radfrac_archive_full

Perhaps the most interesting part of doing laundry is at the end, when I get to pull out the lint trap and see all of the things I forgot to take out of my pockets. This time, fine fragments of gauzy beige paper, traced eventually to a crumpled coffee-shop napkin. Often, tiny balls of paper inscribed with essential ideas I will now have to do without, forever.

My brain is like that now; a confused heap of ordinary things needing to be sorted, and bits of shredded material that were probably once something important.

Gay Men Read Books! May be started up again by my professor.

[I have decided to begin referring to the men in my life as My _____, whether or not they have any romantic connection to me. It just started to happen one day, and I am going on with it of my own free will. It makes me feel like a valuable antique book of poetry, or anyway a valuable antiquarian.]

{Speaking of which:

inlandsea and I were talking things classical over the kitchen table the other night, as we do two nights in ten. She is unpacking and sorting through her university papers, which means she is forever pulling out the most wonderful old books of Latin lessons, inscribed long ago by Welsh aunts in their green youth and spidery hand.

Erraticly mnemonic autodidact that I am, I managed in a very short space of conversation to invert the Iliad and the Aeneid (only a matter of a few thousand years) and then to cunningly misattribute the Aeneid to its subject rather than its author. Though I like the idea of the self-writing epic. Then we were talking Words, and I was skewering the Penguin English Dictionary as a travesty that didn't even contain the word "abecedarian".

"How can a dictionary not have 'abecedarian'?" I snarked.
"Or 'abecedarius'." She added.
"Who's he when he's at home?" I said absently.
"You know. Darius. King of the abecedynians. 'The abecedarian came down like a wolf on the fold...'"

Maybe you had to be there.}

[Hence 'my professor', though I have never formally taken a course from him.]

Anyway, when my professor asked me why there weren't any boys in his class, he also asked me what I thought of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's thesis in Epistemology of the Closet.

Pleased and vain, I suggested we get together to discuss it. I expected to hear back from him in three months, with no reference to this conversation, and an entirely different question of literary theory.

"Sure," he says, "Call me Monday."

And now I have to read the damn thing. I went up to the university yesterday to get a copy on my alumni card. It's September, and everything is just the same, the same. They've only been in session a few weeks. The Imaginus poster sale is coming up. The students are the same. I didn't know any of them, and I recognized them all.

They have something I don't any more, not just youth or exuberance but a rightness in that place, learning. To be part of that properly I couldn't just go back and study more, though I want to; I'd have to teach. I think I will teach. I think I'll have to find a way.

The introduction to Closet is 63 pages long. I call that excessive.

I am nearly finished Russell Hoban's Kleinzeit, and the urge to scatter bits of yellow paper with quotes on them is becoming unstoppable.

Also, I've just picked up Volume Three of Eerie Queerie, an endearingly silly queer manga that

inlandsea discovered for me at the library. Life is sweet.

{rf}