The girl in the story is me

I can't tell you the name of Daphne Gottlieb's new book — it's too anatomical — but I can link to it right here. It's a collection featuring nearly 30 stories that imagine the San Francisco performance poet and provocatrix in a variety of, er, compromising positions, written by a pretty good crew of West Coast underground literati, including Stephen Elliott, Ariel Gore, Bucky Sinister and Justin Chin.

There's no denying that Gottlieb's on to something with this project — a postmodern mash-up of truth and illusion that seeks to eclipse the line between how others see us and the way we see ourselves. The book had its genesis when she began to realize that some of her acquaintances were writing dirty stories about her (one appeared in Best American Erotica) that featured "[e]verything about me, it seems, except my underwear and my modesty." Eventually, Gottlieb put out a call for submissions; the result is this book.

I love the blurriness of this idea, the way fantasy and reality blend together until we don't know what's fiction or fact. Yet I'd be lying if I didn't admit to some discomfort — not because of the sex but because of the narcissism.

Here we have an almost perfect metaphor for the conundrum of contemporary culture, with its look-at-me self-absorption, its sense that the artist is more important than the art.

In the end, that too is what Gottlieb's book speaks to, whatever her intentions are.

David L. Ulin

Comments

[Adri]

An interview with Daphne Gottlieb from the University of Pittsburgh's literary magazine: http://hotmetalbridge.org/?page_id=183

[Daphne]

Thanks for such an engaged reading of the book -- I'm glad that you enjoyed it.

Your qualms about narcissism here are valid;I am absolutely disturbed by and critical of the climate of celebrity that we live under. I think that what I intended the book to point to, ultimately, is that the production of "Daphne" is an empty sign; that we are each unknowable except by (de facto) another's perception of us (and to our selves). So this project of meaning/emptiness and self/and other couldn't have been produced without something to aggregate the work around. I believe(d) the project was worthwhile enough to put myself in the center, even knowing my own discomfort in being the focus. I suppose whether this is important or not hinges -- as all -- on the perceiver. (It's worth noting, too, that this book is the inverse of my new single author book of poetry, Kissing Dead Girls.)

Regardless, I appreciate your interest in and kind words about my work. Thank you so much!

[Thomas McGonigle]

However the best thing about this sort of work is that it is done with when the inevitable happens to the artist: death.