Dear Diary

Nada Gordon6 Comments

Back to work yesterday. Received my mom’s holiday/Festivus/birthday present, a little 3 lb. laptop (Asus 1000H), perfect for writing my memoirs. I named it “Momotaro.” On the whole, spent too much time with/on/thinking about computers yesterday.

Once back home, made a beef stew. I’m tired of eating beef, it seems so wrong, but I do it for health reasons. The stew at any rate was good, wine-y.

Got on Gary’s case for posting that I had given my best reading ever without actually supporting that assertion with details. A few people said that, which only made me think, Jewishly, “so what was so WRONG with the other ones?”

Very interesting discussion on the Flarflist on “Flarf and Embarrassment.” Rodney had written that he felt “embarrassment” was more germane to flarf than “offensiveness.” I agreed and responded:

As an artist, I am not at all interested in offending anyone, but I am very interested in embarrassing myself.

I suppose I think of Swoon (which might be construed as a kind of warmup exercise to flarf) as an exercise in pushing the limits of embarrassment. Especially if embarrassment is thought of as a kind of unveiling.

Last night Rick Snyder read many wonderful poems, but my favorite was the one in which nearly every line sounded something like this: “stricken reference to Valery’s injunction here” – that is, each line was a testament to the writer’s embarrassment at having written it. Without actually embarrassing himself, he was laying bare the device (i.e., embarrassing!) of embarrassment. He said later it was the poem he was most nervous about reading, although I loved it. I felt the same way about the poem I read for Emma, which I thought was lugubrious and not very formally intricate and thus sort of embarrassing, but that was the one most people commented on afterwards.

Also thinking of a line from my Navrang benshi, sung to the red-faced Sandhya: “everything embarrasses me/ everything embarrasses me”…

The principal weakness, it occurs to me, of much of 80s langpo, [or any art that valorizes Pure Form, for that matter] was its unwillingness to embarrass itself.

So what is it about embarrassment that is desirable, I wonder? A kind of trembling? Does it “make us [ugh] more human [ugh]”? I’m afraid the answer would have to be yes.

The key question: are there superior and inferior modes of embarrassment? or do I mean… are there works that succeed because they are embarrassing and others that fail for precisely the same reason (OK, I don’t like “succeed” and “fail” as art terms, but can’t think of better words at the moment: maybe “interesting” and “uninteresting”)? And how do we describe the difference?

Anyway, if I vampire on other people’s embarrassment to make flarf, it’s only because I identify with it so much.

Ben went on to quote from the seemingly wonderful book Keats and Embarrassment, which I promptly ordered from Amazon.

Your thoughts?

p.s. “Take this day off from heavy-duty thinking,” my horoscope says. Uh, when do I do “heavy-duty thinking”?

Foreign Body Sensation Remix

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Here’s my remix of the first two stanzas of Charles’ great poem:

Such thrills as chide me fold away
in the indulgent catachresis of male
dismay. Most arduous
of all, distractions:
the band, of minds, makes faces
in sensuous confusion
to face the mates. Entering more
quickly than diction might undo, a glib
of digital croons audience to mother
on. The clacking
of this indignity reduces
for a pittance what lurkers ask
askew. Stochastic
burps, designed in arms, will savor
for its Asians arts and
salaams. Aviaries
know the slice of mom.

Yet hand-cocked bijouteries
refer to what
they want, prestidigitated
slamdunks, queering
humps. Boys
to anger for
a spanking, hieratic
peals incarnadine,
beds betrayed (sashayed)
inside whose harm?

Dear Diary

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Rewrote two stanzas of Charles Bernstein’s “Foreign Body Sensation” in preparation for my reading tomorrow.

Ironed the black wool Morticia dress with the sleeve cutouts also in preparation for the reading. I bought it several years ago at Love Saves the Day in the East Village, a kitsch vintage store that is soon to close. I had wandered in there with Tonya Foster, was not “looking for” a dress but there you have it. It hasn’t fit me in several years but I’ve lost a few pounds and can now get into it, even if I can’t breathe all that well once it’s zipped up. Well, I’ll hardly eat tomorrow.

It’s a fabulous dress. G. accused me of looking like Adeena in it. Here it is, with me squeezed into it:

Tried to write another poem from the “words of the day” on my yahoo page. These poems are not very exciting, I think. Mere finger exercises.

Lightly researched Louise Colet and Emmy Hennings, as they were both mentioned in Chris Kraus’ book. Louise Colet’s letters to Flaubert have all been destroyed. A pity. She took up with Alfred de Musset (wasn’t he the guy who stabbed his hand with a fork?[later note: no, he appears to have stabbed his brother’s hand with a fork, at least in the movie version]) after she broke up with Flaubert, who really wasn’t all that nice to her.

I chided Gary today for his daily beer habit. He just came in smelling of it. Boys always smell like beer. I have never had a boyfriend who didn’t smell like beer.

We went to 86th St. and ate at Nyonya. I had these incredible curry mee noodles ( I know that’s redundant as “mee” means “noodles,” but perhaps most readers of this blog, all six of them!, won’t know that). I took many photographs as I always do these days, one reason being that when I take photographs I feel less of an urge to buy things, and yet I can still take something home from my travels. Here are the noodles (did I mention that Noodle was my childhood nickname?):


Atop the soup: “young” tofu, a hot pepper and a slice of eggplant both stuffed with seasoned fish paste, and roasted shallots. Divine.

Besides ironing and the Charles poem, I am procrastinating REALLY preparing for the reading. Perhaps I will do that tomorrow. I am also procrastinating on a huge project I’ve set for myself, which is creating a book partly from this blog and partly from uncollected & recent poems. It’s just so daunting. but I have made some progress.

Feeling keenly that my blog has not always been all that intelligent (I haven’t tried to make it so). At least not compared to Chris Kraus’ book. I am so easily given to a kind of gee-whiz breeziness. Maybe the book needn’t be all that intelligent? Like, it might have other virtues?

Gary discussed memoir writing with Kenny and Christian. Both Kenny and Rodney have urged me to write a memoir, and I like the idea very much, except that I would have to focus. Gary says my strong points are memory and description – anecdote, not so much. I am afraid of having to somehow connect or analyze the events of my life. It occurred to me that the events could be discretely described. Why not? Like I Remember without the I Remember. But then that might become a constraint, too. Kenny reminded me that Swoon was a kind of a memoir, at least in parts. This blog was too, at the beginning.

I have a drawer of diaries from I don’t know age eleven or so all through my time in Japan. Every time I think to “do something” with them, something literary, I find myself getting completely absorbed by nostalgia and thus paralyzed.

Apropro of journals, here’s a quote (that itself nests a quote) from the first page of my M.A. thesis on Bernadette Mayer:

Mayer demands from her writing a formal plasticity that matches? mimics? uses? the fluidity of experience. In this she emerges from a tradition of modernist realism whose foremost aim is to capture, in Baudelaire’s words, “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent.” Here is an exaggerated, internalized realism — Proust or Woolf without the scaffolding of fiction, for she focuses on the details of the quotidian. She aestheticizes her own daily life in her writing, but her writing is not diaristic because it is designed to operate in a public sphere, conscious of itself simultaneously as art and as diary: “you better start doing things, like, the diary as book — ‘the lowest form.’ Everything’s high or low, Germans, everything’s perfect.”1 In his essay, “The Distribution of Discourse,” George Steiner writes about the “fantastically loquacious world of the diary,” claiming that “loquacity, copiousness and temporal duration characterize the idiolects of diary writers” — as they do the writing of Bernadette Mayer. Also, the diary has a history as a “woman’s form”:

Barred from public expression of political, ideological and psychological conviction or discovery, the intelligent woman in the ancien regime and nineteenth century makes her journal the forum, the training ground of the mind.2

The journal form permits the integration of the process of writing into everyday life, using daily experience as the stuff of the writing, but it also permits the inclusion of otherwise ineffable material, and a way out of a repressive world.

It’s funny, but when I look back at that thesis, written more than two decades ago, I realize that my concerns and enthusiasms haven’t changed all that much.

Apropo of enthusiasms… a chapbook is in the works… called Interests… composed of lists of interests culled from Blogger profiles of people whose interests linked to mine. A chapbook, ugh! A chapbook!

Too many projects all at once, and the new semester around the corner, I’m like some kind of crazy poodle, really.


Gary’s Diary

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Gary has started to keep an experiential diary on his blog and I mean to hold him to it, as the project interests me. Perhaps I should do the same, even though the entries might be too similar.

Well, anyway…

Viewed:

Preston Sturges’ “Unfaithfully Yours”

Preston Sturges’ “Easy Living”:

“Milk”

re-read Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick:

from page 201:

To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.