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Nabokov, in writing these dark desires, rejected the formula that genius deserves license. Greatness does not mean a free pass to do whatever you want.
Nabokov is in fact a kind of anti-monster. He was willing to have the world think the worst of him. By doing so—by telling the worst story, and letting himself be implicated in that story—he created a way for us to understand, to feel, the enormity of what it is to steal a childhood. The book seems to be a portrait of a monster. But Nabokov has done something even more miraculous. He has caught hold of a bit of iridescent fluff—retrieved for proof of an ordinary life’s destruction.
A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.
but a little part of me has to ask: If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?
is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.
The truth is, art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.
hall.” (Sharp-eyed readers will notice that I myself have used it above.)
Enough of these asides!
She mentioned a short story she’d just written and published. “Oh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?” asked the very smart, very charming husband. The wife had been a monster, monster enough to be ambitious, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.
How was I going to make a living as a writer, with these two children to raise? More than that, how was I ever going to have a hope of writing something great? I loved the children with all my heart. I took good care of the children. The children were, frankly, the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. But also: the children made it hard to go to work, was what I was noticing.
The hardest-hearted woman isn’t a murderer or rapist—she’s a leaver of children.
When I next came to the book, I was a mother of two. A homeowner, a cook, a wife, a gardener, a teacher, a driver, a cleaning lady. I found myself yearning for enough freedom, just enough freedom, to get my writing done. This time around, I found the passage, to use the parlance of our own day, intensely relatable: “The resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time…. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men.”
days I feared I might be one of Lessing’s unlucky ones, taking it personally over and over, finding in my husband’s inability to overcome the privileges of millennia and do the fucking dishes evidence of his lack of love and respect for me.
Even if one stays home, even if one has luck, has money, has help, children and writing often seem stubbornly orthogonal, two forces constantly pitted against one another.
Sexton is nowadays arguably as famous for her daughter Linda Gray Sexton’s incendiary memoir Searching for Mercy Street as she is for her poems, although she was once one of the most famous poets in America.
Is it an accident that Mitchell was also the only, only, only real female titan of the great rock era?
Is this B.S.? The ONLY female titan? No Stevie Nicks? Linda Ronstadt? Janis?
I am never going to be one of those—a genius—but I study their lives in order to learn how to put that steely bit inside myself, so I can get my writing done. So I can perform the small, human abandonments that will let me do my work.
As you can see, once you start quoting Solanas, it’s hard to stop, largely because she’s so often right. For Solanas, getting our asses in gear means getting rid of the men. Not all women can be trusted with this charge; only SCUM—“hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth”—are up to the task. The manifesto whipsaws you. One moment you’re nodding along with her rage, the next you’re wondering “How did we end up here?” as she talks about ramming ice picks up assholes.
The idea of having empathy for the monster—this was uncomfortable for me. I consumed the art of monsters, but it was with a bit of steel in my heart.
This is becoming too memoirist. I’m losing my ability to relate to the common conundrum. I don’t care about her own personal issues
They had me as an audience; they did not also deserve my sympathy. The misdeed was a biography-ender. A full stop. Redemption was not something that entered my imagination; you messed up and you were out. You were finished. The internet agreed with me. It was waiting for you, with its deathly arms spread wide; once it embraced you, you were dead.
Carver enrolled in Chico State College, where he ended up in a class with John Gardner, a famously inspiring—and famously intimidating—writing teacher, and the future author of The Art of Fiction.
What really happened between the two books? The reporter and biographer D. T. Max wanted to know. The accepted story was that Carver’s work was affected by his biography. Max wrote: “Many critics over the years have noticed this difference and explained it in terms of biography.
The distinctive voice that slashes its way through What We Talk About is at the heart of the question. That voice was associated with Carver, but Gordon Lish, Carver’s editor at Knopf, reportedly claimed to have edited the stories so heavily that they were as much his as they were Carver’s. Had Carver really gotten better, healthier, happier when he wrote Cathedral? Or had he simply gotten a different editor? In 1998, Max, then a writer for The New York Times Magazine, visited Indiana University, which had acquired Lish’s papers in 1991. Max found that the stories indeed bore the signs of
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The scale of what needs to happen in order for climate change and environmental degradation to be slowed is so massive that no single entity can handle it. The emphasis devolves to the individual’s responsibility:
Off topic. Off the rails, really.
The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
What do we do with the art of monstrous men? This question is the merest gnat, buzzing around the monolith that is the bigger question: what do we do about the monstrous people we love? We’ve all loved terrible people. How do I know this? Because I know people, and people are terrible. Sam went to the real problem at the heart of everything: the problem of human love. The aesthetic and ethical issues presented by men from Caravaggio to Michael Jackson are a kind of parable for this larger problem. What do we do about the terrible people we love? Do we excise them from our lives? Do we enact a
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“The problem isn’t that your mother hit you on the head with a brick. The problem is that you still love her, that you depend on her.” The problem is that you still love her.
