lazz |>>>>

on a full salary from a university i can't afford rent in any city without it eating over half my income

tenured professors are being fired because entire programs, departments, and eventually fields are being eliminated

i want to say i'll never forget but if i don't write this now i will forget all the necessary texture.

this morning i met alice echols (daring to be bad) for coffee at alcove in los feliz. she lives down the street in a house she and her partner can no longer afford, even on two USC salaries. she says she wouldn't stay in los angeles because she's simply priced out. maybe new mexico? who can afford LA or new york, we asked; i told her i gave up my house in tucson, built a camper in my crosstrek, and have been living all over the US since to stave off rent and ennui. she praised it. in truth it's the only thing that's got me writing again. but what prompted me to share that was her explanation that prior to 2003 she was living entirely on temporary teaching contracts. the alice echols, prolific writer and game changer, wrote these canonical texts from amid economic precarity not out of a tenured position. i should have asked her what drove her to do it but i didn't.

i did find out what motivated her current project though: frustration with the zeitgeist as expressed through students that interracial solidarity is both impossible and unwanted. she didn't put it like that but she did say that the project is a close look at how black and white groups during the 1960s actually did work together and what it was like. the directive to go 'organize your own' had complicated and unfortunate ramifications, but we both agreed it didn't have to pan out the way it has today--ultimately in a reification of racial antipathy/segregation.

we also agreed that there's a surplus to 1960s movements' usefulness to capital. while women's liberation and sixties focus on the body/self (i.e. autonomy) has been incorporated into capital's infrastructure there's always something in excess of and antagonistic to it. whatever that remainder is can be useful in pushing back against it.

we talked about the irony that my teaching job is entirely online while my intellectual pursuits center physical togetherness. the lack of shared physicality is financing the presence of it elsewhere.

"so what's going on with the CR [consciousness raising] stuff?" i told her i've been sitting on the dissertation since defending in 2022. i got a job immediately after and have been triaging my life since then, not to mention wrestling with futility in a country that doesn't read or write. when she asked, and i answered, who i've been working with the most on second wave, her jaw dropped. kathie s*rachild, who refused to give me an interview and thought my dad was the fed? how did you pull this off? the immensity of recognition in this moment was unparalleled. KS wouldn't give her an interview for daring to be bad so i'm pretty sure she had to use sara evans'. she couldn't get over the fact that somehow i'd managed to break through, and we both knew that this was important in itself for how it could advance knowledge about this period. "i love your reaction to this, it's so affirming," i said, to which she replied "yeah because no one will know what this means but i do." she said something about how oral history is very hard work but this situation is all the more difficult.

the remainder of the conversation orbited around my diss' table of contents. i pulled the MS out of my bag to show her how gay one of these second wavers looks. in a photo of a cr group all sitting on the grass, onlookers would have no way of knowing that two of them were romantic partners especially in a revolutionary group that tended to be mostly straight. she asked me about the marx/freud/cr chapter and i told her she's the only one who's ever talked about the pro-woman line in terms of its marxist connotations. does a change in consciousness - as basis for social movement - constitute idealism? how does it not? she loved this chapter and urged me to write the book with the two additional chapters i said i'd tack on.

"you should—well, i shouldn't tell you what to do" and i said no you should. you should move forward with the second wave portion and you can make a nod to the marxist theory of attention elsewhere. "ok i'm going to do it because alice echols told me to." i guess i needed her, specifically, to tell me it's worth breaking the diss in half to focus just on 1960s CR.

leading up to my arrival in Los Angeles, chris emailed. "eileen just wrote & asked if she could stay at my place october 17 - 20 or so — are you fine with that? eileen could stay in the guest room, i told them you would be there & they’re happy about that. see you soon, x c"

weeks later when they arrived, Eileen rolled their suitcase on the concrete walkway up to the house and over the wood floors, yapping like a disgruntled new yorker about broken luggage and transportation. i let them get settled and made no assumptions about what our time would be like sharing the same house. we'd met in marfa a year before, when among other things, we sat in their living room and i read Tosquelles aloud — the passage i'd been trying out as a CR question in other settings, about being crazy enough for someone to love you. are you crazy enough for someone to fall in love with you? "well i'm in love with you aren't i?" robert confessed publicly. it was and still is, while i write this, a sneak peak of the book semiotexte will publish whenever the catalan translation is ready. robert was still in the process of translating it from the french.

so a rapport already existed between us, though nestled in a comfortable uncertainty. once they set up in the office, we started talking in chris' foyer; i sat on the wood steps as the smell of skunk wafted from a room where chris' dog had a run in a couple weeks back, and eileen stood before me. the longer we talked, having begun in a noncommittal limbo, the stranger it became for us to remain there. "do you wanna go sit down?" they asked. so we moved to chris' living room where we talked about everything from exes whose transitions they'd inspired, to each of our decisions not to be on testosterone, to evening plans.

the next morning i woke up before they did and walked upstairs to the kitchen. i made coffee and set up in the living room with chris' newest the four spent the day together. the novel opens with descriptions of her upbringing, which gives an overall feel of domestic mothball suffocation. it's the fifties: her mother collects coupons for grand prizes like toasters while relegated to childrearing in a dreary suburb of Connecticut. it gives texture to friedan's feminine mystique in a way i know my students could benefit from. and it's even more interesting to see how chris' groundbreaking work resulted from that stultification, in a dialectic sense. from my vantage point in the living room, peeking over the top of the book, i could see her mustard yellow pyrex containers arranged in descending size on the kitchen shelf. the matching ceramic dinnerware sets that must have belonged to her mother.

eileen eventually wakes up and walks into the kitchen. the kettle hisses against a backdrop of blissful morning silence. they sit down at the kitchen table with a notebook and i can hear the scrawling of their handwriting against the page, wondering if it'll end up on instagram like the other notes do. we stay this way for a long time: in complete silence and shared caffeination, non-negotiated beforehand. me reading in the room next to them, no one talking. we spent the mornings like that, only talking once we we'd woken up enough. i drove them to their brunch and when they were getting out of the car they said "this is really nice." i feel the same way, i said with a totally regulated smile.

later that night we met up with people at grand central market, where we ate papusas and covered international relocation plans, angelinos living under the threat of deportation, and whether the field of gender and women's studies is a failed project. afterward we walked to redcat to see San Cha's opera Inebria Me. eileen stood outside with me in the wait line until the very end, even though they'd been recognized and given a ticket by the director. we settled into the dark envelope of the theater in plush chairs. "i feel really hapy to be in here," they said, and i noted the lovely way they have of marking contentment when it comes over them. the opera unfolded: a simplistic way of describing the plot is a coming out story, but it was also a tale of resurrection. a woman marries a man and as the dust settles she discovers it's no different than a dead end, a quagmire she'd die unsatisfied in. san cha sings in an enormous white wedding dress, both of her arms chained to fixed points on the stage. things change when an angel appears: a voluptuous, headdress-wearing nonbinary figure with tits out -- salvation, belonging, surplus -- which is consummated when san cha approaches her and sucks on her breast. "i've never seen anything like it," eileen said to me in the theater. how lucky i was to get these live editorializings? to be the recipient of contentments and superlatives from a weathered dyke who paved the way for this kind of opera's existence, for a this livable present for queer freaks.

when it was time to stop being roommates there was just: "welp" from eileen, and laughter by both of us. now separated, we texted about how our dates were going (one in a lesbian gray is it a date zone, the other canceled due to time). they sent me an excerpt of their novel in progress which shockingly they're worried won't find a home. people always think cultural capital equates to financial status or even the status of guaranteed significance, but it doesn't.

i'll never forget lifting weights with one of the greatest lesbian poets to ever live. sexual tension less directed toward each other than as a dyad facing outward.

agreeing they curtail freedom he says

"but some people like that"

and i said "yes, maybe we all like to feel bound and that's just one way of doing it"

he says "yes, so i'm feeling quite unbound here."

tucson loneliness

he says something judgy about such-and-such's book and we share a laugh

"i try to speak about things honestly"

"yes you do" laughing. "i remember when we were first becoming friends and you got mad at me when i said that i liked your negative quality. you thought i meant you weren't positive enough, but i meant negative like negation." he laughed and says yes that's more clear now.

it's at least one reason why we love each other