15 October 2019: "Nobody seemed to realise that this was the only thing on earth."
I haven’t blogged in a while because I’ve been feeling a little bored with my reading life. I’m doing a lot of Penguin Classics self-education, reading a book of translated Buddhist scriptures (because I was reading Anne Waldman’s Voices Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born, and I was hoping to find out about anutpāda—I haven’t yet—taking recommendations!). I’m still reading Nietszche because I’m being a completist for my Exile Punk workshop (and he’s all over Call Me Zebra), but it’s having the adverse effect of putting him in all of my correspondence!
Just look at that mustache!
So for today, something a little different. I’ve been working on a memoir / autofictional work (skewing more autofiction right now). I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood and all its various locations in Texas: Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Richardson. I’ve also been thinking a lot about books and reading. I was a bookish kid growing up in a bookish house, but whenever I’ve previously thought about writing about my life, I’ve worried that people would think it was fake or pretentious or inaccessible. Running the Exile Punk class, with its focus on Call Me Zebra, is really making me feel empowered to make this an intertextual allusive work.
“Later on, Elba [that’s my fictional avatar, talking about going to an all boy’s school in Texas] would try to explain what it had been like, and would reach for British and Irish novelists: Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Roald Dahl’s memoirs which she hadn’t read since she was a boy.
Denton Welch for the feeling of being ill-at-ease in an environment of macho masculinity—a noticer with a pronounced interior life. Denton Welch also for the queer eroticism. Joyce for capturing the feeling of youthful illness. Roald Dahl for the wanton cruelty men and boys in this system inflicted on one another. All of them for a veneer of tradition.”
It helps that I have some Denton Welch in my hands right now. I have a cache of books that I left at my parents’ house when I moved to San Francisco in 2008 that my mom is now sending me, belatedly and serendipitously. One of the books is Welch’s A Voice Through a Cloud, which details the events following Welch’s life-altering bicycle accident. I’m working out in the world and I left the book at home, but I had copied this passage into the notebook earlier.
Another thing I’ve been mentally revisiting and waiting to reread is Jeanne Thornton’s The Dream of Doctor Bantam, hands down the best book of being young, queer, and sad in an Austin that no longer exists (with the caveat that everyone who has ever lived in Austin—perhaps everyone who has ever lived anywhere—claims this feeling of the impossible/irrevocable/lost to the consternation of whoever is living in the supposedly lost place now). I was terrified of this book for a long time because it is so much better than the one I would write, but as the scope of my own writing has shifted to include more of my earlier childhood in the Dallas area, I’ve felt the old anxiety of influence less acutely.
Sometimes reading is reading maps. The visceral inner map is harder for me to access since it’s been so eleven years since I’ve lived in Austin, around twenty since I’ve lived in the Dallas area. So I decided that I would need a map to guide me in my journey there and back.
But Austin now is quite literally twice as big in terms of population as when I was a kid. It keeps pushing out at the outskirts while its core churns. I found the map excerpted here in the online Perry-Castañeda Library map collection. It is a Texas Department of Transportation map from 1990, “Highways revised to September 1, 1996.”
I wonder if I will find other methods of visual representation, aide-mémoir. I’m planning a visit sometime in this next year. How will I read my past? How will I be read? What is lost decayed destroyed or otherwise unrecoverable?
How do I find the place where historical forces, settler-colonialist forces intersect with the conditions of my childhood?
Sometimes reading is listening. I don’t talk a lot here about music for the reasons that I set out to make this a reading blog. Plus I don’t know as much about how to talk about it. But I’d like to branch out. It’ll feel arid if there’s no music in it. I have a Texas playlist called “Everything is bigger” with Texas-themed songs, so there’s that, but more than that I have playlists that I’ve cobbled together from what I can remember listening to at the coffee shops and bakeries I worked at. The stuff that used to play on 91.7 shows I liked, like “Ear Candy.”
Art by George Wylesol
I spent the morning listening again to Nina Keith’s “Maranasati 19111” which felt like arg…is there a better way to say a poignant journey? Reminded me of everything I love about Rachels and The Books and Matmos. I was already primed to be excited about finding another trans musician I like, and I think reading Whitney Wei’s piece about her makes me even more excited. “‘There is likely some link between my obsession with finding sounds that don’t exist because I’m trying to work through my identity through words that don’t exist.’ she says. Where language fails her, music does not.” Ironically the places she has delved into musically embolden me to coin the words, or recombine them in ways adequate to what I perceive as our overlapping obsessions.