marie calloway && the confessional [WORDVOMIT]

Monday, December 26, 2011

marie calloway && the confessional [WORDVOMIT]

i mostly read marie calloway’s adrien brody because it was getting a lot of negative attention, & then tao lin’s response was surprisingly, sweetly earnest, then i was working a graveyard shift on thursday night so i read adrien brody, even though (CONFESSION) i have a really hard time reading things on the internet.

then kate zambreno wrote an AMAZING essay on the whole thing, which said, way better that i would have, a lot of the things i wanted to say, but i still wanted to write about it, so here it is, my christmas essay:

TURNING IN SEX POEMS IN HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE WRITING WORKSHOPS

i had really amazing writing teachers in college, one in particular who’s a sort of old man poet type, very kind, nice beard. he loved baseball and wrote about baseball and was catholic and i still remember the day he read us this tiny poem about the speck of blood that dried on the face of his dead father’s watch. for the creative nonfiction piece he assigned i wrote about how my father broke the dishwasher; also masturbating. for my short story i wrote about dykes and abortions and took major, enormous poetic license in ways that embarrass me greatly. it was intro to creative writing so we did four weeks each of short stories, creative non fiction, and poetry.

Baseball Poet was nothing but sweet. he came into each class drinking coffee out of a mug with hopper’s nighthawks on it. i was eager for him to love me. he told me i was a “firecracker” and a “whiz bang poet.” he took me deeply seriously and for that i am so grateful.

every so often i’ll be going about my business, driving to work maybe, feeding the dog, tearing a biore pore strip off my nose and this flush of embarrassment will come over me, bordering on horror: did i really give that masturbation essay to Dr. ****** ?!

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the people who talk shit about marie calloway are i bet the people who wring their hands over the State Of Contemporary Poetry or something boring like that, people who are maybe less interested in proliferation than in wanting a next big thing.

in who took the bomp, the le tigre documentary, kathleen hanna says this beautiful thing about how she doesn’t want her songs to feel finished, that they’re like zines: a cheap thing that circulates.

hey guys remember livejournal? and its predecessors, including: opendiary? what did you put on your opendiary or live journal? lists of clothes you got at goodwill, clumsy sonnets, quotes from but i’m a cheerleader and ghost world. it was fucking awesome.

the internet: a cheap thing that circulates.

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someone, somewhere that i read was weighing in on this whole thing and saying that women are encouraged to write only about sex/relationships so it’s not radical when a girl person writes the kind of thing marie calloway did: like implying how girls should be above or beyond or not that. girls should write about politics or science or theory (as if girls are not already also doing that) and how that seems so wrong to me, but that was me, not even too long ago, not wanting to be: that: messy, emotional, talking about girlstuff. wanting to be Taken Seriously. the girl wants to be taken seriously, but on whose terms.*

as a smart girl, many people, a lot of them men, have taken it upon themselves to mentor me in ways that fall along a continuum of consent and usefulness. you’re taught to be serious and not show/write about feelings && especially to keep sex private. how if yr a smart girl people tell you that you have to be a certain way and not talk about girly stuff, feelings, sex, getting drunk, having politically incorrect or less-than-feminist feelings.

(not being raised male i can’t answer to the forces that tell male/boy people not to write/talk about their feelings if they want to be taken seriously as academics but if someone wants to take that on i would be really interested to hear)

like: you have to be serious. you have to be two people, a Young Academic Totally Above Reproach and if you want to also be messy you can do that in your free time but in a way that leaves no traces. no paper trail. (a private space, the notebook) (lie in your bed with the shades drawn and weep. skip your canoeing class.)

OK. i hate it when feminists name everything they like/do as feminist (VAG MAGAZINE: these skirts need to be more feminist. you mean, longer? no, more feminist. shorter? no, more feminist. so they should be…pants?) without doing that, i want people to name and talk about their feelings including shameful ones, ones that are not feminist. or like maybe we can come to the conclusion that we don’t have to have feminist feelings, like maybe that is a weird concept

i have a lot of stories that are not feminist, in the sense of, at least, the Feminist Theory classes i took in college***, although i never went to new york to have sex with a writer twice my age, i did some stuff not befitting a Young Academic/Feminist Scholar. and i remember this burning sense of: wanting to tell all this gross shit to my mentors. come closer/stay away. hence the broken dishwasher/masturbation story that i gave to Baseball Poet

i’m a feminist but i also wanna talk about how i made out with ******** ***** in the back of **** *******’s *** ***** *** *** ******** without thinking that could sully my ability one day write about, say, radical social work, or postmodern agrarianism, or teach a college composition course, or run for mayor. or be slut shamed by my people, or escorted out of the radical consent conversation, or have someone else’s narrative about porn, objectification, or the male gaze placed over top of my experience

down with hand wringing!

reading adrien brody, and, too, megan boyle’s beautiful, nervous little book of unpublished blog posts, fills me with a confessional impulse: how the internet is like this enormous middle school sleepover where you talk about periods and who you like and you are sweating in your sleeping bag, sweating coca cola out your pores and you are alone but not, and scared but not, and you have to pee but you don’t want to run into someone else’s mom in her bathrobe or something, how that would feel gross and intimate and you wouldn’t know what to say to her, and it’s all exciting but mean but these are your friends, right, and i just think about livejournal** and how, really, all this is weird, and fucking incredible, and it’s mutating, and nobody’s the next big thing, and we’re all just reblogging each other’s sex stories and embarrassing moments

wanna write a “everyone i’ve had sex with” essay, can we all just do that?

can we just be grotesquely vulnerable on the internet?

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*so much thanks to nic bravo who has been integral to my sense of poetics as it currently is/continues to mutate and femininity and the girl/gross/assemblage monster <3

** i was really scared but i just googled my old livejournal name it’s not there. someone else has that name, now, but they haven’t updated since 2009, which makes me feel old.

*** working on an essay in my head about women’s studies, how important it was, and the thinking i’ve done since, and a lot of shortcomings i feel/felt in my Feminist Education, and about reconciling prosexprude queer poetics and ecology and social work and porn, but that is beyond the scope of this here right now