Jessy's blog

Link: excerpts from "Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters" by Alice Walker, in a special issue of The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research about to Barack Obama (vol. 38  no.1, Spring 2008). 

http://omnivorously.livejournal.com/321690.html 

"You can always learn to rhyme well later but, unless you have that compulsive pleasure in consonant sound, to the point of nonsense, you'll never be a poet."

-Gwyneth Lewis, poet, person who has experienced depression, and author of Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression.

 

When I was shelving some journals today (yesterday, now), I stumbled across a special issue of English Language Notes (v. 45 no. 2, Fall/Winter 2007) entitled Queer Space (and there's a special issue of Social Text that I want to look at, too, called What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?). Richard Hornsey's piece "After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness" raises some interesting questions for me. As I start writing, I've read about 7 of 12 pages. I will put summarizations of Hornsey's points in regular text and my own comments and reactions in italics.

Epilogue, or, whatever you call it when a smart mentally-ill student who has issues with authority and with deadlines, and who is fed up with dragging zhirself along like this, totally cops out and doesn’t put nearly as much work into zhir final paper as everyone else in the class, because zhe’s pretty sure zhe can get away with it with this professor (just don’t tell zhir dean), but wants to justify zhir brattiness somehow (and how distracting were those third-gender pronouns I made up for myself?).

 

[this space represents the traditional academic paper which I am fully capable of writing, but which I simply could not be bothered to do.]

 

May 21, 2008

(The last line makes me laugh. No, no, don’t skip ahead. But speaking of genres. And if you don’t think it’s funny, it’s because of all the things you don’t know.)

 

Stage directions: I drag my chair to the front of the room, out of the horse-shoe of chairs in which the rest of the class is seated. A few minutes are spent in deciding whether to turn the projector off or if I should drag my chair to the side. Shortly, the projector is turned off. I stand on the chair.