The author emailed this response to Leila Zalokar’s December 1 post, “Planet X,” under the heading, “Awesome.”
Starts with a bang! [couldn’t help myself]
And right off the bat, I can’t think of a word, but that melancholy, ironic, hopefulness(?)
…still, the desire to fuck / morning cigarettes…
really hit for me — and so many great / favorite lines in the first section that I’m going to resist copy / pasting all of them.
I’ve been reading and thinking about “Planet X” for a few days now, that’s how I came to “awesome,” I’m struck and struck again but also lost, unable to keep track of reactions I wanted to convey…
So, I’m going to just jump in in the middle — that cinematic section (literally and my sense in reading, in fact, first time through I was thinking of movies and THEN came back to see “Old video footage” at the top — your careful reader… )
Reading, I was trying to keep track of: mom, her / my [the narrator’s] mom, woman who isn’t her mom, she, the sister, the birthday and then two birthdays…
It brought to mind the focus (I, at least) needed (trying) to read [Gaddis’s] JR.
With “Planet X,” at first I was mostly feeling my shortcomings as a reader and my lack of focus, but there was something else — it turned into an experience; like the feelings one gets watching old family movies e.g. is that Uncle Bobby as a kid?, is that me or my brother?, when was this…
A couple days ago I was taking a walk thinking about the section on “fatherless planet,” I liked the way Z explained “a planet with no fathers” which lit up the other ways one might interpret the line.
It also brought to mind an interview with Cage. He was talking about authors he liked, he gave a small list and then said (if I remember right) that it had gotten down to Joyce and Stein and mostly Joyce, because Joyce created a whole world.
Something like that.
And that’s the feeling I have here with Z. I wonder what’s intentional, what she wants us to think, how she’s guiding our experience by showing us things (and what I’m getting, or getting wrong, or missing), but there’s also a sense of wandering around in a place where I might choose to look at this or that, the sense that whichever way I turn, there will be something to see.
And the feeling that we can think about those things and see where they take us, that different ways of understanding are possible / acceptable.
There’s another quote. Cage was visiting a Japanese temple famous for its rock garden with stones arranged with great care (“perfectly”) in a field of sand. Reflecting on the rock garden, what he’s seen and been told, Cage says he thinks that those stones would look good anywhere in that sand.[1]
To me, Cage’s thought points to the idea that the beauty we perceive happens in our heads — that we (viewers / listeners) make the interesting coincidences or structures we find in the world.
I imagine there’s something to that (on a brain / sensory structure level), but my surmise in regard to Z, (this piece in particular, but maybe generally) is that it’s possible to have such an experience as a reader, when the writing is rich enough, when the writer is capable of creating a world for us.
Just a thought. Back to fatherless planet! I liked the shift of feeling here:
you never know who’s cumming inside you
I wasn’t just going to cut and paste but the lists, the explanatory concatenations in “X” are just great, a quick selection of what I’m failing to name:
In his youth, the detective had wandered the criminal streets of Salonika on the eve of its apocalypse, the Metaxas years, his people were gangsters, Sephardic Jews, old ladies hawking wares, foreign whores, honest cops: the few honest cops who only exist in books, alcoholic and melancholy, with pained eyes, unflinching amid the horror, until something so ghastly happens, some senseless femicide, dazzling and obscene, that even he flinches, even he turns away…
[I included the first bit because I also wanted to say the detective (along with Z’s writing) bring Bolaño to mind]
Another:
Women murdered at birth, who hate themselves, whose bodies have been violated, whose psyches have been mutilated, whose sexuality has been stolen from them, trans women who got called faggots, never had a childhood, women who lie around in bed and smoke cigarettes on front porches all day long, hide from the sun, prefer the night, have no secrets left to tell.
Also, those jumbled bits of lines that add up so strikingly from the phone call.
More of that engaging blurring in the sections with…
“the girl she loves”
I lost my train of thought, re “cinematic” (which is where the sense of “engaging blurring” comes from for me).
I was thinking of movies where they’ll have two similar looking characters and it’s not clear what the relationship is, e.g. Are they supposed to be versions of the same person? Are they just there to give you a feeling that something‘s up or to provide a sense of real-world confusion — I think I have a Lynch movie in mind (Mulholland Drive(?)).
And, then there are the women (sex workers / escorts?) who are dressing up like movie stars of the day.
Also thinking of writers who will give two characters the same name or similar names — (maybe Bolaño again, though not just him) and then explain in the way Z does
(e.g. fatherless world)
it’s both an obvious construct (I’m thinking about style, the way the writing hits us) and a bit of truth about how we experience the world — e.g. you see someone who reminds you of someone else, and all that can follow.
Sorry to go on and I know I’m not clear enough — hopefully I’m conveying the sense of my experience reading “Planet X.”
I like the section with “Another girl.” And the subsequent thoughts on the nature of love — Leila’s seasonal fall and the nature of love generally — the “center of the world” stuff but also the dazzling images and beauty.
I liked the part about one love(r) being in / taking the place of (or part of the place of) another:
The girl she loves has a body, presumably, but it is no longer the body inside her. Her body has been replaced by another body, the last one to share her bed. This is a story about whores, about three whores, it might seem as if one whore is the heroine, but actually it’s the other, and maybe the third.
The spirit of the girl she loves is still inside her, alongside another’s body. One might live like this, Leila thinks, with the spirit of one, the body of another, just like how the second-wave terfs called trans women Frankenstein.
[…] the spirit of one, the body of another […]
And the funny, depreciating self-analysis (as I read it) at the end. (terfs / Frankenstein)
I liked the scene in the pool — I had to look up “metempsychosis”, but I dug that line even before I looked it up.
The section about Heidi and the stripper…
…so much fun together but I was constantly running to the ATM…
Many kinds of love indeed (funny but also sincere / serious).
The poem at the end(!).
I assume that’s Z’s. Few[er] or not, obviously, there are more good ones to write.
xxx
Well that’s more than enough out of me — sorry for being more beside the point / off the track / into my own thing than usual.
But the real point is that I read it (a bunch of times now), engaged with it (it’s very engaging) and I liked it.
Note
1 I found a reference to the Cage quote about the stone garden: https://post.moma.org/of-stone-and-sand-john-cage-and-david-tudor-in-japan-1962/
[…] In their free time the group visited temples in Kyoto and Nara. Ryōan-ji, a Zen temple famous for its rock garden, left a profound impression on Cage, but he was not convinced that the placement of the fifteen stones within it was in any way particular. Whether or not he was informed that the stones had been arranged with the utmost care to make it impossible for a viewer on the veranda to see all fifteen of them at once, Cage opined to a Japanese critic “that those stones could have been anywhere in that space, that I doubted whether their relationship was a planned one, that the emptiness of the sand was such that it could support stones at any points in it.” Cage still held this view twenty years later when he composed the score of Ryōan-ji (1983) by tracing the contours of fifteen rocks whose positions he determined by means of chance operations. […]