inreaction

this is a bit awkward to write about but i’m comforted by the fact that no one really reads this anymore. this is to me anyway.

after putting up with countless bouts of intense moral arguments and philosophical masturbation, my love just helped me realize that i would be much better off if i just gave it up. if i am who i am instead of fighting against what i can’t be, then life is so much simpler.

i spend a lot of time fighting to show why things i can’t have or take part in are stupid, lame, or immoral. i go clubbing, for example. i go with friends, i go where i can when i can. but when it comes to places i don’t think i’d get into or am not old enough or loaded enough to find myself, i automatically dismiss it as excessive or superficial. yet i read the superficial.

we are all the same good, with varying levels of interest in numerous things. i enjoy owning nice things, so i shouldn’t disparage another for just being able to acrue more nice things than i can. this sort of bullshit moralism is hypocritical at best and downright hurtful most of the time.

i feel like a damned fool and it’s an odd feeling – realizing you’ve been slowly chipping away at not only your own self-respect and legitimacy but also the ability of your loved ones and friends to be themselves around you, to be real with you. to be honest it makes one hate oneself, but i want to instead try and break this nasty habit. i want people to straight up know who i am and for me to stop tearing down people for things that i can’t have or do. and i want to someone specific to know that she’s far more legit than i’ve let on and i’m sorry. and i want her to have fun.

hopeful.

when i think of the future, as i just did in the shower, i feel as though i won’t really be having one.

not as in i won’t get into law school or won’t want to go to law school. it’s more a sentiment of massive distaste with a life full of work. clearly this is pathetic writing, but there are times where i feel as though maybe i really won’t Make It, won’t pay off the $60,000 in loans i already have, won’t be able to handle adding another $200,000 to that in graduate school fees, won’t be able to afford a house or a lifestyle condusive to a comfortable childhood, won’t be able to take the wife to nice places, wont’ be able to…

but then maybe the time for such luxuries has passed.

i first encountered kathy acker in my post-modern american fiction class this fall (or was it last spring?), and i must say i did not find myself too interested. but i randomly happened upon her wikipedia page and consequently found myself reading interview after interview with her. i now find acker to be one of those figures that we dismiss on the account of their oddness (like the porn star who pontificates on feminist rights; acker is perhaps THE literary feminist pornstar).

this interview is particularly gripping. she goes from sexuality and gender to a particularly interesting portion on “common culture.” prepare yourself, it is graphic (especially towards the very end), her responses are dense at times and the reporter even more so, but if you stick with it you really get a sense for how far down the path of thought some postmodern writers and theorists are willing to go. i can’t quite meet them there, but i think its important for me as a “writer” (of whatever sort that does or, more often, does not mean) to get a wide grasp of the type of thinking that is being and has been done.

Q: Memories work as rhythm too. The passages that you take, since they’re familiar to another context as a memory, are familiar to another context as personal experience. How would the passages function for the text and, perhaps, for the writing apparatus itself as something that might be understood as “memories” that work rhythmically?

Acker: When you’re writing, you’re working rhythmically. When I take different texts, my memory of those texts is really different than yours is. We haven’t read the same things. So there’s no way I can plan for a reader what is going to be the play between the text and the reader’s ability to understand. People read my books and they recognize different stuff. There’s no way in hell that I can really play with that, because we don’t live in a culture where everyone has the same culture. When I teach a class, my students come in and I don’t think there’s one single book that I can pick that every student has read. We don’t have a common culture anymore.

On where literature / reading are and are going:

Acker: I think that old 19th century thing of Samuel Richardson, with the women reading audience–you know, (of course, middle- or upper-class women) curled up with a big, fat novel and lulling away the day reading–is over with. None of us lead those sorts of lives. There aren’t going to be these huge numbers of middle- and upper-class women (huge comparatively in terms of the reading audience), who are going to curl up with books. 600 page novels are only for those who take airplanes. Society changes, form changes, what people want changes. I just see the present, where there’s energy pockets now, where people seem excited about stuff, what might happen quickly.