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A Journalistic Approach
(1993-1999)
So much goes unsaid during the work day. I'd sit at the magazine, waiting
to leave. The straight editors, a bunch of guys, would talk of the porn
stars they'd like to one day interview. It's a locker room conversation
with different furniture. Of course these were female porn stars. I am
the fact checker. I sit at a desk under a poster of an ex-boyfriend they've
put on the cover once. Who am I? Now I am living in New York. Back when
I lived in Georgia, I used to keep this journal. I
kept this journal then because there was little to do there, so little
to find, and the days would build to this point of ennui, with only my
own thoughts to go deeper into. There, I was surrounded by so few people
I felt I could meaningfully communicate with, and I'd try to hold onto
all these thoughts I'd have, to try and show myself I was still thinking,
worried about losing all track of them and thus myself, unless I'd put
something down every day to show me I was there. I wanted to make something
of myself, at the end of the day. I did.
I used to keep a journal, but I had not really started keeping it for
myself. Initially, I'd kept it for J. He was the one who thought I shouldn't
wait to start writing one day. The day would never come. He thought I
should write every day, start writing right now, and the next time I see
him he wants to see what I've done with my journal. We could exchange
journals. We could write a book together. We could create this romanticism
of a fiction between us. I wanted to prove to him that I could do it,
whatever he happened to want me to do. I was doing it all for him. I'd
call to tell him how many pages I'd written that day alone. It was a good
excuse to call. I'd call to tell him when it was the first week, or then
the first month, or then the first year I'd been keeping a journal now.
I was in fact keeping two journals for him.
Another was just the dreams I had, but that was over eight years ago.
I must have not liked myself very much. A first entry ends, "I need
a new way to write my name."
At First Novelty (1998)
I must have not liked waiting for him. I must have been trying to make
something of myself and of him. There were all these feelings I felt left
with at the end of the day, I felt myself repeating day after day.
I'd write them down again. I'd wait on the bed until I couldn't just lay
any longer, and then I'd get up. I'd write in the kitchen at the wooden
card table he'd given me from his shed. I'd spray painted it brown, then
blue, over the yellow. One leg of the thing requires a dictionary to stand
on. I'd periodically pull it out, in the midst of exaggerating these feelings
for myself. Other times I'd try to just hold onto until it might have
turned into something else by tomorrow.
My abjection was becoming the matter with my subjectivity.
In terms of metaphors, he wants me to write in flowers.
As often happens with any initial inspiration, this journal is already
beginning to go beyond him. When I first begin writing the novel which
will eventually be published, a third attempt, J.'s role in my life will
be reduced down to just this one sentence: "I meet him at the house
of this guy I've waited for more from." It's just one of a number
of fictional elements in a book tracing one line of my development. I've
again taken up some daily approach to composing my life. Writing the novel,
I'd try to take up some new aspect of the story every morning.
In some aspects, I'd get caught up and lost.
Then it would be time to move on. Now I felt at the end of a time and
a place, a particular mind set of a character I'd allowed myself to become
in order that a set of demands could lengthen into history.
I felt like I could see how I must have been now.
I went on from J. This was no longer just about J.
I wanted to create a feeling of the reader being as close, privy, even
closer to me than the men I was sleeping with at the time, as close to
me as possible, perhaps even closer than my own narrator, close enough
even to be able to glimpse some meaning to his existing at times even
I seemed at a loss for myself.
It's a complicated objective I am aware of reenacting even now.
I wanted to write the passivity I'd felt, reconstruct it in the way I'd
progressively hid it from even myself often in my own entries that could
correspond to four years which at first overlapped with, and then followed,
J.
Rather than put my foot in my mouth, I'd simply point out the foot and
the mouth.
You could do with them what you would. I'd let the reader make of me what
he could. The reader might even forget that the boy there on the page
was just some body made out of a few words, some context, someone else
had arranged to be there in that way.
The Magazine (1998-2002)
Now, in hindsight, I could see and feel like I could talk about what I'd
done to myself.
Once I began to keep my journal more sporadically, there was a greater
propensity in my life to feel lost. I know my I's are always in flux.
Eye and eye and eye. How exactly this would manifest itself would be to
begin to look towards others, towards men, even more, to try and see myself.
I move to the city. My position of viewing is always changing.
Keeping a journal
is something a young writer does.
I want to still keep my journal, but more than anything, I want to keep
writing. I had to work. I wanted to make something of my being here. I
wanted to do something in the city I couldn't really do anywhere else,
some reason to have to be in the city. I hustled. I'd go from the men
back to the train and write until I got back home. A goal is to not stop
writing the lines of the place I've just left until I've come to my stop.
These episodes are simply the making of a story.
I was the subject of this story now, no longer J, though he would always
be around there in the very medium, whether he realized it or not. In
a complete fiction, he would have disappeared. I wonder at those who feel
at a safe enough distance in their lives to just let themselves go.
I'm interested in how little a story can be made of, to feel less hopeless.
I'm interested in the fact of what it might have meant that I once sat
quietly at a desk, while a bunch of men out there decided what they would
deign to have go to press or not, into print, the next issue.
It is during the time that I work at the magazine that I go and pose for
another. It is never just posing, though. I am thinking things at the
time these pictures of me are taken, things I can only try to reconstruct
later, now, and necessarily conclude with some level of functionality
and fictionality. Often these tropes involve the abstracting from my setting
and into another, attempting to remove my discomfort to get closer to
a source of undefined, in essence to lose the sight of myself, to begin
composing a new one.
I'm interested in how the daily periodically builds to this breaking point,
what one needs to be interested in going on to continue, how much lack
one can take in one life, before one begins looking for the means to supplement
that existence. I want to keep watch out for the other I may be. I am
aware of adopting a somewhat confessional tone. I will want a text that
approaches responsibly its subject matter, never as the certain, never
as the given. I want myself to be implicated in my texts and to have to
answer for them, in some accountability, to give a reality I feel denied.
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