OK, you're getting a bit of a preview.
So this book is called Letter to a Future Lover.
And it comes out in two weeks.
And a word about it-- it's like these
are essays that I wrote in libraries of various sorts,
including the Poetry Center, which, I mean,
is the one that gets kind of epigraphed in the card
that you have in front of you.
And so what I would do is I would go to a library--
and I find myself thinking a lot about ebooks.
Everyone asks me about ebooks.
Aren't ebooks the future, man?
I'm like no, ebooks aren't the future.
I mean, ebooks are fine.
Like, they're helpful.
They're searchable.
It's great to teach with.
They're portable.
But what they don't have is history.
And there's a lot of things they don't have.
They also don't have cool end papers
and like beautiful bindings and so on.
But I really-- I mean, I found, though I'm kind of a techno
dude, like I really--
it turns out the book is a technology.
And it's a great technology.
And I love that technology.
And I'm pretty sure it's not going to die.
So what I would find is I would find myself
in these libraries, including the Poetry Center,
and I would find stuff.
And then kind of write about them
or try to ingest them in some way.
And then publish them back on the card like the one
that you have.
Put it back in the book where I found it.
And then the book is a compilation of some of the ones
that I wrote.
I wrote about 100.
I think there's like maybe 75 that are in the hardcover
that you guys are doing.
And the original plan was to do them all in like this box,
like uncollected, sort of unbound, just loose leaf.
And I try really, really hard to get
Graywolf to bite on this idea.
And Kate-- I think I convinced Katie,
but I think we came up into some logistical difficulties,
such as like in order to do this right,
you really have to get it done overseas.
I mean any kind of economies of scale.
And Graywolf's whole ethos is like, no,
it's got to be done in North America.
It has to be print and bound in North America, which
I understood.
So I did like my own kind of like crazy Kickstartered
edition, which is this is like the super edition.
And there's three left of the other limited edition,
which has more essays.
And they're up here if you're interested in them.
If you're like a real nerd for the book like I am,
then that's the one you want.
But there's only three left.
So hopefully, there's only three of you.
[LAUGHTER]
So a word about this.
I'm going to read a couple of these.
So these are things.
And this is like maybe the most spectacular one,
which is, the University of Arizona libraries
had this problem with this dude over the last
like five or six years who would deface books.
And he'd deface over 200 of them,
including this one up here.
And these are--
I found a copy of the Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia,
in which there's a series of people who are discussed
for their gayness.
And this guy's really upset about this.
But I mean, it's a 500-page book.
And he would deface something like 300 or 400 pages of it,
just go crazy in it.
And it wasn't just him just like being an asshole.
I mean, it was him being an asshole, but it also--
I found it really fascinating because it really
began to reveal things about himself as I
think this starts to.
And I'll sort of talk a little bit about that.
I'm only going to read one of those.
But there's a whole series of these defacer ones.
They didn't catch the guy.
I mean, they know who he is, but they wouldn't tell me his name.
He wasn't arrested because they never caught him
actually defacing books.
They know who he was.
He's been banned, apparently, but my librarian sort of
refused to actually tell me the name, which is probably good.
So this is one he defaced among other things.
This is the Greta Garbo one.
And you could see for yourself.
He's really upset.
I'll read a little bit.
You've got to-- I'm not going to try to stick everything here.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me.
No.
Greta is a lesbian."
He's really upset about this.
"I could never," and he uses this elaborate use of quotes,
"have imagined.
Oh, my.
I've seen dozens of her movies.
She's always in love scenes with men.
What?
If she was alive, I bet she would certainly
dispute this as rubbage and sue this author."
And then below, he's like really upset about Greta Garbo
being a lesbian.
He also gets upset later on about like Ma Bell and Oscar
Wilde.
He's really upset that Oscar Wilde is gay.
[LAUGHTER]
So "Dear Defacer."
In truth I too defaced--
books, surely, variously, furiously, before I
understood their worth, but also--
walls, homes, computer systems, above ground pools,
school buses, schools, school desks and lockers,
bathroom stalls, urinals, garage doors, a bus station,
car glass, cars, glass block windows, wine
glasses at parties.
Mr. Millenbach's shed.
The list embarrasses me a little, but I need to say it.
My name or my words are carved in or written all over,
in margins of all sorts, on borrowed sports equipment,
even in the evening.
Was this an evening out of anything
restoring a sense of balance, of scoring, of settling?
Was it about power?
Feeling my breath, my reach, effect linked to cause,
a pausing of the world in order to press myself into it,
adolescent, and leave it marked?
Dear Defacer, this is a book about the margin,
so while the librarians surely won't, I
welcome your marginalia, since it starts to arc,
suggest your story, growing worry about gender and sex.
It starts in stutter--
bitchassery, a variety of slurs, faggot this, lesbo that,
a yawn, you burring anyone you can.
You pathological, uncontrolled.
A hundred pages later your shriek
against how easy it must be to come out when you're already
rich betrays a shadow self.
The pool's shallow end is not so shallow as it seems,
or else you're drowning there regardless.
They say it only takes an inch.
So on a later page your confession of your age--
he says he's in his 60s--
makes the action even weirder.
Then, quote, 'Should I really be aware that Oscar Wilde--' which
he misspells-- 'is queer?'
Yes, you should, if you're in your 60s, as you say,
if you've read, it's pretty obvious.
'If I had never known Oscar Wilde' quote, 'was a faggot,
why the fuck does someone need to tell me after 100 fucking
years?'
unquote.
You may have noticed we're in the Gay and Lesbian Biography.
Why else were you here?
So I'm not sure it's fair to pair the two of us, Defacer--
16 is a life away from 66, but I still
want to understand your small, weird heart.
Our anger suggests our sadness that the sum
of us in misdirected screeds is greater than the part.
Don't we all wear our faces loosely?
Is it sad to say our eyes are masks?
Garbo's face a mask.
Emily Dickinson's, as you complain.
Wilde's, Ma Bell's, you note, though you
know she's even less real than the rest of these.
Your face a mask.
My face a mask.
This book a mask.
Your marks in it are masks.
Each mask a mask.
These sentences a mask, red death,
a self-photographed macaque, a walk
through the history of our error-prone approach to sex,
desire, to gender, to fashion, to film.
These things are kilns in which we bake the masks of self anew.
These things are stones upon which
we are asked to dash each mask each evening in order
to keep breathing.