An Aesthetics of Failure

A queer theoretical approach to adolescence via a problematization of the teleology of growth.

A dismantling of the idea of a life in “stages” which turns on the multiple meanings of that term.

Darstellung something
Both ends Burning (Roxy Music/Edna St. Vincent)
start collecting more definitions of "adolescence"
start reading Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way
shopping hates your dissertation


I’ve chosen a curious tactic for the completion of my dissertation: i moved from the small, affordable, minimally distracting town that is home to my university (and its libraries and teaching opportunities and my committee) to, umm, New York City. Brooklyn, actually.

After a few months of sitting down to “work” and proceeding no further than sentences and scribbles such as the ones you see above, I’ve decided to get started again. I never really felt that I wasn’t working--because I read almost every day--but there’s been no writing. Nor has there even been much talking about the project. Instead, my days run something like this: huh. Luc Sante’s using a Foucault epigraph in the Sunday NYT Magazine for an article about cowboys? Jesus. Huh, where is my copy of Discipline and Punish, anyway? This thing he’s pulled out about outsiders might actually be pertinent to the dissertation. In fact, Discipline and Punish could be crucial to the dissertation.

Walk to bedroom. Examine bookshelf. Realize that goddamnit Discipline and Punish inexplicably bit the dust with hundreds of other very expensive academic books I spent ten years collecting while working at a feminist bookstore--initially for the feminism, and when that got confusing, for the discount on books. (My rule when i left was that if it didn't fit into the rental car, it was no longer mine). Wonder, not for the first time, how I could not have anticipated that I would someday need that book again? Tell myself: Well, how can I possibly work on this without Discipline and Punish? I’d better go replace it, but god, where should I go? They don’t have it at Spoonbill and Labyrinth is too far away and Barnes and Noble is out of the question. Paul looks at me like I’ve just thrown up on his feet. Uh, St. Mark’s? I still haven’t been. He just keeps staring at me. Come on, I haven’t been. Enough. How do I get there?

Go to St. Mark’s Bookshop. Happily locate both the book I came for and the new Jameson. Start reading the new Jameson on the train on the way home. Spend the next two weeks reading the new Jameson. See how this goes? I still haven’t started writing, much less isolated the argument that was so vital from Discipline and Punish. And if I’m not careful, next Sunday’s paper will get me started on another (absolutely crucial) wild-goose chase postponement.

Well, that’s how it's been since June; however, to be honest, I just bought The Modernist Papers yesterday. I did indeed spend most of the day and early evening reading, but I woke up this morning and wanted to both continue reading and to actually write something, thanks to such passages as:

"The American small town is not mythic or poetic in any of these senses (nor is New Jersey to be sentimentalized a la Sherwood Anderson: the fact that the figure does not work and one cannot imagine how to go about 'adding up' separate people or separate lives--that unworkable fact is itself the poetic datum at stake here, and it is understood and reemphasized again and again by remarkable figural structures which equally do not work either."

But more on not working later, right now I have to go to work.