Tim's journal

“If you make and keep my life horrible then, when I can tell the truth, it will be a horrible truth; it will not sound good or look good or, God willing, feel good to you, either. There is nothing good about the evils of a life forced into useless and impotent drift and privation. There is very little that is attractive or soothing about being strangled to death, whether it is the literal death of the body or the actual death of the soul that lying, that the humiliation and the evil of self-denial, guarantees.

Extremity demands, and justifies, extreme response. Violence invites, and teaches, violence. Less than that, less than a scream or a fist, less than the absolute cessation of normal events in the lock of abnormal duress is a lie and, worse than that, it is blasphemous ridicule of the self.”

-- June Jordan, "Civil Wars"

It took me about six weeks, but I finally finished reading Samuel Delany's recent novel _Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders_. Maybe I just have a kink for long books -- it's 804 pages and, like _Infinite Jest_ (which is even longer), I suspect it's going to be one of those books that keeps being important to me for a really long time. (The third one like that is _A Suitable Boy_ by Vikram Seth, though it hasn't stayed with me quite the same way _Infinite Jest_ has; I've also only read it once.)

In lieu of more thoughts, some quotations from it:

"'There ain't no normal," Shit said. 'That's what he always told me.' With his scruffy beard, Shit pointed his chin toward Dynamite. 'There's just comfortable and uncomfortable. And I like to be comfortable with pretty much everything.'" (p. 305)

"'Well--' Eric looked back up and put his hand on Shit's warm shoulder--'state supported marriage comes with a whole lot of assumptions about how it's gonna be, a history of who has to obey who, when you're justified in callin' it quits, all sorts of things like that. Now, you could agree with each other to change some of those things or do 'em differently, but for thousands and thousands of years gay men and women didn't have even that--except for a few Christian monasteries here and there, where the monks were allowed to marry each other. But nobody likes to think about those. For us, decidin' to be with someone else wasn't a matter of acceptin' a ready-made set of assumptions. You had to work 'em all out from the bottom up, every time--whether you was gonna be monogamous or open; and if you was gonna be open, how you was gonna do it so that it didn't bother the other person and even helped the relationship along. Workin' all that stuff out for yourselves was half the reason you went into a relationship with somebody else. We had some friends once--back when we lived in the Dump--that was faithful for ten months out the year, but for two months they'd go on vacation and do all their tom-cattin' around.' He realized he was making that up, but hell, it was plausible. 'Then they'd be faithful again. But that's how they liked to do it. Then there were guys like us that just had to make real sure that the other person was feelin' good about things, when they did it and knew they were number one and didn't mind. See, that's what people who get married don't have. Or don't have in the same way." (p. 785-786)

"'Bein' a pervert was the only was I ever learned anything worth knowin'.'" (p. 792)

There's also this epigraph, which, if I ever wrote papers anymore, I would try to include in a paper about GC:

"Except there's garbage, which is part of what we're trying to include in our work and our thought, which is to say, we are attentive still to what remains, what gets tossed away and off. We want to include the trash in many ways, thinking of this refuse according to all sorts of disposal systems." -- Avital Ronell

"In the descriptive tradition of the social sciences, past participles are used as simple adjectives and their dynamic nature as verb forms is overlooked. The poor are often described as 'deprived' or 'impoverished,' as if these words connoted inherent characteristics like 'tall' or 'redheaded.' In reality, to say that a group of persons is 'deprived' or 'impoverished' is to say that they have been deprived. Then, changing voice, we can say that someone has deprived them, someone has impoverished them. Only after that dynamic process has occurred does anyone benefit from a declaration, with a scientific imprimatur, that the resulting state of affairs is permanent and unchangeable. It is not the lack of elegant models that leads to policy decisions that further deprive the deprived. Such consequences are usually quite obvious---at least to those about to be deprived. A policy choice is an act of will and intention. We must once in a while admit that the poor have been impoverished intentionally."

-- William Ryan, Equality

"And I know that lots of advice on doing well at things (any things, really) is phrased as 'here are the values and outlooks and skills of the successful people; be like them', but so much of that is bullshit. If any of said advice actually helps or inspires you, by all means go for it, but it isn't worth it to angst about not fitting a model someone else constructed after the fact to explain their own or others' success in a way that minimizes signs of luck and maximizes the appearance of various good qualities." -- luinied

I've been reading (or re-reading) various examples of the genre of Grad Student Self-Help Books. (You'd think such books would be very short and consist of "don't be a grad student".)

"Tattoo this list somewhere you won't forget to look. (1) Publish academic papers. (2) Go to conferences. (3) Get on committees. If you dive into the administrative pool, you can swim around with your professors and get to know them on a collegial level (a cynical colleague refers to this as 'amplexus,' which is the mating embrace of frogs."

-- Robert L. Peters, _Getting What You Came For_

"One of the things we are forced to re-examine is relationships. Unlike straight people we do not have church weddings, we are not often enrolled in the PTA, we are not clear on who is the breadwinner and who is the homemaker. We don't have relatives clucking over us, urging us to be faithful and fertile and upstanding. Our relationships have little social or legal reality. As a result, we must invent love all over again. Gay lovers must work out contracts or agreements that suit them. Household chores, money matters, social obligations -- these things must be decided and assigned. Sex roles in bed, gender-linked behavior out of bed (who cooks, who mows the lawn, who pays the bills) -- these things must be arbitrated. And fidelity, the thorniest question of all, must be arranged.... The variations are endless. My point is that convention does not govern us; we create new conventions for ourselves.... Today more and more straight couples are deciding that traditional marriage doesn't work.... Straight people might well learn something from us, since we have already sorted out the issues, even if we haven't arrived at solutions that will suit everyone." -- Edmund White, "The Joys of Gay Life" (1977)