How warm was the sun?
But winter wasn’t over, so
Tulips will shiver.
Fox Cities Book Festival: April 17 – 24
The Fox Cities Book Festival started in earnest yesterday and I saw one author right out of the gate: James Loewen, otherwise famous for Lies My Teacher Told Me, but who spoke yesterday about sundown towns. And he was amazing. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, please do.
Otherwise, there are a ton of other readings and authors and contests and events and all sorts of things. The very last event is with my colleague David McGlynn who will be talking about his memoir A Door in the Ocean – which didn’t start out a memoir – and how it got that way.
It’s pretty cool. Go see stuff.
Happy Beckett’s Birthday!
April 13th was his birthday, and somehow, I am not surprised he was born on the 13th too. 
from his novel Molloy – by Samuel Beckett. This is one of my very favorite sections.
“I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else …” (found here)
Five Questions With… Zach Wahls
I was lucky enough to meet Zach Wahls at a recent fundraiser and awards gala for Fair Wisconsin. He gave such an amazing talk and was such a cool guy that I couldn’t help but ask him a few things.
(And how can you not love the adorable cover of his book? It’s good, too. )
1) You are sometimes referred to as an “ally” of the larger LGBTQ communities but I don’t think you see yourself that way. Can you talk a little about what it means for you to be called an ally as opposed to being a community member?
I’m most often referred to as a “straight ally” by both the public and members of the LGBTQ community. And that’s usually fine, I don’t correct people or feel that it’s necessary for me to do so. But personally, I don’t feel as though I’m truly an “ally” because, in my mind, I’m a member of the LGBTQ community even though I’m not, personally, LGBTQ-identified. I know that the last thing any of us want to do is add another letter to the acronym, but the reality is that I do feel as though I’m a member of the community. Like LGBTQ people, I was born into this community. Like LGBTQ people, I have felt the shame and humiliation of being in the closet. Like LGBTQ people, I am regularly stigmatized by those who oppose LGBTQ rights as inferior, defective and sinful. The parallels are not perfect, of course, but as a community, we need to figure out a way to create spaces and community for those of us who have grown up with queer parents. So, to be clear, it’s not that I’m LGBTQ-identified, but that I feel the LGBTQ community includes its children, and that, to the extent that that’s true, kids like me are a part of the community. Continue reading “Five Questions With… Zach Wahls”
Pen for Hire
Hey, editor dudes, if you actually want to improve these statistics, I’m available to write with a byline.
Lemme know.
New(ish) Fausto Sterling Book
Somehow, I missed Anne Fausto Sterling’s newest book, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World, which sounds like a more accessible but still scientific take on the science of gender. Her Sexing the Body is, in my opinion, without peer.
Just recently she spoke at Tufts on early childhood gender development:
Using data from lower middle class families in Rhode Island, Fausto-Sterling has discovered that parents’ differential treatment towards male and female infants tends to result in gendered behaviors.
She played four videos where mothers played with their children, rewarding them for certain behavior more than others. For example, the mothers’ tendency to coddle girls and reward fine motor behavior contrasts with their focus on activity-related attention to boys, she said.
“Infants experience gender from before birth and via the minutiae of everyday care, but they also bring their own individually differentiated physiological systems to the table,” Fausto-Sterling said. “Infants assimilate the world.”
Infants experience gender from before birth. Not surprising, but I’m glad someone said it.
Queer Little Poem
I happened upon this little poem the other day & it struck me as so spare and so shocked with emotion.
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder
by A. E. Housman
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
And went with half my life about my ways.
It is so spare and yet gets at that thing of love, no?
Hansberry’s Truth
“Eventually it comes to you,” observes Lorraine Hansberry, “the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
– quoted in Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins
Lynda Barry Talk
Lynda Barry spoke at a recent Lawrence University convocation, & it was one of the best I’ve seen. This is a totally worthwhile hour whether you’re an artist, a fan of Barry’s, or neither.
I’m not sure how she became who she is, but she’s a miracle as far as I’m concerned.
CFP: TSQ
CALL FOR PAPERS: TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.4, “Trans* Cultural Production”, deadline: April 15, 2013
The arts have served as a cultural arena for imagining, creating, and proliferating transgender experiences and communities around the world. As part of its inaugural year TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly will feature a special issue examining trans* cultural production in art, film, dance, design, architecture, literature, and music. We seek papers that critically analyze the current state, history, and significance of these expressive forms as they address, depict, and are mobilized by trans* subjects broadly defined, including people whose gender/sex expression is not informed primarily by contemporary Western constructions and conventions. The issue will feature trans* makers and communities alongside essays exploring cultural production by non-trans* makers as such production impacts trans* lives, trans* politics, and/or trans* theory. We invite submissions exploring the repercussions and resonances of trans* representation in non-trans* contexts as well as work developing trans* interpretations of creative work not originally intended to engage specifically trans* people or concerns.
Rather than a survey of best practices or major figures, the issue aims to offer a forum to examine the wider issues attending to the representation of trans* in the arts and to demonstrate the value of trans* as a heuristic lens for interpreting creative work more generally. While the focus of the issue is scholarly research, we also hope to include a small selection of shorter, less formal essays that engage with critical issues in trans* cultural production from curatorial, marketing, and practitioner perspectives. Continue reading “CFP: TSQ”