Posts by Jay Sennett
Friday, May 17, 2013 2 Comments

On Rejection and Moby-Dick, Expanded

(artwork found here)

Rejection and Moby-Dick seem to have little in common,unless we discuss how many of us in high school rejected reading Melville’s masterpiece. I did.

But I have had cause to read (not re-read because I never got past the first three pages in high school!) Moby-Dick. Day before yesterday I finished reading Tom McCarthy’s C. A book without much plot nor character development, it is a meditation on technology and mourning and the meaning of meaning. McCarthy is a confident, compelling linguistic virtuoso.

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Wednesday, May 15, 2013 No comments

An actor’s voice can be the most distinctive thing about them, whether that of Marilyn Monroe – which was variously compared to “cotton candy, smoke, wind, lollipops and velvet”, “champagne lava” and “the slow folding and unfolding of a pink cashmere sweater” – or the strange transatlantic locution of Cary Grant, neither quite English nor quite American, but from some strange place in the middle where men in top hats did backflips and leopards interrupted your golf game.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 3 Comments

Hovering at the Edge of Consciousness

I have been writing about my grandfather’s murder and male privilege and having male privilege in a female body and also fearing men. Hovering at the edge of my consciousness is something, something I can’t quite grasp. Phrases like “women experience daily living like a war zone” and “I remember the first time I felt a penis used like a weapon” appear in these pages and elsewhere. Yet I inhabit a female body. Male privilege is both mine and not mine. Has a man lost his privilege when he is stalked, attacked and raped by another man? Does he ever lose it in relation to a woman?

Is the ineffability I now experience a fault of my mine as a writer or is it simply that I have reached the edges of how I can conceptualize myself as a man? Will I ever find the words to describe my apprehensions of my time in this world?