i’m supposed to be writing a conference paper on marie’s work, but i’m stuck on my own blog post, “i will never doubt tracey emin again,” from 2009.  

“Tracey Emin might be the ultimate 90swoman. But in the spirit of her confessional art, I have a confession of my own: I’ve never been sure I’d like her very much in person. But at a reading last Saturday I found out that my skepticism could not have been more misplaced. She was hilarious, smart, self-aware, and complicated. She confidently read a short sketch about all the boys she fucked when she was 13 and 14 but refused to read the end of another story because she said she was far too embarrassed. (Even exhibitionists have their limits.) She brought a glass of wine up to the lectern—it’s true, her pleasure-seeking always gives me a little thrill—but she never took a sip from it.

She is unapologetic about how much she likes sex—“sex used to get me out of bed in the morning,” she said—but she’s also deeply romantic.”I think we all know how that feels,” she said at the close of one of her sexually explicit, emotionally vulnerable stories. It’s funny that she’s always called a narcissist, considering how much of her work is about the intense ways in which humans need, want, and affect each other. During the Q & A, someone asked the excellent question “Do you ever stop longing?” She said: Sometimes, but it’s only momentary. Some of the questions–like “are you a sex addict?”–were far less kind. But then, pretty much any female artist who deals with sexuality is going to be semi-covertly accused of sluttiness.

Emin’s relationship with/to straight men seems totally representative of 90swoman heterosexuality. Including that she’s insinuated that she isn’t exactly heterosexual. But maybe this is a subject for a different post.”

tracey emin, suffer love ii, 2009

big sur. we stayed in the same place as jake gyllenhaal and taylor swift, and paddled around the cliffside infinity pool in a fog storm, by ourselves, twice, and felt sorry for the girls whose boyfriends or husbands failed to make dinner reservations in time to see the sun set. the guy who drove us the 30 seconds from our place to reception said “come back three times a year. give me job security.” i was starry-eyed. 

"Grandiosity is of course a term itself rich with theoretical inflection, much of it derived from psychoanalysis keyed to object-relations, where it is largely a term of disapprobation. Grandiosity marks the infant’s delusional sense that the world is, and should be, co-terminus with its wishes: marks, that is, a position that in the more normative registers of “development” must be abandoned. We, on the other hand, are lovers of Whitman—and are also, in our loves, people who have passionately, stubbornly resisted the notion that we cannot, with the force of our desire, remake the world as we wish it to be. So we incline to think grandiosity more kindly. It names for us a quality of abundance, of an achieved amplitude on the scene of self-relation, that is willing to risk a lot on behalf of the revised constellation of possibilities such an orientation can bring into relief. Grandiosity is a willingness to risk, first, not being critical, at least not in the modes we’ve come to know. It marks a detachment from irony or camp, as well as the various exteriorities of “critique,” as modes understood to be exhaustive or exclusive. And it names too, in ways the Kleinians would be quick to recognize, an openness to the kinds of wounding that might follow from grandiosity’s perhaps inevitable disappointments—or, we might say, from its collisions with intractability in its many guises."

From Peter Coviello and Elizabeth Freeman’s ”Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st Century Occupations,” in the latest issue of Periscope. (via lazz)

we went to see spring breakers at a theater with a large selection of alcohol. i texted aliza: “it’s amazing except for the girl next to us who is about to barf.” she fell on her way out. it felt like real spring break! i would watch this movie ten more times. it’s got feminist boredom, feminist violence, feminist terror, brutal frivolity, and girls in bikinis. there are bummer narcs and incarceration and an obsession with price tags. marc was committed to getting a reaction shot for my tumblr.

it was my three year tumblr anniversary…

…on new year’s. in back-reading my blog i thought: 

• this blog is a guide to how i want to be spoken to 
• this blog is a guide to how i think everyone should be spoken to 
• this blog is basically an etiquette blog and if everyone treated one another the way the people i am close to and i treat one another everything would be great 
• this blog is a boyfriend blog, and the blogs i am most impressed by do this better 
• this blog made it so easy to write my area exams and dissertation proposal because i had already archived the important quotes 
• this blog is so boring to back-read when it gets really quote-heavy, which makes me think maybe i should go back to writing more about myself
• this includes posting more chats, which no one really likes except for me—they are actually my favorite 
• this blog is better when read cumulatively, rather than as individual posts
• this blog is better when my life is worse aka is there a way to make this not a mommyblog, given my themes 
• we’re going to find out 
• i am pretty sure that my two favorite posts, ever, are “let’s see what happens if i do this thing” (self-explanatory) and “i like to vacillate” (“withholding and versatile”…”youre like into something and then youre not”…”you change position in relation to the other”…”it’s hard to tell if you’re the dom or the submissive because you’re like, ‘WHAT’S MY ROLE / I DON’T HAVE A ROLE’ in the space of like 5 gchat msgs”
• lol
• is this really a blog? 
   

subashini:

Rogueish: So Kathi Weeks draws The Problem With Work to a close with an…

rogueish:

So Kathi Weeks draws The Problem With Work to a close with an argument, drawing on Bloch, for daydreaming as a political practice:

Daydreaming is often treated as an embarrassment, not only for the lack it represents-a lapse in concentration, a waste of time, an interruption of productive activity-but for what it reveals of our immoderate desires to be and have more, an excess of social desire comparable to the libidinal excesses that can fuel the sleeping dream. And it is not just that these desires for undeserved pleasures are seen as irredeemably self-indulgent; these experiments with the social and political imagination are also considered dangerous-risky violations of that strategy of social adjustment by which we allow ourselves to want only what we are likely to have. In this familiar estimation, daydreams are without value, neither sufficiently productive nor functionally reproductive to merit indulgence or warrant exploration.

Hearts in my eyes, basically.

This has been in my drafts for too long. 

daydreaming = #1. 

(Source: rogueish)

at the beginning of 2012 we agreed on the importance of staging excess precariously and that celebration is the opposite of processing. i told marc that i really want to see miranda lambert, who is playing in atlantic city. he said to remind him and we would book a hotel when we get back to new york: “‘do you want to go to atlantic city’ is the best question anyone has ever asked me. the answer is always yes.” i didn’t actually ask. he is going to walk me to the concert, where i will listen to this song, then i can go watch him play blackjack and have a drink. happy 2013.