"every time you open your eyes, the clock starts again."
i love how in your writing i get the sense there's no such thing as absolute certainty, and somehow, rather than fear or despair, it evokes wonder and excitement. if nothing is certain then anything is possible.
I'm very happy to hear you say this. I think about having invented an uncertain narrator and how lucky my readers are they don't have me telling the stories. xxL
You’re are kind…I figure if I’m going to drive five and a half hours to sit in your beautiful home, I’m gonna ask a lot of questions! It was well worth it. But I still have questions! Talk to you soon.
We love questions, and especially your questions. I'm going to send you a link to this Saturday's zoom conversation, in case you can make it, we are thinking of continuing some of the thoughts that arose during the lab. xxL
Here is a great writing prompt: ‘the other day when I pulled up my shirt ..’. In this story, there is a man, maybe kneeling, maybe squatting, maybe sitting on a chair, attending to our narrator. with a tweezer. He is trying to remove a tic. She looks down and has to double check, yes he has turned the tweezers clockwise, not anticlockwise and is both puzzled and charmed. I’m not that familiar with tics, they scare me witless, though my girlfriend frequently removes them from her gorgeous white and black collie cross. And earlier from her ponies. So, I had to look up how to remove a tic. Nothing about left or right. Nothing about clocks at all. Tic toc! Just don’t accidentally remove the head or it will sink deeper into the skin. I’m currently enjoying Everything is Personal, the book by LS. There are six much admired chapters called The Clock. Does LS live in a radical clock? She certainly thinks in collage, like the structure of the film The Clock, which she finds compelling. This piece, like all her stacks, are collage. One of the features of ADHD that I struggle with a lot is time blindness. I just don’t get time. Or clocks. The unconscious knows no time. So collage really works for me. In me. Too. LS said to me recently in a reply to a comment I made about her stack ‘Dead Dog’ that ‘an image is associative language to stir feeling and thought in the reader’. Well, here is my association to the scene of a man trying to remove a tic from a woman’s belly. Lesley Feinberg. Stone Butch Blues. One of the great cult novels of the late 20th century. A book the New York Library includes in its 125 best loved. I re-read SBB last year. It’s a novel about sexual politics and is understood to have inaugurated the transgender movement in the 1990’s in the US. I lived alongside Jess Goldberg’s early butch lesbian life in 1970’s Buffalo, New York, having come of age sexually in a deeply conservative Catholic Ireland in the 70’s. But even within that repressed culture (where the joke was you couldn’t even come out as a heterosexual in Ireland back then!), the endless police raids of lesbian bars and the regular humiliations often ending in imprisonment were eye opening. Not that the policing of women’s sexuality by church and state was any less oppressive or consequential, just administered by priests rather than the police I suppose. What is revolutionary about this story is the thrilling Marxist articulation of queer and transgender identities in their lived experience. Feinberg was deeply class conscious and a member of the World Workers Party. She went on to publish Transgender Warriors in 1996 (Feinberg never insisted on specific pronouns and felt how they were used in what context mattered more, not to mention demonstrating that there are many ways to be ‘she) which was hugely influential and ‘gave transgenderism its legs’. She is my idea of one sexy revolutionary. Just check out Feinberg and Kate Bernstein together on you tube and tell me these are not revolutionary subjectivities! But back to that other sexy revolutionary, LS. And the story of the woman, the man, the tic and the clock. Feinberg was struck with lymes disease in the late 1970’s and because she had experienced savage homophobia in many medical environments, she was slow to present for treatment, (though the understanding of the tic borne disease was limited then), and so remained untreated for too many years and suffered debilitating symptoms for the rest of her life. She died from its complications in 2014. LS, a contemporary of Feinberg, also understands that the current Trump administration’s threat to annihilate the very concept of transgender is an attack on all of us: ‘females, homosexuals, trans people, gender fluid people, people who defy gender codes and body norms all undermine the notion of maleness as a one-stop, biologically-determined thing owed supremacy. If it were an essential inviolate thing, nothing could weaken its dominance’ (from Body Language, EIP). Rave on Feinberg! Rave on Stone!
I love your layers. Dear Laurie.
Thanks, Holly!
You are a writer through and through.
That's lovely. Thank you, dear Lora. xxL
He does have a spiffy profile.
love the way the dreams and memories flow into each other. And the slipperiness of the past.
Ah, thanks, clever one. xxL
"every time you open your eyes, the clock starts again."
i love how in your writing i get the sense there's no such thing as absolute certainty, and somehow, rather than fear or despair, it evokes wonder and excitement. if nothing is certain then anything is possible.
I'm very happy to hear you say this. I think about having invented an uncertain narrator and how lucky my readers are they don't have me telling the stories. xxL
ha! maybe you could do a “split personality” post one day
In addition to yummy food and cake, it came away with wisdom, words, and magical stories. #artlab
Love you all.
You are fire for us all! xxL
You’re are kind…I figure if I’m going to drive five and a half hours to sit in your beautiful home, I’m gonna ask a lot of questions! It was well worth it. But I still have questions! Talk to you soon.
We love questions, and especially your questions. I'm going to send you a link to this Saturday's zoom conversation, in case you can make it, we are thinking of continuing some of the thoughts that arose during the lab. xxL
You make my memories resonate more deeply because of your articulate gift for analyzing your own. Swooning with awe and appreciation.
Thanks, love . . . kind of memories, invented in the moment for the game of doing what I do. xxL
Here is a great writing prompt: ‘the other day when I pulled up my shirt ..’. In this story, there is a man, maybe kneeling, maybe squatting, maybe sitting on a chair, attending to our narrator. with a tweezer. He is trying to remove a tic. She looks down and has to double check, yes he has turned the tweezers clockwise, not anticlockwise and is both puzzled and charmed. I’m not that familiar with tics, they scare me witless, though my girlfriend frequently removes them from her gorgeous white and black collie cross. And earlier from her ponies. So, I had to look up how to remove a tic. Nothing about left or right. Nothing about clocks at all. Tic toc! Just don’t accidentally remove the head or it will sink deeper into the skin. I’m currently enjoying Everything is Personal, the book by LS. There are six much admired chapters called The Clock. Does LS live in a radical clock? She certainly thinks in collage, like the structure of the film The Clock, which she finds compelling. This piece, like all her stacks, are collage. One of the features of ADHD that I struggle with a lot is time blindness. I just don’t get time. Or clocks. The unconscious knows no time. So collage really works for me. In me. Too. LS said to me recently in a reply to a comment I made about her stack ‘Dead Dog’ that ‘an image is associative language to stir feeling and thought in the reader’. Well, here is my association to the scene of a man trying to remove a tic from a woman’s belly. Lesley Feinberg. Stone Butch Blues. One of the great cult novels of the late 20th century. A book the New York Library includes in its 125 best loved. I re-read SBB last year. It’s a novel about sexual politics and is understood to have inaugurated the transgender movement in the 1990’s in the US. I lived alongside Jess Goldberg’s early butch lesbian life in 1970’s Buffalo, New York, having come of age sexually in a deeply conservative Catholic Ireland in the 70’s. But even within that repressed culture (where the joke was you couldn’t even come out as a heterosexual in Ireland back then!), the endless police raids of lesbian bars and the regular humiliations often ending in imprisonment were eye opening. Not that the policing of women’s sexuality by church and state was any less oppressive or consequential, just administered by priests rather than the police I suppose. What is revolutionary about this story is the thrilling Marxist articulation of queer and transgender identities in their lived experience. Feinberg was deeply class conscious and a member of the World Workers Party. She went on to publish Transgender Warriors in 1996 (Feinberg never insisted on specific pronouns and felt how they were used in what context mattered more, not to mention demonstrating that there are many ways to be ‘she) which was hugely influential and ‘gave transgenderism its legs’. She is my idea of one sexy revolutionary. Just check out Feinberg and Kate Bernstein together on you tube and tell me these are not revolutionary subjectivities! But back to that other sexy revolutionary, LS. And the story of the woman, the man, the tic and the clock. Feinberg was struck with lymes disease in the late 1970’s and because she had experienced savage homophobia in many medical environments, she was slow to present for treatment, (though the understanding of the tic borne disease was limited then), and so remained untreated for too many years and suffered debilitating symptoms for the rest of her life. She died from its complications in 2014. LS, a contemporary of Feinberg, also understands that the current Trump administration’s threat to annihilate the very concept of transgender is an attack on all of us: ‘females, homosexuals, trans people, gender fluid people, people who defy gender codes and body norms all undermine the notion of maleness as a one-stop, biologically-determined thing owed supremacy. If it were an essential inviolate thing, nothing could weaken its dominance’ (from Body Language, EIP). Rave on Feinberg! Rave on Stone!