Blimey. That was unexpected. Cicero has triumphantly returned to Rome! How exciting!
Letter 23 (29 November 58)*
if, as I see to be the case on your forecast and my own too, there is NO hope, I beg and adjure you to care for my poor brother Quintus, whom I have ruined, unlucky wretch that I am. Protect my Marcus as far as you can. Poor little boy, I am leaving him nothing but my hated and dishonoured name.
Letter 24 (10 December 58)
I [am] deeply disturbed, because it looks as if even the faint ray of hope that existed has been extinguished.
Letter 25 (mid-December 58):
A letter from Rome, dispatched after you left, has reached me from which I see that I must pine away in this miserable state. And indeed (you won't take this amiss), if there were any lingering hope of my restoration, caring for me as you do you would not have left Rome at this time..
Letter 26 (mid-January 57**)
... if there is opposition I shall avail myself of the Senate's authority and prefer loss of life to that of country.
Letter 27 (early February 57, in its entirety)
From your letters and from the facts themselves I see that I am utterly finished. In matters where my family needs your help I beg you not to fail us in our misery. According to your letter I shall see you soon.
Letter 28 (10 September 57)
AM IN ROME!!1!! HAVE ALL MY STUFF BACK!!! EVERYBODY CLAPPED WHENEVER THEY SAW ME OR HEARD MY NAME!!! POMPEY IS MY BEST FRIEND AND HE SAYS I CAN RIDE HIS BIKE HOME FROM THE SENATE EVERY DAY!!11!!
Cicero should totally have a blog (like Geoffrey Chaucer, and indeed Pepys.) It's particularly weird reading this kind of epistolatory narrative because mostly I only know about Pompey from Lucan's epic On the Civil War, which is very much about how history can only be written in hindsight, and in which Pompey wears a label on his forehead saying DOOOMED at all times. Hmm. That reminds me, I promised to help draft a proposal for an event on 'the temporalities of reception'. I should probably get on with that.
(A weird thing is that, now that Cicero is back at Rome, his sentences have become notably shorter and more intelligible. KEEP IT UP TULLY.)
*All translations by Shackleton Bailey. (Except one.)
** it's BC, remember, so the numbering goes backwards
Thursday, 29 March 2007
Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Inspiration/Geekdom
Had the day off today (mostly - I went to Sean Gaston's seminar paper on Nancy, Aristotle and Derrida, which was beautiful), and while in the Post-Deng Cafe, eating sezchuan eggplant and gazing at photographs of Deng Xiaoping with small children and/or heads of state, I suddenly had two flashes of inspiration about how to manage the bits in Chapter Two that are still eluding me, which I scribbled down there and then. So that's a reminder that Thinking Requires Days Off, which is the most useful thing anyone ever told me when I started my PhD but which is of course one of the first things to go when you're feeling deadlined.
And now I'm back, through the rainy city, via a detour into the spooky, silent, glass-and-steel Law building for a copy of Heidegger's Introduction To Metaphysics (why was it there and not in the Philosophy library? I KNOW NOT), thinking to myself: You really know you're a geek when you hear yourself thinking Oh great! J won't be back for an hour! Time to sit and do some sewing and read more of Cicero's letters!
(Random Cicero thought: When I was being taught Latin, it was always stressed very heavily that the verb in a subordinate clause in indirect speech [a sub-oblique clause] goes into the subjunctive - in fact, that's one of the only Latin grammar rules I remember to this day.* Which has always been odd, because it never comes up in epic, and that's all I really read - but now that I'm reading Cicero I can totally tell why everyone went on about it so much; he does it about every five minutes.)
*the other is the world's least helpful mnemonic, via my dad: From nemo let me never say/ Neminis or nemine.
And now I'm back, through the rainy city, via a detour into the spooky, silent, glass-and-steel Law building for a copy of Heidegger's Introduction To Metaphysics (why was it there and not in the Philosophy library? I KNOW NOT), thinking to myself: You really know you're a geek when you hear yourself thinking Oh great! J won't be back for an hour! Time to sit and do some sewing and read more of Cicero's letters!
(Random Cicero thought: When I was being taught Latin, it was always stressed very heavily that the verb in a subordinate clause in indirect speech [a sub-oblique clause] goes into the subjunctive - in fact, that's one of the only Latin grammar rules I remember to this day.* Which has always been odd, because it never comes up in epic, and that's all I really read - but now that I'm reading Cicero I can totally tell why everyone went on about it so much; he does it about every five minutes.)
*the other is the world's least helpful mnemonic, via my dad: From nemo let me never say/ Neminis or nemine.
Monday, 26 March 2007
Day update
Okay, today I mostly sat sadly looking at Chapter Two and thinking about how I am not very good at writing or thinking, and I will never be able to write the book I want to write. But, I just looked at what I did today, and I've actually done quite a lot to transform the draft of Chapter Two - it doesn't look at all like it did when I started, and I have a better idea of the shape of it - so I'm sternly reminding myself that I am getting somewhere.
Also, I'm getting into quite a good routine, where I write in the mornings, taking tai chi breaks every now and again, and then read after lunch. Having a specified time to stop writing works to block some of the head-voices which are trying to make me sit at the computer berating myself for laziness and stupidity until I suddenly write the whole thing in one sudden flash of genius (that's not a strategy that works, I've found).
Also also, I should be congratulated for doing any work at all when the new Diana Wynne Jones novel arrived in the post this morning. I haven't even opened it yet (well, only to read the blurb on the dust-jacket).
And finally also, I figured out who it is I want to write like - it's Tom Cho, of course!
Damnit, though, because I never will. Tom writes sentences like:
But there is something in the way that discussions of popular culture can bring people together and thus our discussion soon leads to Johnny and I having sex.
(from his story 'Dirty Dancing', extract online here)
and, left to myself, I write sentences like:
There was something still about him, as if the rage that had driven him fast and hard through all of last year had gone into the darkness with Sirius and been lost; he looked bony and smudged and watchful.
which, as you'll notice, is basically nothing but adjectives. Oh well. nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt, I guess. (That's from the Georgics; it means something like 'Not every piece of earth can bear every crop'.)
Also, I'm getting into quite a good routine, where I write in the mornings, taking tai chi breaks every now and again, and then read after lunch. Having a specified time to stop writing works to block some of the head-voices which are trying to make me sit at the computer berating myself for laziness and stupidity until I suddenly write the whole thing in one sudden flash of genius (that's not a strategy that works, I've found).
Also also, I should be congratulated for doing any work at all when the new Diana Wynne Jones novel arrived in the post this morning. I haven't even opened it yet (well, only to read the blurb on the dust-jacket).
And finally also, I figured out who it is I want to write like - it's Tom Cho, of course!
Damnit, though, because I never will. Tom writes sentences like:
But there is something in the way that discussions of popular culture can bring people together and thus our discussion soon leads to Johnny and I having sex.
(from his story 'Dirty Dancing', extract online here)
and, left to myself, I write sentences like:
There was something still about him, as if the rage that had driven him fast and hard through all of last year had gone into the darkness with Sirius and been lost; he looked bony and smudged and watchful.
which, as you'll notice, is basically nothing but adjectives. Oh well. nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt, I guess. (That's from the Georgics; it means something like 'Not every piece of earth can bear every crop'.)
Head/Space
I went away for the weekend, to stay with J's friend Butch J in her house in Kennet River on the Great Ocean Road. Dude, the sea is big. We saw many animals and I had many thoughts about space and technology - coincidentally the subject of my book. Because it's such an intensely mediated landscape. Two examples:
(1) I'd already (always already?) bought a postcard of the Twelve Apostles to send to my parents (hello, by the way, I'm going to send you a postcard soon), and so all the time that I was standing there on the boardwalk with the other tourists I was thinking Ooh, I'm in that postcard!
(2) Conversation with J and Butch J, about the lack of traces of human occupation in the landscape making it possible to imagine what it was like for the white 'settlers':
I: Except, you know, for being in a hermetically sealed, climate-controlled car going at 100km/hr.
J [I forget which one]: But if we weren't in the car, we wouldn't be able to imagine it!
Which was so spot-on, that relationship between imagination and... something like authenticity? Because of course if it had been 1800 and the road - the vantage point from which we look at the landscape in comfort and at a particular speed - hadn't been built yet, we wouldn't be able to look at the landscape and imagine what it would be like to be discovering it, because we'd be too busy hacking our way through gum trees and avoiding deadly spiders and sweating and being rained on and falling down and breaking our legs. You need a certain amount of speed and a certain quality of road to be able to survey the landscape in such a way as to imagine it - have a non-bodily relationship to it. Imaging technology (cameras, imagination, speculative fiction) always opens up the territory first - I read some good essays on that in relation to medicine and the way we understand our bodies, once, but I can't remember where.
And it was a great weekend in lots of other ways; mediated and modern (and uneasily complicit with colonialism) as it was, I loved driving through those landscapes, and getting to see glow-worms at midnight in the middle of nowhere - glow-worms are awesome - and watching birds fight over seed on Butch J's veranda, and looking at koalas and wondering how they balance. And the coast is so huge and so beautiful. And on the way home, after it got dark, we got into a hilarious discussion of butch/femme and their varying styles of EVIL, which ended up with us listening to songs by Mary Gaultier and Connie Francis in alternation, imagining it as one of those hip-hop style contests in song,* with MG in the butch team (I know I hurt you/ But I never meant to.../ You know that I loved you/ You know that I tried/ You know that it hurt me/Each time that you cried)and CF in the femme (Darling, please don't hurt me;/ Please, don't make me cry/ I don't know what I'd do if you'd ever say goodbye/ Remember -- I love you so much,/ And love is life's greatest joy/ Please don't break my heart like a child breaks a little toy). (CF won by miles.)
But what I really want to write about is writing, and I'm worried it's going to turn into one of those blog posts that never actually gets written because it's never the right time to do it perfectly, so I'm just going to get it down here and now. Apologies for some roughness/sketchiness in the thinking and the expression.
I just started David Wills' Prosthesis today - it's absolutely brilliant, by the way, you theory types should all read it - and I was scribbling down notes on the back endpaper** because my mind was firing so fast, it was lovely. This will be but a pale shadow of my excitement, I bet.
Okay, so the reading of this book is hedged about by a bit of anxiety, because it's published in the series I want to approach and because it's by one of the external examiners on the thesis, so reading it, on the level of fantasy, is really reading a judgement on my thesis (Hmm, so David Wills thinks you should write like this... that must mean he thinks my thesis should be more like that!) So it's making me think about the stylistic choices that I'm making in writing the book-of-the-thesis, and how they relate to the choices Wills has made. Because as well as being an incredibly clever book, this is an intensely, intensely poetic book. And it's in the poetry that the thinking happens and is performed. And one of the criticisms that my internal examiner made of the thesis was - sort of - that it wasn't poetic enough: that it defended itself against the more interesting, wilder, consequences of its thinking by miming or feigning obedience to academic protocols (quoting 'authorities' to justify particular moves, in particular).
So I've been having to think about the value and importance of that poetic mode of writing (theory). When I say 'poetic', what I mean is something which strives not to repress any of the effects of the language - the opposite of the way that 'scientific' discourse tries to be 'transparent', ie not to let any of the non-referential effects of language affect the way that the writing signifies. But in poetry, everything (potentially) is significant: the sound of the words, their metaphorical dimension, their relationship to other poems. And also, poetry is from the Greek word for 'making' - so poetic discourse makes and/or is made, it's an artifact, a thing, not just a 'representation' of a real thing that remains 'outside' the writing. And some theoretical writing tries to work like that, and it's important to me that mine should, too. But my writing looks and feels very different from David Mills, even when it works: my ur-sentence, the one which will not appear in the book and didn't appear in the thesis but has exactly the effect - the tone, the style, the feel, the something - I want to get is:
Aeneas loves Dido because she is a bee.
See? Nearly monosyllabic, nice and Anglo-Saxon, not overly Latinized, short, easy to read, and with a sort of deadpan indecision over whether that 'is' is metaphorical or not. I love that sentence.
But David Wills writes sentences like this:
From earthbound gallop to quadrupedantic flight, from leg of flesh to leg of steel, it is necessarily a transfer into otherness, articulated through the radical alterity of ablation as loss of integrity.
So, given the aforementioned anxiety coupled with my huge admiration and respect for what Wills is doing, I've been having to think about what I mean by poetic, and why he's written the book the way he's written it, and whether if I want to be considered in anything like the same breath as him as a deconstructive scholar, I need to start writing more like him. Because I absolutely agree with his (and others') critique of 'plain speaking', of a kind of writing that poses as 'easy' and 'clear' and so on.
Because that kind of writing - that construction of a medium of communication between author and reader - often rests on a kind of 'common sense', which means that in order to experience the writing as simple and clear and legible, the reader has to sign up to a certain set of assumptions about language, about culture, and about the world. And those assumptions inevitably repress a good deal of the signifying dimensions of the writing, which is methodologically problematic when what you're writing is a reading of texts which aims to restore those very dimensions.
But there's more to it than that slightly arcane methodological concern, I think. Because some of the assumptions that make texts 'clear' are politically or culturally dodgy. I've noticed this mostly from a queer perspective, when I point out that certain texts or images only make sense if you assume that, say, 'female' and 'attracted only to men' are synonymous, and sometimes people get very impatient with me about that, as if I should be expected to do the work of translation which actually excludes my whole existence and the only reason I'm not doing it is to be difficult. I can't think of a good example here, but here's a not-very-clear one instead, which might be more appropriate anyway.
Like it's 'clear' that the mixed-sex love story in Singin' In The Rain (Don/Cathy) is 'really' in the text, and the same-sex love story (Don/Cosmo) is only in the subtext/the eye of the reader/ etc - because Don & Cathy end up together, and no accommodation is made in the plot (as series of events linked by cause-and-effect) for the end or renegotiation of Don's and Cosmo's relationship. But that doesn't necessarily make it 'clear' that all the intimations in the text of a loving relationship between Don and Cosmo just don't exist: the purely-heterosexual reading of the film is a product of interpretation just like any other reading of the three-way relations between the protagonists. It's just that the film, and the institutions of reception according to which we read it, work to efface the work we have to put in to see how 'obvious' it is that there's no sexual or romantic element in the relationship between Don and Cosmo, as there is between Don and Cathy. (Just like it makes people impatient sometimes when I point out that seeing 'female' and 'attracted only to men' as synonymous actually requires me to do a fair bit of work - it's not 'just true', or 'obvious', or 'natural', or 'right').
John Mowitt, in Text - another book which is made of awesome - talks about how, when we write, we should struggle to make what we write 'piratable' by people yet to come, whose struggles may be unrecognizable to us. And that struck such a chord, because... Okay, this is a principle that's been guiding me, in my writing. I write things down, and I ask if they're 'true'. That works well enough to produce statements which I'm happy to publish and stand by, but I've never really managed to work out what I meant by 'true'. But now that I've read Text I think Mowitt's idea of 'piratability' is pretty close to it. In fact, I think 'piratability' is the answer to a question that was posed at a debate I took part in at Bristol about a year ago: if you work in the humanities - particularly if you engage with history - but don't subscribe to 'realism', to the idea that things 'really' happened and are later represented in history - then how do you make sure your work is ethical, is not simply serving your own interests, reflecting your own position, your own self, back to you? 'Piratability' seems to answer that question to me - it's also made me a lot more kindly-inclined towards scientific discourse, which is absolutely trying to be piratable, to produce statements which will be true - which will work - regardless of a reader's cultural and historical position.
All of which means that being in Australia - the disorienting, dislocating experience of being in this landscape, which is so strange to me in terms of all the natural and cultural forces which shape it (the climate, the way the land, the sea and the sky fit together, the plants and animals, the recentness of white/European forms of settlement, the practices and technologies which mediate and have mediated, in the last couple of thousand years, between human societies and their terrestrial environment) - is actually incredibly good for this book. Because the book's about the relationship between sense-making practices and the political/territorial landscape of the Roman Empire (ie, roughly, Europe). And Australia is so visibly*** and constantly different from Europe that writing the book here reminds me that I need to work, all the time, to make it piratable by non-Europeans, not to opt for a mode of writing which is 'clear' at the cost of requiring the reader to fill in gaps with specifically European knowledges or traditions. That is, if I say something about 'the land' or 'the earth', or about 'human society' being constituted by agriculture, then I need to make damn sure I specify where and to whom 'human society' is defined as being constituted by agriculture. Because otherwise I'm saying that I don't care if I exclude certain societies from humanity. Which is about as unethical as you can get.
And - to get back to David Wills - it's that kind of truth-as-piratability that it seems to me Wills is getting at everywhere in his book: it's that specificity that, in the end, makes his writing 'piratable', because he's not using universalizing synechdoches which name the part after the whole ('men' and 'women', 'humans', 'society', 'the earth'), but always specifying what he means. And part of that process of specifying is in the poetic quality of the words: because poetry says that there are no synonyms, that it matters whether you say 'meadow' or 'field' or 'paddock' or 'greensward'.
So - that was my long meditation on why poetry is an indispensible part of the task of theory, but also that was how I figured out for myself why I can do poetry in a different way from Wills, as long as I keep the ethical aim in view.
And this question of poetry and piratability is related to the other thing I was thinking about, which is that writing is a place to find your own limits - to think, experience, and 'do' things that aren't open to you in your socially-constrained, embodied life. That's not a new thought, I know - I'm thinking of Toni Morrison's amazing Playing in the Dark, where she writes about the ways in which writing fiction relates you to other ways of being through the creation and inhabiting of characters, or Calvin Thomas's hilariously deadpan exposition of Cixous' 'writing is the passage of the other in me' via anal sex in 'Must Desire Be Taken Literally?' - but it's usually talked about in terms of identification (as in Morrison) or transgression (think of Dennis Cooper or George Bataille or anyone). And that's not quite what I'm talking about, though it's not completely unrelated: but I think that identifying with characters, either in reading or writing them - although it is very powerful and uncanny and interesting - is only part of the way that writing always exceeds the limits of the writing self. What makes me calm and happy about writing - when it works - is that sense of writing things that are true; that sense of having got past a particular configuration of cultural forces which tries to repress half the potential meanings in texts, and accounted for something which goes beyond or outside the everyday, commonsensical appearance of things, while not contradicting or dismissing the everyday either. And that's something to do with the way language works, I think: something to do with the materiality of writing, as a way of working with language as material: the way that language, and the social, cultural and historical forces that shape it, put up a specific resistance to certain ways of using language, and writing comes out of negotiating that resistance. Just like sculpting, which relies on the material putting up a specific kind of resistance to the precise degree of muscular force applied to the specific tool that the sculptor's using, and so you chip off exactly this little bit of this particular stone until you have the shape you wanted, insofar as the stone will hold that shape. It's a collaboration between the sculptor and the material. And writing is like that too.
Finally, my title and abstract for the paper I'm giving on the 18th are now up.
*I'm not hip enough to even know what those are called. I'm not even hip enough to know what to Google to find out. Isn't there one in Eight [Eighth?] Mile?
**in pencil, Gemma! In pencil!
***And audible: every night at dusk, the cicadas start shrieking, and at first I kept having to go outside to see if someone's alarm was going off. It's a horrific noise: loud and electronic and grating, a cross between an alarm and that screeching noise that water pipes sometimes make. (I googled cicadas and some of them can make a noise up to 120 dB which, I'm told, is close to the pain threshold of the human ear.)
(1) I'd already (always already?) bought a postcard of the Twelve Apostles to send to my parents (hello, by the way, I'm going to send you a postcard soon), and so all the time that I was standing there on the boardwalk with the other tourists I was thinking Ooh, I'm in that postcard!
(2) Conversation with J and Butch J, about the lack of traces of human occupation in the landscape making it possible to imagine what it was like for the white 'settlers':
I: Except, you know, for being in a hermetically sealed, climate-controlled car going at 100km/hr.
J [I forget which one]: But if we weren't in the car, we wouldn't be able to imagine it!
Which was so spot-on, that relationship between imagination and... something like authenticity? Because of course if it had been 1800 and the road - the vantage point from which we look at the landscape in comfort and at a particular speed - hadn't been built yet, we wouldn't be able to look at the landscape and imagine what it would be like to be discovering it, because we'd be too busy hacking our way through gum trees and avoiding deadly spiders and sweating and being rained on and falling down and breaking our legs. You need a certain amount of speed and a certain quality of road to be able to survey the landscape in such a way as to imagine it - have a non-bodily relationship to it. Imaging technology (cameras, imagination, speculative fiction) always opens up the territory first - I read some good essays on that in relation to medicine and the way we understand our bodies, once, but I can't remember where.
And it was a great weekend in lots of other ways; mediated and modern (and uneasily complicit with colonialism) as it was, I loved driving through those landscapes, and getting to see glow-worms at midnight in the middle of nowhere - glow-worms are awesome - and watching birds fight over seed on Butch J's veranda, and looking at koalas and wondering how they balance. And the coast is so huge and so beautiful. And on the way home, after it got dark, we got into a hilarious discussion of butch/femme and their varying styles of EVIL, which ended up with us listening to songs by Mary Gaultier and Connie Francis in alternation, imagining it as one of those hip-hop style contests in song,* with MG in the butch team (I know I hurt you/ But I never meant to.../ You know that I loved you/ You know that I tried/ You know that it hurt me/Each time that you cried)and CF in the femme (Darling, please don't hurt me;/ Please, don't make me cry/ I don't know what I'd do if you'd ever say goodbye/ Remember -- I love you so much,/ And love is life's greatest joy/ Please don't break my heart like a child breaks a little toy). (CF won by miles.)
But what I really want to write about is writing, and I'm worried it's going to turn into one of those blog posts that never actually gets written because it's never the right time to do it perfectly, so I'm just going to get it down here and now. Apologies for some roughness/sketchiness in the thinking and the expression.
I just started David Wills' Prosthesis today - it's absolutely brilliant, by the way, you theory types should all read it - and I was scribbling down notes on the back endpaper** because my mind was firing so fast, it was lovely. This will be but a pale shadow of my excitement, I bet.
Okay, so the reading of this book is hedged about by a bit of anxiety, because it's published in the series I want to approach and because it's by one of the external examiners on the thesis, so reading it, on the level of fantasy, is really reading a judgement on my thesis (Hmm, so David Wills thinks you should write like this... that must mean he thinks my thesis should be more like that!) So it's making me think about the stylistic choices that I'm making in writing the book-of-the-thesis, and how they relate to the choices Wills has made. Because as well as being an incredibly clever book, this is an intensely, intensely poetic book. And it's in the poetry that the thinking happens and is performed. And one of the criticisms that my internal examiner made of the thesis was - sort of - that it wasn't poetic enough: that it defended itself against the more interesting, wilder, consequences of its thinking by miming or feigning obedience to academic protocols (quoting 'authorities' to justify particular moves, in particular).
So I've been having to think about the value and importance of that poetic mode of writing (theory). When I say 'poetic', what I mean is something which strives not to repress any of the effects of the language - the opposite of the way that 'scientific' discourse tries to be 'transparent', ie not to let any of the non-referential effects of language affect the way that the writing signifies. But in poetry, everything (potentially) is significant: the sound of the words, their metaphorical dimension, their relationship to other poems. And also, poetry is from the Greek word for 'making' - so poetic discourse makes and/or is made, it's an artifact, a thing, not just a 'representation' of a real thing that remains 'outside' the writing. And some theoretical writing tries to work like that, and it's important to me that mine should, too. But my writing looks and feels very different from David Mills, even when it works: my ur-sentence, the one which will not appear in the book and didn't appear in the thesis but has exactly the effect - the tone, the style, the feel, the something - I want to get is:
Aeneas loves Dido because she is a bee.
See? Nearly monosyllabic, nice and Anglo-Saxon, not overly Latinized, short, easy to read, and with a sort of deadpan indecision over whether that 'is' is metaphorical or not. I love that sentence.
But David Wills writes sentences like this:
From earthbound gallop to quadrupedantic flight, from leg of flesh to leg of steel, it is necessarily a transfer into otherness, articulated through the radical alterity of ablation as loss of integrity.
So, given the aforementioned anxiety coupled with my huge admiration and respect for what Wills is doing, I've been having to think about what I mean by poetic, and why he's written the book the way he's written it, and whether if I want to be considered in anything like the same breath as him as a deconstructive scholar, I need to start writing more like him. Because I absolutely agree with his (and others') critique of 'plain speaking', of a kind of writing that poses as 'easy' and 'clear' and so on.
Because that kind of writing - that construction of a medium of communication between author and reader - often rests on a kind of 'common sense', which means that in order to experience the writing as simple and clear and legible, the reader has to sign up to a certain set of assumptions about language, about culture, and about the world. And those assumptions inevitably repress a good deal of the signifying dimensions of the writing, which is methodologically problematic when what you're writing is a reading of texts which aims to restore those very dimensions.
But there's more to it than that slightly arcane methodological concern, I think. Because some of the assumptions that make texts 'clear' are politically or culturally dodgy. I've noticed this mostly from a queer perspective, when I point out that certain texts or images only make sense if you assume that, say, 'female' and 'attracted only to men' are synonymous, and sometimes people get very impatient with me about that, as if I should be expected to do the work of translation which actually excludes my whole existence and the only reason I'm not doing it is to be difficult. I can't think of a good example here, but here's a not-very-clear one instead, which might be more appropriate anyway.
Like it's 'clear' that the mixed-sex love story in Singin' In The Rain (Don/Cathy) is 'really' in the text, and the same-sex love story (Don/Cosmo) is only in the subtext/the eye of the reader/ etc - because Don & Cathy end up together, and no accommodation is made in the plot (as series of events linked by cause-and-effect) for the end or renegotiation of Don's and Cosmo's relationship. But that doesn't necessarily make it 'clear' that all the intimations in the text of a loving relationship between Don and Cosmo just don't exist: the purely-heterosexual reading of the film is a product of interpretation just like any other reading of the three-way relations between the protagonists. It's just that the film, and the institutions of reception according to which we read it, work to efface the work we have to put in to see how 'obvious' it is that there's no sexual or romantic element in the relationship between Don and Cosmo, as there is between Don and Cathy. (Just like it makes people impatient sometimes when I point out that seeing 'female' and 'attracted only to men' as synonymous actually requires me to do a fair bit of work - it's not 'just true', or 'obvious', or 'natural', or 'right').
John Mowitt, in Text - another book which is made of awesome - talks about how, when we write, we should struggle to make what we write 'piratable' by people yet to come, whose struggles may be unrecognizable to us. And that struck such a chord, because... Okay, this is a principle that's been guiding me, in my writing. I write things down, and I ask if they're 'true'. That works well enough to produce statements which I'm happy to publish and stand by, but I've never really managed to work out what I meant by 'true'. But now that I've read Text I think Mowitt's idea of 'piratability' is pretty close to it. In fact, I think 'piratability' is the answer to a question that was posed at a debate I took part in at Bristol about a year ago: if you work in the humanities - particularly if you engage with history - but don't subscribe to 'realism', to the idea that things 'really' happened and are later represented in history - then how do you make sure your work is ethical, is not simply serving your own interests, reflecting your own position, your own self, back to you? 'Piratability' seems to answer that question to me - it's also made me a lot more kindly-inclined towards scientific discourse, which is absolutely trying to be piratable, to produce statements which will be true - which will work - regardless of a reader's cultural and historical position.
All of which means that being in Australia - the disorienting, dislocating experience of being in this landscape, which is so strange to me in terms of all the natural and cultural forces which shape it (the climate, the way the land, the sea and the sky fit together, the plants and animals, the recentness of white/European forms of settlement, the practices and technologies which mediate and have mediated, in the last couple of thousand years, between human societies and their terrestrial environment) - is actually incredibly good for this book. Because the book's about the relationship between sense-making practices and the political/territorial landscape of the Roman Empire (ie, roughly, Europe). And Australia is so visibly*** and constantly different from Europe that writing the book here reminds me that I need to work, all the time, to make it piratable by non-Europeans, not to opt for a mode of writing which is 'clear' at the cost of requiring the reader to fill in gaps with specifically European knowledges or traditions. That is, if I say something about 'the land' or 'the earth', or about 'human society' being constituted by agriculture, then I need to make damn sure I specify where and to whom 'human society' is defined as being constituted by agriculture. Because otherwise I'm saying that I don't care if I exclude certain societies from humanity. Which is about as unethical as you can get.
And - to get back to David Wills - it's that kind of truth-as-piratability that it seems to me Wills is getting at everywhere in his book: it's that specificity that, in the end, makes his writing 'piratable', because he's not using universalizing synechdoches which name the part after the whole ('men' and 'women', 'humans', 'society', 'the earth'), but always specifying what he means. And part of that process of specifying is in the poetic quality of the words: because poetry says that there are no synonyms, that it matters whether you say 'meadow' or 'field' or 'paddock' or 'greensward'.
So - that was my long meditation on why poetry is an indispensible part of the task of theory, but also that was how I figured out for myself why I can do poetry in a different way from Wills, as long as I keep the ethical aim in view.
And this question of poetry and piratability is related to the other thing I was thinking about, which is that writing is a place to find your own limits - to think, experience, and 'do' things that aren't open to you in your socially-constrained, embodied life. That's not a new thought, I know - I'm thinking of Toni Morrison's amazing Playing in the Dark, where she writes about the ways in which writing fiction relates you to other ways of being through the creation and inhabiting of characters, or Calvin Thomas's hilariously deadpan exposition of Cixous' 'writing is the passage of the other in me' via anal sex in 'Must Desire Be Taken Literally?' - but it's usually talked about in terms of identification (as in Morrison) or transgression (think of Dennis Cooper or George Bataille or anyone). And that's not quite what I'm talking about, though it's not completely unrelated: but I think that identifying with characters, either in reading or writing them - although it is very powerful and uncanny and interesting - is only part of the way that writing always exceeds the limits of the writing self. What makes me calm and happy about writing - when it works - is that sense of writing things that are true; that sense of having got past a particular configuration of cultural forces which tries to repress half the potential meanings in texts, and accounted for something which goes beyond or outside the everyday, commonsensical appearance of things, while not contradicting or dismissing the everyday either. And that's something to do with the way language works, I think: something to do with the materiality of writing, as a way of working with language as material: the way that language, and the social, cultural and historical forces that shape it, put up a specific resistance to certain ways of using language, and writing comes out of negotiating that resistance. Just like sculpting, which relies on the material putting up a specific kind of resistance to the precise degree of muscular force applied to the specific tool that the sculptor's using, and so you chip off exactly this little bit of this particular stone until you have the shape you wanted, insofar as the stone will hold that shape. It's a collaboration between the sculptor and the material. And writing is like that too.
Finally, my title and abstract for the paper I'm giving on the 18th are now up.
*I'm not hip enough to even know what those are called. I'm not even hip enough to know what to Google to find out. Isn't there one in Eight [Eighth?] Mile?
**in pencil, Gemma! In pencil!
***And audible: every night at dusk, the cicadas start shrieking, and at first I kept having to go outside to see if someone's alarm was going off. It's a horrific noise: loud and electronic and grating, a cross between an alarm and that screeching noise that water pipes sometimes make. (I googled cicadas and some of them can make a noise up to 120 dB which, I'm told, is close to the pain threshold of the human ear.)
Friday, 23 March 2007
Reading
So I bought this book about the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger because it was on sale in Readings, and it turns out to be just like trashy celebrity gossip for academics, with a bit of Gothic romance thrown in:
The adult Arendt, the preeminent scholar, would indeed appear to the world self-confident, even imperious. But never would she appear so to Heidegger.
The first-year student found in Heidegger a lover, friend, teacher, and protector. He promised to love her forever, to help and guide her. Carried away by his seductive declarations, she let down her defenses as never before...
When they met, the thirty-five-year-old Heidegger, married and the father of two young sons, was finishing the manuscript of Being and Time, a book that would put him in the ranks of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century. From their correspondence it is clear that he fell in love with his young student from their earliest meetings in his classroom. And though his passion subsided as time went on, his need to be her idol did not. Until he met Hannah, Heidegger - strict, rigid, hard-working, the son of devout Catholic peasants - seems to have known little of genuine passion, of a physical and spiritual bond. It is clear from Heidegger's letters to Arendt that she showed him how to love ardently and not feel it a sin. He needed her in order to breathe fully and deeply, to enjoy being alive.
(Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger [Yale University Press, 1995], p.3)
In other news, Cicero has now left Thessalonica. He was going to go to Epirus, but Plancius wouldn't let him (honest), so now he's at Dyrrachium, where the people are very keen on him. He is no longer so much talking about how nothing this bad has ever happened to anyone in the history of the world before, but has instead started saying things like You could have saved me from all this, Atticus - but no, no, I'm not blaming you, it's all my fault for thinking that you loved me as much as I wanted you to. Trust is such a terrible burden to place on a man ::looks sad::.
The adult Arendt, the preeminent scholar, would indeed appear to the world self-confident, even imperious. But never would she appear so to Heidegger.
The first-year student found in Heidegger a lover, friend, teacher, and protector. He promised to love her forever, to help and guide her. Carried away by his seductive declarations, she let down her defenses as never before...
When they met, the thirty-five-year-old Heidegger, married and the father of two young sons, was finishing the manuscript of Being and Time, a book that would put him in the ranks of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century. From their correspondence it is clear that he fell in love with his young student from their earliest meetings in his classroom. And though his passion subsided as time went on, his need to be her idol did not. Until he met Hannah, Heidegger - strict, rigid, hard-working, the son of devout Catholic peasants - seems to have known little of genuine passion, of a physical and spiritual bond. It is clear from Heidegger's letters to Arendt that she showed him how to love ardently and not feel it a sin. He needed her in order to breathe fully and deeply, to enjoy being alive.
(Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger [Yale University Press, 1995], p.3)
In other news, Cicero has now left Thessalonica. He was going to go to Epirus, but Plancius wouldn't let him (honest), so now he's at Dyrrachium, where the people are very keen on him. He is no longer so much talking about how nothing this bad has ever happened to anyone in the history of the world before, but has instead started saying things like You could have saved me from all this, Atticus - but no, no, I'm not blaming you, it's all my fault for thinking that you loved me as much as I wanted you to. Trust is such a terrible burden to place on a man ::looks sad::.
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
Day of Calmness
Yesterday I went to the Baillieu library to take out another pile of hard books. (You may be able to deduce from the titles - The Gods In Epic, The Textualization of Nature, Acts of Religion, Materialities of Communication - that I am going off on a tangent about Roman religion as a communications network which, er, textualizes nature. I'm quite excited about this, as I think it solves a few of the problems in the thesis's structure.) Then I got myself booked in to give a paper at the School of Cultural Studies research seminar, and then went along to Anthony White's paper to see what the gig would be like; I was immediately very glad that I'd signed up for it. The paper itself was interesting and well-theorized; attendance was pretty good (about 15 people, which isn't bad for a departmental seminar); and the feedback was awesome: coming from diverse places, but all very thinky and erudite and generous.* And the theoretical points of reference people are using are fairly familiar to me. So this is going to be a great place to try out stuff from the book, I think.
The day before yesterday I shoved Chapter One roughly into place. This isn't usually the way I work - the structure of a paper usually evolves for me out of slow, sentence-by-sentence, thoughtful and immersed work - but I think that's because I'm working on a larger scale now (not to mention because I'm rewriting), so I have to have a framework in place before I do the detailed stuff. It's also because it's a longer project in terms of time as well as word count, and I'm interleaving writing with reading - so I don't want to have either the thinking or the phrasing buffed to a high shine of completion while I'm still reading. Because what if something in one of the piles of hard books makes me rethink everything? So this more rough-hewn way of working feels like a better process for the moment.
Before that I had a bit of a rough time for a few days - hit an emotional bump in the road or something. So today I celebrated feeling better about myself and my book by, er, slacking off: I worked out a rough structure for Chapter 2 and made some notes about the overall aim of the chapter, then curled up in the comfy chair and read through the fan story I'm working on at the moment. I'm happy to report that it is awesome, containing drawling, robe-swirling, and politics.
Otherwise, life keeps chugging along. I started a tai chi class a couple of days ago, and instantly felt about five times better (memo to self: YOU HAVE A BODY); we finally filed J's visa application (behold! could anyone who had not lived in a relationship akin to marriage for two years have amassed this many documents? ) the other day; I've bought a present for my nephew's upcoming third birthday, and now I just have to post it; and I continue to sew obsessively.
*Melbourne Uni seems in general like a generous place. I say this based on (i) going to this paper and (ii) going to the loo in the Baillieu Library, to discover a whole wall full of touching and supportive graffiti; one person had written 'Help! I like a girl but I don't know what to do with girl bits!' and one person had written 'My heart is broken and it hurts so much'. And both those comments had drawn multiple, lengthy, helpful responses. Not one person was mean or rude or sarcastic. Truly it is a utopian toilet. (Except of course that the loos are gender-segregated, so the conditions of entrance to utopia are that you submit to compulsory binary gender: this is more usual for utopias than it should be, alas.)
The day before yesterday I shoved Chapter One roughly into place. This isn't usually the way I work - the structure of a paper usually evolves for me out of slow, sentence-by-sentence, thoughtful and immersed work - but I think that's because I'm working on a larger scale now (not to mention because I'm rewriting), so I have to have a framework in place before I do the detailed stuff. It's also because it's a longer project in terms of time as well as word count, and I'm interleaving writing with reading - so I don't want to have either the thinking or the phrasing buffed to a high shine of completion while I'm still reading. Because what if something in one of the piles of hard books makes me rethink everything? So this more rough-hewn way of working feels like a better process for the moment.
Before that I had a bit of a rough time for a few days - hit an emotional bump in the road or something. So today I celebrated feeling better about myself and my book by, er, slacking off: I worked out a rough structure for Chapter 2 and made some notes about the overall aim of the chapter, then curled up in the comfy chair and read through the fan story I'm working on at the moment. I'm happy to report that it is awesome, containing drawling, robe-swirling, and politics.
Otherwise, life keeps chugging along. I started a tai chi class a couple of days ago, and instantly felt about five times better (memo to self: YOU HAVE A BODY); we finally filed J's visa application (behold! could anyone who had not lived in a relationship akin to marriage for two years have amassed this many documents? ) the other day; I've bought a present for my nephew's upcoming third birthday, and now I just have to post it; and I continue to sew obsessively.
*Melbourne Uni seems in general like a generous place. I say this based on (i) going to this paper and (ii) going to the loo in the Baillieu Library, to discover a whole wall full of touching and supportive graffiti; one person had written 'Help! I like a girl but I don't know what to do with girl bits!' and one person had written 'My heart is broken and it hurts so much'. And both those comments had drawn multiple, lengthy, helpful responses. Not one person was mean or rude or sarcastic. Truly it is a utopian toilet. (Except of course that the loos are gender-segregated, so the conditions of entrance to utopia are that you submit to compulsory binary gender: this is more usual for utopias than it should be, alas.)
Friday, 16 March 2007
Photo post
I actually had some insights into the writing process today, but they're going to have to wait till I can do a more thoughtful post. So instead, you get photos!
Here's what my desk looked like today. Notice how it is gradually silting up. The tower 'o' books to the left of the computer is Lucan on Livy on Vergil: it's like a sculpture of the canon! But that's how I like to work. Sara Ryan once talked about how it's hard to do the labour of writing when you have too many other things going on in your life, and how she'd heard a great metaphor for it: like an Internet browser with 'too many tabs open'. Having a clutter of open books on the desk, for me, is like having lots of tabs open in a good way - it's a spatial analogue for the connections I'm making in my mind. It feels like I can entrust some of the work to that clutter, and not have to be conscious of everything all the time. It's a writing-prosthesis!
On the little plinthy-thing on the desk is a tray J brought me, containing lunch (avocado/cottage-cheese sandwich) and a cupcake from Dench's. J (and cupcakes) is also part of the highly-oiled machinery that keeps this production line going, as you can see.
I was also amused today to notice that, although we're only here for four months and are trying not to buy food items that will outlast our stay, we have both red wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar. So I took a photo of our shelves, to show you the full bourgeoisity of our priorities:
Top shelf (olive oil, sesame oil, 12-year-old whiskey... What?)
Middle shelf (ketchup, sugar, Maldon-brand flaky sea salt... What?)
Bottom shelf (now this one is more normal: Vegemite, honey, peanut butter.)
Today I refused to write any words - in a sort of weird, mute, visceral way, like a horse refusing a jump - and ended up sitting on the sofa sewing and reading Cicero's letters to Atticus (Book III. He's in Thessalonica. He hates Thessalonica! No-one understands him! He's totally leaving! He's going to go to Asia! Oh, wait, he's still in Thessalonica). This is my current project. I've been working on it for about three or four days now (can you tell what it is yet?* (This is a finished one: I started it on the plane out, so I guess it took three or four weeks.)
Sometimes I do leave the house, honestly. I go to Federation Square (though not very often, really), home of art galleries and, um, stuff. There's an old-fashioned tram going past in that picture, but usually I get the more modern-looking ones. [Thanks for Tom Cho for the tramtactic link.] More often I go to Brunetti (and here's a close-up of that gorgeous architecture: see the tiny cupids!).
Sometimes I see cool stuff (as J pointed out, I can see where waxing and teeth-whitening might be frowned upon, but really many of us have hair and nails, so the judgement seems a bit harsh...)
*Ans: It is a mediaeval lady at a loom. That is the left-hand foot of the loom, and the frill on her dress.
Here's what my desk looked like today. Notice how it is gradually silting up. The tower 'o' books to the left of the computer is Lucan on Livy on Vergil: it's like a sculpture of the canon! But that's how I like to work. Sara Ryan once talked about how it's hard to do the labour of writing when you have too many other things going on in your life, and how she'd heard a great metaphor for it: like an Internet browser with 'too many tabs open'. Having a clutter of open books on the desk, for me, is like having lots of tabs open in a good way - it's a spatial analogue for the connections I'm making in my mind. It feels like I can entrust some of the work to that clutter, and not have to be conscious of everything all the time. It's a writing-prosthesis!
On the little plinthy-thing on the desk is a tray J brought me, containing lunch (avocado/cottage-cheese sandwich) and a cupcake from Dench's. J (and cupcakes) is also part of the highly-oiled machinery that keeps this production line going, as you can see.
I was also amused today to notice that, although we're only here for four months and are trying not to buy food items that will outlast our stay, we have both red wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar. So I took a photo of our shelves, to show you the full bourgeoisity of our priorities:
Top shelf (olive oil, sesame oil, 12-year-old whiskey... What?)
Middle shelf (ketchup, sugar, Maldon-brand flaky sea salt... What?)
Bottom shelf (now this one is more normal: Vegemite, honey, peanut butter.)
Today I refused to write any words - in a sort of weird, mute, visceral way, like a horse refusing a jump - and ended up sitting on the sofa sewing and reading Cicero's letters to Atticus (Book III. He's in Thessalonica. He hates Thessalonica! No-one understands him! He's totally leaving! He's going to go to Asia! Oh, wait, he's still in Thessalonica). This is my current project. I've been working on it for about three or four days now (can you tell what it is yet?* (This is a finished one: I started it on the plane out, so I guess it took three or four weeks.)
Sometimes I do leave the house, honestly. I go to Federation Square (though not very often, really), home of art galleries and, um, stuff. There's an old-fashioned tram going past in that picture, but usually I get the more modern-looking ones. [Thanks for Tom Cho for the tramtactic link.] More often I go to Brunetti (and here's a close-up of that gorgeous architecture: see the tiny cupids!).
Sometimes I see cool stuff (as J pointed out, I can see where waxing and teeth-whitening might be frowned upon, but really many of us have hair and nails, so the judgement seems a bit harsh...)
*Ans: It is a mediaeval lady at a loom. That is the left-hand foot of the loom, and the frill on her dress.
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