radiant fracture

Herewith the Gilgamesh rant I promised / threatened, jasmine_r_s.

This is kind of an outtake from developing my course materials; I may use some of this as an example of thinking about questions in translation, transmission, editing, and the literature vs. orature divide in epic scholarship, but it is ultimately mostly for my own satisfaction.

I am not a scholar of ancient texts, and this is a bit sketchy as yet; such scholars may feel free to drop in and note my more glaring errors or omissions. (Glances over shoulder at jasmine_r_s and sovay).

Okay.

( Tablet XII is canon: Literary elitism and homophobia in translations of Gilgamesh )

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Welcome back to the reliably erratic review of José Esteban Muñoz' Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurity. This trebleweek, we're talking about "Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative."

Muñoz was a queer punk! So was I, after a fashion, though I wasn't terribly good at it. Like the last chapter, this discussion activated my own queer nostalgia -- and therefore perhaps hope.

As I consume further chapters, I more and more admire Muñoz' ability to layer new nuance onto the concept of utopia as a mechanism for imagining queer futures. It isn't a gimmick: each of these essays genuinely illuminates another way to think with the idea.

I found this the most conceptually straightforward and emotionally evocative essay so far. Muñoz himself seems to be having a better time -- he's more confident, less hedged, here. His central thesis is that spaces for queer performance create the potential for envisioning more livable, joyful and expressive queer lives.

That makes the idea sound simple, but Muñoz captures, without directly naming it, the almost (or actual) ceremonial quality of such performances -- they way performance is an imaginary thing that makes itself real, where the real here is livable, joyful queer life.

( Utopia is a stage )

What this essay most woke in me was the desire to go out to a queer bar. After a dry spell of many years, we have two new and active and highly aesthetic queer bars, or rather a restaurant and lounge, with regular drag performances featuring drag kings and drag queens. What I would most like is to feel again that sense of potentiality, of another future life with more beauty and pleasure and joy.

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Welcome to the first Muñoz post of the day! If you're looking for the post where we draw fanart of Muñoz and Blackbonnet in a big queer hug, that's the next one.

This is part three of my readthrough of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by José Esteban Muñoz. We're looking at Chapter Three, “The Future is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia.”

Note that this discussion of sexual avant-gardes includes mentions of sex work, AIDS, and police brutality.

* * * * * *

Remember how I mentioned Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water last week? This week’s chapter is all about it! I either had no idea that was the case or I forgot it was so.

(Somehow I no longer have my copy of Delany’s book. This makes me grumpy.)

( In fact, Munoz connects the memoir, gax sex clubs, stickering campaigns, and police brutality )

Anyway, on to the communal queer visions of Our Flag Means Death. Let's see what it can do for us.

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Although I have taken very little advantage of the sudden access to cultural events online, I did manage, weeks ago, to sign up for the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival's A Night of Storytelling.

The showdate was located in a distant, nebulous future when I signed up in, I don't know, June. Then the alert popped up and startled me yesterday, because time is just potato salad at this point.¹

I "bought tickets," which was really just RSVPing plus a donation. At the last minute, because potato salad, I sent out invitations rather haphazardly to poetic friends, and two were unoccupied enough to backchannel with me. It was like sitting and wittering together about the show without rudely interrupting the performers with noise or flickering screens.

I think the organizers did that thing where they pre-record the event and then watch it alongside us and chat in the comments field, but I'm not completely sure.

Miraculously, a video of the reading is available here. I recommend it with all of both my hearts.

[ETA: CN for subjects like trauma, transphobia, and sex work]

This is the damn lineup:²

• SD Holman (Artistic Director of the Festival - introduction)


• Danny Ramadan (Host)


• Jillian Christmas


• Jaye Simpson


• Erin-Brooke Kirsh


• Billy-Ray Belcourt


• I'm just going to say that again


• BILLY-RAY BELCOURT


• Amber Dawn

Despite the title, the event was really a poetry reading, though story of course figured.

It appeared that the performers, organizers, ASL translators, and crew were alone together in the theatre -- maybe a dozen awesome people in that big dark space, making something beautiful for us.
Maybe the best part was hearing the writers affectionately heckle one another with increasing fervour as the night progressed.

SD is the only one of the bunch I've actually hung out with by any reasonable definition. Years ago, when my ex-husband and I lived in Vancouver, we hung out quite often with SD and especially SD's partner Catherine White Holman, may she rest in power, who was a good friend of the ex. Danny Ramadan I don't know at all, but I have now liked many of his tweets. I've seen Jillian Christmas read once before at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts. Erin-Brooke Kirsh I hadn't heard of -- she had a killer poem + miniature comment-poem/dirty joke structure. Billy-Ray Belcourt I met when he came to read at the college, and of course I was going to attend the residency with him in Banff before the apocalypse happened. Amber Dawn I've seen and met at other readings over the years. There was such a warm feeling in the circle that it was almost better than being there live, because we could sit in such an intimate way with the writers and their affection for one another.

Lemme see if I can pull out a few lines from our texting chain that will make you want to watch:

• "My queer feels like interruption." (Jaye Simpson)
• "I wanted to BOOM-BAP-strut my way back into my whiskey throne, / with the ghost of Ma Rainey riding my tail-bone" (Jillian Christmas)
• "You my friend have made a very powerless enemy." (Erin-Brooke Kirsh)
• "Sometimes a body is that which happens to you." (Billy-Ray Belcourt)
• "I bore witness. It did not ask this of me, but I wanted to keep watch of the dying everywhere, so I could figure out how to care for a bleeding sentence." (Billy-Ray Belcourt)
• "Poetry gives no particular fucks about moving forward." (Amber Dawn)
• "My queer and desperate poetry." (Amber Dawn)

Tonight I've been watching a Comic-Con@Home 2020 panel, "Shudder: 'Horror is Queer'". The speakers very much valorize queer reading as a survival practice, which I really like, since reading is so much my mode.

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Notes

1. There's an undefined enormous amount of it and yet somehow you eat it all.

2. Okay, I recognize that these names may mean more to me as a west-coast Canadian queer than to you, wherever you are, so if you haven't heard of these folks just know that it would be hard to imagine a better lineup if you tried.