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Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through
W. G. Sebald meets Maggie Nelson in an autobiographical narrative of embodiment, visual art, history, and loss.
How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonz�les-Torres's artworks--piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles--as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality.
From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.
How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonz�les-Torres's artworks--piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles--as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality.
From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.
163 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 4, 2019
133 people are currently reading
5535 people want to read
About the author
T. Fleischmann
4 books86 followersT Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty and the curator of Body Forms: Queerness and the Essay. A nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and contributing editor at Essay Daily, they have published critical and creative work in journals such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, and others, as well as in the anthologies Bending Genre, How We Speak to One Another, Little Boxes, and Feminisms in Motion.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 201 reviews
September 17, 2022
Not too interesting.
Not too good writing.
Not too medically informed.
Not too healthy a relationship with oneself portrayed.
The main protagonist is seriously at odds with their body, looks, sex, life, people... many things. I don't think their main issue was their sex or whatever. This protagonist came across as abused, taken advantage of, misunderstood person who suffered way too much and not just from gender dysphoria but from general lack of self-sympathy, which is an entirely too painful thing to happen to anyone. People who are genuinely in love with themselves would be totally ready to forgive themselves minor physical idiosyncrasies such as the make up of the body structure, complexion or the set of privates. A good psychologist would have come a long way to help.
The use of the word 'slutty' I found particularly not healthy:
Q:
In my early twenties the acne quieted on my body, and my face calmed down slowly, and then I became actually slutty. Just like how I had started wearing makeup when the acne came fully on, exactly as the acne began clearing is when I started slutting my way to the top of the slut class, this new me confident enough to put on a black slip and head to the Eagle. No surprise, then, that it was not until I started to take testosterone blockers that the acne actually stopped—although the hormones would also come, eventually, to mean good-bye to the hookup culture of anonymous gay men, to the bears and twinks of my youth. It had been testosterone, of course, that had been the problem all along. The doctors had tried all sorts of things, keeping me on harsh antibiotics for years, which wreaked havoc on my body’s ecology and permanently damage-dried my skin. The heaves in my digestion and my horrible sensitivity to light are from those antibiotics, with their long, long lists of side effects. I am reminded of this history, the same pain intensifying every time I have to take antibiotics for chlamydia or strep or whatever. (c)
Q:
At the same time, my days become increasingly filled with professional activities: presenting ideas to a committee of strangers, attending a meeting followed by another meeting, giving a lecture. Each of these are instances in which I have to talk, and in which everyone else listens to me and looks at me. The way people react, I know that they are thinking about what they would call my gender and, in the way most people find gender and bodies to be irreducibly the same, that they are thinking also of my body, the small weight of my breasts maybe visible in a sweater. I know that when I am talking to a large group of people, in their heads are odd confusions about me, and that when I am talking one-on-one, a slight nervousness sometimes—the fear that they will say the wrong thing, and their language will reveal how they see me. (c)
Not too good writing.
Not too medically informed.
Not too healthy a relationship with oneself portrayed.
The main protagonist is seriously at odds with their body, looks, sex, life, people... many things. I don't think their main issue was their sex or whatever. This protagonist came across as abused, taken advantage of, misunderstood person who suffered way too much and not just from gender dysphoria but from general lack of self-sympathy, which is an entirely too painful thing to happen to anyone. People who are genuinely in love with themselves would be totally ready to forgive themselves minor physical idiosyncrasies such as the make up of the body structure, complexion or the set of privates. A good psychologist would have come a long way to help.
The use of the word 'slutty' I found particularly not healthy:
Q:
In my early twenties the acne quieted on my body, and my face calmed down slowly, and then I became actually slutty. Just like how I had started wearing makeup when the acne came fully on, exactly as the acne began clearing is when I started slutting my way to the top of the slut class, this new me confident enough to put on a black slip and head to the Eagle. No surprise, then, that it was not until I started to take testosterone blockers that the acne actually stopped—although the hormones would also come, eventually, to mean good-bye to the hookup culture of anonymous gay men, to the bears and twinks of my youth. It had been testosterone, of course, that had been the problem all along. The doctors had tried all sorts of things, keeping me on harsh antibiotics for years, which wreaked havoc on my body’s ecology and permanently damage-dried my skin. The heaves in my digestion and my horrible sensitivity to light are from those antibiotics, with their long, long lists of side effects. I am reminded of this history, the same pain intensifying every time I have to take antibiotics for chlamydia or strep or whatever. (c)
Q:
At the same time, my days become increasingly filled with professional activities: presenting ideas to a committee of strangers, attending a meeting followed by another meeting, giving a lecture. Each of these are instances in which I have to talk, and in which everyone else listens to me and looks at me. The way people react, I know that they are thinking about what they would call my gender and, in the way most people find gender and bodies to be irreducibly the same, that they are thinking also of my body, the small weight of my breasts maybe visible in a sweater. I know that when I am talking to a large group of people, in their heads are odd confusions about me, and that when I am talking one-on-one, a slight nervousness sometimes—the fear that they will say the wrong thing, and their language will reveal how they see me. (c)
Read
August 7, 2020ugh i’m sucker for book-length essays, and this one’s so loving and grimy / lovingly grimy. it concerns me that the most popular review on goodreads is high key transphobic and recommends that fleischmann seek medical help ... what the fuck??
March 12, 2020
I think this is the first book I truly loved in 2019. It's such a wonderfully built essay/book, circling and weaving, always on the move. Mixing criticism & autobiography, it reads similarly to Maggie Nelson, and anyone who liked Bluets or The Argonauts should probably read this (especially because there's not the weird fetishism-y vibes of trans people in this one).
The way that Fleischmann discusses their identity, their resistance to much of the firm language relating to queer identities, is truly everything to me. I didn't expect to see myself so reflected in this book. Also, there's a lot of just really fun stuff and many moments of humor! This is really truly excellent and you should definitely not sleep on it!
Also, be on the lookout for an interview with myself and Fleischmann, which should be out in June (when this book comes out!).
EDIT: Here it is! https://electricliterature.com/t-flei...
The way that Fleischmann discusses their identity, their resistance to much of the firm language relating to queer identities, is truly everything to me. I didn't expect to see myself so reflected in this book. Also, there's a lot of just really fun stuff and many moments of humor! This is really truly excellent and you should definitely not sleep on it!
Also, be on the lookout for an interview with myself and Fleischmann, which should be out in June (when this book comes out!).
EDIT: Here it is! https://electricliterature.com/t-flei...
March 3, 2020
T. Fleischmann's Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through is a thing of collective beauty. One part meditation on ephemeral transsexual love, one part art criticism of the work of Félix González-Torres, and a third part ice, Clutch's book length essay escapes easy classification - is it perhaps precisely what Trish Salah means when she says trans-genre. If you know that look you know that look is exactly how this book moved through my body. There is something very gorgeous and almost tragic throughout, and in this way the book is like all trans women I know.
December 17, 2018
"I know it's not that simple, tit for tap, but I don't want to give any more of my touch to language. I just want language to generate more touch." A book about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ice, and sex, but also coming into one's body and how or why to live and love "uninscribed," as a writer. I read this out loud to a lover in two three-hour stretches over two days. It's tender, agile, and smart, and I didn't want it to end.
September 9, 2021
Torrey Peters showing up to give T some deep trans femme insight is so god damn wholesome. This book is underrated. I loved the exploration of art and the body and the way it’s all perceived by the world. Good good high quality good.
January 8, 2023
This is someone’s Stone Butch Blues, someone’s Argonauts, someone’s Exile & Pride. Not mine, but I appreciate it nonetheless!
September 16, 2019
Per its title, it's no surprise that this book offers an embodied movement through time -- and yet it resists narrative fixity. Fleischmann brings to it a great deal of respect for experience, change, motion, difference, space--and love, via complex intimacies that bloom and retreat and defy categorization. Super trans4trans and politicized as a given, while resisting inscription in queer/trans identity politics -- the author draws on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to offer a politics of the embodied self in relation to others. This book-length essay integrates within it an essay in desiring verse (dropped in in sections), and a fascinating essay-talk on the Publick Universal Friend (dropped into the middle in full). I loved this.
September 14, 2020
I liked this, and parts were interesting, and I was even here for the heavy art talk (reminded me of high school), but the central idea of writing around the edges of things without naming them is one of those things I find boring in lit, especially when it's relationships. I'm not deep enough, probably.
The bit about the Publick Universal Friend was interesting, but it's not a large part of the book, nor as integrated as the Félix González-Torres stuff. I was impressed by the way it contextualizes them simultaneously as
- an (illegal) settler participating in the displacement of indigenous people by trying to get far enough away from society not to be judged
- someone who empowered women
- a religious fanatic
- clearly nonbinary trans (in a way that would slip into modern identities with barely a ripple)
- one of those people who's super fucking obnoxious at public meetings.
The bit about the Publick Universal Friend was interesting, but it's not a large part of the book, nor as integrated as the Félix González-Torres stuff. I was impressed by the way it contextualizes them simultaneously as
- an (illegal) settler participating in the displacement of indigenous people by trying to get far enough away from society not to be judged
- someone who empowered women
- a religious fanatic
- clearly nonbinary trans (in a way that would slip into modern identities with barely a ripple)
- one of those people who's super fucking obnoxious at public meetings.
October 23, 2024
Best case scenario is when you actually enjoy a book that you’re only reading because someone you’re dating tells you to
December 6, 2020
Got this from the NYPL e-book app, which was exciting! Such better trans books than my municipal libraries had growing up.
This book made me feel like my life made sense, and a lot of it felt very familiar. I can't vouch for how it'd read to someone who hasn't experienced trans life in some of the settings T talks about, but seeing little snapshots of everyday life on paper in this way felt beautiful to me. I want to say something about "finding the sacred in the mundane" but I don't think trans bodies and art and sex and how we relate to our geographies are mundane topics at all.
I don't understand the review that claims this book conveys gender dysphoria. It felt notable to me in how *not* about that it was. T expresses a longing for dyke and fag life alike that I guess one could confuse with dysphoria or malcontent, but that seems like not a particularly interesting read. Like, the liminality is the point! That's why the form is like that!
This book made me feel like my life made sense, and a lot of it felt very familiar. I can't vouch for how it'd read to someone who hasn't experienced trans life in some of the settings T talks about, but seeing little snapshots of everyday life on paper in this way felt beautiful to me. I want to say something about "finding the sacred in the mundane" but I don't think trans bodies and art and sex and how we relate to our geographies are mundane topics at all.
I don't understand the review that claims this book conveys gender dysphoria. It felt notable to me in how *not* about that it was. T expresses a longing for dyke and fag life alike that I guess one could confuse with dysphoria or malcontent, but that seems like not a particularly interesting read. Like, the liminality is the point! That's why the form is like that!
December 31, 2023
one way i judge a good book is if i finish it and immediately want to read it again. this one definitely falls into that camp
July 17, 2019
This is a long essay about the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ice, and sex. No, that is just the superficial description. It is about transformation in the uninscribed. As a trans person, the author focuses a lot on the transitions of the body, whether through aging, gender, or death. Also explored are the relationship between love and desire, societal change, and, of course, the transformations of ice (breaking, melting). Complex, but grounded. Graphic, yet compassionate.
The flow is a bit choppy, but this is well-worth a close reading.
The flow is a bit choppy, but this is well-worth a close reading.
December 22, 2024
holy shit. so many quotable lines and paragraphs. obsessed. wrote 'fuck' in the margins way to often at prose that blew my mind. T did something really special, thank you Anton my queer yoda for this book.
July 15, 2019
I bought this thinking, as per the description, it would have a lot to do with Felix Gonzales-Torres' work. I was excited for a contemporary take on it.
I first encountered Felix Gonzales-Torres' work in the Astrup Fearnley gallery in Oslo. Untitled (Blue Placebo) was on display. The piece, for those who don't know, is a pile of boiled sweets wrapped in blue cellophane. 130 kg of which, to be precise, the weight (as I understand it) of Gonzales-Torres' lover Ross, who eventually died of AIDS. The blue placebo refers to the drugs Ross was taking to mitigate the effect of HIV. The piece was not only on display but for literal public consumption: you're allowed to eat the sweets. It was quite an amazing thing to interact with. It's a memorial to a departed loved one, a joy shared--but also a commentary on the medication, which might as well have been a stack of sweets for all the good they did. It's a quasi-religious experience, eating of the body. It is so beautiful and sad. A bittersweet gift.
Sorry but I think that off-the-cuff review is a better description of the experience than appears in this "essay"--don't essays have a point, a thesis topic or something? I'd call it a ramble--which seems to be about... what this person got up to for a while. There were some interesting observations, in the way there are inevitably some in a first draft if you just type long enough... It is largely concerned with sex, and a little to do with the author's interest in describing ice? Also a vague disdain towards capitalism and climate change. Maybe?
I'm kinda glad that people are carrying the Samuel Delany torch of mixing it up, refusing categorisation, sleeping around all over the place in spite of the still-strong (even stronger?) opposition to this as a lifestyle. And I'm glad they put it in books so I can observe it from a distance and be even surer that it's not for me...
But I've also left with more of the one thing I'm always trying to combat, the one thing I always want to suspect is "too easy" and "not true" and "we must be missing something" and "there must be something here", which is a stronger notion that the conceptual art world is pretty bullshit.
I first encountered Felix Gonzales-Torres' work in the Astrup Fearnley gallery in Oslo. Untitled (Blue Placebo) was on display. The piece, for those who don't know, is a pile of boiled sweets wrapped in blue cellophane. 130 kg of which, to be precise, the weight (as I understand it) of Gonzales-Torres' lover Ross, who eventually died of AIDS. The blue placebo refers to the drugs Ross was taking to mitigate the effect of HIV. The piece was not only on display but for literal public consumption: you're allowed to eat the sweets. It was quite an amazing thing to interact with. It's a memorial to a departed loved one, a joy shared--but also a commentary on the medication, which might as well have been a stack of sweets for all the good they did. It's a quasi-religious experience, eating of the body. It is so beautiful and sad. A bittersweet gift.
Sorry but I think that off-the-cuff review is a better description of the experience than appears in this "essay"--don't essays have a point, a thesis topic or something? I'd call it a ramble--which seems to be about... what this person got up to for a while. There were some interesting observations, in the way there are inevitably some in a first draft if you just type long enough... It is largely concerned with sex, and a little to do with the author's interest in describing ice? Also a vague disdain towards capitalism and climate change. Maybe?
I'm kinda glad that people are carrying the Samuel Delany torch of mixing it up, refusing categorisation, sleeping around all over the place in spite of the still-strong (even stronger?) opposition to this as a lifestyle. And I'm glad they put it in books so I can observe it from a distance and be even surer that it's not for me...
But I've also left with more of the one thing I'm always trying to combat, the one thing I always want to suspect is "too easy" and "not true" and "we must be missing something" and "there must be something here", which is a stronger notion that the conceptual art world is pretty bullshit.
January 11, 2020
This essay is many things, and at times felt meandering, but the writing and lived-experience that is detailed in these pages feels so utterly radical and raw, with no sort of editorial filter to make it more palatable—a commendable achievement. It was a nice reminder that writing about a queer experience does not (should not) need to be sanitized or explained. Some of the descriptions of various art pieces/installations went fully over my head, but I so enjoyed the voice and never knew what was going to happen next. I’m so glad Coffee House Press took on the publishing of such a seemingly odd and niche text. 4/5
April 10, 2020
Water is a bit like the moon, in that if we are not careful, it will
accumulate our ideas to a measure that obscures it.
To even place them together—
the moon, at dusk, reflected on a pond,
or the suspended water of a cloud obscuring the moon—
is to suggest a deep, almost selfish romanticism.
Such romanticism is pleasant, and I have spent many nights
on a Brooklyn roof or a Tennessee hillside gazing at the moon
and thinking of someone I loved.
Sometimes a person far away, sometimes sleeping in my bed.
The moon has a partial face, trapped to look at us just so,
and another face, always looking away.
This is why it is different than water.
When has water ever remained the same?
Gaze across the lake and see if you can find me.
Move through fog until we touch.
Here, my hair is wet with rain, and the white cotton of your
shirt see-through to your skin again.
pg. 56
How absolutely silly that we name some things as romantic,
some as not.
I have spent many afternoons waiting in cafés, impatient for
something to occur, or for the day to become different.
pg. 58
“I work all day like a monk /
and at night wander about like an alleycat /
looking for love,”
Pasolini begins one of his Roman poems, written early in his
relocation to that city.
The filmmaker and poet had fled there after being caught with
teenage boys, hiding in the trees,
a scandal exaggerated to cost him his teaching position and
drive him from the Communist Party.
For Pasolini, Rome was a chance to reinvent himself, a necessary
prospect.
In Rome he could write novels and face the self that existed
in this new place, which could be neither “an old nor a new
Pier Paolo.”
“I pity the young fascists,
and the old ones, whom I consider forms
of the most horrible evil, I oppose
only with the violence of reason.”
he writes in the 1964 poem, and describes himself in its closing—
“Passive as a bird that sees all, in flight.”
It is a poem of confronting, not just the mobs that condemn
and disparage his sexuality, but his own actions as well,
the contradiction of feeling both hate and love at once.
Which part of it might have appealed to Gonzalez-Torres,
when he selected the poem for the press release of a 1995 show
at the Andrea Rosen Gallery?
It is placed alongside an excerpt from Barbra Streisand’s 1995
speech, “The Artist as Citizen,”
in which she defends both abortion and gay rights,
and an excerpt from Rimbaud’s “The Savior Bumped Upon
His Heavy Butt.”
“The Citizen as Artist” might be another way to say it, to
acknowledge that we are making something by joining
together.
I suppose I can pity the fascists, sure—
I know how painful it is to be defined by something so large
that it seems to swallow every bit of who you are.
That’s why feeling joy is so revolutionary.
So that later, when I feel like I am a memory, all alone in the
moonlight,
I will know that I must wait for the sunrise,
and I must think of a new life,
and I mustn’t give in.
pg. 64-65
Nearly everyone I know relies on sex work to pay their bills, to one degree or another, although I rarely mention this in my writing, and so my essays are filled with people who have these lacunae in their lives, their behaviors and movements and circumstances seeming to lack a certain context or motivation, and their labor erased. I worry they come across like bullshit flaneurs or something, like they have resources or stability they don’t, when the reality is that they are all activists, artists, survivors, finding ways to live under and to fight against a state that tries to legislate our lives away.
Not that everyone who looks like a bullshit flaneur is all bad. A lot of my favorite books are filled with really wonderful queens acting atrociously, pretty much all drunk and some of them revolutionaries and some of them just absolutely ridiculous and in love, these faggots with so much over-the-top, entering the room style-first. Everywhere you turn, it’s just so wonderful—you can learn the world from the people wearing the silliest clothes.
pg. 68
The spare nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s art is not just an opportunity
to face the power of our own imaginations,
to extrapolate what we will from the taste of a candy,
but also an occasion to honor that part of the artist’s life that
I’ll never know.
He makes something of his desires, but that does not grant us
any right to those desires,
only to the specific thing he has shared with us.
You can’t touch the dancer.
Why did you think you could?
Who told you that you have that right?
Just love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve
chosen to keep away from you.
pg. 76
Anyway, you never get there, you just keep going. Things are repeated, and sometimes we mistake the fact of their repetition for their value. It can make it seem like we aren’t supposed to change, or like our love has to be just so. It can make it seem as though what we know is best, which it only sometimes is. But maybe that’s okay. Even when imagining takes us away, it still begins with what’s already here.
pg. 86
If the aliens do show up, I hope they’ll see people they want to save. Friends and magnificent sluts, smashing the walls of the prisons and burning all the money, running around with signs that declare our liberation. Our hands up in the air and then down again, like some people in love. Our hands taking from two stacks of paper, “Nowhere better than this place” and “Somewhere better than this place.” Just a small part of the relentlessness of people in love, finding ways to make pleasure through all time. With losses that are shared and that no one else knows. I guess that’s what the story is. A story of bodies that are different, of people who fuck up and make each other happy and then die. Where everything is impossible and so we try to make it real. Where it’s spring, and the season of ice has passed.
pg. 86
accumulate our ideas to a measure that obscures it.
To even place them together—
the moon, at dusk, reflected on a pond,
or the suspended water of a cloud obscuring the moon—
is to suggest a deep, almost selfish romanticism.
Such romanticism is pleasant, and I have spent many nights
on a Brooklyn roof or a Tennessee hillside gazing at the moon
and thinking of someone I loved.
Sometimes a person far away, sometimes sleeping in my bed.
The moon has a partial face, trapped to look at us just so,
and another face, always looking away.
This is why it is different than water.
When has water ever remained the same?
Gaze across the lake and see if you can find me.
Move through fog until we touch.
Here, my hair is wet with rain, and the white cotton of your
shirt see-through to your skin again.
pg. 56
How absolutely silly that we name some things as romantic,
some as not.
I have spent many afternoons waiting in cafés, impatient for
something to occur, or for the day to become different.
pg. 58
“I work all day like a monk /
and at night wander about like an alleycat /
looking for love,”
Pasolini begins one of his Roman poems, written early in his
relocation to that city.
The filmmaker and poet had fled there after being caught with
teenage boys, hiding in the trees,
a scandal exaggerated to cost him his teaching position and
drive him from the Communist Party.
For Pasolini, Rome was a chance to reinvent himself, a necessary
prospect.
In Rome he could write novels and face the self that existed
in this new place, which could be neither “an old nor a new
Pier Paolo.”
“I pity the young fascists,
and the old ones, whom I consider forms
of the most horrible evil, I oppose
only with the violence of reason.”
he writes in the 1964 poem, and describes himself in its closing—
“Passive as a bird that sees all, in flight.”
It is a poem of confronting, not just the mobs that condemn
and disparage his sexuality, but his own actions as well,
the contradiction of feeling both hate and love at once.
Which part of it might have appealed to Gonzalez-Torres,
when he selected the poem for the press release of a 1995 show
at the Andrea Rosen Gallery?
It is placed alongside an excerpt from Barbra Streisand’s 1995
speech, “The Artist as Citizen,”
in which she defends both abortion and gay rights,
and an excerpt from Rimbaud’s “The Savior Bumped Upon
His Heavy Butt.”
“The Citizen as Artist” might be another way to say it, to
acknowledge that we are making something by joining
together.
I suppose I can pity the fascists, sure—
I know how painful it is to be defined by something so large
that it seems to swallow every bit of who you are.
That’s why feeling joy is so revolutionary.
So that later, when I feel like I am a memory, all alone in the
moonlight,
I will know that I must wait for the sunrise,
and I must think of a new life,
and I mustn’t give in.
pg. 64-65
Nearly everyone I know relies on sex work to pay their bills, to one degree or another, although I rarely mention this in my writing, and so my essays are filled with people who have these lacunae in their lives, their behaviors and movements and circumstances seeming to lack a certain context or motivation, and their labor erased. I worry they come across like bullshit flaneurs or something, like they have resources or stability they don’t, when the reality is that they are all activists, artists, survivors, finding ways to live under and to fight against a state that tries to legislate our lives away.
Not that everyone who looks like a bullshit flaneur is all bad. A lot of my favorite books are filled with really wonderful queens acting atrociously, pretty much all drunk and some of them revolutionaries and some of them just absolutely ridiculous and in love, these faggots with so much over-the-top, entering the room style-first. Everywhere you turn, it’s just so wonderful—you can learn the world from the people wearing the silliest clothes.
pg. 68
The spare nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s art is not just an opportunity
to face the power of our own imaginations,
to extrapolate what we will from the taste of a candy,
but also an occasion to honor that part of the artist’s life that
I’ll never know.
He makes something of his desires, but that does not grant us
any right to those desires,
only to the specific thing he has shared with us.
You can’t touch the dancer.
Why did you think you could?
Who told you that you have that right?
Just love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve
chosen to keep away from you.
pg. 76
Anyway, you never get there, you just keep going. Things are repeated, and sometimes we mistake the fact of their repetition for their value. It can make it seem like we aren’t supposed to change, or like our love has to be just so. It can make it seem as though what we know is best, which it only sometimes is. But maybe that’s okay. Even when imagining takes us away, it still begins with what’s already here.
pg. 86
If the aliens do show up, I hope they’ll see people they want to save. Friends and magnificent sluts, smashing the walls of the prisons and burning all the money, running around with signs that declare our liberation. Our hands up in the air and then down again, like some people in love. Our hands taking from two stacks of paper, “Nowhere better than this place” and “Somewhere better than this place.” Just a small part of the relentlessness of people in love, finding ways to make pleasure through all time. With losses that are shared and that no one else knows. I guess that’s what the story is. A story of bodies that are different, of people who fuck up and make each other happy and then die. Where everything is impossible and so we try to make it real. Where it’s spring, and the season of ice has passed.
pg. 86
December 20, 2021
Coffee House Press tends to be recommended to me by others as an 'indie' imprint, but they are big players in American indie lit scene. This is probably one of the most experimental books I've picked up from their catalogue, and something about the blurb made me expect a very different book from what I ended up reading.
Having just come off reading Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, I found the experience of Fleischmann's work difficult and frustrating. The book is a singular essay that blends together Fleischmann's experiences of growing up in a working-class, rural town, their moves to the coastal metropoles of queer culture, their experiences with cruising, and friendships balanced precariously on the edge of romantic intimacy, amongst others. Interspersed throughout the essay are long free verse poems that reflect on the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The paragraphs are almost uniform in size, but there is an unrelenting outpouring of detail, a sort of hyper-maximalist embroidering of places, details, and names. People appear and disappear from the narrative, time dilates and shifts from past to present. It is hard to keep grasp of where I am or who I am supposed to be focusing on.
I believe the non-linearity is an intentional move on Fleischmann's part to help 'queer' their narrative, and there is a similar defense on hand for the frank and graphic descriptions of sex, orgies, and 'taboo' words that appear with casual frequency in the book. It is difficult, however, to keep a wider appreciation of the book's ambitions when the constant introduction of new details, scenes or ideas is whittling away at my attention. Instead of trying to judge the book on whether it has held my attention, I'm judging whether my attention is being well-spent.
At one point, I wondered if the maximalist approach of Fleischmann's prose is a deliberate counterpoint to the formal minimalism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work. After all, it is blurbed as using the artist's work to question a wide variety of topics. I returned to the long poems with a closer eye. There were some interesting passages about the relationship between Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn, how Roni's work inspired Felix's approach to using materials and colours, as well as another passage where Fleischmann talks about their interpretation of the artwork "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) as a site of erotic potential, cleverly noting that Gonzalez-Torres has never stipulated the gender of the go-go dancer in his art piece:
This section, I felt, best merged Fleischmann's writing with their study of Gonzalez-Torres. An examination of the artist's work leads to an observation about queer pleasure, of the marginal/empty space as a place of possibility. I wished more passages were as detailed and personally-informed, drawing linkages between these ruminations and the long passages preceding it and coming after. Unfortunately, much of Fleischmann's work does not feel in dialogue with Gonzalez-Torres's. Rather, I believe this book is best read as a work on the transgender body. The blurb is a mischaracterization: the work grew out of it, and is trying to become something else.
Having just come off reading Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, I found the experience of Fleischmann's work difficult and frustrating. The book is a singular essay that blends together Fleischmann's experiences of growing up in a working-class, rural town, their moves to the coastal metropoles of queer culture, their experiences with cruising, and friendships balanced precariously on the edge of romantic intimacy, amongst others. Interspersed throughout the essay are long free verse poems that reflect on the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The paragraphs are almost uniform in size, but there is an unrelenting outpouring of detail, a sort of hyper-maximalist embroidering of places, details, and names. People appear and disappear from the narrative, time dilates and shifts from past to present. It is hard to keep grasp of where I am or who I am supposed to be focusing on.
I believe the non-linearity is an intentional move on Fleischmann's part to help 'queer' their narrative, and there is a similar defense on hand for the frank and graphic descriptions of sex, orgies, and 'taboo' words that appear with casual frequency in the book. It is difficult, however, to keep a wider appreciation of the book's ambitions when the constant introduction of new details, scenes or ideas is whittling away at my attention. Instead of trying to judge the book on whether it has held my attention, I'm judging whether my attention is being well-spent.
At one point, I wondered if the maximalist approach of Fleischmann's prose is a deliberate counterpoint to the formal minimalism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work. After all, it is blurbed as using the artist's work to question a wide variety of topics. I returned to the long poems with a closer eye. There were some interesting passages about the relationship between Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn, how Roni's work inspired Felix's approach to using materials and colours, as well as another passage where Fleischmann talks about their interpretation of the artwork "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) as a site of erotic potential, cleverly noting that Gonzalez-Torres has never stipulated the gender of the go-go dancer in his art piece:
It’s a very exciting moment, to wait for someone to arrive,
to give you pleasure by giving themself joy and pleasure.
How many people can this person be?
Can this person be more, somehow?
This section, I felt, best merged Fleischmann's writing with their study of Gonzalez-Torres. An examination of the artist's work leads to an observation about queer pleasure, of the marginal/empty space as a place of possibility. I wished more passages were as detailed and personally-informed, drawing linkages between these ruminations and the long passages preceding it and coming after. Unfortunately, much of Fleischmann's work does not feel in dialogue with Gonzalez-Torres's. Rather, I believe this book is best read as a work on the transgender body. The blurb is a mischaracterization: the work grew out of it, and is trying to become something else.
January 8, 2022
i wasn't expecting this to be as much of a memoir as it was ? and i was also, i think, half-expecting the sleight of hand that characterises many of the long essays i've read that do similar things with biography, autobiography, criticism & art, where metaphor and analogy become the connective tissue, make new meaning & some sort of internal logic out of things that don't seem related. but this essay rejects metaphor, fr reasons that i think are interesting, and just leaves things next to each other, connected by their presence in fleischmann's life & conversations & reading, but not merged by the sort of ? alchemy of figurative language, that can make things stand in for other things.
maybe this is an invitation, to imagine the parallels, the things that connect ice, and sex, and felix gonzalez-torres' work, and t. fleischmann's experience of life ? and also to recognise those things for themselves, in themselves, without mediation. but like. i personally am a slut for metaphor, and something about the way this structure felt, the precision of the language & its abrupt movements, made it v hard to enjoy. there were thoughts & historical tangents & descriptions & citations that made me Curious, and descriptions of art-making & intimacy & touch & laughter that made me Miss my Friends, but fr the most part i felt like i was sliding off the surface of the writing, esp some passages of the poems.
maybe this is an invitation, to imagine the parallels, the things that connect ice, and sex, and felix gonzalez-torres' work, and t. fleischmann's experience of life ? and also to recognise those things for themselves, in themselves, without mediation. but like. i personally am a slut for metaphor, and something about the way this structure felt, the precision of the language & its abrupt movements, made it v hard to enjoy. there were thoughts & historical tangents & descriptions & citations that made me Curious, and descriptions of art-making & intimacy & touch & laughter that made me Miss my Friends, but fr the most part i felt like i was sliding off the surface of the writing, esp some passages of the poems.
January 9, 2023
an authentic and familiar account on relationships (platonic, romantic, sexual) and sex and sexuality through a t4t lens. structured as a free-flowing, book-length essay with beautiful, flowery prose and grounded by genuine events (ex. moving throughout cities across the US), Fleishmann analogizes their experiences with partners, hookups, and their own identity to the work of visual artist Félix González-Torres among other subjects (often further explored through insertions of Fleischmann's poetry throughout the text, perhaps acting as a break in between paragraphs).
yeah this was good, well-written especially considering people don't write about this yet (sex and relationships as a trans person). some of this was very moving, very raw and resonated with my own experiences, feelings and the landscape of my personal relationships. i did enjoy how this read more like a memoir or an open journal. yeah the feeling of isolation as a queer person is real, yeah that theory about queer people who flock to metropolitan cities to find community is real, yeah i love to read and write and romanticize but i love to be around other people more, yeah enough of the air and its ease i am asking you to touch me (-ada limon, the end of poetry).
i knocked off a star in the rating because of the unique, free-flow structure- there was little separation and felt like it dragged. new-age, non-editorial filter but risky style. the connections to art and long-essay structure feel very "art school thesis" or "friend's substack", can even feel a "tumblr-like" quality from some cornier writing choices, but im turning my cheek as i appreciate and favour the unsanitized language and resonating subject. i think the poems would be more compelling if there was an established, neat structure to the novel.
yeah this was good, well-written especially considering people don't write about this yet (sex and relationships as a trans person). some of this was very moving, very raw and resonated with my own experiences, feelings and the landscape of my personal relationships. i did enjoy how this read more like a memoir or an open journal. yeah the feeling of isolation as a queer person is real, yeah that theory about queer people who flock to metropolitan cities to find community is real, yeah i love to read and write and romanticize but i love to be around other people more, yeah enough of the air and its ease i am asking you to touch me (-ada limon, the end of poetry).
i knocked off a star in the rating because of the unique, free-flow structure- there was little separation and felt like it dragged. new-age, non-editorial filter but risky style. the connections to art and long-essay structure feel very "art school thesis" or "friend's substack", can even feel a "tumblr-like" quality from some cornier writing choices, but im turning my cheek as i appreciate and favour the unsanitized language and resonating subject. i think the poems would be more compelling if there was an established, neat structure to the novel.
Read
June 28, 2025"anyway, you never get there, you just keep going"
August 22, 2023
«Because there are no limits to how much we can give each /
other, when we recognize that none of this was ever ours to give, /
and as we give each other the world».
other, when we recognize that none of this was ever ours to give, /
and as we give each other the world».
August 28, 2023
(3.5???)
April 30, 2024
Started this early April as audio and I fully believe this book gave me my slump.
The synopsis on Everand was not it and truly did not remotely prepare for what this book was about. I wouldn’t have read it if I knew.
The synopsis on Everand was not it and truly did not remotely prepare for what this book was about. I wouldn’t have read it if I knew.
April 16, 2024
I was really liking this as I was reading/listening to it but after finishing idk it didn't really leave me with as much as I thought it would... Definitely some great passages and trans insight, I also really liked the art history aspect :0 a great reading experience but not much after that. Solid 3.5 ⭐
July 2, 2024
the trans temporality and blurring of form that this work moves through made me feel like it was written for trans people, but the few clumsy political slogans attempted as radical positionings interspersed throughout really dampened it for me... reminding me that the white trans community still has a long way to go.....
August 12, 2023
all i know is that louisa may alcott would’ve enjoyed this
December 15, 2020
strange, strange, beautiful, strange, all over the place.
What can one do with a past?
What I mean is, what can we do with our bodies?
Inclusion is sometimes just more people performing labor to hold up the bullshit.
Even when imagining takes us away, it still begins with what’s already here.
We’re all telling ourselves a story, as we try
to understand where we’ve arrived.
What can one do with a past?
What I mean is, what can we do with our bodies?
Inclusion is sometimes just more people performing labor to hold up the bullshit.
Even when imagining takes us away, it still begins with what’s already here.
We’re all telling ourselves a story, as we try
to understand where we’ve arrived.
June 30, 2020
I was really excited to read this book. The long, lyric, meandering essay is a genre I've come to enjoy through Maggie Nelson, Mark Doty, and others; the focus on physicality and queerness is something I have been often thinking about recently; and it begins set in Buffalo, a place I dearly love and want to see complicated or criticized more. But this disappointed me. I would rate it lower, but I think my sincere excitement led to a deeper disappointment, so I'll try to be fair.
Some moments took on a genuine, earnest, vulnerable tone, small nuggets of insight I appreciated: "Sometimes it takes so much momentum to escape your context that you seem to never stop straining at escape after that. Sometimes you meet people you love but that still won't be enough because you won't know who you are, when you are someone who isn't alone," the "context" relying on a lack of clear social support for sexuality and gender exploration (95). Or the sincere love in the ending, with "Things are repeated, and sometimes we mistake the fact of their repetition for their value" (143) and "If the aliens do show up, I hope they'll see people they want to save" and the entire last paragraph following (144).
I also have to admire anything that takes on genderqueer bodies and queer liberation in such a head-on, unapologetic, critical and yet kind way. Even though I don't agree with all the points made, and have had a very different experience of queerness, I feel like I have an at least partially more examined and developed view of radical queer politics because of this.
But so much of this essay dwells in pretentious theorizing and idea-building seemingly for the sake of itself. For something meant to be radical, it feels unduly high-brow, at points academic, and frustratingly abstract when it doesn't need to be. The good moments are breaks in the otherwise obtuse voice, not vice versa. And as much as I want to feel invested in discussions of old lovers and blurs between friendship, sex, and romance (been there too, I get it), they sometimes feel out of place next to larger discussions of queer community and resistance. I can see the outline of the connections formed, but not yet fully fleshed out.
For these reasons, large sections of the book feel forgettable, writing I think will fade from my memory as I read other, more vivid things. That doesn't necessarily mark this book as "bad," but it does suggest the lack of overall, long-term impact this book carried for me.
Some moments took on a genuine, earnest, vulnerable tone, small nuggets of insight I appreciated: "Sometimes it takes so much momentum to escape your context that you seem to never stop straining at escape after that. Sometimes you meet people you love but that still won't be enough because you won't know who you are, when you are someone who isn't alone," the "context" relying on a lack of clear social support for sexuality and gender exploration (95). Or the sincere love in the ending, with "Things are repeated, and sometimes we mistake the fact of their repetition for their value" (143) and "If the aliens do show up, I hope they'll see people they want to save" and the entire last paragraph following (144).
I also have to admire anything that takes on genderqueer bodies and queer liberation in such a head-on, unapologetic, critical and yet kind way. Even though I don't agree with all the points made, and have had a very different experience of queerness, I feel like I have an at least partially more examined and developed view of radical queer politics because of this.
But so much of this essay dwells in pretentious theorizing and idea-building seemingly for the sake of itself. For something meant to be radical, it feels unduly high-brow, at points academic, and frustratingly abstract when it doesn't need to be. The good moments are breaks in the otherwise obtuse voice, not vice versa. And as much as I want to feel invested in discussions of old lovers and blurs between friendship, sex, and romance (been there too, I get it), they sometimes feel out of place next to larger discussions of queer community and resistance. I can see the outline of the connections formed, but not yet fully fleshed out.
For these reasons, large sections of the book feel forgettable, writing I think will fade from my memory as I read other, more vivid things. That doesn't necessarily mark this book as "bad," but it does suggest the lack of overall, long-term impact this book carried for me.
October 28, 2020
This was my second read of Fleischmann's lyric essay book. I plan to buy my own copy rather than borrowing it from the library for further readings. I need my own copy so I can flag and underline the many passages and sentences that moved me. This is an open, rich, bright, funny, and joyful book that ranges over the work of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the nature of ice, and Fleischmann's own romantic, sexual, artistic, and academic experience. Like Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, it uses sexual experience within the queer and trans communities to engage larger questions of art and meaning, while also mounting a critique of capitalism. The book questions the utility of metaphor, and the linearity of time. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
"An annoying thing about gender is that it always gets in the way of people understanding context." (63)
It's taken a lot of resistance, that I want to leave my gender and my sex life uninscribed--that it took me years ot consider the fact that I did not have to name my gender or sexuality at all, so that now I must always tell people that I am not something." (64)
"Fun and pleasure are productive places to start building resistance." (132)
"The police state wants me dead to make sure their children don't end up like me, so I guess every time I fuck and I'm happy and I do what I want I would like to call that an anti-state action." (138)
"An annoying thing about gender is that it always gets in the way of people understanding context." (63)
It's taken a lot of resistance, that I want to leave my gender and my sex life uninscribed--that it took me years ot consider the fact that I did not have to name my gender or sexuality at all, so that now I must always tell people that I am not something." (64)
"Fun and pleasure are productive places to start building resistance." (132)
"The police state wants me dead to make sure their children don't end up like me, so I guess every time I fuck and I'm happy and I do what I want I would like to call that an anti-state action." (138)
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