Wilma's Webworld

More on Monstrosity

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

Grief in Parentheses and other queer addresses

Titi de Paris and I don’t talk much in the morning, but today he did say, “So you didn’t end up having insomnia? I was worried. It took you a while to get to sleep.” No major insomnia last night, just a little trouble getting to sleep since stuck in my mind was a phrase: “I learned that the machine worked despite grief; that the world opened more or less at will. And continued.” She wrote that. To me, sorta. At least part of that post of yours was also an email to me. But which parts exactly and in which ways?

We’ve got a queer address going on. Our pronouns have trouble settling into place. Given how far apart we are, physically, an ocean and all that, this makes sense. And I think that it could be a good thing. Though inevitably tainted by the notion that it could be a better thing if we just sat in one another’s proximity reading on the couch on Saturday morning after Diner dinner on Friday night. At the same time, some of the same questions would apply. We just would have more trouble talking about them.

Who’s she talking to? Who am I? Talking to, I mean. A blog is a pretty good place to ask that question, though I’m not sure it’s the best place to get any kind of a definitive answer. In a way, you’re talking to no one and to everyone at once, with, in happy circumstances every once in a while, someone specific in mind. She’s been someone specific for me in some strange ways over the last weeks. She cites June Jordan:

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

Fucking our way into the New Year

Titi de Paris and I are having some kind of a sustained, or at least reiterated thing with this guy who has a fuck pad that's a cigarette's walking distance from our home. It's a nice walk: we smoke a bit at home, and then the stairwell down to the street almost always seems really long, like, as Titi asked one our way out the other night, "Who added storeys on to this building?" But the last time we went, on our way out, I had somehow mentally prepared for that sensation and ended up feeling totally in sync with the time lag I knew I'd feel. Feeling in sync with a lag seems to me like somewhat of an accomplishment -- it might well be in that kind of a rhythm with its relation to lag that writing, these wintry, unwriterly days anyway, gets done.

Out the door and a little high, the bitter cold of the few days before having died down, lapping along prodded by a promising lag, feeling legs wrapped in leather and a chest trying to fill up its shirt: it's a nice walk to the Klebs's piaule --

London Calling, Take Three

So it was yet another London weekend, even if, to judge from the news, all the “action” seemed to be happening around Paris. (Pretty good links to things much better than the NYTimes’s heinous coverage of the events today can be found here en anglais and a pretty decent interview en français here ). I’ve taught this morning, Lulu-Cat is curled up on my lap for a nap after having gnawed her annoyance out on our skin last night in sneaky attacks, the sun keeps coming and going, and I’m pooped. I’ve said this before, but London does that to you.

I’m pooped enough not to try and blog about my cultchahrully eventful weekend in one fell swoop. You’ll get it in installments, beginning with my Thursday afternoon and evening.

So Thursday I arrived at Waterloo at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Formerly Manchester and currently London Kev sped up to meet me as I was rolling my post-Eurostar cigarette just outside the sliding doors of the train station. He was bearing the East End and currently US-touring Fox’s flat keys, where I was able to camp for the weekend. Apparently I’m enough at home on Wilmot Street for my half-sleep to have led me to believe that Lulu-Cat was likely to come and join me in bed on Thursday night. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Loving Margery Kemp

Why has it taken me so long to open Margery Kemp? People I know and love must have raved about it at some point. Why did I not heed their ecstasy? It’s having the same effect on me that reading James and Genet did, and does: I open the book and feel my face turn stony with concentration, and after a few sentences of warm-up—these are after all demanding writers—the stone cracks, and I feel this beatific smile come to my lips.

Yesterday, I was at Café Chéri(e), one of my neighborhood haunts. I was sitting under the awning on an Indian summer late afternoon with Margery closed on the table. The stoniness on my face yesterday as I opened it was in part because of concentration, but also because a pigeon who had nestled into the place where the awning gets rolled up above my head did exactly what you’re always afraid those evil rat-birds will do. I heard and felt the plop on my favorite piece of American Apparel. It was a good excuse for some banter with the cute waiter, though, and, at any rate, when you read all that Margery endured and learned to love, it tends to bestow a blissful and gratuitous recognition upon all your little bleus.

What do I have to do to be able to someday write something like this?

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.

London's Still Calling...

So one of the things about Kiki's performances that holds for Justin Bond's as well is that there is so much going on that it takes time after they are over to remember all the things that you loved about them. Which means that I omitted several things that I wanted to mention here before I forget them for good. Like the reassurance JB claimed to feel about the election of the new Pope. Because before, you had to wonder if the Catholic Church was really fascist. At least now you know, since the current Pope is a card-carrying Nazi. But then there was also the only bit of name-dropping he allowed himself. See, he had lunch in London the other day with Antony and Tilda Swinton, and they were talking about how hard the 90's were, how often you felt like you were living through a catastrophe. I mean, Justin Bond lost like 12 very close friends in 1994 alone. At least, said JB, now we know for sure that the world is getting ready to end. And, with a little help from the piano player, he quoted Antony's lunchtime words in a terribly apt aesthetic slogan: "radical gentleness while looking into the abyss of hope." (I'm quoting from memory and hope both Justin Bond and Antony will forgive me for any sins of imprecision.)

Speaking of the piano player, and prompted by Dr. Econ, I wanted to mention another of the Freudian Slippers. Should anyone be looking for a lovely and enthusastic flute player, the young and strapping Mikey Kirkpatrick would be happy to blow his cheeks pink in the service of his lovely instrument. Just be sure you invite Dr. Econ so he can maintain the fire that began burning as he watched him blow... into the flute, and that continued into the stutters of a flirtation as we crossed the Duckie dance floor to congratulate the united Freudian Slippers, gathered again but this time with beer and awaiting, as we were, more from Kiki and Herb.

Spanish Weddings

How lovely that I can also include "Culture" as a subject heading for my link to a translated version of Zapatero's invigorating speech consecrating same-sex marriage into law. He speaks to the opposition, talks about liberty, AND he cites Cavafy!! James Wagner's great site has the full text here, if you scroll up the page once you get there.

London Calling, Take Two

I just had a wonderful 24 hours of planned craziness. See, Titi had this conference in London a couple of weeks ago. I tagged along, bought some books – Jaqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion and her partner Adam Phillips’s Going Sane have already been thoroughly enjoyed, and I’m almost all the way through Juan Goytisolo’s destabilizing imagining of the siege of Sarajevo in the streets around Strasbourg-Saint Denis, part of several interlocking plots around a sodomist poet's lyrics in State of Siege – saw a bit of colorful art, drank a couple pints, took in the view from our friend Dr. Econ’s lovely sixth-floor Soho abode, ate curry and fish and chips… But I also had a cold, and then the chilling realization that Justin Bond was going to open a show in London some two or three days after we left.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Justin Bond has spent the last several years of his life incarnating Kiki DuRane, a brilliantly violent lounge singer eternally on a come-back. Until this weekend, I had only seen her and her partner Herb perform once, in New York, at the Fez, but since that vision I’ve been a faithful listener of Kiki’s CDs with Herb and various sundry NYC more or less celebs. Last Fall, they sold out Carnegie Hall under the title Kiki and Herb Will Die For You.

I've become more than a fervent fan. When I found out that Justin Bond was going to be doing a show in London, I was actually already in the midst of  beginning an attempt to write something serious and academic about them whose first line might end up being: "Kiki DuRane has a terrible memory. Luckily for her, and especially for us, she has Herb to carry her melody line."

So, upon my return, I was sighing about this conundrum to my dear friend K, who has already intervened in innumerable, sometimes even oracular ways in my life. And she said, “This is just stupid. I haven’t given you a birthday present in years. Get a Eurostar ticket. I’ll pay.” Gifts like these are not easy to accept, so it took a little bit of effort for me to suck up my pride and say, several times over the next several days, “Do you really mean it?” She kept saying that she did, with the hint of hesitation in her voice that accompanies any grand gesture. Titi, who has never seen Kiki or Herb or Justin perform, decided his meager salary as a civil servant could nonetheless take this little blow to its budget, and so on Saturday morning, we left on a pilgrimage to the Soho Theatre in London to see Justin Bond and the Freudian Slippers do Glamour damage.

School's out and I'm cruising the internet

It's been one of those days where I procrastinate finishing up the grading for my class by browsing the internet. I've found a whole host of sites where historians and poli-sci people who are ABD or PhD talk about life "outside the box." Many -- or at least many who have the time and energy to write blogs -- are apparently happy now that they've abandoned academia. I've yet to find any humanities people blogging about their experiences, nor have I found anyone talking about career conversions that take international parameters into account. If anyone has seen anything like this, I'd love to read it.

But I also came across a decent article in the New Yorker that addresses some of the things that my intermittent "sex spots" were also trying to deal with. The article is only decent because I feel like it turns epidemics into psychological problems when they are, as many of us know, cultural, epistemological, and political ones. But of the people cited who talk about their experience, there's at least one guy, a certain Ron Stall, epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, who makes a very good point that I tried to make in my own way in this earlier post. Stall says that we -- we gay men and anyone who's dealing with us -- are actually dealing with several epidemics, and that it's the combination of these epidemics that's posing the problem. He calls these combinations "syndemics," and says that some of the concurrent epidemics that are making AIDS difficult to deal with these days are depression, a childhood history of sexual abuse (people should see Mysterious Skin if just to understand that point, but also because it's really pretty), substance abuse, and partner violence.  The rest of the article, while sympathetic to people trying to deal with these syndemics, just doesn't give enough perspective on the problem to allow much more than a sigh about how rough the world is these days. Which is always already that and much better than a guilt trip.