Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

Hip hop uses samples as material from which to make art, whereas rock uses covers to foreground identity, performance itself the art.

He realized now he could hardly take a backpack into a leather bar, so he rifled through the contents and extracted only the paperback copy of Discipline and Punish he was reading for school. He could fit it in his pocket, and any guy who saw it would assume it was porn.

Paul chopped his pile of carrots carefully, languishing in the sad earnestness of the woman who was driving away from something upsetting in a fast car, the one who was closer to being fine, the one for whom life was like a brook, and all the others, those amber divas of lesbian melancholy so different from his gayboy ideas of women who were every woman, women for whom no mountain was too high, women who remembered the ways things were.

Cool was relational and conceptual; cool took work, cool was a meritocracy which, with all its flaws, he still preferred to the aristocracy of genetics.

There was something a little faggy about someone who made a point to identify as a top, instead of just being a top.