Screen Tests Read online

  Epigraph

  At the end of my time, when I die, I don’t want to leave any leftovers. And I don’t want to be a leftover. I was watching TV this week and I saw a lady go into a ray machine and disappear. That was wonderful, because matter is energy and she just dispersed. That could be a really American invention, the best American invention—to be able to disappear.

  —ANDY WARHOL

  Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting the same page.

  —ANNE CARSON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Stories: (2016–2018)

  Susan Sontag

  The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival

  Blanchot in a Supermarket Parking Lot

  Amal Clooney

  Double

  W. at the Movies

  Author Photo, Part One

  Withdrawn

  Ghost

  Second Dog

  John Wayne

  Beckett in Shorts

  And I (after Borges)

  Author Photo, Part Two

  Sontag in the Bear Suit One

  Sontag in the Bear Suit Two

  Reformer

  Rider

  Pink Bunny Ears

  Bette Davis Horror Film

  Cinephile

  Patty Hearst Wins the Westminster Dog Show

  Dogs in Film

  Dogs in Video

  La Chambre

  Gertrude Stein, about 3 PM on a Saturday (after Anne Carson)

  New York

  Plagiarism

  Dream

  Introductions to B. Ingrid Olson

  On the Puppet Theater

  Shorts

  Autofellatio

  Replies to My Male Graduate Student

  Andrea Dworkin!

  Burned

  Sontag in the Bear Suit Three

  We

  Pink Bear

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Heiress

  Louise Brooks in a Mint-Green Housecoat

  Author Photo, Part Three

  Elena Ferrante

  The Barbizon Hotel for Women

  Reply All

  Screen Tests

  Edie Film

  Nico in the Kitchen Cutting Her Bangs

  Meg Ryan Vehicle

  Andy Warhol Self-Portrait

  Two

  Diane Arbus Visits Marilyn Minter in Gainesville, Florida

  Valerie Solanas in a Silver Lamé Dress

  Wittgenstein’s Mistress

  Henry Fool

  Gleaning

  Scream Tests

  Essays: (2012–2014)

  Sleepless Nights

  Fragments of a Lost Object: Meditations on the Photographs of Anne Collier

  New York City, Summer 2013: On Kathy Acker

  One Can Be Dumb and Unhappy at Exactly the Same Time: On Failure, the Depressed Muse, and Barbara Loden’s Wanda

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Kate Zambreno

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Stories

  (2016–2018)

  Susan Sontag

  I like to think about what other people do when they’re alone. This is what I would really like to know about people, but I never know how to ask. Some people try never to be alone. I once read that about Susan Sontag. That she insisted someone always be with her, when she was eating breakfast, when she was agitating around some idea. I wonder what it would have been like to be Susan Sontag. To exist, in so strong and intense of a mind, the solid outlines of her body. To photograph so definitively, as if there were such a thing as a self. A friend wrote to me recently that she wasn’t sure what she thought of Susan Sontag, because if they met, say, at a party, she wasn’t sure if she would like Susan Sontag or if Susan Sontag would like her. This was obviously a hypothetical conversation since Susan Sontag has been dead for some time. I liked thinking about that, about how my friend viewed the persona of Susan Sontag, because it was so different from how I thought of Susan Sontag. I don’t think of how famous people or people I admire would view me at parties, or if they would recognize something in me if they met me, probably because I do not go to parties, and usually avoid gatherings of more than five people, unless they are book-related gatherings I’m involved in, and then I have no choice. And if I were to think about how I conduct myself at the handful of parties that I have attended in recent years, almost always with fellow writers, I imagine I might not come off too well. I think I might come off as severe, in my dress and in my mannerisms, or if not severe, then formal, or if not formal, then not full of ease, although that’s not how I think of myself, or that’s only how I think of one version of myself, the writer in public, which might be unconsciously mimicking Susan Sontag. I am actually just pretty awkward because I do not go to many parties, and I’m usually eager to leave. My favorite pastime at a party is studying bookshelves, to see how books are arranged, or not even that, to greet the authors on the shelves as friends. So if Susan Sontag was at a party that I was also at, I would probably be more comfortable going through Against Interpretation or Under the Sign of Saturn than making small talk with Susan Sontag, for after all, you can tell a lot about a writer by how much Susan Sontag they have on their bookshelf, if they have Death Kit, have they read it. Once I think about it, making small talk with Susan Sontag sounds pretty excruciating. I am pretty sure Susan Sontag would not like me if we met at a party. Perhaps I would be anxious to perform and to say clever things, and I would bring up Michel Leiris and Maurice Blanchot and be unsure as to pronunciation. Maybe Susan Sontag would like me. For me, I don’t think it matters. I am sure I would like her, because she is Susan Sontag, and even if she was dismissive or haughty to me, or seemed paranoid and fragile, or brazen and intense, or any of all the adjectives used to describe women like Susan Sontag and even women who are not like Susan Sontag, I think I would appreciate her for it, even love her for it, and know that this was only one version of Susan Sontag, that there were other, private versions of Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag performing to an audience of one, her son or lover or whomever, reading out loud her drafted brilliance, her unbelievable brilliance, and then there is even another Susan Sontag who is completely alone, alone in her thoughts in a comfortable way, or alone in the bathtub, or alone sleeping, or alone in despair, and this, this is another Susan Sontag.

  The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival

  Over a year ago my agent forwarded me an email inviting me to sit on a panel for The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival and to read a new piece of writing on the life and work of Jean Seberg. The press release told me that the festival would take place in late November in Jean Seberg’s hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa. I have now found myself on the Wikipedia entry for Marshalltown, Iowa. It seems like a picturesque town with a Main Street. In fact, the first European settler built a log cabin there and called it the “prettiest place in Iowa,” much like, I’m imagining, Jean Seberg was also called the prettiest girl in Iowa, or at least in Marshalltown, Iowa. There is a list on the Wikipedia page of Notable People from Marshalltown, Iowa. There are a surprising number of Notable People from Marshalltown, Iowa, in the fields of sports (it’s a baseball town), media, civil rights, acting, and politics. I decided to look up my own hometown of Mount Prospect, Illinois, unsure if it has a Wikipedia page. I am somewhat surprised to find that there are several apparently Notable People who were born in the northwest suburb of Chicago where I grew up. A handbag designer I’ve never heard of who shares my initials and whose bags have been worn by Paris Hilton and Jessica Alba. The television actress Jennifer Morrison. The winner of a seaso
n of American Idol. Several professional athletes. I spend a moment thinking about the strange category of “success” and its relationship to the other category of “failure,” how American these divides are, and how I’m much more compelled lately by the latter, although one cannot be a failure if one does not have at least some image of what success should look like. And that the movement for the Notable People was one of leaving their small towns—they are notable at least in part because they have left Mount Prospect, Illinois, just as Jean Seberg is notable because she left Marshalltown, Iowa. The other day in an existential funk I began to look up online everyone I had gone to high school with whose names I could remember, which was not many people, only to find that most of them have never left; they were all still there, or have moved on to a more upwardly mobile suburb, closer to the Woodfield Mall, like Rolling Meadows, where there’s the racetrack and courthouse, or Long Grove, where there’s the old-fashioned village of shops. My father, when he speaks of the kids I went to school with, always tells me how many children they have had, and if they’re married, because that’s his measure of success. Or if they became doctors or lawyers, or perhaps teachers. And yet I must go back to the initial invitation to participate in The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival. I should note that the letter inviting me was specific and knowledgeable about my published work, which has in fact revealed an interest in Jean Seberg, particularly her earlier oeuvre, her work both in Bonjour Tristesse and Breathless. I realized, reading this invitation, in fact several times, still musing over this invitation now, that I do not know much of what came after these two films for Jean Seberg, and went then as now to her Wikipedia page. There were many points of interest that compelled me—the fact that Jean Seberg was a target of FBI surveillance, much like Marilyn Monroe, and that she was actively involved in the Black Panthers. I was still interested in her early filmography, that she was picked as an unknown to play Joan of Arc by Otto Preminger, and even though the film was a failure, he cast her the next year in Bonjour Tristesse. And that even though that film was also a failure, Godard then cast her in Breathless, telling her that he wanted her to play the same character as in Bonjour Tristesse, that the film could start with the last shot of Preminger’s film and then dissolve to a title card that read “Three Years Later.” A friend brought up this reference when I was speaking of what I saw as the failure of my last book, which was published several years ago. She said I could just write again some version of the same book, or with the same energy and impulse behind that book. Perhaps all of our books are like that, perhaps we keep on writing toward the same thing, perhaps they could all have a title card that dissolves to read “Three Years Later.” When I received the invitation to participate in The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival, I found it enticing, because that is the exact sort of subject matter I like to twist on about—the disappearing acts, the ellipses, the periods of invisibility we cannot know about. Although I should note, the invitation came at a strange time, as I was just, at that moment, having one of those paranoid days spent online, noting that several authors I knew were invited to a literary festival in Australia, including a friend, a more famous novelist. I enjoyed the voluptuousness of it, that I was not ever invited expenses paid to international literary festivals, but I was invited to an international film festival in Marshalltown, Iowa, where I would be given a $150 honorarium, but I would not have my travel and board paid for, as obviously this was a grassroots kind of effort, which I appreciated. I really almost did it. If they had paid a little more, so I didn’t have to pay to travel to Iowa, I would have considered it more seriously. Although who am I kidding? I have canceled every event that has involved travel in the past two years, sometimes at the last minute. Was Jean Seberg blackballed by Hollywood for her support of civil rights? Is it true that the FBI’s following of her was responsible for her deteriorating mental health? She is tagged on Wikipedia under “Actresses Who Committed Suicide,” “Drug-Related Suicides in France,” and “Female Suicides.” In the past ten hours an editor at Wikipedia has tried to add her to the more generic and extremely eclectic “List of Suicides,” each of which contains a novel someone needs to write (Diane Arbus; Walter Benjamin; John Berryman; Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter; Gilles Deleuze; Isabella Blow; Yukio Mishima; Alejandra Pizarnik). Seberg’s suicide note read, “Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.” Her New York Times obit headline: “Jean Seberg Found Dead in Paris; Actress Was Missing for 10 Days; A Life of Personal Tragedy.” The Wikipedia entry of “Actresses Who Committed Suicide” is extremely long. I feel I’ve tried to write an essay or poem about half of them at one time or another. Like Peg Entwistle, who leapt from the H in the Hollywood sign. Is it worse, I’ve wondered, the tragedy of the unknown, or the tragedy of the once famous? Edie Sedgwick is not listed, which I find strange. I could spend all day here. When I first received the invitation to The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival, I had been thinking in fact of Edie Sedgwick, of Warhol’s Screen Test of her, like a luminous blinking statue staring back at us. It took a while for me to get oriented and realize that I was invited to write about Jean Seberg, not Edie Sedgwick, although for sure, Edie Sedgwick was kind of playing Jean Seberg, she was consciously playing the part, just like Jean Seberg was consciously playing the part from Bonjour Tristesse in Breathless, or like Candy Darling was consciously playing the part of Kim Novak, or like the cycle of Hollywood actresses on screen self-consciously mimicking the previous history were doubles of the other, like Hedy Lamarr named after Barbara La Marr, or Marilyn Monroe playing a Jean Harlow type, and on and on. I realize now writing this that I never actually replied to my invitation to The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival. Perhaps this will have to suffice. I appreciate the invitation, I do, I would have liked to have taken the time to think more about the life and work of Jean Seberg, I would. I was there in spirit. Yours, et cetera.

  Blanchot in a Supermarket Parking Lot

  There are three elements to the photograph. There is the grocery cart in the background, the white Renault hatchback in the foreground, and then at center there is the reclusive philosopher who explored literature’s impossibility. This is one of only three photographs of Blanchot widely known, the other two from when he was much younger. No doubt Foucault was referring to him when saying in an interview that surely there were others like him, who wrote in order to have no face. Amazing to have lived a life and to have authored so many books yet to have avoided being photographed, or having the photographs circulated. Except here, in his fragility, when he probably least expected it. Not even when he resurfaced to support the May 1968 student protests did anyone dare to take his photograph, and now this. The philosopher is nearly eighty years old in this photograph, if it can be called that, as it is more of a paparazzi snapshot, and he is dressed as you might imagine a French intellectual would dress, in a black turtleneck, wool jacket, and thick spectacles. The photograph was published in the June 1985 issue of Lire, so he is probably overdressed for the weather. Blanchot most likely didn’t have summer clothes. He looks annoyed at this intrusion, and/or annoyed at the indignity of old age and of having trouble getting around. There is something so lonely about the idea of Blanchot going to a supermarket by himself. The monstrosity of the American-style supermarket, all of these options, it can be paralyzing. He will have to carry a brown bag outside himself, or push his cart and load his groceries into his car. What does Blanchot buy at a supermarket? I imagine a list that’s ordinary and yet somehow profound, but I struggle to write it. Canned peaches, for some reason, that’s what I fixate on. It is impossible to know.

  Amal Clooney

  Recently, I’ve noticed that when I google myself, Google states that I am forty-one years old. This bothers me, because even though I am in my forty-first year, I only turned forty-five months ago. Every time I look at this, which is more regularly than I’d like to admit, it bothers me. Why is the Inter
net aging me so fast? I have been told that this is because my Wikipedia page, which is fairly short and no one has updated in some time, lists the year I was born but not the date. So I’m listed as a “1977 birth.” Except I was born on the second-to-last day of the year. I barely count as a “1977 birth,” if you really think about it. Since I’ve turned forty, I’ve become aware of other women in public who are approximately my age. A friend, a well-known novelist, is almost an entire year older than I am, but we are listed as the same age. She is actually forty-one, however; I am just in my forty-first year. Another famous writer, who dislikes me because of a falling-out a few years ago, is listed as forty because she was born in 1978, but in reality we are less than two weeks apart. I think it’s possible I’m this writer’s nemesis, although she is not mine. When I first moved to the city and felt alienated by the publishing world, I developed several nemeses, perhaps as a defensive tactic, but since then I have felt too tired most of the time to retain the energy to have nemeses, especially nemeses who are women. Everyone honestly seems like they’re trying their best to survive and make art within capitalism, and this is what patriarchy does—tries to pit women against one another, to compete for the very few slots of attention or recognition at the top. I still have a couple of male nemeses who are writers, as it feels healthy to have a nemesis, or, plural, nemeses, when writing, just as it’s helpful to have an addressee. I realized today, because of some tabloid piece I was reading, that Amal Clooney and I are the same age, approximately. However, the Internet lists Amal Clooney as only forty, which is her age, as she was born in February of 1978. It’s strange to realize once I reached forty how friends I thought were much older than I am are only a few years older, even though I thought I was much younger, or at least younger, than they are. It felt more pronounced when I was thirty-five, and they were, say, forty-one. But now that I’m forty, or, as the Internet has it, forty-one, and they are forty-six, it doesn’t seem too large a difference. It seems I either have friends who are five years older than me or five years younger. I know few women who are exactly my age. The ones who are older now refer to “getting older” like we are in the same category. Some of them are entering or have entered menopause, and so that is a difference, as I am still, apparently, fertile, but who knows for how much longer. However, those who are younger, still firmly in their thirties, no doubt think that I’m much older than they are. The gap closes on one side but widens on the other. I have no doubt my male nemeses spend very little time thinking about this, how they are no longer considered young once they turn forty, and what that means in terms of how they are perceived as writers and as people, and this is one of the reasons why they stay my nemeses. Sometimes it surprises me, the ages of celebrities, in terms of my own perception of my age. I’ve been doing a lot of Internet searches on the ages of celebrities, because I’ve been wondering whether or not to try to have a second child, which I’ve spent far more time thinking about than I ever spent thinking about whether to have one child, which I never spent much time thinking about, having thought the matter was already decided until I found myself pregnant. There are many online slideshows about the ages of actresses in Hollywood. For instance, “Women who have had babies past 40.” I look at those lists a lot. They are the same lists, but I keep on looking at them. Or, when I find out how old a female celebrity or artist is, if they have had children, I find out the age of their children and subtract. Amal and George Clooney’s twins will turn one year old in two days, I discover. That means that Amal was thirty-nine when she had them, so she’s not on any lists. If she has another child, which in this interview with The Hollywood Reporter she says is not happening, as she was already “old” when she had the twins, then she would be on some lists, for sure. It’s strange that as I get older, celebrities get older as well. I never expected that to happen. I often look at these celebrities who are forty or over forty and wonder if that’s what that age looks like on me. And yet these celebrities are extremely well preserved. So if anything, I probably look much worse. I think that Amal looks, obviously, amazing. But she seems older than me, despite looking so young and radiantly beautiful and well slept in photographs. I wonder if it’s because she obviously has a career and incredible accomplishments. Whereas I often wonder what it is I have accomplished, not owning my own home, not being employed full-time anywhere, at forty. I mean, her twins are one, but she’s already so slender and out of the house. She doesn’t lie around on the couch writing little things in her notebook and eating bagels and cream cheese. Of course, she is probably more well rested. I imagine Amal and George Clooney have a nanny, maybe two nannies, despite how he talks in magazine profiles about diaper duty. I’m imagining George Clooney, who is fifty-seven, doesn’t lie around all day either, worrying over his age. I bet when he found out he was having twins, he didn’t google other dads having babies in their fifties. He still looks charming, and dapper, and like—like himself—but when did George Clooney get old? When I see him, grayer, older, I realize then—I too have gotten grayer and older. Every year, it seems, this is happening.