* (My Internet is so slow, I cannot download images, you will have to google the two Durer images, compare and contrast. My above neighbors got Optimum to come by because their Internet is so slow too. Oh mine is too, it's really slow, I tell my neighbor, a Goldin-esque photographer who wears in the late fall this striped poncho I always vocally admire. You should get it fixed, she tells me. But I realize that I like the slow, I am liking the slow, I am liking not knowing everything, not reading everything, not being able to link to everything. The link Sheila sends me today, the article everyone is circling, I don't want to read it, I don't want to respond to everything, I don't want to read responses to responses to responses. This blog is fast, I worry over how unmediated these words are. Yet these are notes towards notes, this is not anything yet. Is it fast because I know it will be read? The slower is to write for invisible readers, the slower is to write for ghosts? For that is always who I want to write for, I want to write for ghosts, for the already dead, for those on the margins, the outsiders, the losers and the suicides, and then my living elective affinities. Lately I write for David Wojnarowicz and Nella Larsen and Herve Guibert and Robert Walser and WG Sebald and Bolano and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Clarice Lispector and Ludwig Wittgenstein and Enrique Villa-Matas and Louise Brooks, I write for the quitters and the Bartlebys and the queer bachelors and the feminine monsters, I write for Bhanu Kapil and Sofia Samatar and Danielle Dutton and Clutch Fleischmann and Sheila Heti and Douglas Martin and Jenny Zhang and Azareen van der Vliet and Suzanne Scanlon and Amina Cain and Pam Lu, and out of love and envy for the work of Renee Gladman and Claudia Rankine and Valeria Luiselli and Lydia Davis, I would never write for Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth. We must be able to elect our elective affinities and not have them elected for us - I am so tired of reviews or essays naming the same group of white women writers, sometimes that writer whose name uncannily resembles mine cringingly included, as the ones breaking boundaries or being applauded for subverting autobiography, even though I of course intensely admire many of these writers often named. However, I could write an essay over the terrible specter of Susan Sontag, who I do feel I pander towards, I so want her to write an essay about me, my eventual and hoped for luminous opacity, why in every book I'm reading does Sontag or William Gass write the introduction? I am in constant conversation with them, it's oppressive,but I cannot help but think almost everything they say feels right, they are my professors, I who had none, no writing mentors, no workshop environments. I also feel every time I discover a writer, say in translation, Sontag has always discovered them. Another point to explore later on: Why does almost every straight white male writer always bring up Susan Sontag to me? They always want to know what I think of her, or talk about me with her, or reference her constantly, maybe they just bring up Sontag to everyone, I don't know. There are some people I have no desire to discuss Susan Sontag with.)
- I Am the Daughter of Winfried Georg Sebald
descensus Averno facilis est