Style, more
than species, is what distinguishes the howl of the wolves saluting the moon
from the songs of the neighborhood dogs rising over fences and alleyways.
~Valerie Vogrin
Aesthetic form is a spellbinding (or not) attempt to transmit and circulate affect, without
which not much happens at all.
~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg
I am THRILLED to announce today that we have finally published ON STYLE: AN ATELIER, edited by myself and Anna Klosowska, with the assistance of Mon. Sparkles Joy [who may be the first Papillon to be listed as an assistant editor on an academic book, but he IS an expert on fashion, after all: Ask Mon. Sparkles Joy]. The volume comprises essays presented on two linked panels that addressed the intersections between scholarship and style, co-organized by Anne Clark Bartlett and myself, at the 2010 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan and the first meeting of the BABEL Working Group in Austin, Texas in 2010. Contributors include: Valerie Allen, Gila Aloni, Kathleen Biddick, Ruth Evans, Jessica Roberts Frazier, Anna Klosowska, Christine Neufeld, Michael Snediker, and Valerie Vogrin.
PLEASE REMEMBER that all punctum books are open-access and free to download [and are also available in handsome print editions], and that open access is NEVER EVER NEVER free. So much uncompensated time and labor goes into each punctum volume, and I urge you to understand that open-access initiatives cannot and will not thrive unless all of us recognize our responsibility to help make that the case. When you go to download the book there is a pop-up window that asks you to consider making a donation to the press. PLEASE DO. Do not send me flowers or chocolates or diamonds for the holidays, although I love getting those from all of you each year. Instead, please help me make my dreams come true by donating something, no matter how small, to punctum books.
I will share with everyone here my short Preface to the book, and also Anna Klosowska's delicious "Reader's Guide":
On Style: A Prefatory Note
Scholarship in medieval studies of the past 20 or so years has offered some provocative experiments in, and elegant exempla of, style. Medievalists such as Anne Clark Bartlett, Kathleen Biddick, Catherine Brown, Brantley Bryant, Michael Camille, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, James Earl, L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Roberta Frank, Amy Hollywood, Cary Howie, C. Stephen Jaeger, Eileen Joy, Anna Kłosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Peggy McCracken, Paul Strohm, David Wallace, and Paul Zumthor, among others, have blended the conventions of academic writing with those of fiction, drama, memoir, comedy, polemic, and lyricism, and/or have developed what some would describe as elegant, and arresting (and in some cases, deliciously difficult) prose styles. As these registers merge, they can produce what has been called a queer historiographical encounter (or in queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman’s terms, “an erotohistoriography”), a “poetics of intensification,” and even a “new aestheticism.” The work of some of these scholars has also opened up debates (some rancorous) that often install what the editors of this volume feel are false binaries between form and content, feeling and thinking, affect and rigor, poetry and history, attachment and critical distance, enjoyment and discipline, style and substance.
In his essay, “The Application of Thought to Medieval Studies: The Twenty-First Century”—Exemplaria 22.1 (2010): 85–94—D. Vance Smith worries that some medieval scholars’ desire for “relevance has come at a cost of a creeping anti-intellectualism,” and in the work of certain scholars, such as Carolyn Dinshaw in her book Getting Medieval (1999), who are interested, especially, in self-reflexivity, affect, and the haptic, Smith worries further that, although Dinshaw’s work possesses scholarly “rigor,” its style and method is ultimately “inimitable” (because a “scrupulous adherence” to its call for the importance of incommensurability would render imitation impossible, as if that would be the point of following in Dinshaw’s footsteps, anyway). What Smith is really concerned about, it appears (from this essay, anyway) is that “the danger of valuing affect so highly is that doing so attributes to it an epistemological and even ontological difference so radical as to exclude other categories of representation—that is, to deny these other categories the difference necessary to their work of identification and representation.” And further, “the installment of affect as an historiographical mode” might even be “insidious,” a product, ultimately, of our own “self-interest” and “narcissism.” But who says this is exactly the case—that affect’s epistemological and ontological difference is so “radical” that it excludes other categories of representation? Certainly not Dinshaw, nor, really, any of us who work on affect, the haptic, queer historiographical modes, etc. And regardless, as Anna Kłosowska writes in her contribution to this volume,
The question of style, as it applies to medieval studies, is precisely the overcoming of that dichotomy between Nature and Man: a third element. And when the critique proceeds through the denunciation of the inimitability of someone’s style, as if it were the third sex, ungenerative, queer, sterile, sodomitic, lesbian, etc., the critic unconsciously puts his finger on exactly what style is; but that critic is mistaken about the style’s supposedly non-generative powers. In fact, style, neither fact nor theory but facilitating the transition between the two, is . . . the generative principle itself.Ultimately, the question of style—and isn’t affect itself a style, a mode, or mood, a way of inhabiting and moving, artfully and creatively, through the world, of sensing one’s, or anyone’s, place at any given moment in a way that helps us to thrive (and we’re to be on our guard against this)?—asks us to consider the ways in which, as much as one might want to insist otherwise, everything is hopelessly (and yet somehow also marvellously) entangled: self and Other, sense and articulation, form and content, personal self and scholarly self, observer and observed, past and present, and so on.
What, then, can be said about the ‘style’ of academic discourse at the present time, especially in relation to historical method, theory, and reading literary and historical texts, especially within premodern studies? Is style merely supplemental to scholarly (so-called) substance? As scholars, are we subjects of style? And what is the relationship between style and theory? Is style an object, a method, or something else? These were the questions that guided two conference sessions initially instigated by Anne Clark Bartlett and organized by the BABEL Working Group in 2010 (in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Austin, Texas), out of which this volume was developed.
On Style: An Atelier gathers together medievalists and early modernists, as well as a poet and a novelist, in order to offer ruminations upon style in scholarship and theoretical writing (with exempla culled from Roland Barthes, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Bracha Ettinger, Charles Fourier, L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Heidegger, Lacan, Ignatius of Loyola, and the Marquis de Sade, among others), as well as upon various trajectories of fashionable representation and self-representation in literature, sculpture, psychoanalysis, philosophy, religious history, rhetoric, and global politics. As you are reading this volume and dwelling in its atelier, please remember to wear your tenses lightly and to always, always, be fierce.
Eileen A. Joy
Washington, DC
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Style
A Reader’s Guide
Anna Kłosowska
When
George-Louis de Buffon, naturalist and mathematician—calculus, probablility,
Buffon’s needle—devoted to style his acceptance lecture at French Academy
(1753), he said that “well-written works are the only ones that will be passed
on to posterity. . . . small objects [such as] knowledge, facts and discoveries
are easily taken up, transported, and even gain from being put together by more
nimble hands. These things are outside of man, the style is the man himself.”[1]
In the coda to this volume, Valerie Vogrin reminds us that Victor Hugo, in his Function of Beauty, fulminates against
small bourgeois minds that relegate style to the background: “Style is ideas.
Ideas are style. Try to tear away the word: it’s the idea that you lose. . . . Style
is the essence of a subject, constantly called to the surface.”[2]
It seemed to us that the question of style, cognate as it is to the question of
the role of the humanities, needs to be asked about theory in medieval studies.
In this collection, style is instantiated (we have assembled a breathtaking
cast) as well as thematized and theorized. Christine Neufeld writes in the
conclusion to her essay in this volume: “Perceiving this aesthetic relation to
the past does not free us from a sense of accountability to the delicate,
tattered fabric of history that both touches us and exceeds our grasp.” In
other words, we study style in this collection because it instantiates and
theorizes the relation we have to the past, our subject. These are (again, via
Neufeld), “the issues the Style project represents for medieval scholars: how
to contend with the ‘immaterial’ intensities of our scholarship, the effects
and affects of being touched by the past.” We wanted the volume that resulted
from our collaboration to be as stylish as it is functional: our introduction
offers a map of the contributions as well as wardrobe suggestions. But—to cadge
from Hugo again—each author has “a way of writing that one has alone, a fold
that imperiously marks all writing, one’s own way of touching and handling an
idea.”[3]
So, reading the introduction is a bit like reading the label on the pint of
gelato.
Valerie Allen, in “Without Style,” focuses on the
definition of style as an arrangement and, especially, as “an ethical
disposition effected by that arrangement.” She maps “formative turns” in the
history of the concept of style: the opposition between Plato (philosophy) and
the Sophists (rhetoric) that privileges the former, the sixteenth-century splitting
of the five canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory,
delivery) into two, philosophy (invention, arrangement) and rhetoric (style and
delivery, “shorn of content”), a model associated with French humanist Peter
Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée), and finally the logical turn, both in positivist philosophy
and mathematical logics, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Allen
quickly shows that this last turn, privileging rigorous notation over always
indeterminate language, provoked a correction in the guise of pragmatics, with
J.L. Austin showing that “ordinary words” have complex claims on agency just as
well as the formalized meta-language does. Although the plain, non-rhetorical
style of critical writing depends on
numerous shortcuts—abstract, index, specialized lexicon, allusions, footnotes—this
does not cancel the fact that academic writing, too, is for an audience,
including “loved ones, as if our words were gifts,” as well as “the ghostly
audience of absent authors” who marked us. Like the hoarder who collects old
newspapers, in case they come in handy, we, too, aren’t quite in control of our
word-hoard; we, too, have the experience that the language speaks us. When
working on her essay, Valerie Allen wore a black georgette de soie YSL pantsuit
embroidered with stylized white cabbage roses,
reminiscent of fine Southeast Asian mid-century decors. Her perfume is Comme
des Garçons 8 88. We invite the
readers to try the same.
Ruth Evans’s essay, “Lacan’s belles-lettres,” on “the new aestheticism” in literary studies, examines
the diagnosis that the more theoretical and hermetic writing is a symptom of
exhaustion or waning of the discipline. Psychoanalysis suggests a way to
understand the relation between obscurity and beauty: “the moment when the
theoretical text presents itself as obscure, sightless, like the analyst who
remains silent in analysis, allows desire to emerge in the subject, and thus
allows for the production of something new.” She opens with a reflection on
Jacques Lacan’s litter-ature (“trashy
reading), her brilliant translation of poubellication: a suitcase word, mashup of “wastebasket”
and “publication” with hints of “embellishment” and “bellicosity”; the last two words sum up Lacan’s style. Evans
recalls Roland Barthes’s mot, “when
written, garbage doesn’t smell,” to remark that Lacan reverses or complicates
Freud’s pellucid explanation of trashy, thorny cases. In Lacan, on the
contrary, it’s the psychoanalysis that reads as trashy and thorny. If Lacan’s
style can be called beautiful, Evans says, it’s only on Lacanian terms: “beauty
and desire are intimately related and densely contradictory.” Beauty is closer
to destruction than goodness: it is mesmerizing, terrible, queasy. One might
add that Lacan’s la belle, the round
of the match that decides who proceeds to the next round, is always followed by
la consolante, the round played only
for pleasure. We can reframe the question of style as the question of pleasure,
“opposition between scientific discourse and the discourse of the Other, that
is, the unconscious,” linked to the opposition between science and the
humanities. But Evans reminds us that the opposition is false: the same desire
motivates scientific research as any other pursuit. We invite the readers to
enjoy this essay while wearing black skinny jeans, stiletto boots, a cashmere
leopard-print top, and D.S. & Durga’s Burning
Barbershop.
My own essay in the volume, “Style as Third
Element,” assimilates style to Charles Fourier’s third element. The early nineteenth-century
utopian famous for his phalanstère—a commune
big enough that every individual’s forms of desire find their complementary
individuals who want nothing more ardently than to fulfill that particular
desire (melon eaters and melon growers, and so forth)—Fourier defines the third
element (in-between, neuter, neither solid nor liquid, hybrid) as the principle
of generation. This was of interest to Barthes, who in his book Sade Fourier Loyola reflected on three structural
perpetuum mobile: Fourier’s utopia,
Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. It is Barthes’s genius not to take the
presupposed opposition between Sade and Loyola for granted: in both the algorithm
of perversions and the manual of spiritual exercises, memory lapses and errors
of execution provide a built-in openness to the system. Both Sade and Loyola
worry about having forgotten something: the more conscientious the exercitant,
the more reliably s/he produces errors that are the condition of infinitely
extended reparation: an inexhaustible source of fuel for the perpetuum machine. As does error in Sade
and Loyola, the neuter (a concrete category mistake) makes the Fourier machine
go. Compared to Sade, Loyola, and even Fourier, a medievalist has different
pleasures on her mind, and a different sort of need to exhaust her subject
animates her as she writes her book. And yet, just as Fourier, the eternal
though inept sponger who lived off his nieces, just as Sade in the narrow
confines of Bastille filling both sides of a 39-foot-long, five inches-wide
scroll with the account of a fictional world of omnipotent predators collecting
and cataloging the humiliations they inflict on their prey, and just as Loyola
anticipating that—unlike standup comics—penitents never run out of good
material, the medievalist, too, lives off others. All this is to help
illustrate how absurd it is to distinguish (never innocently, always
hierarchically) between critical theory and elegant style, between rigorous
historicism and queer studies, and so forth (I provide a handful of egregious
examples). For this occasion, readers should consider pink, my signature color,
and Dominique Ropion’s Carnal Flower.
Kathleen Biddick’s essay,
“Daniel’s Smile,” on the Old Testament prophet Daniel’s smile carved into a
medieval cathedral, queer theory, the death drive, and futurity reflects on the
“intimate vulnerability of style” and its connection to Michael Snediker’s “style
as smile,” “a mysterious, collective force as a serial trope.”[4]
From the opening autobiographical confession on the cruel orthodoxies of early
1960s teen magazines—“my heart would sink when I discovered that some accessory
of mine, beloved to me for its vibrant charm, was, in fact, deemed by the style
editors to be the latest sign of abjection”—Biddick draws a line through
Snediker and Lacan’s thinking about the master signifier. She asks whether
incarnation or psychosis are the only two options for the master signifier:
incarnation when we follow an inborn, uterus-formed “style” and psychosis when
we don’t? Do all humans have one master? Biddick leads us through Lee Edelman’s
critique of Lacan and his definition of the death drive to Snediker’s D.W.
Winnicott-based optimism. This is not a Leibizian mega-optimism, nor a naïve
future-bound optimism that Edelman denounces in his opposition to heterosexual
procreative absolutism with its emblem, the “poster child.”[5]
Rather, Snediker invents a queer optimism whose emblem is “an aesthetic person.”
And Biddick suggests that this “aesthetic person” can be understood from the
vantage point of Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial borderspaces.[6]
Ettinger, a “new Euridice,” does not have to be hemmed in by the Lacanian
choice of incarnation or psychosis. She visits these options and the
borderspaces they disallow, and yet “lives to tell the tale.” And Ettinger’s
style! As Biddick details, “Her text blossoms with what she calls ‘eroticized
aerials,’ receiving and transmitting the incipiencies of a co-poesis. Habits of
explication falter at such incipiencies.” Ettinger proposes transmissibility
(relating without relations) along acoustic and tactile synchronies, emergence
(dynamic and partial), and transubjective affects (not subjectivity). The link
Biddick establishes between Snediker’s queer optimism and medieval “exegesis,
sculpture, performance, juridical execution, and liturgical lamentation”
understands the sculpted medieval Daniel’s enigmatic smile in a new light: “the
‘tender love’ of Daniel’s young days in the palace of the chief eunuch that
somehow persisted as a trans-traumatic encounter in the stony remainder” of his
portrayal in the wall of a medieval cathedral. For this essay, one should wear kindness
and white linen, and Santa Maria Novella’s Opopanax.
More than the clothes, though, it’s the place that matters: try a deep, green,
clear, early summer night, under enormous trees that soften the sound.
Michael Snediker’s response to the preceding essays
by Allen, Evans, Kłosowska, and Biddick, “To Peach or Not to Peach,” focuses on
the ways style works—that is, on seduction. Takes one to know one. As D. Period
Gilson says in a review of Snediker’s poem “Ganymede,” Snediker’s poems are “like
the most alluring of men.”[7]
One of the most seductive poets and thinkers today,[8]
Snediker is also one of the most important readers of Emily Dickinson and Americana.
As I was reading his beautiful essay in this volume, I
was thinking about what Gilson says about that “2013 Ganymede” who accessorizes
with a Luis Vuitton clutch to go to a sandwich shop: “that mortal so utterly
beautiful Homer tells us, like the Louis bag the speaker carries here, and yet,
still mortal, not divine, like the speaker himself waffling between ordering
the turkey or meatball sub.” Here, in a nutshell, is the importance of the
style of “Ganymede”: it is a grand poem, and in Gilson’s words, “the poem
carries this intellectual weight in a sexy handbag to Subway, where it orders a
sandwich.” Yes, and yes: an intellectual poem, a poem that carries the weight
of Western philosophy and literary tradition in an LV pochette into the most mundane and sadly lit interiors. What is
style to Snediker? It is a line between the Actual and the Imaginary “where
style lies. In as many ways as you wish.” Of course, this piece must be read
when one is more than six feet tall, dressed in slim Armani and long-tipped shoes
that one can only see often on the Paris Métro,
devastatingly beautiful, and drenched in Santa Maria Novella’s Angels of Florence. Yes, drenched: given
that 5% of the proceeds benefit the restoration of Florentine monuments after
the flood of 1966. That is what, in my mind, Snediker’s style is doing: saving
the world, one eternal city at a time.
In “The Aesthetics of Style and the Politics of
Identity Formation,” Gila Aloni reflects on the blurred boundaries between past
and present. Aloni begins with Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval,[9]
and its concept of the past as a means to “build selves and communities now and
into the future,” then moves to historian Daniel Smail, whose interest centers
on the ways tradition shapes the brain,[10]
and to Aranye Fradenburg’s concept of “atemporal historicity,”[11]
to conclude with a reading of Chaucer’s “dream within a dream” in his rewriting
of Hypermenstra in the Legend of Good
Women. Although Aloni does not follow this direction, her reading reminds
us that the single most important confluence of medievalism and present
concerns, in terms of what has made medieval studies relevant, was without any
doubt queer studies and the phenomenon of Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval. And by the way, let us not forget Dinshaw’s pantsuits
at job interviews in the 1980s when women were still only expected to wear
skirts, and her black leather trousers a few decades later at the “Knights in
Black Leather” session at the MLA, or her retro-1970s geometric print polyester
shirts at Kalamazoo in the naughts. Of countless others, let us only mention
Anne Clark-Bartlett, who originally conceived the idea of this Style volume, and her “Reading it Personally:
Robert Gluck, Margery Kempe, and Language in Crisis,” which is one of the
reasons Eileen Joy wanted to be a medievalist.[12]
For those who favor a statistical approach, we recommend Steven F. Kruger’s
study of the internet as “an archive for American medievalism and pornographic
and erotic medievalism.”[13]
It is recommended that one read Aloni’s chapter
in the shadows of Issey Miyake’s studio in the apartments of the Places des
Vosges while drinking Sancerre and applying Smashbox’s “Fade to Black”
lipstick.
In “Renegade Style,” Jessica Roberts Frazier looks
at the shopping scene of The Renegado
(1624) to see how this set piece combines classical mythology and the “material
efficacy” or agency of objects (plates that self-destruct if served with
poisoned food, for example) to cast the Oriental “improper orientation towards
things” as a historical as well as geographical Othering, a trait that links ‘Oriental’
characters to the démodé past that
the West has supposedly already outgrown. A reversal in the second act shows
the return of the repressed. A catastrophe (in drama, this term simply means dénouement) in the last scene echoes the
“gruesome wardrobe malfunctions” (Dejanira’s robe, Marsias’s cries, Daphne) of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. No doubt, this
piece is best read in Versace’s Byzantium collection (Fall 2012) or Chanel
Pre-Fall 2011, or anything by Mary Katrantzou. For the conservative reader, we
recommend Faye Toogood’s (of studiotoogood) recycling of the Hermès collection’s
rejects (their Petit h initiative, a très
Lacanian label), all slathered in latex blood.
Christine Neufeld observes in “Always Accessorize:
in Defense of Scholarly Cointise,” that
style is almost always taken as provocation. In her essay, she traces the
confluence and resonance between three constituencies—“the queer community, the
New Narrative school, and the medieval scholarly community,” which so
powerfully came together in Dinshaw’s Getting
Medieval and Bartlett’s 2004 Exemplaria
article (cited above). Neufeld’s “sumptuary semiotics” points out that accessories
are a symptom of the way style works: “as ‘excess,’ an effect that is greater
than the sum of its parts, whose creative power depends precisely upon its
inimitability, its mystery.” She notes that accessories are gendered: “[b]eginning
with patristic texts, the ubiquity of Christian sumptuary injunctions, against
women’s clothing and fashion consciousness in particular, link anxieties about
costume’s expressive power to the persuasive power of women’s speech.”
Decorative speech is gendered as well: every reformer urges his audience to
curb the “feminizing force of rhetoric’s persuasive cadences in favor of more ‘penetrating’
logical analysis.” From the Wife of Bath’s ornaments to the realization that with
Margery Kempe, “the immaterial discourse of her soul [was] expressed most
provocatively through her white clothes and her endlessly spilling tears,”
Neufeld guides us through a fantastic recovery of a dense, stylishly tactile
past. She takes us further still, to the New Narrative School (New York and San
Francisco, late 1970s and 1980s), to chart the “response by queer writers. . .
to the disembodied poetics of the Language School.” In the Narrative School’s
refusal to “choose between affinity and critique,” Neufeld maps the resonances
with medievalist criticism, whose historical subject is both endlessly alluring
and endlessly elusive. Oh, and one more thing: Neufeld has possibly the best
shoe collection in medieval studies, a competitive field (may we mention
Catherine Karkov, or our own Eileen Joy), where shoes have been known to cause
the demise of academic journals (it was bruited that one publisher within
medieval studies embezzled funds to keep his better half in Manolos). And let
us not forget the late medieval poulaines,
shoes with one or two-foot-long tips, sometimes tied by a string to the leg
under the knee to facilitate maneuvers.
As Neufeld observes, “[if] exploring the Middle
Ages now means we can or must acknowledge the unrecorded effects and unanalyzed
passions, formerly deemed supplemental, accessory, to our critical discourse
then, like Margery Kempe, we also are in search of idioms that allow us to articulate
the ineffable.” The abundance of things— these “intensities,” as Gilles Deleuze
or Michel Foucault would call them—reminds us that interesting relations can
take forms other than oppositions or linear hierarchies. As Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition, “[o]ppositions are roughly cut from a
delicate milieu of overlapping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences
and disparities, of heterogeneous potentials and intensities. . . . Everywhere,
couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organized oppositions
presuppose radiations in all directions.”[14] For
Neufeld, then, the turn to style is a natural theoretical consequence of the
autobiographical turn, what she (citing the 2004 Exemplaria article by Anne Clark Bartlett, mentioned above) tags as
“a new mode of so-called ‘confessional’ criticism [that] has emerged recently
[and] unsettles the dichotomy of ‘expressivism and objectivity,’ intersecting petite histoire and grand récit to generate a new ground for the ‘transaction between
text-as-subject and reader-as-text.’”[15]
In other words, it is a result of our autobiographical turn that we are “in
search of idioms that allow us to
articulate the ineffable.” And the result of
that autobiographical turn is also a paramount movement to create communities,
affinities and kinships: communities brought together by style, like the
wink and the sartorial hint of alliances doomed to secrecy in the context of
the persecuting past.
Valerie
Vogrin, fiction writer, editor of the literary journal Sou’Wester, and Director
of Peanut Books, gives us a fireworks show of a last essay, each passage bold
enough to stand by itself— and un-summarizable. Faced with this impossibility,
I will only mention a couple of favorites: “Style, more than species, is what
distinguishes the howl of wolves saluting the moon from the songs of the
neighborhood dogs rising over fences and alleyways.” And: “The myth of a
neutral style. As if knowledge was a substance to be displayed on a glass
specimen slide. The challenge isn’t to see things as they are, but to see
things at all.” Politics of style. Specific style as a philosophical
proposition. Economy, as in: conciseness. But also as in: Marxism. Style as the
generative principle itself. I could go on: Vogrin mentions Queneau’s Exercices de style, but she herself is
the great encyclopedist of style in this volume, examining it in its different
dimensions. Of course Vogrin’s piece is best read wearing vintage threads,
preferably from Casablanca in Cincinnati, Ohio. It has three floors of clothes,
from the 1870s on, and you can probably find there Nerval’s smoking jacket and
the underpants that Verlaine tore off Rimbaud, and of course, Emily Dickinson’s
umbrella. Failing that, try any Americana—jeans, cowboy boots, Pendleton
blankets —recycled as girl clothes for the City of Lights (if it worked for
Isabel Marant, think what it will do to you); accompanied by a custom scent
from Christopher Brosius. Better still, go to a souk after dark on a spring
night and have one made for you.
[1] George-Louis de Buffon, Discours sur le style et autres discours
académiques (Paris: Hachette, 1843, 11). All translations are mine unless
otherwise indicated.
[2] Victor Hugo, Oeuvres posthumes de Victor Hugo. Post-scriptum
de ma vie (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1901), 24–25, 52.
[3] Hugo, Oeuvres posthumes, 45.
[4] See Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other
Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
[5] See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
[6] See Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
[7] D. Gilson, “The Last Poem
I Loved: ‘Ganymede,’ by Michael D. Snediker,” The Rumpus, July 13, 2013: http://therumpus.net/2013/07/the-last-poem-i-loved-ganymede-by-michael-d-snediker/.
[8] As Daniel Tiffany said
recently of Snedkiker’s book of poems The
Apartment of Tragic Appliances (2013), “We
have been missing poems like these for a long time. It’s as if one were overhearing the grotesque and
beloved ‘Matthew mighty-grain-of-salt O’Connor’ coming through James
Merrill’s Ouija board. Michael Snediker is one of the most original and
affecting poets of his generation.”
[9] Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and
Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
[10] See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008).
[11] Aranye Fradenburg,
“(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming,” in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, eds. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia
Frederico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 87–116.
[12] “Reading it Personally:
Robert Gluck, Margery Kempe, and Language in Crisis,” Exemplaria: A Journal
of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (2004): 437–456.
[13] Steven F. Kruger, “Gay
Internet Medievalism: Erotic Story Archives, the Middle Ages, and Contemporary
Gay Identity,” American Literary Identity
22:4 (2010), 913-944.
[14] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul
Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), 51.
[15] Bartlett, “Reading it
Personally,” 437–456.
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