Ally’s Reviews > Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through > Status Update

And then we run a hot bath and sit in it together: what Jackson calls a Jurassic sauna, with a Sade album on.

["Sade" pronounced rhyming with "aid" -- come on Joel Froomkin, whitest gay alive.]

[HELLO PUBLIC UNIVERSAL FRIEND]

[...I might have read that energy into the text if I'd encountered it by itself - the thinking is bright and energetic even while the subjects are difficult. The book often avoids violence directly even while it's affecting the conversation (which feels related to that not-exactly-nervous energy). But Froom's voice is sooooooo depressed that I think I'm hearing a lot of this differently.]

[I wonder about how much the choice of the narrator Joel Froomkin affects how I'm receiving this book. He's got this depressed ex-twink voice - it's maybe more appropriate given the concerns of the book than a very feminine voice, but in readings and interviews with Fleischmann, they have this gangly energy, this is-it-safe-to-be-joyful-if-it-is-let-me-bubble-over familiar transfeminine vibe...]

Psyche's quest ends when, at last, Cupid declares his devotion to her, and Jupiter grants the two permission to marry, so long as Cupid promises to fire his arrows at any disinterested woman Jupiter desires.

[what a horrifying metaphor for assimilationism]

But the best known moment in the life of Orpheus has nothing to do with his song. It’s just a man deciding he would rather see his beloved than any future the gods could promise.

While Bow-wow has never been sexualized, then, he does come very close to sexuality.

[this queen sleeps with their childhood stuffed animal and their guy of the night simultaneously... I was feeling very distant from this narrator who is somehow further separated from material reality by their aversion to metaphor, but this detail totally charmed me]

I've been getting bored with metaphors anyway. I've decided that I don't like them because one thing is never another thing and it's a lie to say something is anything but itself. It's ontologically and physically impossible. In fact not even apple and apple can be each other. So the gay mens' sexual walking tour of Manhattan has this additional challenge.

The mother possum had made that crawl when she was young, too, and then made whatever possum life that followed, which I'm sure wasn't easy. Is this what it takes to live sometimes? Digging into a pouch, tossing, rummaging, tossing, and running? Leaving what you love three feet apart? Our own nature can pull us so easily to a horror like this. To throwing to the ground as we flee who we were.

...I was beginning to navigate some of that desire for Simon, which was a quality of loss, as I understand all desire, or rather all the desire I have known. That my want for another body arrived first, with the knowledge that it could not be. Maybe this is what binds the family of men together. The desire for the top and the lack of a top. A torque of specificity and hope.