Wherein I speak about AIDS seriously

Between reading Alexander Yate’s Moondogs (excellent) and Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East (also excellent) I’ve been reading up on a few cases of legal judgments involving HIV+ people infecting others. I’ve always had an interest in the disease (my sister’s research interest in the 1st half of the PhD, a queer lit. course on Derek Jarman, subsequent research on poetry dealing with the epidemic in the 80s because I didn’t want to write the final paper on Jarman, etc.), specifically the evolving cultural stigma surrounding it through its short history (if you can recommend a book on the historical overview of that, HOLLA FO REALZ). My recent revisitation on the topic has nothing to do nerdy nostalgia though, but was reignited rather by a sorta under-the-radar news item involving an underage HIV+ teen in Edmonton and FB conversations I’ve had about it with a friend of mine who works in public health as a teen sex ed. educator (did I get it right Liz?). But before I go into that, I’ll summarize what I’ve read thus far because I’m nice.

Heaven is other people

Sneak peek of my 2nd book. Here’s an email I sent to a few people. Can’t WAIT.

What y’all think about all this Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau bidness?

X-posted on my FB:

If you haven’t heard yet, this. From what I’ve read in people’s commentary, the usual response can pretty much be summed up here: “Photo shoots requiring her, a 10-year-old-girl, to dress in full make-up, teetering heels and a dress with a cleavage cut to the waist across her pre-pubescent body deny Blondeau the right to be the child she is.”

And the image that’s being passed around in the media, this.

I want to write a nerdy blog post on this over at B&S and I’ve been organizing my thoughts but am having a hard time gathering all of them into coherence. I’m gonna list a few things that I’ve been thinking about, c’mon and tell me what you think on any of these, or whatever that’s not included here:

You can’t ever smoke enough at night on a balcony to sustain the feeling of smoking at night on a balcony

I haven’t had enough nights like tonight where I’m awake enough or awake even to talk to myself in that languid non-light where I get to indulge in recursive tenuous thought-trains and pretend them some worldly dreary wisdom. The gods have granted me tonight because my laptop died two days ago, my rowing lessons ended earlier evening yesterday and now my Final fantasy 13 died on me as well. They’ve been good distractions even when looming mosquito bites of dread sorta festered to the logic tune of “write with all this free time ya trucknuts for a brain that may as well second as douche sponge!”

Well, so here I am after a three month sojourn.

Despite teaching my students to be aware of the author in a text, I’m pretending here that the reader doesn’t exist

In Chinese martial arts films, there’s this common motif of someone getting so absorbed in his art for the sake of getting really powerful that he loses it: he either goes crazy, evil, or worst of all, he loses control of himself in some way. That motif was floating around in my head last night as I walked around the city, trying to figure out precisely what it is about HK that I find so distasteful, in the section of the city that I’m fearfully allergic to, where the *ahem* capitalistic fervour finds its most succinct expression, lights lights and more lights, showroom after showroom of stuff stuff stuff, the place where I’ve been camping out for the last 3 or so weeks, and another 1 1/2 to go.

I think I was borderline hateful, towards other pedestrians strolling casually the streets I too strolled through, overhearing their innocuous idiocy, trying to find meaning in what I was overhearing, sitting atop the moral/intellectual high-horse all the while as I project onto the passersby conversations narratives that I deem fitting of their words, narratives often of the dismissing sort. And then I wondered what went through their heads as they see me, this panda-eyebagged Chinese (maybe?) banana walking around the street all by his lonesome with a beer in hand gawking (maybe?) at them and then some irrelevant thoughts about us being ants in a systemic maze, walking where we’re allowed to, from an imagined birds-eye shot from an absent narrator, and then after that  I tried my best to be empathetic and humanizing and realizing the fundamental desire to lead a comfortable life within the definition that’s culturally yessired here.

What I was trying to ignore was the realization that I’m not so different from these people, their aesthetic notion of a comfortable life. If I remember right Brodsky made mention of the middle-class being the ones most invested in the status quo. And similarly Rousseau’s diagnosis of the middle-managers of the world being most vicious against those below them. The haves-but-have-nots. What these people saw in a Bentley showroom is the photo-negative sign of what I pedestal as the intrinsic worth of those great abstractions, the grandeur of intellectual competence, of literature, those very big things that we suppose would outlive us. What I realize then was the false-dichotomy between my art and prescriptive requisite of being poor, or on the other side of the same coin, the rich and their mindlessness. This is what I want, and what I’m going to make a pet-project out of (I called a super-friend a few nights ago and bitched about not having a project to lose myself in): I’m going to be comfortably well-off while remaining conscientious. Sounds like a good project right?

Though interestingly, that’s the kind of wording one would use to deceive himself of a basic sense of loss, or someone who’s convinced about the futility of everything. I remember also last night as I gallivanted the argument I had with myself about feeling of pointlessness against what I’ve done so far in life; according to my own system of values, and the ambition I’ve set out for myself, I’ve been pretty much on-schedule with just about everything I feel necessary and worthwhile. So why do I feel so unwarranted? I thought also last night that I knew the answer to this, and I know now still, but the answer is so unsavory in its simplicity that I must pretend it as a question until I’m big enough to accept it in myself.

Am I yelling into the internet again? I’m a little drunk, @ 10 in the morning here. Hmmm.

The night is not long enough for me to make sense of the day

It’s freakin’ 7:30 in the morn here. No, I did not just wake up. Today is special though as it marks 2 weeks, 2 WEEKS! left b44 I getta head back to my people. Holy Batman who art thy saviour it’s going to be so great because here has been so not great. Don’t feel like airing dirty laundry here so um nevermind!

I finally got my grubby digits on my book a few days ago! And despite a poet friend’s warning, the book hasn’t sucked in my eyes yet. YET! I read it first sober then a few days after drunk. It’s better drunk. Something to do with not knowing precisely what I was up so I have to read slower. What I enjoy the most is the book taking me back to the summer of ’06 when I was A) heartbroken & B) as serious about writing (or, writing it out, rather) as I’ve ever been and those nights when the entire world was left outside the door so I can have only the laptop, the table, the cigarette/ashtray and Glenmorangie as the things outside myself and getting to cruise the sort of illuminating darkness you find yourself in before anything worthwhile can be found. I am envious of that guy, however much he was butthurt from dem emotions, it’s totes worth those little pockets of eternity that came a-visiting.

Ahh sheeeit, right when I was starting to get into writing this my brain’s all counting sheeps.

Words are abundant everywhere but here

So, remember so very very long ago when this blog’s raisin derek jeter had something to do with the phantom of a book that I purportedly had written? Um, it’s now available to order here. If you’re a Canuck, you can also find it on amazon.ca or Chapters/Indigo online. Not available on amazon.com yet if you should search for my name, BUT the first result is a 90s Hong Kong movie, available only on VHS, titled Love & Sex Among the Ruins. I’m glad that’s not a poetry title I have to compete with, because I would totes buy that instead of my book were I to base the purchase decision purely on the name.

Related: I have a quickie Q&A profile with Open Book Toronto here.

& lastly, another post on B&S.

Ok a totes irrelevant anecdote since I haven’t said much on this thing for a long time it feels. When I was doing undergrad I rented this apartment 18 floors up with a skinny solarium facing a pretty unspectacular view. In it were 3 things, no 4 things: a crappy two-piece recliner, a three-legged table big enough for a bottle of wine and a wine glass, a standing lamp and a 5 disc stereo with the usual female jazz vocalists and Bossa Nova standards that haven’t wandered so far from the sort of thing I listen to now. I spent many nights there, drank many bottles of wine, did a lot of thinking, usually silhouetted in a soft, satisfying sadness because it was night and I was drinking wine and thinking and Sarah Vaughn or Stan Getz or Antonio Carlos Jobim was in the background and sometimes a moon too. That was an awesome cliche bubble to live in. Sadness is just so boring and pointless these days when it comes that when it does come, I’m like “go away!” and it goes away without even putting up a fight. And that’s a bad thing, somehow.

Twitteresque Movie Review #1: Winter’s Bone

Is one hand enough, you think? Meh, throw in another, just to be sure.

Once a cheater, always a cheater

Here.

I’ve been cheating on this blog with another blog

Here.