Summer Hot Kitchen
Hot Summer Kitchen
Kitchen Summer Hot
...
& caetera.
Hating this weather is a good enough excuse to love it: it is not my natural habitat, sweating out of both armpits and generally feeling bleary. MG says, and I think he means it, I look best when I'm doe-eyed and out-of-it, since, I surmised, and promptly put the words in his mouth, since it takes the knife out of the way my eyes focus.
So, then, hurrah for summer and a bit of beer to help the process along.
Hurrah also for Lynda Barry's Cruddy which I have just finished, or, should I say, has just finished me.
It is, alas, going to be an emotional entry.
Let's just start with Saturday, then, shall we, at the point when, after having danced almost my fill, I was taking a smoke break on the sofa at my favorite Cambridge club (the cigarette was suffused with WB's sweat and he was still grinding away) when a small punk ladybug tossed herself at me and said,
"You need to smile more".
Which is, and about this there can be no manner of doubt, correct.
After a basic grilling of who I was and where I was from and what my sexuality was (just the essentials, you see), she told me that the boys would simply come running if I smiled more. I happen to think this utter rot, since (1) nobody smiles there and (2) the people at whom I've smiled have to a man not slept with me.
She asked me what my favorite band was, which is a charming and difficult question, because I never know which answer to give. In all truth, I would have to rabbit on for weeks about seventeenth century music, which nobody wants to hear about. So I said, "The Magnetic Fields," which (mercifully?) did not impress her. She pointed out her best friend in the whole world and I admired his splendid haircut. She said she'd given it to him and I rendered unto her appropriate kudos.
Fast on the heels of this, another person talked to me.
I had no idea what to do. I felt like a small orphaned otter recently shot from a drainpipe into a polluted lake.
So, of course, I danced, and freaked quietly and sadly inside. Since I lost that strand of continuity with my self-construction; I lost track of the thin but impenetrably sound shell which told me that I was completely invisible to all around me.
Don't worry: I only lost it for a moment, and then I crawled back in.
It seems while I was out of the shell I dug up some strange memory that, for example, I had been my entire life offending people by being too stand-offish.
The truth is such boring reading, so I won't inflict too much more of it on you. The only thing that I will add is that I re-engaged with Monstrosity. As in Tournier's Roi des aulnes [A WONDERFUL BOOK; WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT -- LOOK IT UP!] or Anne Carson's ["haunting", say the reviewers, and I feel like echoing them] Autobiography of Red.
Monstrosity like this: "I", the character, feels like "I" is scary. In short, whatever "I" does or thinks or says is threatening to the dehors-de-"I", and, from the teensy shields of others ignoring "I" and from their shocked unwillingness to look at "I", "I" builds a wall of sparkling invisibility, of being, at once, universally acknowledged but never addressed. A human taboo -- a living nefandum.
It is, of course, deliciously Queer. Of course it is -- I can queer any concept and have enough schlag left over to top the post-coital coffee. Did I explain it well enough to you?
You know the fairy-tales: the monster is, almost invariably, male. And male-centric. She-monsters are mostly about female sexuality. That's a big and wonderful subject, but even as entranced by it as I can get, it doesn't, and "shouldn't", pretend to universality. No, the male monstrous is, for better or worse, the fairy-tale locus for livingbreathing monsters of both genders. Such as we. Not just that I am "of" both genders, although, thank all the gods and goddesses that I am, but that ...
Well, if I had to defend the proposition that Western culture genders the Subject as male, I'd be here all night.
Thus: take it as read: boymonsters are monsters qua monsters, onemonsters, monstermonsters.
Monsters, primarily, do not understand themselves. Nobody will sit with the monsters at lunch. People stare at them, or, more often, look very pointedly away from them. Monsters are more than usually problematic in the Human gaze.
Monsters have special powers -- even if their only powers are to be disgusting and disquieting. (That is usually more than enough). Monsters can fly or see in the dark. They have odd passions; motivation, for monsters, is a matter of "nature". Nobody need bother asking why ogres eat maidens -- well, duh.
Monsters are quite ugly creatures who fall in love with something beautiful, where beautiful is usually defined as the lack of ugliness. Monsters fall for humans and then either kill them or are tamed by them.
Usually both.
I put forth to you that monstrosity is as useful a concept for understanding queer love (and, [shhhhh!! don't tell anyone!!] therefore, any love) precisely because it inhabits the ugly/beautiful axis which lies pretty deeply wedged into the conception of Love.
[NB: I'm on Plato's side, here: queer love is a more useful philosophical concept because there are fewer variables, supposedly. Keats and Yeats are on your side, darlings, but...]
In short (were you waiting for this?) I feel like a monster sometimes. And I want it to be philosophically meaningful. Luckily, the fact that I've had a couple beers and I'm just spewing out an online journal entry means that I can afford to be a fuzzy thinker and hope that somebody out there is spurred on to more discipline. Somebody, starting with me, but I haven't written that paper yet.
And then there's my favorite monster story-- yes, corny, but I can feel the tears priming anyway.
(They will not drop. I only cry when there are others around)
That beautiful story. My story, and none of you can have it, about the ugly duckling.
Quack.
alastair