Kate Zambreno Screen Tests Louise Brooks

“Kate Zambreno writes with a winning, gleeful transparency about days and nights spent entranced by literature, film, and her own densely populated imagination. Zambreno pays attention to her own desire’s fluctuations—to attachments, moods, self-constructions, and self-abasements, reconfigured in a series of shadow-box homages to writing as an asymptotic specter. In rhythm-conscious bulletins, streaked with passionate candor, she confirms her vocation as haunter and as haunted.” -- Wayne Koestenbaum
 

Kate Zambreno photo credit Tom Hines - Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno - Louise Brooks photo credit Eugene Richee

Admittedly, I didn't know anything about Kate Zambreno until I received a key word alert telling me her new book, Screen Tests, contained a section on Louise Brooks. I know you are not supposed to admit to ignorance, but we all start somewhere, don't we, specifically in that place of not knowing until we find ourselves somewhere else, if only a few inches to the left or right of some new or altered awareness. Ignorance is not necessarily a bad thing, if it is a point of departure. That key word alert was a loose thread, which I pulled at -- another thing you are not supposed to do, but how could I resist? I track such things. Homage to Lulu is an ongoing project of mine. “In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with,” said writer Brian Evenson. He put it well. I pull at the threads of Louise Brooks, her appearance in books not about cinema, the way non-filmmakers like Borges friend Adolfo Bioy Casares adored the actress and wrote The Invention of Morel, considered the first great work of Latin American magical realism, inspired by our Miss Brooks. It was published in 1941. If you wondered why Brooks appears on the cover of the book's most recent edition, it is because a thread was pulled. Angela Carter was also a Brooks' obsessed thread puller. The same for contemporary novelist Kathy Acker, who wrote Lulu Unchained, a play inspired by Brooks while riffing off Wedekind. That's what Kathy told me. Kate Zambreno's key word alert was her coming across a copy of Lulu in Hollywood some 15 years ago in a used bookshop. She emailed me, writing "I became enthralled to her writing. I think of that book as in some ways an inspiration for Screen Tests. Then I watched the movies... it was her words before the movies" that fascinated Zambreno. Adding that she became fascinated with Brooks' life in Rochester, and her her attempts at memoir, Incinerator One and Incinerator Two." The text alert that I received was not yesterday's Interview interview, where Zambreno said "Louise Brooks, who I write about in her old age and as a hermit, she’s only seen mournfully through her previous image. One of the things I was most shocked by when I moved to New York—but again, like everything else, I’m less shocked by now—was this concept that to be a writer here, you were expected to be an image. You were expected to be good at getting your photograph taken." Brooks rejected that, didn't she, the reliance on image, the all too often superficial. The impression I came away with after reading Brooks' Rochester journals was of a mind striving to understand what had happened to her, of how she fell, scratch at texts beneath the surface of gloss and publicity. Zambreno's book is described this way, "A new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel." I like the old-school collage cover of Heroines, which depicts various women like Zelda Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker. Brooks met both of them, observed both of them. Heroines is described as "A manifesto for 'toxic girls' that reclaims the wives and mistresses of modernism for literature and feminism." In it, Zambreno writes about Louise Brooks and mentions some of the other Jazz Age flappers as well, Clara Bow. "Enthralled" is not a word people, let alone writers, use much anymore. It has all manner of connotations. Screen Tests contains fragments of Zambreno's beguilement, her enthrallment, specifically "Louise Brooks in a Mint-Green Housecoat," and the section-chapter before it, "Heiress." There is also captivation with Kathy Acker. And Susan Sontag, another thread.

Lulu in Rochester