on not getting in a paper, by @jessiemclaugh i sent in a proposal to queer modernisms, and pretty soon after received the below

ouch, i thought what was my abstract? and wtf made it so abstract?

‘the great Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness noted in 1925 that Reykjavik had finally acquired all the accoutrements of modernity: “not only a university and a movie theatre, but also football and homosexuality”’ i wanted to talk about SPORT, ART, LITERATURE and what these three things might be able to learn from one another, how they might be able to radicalise one another, queer one another

(some highlights were gonna be … (admittedly i probably should have specified that i was planning to focus on modernist art & lit … )

but still, it *felt* like the email was saying the idea of trying to stir together sport and modernism won’t be appropriate as part of a conference on queer modernism @ oxford

soooooooooo …

why did i think it would ?? hi

MY NAME IS JESSIE … BARNEY … TOM … TIGER

… TYGER … JESSE … JESSE JAMES … HEATHCLIFFE i am queer, brown, soft, introvert

i am an amateur, at football, at art, at writing i have a ba (hons) in english lit & lang a masters in fine art photography & i’m about to start a arhc funded phd exploring the process of queering and decolonising the art museum by working with young people (i’m telling u this to acknowledge of all my privilege)

and across all of these things i enjoy thinking about

(queering) METHOD “instead, it offers a 1990s-flavoured lesbian Victorian London … it conjures up an antique lesbian lingo, using, or cheerfully misusing, some of the words and phrases – “toms”, “mashers”, “tipping the velvet” itself – that I’d come across in dictionaries of historical slang and in 19th-century pornography. And it makes frequent little nods to lesbian and gay icons and classic queer texts – to Dorian Gray, Hadrian and Antinous, Woolf’s Orlando, Zola’s Nana, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, Henry James’s The Bostonians ... the very patchiness of lesbian history, I was trying to say, invites or incites the lesbian historical novelist to pinch, to appropriate, to make stuff up. I wanted the novel not just to reflect that, but to reflect on it, to lay bare and revel in its own artificiality” novelist sarah waters on looking back twenty years on @ her debut novel, tipping the velvet but sarah waters is white and writes white, i’m queer and brown and femme - there isn’t even always patches to pick through, u just have to mix together what u have

let’s image …

u are queer u are born in 1989 north london u might take

# legs in shorts scrambling over rocks from george of CBBC’s famous five (circa 1995) # the soundtrack from bend it like beckham # mrs dalloway (the penguin copy circa 2007)

‘the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames’ # hair from eminem

# and/or hair from justin bieber # and/or hair from young leo

(i can’t seem to get away from worshipping white boys) mix together w photo booth on your laptop =

queer selfie …

i have been left to bargain with myself and i have come not to be pleased to see they wish to watch the little bird who flew at which they look they never mentioned it to me i stopped to listen well it was a pleasure to see a fire which does not inspire them to see me

…

before the flowers of friendship faded, friendship faded, gertrude stein i see the queer body as the foremost site of queer research, queer investigation /to research through (queer) feeling, through (queer) movements, (queer) gesture and as gaps arise, as patches can’t be patched up enough because what we can see around us just isn’t enuf (maybe because certain parts of the story were just ‘never mentioned’ to us) i feel as though not only should we acknowledge this, but we can also celebrate our many fingered responses and adaptions as queer strategy even align it to some of the methods used by (queer) modernist, who were also fumbling w gaps, w breaks i.e.

(But while I try to write, I am making up To the Lighthouse - the sea is to be heard all throughout it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my book to supplant “novel”. A new - by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?)

- v woolf, a writer’s diary

or v woolf in on being ill so what is lost when we don’t allow everything in? when we say some (queer) patching is more relevant than other (queer) patching?

(for example, an email saying a paper on sport isn’t relevant to a conference on queer modernism) this girl i’m seeing said something quite amazing the other day she said, ‘it’s incredible to me that on a masters module on sexuality and gender (queerness and those left out of the mainstream) no one is talking about how racist every text we are reading is. literally no one’

(the module reading list includes dorian gray, orlando, etc etc) i scoffed, felt pain

vita 2 virginia I have had enough— border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. O for some sharp swish of a branch— there is no scent of resin in this place, no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent— only border on border of scented pinks. extract from Sheltered Garden (1916), H.D. we exchanged a few emails and maybe i should have left it. but instead, i replied once more