I’m always being chastised for finding things boring. I can’t count the number of partners who have criticized me for that, everyone likes to think that what they love is so fascinating, nobody wants to see your boredom but these boys are so masturbatory and they drone on about their fucking music…
i am reading poems in new york with my friend cat (@trying2endacct) a week from tomorrow!
debbie and i are reading in brooklyn
we are reading unpublished work and work composed for the occasion
date: thursday, may 3, 8:30 p.m. (reading will begin around 9)
location: 88 starr, brooklyn (near jefferson st. on the L)
From her new article, “Inside Out:”
But the entire content of this rant is so thoroughly lodged in my intestine that I can’t imagine I’ve ever had the goodwill to actually write it out from beginning to end, much though it comes up almost every time I put a pencil to paper. I catch whiffs of it and feel immediately nauseous; I try to change the subject but find that I’ve already spoiled any possibility. I write a sentence that’s the opposite of whatever’s in my head; I make a line break and write something completely different; I look for surprises out the window; I draw a non-representational picture; I add to the picture by crossing it out. What comes onto the page is as erratic and incomprehensible to me as it would be to a reader, the spasms of an invalid who grasps in all directions for anything, anything that exists and is not able to be sick. The best thing I can find myself doing in these circumstances is transcribing
I have become dizzyingly unceasing on the Internet. I am worm moving forward with the lack behind my butt constituting my soul so I can’t go backwards, only forwards into a stream that says yes, there are more things to read. I think that there is something hard and special about Cat’s writing. I feel like it’s a little bit anti-Internet though what an obvious thing to say. Lately I’ve been feeling like there are only four things: internet, heteropatriarchycapitalismwar, internet-heteropatriarchycapitalismwar, and heteropatriarchycapitalismwar-internet. Like the most big thing other than hegemony is the internet or like you have to give all your things to the internet or else they will be taken by heteropatriarchycapitalismwar, but even if you give all your things to the internet it still is probably wracked by these things. The way you sometimes wonder about how much reality twitter has actually managed to digest. But it’s good that you can also put other things on the Internet which are hard to digest like Cat’s writing.
Anyways I am going to be in New York soon so I will get to talk to Cat more soon about writing and whether maybe her hardness has anything to do with the gallstone in The Cow, why girls and boys come in during the second section and then vanish and all you have is the specter of men protecting themselves, Phil vs. David Foster Wallace vs. naive readers of David Foster Wallace, Cat what are you trying to say? You don’t have to explain more to me if you don’t want. It sounds like some boys are being misogynists.
Today a lady asked me “What did you do today?” And I said, “Oh, not much, I have the runs, also I read The SCUM Manifesto.” And she was like, “Was it your first time?” And I felt happy because in that moment we basically came out to each other as feminists and it was relieving, even though afterwards we weren’t able to have a very satisfactory conversation about the piece, or resolve some kind of disagreement; she ended up shrugging and saying that she should read it more.
The SCUM Manifesto: what an amazing thing. Excited back crack pleasures of reading a text that treats man as an inessential creature with an essential being. I don’t know. I feel like I’m going through these feminist postcolonial readings that Jane or twitter or Jackie Wang tells me about in a different way than I’ve ever read, just pure eating. Like I can’t get enough and I can’t sleep until I’ve read three more. Is there any digesting at all happening inside of me? Or am I using it to treat indigestion?
All the time I’m wondering, what’s place-specific about Connecticut and New Jersey, were all of the suburbs I lived in just “the suburbs?” I don’t know. Can it be anything but contemptible to say, “I’m too American to live outside of America.” Can I think my American diaspora at the same time as my other diaspora. Knowing that my petit bourgeoisie diaspora is so different from the other kinds.
Watching this amazing nine hour film called “To the West of the Tracks,” a documentary made by the Chinese cinematographer Wang Bing, and disc 3 treats this town that gets diasporized. It shows people climbing onto the roofs of their houses and taking the roofs apart by hand. To sell the raw materials. It is a slow beautiful movie (entirely?) hand recorded with a digital camera, about a dying factory and the dying town around it, in China, in 2002 as the last socialized factories were dribbling away being replaced by new planned cities and their economies. Austin says of the factory scenes where there is so much smoke and orange light and isolation, he says that he feels like he is watching something on the inside of the world. I feel like they’re watching me.
I feel so ensconced that I can no longer tell what I am or whether I’m doing “justice” to a piece, the way critics are supposed to worry about doing justice to a piece. Like the boundary between my brain and the writing I read has become unstuck. Is this worth adding to the Internet about? I’m excited to talk to Cat about the reading we’re going to do together and maybe I am going to try to write about radical relational insecurity and the practice of approval-seeking.
I upload some articles and linked to some books I’ve read recently (or somewhat recently) on prisons. Feel free to download and share the links with friends. We should have a conversation about this material sometime. Read it and let me know what you think.
Nowadays I feel happy about the possibilities of blogging, and I think it was because of the revitalizing feeling of talking about reading “girl blogs” (like the blogs of Jackie Wang, Bhanu Khapil, and Elaine Castillo) with Jane.
This is going to be a post about dependence. It’s about my relationship with my friend G., whom I’ve been living with in Paris for two months. We hang out all the time and also have sex sometimes. (For the record, he’s said that I’m allowed to blog about him.)
I usually talk about him to people who don’t know us as “my friend G.” But about a week ago I asked him if I could call him my partner.
He said he didn’t like that idea because he felt like our relationship is nonromantic. That made me feel bad. But I need to work on expressing my feelings more directly, because out loud I said, “I don’t think romance is a thing!”
“Couldn’t you say that I’m your nonromantic partner?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, defensively, “I guess I feel like if there’s a distinction, then I feel like my relationship with you IS romantic.”
We kept talking, and eventually I said a mean dismissive thing about how I feel like being a white HOCD/bi man is “less complex” than being me. That was shitty. I don’t believe that. I think it points to a limitation of identity politics that a thought like that can even be syntactically formulated.
But for me there is something important about being able to refer to this intimate relationship I have, prior to other facts coming out, facts like that he is a boy and that we live together in an apartment that is 11 square meters. I don’t like that as it stands, people infer a sexual relationship from the fact that he’s a boy and I’m a girl.
I like that “partner” states an intimate relationship without stating genders right away. I like that it suggests an egalitarian relationship, the terms of which have been discussed and are negotiable. I like that it’s vague and queer.
It feels urgent for me to stake myself out as queer because there are so many institutions that fail to recognize the worlds that people build for themselves through non-heteronormative relationships. (Here is a good article on this: Sex in Public by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner.) G. and I are cys-gendered, so we’re able to pass right now as a cute, normal couple, but I feel uneasy about the possibilities for a future in which I will continue to want to have intimate relationships without rules about monogamy or projections about marriage.
Also, I like the idea of saying, “my partner,” because it’s a way to invoke the sense that I have something. Or that I’m had by something.
Because I feel really really alone, like a lot of the time, except, lately, when I am with G. I guess that seems like it could be a bad thing. In an email to me, Jenna said, “Are you becoming dependent on G.? Are you sure that that is healthy for you?”
But that aspect, the dependency aspect of it, doesn’t trouble me at all, actually. (*This is less true than it was a week ago when I wrote it.)
Because I feel like I am like a genie.
I’ve met feminists who talk about how women are goddesses. For me, too, it seems to undo some of the sexist ideology I’ve been fed all my life to look at women and repeat to myself, “Women are sacred!” Somehow this thought manages to soothe and silence the agitated voices that rise up inside of me in social settings, voices that criticize other women, criticize myself, make me feel intimidated, jealous, contemptuous, dumb, bad, gross, ashamed, embarrassed for them/women/me. To think a thought like this about women puts me in solidarity with people that I’ve been conditioned all my life to try to compete with.
Women are holy and powerful, and sometimes I feel holy and powerful. But also a lot of the time I feel really helpless, especially when I’m alone.
There’s nothing that really consistently works to get past this.
That’s why I feel like what I am is more of a genie than a goddess. In The Weather in Proust, Eve Sedgwick’s amaaaazing new book, she talks about how genies complicate our traditional notions of omnipotence because they traverse the binary of power/dependence. Genies have the power to make anything at all come to be, but they are also susceptible to being trapped inside of objects—“flasks, stone pillars, signet rings, and, notoriously, brass lamps—and whoever comes to own the object also comes into ownership of the genie and it powers.”
Thus a distinctive psychopolitical, master-slave dimension of relationality opens up…. To the genie… giving its godlike support to a person may also signify its servitude. It is firmly external rather than internal to the person whose wishes are its command. It can be resistant: truculent or actively malicious in interpreting those wishes…. [and the] nature of their ties to “their” people and places…. can become an affectively potent space for speculation, longing, and ressentiment.
phenomenal cosmic powers, itty bitty living space
I’m really taken with Eve Sedgwick’s picture of a kind of transference that isn’t insatiable and jealous. She takes the idea of the possibility of such a “benign transference” from Michael Balint. Here’s Sedgwick:
Neither competitively nor genitally organized, the benign transference does not demand to be gratified by “external action” on the part of its object. Instead, Balint writes that what it requires from its object is a mode of being, specifically the mode of being that characterizes the natural elements. It “presupposes an environment that accepts and consents to sustain and carry the patient like the earth or the water sustains and carries a man who entrusts his weight to them. In contrast to ordinary objects, especially to ordinary human objects, no action is expected from these primary objects or substances; yet they must be there and must—tacitly or explicitly—consent to be used, otherwise the patient cannot achieve any change: without water it is impossible to swim, without earth impossible to move on.”
I feel like there’s an extent to which the condition of geniehood is existentially true. We all need holding environments. (Winnicott: A good maternal holding environment is one that enables us to think of something else, something beyond the mother’s care.)
“Maybe I should write a self-help book called WE’RE ALL GENIES!” I enthused to G.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I feel like it’s more interesting for me to think of only some people as genies.”
“Plus,” he added, kind of nervously, “What if this means that I’m your master?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I think that that is what it means.”
“Well,” he said, “Then I can’t be a genie! Genies can’t own other genies!”
I’ve written before that I sometimes think of myself as a wandering housewife. I keep traveling, and when I’m not going somewhere in search of a radical community, I’m going somewhere because of a man and installing myself in a home and tending to it like a restless stay-at-home wife. I came here to live with G.; I drove west to be with J.; I drove back to Lincoln to be with E.
Some days, here in Paris, it is all that I can do to sit around and wait for G. to come home. “Maybe you should volunteer somewhere?” Jenna suggests in the same email. And there are things that I have been doing to try to shore up the boundaries of myself, but there’s always going to be a core neediness, I think. And maybe I think I especially feel my dependence here in Paris; there is something about being an ethnic foreign woman in a city: places don’t seem like they’re “for me.”
Genies have an impersonal dimension to their dependence. Like it’s not that there’s necessarily something especially remarkable about the person they’re held captive by—-it’s that they need to bargain with mortals in order to have the possibility of (temporary) freedom. On top of this impersonal need for other humans, a personal relationship with a particular human can develop whose terms are TBA. I really like G., which is nice, because I also love him.
I think that’s why I wanted to be able to call G. my partner, because it’s the easiest way to try to convey an extent to which I’m owned and an extent to which I’m free. I’m still working through it, and who knows how it will feel, but for now I think I’m okay with dwelling in the place where holding folds into owning, always knowing that I’m free to go, but that I’ll probably only be happy if I become reattached (or re-enslaved) to some new object (though not necessarily a man, or just one man).
So we keep talking and it turns out that perhaps what really bothers G. about me calling him my partner is that it will reinforce the perception that he’s straight. So we decided that the thing that I also have to convey is that he’s gay.
“Okay, so I’m supposed to say, ‘He’s my partner, but he’s gay,’” I say, “How am I gonna say that?”
“It doesn’t matter, that part’s up to you,” he says. He seems to be happy with the compromise we’ve reached.
“But wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, ‘He’s my partner, but he’s bi?’” I ask.
“Yeah, but there has to be a ‘he’s my partner, but—’ and it feels like there’s no reason to say ‘but’ if I’m bi. I feel like if you tell people we’re partners and I’m gay, and I tell people I’m bi, then they’ll get the sense that things are complicated, which is accurate.”
—-
A Postscript: I have been feeling ambivalent about publishing this post, because its cheery acceptance of dependence has come to seem troubling. (Especially now that I’m leaving Paris in two weeks.) But I still wanted to try to think through the possibility of a feminist dependence on men. Maybe I will try to write a darker, more digested post on dependence later.
View high resolution
Why We Oppose Votes for Men
1. Because man’s place is the armory.
2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
3. Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.
4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.
5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government.
from Are Women People? by Alice Duer Miller
(Source: anarchistsoup, via subashini)
“I’m stupid”
I don’t eat properly or remember to take vitamin B
so I’m tired all the time
I just stole a book
even though I have $13,000
Ai Wei Wei is a blogger, but they put him in the gallery
because they don’t have galleries for bloggers
they don’t have galleries for people
I don’t have a pen
so I’m the only person typing on my iPad sitting around this fountain
I don’t owe anything to anyone
I’m going to have my first lesbian experience tonight
I don’t even really like the weed we brought back from Amsterdam
hidden inside Austin’s deodorant
I wish I were in America
so I could look at a tree
try to describe something
lipstick
symbolizes chastity
last time my lipstick got fucked up someone joked, “who have you been making out with?”
well what kind of poetry do you like
well I think that shade is flirtier than the one you have on
well the truth is every time I use technology I get afraid
about the world ending
I’m happy Austin is writing poetry
but he probably won’t show it to me
Bora Yoon and Luke DuBois at the Boston CyberArts Festival, 2011.
I wrote an article for the Hypocrite Reader called money money money money.
A LUMP OF CASH
If you take a stack of one-hundred-and-thirty-three hundred dollar bills and roll it up very tightly, it will fit in the breast pocket of your shirt, especially after your grandma sews it shut with white thread
& then I wore these bills over my heart
& I wore a thick coat to cover this extra breast
& going through airport security the small woman felt me and looked at me and asked, in English, “money?” and I nodded.This was in Thailand, where I had a layover.
DEBBIE, STOP
ARE YOU GOING TO TRY TO WRITE POETRY ABOUT YOUR PRIVILEGE?Yes because my thoughts won’t stop gushing and because I have discovered in me a bedrock of fear (call it entitlement) that means I’m not going to simply give away this money that I was given. I guess this is me making and unmaking peace with this money that is mine that was made by governments that was made by work or worse.
To read the rest, follow this link: http://www.hypocritereader.com/13/money-money-money-money
Occupy Wall Street
I haven’t written about the “Occupy” movement on here. I’ve been biting my tongue, trying not to be too cynical as a result of my sour experiences/disillusionment with the Baltimore encampment. You can read the Baltimore Feminist Reading Group’s analysis from the Women…
