Sitting at the ladies’ table

A few days old now, but I took part in a roundtable on Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. At the discussion (if one can be ‘at’ an online space) were Joanna Walsh, Christine Cody, myself and Michelle Bailat-Jones, who put the whole thing together and asked thoughtful and probing questions of the group:

 

 

The chattering woman is the muse of modernism. Her talk that is represented as unconscious and intuitive and associative. He always accompanies her with a notepad. He copies down her “disordered” speech, and later he will use it to convinct her.

Kate Zambreno, Heroines, p.83

In 2012, Semiotext(e) published Heroines by Kate Zambreno, a book that is as much memoir as it is literary criticism, that is also a kind of novel, and that questions its readers about all these forms and how we define them, how we work within them and around them. The book also opens up a discussion about women’s writing and the literary canon, about who gets to “write women”—their fiction and their biographies—and from what perspective.

 

We decided to put together this discussion in response to Heroines, as it’s a book that has stirred up much interest, a fair amount of praise and some controversy.

 

READ MORE

 

In other news, I am working on an application for a three-month fellowship in New Zealand at the Pah Homestead in Auckland. It’s a bit of a long shot, but the position is open only to writers of Scottish origin or inclination, so I do have my hopes. It would be an incredible opportunity, and something that I would never be able to do under my own steam. Wish me luck!

An Endless Year in Review

 

2012 is nearly over – it’s been a year of open spaces. A year of close reading. A year of patient steps. Anticipations, damp days, wandering the city (see my love letters here)

Of writing this second novel, and hoping, still, for the first. Of making friends online (- you’ll see them on my blogroll there, though I should do a big long post addressing them) and discovering literary journals, where my work fits, or I  find what turns something in my heart.

 

I’ve read 44 novels this year, and I’m working on the 45th. I’m a pretty slow reader, needing to take breathers, often distracted, so I feel happy with this total. Before the year’s out, I want to say a few things about the writing that has stayed with me – I’m lucky, in that a lot of what I read this year was utterly wonderful. Not all of it was new, or even new to me. But here are my picks of the best:

 

I began reading Humanimals: A Project for Lost Children by Bhanu Kapil an hour before the bells rang in 2012, and its hybridity and excellent prose has haunted my imagination. If I get the chance, I’ll be seeking out more of Kapil’s work in 2013.

 

The Summer Book introduced me to the wiseness and gently wood-carved sentences of Tove Jansson. I’m reading A Winter Book right now, and loving it almost – though not quite as much – as the sunsoaked earlier novel.

 

Green Girl by Kate Zambreno – how can I begin to talk about how much this book inspired so much in me this year? I can’t possibly do the stark, girl-centred, needling thing justice. Or the many conversations it inspired across so many online platforms?  Just be glad that it sent me towards Zambreno’s blog and Heroines, which if you haven’t read it, what are you waiting for? Participate!

 

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith taught me the power that can be contained in an almost-novella, written with such care, without an ill-placed word.

 

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka was on the other hand an explosion, an earth-scorching revelation of words. I await her next works with the eagerness of a sailor’s wife, standing on a pier, watching a maelstrom wreck the waters.

 

I Have Blinded Myself Writing This by Jess Stoner wins best title and Book That Made Me Cry and stare off into space thinking of it. It’s experiemental, beautiful, humane – let me just throw some more words till you decide to go investigate.

 

Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen is one of those rare collections – one that I cannot stop reading. Normally I struggle to find the energy for short stories, but each of these connects, refracts or sparks the rest, and I felt like I was in a workshop for what this form can do. It’s the second book after I Have Blinded Myself Writing This to be published by small press giants, Hobart.

 

Domestication Handbook by Kristen Stone, another hybrid work, charmed me with its twisty, raw-fingered deployment of memoir and textbook and poetry.

 

Special, rather shocked mention to 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, for being such a messy and plain and overblown thing, which nevertheless slowed me down in my own work, made me consider my audience and how to talk to them.

 

Not too many men on this list, but it’s down to my vowed focus on female writers. Only 11 of the 45 books were written by men. No regrets. The world of book and poetry reviews is heavily weighted in favour of men, as Vida proved true of America last year.

 

So what will 2013 bring?

 

A superstitious year. Bad luck and good ahead.

 

More books – the first of the new year will probably be Errantry by Elizabeth Hand. Anticipating good things, from what I’ve read around it.

 

More writing.

More of my work shared, I hope. I am coming on with this draft, and really think, after absorbing so much great writing, that my own has improved. Nothing can be known in advance. I am prepared to patiently keep stepping forward, honing and learning every day.

 

More adventures. More of the seashore and the mountains and the countryside. Glens and slopes and lochsides. Another trip to London, in mid Janurary, this time with D – a Christmas gift from my parents.

 

A move, at the very least out of this cramped flat. Perhaps out of Edinburgh – mysterious, but I’ll know more in the Spring.

 

So much more – a new camera, to replace the last. I hope to work on my photography skills bit by bit, and bring you better images, views of places that have innately such beauty that I cannot distorted it too much.

 

 

And of course, reading. A new Endless Reads – I hope you’ll let me know of what books you’re thinking of tackling, which you’ve loved, which you have great furious hopes for.

 

And I wish you all a raucous or peaceful and in any case charming Hogmanay – see you back here, after the bells birth 2013.

Endless Reads Review up on PANK: Heroines by Kate Zambreno

It’s probably bad form to write a review entirely composed of quotations from this book.

But – that’s my immediate urge. READ MORE…

 

The smallness of what we can gather

 

Do you have a quote you can bring to mind, or have found recently – I won’t ask for a favourite – but something that you find incredibly precise or beautiful in its attention to language? Or where the ideas stir you and seem the best articulation of something you’d perhaps never thought to think?

 

I want to quote here from Heroines. Specifically, towards the close of the book, where she utters part rallying cry, part acknowledgement to the community of writers online, part kick, part song to being thin skinned and writing despite lack of recognition.

 

I want just to say, I felt it all.

 

 

“I’m tired of trying to hurl my girl-body against the great unfeeling fortress of academia and old-guard literary publishing”

and

“In a way this subculture of literary blogs, fluid, amorphous, non-hierarchical, functions as a community of solidarity, privately and publically – fighting against feelings of illegitimacy and invisibility, of feeling like ghosts in the physical world”

and

“We cannot wait around to be discovered. If you can’t write masterpieces, why write? the doctors said to Zelda [Fitzgerald].”

 

I would quote it all. I can’t. But I think of light, when I put this down.

How the internet is light broken up and reformed, broadcast in pixels, in beams. How the internet is a trembling net of light across the world.  Marvel. How words on the internet and in books are tiny darknesses printed on white. Of the smallness of words that have traveled a long way, visible, invisible, here and now, gone, shared. And I am thankful for how much good writing there is still left to transmit and cheer, from one place to another.

Guess what arrived?

 

 

I’m so excited to have received this book today. I carried it about with me in a bag full of bleach and Economist Magazines – strange mix. I hope to review it on PANK as soon as I get through it. Current deciding between: rush through it in a big swoop OR go slow and carefully. I haven’t reviewed anything for PANK in ages because there had been a dearth of small press titles for my sticky hands. Now – the book I’ve been awaiting. A spell broken. Probably a list of ‘must reads’ will come out of this like ticker tape as I read. Edinburgh Library can expect me back (I think I owe them a few quid after the last overenthusiastic raid).

 

As usual I’ll post a link to the review when it’s done and approved and up!

Washed away by the rain, beached by the flood

Where have I been?

 

Working.

 

Trudging through the cold, month-long rain. Gasping in the gaps, when the sun washes the cobbles white, the leaves glisten.

 

 

Teaching students (and loving that, though I will not write about anything work-related here, a personal vow).

 

Writing through bleary eyes, one page a session, but really convinced I’m doing good work, for now.

 

Reading – really reading so much stuff I’ve never encountered before. Reviewing only a tiny bit of it as time allows here and on Pank. Leaving the stuff written by dead authors behind, because let the dead blog the dead.

 

Receiving a letter from an author (who shall remain nameless, only out of consideration for their privacy, because I don’t know their wishes)  in which the author spoke so kindly and warmly about my review that I nearly teared up. And could only hope to read more from this author in the future.

 

Another big part of my time lately has been engaged in thinking about a discussion on the nature and norms of online communication – forgive me if I go on a bit, but I think if you are a blogger, particularly a woman who blogs or comments online, or uses Goodreads, or has their own space for criticism of books, this will be of interest to you.

 

The question is on how women, in particular, present themselves and their opinions on blogs and in dialogues and comment sections. How the spaces (the unwritten and written rules of what is acceptable to say, the colour of the background, the choice of font, etc) shape the way we perform, play, at ourselves. This, and what makes good criticism in a female-driven space. Must we be objective? Or do emotions have their place? Fragments of our lives, and which fragments? What about tone – is humour any less valuable than seriousness? Is criticism subject to gendering? Are we too nice, too ‘girly’?

 

What the hell is ‘girly’ anyway, given that many women of differing attitudes and scales of appearance start out as girls, and as girls are so different as to make a narrow standard impossible to formulate.

 

I am asking a lot of questions. I am a blogger, I am a writer, a reviewer and I’ve commented, thinking about my tone, trying to be witty and also to be kind. This is relevant. If you’ve done any of these things, it’s probably relevant to you. I’d love to hear what you think. I have no answers, really, beyond my own experience.

 

This tumult of questions was in response to an interesting, if flawed essay by Molly Fischer ‘On Ladyblogs‘ from Kate Zambreno ‘Ad Feminim‘. Also very much of interest in this vein is this conversation between Zambreno and another WriterKate, Kate Durbin.

 

You might have read some of my book reviews. I really cannot be objective, particularly, when it comes to books. I am I, who loved or found a book complicated. Because there is an ‘I’, I cannot seek to harm the book with indifference in my review. I feel culpable, and bound to care. I feel about with my fingers, finding the shape and texture of books. In real life though I say less, sometimes, than I do in my reviews. I am bound by the indifference of those I am speaking to, and of the nicheness of my interests in fiction that takes risks, and by my shyness, and sometimes clumsiness of speech.

 

All this means that there is a difference between the voice I use online, and the voice I use in real life. As there are between the voices I use at work, and the voices I use with my family, with my friends, with D, with writers and reviewer and internet persons I am trying to articulate difficult things to. This seems to be jamming up against the idea of sincerity, which I blogged a wee bit about, and which Montevidayo has explored more extensively, and many others besides. Authenticity. The idea that there is only one truth in appearance.

 

I accept multiple readings and plural selves (the writer, the commentator, the teacher, the jester, the friend). I want multiple perspectives on the news and on life as I will never have the chance to live it. I want the freedom to play with voice. To support those who have done so.

 

But what is your opinion? Is there any difference between who you are online in various spaces and who you are at work? At rest?

Endless Reads Review: Green Girl by Kate Zambreno

This novel. Oh this novel. It rattles like a freight train. It kept me up at night. It made my thoughts frantic, made me wish I could write the review before I had finished, just so I could exorcise the influence of it.

In other words, it is impossible for me to approach this in anything other than a deeply personal way. I can’t help but ask myself am I like the Green Girl, Ruth? In what ways am I like and unlike her?

Stop, take a breath. To explain, this novel is the story of Ruth, an American girl living and working in London. Ruth works in retail, in a department store called ‘Horrids’ – not subtle. Nothing about this book is subtle. It is didactic and impassioned and cynical and despairing and utterly, utterly compelling.

The pull, the blood, the cry.

The agony of becoming.

I gaze down upon her. She is without form, and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep. Cast in the likeness of her creator. I give birth to an orphan girl.

Now I must name her. Ruth, a hopeful name. No, maybe not Ruth. Perhaps Julie or Kathy. Ahh, that’s it. Julie or Kathy. No, no. Ruth. She is a Ruth. She is Ruth.

I can’t see her. I squint, steady: nothing. I cannot ressurect her. Who is this girl?

I look at a Diane Arbus photograph of a young Mia Farrow. Perhaps this is Ruth. My actress. I try to trace her outline. I learn her curves. The slightest bit of flesh caught in between strap and armpit. The shadow of a line down her stomach, like a bisected butterfly.

 

This is how the book opens, with the author, the authorial voice pulling her character into being from nothingness. It’s that kind of level of assurance. Throughout, this voice will single out Ruth, hold her up for examination, pity her, will her to break down in tears, as if the power over this character is incomplete, as if she has a formless, unknowable sort of autonomy. Film characters are brought up as points of reference not only by the authorial voice but by the characters themselves, in dialogue and thought and performance, seeking to align themselves with the ingenues of French cinema, the doe-eyed and sharp-tongued vamps of golden-era Hollywood. They are place holders, glitter-and-sequin-and-fairydust sprinklers, trying to make sense of this void that is struggling to become.

And in between chapters, there are quotations from novels, criticism, poetry, religious texts, which will relate to forthcoming actions and moods in the text, while at the same time forming links which tie the novel into a place within the canon of a certain mode of literature. “You speak like a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance. – Polonius to Ophelia in Hamlet.” and “What I am writing is something more than mere invention; it is my duty to relate everything about this girl among thousands of others like her. It is my duty, however unrewarding, to confront her with her own existance – Clarice Lispector, The Hour of The Star.”  Zambreno positions her novel within the context of literature of the girl.

 

If you’ve never read The Hour of the Star, or Hamlet, or Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, Green Girl may read differently to you. If you’ve never been a young woman, struggling for identity, this may speak differently to you. I worked in a department store, I have very recently been an immigrant worker in a huge, indifferent city. I was never obsessed with make-up nor with imitating the elegance of film stars. It is a strange situation to be in, as a reader used to looking at plot and theme and technique, to instead feel I must focus on character and related literature. Green Girl makes me want to plan a course in literature of the girl, representations of young femininity. To stabilise my frantic reading in context and to make bored young men read it, confident young women who may think they have never have felt like Ruth. I want to match it with its predecessors, hold film showings. Go all the way back to Early Modern English to find examples of women and men writing then about the same things; desperation, identity, lust, God, anonymity. I want to hear the young men say, rubbing their foreheads, tapping the tables, “I dunno, she was kind of pathetic, that’s all” and then say, look, read it again, try to understand. What is being said about loneliness, vulnerability, identity, faith. How would you write about it? How am I writing about it, with my Kilea and Aida? How am I writing myself, in failings and searchings and mirrors, in my daily life?

 

Some novels you don’t read for pleasure or to be consoled. This is one of them. Axes and frozen seas. A freight train goes rattling through the night, keeping me awake.