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Storr: How consciously did you structure this according to psychological or psychoanalytical models, or how much of this was organically coming out of your own experience?
X: It came out of my own development.
STORR: Your own development?
X: Yeah.
Storr: What do you mean by development?
X: Are you familiar with photography, the process of photography?
Storr hesitates and half laughs as he squints at her.
X: You put the photo paper in the developer and what happens?
Storr: What I was asking—
X: What happens, Jerry?
Storr: The photograph develops.
X: Good boy, Frank, good boy. The photo develops. And this is what life is, little Waldo Emerson, little Charlie, darling. You put people in situations and their personality develops. Their little freaky heads.
X lights a cigarette. A long silence.
STORR: I—well, I had one more—
X: Come on, Billy, just go with it, Billy Boy, ask me another smart question of yours. Have a look at your notes, find some genius in there!
this is so funny
Knowing all this, I listened to Mr. Vine go on about how the ST was a better place for women than anyone realized, how his wife (my wife) had simply mistaken the simplicity of her life as a form of oppression. This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.
X then went on to name names, to make an example of thirty-nine of her peers and their most celebrated works, which she deemed “full of unredeemable pettiness, violent anti-intellectualism, and fatuous notions of insight.” Her primary thesis was that “art is an expression of the society from which it emerges, not the artist in themselves,” and her primary complaint was that the relative comfort and political apathy of the Northern Territory had produced at least three generations of “money-driven fluff machines … that insult the very notion of art as a matter of existential survival.”
i mean not a bad point but not to be treated as totalizing either
What if I could be taken to wherever Gregory Charleston went? Would it be worse than here or better or the same? Cannot stand another day in this kitchen … Billy says there are times in a life when all the stories break down, and how we chose to react then says everything about who we are.
For a time, her letters to Ted took an explicit turn—not toward him but about herself. “I want it more than both ways—I want it all ways. I only want a dick because boys look at me more than girls do and it seems a shame to go around empty-handed.”* She writes of lovers, but never love. She writes of fucking so frankly, it seems she’d shrugged off her upbringing in the ST like an old coat. If these letters are to be trusted, she seems to have spent an incredible amount of time pursuing sex, having sex, planning new pursuits of sex. In one twenty-four-hour period she had a trio of threesomes with five different people. Why? A compulsion, a fit, a need to outweigh all the dying with warm bodies, maybe. Living in the shadow of her friends’ deaths, she catapulted herself from bed to bed.
Often X made the argument that our supposedly liberal society was illogically puritanical about age differences in romantic partners, that “some” fourteen-year-olds were more mature and capable than adults well over twice their age. I agreed this was a possibility, but it seemed sagacious teens were in shorter supply than lecherous adults, and lust itself has a transfiguring effect, a way of taking action and justifying it later. I’d once had a professor who’d pursued me while I was his student, and though I was technically and legally mature enough to consent, the imbalance of power seemed to me a warning. To this, X groaned: Didn’t I know that personal experience blurred the truth? And furthermore, she said, the professor obviously hadn’t been appealing enough to me, so it wasn’t an adequate example. I did not bring up the fact I’d been quite attracted to him, as I never mentioned any attractions I’d had in the past; I even found it difficult, in her presence, to remember them clearly, so completely my sense of desire and sexuality seemed to rest in her hands. We never reached a conclusion to this disagreement; we simply concluded and re-concluded that there was no use bickering over abstractions, though abstractions continued to be the sole subject of our bickering.
this is funny. maybe bh inspo? for arguments
The same year as her Morning Show performance, Gene Deitch invited Connie to perform at his salon, a regular event he held and recorded in his Greenwich Village apartment. Connie arrived in a long shapeless dress, leading someone to quip that she’d “just come in from milking the cows,” to which she retorted, “I’ll milk you,” then took up her guitar and began to play.† She impressed the crowd that night, though they still found her strange and old-fashioned. The problem, perhaps, was that Connie had all the qualities a male folk musician was allowed to have in the 1950s and none of what was expected of a female singer. She was bewildering when she should have been seductive, rugged when she should have been glamorous. Her songs were about steely women when they should have been about powerful men. Her voice had a stilted, pedantic quality—the sort of irregularity celebrated in Bob Dylan—instead of the nostalgic, mellifluous tone of a woman. A booking agent told her she needed to buy some lipstick and high heels before he could get her gigs. Shades of equality could be seen elsewhere in the Northern Territory, but stages and spotlights still demanded a beautiful docility. At the time, few noticed or cared about correcting the prejudices in an industry seen as ultimately frivolous.
This sort of gesture—to force someone into feeling what they wanted to avoid—was something X did all her life to anyone she felt she had the right to change. It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter the damage. [...]
Tim Holt, a book editor X befriended that year, was the only Big Bar regular who didn’t quite belong. He arrived each Friday at five to attend to his customary three martinis as he read through a stack of book submissions. The bar was nearly empty at that time—quiet enough to read for an hour, then busy enough to distract him from all those desperate pages. Holt noticed the cheap paperbacks X kept in her back pocket and started bringing her books from New Directions, his employer, gifts she countered with shaking larger drinks, the runoff served in a tumbler on the side. I spoke to Holt by phone, as he’d retired and moved to the Western Territory.*
this is fun
Over the next few weeks, Waits practiced piano at Grove Street so often that X gave him a key. In a diary, X wrote that she knew she could respect him because unlike so many other musicians, he understood that “the importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It’s nothing but a noose.”† The admiration was mutual; Waits soon invited her to Electric Lady Studios, where he’d been gifted some time that winter. (“She was like a broken toy that works better than before it was broken,”‡‡ Waits told Mr. Smith.) Of course, no one at Electric Lady had ever heard of any “Bee Converse,” but there was no need to ask for her qualifications or which records she’d worked on. Arriving with Waits was credential enough.
actual source: Fleur Jaeggy