A Curious Body.

I just finished a three-day sprint at the &Now Festival 2011, where we were immersed in electronic and new media, excess and overflow, the feminine, the queer, the transgressive and the mad. All this was in San Diego, so I was able to slip out for some escape to the sea and the shore.

Today I was able to present on my first conference panel, "Women on Women and Bodies," where I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cristina Milletti, Christine Hume and Niina Pollari as they read from their work. I presented from my critifictional piece "A Curious Body," which is a response to Shelley Jackson's surreal and visceral autobiographical hypertext, My Body. My piece was built on the Tumblr platform to be better able to create a digital cabinet of curiosities— nested drawers, loops and recurrences, and dead ends.

This one is always a joy to read because it requires audience participation. As I read from the text, I ask the audience to dictate when I click on a link. They have to talk during a panel— sometimes I think that is the most miraculous thing of all. They lead me blindly, and sometimes this creates beautiful fragments, other times still air, but I get to watch the text transform as different hands touch it.

Check it out here.

Fall Semester.

After a syrupy, off-kilter summer of too many illnesses and the my house redolent of heat (it soaks through the bricks and the single-pane windows), autumn is finally coming.

I get to— I remind myself of this, the sheer enormity and pleasure of this— focus this year on the literature I'm reading— I'm starting off chronologically on my history list, making my way through Ovid, to Shakespeare and Cervantes. So far reading has been a joyous and strangely private experience: my brother caught me talking to my battered, much-flagged copy of Pamela. (Sometimes you and Samuel Richardson just have to throw down across several centuries).

Mostly I read from my loveseat with the pale knitted throw across the back: I listen to the sweep and the yawning pitch of the cars on the street below. My sky is broken by decade-old trees (huge and feathery) and telephone wires.