“Are these nymphomaniacs virgins?” (105)
The drunks are all dry and the can’t get is all lead out. So I thought almost every day about the new attitude I was trying on; there was the success I was still having treading water and walking that thin line: if my lead would stop breaking I might actually complete one of these ill formed sentences. Blake said he could write his way out of anything—even a wet paperback. Well, he sort of implied as much anyway. No I’m trying to write my way into something even softer and easier to penetrate. What of the nymphomaniacal virgins—what of the squeamish surgeons—or just the way the med school students all wave to me not realizing that I’m an outsider? I somehow managed to find my way to the library—in spite of the fact that all the signs had been changed—it was me they had in mind when they changed them. There is often a nauseating quality to mushfaking, that is, trying to fit in and succeeding, or just imagining success. It is bittersweet and, forgive the plural pronoun, “so vertiginous it unhinges us” (ibid.). There we are—it is only me really—but there we are in and unhinged. Ready and giddy for a pat on the back or a wink or a helping hand. I sat there for hours nibbling on my chocolate chips—bittersweet—and reading Fanon. So sweet and bitter, to linger long with my fingers on the hardwood desks and my ass in the cushioned seats not made for me.
--Quotations from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox.
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