Genius Town

Pygmy.

2009-02-19T23:03:00.000-08:00

Chuck Palahniuk has a new book called Pygmy coming out soon and I already read it and I didn't like it very much.

Okay so. Did you see that M Night Shyamalan movie The Village? If you're like me, five minutes into that movie you were like, 'clearly these puritanical folks are modern-day back-to-olden-times people! Otherwise why would a director like Mr Shyamalan, who normally pays so much attention to details and specifics, have them all talking like people in the oughties?' And then in the end you felt very smart for having such brilliant insights when you were proved right.

My point is not that I am a brilliant, insightful genius. My point is that, if you are going to have people talk a specific, idiosyncratic way, there had better be a goddam reason for it, y'know? The whole hook of this book is, oh hey, this is fragmented English because English isn't the narrator's first language! Which is a legitimate conceit, except that when the narrator is someone who's mastered the periodic table of elements by the time he's four, there had better be a goddam reason that he can barely grasp another language's syntax. And also, while we're at it, if the book is told in the form of reports back to his home country, why the fuck is he reporting in this language he sucks at? It just doesn't hold up.

Oh, wait, no it holds up in the context of xenophobia!

Which is complicated, right, because here is what the book is about: America is full of jerks (a thesis I'd agree with) and other countries don't always like it (a thesis I'd agree with) and sometimes people from other countries do something about it via terrorism (true). This is all fine fodder for a novel, for sure. Let's even make it science fiction, and instead of having the terrorist be from a real country America has declared war on, let's have him be from a made-up, futuristic coalition of countries- that might cut down on the potential for real-world political insight or commentary, but hey, it's fiction, Chuck can do what he wants. Plus they were made-up countries in Brave New World, weren't they? Oceania was, anyway. And Brave New World worked.

That is a good idea for a book! So Chuck, why did you have to waste it on jokes about vibrators and how foreigners can't speak English right? Oh, because you're Chuck Palahniuk and you pander to an audience of manly, bro-ey duders (and me, I guess) who want titillation, not insight. Who want you to play with but ultimately reinforce their prejudices and snappy judgments.

Of course this is old news to everyone except me. Chuck Palahniuk's reputation is: famous dunderhead, churning out stupid bullshit. I think it's more complicated than that, though! Dude has a giant brain, comes up with good ideas- brutal criticism of America from an oppressed outsider's perspective!- he just always then completely blows them with jokes about that murderous vibrator, or fucking your sister or something. (Whereas when he just lets his brain goes and gets less, like, sensationalistic- see Rant or even Invisible Monsters, although I guess Invisible Monsters was pretty ridiculous- he can be pretty amazing.) When you strip away the vaguely xenophobic conceit, Pygmy is just a bunch of goddam predictably outrageous Chuck Palahniuk hijinx: "Oh, Pygmy thought that he could bake the cake in half the time if he turned the heat twice as high! Oh, Pygmy ate all the chocolates!" Whatever.

It's a shame. I want better from you, Chuck! At this point, I almost wish you hadn't written Rant, because Rant was absolutely brilliant and is one of my favorite books and if I'd never read it I certainly wouldn't keep reading this shit.

2008-05-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

Look at this! Somebody- who will remain nameless, because of the 1984 environment at the Strand- e-mailed it to me. It's pretty nice to see media attention on the fact that Nancy Bass is a hateful, racist person. I had similar experiences to those that folks describe in that article, although mine were about when I started to transition, instead of my race.

That woman is a friggin bully, man. She will get up in your face for looking at her. There are a lot of mean things you could say about her that don't have anything to do with the poisonous work environment she creates, but the relevant ones are about the fact that she's resentful toward her employees. Or something that looks like resentfulness. She treats her employees like they're stealing from her. You'd think that, with an MBA, she would understand the fact that nobody is happy in an environment where the co-owner micromanages everything around her. I've never been to business school, but I do understand that employees who can take a second and talk shit are a lot more productive than ones who are terrified they're going to get written up for going to the bathroom.

Plus, Nancy? It didn't work. I slacked off SO HARD, SO PROFESSIONALLY, SO OFTEN while I worked at your store. You never caught me. I wonder whether that's because I'm white so you weren't paying attention.

I mean, I have a pretty good idea that's the case.

Also, that article makes it look like the managers are all complicit with management's whims, and since I don't work there I can let you know that that's not the case. Managers at the Strand tend to be great people who get the same shit from Ms Bass as the rest of the employees. The only difference is that, once you become a manager, you're no longer protected by the union, so she can fire you on a whim. She doesn't even need to document anything, write you up a couple times. I've seen this happen. There's always some stupid hearsay reason that some other manager will confirm (maybe MAYBE because that manager is on thin ice already).

Anyway, yeah. It's nice that somebody's calling Ms Bass out, is all.

two awkward things

2008-01-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

Fine.

1. Giving Disorganized Boys the Tools for Success

2. Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Reduce the Need For Sleep.

whatever

2007-11-14T22:59:00.000-08:00

Well, listen. It's been more than a month since I posted to this thing. I can be non-monogamous with who I make out with, but I don't think I'll ever be able to be faithful to more than one blog.

Remember when I was writing about how this was gonna be my grown-up blog? Ha! Turns out the internet is for children and I'm deeply, deeply immature.

This is gonna be my goddam blog for the rest of my life, I bet: jnnogen.livejournal.com.

bike, divorce

2007-10-11T09:39:00.001-07:00

My bike is missing and I need to get this divorce together.

Jewshi

2007-10-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, drunk after band practice, I saw a sweet lil hipster fellow with a hoodie on that said HERBIVORE in distressed, pre-faded lettering. It gave me an idea: SELF-RIGHTEOUS VEGETARIAN shirts! I wrote this on my hand. I have been living in Berkeley for long enough that it has sunk in, I guess.

I don't know whether that's related, but today I ate lox! At Elijah's birthday brunch party I probably ate, over the course of half an hour, a blob of lox the size of my fist. And it was great! It was the meatest thing I've eaten in probably five years, and I'm trying to feel bad about it but I don't. Elijah said it was Jewish sushi and I though, Jewshi!, but I kept that to myself.

In conclusion, I'm a little bit in love with this Philip K Dick book Valis. It's basically him talking about FUCK GOD a lot, which is charming.

sex advice

2007-10-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

Well, clearly this is the best idea anyone's ever had for an article: Sex Advice from Booksellers, on Nerve via Bookslut. "Who doesn't want to date a bookseller? We climb ladders in skirts, and remain slightly aloof."

Also, I lived with the first guy! In Bed-Stuy. I think I've played shows with him, too, but maybe I've just seen him play shows.

two things about Brooklyn and one other thing

2007-09-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

This Brooklyn comic shop, Rocketship, is one of my favorite places in the world. I know folks who have different priorities, so whatever, but the emphasis is on everything about comics that I am stoked about, and not any of the stuff I don't care about. Also, I met Mary a little before the store opened and she is one of the sweetest, awesomest people ever. When my Williamsburg apartment was overrun with bedbugs, she came over with buckets, mops, bleach and underwear (good story there) and paid for my drycleaning 'cause I was broke.

Also, you know how whenever you're in my store you're like What are these sweet, sweet sounds coming through the stereo? Rocketship's like that, too, only times ten. Every time I go there I learn about a new band.

Anyway, love letter aside, they were in Japanese Esquire this month.

Another thing is that I love Jonathan Safran Foer as much as the next sensitive mid-to-late-twenties college-educated white kid- maybe more, since I don't have an angry chip on my shoulder about him like everybody else I know seems to have- but this article tearing him + Dave Eggers and the rest of the "Brooklyn Books of Wonder" writers still made me smile. I lived in Brooklyn for a long time and I love it with all my heart, and while I was there I was very much in the mindset that ol' Melvin Jules Bukiet's writing about; I just get excited that somebody's complaining about those folks in a way that feels like a useful criticism, instead of just calling them stupid or gimmicky or whatever.

Also, my girlfriend and I got a puppy. Her name is Pants. I don't care about the internet any more. (Which I guess is the theme of this blog so far- why I hate blogging and the internet- because I'm a postmodern hack.)

Junot

2007-09-19T19:12:00.000-07:00

Junot Diaz dot com is up. It sucks, but maybe more stuff will go there and it'll suck less. Also, it doesn't say how to make him come do a reading at your store, if you have a store you want him to do a reading at- it just says that his tour for Oscar Wao is already booked up EVERY DAY, and that he's coming through my neighborhood and doing a reading at freakin Diesel, which is kind of an awesome bookstore and I'll be there but STILL.

"paraphiliac"

2007-09-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

Barring for a second everything stupid that he's asserted, what if J Michael Bailey's thesis in the Man Who Would be Queen- that male-to-female transsexuality is the product either of male-male homosexuality or a paraphilia- were true? Would that impact the day-to-day lives of transsexual women in any way? I feel like, if a paraphilia were so intense that its paraphiliac needed to change their life so drastically (and go through so much gross shit) in order to be okay, then- I mean- who cares?

The question then becomes not about cultural views of transsexuality but cultural views of deviant sexuality, or however you want to frame it.

I just feel like I've known so many folks- myself included, a long time ago- who get so hung up on "What if I'm Just A Pervert And Not Really Trans" that they ultimately lost sight of: regardless of which is the case, you're not gonna squash it and watch it go away. Y'know?

Shame around sexuality is such an asshole, I swear to god.

stencils; die

2007-09-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

Stencils wallowing in their own stencilness is kind of blowing up right now, in advertising and other non-wall contexts. Isla's been doing a bunch of 'em, and hers keep getting better; also, everybody's in love with Banksy, right? I just wanted to say, I'm excited that I don't hate a popular design trend. I'm sure it'll get old, but for now I am excited.

Also Die! Die! Die! is gonna have a new full-length in November. It hasn't been leaked to the internet music pirates (me; arr) yet, as far as I can tell. I'll keep you posted.

check in

2007-09-10T20:30:00.001-07:00

It's just that I haven't been that interested in the internet lately. For a while there- say, a good decade- the internet was kind of my boyfriend, in a pretty intense way. He validated my emotions, gave me room to talk, space to figure stuff out, stuff to think about, and he even got me off. But lately, not so much. Maybe it's because I've had a real-life girlfriend I feel comfortable talking to about the stuff I used to secretly need to turn to the internet for, like specifically gender stuff, queer stuff, kink stuff, insecurities, all that. Other stuff. Or maybe I'm just burned out on staring at screens.

It's stupid though. It's frustrating! I have been looking around this ol internet, its emptry electronic alleys and parking lots, expecting to feel empowered and excited the way I did a long time ago. But I don't. It's a habit: I look at strap-on and just feel kind of sad; I look at trueselves and I just want to yell at everybody; internet news always feels biased or pointless or, at best, masturbatory. All I care about is bookslut's blog, which i stare at the screen, refreshing, and livejournal, which is the most navel-gazey place on the internet.

I mean, I know, right? I've spent a long, long time staring at my bellybutton on livejournal. I still post silly bullshit on that thing, but it's like... this is what I'm spending my time doing?

I've been playing a lot more guitar. Have I ever told you about how bad I am at writing songs? I write most of a song pretty much every day, decide it's stupid, get mad at it, and forget it. I'm an awful singer- I'm learning other people's songs, how to do the strum-and-holler thing I always felt like I was too smart to have to do (I'll just skip straight to being in the Smashing Pumpkins, I always assumed).

Wait, I lost the point. Here's where I was going: I started this blog with the idea that I'd talk about grownup things here. Gender stuff, book stuff, activisty stuff. But I kinda don't even care to do that, and ALSO I just started this blog, which is a trans news blog whose point is to be critical of the way trans news is presented by the media, but I also don't want to do that.

You know the thing where trans women fade out of internet visibility, out of the scene, as it were? I am getting that so bad right now. Which is fine, and I've always ALWAYS said hey man, I don't judge anybody for doing that, because it happens so often I bet it'll happen to me, I'll just want to bail too. The problem is this: I was elected head organizer of Camp Trans this year. I've been involved in trans communities for so long that I can see the role the internet plays in organizing, how valuable a trans news site could be, if it weren't smug, and weren't sucking up to anybody, and were run by smart people with intelligent critiques. It's just that feeling like I have any perspective on this stuff, and power to change it, is arriving contemporaneously with some pretty intense burnout.

I know. We've been here before and it's boring.

I'm just sayin, I don't know what to do. I want to live my life, cook goulash for my friends, play in a band, have people stay at my house, read books and hump my girlfriend. I feel like that's enough to juggle, right? I want to do that stuff and not worry about it, but I've got this urge to make sure that everybody knows that I'm some normal boring girl with a brilliant, normal, boring, amazing queer life. Making sure the whole world knows my life is great, it feels like an obligation- mostly, probably, because the whole world told me for so long that if I was trans, queer, disinterested in a money money job, punkish, that my life COULDN'T be this good. You know? I kind of want to yell at everybody 'you are stupid for making me feel insecure about my priorities.'

I know- and I'm practically thirty.

My point is just that I'm tired of feeling like I have to holler about shit all the time. Whenever there's an article on the internet about Michfest, I wish I didn't feel like I needed to educate the shit out of everyone present; whenever somebody says, 'yeah, being a high school teacher's great, but maybe one day you'll be a college professor,' I'm tired of feeling like I need to say something.

So whatever, is all I'm saying. 'Cause I'm nervous that, if somebody looks at this and sees that I haven't written anything in a week and a half, they'll think nothing's going on. It's the opposite- if I'm not on the internet, I'm almost certainly doing something better. That's all I'm sayin.

Oh, happy September 11th in a couple hours. Can we make it a thing where everybody tries to have really gross kinky sex on September 11th?

fancy and toxic

2007-09-02T23:37:00.000-07:00

This, also, is from Shelley Jackson's Half-Life, which I am still reading because I read slowly. But which makes me stoked that I read slowly! Because I'm glad I haven't finished it yet.

-
Her stiff skirt showed dirty white lines where the caked shit stretched, cracked, and the fabric showed through. Once it had been a party dress, cheap and frilly and synthetic. It was the sort of dress Granny called "fire-retarded"- it would kindle all at once with a fwhomp, set your hair on fire, then disappear and leave you naked, except for sticky black plastic boogers that would sink into your flesh as easily as needles. It was the kind of dress little girls wore at beauty pageants and Mexican weddings, the kind you found hanging in plastic bags in cheap stores in the Mission. It was fancy and toxic, like a wedding cake frosted with petroleum jelly. It had so many pleats and ruffles that its surface area was incalculably large, like a brain's. I read an interview once with an artist who made drawings about child abuse. He said the most volatile words in the English language were "little girl." When the prosecutor pronounces those words, the courtroom goes crazy. This was the dress that went with those words: a language dress, a hallucinated dress, from a grown-up's dream of little girls.
-

Maybe when I finish it I'll elucidate specifically all the ways Half-Life resonates with me, but I doubt it. I just want you to know that I'm gay for Shelley Jackson.

worn out, money and the double bind

2007-09-02T22:50:00.000-07:00

I am getting worn out from thinking about trans stuff so much. It's frustrating: trans folks tend to burn out on activism because doing trans activism specifically means having the same conversations ("Is Michfest REALLY such a big deal?" "What exactly do hormones do?" "Here is some theory I have about what being actively transsexual is like, and that's what my experience is going to be like when I transition, and I want to talk about it a lot but not hearing anybody whose experience contradicts it.") over and over again, to the point that you're just, like, well fuck, I understand being trans well enough to get by for myself; do I really need to keep doing this?

And of course SOMEbody needs to keep doing it. Otherwise we get an internet full of white women who don't understand white privilege making policy decisions for the rest of us, putting up a weird public face for the rest of us, and not understanding why their movement feels oppressive, even to them.

Which is annoying.

But anyway, I've been trying to dip my foot into the great salty lake of 'I'm just a normal lezzie punker girl who gets read as a boy occasionally,' whereas, for the last couple years, I've been (necessarily, I'll admit) living in the 24-7-trans-activist puddle. Which- I don't want to say anything bad. It's just that analyzing trans stuff, reading trueselves (whose name, to begin with, gives you the impression of the dominant perspective, but which still is the least awful internet trans community I've found, outside of livejournal, which I'm not gonna count really because 1. livejournal is blogs and 2. livejournal transfolks are often SUPER SUPER AWFUL), checking the camp trans organizing listserv, and thinking about how I'm being read, all a bahundred times a day, they've become like a compulsion. One I'm exhausted by. I guess compulsions are like that, huh? They exhaust you?

My point is just: if I'm going to be able to keep doing activism, being visible in the community and, y'know, not fade into the wallpaper like folks tend to do, I need to change the way I relate to trans stuff. I'm not sure how, exactly, that looks.

Also, my bank took about five hundred dollars in overdraft fees out of my account. Do I look like the sort of fucker who can afford five hundred dollars in overdraft fees? Nobody tells you that they're charging you a hundred and fifty dollars a day- 27 each time you debit a two-dollar burrito. They just let you keep doing it until days and days later you log into your bank account online at work and wonder, innocently, what the parenthesis around your balance mean, and why the number is hundreds higher than you expected.

Fuckers.

Also? Let me tell you something else. You know the argument that trans woman excluders like to make about how trans women internalize male privilege and then can never get rid of it? I have a different problem that I see way, WAY more often, that it feels like nobody ever talks about. What about the thing where, way before she comes out, a trans woman is being read as a guy, and trying to be read as a guy, and everybody's trying to attribute all this male privilege to her- by the goddam buttload- but it feels super gross to her? And she doesn't have the framework to go, 'oh, clearly i need to behave in a manner rooted in general anti-oppression work and therefore flatten, as best I can on my small scale, the privilege hill that I'm on top of,' so instead, she just shrugs it off? Learns to be a wishy-washy milquetoast who doesn't really have opinions about stuff, lets other folks be in charge of where they eat lunch and hang out and what movie they see and whether they go to protests or McDonald's? Because I see that a lot more: trans women who've internalized, deeply and a long time ago, that accepting male privilege feels shitty and so learns to shrug it off ineffectually and like a friggin wuss?

Not to use the word "wuss."

This dovetails nicely into the trans woman's double bind- the one that says, if you're assertive, you are holding onto male energy, and if you're passive, you've internalized problematic social norms about women being passive, emulated them, and continue to oppress other folks with 'em. Which is stupid. How many trans women can't stand up for themselves, like, ever? It's gross.

Anyway, whatever. My point is just, this is what I think about all the time, when I'd be much happier thinking things like Man, I sure like doin' it.

quickly:

2007-08-26T19:21:00.001-07:00

I love that Emily Bronte sits right next to Jimmy Buffett on the used mass market paperback shelf at my bookstore. Y'know, right across from Women Must Not Be Allowed Into the Canon by Harold Bloom?

Unrelatedly, Miss Maudlin's posted a very sweet review of my performance at Camp Trans, along with very sweet reviews of a couple other folks.

GQ

2007-08-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

I keep having anxiety dreams where I'm all exhausted and need to save the world for other people all the time. Know what this means? It means I'm too invested in saving the world. I need to stop paying attention to other people pretty bad and give myself room to sit and to be and to get in touch with myself, in the hippiest, woo-est way possible. Of course it's all related to getting back from Camp Trans a week ago and having to figure out which outside-Camp defenses to put back up and which ones to try and get rid of. 'Scomplicated.

Anyway and relatedly, I'm taking a week off from the internet. Fuck the internet anyway, but when I can't sleep and I'm writing mopey songs about it, not reading things about everybody else's shit everywhere is maybe a good solution. Then I can just deal with my own shit!

Hey speaking of my own shit for a second, can I talk about genderqueer identities for a second? Lots of folks at Camp are super invested in their genderqueer identities, which is great and I don't want to say anything bad about how anybody identifies- I know lots of folks outside of Camp for whom that's a really important thing. For me though? I don't identify that way at all. I mean, I fuck around with gender a lot, right? It's kind of hard for somebody who's trans and also obnoxious not to. It's just- I don't know, I can't think of anything I'm interested in doing that would complicate my identity as a woman. Does that make sense? I get that, for lots of folks, gender binaries don't exist, or are way more complicated than two poles, and lost of other things.

Like, I'm nervous about genderqueer identities shutting down the possibilities of a female identity. For some folks, clearly, "female" is limiting. But for me, I learned to be female from women who IDed as women and who would tell people to suck their cocks, who'd wear spikes and shave bits of their heads, who'd wear ties with skirts- who figured out how to pee standing up. And this was way before I ever heard about IDing as genderqueer. Y'know? That's all pretty surface stuff as examples of a theoretical genderqueer gender, but that's kind of my point: I can't think of anything that feels restrictive, for me, about "female." Maybe it's residual male privilege? Maybe it's the fact that a punk identity precedes a girl one for me, and so I already got my liberation there?

Also there's the fact that I lose my shit when I get pronouned wrong.

Like I said, I don't want to say anybody's wrong about the way they identify, just that, with the way hierarchies of radicalism are maintained (which is its own stupid, frustrated blog post), I felt super shy coming out as NOT genderqueer. Even though, as Alex pointed out to me, in a queer culture (and culture are large) where masculinity is fetishized, "girl" is kind of a revolutionary identity to have.

Anyway, whatever. I'm done talking about it. I wrote "FEEL INGS" across my knuckles at Camp, and then "NO" right about the EE in FEEl to show that I was done with feelings. I'm still done with feelings and now I'm going to go find a marker and write that on my knuckles again and then eat a bunch of vegetables. In a tortilla.

read me.

2007-08-20T17:11:00.001-07:00

Today I ate bee pollen in a smoothie and I have been sneezing nonstop. And when I am not sneezing, my face is curling up attractively in preparation for a sneeze. I guess it's like a vaccination? Alex said that if you eat the pollen you'll sneeze less because your body will be used to it, and man have I been sneezing in response to the California pollen my body's not used to. Gross.

Anyway, also this thing happened today where I got reminded that I'm not in charge of how my body's read, or what folks do with those readings. Stupid. I have a hat that I like and today I wore it. It's a stupid, army green, emo doofus hat with a big TSPX¹ patch on the side; I wear it cocked to the side to signify Big Dyke, since apparently lots of eyeliner and sparkles don't, and because I was grumpy and sleepy this morning and didn't want to deal with my hair being all clean and weird.

So, I am wearing a big gay hat (which maybe is not big or gay. I don't know. I don't know how anybody fuckin reads anything I do ever any more) and doing bookstore things and this old Berkeley hippie decides that maybe it would be nice to hit on me. So he goes, "can I come flirt with you for a minute?" And I said sure, because why not. Who cares, I wasn't doing anything important.

He was like, blah blah, what's your bag, and I was like, Shrug, I guess I organize and play punk rock, and he goes OFF AND OFF AND OFF about how he'd love to have a cup of tea so I could explain punk rock to him because it seems like the Dark Side and his daughter and he saw Janice Joplin or something, and then I guess he caught wind of the fact that I was trans somehow? Because first he said something about somebody being a girl or a boy or something, and then since I didn't respond delightedly to the broaching of the trans subject, he called me "young lady. or man."

Which you don't do.

I think I was polite for a second and then less polite because I'm bad at navigating a "fuck you" at a customer. Eventually he left and I was pissed for a long time til I thought about Dog the Bounty Hunter and how much John likes him.

Then later Alex took me for a smoothie and I ate a bunch of bee pollen, which was nice, and then this boy started walking next to me and asked my name and then asked for my phone number and I was like nope! He was like, why? And I said, Because I don't really date boys. "But you on hormones," he wanted me to know, "you've got titties!" At which point our conversation ended, and fuck that guy.

It's gross and unsurprising that folks think I'm interested in how they're reading my body, but that's what male privilege is, right? Laid out in a trans context: this unexamined "here is my opinion, which is valid because it's mine, regardless of what effect it's going to have on you." Like when folks read me as trans and then NEED NEED NEED to let me know that they've put it together.

Anyway, ew. Now I am going to have a big lezzie Dirty Dancing/beer/gay bar + tomato soup date with my girlfriend. Then, tomorrow, I am going to try to remember that my main coping mechanism is to be pissed at the whole world all the time: I went to Camp Trans and forgot for a little while.

1. TranSPunX. Clearly.

she moaned:

2007-08-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

Somebody found my blog by googling "she moaned as the zombie fucked." That makes sense- you know how sometimes folks explain zombies by saying, 'their brains are mostly dead except for their most base impulse: TO EAT,' except the truth is that there's a scientific theory that bodies are just DNA replication machines, so really the most base urge in the brain is to D.I., you know? and therefore: zombie porn- but still, ew.

books

2007-08-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

Link from bookslut: TS Eliot read the Wasteland.

Also: Amy Bloom has new fiction! I thought her book about trans stuff was... I don't know, nice, but not really my favorite thing ever; I read the shit out of all her fiction over the course of like three days back a million years ago when I first discovered her; I'm excited about the new one, even though I'm still thumpin my way excitedly through Shelley Jackson. I kinda want to rip open the boxes of books-to-go-out-Tuesday and start in on it, but I've got a bunch of stuff going on and I'm still trying to decompress from Camp Trans and I didn't really sleep last night, for reasons I don't think I'm supposed to publicly blog about. They're pretty mundane though.

Anyway, yeah! New fiction about heady desire love stuff. I lump Amy Bloom in with Jeanette Winterson theoretically because they both write about sex/love desire so much, even though maybe it's just because they're both big lezzies. Hey speaking of which, what's happenin, Jeanette Winterson? Are you a young adult author like everybody else now? Visola liked Tanglewreck but I'm having trouble getting interested.

[/boring list of lady author names]

ct07

2007-08-03T00:19:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving for Camp Trans in a few hours. That's exciting. After CT last year- which was the first time I'd ever gone- I kept promising to process online all the stuff I'd been through and figured out and experienced, but I never did. There was too much.

There's this thing- well, okay, background. There's this other thing (and forgive me if you've read about this a bahundred times in a bahundred places already) called the Michigan Women's Music Festival that's been going on since the early seventies, I think? Since the heyday of Janice Raymond's the Transsexual Empire, the pinnacle of second-wave feminism's transphobia and, incidentally, a work so thoroughly discredited that it doesn't even have a descriptive blurb synopsis on Amazon. Basically, her thesis is, transsexual women are men! Invented by science! To undermine the women's movement! Which, y'know, is problematic, but I don't think anybody really listens to her any more.

The problem is, this music festival is the largest women-only space in the country, or the world, or whatever, and is this hugely (historically, at least) bit of lesbian ... I don't want to say herstory, but y'know. They might. They spell woman with a y. Which is fine, just- jesus, never mind about that. The point is that they ae an enormously important cultural touchstone in dyke culture, and about fifteen years ago they booted a trans womans (whose name I forget whether I'm allowed to drop, so I won't) for being trans, and since then have had a "womyn-born-womyn" policy that says, trans women are not women.

Basically CT has this winding history since then that involves Les Feinberg, Riki Ann Wilchins, strap-on.org, and a bunch of other folks. The point is just that it started out as a protest against Michfest's no trans women policy. Dig?

Anyway, okay, whatever. Firstly, fuck Michfest: it's for rich women who have jobs the let 'em have two weeks off in the middle of the summer to go topless in the woods; it's for women who can afford not to work for two weeks; it's for women who can afford the gas or bus or plane tickets to get to Michigan from wherever they are; it's for women who like lesbian music; it's for women who aren't trans; and it claims to be an inclusive space. Lame. Bouge. I'm not invested in protesting Michfest at this point; I kinda don't care about their policy, except in the 'oh yeah, that sure is fucked up' kinda of half-appalled half-interest I have whenever I read about an organization with a fucked up agenda toward trans women.

What I'm invested in with Camp Trans is the empowering space it makes for trans women, regardless of what the protestual context is. (Which is funny- that's what Michfest is supposed to be for all women.) Lina said it better than I think anybody else ever has, as far as I'm concerned; other folks with similar shit where you're not inside THEIR heads with THEIR neuroses, getting perspective on your own shit. All these beautiful queers.

I book music: I'm playing. So are: DJ CPI, MC Redorix, Nervous But Excited, Gage, Kristin Bell Murray, Vanessa Marie Spitzer, Athens Boys' Choir, Miss the Maudlin Geek, Tough Tough Skin, and the Degenerettes. (I'd make those links but I just got all sleepy. Google 'em.) Also, fuckin Lezzies on X are probably going to come spin a set on Friday, if we can get ahold of a pair of CD players and a mixer. I bet we can.

In case that wasn't explicit: That's seven solo performers and two bands, out of eleven acts total, who are trans. And the majority of THOSE, I am stoked to report, are trans women. Not that I have anything against trans men, just that my experience has always been that, in so-called trans-positive spaces, trans men are visibly the majority. (Which, interestingly, is the opposite of how trans folks are portrayed by the media; probably because it's harder to make a trans man look like a freaky crazy- Julia Serrano talks a lot about this in her book Whipping Girl, which we carry at my store, by the way. I think it's her most important contribution, the whole scapegoating of femininity thesis.) One of my favorite things about Camp Trans is the fact that it started as a protest specifically for trans women's rights, not trans rights in general, which in a way acknowledges that trans women and trans men have a lot of issues in common and a lot of issues ... not.

Which is a conversation nobody seems interested in having, I guess because it's hard and I guess because it cracks the unified front we like to put up. Hi, problem that comes up every couple years in feminism!

Anyway, whatever. My point is just that- I know I keep using the word "empowering," but I can't think of another one. For three months after last year's CT, I was high on the possibility of my own life. Thank God for radical queers, is my point.

Well, also: see you in two weeks. They don't have internets in the woods.

my impression of David Foster Wallace

2007-08-01T22:52:00.000-07:00

Hey, look at me! I'm David Foster Wallace! Everything I write is absolutely fucking unreadable!

protest + regular test

2007-08-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

A couple things happened. Firstly, we went to the silent protest in San Francisco a couple mornings ago, to support a trans woman named Alexis Giraldo, who's suing the California department of corrections for holing her- a woman- into a men's prison, where she was assaulted. The nice thing about the protest was that everybody was supposed to wear red to show their support- but since it was a bunch of activists whose clothes are all black, everybody was wearing red & black: it looked like a white stripes video shoot! Nice.

Also, I mean, I guess red & black are the Official Colors of Anarchy, but whatever. White stripes. The only thing about the white stripes that's better than the doorbell song is that they still only dress in a couple colors.

Anyway, after that, Micah came with me for my driver's test, which I passed this time. That's nice, because I'm driving to Michigan on Friday. The test was terrifying and I borrowed Isla's car, which doesn't have power steering, so I think I got points taken off for turning smoothness, but whatever. I passed. (It's weird to use the word "pass" in a context other than, like, "passing for one gender or the other," but also really, really nice.) I get a license in the mail in a month and a half, and then I bring it back and say "please fix this goddam wrong name and sex marker."

wwn

2007-07-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

Last night, Josh told me that the Weekly World News is closing down. Turns out this is true. So: Punk Planet, Jane, Weekly World News- it's like the magazine industry is going in reverse order of my life and shutting down my favorite magazines. Next are the guitar magazines I swallowed whole when I was like fourteen, and then, finally, Highlights, the logo of which makes me feel nostalgic and weirdly icky for making jokes.

Anyway the Weekly World News! I bought that thing every week for like six years. I was mainly interested in rifling immediately through to see whether there were any fake "sex change" stories, even though I hadn't really even owned up to that to myself. And nothing really seemed amiss with my obsession, becuse it was the Late Eighties and Early Nineties: When Everything Was Stupid and Weird. I learned a lot about bad, obvious jokes from Dear Dottie; the crossword puzzle was enormous and almost frustratingly easy; once time, I convinced my brother and two cousins to act out three of the stories in front of my dad's sweet camcorder as an excuse to, well, y'know. Not to be a one-trick genius, but the real impetus there was to perform the article about the husband and wife who both had "sex changes" and remained husband and wife. Gross. I don't even remember what the other skits were about.

Anyway, all I'm saying is: I'll miss you, Weekly World News. You gave my confused gender identity a confusing, unhealthy outlet, and helped me understand Flaming Lips' visual aesthetic back before they became geniuses.

(Here's a tangent for you: I was obsessed with the Flaming Lips back then. Y'know, they grew up became all famous pop geniuses and stuff, but back when they were singing about unconsciously screamin, and turning on all the distortion pedals for half an hour just to see what would happen, I was in love with them. Their aesthetic was: 'whatever, let's just put this stuff down. Let's stretch this picture, let's make this thing pink. We are on acid.' It took me a long time to understand that this is annoying. At this point in my life, I have a nostalgic affection toward what they used to do, but I can't stand the whole accomplished songwriter/musician thing they've got going on now. You know? It just seems pretentious and insufferable and unexciting. I'm glad they're successful, I'm just bored.

My point is, the Weekly World News never got boring like that.)

(Actually, it probably did. I stopped reading it a long time ago.)

Ralph Ellison

2007-07-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

I love that, since Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison just came out, everybody's posting articles online about ol Ralph. (I especially like that this one's called "One Hit Wonder," like Ralph Ellison's the goddam Toadies.)

I'm not sure why I've been so attracted to Ralph Ellison for so long- it's not like I've read and re-read his work, and it's not like I'm likely to read that whole biography; I'll probably get it from the library, be bored in a couple days, convince myself that I'm gonna read it, hang onto it for a couple months and then have hella* late fees. I remember that Invisible Man was super formative for me like my senior year in high school, the way the prose went from pinpoint grit to fevery magic realism and back; it felt like Sonic Youth, but less, I don't know, fun? Playful? Willing to let you in? And I loved the hell out of Flying Home, which I sort of suspect was a cash-in posthumous collection of stuff he'd rather not have seen collected, just because nobody ever talks about it.

But his politics- basically 1. I hate everything and 2. Black people's problems are black people's fault and 3. I'm a fuckin genius, love me- are kind of problematic. And not even stuff that I relate to much any more, although there was a point where points one and three resonated pretty hard for me. I guess I'm just fascinated by what a conflicted, headstrong jerk he could be? Plus I love the image of him yelling at Amiri Baraka. (I almost typed "Barak Obama." Different guy.)

Just like- Ralph Ellison was brilliant, and wrote brilliantly, and he was a total dick. And I'm fascinated by the way those intersect and interact- basic, obvious stuff to be fascinated by, I know, but I'm still excited that I've been able to read about it lately. It's nice when there's a cultural moment that intersects with stuff I like- now I am ready for people to discover they were dicks for ignoring Garbage so hard for so long. Maybe Arnold Rampersad will write a biography of Shirley Manson.

*or: hecka

the police

2007-07-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

Hey, the Chicago police raided and shut down a party at a private art gallery. The party was for literature.

Hey, unrelatedly, I live with somebody who is an organizer with a group called Copwatch, they do pretty good work.

Actually unrelatedly, my band has a name. We're called Angela Chase. We're on myspace.

rich popes

2007-07-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

I think the most magical thing about Harry Potter VII at midnight was the look of appalled disappointment in people's faces when I told them that it was forty dollars.

I predict that someone will die.

2007-07-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

I'm not even allowed to hang out in the office, drink beer and read 'em.

2007-07-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

New York Magazine did a Fashion Shoot with people from my old bookstore. I think it's funny that Ms. Bass, the owner, is there on the front page but not on the inside, and I think it's probably because they asked her questions and she answered ridiculously or stupidly, or else just moaned like a zombie. Or, more likely, they asked her a question about books and she answered in a manner that was so transparently clueless-while-trying-to-sound-clued-in that they couldn't even use it.

I'm mostly excited that Jenny McKibben was in it, though. I kind of always wanted to be her: she looks super put together every day in a way that doesn't feel pretentious, just badass, plus she's very very nice. Also sometimes she is hung over. I kinda miss wishing I had her clothes.

And of course, nobody I'm very tight with is in the thing, because we are all too attractive for mass media.

Shelley Jackson

2007-07-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

This is from Shelley Jackson's Half Life:

But hate, like love, is very hard to squash. It's knocking in the coffin and embarrassing the mourners. It's sprouting hair, hawking loogies, chewing with its mouth open, farting, grinning. It's life: untoward, unseemly, but way cooler than easeful death, that sap. Who decorously taps his toe behind "Nora, you have self-esteem issues," and "Nora, so much rage," and ...

Um, it gets a little abstract out of context after that. I love her. It's frustrating though: I've been getting super excited about books, and then losing interest in them halfway through VERY CONSISTENTLY lately. It happened with the new Junot Diaz, it happened with the serious sociological study on punk girls- it even happened with Whipping Girl for a while, even though the whole time I was reading it I was like "as frustrating as this can be, I'm so glad it's in the world."

I'm not sure what the losing interest thing is about, but whatever. It's fine. As long as I remember to lose interest in library books instead of ten dollar books, everything works out.

n/a

2007-07-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

Blogs are weird. If you haven't looked at this thing in the last two hours, this will be strage to read first, but here is what happened: I went to the driving test, didn't get arrested on my way there, waited for an hour, was told that I had a brake light out, and didn't get to take the test. I drove home aggressively and it was nice when, again, I wasn't arrested.

The music I was listening to when I was driving aggressively was Blondie, which wasn't really appropriate.

Oh and also there was a scramble right before I left because I couldn't find the registration or insurance in Alex's truck, so I had to bum another car- from a different Alex- in order to get there at all. Therefore and in conclusion, fuck the DMV.

drag

2007-07-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm up early and dressed like a boy this morning so that I can go into the DMV and get a driver's license. It's pretty awkward, because "dressed like a boy" for me means "not wearing any bright sparkly eyeshadow or visible dresses or slips." I might pull my hair up into a hat, but honestly that's more for undercover spy effect than anything valid and important. Also I think my sports bra- which doesn't even squish my tits much- is in the washing machine, and I'm not invested in binding, so it is the most half-assed drag you're ever gonna see. Like, when I actually DO intentionally drag boy, there's usually lots of eyeliner. I feel like today I'm dragging hoodie/lazy, which isn't really a gender identity.

I mean, maybe it's somebody's. If hoodie/lazy is your gender identity, I totally support that.

Anyway, I completely forgot to make arrangements for somebody to come with me to the DMV, which means I think I'm going to drive Alex's truck over there by myself without an escort, which is illegal. Whatever though. I grew up middle class in New Jersey, I drove a car everywhere every day for something like eight years. The only reason I don't have a license now is that, when I was in New York, I was so invested in saying "Car? Sneer. I ride a bike" that I let mine expire. And also, everybody I knew who had a car in New York made it sound like such a giant pain that it wasn't worth it. So I carried a non-driver ID as a statement of protest against America or the oil companies or whatever.

Anyway, wish me luck! If I get a license, it will have the wrong name and gender on it. But getting a wrong license is the first step in the process of getting a license with the right name and gender on it, as far as I can tell. I don't know, I'm pretty much making this trans stuff up as I go along.

pictures

2007-07-14T00:59:00.000-07:00

Lost's artwork (which is largely at sickness and filth) is my favorite, even more so than Julie Verhoeven. (Careful, that link has loud music that you can't turn off.) I have to make a band first, but then I think I am going to solely use her stuff for band art like album covers and flyers. Also, I am excited to see her in Michigan in a month- aside from a couple times when I had just moved to the bay and was super disoriented, I haven't really seen her since she crashed on my floor in New York for a couple of nights, and then brought grapes to Strictly Platonic practices. ("Every fourth one is kind of weird, but they're mostly good.")

If you do the "view image" thing on these pictures, you can see 'em unsquished.

my relationship with four magazines

2007-07-12T00:49:00.000-07:00

Also, Punk Planet went under, which is stupid because they're the only magazine that's not Bitch that I care about at all. I guess the fact that there is no possible way to understand the magazine distribution system, much less how anybody makes any money from it, is finally catching up with reality, though: now Jane has also gone under. That's a bummer 'cause Jane is the stupid magazine I read if I am on an airplane trip and I realize that all I've brought to read is Dense Boring Literature. Maybe I can just start reading Us Weekly in those situations- isn't it only like two dollars?

I bet Maximumrocknroll is the cockroach of the magazine industry and will outlive even National Geographic.

i am angry at the world

2007-07-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

I decided that maybe I'm going to be angry at the world. As a coping mechanism. Like not mad at my friends, or most of the folks I interact with, but just at y'know the whole stupid society I have to swim around in all the time.

I told Alex and she was like, oh yeah, like a sixteen-year-old!

I said, exactly! I did the thing where I bounce up onto my toes, cock a hand in the air, snap a couple times and point. Exactly! I think sixteen-year-olds are right on, to be mad at everything.

I've been having kind of a stupid time lately, because I get read as a boy sometimes. Mainly I only know because somebody refers to me as "he;" it's been a while (with one exception, I guess, when I was riding by and some ten-year-old kid on a bench at a bus stop was like Yo that is a TRANS (pause) VESTITE, which was stupid, and to which I retorted confidently "OH YEAH?" and kept riding) since anybody really felt like doing the transphobic violence harassment thing. Which is nice. But it happened a few times in the last couple weeks, starting almost exactly at the end of Gay Hell San Francisco Pride.

When I'm being read as a boy, I get shy and start dressing androgynously, which makes people read me as a boy more. Which makes sense, right? The reality of the situation is that I had boy puberty, got tall and grew kind of a chin, and THEN got on estrogen. So my body's this kind of, I don't know, indeterminate thing, and sometimes people need help knowing how to read it. As in, when I wear the country singer dress, folks usually gender me right. When I wear jeans and a hoodie, it's kind of a crapshoot, unless there is accessorizing.

Anyway, that all is an aside to the point: today I wore the long librarian skirt and got gendered right all night and it made me kind of mad that I'm not in charge of how I get gendered, really, unless I want to dress all girly all the time. MAD AT THE WORLD.

It's interesting how this plays into the thing about transwomen and residual privilege. Specifically, there's this thing that happens when people who are used to being read (and used to acting) as straight white middle-class men start being read (and acting) as women: they stop having all the privilege. It's funny what some folks do with that loss of privilege, and also stupid: mostly, we hang onto it however we can. Like, lots of people in that situation will make themselves out to be trans gurus, and tell other people how to be trans. (I have done this.) Others will keep their heads down, avoid eye contact anywhere and try as hard as they can not to be noticed at all. (I have done this.) Still others will demand that they be treated with the same respect that they were treated with before they transitioned. (I have done this.) (And called it feminism.) (Which is complicated and valid.) (Even though there's theoretically a flavor of this last thing that looks like transwomen walking into women's spaces and wanting to be in charge, which is what the whole Michigan Women's Music Festival thing is about: a made-up threat of that happening. It's pretty rare and unlikely. Gross.)

But so where do we go with that? I'd been upset with being read as trans, which means getting read as male, and it was squashing me. When you can't get gendered appropriately and you're getting desperate, it becomes hard to leave the house. But I had this realization: much like generations of ethnic minorities, sexual deviants, punkers women and sixteen-year-olds, nowadays I don't have the privilege to be in charge of how I'm perceived. Or, more specifically, not to care how I'm perceived because I see faces like mine on TV, at work, on election posters, book covers, and wherever I go.

Basically, nobody really knows what a transwoman's face looks like, or even really that they're real, so I get lumped either into male or female, depending on the whims of goddam fate. Which is stupid. So the reality- I had boy puberty, I looked and acted like a boy for a long time, and now I am working on not looking that way any more, but it is my experience and it's written all over my body- gets erased. Laid out like that, it's pretty simple, but in practice, I'm not interested in educating everybody who gets my pronouns wrong. So where do I go?

Toward anger! A valid, constantly simmering anger at everyone and everything that hasn't proven him-, her- or it-self to be a badass ally to transwomen. Or at least to me. It's not about flipping out all the time, and it's not about yelling at people who haven't done anything; it's just about recognizing the fact that the place and time I live in is pretty stupid when it comes to just about everybody I know. It's also about not being afraid of cultural inertia backlash if I say something about it, and the realization that I'd rather get beat up & killed for being trans (which happens) than hide out in my house. And also just keeping my head up: without anger, again, it's easy to get squashed. I'd love to be a big hippie and come from a place of love, but. Y'know. Eh.

Oh, hey, speaking of being mad and flipping out, I've got a date on Saturday to play punk rock with a drummer I found on craigslist. My ad: "queer female drummer wanted."

Why I Need Another Blog

2007-07-08T23:33:00.000-07:00

I've had a livejournal for something like six years- well, kinda multiple livejournals: one (here: illscientist.livejournal.com) where I was like, I am a boy! I work at an insurance company, so instead of doing work, I'm going to make up and post fake interviews with bands I don't like. And then another (here: all_summer.livejournal.com) that was like, this is a top secret space for me to process the shit out of all these feelings I have about gender, except some top secret people are allowed to read it. Then, even later, after talking about that stuff became mundane and less scary, and also I figured out that the problem the whole time was that I was a girl, I got bored with both of those livejournals. I squished 'em together to make my last current livejournal (here: jnnogen.livejournal.com), which I've been using pretty consistently for, I don't know, three or four years?

And before that, oh man, back in the hazy fogs of the days when I was communicating VERY SERIOUS FEELINGS across the internet without a livejournal, I had a geocities website- which has been taken down, i think, or I'd link it- that I coded all by hand and on which I had my drunkest, weepiest, most dramatic blog of all. That one was nice, it was all, no! no! no! here is a litany of reasons why I can't possibly be a transsexual!

Adorable.

Anyway, you know the stereotype about livejournal being for fourteen-year-olds? I've always felt like that was pretty unfair, kind of like the stereotype that fourteen-year-olds are all paralyzingly immature. But I guess it's seeped into my consciousness after all, because I realized that lately all I'd been using livejournal for was, like, pretending I'd gotten a copy of the new Harry Potter book ahead of time so I could make dumb stuff up, or moping inarticulately about feelings. Or cussing. All of which is important and valid, it's just like, I do this thing where I validate the amount of time I spend looking at a computer- which is a lot- by calling it trans activism, e.g. by saying "as an out transwoman on the internet, making stupid jokes and cussing shows that transsexual women can make stupid jokes and cuss on the internet just like anybody. It contradicts oppressive media stereotyping and is punk rock!" Which, y'know, there's no good argument against that. It's pretty convenient! It's just that, also, there's lots of pointless self-indulgence going on.

Livejournal feels stale. It's this paradigm that I'm so used to, it doesn't feel productive to work in it any more. Y'know? I used to have a date who said she wanted a love so intense that she didn't even see the person any more: they'd disappeared, become effortless internalized, whatever. I never got it. I always felt like, when you stop seeing somebody and love becomes automatic, then isn't it kind of pretty much gone? Not that I am or ever was in love with livejournal; it just feels so comfortable to call Dumbledore a fag to at least a hundred and eighty people over there, which is weird and not productive. Boring. Rote? Sure, whatever.

I come from a weird time, because I was in college from 1997 to 2002. When I got there, man, I knew about the internet, and folks knew of the internet, but it was a year or two before everybody had an e-mail address, and, what, three or four before everybody was on Friendster. Y'know. The only reason I knew anything about the internet was because I was transsexual and didn't want to own up to it and the anonymity of this computer thing I'd heard about was super appealing: I knew that if I could just get online by myself I'd find a supportive community and everything would be brilliant. (What I found was a community of people masturbating furiously, but I'll tell you my coming out story later.)

The point of that whole thing is just about generations: I'm from the very tail end of the last generation to exist before the internet was pervasive. I keep typing out examples of how it used to be (I used to have to listen to the radio for new music! Or watch MTV!), but that's so boring and so friggin old lady. I'm just trying to paint a context for why I'm starting a new goddam blog, but my life is so complicated and fascinating and narrativized that it's hard.

It's just this: I'm internetty enough to be on myspace, but old-timey enough to feel self-conscious about it. I'm book enough that I have to rationalize it: well, on myspace, I'm a band, so I'm kinda forwarding my music by having a million friends there. Like how I was saying I justify livejournaling by calling it activism? Whatever. I think the whole point I'm getting to is just this: starting a blogger blog, the project here is just to have something on the internet that's not absolutely humiliating, or pointlessly (unless "hilarious" is a point, which it is- same for "obnoxious") vulgar, or whatever. A grownup thing! It's funny, I had a conversation with somebody today about getting a dog together, planning the logistics of it and stuff. Super lezzie, 'cause it's way in the future, but I think I might be turning into a grownup and losing interest in being a messy fuckup, too.

Nah, that's not true. I did make it to the second-to-last paragraph without really cussing, though.