cool for you? confusing for me.

Eileen Myles is also a poet. Her memoir-ish novel often reads like poetry. It’s beautiful at times. At other times, it’s difficult to penetrate her prose, but easy to imagine the acid trip that undoubtedly produced it. I particularly liked her style of connecting two seemingly unrelated sentences with short one or two word comments. The connector sentence could be commenting on the previous sentence or the following sentence. For example, “All the rich girls’ parents would worry about them and send them to therapists. I’m so screwed up, they’d wail. Pathetic. Cuase then the kid would wind up convinced” (13). What exactly does pathetic refer to? The crying rich girls wailing that they’re pathetic to their therapists? Or the fact that the girls eventually become convinced that they’re screwed up? Another example: she describes her friend Janet – “She was smart enough, she wasn’t ambitious.” Are they two separate comments? She’s ‘smart enough,’ but she also ‘wasn’t ambitious.’ Or are they related? She was ‘smart enough’ to know not to be ambitious. Final example: in the only description of a woman who she has a sexual relationship, Myles paints a vivid snapshot of them lying on a raft and talking about which one of them should get pregnant. “Years later, well about one, I learned that my girlfriend was having an affair with a man that summer. It really chills me. The August light. All that reflection on the pond” (111). What exactly chills her – is it the fact that her girlfriend cheated on her with a man, or is it that strange scene – discussing her pregnancy at age 41 on a raft - that haunts her?

Myles suggests, both indirectly and directly, that the answers to these questions about ambiguity is: “why not both?” She has a conversation with a man who takes her to a football game; he tells her that he “was at a point where he was going to have to become either a Jesus freak or a fag” (131). “He was weak,” she decides. “People who think there are two choices are even worse off than me” (131). These confusing poetic phrases are often a testament to that idea – why string words together in such a way that they can only possibly have one logical meaning? Why not leave the meaning purposefully clouded? Why not have one sentence relate to two sentences, connecting their seemingly incongruent topics together by sandwiching an ambiguous connecting sentence or a comma in between them?

The protagonist in Cool For You seems to follow this advice – she does not force herself into neat little boxes; she is Irish, Polish, Catholic, white, alcoholic, not-straight, a poet, not wealthy. She sometimes self-identifies as queer, other times self-identifies as lesbian. At the same time, however, I was slightly confused by how her refusal of picking between two choices related to her notions about her gender expression. At many points in the novel, she claims that she wanted to be a boy. The favorite son. She was always a tomboy, and her mother – also a tomboy – felt threatened by that and decided to send her to ballet classes. “Being a woman,” to her, means getting her period, and she devotes a chapter to how much she hates that experience. She rarely says anything that could be interpreted as positive about the feminine aspects of her body. In this way, I did not get the impression that the protagonist felt she had more than two choices about her gender identity; she did not seem to enjoy being a woman, and instead wanted to be a man. Not androgynous, not both woman and man, sometimes woman, sometimes man – but a man. I’m really curious about how you felt about her constant descriptions of wanting to be a man – does it suggest gender duality or androgyny? How (if at all) did her ideas about her own gender identity and gender differences in general affect the way you read the book? Also, on a less-related note, what did you make of the drastic differences between her descriptions of sexual experiences with men and women? Her experiences with men seemed disgusting, cold, and unfulfilling. Her experiences with women seemed to be little more than fantasies; she did not describe sex with women. What did you make of the lack of pleasure in the novel?

week 7: queer time makes sense now

I didn’t begin to grasp the concept of “queer time” until I read a specific passage of Close to the Knives. (The passage appears on pages 87-89.) David Wojnarowicz describes the division between the “World” and the “Other World.” He has “always felt like an alien” in the Other World. This is the mainstream world – “the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking sign, the rental world, the split-rail fencing…. [t]he bought-up world; the owned world.” Because he has “been born centuries late,” he has been denied access to the Other World, which is the World of “earth or space, choice or movement.” What exactly does he mean by being “born centuries late?” I think this implies queerness; he cannot fit neatly into “calendar turnings” of measured space and time, and he does not belong in the consumer world.

This passage flips the common conception of “the Other” on its head. Simone DeBeauvior separates gender into man – “the One” – and woman – “the Other.” Usually, minority groups are discussed as “the Other,” because they are othered or marginalized by the mainstream group. Wojnarowicz , however, describes the mainstream world as the Other World and the queer world as the World. This unconventional twist moves the traditionally marginalized group to the center. Instead of reaching for the World, Wojnarowicz situates himself in the World, rejecting the Other World– he chooses queer time over straight time.

Wojnarowicz also point out a potential paradox in queer time. “[T]here’s the World where one adapts and stretches the boundaries of the Other World through keys of the imagination. But then again, the imagination is encoded with the invented information of the Other World.” Perhaps queerness is creative enough to stretch the mainstream’s boundaries, but queerness is still conceived of in the language of straight time. In this way, the queer world is dependent upon the other world; a queer world radically restructures the mainstream culture.

I think that Wojnarowicz’s attempt to demonstrate queer time is very effective in Close to the Knives. It is a memoir written in a series of essays rather than linear chapters. The essays are often dreamlike, jumping from scene to scene, dream to reality, exaggeration to realism. The content of the memoir is not unlike much of what we’ve already read for this course – full of drugs, hustling, and sex with faceless strangers– but there is something special about the construction of this memoir. Wojnarowicz taps into queer time by breaking all of the conventional rules of biography and grammar, and despite breaking all of the rules, the prose is still beautiful.

I also wonder if somehow this queer narrative is more true to “nature.” By stepping outside of linearity and strict, boring realism, Wojnarowicz captures more of the human thinking process. If I want to write a “realistic” story about my life, I attempt to dissociate from my present state of mind and look back at that event as if it’s a movie – otherwise, it would be difficult for someone else to picture the story. This is not the “reality” of how my memory usually works – normally my mind jumps all over the place, jogged by present perceptions and interrupted by random thoughts. I do not think linearly or logically in every day life. Therefore, reconstructing a story of my past requires a far departure from the way my mind normally operates. This is what I think Wojnarowicz means when he says that “the invention of the word ‘nature’ disassociates us from the ground we walk on” (p88). Despite the queer structure of Close to the Knives, I think it is more close to the nature of the human memory and thinking process than any “normal” biography – the kinds of biographies that usually achieve commercial success in the Other World. As I read Close to the Knives, I wondered if we’re taught to write and tell stories in ways that are unnatural – logic and sequence are learned behaviors, and queer time is really more natural.

Wojnarowicz’s transition from this paragraph to the next paragraph perplexes me. I think this is the first time he officially names AIDS; in previous chapters, it was a nameless disease. My interpretation of this second paragraph is that the spread of AIDS shows him that he is not the only one walking outside of the Other World – the thousands of people who walk in the World with him finally start to become visible. The AIDS crisis was awful – and that is a gross understatement – but it increased visibility of hundreds of thousands of people who were excluded by the definition of “acceptable” sexuality, allowing them to find each other and band together on common issues. I think that he might mean something much more complex than that when he compares the feeling to “pressing one’s eye to a small crevice in the earth from which streams of ants utter from the shadows.” What else could this final image in the passage mean?

cherry lips

Girl Boy Girl drops a lot of famous names - one of them is Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage, a band that was popular (I think they were popular?) in the '90s-early '00s. "Cherry Lips" is inspired by JT LeRoy's novels. I listened to this album when I was 12 or 13 years old - and now that I know the background of this song, it makes much more sense. I also think that the video has one interesting touch - Shirley Manson has bleach-blond hair. Because she is usually a brunette, I wonder if she deliberately did this to look more like JT LeRoy or more like the "delicate boy" she's singing about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqaUZkf52fs

The invention of JT LeRoy - Necessary? Scandalous?

After reading Sarah, I began to read Girl Boy Girl. I couldn’t understand why Laura didn’t publish the novel as Laura; why did she feel a need to create JT LeRoy and claim that Sarah related to the author’s experience? As I read Girl Boy Girl, I noticed Laura’s habit of saying things about JT’s personality that would embarrass Savannah/JT. (For example, she tells Mike Pitt that: “ ‘JT did a photo shoot last week for the first time and he put on lipstick. It was fucking brilliant! And you didn’t fuck the photographer. I was so proud of you, JT.’ Then she said in a conspiratorial tone as if I weren’t there, ‘He used to have sex with anything that paid him a compliment’” (80).) Laura is an example of an author who misrepresents who she truly is to her readers. Don’t all authors - and politicians, movie stars, anyone who has a very public career – recreate themselves to some degree? Usually, that might just mean downplaying their flaws. Laura might think that by creating a very flawed JT, she is doing the opposite of that – she is creating a more complex, believable character. With that line of reasoning – it’s impossible to truly know any author – I started to wonder why the public was so disturbed when JT LeRoy turned out to be a fake. Of course, the reason why JT LeRoy became a mass media scandal is blatantly obvious – hoaxes are often newsworthy.

The question of why Laura felt the need to create JT LeRoy sparked other questions for me, as well. What would have happened if Laura had published Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things as herself? I’m willing to bet that critics would have dismissed her, claiming that she didn't know what she was talking about. People would have scrutinized her slang and her buzz words. She was a married woman, not a transwoman or a prostitute; how could she possibly write an accurate portrayal of a trans character who is a truck stop prostitute? The fact that JT LeRoy speaks from personal experience seems to be all that people needed in order to praise the novels without questioning them. What perplexes me is that both of the novels are fiction – why would they need an authority of truth? I’m assuming that Laura’s novels, though very interesting, wouldn’t have gotten as much publicity if they weren’t marketed as written from true experiences. This could, of course, be a wrong assumption. Watching Gus Van Sant’s rendition of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things perhaps helped me see why people would hypothetically care if the novel was rooted in the author’s experience. Almost every single scene in that film was difficult to watch. I watched these horrible abusive scenes played out on screen, and I wondered who would be sick enough to even think about some of these scenes. Perhaps hearing that the author who thought of the scenes was writing from actual childhood experiences would make me a little bit more sympathetic; if experience wasn’t at the root of the scenes, I would maybe think that the author is sick in the head and shouldn’t be around little children. I understand this point, but I’m still thinking about pseudonyms and alter egos – was JT LeRoy necessary for the success of Laura’s novels? Was the scam that Savannah and Laura concocted really much more than an extremely exaggerated version about the fabricated personalities that most public figures have?

Before Night Falls: a radical theory of sex

As I read Before Night Falls, I was disgusted by some of the sex scenes. After the descriptions of bestiality in the first few pages, I tried to keep an open mind. A few scenes still got under my skin, however – namely incest with his cousin, being molested by his uncle, and his estimate of 5,000 sexual partners by 1968. Despite my aversion to these scenes, I was disappointed that none of them appeared in Julian Schnabel’s film. I think that this feeling of disappointment relates to Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex.” Gayle Rubin claims that there is a small window of socially acceptable sexual behaviors, and all other sexual behaviors are seen as sexually deviant. As homosexuality becomes increasingly more socially acceptable, the line between socially praised and socially condemned sexual behaviors is increasingly blurred. Rubin argues that monogamous, long-term homosexual relationships are acceptable. Bestiality, promiscuous gay sex, fetishes, incest, man-boy love/ cross-generational love, and transsexuality are all deviant behaviors.

Arenas’s memoir certainly crosses this line into “deviant behaviors.” Arenas does not pass negative judgment on these scenes – he says that most young boys from the countryside participate in bestiality, he was turned on by his uncle, and the interactions with his cousin were just childhood games. After his first lover, he doesn’t mention being in any other monogamous relationship, and having sex with thousands of men doubles as thousands of acts of rebellion against Fidel Castro’s repressive regime. Most of this is conspicuously absent from the film version. One particular part of the novel that I found striking was where Arenas discusses his refusal to have sex in prison. “Making love with a free man was very different from making love with an enslaved body behind bars…. There was no beauty in the act, it would have been a degradation” (179). This point - a point that directly connects Arenas’s feelings about free love as antirevolutionary – is also missing from the movie.

The film version certainly includes some naked men and portrays one sex scene (in Arenas’s explanation of the four types of gay men in Cuba); it doesn’t completely ignore sex. I think that Schnabel’s decision to exclude the more graphic images of sex from the movie has both positive and negative effects on viewers. Viewers are much more likely to sympathize with an Arenas who doesn’t engage in what Rubin categorizes as unacceptable sex. Because they aren’t turned off by graphic scenes of incest, bestiality, and promiscuity, they can tune into the “real” linkage between sex and rebellion. (By omitting Arenas’s refusal to sleep with men in prison from the movie, however, Schnabel misses out on a golden opportunity to make this linkage.) On the other hand, omitting these scenes waters down the viewers’ experience of Arenas’s life. These sexually-charged childhood scenes are formative scenes in Arenas’s life. The movie excludes large chunks of Arenas’s memoir, but because the author’s political views are radical and his views about love certainly fit into Rubin’s radical theory of sexuality, the movie isn’t as radical as it should be. By toning down the sex, the film fails to portray many of Arenas’s truths.