duck, duck....goose!

from the bookofum blog:

Gender Blender: Straddling the sexes can be a bitch. Designing the margin of feasible bodies: An article on truths and binary oppositions in the construction of sexes-genders-sexualities. A review of Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes by Gerald N. Callahan (and more and more and more and more). Bourgeois society's reduction of sexuality to the logic of (re)production results in a series of rigid dichotomies; Marcel Stoetzler rejects sexual dimorphism and the gay/straight split to imagine a sexuality that is free to recreate itself. Top scientists get to the bottom of gay male sex role preferences. A look at why lesbians are the butt of gay men's jokes.

MORE on sex and gender and trans issues HERE.

'the biggest difference is I was queer and really wanted to write about it.'

Eileen Myles on why she didn’t get involved with the language poets: (highlights below)

"I think the biggest difference is I was queer and really wanted to write about it. If you look today in the piano bar chronicles about language writing there really isn’t much sex. And they were having sex. They were young. They had to be. They just didn’t like writing about it and for me, aesthetically that is a problem. There was a whole revolution in San Francisco which created New Narrative Writing which was I think about people on the poetry scene wanting to be engaged with excess and sex and narrative particularly as AIDS reared its head – I have to ask where is the great language poem about AIDS, how could you watch so many people die and not write about it? I’ve always thought of AIDS as the Vietnam of my generation. A war needs its poets and we were absolutely there. John Ashbery did it in his John Ashbery way. And I think Language writing did not see that as its job. For that alone I have to stand in resistance to thinking of Language writing as what happened in poetry in the seventies and eighties.

To advance our poetics we have to go back. I think I’m allowed to say this because these poets are my friends (or they were) and this is what we do right, a discourse, and I’m trying to make room for other histories as we’re wallpapering the past we have to know there were many more than one. The explanation isn’t happening here. And also despite the fact that this conference is taking place in the academy I think we also must know that as artists we have to always take the academy with a grain of salt. It’s a resource, it’s a workplace, it’s many things. It’s a patron. It’s something we’re in cahoots with. But it can’t be the ground of the poetry world. It’s not in here."

A call for gay studies in higher ed.

David LaFontaine, professor in the English department at Massasoit Community College, offers up this important call to action in the Boston Globe recently.  LaFontaine served as chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth from 1992 to 2000.  Here are some highlights:

MASSACHUSETTS HAS a history of national leadership in the area of gay rights, but when it comes to the state’s public higher education system there has been virtual silence about including gay and lesbian studies in the curriculum. The creation of gay studies programs within the state’s 29 state and community colleges is long overdue.

The cultural revolution in attitudes toward homosexuality, generated in part by the explosion of gay characters on television and in films, has had a profound effect on today’s youth. What was once a hidden population on college campuses is now a visible and numerous presence. College curriculum, however, has failed to keep pace with the changed cultural landscape and with the needs of its gay population.

---

Professors and their departments will need to lead the way in creating an inclusive college classroom in which the contributions of gay people are validated and studied. Subjects such as literature, history, and sociology are logical academic areas in which to incorporate gay topics. Literature courses will be enriched by studying gay themes in the work of authors such as William Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Herman Melville. In addition to reinterpreting the classics, contemporary literature such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain’’ and Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours’’ merit inclusion within college classrooms.

Poem in process

I have NO idea where this is going, but I can't get these phrases out of my head so I need to put them down and be free of them for a bit.  The first three are the ones I thought of first.  The others I prompted myself for.

Milk the cut
Smuggle the blood
Beard the groove
Douse the frost
Cake over the sick
Oil the blatter
Suck the blessing

Those wacky Nobel laureates

HTMLGIANT is one of the nuttiest sites around.

They recently posted " A Very Brief History of the Nobel Prize in Literature," complete with a hilarious caption to a photo Sweden's king, who hands out the awards.

Here's their entry on Gide.

1947: André Gide (France). Not only the first openly gay person to win the literature Nobel, but the first openly gay person to ever write a book. Seriously. There has never been another gay author. Ever.

And...

1957: Albert Camus (France). The Academy was going through a phase that year, you know? Nine Inch Nails. Clove cigarettes. They’re kind of embarrassed about it now.

And...

1993: Toni Morrison (United States). America reacted to this pick the same way it reacts to most literary news: with generalized apathy and a suddenly-realized hunger for “cheez” curls. Three years after Morrison won, Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon as the second pick for her book club, and Morrison’s books finally moved out of the “Black Interest” sections at Barnes & Noble stores. Well, some of them. Not Texas.

More from Edmund White

His latest book gets reviewed in the TIMES.  The juicy part of the review reminds me of those movie trailers you see and immediately think to yourself, 'Why do I need to see the movie now?'   Warning these juicy parts are in fact pretty darn NSFW language.

Orgies; leather bars; tabs of LSD; sex on the balconies of gay dance halls, in the abandoned piers along the Hudson River and in the dunes on Fire Island; group sex with American Indians and Norwegian flight attendants from Minnesota — it’s all here in exacting and eye-popping detail. He captures the “odor of brew, harness, sweat and Crisco” that began to fill gay men’s nostrils in the mid-’70s.

Mr. White was a kind of sexual werewolf. As midnight approached, he says, “my hands began to sprout hair, and my teeth to sharpen.” He sleeps with so many well-known writers and artists that this crackling if lightweight memoir can read less like a prelude to “And the Band Played On,” Randy Shilts’s stately book about the early days of AIDS, than an all-boy update of “I’m With the Band,” Pamela Des Barres‘s trippy and picaresque rock groupie memoir.

He describes a quickie with the travel writer Bruce Chatwin here; a three-way with the poet John Ashbery there. The notches Mr. White claims on his bedpost are vast and crisscrossing, and he likes to run his fingers along them in wistful horndog memory.

A queer storm over at Lambda?

Seems Lambda Literary had decided to disqualify writers who don't identify as GLBT from their awards.  The blogosphere is abuzz with many of the big gay sites weighing in.

Here's portions of Lambda's announcement, which can be found here by scrolling down.

September 25, 2009 - The Board of Lambda Literary Foundation, under the leadership of Christopher Rice, spent much of last year discussing how our literature has evolved, and the actual mission of the Foundation given the perilous place we find ourselves in with our drastically changed market conditions.  We also took into consideration the despair of our own writers when a heterosexual writer, who has written a fine book about us, wins a Lambda Award, when one or more of our own LGBT writers may have as a Finalist a book that may be the only chance in a career at a Lambda Literary Award.

We discussed two essential questions: who we are, what we are here to accomplish.  We discussed every single word of this, our Mission statement: The Lambda Literary Foundation is dedicated to raising the status of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people throughout society by rewarding and promoting excellence among LGBT writers who use their work to explore LGBT lives.

-----------------

As to what defines LGBT?  That is not up to anyone at Lambda Literary Foundation to decide.  The writers and publishers are the ones who will be doing the self-identifying.  Sexuality today is fluid and we welcome and cherish this freedom.  We take the nomination of any book at face value: if the book is nominated as LGBT, then the author is self-identifying as part of our LGBT family of writers, and that is all that is required.  There are many permutations of LGBT and they're all welcome as that LGBT term we've all adopted makes clear. 

I don't know if there are actually people out there who are concerned about this, but if there are they
would be the kinda people who visit this blog.

What's your opinion!?!?!

A moment for a quote

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.” – Tennessee Williams.

I found that here, a post about gay superheroes of all things.

Queer Futurity

From latest online PW reviews:

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity José Esteban Muñoz. New York Univ., $19 paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-8147-5728-4
Gay liberation's activist past and pragmatic present are merely prologue to a queer cultural future, Muñoz (Disidentifications) suggests in this critical condemnation of the political status quo. Casting his vision of a radical gay aesthetic through the prisms of literature, photography and performance, the author dismisses commonplace concerns like same-sex marriage as desires for “mere inclusion” in a “corrupt” mainstream. More defiantly, he exalts the persistence of commercial sex spaces in the face of “antisex and homphobic policings,” and celebrates the overlay of punk and queer in performance spaces. Muñoz draws on a dynamic roster of seminal artists to illustrate his vision of a utopian queer future, from the well-known (LeRoi Jones, James Schuyler and John Giorno) to edgy artists, including homo-core punk queen Vaginal Davis, club photographer Kevin McCarty and drag chanteuse Kiki (Justin Bond). Queer theorists will find the book's provocative thesis stimulating; lay readers unfamiliar with Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt School of philosophy on which the author builds his argument may find it a slog. (Nov.)

CLAGS

I don't relish the idea of traveling to NYC (it seems so far away), but I might have to make an exception and try to make it to one of these!

10/1

Thursday, 7-9 PM

Room 9207

Graduate Center

Rare Form: Crafting Queerness in Contemporary Literature

Panelists: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D. candidate, English, Africana Studies and Women's Studies, Duke University; Sarah Dowling, Ph.D. candidate, English, University of Pennsylvania; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. candidate, English, University of Pennsylvania

Moderator: Jennifer Williams, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University

This panel explores contemporary queer literature and culture with an emphasis on form. Situating North American literary and theoretical texts in a diasporic frame, the panelists will analyze forms of literary expression through the generic lenses of language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and race and will also consider richer and stranger forms of difference. One of the central questions raised and discussed will be: How do representations of difference impose formal restrictions upon or create new formal possibilities for a text? Taking up contemporary work on futurity, the body, motherhood, sovereignty, and visibility and voice, these presenters ask what difference it might make for contemporary queer studies to make questions of form and craft central.

10/5

6-8 PM

The LGBT Center

208 West 13^th Street

New York, NY 10011

CLAGS-IRN Seminars in the City

Axes of Desire:  Gender, Sexuality, & Human Rights

For the 2009/2010 academic year, the Seminars in the City will be sponsored by the International Resource network, focusing on the theme of sexuality and human rights around the world. The series reflects CLAGS and IRN’s shared commitment to providing a public forum for intellectual discussion and debate within and beyond the academy by connecting academics, activists, and the larger community around the world to share information and resources in sexuality studies. Since the IRN is organized by geopolitical regions, each seminar will focus on questions of sexual human rights in specific regions around the world. For more information visit: http://bit.ly/ja1eJ

Neither Heaven Nor Hell: The Realities of Sexual Minority Organizing in the Caribbean

Presenter: Angelique V. Nixon, Assistant Professor in Residence, Women's Studies, University of Connecticut

The Caribbean is stereotyped as heaven for tourists and hell for sexual minorities.  This session will explain how these two mistaken beliefs are connected - and will describe some of the exciting activism happening within the region, including specific strategies, successes, and challenges. It will use the recent development of the Caribbean IRN subregion to discuss how the internet can help build local and regional movements.  Finally, we will discuss how the diaspora and others positioned outside of the region can create their own movement, support work within the region, and respond to stereotypes of and boycotts against the Caribbean.

Reading Material: Free course packets for the Seminars are now available at the CLAGS office. Please call: 212-817-1955 to make sure the office is open for the packets to be picked up. Due to budgetary reasons we do not mail the packets. For further inquiries please check our website www.clags.org or email clagsevents@gc.cuny.edu

Registration or attendance of past seminars in this series is not required.

10/09

Friday, 7-9 PM

Skylight Room

Graduate Center

CLAGS LGBTQ Studies Panel:

The History, the Historian, the History Maker: A Conversation with Martin Duberman

Moderator: Sarah Chinn, Executive Director, CLAGS

Join us to welcome Martin Duberman, the founder and executive director of CLAGS (1986-1996), for a conversation based on his recently published, Waiting to Land, A (Mostly) Political Memoir. An award winning historian, biographer, playwright and gay rights activist, Duberman will focus on the struggle for the founding of CLAGS, and an exploration of what it means to be Queer in post-Stonewall America. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear and engage with this living icon of queer scholarship and activism who believes, to quote from his latest book, “The essence of gayness is having grown up, or tried to, without the motivating, certifying power of established social norms—and hence skeptical of their validity. To be gay is to be a political saboteur.”

10/14

Wednesday 7-9 PM

Room C 201

Graduate Center

LGBTQ Studies Pedagogy Workshop

Teaching, not Bowing: Queer Pedagogy in an Age of Assimilation

Matthew Brim, Assistant Professor, English, College of Staten Island, CUNY

This workshop will explore the responsibilities of the queer studies teacher in hyperassimilationst gay and straight culture.  How might queer classrooms be intentionally framed as separatist in this context, and what does separatist queer pedagogy look like?  The workshop will be discussion based, so please come ready to participate.

Cosponsored by the Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), New York University

10/16

4-6 PM

English Department

Room 4409

MY DIVA Reading Series

Michael Montlack, editor of the essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), will be discussing the book and its focus on the special bond between gay men and their divas. There will be readings by Michael (on Stevie Nicks), Wayne Koestenbaum (on Anna Moffo), Mark Doty (on Grace Paley), Jason Schneiderman (on Liza Minnelli), Christopher Murray (on Margaret Dumont) and Richard Tayson (on Helen Reddy). Q/A and Reception to follow.

Cosponsored by the Phd Program in English

10/20

5:00-6:30 PM

CLAGS Office

Room 7115

CLAGS BACK-TO-SCHOOL-MIXER
The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies invites you to a back-to-school mixer.  Come share a glass of wine with fellow students, meet our staff, pick up information on our fellowships, awards, prizes, and events. The mixer will be followed by the LGBTQ Film Screening: Our Family.

Light Refreshments Served

10/20

Tuesday, 7-9 PM

Room 9204-9205

Graduate Center

LGBTQ Studies Film Series

Our Family

Directed by K. P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro

2007, 56 min., India
Tamil with English Subtitles

Set in Tamilnadu, India, Our Family weaves together excerpts from
Nirvanam, a solo theatrical performance by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and the
lives of three generations of transgendered females. Aasha, Seetha and
Dhana, a family bound together by ties of adoption, belong to the
community of Aravanis (also known as hijras in some parts of India).
The performance by Chakravarthy and the daily lives of the three family
members bear witness to the tumultuous journey towards a reinvented
selfhood, a journey fraught with violence, exploitation, affection and
courage. This award winning film allows the viewer to reinterpret
Nirvanam, a Sanskrit term with religious connotations, as an act of
liberation and transformation-from male to female. For more information
about the film visit: http://ourfamily2007.wordpress.com/

K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, professors at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, will be available for Q&A after the screening.

Cosponsored by the Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), New
York University

10/22

Thursday, 7-9 PM

Room C 201-202

Graduate Center

LGBTQ Film Series

NO!

Director, Aishah Shahidah Simmons

2006, 94 min. USA

Through intimate testimonies from Black women victims/survivors, commentaries from acclaimed African-American scholars and community leaders, archival footage, spirited music, dance, and performance poetry this award winning documentary unveils the reality of rape, other forms of sexual assault, the use of rape as a weapon on homophobia, and the healing in African-American communities. For more information on the film please visit: http://www.NOtheRapeDocumentary.org

The filmmaker will be available for Q&A after the screening.

10/29

Thursday, 6:30 PM

Skylight Room

TENDENCIES: Poetics and Practice

Rachel Zolf, Trish Salah and Robert Glück

This series of talks by major poets, titled after the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, will explore the intersection of contemporary poetic practice, queer theory and pedagogy. Too often today, statements on poetics and their manifesto-like style have been moralistic or prescriptive discourses. By contrast, this series will attempt a Kinsey-like survey of actual poetic practice--what writers actually do, in the writers' own words--in the process queering the manifesto, inventing new terms for poetics discourse, and emphasizing queer writing and poetics.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the PhD Program in English and the Poetics Group

The Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY at 34^th Street.  All events in the Graduate Center are wheelchair accessible.  Please contact the security office at the Graduate Center (212-817-7777) for further details. 

CLAGS is committed to accessibility for all participants at our events, so we have a SCENT-FREE policy.  ASL interpretation can be provided for any CLAGS event if requested 10 or more working days prior to the event. If you have other accessibility needs, please contact the CLAGS office, with a relay operator when necessary, at (212) 817-1955 or email us at clagsevents@gc.cuny.edu.  For more information, visit our website, www.clags.org. 

All CLAGS events, which are free and open to the public, are co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Studies Concentration in Lesbian and Gay/Queer Studies. 

Nearest subways: B, D, F, V, N, Q, W to 34^th Street; 6 to 33^rd Street

Massive Fall"

Have I said how much I adore the Band of Thebes blog? Yes, I know, many times. 

One of his latest posts actually goes to the trouble to create a list of upcoming books you might want to check out that are coming out this fall.  I swooned.  So many books.  And me, I'm reading the huge tomes of the 18th century so likely won't be getting to many of these books on B of T's list, but that doesn't mean you can't!  And send me reports so that I might be edu-mi-cated.

By the way, those 18th century novels....not so bad...actually quite the page-turners...which, thank god, is good  because most are longer than lucifer's tail!

American Book Awards

I tell you what, Facebook is breaking news these days.  Nothing seems to be posted on the interwebs yet, but I've heard two books by gay authors have won American Book Awards this year!   Who are the lucky folks?

My Vocabulary Did This to Me (collected Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi)
Jericho Brown's debut poetry volume, Please.

Join me in hearty congratulations!  And let me know if there are more to add or if anyone has a link!

(By the way, I'm blogging this in Umass-Ahmerst's "English Department Faculty and Graduate Lounge" [eeeee!] and Peter Gizzi's office is RIGHT DOWN THE HALL [eeee again!]/)

Ashbery the monument

A few weeks ago I had my second opportunity to interview Mr. John Ashbery.  It was our follow-up session, which I felt very privileged to have since he gave me nearly two hours for our first meeting.  I hope to have the completed interview edited and sent to him by the end of the month.  Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, please click on over to Avoiding the Muse for this great post on Ashbery's most famous poem. There's also a great image of one of Ashbery's own collages.

Ganymede

I'm excited to say I have three poems coming out in the next issue of Ganymede, the gay men¹s lit/art print quarterly published quarterly in New York as a paperback book.


Their latest issue just recently came out. Here's the details.

GANYMEDE #5 ISSUE RELEASED
...biggest ever--a whopping 344 pages!


Table of contents and readable sample pages:
http://www.ganymedenyc.com/
Purchase (print or download) at
http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1308479

--EDMUND WHITE on writing gay
--OSCAR WILDE's delicious 1889 dialogue on art, ³The Decay of Lying²
--GLENWAY WESCOTT's rare 1928 story of a little boy going to a ball in drag
--BERGDORF BOYS by Scott Hess: first of four parts serializing a complete
novel, both witty and dark, about gay party boys in New York
--TEN gay poets in 36 pages--the finest survey of gay poetry in print today
--EIGHT cutting-edge gay visual artists from around the world
--SUSAN GLASPELL's 1917 story ³A Jury of Her Peers,² now a discovered text
in feminist lit
--INDIE EYE returns with tips on obscure movies to rent, including the first
gay Bollywood flick!
--The Paris of Our Dreams: the 19th-century transformation of Paris
coincided with the birth of photography, and the rise of archival
photographers who snapped parts of the city either rising or falling. Our
portfolio shows these precious images.

"American Poet" magazine

Wow, good stuff in issue #37.

 The Art of Violent Concision: Henri Cole, by John Koethe


The Surreal Is No Less Real: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, by Carl Phillips

For a Dollar: Louise Glück in Conversation, an interview with Dana Levin 

 

The Poetry of Place: James Wright's "The Secret of Light" by James Galvin


Many many apologies for being such a bad blogger lately.  Needless to say, I've been very busy.  Hopefully more soon.

Reginald Shepherd prize

What an exhausting (but awesome) week of teacher orientation. Classes start Wednesday! And my first MA/Phd class starts Tues. 18th Century Novel. You should see the freakin' stack of novels! But daunted, nay! Sally forth I shall. (I have no clue what century such talk is! ;-)

Anyway, blogging is going to be infrequent, in all likelihood, until I get myself settled into a routine. But I DO have LOTS to blog about so I am hopeful it will come.

In the meantime, check out the winners and all the finalists and semifinalist (including three of my poems) from the Reginald Shepherd memorial contest from KNOCKOUT.

Joe Milford Poetry Show

Gay poet and editor Jeremy Halinen interviewed on rich poetry resource Joe Milford Poetry Show. TAKE A LISTEN!

Gay poet and project creator extraordinaire Dustin Brookshire was also recently interviewed!

Learn more about the SHOW and check out all the archived interviews!

Gay poetry on YouTube!

Gay slam poets on YouTube. Here's Regie Cabico to give you a taste. "Your orgasms are onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia! Onomatopoeia! Onomatopoeia!" "Your ejaculations are sprung rhythm!"



Another one!

Gay poet has new book coming this Oct.

Tom's name in new to me, but eager to learn more about him and his work!

Healy’s sensual, urgent debut collection moves from farmyard to cityscape as it depicts a teetering, asymmetric world. A speaker “deaf in one ear” ponders that “the Moon’s dark side / has no sound”; a mother and child finally “take the journey they’d talked about” but get only “a Sunday drive on Tuesday,” a near-miss “tracing circumferences.” Healy’s assured rhythms and measured stresses ballast the uncertainty of social relationships and bodily suffering. He seeks past the self for ways to act: “the task is to remember / the troubled blood of others, // and not remember // the bliss of deeper waters.” This book of “salt and work,” of surviving ourselves, our illnesses, and our language, tenderly explores the unsaid and under-the-surface of the separate lives we live together: “we sat // in the rocking chairs / of each other’s / moods.” An intimate, intelligent, and lively debut.

Poet, Phd student

Nope, not me. It's JeFF Stumpo, who blogs here. And he's a cutie! Too bad he's straight! ;-) But he does wonder if he could identify as a "queering poet." That's a start.