"The palace is collapsing/ & here you are smearing the bright world/ with your shit"

The title of this post is from Lara Glenum's new book SNOW. It's in line with her work in Pop Corpse!, which is a kind of gurlesque research into the Little Mermaid (and all of the meat-things implied by mermaids and daddies); it would be reductive to say that SNOW takes up Snow White, but it's also useful as a starting point. It's really Glenum's wild ways that blow my mind.  "And hand me my clit/ on a plate/ pierced by a tiny flag/ emblazoned with/ the ensign of our house." "Snowflake's got/ a blotto case/     of garbage body."

As I begin writing this, it's the day before both Mothers' Day and the deadline for Final grades.

"I'm the one who shot you/   out of my shunt/ I'll sure as hell shoot you again."

"Hell/ is a ripe daughter." "A daughter is a crime scene."

I read the first half of the book yesterday after a bunch of reading and "grading" (entering things into the LMS), and then I read the second half today on the couch while Phil read in our bedroom about an abyss-god and Lou read on her bed a manga from the library.

Last weekend, I could not help myself and, despite many many work tasks remaining, started and finished all of Suzanne Scanlon's new book Committed. I devoured it.

Scanlon's book is about madness/what we might think of as madness/what madness might mean, being young, being young in the 90s, control and suffering and despair and disgust and desire, and pleasure, and reading. Most of all, or as I recall in my hypnotic all-weekend read of it, it's about reading--in all the ways we can think of that. Scanlon reads it all. I love her empathy. I love her wildly receptive sentences. She writes somehow into openings, or her sentences have openings, or she writes like over a surface full of strange holes and peers in by writing. But that's not at all right what I'm saying. Just an impression of possible reads.

"It has always been one of my great dilemmas, as a girl as a person as a writer--how to protect my inner life."

Responding to Duras' line ("My memory of men is never lit up like my memory of women"), Scanlon says, "My memory of a book written by a man is never lit up like my memory of a book written by a woman."

Much of Scanlon's reading/"reading of" is centered around Plath's The Bell Jar (and Promising Young Women very much aligns itself with Plath's project; in fact, I think, years ago, Phil assigned the two together and invited Scanlon to talk to his class; the new book with these two would be a wonderful reading adventure--!!!). 

I read Bell Jar in such a manner that sounds like someone else's life but was shockingly my own: my mother gave me an old copy the summer that I turned 15, she often helped me sew my own clothes and together we'd made pale green palazzo pants out of a crinkly fabric, and--for a trip to New York City (she had to finish cleaning up her dead aunt's apartment in Brooklyn)--she bought me a purple blouse and a matching purple vest, and I read the book while standing in lines around the theater district where my mom would plant us so that she and I and my brother could get reduced-price tickets to Broadway shows (we did all the shows you'd expect in 1993). I wore my hand sewn pants and the purple tops. I had thick-soled black sandals that were kind of like doc marten rip-offs. I kept the Plath in my little purse. I don't know what my mom and brother did while we'd be in line. I wasn't even there. I was just in Bell Jar. When Esther wakes up from her first attempt, she mentions something about a crawl space. I remember looking up and seeing New York City but I was thinking of what I knew of crawl spaces and what I knew about being interested in dissolving. New York City, the crawl space in our own home, my feeling that I knew how much comfort might exist in "secret failures" (that's Glenum, there).

It was inappropriate.

Not really. But it was like I was (in) a hole.

I'd even frantically read more pages in each theater just before the lights would go down.

On the couch today, I read in Glenum's SNOW: 

        I suck

        until I shine like rising death

            I shine until             I'm rotten rotten

                                                to the core

And I thought of "Lady Lazarus" . . . "I eat men like air," etc.

And Glenum's book, like Scanlon's, commits to Plath feeling, too:

Plath: "Soon, soon the flesh/ The grave cave ate will be/ At home on me."

Glenum: "He grins/ & slides his fingers/ into the wet velvet lining/      of my coffin."

I wonder about Plath's haunting of Literature.

Or Plath's haunting of some girls' experiences of Literature.

A certain taste. A way of ringing the bell in a grave, in a crawl space.

Scanlon says that being an English major "help[s] you to understand what it means to be alive."