Meta: the course blog all in one page, plus some wrap-up

Wrap-up. An introduction. Lord Rochester. Binnie's Nevada.

Jane Austen. Audre Lorde. Mansfield and Lawrence and other modernists. More Lawrence.

Renaissance sonnets. Walt Whitman. Lorca break: Lorca's Whitman Ode in Kline's English and in Lorca's Spanish. A nonacademic host for the full text in Spanish of Poeta en Nueva York.

Recommended writers of color (also furries). Oscar Wilde. James Baldwin. More sonnets (also "Goblin Market").

Tamara Faith Berger. Live on stage. Alison Bechdel. Sedgwick and Lockwood.

Who is apparently writing? Who does she think will be reading? Is there a speaker, narrator, persona?

Fabula vs. syuzet: what happens and how it's told. The town, the map and the direction of the journey. Choices about chronology.

A medium. Another medium. Another medium.

Two genres. Another genre. How many genres?

Ask what it's not. Look for allusions. Look for recommended precedents.

Ask why a work begins where it begins, and ends where it ends.
We say we have sexualities. We have triangles. Not necessarily the only way. Older models.

Intersections and intersectionality.

Eve Sedgwick; Patricia Lockwood

An Eve Sedgwick memorial site with short recaps and discussions of essays from Tendencies. Jason Edwards follows up on "Queer and Now." Robert Mills follows up on "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay."

Another story about the APA's 1973 decision, from Alix Spiegel of This American Life.

The gender-and-desire slot machine.

Some things have changed: the out gay undersecretary of the US Air Force; gay Air Force alums. Some things haven't changed yet.

Some things have changed: gender-variant kids. Photographers love trans and gender-nonconforming kids. More gender-variant kids' camps. One of several great organizations for trans and gender-nonconforming kids.

Kids' clothes, unisex fashion, and the world expert on both. Her kids and clothes resource linked to her academic book.

I believe we mentioned GLTBTQ+ superheroes? If you read only one thing about gay superheroes… If you read two, or three, or four… If you read five… Also this title.

Patricia Lockwood: the whole poem "Rape Joke," as originally published at The Awl. More whole poems as published online: "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers." Scroll down here for "The Feeling of Needing a Pen." From the New Yorker, "Love Poem Like We Used to Write It" (may require login). "The Hypno-Domme…"

Minoan jug dolphins are real. One portrait of Emily Dickinson. 128 portraits of Walt Whitman. Lockwood, rhetorician.

The famous/ notorious Twitter feed. A lot of actual hypnodommes on the Internet. One hypnodomme. Even more hypnodommes.

More reactions to "Rape Joke." The Times magazine profile. A Rumpus interview. The Kat Stoeffel review.

Fun Home

The main Alison Bechdel page. The Dykes to Watch Out For strip comics archive online. Bechdel's blog (more up-to-date than much of the site). Fun Home the musical (video clips). More on the musical.

Studying comics: you should probably start here.

McCloud's big triangle. A couple of faces. Another face.

Graphic novels. More graphic novels. A lot of queer comics. Our leading academic scholar of (memoir-y or non-superhero) graphic novels. Another relevant graphic novel.

The auteur's hand. Even more DTWOF.

Neo-burlesque and other live performances (with Jade Sylvan)

Cam Awkward Rich, A Prude's Manifesto.

Johnny Blazes, drag reverse striptease. If that link fails try this Johnny Blazes performance instead. Another reverse striptease from London's Wotever World venue (performer uncredited).

The Slutcracker: video promo.

The Slutcracker: Waltz of the Flowers.

Sugar Dish, The Contract.

Jade Sylvan: "You know how sometimes…" prose poem/ essay; a live reading of that poem; a few more poems; essay on the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Spider Cult promo video. The TEN promo video. Kissing Oscar Wilde, the book trailer.

Looking ahead: the main Alison Bechdel page. The Dykes to Watch Out For strip comics archive online. Bechdel's blog (more up-to-date than much of the site). Fun Home the musical (video clips). More on the musical.

Studying comics: you should probably start here.

The performer, educator and poet Sam Sax. The poems and performances of Rachel McKibbens.

Mixed-genre queer performance in Boston: the Femme Show.

Maidenhead

Tamara Faith Berger on Twitter. In conversation with Kate Zambreno. In other books. In Vice Magazine.

A slave. More slaves. Master-slave connections.

On missing white girls. Search and rescue.

Paradigms of meaty liberation. Older similar paradigms. Symbols of liberty? The fons et origo of explicit lesbian feminist erotica. A famously articulate porn star. VICE magazine's video interview (not for showing in class) with her.

Another important topic. And another.

Writing genre: erotica. Writing literate queer Canadian erotica.

Making a case for the sexual lives of minors. OTOH, making a case against porn.

An important story. Part of a farm animal. Getting wet.

A musical instrument. Another instrument.

A pretty good feminist magazine. Not so beautiful. Are we all trapped?

More sonnets, plus "Goblin Market"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese: sonnet one ("I thought once"). Sonnet forty-three ("How do I love thee"). Much (though not all) of the rest of the sequence.

Camões, or Camoens, wrote sonnets in real Portuguese. What Theocritus sang, in Edmonds' 1912 translation (scroll down to Idyll 15, lines 104-05). "How do I love thee" in manuscript. The Phoebe Anna Traquair illuminated "Sonnets" (1892-97).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life: sonnet thirty-six ("Not in thy body"). Pretty much all of D. G. Rossetti (both paintings and poems) online. The House of Life, in a big academic digital variorum edition.

Christina Rossetti< Monna Innominata (complete sequence).

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market. The British Library exhibit on "Goblin Market," with manuscript facsimiles and illustrations.

Exotic fruit. Less exotic fruit. Another edition with some illustrations by L. Housman and D. G. Rossetti. A sampling of mostly c20 illustrations. The first edition, with DGR illustrations (scroll down).

Many, many interpreters. Are we in in London? Perhaps here? It doesn't look evil. But neither do these. Or these.

"Tenderness," by Thomas Page McBee. "Fool," also by McBee. The main McBee site.

James Baldwin

James Baldwin, interviewed in 1984. Baldwin on NPR. His 1987 NY Times obit. Darryl Pinckney's recent tribute.

Short clips and interviews from the documentary film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. The official site for the film.

Lee Strasberg, teaching actors, on video. Another method acting lesson.

The New York Times reviews Blues for Mr Charlie(1964).

A poster for a 1935 production of Waiting for Lefty.

"Whether I'm a man": the last scene from Kings Row.

For those who missed it from Tuesday's lecture: another proud hammer. What is the hammer?

What do actors really want?

Another good recent book about race and microaggressions. An excerpt.

Another good writer who became a man.

One artificial phallus. Another artificial phallus.

The last scene in Shakespeare's Othello. Mo Willems on a good choice.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde, photogenic aesthete, and an 1881 parody of his early public image. Max Beerbohm's caricature of Wilde on his successful American tour.

The full text of Wilde's essay in dialogue form, "The Decay of Lying."

More full text of Wilde's works online, inelegantly, from the Victorian Web, and very elegantly at a nonacademic site.

Visual analogies from An Ideal Husband: Boucher's Triumph of Love. Ladies at start of play would have appealed to Watteau. Mrs Cheveley is Lamia-like ("The Lamia," H. J. Draper, 1909). A Tanagra statuette. Another Tanagra.

One of Beardsley's famous illustrations for Wilde's Salome (English tr. by Douglas pub. 1894); another one of Beardsley's illustrations, and another.

More Beardsley and Decadence: A Suggested Reform for... Ballet" (1895); another title page; a collection of Beardsley's art for the Yellow Book, which contrary to reputation never published Wilde.

Wilde's image and identity sell coffee. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop.

Stills from a few recent productions of Earnest: Seattle's Village Theatre (what is Lady Bracknell wearing?). Algernon and Jack, from the Village Theatre again.

An all-male, perhaps too modern Earnest.

Another recent Earnest from the National Theater School of Canada.

More LGBT and/or Q writers of color; furries; other maps

Early 1970s gay liberation. More memories. US GLBTQ history, from Michael Bronski.

Thinking about kinds of feminism.

A performing artist who could certainly be in this course. Some clips.

A major science fiction writer who could also be in this course.

The latest book from a challenging poet. A significant new poet and his much noticed new book.

A new book about queer and trans artists of color. Comics by Nia King.

Fifty queer zines by people of color.

A critic, poet, translator and autobiographer.

Another significant poet and some of his poems. An especially explicit example of his thoughtful work.

A DC-based pioneer of performance-oriented poetry. A poetic manifesto. On his legacy.

One more poet (he's reading this Sunday in Brookline)!

A critic, memoirist, YA writer, short story writer, and poet.

A terrific fiction writer and some of his essays and stories.

(This blogger got asked a similar question and came up with a neat miscellany.)

Back in the alphabet soup. More soup.

Some tools for writing about poetry. The most important tool. Diction, or spices. Syntax, or routes. A toolbox. A very useful tool or recipe book.

Finally, furries. Also, intersectionality. Definitely not representative. What about this non-furry? Lots of furry events.

Quantifiable research on furry. Furry demographics, for example.

Valdor and other fursuiters. Furry video central. A performance by Sardyuon.

Michael Arthur on furry. Arthur's comics.

Morris Stegosaurus, a furry who's quite a good writer. His performance and his book.

Walt Whitman

Deathbed edition text for Children of Adam poems in Leaves of Grass.

Deathbed edition text for Calamus poems.

The entirety of the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass.The 1860 Calamus poems. The 1859 proto-Calamus manuscript, "Live Oak with Moss." A close-up view of calamus, or sweet-flag (Acorus calamus).

The kind of awesome Whitman Archive landing page.

A late 1850s photograph of Whitman, "one of the roughs." Whitman seated, in Boston, 1860. Whitman in D.C., 1863: "Do you detect a scowl?" Whitman in 1866 or so by Matthew Brady. Whitman in 1880.

The first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The 1860 edition. The 1872 edition.

Phrenology, the pseudoscience of head bumps! More phrenology. American popular "science" in lots of books from the 1850s. Mesmerism. Whitman's early work as a temperance writer.

All about Peter Doyle. Whitman with Peter Doyle. Whitman with Harry Stafford.

A delightful and very non-scholarly Whitman fan blog. Remembering Robert K. Martin. Colm Toibin on Edward Carpenter. A nonacademic Carpenter fan site, with unreliable editions of Carpenter's writings (check before you quote!)

Sherman Alexie's poem "Defending Walt Whitman."

Federico Garcia Lorca's "Oda a Walt Whitman" in Spanish and in one English translation b A. S. Kline. Mayakovsky's looking at you.

Renaissance sonnets

Aspects of sonnets. How to write sonnets, by Rachel Richardson.

The sonnets on our syllabus: Sidney, Astrophel and Stella 1. Sidney, Astrophel and Stella 71 ("Who will in fairest book of nature know"). A lot of reliable resources for the study of Sidney (and Wroth and their family). Sidney's whole sequence, reliably edited and in 1580s spelling. An engraving of Sidney. A portrait.

Shakespeare, sonnet 105 ("Let not my love be called"). Shakespeare, sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds"). Sonnet 129 ("The expense of spirit"). All Shakespeare's sonnets in a decent modern-spelling edition. An online edition (with commentary) of the first quarto.

Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 2. Wroth, Pamphilia 7. A reliably edited text for the whole sequence, with notes. A short life of Wroth. A longer reliable life, with more on what happens in her enormous Urania. Her complete writings online.

Quite a lot of reliable texts, and commentary, on Barnfield. Barnfield's Affectionate Shepherd, sonnet 16 ("Long have I long'd") and sonnet 17 ("Cherry-lipt Adonis"). The polemical Rictor Norton on Barnfield and other gay shepherds.

Some precursors and parallels: Thomas Wyatt's "long love. Thomas Campion's cherry garden. Petrarch's Canzoniere in modern English by A. S. Kline.

A Nicholas Hilliard miniature. And another. J. E. Delaunay's Ixion (late 19th c.). Botticelli's Cupid.

Lawrence

Defending the author. Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in Britain. Lots of Lawrence's poetry. The D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature in a reliable, academically edited online version. F. R. Leavis, Leavisites and Lawrence.

A message to send. A complete org chart. A map with directions. DHL's favorite word.

England. Old coal mines. Old industry. A ruin.

What has to be simultaneous. Ideology everywhere. Ways to classify everyone. Disability issues. The mind-body problem. A liberator.

Into the woods. A work of art isn't necessarily a program.

Wandervogel. A gift. Lose your virginity and turn blue. Come on and touch me. Lady Chatterley's destiny is here not here. That's what it is.

Good timing in sex. In search of real men. Always pointing elsewhere. Some men are babies. More adults who are babies.

Men are from dog, women are from cat. Feminist cat studies. Women have eggs.

Mansfield, Lawrence, Rich, Grant, Ukeles, Freud

Please keep following Topside Press! Remember that there are other resources for contemporary transmasculine identities: Bear Bergman comes to mind.

These are contemporary, perhaps near future, ways of living. What's present from the past, or in the recent past? Concepts that were confining, or fruitful, or went without saying?

Three concepts in particular to keep in mind. Later writers puncture or push back.

First, a guy with a cigar. A special type. He didn't think homosexuality required a "cure."

He gave us a complex. Or two. And a series of stages. A roadmap to the right kind of adulthood.

Thinking about immaturity. A word that does not mean what he thinks it means. Enjoy the ball.

Warning: freeze-dried. An arrow. Psychoanalytic detection. A series of tubes. Big questions.

An idea of marriage. One way to treat women's complaints.

A lot of research help (aimed at college students) on gender in Victorian Britain. Women in men's hands. Or in men's houses.

Women as men's property: Gayle Rubin. Sedgwick's Between Men. A similar contest.

Flirting with stockings. Not him. Not him.

If you or another real person (not a made-up literary character) experience unwanted sex, or violence in a relationship, you can get help.

Can intimacy be separated from money? Are sex workers doing a job? Melissa Gira Grant's essay on brothels. Robin Hustle was an escort and will be a nurse.

Sex work is a thing people do, not a thing people are. There are other jobs that most people don't want to do.

Ukeles and maintenance art. (Note the poke at Freud.)

Is there a bright line between sexy and non-sexy intimacy? Or a continuum? What makes men afraid? People aren't produce.

Audre Lorde

Men and women and Austen and basic math.

Looking at Audre Lorde. A brief life of Audre Lorde. The Audre Lorde Project.

Sister Outsider. One essay: on "the erotic." Another famous essay: "The Master's Tools."

Intersections. Not the house of difference. A house of difference.

Harlem (W. 125th St), in 1939. Harlem in 1939 again. The whole Caribbean. A house on Carriacou.

Seeking connections. Writing to your future self.

Thomas Couser on memoir, a lot. On memoir, a little.

A letter to lose. A culinary symbol. Another symbol.

Learning to label. Read some Ann Bannon. Like this one. Bannon's original book covers.

The importance of the 1950s bar scene. Of an urban bohemia before Stonewall.

Don't stay isolated. Don't assume your lover is the one.

A queer database documentary. Looks very cool. Another one from the UK.

Sense and Sensibility

Title page, first edition of S&S (1811). Illustrations for a 1907-08 edition, by C. E. Brock. Another edition, whose introduction, by Laura Engel, I recommend.

A searchable electronic text for S&S: your eyes will pop out if you try reading it all online (which is why you had to buy the book) but you do cool things by searching for phrases & words. Jack Lynch's online edition of Fantomina.

Book trailer for "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters." More Sea Monsters. S&S and something else. Something else.

Not monsters so much as a set of constraints which dictate the life course. Like this.

"The economic basis of society." Country society.

Some Austen plots could work almost anywhere, especially in high school. Why is that and what gets lost?

What was sensibility? More on sentiment and sensibility.

Elinor: like a visual artist, or like a writer. Marianne: a musician; a terrible actor.

Sensibility, feeling and the French Revolution" ("Liberty Leading the People" by Delacroix)

Limited choices. Men can go here. Women have small dating pools.

Who courts whom, who gets married, at what age?

Should you look for the One? Or round up, as per Dan Savage?

Who gets to have a body? Who feels what through the body? Who conceals and who reveals what feeling? Who cares for whom?

Take the analogy seriously. Also, trolls.

The places in S&S (nonacademic). Disapproval. D.W. Harding and "Regulated Hatred." A vast trove of Austen-related images and nonacademic (but articulate) essays.

Nevada

Imogen Binnie official site. Binnie's older, more punk rock site. Her Twitter feed. An interview with Binnie. Another interview.

Universalizing as against minoritizing identity.Individualizing identity. In the first scene, Maria can't speak.

Is gender something you are, or something you do? Is it all performance? Judith Butler only sort of thought so. This is a costume. So is this. So is this. One more social construction.

Realist novels give practical advice. About sparkles, for example. What to expect when you're trans. Want more advice in that line? Here are good YA novels.

It would be cool-- but it's not actually possible-- to see ourselves as others see us. Maria would rather not take them off. What is junk? Good luck being present in your body.

The real Star City, NV is a ghost town. The real Strand Bookstore might or might not be a terrible place to work. Other work from Topside Press.

Most trans women are not seen here. Most trans women are not Jenny Boylan. Boylan's best-known book. Most trans women are also not Julia Serano, who blogs a lot. Reinventing queer narrative with Robert Glück.

Most life stories aren't that simple, let alone that simple. Some can feel like Nevada Route 80.

Nevada also includes, in effect, a short trans (mostly transfeminine) reading list. Here's a very long one. Here's a heavily annotated one from the very helpful Helen Boyd. Here's one for transmasculine people.

A trans man whose memoir refuses the classic narrative. A lot more Gender Outlaws.

James thinks about something called "autogynephilia," a memorable but pretty much discredited psychological (and pathologizing) model of what transfeminine people want.

The stories that James likes to read are out there. A lot.

Kinks are arrows. Some writers I trust about kink.

About Kathy Acker: Acker talks about narrative. A long introduction to Acker from Peter Wollen at the LRB. Acker's NYT obituary and Guardian reintroduction.

We may be on the road, but we're definitely not On the Road.

Practical (not necessarily literary) trans groups and resources at Harvard, and in New England, and for young people, and for trans and gender-noncomforming young people's families, teachers, and caregivers, and an important conference in Philadelphia. A Harvard-student-run resource for kink.

Lord Rochester, rakes and libertines

A hand-copied Rochester manuscript. A famous portrait of Lord Rochester. Rochester's verse satire against King Charles II.

Jonathan Kramnick (2002) on Rochester, the history of sexuality, "Love a Woman" and other poems.

"Fair Chloris" in our own clean text. Pastoral. Also pastoral. Definitely not pastoral.

Writers can make identity seem unstable. Or fluid. Or like a slot machine. Maybe sex can make identity go away. Or maybe we want to build a community with inclusive labels.

Rochester's Dildo. The future King, James II (portrait by Lely). Mary of Modena, whose arrival occasioned the poem. Tom Killigrew. Slightly later dildos and their source.

Rochester's poem "The Disabled Debauchee." Rochester's poem in tercets "Upon Nothing." One nothing. Another nothing. And another; and another? Not this guy.

Introducing our course and some of the things we can study

Lord Rochester. Also heroic modern feminist writers. Also Walt. Also other identities, ways of writing and performing sex and gender and other intersections, and ways of making up people. (More about making up people.)

Inside the penis museum. Passion and/or fertility and/or lust.

Social conventions, life partners and the life course, conventions and weddings and more weddings.

What kind of person do you think that you are?

Disaggregating concepts, doing genealogy. But are we really so different from writers a long time ago? In some ways, maybe not!

Some important letters. Even more letters. However: literature. Also new literature.

To study what's unusual you also have to study the norms. They haven't always been exactly the same.

We know we have chromosomes. What do they do? We tend to think partners should be semi-equal. Do we know what porn is? What about sex work?

We're not in ancient Athens. Or Renaissance Florence. Or in a world before modern biology.

Don't step on one of these. Or one of these. Or one of these.

Unusual genders in the late eighteenth century. Performing gender in famous plays. Performing a fabulous gender. Living, and writing, complicated gender for real.

Thinking about sex workers. Thinking about violence. Thinking about what's called love.

We'll never ask you how you see yourself.

Three poly folks buy a bed, by Jade Sylvan, whom we will meet this spring. Jade has no single identity. Bonus personal essay by Anshuman Iddamsetty: "Desire that is pure and honest doesn't require a narrative." Really?