Greetings from what I’ll call a calm between eclipses.
I’m in the middle of determining my fate for the coming months and it is difficult and also work that must be done. I ~was~ so incredibly depressed just a week or so ago, and right now I am not. Thank the saints. How are you all doing?
Tomorrow's desire practice/smut writing workshop is on again in Clark Park (West Philly), from 2-4pm. Meet me in the shade on the Baltimore avenue side of the park. I'll have cold iced tea. Bring something to write with. We'll be doing a helpful worksheet and then working with what we get from there.
At the previous workshops I had everyone read pieces of smut stories out loud, but thanks to feedback, we’re just going to do more writing and less of that…vague public humiliation? (i say this jokingly)
…
Due to the incredible astro weather going on right now I am compelled to share that I’ve never been to a writing workshop in my life or had anything I’ve written workshopped, in what I assume is a regular experience if you have a Creative Writing Degree™ (your cohort critiques your writing on some basis of Western narrative convention and contemporary writing style as dictated by New York Times bestseller lists and publishing market controlled by blah blah blah). And I am wondering still how on earth one acts regular trying to get residencies. Shout out to Wesley for sending me hell of residency links that one time–I have not abandoned those.
Enough self-loathing, though. I finally put A CROSS THRU on my website, and there is an explicit call not to talk shit on yourself in there:
This is a time capsule of a 2016 me. I first put pieces of this spell in a personal zine titled SHEDDING, eventually fleshing out this longer version for METROPOLARITY‘S Style of Attack Report, both released in that year. From what I’ve heard since then, many people resonated with the words I set down here. In 2017, I spoke an altered version onto a guest track for SOLARIZED, a Philly hardcore band fronted by METROPOLARITY’s Alex Smith.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People and it is very good. I’ll come back with a review at some point. I’m also ~or was also~ reading Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era …and it’s like… can the Donna Haraway stans take a chillpill on this DENSELY LAYERED THEORIZING and just tell a damn story? I honestly thought I’d be reading a lot more about taking T and less having to deal w/the portmanteau’ing of 5 post-structural media theories every other sentence. (It’s hilarious to me that Haraway herself has taken to giving narrative lectures, btw.)
Speaking of the cyborg theorist originator, I saw Haraway had a ‘pamphlet book titled Making Kin Not Population, with someone named Adele Clark. The little book struck me as cool, like hell fuckin yah no more white babies in this bitch, but you know– as I paged thru the thing (in the wonderfully air conditioned Penn Book Center), I kept seeing the word feminist. The book is like, it’s troubling that feminists don’t stop and think about how having babies is like, a problem for the environment. And I just wanted to go YOU MEAN WHITE WOMEN DONNA. Or I sure woulda wrote that in the margins if I bought the thing. And that brings me back to Testo Junkie… These very cyberpunk very futuristic very cyborg feminist intellectual writers SAY SOME INTERESTING THINGS but I wish they did more to ~really~ contextualize themselves in the trajectory of whiteness-as-constructed-by-empire. They mention being white and European here and there (in Testo Junkie), and I’m willing to bet the Haraway/Clark book mentions women of color or like, indigenous tribes or something… but can ‘we’ put in the extra effort to strongly articulate ‘ourselves’ away from the center of contemporary thought or some shit???? Do you feel me? Do u follow? These academic texts and radical gender autobiographical-theory books fall short––they fall within the confines of the academic intellectual. And as that tower crumbles, so do their arguments become incomprehensible.
Pshhhhhhhh yeah……….
The Prop Werx workshop was cute. LMK if you want me to come to your area and do it there. We broke down media messages of various kinds and it was Good. It was so hot that day tho and we weren’t in AC, so we didn’t get to crafting our own propaganda messages. I’ll be making a little report-back post with resources, more info, and links when I get the energy. It’s still hot right now.
Saints, please grant me the ability to know what and where to focus. May I leave my own self-loathing behind one day soon.
Take care of yourself, love.
@}-}-;———
Monk
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