On Recovery (Redux)
; or, Regards, Marcel II: Back in the Habit
Mes amis!
Regards!—& thanks again for your patience these last weeks. I’m excited to be back :) Today’s dispatch will be brief: a grateful hello, some housekeeping, and a bit about what’s been happening in my post-surgical world. I hope you’re all well, and that your copies of volume two (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs1) are getting their proper workouts already.
The plan, going forward, is to continue our reading of Proust’s La recherche apace, which means that—in case you missed it in the most recent letter—we’re looking at this schedule for the next few months:
July - through “certain images which the judge would certainly never have perceived” (~183 in the Moncrieff) | August - through “the infinitely wide social gulf which separated me—at least at Balbec—from Mlle de Stermaria” (~359) | September - through “the accumulation of its labours and the hopes of its hive” (~540) | October - through the end
Between book writing, freelance work, this project, my bar jobs, AND trying to carve out meaningful time, care, and energy for my partner, my dog, and my friends, I’ve been stretching myself a bit thin the last few months. At least through March (when I turn my manuscript in to the publisher), dispatches will be monthly, and not biweekly, but—of course—will remain free. For paid subscribers, I’ll feature occasional guests and conversations with other writers and artists, about every other month. Once the book is completed, the plan (for now) is to be a more frequent presence, but then again, who knows—maybe people prefer this breathing room, particularly in a time when it seems like 5,000 newsletters flood your inbox every single day. (And I love them! But I know it can be overwhelming…)
For now I’m making peace with the fact that life happens—local woman shocked!—that intellectual projects, being not dead paperweights but living, breathing affairs, necessarily metamorphose, and that, despite myself, I am and can only be one person. That that one person is a willful, stubborn, and restless workhorse cannot render my capacities infinite. That’s ok. Being forced to slow down twice this year by surgery has been an unmooring experience, but a generative one also. I think I needed to learn what it is to be at rest. This isn’t a practice I’m especially good at, in no small part because of poverty PTSD. The thing I learned watching my mother as a child—and a knowledge calcified by the economic perils of my own adulthood—was that to not be working was, in a morally and materially inexorable sense, to be sliding further into debt.2 (Just this morning I had to turn a commission down, and immediately found myself in a panic over this loss of income—income that had only surfaced as a future possibility moments before. Brainworms!)
I’m prickly about talking money—particularly vis-a-vis writing—because, let’s face it, the unavoidable commodification of our art in late capitalism just plain feels bad. Not to say it’s a modern phenomenon, but that the escalating inextricability of the work from its saleable function (in any case if you are not an artist of independently-wealthy-experience) asphyxiates, and recasts often-pleasurable labor as principally a money-making enterprise. There’s also, of course, a nagging sense of shame there: an idea that, if what I was doing mattered to the world as much as it matters to me, I’d be—what—on staff at the New Yorker?; making enough bread writing to not have to bartend anymore?; be jetting off to speaking engagements every other week? In an American discursive economy that characterizes structural inequities as the result of individual failures, it’s the easiest thing in the world to feel that whatever struggle you wrestle with is to do with your peculiar and inarguable badness, rather than, say, wealth-hoarding, nepotism, the devaluation of the arts, et cetera.
How did I get here? I’ve lost the trail—my brain remains foggy after my long confinement (—I joked that my boyfriend was secretly Yellow Wallpaper-ing me). Anyhow, now I have an excuse to invoke that scene from Mad Men where Marie Calvet tells Megan that “not every little girl gets to do what they want—the world could not support that many ballerinas.” And maybe an invocation of that scene doesn’t fit here but I don’t care, because it’s a great moment, and at times when I’m feeling professionally insecure, her voice, that advice, runs its little serrated edge against my skin.
In any case, June was an odd, difficult month. A thing I can confirm for all the doubters and haters: recovering after getting your tits done is far easier than recovering after a surgical team’s peeled your face off and re-sculpted the literal bone surfaces of your skull. I couldn’t see my laptop screen for the first week, so I wrote in fragments on a journaling app about the pain and helplessness I was experiencing—a baroque unraveling.3 Despite this, I was on deadline for a few editors—not to mention acutely conscious of the hovering specter of my book, which was placed on the back burner all month—which meant that, the second my eyes were no longer swollen shut, I had to soldier onward with work, even as my writing brain was, put simply, barely functional. Negotiating this stoppage is an ongoing process.
What I told Charlotte and Harron last week was that it was as if I’d temporarily lost the ability to write inside my head. The typically uninterruptable dialogue between my creative and editorial minds seemed to have vanished: I wasn’t plotting essays as I fell asleep; I wasn’t waking in the middle of the night to jot an observation, a dream, a revision down in my notes app; my interior had gone blank. I wasn’t dreaming at all, in fact; it was only when sitting in front of the computer, facing a blank page, that I could shift into that gear again. Even then my usual faculties seemed impossibly distant—visible, yes, but entirely out of reach. Each word, every graf was a Sisyphean task. It was as though I couldn’t see the world in a comprehensive way. I was operating in the register of level-of-the-sentence minutiae, which is, I admit, often where I feel most comfortable and confident in my writing. (I don’t see myself as particularly holistic thinker, but that’s for another meditation…)
Somehow, though, I managed to read quite a bit in June. Catherine Lacey’s and Joanna Biggs’ new books, the latest Elena Ferrante, also: Virginie Despentes and Leonora Carrington and Rachel Ingalls and Leslie Marmon Silko and Christa Wolf. I listened to Proust, which is a thing I’m trying with this second volume, though probably I’ll require the hard text for reference while writing on it.4 As someone who never knows when to stop, I decided, also, to begin reading Woolf’s diaries top to end, a thing I’ve never done in any consecutive fashion. (Where I’m at now, she’s just published Dalloway and is dreaming up Lighthouse. Proust and his novel, meanwhile, appear pretty often5. The diaries are glorious!) I watched The Idol (fun cast, excepting The Weeknd—and absolutely atrocious, incoherent, not to mention misogynistic writing), … And Just Like That (often cringey but a VAST improvement on season 1), MILF Manor (I almost wrote about this, LOL), and some wonderful movies: Possession, Anatomie de l’Enfer, Fallen Angels, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down. I loved the new Youth Lagoon and Caterina Barbieri records, finally bought Rid of Me on vinyl, and got excited for some fall concerts (mainly Devendra Banhart, who I’ve never seen live). It was a busy month, and a challenging one, but I’m thrilled to be back in the saddle. I’ll see you at the end of July with a little more Proustian depth. Happy reading xx
À bientôt!
Jamie
I’m sorry, it’s just I love the French best here. The Moncrieff we’re using goes with Within a Budding Grove, which is, I think, a beautiful phrase but an awful translation. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, in its turn, is a nice literal unearthing, but the original is so musical, so fragrant, it feels so lush on the tongue.
As an aside: I’m thinking how smart Johanna Hedva’s newest novel Your Love is Not Good is on questions of precarity, art, and debt. There’s a passage about a third of the way through that’s been haunting me for days: the narrator thinks how she’s ended up in a hole just around the size of two-hundred and fifty-thousand dollars, remarking that she’d known the cost, that “to sign my name on the promissory note hadn’t felt like an acknowledgment of my poverty, it never felt like I was the one promising to repay the money, but rather that the document and what it represented were making a promise to me, a pledge to pull me out of the penury I was from, a hook in my lip to bring me up from the aphotic zone of who I was and into the light of who I could become.”
I may, in future, shape those fragments into something readable, but for now they feel fragile, too intimate and formless—another thing I’m prickly about at the moment (and, frankly, always have been) is writing transness. The rapid escalation of anti-trans bigotry in mainstream discourse has shifted from infuriating to frightening—to the extent that I can, I have to try to shield myself from that chaos.
I don’t (yet) use Audible (should I?), but this is the version I’ve been listening to, narrated by John Rowe—it’s pretty fun!
Loved this, from April 1925: “The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom.”