Tag: billy childish

No, it don’t feel right

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Looks like it was also used as the cover of Poems of Laughter & Violence, one of his zillions of volumes of poetry. The photo is by Eugene Doyen.

Lately the idea of—the fact of—emotional repression is popping everywhere I look. It’s something I’ve been doing some hard work on recently, learning to feel and name my emotions and not hate them and not be too scared to express them to another person—but the more awareness I have of this, the more I realize how common this problem is.

For instance. I wanted to tell you about this book I’ve been reading, an old RE/Search book from 1991 called Angry Women. The RE/Search books contained long-form interviews with fascinating artists of different kinds; some of my favorite people in the world have been profiled and probed in those books. I’ve got a framed picture on a shelf of the one and only Billy Childish, standing with Tracey Emin (his ex lover who went on to make a career out of more or less making fun of him) in a kitchen. It looks like a snapshot taken at a party in someone’s house, in the middle of some joke that’s making them both laugh. She’s wearing a 40s-style halter-tie bathing suit as a dress and he’s smoking a cigarette and smiling with his eyes. Point is, the photo is on the back cover of a RE/Search book that included an interview with Childish, and I loved the picture so much I tore the cover off the book and stuck it in a frame. 

A few months ago I ordered this Angry Women book from my friend Karen who runs an excellent secondhand books business, knowing it was the kind of book that would have made a massive impression on me if I’d read it as a young woman when it first came out. Sure enough, it’s packed full of enough ideas, photos, and inspiration that I think I’ll be carrying it around with me and picking through it for some time to come. One of the conversations is with the writer Sapphire from before she published her devastating novel Push, which inspired a bidding war and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, when she was still an underground poet whose “uncompromising writings deserve much wider publication,” as the RE/Search editors put it. The poem they reproduced alongside her interview, “Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio,” which describes childhood sexual abuse, is so blistering it will melt the hair off your head, but in this context it feels like a natural extension of the zero-bullshit interview she gave, in which she aired dark family secrets that the people in her family still actively denied. 

(It’s superficial and me-centric, I guess, but I feel so proud and pleased to look at the pictures of Sapphire in this book and see that I have a long black dress and a wire-wrapped quartz necklace just like she wore here, in 1991. Like, Sapphire saved her own life with her art and her bravery, you know? And maybe in some small way I am like her. I like the thought of that.)

My scan of a photo of Sapphire from the book (photo credit: Chris Buck)

But yeah, the most refreshing— and frankly useful, even life-giving—thing about these artist interviews is their emotional honesty. I’ve always needed this from art: Songs, stories, poems, and essays in which the creator tells me just exactly how they feel. It gives me life. And yet talking about my own feelings can sometimes feel impossible to me. The word feelings, the word emotions: These have felt like such embarrassing things to say. Isn’t it loserish to be sloppy like that? Aren’t me and my big brain above that sort of thing? As I come to recognize this kind of thinking as a problem, I’m also realizing that I didn’t come by it naturally. It was passed on to me and has been reinforced on many levels, and it has hurt me badly, at times even sapped my life-force. And you know how that makes me feel? PISSED!

When you learn a new word, it has a way of showing up everywhere all of a sudden, as if for the first time. Similarly, when I opened the book just now to see which artists I wanted to tell you about, what did I see but this big pull quote from the performance artist and writer Karen Finley on heart v. brain:

“That’s the ‘male’* way of dealing with suffering: ‘thinking’ about it instead of feeling it. And my way is to feel it, acknowledge it. As a culture we kind of have the thinking part down pat, but not the feeling…”

It’s true, I think. (I feel that it’s true. Ha.) As a society, we really have a hard time feeling our feelings and not hating ourselves, or other people, for having them. Intellectualizing them is easier for a lot of people, as it takes the edge off the discomfort and pain—and doing so is often rewarded socially, while showing an honest emotion might well get you shamed or mocked right out the door.

Intellectualizing is one of those things that sounds kinda good but really isn’t, like perfectionism. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a creative type brag about being a perfectionist, as if it’s a good thing to be so afraid of making a mistake that you never let a piece of work out into the world or even start working on it in the first place. It’s really just more fear: Fear of messy human stuff, like emotions and missteps and having an outburst when you were trying so hard to be polite. If your idea of being polite is never saying how you really feel because you’re “expected to sit and take some lesser man’s shit” (thanks Kevin Barnes), then cut it out! Name those feelings and get ’em out there!

*The conversations in this book are a little heavy on the gender binary approach so prevalent in 3rd-wave feminism, except for when the queer artists are talking. For instance, a performance artist and playwright named Holly Hughes, who I’d never heard of before I read this interview with her, talks about her public identity always being tied to her identity as a lesbian, and how reductive that can be for an artist when they are trying to express a range of ideas and feelings, including more “universal” life experiences, like her waitress job at Red Lobster. Andrea Juno, the editor who conducted most of the interviews in the book, says to Hughes, “It’s a trap for women to think they’re that separate. If you start defining what you ‘are,’ you start getting so many exceptions that any argument can be whittled down. Actually, there’s nothing you can say that women are, that men aren’t (and vice versa).”

Body horror

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Oh fuck, my body’s rejecting me.

—Zipper Mouth, Laurie Weeks
Judy Davis in The Dressmaker (2015)

I seem to love every book the Feminist Press ever publishes, so when they put out Laurie Weeks’ novel Zipper Mouth in 2011 I made a note to read it, then forgot for awhile. I finally got around to it this spring, and wow. There is a lot going on here.

The jerk on Amazon who said Bret Easton Ellis already wrote this book, only better, was wrong on both counts. It’s a different book, and hers is better. Though it was written by a woman and narrated by a female character, Zipper Mouth, in my opinion, would be better classified as the heir to Notebooks of a Naked Youth by Billy Childish. I’ve written about Childish’s wonderful novel on this blog before—in fact, one of the things I wrote about was the genderfuck of my extreme over-identification with its narrator, William Loveday, who is a man. Then along comes Zipper Mouth, offering us the female version of that sorta lovable antihero, who never stops spilling her guts in the same filthy, hilarious way. 

The novel doesn’t have a ton going on in the way of plot. To sum up, an unnamed (young?) protagonist with a huge personality and a growing drug problem makes her way in New York in the ’90s. (I only know it’s supposed to be the ’90s from descriptions of the book I’ve read. It’s not really apparent from the book itself, at least to me, though the characters do wear a fair amount of animal print clothing.) Like Childish, Weeks has a rare poetic gift; the language in this book is insane. It may send you, as it sent me, googling excellent phrases and weird words to find out what they mean, or if Weeks made them up. A “vent figure,” if you didn’t know, is another name for a ventriloquist’s dummy. A “vaginal vault” as also apparently a real thing. Here’s Zipper Mouth, walking down a New York street in the dead of summer: “The dilapidated blocks had undergone a phase shift from zones combustible with violence to the sultry chiaroscuro of a black-and-white film starring Ava Gardner in a tropical setting.”

Zipper Mouth is marvelously messed-up. (I find I want to call the narrator of Zipper Mouth Zipper Mouth, since we never learn her name—kind of like the unnamed lead in that show Fleabag who, as pretty as she is, seems to be named Fleabag.) An adolescent grown-up who can’t stand to be around anyone ever, she betrays her need for connection through her obsessions with movie stars and unrequited real-life loves. She frequently composes letters to her obsessions, who include Vivien Leigh and Judy Davis, and incorporates them into her thoughts. Her consciousness gushes forth. 

Like William Loveday, Zipper Mouth’s primary obsessions are love and lust, and any other emotions she can stoke up inside herself and wallow in when she’s alone. Throughout the novel, on every page really, she tweaks her mood with drugs or quasi-drugs, like cigarettes and caffeine and those speed-like herbal substances weightlifters (ab)use. In her various heady states, she wobbles on the walk-and-turn sober test between florid beauty and visceral revulsion: 

“God I love everything, I thought, gazing out my window at passersby several stories below. Blossoms dripping from the trees, robins in love warbling among the peeping spring budlets, trash spilling festively from an orange dumpster. … Love leaked from my pituitary and converted on contact with my bloodstream into panic and I was swelling up, threatening to leave the ground and float off fast.” Most of the descriptions in the novel are like this. They gave me intense sensations, and though the book is short—you could read it through in a couple of hours—I had to take frequent breaks to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I kept getting “worked up,” the way Zipper Mouth reports feeling when she listens to music and daydreams druggily, or reads something challenging and weird.

In the final analysis, this novel does not have the substance of Notebooks (though both novels have strangely awkward endings); it needs to be more grounded, more finished. But it is literary body horror at its finest. If Zipper Mouth had a thesis statement, it would be something like this line she writes to Miss Davis in her mind: “The body is a great thing, Judy, a horrifying thing, a great and horrifying thing to be trapped in a body, anything can go haywire at any moment, you’re just hanging on with clenched teeth to a rope that swings your body sickeningly around and around over that bottomless and legendary thing we’ve come to identify as The Abyss.”  

Three months after I finished this novel I don’t find myself thinking about it; I had to rely entirely on my notes to write about it. There was something ephemeral about it even as I read it, the imagery hard to hold onto, the ideas slipping away like smoke. But it was everything to me while I was reading it. Sometimes I have a desperate need for a book like this, something that gives my inner demons a song to scream along to. Come to that, I made a note while I was reading it that I’d found the perfect musical accompaniment—the doomy noise of an industrial act called Terminal Brain Disease. While I lived (briefly, feverishly) inside Zipper Mouth’s mind, this music came pouring out of the cassette player that sat on the floor beside me, filling the room with its perfect attitude: Witness the absolute horror and wonder of simply being alive!

Naked Youth

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“I know it’s silly to write things down, but it’s also good and important, though a little arrogant and pointless.”—Billy Childish, Notebooks of a Naked Youth

Though I’ve cited it as my favorite book of all-time—if I had to pick one, which I obviously don’t—it’s been years since I looked at Notebooks of a Naked Youth. I’d forgotten how funny it was.

The reason I got it out today was because I wanted to tell you about the description of a migraine that’s in it. One day, our hero William Loveday, a young guy who’s either a genius or constantly on the verge of losing his marbles—or both—gets a migraine, and the pain and distortion come ripping into his cold, miserable bedsit, disrupting his delusions of grandeur and hilarious train of thought.

I found this book when I was in my 20s, and all these years later my memory of reading the headache passage is strong and physical. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed in the apartment I lived in alone, where the air was always so still, and being stunned by what I was reading. It seemed that someone had somehow crawled into my skull, peered through my eyes, and reported on what they saw through them in this fucked-up, beautiful book. It switched something on for me, the way a book can light you up when you’re a young teenager and later on you realize it helped shape the person you became. I didn’t think that could happen to me as an adult, but it did. 

When I remember that little apartment of mine now, I think of those walls as barely containing all my thrashing around. I kept the place tidy and sweet looking, and I think I myself may have appeared tidy and sweet looking, but on the inside, a lot of the time, I felt like a wild, spooked horse, bucking around with all the feeling inside of me and no good place to put it. My only real outlets were my writing and the sparking neural discharge of my migraines. I had a lot of migraines while I lived there. I’ve always gotten them, beginning in childhood—-and not with the onset of adolescence, the way a lot of people do, though I think I have correctly assessed that at least one of my migraines triggers is hormonal shifts—but for a couple of years when I was in my 20s they peaked, in both number and intensity. For at least a year I got around one debilitating migraine a week. I don’t even like thinking about this for long enough to describe it to you, but I can tell you that my memory of that time is symbolized by one day in particular. My migraines have always lasted exactly the length of one workday, beginning upon waking and leaking away around dinnertime, and my joke was that one of us had to work a nine-to-five job so it may as well be the headaches. I spent this one day in the same position for about 8 hours straight. Sat up on my bed, bent at the waist with my head pressed into a pillow on my lap, not moving. Occasionally moaning, though I immediately regretted doing that. I’ve learned some things from this pain over the years, and one of them—for better or for worse, metaphorically—is that crying only makes it worse. That kind of pain makes you feel trapped in your body; well, you are trapped in your body, aren’t you, for now at least. But during an episode like this you’re trapped in there with the pain, which obliterates everything else, which means there’s nowhere to go inside your mind for comfort, so you kind of have to … go into the pain. It’s the only way through to the other side, to where the pain is gone. I know that sounds mystical, but I’m trying to be as literal as I can be. It hurts worse when you fight it, goes easier when you don’t. I think it might have something to do with this letting go I’ve always heard so much about, but find so very hard to do.

Anyway, the unlovely William Loveday gets migraines too, though only his doctor uses that word. Loveday just calls them “my headaches.” I want to tell you about his description of one of them, which can only have been written by someone who gets migraines, so I guess I share that in common with Billy Childish, who is one of my idols for this and many other reasons. Here is the thing I read that broke me open all those years ago and made me a better person:

“Something that people shouldn’t laugh at is watching a lot of silly shoppers crawling up and down the High Street, their faces ravaged with delight and misery, the wind so strong that they are forced to lower their bodies and cling to the pavement like a lot of silly insects. Shopping in this manner is something that you shall never see me doing. I force myself to look away, which means I will probably miss seeing Kursty and her ridiculous mother. If indeed they do choose this particular hour to come shopping for rain hats.

Next, I see a flash and something hits me in the eye. I turn and stagger against the wall, my head thundering like a freight train and I go down. My hands dance like white skeltons before me, the blood drained from my skin like as if someone had opened my wrists. One second I’m standing there, holding my hat on against the breeze, the next I’m knocked sideways and no little pill can straighten me out. Full-blown, flashing lights, like a punch up the bracket. The world slides away from me. … Toothache of the eye socket, just up and behind it, my left eye … I hold onto it … My knees shaking … I can’t stand … I have to go down … to get my head level with the pavement … dull, a million patterns … rhythms of the blood …”

I love everything about this description, including the slide from his pissy disapproval of the people doing their shopping into breath-taking, stupid-making pain. Toothache of the eye socket. That’s the feeling alright.

To be sure, there is something humbling about being struck down that way, especially when you’re a person who’s given to arrogant, mean-spirited thoughts, like William Loveday and me. There’s also something about it that tends to make you superstitious. I’d wake up into the pain and nausea of a fresh migraine and immediately remember the snit I’d been in the day before, grumping about everyone—that must have been the headache, building up inside me—or something rotten I’d smelled—that’s what brought it on!—or the hundreds of cigarettes I’d recently honked up, that I could still smell on my fingers. Smoking might well have been a trigger, actually, though I never entertained that idea seriously until I was ready to quit. 

Loveday staggers off the street back to his home, where he manages his migraine and related symptoms for a week, alone in his grubby room on his “stinking mattress.” He describes the way the pain comes and goes, which is hauntingly familiar to me. It’s not gone until it’s gone, and it might decide to play with you a little before it leaves. At one point he tests it by shaking his head “like a block of cheese” and he can tell the worst is over, but senses “…the ache still there, not quite past, waiting, like a sentinel.” That’s exactly what migraines do. Sometimes you can know they’re still there even once they’ve stopped hurting, and it is weird things like this that make them totally different from regular headaches. 

Back when I was suffering with these frequent migraines, I never talked to anyone but my mother about them—she used to get them too, when she was younger—and though I instinctively kept the problem a secret I think that made things worse. As secrets tend to do. I kept to myself and was lonely and weird. Reading this book and coming across this passage, the surprise of it like a bolt out of the sky, felt like making violent, glorious connection with another human being. I may have been lonely but I wasn’t alone! And not only that, but it seemed that I shared something meaningful with a writer I admired very much.

Until this morning I hadn’t picked up the book in a long time. I’m not sure why I let it sit on the shelf, often thought of but never reread. Maybe it scared me, thinking about that pain; maybe I didn’t want to tamper with my memory of reading the book for the first time, which was important and identity-building. Now that I have it out again, it’s got me thinking about other things, too. About comfort and discomfort, wildness versus settledness. About where I was then, and how I’ve gotten to the place I am now.

Back then, I loved William Loveday, the haunted, dragged-out, disgusting person who told us his story in so many flavors of unsugar-coated truth. He masturbated and felt ashamed about it, even though he told us about it every time and tried to act like he didn’t feel dirty. Later, he’d call himself stained and ruined, a dog. He insulted people in his mind, sometimes arch and self-aware but often just plain mean. He described street scenes and barrooms that were so squalid they made him woozy, almost dissociating in distress. I’d say I fell in love with him, but it wasn’t quite like that. I felt like I was him, and he was the messy, disastrously masculine version of me. 

I had then, and still have now, a restlessness in me that grows until it is intolerable, and then something has to give. I can’t decide whether this energy is my life force or a death drive. Maybe, for me, they’re the same thing. And then there’s the ever-present anger and sadness, the well that never goes dry. Whatever these feelings are, wherever they come from, it seems to me that some sort of existential pressure builds up inside me that must inevitably burst out in the form of a migraine—or else the pressure is the migraine, gearing up for its performance. Getting a piercing or a tattoo can help release the pressure before it blows: ritualized pain. So can standing in a dark room with a bunch of strangers, listening to musicians make noise so loud it makes your jaws vibrate. More pain, the kind that drowns out your thoughts, not unlike a headache. Battering my body, just a bit, in a way I can control. But the best place to send my restlessness is into my writing, which lets me plug into the great flow of life and feel it stream right through me. This is when I feel most alive. I think I might sound highfalutin and self-indulgent now, but like William Loveday—who knows he is a genius—I don’t care. I care, but I can’t care. What else can I do? I have to tell you what it feels like to be me.

I still have the wildness in me, but I’m also more comfortable than I used to be. I’ve got more money and a little more space to live in, and some of the things I was constantly aching to do as a very young person, I have gotten the chance to try. I’m more comfortable in my skin, even, which seems to be something that kind of just happens with age, thank god. But the biggest difference, I see now, is that I’m no longer walking alone through life.

William Loveday does everything by himself. He falls in love and has sex and gets into fights, but he’s moving through the world as a solitary figure. I don’t think I realized how important aloneness is to Notebooks of a Naked Youth until just now, probably because I am alone at this precise moment, for the first time in ages, sitting in a rented room on a solo writer’s retreat of my own making. I’m in the carriage house of a spooky old gothic Victorian house, where there is no wifi and no TV. Just four rooms, each with smooth, unvarnished hardwood floors and a certain stillness I remember from the years I lived alone. I stayed in that apartment of mine for almost ten years, and during that time I didn’t get too close mane people, and most of my paying work was in the form of freelance and contract gigs that I did from home. I did get a little weird sometimes, but being alone with my thoughts so much was good for my writing. (I didn’t have a TV then, either.) I prowled the rooms and got up in the middle of the night to stare out the black window, woke up the next day and hammered away at my computer keyboard or my typewriter. The things I needed to say, I said to the universe. 

But then I met someone who became my best friend, and now we’ve been married and have lived together for four years. We work together, make music and books together, go out to shows together, ride the bus together, sleep side by side. We talk all day long. I’m as comfortable with him as I am by myself, but of course the two things are not the same.

It took a long time for me to get this close to him. For years we lived apart and only saw each other on the weekends, but bit by bit I let him in, and now we’re inseparable. We live together in a house in Philadelphia, and it has a fucking TV, as well as fancy electric toothbrushes that I’m embarrassed of but kind of need for my horrible teeth, according to the dentist. And to my life partner and great friend, who takes better care of me than I have ever taken of myself. 

The wildness and the aloneness I’ve been musing about—they might be closely connected, at least for me. Most of the time I’m working to beat the wildness back, keep the headaches at bay, and release some of that uncomfortable tension now and again. But for now, while I’m alone and working on this writing, I might let the wildness out to stalk these quiet rooms. As long as it doesn’t overstay its welcome it can be pretty good company. 

Enough! we’re tired, my heart and I.

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Early in January, I declared 2016 an Orgy of Reading. For me personally, I mean. I don’t care what the rest of you jokers do. For years I have worked as a freelance book reviewer, which is a kind of writing I find useful and enjoyable to do, but it meant that at any given time I was reading a book for work, which had a way of interfering with my “personal” reading, as I call it. It was a bit like being in school that way. Last year I stepped back from reviewing books quite so regularly, and I felt a resurgence of my old passion for reading that was so pleasurable, it was almost sensual. Hence the word orgy. I was choosing books with titles that felt good to say, or ones that had beautiful covers. And even though I get most of the books I want to read from the library—cuz I’m cheap, and because I love it there—for a little while I treated myself to books that I had to buy because they were harder to find.

For starters, I indulged the morbid curiosity I’ve always had about the artist Tracey Emin by buying a collection of the columns she wrote for The Independent newspaper, and found I dislike it, and her, more than I expected to. I’ve been devoted to the artist/writer/poet/musician Billy Childish for a long time, which is how I learned about Emin, who’s a much more successful and better known artist than he is. After they broke up, she mocked him for staying in the small town he grew up in and revisiting the same subjects over and over in his paintings and writing. Childish wrote a poem that quoted Emin telling him, “Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck. — Stuck! stuck! stuck!” and a movement, called Stuckism, was born. Basically, the Stuckists were about upholding the value of painting and were down on conceptual, modern, and postmodern art, which is a view I don’t entirely share. I find lots of conceptual art interesting and worthwhile. (And I understand that Childish himself dissociated himself from the movement early on, and may never have been too seriously invested in it.)

REGARDLESS, I deeply admire the kind of work Childish does. Reading his novel Notebooks of a Naked Youth broke me open in a way I hadn’t been since I was a teenager and everything was new. His writing, paintings, and woodcuts are stripped-down, honest, and tough, but intellectually muscular at the same time—and he’s done it himself all these years, without much in the way of institutional support. Not to play THIS game, but he strikes me as a real punk. I … I kind of love him. Still, I thought Emin’s columns might interest me, since I also enjoy short-form memoir, especially when it’s written by women. But nah. I couldn’t stomach those essays at all. They’re just braggy chronicles of all the cool famous people she finds herself at parties with. Next!

(Well, next I might have to try her memoir, Strangeland. It seems like she might get pretty real in that one. I’ve enjoyed some of her artwork, and I want to like her. I’ve had a picture of her with Billy Childish on my desk for years. In it, she’s wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit and heels, and she’s laughing her gap-toothed laugh. Billy has on baggy trousers and is smoking a cigarette, and he’s smiling too, which—google it—he’s rarely shown doing. It’s the 80s and they’re in someone’s kitchen. I could look at this picture every day for the rest of my life and never get tired of seeing it.)

Anyways. A couple weeks ago I paid a visit to my new favorite Philly library, the Joseph E. Coleman Northwest Regional branch. It’s a bright, bustling, modern library, with a good collection and a dragon. I nosed around in there for a while until I found a few books that interested me, including Morvern Callar. Do you remember that one? I saw the film adaptation when it came out a million (fourteen) years ago and remember liking it, and its quintessentially 90s bleakness. I’ve read a few stories by Alan Warner—he’s a Scottish writer who writes in local vernacular, which is a style choice I really enjoy—but somehow I hadn’t gotten around to this novel, which was very well received when it came out. So I brought it home, and let me tell you, it’s good. It’s so strange. Morvern Callar is the name of the young woman whose story it is, and she’s an unusually compelling character. Every synopsis of the book tells you this much, so it’s not spoiling anything to let you know that when the novel opens, Morvern’s live-in boyfriend has committed suicide (in a really gross way, too). Her response to the tragedy is fucking weird. Though she tells us her every thought as she proceeds to do strange and dark, yet strangely life-affirming things, I’m drawn forward by trying to understand her motivations, because she doesn’t seem to have any. She’s totally self-contained and, in her secretiveness, very powerful, and I refuse to believe she’s empty-headed and nihilistic, which is what seems to be the consensus on what this book is about: The nothing generation that came of age in the 90s.

But I have to be honest, my orgy of reading is on hiatus this week. I have hit a wall of mental exhaustion, and all I can think about doing in my down time is, like, bodily stuff. I want to go for walks, drink coffee, and slather myself with the patchouli hand cream I got for Christmas. I want to help Joe dig up our garden out back and try starting beans and corn from seeds and, like, listen to the radio. I do NOT want to go to your party or meet you for drinks. Don’t take it personally, I’m just so wiped out. I think it’s from writing. For the last two months I’ve spent part of every day writing a new book, and though it hasn’t been an especially difficult or frustrating process this time around, I think it’s drained me. Rummaging around in my memories, dredging stuff up—both sweet and sad stuff—and laying it to rest—that’s hard work. Even though I’m not quite finished writing the manuscript, I need to take a break from it. And as far as reading goes, I think I’ll keep up with Morvern and maybe see what else Alan Warner has written recently. But for today, tomorrow, the next day—I don’t think I’ll feel all that hungry for a good book.

What do you do when you need a mental rest? Or a mental kick-start? I’ve gotten pretty good at taking care of my body when I’m tired or sick or sad, but I’m not as sure how to replenish a tired mind. Your suggestions are welcomed.

Love, Katie

dragon
Toldja

Naked Youth

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long1 long2 long3

I just finished reading one of those rare books that is so wonderful and unique, it opens your eyes, and everything looks new again. I found a book like this in my twenties, Notebooks of a Naked Youth by Billy Childish. The language and images and ideas were so fresh and raw and new that it startled me out of my old life and into a new one, and I remember thinking at the time that, without articulating this to myself, I’d assumed I could never feel that way again, since childhood and adolescence were over, and I’d lost a little (okay, a lot) of that feeling I used to carry around with me all the time, that life was one ongoing surprise, like a gift I was always unwrapping. But here was this wonderful, frightening book, with a character who described his crippling headaches in words I’d never heard before except for in my own migraine-rattled brain. He was me, I was him; I was transformed.

And now, some ten years later, it’s happened again: I just met Jessica Vye, the hero of Jane Gardam’s novel, A Long Way from Verona, and I felt I was meeting a more perfect version of myself who is living a different but parallel (and of course fictional, but what does that ever really mean) life. Heaven.

Jessica is nine years old when the story begins, and she tells it to us from her now-13-year-old perspective, which is full of hilarious and precocious insights about life and love and art. Because—as a visiting author tells her after she shares something she wrote with him—she is a WRITER, BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT! The novel takes place in England during the second world war, where gas masks and air raids and fairly shocking deprivation are all part of normal daily life. The story is sad and worrying and hopeful, and absolutely lovely for its sweetness. If you have not read the book—especially if you are a person who writes things, and maybe even more especially if you are a person who was ever a young girl—you should read it soon. You’ll thank me, I promise.

Evidently A Long Way From Verona—which, incidentally, I had never heard of before, and found by browsing the shelves at my fine local library in Philadelphia—was meant as a children’s book when it was published in the 1970s, and has since been read and loved by many adults, some of whom are, ya know, critics. I am reminded of other young teenage narrators that I first read as an adult and fell in love with, like 13-year-old Jason Taylor from David Mitchell’s magnificent novel, Black Swan Green. That one’s said to be semi-autobiographical, which I think comes through, and has been called a YA book too, but I don’t know. Between me and you I have found that a lot of young adult novels make for thin, simplistic reading (for adults), and neither of these did. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is another book I read for the first time as an adult, and absolutely loved. Hilarious, spirited, truth-telling young girls are my favorite kind of human.