Stacked · From the Archives

i’m unsure if i ever published this, as it cuts off abruptly at the wojnarowicz bio, which happens to be an excellent read.

The Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson

This I read on a flight from Saint Paul to New Orleans, cover to cover. I retrieved my car, drove home from the airport, and ignored my unpacked luggage deposited on the floor of my bedroom so that I could experience it again, back to back, immersive and consuming.

I am unable now to see a tulip without getting hard.

Revisiting my copy (gifted to me upon finishing a re-read of the Honorable Mention of the Wind Up Bird Chronicles, I left that on a nightstand as an offering), I find underlined passages that are breaking my heart and forcing me into an aching state of longing : to love you calmly is to not love you at all.

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

The most beautiful love letter to sodomy ever composed. Genet transforms Paris into a dimension of perfection within perversion, not contaminated by virtue, it’s purer than that, an idolization of its anti-heroes of murderers, pimps, and prostitutes, the holy saints of sinners.

My introduction to Genet was through Patti Smith, she enters her memoir M Train with her pilgrimage to his ideal prison, and then later to his grave to deliver rocks and debris from his beloved confinement. She is moved by his words deeply, and I entered this fantasy version of an autobiography with high expectations coming from a low place – what could I really expect from a pathological masturbator, a derelict of society, a purposeful outcast? Ask, and you shall receive, and in abundance. Its conception is as profound (profane?) as its content: written on scraps of paper within his cell, destroyed by prison guards and written again from memory, constructed by the stories of other criminals and Genet’s own longing for skin against his skin, his alter ego, his perfected avatar, beautiful, sacred Divine.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, Susan Sontag

This is making my list not so much for its content { no shade, SS } but for its inspiration. I had fallen out of keeping journals on and off over the last few years feeling like they weren’t right in some way, a self-judgment that on admitting, feels sort of ridiculous. They weren’t linear, neither diary or grimoire, and mostly illegible. This, alongside Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook”, reminded me that my journals are mine, and don’t require any sort of formatting or specific content, although I am making an active effort on improving my penmanship.