THE PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE

Starting out easy

Sitting down to do my first paid piece has proved very difficult. No matter how much published writing I read that to me seems endearingly vulnerable at best, I can’t seem to accept my own starting point as a writer. No one really tells you about how the act of writing itself is an ontological mode that you must work to keep being able to access. It seems to require a sort of anticapitalist zen – you must work to forget everything except the here and now. As someone coming from a critical perspective, having been trained (albeit lackingly) as an arts critic and a literature analyst, it is now becoming plain to understand why you must pick either one or the other. An artist is someone who starts from, and perhaps makes love to, the void that is the starting point. An artist doesn’t need to keep the phone on at night or be on the lookout for illogical intruders. A critic, on the other hand, works backwards from a cluttered den of a hypertext hoarder looking for that blank space, looking for the void that a particular artist treasures. I’ve fallen weirdly in the middle and I can’t tell if I’ve got too much shit on my hands or not enough. What I do know is that criticism, on the whole, makes me deeply unhappy.

While I spend my time being deeply unhappy and peculiarly unable to access the here-and-now antiparanoia of a writer (did someone call for a Sedgwick reread?), I’ve decided to answer the Proust Questionnaire to at least air out my personal proclivities and possibly suggest what could be my stomping ground in a year or two. There is no girl that dreams of being interviewed about myself more than me and indeed I do it all to one day maybe have this as a reward… so let’s get started.