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[...] I read like five male coming-of-age novels that had intense, long passages about masturbation. These books taught me a lot about what it must be like to be a young man, and gave me some terrible ideas about the kind of woman I didn't want to be, in order to not be thought dull or needy by the intelligent, masturbating young men I liked, but they did not help me understand my life. [...]
[...] These were the books that were handed to me, and so I thought, this is something that I have to get used to. I knew that if I had been a young man, I would mimic these novels too. The realization that there were parts of that acting out that I didn't get to do, solely because of my gender, and other parts in which my acting out was seen differently, not as fun but desperate, was devastating. I can't even explain how devastating that was. I couldn't even think of the ethics of any of it because all I saw was the role I was confined to in those stories. I can't think of a book that I would've given myself that would've armed me against that feeling. I got really mad at the books. I remember getting mad at a boyfriend who had lied and saying, "YOU THINK YOU'RE THE HERO OF A FUCKING UPDIKE NOVEL." But it was my role I resented, the role of the bovine female, while he was the Julian Sorel, the deceptive, neurotic, charmingly flawed hero balancing competing claims for this affection--again, the bearer of narrative.
on Roth
I had made no conscious decision to be single, but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Because of this, people around me continued to view love as a sort of messianic event, and my friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love was something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape. I had known love, but having known love I knew how powerless I was to instigate it or ensure its duration. Whether love was going to arrive or not, I could not suspend my life in the expectation of its arrival. So, back in New York, I was single, but only very rarely would more than a few weeks pass without some kind of sexual encounter.
What even to call these relationships? Most of my friends had slept with one another and I had slept with many friends, too. Sometimes years separated sexual encounters. Things thought buried in the past would cycle around again, this time with less anxiety and greater clarity, in a fluid manner that occasionally imploded in horrible displays of pain or temporary insanity, but which for the most part functioned smoothly. We were souls flitting through limbo, piling up against one another like dried leaves, circling around, awaiting the messiah.
pretty
[...] He differentiated between prose, where “there is generally a quite closely defined channel or corridor of sense-making,” and certain types of difficult poetry, where “this corridor of sense is much wider and more open, more like a network across the whole expanse of the text, with many loops and cross-links of semantic and referring activity which extend the boundaries of relevance, and of control by context, in many directions at once.” He said that when text is delinked and incoherent, when “extreme ambiguity displaces recognizable topic-focus” and references abruptly shift with no warning, “these features may begin to comprise a second-order strategy of pattern-making in a new way.” He compared this form of pattern-making to traditional rhyme forms — how a poem in which the words themselves do not link into a recognizable statement can be experienced as a unity through lines that end in rhyme. In the end the poetry forms a process of “pattern and pattern-violation generating their own tendencies of meaning — or perhaps we should call this ‘meaning,’ in some second-order sense.”
on J. H. Prynne
[...] in the words of I. A. Richards, “As the finer parts of our emotional tradition relax in the expansion and dissolution of our communities, and as we discover how far out of our intellectual depth the flood-tide of science is carrying us — so far that not even the giants can still feel bottom — we shall increasingly need every strengthening discipline that can be devised.” Richards saw the study of poetry as such a strengthening discipline, and when I considered what might be elitist about Cambridge poetry it was the notion that they were keeping the flame of some greater truth alive against the perceived onslaught of popular culture. But to see the poets this way was to pit some concept of exclusive British culture practiced by wealthy dilettantes against more inclusive cultural practices. That would have been elitist, or at least haughty. But the poets were not doing that. What they were doing, together or as individuals, was merely a search, to try to use language in a way that did not remind us of someone trying to sell us something, that made words seem new, that gave us a way to describe the things we aspired to that did not echo the vocabulary that we could no longer trust. This did not feel elitist, just hopeless.