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Grad School Year 1

Gabriel Bruno Eng Gonzalez

• 12 min read
Grad School Year 1

Dear Reader,

I haven't written anything on here since October, whoopsies.

I think I got a wee bit overwhelmed with everything and forgot why I started this in the first place: to keep you, reader, informed of my doings and going ons, to document and archive those doings, and to take this all a little less seriously to hold things a little less preciously by sharing, sharing sharing! Being back in the belly of the academic beast is. . . well it's ridiculous! But despite that, I do have some writing, some dancing, some thinking I wanted to share with you.

xoxo

Some life updates: I am a Dance Church Teacher now! I applied with this video which makes me laugh, i think myself so funny: link

I have started work with the second iteration of the HRI's Mellon Foundation funded Interseminars Cohort ("The newly selected project, titled “Improvise and Intervene,” challenges scholars to reimagine how scholarly theory and methods are taught and practiced, expanding the possibilities for innovation in interdisciplinary, collaborative research design." link) I love how impressive that all sounds but what I love More is that for the application I wrote in depth about creating that Charli XCX video where I wore a leather harness and lip synched in my bedroom in December 2020 of US Covid lockdown (right before Taiwan).

Image 1 Image 2 Image 3 Image 4 Image 5

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images from the mentioned Charli XCX video... (I had Chat GPT code this image layout ...wtf!)

"hi i need some html code for a way to include 5 images in a scattered, layered, format on my blog page."
"how do i include a file path here or upload the image so i have a URL i can use?"
"can you add to that code so they are much smaller and uniform shape, how about iphone sized, and a little opaque."
"The writing is so individualistic and offers no allegiance to any hegemonic rule of the craft ... You’re working from an internal motor that’s so central to you and it is complex and coming into being in tandem with what you seem to refer to as, and that I hope is, a period of healing. This kind of multivalent, complex thinking and making takes time to find its fullness.  So, breathe and take your time!"

which is like So Slay!! anyways; here. i didn't change anything since submitting, i think if i read it too much i won't want to share it:

May 10th 2023, two days past the deadline, Urbana Illinois

Dear Reader,

I am writing this assignment to answer a prompt and get a grade. But before that, and above that, I am writing to understand what the hell is going on.

The work I create uses the computer screen as a stage and uses movement to connect with the real histories that have shaped my own body and the bodies of dancers I work with. Through this paper, I will be aligning my thoughts with those of contemporary authors I have been engaging with as a reader and dream of one day engaging with as a collaborator. The writing will follow the choices I make to frame and deliver personal histories to audience and the personality and voice I have developed in order to separate life from performance. This is not an explanation or a defense of any of my current work, nor is it a grant proposal or personal statement. This is an extension of the work. This is a preparation for a thesis.

There are artworks that have allowed me to feel as if what I am experiencing now can be true; because it has been true before. Art about sexuality post-abuse, about memory at 23 and 24, art about being in a pandemic, art about digital cruising, and secrecy, and family. Garth Greenwell writes about how he realized his otherness through his first moments of disgusting people. How he disgusted his father and his peers, and how he experienced it again in his lovers, how he also maybe…sought it out.

“I don’t know why I cringed at her stories, when I had done so much worse at her age, having sex in parks and bathrooms, dangerous and indiscriminate sex; but I was troubled that her history seemed to parallel my own, that we shared what I had thought of as my own gnawing affliction. And I knew she would outgrow the satisfactions she had found, that soon she would desire other and more intense experiences, drawn forward by those appetites we share, that humiliating need that has always, even in my moments of apparent pride, run alongside my life like a snapping dog” (What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell 67).

Alexander Chee writes about memory and how his primary memories around realizing his sexuality are equally tied to painful memories of abuse. The way his desire was twisted against him; because of his secretive difference he chose and attempted to withhold, he was the perfect target for his abuser to take advantage of. The ways his abuser made him feel as though it was him who was at fault for his perversion of masculinity and sex and how this was not unlike the strategy of his bullies. His first lessons in desire and trust were equally his first lessons in being unlovable. I have found solace in this quote from Chee’s final chapter in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel which I use to create my own passages and endings and writings.

“In the months after the memory returned, I continued with my life as best I could. But my recovered memory, for me, was like receiving a telegram one morning and finding inside the answer to twenty-five years’ worth of mistakes, twenty-five years of confusion and pain, and watching as around me the day turned black as night. There was a story I needed to understand, the one I had tried to avoid, and it was all I wanted to listen to, and everything else I had to do was in the way”(How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee 237-238)

I also think of Brontez Purnell’s ability to boldly claim his slutty behavior in his writing, in his art. He creates pockets for manifesto and memoir and truth, he holds a microscope up to being Black and gay and leaves no room for the shame people want him to feel. His language is gritty and sexual and honest and it turns a lot of people off. And maybe that is partly why I am so interested in echoing his style, but mostly it is because he writes manifestos such as this:

“MANIFESTO: NO NEW BOYFRIENDS
ME AND ALL THE REST OF THE BOYS on the block had adopted a very trash-and-burn style with sex: no guilt, no morals, no new boyfriends. It was the rule. Every once in a while some random two would pair up and monogamy about it. The rest of us talked shit: “Not cool, not anarchist - hoarding all that dick like that. Sexual cap!” (We said shit like this.)” (100 Boyfriends, Brontez Purnell 192)

It’s self-aware writing and personal and smart and I want to imitate it until I’m producing work that is original. Saam Niami writes about Brontez’s work in Vulture saying, “It fluctuates between first person and third person, the present and the past, prose and poetry, and reads like a series of 4 a.m. text messages received from a very smart and very messy friend — when there’s no way you can wait till morning to respond, “What the fuck? Are you OK? Did you at least have fun?””(Brontez Purnell and the Ghosts of Exes Past, Saam Niami) — which is so how i want someone to write about me one day.

At this moment, I find myself ready to face the memories that have been coming up — as I return to dancing, and I am trying to write about it, and perform about it, and it’s A LOT. And in doing so, in so doing A LOT, I remember this New Yorker article by Parul Sehgal that makes bold claims against “trauma plots” in writing. Sehgal pointedly quotes authors and thinkers and television shows in order to make the claim that, “The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority.” (Parul Sehgal) Which I don’t disagree with, and yet, I’m so drawn to writing about it. But why? Well, one of these authors Sehgal quotes is Larissa Pham and her essay collection Pop Song and it gave me some clarity. In order to explain where modern day trauma writing is at, Larissa says,

“The dominant mode by which a young, hungry writer could enter the conversation [is] by deciding which of her traumas she [can] monetize . . . be it anorexia, depression, casual racism, or perhaps a sadness like mine, which blended all three” (Pop Songs, Larissa Pham).

So here I am, writing and dancing and making movies about trauma in order to get a grade, in order to get an MFA, in order to be that young hungry writer desperate to enter the conversation…

I’m in my second semester of grad school at University of Illinois, when Raquel Gutierrez tells us, the room full of brown queers, to write about Intimacy/Lovers/The Dead and how they overlap, how they diffuse into each other, how they become — borderless.

The workshop is in a glass enclosed classroom across the hall from the architecture library, anyone could walk by and see us gathered, and I can let this thought go as she glances over my shoulder at my paper. She then turns to the room and asks us one last time to share what we’ve written. “Some of you have a lot of writing…” I do not find the courage to speak.

But I find the courage to remember the feeling of keeping intimacy secret, and I think to myself “that is enough for today.”

And I wrote:

I remember the weight and the fear I had of sex becoming something only ever to be wielded against me, against my body.

Denying me, contorting me, erasing me.

I spent so many little league games negotiating questions of love and belonging and dating from families of children I didn't know. They weren’t my little league games so I would leave and walk through the park as my brother added trophy after trophy of American Masculinity to the bookshelf which butted up against our shared wall. During my walks, I scouted out spots that I could later park in, ones that were obstructed from multiple angles.

And in these spots, I learned how to take A— into my mouth. We learned to tell our families we had joined a summer running club that met from 6 to 8 am. We learned to work quickly before the car got so hot that we’d have to leave a door open. We learned that no one used those baseball fields that early and to find somewhere new if ever there was another car in the lot.

I don’t know if anyone i’ve fucked is dead now, although I imagine it’s not impossible. Maybe Rocket, the air force pilot, was shot down. I haven’t heard from the email he gave me in years. I wonder if he’s still in Iraq, if his wife found out, if his kids know who he is. I forget his real name. Maybe that British man with no hair, and a fridge full of beer, and a slug of a tongue, is dead. I’ve wished he was dead before.

I wished J— was dead before. And E—, and that man, who when I was 19, invited me to that gaudy rice queen bar in Chicago. I didn't wish he was dead upon invitation, the wish only came after speaking with V—, a fellow Chicago gaysian, who told me he had hooked up with the same man and that he tried to have them watch violent Asian fetish porn together so he could keep his dick hard, that was when I wished he was dead.

I never wished O— to be dead, nor R—, or S— but they will die one day, maybe not soon. Some people live to be 100 & 50 is still young.

But still, some don’t.

M— only lived to be a quarter of 100.

When I imagine visiting the gravesite in Louisville I first think of how I'll have to find the address by scrolling through the group chat and clicking on the Zoom funeral link. The one I attended while quarantined in my bedroom, feverish, camera off.

There was a woman who wasn’t muted and kept interrupting the priest to tell her kid to stop bothering her to enter her ipad password for microtransactions. “Let me finish this thing.”

“Maybe they were a mistake, my years in this country, maybe the illness I had caught was just a confirmation of it. What had I done but extend my rootlessness, the series of false starts that became more difficult to defend as I got older? I think I hoped I would feel new in a new country, but I wasn’t new here, and if there was comfort in the ideas that my habitual unease had a cause, that if I was ill-fitted to the place there was good reason, it was a false comfort, a way of running away from real remedy” (What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell 145)

Same, Garth.

I had grandiose visions of what this paper could be, I imagined an accompanying video performance which builds off of Xandra Ibarras y Estrellx Supernovas works that I have written about previously this year. I wanted to use the dorm room that I have been living in as a setting and as a material and capture the route from there to my new house as a moment of break and a critical shift in this

3 year durational performance as a grad student.

But I didn't do any of that.

I wanted to write more in the style of the Deborah Hay response, I wanted to distill and corral and harness the writing into its punchiest, hardest hitting version, But I don’t have the time.

Not in Grad school, well not in the first year.

And so, instead, I’ve focused on how I’m going to talk to my father, how I’m going to do better next semester, next year, how I can confront this feeling that I need to continually reinvent myself by going to a new school, a new continent, a new medium, that it is in fact possible at all to reinvent myself without confronting first, myself.

“Do you know this phrase, the therapist with the nice voice asked me after a number of sessions, “In repetition is forgetting”?
I don't, I said.
It’s Freud, he said. It refers to the Freudian repetition cycle. We repeat something so that we can forget the pain of it. We set out to get it right instead, to fix what went wrong. But we can never fix the past, he said. We then only repeat it”
(How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee 242).

Am I too young to fully grasp the feeling of lifelong repetition, no — the exhausting performance for me is the racialized queerness I have become masterful at navigating. I am not too young, I was too young, I was a child, and I am in pursuit of undoing my own ability at endurance. The endurance Chee refers to as the thing he mistakenly took for strength. Is it strength to withhold one's truth? It is, but it is not one I wish to exercise any longer.

And so, reader, I go into the summer between year one and two ready to bear it all, ready to write and perform and speak. And ready to meet my father in Ohio next weekend.

There is a nakedness I want to create from, a nakedness that is slow to build and lets my audience understand the surreal world I have constructed in order to deal with the pain I include in my works. I am interested in abstraction but I am not interested in erasure. My work takes a stance and it leaves some perspectives on the perimeter, but in doing so, it invites others into the fold, into the world. I want my work to say,

if you’re ready to believe this is real, it is here for you to deal with. You’re not alone, you’re not crazy,

but you might be gay.