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Here is how it was.
I was afraid when I got to the retreat it would be mostly rich white people with rich white books about being rich and white. Or worse, rich white people with books about something more Glamorous. I was afraid we had been invited as part of the glamour.
But it was only half Rich and half Glam and so for all the rich folks I think we just read as different. It was like the way the city always paints the low-income housing hospital mint, lemon pie, and brink pink as if to say:
“We’ve done all we can to sterilize them.”
“What sweet thing are you making out of your fortuitous little hardship?”
and
“At least we’re demure here– on the precipice.”
The government says they’ll help you out with shelter but– if— “By the way, do you mind living in a petit four?” That way all the taxpayers can drive by and see the rainbow of their generosity, the spectacle of liberalism.
Thank you.
But these were the kinds of oblivious taxpayers who don’t understand the way their state-mandated donations humiliated the Glamourous Ones and so they didn’t really rub it in. Except, of course, in a couple of choice cases in which they brandished different sorrows in an attempt to bolster some mythic credibility. It was easy to tell them apart because the rest of us weren’t brandishing hardships. We were laughing out loud about missing teeth in a way that made them feel uncomfortable and then feeling sad and complicated about their sorrow.
Best and Worst:
It seemed almost foolish to start talking to the people who I would eventually talk to. Our latent friendship seemed such an embarrassing foregone conclusion that I was shy to begin. On the first night as a getting-to-know-you-game we were asked to find a partner and there were four or five I couldn’t have gone with because the facilitator had specified that we were to choose people we didn’t already know and they seemed too familiar. Of course they weren’t familiar and I didn’t know them. And: there wasn’t enough time to think like that.
Driving with G across the canyon from where we were staying I pointed to an enormous 1970s modern complex. “Wow,” I exclaimed with sincere curiosity, “what’s that?” We had been there four days already but it was only my second time away from the conference. She had been giving me a tour of the canyon and pointing out the really rich from the really really rich. With limited time I had decided to become an expert on Bel Air Knolls. For an hour I had pointed and she had obliged (that’s where Kathy Griffin lives, they’re cypress trees, yes– just like the movie.) “That?” she pointed, laughing, “that’s the University where we’re staying! In fact I think you can see ___ writing on the deck.” It was clearly him but I hadn’t been looking for him so I hadn’t recognized that hat and those legs. Soon it couldn’t have been anyone else.
“I saw a lizard!” ___ announced and later generously showed me a photograph of the reptile poised to run across the hot cement. “I got this one, too,” he said showing me a camera-phone image of the cement and the bushes from a greater distance. “If you know it’s there,” he said, “you can almost see the it.”
I wrote a note in cursive and it took him a moment to figure out what my letters were but he said the writing was pretty. Perhaps the worst thing to hear at a writing workshop.
Even when the moon was almost full
Even when the moon was full
Even when the crowd had thinned
Even under unforgiving institutional light
Even caught in headlights
Even as the rest of it turned into a restless, drunk din, and we perched distinct on the edge
Reading It Each All Other was still hard and dire.
And now I’m home and I’ve tried other outlets but it seems my only recourse is to write. Funny that that should have to be sufficient.
* A line from the entry “Angel” in Alistair McCartney’s encyclopedic novel The End of the World Book.
You make me feel like some old fashioned feminist art.
Lolaj is rarely breaking his blagmorotorium so I am just going to take a moment to grieve his absence by performing the Inverse of project. I’m sure his guest Ask-A-Lesbian columnist is getting really fucking tired of not being misquoted on the Internet. So I’ll just reproduce a question the Lesbian asked me.
On Monday I returned from the Lambda Literary Workshop in LA and while I was there she asked me how it was going. I was telling her about some femmephobia and some terrifying Beyonce elocution from white boys. About one in particular…
Les: i hope you tell him what’s up. are you telling everyone what’s up? or are you quietly biding your time and planning to blog about them mercilessly?
And I told her. And now I tell you. Both.
On the last night I got into a really inadvisable argument about class. Despite the fact that I come out the hero in the retelling, at the time it was just humiliating and horrible. So you’ll have to stay tooned for the actual recap and not just the preview of the recap once I’ve reeled and recovered a bit more.
Just consider this a primer and an homage. Oh. And a call for negotiations to end AJ’s writer’s strike.
Please.
When I was sixteen years old I broke up with my first boyfriend, Jesse Case. But before the real break up we had a week long break, break-up during which I went for a walk to the half-shell and then therapy with his best friend John Munch. I think we talked about being freaks at school and The Eagles. Someone was committing infidelity of some kind. Then Jesse and I got back together and then we broke up for real and he started calling me and saying some pretty mean stuff which I think I mostly ignored. Whenever I would engage him to defend myself or to try to hear him out or comfort him, our exchanges would devolve into pure pain. His. Mine. Eventually he discovered the thing that would get to me. He wrote me an email that read: Dear Rebecca, I’ve been talking to my friends about you and everything and we’ve decided that you need serious help.
I was devastated. I was also a little confused since his friend had actually walked me to my weekly appointment of serious-help just a few days earlier. After a lot of crying and worrying about it, hating myself, and believing I would helplessly repeat all of my parents’ relationship mistakes I did a funny thing. A funny thing that in almost every other situation has been a major mistake but this time actually panned out. I went to my father. I told him what Jesse had said and without taking even second to think about he explained that Jesse was just upset and was trying to get to me. This just hadn’t occurred to my optimistic, 16 year old mind.
I was still trying to protect Jesse as much as possible and felt horrible for wanting to break up. There wasn’t any real reason to break up. He didn’t do anything terrible or even unkind or boring. In fact, our relationship had been a pretty healing one– for me, I know, and I think for him as well. He had lost his father a year before we started going out and we talked about it a lot. He wrote me three songs on his keyboard– all in different keys with violin interludes and some charming forever-love type lyrics. We watched The Abyss and ate a lot of Chinese food and had sex. And then it was over. I just didn’t really desire him anymore and I desired other people and that love we had had was over. I felt selfish about wanting to be out of our relationship but decided to break up with him even though it was the selfish thing to do. Even more selfishly I wanted to maintain a different kind of love so that all the healing we had done wouldn’t be unmade simply because we weren’t going to get married and go around together forever.
Now it’s been about seven years and I’m doing it again. Breaking up, I mean. And I know a lot of you already know it. If not because I’ve told you or the internet has told you but through intense radio-silence buffered only by midnight bleatings of all sorts.
A series of invectives and accusations has been launched and I don’t know what to do. I could rebuff each one. Defend, explain, and apologize. That seems to make it worse. And today we reached that tipping point where I got an email akin to “my friends and I have all decided that you need serious help” and it was all I could do not to think about Jesse. It would never have occurred to me to lob the particulars of his father’s death, his own traumas and histories, at him. Even now, even though I meant to write more specifically about them, I can’t. Even though Jesse does not read my blog and even if he did, he might not care. I’d rather maintain the possibility that that healing was actually healing and that means not chasing him around with accusations of my own. Even though our relationship did not last forever I am still faithful to the confidences we shared then. Without knowing where he is with all of it it would feel like a major betrayal to post them on the internet. In a way I’m not doing it now to prove that I was serious then. Which I was.
I mean, I wasn’t going to do any of this really. I was just going to keep diligently working on an essay I’m writing about butch/femme and break-ups and privacy and healing and confidentiality and concealment. You would have liked it. It was also about the 1780 shipwreck HMS Ontario which was recently discovered under 500 feet of water in the great lakes, remarkably more intact than it should have been.
And look where I am now. Doing all those things. Even kind of talking about The Eagles.
Last night we danced. 10-2:30 for free in Austin. All within a five minute interval while waiting in line in the bathroom with Amanda (my pockets):
gayboy: Are you two straight?
we [ignore ignore]
gayboy [turns head to side in querulous kitten sense except not in a cute way]: Are you straight?
femmephane: No.
gayboy parses, processes, gives us each the up/down, decides that we must be there to pick up another woman and that my “no” came because I was BIsexual.
gayboy [looks at Amanda]: Are YOU straight.
we [ignore]
gayboy: Are you related?
we are now facing each other as his barrage of questions persists into the back of my head and then over my scalp and into A’s ignoring-eyes.
gayboy: Are you straight? Are you related? Are YOU straight?
Amanda: I’m butch.
gayboy performs gayboy shock pause.
gayboy: OH! I totally understand. [sweeps hands in conciliatory gesture in a circle in front of A's chest in a way that makes me wonder if he had actually been touching her through this whole interaction.]
Then, from behind, gaygirl begins. Has she, I wonder, been listening to this interaction with gayboy?
gaygirl: oh my god. you know who you are?
we [ignore].
gaygirl: You’re totally David Bowie. Wow. Totally.
….
ch-ch-ch-changes
Dear Friends,
Thank you for your very generous help. So far you have helped me to raise half the money for the workshop. I want to thank Angela, Jack, Sarah, Stork, Alex, Jennifer, Erica, Julie, Piper, and Kit not only for donations but also for some really witty, supportive, hilarious emails to accompany them.
I will let you all know if/as things develop and then I’m sure you’ll hear from me when I make it to LA.
Fondly,
Femmephane
Dear Friends-Readers,
I am trying to raise $750 in order to attend the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat in LA in August. That way I can workshop and “network” with Dorothy Allison and some other “emergent queer writers.” I am hoping to make a lot of progress on things like a collection of essays and publication.
Lambda has a This is a pretty big deal because it was sort of hard to get into. It
is also a big deal because Lamdba has a history and reputation of
catering to rich, white, gay dudes. Whether they’re looking to change
their history or their reputation, they’ve let me in.
However they did NOT give me enough money to attend. They gave me a
half scholarship which means I still have to come up with $750 and
airfare.
Since they’re already reaping the reputation-enhancing benefits of
claiming me as a conference attendee (I’m one of those colorful
biography bytes they’ve included on the diversity-proof website) I am
hoping to reap some of the history-enhancing ones myself. So I’m
asking for your help.
In order for it to be possible for me to go I have to raise that
money. I was hoping that some/any of you might be able to contribute
some small amount toward my bigger goal. It is fairly easy to
contribute online. Just go to:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/donations/retreat.html
and you can enter an amount to donate. You will also have to send an
email to retreat@lambdaliterary.org in order to earmark the money for
me. It’s all explained on the website. I am trying to get the funds
together as soon as possible. I have to pay in full by August 1st.
I have already hit up my friends, enemies, and former professors for money and I thought I might try you: somewhat-public, as well. You can email or comment for more details if you want- I’ll be glad to provide a summary of my intentions and a glowing recommendation of my own work.
I suppose if you’re reading this then you already know about my work. GoodBadUglyEtAl.
Anyway, I would be exceptionally appreciative.
I also have a PayPal account if you have problems with that or would rather subsidize my travel. You just have to use my first.last@gmail.com email address in order to contribute.
And don’t worry… I’ll take this post down if I reach my goal.
thanks,
Femmephane
I wouldn’t have been back from Europe yet but it’s time you all know I never went. I’m in Austin, Texas. It’s one of those organic-clothing, designer-food, people’s republic, college towns like Cambridge, like Boulder, like Santa Cruz, like, I’m told, Eugene, Oregon.
Except that the live music scene is apparently much better: something
I, live-music-hater-extraordinaire, can neither confirm nor deny. The city is: eminently bike-able, very much worth the (But It’s A Dry) heat, and cheaper to be in than the rest of those towns.
Last night I actually went dancing and spent a total of $2.50 for the entire event. One potent gin/tonic and no cover charges.
The only drawback seems to be a kitten that likes to preen and stomp across my body in the morning, claws out and meowing loudly.
I do miss home. I am avoiding certain a host of pains and familiarities.
I’ve realized that if I have any hope of going to LA in August, I don’t have the money to fly home between now and then.
Please take care of my tree house. And my own home town. Whichever and wherever that might be.
Signing off.
This isn’t what I expected.
Rousseau explained:
One day at table, just as she had put a piece of food into her mouth, I exclaimed that I saw a hair on it. She put the morsel back on her plate; I eagerly seized and swallowed it.
And in a moment of lesbian character (why so many lesbian characters) Charles Baxter in his latest:
“Right And I want another girl,” she says, “to fly away with me. Not you. I can’t fly anywhere with you. With you, I’m grounded. Men are beasts of the ground.”
“Uh… you sure about that?”
“Absolutely. You’re all creatures of the mud. You can’t help it. I know this feels weird. That desire I’m supposed to have for you? I don’t have it. I sometimes wish it were there, but it isn’t.” She waits. “I sort of love you anyway, but a girl can’t go on doing charity work for a mud-beast forever.”
If only my problems were so simple. Instead the most evocative expression comes from the other room behind a slammed door where a five-year-old yells at the top of his lungs:
“Don’t pay attention to me!!!”
Godbless the little leo. Godbless the fire-words.
The OED tells me that the word of the day is “joined-up.” And I thought I knew what it meant but it turns out I didn’t. Brit. I’m told, referring to cursive lettering. With this to clarify.
Queer as Folk: Scripts Episode 7. 189 Stuart: (Grins) Lesbian letters. Can I read them? Lisa: I doubt it, it’s joined-up handwriting
Well that explains it.
has incurred case of virulent indigestion spanning two weeks. There are worse days. This is a better day.
has ruled out ulcers and parasites.
has discovered when the suggestion of ulcers or parasites made the ache worse that the pain might be anxiety-related.
has been blag-lax but intends to improve and NEVER talk about blaglaxity again. Score.
has great appreciation for her friends and new clique.
has plans to incur allergy shots with new fancy Harvard HealthCare.
has nearly finished The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter’s newest: with mixed results. Has barely started The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant’s latest: with great anticipation.
has embarked upon several essays: shipwrecks, lithops, continental tectonics, Desperate Housewives?
has realized there is a better chance she can go to Hogwarts than enlist in coveted writers workshop in LA but did enjoy livin’ the dream.
has no cord to charge ipod through usb or other means but plenty of chocolate.
has discovered the heat is just fine after all and that there’s no reason to bike faster than you can walk (low).
has aspirations about even liking grad school.
has mixed feelings and some remixed portuguese lessons on mp3.
has thought of divine yarn solution for apartment that will allow increased use of the word “cubby.”
has surprisingly less to say about “oil and/or vinegar” the longer she thinks.
has tattoo plans and piercing dreams andno need for a videographer for the job.
has a ride home from logan.
has some careworn heart, fragile parts, havoc.
has a countdown. Already.
I’ll be departing for North Africa and Europe on Sunday at 10:30 pm from JFK. I have committed to update my othore blag but this one might have to lie fallow. We’ll see. If any of you have been then you should provide advice and recommendations.
Vague Itinerary:
JFK to Malaga, Spain
Malaga, Spain to Gibralter (UK) via bus through southern Spain
Gibralter to Algeciras
Algecira to Asilah, Morocco (via ferry across the Straight of Gibralter and then buses)
Then an eastward loop stopping in Meknes, Fes, Taza.
Back along the northern coast through Al Hoceima, Chechaouene and back out through Tangier.
The Homosexuality is illegal in Morocco but, perhaps, going to be less of a big deal as we are more-or-less women. Still. I might have a harder time than I expect remembering that making out in public is more than just inadvisable.
Then I’ll be heading up to Sevilla, Spain
Sevilla, Spain to Southern Portugal and that’s it. That’s all of the plans so far… The trip will end with six days in Lisbon and a train ride to depart from Madrid somewhere around the end of July.
If you find yourself full of helpful information for Morocco or some really promising but simple to use Portuguese and Spanish slang.. please let me know. Also if you’ve spent some/any time in a Muslim country— which I have not— then you should tell me some things. I will also be sending postcards and letters so you should communicate your contact information to me via reasonable means whenever you feel like it.
J muses about what her department learned when a certain faculty member did something cruel and livelihood threatening to another faculty member.
We always knew he was something in sheep’s clothes. But we didn’t know what.
He could have been a sheep in sheep’s clothes or a wolf or something else.
But it turned out he was a wolf in sheep’s clothes.
————————————————————————————–
I retell the story about the harrowing beast attack a few weeks ago
I had put on Erin’s judo outfit and was pretending it was a smoking jacket when her fiance, Oleg, decided to show me some judo chokes. So all of a sudden he flipped me over and every time I would get close to passing out then he would move me to some other choke. I could barely speak and I was having a hard time communicating with him because he is this enormous Russian guy and there is often a language barrier of some kind between us. He didn’t really understand the severity of my protestations. And then— he moved into another choke and I saw their really mean cat hissing at me and then he viciously attacked my face. I got all scratched up.
So basically you were attacked by the Master and Margarita?
—————————————————————————————
A fB msg that anyone else might have objected to:
did i tell you about the new boytoy? just how i like ‘em - tall, lean and wan-looking. the only downside is having to brief everyone before he shows up that, despite appearances, this one is actually not the same and conversations should not pick up where they left off.
I have just seen the new Indiana Jones one. Here are my ratings as a prose-poem-quiz
1) + or - 1 for the fear of snakes gag
2) + or - 1 for no rolling boulder of potential doom
3) I wondered how it would affect ladyfolx that Indiana’s love interest is his own age. Is this a feminist question? Yes or no?
4) Cate Blanchett– hot or not?
5) Shia LaBeouf: nice adolescent partial recognizability. Just enough to annoy in to a WhereDoIKnowHimFrom stare throughout the film. Answer: Disturbia, tv cameos, Freaks/Geeks
6) Are we just going to be killing characters in cinematic atomic action blasts from now- willy nilly?
7) Which of the following was portrayed MOST like a human:
a ) Mayans
b ) The People of Peru
c ) misc Tribal People
d ) Aliens
e ) Soviets
f ) mannequins in a fake American suburb
After I was advised that I look like an actress in the film, I rented Normal Adolescent Behavior. Rental also accommodated my recent recession into older projects: watching everything ever made about teenagers having sex. And this one was explicitly about (only according to the director, writer, actors but not, perhaps, the actual communicated narrative) women having sexual desire and pleasure. It follows a “family” of six 17-year-olds who have been together since fifth grade or something. In order to rebel against the hook-up-weekends, party girls, and blow-jobs the six only have sex with each other. Every Saturday night they just hetero-pair and then fuck in the same room. To the taunts of their classmates, the women in the family flirt and make out. One girl, attracted to a boy outside the group, struggles to get out. At first she hides her relationship and eventually she speaks out against the family.
Memorable exchange:
Sean: What? You don’t live in what world? The world of first dates? Of holding hands?
Wendy: No you jackass. Of disposable girlfriends. Of bracelets for blowjobs. Of macking and making out and going down and text messaging some asshole whose gonna come all over my shirt. That world.
It was completely confusing.
Femmephane buys into some parts– maybe– in a sort of polyamory, alternative relationships type of way. But, then, how come blow-jobs and stripper poles are tools of the hegemony but tantalizing lesbian-theatrics and rigid heterosexuality are not? Eventual message seemed to be: grow up protagonist-girl and burn your past so you can have fairy-tale relationship with boy-next-door. In her damning evil-of-family rant at the end she lists: cutting, secret boy/boy homosexuality, and crabs as the pitfalls of the cult-like group.
In an effort to better understand the very particular statement of the film, I also watched the commentary where the director describes that the group is a “monogamous” group of six. (Yet more confused) One of the actors clarifies, The Point is That the Family Is Totally Different but Not Perverted Or Anything. (What?)
The film also features some really shoddy acting and I couldn’t seem to remember the difference between the three brown-haired boys. (No, MORE than usual, I promise.) The particularly stilted acting of Kelly Lynch is distracting. She is not only unbelievable as an unathletic-housewife and an extremely effeminate hot mom but is also unbelievable as a professional actor or even a human. Or maybe I just can’t see her as anyone but the L-Word Season 1 NightMare Extravaganza: Ivan.
Only after the fact did I realize that this film is supposedly a sequel to the Anne Hathaway movie Havoc. No matter how dedicated I am to my suffering and your well-being I am not willing to suffer that one in order to understand exactly how NAB is a sequel. IMBD alleges that Havoc is about ” Two affluent suburban girls who clash with the Latino gang culture of East LA.” And all trailers seem to support that synopsis. Femmephane thinks maybe the person who named NAB is confusing the term “sequel” with the genre “adolescent teenagers have sexual tension.”
Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.
by Mary Oliver
Cambridge: It’s not the first time that a slumbering giant crept up and bit me– sleeping, luxurious, nasty.
Graduation day I wore ivory with the perfect shoes. Another graduate looked over to me angrily as we processed in to the All School Ceremony (words of Meredith Vieira + Mary Oliver gets silent Honorary Degree) from beneath a polyester widow’s peak: You’re Not Even Wearing the Hat? A very gowned group, the 1500 that left with me.
Texts from my audience— the A-dubbed “pack of queers” + sis surprise:
“Did [Meredith] really just say schizoid?”
and also of note,
“Sister loves you”
For some (obvious?) reason one of the most successful women in tele-journalism used her speech to tell us all about how the best decision in her life was when she ceded to her guilty feelings about deserting her family for her career and “went home.”
Later we were walking around and sister pointed out that she was Sick of Everyone Staring at Us. Low/Behold everyone WAS. All those queer couples and one exceptionally pregnant with imminent Leo-Queer.
Another dream: I was going to marry one of my male friends. It wasn’t clear why– just that we would never have sex, he would still be in a relationship with his girlfriend, it was going to happen. Someone from my past came up to me and she told me it was a bad idea. Everyone did. I didn’t want to and there was no reason to marry him. It’s just that I had already agreed and everything had been arranged and the wedding would be the next day. Marrying him was impossible but I couldn’t stop it. Or marrying him was impossible so I couldn’t stop it. I can’t tell which. The person in my past said she could stop it all if I wanted to but refused to kiss me.
I brought it to my shrink. Delicately and then in rage and tears hoping she could tell me more about why I am invested in the fights I’m invested in.
“You left your keys in Providence? Who is this man?”
I moved forward to take a bite and slipped again and cried on her mat. I’m Glad You’re Going to Be Here Next Year. With her. With me. I told her.
Doubtless I would produce a brood of three– each with her own porcelain appendages by puberty. “Mom.” One would explain, as she tapped demonstrably at the glass eye with a ceramic fingertip. “Hey,” i would joke carving up a thigh for dinner, “it could be worse. You’ll be immortalized in glass.”
For me it is just the shoulder gone but I can’t be sure how much of my children I would feed Demeter before the gig was up. Public schools and appointees of the court are a far cry from a celestial dinner table and more likely to, say, gouge out their eyes than cope with the cannibalized.
It’s mothers day.
I went to a baby shower yesterday. Everyone got drunk at two pm and by five there were only six of us left. We decided it had been a success, stayed until midnight and looked up “baby shower” on wikipedia to see if we had done it right when we learned there had only been one parent (of forty guests) in attendance. All of our gifts had been guesses except the beach volleyball set– that one was a sure thing.
J’s ex’s grandmother died yesterday morning. J said lots of things like– Only One in Her Family to Survive the Holocaust, Lost her Whole Family and So Made a Whole New One, and I Loved Being Part of That Family– I Miss Being Part of Her Family. I don’t find it touching– these big loving chains of women and it mystifies me that you do. The intra-continental dynasties, the orgies of juridically sanctioned, feminist-approved history, cultural celebration, obsession with the family line: surviving, thriving, loving. I’ll show you what oral transmission really means.
Perhaps I am not moved in the same way that J failed to appreciate the gravity of something else. It is the same as when JK, recently informed he has become unwelcome in his family’s homes, asked if he should fly home and stay in a hotel to visit his parents and sisters. J said: Fuck No- Why The Fuck Would You Do That. I only wept later and said– But of course he should. But I don’t want to give bad advice.
I know.
Now more than ever I know I can neither offer up that family nor promise one in the future. I am so young that she thinks, perhaps, I will grow into wanting to make a family. The party was full of people excited about the prospect of baby. Baby will love you. You will love baby.
It’s mother’s day and today I know it’s not just animals who eat their young. It is also the cursed and the clever. The sacred and profane. And the certainty doesn’t come from my experience as the victimized young.
Or maybe a curse is compelling enough to warrant life. Especially the kind of lonely life that family can never satisfy. This must be what queer means. Once everyone’s actual families come to town I am lost again.
This week, for example: mother’s day, my parents’ birthday, senior gala, my final address to women’s studies, graduation. All of these things beg guests, dates, family, and I can’t find any. The thought of doing the week alone makes me feel like I have eaten something rotten. We had planned to have a graduation party. But when my most beloved guests could not come (or failed to RSVP completely) I opted out: NC who was there for two years of the hardest stuff and always promised, my dear brother, my dear sister, Ken, Nora, and J– who can come for the ceremony and the party but nothing else.
Sure. I understand. But I don’t. Whether or not this is what family means, I don’t want one.
“You have to find some people to come on Wednesday,” my adviser reminds me as I tie up her wet hair, “everyone except for A will have family there– and a bunch of friends.” What is this private school public torture?
In anticipation of it all I remind you again: I will not become the family you or I want. I promise.
There’re still five vials of the sperm she’s saving for anyone who wants them. J suggests again and again that it be me. But Pelops would have made a lousy matriarch and even Antigone couldn’t have cared less about her own offspring.
I’d rather rent a room.
After years of aspiration and experimentation I have finally found the environment in which the alluring US Weekly is completely intelligible to me: treadmill. It’s good. I feel temporarily assimilated into an otherwise impenetrable (sorry) girl-world. You never know when you’ll have a chance to reap the benefits of your showbisdom by mentioning the new Pitt-Jolie house (therapy), talking about star “post baby bodies” (Angela), or listing all the celebrity couples with a 12-year age difference (this one actually failed).
However, since the writers’ strike ended I have found myself lost amidst all this tv coverage. These magazines are no longer talking about banal mega-celebrities like Halle, Will, and Miley, but have instead gone back to banal reality stars. I was ready for Gossip Girl. All is well with Grey’s Anatomy. And if anyone ever decides to do a piece on Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein, I’m all ready. Unfortunately the coverage is going to shows I’ve never seen and they’re either ones you have to watch in order to (presumably) enjoy gossip about (American Idol) or just things that I’ve never heard of.
For a while it was okay. I could just read over the Dancing with the Stars and Next Top Model. Still, something wayward blossomed on the glossy horizon. Her name was Lauren Conrad.
I spent a couple of weeks looking at her picture and nodding along as if I knew who she was. Every time I saw her picture I just pretended that she was Christine Taylor– the actress who played Melody on that classic Nick sitcom “Hey Dude.” Please, I’m not insane. Just willful. Look:
Every time an article would mention Conrad’s age I would just hum loudly or act like the number referred to something else. All this to get out of Google-for-the-answer– or perhaps to prolong that killer-cacti song in my head. But, as you all know, you can not actually elude Google-for-the-answer. You can only postpone it. Which means that I’ve just seen three whole episode of The Hills.
I am aware of the fact that I just had to do some garbage-watching in order to make other garbage more interesting. And I’m into it. And not in a completely performative way.
Also– something else came out of this whole thing. I hate to restart blag with kernals of truth etc etc but now have to. I have found a perfect way to access unadulterated, idealistic girl-advice. This hypervisible information is actually invisible to me. It seems I don’t know the girl-maxims or the girl-morals. It’s a whole world of indoctrination that I seemingly missed. At least I, female-friendlessly, missed a lot of it. Which is good and bad but whatever it is, The Hills is the solution.
You actually get to SEE one character start dating a total asshole and her friend say generic supportive, get-rid-of-him things. You see the character’s confidence rise as she threatens the boy saying something to the effect of: since you are a rude asshole maybe we shouldn’t see each other any more. And he replies: well, we can do whatever you want, but remember that I always liked you for you and I never wanted YOU to change at all. And she actually gets weepy. And then Lauren Conrad’s all like: I love you, you are my friend, wtf though.
I have to go finish mainlining these messages about loyality and assholes. It is so overdetermined it’s almost a Greek myth.
marking my return to the blaggosphere. with love. and with photo credits for jte.
Dearfew, he tells me, means Curfew For Your Dear Ones.
Oh, I admit. A Dearfew. But I won’t let him play the word. It’s raining, we’re below ground, outside you can smell the river.
She Will Miss You, I mention. By now he is eating my melon, balancing wet feet on top of wet sneakers, and I am looking up to the street.
Will You Miss Me? he asks.
I want to stay underground, sheltered together. I wonder if there are any large stones left over from Easter to roll over the door. I already cried for so long about it last night and yesterday morning and before that when I got home from Nora’s. I am angry that she’s broken the news to me but not at her and not at him. So I drank too much over fennel cupcakes and tamales. My bike slid and tipped. I Didn’t Drink That Much, I remind myself, toppling in psychosomatic rigor. But I can’t stop swerving. I can’t hear the street. If a car comes up behind me I won’t be able to move. It will surely hit me: merely incidental. I do make it home.
How do I answer him? He has become a shivering, distant, play tree. Every once in a while a set change brings him back and I wonder when he’ll be folded over again for storage. I cannot follow or predict the plot. I don’t know what acts he’ll show up for. Just sometimes he comes back to read a book and say hello, tell me six or seven stories, show me photos. Go. Except, this is no drama and when he goes, nothing takes his place.
I asked Anne Carson and she told me, once and for all:
On Shelter
You can write on a wall with a fish heart, it’s because of the phosphorus. They eat it. There are shacks like that down along the river. I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you. Replace the door when you leave, it says. Now you tell me how wrong that is, how long it glows. Tell me.
And I mean it, too. But Greek breakfast yielded no spare fish hearts. I’ll give it to you in invisible inks instead:
I love you. Don’t go.
I asked you what the organs are for. One by one. The gallbladder. The pancreas. The spleen. And you said. Stores Bile. Gives You Cancer. Makes Blood, no– Bone Marrow Makes Blood But Something With The Blood.
I give you everything I know in return. Nothing. Patrick Swayze. You Can Live Without A Spleen. (A fact I know only because someone else in my life failed to.)
Just an hour later I know more about what those organs do. They swim to the top of my body and clamor, begging you. They are the lesser begging organs.
Please don’t go. Please. And close the door behind you when you do.
I’ll Say Hello To My Mom For You. He says before we go.
And Your Sister. By which I mean, please have them both say hello to you for me, if you are anywhere at all when you are not here.
Please don’t get me wrong. I want you to have yourself. I asked her, again, for you and she said:
On Major and Minor
Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the names of schools of philosophy, mood and not having mood, the correct time. There are more major things than minor things overall, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.
You know I can only offer you prepositions and inexhaustible love. And those are good wherever you are. For you, I hope, life will be less tragic. Who needs another Atlantis?
Maybe, in many years, I’ll remember that he used to come for a while. During those times: every night I expected him to turn to me and say I Have To Go Home, I’m Late. But night after night he wouldn’t. Until one when I hear, from someone else, that the time has come. He Has To Go. He’s Late. I am heartbroken but knew, of course, that he always had a Dearfew.
“I used to be worse but my wife is a litigator so she makes me follow all the driving laws now.”
“Maybe J would be a better driver if I became a lawyer. Or an officer-of-the-law.”
“She also made me donate my body to science.”
“What? That’s disgusting. What if they use it to test cosmetics or something else lame like that. Donating your body is no good. It’s too general. You want to be sure about where it’s going.”
“Oh, I just thought it was kind of cool, I never thought about it going so some lame cause. That is a little weird.”
“Yeah, I’m donating my body to religion. I totally want people to channel a goddess through my dead body and then ritually eat my decaying flesh.”
“So you’re actually donating your body to Tantra then, not just ‘religion.’”
“Totally. Well, what would the Catholics do with it? Staple it to the church wall as a condemnation of homosexuality?”
65 pages since Monday at 9 am.
20 more before tomorrow at noon?
yes. I’ll call you when I’m free. I promise. 4/11.
The purpose of our project. To link the word and idea of gentrification to something insidious and terrifying that looks like it might be able to turn the world into a drone-run planet (despite the incredible power of Will Smith.) That way, when you are about to make “easy” decisions about where to eat (eh hem, Bloc 11) or where to live or where to put your hipster-infant-clothing store, you will be bombarded not with guilt, empathy, or ethics.. but with terror of colonization and dominion.
The method: Pavlov, Youtube, Blag tip-offs.
Without further ado…..
we ask that you please VISUALIZE GENTRIFICATION
*if this works, I’ll be looking for suitably terrifying videos to pair with other malicious problems.
** for a more productive evaluation of the video, see lolAJ. but don’t keep linking between us. it’s gross.
Strange* advertisement for a Lesley University summer semester 
on the subway.
The copy reads “Passion, Potential, Purpose.
Enhance your skills– enrich your world!”
It certainly leaves me wondering what these summer classes are all about. Black and white photography? Ethnographic research? Diversity?
*By strange I mean weird.**
** By weird I mean racist.
Correction: May March! 28. Incentive. A whole new country. So share what you know.
(She isn’t used to it! It hurts her paws.)
(I hope Pedigree only helps good dogs. Divorce victims etc.)
J keeps asking me to write about providence.
“Write about Providence,” she asks me. All the patched asphalt spots in the street have sunken over the winter and we are bumping violently in her truck. Down town. It’s all because that morning I came up with a new description of the city.
“It feels like we’re actually in a huge factory and all these buildings are actually in a bigger warehouse. And not a good one. Something out of a Kurt Vonnegut book.”
At first I keep it vague. As if I, for some reason, mean to allude to all Vonnegutesque factories. I don’t. I don’t know very many. I’m referring to Player Piano, a not-very-good Vonnegut book (if there is such a thing anyway) that we used to have and I spent the better part of my child-hood reading the opening (factory) scene of. So one could argue that while I don’t have great breadth of knowledge, my detail is pretty reliable in this case.
I am particularly pleased with this last explanation of the city which fortells an eventual factory worker in the dystopic future because it is my latest analogy and therefore my best. Also, if they made a movie of it, maybe they would find a technology-filled room full of full-grown humans gestating in pink goo.
J likes it too.
“I dare you to write a story about Providence. Can I do that?”
“I don’t know.”
We’re at Borders in the Mall on our way to the Apple store so that I can find out which way I’m not covered for repairs this time. My computer hinge is broken. I can’t write a story about Providence if my computer keeps falling flacidly open or closed on me. Especially not in Providence. It’s too over-determined.
The factory analogy has replaced my assertion that Providence is the place I would be least surprised to see a zombie (tied with Ward, Colorado.) Before that, I called Providence a staging ground for a city. It was something out of Columbian magical realism: the city-dwellers (a dynasty of super/supra-human caretakers of town and myth) spend all their time and magic preparing Providence. It is a festival set. A place where a city is about to happen. Either that or it is being polished and honed by commercialism so that it won’t be surprised with Metropolis happens overnight (like DUMBO, now).
But I’m not going to write about Providence because I’m too smart for that. If I do, it will eventually be used against me. Deployed mid-fight by J who will have indexed documentation about how I feel about the place she lives.
I won’t write about it because, at times, I love it. No qualifications. No kidding.
But mostly I won’t write about it because I know you guys. You read my stuff and sometimes you laugh. I say it tastes bad and you immediately go out and buy some to eat. I mean, you pay money for the pain. Believe me. I know. I try hard to prevent you the pain. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from goodreads.com is that I can write the most discouraging, pained review of my life and an hour later at least two of my friends will add it to their to-read list. Then a few months later someone will inform me,
“Femmephane, I read Charlotte Gilman Perkin’s Herland, and it was terrible”
“I know. It starts out as interestingly terrible but then it gets really old really fast. I stupidly decided to write a paper about it once.”
“Yeah. I remember. You should have warned me.”
“Aren’t we good reads friends? I do all of my public warning on there.”
I know.
So when it comes to Providence I’m warning you: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
My mother subsidized her nursing school living expenses by selling her class notes. She reminded me constantly of this when I was in elementary school. Of course, this was before it was so easy to attach and send those notes you’ve taken on your computer. Which brings me to this current anguish.
One of my classes (Tantra) meets once a week. That means we only get 12 sessions in a semester. The professor has a long-standing, strict attendance policy: if you miss more than two classes, you get half a letter grade taken off your final grade. I’ve experienced his sincerity.
Two students (let’s call them Brian and Brian) have now missed every class for the last month without even contacting the professor, despite the fact that the syllabus said that the midterm would be distributed two weeks ago and due last week. They just went ahead and missed those without warning, too. No prob.
So then last week Brian sends an email to the class listserv asking for someone to find it “in their heart” to give him a copy of all their notes. Brian replies-all: Ditto.
“These guys have missed four classes and they expect us to to give them our notes? None of the men ever come. The women always do.”
“I can’t believe it. ‘Ditto?’” Right.
Then I remembered my mother.
I sent an email to the whole class:
Dear Brian and Brian,
I’m sorry you have missed class. I do have all of the notes typed up on my computer. Two of the days I was even careful to record almost everything the prof said because I was taking notes for friends missing the class that day. I would be happy to sell you the notes for $10 per day.
Take care.
Brian wrote back immediately: He wanted them. He was good for it. I know him. He is. So I sent them on, with a copy of the midterm and some friendly tips for writing a paper the prof would like.
And THEN I heard from Brian:
Hey,
I can’t pay you for the notes, I don’t have that money. Knowing that I won’t graduate in
May if I don’t get those notes maybe you can hook it up..
Love*,
Brian
Now. I think I’m empathetic to not being able to pay. If he had, say, made me another offer or something, I would have gladly accepted it. After all, I’ve spent many weeks at Tufts deciding how many classes I can afford to go to and how many days I should skip to go to work. It was the entitlement in that second sentence that got me. Knowing that you’re not going to graduate in May, maybe you could have hooked yourself up with attending.
I haven’t written him back yet. Although I did discover immediately after I sent the notes to Good-Brian, Bad-Brian emailed him asking if they could split the cost. He was happy to pay Brian 20, but not me.
I guess I had failed to appreciate how my hard work, attendance, attention were the least I could do to facilitate this guy’s graduation in May. So I started snooping. I stopped, enraged, upon opening his Facebook page and immediately reading his Activities: “chillin with the bums on my way to fine restaurants.”
*I cannot make this shit up
Rage has compounded itself into utter dejection. And so I have failed to blag what/when I should have. If only I could be like AJ, tireless in my tiredness. A fierce reporter of— lolcats, Dowd-antics, and injustice. Instead I have been beaten by it.
First, there is a white, Harvard man in my life who is currently making a film about how his friend group is “post-race.” The ten-minute film follows two black characters (one based entirely on the filmmaker) as they sleep together in the wake of the female-lead’s queerness. (She is/was queer and troublingly keeps leaving another dyke’s arms/bed to finish herself off with the lead.) Oh, right, did I fail to mention that the film is also supposed to about how his friend-group is post-queer? I have no idea why the filmmaker has cast himself as a black man. (Well, I mean, of course I do, but he hasn’t, like, justified it or anything.) Whatever. I’m so post-him.
And then at my own disaster of a University.
A few choice excerpts from class.
In a classroom conversation about the film The Apostle:
After several students egged each other on about how drunk, stupid, and lazy Southern people are, we finally made it to this Gem.
S. I just think this movie is outdated. I mean, it’s like 15 years old. Race doesn’t work like that anymore. I think we’ve moved beyond race. It’s more about class now.
Professor. Really? What do you mean by that, S? In what way?
S. [Confident in the flawless logic of her illustrative example] Well, has everyone seen Erin Brocovich ?
Students nod. Some express worried faces.
S. Well, that movie has a really beautiful, classy, movie star playing this totally trashy, white-trash, whorish character and the audience really likes her. That’s what I mean.
[World fails to implode. Betelgeuse does not expire, engulfing us all in darkness and death. Unfortunately]
A week passes.
In a classroom conversation about the film Malcolm X:
S. I’m not sure I really understand the Nation of Islam. Could you explain it to me using an example white people can understand.
Presentation-leader. Uh. Well…
S. I mean, would it be equivalent to, like, the KKK?
The word of the day is brandish. 1. trans. To flourish, wave about (a sword, spear, dart, club, or other manual weapon) by way of threat or display, or in preparation for action.
When I say “MoM” I mean it like the tattoo means it. Round, palindromic, and red. It’s completely a joke and completely a scar.
I should use it in a sentence, commit it to memory or something else. But I think– in order to brandish you first have to wear and wield, find and clench in fist.
I’m groping around my apartment to find some manual weapon, spear, or dart. I can only come up with a 5oz vermillion mug and four wooden elephants, two seed beans, and my boots. Can any of those be brandished? Or just shaken hard?
How much of this will I be able to fit into my suitcase when I go?
What is this retrograde that I am listening only to Chopin and The Books?
I’m sorry. I’m returning after a week with mostly questions for you.
This time I can only envision moving out in a different way. A titling back of my head into a tub of milky water, lips finally pink, and hot white water turning my hair brown. There is no coming out or coming through it. Only the infinite tilting back.
My classmates are all graduating to pursue trade programs. Massage therapy!
I have nothing else for you besides this proof of life. note from Captor/Captured to friends of family via podCast. I’m gathering the family funds, will send them promptly to myself, will let myself go if the police are not involved. Especially Horatio.
In the meantime here is who I’m reading. Voila! Distraction. The NewBloggers. Also, apparently, transguy celebration zone?
lol-aj> and this one, especially, about Diablo Cody and sex work
charmed > especially by his ultra-geeky, ultra-blogger self-description but put off by my distance from cookies and airspace dedicated to Candidates
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:
__________________________________________________________
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.)
___________________________________________________________
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.)
__________________________________________________________
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.
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.
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 »
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”
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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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1. ___________________________ of legs. ______ ,practically. In ribbons______
2. Update Conversation?
3. Google wagers You Can Sleep Less!
4. Epicaricacy. I peeled back your misfortunes (as whole fingernails removed smoothly with a paring knife: orange and to the bed) and they tasted like honey.
5. The Moment: Boots with Room for Calves.
6. Maybe I was a lil too, um forward?
7. The famous MORMON masturbation factory of boys.
5. “In traumatic and war neuroses the human ego is defending itself from a danger which threatens it from without or which is embodied in a shape assumed by the ego itself. In the transference neuroses of peace the enemy from which the ego is defending itself is actually the libido, whose demands seem to it to be menacing. In both cases the ego is afraid of being damaged - in the latter case by the libido and in the former by external violence. It might, indeed, be said that in the case of the war neuroses, in contrast to the pure traumatic neuroses and in approximation to the transference neuroses, what is feared is nevertheless an internal enemy. The theoretical difficulties standing in the way of a unifying hypothesis of this kind do not seem insuperable: after all, we have a perfect right to describe repression, which lies at the basis of every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma- as an elementary traumatic neurosis.”
-Freud on War Neuroses
Below is a summary of my feelings about the election. I will never again talk about them on blag.
1. 7am this morning, Porter Square T Station: woman with pearls over turtleneck with helmet-hair half ponytail and teeth so white they were almost blue smiles holding VOTE HILARY sign.
2. As a practical joke: My ladywife hacked my archaic Friendster account and befriended Barack Obama. Who knows how long my friendster account bragged OBAMA!!! ? Who knew Friendster was still an apt place to make jokes. Is that its new purpose? One thing is certain: there will be vengeance. And the kind of vengeance that would make Leonard Nimoy proud!
I. I received another letter to the parents of femmephane from University yesterday. This one kindly numbered three reasons why families should bring a ($400) diploma frame with them on graduation day. They went something like this: to show your kid you’re proud, to show the extended family it’s really true, because otherwise it’ll get wrinkled. My shrink asked me if I was going to walk despite the fact that it will be a completely fucked up distressing day and mostly stupid. I appreciate her more.
II. Brown University’s grading system has only A’s, B’s, and C’s. That’s it. Three grades! D’s and F’s are dropped from transcripts and there are no pluses or minuses. That means that anyone who gets anything between a B+ and an A+ gets an A. And since C’s are treated like F’s almost no one gets them. 60% of the grades given at Brown are A’s. And then those students and their money apply to grad schools with those GPAs! Oh boy.
III. Okay, so it was me who pulled up the anti-abortion (anti-choice/anti-life) signs from the University lawn. But it was really to save the Republicans from their own shoddy workmanship. You can’t put down one (1) flag to represent every fifty-thousand (50,000) abortions! That doesn’t make a statement at all. Who can visualize 50,000 babies? Five, maybe. Especially because they were those cheerful little Tyvek numbers that contractors use to partition space. Maybe if they had used human fingernails (a la Juno) I would have been able to really conceptualize it. Bad work GOPs. Worst protest on campus since Pangaea’s Simulation Refugee Camp got canceled because of the rain.
I’ve been maniacally humming a lot of David Bowie for the last few days. Which is pretty cool, if you ask me. Maybe less cool for the Y trainer who came over to ask me to turn down the ipod to so I could hear myself singing. Or–rather–hear myself start to not sing, as he would have it.
I attribute my elation to the heralded return of my very dearest friend from the bowels of America. By which I mean…. the twisty center and not the shittiest place. He has known me since I was studying econ and wearing my mother’s jean jacket embroidered with Eustace Tilley. I wouldn’t want to belittle the care the rest of you have delivered. Still, the return of Ken has seen a record low for anxiety. My fake allergies have subsided, considerably. Perhaps it’s because K has a spotless record of emergency room behavior.
Had HE been at the gym, he probably would have hummed along. I didn’t tell the trainer that my ipod was off. My whole face had already exploded with adrenaline. Then I consider how Ken calls our joint singing race-to-the-bad note and think we might, perhaps, confine our music to home. And maybe a cruise or two.
In other news:
1. gin and tonics– wow, what an oversight?
2. we’ve brought in a cat, temporarily, as radical measure to take care of mice. I have forgotten so many cats in my life. I called Nico recently to ask her where we met a cat I used to know. I’ve probably convened with yours.
3. there is a second hole in my nostril. really, a third if you count the nostril itself. this time I did not do it because I was feeling impulsive but because I had some time to kill.
4. I have almost finished the first chapter of my thesis. I am going to make a new page for it on my blag. I entreat you to read it and to say scathing, critical things. I don’t have an adviser and trust you more anyway.