D O D I E B E L L A M Y
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It's the 80s, and I'm giving a reading that's important to me, it's happening somewhere in San Francisco, for at this point I've only read in San Francisco. I've been fantasizing about this reading for weeks, I'm going to unveil the latest installment of The Letters of Mina Harker, where I've taken the writing to a new level of formal pyrotechnics, I've finally learned how to weave in high theory with the embarrassingly intimate and grotesque, how to shift at lightning speed from subject to subject, to toss subject after subject in the air and to catch them all again before they thud to the ground—no thud thud in my writing, none at all—I'm going to dazzle the crowd. In our fishbowl of experimental writing, pretension was good, there was no such thing as too pretentious. I wanted to out-pretension my peers, I wanted to glory in it. So, I read and it went pretty good. People didn't stand up on their chairs and applaud, but I was happy with my reception. And then poet Lisa Bernstein walked up to me and said, “What I love about your writing is you're such a gossip.” A gossip! I was incensed, crushed, victim of a primal blow to my self esteem. I imagined the entire audience elbowing one another and snickering, “Gossip!”
Skip to 1998. After two painful years of rejection, The Letters of Mina Harker is being published by Hard Press. I've edited out much of the pretension, but I still want to dazzle. I'd spent hours blasting rock music through headphones, fantasizing about person after person awed by Mina's otherworldly epiphanies, when Eileen Myles' blurb for the back cover arrived: “At one end of the century Gertrude Stein said gossip is not literature Hemingway. Nobody cares about him much now and Gertrude was totally wrong. Dodie Bellamy writes brilliant gossip and if there's anything better than literature this is it.” In 1998 when I first read this blurb, the word GOSSIP stood out like this big neon pimple. I had post-traumatic flashback to Lisa Bernstein's comment a decade earlier. All anybody thinks is that you write gossip, that's all anybody will ever see, ever think, that you Dodie are this inconsequential gossipy worm.
To call something gossip is to relegate it to low art. Lowness has been a life's lesson for me—how to reconcile my lowclass origins, my predilection for all forms of dirt, with my baby boomer modernist dreams of greatness. One of the things I admire about Kevin Killian's writing is how he subverts the whole high/low dichotomy. Kevin's engaged in a “secret” project of writing customer reviews on Amazon.com. He's written hundreds of them. Friends who have stumbled upon one of his reviews have lost whole days clicking links to the rest of them. Here's an excerpt from his review of Deaf Women of Canada: A Proud History and Exciting Future, which he gave five stars:
Some of the women portrayed have had pretty much minimal contact with Canada, and some have left the country to better their station and perhaps to get a glimpse of the “deaf utopia” which many deaf people believe lies ahead. Still, despite these reservations, you will enjoy reading this pageant of brave women and you may be tempted to reach out to the deaf ones in your life and try to give them copies of this groundbreaking book.
Kevin throws himself wholeheartedly into Canadian nationalism, embracing the saccharine enthusiasm of a brochure on deaf people one might read at a social services center. I don't suppose Kevin has ever seen a copy of Deaf Women of Canada . Reviewing is an invitation to fantasy, to effusive giddiness. This is even more pronounced in Kevin's five star review of Call Me By My True Names, a pair of cassettes documenting Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's visit to San Francisco in 2000.
We were there the day Thich Nhat Hanh gave his lecture at Grace Cathedral. We were there, simply enough, praying in the bold Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill, having just stopped in to get out of the chilly fog on a windswept afternoon. People with dark suits and lengths of lavender ribbons were festooning the nave and aisles of the church with color and flowers, and placed a large jar of proteus on the podium floor. We later discovered that proteus was the favorite flower of Thich Nhat Hanh, and you can hear him croon with pleasure on the tape about the flowers, and if you do not understand the reference immediately, he's talking about how he sees proteus all over the world, so it's like a universal symbol of love.
We soon found out that Thich Nhat Hanh and his organization had sold tickets to hear this lecture but miracle of miracles, they did not kick us out, but allowed us to stay even though we did not pay the minimal fees charged. And what a lecture, filled with poetry and the pedagogy of love. By the time we went outside, the sun had burst out, and you could see a rainbow towering over Nob Hill with one end buried in the Mission and the other by Coit Tower. Afterwards we saw Thich Nhat Hanh, accompanied by two children, scampering through the famous maze in the pavement in front of Grace Cathedral. With glee they negotiated the twists and turns that baffle Western man.
Stopping in the church and praying is a reenactment of “California Dreamin'” by The Mamas & The Papas. Of course, Kevin wasn't there, but he has seen a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's On Love lying on our bedroom floor. As he's poking fun at my New Age leanings, he's also engaged in a sly critique of critical discourse. The proteus is a reference to John Greyson's film Proteus, a homoerotic tale about a Dutch botanist and a native prisoner in South Africa. Kevin's queering of Thich Nhat Hahn makes me think back to the 80s, I'm sitting in Bob Glück's kitchen, and Bob says that, unlike the other writers in our circle, Kevin has no bottom line. Bob's statement has been a touchstone for me over the years when looking at Kevin's work, why it causes so much discomfort in some people, why it's so difficult to analyze. In both these reviews, Kevin gives few clues where he stands in relation to the material, he just keeps heaping on more dayglow cliches, more breathless goo. On the Amazon site, potential customers can vote as to whether they found a review helpful. Kevin laughingly tells me that people hardly ever say they find his reviews helpful.
Kevin also reviews for a leading trade journal. He used to write lots for them. It was a nice, reliable source of pocket money, but when editors switched, Kevin's assignments became infrequent. After several dry months the new editor gave Kevin three books all at once, and I said something like—great, maybe she'll start using you more and more, and it'll be just like before. Kevin's face turned wide-eyed, beaming innocence and surprise, and he said, “I don't need to write for a Leading Trade Journal, I have my Amazon reviews.” Snobbishness, canonization, sanctioning—Kevin was turning them on their head, hurling them down a whirling populist drain. With the grassroots power of the internet, who has more influence these days—fans or the official arbiters of taste? Publishers Weekly reviews are often at odds with Amazon customer reviews. If twenty ordinary people give a book 4.5 stars but Publishers Weekly says it stinks, do we automatically believe Publishers Weekly? I don't think so. Cultural capital's feeling very slippery. I watch Kevin at the computer with his two pointer fingers typing furiously. Click click click click click. It sounds like an echo chamber of high heels. “Amazon review?” I say. “You're doing another one?” He nods and smiles, and I have one of those epiphany moments, where you look at the person you've been married to for 18 years and you're dumbstruck by their alien beauty.
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