Wilma's Webworld

More on Monstrosity

Monstrosity is what isn't represented - it just shows.

A Hint from "The Animal Side"

This weekend I put this off for later and stayed in on Sunday and read this instead. Beckett, as is well known, can wait, especially since the exhibit is here until the end of June. I couldn't quite emerge from the animal side to get myself out the door. After reading Bailly's Le versant animal, with of course more than an occasional eye on Lulu-cat, I did end up making my way to the gym. It's nice to work the muscles on a Sunday: my guess is that the gym queens worked theirs on Saturday for their nights out, so the weight-machine room is, in comparison to the over-flowing cardio room, entirely negotiable. I haven't quite figured out the cruising thing at the gym, but Sunday I got a little inkling of how it works. And then today, with Bailly still vaguely on my mind, as I was crossing the cardio room, I saw two men on rowing machines, and I was sure that one was looking at me just like a squirrel, the other perhaps some kinda beaver. Animal eyes, at any rate, and so there we were.

Bailly says lovely things like the following that I've translated and that make me want to keep moving and thinking and help me to realize that my anxiety about "getting things down" might just not be for our day and age:

 

Genet: Loving Lucien

This is one of the ways the narrator of Jean Genet's Thief's Journal describes the man whose love accompanied the writing of that beautiful book:

This machine, capable of swinging punches, iron knuckles, and kicks, stretches out, lies down, unfolds, and proves to my surprise that it was only contracted, tied-up gentleness, folded onto itself several times over, knotted and swollen, and I learn how this gentleness, this supple docility in responding to my tenderness will transform again into violence and meanness if ever gentleness were no longer given the chance to be itself, if my tenderness stopped, like if I left the kid and took away from weakness the possibility of occupying this magnificent body.

Beets and Sundries

I seem to have gone all axiomatic, but I do still have a body. We just had a beet and endive salad for dinner last night which was super yummy. and I'm very excited to be in on the beginning of "La Nouvelle Star" (ie American Idol, i think, or one of those things, but in fransh) adventure. We got through day two last night while eating our beets and sundries, and the cut down to 40 candidates. Among last year's semi-finalists for the same show included a skinny boy nicknamed the turtle who sang like a woman and a dyke-ish woman of color who sang "Every Breath You Take" like a man, and people loved them. One takes one's hopes where one finds them these days. There's a big boisterous buxom diva on the jury who they often show tearing up when somebody does good. I am a faggot and I love her.

I think we should all pay more attention to our explosions of the real. At least that's what I'm planning on doing as I work on translating that transgression axiom of monstrosity onwards. This is not unrelated to my nascent addiction to "La nouvelle star." Seems to me like song does (and maybe has always done?) a lot in giving us access to that real. (Genet almost always theorizes his prose as song.) And plus, you know, on a show like this, that these are, like, real people, giving it up as much as they can and cursing themselves for not having given it up enough and being eliminated. Of course, there's lots of scary ideology to this, too: so long as they have that teary diva, and the rest of the jury, too, showing how they are sometimes moved, my ideological worry fades, and I give it up, too.

Monstrosity

Monstrosity is what needs love because love interrupts it.

Monstrosity is the transgression that the law needs because it opens up the possibility of its applying otherwise.

These modes of monstrosity are what need to be shown, if not exactly at the same time, at least in close syncopation.

Timing, in ritual spontaneity, is everything.

Yoko and Cat

Ohmigod. Listen to that. And especially listen to them singing together. They sort of don't -- quite sing together. But they play off each other just right. Her piano, and her responses. And apparently Yoko's album is gonna be called Yes, I'm a Witch. Which can only please the genetian in us. Can't wait for the album.

Now I get it

Glancing at my stats recently, I was wondering why I had several hits from people looking for "pictures of Wilma." Turns out my namesake is brewing its way into a hurricaine. I wonder if it will reak havoc or sputter into an upgraded breeze? For the moment, she's only "potentially dangerous," and given the way the powers that be tend either to throw up their arms in hysterics over potentially dangerous situations or ignore them entirely, who knows what Wilma will get up to.

For What It’s Worth

Did you know that was the name of that Buffalo Springfield song? You know: “Stop, children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s goin’ round.” Good song. Should be heeded. I don’t think I’d ever heard it say: “Paranoia strikes deep/ Into your life it will creep/ It starts when you’re always afraid/ Step out of line, and the man he will come and take you away…”

In between lots of good stuff this weekend – especially the Parisian stay of Cami – the man paid me a visit and I got taken away. Into the wee hours of Sunday morning. Which turned into a generalized absence all of Sunday whose only benefit was to allow me finally to start reading Sweet Home, a new melancholy novel by Arnaud Cathrine, someone three years younger than I am who has already published five books for adults and as many for children. If you’ve read anything else by Cathrine, it takes an absence from one’s self to start reading him again: they are well-constructed, sparse gems of prose that have a tendency to hook you into their characters’ distortions of reality the better to set up reality’s subsequent, and often traumatic, intrusions into the plot.

Luckily for me, reality intruded in a more graceful way than it often does in Cathrine’s work. Last night on the way to sleep, after accompanying me as far as he could down the path where the man was taking me, Titi de Paris let loose a thought that must have been ripening all day long in our silences. With a hand on my thigh in the dark and before we slipped into our spoon, he said that things are difficult but that it is a good thing that we are together. He’s right, you know. It's good to be together. You just gotta stop, hey, what’s that sound…

Back from Provence, Lulu is on Red Alert

Titi de Paris and I just spent a great weekend in the south of France. Our visit was conceived as a pilgrimage to catch up with Titi’s delightful Mami and Maman, but we hadn’t realized that it would include the perk of an afternoon boat trip for the two of us to the island of Porquerolle near Toulon. We almost killed each other in a silly fight inspired by my empty stomach as we were trying to figure out when the next ferry to get to the island was leaving. All was gracefully forgotten, though, over a Salade de poulpe which had le vent en poulpe and splattered all over Titi’s t-shirt, as did the île flottante that turned into an île volante under the force of the incredible winds rattling the roof over the terrasse at “le Prado,” a restaurant at La Tour Fondue from whence a 1:30 pm ferry we thought didn’t exist left under our very eyes. Once on the island, after a terribly pleasant walk along several vineyards and through the beginnings of a preserved forest that covers most of Porquerolles, we made it to the plage d’argent where we lolled about for an hour or so, where Titi swam and I dipped my toes into the water, only to decide it was a little chilly given that we had found a shady spot under the trees at the beach. The water really was silvery – shallow for an unusual length for the Mediterranean – and the sand was, too, at least what of it that was left exposed in the gaps of the flakes of brown algae that had washed up, lovely, on the shore. While Porquerolle was an unexpected perk, I had planned on dinner in Marseille Chez Toinou where I moaned with predictable but overwhelming pleasure at the little bits of crab that I wheedled from the shell and devoured mussels, sea snails, shrimp, langoustines, and three varieties of clam. We ended up chez Toinou after an afternoon stroll through the Panier a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that is filled with crafty boutiques and signs declaring the death of the neighborhood and the greed of financial speculation. Seeing as we took care of a little Christmas and housewarming shopping, I guess we know which side of that fence we were on.

The whole weekend was so charming that, writing this account, I've had to edit out the over-occurrence of the words "little" and "lovely." I've left one "lovely" in for the algae.

But the real inspiration for this blog entry was to display Lulu once again. Our suitcase has not yet been put away in the closet, and she’s decided it’s a nice place to sit. I guess she thinks that if she sleeps on it all the time, we won’t be able to pack it up and leave her roaming around the apartment on her own.

Butterfly

There was a butterfly in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont today. I must have been sitting in something like its territory, because it kept flitting around me and others near me. When I took my seat, though, I thought I was in feline territory. Two dykes had their little black cat on a leash and I was curious to know how he fared and how they fared with him. Only once did he lunge for a pigeon. The rest of the time he spent curled up at the legs of a straight couple with big boots, motorcycle helmets and big smiles, chatting with the lesbians. It’s a stunningly beautiful late-summer day here in Paris, and I kept looking up from Marilyn Hacker’s Presentation Piece at the people lazing on the lawns, thinking, maybe the French really do know something about living.