Fancy Coleslaw and Heart Attack Man

Today was the last day full day our class had together in London. We all spent the morning doing different things, from going to museums and shops, to just relaxing and reading, and as far as I can tell, we all had a great time. We all went to dinner together at a French restaurant, were served some very fancy coleslaw, and discussed how excited we were for the talk we were going to later by Jeanette Winterson. We all thought it would be really fun, and were looking forward to asking her some questions.

We listened to her lecture, and it was pretty good. I didn’t know much about her at all before the talk, so I found it very interesting, and I couldn’t wait for when she would answer questions. I couldn’t have been more disappointed. She hardly answered any of the questions, even the easy ones, even though she said that we could ask her anything. After a couple stupid easy questions (If you were stranded on a desert island, what three books would you bring? Her answer was the Bible, Shakespeare, and a list of about four others.), Michael asked a question that actually had some thought behind it. Not only did she not answer the question, but made it seem as though the question was completely idiotic. People asked a few more silly questions (Do you love your mom? Her answer was: “she’s dead.”), Will tried to ask a question. He got about three words out, when she interrupted him, and said that she didn’t like those words. When Will tried to finish his question anyway, she said that the two of them couldn’t talk. Then Heart Attack Man (the smelly guy sitting next to Will) started cursing at Michael. I’m not sure what his problem was, but he needed to calm down.

So the talk had potential, but turned into a major flop. Fortunately, we had a great time afterwards, and made the most of our last night together. We had fun with the street performers on the way back to the flat, and talked and danced late into the night. And even though our time together in London has come to an end, I’m sure we will have amazing reunions once we get back.

They Forced Me to Look at Modern Art THEN Write Poetry on It.

A Response to the Painting February 1954 by Roger Hilton

In her red dress she dances

Her feet up in the air

Her head thrown back

No need for music

She’s dancing

I’m her audience

My eyes clap for her

And then I walk away

But she’s still dancing

With much convincing from Michael and Suzaana, I wrote this poem in our impromptu poetry workshop in response to this painting which we viewed Monday at the Tate Britain. Writing this poem was a huge stretch for me. Quite different from those two, I have not picked up a pen to write anything creative (unless you count this blog and witty Facebook statuses) in years. However with encouragement from my always supportive trip mates- and I must acknowledge a teeny tiny bit of alcohol- I scribbled this blurb.

Admittedly, it was only with persuasion that I even viewed the painting described, a simple composition of only the colors black and red splashed, apparently with meaning, upon a white canvas. Like creative writing, modern art is not something I usually enjoy. Often I do not find the works aesthetically pleasing, and rather than inspire me, modern art instills in me envy. I stand before the canvas and think, “I can ‘ingeniously’ produce a work in the fashion of a kindergarten art project all the same, why am I not getting paid millions of dollars for this?” I found these sentiments to quickly arise as I stared at this painting, but through our discussion learned to suspend these judgments. As Michael, Suzaana, and Will looked upon the painting, they saw much more than the seemingly only big blotch of misshapen rectangular red paint with four smaller misshapen black rectangles extending from it and a dash of more black paint to its left. They noticed that the colors possibly make up numerous things, a piano for instance, or a lady doing a handstand. Then, unlocking my closed mind, I finally saw a lady dancing. The big splash of red became her sensuous dress, the four extending splotches of black transformed into her moving arms and legs up in the air, a lacking fifth piece of black her head thrown back in exuberance. I realized that this work was, not amateur, but astonishingly provocative in its simplicity, an inspiring masterpiece that required skill to create.

Through just these casual discussions of modern art and a slightly tipsy poetry workshop, Monday forced me to extract deeper meaning from what I would normally disregard and then create a new discourse to describe it. Moments such as these have made up this Queer London course. Over the past three weeks I have learned to, in the words of Michael, “put pressure on” what I would normally ignore and to analyze and describe it in a new enlightened manner. Thank you tremendously to this course- composed of Gaga dancing, strip tease encompassing glam poetry slam, a confessing dancewhore, laugh-til-we cry Greyhound bus stories (love you Suzaana!), free time Disney movies, and many, many things more- for that.

Wrath of Judith, a Burch/Tarantino collaboration

I just got back from a wonderful late afternoon spent at the Tate Modern, where I spent the majority of my time in the “Poetry and Dream” exhibit (Do exhibit titles go in quotes or are they underlined? Perhaps one of the numerous English professors who read this can help me out). This exhibit, which was largely a surrealist exhibition, was absolutely fascinating in the way it discussed the connection between writing and the physical body, something I am particularly interested in. In this way, the exhibit might have been better termed “Discourse and Materiality” (a la Judith Butler).

Painting, in particular, is an interesting arena in which to engage this discussion because of the medium’s ability to capture (or possibly imagine) the process of bodily materialization; in the real world, we are only able to get at this discussion by way of either fully materialized human bodies (resting at the “matter” end of the spectrum) or via writing (which falls firmly at the “discourse” end of the debate). Dorthea Tanning’s A mi-voix, pictured here,is quite wonderful in the way it captures partially formed human bodies, frozen part-way through the process of materialization. The wonderful thing about this painting (as Michael pointed out of the Francis Bacon paintings) is that, because the bodies are frozen, the viewer cannot tell whether they are being constructed or deconstructed. In this way, painting might be seen to capture the inscription of a body without evaluating it.

These partially formed bodies raise a number of questions: If discourse informs materialization, what sort of discourse might result in partially formed bodies? Conversely, what sort of language or discourse might cause a body to unravel? In contemplation of Jeanette Winterson’s use of the body in Written on the Body, how can physical embodiment be a point of communication that is independent of language, when language is inscribed on the body? I can imagine an exchange between Jeanette Winterson and Judith Buther: “There is a ‘language written on the body,’” Judith might exclaim while beating Jeanette in the head with her copy of Bodies that Matter. “Language is the language written on the body!” she would yell with each blow. The scene might end with Butler standing over Winterson’s unconscious body, head cocked to the side. She would then wipe her brow and whisper “It’s discourse, dummy...” Fade to black.

This Winterson/Butler smack-down aside (guest directed by Quentin Tarantino, of course), the Tate exhibit was particularly fascinating in the way it traced the process of materialization. The penultimate room, the last room that contained paintings, was one dedicated to a sect of twentieth century realists (where the rest of the rooms were abstract in some capacity). Meredith Frampton’s Portrait of a Young Woman, when placed in conversation with the rest of the exhibit, seems to articulate the exhibition’s conclusion in the way it projects the plainest, most uptight-looking white woman into what has (until this point) been quite a queer space. The gallery seems to highlight the idea that bodies are themselves policed and ultimately normalized institutions; by the time bodies are fully materialized, the chaff has already been picked from the wheat, as it were, which is especially problematic because the process/moment of materialization seems largely inaccessible. In Butler’s words, this moment becomes “retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access,” and, as a result, pointing to a moment of materialization outside the theoretical seems impossible (Just as a heads up, this Butler quote is taken quuuiiiite out of context. I feel the need to apologize out of fear of Tarantino-esque retribution from Butler. I might become the inadvertent star of Wrath of Judith II: No Exit, which I read somewhere they’ve started production on). Where, then, is there room for a queer body? What about a disabled body, a body which was normative but has been broken? This exhibit might suggest that because bodies are normalized structures, there isn’t any room for a queer body, which seems sort of troubling.

Also, I’ve read that Judith Butler does all her own stunts.

Queering "Queer"

“Camp is a weapon, a means, an attack on the norm,” asserted the triumphant drag queen (or should I say ‘quean’?) with a stamp of her platform-clad foot, a defiant flash of her three-inch-long, glittering lashes. And then the “Confessions of a Dance Whore” star stripped herself slowly of her costume, grating away layers of camp - her weapon, as though scraping iron from iron with a peeler. Even as I write this description, I find myself stumbling over pronouns, for moments later, he stood in front of us in a school-boy uniform, pondering, and asking us to ponder, "Is there an essential me under all these me's or are we always performing?"

I am down to my last blog entry in London, and I find myself distilling the entire course down to that exact question. After all, where does an identity end and a being begin? We have spent the past two weeks traipsing about a city that has no idea whether it wants to be ancient or modern, Greek-classicist or Orientalist, monarchy or democracy, and so-on and so-forth, etcetera, etcetera … until London has finally run out of conflicting dichotomies from which to suspend our question marks. We have spent the past two weeks deconstructing discourse while creating a discourse of our own – one that exists in the loops and holes of a spiral bound notebook, that is – in the margins outside the margins. We have learned to “queer” (that scrumptious adjective/noun-turned-verb) just about everything – queering architecture, queering time, queering literary aesthetics, queering legal systems, queering responses to modern art; but what happens when we turn the verb “queer” on itself? Have we wielded the word “queer” as a weapon for attack on the norm, much like Will’s favorite dance whore wields camp? And in doing so have we created an anti-norm that exists for its own sake, thereby becoming a norm unto itself? I realize I am speaking in abstracts; allow me to “queer” my abstractions with anecdotes …

Earlier this evening, dropping by our fully-applianced apartments to collect his laundry, our professor Jason couldn’t resist a chat with his delightful, A+ students; and being the brilliant interlocutors that we are, the conversation slowly drifted to the cliché binary between academia and activism, and naturally, to the LGBT community’s grand assimilation project: same-sex marriage. And while I have NEVER wanted to get married, and while I would personally like to pull the marble columns out from under the friezes of this aging temple of an institution, I find myself committed to defending the rights of those who seek its security to be free to do so. And if you want to know why, let Jason tell you his story of adoption legalities. Let my roommate Carrie, whose partner was killed, tell you her story of funeral arrangements that excluded her entirely, deference given to “family” who refused to acknowledge that their only daughter was gay, even in death. And what about the average Tom and Dick, or Sally and Sue who genuinely want the rings, the cake, the “till death do us part” shebang?

Yes, I am all about questioning the norm. It is what I want to spend my life doing, and that is why I must question the norm of “queer”? How can we critique binaries that suspend genders and sexualities across taut lines, if we are not willing to recognize the normative/anti-normative binary that we are creating ourselves? Is queerness a kind of camp, a performance of its own? A wig to don and doff when we are on or off a stage? Is queerness about an attack, a weapon we use to destroy? Or is it about an embrace, a tool we use to create? Is queerness about always making a statement or always asking a question - a kind of ever percolating ellipses that forever trails off the end of the page?

To reconcile these binaries of queerness, I would like to take both ends, loop them around till they meet in the center of a skater’s figure 8, then fold the 8 in half to create a queer sort-of imbricated, diamond-drop circle with plenty of nooks and grooves for norms and anti-norms and everything in between. I am interested in existing in the gaps between deconstructed brick walls, where discourse can lose its power structures and become two people talking to each other about how they feel. I want it to be okay for someone who wants patches of norm to stitch those patches into their own quilted queerness. Can’t we exist in the interstices between the iron rails without actually hopping on the train? Can this poly-lesbian, femme-top, academic-activist-artist person find a space in the gaps between her various anti-norms, lay down her weapon, and just be?

Yes, I will admit: if I had to choose (and thanks to Foucault, I don’t), I would privilege a world of beings over identities. Because beings are the essential me under the me’s. Because beings happen in the intersections where identities X away from each other. Because any real queer knows each one of those identities is constructed in the first place. (And after “Love the Sinner,” we all know a bad performance when we see one.)

Hampstead

Some photos for your viewing pleasure, sans insightful commentary. Roxie, this terrier is for you (seen romping about Hampstead Heath).


In the backyard of the Sigmund Freud house.


And finally, a video -- somewhat abbreviated -- from London Pride!

ARTIST.LIVED HERE. (For Mark Gertler)

The Hampstead Plaque Fund
and the local real estate company
have conspired together, wagered
big money to keep you here –
here in this discarded
cigarette butt of a corner,
scuff-marked and ashen with burnt-out light.

They have inscribed your name
in bold white block letters on a mounted black
oval. They have stuffed your years between
unseen parentheses like stage directions.
(Enter stage left 1891) -
(Exit stage right 1939).
Your life little more than the hyphenated
suspension between birth and death.

You are fixed in this space
for good now, whether you like it
or not – a stuffed bird,
dead and caught forever in flight,
invisible cord hung high behind glass
in an old, brick museum.

If I were you, I would
stumble out of the grave screaming,
dirt-mangled grass in my hair,
“I did more than ‘LIVE HERE’ once.
I shat here, and spat tobacco,
and downed shots of whiskey. I pissed here
and painted in bright, contrasting colors.

I piled the horrors of war onto a merry-go-round
and spun them about until their screams
were suspended in orangeblue. I threw
bricks at museum windows and demanded
they let me in. And now you
have all but forgotten

me. My paintings archived
in dusty manila envelopes you call
the Internet, and one or two hanging
naked in the Tate. While you
have turned me into this plaque,
these rusting brown bricks,
a window boarded up
with yesterday's newspapers.”

Pride, Opera, and Disney

We took this photo at the London pride parade. The flag on the left with the pointy tip almost poked my eye out on several occasions. The flags are pretty, with their bright colors and the way they are waving in the wind, but you might notice that there’s nobody marching in the parade. This happened a lot, and to be honest, I was a bit disappointed by the parade. There were some fancy drag queens, a few buses, a couple leather bears, and a lot of gaps between them. Sometimes the gaps between the groups were so big that I thought the parade was over. There was also a distinct lack of nudity. Really, you know a pride parade is a bit pathetic when the opera has more nudity in it.

The opera had to be my favorite part of today (although, watching Mulan later was a close second). We saw Salome, and it was wonderful. Our seats were house right at the very top and, while not ideal, gave us a very interesting view. One advantage was that we could actually see into the cistern where Jokanaan was. Of course, we also had to put up with the bad parts of sitting in seats that cost only 5 pounds. This mostly consisted of the jerk in front of me who started texting twice during the show. But not even the rude cell phone man could do too much damage to the production. One thing in particular that I really liked about this production was that instead of having the dance of seven veils simply be a dance, they turned it into a creepy almost rape, which added a lot to how messed up Salome is at the end, which is saying something since she is really messed up. Another thing was that the severed head looked deliciously real, and even had blood dripping from it from the moment it was brought on stage (by the naked executioner) until the very end of the play. It was also wonderfully disturbing when Salome, completely covered in blood, finally kissed it.

We finished the night by getting some Burger King and watching Mulan. It was the perfect way to end the day.

Jiltfest 2K10: The Day After

In the spirit of voyeurism, I’ve spent the last twenty minutes or so lurking about the park, photographing strangers in an attempt to emulate this afternoon’s exhibit in the Tate Modern. Though the picture I’ve decided to engage is one I took yesterday in the London countryside, I’ve included a few of this evening’s photographs to share my creepings and lurkings with our QueerLondon fan base. I should preface this post by admitting that I am not sure I have quite the eye for detail which is required of a photographer, but that I plan to smokescreen my audience into forgetting this by way of my blog post.

Compositionally, I like the texture of the water; the squiggly lines of the ripples seem to contrast nicely to the very straight ones of the fishing pole. I also like that the viewer is given minimal information about the main character. Man? Woman? Sleeping? Enjoying a lazy day by the pond? Alone? Frustrated? It turns out that this man was snoozing gently, pond-side, quite alone. Something about the way the green of the grass spikes into the water interests me as well, though I’m hard pressed to specify.

I’ve selected this particular photo (which I took prior to our trek to the Tate Modern) because I find something about the voyeurism involved in catching this Londoner at his sleepiest intrigues me. What does the fact that this man is unaware that he is being watched (and captured) mean for the photo? Though we can imagine that the sleepy man is no different for having been captured in such a way (that is, until the Queer London blog gets optioned for a film), this photo, along with the exhibit, seems to raise questions of artistic morality. Why is voyeurism constructed as undesirable in our culture if, practically speaking, it is nearly entirely harmless? What am I, the photographer, doing to this bystander without his consent? One such effect seems to be in the way this medium mythologizes its subjects. It seems as though this voyeuristic photography does a disservice to its subjects by manner of the way in which the photographer strips the subject of his “real” story and impresses his own narrative on the subject. What the man in this picture is actually doing ceases to matter; I have captured him on film and as a result, he will assume whatever story I attach to him.

In the spirit of our discussions of Carol Ann Duffy’s “Stuffed” and Wolfgang Tillman’s photography, I cannot help but think of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, which seems to parallel Duffy’s poem in its examination of the artistic impulse. We are asked, if only momentarily, to believe that the subjects of a painting are, in fact, real people that have simply been shaped to the artist’s will and frozen in time, condemned to hang on a wall forever. Sondheim and Duffy both seem to explore the selfishness involved in the creation of art thought the way both artists (taxidermist and painter) ignore their subjects actual function/need and instead shape them to whatever is most aesthetically pleasing. Following this line of thought, I wonder what happens if we think about the subject of this photograph as alive. I seem to have turned this Londoner into a 21^st century mariner-sleeping beauty and perhaps, in compressing him to a digital image, robbed him of personhood in the name of art. All in a day’s work, I suppose.

(I was tempted to write about this tender moment I seem to have captured between man and squirrel, but I think the picture tells quite a richer story by itself than I could manage. Love comes in all sizes, dear readers. I just worry that the logistics of moving in together might be tricky; that man looks ill equipped for tree climbing.)

An Image within an Image

Normally I never upload pictures of my travels while I’m away. I prefer to wait until I return home to view the images and reminiscence of the good times recently had because, as Michael said it best, “a photograph extends emotion across time.” The photographs allow me to continue the vacation for just a day or two longer. However, in the spirit of the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery and the Urban Spectatorship reading by Judith Walkowitz, our professors have put us up to the task of commenting on a photograph that we have taken thus far. So here it goes.

I took the photograph seen here on the top of a double-decker bus crossing the Thames, and to me it encompasses the literal meaning of urban spectatorship. It is urban in its composition, the scenic London nightlife composed of Big Ben and the river and its vantage point, a double-decker bus. It is spectatorship in that the photograph, due to the bright lighting and glass windowpanes of the bus, includes the reflection of me observing my surroundings and snapping the picture. The image I attempt to capture and I become intertwined in the most accidental but beautiful way. This unintentional superimposition of me the spectator and my London surroundings defines urban spectatorship.

I Found the Friendly Londoners. They were Hiding under London Bridge.

The past five days in London have been marvelous. The unusually glorious weather has continued. Our discussions of my beloved author Oscar Wilde were intriguing and the paintings of the National Gallery, several of which featured the recently discussed story of Salome, were breathtaking. Most notably, what have become known to us as the notoriously evil people of London, do not seem so evil any longer. In fact, over the last few days of our trip, several have proven to be amongst the most lovely, inviting people I have ever encountered.

I first discovered a heart in a Londoner on the train returning from our day trip to Brighton. After meeting such friendly, artsy shop vendors throughout the small beach town, several of us were despondent to go back to the grimacing residents of London. Whereas Brighton held strangers who actually complimented us (granted they may have been nice simply because we bought half the town), London overflowed with people who glared as we passed complimenting them. So when a stranger started speaking to me on the train ride back “home”, I nearly almost jumped! The young man in his thirties, who we later found out to be named Matt, began the conversation with just small chit chat, asking where we were from and how we were enjoying our stay, and just this small bantering was refreshing enough. But as we neared our stop to get off the train and switch to the underground, Matt invited us to go along with him to his brother’s pub and have a drink on him. Was this really happening? A resident of London spoke to me and then INVITED me somewhere, to have a drink on HIM? I couldn’t believe it. It was an opportunity we couldn’t turn down. So we stumbled along behind him to a pub outside London Bridge and wound up in the middle of his older brother’s Stag Do, a Bachelor’s party back in the states. Now yes I know that may sound quite dangerous, but what back home usually involves blackout drinking and strippers, actually here was only a gathering of family. This was the exact encounter with Londoners I had been dying to have. The people were so friendly, absolutely hilarious, and quite helpful. Matt marked up my map with all the cool places to shop, eat and dance, and when I was leaving his brother offered (unnecessarily but graciously) me his Oyster card to get home. The icing on the cake: the USA World Cup game was on. I was ecstatic. The scene felt as though it had been scripted from my book of London dreams.

I decided I must return home once the game ended, but upon an irresistible invite to come back tomorrow to watch the huge England vs. Germany soccer (football) game, I traveled to the pub again the next day. Joined by the fiancé of Matt’s brother and her girlfriends, this outing, in spite of England’s sad loss, was even more fun. Free drinks for me flowed continuously, and most importantly the ladies were absolutely wonderful. By the end of the night I was invited to go on a shopping tour with one and stay in Ireland the next weekend with another. Wary of me traveling home alone after drinking, Matt then escorted me back to our flat, serving as a tour guide along the way. Most appreciatively, Matt respected my privacy, and stopped at the corner of our street rather than in front of the flat in our arrival at my temporary London home.

The whole experience was delightful. In the heart of the city I found that there are actually people in London who have a heart. As much as I would like to take up the offer for the shopping trip, I did first meet Matt coming from a Brighton shopping trip that wiped out my wallet, so that probably will not happen. But I will let you know if I stumble across another good time with some old fashioned London Blokes : )

“But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting,” said Lord Henry in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I could not agree more. After the horrible first act of Love the Sinner, I would have been happy to leave, but hoped that the second half might redeem it. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The play must have been written when the writers were on strike, and the director must have told the actors that if they weren’t sure what to do, they should start yelling their lines. While the play definitely had potential, it never realized it, and my morals have been degraded because of it.

Earlier in the day, we went to an exhibit of photographs by the artist Wolfgang Tillmans. It was interesting, though not exactly to my taste. The pictures that stood out to me were one of a German biker glaring at the camera, and one of a seated man pulling a splinter from the bottom of his foot. I’m not sure what appealed to me about the picture of the biker, but it was probably his expression of obvious distrust of the photographer. As for the man with the splinter, being as obsessed as I am with Classical and Renaissance art, it makes sense that I’d appreciate an allusion to Spinario. I can’t say I really liked the rest of the photos, but our discussion of them was interesting and definitely made the experience worthwhile for me.

The Ethnicity/Culture of Gender Performance, or “Remember to Change your Gaydar to London Time"

One again, I am sitting in Russell Square, which has served as my blog-muse here in London, despite having to wander knee-deep through a gaggle of French children to find my own patch of grass. Thursday night’s outing to Edge (a gay bar here in London for which I have little context) left me wondering about the dangerously stereotype-steeped idea of gaydar as well as the cultural and ethnic attachments which our masculinities, femininities, and other gender performances posses.

I should begin this discussion by confessing that I am extraordinarily wary of the idea of gaydar; though I’m not sure I can dismiss its existence, I’ve always felt it to be problematic and downright medieval in the way it remains rooted in stereotypes. I found myself surveying the bar we were in (which, judging from the size of the bartenders’ biceps and the amount of gel which their hair contained, was certainly a queer establishment), and realizing that though I was taking the majority of the clientele to be gay, I had a hard time deciding which European men were certainly gay, which ones might be straight men stopping by for a particularly strong gin and tonic, and which might be most likely to break into choreographed Madonna dance.

I’ll admit, in fairness to my readers, that my own aversion to gaydar has been termed sour grapes by a number of people, which is to say that even in the States, I am a terrible discerner of gay men or women. I will stick up for my poor, malnourished Deviant Detection Device by saying that, even so, I am still usually able to pick out the queeniest among us in America.

On the one hand, it might seem quite obvious to expect, if gender is constructed socially, and perhaps as a cultural inscription of sex, that it might be established differently depending on cultural contexts and especially susceptible to shifts in culture. Culture is, after all, the medium by which gender manifests. Is seeing a shift in gender performance in another culture no more remarkable than finding that colors might manifest differently on a different type of painter’s canvases? Is the gender/culture relationship simply a relationship of mediums?

However, the idea that gender performances, in this case masculinities, might have ethnic strings attached to them quite disturbs me and seems to buttress the idea that sexual, gender, racial, and, economic troubles all reinforce and materialize each other. If I place myself in the mindset of the average (in this case American) xenophobic plumber from Western Ohio and presume that I have embraced the stereotype that French men are particularly effeminate, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine that there is some element of homophobia bound up in my distaste for the French. Conversely, there seems to be a grain of Euro-phobia in my dislike of the (domestic) gay population. I wonder then, if this plumber persona (which is itself constructed from stereotyping) might be said, on some level, to dislike Europeans because they remind him of gay people and vice versa. Hopefully my ideas haven’t gotten too bogged down in the minutia of my example, but my questions are these: In what ways do existing stereotypes help form and inform the deployment of other stereotypes? What are the implications of the heterogeneous nature of “acceptable” gender performances? What does it mean that different cultural and ethnic identities sanction different masculinities and femininities while outlawing others?

As a short post script: Am I imagining it, or do British pigeons make much creepier noises than their Yankee counterparts? These two very sizeable rats-with-wings just decided that I had been writing for quite long enough and bum-rushed me, issuing a terrifying guttural sort of throat-warble. The bastards were quite successful in ousting me from my sitting spot, which leads me to conclude that these pigeons can smell fear…

Stupid American

It has already been a week since a dragged my broken suitcase out of the London airport, but I am still trying to remember the rules of the city: 1) Do not smile at the people whose glances accidentally stumble into yours; 2) Do not compliment women on their clothes unless you actually want the glares; and 3) Cars do have the right to nearly run you over if you are in the street even a millisecond after the light changes. In addition, every day I rediscover the fact that I am tragically and hopelessly directionally challenged. For instance, as I traipsed about London alone on our first free day, I went left when I was supposed to go right, north when I was supposed to go south, and found myself retracing my steps through semi-familiar loops in the winding alley-ways. I am the worst kind of English major-poet-girl; when my nose is not stuck in a book, it’s stuck in the clouds. I notice patches of sky instead of street signs, the cheeky swagger of citified pigeons instead of traffic lights, the occasional book store branded “G-A-Y Is the Word” (like the one I am sitting in now) instead of left and right turns; and today, I directionally challenged my way into a pub full of reveling World-Cup fans whose chant of cheers I had heard from half-way down the street.

Following the sudden unction to live the “full London experience” and add my body to the swarming human energy, I tentatively wandered in to watch the long anticipated England-Germany “football” game. It was standing room only, and my feet were tired from walking all day; but as I studied the movement of the ball from one cleated foot to the next like squares in a game of dot-to-dot, I quickly found myself immersed in the competition, cheering the red jerseys right along with the rest of them. In the middle of a commercial break, however, I spotted an empty chair, and asked the “bloke” in the seat next to it if it was taken. My Yankee accent must have pushed the wrong button, because he snapped at me, “Can’t you see it’s reserved?” with that piping up-then-down British intonation at the end of his exclamation. Noticing the inconspicuous “reserved” tag I had missed before, I apologized quite profusely only to hear him muttering “Stupid American” as I walked away. I realized with a start that this revelry was not mine to partake, that I was just as foreign here as the word “soccer.”

I felt disturbingly out of place, and as I watched the countries battle their quarrels on the green “football” field, I found myself pondering the question of nationalisms. What does it mean that the world is parceled into borders and flags that fence in our perceptions of humanness? What does it mean that language and sports – both of which are necessarily communal – have become means of division? In London, I can walk into a pub and hear Rihanna, I can traipse down the street to a Starbucks or McDonald's, I can catch a train and notice movie advertisements starring J.Lo and Adam Sandler; but because I think dollar instead of pound, “elevator” instead of “lift,” and the aforementioned “soccer” instead of “football,” the city is as strange as it is familiar. How is it, though, that a city so infatuated with imitating the foreign in its music and art and architecture, that hordes artifacts of the foreign in its world-renowned museums can somehow remain hostile to the foreigners themselves? Like the gay man we read about, the one who was denied asylum in England although he was nearly killed by a mob in Iran. Like the American student studying abroad in a class called Queer London, a class which necessarily involves her in a transatlantic conversation. Funny – as a less-than-patriotic, left-wing political activist, I proudly identify as queer, but I have never really identified as American before traveling away from it. Suddenly, however, my Americanisms make me queerer than ever, and I find myself reluctantly attaching to my national identity, even as I try to queer the notion of identity itself.

This Side of Paradise

Can it be we’ve now had eight days of warmth and sun in England? Yes, dear readers, it can! What a delight to be here, teaching this class, and to feel genuinely on holiday.

Aside from the weather, my especial pleasure through the last week has been watching the ideas of our class come together. Our readings of the queerness of classical sculpture – both through essays and in person at the British Museum – transitioned into a discussion of the ways Sir John Soane constructed a sense of self (at the turn of the nineteenth century) through architecture and the amassing of artifacts from the world over; such musings offered a perfect opening into the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, in all its orientalist grandeur and absurdity. Queerness here operates in ways that far exceed sexual orientation.

The first performance we attended as a class – the stunning National Theatre production of Terrance Rattigan’s 1939 After the Dance – likewise asked us to think about the ways we shape our selves in relation to others. Toward the end of the second act, not long before she throws herself, Tosca-like, from a balcony, Rattigan’s Joan admits she’d withheld emotion from her husband through twelve years of marriage because she thought that’s what he wanted. Their lives as socialites depend on the notion that most of the real world – including Hitler’s growing armies and the Great Depression – is such a bore.

But like Dorian Gray, who flirts with the accoutrements of culture but never quite lives a vital life (hence the portrait in the attic, more alive than the actual Dorian), Joan and her husband David present only shells of themselves – until feeling finally rushes in and it’s too late to make amends.

Michael and I head off today for Glyndebourne, the opera festival. We’re seeing Britten’s Billy Budd – a queer collaboration if ever there were one (based on the queer-as-pink-ink Melville novella, the libretto was composed by E. M. Forster). After last night’s magical recital – the mezzo Catherine Hopper at Wigmore Hall – and our sunny day in Brighton, I’m feeling lucky indeed.

Brighton

I just got back from spending a fantastic day in Brighton. The Royal Pavilion was breathtaking, the shopping was fun, and the people were charming.
We arrived at the train station on time and looking beautiful (see, we can manage to do both sometimes), and set out for Brighton. When we got there, we went to the Royal Pavilion. The Pavilion is a stunning building inspired by Indian architecture, with the inside decorated in a dramatic mixture of styles from the exotic Chinese and Indian to the more typical classical style.
While looking at all the ornate rooms, complete with dragons on top of the chandeliers, snakes around curtains, and various objects from China, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The lavishness of the Royal Pavilion was the epitome of the aestheticism that Dorian so loved. While walking through such luxury, surrounded by beautiful things, and listening to descriptions of how the rooms were originally used, it was easy for me to imagine leading such a decadent lifestyle.
After the splendor of the Pavilion, we decided to wander around and go to some of the many shops. As we were walking down one of the streets, we saw a store with a rainbow and a scantily clad pretty girl on its sign. This seemed like a promising little shop, so we went in. After looking around for a while, we were a little confused. With a sign covered in a rainbow and a girl, we had thought that it would be a lesbian store, but it seemed just like any other sex shop. We started talking to the girl working there, and asked her about it. Apparently, the shop was originally a lesbian bookstore, but wasn’t really anymore. There were a few books in a corner, but not many, and certainly not many lesbian ones. The girl said that when they had really been a lesbian store, there were so many straight couples that came in, that it didn’t make sense not to cater to them as well. Unfortunately, the straight part of the store seems to have taken over.
We made up for our disappointing attempt at finding a gay store by just going shopping instead. This was very successful and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though the Batman dress didn’t fit.

London, it May be many literary tours but should not be confused with the Pursuit of Happiness tour.

I woke up this morning “unhappy.” Yes, I know that seems blasphemous to say that I woke up this miraculously once again sunny Friday morning in London, a morning that succeeded dancing to my favorite Lady Gaga tunes into the wee hours of the night in a club outside Soho Square, anything other than elated (my mother would die if she knew that her Friday paycheck financing this excursion, the one thing for which she woke up this morning on the other side of the pond, was going towards a less than ecstatic child), but it’s true. Terribly vivid, stressful dreams plagued my mind throughout the night, rendering it a restless sleep and a somber morning. I stepped into the shower hoping to rinse away the negative thoughts and perspiration from imitating the Fame Monster cooer that stemmed from the prior night. Yet as I pulled on my robe of bright pink polka dotted terry cloth, I was disappointed to find that while the cheerful scent of my tangerine sunshine body wash now replaced my former stench from the Soho night club, the equally jubilant disposition for which I so desired did not supplant my dismal mood, and the gloom most typical of a London skyline remained.

Along with my despondency, now set in guilt. How could I possibly be in London stressed, having nightmares? How, this morning, after seeing Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, touring literary Bloomsbury and the British Museum, philosophizing with great intellectuals of this city, (and did I forget about the dancing to Gaga), could I not find happiness? I must enroll in therapy as soon as I return to the states I began to think to myself! However, the perfect solace came to me much sooner than my expected return to the U.S. It came to me that very morning in the form of a lunch at the Wagamama noodle chain with Sarah Ahmed, queer theorist and professor in race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths University of London.

Author of The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sarah spoke on exactly the subject presently troubling my mind: my happiness, or lack thereof. Sarah focused on the etiology of the word, reflecting that “hap” means by chance, and powerfully proposed that happiness is not a guarantee of action but an occurrence of chance. She asserted that historically society, incorrectly, has made us to feel that we have the ultimate power and responsibility to control happiness, that in the words of Michael, “if you do all these things and you’re not happy, boy you’re fucked.” This notion against the conventional thoughts on the attainment of happiness was the most uplifting philosophy I have heard in ages. No longer was I steeped in remorse for my lack of glee. Now, it was a sense of freedom to let my joy “happen” that overwhelmed me. Sarah Ahmed transformed my Wagamama seat into a shrink’s couch, and unlike the costly, most often uninsurable, session with a psychologist, this beautiful conversation with the renowned philosopher was priceless.

In the spirit of chance, the theme of happiness ensued throughout the night. All dressed to the nines, we attended the play After the Dance at the National Theatre. Set in the time period directly proceeding World War II, the play focused on a rambunctious, drunken crowd of riches and lavishness, all of whom are masquerading in an act of happiness yet none actually achieving such. The main character David’s false pursuit of happiness sparks the tragedies of the narrative. After finding that her husband will soon divorce her for a younger woman, the wife of the protagonist, Joan, commits suicide at the very party she hosts. The play ends with David deciding to drink himself to death. Exploiting the notion that a life dedicated to only the search for happiness is a vapid and destructive one, the play was enlightening, the perfect fit to follow the morning’s discussion with Sarah, and as I rose from my theatre chair, I once again felt as though I was departing the comfy, lavish sofa of a therapist.

Last summer, in the scorching hot months of the states, the Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness album lyrics were the words by which I lived. This summer it will be the quite contrary philosophy of Sarah Ahmed to not pursue, but stumble upon, happiness. Today granted me the freedom to release the guilt for my own emotions, to let “happiness happen.” So in the words of Joan when asked how does she feel, I can gladly boast “I don’t know yet.”

(Note to reader: the moment of unhappiness of which I speak was very very transient. London is absolutely wonderful! And after my ridiculous shopping in the delightful beach town of Brighton, unhappiness may no longer be in my vocabulary.... until I see my bank statement that is)

It Seems Doubtful that London has Ever Been Queerer

For the purposes of crafting this blog post, I have taken my laptop out into Bloomsbury Park and am currently lounging in a grassy patch of London soil thinking about Foucaultian sexual politics, reading Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal and people watching. My life has certainly been in worse shape (and probably will be again once my credit card bill arrives). So far my time in London has been overwhelmingly fantastic. Two days ago, we went on a literary tour of Bloomsbury, home to Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury group and the site of Ted Hughes’ marriage to Sylvia Plath (runners up for the Grammy Award for “Stormiest Marriage of the 20th Century,” losing out narrowly to Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston). We also saw the house that Hughes and Plath first lived in following their honeymoon, on which the poem “18 Rugby Street” is based. I cannot find a link to the poem online, but if anyone knows of one, lemme know. Today’s discussion with Christina Perry was fascinating in the insight it provided into the English government, particularly with respect to the politics of LGBT legislature. I find the British legal system to be quite a bit more nuanced than our own and perhaps more complicated (partially due to my unfamiliarity with the system).

Michael Snediker was robbed at a Glam Poetry Slam, which I can only presume means that said Slam had little to do with either glam or poetry. Pictures are forthcoming, and we can probably promise that the Queen’s University provost won’t receive them in an anonymous email. I wonder if the wig category (which has never been more exciting) has ever seen a published professor before. Though the poetry was sub par, the Slam itself was actually quite a blast, even if Suzaana let Michael down...

I would like to return briefly to Tuesday’s conversation about Foucault, particularly with regard to the politics of sexual discourse. In this discussion, we explored the compression of sex into discourse, paying particular attention to the ways in which this compression is a method of concretizing and controlling sex, a way of wrapping a fist around sex, as it were. Our discussion seemed to paint this phenomenon as a largely negative occurrence; power acts through sex-turned-discourse to materialize other economic and racial constructs in what we seem to have construed as a largely repressive event. I wonder, however, if the discussion is somewhat more complicated than that.

Though sexual discourse allows outsiders (perhaps vaguely termed “Power”) to reach their fingers around our sexualities, substantiating sex in such a way also seems to grant us the ability to direct our own sexualities and identities; discourse seems to grant power over sexuality indiscriminately, offering control to outsiders and ourselves. To this end, agency (which is perhaps inextricably linked to power in a number of complicated ways) seems an important factor in the sex/discourse/power conversation rather than answers. For better or worse, at this point in the conversation, I seem only able to provide questions. Do we always possess agency over our sexualities? Is discourse a friend or foe in the quest for sexual autonomy, unavoidable though it is? Is our exchange with discourse one sided, or do we perhaps exert power over discourse at the same time it does work on us; are we in “discourse” with discourse? (That last one turned out a little more convoluted than I might have liked)

Edit: The people watching in London gay bars is fantastic and Lady Gaga sounds the same in every country, which is to say, significantly underwhelming. Perhaps Gaga is the great unifying mediocrity.

"Remember Us"

“The very air breathed with antiquity”: these were the opening words of our first reading for the day, “A Woman’s View of the Greek Question”; and as I walked into the Greek mausoleum of the British Museum, these are the words that shivered down my body like a bird of goose bumps. The headless marble torsos of Zeus, Dionysus, and Aries with their chiseled pecks and muscled abdomens seemed to mock the empty air where their legs used to be, almost laughing at Time who had left her teeth marks in the dismembered stone. Because even castrated and defaced, they held our attentions captive. Weathered frieze after weathered frieze lined the museum walls, the materialization of the stories we had read aloud in literature classes, scribbling hurried notes as our teachers lectured on their significance. They were all there – the kings of Assyria, the Gods of Olympus, the Roman warriors, the slaughtered women and children of their conquered lands. It was as if, as in our Harrison readings, Themis, “the spirit of assembly incarnate” the embodiment of “collective conscience,” had summoned the memories and stories of all peoples and gathered them together for one last banquet for which we too were being invited to take part. Vicki, forgive me, but it was a very spiritual experience as I marveled at the meticulous detail of each chiseled curl of hair, each engraved symbol – the kind of explicit detail that would have taken ages to create without our modern mediums and mechanized instruments. We had spent the morning queering ancient philosophy and dissecting Tipping the Velvet with Churnjeet (our brilliant visiting scholar), and my head was heavy with her words as she spoke of Waters’ use of synesthesia, her articulation of the sensual “allowing us to touch the text” thereby aesthetically queering our perception of a temporally distant narrative. And here in the museum, even in a space of marble columns and rigid ancient sculptures, I was still touching a text, touching a story that was not my story. I was queering time, because the past was the present in these rooms filled with Egyptian mummies and Olympian gods. I was deeply struck with the sense that they wanted us to know they had been here; I could almost hear them saying, “Remember us.”

Sign of the Four

Our class is off to a good start: two days of walking the city and discussing everything from sexual topographies and Victorian lamp-posts to E. M. Forster and Michel Foucault. In the category of personal achievements, I think I've now figured out the London bus system, which had always eluded me. Dinner at a French bistro capped off our first day together, much deserved by this jet-lagged and foot-sore but still enthusiastic crew.

We now turn the blog over to our students, who'll take turns reporting on our adventures. Expectations are high.

Tamarind

We’ve arrived. Aside from not having hot water, we’re delighted with our flat at Endsleigh Court, Bloomsbury. New mobile phone in hand, we ventured out to a restaurant reputed to be the most popular Indian joint in town: Tamarind. Our verdict: “popular” seems appropriate only with an accompanying qualifier: “among people who don’t really like Indian food.” From the rose-water martini to scallops and sea bass, we were first disappointed, then disgusted that a Michelin-starred establishment could be such a sell-out to mediocre palates: bland, bland, bland. We imagine vats of tomato paste as the base to most of what emerges from the kitchen, each dish nearly indistinguishable from the last. Shame on you, New York Times, for leading us astray on our first night in London.

Putting aside culinary disappointments, we’ve already swooned to London in the summer, catching glimpses in shop windows, light refracted over rooftops: signs of more good things to come. Early morning tomorrow to pick up our class from Heathrow….

Nearly Ready

Never having posted on a blog, I thought it'd be a good idea to experiment at least once before actually hitting the ground in London. Michael and I will be arriving Sunday, and our students follow Monday morning. Until then we're busily checking off to-do lists, cleaning house, and fervently hoping Iceland's volcanoes keep their ash to themselves.

For those of you interested, here's a link to our syllabus. You might also take a peak at the brewing transatlantic political storm we all may find ourselves navigating in the coming weeks. Wish us luck! We'll be posting more, and more regularly, from abroad.

Lovely lovely~

this will be a fantastic trip, indubitably. looking
forward to meeting all of you~~