed by a warm, carnivalesque loop of recorded music that it took a minute to place: it was the beginning of “Like A Rolling Stone.” It led me to a room with two wall-mounted speakers that on first glance seemed empty.  On second glance there was a little wall plaque that read: “chicken burrito beef burrito.”  And on third glance there they were on the windowsill:

In spite of not having been in a good mood a minute earlier I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Another girl entered the room and saw the burritos. Our eyes met and she laughed too.  She took a photo and I was emboldened (obviously) to do the same.   The rest of Darren Bader’s work included: a disassembled oven filled with pizza, a room full of fruits and vegetables prettily displayed on plinths in a room with a sign listing times when fruit and vegetable salad would be served and a room where “celebrity sculptures” will assemble if any celebrities volunteer.  Another room contained a croissant and an iguana — “iguana and croissant,” read the plaque.

And in the final room, in which only four visitors are permitted at a time, there was a couch, a stack of magazines, a PS1 employee, and three cats who are available for adoption.  These are very charming cats — if you’re in the market for a cat, go get ‘em!  (The iguana is also available for adoption, though it’s illegal to own one in the 5 boroughs of NYC, as I’m sure you already knew.) The obligation I felt to make awkward conversation with the PS1 employee rather than besotted babytalk conversation with a new cat friend was the only thing that dampened my enthusiasm for this artwork, which otherwise, obviously, !!!!!!

So I felt then like the museum had worked its magic.  Maybe it hadn’t given me any new ideas but it was getting to be around the time I’d thought I would leave and so I made my way in the direction of the exit.

As an afterthought, though, I hit one last gallery.  At the entrance to the hallway leading to a large room that in PS1’s earlier incarnation could’ve been a gymnasium a sign said:

I found this unpromising – oof, sound art – but could hear strains of music coming from the gallery so I went in.

40 speakers stood in a ring around the room at almost exactly the level of my head and a single voice sang from each of them, recorded so well and reproduced so perfectly by the speakers that, when you stand near the speaker, it’s like someone is singing in your ear.  Standing in the center of the room I could hear the cumulative effect of 40 voices merging: a choral piece, I guess in Latin, Deus Domine were the only words I picked out.  But walking near the speakers I could hear each voice’s singular human-ness – the glorious, virtuosic trill wasted in the cumulative muddle, but also the tiny stutter, the fading weakness at the end of a held note. Maybe the most striking aspect of this artwork is the 3 minutes of recorded intermission between the 14 minutes of song: coughs and giggles and deep, resonant expectorant sniffs emanate from the corners of the room, creating the almost creepy sense that you’re surrounded by a ring of invisible people.

When I first entered the room there was no one there but me and a young male guard, but more people came in as I walked the circumference of the room.  I pretended not to notice them, but I knew they were there and I became even more aware of them at the moment when, standing between two speakers at the crescendo of the motet and staring fixedly out the window, I realized that I was about to start crying and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I didn’t sob but tears came to my eyes and squirted out uncontrollably, like sweat from a cartoon character’s brow. I wiped them away furiously with my sleeves. I wanted so badly not to be crying. How ridiculous to be moved so much by art (never mind that I had come to the museum in hopes of being moved).  But I felt manipulated – “I’m so easy,” I thought. It’s true that something about the frequency at which spiritual music vibrates often makes me inexplicably, uncontrollably weepy, a phenomenon I have hesitated to explore lest I find myself having to Get Religion in some dumb time-consuming careworn-narrative way. Then I realized (this all happened in less than thirty seconds, probably) that the other reason I didn’t want to be crying was so much simpler: I just didn’t want anyone to see me crying.  I was embarrassed about crying, the weakness and vulnerability that crying inevitably conveys.

I have made so many decisions based on my desire to never seem publicly weak or vulnerable.

And then I thought: what if I just didn’t care?

I thought: do any of those people care that I’m crying?  Will they even notice, and will they think less of me if they do? I don’t even know them so why do I even care what they think?

And for the first time, for just a moment, I didn’t care.

And I started crying harder, because now I was crying with joy.

And when I finished crying I sat down on the bench and listened to the rest of the motet, watching seagulls swoop by outside the windows and refusing to notice whether anyone was watching me.

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.

I had taken the paint from the Art Barn where I was failing a sculpture class that semester. It seems ridiculous that I was failing sculpture but I was. I came to class and did the assignments but the professor, an Ohioan famous for his large cheery site-specific installations in Columbus office park atria, just really hated my work. My work was pretty bad. In a previous art class I had mostly gotten around the limitations imposed by my lack of technical skill by working with appropriation, pastiche and performance, ie I had put on a bikini and smeared myself all over with lipstick for the midterm and built a giant fake wedding cake topped with doll heads and surrounded by bowls of Karo syrup fake blood for the final. But in this class we had to carve and weld, and I lacked both the patience and the innate knack that you need in order to be good with tools. I made two Easter Islandy heads out of wood and metal which were intended to be realistic but came out more impressionistic. Around the time of the “slut” incident I’d been working on a landscape that I’d carved out of insulation foam that I’d sprayed into a plaster mold of my own naked torso, which I’d then painted green and decorated with little sculpee trees like the ones in a model train set. This was my masterpiece and I think it also got a D, or maybe a C-. The professor circled my work like Tim Gunn and pointed out its flaws with one outstretched finger. I guess I was still at the stage of life when I thought I could potentially be good at anything I liked doing.

Another thing I thought I could potentially be good at around this time was acting, so I was taking an acting class, and though I wasn’t failing that one I ought to have been. Maybe I had never considered that great actors have a chameleonic quality—a genius at concealing themselves, “losing themselves in a role,” or maybe I hadn’t noticed yet, about myself, that I am much less good at concealing myself than most people are. I only knew that I loved to get onstage and cry or scream or tremulously declare myself, to generally chew the scenery. Part of it was just the pleasure of being allowed to say the lines. The class had a greatest-hits type curriculum so I had little bits of Shakespeare and Chekhov to memorize for it all the time. I thought I was the best actress in this class for sure. The best actor in the class was Dave and we had a lot of scenes together, I began to look forward to our scenes, we sometimes had to meet outside of class to rehearse.

I am skipping over the part where we draw closer and eventually fuck a) because it’s obvious and b) because I don’t remember anything about it.

I want to also step back from making fun of myself a little bit here and acknowledge that what was happening to me and around me at time was often terrible. Many things were happening, some were great, others were terrible. After a strange period of not fitting in with any of the cliques I’d tried to join freshman year – straitlaced nerds whose nerdiness was not the intriguing kind, sad pretty girls whose habit of eating meals together was forged around what I realized belatedly was mutual avoidance of actual eating – I was finally finding the people with whom I could take bong hits and watch Annie Hall repeatedly. It wasn’t quite my dream of going to school in New York City but it was as close as I was going to get that semester. I also met Val and she became my roommate. Basically things were looking up, with a few exceptions. I still had the frat boy boyfriend I’d acquired early freshman year, who, consciously or not, I’d started dating so that I could be protected from rumors about my “sluttiness.” We were at that point in the protracted end-stage of our relationship that consisted of: we would get drunk and he would yell at me and I would cry and we’d have sad drunken sort of violent sex, repeat. This was my first experience with this relationship dynamic so I guess I can be forgiven for not recognizing it for what it was and shutting it down immediately.

I wrote about this in my book so forgive me if you’re hearing this story twice, but this is also around the time that a girl from our school was found, badly decomposed, rolled up in a carpet in a mobile home miles away from campus. She’d worked at the campus pub/pizza restaurant and a coworker, not a student, had murdered her. Until the body was found, months after her disappearance, everyone thought she had committed suicide. The suicide theory was based on journals she’d kept that the cops had found when they’d searched her room. They said that in the journals she’d seemed depressed.

The weirdest thing about this girl’s murder, besides its having happened at all, was how little of an overt impact it made on this tiny—like fewer than 2000 people tiny—community. I worry that I’m misrepresenting this because it does seem incredible that her death was so downplayed, that there weren’t candlelight vigils and busloads of students attending her murderer’s trial et cetera. Maybe the administration suppressed attempts to discuss what had happened or memorialize the murdered girl. Maybe people were ashamed of how willing they’d been to accept the suicide story.

I was going to school in the middle of nowhere and it was now clear that a girl could die there and no one would really care. Though I’d known this in some abstract way before the murder it was different to know it for sure. I was young and inexperienced and incredibly self-absorbed and on drugs a lot of the time, and I hope that’s why it took me another six months to get the fuck out of there. I had conflicted feelings. Part of me wanted to stay. But another part, a self-preserving part, or at something that functioned as a self-preserving part in this context, set about making it impossible for me to stay. The “slut” thing was the first step.

When I was 19 I spray-painted the word “slut” on the dorm room door of a boy who had flattered me, fucked me, then abruptly dropped me for another girl – a boy I was cheating on my boyfriend with. Why “slut”? Maybe I indulged myself with the thought I was protecting other women with a warning (this is a common form of self-indulgence). I don’t think I was consciously doing anything as complicated as inverting an insult that had been applied to me, peeling something unwanted off my own body and slapping it onto someone else’s.

The act of spray-painting the word slut was less important than its consequences. One of them was that Dave got really angry at me, which was exhilarating. It also became a public enough incident that word of it got back to my boyfriend, who (sorry, again I’m repeating myself but it’s what happened) read my diary to confirm that I was cheating and then confronted me with the evidence. I wonder how much of my diary he read, also whether in another context a reader of that diary would have concluded that I seemed depressed. Also, my “diary” was a school notebook that I left lying around his bedroom.

Another detail of this incident that seems, in retrospect, like a seed that later germinated into some variety of showy, smelly flower is that the girl Dave moved on to was the first person to ever write a mean anonymous comment on any of my blogs. She wrote it on my now-defunct first blog, The Universal Review. This was the blog where Bennett and I wrote reviews and assigned letter grades to various institutions, substances and experiences, and on my review of Kenyon College (I gave it a C) this girl wrote that no one at Kenyon had liked me, et cetera. I don’t know for sure, of course, but something about the details and the context made me suspect it was her. Of course, it could also have been lots of other people.

**

In the time between my getting obsessed with the blog post and my writing this, it has been transformed into “fiction” – it’s been relocated to a different place on the internet, references to real people and institutions have been removed, and the subject, an Internet writer who the narrator says she seduced via email, has been stripped of his real name (per his request?) and rechristened “Adrian Brody.” In the post, the narrator, a woman in her early twenties, describes in detail how she arranged to meet with the fortysomething Internet writer for sex. She quotes what she implies are his emails, describes her emotional responses, draws out the tension – will he or won’t he make the ethically dubious, self-destructive (because, based on the circumstances of their meeting, it’s impossible for him to be unaware of her intention to write publicly about the experience) decision to have sex with her? Will he have sex with her despite his having a girlfriend (“How old is she?” “Like mid 30s.”)?

Spoiler alert: he fucks her. They fuck in various ways and have conversations about Spinoza, Gramsci, waves of feminism and ways men and women are socialized, Marxism, and porn. He says a lot of things that sound familiar because they’re the same idiotic things men tend to say when they are trying to assert a version of themselves that has sex with beautiful young strangers.

Just to be clear: when I originally read the post, before it became “fiction,” it contained the Internet writer’s real name and even a picture of him and also a blurry cell phone photo of the post’s author with, she writes, the Internet writer’s cum on her face. The next day I was scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard and I saw the Internet writer’s name; he had written a review of a new book by an author who is famous for hating women.

I left the original version of the blog post open on my laptop on Sunday and when I came back to read the rest of it my boyfriend was reading it. He was sitting alone in my parents’ living room in the dark with the light of the laptop making his face blue.

My boyfriend doesn’t love the idea that I could write about having sex with him. Lucky for him I think it’s impossible or at least extremely difficult to write about sex with someone you love, who loves you (also possibly not interesting). That kind of sex automatically precludes any kind of analysis. Not that it wipes your memory clean the moment you roll away, but if you’re standing outside yourself and observing your experience and mentally transcribing your noises and dialogue and remembering what parts touched what other parts in what order, you are by definition not having the kind of sex I mean when I say “good sex,” which submerges the judging, thinking, observing layer of the brain the way drugs, exercise, and (I hear) meditation do. Of course sometimes I am outside the experience and still noticing. But it’s harder to do the kind of noticing that leads to writing when you compassionately mutually love someone. It’s easy to do that kind of noticing when you’re having highly intellectualized sex with someone who exists for you much more as an idea than as a person. Noticing has to have an object, or at least the kind of noticing that leads to writing has to have an object.

The point of writing “slut” on the door, I imagined as I was writing it, was to warn other women to stay away from Dave. The point turned out to be that it (indirectly) forced me to leave Kenyon. So I’m not saying you have to know why you’re doing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. You don’t have to know what the object is while you’re noticing but you do have to figure it out somewhere along the line.

**

The person who emailed me the blog post wrote “I Love Dick related” in the subject line of her email and sure, I would locate this blog post in the tradition of I Love Dick. I Love Dick is Chris Kraus’s novel about a narrator, Chris Kraus, who falls in love with an art critic named Richard and becomes enmeshed in an art project that entails Chris and her husband Sylvere’s writing the art critic letters which leads to their marriage’s unraveling and then Chris goes to California where Dick lives in order to have sex with him and I won’t spoil the rest if you haven’t read it because you really should.

One of the most powerful things about this book is how Chris uses a variety of both explicit and subtle tactics to illuminate the problem which, at its most fundamental level, is the power imbalance inherent in heterosexuality. “I’ve set myself the problem of solving heterosexuality,” she writes. When I think about this book the first non sex thing I remember is her description of an art-world party that Chris attended as her husband’s plus one – her name, like most of the female guests’ names, not even on the invite list. Late in the evening of this party, the playlist turns to disco and Chris realizes that those songs—Upside Down, Shame!, Le Freak, et cetera—were

“the songs that played in topless clubs and bars in the late 70s while these men were getting famous. While me and all my friends, the girls, were paying for our rent and shows and exploring “issues of our sexuality” by shaking to them all night long in topless bars.”

These are the conditions. Why wouldn’t women want revenge? And why wouldn’t they also, simultaneously, want love?

**

I was in the car most of Monday and I wanted to write an email responding to the woman who’d emailed me the blog post. At one point I was just going to write a list of the other things the blog post reminded me of:

Katha Pollitt’s Webstalker essay

You’re So Vain by Carly Simon

The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy

I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he’d liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn’t the pure ethical person she’d perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her.

Keith said, “It’s like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice.”

I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. “It’s a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT’S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!”

I tried to explain what I meant.

I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn’t know what their true sexuality was like, because they’d been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don’t tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of their faults, unless their faults are cute little hole-in-the-stocking faults. Whereas women, heterosexual women, are capable of finding being ignored, being alternately worshiped and insulted, not to mention male pattern baldness, not just tolerable but erotic.

People might say, you know, what about this guy’s right to privacy, his right not to be written about. Or maybe they would think it was okay for him to write about what the experience was like from his perspective. Do you feel bad for him, in all his bald vulnerability? Maybe a little. But mostly you feel bad for women, who are in this and cannot escape and especially can’t escape themselves. At least they can describe their situation and I guess that’s what part of what I like, when people do that.

To prevent myself from looking at the Internet yesterday I went to PS1 in Long Island City.  I went to the Laurel Nakadate retrospective for the third time, probably not the last, either.  I watched a video I hadn’t watched before, one where she dances in the desert to exorcise sadness from Britney Spears. (It worked!) Afterward I went downstairs to the art bookstore where I scrutinized the contents of every shelf before finally casually passing the shelf my book is on, a little treat. But seeing it there yesterday, knowing in advance it would likely be there, didn’t feel as good as the first time I spotted it there unexpectedly.  The diminishing returns of the Internet are like that too, but I will probably still keep visiting that shelf.

I left the museum and sat in a cafe near the Pulaski bridge.  The cafe has a laptop section and a “dining room” and I sat in the dining room.  The laptop section was empty. Trucks were rumbling onto the bridge a few feet away.

Reading The Buddhist momentarily gave me back my old feeling of bloggy first-person urgency — the feeling that all my sensations deserve description and dispersal.  One aspect of this feeling I’d never identified before is the sense of furious competition — like if I don’t publish these thoughts immediately after having them, someone else might beat me to it.  (What a weird illogical feeling! Like someone is going to beat me to a photo of my own cat!  But you know what I mean.)

Leaving the café I took a circuitous route down an ugly sidestreet and said “bless you” to an old lady up ahead of me who’d sneezed.  She turned to look at me with a look of shock and fear that dissipated immediately when she saw me (in a dorky raincoat, extra nonthreatening).  Long Island City seemed like a movie set, maybe because of how often it is one. I passed the pet store that had been my excuse, years ago, to walk across the Pulaski bridge from Greenpoint.

Back then I’d thought my biggest problem was that I felt unloved but in retrospect the problem was more that I didn’t love anyone, not in any real way.  I didn’t know how to give or receive anything good. I walked around all the time feeling like a giant black hole of need that other people’s good feelings would occasionally get sucked into by accident.  On the weekends I would cross the bridge as though that meant escape. I’d buy some cans of cat food and then walk back to Greenpoint.

Lately I have noticed, walking around, that I am less prone to dashing forward, anticipating my arrival at whatever destination. Sometimes I can even walk down the street slowly enough that I start to feel my surroundings pressing in on me, slightly overwhelming in all their details.  It’s okay not to do this all the time.  It’s better, actually, not to do it all the time.