Friday, October 08, 2010
why i will never listen to or read joe.my.god or dan savage
the above is a link to one of the most repulsive, essentializing posts i have ever read. dear joe and dan...you (and your listeners/readers) are advocating for the same kind of violence that you claim to be "fighting" against. it is your way or nothing....there is no critical inquiry or conversation regarding your white male "ideas" or about how to "fix" something...and when, goddess forbid, someone does actually want to put your ideas into relief with others you simply go on attack mode...again...how white, male of you. does it really get better? or is this a rehashing of the myth of "the american dream"? if you work hard enough you can get whatever you want....because if you don't get what you want then you didn't work hard enough and therefore you are a failure? turn it around, the "it gets better" videos, as femmephane points out in this post:
http://tempcontretemps.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/why-i-dont-like-dan-savages-it-gets-better-project-as-a-response-to-bullying/
are created mostly by white, privileged gay men...and when you get to the bottom of this issue it doesn't address gay teen suicide at all it addresses a personal experience of "overcoming" that is universalized and repurposed as a truth. what happens then is the self-serving motivation that constructs these videos, as objects of truth claims, create an unchallenged and anitintellectual (much like the tea party is doing) violent and reactionary atmosphere wherein a teen who does commit suicide is going to be seen as a failure instead of the tragedy that it most certainly is. dan and joe...gay teen suicide is NOT about you or your lives...it is about hopelessness and oppression...it is about trauma and the loss of voice. if you really want to "make a difference" why don't you listen instead of throwing your lives up on a video and telling people to just stick it out or rather "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps kids" because "if you don't get through this difficult time then you have missed the point and you are a failure because you did this to yourself"...joe and dan....in your attempt to embrace this problem, to bring it closer to yourselves you (and i think inadvertently) are abjecting the very bodies that you want to speak to. we need dialogue not two guys (among many) who have tricked themselves into pretending to be self-absorbed mother teresas, and, btw, calling queer theorists "navel gazers" doesn't help your cause...at all...you're just name calling...something i'm sure that gay teens are all too familiar with. if you can't listen to other types of narratives, critiques, and standpoints then how in HELL are you going to be able to listen to bodies that feel hopeless, oppressed, and violently abjected into the periphery? ultimately this is about power...who has it...who doesn't...how it is moving through language. i don't see empowerment in these videos...i see a reinscription of a hegemonic struggle enunciating itself through privileged bodies who, in turn, are firming up their always and already privileged standpoints.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
early morning poem...because i can't sleep
Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
by Margaret Atwood
The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.
I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.
Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
why day friday
why do these same white males think that they can pick up women by reading gay/bisexual authors?
why did summer take so long to get here and then turn around and leave?
why is glenn beck given any kind of platform? seriously, he's an idiot
why do i constantly feel the need to run?
why does it always feel like i am under water when i do run?
why can't keith olbermann run the universe?
why do i see so many people with tattoos now? (not that there's anything wrong with it)
Saturday, August 21, 2010
adventures in dating
i have an online journal on a social networking site called okcupid
it's an ok site...especially since it is free. i like to write in the journal there because ideas and topics come to me quickly when i read people's profiles and how they choose to present themselves to their online audience...so this is what i wrote today:
i haven't written in this thing for awhile...i think the reason revolves around the role that writing plays in my life. i am researching and writing for a living and sometimes it's just nice to just read. so i have been reading when i'm on this site. of course what i have been reading are the various profiles. it's interesting to see what people write (and consequently don't address) when they are constructing an online persona. some are really nice...well written...expressive...obviously offering up to the reader the very best of what or who they think they are. of course many are really, really sad. so look oriented, so age oriented, so much is focused on the body but a completely unoriginal and yet static abstraction of what they expect, so specific, so much like themselves or what they are striving to be. i think that the beauty principal (especially within the gay male community) is grotesque and yet pervasive and insidious. what happens, i think, are a couple of things. 1) there is the "idea" of what we want that will never live up to the second point...the materiality of this "idea." how do you fall in love with an impossibility. for instance here's and example of what i mean:
"Preferably within +/- 5 years of me but not a deal breaker
'Ripped' muscular which means not only does he work out and doesn’t smoke, but clear progress has been made. [insert my note: what does this mean, exactly?]
Honest
Intelligent
Patient
Giving
Sports minded, or sports open minded
Somewhat humble but definitely not arrogant, or narcissistic
Goal oriented
Sense of humor
Emotionally secure enough so as to not need a party every night or someone to entertain them and knows the difference between uncomfortable and comfortable silence
Clean – neat as well as free of bugs and diseases.
Likes music – all kinds but a bias toward alternative rock is ideal. (If classical music is the one and only station because of the snob effect, and ditto for jazz then that fish should swim out to sea.)
Likes all kinds of art (painting, sculpture, photography, theatre, books, architecture, etc.)
Thinks old car are “kewl” and even some new ones but not just because they’re new
Spiritual but not necessarily with an established religion
Not obsessed with money or social status.
Maybe has chest hair and a tattoo or two (or even a couple more)
Knows what LTR stands for.
Can write an inquiry email more than one line long that describes themselves and how they fit the list." [seriously? i don't even think that jesus christ (or whatever messiah you happen to believe in) could live up to all of these expectations]
clearly, as stipulated by the final sentence...this has nothing to do with any one person "applying" for this man's affection but rather this is how this person sees himself. narcissism at its finest. so specific and so "obsessive" and yet to be obsessed is something that this person doesn't want (except, perhaps in the attention that they pay to their body?). and i would like to know his definition of LTR. what does that mean. i study language...i am a rhetorician...so definitions and expectations within language systems intrigue me. does his definition encompass someone in a wheelchair? probably not...is this a search for love or for an ideal? who knows...but it is sad and pathetic and one of the main reasons why i feel no solidarity with the gay community.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
on the verge of a daydream
Monday, August 09, 2010
just a thought: a monday morning free-write
Sunday, August 08, 2010
sunday poem, because i'm procrastinating and yet always thinking about my dissertation
Margaret Atwood
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.
ò
I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
ò
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.
ò
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
ò
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
ò
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
Monday, August 02, 2010
adventures in writing a dissertation while in vegas
so, i worked on my dissertation with a buzz, listened to my ipod, people watched, and in between those times, i attended the wedding (which went off without a hitch). most of my friends hung out by the pool...which was impressive i must admit (the pool not my friends although i'm sure they would beg to differ) but i was born and grew up in florida...around palm trees, beaches, and pools so those things meant nothing to me.
i did walk around outside a bit...which, btw, dry heat sucks. i went to "the palace," and i trekked on over to "paris." i guess what freaked me out about these places in general is the illusion of history that they present to their "readers." i study rhetoric and these rhetorical situations where anything but interesting. i mean vegas has all of these copies with no original...i know that a number of philosopher/theorists have written about this complex (and yet straightforward) cultural intersection but reading and experiencing are two very different things. even the palm trees (which i don't think are indigenous to the area) that surrounded the waterfalls (which i know aren't natural) created this site of "meaning" that made no sense at all. flat, schizophrenic (as f. jameson would say), without a history, and copying off of an original that does not exist nor has it ever existed. too weird...no wonder i needed a drink.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
further adventures in dissertating
Saturday, July 24, 2010
every intention
some days i think that i have this dissertation under control and then all of a sudden it is too big for me to wrap my head around...again...it makes me want to cry but i don't have the energy. telling my parents and friends that i will be graduating in may 2011 has put the pressure on and at first it was a positive stress but now it is just eating me up...especially when my mom is saving to make the trip...oh well, back to dracula...meh
Friday, July 23, 2010
why day friday
why does johnny depp not age? seriously..it's kind of creepy
why does the old dude at the coffee shop not see the uncomfortable facial expressions of the women that he is hitting on? and fyi dude tuck in your shirt or don't but please for the love of god stop with the half tucked look
why do i feel panicked all of the time?
why do i look better on paper? i mean, really, a guy will ask me out on a date and then i never hear from him again
why can't i just feel comfortable with myself, books, poetry, and writing to keep me company?
why is enough really never enough?
why are my thumbs twitching as if there is something wicked coming?
Saturday, June 26, 2010
growing older
Monday, April 12, 2010
and you ain't there...
And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.
should i?
i mean...it's kind of like talking/writing to myself or talking/writing into the void only this void is on the internetz
maybe i should finish writing my dissertation on this blog...that would kind of cool
or not.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Chairlift - Bruises
I tried to do handstands for you
I tried to do handstands for you
Every time I fell on you, yeah every time I fell
I tried to do handstands for you
But every time I fell for you
I'm permanently black and blue, permanently blue for
you
I tried to do handstands for you
I tried to do handstands for you
Every time I fell on you, yeah every time I fell
I tried to do handstands but every time I fell for you
I'm permanently black and blue, permanently blue for
Chorus:
You-ooo etc...
For you-ooo etc...
So black and blue-oooo etc...
For you-ooo etc...
I grabbed some frozen strawberries so I could ice your bruising knees
But frozen things they all unfreeze and now I taste like...
All those frozen strawberries I used to chill your bruising knees,
Hot July ain't good to me
I'm pink and black and blue
I got bruises on my knees for you
And grass stains on my knees for you
Got holes in my new jeans for you
Got pink and black and blue
Got bruises on my knees for you
And grass stains on my knees for you
Got holes in my new jeans for you
Got pink and black and blue for
Chorus:
You-ooo etc...
For you-ooo etc....
So black and blue-ooo etc...
For you-oooo etc....
Do-doo-do-do-do
Do-doo-do-do-do
Do-doo-do-do-do
Do-doo-do-do-do
Do-doo-do-do-do
Sunday, April 19, 2009
sunday memory
i remembered how amazed i was as a kindergartner at the sheer awesomeness of it all
i miss her tremendously