A lonely, anxious rearranger of things

On guilt and shoehorning

I’ve been reading McKenzie Wark, who had a correspondence/relationship fling with one of my favourite writers, Kathy Acker. Reading Acker is like touching a hot object, I pick her up and throw her down, I am thrilled, appalled, titillated, excited, left raw and bleeding, she inspires me, and I read her in a particular way, in spurts, and upside down, which, I am coming to know, is fine. I will write more about this, the way we read things, as I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially after so many great discussions in the bookshop. Books ask to be read in certain ways, or even possibly, not read, and my anecdotal studies seem to show we expect to be able to read all books the same, cover to cover, linearly, and we feel guilty if we’re unable to achieve this. We also feel guilty about not having read a lot of books already, such as the (stupid) NYT best 100 (look! A cat!). Books come to us when they’re ready. If they’re ready.

But reader guilt isn’t what I want to write about this morning. Or is it. No. I wanted to write about shoehorning because I got excited again on reading the introduction by a friend of Kathy Acker’s, Matias Viegener, to the book of correspondence between her and Wark, ‘I’m Very Into You’. This is a precious book, one that Viegener admits Acker would not have wanted published, so it feels awkward and sad and exciting and naughty and raw to read it. (Side note - I’ve been on a Wark bender lately, Reverse Cowgirl and Love and Money, Sex and Death, and, as per above, not allowing self to feel guilty/sad at how long it’s taken me to get to her books). Anyway, Kathy was a playful and brazen plagiariser and, I’d forgotten, an ‘appropriator of her own found material’ … She mined her own personal writing to build her books, used it, reused it, played with it, (fucked the living shit out of it). I think this piece is about this dumb guilt I feel about ‘shoehorning’. It comes up over and over and I don’t know why.

I did the same dance when in Helen Garner’s yellow diary I found this:

All these years of note-taking, of being what Joan Didion calls ‘a lonely, anxious re-arranger of things.

Oh my god.

I even got the skier on the colour TV in the Italian cafe!

In the margins I have written: THE SHOEHORNER!

Perhaps this piece this morning is about guilt. Reader guilt, writer guilt. Perhaps I should stop trying to understand what it is I’m writing about, FFS. Anyway, the thrill of knowing other writers, such as favourites HG & KA, work like this, which in some way I knew but had never seen clearly identified in writing, made me and consistently makes me feel released from solitary confinement. I had this idea that all writers, especially the good ones, worked linearly, ie, they started with an idea and wrote it through, fresh. I could never do that. I tried, but I would get bored and frustrated. The fun of it was the wild adventure scientific experiment of trying to fit all the pieces I’ve got stowed away into something, find the story they tell.

It’s an infuriating and exasperating and wasteful way to work. And the pieces insist on being jammed in, even when they don’t belong, and you have to find the way to let them, and even then you fail. But when those pieces, the skier on the colour TV in the Italian cafe, even the entire collection of Wark and Acker’s emails, find their place, ah. I’m Very Into You has found its place in Acker’s death, and I like to think she is okay with it from there, as it shows us what I suspect she wanted us to know: that her books are very much a persona, works of art, character, and not herself. It would annoy her, apparently, to be confused personally with the characters in her books, especially by her lovers. This story of her, the real her, could only have been shoehorned in by a friend post-mortem, but what it gives is her books back thousandfold.

I think I have figured out how to shoehorn a giant bit in that refuses to be refused, by putting it in third person. It has been months of work, to make it work, and then it may not work at all.