Now and Rome

Moving

2010-07-13T06:41:00.000-07:00

I'm moving to WordPress. You can find posts from July 2010 onwards here.

omg look it's real

2010-06-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

It's like a real book! Only more expensive!

Where homophobia and transphobia meet

2010-05-27T03:42:00.000-07:00

is a bad, bad place to be.

This is a quick post to link to this very good analysis of the reportage on the Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza case, in Malawi, which has been all over the Western press lately. Ms Chimbalanga is female-identified and in a relationship with Steven Monjeza: they held an engagement ceremony in December 2009, and have been found guilty of 'performing unnatural acts and gross indecency' and sentenced to 14 years in prison with hard labour. The courts are proceeding on the basis that Ms Chimbalanga is male and that her relationship with Mr Monjeza is therefore homosexual. The Western press is also reporting the case as if Ms Chimbalanga was a man, and as if the only issue here were the right to same-sex relationships (and, in particular, same-sex marriage). This means that a whole dimension of the suffering and mistreatment that Ms Chimbalanga is going through - her being persistently misgendered as male and subject to invasive procedures to establish her biological sex - is being erased by the Western press, in order to make the predicament of this couple fit more neatly into our current obsession with the right to same-sex marriage.

Help me write my paper

2010-05-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing my paper for this conference (which is going to be so great, you guys), and in all seriousness, I would like your answers to this question: why is Dante in The Divine Comedy not a Mary-Sue?

Here's a bit of the Inferno:

And so I saw together that excellent school
Of those who are masters of exalted song
Which, like an eagle, flies above the others.

When they had talked together a little while,
They turned towards me with signs of recognition;
And my master smiled to see them do so.

And then, they did me a still greater honour;
They took me as a member of their company,
So that I was a sixth among those great intellects.

So we went on in the direction of the light,
Talking of things of which it is well to say nothing,
Although it was well to talk of them at the time. (Inf.4.94-105: trans. Sisson in the Oxford World's Classics edition)

Here's the start and end of the original Mary-Sue story:

‘Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky,’ thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise. ‘Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet - only fifteen and a half years old.’ Captain Kirk came up to her.
‘Oh, Lieutenant, I love you madly.'

... In the Sick Bay as she breathed her last, she was surrounded by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott, all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness.

Any and all answers welcome. If you don't want to make up a google account just to comment here, drop me an email - you can find my work email really easily from the contact directory at Bristol uni, or via my staff page.

not dead

2010-04-28T05:06:00.000-07:00

Hello! Sorry, finishing the book wiped me out for... blimey, three months. Eek. And I'm still not back - I'm marking - but I just read a post on Ballastexistenz I really wanted to link to. It's here, and it's about art and creativity and rules and elitism, but in particular, for me, it's about teaching and learning. I'm teaching languages at the moment* (in fact, I should be marking language tests right now), and the comment about language teaching resonated with me, because I'm trying to figure out - at the moment, and always - how to figure out the balance between rules-based, rote-learning stuff and just going in and reading and making stuff up. The balance between perfectionism and just-give-it-a-go-ism, I guess. (I posted about similar stuff before.)

But the thing I really wanted to repost, and to pass on to my students and indeed to everyone I ever meet, is this, again from a comment on the post:

A lot of my fear about this stuff came from being taught the only way to do things was a way I couldn’t do.

Which rings so many bells with me, in relation to students having an idea that you have to write essays by mind-mapping, then planning, then redrafting, or that you have to state a thesis, then a contrary point of view, then put your own point of view in the end. What gets lost is a sort of messiness and creativity, a sense that the essay is theirs and that they can just jump in and see what works for them. Or, as Amanda Baggs goes on to say in the same comment:

I’ve become a lot more relaxed since I started painting lots of cats. Because at least even the worst ones were done in a way that suited me and not the way people taught me.

*I should say that I teach Latin, and I don't have any active language skills in Latin (though there is a conversational Latin group at my university), so I'm only talking about reading here.

fugitivus

2010-02-16T05:40:00.001-08:00

I guess this explains why Fugitivus has gone all password-protecty, but you know what it doesn't explain? It doesn't explain what I'm going to do without Harriet.

Woe.

(Let this serve as a reminder that I want at some point to do brief introductions to all those blogs over there in the sidebar. But wow, finishing a book leaves you with a backlog--)

it's not finished... it's finished

2010-02-10T01:22:00.000-08:00

so the last few days have been very like this (link goes to YouTube video), especially from 1:26: It's not finished.... It's finished, but yesterday I printed it off and emailed it to the publishers. and given how strict their 'guidelines to authors' are about not making changes after submission, I guess... it's finished?

PS: There is not really going to be an author photo, I lied. Sorry.

here goes

2010-01-29T05:44:00.000-08:00

here's what our calendar looks like today:

Going in to the library now with my laptop, my data stick, and my Giant List Of Things To Look Up In The Oxford Latin Dictionary (and elsewhere). By the time I come home again, the book should be f... f... fin....

... no, I can't say it.

(What do you think of this for the author photo?)

marginalia

2010-01-27T10:55:00.000-08:00

I love some good marginalia, me. Even when it was me that wrote them, ages ago, and then forgot.

Heidegger: We say that an equipmental contexture environs us.

me [in margin]: Do we indeed Martin

(But honestly, though. Honestly. An equipmental contexture environs us, indeed. Maybe it's better in German.)

you know what?

2010-01-23T05:41:00.000-08:00

The Aeneid is really good. Just really good. Even outside of the whole crazy edifice I have made for it, the Tower of Song in the Underworld where Vergil lives with Lucan and Dante* and Roland Barthes drops in for tea,** it is just completely brilliant.

I am going to make myself a TEAM AENEAS t-shirt like those TEAM EDWARD ones. (Though I guess it should really be TEAM DIDO... Ooh, also, I should make a TEAM BELLA t-shirt!***)

Or possibly I should go back to fixing my damn footnotes. Okay, see you in a week--

*as in 'Jenny lives with Eric and Martin', except I guess Lucan would be the sulky teenage son here.

**from the Tower of Theory. He invites Derrida along every week, but Derrida is too reclusive (Oh, you know what, maybe next time, Roland...)

***Hooray! Lots of people already have! I like this one.

actually it wasn't very good

2010-01-22T02:51:00.000-08:00

I haven't quite finished it yet, but A Question of Love turned out to be fudging/pulling its punches on the grief stuff, and to have some very odd misogynies scattered through it. Alas.

drive-by

2010-01-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

Yes, hello, ten days till the deadline, I have five meetings tomorrow and a new semester's teaching starts on Monday, WHATEVER. The point is that I am planning (for February, when a utopian world of time-having and headspace and sunshine and tweeting birds will open up ahead of me) a post on chicklit, because I like chicklit and I don't want that giant post on Linda Green to look like I am dissing the genre. (In fact, LG claims to have invented a new genre called 'chick-noir', presumably on the basis of a strand of the plot I didn't talk about in which her heroine's behaviour is shown to result from a bad experience in her past - she had a miscarriage - which is an absolutely standard chicklit plot - I've read two others dealing with it in the last week or so, both of which handled it much better and, indeed, more noirly.)

Anyway, though, this is not that post, it's a reminder to myself/teaser trailer to that post, in that I have just opened another sugary-pastel novel with a scribbly cover picture of a dreamy girl, described by Sophie Kinsella* on the front as Pure feel-good escapism and summarized by Heat on the back in the words A resigned singleton, Laura's world is rocked when her first boyfriend appears... and it appears to be about the process of grieving your husband's suicide.

Which, again, is the thing about chicklit. It tends to deal with big, complicated emotions. It has big themes: love, death, birth, grief, pain, joy; how to build and rebuilt a romantic relationship; how to be a good friend. But for some reason, it gets painted sugary pink or acid green and described as being escapist, feel-good, charming, and/or exclusively about the 30-something hetero-dating scene. I can't decide whether this is camouflage or outright lies.

Anyway, I am only 13 pages into this book (Isabell Wolff's A Question of Love), so I will tell you how it turns out.

(Yes! Obviously some chicklit is very bad! But have you read a literary novel lately? Sturgeon's Law, people, Sturgeon's Law. Either of them.)

*I really, really like Sophie Kinsella. The Shopaholic books go off the rails quite quickly (though I really like the P J Hogan movie - remind me to tell you about P J Hogan as a critical reader of popular novels one day), but all the others are great, especially the amnesia one whose title I quite genuinely forget.

I Read A Bad Book

2009-12-28T07:16:00.001-08:00

Hello! The book is going very nicely, thank you, and I have lots of things to say about it, but not in this post, which is about another book, one I have just read, called I Did A Bad Thing by Linda Green. And yes, she did.

I began having dubious feelings about it on the acknowledgements page, because of the juxtaposition of acknowledgements to:

my husband Ian for... never losing faith and waiting eight years... for the widescreen television I promised to buy when I got a book deal

and to:

my creative writing students for providing such a welcome break from the rejections.

Which I guess put me in a suspicious and uncharitable frame of mind from the start: like, if you're going to teach creative writing despite never having produced any publishable fiction in eight years, I'm going to be looking for evidence that you at least have the kind of technical skills/craft that can potentially be passed on. But on that technical level, the book's kind of a mess: there are unintentional tautologies and awkward phrases like the mental image I had of Nick in my mind, or I am filled with an overwhelming sense that I will never see him again. Maybe it was the way he said goodbye with such an air of permanence. (What, like when he said 'Goodbye forever', or 'Goodbye, we won't meet again?' Gosh, maybe it was.)

Also, it's all written in very short sentences. Except that it isn't. Really the sentences are quite long. Grammatically they are. But the sub-clauses are all marked by full stops. And capital letters. Instead of commas. Irritatingly. (I felt the ache grip me again. Mixed with a fresh shot of guilt.; I sat there for a long time. Probably an hour. Seeing it all in my head, the images still vividly real).

The pitfalls of the very-short-sentence technique became particularly clear very early in the book, though, on p.6:

The door opened and he walked in. Resplendent in his Burberry trench coat. Hair the colour of Bourneville chocolate. Stubble caressing his chin. Shit. He looked even better than I remembered.

Which is a particularly impressive feat given that 'he' (Nick) appears to have shown up for a job interview covered in poo (really, it took me about three reads of this to figure out that 'Shit' was not grammatically parallel to 'Hair' and 'Stubble', but in fact belonged with the following sentence and marked a shift into the narrator's own commentary.)

Anyway, none of that is a giant deal, really. What made me decide I had to post about it was the way the plot actually revolves around the idea that vegetarians and people who do political work relating to people outside the First World are (at worst) just putting it on to make themselves feel smug or (at best) victims of psychological trauma. I was having a conversation with a friend recently who's training to be a counsellor, and she was telling me about how common it is in academic work in the field for vegetarianism to be seen as a symptom of some sort of mental disorder. (so, you know, you go to a counsellor about your post-traumatic stress disorder and he starts telling you to eat more bacon...) So I guess my brain was primed for this, a bit, but as the book went on, I was just more and more amazed and appalled at the way that vegetarianism and/or engagement with non-British politics were themselves constructed purely as the sign of a character's being inadequate, stupid, traumatized, infantilized, status-obsessed, and/or hypocritical.

So, okay, examples? Well, one of the prime ones is a comparison between two dinners out in the book. The first is a birthday dinner for Sarah, the narrator: she's there alone with her boyfriend, Jonathan, who takes her to a nice restaurant but before ordering his own food, checks whether the wine is vegetarian (not filtered through isinglass); whether the soup is made with vegetarian stock; and whether there's gelatine in the cheesecake (there is); and whether the coffee is fairtrade. He's polite and helpful (he has a list of vegetarian wines with him, in case the waiter doesn't know which of the restaurant's wines are okay), and at no point does he have a go at the restaurant for not labelling its menu properly, as I might have done (this novel is set in Birmingham in 2006 or 2007, by the way). But this, in the novel's terms, constitutes 'making a fuss', and Sarah is so incensed at his behaviour that she walks out of the restaurant, shouts at him in the street, and gets a cab home on her own:

I stood for a moment, gulping the damp night air, trying to stop my body from shaking. Jonathan emerged a few minutes later.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean to upset you.'

'Well you have. It was supposed to be a quiet birthday meal, not a party political broadcast on behalf of Friends of the Earth.'

I lowered my arm, conscious that I was jabbing a finger at him. Jonathan stood staring at me... The cab pulled up outside. I opened the rear door and got in. Jonathan was a few steps behind.

'Sorry,' I said, turning round and slamming the door behind me, 'the cab driver filled up at Esso. I'm afraid you'll have to walk.'

I hated doing it. But it was the only way he'd learn.

By contrast, this is how Sarah behaves at her works Christmas dinner where she's ordered a vegetarian meal in advance:

Even the waitress looked embarrassed as she lowered the plate containing a round brownish object down before me. I looked up at her questioningly.

'Stuffed onion,' she said.

'What's it stuffed with?'

'Er, Stilton,' she replied. 'And it's dressed in a vegetable gravy.'

'And what about the other eighteen pounds I paid?'

'Sorry?' said the waitress.

'Well, that and the soup must have cost less than a couple of quid to throw together. I wondered what had happened to the rest of the money I paid for my meal.'

She decides to have the poached salmon instead:

The bemused waitress removed the offending onion and scuttled away... The salmon arrived. It tasted good. Better than I remembered. Some things were worth breaking the rules for.

[You get the foreshadowing, right? By ordering the salmon, she is signalling her intention to chuck nice Jonathan for Nick, the guy who came to a job interview with poo on his head. That, by the way, is the plot of the novel, which is 375 pages long: she used to go out with Nick, who was going out with someone else at the time and left her for the someone-else; she felt guilty about sleeping with a girlfriended man, so tried to exorcise her guilt by going out with Jonathan; she doesn't actually like Jonathan, though, so when Nick turns up again she chucks Jonathan and goes back to Nick, although not for an unaccountably long time, cf above about the 375 pages.] Anyway, though, Sarah's behaviour at this dinner, for some reason, is not 'making a fuss' or 'a party political broadcast on behalf of the Value For Money Party': it's a blow for freedom! For individuality! It's 'breaking the rules' in order to gain more pleasure and more joy in life! And if you have to be loudly and publicly rude and sarcastic to an innocent waitress to get that pleasure, then so be it! That's all just part of your charming, rule-breaking, happy-go-lucky, meat-eating transgressiveness! (Imagine - eating fish! How many people are brave and free-spirited enough to break our deep-rooted English cultural taboo against eating fish? NOT MANY.) No-one would ever be embarrassed by that behaviour, compared to a polite request about whether there's gelatine in a cheesecake!

Oh, but wait - Jonathan himself has admitted that his behaviour at Sarah's birthday meal was very poor:

I'm sorry I upset you,' he said, his face suitably apologetic. 'I guess I was a bit distracted with the stuff at work. And wanting you to enjoy it made me a bit anxious and when I get anxious I tend to babble and, well, you know what happened.' He threw his hands out wide as he said it. His way of begging forgiveness.

Begging forgiveness, may I remind you, for being left outside a restaurant in the rain by his girlfriend. Later, Jonathan says:

'Thank you... for putting up with me. I know I can be hard work sometimes. Especially when I'm feeling insecure. That's when I start coming out with all that stuff.'

'What, like in the restaurant?'

'Yeah. I get anxious in unfamiliar surroundings. So I revert to what I know best. What I feel safest with. It helps to disguise my lack of confidence... I must really piss you off sometimes.'

So there you have it. Asking about gelatine reflects a deep-seated psychological problem (to do, we learn, with wanting his mother's approval) - not, as one might have thought, reflecting, oh, say, a desire on the part of a vegetarian not to be fed dead pig. And it is something which would piss off any reasonable person, and something which has to be 'put up with'.

At this point, by the way, I keep being tempted to make cheap comparisons and say 'Would Sarah/Linda treat an observant Muslim who asked about pork products/alcohol like this, and insist that religious observations are also nothing more than showing-off and making a scene?' Luckily, however, I don't have to speculate, because Linda Green has helpfully provided a Muslim character, so that we can answer that question. With, as it happens, a resounding yes. For when what I will call, with about the same level of cultural sensitivity and research as the novel itself, 'Muslim cultural stuff' clashes with white middle-class liberal values, Muslims are indeed expected to ditch the Muslim cultural stuff immediately and decisively, as it is but an obstacle to white middle-class liberal values... sorry, I mean an obstacle to shagging white men. Sorry, I mean an obstacle to fulfilment and happiness, obviously.

Here's how it plays out. Sarah (our waitress-abusing, fish-eating, vegetarian-scorning narrator) has a friend called Najma, who in turn has a boyfriend called Paul. But, we find out, Najma also has a boyfriend called Surrinder, who sees her with her boyfriend called Paul and relays to her the message that if she stays with Paul, her parents - who are 'devout Muslims' - will disown her for good, for she has 'brought shame on the family'.

'Oh, God. You poor thing. Is there no way you can reason with them? Get them to meet Paul so they can find out for themselves what he's like?'

'No,' she said. 'It doesn't work like that. You have to stick to the rules.'

But this novel is nothing if not consistent. Whether choosing salmon at the works Christmas dinner or estranging oneself from one's family for life, 'sticking to the rules' is wrong, whereas breaking the rules is the way to happiness and fulfilment (or whatever it was, I forget). And so, following Sarah's advice, Najma tells Paul about her parents, and he responds by asking her to marry him.

'I know it's a bit quick, what with us only being together for a few months. But you know what it's like when something feels so right. When you know you're meant to be together no matter what obstacles are in the way.'

... 'I'm so pleased for you, Naj. So glad Paul's come through for you. You'll need his strength. I know it won't be easy for you.'

She looked down, her face clouding over for a moment. 'It'll be harder the longer it goes on, I think. Wondering how my family are, what they're doing. And around Eid, and times like that, when I know they'll all be together.'

'You never know,' I said, 'maybe as time passes and they miss you, they might get in touch.'

'Maybe,' said Najma, 'but I won't be holding my breath. And I'm determined not to let it spoil things for me and Paul.'

'Good for you,' I said.

Yes, indeed, good for Najma. And once again we learn that what looks like taking into consideration viewpoints other than good old thrifty white liberal bourgeois individualism - in this case, the viewpoint of one's own family and the culture within which one was raised - is in fact 'sticking to the rules', and should be ditched immediately, because the only thing that matters is the success of one's heterosexual romance. We actually get this stated twice, once by Nick:

[Sarah:] 'It's about making sure other people don't suffer because of your actions.'

'Bollocks it is. It's about being pious and going to bed at night feeling smug because the guy who picked your coffee beans was paid a few pennies more for his efforst. It's not exactly going to change the world, is it?'

'You've got to start somewhere.'

'So start with yourself. Leave Jonathan and come and live with me. I can't guarantee you Fairtrade coffee... but at least I can give you a chance at happiness.'

Sarah restates the same premise at the end of the novel, when we learn that her relationship with Jonathan is more important, in the global scheme of things, than the Shell pipeline in Tibet. In this scene, Sarah has grudgingly agreed to show up at her boyfriend's talk on Tibet, where she promised to be to support him some months ago, but since then another friend has got a gallery opening: she feels it's much more important for her to be one of the hundreds of people at the private view rather than at her boyfriend's talk, because 'This could change Colin's life. What's your talk going to do? Force the Chinese out of Tibet by Christmas?'

Anyway, she goes, and what's more, she agrees to pick up some milk for the Amnesty refreshment stand on the way to the talk. But, as she casually tells Jonathan, she's bought it from the Shell garage on the corner:

'You bought milk for my Tibet talk from a company which has invested millions in an oil pipeline in China?' ...

'There are more important things in life to worry about, Jonathan, than where a bloody pint of milk came from.'

'What's more important than upholding our principles?'

I slapped my hand to my forehead in disbelief... 'Us, Jonathan. Me and you. At least it should be.'

Okay. Now, I do have a problem with the commodification of 'ethics' and 'politics', and the transformation of efforts for global political solidarity into a question of shopping. I agree that buying Fairtrade isn't going to change the world; I agree that buying ethical/organic/green products can be a way for middle-class people in the UK to buy status within their closed social circle (though I'm not quite sure what's wrong with that, to be honest: most cultures and subcultures have some means of buying status). But. One of the things I haven't told you is that while all this is going on, there are threatened redundancies in Sarah's workplace, and - as a union member - she is campaigning to save her friends' jobs, including balloting for strike action. She is also stricken with sadness and empathy for those of her friends who are going to be made redundant, and works hard to try and ameliorate their situation. At no point is it suggested that this form of political activism is 'sticking to the rules', a hypocritical bid for status (eg with Nick, who used to be a union rep), or the sign of a deep psychological trauma. So it really does seem that it's only if you want to do something to help people outside Britain (along with vegetarianism, the main targets of this novel's satire - such as it is - are Amnesty International and the boycotts of Esso and Shell) that you are automatically smug, damaged, and hypocritical.

And that's the point at which this book stops being amusingly bad and just becomes racist. It's the other side, I think, of the thing I was talking about in my post about the way people try to appropriate the word 'racist' as if it were a diagnostic tool to rank the right-onness of white people, rather than to describe a set of practices which erase, discriminate against, misrepresent, and/or otherwise oppress people of colour. This whole novel runs off the idea that there can never be solidarity with people outside one's own country; there is only ever the attempt on the part of white liberals to win status from other white liberals. Which is all just another way of erasing nonwhite people,* not having to consider their experience, their exploitation, and their oppressions as real, and as something that middle-class white liberals directly benefit from (those non-Fairtrade cookies really are tastier than the Fairtrade ones!)

So I'll close this post with one of the more blatantly racist moments in the book, when Sarah, having decided to reconcile with poor bloody Jonathan, goes to the video shop in preparation for a night in with a film and a takeaway curry. The girl on the counter asks her for her 'memorable name', for security purposes:

Jonathan had taken the membership out; he usually got the videos. I had no idea.

'Er, Sarah?' I suggested hopefully.

The girl shook her head, her ponytail exaggerating the refusal.

'Sorry,' she said. 'I do need it to let you take the film out.'

... I got out my mobile and called Jonathan. 'Hi,' I said. 'I'm at the video shop. What's the password name thing I have to give?'

'Oh, that,' said Jonathan. 'It's Aung San Suu Kyi.'

I paused for a moment, waiting for him to say it was a joke. He said nothing.

'Of course,' I said. 'I should have guessed.'

I hung up and repeated the name back to the girl, who clearly wasn't well versed on the political opposition in Burma.

'I'm not surprised you couldn't remember it,' she said. 'I've never heard of her. Who is she?'

I hesitated. 'A porn star,' I said. 'A Thai porn star. My boyfriend's seen all her films. Ask him about her next time he comes in.'

I took the video from her and walked out of the shop, heading for the Indian to pick up our chickpea curry. Our quiet night in no longer seemed so appealing.

Aung San Suu Kyi, ladies and gentlemen: a name which should only ever be heard as the punchline of a joke. (It's funny because it's foreign. Sheesh. Do you not have a sense of humour, or something?) A name which it's okay to use to trick the girl at the video shop into asking your boyfriend about his porn-watching habits, but which it is absolutely not okay to claim is 'memorable'. Because that would suggest that the names of Nobel-Peace-prize-winning democratic political heroes in Burma were worth remembering - and we all know they're not. And not just neutrally 'not worth remembering', but actively not to be remembered: when it turns out that your boyfriend thinks that the name Aung San Suu Kyi is memorable, that lessens his value considerably, and you look forward appreciably less to spending time with him, that Burmese-name-knowing bastard.

*Except, of course, for the token Muslim girl who's allowed into the novel because she's sensible enough to break off all contact with her family so she can marry a white man she's only known a few months. (Good for you, Najma.)

Productive Time vs Baggy Writing Time

2009-11-06T10:05:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting since term started, because I've been busy. Which is a very nothing word, particularly in the modern world of today - I've just been reading lots of books by Barbara Ehrenreich, including her lovely Bait and Switch and Bright-Sided, in one of which she talks about the way that academics have elevated the idea that 'busyness' is a virtue to almost religious levels. And I do try to resist that; I'm not sure why working enormous amounts of unpaid overtime and donating extra surplus labour to an institution should be seen as morally worthy.

So what I really mean by 'busy' is that -- well, okay, actually I do mean that I'm working quite a lot of unpaid overtime. But! More interestingly, I also mean that I'm occupying two quite different kinds of time/flow -- neither of which are very congenial to blogging. I'm trying to finish my book by the end of January, which is pretty tight, given that I'm teaching three units this TB and supervising three PhD students, and then there are various other demands on my time - grant applications, bits of organizing for the Desiring the Text conference, mentoring, personal tutoring, lots and lots of meetings (as well as being a member of two departments, a School and a Faculty, all of which are having lots of meetings at the moment to talk about The Situation, I'm also on one Committee, two Boards, and a Steering Group). What I'm trying to do at the moment is get all my non-writing work done on the three days a week when I have teaching scheduled - Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday - in between my six hours' teaching, two 'consultation hours' (drop-in for students) and two hours at the weekly Classics departmental research seminar. Which is making for a really, really busy start to the week - to the extent that if I have a whole hour and a half continuous unscheduled time, I jump on it gratefully and (eg) write a 50-minute lecture on The Divine Comedy or bang out a 3000-word 'Case for Support' for my AHRC grant application. So it's tiring, and to some extent it has those rewards of high-productivity in (I get to cross lots of things off lots of lists very fast!), but the thing is that it really just isn't enough time, which means that I'm having to do a slightly faster, shoddier job on lots of things. Which is hard to take, sometimes, because like many women academics I'm a bit of a Hermione Granger, and I really hate not doing everything perfectly; I hate looking less than competent in front of colleagues and students, eg because my Powerpoint for a lecture is ugly and last-minute (or because I forgot to bring it altogether), or because I need to be chased up by everyone for everything because I'm working right down to the wire on all my deadlines (and, it has to be confessed, letting the less strict ones drift right past me). Which is a low-grade waste of everyone's time and energy, I know. But the thing that I'm realizing is that learning to get by is a skill in itself. I could call it 'prioritizing', I guess, and that's part of it, but that sounds like a fun thing to do, like you get a little thrill out of being ruthless and effective. I'm talking more about the other side of it - about learning to live with the consequences of what I have to deprioritize, learning not to beat myself up when I just don't have time to do a really good job.

But what all this does is buy me (on a good week, which is about four out of the ten weeks of term, when I don't have extra teaching or meetings scheduled on my 'free' days) three days for writing: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. (Usually I am adamant about having two days off a week, but I've gone down to one day a week till the book is done.) Which is the other kind of time/flow that I was talking about: Baggy Writing Time, time where you get up and down from your chair and wander into the kitchen looking for the perfect sentence to bridge into your next paragraph, and end up spending forty-five minutes on the washing-up. Or when you realize (like I did yesterday) at 11am that you can't do any more work on Chapter Two today because you've just torn it down and restructured it from the ground up, so you have to give your undermind time to get used to that before you get to the sentence-writing part of the writing process. But part of the discipline of keeping time free for writing, I'm figuring out, is that that didn't mean I could open the rest of that day onto Productive Time, because that would throw my brain off track for the writing. (As it happened, I discovered that I had to redo the maths on a grant application very fast that afternoon, which neatly solved both problems, because it meant I Got Stuff Done that wouldn't then eat into Baggy Writing Time next week, but didn't involve having to wrap my brain around any new kind of intellectual stuff and thus distract it from thinking about Julius Caesar.)

So that's where I am at the moment: either on a weirdly Fordist kind of production-line for academics, where my time isn't my own to command because every email or knock on the door is like the next thing going past on the conveyor belt, organizing my workflow at the pace of the university machine, or on baggy writing time, where I have to protect a space for my thinking and my writing to go at their own pace as far as possible, not to be disrupted by demands from outside. Either way, it means I'm not blogging much. Normal service will hopefully be resumed in February.

2009-10-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Ursula K Le Guin

2009-10-21T03:43:00.001-07:00

I wanted to write a long post about Lavinia for today, but I haven't been able to. So this is just to say: happy 80th birthday, Ursula K Le Guin. Lavinia is one of the most rich, beautiful, intelligent and moving encounters with Vergil since he took Dante's hand and led him into the Inferno; 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' has changed the way I and many of my students think about utopia, literature, and the social; 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' has done the same for language, humanity, and the limits of communication; 'The Diary of the Rose', for dream and politics.

Not even to mention Earthsea, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Like so many other people in the world, I am profoundly and unrepayably in your debt. Thank you, and happy birthday!

Things You Should All Read: Preamble

2009-09-01T03:51:00.000-07:00

Since I started at Bristol in 2005, I've always taught a unit to first-year undergraduates called 'Critical Issues', which is one of those hair-tearing-out 'Theory In Ten Weeks' courses, which goes, like, Week 1: Feminism. Week 2: Psychoanalysis. Week 3: Postcolonialism. It's a challenging course to teach for me, because I'm one of those people to whom theory speaks with a kind of hair-raising immediacy: I remember sitting in the Bodleian Library when I was doing my undergraduate degree, reading an essay on writing in Euripides' Hippolytus which drew on the work of Derrida - the first time I'd ever come across him - and just staring at it, going But this is my life! This is my LIFE! And then I went to Leeds to do an MA in Cultural Studies and stayed on for a PhD, to work with Barbara Engh, so not only do I have an immediate I-need-this, this-will-save-me click with theory, but I have spent the last ten years working on and with and in it, so that the ideas of Derrida and Barthes and Benjamin and Adorno and Butler are just absolutely intuitively given for me now.

Meanwhile, my students have never been exposed to any of this stuff really or rigorously: some of them are repelled by it as intuitively and strongly as I was attracted, though most of them aren't - but all of them are, like, what? Things that are (now) part of my basic orientation towards the world are absolutely new and strange and profoundly challenging and difficult to assimilate for almost all of them. (And they were for me, once, of course, but I somehow knew how much I was going to get from them, so the challenge and the difficulty were exciting, not threatening.) So there's an interesting gap between me and them, which I guess is the gap where pedagogy happens, but it's been an interesting time figuring out how to measure and use that space-between.

All of which is actually tangential to my point, which is that, for some of those reasons, the unit can be quite an intense experience: it involves a kind of learning which (I hope) connects up with bits of experience and headspace and thought and affect that other units don't reach. And I think it's for that reason that I was very happy and tickled when one of my students last year asked me for recommendations of more books to read: I felt like I was being asked for a particular kind of book, books with that kind of edge to them, books that connected to and articulated those inchoate, itchy experiences and insights that mainstream culture, the most readily available formulae for reading and thinking, doesn't give you the resources to think about, to formulate, to work with and on.

So anyway, since then I've been vaguely thinking, in the back of my mind, about the books and stories that I would like to recommend. And since I've had at least one email from a student about this blog, I thought I might as well stick the list up here for future reference, in case anyone else ever asks me for it. I'll put it in a separate post from this preamble, and link it from the sidebar.

Feminism 09

2009-08-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

I hope to be able to make it to this feminist event in London in October.

2009-08-17T18:42:00.000-07:00

I should totally read this giant zine about what causes fic at some point. (Tony, one for you too, I think, in relation to the idea of a geek aesthetic?)

Towards an Erotics of Reception

2009-08-11T00:35:00.000-07:00

So for a long time me and my esteemed colleague at the University of Toronto, Anna Wilson, have been putting together a call for papers for a conference next July, which is going to be about loving texts.

From my point of view, the conference comes partly out of my interest in the relationship between sex and language. They're intimately related, of course, in that language can be highly eroticized, and in that our language has some effect on (if it doesn't determine) the way we think about and experience our bodies and our sexualities. But at the same time sex and language can be understood to be completely different: language as cerebral, virtual, unreal, representative, sex as bodily, real, true, authentic, nonrepresentational: sex as an 'outside' to language and power, or sex as the site where we are most intimately engaged with language and power. That's something that's gone on intriguing me for more than a decade, and which partly explains my interest in writing about sex. (I'm also interested, as several years of my students have been mildly-to-profoundly shocked to discover, in sex as a metaphor for writing, as in Calvin Thomas's wonderful essay Must Desire Be Taken Literally? on Helene Cixous, writing, and anal sex.)

I'm also someone who loves books, writing, language, someone who writes fanfiction, someone who gets crushes on books and authors and characters, and someone who teaches literature: so I'm also interested in the way that whole messy range of responses to texts and writings gets cut up and organized institutionally. Me, I feel like writing within a fictional universe and writing an analytic essay about a book are both ways of loving texts, but I know lots of people think that analysis and love are opposed (cf this really beautiful poem by U A Fanthorpe), and that intrigues me too, not only for what it says about literature but for what it says about love.

So I'm really excited to be organizing this conference: not only will I get a chance to talk for a whole day to other people from around the world who are interested in love and desire as modes of making textual connections, but it's going to be the basis for an application for a Research Network grant, so hopefully there will be a whole series of research events on this theme. In the short term, though, I'm particularly delighted that Carolyn Dinshaw (whose book I blogged about here) has agreed to be our keynote speaker. I'm excited to meet her, and to start what I hope will be an ongoing conversation with her and with everyone else who participates!

Here's the Call for Papers. There'll be an official web page for the conference at the University of Bristol website soon, and I'll let you have that link as soon as I can, but in the meantime, please pass on the news to anyone who might be interested, and feel free to link to this post!

DESIRING THE TEXT, TOUCHING THE PAST: TOWARDS AN EROTICS OF RECEPTION

A one-day conference co-organized by

The Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition & the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

University of Bristol, 10 July 2010

Keynote Speaker: Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, NYU

CALL FOR PAPERS

In reading Cicero's letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me. (Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Liber I.1.42)

Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters, while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading - from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom - are characterized by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-a-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.

This conference aims, by contrast, to begin to elaborate a theory of the erotics of reception. It will bring together scholars working in and across various disciplines to share research into reading, writing and viewing practices characterized by love, identification, and desire: we hope that it will lead to the establishment of an international research network and the formulation of some long-term research projects. In order to facilitate discussion at the conference, we will ask participants to circulate full papers (around 5,000 words) in May 2010.

We now invite abstracts of 300 words, to be submitted by email by 30 November 2009. Abstracts will be assessed on the basis of their theoretical and interdisciplinary interest. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars working on literary, visual and performance texts in the fields of: history, reception studies, mediaeval studies, fan studies, cultural studies, theology, and literary/critical theory.

Some ideas which might be addressed include, but are not limited to:

* Writing oneself into the text: self-insertion and empathetic identification
* Historical desire: does the historian desire the past?
* Hermeneutics and erotics
* Pleasures of the text, pleasures of the body: (how) are embodied responses to the text gendered?
* Anachronistic reading: does desire disturb chronology?
* Erotics and/or eristics: love-hate relationships with texts

This conference is part of the 'Thinking Reciprocity' series and will follow directly from the conference 'Reception and the Gift of Beauty' (Bristol, 8-9 July 2010). Reduced fees will be offered to people attending both conferences.
If you have any queries, or to submit an abstract, please contact one of the conference organizers:

Dr Ika Willis (Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk)
Anna Wilson (anna.wilson@utoronto.ca)

No I Am Not On Facebook

2009-08-10T22:47:00.000-07:00

Can someone who is on Facebook check this out? I have never joined Facebook, and I know full well there isn't anyone else called Ika Willis, but on the other hand I am clearly not important enough for anyone to join Facebook pretending to be me, so I am flummoxed. (And secretly hoping that I am important enough to have someone impersonating me, obviously.) But presumably Facebook has just harvested my name from, I don't know, staff web pages or Google blogs or something, and set this up without telling me? Or maybe they did tell me and I ignored them, because I ignore all Facebook-related email. Whatever, I am mildly irritated, because I want not only not to be on Facebook but actively to be a person without a Facebook page.)

Letter to WisCon

2009-08-03T02:38:00.000-07:00

You know, one thing I feel kind of embarrassed about is that I don't actually know what WisCon is. 'Some kind of awesome fat-positive feminist trans-friendly queer anti-racist SF convention' is how I think of it in my head, although I'm also aware that it doesn't live up to that tag. Anyway.

But this letter! This letter is lovely.

Talking about issues of race and access makes everyone uncomfortable. There’s a particular expression of that discomfort in the sf community, where we have the hope that race is one of the differences between humans that will cease to matter in our brave new future, and that the best way to hasten that future is to act as though we don’t ‘see’ race [see note]. But, as Chip Delany has said, someone who can’t see something that threatens his life is not going to be his best ally...

This high level of discomfort squashes dialogue and leaves people feeling that race is still an issue, but it’s somehow shameful to even speak about it. As feminists we’ve had a parallel experience in trying to raise awareness and organize around issues of feminism. Feminism has developed a time-tested way of dealing with such silencing, which is to first take a little private time and discuss the issues amongst ourselves, without the need for constantly allaying the dominant group’s anxiety at every step.

Anyway. This is mostly for my own reference, so I can model my own teaching and talking practice on this kind of sweet, straightforward tone, wherever possible. (Not that I am going to give up ranting, don't worry--)

And yeah! I'm in Melbourne. I've been to two conferences in July, I haven't blogged about either of them, or about Australia, at all. I feel a bit hampered by the fact that I brought the wrong camera lead so I can't upload photos--

there were people of colour in the past, too!

2009-07-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

Thinking about Benjamin and writing the introduction to Now & Rome, which currently closes with the quote from Carolyn Dinshaw about the past as a site of identification and cultural connection, with unpredictable but powerful effects on the future, has brought something into focus for me which is really interesting. (I mean, really interesting to me, not really interesting as a kind of cutting-edge expansion of thinking about race, or anything.) Anyway, this post has been brewing for a while, but I notice it's International Blog Against Racism Week this week, so it seemed like a good time to post it.

So over the last few years I've noticed some things about talking/thinking about race and racism in the UK, and particularly in relation to teaching post-colonial theory and literature. I should probably contextualize by saying that post-colonialism is not the focus of my teaching, but something that gets touched on in most of the units I teach: I specialize in reception/appropriation, and I work mainly with Latin and English literature, so the history of imperialism and resistance is a crucial part of the way I think about literature and our relationships to it as authors and readers. For example, in the Critical Issues unit I teach to first-year English students, we have a week or two on Jane Eyre, talking about how the politics and metaphorics of imperial racism actually underpin the plot and the emotional drive of the narrative, even though this is not ostensibly a novel 'about' race and indeed, arguably, has no non-white characters. Then I teach a unit on Contemporary Literature, in which we read Derek Walcott's Omeros and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and I also teach Omeros in my unit on the Legacy of Classical Literature.

So one of the things I've noticed in both my teaching and my observation of the culture in the UK more widely is a tendency in white British people to behave as if accusations of racism were more serious than, well, racist behaviour. So it's okay for white people to say pretty much anything we like about race and/or people of other ethnicities: we might, like Martin Amis, be 'experimenting with the limits of permissible thought' when we say we think perhaps all British Muslims should be rounded up; or we might, like Sacha Baron-Cohen, be doing edgy comedy by perpetuating racism (in order to laugh at it); or we might be performing any number of intelligent, thoughtful, experimental, unserious, free speech acts. But when someone calls a white person (or their behaviour, or the things they say/write) racist, that's a terrible, and terribly serious, accusation, and we have to jump through an impossible series of hoops to prove that they really are racist before we say such a terrible thing.

And there's such a huge disconnect here - I don't want to call it a failure of empathy, because I don't really think that's what's going on, and because of the excellent work by people like, I think, Sara Ahmed* on empathy as disabling critical responses to racism by white students ('I cried when I read Beloved and that means I am totally able to understand the life experience of poor black women in the UK, and if they say I can't they're wrong!'). But it's a huge double standard, and its invisibility to my students (and to me, before I struggled to figure out what was going on) is extraordinary.

One of the ways I notice this is in a persistent motif in student essays on Jane Eyre, which is that we can't, mustn't, or shouldn't say that the book or the author 'is racist', because Bronte lived in 'the past', where 'they didn't know' that it was bad to be racist. So again, it's much more important to be fair to Charlotte Bronte than it is to engage with the ways in which her text constructs race and power, and vice versa (the ways in which race and power construct Jane Eyre, beyond or outside Bronte's ability to control the language she uses). Part of this is about the way the figure of 'the author' still persists in our thinking about texts (who cares whether Bronte was racist, as a person, or not? She's been dead like a hundred years!), and I think also that perhaps students are trained at school to think that 'critical judgement' is not about analysis but about evaluation (this is a Great Book, this is Populist Trash). But part of it is straightforward racism, of a kind that's so entrenched in (my) white consciousness that it's taken me a long time to see how simple it really is:

There were people of colour in the past too. To say that a book is 'not racist' because it was written in the past and 'they didn't know any better' is to do history from the point of view of the oppressor to a really startling degree. Because, you know, who didn't know any better? White people who dehumanized black people, and profited from the dehumanization. The African slaves working on the sugar plantation which provides the basis for Jane's financial independence and therefore her successful/model marriage? They knew better.

Getting people to think of racism solely as a diagnostic tool for ranking the goodness, rightness, and therefore authority/prestige, of white people, rather than as a system of violent oppression of people of colour: that must count as one of the biggest victories for the anti-civil-rights backlash.

Another thing that's interesting is the way my students have learned somewhere that racism is always in the past, so that one of them wrote of Derek Walcott's Omeros that at first the critical response was a straightforwardly racist one, that the poem was bad and didn't count as an epic, but later, when we had all made a bit more progress towards equality, everyone realized that it was a great poem and totally did count as an epic. Now this is just simply not true: Omeros came out in 1990, and Walcott won the Nobel in 1992; and US/UKian public/critical culture has not really become noticeably less racist since 1990. I think the student was referring to an essay in a special edition of South Atlantic Quarterly - in 1997, incidentally - about the politics of calling Omeros an 'epic', and whether 'epic' is essentially a European genre or whether that in itself is a racist appropriation of a genre shared by, say, Yoruba narrative/mythological poetry. But that essay was very clear that this debate is ongoing - two simultaneous positions - while this student had obviously been under very great cultural pressure - great enough to mean they had not been able to hear what I had said about Omeros, or read what David Farrell Krell had written - to translate this into a diachronic narrative: there was racism, and now there is colour-blind appreciation of great poetry.

And so much of my teaching - because it's about cultural change and appropriation and time and reading - seems to engage with students right at the intersection of these two cultural pressures: to translate and flatten currents of thinking and power and reading into a simple diachronic narrative of progress ('we used to be racist but we're all right now'), and to think of racism as a bad character trait. (I actually saw an anti-racist white friend on the internet describe racism in precisely those words recently.)

I think there's another move that needs to be made here, about quite what that intersection does to history: I think it whitens it, along the lines of Benjamin's vision of history as a long procession of the victors. So that the lines of transmission of history, of the past, are themselves white, and so that the transformative power of the past, and in particular the possibility for identification with people of colour across time, is denied. I need to think about this more, perhaps.

One thing I do have to say before I finish is that I was helped so much in my thinking here by a post I can't now find again, very annoyingly - if anyone knows what I'm referring to, could you link me? It was about how one of the key differences between privileged and unprivileged positions is that people in privileged positions aren't used to being told they're wrong. So people of colour live in cultures which tell them all the time, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that the way they understand the world is wrong, but white people (qua white people - obviously gender, ability/disability, sexuality, etc have huge impacts on the way we experience privilege/unprivilege) have a constant little flow of reassuring messages that whiteness is normal, attractive, empowering, and, crucially, not-to-be-remarked-on. So it feels, maybe, to a white person, and particularly to a white person who's used to being told they're intelligent, perceptive, and sensitive (like most of the students I teach), really bad to be called a racist, because we all 'know' that racists are the opposite: ignorant, wilfully blind to reality, and insensitive. So that's where some of that giant disconnect that I talked about above comes from, I think.

*Sarah Ahmed, 'The Politics of Bad Feeling', Australasian Journal of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 1 (2005): 72-85.

going away

2009-07-15T01:44:00.001-07:00

Travelling, then holiday, then Violence conference. Normal service will be resumed around 27 July, from MELBOURNE!!!

Back in Bristol 29 August.

violence 2

2009-07-07T11:05:00.001-07:00

so now I am reading Agamben's State of Exception, and where he writes

Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law - no longer practiced, but studied - is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage towards justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity - that is, another use of the law

I have written in the margin YES YES - LUCAN.

Given that what I am doing is making notes for my paper on violence and law in Lucan, I really wish I had the slightest idea what I'd been thinking when I wrote that --

violence

2009-07-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

I'm starting work on the paper I'm giving in Brisbane on 23 July (yes, yes, about time too) and am rereading Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence', the 1921 essay where he makes a distinction between 'lawmaking violence' and 'law-preserving violence'. (I think he is actually still friends with Schmitt at this point,* and there's a strong similarity between some of the ideas here and some of the ideas in The Nomos of the Earth.) Anyway, Benjamin is talking about how 'a totally nonviolent resolution of conflicts can never lead to a legal contract' (because any legal contract 'confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the contract'), and he goes on to say:

When the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay. In our time, parliaments provide an example of this. They offer the familiar, woeful spectacle because they have not remained conscious of the revolutionary forces to which they owe their existence.

I have no idea whether I agree with that or not.

(All quotes from Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence' [1921], in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz [New York: Schocken, 1978], pp.277-300).

(I should actually be blogging about this conference, which I went to last weekend and which was marvellous, but in the countdown to setting off to Oz next Wednesday - by which time I have to have written the Introduction to Now and Rome, checked all the Latin in the manuscript, sent it off to beta-readers, and written the Brisbane paper, not to mention dyeing my hair and going to the spa with my best friend H - things are getting rather squeezed.)

*I looked this up on Google and found this extract from an essay by Horst Bredekamp in Critical Inquiry 25:2 (1999), which has some of the details about Benjamin's relationship with Schmitt, including the letter Benjamin sent Schmitt together with a copy of the Trauerspiel (The Origin of the German Mourning Play). Wikipedia (yes, I know, shush) says that, according to Agamben (States of Exception, pp.52-55),

Schmitt's conceptualization of the "state of exception" as belonging to the core-concept of sovereignty was a response to Walter Benjamin's concept of a "pure" or "revolutionary" violence [in 'Critique of Violence'], which didn't enter into any relationship whatsoever with right.

t rex on schmitt

2009-06-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

As ever, Dinosaur Comics has pre-empted my thoughts.

on my holidays

2009-06-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

Hey! I just got back from a weekend in Antwerp, staying with my and J's friend Inez, who - awesomely - is a nomadic writer going from place to place, residency to residency, across Europe and the States and India. And she just sent us this link to a YouTube video of an interview she did for Antwerp TV, which shows the very flat that we stayed in with her, as well bits and pieces of the city, which is beautiful.

(It was a great weekend, thanks. We had the obligatory long discussion about Kids Today And Their Essays, which was highly enjoyable, and also some fantastic rambling talk about science and religion and Communism over tapas, and J and Inez are both writing memoirs so I got to eavesdrop on a lot of writers' talk, which I enjoy. And we drank Belgian beer and looked at statues and parks with baby bunnies, and stunning Art Nouveau architecture, and I bought some new jeans, so that was a successful trip.)

bit of cyberactivism

2009-06-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

Also, I'd ask everyone living in the UK to consider writing to their MPs and/or the Home Secretary about Marina Silva and Rosa de Perez, two women working as cleaners at SOAS (part of the University of London) who are facing deportation: several of their colleagues have already been deported, in some cases breaking up family relationships here in the UK. The deportations were carried out in an unnecessarily aggressive and possibly illegal way, and timed to coincide with a planned rally by the cleaners in support of their recently sacked Union rep. In a newspaper article here, the Labour MP John McDowell says:

As living wage campaigns are building in strength, we are increasingly seeing the use of immigration statuses to attack workers fighting against poverty wages and break trade union organising.

The message is that they are happy to employ migrant labour on poverty wages, but if you complain they will send you back home. It is absolutely shameful.

There is lots of information about the case here, with details about how to contact your MP and the UK Border Agency. The academic solidarity statement is kind of heartening.

deglobalization

2009-06-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

This is interesting. More a note to myself to read it properly when my brane hasn't just been clubbed to bits by a three-hour exams board meeting (though actually it was infinitely smooth, efficient and pleasant, but still three hours long. Also I was up at 6am because I stayed in London last night and had to get back to Bristol for a 9:30 meeting).

oh yeah and superkids

2009-06-16T04:15:00.001-07:00

Is a full-on thriller (full of people tightening their grip on their browning semi-automatic pistol and becoming enthralled by the quality of the workmanship on the golden bracelet known as the Seneghor Serpent while all around them security alarms go off), with a pretty wince-inducing construction of race. I've only read a few pages so far but I see from leafing ahead that a girl called Bonnie is about to appear, and the sight of her name produces a bit of a warm glow in my heart, so we'll see.

catch-up/update

2009-06-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

Still here, still writing. Actually I printed out a complete (so far: missing four 'interludes', which are going to be brief readings of particular passages of Latin which serve as transitions between the five chapters, and an introduction) draft of N&R the other day and read through it, which was nerve-wracking, but you know, I think it's okay. Well, it's like there's a narrow, perilous bridge of thinking-it's-okay over a cavernous abyss of doom in which I think I should be more scholarly, more relevant, more poetic/difficult, more lucid, more disciplined, more wild... But sometimes a narrow perilous bridge is all you need.

Other stuff that's going on: I have two conference papers to write (both for July, one on queer family in Diana Wynne Jones and one on sovereign violence in Lucan) and a fifty-minute paper (probably a version of the Doctor Who: Fires of Pompeii Latin-as-time-travel paper) for the Classical Association of Victoria. I'm behind on my postgrad supervisions because it's the end of the undergraduate marking season (sorry postgrads), and looking forward to getting to those: this year I'm supervising a PhD on ideology and phenomenology in Tacitus' Agricola and one on Penguin Classics, and MA dissertations on: (1) social control/propaganda in contemporary advertising techniques and Vergil's Aeneid; (2) memory, secrecy and revelation in Augustine's Confessions; (3) the construction of Hollywood cinema in the novels of Carl Van Vecht; and (4) appropriations of Plato and contestations over the meaning of 'Greek love' in the work of John ~~Adyngton Simonds~~ Addington Symonds, whose name I should learn to spell. I'm also working on a new third-year undergraduate unit I'll be teaching next year, 'Literature's Children', on childhood/children in literature (including children as implied readers), which is fun but involves a huge amount of reading. Oh, though, I am reading Carolyn Steedman's Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1760-1930 and it is really, really interesting and thought-provoking: I hope we can get her to come to Bristol and talk about reception.

The other main thing that's going on is this: I'm starting to realize that despite the fact that it's after we get back from Australia, September is still, unfairly, going to happen. I'm supposed to spend the month holed up doing final revisions on N&R, but I notice that in my insouciant disbelief in the existence of the bloody month, (1) I've agreed to chair a panel at a very excellent postgrad conference in Bristol, (2) the research group I head up (Word Unbecoming Flesh: Beyond Text, Across Media [link is to a pdf document, scroll down to p.2]) is doing two or three biggish events, (3) I really want to give a paper at a conference in memory of Don Fowler (an amazing, amazing Latin literature/literary theory person), and (4) I've just agreed (subject to funding) to be keynote speaker at a postgrad conference in, er, Melbourne. That's right! Four weeks after I get back from six weeks in Melbourne, I will be flying out there again for, like, five days! But the theme of the conference is 'cultural capital' which is a subject dear to my heart, and plus, invitation to keynote, what could be more flattering than that?

And then in November, another conference, this time in the States and part of the 'imperialisms ancient and modern' series, where I am not keynoting because Homi Bhabha is keynoting. Which, squee.

blimey

2009-06-05T03:15:00.003-07:00

I've just realized, I've been working on this book for a quarter of my life.

Superkids

2009-06-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

So when I was little, there was this book I really loved, called Superkids by Michael Maguire. (You can tell I really loved it because I haven't read it since I was about ten and I still remember the author's name.) I can't remember that much about it, except that it was about a bunch of gifted children - were they super-clever or super-physically-gifted or something? It was published in 1978, Google tells me, and I seem to remember that it was very much that sort of 70s/80s children's superhero team grouping - a white able-bodied guy in the lead, with a mix of sidekicks involving femaleness, blackness, and disability somewhere. (Often a black female, freeing up more people to be white and male. In this case I'm pretty sure there was a black able-bodied boy and someone in a wheelchair.) Anyway, they... solved a mystery and saved the world in some way. And I think at some point in the course of events someone rode a motorbike onto a yacht. (But I just saw that happen yesterday in Tombraider 1, which I am currently playing on my ancient Playstation, so maybe I am confabulating that.) There was definitely some kind of motorcycle stunt, anyway.

Anyway, every now and then I think ooh, I'd like to read that again, but today was the first time I had that thought while being near a computer, so I had a google for it: Abebooks don't have any copies, Alibris don't have any copies, eBay don't have any copies, Amazon.com has one used copy for a hundred and eight dollars wtf (I mean, I don't think - with all apologies to Michael Maguire - that it was actually all that good. In terms of being a long-lasting children's classic or anything.) But the eBay search page (here) tells me that 'people who like Superkids by Michael Maguire' - and remember that we are here dealing with a children's thriller from 1978 - 'also like Go Fish [DVD] and Magical Moments from Great Musicals'.

So everyone else who liked it grew up to enjoy either/both lesbian independent film or musicals. That... probably explains a lot.

[ETA: An awesome person with more google-fu than me (thank you, G!) has directed me to a copy for sale for £6, so I have one on the way now! I will let you know what it's like.]

Carl Schmitt

2009-05-31T05:18:00.000-07:00

You know, I shouldn't be surprised when a Nazi political theorist turns out to be genocidally racist, should I? But I'm working with Carl Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth at the moment, for Chapter Three, and it's making me feel a bit sick.*

In 16th and 17th century international law... great areas of freedom were designated as conflict zones in the struggle over the distribution of a new world. As a practical justification, one could argue that the designation of a conflict zone at once freed the area on this side of the line – a sphere of peace and order ruled by European public law – from the immediate threat of those events ‘beyond the line’... The designation of a conflict zone outside Europe contributed also to the bracketing of European wars, which is its meaning and its justification in international law (pp.97-98).

A couple of pages later (p.100):

A rationalization, humanization, and legalization – a bracketing – of war was achieved against this background of global lines. At least with respect to continental land war in European international law, this was achieved by limiting war to a military relation between states.

I keep finding it really hard to believe that he actually means that the territorial dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples in America, Asia and Australia was a good thing because it 'humanized' war in Europe. But he really, really does mean that. I mean, he really does. And his translator is all like 'hey, this book is awesome' rather than 'there's some good theory in here, but remember you have to completely invert the ethical thrust of the argument'. I just.

(All quotes from Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G L Ulmen [New York: Telos Press, 2006 (2003)], originally written in Berlin 1942-45 and first published, as far as I can make out, in 1950).

*Una, we talked about this last time I was in Cambridge and we talked about whether humankind should TAKE TO THE STARS in the manner of Sylvia Engdahl - you'll be pleased to hear that Schmitt doesn't think that'll work, which is making me think that maybe it will:

The traditional Eurocentric order of international law is foundering now, as is the old nomos of the earth. This order arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world, from an unrepeateable historical event. Only in fantastic parallels can one imagine a modern recurrence, such as men on their way to the moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on earth. The question of a new nomos of the earth will not be answered with such fantasies... Human thinking again must be directed to the elemental orders of its terrestrial being here and now. We seek to understand the normative order of the earth.

Oh, stuff. Hello

2009-05-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

You know, I really love my job. At the moment it's marking season - and of course I have to have a draft of Now and Rome ready to send to my army of beta-readers (I should actually warn them about this plan, shouldn't I?) in six weeks' time. So I have a strange sort of existence, being in three different workflow/timeflow modes at once, but I like all of them, and I'm enjoying the alternation:

(1) Writing time!
I can't always write all day - often I have to stop after about four hours, and then I spend the afternoon doing other stuff - but if I am going to write on a given day, I must begin the day with writing. I have to turn the internet off before and throughout writing time, and I've quit smoking, and I can't find a free download of Minesweeper or Hearts for the Mac (for the love of God, if you know of one, DO NOT TELL ME ABOUT IT), which were things I did as distraction/procrastination, yes, but also things I used to do meditatively, while letting the next paragraph/idea/transition slot into place. I have new and better ones now: knitting and the Rubik's cube! Also making cups of tea and occasionally eating bread and Branston pickle (lunch is anathema to writing, you have to just eat something without noticing when you go into the kitchen.)

The main point about this, though, is that writing time is protected, don't-talk-to-me, focussed, single-tasking time, unlike

(2) Marking time!
The thing about marking time is that it's erratic - I'm pretty good with first-marking now, but I often just can't tell how long second-marking will take. And of course you never know when you're going to need to meet with a second-marker to agree marks, or when your second-marking will show up, and there's all this fiddly stuff that I always forget to account for: calculating unit marks on the basis of four differently-weighted assessment tasks, filling in mark sheets, all of that. So it's a sort of rapid-response thing: we're (academics) always behind where the office wants us to be, so I'll be like, okay, I finished marking my second-year exams, great, I'm done for the year, and then suddenly a unit of second-marking will appear without warning out of nowhere with a request to get it back to the office yesterday. It's kind of fun* and collegial and urgent and stressy, and we all commiserate with each other like mad while doing our two-photocopies-of-the-cover-sheet, staple, paper-clip, thing in the photocopy room.

(3) Scholarship time!
'Scholarship' is a new category that appeared on our Time Allocation Survey forms this year or last year or something. It's for, like, reading journals and generally hanging out in an academic kind of way, the 'significant soil' of academic life which may or may not nourish the eventual yew tree of research, if you like, and why should you. What my friend A calls 'baggy time'. At the moment, this basically involves me and a sofa and a cup of tea and a giant tower of books about the social construction of childhood and children's literature, which I am playing around in happily while beginning to put together the reading lists and ideas for the third year undergraduate unit I'll be teaching next year, 'Literature's Children'. It's lovely, non-focussed, non-directed, playful kind of work and I'm really enjoying it.

*At least it is for me, this year, because I have barely any marking for some reason: all the units I've taught have been really small numbers and mainly assessed by coursework, so I don't have any of the big 70-student options with end-of-year exams to mark. Huzzah!

upcoming attractions/note to self

2009-05-06T05:54:00.001-07:00

I want to post about:

Torey Hayden
interdisciplinarity and theory
Saposcat

that quote from eric

2009-05-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

When one looked at him that day with his straw hat on and its neat light-blue ribbon, and the cricket dress (a pink jersey and leather belt, with a silver clasp in front), showing off his well-built and graceful figure, one little thought what an agony was gnawing like a serpent at his heart... It was long since he had stood before the wicket, but now he was there, looking like a beautiful picture as the sunlight streamed over him and made his fair hair shine like gold.

It's not really what you think of when people say Victorian masculine values, is it? (There's also an awful lot of crying, hand-holding, hair-stroking, breaking-down-and-getting-brain-fever-from-the-least-little-thing, and picking flowers for other boys.) Very unfamiliar gender system.

books i have(n't) read

2009-05-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

I am reading A La Recherche du Temps Perdu in French, by which I mean that I took about a year to read Du cote du chez Swann a year or two ago and have just got A l'ombre des jeune filles en fleur out of the library. My French is very bad, and I read at the rate of one or two pages a night, without using a dictionary or a grammar book, so (a) I keep having experiences like when people refer to 'the scene with the hawthorn bush' and I go OH IS THAT WHAT AUBEPINE MEANS, and (b) I expect it will take me at least ten years to finish it. But I'm actually really enjoying it, in a strange, impressionistic kind of way (and I absolutely bloody hated Madame Bovary, which I also read in French without knowing what lots of the words meant, so some kind of encounter is going on between me and the text.) It makes me think about Pierre Bayard's How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, and how the idea of having 'read' a book covers so many different kinds of encounters with and knowledges about a text - there are books I haven't read that I 'know' quite well (Joyce's Ulysses, of which I read the first 42 pages in about 1990), and books I have read that I have entirely forgotten, and all points in-between. Which is something which pulls together all the kinds of teaching that I do: I teach a course on 'contemporary writing' which is focussed through rewriting and appropriation, and I'm getting more and more interested in the rewriting of books one hasn't read (Walcott, in his epic poem Omeros, has his narrator claim that he 'never read' the works of Homer 'all the way through', and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is very closely related to Joyce's Ulysses, which - according to the story she tells about it - she too has never read.) But also, I'm teaching a Latin course (Level B, for post-beginners) and thinking about the ways I ask the students to 'read' Vergil and Lucan, that very normative, close, philological/critical kind of reading, attending to the grammar and the syntax and the literary qualities all at the same time. The kind of back-and-forth between part and whole which has to go on, paying attention to detail and texture and individual words, but knowing that their meaning is conditioned by their total context (which itself, of course, is constructed and contingent, never finally determinable). And how does that idealized model of reading actually map onto the experience of reading in a language at which one isn't very proficient, like me and French? It's something to think about, the way I demand my students should be able to account for every case, mood, and tense of every word in the texts they read, versus the impressionistic way I read Proust, missing lots of words and lots of sentences and lots of paragraphs but somehow loving it nonetheless, having lots of it remain with me in nonverbal ways.

And I've also been meaning to write about how much I love Eric, or Little by Little, and how much it reminds me of my own fiction, and how I feel like I should only love it in some sort of kitsch or ironic way, but actually I just really love it for the same reasons I love books that I know are actually much better, as books (as crafted artefacts and as pieces of what Benjamin calls 'counsel', 'wisdom woven into the fabric of everyday life', in his essay 'The Storyteller'). Everyone has so many feelings about everything, and there are so many wonderful words, descriptions, moral asides, narratorial interjections... So overwrought and highly-coloured and excessive. Actually, it reminds me of a quote from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick which I used last week in a brief 'position paper' for a debate about interdisciplinarity (and which I used in my essay on fanfiction, I can't let it go):

I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other… The need I brought to books and poems was hardly to be circumscribed, and I felt I knew I would have to struggle to wrest from them sustaining news of the world, ideas, myself and (in various senses) my kind. The reading practices founded on such basic demands and intuitions had necessarily to run against the grain of the most patent available formulae for young people’s reading and life… Becoming a perverse reader was never a matter of my condescension to texts, rather of the surplus charge of my trust in them to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.

So let this be my 'in memoriam' post for Sedgwick, who died a few weeks ago and who saved my life and many others. Not good enough as a memorial for her, not nearly good enough, but at least perhaps she would like the context: genderfucked Victorian boys' fiction (remind me to post the quote about Eric in his pink dress with the silver clasp that shows off his figure*) and Proust, high culture and popular culture, mysterious, oblique and excessive.

*in which he is playing cricket, naturally

postscript and coming attractions

2009-04-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

Also in Getting Medieval (p.196) I found this citation from Foucault, which basically sums up everything I believe in like twenty words. Well done there Michel.

'One "fictions" history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one "fictions" a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth'.

('The History of Sexuality', interview with Lucette Finas, trans. Leo Marshall, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-2977, ed Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp.183-93, p.193.)

Or, for those of you who think that science fiction writers do theory better than theorists:

I fell in love with realism because it deflates the myths, the unexamined ideas of fantasy. It confronts them with forgotten facts. It uses past truth - history.

I love fantasy because it reminds us how far short our lives fall from their full potential. Fantasy reminds us how wonderful the world is. In fantasy, we can imagine a better life, a better future. In fantasy, we can free ourselves from history and outworn realism.

Oz is, after all, only a place with flowers and birds and rivers and hills. Everything is alive there, as it is here if we care to see it. Tomorrow, we could all decide to live in a place not much different from Oz. We don't. We continue to make the world an ugly, even murderous place, for reasons we do not understand.

Those reasons lie in both fantasy and history. Where we are gripped by history - our own personal history, our country's history. Where we are deluded by fantasy - our own fantasy, our country's fantasy. It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible.

And then use them against each other.

Geoff Ryman, Was (London: Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks, 2005 [1992]), pp.453-54.

getting medieval

2009-04-27T04:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, I just read Carolyn Dinshaw's excellent, excellent book on queer medieval history, Getting Medieval, and now I have to return it to the library because my enthusiastic recommendations to everyone I have talked to recently have resulted in a rain of requests for it. (That'll teach me to be intellectually generous.) But before I do, I just wanted to blog about it quickly.

Towards the end of the book, in a chapter called 'Margery Kempe Answers Back' (which also deals with The Book of Margery Kempe, an account of the life of a fourteenth-century female visionary from Norfolk in the UK, and with the recent novel Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck which reuses Margery's story to talk about queer male experience in the twentieth century), Dinshaw does some intelligent and really exciting close-readings of the ways in which American Republican politicians referred to mediaeval studies in order to discredit arts and humanities research, and ultimately to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities, in political debates in the late 1990s. One of the projects which was repeatedly referred to as an example of the kind of self-evidently irrelevant research which wastes of public money was a conference on Sex and Gender in the Middle Ages - Dinshaw cites Representative Hostettler in the Senate, saying:

Mr Chairman, how, when faced with a $5 trillion national debt that continues to grow, can we continue to spend money on projects like these: Sex and gender in the middle ages, 1150-1450. This course received $135,000. Let me give a free lesson here and save the money - there were men - and there were women. The fact that we are here today lets us assume some of them had conjugal relations.

Dinshaw concludes her close reading of this and other moments in the debate by saying:

Motivating this list [of absurd or wasteful research projects] is a thorough resistance... to the very concept of engagement and relation across time as well as across other divides (of gender, sexuality, religion, race, class, nationality). Because the very basic idea that history lives, that even distant and relatively unexplored times and places are relevant to twentieth-century American lives, suggests sites of cultural relation that are unpredictable, uncontrollable. In the mention here of at least half these funded projects, the possibility that we can forge dynamic relations to the past, even the distant or unfamiliar past, even if at present we cannot know where such relations will lead, is closed off.

Which is some of the most cogent reasoning I've heard for taking Walter Benjamin very seriously when (as I posted about recently) he argues in the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History') that political resistance, revolutionary energy, come from engagement with the past in 'uncontrollable' ways, rather than fantasies about the future.

And isn't that quote from Hostettler revealing, too - that 'sex and gender' must refer only to men, women, and reproductive heterosex, and our relationship to the past must be framed solely in those terms, as biological inheritance via heterosex (this is what I call 'the order of generations', following Derrida in The Post Card, the ordering force of a reproductive, heterosexual understanding of time and history). And here it is in the House of Representatives, in a debate about government funding, as the explicit principle for allowing/denying funding, for legitimating academic enquiry!

It's nice to be reminded sometimes that what I do is important, that it's not just the contemporary and the 'now' that has urgency and political weight.

Amazon update

2009-04-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

Amazon have blamed the removal of LGBTQ books on a 'glitch', and denied that LGBTQ books (and, it seems, books on disabled sexuality) were targeted. Here are two very good blog posts explaining why that doesn't make the problem go away: Mary Hodder on Techcrunch.com, and Keith Kamisugi's response and elaboration on EqualJusticeSociety.org. (Thanks to Oyceter for the link.)

In the meantime, now that you're all into the signing of petitions, please, please, please go here and sign the petition written by Christopher Bollas and Darian Leader on behalf of the Coalition against the Over-Regulation of Psychotherapy. The link will explain the background, but here's a brief quote from their home page:

The new proposals have shown a serious and bizarre misunderstanding of the nature of talking therapy. They see it as a definable technique to be applied with predictable outcomes. Yet the key to talking therapies is the nature of the relationship between the parties rather than the performance of any particular procedure. Analytic work involves an open-ended relationship, where results may emerge that were never predicted or even thought of beforehand. The proposed regulation leaves no room for the unknown, as if the solution to each person's problems were known in advance: therapist and patient will be expected to adhere to a clear predetermined agenda. Government intervention thus threatens the very foundation of analytic work, compromising both its creativity and authenticity.

The new regulations proposed for the talking therapies - which include 451 rules for the analytic session - would effectively make it impossible to practice psychoanalysis and many other forms of therapy in the way they have been practiced for the last hundred years.

I can't even begin to tell you how important I think it is that talking therapies be available to people, and that CBT not become the only government-funded (or legally practicable) form of therapy. This article by Darian Leader goes some way to explaining why.

Homophobic Amazon

2009-04-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

You've probably all already heard about Amazon.com's decision to remove hundreds of books with gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and/or trans content from its sales ranking and search engines on the basis that they have adult content.

Books targeted include YA fiction, non-explicit LGBT classics like The Well of Loneliness and Giovanni's Room, and Kate Bornstein's Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. Conspicuously not included are books containing explicit heterosexual sex or naked women (including Playboy: The Complete Centrefolds) and the two books which now come top of the search results when you put 'homosexuality' into Amazon's search engine: Can Homosexuality be Healed? and A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.

Yes, that's right: Amazon is promoting the 'prevention of homosexuality' and removing the link to 'alternatives to suicide'.

Please write to Amazon, boycott the site, sign the petition here, and do whatever else you like to make your displeasure known.

also

2009-04-12T07:06:00.001-07:00

I am reading Eric, or Little by Little, which is brilliant, and making plans to write something on the terms 'boyish' and 'manly' in Farrar's school stories - it seems to be the case that good manliness is the same as boyishness, while manliness which is opposed to or differentiated from boyishness is bad, and the cause of downfall.

preview of coming attractions

2009-04-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

I just read Carolyn Dimshaw's Getting Medieval, which is excellent, and I'm starting to think Benjamin is actually right about the past being more important than the future for political resistance. So I expect that will be my next substantial theorypost.

brief books update

2009-04-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

This Jane Green novel (Jemima J) is the most fatphobic book I have ever read in my life, to the extent that the fatphobia is preventing the plot and the characterization from making any sense.

Books update

2009-04-05T08:06:00.001-07:00

So I have now also read, from the Tower O Books:

Lesley Arfin, Dear Diary
which I didn't enjoy as much as I thought I would. The premise was that it was edited highlights from her diary, aged like 12-25, with annotations and 'updates' from her currently-28-year-old self (including conversations with people from the diary, etc), so I was kind of thinking of it like Michelle Tea's Rose of No Man's Land and Phoebe Gloeckner's The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but it wasn't, really. It was like a weird mix of self-condemnation and self-normalization, like half the time it was going God, I was so stupid, teenage girls are so stupid and rubbish and half the time it was going This happens to everyone it is the HUMAN CONDITION. Both of which strike me as the two most boring ways to deal with experience, especially in combination. Like, there's nothing unique or likeable about me! Buy my book!

It also did that thing of going on about how once the cool girls had rejected her she couldn't possibly have been friends with Chloe So-and-so because that would have been failure, social death, etc, which just baffles me, because I spent my school years being friends with people that I liked and really, if there were cool kids at my school I wouldn't have noticed or understood why their judgements on me were supposed to carry more weight than mine on them. (J says she thinks this might be an American thing, because coolness/social capital seems to be institutionalized in American high schools through things like football teams, cheerleaders, prom king and queen etc. We have done extensive research ie watched Buffy and Carrie and read the Class of '89 series.)

Perry Moore, Hero
which was excellent: a YA novel about the teenage son of a disgraced costume hero, trying to figure out how to tell his dad (a) that he's gay and (b) that he has superpowers, like the bad heroes who disgraced and abandoned his dad. The end was very fast-and-furious and I wasn't sure that the action-adventure plot quite dovetailed with the emotional journey of the characters in the way it was promising to do, but along the way it was tons of fun: like Watchmen meets What They Did To Princess Paragon. Lots of great political/world-building detail.

P E Ryan, Saints of Augustine
which was also good, but not hugely world-shattering for me: the two main characters are likeable, and they do stuff, and the plot is satisfying and the writing is good, but it hasn't left me with a great deal of new ideas and I don't think Sam and Charlie are going to take up residence in my head. It's the one about the two ex-best friends, one gay, one straight, who learn and grow in the course of a summer. I guess the thing that makes it a post-90s gay teen novel is that the gay/straight thing isn't really the core of the book (though it does tell the gay protagonist's coming-out story): both of them have other/bigger things going on in their lives (bereavement, drug debt, divorcing parents).

I'm sick at the moment (this cold I brought back from London is doing me in), which means I'm reading a lot, but nothing very taxing. Probably I will go back to the chicklit next - I have a Jane Green novel I got in the three-books-for-two-pounds box at Cancer Research on Whiteladies Road the other week...

fan fiction conference

2009-04-01T06:19:00.001-07:00

Back from London, where I caught a cold: catching up on email and found a link to this conference on fan fiction and sexualities, in Sweden, February 2010. The emphasis on close reading/textual analysis rather than ethnography sounds promising.

going to london brb

2009-03-27T02:01:00.000-07:00

Going to a conference on Eros with my little Powerpoint and my knitting! Back on Wednesday.

Wittlinger

2009-03-24T04:21:00.000-07:00

(You can tell it's the spring vacation, can't you? HELLO THAR INTERNETS.)

So I read Love and Lies: Marisol's Story, which is a companion volume to Hard Love, which is one of my favourite YA novels of all time, and Parrotfish, which is about a FtM protagonist, and they were fine, but neither of them had that thing that made Hard Love so awesome. I think it was because Hard Love had lots of different voices, lots of different formats and styles and points of view, and you had the sense that more was going on with everyone than you ever found out: its point of view was slightly skewed from the main narrative line, and there was something pleasingly complicated about the star-crossed lovers plot. Whereas both Love and Lies and Parrotfish, I felt, worked a little bit too hard at presenting the 'right' way to see things through a first-person narrator, and that made everything a bit flat and unnuanced. They were good examples of the problem-novel genre, which I happen to really like, but they didn't do an awful lot with it, I thought. But, you know, isn't it great that there's lots of perfectly-good-but-not-world-scorchingly-brilliant queer YA fiction out there? When J wrote her first queer YA novel, her editor told her it had to be three times as good as the next book because it was queer. And that's just not true any more, which is great.

Okay, now I have to go revise my article for Cultural Critique - the anonymous reader (who was very helpful, thank you anonymous reader) pointed out that I hadn't written the last paragraph of it. Which I never do; that's like my besetting sin as an academic writer. I hate the bit where you go 'And so in conclusion the last five thousand words were basically about this'. So, gah, I hate having to do it, but double-gah, I know it will make the piece like a hundred percent better, so I can't even grumble about the unreasonable demands of editors.

Incidentally, yesterday I practiced my Eros paper on J and she says she can't tell whether I'm getting cleverer or stupider either.

This Charming Man

2009-03-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

The only book I have so far read from the Tower O Books is Marian Keyes, This Charming Man, which I liked a lot on the way through and which I think did some subtly quite interesting stuff with gender and race/racism, but I was kind of disappointed in the ending. It wasn't as bad as Alexandra Potter's Who's That Girl?, but it did remind me of it, in that both books deal with men who serially abuse women (the charming man of MK's title beats and rapes his girlfriends, and Who's That Girl has a character who sexually abuses his patients), neither book shows the man being punished for it, and both of them frame their endings as happy. Me, I'm of the opinion that the good should end happily and the bad unhappily (that is what fiction means), and it doesn't seem too much to ask that, you know, rapists in popular, escapist-ish fiction should get their come-uppance.

Probably I will read something by Ellen Wittlinger next.

and what i really want to know is this

2009-03-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

I listened to Laurie Anderson's album, Bright Red, constantly while I was discovering Benjamin and Derrida in my MA year, and (perhaps consequently) it seems to me to be one of the savviest theoretical works on history in existence. It has a song 'Same Time Tomorrow' which contains the lines:

and what I really want to know is this:
Are things getting better, or are they getting worse?
Can we start all over again?
Stop. Pause. We're in record.

Which is such a deft and intelligent and dense and complex set of reflections on what it is to do history (we can't interpret historical data, particularly data from our own historical moment, without a narrative of progress or of decline; we can't start all over again, because the burden of history weighs on our brains like a nightmare from which we are trying to awake; and our experience in the present is conditioned or determined by technologically specific archival structures.) The fact that the previous stanza is all about letters and their burning (the conceptual/metaphorical centre of Derrida's The Post Card) just makes me love this song even harder.

The Benjamin connection is 4REAL, by the way - one of the ways we were taught Benjamin on my MA was through a documentary by/about Laurie Anderson, in which she clones herself and her clone (who looks nothing like her) only speaks in Walter Benjamin quotes. Also, her song 'The Dream Before' is a version of Benjamin's Angel of History, from his 1940 essay 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (recently retranslated as 'On the Concept of History').

Anyway, I'm currently trying to write my paper for the Eros conference this weekend and wishing I knew whether I was getting cleverer or whether I was getting stupider (is the reason it's flowing relatively easily but I can tell where the conceptual holes are just because I am better at writing and more self-reflective than I used to be, or because I have become glib and superficial in a career-driven bid to publish/give more papers?) Which is what that title was originally about, but of course it will also serve to segue into my promised post on Benjamin and Edelman.

I've ~~bitched~~ talked a fair bit about what I think is wrong with Lee Edelman's book No Future in the chapter I wrote for Miriam Leonard's volume Derrida and Antiquity. I had really high hopes for the book, which is about the political motivation of appeals to 'the children' (won't somebody please think of the children?) and the way that such appeals implicate us in a particular way of thinking about the future as the reproduction of the present, which involves a particular kind of naturalization of heterosexuality and the nuclear family as well as a problematic conservatism, a closedness to the future as radically unknown and unknowable. Which is a great thing for a book to be about, yes? Yes! But the book itself has four main flaws, for me:

(1) It takes for granted that reproductive heterosex can be distinguished from queer, non-reproductive sex, and it doesn't seem to believe that the future can be thought of in any way other than the reproduction of the Same (this is the point I take aim at in the Derrida chapter).

(2) Its argument, riskily, is that queers should proceed by repeating and fulfilling the homophobic insistence that queerness is dangerous or deadly to children, and that queerness has no future. I don't think this risk pays off: Leo Bersani writes on the back cover of the book Edelman’s extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument. Which means that his book requires that queers assent to our non-survival, our eradication: I can't think of anything more anti-queer than that (not just that queers should be eradicated, but that we should participate in our own eradication), and it never quite becomes clear to me what is pro-queer about the book's argument.

(3) Edelman repeatedly says 'queers' and 'we' when he means 'gay men' (We all know the pain of homophobes insisting that we are effeminate interior designers! No, not if 'we' are butch lesbians). Universalizing specifically male experience is irritating, lazy and sexist anyway, but when it's in a book about the production of children, it's even more so.

(4) It doesn't engage with the fact that some people are children - and that the use of children-as-metaphors is damaging and harmful to them, too.

So, anyway. I teach an MA unit called 'Reception: History, Time and the Archive' which is about the reception of (texts and artefacts from) the past, and the models of history and time that we use to think about the material or textual survival of the past into the present. It's a really fun unit, and this year I have a particularly excellent group of students, who pretty much on a weekly basis help me to push my ideas further (they're already in the acknowledgements page of Now and Rome for helping me, in our session on Jauss, to sharpen up the relationship between textual and political reception that the book is all about). And when we read 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' a couple of weeks ago, I realized for the first time that Benjamin's whole argument there can be seen as being about the revolutionary potential of the past as opposed to the future.

In Theses 2-6, Benjamin talks about the claim that the past has on us, and how the task of the materialist historian is to 'rescue' the past, which is in danger. For example, in thesis 6, he writes (emphasis original):

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

And the angel, of course, in Thesis 9, 'would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed': 'his face is turned towards the past', but he is blown helplessly into the future by the storm of progress. But the clearest bit, I think, is in Thesis 12, which is otherwise quite opaque to me because I don't know the historical context well enough (emphasis mine):

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the repository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction... has always been objectionable to Social Democrats... Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished more by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.

Benjamin's target throughout the 'Theses', as-I-argue-in-my-book, is a set of linked concepts: 'tradition', 'progress', 'the continuum of history', and (crucially) 'homogeneous, empty time'. He's arguing, I think, for a way of doing history that doesn't allow the ruling classes or the 'victors' to determine causality and continuity, or to determine what makes it into the historical record and what doesn't. That is, he is arguing against the enslavement of the future to the past via a dominant set of cultural and political norms, against becoming trapped on the trajectory of 'progress', as opposed to being able to take a 'tiger's leap into the past' in 'the open air of history' (which, he says, 'is how Marx understood the revolution').

So the important and revolutionary thing, for Benjamin as for Edelman, is the refusal of dominant forms of continuity and 'progress' into a future which is modelled on the past. Like Edelman, too, Benjamin argues against thinking the future through the figure of the child: he says that the image of 'liberated grandchildren' is what destroys and dissipates the energy (the hatred and spirit of sacrifice, isn't that a great phrase?) of the revolutionary class. But he doesn't therefore say, like Edelman, that there will be 'no future', or that we must 'pronounc[e] at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not:... that the Child as futurity's emblem must die: that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past' (No Future, p.31). Very tellingly, this is the only reference to the past that I remember in No Future (I don't have my copy of it to hand, I lent it to a friend), and I don't remember Edelman explaining why 'the past' should be lethal when it can, of course, be life-giving (for example, many queer people have found it urgent to research and tell queer histories in order to find alternative ways to be queer in the present).

Anyway, Benjamin's critique of futurity runs, perhaps, along similar lines to Edelman's, but he doesn't draw the same conclusions as Edelman. Instead Benjamin says that, in doing history in a new way, in thinking of ourselves as the redeemers or rescuers of the past rather than of 'future generations', we are inaugurating a whole new model of time, escaping the 'homogeneous, empty' time of progress and historical continuity. He ends, in Thesis 18B, by saying:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.

So doing history in the Benjaminian way - turning our faces towards the past; thinking of ourselves as the redeemers not of future generations of liberated grandchildren but of enslaved ancestors; refusing to investigate the future - opens up the future to the absolute unknowability and otherness of the Messianic moment. It turns the future into a future-to-come (in Derrida's pun on the French word 'avenir', which means both 'future' and, differently punctuated, 'to come'). Just as Edelman sets out to do, the 'Theses' demolish a future predicated on the Child as the emblem of 'heteroreproductive futurity', the endless repetition of the same, but Edelman leaves us in an unsurvivable moment which valorizes death (the subtitle of No Future is Queer Theory and the Death Drive), while Benjamin, fanning the spark of hope in the past and valorizing redemption and rescue, shifts us into an entirely different mode of futurity.

I know which revolution I'd rather dance at.

no no future = yes future!

2009-03-18T04:24:00.000-07:00

To remind myself that when I get an hour or so (mmm... an hour...) I must post about how Walter Benjamin pre-emptively and definitively dismantles Lee Edelman's No Future. And how my MA class were the ones to show me how. I love my MA class.

Harry Potter is a war criminal

2009-03-14T06:00:00.001-07:00

and I love Shami Chakrabarti even more than I did this morning.

IS IT CAN IT BE BOOKS TIEM NAO

2009-03-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

I have a huge pile of books!

J and I bought them together in two big binges: today we went to Cardiff and bought the first five in Borders (I just went in for This Charming Man, it was like that episode of Black Books where Manny goes into the bookshop and comes out five seconds later with #100 worth of books and a latte), and when we came home the rest had arrived from Amazon (in, J wishes it to be recorded, a big box. Not a small one, as you might think; a big one). The big box was the result of an online binge a couple of weeks ago, which in turn was a result of J's slightly chaotic accounting system (me: I wish we had lots of money to spend on books; J: I BET WE COULD AFFORD LIKE A HUNDRED POUNDS OH LOOK.)

Anyway. They are sat on the coffee table, waiting for it to be the Easter vacation. This is a list of them and why we bought them:

Jacqueline Wilson, My Secret Diary (I buy everything by JW as soon as it comes out)
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (it has a reference to Blake's 7 on page 22)
Leslie Arfin, Dear Diary (It is about chaotic drug-addicted teenagers!)
Marian Keyes, This Charming Man (Big fat chicklit novel about domestic violence! And Morrissey gave permission for the title!)
P C and Kristin Cast, Marked (J says: For the first time in ages a vampire novel that reminds me of Buffy!. [In the shop she said: A vampire novel with a sense of humour about itself!])
Katia Noyes, Crashing America (Streetsmart lesbian road movie novel with teenage protagonist and a back-cover blurb from Michelle Tea!)
Ellen Wittlinger, Parrotfish (FTM novel!)
Mayra Lazara Dole, Down to the Bone (Cuban-American lesbian teen lit!)
Ellen Wittlinger, Love And Lies: Marisol's Story(Companion novel to Hard Love, one of my top three favourite queer YA novels)
Steve Berman, Vintage: A Ghost Story (J says: Queer Gothic, worth a try)
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (WHAT MORE NEED WE SAY)
Perry Moore, Hero (Gay teen superhero! And all his friends have, like, rubbish superpowers!)
Sylvia Brownrigg, Pages for You (Intergenerational lesbian awesomeness!)
P E Ryan, Saints of Augustine (One of them is gay! One of them is straight! They ~~fight crime~~ learn and grow in the course of a turbulent adolescent summer!)

When I have read them I will tell you about them.

high on books

2009-03-07T07:51:00.001-08:00

So I survived my Very Busy Week in fine style: Thursday afternoon saw me spellbound with interest at an awesome keynote lecture by the inexplicably undersung Marcel Swiboda on Samuel Beckett's Ghost Trio, followed by a very exciting response from Richard Stamp which followed some of the same theoretical and formal questions through a reading of Duck Amuck (YouTube link). (Later, over dinner, I argued that there was, in fact, a right answer to one of the central questions - 'what does a close-up sound like', or 'what is the auditory equivalent of the close-shot' - and that answer was THE SOUND OF THE TARDIS.) So that might have been one of my favourite academic moments ever.

Then on Friday I went to a short-listing meeting where we all quite amicably agreed on a short-list for the one-year post-doc at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition, and then to a workshop on mentoring (I have a mentee!), and then came home and finished* my marking. Then J & I celebrated the finishing of marking with champagne, popcorn and the episode of Black Books where Manny gets a weekend off and announces his intention to take long baths, braid my beard, unbraid it, lie around fondling moonbeams and being a lord of leisure, eat tiramisu in bed with a long spoon.

And now it is the weekend, and I have two days off,** and things are going to be a bit calmer for the next few weeks. When I was walking down the hill to my mentoring workshop yesterday, it was a beautiful spring day, and there were daffodils in the gardens of Bristol Grammar School and blossom on the trees by the road and that springlike energy in the taste of the air, and it suddenly occurred to me that on the way home I could go into a shop and look at the things in it for no reason! I could take slightly longer than necessary over tasks! (In the end, I didn't, because I wanted to get my marking finished early. But still. That sense of being off the treadmill is just glorious.)

So far my moonbeam-fondling activities have mostly consisted of having energetic conversations with J and reading novels of immense brilliance and joy. In termtime, I read very little new fiction, because I get so little uninterrupted reading time that everything has to be broken up into five pages here and there (usually in bed, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, when I don't want to be sinking luxuriously into a fictional world/a sensory-intellectual bath of wordlove). So I mostly read chicklit, and undemanding chicklit at that, while J rolls round in literary splendour and piles up huge Towers O Books by my side of the bed for me to look at longingly and then pick up another Meg Cabot novel.

But today! I read Cathy's Key, which is the sequel to Cathy's Book, which I stayed up till one in the morning to read in one hit last summer. Key is slightly less exciting than Book, I think, and does less with its so-called 'interactive' format,*** but much more emotionally complex and interesting - in the same league as Feeling Sorry for Celia, which is one of my favourite books in the world. You guys should all read it: it's a really refreshing in a post-Joss-Whedon kind of a deal (as in, following up on the cool stuff in Whedon and briskly repairing the uncool stuff in a no-nonsense, hip kind of way), and makes me even more puzzled that Twilight is taking over the world. Here's a non-spoilery extract from some of the metafictional discussion towards the end, which I read as a pleasing sideswipe at Bridget Jones**** and post-Bridget Jones romantic comedies (on which, see this potentially interesting Guardian article, by the way), and as kind of a manifesto for the books' portrayal of kick-ass girlhood:

Hollywood is nervous about having female lead characters. Romantic stories about young women in adventurous situations are considered very niche - only for teenage girls. [But] they liked all the bits about you getting humiliated at work.

Anyway, there's a third one coming out next month, Cathy's Ring. Hooray!

And the second book I read today is Kensington Gardens, which all my ch lit friends must go and read IMMEDIATELY, though I have also told you all to go and see P J Hogan's film of Peter Pan and none of you have done that, so I hold out no hope. But it is awesome! It's narrated by Peter Hook, a children's writer and the creator of 'Jim Yang', the time-travelling boy hero who can't grow up, and it's a kind of bonkers mash-up of the life of J M Barrie with London in the Swinging Sixties. It's rich and strange and full of pontification and riffs and at one point has a ten-page list of people who were famous in the last 60s, and it's completely compelling - it's 400 page and I read it in one go.

The oddest thing about it is that J loves it, and it's totally the kind of thing she'd usually hate. I know this because it's avowedly structured very like The Good Soldier, which is one of Fresan's favourite books and also one of mine, and J hates The Good Soldier to the extent that she is gnashing her teeth and hurling it against walls by about ten pages in. And actually, the 'ten-page list' thing makes me think of American Psycho, which it doesn't really resemble except where it does, and J hates that, too.

Anyway, but the really awesome thing about it is that it's kind of a version of Homeward Bounders, which I don't think (from his acknowledgements and lists of sources) Fresan has read. I am semi-seriously toying with the idea of sending him a copy, because I think reading some DWJ would totally remap his ideas about children's literature.

And tonight! J and I and our friend G are going to go and see The Wizard of Menlo, a play about Thomas Edison (sample quote from publicity: Yes. Life is being improved. We are improving it with our machines), which I am fully expecting to be as steampunkily mad and brilliant as Tomorrow's Eve, though I may of course be disappointed. So between the post-Buffy teen-girl-adventure-romance-with-supernatural-elements and the Latin-American-magic-realist-Peter-Pan-60s-London thing and the Czech-paean-to-Edison, possibly my brane will explode ~~and I won't have to teach on Monday anyway~~. HOORAY FOR THE WEEKEND.

*I still have three units of second-marking to do, but none of that is actually late yet, and I have finished my first-marking! (Until my Latin students have their exam on Thursday, anyway.)

** Well, I have to do a handout/Powerpoint for my 9am lecture and read like fifty lines of Vergil for my 10am reading class on Monday. BUT THAT IS ALL.

*** The books have phone numbers and email addresses and websites and suchlike in, that really work, and a little envelope full of doohickeys - menus and documents and scribbled-on matchbooks and stuff. The doohickeys are cool but the phone messages are all transcribed in the book itself, and the websites also seem to just have scans of the doohickeys, and I'm unsure why 'clicking on stuff' is any more 'interactive' than 'turning the pages of a book'. But I am a grumpy old woman, I know.

**** I actually really liked Bridget Jones the book, which is mainly about female friendship and urban friend-based kin networks of care, and the inanity of self-help-book versions of heterosexuality which try to set up men and women as different species. But the film... didn't really do that so much.

Redemption

2009-03-01T03:08:00.000-08:00

So last weekend I went to Redemption 09, a multifandom convention which has been running biannually for ten years now: it started in 1999 as a Blake's 7/Babylon 5 convention, became 'Blake's 7, Babylon 5 and Beyond' in I think 2005, and now the only real trace of its origins as a two-fandom con is the awesome logo (the Liberator from Blake's 7 emerging from a Babylon-5-style jump-gate). I've been going since 2001 (though I had to miss '07 because I was in Australia, and will probably miss '11 for the same reason, BOO).

It was fantastic. I haven't been very involved with fandom as such over the last few years: the shift of fandom from e-mail lists to Livejournal hasn't suited me very well, and also there was the whole thing where I got a girlfriend and a full-time job and had less time for spontaneous small-scale writing, and also the obsession with Harry Potter which has paradoxically kept me out of organized fandom. So I don't participate in a lot of the activities which tend to be used to define 'fandom' - I've written very little fic, and almost all of it in fandoms which I don't otherwise participate in or which are extremely small-to-non-existent; I don't beta-read, edit, or really read fanfic or watch songvids; all my fandoms are closed-canon so I don't participate in ongoing show discussion or reviews or whatever. But really my online life centres around fandom and fans, and I still think of myself as a fan. I guess I still read like a fan. But I went to the con with a little bit of trepidation, in case I didn't 'count' as a fan any more.

But it was just bloody marvellous. I still had that feeling of being among my people, and just that absolute joyfulness of being among people who all want to think and talk and share their skills and their enthusiasm with one another. People who are making stuff, all the time, out of the bits and pieces that our culture gives us, and who are keeping alive niche skills and strange traditions, and who are looking at the world from a strange sideways perspective and thinking about how to live in it differently, and who are in a glorious tradition of amateurism (root word love): doing things for the love of it, as best as we can, and in ways which often bypass the main (commodified and professionalized) circuits of reward and evaluation. I guess one of the best ways to try and convey that is to talk about the Saturday-night cabaret, where any con attendees can sign up to perform, and which this year included, among many other things:

* a beautiful youth whose gender I couldn't read (sorry, beautiful youth, unless you prefer not to be read in gendered terms, in which case, unsorry) performing a hilarious Star Trek version of a song referred to in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, complete with Tribbles; I talked to hir afterwards and ze said it had been hir first performance without a script, but ze hadn't been nervous because ze'd spent the whole half-hour before ze went on talking to the Guests of Honour (Doctor Who writers Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman) and they'd been so lovely and interesting ze'd forgotten to be scared;

* a woman in a pinstriped corset with a red feather boa and a tiny black hat with a veil skewered onto her long hair, performing a dance to an amazing song called 'Doomsday' which managed not only to be visually splendid but also to critique and extend the characterization of Lucy Saxon (the Master's wife in Season 3 of New Who) in fabulous ways;

* a person in mediaeval dress playing the dulcimer and the recorder (simultaneously);

* a woman doing a poi routine to a Tom Lehrer song;

* a completely hilarious sketch crossing Doctor Who with the Council of Elrond from The Lord of the Rings (and critiquing both texts in the process);

* a fancy-dress competition won by a woman who'd hand-sewn an outfit from original Victorian patterns, with second place taken by a woman who'd made a 'Liberator' costume out of three paper cones and a big green balloon - both of them were amazing and fannish in completely different ways, one because of the craft and the rigour/geekery and the skill and the labour, and the other because of the simplicity and the humour and the way in which it relied on a shared fannish world of references and icons and allusions.

The Redemption community is a nice mix of ages - skewing mainly into the 30s and 40s but with a good sprinkling of white-haired sex- and septuagenarians, and a fair number of twentysomethings. Also some children, between about three and about ten (not many teenagers). It's pretty white, but by no means completely so, and there were a number of people with visible disabilities (including a guy with a guide dog who ran a panel on how blind people experience TV, and talked very interestingly about how Old Who, with the Radiophonic Workshop, is a much better show for people mainly experiencing it aurally than New Who, with the fancy visual CGI and the intrusive/cliched post-John-Williams-style music).

I spent a lot of time in the bar, talking to good friends I made through Blake's 7 fandom and/or at earlier Redemptions, and a lot of time going to panels (one of the differences between a Redemption convention and a conference is that Redemption schedules three streams of panels/activities continuously from ten am until midnight or one in the morning, and people think this is a good thing, because there isn't anything we'd rather do than, for example, have a beery discussion about who the best Doctor Who writer is at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night). I participated in two panels - one on Mary-Sue, which was absolutely brilliant and caused me to have many thoughts, which will all mulch around in the back of my brain until I suddenly come up with a shiny new Theory of Mary-Sue, and one on Lois McMaster Bujold, which was also brilliant: in fact, one of the things I liked best about the convention was that we managed to spend nearly an hour talking about Bujold's protagonist Miles Vorkosigan and the way in which her characters are given psychological depth and complexity so as to deepen and extend the action-adventure/space-opera/romance genres that she plays with... and no-one even once mentioned that Miles (the action/romance hero) is severely disabled, because there was so much else to say. (I also liked the moment when about seven of us, all women, had gone out into Coventry to forage for dinner and some boys threw stuff at us from an alleyway - but we paid no attention because we were too busy animatedly talking about self-defence systems and the best way to deal with attacks, and the boys got bored and gave up straightaway.)

But perhaps the highlight of the con was the now-traditional dramatic reading of Man of Iron, which started in 2001 and now has to be scheduled in one of the biggest conference rooms the hotel has to offer, because the audience gets bigger every time. Now, Man of Iron is a never-produced script written for Blake's 7 by Paul Darrow, who played one of its leads, Avon, and, in the words of the person sitting behind me at the reading, it reaches levels of bad never before attained by humans. It was, alarmingly, the only specifically Blake's 7 item on the programming this year, and I'm pretty sure there were people watching it who had never seen any of the original show, but this doesn't seem to detract from the sheer joy of it. By now, it's becoming a sort of Rocky-Horror experience, with semi-formalized, semi-spontaneous audience participation (eg the explosion of applause and catcalls at the line Water is your ally, Tarrant! Water! Water!). Again, it's the sort of thing you could only get at a convention: it's a celebration of a shared world, a shared knowledge of genre conventions and their uses and abuses, and a shared mythology of Paul Darrow and his curious mix of self-delusion and canniness (one of the things that is most mocked by fans about Darrow's performance in B7 is his running; one of the things we love the most is his capacity for Beautiful Suffering; and the Man of Iron script consists in roughly equal measure of Avon running and Avon being beaten up). And the performance works so well because of its skilled amateurishness: more of a professional gloss would ruin the tone of it, and make it less of a shared experience between audience and actors (also, would we start casting according to physical type, and lose our fifty-nine-year-old, walks-with-a-cane, portly, white Dayna and our skinny, blonde, female Avon? Not to mention our mad scientist in a silver PVC knee-length kilt?); less skill in the performance and it wouldn't come across at all.

And now (see previous post) that is all the time I have to write about Redemption, though I wish I could say more about almost every aspect of it. I'm gutted we'll probably have to miss Redemption 11, but starting to lay grandiose plans for Ruler of the Universe at Redemption 13 (this year won by Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, an alternate-universe Fascist version of the Brigadier who appears in one story from Old Who - I love it when the minor characters rule the universe! - played to the hilt by a fantastic fan whose name I only know as 'Ming' (his badge name), complete with a poster campaign with slogans like: If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping down on a human face. Now imagine your foot in that boot. Vote Lethbridge-Stewart!), and hoping to attend Odyssey 2010, which will be run by the same committee as Redemption and therefore will no doubt be AWESOME.

And so, in conclusion, GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN!!!!!!

three and a half weeks till easter

2009-02-28T09:32:00.000-08:00

I don't want to do any more work! I want to ring my parents and my best mate who I shamefully owe phone calls to, and lie around reading my new novel about Peter Pan which comes enthusiastically recommended by J, and start tracking down all the movies we got off IMDB in which Brendan Fraser is gay, Jewish, and/or at a boarding school, and write fanfic, and finish my 'Charming Man' songvid, and make a new mix CD for walking to work, and write a report on the convention I was at last weekend...

but, oh, Lord, the week I have coming up. Actually accomplished today and yesterday:

* replanned the penultimate chapter of my book (Chapter 4), started planning Chapter 5 in more detail, bodged together an 8000-word draft of Chapter 4 (from old papers, saved as '4frankenstein') and wrote up about 2000 words of it into near-final-draft form
* read a 40-page chapter from a PhD student, annotated it, and wrote a 2000-word response
* marked (very late) a 4000-word essay on Frankenstein which had got paper-clipped to the bottom of a small pile of MA second-marking and therefore been overlooked.

Still on the pile of things I was going to accomplish today and yesterday:

* peer-review 7,000-word journal article on 'Plato's Pharmacy'
* second-mark 15 2,000-word essays on George Eliot (very, very, very late and promised to the office next week WITHOUT FAIL)
* second-mark 15 bundles of unseen translation/prepared translation/ practical criticism exercises (only very late)
* second-mark 8,000-word dissertation on the reception of Ovidian myth in poetry and visual art (not actually late yet!)
* redraft lecture on genre for Monday morning, prepare Powerpoint
* prepare 50 lines of Vergil for translation class on Monday morning

Tomorrow is my day off, and I will not work on it, not least because Charlie and J and I are going on a long walk from 1pm and then I am cooking dinner, so I can't. And then next week looks like this:

Monday
9-11: teach 2-hour Latin class (lecture on genre, 50 lines of Vergil)
11: meeting to discuss arrangements for workshop on the philosophical implications of the close-up on Thursday
2-4: teach 2-hour MA class (student presentations on history and literature)
4:30: meet with postgrad students who want to set up a theory reading group, advise them on what theory they should read
5:30: pick up work samples and references for 15 long-listed applicants for a one-year postdoc
6:00: get home, prepare for Tuesday and Wednesday

Tuesday
9-2: read work samples and references for 15 long-listed applicants for a one-year postdoc
2-4: office hours (usually chocka, with anything from requests to discuss crunchy theoretical issues for a PhD application to random Latin grammatical queries to worries over mental health problems)
4-6: School of Humanities interdisciplinary school seminar on 'Character' which will be AWESOME
8-9: tai chi class
10:00: get home.

Wednesday
morning: run session on Reception MA for postgraduate open day (with lecture and Powerpoint), till
3:30: go to workshop on The Prospects for Feminist Methodology (till 5:30)

Thursday
9-10: teach Latin class (Ovid)
11-12:30: teach Contemporary Writing class on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
1-5: workshop on the philosophical implications of the close-up, probably followed by dinner with the speaker

Friday
11-1pm: shortlisting meeting for postdoc application
1-2pm: mentoring workshop
2pm: possibly resume shortlisting meeting

And to be fitted in somewhere next week:

* read final bundle of UCAS application forms for English students, evaluate according to criteria, annotate and return to office
* write unseen exam for Latin class
* mark 7 new essays which were handed in yesterday, probably mostly on Slaughterhouse-5.

new book title, new abstract

2009-01-30T06:11:00.001-08:00

Currently I think the title of the book will be Now and Rome: Five Technologies of Space, Time and Sovereignty, which I am slightly in love with. ('Empire After Earth' will now be the title of the introduction, so I don't have to lose it entirely.)

In other news, I just submitted my abstract to the Diana Wynne Jones conference which will be held in Bristol early this July:

‘Mum’s a silly fusspot’: the queering of family in Diana Wynne Jones

In Four British Fantasists, Butler cites Diana Wynne Jones saying that her novels ‘provide a space where children can... walk round their problems and think “Mum’s a silly fusspot and I don’t need to be quite so enslaved by her notions”’ (267). That is, as I will argue in this paper, Jones’ work aims to provide readers with the emotional, narrative and intellectual resources to achieve a critical distance from their families of origin.

I will provide a brief survey of the treatment of family in Jones’ children’s books, with particular reference to Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Ogre Downstairs, Cart and Cwidder, Drowned Ammett, Homeward Bounders and Hexwood, and then narrow my focus to two of Jones’ classic treatments of family: Eight Days of Luke and Archer’s Goon. I will read these books in terms of the ways in which their child protagonists reposition themselves in relation to family in the course of their narratives. Drawing on Esther Saxey’s recent narratological analysis of the coming-out story in Homoplot, I will argue that the way in which Jones shows her protagonists both coming to terms with their families of origin and creating new kin networks or ‘chosen families’ makes her books particularly hospitable to queer readers – or at least to this queer reader.

The best thing about that, of course, is that it means I have to read Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Ogre Downstairs, Cart and Cwidder, Drowned Ammett, Homeward Bounders, Hexwood, Eight Days of Luke and Archer’s Goon. And Homoplot. FOR WORK.

things that are wrong with the world today

2009-01-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

(number one million and nine in a continuing series)

(1) I just overheard a young woman on her mobile phone saying It was a brilliant film, really really good, it ticked all the boxes, whatever emotion you wanted, it had it. This is depressing because a lecturer in TV studies told me recently that the reason TV drama is rubbish these days is because of reality TV changing the way that we make and understand narratives - because you can't plot reality TV round events, you have to structure the episodes solely around the emotional ups and downs. And now fictional drama has begun to privilege emotion as the primary narrative drive, too. Which hypothesis is, by the way, borne out by every episode of New Who that Russell T Davies has ever written.

So this explains a lot about why so many of my students find it so difficult to talk about the words on the page in front of them, rather than going straight into generalities about the meaning of the text or how it made them feel. Because pop-culture these days is often not rewarding the kinds of reading that follow structure and plot and respond to well-crafted, intricate, sense-making narratives. Films? They might as well be mood organs!

(2) Andrew O'Hagan wrote an essay on the decline of the English working-classes in the Guardian review recently, which I did not read, and then Tim Lott wrote a very long letter to the Guardian in response basically saying that the Scottish working-classes were much worse so there. But what was incredibly revealing about this letter - gah, I don't seem to be able to link to it, if anyone can find it please let me know, or otherwise I'll just have to copy bits out when I get home and find it - was twofold; Lott says

(a) that the English are 'naturally dominant' in Britain because they comprise 84% of the population in the British Isles, and that this isolates them; and

(b) that it is harder to be a member of the dominant culture because you are not cushioned by oppression.

Cushioned by oppression! It's brilliant! By which I mean it's one of the neatest expressions of one of the stupidest ways of thinking I've seen in a long time. The idea that dominant groups are not 'cushioned' by constant reflections and reminders of their own rightness, their own normality, their own obviousness, their own naturalness. Instead members of oppressed groups, living in cultures which constantly remind them (us) that they (we) are wrong, abnormal, surprising or unusual or unnatural or in need of explanation and justification, are 'cushioned', by... I'm not sure. The sense of specialness that this gives us? The way we are protected from isolation by sheer lack of numbers? Hmm.

Anyway, thank you, Tim Lott. I have been trying to put my finger on a particular strand of dominant-culture apologia for a long time now, and this crystallizes it for me.

Doctor Who CfP

2009-01-14T03:24:00.000-08:00

Tony Keen, of Memorabilia Antonina, together with Simon Bradshaw and Graham Sleight (whom I don't know), are co-editing a book for the Science Fiction Foundation entitled The Unsilent Library: Adventures in the New Doctor Who (that link goes to the cfp). Proposals due 1 March, final chapters due 1 August, which probably knocks me out of the running, which makes it all the more important that you guys write something brilliant. Something brilliant, I say!

Lavinia

2009-01-09T05:41:00.000-08:00

Ursula K Le Guin has written a novel called Lavinia, which is coming out here in the UK in May. Here is a review of it, and it sounds unbelievably brilliant.

I will do a proper post about this later - I'm supposed to be thinking about Chapter Four now, but my head is very scattered--

I'm in love with Jacques Derrida

2009-01-08T06:04:00.001-08:00

That's the title of a song by Scritti Politti, which was the first song that iShuffle chose to play me today (which, pleasingly, was the day I started work on Chapter 4 of Teh Book - the Derrida chapter).

Anyway. You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again?*

It's just this, really: Derrida is so great. I'm working on his essay 'Faith and Knowledge' today, and it's all brilliant, but this in particular, on the 'demographic-religious problematic' (I'm thinking about the attacks on British Jews in 'retaliation' for the Israeli attacks on Gaza, and about the recent research into white working-class fears about immigration):

... the manner in which the faithful are counted must be changed in an age of globalization... In truth, this question of numbers obsesses, as is well known, the Holy Scriptures and the monotheisms. When they feel themselves threatened by an expropriative and delocalizing tele-technoscience, 'peoples' also fear new forms of invasion. They are terrified by alien 'populations', whose growth as well as presence, indirect or virtual - but as such, all the more oppressive - becomes incalculable. New ways of counting, therefore.**

WELL EXACTLY.

The trouble with this is that it looks like 'Faith and Knowledge' is going to be a major text for Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 (which is mainly going to be about the angel of history in Benjamin's profoundly theological 'Theses on the Philosophy of History') is entitled 'Angel', and the book as a whole is largely about concepts of globality, communication and sovereignty in Latin epic (which of course means augury, divine messengers, prophecy and necromancy), which in turn looks very much - doesn't it? - as though I am writing about religion. But I don't have any thoughts about religion! Really! None!

*That's from T S Eliot's 'East Coker', perhaps the most awesome of the Four Quartets. You can read the whole thing here, if you like.

*Jacques Derrida, 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion" at the Limits of Reason Alone', trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. and intr. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) [first published in French, 1996; in English, 1998), pp. 40-101, p.90.

Writing!

2008-12-30T07:32:00.001-08:00

I took a week off over Christmas to write fanfiction, but the week is now over, so this week I'm changing gears to write Now and Rome.

The differences between the two kinds of writing are interesting. I have to draft and redraft a lot more with theory than I do with fanfic: in fanfic, as J pointed out to me (she was reading what I wrote on a day-by-day basis), I tend to get the words right first time - though I have terrible trouble with structure and plot and narrative order and, you know, everything that's not on the level of the sentences - but in theory, I have to go through usually five to ten drafts for everything. I worked out this morning that it's because, strangely enough, there's something much more private about the way I write theory: what I write down first of all tends to be a note-to-myself. So it never quite captures the thought that I have - it's more of a footprint of the thought (and a footprint doesn't look like a boot), and it also never quite makes sense to other people, because it's in such a private language. So I end up having to go through it all over and over again, trying to find a way of expressing the thought which is both closer to the thought itself and clearer to other people. Who was it who said, when someone asked them who they wrote for, 'Myself, and strangers?' That's actually what deconstruction is all about, the way that language has to be for strangers - thought has to go through that detour into the public realm of language in order to make sense even to oneself. But anyway. That's the double movement that the writing has to go through.

And of course the same holds for fanfiction: if I was just in it for myself I wouldn't write down stories, I'd just daydream (I do lots of that too, obviously). A great deal of the pleasure I get from writing fanfiction is trying to put physical sensations and emotional states into words, when there aren't words for them, really. But that 'for-strangers' thing is more built into the writing process of fanfic for me, I think. I mean that when I write theory I have an idea and I scribble down something which reminds me of that idea, and then through progressive drafts I get the idea clearer and clearer, both in-itself and for-others. But when I write fanfic, I visualize and experience the scene quite clearly, and then the process (and the pleasure) is all about translating that immediate experience* into language, for strangers. There isn't really an intermediate stage where I write for myself. I wonder why? And I don't think that would change if I was writing 'original' fiction - I wrote a realfic novel in my mid-20s, and started two or three others in my teens, and I think the feeling of writing fiction has stayed remarkably consistent all that time. (I also tend to mix original characters with canon characters in fanfic, and I never feel particularly different about the way I write them - they do stuff, I watch them and write it down, and whether they're played by Alan Rickman or an imaginary person in my head doesn't really make any odds.)

But this isn't getting my book written!

*Of course - I add hastily in case any of my MA students are, by some chance, reading this (hello, if you are, I hope you are all having excellent vacations) - there is no such thing as immediate experience, there are only chains of differential marks. But still.

Contract

2008-12-05T10:32:00.001-08:00

I have a book contract for Now and Rome with Continuum.

Conference alert

2008-12-02T04:59:00.000-08:00

This may be of interest to some - Anna? A conference in Wales on 'the erotics of narrative', 15-19 July, which is a completely fascinating topic (suspense! Climax!) but I am planning to be in Brisbane at the end of next July...

If I went to all the conferences I want to in July, it would look like this:

3-5 July, Diana Wynne Jones, Bristol;

6-10 July, Classical Receptions in Children's Literature, Lampeter;

15-19 July, The Erotics of Narrative, Gregynog (near Newtown);

20-23 July, Cultures of Violence and Conflict, Brisbane.

So that's not going to happen. I am going to the DWJ one, where (if my abstract is accepted) I will talk about the unmaking of family (and the making of queer family) in DWJ, and to the violence one, where I will talk about violence and the writing of history in Lucan. And that's already two too many, as I am supposed to be finishing my book...

note to self

2008-11-20T08:11:00.000-08:00

EXORBITANT. Derrida characterizes his method as such - ex-orbitant, out of the orbit, having-reached-escape-velocity - and the whole time in 'Signature - Event - Context' he talks about the 'horizon' of experience, of presence, etc. From Horizon to Orbit was a heading I used in my head all the time when I was writing the PhD - and of course Horizon and Orbit are both episode titles of Blake's 7, so the secret Blake's 7 thread would still be there - but also, could you read 'horizon' in relation to 'horizon of expectation' (Jauss and possibly also Gadamer)? Deconstruction as exorbitant as opposed to the earth-bound (and therefore - gasp - HEIDEGGERIAN) aesthetic of reception?

(Sorry. All of this is because I think the new title for Teh Book is going to be Empire After Earth, and also because I'm writing a lecture on Derrida for tomorrow morning and having ideas I want to record but no time to think them through properly...)

j's birthday

2008-11-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

J turned sixty last weekend, and the indescribably lovely Kerry stood us dinner at the Bath Priory hotel together with J's good friends Annie and Viv. Here's us (left to right: J, me, Viv, Annie):

(I am, as so often, slightly in awe of the company I keep...)

Swedish toilets

2008-10-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

I'm in Sweden, at this conference. Which I'm not going to talk about; instead I'm going to say that new Swedish buildings all have gender-neutral toilets (yayy), but what's strange is that they're announced as toilets by having both the little toilet man and the little toilet lady on them. Which got me to thinking about how strange it is that our sign for toilets is not, in fact, anything to do with going to the toilet, but a picture of gender - so that even when the toilets are not separated by gender, they are announced by a sign which means 'for everyone', but says it by showing a little man in trousers or a little woman in a skirt. As if 'men' + 'women' = 'everyone'. Which is kind of exactly the assumption that is opposed by many of the people who support gender-neutral toilets in the first place.

I mean, not that it's not great that the toilets are unisex. Just, isn't that interesting?

In other news, I've just found out from checking how to do a yarn over on Knitting Help that I have been a Continental knitter all along. Apparently the difference is which hand you hold the yarn in, and English knitters hold the yarn in their right hand (the hand holding the working needle, ie the needle onto which you are transferring stitches). Is this true? That looks so counterintuitive and strange to me.

I am still not quite sure whether I am doing the yarn over right. I guess we'll see when I'm a bit further along with this sock.

Beckford's Tower

2008-10-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

This post is co-written with J and tells the story of our adventure.

The story begins on our very first trip to Bath, when we spotted a strange structure on the skyline: we've never managed to find out what it was (we've been on the Bath Skyline Tour, which doesn't mention it, and asked a couple of people Do you know what that strange structure is on the skyline on the Bath Road?, to which they have invariably said No). We've called it 'the wicker man' ever since, because it seemed to have a head and shoulders (and also because of that one time when we were in Wales, in an otter sanctuary, and suddenly saw a giant otter on the horizon, which turned out to be a ten-foot-high wicker otter). And from time to time we idly wondered about borrowing a friend with a car and getting them to drive us to the wicker man, so we could see whether or not there really was a giant wicker man on the Bath horizon.

A month or so ago, we got the train to Bath and realized that we had no need of a friend with a car, for the strange wicker-man-shaped structure was very clearly visible on the horizon from the little station Oldfield Park on the Bath-Bristol branch line.

A fortnight ago, accordingly, we went to Oldfield Park and struck out confidently up a minor road which appeared to lead directly to the wicker man.

Two hours later, after much wandering round the overly manicured and eerily silent Sunday-afternoon outer suburbs of Bath (which have lots and lots of cul-de-sacs), we found ourselves on a road leading into the centre of Bath, not having caught a glimpse of the wicker man for an hour and a half, and thoroughly disorientated. So we gave up, rolled down the hill to Bath, and had vegetarian pub food.

Over the last fortnight, we bought an Ordnance Survey map and some binoculars.

Today we set forth on the bus, and got off at the Newton Looe roundabout where we've always had our most reliable sighting of the wicker man. Here is a picture of the view from the footpath where we started, with the 'man' barely visible on the horizon: probably you will not be able to see where it is, but we know, because we were there.

And furthermore, J is saying, we know because we looked at it through the binoculars, and discovered that it was not, in fact, a wicker man, but a stone tower with fancy carving and another, smaller, tower on the top. With pillars.

Gold pillars.

(Though at this point we thought they were white/marble and only begoldened by the sun.)

So, although obviously it would have been good if it had really been a wicker man, it was still pretty cool (I had started to have a terrible fear that it was a water storage tower).

I checked my Ordnance Survey map carefully (though I couldn't quite tell whether we were heading for 'Kelston Round Hill', 'Triangulation Pillar', or 'Prospect Stile') and we headed off in the direction it said, across a field and under the railway line, finding ourselves in a ploughed field full of people watching a regatta. (Mostly watching a regatta: there were some children aged about four-to-seven who were picking up clods and running about joyfully for unclear reasons.) So we walked along the river, then up some steps to the Bristol & Bath Cycle Path.

We had almost immediately lost sight of the tower (as we shall now call it) and were navigating by a combination of faith (on J's part) and the Ordnance Survey map (on mine). And also the fact that there weren't any other footpaths to take for a while.

The cycle path was lovely and we saw some kind of excellent bird of prey, flying around above us for a while.

Then I found a footpath (or really 'some stairs') taking us up into the hills, so we climbed it and found ourselves near a pub we'd also noted from the bus at one point as 'being in the direction of the wicker man'. Over J's protestations (No down there is only the pub! We must go along the road!) I brilliantly steered us onto a beautiful narrow footpath, overhung with trees and all dappled in the bright autumn sunshine, this time over J's indignant cries about how I had tried to make us go along the road.

Then we climbed up another steep path, past some children camping in the corner of a field, and then past some people making a camp-fire, and just when we really felt we were getting somewhere we found ourselves on a main road opposite a modern school with no view of the tower. I carefully consulted the map and found a brilliant route up the road to the left and then onto a series of way-marked paths which would lead us almost directly to Prospect Stile; J found a road on the right that appealed to her somehow (it had cars on it), so we went that way (pausing only to get the binoculars out to look at some people flying in the sky on, apparently, swings attached to giant kites - and, in my case, to become extremely giddy and have to sit on the pavement holding onto J's leg and refusing to look up for five minutes).

The road with cars on began leading us into what looked disturbingly like the very same suburbs we had spent two hours in last time, but I found a stile which led us into some fields again. It was getting a bit muddy and I had forgotten to put my good hiking boots on (sorry, K) and we hadn't seen the tower in ages and we were in the bloody Bath suburbs, so I trudged along dispiritedly until I heard J shrieking in joy beside me and looked up to see the tower, back on the horizon.

We struck out happily across the field, me confident with my Ordnance Survey knowledge that at any minute we would strike the Cotswolds Way which would lead us to Prospect Stile and/or Kelston Hill; we found a way-mark saying COTSWOLD WAY, with an arrow; we went over the stile in the direction of the arrow; and we found ourselves in a park with no footpath to be seen. (Though we could still see the tower.)

Returning to the road, we walked through what was starting to be more of a village than a suburb, anxiously looking up every few steps to make sure that the tower hadn't vanished. (It hadn't.)

The Cotswold Way went along the village streets for a while in a pleasing manner, but then began disconcertingly to lead away from the tower: we nervously went up a road which looked as though it led in the right direction (but this was how we'd been caught out the previous time, as roads in the suburbs tend to end suddenly and, annoyingly, not to give onto footpaths), then all of a sudden we were heading up an outrageously beautiful, steep, tunnel-through-trees, trickling-with-water, lane (helpfully and rather quaintly labelled BLIND LANE. Ominously, it was also labelled with a 'dead-end' sign, which might have only been for cars [which, yeah, wouldn't have made it very far up the lane], but on the other hand, see above re 'how we'd been caught out the previous time').

So we climbed, and we climbed, and we climbed, and we stopped for a rest and drank some water, and then we climbed, and we climbed, and then more water, and then we climbed and we climbed and we climbed and we came out here.

So that was all worth it.

But there was still a climb ahead of us, and so I lay down on the grass in protest, and J sat down beside me and started a long conversation with herself about whether it was possible that there were calves in that field over there, a controversy which was resolved when she got out the binoculars (we love our binoculars) and saw that there were, indeed, four calves in that field over there. That settled, we pushed on up the hill and up the hill and up the hill, past a slightly confusing sign saying PRIVATE PROPERTY STAY ON FOOTPATH which seemed to want us to walk across a field and not on the made gravel path, but when we did so there were COWS.

Lots of cows.

Just sort of wandering-about cows.

Which looked at us.

And then started to move towards us.

En masse.

Stalwartly, we started to scurry quite fast round a circuitous path a little way down the hill from the cows (still massing, looking, and moving towards us), until, to our relief, we saw a farm-hand coming towards us. (He turned out to be a Chinese tourist, but nonetheless at his approach the cows scattered and ran away like cowards, pleasingly.)

(Oh, and I haven't even said! But by this point it was very clear that we were not, in fact, heading towards Kelston Hill or Prospect Stile, but towards a thing on the map called Beckford's Tower. Beckford, J said, There is a guy called William Beckford who wrote a Gothic novel called Vathek, I bet that is his tower.)

By now we were almost always within sight of the tower, which was coming ever closer, and the only excitement left was whether we would make it before night fell (seeing as how we had not left the house until about 2pm, for reasons, and now it was around 5:30, and it was hard to tell whether it was quite a large tower quite close up, or a really large tower quite far away. This is the sort of thing which makes us bad at orienteering.)

But after the cows we came out onto the road, and there was a sign saying Beckford's Tower, and we found a gate into what turned out to be a most beautiful, overgrown and atmospheric cemetery, culminating in

the tower.

(Look! We were really there - here is J at the foot of the tower.

It really was designed and occupied by William Beckford, author of Vathek and England's wealthiest son (who turns out to have been awesome), and he is buried there, in a pink granite sarcophagus on a ditch-encircled mound.

And so, in conclusion, J would like to say:

It was as great as we thought it would be, except in a different way.

PS: After exploring the cemetery a bit - look at this excellent tomb, which is that of Henry Adkins et son epouse Marie-Louise - and deciding to come back when the Beckford Museum is open, we went back to the road to get a bus into Bath, because our legs were tired from all the climbing of all the hills, and discovered that we had been one bus stop away on the same road at the point where we gave up last time. Oh, the irony. We recovered in The Porter again, with veggieburger, veggie shepherd's pie, Bath Barnstormer ale, and quite a lot of chips.

Term has started

2008-10-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

... and I'm trying to reorient myself in time, to figure out how to surf the strange new shapes of my days, to mark dissertations and read PhD proposals and secondary literature on John Donne and departmental strategic plans in the odd hour or two in between the adrenaline-high moments of classes and lectures and seminars.

So far it is not going brilliantly, I have to confess. I taught for three hours this morning (a seminar on Mrs Dalloway and the relationship between content/worldview and literary form 9-11am, then 11-12 a class on Dorothy Parker's 'Penelope' as a critique of the epic tradition, of twentieth-century bourgeois marriage, and/or as a response to the Odyssey). This year my students (so far) appear to be uniformly brilliant and motivated and thrilling, but frankly after three solid hours of teaching I would rather not be trying to do lots of little semi-creative tasks where I have to both pay attention to detail and engage my brain. But that's all I have on my to-do list for this week, except 'write conference paper', which is even less likely to happen just now--

Dates

2008-09-29T02:06:00.001-07:00

I'm on a classics mailing list, and it's the start of a new academic year here in the UK, so I'm getting emailed about lots of upcoming seminar series and lectures and whatnot. Obviously it would take a fairly spectacular event to get me to Edinburgh or Leeds (or, frankly, even Exeter or London) at 5pm on a weeknight to listen to a research paper, so what are the odds that both* the events I most want to go to - Miriam Leonard's paper on 'Noah and Noesis: Derrida between Greek and Jew' and Ahuvia Kahane's, on 'Poetic proportions, ethics and politics', in a series on epyllion** - are on the same day?

And both on a day when I have to be in Bristol for an equally interesting event?

::gnashes teeth::

*Actually, I also really want to go to one in Leeds, on homoeroticism in Lucan's battle scenes ('ardens amor: Brothers in (each other's) Arms in Lucan's Ilerda Episode') and I can't make that one either, despite the fact that it combines all my research interests into what is clearly the best topic ever.

**Epyllions are 'little epics' and really interesting - I wish I could go to this whole series, actually.

Small writing update

2008-09-27T07:43:00.001-07:00

1. Derrida and Antiquity chapter redrafts finished (I hope) and mailed to the editor and my above-and-beyond beta-readers, Una and Aren. I am secretly rather proud of it.

2. Yesterday I tried to work on Chapter Three of Now and Rome but the map/territory relationship just fell apart around me and I ended up having to go for a long walk, cook smoked tofu with peanut and coconut rice plus hot walnut-pomegranate-rocket salad, and watch An Affair to Remember with knitting and ice cream instead.

Today I took Chapter Three to the coffee shop and had a medium-sized structural insight and wrote 500 words, fairly angstlessly. Which is fine, and reminds me that bad days often precede good ones. (The only trouble is that as of next week I will only have one day a week to work on the book: my plan is to take it to the coffee shop and keep telling myself firmly that I am only working on one paragraph at a time, in order to avoid the abyss of map/territory disintegration).

3. Surprisingly, working on fanfiction this summer has been potentially really helpful for my theory practice, in a couple of ways: one of them is precisely the map/territory relationship. I am getting into a working/workable flow in relation to plot/writing in the fanfic: I can usually tell when I need to stop writing and let the next section of plot clarify a bit further, and I seem to have found my comfort level in terms of how far ahead I need to plot, so that I'm not writing into a void and constantly anxious that I'll end up finding out that the last umpty- thousand words were a tangent, as has happened a couple of times with this story already, but I'm also not constrained away from random insight and creative flow by too-tight plotting. And I can start to see how I can import that into my theory writing, getting a feel for the overall argument and shape but letting my embodied, sentence-by-sentence, walk through the territory inform the map as well as the other way round.

The other thing is delight. When I think about how many rules my fan story is breaking - how many things it contains that I know full well that lots of fans mock and denigrate (mary-sue! mpreg! weddings!) - I just feel delighted. And I want to learn how to import that into my theory, that sense that my certainty in, my ownership of, my delight in my writing actually increases when I think about its oddness, its me-ness, its newness. Not feeling that I am potentially under attack and I have to write from a position that's either unassailable (ie already-known) or belligerently 'new'; just feeling, as with the fanfic, that this is something which delights me and which I want to show to other people, in case it delights them too.

Idiosyncrasies of memory technology, by which I mean GODDAMNIT

2008-09-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

So if - hypothetically speaking* - I download a document that I've emailed to myself on my work computer, and spend a happy hour or two editing it (hitting 'save' every five minutes), then you think I mean 'save to a temporary folder which is then emptied, purged and lost forever when I turn the computer off to go to a meeting'?

Interesting choice, IT people/Windows, interesting choice. It didn't at any stage occur to you to save the document by default to, say, the desktop? Or My Documents?

*by which I mean 'just now'.

Knitting

2008-09-19T09:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't really blogged about knitting since I took it up, back in Melbourne, but you can take it for granted that these days, pretty much every moment that my fingers are not typing, they are knitting.

Which means that friends with babies - even if I have not yet been able to meet said babies - will sooner or later become the target of Sekrit Knitting Projects. Most recently, the baybeast babies, Loey:

and Huey:

for whom I knitted, respectively, a giant hat (it came out bigger than I was expecting...) and a cable-knit jumper, which came out pretty well (though slightly smaller than I was expecting, so that in the end the hat and the jumper were, rather alarmingly, more or less the same size.)

Both of them were patterns I got from knitty.com. The hat was from this pattern, for a hat which looks like a berry tart (the linked page has a photo of a cute and non-giant version of the hat, which actually more-or-less resembles a berry tart, unlike my version). This was exciting to knit, as I hadn't knitted a hat in the round before (and also because I was using stash yarn and I had literally about 30cm left of the purple colour when I finished, so it was a race against time [or, more accurately, length] by the end), but also frustrating as the bobbles involved many, many iterations of k3tog, a stitch which I fundamentally cannot do.) The jumper, very excitingly, has a randomly generated cable pattern: you roll a die every two-to-four stitches on the cable rows (every fourth row) to see whether you're going to do a right-twisted cable or a left-twisted cable or no cable at all. It was really fun to do, and it came out surprisingly pretty! Here's the pattern.

But really, this is a story about human connection and the Internet, and how much fun it is to knit for other people and have them in mind when you knit, and how strange and moving it is to see photos of people who didn't even exist (not quite, not yet) when I left Melbourne, and now they are wearing clothes that I made for them. It is kind of like the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef - new connections coming into being via very old webs of knowledge and craft, plus very new technologies of transmission - but this time with added pictures of baaaaaby humans. Truly the Internet is a wonderful thing.

More Harry Potter copyright stuff

2008-09-17T03:20:00.000-07:00

So I read in the Guardian that a movie made by a Mumbai-based studio, Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors, about a ten-year-old Indian boy in England comically foiling a couple of inept criminals somewhat in the manner of Home Alone, has been blocked by Warner Brothers on the basis that it 'infringes its intellectual property rights', by having a character with a name that sounds a bit like Harry Potter's.

It's kind of interesting, the way that HP keeps showing up at the cutting edge of legal disputes about intellectual property, fair use, creative transformation, and the ownership of funny words; the books were always products of a brand-based aesthetic. Brands basically stand in for magic in the books: where Ursula K Le Guin, say, would create a coherent set of rules and laws for magic in her universes, Rowling always used one-word spells and created a universe based around commodities: the Nimbus 2000, the Firebolt, Bertie Bott's Every Flavoured Beans, Chocolate Frogs, etc. The most meaningful magical connection in the whole of the seven books is the fact that Harry and Voldemort have the same wand. Magic in the HP-verse is basically commodity fetishism. J and I once gave a conference paper on this - on Guy DeBord's Society of the Spectacle and the disappearance of labour into fetishized commodities in the HP-verse - and a fabulous woman gave us the perfect example of it in the question-and-answer period. It's a moment in Prisoner of Azkaban where Harry gets his Firebolt-brand broom and Hermione, who is worried that it's booby-trapped, says 'You're not going to ride it, are you, Harry?' and Ron says:

What do you think he's going to do with it? Sweep the floor?

Things

2008-09-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

Dorian Gray was wonderful. I want to write about it in more detail, partly because I don't know anything about dance and the writing thereof and that reminded me that that was one of the things I wanted to use this blog for: nondisciplinary, amateurish writing about stuff that interests me but doesn't feed into the life-cycle of academic capitalism. (But having said that, I keep making plans to publish things about slash and Doctor Who and Melissa Lukashenko and whether Catullus was a lesbian*, so everything ends up being appropriated for career profit anyway. I mean, except that the only thing I've published which has ever been cited or led directly to any RAE-declarable 'signs of esteem' was the Harry Potter slash essay, and that wasn't even part of my RAE submission** because it doesn't fit with my research profile as part of the Classics department, so the economics of the whole thing is sort of eccentric, anyway.)

Anyway, though, it's 5pm and I've run out of steam, so instead of writing about Dorian Gray (oh God it was wonderful though) I am just going to put up a few links to remind myself of things:

1. The online Journal of Transformative Works has its first issue out, and I must go and read it.

2. Postgrad conference on Doctor Who! And Una's going! And Tony Keen is going to be giving a paper on Doctor Who and the Cambridge Latin Course! And there's a paper on the Radiophonic Workshop, which is going to be unmissable for me. And it's twenty quid for the weekend and within commuting distance, so the only question is whether J wants to come with me.

*Yes, is the answer. I wrote an essay for my MA on Roman lesbians which had a section headed 'Catullus, The Sapphic Man', and now I really want to use that as the title of a journal article... Actually, now I come to think of this, this essay was probably the start of what one might describe - if one were that way inclined - as a whole strand of my research, about queer desire for the past, or a relationship to the past premised on queer desire (this is what my essay for the Derrida and Antiquity volume is about, and the paper I'm giving at the Eros conference at Easter, and perhaps the one I'm thinking of giving at the Sexual Knowledges conference in July...)

**The RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) is this thing where academic departments submit a big document about their research, plus also selected publications of research-active members of staff in the department, to a panel of experts for assessment, and the panel decides how good individual university departments are at research. This determines the distribution of prestige, of course, but also of funding. I have a job which spans departments, but I was declared in the Classics department for the last RAE, which meant only my publications which mentioned, you know, classical stuff counted.

Harry Potter Lexicon

2008-09-10T03:34:00.000-07:00

Steve Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon not only cannot be published in print form, but has been taken down. Yesterday I was angry about this. Today I am very sad.

What transformed the Harry Potter books from the poorly-written, under-edited, over-derivative things they are into a global phenomenon of communal joy and squee was the appropriative, taxonomic, and imaginative labour of readers and fans, who filled in the plot holes and filled out the characterization. The Harry Potter universe is a collaborative one, from the moment one child sits alone in her bedroom and opens Philosopher's Stone to the moment that the folks over on InsaneJournal create an archive of classic HP fanfic, nominated and voted for by fans. If 'Snape' is anything, he's the creation of Jill Murphy (Miss Hardbroom), Antonia Forest (Miss Cromwell), J K Rowling, Alan Rickman, Christopher Colombus, Alfonso, Cuaron, Mike Leigh, David Yates, Snaples, Telanu, and everyone else who's hated him or crushed on him or drawn him or wondered whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. And the Lexicon was a concrete manifestation of that collaborative, fannish, readerly, analytical work. I'm absolutely miserable that imaginative, as well as financial, control of that universe has been granted to Rowling/Bloomsbury/Warner Brothers.

And also, you know, I miss the Lexicon. It was a nice site, and it meant that when I needed to check the name of some character or find out how many people had been given the Order of Merlin and what for, I could find out without having to comb through three or four thousand pages of print. I should have figured out how to archive it, I suppose, but I never thought it would really be gone.

Thanks for all your work, Steve Vander Ark and all the other Lexicon contributors. It was a fantastic resource, and I'm really going to miss it.

Publications

2008-09-07T03:41:00.000-07:00

Actually, what I want to post about is two things: (1) Mysterious Skin which I finally summoned the energy to watch yesterday and which (you were quite right, Az) is unbelievably brilliant, and now I even more can't believe that anyone bothered to make The Woodsman or was ever fooled into thinking it was anything but a facile, spurious piece of Holden Caulfieldery, and (2) the Aeneid, because it's occurred to me that I never actually write about the Classics, and that most people I know don't like the Aeneid even though it is the greatest work of literature in the Western canon,* and they must be shown the error of their ways.

But those are long and thinky posts, and who knows whether I will get time for them today, so in the meantime, I just thought I would let you know that my abstract for the Doctor Who essay was accepted (yayy), and that, in a bizarre blast from the past, my co-editor on an edited collection called Origins of Deconstruction, which we put together in 2003 and which I thought was long dead and buried but which contains an essay I'm still quite proud of, on Dido and Derrida's 'The Double Sesssion' and Irigaray... anyway, he got in touch with me to say that it looks as though we'll get a contract for it with Palgrave Macmillan in the very near future (the reader's report was glowing). So that's strange but good: the collection contains first English translations of a couple of interviews with Derrida and Cixous. The Derrida interview is all about his writing practices - handwriting, typewriting, computers, etc - and is one of those lovely theory-meets-geeky-fetishism pieces. (He wrote Of Grammatology standing up, with a quill. I'm serious.)

*except possibly the Georgics, which is like Gerard Manley Hopkins translating Lucretius with a sudden, From-Dusk-Till-Dawnesque twist into high fantasy at the end.

Open Letter to Priyamvada Gopal

2008-09-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

Dr Gopal, will you marry me?

Writing update, life update

2008-08-26T11:16:00.001-07:00

I'm absolutely loving this summer. No conferences! No deadlines! (Well, except that I have to rewrite my chapter for Derrida and Antiquity in the next three weeks. But I've had some really useful feedback from Aren and Una, so I'm starting to have some ideas about how to do it.)

It was my birthday in July, and J bought me (among other things) a bottle of Hendricks Gin, to which I have been very partial ever since I bought a bottle for my dad and then one for our good friend K and drank some: gin and tonic has been integral to my self-image this summer, a self-image which I stole from Bridget Jones stealing a self-image from Kathleen Tynan:

I read in an article that Kathleen Tynan, late wife of the late Kenneth, had 'inner poise' and, when writing, was to be found immaculately dressed, sitting at a small table in the centre of the room sipping at a glass of chilled white wine. Kathleen Tynan would not, when late with a press release for Perpetua, lie fully dressed and terrified under the duver, chain-smoking, glugging cold sake out of a beaker and putting on make-up as a hysterical displacement activity. Kathleen Tynan would not allow Daniel Cleaver to sleep with her whenever he felt like it but not be her boyfriend. Nor would she become insensible with drink and be sick. Wish to be like Kathleen Tynan (though not, obviously, dead).

Lately, therefore, whenever things have risked ranging out of control, I have repeated the phrase 'inner poise' and imagined myself wearing white linen and sittng at a table with flowers on it.

No flowers in my study, and obviously I am not wearing white linen (though I have been wearing a grey sleeveless cashmere jumper a lot this summer - I got it for a tenner off Brick Lane market, before you say anything), and the white wine has been replaced by Hendrick's Gin and tonic, with ice, in the beautiful heavy-bottomed tumblers that K got me as a present. But the inner poise is coming along rather nicely.

After comments by Beppie and M on my last writing update, I have been thinking about what 'just writing' consists of. I think the real tipping-point for me, the thing that makes 'just writing' pleasurable rather than painful and scary and vile, is the point where the map and the territory begin to coincide with one another. That's one of the main metaphors I have for thinking about writing, the difference between a map and a journey - the different sense you have of a terrain when you're studying a map and when you're walking through it. So sometimes, when you're planning a piece of writing, you don't know what certain parts of your argument are going to be until you've actually sat down and written them out, word by word and sentence by sentence: you can't understand/draw the map until you know what's in the terrain. But sometimes, when you're in the terrain, you get lost in the unfamiliarity of that way of experiencing space, and you can't see how it relates to the map you have at all, and you wander off and get discouraged, or start worrying about whether you need to redraw the map, or whether you're in the wrong bit of the terrain, or what's going on.

Um. Less metaphorically, that goes a bit like this: I think the two most important things in the process of writing are the relationship between what's written and what's unwritten, and the relationship between the part (the sentence, the paragraph) and the whole (the chapter, the overall argument). When those relationships are off, writing is not 'just writing' but much more a process of rethinking, staring at the screen, going off to read another book, writing-and-crossing-out, playing Minesweeper, doing the washing-up, staring at the screen, going for walks, etc... and all that stuff is necessary to get those relationships right. But when they are right - this is what J calls 'getting the ting' - then, then you can just write, and the more you think about the part, the more you understand the whole; the more you think about the whole, the more you understand the part; the more you think about what to leave unwritten or implicit, the clearer what you write will be.

When I say 'you', obviously, I mean 'me'.

Anyway, this very joyous map/territory synchronicity has been happening for me lately both with The Book and with a long piece of fanfiction I've been writing for mumble years: it's easier to spot with the fiction, where the main sign that everything is coming together is that the harder I think about how to solve narrative problems, the more sense the story makes (when things are going badly, if I think about problems too hard the whole story comes apart and becomes meaningless). Or I try and figure out how to solve one problem and discover that the solution actually also solves another problem that I've been worrying about. It's a period of everything simplifying rather than complexifying, so that each step doesn't lead to ten more possible branches, but rather braids together ten different strands. (Michel Serres writes somewhere about how the dominant mode of knowing in the West is analysis, which means 'untying', and why shouldn't we have a way of knowing that's more like knotting? By which I take him to mean knitting, but that's a whole nother post...)

The same feeling is coming to me with The Book, now, but it's harder to explain exactly how or why. I think it's a feeling that the different currents and strands are braiding themselves together, simplifying into two main lines of argument, which I could (not yet! but soon!) actually explain in an introduction or a book proposal without worrying that they'll come apart if I put them into different words or look at them from a slightly different standpoint. It's... a feeling of the thereness of the material, that I'm working with what the texts want to say rather than against or regardless of it.

And so, in short, hooray. The Book is going to work! And the Giant Fan Story Of Doom might one day be finished!

In other news, my promotion to Lecturer C officially took place on August 1 so today was the first day of my new salary: I have £100 more a month and am celebrating by buying tickets to Dorian Grey at Sadler's Wells. This is my last chance to convince J that ballet can actually be very cool: the first ballet I ever saw, and loved, was the Northern Ballet Theatre's Dracula, which had a fantastic boy-on-boy duet (is it called a pas de deux when it's dancing?) between Jonathan Harker and Dracula, and when the girls came on all skinny and twinkly and dancing unnaturally on their points, this was because they were vampires and thus meant to be skinny and twinkly and unnatural. But then I went to see Romeo and Juliet and discovered that ballet can also be about highly trained men and women working very hard to maintain the illusion that there are vast natural differences between men's and women's bodies, movements, etc, and that is not so much my cup of tea. So I have high hopes for Dorian Grey.

Oh, and I thought of a new and better subtitle for The Book today, so as of now its working title is: Now and Rome: Empire After Earth. Thinking about it, I think this must have arisen from conversations with Una over our extremely joyous weekend at her place a couple of weeks ago, about Carl Schmitt and whether colonizing other planets is the way forward. So: Now and Rome: Empire After Earth. Brought to you by our sponsors, Hendricks Gin.

Looking for Alaska (Spoilers)

2008-08-25T11:39:00.000-07:00

(Does anyone know how to put entries behind a spoiler cut/fold in Blogger?)

So we had a bit of spare cash this summer, and a plan to spend the whole summer in the house writing (which I must say the British weather has been co-operating with fully), and we got a stack of books, including a fair bit of American Young Adult fiction that we'd heard of but missed over the last few years. And we were really excited about Looking for Alaska, and I don't even know why, now, because it's not like it doesn't signal THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT AN INTERESTING BOY AND A SYMBOLIC MYSTERIOUS GIRL right there in the title. And so then it arrived, and the blurb was like:

His whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the 'Great Perhaps' (Francois Rabelais, poet) even more. He heads off to... boarding school, and... down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up and utterly fascinating Alaska Young...

and then the final blow to my hopes was delivered by the quote on the back from KLIATT (whatiz?): The spirit of Holden Caulfield lives on.

Well, I say the final blow to my hopes, but then I did read the book, because we'd spent money on it and everything and... oh, I can't believe they're still writing this book. It's the old, old story of boy-reads-too-much-existential-poetry, boy-meets-fucked-up-girl, boy-decides-fucked-up-girl-is-too-much-effort-to-treat-like-a-human-being, fucked-up-girl-dies, boy-is-sadder-and-wiser, for-some-reason-we're-still-supposed-to-care-about-this-boy-whose-story-is-apparently-more-important-than-the-girl's-I-wonder-why-oh-wait-I-forgot-he's-a-boy.*

It's just extraordinary. The girl pretty much tells the boy that her mother died on page 57 (or 'ninety-eight days before' she dies, in the novel's before-and-after structure) - I mean, I understood that that was what she meant, I have no idea why the narrator didn't - and she's obviously really, really fucking unhappy. I mean, for values of 'obviously' and 'really fucking unhappy' that include 'coming into the boy's room completely distraught, in uncontrollable tears, asking for help'. But when she does that, she doesn't explain the full context of everything she's saying (that's right! the distraught sixteen-year-old girl doesn't provide a full glossary and back-story!) and the narrator says: As much as I wanted to understand her ambiguities, the slyness was growing annoying. That's for a value of 'as much as I wanted to understand' that means 'I once asked her what was wrong straight out and she didn't tell me!', and a value of 'slyness' that means that the distraught sixteen-year-old says That's the excuse everyone has always used while not explaining who 'everyone' is. Sly!

And then she gets obscenely drunk and unbelievably distraught and the narrator enables her to go for a drive at three in the morning (advising her not to turn her headlights on) and - omigod - she totally dies! And the narrator is really sad for a while, but in the end he knows that Alaska would forgive him for being such an unbelievable shit, and we have all learned and grown and stuff. I mean, apart from the girl, the girl who is genuinely unhappy and has real problems. She hasn't learned or grown. She's dead. But the boys! The boys who are emotionally safe and from happy homes! They have learned and grown!

Probably my two favourite symptomatic quotes:

She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.

Which is the main thing, of course. And:

Hank hugged me and said, 'At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain.'

I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it. There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.

I just love that. He didn't get it! I didn't care about Alaska's pain! I cared about MY PAIN!

I was trying to remember why we'd been attracted to this book in the first place, and J. reminded me that we'd been told that Alaska was a feminist, which is kind of cool because very few young women I know seem to be happy with that word (or indeed those politics) at the moment. And indeed Alaska might be a feminist; she uses the words 'objectify' and 'patriarchal'; she uses them more than once. But don't worry! She's not one of those man-hating feminists! She ends her mini-lecture on how mainstream porn is not good for women by reassuring the protagonist that it is nonetheless normal and healthy for him to get turned on by watching men fuck women who appear to be being hurt! She insists that it is sexist to expect women to cook for men, but she does it anyway, whipping up a delicious Thanksgiving dinner in a trailer together with the protagonist's best friend's mother, because boys can't cook! She hangs out only with boys, and only speaks to other women twice in the book: once to accuse another girl at the school of being a bad feminist, and once to get another girl (whom she later tutors in how to give a blow job, again for the protagonist's benefit) to go out with the protagonist! She's a quirky, kooky, cool kind of a feminist, who isn't afraid to smile indulgently when her male friends stare down her tank top, and who knows that these days being opposed to the patriarchy doesn't mean that women can't choose to put their energy into providing emotional, sexual and domestic labour for boys!

This blog post was brought to you by the letter R for Rage.

*This is unfair, actually, as girl-on-girl versions of this story abound, cf The Tulip Touch and Me Without You, but Holden Caulfield comparisons make me unreasonable. Oh! Except for Frank Portman's King Dork, which is excellent, and even has a hilarious critique of the interesting-boy/kooky-girl-out-of-his-league plot into the bargain.

Behold The Sound of the Universe

2008-08-08T04:15:00.000-07:00

So I finally and belatedly finished my proposal for a chapter in this book (doesn't it sound great?) and sent it off, and I thought I'd post it here, because I'm all excited about it. I actually want to do readings of the telephone call in 'Father's Day' and the silent clocks in 'The Girl in the Fireplace' too, but they didn't fit into the 500-word proposal thingy--

Behold the Sound of the Universe: Time, Space and Affect in Doctor Who

This paper explores the ways in which Doctor Who uses sound and sound effects to construct space and time on both a cosmic and a subjective-affective level.

Sound in the Western imaginary has long had a privileged relationship to presence: the invention of the phonograph, the gramophone and the telephone (as documented by Friedrich Kittler in Discourse Networks and Film, Gramophone, Typewriter and by Avital Ronell in The Telephone Book) troubled that relationship. Sounds could now be reproduced in the absence of the body which originally produced them, and this – as has been argued by Barbara Engh – profoundly disturbed the ways in which we imagine space and time. Engh writes, for example:

If the phonographic record… bears the mark of the ‘that-has-been’, nevertheless it does so at the expense of the radical dissociation of the utterance from its context. Even if all the [sounds of the past] could be located, these sounds could only be sampled, arranged in a constellation, supplied with a context. (1)

In this paper, I will argue that Doctor Who fully exploits this temporal and spatial uncanniness of synthesized and recorded sound, to two main ends: firstly, sound is used along the lines that Engh sketches, to disrupt linear time and to create a complex interplay between presence and absence; and secondly, sound as a memory trigger is used to explore the affective dimension of television viewing and to comment on the history and timeline of the show itself and of its fandom.

Although sound – in particular, the theme tune and the sound effects produced by the Radiophonic Workshop – has always been crucial to the affective and temporal dimensions of Doctor Who, I will concentrate on New Who in this paper, because its conscious relationship to Old Who - its consciousness of its own temporal position in television and fandom history – allows it to do more complex work with sound.

Through readings of several moments in the first two seasons of New Who, investigating the disjunction between soundtrack and visual imagery, I will show that the brilliantly uncanny sound of the TARDIS functions very much along the lines that Kittler and Engh sketch out. It is both an index of presence in time and space (the TARDIS is materializing here, now), and an aural symbol of the possibility that linear time and space can be overcome (the TARDIS travels in both, instantaneously remapping both space and chronology). I will then go on to a close reading of the second season episode ‘Love and Monsters’, in which the sound of the TARDIS is described as ‘the sound of the universe’ and functions explicitly as the mysterious object of fannish desire. Through this close reading, I will argue that sound is a powerful affective technology in Doctor Who, creating a fragmented, disrupted temporality not only for its fictional universe but, through its function as a memory-trigger, also for its viewers/listeners.

(1) Barbara Engh, ‘After “His Master’s Voice”’, New Formations 38 (Summer 1999), pp.54-63, p.56.

**

The idea that New Who is talking about its own fandom history when it talks about time and the historical record I owe to some really insightful comments by the brilliant Penny Goodman on the paper I gave at Leeds last May, as well as to discussions of 'Love and Monsters' with the equally brilliant Una and Matthew. I really hope this proposal gets accepted - I've been saying for three or four years now that I'd love to write an entire paper on the sound of the TARDIS, and look! I really might be able to!

Stuff White People Can Do (And Why Sometimes We Can't)

2008-08-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

For International Blog Against Racism Week, I'm linking to a couple sites and articles which might help well-meaning anti-racist white people sharpen their (our) ideas and learn - keep on learning - to decenter the ways we see and think about ourselves, our 'race', and 'race' in general.

A fantastic essay by Sarah Ahmed on the 'non-performativity' (thank you) 'of anti-racism';

Rent-a-Negro, which takes a bit of translation for non-Americans but is unsettling and interesting;

and the website of its creator, Damali Ayo (check out her pdf I Can Fix It: 2000 people were asked for 5 things individual people can do to end
racism. Here are the solutions in our own words.).

And finally, of course, a Peggy Macintosh lolcat.

Writing update

2008-08-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

The editors of the special issue of Cultural Critique I just wrote the paper for emailed today to let me know that they don't think it needs any revisions before it goes to peer review, hooray and phew, because it was no fun to write and I don't know if I could revise it.

This week I started work on Teh Book again: I'm trying to bash out a completed draft of Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 at the rate of one a week over the next, well, five weeks. Chapter 2 was in fairly good shape when I started, and work went well yesterday and today, so I think that'll be fine. I don't know how coherently I can write about writing it, but here are a few scattered speculations (not on value):

At this stage I just need to write it. But what is this thing called 'just writing'? For me and in this context, I think it means: not obsessing about 'style'; accepting that about 90% of everything that I have thought and read on all the topics and concepts that spiral out from the heart of this book is not going to make it into the book, and letting it go; not going off on new and interesting connections that the close readings throw up; doing more of the work of scene-setting and clarification (this is my hardest thing, I hate doing the work of scene-setting and clarification, it makes me feel vulnerable and banal, vulnerable to being called banal. One of my friends got called banal at a conference recently and, excellently, there was much fall-out and discussion of this in the interstitial spaces of another conference where she and I were together; it's such a catch-all word; anything can be banal; it makes you do the work of doubting yourself without doing any of the work of critique; but it's impossible to defend against).

The nice thing about all of that - particularly the bit about letting 90% of the thinking not appear - is that it makes me realize fully for the first time how much work I really have done on this book. I can walk past all the chapters in my head, brushing my fingers against them, like stones in a stone circle, and I know what is going to be in them: I know what my key words are, and what passages from the literary text are going to be close-read, and although I might not be able to put it in clear and straightforward words every time, I can feel roughly what the shape, the argument, of each chapter is going to be. And that really is a big deal. So I really didn't waste my six months' research leave.

Which is a relief, as you can imagine.

The other thing which is making this bit of the writing go well is that I seem to have achieved the right distance from the material (at last! eight years later!). For the last couple of days, at least, I haven't been too close to it, seeing the unmanageable, unruly, glorious complexity and particularity of every word in every passage I quote; but I also haven't been too far away from it, feeling like every sentence I write bears the unbearable weight of the demand to justify its existence not only in the book but in my life, not only in my life but in the world: to justify itself to everyone everywhere at the same time, from my boss in the Classics department and my ex-supervisor in Cultural Studies to my scary, clever, wonderful, activist theorybitch friends on teh interwebs. It feels like working the material from a distance, like with giant mechanical hands: this is partly, of course, because mostly what I've been doing is shoving already-written sections into place and writing new explanatory, introductory, clarifying or linking sections almost in private, note form, so we'll see how it goes when I have to do more close-up work.

Yesterday, the day I started, J told me I was white all day, white and not-there, like a ghost; printing three old versions of the chapter out and making a tiny skeleton outline of the final version put colour back into my face.

The most exciting thing is that - mostly and so far - I like it. I like my book. I was really scared I wouldn't.

I spent the weekend tidying my study in preparation for starting, and I have a nice, clean, workable work space now, with drawers in a little cabinet for all the different chapters, and a desk-top organizer for pens and articles, and a flat surface for towers of books, and all my little magical objects collected around my computer (the pottery toad I bought at the North Bristol Art Fair last year, the glass coaster with a heart on it that J bought me at a market in Queensland just after we got together in 2003 and she had to go back to Australia, the little pipe-cleaner Deva a good friend of mine from Blake's 7 fandom made me a few years ago, the tiny wombat in a mortarboard that J gave me, the photo of the statue of Wellington in the park in Leeds near the university campus whose boots are always painted red by some helpful street artist, the Judy Horacek card 'kissing with crockery' which J sent me years ago when we weren't living together and when what we most wanted is what we have now; living in the same house, working hard in different rooms, and kissing when we bump into each other from time to time in the kitchen, distracted and not-there, and then going back to work).

Oh! Incidentally, this is International Blog Against Racism Week. So I will be blogging against racism soon, and you should too.

just like that story my dad used to tell about the guy who did his exams on benzadrines

2008-07-28T02:26:00.000-07:00

... but then on Friday night I was sitting next to J. on the sofa, watching Roseanne, when I suddenly thought:

maybe that whole three paragraphs about Frodo wasn't such a good idea after all.

Never mind. My parents are visiting for three days from tomorrow (hello!) and the deadline is Thursday, so I have to finish it today, Frodo or no Frodo.

Writing

2008-07-25T07:09:00.001-07:00

So it's the summer, and I'm writing, and I'm going to try and turn this blog back into a journal of the writing process, mainly for my own benefit but also because it's difficult and interesting to be public about how writing happens.

So far writing this journal article has been horrible, slow and painful. But today I was suddenly possessed and wrote over 2000 words in a non-stop three-hour blast (I didn't even pause to knit a few rows while rereading/getting distracted, which I usually do while writing, ever since I gave up both smoking and Minesweeper), and it's basically done. When I say 'basically done' I mean I have to write the introduction and the final paragraph, the bits that actually say what the paper is meant to say, look up a bunch of references (Henderson and Bartsch on Lucan, check the OLD and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae for cursus), put in the references, do a final cut-and-polish and get it into house style. But, you know. Done!

Things that may have contributed to this:

Luck
Putting on my 'Vergil' perfume before starting to write
Nice weather for writing (not too hot!)
... or, just possibly, turning my internet off and not going online before or during writing. (Didn't I learn that lesson last year?)

Speaking of Vergil, I occasionally fantasize about writing a novel about the tangled erotic-political-literary relationships between Octavian-Augustus, Marc Antony, Vergil and Ovid, but then I realize that I can't write a historical novel because I could never do all that research to make a coherent and accurate world for the characters to inhabit. But this morning, I realized that the reason I can't do that is not just because I'm too lazy, but because I fundamentally don't believe in creating a coherent and accurate historical world. I mean, I don't think of Vergil like a character in Rome, going about being all three-dimensional and authentic in an accurately-reconstructed setting. So now I've started to fantasize about writing an experimental novel about the tangled erotic-political-literary relationships between Augustus, Antony, Vergil and Ovid.

Narrated by Dante.

Frank O'Hara

2008-07-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching a seminar on T S Eliot on the English Literature MA next semester, so I went upstairs to nab J's Collected Poems to decide which poems to set and my hand went for Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems as well, so I've been reading them and getting damp around the eyes. I completely love Frank O'Hara. Here's his official home page; go read some poems (the second one on that page, Ave Maria is one of my favourites. So wicked and joyful. But actually all the poems there are great). And! You can hear him read one of my other favourites, Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed), which is much funnier out loud (when I read it to myself it is quite sad). Poetry is odd like that.

So Frank O'Hara makes me feel better about everything. Good. (He's dead, though - someone ran him over in a car on Fire Island when he was forty, which sucks. OH FRANK O'HARA WE LOVE YOU GET UP.)

Sometimes I Just Feel So Tired

2008-07-23T04:20:00.000-07:00

So today I was thinking about posting a brief compare-and-contrast of Debbie Harry Sings In French with Barbara Wersba's Tunes for a Small Harmonica, to make the point that good YA fiction about sexuality and gender identity was being written back in the 70s and 80s, so all this hoo-hah about how ground-breaking and innovative the queer books of today are is a wilful forgetting of YA history. But instead I am posting about three things I came across within five minutes of going on the Internet, and the exhaustion that comes over me at the thought of living in a world where this kind of thing happens, and where critiquing them so often gets you read as a Humourless Feminist (tm).

So, in order...

1) Today's 'Daily Poll' on imdb was about who you would get to narrate your life: it listed seven actors, all men. I guess there are no women with voices good enough to narrate the life of any random internet-surfer who reads imdb.

2) Then someone linked me to this blog, Cake Wrecks, and the third cake down was a (pretty funny, I thought) baby-shower cake with a marzipan figure of a woman giving birth on top (here): the blogger comments that the, er, "mom" here... is completely nekkid (is that a new trend in delivery rooms?), and is anatomically correct where you wouldn't expect her to be (ergo the censor bars - sorry, fellas!) Well, yes, quite a lot of people are naked when they give birth. And why on earth would I not expect a figure of a woman in childbirth to be 'anatomically correct' in the places where babies come from and are fed?

3) And then someone else linked me to this blog post with a brief critique of a Snickers ad in which, in order to sell a chocolate bar, Mr T pursues a man who is speed-walking (and thus coded as effeminate) down the street, firing Snickers bars at him from a giant machine-gun mounted on a big truck, and exhorting him to 'run like a man' and 'get some nuts'.

I am too tired to critique these. Do them yourselves.

(The post title is the caption of a Judy Horacek cartoon, showing one of her women slumped over a desk: up on the wall behind her are the statistics from the 1980 UN report on the status of women.)

Back to Writing

2008-07-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

I've finished off most of my outstanding stuff from last year, had a week off, been ill for a week, and had a rather epic birthday; the rest of the summer involves holing up in my flat and writing like crazy. I have a journal article to write by July 30, a book chapter to revise by September 15, and a conference paper to write by October 23; and I need to have a finished draft of Now and Rome by the end of September. I'm planning to write in the mornings and read in the afternoons for four days a week; spend one day a week on teaching- and admin-related tasks and 'misc'; and have two days off a week for hanging out with J, knitting, fannishness and walking.

I'm trying to write this journal article at the moment - it's for a special edition of Cultural Critique, which is exciting yet daunting - and it should be very easy because it's all stuff I've been working on for years. But I keep being surprised by how wobbly my confidence is, and how if I take my eye off the task at hand for a moment, doubts start creeping in, all the way up from 'is this the right quote to use?' to 'should I actually be an academic at all?'

I also seem to have left two crucial books at work, so I think now might be the time to knock off and walk over to my office; it's a sunny day and my office is about fifteen minutes' walk away through leafy parks and Georgian back-streets.

Dirty Books and the Great Wen

2008-07-14T03:19:00.001-07:00

Just back from a week in London, part-financed by my and J's very good friend K, who is lavishly generous and splendid and brings a better world with her wherever she goes (one part Wodehouse, one part Dion Fortune, one part The Saint, one part Emma Goldman, shake, pour over ice, and serve with a sprig of fresh mint). She said she was giving us the cash so we could tell her what we thought of Kipling's house at Bateman's (any excuse, honestly, that K), so we went there, and it was splendid. (I really like Kipling. I don't mean to downplay the sexism - he was deeply opposed to women's suffrage - and the imperialism and the racism, but so much of his stuff is just great: his use of language is beautiful and he gets at some of those tiny, hidden feelings and relationships and ideas, mining them out of experience into language. Thorts into Stuff, as Una says. And those bits are relatively detachable from the power and the privilege and the White-Man's-Burden stuff, which isn't true of all writers, or at least I think so.) I was going to put up some pictures from our trip, but naturally I can't find the cable for my camera, so that'll have to wait.

Other things I did included speaking at the Dirty Books event at the London Literary Festival last week, where I enjoyed myself thoroughly and may possibly have referred to slash as 'a feminist utopia of porn'. It was a slightly odd event overall, containing rather more straight women than I'd expected from a queer event, including one who felt the need to inform us on about five occasions that although she did have sex with women, she didn't really enjoy it. But from the extract from her work she read, she didn't seem to enjoy sex at all, so perhaps I shouldn't have felt so ruffled at her presentation of f/f sex as oh-so-thrillingly outrée but ultimately not real sex. The highlight was probably the very impassioned and lovely defense of erotic writing by the organizer, Rupert Smith aka James Lear. (Actually, this was a bit of a theme of the week: I also went to see Alan Moore and Melinde Gebbie talking about Lost Girls, their 'pornographic novel about pornography', which was fun. It was the first time I'd ever been in the same room as Alan Moore and his splendid beard.)

Oh! And we went to see the Magnetic Fields in concert, which was great. And! We saw (some of) the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project, which may be the best thing that has ever been in the world. Slightly-simplified-for-feminist-squee account of the project:

Geometers used to think there were only two types of space in which you could do geometry (Euclidean flat space and spherical space). There was a possibility of another kind of space, hyperbolic space, but for many reasons - including the difficulty of physically modelling/visualizing it - its feasibility was disputed for, like, hundreds of years.

AND THEN A FEMALE MATHEMATICIAN CROCHETED IT. And she came and presented hyperbolic space in the form of crochet to the Royal Society of Geometers* and they were like, whoa.

And then - because hyperbolic space also exists in coral reefs - the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project came into being, whereby people (mostly women) from across the world crochet coral reefs and exhibit them. It is craft + female-flavoured community + maths + conservation/ecology. I don't see how it could possibly be a better thing. And, it's free! At the Hayward! Go and see it if you are in London, or if it is on tour near you ever.

*or something

reeling rather

2008-06-21T05:21:00.000-07:00

God, I love Meg Rosoff. What a thoroughly queer and splendid book.

Also, I wish I was Meg Rosoff. Her first book was about war and anorexia, probably my two favourite subjects for fiction (and so rarely combined!), with a stalwart anorexic female war heroine in the lead - and won the Guardian award;* her second book was about fate and responsibility and won the Carnegie medal; and this one is a subtle and strange revisiting of some of the major early children's lit topoi and genres (school story, castaways). And queer as anything, like I said.

(A couple of reservations about the fate of the Gollum character.)

*I am always slightly surprised that I haven't won the Guardian award for children's fiction, but J points out to me that I have not in fact written a children's novel. Which seems a bit of a technicality to me, but I suppose they have to stick to the letter of the law.

Weekend O Books

2008-06-21T04:08:00.000-07:00

Exam boards are finished, tutee meetings are over, I have finished the undergraduate teaching year, and celebrated with a small and pleasing party last night (bruschetta, prosecco, faculty gossip), and this weekend is the Weekend O Books. In term time I can usually only read very bad fiction, because I don't seem to be able to afford the headspace to risk being taken over by a book, and because I only get very limited fiction-reading time (early morning and late at night), so I tend to read mindlessly, the way lots of people watch TV (in fact I think in termtime books and telly occupy exactly the reverse of their normative places - I watch very little TV, I'm very selective about what I watch, and I watch it attentively.* Perhaps it's a fan thing.)

Anyway. Here I lie on the sofa, with a pile of books beside me as follows:

Les Mots Pour Le Dire, Marie Cardinal
When Dad Killed Mom, Julius Lester (enthusiastic rec from J)
Bindi Babes, Narinder Dhami (another enthusiastic rec from J)
Suburban Freakshow, Julia Lawrinson (rec from Judith Ridge's blog; I usually either love or hate Julia Lawrinson's books so who knows what I'll think of this)
After Summer, Nick Earls (saw it in the Amnesty bookshop for 20p and J told me to get it)
Where Have All The Boys Gone?, Jenny Colgan (chicklit, 20p, actually bought as termtime reading, may skip)
Bulldozer Rising, Anna Livia (lesbian-feminist sci-fi novel about a structurally ageist society, 20p)
Peter Pan in Scarlet, Geraldine McCaughrean (J put this on my to-read pile months ago, but amid so many dire warnings of its extreme boringness that I haven't read it yet)
Written For Children, John Rowe Townsend (technically work)
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July (because I loved You And Me And Everyone We Know so much)
In the Name of God, Paula Jolin (Muslim-fundamentalist YA novel, wonder what it will be like, bought it in Stanford last November alongside a Christian-fundamentalist YA novel which wasn't much cop)
The Summer of Love, Debbie Dreschler (YA graphic novel, I keep starting it but not getting very far because I'm finding the art difficult to read).

But! The very top book on the pile, which I have already started and of which I am currently on page 24, is Meg Rosoff's What I Was. It's her third novel, and I absolutely loved the first two but sort of thought there were problems in each, so I am delighted to record that as of this moment, this may be the perfect book.

::sighs happily and returns to Weekend O Books::

*except for the constant knitting, obviously.

Meme: I Can't Believe It's Not A Passion Quilt!

2008-06-10T05:35:00.001-07:00

I don't know what the title of this post means. I tried googling 'passion quilt' and mostly I got iterations of this meme, so I am none the wiser. Anyway, Aren tagged me for this, and I'm finally getting round to it:

The rules are as follows: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what you are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your post “Meme: I can’t believe it’s not a passion quilt!”. Link back to this blog entry. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

The thing about this image is that it points towards the intersection of traditional academic conventions with political and ethical responsibility, and gives me hope that I can actually teach the kinds of thinking I want to teach through, not only alongside (or even despite), traditional academic activity (literary reading, critical analysis, essay-writing).

The main thing about it, I think, is that it shows a way in which the kinds of skills that I teach give students the ability to question and critique authority. 'Britain is being swamped by immigrants'. CITATION NEEDED: what are the figures? But not only 'what are the figures' - if I thought that objective truth was the only location of resistance to power, I would be a scientist (or at least a social scientist!), so for me other questions need to be put, too: how are you defining 'immigrants'? Why are you using this term 'swamped'? CITATION NEEDED. The idea that all statements are discursive, are made in the context of a network of definitions and rules and statistics which legitimate them (or don't legitimate them), and that following up the 'citations' allows you to read and to resist this network of knowledge-and-power.

In terms of academic techniques, too: I teach a lot of first-year students, who are in the process of figuring out how to write an undergraduate-level essay, and one of the things that's hardest for them on a technical level is distinguishing their own voice, their own argument, from those of their sources. If you read someone else's work and agree with it, does it become your work? (No. Well, okay, sort of. But it's only manners to acknowledge, rather than appropriate, work that cost someone else many more hours/years to write than it took you to read.) If you read someone else's work and disagree with it, how can you articulate that disagreement convincingly (when they are, say, Judith Butler, and you are an eighteen-year-old who hasn't read any Freud yet)? And this is somewhere where the conventions of academic writing are actually immensely helpful: proper citation and 'evaluation' of sources (as the marking criteria put it) allow you to make your argument more convincingly, but more importantly, they require you to be aware of the ongoing, dialogic, provisional, situated nature of academic work: understanding that the same term has very different meanings and implications in different fields or traditions, and being able to explain how you want to use that term, means understanding that thinking is both collaborative and antagonistic, and learning both how to honour the people who have enabled you to (let's say) see something new in Jane Eyre and how to argue against the people whose readings are (let's say) are effacing important dimensions of Jane Eyre.

I'm aware this is somewhat utopian.

And I notice that the meme asks me to 'link to' five or more educators, not to 'tag' them, so I'm going to do just that, because some of these people don't know me!

Anxious Black Woman, a blog I recently discovered through the Amanda Marcotte/Seal Press controversy (no, I'm not going to link to it!) and am going to read more assiduously;

John Lyons, a theologian who works down the road from me and is one of the people I know with an enviable ability to combine theoretical thinkiness with lightness of touch;

Lauren Berlant, an awesome queer theorist whose blog often, embarrassingly, falls into my tl;dr bin, but one of my ongoing ambitions is to combine blogging with thinking more effectively, so...;

Lori Askeland; this blog is about her activities as a local councillor in Akron, Ohio, rather than her educative/academic stuff, but it (and she) is wonderful nonetheless;

WOCPhD; another blog I should read in more detail, which includes excellent reading lists!

Changing gear

2008-06-05T02:03:00.000-07:00

I mentioned I'd finished marking, didn't I? Why, yes, I think I did.

So now it's time to start trying to change the gear of my brane, from the slightly mechanical, judgey, slightly impatient mode that marking demands if I'm to get through it with any remnant of robustness, to the more flexible, humble and patient mode that research requires. (From Sir Humphrey Appleby to Bernard, if you will.)

Luckily, I have two excellent research events coming up back-to-back here at Bristol: this afternoon, this workshop on the aesthetics of film, including two papers on sound and one on Fred and Ginger, and tomorrow-and-Saturday, the Performativity and Emptiness conference, which is the culmination of a two-year research programme that I've been (less deeply than I would have liked) involved in throughout. Everyone I've met through this project has been fiercely interesting and strange-minded, so I'm looking forward to the next couple of days a lot. And hopefully the kinds of attention that will be required will reorient my head into a state where I can get on with the writing I need to do this summer.

In the meantime, though, I'm supposed to be spending this morning tidying up bits and bobs, and it's amazing how hard it is to attend to anything work-related. It's like the Spinning Rainbow Wheel of Death is hovering above my head.

A Great Day In A Woman's Life

2008-06-04T03:59:00.000-07:00

I've finished* my marking!

I have been tagged for a meme by the always-crunchy Aren, and I know exactly what my image is going to be, but I want to sit with my ideas about that post for a while longer, so in the meantime, I'm going to post the three passages that have been keeping me going throughout marking season (here assembled under the heading 'Three Ways To Get A 2:2'):

1. Diana Wynne Jones, from A Tale of Time City:

"Haven't you done any translating either?"
"I've done some," Vivian admitted.
"Let's hear it then." Dr Wilander leaned back and lit his pipe with a tap of one huge finger on its bowl, as if he expected to be listening for the next hour or so.
Vivian looked miserably at her few lines of crossed out and rewritten green writing. "One large black smith threw four coffins about," she read.
"Oh, did he?" Dr Wilander said placidly. "To show off his strength, I suppose. Carry on."
"So that they turned into four very old women," Vivian read. "One went rusty for smoothing clothes. Two went white in moderately cheap jewellery. Three of them turned yellow and got expensive and another four were dense and low in the tables--"
"So now there were ten coffins," Dr Wilander said. "Or maybe ten strange elderly ladies. Some of these were doing the laundry while the rest pranced about in cheap necklaces. I suppose the yellow ones caught jaundice at the sight, while the stupid ones crawled under the furniture in order not to look. Is there any more of this lively narrative?"
"A bit," said Vivian. "Four more were full of electricity, but they were insulated with policemen, so that the town could learn philosophy for at least a year."
"Four more old women and an unspecified number of police," Dr Wilander remarked. "The blacksmith makes at least fifteen. I hope he paid the police for wrapping themselves round the electrical old ladies. It sounds painful. Or are you implying that the police were electrocuted, thus supplying the townsfolk with a valuable moral lesson?"
"I don't know," Vivian said hopelessly.
"But just what," asked Dr Wilander, "do you think your multitudes of old women were really doing?"
"I've no idea," Vivian confessed.
"People don't usually write nonsense," Dr Wilander remarked, still placidly puffing at his pipe.**

2. Douglas Adams, from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Fit the Second):

VOGON CAPTAIN: So Earthlings I present you with a simple choice. Think carefully for you hold your very lives in your hands. Now choose: either die in the vacuum of space, or… tell me how good you thought my poem was.

FORD: I liked it

VOGON CAPTAIN: Good...

ARTHUR: Oh yes, I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective.

VOGON CAPTAIN: Yes?

ARTHUR: Oh…. and um, interesting rhythmic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the, er…

FORD: Counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the, um…

ARTHUR: Humanity of the er -

FORD: Vogonity.

ARTHUR: What?

FORD: Vogonity.

ARTHUR: Oh. Oh! Vogonity. Sorry. Of the poet’s compassionate soul which contrived through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into… err…

FORD: Into whatever it was that the poem was about.

3. Diana Wynne Jones again, from Witch Week:

Simon was very cunning. He was clever. He was thoroughly suspicious of the whole thing. They were trying to catch him out somehow. The safest and cleverest thing was not to commit anything to writing. He was sure of that. On the other hand, it would not do to let everyone know how clever he had gone. It would look peculiar. He ought to write just one thing. So, after more than half an hour of deep thought, he wrote:

Doggies.

It took him five minutes. Then he sat back, confident that he had fooled everyone.

*Well, I have two more dissertations to second-mark, and two moderation meetings to go to, and a resubmitted essay to chase up, but last night I finished the last actual pile of stuff and drank two glasses of champagne to celebrate, so that counts.

**Dr Wilander later gives the correct translation for the passage:

The great Faber John made four containers or caskets and hid each of them in one of the Four Ages of the World. The casket made of iron, he concealed in the Age of Iron. The second, which was of silver, he hid in the Silver Age, and the third, which was pure gold, in the Age of Gold. The fourth container was of lead and hidden in the same manner. He filled these four caskets with the greater part of his power and appointed to each one a special guardian. In this way he ensured that Time City would endure throughout a whole Platonic Year.

Rights of Paternity

2008-05-06T05:53:00.001-07:00

I just wrote a review for Classical Review and am consequently having to sign Cambridge University Press's copyright form, to assign them my copyright, and look what I found in the small print:

Two 'moral rights' were conferred on authors by the UK Copyright Act in 1988. In the UK an author's 'right of paternity', the right to be properly credited whenever the work is published (or performed or broadcast), requires that this right is asserted in writing.

The right to be credited is a right of paternity? Is that, like, a patronymic? Like, whenever I go about the place, my surname constitutes 'proper credit' to my dad? Wow.

Lesbians; Rome and science fiction

2008-05-02T02:03:00.000-07:00

I'd love to write an elegant demolition of this absurdity (Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian" - apparently it 'violates their human rights'). But I have no time. Instead I'm going to use this space to jot down some thoughts about the SF paper that started forming in my brane on the walk to work.

-- Rome as transtemporal site (passim in Western culture eg Philip K Dick Valis, Martindale 'The Ruins of Rome', Freud on Rome as city where all times present/accessible.)

-- time travel and the passage in 'Aetiology of Hysteria' about speaking stones, labour of technological mediation which enables direct communication with past

-- obviously we already have these technologies (reading and writing, but esp. audio recording, already disorder time) - 'The Fires of Pompeii' as elaborate argument about history and access to the past (Pompeii as 'fixed point' - b/c always-already 'fixed' in stone?) - but then the people turning to stone before the volcano, and the Doctor being commemorated in marble in the last shot, getting into the historical record - also elaborate argument about the learning of Latin as transtemporal connector (family from Cambridge Latin course, running joke about translation-as-technology [TARDIS translation device] and situatedness [Latin = Welsh, ref to Cardiff as site of Doctor Who, though of course in this ep dislocated into Rome-I-mean-Pompeii [Tony Keen talks about this play on the siting/setting of the ep]).

-- Stone circuit/stone prophecy in 'The Fires of Pompeii'. Stone as recording device. The Stone Tape. Stones speaking in the De Bello Civili, also site of set of meditations on the relationship to the past. Stonesyayy.

-- Necromancy - The Resurrection Glove and Erichtho. Technologies of communication with the dead. Circuit of history. (I always decide to write on the necromancy in DBC and I never do, it's something I've been circling around for like five years now...)

Help me! I will acknowledge you in a footnote!

2008-04-27T02:02:00.000-07:00

The paper-machine drives ever onwards... I'm giving a paper to the Leeds branch of the Classical Association in a couple of weeks on 'The Romans and Science Fiction', and I need anecdotes and exciting examples and trivia and stuff. Please to provide:

* Science fiction with Romans in (either literally eg 'The Last Days of Pompeii' or allegorically eg the Romulans in Star Trek?)

* Science fiction about getting information from dead people - I think there was an episode of Torchwood with this theme? Which one was it, and Is there anything else?

* Science fiction about stones speaking or otherwise transmitting information (is there like a humming stone in Dune? What's going on there?) I'm finally going to watch The Stone Tape this week and am very excited about that.

Sources that come with snazzy visuals are particularly appreciated.

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR HELP.

The queer erotic literature event is now to be called, rather less syllabically, Dirty Books. It'll be in the evening (exact time TBC) of Saturday 5 July, in the St Paul's Pavilion in the South Bank Centre. It's being organized by this profoundly awesome dude, Rupert Smith aka James Lear.

world tour, media whore, pleased the press in belgium

2008-04-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

Just been booked to speak about slash at an event about queer erotic literature at the London Literature Festival this summer, probably between 5-10 July. Very excited. More news as it breaks. Keep fingers crossed that this will not clash with the Magnetic Fields concert on the 10th for which we have tickets.