I agree with every criticism that does not present itself as objective. If someone thinks my writing is horrible it’s true, to them, that my writing is horrible. I agree, if the statement is something like “I view your writing as horrible,” not something from an omniscient perspective like “this writing is horrible.
For people who can’t let go of received ideas of what constitutes good writing, reading this novel will be a nightmare, but they will also miss the point: the language is part of Lin’s ongoing question of what is “speech” and what is “writing,” what is sobriety and what is intoxication, and what is digital and what is real.
Because this ideal of the attractive but not whorish white woman, in a good marriage but not self-effacing, with a nice job but not so successful she outshines her man, slim but not neurotic over food, forever young without being disfigured by the surgeon’s knife, a radiant mother not overwhelmed by diapers and homework, who manages her home beautifully without becoming a slave to housework, who knows a thing or two but less than a man, this happy white woman who is constantly shoved under our noses, this woman we are all supposed to work hard to resemble - never mind that she seems to be running herself ragged for not much reward - I for one have never met her, not anywhere. My hunch is that she doesn’t exist.
King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes
The distinction that this moron is eliding is the distinction between construing having someone come on your face as “an act of empowerment” and construing writing about it as one. Which of course is the crux of everything. I wish guys like this could be locked in a room and not let out til they finish three books about female subjectivity besides the one they’re, for some reason, being permitted to write about.
Her death affected me profoundly as did her last show Intra-Venus. She was dying and all her vanity disappeared. Hannah had been very competitive and always felt neglected by other women artists especially those who thought she was just too pretty to be taken seriously. Well she showed them.
As this scene opens I am walking around grabbing stuff and putting it in my backpack, about to leave for the day, and Keith is sitting at the kitchen table with his computer.
Me: Did you see the review of Taipei?
Keith: No, where was it?
Me: The New York Times.
Keith: Oh. Was it good?
Me: It was Dwight Garner, and he said that he hated it when critics said they both loved and hated a book, but then said he both loved and hated the book.
Keith: What else?
Me: I don’t know, it didn’t exactly say this but there was the implication that Tao Lin is describing a generation or a scene. I hate that. Not everyone in our generation has some kind of internet-borne autism spectrum disorder.
Keith: (in an affectless monotone, turning back to the computer) I can’t talk to you right now. I’m tweeting.
Me: I’m perceiving the experience of saying goodbye to you right now as “like closing a tab”
Millennially yours,
Someone who should have sent a card
Last weekend I fell in love with a book. Every time this happens to me it takes me by surprise, even though it happens to me all the time; this helps me to understand people who fall in love with people all the time (I don’t.) The author is alive but all her books are out of print, though they seem to have been a big deal when they were published. One of the things that struck me about the book was its author’s lack of ambition; her books are full of lavish descriptions of her endless-partyish life, but she never describes the role that writing plays in it except in one memorable line about how when she’s asked how she writes she replies “on a typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.”
I found this attitude, even if feigned, refreshing. I think because I’ve read so many books about being a writer now (and also written two) and also because this cheerful attitude made me feel hopeful: maybe writing can be effortless and fun, one part of a full life, and not an endless source of anxiety. Maybe there could be a way to eliminate the aspect of having a writing career where you scheme and calculate about how to position yourself and worry about alienating people who might help you or worry endlessly about how to do enough non-writing work to support the writing that you want and need to do. Maybe the problem is New York!
But then I came back down to earth as I started to research the later part of this writer’s career. If you are not ambitious on your own behalf, people will rarely be ambitious for you.
I also reread Lee and Elaine this week and it struck me for the first time how meta of an Emily Books selection it is. In Lee and Elaine, the narrator becomes obsessed with ghosts of women artists whose work wasn’t recognized in their lifetimes, except as sort of a shadow corollary of their husbands’ work. She’s partly making up new stories for them, inventing what their stories could or should have been. What Ruth and I are doing is similar, except that luckily some of these ghosts are still alive and their stories can still be revised, or can come alive to new readers. There are all these random circumstances that collude to repress this kind of writing but when you start to do archiving/revival work, patterns begin to emerge, and then the patterns start to look like an apparatus that’s been in place for years and is not going anywhere unless we work to dismantle it.
YOU WERE TOO BEAUTIFUL FOR THIS WORLD.
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present...
Hey everyone,
If you’re here, it’s probably because of this post I wrote about the Kickstarter...
true, ish
High line ladies
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