Back before social media and platforms like Substack, you didn’t know how your writing was landing. Now, it’s in your face right away if people feel things, if you give them pleasure, and this is great. The readers of my work are always right. If something goes into them, it’s because the story is in love with something they can feel. If a piece doesn’t land as well, it’s because the narrator’s delight isn’t clear enough. Where is love in writing that’s so often at odds with how the world works? I mean my writing. That’s the question I ask myself all the time. I’m trying to build comic tension between the love the narrator feels for something in life and her frequent tone of “Are you fucking kidding me?” I think that’s what I’m going for.
Here we are, starting year 2. Huge thanks to all readers and to those who are generously funding the publication with paid subscriptions. If you have been reading with pleasure and can possibly upgrade from a free to a paid subscription, this is a super helpful time to keep the publication afloat. If you can tell one friend who’s able to afford a monthly or annual subscription, that would be super. There’s a lot of competition on the platform. I think this stack is doing its own thing, and if it’s making you happy—even sometimes in a sad or bewildered way—let’s see what develops.
Zoom conversation #3 will be on Saturday September 23 at 3-4pm EST. All paid subscribers are welcome to attend. If I’ve already confirmed you, you’re good, and links will go out closer to the event. We’ll be talking about writing memoir that isn’t teaching moral lessons and isn’t about heroes or victims. How do you write dialogue that does all the work of a scene? Off the top of my head, I’d say having get two funny, smart people talking to each other. If you’d like to attend the Zoom conversation and bring questions about your memoir projects, please RSVP to me here: lauriestone@substack.com.
Today’s stack is a collage of three takes on time. The first is something I suddenly wanted to say about the concept of age-appropriateness. I wanted to say, “Fuck that.” The second piece is a look back at Karen Finley—presented in the spirit of everything new is new again. I sometimes feel my life is a revolving door, and even if I step out for a while, when I get back in, the world looks so, Really, this again? The last piece is a small thing I wrote the other day, when Richard and I went to coffee place in Kinderhook and sat outside. Whatever’s on our minds rises to the surface in these writes. We look at each other and go.
I test things on social media, and if you read my posts there, you may have seen bits of this and that as thoughts were forming. In all three pieces, I’m pushing back against different forms of biological determinism. I’m pushing back against the notion of age groups as identity boxes that can be bar coded and marketed to. The past couple of months I’ve been working with an editor at another publication who is 50 years younger than me. We talk freely like girls talking freely about sex and money and love and work, and it’s honey as it washes over me.
In other news, Karen Finley, Jeff McMahon, and I will be appearing together at First Mondays: Readings of New Works in Progress, organized by Sarah Schulman. It’s free with RSVP, at Performance Space New York, located on the corner of First Avenue and Ninth Street, 150 First Avenue, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10009.
https://ci.ovationtix.com/203/production/1171643?performanceId=11328718
There are three buttons on the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your responses are hugely helpful in attracting new readers. I also love them.
Passages
In 1974, Gail Sheehy, a staff writer at New York Magazine, published a book called Passages. It was a huge success, and it addressed the lives of middle class Westerners, who were her readers. Sheehy drew a map of life’s stages, a map that was written as if one size fits all people and one size fits all people for all time. At the core of her thinking was a narrative in which people, who followed the map, discarding this bit of personal yearning in order to become for example the right kind of parent, and gaining that bit of wisdom for having forfeited enough desires, arrived at their burial plot with a lot of growth.
The growth would make you happy in the way happiness is promised in all tracts of right living—from bibles, to 12-step programs, to forms of shrinkage, to “wellness” hoohas—promised but not dramatized because happiness, like all abstract nouns, is a word without meaning. At death, your happiness—or at least your adjustment to life’s stages—would be visible if you were slit open and people could see the rings in your trunk.
Sheehy writes: “Resolving the issues of one passage does not insulate us forever. There will be other tricky channels ahead, and we learn by moving through them. If we pretend the crises of development don’t exist, not only will they rise up later and hit with a greater wallop but in the meantime we don’t grow.”
Do we grow? Maybe, sorta. I don’t know. It’s hard to question every piece of received belief in the culture you live in, and yet it’s so much fun. It makes me happy, saying, “Hey, wait a minute, is any of this true?” Recently, I was talking with some people about writing memoir. I was suggesting you don’t need a story that can be summarized as, “I used to be, and now I’m not.” I used to be dumb, and now I’m smart. I used to be an addict, and now I’m clean. I used to believe in God, and now I’m an atheist. You could write memoir that was, “I used to be, and I still am.”
In the framework Sheehy proposed in her book—and she went on to write a number of books with "passages" in the title, the last one in 2014—“I used to be, and I still am” would represent a failure to adjust. And how does it feel to live this life, you may be wondering? It varies from moment to moment because everyone’s life varies from moment to moment.
When you question a model, it’s hard not to sound like you're proposing an alternative model. I’m not. You don’t need to take notes. This is only a bunch of thoughts.
To me, things exist, and then they cease to exist. If you separate existence from a story about how life is supposed to go, you separate it from biological determinism. Biological determinism is what people call on, for example, to tell women they will fail at this thing and that thing, and to tell women their role is to reproduce and shut up. Biological determinism is what people use to justify dividing people of color from people with white-appearing skin, and then giving less to people of color. Biological determinism—the notion that there are “natural” passages of development everyone must ride through—turns life into a school where you adjust to things as they have always been rather than learn things that are true. An example of something true is that the concepts of nature and the natural are made up by humans.
Doesn’t everyone hate school? As soon as someone at a party or at a bar starts telling you about things to improve your life and fix your damaged bits, don’t you imagine the happiness you’ll feel when they fall through a hole in the floor? Does anyone really believe that death will be easier to anticipate because you got a gold star for conforming to life’s “natural” stages? Who dispenses the gold stars and what other products are they selling for living in the right stage of life? The stars aren’t free. They cost you your freedom.
Karen Finley (Everything new is new again.)
From my review in The Nation” of The American Chestnut, a collage of monologues, tableaux vivants, and projections at P. S. 122, 1997.
Nakedness has been a feature of all Finley’s shows and has in part incited the unusually loud “no” that has been lobbed at her, especially by Jesse Helms in his crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts. The irritation she prompts isn't just from her nakedness. Dancers have performed nude and plenty have been nearly nude, with every sinew visible, yet no one is saying go away to dance. Part of Finley’s power to disrupt comes from the fact that she's beautiful and she doesn't use her beauty to comfort people. By people I mean men. She doesn't beg for love or approval, and in some circles for a woman to do that is asking to be shot.
She’s becoming funnier these days, poking at the sexual double standard by introducing, for example, “breast milk art” into the theater. Why? Because, like menstrual blood, breast milk has been nowhere allowed in public, while semen (and pseudo-semen) are okay and while the blood spilled by a performance cutter such as Ron Athey can assume the sheen of social transgression. Finley is always reacting to the punch she feels that while the male sexual memoirist is considered a cowboy of candor, a woman presenting the body as sexual autobiography gets called a stupid slut.
In a video, she flits nude through an art gallery, comparing her body, post-pregnancy, to the bodies of women sculpted by Degas and Giacometti. She imagines the deal given to women flipped onto men—“I want men photographed so we can see the tips of their nipples hard and erect on the cover of Time. I want testicles dressed in nice, woolly caps. I want the hot, hairy ball look. I want to smell booty." She also suggests how Hillary Clinton could win the approval of the masses: “They want her to say, ‘I'm sorry I was first at Yale Law School and Bill was sixth’.”
In Chestnut, Finley is moving closer in tone to the mordant resignation of fellow body artist Bob Flanagan, who recently died of cystic fibrosis after a lifetime of medical interventions and who billed himself as "Supermasochist," claiming an erotic life from the virtual zero hand he was dealt. Finley is nearing, too, the camp wisdom of grunge connoisseur John Waters, who once described trying to quit smoking by eating all the butts in his ashtray and then discovering they didn't taste all that bad. Like Flanagan and Waters, Finley is saying there are worse things than shit to eat—like eating your own impulses.
From my review of A Different Kind of Intimacy, The Collected Writings of Karen Finley in the LA Times, 2000.
Finley grew up in Chicago and came to New York in 1983, a time for her of whirling experiment and thrilling wildness. With a sublet in the East Village and a job as a cocktail waitress at the club, Area, she began performing at Danceteria in the monthly showcase, No Entiendes (“You don’t understand”), along with John Sex and Ann Magnuson. In some work from this period—her monologue, “I’m an Ass Man,” for example—Finley is tough-minded and funny, playing with a vicious kind of aggression and showing the lie in every kind of decorum.
In 1986, after C. Carr wrote a praising profile of Finley in the Village Voice, the next week Pete Hamill wrote a savage denunciation of the article, and Finley became a symbol of the culture wars that were roiling not only between right-wing conservatives and avant-gardists but between left-wing straight males on one side and women and gay people on the other. Guys like Hamill were offended by sex as a subject in any way tied to power and politics. To him it was sissy commentary corrupting the politics of economics, race, and class. Feminists and gays considered gender inequality as important as any other sort of injustice and insisted, too, in inserting discussions of sexual practices into the public conversation—especially where, as in the cases of abortion rights and the criminalization of homosexual sex acts, governments policed the bodies of individuals.
That same year Finley was threatened with arrest in London if she performed nude, a piece of hypocrisy, given the commonness of strip clubs there. Finley made the point that it was okay for a woman to use nudity to turn men on, but if she used nudity to dump on this arrangement, she was asking to be jailed.
In her book, she writes about the famous embroilment that she and fellow-performers John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller were swept into when, in 1990—as a bow to Jesse Helms and other conservatives in Congress—the NEA revoked grants that had been awarded to the four artists. Their work involved the body and all but Finley were gay. The NEA Four, as they came to be called, protested this censorship as well as the “decency clause,” enacted by Congress, that grantees were required to sign, pledging that their work would not contain, among other things, “homoerotic” content, which was labeled “obscene.” Lawyer David Cole, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, argued the case of the four, who sued the NEA and challenged the constitutionality of the decency clause. They won in 1993, though, Finley reminds readers, the putatively liberal Bill Clinton administration appealed the decision, wishing to let the decency clause stand, and moved the case to the Supreme Court where, in 1998, the NEA Four lost to the government.
Among other principled stands Finley took, in 1990 she stepped down from hosting the Bessie Awards, after learning they were financed by Phillip Morris, a company that with one hand supported avant-garde art and with the other was a big funder of Helms. In her book, she documents her evocative museum installation “Momento Mori”—she presented an antique chest filled with sand, and then visitors were invited to write the name of someone who had died of AIDS and afterward erase the name back into the sand. In “Moral History,” she sniffs out the sadism in the the social fad at the time of the “silent childbirth” (is it still a thing?), where women are praised for giving birth and shuting up while it’s happening!
Some performance scripts have a life on the page—I’m thinking of works by Spalding Gray, Danny Hoch, Eric Bogosian, John Leguizamo, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, Lisa Kron, and Peggy Shaw. Other performers enact something closer to ritual and probably require the body to make their impact felt. You probably have to be Chris Burden to make shooting yourself into something more than a rip-off of Chris Burden, just as you have to be Jackson Pollock to do his particular spatter paintings. Where does Finley fit in? Me, I like seeing her in the flesh.
Seabiscuit
Every time something goes my way, it predicts the past. This is my oldest thought, and in the ways I don’t change, I’m not aging. I think at the same speed as always about more things. Living in Hudson, a distance from most people we know, Richard and I are a unit that makes its own gravy. We live on love we’re too old to run out of, we like to think.
Each day, we park at the top of Warren Street and walk to the river. Coming back is up hill and steep, and weirdly, although I’m slow most of the time, I finish strong. It was true when I swam laps. Often I say to Richard, "Do you mind if Seabiscuit runs back to the barn?" Richard says, "People who speak of themself in the third person, and also as an animal . . . do I even want to know you?" I say, "Fair." And off I go, and the smart ass still beats me.
I don’t see aging on the landscape. The hydrangea bush beside me looks the way it has always looked, fat with flowers and bees—and frozen in the moment you become aware of it. The summer is wet and cool. The summer is the Ireland every garden dreams of. The rest of my life, I’m going to miss people. I’m in a state of missing, like a lost limb or a lost chapter, loving what’s not there and maybe can’t be.
Beautiful ❤️ our vehicle gets old, WE, do not ❤️
Your writing touches me in all the right places. I'm so sorry that I can't subscribe due to an appallingly bad economic situation, but one day..