Sunday 7 April 2013

I'm Waiting to Eat My Orange (Though Once Eaten, It's Not Much Good)


Just now over at the Y, I finally added an apostrope to MENS outside our changeroom.
Pretty soon I'll get to what's in the archive of Archive of the Undressed. Thinking like the orange, I wonder if the book is about undressing, as in destabilizing yourself, as in leaving the changeroom changed.
Well never mind that last bit, but Playboy is not the point of the book, although Jeanette Lynes in her intro, an essay called "Begin the Slow Peel of Elbow Gloves", makes much of her fascination with vintage Playboys--their founder and style and readers and women (especially those lost) and personal resonance. What we take off, and how, and what we leave on--on our bodies, first and last of all--is what makes up the thematic heart of archive. Formally, this happens via all manner of voice, rhetorical dynamic, fragment, found language, autobio snippet and so on until, in the end, the book itself is the performance we've lived all this time.
Something along these lines is what I'll run by my students tomorrow. They're the ones who have to write the essay.

1 comment:

Jasper Gates said...

Thanks for the tip on the book, Ger. I liked The Factory Voice a lot. Keep on with the acts of punctuation vigilante-ism!