My life is so glamorous

You know that Pet Shop Boys song, Being Boring, that ends:

I never dreamed that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be?

Well, tonight I am going to dinner with (in alphabetical order) Charles Butler, Diana Wynne Jones, and Jenny Pausacker.*

I am simultaneously dumbstruck with joy at the glamorosity of my own life and dumbstruck with awe at being in such august company.**

Hmm. I don't know how successful I will be as a conversationalist.

*And I even get to go home with one of them at the end of the night! (I don't get to pick which one, though.)

**okay, particularly about Diana Wynne Jones, who (a) I don't know as well as the other two and (b) is the only one I actually read as a child.

Agamben emergency

I'm giving a paper at a workshop on 'Ancient and Modern Imperialisms' in a couple of weeks, called 'Terminal Man: Agamben's Homo Sacer and the end of the Aeneid'. It's an investigation of the links between Agamben's argument in Homo Sacer about sovereignty and biopolitics (Agamben argues that the sphere of politics 'captures' biopolitical bodies - bodies exposed to sovereign violence)and an incredibly strange, ambiguous, and dense scene at the end of the Aeneid which seems to assemble all the elements of Agamben's argument: Aeneas, a refugee from Troy who is fated to found Rome in Italy,* has now arrived in Italy and is at war with the indigenous inhabitants (the Latins). At the very end of the poem, Aeneas is in single combat with a Latin prince, Turnus. Turnus throws a boundary stone at him - moving a boundary stone is one of the things that makes you a homo sacer in Roman law -and Aeneas stabs him to death. The verb Vergil uses for 'stab' at this point is the same verb used for the foundation of a city.** So the end of the Aeneid foregrounds a relationship between city-foundation and a body exposed to sovereign violence through sacratio. Which is all very nice and Agambanien, and what I wanted to do next was take this forward via Agamben's consideration of life and death as a political boundary, together with Virilio's fantasy of 'terminal man' (a fully technicized human body in a new political space inaugurated by real-time communications technology: 'the witness's own body becomes the last urban frontier', says Virilio).

But - apart from the fact that Vergil very annoyingly put a big sign on Turnus's head at the end of the Aeneid saying NOT A HOMO SACER, KTHXBAI and thus buggers up my whole argument - it's occurring to me that I'm not entirely sure I know what Agamben's argument about life and death is at the very end of Homo Sacer. And it's important, because what's emerging for me from this rereading of the end of the Aeneid is a whole argument from Vergil about dead people as political agents. So... can any of you guys help me with this? Or pass this post on to someone who'd be interested in talking about it over the next couple of weeks?

Towards the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben talks about the 'overcomatose person', and points out that the current state of life-support technology and transplant techniques means that the decision on life and death can no longer be taken by the 'ancient criteria' (the stopping of the heartbeat and the cessation of breathing), so that now there is a 'no-man's-land' between life and death. He writes (p.164) that 'life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision. The "frightful and incessantly deferred borders" [between life and death]... are moving borders because they are biopolitical borders'. And later, on p.187, he writes:

'In its extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life. In the person of the Fuhrer, bare life passes immediately into law, just as in the person of the camp inhabitant (or the neomort) law becomes indistinguishable from biological life.'

This is the bit that I get, or nearly get: that the problem of power, of sovereignty, is that it produces subjects/citizens/people as bare life (zoe), as purely biopolitical: there isn't a 'ground' into which bios or political life is inscribed, and which could therefore resist inscription, inscribe differently, etc. Life itself is what is captured in the sphere of the political. Yes? Is that right? But then... I guess my question is so what? How does the life/death border, as the border of the political, relate to, say, material borders, material spaces on the ground? How does this insight - that the life/death border is the site of the foundation of the political, if I'm right - transform the way we do (or think about) politics?

I thought this paper was going to be so easy, that I'd done all the thinking for it already. And I guess it's nice to find out that it's not, to be challenged to come to a new understanding of the material, but on the other hand I really have quite a lot of other stuff to do this week...

*remember? Eric Bana gives him the Sword of Troy? (JUST KIDDING)

**and, actually, the composition of a poem.

Masculinity conference

Damn. Looks like I've missed the deadline on this one, but doesn't this look interesting? Especially the second question in the title, which isn't asked as often as the first one (and the first one isn't asked as often as it should be, either).

What is Masculinity? How Useful is it as a Historical Category? conference at Birkbeck next May. I've just asked the organizer if he's accepting late proposals - I might use this as a trigger to write something about Iphis, the transman (but is he a transman?) in Ovid's Metamorphoses, who I've been vaguely meaning to think about for a while.

Week 0

Still not a substantial post from me, I'm afraid. It's Week 0 (Fresher's week) and the last few days have been solidly busy, but things are starting to come together: I actually have students on the MA in Reception and Critical Theory, and I'm very much looking forward to starting the real work of teaching after two years of planning and form-filling and determining 'learning outcomes' and 'unit aims'. (Please do spread that link around to potential students, by the way - we're looking to increase our number of MA students.)

Things I've been thinking about lately include a theory of reading/reception based on the idea of 'pellets' or 'rewards'. What intrigues me about, eg, deconstruction and reader-response theory is that you can read any text as meaning anything, in theory: so how, in practice, do readers make meanings out of texts? And at the moment I think one of the ways is that readers get rewarded by the text for certain interpretations: it's like video games unlocking levels or giving you 'easter eggs' if you figure out how to do a secret task. Like if you think the main romance in Singin' In The Rain is the Don Lockwood/Cathy Selden one, you get a treat at the end of the movie, you get to see your pairing kissing on a hill; if you think the main romance is Don Lockwood/Cosmo Brown, you don't get a treat. Which is, of course, where fanfiction comes in: we give ourselves treats for our own readings! We don't rely on The Man Author to do it for us! We own the means of production of treats!

I've also just started reading 1000 Plateaux, or at least reading bits of it that I hadn't read before: I always forget that Deleuze & Guattari are actually really good, because they got taken up mainly within a particular, very macho, style of academic discourse which annoys me. But I'm reading about nomadology and the war-machine and smooth and striated space, and thinking that really this needs to get integrated into Now and Rome immediately.

It's Wednesday!

And the system is already broken, today, because of... stuff I don't even have time to blog about.

But the only thing that I really have to tell you is that I have a new haircut and it is excellent. Photos will perhaps come, once I've dyed it (off to do a skin test with the bleach before a fannish friend arrives for our semi-regular vegan-food-and-slash date...)

New year's resolutions

I haven't been here very regularly over the summer, you'll have noticed. But I now have my teaching schedule for next semester - I'm teaching on Mondays, Thursdays, and a slightly daunting four-hour block on Friday morning (9am-1pm, teaching two groups of first-year English undergraduates in two back-to-back two-hour seminars: I wonder how attendance will be at the 9-11am class?) - and am full of plans about what to do with that lovely classless two-day stretch in the middle of the week.

One thing I'm going to do with it is blog, I think, every Wednesday. Wednesday, because Wednesday afternoons are free from teaching for everyone, so that we can attend meetings. I go to lots of meetings, because I'm in two departments, plus I'm on two committees and a board. So Wednesdays have a slightly anomalous, free-but-not-free status, which means I should find it possible to spend an hour or two blogging.

My plan is to keep blogging about the progress of Now and Rome, plus talk about whatever I've been thinking about that week. This week, that's easy, because what I've mostly been thinking about is writing books, and this is what I have thought:

Writing books is hard.

I'm thinking about this from three points of view simultaneously at the moment. Firstly, there's Now and Rome, which proceeds achingly slowly and refuses all attempts to hurry it up; secondly, there's the fan novel I'm writing, which has taken me five years and will have a readership of roughly ten people when I do finish it; and thirdly, there's J's Great Australian Novel, which has taken her two years full-time and is currently languishing with the agent and may need to be rewritten with a new framing device in order to teach The Public At Large how to 'get' it.

And the thing they all have in common is that it is hard to write them. Hard, exciting, strange work which makes you suddenly confront things from your past that you thought you'd forgotten, or do emergency psychotherapy on yourself to get yourself through a particularly emotional plot twist/ theoretical turn, or sit staring into the void and doubting your own capacity, or suddenly realize that without realizing it you've secretly coded the solution to the problem that's confounding you into the first chapter of the book, or realize that because you've been trying to avoid thinking about a painful or challenging or risky part of the project too deeply, you've fudged large quantities of the last chapter you wrote and will have to rip it up and start again.

And none of that - none of it, worse luck - bears any relation to the successfulness, the marketability, the readability, or even the quality of what you produce. One of J's touchstone books as a writer - and hence one of mine, too - is A Long Way From Verona, by Jane Gardam, where the young female protagonist is told that she is 'a writer beyond all possible doubt' by a Professional Writer, and the glamour of his certainty carries her through the doubt and drang of her teenage years.

And then she reads a book by him, and it's terrible.

But that doesn't make it any less true that she - and he - are writers, beyond all possible doubt.

Eight Random Facts meme

Aren tagged me for this meme, where you write down eight random facts about yourself. (But what is a random fact?)

1. I was once woken up by a Scud missile.

I lived in Bahrain from December 1989 to June 1991, during... it's hard to know what to call it. The First Gulf War? The one which started when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Anyway, that was the nearest I ever got to living in a war zone, and one night a missile fell on the island, and my whole house shook in the blast, and I woke up. That was the only night in two weeks I hadn't been woken up by air-raid sirens: full-on, second-world-war-style, oo-wee-oo-wee-oo-wee air raid sirens, as featured in Britain's constant memorializing of the Blitz. When the sirens went, we were supposed to go sit in our "safe room" (room containing lots of bottled water, with the air-conditioning vents taped up in case of gas) and listen to the radio, which alternated the soothing sounds of James Galway's flute music with dissonant fanfares and a DJ shouting 'BAHRAIN IS ON ALERT!!' at you. Strange times.

2. One of the best times I had in Melbourne this year was going to the gloriously fake-decadent Madam Brussels - a bar on the third floor on Bourke Street, in the heart of the city, decked out in Astroturf with a herringbone-paved brick path and white wrought-iron lawn furniture - with J and our friends K & D. We drank jugs of Singapore Sling (K & D) and pink fizzy wine with a little dish of Turkish Delight (J & I), and watched a very pretty barman with a multiply pierced face and a white suit preparing absinthe for Kerry in a highly ritualized and formal way (pouring the absinthe over a lump of sugar in a holey silver spoon, then setting fire to the sugar). All in the afternoon!

3. I really like Tori Hayden (whose website seems to have disappeared) - I have a slight wincing feeling as I wait to be disillusioned about her, but I find her books immensely comforting: I used to read a lot of misery memoirs and true-life magazines, because I liked reading about bad things happening, but these days I prefer reading about how it's possible to make a livable life after bad things have happened. Hence, Tori Hayden. I also really like Katherine Applegate's Making Out series, a 28-book teen romance/soap series. With cocaine! And long-lost half-siblings! And wrongful imprisonment! But everyone loved each other very much, and things usually worked out in the end. It was a world I really liked living in. I discovered it because number 4, Ben's in Love (front cover blurb: Ben's in love... with two girls... who just happen to be sisters!) was a free giveaway with some teen magazine or other, so it showed up all the time in charity shops, which is where I got all my reading material when I was an undergraduate. Then I got hooked and started buying the books as they came out, which was at the rate of one a month by the time I was in my final year at university: I used to reserve them in Blackwell's children's shop and hang around pestering the staff if they were late arriving. I remember when number 26 (Zoey's Broken Heart) came out explaining to the woman on the reserve desk that there had been a terrible fire in the previous number and I didn't know if anyone had died, and she said Don't look at the cover of the book then, it'll ruin it for you!. So I read the whole thing without looking at the front cover. I credit Katherine Applegate with a high proportion of the sanity I retained during/after that year.

Also under this heading: I think Jennifer Aniston is an extremely good actor (have you seen Friends with Money?)

4. Speaking of true-life magazines, I once got £25 from being "Letter of the Week" in a British true-life magazine called that's life!. There was a little cartoon to go with the letter, and everything. It was about how I was called Ika, and my partner was called Aneurin, and went: Although we are both very proud of our heritage, blank looks and requests for spelling make introductions a chore. Our daughter is due in two weeks' time. We're calling her Jane! Which, as several people have pointed out to me, wasn't as clever a name for my fake daughter as me and my fake boyfriend seemed to think, as there are about five hundred ways of spelling 'Jane'. Never mind.

5. I own five lipsticks, all from B Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful (this sort, in the little tubs): Bellatrix, B Cause, B Daring, Borscht and, um, Beijing, maybe? It was a pink one, anyway. I haven't worn it yet. I don't wear lipstick very often - mostly just to give lectures and conference papers, like a costume.

6. I have A-Levels in Maths and Further Maths at A and B grade, and I was accepted to Oxford University to do a Maths and Philosophy degree. (I didn't do it, though.)

7. I actively hate chess - boyfriends used to keep trying to make me play (You're clever! You're good at maths! You'll like chess!) but I don't think spatially, I think in words, so I'm no good at it, and I just react like a sullen teenager and throw myself about in my chair and sulk until my opponent finally wins and puts a stop to the whole miserable, futile process. Or I used to; since I became queer no-one has tried to make me play chess. An unforeseen benefit.

8. I'm currently watching my way through Buffy, starting from Season 2, and Seasons 3 and 4 have made me realize that actually Alyson Hannigan/Willow was probably my first conscious lesbian crush (I know. Isn't that embarrassing? I was like twenty-three or something when those were on telly). She was also a bit of a role model for me. (Also noticing on this go-round of Buffy: Willow is better than Hermione, Xander is better than Ron, Buffy is better than Harry, Giles is better than Dumbledore, the Initiative is better than the Ministry of Magic.)