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As a river always happens, as a body's an event
I always forget about National Coming Out Day, so this year I seem to have observed it in the form of the rest of my birthday with my family. I don't mind. We made small steaks and creamed spinach and twice-baked potatoes with enough garlic to threaten a dynasty of Draculas and my father constructed salads with butter lettuce and tiny heritage tomatoes and my mother invented a cake that was mostly meringue and whipped cream and mandarin oranges and my niece insisted on me opening first the present from her family, which was lovely since it was A.C. Jacobs' Nameless Country (2018). I riffled through at random and got the following poem:
Place
'Where do you come from?'
'Glasgow.'
'What part?'
'Vilna.'
'Where the heck's that?'
'A bit east of the Gorbals,
In around the heart.'
Other gifts include Michael Cisco's Secret Hours (2007), K.J. Bishop's That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (2012), a second pair of blue-black corduroy cargo pants, Jake Xerxes Fussell's Out of Sight (2019), Desperate Journalist's In Search of the Miraculous (2019), and Julia Wolfe's Fire in my mouth (2019), which I had not even known existed. My mother heard an interview with the composer on the radio and correctly guessed that a ghost oratorio of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire would interest me. I have plans tomorrow to hear Ivan Gusev at the Museum of Modern Renaissance, but I may spend as much time as possible before then on the couch with new books. Someday I will have a living room where I can set up a sound system, too. I came home and checked the internet for the first time in hours and found that Craig Laurance Gidney had said nice things about me on Facebook ("One of Tanith Lee's spiritual daughters. Her prose is a delight on its own and her baroque plots are imbued with a 'sense of wonder' aesthetic"). I would like to be less sick and I would like to be writing more and a whole bunch of other things with the world or the inside of my head, but: art and people who love you are good things to have. Also mandarin orange cake.
(In re National Coming Out Day: my 2017 post on the subject is still fundamentally accurate. I have stopped feeling even misplacedly bad about not having a coming-out story. I think "BLARGH" may now be my official gender designation.)
Place
'Where do you come from?'
'Glasgow.'
'What part?'
'Vilna.'
'Where the heck's that?'
'A bit east of the Gorbals,
In around the heart.'
Other gifts include Michael Cisco's Secret Hours (2007), K.J. Bishop's That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (2012), a second pair of blue-black corduroy cargo pants, Jake Xerxes Fussell's Out of Sight (2019), Desperate Journalist's In Search of the Miraculous (2019), and Julia Wolfe's Fire in my mouth (2019), which I had not even known existed. My mother heard an interview with the composer on the radio and correctly guessed that a ghost oratorio of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire would interest me. I have plans tomorrow to hear Ivan Gusev at the Museum of Modern Renaissance, but I may spend as much time as possible before then on the couch with new books. Someday I will have a living room where I can set up a sound system, too. I came home and checked the internet for the first time in hours and found that Craig Laurance Gidney had said nice things about me on Facebook ("One of Tanith Lee's spiritual daughters. Her prose is a delight on its own and her baroque plots are imbued with a 'sense of wonder' aesthetic"). I would like to be less sick and I would like to be writing more and a whole bunch of other things with the world or the inside of my head, but: art and people who love you are good things to have. Also mandarin orange cake.
(In re National Coming Out Day: my 2017 post on the subject is still fundamentally accurate. I have stopped feeling even misplacedly bad about not having a coming-out story. I think "BLARGH" may now be my official gender designation.)
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BLARGH seems like a good gender designation to me.
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Thank you! It was an extremely delicious dinner (we have leftovers!) and the praise was lagniappe.
BLARGH seems like a good gender designation to me.
It covers the basics.
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Thank you! It's sort of an extended birthday festival approach, which I enjoyed.
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Rochester- the Riga quarter...........
I do have a coming out story but I won't bore you with it! :o)
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Exactly!
I do have a coming out story but I won't bore you with it!
I think you have told me pieces of it. Mostly I am glad that it ends with you here.
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I'm trans but had to deal with it all back in the seventies, which was a very different (and more dangerous) place, hence the story! :o)
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I know it's not entirely generational: I know a lot of people in my age bracket with coming-out stories and there's a lot of trauma wrapped up in a lot of them. But I don't feel that I don't count in my community because it was not painful for me, and I think that's important.
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.
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I don't think I knew it was a thing until a couple of years ago, when I started seeing it across my various friendlists. Then it turned out to have been around since 1988.
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Um that sounds amazing
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Thank you!
Um that sounds amazing
It is. I don't know if you can stream it anywhere, but if you can, you should hear it. It is written for 146 women's voices, the same number as died in the fire.
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art and people who love you are good things to have. Also mandarin orange cake Strong agree about all three. Actually I've never tasted mandarin orange cake, but I can tell I'd like it.
I think "BLARGH" may now be my official gender designation --And an excellent one it is.
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I was really honored!
Actually I've never tasted mandarin orange cake, but I can tell I'd like it.
I think it was the same theory as a lot of cakes made with non-mandarin oranges, in that there was fruit all over the place and it tasted great.
--And an excellent one it is.
Thank you.
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I saw that in the liner notes, but I haven't heard it! I will check it out.
I don't know if Fire in her mouth is her representative style, but it is both jagged and lyrical and makes considerable use of collage of historical texts as well as some startling sound effects, like the shearing of scissors.
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