My website receives a lot of spam blog “comments,” but I’ve never gotten one as good as this:
“Hypnosis is another product. And furthermore, her pussy was lousy and it stank.”
Furthermore, would people start leaving some blog comments so there’s something for me to look at other than this crap?
It’s been a wonderful weekend. Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Beirut at the Wiltern, and it was absolutely amazing. They were charming as hell, and their performance was nothing short of epic. The best way I can describe it: imagine if a group of kids from the high school band walked out on stage, and then proceeded to blow a sold-out crowd away. Zach Condon’s voice is simply one of the best out there. It was one of those shows that reminds you why it’s good to be alive–touching, energetic, and unpretentious. Not to mention the sheer volume of instruments on stage, and damn, those kids can play. Simply beautiful. If you haven’t gotten a chance to check them out, I’d suggest getting a copy of Gulag Orkestar–I think it’s their best. Also, they’ve got mp3’s on their website, http://www.beirutband.com. In the top left corner, there’s a little player you can use to go from song to song.
Other highlights of the show included a girl who was ejected by security for attempting to get crunk/”belly dance” in the aisle, and Zach’s comment that on Friday night he’d had a real LA night, having woken up in a hotel room covered in blood that morning.
Today, Sunday, I went over to the LA Poets and Writers Collective reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice, hosted by Jack Grapes. Jack’s been doing these for a long time, and they’re always a lot of fun. Readers who go over the 2 minute time limit are subject to a fart machine, and if that doesn’t stop them, they’re squirted with water pistols. I actually got to be one of the enforcers today and squirt a few people, which was pretty great. Jack also surprised me by asking me to get up and read from the book, and we got a really positive response from the crowd. It was a fun afternoon, and I’m always touched by Jack’s generosity in mentoring and helping local writers and small presses. I began studying with him when I was 17, and I can’t say I’d be the writer or the person I am today had it not been for his encouragement and guidance.
The best part of the whole weekend, though, had to be when a woman at the reading came up to me after I’d read my piece and asked me, “Were you a crackhead?”
I’m finally getting around to reading Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and I’m highly impressed by the clarity and complexity with which she manages to tackle this most difficult of literary theorists.
I’ve always been intrigued by the way in which a writer, to some extent, deconstructs his/her own creation while simultaneously creating it. Or, that failing, deconstructs his/her creation in the process of editing—laying bare, in the best circumstances, those contradictions or moments of failure within a piece that demand further examination, and in which reconciliation with the remainder of the text seems never fully possible. I’ve always felt that these actions are somehow linked to the influence our unconscious has on work. For me, these unconscious drives are often what “propels” a piece forward, causing seemingly unrelated images, moments, and ideas to suddenly appear, cryptically linked, on the same page. Spivak’s summary of this process is helpful to my own understanding of this phenomenon:
“As we recall, at the time that a stimulus is received, it goes either into the perceptual system or into the Unconscious and produces a permanent trace. That particular trace might be energized into consciousness…long afterward…but it never comes up as such; in fact, as Derrida argues, following Freud, the trace [die Bahnung] is primary. There is no “thing” there in the Unconscious but simply the possibility for this particular path to be energized. When the track is opened up, and we have the après coup perception of the originary trace, the impulse in the Unconscious is not exhausted. Unconscious impulses are indestructible” (Of Grammatology, lxxxi-lxxxii).
I’m fascinated by the phrase “the possibility for this particular path to be energized.” For me, it’s one of the clearest articulations of how the writing process occurs—-by entering a creative space, we open this possibility “after the fact,” and are given the chance to place on paper not an experience, not an accurate representation of an experience, but the “trace” of some distant experience, of which the impulse to communicate, to come forth, is as necessary as life and death for the artist.
When Kim is not writing, she teaches writing workshops and works as a freelance editor. She lives in Los Angeles.
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