The Ascent of the Sick-Girl Narrative

“‘…Empathy requires knowing you know nothing.’ In the sick-girl narrative, the attention is turned inward to chronicle the author’s experiences of recognizing, treating, and living with illness. The empathy evoked is of the reader, who is encouraged to find compassion for the author’s account.”

On Institutional Garbage

“Does the digital envy the analog, the haptic sense of its excesses, the paper trail’s disarray? Is it nostalgic for the language and forms that filled the briefcases of bureaucracy?”

An Inheritance of Lost Mothers

a reflection on art exorcism and mothers, in dialogue with Chantal Akerman, Marc Rothko, and Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter

A Year in Reading 2019

a year where dreaming led to my best reading, on the uncanny in literature and life

File Under: Self-Realization in Women

“Pitting a novel entitled Am I a Redundant Human Being? against Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love may initially seem like an imbalanced match. Eat, Pray, Love is more than double its length, a best-seller turned blockbuster movie, an inspirational book devoted to the pursuit of sensuality, spirituality, personal independence, and love. Mela Hartwig’s Am I a Redundant Human Being? is a conspicuous underdog, a slight volume in translation written by the Austrian actress turned novelist Mela Hartwig who befriended Virginia Woolf in Woolf’s final years.”

I’m with the Losers: On Dubravka Ugrešić’s Europe in Sepia

“AWP conference attendance has ballooned in recent years as more and more writers empty their already shallow pockets for the exuberant and wearying spree packed with publishing tips, idol worship, and camaraderie. If something about this makes you wonder about the state of the métier, and, well, especially if it doesn’t — Dubravka Ugrešić is the author to consult.”

On Lynne Tillman’s What Gets Kept

“What Gets Kept. It’s the title of Lynne Tillman’s latest creative project, an LP of recordings of Tillman reading selections drawn from her oeuvre. The name itself is at once serious and playful; and like much of Tillman’s writing, it embraces this contradiction. There’s a nudge of self-acknowledgment, too, that however arbitrary or intentional the choice, what appears here has become part of the ‘kept.’”

On “I am your voice” vs. “I am a human ear” & how to do things with words, Pioneertown

examinations column 2.7

‘The woman writes as if the Devil was in her…’

“Edmund Wilson encouraged his second wife Mary McCarthy’s first forays into fiction by shutting her in a room for three hours and asking her to write a story. Author Shirley Jackson’s husband Stanley Hyman, a literary critic and writer for The New Yorker, devised strict writing schedules for her. And with the money from Jackson’s royalty checks, he purchased a dishwasher to make more time for her writing. Alice B. Tolkas tended to domestic duties so that her partner, Gertrude Stein, could pursue her literary endeavors. As Stein said, ‘It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around and do so much nothing, really do nothing.’”

Bulletin: Interview with Tom McCarthy, General Secretary, INS

“When I first received news that INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy would visit the City of New York during a promotional book tour this September, I inquired via the Secretary’s secretary whether he would be available for interviews. The response was delayed, and inconclusive. The return email landed in my spam box where it sat unnoticed for days. The message indicated only that McCarthy would appear alongside Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley in Brooklyn and respond to a panel of New York intellectuals’ inquiries about the recent activities of the International Necronautical Society, specifically the recent publication of the General Secretary’s third novel, C.”

A Girl’s Guide to Becoming an Intellectual: Susan Sontag’s Journals

“Today’s young sophisticate learns quickly that appearances matter. But her mind still receives the short shrift. It’s not cool to stand her ground in battles of the intellect, and it’s brainy, not to mention isolating, to read too many books. And let’s say she already eschews such magazines and dating guides as callow or shallow, to where does our intellectual debutante turn for advice? Lucky for her, the first installment of Susan Sontag’s journals, composed during her teens and twenties, were recently collected and published in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-63.”

I’d Rather Be a Lightning Rod: On Ken Kesey, Life, and the Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest

“In Newport, Oregon, nature dominates. The only depiction of this town I’ve encountered beyond a travel guide is in Jon Raymond’s story “The Coast” from his collection, Livability. Raymond’s eye is attuned to the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. In his story, he describes the coastline in quadrants and colors as if he’s painting: ‘The wind was blustery and the sky was all over the place–dark in one quadrant and pale blue in another, with splashes of magenta, orange, and streaks of hot pink in the lower regions. The billowing cumulus clouds gliding over the ocean were like slow-moving buildings of water and air. I skirted the edge of the tide, avoiding heaps of bullwhip kelp and seagull carcasses and blobs of broken jellyfish.’ The sea, the wind, and labile sky capture the tableau precisely.”

Je est un autre: David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York

“‘The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness–he explores himself, he tries out all the poisons on himself and keeps only their quintessences’ So wrote a Paris-based Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to his friend Paul Demeny in 1871. Nearly one hundred years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the artist David Wojnarowicz followed a parallel path on the streets of New York.”

Art, Life, and Lurking: Barbara Browning’s I’m Trying to Reach You

"Writers sit habitually before their keyboards (or with a pen and paper at the ready), and in doing this attempt to isolate moments from life and reframe them on the page. Another way of understanding the performative in the literary is through John Cage, who said that literature, “if it is understood as printed material, has the characteristic of objects in space, but, understood as a performance, it takes on the aspects of processes in time.” The blurring of time and space, and of art and life, are central to Cage’s conception of art, that “art should not be different [from] life but an action within life.” An action as habitual as brushing your teeth can become art if a certain conscious attention is paid to it.”

This Girl Needs a Spanking (on The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer)