[INAUDIBLE]
Hello.
I'm a part of a poetry class.
And we were reading "Bluets."
And so we were having a fun time trying to actually tease apart
what blue actually meant and if there
were any like metaphors or blue as an allegory
or did it mean anything.
So I guess the question is what does blue actually mean
or should we take it at face value?
Thank you.
I mean, there's a part in "Bluets"
where I say I'm trying to figure out
what blue means apart from--
what it means to me apart from its meaning, you know?
So color is a frequency of light, you know?
And as I say somewhere else in the book,
like a honeybee doesn't see the same color as it's
going towards the flower like as we see.
So essentially, color is intensely personal both to us
as a species, the way we see it all together, but also
to each person in color blind people
and sightless people, all kinds of things.
So I think part of my attraction to writing
about this subject was that it's both a very abstract concept
and is also deeply, deeply subjective, and personal.
It's personal.
It's a book to me that's about perception,
but it's also about my own perception and impressibility
by things around me, including color.
If that makes sense.
Does anyone-- someone in the back, good.
Thank you.
You do [INAUDIBLE].
This is a very simple question, but I was just curious,
does the book that you're working on now
have a title or a working title?
No, we were just talking about that at dinner.
I think because of the passage I read to you,
I call it sometimes the Argonauts, but it has--
but I don't know what it's going to be titled yet.
So we shall see.
If you have a good idea, you're welcome [INAUDIBLE].
OK.
So my sister and I have a question.
When you collect these quotes, you collect these ideas,
and you kind of know how you feel about them at the moment.
Well, if you know because it just for "Bluets."
So I'm assuming that's not always the case.
Do you test them out on people you know?
Do you apply them to the people around you?
Because it seems like--
The quotations you mean?
Well, not just the quotes, but the--
Like the theories, you mean?
Yeah, the theories and the social ideas, I guess.
You mean test them out like--
just like think about situations in my life
and see if the ideas stack up against them,
or that kind of thing?
Yeah, like do you apply them to the people you know and see
if you feel as though they're so correct?
You know, I mean I'm not really--
I mean, obviously, from everything I've just read,
it's like I'm very invested in this kind
of cerebral bodily mash up, you know?
And because I'm so invested in it,
I think I can't really even see ideas of something to test out
because like--
I mean, I think it keeps this phrase, which
was like you have to feel ideas on your pulses or something.
It's like-- that's just--
If I read a quote that seems interesting to me,
it might make like my blood quicken.
You know what I mean?
Like my pulse get excited, I mean.
It's like it's a very--
I mean, it's all very mixed up to me.
So I think that there's a little bit more of a flow
I guess, if that makes any sense than testing that might allow,
you know?
OK.
So I was just wondering where do you get your inspiration from
and if there are any specific authors that you look up to?
Kind of broad.
Well, it's broad, but it's also--
I mean, I think a long time ago, I kind of--
I don't really do this in my poetry.
So much of poetry often kind of cannibalizes or subsumes ideas.
And I like to write in kind of a plain language idiom that
doesn't bear the marks of them.
But in the prose that I write, I very typically show my hand
like entirely.
So everybody that I just mentioned,
I mean, it's kind of a way of cheating out of the question,
but are all the people that--
they're my family.
They're my chorus.
They're my friends.
They're my-- I was calling them, I
think in Brian's class, my patron saints.
Like an ancient book, I feel like I write--
I mean, maybe this is just my failure of originality, which
is fine because I've made peace with that as my style--
as my style.
But like I feel like a lot of times when I write a book,
I think of it as like who are the characters that
are the main figures I'm going to be in conversation with.
So like the thing I'm writing now, people are like,
oh what's it about?
Like I could say like sodomitical maternity,
or I could say queer family.
I could say a lot of things.
But often in my mind, I'm thinking
more like will I put like Winnicott and Sedgwick,
and you know, I don't know, like, say Conrad,
like a bunch of different--
Annie Sprinkle, like Cathy Opie, I
put a bunch of different people in the room.
Many of whom are friends or heroes, and let them kind of
bounce around with each other.
And certainly, a book like "Bluets" is like that too.
"The Art Of Cruelty" is as well.
It's a little more-- that book has
a lot-- it's a little more ambivalence because I
write about some things I don't like as well as things I do.
But all of them are my teachers, yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
This is a real test.
[INAUDIBLE]
You've got a future in this.
Yeah.
But these are the last two questions.
It seems in quite a few of your books,
you're interested in human spirituality and Eros,
physical, you know,
the physicality of humans and how the two are really
intrinsically linked.
I was hoping you could talk about that a little bit,
if you wouldn't mind.
It's very personal, but sorry.
No, that's OK.
I mean, I think something I just read.
I think it was in part of "The Art Of Cruelty," where
I'm talking about the undoneness by each other.
And I think that people often crave and are
horrified by undoneness.
But undoneness often can obviously
come from a radical spiritual experience of dissolve
or oneness or terror or feeling found or transcendence.
And then obviously, people like Leo Bersani or Judith Butler
or others have written very eloquently
about the kind of undoneness that the desire or sex can
deliver, and the ways in which that can make actually sense.
I mean, this is Bersani's kind of a main point
in his writing a theory and the ailment in a different way.
These are different queer theorists,
but writing about what actually makes that kind of focus
on the undoneness of the self-shattering in Bersani's
terms of sexual encounter, a very
difficult flashpoint for identity making
or for your politics.
So I think that in different spheres,
like "Bluets" is much more concerned with divinity
and the kind of spiritual reckoning through that book
because with the last line about being a student of light,
I mean, it's in some ways about, it's kind of an allegory
or at least bleak relation to being--
I mean, Simone Weil, right, she's
talking all the time about her relationship to God.
And that book kind of moves through
and rehearses those questions.
And what I just read is probably more concerned
with undoneness and the capacity to be undone, or done, or made,
or conflicts with identity, or politics relating
to corporality in that way.
If that makes sense.
Yeah.
First, awesome.
Thank you for reading.
Those are amazing.
Thank you.
But I'll try to pick something up or steal something.
But as somebody who also owns a plot of land in Queermerica,
like what do you think is the next lesson for--
[INAUDIBLE]
What's the next most important part from your perspective
of our struggle or fight?
Moving out from being third class
to like third and second class citizens.
To remember everyone who's being treated
like a second or third class citizen, you know?
I mean, I think actually to paraphrase something,
Brian once said, you know, it's like with every law that's
passed, ask how it works for the neediest, the most vulnerable
among you.
And if you bring that as a test of its worthiness,
I think it's one viable strategy, you know?
I think-- but you know I don't have as little abstract, that's
probably as good as I'll probably get.
Thanks, everyone for coming.
Let's applaud Maggie again for being here.
[APPLAUSE]