Happy full moon eclipse and Happy New Year everyone. :)

I’m writing from the kitchen table with a cloth face mask on and penicillin in my system after an unplanned trip to the urgent care this morning for an ear infection. Woof. A cold had been brewing, making itself cozy with some mucous production and fatigue these past few days, but I guess I fucked around with doing too much yesterday and the bitch decided to take advantage. Really curious how a 35º change in temperature from mid-week to weekend will affect all our bodies.

I want this to be an interesting jam packed newsletter but baby I’m tired. I’m gonna take it slow.

Geez, I just went on Tidal to find some background music, digging around in the new releases, and it’s just… I’ve been so amused and appalled at how white indie rock has shamelessly delved into this 60s & 70s psychedelic aesthetic with their visuals and sound over the past few years. And then the whole thing of the sound being derivative of Black music from decades past. I don’t have the energy to get into it. Did I ever share that article about Jared Leto and hippies and media narrative control and the CIA? Well I can’t link you now anyway cause looks like the site is deleted. 0_0; For that matter, here’s a screencap I saved from a slideshow I can’t find anymore…

If you remember from last time, I was counting down the days till I could stop my full time hours at my job and enter into a beautiful month and a half off, to prioritize getting shit done with my All That’s Left rewrite. Is it any surprise that the first full week in I get sick? I remember near the end of December wondering if something like this would happen, and all week I’ve been pulling the Star and the Hanged Man in my tarot deck. Take it easy. Cool.

I thought about writing some epic 2019 recap thread, but again I’m tired, and you can honestly see what was what on my News page. Speaking of…

news

Just hours earlier I received my reprinted, expanded short story collection, TRANSITIONAL TIMES TRANSITIONAL BODY.

Tales from the crossroads of desire, hope, and despair. A sci-fi survivor memoir that has no princes, cops, or chosen people, that does not promote the colony or romanticize the empire. The short stories in this freshly expanded collection make apt companions for travelers, underworlders, heartbroken hope seekers, and of course fellow cyborgs.

Once a zine, now a book with 6 stories:
• Heat Death of Western Human Arrogance
• About A Woman and A Kid
• Adolescence
• The Romance of the Colony
• Monk's Dream
• Real Work You Deserve

Set in OpenDyslexic typeface.

106 pages.

3rd edition for 2020.
ISBN: 978-0-9981138-3-8
Ships media mail.

buy the book

It’s 8 bucks, plus $2.50 shipping in the US. Anyone in my area, you’re more than welcome to message me & stop by my place and get a copy, I just don’t have it in my rn to coordinate delivery meetups—in my experience they nearly always drag out and in the end feel pretty inconvenient for me. Thanks for understanding.

floating world podcast

Episode 5: Ghost of Mars just dropped and I’m very excited to listen! Catch me doing a feature on this experimental podcast I love that reminds me of the best of radio/sound shows

As usual check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. In this episode some folks leave for Mars under dubious circumstances. Projecting the insidious logic of colonialism onto our (very hypothetical) spaceward expansion, M Téllez (@cyborgmemoirs) of Metropolarity weaves a tale of subjugation, coercion, and little resistances - amid neighbourhood walks, cyborg rhythms, and a strange goodbye from an old caretaker.

You can find out about M Téllez at their website, www.cyborgmemoirs.com

Submissions from:
John Morrison
Rodnie King
Cybee Bloss
Elissa Fredeen
Rachel MacDonald

compiled, edited and composed by Ada Adhiyatma / madam data
'little feather' composed and performed by Ada Adhiyatma

if you'd like to support and maintain The Floating World, consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/thefloatingworldpodcast

in case you missed it

• Heat Death of Western Human Arrogance is now an audiostory [Mixcloud] [Youtube]

• Venus Saturn Square smut zine is open for submissions, due Feb 29th

• My guest spot on a live speculative fiction panel edition of Weird Kids Wanted social/literary criticism podcast [ep11]

coming up

• Soothsaying with Metropolarity podcast in the works???

but anyway…

I walked up and down the streets downtown the other day in response to this US aggression on Iran shit. I haven’t been in loads of demonstrations or marches or protests, but I was disappointed (and have likewise been disappointed in the past) at how lacking in persuasion the march chants were. No rhythm in the chants or the stepping, and if anything can be appropriated from Mummer’s day parades can we turn the Mummer’s strut into a protest dance? Or liiike, more I’m saying that the Mummer’s Strut is incredibly easy to do, and don’t people just love going to New Orleans and doing that second line dancing? Maybe I’m being ignorant—maybe people don’t want anything to do with Mummers not even taking their moves.

Later that day (since it was a nationwide coordinated demo), I read a twitter thread—a few, and many from people who were out in the streets during the 90s and 2000s over oil wars in the Middle East—but this one in particular was talking about how mass demonstrations do nothing to prevent war. They weren’t being nihilistic, they were recounting their own participation in anti-war anti-imperialism protest movements, and recounting recent world events related to it all. I think it’s good people show out in the streets, and that alllll the people who had their phones out recording us as wide-eyed bystanders, all the cars that drove by honking, they catch that energy. I think in a local way it’s better than say, being absolutely legally barred from demonstration and violently repressed if we try. I want to exercise that right and shit. But in terms of yeah how the fuck does this affect the decisions and resources and choices available to our rapist psychopath president??? (and bet he’s not the first!) How do our street demonstrations affect the major players of geopolitical power??? In the early 90s a hacker said straight into a video camera how he was basically as powerful as the government, and if the banking system or a facist government needed to be taken down, would he do it? If it needed to be done, he answers. Where is he now, I wonder.

World news is distressing. I just want to say to all my Philadelphians and mid-atlantic region peeps that while I don’t think our extreme weather will be as catastrophically massive as Indonesian floods and Australian fires and so on (yet), I do think we’re going to be dealing with bugs, illnesses related to sanitation, water & air quality issues, etc. A transplant asked me with a bit of disbelief, I drank the tap water here? Philly soil is full of lead! And I was like… ::looks down at self and sighs:: and… I’m gonna be drinking this water until I really physically can’t anymore. I have always resented bottled water as a trend and marketing item. For years I would rather get dehydrated than go to a store and spend a dollar or two dollars on a bottle of water. The motherfuckers. If you didn’t have someone in your life growing up making sure you let the tap water run for 10-20 seconds before you poured it in a glass, well, just remember to do that cause I think it’s a good habit.

Now I will admit some personal thoughts regarding abolition. Maybe they’re adjacent thoughts, or thoughts that I contend with when I think about virtue signaling my belief in abolition on socials. I believe in abolition over reform. Abolish the police, abolish the prisons, abolish the president and all nation states. Something else must arise, that is the dream. Black and Indigenous disabled and trans people should lead, and the rest of us should be in service. I believe that, and yet I find myself a coward when it comes to fully refusing participation in the material structures and institutions that keep imperial death cults in power. I find myself unable to totally respond to the needs of those I should be in service to. I am unwilling, when the hourly calls come, to give all the money in my posession or all my time-energy away, and find myself incapable to stretch that thin and stay sane. And while I also believe the reasoning that one should take care of themself in order to take care of others, it becomes so questionable to me under some abolitionist lenses. Given our specific personal circumstances, what's the difference between having resources and hoarding resources? I see more and more people on the streets in Philly and I know I don't ever wanna be in that position again; I'm still burnt out from being the main person holding a whole house together; I have a level of material stability that I know would be foolish to completely abandon (self preservation). In order to face a personal problem, one must admit that they have a problem to begin with, right? One must constantly reckon with having a belief system (aka ideology) that isn't yet powerful enough to overcome the violent demands of our material confines. And there is so much more to say here than words can give meaning to. So many variable contexts to situate and reason within. And this is just a meditation that I'm sharing, from daily interrogations I hold for myself. Make of it what you will.

I just went through my email looking for “abolition” and a Data for Black Lives email came back, with these words from Yeshimabeit Milner in it

"Abolition is about reimagining the social landscape, it is about unlearning, surrendering, and it begins with you, right here and right now."

and this video embedded (shout out to Petra for fwd’ing the email):

till next time

take care of yourself, friends

Monk

@}-}-;———

Hi everyone. Welcome to December. I’m not surprised we’re here, and in fact I’m glad because the sooner we get to XMAS the sooner the frenzy for sales at my work can diminish.

How are you? I’ve been enduring a week plus of what I would now call hypomanic ~type~ ~symptoms~ …heart pounding, holding my breath, trouble breathing deeply, staying up late as fuck, low appetite, extreme focus/distractedness and so on. Had to take a day off work last week I was feeling so thinned out. YouTube must have also sensed my preoccupation with online windowshopping and suggested me to watch a video on cyclomythia. Fascinating. I have struggled with lots of self-esteem/personal/mood/energy/interpersonal issues throughout my life, but none to the degree as to require medication or hospitalization. Since my late 20s, perhaps around when my Saturn Return was approaching, I’ve come to learn about many ways to take care of your body or to get care from others, and how to be more kind to yourself. Yourself meaning myself. Exercise, food choice, herbal regimens. It has not been lost on me how I have long loved and admired cyborgs, pinnacles of empire-state technological labor, yet towards my own corporeal form I have tried to make due without their assistance. And that is just me – I mean no disrespect to anyone else’s corporeal condition & needs demands.

This brings me to a point… Jessica Dore—whose tarot circle I have attended for a small while now and who is steadily receiving greater attention (and who is currently working on a book about tarot that I am very much looking forward to)—posted an image of the book Woman Who Glows in the Dark. It reminded me oh! I have been meaning to read that! Oh and now that I connected my library card to their online database, I can request holds on books to my local branch, and ~ cut to today and I’m around 60% through. This book is about curanderismo, a healer tradition of Aztec/Mexica and mestiza/mixed race peoples from what is now called Mexico, the American Southwest, and the armed & surveilled border area maintained by the United States on the land. A curandera wrote the book, and the curandera, Elena Avila, is also a trained psychiatric nurse. The book actually goes in on the origins of curanderismo and acknowledges the cultural influence & importance of enslaved Africans alongside Spanish and Indigenous peoples’. I’m interested to read more thoroughly about those topics, but for the purpose of this conversation, I want to shift over to my dad.

My dad is an old Mexican man from a ranch in Hidalgo state. He is healthy, he is proud, he is a survivor. All my life he has lectured me and instructed me about how to comport myself, how to carry myself, how to eat, how to deal with skin issues, how to breathe, how to rely on the power of the ocean and the sun and the wind to heal my body and soul, and so on and so forth. When I ask him about brujería he repeats what he has always told me about psychics, tarot card readers, and other non-Christian activities—that it’s all bullshit and to not let it take advantage of you. I asked him about curanderos once before and he had the same attitude. In Avila’s book, she talks about how many charlatan ‘curanderos’ are out there and the harm they do. This book has me thinking that it might be wiser to tell my dad that I think he does things a curandero does, and see how he will respond to that. It’s famous, right? How immigrant parents are so unwilling to say much when you ask them about their lives growing up? Their childhood? I’m not totally sure it’s famous, but I’ve sure heard enough children of immigrants say it’s like that. I just want him to give me a few more clues, and not insist upon a Christian and European identified Mexican existence when I know he’s told me otherwise before. From my perspective I perceive an assimilation survival strategy, but who knows what else there is. I muse about my father a lot and he is very secretive. And I probably shouldn’t talk about him like this, but I also find myself grappling with how else to make use of my observations and feelings. I am tired of assimilation. The forgetting. The letting go.

news/events

This morning I pulled the Fool card and met the artist Johanna Hedva, who some of you may know as author of the essay Sick Woman Theory. Johanna is here to participate in & perform for Bodies Assembled, this intriguing Philadelphia Area Creative Collaborations project of which I am also a part. They are performing at Haverford College for free, this Tuesday the 3rd night at 7pm. I’m going to go, see you if you’ll be there. On Thursday the 5th there will an open-to-the-public art showing & performance from all involved parties, and I will read the opening from my book’s 2nd chapter ~ soon to be published on my site and my Wattpad.

Speaking of publishing, there is finally an AUDIO story version of my tale, HEAT DEATH OF WESTERN HUMAN ARROGANCE, which if you didn’t know and are impressed by awards, was in two anthologies nominated for or that won Lambda Awards, and one that won a American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. So poo poo on you! Skssss ummm but for real, I honestly live to write my stories with the intention of delivering them aloud, so dear reader, consider this an invitation to luxuriate in my storytelling talents. Let me also express my gratitude to Paul Walker, who remains a steadfast support and is always down to contribute compositions & mix down my audio offerings. <3

As for audio, remember last time when I announced I would be on Weird Kids Wanted podcast for a live-recording speculative fiction panel? That episode [ep11] is up for your listening pleasure as well.

Annnnd

CALL FOR SMUT: Slow-moving /venus saturn sqaure/ zine returns. An attempt to straddle the realms of fandom kink & fantasy, cruising & BDSM, service, obliteration & satisfaction. A private hot tub invite to those who find themselves stuck, conflicted, in denial, or self-sabotaging of their own desires. ISO smut dreams & fanfic that lives between the confines of existing canons and trips into the surreal and ecstatic. No pressure to climax, penetrate, or deal with Western narrative. Drafts welcome. Editing help provided. Tag a freak.

first drafts due:
FEBRUARY 29TH, 2020
to magusmonk at protonmail dot com
details/archive/practice materials at cyborgmemoirs.com
workshop dates on the way.

so. now you know. feel free to share. feel free to ask me questions. feel free to connect me to opportunities i may be unaware of.

oh, and i’m sold out of my first run of TRANSITIONAL TIMES TRANSITIONAL BODY short story collection. Thanks everyone. I’ll be printing an expanded version soon. In the meantime, all the stories from that collection are on my site 4 free, with recordings of all to follow.

meanwhile[links],

Annie Mok recently dropped an essay on learning to play 2D fighting games, and because watchful Youtube and Twitter were paying attention to my browsing, I was shown a video dissecting the animation of BB Hood from Darkstalkers, my favorite fighting game ever. It made me instantly wonder about my main demonic bitch, Morrigan Aensland. And several hours later, I had listened to her Marvel Vs Capcom stage theme on loop about 20 times.

My note to self for this email draft was: this shit makes me horny

Give it a listen! And check out that ~artwork~ <3

PLEASE have a look at the comments, too.

Then there’s the Darkstalkers 3 BGM below here, which you could say established her 18+ adult club music theme:

And since I love Morrigan to the extent that I’m contemplating writing a zine dedication, let me share my faves from this voice actor montage below: Yayoi Jinguji [at 0:12] who voiced her in the original game, and Rie Tanaka [at 2:42] from her Marvel vs Capcom 3 appearance. Yayoi Jinguji’s gutteral attacks were my shit, so therapeutic to beat someone’s ass to. And Rie Tanaka’s voice acting gave me SOOO much life. This Morrigan, thanks to her voice acting, gave me SUCH bitch fem energy in the midst of some of the worst times of my life! I still fantasize about embodying that high shattering dismissive bitch cackle! One day, one day. :))))

why does this instagram-driven design aesthetic transfix me? i have so many thoughts: https://www.instagram.com/youthloser/

i don’t think i’ll ever get around to reading this webcomic, but it has a following and fuckinnnn look at the way it’s presented: https://superposecomic.com/

and then you know, i been listening to shit like this when i’m trying to give my eyes a rest:

Alright yall, I’m gonna call it quits for now. I don’t have the energy to go into it at this point, but Philly check out Deep Space Mind 215 [IG] that the homie Ras Cutty is doing. I’ll be attending their next gathering.

Take care of yourself. Meant to write back everyone who wrote me back last time, but it’s been a ~braiiinns~ month. ~_~;

@}-}-;———

Monk

Hallowed greetings, dear reader. I’m in the kitchen where I live. Where I live there’s a woodstove that burns timber, and it is delightfully toasty right now. But if you’ve ever lived in one of Philly’s Victorian era houses (or any old house anywhere), you’ll understand me when I say the air in the rest of the house is comparatively brisk. Winter beckons.

Catching Up

How’ve you been? Every time lately someone’s asked me that I respond with the nondescript “pretty good.” After months and months of drinking an herbal tea to regulate my hormonal moods, after beginning to take a B12 supplement with my morning meal, after getting serious about cooking for myself once the solstice came, and keeping up with the neighborhood trans friendly lifting club, I feel QUITE emotionally stable. This has been a long time coming, and follows in the steps of securing a bit of material stability before it. I’m in couples therapy. I’m in regular therapy.

And so now, after ten years, I’m on the verge of leaving my job to attempt a 3 month self-induced writer’s retreat. I am thinking of one time, either @ajomarimacho or Lou (I can never find ur handle!) was on twitter talking about how some arts/writing workshops and retreats are essentially expensive vacations you pay to go on. And truly, they are, aren’t they. Shout out to Wesley for that time sending me hell of links to artist retreats—I have been tempted to apply to them, but without mentorship in the picture I’m very hesitant. It could be just like that Carmen Maria Machado story I hated about an anxious queer woman being at a writer’s retreat, surrounded by obnoxious and entitled weirdos.

So maybe, in the time I get back to myself starting this January, I will start a weekly workshop group so that we can all critique our projects and keep each other going. Let me know if you are interested in that. As I’ve said before, being outside academic and art institution settings and trying to get mentorship has been a joke! (Shout out to all those within who have reached out over the years thus far to provide opportunities.)

The homie Ras was linking me to some NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) information, and since it seemed they were pretty serious about doing it I was like ok me too. I never had a buddy before to even attempt it with so here goes nothing. So I’m doing NaNoWriMo. Please send me your genki-dama style energy that I get through what needs to be done with All That’s Left, and make serious headway on this damn thing!

Ras had also linked me to this newspaper article about this woman who was making serious $$$ from a self-published fiction series, After, she had been writing on Wattpad. The article seemed timed to accompany the debut of a made-for-Netflix movie, and so in the middle of reading it I was checking out this Wattpad platform. It says it’s sort of a social media type platform for fiction writing. I was like oooo man this is like an updated sort of fanfiction.net!! And I started paging through all the top ranked stories, checking their tags, reading a few bits of chapters—it’s definitely a next gen fanfic.net situation, just with space for original fiction as well. It has a phone app. Some big time published authors have their stories on there for free. You can get subscribers and paid followers. You can upload cover art for your stories. I signed up and ported over a couple stories under my usual handle, cyborgmemoirs. I’m very happy at the possibility that random people will be able to find my stories.

Speaking of stories, my apologies if you’ve been waiting for me to drop some new audio tales—I held off on a newsletter earlier cause I was hoping to have them on offer, but I’ve been unexpectedly busy and/or conserving my energy and resting when I can. That’s still a big TO DO, so …stay tuned there. If you are looking for some weird, stimulating, audio story type shit, PLEASE please spend some time with the ethereal/field recordery/experimental FLOATING WORLD podcast that area badass Ada has been doing. It’s my favorite kind of shit. Like tune in to the hidden radio station on your dial and get captivated by the transmission level shit. And speaking of transmissions, I wanted to also share King Britt’s Transmissions radio show, which I finally got a chance to listen to. I dunno about you, but these are the kinds of things that suffuse me with energy to write.

It’s also true that reading good stories gives me energy to write. I’ll get to some book reviews in a minute, but first here’s some…

events

Nov 9th | Saturday, 5:30pm at Novel Idea Bookstore | 1726 E Passyunk Ave, 19148

I’ll be joining the homegrown Weird Kids Wanted podcast for a speculative fiction panel episode. Waiting to hear back from the bookstore what their accessibility info is, will update on my IG. I hardly ever make it to that East Passyunk ave area, so come thru if you live down that way. :)

Nov 16th & 17th | weekend, noon~5pm at The Rotunda | 4014 Walnut Street | wheelchair accessible

I’ll be tabling Metropolarity books, posters, my own books & zines, and other gear the whole weekend. Plus catch a sweet lil Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic I wrote that’ll be in a collab fanzine with @koreabootrash @skudsink and @anujink (who did the amazing cover).

SPEAKING of SOME EVENTS in PHILLY TO ATTEND, the homie Joe’s SEPTAcalendar is a very fine place outside of social media to check for stuff to do. It also has a growing list of accessibility info for various venues around town.

Last I wrote, I was promoting the Venus Square Saturn reading party, so let me just update and say that the event was QUITE a dream come true. It was well attended. People were into the stories. We had a little open mic. Readers were paid! Smut zines were sold. It was beautiful. I didn’t take a single blessed picture (except of Marcus/Fatherfucker). Thank you to everyone who read, helped out, Malachi and the Vox members who hosted. Come December I hope to update with new workshops or at least a fresh call for submissions for the next episode.

a few reviews

Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People

The History of White People is written by Black historian and author, Nell Irvin Painter. I haven't read a ton of history books for fun, but this one was a ~very~ smooth read. Physically, it's one of these floppy pulp paperback books with pleasing wop-wobble heft. There's a chapter titled \White Slavery as Beauty Ideal\, dissecting Western Europe's 18th century sexual-beauty fetish for light skinned Georgian, Ossentian, Circassian women discussed mostly in writing and never seen in person. There are chapters titled \The White Beauty Ideal As Science\ and \Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Names White Peple "Caucasian"\. A chapter really reaaally lays out how Ralph Waldo Emerson is a preeminent contributor to racist-American thought. Another lays out how the myths of Anglo/Saxon/Norse/Viking identities have been created, spread (and by whom), and used as facist-racist propaganda by major players in history to legitimize American'ness and racial/white superiority.

It's pretty good!!

It's easy to read. Conversational. Fun. Only a handful of chapters later on get a little dense with names and dates, but if you're willing to keep track of the centuries as you read and maybe already have done some investigation into origins of European & American identity (or at least regional history of these places), you will come out of this book like DAMN. History is wild yo. It truly is. I had a old codger of a history teacher in 8th grade (we only learned about the civil war all year), who said history is written by the winner. And as an 8th grader you can say, yeah no shit old man. But as you begin to experience the passage of time in stranger and more heartbreaking ways, you realize it's really that way for real.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson was basically writing homoerotic fan-fiction about tall strapping Anglo Saxon men, and he was doing well-paid lecture tours at all the ivy league schools for it! Legitimacy in this book is shown to be the product of upper class men who either had education or big business, both of which control/led mass media popular thought.

The History of White People starts with the Greeks (as most of [white] history likes to) and goes to our contemporary times. Recommended.

Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction

Shout out to Faye for pulling this off the shelf in Penn Book Center and telling me to at the very least read the last poem in the book. After flipping through and seeing critiques of Gloria Anzaldúa, POC identity, anti-Blackness, a poem for Jamie Berrout, and some other things I wonder about but rarely say aloud, I was like yeah ok here is a poetry collection I will definitely read. I am not one to read poetry. I will go to a poetry reading many times more than buy a book of it. So that is to say I enjoyed this one, as a time capsule of many topics floating about in personal conversations and private/socially monitored online spaces. I will save my deeper criticisms for conversations with friends but in general I'm trying to read more of this anti-capitalist cohort’s poetry.

Cherríe Moraga's Native Country of the Heart

Native Country of the Heart is Cherríe Moraga’s memoir about and relationship with her mother, Elvira. A friend and I went to go see Moraga speak at the book’s release at the People’s Forum in New York City, and we were both tearing up with deep feels in relation to the passages she read to us. Us raised in the United States with immigrant Mexican parents. It was powerful to hear someone from another generation (and a formative generation for many–Moraga co-edited This Bridge Called My Back with Gloria Anzaldúa) respond to audience questions on current political quandaries relating to xicanx identity and latindad, which is fitting given the book itself works through many thoughts about Mexicanism/Mexican’ness as it has/becomes generationally diluted and removed from indigenous origins (especially people whose family lines come from lands in and around what is now the US/Mexico border.

Cherríe Moraga talks about the world surrounding her mother and the circumstances it wrought on her over the years, including her own withdrawn white father and his presence in their family’s life. Not just him though–the effects of assimilation/aspiration into white American society come under scrutiny time and again. And not just that, but the ways patriarchy and the brutal surveillance of a colonizer Catholic society contains someone designated ‘woman’ and ‘not indio/Black’ in said society.

I can’t say I enjoyed this book as much as I simply wanted and needed to read it. If you are like me, and you are looking back at the world that shaped your own parents and family, it is a good commiserating read. Before reading it, I didn’t know Moraga was a half-white mixed person like me (my words, not hers), and that made me think a lot about how many times I’ve read or heard about mixed people of color’s shitty/pathetic emotionally absent and/or selfish white fathers. How the mother’s non-dominant culture becomes impressed upon the child. The formation of a non-white identity despite being “half” white. In the book, her white father has the presence of a limp piece of bread, and she even remarks that when her mother finally dies her father’s first response is to worry about himself.

A personal aside: When I went to get my book signed, Miss Moraga asked me for my name in Spanish. I responded with my chosen name in English (as it often needs repeating), and I saw her expression change so quickly. Internally I scoffed (seemingly scorned, however gently) and sad-sighed–revealed as just another someone one circumstance removed from a purer, more meaningful culture, maybe a poser or faker or appropriator. Just one more violent unspeakable situation removed from relating to a truer identity that would make me more legible to a dominant group or more righteous in refuting my position in anti-black/white supremacist society. Or if I’m honest, the bite of exclusion where being able to speak Spanish would have absolved me, just a little bit, of my otherwise suspicious whiteness. (I really appreciated Wendy Trevino’s poetry for going in about white supremacist cultural norms in chicanx identities, btw.)

If you don’t know, I am of Mexican heritage on my father’s side (and he is read as racially ambiguous, tho constantly interrogated by white people in his restaurant jobs–and his own self identification seems to change/ebb/flow over the years). I was much more vocal and vulnerable about this in the high era of tumblr. It’s since become questionable to hash out my personal identity quandaries in cyberspace public, and in the end aren’t so many of us mixed white people just WHITE in the black/white race binary??? (And you know I believe all binaries are false.) I think there is something to confront and deal with there, an interior work, while still holding on to our myriad home cultures and strange/oppressive/violent/othering treatments in society.

So anyway.

For me, Native Country of the Heart was one of those powerful reads about someone’s own life and own mother and the mysteries of her life that can only be pieced together from a lifetime of observation/reflection and stored memories imbued into that person’s objects and dwelling spaces. Reflection born from the difference between you and your parent’s experience in the world, and the cultural/racial/class norms you are all subjected to the genocidal settling of what we now call Mexico and the United States by what we now call Europeans remains a haunting, and I think we’re all caught up in it no matter who we are on this land. I think these sorts of memoirs that reflect upon one’s own family, that ruminate over the circumstances of violence leading to your family’s assimilation and forced forgetting, and the honoring/remembering of what is and was lost–it’s just one step, a baby beginning step to cycle breaking. Maybe.

Alex Smith’s ARKDUST

ARKDUST. What can I say? I've watched local legend Alex Smith perform his short stories for years now, and his tales always always always make me giddy with amazement and emotion. I love the mixing of mundane details with fantastic element, his penchant for perspective jumping and simultaneous layer weaving, his exacting captures of the outrageous and demoralizing, his city as universe dream as reality style.

I catch some new feeling or new detail every time I've heard Alex perform a story that I've heard him read before. The archive-time capsule that is ARKDUST exceeded my own recollections of the times I'd heard these stories alive on the air. Some stories were new. All are portals. To me, they capture a #metropolarity essence of many intersecting parts at once–the resulting matter of the intersection/collision itself.

Alex Smith has organized all manner of events from workshops, fests, readings, shows, awareness-raising forums... played in bands... writes for local music XPN jawn and Philly Gay News... and so on. (Honestly they deserve a huge arts grant right now hint hint someone who knows.) Were some of the first #queerscifi tags on the early '10s internet about Alex's work? You heard it here first.

So ARKDUST is a must-read for me. Especially–let me not forget to mention–because it has many many excellent scenes describing fat hefty husky men and their bodies, and it's wild how refreshing and vivid it feels to read those.

The first run of his book sold out in like 2 weeks, and it wasn't till its recent 2nd printing that I finally cracked my signed copy open. You can get a copy via the Metropolarity distro, requesting your local library get you a copy, or direct from Alex themself.

That’s all I got on my end, dear reader. Hope you enjoyed your time here as usual. Please feel free to drop me a line, cheer me on for NaNoWriMo, or request some sort of content that you’d like to see me share here.

Take care of yourself.

Till next time

@}-}-;——

Monk

now, if you’ve made it this far, some links

• Dee Diggs on mixcloud. House music okay.

• Trans Women Writers Collective booklet series

• Renee Hobbs full What is Propaganda class syllabus, materials, and lecture videos. I had an extremely influential class & research assistant stint with Renee Hobbs during my time at Temple University, so I find her further work on propaganda useful.

• Amazon’s Surveillance System Is a Global Risk to People of Color by Hiba Ali

• The wikipedia entry on Ghost in the Shell series cyberbrains

• This Stanford lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology, which my man turned me onto, saying dude spends the whole series thoroughly unpacking all sorts of bullshit attributed to genetic traits, revealing instead the larger environmental, historical, and experiential impacts on people’s behavior/biological statuses.

Howdy everyone how ya doin? Doin alright? How we doin? How yuz doin. How you doin.

(scroll to the big n the bold for EVENTS happening this & next week)

It’s September official. Sun sets before 7:30 now and last light is before 8pm. I remember checking the sunset and last light on my weather app at the height of summer and last light wasn’t till 9:15 and shit. AS THE PLANET TURNS.

I did a thing I’d been wanting for yearrrrs and took a long weekend summer vacation in Wildwood with my boo. Going down to Wildwood at the end of August was our big family vacation when I was a kid. Wildwood, if you don’t know, is/was one of South Jersey’s free beaches. My mom called it the working class beach one time. It’s one of those bastions of Irish/Italian/Polish 1950s vacation utopias of an era past, where every generation’s next immigrant wave (directly or indirectly related to US imperial war efforts) comes thru but the old timers try to act like white is right in these demoralizing patriotic fuckshit ways and it’s like FOR WHAT (i know for what). Wildwood has three piers and three rollercoasters and ––oh this was interesting~ apparently the city decided to pay a falconer daily to fly 2 falcons during the day and 1 owl at night over the boardwalk, to scare away (not kill & eat) the seagulls, which had become extra aggro trying to get food this year…. And now the city is trying to get the boardwalk merchants to cover the costs and everyone’s fighting about it. Anyway, Wildwood wow. When I was a preteen Wildwood was like …super peak 90s macho sexy corny MTV spring break teen cruising hell, with hot body babe crews and water guns and misfit headbanger freaks (like me) hanging around under the boardwalk & in the goofy Sublime t-shirt Operation Ivy patch selling combo bong skate shop (swirled whirld). Like my block in Olney, Wildwood as I remember it in my teen years was a mix of white families and Black and brown families, and it was definitely working class. People used to cruise around town at night with stereos blasting club music, and it felt virile and exciting as fuck to my shy gay freak ass. They eventually put some noise ordinance in place. ~_~

Every year there’s all these horrible crass ignorant shirts and other trending fashions, and this year I was nonplussed to lay eyes on all manner of outrageously SHITTY pro turnp meme shirts. I learned that there’s a Firefighter lives matter flag that looks like the cops one but with a red stripe instead of blue… and I’m like lol OKAY. The militarism and patriotism is SUCH a feeling and experience in these south Jersey beach towns (and swaths of South Philly and the N’east, m i rite?). This one Military Recruitment and Hollywood youtube really lays out some CONS to joining the military, which I found for real compelling and not just some shitty looking down my nose at you for joining the military liberal college educated type attitude – Dude in the video is like MANY people who join the military commit suicide, experience sexual assault, and you know the usual injury, addiction, PTSD and trauma shit AT EXTREMELY HIGH RATES compared to rest of the populace… I think he even offers alternatives to military recruitment? I forget. It’s a good thorough video, and as you all know I LOVE a deeply informative, easy to watch video about complex topics. Shout out to the synthesizers out there.

Anyway I was in Wildwood this weekend and it was giving me lots to reflect upon (like after I said out loud that Wildwood is where my mom and my dad met, working in the same restaurant and my boo was like no wonder ur obsessed with this place, and I was staring at the ocean like damn). Not least of which ALSO was that it was this Roar to the Shore biker rally… I was like oh I wonder… what kinda bikers… are gonna show… up. And by the evening when crews of hard looking dudes in Pagans patches and their women decked out in Property of so and so back patches were strolling all over town, Wildwood police posted up everywhere like rival gangs in a 50s drama, I was like maaaan…. What a fucking scene. Look up some shit about the Pagans if you don’t know. If you read Patrick Califia’s Doc and Fluff, witnessing all this managed to give me some deeper insight into the ruthless violence depicted in the biker crews in that dystopia. :squeamish flirtatious emoji:

I have an internal tactic that I won’t write about the violence capable of mobs of people heavily invested in whiteness and patriotic/nationalistic/outlaw-law identities. I won’t depict it or go out of my way to describe it. But you know I think about Parable of the Talents like fuck.

Some years ago I decided I was writing fantasy and not science fiction. Fuck the dreams and nightmares of imperial science. Imperial meaning empire. Like evil empire. All encompassing.

But fantasy is not escapism. We need magic and fantasy.

I’m still working on a zine about the crux of absurdities in being mixed European American and [something else/insert other heritage] white passing white person white assimilation cultural forgetting decrepit family ties secrets and loathsome positions of self-negation with ego’s ever present’ness under white supremacist social realities… The working title is The Void of Meaning. Anymore I’ve been feeling so fucked up stuck trying to talk about this shit ANY WHERE online. IRL is another story.

Here we go again with a full failure of words.

Well let me move on for now. September is busy for me. I’m doing an event every week and prepping for like 2-3 collab zines with friends, and still carving away at my own solo projects. I’m gonna wholesale repost the post description from my IG post about the same events:

EEEVVVENTSSSS

1) September/new moon greetings all. I've seen a good handful of posts from friends/neighbors lately about how not being on social is great for their health, and how they'd also be off IG if not for the news/event announce aspect of the network (reminds me of so many ppl's reasons for not leaving FB). At any rate, I'm just here to show my face (plus my fit) again and remind whoever that I post to my stories more often than my wall ~AND~ that @adifficultjoyce made this Some Events in Philly To Attend (SEPTA) Calendar for the people. Please submit your events & financial support to [*]septacalendar at protonmail dot com[*]

2) SEPT 12th /8~11pm/ ~ I'll be emcee'ing and performing at @pauline_darkstar's SIGNS OF AGING tape release show alongside Rainbow Crimes at Vox Populi Gallery. For the crowd that likes/appreciates that outer space odyssey shit.

2) SEPT 19th /7pm~midnight/ ~ I'll be vending at @hawkmothevents __Garden of Celestial Pleasures__ queer equinox celebration & magickal bazaar, w/ethereal costume contest & surprise DJ ft @bb_basura. At Bartram's Garden, wheelchair accessible

3) SEPT 21st /8pm~11pm/ ~ Enter into the dark and listen at the official release soirée for VENUS SATURN SQUARE. This trans-centered erotic zine unfurls from its printed confines for an evening to thrill and confound desires. Come ready to lurk-xuriate in low lighting and heavy listening. Listening masks and phone check will be on offer for a low-distraction experience, along with glow bracelets for anyone who'd rather not talk. Feat reading performances by yours truly, @spaceface2.0 @snaxho_ @theholyhawkmoth, also at VOX.

Every event is sliding scale $$ entry but no one turned away for lack of funds. VOX wheelchair accessibility ~ has 5 steps to the elevator entrance, which is 29-inches wide, so may not accommodate all wheelchairs or motorized chairs. Contact ahead for ramp at events@voxpopuligallery.org or 215.238.1236

~AND~ November 17th, Metropolarity will be at the Philly Zine Fest at The Rotunda, Sunday only (cause the tables sold out immediately). Word on the street is that Alex Smith’s ARKDUST will be back in print by then.

ONGOING

Mil Mundos Books in Bushwick, Brooklyn has started reading Metropolarity’s STYLE OF ATTACK REPORT for their reading group. So cool. Last week I ordered us another batch of books, putting it at 1000 books produced (and hopefully read).

And that might be it for now.

Writing this while listening to Chico Sonido’s latest radio show.

I binge watched the first half of that anime Carole and Tuesday (on netclix). Did you? Would recommend with caveats re: ambivalently negative trans depictions & unfortunate lapse into actual talent show format, but Shinichiro Watanabe (director of *clears throught* Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy, etc) is behind this series so there’s that too.

In Wildwood I finished reading Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People and read (in a day) Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart. STILL working on Testo Junkie… >_<

Next time I hope to offer up reviews, along with some finished projects, some new audio stories to ~listen~ to, and more deep thoughts. Let me know how you’re doing. I always appreciate those replies, no matter how seemingly trivial. If you’re in the area, would also love to see your faces at the Vox events, ~espécially~ Venus Saturn Square. ;^]

con amor y sore tendons

Monk @}-}-;———

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