Friday, February 29, 2008

an intransitive verb

exit

has a subject but not an object.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Sunday, February 24, 2008

wherever I go, she's gonna go.

demon
overweening fear that my future job prospects, come dissertation completion, will be in nowhere, midwest (say, Oklahoma), as they seem to be the last sites recognizing that WGS programs are at least a window-dressing necessity in the chilly, profit-driven halls of the academy.

How to cope? Hand-rolled cigarettes, and this question, on repeat: "who gives a fuck about an oxford comma?"

Next-big-thingism aside, that Vampire Weekend album is really quite good. As is Des Ark, which is only serving to further fuel dreams of moving to Durham so's I can a) shop at Bull City Records whenever I want, b) drink microbrews on my glorious, shady front porch, c) begin my career as a queer 'magical realist,' and d) play frisbee on the green, green lawns which flank the southern ivy league (kudzu league?).

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

packing heat

or, lesbian love vigilantes.

Reasons why lesbian detective fiction owns face and rules, generally and entirely:

1) the erotics of concealed weaponry.
2) the frequent highbrow literary allusions in the trashiest of genres, which often bear out queer readings of said highbrow texts that you never even thought of.
3) the incessant trope of the mechanic-suit-as-disguise.
4) the indiscriminate mixing of business and pleasure.
5) the heroines are so far outside the law, it seems an alternate universe.
6) avenging homophic misogynists and restoring honor to the perverse!
7) the nobel loner could be yr girlfriend.

Reading Lauren Wright Douglas' The Always Anonymous Beast, before bed, as it were, post-Lacanian-feminist-revision-flogging (it has taken me three days to work through Butler's "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary," and I think it's because I'm allergic to the mirror stage).

In case you ever felt like charting the movement of desire from subject to object and back, in Lacanian terms, in order to understand the failure of said desire, you needn't. It's been done for you.


It's okay. I'm not quite sure I understand it, either.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Radio Phoenix Regazza

hardhats

Or, Gil-Scot Heron may have been wrong.

Not sure how Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames eluded my attention for so many years, but I'm entirely glad we've finally had the chance to meet.

Reasons: the explicit skewering of the sublimation of radical (queer?) resistance to a party, the party, any party -- or, as the lady writers of the Young Socialist Review so pedantically illumine, the necessity for the division between 'politics' and 'action' to be dismantled -- all pencil skirts and goggle-glasses as they realize that, hey, maybe the politics of the women's army is born in praxis -- permanent deferral of theoretical coherence, recognition that this sort of revolutionary hermeneutics is forthrightly incapacitating.

Further Reasons:
a) The Slit's "Newtown" featured prominently on the soundtrack, diegetically re-visioning their riotous lament about specularazation and pre-fabricated 'community'
b) anti-rape action involving bike gangs, whistles, and ladies in short-shorts!
c) the use of weaponry on communications centers, following an empathic charting of the tendency for species-directed violence to lead to sorrow, retaliation, and further death.
d) the closing scene of the film, demonstrating thoroughly that all that was needed to be taken out re: the WTC was simply its capacity to broadcast -- not the whole damn building. Regardless of what Zizek and Baudrillard have got to say in terms of us (u.s.?) willing the attack, it's sufficiently clear that certain terms were different. At least for some of us, you know, internal terrors.

And I leave you with this:

"What one takes away after seeing this film is the image of a heterogeneity in the female social subject, the sense of a distance from dominant cultural models and of an internal division within women that remain, not in spite of but concurrent with the provisional unity of any concerted political action. Just as the film's narrative remains unresolved, fragmented, and difficult to follow, heterogeneity and difference within women remain in our memory as the film's narrative image, its work of representing, which cannot be collapsed into a fixed identity, a sameness of all women as Woman, or a representation of Feminism as a coherent and available image"
-- Terese de Lauretis, from "Rethinking Women's Cinema"

Monday, February 11, 2008

s'not what it semes...

you know what I meme?

all of the babies they can feel the world.

Presenting here, a paper entitled "Documenting Sexed Aberrance, Figuring Subversive Desires: Intersex Visuality".

Organizing this, which is shaping up fabulously.

Reading this:

which is like coming home after my disconcerting foray into 60s-era cultural anthropology.

and contemplating Ms. Winehouse's response to sweeping the floor with Kanye's astounding id at the Grammys last night, as well as the momma-centricity common to each of them. And the shout out to 'blake incarcerated,' which made me think of 'kids incorporated'. An unlikely parallel, surely.

We love mommas.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

on effetecism

So, Nietzsche sez, the The Genealogy of Morals that, you know, most of the last couple of centuries have been all about 'effete self-doubt' prompting interiorization and 'bad conscience'. Now, slightly over 8 years into the millenium, I've got a proposition, or perhaps more than a propostion, as I can already see manifestations of it. Everywhere!

It's kind of like his thing for Wagner and Goethe.

From here on it, it should be all about severe, no-holds-barred effete affirmation!
Yes!

You want proof?

pikachu!

Pikachu and the Hulk. Omen? Harbinger of hope?

Friday, February 1, 2008

an outside more than merely an exterior to an interior



Midtown Miami, the Carnival Center, Scott Turner Schofield's 'Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps,' after the performance has taken us through a series of ever-ambivalent identitarian permutations. We are smoking on a balcony, clutching glasses of free wine and doing our best to avoid the gay and lesbian bourgeoisie schmoozefest happening behind plateglass, feet from us, as we lean over the railing and seek human forms in the windswept, meticulously bricked no-man's-land which passes for a courtyard (although, really, of course, it is a magnetized repellant homeless-rejector), tell stories about our respective and disparate difficulties with crowds. With us, on this balcony, are some queer kids from Pridelines, kindredly intimidated by the crowd, the tax bracket, and the potential cruelty of a question and answer sesh where the predominatly normatively sexed audience interrogates STS. Not necessarily disastrous or uncomfortable, but tendentiously walking the tightrope. Or so I think, accustomed to assuming misbehavior, misrecognition, and invasiveness mild and otherwise in such situations. A presumption in bad faith, perhaps. Elaborate defense strategy.

Note to self: underestimating the productivity of uneasy engagements, no matter how scripted, may be a mistake.

But back to the bad faith, the feeling of being elsewhere and otherwise -- on the balcony, sketchy and uncomfortable, framed against the flood lit palm trees, a shadow.Thoughts, again, as ever, about intelligibilty and excess. Moreover, paralysis. To stake it: this 'I,' determined by engagement and interpellated in so many different, various, and half-realizable ways -- boy, girl, queer, otherwise, butch, femme, etc etc ad nauseam -- how can I trust this crowd? How can I revel in the potential of affixation? How do I refuse the tendency to back out, to run? How, in short, to trust?