pedagogy of the hopeless

for david foster wallace

2008-09-16T05:11:00.000-07:00

missed, dearly.

1) I bought my older brother a copy of The Girl With Curious Hair in tenth grade. He gave me a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men for Christmas. We loved you, then. It was you, and rounds of Ginsberg and extracts from Dharma Bums in the garage late at night, sitting on the washing machine with stolen domestic beer and doing our best to channel that particular sort of brilliance.
2) My footnotes are now, and have always been, your fault. I don't think I even knew how to insert them in word processor programs until you. Yours are better.
3) I'm happy you dropped out of your philosophy grad program. Things were better this way.
4) You deserved that MacArthur Grant. Octavia Butler did, as well. No one else, though. Not a one.
5) Your books are in a box in my father's attic. It's been years. I'm going to dig them out. Them, and all of that old, trashy lesbo-fic. It's like missing a finger or two, without you and them on the bookshelf.
6) A best buddy made his students read from Consider the Lobster yesterday, out loud. Thought you should know. He came and told me about it (this hanging business) afterwards, and we proceeded to leave campus and drink one beer, and then another. We were bummed, terribly.
7) Team Dresch wrote a song in the mid-90s entitled 'don't try suicide.' It's on Captain My Captain. It's yours, if you want it.
8) Here it is. Straight from the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC. We should've been there.

home/sick

2008-09-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

Lisa Anne Auerbach's "Along the Dixie Highway"

porn shops, hot dog stands, international florists, derelict orange huts, pleather dinettes, blankets about the old(racist)floridacentricity of the term 'cracker.' Enough said. Go look.

my love affair with rick springfield's

2008-09-01T07:09:00.000-07:00

"Working Class Dog" is nearly full blown. Thought I should let you know.

Man of my dreams:

driving down to the kenai peninsula

2008-08-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

with copies of albums by Ida, Juliana Hatfield and Mastodon, courtesy of my dear, dear big brother, in a rented Ford Taurus (mid-size for the price of economy!). Hello, my late teenage years -- Ida and sedans. Now where's the vicodin? The bumper-to-bumper on I-95 south to Dade County?

Nowhere to be found. Just myself, two of my favorite ladies, some borrowed camping gear, soup from a box, fjords and glaciers and an old fishing town.

Did you know that in Whittier, AK, the entire population lives in two buildings? And that, before the 1964 earthquake, they all lived in one? And this one building was, at the time, the largest poured concrete structure in North America? But was decimated by the earthquake, and now lies abandoned in the center of town?

from a desk in anchorage

2008-08-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

where a still from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out adorns the desktop in all sorts of pixelated glory.

Things to know if one is ever in Anchorage, Ak:

1) If you are looking to see outdoorsy-type hipster dykes at work slanging lattes and serving tofu scramble, the place to go is the Snow City Cafe. It is on the corner of 4th and L, downtown, across the street from the Cook Inlet. It is also across the street from
2) Pablo's Bicycle Rental, where you can rent a tandem bicycle to ride with your partner's mother, who has a bum ankle and cannot front the full weight of a typical bicycle without experiencing searing leg pain. You can also talk with a 30-something, mostly queer gentleman from Mexico-cum-San-Diego who, while adjusting your bike seat with a lug wrench, will look up at you, crack a smile with his wrench between his legs, and say "I can't work my tool right!" Family, family everywhere.
3) If you ride down the hill to the inlet from Pablo's and make a right into Resurrection Park, you will find the Anchorage Coastal Trail, which runs for 11 miles down the bay, past mudflats and high cliffs and flora with leaves the size of dinner platters. While on this ride, you may pee in the woods and be happened upon by British tourists while zipping up your jeans. If this happens, you must smile pretty and walk right quick back to your tandem bicycle and proceed to dance like a back-up vocalist for Sly and the Family Stone, to disarm them and make them forget that, a moment ago, you were urinating three feet from where they are now standing and that, if the wind blows correctly, they may be able to discern that you have been drinking far too much coffee, because every three blocks in the metro area there is a
4) roadside, drive-thru espresso stand, with an appropriately kitschy name, typically derived from regional wildlife that will kill you if you stand in their way -- bears, moose, and the like. They are all independently owned, and none of them serve soymilk or regular coffee. Do not be disappointed, for this may be the only time you can buy espresso at a place which utilizes the pun 'calf-e' and believes correctly that this makes good business sense.
5)Good business sense, in Anchorage, seems to rely on keeping a high quota of local microbrews on the menu. Drink them all, and ride the bike trails home. You will not be sorry, although you may be mildly injured. Unless you are the victim of a bear attack, in which case you will be either comatose or dead. And then, you will have died a happy wo(man). I've also heard mace works on bears, if you spray it right in their snarly faces and run really fast. Try that.
5) The world's 101st largest bear is housed downtown, at the 5th Avenue Mall, taxidermied in an enormous glass case which forms an immediate border between the luggage and shoe departments in JC Penney's. Go there. You will be awe-inspired, amazed, and surely swayed to buy a duffel bag or a pair of sensibly heeled loafers.
6) Also, in the 5th Avenue Mall, on the bottom of four floors in the middle of a shoe store, a woman died by her own hand. She threw herself off of the fourth floor balcony, and the piles of Lugz did not break her fall effectively. Alaska has a very high suicide rate on account of a severe lack of Vitamin D and because Inuits have a very difficult time metabolizing alcohol and white folks cannot deal with living in a place wherein they are so obviously complicit with a genocidal imperial legacy. Many Alaskans are libertarians, which means they do not do well with feelings of guilt. For them, the motto is "give me imperviousness or give me death." Most choose the former, but there are a handful who go for the chalk outline.
7) If you have the opportunity, head to the combined bowling alley/laundromat/bar in Eagle River called "The Homesteader." It is the only bar in Eagle River (15 minutes north of Anchorage), and it is very busy. It has undergone three expansions in the last twenty years, and on any given night it is full of folks getting down to Cash/Carter, Usher, Little Richard, T-Pain, and Rihanna. The dance floor is sunken and smooth-waxed. A guaranteed good time. You can do your laundry afterward, pitcher-drunk on Pyramid Hefeweizen. Don't bother sorting your whites.
8) You may find yourself staying at your big brother's place, attempting to make friends with a cat named Emma, after a well-known and long deceased radical lady, who hisses at you when you tell her that she is misdirecting her kitten-rage, that you, a fellow prole, are not the enemy. She will begin to come around, particularly if you bring her outside and encourage her to do her kitty-business on the hoods of expensive SUV's owned by folks with outdated frontier fantasies of becoming forebearers of their own fiefdom.
9) You may also find yourself, noon-time, sitting in your brother's pajama pants thinking you should shower and take a bus somewhere you have not yet been, which is what you will do, as soon as you finish this coffee and blow your nose.

tell me everything you know about blast beats.

2008-07-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

Okay.

"A blast beat is a drum beat, primarily used in forms of extreme metal, made with rapid alternating or coinciding strokes primarily on the bass and snare drum."

"Early blast beats were generally quite slow and less precise compared to today's standards."

"Typical blast beats consist of 8th-note patterns between both the bass and snare drum alternately, with the hi-hat or the ride synced."

"There are a number of different types of blast beats and variations within each type that make for a rather large arsenal of rhythmic textures and moods."

"If you need even more speed then try hitting the bass pedal twice in rapid succession."

"Listen to "Overkill" by Motorhead."

"The gravity blast involves playing a basic Euro-blast pattern on the kick and cymbal but using a one-handed roll technique using the snare's rim to create what sounds like a two-handed drum roll with only one hand."

"Make sure you stretch a bit before doing it for long periods of time because your hands might cramp up."

"its the same with blast beats as it is with running, you start out slow to get the technique in and get used to the motion and as you go on you can do it longer and longer and when your at a point where you can do it long (your choice) you can start working a little with speed."

"1. Blast Beats
the coolest drum beat ever created, used primarily in death metal and grind-core."

"Praise and worship the blast beats! They are Gods! and so are the people who play them."

whirlwind

2008-07-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

days, these. Very old and true-hearted buddy up from Durham, NC, steering a black pick-up through the wilds of upstate and interior PA with a ladyfriend in tow to end up finally, wonderfully, crashing in the cordorouy-covered spare bed for four days, led to this, in roughly chronological order: a midnight dinner of soba noodles and sesame dressing; a drive down to the isle of Manhattan for lime popsicles in the Ramble, glorious vegan mock turkey mock thanksgiving dinners in the village, west, a ride uptown to revisit the tortorous youngster years with gloriously bereft sing-alongs courtesy of ani difranco, a ride down to Harlem to find friends and lovers stoop-sitting like profesh; informal contest to see how many watersports jokes can be made in one delirous midnight car-ride north, to home, with the company of deep-fried mock chicken and terrible kwikmart coffee and john darnielle belting in full-on stereospectrumstereophonic sound, busted sub-woofer be damned; no sleep, and no sleep, and no sleep, the best vegan chocolate cake in the world, and loading said buddys arms up with rubyfruit jungle, play it as it lays, white noise (brown, didion, delillo, respective) because it's good for her and she'll thank me for it later.

And now that the house is quiet save for the whirring of fans and the slow drip of sweat down my neck, it's time for book-cracking and brain-recovery.

go time

2008-07-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

for reals.

a gnome

2008-07-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

for you. Quotidian statuary from the Birch Haven RV Park.

"Art always

2008-07-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

has to do with cosmogony, but it exposes cosmogony for what it is: necessarily plural, diffracted, discreet, a touch of color or tone, an agile turn of phrase or folded mass, a radiance, a scent, a song, or a suspended movement, exactly because it is the birth of a world (and not the construction of a system). A world is always as many worlds as it takes to make a world."
-- Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural

the summer of salsa and strikes

2008-07-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

freedom fries

fine form

infinite and free flowing condiments

forever.

backyard conversations

2008-07-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

in flagrante delicto
H: "Ants are totally the proletariat of the insect world."
E: "Right! I mean, people are always going on about 'worker' bees, but all they seem to do is go out and fuck plants. They're really, like, the courtiers, the lumpen."

resistant bliss

2008-07-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

Last night: post-marraige party, red-velvet cake and a crowded house for two equally brilliant friends, one who spends his time arguing with evolutionists, another who has recently made the decision to quit grad school, after a few degrees, to dedicate herself to writing without the deadlines and committees. This clock

presided over the ceremonies, and sheet music from the Romantics was mounted prominently on a synthesizer, and folks all around were all smiles.

Woke up this morning to a counter-London-pride zine, scanned in PDF, in my inbox, sent by a dear old friend who's there, now, rageful and right-on. Excerpted, below, at length, from the zine's introductory mock letter from Boris Johnson, Mayor of London:

"I am delighted to greet all you picaninnies, I mean LGBT’s (is that with an
apostrophe?).You are indeed my favourite weirdos, I mean minority. You shop till you drop, and you lead the pack in the partying stakes. You drink even more than Eton boys do! And our commonalities do not stop in the bunk bed. Your community displays the best of our city’s character: our capitalism, our greedy dynamism, our sick sense of humour, and our distaste of all things foreign and misshapen (unless we can buy it or eat it!).

But Pride is more than just a party – it is our opportunity to show the world how Great Britain is once again. We are an Empire of diversity, tolerance, and goodwill,
encompassing now even the perverted and the freaks. You are our beacon – we go in
your name to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and soon maybe Iran. We thank you for
helping us liberate these places and spreading the pink pound, I mean the human
rights. Soon we can go to these warm sunny places and buy more things and party
more and maybe even have a bit on the side! How hilarious, what a laugh.
Together we can bring back the myths, legends and fairytales of the Old Orient, full
of senses, spices, flavours, and colours. You can contribute to our dream your talent
in dressing up. Gay men make the sparkliest moors, and it is heartening to see
coloured people, too, integrate themselves and join in our own cultural traditions of
blackface."

And for g-d's sake, if you haven't already, please read both Lisa Duggan's The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, as well as the Winter 2008 edition of Radical History Review, an issue entitled Queer Futures, which takes the homonormativity bit and runs with it. Do it!

"step on the cockroach"

2008-07-09T06:56:00.001-07:00

Pancake Mountain, where have you been all my life?

A full-on cable-access revolution, forthcoming. Or maybe we're just breeding a better hipster (get 'em young! recruit! recruit!).

All that aside, M.I.A. should be here, in the guest bedroom, right now, and I could teach her how to "sweep a floor," and "bake a cake," as well as "put it in the oven".

Move-swap 2008.

More?

2008-07-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

BIDITY!

Found while learning chords. Favorite comment on clip:

"I may only be 13 but this touched me when I first heard it. It makes me forget everything bad I;m not afraid of school, my friends or my family tearing away. This song should do that to all people deserving"

I feel that.

thieves?

2008-07-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

Had a dream that Ghost Mice played a rooftop show and then stole my dresser and my favorite wooden chair.

I awoke bereft and disillusioned, though everything in the bedroom was in its proper place.

ostracism, girl pirate

2008-07-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

Brief, to share -- found at Last Vestige Records, Main Street, Saratoga Springs, NY, yesterday, after buffalo tofu and before muscadet, fireworks, and father-daughter Irish folk songs:

Kathy Acker + the Mekons, Pussy, King of the Pirates
The Red Krayola, s/t
The Faint, Danse Macabre Remixed
The Duke Spirit, Cuts Across the Land

for $23.98. That's, like, cheaper than mp3s that you pay for! And I've got the cover art! And the liner notes! Oh My God!

Just me?

2008-06-27T05:56:00.000-07:00

Or is the Black Kids "I'm Not Gonna Teach Yr Boyfriend How to Dance With You" straight-up Three Imaginary Boys-era Cure?

Question: Do we need more of this in the world?
Comment: Abso-fucking-lutely.

More of this, as well? Is pop-genius appreciation genetic? Can surreptitious placing of headphones on babies modify the code?

Because there is a mournful sexaphone

2008-06-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

and it is guaranteed, tried and true, to brighten your summer and your life generally, and prompt you to shout "yeah!" and "uh-huh!" more often than is perhaps warranted, sanctioned, or approved of: Jason Anderson & the Best, free download of a mid-Spring church show in the Great North of the Land of the Free.

And if this doesn't firmly reestablish yr faith in basic human goodness and the glory of fun-times and devil-may-care-music-making, fuck the skills, then watch this, a song which played on the radio, on WICB while my and my number one comrade were driving out of Ithaca, after Farmer's Market burritos and loading an enormous elliptical machine into the hatchback:

Lord's Ohio or Bust

2008-06-21T05:43:00.000-07:00

a certain special someone is the proud owner of a shiny mandolin, which has given me full license to refer to her as a 'mandolier,' which makes me think of man candy, which she is, sans man.

Also -- brand new (used) tenor sax, sitting at the foot of the guest bed, and I remember all my major scales by heart and ear. The last one was stoled and pawned for drugz and cash money close to a decade ago,and now there is a replacement! And the case -- O, the case -- soon to be covered in either a) grossly patriotic stickers (bald eagle, "THESE COLORS DON'T RUN OR BURN"), or glitter + duct tape + origami squirrels. Or maybe this bumper regalia:

Right? Revelation, fire, brimstone, re-upping on the devout quotient?

Naw. Origami rodents, all the way.

that portion of the day

2008-06-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

when yr seventeen year old longing meets a baby Rose Melberg at a sit-down show a decade ago, wearing polka-dots and timid.

"More Busby Berkeley, more nerd sex, more hermeneutics, more whips, more chains, more Kant"

2008-06-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

says Jennie Livingston, here, regarding the potential full-length version of "Who's the Top?"

If you loved me, you'd find me a bootleg.

on the increasing impossibility of general strike

2008-04-30T14:47:00.001-07:00

or, mid-afternoon bowling break.

Just the queers and the retirees swizzling free rotgut coffee and ginger-ale.

The film 'A League of Ordinary Gentleman" documented, well, the downfall of bowling-as-national-spectacle, as well as the death knell of 'civic engagement,' localized dialogue, etc., sounded by the demise of the local bowling club -- but here, in Binghamton, where we tend to be about two decades behind all those 'deaths' prompted by the transnational cannibalism, the bowling league is still alive and well. Gentleman bowling in the lane next to us (team tag: "may guys" -- labor nod? perhaps...), one fully decked in faux-leather replete with a full-color Elvis head on the back, between the shoulderblades, officially owned, having honed their scores since Carter. Myself -- didn't do so hot. The third graders, firm ensconced to our left, managed higher scores than myself ("but they had bumpers" my bowling partner says. As if bumpers have anything to do with the deadly aim of an eight year old on a gym class fieldtrip).

cops/academia

2008-04-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

Working on an essay for inclusion in a book. A real, tangible, hold-in-yr-hands book. Details forthcoming, more than likely. For now, though, some thoughts on conversations had recently at last weekend's "Knowledge, Violence, Discipline" conference, firstly: holding a conference which really attempts to engage the relation between policies of exclusion re: the university, the privitization of the university, the necessity of destruction of the myths surrounding the university as a 'last bastion' of 'free speech' in one of the most heavily surveilled university buildings I've seen seems, in retrospect, a bit counter-intuitive. Now, some factoids:

1) York University, in Toronto, has instituted a policy banning all 'voice-amplification' devices in order to quell campus anti-war protest. Notwithstanding thoughts as to the effectivity of campus protest in general (which strikes me, oftentimes, as a closed-circuit broadcast, wherein the only possible effect is a) irritating the administration (not an undesirable effect, certainly) and b) pissing off campus Republicans), this little bit of information is possibly more than enough to convince even the most starry-eyed, politically hopeful undergrad of increasing sanction and roll-back of -- what to call it -- 'freedom of speech'? As if that phrase meant anything, anyhow.

2) The U.S. Military is hiring social scientists, particularly anthropologists, for inclusion in the deployment of what's been termed 'Human Terrain Systems' -- a presenter this weekend drew links between this and Margaret Mead's Cold War research on the USSR. Disturbing, yes, but what's more -- particularly for someone who's interested in more surface/intensity-focused understandings of the body (to move away from the depth-oriented models which force organs and genes to speak an instrumentalist, determined subject -- see Grosz's Volatile Bodies) is the notion of the subject as 'human terrain,' the employment of a spatial metaphor I typically find more engaging, deployed in such a way as to fuel a notion of transparent mapping with reference to irreducible and opaque 'Others.'

All for now.

script flipping (script flopping)

2008-04-04T06:30:00.001-07:00

From a paper I'm presenting in 24 hours:

"But what if we were to flip the script of medical photodocumentation and reception? What if we were to restore a certain libidinality, a certain sexiness, to the documentation of intersexed bodies? What sort of reception would this prompt? What sort of relinquishing of ‘common sense’ conceptions regarding sexed intelligibility, and further, sexuality/sexual politics would be necessary to view this sort of image while abstaining from the all-too-predictable guesses as to what one is seeing, guesses typically framed by an implicit assumption of a binary structuration of sex?"

and i could kiss yr eyes

2008-03-31T11:33:00.000-07:00

My word. Tender Forever. "How Many." Channeling all the best in sunshine pop and handclaps. Springtime Supreme.

That's all.

canyons

2008-03-13T06:42:00.000-07:00

are carved slowly, over millenia.

I will be there (above) tomorrow, along with the textual versions of Alice Jardine, Chantal Mouffe and, because s(he) deserves to be brought along on all epic winter camping trips, dear, dear Orlando, who has just recently returned from Constantinople and remembered that crying is key to persuasion. Lady after my own heart.

read me

2008-03-05T18:24:00.000-08:00

going on and on about profit, academia, epistemic window-dressing, etc., here:

On Opacity and Incommensurability

This paper is part of a larger, ongoing project pertaining specifically to the doctoral program I call 'home'-ish, but broadly concerned with academic impropriety, documented here.

false apo(lo)gee(a)

2008-03-05T06:28:00.000-08:00

chapter abstract on intersex, categorical logic, coloniality, and technics of visibility done in t-2 hours.

Seriously. T-2 hours. No way will scrabulous stop me. Not this time!

would you rather barbara kruger be

2008-03-04T16:30:00.000-08:00

a) yr best friend
b) yr momma
c) yr sugarmomma
d) yr eccentric aunt
e) yr girlfriend
f) yr thesis advisor
?

I'm undecided.

suffering

2008-03-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

On our way home from seeing Sabhat Tuncel -- Kurdish parliamentarian, former PKK member, elected to Turkey's parliament by a landslide vote while in prison -- speak about the Democratic Society's tripartite position (re: 'the Kurdish question,' 'the ecological question,' and 'the woman question') at CUNY Graduate Center, after braving the hipster crush at Red Bamboo, endless jokes about fake askesis, toast, and the unbearable whiteness of being, and getting near-lost in the outer boroughs, we encountered a serious and severe whiteout in northern Jersey and were forced to pull off the road and get a room at the Holiday Inn in Suffern, NY. The lot was full, as the hotel was hosting the requisite annual Gun Show.

I fell asleep to sounds of mis companeras laughing hysterically at a camel-toed yoga-informercial, and woke up to the sounds of the men in the next room vociferously debating nationalist tragedy and the health merits of PB+J on wheat bread.

an intransitive verb

2008-02-29T04:54:00.001-08:00

has a subject but not an object.

con los pobres de la tierra

2008-02-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

wherever I go, she's gonna go.

2008-02-24T05:53:00.000-08:00

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?).

packing heat

2008-02-20T06:16:00.000-08:00

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.

Radio Phoenix Regazza

2008-02-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

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"

s'not what it semes...

2008-02-11T12:42:00.000-08:00

you know what I meme?

all of the babies they can feel the world.

2008-02-11T06:22:00.000-08:00

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.

on effetecism

2008-02-02T16:19:00.000-08:00

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 and the Hulk. Omen? Harbinger of hope?

an outside more than merely an exterior to an interior

2008-02-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

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?

at the bottom, they all want proof.

2008-01-04T07:40:00.000-08:00

Can't be in a place for more than ten minutes before the critical hits.

A cloudy winter morning on the bay side of the cape, on the piers, staring at enormous wheatpasted black and white portraits of Portugese fisherwomen on the side of a boat house, reading a mounted text about how these women were 'the backbone of the Provincetown fishing community' and also the keepers, in the grand tradition of hearth and homestead affiliation, of the 'songs, dances, recipes, and rituals' passed down orally and praxically through generations and thus kept from falling victim to cultural delegitimation, cultural death. Towards the end of the text, it's mentioned that the state of Massa-choo-choo, on account of the tightening of commercial fishing laws 'meant to ensure sustainable practices' -- which is, I'm sure, a gloss obscuring corporatized rights to cape waters, have been slowly pushed out of the Provincetown area as these laws re: sustainability have made fishing-as-primary-independent-economic activity increasingly untenable.

The night before, I had a nine-dollar margarita.

Unravelling sympathies and complicities, always.

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

2007-12-30T07:45:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-13T10:50:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

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:

2007-12-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

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

2007-06-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

So far:

tents being torn down in thunderstorms.

the new Hold Steady album all the way through Virginia, the one wherein Sal Paradise was particularly correct, which is what every thinking person has known for years, now.

new ways of considering urban planning re: the function of wide sidewalks as crucial community integrators.

burritos for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.