APRIL 7 — things that change your brain
Frequently when I write fiction I feel like it’s very obvious that I was a gender women and sexuality studies major. I know it’s not, I know other people are not seeing the underlying theory that my thought process is built on. But it’s obvious to me, and sometimes it makes me self conscious, but mostly I think it’s very funny. I’m working on a thing about [redacted] right now, and there’s no way that anyone is going to read it and think, “Oh, yes, it’s obvious that the author was thinking about that one Butler essay with the line about going to Yale to be a lesbian the whole time,” even though that was echoing through my mind the whole time I was writing.
That essay is called “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” and I read it the spring of my freshman year of college in the mandatory GWSS methods class, the only course that the major required. Most people wind up taking it as an upperclassman, but I wound up taking it that spring, and I am so grateful for that because it gave me this foundation of knowledge to build on. I have such vidid memories of the day we discussed this essay in class. It was a sunny spring day, the class met on the first floor of Ford Hall, on the side of the building that faced away from the lawn. It’s like my brain knew something was getting rewired so it better hold onto this day.
I skim reread that essay a couple of nights ago, and I still wouldn’t say I understand all of it. If you wanted me to explain it I’d need to sit down and do a more careful reread to really pick things apart. But some of the ideas in here, and in other things I read after this with this in the back of my mind, have had a profound influence on how I understand the world. It’s weird that I can trace so much of my ~intellectual journey~ to one thing I read when I was nineteen, that I can reread it today and find more to think about.
I’m reading A People’s History of the United States from cover to cover for the first time. I had to read bits of it in high school, but never got through the whole thing. I’ve been reading it slowly, a few chapters a week, and I just got to chapter ten, which is about labor movements around the civl war. There’s a bit about strikes in the late 1870s. Part of the city was on fire, and the national guard got called in to break up the strikers.
I remember walking around Loring Park in 2020, and there was a fucking Hummer parked along the edge of the park that I considered my back yard, where I took my afternoon walks, and I knew that this was something I’d never get over. Those vehicles were just around for a couple of weeks. There were helicopters everywhere. Gus and M are both very sensitive to helicopter sounds, I normally don’t hear it, but those couple of weeks I did. My experience of living in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 isn’t that interesting. I was too busy keeping myself alive and my anxiety tame inside my chest. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t go anywhere on purpose, the only things I saw I saw on my afternoon walks or on a pilgrimage to the grocery store. But I saw enough that reading about the national guard getting called into a city, even separated by 140 years of history, made my nervousness a physical thing, taking hold in my body, making me slow to get to the next page.
I finished the chapter. I made a pot of soup. I distracted myself writing and haphazardly re-reading Judith Butler. My experience of living in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 isn’t interesting. It’s not the story of Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. But it’s mine, and I’m going to live with it. It’s not like I had a good opinion of the national guard before, it’s just… different to see the army on the streets where you walk, especially when walking is the only thing you’ve done for months, cut off from the rest of the world. Weird summer. Weird year.
A lot of you were here with me, watching me blog through it, and I don’t fucking know man. I haven’t gone back and read my blogs from that summer, and don’t intend to do so anytime soon. I don’t have a concluding thought. ✌️
PICTURE OF THE CAT
gus left him tucked in on the chair when we went to bed for the night around one, and he was still there, only slightly untucked, when I passed through the living room a bit after four. my little baby weirdo <3
WHAT I WATCHED
I watched actual movies this week! Multiple actual movies! Please be very impressed!
I watched The Lost City, the Sandra Bullock/Channing Tatum rom-com where she’s a romance writer and he’s a cover model and then plot happens. It’s almost great. They’re both fun, and the jokes are fine, but it never tips into the next level of something I’m going to cherish and rewatch. Daniel Radcliffe is pretty good as the villain, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph is delightful as Bullock’s editor.
I went into Babylon not expecting to love it, and I was right. I generally find Damien Chazelle a bit insufferable, even in the films of his I like alright. This movie is just… too long, to start. And messy in ways that don’t interest me. Not compelling enough for me to spend time typing up why I didn’t enjoy it.
And then I finally watched Saint Maud, which has been on my list for a while because it’s an 84 minute long horror movie with creepy catholicism and also lesbians. That’s exactly what I think movies should be about. I didn’t love it, but I did think it was interesting, and I’m excited to see what the director does next.
SONG OF THE DAY
Dazy have a new EP that I have enjoyed, but it’s mostly made me go back and spend more time with their 2022 album OUTOFBODY. I love a scuzzy rock’n’roll band.