Amazon.com says "thanks Kate"

Okay, maybe Amazon.com doesn't actually say thanks, but the reviews for Hello, Cruel World are almost all positive.  Surprisingly, only one reviewer didn't like it, saying,

"I think there are better ways to help kids than to say that anything they do is okay. I was alarmed by the advice in this book."

Reading Bornstein's book in an academic setting can make us lose sight of the actual people Hello, Cruel World is supposed to impact.  It's good to see that Bornstein is not just intellectually engaging, she's also effective.

Kate Bornstein's Personal Homepage

www.tootallblondes.com is Kate Bornstein and Barbara Carrellas' (hir partner) personal website. It's interesting to note how inconsistent Kate is in hir use of personal pronouns, using both she and ze. This inconsistency is probably a function of the multiple identities she juggles, which she discusses in the fascinating article "Hoowahyoo?". It's also interesting to see how naively the couple reacts to their trip to Africa, despite having experienced a lot in their lives. Generally a good resource in thinking about Hello, Cruel World.

Acker on narrative

remarks, prose

Baldwin

"People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity... Straight cats invent faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves." (in 1971, quoted in A QUEER READER)

the Viegener I was telling you about

Foucault

there is lots of good Foucault business in Clint Eastwood's CHANGELING, out now, up the street at Destinta for another week or so?--along with some food for thought as to scapegoating: who is being, by whom, just the police, the narrative, the director, the writer?

I forgot to mention, Acker was vegetarian.

ACKER, from ANGRY WOMEN (Juno Books):
"A gay friend of mine said something interesting to me. I asked her if she differentiated between gay and straight women, and she said, 'Yes, women who are gay are really outlaws, because we're totally outside the society--always.' And I said, 'What about people like me?' and she said, 'Oh, you're just queer.' Like--we didn't exists?! [laughs] It's as if the gay women position themselves as outside society, but meanwhile they're looking down on everybody who's perverse! Which is very peculiar..."

&
"...we're looking for a society that allows us the fullness of what it is to be human, I would think--it's hard to know because I've never been there! But I read about societies in which ecstasy and joy and certain areas of sexuality are venerated (not just in individual situations--or maybe it can be even individual experiences that go further). And: a whole range of feelings--really, a fuller life! I keep thinking: what we know of as 'life' is so thin and juiceless and boring, frankly--we're ground into nothing before we even start out! I mean, take tattooing (which has been denied us for so long): it's beautiful, the colors are gorgeous, the images: if you have the tiger on you, you have the spirit of the tiger in you--that's something: to find out what it is to be an animal! We forget everything: we forget all of this!"

see Civilization and Its Discontents

"The 'oceanic feeling,' Freud argues, is a form of infantile regression, in which the individual seeks to return to early childhood experiences of breast feeding; likewise, it is associated with personal mysticism and spirituality." (quoted in Mavor, Reading Boyishly)

links to Acker's voice

--link to one early excerpt , mid-70s, source of plagiarism case with Tom Robbins, text in book THE ADULT LIFE OF TOULOUSE LAUTREC (the longer piece is from late-late 80s IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY)
--piece from around MY MOTHER, DEMONOLOGY, '93, i'm thinking, off my head

Virginia Woolf Comes to New York

A Post-modern reinterpretation of the first post-modernist? I thought this article in the NY Times on a theatrical production of Virginia Woolf's last novel, "The Waves" was interesting. The show recently went up on Broadway and got a very favorable review, also in the Times. Thoughts?

Butler, 64-65

"...appearances become more suspect all the time. Reflections on the meaning of masquerade in Lacan as well as in Joan Riviere's "Womanliness as a Masquerade" have differed greatly in their interpretations of what precisely is masked by masquerade. Is masquerade the consequence of a feminine desire that must be negated and, thus, made into a lack that, nevertheless, must appear in some way? Is masquerade the consequence of the denial of this lack for the purpose of appearing to be the Phallus? Does masquerade construct femininity as the reflection of the Phallus in order to disguise bisexual possibilities that otherwise might disrupt the seamless construction of a heterosexualized femininity? Does masquerade, as Riviere suggests, transform aggression and the fear of reprisal into seduction and flirtation? Does it serve primarily to conceal or repress a pregiven femininity, a feminine desire which would establish an insubordinate alterity to the masculine subject or expose the necessary failure of masculinity? Or is masquerade the means by which femininity itself is first established, the exclusionary practice of identity formation in which the masculine is effectively excluded and instated as outside the boundaries of a feminine gendered position?"

From e-mail from poet C A Conrad

TEN YEARS AGO TONIGHT...

...Matthew Shepard was driven out to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming and tortured and beaten and left to suffer and fight for his life until found by another young man on his bicycle.

TEN YEARS AGO TONIGHT, after torturing Shepard, and beating him over and overhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif with his pistol, Aaron McKinney would decide to go back into town, go to a bar, get into a fight with a man much bigger than himself and be beaten so badly that he would also wind up in the emergency room three beds away from Matthew Shepard. Shepard would die five days later.

TEN YEARS LATER, queer teens still have the highest suicide rate. Queers of all ages, but especially African American transgendered people, continue to be murdered more than any other group. No one else I knew had the stomach for keeping track of this carnage like my friend, our friend, poet/artist/musician kari edwards. Up to the day she died she maintained blogs with the most harrowing evidence, which you can see

HERE

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, pg. 30 (Routledge, 2006 edition)

"The articulation 'I feel like a woman' by a female or 'I feel like a man' by a male presupposes that in neither case is the claim meaninglessly redundant. Although it might appear unproblematic to be a given anatomy (although we shall later consider the way in which that project is also fraught with difficulty), the experience of a gendered psychic disposition or cultural identity is considered an achievement. Thus, 'I feel like a woman' is true to the extant that Aretha Franklin's invocation of the defining Other is assumed: 'You make me feel like a natural woman.'* This achievement requires a differentiation from the opposite gender. Hence, one is one's gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair.

*Aretha's song, originally written by Carole King, also contests the naturalization of gender. 'Like a natural woman' is a phrase that suggests that 'naturalness' is only accomplished through analogy or metaphor. In other words, 'You make me feel like a metaphor of the natural,' and without 'you,' some denaturalized ground would be revealed. For a further discussion of Aretha's claim in light of Simone de Beauvoir's contention that 'one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,' see [Bulter's] 'Beauvoir's Philosophical Contribution,' in eds. Ann Garry can Marilyn Pearsall, Women, Knowledge, and Reality (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989): 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996)."

See:
Blige
Clarkson
Franklin
King

New Yorker, Woolf

Freshwater

1879 Edward Burne-Jones paints Julia Stephen, V. Woolf's mom, the Virgin Mary in "The Annunciation"

Anne Carson, Freud (1st draft)

Freud spent the summer of 1876 in Trieste
researching hermaphroditism in eels.
In the lab of zoologist Karl Klaus

he dissected
more than a thousand to check whether they had testicles.

"All the eels I have cut open are of the tenderer sex,"
he reported after the first 400.
Meanwhile

the "young goddesses" of Trieste were proving
unapproachable.
"Since

it is not permitted
to dissect human beings I have
in fact nothing to do with them," he confided in a letter.

Sarah Lucas, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Sedgwick, Closet

"We can't possibly know in advance about the Harlem Renaissance, any more than we can about the New England Renaissance or the English or Italian Renaissance, where the limits of a revelatory inquiry are to be set, once we begin to ask--as it is now beginning to be asked about each of these Renaissances--where and how the power in them of gay desires, people, discourses, prohibitions, and energies were manifest. We know enough already, however, to know with certainty that in each of these Renaissances they were central. (No doubt that's how we will learn to recognize a renaissance when we see one.)

Bestiary, Leonardo da Vinci (trns. Eraldo Affinati)

Sadness. Sadness is reminiscent of the crow. When it sees its newborn children are white, it goes away in distress and with great regret abandons them, and does not feed them until it sees that they have some black feathers.

Gratitude. They say that the virtue of gratitude is seen best in those birds which are called magpies. Aware of the benefits of life and nourishment which they have received from their mothers and fathers, when they see them grown old they make nests for them and nurse them and feed them and with their beaks pull out their old and ugly feathers, and with certain herbs restore their appearance and well-being.

Truth. Although partridges steal eggs from each other, the children born from those egg always return to their true mothers.

Chastity. The turtle-dove is never false to its mate, and if one of them dies, the other observes perpetual chastity, and never rests upon a green bough and never drinks pure water.

The stork. This creature drives evil away from itself by drinking salt water. If it finds its mate is unfaithful it forsakes it. And when it is old, its young nurse it and feed it until it dies.

Foresight. The cock does not crow until it has flapped its wings three times. The parrot, when it goes from bough to bough, never places its foot where it has not first placed its beak.

Some Binaries (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet)

homo/ heterosexual

secrecy/ disclosure
knowledge/ ignorance
private/ public
masculine/ feminine
majority/ minority
innocence/ initiation
natural/ artificial
new/ old
discipline/ terrorism
canonic/ noncanonic
wholeness/ decadence
urbane/ provincial
domestic/ foreign
health/ illness
same/ different
active/ passive
in/ out
cognition/ paranoia
art/ kitsch
utopia/ apocalypse
sincerity/ sentimentality
voluntarity/ addiction

Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood (trns. David McLintock)

"Whereas for most other human beings--today no less than in primitive times--the need for some kind of authority to relay on is so imperative that their world begins to totter if this authority is threatened." -Freud