Camping in Nature with Grizzly Men: “Ecocriticim” through a Camp Sensibility – ENG 449

Treadwell reads as we read Treadwell

John Water’s camp classic Pink Flamingos ends with Divine eating a pile of dog feces. The story goes that Divine followed the dog around for hours, waiting for it poop, setting a stage for a performance and scene that would cement her title as “the filthiest person alive.” And similarly, in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell glorifies bears, their scat and filth, puts himself “at risk,” performs excessively to gain credibility as a naturalist. He is performing an identity that he himself may or may not understand but it is nonetheless—to borrow from Judith Butler—both deeply embodied and artificial. A character like Treadwell, who sincerely and bodily performed loving the bears unto his death, forces uneasiness within an audience that holds tremendous preconceived notions of nature and the natural and what constitutes an appropriate relationship towards them. Nature, the universe, the environment—the what we consider to be natural, wilderness, or interconnected—these very foundations of ecological language, are made more readily visible as constructed notions and artificial through Treadwell’s performance. Grizzly Man illustrates for its audience that these concepts rely upon their conceptualization through the human mind and are constantly molded by human stewardship and touch. And so, in terms of conservation, Grizzly Man questions our naturalized unreality by examining the more porous aspects of ecology and stewardship.

Grizzly Man, through Herzog’s and Treadwell’s mediated and contemporaneous performance and direction, take serious Treadwell’s actions but exhibit a serious failure of tone through the extravagant tension these competing narrators produce. And Grizzly Man becomes sensible, through the extravagant failure it performs, as “pure Camp,” which according to Susan Sontag requires an “essential element…a seriousness that fails…that has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve” (23). Treadwell takes himself seriously as an activist and lover of bears but still exhibits his actions and stewardship playfully and as a performance—his camera is present, to drink in and represent his enactments of friendship and protection. And Herzog appropriates these performances, interprets the composite of his footage, and inserts his direction and his own performance to inscribe a different language of consequence onto Treadwell’s actions, forcing a tense competition between the two subjects.

The narrative tension bred from this competition manifests throughout the film but is exemplified in an intense moment of tonal juxtaposition as Treadwell crouches over a half-eaten fox, quietly crying “I love you…I love you and I…don’t understand; it’s a painful world” (Herzog). In this passionate performance of tenderness, Treadwell mourns the loss of one of his “friends,” treating a “natural” creature as he would a deceased pet or relative.  But in a narrative move that is best described as predatory, Herzog seizes an opportunity to interrupt, “Here I differ with Treadwell, I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder.” Herzog claims control of his audience’s perception with a rhetorical either-or dichotomy—harmony with or antagonism against the natural. As this is Herzog’s representation of Treadwell, the audience is meant to sympathize with the cold, Teutonic appraisal of the state of nature: something that cannot, will not, and is unable to reciprocate Treadwell’s and humanity’s wishes, desires, and devotions.

But Herzog’s performed dichotomy is false and predicated on terminology that he insists upon and provides which erodes his ability to control his dominance over the narrative through its overbearingness. Treadwell believes the world is painful but he doesn’t seek to explain it, and instead consoles himself by appealing his own lack of understanding to embrace of the melancholy his performance produces in this encounter with death. Herzog believes the world is painful and interprets Treadwell’s sorrow as a failure to react rationally to the irrational “reality” of nature; Herzog seeks to reify his narrative authority in this moment, forcing his moral upon the audience. In this flourish, Herzog handles Treadwell in a manner that parallels Susan Sontag’s relationship to Camp as she says she “is strongly drawn to [it], and almost strongly as offended by it” (1). Herzog’s unsympathetic evaluation attempts to produce a pleasurable and satisfying affect in its audience because it wantonly appeals to the audience’s fear and repulsion towards bears and the natural world while still attempting a concerned honesty towards Treadwell’s “naiveté.”

However, this stark tonal juxtaposition illustrates a moment of narrative fissure, opening up and magnifying the effervescent, extravagant artifice of Treadwell’s and Herzog’s posturing within Grizzly Man. These performed postures are so overwrought and excessive that they become sensible as Camp, which contains “a large element of artifice” (Sontag 7). Through their increasingly artificial performances, Treadwell and Herzog represent “instant characters” who embody “a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing” (33). Treadwell’s affected mannerisms and childlike behavior are a “triumph of the epicene style,” since his subject performance is always a mix of maternal tenderness and an aggressively paternal protection which make his gender unconventional and puzzling (11). Both men are “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater” (10). And so, these men exhibit many of the “notes” that Sontag uses to describe a Camp sensibility. Camp is a “mode of seduction – one which employs” but also latches onto “flamboyant mannerisms susceptible to double interpretation, [and] gestures full of duplicity” (17).

One of Herzog’s closing remarks insists that he sees no harmony, discovers “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy” in the eyes of a bear Treadwell films and sees “only the overwhelming indifference of nature” but this statement appears duplicitous since he admits that it is a difference of perception between him and Treadwell. He invites the audience to reflect on the bear’s eyes in this gesture—and how the audience reflects is a projection of their own postures and sensibilities towards bears onto the “bear.” Camp provides an opportunity to interrupt Herzog’s machinations in this scene and seek meaning through alternative sensibilities.

Sontag’s portrayal of Camp is meant to be opaque and so it often appears that a work of Camp is performing the seduction of Camp as the reader is perceiving the duplicity of its performance and recognizing the Camp within it. It is described as a sensibility and its ability to be sensed, through a refinement of a taste or a capacity for sensation, help to inform the complex interaction between a thing performing Camp and audience perceiving Camp in a performance—which are often collapsible categories, further complicating what it means to be Campy. At some point, the complications become so immense that the argument for Camp must be simplified to “I know it when I see it” or put another way, “it simply is.” And Grizzly Man, through its excessive narrative performances and opulent theatricality simply is Camp to this audience member. Sensing Grizzly Man’s Campiness provides an opportunity to reevaluate its didacticism since Camp is “a solvent of morality” that “neutralizes moral indignation, [and] sponsors playfulness” (52). This allows the audience of Grizzly Man analytical distance and provides the ability to articulate the ways in which Treadwell embodies the exaggeratedly theatrical and excessive performance that Camp senses, values, and celebrates; Camp sees “artifice as an ideal, theatricality” and allows this theatricality to invest their thought in new ways of “being” in “nature” (43).

There is a lingering spectral presence that interrupts an elegantly Camp interpretation of death in Grizzly man: it is not Treadwell’s specter—or society’s—but Amie Huguenard’s. She is the only character who shirks the excess of performance in Grizzly man: liminal in appearance and representation, she remains a nonentity. And therefore, she the only failure that Camp cannot locate success within. She cautions the playfulness of Camp to not entrench itself so deeply into irreverence that it becomes cruel; Camp considers nothing sacred but cannot celebrate something that is not extravagant and is simply lamentable. Instead, Camp latches onto characters, like Treadwell and Herzog and “relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character”…identifies with what it is enjoying…Camp is a tender feeling” (56).

Treadwell, through many triumphs and awkward intensities of exaggerated performance, illustrates the ability to reimagine the “natural” into his own set of rules and regulations of appropriate touch, reverence, and stewardship. Camp is a sensibility and aesthetic, values performances, like Treadwell’s, that defamiliarize and make exaggerated, the constructions society assumes to be natural. In a moment of exaggerated unfamiliarity, Treadwell stoops over a pile of fresh scat, rejoicing in its warmth and excrement as a product of life, something produced by one of his bear friends, and it provides a moment of slippage for his audience where we are able to glimpse into the construction and constructedness of the natural. He whispers that he “can feel it,” that it was “just inside of her, my girl…it’s Wendy’s poop” (Herzog). He returns the camera to his face, addressing the audience and anticipating their disgust as he relays, “I know it may seem weird that I touched her poop but it was inside of her…it’s her life…it’s her…she’s so precious to me, she gave me Downy” (Herzog). This is one of his least dangerous interaction with the bears but it is also the most confusing and unsettling, as he infuses qualities of vitality and importance onto the waste product of these omnivorous alpha predator.

Through his touch and tender reverence, he remarkably defamiliarizes the audience’s relationship to poop and bears by his active redefinition of meaning and boundaries. There is a proliferation of new meaning in this interaction, bear becomes “my girl,” “my girl” becomes Wendy, her poop becomes an extension of Wendy, Wendy’s poop becomes Downy—her cub, an organism that gestated inside of her and was released into the world, full of vitality. It is a series of performative speech acts, producing new definitions of reality as he builds his utterance towards the conclusive, “everything about them is perfect” (Herzog). His appraisal of the scat descriptively not wrong and it is infused with appropriations of existing facts: it is indeed warm, fertile, and full of life—fecund for literal bacteria and figurative meaningfulness.

In “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag argues that Camp is “at least apolitical” but the redefinitions and newly produced meanings that Treadwell performs are inherently political since they bear consequences for Grizzly Man’s subjects, for the bears and their ecosystem, and for a society that actively asserts and produces definitional meaning as a means of controlling its subjects through discourse (2). Performative redefinitions happen throughout society, often contemporaneously; the societal reaction to the AIDS crisis mutated the rectum into a grave incubator of disease and death, and through this redefinition, mediated and informed a deepening societal revulsion to the anal and fecal (Bersani). But Treadwell interrupts this societal distaste to redefine the scatological as he shrewdly performs for his audience—as a trained actor does—balancing his performance and the audiences’ repellant perception of poop to negotiate his new understandings. Through his performance, he produces a new reality where touching poop becomes a gesture that touches bear, transforms poop into natal, and re-describes digestion as a celebratory, bountiful production of fresh life instead of a repulsive symbol of death, waste, and terminated consumption.

In a beautiful, off-screen turn of unintentional Camp, Treadwell is eaten and can finally become bear, through digestion, by becoming the poop he gleefully touched. Poop is the means through which Treadwell can transform into “bear,” if we follow his produced framework of definitional meaning.  However, he is denied this (through a bitter reversal of his wish to never harm a bear) as he and his lover, Amy are exhumed from the bear’s stomach. Through this denial, he remains human and his composite parts are collected into a trash bag. What the coroner call “a trash bag of human parts” (Herzog). But he has been human trash for a while: a dejected, depressive ex-junkie and failed actor—he is already discarded and devalued by society. Camp allows the audience to sense that Treadwell was always already failing to become “bear” and his failed transformation into poop further exemplifies the inability to break free from human constructions and the power of discursively enforced relationships and boundaries. Camp can also sense the performance of societal power—as a display that reifies humanity’s status as the “alpha predator”—and in this moment, the audience can “sniff the stink and pride ourselves on our strong nerves” since this naked performance of power exhibits how deeply new definitions of relationality are resisted by society when they do not conform to a produced appropriateness or normality (Sontag 48).

Treadwell’s failure to become bear can be understood, through a Camp sensibility, to reveal the perpetual production of artificial meaning within the societal constructions of nature, the natural, and humanity’s enforced relationship to them. Grizzly Man presents Treadwell as naïve and strange since his desires are projected onto creatures—predators—associated with carnal needs, aggression, and death. Yet Herzog is didactic and extreme, so unabashedly predatory and hyperbolic in his direction, that when compared to Treadwell’s tender earnestness, both men seem comical and frivolous. The moral murkiness is buttressed by the profusion of discourse Herzog provides through interviews that work to moralize Treadwell’s passing; each new subject seeks to make meaning from his corpse, to turn Treadwell into a heroic figure, a parable, or cautionary tale. The absolute unnaturalness of these postures, and their naked desire to enforce narrative, force the audience to work through the ambiguities that become manifest in their performances. A Camp sensibility resists the compulsion to moralize and seeks to “find the success in certain passionate failures” (55). And in terms of Camp, Treadwell’s death was a glorious success since it is an imperfect triumph of his aesthetic; he became “bear” in a very momentary victory against the power of entrenched definitions and produced a new form of “being” through digestive transmutation. His success as “bear” is artificial and ultimately fails but is equal in its artificiality and failure to the language that seeks to enforce his status as “human”; as Sontag says “Camp sees everything in quotation marks” and those quotation marks denaturalize naturalized categories of being. And so “bear” never was Bear just as “human” never was Human; the categories were always already constructed and Grizzly Man makes them perform their artificiality by exaggerating them to their logical extremes.

This effervescent proliferation of artificiality allows the audience to feel the “sympathy modified by revulsion” in Grizzly Man which is an ambivalence that returns them to Camp as a “solvent of morality” and a sensibility that” neutralizes moral indignation” and “sponsors playfulness” (1, 52). A solvent dissolves substances into solutions and the solvency Camp provides is its ability to dissolve the solute of naturalized categories of being and identity. Equally intriguing is its ability to transform these categories into solutions through their dissolution. Grizzly Man’s proposed solution is illusory, imparted through Herzog’s objectivity as a documentary filmmaker but he inserts his narration into the film and—whether intentional or not—exposes the role he plays. Through his unabashed mediation, he reveals the artificiality of a “documentary” that proposes to “document” the life of another. Treadwell’s solution is less duplicitous through its naiveté. While both men are playful with artifice, Treadwell works to deconstruct the appropriate boundaries of identity, touch, and the natural to broaden possibility; whereas Herzog plays with artifice to foreclose the possibilities opened by Treadwell. The Camp solution celebrates the successes each man achieved through their failed experiments, understanding each to be inadequate and radiant, beautiful and repulsive. Sontag concludes, “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful…Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I’ve tried to sketch in these notes” (58).

Certainly, we can say Grizzly Man is good because it’s awful; its subject matter is “grizzly” and the playful pun does not go unnoticed and informs the shades of grey between the extremes of the film that inspire awe within its audience. And so, if everything remains awfully grey and that greyness remains constructed, we are encouraged to play in the constructed greyness and to interrupt entrenched definitions of “natural” relationships. We see a sign that commands us “Do Not Wander from the Path” at Walden Pond and we can sense that this is antithetical to what Walden Pond represents and draws people to it. But we can also celebrate the contradiction while respecting its purpose. These boundaries and restrictions are artificial, readily subverted by Camp—playfully—with an irreverent respect towards what limits seek to protect. A Camp reading of Grizzly Man knows better than to suggest that people should touch the bears. But a Camp sensibility can joyfully respect and celebrate the desire and attempt to redefine what it means to touch, love, and protect through understanding that these artificial redefinitions are exactly where meaning is always already located.

Works Cited

Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” The MIT Press (1987): 197-222. Print.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Inside/Out: Lesbain Theories, Gay Theories (1991): 13-31. Print.

Gammil, Cassia. “A Queer Ecological Presentation on Bear and Grizzly Man.” Eng. Department Colloquium. 27 May 2015.

Grizzly Man. Dir. Werner Herzog. Lionsgate, 2005. Film.

Pink Flamingos. Dir. John Waters. Dreamland, 1979. Film.

Sontag, Susuan. “Notes on Camp.”1964. Georgetown.edu. Web. 4 April 2015.

“Beyond Terrestrial Futurity” – ENG 449: Sex, Gender, and Ecology

I made a short zine for my scrapbook project that investigates the imagined futures within the PC game Civilization: BeyondEarth.

Presentation Proposal – Camping in Nature with Grizzly Men: Ecocriticism through a Camp Sensibility

Burger Girl – “Kiss Lamour” on youtube

**Submitted proposal for a paper presentation–more to come if accepted!**

John Water’s camp classic Pink Flamingos ends with Divine eating a pile of dog feces. The story goes that Divine followed the dog around for hours, waiting for it poop, setting a stage for a performance and scene that would cement her title as “the filthiest person alive.” And similarly, in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell glorifies bears, their scat and filth, puts himself “at risk,” performs and camps-it-up to gain credibility as a naturalist. A character like Treadwell, who sincerely and bodily performed loving the bears unto his death, force uneasiness within an audience that holds tremendous preconceived notions of nature and the natural and what constitutes an appropriate relationship towards them.

Nature, the universe, the environment—the what we consider to be natural, wilderness, or interconnected—the very foundations of ecological language, are constructed notions and artificial. And it’s deceptively simple to admit that without consequence. However, it is another to consider this unreal reality in terms of conservation, in terms of ecology, and in terms of sustainability. What are we seeking harmony with? What antagonizes us? What is nature? How do we contextualize our own purpose within it?

Treadwell is presented as naive and strange; his desires are projected onto creatures—predators—associated with carnal needs, aggression, and death. Herzog defamiliarizes both his own and Treadwell’s views of naturalism by putting them into conversation with one another. Herzog is didactic and extreme, so unabashedly predatory and hyperbolic in his direction, that when compared to Treadwell’s tender earnestness, it seems comical—campy even.

If camp, as a sensibility and aesthetic, seeks to defamiliarize, and make exaggerated, the constructions society assumes to be natural, what can be gleaned from camp performances as ecocriticism. And equally important, can camp—which is descriptively apolitical—offer meaning beyond aesthetics? Is camp and camping a virtue and mindset towards which society should aspire?

“Lesbian: An Investigatory Treatise” – WS 308: Lesbian Literature

For this zine project, I felt particularly cautious about defining and unpacking the term lesbian in the same manner I did “Intimate” and “Queer Reading” within those zines. I took particular care as someone who understandably participates within this class as a complete outsider–someone who is neither female-identified nor someone who couples with female-identified persons.  Lesbian, the word and concept, seems particularly fragile–if only because it felt readily abandoned by those who identified as heterosexual and those who believed they were beyond the label of “lesbian” and simply were “themselves”. I found this both within the texts we read, in readings by/about the authors of the texts, and throughout discussions with my peers. I did/do not intend to make a judgement towards those who choose not to identify as lesbian but my intention within the zine was to project my hope that a multiplicity of someones will continue to participate within this identification, make it their own, and thrive within its capacious confines.

Lesbian: An Investigatory Treatise

Nancy’s Conclusions? The Myriad Complications of Historical, Subjective, and Narrative Identity in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl – ENG 464

Willa Cather at her least Willa Cather

-For ENG 464: Willa Cather and Reading Queerly

Sapphira and the Slave Girl constantly attempts and tries to achieve a static ideal only to interrupt itself, to retract and redact, pulling its language or plot back into itself. Nancy, who may very well be The Slave Girl in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is a driver of plot, as a locus of desire, hope, and faith, and as mentioned, and stands out as a textual device of interruption. Nancy is a character who “didn’t tell falsehoods deliberately, to get something she wanted; it was always to escape from something;” Nancy’s escape through lying is interrupting less for its dishonesty and more for its desire to flee and escape from consequences—even if only for a moment (44). The inability to be honest makes the asymmetrical power dynamic of master and slave explicit—a conflict that is central to Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Nancy “caught at any pretext to keep off blame or punishment for an hour, a minute,” which interrupts a relationship predicated on the ability of Sapphira, the master, to control punishment and control the terms of the punishable for Nancy (44). Through lies, Nancy illustrates her desire to escape the power-dynamic for fleeting moments “before she had time to think or to tell herself that she would be found out” (44). Exposure is framed through the language of the inevitable within the text, something that can be deferred but that will ultimately be found out. But oddly enough, despite the language of exposure, lying, and deceit, the text makes no mention of truth or honesty, belying the text’s investment in leaving matters of truth and honesty largely unspoken for. The text seems to insinuate that the confusion bred from lies and half-truths may paint a more honest picture of the novel’s setting than attempting to relay the “truth” through the verisimilar. It hints at the inability to find truth in a system that places value in wildly disproportionate power structures where all participants lie to one another in order to maintain whatever aspects of control they are able.

The end of Book III, “Old Jezebel,” exemplifies the text’s use of lies and half-truths as an escape by fleeing, darting off as a means of gesturing towards the intersection of conflicting narratives. In chapter one of “Old Jezebel,” Sapphira reminisces that their time together, gardening “were good times” but then laments, “I’ve been house-bound for a long while now, like you” (87). Relayed through vague snapshots, and mediated exclusively by Sapphira with nodding affirmation from Jezebel, their past together truly does appear good; we are given very little information about their history but both women seem to agree that they worked together pleasantly. Simultaneously, Sapphira extends sympathy, blithely comparing their ailments, apparently unconcerned with the asymmetry of the comparison. It is clear that aspects of the sentiment are genuinely considerate of Jezebel but Sapphira’s sympathy serves a dual purpose since it forces Jezebel to accept the comparison and return the sympathy.

During Jezebel’s consideration of Sapphira’s condition, she begins to wheeze, signaling a moment of gasping interruption that is trying to burst forth, out of Jezebel’s mouth; the moment underscores that she spends her dying energy towards ensuring Sapphira’s well-being and peace-of-mind through sympathetic words. Even as Sapphira implores that Jezebel “musn’t talk” since “it “catches [her] breath” she continues, “We must take what comes to us and be resigned” reducing Jezebel’s words to a whisper and allowing herself to remain in control of the conversation (87). Jezebel’s coughing is only threatening to Sapphira in its ability to detract from her own sense of victimhood and proximity to death. Sapphira’s dropsy is crippling but she still exerts considerable control and ability through her power over others; one of her methods to maintain that power is to ensure that she is always perceived to be weak and in need of sympathy and care. None of this is to say that she isn’t weak or in need of sympathy and care; however, she certainly uses her dropsy as leverage to bolster her supremacy.

In chapter III of “Old Jezebel,” Sapphira’s perception of her own impotence explodes into a manic frenzy, illustrating how fragile her sense of power and ability appear to herself—helping to explain why she so desperately leverages, and clutches onto, what power she has. Sapphira glimpses Nancy and Henry “in deep conversation” after Jezebel’s funeral (103). She is incensed by the momentary intimacy they share with one another and the sight of it causes Sapphira to “put her handkerchief to her eyes, afraid that her face might show indignation” claiming she had never before “seen him expose himself like that” (103). Exposure returns as both an anxiety and inevitability with Nancy as its catalyst but Sapphira must maintain the appearance of composure and control—literally saving her face from exposure, lying to escape from, and mask the reality of, her embarrassment. Sapphira claims that Henry “had forgotten himself,” his forgetting to lie or veil his feelings and intimacies is an exposure of genuine emotion, not intentionally on display for others but observed nonetheless, and Sapphira considers this authenticity to be deeply embarrassing to her (103-4).

Sapphira remains committed to the stasis and equilibrium of her own, carefully constructed reality, something that this indiscretion interrupts; she is not as in control of her husband as she likes to outwardly have herself and others perceive, which leads to her sudden, frantic outburst at the end of the chapter. Sapphira obsesses over the details of Henry’s exposure, feeling “wretched and lonely and injured” relenting, “The thought of being befooled, hoodwinked in any way, was unendurable;” these sentiments quickly morph into a suspicion that every person she knows is complicit in a conspiracy against her and she frets, “unable to lie still any longer” and rises out of bed (105). Lying takes on a dual meaning within this sentence. Sapphira feels inactive, inside of her own head, fearing the exposure, the “shattered and treacherous” disclosures that gossip, hearsay, and misconceptions produce when she is not the one maintaining perception (107). She has to rise, no longer comfortable in bed; she is agitated. And she is unable to defer the lies and lying any longer; she cannot maintain her deceptions when she herself is deceived.

This energy and mania builds until she nearly faints from overstimulation, ringing the bell to usher Nancy into her room (105). Nancy is summoned to either interrupt or confirm the worries Sapphira has; Nancy enters as evidence that Sapphira’s anxiety is unfounded, that her worst suspicions remain unrealized, and that Nancy remains under her control—available for her to call upon when needed. Sapphira relies upon the perception and words of others for information but “her house [stands] safe around her,” as long as it is in her control (107). And while Nancy does not lie to escape explicitly or verbally, she allows the lies to continue by entering the room, the careful fantasies of the house remain in-tact since she stands as evidence that everything is still under control. It’s a near catastrophe, but one that can be deferred and pushed away by Nancy’s interrupting presence.

This extended conflict, from the moment of exposure to its deferred resolution underscores Nancy’s interrupting presence and illustrates how it both serves as a driving force of progress and as a suspension and cessation. She has the ability to interrupt Sapphira’s notion of control through simple, innocuous, and deeply personal gestures, signaling an intimacy, affection, and authentic emotion that is indecent between master and slave. But she has the ability to postpone and suspend any further implications by entering the room as evidence and an exposure of innocence. And yet, Nancy is described as the character who lies despite how innocent, honest, and authentically she behaves throughout the entire novel. Oddly, it appears Nancy lies because she characteristically will not lie in a system predicated upon lies; and that is precisely what an interrupting force is. In the same manner that both Sapphira and Henry “were talking about Bluebell” but were actually “thinking all the while about Nancy” the narration displaces lying onto Nancy, calling Nancy a liar when in fact the narration is thinking about everyone else in the novel and specifically, Sapphira (53). The narration and Sapphira recognize Nancy as an earnest force that indiscreetly and recklessly breaks the veneer of untruth through innocence and authenticity; she is someone who does not fully understand that she is a pawn, whose purpose is to be manipulated by Sapphira. And yet still serves Sapphira to maintain aspects of balance through her innocence and well-meaning.

Martin Colbert’s enters into the narrative as a pawn of corruption by Sapphira and Nancy’s innocence becomes fragile at the very least, broken at worst, all the while still remaining virginal. Martin’s attempts to rape Nancy are never explicitly named as such; Sapphira describes it as “going wrong” or “demeaning himself,” Henry calls it “demoralizing,” and Sampson calls it “foolin round” but the threat is clear and it’s sexual (199, 190). The threat forces Nancy to flee, no longer in the mental or figurative sense, from Sapphira’s house. Henry feels that “something disturbing had come between” him and Nancy once he is alerted to Martin’s advances by Sampson (192). He no longer views her as “an influence,” instead seeing her as “a person”; if she can be perceived to be sexual and desirable then her presence as a force of interruption is made explicit and exposed to Henry, who now feels repulsed by her (192-3).

Nancy interrupts Henry’s self-control as much as she does Sapphira’s; Sapphira’s self-control manifests in her ability to control Henry and others and Henry’s self-control manifests in his ability to regulate himself. Even as Martin’s rape attempts play directly into Sapphira’s machinations, Henry now feels manipulated by his own desire and susceptible to Nancy. And since Henry cannot force Martin to leave, he passively helps Nancy escape—unwilling to embarrass Sapphira through his actions—he enables Rachel to steal the money she needs to get Nancy to Montreal (226-9).

Nancy’s shattered innocence within the text is made clear when the text re-acknowledges that she “had come into the world by accident,” acknowledging her very existence as something that is outside of the Sapphira’s plans (219). Nancy, simply by being a product of slave rape, is ultimately a symbol for the mixture of black and white, a never-ending interruption to “the order of the household” (219).

Nancy’s absence provides a narrative gap of almost twenty five years, offering details that inform how little has changed without her there; however, the narration surveys the lack of change in tandem with those details and aspects that have changed. Together, they illustrate a world that is very little altered while still having endured the onslaught of the Civil War and the passage of time, pointing to a portrait of the South that suggests an odd static dynamism. The civil war enters the concluding book immediately, the narration reports that it “came on so soon after Nancy ran away” which implicitly connects the two into a relation of cause-and-effect (273). Nancy’s absence, as is her presence, interrupting—while Nancy’s departure may prevent interrupting conflicts within Sapphira’s home, her escape and her very identity is still placed into relation with conflict through comparison to the Civil War. While this could otherwise be considered a simple connection bred from proximity, the text’s heavy use of insinuation and diffusion of untruth informs a more dubious reading.

The text continues on the Civil War, suggesting that despite the many deaths and loss of livestock, “Defeat was not new to [the men of Back Creek]. Almost every season brought defeat of some kind” (275-6). And so, the text portrays the Virginia backwoods folk as inoculated against change, able to return to the way it was through their perseverance. But it also acknowledges that “though the outward scene was little changed, [Nancy] came back to a different world” (277). The narration cannot quite decide what has changed and what hasn’t—at once, very little and very much. It makes note that appearances haven’t changed but that something akin to the atmosphere has changed, noting that the new generation is “gayer and more carefree,” taken to “picnics and camp-meetings…and dancing parties” (277).

The first-person narrator that interjects into the final book is the offspring of this generation, and seems to relate to the new energy dynamism, while still showing investment in the more static, inherited histories of the older generations. Within the first paragraph of the new narrative voice, the “I,” comments upon “the limp cordage of the great willow trees in the yard” getting “whipped and tossed furiously by the wind” but concludes, “It was the last day I would have chosen to stay indoors” (279). Quickly, it is worth noting that this storm ushers Nancy’s entrance, another implicitly insinuated connection between Nancy and conflict. The narrative voices desires to be out in the storm, they are drawn to the squall and feel shut in against their will.

At the same time, the narrative “I” believes, “The actual scene of the meeting had been arranged for [their] benefit” suggesting that there is a layer of mediation from the adults, and an attempt to make an auspicious setting for the reunion—all the while the narrator would rather be playing in the storm. This mediation is odd, since we are given few hints about who this narrator is: they’re a five year-old child, their parents are friends with the cast of characters that the narrative has followed. But we don’t know the purpose of the stage set before the narrator, why it is so meticulously controlled? We know it is informing the narrator and therefore, the reader and we know, following the logic of the text, that the adults are a product of a generation that desires to promote artifice and untruth; to lie to escape and defer until later.

As Nancy returns, these familiar characters seem to want to broadcast that all is well to the narrator—and the reader, by proxy—and insist that Nancy can return and reconcile with the novel and the setting. And for a while, the idyllic mediation, the stagecraft, the artifice holds up as they reminisce of the time passed; the narrator is “allowed to sit with [the adults] and sew the patchwork” (287). But Nancy’s power of interruption creeps into the narrative shortly after, our narrative “I” reflects “I soon learned that it was best never to interrupt with questions—it seemed to break the spell. Nancy wanted to know what happened…and so did I” (288). The narrator’s curiosity and Nancy’s are joined, as is their ability to question and interrupt. The narrator feels solidarity with Nancy, who has earned the ability to question through her growth and absence—the adults see her as one of them and trust her to be complicit in their act. However, Nancy disturbs the stunt “with a smile” as she asks Rachel “what had become of Martin Colbert;” this reintroduction puzzles the narrative “I” who has “never heard of him” but instills a curiosity and disallows the Martin’s violence to be erased from the narrative. The narrative “I” knew Nancy was returning but never express that they know why she left. The reintroduction of Martin into the narrative complicates the narrator’s perspective, forces questions to linger and ultimately, interrupts any neat or tidy conclusions the text may attempt to make.

And then Sapphira and the Slave Girl ends in a stupefying manner, continuing after the annotated “The End,” with a reflection upon Fredrick County surnames and finally finished with a flourish of the name “Willa Cather” (295). With the introduction of the author’s name as the end note, the reader is left to question whether they should bridge the potentially autobiographical implications of this sign-off and the introduction of the narrative “I”. The narrative complications of auto-biography verses the narrative “I” work in-tandem to complicate the already complicated majority of the novel, written from the third-person perspective. Quickly—all in the course of twenty pages these narrative moves build towards a crescendo that questions the previous narrations in hindsight.

Temporally, this conclusion compounds the layers of narrative mediation the reader must unpack in order to interpret the story as it is presented to them. The novel, seemingly about a discrete timeline in 1856, is refracted through a lens of the recent past, then twenty-five years removed, and then to Cahter’s Era, an additional sixty years later. These complications and their continuation, the transferal of narrative mediation from third person, to first person, to a signed Willa Cather provides an explicit, textual attempt to confuse the reader’s sense of narration, truth, and time as if it were throwing its hands into the readers face in a manic flurry. This mystifying, stupefying gesturing both distracts and obfuscates but ultimately seeks to inform a readerly conception of inability and failure to unify or concretize within its parameters.

Temporality and narrative voice has always already been complicated just a few pages back throughout Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Within the final book, the newly-introduced first person narrator admits that Nancy “had been gone now for twenty-five years” which confirms the subtitle of Book IX “Nancy’s Return,” “(Epilogue—Twenty-five years later)” (281, 271). The confirmation of the passage of time suggests that this first-person may in-fact be the previous third-person that has mediated the majority of the novel thus far, and establishes and complicates these now-multiple narrators as a potential, unified author/narrator. Within a few pages, the potential, comfortable unity is once again made insecure by the interjection of Willa Cather herself, which advocates that the narrator-as-author suggestion is true—and even autobiographical—while also making these conclusions problematic by investigating the troubles with hearsay and naming that Cather has encountered through recalling past memories of stories told about others.

These allusions to acquaintances of Cather’s parents, “often talked about” from afar are gossip, the names and people are both “unknown” and “a lively fascination” for Cather; a fascination bred from ambiguity, making the names “especially delightful” in how unusual and distant they sound (295). As Judith Butler points out in “Dangerous Crossings,” there’s a lot of psychic energy latent within names in Cather’s work, a “dynamic of identification” that acts as “an occasion for the retheorizing of cross-identification” and crossings that themselves seem “at work in every identificatory practice” (Butler 143). The dynamism that Butler asserts is not entirely self-evident in Sapphira’s concluding paragraphs; however, the novel’s autobiographical reflections upon a fascination with naming seems to winkingly re-separate Willa Cather from the narrative voice by creating a sense of distance through time and langauge—all the while still insisting that they are not entirely different by sheer matter of discombobulated context.

The narrator both is and isn’t author due to the complications that Cather details and Butler enriches—we’ll essentially never see the person who bore the name Willa Cather and to this day we don’t know how to spell it out (295). We don’t know how to introduce the name as a unity of an autobiographical author and narrator, which is just the way Willa Cather may have liked it and/or understood herself to be a site of such complication (but we’ll never actually know the truth in its entirety). Butler is pointing towards a suggestion that, yes, Cather sees the name as an occasion for necessary confusion and something that is always already an unstable foundation. Thus, Cather exposes the narrator’s and narration’s zig-zagging identity to variance and multitude, enriching its possibilities and muddling its certainty.

These complications underscore and illuminate how the text has always already been obfuscating its multiplicity of identities throughout its timespan and narration: in parentheticals, in asides, the by-gone histories of people, and in references to futures not yet realized with in the established time-frame, all among other pricking temporal inconsistencies. And in fact, the novel begins, “The Breakfast Table, 1856 [period],” establishing an incredibly distinct, specific—maddeningly vague—punctuated setting, both in time and place; however, despite this localization, the text continues in past-tense, “Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted….beyond that he appeared irregularly” already acknowledging that it is discussing something that has already happened and simultaneously referencing a pattern of past and future behavior (3).

All of these cursory textual details are banal to the point of being unremarkable in the introductory pages of a novel—the reader very much understands that there is a past, present, and future and that a rich novel exists in a multitude of these temporalities. However, once re-read with Sapphira’s conclusion in-mind, temporal details mark a very different narrative device within the novel, that of compartmentalization: the text suggests, from the beginning, that it should be read as a punctuated, specific snap-shot moment of place and time—“The Breakfast Table, 1856.”—without the influence of a past or future but it cannot escape the descriptive language of alternative tenses. Compellingly, the profound amount of lingering questions that the text provides—at its end and throughout—forces a methodology of interpretive hindsight, layering previous readings with compounding, frustrating, interrupting and contradicting information—all of which suggests that this novel embodies the project of history and identity as Willa Cather understands it.

Queer Reading Journal – ENG 464: Willa Cather and Reading Queerly

Here’s my Zine/Reading Journal, it traces readerly practice throughout the course. PDF – Reading Queerly

“YOU CAN HAZ ART ESSAY BOUT KATZ, K?” – WR 333: Advanced Composition

 

I wrote this a while ago and never posted it but I finally got around to it. It’s impossible to make this essay work in wordpress with my extraordinarily limited knowledge of coding so instead read the PDF! You Can Haz Cat Essay

Funderwear: How to Get Over Your Hang-Ups and Buy What I’m Selling – ENG 333: Advanced Composition

**I Suggest reading the PDF format: Funderwear (it is much easier to navigate)**

–

It may appear terribly disingenuous to claim that I found myself working at a men’s underwear store for the sake of experimental investigation. But after five years of employment, it feels like an honest thing to say. Sometimes. Sort of.

At age 18, I caught my first glimpse of UnderU4Men by accident; it was a storefront that I’d hurriedly and carelessly passed as I schlepped deliveries from my father’s liquor store to the neighboring downtown bars and restaurants. Unexpectedly, that changed: I caught a greyscale wink from a bulbously ovoid, shaggily overgrown—but tastefully sculpted—pectoral and I seized up. My hands slipped across the dolly—up and down again—slick with sweat; I flinched and stared at this exposed chest face-to-face. And on the printed metal sign, these words appear: “my name is UnderU4Men, look upon my designer men’s underwear, ye mighty and despair,” also “live models appearing”—something like that. I gazed at the marvels of this foreign bazaar, the once-familiar surroundings that I knew and encountered in all its pedestrian glory suddenly dissolved into sand as I gawked. I sheepishly glanced into the store, a surreal monument of colorful trinkets, encased in a glassy storefront exhibition, inaccessible to touch, an impossible threshold to cross as I hastily decided to finish my deliveries.

I was not yet ready to face the experience of shopping for men’s underwear. It’s an overwhelming thought, at first. Certainly, it was too much for my sheepish, shy, newly eighteen-year-old self to handle. My teenage anxiety, like all teenage anxiety, was somehow extremely subjective and yet boringly universal: I wore the same corduroy jacket every day for a year, I dyed my hair black during sophomore year, listened to an arrogant amount of Nirvana, Elliott Smith and—later—Gwen Stefani, I was on the newspaper staff, I was an art student, and I sporadically dated, or attempted to date my lady-peers. And when I say “dated,” I use this term very, very loosely since there was lots of hand-holding, hugging, and a deeply platonic sense of companionship; however, I had yet to kiss anyone on the lips until I finally got naughty and drunk after senior prom[1]. I was a sexual milquetoast, despite the numerous suspicions of my overprotective, paranoid mother. I was way straightedge, probably because I just wasn’t popular or unpopular enough to be otherwise. Until the very end of senior year, I neither drank, smoked, nor fornicated in high school.[2] I was decidedly happy with my status in social limbo, comfortably content to lay within the mean. And all this is to say, sexuality wasn’t an identity-defining factor within my life at the time; my hands and the internet got along fine and the rest I assumed I’d investigate further during college.

So now, to put it into context, the first time I walked past UnderU4Men’s busty a-frame sign, I was in an unexpected moment of personal flux and viscerally unstable sexual fluidity.[3]

Earlier that day, I talked with a new friend who had also just been accepted into Whittier College’s Freshman class and I experienced feelings and inclinations that were never really at the forefront of my mind. I soon dated Thomas, my new classmate, had sex with him often, and come out to friends and family as a gay man.[4] But I’d refrain from calling these snap-shot moments a “sexual awakening”—there’s a pleasure and nuance to sexuality that’s best left confusingly and puzzlingly unspoken. It’s an awkward, mystifying experience to reflect upon. While I identify as gay—I am gay and yet strive to be gay at the same time—I am, as we all are, more than the sum of our chosen and ascribed labels.

This sense of awkward and slippery sexual subjectivity is something that I keep in mind as customers bewilderingly stumble or creep into the front door. I try not to assume much about each person—which is a challenge in retail since the whole point of salesmanship is making a connection and people approach connection in myriad ways—so I’m always trying to navigate the interaction and find a comfortable starting point before initiating. One safe assumption: shopping at UnderU4Men is an intimidating experience for first timers. Another: most people don’t mind being asked if they’ve been in the store before. Additionally: those who march assuredly in, are often regulars. Therefore: if I don’t recognize their confident swagger or their presence seems tenuous, I greet them kindly and gently, try and make a joke about how daunting it can be to navigate this exciting new world of colors, fits, fabrics and selection, I mandate that they never hesitate to ask any questions, and let them roam for a while before continuing to inform their shopping process.

The sensation of awe and confusion is—somewhat—purposeful on the part of UnderU4Men, a store that I like to divulge to first-timers, “is the largest men’s underwear store in the nation, filled with 40 brands of Underwear, Swimwear, Gymwear and a newly expanded selection of Skin and Body Care—all for dudes.” In the same way that the Cathedrals of old Europe are supposed to evoke an allegorical heaven, the store is a pretty literal evocation of how different and dynamic men’s retail, fashion, and sexuality have become in the past few decades.

Importantly, UnderU4Men is a store geared towards, and targeted at, Women who couple with Men.[5] This demographic spends the majority of money in retail—and while this statistic is dynamically shifting, it’s still holds true by an impressive margin. That said, it’s a store owned by a gay man, staffed predominately by other gay men; until very recently we’ve had a remarkable variety of sales associates from disparate identifications and backgrounds—it ebbs and flows. But we definitely get all sorts of customers in the store. While gay-identified men are a necessary, foundational demographic for UnderU4Men, we cater to mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, sons, and daughters—all of which could be straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, trans[6], cis-gendered[7] women who wear men’s underwear, trans women who wear men’s underwear, trans men who wear men’s underwear, cis-men who wear men’s underwear, those who identify with no sex or gender at all, and any yet unspoken for or forgotten. All of the categories that seek to inform or signify identity help to inform and signify people’s notions about whether or not they should shop at UnderU4Men. But I’m not giving you the hard sell when I say that there’s absolutely something for everyone.[8]

So, after a brief greeting, we talk about what the guy[9] (present or not) likes, or what he wants to be seen in, or what his partner wants to see him in. Are we looking for boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs, trunks? We discuss how substantial the underwear’s coverage should be, how tight it fits, how long the legs are, if there’s any leg at all. I usually don’t mention jock straps or thongs but those are options too! Then there’s fabric: do they want to stick to cotton? There’s 100% cotton, there’s cotton/spandex blends, nylon/spandex blends, polyester/spandex blends. There’s the “natural fabrics”: merino wool, modal—made from beech wood trees, tencel—made from eucalyptus, bamboo—made from bamboo.  All are splinter free. Or your money back.

We get to talking about a lot before we start to talk about anything specific.

Many customers are already gracefully adept at negotiating the ever-changing landscape of men’s underwear. And most of my best moments, as a sales associate, are with people who can converse in the shared language of the store—those who understand, or have come to understand, what they like to wear, hope to wear, and want others to wear. But, I have a special place in my heart for the skeptics, those folks who are unindoctrinated, who assume that they cannot share or bask in the fun of shopping for men’s underwear. As mentioned, there’s varying degrees of openness to the experience and I shift my angle for each. Often, a “main street”[10] couple will walk into the store and I give my greeting and allow a minute or two of wandering, I check-in and ask what they think of the store: are they overwhelmed, excited, navigating things ok? And occasionally, the response is a haughty, “Well, it’s pretty clear that there’s nothing for me in this store” from the male-end of the couple. And I shoot a quick smirk to the female end of the couple and quip, “Oh, you don’t wear underwear?” And my smirk is returned from the female half. This is a (sometimes) effective strategy and less snarky and more playful than it may sound. It’s an attempt to cut through the discomfort with humorous shears and force the man to divulge that, yes in fact, he does wear underwear: he most often wears [these], or likes to wear [those], or is specifically looking to wear [this]. And we get to talking.

Sometimes, it is not as challenging to distill the specifics of a newcomer’s preferences. Some guys are happy to compromise or cede to their partner’s choices. Some guys bought a pair of Calvin Klein in 1998 that they have been combing the known world to find again—there’s not much I can do for them, unfortunately. Fashions change and so does fashion underwear.[11]

There’s an occasional request for fly-front underwear and this is particularly complicated. In his book, Gaga Feminism, gender-queer theorist Jack Halberstam reports an exchange about men’s underwear flies that he had with a writer from New York Magazine—whom he cheekily calls “Mr. Journalism”—and it illustrates the perplexities of this flighty conversation nicely. Mr. Journalism asks, “I go into the bathroom the other day in my new briefs that my girlfriend has bought me and I realize . . . is this OK?” Jack responds, “Yeah, sure…your new briefs, you are in the bathroom . . . go on.” And Mr. Journalism hesitates, “Well…I get up to the urinal and I realize the briefs have no opening and so I cannot really get myself in the position to pee without pulling everything down so I have to use the stall, which is, you know, embarrassing . . .” (88-89). It needs to be said that both of these people are saints. Mr. Journalism is gingerly confiding a confusion and Jack is responding in a playful, curious, and respectful manner. Very adult.

When I discuss fly-front underwear with customers who are accustomed to using the fly in their underwear, the idea that it does not exist in all men’s underwear is baffling, angering, humiliating, and/or unintelligible to them. Not always. Certainly often enough to make it noteworthy. In my experience, this conversation often manifests in apoplectic anger or dismissive pissiness towards me and I respond in-kind. The moment that panic sets in takes uncountable forms but here’s a few: “Where’s the pee hole?” “Where’s the slit thing?” “How am I supposed to piss while wearing this underwear?” There are many, many things that I’m willing and able to answer as a sales associate but I regularly fail to provide an answer that is satisfactory to this line of questioning. I again, default to humor, “no one goes through the gate anymore; they just hop over the fence,” I joke.[12] That tends to fall flatter than I’d like since it still doesn’t really address the customer’s concerns. And they tend not to trust me as I continue, telling them that “eighty percent of men no longer use their fly.”[13] And so their reaction, still sounds a lot like Mr. Journalism’s: “So I just pull my pants and underwear down and show the entire restroom my ass or use a stall and sit down?” They ask.

Internally, my response is “sure, that’s one way to do it. I mean, I do it differently.” I could (and sometimes attempt to) describe how the market trend towards a lower rise in men’s underwear increases the band’s proximity to male genitalia and therefore makes it easy to just pull down what little fabric there is to accommodate urination instead of pulling said male genitalia through a complicated fabric labyrinth. But this is very often a conversation ender—an almost certain exercise in futility. It’s just absolutely ass-backwards awkward to try and verbally convince a 50 year-old man that how he pees is outdated. Essentially, no one ends up a winner in this conversation; we all lose because we all fail to understand one another.

It’s important to mention that flies have largely been replaced by pouches—supportive, enhancing pouches, to put it gently. Ball bras, to put it bluntly. Not all pouches on men’s underwear today are “enhancing” in such obvious ways and not all pouchy underwear lack a fly. Some are designed for comfort, some are designed for support, some are for sports-performance. Some just say “pouch front underwear” on their boxes. Others have more ostentatious names like “Trophy Shelf,” “Trophy Boy,” “Almost Naked,” “WonderJock,” “Show-It Technology,” “Saxx,” “Shock Jock” and the list goes on. The “Almost Naked” remains the highest selling pair of underwear at UnderU4Men, the bamboo soft fabric is one selling point but the hang-free pouch is another. “It’s supposed to feel like you’re not wearing anything” I tell customers.[14] The idea that it feels like the underwear and pouch are not there is appealing to men. They want to feel free and unbridled; to let it all hang out. Comfort is still king in men’s wear. But the “Almost Naked” also foregrounds the penis; it’s front-and-center in the apparatus.

Halberstam’s Mr. Journalism—the archetype of journalistic curiosity, restraint, and balance that he is—finds a perfect center in this dichotomous, divisive conversation when he sums up that “men’s briefs do have a logic, but now the logic of use has been replaced with a logic of size” (89). And this “logic” is key. Well reported, sir. But, with that said, the idea of what “a logic” might mean requires some deconstruction. Grammatically, saying something has “a logic” seems clumsy—it interrupts common usage and obfuscates the integrity of the usually rational word “logic”. However, I’d venture to say that this inelegance is productive and informative since it makes us pause on it and consider its tricky queerness. A Logic: a rationale, a reason for being, a purpose. “A logic of use” suggests that the underwear is worn to be used, to be penetrated before peeing, and to serve the man wearing it. But “a logic of size” suggests something less self-serving, something that is put on display for others. It steals underwear’s purpose away from the man—singular, the one wearing it—and offers it up to other men, women, and anyone who wants a look.

This is what I’m selling, ultimately—I want men to recognize how unstable their deep-seated concepts and notions of self and masculinity are. We are all commoditized and packaged in ways that seem unpleasant—but men—men aren’t as often forced to reflect upon those internal and external pressures. There are widening fissures in the façades and veneers of masculinity that are not dismantling masculinity necessarily but changing what it means at a pace that is (at times) reckless and (at others) sluggish. There are uncountable and unaccountable intersections between gender, economies, markets, masculinity, femininity, queerness, fluidity, rigidity, fluctuations and I cannot begin to understand them in their entirety. I am confused. And I want to interrupt “a logic of use” not to necessarily replace it with “a logic of size” but to inform a privileged population that they should feel as confused and mystified as I do. And I want them to be better for it. Because I feel better for it, even when I am weighed down by crippling doubt and uncertainty, I manage to believe that I am who I am in all my myriad, escaping forms and ideals. I love what I sell.

---

[1] The events of the evening earned me my first—and last—hicky!

[2] Now I do all three. Look how far I’ve come.

[3] Fluidity is a word that’s employed by gender theorists to describe a flexible, malleable approach to aspects of sexuality. Rigidity is a word used to describe a sexuality that is inflexible. A man in his freshman year of college may experience a period of fluidity by experimenting with oral sex with men, but he may remain rigid by not wanting to kiss or have anal intercourse with other men. And he may still rigidly identify himself heterosexual, and if that’s how he feels, I’m comfortable agreeing with him. He’d be a boring playmate, anyway.

[4]I would not consider this a moment in which I had a profound revelation about a latent same-sex desire that I suppressed until now—this form of latency implies that desire and sexuality is a singular thing. However, many people have numerous sexual partners throughout their lives and therefore numerous sexualities. And so instead, I consider this a moment during which I enriched and shifted my sexuality that is both always already there and yet was never so embodied or experienced so sharply up to this point.

[5] AKA: Heterosexual Women

[6] Transgender: A person who does not self-relate their gender identity to the sex they were assigned at birth.

[7] Cisgender: A person who self-relates their gender identity to the sex assigned to them at birth.

[8] Are you interested in looking at a unique wallet made from Tyvek, Rubber Polymer, or Stainless Steel? Or perhaps a belt made from locally recycled bicycle tires? NO? What about sunglasses made from oak and granite? Not every person can—or—should find something that they have to have, all I’m saying is that if absolutely nothing seems interesting or appealing to touch and look-at in this store, you probably hate fun.

[9] To avoid the painstaking qualification of pronouns each time, “guy” will simply refer to the person who we are shopping for.

[10] My boss’ press-release code word for “breeder” AKA “heterosexual”.

[11] This is not always easy to explain. Even plain-Jane “basics,” your everyday cotton briefs are subject to the whims of market forces. Brands alter, sometimes only slightly, sometimes very significantly, their “basics” line. The elastic band can change, they blend their cotton with a little spandex, and/or they shorten the leg on their boxer brief, et cetera. This can justify a price-increase, compensate for an inferior product by making it obsolete, accommodate shifting demands and/or tastes, or be just for shits and giggles to cure the underwear designer’s boredom.

[12] It’s a joke someone told me at some point, attributing it to Seinfeld, and I liked it so much that I’ve adopted it into my selling technique. So, if asked, I attribute this wisecrack to Seinfeld. But I’ve only watched two episodes of Seinfeld and I’ve never watched his standup; Google offers no evidence that anyone has ever said it.

[13] Probably because it’s a factoid that my boss throws around and is impossible to find source data on. It just feels true though doesn’t it?

[14] As if they couldn’t figure that out on their own.

The Fanciful, Feminine Dualisms in Cavendish’s The Blazing World – ENG 440: SciFi Before Modernity

Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World is prefaced “To the Reader” with an exploration of a dichotomy between Reason and Fancy. She discerns that

“Fictions are an issue of mans Fancy, framed in his own Mind, according as he pleases, without regard, whether the thing, he fancies, be really existent without his mind or not…Fancy creates of its own accord whatsoever it pleases, and delights in its own work” (152).

The Blazing World is a work of fancy, a fantastical fiction, and a way to explore a world designed within Cavendish’s mind. This world is established apart from the cajoling externalities of truth or reason but also attempts to construct a narrative of feminine power. The Empress of The Blazing World first appears to be a foil to Cavendish until The Duchess of Newcastle is enlisted as her scribe—exposing a more convincing foil. The introduction of The Duchess offers an odd exploration of souls and their relation to matter. Cavendish’s piece toys with mind-body dualism by insinuating that these two feminine souls are reaching through the material Blazing World, departing its imagined world, and inhabiting a realm of physical reason within the reader’s mind—where soul meets body.

Cavendish’s narration interrogates capacities of souls, questioning their ability to move through time and space, and investigating which states of matter they can inhabit. The Empress is curious “whether it was not possible that there could be two souls in one body” and the immaterial spirits are quick to respond that “it is impossible” for something immaterial to inhabit the material (203). However, the immaterial spirits offer “by reason every material part has a material natural soul” and that all aspects of nature are comprised of “three degrees; the sensitive is the life, the rational the soul, and the inanimate part of the body of Infinite Nature” (203). This is a perplexing metaphysics, one that is challenging to understand as a whole. Material things have material souls and souls are the rational components of all material natural things; sense-perception is bonded to lived-experience and there is an unchanging, eternal aspect to all material as well. These “three degrees” comprise natural material and within this framework, there is a link between materiality, rationality and souls that Cavendish’s work never quite makes sense of.

However, the reader is given a moment of challenging embodiment when three souls inhabit one body as the Souls of The Empress, The Duchess, and The Duke all inhabit The Duke’s body. Just before this spiritual comingling, The Duchess sees The Duke and “her aereal Vehicle became so splendorous…[through which] we may perceive, that passion of Souls or Spirits can alter their bodily Vehicles” (222). This moment suggests that souls and sprits affect and inform the material, suggesting that material vehicles—whether physical bodies or material objects—mirror the sensations of material souls.  And so, as the women’s souls leave their “aereal Vehicle[s] and [enter] into” the Duke, whose soul is “wise, honest, witty, complaisant and noble,” the piece suggests that there is a potential for material affect inspired by these women’s souls entering the Duke’s bodily vehicle (222). The Duchess’ “Platonik love” of The Empress assuages jealousies as these three souls converse within the Duke’s body (222-3). The delightful, soulful intercourse displayed within this moment doesn’t describe any effect upon the Duke’s body in a tangible way but it does relate that “the Dukes soul entertained the Empresses Soul with…all kinds of harmless sports” (223).

The conversation between these three souls is evidence that these women’s souls exert influence over the Duke, an idea buttressed by The Blazing World’s description of feminine power that works through insinuation. In the earlier blossoming friendship between the Empress and Duchess, the Empress reflects “Husbands have reason to be jealous of Platonik Lovers, for they are very dangerous, as being not onely very intimate and close, but subtil and insinuating” (208-9). Through this, the text implies that insinuation and subtly are aspects of a Feminine Platonism between two women and therefore aspects of the power that feminine souls can exert over masculine souls or materials. The Duke entertains these material souls within himself and enjoys their company and conversation and the text implies that through this interaction, he is being subversively manipulated.

By broadening the scope of The Blazing World’s murky metaphysics, the text suggests that this work of fancy can be a material vehicle for material souls since we encounter these women’s souls through the text. They fluctuate between the material letters of the page and the reader’s mind, leaving the text and entering into our imagination, insinuating and manipulating through their conversations with our rational, material souls. It is a stretch to say that this is definitely what Cavendish’s work implies—but given the text’s constant obsession with fancy, alternative worlds and spaces, and her character’s ability to create new worlds, travel between them, and conquer others: material bodies’ capacities for multiple, influencing souls  is under intense scrutiny and investigation. The Blazing World appears often confused by its purpose, metaphysical assertions, and understanding of itself but it is, in Cavendish’s own words “a World of [her] own: for which no body, [she] hope[s], will blame [her], since it is in every ones power to do the like” (154).

“Pure Muckery: Experimental Translations in Quicksilver” – ENG 440: SciFi Before Modernity

Alchemy seeks to refine base metals into gold; taking the waste, dirt and feces of the world, the Alchemist hopes to translate these lesser substances into something precious and valuable. Quicksilver’s imagery is full of figurative base metals, emphasizing the grimy bits of its world to suggest that there’s alternative methods to transform dirt into gold. Quicksilver’s combined use of filthy, golden, and Alchemical imagery illustrates latent value within the waste and filth produced by experience, experimentation, and methodology and suggests that filth and waste can be translated and transmuted in dynamic, unexpected ways.

Filth, specifically muck, is connected to experimentation by Daniel early-on within Quicksilver and illustrates how unexpectedly productive outcomes can be bred from imperfect, dirty things and experiences. Daniel and his friend attempt to recreate a chemistry experiment; Daniel reports that they “began mucking about in [Wilkins’] chambers and set fire to a tabletop” (55). “Mucking about” suggests something dirty, it’s a potential pun for “fucking around,” and describes a recklessness in methodology, especially with fire as an end product.  It is not neat or tidy and while it’s a replication of another experiment, Daniel’s use of muck assures the reader that the experiment was an imperfect copy. But as Daniel continues, he exposes that “it accomplished what Wilkins wanted it to: [it] wrecked the mask of etiquette” and inspired Daniel to study Natural Philosophy at Gresham’s College, where professors taught “without years of tedious nincompoopery as prerequisite” (55). Filth, poop as a root word in nincompoop, surfaces again and relays to the reader that not all waste is useful in Daniel’s mind. Nonetheless, it is “mucking about” that shatters his notions of proper, useful science; the filthiness of the experience coaxes him to seek an education that values experimentation, as opposed to regimentation.

The value of mucking about is investigated by Daniel again as he reflects upon sifting for gold; he exposes the complexities, ambivalences, strengths and weaknesses of experimentation through his contemplation of the process. He imagines that his attempt to remember his childhood is akin to how a pilgrim must have felt after arriving in the new world, after “having come so far, and suffered and risked so much,” the first thing they do is “unpack a shallow basin and scoop up some muck” hoping to find gold (58). This passage is recounted with a heavy dose of sarcasm in Daniel’s tone but it points to the troubling aspects of experimentation and the focused thinking it requires. The recklessness of earlier mucking about is devalued slightly when muck acts as something that is discarded while searching for gold. And at the same time, the passage is pointing out the absurdity of coming to a new world and only finding the potential for wealth in gold. Daniel mocks the pilgrims who seek gold when they are surrounded by an overabundance of natural wealth. The mockery is ironic since he is also criticizing himself and his inability to focus on anything but finding the nuggets of his past in his mucky pan.

Daniel’s reflection upon muck and gold-panning—and its analogue: experimentation—becomes a curious acquiescence that suggests that the focus upon—and purposeful ignorance of—certain aspects of the world are necessary to gain insight. Daniel continues to develop his gold-panning metaphor, likening himself to “the explorer who turns his back on orang-utans and orchids to jam his pan into the mud of a creek bed. Naught but swirling murk had been the result” (59). Again, the text suggests that Daniel may be engaging in a myopically, futile quest that ignores the rest of the observable world. However, this thought is quickly rejoined when he finds that “the muddy swirl has been swept away” (60). The use of passive voice confirms a passive process, Daniel’s clarity of mind is something that he is “startled to find out” (60). It is a happy accident—his experiment paid off. The text’s use of humor to criticize an over-magnifying of scope and observation forces a shrewd ambiguity to suggest that Daniel came to a clarity of mind through elements of focused effort and happenstance—and so, the specific methodology within the passage are murky and mucky as well.

Daniel concludes that, “The mental pan had been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remains are nuggets” (60). As the passage suggests, there’s gold to be found in dirt and muck; it’s painstaking to find the nuggets and nuggets are only small bits that require further combination to produce something truly valuable. The process is mystifying, it requires both active and passive elements and—the text suggests—what amounts to luck, on occasion. Alchemy seeks to turn dirt into gold but as Daniel’s reflection shows, it is no different than panning for gold in terms of what ends are sought. Alchemy is a methodological pan, while it failed to transform base metal into gold, it provided the muck to sift through and find nuggets of knowledge through empirical data and observation by Natural Philosophers.