Monthly Archives: April 2012

I Like Fucking

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“We would walk into environments that were very straight white male dominated and felt very unwelcoming to anybody that wasn’t a straight white male and we would say we want to transform this space and we want to make this a space where women feel not only welcome but that they can enjoy themselves–which was a radical concept actually in the underground punk scene in the ’90s.”

–Kathleen Hanna

i went to grad school in order to think about what pleasure and desire have to do with each other. i knew this was ultimately what i wanted to write about, but i needed to read more. i wanted to figure out my place in the argument, and learn how to give my work a shape that understood itself. i was interested in how and why both desire and pleasure can be so incredibly disruptive.  Do other people’s bodies teach us something that, say, talking, doesn’t? What do we lose when we stop attending to libidinal desires, often in order to execute more normative, generally financial, comfort-based ones?  How/does sex hurt–not only in cases of violence, but perhaps when it violates ideas of trust and ownership? How can one build an academic career that, by its very definition involves the study of literature, on an interest in sex? How can reading be doing? How can doing be reading? Thank you Feminism, thank you Karl Marx, thank you Audre Lorde, queer theory, Goerings Book Store, Amitava Kumar, Kathleen Hanna, Judith Butler, poetry, teaching, Foucault, ACT UP, Judy Chicago, Riot grrl, Community Action Center, Wild Iris Books, Nishant Shahani, David Wojnarowicz, and Deconstruction for showing me a world in which these questions are valued and possible.

Then there are my ingredients: memories that haunt me–the things, often guilty pleasures, that made me obsessive and desiring in the first place. Osaka, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Gone With the Wind, drugs, libraries, flea markets, house parties, house fires, thrifting, love hotels, passing notes, the Rolling Stones, Barthes, kabuki, my parents’ wedding album, Morrissey, professor-love, the pool, drinks after work, Stevie Nicks, marriage, restaurant jobs, floating down the Ichetucknee in an inner tube, Denis Johnson, and lots of problematic, fun, shit-stirring, sweet, unadvisable, dirty, necessary sex.

So far i have failed in my efforts to make these worlds coincide. The things i live by in one sphere often can’t stand what i can’t live without in the other one. i spend years investing in one side, then drop out for a while and give the other one everything i have.  A gesture or a vocabulary word that is de rigueur on heads is met with eye roles or blank stares by tails.  i don’t need, or even want, to be in Gainesville–or the 90s–anymore, but i sure am happy they both happened to me and gave me a peek at how the coexistence of these concerns might actually unfold. The non-dualism of queer theoretical work and the suggestion that sex is gender, teaching and writing, the possibility of rethinking community–these are the hopes that remain.

Spinning glue back into horses

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“We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back” (Housekeeping 198).

In typical Cardozo fashion, my Dad never finished the barn he began building for the tiny farm my parents fumbled with as part of the general toil of my early childhood.  Along with the rest of the future rednecks taking part in the late Seventies/early Eighties white flight exodus from Miami to pastoral exile, by the time i was three my relatively cosmopolitan parents had gone country. They began building the barn before my Mom left, which would make her claim, many years later, after she had relocated to the Russian River Valley in Northern California, that she wanted to make a photo book of all of the gorgeous, dilapidated farms in that area that much more bittersweet.  Of course, she never bought a camera.

Along with the chicken coop covered in Japanese honeysuckle, the hand-painted mailbox marking our spot on a dirt road, the brick house, the creek, the gardenia and azalea bushes, the subscription to Mother Earth News, a huge tractor, a pig, a magnificent garden complete with pea trellises and sunflowers, my Dad’s light blue Chevy pickup truck, and my Mom’s cherry red Fiat Spider, we had the beginnings of a barn.  My Dad had never built anything like this, but he could’ve pulled it off.  Papa, my grandpa who had been a brick layer in Miami for his whole working life, would come over to help, and i remember the two of them drinking beer and planting huge wooden poles that would become the foundational pillars for the barn.

It had a tin roof, perhaps for my Mother, who ‘loved the sound of rain tapping against a tin roof’.  After she had left, wanting to know something about what exactly it was that  she did love, at the first sign of rain i would fly through the back yard, out to the ‘back two and a half’ (acres), and up the staircase to the second floor of the barn. There were no walls yet, nor would there ever be anything of the sort.  i’d stretch out on the rough wooden planks of the floor, close my eyes, start listening hard to the rain, and wait. i wanted to hear what she heard, but the kamikaze splatters unnerved me.  i didn’t find it soothing, or beautiful. i figured i wasn’t trying hard enough.

In the earlier days, there was a pig named Ms. Piggy, piglets, two adult Golden Retrievers (Harmony and Moonshine), several litters of puppies, 2 cats (Shanti and Tigger), a rabbit (Bunny),  hamsters (Bernard and Bianca), a cockatiel (Professor), and three cows (Petunia, Judge, and Joker).  Unlike another little girl with whose story i was very familiar, i would not be able to save our pig from the slaughter (or the cows). In fact, i would come home from school one day to find Petunia strung up in one of the huge pines in the back yard, skinned beyond recognition, her brain in the kitchen sink.  i was given multiple talks about economy and nature and about this just being what people have to do.

At some point, while watching a particularly harrowing movie, my Dad told me, “It’s a Hollywood movie. There’s no way they’re going to kill the hero.” i loved the tidiness of this information, and took it to heart. The rub was finding out that real life did not play by this rule. Ms. Piggy wound up in the skillet and Petunia flavored countless batches of chili. My Mom left. The house fell apart. Grass grew over the tractor’s wheels. The barn remained our own private A-bomb Dome–a skeletal reminder of what’d happened before we were broken. And i rehearsed that it was all character-building and eccentric and fine, but lately i’m not entirely convinced.

Now write this down

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The Stones notoriously preferred what they imagined as the soul-killing junkie destitution of the Blues over the little-ditty silliness of country. i guess the line seems much finer, or at least differently demarcated, if your familiarity with the players is more local, but i get the point.  Some Girls, their “country” disco album, was released in 1978. It was hugely popular–somehow inhabiting punk’s insouciance without having to sound punk. Jagger says it’s an album about New York. It is also deep melancholy, but this is how they stayed “relevant”–by getting, and cashing in on, the joke. The video is absolutely necessary.  They have made the leap from high modernist sincerity to the permanent smirking onslaught of the posts. My first memory of Mick Jagger as performer comes from the “Dancing in the Street” (1985) video with David Bowie, but this one also feels vaguely familiar.  i had to discover the tragic heartthrob Rolling Stones stuff on my own much, much later. In other words, flipping the classic maxim from the 18th Brumaire, i knew them as a joke first. This is how most things seem to have come–i’ve had to really shuffle time lines to make them matter.  My parents. Rock and roll. Gender roles. Cars. New York. Lovers. San Francisco. David Bowie. Poetry. Meat. Dylan. If i know you haven’t always been this lame, i can figure out how to love you.

“Miss You” is the first track. “Shattered” is the last. “Beast of Burden” is penultimate. Remember the Bette Midler cover? It was my favorite video for weeks back in 1984. The context was, of course, completely lost on me–the video starts with Mick coming into her dressing room and telling her they have to end their love affair because he can’t stand the publicity.  She convinces him to stay and watch her perform “his song,” which in her version substitutes the catchy “pretty pretty girl” stanza with the brazen and ominous: “My little sister is a pretty pretty girl. My little sister is a pretty pretty girl. She loves to ride and she loves to crawl. They love to take her out behind the garden wall. And when they’re done they just throw her away.  And she don’t have an awful lot to say.  It hurts her so bad to come to the end. I remember all the times she’s been so, easy.” The message is clear: her little sister may be a beast of burden, but not the Divine Miss M. Jagger seems like, well, a shadow of his younger self.  At the time, Bette’s hotness seemed objective to me, and his seemed like a great, puny joke. They end up on the stage together, but his little moves are lifeless and silly.  They are both performing young Mick, but she does it better.

For some time now, i have been puzzled by Elizabeth Freeman’s essay on Elisabeth Subrin’s film Shulie.  The essay exists in a couple of incarnations: first as “Packing History, Count(e)ring Generations” in New Literary History (Autumn 2000), and recently as the “Deep Lez” chapter in her new book, Time Binds.  What i am most confused by is her reading of Judith Butler in order to articulate her proposal for something i find very compelling called ‘temporal drag’.  Freeman argues that Butler’s theory of gender performativity creates a slippery valorization of gender performances that attempt to shake off the past, and necessarily makes those who choose to inhabit allegedly retrograde identity-subject positions umm, less cool? This is where i start to get confused. ‘Repetition with a difference’–what has become Butler’s ‘always historicize’–in my reading, is precisely an attempt to inhabit the citations we are bound to with both an understanding of how we represent and a hope that repetition is not a fatalism.  No annunciation is possible without citing past conversations and conventions.  Here is the line in Freeman that always stumps me: “Moreover, to reduce all embodied performances to the status of copies without originals may be to ignore the interesting threat that the genuine past-ness of the past–its opacity and illegibility, its stonewalling in the face of our most cherished theoretical paradigms–sometimes makes to the political present” (63). The beauty of Butler’s work is the way she troubles the line between copy and original. Each copy is a singularity. Originality is not necessarily the question.

What i can’t quite understand is, what is the genuine past-ness of the past?  When someone we love is really gone–when he or she becomes a physical impossibility, maybe that is the genuine past-ness of the past? This is why mourning is the healthy response to loss. It indicates an understanding of the natural flow of things.  But why accept nature for some things and reject it for others?  If we are really trying to undo teleological time, why reify something as alive as the past?

Broken English

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Dad: “What is it, Ben?”

Ben: “I’m just.” Dad: “Worried?”

Ben: “Well.”  Dad: “About what?” Ben: “I guess about my future.” Dad: “What about it?”

Ben: “I don’t know.  I want it to be….”  Dad: “To be what?”

Ben: “Different.”

Like many, many other people, i am a huge fan of the Graduate (1967).  Perhaps unlike the  average viewer, i find Elaine (Katharine Ross) tiresome. Nonetheless, Benjamin’s post-collegiate adult extended-adolescence, his awkwardness with Mrs. Robinson, the plasticity of his days, the way that almost every shot is prescient and overdetermined, and mostly, what the beautiful, jangly version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” alerts viewers to in the first minute of the film–its keen ability to listen.  The volume of mundane daily life is how we understand his discord with his surroundings. We hear the loudspeaker at the airport when Benjamin first returns to L.A. obnoxiously “interrupting” the soundtrack, bubbles in a fishtank, his flippers smacking the linoleum floor, his ill-timed whimpers and groans of discomfort, and, of course, his Darth Vader-y breathing inside the scuba suit that mutes all other sound.

At night, after my son goes to sleep, i put my headphones on while i work, but i always pull one ear to the side so that i can hear him if he coughs or rolls out of bed or has a bad dream. i can hear the traffic on McGuinness, too, which seems to get louder at night. My neighbors screaming at each other in Polish. My cat begging for a second dinner. And in my covered ear, songs, splitting my thoughts. A soundtrack that i choose to hear as a hope for something different. The sounds marking a silence more present in its absence than any (other) real company could offer.

Give Out

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My middle name is Sunshine. That’s what my parents decided, and it’s funny after a few drinks. It doesn’t quite match my temperament; that is part of the joke. i can’t say that it hasn’t always, but once i started learning that i could say no to things, my insistence on that word (that word that no one thinks she wants to hear) shortened my candidacy for beacon of light-hood.

In a further flattening of affect, a couple of years ago i was diagnosed with narcolepsy, a central nervous system disorder that produces the sudden, uncontrollable onset of sleep. There is no explanation for why people “get” it, although it seems to have something to do with heredity and something to do with a shortage of a brain protein called hypocretin that may regulate when and how we sleep. Other symptoms include, “features of dreaming that occur while awake,” and cataplexy–attacks of muscle paralysis triggered by strong emotions. i exhibit both. This means that i have to constantly consider my behavior before and while doing almost everything. Getting in an argument while walking down the street is basically impossible–my knees buckle and my legs just give out. Telling a joke is hard. Giving someone a basic complement, if i really mean it, makes me tremble. Allowing myself to get frustrated when doing things like, say, waiting tables is also problematic. My hands start to shake, plates begin to clang, and i have to take a deep breath and stabilize myself on the edge of a table or the bar to keep from falling on diners.  i get sleepiest after i eat, which means that eating alone at a restaurant, sitting at the bar–one of my favorite things to do, can also be tricky. The subway is a crapshoot. In general, i have had to become less of a hothead, because when i try to lose my cool, my body doesn’t cooperate. For someone who had never been very interested in controlling herself, this has forced extensive modifications of my nature.

Claire Denis, Trouble Every Day, 2001

Research that produces articles with titles like, “Brain Protein Tied to Sleep and Feeding also Involved in Bodily Sensations,” suggests that hypocretin also sways how we eat and how we respond to pain. This study reports: “Perl and his colleagues were intrigued by the observation that hypocretin nerve fibers terminate in a spinal cord region involved in sensations about pain-causing events…It may be that a decrease of the protein ‘helps people sleep and minimizes attention to minor inputs. Conversely, an increase helps a person to continue to do an essential function like eating even when there are minor inputs from the peripheral nervous system, such as occurs when one sits on a rough edge,’ the neurophysiologist explained.”

A decrease could presumably result in someone who easily loses her appetite when she sits on rough edges? Someone who doesn’t mind rough edges? Someone who snuggles up to rough edges and prefers the floor to pillows? Or, as the Pavement song has it, “Nothing gets me off so completely, than when you put it down ten feet in the ground.  Call it response (to a) negative home.” i am interested in these sorts of explanations, but i am less interested in the “why?” of narcolepsy than i am in thinking about how it works for me. What is my body trying to get me out of, or back to?  In his essay “Queerness as Horizon,” Jose Esteban Munoz pulls a phrase from Ernst Bloch–“the no-longer-conscious,”–which he explains as, “…a term that attempts to enact a more precise understanding of the work that the past does, what can be understood as the performative force of the past.”  Lately, i’ve begun to wonder if these ‘features of dreaming that occur while awake’, coupled with muted responses to pain have something to do with my insistence on being stuck. There are things that i just enjoy not getting over. An over-played mixed-tape, mountains of books i have no proper place for, folders full of old writing assignments i received in college, a wine bottle i shared with someone to whom i am attached, rocks my son picks up for me on the street, daffodils, matchboxes, promises.

Forrest Bess, Untitled, 1967

i don’t completely mind the narrative for “stuck.” Somehow, it feels more honest. If we understand ‘performative force’ as the life-altering effect that can result from citations of the past–of stories and memories that actually do something to the present and breathe a modified life into our presumably dead histories, then the unconscious is much more than a tomb. What i like about my narcolepsy is that somehow it feels productive. Is the no-longer-conscious accesible through sleep? Is my nostalgia and desire for people and things that seem to be gone keeping me from waking life?  Am i a ruiner or a sociopath because i am lacking the brain protein that tells me when to quit, or when to stop dreaming? Do you see where i am going with this?

It Can’t Be All That Pretty…

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i first heard the Magnetic Fields in 2004. My boyfriend at the time was a (music) writer, and would gift me with unstoppable mixed-tapes full of jams and heartbreakers–most of which were new to me. Part of the gap in my musical knowledge had to do with a ban on indie rock that was in its homestretch when i met him, so there was basically a genre of really good music at which i had theretofore merely rolled my eyes.

The person i had designated as my untoppleable true love was a purist, and i had followed in his footsteps. Bowie, the Stones, Roxy Music, the Clash, Scott Walker, Neil Young, Morrissey, the Smiths, some reggae, a lot of Soul. This was the late 90s, so Suede, Pulp, the Make-up, and the Verve were allowed, too.  We were academic about our listening. We would find a band, get into them, and then listen all around them.  Who had their influences been? Who were they friends with? What other bands happened because of them?–etc. We bonded over Morrissey and Roxy Music, he placed Bowie and Scott Walker in my lap, we found the Clash, Neil Young, T. Rex, Spiritualized, and Fleetwood Mac together, lived through Suede and Pulp and the Make-up, disagreed about the Red House Painters and Pavement and New Order, and, over the many, many break-up years got into Dylan and Led Zeppelin.  i would put my head on his lap and stretch out on the couch and we would just listen, silenced by how good it all was. i would crawl into his tiny twin bed and he would tap his fingers along the cds, humming, looking, even though he’d already decided on Scott Walker. He would start the cd and climb into bed with me, both of us long and absurdly lean, and press our foreheads against each other and fall asleep. The White Stripes and the Strokes happened. The Flaming Lips, more Spiritualized.  i found the Boss and Thin Lizzy on my own, but somehow everything else that mattered had crossed my path directly because of,  with, or under the real or imagined spell of him. This means that our dislikes were also passionately shared: no Bowie after Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), we covered our ears at Belle and Sebastian. Yo La Tengo, Wilco, and Modest Mouse were pure snores. Sleater-Kinney were unlistenable. Many, many other bands had good lyrics but just looked stupid or sounded…old. Not old like the Seventies; old like middle-aged. Of course, i would come to change my mind about almost all of this.

Shortly after i started dating my fancy writer, he moved into an attic apartment. June in Florida is hot with the sun. He would leave early to teach and i would lay in bed all day in front of the AC unit, reading his books. There i found Padgett Powell and Joy Williams and Leonard Michaels and Denis Johnson. The Believer had just started, and i found it first on his floor. When he came home, we would rush to the pool and stay there until i had to leave for work. When i got home, i would crawl into bed and read some more. He would start a cd without saying anything while i was running on about some table i’d waited on or some friend of mine, and then suddenly i would shut up and say, what is this? i was sat underneath the quilt his Mom made with squares his Grandma brought home from her factory job–a blanket that became the closest thing i ever had to a transitional object–when i first heard Bonnie “Prince” Billy. i wanted “Hard Life” over and over. He and i, i don’t know how the fuck we didn’t kill each other. Maybe we did, but we also lived for a few years. No one could have kept it up, but that song keeps all of the early desires and empathies and, well, prescience, intact. Interpol: “NYC”–sitting right there. Same spot. “Maps” in the car. “Hey Ya” in the living room while he was cranking out a review. We got so drunk. And played it over and over. And danced our stupid asses off. We’re lucky Jason Molina didn’t turn us into junkies. Joanna Newsom’s first album. The Walkmen. My Morning Jacket.  Finally, on a mixed-tape, the Magnetic Fields.  We were in the car. He was skipping through the songs to make sure i knew what they all were and “I Don’t Believe You” was in the queue. “Stop. Start that one again. Let it play.” How could i not have, but now i knew we were doomed. If Stephin Merritt could write those songs, then there might be others out there. Other people even more terrible and even more perfect and we both knew it,  and we both took the hit and kept demanding newer, more perfect love. The songs had convinced us it was out there. When i lost the first one, i put everything into a bowl and ate it. He became a part of me that will keep me from ever being only me again–thank god. When i lost the second one i thought, how can i ever make my days matter this much again?