Alfonso Tupelo in a Cardboard Box

Hello. I am in a box. I'm going to use this, you know, as a metaphor. The real and the metaphorical box I'm trapped in and you're trapped in and your parents and your aunts and your uncles and your friends and the people who don't like you or those people also who don't even know you - we are all in boxes trapped. Immobilized. Ensnared. Whatever.

Are you picking up what I'm putting down?

What is this box, you're asking yourself. What is it this gorgeous cat is going on and on about? Oh, you're thinking, how I love to read his words, but still I'm perplexed! What oh what could the box be? To quote a ridiculous serial killer movie: "What's in the box?!" Although, and I'm certain, reader, you'll agree, I'm far far far lovelier than the capable Brad Pitt.

Is he even capable? I'm sure we all know I'd be a much better actor. Just envisioning how I'd act out that selfsame scene brings tears to my eyes.

But I digress!

The box is whatever preconceived notions are at present boxing you into a small space. A space smaller than someone of your girth should occupy. I know I could lounge in entire galaxies, but that's just me, and I'm not, dear reader, trying to say I'm fat. I know what I am; incredibly, wonderfully, perfectly voluptuous.

And anyway, I enjoy luxuriating. If  I'd been born a human I'd have 785,432 votive candles for each and every sumptuous bath. Incense and rich, dark chocolate, yoga classes and deep tissue massages.

Alas. It's rather more than difficult to convince anyone around here that I deserve and need a certain level of, let's call it, pampering.

Today my box, my metaphorical one, not the real one - the real box was a box full of pickles - today my box is the idea that the wonderful novel The Marriage Plot by Eugenides should never have ended. I'm serious. Please, Mr. Eugenides, serialize this novel. Graphic novelize it. Um, print it on the backs of cereal boxes, I don't know! But please, sir, don't let it end.

I've just, you know, finished it... And I'm having difficulty rousing myself from a deep depression at its end. Not the ending itself, mind you, which is actually quite nice, but at the fact that I've finished it, ended it, and also? I believe there is room, Mr. Eugenides, for Madeleine to please please please discuss Wuthering Heights in depth. Right?

I mean, in a novel that revolves around a budding Victorian scholar, surely a sentence or two for my beloved Heathcliff?

But, gah, it's not to be, is it? And this is where I am.

If I could just accept it's over, I might feel better. Just like how if you accepted it's over, whatever it is for you, you might feel better. Or, I don't know, maybe your box is something that's beginning and you won't allow yourself to see it. Be patient. You maybe think of this thing like looking straight into the sun. But, reader, look anyway - it cannot blind you.

Rub your eyes clear and gaze around you. The thing about boxes is that they are made of cardboard and easily transformed into something else. A diorama, for example, of Mitchell volunteering for the Home for Dying Destitutes, or of Leonard in the casino, or of my Heathcliff and Catherine embracing; a diorama of you and me, reader, jumping from our boxes and shredding them (a meta-diorama?); of me being massaged, sipping cool tuna water.

We're so easily convinced by people around us of what is right and wrong. I think we need to spend more time looking at what these people tell us and questioning it. We need to read more and think more. Be outside more.

Love more.

Luco & Gender Performance & the Dog

The dog brought up a relevant point in his last blog. A point I am unsure he actually meant to make, but make it he did, and so I am compelled to comment.

Perhaps you are familiar with Judith Butler. If you are not, I would advise you become so. She is one of those rare philosophers who captivates me; I must admit, reader, that most philosophers rather bore me and often even offend me, but not Butler. The work she has done with the concept of gender and on gender as performance have been, for me, life altering.

They have been life altering because of the awareness she breathed into me. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity she writes: "As much as drag creates a unified picture of "woman" (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself - as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary" (Butler 175).

Butler states here elegantly what the dog, in his vast inelegance, got at with his "Dog in a Dress" entry. If gender is a thing which can be imitated, then it is itself a construct (albeit a construct we grip with locked fists and eyes streaming with tears for the "sanctity" of nature and/or of God). That the dog somehow came to this conclusion on his own, in a ridiculous dress no less, is a matter I find just a little depressing.

Or very depressing. Let us not pretend you do not know me, reader. Let us not cower behind convenient fictions. Oh, would I were a cat who could crow at the dog's accomplishment, but my heart recoils that he, with his bean brain, has come to this idea on his own. Without Butler.

Without any books at all.

Without even deeply considering the consequences and implications of his own, pure joy.

He is like a kitten (or rather like a puppy I suppose - I detest those creatures so!) who stumbles into a ball of yarn and mewls string theory at the ceiling fan. Sigh.

It is just that I work at this, reader. Do you identify with me? I work and I study and I research and I log onto the computer, read his blog, and the dog has come up with something akin to brilliance (I do not actually believe him capable of brilliance. This is deepest chagrin guiding my words).

Perhaps instead of reading tonight I will lie as he does on the couch and stare into space. Perhaps then I will be able to come up with something worthwhile to write about.

But I very much doubt that.