MARIE CALLOWAY

Earlier this week I read a Huffington Post piece about the writer Marie Calloway. It had a provocative title: “MARIE CALLOWAY PUSHES THE BOUNDERIES OF WHAT’S PRINTABLE”. What self-respecting borderline pornographer could resist this? Combined with her brilliant pseudonym I had to read the article. Marie Calloway is young. She has been praised and denounced for a seemingly artless prose dissecting her sexual obsessions and adventures. She blurs the line between memoir and fiction. She was first published by Tao Lin, a notorious young nihilist. Lin and Calloway are seen by adults as both frightfully flat and as voices of  the alienation and hopelessness of their generation.

I went to Calloway’s Tumblr blog (SCROLL DOWN, PAST THE PICTURES) and read excerpts she posted there and intended to read at a reading. There was the caveat that they were raw. And they read like the unedited journal jottings of a twenty something person who has the mind of a fifteen year old. They were by no means stupid. They were artless and honest and self-involved to the point of solipsism. Her writing, as much as I’ve read (I skimmed through the stuff she published on Tao Lin’s site, Muumuuhouse ),  has the charm of a teenager playing guitar and singing into a cassette deck. Yes, that dates me. But it’s an alone in my room sound, unmistakably.

The assumption is that writers like Lin and Calloway speak for a generation. I don’t think that’s possible, and it’s as unfair to them as it was to Dylan to say so. A writer speaks for herself and those around her. Every generation wakes up and discovers the world. Often they mistake their discovery for a unique experience. Now, the twenty year olds of today do have a unique experience, and much to be angry about. But this has been happening for a long time. They didn’t discover a unique situation, but rather, and ongoing disaster. Alienation has been in vogue since at least Blake. Marx had quite a bit to say about it. So did the modernist poets. After the war (that would be world war 2) it became the stock and trade of pop sociology, of pop culture. It fueled the rebellion against Ozzie and Harriet. It is in Henry Miller, The Kinks, The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, Raymond Carver… Alienation, the meaningless communications of dull daily doings, compensating with joyless but curious sex and the mindless pursuit of electronic sensation, this has been American culture for decades. And the response, the mimetic response with lifeless, uninflected prose, has also  been around for more than a couple of cohorts. So outrage is as misplaced as celebration.

There is something seductive about prose that eschews adjectives and affect, that delineates the grey lifeless stream of nothing we inhabit. But the point of a counter-culture is to either be enraged by the situation or utopian in the face of it. This devastation that we inhabit, which is multivariate, demands a response. It would not appear to be devastation if the opposite did not exist. Why are we disappointed if nothing else is possible? And I say multivariate because the true devastations of life are not social. Tragedy is time’s arrow. To love in the face of death is all we can do, and when we refuse, because our love has been coopted, denigrated, sold, denied, deflated, politicized, analyzed; when our love has been crushed into a mirror and snorted; when our love has been washed, shaved, sprayed, airbrushed, auto-corrected, scanned and posted to a porn site; we refuse the actual true and only challenge of life, to redeem what’s fallen. And this redemption is multivariate. Political redemption is essential, for the political is the arena of our material life, how we will eat, clothe and shelter ourselves, and how we will live in a community with the others we depend on and in turn serve. But beyond, within, across the political there are the radiations of spirit, of emotion, of family, of friends, and sex. That food on the table, produced and paid for by political process, is also our sustenance, the occasion of talk, the livelihood of a farmer, of a grocer. We are alienated, but the artist starts out in the punk crater and sees above the horizon that when the collective fails the individual is responsible. The first responsibility is an act of consciousness and the next is a hope, not a faith, that action, in words and deeds, are worthwhile.

And then there is style. For the pleasures of style, of beauty and of art are redemptive. But you do have to get there.

And her writing is dirty enough, but pushing the boundaries of what’s printable? After Ulysses? After Portnoy’s Complaint? Kathy Acker? Ad nauseum? She’s not the first novelist to discuss cum on the face.

I suppose young and old need to hold each other in mutual incomprehension. I don’t think I want to read her book, though I like the title: WHAT PURPOSE DID I SERVE IN YOUR LIFE. It captures the mood perfectly.

Of course, I would rather she and her pal Tao Lin were out throwing bombs, not bongs. But nihilism, literary and otherwise has its place and refreshment.  DADA incites the same response. PUNK incites. What the middle aged don’t want to hear is that it’s all for nothing. But NOTHING is the flip side of SOMETHING.