#amreading Olivia Lain,
Crudo.
Perhaps
a biography of postmodern enfant terrible Kathy Acker, perhaps just a critical review
of society’s ills, definitely a shake-up of the traditional novel format!
Maybe biography (and history in general) should be the domain proper of a novel. Memory, like the protagonists of many novels, are unreliable after all.
This was the problem
with history, it was too easy to provide the furnishings but forget the
attitudes, the way you became a different person according to what knowledge
was available, what experiences were fresh and what had not yet arisen in a
personal or global frame. Aids, specifically… What insights might we
have now? It was uncomputable, it was
the province of the novel, that hopeless apparatus of guesswork and supposition.
Does weather affect your memory?
It’s August but it
feels like autumn, slanting light, a smell of rot and ripeness. It’s pleasant
but makes her feel bad, like a lot of old news is churning under the surface,
returning unexpectedly. Memory showers desire, desire infects memory.
Do other people in the room affect your memory?
He hated shouting, he hated l sudden noises, a dropped fork would make him flinch, if he broke a glass he felt bad all day. He wasn’t fragile exactly, he was just transparent, transparently hurt of scared, closing up around himself like a starfish, a sea anemone.He was hunched at his chair, his head poking forward like a turtle. You’re filling the house with your nervousness, Kathy told him. You’re making a complex architecture of anxiety and fear…it was one of those days where her skin and hair felt coated in a thin layer of grease, when nothing hung right.
Or
do you just want your memories gilded?
They had that multilingual
good manners veneer that only comes with money.
Maybe possessions were
like beauty, they made you impermeable. Kathy loathed permeability, she wanted
to be gilded, I mean everyone did.
