The books on my nightstand.

The books on my nightstand have been piling up lately. I’ve let things get a little carried away. But I love every second of it. Last night I already read two and a half of the texts pictured here, and I can’t wait to devour more of them this month.

When I went to the Lambda Literary Awards this year for the first time, I interviewed a number of the past and present winners and nominees about where and how they find, or found, queer literature past and present, and also how they felt about how they find queer literature today. There were many differing opinions and viewpoints.

I love the process of finding the next book, of finding the next thing to read, of taking recommendations, of not taking them, of finding something else on the way to that other book. I have a kind of astrological belief in the books I read, like the one I’m reading now is precisely the one that I need to be reading right now. That the information I’m going to find there is precisely the thing that the universe needed to tell me.

Books have been profound companions, teachers, and world openers for me. I look forward to many more piles like this in my life.

We meet once a month at a group member’s apartment—most of us are in Crown Heights or nearby, so we’ve been meeting primarily in that area and will probably keep that as our central orbit.

We have four slots during each session for people to get 20 minutes of feedback on their work. The ideal situation being that those four people send the work around by email a few days before the meeting so that everyone has a chance to read it beforehand. Then, if other people (beyond the four) want to share short pieces we can do shorter 5-10 minute feedback sessions. Each person receiving feedback can say what kind of feedback they want and choose how they want to participate in the feedback session. That said, we’re pretty loose with this and each meeting has its own dis/order.

We’ve also gotten into the habit of starting off with some sort of get-your-creative-juices-flowing exercise or writing game at the beginning, just for fun.

All of which is to say, we’re pretty casual, but everyone is committed to their writing in their own way.

All queer-identified genders and sexualities are welcome. And all writing genres—we’ve read everything from plays to novel excerpts to chunks of grant proposals to poetry. The subject matter of the writing doesn’t need to be queer, we just want to provide support for queer stories/narratives and writers in all their manifestations. The only caveat is that we ask people to come with some experience and prefer not to have people currently in school for writing.

We’re also planning a special project or two for members of the group who want to participate.

Agnes Martin in her studio.

“An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution.”
— Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

“When we claim to know and present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless essential to who we are. We cannot reasonably expect anything different from others in return. To acknowledge one’s own opacity or that of another does not transform opacity into transparency. To know the limits of acknowledgement is to know even this fact in a limited way; as a result, it is to experience the limits of knowing.”
— Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
— Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, Worlds Apart (1978)

Agnes Martin, The Sea, 2003. Acrylic and graphite on canvas. 60″x60″

Why

As a young person, I remember reading Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and finding it’s aggression and intellectualism exciting. But as an adult, rereading the play, I couldn’t help but feel very differently about Albee’s writing in that work. This play is not a direct response to Albee, so much as a riff from a very different perspective.

What

Characters: A woman and an elephant (female).
Running Time: 25 minutes
Summary: A painter and an elephant meet in a park—the elephant has recently lost her job at the zoo and the painter has lost her confidence ahead of an important opening. The two discuss their respective existential and philosophical dilemmas, eventually reaching an unexpected resolution.
Recognition:
• Finalist in the first annual Labute New Theater Festival, 2013.

When & Where

Availability: Available for production.
Production History:
• To be produced by the St. Louis Actors Theater as part of the first annual Labute New Theater Festival, as the Gaslight Theater, St. Louis, MO, July 2013.

I’m hoping to be able to travel to see it, but I’m actually in rehearsal for another show that we were going to do a work-in-progress showing of in late July, so it will depend on the timing. But either way, I’m excited to have the play be part of this new festival.

Please join if you’re in the Boston area:

Wednesday, April 10 @ 7.00pm
Capenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
This event is free and doesn’t require tickets or RSVP.
Further info

“Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, and every native would like a tour. But some natives — most natives in the world — cannot go anywhere.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, The Ugly Tourist

“Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“A clearer picture of the scene aboard the ship began to emerge as passengers who have been mostly out of cellphone reach described overflowing toilets, sewage backed up in showers, scarce food and people getting sick.”
― Jay Reeves and Ramit Plushnick-Masti for the AP, regarding the troubles aboard the cruise ship named Triumph

“In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent.”
― Tony Schwartz, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive” in The New York Times

• A Fight to the Death for Arts Funding?

That piece follows up on a series of articles and essays I’ve been writing over at Hyperallergic about the role of the arts in US society. All this writing builds on the research I’m doing for a book that I’m writing about the value of the arts in America.

Here are a couple of the other pieces that I’ve written lately:

• Failure, Success, and Community in Contemporary Performance

• Recovering the History of the Puerto Rican Art Workers’ Coalition

• A Grand Unified Theory of Art?

• The Perplexing Role of Metrics in the Arts

• It Is Broke, We Should Probably Fix It: The Nonprofit Model and the Arts

• Good Intentions and Big Ideas: Feel Good Grants That Exploit Artists and Reduce Arts Funding

View the complete archive of my pieces for Hyperallergic here.

• CPANDA (The Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive – has links to just about every major arts-related data set out there)

• Some 2001 data from Princeton on the question of “How many artists are there [in the US]?” (it has holes, but it’s a great and very digestible jumping off point to larger questions about how we name and count artists)

• Most of this woman’s writing: Ellen Dissanayake

• This book, for many reasons: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

• Not being an educator, I’m coming to find as I dip further into a framework for better understanding the arts, that the term “inquiry” has achieved a vogue in education now, as in “inquiry-based learning.” Inquiring minds want to know…

But it’s not all research all the time. This fall I started a Queer Writing Group with Ella Boureau of In the Flesh Magazine. And in November I co-organized a marathon reading of work by Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. My brain can’t sit still these days.

• Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millenium, Thomas McEvilley (His writing is dense with reference and history, and the challenges to art historical narratives and pat explanations of why and how art transforms are great.)
• The Women, Hilton Als (The only word that I could come up with to characterize my impression of Als’ voice in this book was surgical—it felt precise, detached, and rigorous. I admire it, but it’s also difficult to image being under his microscope.)
• Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald (This book and another project I was working on led me to spend some time considering southern gothic as a form. Both things made me appreciate the form much more than I had before.)
• ‪An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures‬, Ann Cvetkovich (There’s a lot to discuss in this book, but at the moment that I read it, I appreciated it most for it’s insistence on nuance, complicating what appears to be simple or general, giving emotion credence, and welcoming ambiguities.)
• ‪Innovation‬: ‪The Basis of Cultural Change‬, H.G. Barnett (No wonder this book kept being referenced in others. It’s pretty fantastic for it’s non-specific, very open definition of and interest in cultural change, which is what he really means by the term ‘innovation.’)
• Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler (This is not an easy read, but her primary points, about acknowledging the ambiguity and instability of our ‘selves,’ and also acknowledging that in others, is a powerful one.)
• Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me, Ellen Forney (I bought this as a treat for myself in the afternoon and finished it by evening. Sometimes a graphic novel is just the thing.)
• I Still Believe Anita Hill: Three Generations Discuss the Legacies of Speaking Truth to Power, edited by Amy Richards and Cynthia Greenberg (I’ve talked to a lot of people about our memories of the Hill hearings while reading this book. I was 11 at the time. My memory associates them with shame and being punished for speaking up. But I also remember accusing a classmate in 6th grade of sexual harassment, and I can’t think of where else I would have gotten the idea—the timing is more than coincidence. It was enlightening and great to read about how much that episode served to galvanize so many others into action.)
• Heroines, Kate Zambreno (This kept coming up in a friend’s Facebook feed, so I decided to get a copy. After reading it I was surprised by the fact that more Facebook friends hadn’t mentioned it. I feel like Jelinek is a great forebear to list for this one. This book is fantastic and rich and totally integrated in terms of subject and form. This movement from the loose voice of the internet to a crafted printed voice is exciting to see. I loved Dodie Bellamy’s transition and though I didn’t read Zambreno’s blog, I really appreciate that all of that work is present in this new form.)
• Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks (This came to me by way of a group of young feminists in the city who were hosting a kind consciousness-raising workshop focused on anti-racist work. This book is a fantastic reminder of what feminism is, has been, and can be—and mostly importantly, she really succeeds in making it highly readable.)
• My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor (An intriguing and rich story, if sometimes contradictory.)
• The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues, Angela Davis (There’s some good stuff in these speeches, but it makes me want to read more in-depth writing from her as well.)
• Art as Experience, John Dewey (Despite being very aggravating in it’s winding and too-wordy prose, there’s a ton of good stuff in here.)
• Who Is Ana Mendieta?, Christine Redfern and Caro Caron (A very good and worthwhile read.)
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber (Perhaps the most important point in the entire book is that debt and the markets that are driven by it are often predicated on fictional ownership, colonialist thievery, and enslavement via threats of violence.)
• Women’s Barracks, Tereska Torres (Pretty much just great, particularly the Feminist Press edition.)
• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler (Because I hadn’t read it before. Though probably a bit heavy for Thanksgiving reading, but, that’s the time I had.)
• Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton (Let’s just say it was interesting to read this book the week after Thornton published her essay about why she no longer wants to write about the visual art market.)
• The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, Denis Dutton (This book is little better than a muddled literature review, but Dutton insists on taking credit for a good deal of the thinking he summarizes. Ultimately it offers little in the way of insight and there’s an abhorrent and overly lengthy half-assed discussion where he attempts to draw a parallel between art and the female orgasm. Are you fucking kidding me?)
• My Awesome Place: The Autobiography of Cheryl B, Cheryl Burke (Glad to have had a chance to read this one—a classic New York city story told from a non-classic perspective.)
• How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell (A fantastic blend of history of ideas, philosophy, biography, and social history. Bakewell’s writing is so readable and thoughtful, I can’t help but admire this work.)
• Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Melissa V. Harris-Perry (After listening to this discussion earlier in the year, I added this book to my list, glad to have had the chance to read it.)
• Rughum & Nadja: A Novel, Samar Habib (Saw this title appear on Sarah Schulman’s Facebook newsfeed and was looking for a beach read so decided to give it a go.)
• Queer Spirits, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs (Read this because Hyperallergic asked me to review it, and really glad to have encountered it.)
• Open City, Teju Cole (Unfortunately, I found this book a little frustrating, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the flaneur novel.)
• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (Learned a great deal in reading this, and was challenged to push even further with some of my own thinking about non-profits.)
• Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art Between Museum and Marketplace, Martha Buskirk (Well worth a read for anyone with any connections to the arts.)
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson (This book is fantastic and deserves to be read by many people. I can’t think of a more compelling account of such a huge swath of history.)
• Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars, Kay Turner (Really a remarkable work, tracking a largely invisible, but deeply important tradition that cuts across cultures, beliefs, and identities.)
• The Origins of Cultures: How Individual Choices Make Cultures Change, W. Penn Handwerker (Clearly this is just a sketch of a book, some of the ideas are tangential or underdeveloped. There are some interesting beginnings of ideas though.)
• Are You My Mother?: A Comic Novel, Alison Bechdel (As I said to the friend who gave me a copy of the book, I swallowed it whole. A fantastic example of why art provides such a rich opportunity for alternative forms of intellectual inquiry.)
• The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Sarah Schulman (Schulman’s writing here is disagreeable in the best possible sense, she refuses to make what she’s saying agreeable and instead focuses on stating her experience, ideas, and observations clearly, and with support where warranted. Thought there are points I would argue with her on, that’s kind of the point. It’s refreshing to see this smart, ranging work by a woman, a lesbian no less, published and receiving the serious attention it deserves.)
• The Decline of Pleasure, Walter Kerr (Some of this book is a definitely a product of its time, but there a lot in the first half that’s incredibly spot on, even some 50+ years later.)

“The impulse to express and understand will always compel some people with integrity. And integrity has its own strange trajectory—greater than any one person. Now that is a good lesson of history.”
-Sarah Schulman in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012)