things that are wrong with the world today

(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

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

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

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!

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

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

Conference alert

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...