Today for no particular reason I kept thinking about a book I loved in college, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, and so I wanted to use the posting this week to search around and find what kinds of work have been done with it of late. I landed on this piece by Jonathan Kemp, which looks at the book as a representation of a particular way of queering time. He talks about Lyotard’s concept of radical timelessness, wherein the unconscious/libidinal is insistently resistant to formations of time created with language. Kemp specifically looks at narrative representations of masturbation as attempts to engage with a queer, unstable state of timelessness, and Our Lady of the Flowers is one of his chief texts. Kemp doesn’t mention this, but if anyone is interested in this constellation of ideas, another fantastic thing to look at is a strange & wonderful thing Wayne assigned in his seminar last semester: a book called In the Deep by Pierre Guyotat.