for a long time i used to go to bed early.

Marion: Taking pictures all the time turns you into an observer: it automatically takes you out of the moment. For our trip to Venice, I wanted to be in the moment, with Jack, but, instead of kissing on the gondola, Jack took 48 pictures on the gondola. Instead of holding hands, walking across Piazza Saint Marco, Jack took 72 pictures of Piazza Saint Marco. Etcetera. Etcetera.

Jack: A sole blow job! You had sex with the guy.
Marion: Who?
Jack: Manu.
Marion: No! Well, yeah, okay, just... vaguely...
Jack: Vaguely? What is that, just the tip? I don't see what the point of lying about it is.
Marion: I didn't lie!
Jack: Yeah, well, you did. And not to mention the fact that he told me that he was the first person to give you an orgasm through intercourse. Sound familiar?
Marion: No. Listen, I promise you--
Jack: Rings a bell, doesn't it?
Marion: No. No, I told him that to make him feel better. I mean, good.
Jack: Right, exactly. Which is exactly what you told me.
Marion: Did I?
Jack: Oh my god.
Marion: No, but, you-- It's true with you!

Marion: It always fascinated me how people go from loving you madly to nothing at all. Nothing. It hurts so much. When I feel someone is going to leave me, I have a tendency to break up first, before I get to hear the whole thing. Here it is: one more, one less. Another wasted love story. I really love this one. When I think that it's over, that I'll never see him again like this-- well yes, I'll bump into him. We'll meet our new boyfriend and girlfriend, act as if we had never been together, then we'll slowly think of each other less and less until we forget each other completely. Almost. Always the same for me. Break up, break down. Drink up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another, fuck around to forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness, start again to look for true love. Desperately look everywhere and, after two years of loneliness, meet a new love and swear it is the one. Until that one is gone as well.

best festival maybe ever?

I've got to be unstoppable.



And the wanting comes in waves.


All your sanity and wits, they will all vanish, I promise.
It's just a matter of time.



SASQUATCH! 2009

like an unprimed canvas.

ungeziefer.

one // two

maybe monday, maybe not.

She astonished him — astonished herself — with the dance she did one Saturday night, standing at the foot of his foldout sofa bed in her half slip and nothing else. She was getting undressed, and the radio was on — Symphony Sid — and first, to get her moving and in the mood, there was Count Basie and a bunch of jazz musicians jamming on 'Lady Be Good', a wild live recording, and following that, more Gershwin, the Artie Shaw rendition of 'The Man I Love' that featured Roy Eldridge steaming everything up. Coleman was lying semi-upright on the bed, doing what he most loved to do on a Saturday night after they'd returned from their five bucks' worth of Chianti and spaghetti and cannoli in their favorite Fourteenth Street basement restaurant: watch her take her clothes off. All at once, with no prompting from him — seemingly prompted only by Eldridge's trumpet — she began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by a Fergus Falls girl after little more than a year in New York City. She could have raised Gershwin himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang the song. Prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song, there to see, plain as day, was all the power of her whiteness. That big white thing. 'Some day he'll come along ... the man I love ... and he'll be big and strong ... the man I love.' The language was ordinary enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half meaning, half pretending to cover her shame. But the gesture protected her against nothing, least of all from his enravishment. The gesture merely transported him further. 'Where did I find you, Voluptas?' he asked. 'How did I find you? Who are you?' --Philip Roth, The Human Stain

because the world is round.

“A desire path (or desire line) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. The term was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space. Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.

They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g. as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tread a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail "of least resistance" for followers.”

“In Finland, planners are known to visit their parks immediately after the first snowfall, when the existing paths are not visible. People naturally choose desire lines, which are then clearly indicated by their footprints and can be used to guide the routing of paths.

Many streets in older cities began as desire lines, which evolved over the decades or centuries into the modern streets of today.”

it's you, blackbird, i love.

A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.
--Anne Carson, Tango I, The Beauty of the Husband


For a long time I used to go to bed early.
--Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu


Hugging close to the threshhold of Vesta, speechlessly hiding there,
I noticed the daughter of Tyndareus, Helen. The blaze lit up
The whole scene as I wandered, peering this way and that.
Helen, the scourge of Troy and her own land alike,
In dread anticipation of Trojan wrath at Troy's
Downfall, of Greek revenge, of her cuckolded husband's anger, -
Helen, that hateful creature, was crouched by the altar, in hiding.
--Virgil, The Aeneid, Book II


Unlike racism, homophobia is entirely a response to an internal possibility.
--Leo Bersani


For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her 'Sybil, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'
--Petronius, Satyricon


'What now?' Gregor asked himself and looked around him in the darkness. He soon made the discovery that he could no longer move at all. He was not surprised at that. On the contrary, it struck him as unnatural that up to this point he had really been able to move around with these thin little legs. Besides, he felt relatively content. True, he had pains throughout his entire body, but it seemed to him that they were gradually becoming weaker and weaker and would finally go away completely. The rotten apple in his back and the inflamed surrounding area, entirely covered with white dust, he hardly noticed. He remembered his family with deep feelings of love. In this business, his own thought that he had to disappear was, if possible, even more decisive than his sister’s. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. In front of the window he witnessed the beginning of the outside growing generally lighter. Then without willing it, his head sank all the way down, and from his nostrils his last breath flowed weakly out.
--Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis


I park, pause, take heed.
Breathe. Just breathe and sit
And lines I once translated
Come back: 'I want away
To the house of death, to my father

Under the low clay roof.'
--Seamus Heaney, 'The Blackbird of Glanmore', District and Circle


We are born naked. Everything else is drag.
--Ru Paul


I place a lot of importance on the care of the elderly within a family. I'm also a child of divorce, and like all children of divorce I want to see my parents back together. When my parents eventually need to be taken care of, all I have to do is stick their new partners in nursing homes and then I'll look after the two of them myself - at home. I'll put them together in their matrimonial bed until they die.
--Charlotte Roche, Wetlands

i want your text.

“The most influential philosopher of desire in the twentieth century has been Sigmund Freud. For Freud, all desire goes back to the child's original desire for the mother, for the mother's breast. This desire is so strong that it produces an absolute identification: '"I am the breast"', Freud wrote, ventriloquizing the unspoken words of the infant. Beyond this originary desire, however, Freud tends to see the precise structure of desire as determined by socialization, by the way in which the child is brought up. In such texts as On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud argues that desire is 'essentially' mobile - it has no essence, no proper object, beyond the child's hallucinatory desire for the breast.”

“In the context of literature more generally, we can begin to think about the importance of desire in two fundamental ways. In the first place, we would suggest that every literary text is in some way about desire. To say this, however, is not to suggest that it is everywhere and always the same desire. [...] But literary texts are not only about desire: they also produce or solicit desire. Literary texts produce desire in reading, textual desire. Literary texts, we might say, are machines of desire. Not only do they generate desire (such as the desire to read on), but they are generated by it (by the desire, for example, to tell). In this respect it might be useful to turn to Freud's famous question of female desire, 'what does a woman want?' - and Gayatri Spivak's reformulation of it as 'what does a man want?' - into a question about literary texts: What does a text want? Does it want to tell us something or conceal something? Does it want to make us want it? And so on. But if texts can be thought to desire, readers desire, too: we desire solutions, we desire to get to the end of the story, we desire insight or wisdom, pleasure or sadness, laughter or anger. The fundamental paradox of reading, however, is that we always desire an end (a resolution, an explanation, the triumph of good), but that this end is not the end of desire. As Boone has shown, classic nineteenth-century narrative ends with the satisfaction of desire. But as Freud has taught us, this end of desire is not the end of the story: as he speculates in 'Civilization and its Discontents', there is something in the very nature of sexual life which 'denies us full satisfaction'. [...] Freud emphasises the ways in which we can never get what we want: we may think we have got it (pouring ourselves a gin and tonic, paying for a new car), but actually desire will always have moved on again (to the next gin and tonic, the chance to get on the road and drive and so on). Waiting for a final fulfilment of desire is, indeed, like waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett's play. For Freud, this endlessly deferred complete satisfaction is seen simply as an unavoidable, if rather pathetic aspect of what it is to be human.”

“If literature and theory alike demonstrate that desire is mobile, endlessly displaced, they also suggest that it is "mediated", produced through imitation and simulation. Particularly influential in this context has been the recent work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Developing the ideas of the poststructuralist critic René Girard, Sedgwick argues that desire is everywhere mediated, that desire is structured by a triangular relation of rivalry. Take three people, A, B and C. A, let us say, desires B. Why? Normally, we would assume that A desires B because B is desirable (at least to A). For Girard and Sedgwick, however, things are rather different. For them, A desires B because B is desired by C. We learn to desire, Girard and Sedgwick argue, by copying others' desires, and our desire is produced, fundamentally, in response to the desire of another. 'The great novelists,' Girard claims, 'reveal the imitative nature of desire' and expose what he terms 'the lie of spontaneous desire.' Now, Sedgwick further points out that most of the examples in Girard's book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, involve a specific relation of gender, wherein B is a woman and A and C men: the woman is the object of desire, while the two men are rivals. Love stories often concern the rivalry of two men for a woman, in which the rivalry itself indeed becomes more important than the desire for the woman.”

“For Sedgwick, in fact, Western culture is structured by a 'crisis of homo/heterosexual definition': 'an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition.' Sedgwick develops these insights to suggest that, in Western discourse, in stories, novels, films and so on, relatiopnships are most commonly structured in terms of what she calls 'homosocial desire.' Homosocial desire is not the same as homosexual desire. It does not need to be explicitly expressed as desire, and it is not necessarily physical. In fact, homosocial desire is often concerned rigorously to exclude the possibility of homosexual relations. The traditional male preserves of locker-room, boardroom, and clubroom are sites of homosocial bonding which, at the same time, may be virulently homophobic. But in male-dominated society, such relations are fundamental: in all such societies, Sedgwick claims, 'there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.' Sedgwick argues that a large proportion of the stories, films, songs and other narratives by which Western society imaginatively structures desire can be read as narratives of homosocial desire: while such narratives take as their overt subject the desire of a man for a woman, again and again the really important relationship is that between two men, either as rivals or colleagues, friends, or associates. Developing the idea first proposed by the French structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, that in many societies women tend to be tokens of exchange, Sedgwick argues that women are effaced in this triangular structure, as mere objects for barter. At some level, then, partiarchal society excludes women even from relations of desire. Homosocial desire in our society, Sedgwick suggests, is both the most required and the most socially regimented desire.”

From 'Desire', in Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle's Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (1 // 2 // 3 // 4)

the hand, cut off from any voice,

from Milk & Chocolate by Allure+Desire

that's what grown-ups do.