“My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people, and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back to your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.

And then if you’re lucky, and I have been lucky, everything comes back to you. And then you know why one of the freedom fighters in the sixties, a young Black woman interviewed shortly after she was beaten up for riding near the front of the interstate bus––you know why she said, ‘We are all so very happy’? It’s because it’s on. All of us and me by myself: we’re on.”

what does the last line mean to you?

i have thoughts: engagement, engagement, engagement, i read from that line, which i didn’t understand at first; a line which i first read as stunted, an anecdote which seemed to blunt the edge of the beautiful paragraph that proceeded it, but then the revelation crested and i summoned june‘s insight: engage, engage in the struggle, bliss out when you engage in the struggle, engage, engage. “it’s on”: be in it, live it, live the struggle.

and douglass too, maybe: “without struggle there is no progress.”

always a reminder.

it’s also interesting to be exposed to legal vocabulary that surrounds sexual misconduct and the wide spectrum of terms – and the many degrees of subtlety – that such vocabulary includes: sexual misconduct versus sexual harassment versus sexual abuse versus sexual assault. the legalistic vocabulary that we use greatly impacts how we conceive of such actions: the choice of “victim versus survivor” or “perpetrator versus participant” are moral claims, as much as they are legalistic ones.

as an artist who delves into the murky terrain of sexual abuse, i’ve often considered the realm of the moral to be creatively stifling. yet, i want to be responsible and i want to be real. to approach my characters and my poems with humanity, it has seemed important for me to ignore the moral and legalistic vocabulary that hill employed. as an artist, i ignore such language, but as a citizen, i can champion it.

ps: she also has a background in fashion. the interdisciplinary artist is yet another topic to explore.

http://www.tonkonow.com/lee.html

i love this quote — i love how gordimer describes writing as the most extreme of acts.

on an entirely different note:

i wonder what you guys think about writers hanging out with writers: for me, i sometimes feel driven to an almost maddening degree of self-consciousness. the dialogue feels strangely circular, and the conversation feels often more about words than about life. why is this so? how can writers break out of this prison? creative cross-fertilization, perhaps? make new painter/actor/accountant-friends? i also acknowledge and value the importance of community for the writer, because the act of writing is inherently lonely.

What is most profound, to me, is how SLP is both compassionate and ambitious: love and power do not sit in contradiction for Parks, but instead are strengthen by the existence of the other. Because, really what good is love without power? And what good is power with out love?

Check out the profile in full: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/30/061030fa_fact2?currentPage=3

“The serious, merciless invasion of privacy is at the heart of the fiction we value most highly.” philip roth

“How you get work done is by exploiting yourself and your feelings, and sometimes people get in the way.” carrie mae weems

philip roth’s quote suggests, to a certain degree, that the invasion of the subconscious — that most private of spaces — it distinguishes great art. the subconscious — that raw, uncharted terrain that is both individuated and universal, inchoate and exquisite. how does one open the door to such a place? is it accessed through ordinary means? the artist cannot demand that the subconscious reveal itself, but roth and weems both suggest that a certain brutality is required to access our deepest, most profound work: for weems it through exploitation, for roth it is through the “serious, merciless invasion of privacy”.

what does this mean for the writer? what does this mean for the artist? it means that, to some degree, we have to lay our characters and our work on the operating table: to create great work we must expose ourselves and in fact, interrogate ourselves and our characters. who would be game for such a project? very few, i would imagine. in many ways this is why so few people choose to be artists: to be an artist demands a certain brutality — and with that brutality comes a form courage.

one of the elements of great art, for me, is the distillation of contradiction and weber so precisely marries desire & shame, beauty & repulsion, childhood & horror. weber enters the home and then haunts it, or maybe the american home has always been haunted and it is only weber who illuminates the ghosts…

philip roth said, “the serious, merciless invasion of privacy is at the heart of the fiction we most highly value.” i think this is also part of weber’s project: yes, she invades but she also seduces, draws you near, if only to smack you down.

check her work out for yourself in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC6H7-u00pM

or scroll through her website: http://www.marnieweber.com

what strikes me most about smith’s approach to criticism is how she is at once generous and sharp, well-read and open-minded. she knows the canon but she sees beyond it; more than anything, she reflects and ruminates on her own process as a critic and as a writer: it is her ability to reflect and revise — that is to say, the ability to grow and transform — which i most deeply value.

why is it that most writers & critics fail to aggressively investigate their own canons and their own book shelves? what is it that is missing from yours? what’s missing from mine? it seems that we become better writers when we are exposed to as wide a range of material as possible — when we are as deeply influenced by shakespeare as we are by mos def… i could rail **for-ever** about the ways in which the american education system priveleges a certain male eurocentric curriculum at the expense of the truly dynamic world of arts & letters that exists out there: and a whole generation of children (and adults) suffers!

… alas.

and some dope quotes, for the black-white-and-green among you:

Yeah, I have a kind of—I just feel suspicious of the idea of pure writing, of something that never embarrasses you, which is completely clean. It’s just, in my experience, writing which is completely clean is writing that has had shorn from it almost everything that’s of interest.

And that another thing I suppose I’m looking for in the books that are sent to Harper’s: people who are able to write genuinely out of their own sensibility, not out of nostalgia, not trying to sound like somebody else, not fearful—people who write frankly, and Geoff’s certainly one of those.
But then again, my instinct is to defend the novels that I love, and to try to see the—sometimes, I said in Changing My Mind, sometimes a writer’s failures are the most distinct part of them, and not just to be thrown away or discarded. It’s kind of what interests me. That might be a vocational defense, because I need to be interested in my own failures. But that engages me, I think.