tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post368678811896527016..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Personals for the Fictionally ForlornCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-4088628825457111662008-12-10T22:24:00.000-05:002008-12-10T22:24:00.000-05:00First, for a reading of Judith Butler's Precarious...First, for a reading of Judith Butler's <I>Precarious Life</I> with the human as question in mind, see Karen Houle, "(Making) Animal Tracks" in that recent issue of PhaenEx on animal, which discusses a critique of Butler in a paper by Chloë Taylor, “The Precarious Lives of Animals: Butler, Coetzee, and Animal Ethics,” <I>Philosophy Today,</I> Vol. 52, Issue 1 (forthcoming 2008). See <A HREF="http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/issue/view/58/showToc" REL="nofollow">here</A><BR/><BR/><I>so I opted for this instead--I like the challenge of the really short form. I also wanted to get at some of the hopelessness of love--how we're often in the wrong place at the wrong time, as opposed to the right place at the right time, and yet, we're always longing. </I><BR/><BR/>Fascinating stuff, of course. Of course, none of these people are quite in the wrong place at the wrong time, since they intersect with people we ourselves desire: we desire Ophelia, Achilles, Seigfried, and so forth, rather than some anonymous schlub no ancient literateur would ever commit to writing. And we're not of course just witnessing the desire of some anonymous rock piler for Antigone. That rock piler is the witness to Antigone that we imagine ourselves to be, that in a sense we are, while we read that play. While we read, while we desire, we're always in the right place, but we're always in the wrong place with this desire--always too late, always outside the book--since we can't act on it with our objects, except in the highly mediated way that we do by being students of <I>Antigone</I> rather than lovers of Antigone, no italics. We might even say that our desires for others, or for our profession, are ghosts of our 'true' desires for these literary types (here I think of Irina's for GG, LB, and perhaps even Angela of Foligno's for X, if we accept, as I do, the fictionality of X: of course Angela's problem is that she doesn't know that X exists only in her desires).Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-90763128515591085412008-12-10T13:21:00.000-05:002008-12-10T13:21:00.000-05:00Wow. For some reason, maybe the Foucault epigraph,...Wow. <BR/><BR/>For some reason, maybe the Foucault epigraph, but really the whole space of desire created by these, this passage from Angela of Foligno comes to mind:<BR/><BR/>"Among other things, she related to me . . . that on that very day, in a state of ecstasy, she found herself in the sepulcher with Christ. She said she had firs of all kissed Christs's breast--and saw that he lay dead, with his eyes closed--then kissed his mouth, from which, she added, a delightful fragrance emanated, one impossible to describe. The moment lasted only a short while. Afterwards, she placed her cheek on Christ's own and he, in turn, placed his hand on her other cheek, pressing her closely to him. At that moment, Christ's faithful one heard him telling her: "Before I was laid in the sepulcher, I held you this tightly to me." Even though she understood that it was Christ telling her this, nonetheless she saw him lying there with eyes closed, lips motionless, exactly as he was when he lay dead in the sepulcher. Her joy was immense and indescribable."<BR/><BR/>The possibility of some affinity between the temporal structure of this event and your personals is what fascinates me. Here the ecstatic vision experience takes her back to an earlier event that is now first for her but second, a repetition of an inaccessible earlier instance, for Christ. And then the words are spoken as from the dead, without bringing the dead itself to life, even though the hand does move! So there is something similarly weirdly beautiful about the personal, all the more so in the wildly hyperhistorical way you are doing them, the communication of an earlier one-sided event that crosses its original distance but also preserves it via anonymity, the intimacy of being with the other as corpse, etc.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-55374727086807558682008-12-10T10:00:00.000-05:002008-12-10T10:00:00.000-05:00From Michael MooreEileen, your singles ads are ver...From Michael Moore<BR/>Eileen, your singles ads are very beautiful and frighteningly funny. I like to check in from time to time, to see if you have Invented Any Entirely New Poetic Forms lately. I would like to point out that most people have Not.<BR/><BR/>But you can't do things like this, you know.<BR/>Like a fool, I answered one or two of these ads, and....EgadAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-47200454605405339442008-12-09T23:10:00.000-05:002008-12-09T23:10:00.000-05:00Eileen, these are wonderful. I've spent the last ...Eileen, these are wonderful. I've spent the last few days reading rough drafts, and these were wonderful to read now that I can take a breath. Perhaps a letter to Orpheus sometimeRick Goddenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04109263756022001400noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-28069754474360401282008-12-09T00:14:00.000-05:002008-12-09T00:14:00.000-05:00Irina: you do realize this is just another reason ...Irina: you do realize this is just another reason we are soulmates, right? There is no escaping this.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-29644498315243954872008-12-08T23:04:00.000-05:002008-12-08T23:04:00.000-05:00can you love someone who is already dead/has alrea...<I>can you love someone who is already dead/has already checked out? can you send them a personal?</I><BR/><BR/>You can, but it's a bad idea. It's taken me almost two decades to get over George Gordon, and I can't tell you what kind of messes that particular unrequited love affair has gotten me into.<BR/><BR/>You know that I decided to go to Yale because they have a lock of his hair, right?ihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14105686105741162480noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-13036846058440922172008-12-08T15:13:00.000-05:002008-12-08T15:13:00.000-05:00And what I didn't say, which I should have, in rel...And what I didn't say, which I should have, in relation to Jeffrey's query, was that I was also largely inspired by Heather Love's book, which I really really have been moved by. Everyone should read it, and just the title of the book, "Feeling Backward," was a kind of provocation for the whole thing [can you love someone who is already dead/has already checked out? can you send them a personal?].Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14254595793765067282008-12-08T14:22:00.000-05:002008-12-08T14:22:00.000-05:00For Mike [a new addition, "Lavinia"]You won't need...For Mike [a new addition, "Lavinia"]<BR/><BR/>You won't need your hands for what I have in mind, nor your tongue. Although, if you still have something in you that can writhe a little, with pleasure, I think we can make this work. I understand your neck is broken and that you were a willing partner in that, offering yourself to your father like a lamb, and that's why I'm writing you now. I love lambs, and the soft bleating noises they make. Do you think that's strange, or off-putting? I hope not, because, deep down, I don't think Bassianus ever stood a chance with you, and you would have figured that out eventually. Where I'm living now, shame has really lost its zing and no one would ever want to die for it, if you get my meaning. As Evan Dando sings, "I'll meet you in New York, by the drug store on First Avenue," the one where, if you meet the pharmacist out back, he can show you where the still waters of Lethe run. And then "we can lie down, with the buildings all around," and you don't have to say, or even feel, a word. It's just a thought. Box 95R31.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-84323013638712271122008-12-08T12:32:00.000-05:002008-12-08T12:32:00.000-05:00ps. Lavinia would be a nice addition.ps. Lavinia would be a nice addition.Mike Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00653428066604494027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-64474159069892696272008-12-08T12:23:00.000-05:002008-12-08T12:23:00.000-05:00These are wonderful, Eileen! They're just what I ...These are wonderful, Eileen! They're just what I needed to break the hell (as I told you earlier) of writing seminar papers. Thanks so much!Mike Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00653428066604494027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34174957633948010942008-12-08T10:40:00.000-05:002008-12-08T10:40:00.000-05:00What was behind this project? Several impulses--fo...What was behind this project? Several impulses--for one, I haven't written anything fictional, or worked on revisions of stories, for about three, almost four years now, and that was starting to make me feel . . . . weird, like: is the only thing I'm ever going to write from now on scholarship [and the occasional love letter/poem]? [Do people still write love letters? My feeling is that we should each write about one a week, and I try to keep up my end of things in the universe. We should write these to those we know and to those we don't know.] Also, this semester I've been teaching a kind of experimental first-year seminar course on the theme of "beholding violence" in epic, drama, and film, and reading some pretty intensely dark texts: the "Iliad," "Agamemnon," "Medea," "Titus Andronicus," "Macbeth," etc. And when I was in Philadelphia for the GEMCS conference I heard a really interesting paper on Fortinbras, which got me thinking about him [he is the one writing the personal ad to Ophelia]. Last July--and you may or may not recall this, Jeffrey--you posted a small bit on a website in the UK where people posted love messages to persons they didn't know but who they saw on the trains in the Underground, and I thought it would be lovely to construct a short story that would mimic the structure of that website and those messages and out of which some kind of longer narrative would emerge, but I'm kind of horrible at longer narratives [my one attempt at a novella, years ago, almost killed me], so I opted for this instead--I like the challenge of the really short form. I also wanted to get at some of the hopelessness of love--how we're often in the wrong place at the wrong time, as opposed to the right place at the right time, and yet, we're always longing. And the final piece, actually, which is kind of funny [but true], is that I've been bogged down for a little while now in trying to finish a review essay for GLQ on queer theory and the question of the human [reviewing four books: Judith Butler's "Precarious Life," "The Donna Haraway Reader," Luciana Parisi's "Abstract Sex," and Myra Hird's "Sex, Science, and Gender," but also visiting/re-visiting texts such as "Queering the Non/human," Edelman's "No Future," Cary Wolfe's "Animal Rites," Elizabeth Grosz's "Time Travels," etc.], and yesterday I started to feel a sense of hopelessness--not about the review, but about "being human," and about love, whatever that is supposed to mean. I don't think it helped that I've also been reading Laura Kipnis's "Against Love" [a book I'd like to set on fire some nights--yeah, I know it's smart and provocative, but . . . .], and so I just started thinking about writing a kind of queer defense of love in the most extreme, extenuating, *violent* circumstance [in the face of suicide, decapitation, abjection, murder, uncontrollable rage, self-hatred, etc.]. I actually want to add more personae [Lavinia from "Titus," the Danaides--all 50 of them, etc.], just keep adding to this. You know, you can't really talk about your own stories, because you start to feel stupid, but it felt good to just spend a day doing this instead of something more . . . academically practical.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21936143553384875952008-12-08T08:26:00.000-05:002008-12-08T08:26:00.000-05:00These are wonderful. Eileen, can you say a little ...These are wonderful. Eileen, can you say a little bit about what was behind this project?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-10187110179597735282008-12-08T01:13:00.000-05:002008-12-08T01:13:00.000-05:00Those were fantastic shorts. Thank you!Those were fantastic shorts. Thank you!Erynnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08297413089914906458noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34990237310605874342008-12-07T23:33:00.000-05:002008-12-07T23:33:00.000-05:00I am living in a dream world I have always fantasi...I am living in a dream world I have always fantasized about. Thank you, Eileen, for creating it. <BR/><BR/>Thank you, everyone, for being part of the dream, too.anna klosowskahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09611569607945164280noreply@blogger.com