Tag: joy

537: “A Live Fish?!” (Badell, Rebottaro, & Bender)

“Bunker: ‘A live fish?!’
The Wraith: ‘The true crimefighter always carries everything she needs in her utility belt, Tyler.’”
                -Flavor text for The Wraith’s Utility Belt card in Sentinels of the Multiverse by Christopher Badell, Adam Rebottaro, and Paul Bender

                I don’t love this quote just because I love the image. A Batman style utility belt, and inside a live fish—maybe a little dace—of course in water because otherwise it won’t stay alive for long. And I don’t love it just because my friends and I were playing Sentinels of the Multiverse yesterday, and Hannah stopped us, saying: “Wait. This card’s actually pretty funny.” Though maybe in part this post is a you had to be there moment. So much of language is, isn’t it? A connection in a place and time. A hand holding a fish. You had to be there, and it all made sense.
                There’s also something ridiculous about that superhero trope of carrying everything you need. Of somehow being fully independent of context and situation, as though prepared enough could keep you dry in a rainstorm, cool in a heatwave, could help you chat with friends around a board game, cure your cancer, ready you for a loved one’s death or an old friend’s return, or the pipes freezing, or your joints aging, or life, or death. Could be ready for all the endless perhapses and certainties of a changing world. For that you really would need a live fish. Or maybe, instead, you could let the fish go back in the river, where it would rather be. Swimming along. Not helplessly, not mindlessly. Not ready for anything but responding to this. These changing currents of river and world. You had to be there, but luckily, you are.

by Azlan

499: “Frivolous, Promiscuous, and Irrelevant” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

                I’m writing a book for my PhD dissertation. I know, I know, but I couldn’t fit in the bird bath (it looks so fun!) and you have to do something. So earlier today I’m at a cafe with my advisor, chatting about my constantly changing book ideas. She laughed at me. I would laugh at me. What this book is and what it’s about has been changing week to week. We laugh together, and she says, “Well, what book do you want it to be like?”
                And I think about Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. 
                Now I’m not going to write anything like The Queer Art of Failure. For one thing, Halberstam is brilliant. For another my pages tend to have more personal story stuff than that book. But I did tell my advisor, You know, I wish what I was writing was funnier. 
                Since then I’ve been thinking about why my pages aren’t funnier. And I could say, well, the book’s about difficult things, and that’s true, but so is Halberstam’s. And Halberstam’s is funny as me trying to think my way out of overthinking. (By which I mean, very). I think part of the seriousness in my pages is that I’ve bought into exactly what Halberstam is warning against, what they’re so gleefully refusing: this idea that I want to be a success, and I know what that means, and so I’ll go along the paths I’m supposed to until someone severe and somber says, “Yes. Look what hath you wrought.” And that’s rot. Which is to say: this week I looked at someone who’d made their neck and chin look like a burger. This week I showed that to my friend, and now to you. This week my friend and I talked about her work, which means we talked about how our medical systems fail to support her and her relatives. And we got angry. And we got sad. And we laughed, too, because in person that’s easier, even with the angry and sad, and I think laughter can be pavement for the detours that lead to where we hope we’re headed.

by Azlan