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DIAGNOSIS: FEMALE

By Mike Hudson

There are more blogs in Japanese than in any other language. What has the work uncovered?

There are, of course, pockets of resistance, and this brings us to yet another irony. The tension beneath her willful gaiety.

She made a half-hearted attempt at writing, and later took a short-lived job as a record store clerk, but basically drank, gave parties and practically bankrupted her parents.

There is much that is hard to comprehend. Errors and elisions abound, and all that I am unable to express. Writing is a second-order language that captures meaning in a system of conventional signs that gradually took the form of alphabetisation from about 3,000 years ago. "You don't have to understand. There's nothing to understand," she always said, and I guess that's as true now as it ever was.

There were the cities, of course. Brooklyn, New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago and other places too. The arid foothills of the Superstition Mountains and the white sand beaches of the northern Gulf Coast, her Redneck Riviera. Identifiable, though more like panoramas made from magazine clippings than representations of the actual places.

There were also the bad memories, and perhaps it makes perfect sense that this peripatetic seductress, whose very name suggests exotic realms, should have been raised in the decidedly pedestrian purlieus of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

One can allegorize this enigmatic story any number of ways. In branding and selling her, I exploited that peculiar modern cycle by which popular culture imitates life and life imitates popular culture. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. Her inability to form a coherent view of the world.

And yet, like many dreams, it's hard to realize in the morning light. What's wrong with this? We press our noses against the glass and wonder why we got left out. Entirely ordinary, this voice of doom.

There were the men, of course. More than she cared to remember really, or even cared about. Students and professors, a cop and a sculptor and a guy named Sal, from Toledo. Any number of musicians. A painter and a writer. And still she never forgot. Salvation through sin. Shock value.

Hours surrendered, like nickels to a gumball machine. Even the salt loses its savor.

The loss of hope, the wearing away of love. Eons from now, perhaps, even our love affair with the printed word will be remembered as but a brief episode in our cultural maturation. And isn't the commonplace desire to make no judgment at all based simply on the judgment that it is wrong to make a judgment? Anything goes, and nothing lasts.

The decisive incident. Lurid details meant only to distract. The sudden crossing of separate trajectories that makes us believe, if only for an instant. It was hard not to be seduced. That film of her, walking away from the camera, so familiar now but then so new. A revelation.

After that, those who hated life, those who sought to ruin it, would have to ruin her. And to ruin her they needed me. It was like swallowing poison.

She didn't realize it at the time, of course. She couldn't, because I didn't realize it myself until it was too late. It was as if I put my beliefs into a drawer, and when I opened it there was nothing there at all.

So there it is. The decisive incident. Only the lawyers would be happy now. She had come to represent waste, the superficial, the inequality of wealth. Her luster tarnished, she had no need to exist. The time had come for "a new modesty," everyone agreed.

Any vision of restored stability was a delusion. The annihilating necessity of death. Words were not often brought into play, and seemed rather a last resort, to be used only if everything else failed. Facts do not solve problems and no one who had "a taste for literature" had any right to be happy. So went the prevailing notion.

The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable. The Niedermayer-Hentig expedition of 1916, Duchamp and his readymades. But separating truth from fiction became futile. That peculiar blend of bad luck and innocence. Her passionate certainty about large and distant abstractions ran headlong.

So much the better, then. One way to understand this new system was to draw on the sociology of knowledge, and in particular the connections between literature and power. There is a profound difference between what appears to be and what is.

An empty room, a solitary kitchen table in the middle of it, an iron bed.

Space for an interior existence. Complete belief in the primacy of ideas.

That great contemporary terror -- anonymity -- had for her become an impossible dream. Was solitude even possible in the digital age? Not for someone like her. Her liquid green eyes and porcelain skin could be seen in a thousand different images by anyone typing her name into the Google search engine. Her thoughts and fears forever accessible in the hundred interviews she granted.

And the critical assessments, fawning at first then venomous, as though something had changed in her rather than in the subjective judgment of the critics themselves, remained a part of her permanent record as well, translated into many dozens of languages.

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com January 27 2009