Now for Janice Lee's Own The Sky Isn’t Blue

Janice Lee day! At Berfrois, we spied this Jessica Sequeira review of Lee's own The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), in which "fragmented 'essays,' inspired by [Maggie] Nelson and other past teachers like Eileen Myles, along with French theorists such as Gaston Bachelard, [Lee's] dead mother and musings while visiting favorite places along the coast, begin from a similar place of loneliness." More:

[The] processing of emotion into poetic prose is a tremendously valuable project. It is also a trompe-l’œil, as this insistence on empathy becomes so divorced from any specific person that it too becomes cerebral, an object. The temptation to mysticism, and desire to simply embrace nature are framed in the most abstract, almost aphoristic prose. That love could be for anyone. That sky could be anywhere. Triggers for memories could come from direct life, someone else’s life or stories and myths. Lee herself admits this. “Even in this state I can recognize the shameful sincerity of my situation. I do not miss you or even you. I miss the sensation of you. I miss the warmth, the questions,” she says in Mornings in Bed. Her way of writing is a way of seeing the world, an embrace of the ahistorical, unattached life at the western edge of a young country. “There are no ancient tribal feuds, no wounds, no blood. It is less absolute, perhaps. But better” than the history-obsessed Old World, as Chris Kraus claims in the last lines of Torpor. “The sky isn’t blue”, Lee’s rallying cry of possibility, inhabits the same mental space. For Lee, the sky can be (should be?) different every time.

In Los Angeles, where the sky is always blue, this is a radical denial, but its “anything goes” ethos is also the most LA statement there is. The city is central to Lee’s fragmented accounts, as it is an urban nexus, a place where one can wake up beside someone and never see them again; where relationships require advance planning; where all is atmosphere, gridlock, freeways, immensity, movement; where life is different for everyone, even different for oneself from one day to the next. LA is an unquotable haze, just as in this book, almost no sentence can be quoted, but quoting isn’t what it’s about, even if Lee herself occasionally hat-tips the authors she likes, such as Kenneth Patchen, Jaime Saenz and Jean-Paul Jouve. What it’s about is an attitude, the creation of an atmosphere. This attempt to articulate emotion in a unique way can reduce to trivial thoughts, which provoke despair precisely when one realizes nothing new can be said. The lyre’s been sung since the beginning of time, the sky is blue.

Yet when Lee dares to flout the obvious, and say once again that she is sad, that the sky is not blue, something happens; this becomes an intrepid statement in itself. The imagination is rearranged; the insignificant becomes significant. As Lee writes, “that is what love is, perhaps, a complete rearranging of the imagination, a complete infiltration of a subjectivity that seems to defer how images correlate with each other. Suddenly, what matters is the color of the sky. The direction of the stars. The speed of light. Significance and insignificance change places.”

Read all at Berfrois.