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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
I really enjoyed the interviews in here. The letters from Bjork a highlight. Some of the reviews dragged slightly, especially when I didn’t know the artist, but I have been introduced to so many new artists through this! A good read and a thought provoking one
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
had to return to the library. read the essays that spoke to me. it's kind of comforting to know that not everything Maggie Nelson writes is a masterpiece
(Bjork on Lars von Trier) "the director does not provide soul to his movies and he knows it. He needs a female to provide it and he envies them and hates them for it. so he has to destroy them during the filming and hide the evidence."
(on Guibert) "his work inevitably comes off differently to those of us who also swim in the choppy waters of high-stakes life writing, and are familiar with the ethical and aesthetic challenges that come with it (not to mention how intensely others judge the venture).
Many life writers eventually come to understand that a reader's sense of scandal or sensationalism tells us as much or more about her than about the writer; certain sensibilities, sentiments and activities that are shocking to some make others feel at home. Likewise, the charge that Guibert's obscenity lacks in higher purpose - that unlike, say, Genet or Bataille, he was just "a young man out to trigger the middle-class world, espousing extreme self-exposure for its own sake" (as one critic recently put it in The New Yorker) - lands a punch only if "extreme self-exposure for its own sake" strikes you as obviously thin or bad."
(on having known Sedgwick) "As often happens with a figure whom many treat as a guru, or with someone you perceive as "having what you want," the idolisation/idealisation produced a kind of melancholia: the melancholia of inferiority, of distance, of longing, of feared impossibility, of shame about where you are, or who you are, right now. The desire to move quickly into enlightenment, liberation, knowledge, sobriety, shamelessness - into a freer self, a happier self, a queerer self, or what have you - can be fierce, and fiercely privatising.
This melancholia or shame can exist throughout life in a variety of arenas (Sedgwick also describes its workings in therapeutic setting). but it's also a consitutive element of being a student. Being a student is -perhaps structurally - an incredibly rich, contradictory, and volatile place to be."
(Wayne Koestenbaum) "..to understand why poetic lines are often so claustrophobic for me. Odd, that while writing an essay I'm more inventive with "poetic lines" than when I'm writing a poem."
(Bjork on Lars von Trier) "the director does not provide soul to his movies and he knows it. He needs a female to provide it and he envies them and hates them for it. so he has to destroy them during the filming and hide the evidence."
(on Guibert) "his work inevitably comes off differently to those of us who also swim in the choppy waters of high-stakes life writing, and are familiar with the ethical and aesthetic challenges that come with it (not to mention how intensely others judge the venture).
Many life writers eventually come to understand that a reader's sense of scandal or sensationalism tells us as much or more about her than about the writer; certain sensibilities, sentiments and activities that are shocking to some make others feel at home. Likewise, the charge that Guibert's obscenity lacks in higher purpose - that unlike, say, Genet or Bataille, he was just "a young man out to trigger the middle-class world, espousing extreme self-exposure for its own sake" (as one critic recently put it in The New Yorker) - lands a punch only if "extreme self-exposure for its own sake" strikes you as obviously thin or bad."
(on having known Sedgwick) "As often happens with a figure whom many treat as a guru, or with someone you perceive as "having what you want," the idolisation/idealisation produced a kind of melancholia: the melancholia of inferiority, of distance, of longing, of feared impossibility, of shame about where you are, or who you are, right now. The desire to move quickly into enlightenment, liberation, knowledge, sobriety, shamelessness - into a freer self, a happier self, a queerer self, or what have you - can be fierce, and fiercely privatising.
This melancholia or shame can exist throughout life in a variety of arenas (Sedgwick also describes its workings in therapeutic setting). but it's also a consitutive element of being a student. Being a student is -perhaps structurally - an incredibly rich, contradictory, and volatile place to be."
(Wayne Koestenbaum) "..to understand why poetic lines are often so claustrophobic for me. Odd, that while writing an essay I'm more inventive with "poetic lines" than when I'm writing a poem."
challenging
informative
reflective
Olisin halunnut tykätä tästä paljon enemmän. Osa esseistä oli upeita ja toisia lukiessa tunsin itseni täysin tynnyrissä kasvaneeksi tolloksi.
Maggie shines in conversation—some of the older essays drag, but all of the writing gathered in this collection gets noticeably better as the conversations and essays are written closer to the present day. All in all, I’d follow Maggie Nelson in any literary direction she pointed me to.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
Made my head churn, helpfully; made me take myself more seriously; helped me to let go of my gender more than ever.
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This book is like literary whiplash. You start to zone out or think it's no longer worth delving into, you think “I haven’t read or seen or engaged with what she’s talking about or reviewing, so surely this is irrelevant to me,” and then it hits you with a thought that knocks you flat on your ass! Nelson says something to this effect in her essay about in her essay about Sedgewick's The Weather in Proust, about how you can feel disconnected from the work until something momentous hits you. I wish I wrote that quote down, because I thought it was an ingenious thing to note so early in the collection and gave me important perspective on how to engage with the rest of this book. However, I feel unable to unlearn that Maggie Nelson was a contact improv person. Horrible.
Quotes I liked:
The credits have started to roll, the theater is still dark. A mother - my mother - leans over to whisper: “Well, what did you think?” What did I think? How could anyone be composed enough to be thinking, talking? My job is clear: I must protect the transmission, smuggle it out of the theater, to examine later in my room, see if it glows. If it does, I might start to think in sentences about it. If the sentences get bossy enough, I might start to write them down. This much I’ve learned - you put enough in, and eventually, if unpredictably, something will come out. (James Baldwin: “All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”)
WK: I doubt I've ever had a proper "nervous breakdown," though I often feel I'm in the midst of a slow-motion, barely detectable dissolution of the threads of sociability and normalcy, a process of becoming-strange to friends, becoming-strange to my own language.
Jane's worries about appearing selfish, as expressed in her diary entries, are a good example of the bind. In some ways, they made me think that if one is worrying over appearing selfish, one might already be heading down the wrong path altogether, insofar as for women - not exclusively, but perhaps especially - setting boundaries around what one can and cannot give to others has always been a difficult point, a subject of much internal consternation. I have become an avid reader in the occasionally linked spheres of Buddhism and feminism, and one subject that appears often in this overlap is how women need to be especially cautious in avoiding "idiot generosity," that is, giving that which will make you resentful or depleted, while also pursuing the kind of radical generosity that Buddhism encourages. But this generosity has to be commensurate with your capacities - you can't just become a doormat, which doesn't help anyone. But nor does being paranoid about becoming one. It's a bit of a pickle.
But back to poetry, which is our ostensible subject here: I'm all for dragging epistemes into poetry; my only demand is that they be metabolized, embodied, or inhabited in some way - don't toss in the word "Hegel" just because you want to sounds smart but don't really give a hoot about the referent; don't mock critical theory or terms for sport, especially with the aim of demonstrating that poetry doesn't need those things, doesn't need to be "thinky" in order to have value. Of course it doesn't! Poetry doesn't need to be thinky, or intellectual, in any proper sense! It can be, but it can also be a shimmer of mood scrubbed on a cocktail napkin.
Carolee: "In my experience men would rather tear a relationship apart than adjust, adapt and change what needs to be changed in their psyche... it's difficult to find a really intelligent man who shares a commitment to feminist issues and practice, who reads the same material I read... someone who knows what's happening with this reinvestigation of 'inherited culture.'"
I feel like the small amounts of writing that I've done in the past several months, I can only do them by opening the file and then saving it and shutting it and never looking at it again. It's like I'm taking private turds and then burying them, and I actually feel phobic about ever looking at the pile. I used to get really excited, when I was younger, to write at night and behold all I've written the next morning. But at the moment, it's like I need to keep it so dumb that it's actually literally dumb, it's not speaking, it's entombed or something.
Often when I've agreed to take on a writing assignment, I resent that I've taken the job, and when I finish it, I think, "god, that was such a distraction." But (a) from what? and (b) before I started it, I probably felt like everything else in my life was a distraction, keeping me from the assignment. When I see this pattern from afar, I just think, wow, this is all a really elaborate mind game about where value is, where things are happening. You know, I'm hot, better turn up the AC, I'm cold, better turn on the heat. So you're spending a lot of time just jiggering the thermostat.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
slow-paced