[FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

[jon zingale]

At times, I miss living near Reed. Sometime in my twenties, my friends
Ralf and Allison and I rented a car and drove to Columbus Ohio where we
heard that John Griggs Thompson was to speak. None of us felt like
springing for a hotel room and decided instead to drink coffee and eat
donuts at Buckeye Donuts until the lecture the next morning. The donut
shop was cramped and teeming with students and Columbus's homeless.
The three of us sat in the window and watched the falling snow. Allision
and I were learning to tie Celtic knots and Ralf sat coloring and writing
poetry on index cards.

A few feet away from us, a budding engineering student attempted to spit
game with another student. The former, male and typical, tried his best
to impress the young woman with the status and money that he would one
day have as a working engineer. We watched the young woman roll her eyes,
cooly flirt, and troll the oblivious boy with anti-rationalist rhetoric.
At some point she excused herself, she would need to attend a class the
next morning. As she squeezed by us, between the swiveling diner
stools, Ralf caught her arm, looked into her eyes, and said, "Would
you care to hear a poem about compost tea"?

That night, the three of us were invited back to this young woman's
house. Her absent parents were both ceramicists and it showed. Every
possible spandrel was decorated with cup handles, clay faces, and other
abstract forms. The next morning we drank coffee in her kitchen and read
the sad news that John Griggs Thompson's lecture would be canceled due
to his poor health.

The whole affair struck me as being a sort of anti-Aesopian fable.

One where, if I needed a moral it would be
that one can get more honey with a poem,
one involving compost tea.

or alternatively, that youth is a donut to be eaten on the spot.



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