#Los Angeles literature

[theaskew]

Lithium for Medea, a novel by Kate Braverman, 1979. [New York : Harper & Row]

[that-butch-archivist]

"Tess was a performance artist and part-time jewelry maker who now worked as a set designer. [...] The first night we spent together, I taught her to knit — my classic seduction technique (High Femme Camp Antics, or HFCA) — and about frisson, that carbonated feeling that accompanies a crush. We stared at each other for a long time, unblinking. Because I knew that this otherwise might take forever (lesbians!), I finally asked Tess point-blank if she felt a frisson for me (HFCA). In response, Tess kissed me hard, with teeth. I knew she wanted to fuck, but I pushed her hands away dramatically when they crept under my skirt (HFCA). I told her that I didn’t typically sleep with people so soon (HFCA), which was true not for any real reason but because I was privately humiliated by my body (HFCA). Instead of letting her fuck me, I scratched Tess’s entire torso with my long, pink fingernails (HFCA). “Her fingernails drifted down my neck, across my shoulders,” Jess Goldberg, the butch narrator of Stone Butch Blues, says of a high femme whose camp antics thrill her. “I’d forgotten the sheer pleasure of a high femme tease.” “Your fingernails are full of frisson,” Tess said as morning light began to stream in through the window above her bed. “I know,” I said. I recently read a collection of funny stories by Lesléa Newman, high-femme chronicler of dyke life in the 1990s (the materialistic, shopping-addicted Golden Age of HFCA). In one story, a butch named Flash arrives to pick Lesléa up and take her out to dinner. Flash politely tells Lesléa that she looks nice. “The average femme would have taken that to be a compliment,” Lesléa dishes. “But this high-maintenance femme hadn’t spent the last two weeks shopping for the perfect outfit and the last seven hours bathing, shaving, bleaching, filing, polishing, combing, brushing, drying, moussing, spritzing, spraying, and applying five pounds of makeup to have all her efforts summed up in one little four-letter word.” Flash’s flimsy compliment doesn’t satisfy Lesléa’s desires to be seen, appreciated, and worshiped, and so Lesléa starts from the bottom and works her way up, prompting Flash to compliment her shoes, her miniskirt, and finally her hair in a grand, shimmering pyramid of HFCA. But even as she performs satiation, Lesléa is insatiable. Her antics fail at getting her precisely what she wants from Flash, because there’s always something unsatisfying about getting what you want by asking for it. Lesléa’s desire glows from within the frame of her HFCA, distilled and exposed and unmet. Can I Come Inside, my high-femme sex game, deals primarily with unmet, outsourced, and circumnavigated desire. In Females (2019), trans lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu argues that femaleness is a universal, existential condition rather than a gender or a sex — a condition of being and of consciousness that involves letting others do our desiring for us. At stake in Can I Come Inside, as well as in HFCA at large, is a femaleness that both craves and rebels against its tendency to outsource desire. In playing Can I Come Inside, I, like Lesléa, ask Tess to do my desiring for me, and Tess in turn defers her desire to me: the game is strictly my desire, one that she insists she does not share. Even though it mandates a performance of aggressive desire from Tess, there’s no doubt that Can I Come Inside is about my desire; it’s my game; I make the rules."

-- An excerpt from "High Femme Camp Antics," an essay written by Jenny Fran Davis. (Emphasis in bold my own.)

[blastofsports]

Magic Johnson 💫🪄

[riannosaurus]

📍reading on a bus, Los Angeles, California

[yourfavsaggitarius]

[bypreciousugo]

@the.creativecomeup.pod

Listen to the first episode of The Creative Come-Up with Precious Ugo.

[girlbl0ggerxd]

a poem I wrote about a past love

#poetry #poem #joandidion #evebabitz #franzkafka #dostoevsky #literature #darkacademia #losangeles #losangeleswriter

[tilbageidanmark]

"I had one cultural advantage. I owned a 1955 Ford Fairlane, which I had bought for $100. Gas was twenty cents a gallon. Jim and I drove all over Southern California, which is admittedly something teenage boys don’t mind doing, to attend free concerts and performances. It was the age of high print-culture, each Sunday the Los Angeles Times listed every forthcoming concert in Southern California. Any concert within a hundred-mile radius was fair game..."

One of the walls of opera recordings in my brother’s home, from Cruising for Classical Music in LA

[love-margaret]

The Last Bookstore in downtown LA 🤍 found so many classics here that I have been looking for!

Love, Margaret ♡

[johnny69150]

Alexandra Daddario ❤️

[theaskew]

Elsewhere, California, a novel by Dana Johnson, 2012 [Counterpoint Press]

[loneberry]

Here’s my interview with Christopher Soto on AI + labor in the LA Times!!

[blastofsports]

Magic Johnson

[escapismsworld]

Boots, 1900-10. France. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

[boybasher]