a full time job changes everything. so does working nights. the ripe morning glow is all mine. at the studio by sunrise i stretch and twist and leap through the air till my muscles vibrate. on my way home i do not walk so much as slosh. in our cramped kitchen, M and i cook our monk’s lunch: brown rice, beets, and leeks. i stand at the sink, peeling carrots, waiting for M’s quick kiss on my shoulder while he fries up a sausage for himself. at our heels, shoved against the stove, the cat mews for grease. we eat on the living room floor. dishes. i read, rolling onto my stomach then my back, unable to finish more than three pages of victorine, a novel about a 13 year old girl’s quiet, yet explosive, sexuality. its elegant, very lush. however, my mind is all chatter. already i dread my 2pm, sun-soaked commute through the valley despite the natural splendor.  as i speed north, first signs of the sun setting. a small wonder more drivers do not careen off the cliffs, staring into the lavender distance

diary love

a few months ago the internet started to bore me. i mean, really bore me.  after more than a decade of blogging, i was ready to explore other forms of sharing, especially ones that didn't involve the internet. instead, i began mailing out my personal diary in monthly installments to a few friends, and in return, they send me their journals. i'll still update precious little lamb pit but not as often, and mostly with pics, youtube, etc. if you'd like to share your journal with me--or read other's jounals--email me at cloying (at)gmail.com.

PROJECT CENSORED: VANISHING VOTES, DISAPPEARING DEMOCRACY AND MEDIA MISDIRECTION

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GOIN' TO HELL ON A SLED BY JOHN D LOUDERMILK

september and october

the here & now

"When I tried to think of the idea of intellectual emancipation, there is no distinction between the idea that – now we are struggling, now we are constructing and now we are preparing the future and the future will be wonderful. The art of emancipation is precisely to get out of this relationship between means and ends, which in the leftist tradition is based on the idea that now we create the conditions for a better future, we are preparing the weapons for the future, which means a certain phase in historical necessity. But what I think is at the heart of emancipation is precisely the idea that time is everyday. This does not mean that you have to be entirely swallowed in the everyday, but that the question of time is not to be thought of in terms of present and future, it has to be related to the partition between here and now, between time as a form of constraint and time as a possibility of freedom; and what is important in Nights of Labour was this idea of the subversion of time, and what happens in the here and now."

from An Interview with Jacques Ranciere

excerpt from my interview with Dodie Bellamy

My interview with Dodie Bellamy is out in the Denver Quarterly. You can read the first two pages below.

Elizabeth Hall: While the Buddhist charts the dissolution of an emotionally abusive relationship, you often use humor as a way of navigating an array of highly personal, often embarrassing and painful experiences without overwhelming the reader, or losing emotional intensity. The first time you fuck the buddhist is in a kabuki hotel. “There’s no lube, so it hurts like hell,” you write. “I’m reminded of the lecherous Buddhist teacher I read about who fucked his students without lube, and I wonder if it’s a Buddhist thing to do, to fuck without lube, something about not wanting to gloss over an experience.” Humor serves a similar purpose in your chapbook Barf Manifesto, especially in the scene where you overflow poet Eileen Myles toilet: “So I’m pumping and pumping...I’m begging her, this isn’t working, jiggling breasts, pump she says, that same trip her ancient pit bull Rosie pissed on the dining room floor, and Eileen cleaned it up so tenderly, petting Rosie, telling her it was alright, and I hate that she’s treating a dog better than me.” Can you talk a little about how you see humor operating in the Buddhist, and your writing as a whole?

Dodie Bellamy: Humor creates a crack in our resistance to threatening subject matter—when the reader guffaws the ground opens for a moment, and she/he tumbles into the writer’s eager, subterranean hands. In my writing I’m drawn to the horrific, the ostracized, the disenfranchised; I seem to have a compulsion to dive into the center of what many people would rather turn away from. After I finished the Buddhist I found myself watching Richard Pryor videos on YouTube and Netflix; the fearlessness of his comedy is still amazing. Live on Sunset Strip (1982), filmed not long after Pryor was burned badly while freebasing cocaine, veers off his usual topics of race and sex, and directly addresses his drug accident. One extended comic riff is about being in the burn unit of a hospital and the excruciating pain of being bathed when you have 3rd degree burns over a large portion of your body. Pryor’s candor comes across as both generous and aggressive. I remember when the freebasing incident happened, and everybody was making jokes about Richard Pryor—but Pryor’s unapologetic flaunting of the experience onstage is so surprising and destabilizing, nobody could laugh at him. The situation is too uncomfortable to laugh with him—it’s more like the audience is laughing at his command. Pryor, in his vermillion suit and gold lame shoes, is leading us through a rite in which we are forced to contemplate the extremes of human frailty, and that close attention is a form of celebration. In his stand-up routine, Pryor is as unflinching as those holy men who meditate in charnel grounds among the putrefying corpses, but way more fun.

the Buddhist was not a work produced in retrospect. It was written in the heat of loss and rage. Humor was a way for me to obtain enough distance to make the writing process bearable. Similarly, immediately following my mother’s terrible death from lung cancer, I wrote a long piece about her passing, and finding a humorous angle is what allowed me to do so. I had an assignment for Brian Pera’s and Masha Tupitsyn’s anthology, Life As We Show It, to consider how we live our lives through the movies. My mother and I watched E.T. during the final weeks of her life, so in “Phone Home” I used the silliness and joy and grandeur of E.T. as the crack through which to tumble myself and the reader into my relentless mourning.

On another note, I was raised in the Rust Belt, and the working class sense of humor there is pretty sick and brutal. One of the first things I learned when I moved to California was to be careful making jokes for people were appalled by what would have been simply funny in Indiana. Humor in my writing is a way for me to glory in the vulgarity of my heritage.

EH: One of the most striking aspects of the Buddhist is the graphic and honest depiction of the aging female body that still desires and is desired. The book literally opens with a physical description of your naked body, mid-fuck, “ass up in the air, cunt pointed towards the ceiling.” You then tell a story of a colleague who fantasizes about a body suit for older women who take on lovers with two holes for the breasts, big enough for the nipples to poke through but not the areolas, which spread as you get older, just as the labia begins to sag. “Nobody wants to see that,” she adds. However, in a way, the entire text can be read as a rebuttal to “nobody wants to see that.” What role do you see the nonperfect female body playing in your work? How has your approach to writing about the body changed over the years?

DB: I love your reading of the text as a rebuttal to “nobody wants to see that.” Isn’t that the privilege of being a hag—to point a crotchety finger at what nobody wants to see, and then open your toothless maw and cackle with laughter, your wild white mane burning like ice beneath the full moon?

When I was in high school I wrote in my journal that the three things that interested me most in the world were sex, literature, and religion, and I’m happy to say that my writing has stayed true to my teen vision. I explore the sexuality of nonstandard bodies in my writing, mostly because that’s how I’ve experienced sexuality, through my own nonstandard, chubby body. At one point in The Letters of Mina Harker, Mina says, “The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else.” To be female in America, with few exceptions, is to have a fucked up relationship with your body. Though I’ve always been compelled to present imperfect bodies and imperfect desires in my writing, that’s such tender material, I’ve had to approach it slowly over time. As I’ve honed my writing skill I’ve been able to work with a more nuanced touch rather than bludgeoning the reader—or at least have more nuances when I bludgeon the reader. The idea of presenting a glamorous big screen version of my life where I was normatively gorgeous always seemed pathetic to me. I’d rather embarrass myself by acknowledging my painful sense of otherness. Since I first became aware of my sexuality as a child I knew that I wasn’t supposed to own sexuality, that it was the providence of perfect-bodied souls. American culture—from high to low—inculcates us with images in which desire in the overweight or aging or otherwise nonstandard female body is depicted as predatory, pathetic, monstrous.

In June, 2007, when I was teaching in Los Angeles, I went to see WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (1965-1980), at the Geffen branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Walking through galleries packed with feminist-inspired sculptures, videos, framed art, and vitrines displaying ephemera, I encountered the expected images of female drudgery and oppression—but to my surprise and delight there were also all these in your face images of female sexuality. Curator Connie Butler had packed the Geffen with naked tits, cunts, and asses. Ever since I began seriously writing, in the late 70s/early 80s, I’ve been searching for a lineage for my blatant portrayals of sexuality, and at times it seemed like the only female progenitors I could find were Erica Jong and Kathy Acker, and way way back, maybe Sappho. I’ve frequently credited gay men for nurturing my interest in writing about sex, which feels sort of sad, to have had to turn to men for that. But standing in the midst of the WACK retrospective, mouth hanging open in astonishment, I felt like here it was, this art was my lineage. I may not have been familiar with all the women in the show, but I was a teen and a young writer immersed in the same zeitgeist this art was coming out of; I had to have absorbed some of that same energy as Vaile Export, Adrian Piper, Carolee Scheneeman, Lynda Benglis, etc. When I went home all I could think about was the show, and the more I thought about it, I began to be troubled by a nagging footnote. And that was that with few exceptions, the images of powerful female sexuality were of young, thin, mostly white, abled bodies. (Maybe if you did some actual bean-counting of the exhibit, you could prove me wrong, but that was my impression.) Thankfully that’s changed, at least in work I’ve seen coming out of the queer writing and performance scene in San Francisco, where all sorts of “marginalized” bodies are celebrated.

On a mass culture level, the TV show Drop Dead Diva provides a welcome antidote to perfect body fascism. Since some readers of the Denver Quarterly may not be familiar with this Lifetime Network series, I’ll explain the premise. A beautiful fashion model, Deb, dies in a car accident and instead of going to heaven she lands in the body of Jane, an brilliant but obese attorney who also just died. Deb does a make-over on her new Jane body—better hair, chic clothes, etc.—but soon realizes she’s living in a body with appetites and genetics she can’t triumph over, and she has to accept that the body will remain large. Much of the humor of the show centers around airhead Deb having access to Jane’s intelligence, and the surprise she exhibits when something smart comes out of her mouth. She puts a finger to her forehead and says in astonishment, “I know that!” Even though Jane/Deb continues to be ashamed of her weight, men are attracted to her, falling in love with her body as well as her mind. Jane/Deb’s own desires, in turn, are depicted as normal and healthy. She doesn’t need to make herself more attractive; her heroic journey is learning to accept how attractive she already is. Even though it’s dopey and has a Cosmo magazine sensibility, Drop Dead Diva is one of the most radical mass cultural venues in promoting an expanded acceptance of the sexualized female body.

It’s important to remember in life as well as writing that otherness does not merely bring abjection—profound pleasure can be found there as well. As a cheerleader says in Revenge of the Nerds, “Once you go nerd you never go back.” To put it another way, otherness doesn’t inevitably result in disempowerment. The people I’m most drawn to are those I sense some otherness in. Case in point: the buddhist. He once told me that among Buddhists he was perceived as mildly eccentric. One trend in contemporary fiction that irritates me is when the author creates an almost random loser and smugly chuckles over her or him. It makes me want to become a characters’ rights advocate. I sense a desperation in the background of such derisive treatment of marginal characters, a mantra of not me, not me.

Aging has initiated me into a new layer of imperfection. It’s hard to write about it, to not take on the perception that aging is an embarrassment, a failure. If we let it, aging can bring compassion and grace. It’s helped me remove the soft focus gel lens and really gaze into the heart of my situation and of others. For it’s beyond the idealizing gel that the beauty of the world lies. I believe that monstrousness is at the heart of all beauty, and vice versa. Of course there’s no one right or official way to view anything—a constant theme in the Buddhist—but I’m committed to continue to peel away layers—not to get to some truth, for I don’t believe in the concept of truth—but to get to some core honesty that I can live with. I don’t know why I’m drawn to do this, I don’t even believe it’s a necessary thing for art or writing to do. And “honesty” is just as essentialistically problematic as “truth.” Writing is so constructed, honesty is more of a tone than a state of being. Nevertheless I keep going for it. In some ways I’m still that young innocent girl who at one point in her development first caught a glimpse of the hypocrisy of the world and was appalled by it. I have this naive part of myself that still wants to battle hypocrisy and falseness, like a literary superhero.

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my day off work

tamara is the queen of hollywood. or one of them. yesterday, at noon, naked in her hot tub, we drank chardonnay and stared up at the stony grey sky. rain? we hoped so. tamara had soaked some funny-smelling purple salts at the bottom of the steaming water which she claimed would penetrate and repair every inch of skin tissue. even the puckered ring of your asshole. tamara knows all about assholes. her job: at-home wax jobs; she also bleaches assholes.

i met tamara two weeks ago when she walked into the shop to pick up a portrait. we have little in common, but we like to spend time the same way: sitting very close, for long amounts of time, talking and not talking. tamara and i have also bonded over the recent revelation that for us all relationships, no mater how casual, are intense. except this one. we hope.

we polished off the wine then slipped into terrycloth robes and walked inside. i laid down on her bed, pulled out my little bag. i’ll call the cab tamara said. hold off. we split a spliff sprinkled with hash. she blew smoke rings, her fat lips slicked with spit. we dressed...sparsely. the cab arrived. drizzle smeared the windshield. we walked up to mitch’s front porch hair wet, eyes threaded red. come in said mitch, opening the door wide. his body, compact and corded, crushed against us in a tight hug. mitch is beautiful in a way that makes my stomach seize up yet he’s so blissed out on pot and kundalini, he acts as if he possessed no physical body at all. when he kissed tamara’s hand what's up, she blushed. he didn’t notice, or pretended not to care.

the first time i met mitch, i assumed his tasteful, two bedroom bungalo belonged to his parents. i remember he put his hand on my shoulder and huffed why are YOU so dressed up? tamara rolled her eyes she’s always dressed like that. my slinky black shift. his standard attire was no shirt and tight, cut-off khaki shorts. i understood his comment had nothing to do with fashion and avoided all further questions. if he had a job, he never mentioned it. most important: whenever we call, he says yes.

we rolled a blunt on his back porch then smoked it huddled beneath a fuschia pashmina scarf. tamara and i laid down on the wooden planks, holding hands, just laying there. in the kitchen, mitch blended several different grasses in his little red machine, strained the mixture, then served it in chilled shot glasses. i drank mine with a cough while tamara held her nose with real flare. mitch scoffed health won’t kill you. when the sun started to set, tamara and mitch rolled out their yoga mats and moved through a series of poses...for two fucking hours. in the backyard, sprawled on a pool float, i read grace hartigan’s journals by candlelight, letting the mosquitoes go hog wild on my legs.

later, we piled into mitch’s car and drove to a house party in the hills where i ate a massive bowl of stew with carrots, potatoes, celery and some indistinguishable meat, much to mitch’s visible disgust. but i was so hungry! in a hash-haze, i danced with an ad exec for an hour and a half. outside, on the patio, we discussed paul ryan’s physique. he told people magazine that he does INSANITY i said. really? i do that, he beamed, leaning in to light my second cig. later, mitch mocked this exchange, in the car, speeding towards a bar in westwood. INSANITY is so american, he lamented. its main selling point is physical torture and punishment. tamara scratched her knee and spit her gum out the window. its so LA to feel political about fitness, i said, slurring a little, which made everyone laugh.

sitting at a circular booth at the far end of the bar, m and t downed whiskey while i sipped water out of a fat red straw. my stomach churned. booked it to the bathroom. a long, long line. waited five minutes then no more: grabbed the trashcan, squatted, and puked up the stew, poking my head up periodically to apologize to those in line. its not the booze i whispered. i ate some bad soup. i vomited and vomited. once inside the stall, i washed my mouth, face, and neck. someone pounded on the door anyone in there? we’ve had a complaint that someone is sick. open up. i applied a fresh layer of lipstick and mascara then cracked the door huh? he repeated his spiel. that was the girl before me i said, flipping my hair. she has long black bangs and she was wearing a black shirt with black boots. (the description, of course, fit me and several other girls in the bar.) the man escorted me into the hallway. i pointed to where my friends sat. do you see her? he asked., i only saw the top of her head, bent over a can. he smiled then walked off. i returned to the table. where were you? we thought you died. i said long line.

back at tamara's house, i struggled to sleep.  no traffic, light pollution. i got up, turned on the desk lamp, and opened the window to let the night in. 

ALWAYS REMEMBER HELL IS UNCOOL

 see you there?

spring!

last night

waiting for the bus last night, book on my lap, i didn't even want to read. the poems were so good i couldn't stand not to look up, out. no matter that all i saw was a still hot log of dog shit on the sidewalk. i don't know about you, but its why i read. the weather here does strange things to my brain.   throughout january and february my new years resolution-- "be less critical"--seemed like a delusional demand, but now it is spring, and the view from the living room window is obscured by a wall of fleshy purple blossoms.

christmas in los angeles

spent christmas break house sitting for a former professor, which is to say, i spent the holidays in book heaven. alone. was strange having so much space to myself, a whole house, backyard in which to romp, take my clothes off, scrape my shins against fat cacti, read janet frame's owls do cry, and eat peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. my sole companion: a blind, deaf dog who i repeatedly startled by touching too quickly, forgetting to first let him sniff, lick my hand.  for the first three days, i seldom ventured beyond my spot on the back porch. stretched out on a knit hammock, in a fat pill of light, i read trashy biographies of elvis, scanning each page for references to the clitoris. she’s a beautiful girl. i wouldn’t lay a hand on her. but to have her sit on your face! the king supposedly said about the then fourteen year old priscilla. still, many of his “friends and handlers” asserted that she was "a virgin, at least technically" on her wedding day. president wilson, on the other hand, remained a virgin, of every sort, until twenty-eight. curled beneath a faux fur blanket, i started and finished alex forman’s delightful tall, slim, & erect, a gossip’s guide to the presidents. jefferson, apparently, could not ride a horse for months due to boils on his ass. hayes felt a crazed and tender devotion to his sister. at night, i put myself to sleep by imagining buchannan whispering to his lover in moment of total privacy, unmatched bliss, your cock is a cocoon and its going to live inside me and be recycled.

on xmas eve, as afternoon browned into evening, my daily headache (usually mild in nature) morphed into an otherworldly migraine. to experience persistent physical pain in the way of migraines, stomach cramps, insomnia, etc is to be aware, at all times, of yr body—its immense powers, limitations, ability to humiliate yr intelligence entirely. no sooner do i feel as if i have “figured it out,” could predict the onset down to most infinitesimal detail, do i find myself leveled out, face spangled with sweat, hair slicked with vomit. i must submit, let myself go with it, knowing i will emerge, as with many of life’s most lonely and degrading things, having learned nothing whatsoever.

i laid down on the faded purple couch and prepared myself for the worst. no music, light. i dreamed what i always dream of when dazed with pain: heaps of sticky, swollen nugs waiting to be ground up, smoked. i fantasize about getting so stoned that my body forgets to be a body at all. fantasize, too, about a single, exquisite fuck, a pleasure so totalizing, wholly satisfying as to permanently snuff all the other needs of my body: eating, sleeping, not sleeping, shitting, or for one, the urgent need to be touched all over, all at once, when there is no one but me around in a strange house.

woke christmas morning ache-free, that is, radiant. fried an omelet then snuggled with the dog in the hammock while watching the neighbors open gifts, take out the trash, slice up a ham. called my mother and sister who, for the past week, had sent me an endless stream of pictures of themselves in cut off shorts, drinking mai tais on a beach somewhere in north florida. it is always too expensive for me to fly home for christmas. besides, i don’t like to travel, never learned how. until i moved to california, i had never cruised beyond the deep south, had only seen the ocean twice. i am very grateful that my nephew gets to take so many trips, see all there is to see, including real life palm trees. many hours later, after several neighbors have tossed their farmed pines to the curb, a man knocked on the door, a delivery from the local liquor store. cabernet. from yr mother. i curtsied and kissed his hand bless you. decided to ditch the books, celebrate the best way i know how: wine spilt down the front of my slip, dancing across the hardwood to chris kenner c’mon let me show you where its at, c’mon the name of the place is i like it like that.

girls today don't like to sleep alone

from a letter to jessalyn

two weeks ago i visited my family in georgia. the day after thanksgiving, sprawled out on my sister’s brown suede couch, i transcribed the most relevant portions of her college journals spanning from spring 2003 to summer 2004 when she stopped writing all together. that was also the summer she moved back home. a week before my high school graduation, i discovered in her diaries that she was fucking a man named mason, always without a condom, and often, without her explicit consent. i also learned that she was cutting herself again, contemplating suicide with some sincerity, and in a ten page hybrid essay, i read that our stepfather had abused her. the prose was pretty bad, v. derivative of dorothy allison’s bastard out of carolina, a book we both still admire. it took me several pages to “get past” the style. the narrative lacked allison’s fierce honesty, was mired in obscure poetic language. when i confronted my sister about the abuse, she said “it didn’t happen.” i told my mother. nothing of consequence occurred. i graduated, left to live and work and never sleep in a cramped canvas tent at an overnight girl scout camp. years later when my sister got pregnant and moved home yet again, i could not stomach the idea of my stepfather raising the baby, having access and control over his emotional development. it became apparent to me then that my sister was never going to force the issue, that she harbored this great hate for our stepfather, and in turn, our mother for being with him. my role within the family has always been part therapist and part tattle-tale. in spring 2009 i went behind C’s back and told my mother that C would never love her, never really forgive her, until she divorced him. my sister still does not know this, all my dazzling scheming, which went on for months. i prefer her to think that our mother came to the realization herself, that she had the courage, all on her own, to rebel against her husband of twenty years, that her love for my sister was so stupendous she was willing to sacrifice her own stability so that C could finally prosper.

whenever i go home, i reread my sister’s journals. not only because they shaped my own feminist leanings but also because i had never—and still have never—felt closer, more in love with her, than while reading those pages. when she found me transcribing them on her couch after thanksgiving, she threatened i will sue you if you use them, if you write about me at all. i explained yes, i will use them but that the likelihood that a book will ever be published, much less read, is slim to none. that’s not the point. i know—have always known—that C will hate me for “saying,” shedding light on “our family’s shame” but i don’t care. her journals only further convinced me of the saliency of my thesis: it might well be worth saying simply because it happened.

on march 25, 2003, C confided in her composition notebook: “this is so hard for me to write about. i can’t think creatively. i’m so afraid to remove the veil. that veil helped me exchange hurt and weakness for hate. hate that is better than a destroyed family and shame. i trust myself a lot in this case to know that suppression is the best thing. no matter what people say.” i was struck by the similarity of our coping strategies, even if i never felt the need to protect some nonexistent “family legacy.” however, in the weeks after my high school graduation, i too, wrote in my journal silence is holy. we were both operating under the delusion of “self-control.” later in the same 03’ entry C added: “every time i cry about what he did to me, i drift further from the freedom i so desperately want to attain.” she quotes various authors about “silence” and “power”—as i did, repeating to myself a passage duras wrote in her own (undated) diaries: “I say nothing to no one. Nothing about what goes through my life, the anger, the wild movements of my body...I am modesty, I am silence itself. I say nothing. I express nothing. About what is important, nothing. It is there, unnamed, untouched.”

once i moved to california i realized the exact extent of my delusion. the delusion, of course, was not that silence can give you power, but rather, that anyone has power to begin with—that is, power to control what other’s do to you. whatever personal power (perhaps control?) i possess stems from the realization and acceptance of fallibility: you never know what the other person in the room is thinking, will do. you just don’t. “saying” does not, in any way, effect the so-called “shame” of abuse, or say, the shame of being rejected by a once-cherished lover, or perhaps, never having had a respectful, nurturing partner in the first place. you cannot be held responsible—made a fool—if someone swindles, deceives you however terrifically. bogart, playing sam spade, taught me this. you are never the fool for trusting, loving. you only become the fool the moment you believe that it is even possible to “know” others true motives, “what they will do.” we should never fetishize truth as such. foolish is the person who replaces trust and tenderness with suspicion and fear.

on the plane to atlanta, the woman sitting next to me read cover to cover six gossip mags all promising the “inside scoop” on kim kardashian’s short-lived marriage to that douche chris humpheries. by the time the beverage cart made its first round, i too had read all six rags and found myself deeply involved in a conversation with this woman about kim as well as her own love life. she informed me that her name was “sarah” and that she had moved to hollywood in 02’ to sing or at least make american idol but now worked as a waitress. she was overweight, wore too much eyeliner, high heels on a six hour flight. of kim’s quick divorce sarah mused: did they even try counseling? i mean, vows are for forever. she snapped her fingers, opened a mag. i’ve watched the show for years. i see the divorce as a betrayal, an affront. as i soon found out, she had also been married and that her ex had cheated on her for about eight months of their two year marriage with a variety of women. i was willing to forgive, she said, ordering us both a second cabernet. we went to counseling. to no benefit apparently. he just didn’t want to be with her. did he ever? she blinked, fully expecting an answer. after the affair, she struggled to find a single thing that she dug about him. i can’t think of him in terms of love, only WHAT HE DID. which, of course, is how i feel, at times, about my stepfather. even though i believe that no one person is all bad. not even sade’s monsters. its true: the point of sade’s justine is not that all people and institutions of power are inherently evil, but rather, that there is no virtue in the suffering said institutions cause, even if you think there is, as justine does, it doesn’t change the blunt fact: suffering is just that, suffering. since sarah’s husband cheated on her throughout their marriage—and alton abused my sister throughout our childhood—one might be tempted to discount whatever small pleasures sarah or my mother received from the relationship. did their betrayal, by its very nature, negate the incredibly real love sarah and my mother felt?

in origins of totalitarianism, arendt argues that since the mid-19th century there has been a tendency to define and interpret civilizations solely by their decline, ignoring the rather obvious fact that, before societies dissolve, they usually prosper for thousands of years. in history courses today, the “all societies decline sometime, by largely the same means” is still a guiding principal. but this focus on “decline,” she asserts, is but a flaw in the historiography, interpretation. perhaps it is the same with relationships. when i fell deeply in love with M in asheville, i knew already that there was nothing that M could do—even in my wildest horrors—that would alter the way i felt about that specific time period. if, say, it turned out that he had, in fact, “betrayed” me during those blissful years, i would still cherish the way his love made me swoon, feel as if anything were suddenly possible. even if his affection proved to be a lie, a farce, i still felt it. that is enough.

rereading C’s journals, i was doubly struck by all that i had missed before, especially in regard to mason. where at once i saw their affair along the strict lines of abuse, i now saw the pleasure too—the real physical delight she experienced whenever he “let himself into the house uninvited” or fucked her “always in the missionary position.” her version of the affair contains no “satisfaction” emotion or physical—but enjoyment, yes. also, a real sense of graciousness. she was thankful, not so much for him specifically, as for the touch, collective sweat, unmatched thrill of the flirt, high tease. it is one of the things i admire most, about the body: it takes what pleasure it can. whatever else is happening in your life. the body will, without your consent, root out pleasure. again and again.

thanksgiving in atl

thanksgiving in atlanta. first time i'd been home in a year and half.

My story "Green Mountain" is in the new (& incredibly beautiful) issue of Black Warrior Review, which also features work from Sarah Rose Etter, Brandon Davis Jennings, Kathleen Rooney, Derek Gromadzki, Leon Baham, Esvie Coemish, Shelly Taylor, Zachary Schomburg, Brandon Shimoda, Karen Volkman, dawn lonsinger, Christina Manweller, Afton Wilky, Joelle Biele, JP Gritton, Joy Wood, Lee Milena Goodman, JA Tyler, Dan George, Farid Matuk, and Allison Titus, with comics from Edgar R. McHerly and Nick St. John, and featured art by Helen Pynor.

You can read an interview with the editor Farren "dirty love" Stanley here about her tenure at BWR. She is also the author of one of my favorite blogs: anatomy of a dress.

for some, it is always clit city

i haven't had much time to write or do anything but research, always more research, interrupted only by sips of cabernet, stinky menthols, z magazine, and too many tangerines.