Tag: queer

A Map of Desire: Thomas Dai’s Take My Name but Say It Slow: Essays

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Posted on by editor
Cover of Thomas Dai's Take My Name But Say it Slow

In Thomas Dai’s essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow (288 pages; Norton), Dai crafts deeply contemplative meditations on growing up Chinese American and navigating queer identity. The diptych of parallel reminisces that composes pieces such as “Running Days” and “Driving Days” evokes calm summers in Wenzhou made meaningful by his grandparents’ steady presence, as well as the particularities of traveling alone as an MFA student, styling himself after butterfly-lover Vladimir Nabokov and gay photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. Dai’s astute observations about identity fold back on themselves in Eastern-inflected asides on Chinese philosophy and nonbeing, and through nostalgic […]

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Obsessions: Our Solitary Fancy

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Who wasn’t obsessed by the Beat Generation in high school? Okay, it was just unbearable punks like me. In Jack Kerouac, I saw a reflection of my ineloquent angst. I used to be able to recite entire paragraphs of On the Road, but I’ve since blocked all of it from my memory. I was particularly interested in Allen Ginsberg because, like me, he was unpretentiously pretentious—or at least we both tried to be. He might allude to a Greek myth in a poem written on acid. A surfer boy reeking of weed, I used polysyllables that made my classmates’ eyes […]

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An Evolution Beyond Gender in the Wild West: Cutting Ball Theater’s ‘Sidewinder’

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For the world premiere of Basil Kreimendahl’s hilarious and tenderhearted play Sidewinders (directed by M. Graham Smith), the Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco has flipped its performance space, arranging the stands of chairs so the stage is deeper than it is wide. Papier mache clouds hang from the ceiling, casting shadows on the clouds painted on the walls, creating an illusion of depth (lighting design by Heather Basarab). The stage seems to open up in front of us on three sides. The set, designed by Michael Locher, is dotted with sandy colored, flat-topped stumps, like desert mesas in miniature. […]

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