Yet what we are writing are essays, in Montaigne’s sense, the idea of circling, exploring, of attempting something. Sometimes they are essays into ourselves, who we are, as writers, as desiring or abject bodies. We pride ourselves on strange disjunctions and connections from theory, literature, pop culture. Essays written by Joyelle McSweeney, Roz Ito, Danielle Pafunda, Jennifer Lowe, Suzanne Scanlon, Kate Durbin, Johannes Göransson, Angela Simione, Roxane Gay, Mike Kitchell, Jackie Wang, Blake Butler, Kristen Stone, Kari Larsen, The Rejectionist, too many others to name, those I am not even aware of, other communities of writers, some in other countries. These ideas all frantically circulate. These spaces become ones not only of emoting but of intense inquiry. We link to each other, we pass along books.
But these aren’t strict formalized book reviews. Often sprawling, associative, automatic. Messy, girly.
My blog began as a cocky, ecstatic sprawl, weaving in and out of anecdotal passionate homages to women writers I adored, posting their fuck-me-fatale photos, to sacrilegious reflections on the Surrealists to a sort of aesthetics theory, favoring what I then characterized as the bulimic versus the anorexic text. I sent links to the blog to a few writers I knew who had large online presences, and all of a sudden I had readers, and a flood of comments pouring in. The first post was cheekily entitled: “Why I Write Such Excellent Blog Posts.” An automatic writing (feel, then write, then push publish on Blogger).
For my criticism came out of, has always come out of, enormous feeling. Often the feeling was anger, finally allowed to let loose in these visceral rants. (I had written book reviews previously, for publications like Bookforum or The Believer, but my editors expected the pretense of objectivity, a journalistic gloss, these blog posts felt like I was committing a gleeful hari-kiri on my journalist girl-self.) Virginia Woolf hiding behind Mary Carmichael in Room, not wanting to write the self in her criticism (although like Elizabeth Hardwick, it is everywhere diffused in her essays). Writing about the “red light” of anger as impeding one’s mind, one’s argument (in opposition to the “white light” of truth). But what’s wrong with writing out of anger?
I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order — pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. The comments on Frances Farmer Is My Sister and allied blogs that have built sometimes to this glorious other text, this communion, this conversation, this casual liquidness, the superlative nature, that is generative and affirming as opposed to dismissive, that uses our own language instead of theirs.
And when I think about so much of the writing happening online, I think about the notebook form, and especially what Hardwick performs in Sleepless Nights, the drifting anecodotes mixing real-life characters with literary references, this tapestry. Also: Joan Didion’s The White Album, Renata Adler’s mosaic Speedboat. Elizabeth Hardwick was inspired especially by Speedboat for her Sleepless Nights—both scrapbooks that are kaleidoscopic, anecdotal, self-aware, witty, and intensely nostalgic. Both women who previously needed to rely on the objectivity of the critic (Adler with film, Hardwick with literature), but in their nonfiction novels they write the self, their experiences. In Sleepless Nights, Hardwick critiques what has been historically considered worthwhile material for a noveclass="underline" “It certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate motion on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all, ‘I’ am a woman.” Sleepless Nights shows a mind, a library at work, an old woman surrounded by her books.
All these experiments being written online — notes for projects never written, resembling sketches from Camus’s notebooks, experiments in the epistolary, the fragmented, this casual, cultural criticism, some of it in the comments. It is all ephemeral, not wanting to be formalized. I am beginning to think of this note-taking as the project itself.
Bhanu Kapil dismantling the novel in her Notes on Ban, notes for a character and a work that stands in for the work itself, some of these she writes online, in the margins, others published, formalized. Suzanne Scanlon who accretes such amazing bodily essays, who writes of her past of being a fucked-up girl in a way that reminds me of Mary McCarthy, or Colette, while collaging throughout a variety of literary sources. Suzanne’s pieces are often fictionalized, in that she changes names, the myth is that when one writes from the self one does not already alter, shape, adjust the text’s rhythms. It’s astonishing to me she doesn’t yet have a book. What she does have is a brilliant and, yes, literary blog. I remember telling her once when we were having drinks in Chicago that she needed to publish some of what she was writing on her blog — and she got this look on her face, like what would it be? Essays? Creative nonfiction? Fiction? Still this question of genre strangles us. Of fiction, of distance and form. But perhaps these blogs are a new form, a new genre. Like Montaigne’s essays self-reflective, circling around itself.
I think this whole question of publishing what we are writing online really begs these questions that remain from modernism — what is the work? Who is an author?
Yet perhaps our writing needs to be fragmented to fit our fragmented times. Sometimes yes the online notebooks feed our other writing, as experimental incubators, like Rhys with her Ropemaker Notebook. But sometimes the posts are just what they are — unfinished, fragmented, explorations into something. We don’t wish to formalize them into books. We want them to remain as they are — RAW, our own material. And how liberatory and open this virtual space can be, we are allowed to present different personas, performances, like Pessoa’s heteronyms, like Viv’s heteronyms for The Criterion. And online we get absolute permission not to push towards “finishing” towards “polish” towards “professionalism.”
The Professor Xs would hate our blogs: unfinished, bodily, excessive, nakedly autobiographical, even when written under pseudonyms. Perhaps all the reason to write them.
Yet what happens to the blogs and Tumblrs, these infinite, immaterial notebooks? One can erase them but even then they may persist, traces of them still saved somewhere on the Internet. Who is archiving these scraps of our existence? Those who decide what is important or not to archive. Who to preserve, what to throw away. If you are considered important enough, John tells me, any note or scribble relating to your work is valuable.
This is a memory campaign. Who is canonized, who is remembered. It begins with reviews and filters down to who is taught in schools and then whose papers are collected by which library. If you are a Great Author — then EVERYTHING needs to be saved and documented. Salman Rushdie’s laptops saved at Emory. David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis published. And how carefully their materials are handled, unlike Vivien(ne)’s notebooks mouldering or lost in the Bodleian.