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It seems everyone I know is blogging. Even myself in the past. I was innocently preparing my dinner (yes, of course it was cheese!) when it occurred to me that my blogger blog wasn’t my first one. Before that I had a ***** account. I tracked myself down as diligently as I have my exes and high school mistakes, even had to re-register a lapsed email address just to get my password back. I think I stopped writing it about the time I started visiting Nell in NY (c. 2005?) but it chronicles my whole relationship with Drew.
Fittingly enough reading those entries feels like being trapped in a soft-black construction paper room, walls shodily scotch taped together at the translucent seams. I remember other things about Drew now: being papered into his dorm room in the middle of a fight, lying on the lawn at Tufts, the red carpet of my room during the summer I was so completely alone with one album (Thought for Food) and rice, sitting at Radcliffe once we were really over, the beach with Gregnon. Once we spent hours wedged between a coffee table and a low bench in the campus center and now the whole thing’s been remodeled out of existence. He was telling me about the possibility of going to London for the summer. His roommate would never let me sleep over because he thought it would be disrespectful to his own girlfriend and Jesus Christ. I would wait until 2 and then sleep on my friend’s futon instead. I never anticipated what memory would feel like (heartbreak, but lower.)
I need to stop writing this. Reading old me has begun to degrade my new me writing. I’ll leave you with an age-old joke courtesy Ken Kitchin.
Monday, March 14, 2005
| my friend is so funny:The hypothetical title “Britain’s colonial aspirations: South America to India” is Colonial.
The Hypothetical title “Britain’s colonial aspirations; South America to India” is semicolonial. |
This weekend between a conference entitled “Secrecy and Social Practice from Antiquity to Present” and the elegant Pembroke carpeting, I learned a few things. Including: which names I would be willing to pilfer from ancient history for my progeny. And also: that one shouldn’t refrain from playing the What-I-Would-Name-My-Kids game just because one won’t be having kids to name.
So without further ado. The Losers and Winners:
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Definitely Not Hot (we had so many qualified applicants, we threw your name away immediately!)
Antigone (alas, a good name spoilt by the advent of psychoanalysis)
Damien (I’m sure most of you are familiar with the common associations with this name but in case you’re fuzzy I’ll refresh you: Damien is the name of the movement-sensing, cackling, Halloween skull that Ms. EM lifted from HalloweenSeasonKickOffParty2007. It currently resides on a kitchen table in Brooklyn and is turned on when guests get tipsy enough to jump. I think we can all agree that no one wants to be named after an automated party decoration. I mean, Tinsel, mayyybe.)
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Almost as ‘07 as POM
Sophia (error: classic(ist) rookie mistake, name totally played out thanks to New Testament scholars, budding etymologists, starry-eyed academics; bonus exclusionary reason: it means “wisdom.” If you wouldn’t tattoo the Chinese character on your iliac crest then you probably shouldn’t pin it on a child.)
Sanders (tragic downfall: overuse by men who also use words like “yar” and wear designer casual with their trust funds.)
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Hot
Caligula (benefits: means “little boots,” according to wikipedia my source of most information about the ancient world, “Although Caligula was popular with the Roman public throughout his reign, the scarce surviving sources focus upon anecdotes of his alleged cruelty, extravagance and sexual perversity, presenting him as an insane tyrant.”)
Medea (I think we’re all clear on this one. If I had a daughter….)
CSI: I think she was definitely into something hinky. I’m just waiting for tox to tell me more.
Medical Examiner: [standing over corpse of young, blonde, white woman] She didn’t have any track marks, body weight’s normal, no sign of hep or other diseases..
CSI: Meaning?
M.E.: There’s a look they have when they hit my table, the bad ones, this one? She didn’t have that look.
CSI: She was speeding out of town at sunup with a uh- a body in her trunk.
M.E.: You asked my opinion.
CSI: I’ll tell you mine. I think she was up to no good.
M.E.: If she was, Ryan, let her tell us.
I’m on hiatus from that antagonistic maw which is my Religion in U.S. Film class in order to blag. (I’m so dedicated that I am retyping the post that my browser just swallowed.)
I’ve been laying low– in recovery. Something I especially needed after I met a Brilliant, Groundbreaking, Important, French Man last Thursday evening.
But, Femmphane, you may ask, how would you know if a man was all of those things? You don’t usually stop to talk to men? You call all of your male classmates Brian!
I know. I know.
The answer is: Because he told me. I was surprised, too. I thought every man’s natural brilliance/relevance was self-evident and taken for granted. I thought they just assumed we knew? Apparently I was mistaken because there I was sitting (innocently*) at the bus stop, trying to read a decent chunk of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis when he approaches.
“Oh do you like the Lacan? I’m the author of a very important, unpublished essay on his work in French.”
“Oh.” He is massive, white, scruffy, and wearing a Harvard-crimson knit hat with an enormous H embroidered on it.
“Maybe you’ve heard of me.”
“Nope.”
“Well that stuff is impossible to understand unless you speak French and have access to a lot of unpublished, untranslated Lacan seminars. I could help you a lot. You could help me with my English.”
Yeah. I bet I could.
Weekend reprieve: sixth annual Sex Workers’ Art Show. Always a complicated experience. Not least because I have to curb the desire to maul the shouting guys in front of me. Afterwards we had drinks with half the cast and had a really productive rock/paper/scissors tournament. I can’t say how good it was to be around some familiar voices again.
*This is a technical term in my work which I use to mean 1) not antagonizing others First and 2) the protagonist of the story.
I feel like I should apologize. Keeping track of my blog stats has taught me a lesson about the cervix. Some must be easier to see than others. Even though my LadyWife took the time to make sure I had seen my own (and probably would have offered me prime speculum access if I hadn’t) I realize not everyone has a gay boy friend who knows so much about fisting and the figure-8.
Maybe it’s not always so pink! Maybe it’s obscured. I don’t know what’s going on. Clearly I am not a medical professional. (I was really hoping I would get to say that on the blag soon.) But People are worried about not finding it. They are so worried that they are skimming pages and pages of search results before finding my blog. Scary. My blog: where I belittle the doctor that couldn’t find a friend’s cervix as a total idiot. I would hate to think that at the end of a tiring, degrading, post-gynaecologic exam websearch, women are finding my disparaging remarks. And either my one friend is still so nervous and upset about it that she googles the topic incessantly or new people are, in fact, finding my disparaging remarks. Other people are taking responsibility for the way people find their blogs and I feel I should join in.
That very same friend and her normative cervix DID send me a lovely Valentine’s Day card. I was holding out on her (see: winter holidays, valentine’s day, president’s weekend) because I wanted to wait until I went to Europe so that I could send her postcards To:DG From:MySpecialUnderweaar (like Amelie without the polaroids?).
Last summer we went to Sports Basement and I bought some technology-heavy underwear with a slogan about how you could wear them in 16 countries in three weeks. Okay so my curiosity got the best of me and I mostly bought them to read the copy on the inside of the packaging. Alas! There was nothing there. No more exotic stories about traveling underpants! Just that first vague promise and some elaborate care instructions: Wash with detergent or soap in sink, Rinse thoroughly, Lay flat on a towel and then roll towel, Put the towel on the ground and stomp on it, Unroll towel and hang underwear to dry.
I’ve never been to 16 countries in three weeks but I have this sneaking suspicion that if you’re taking the kind of trip where you only pack one pair of underwear, you might also be taking the kind of trip where you wouldn’t want to put your towel on the ground and stomp on it. Especially if you’re going to have to hang up the damn underwear to dry anyway.
I will NOT aplogize for not having as many pictures of Nude Women Underwater as you have asked for. I have almost no control about the number of Nude Women on my blag.
I think Nora was taken aback by how much pain. We watched a bike with one white rim and speculated about the owner. I had a throat full of steelies that I would forget about for a few minutes. But you can’t get very far into any sort of dialog without being affected by a mouthful of heavy, marbles– so close to slipping without warning. Our conversation would hit some secret hold– some gentle, felt, indentation to a drain and I had to violently tip my words away from it because I knew they would fall in. Do I swallow them hard? Do I spit them– indecorously on the table and cry out? I am no longer curious about what’s inside. They are silver, heavy, carcinogenic, reflective, dense, slippery, and wet. I inhale hard and think it would feel better to suffocate on them. After a while my neck got sore from twitching it upwards and away as if to incline the field and loose the marbles from their ill-fated orbit.
Elsew/here: I don’t know how you’re feeling. I think you are dyadic, precarious, longing. On Sunday I thought that you’d simply come out of it. That this was some wild, ridiculous moment that you could escape from. We would pass through it and work on it later. I misunderstood. I think I know better. You are Halfway absorbed with some other thing (work) and then fall, sometimes, to thoughts of me but not like I do. You are not sucked and dropped– but instead flip yourself over as if you’ve finished the page and are now interested in attending to the next one. I live in a pothole universe. For you– something linear. It isn’t (like me) that your stomach drops out and you have to tip the tray. You go into it on purpose, stepping into me and then immediately you claw and panic for air. I wish I didn’t make you feel dropped in a well. We’re both drowning of different things. You feel compelled to finish the book, to check sources, to array the translations and read all the criticism available. Then you want to produce something original and incisive. At the same time, you would be relieved if you could close the text and hurl it hard enough that it wouldn’t come back.
This, suffused with dire sadness, is about as appropriate as I can get. PythagoraSwitch! Indeed.
You’re right. Suffering is so 2007.
CANTILEVER
OPEN THE PINK STAR
I knew we should have stooped back there
by the pudding station
but the pudding people were so–well–
full of themselves.
The Sphinx didn’t want us to come this far
even though we answered her questions
and threw in a bonus answer: “As honey is to the jaguar.”
And we so well along too–
Coming up is the world’s longest single cantilever span.
I am numb with thrips.
John Ashbery
Text Message from NY: “Sat in on brother’s religion and sexuality class. Phrase of the day: ‘forced, but not in a rape way,’ re: spousal (non) rape.”
Please stop. Please stop. Please stop!
In case anyone was in danger of forgetting my awesome storming style, I made a dramatic exit from my religion in American film class this morning. I know some of you are probably nostalgic for my old antics. Who could forget the semester I walked out of a presentation on gender in Tribal Africa (as gleaned from one film by six, white, American girls) , a scintillating experiment about what it was like to be a tranny in Dorchester (performed by a male student in sad drag), and a play about trafficking women all in one, glorious, semester! I had almost forgotten it was something one could do.
It was the least I could do after a conversation about Edward Norton’s movie Keeping the Faith turned into a full-scale defense of Perfect Rich Jewish New York and the charming race-relations that make the city “so great.”
In the film Ben Stiller and Ed Norton play a charismatic rabbi and priest, “the God Squad,” who are refreshing everyone’s feelings about faith by divorcing it (except not really) from religion. Jenna Elfman plays the female lead. The boys’ friend in childhood, she returns as a high-powered executive who is goofy, smart, and sexy. Both men fall for Elfman and she dates the rabbi, causing problems with his family and congregation. For the priest, Elfman’s character is deployed as a test of faith. In the end everything is resolved when Elfman, fearing her ticking biological clock, converts and the guys open up a Jewish/Catholic senior center in an old gay disco.
I could have said a lot of things. And by that I mean I could have just talked about some Backlash b.s. or I could have brought up the homo-erotic? closeness between the two men and the implications of moving religious seniors into ex-gay space.
I should have known I was in trouble when I mentioned that the romance and comedy obscured the underlying Doctrine of the Normative Family and my classmate said:
“Well, but this is what women want. Everyone wants to get married and have children. Don’t you?” And since I was already involved I had to say, No. And she said, “Well, that’s abnormal. Don’t you think that’s coloring your misinterpretation then?”
Which would have been okay. Stupid, sure. But fine. No, no, no. She has to go on to tell everyone that as a New York Jew she understands this movie better than anyone. That we don’t understand how nice it is to take the train uptown and see black guys playing basketball with rabbis and priests confiding in Muslim-Catholic-Sikh bartenders. The professor productively tried to shift our perspective to wealth, asking us if everyone seemed rich.
Of course She answered: “No, there’s that little Spanish boy. I think he shows that the Jewish community is rich and the Catholic congregation is poor. I mean that’s what they trying to communicate when they put in that off-the-boat kid.”
Really. I’m not joking.
Someone else tries to save it, “There are a lot of bilingual people in the U.S. and that doesn’t mean they’re ‘off-the-boat.’”
She persists. The movie is NOT fucked up, she tells us, because it’s perfectly politically correct. She cites this scene as proof. She argues that this scene is great because it’s just what Chinatown is like. “They go there because it’s cheap!” She explains. (No, I’m not sure how this explains ANYTHING.) I argue with her for a little while before she tells everyone to hold on and then addresses the only Asian student in the class. She asks him if he was “personally offended.” And then says if he wasn’t offended then obviously this is just really funny and also more proof of how charming and close-knit and mixed New York is.
I made one final attempt when she pointed out that at the very end one very minor character comes to an event with a black date, thus proving that this is a film about everyone.
F: That doesn’t prove anything.
S: What you want her to come with a woman?!
Professor: If she came with a woman no one would understand it was a date. Or it would just be in there as titillating.
F: Right, so we should maybe think about why that is. Why it wouldn’t be legible as a date if it were a woman. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. That guy she is with is wearing a sweater vest and khakis.
S: It was a nice event! That’s what you wear!
F: No, that’s what the Jewish guys are wearing! You’ll notice she didn’t come with one of those basketball guys.
S: That’s because it’s a nice event. THAT is what you wear.
F: You can wear other fancy clothes to dress-up. Her date looked like a really palatable, educated, rich, black man.
Several more slurs are thrown. Bilingual-defense guy tries to tell her about how people code language between communities.
[exeunt]
Keeping it short:
Perhaps, given the rest of the circumstances, the forum wasn’t the best idea. The person who posted as Chili2008 made my day. What Grover said is true: there are already a few “ouch” questions up there.
Also. I received the first of six? Perhaps seven? rejection letters. Hey, at least they misspelled my last name.
Both/and all I wanted to do was call J.
I’m sorry for all the self-pity. I’m going to make some graham bread.
Tomorrow I’m supposed to be leading a discussion on Barbara Johnson’s A World of Difference in my literary theory class and I can’t decide if I should bring a dildo. (I know, I know… one of those rare blagpportunities where the title literally summarizes the post.)
We are talking about pedagogy and I will be talking about how Paul de Man avoids the problem of gender by using the word “it.” He also ultimately decides teaching should be an impersonal activity as opposed to an interpersonal one. He also personifies his arguments and linguistic devices so that they carry the burden of the work. Barbara Johnson shows that the combination of these strategies does in fact gender de Man’s work:
“But the question can be asked why de Man’s discourse of self-resistance and uncertainty has achieved such authority and visibility, while the self-resistance and uncertainty of women has been part of what has insured their lack of authority and their invisibility.”
She finishes with delicious aplomb, “It would seem that one has to be positioned in the place of power in order for one’s self-resistance to be valued. Self-resistance, indeed, may be one of the few viable postures remaining for the white male establishment (45).”
This “it,” this “personification” that stands in for the person, the agent of pedagogy satisfying student and teacher in an impersonal exchange sound eerily like a fetish! Even a phallus… So why can’t I do the whole presentation with one in front of me?
By holding the phallus I would make people anxious about sex— which would, in turn, make them anxious about gender. I would have something there that half of the room already has, but the fact that I held it would turn me into a perverse spectacle (Hypothetically? In addition to really?) and bring us right back to talking about how deconstructionists ignore affective difference, the practical manifestations of discursive constructs (like race, queerness, gender.)
Plus– who wouldn’t be comforted by squeezing a little silicone during tense moments.
(And what would the Mormon think!)
Please check Yes or No.
Abrupt isn’t as queer as you think it is. Did it feel good for you too, baby? I think you did it for me. By that I mean, I’m getting accustomed to it, it hardly surprises me anymore and I don’t know if my sedation belongs to a history of abrupt or a history of mellowing abrupt down around the edges until it’s a row of soft, white, neat packages to line up– hide: Pack: expel.
In middle school I was voted (euphemistically? ironically? by dint of hanging chad?): Most Talented.
I’ve refined it now and realize I haven’t changed at all (popularity! irony! fraud!):
I award myself Most Denotative Use of Anal.
On election day, a coincidence, I polled you about what mythic/fantastic creature you would be in order to compensate for an assignment. The answers rolled in.
Nora: mermaid (she defends: no shell bra! majestic centaur of the sea!)
Sam: windigo (at least someone cops to carnivorous desires if not to blatant carnivorous tendencies)
Ken: not a centaur, centaurs are played out. A ___? Instead.
Femmephane: a centaur (no shell bra!). Fallback: vampire (my motivations clarified– camp)
Galen: “A goat creature? No. A Kraken. The Kraken is really metal.”
J: Cyclops
( F: No! Please, not a cyclops! I wouldn’t be with you!
J: I would be a big monster. I would make you!
JimmyHank: You wouldn’t be able to catch her without depth perception.)
In honor of elections (in allegiance to OneCountry) I elect Jimmy Hank: Most Talented.
* From Johnson, Barbara. “Nothing Fails Like Success,” A World of Difference. p 15.
The White Anti-Racist Is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to “White Anti-Racist“
By Tamara K. Nopper
I received an annoying e-mail about white people and their struggle to do anti-racist work. I keep reading and hearing white people talk about their struggle to do anti-racist organizing, and frankly it gets on my nerves. So I am writing this open letter to white people who engage in any activist work that involves or affects non-whites. Given that the US social structure is founded on white supremacy, and that there is a global order in which white supremacy and European domination are at large, I would challenge any white person to figure out what movement or action they can get involved in that will not involve or affect non-white people.
That said, I want to begin with what has become a realization for me through the help of different politically conscious friends. There is NO SUCH THING AS A WHITE ANTI-RACIST. The term itself, “white anti- racist” is an oxymoron. In the following, I will explain why. Then, I will begin to detail how this impacts non-white people in organizing work specifically, along with how it affects non-white people generally.
First, one must realize that whiteness is a structure of domination. As such, there is nothing redeemable or reformable about whiteness. Intellectuals, scholars and activists, especially those who are non- white, have drawn our attention to this for years. For example, people such as Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and many, many others who are perhaps less famous, have articulated the relationship between whiteness and domination.
Further, people such as Douglass and DuBois began to outline how whiteness is a social and political construct that emphasizes the domination, authority, and perceived humanity of those who are racialized as white. They, along with many other non-white writers and orators, have pointed to the fact that it was the bodies who were able to be racialized as “white” that were able to be viewed as rational, authoritative, and deserving. Further, and believe me, this is no small thing, white people are viewed as human. What this means is that when white people suffer, as some who are poor/female/queer, they nevertheless are able to have some measure of sympathy for their plight simply because they are white and their marginalization is considered an emergency, crisis or an issue to be concerned about.
Furthermore, even when white people have been oppressed by various dimensions of classism, homophobia and heterosexism, they have been able to opt for what DuBois, in his monograph “Black Reconstruction” brilliantly called “the psychological wage of whiteness.” That is, whites that are marginalized could find comfort, even if psychological, in the fact that they were not non-white. They could revel in the fact that they could be taken as white in opposition to non-white groups. The desire for this wage of whiteness was also what drove many white people, albeit marginalized, to engage in organized violence against non-whites.
Of course, legal cases such as the Dred Scott Decision along with many different naturalization cases involving Asian individuals, has helped to encode a state-sanctioned definition of whiteness. But there are other ways in which white people can be racialized as white by the state. They are not stopped while driving as much as non-white people. Their homes and businesses are not raided and searched as much by police officers, INS or License and Inspections (L&I). White people’s bodies are not tracked and locked up in prisons, detention centers, juvenile systems, detention halls in classrooms, “special education” classes, etc. White people’s bodies are not generally the site of fear, repulsion, violent desire, or hatred. Read the rest of this entry »
-28. Somehow I think I failed to express my great sororal feelings in trackChanges. Red doesn’t suit me. But perhaps you’ll remember the bird below. A copy, perhaps. But ensconced in my covers nonetheless. (K)
-26. I should have remembered that my feet would start to hurt when the fever rose. I couldn’t get back to my bed alone. Thank you for coming to my rescue. My shrink will want to know as I often start sex stories with summaries of my feet. There Gone Bare Purpled. (O)
-24. I was thinking about you both in my bedroom at night. The elves and the shoemaker. (C/K)
-14. Between our visits I get tighter and tighter. Why. I Don’t Know. Well Please Figure It Out. My people, my only- dear- escape and I, Right? finish my thoughts with you. It’s always a surprise when I feel comfortable enough to take off my wet boots, put my bag out of reach, sit down as if I might not have to run. And for two whole, shuddering, hours I don’t. (T)
-8. We made Orphan promises and I meant mine in the most optimistic way. I do want you to have everything and was naive when you weren’t about the past and how to make the future. It’s not like I’m still looking for shoes small enough to fit you anymore. (NC)
Illustrations:
bird whistle. for best results, submerge.
my brother. redheaded and still unashamed of his grin. water-damaged.
my father, younger. his mother, left, with IV.
first generation. Coney Island
1. (Recapped and commented up on) “If we were writers on a spaceship tv show, you would be the one who came up with the technology and I would be the one that gave the planets Greek and Roman names.”
2. [On another page?]
1. “Like, for example, you would be the one who invented the Holodeck and I would be the one who named the planets that you used the Holodeck to get to.”
2. “Uh… the Holodeck was already invented.”
3. “Wow.. This conversation went on much longer than I expected”
———————————————————————————————————————
1. “No. Not that kind of straight-streak! I’m not sleeping with men, I’m sleeping with straight women.”
2. “Oh, that makes more sense.”
1. “There are a couple men I’d sleep with.”
2. “I would sleep with the Culkins.”
1. “Bill Clinton.”
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1. “If you don’t stop using the the ‘google’ when you mean ’search youtube,’ I’m going to start using ‘google’ to mean ‘to look for’ all the time.”
2. “What? Hey! Are you on youtube? Google that new Snoop Dogg song!”
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