2007 Self-Reflexivity

I just found something I had written about writing from 3 years ago. Must have been for an interview that never got published and it is pre-publication of Girl on a Stick. I find it hard to believe I wrote it just for myself, but I found it in longhand. It was a little bizarre to read because to my memory I have never written about my artistic process before (I kinda hate to).

I think it's like taking photographs and stealing your soul when you dissect your OWN art too much (and possibly other people's, too).

It's like overanalysing GREAT SEX.

It's like living your life FULL-TIME on the Devil Facebook. It's like...

Well, it's like this. Kathleen on Art, specifically Writing, circa 2007:

I had my first novel published in 2001. It was called Mush. I got some nice reviews for it. Most reviews and personal feedback used the word "haunting". That's flattering, the idea that something born from my brain and life affects other people, like some movies like The Wicker Man, Donnie Darko, Lost in Translation, Event Horizon, Strange Days have affected me the day after. But I'm not trying to haunt anybody. Although I am doing paintings of ghosts. Some dreams do this haunting too; everyone knows this.

I think I like this "haunting" feeling.

But it's not a very pure emotion; it feels complex and perverse.

Many of my favourite authors (Atwood, Murakami, Ryman), painters (Kiefer, Chagall), singers/bands (Pulp, Tricky, Cadallaca), filmmakers (Maddin, Lynch) could be described as complex and perverse.

So at the end of the day I like the idea that Mush has haunted people.

What I've written since Mush is less "decaying" and more in the present, like second novel Girl on a Stick (which is a grab-you-by-the-neck-and-shake-you kind of present) and third novel He's Lucid, which is also "in the moment" (a phrase from acting class that troubles me but is apt when it needs to be), and is also calm, crazy and playful, though still also complex and perverse (I have had the most fun writing He's Lucid, and it feel it is written in my "truest voice", another writerly phrase that troubles me).

I think whatever I'm reading at the time colours what I'm writing.

When I was writing Mush in 1997 and 1998, I was also writing an MA dissertation on essentialist qualities of male (hard, dry, structured) and female (soft, wet, free) and how our society forces these dichotomies/assumptions on us when actually it's a bunch of bullshit. So the characters of Nicky and Carol (and Ellen as a mutable third way) were my way of labelling and then rejecting both masculinity and femininity. I was reading a lot of Foucault at the time and it probably shows. And I think I was re-reading Keri Hulme's The Bone People several times too, with its love of green, green nature and power dynamics mixed with dark sex and violence, and that probably shows too.

Halfway through my first draft of the feature film The Viva Voce Virus, I saw Mullholland Drive. That probably shows.

I was introduced to and then devoured Angela Carter all the way through the writing of Girl on a Stick. I think there was a little bit of Bulgakov reading going on, too. I was purposefully writing in a Tama Janowitz anti-chick lit style that I remembered from the early books of Bret Easton Ellis (I haven't read any recently).

Some of my recently published short stories like "The Werfox" and "Sister Six" were influenced by a freedom I felt after reading Frances Gapper's Absent Kisses short story collection. I realised that she was breaking all the rules and that I wanted to do that, too. Other short story influences would have to be the open-ended humanity of Ali Smith's work - and the wry freedom of Tove Jansson's Fair Play, which I was translating at the time.

HOWEVER. I am very careful not to read anything too similar in plot or theme WHILE I'm writing something. So, surprisingly, I did not read Surfacing by Maragret Atwood for the first time until after Mush had been published, and heard the details of Oryx & Crake only after I'd precisely plotted out the scope of He's Lucid. I was worried about crossover or subconscious plagiarism because Atwood is from a place very similar to my home and also I think I like to write lyrically (to be clear: I am not comparing myself to a Booker Prize winner in terms of quality). Likewise, I could see a lot of whimsy in my writing BEFORE I read Carter and Gapper, but reading them made me feel that I was allowed to be playful - and better yet, not care if it was right or wrong.

I think I have at least 4 separate writing styles: the Mush style (Mush, the short story "Winterland"); the open elliptical style (the short stories "Ring Us" and "Worms"; the verbose, Carteresque style (the short story "Scratch", parts of Girl on a Stick), the rambunctious, playful anarchic style (He's Lucid, "Sister Six"). Oh yes, and "genre" writing. Writing erotica for money and publication allowed me to work through these different styles and now I write using just what style I feel like at the time.

Usually there's an image in my head and I work towards that. I don't want to think too much about how I write (as opposed to what comes of what I write), because I don't want to over-analyse or pin it down. Right now it's flying free.

In just an interesting aside, my university is currently occupied at the moment (I let the students go a few minutes early from their tutorial so they could go to the protest). The anthropology department does not seem to be occupied, however... (security guard at the entrance, though, and all major buildings locked this morning).

I am reporting from the heart of Trotskyite resistance, the second-floor paleoanthropology lab of UCL, otherwise known as the bone room! People keep soldiering on here with their baboon craniometry.

Courage, comrades!

others, click once to isolate, then click again to enlarge

Last night I dreamt of whales, many of them. It felt kind of Jungian or something, I can't explain. I woke up in the middle of the night. It was such a gorgeous dream. At first I only saw one, but they were passing under a bridge I was near. Initially it seemed like a beach, but then it was a bridge like an aqueduct and they were going to survive. I went down to their level and got up close and saw one of them and its huge eye. It was gentle, beautiful, and it wasn't going to hurt me. I took a picture of all their grace in the water because I wasn't sure anyone was going to believe me. So fucking beautiful. I think I will do a painting of their tails.

The image feels rooted really deep inside me; I have seen it before.

I think I must have seen it somewhere before in real life as a kid.

"I am for the birds, not for the cages in which people sometimes place them." - John Cage

Winterland

UPDATE:
And... here is Jessica's wolf-sized wolfwoman print, which she has laid out so smoothly on her bed, the print all freaking gorgeous-like and everything.





(all images and text (c) Kathleen Bryson & Jessica Cheeseman 2010; illustrations by Jessica Cheeseman and text and lettering by Kathleen Bryson for the graphic novel Winterland, all such illustrations and text are from the copyright-protected graphic novel in progress)
www.facebook.com/winterlandgraphicnovel

xtine's diary, stills

(photo by Steve Lyon)


The purpose of art is not rarefied, intellectual distillate - it is life, intensified, brilliant life. - Alain Arias-Misson

MA Dissertation: (In)Tolerable Structures: The Mutable Category, Fluidity and the Internet (1997)

NB — sorry, I’ve deleted this one. Please feel free to contact me if you want a copy of my MA dissertation.

Now cease your worke, and at your pleasure play:
Now cease your worke; to morrow is an holy day

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Pyrrhic

"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question,
now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside
looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which." - Animal Farm

All This Juice and All This Joy

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918)

Winterland

(all images and text (c) Kathleen Bryson & Jessica Cheeseman 2010; illustrations by Jessica Cheeseman and text and lettering by Kathleen Bryson for the graphic novel Winterland, all such illustrations and text are from the copyright-protected graphic novel in progress)
www.facebook.com/winterlandgraphicnovel

Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is the most bizarre blog. No one ever reads it (well, no one that I know personally, anyway). No one knows that I write it. I don't reveal the complexities of what actually happens in my outside life in it, out of respect or courtesy to others and also out of fear of exposure concerning my owns thoughts and desires. So in one sense it is cut off, detached, superficial, with odd little poems and songs that affect me bumping up through it, spiced (or dulled) by what other people have said about me (a.k.a. reviews or interviews) and the occasional artistic rant or observation.

All of these things are detached and don't do more than skim at the real person, but I suppose all biography is like that, auto- or other. Yet I wonder whether these snippets of thoughts, of music and butterfly theories, of some things that moves me - add up to anything real at all.

Does anything ever add up to anything real?

I love this poem the way I love the poem "Snow" by Louis MacNeice. And the way I love "Theme from a Summer's Place" and the song "I Melt With You". With all my heart.

"Pied Beauty"

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

My mom used to hum this in my childhood

Escape to Witch Mountain

Alaska looked like this: Alaska was the center, and when people talked about going Outside for the summer, it meant going outside the center. The center was green and bigger than the whole world. It was a fairy tale that went on and on. The sun always shone through the summer months and she was allowed to be entirely feral; all children were; she played every day from nine o’clock in the morning to eleven in the evening outside, running crazy through the woods. There was no hot sun to burn you; it wasn’t that hot in the summer back then; the hottest it ever got was 67 degrees or something.

There were trees everywhere and they were trees that grew taller than the empire state building or the washington monument that her best friend sent her on a postcard against a purple washington dc sunset; every one of the trees reached up to the moon, you could see the silver dollar sometimes in the birches but the moon was higher in daytime (she alone was able to see the moon during the day to herself; the pale fingernail skin of it; it was her greatest secret) and it was rare that the trees grew tall enough during the day. Tall enough to reach the moon, that is.

The ocean was right there too; a real live ocean like you read about in books except the sand was grey and hurt your feet; even though her parents said it was a beach it didn’t look like the yellow soft beaches she’d been promised in books, beaches like butter. Living was easy in other places. She lived where living was hard, that’s what they said, but it didn’t feel very hard. It felt cool and clean like peppermint. She was peppermint in her head; she liked to drink peppermint extract in well-water but her mother said there was alcohol content in peppermint extract so she was stopped. The summers felt like peppermint, crisp and sunny and wild. The sun was so bright on summer mornings. It shone on the birch trees and the dew was like the glitter they glued on to construction paper at school. There was blue glitter and red glitter mixed. The colors didn’t go well together. There was also silver glitter and gold glitter. That was better and looked more like the dew.

Carrie knew how babies were made. Her mom had read her the fairy tales, and later on Carrie could read on her own and was able to check out Andrew Lang’s big Green Book of Fairy Tales from the school library. The way you got babies was always the same. The King and Queen wished for babies and then they got them. Grownups wished for babies and then they got them. Except for one teacher at her elementary school who wished for a baby and had a big stomach except the baby was born dead. The wishing didn’t work.

And in the story Thumbelina, the man and woman wished and wished for a baby and didn't get one, though eventually they got a little tiny one that slept in a flower. Carrie’s mother told her that babies were teeny-weeny inside a mommy’s tummy and then they grew, so Carrie thought really the inside of a mommy’s tummy was like a flower. She thought maybe it would be a bluebell because those were the prettiest and the teeny-weeny baby could sip dewdrops, like Thumbelina got to.

Eventually, with a new baby in her tummy, Carrie’s mom told her a different story about how babies were made (the baby would be either a boy or a girl, Carrie’s parents hadn’t decided yet). And this is how babies were made. Where the man has a penis, like Carrie’s daddy and Carrie’s little brother and Carrie’s friend Tommy Okimura, and the grown-up woman has a vagina like Carrie and Carrie’s mommy and Carrie’s little sister, and the grownups put their vagina and their penis together like a puzzle and there is a seed in the penis and a seed in the vagina and when they get together they are one seed and it starts to grow into a baby.

Like a bluebell? said Carrie.

Yes, said her mother.

So fairy tales were always right.

[There is a lot more to this story, but I've decided to remove it.]

gloriana

GLORIANA: A mere inch from gut to gusset. We can go on all day. I get it, I get it. The hive as metaphor, me in my dotage, no winged maggot cosseted by gravy gel to rise up into the blue air, stinging the other queenlets in their mucus sleep, to soar victorious and glorious, mustard and swarthy-belted, the Insect Triumphant!

Fear

When she pours washing-up liquid into the sink it looks grey, though she knows it's green. Or maybe it's blue. It can't be grey. It wouldn't be good marketing for Fairy Liquid.

Ten minutes later the dishes are done and she can't remember how that happened, how she got from there to here. She shakes her hands off, grey splashes, outside the door is the forest.

*

When the wolf comes it's already half an hour to noon and it has a bloody nose, like a PETA member went nuts and got the order of protest all wrong; its jaws are tight and smooth with Vaseline over her neck; it only has gums. She slides in and out of the aperture, it's like fucking. The wolf is growling outside her experience. Would you like a tissue, sir. How does your dog-wolf smell? Awful. It's the altitude. It's the dry weather. It's because you picked your nose with oh what sharp claws you have.

*

Her son and daughter-in-law are coming for lunch. She has put doilies under the tea-cups.

*

When the sun sets, her stomach is growling again, but she can't see the trees outside the window. It's too dark. She drinks a cup of Earl Grey and looks out the glass darkly to something less than black but more than over-steeped brown tea. Her throat remembers the tight bottleneck; the kitchen is safe from trees and fur; her mouth is full of fur. She keeps looking out, but while she's remembering her eyes are not watching.

*

It's night. She puts her false teeth in the mug of cold tea and it's not water, but it will have to do.

grace

On-going analysis of the songs on one of my own mixed tapes, called TWINKLERS.

Part I. "I Melt With You" by Modern English

In the freezing garage, pronounced the British (un-French) way, to find a bloody floppy disc (unfound) for a project, when I unearthed this old, old, old cassette tape of high sentimental value that predates my initial move to London and post-dates a previous relationship in Sweden. (The sentimentality evidenced by my song choices, therefore, had no direct romantic connection at the time I made the tape.) Whereon it was this song, and it's so beautiful and the singer is so beautiful in that effortlessly early-80s Mapplethorpe/Marc Almond way and all the songs on the tape feel indeed quite imbued with crazy romance, conscious at the time or not (including my inclusion of a favourite song from the musical Camelot, "Follow Me", sung by the spirit Nimue to Merlin). That's right, Camelot. So sue me. No, follow me. I mean, "Follow Me".



(this is not "Follow Me")