Craigslist gay ersatz
But what is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure in a single second?
~ C. Baudelaire
The Anti-Social Turn
No Future, Edelman’s magnum opus of gender non-conforming negativity, offers a series of crucial lessons for baedlings; that is, for those of us whose queerness means the refusal of society and not any negotiation with or within it. In our reading and use—or abuse—of Edelman’s singular work, we have no choice but to take him to task for his academic form, his position within institutionalized queer theory, and the separation between his theory and practice. His project fails in that it locates queer negativity within various cultural productions—literature, film—and yet never works to unveil this negation in the context of lived revolt or of active struggle against the society he purports to oppose.
In exploring No Future, we persist on expropriating it from the ivory tower of theory and using it as a tool for our life projects. Against the safe interpretations offered by the academy and its theorists, we begin on an elaboration of queer negativity that
Rueful Proximities: Lorine Niedecker, Lgbtq+ Affection, and Lyric Drag
Lorine is not Bette nor Billie nor Marlene nor Lena nor Joan nor Judy. But, she is a homosexual icon. Niedecker's iconicity stems from the distinctiveness of her habitus and approach — such that she is situated, in the realm of poetry, alongside Dickinson, Whitman, Stein, O'Hara, Angelou, and Plath.1 From her spare hermitage along the Rock River — for so many years just herself, books, and birdsong, tethered to the art nature by flood-perfumed letters — issued disconcertingly original verse that combines the top-of-head-taking originality of Dickinson, Bashō's profound whimsy and exquisite concision,the breath-blown forms of Objectivism, and a capricious application of Marx. To explain her in such terms condenses Niedecker to the "largely sentimental image" that Douglas Crase rightly argues has occluded our view of her true complexity.2 Niedecker, however, is happy to occupy in such essentializing characterizations herself: in "If I were a bird" she provides a series of portraits in miniature,
Columns
MRR # &#;¢ April
No More Bad Future
Ruthless criticism of all that exists! Nothing is immortal and the future is the only real thing! I was not going to eulogise. I called Brace from a busted payphone in the lobby of a hostel in the Mission in to hand over him some punk post. I apologetically jammed a copy of my zine into the box which he left at the compound and here we are. Printing my full real specify and the address of every home I had in a magazine that went out thousands of absolute losers around the world has had its consequences.
Too many people were all too patient with me as I learnt to write past painfully overwrought puns and local vendettas. Intrepid legends wrote to me of ancient lost bands, men asked me personal things about my life that they own read in here at gigs wherever I went. Still perform. Incarcerated people sent me their drawings and dreams. The most British thing about me is my abiding distaste for Americans but I met some really real real ones living the compound in while researching counter-institutions, th
A THROW OF THE DICE
When we were first married, he went out and bought a ball gag. It wasn’t something I asked him to act. He wasn’t a elevated man but I expect he was reasonably robust. He had a construction job, at the period. It was the sort of work he claimed to prefer.
We were living in San Francisco and through some act of god managed to detect an apartment we could afford in an occasionally fancy neighborhood. It was just two rooms with a kitchen, the bathroom memorable for its coordinating sink, tub, toilet, and floor-to-ceiling tile, all a click shy of Pepto-Bismol. Outside, in the mornings and at dusk, an oddly shaped vehicle I learned to call the Google Bus rolled darkly by.
He was up at five, cycling into the East Bay. Around seven, the garage door screwed into the ceiling that was also the floor beneath our bed (a mattress) went into move. It was a braying sound, accompanied by copious vibration. During this process, I envisioned what I believed to be the exact fashion in which the building would implode during an earthquake. I saw myself mangled in rubble. I lay, intac