#i want to party with zosia so hard it makes me look stupid

[chicago-geniza]

Stefania says this too and she connects it to fashion history, saying the lush, elaborate, curve-exaggerating and almost baroque-rococco styles that inhibited movement were impractical for anything but posing for portraits and appearing decorative--the End of Empire styles--were one form of objectification (pure passivity and sexual receptivity, a tabula rasa onto which fantasies can be projected), while the androgynous, shapeless fashions of the ‘20s that favored a lanky, emaciated silhouette sans secondary sex characteristics were not as liberatory as they purported to be. If you imagine the binary as “madonna/whore,” sure, at first they look like an escape from the paradigm, but they’re not--it’s just asexuality and denial of femininity in order to achieve one’s desired ends, i.e., emancipation, the franchise, “pelne zycie,” the whole equality-equity civil rights shebang, under the law and under contract and under one’s household roof and under the sheets, so to speak. But of COURSE Stefania would have been reading Weininger too, and I can’t believe I didn’t make this connection--!!!

[chicago-geniza]

Zofia Nalkowska writing about her goal to “awaken the woman inside herself” like an item on a to-do list explicitly in terms of literary archetype by reference to narrative tropes and a month later dutifully recording in her diary “ok, successfully awakened the woman in myself” is the most relatable thing i’ve ever read about my past experiences approaching Gender from my present position as an autistic transmasc butch

[chicago-geniza]

Zosia and Stefania were not close friends but they got along very well and took the time to catch up--often on long phone calls or conversations over coffee, and they frequented the theater, the opera, etc.--and what Zosia notes in her diary is that she always appreciates Stefania’s intelligence (commentary on literature, on art, on politics), insight, and especially her incisive humor about their milieu (people’s seeming inability to reconcile the mutual exclusivity of conduct and stated principles; cliquishness; investment in various -isms or schools of thought for reasons of drive and desire, but feeling compelled to justify their investment post-facto with specious/spurious and inconsistent ideological claims to justify their desires from a faux-objective, pseudo-rational standpoint, really just a lot of pompousness and cliquishness and sexism, etc. and both Zosia and Stefania had a way of looking at the world that mapped onto art and was dynamic rather than static, that adapted to changing conditions rather than forcing the world into the periscope eye of one’s preferred aesthetic theory, the legend of the age that will build the future). Tl;dr reading this now and I can see it very clearly, they have EXTREMELY similar personalities except Zosia had a steel fucking core and Stefania was. Deeply insecure lol

[chicago-geniza]

for real though that Zosia quote--"Całowałam się z utrzymanką właściciela pralni, gdzie szklanką piłam najprostszą wódkę"--is going to be rattling around in my skull on my deathbed alongside the quote from that Russian reality TV star who answered a yellow press interviewer’s question about future plans with "переспать с женщиной, отбелить анус"

I read it in 2014 or 2015 and I still remember it almost daily. If you do not read Russian that is “sleep with a woman, bleach my ass” lmao

And we have Zosia like “I made out with the sugar baby of the guy who runs the laundromat* where I drank gutrot samogon house vodka straight from a glass”

*I didn’t have access to the whole letter or the whole story, in context she could also mean like a money laundering front and by the tone it sounds like that’s what it is, either she’s being derogatory about a shitty bar or she’s saying fuckery is afoot if the business is making bank enough to utrzymac a woman and he’s serving bottom-shelf bathtub booze in a basic ol’ glass 

[chicago-geniza]

Anyway here is the Queer dot pl profile on my friend Zosia. I think Krzysztof Tomasik writes the Wielcy i niezapomniani series and like. What if I just wrote a blog post about Stefania and Jelonka and pitched it to him. What if I did that. Soft launch my project. Make the second-wave feminists grumble and groan like Milosz who got very Old Man Yells At Cloud about homoeroticism entering literary criticism in the 90s-- “women can’t be affection with each other any more, men can’t have deep emotional bonds, everyone reads perverted icky Gay Sex into it, that’s shallow reading and moreover it makes me feel Personally Uncomfortable.” (I love when people call anything that makes them uncomfortable a lack of nuance as though queer readings are not founded precisely upon a recognition of nuance, reading through nuance, an exegetical practice that begins at derash in order to swim back up to the surface and rediscover the “gesto zaszyfrowane,” as someone put it earlier, intertextual web that shimmers in and out of sight over superficial things like Plot & Story, gd, Czeslaw.) Ok please read about Nalkowska, I am really into her today because I just got a book about her diaries and now need to obtain...the rest of her diaries

[chicago-geniza]

Polish tabloid headlines about long-dead literati are my favorite thing but I can't decide what's funnier here: labeling Bruno Schulz as Boguslaw Kuczynski, or ignoring the fact that her unmarried status post-divorce was a conscious choice, while calling Shocked & Awed attention to her promiscuity (she fucked over fifty! men!) while also ignoring that she was flamingly bisexual. If you’re going to go for the prurient interest angle you might as well go whole hog. 

„(…) Zaczęła się najciekawsza epoczka. (…) Włóczyliśmy się całe noce po różnych spelunkach. Całowałam się z utrzymanką właściciela pralni, gdzie szklanką piłam najprostszą wódkę.”--Zofia Nalkowska, letter to Zofia Villaume, also a sentence phrase I will never stop quoting until I drop dead