thevillagecharlatan

What kinds of archives are interesting? People tend to like archives that contain one or more of the following: love letters, pieces of specially minted currency, circus memorabilia, people in European cultures doing something oppressive or touristic to people in non-Euro cultures, and manuscripts (bonus if handwritten). Thinking about choosing a brand new and unknown archive has made me think about what my interests really, really are. I am hoping to find a medical archive with lots of pregnancy photos, or advice given to pregnant women in times other than our own. I might like to learn about how people in times other than our own conceived of The Future. What were their plans? Did they make drawings of the future? Did the popularization of science make people start thinking more and more about the future? (That last one is kind of taken.) I also found myself looking on the internet at archives involving people’s travels to Italian colonies between 1860 and 1960. I don’t ever run into anyone mentioning remnants of Italian culture in, say, Libya or Ethiopia. Lots of interest in French Algeria but very little in Italian Somaliland. Also, there’s always gay fucking, pedophilia, dyke murders, or some other equally prurient concern. Is there an archive about prurience? Don’t steal that one. It’s mine.

I’ve been cooking a lot more lately. Here are the things I have cooked so far: fettucine alfredo, fish with Indian curry butter, rice pilaf with pistachios and peas, spinach salad with homemade croutons and chopped prunes and Dijon balsamic vinaigrette, homemade vegetable stock, pumpkin risotto, creamy tomato/porcini mushroom risotto, chocolate coconut sauce for ice cream, spicy Indian browned butter sauce for ice cream, and molten chocolate cake. I think scones are next. I was thinking quite a bit about homemade scones last night. Rachel Ray made them on her show recently; I’m generally bored with what Rachel Ray makes but this time the scone batter looked so pale and pillowy, studded all nice with dried cranberries. There’s something about dried cranberries that makes me wake up sweating in the middle of the night. You know, in a good way. Back when I was on birth control I would have whole cranberry-themed dreams, after which I would wake up and make cranberry pancakes with buttered cranberry sauce on top. It was crazy.

It is a wonderful thing to meditate on spring, and love, and pleasure. Today I ran across a listing for a Ralph Chubb woodcut collection, and saw some of his woodcuts. They’re all about teenage boys fucking underneath British docks. He writes poetry to accompany them too. Why wasn’t this stuff destroyed? It’s pornographic. Not that I want it destroyed - I just expect it to be. How does this stuff get resurrected? How did The Well of Loneliness finally get circulated in the 70s? How did Suite Francaise finally get published after the manuscript lay in a suitcase for fifty years? Revivals. Spring is also about revival.

How are you with deadlines? I’m lousy at them. Meeting them more than setting them, really. I can set a deadline like nobody’s business. Projecting authority and control? No problem. But when 5 pm on Wednesday rolls around, I am laying low, pecking at the keyboard or staring at paperwork, reading salon dot com and vvork and all the other time-wasting websites designed to fuel graduate student essays on the 21st century metric of productivity. Will I ever improve? What will I have to lose in order to make me reform myself? I’ve never lost a writing job or failed a class because of this pathology. It just seethes inside me, threatening to destroy my life. How far will I go?

Everyone’s posting about the same thing today, and what am I if not a joiner? I am joining, my friends. I am joining the cadre of young folks who are feeling un-ironic joy and excitement. I’ve sifted through “hope” and what that means, I’ve thought about its import as an advertising slogan. I know that we were all supposed to feel “hope” because “hope” impedes real analysis. I know that Obama isn’t really like you and me, that he’s a silver-spooned Ivy-league brat with a skinny neck and the wide vocabulary and big dreams borne of privilege, but fuck all of that now. Rather than buy any of the commemorative memorabilia (tote bags, photo books, etc), I think I will print out all the invitations to inauguration dance parties in my inbox. There are at least three. I will put them in an archival folder and remember that Obama brought the dance revolution. He’s like Kevin Bacon’s character in Footloose. 

I got an email today. I am being nominated for a university fellowship at one of my chosen PhD programs. It is the least selective program and school in the lot, though, so the fellowship will be good for leverage and not much else. This prompts a question to you, though, my readers: Would you attend a PhD program staffed by younger (albeit interesting) scholars in your field if they paid you $20,000 over tuition to do that? Remember, this frees you of any teaching obligations that would tax your energy or hamper your studies in any way. You would be given a check for $1666 each month to pay for books, rent, food, liquor and whores, no questions asked. Imagine that the $1666 a month would represent a significant salary hike compared to what you’re making right now as an MA student. You would probably be able to get a nice studio apartment in Pilsner, go to Trader Joe’s on Sundays for white chocolate asparagus spears. You know, readers—live the Good Life. How much is the Good Life worth to you? Is it worth a negative-ten wind chill in winter? Is it worth the risk of academic anonymity after graduation? Help me.

It’s one of those days–the result of several days of adequate food and sleep– where I need a little flow chart to keep track of my new ideas. I hope I can keep up with these ideas. So far today I have thought about: the “influences” list on the Lucky Dragons website; choosing/designing a list of courses to better train me for my job; the mechanics of getting a PhD in information science; Adorno’s comments on masks and animism; the canonization of information (prompted by looking at “A Great Idea at the Time” and “Reinventing Knowledge from Alexandria to the Internet” on Amazon dot com); the implications of dwelling in your identity thoroughly versus allowing your identity to encroach on your scholarship; ways to articulate “not-there-ness” [absence, relocation?] and “instead-ness” [substitution?] (prompted by thinking about Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto project); the unwritten first fifteen pages of the second chapter of my MA thesis; train travel to the midwest; my exclusion from last night’s viewing of American Idol; and the fact that perhaps my thinking is so lateral that it cannot be contained by disciplines. Yes, I may conclude this thought session convinced I am a genius.

I have returned from five days of corporate feasting and am ready to assume some new responsibilities at work. Unfortunately, within an hour of getting back to my office, I cut myself badly in the kitchen while slicing Tofurky and feel this to have undermined my public face of reliability, ambition, and intelligence. The cut is bleeding through its band-aid and reminding the world of my unruly nature. And speaking of my unruly nature, I’m about to go get my first haircut as an official out-to-the-world dyke. Will I tell the hairstylist this? Should I let her perception of what “dyke haircuts” are supposed to look like have bearing on my new public homo identity? The haircut is the first frontier to other people, and I am loath to force my hair into some gay framework that it was probably already edging towards anyway. My gay identity-hair should move at its own pace. Shall I name a style icon (Sophie Scholle, Jimmy Page, Young Beethoven)? Shall I ask them to accommodate a lazy, poor graduate student with no room in her life for acronym-based styling products with names like “B Twelve: your power-putty for achieving that parochial school escapee look”? Perhaps I will post a photo of the results on this Dollar Blog and invite public commentary.

Today is the company retreat for my place of employment, a speculative nonprofit initiative in a mid-sized Southwestern town. We have been brought to the boss’s palatial hobby farm for the retreat - a hobby farm whose remoteness is charming/romantic/British-Isles-gentry-esque and slasher-filmy in equal measure. The place is still being remodeled, and the array of construction materials within easy reach makes the mind turn to grisly murders. Some slightly ameliorative features of the farm are the hotel-size stainless steel refrigerator stocked with catered lamb shanks and French baby lentil and purple potato salad, Danish salted butter and five-dollar crusty breads, chived Stilton, brie, rare sliced roast beef, alienating peanut butter from a Whole Foods bulk bin, lavender body wash and Aqua di Parma scented shampoo, thick Turkish towels towering in precarious piles (within easy reach if you care to stand under the ten-inch stainless-steel adjustable shower head that pours deluge after deluge onto your soapy head - if that doesn’t satisfy you, perhaps you’d prefer the Jacuzzi-jetted bathtub underneath you which screams QUICK MASTURBATION; your choice, really), twelve-foot walls of windows that frame such sweet pastoral views that you feel like some kind of lord of the manor whose slaves labor merrily in the background, whistling over the saws, getting black lung from merbau dust. Every so often the boss nips out of the room and comes back with a plate of handcrafted shortbread squares or boutique lemon loaf. I feel like Little Fucking Orphan Annie, staring agape at the framed Bruce Nauman ephemera and Shrigley paintings, stuffing my little maw with artisan pretzels, wondering when they will all wise up to my tricks.

Hello friends. Have you ever become suddenly interested in a television show that’s been playing for a while? Isn’t that fun when that happens? All the episodes laid out for you, recorded on the internet, for you to watch at your leisure? I think I feel that way about The L Word right now. I watch a lot of television during holiday breaks. Generally I expect to discover some new show and deal with all the characters in large doses, the way I’m doing now. This fits, since I am now exploring the new check-box of “fucking homo”, “currently sexually active with female partner” (that last one is a real option at my progressive gyno’s office), or, as someone recently proposed on New Year’s Eve, “rowdy dyke”. It’s working out pretty well.