People Who Share My Interests

[queerbychoice]

The following is a meme that you should definitely not participate in if you have a lot of LiveJournal friends, because it takes far too long to collect the information, even though the results can be interesting. I speak from experience, having made the mistake of participating.

The meme consists of listing everyone on your friends list who has four or more interests in common with you and what those common interests are. The hope, I believe, is that those of you with many common interests will be delighted to find others who share many of the same common interests.

---

16 interests in common with me:
frankepi (anthropology, civil disobedience, david bowie, don delillo, ethics, first amendment, gore vidal, haruki murakami, human rights, identity, michel foucault, milan kundera, noam chomsky, queer by choice, queer theory, radicalism)

11 interests in common with me:
theobscure (atheism, caryl churchill, david bowie, ethics, human rights, langston hughes, morrissey, peter høeg, queer theory, r.e.m., sylvia plath)

10 interests in common with me:
brighton74 (bisexuality, dictionaries, fiction, free speech, identity, online relationships, queer by choice, queer theory, social constructionism, wanking)
dark_matter (anthropology, atheism, international baccalaureate, james baldwin, kate bornstein, leslie feinberg, pansexuality, queer theory, social constructionism, stephen jay gould)
eve_l_incarnata (arundhati roy, atheism, bell hooks, bisexuality, human rights, langston hughes, noam chomsky, salam pax, sapiosexuality, sherman alexie)
heres_luck (adrienne rich, bell hooks, bisexuality, cats, james baldwin, pomosexuality, queer theory, queerness, salman rushdie, tony kushner)
lentrot (atheism, bisexuality, david bowie, human rights, morrissey, noam chomsky, patti smith, placebo, queer by choice, queer theory)

9 interests in common with me:
chisparoja (bisexuality, bonobos, cyberculture, human rights, john stoltenberg, pansexuality, peace, queer by choice, social constructionism)
wanderingrogue (atheism, bisexuality, cats, david bowie, human rights, peace, placebo, sherman alexie, sylvia plath)

8 interests in common with me:
inkstained (atheism, don delillo, human rights, morrissey, noam chomsky, patti smith, placebo, queer by choice)
lm (anthropology, bisexuality, david bowie, fiction, hermits, pansexuality, queer by choice, queer theory)
moominmuppet (bisexuality, david bowie, gender, kate bornstein, peace, reproductive rights, sapiosexuality, self-love)
sheamues (atheism, bell hooks, bisexuality, cats, gertrude stein, human rights, sewing, sylvia plath)

7 interests in common with me:
deadinmotion (michel foucault, morrissey, pansexuality, pet shop boys, placebo, queer theory, salman rushdie)
izzycat (atheism, bisexuality, gender, genderfuck, queer by choice, sapiosexuality, sylvia plath)
l_diggy (audre lorde, bell hooks, bisexuality, communication, haruki murakami, solitude, sylvia plath)
legolastn (cats, civil disobedience, gender, genderfuck, pansexuality, queer by choice, queer theory)

6 interests in common with me:
monkeydyke (adrienne rich, audre lorde, human rights, peace, reproductive rights, sylvia plath)
priedpeesh (adrienne rich, audre lorde, bell hooks, pansexuality, self-love, solitude)
sammka (cats, david bowie, drag, gender, kate bornstein, pomosexuality)
starstealingirl (banana yoshimoto, disabled rights, drag, kate bornstein, queer theory, sewing)

5 interests in common with me:
djpekky (bisexuality, david bowie, human rights, morrissey, patti smith)
exterra (audre lorde, cats, human rights, queer theory, solitude)
fflo (annie dillard, anthropology, bisexuality, cats, gertrude stein)
fromdistantstar (bisexuality, noam chomsky, not shaving, sewing, unschooling)
heron61 (bisexuality, david bowie, peace, polyfidelity, sapiosexuality)
maybelater (audre lorde, bell hooks, cats, leslie feinberg, queer theory)
melishma (audre lorde, communication, lillian faderman, r.e.m., salman rushdie)
noplacelikehome (atheism, bisexuality, ethics, radicalism, self-sufficiency)
princesswitch (bisexuality, cats, free speech, queer by choice, the boondocks)
purple_umbrella (bisexuality, human rights, not shaving, peace, sylvia plath)
rampling (atheism, bisexuality, cats, human rights, queer by choice)
seifaiden (atheism, cats, drag, gender abolition, placebo)
transientdyke (bell hooks, cats, gender, queer theory, reproductive rights)
v3g4n (bisexuality, ethics, human rights, noam chomsky, pansexuality)
yareach (atheism, bisexuality, cats, human rights, peace)

4 interests in common with me:
allyscully (atheism, john irving, salman rushdie, sapiosexuality)
cherryxriot (bisexuality, david bowie, placebo, sylvia plath)
datagrok (atheism, bisexuality, electronic frontier foundation, free speech)
decklin (bisexuality, david bowie, placebo, the boondocks)
dickon_edwards (emily dickinson, gertrude stein, morrissey, pet shop boys)
enile (arundhati roy, banana yoshimoto, patti smith, sylvia plath)
experimentego (david bowie, fighting sociobiology, genderfuck, queer theory)
insipidity (anthropology, atheism, bisexuality, r.e.m.)
lalenalefay (bisexuality, cats, david bowie, noam chomsky)
language_idling (bisexuality, david bowie, dictionaries, sewing)
misguideme (atheism, bisexuality, cats, independence)
tikisan (atheism, bisexuality, cats, gender)
trysha (cats, queer theory, sewing, solitude)
tumblingecho (cats, mary gaitskill, noam chomsky, peace)
zestifyingagent (atheism, drag, human rights, queer theory)

Comments

[theobscure.livejournal.com]

Yay, I almost won something! :D

[frankepi.livejournal.com]

i just made a couple of changes to my interests list, but i think it actually gave me even more points, so i'm still the winner.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Wow, you have eighteen interests in common with me now. And you know, if you'd just stop rebelliously ignoring the instructions given right above the interests-list box to use the noun form instead of the adjective form of whatever words you're interested in, then you'd list bisexuality and queerness instead of bisexual and queer, and then we'd have twenty interests in common. And that would be so scary that people would start asking us whether we're actually some new form of siamese twins with different bodies that are completely unattached and able to walk around freely yet the same brain somehow.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

And I just stole Amnesty International from you, so now you have even more interests in common with me. Plus I have in the past listed several others of your interests. Incidentally though, what is "poetic terrorism"?

[theobscure.livejournal.com]

It's sort of an idea of aggressive, misceif-making attempt to infect the world with art. I know it mostly from Hakim Bey and temporary autonomous zone:

"Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.

Go naked for a sign.

Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.

Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...

PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.

Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.

Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art."

[erdbeermund.livejournal.com]

I like that the two we have in common are "genderfuck" and "Pet Shop Boys."

I happen to be listening to the Pet Shop Boys this very instant, which is quite a coincidence since I hadn't listened to them in ages until tonight.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Hey, your recent mention of John Updike's Rabbit Redux caused me to go reread Rabbit, Run. So now I have more to say about it. My reactions upon rereading it were:

(a) Wait, I remembered Rabbit as being "middle-aged" and he's a year younger than I now am????
(b) Oh, he's married with kids and unhappy about it - that explains it. Married or parenting people almost always seem older than me, even if they're actually sixteen.
(c) Wow, Rabbit is about ten times even more misogynistic than I remembered. It's painful to even read.
(d) Hey, I could swear that Rabbit is my ex-boyfriend Jeremy! I mean, not really misogyny-wise, but they do have totally identical behavior patterns of repeatedly running away from everyone they know with no explanation the second that they find themselves under even the tiniest stress of any kind. What a shame that reading this book about him in college didn't more adequately prepare me to avoid or cope with ending up in a relationship with him later.
(e) *politely squelches sudden impolite desire to mail book to ex-boyfriend, but hopes that as a fellow English major he's been forced to read it anyway*

And now I have re-finished the book, and can immediately begin re-forgetting it so that when another eight or nine years have passed, I can re-read it again.

[erdbeermund.livejournal.com]

LOL
So I shouldn't bother with it?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I can't exactly decide. I'm actually trying to decide whether I should bother reading Rabbit Redux too, and I can't decide that either. I mean, it's a well-written book, and in general I believe in reading all well-written books, but that Rabbit guy is an awfully annoying person for me to want to keep hearing about.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Look, I have found you a perfect instance of poetic terrorism!

[erdbeermund.livejournal.com]

Is there anything by Updike which you might emphatically recommend

How about Gore Vidal?
I've been sort of reading Myra Breckinridge every now and then when I both have time and am so inclined, but I have sort of been preoccupied lately.
As I mentioned in my journal, I just checked out Live from Golgotha and United States (a large anthology of essays, cleverly titled in my opinion) from the GLBT center at UWM. I've started to read the former and it seems entertaining in a way that is perhaps reminiscent of the sensationalistiic style of a young writer.
That said, is there anything by Vidal you would strongly recommend?
Do you have any opinions of his work in general you might share with me?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Rabbit, Run is the only thing by Updike I've ever read.

But I love Gore Vidal and have read lots by him. I love both Myra Brckinridge and Live from Golgotha. I haven't read United States. I would also highly recommend his nonfiction books Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (about September 11th and Timothy McVeigh, an interestingly intertwined discussion of the two kinds of terrorism - foreign terrorism from bin Laden and domestic terrorism from McVeigh) and Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (his essays on sexuality, with particular emphasis upon his often-repeated assertion that there's no such thing as heterosexual or homosexual people, only heterosexual or homosexual acts). Fiction-wise, I highly recommend Vidal's novels Julian and The City and the Pillar, but I'd recommend Myra Breckinridge and Live from Golgotha equally highly.

Vidal's novels are mostly divided into two categories - novels about real historical figures, and novels about fictional characters. Personally, I usually prefer the ones about fictional characters, but I think that actually says more about my own tastes than about Vidal's talents, and anyway there are exceptions (Julian is about a historical figure, a Roman Emperor, but I loved that one) and I've never disliked any Vidal book.

In his nonfiction, I find that Vidal has a marvelously consistent tone of careful clearsightedness, laying out exactly what he thinks and why and consistently standing by the same statements from one essay to the next, even when forty years passed between the times that he wrote each of them. This is especially clear when reading Sexually Speaking because the essays in that book are from such a broad time period. He also has a certain tone of supercilious contempt for people who buy into the incoherencies of more popular ideas than his own, and frankly, I take rather more delight in his superciliousness than is probably quite nice of me.

Perhaps the best thing about him is that he isn't afraid to find himself in considerable sympathy with people whom it would actually be far easier to just view as being 100% enemies. Timothy McVeigh, for example, was both a mass-murderer and a right-wing extremist of the kind who really, really don't agree with Gore Vidal on very much at all. In spite of this, Gore Vidal spent time corresponding with Timothy McVeigh while McVeigh was in jail awaiing execution, and Vidal took the time to write a book on "how we got to be so hated" by McVeigh as well as by bin Laden, acknowledging that McVeigh actually did have reasons for his hatred, and proposing better ways of not provoking people like him to such wrath.

[erdbeermund.livejournal.com]

A professor of mine once discussed one of his novels in a class, that I didn't catch the name of. It was about the Cold War from a Russian point of view.
Does that ring any bells?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Hmm, he's written plenty about the Cold War, including his seven-part "American Empire" novel series. But the novels I've read from that were set in America, so I don't know of anything he's written that is from a Russian point of view - unless the professor meant merely that his novels present the point of view of Americans who don't always think very highly of their own government's actions, though they're not exactly on the side of the Russian government either.

[erdbeermund.livejournal.com]

hmm, no, she definitely said it took place in Russia.
It was about how from the Russian perspective America was the aggressor after WWII.
The course was about the history of the DDR (ie, East Germany) and she mentioned it because I said that I was surprised by how many of the actions of the West seemed hostile, whereas the East repeatedly tried to make peace. Whether the East was sincere in its efforts is, of course (I guess), open to debate. I mean the West wouldn't even acknowledge that the DDR was there. I guess in it's entire history, no West German president ever acknowledged the existence of the DDR nor accepted any communications from the East German president.

[ex-fractals713.livejournal.com]

MWahaha I copied one of your interests! Did you notice?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I did. I was glad. :-)

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Hey, is poetic terrorism one of those things where, as soon as you're introduced to the concept, you suddenly encounter it everywhere? Because this is yet another perfect instance.