chavisory's post-it notes

-The Song of the Lark, Part 1, ch. 3

That is quite a combination of words, and yet I am fairly sure that Cather didn't mean to imply that Tillie is queer in any modern sense of the word?

And yet the publication of this (1915) was not that long before those words were well on their way to acquiring their current connotations at least among the gay community of NYC. According to the first chapter, this story begins "twenty-five years ago."

So I'm fairly comfortable in saying that, in 1890's Colorado, the words would not widely have been understood as having that connotation?

"In terms of the present study, however, what really matters is that 'queer' is a name Willa Cather called herself, and she did so in the only documents we have that speak directly to her sexual self-identification, the letters of the 1890s that are either to or about her college crush, Louise Pound. Beyond these private, terrified acts of self-naming and -unnaming, the word 'queer' resonates throughout Cather's fiction with the snap, crackle, and pop of acute anxiety and ideological work. It becomes, like the indolent, receptive Thea in Panther Canyon, "a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas."

-Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America

Yes the fuck it is, stop being a baby

Yes pride is a riot and a fight and yadda yadda yadda but you are not revolutionary for sucking the joy out of queerness. Sometimes, pride is a party. It is a celebration of the fact that we are here, we're queer, and we're not going anywhere. And that is just as important as throwing bricks and fighting cops, actually.

When youre like 90 pounds of hunting dog mixed with livestock guardian dog but you can be bullied by a small cloud

-We arrive this morning to find one of the pianos basically disassembled on stage, by a new piano tech who apparently didn't get the performance schedule for the day, or assumed since it is summer that there was none.

-"Can I use this outlet to plug in a steamer?"

"Sure!"

...only to look over and see these two trying to use an iron as a steamer on a freestanding vertical projection screen.