Friday Feelings

I have posted something here every Friday for the past few weeks and it occurs to me that most of it has been a kind of round up of things I’ve written, podcasts, interviews and such. I haven’t been posting much “original content” on this newsletter. I’m not sure if I want to use this space for that—the feeling I have is still something like “but if I publish it here I can’t use it elsewhere” and I hate that feeling, that scarcity economy. But I thought I would ask you, reader (there are about 100 subscribers now!) how you feel about the way this has been going so far.

Friday Feelings

I remember listening to José González for years, specifically his 2007 album Down the Line. What I remember is the insistence of his guitar plucking, a filament pulling at me, the lyric, “don’t let the darkness eat you up,” and the sense that the darkness would always win. I was in graduate school in 2007, early years of it, and I don’t know why, but I have been listening to this album again recently, and I’m thrown back to not just the way his voice makes me crane with a nostalgia for something, somewhere, that I know I have never known, and yet, in his tone, I feel I can discover. What is that?

At any rate, this is to say that I have been feeling Friday feelings. I’ve been trying to write. Trying to finish this chapter I’ve been working on, and instead I get lost in the memory of a place that never really existed, a memory of a possibility never quite realized—being devoured by darkness.

These days, I might be tempted to see how hungry the darkness is. To see what I taste like. To see, after all, if I satisfy the darkness. Or I could just listen to the rest of the album and wax nostalgic, and get back to writing later.

Upcoming

This Saturday, tomorrow, I’ll be in conversation with Dorotea Gómez (Maya K’iche’) about sexual diversity in Abiayala. The conversation is sponsored by the Mayan League and will be in Spanish. There was a deadline to register, but if you want to join us (again, in Spanish), then please let me know (email: joseph.pierce@stonybrook.edu) and I can put you in touch with the event organizers. I’ll be providing a bit of an overview of “sexual diversity” with the requisite caveats and divergences. But as far as I can tell, this is going to be a very well attended and interesting discussion about recovering (or as I would put it, just being) our erotic sovereignties.