you go to the coast, because the coast is where it's at.

T-23 hours, premeire homo-hot-spot v. winter double oh 8 awaits.

And, you know, for good measure, Jeanette Winterson sez this:

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. A release of energy from one site to another. Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel sexure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, genuises, joints, pivots, worked over time, and through time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit.
-- from "Gut Symmetries", which was a gift on Jebus Day.

Don't start playing Sudoku. You already know basic math functions. Don't quit on us now, not when we need you more than ever.

Dilution

Reading That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. Mattilda, as I'm teaching it next semester, and wondering about the amenability of throwing a book like this at undergrads with relatively middling investments in political action, direct, circuitous, policy-level, or otherwise. I've got this tendency (read: urge) to introduce them to radical critiques of certain 'hot topics' either prior to or concomitant with more doctrinal lines of argumentation, on account of a set of hopes that run something like this: through presenting a line of critique and political intervention that runs counter to a logic of slow, incremental political 'adjustment' I'll encourage, or at the very least provide a fleeting space for, a kind of political engagement at once strangely discomfiting and rife with potential -- the pedagogical impulse, here, is one of estrangement and defamiliarization, throwing students outside of themselves, opening up a space for the recognition of other lives they've difficulty imagining -- with the hope that an earnest, critical discussion of a set of tactics and ideological bents so seemingly beyond the pale will prompt something more than either an out-of-hand dismissal or a kind of underinformed radical posturing.

Insecurity: teaching this text, in this context, particularly through an assumed lens re: the unfamiliarity of students with radical queer critique, runs the risk of positing an insider/outsider dynamic that I'm profoundly uncomfortable with, but unsure how to translate.

Immediate Impulse: to search for ways to make arguments regarding, say, the interconnection of draconian immigration policies and the sanctification of gay marraige intelligible, on an immediate level -- which leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, as I tend, more often than not, to rely on quick, confusing glosses and reductive simplifications based on the conjecture of alternate, possible lives -- i.e. the rhetoric of "say, you were in such-and-such situation" -- which encourages a kind of fantasy recognition ("oh, let's imagine me in such-and-such situation") which makes all too easy a comfortable denial of complicity. How to argue for careful, critical allyship without alienating a classroom?

miniskirt appropriation

Snow-blankets, thoughts about the difficulty of creating positive, vibrant counter-publics in economically depressed cities, further thoughts about a painting-gift documenting a teddy-bear assembly-line that transmutes, about midway, to the documentation of a teddy-bear uprising (replete with wrenches, socket sets, toolbelts strapped around their waist) wherein the machines are disassembled -- no new production!

This is possibly because my favorite teddy bear, growing up, was from a Salvation Army in Albany, NY -- a gift from a financially despondent father, who was instrumental both in lessons regarding getting by as well as integral later practices of finding large joy in the very smallest, insignificant things -- perfectly preserved leaves between the pages of books, moss on rocks, coffee milkshakes, spaghetti and red sauce dinners.

A Used Teddy Bear Distro. A great idea, I think, especially when one thinks about the standard operating procedures for organizations like Toys for Tots and the inculcation of a juevenile romance with the bright, the shiny, the new. Notes could be attached, documenting the teddy bear's travel, temperament, conditions of departure, etc.

finals week; parallel universes

Woody: looks how I feel, and partially how I look. hot air, unkempt hair, bad posture, tired and cynical goggle-eyes.

Michelle Tea, in a poem in The Beautiful, mentions that a friend told her she was a lesbian Woody.

Can you feel that? I feel that.

This is all:

Becoming lesbian, if I can put it this way, is thus no longer or not simply a question of being lesbian, of identifying with that being known as a lesbian, of residing in a position or identity. The question is not am I – or are you – a lesbian but, rather, what kinds of lesbian connections, what kinds of lesbian-machine, we invest our time, energy, and bodies in, what kinds of sexuality we invest ourselves in, with what other kinds of bodies, with what bodies of our own, and with what effects? What is it that together, in parts and bits and interconnections, we can make that is new, that is exploratory, that opens up further spaces, produces further intensities, speeds up, enervates, and proliferates production (production of the body, production of the world)?
-- Elizabeth Grosz, from Refiguring Lesbian Desire