You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death, and Transition

by Chase Joynt, Mike Hoolboom

Overview

YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive.

The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolve. Man and woman. Queer and straight.

What if it's not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call ‘second lives’: Chase’s transition from female to male and Mike’s near-death from AIDS.

Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might mean to find love and hope through conversation across generations.

'Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one’s life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I’m so glad they have each other, and that we have this.'
– Maggie Nelson

‘Despite its complexity, the book is refreshingly clear, direct, and elegant, and pleasingly consistent in tone despite its shared authorship ... This is an ode to friendship that is as beautiful as it is revelatory.’
- Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire

'You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in 'second lives' when all past expectations have been foreclosed.'
– Chris Kraus

'The writing is out of the park — strong and surprising, a relay race of brilliant twirling, tossing thoughts back and forth like balletic rugby bros. Joynt and Hoolboom’s dances of disclosure are so courageous and generative, gifts to us all.'
– John Greyson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552453315
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Exploded Views
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Mike Hoolboom: Mike Hoolboom is an author and filmmaker based in Toronto. He has written four books, received more than thirty international prizes, and enjoyed nine international retrospectives of his work.

Chase Joynt: Chase Joynt is a Toronto-based moving-image artist and writer who has exhibited his work internationally. He recently received a Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the University of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 1:

The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolved. Man and woman. Queer and straight. Only we have two bodies now, the one that gathers sensations and the other one that archives the records. Is it too terrible to admit that we prefer the record, that we find it more reassuring, even more erotic?

In this moment we write about love, and this love was not different from the revolutions that had flourished and died and lived on in the bodies of those who had become us. Shopping was a form of voting, and love was a way to topple the state, or at least budge the inner states that had held us in thrall for too long. For how many years had we wanted only to come to the end, to finish with it all, to close the book. With a startling suddenness that could not be separated from violence, we could hardly wait to get started.

Table of Contents

0.0 Orly
0.1 First Date
0.2 Ease
0.3 Packaging
0.4 First Kiss
0.5 No Man’s Land
0.6 Father
0.7 Akin
0.8 Fear
0.9 Love Letters
0.10 Pusher
1.0 Festival
1.1 Second Life
1.2 Looking
1.3 Inside Out
1.4 Beards
1.5 Serena
1.6 Relational Autopsy
1.7 Screens
1.8 Passing On
1.9 Archive
2.0 Café of Silence
2.1 Funeral
2.2 Mark
2.3 How Could You Ever Leave Me?
2.4 Imperfect
2.5 Tears
2.6 How to Make a Couple
2.7 Pride
2.8 Secrets
2.9 Leaving Home
2.10 Forced Out
2.11 Duty and Profit
2.12 Dirty Penny Drop
2.13 Tied Up
2.14 Love
2.15 Curtain Call
2.16 Postscript

Editorial Reviews

"Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one’s life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I’m so glad they have each other, and that we have this."
– Maggie Nelson

"Meeting at an impromptu gathering at Orly Airport on the day of Chris Marker's death, Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom embark on an extended correspondence inspired by their affinity with the filmmaker. Over time, the two correspondents will investigate the thrill of discovered affinities, most especially their own. You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in 'second lives' when all past expectations have been foreclosed."
– Chris Kraus

"What a wondrous, shimmering, piquant concoction of tales and tails and herds and heads. By tails, I mean all the wagging bits of bodies that Joynt and Hoolboom so courageously put on the line. By herds, I mean all the communities with whom they so gracefully graze. By tales, I mean the way they trouble memories. Stories are never simply recounted, but instead, offered as queries and question marks and interrobangs for all of us to worry over like bones. Most of all, such heads! The writing is out of the park — strong and surprising, a relay race of brilliant twirling, tossing thoughts back and forth like balletic rugby bros. Joynt and Hoolboom’s dances of disclosure are so courageous and generative, gifts to us all."
– John Greyson

From the Publisher