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Oliver

If I Could Turn Back Time… and Turn Into Cher

by Oliver on March 5, 2012

Snap out of it!

One of the most fun parts for me about coming out as trans has been feeling like I have space to be as flamboyant as I want to be without worrying about being misread. Right now I’m really into painting my toenails and wearing eye glitter. Since I’m not on T, at first I thought it would be hard to do these things and still be intelligible as trans, but then I was like, fuck it, I’m just doing it. I feel lucky to have friends and lovers who get my complicated gender. [Read full post...]

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[OLIVERblog] In defense of emoticons :-P

by Oliver on January 30, 2012

:-D

This week, I’m taking up the hot topic that’s been on everyone’s minds: EMOTICONS. Emoticons have developed a bad rap in our post-adolescent, post-AOL life. I’m guilty of it, too—I have a clause in my syllabus that actively discourages my students from using emoticons in their written feedback on each other’s writing. You know, to avoid responses that say nothing more than: “I liked this! ”

But here’s another thing I’m guilty of: using emoticons, and loving it.

;-d

I would like to make a case for the idiosyncratic and impassioned use of emoticons. They remind us—even as we type disembodied words into a computer—that there’s a face on the other end, and a face on our end. A face in front of a brain connected to a body powered by a heart. I would like to take up emoticons in a Haraway fashion—because of how they trouble and add pleasure to the blurry boundaries between human and machine. What could be more fun than representing our mood or facial expression with punctuation marks and letters? It’s like a nerd’s dream, having such a shorthand icon for emotion. Why wouldn’t we use them?

[Read full post...]

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PARIAH: Live-blogging a queer artsy outing

by Oliver January 13, 2012

PARIAH is a 2011 contemporary drama film written and directed by Dee Rees. It tells the story of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year old African–American teenager embracing her identity as a lesbian. It premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Excellence in Cinematography Award. 5:20 pm: I get dressed. Brown boots [...]

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I Am The Least Difficult of Men

by Oliver December 29, 2011

All I want is boundless love. -Frank O’Hara There are so many things I wanted to write about this week. As if on cue, someone I follow on Twitter shared this Maud Newton quote a few moments ago: “I don’t think of it as procrastination. I think of it as allowing my work to accumulate [...]

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How I Conquered My Stage Fright and Learned to Love the Front of the Classroom

by Oliver December 21, 2011

Now that I have one semester of teaching under my belt, I’m convinced of one thing: teaching is performing. I remember being so anxious my first, second, third time standing in front of the classroom of sophomores. I had a script and didn’t veer from it; I was convinced my voice noticeably shook; I was [...]

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[OLIVERblog] How to navigate winter like a true ninja

by Oliver December 5, 2011

Gentle men and seahorses, winter is upon us! As someone who has spent almost a quarter-century of winters in the upper Midwest, I thought I’d share some of the methods I’ve developed to stay warm and happy while the elements do their thing. Pro Tip #1: Set your binder on the radiator …for a minute [...]

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[OLVERblog] PLAYING IT BY EAR

by Oliver November 18, 2011

As I walked into my classroom this week to teach, one of my students—a slam poet—was performing, or “slamming,” the syllabus. One of her classmates had asked her about slam, and so to demonstrate, she passionately performed the course description—not the most inspiring of material, I’ll admit: “Because we will cover both fiction and poetry…this [...]

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[OLIVERblog] Queering Halloween

by Oliver November 4, 2011

In Madison, Halloween is a big deal. The main pedestrian street closes off to traffic for an annual block party called Freakfest. It’s a pretty raucous event, though not as much as it used to be (about ten years ago, police donned riot gear and used tear gas against a crowd of 65,000). These days, [...]

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Trip to the… whichroom?

by Oliver October 20, 2011

I realize I’m not the first trans person to write about bathrooms; nor will I be the last. But readers, I have news to share! For the first time this past week, I used the men’s bathroom on campus. Sure, I’ve used single-stall men’s rooms before. But this time we’re talking multi-stall, urinals, the real [...]

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[OLIVERblog] Breaking the rules

by Oliver October 6, 2011

Surrounded as I am by fellow poets, it’s easy to forget that for most of the world, poetry is baffling and irrelevant. That’s because when most people hear “poetry,” they think of dense, rhyming, buttoned-up stuff. Like Milton’s Paradise Lost: Say first, for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first [...]