Travels 2

Today I am reminded of the flaneuse in Gail Scott's My Paris, stuck in her room, filtering everything through Arcades Project and the foreign. She looks across at the changing window display, the mannequins arranged in various erotic poses. J says he wishes I could be more free and adventurous and I could flaneur more while he's at the conference and I'm roaming about (one small area) of Philadelphia, and of course I wish that too, but sometimes I just feel so terribly stuck, unable to relax or experience pleasure, because I have not worked on a particular project for that day, because I have not written. So I spent all morning in the hotel room trying to read everything I could about "becoming-women" in D&G what Elizabeth Grosz has written and Alice Jardine and of course Thousand Plateaus, but I read it on Google Books, so there's pages missing which is actually really probably funny. Then I wondered whether I'm really supposed to be a scholar in the book, and then I feel sorry for myself that I'll never be a scholar, because I lack the appropriate discipline and exactness and sharpness, reminding me again of trying to talk about Derrida's Glas his essay on Genet in a performance theory seminar and to me I made sense but everyone thought I was fucking insane and the professor told me at the end of the semester that I was a "creative thinker" and I wondered today if I should apply to study with Elizabeth Grosz at Rutgers, and I realized I already have, two years ago, and was rejected, and so on. That has been the cycle of my thought today. It is this chapter that I'm working on that I have felt the most theoretically shaky - on the Gurlesque, on poetry, on D&G's body without organs, on Artaud - and so now I am questioning everything. I made J my captive audience last night and sketched out my outline to him in the air and asked him to follow my fingers, I don't have an outline, I write down series of about a hundred mood words that mean something to me, that's how I essay, that's how I essay here, when I used to essay here, and I realize as I sketched it I sounded like I was totally fucking insane, like Artaud lecturing on the plague at the Sorbonne insane, but less, or not at all, brilliant. In Under the Shadow of My Roof, the book I realize I've basically plagiarized from Blood and Guts in High School and so might trash, I rip off the scene in Anais Nin's Incest where she goes and sees Artaud at the Sorbonne and then falls madly temporarily in love with him they fall in love with each other like they are Sookie and Eric on True Blood, I've always thought of Artaud like that, actually, vampiric, a long cold white body, afraid of dawn, of feelings, of intimacy, and that scene where they try to fuck and Artaud is impotent oh! I reappropriate it but then I mix it up with this strange scene about this boy I went out it for one night a junky who wore shorts year round and I found him intriguing until he stalked me and one night we made out and he was living in a room with no bed (like a vampire) and he had all of this sexual paraphrenalia scattered everywhere like anal beads and naked pictures of his exgirlfriend...as he babbled nonsense I found strangely compelling...and I think now as I thought then...how the fuck did I get here?  

Back In

The books are back in stock at SPD! Well, that's a relief. Really terrific 4th of July present for the patriot in your life.