Reading Jayne County

I was trying to find a 70s German movie set in the US desert. Juggling search terms, I ran across a film starring Jane County (the chaotic beauty City of Lost Souls (1983)). This took me back. I read Man Enough to be a Woman when I was 19 or 20 after finding it in the back of the Friends of the Free Library bookstore where I worked. It had come in as a donation, as most of the books did, and was priced under two dollars. With this cover, I had to have it.

Man Enough to be a Woman came to me before my first great lesson in mortality but after suffering from depression for many years. I was generally joyless and too young to know how to change that. Though my memory is fuzzy on the text, I now realize that this memoir was part of my lifelong search for examples of happy lives from people who do not follow the rules.

The book's title comes from an album title from County's band Jayne County and the Electric Chairs. She is a US born, Berlin based musician actress and artist. She was a huge part of the 70s Berlin music scene and seems to have met or worked with everyone, while also simply surviving in a cruel & boring world. This book made me want a time machine. Failing that, it further bolstered my belief that one can create spaces to be and just sort of living the idea that life is very short.

Reading queer and trans history helps remove the confines of the banal evil of heteronormativity and white supremacy and makes suspect the myth of queerness being a uniformly miserable time until recently.

Man Enough... got rereleased in the UK in 2021 by Serpent's Tail. I was too busy attending to my living death this year to hear about it, but now I’m keen to find this book again. I especially want to read the new afterword by County herself.

Here's a review of City of Lost Souls (1983) by Caroline Golum. Link to youtube rip above.

"I was fourteen and didn't want to be involved in any of this, but I was part of it as always, and as always, everyone kept asking me, What's wrong? Are you okay? Is something bothering you? At night I flung my pillow against my mattress and prayed to my fake jade statue of the Guanyin goddess to give me a different face so that people would stop looking at my current one and asking me what was the matter."
--> “You Fell Into The River and I Saved You!,” Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang
I read Sour Heart for a (forthcoming) review, and because of word count and sanity, I didn't get to cover all the things that the book brought up for me. On top of the often fucked-up circumstances of their lives, many of Zhang's characters are sad, feel like nothing, and are constantly battling big, bad emotions. In the background of several of the stories is childhood depression and the way the world treats sad and/or angry girls. I appreciated that Zhang explicitly included the pressure to be happy, which often degrades to the pressure to look happy,  in her stories about identity and family. Also included is the reaction to wish to be simply left alone, make the slide through life as easy as possible, already knowing that no one, even those that love you, are likely to help. That deceptively mild feeling of wanting to change because the world isn't going to and you are tired, even though you are a kid.

Sour Heart comes out on August 1.
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ETA:  Here's the review!

Oh lovelies,

Reading has been tough. My mind is currently focused on bringing up all the pain of the past 20+ years and parading it around, making focus difficult and spare time unpleasurable. Today is the third (is that possible?) anniversary of my father's death. He had terrible dyslexia; he was so proud that I enjoyed reading, even though it made us further apart. This year reading has not been the refuge I crave. What interests grief hasn't flattened, depression has steamrolled.

I'm still in The Crystal Eaters, still hoping the end supports everything I love about story developed so far. Shane Jones definitely has a razor insight into the thoughts and compulsions of children, especially traumatized children. It's so difficult to get that right. Place that precision in a book also dealing with complex family sadnesses, and dang, you've just created a book I am deeply into and can barely bear to read! He also captures what pain drugs can take away while also showing what pain they can give subtly and without moralizing.

I've been reading everything from my comics subscriptions (Ley Lines from Grindstone Comics/Czap Books, Kus, Retrofit/Big Planet and Frontier from Youth In Decline), but at a leisurely pace and without the calming effect of falling into a novel. CAB was fun and I'll dive in to my haul, mostly longer works, as soon as seems wise.

What have you been reading?

Your friend,
Carrie

2015 finally dies!

Despite this being a horrible life year, it was a very wonderful reading year. Not included in my tally are the many books I started or collections I picked through over 2015, many of which were also good but not for me, not right now.

This has been the first full year I've lived without my father after two years of his frightening and terrible decline. I was deeply involved with my father's end of life and death, the details of which I am still reckoning with and will be for quite some time. Being faced with admin tasks that are not only relentless and boring, but suffused with such powerful hurt has been exhausting and lonely. Luckily for me, cartoonist Roz Chast went through some similar things and decided to write a funny, informative and just SO TRUE book about it called Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? This book was loaned to me by a great friend. When I read it I cried, but with relief.

Too fucking real: pic.twitter.com/Fa70oYefnU

— Carrie (@carrietryharder) March 21, 2015

There are books that take you away and books that make you stay and the three novels in The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer accomplish both. The first, Annihilation, is a missive from an inhospitable land, filled with beautiful natural details and almost unbearably tantalizing mystery. The second, Authority, is about juggling identities and becoming oneself, and while the main character wasn't all that interesting to me there were enough other things going on in the story to carry me though. The final volume, Acceptance, follows a character present in the previous two and brings many of the mysteries of the Southern Reach to a satisfying close, without solving a single thing. Vandermeer created a world with endless frightening possibilities and endless frightening beauty that I still think about; this trilogy is an excellent reminder that life is complex and not simply a trial, no matter how much horror gets served up.

I finished THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE on the plane ride back and, though I've read it a few times before, wow. Just wow.

— Carrie (@carrietryharder) September 23, 2015

Speaking of horror, I returned to an old favorite this year The Haunting of Hill House, after recommending it to a friend. Turns out that Jackson's sure voice and teasing plotting were exactly what I craved at the moment, and it is always worth taking another look at what the desire for acceptance will do to a person. Plus, Theo, always Theo.

To balance the many terrible surprises of the year, the mail at least was peppered with some lovely ones care of my subscriptions to four comics presses: Ley Lines from Grindstone Comics/Czap Books, Kus, Retrofit/Big Planet and Frontier from Youth In Decline. I wrote about some here on try harder, some I just sucked in. Two stand outs I didn't write about, both from Retrofit/Big Planet were Ikebana by Yumi Sakugawa and Sea Urchin by Laura Knetzger. I loved Sakugawa's quiet story about stopping giving any fucks and creating oneself. Sakugawa's work always speaks to me, but this one came at exactly the right time. I've been following Knetzger for awhile, and just got her all ages tome Bug Boys from Czap Books. Sea Urchin is decidedly adult autobio about depression and what we think about when no one is watching.

I listened to many fewer SFFH podcasts the second half of the year than I usually do, mostly because I fell victim to Fallout 4's immersive charms. However the casts from The District of Wonders, Escape Artists, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Uncanny and Apex, continue to expose me to exciting short story writers and take me places I never could have imagined.

And no 2015 survey would be complete without talking about twitter. Besides the usual dog jokes, book news, essay recommendations and author process notes that twitter always provides, this year the service was one of the only and best ways I could connect with my own grief. That meant posting photos and thoughts, as well as meeting (or further developing relationships) with others that have been through similar stuff or are just empathetic souls. Invaluable stuff.

I know I'll be thinking about the stuff I read in 2015 for many years to come. What about you?

your public face is broken

One of the things that I promised myself when I started this blog was that I would never be afraid to write about the complete shittiness of depression or grief. If you are wondering why I would be afraid then you have never applied for a job knowing that you will be Googled. Or maybe you've never has so few good days that you don't want to ruin one by thinking about why you have so few good days.

Here are two amazing pieces, posted yesterday, on what happens when life is something you suffer through rather than live. Improvising a Bone Graft by poet Nikki Reimer is deft examination of public grief and private pain. Let's just say that I identify: I loved my brother with a fierceness that is not ashamed to stand howling and naked in the middle of the road, and what I miss is the material essence of him. The only thing in the world that I want, and can’t have, is my brother’s arms around my shoulders, his infectious laugh, his shit-eating grin, his middle finger pointed at me in response to sisterly teasing. His “jerkface!” in response to my “jackass!”

Depression Part Two by Allie Brosh is both a hi-lar comic and the most apt description of chronic depression I have ever read: Months oozed by, and I gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing I got to feel anymore. I didn't want anyone to know, though. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!

You might want to read the first part first. Check the dates of the posts to get a sense of the cyclical devastation even those who are treated experience. Wait, that doesn't sound funny at all! I promise you will laugh (or at least approximate the sound with your mouth).

more bad, good dog

One of the most distressing things about grief for me is its tenacity. It just comes and comes, never forgetting for more than a few moments. When you are a person with depression, this doggedness can turn great sadness into a feeling of sickness or even, in my case, a sense of being trapped in a nightmare. The depression augments the grief like diarrhea atop a shit sandwich. More bad.

I've been eating a shit sandwich for several months. But these days, unlike in the past, I have a persistent, inconvenient, desire to stick around on this planet. So the question became: How to keep on keeping, etc. AND smile every once and awhile?

I started looking at adoptable dogs on petfinder a few months ago to distract from my dad's tidal wave of a diagnosis. It was calming, and free and sane. Fast forward to B & I checking out an adoption event and then emailing a few choice petfinder folks. Only one rescuer responded, but the dog we were looking at got adopted. However, there was a new dog that she wanted to get out of the shelter ASAP. Enter Giacco (jee-ah-koh), foster dog extraordinaire:

Giacco is 50 lbs. of puppyish fun with some learning to do. He is getting adjusted to tryharderland and is always ready for some quiet reading time. We are not sure about the long-term feasibility of having a dog, but getting to know him has been a jolt of love and difference that my brain needed.
[Giacco was rescued by Sugar Mutts. Here is his page, check it out!]

Checked my P.O. this week and found stuff in there from October. Then I had to wait in line for 20 minutes to find out that that they had sent some of my mail back. I spent so much time in that post office that I forgot how much I love mail. That place has an evil power!

VVVVVV

If you've been checking the sidebar at all you can see that I've been pouring books down my gullet like a starving sea bird. Almost all have been good, all have have fantastic elements. Reading still has that dislocating power for me--a fact that I become more grateful for as the tragedies pile up. Short stories work well for the subway, novels for the train and while in my parents' house, and comics for all the times in between.

What have been your security blanket books?

VVVVVV

Felt a strong connection to the Norwegian people after hearing this from Julia Grønnevet's recent essay in n+1, "Letters from Oslo:"

"Almost everyone owns a washing machine, but no one owns a dryer! Instead everyone dries their clothes on flimsy drying racks, and this takes so long that these racks are out on display all the time, even though they are constructed so that you can fold them away. it mystifies me why Norwegians, who tend to arrange their lives for maximum convenience, treat laundry as though it were a passing issue. It looks terrible..."

The essay is actually about a mass-murderer, and it is very disturbing. A reminder that life and laundry persist even as monsters exist.

I'm stuck in the land of tiny bits with huge universes attached to them. Not only does this mean paper scraps, phrases pulled out of conversations, garlic, raw & cooked, it means short stories.

Start stopping through Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler makes me go back to What I Didn't See (buy this book) and the two are making me want to try more stories. There is something invigorating about how the reader can feel the harnessed anger and sadness thrumming underneath the stories. My favorite thing about her stories are that they never go where I think that they are going. Surprise is the really the nicest treat.

&&&

The seasons are truly screwing with me. How about you?

&&&

This is an excellent essay about the Penn State child abuse conspiracy and the seemingly incomprehensible reaction of students to the firing of Joe Paterno by Brian Spears. My only complaint is that it is too short.

An awesome comic about depression, rendered in Paint, by the hi-lar Allie Brosh.


Fuck. The. Fucking. Beaches. A Tessa Brunton comic about chronic illness and the bullshit of being "positive" when life is awful.

And for something a bit lighter, here's a story about ghostbusting college kids in Malaysia over at PodCastle by Zen Cho, which shows how a great reading can change a story for the better. Reading by Tracey Yuen.

old, in internet years, but good

The best comic shops in Paris, a list by Mark Burrier. I've been to two of them--Album and Boulinier--and spent much more money than was wise. My one Burrier print is away at the framer. When it is done, it will go to B's windowless office to act as antidepressant decor.


#####
Here is a callback, I encountered Pinocchio by Winshluss at Album, right after it won the Angoulême International Comics Festival award. If I had known that it was about beetles in your brain, well then perhaps I would have picked it up. Depression (and other inaccessible brain things) is difficult to write about, and this review covers three comics that try. I want to give Bookslut review-writer Martyn Pedler a hug right now: "Why am I putting this in print? I don’t know. Maybe because the only way we’ll ever know what each others’ cockroaches look like is to try to explain our own, and pay close attention when others do the same."


#####
Some terrible things that bosses have said. My entry: "Well, [your brother] wouldn't have died if the car had had airbags." This was about two months after it happened. I left for the day right after that.


##### "Still, it is hard to look at people the same way when they are so clearly putting a blanket of hatred over me, even if they didn't know I was standing there."  I like a blog post that talks about Burger King, disappearing, a small room under the stairs and why Facebook is a pipeline to hate.

all those todays

Today I forgot to do every little thing on the list, crying and dreaming in equal parts. Nothing important got done, I think, but I’d like to believe that this neck-up action will lead to something akin to what Renee French talked about on her recent Inkstuds interview. She discussed how when she has migraines she can’t do anything but sleep and imagine lightly around a blocky world. Those flights from physical reality ultimately inform her work. It’s nasty and tiresome and painful, but she makes something out of it.

I just keep reaching in and rooting around in my guts and heart looking for a hold on any one irritant, something I can pluck out and expose on the page, pin down and examine until it dies and disappears. I want to reach out instead, and perhaps I should, but right now I am out of step with my people. Friends, near and far, are often mired in pits of things done and left undone and likely don’t have time for search parties and good cop, bad cop.

It takes me forever to lurch around my own mental landscape and find words. To find out if the way I’ve arranged stuff is worth keeping in any way and then move on. I’m working on something depressing but very important—a difficult position for someone like me, someone who flees from pinpricks but often ends up trotting straight into the woodchipper. Even though I hate them, I need the failures almost as much as comments and kudos and victories. Without them I can’t get to the good stuff and I’ve been avoiding failure for more years than I care to mention and, of course, only failing to do anything at all.

Shining a light on a wheel as it spins in place doesn’t tell you much, does it? So, how about I turn off the light and just listen for awhile?

Image from the NYPL Digital Gallery, Image ID: 1157702

writing about the big ugh

Writing about grief is difficult. For me, not only is there a resurgence of incredibly unpleasant feelings, but the writerly nag of being precise with my language and not repeating myself. For instance, when I have a day like this, I get very specific physical sensations like nausea, pain in my chest and weight on my body along with anger, fear and extreme sadness. I don’t want to say over and over that there is a hole in my heart, though that is the best description, because that would be boring and belongs in a private journal, nor do I want to describe to readers what it is like to want to throw up—they know.

What I do want to do is write openly about grief in a culture that is ashamed of it. I want to help grieving people by showing them that they are not alone, that their feelings of loss are not excessive or insane. I want to help the loved ones of grieving people understand that it just doesn’t go away and how memories haunt objects, places, smells. I want to show how grief affects a depressed person; how I feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that, because of the medical care I’ve received and the hard work I do every day, I feel better than I ever have in my life, despite this sucking wound. I want to talk about how sometimes, (rarely now), grief and depression do a little dance that would have me hanging from the rafters if not for my new-found patience to ride it out. I want to honor my brother and the gifts he gave me by striving to write well and help others that need it.

I want to write my survivor story.

Thank you to all the strangers and friends that have written me over the years to support my writing on this unfun matter. Thanks to all the people who come here to read about books or comics and stick around for all of it. This biggest thank you goes to the people who have lived this with me and who continue to do the hard thing in order to make life easy.

Ever had a day where there is shit on the breeze and you can’t get the badness of out your hair? I am having one of those today.

In my dream last night, I was by a large river, swimming in the water with family of friends. Little kids were splashing around, diving for bright fruits and fish in the water. My brother was with me there. He had a flower behind his ear and we were talking about how awful it was that he was dead—that he could only be alive in certain places, but that he would disappear when I needed him, later. All the laters. We also discussed why he had to wear a hairpiece. Wasn’t it crazy that his head was so damaged in the accident that they needed to replace parts of his black brush cut with fuzzy bits of fake?

Ha ha.

Upon waking this dream dialogue was so heartbreaking, so wrenching, that the usual daze of the morning was replaced with a blinding, grinding vision of loss. I’ve been trying to shake it all day but all the days since his death have been subsumed and I am right back there again, living that first day without him, flashed-back to my bloody rebirth into a life I never wanted to live but have to, every day, until I too, die.

Even now, I am still missing, in every sense.

link-smackin' good

Maud Newton has two events coming up that sound really great. Both are at the Housing Works Cafe & Bookstore.
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A week of groceries on $30? Here in New York? These folks are doing it and making really good food too. (Except for the nasty raw food week. Raw food dinner is a-ok. Raw food breakfast is not for the hedonistic, to say the least.)
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Science and life and being a lady--all the good things, no? Thesis--With Children is great writing on all of those topics and more. I have especially been enjoying the posts on race and academia.
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Speaking of science, here are some great posts on depression, courtesy of Neurotopia 2.0. Read the entire enlightening series.
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I've also been doing a lot of art snooping these days. If a poor person buying art is wrong, I don't want to be right!

Great things

Dooce has an excellent essay on living with depression. She has written about this topic before, and I have linked to it, but, once again, she has turned out an intelligent, honest and thoughtful piece on a condition that defines my life. Her husband wrote an essay on being a depressed person's partner that is worth reading too.

Over at the Freebird site, Peter Miller is really kicking out the blog.

Creepy, but amusing, gift ideas.

My taxes are done. I hope yours are too.

***
I have been trolling all over the booky internet for the last few hours and I must say I feel a bit defeated, a little shrunken in the brain. With all my attempts to narrow my focus and work harder on fewer things, I seem to be missing out on a lot of fun and interesting thoughts. To make matters worse, my efforts do not seem to be producing much in the way of results. I still feel as stressed, scattered and one-step-behind as usual. In fact, I feel like this in more aspects of my life than usual. It feels bad. What do you do when doing what you do feels bad?

***
Last night I watched a NOVA special on "The First Flower." It was really very visually beautiful and I learned a bit about China and angry paleobotanists while watching it. The best part were all the interior shots of Kew Gardens' buildings, all ornate ironwork and big windows. The last time I was there I really enjoyed myself. The melancholy of a place that is meant to take you far away from another place, a place for whatever reason you can't leave, appeals to me. During my visit some of the glasshouses were being worked on and the workers seemed to take great care with what they were doing, unlike the grubby, glassy-eyed construction guys I see around here. My father and I spoke with one of them for a while. He seemed so perfectly balanced and sensitive beneath all his denim that it was like he sprang from the pages of a bad novel about middle-agers finding love... for the second time.

Sometimes I wonder what my neighbors think of me when they see me squatting around in my garden, stirring compost and molesting my plants. Do they think of chick lit? I hope not.

***
I just started reading H20 by Mark Swartz and enjoying it. I don't have much of a grasp what it is about yet. It was sent to me with the idea that it was SF-y back catalog stuff from Soft Skull press. Last night I finished the other book in that package and brought it with me to the bar where my boy's band was playing. I ended up talking to a group that liked SF and one of the people said that he had brought two SF books along with him to the bar. After I showed him mine, he wouldn't show me his. It was lame. Obviously there was going to be no fun made. He did recommend someone named Dan Simons though. Anyone know anything about him?

A few nights ago, B and I were talking about our favorite money. I said I'd like to have all my money in 10-dollar bills, two-dollar bills, dollar coins and dimes. I also said that I used to like the fives, but the new notes leave me wanting. That’s a surprise since Abraham Lincoln is my favorite old timey guy, not because of the Emancipation Proclamation, or the tall hat or the beard, but because of Lincoln’s beautiful writing and his relative openness in writing about his melancholy, the old timey, flowery name for depression.

Depression stops a person from being a person. It is hard to write about. Recently, I heard about a book called Against Depression and another called The Noonday Demon and another by an old media guy/politician/something important (I can’t quite remember); all these book are about depression in some way and are, by most accounts, good writing. When I heard about them, I felt a strong, strong urge to read them, to hear my story told by someone “important,” to be validated. “Look person-I-care-about, this is what is wrong with me. It is real. This is what it is like.”

At the same time, I felt (feel) ambivalence toward reading something that might, to my mind, misrepresent me. I also feel fear about reading something that could drag me down and destabilize my generally tenuous well being, even just for a short time. I don’t want any more lost days.

But.

Perhaps it is the time to give it a try, if only in the spirit of fulfilling my 2007 goal to read more nonfiction.

All these thoughts started swirlin after reading this amazing post, via Dooce. Go read it. Dervala, thank you for your eloquence.

Today I am writing various things to get away from some personal sadness and dark-daytime-weirdness. I am reading the internet to feel impersonally depressed, part of a group (see booky folks links), and just plain distracted.

I have crusty pimple freckles that I am also avoiding, as well as bathing and doing some editing.

For a month or so I have been dreaming often of being on America's Next Top Model, either as a contestant, a judge or a former contestant, wearing gold lame and eating ramen. Maybe I should watch it tonight to further my agenda of distraction.

Also, I could go to Mo Pitkins here in NYC to see another Grace Reading Comics Showcase. That would be fun.

(Secretly, secretly, it is not working. I am raging and wet inside with grief and anger and longing. Nothing helps much.)

working on something that's not working

It is late. The plumber is coming in a few hours to fix some drips and answer some questions that have stymied our energies.

I am writing and looking and not seeing for a bunch of projects and still looking for a job. I am more frustrated than I have been in awhile.

My body is not responding to my prayers for health. It is also not responding to my demands for fitness or my threats against being gross. I think that means another day in the doctor's office for me.

The day I spent in the doctor's office today was long and only partly helpful. I don't look forward to tomorrow.

My mind is wandering to nowhere good and making me seem morose and ditzy. How lame, especially with an unread Checkov in my bag.

Luck and concentration would be great right now. Got any to spare?

losing it/ loosing it

For the last few days it has been raining in New York. I truly enjoy the rain. It makes me dreamy and okay with being at home and doing the things I need to do like writing and cleaning.

One down side to all the sleepy slowness of these kind of days is how pleasurable it is to stay in, make tea and just read all day, the kind of reading you do instead of TV, the kind of reading you won’t remember when the sun comes out. Doing the crossword and eating kimchi instead of showering and taking care of bills is a pitfall not to be lightly ignored on a damp day. It is also easier to daydream about projects that require much muscle and clanking tools on rusty nuts than it is get a current apartment ready to be vacated.

Something I’ve been thinking about during these recent rains is what I am doing with my reading and writing and the conclusion is that I need to slow down. I need to counter my voracious appetite for reading with more concentration on what I am actually consuming. That is maybe harder than it sounds here on the screen. My mind has been boiling with plots and characters and clever phrases to categorize it all- usually a pleasant distraction from obsessions and sad thoughts- but now nothing is coming from that mess but confusion and unmet obligations. I realize that it is hard for me to remember what I got out of all that time spent bent over all those pages, and for someone who lives and breathes (and writes about) books, this disconnect between pleasure and utility is disturbing.

Not as disturbing as the exploding glasses in my kitchen cabinet (discovered after an unexplained THAWUMP in the night), but a lot less easy to fix.

As always the comments are open for you guys to commiserate and advise. Please do.

dark and dreary

Still postponing the A Long Way Down entry mostly because I don't feel like finishing writing it. I have to say that this easy, breezy book about suicide has got me thinking (ok, when am I never not thinking about this?) about depression.

Here are two recent, great posts about it by smart and funny people:

dooce
mike

I have a hard time writing about the subject, mostly because it doesn't really help me feel less depressed. Sometimes my inability to endlessly expound on the subject that colors most of my life actually makes the depression worse. I could care less about books with depressed main characters, because depression is boring. Depression is intensely personal, incredibly painful, maginficently consuming and boring beyond the descriptive powers of silly adjectives. It takes an amazing writer (or a personal connection) to move me.

In later February, Bookslut will have a review of mine of a graphic memoir about a depressed teenager. I'm sure I will get some flak for criticizing the author's decision to record his illness in the (BORING) way he did. As I say in the review, there is a difference between a record of your depression and creating art about depression. I don't care if you are writing a long-running, autobiographical comic or a zillion-page bestseller. Art requires some sort of analysis or interpretation of a situation. Too hard, not your style? Write a diary.

I have to go right now and watch a German comedy about Holocaust survivors or somesuch for work. Fitting? You decide, because I don't care.