Oh and Chris P/Michael Collins are getting married.

About Weddings:

Being queer in the church is lonely. Being queer in the straight world is lonely. Being queer in evangelical circles is a never ending set of booby traps and realtionships that never quite settle. I believe in the communion of saints, and I believe in working together towards mutually agreeable solutions. So, I break bread and try to engage in people's lives. I buy books for their kids, I ask about their wives or husbands, I listen when they tell me things that that they feel like they cannot tell their pastors or their more conservative friends. We pray together. I go home alone.

Usually this works. I love my evangelical friends. We are both very cautious, I don't give them too much detail about what goes on in my queer life; they are very careful not to tell me how much they think that life is sinful. The conversations we have are academic (bracketed, footnoted, with bibliography). There is never any real intimacy.

Because of the peculiar irony of the Anglican church and it's more conservative edges--often there are hints of the glass closet. I can talk about the male organist's male partner over dinner for example, but those are kind of rare.

All of this is context. There is more context. Maybe in a seperate email, maybe in one that is less intellectual.

I love Chris. I like Amy. After all of the chaos of their courtship, I am glad they are getting married. The last week has not been about me and I know that. But it has struck me as a metaphor for the church. I spend a lot of money, and a lot of time, working on behalf of someone else, so they will get the privileges that they would sooner see me not have. The homilist has worked on making sure that I do not have these privileges.

Then I go to the rehearsal, and the readings are explicit in their exclusion. They make sure that what was assumed and hinted at, is made clear. You and I have talked about how the queer contingent of the Anglican church is taking over, and you and I have disagreed about whether that is the case. But the viciousness of hetero-sexism, is that the isolation of glbtq voices in the church is because of scripture and tradition. The circle will not be brought wide enough to fully allow for that isolation to end.

So this is the question of schism--with all of that stated; is loving Chris and loving the church enough, to continually isolate myself, healthy. Schism is often constructed as active, as an explicit split, as a kind of fuck you gesture. But could schism be a floating away, via a kind of refusal or inertia?

The discussion of this song on my facebook page went to something like 35 comments, and many things were brought up, and nothing was settled. I think the song is important, especially with regards to new Nashville, but I am not sure that it is any good.  So, the score is a formality, but I wanted to mention a few things about the track itself. 

1) I think that this is a direct response to work about the south that has come out in the last few years by people younger than him, that is not historicized. I think that he is pointing out the difficulties of cosmopolitanism. 

2) I wonder about the inclusion of Dixie. The man who wrote it was from the North, and he was confused that it became an icon of the south. Plus, in this discussion of the new South, there is flirting with racist signifers without really pushing the idea fully and completely--Paisley saying, you know you want to play with the nature of the South, let's work out exactly what that means. 

3) The meta-work of the elder statesmen seems more dignified than the "I can still party with the kids" vibe of deseprate clinging of people like Keith or McCaw. 

4) I also, wonder--and this is somewhat related, if he is pandering. Paisley can be insanely pandering--see his George Jones duet Too Country for an absolute nadir. b) I think that in the criticizing of other people for refusing to see the implicaitons of southernhood that they espouse, that he is actually doing the opposite of pandering--but can you pander as a critique of pandering, can you meta-pander? c) he has done songs that are harrowing in their depictions of the geography of economic failure: A Man Don't Need to Go To Hell or  You'll Never Get Out of Harlan Alive d) so the interesting paradox of Paisley--is how he is capable of making dumb and fun shit, shit that panders, and shit that out Haggards Haggards, e) considering that he is in the middle of being phased out, he is working out how to figure out how to make that paradox work for him. I think that this is why the song works as a corrective. 

5) With Romney losing, and perhaps Atwater's Southern Strategy losing, and the old ideas of the south being slowly reworked or replaced, ideas or discussions of what the South is, are in the middle of a major demographic shift. What would a Southern Identity without pandering look like? Can you imagine a country music equivalent to, for example, the flatl affect and cultural irony found in the photographs of Eggleston? 

6) Can all of the feedback over a children's choir make an argument about the dissonance of a new South--and having Dixie overwhelm the platitudes of the song's first few minutes, that is saying something about the bedrock of history always presenting itself, but it is kind of a sweet and soft way of reminding one of that history. Neither Hell or Harlan were singles, and this is a single. That might give evidence to  the pandering element. 

7) The song holds so much baggage--but he allows for that baggage to be held. and much of that baggage is commercial. It is a song that is very, very current to Nashville--and one of Paisley's many, many talents is a shrewdness about audience--this song is a genius example of that shrewdness, and so the meta/paratext becomes integral to the text itself--but I'm not reviewing the paratext.  I love his voice. Warm and burnished as burled walnut. I love the song Dixie--though I know I am not supposed to, and I love it mostly because I used  to listen to it on a collection of Disney folk songs that my mom got me for Christmas when I was 6. I love the cleverness of the guitars shredding (pun intended) Dixie. I love how slick the production is. I think the lyrics are interesting enough to pass for substantial. As a text it's a 7 or 8. As a paratext, who knows? 

The Tamed Deer

by Edmund Spenser

Like as a huntsman after weary chase Seeing the game from him escaped away, Sits down to rest him in some shady place, With panting hounds beguiled of their prey: So, after long pursuit and vain assay, When I all weary had the chase forsook, The gentle deer returned the self-same way, Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook. There she beholding me with milder look, Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide; Till I in hand her yet half trembling took, And with her own good-will her firmly tied. Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild So goodly won, with her own will beguiled.

wendy's ordination, drinking afterwards, then dinner. talking with spencer before. was a reader at wendy's ordination, w. her son. spencer and i talked about kids and money. the music at the ordination consisted of psalm 42...just heartbreaking; which wendy used at her kid's baptism, and at a friend's funeral. psalm 42 is one that i go to; because i can understand longing more than completion'; but wendy's ordination is about completion of longing...sometimes the hart's drink, and sometimes you find a way of having a second kid, and sometimes you go to the diplo on college for a bad burger and a table of people who you know forever, who come to  church because of yr longing and not theirs.

 As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.

² My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?

³ My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?

⁴ When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday.

⁵ Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.

⁶ O my God, my soul is cast down within me: therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar.

⁷ Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.

⁸ Yet the Lord will command his lovingkindness in the day time, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.

⁹ I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

¹⁰ As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me; while they say daily unto me, Where is thy God?

¹¹ Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.

The Problems of Reclamation: Felicity, Perpetua and the
History of Bodily Instability

In the last 15 years, there have been attempts to name Christian historical figures as explicitly gay or lesbian, despite Foucault's warning that this is an a-historical practice. An exploration of the non-normative potential of these figures, however, can still be considered a valid enterprise. Using the early Christian martyrs, Felicity and Perpetua as examples, this paper begins with a discussion of why they have been claimed as proto-lesbian, how this claiming becomes an act of colonial practice, what other descriptive strategies exist, and how these two women could fit into these descriptive factors. Their refusal of a ‘contient’ body is examined in the context of a trans-historical understanding of queerness central to which is a similar refusal of ‘contient’ bodies. In addition, understandings of Felicity and Perpetua's bodily strangeness is compared to current attempts at identifying the larger implications of non-normative bodies....

My Abstract for the PAtristics Seminar, Nov. 14.

Judy Dishku, Radical Mormon Femminist  goes off  on Romney

The World Waterfall Database is a thing

the la times  deserves a pultizer for this story about how the Boy Scouts have concealed sex offenders in their ranks, for 80 years.

This new Corrine tucker song  is like a dyke Richard Linklater, with all the suburban high school ennui that implies--gorgeous video too.

Latour as a critic always does the silver edge of a sideways mirror--this article on Frankenstein, God and the Enviroment is brilliant.

who do you think tops?

137 gifs

My review of the new Josh Turner, and the implications of baptist married sex

Randy Newman is not usually this blunt, like his song about Bush satrists get plainer when they get older.

Brad Shoup got a regular gig at Stereo Gum, which is a gift from the universe, b/c he's fucking amazing--links go to his review of the new Killers album, and a discussion of Pavement.

I, for one, welcome our new Crow overlords.


Just watch, Wrestling craziness at it's best.

The odds and insdery gosspip about the new Archbishop of Canerbury.

not only can ray write i think that his discussion of physics on narratology, even outside of videogames seems really fresh.

Jean Luc Goddard, the font

smart, textually bedrocked discussion about what exactly happened in the 28 years b/w Firestone's Diaalectic of Sex, and her last book.

Terry Castle's gossippy and sex fueled discussions of early 20th century dyke culture is why i subscribe to LRB>

I keep thinking about this prof i have this semester, and i keep getting asked what my focus is, and i told her you know Anglicans in the 18th century and Americans in the 20th, and she said, you know you got to focus, and then i kept thinking of the work and play i did today---kurt stuff about the history of corporeal punishment, some reading on paul, some jukebox work, an abstract about Felicity and Perptua as queer but not lesbians for the patristics seminar, my own reading on afro-modernism, plus some porn, plus talking about politics with alex, eccelsiology with ada, video games with ray, joni mitchell/bob dylan with sundar---i mean there are things i am interested in--media, sex, the west, masculinity, rhetorical irony, the intersections of the church and the state, homosociality, all of the problems with bodies--and they become things that i circle and return to, but there is never one focus, never one thing that i keep saying this is it...and even then, there are texts that i keep coming back to---form today's list: Wittig, Fanon, Foccualt, Derrida, Barthes, Crashaw, Sedgewick, Hickey, Donne, Quinn, etc etc--and there are places that are new, Ray on Physics and Video Games, Sundar noting how shitty Dylan's harmonica playing is, Alex's libertarianism, Margaret Mitchell's book on Paul--the adding new and remaining old, and finding patterns, i think i will lose this if i just focus on one thing over and over again...

sigh, not sure where to go.

ok

this is what i think

a) we have rights, as human beings, to a minimum level of security

including food, housing, pleasure, safety, and comfort

b) those rights are best distrubated, because of questions of population

by v. large orgs.

c) governments have a better chance conceptually to a multi-phasic distrubtion

d) Churches, Community and Ethnic Groups, and the like are good at narrow focuses on certain populations, but I am not sure I would trust them to do large scale work

e) part of this is money--taking money is only done in our society, by the gvnt--everything else is willign to be give money

f) the problem is post-Friedman, the expectation for those in narrow focus groups, to do the work of wide populations--

g) this has failed to work--and results in a leadership gap in churches for a variety of reasons

h) which means that people who seek to populate that leadership gap are ill trained to do so.

i) monkeys are the best mammalls

spent three hours yesterday looking for point aux prarie park, but failed to find it. 

frustrated about housing, thinking about what the implications of staying at concordia are and if i am staying, what the implications of being in philosophy and religion, liking montreal. 

had drinks with ray's video game journalist buddy yesterday, which turned out really well. 

really lonely, but i think it will work itself out.

concordia is fucking me over a bit, i think.

P9100049

P9100049, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

t, you know, you come out every day in ten million different ways, and sometimes giving somebody a hand job in the back of a car in etobicoke isn’t a gay act, it’s a sort of mutually traded orgasm, like you would trade hockey cards. If you want to play some straight acting and you want to have somebody give you a hand job it’s fine. I’m not going to police you [inaudible] or your identity.

from an interview i did with a pysch student at ryserson about gay male identity and the body.

P9080189

P9080189, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P9080189

P9080189, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

not homeless, registered for classes

in montreal, hope i'm not homeless tomorrow