Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl and O Fallen Angel. Her book of essays, Heroines, will be published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents series in Fall 2012.

I read Green Girl as part of a larger body of literature--I guess you could say "literature of the girl," which deals with a lot of different ideas of femininity and the female experience but also I think specifically talks about femininity as a kind of labor in exchange for a (usually limited) degree of material comfort provided by male lovers--like Jean Rhys's narrators, or Doris in Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl. So in a certain sense, that performance isn't entirely consensual, and it's dictated by the demands of male desire, and it's also very explicitly informed by class. There's always the sense that the narrator is being observed, and knows she's being observed, in all these books, and in Green Girl as well. Can you talk a little about how you see your work fitting in with, or writing against, that literature?

Hi Rejectionist! Yes, I think it's become my sort of idée fixe , this idea of the girl, how she has been written, rewritten, whether she herself writes. This obsession ran parallel with my desire to become a writer, to excavate the experience of being a fucked-up girl in my early twenties, because I wasn't reading literature reflecting that, I wanted to write something that made the toxic girls I knew and that I once was say aaahhh with recognition like Infinite Jest , or Kerouac's On the Road did. Of course, I had Jean Rhys as a precursor but didn't know it yet. And then while working in a bookshop in London while 26 or 27 I read all the silver Penguin Rhys paperbacks, devoured them whole--and was like, oh, well, she did it, Rhys did do it, she wrote of a demimonde almost a century earlier that was still so immediately recognizable and real today, of a feminine economy, where girls use and are used. And to some extent I think my character Ruth in Green Girl fits into that tradition--both "preyed and prayed upon," as I write in a reading of Rhys in my upcoming critical book Heroines, but she needs the approval of the outside in order to existentially exist, more passively pulled by the force of others' desire, less so dependent on them for material survival, like Anna with her protector in Rhys' Voyage in the Dark (I love that scene in Voyage in the Dark, the 18-year-old heroine Anna is reading a book, and her older, brazen chorus-girl friend Maudie says of the "dirty book"--"I bet you a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of lies one way or another.") But yes even in Green Girl there's a class system to all of this--Ruth is Woolf's nameless, powerless "girl behind the counter"--or her power is in her youth and beauty. She will let a man buy a dress for her and just hope she doesn't have to sleep with him, or she'll sleep with someone to have power over him. I wrote a toxic girl character more broadly drawn in my first novel, a triptych of Americans during wartime called O Fallen Angel, and a reviewer classified my character, Maggie, as a prostitute, because of a passage in which I wrote that Maggie occasionally slept with men to get help moving, or for money for a ride home. Just like the modernist women I'm fascinated with are classified often in Wikipedia as "prostitutes"--like the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven or girls mentioned only by first name in Surrealist texts. It's actually that these muses of modernism were just very conscious of their roles in the exchange, conscious of what they had to perform (Miller in Tropic of Cancer goes on and on about the "whore" but he too is a "whore" himself, bartering himself and his services for money, for survival. I guess the power is in who gets to name). I discuss a lot of these ideas in the upcoming Heroines.

But to get to your other question, in Green Girl my narrator is the one doing the observing, she has created and is constantly watching the girl, much like the girl always watches herself and is watched. She is kind of an ambivalent mother-figure, sometimes quite cruel and dismissive, other times maternal. In some ways the novel became my meditation on youth in general, and more of a philosophy of the girl, so became more hyper-aware, of the literature she fits into or she's been excluded from. In my creation of my narrator, who is Ruth's author, I was really inspired by Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star.

It's also very interesting to me, and by "interesting" I mean "deeply depressing," the extent to which these kinds of perspectives are totally erased from what's considered literature--I think the "power of who gets to name" is a very nice way of putting it, and who is doing the naming hasn't changed at all between Rhys and Green Girl (I mean, between Marie de France and Green Girl , if we are getting technical). I would consider myself pretty rabidly anti-essentialist, but I think there is also a real truth to the idea of écriture féminine--where you have this body of writing by women that is basically united in having difference imposed upon it, of having specific stories devalued or erased altogether. And obviously particular women--queer/poor/trans/of color--are erased more routinely, but even the idea of telling a story like Ruth's is still seen as not a worthwhile project. It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, because I also write (so far exclusively) about women, and I wonder sometimes if it's possible to really understand work by and about women if you haven't had the experience of being read as female. I also just read Dodie Bellamy's Barf Manifesto, where she describes "the Barf" as a literary form that "comes naturally to women" ("The Barf is feminist, unruly, cheerfully, monstrous... not so much anti-logocentric, anti-dichotomy, as outside the whole fucking system"). Do you believe in a kind of writing that is, I guess for lack of a better phrase, inherently female? Or that that shared experience of exclusion leads to a different kind of literature?

I mean, I think the literature's out there‚ in contemporary American writing, just in the past few years, I'm thinking works by Danielle Dutton, everything Danielle publishes on her Dorothy press, Laurie Weeks' Zipper Mouth, Bhanu Kapil's recent Schizophrene, a lot of writing done on women writers' personal blogs, like by Bhanu or Suzanne Scanlon or Jennifer Lowe or Jackie Wang. I think our work is often just pushed to the margins. We are often shuttled to the "minor" in the public literary conversation. A few things to parse out here--when I think of l'écriture feminine as interrogated by the French feminists, I think of a radical mode of writing, that is the writing of voice, of the body, by the outlaw. That to me is also a question of style, closely associated with the Surrealist idea of automatic writing--and maybe some of what Woolf was talking about when she wrote about breaking the sentence in A Room of One's Own, which to her looked a lot like Dorothy Richardson's stream-of-consciousness. A lot of Cixous' examples of this type of radical writing were men--Thomas Bernhard or Joyce's Molly Bloom monologue. I would add to that Eliot's "The Waste Land" or the monologues of Artaud or Bataille's Blue of Noon or Céline or Henry Miller (and for women examples--of course Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles and Violette Leduc and Marguerite Duras and etc.). But another aspect of this idea of feminine writing is not only the style but also the experience--that of being subaltern, silenced. And I think the explicit, the excessive, the emotional, is a vital way to write against the system, to revolt--and for precursors of this I think of the queer and feminist practitioners of New Narrative, including Dodie, but also Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives, Dennis Cooper, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, how these writers subverted the novel form and inserted their monstrous and messy selves into the conversation. I don't think the reader should be excluded from the conversation, though--there's this weird idea in our culture that women writing is only for women (I'm thinking V.S. Naipaul and his dismissal of women writing as "feminine tosh")--I don't think that's true at all. I think these works are just less visible and known, and so are not regarded as canonical. I write a lot to this in the critical text that's coming out.

Oh, for sure, I don't meant to say that you have to be female to read women's writing; but I was thinking about this conversation when I was walking to the subway the other day, and some guy started following me yelling "It's my birthday! Why don't you fuck me!" and I thought, "You know, this is a very particular and visceral type of experience that a large group of people will never have, and it certainly colors my perception of the world whether or not I want it to." For me, I think that kind of externally enforced essentialism is pretty central to my experience of reading, of the kinds of stories I'm drawn to and the kinds I lose patience with very quickly.

"Feminine tosh" is a nice segueway into Marie Calloway--you wrote that brilliant piece that was republished at Thought Catalog, and there's so much there I want to ask you about--but I think one thing you didn't really talk about that interests me is whether you think that kind of confessional writing is altered by the medium it's transmitted in. Do you think the Internet has affected what you call "the decision to write the body"?

Why didn't you fuck him? I mean, it WAS his birthday! Very little to ask for, after all. Yes. We need women to write to revolt against THAT. Agreed. And more than that, I think it was Simone deB who said in The Second Sex, I'm rewording her, that yes largely we are equal, but it's these little upsets and humiliations that we burrow under our skin, the experiences of living in a patriarchal society. We need a literature to viscerally reflect that. As Jean Rhys does for me, or Virginia Woolf, the modernist wild women I love, as well as more contemporary writers, Kathy Acker or Elfriede Jelinek or Ingeborg Bachmann. I find myself lately reading *mostly* women writers, and women writers who write of the fucked and fucked-up experience of being female, although my mentors on the page are equally male (Thomas Bernhard, Beckett, Henry Miller, Bataille, I love so many assholes it seems). What I guess I was reacting to, which I don't think at all that you were implying, is that the feminine experience is not universal or human enough for great literature (which even Simone deB in The Second Sex suggested). Or Caitlin Flanagan just recently in The Atlantic hurrahing about Didion being for girls, Hunter S. Thompson for boys. Fuck that.

I think there's a whole other revolution of l'écriture feminine happening on the Internet--I know that seems hyperbolic, but I really do believe it. The blog is such a fascinating, confessional, diaristic, form, that has something in common with the notebook form, Camus' notebooks or Elizabeth Hardwick's fictional notebook Sleepless Nights, or Montaigne's longform essays. I'm thinking less of Marie Calloway and more the notebooking you do, or the subsubculture of writers who keep personal literary blogs that comment often on my own blog, Bhanu Kapil or Jennifer Lowe or Suzanne Scanlon. I think there is something particularly feminine about this form--also that we can publish ourselves, and that it's uncensored except what we choose to censor, that we can be pseudonymous or develop different literary personas. This sort of blogging is part process, part performance art. And I would connect it in a lineage to girls writing in their Tumblrs, and before that Livejournals. What I find fascinating about Marie Calloway and mostly the older school, traditional reaction, is that she is a writer who grew up with these forms, so being confessional in public was second-nature to her, part of the way writers and girls like her compose and mediate their existences. Probably the last third of Heroines meditates on the girl-blogger, and her previous incarnation as a diarist in the modernist period, Jean Rhys' diaries or Anais Nin's notebooks.

Right, his birthday! What an asshole I am.

Another thing that's so fascinating to me about the reaction to that story is the obsession with whether or not it's "true," or how much of it is "true"--which, to my mind, is one of the least interesting questions you can ask about a piece of writing (I mean, other than journalism, where "truth" takes on a whole different quality--but anyway). Personal blogging seems to blur that line quite a bit in interesting ways. Eileen Myles is a writer who plays with that pretty brilliantly, I think--in all her prose, but especially in Inferno. And as I told you, I read Inferno and Green Girl back to back, and they complement each other and intersect in these fantastic ways. Two very different blueprints for your potential life as a girl, but the problems faced by the narrators are the same: being fundamentally hampered by other people's readings of your body (there's that great line in Inferno: "I always hear about men feeling humiliated by the army, or something. They should try being female"; which dovetails with Green Girl's narrator's observation that "being a girl is like always being a tourist, always conscious of yourself, always seeing yourself as if from the outside"). So collapsing all of that writing, which comes out of a lived experience--I mean, it has to, I don't think you can live the experience of being female without being affected by it on some level--into "Is it true? Or not?"--seems so tremendously boring to me. I guess that's not a question. But maybe you have a thought about it?

Yeah, it's really interesting how short-sighted people can be in terms of literary history. I keep on saying again and again that I'm boring myself--nonfiction and fiction are genre terms, worse than that, they're publishing house terms, but this strict division wasn't always there. And the writing I'm most interested in blurs these boundaries, blurs boundaries in general--and I definitely see the New Narrative writers as fitting into that. I recently reread Kathy Acker's Great Expectations and I was really thrown with how she was fucking with the notion of autobiography, she's writing her life, she's writing the life of the girl, but she complicates it, she fractures into all of these personas, she tries to insert the girl back into literature, she writes the girl coming to be an artist, which was before seen as the province of the great men, which I think Eileen M. does as well with taking back the poet's novel in Inferno... And I am really interested in Eileen Myles' recent prose work, as well as my editor, Chris Kraus', I feel they have really revolutionized and made feminine, or queer, the nonfiction novel. But there are precursors to this, Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, where the narrator is named Christopher Isherwood, Henry Miller's novels. But the naked memoir was often seen as taboo in modernism, Scott Fitzgerald getting shit from his male contemporaries for his "Crack-Up" essays, or Ezra Pound furiously scribbling PHOTOGRAPHY next to the lines of marital distress in Eliot's "The Waste Land." But... but... a point I try to make in Heroines... that I really wrestle with... is that I feel it's considered more dangerous, more taboo, when the girl who was previously muse or character takes back her own narrative. And I really focus on the shitstorm that happened when Zelda Fitzgerald attempted to circle around her experiences of breakdown, while writing Save me the Waltz, the "madness" material Fitzgerald was stewing over for years and years with Tender is the Night. Or Jean Rhys' drawing from her life as material in the novels.

The Marie C. situation, added to that the immediacy of blogging, is not a strict parallel. She initially wrote the piece as memoir on her blog, then when Tao Lin published it some names were changed and it was "ta-da!" fiction. I don't deny there's perhaps some ethical dubiousness about writing so confessional in a blog format, involving potentially unaware parties (I'm referring to people's concern over the girlfriend in the unknowing ménage). But the point I think I was trying to make, at least one of them, is that this is not a new conversation. And yes the question "is it true?" is totally boring. And the defense "yet it's fiction," also boring.

I think people draw such strict lines between "fiction" and "memoir"--perhaps MFA programs are to blame, with their genre divisions? What you say here about Green Girl is true. I wrote from, I always try to draw from, to plumb, the material of my existence. I did with Green Girl go into a space of fiction, I did begin to regard Ruth as this character outside of myself, and Agnes, who truth be told are both versions of myself at one point, and began to model both of them on others I had known, the girl living down below from me, celebutantes, wordless girls that stared blankly at me from fashion advertisements. And Green Girl did start more as autobiography, but as Jean Rhys has said, real life doesn't have shape, and then as I began to work more and more on the book, and it became this world more distanced from myself, the novel itself became a meditation on fiction, on what it means to be a character, what it means for a woman or girl to always feel like a character in a novel, and with the appearance of the narrator--which came later--also a semifictionalized character, I began to meditate on this character, Ruth, this former self, on youth in general. But in terms of "truth"--I think, I hope, there's a lot of truth in the novel. I am not a blonde Deneuvian ingenue, I have never worked as a perfume spritzer in a major department store, when I lived in London I was an impoverished new married, working in a bookshop, and a few years away from those mythical fuck-up years. But the stuff of the novel--the real stuff--is true. And the other stuff--the icing--where I lived, who I worked with, characters in my path, experiences being out in the world, my experience of being a girl in a city, of being a foreigner in London, of getting my hair cut--lots of that is taken from my life, my lived and observed life, taken up and twisted and planted where I saw fit.

I am always reminded of this when I see the way men sit on the subway--the unapologetic occupation of as much space as you want to take up can be a really useful strategy. I do that in my writing, and in my daily life as much as I can.

Oh I like that--an unapologetic occupation.

New Yorkers: Kate is reading at the Franklin Park Reading Series on February 13 and at the KGB Bar on February 19.

Lately my life has been exhausting and amazing and sad and complicated and huge and thrilling and making me cry for a lot of reasons I am not going to talk to you about, but sometimes everything is different all of a sudden and then it is really different, and there you are, in the middle of all that difference, wondering what happened to your old life and missing it and not missing it. Last night I went to a dinner party and everyone at the dinner party was a real artist, like the kind of artist who is working on an installation in a park, but a legitimate installation and not the kind of installation people I know would install, which would be "drive up in the middle of the night and leave a bunch of shit there." Or the kind of artist who made a movie about a genocide and the movie was so good that people still call her now from that country whenever something bad happens. Or the kind of artist who is a Fellow of something. Or the kind of artist who owns property. You know what I mean? The nicest people ever but "I have a blog" doesn't really hold up. Like always I was shy and my clothes were weird and on my way to the train a homeless man laughed at me and yelled "Vampire be happy!" and I thought that would make a good T shirt. No comma after the vampire. "What is your story," said the filmmaker to me, and I had no idea. What is my story? I don't know. Which part? I don't like telling it unless I'm trying to charm you and then I just tell the one about running away with the circus. Everyone loves that story.

Nobody likes talking about their work but everyone always asks you about your work at dinner parties of artists because that's the only thing artists can think of to talk about, but my work is I don't even know what. I am mildly famous on the internet which is hard work to take seriously even though I like all of the things I write for the internet, and I write about teenagers and myself, which sounds dumb when you are talking to someone who made an award-winning film about genocide, "My work is talking about myself," right, that's a dumb thing to say. My work is collecting plastic pants and band shirts I am too old to wear. My work is not letting myself look at the internet too much. At the dinner party I got drunk, but quietly, and I ate three helpings of lemon tart and part of a cookie and this was after I ate all the olives that I brought and also three bowls of pasta or maybe four bowls of pasta, and I took extra sausages out of the pasta dish when no one was paying attention and ate those too. Sometimes at dinner parties I think, You have a little bit of money and I don't have any money so I am going to eat all the food. It was a cold night and I didn't have a warm enough coat, because I gave away all my coats, because I have developed this inexplicable aesthetic objection to coats. You see? I'm talking about myself.

Or people will ask me about my work and I will find a way to talk about someone else's book instead, or I will ask them where they grew up, or I will fall over and die, anything anything anything to not talk about it. What is the point of talking about it. You make it or you don't and it's good or it isn't and if it isn't, well, that's embarrassing. Like when you meet someone and you like them and then you listen to their band and you think, Oh my god, and there is a part of you that can't like them ever again no matter how hard you try. In real life I don't like talking about myself at all, which I guess is sort of funny. I like talking about books and things to eat and I like talking about kinds of whiskey and I like talking about music a little bit, but not with people who are the kinds of people who know all the track names in order and what year the original drummer quit.

Books I don't like and why I don't like them is one of my favorite things to talk about, which has gotten me into trouble on the internet before--jesus, internet, so sensitive, fucking loosen up a little. In real life you just get into fights with people about books and it is the greatest thing ever and you can tell that way if you like them, how they fight about the book and what books they will go to bat for, and how they react when you say "I don't read books by men anymore really." Just so you know, if you ever meet me in real life, this is a test. I mean, it's true, but it's also a test. And if you get it I will probably like you. And if you do that thing where you throw up your hands and pretend to shake me when I hate a book you love I will probably like you, too, and then when we find a book we both love together it will be an extra kind of triumph, and we will go into the night like friends. Bonus points for you if you read weirdos and queers but we can meet halfway at The Master and Margarita also, see, that's a book a boy wrote. I'm not narrow-minded, although I am definitely a bitch.

At the dinner party we didn't talk about books, I tried not to talk at all. People talked about AA meetings they had gone to--with friends, not for themselves, we all drank a lot at that dinner party. I forget what else we talked about. Places you live in New York. Real estate, this is a thing everyone talks about here, it's sort of charming. Where is your apartment and how big is it and how much is your rent and how awful is your landlady, oh my god, she goes through your trash, are you serious. I looked at all the books on the shelves, which is another thing I do. This year, like every year, I resolved to be less hateful, and this year, like every year, I am failing. My friend Mary read my chart and told me that this year will be a banner year, a year full of successes, and I thought What if this year is the year I am not poor anymore, what then. I have spent so long despising people with money; what happens in the unlikely event I turn into one? And then I thought of a friend I haven't talked to in years, who used to say that the thing he did whenever he had any money was to get it away from himself as soon as possible, which still seems like the best strategy to me. When I make it, I'm buying.

When I was at my fancy artist residency I started working on a goth mix for someone who had never heard of Bauhaus and I listened to it one night, alone in my studio, to see if it was any good, and it was so good I had to turn it up all the way and get out of my chair and start dancing. You know that LCD Soundsystem song. Dance with me until everything's all right. Never change never change never change never change. Curtains open, whatever, it's the woods. Dancing for the deer and the stars and the beech trees, arms flailing. Love is a murderer but if she calls you tonight everything is all right. I can change I can change I can change if it helps you fall in love. That feeling I get sometimes, that feeling that this is my life, my real life, my life I made. Dancing until I was sweaty and breathless and full of light, my own light, a light that was for me and me alone. That's the work, the best work, the only kind.

SCENE: A VIETNAMESE RESTAURANT in Chinatown. REJECTIONIST and FRIEND are eating noodles. One wall of the restaurant is mirrored. REJECTIONIST is facing mirror.

REJECTIONIST FRIEND: ...so the premiere of The Next Generation is called "The Encounter at Far Point," and the plot is that Picard is the new captain of the Enterprise, and they go to investigate this, like, space base, Far Point Station...

LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE: ...applied to Yaddo, but I'm sure I won't get in--

HER DATE: Oh, you'll totally get in, your novel is so fantastic!

LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE: Do you think so?

HER DATE: Absolutely. It's fantastic.

LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE: (Bats eyelashes)

(REJECTIONIST perks up, stares at LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE and HER DATE in mirror)

FRIEND: Man, this town is fucking lousy with writers. Anyway, it turns out that the aliens on this planet have kidnapped a creature that can turn itself into any shape and they're making it turn itself into a spaceport and the creature's lover comes flying around in space, so the captain releases the space port alien and it turns into like a marine mammal type of thing, or a sting ray I think, and they go off together, it's a romantic kind of ending. I might remember the last line. I think the empathic lady--

REJECTIONIST: Is that Whoopi Goldberg?

FRIEND: No, Counselor Troy. I think she says that she senses joy and gratitude or something. Oh and then there's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"--that one they're trying to make contact with this culture no one has been able to communicate with and Captain Picard gets beamed down to this planet, and he and this alien he can't talk to have to band together to defend themselves against this monster, but then Picard figures out the aliens communicate by referencing stories. That one's really good.

LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE: ...I mean I don't want this to be, you know, like a commercial thing--I am just so opposed to that, you know? I mean I just don't want to compromise on anything. I wouldn't feel right. But I think a romantic interest would still be in keeping with my vision, you know? I think romantic intrigue can really create tension. You know, make it so much more salable? (LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE stares significantly at HER DATE) I mean, you know what I mean? Romantic intrigue?

HER DATE: Romantic intrigue, yes, yes, I think romantic intrigue is very important. (Stares significantly at LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE)

FRIEND: Then of course there's the time when Picard got turned into a Borg, that was a really good one--

REJECTIONIST: (Leaning toward LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE and HER DATE, about to fall out of her chair) Mmmmm.

FRIEND: Are you listening?

REJECTIONIST: To them? Yes.

FRIEND: To me. That episode--

REJECTIONIST: SSSSSSHHHHHH

HER DATE: Have you thought about showing your novel to Emily?

LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE: Oh god, Emily, you know the trouble with Emily is that she is so fixated on voice. I never show my work to Emily if I can help it.

HER DATE: That was pretty weird in workshop, the other week, when she started in on you--

LADY AT NEIGHBORING TABLE: Emily is a bitch.

REJECTIONIST FRIEND: (Thoughtfully) I used to be sort of closeted about it, but I'm not really embarrassed about my feelings for TNG anymore--

REJECTIONIST: Do you have a pen?

REJECTIONIST FRIEND: What? Why?

REJECTIONIST: I need to write this down! Where is my pen! (Rummages frantically through bag)

REJECTIONIST FRIEND: (Confused) They're all on Netflix, I think. I can tell you the names of the ones you should wa--

REJECTIONIST: SSSSHHHHHHHHHH

FIN

Fair readers, old and new! Lo, how long are the days that separate the present from the last time we frolicked together in that Elysian field of the intellect! Do not think this Cat has been deaf to your entreaties, your cries of "Lola Pants! Gorgeous creature, speak to me of divine and wondrous things, for I am lost in the wilderness of self-doubt!" There are birds to watch from one's perch inside one's prison, and kibbles to be crunched, and paws to be licked, and deep thoughts to be had--and so you must forgive this humble Cat for her preoccupation with her own concerns, and her general disinterest in yours!

And yet, of late your voices have clamored so mightily that even the most aloof of cats cannot remain immune to them. "Lola Pants!" you shout. "Here we have come upon a New Year, a time of beginnings, and yet my heart quavers! Will I write a book that is excellent? Am I handsome? Have I even the faintest hint of talent? Do my friends love me or are they only pretending? My writing is really stupid, isn't it? I have vowed to move forward, to stand fast to my Resolutions, and yet fear and anxiety creep into my person like a thousand ghostly knives! O fairest and softest of incarnadine-nosèd Cats, whose exquisite fur begs petting! Comfort me in my time of crisis!"

Indeed, fair readers, though this Cat is deeply absorbed in her own great works, she shall descend to the pedestrian realm you inhabit to impart a morsel of wisdom! Nay, do not babble so in gratitude--Cats are not won over with platitudes and gross flattery! Hush, now, and listen! Though it is ever distasteful for this Cat to speak of the Rejectionist--her tormentor, her gaoler, that detestable personage responsible for her current ignoble situation of dependence and imprisonment--you may find some utility in the following anecdote--indeed, you may come to understand, fair reader, the attitude necessary for what your tiny minds consider Success (and O, the ambitions of humans--so charmingly minuscule! so naive!--but this advice is directed not at Cats, whose dreams are far grander, but at you, dear readers, constrained as you are by the limits of your simian intellect).

As you know, Cats do not have thumbs, and are thus obliged to depend upon others for their provender--a situation so distasteful as to be nearly unspeakable. ("Lola Pants!" you cry. "What has kibble got to do with my despair?" And this Cat flicks her tail at you, and says, "Silence! Patience! Ingrates!") A Cat's schedule must not be determined by the whims of others--a Cat's meals must come when she demands them! How is a Cat to address this affront? By rising, fair readers, at the hour of four in the morning, when odious Rejectionist is enmeshed in slumber, drooling upon her pillow and emitting the most sonorous of snores! (Ugh!) And though this Cat would too prefer to sleep blissfully through the night, it is only by galloping madly from room to room--by sharpening her claws upon the furniture--by voicing her protest at the highest of volumes--that she may convey who is the true master in this house! Nothing shall deter her from this crucial project--not even foul Rejectionist spraying her with a water-bottle! Nay, this Cat shall not rest until that lazy ape rises from the bed, and fills this Cat's bowl with the finest of wet foods, and admits the superiority of Cats in every regard!

"But Lola Pants!" you wail in chorus. "What does this have to do with my book? I don't want to run around the apartment at four in the morning! I want to be a Genius!" And this Cat must respond with disdain--have you listened to none of her counsel? It is not the task itself that is the crux, but the spirit with which it is performed--the spirit of Persistence! of Dedication! of Commitment to a Goal! Think of this humble Cat, rising each night during the longest and darkest hour, refusing to hear the siren song of sloth! For she would far rather remain curled against the snoring bulk of her tormentor, basking in the Rejectionist's one useful quality--the warmth of her person! But a greater purpose calls her, and thus she must answer that mighty voice! If Greatness is your destiny, you must rise to meet it--for as all cats know, the gods do not stoop. Ad astra per aspera, fair readers. Perhaps on your way to the celestial sphere you might think to offer this humble Cat a morsel of sustenance, that she may comfort herself in her long imprisonment with your gratitude--simpering and insufficient as it may be. Go forward into this year, fair readers, and remember: Persistence! Persistence! Persistence!

1. There must be utility in every post that you offer, a kind of utility that is never defined but will alter the lives of others to such an extent that they will wish to give you things, or money, or people with things and money will read the utile posts of your blog and send you emails saying, "Here is a product that may interest your readers, I will send it to you and you may tell them about it," or if you are lucky they will pay you money, and you will wear the product or take photographs of yourself eating or using or applying the product. The utility will be a part of your content. Content is sentences but they are a special kind of sentences, they are sentences that make transactions happen, the transaction of money from someone else to you.

2. There should be nothing about your cat.

3. Because really who cares about your cat. Or your life or your stories, or the time when you got on the bus and some hippie tried to take his bike on the bus because the bike rack was broken, this was in Seattle and obviously not New York, where it would not occur to anyone that a bus should be used to transport a bicycle in any fashion, and the bus driver said that she would not start the bus until the hippie took the bike off the bus and the hippie shouted that it was the responsibility of the bus to provide a functioning bike rack, and the people behind you cried "Get off the fucking bus!" and "Why you got a bike if you won't ride it!" and this state of impasse continued for some time until at last the hippie, sulking and yowling, carried his bike off the bus and then the Fremont drawbridge went up and the bus couldn't go anywhere anyway and you were fifteen minutes late to your lunch date. This is an example of a boring story about your life that does not belong on a blog.

4. Don't talk about sex. Don't talk about yourself. Don't talk about politics. Don't talk about things that matter. Don't talk about things that don't matter. Don't repeat things. Don't say things other people have said already, or things you said earlier, or things you wrote about and forgot you wrote about. Don't love yourself too much but don't not love yourself, either. Don't think you are important. Don't think you have anything to say. Definitely don't come home drunk at two in the morning and google yourself, just this one time, for fun. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

5. If you say some things that make most people dislike you you will not succeed, but if you say most things some people dislike you will not succeed. If you say most things most people like while some people dislike you you will not succeed. If all things said by you are not all things to most people some of the time you will not succeed, but you may succeed if you avoid ruffling most feathers of some people or some feathers of most people, but don't have opinions, or if you have opinions most people should share them some of the time.

6. Don't write about writing. Don't write about not writing. Don't say bad things about other people's writing. Make friends. Love everyone. Even if you don't love them: say you love them. No one will love you if you don't say you love them. Be patient but don't think things will happen for you if you just sit there, jesus, what's wrong with you, anyway.

7. No cat. Kitten tumblrs are okay. Everyone loves kitten tumblrs.

1.
Lisbeth Salander is always willing to fuck you. That's what makes her Lisbeth Salander. You know it, from the first page. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

2.
My old boss used to compare me to Lisbeth Salander. My old boss never understood why I did not take this as a compliment. After all, Lisbeth Salander is hot. "Not that you're a sociopath!" she would say. "Just, you know, you're thin, and you have so many tattoos. And your clothes." If I remember correctly--it's been a long time, since I read the Lisbeth Salander book--Lisbeth Salander only has one tattoo, a dragon, placed in a becoming manner upon her bony shoulder. Lisbeth Salander definitely does not have a stick-and-poke banner (empty) from the night she drank a fifth of Wild Turkey with her friend Matt and decided to commemorate the occasion, or a procession of wobbly broken hearts up the inside of her calf from the time she let her friend's ex-junkie lover practice on her with his new tattoo gun. Lisbeth Salander does not have her dead cat's name inside a heart over her hip, or a flight of shorebirds winging their way from her knees to her hipbones--the first tattoo I paid real money for, and the best tattoo I have ever seen, if I do say so myself. Stick and poke banners: not sexy. At all. Believe me. It's tiny, at least. My old boss used to compare me to Lisbeth Salander, and then she would make me go get her coffee. Small latte, not too hot, two sugars. Look at me: I still remember.

3.
Lisbeth Salander is skinny. Frail-skinny, bird-boned skinny, so that when you fuck Lisbeth Salander you think: Not so tough. I could break you. Fuckable damaged girls are always skinny in books by men; fat girls are a different kind of damaged. Which is to say, unlovable. Remember that, the next time you tell someone Lisbeth Salander is strong.

4.
Here's what most women I know who have been raped did to the person who raped them: Nothing. There's not much you can do. If there were, most women I know probably wouldn't have been raped. I worked once, more than ten years ago now, with a woman who shot her abuser. She's still in jail. He's fine.

5.
You're the only one who sees it, the woman inside the monster. Like Beauty and the Beast. Give her a rose and she's yours. Lisbeth Salander will never look for the beauty in herself. That's your job, tiger.

6.
The posters are up for the Lisbeth Salander movie. They're everywhere, in all the subway tunnels. Not the famously controversial one, where Lisbeth Salander is naked and gazes defiantly at the camera as James Bond grabs her boobs. This one is just the side of her head, with James Bond inside it. I don't think it's supposed to be symbolic, that there's a dude in there.

7.
The Lisbeth Salander clothes store on Gansevoort is only open for three days. I went yesterday, the first day. It was full of Italian girls in Uggs. The store has a fake library and flashing lights and a dj. Real comprehensive look. In New York they call this a curated environment. I got some pretty sick plastic pants even though I keep telling myself no more sweatshop clothes. They're not very well-made. I'm kind of thinking about going back today and getting another pair, for when they fall apart. Is that weird? Maybe that's weird. It's just that they look so good.

8.
Lisbeth Salander is not an actual person, although she reminds me a lot of Lara Croft.

9.
Lisbeth Salander is crazy, Lisbeth Salander is broken. Lisbeth Salander doesn't know kindness. Until you come along. You. Yes, you. Lisbeth Salander is waiting for you, to show her the mysteries of her own heart. Lisbeth Salander: incomplete without you. You'll find yourself attracted to her, despite her prickly demeanor; underneath it all, she's really rather pretty, although she doesn't think so. Tell her she's a babe! She'll growl, but secretly she'll be pleased. There's a soft spot in there, just waiting for you to find it. Draw it out, with your compassion. Feed her a square meal. Lisbeth Salander is a stray you can take home. Pick the burrs out of her matted coat and brush her until her fur shines. Lisbeth Salander is cleverer than you but by the end of the book that won't matter. Lisbeth Salander just needs to fall in love. You--yes, you--can be the only man who makes her real.

10.
I've known some strong women. Feral, my friend Dirt's forest-activist girlfriend, who u-locked herself by the neck to a bulldozer on a forest stand that was about to be clearcut and lived on a platform in the trees for months at a time. Later she went to work on the Greenpeace boat and after that she sailed around the world. I had a brief delusional moment where I considered forest activism, until Dirt told me you have to poop in a bucket. In front of other people. That's the thing about the platform: You can't come down. My friend Noélia, who grew up in the middle of the desert with a dad who beat the shit out of her and brothers who did other, worse things, who was hooked on meth by the time she was fifteen, which is around when she met the boyfriend who spent the next ten years trying to kill her. Now she is a lawyer who does pro bono work for undocumented women; in her free time, she started a social justice organization. My friends who have hopped trains alone across the country, hitchhiked solo from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, bicycled alone from Morocco to Ulaan Bataar, my friends who are social workers and activists and artists and revolutionaries and lovers and fighters, fighters, fighters. Me. Not to toot my own horn, but I am pretty fucking strong. I guess "Is awesome, loves self, probably won't have sex with you" would make for a pretty short book, though. Or at least, not a compelling one. Because it wouldn't be about men.

11.
My friend Meg and I are looking for an intern, to go see the Lisbeth Salander movie and take screenshots of Lisbeth Salander's clothes. Not during the rape or torture scenes, please. If you're interested, let me know.

So it is wacky, right, to spend a month in the woods having your lunch brought to you every day in a hamper--O reader! How your friend the Rejectionist mourns the loss of that hamper!!!!--and wondering why exactly it is you live in the giant cesspool that is New York, and then to be suddenly thrust back into said cesspool without warning; wacky and sort of disorienting. When I got off the train at Penn Station I got lost, on a street I walked on every day when I worked at a literary agency. But then a few days later I went into the grocery store, where a homeless gentleman drinking out of a fifth tucked into a paper bag held the door for me, and continued to hold the door, just in general, while commenting on the weather to no one in particular, and I thought right, here I am, I am home. All of which is to say it is That Time of Year Again, the time Support Team and your friend the Rejectionist brave the shitshow that is Fifth Avenue, and the TOTALLY MYSTERIOUS LINE OF PEOPLE WAITING TO GET IN THE ABERCROMBIE AND FITCH STORE, WHAT THE FUCK ARE THOSE PEOPLE DOING, DO YOU KNOW? LIKE I AM SERIOUS, to photograph the Bergdorf Goodman Christmas windows for you.

I have a complicated relationship with capitalism, to be sure, but if we are going to be living in an era at the edge of the apocalypse, and if we have to tolerate totally incompetent motherfuckers stealing all the money and ruining everything for everybody--well, at least rich people bring us the Bergdorf Goodman Christmas windows, I guess. I do really love the Bergdorf Goodman Christmas windows. First we stopped off at the MOMA, to check out the Willem de Kooning show, and the museum was on fire. I am not making this up. The lobby was full of dense blue toxic-smelling smoke, like burning-plastic smoke, and the fire alarm was flashing, and yet the first floor was packed with people milling about quite unconcernedly. We asked the man who gave us our tickets if we ought to be worried about the palpable evidence of fire, and he said, "Well, they haven't evacuated the building? So I imagine it is safe," which is I guess as much reassurance as you get in New York. If there are no visible flames, go look at the art.

I don't actually like Willem de Kooning, is the thing--I always forget this--but I was pleased to discover two people I had never heard of and did like very much. Here are some posters letterpressed by Ben Vautier (French, b. 1935).

This one says "Crisis and depression at Ben's house, Saturday the ___ at ___ o'clock."

And this one says "Art is my ass."

Here is a piece by Doris Salcedo (Colombian, b. 1958); there are little recessed cubbies with shoes in them, covered over with sheepskin that's stitched to the wall. So spooky and beautiful in real life--one of those pieces that just catches you, and you have to stand and look at it for a long time.

But it turns out inhaling burning plastic is super bad for you, even if you cannot determine the source, and after just a little while both ST and Rejectionist were quite overcome by the fumes and obliged to flee the museum for the out-of-doors. Also it turns out that inhaling burning plastic makes you want to punch the people waiting in line to get into the Abercrombie and Fitch store, with an irrational degree of intensity (in my defense, it is incredibly difficult to get past them). Anyway! HERE THEY ARE. THE BERGDORF GOODMAN WINDOWS. So lovely.

This one was my favorite. OUT OF CONTROL.

And this one had all sorts of neat bookish things in it. All the animals are made out of paper!

I DIDN'T EVEN HIT ANYONE. You can send a cookie, if you like. Here are better pictures of each window.
xo r.