There's A Reason Why Trainspotters Are Not

It's The Strangest Thing About Being Human: To Know So Much, To Communicate So Much, And Yet Always To Fall So Drastically Short Of Clarity, To Be, In The End, So Isolate And Inadequate. Even When People Try To Say Things, They Say Them Poorly Or Obliquely, Or They Outright Lie, Sometimes Because They're Lying To You, But As Often Because They're Lying To Themselves.

We Live In A Funny Time, A Funny Era, When Desire, To Be Adult Desire, Has To Be Conceived As Sexual. And That Didn't Used To Be The Case. Sexuality Is A Social Construction As Much As Anything Else And I Think The Realities Of Sexuality Don't Always Fit Into The Social Constructions That We Have, And We Live In A Goal-oriented Time - On All Fronts.

There's A Reason Why Trainspotters Are Not Girls, There's A Reason Why There's The Myth Of The Slightly Autistic Male Genius, There's A Reason Why Gertrude Stein Believed That Her Self-presentation Was Male. One Could Argue That Was Susan Sontag Also. The Things That We Associate With Femaleness Are Not The Single-minded, Exclusive Pursuit Of A Vocation, Whether It Be Art Or Anything Else. It Is Not A Model That Is Widespread In Our Culture, It's Not Something We Think Of For Women.

I Was Funny -- Ha-ha, Not Peculiar. It Was A Modest Currency, Like Pennies: Pedestrian, Somewhat Laborious, But A Currency Nonetheless. I Was Funny, In Public, Most Often At My Own Expense.

There Questions Of Wanting To Be An Artist, And What Does That Mean, What Makes You An Artist? Are You An Artist If You're In A Gallery In New York And Not An Artist If You're Doing It At Home? Do You Need Legitimation To Count? If You've Been Acculturated To Believe That You Have Certain Obligations - Familial, Social, Human - If Multitasking Has Been Your Forte And That's What's Been Praised And Rewarded, Where Do You Find The Single-mindedness, The Selfishness To Do Something Like Art? I Think Those Are Questions That Arise Differently For Women And For Men.