frustration....or the absurdness of humanity

so i finally watched the documentary on derrida

and it is extremely frustrating to watch...not because of the

philosopher or the concept of deconstruction

but the absolutely stupid questions that people

(the "documenter" included) asked him

i must say derrida himself was composed, graceful, and patient

most of the answers he provided to these questions

spoke to their own impossibility

derrida, throughout this documentary, stated that he...himself...as

an articulated and inarticulated self, is skeptical of narrative acts

especially narrative acts of auto/biographical frames...

one constantly speaks about oneself but only in an always already limited way

because there is always something being withheld

always something suppressed or abjected

but we take these narratives anyway and hold them up as something

"authentic" and universal when, in fact, they are nothing more than specters

or phantoms...therefore, we are disjointed in our "being"

we reject the Other while also embracing it

we look and we touch and we remember

but what if we attempted to look at ourselves with the eyes

of the Other?

what would we see then ?

subjectivity, as derrida stated throughout, is an inescapable violence

many times rhetorical

often times physical

most times both

it's rather disheartening...to dispel or unravel the violent knots of being...

of i-ness...

and the utter masculinity that all of this is framed within

i also was extremely interested and saddened by a talk that he

gave in south africa regarding the "who" and the "what" in regards

to the concepts of "forgiveness" and "reconciliation,"

the role of love, and the conflicting terms of negotiation

that inevitably announce themselves in this type of analysis

i say interested because i see relevance and

saddened for the same reason...

but above all

my favorite moment in the film was also, ironically, the most absurd

an interviewer actually asked derrida if he was familiar with the u.s. sitcom

seinfeld...when he replied "no" she gave him a short introduction

to "what" it was via an anecdote then

she made a connection between this show and a process of deconstruction by the

insinuation that this show illuminates a deconstructive process...

i loved his answer:

"deconstruction can never be a sitcom"

loves it...

but i'm a drafter

"we write to taste life twice."
--anais nin

i was hanging out with my friend M yesterday and
like most grad school nerds we were talking about
academics...more specifically writing.

i have a very strange relationship with the process of writing
i love it
i hate it
i use it as an object to gauge my own self worth,
to determine the exact dimensions or specifications
of who i am as a writer
i realize that this is unwise
but i still do it nonetheless

in any event, back to my conversation with M
i was telling her about one of the comments
that i received (anonymously) from a reader
who, incidentally, passed me on the answer to the question...
anyway,
this reader basically scolded me for articulating my
ideas in "tortured" prose.
i must admit that this hurt my feelings
and i was pretty vocal about it

i'm not above criticism...and i,
more than anyone else,
realize that my writing can indeed be 'torturous' to read
because it is torturous to write
but i think that's the point

going over this comment and my adverse reaction to it with M
she looked at me and said:
"YOU'RE a drafter"
i thought about it and i sighed out an agreement
i am a drafter
writing is never, ever finished for me

my project and, consequently, my writing is and always will be
a draft
i write against language
i write against grammar
i write against the active
in an actively passive way...the paradox is torturous
but, for me, most necessary

while i disagree with the violent word of "torture" and
the various acts that it signifies i do realize that
my writing is a struggle
with knots
i untie them while at the same time making new ones
i look at the knots that i have made and i begin to untie
them and in this process creating newer ones
and so it goes

i am a drafter
an un-tier and maker of knots simply because
i hate the regulatory "nature" of language
with its power and its violent oppression
i will always write against it
because my life and who i am is reflected within the very
prose that issues forth from my clouded mind

i am a drafter therefore
my life and who i am is a draft and i
will continue to write
and rewrite my ideas and my life

at times, my stances will be cogent even if only in an instant...
at others
not so much (at least for the reader)
but ultimately i must be true (in a postmodern sense of 'true') to the conflict
that brews inside of me and work it out the best
way that i know how
which is writing
which is reading
which is interpreting and
ultimately unapologetic

it's funny, this same reviewer rattled off a litany
of scholars that i should read...(about 8)
6 of them i have read and
hindsight causes me to chuckle
because when i reflect on this list
i have very specific reasons for NOT using
these suggested writers
and i chuckle even more when i think
that if i ever attempted to copy or emulate the ways in which
they write or, more specifically, how they work out their ideas
within their writing i would never have
been accepted to grad school and certainly would never have
passed three comprehensive exam questions

from now on
i will be unapologetic with my writing
it has to be honest (if only temporarily)
and it has to be
re-written

i am a drafter
i would not want or have it any other way

note to self

pat yourself on the back

for passing your comprehensive exams

(but only for about 5 minutes)

then start writing your proposal

and freaking out over a dissertation.

is "fag hag" empowering? and the "colonizing" mother

i presented a paper at the children's literature association's international conference this month and (like most conferences that i go to and present at) i either love what i hear or hate it...a binary i know but i very rarely find gray areas at these events.

for the record i am not specializing in children's literature...my ethos to this field is through english studies via rhetoric...i am transdiscipinary which means that i feel a certain amount of responsibility to verse myself (if only incidentally) to the major intersections of critical discourse where text and culture intersect.

with this said i listened to two papers that were absolutely horrible if not disturbing. one paper was given on a panel that i was chairing. the panel was devoted to issues of colonization and (to some extent) the future of postcolonial studies.

one of the papers (given by a recently graduated "master's" student) analyzed the relationship between illustrations in a picture book and the words on the page. although i am all for cross pollinating concepts in order to parse through dense theoretical connections i sat there wondering what any of this had to do with colonization? i mean, i was making connections in my mind but as far as listening to the direction of this person's paper i was coming up short in constructing some kind of intellectual relevance. then she started talking about colonization.

the picture book being analyzed is entitled _the water tower_. essentially it is about two white boys who are around 9 to 10 years of age. the speaker then proceeded to talk about how these two boys were colonized by their mothers. or more accurately, how one boy was colonized because he had a mother and the other wasn't because his mother was absent. i suppose in her theoretical context fathers are unable to or just don't 'colonize' their spawn? i was dumbfounded. what did the speaker mean by colonization? acts of discipline imposed from one body onto another? althusserian interpellation? i am not persuaded. in fact this is what happens when students (and i am still a student) are given carte blanche to any half baked idea and consequently thinking that they are being "original" or "subversive". this student's mentor (a supposedly "big name" in this field) was there as well...and i kept on thinking to myself that this "mentor" approved this garbage and that she should know better.

the paper was not only terrible, it was dangerous. this paper is dangerous indeed because it downplayed the very real material presence of colonization (and its after-effects). colonization is local but it is also cultural...it deals with hegemony and the violence of the hegemonic struggle in a very "real" sense. it is traumatic and violent and it reifies this trauma on bodies and cultures mimetically (even after this said colonization or the colonizing agent has extracted itself from the cultural landscape). the power of discipline from a mother (or parent) to a child is many things. for instance, it creates subjectivity...it proves itself problematic insofar as insuring the proliferation of white male heteronormative power (in western society) is kept in place. many, many theorists have written about this power dynamic (adrienne rich or jessica benjamin, for instance) but in no way does this process even mimic a colonizing process. if anything this student's analysis downplays colonization...giving it license to hide itself in an irresponsible analysis.

furthermore, this student talked about the image of the water tower itself within the narrative structure of the book. she surmised that the water tower was/is a matriarchal (and colonizing) figure in the story. how so? well this student says that the boys went swimming in the water tower. the water tower was round (womb-like) and it contained water. my brain almost exploded. what about the shape of the water tower? is it not in some way a phallus? the fact that this womb was housed inside a phallus was absent from this critique therefore actively ignoring at least 50 years of feminist scholarship that addresses this very issue. what kind of work does this ignorance or short-sightedness do? could it be that the figure of the mother as womb is created within phallogocentrism? this student's problematic paper displaced the point of critique from the oppressive dominance of white male heteronormativity onto the body of the woman as mother using a non sequitor of colonization.

also, another alarming aspect to this student's talk was her use of "marriage". she constantly reiterated a marriage between the image and the text; marriage between oppression and the body. yet again, i am reminded of how very pervasive white male heteronormative dominance can be in that it manipulates and hence reifies itself under a rubric of a critique that supposedly does the opposite. meaning, her paper was not a critique but an excurses based upon a very well hidden apology from the dominated to the status quo.

the second paper that i had the "privilege" to listen to was given by a new master’s student. if not for the fact that i had to read my paper right after her, i would have left the room. she proposed through her paper that the term "fag hag" is empowering. she used an adolescent text to make her point. in this text a young woman finds out her boyfriend is gay (through, i am assuming, his disclosure). they break up. this break up does not lead to animosity but rather to friendship...this young woman becomes in this text a "fag hag." the reader of this paper then tries to say that this is empowering...that fag hag is not what it used to be but it is something different. she also used several examples from pop culture to illustrate her point (seinfeld, will and grace, and sex and the city, etc.). i kept on thinking to myself (while biting my tongue and trying to keep blood from shooting out of my nose): really....Really.....REALLY???????? not once did she theorize the term. not once did she rely on any of the critical feminist and queer theory scholarship that challenges this term. furthermore, she didn't even historicize the label as a pejorative.

i am all for reclaiming a name...i do this with 'queer.' but unlike this reader i try to always question the terms and the work that 'queer' does. queer in my lexical and theoretical usage is grounded in strangeness...it functions on ontological, phenomenological, and ultimately epistemological registers. queer looks at race, gender, ability, sex, and class in terms (and not despite) of normativity (in a juridical foucauldian sense). however, i must never forget what this word still can do. i must always remember that it functions for many as and only a pejorative. it still does work that i critique against. this word is still rhetorically VIOLENT. i must never forget this. the same goes with "fag hag."

never once was the question raised by this student...can "fag" ever be empowering? what about "hag"? both have very long histories. both have been critiqued together and separately through countless pages of scholarship. i am not persuaded that these terms can ever be empowering...maybe i'm wrong but unlike queer this term was created solely for very specific reasons. it is a raced term...it is gender specific and points to a solid demographic (self identified straight white women who hang around white gay men). "fag" in this sense is being used as a label by white gay men to lay claim to the "hag" or, more specifically, the body of the straight, white woman. therefore, "fag" is a term of empowerment and melancholy for white gay men over white straight women. it is a move that signifies not only a claim to bodies but a claim to power. so my question is who is being empowered by this term? how is the term "hag" functioning? is it empowering? for whom?

during the q & a time i tried to bring these questions to the fore. i attempted to get people discussing the inherently misogynistic work this term is still "doing" within culture...is will and grace subversive...what about sex and the city? what specific images are being attached to the term? how is this term working? no one wanted to talk about race or class or gender in this way. they just wanted to sit around and talk about how "fag hag" is empowering. this, like the previous paper, is dangerous. the term is still used as a pejorative...unnuanced and under theorized by the people who want to claim it as an excuse for doing "cutting edge" work.

i have said this before and i will say it again (even though it is problematic). anytime (white) straight people/scholars attempt to discuss the lesbian/gay/transgendered/transsexual bodies within culture and cultures through what they think is substantive critique they (9 times out of 10) fuck it up. thus "open minded" and/or liberal/progressive self identified straight (white) people are always reassuring their listeners through their words that they as normative bodies are still the unquestioned paradigm and thus, unintentionally, admitting that although normativity should be questioned it is only questioned insofar as their fear of implication allows them to go.

a rough couple of days

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

--e.e. cummings



i couldn't understand my mood

these past couple of days

then i remembered that it was

father's day on sunday

and all of the heaviness

started to make sense

grief is tiring because

it is heavy

and mourning is like a movie screen

that plays memories

in no particular order

so you sit with your grief in the darkness

of this theater

watching the glow of the past in

illuminated gestures

breathing slowly and just wishing for

that time back.

saturday night wordle

i follow the example of the greatness that is devin because

i too created a wordle...


title="Wordle: Untitled"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/Untitled_365"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"
>


you can create a wordle too....

http://www.wordle.net/

hump day video with better than ezra

Juicy

Here We Go
I got with somebody's date
You're like a soap Opera cover
My lover self-automates
Juicy
Aw, Juicy

You say a-somebody say
You're like a salve for a leper
You're sweet for somebody's pain
Juicy
Aw, juicy
Aw, juicy

Yeah, you got to live for your own
You say you got all the sordid details
Check-out retail
Watch it sell
Now juicy
Aw, juicy

I gotta delay...

Mothers, children on the street
Can't get enough to eat
Off the record, dishes fly
Don't know the reason why
Meet me in the check out stand
See who can be the lover man
Conscience bleeding in a song
Guilty as the day is long
Goodbye

Yeah, you got to live for your own
You say you got all the sordid details
Check-out retail
Watch it sell
I got to see that lie
You say what you're going to say
You got to know it's a bitter poison
Sapping all of your soul away

Yeah, aw juicy
Juicy
Aw juicy
Aw juicy
Aw, ooh, aw, ooh, yeah yeah yeah
Juicy

the-world-as-it-really-is(n't)

124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The women knew it and so did the children.

Toni Morrison

Derrida insists that the problem of reference admits of no solution. Language is not the 'house of Being' with the potential for leaping the gap between culture and 'nature.' Language will never become a transparent window to the-world-as-it-really-is.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

wondering where i am

i always thought that i was getting to know
myself better the older i got...
i definitely have changed since i was younger
but this new middle age me is still as perplexing
as the me in my 20s and 30s

i have more aches and pains than ever before
aleve has become an important part of my diet
i play "trombone" with the books that i'm reading
i think more about death now than ever before

the last point is more complex than just the anxiety
of fretting about whether there is an afterlife or not
a heaven or a hell
or if i'm coming back as another person
or a fly

this anxiety is over loss
which means i'm not anxious over my death
but the death of those around me
paradoxically, it seems that i'm not afraid
of death after all but
i'm afraid of living
living through loss

i am the youngest of my siblings
theoretically, i will outlive them all
because i am significantly younger than they are
i am so used to following
i am so used to being the one who trails along
being told what to do
being loved and loving

i was re-reading _the return of the king_
in this book there is a scene in which sam
is trying to resuscitate frodo after he was bitten
by the spider shelob
sam yells at frodo telling him not to go
indeed, he says to frodo "don't go where i cannot follow"

i feel that i will replay this scene for the rest of my
life
the people that i love
that i follow will leave
and i cannot follow them
one of my sisters is having this issue
right now with the loss of my father
because just like her oldest daughter
passing away some 12 years ago
my sister is reminded once again of
the inertness of her position
of the imposed 'stillness' of life

i felt it too when i was beside him
when he took is very last breath
and i felt the numbness creep
from my brain to my feet

i'm sure some scientists somewhere
will tell me that it is all chemicals
a "natural" and "evolutionary" development
to help me cope...to get by...to keep on living...
to deal with the idea of not following
there is little comfort in that for me
to be reminded that i am only soft tissue and
that my longing is just gray matter
and neurons firing
that not being able to follow is natural
because it secures survival
because for these scientists...that's what
it's all about anyway

not for me
never for me

but the concept of god or an afterlife
is hardly any better...
people have concocted some wild theories and stories
that we take to be true
leaving one group of people yelling
at the other
it's noisy being in the middle of all of this
ideological dissonance
it still doesn't feel "good" or reassuring
because the longing to follow and yet
not being able to is there
and will always be there

i didn't want him to leave
and i miss him
i don't want my mother to leave
nor my sisters
nor my brother
my friends
my partner...if only he thought of me this way...which i am unsure of
and much too afraid to really ask

this is not about being alone
this is about access
about a preemptive lacking
that i know will be coming
so maybe things haven't changed as much as i
have imagined
maybe age while dulling
my body like a river stone: smooth and rounded
sharpens my inner hearing
to what my mind and my body are trying to tell me
through voices that extend way past the box
of scientific discourse
and chemicals
and nature

the voices that only a young body can suppress
there is a spirituality
about all of this
about following
about the love that creates the desire
to follow
maybe that's what keeps us going
anticipation of not being able to follow
and waiting for a resurrection that we know
will never happen

note to self

try not to judge too harshly

people who choose to put bible verses on

their t-shirts;

we all have our own 'bibles' to read

because death is kind of scary

hump day poem

i thought that i would preface this poem with a quote from "why i write" by joan didion

in many ways writing is the act of saying i, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. it's an aggressive, even a hostile act.

Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds


But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--
I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence--our I--when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.




From Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

the art of revision

i hate waiting for my comp results
sometimes i am ok with the pressure and
i attempt, in part, to write out a place
within myself that gives me a certain amount
of peace
because, i am really trying hard not to
narrate a worse case scenario

but still....

at the most odd times,
driving around town running errands, etc.
i'll get a flash of panic
and i think...omg, i've failed
everything that i have been working on
for the past four years is insubstantial...my scholarship has been built
with cards...flimsy, unstable
and then this moment goes away as quickly
as it came
leaving me tired...and scared...and depressed
imprinting a question mark on my brain
'am i a sham?'
'do i know what i'm really talking/writing about?'


this drives me crazy

at other times i think
i answered the questions the best way
that i knew how...
i was careful
i tried to be precise or at least
i thought that i was and sometimes
this is reassuring

but then the panic flashes again
like heat lightening or
an intense moment in a movie
where the villain jumps out of a corner
grabbing the unaware protagonist
and then i start narrating again

i narrate a future that is dismal
and ornamented with failure
i stop this writing
and begin again
i revise
i delete paragraphs and phrases
and i attempt to add a more healing prose
a prose that is comforting EVEN if
my worst fear materializes out of thin air
or from some dark corner
my revisions tell me to breathe
to be present
to close my eyes and most importantly
to remind me
to keep taking my meds