Peace Now is thirty years old today

How long?

In a queer time and place

Queer is all around (to the tune of "love is ....") Adelina helped me get some in my piece. (Get some queer sex into my play, I mean. What did you think I meant, you naughty peeps?) And now, queer sexual practices and queer genders in place, I'm still thinking about queer aesthetics/queer ethics beyond sex acts and gender expression. How else do our bodies move through the world queerly? What might it look like to queer time and space? (Thanks to Jax for that question.)

So, from the desk of the resident doctoral candidate, I picked up Jack Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. The first chapter begins with Jack claiming the existence of "queer time" and "queer space." I've only gotten as far as time. Perfect, since I spent last night thinking about time, reading Calvino on "quickness" and arguing with myself and him about the relative merits of quickness and slow thinking.

Anyway, Halberstam says:

Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification. If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity .... Obviously not all gay, lesbian, [bi] and transgender people live their lives in radically different ways from their heterosexual counterparts, but part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space.

Jack goes on to talk about denaturalizing the way that heteronormative capitalism has organized time, how art can remind us that time isn't, in & of itself, what they try to teach us it us. On Waiting for Godot: "the experience of duration makes visible the formlessness of time." All that waiting while nothing happens, feeling nothing happening over time! The audience has to feel/gets to feel what being-in-time feels like, without the imposition of events or even, eventually, the anticipation of events.

I like thinking about this -- things happening "out of order," the wisdom of young people, family connections that disrupt heteronormative assumptions of reproductive/familial time...other logics of location, movement, and identification...

Dissolving the solidity of the world

Back to thinking about lightness. (Because Sherry Kramer was both unflappable enough and nice enough to invite me to sit in on her class discussion of Calvino, in response to my jumping out of my car to ask her "just one more thing" after her Austin Scriptworks workshop on visual metaphor and magical objects. )

Calvino: Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

I just want to go meditate on that with my draft in front of me. How to dissolve the solidity of the world onstage? What knowledge of the world do my characters have? Or seek? How do (or don't) the characters dissolve the solidity of the world? What properties are left after the dissolution? I don't want to think about puddles -- more the dissipation of breath that the Wednesday night meditation teacher asked us to visualize ...