"For the Etruscans."  The Pink Guitar

The only texts that have moved me from all the readings for the class.

A lack of engagement. Nothing he can say about these essays.  Maybe I should let one of you lead discussion on these texts.

poetry money, writing money, a male bastion of winnings/earnings.  I hear a female poet talking about inequities in grants for artists when she arrives at our campus.

On a recent questionnaire that crossed my desk, "What does it take to get ahead at this university"

pause.  is this a rhetorical question?

A woman in my life says she's happy to give the men she knows the upper division courses...they need time to write, she says.  She'll take the introductory writing courses. She's good at all that grading.  Feels like she's giving to two groups, students and colleagues.  Collegiality, she calls it.   GASP.  Sexy pens, evidently, require more time.  Who knew?

"I don't know that this text is "artful."  Careful.  "Responsible."

long ago on that Rachel Blau DuPlessis visit...she says, I need some recommendations on reading, for the airplane ride back...sees that I'm lugging around Sedgwick's Tendencies, says she has met a local author  whose book she is curious about...so should she read his book or Tendencies.  I don't know that his book is artful, I want to say.  He betrays you.  Instead, I recommend Tendencies.  Leave it alone.

My own ways of making sense of genre start with migrations Migrations away from the voices from presumably elite academic definitions of "artful"

Migrations into satisfaction and an emerging self-identification as writer 

Migrations into solitary locations, 
and isolated spaces.  Hospitable and inhospitable spaces.
Exploring virtual as a means of finding hospitable locations.  Literacies starting to include the ability to find kindred people.

Migrations towards queer
vibrantly articulated by multiple participants. 
Unexpected.  Opening definitions of queer. 

Embracing a larger community.  Hoping to collaborate on new literacies.  Acknowledge our inner queer children.  Join the self-help study...led this week by guru Eve. 
 

The future is all the people who've ever been kept out, singing.

In the future everything will be allowed.

So the future is for you, too.  Not to worry.  But not only for you.

For you, but not only for you.

Not to discard the canon, but to enlarge it.

No more monoliths.  No more Mick Jaggers.  No more O.J. Simpsons.  No more James Joyces. No more heroes.

Everything threatens you.  Hacks, hackers, slacks, slackers, cybergirls with their cybercurls and wiles, poets of every sort.  Rock bands with girls.  170

Wish list:  that the homogeneity end.  That the mainstream come to acknowledge, for starters, the thousand refracted, disparate beauties out there.  170.

The future is for women, for real this time.  I'm sorry, but it's time you got used to it.  172

Dream: that this new tolerance might set a tone, give an example.  This openness in acceptance of texts, of forms, this freedom, this embrace will serve a as models for how to live.  Will be the model for a new world order--in my dream.  A way to live together better--in my dream.  175

Wish: that writing again, through its audacity, generosity, possibility, irreverence, wildness, teach us how to better live.  176.

Migrations away from "artful" as narrowly defined by the activations, the data collection/assemblage, and migrations to collective data collection.

Educations, sometimes, are about getting the allusions. Late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.  A certain slant of light.

Or a broader literacy.  To what degree does one have the right to activate that which does not get played out in the dominant imaginary?  To reimagine outside dominance and submission paradigms of hetero male privilege?  To be able to escape the routine representations of men and women that the TV, the dominant movies, the heterosexual porn industry would have us imagine.  To imagine, instead, outside these limited frames, frames that often shape women as the targets of rape, of violence, particularly in the het porn industry.  (Cornell works these ideas over in so many spaces...the imaginary domain)

Can we activate to our hearts' content?  Or do limited representations of what is "artful" still impose?  My professor expected our silence.  Our denials.  Admission to his club.  I seethe, still at my silence.  That I didn't respond to a professor who could not get DuPlessis.  She was so far outside what he activates, and therefore, presumed to be lacking in art.  Cannot be taken up.  No shots exchanged.
 

Adrienne Rich: "Poetry means refusing the choice to kill or die." 
Wish: that the straight white male give in just a little more gracefully.  183

Her argument was that in learning, in the education system, we trained people to fight.  Competition in learning.  Crazy systems of education shape our proclivity to war.  So what role does genre/gender play in education?  How might we rearticulate, revisit ecriture feminine? 

Is it possible to create a sense of vulnerability I want to associate with queer, with shame, with what I think works conceptually for me as a locus of transformation.  A concept that doesn't designate us to "let it be, let it be" locations, and doesn't blind us to our collusions.

I cannot endure this concept of war.

The gulf war.  the first time I heard the word war---really heard it as an adult.
outraged  at our oil battles

Who can we be if we don't understand how disruptions of relation set about feelings of betrayal, of narrative stopped.  Mournings so profound that we don't even really know where to start.  What to say.  How to shape our outrage and our sorrow.

To be angry.  To desire fusion, to recognize the shame of disrupted interest.  To act.

But how to speak.  And how to respond to silence, or dismissive charges.  How to articulate our depressions in the midst of cultural forces on our sexuate beings.

How does this war/queer location/silence in response shape our writing?  and what might writing look like right now, in the midst of crises, and in the future.  In some distant time of peace?

How might
instant messages
phone calls
lists of quotations
linear thoughts
simultaneous thoughts
disrupted
fragmented
unified writing
and
desires for fusions
desires for stable subject object relations
desires for familiar

be rearticulated to shape a writing that will hold us.  Gather us.  Allow us the desire to imagine. Rekindle hope?   how long?

I fear, more than anything, that depression will over take the voices that give me space.  The voices who artfully speak to my reality, to my issues.  Who activate enough of my world view that I fantasize momentary fusions...transferences, the kind that are highly erotic, highly suggestive, and which send me to new locations of insight/action.

Eve Sedgwick:  I dread

every bad thing
that threatens people I love;
for me, dread only

I may stop knowing
how to like and desire
the world around me.
4 (A Dialogue on Love)
 

Wish: that forms other than those you've invented or sanctioned through your thousands of years of privilege might arise and be celebrated.  186

words are the ginger candies my dying friends have sucked on.  Or the salve of water.  187.

Words are the crow's feet embedded in the skin of the father I love.  Words are like that to me, still. 188