Image: The cover art is made with crayons on grey paper. There are splashes of colour—pink, red, orange, yellow, even a little purple in the corner—like leaves falling in autumn. Along the left edge, white letters in a sans serif font say ‘Gary in your pocket’.
In reading lists, as in everything else in life, there is a hierarchy. Lowest are the books that merely scratch your skin, which leave a sting of curiosity, an itch that might heal on its own. Other books are pressing, urgent wounds, the kind you buy immediately and read in one sitting.
Then there are merciless fiends in book-shape, that ambush you in the dark, tearing away flesh, ripping out organs, until you’re reeling, you’re incomplete, you cannot think of anything else until you devour the book, satisfy that very specific hunger. But the cavern refuses to be filled. The book is lost to time, or worse, it exists but at a distance—Sapho’s lost verses, an out-of-print novel from your dad’s childhood, an untranslated story in a language you do not know.
Gary in Your Pocket is a book like that. Introduced to me as ‘riveting writings on race and sexual submission’, this is a collection of journals, stories and poems written by Gary Fisher, a gay African American man (and one of Eve Sedgwick’s students), who died young and unpublished of an AIDS-related illness.
There was no e-book made, or I’d have found it already. I was prepared to buy a physical copy, but it was ₹3200 on Amazon (free shipping though!), and anyway, I couldn’t possibly explain the appearance of a mystery parcel containing an even more mysterious book.
So unless I hop continents to visit the archives in person, or suddenly acquire a private address and a lot of money, I’m never going to read this precious book.
What fun.
—
I like recording, re-tracing the path that led me to a book. Sometimes it is broad and obvious (I’d read any book by my favourite authors or in my favourite series). Sometimes it is more complicated (and thus exciting). Curiosity leads me down unfamiliar roads, I’m never sure if I’m going to find the love of my life or a disappointment. So it was for this book.
I read extracts of Gary in Your Pocket on Google books, because
Ellis Hanson said it was about race and sexual submission, and I was reading his paper because
I was trying to understand Reparative reading, because
I was writing to Akashleena about Sedgwick and enlivening theory and the hermeneutics of suspicion, because
I struggled through the introduction to Novel Gazing, because
Michael Broder mentioned Sedgwick’s essay in the context of reparation and healing gay shame, because
He was writing about kink and poetry for The Rumpus, which I was reading because
The Rumpus has a section called ‘(K)ink: Writing While Deviant’, which I discovered because
I was looking through their archives trying to see if I could pitch an essay for them, because
I clicked on a link to Notable Online events in the week of 26 July to 1 August, because
I found them on Twitter and I liked their name, because
I was looking for new websites and editors and opportunities while procrastinating on Twitter.
This is a story in itself.
—
This is the first sentence of Italian writer Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
This novel is a genre unto itself. It’s really a series of intriguing first chapters interspersed with the adventures of two readers trying to find the missing bits (I wonder why that sounds familiar). Anyway, Calvino goes on to write (emphasis mine):
You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book
Well, I said to myself, if I can’t read the book, I can at least read around it. I can read the Introduction and the sample pages and all the commentaries. The final list of sources, after an afternoon’s worth of searching, was frustratingly small:
The official meta-data on the Duke University Press website
The few tantalising extracts on Google Books (Pages displayed by permission of Duke University Press)
Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (José Esteban Muñoz)
Catalogue of the Gary Fisher Collection at the Gay and Lesbian Center, San Francisco Public Library
The first page of The Future's Eve: Reparative Reading after Sedgwick (Ellis Hanson)
Sedgwick’s introduction to Novel Gazing
Still, better than nothing.
—
The Google Books extracts are miserly, but they did let me read six or so stories and poems (albeit with some missing pages). Never have I fallen in love with a book faster.
In prose that is maddeningly beautiful, Gary Fisher’s stories are as transgressive, and as titillating, as Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Moral Girl. With a talent for provoking raw emotion and drawing out the erotics, he pins familiar feelings like butterflies onto parchment paper. He pays careful attention to the social kaleidoscope of tiny gestures that draw us together and drive us apart, he creates fierce intimacy with the characters. Even his poetry is unforgettable (and also has a sense of humour). Do you know how hard it is for me to love poetry?
—
It was only natural that his works would be controversial. After all, here was a young African American gay man who openly engaged with the 'erotics of racial humiliation and other pleasure-giving forms of sexual debasement'.
It is very easy to slip into a paranoid reading of ‘s/m as racist pathology or false consciousness’ or any number of alarming interpretations informed by the hermeneutics of suspicion. Instead, Sedgwick invites a reparative reading; Ellis Hanson takes up the challenge. In his abstract, he promises to question the ‘incapacity of paranoid readings to account for the very queer pleasures they ostensibly seek to enable’ [I wouldn’t know if he succeeds—I can’t afford that paper either].
—
I know very little about Gary—a little biography, the tragedy of his death, his controversial sexual desires. I shuffle through my litany of facts. He was born on June 19, 1961. Today he’d have been 59 years, 3 months, 4 weeks, and 2 days old. He was 32 when he died. Duke University classifies his work as fiction, under LGBTQ Studies, Literature and Literary Studies, under African American Studies and Black Diaspora, Gender and Sexuality.
In his introduction to Gary in Your Pocket, Don Belton writes that Gary Fisher had developed ‘an internal sense of himself as a writer with little external affirmation of his practice’. He had been writing since he was an undergraduate student, and had circulated some pieces among his small circle of friends, but had never been published. Fisher wrote in a letter to Belton, "A couple of months ago I got very sick and a weird sense of urgency possessed me and my writing. I want to get this stuff in a book."
How horrible it is that he never got to see his work in print. When his prose dazzles like it does, why didn’t he get to write until he was ninety? If he were alive, I’d have written him a fan letter and begged him to publish more. How unfair that his stories have been buried in some far-away, forgotten corner for two decades, deprived of the necessary communion with readers! Isn’t it a pity his works live on in obscurity, that his stories are not pirated and photocopied and spoken about in classrooms and bedrooms?
—
I discovered the catalogue of the Gary Fisher Collection and read it through, looking for clues in the sterile lists of papers and files.
All his notebooks were so different—Light-blue bound composition book in ‘89, Mead marbled bound composition book (black and white) in ‘93, a red notebook, spiral bound at top, labelled ‘ideas...’, and many, many more.
He wrote a journal (like me) for sixteen years, maybe more. I haven’t read any of it yet, but the knowledge that his diaries exist somewhere is electrifying. What secrets would he have written about? Did he expect, perhaps, that one day his papers would be made available to the public? Did he look forward to that prospect? Did he think he was worthy? (What will they do with my journals, which I categorise and archive so neatly?)
It seems he journaled about everything (a dream, story ideas, travel memories, hospital journal, long pages of music lists, anecdotes, teaching notes, shopping lists, class notes, little vignettes, illness, living and dying, notes for a zine, loose pages of notes w paragraph of story in blue ink, also notes on medieval and renaissance authors, handouts, poem and story critique, notes on characters, lyrics, essays, list of students` papers and grades), and included ‘everything from ticket stubs for events he attended, to copies of the sex ads he placed in gay magazines and newspapers…bday card from co-workers’.
There’s a list of his stories and poems, little two or three word titles that make me yearn. What happened at ‘Corner-Store’? Who was the ‘Flower Lady’? What were the ‘Several Lies About Mom’?
Why does it please me so, to learn that he kept all his notes and drafts of stories and poems? Is it because I see myself hoarding all my old versions, for the pleasure of seeing how they changed? The catalogue mentions some stories (Red Cream Soda, Tawny, The Villains of Necessity and Walt) which he wrote and re-wrote over several years. I’m immediately curious. How did the stories change? What made him return to them? I want to read them too, if they mattered so much to him.
He used to draw too (like me!). There are some ‘interesting drawings’ in conte crayon and pastels in his notebooks. But what did he draw? Himself? Still life? His lovers? The catalogue doesn’t say.
There are Polaroid photographs! Was he photogenic? Did he take pictures of random windows? I need to know! I want to know what he looks like. Don Bolton (who also never met him in person) describes Fisher in a photo like this: "He looked as I imagined him, a beautiful brown man with startled eyes and a flowerlike mouth, indrawn, quizzical. He was seated, with a satiated look, in Eve's living room, his head inclined in an attitude of listening. He was, Eve told me, listening to a Dionne Warwick record."
I’m so hungry, a list of his works stands in for the substance (isn’t it silly?). I want to see everything, the writings, the ‘small amount of photographs, correspondence and ephemera’. It’s rude to be so tantalising!
I day-dream about requesting a visitor’s card at the San Francisco Public Library and going up (I’d take the stairs) to the third floor, where the Gary Fisher collection is housed in the Gay and Lesbian Center. There’ll be a long line at the scanning machines, of course, but I won’t mind. I’d be beaming like an idiot because I’d be holding his entire archives in my hands.
—
Like the readers in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, I puzzle my way through the excerpts in the Google Books preview—endings without beginnings, set-ups without climaxes, and always, always cut off in the most infuriating places. I want to own the stories, I want to know how they end. I come close, but not close enough. What a difference two missing pages make in a short story!
Sometimes there is a complete poem. Frequently there’s a little banner that reads ‘Pages X to X are not shown in this preview’. It feels like I’m gratefully putting together the surviving scraps of an ancient manuscript. If this were not so frustrating, I’d find it funny, this real-life post-modern nightmare.
In Google books, if you hover the cursor above the words on the page, it turns into a tiny white-gloved hand. If you click, the hand closes into a fist, and you can drag the page up and down. I haven’t seen one of these hand cursors in a long time, so I stop to play with it. Click—I’m grabbing at the words. Release—I can’t have the words. Click. Release. Mine. Not mine.
In her introduction to If not, Winter, a collection of Sapho’s surviving works, Anne Carson writes:
So far we have looked at examples of citation without context. Still more haunting are instances of context without citation.
…
Some song of Sappho's that Solon heard sung by a boy is mentioned in an anecdote of Stobaios but Stobaios omits to tell us what song it was:
Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho's over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why he said, So that I may learn it then die. —Stobaios Florilegium 3.29.58
Some shrewd thinking of Sappho's about death is paraphrased by Aristotle:
Sappho says that to die is evil: so the gods judge. For they do not die. —Aristotle Rhetoric 1398b = Sappho fr. 201 Voigt
As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write—but they cannot be called texts of Sappho's and so they are not included in this translation.
And so, piece by piece I assemble a negative picture of the man and his inner life—it is incomplete but legible, like seeing an invisible man in the outline of rain drops bouncing off his invisible wet skin.
This is circling the book, reading around it, about it, behind it. What happens when I’ve read all the reviews [the ones that are free anyway], but not the book itself? Can I understand the book with just the reviews? Can I understand the reviews without the book?
When I was a child, I had a picture book with slits in the pages, so that with care, a paper dog attached to a glossy red ribbon could be threaded through the slits to visit all the other animals in the farm. Precisely because of these holes in the text, the characters in Fisher’s stories and poems can defy boundaries and intermingle. The couple ignoring the cat in their throes of pleasure (in ‘a cat poem’) may well be the men avoiding each other in the club after ‘good sex’ (in ‘Walking’), or (and) the two Gregs, one white, one black (in ‘Picaro’). Who’s to say?
Like in any good post-modern novel, these fragments coalesce into something else entirely, because they must, how could we not assign meaning to coincidences? By displaying only a few select pages, Google Books has accidentally created large-scale black-out poetry.
Was this a good idea? Perhaps. It certainly was a unique experience, a kind of experimental reading. Don’t get me wrong—I’m already saving up to buy the book for real—but there is a magic in giving up control, in accepting that some paragraphs won’t make sense, and then welding together the rough edges anyway.
—
Scrolling through the book for the third time today, I stumbled upon a photograph of Fisher on the back cover (how did I not see it before?). He's leaning back, head tilted, eyes half closed. A wide grin lights up his beautiful brown face. He is photogenic!
Image: Book cover, Duke University Press
Gary (Not) in Your Pocket
Ah! There were a lot of lines which captured my attention but this one really stands out - "but there is a magic in giving up control, in accepting that some paragraphs won’t make sense, and then welding together the rough edges anyway". Something very similar to your past works as well on satisfyingly thrilling or even thinking for yourself. The process of experimental reading made me be a part of your journey of unravelling Gary Fisher which I believe is an unfinished project. I think Gary would have been glad to see someone out there willing to wipe the dust away on the books in the corner, be a part of the journey undertaken and more than anything feel such a vast myriad of emotions. I am still navigating my way through hermeneutics of suspicion in my defence, it shall help you understand why copies of Gary Fisher were not circulated or pirated in classrooms. But there is a magic in acceptance and embracing as well. Thanks for letting us be a part of this process, I loved seeing you smile at the poems or even frown at the reasons we do not talk much about Gary.