tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142237992024-03-07T05:46:40.045+00:00Delirium's LibraryEver wondered what happens to all those books sold in second-hand stores and yard sales, left on buses, or given away free? Sandman readers will know Dream's Library, which is full of all the books never quite published, but Delirium, Dream's younger, kookier sister, also has quite the collection of bizarre and brilliant works. As guardian of this library, it's my pleasure to read through the never-ending shelves of "books I bought or was given and can't remember why."Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.comBlogger139125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-54624115798768895862013-11-21T18:25:00.001+00:002013-11-22T15:54:07.589+00:00Antigone's Answer<div class="tr_bq">
In the thirteen years since Judith Butler published <i><a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-11894-1/" target="_blank">Antigone's Claim</a></i> (having first performed the book as a series of Wellbeck Lectures), the question of what Antigone is claiming – as a woman, and in the aftermath of war – have become ever more pressing. In retrospect, the book seems uncannily prescient of the questions of grievability and vulnerability raised by the events of 9/11 and subsequent imperial wars, as addressed by Butler in her recent work. Both <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/the-watch-joydeep-roy-bhattacharya-review" target="_blank">The Watch</a></i> by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya and <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/the-watch-joydeep-roy-bhattacharya-review" target="_blank">The Patience Stone</a></i> by Atiq Rahimi draw on Antigone (the former more explicitly than the latter) for Afghanistan-set stories of female mourning outside the law.</div>
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Moira Buffini's play <i><a href="http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/welcome-thebes-national-theatre" target="_blank">Welcome to Thebes</a> </i>resituated Sophocles' play in that mythical unnamed country, <a href="http://africasacountry.com/" target="_blank">Africa</a>; making surface reference to (and drawing a charge from association with) the revisioning of tragedy practised by Wole Soyinka, Sarah Kane and Yael Farber, Buffini's conventional drama - like Roy-Bhattacharya's and Rahimi's novels - relies, as an update and relocation, on a creepy, tired notion of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny -- that is, on a EuroWestern sense that contemporary Afghanistan or "Africa" are culturally analogical to ancient (mythic) Greece. These over-theres are cast as primitive, embroiled in the awful, terrible beholden-ness to gods and fate from which our supposed civilisation has supposedly rescued us. It's a melodrama composed out of pity porn, made august by its claim to the classics.<br />
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Of course, Greek tragedies are endlessly rewritten and updated, and the century after Freud's Oedipus has proved particularly fruitful for the Theban cycle. Butler recommends Antigone as a post-oedipal position from which to rethink psychoanalysis and ideas of both identity and identification, for example. Rather than outsideoverthere, Butler puts Antigone in us: not as an archaising exercise, but out of frustration with the deathliness of her narrative. We have responsibility for working things out differently, not just watching endless repetitions and shaking our heads as overtheres repeat our mistakes for our edutainment. Antigone's claim on us is also in us, about us.<br />
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A new retelling, <i><a href="http://pushkinchildrens.com/the-story-of-antigone/" target="_blank">The Story of Antigone</a></i>, by Ali Smith with illustrations by Laura Paoletti, started me thinking about the nature of Antigone's claim; maybe because it's a telling for younger readers, it both makes the issues of Antigone's claim clear (clearer than a highly academic philosophy book) and allows them to resonate in all their complexities. Smith's Antigone is young – only 12 – the youngest sibling of the family, youngest child of Oedipus. Both her innocence and her experience inform her powerful, internal sense of justice: it's not just because she's a child, seeing in black-and-white, that she decides to bury her brother against the king's orders; nor is it just because of the weight of familial trauma. She figures both with her implacable logic and its courage. She asks a lot of herself.<br />
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For Butler, Antigone's claim both legal – a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(legal)" target="_blank">cause of action</a> – and a philosophical critique – a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition" target="_blank">proposition</a> – against Creon's agonistic jurisprudence. More than an argument, a claim can be a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right" target="_blank">right</a>, something staked. Perhaps even more curious, for Butler's interest in performativity and destabilising identity, in internet terminology <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims-based_identity" target="_blank">claims-based identity</a> uses statements made by online entities about themselves or their users as authenticating security tokens. Here, technical concepts of security, identity and authority both meet and play out their political equivalents, like a mini-NSA soap opera:<br />
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Claims are not what the subject can and cannot do. They are what the subject is or is not. It is up to the application receiving the incoming claim to map the is/is not claims to the may/may not rules of the application. In traditional systems there is often confusion about the differences and similarities between what a user is/is not and what the user may/may not do. Claims-based identity makes that distinction clear. Once the distinction between what the user is/is not and what the user may/may not do is clarified, it becomes apparent that the authentication of what the user is/is not (the claims) are often better handled by a third party than by any individual application. This third party is called the security token service.</blockquote>
Got that? So information technology has literalised Creon's command-control style. Sophocles' play shows what happens when a third party – in this case, the seer Tiresias, who is third-gendered and appears three times in the Theban trilogy – adjudicates what the user may or may not do, based on the service provider's claim about who they are or are not. Tiresias acts as a security token service, telling Creon to save Antigone from a living death, and to bury Polynices with full rights. The tragedy is that this authentication arrives too late: system failure.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tiresias appears</td></tr>
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In her prose retelling (with rhyming verse choral odes), which retains the mythic Thebes as a setting, Smith uses third person (which drama cannot), and begins in a third-party point of view: that of a crow sitting on the main gate of the city. As in Hans Christian Andersen's weirdest story "<a href="http://hca.gilead.org.il/marsh_ki.html" target="_blank">The Marsh King's Daughter</a>," there is an affinity between a watchful bird and a troublesome daughter who stands outside the law (there, a stork and a princess who turns into a toad at night). In an appendix in which the Crow interviews her, Smith says her choice of observer comes from the play itself, which is full of references to the crows and dogs who scavenge at the feast of death that is any Greek tragedy, and this one – which starts at the end of a battle – in particular.<br />
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For the mother crow, human death is a source of nourishment, and human actions a source of entertainment – just as for the audience in the tragic theatre. Rather than catharsis, however, the mother crow spits up a bolus of food to pass on to her chicks: a story. So the crow – scavenging in death – is the (re)writer as well as the audience: Antigone's claim on her is that her body/story be <i>ingested</i>, taken in, processed, laid claim to. Antigone's death demands that the crow claim her. Antigone (is) in us.<br />
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Although the story shifts subtly in and out of being aligned with the mother crow's point of view, it ends with an epilogue, one year after the events of the play, in which she tells the story to her chicks as she feeds them. The call-and-response form in which it is presented, with the chicks demanding<br />
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"Tell us the story about: the mad black cloud of crows/the tasty body/the time our own mother sat on the hand of the wise Tiresias/the brave still-alive boy who stood up to his father/the piece of pink material that got woven into our nest"</blockquote>
is not only a vivid depiction of how human children engage with storytelling (and a reminder of our adult investment in narrative repetition and its pleasures), but also a model of responsiveness, in which each side of the conversation makes demands on the other, and is heard. This is the opposite of Antigone's negotiation with Creon, in which not only her side of the story, but her narrative structure, is denied by his. Storytelling places teller and listener, Smith's use of form argues, in a relationship of responsibility to each other, conducted via the tropes of the tale.<br />
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So displacement could never be enough: the (re)writer/reader needs to take seriously the claim made by the text if she is to act as a security token service, to authenticate the possibility of relationship and of the significant information about life, death and law that flows across it. As well as the dialogic form of the epilogue, the book as a whole creates a dialogue between the text and the illustrations, which shift between full facing-page and embedded in the text. Illustrations are like the family secret of our textual culture: a family member that is ignored. It's there in the work of <a href="http://hum.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/home.htm" target="_blank">WJT Mitchell</a> and, in brief, in this thought-provoking discussion of the word/image interaction in children's books by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/12/oliver-seawigs-philip-reeve-sarah-mcintyre" target="_blank">SF Said</a>.<br />
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Like the law (unto) itself, the pictures here tell their own version of the story. They tell the reader who does and does not count in the world of the story. Creon only appears once, riding out in pomp: after his declaration against Polynices, he disappears off the side of the page, being represented only by his horse (and finally, when he realises what an idiot he's been, by his horse's arse). The Elders of the Chorus, who are on the side of the status quo, are a faceless flock; instead, there are detailed illustrations of the crow, the dog, a feather, a flower, a piece of pink fabric that links Antigone and Ismene, as well as of the two sisters, Tiresias and Haemon, Creon's son.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bianca Stone, <i>Antigo nick</i></td></tr>
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The illustrations take a passionate stand for Antigone: they are on her side. Unlike a conventional staging, they make the story only partially visible. The same is true of Bianca Stone's illustrations in Anne Carson's <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/antigonick-anne-carson-review" target="_blank">Antigo nick (Sophokles)</a></i>, some of which are printed on slightly opaque translucent mylar, thus revealing/concealing the hand-lettered text beneath. Carson's text is entirely dialogic, using the form of the playscript, and she has performed it live, with a rotating cast (including Judith Butler as Creon!)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/58960272" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/58960272">Anne Carson: Performing Antigonick</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/louisianachannel">Louisiana Channel</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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Carson's retelling is also set in mythical Thebes, and hews far closer to the structure of the play, although it includes anachronistic references to speedboats and Freud. Unlike Smith's chorus of Elders, whose awkwardly-rhymed platitudes are an exercise in comic relief, Carson's Chorus are profoundly poetic, and in some sense the narrator of the play, perhaps in response to Hélène Cixous' essay "Collaborative Theatre," which mourns the loss of the chorus from the post-classical stage, and wonders about the chorus – like Smith's crow's eye view – as a figure for democratic conversation and response-ability.<br />
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It is the Chorus who are the interpreters for Carson: figure of both (re)writer and reader/viewer.<br />
<blockquote>
WE ARE STANDING IN<br />
THE NICK OF TIME </blockquote>
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[ENTER MESSENGER]</blockquote>
reads the end of the penultimate choral ode (where the stanza break is actually most of a blank page). It's a painful irony – the Chorus declare victory (Creon has saved Antigone and Haemon in the nick of time) at the moment defeat (oh no, he hasn't) arrives to announce itself. It's easy to think of the Chorus, especially in this moment, as somewhat smug, self-satisfied status quoters – not least as a way of doubly disavowing our own expectations of narrative satisfaction (we feel stupid because we, like the Chorus, want Antigone to survive and she doesn't; and we feel cruel because we <i>really</i> – according to the structural logic in which we have been educated by our culture – want her to die, and she does, and that makes us hate ourselves and feel responsible for her death). But their declaration is a very precise description of the claim made on the spectator: we are standing in / the nick of time.<br />
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That is, we are in some sense stand-ins for the historical witnesses (as the Chorus are also our stand-ins on stage); we experience the highlights of the drama, the nicks of time on which the playwright or (re)writer wants us to focus. The sense of 'in'ness coincides with Antigone's claim to be in us: we have to, in another of Butler's phrases, put our bodies on the line, be <i>in</i> the temporality and logic of the play. It could also be read as another kind of claim: can we, as the (offstage) Chorus, stand our bodies in the nick of time? Can we place ourselves between the story as told and its supposedly inevitable ending? Can we look closely at our disavowal in order to change the structural logic and its supposed satisfactions?<br />
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The nick of time is an uncomfortable place to be; it is like being in the beak of a crow: sharp, risky. Who would be there? Antigone is the first one to try and place herself therein, between Creon's Law and the law of entropy (time) under which Polynices' body will become the nothing – the lack of a claim-based identity – that Creon wishes it to be. She leaves the city gates in the half-light between night and dawn (a dangerous time for anyone to be about, let alone an unmarried girl traversing a military camp); when caught, she is buried alive, in Creon's casuistical solution to his own law and his own conscience. Time (Death) keeps nicking her, a device that Shakespeare will borrow for the final scenes of<i> </i>both <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.<br />
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In Carson's final stand on Antigone's side, Nick becomes a (silent) character, "who continues /////// measuring" at the end of the play (there's that blank-page-gap again). Antigone and Nick share the letters I-N (reversed) in their names; Nick is also the name of Carson's brother, the subject of her work prior to <i>Antigonick</i>, <i>NOX</i>. "in" is one of the final words of Catullus' poem 101, an address to his dead brother, spoken at his grave. The final line of the poem reads "atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale." Carson defines each word of the poem in depth, generally giving (some invented) examples of usage. For "in," she offers only one such, "<i>in noctem</i> death vote," in the exact middle of a long list of relations that "in" can denote.<br />
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Those that follow the invented usage could be said to describe Antigone's "death vote," her decision to use the only choice she has to join her brother in death:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
in reference to, respecting, with regard to; in proportion to, considering; in comparison with; in accordance with, after, in the style of; so as to become, into; so as to produce or result in; in order to cause, with a view to; in order to make up (a total); for the needs of, for the use against; in expectation of.</blockquote>
This is how, as she says of Inger Christensen's masterwork <i>It</i>, prepositions form "all our raw hopes of relation." 'In' is complicated for Antigone: if she is in the city, she cannot be in the family – and moreover, in herself; she learns that with her father's exile and her brother's desecration. Or rather, she stands "in the nick," in the tension or interval of trying to be both: a good citizen and a good sibling; alive and dead; virgin and bride. She stands for the irresolvable, what both is and isn't, may and may not, for what is beyond "claims-based identity." As Smith tells the crow,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
through the whole play, the whole story of Antigone, there are questions which, though they are unspoken, are still there nonetheless, about the borders of things… about wildness and tameness… about what is natural and what isn't, what is spiritual and what isn't.</blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antigone, Laura Paoletti</td></tr>
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Antigone is the embodiment of these questions, but not of their answer. In fact, what might be most important about her is that she is exactly a claim, not its resolution. That is part of being <i>in</i>: "in uncertainties, Mysteries and doubt," as John Keats said a good reader and writer should be. Updatings are perhaps too busy proposing answers to notice the abyssal complexity of staying in the question, being the person who – after <i>exeunt omnes</i> – "continues /////// measuring" – perhaps "in order to make up (a total)," that is, to invent an ending or solution, to add some more what isn't to what is, and vice versa.<br />
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That is to be epi-logos: after the word. There is an after, even to Creon's word, the unbreakable Logos of EuroWestern logocentrism. There's the bird-person who flies off for yet another round of food, for the chicks who will ask for the story again – and gets waylaid interrogating the author, questioning her control of the Logos. Whose point-of-view or appearance makes a nick in the temporal structure of the narrative into/out of which the possibility of change pours.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-21169866783143372482013-11-11T17:05:00.000+00:002013-11-11T17:11:15.172+00:00"The strange event is not the rupture": Being Followed Home By a Wannabe MC While Reading Simon McBurney's Who You Hear It From"The rupture," McBurney continues, "is what this strange event reveals." He's writing about the three central characters in Theatre de Complicité's <i>The Elephant Vanishes</i>, in an essay collected in <i><a href="http://bnb.data.bl.uk/doc/resource/016084315" target="_blank">Who You Hear It From</a>. </i>A pocket-sized volume, it unfolds (like Complicité's shows) to take in the whole world and fold it up inside your head, where it zings around, making change.<br />
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So I was walking home with McBurney's thoughts about never feeling at home, feeling dis/located and dispersed by a rare encounter with someone in my professional life who, three degrees of interrogation/separation, knew members of my family. Worlds collide: is that part of feeling at home in them, or feeling unsafe in them? The rupture – the dislocation of my professional, academic and creative self from my upbringing – is what the strange event reveals.<br />
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It's a potent formulation for impact, interruption, crisis. Over the last month, I've been assisting with the creation of an online anthology that looks exactly at the "strange event" and its rupture, <a href="http://peonymoon.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/against-rape/" target="_blank">Against Rape</a>. Contribution after contribution argues that the rupture – that is, the violent framework of kyriarchy – is what the "strange event" of rape reveals. Rather than seeing rape as an isolated violation, a momentary incursion that creates a private trauma, one that is often characterised as inexpressible, McBurney's reasoning suggests that rape is so traumatic because it brings home the status quo. It's an extreme statement of the micro-aggressions of asymmetrical power that we live with everyday. It means we can't deny or avoid them anymore, nor claim exemption from them. We have to engage with the fact they are structural.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm_XVoyDiJ30eVPbTsr_rEUmUPYO5zQQnu8AydJkBdVzu2UEOtVUM4XMp_MzRCGlDo8K0XtOKFpvZ7_uszklo9VNr8lNgzw1J1qE6mC_CnCDZ_JBrpHps6wmbHBeHLDoWswnAI/s1600/against-rape-header-lorraine-adams.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="83" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm_XVoyDiJ30eVPbTsr_rEUmUPYO5zQQnu8AydJkBdVzu2UEOtVUM4XMp_MzRCGlDo8K0XtOKFpvZ7_uszklo9VNr8lNgzw1J1qE6mC_CnCDZ_JBrpHps6wmbHBeHLDoWswnAI/s320/against-rape-header-lorraine-adams.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Against Rape header by Lorraine Adams</td></tr>
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Of course, the universe being the universe handily delivered me evidence on my walk home (you can't, as Complicité's shows show, make this kind of co-incidence up). A man walking along the street behind me, yelling insults (I sneaked a glance) into his cellphone. Not such a strange event: the incursion of private thoughts and debates into public space. Stranger, though: he wasn't pausing for breath. Moreover, he was rhyming. I rewrite the narrative: a wannabe white MC recording his try-hard flow in the echoey acoustics of the street, with a fireworks backbeat.
He was loud, large and audibly high, so I kept my head down and walked. Made myself invisible. But, with two references, he made me feel not just visible but naked in the cold: the smackdown "I squeezed your girlfriend's breast like a rubber duck," and a paranoid reference to "grimy Jews." The rupture is what the strange event reveals: violence shows our vulnerability, hitting us with our capacity to be hurt. Instinct says turn and run. Instinct says turn and shout him down. Rationality kept me walking, steadily. Recorded the phrases in my head until I was home safe.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Tell me about your fetishisation of rubber ducks."</td></tr>
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Except "home safe" is a myth. Not because my (quiet, suburban) neighbourhood can erupt with that kind of violence; to me, growing up with domestic violence, that's a given. Or not just because. But because bricks and mortar, streets and signposts, aren't my home. Why did I feel unsafe, threatened, caught out and contorted? Why, for the same reason I <a href="http://peonymoon.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/protest-against-rape-monday-may-be-triggering/" target="_blank">contributed to Against Rape</a>: because language is my home, and I feel responsible towards it. Working for <a href="http://www.englishpen.org/" target="_blank">English PEN</a>, I'm steeped in arguments about the difficulties of defining offence. Concepts of hate speech are inadequate because they don't allow for the mobility and fluidity of language, its polyvalence and its contextuality. As for censorship, well: the repressed always returns.<br />
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Rehearsing the rhymes in a conversation with friends (many of them poets), I had an insight: the strange event let me see the rupture. This is what I wrote in that conversation:<br />
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Actually the creepiest thing about it was its incoherence, in which anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia were like <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/art/archictecture/articles/008.htm" target="_blank">Homeric epithets</a>: just filler, spacing, a way to make the rhyme or beat. There was no argument or logic, just an associative chain in which smackdowns and hate speech are part of the rhythm. You can't argue with that, or refute it. It's a grammar not a vocabulary.</blockquote>
It's a question of syntax, not semantics. The individual lexical units are "strange events," insults flung onto the crisp night air, but in a way they are meaningless. This isn't a particular problem of freestyling, which reflects, perpetuates and partakes of the larger dominant culture of which it's part. Both the "battle" ethic and the syntactical spacing of a few incoherent fragments of argument with put-downs, dismissals and empty threats can be heard any time of day on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/bbc_parliament/" target="_blank">BBC Parliament</a>. It's the grammar of orature inherited from the Roman law courts, amplified by the dual growth of capitalism and parliament, both espousing ruthless competition and utilitarianism.<br />
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So here's the rupture: the sentence of our culture is broken. Subject Verb Object <i>obviously</i> makes someone/thing a subject and someone/thing an object and insists they have a relationship dependent on action and on asymmetric power. That's among the reason <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238702" target="_blank">Gertrude Stein</a> had a problem with nouns (other than that stable naming is impossible and inflexible) and liked participles or gerundives: they both relieve and point to the pressures of subjectivity and objectification.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDQE5MrOW72TcvpZLn4Ye-ruKyUbnKQkHkKGpoq6Pia5TWGCDOO6FFVkIKGyhlU-erDGBugblIZQMLYWfwHnRtFh4Bi73iKGOpncrZHEzKPf1-OacMqHCJfMHRa96i-h0hu8iv/s1600/Gertrude_Stein_by_Alvin_Langdon_Coburn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDQE5MrOW72TcvpZLn4Ye-ruKyUbnKQkHkKGpoq6Pia5TWGCDOO6FFVkIKGyhlU-erDGBugblIZQMLYWfwHnRtFh4Bi73iKGOpncrZHEzKPf1-OacMqHCJfMHRa96i-h0hu8iv/s320/Gertrude_Stein_by_Alvin_Langdon_Coburn.jpg" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gertrude Stein, photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn. <br />
A woman not to be told to "Calm down, dear."</td></tr>
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But still SVO is the grammar of our grand narratives, of our legal system, of the way we engage with each other, and with cultural texts. It's far from universal: McBurney talks in "<i>The Elephant Vanishes</i>" about how, in Japanese, "particles, not the order, tell you the function of the different [sentence] parts." The more inflected a language (that is, the more single lexical units contain statements of relationality to time and space, and between interested parties), the more flexible its sentence structure.<br />
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How do we unfix the sentence structure of EuroWestern culture? To me, this seems both a more challenging and more potentially useful task than trying overtly to alter the meaning of lexical units used as pejoratives. Semantic meaning alters constantly, as the word "queer" demonstrates, through registers of usage. Working to change meaning without changing structure is like, well, any protest, campaign or revolution that changes a detail without changing the system. The inequality that underlies the production of meaning remains – and remains in the hands of power.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYcNHjagMZt8Q5y8xuWb5V8WNoJDw9TCfKIUk4LV-DEFa6mn0-VL7hR6WaN5mrtF_8MWecxrkM-405aBNW55hMAc1J1b93-6YD_KfbaxFVV3DGkJEcg1Zv8_catBzn85iiaSoO/s1600/UndocuQueer1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYcNHjagMZt8Q5y8xuWb5V8WNoJDw9TCfKIUk4LV-DEFa6mn0-VL7hR6WaN5mrtF_8MWecxrkM-405aBNW55hMAc1J1b93-6YD_KfbaxFVV3DGkJEcg1Zv8_catBzn85iiaSoO/s320/UndocuQueer1.jpg" width="271" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From Colorlines' National Coming Out Day portfolio.</td></tr>
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Talking about the poet Stesichorus in the introduction to <i>Autobiography of Red</i>, Anne Carson says he was the first to "unlatch" adjectives, to unfix epithets from their Homeric regularity. Homeric bards, reciting their often very long poems, used these fixed epithets to fill regular metrical spaces, to pad out a line, as well as to retain the hieratic, ahistorical quality of the gods and heroes in their epic poems. Stesichorus, too, wrote about gods and heroes, but he was critical of them. He saw them as beings with ethical choices, not just figures on a vase. He fucked his culture's sentence up so badly that, according to legend, Helen cursed him to blindness after he wrote a poem that questioned her role in the Trojan War.<br />
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It's a cautionary tale about what happens when the strange event leads you to see the rupture and you realise you can't look away from it, and you can't not point it out to others: you get blinded. Especially if the rupture you point to is what you're supposed to see as structure, the thing that makes sense of everything, the thing that holds it all together. Like Carson and McBurney, I believe that cultural work can make an intervention: it can make the rupture visible <i>and</i> it can provide, or at least speculate on, a new grammar. Better, it can demonstrate that we are capable of understanding multiple, shifting grammars and don't need a fixed one (a "home") at all.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-32226521538421031412013-10-08T15:08:00.000+01:002013-10-08T21:53:13.543+01:00When Did I Become Us? <iframe height="320" src="http://www.nfb.ca/film/pas_de_deux_en/embed/player" width="516"></iframe>
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<a href="http://www.nfb.ca/film/pas_de_deux_en" target="_blank"><em>Pas de deux</em></a> by <a href="http://www.nfb.ca/explore-all-directors/norman-mclaren/" target="_blank" title="more films by Norman McLaren">Norman McLaren</a>, <a href="http://www.nfb.ca/" target="_blank">National Film Board of Canada</a></div>
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<i>Pas de deux</i> by Norman McLaren may be the most beautiful dance film ever made (<i>The Red Shoes</i> has a thing or two to say in that argument but moving on...). It's 13 minutes of minimalist movement, backlit figures appearing as white light and shadow. But it's also a witty and profound joke on the title: there's <i>way</i> more than deux involved in this pas. Light tracery multiplies each dancer's body towards infinity, as they lose and join themselves and each other. </div>
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That sense of multiplicity <i>within</i> the individual - multiplied further when she interacts with any other, so that my relationship with you creates many other mes and yous through our interactions - is one of the reasons I'm fascinated by acting, whether on stage or screen. I'm particularly fascinated by meta-performances, for example Cate Blanchett's 'rehearsal' scene in <i>Elizabeth</i>, and by clones and multiples.</div>
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This is a particularly strong trope in the portrayal of female identities in current TV: there's been <i>Dollhouse</i> (which to be fair, had male 'dolls' performing multiple roles as well, but only two significant male doll characters compared to five or six significant female 'doll' characters), <i>United States of Tara</i> (which picks up on that old favourite, multiple personality disorder: rich pickings for Toni Collette, an abysmal shambles in terms of the representation of mental health), and now <i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01fmq6q" target="_blank">Orphan Black</a></i>, which has clones.</div>
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These are not the liberatory, goofy, partial, carnal clones promised us by cyborg feminism and Lynn Hershmann Leeson's <a href="http://www.teknolustthemovie.com/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Teknolust</a>, in which Tilda Swinton gives her ultimate performances as a brilliant scientist and her three cyber-clones who take on material existence. They are the scary, secret-science-experiment clones of Cold War-era science fiction, a step back towards the paranoid fantasies of an era clinging nostalgically to the idea of the unitary self and the unitary nation-state. </div>
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So politically and culturally, it's a bit meh, but there's an undeniable excitement in watching <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/posts/Orphan-Black" target="_blank">Tatiana Maslany</a> performing the diversity of roles herself. While, like <i>Dollhouse</i>, it can feel a bit Barbie DreamWorld (there's Scientist Clone, Berlin alt.grrl clone, Soccer Mom clone, Cop Clone, Grifter Clone, etc.), it certainly passes the Bechdel Test (or does it? If they're all clones, is it a conversation between one or more women?) with its focus on a group of female characters contesting their relationship to one another - particularly contesting ideas of biology and essentialism. </div>
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By the nature of cloning the show excludes ethnic diversity from the clone community, but the show does attempt to reflect the cosmopolitan transnational mix of most major North American urban centres in other characters (it's shot in Toronto), and the clones do represent a span of class diversity, and - within the limits of televisual femininity - gender diversity. (It would be great, although unlikely, if the show were to include a trans clone character). Both the performances (including the protagonist's Sarah's 'rehearsals' to take on the life of Beth) and the characters raise the question of what it means to look or act 'like' someone, drawing attention to the narrow bands of feminine performativity within given classes, ethnicities, and ages available in our media culture.</div>
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<i>Pas de deux</i> and <i>Orphan Black</i> share Canadianness, and I wonder if Canada's "Are we British? French? American? Indigenous? None of the above?" persistent cultural debate lends itself to this kind of imagining of multiplicity, whether utopian/romantic or dystopian. On the other hand, <i>Orphan Black</i> puts us firmly on the side of the clones, not their killer, and positively represents adoption and fostering as part of a familial continuum. And our focal character/clone is Sarah the grifter rather than Soccer Mom or Scientist. </div>
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I thought of Sarah - an English woman with an Irish foster mother, having grown up in Toronto and moved around North America - when reading Adriana Lisboa's <i><a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/crow-blue-9781408838303/" target="_blank">Crow Blue</a></i> this weekend. Like <i>Orphan Black</i>, it's a story about alternative families, quests for identity, transnational migration, and the scope of the Americas. Unlike <i>Orphan Black</i>, it is rooted in historicity: the Communist guerrilla movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil. The protagonist, Vanja, leaves Rio when her mother dies to look for her North American father. The trail is cold, so she stays in Colorado with her step-father, Fernando, whom she's never met, and whom her mother left before she was born. Along the way, she befriends Carlos, her Salvadorean next door neighbour, and meets friends of her mother's, June and Isabel, who are Zuni and Puerto Rican respectively, creating a rich sense of the blended cultures and diverse Latin@ and indigenous communities of the American South West. All the characters have fully-fleshed back stories about their transcultural identities and migratory routes. Like birds, they escape the borders of nationality.</div>
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It's this assorted group that sets out to find news of her father, Daniel, who turns out to be living in Ivory Coast (sorry for the spoiler, although it's not really). The wild-bunch quest, ranging over Colorado and into New Mexico, and chronicled by the older Vanja, is deeply reminiscent of a key text of North American identity formation: <i>True Grit</i>. The recent version by the Coen Brothers lends credence to Susan Faludi's argument in <i>Terror Dreams</i> about the centrality of the Western for American identity, particularly post-crisis. Faludi looks at <i>The Searchers</i>, but <i>True Grit</i> shares with the earlier novel/film the father-daughter relationship, and the search into Indian Territory. </div>
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Vanja isn't looking for her father's killer, and Fernando is not a deputy US Marshal - he's a public library security guard, and there's an attendant lack of "true grit" melodrama on their interstate journey. While the history of the American Civil War haunts <i>True Grit</i> (Cogburn and LeBoeuf served under different Confederate commands), it's the suppressed history of Brazil's actions against its Communist organisers that, through Fernando, forms the bedrock of <i>Crow Blue</i>'s investigation of memory and identity. It's through storytelling that Fernando becomes a father to Vanja, and Vanja a daughter to Fernando, generating alternate versions of themselves, and a finely-judged, quietist ending (one that again echoes the end of <i>True Grit</i>, with Vanja resolutely single and in mourning) that leaves you pondering the infinitesimal decisions by which we all become, and the infinite possibilities we carry within us.<br />
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Perhaps nothing expresses that better than Maya Deren's film <i>Meshes of the Afternoon</i> - to which I can't help but feel that <i>Teknolust </i>is paying homage. Four Tildas = four Mayas; the computer (well, microwave - Leeson's pretty witty like that) screen = the window. Deren's search, like Orphan Black's, takes place in the maze of her own face and its multiple identities. Deren, like Vanja, is an emigrant to the United States, a Russian Jew who was a vocal Socialist at college, and whose husband, Alexander Hamid, had been chased out of Czechoslovakia for his left-wing journalism. They were making the film at a time of political turmoil and anti-immigrant feeling, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Less than a hundred miles from the cottage where they shot the film, Japanese-Americans were being interned. "When Did Us Become I?" the film might ask of the divisive racism that Deren would have witnessed in 1943, as she had earlier as secretary to African-American Katherine Dunham. The film is a plea, like McLaren's and Lisboa's (jury's out on Orphan Black...), for plurality within the self and the state.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/4S03Aw5HULU" width="420"></iframe><div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-23892116424592421062013-10-06T14:52:00.001+01:002013-10-06T14:52:49.173+01:00The Topic of Exchange Between Human Beings<div style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
This has been my favourite piece of fiction of the last few weeks: Omar Aziz's "<a href="http://getpocket.com/a/read/441849376" target="_blank">A Discussion Paper on the Local Councils in Syria</a>." Calling Aziz' urgent and practical paper, shared posthumously among revolutionary organisations across Syria, a "fiction" may seem derogatory, as if I were calling it a lie. But I mean the word in its richest sense: an imaginative extension of real circumstances, a carefully-structured narrative of potential change. Signifiers of reportage are common in work published as fiction, from Daniel Defoe's cross-genre work to Jennifer Egan's use of PowerPoint in <i>A Visit from the Goon Squad</i>, setting up a framework for the reader's reality-testing. Even (or perhaps, most especially) speculative fiction employs the language and even layout of the newspaper or the scientific report, as - magisterially - in Christa Wolf's "<a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3115190?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21102725722417" target="_blank">Self-Experiment: Appendix to a Report</a>" (jstor sign-in required, alas).</div>
But what if we take the reverse proposition for consideration? That part of the work done by essays, science experiments, and even news articles, is that they are fictions: not only in the Frankfurt School sense that they emerge from (and cannot stand outside) social constructions, but if we imagine them as, like all human acts, powerful wish-fears. And beyond that: as proposals for realisation <i>within</i> the imagination first. When we read about a new scientific development or proposal for a government bill, or even the agenda for a meeting, we envision/construct/imagine it ahead of its taking place - or imagine its implications and consequences for ourselves and others. Even watching actuality, we are in the realm of fiction (not as in Baudrillard's negatory "welcome to the desert of the real" take, only): we are interpreting others' emotions, putting forth hypotheses, seeing around the edges of the frame.<br />
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It's this imaginative action that I'm so drawn to in Aziz' paper: that it so powerfully connects pragmatic reality with utopian ideology. In particular, the repeated articulation that the actions of revolution form revolutionary subjects. You can't, he suggests, pre-claim yourself as revolutionary, or deny that others are revolutionaries: it's a doing, not a being. In fact, its only being is in action: it finds its form and meaning through the strategic collectivities - talking, thinking, imagining together - that he proposes. We need fictions to help us walk out in fear, and to change the story as told by the government and media.<br />
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But most stories of revolution focus only on violent ways of becoming, or on the traumatic violence that causes a collective or individual break, or on the heroic individual (often forged in violence) -- and not on the collective and interconnected social formations that emerge from this, or how. We are socially conformed to narratives shaped and paced by adrenal charge, or to a verisimilitude that is stylised to the point of caricature. Who wants to read a bunch of people sitting around in a room talking - even if what they're talking about is what, as Aziz argues, replaces the security of the state, the fear of whose loss (even though the security itself is unequal and faulty, if not entirely a fantasmatic construction) is what keeps people from engaging in revolutionary action? </div>
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Educator Paolo Freire proposed a distinction between organisation and control that's as useful a way of thinking about how an artistic experience works on us as readers/viewers as it is of thinking about how the state works on us. Hard and fast distinctions between fictional and factual writing, with negative and positive values attached respectively, are where state and aesthetic control meet. This is pervasive in Anglocentric thinking (although frequently attributed to totalitarian Soviet 'socialist realism'). The recent, much-hyped-by-liberal-writers <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=novel-finding-reading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy" target="_blank">findings by Emanuele Castano and David Kidd</a>, that literary fiction improves readers' empathy (compared to genre fiction) is a peculiar example of this: under the guise of claiming value for fiction, it actually solidifies unhelpful distinctions (literary fiction <i>is</i> a genre, and not all of it is well-written or psychologically accurate because it universalises) - but also remands the work of art and literature to the zone of affect.<br />
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Or rather, disconnects affective intelligence from political and social intelligence. The idea that fiction makes us feel and factual writing makes us think is a way of preventing us from really doing either. The topic of exchange between human beings is never purely empathic or purely political: it's where subjectivity and sociality meet. We need to think with both.<i></i></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-67715897652029731462013-09-06T16:27:00.000+01:002013-10-06T14:54:59.151+01:00This Future of Yours, When's It Going to Arrive?(Or, Some More Trains, In an Attempt to Get Somewhere)<br />
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In Sally Potter's adaptation of <i>Orlando</i>, the future arrives as a train:</div>
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Or rather, in the disjunction between the Romantic hero on a white horse, and the train that blows the steam that mists the shot. It could be a moral painting titled "It's Later than You Think." A few scenes later, Shelmerdine the Romantic hero rides off to take ship for America to foment revolution and create a better future. Evicted, pregnant, abandoned, not to mention legally dead, Orlando asks him wryly, "This future of yours, when's it going to arrive?"</div>
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Orlando's question recurs to me frequently when reading anything futurological, whether science fiction or political theory, with its ecstatic promises and equally ecstatic displacements and evasions. In an alternate draft of the screenplay, Potter had Orlando tell Shelmerdine "The future is in my body!" It's literally true in the sense that she is pregnant (and that she is a time traveller), but it's not an essentialist statement. The body is where the future will take place, every second. Whatever the utopia or apocalypse, it will be bodies going through it: labouring, loving, evolving.</div>
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Maya Borg's beautiful film <i>Future My Love</i>, which tells the story of the end of the filmmaker's relationship interwoven through a history of the Venus Project and other failed futurological utopias, gets this exactly. It asks what we do with imagined futures - at the end of a relationship, but also at a given point in time looking back at past fantasies of the future moment that is our present - that have not come to pass. When a future is past, what does it have to offer? </div>
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As does Gwyneth Jones' <i>Bold as Love </i>series, with its crucial attention to what most science fiction (and indeed, realist fiction) ignores: utilities in the time of revolution. As <a href="http://www.paulgrahamraven.com/" target="_blank">Paul Graham Raven</a> says, as writers, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/sep/04/artist-engineer-infrastructure-means-matters" target="_blank">we need to talk about infrastructure</a>. As he explains in the article, infrastructure fiction is a manifesto for attention to how our lives function <i>in relation</i> and through connection, and the labour that is expended to ensure that. Infrastructure is the great secret, the ultimate conspiracy, both in terms of the invisibility of its labour, and the power that accrues to and flows through it. </div>
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Trains are a powerful symbol of this: prior to the railroad, a network of ships, horse-drawn vehicles and shanks' pony provided transport. These made their way according to a very vague and relative timetable, largely circadian (ie: the coach will be here around sunset). It was only with the advent of the railroad and its precision timetables that clock time was systematised and regularised, whereas previously individual towns set their clocks according to the sun. Jay Griffiths' <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/sep/04/artist-engineer-infrastructure-means-matters" target="_blank">Pip Pip</a> </i>details industrial capital's delinkage of time from personal/collective experience of the natural world, and its effect on our embodiment and consciousness. National water provision was a plank of industrial development: it has improved living standards (in tandem with better understanding of biological agents of disease), but has created its own problems, including massive wastage from ageing infrastructure that's too embedded to repair, as well as mass exposure to industrial pollution - as well as the more profound transformation of water into a commodity.</div>
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Similarly, other aspects of infrastructure gradually remove both our relation to, and any responsibility for, our bodies' place in the world. Quite literally, someone else deals with our shit: both the sanitation and construction workers who build and staff sewage treatment plants (and the vast administrative staff), and those whose water is polluted by sewage leaks or flushed plastic. Infrastructure allows most of us to wash our hands of many of the basic aspects of being alive, what <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/agamben/" target="_blank">Giorgio Agamben</a> calls <i>bare life</i>. Even if we work in infrastructure or utilities, whether as engineers or helpline operators, Fordism has guaranteed that we can only access the limited amount of information necessary to the task at hand. Outsourcing, privatisation and automation together have fragmented knowledge of infrastructure, while consolidating corporate control over the power it offers (and carries).</div>
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Worker-run factories, renationalised utilities (particularly water and minerals), local internets, and other attempts to place hands directly on infrastructure in times of political change. To me, this isn't just a story about control of the means of production, to use Marx' term, but the means of <i>relation - </i>to each other, and to the world. It's a taking of responsibility for the community's wellbeing; and in community, I include all of the living world. Existing infrastructure may be the single greatest problem in engaging people in ecopolitics, although it is also a flashpoint for community organising (particularly around energy and water). It obscures both the power and the responsibilities. </div>
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In <i><a href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-resilient-community/a-paradise-built-in-hell" target="_blank">A Paradise Built in Hell</a></i>, Rebecca Solnit explores what happens when infrastructure is overwhelmed by a natural or man-made disaster, and communities are required to find solutions to maintain bare life. She finds that resilience and inventiveness emerge, that people – while often grief-stricken, and frequently disease-stricken – are not passive victims of circumstance, or nostalgists at a loss without state/corporate provision. Alternate systems spring up, not only providing utility, but shared purpose and a renewed sense of interconnections. New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina has provided (and I suspect will continue to provide) US artists with examples and a backdrop for experimenting with such stories: David Simons' series <i>Treme</i> uses the serial form to explore exactly the connectivity created by rebuilding, with the city's musicians as both a focal point for narrative engagement, and vibrant examples of contingent, collaborative community (and in season 3, about how fast entrenched interests return to take over and, yes, "monetize" this reconstruction).</div>
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I wonder if the disintegration of infrastructure, and return of the possibility of relation, is part of the attraction of dystopian, post-apocalyptic fictions? Too frequently, however, post-apocalyptic fiction presents another fantasy, that of totalitarian control, rather than engaging with this less apparently dynamic question. Perhaps a novel about making the trains run – or getting rid of them and finding a replacement – doesn't have the appeal of one about mediagenic young people fighting it out for the amusement of the upper classes. But perhaps the kind of negotiations and relations that might emerge from such an infrastructure fiction offer an intriguing new kind of futurology, along the lines of this new <a href="http://towersnet.info/" target="_blank">collaborative writing project</a>: one that recognises that all futures are the present for their inhabitants, that bare life is the continuum that does not change, and that the only story we can tell is one we make together.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-41872807538187836382013-09-02T12:12:00.001+01:002013-09-02T12:12:42.590+01:00In Train: On MiddlesMaybe it's reading several Thomas the Tank Engine books to my friend's train-loving daughter (probably not, though, given the monotonous classism and sexism and plots) - or maybe a few long journeys this summer - but I seem to have falled in love with trains. Trains as vehicle of the metaphor of narrative, but also trains as insignias or symbols of a certain moment of modernity.<br />
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In my last post, I ended by thinking about the audio recording technology as disruptive of older narrative forms and models of self -- the inner voice made outer, memory turned magnetic. Writing science fiction, I'm intrigued by how realist fiction records and explains (or not) technological innovation, scientific experiment and social debate in its moment, how the coming of change appears when embedded in lived history. Too often, science fiction reads like an issue of Which? magazine, analysing and advertising shiny, with souped-up Basil Expositions giving the skinny to characters who should either a) already have the know-how, or b) don't need it. How to present technological, social, cultural and other imaginings to the reader without PowerPointing them over the head?<br />
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Which is where the trains come in. Three novels I've read in the past week, written throughout the twentieth century, all feature trains as metaphors for both modernity and modernism. There's plenty of fun and thought-provoking material out there about <a href="http://theartofmemory.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/trains-in-cinema-part-1.html" target="_blank">trains and film</a>, but I hadn't given much thought to trains in books. Of course, they provide an ideal setting for locked-room mysteries in both media, but I'm more intrigued by a different narrative effect -- what could be loosely called, one thing after another, a <i>loosening</i> of cause-and-effect, as opposed to the forceful, fateful forward motion associated with the train in cinema. <br />
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Poetics maven <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/" target="_blank">Al Filreis</a> posted this quotation from Gertrude Stein today on Facebook:<br />
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I think one naturally is impressed by
anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one...is
emerging from adolescence.... American writing has been an escaping not
an escaping but an existing with the necessary feeling of one thing
succeeding another thing of anything have a beginning and a middle and
an ending."</blockquote>
Particularly intriguing because the first of my train books (not books read on trains: I keep <i>Don Quixote</i> for that -- and three years on, I'm still stuck in Book Two) was Willa Cather's <i>My Antonia</i>, which I'd somehow failed to read despite many Women's Lit classes (and the amazing fact that there was a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113892/" target="_blank">1995 TV movie</a> starring Neil Patrick Harris as Jim Burden and Elina Lowensohn as Antonia: yes, Doogie Howser MD + Sofia from Amateur, with Eve Marie Saint and Jason Robards as the elder Burdens. The mind does boggle).<br />
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<i>My Antonia</i> is a novel about beginnings, middles and endings, "an existing with the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another," a deceptively simple paratactic style in which each chapter focuses on a single incident, moving forwards in time. Each incident has its beginning (often in a previous chapter), its middle - generally an incident of strong emotion or sensation, presented with incredible directness to the reader - and its ending, often faced with or brought about by social strictures that limit the interactions and passionate feeling of the adolescent Jim and Antonia.<br />
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Cather writes from a powerful sense of America-as-adolescent-nation (albeit one whose great indigenous antiquity she explored in <i>In the Professor's House</i>), and the railroad is one emblem of this: in the Prologue, we learn that Jim Burden is now a railroad man, not one of the plutocrats who built it, but a time-and-motion man, travelling the railroads to assess them. On the train in the couse of business, he bumps into an old acquaintance from his home town, to whom he later delivers the memoir that forms the body of the novel. So the book opens with a direct link between Jim and the train - and the story does, too, as Jim's earliest memory of Antonia begins on a train. Jim is travelling from Virginia, where he was born and his parents have both died, to his grandparents in Nebraska, and Antonia and her family are making the final part of their journey from Bohemia.<br />
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Jim and Antonia don't meet on the train: he hears about her from the conductor, but is too shy to see her. Instead, they share a night-time ride in the back of a cart to their homesteads. Later, Antonia falls in love with a train conductor and Jim, ever-fastidious and painfully aware of social divisions, sets aside his feelings for her. The train conductor done her wrong, and at the very end of the book, Jim returns by train and buggy to visit her and her insuperable number of children. As I type this, a disturbing equation arises between Antonia (female principle) as fertile land and men as the railroad who "open her up." Antonia, born in the "old country," becomes both a replacement for and symbol of the indigenous Americans displaced by the settlers in Nebraska.<br />
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As Rebecca Solnit discusses in <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/05/conversation-rebecca-solnit-biographer-of-eadweard-muybridge.html" target="_blank">River of Shadows</a>, her biography of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who worked for railroad baron Leland Stanford, the railroad was instrumental in "opening up" the West, perpetuating displacement and genocide. Many workers - white, Chinese and Native American - died during the building of the railroad, and it destroyed some small communities when it bypassed them. Part of its symbolism, then, is modernity as brutality. But there is also an almost erotic tenderness, a tremulousness, in Jim's relation to the railway, something that undercuts that easy equation. The train is, literally, the engine of the novel, but there are few train journeys between the first and final chapters. People travel by horse and cart, or on foot. And yet it's the train that is suffused with Jim's nostalgia for Antonia, as much as is the landscape, and the train that offers the one-thing-after-the-next structure to the novel. As a railroad man, Jim doesn't travel from A to B, but rather takes linear journeys in a circular and repetitive fashion."An existing with the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding the other thing" cuts against the cut-and-thrust the railroad seems to claim for itself, and for the "manifest destiny" of American modernity.<br />
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The railroad manifests similarly in Intizar Husain's <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/basti/" target="_blank"><i>Basti</i></a>, as an ambivalent marker of the coming of modernity under the shadow of empire. It both connects and disconnects what will become India and Pakistan in the course of the novel, as it connects and disconnects Zakir, the narrator's, past memories from his present.<br />
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Falling between Cather's and Husain's novels - and without the nostalgic framework of either - the train means something quite different to American poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose novel <i>Savage Coast</i>, just<a href="http://www.feministpress.org/books/muriel-rukeyser/savage-coast" target="_blank"> republished by the Feminist Press</a>, is based on her own experiences in Spain in 1935. Helen, an American activist travelling to the People's Olympiad, gets stuck on a train between the Spanish border and Barcelona during the General Strike that followed the Popular Front's prevention of a Fascist coup in Catalonia. As the train sits in a small town, it becomes a model League of Nations - generous and querulous, full of shifting alliances around a noble core. The stopped train is a powerful symbol of withheld force (paralleling the Popular Front and its soldiers, mainly seen raising fists in solidarity rather than in action) and a reframing of the narrative of industry and/as "progress" -- later in the book, we learn that the PF is planning to nationalise the American motor car factories around Barcelona.<br />
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Once the novel leaves the train for Barcelona, it becomes more diffuse, although quite moving in its portrayal of confused days and heady nights of political tumult: I imagine you could change the street names, add some mobile phones, and present it as written in Istanbul this year, or Cairo three years ago. Forward motion is both demanded (political change) and impossible (Helen and her friends remain tourists, the plot dictated by the vagaries of consuls and rescue ships), a state that the stilled train symbolised perfectly, not least by holding together its ill-assorted community. Stopped, the train is all middle: beginning and ending are suspended, as the passengers worry at half-translated broadcasts, rumours and contrasting accounts from the townspeople. <i>Incipit</i>, says Peter when they reach Barcelona -- but there's something about the calm before, the dreaming of revolution and the way the exigencies of the stopped train bring the events and emotions into the body, that is truly radical. "An escaping not an escaping": a staying still and expanding. That ever-busy little striver Thomas could learn a lot from Rukeyser.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-6981462781449349762013-04-01T14:41:00.000+01:002013-04-01T14:42:53.954+01:00SF in SF, or Julian May, Ellen Ullman and Making Things UpHappy seventy-first birthday to Samuel Delany! And congratulations to Mira Grant for her record- (and glass ceiling) busting <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/31/seanan-mcguire-hugo-awards-shortlist" target="_blank">haul of Hugo nominations</a>. It's going to be a while before I get to her work, though, because I've just discovered <a href="http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/julian-may/" target="_blank">Julian May</a>: for once, even starting by reading the first book of a series. One down, fifteen to go.<br />
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That first book, <i><a href="http://torbooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/extract-from-THE-MANY-COLOURED-LAND.pdf" target="_blank">The Many-Coloured Land</a></i>, was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus and Mythopoeic Fantasy awards in 1982, and was recently -- just this January -- brought back into print and ebook by Tor, 20 years after its last edition. They fanfared the relaunch with <a href="http://torbooks.co.uk/2013/01/16/from-the-archives-interview-with-julian-may/" target="_blank">a rare interview</a> with May from 1982. Therein, she answers one of the perennial questions fired at writers: where do your ideas come from?<br />
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All those wild, wild ideas – where did they come from? . . . I once estimated that I had read or skimmed nearly fifty thousand volumes in the course of researching my nonfiction juvenile books and writing the seven thousand encyclopedia articles. I read very fast and retain quite a lot of the data. And besides the research I had to do, there were certain other topics I delved into for the sheer hell of it: mythology and folklore; psychology – especially Carl Jung; geology and paleontology, which I’ve always adored; sociology and political studies; history – especially English history, since I’m a keen Anglophile. </blockquote>
What May doesn't answer is the implied, more complex question: how do you mesh these ideas to produce characters and narrative? What is the process that takes the 50, 000 volumes of non-fiction and composts them into the Galactic Milieu and the time-gate?<br />
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Science fiction, because it composes its realities very explicitly, foregrounds this question as a genre, whereas literary realism implies an indexical process: you observe the world and the people you meet therein, and translate them to the page. Of course, that's a useful fiction in itself; the world of a realist novel is as selected, invented and constructed as that of an SFF novel, within a framework of constraints, including formal and generic precedents and reader expectations.<br />
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It's been fascinating discovering May in the same week as discovering <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/mar/18/ellen-ullman-computer-programmer-novelist" target="_blank">Ellen Ullman</a>, "the computer programmer who became a novelist." Her new novel, <i><a href="http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2012_03_018826.php" target="_blank">By Blood</a></i>, is -- in a way -- about programming: set in San Francisco in 1974, before the tech revolution of which Ullman would be a part came to dominate and define the Bay Area, it's about genetic and cultural inheritance; specifically, what does it mean to say one is (or is not) a Jew. Like May's novel, it also asks what it means to learn and research, as the protagonist is a classics professor who turns his skills from commenting on the Eumenides to researching the aftermath of the Holocaust. The effect of knowledge -- and its relation (or otherwise) to self-knowledge -- is of course a theme as old as Oedipus, but both of these novels are working it out in relation to new 20th century constraints and questions.<br />
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Is it co-incidental that this neo-noirish paranoid plunge of a novel, in which the passive protagonist eavesdrops on a therapist and her patient, opens at around the time SF-based SF novelist <a href="http://www.philipkdick.com/aa_biography.html" target="_blank">Philip K. Dick</a> started receiving pink light beam visitations? While Ullman's novel, with its (characters') investment in testimony, witness and evidence, is presented as realist, the fact that it consists of material overheard by an unreliable narrator, and conveyed as oral testimony from person to person, leaves the novel in an unsettling realm where the Freudian theories of fantasy could be said to meet the genre of the same name, as American dreams/nightmares of Old Europe are dreamt and deconstructed.<br />
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Ullman's programming fascination also surfaces in the appearance of recording technologies as bearing witness; an appendix offers a link to a recording of a BBC radio broadcast from Belsen/Celle that the protagonist discovers at a key moment in the narrative. Some narration is delivered via a tape recorder. The novel passes little comment on these technological interventions and what effect they have on narrative as the "old world" of blood heritage and beliefs (such as the genetic inheritance of mental illness, comprehensively disproven) meets the new world of gay bars.<br />
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May's novel deliriously reverses what's implicit and explicit in Ullman by sending 22nd century humans back to the Pliocene, where they encounter a space-faring -- but culturally medieval -- alien race that his hiding out on Earth. Fantasy, science fiction, and palaeontology are mixed together but with a similar question in mind: what, as individuals, societies and species, do we inherit? What do we make for ourselves? Behind "how did you come up with your ideas?" lies this question of the unsettling nature of (self-)invention.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-84434370296164619052013-01-07T14:58:00.000+00:002013-01-07T14:58:08.993+00:00Wanna Be in My Gang?: Reading Girl Gangs & the Problem of Violence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Foxfire, dir. Laurent Cantet, 2012. Adapted from Joyce Carol Oates' novel, Foxfire.<br />
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Everyone loves a girl gang, right?<br />
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I ask because posters for Foxfire followed me around Paris this yearturn as I read:<br />
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Sylvia Townsend Warner, <a href="http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/Books/detail.page?isbn=9781844088041" target="_blank">The Corner that Held Them</a> (C14th nuns)<br />
Kate Mosse, <a href="http://www.katemosse.co.uk/index.php/kates-books/citadel/" target="_blank">Citadel</a> (all-female Resistance group in Languedoc)<br />
Alice Hoffman, <a href="http://alicehoffman.com/books/the-dovekeepers/synopsis/" target="_blank">The Dovekeepers</a> (four women in Masada)<br />
Octavia Butler, <a href="http://www.malindalo.com/2010/10/on-reading-octavia-butlers-parable-of-the-sower/" target="_blank">Parable of the Sower</a> (female Messiah on post-apocalyptic Pacific coast)<br />
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Girl gangs - monstrous regiments of women - nunneries - dovecotes: whatever you want to call them, the idea of a group of women <i>working</i> together towards a powerful and public project fascinates us because, I think, it's so rarely portrayed in our culture. All of these books explore the particular loyalties, tensions and strengths that connect these groups under the deformative pressure of patriarchy (call it Nazism, the Church, apocalypse or the Romans, as you will), but they are unsettled when investigating the question of how women might fight back against this pressure: all, as writers, have chosen the word, and yet the fascination with the sword remains.<br />
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Earlier this autumn, I spent some time thinking about Lizzie Borden's 1982 film, Born in Flames, about a group of women who organize in New York City against a stultified socialist revolution. Borden's characters train for violent resistance, but are shown using it as a threat rather than actualising it, instead targeting media and raising consciousness through anarchist tactics.<br />
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Butler's Parable and Borden's Born in Flames share many resonances, not least their diverse characters, with a radical emphasis on African-American and Latina women as activists and leaders. They are also both science fictions of the near and possible future, whereas the other three books are historical fiction. All of the books are also - broadly, and unlike Born in Flames - concerned with religion, as both social construct and faith.<br />
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Why put together girl (or girl-led) gangs and religion (Judaism and Christianity, to be specific)? There's no doubt that a powerful charge arises from telling women's stories in the most unlikely settings: and not just the story of a singular, outstanding woman but of women interacting with each other, and - in the case of The Dovekeepers in particular - of women's knowledge (<i>keshaphim</i>, women's magic) and its oral, inter-generational transmission.<br />
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But that camaraderie, which in itself forms a kind of resistance to the patriarchal world (even in The Corner That Held Them, where the nuns spend a good deal of time wanting to escape the cloister), is shaded by another type of resistance, one that sits - I find - uneasily with it: that of violence. Aziza, one of the four dovekeepers (whose role suggests their connection to peace), dresses as a man in order to fight in her brother's place, for example. Alongside this gender slippage - which Hoffman handles very powerfully, as Aziza finds love with another warrior who accepts her as transgendered - there is another performance, particularly in Citadel, in which the women use hyper-femininity (or "feminine wiles") to carry out their plans for sabotage.<br />
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I can't quite put my finger on what unsettles me about the triangulation of magical/occult camaraderie, breech-part violence and hyper-feminine espionage, but I think something about it disturbs both Mosse and Hoffman as well, who provide spectacularly punitive endings to their (very long, absorbing, close third person) novels. The death of Sandrine, the protagonist in Citadel, is practically pornographic in its intimate physical detail: a grenade lands by her thigh. Is it that women are to be punished for trespassing on male territory? Or a restatement that war is bad and women its victims?<br />
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Only Butler and Borden fully explore the analogy that these stories might be making between war and gender politics: that of "sleeping with the enemy." In Butler's Kindred, this is also explored across race and class lines in the antebellum South. Warner, by walling her women into a convent and showing how they both thrive and chafe, creates a fascinating ambivalence, as she does in Summer Will Show, her tour-de-force about a lesbian couple involved in the Paris Commune, about the intimacy of women and history.<br />
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What Warner and Butler reflect in their stories, and Hoffman and Mosse struggle with, is that neither intimate nor political relations can be equal until society is; all four novels show groups of women struggling against inequality in all its violence, but Mosse, in particular, turns that violence in on her characters rather than propose or investigate a radical social shift. Writing historical fiction makes that difficult, of course - but Warner manages it in Summer Will Show, as her protagonist sits down to read the opening of the Communist Manifesto.<br />
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I wish I had as satisfying yet open an ending to this post. I suspect my enthusiasm for girl gangs - for reading about girls in books, and seeing girls on screen - will burn and burn.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-18875013448067023772012-12-26T19:10:00.005+00:002012-12-26T19:14:16.964+00:00The Veiled Detective: Sherlock Holmes (&) the New Woman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So Arthur Conan Doyle based his detective duo on a lizard from the dawn of time and her wife. Madame Vastra, a Silurian (lizard-looking alien who eats humans), is known as the Great Detective (she tracked and ate Jack the Ripper) and Jenny, a Victorian human, is a sword-fighting former match girl.<br />
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Or, merry Christmas from Steven Moffatt, current Doctor Who (and Sherlock) showrunner, doing his bit for equal marriage rights. In yesterday's Christmas episode, The Snowmen, the dynamic duo were greeted by villain Dr. Simeon with the reveal that Vastra, known also as the Veiled Detective, was Doyle's inspiration. An in-jokey cross-reference of course, but also - possibly - an admission from Moffatt that there something missing in the state of Sherlock. As there has been in Doctor Who: this is not the time or post to go into everything groanworthy about Moffatt's Whovian arc, but briefly: everything, and particularly his treatment of female characters who are never... <i>themselves</i>. Clara Oswin Oswald, the new companion, looks like she'll present a similar problem, being an impossibility (the girl who died twice) who, far from being a vampire slayer, will be a temporal impurity the Doctor will have to erase.<br />
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Dialling back the predictions, though, it's safe to say that Moffatt has a problem with women. Or rather, with girls who become women. It's all marvellous when she is Amelia in her nightdress or Jeanne Poisson in <i>her</i> nightdress (hmmm), but as soon as these spitfire girls - who need the Doctor as a protector - attain womanhood (or at least adolescence) they become something threatening: sexual beings who snog the Doctor and dizzy him. And so they must be abandoned, duplicated, sacrificed, fragmented (River), married off (Rory!), or otherwise written out.<br />
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Now, obviously, the character of the Doctor as conceived since the dawn of time, is an escapist bachelor fantasy: one that Moffatt also identifies in Sherlock Holmes. His Sherlock is, to me, as problematic as his Doctor. The writing might be sharper in the former than the latter, but the characterisation depends, again, on such a limited and depressing gendered binary that I find it unwatchable. Again, further analysis is for another time.<br />
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Because my Moffatt-bashing may have something to do with my absolute devotion to the one, the only incarnation of Sherlock Holmes: the magnificent Jeremy Brett. I grew up with Brett's Holmes, from 1984 to 1994, all 2358 minutes (approx., according to the box set) of aquiline deduction and irascible line deliveries. Whether the codex or televisual Holmes came first to my consciousness is lost in the mists of times: they are intertwined. My uncle gave me the Penguin Collected Sherlock Holmes when I was still at primary school; in my final year, I won the public speaking competition <i>as</i> Holmes, with a riddling speech in the first person leading up to the declaration, "Who am I? It's elementary."<br />
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I was a strange child, and I still am. The postcard from the Sherlock Holmes museum, which informed me that Mr. Holmes could not answer my question because he had retired to keep bees in Sussex, still rankles in its insinuation that I couldn't tell fact from fiction. I was a Holmesian: astutely in tune to the crucial distinctions between the real and imagined.<br />
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Rewatching the entire 2358 minutes of Brett's Holmes earlier this year, I was amazed by how fallible my memory of the series was, given my devotion to it, but also by how vivid. Fragments, moments, expressions, phrasings persist where plots had fallen away. Unlike many avid Doyle readers, I never became a fan of detective fiction. It wasn't Holmes' deductive method, or the tangled webs from which he extricated himself, that interested me.<br />
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What was it? I've been wondering all year how to describe, or even identify, it. From the off, though, the ordering of the ITV adaptations hinted at something confirmed by the magnificent, melancholy concluding episodes: Holmes, like his exact contemporary Sigmund Freud (who moved from physiological to mental deduction), listens to women. In fact, he listens "like a woman" (to quote, contingently, cultural norms).<br />
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Moffatt's Sherlock, among his other deficiencies, does not: he is rude, abrasive, disengaged. Debates have raged online about whether his Watson's joking reference to autism is in fact intended as a diagnosis, with fewer debates about the complexities of what this means - from the stereotyping of the autistic 'savant' to the mechanisms of autism. Whether Moffatt's and Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock is intended to be an autistic character or not, he behaves brusquely and even brutishly towards the emotions and imaginations of others. Brett's Holmes is, rather, like a taut violin string sensitive to every emotion and imagining around him: hence his brusqueness, not because he is unaware, but because he is <i>too</i> aware.<br />
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And with this awareness, like Freud, what he hears is the plight of middle-class women, often New Women. The ITV cycle begins with A Scandal in Bohemia, the first short story to be published in The Strand Magazine in 1891. In it, Holmes meets his match, not in Moriarty, but in Irene Adler, a woman of exceptional intelligence and courage, determined to pursue her feelings against social norms: she turns down the affections of a king. Holmes, commissioned by the king to steal back a photograph from this woman out of fear of blackmail, ends up switching sides. In Moffatt's version of the story, A Scandal in Belgravia, the female suspect is wily and manipulative, using her erotic capital to both flummox and inform Holmes - who is beaten by her, but does not respect her.<br />
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Brett's Holmes harbours a Platonic love for Adler, evinced by his possession of a photograph of her, hidden in a drawer as her photograph of the King was hidden in a safe. Holmes does not save Adler (she does that herself), but he keeps her safe, one could say. Subsequent episodes in the first ITV run, entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and not even vaguely related to publication order (only sampling the published collection known by the same title), feature similarly bold, brave women to whom Holmes increasingly lends a sympathetic ear.<br />
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There are wives who fear the return of the repressed (for example, in the second episode The Dancing Men) or disgrace attendant on their dependence on their husband (third episode The Naval Treaty). But there are particularly young, unmarried New Women, threatened by indeterminate and suggestive forces. Episode four, The Solitary Cyclist, focuses on Violet Smith, a middle-class young woman impoverished by her father's death, and working as a music teacher to provide for her mother and earn enough to marry her fiancé. Cycling to the railway station to take the train to her mother's, she is followed by an unidentified male cyclist, whom she suspects of being either her employer or his boorish guest, both of whom have expressed a competing attraction to her.<br />
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What saves this from being an all-too-familiar tale of the (depicted as) self-inflicted peril of the unmarried woman daring to be out in the world is Holmes' attention to the details of Smith's case, the way in which he treats her, first of all as a serious client even though she is not wealthy; and second of all as a serious and credible witness to her own almost supernatural circumstance. It was only in the 1880s and 1890s that the safety cycle had attracted women to bicycling in great numbers, providing - in tandem with the railway - freedom of movement for the increasing numbers of working middle-class women. Violet Smith is a model of such a woman, and the story offers a sympathetic and ultimately vindicating account of the threat posed by and to the New Woman by hardened Victorian patriarchal attitudes. Smith's forced marriage is annulled, her fortune is rightly inherited and the two competing suitors are both punished. It's an upside-down fairy tale, one that depends not only on Holmes' deductive skills but on his willingness to trust Smith, and hers to participate, dangerously, as bait.<br />
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That danger is multiplied in The Speckled Band, one of the creepiest of Doyle's stories - and perhaps the most Freudian, featuring mirroring sisters, a death on the eve of a wedding, and - finally - a snake that slithers from a stepfather's bedroom and down a bell-pull. Helen Stoner, another young fiancée living precariously in the house of a man who is neither father nor husband, braves her stepfather's considerable disapproval to contact Holmes; in fact, he follows her to Holmes' office and demands to know what she's told the detective. In this, even before the snake appears, Dr. Roylott comes across as the classic sexual abuser. Words can't describe the satisfaction of Holmes striking Roylott's swamp adder and sending it back through the ventilation shaft to bite its owner.<br />
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Like Freud, Holmes appears to identify and refuse to indemnify the source of his young female clients' oppression and terror: the older men who hold monetary and social power over them. In another Adventures episode, The Copper Beeches, governess Violet Hunter (a first featured TV role for Natasha Richardson) finds herself the subject of strange, quasi-sexual ministrations by her employer, only to discover (at considerable personal danger) that she is impersonating the locked-up daughter of the house: a profound and clever pastiche of all those "madwoman in the attic" novels.<br />
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It's a trope that appears again in The Eligible Bachelor, one of the most ambitious of the ITV adaptations, a film-length episode that takes the fairly simple Holmes story The Noble Bachelor and meshes it with elements borrowed from other stories, as well as inventions. In the opening act, Holmes attends a rehearsal of an Ibsen play (Hedda Gabler, I think), a signature embodiment of the Woman Question and women's contemporaneous struggles for self-determination. The lead actress, Flora Miller, becomes a character in the story - an informant - but it is with a darker, Gothic fantasy that the episode concludes. The bright young American bride-to-be (an echo of American opera singer Irene Adler, perhaps), Hetty Doran, disappears and reappears, persuaded by Holmes to undertake that dangerous adventure of being bait that appears in The Solitary Cyclist and The Speckled Band. Wandering through the guignol fantasia of her betrothed's abandoned country house, she is chased by a leopard (there's also a leopard in The Speckled Band), which leads Holmes to an animal pit that conceals Lord Robert St. Simon's first wife, whom he had committed and then - when she was maddened by confinement - returned to his estate where she was caged like an animal.<br />
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A truly remarkable woman, Amelia has sustained her sanity by turning her cage into a trap - intended for St. Simon. With Holmes' help, she escapes, and in the final shot of the episode, she attends the opera (another Adler reference) with him. Many viewers deride the episode, in common with many directed by Peter Hammond, for its hammy inclusion of such Gothic elements, its pick-n-mix approach to adaptation, and its use of the supernatural: Amelia appears to Holmes in dreams that lead him into a depression: he believes an animalistic woman is coming to destroy him. Watson even suggests that Holmes consult a Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud, about these dreams. But Hammond and screenwriter T. R. Bowen invert the dream's apparent vision of the castrating woman, by having Holmes and Amelia rescue each other: he rescues her physically, but she rescues him spiritually.<br />
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Among other stories, The Eligible Bachelor borrows from Doyle's The Veiled Lodger, bringing us back to Madame Vastra and Moffatt's counter-intuitive insight given his own depiction of Holmes. Veiled within the great detective is not only a sensitivity, but an attunement to the Woman Question (equality of education, employment and independence) that lies at the heart of some of the greatest Holmes stories. ITV's adaptation, perhaps fuelled by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, brings this strand out. The plot is almost always the same, whether in The Hound of the Baskervilles (another version flubbed by Moffatt) or The Master Blackmailer: double standards and asymmetrical power. The solution that compelled - and compels - me is not the unravelling of the crime but the stark and subtle reveal of the far greater power behind the crime: not Moriarty, but patriarchy.<br />
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Like Freud, who changed his mind about seduction theory under social pressure, Doyle was a man of his time, both alive to inequality and - in other ways - blind to it. It's undeniable that the Holmes of the stories can also be classist, racist and sexist, dismissing people as inadequate based on a few trace facts about their identity. Franco Moretti has shown that Doyle's crime map of London bears no resemblance to the recorded criminal activity reported by Scotland Yard and the media, but rather an instinctual bias against working class people and immigrants. But the ITV series - and here credit must go, I think, to Brett as the one constant as directors and screenwriters changed around him - finds a Holmes that resonates deeply with a century of change: Holmes, (friend of) the New Woman.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-84104172052972201792012-12-11T18:38:00.000+00:002012-12-11T18:38:24.326+00:00Nowhere or Now Here: William Morris' Utopia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Strangely?' said he. 'Is it strange to sympathise with the year and its gains and losses?'</blockquote>
There's not many science fiction novels whose plot motor is getting upriver for the harvest. Maybe only one: William Morris' <i>News from Nowhere</i>, first published as a book in 1890. It opens with a disgruntled man leaving a Socialist meeting in London, where discussions "as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution" had turned into a petty argument. He walks home to Hammersmith, and wakes up the next morning a century in the future, on that morrow. He travels through London and then down the Thames with a friendly utopian, shipping up at Kelmscott Manor, Morris' own house of later life. At the culmination of the book - at a harvest feast in Kelmscott's village church - the narrator simply fades from his companions' awareness, returning to his house in present-day Hammersmith.<br />
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It's an incredibly efficient and effective narrative device, one that opens up the real motor of the novel: how did the world change? And how does that change follow from, and bear out, Morris' own practical and political socialism.<br />
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Morris' first person narrator is at once overwhelmed with happiness and apprehensive about the post-industrial, post-capitalist egalitarian utopia in which he has awoken, and it's this combination of delight and melancholy (that change has not been achieved in his own time) that draws the reader on through long dialogues with utopian citizens. Morris breaks that hoary saw "show don't tell" endlessly: his characters, who predominantly disapprove of books, turn telling (back) into a vivid art. There are didactic strictures on labour, class, exchange and architecture, and plenty of them, but they are delivered in character and in tonal harmony.<br />
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Morris places some excellent and entertaining (to me) rants about the novel as a form in various characters' mouths. While art, architecture and craft - indeed, all forms of physical and material beauty - are highly valued in the novel, the linguistic arts, whether conversation or letters, are looked on with suspicion, giving the novel a curiously astringent character, an asperity towards its own means. And indeed, as a literary work, it fulfils the contract it sets out by not falling into any of the traps it identifies. Here Ellen, the most perceptive of the utopians, the only one who can see that the narrator is from the past, comments frankly:<br />
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As for your books, they were well enough for your times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people. But I say flatly that in spite of all their cleverness and vigour, and capacity for storytelling, there is something loathsome about them. Some of them, indeed, do here and there show feeling for those whom the history-books call 'poor,' and of the misery of whose lives we have some inkling; but presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people's troubles; and that after a long series of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings and aspirations, and all the rest of it; while the rest of the world must even then have gone on its way, and dug and sewed and baked and built and carpentered around these useless - animals.</blockquote>
Take that, Jane Austen. Ellen is also perceptive as to the effects of this cultural production on the minds that absorb it, noting later that the narrator ' "nurse[s] a sham sorrow, like the ridiculous characters in some of those queer old novels." ' She's right: and it's part of what's gripping about the second half of the novel: the narrator's absolute conviction that he will lose, or be dismissed from, this utopia. Ellen identifies it as a self-fulfilling prophecy: the narrator is held back from his full participation in the utopia by his conviction that he must lose it, that he is unworthy or unwelcome, and also right that this mode of thought derives from his cultural background. He cannot prise himself out of the narrative mode and shape with to he is accustomed.<br />
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But the narrator experiences his awakening as a wake-up call. Morris was deeply familiar with medieval poetry (not least through the creation of the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/landprint/kelmscott/index.html" target="_blank">Kelmscott Chaucer</a>), and the motif of the spiritual dream in which the dreamer is saddened to awake from his vision of heaven, but also invigorated by awakening with his new knowledge, is echoed by the end of the book. The narrator remembers 'Ellen's last mournful look' and interprets it as handing him a mission for his return, to work towards the realisation of the future he has seen. So the experience narrated by the book takes its place as the 'dream' intended by medieval poets, rather than Symbolist or (given the book was published in 1890) psychoanalytic writers: as a revealed reality, experienced through intense longing.<br />
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Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.</blockquote>
With this final sentence, <i>News from Nowhere</i> also sets out a new vision of the novel as utopian form or project: not to draw the reader in through a cascade of inorganic crises and tensions leading to a normative and normalising resolution, but to present its world-building as a vision: detailed, and even dove-tailed, as Morris' narrative architecture is. Why shouldn't the year's gains and losses be as effective and intriguing a rhythm for narrative as the three-act structure?<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-65583151650918172902012-11-25T15:55:00.001+00:002012-11-25T15:58:28.696+00:00The Revolution Will Not Be Fantasised: G. Willow Wilson's Alif the UnseenI'm very glad that <a href="http://aliftheunseen.com/" target="_blank">Alif the Unseen</a> exists - and indeed, glad that its author G. Willow Wilson exists and is making work in comics and fiction. What she says of the Arab Spring -- "For good or ill, those kids were imagining a brave new world" -- is also true of her work. Alif the Unseen is an exciting, credible and witty fusion of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, and the films, blogs and fiction that have come pouring out of the Arab Spring. It's full of gorgeous ideas about metaphor as world-coding (like China Mieville's Embassytown) and about reversing the Enlightenment cleaving of the rational, empirical world from the spiritual (or science fiction from fantasy, to put it generically). The best, most paradigmatic line in the book is probably when a shadow-djinn in the sideways spirit world of the Empty Quarter tells Alif, the hacktivist protagonist: "Brother, we have <i>Wifi</i>."<br />
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I'm with Willow Wilson in her take on Asimov's third law --"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- which is that any technology, from making fire onwards, <i>is</i> magic; that is, an extension of the human imagination made possible. There's a lovely scene where an imam explains to Alif that scholars considering the laws concerning travel to Mecca predicted, legislatively, air travel by several centuries. Technology actualises imagination one way; magic another; fictional writing partakes of both. Human cultures include both, strategically as it serves them, and often make technology in the image of magic, and vice versa.<br />
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So why did I feel dissatisfied at the end of the book -- a book,
moreover, in which a book is all-powerful; in which language is revered;
in which politics are foregrounded? I wonder if it's because the
book-within-a-book highlights another division, one that transcends
genres and the whole "science fiction is more radical than fantasy
because it's futurological, technological, rationalist / fantasy is more
holistic than science fiction because it embraces and expands
tradition/history, is non-teleological, non-techno-fetishist" blah blah
blah. The book-within-a-book is <i>Alf Yeom Wa Yeom</i>, Wilson's fictional counterpart to <i>Alf Layla Wa Layla</i>, or The Thousand and One [Arabian] Nights. The <i>Alf Yeom</i> is a classic narrative device, like the Ring of Power in <i>Lord of the Rings</i>: stolen, powerful, ambiguous, carried by an innocent who gradually taps into its power. It drives character development and action.<br />
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Yet Wilson also goes William Gibson/Kathy Acker/Samuel Delany/Mieville and suggests the book does more: it can hack reality. Not just through its ideas (which is fortunate, as Wilson's attempt to write allegorical, multivalent tales on the model of <i>Alf Layla</i> is a little embarrassing) but through its linguistic and narrative properties. The idea of the book-as-code (and the story-as-code) is not a new one, but Wilson runs with it impressively. Until she doesn't: the book fails as code, the world doesn't change, and it's left to old-school narrative fiction and its car chase/dream/fight/puzzle tropes to save the day.<br />
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The book doesn't follow through formally on what it's saying narratively, in other words. It's not a multivalent allegory, nor - like Acker's <a href="http://www.paraethos.com/library/empire.htm" target="_blank"><i>Empire of the Senseless</i></a> - does it hack language and linear narrative as codes that structure the world. Instead - details of Gulf culture aside - it reproduces them. As the argument runs, car chases and shoot-outs make accessible radical material (the fusion of Islam and computer technology) that readers might otherwise resist. But master's tools, master's house: reproducing the form of EuroWestern science fiction, down to its getting-the-girl ending, is frustrating; it's just as frustrating in Doctorow's <i>Little Brother</i>, which argues for revolution but faithfully reproduces the beats of conventional narrative (less successfully than Wilson does, although her fight scenes are rather confused and desultory).<br />
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On the other hand, readers hardly flock to Delany or Acker, says conventional wisdom -- aka, the accountants at publishers. It's true that His Dark Materials spread critical thinking about fundamentalisms far and wide -- but ultimately, the books were broadly palatable and their political message dulled by their narrative imperatives. Thus, I think there is an argument for relocating the binary, if we need to have one, not between science fiction and fantasy, but between books that follow conventional narrative structure (as inherited from the Victorian novel via Hollywood cinema), often with didactic purpose; and books that take the premise of their content seriously in allowing it to affect their form, so a novel isn't just about hacking, it's hacked -- it's not just drawing material from sagas, it explores the saga form.<br />
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What's radical is not only the ideas a book puts in the mouth of its characters, but whether it puts its money where its mouth is, and lets those ideas change the novel itself. Wilson appears to explore this through the <i>Alf Yeom</i>, with its allegories imparted through interactive oral storytelling, but in the end the story tells us explicitly that this revolution - in which metaphors fully mean, in which their multivalence is realised as the structure of reality, in which imagination and the empirical world are recognised as mutually constitutive and thus fiction <i>can</i> hack RL - makes the world unstable. And that applies, it seems from the final chapters, to other revolutions too...<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-24005594746333578162012-09-16T12:12:00.002+01:002012-09-16T12:13:21.349+01:00Trains, Janes and Automobiles: Variations on a (Jane) EyreI haven't quite finished <a href="http://www.margotlivesey.com/the-flight-of-gemma-hardy.html" target="_blank">Margot Livesey's <i>The Flight of Gemma Hardy</i></a>, but I wanted to write this now (just in case I'm reading the book's signals wrong and it doesn't follow through on its line of flight from <i>Jane Eyre</i>). Gemma is an orphan raised and then cast out by her aunt, schooled at a brutal boarding school, then hired as au pair to a motherless child in an isolated great house. Eighteen and starved of affection, she is swept off her feet by her wordly, wealthy employer, only to have their hasty wedding halted by a revelation that causes her to flee -- almost to her death. Cared for by a rural family, she is torn between a desire to make a life for herself and the memory of passion.<br />
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Livesey follows the characters and plot of <i>Jane Eyre</i> almost every step of the way. The book is particularly good at taking small incidents and themes from Charlotte Bronte's novel -- the significance of birds, questions of faith, the chain of abandoned or badly-cared-for children -- and expanding them. Relocated to post-war Scotland, Livesey's Jane -- Gemma/Jean -- finds herself astonishingly close to the poverty and limited options of Bronte's Jane. But Livesey is also careful to note what has changed, and how the world around Gemma is changing. There are professional women (a vet, a chemist), as well as many kinds of teachers, farmers and housekeepers. There are also women artists -- a musician and a potter -- living the lives that women like the Brontes carved into public consciousness.<br />
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Gemma, like Jane, encounters the kindness of strangers, but -- unlike Jane -- through these strangers her world expands. Not (so far) to the missionary fantasy of St. John Rivers (yup, the bit of <i>Jane Eyre</i> everyone forgets or passes over, myself included), but through education, local history and botany, and through Gemma's own story. Her mother was Scottish, her father Icelandic, and she spent her childhood in a fishing village in Iceland before being brought back to Perth by her uncle. So encoded in Gemma's story from the start is flight: travel, escape, freedom, migration. This gives the book a lightness and sense of possibility other than the romantic myth with which <i>Jane Eyre</i> is primarily identified: "Reader, I married" the Great Man, and moreover, the Great House.<br />
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Gemma traverses Scotland by train, bus, ferry, van, car and foot; Jane Eyre, too, is a great walker (and occasional user of the post-chaise), but Gemma's journeys take the central place of Jane's relationship to Rochester's house, Thornfield Hall. Instead of the Gothic romance of Bluebeard's Castle -- seductive for all its dangers -- Livesey offers a feminine <i>On the Road</i>, a peripatetic tale of bus stations, cheap hotels, Teddy boys, fish and chips, and sea-sickness. Exploring the heart of a novel about a woman who longs for a home, she finds a new story: a woman who realises that home can be (and has been, for her) a prison; that a home where she is mastered is no home. That she can move.<br />
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Livesey's not the first to uncover this taking-flight of Jane into the Eyre. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/14/solace-of-road-siobhan-dowd" target="_blank">Siobhan Dowd's <i>Solace of the Road</i></a> tells an even more modern story, of a fourteen year old girl called Holly Hogan who runs away from her foster home in London in an attempt to return to her lost mother in Ireland. Taking only a wig, a copy of <i>Jane Eyre</i> and a nom de voyage, Solace too meets kindness and cruelty (both new and remembered), good luck and awful accidents. Postmodernly, she muses on the resonance of her fate with Jane's, drawing on her knowledge of the only school book she'd ever liked to understand her own journey, especially when she separated from her possessions and stilled by missing a train.<br />
<br />
As its title suggests, the sensation of movement offers solace -- at the very least, the solace of choosing to leave a situation, choosing a goal and aiming for it. In Livesey's and Bronte's novels, walking is a solace in itself, both the movement of the body and the opportunity for solitude and observation. Modern transport extends that solace, enabling Gemma/Jean and Holly/Solace to travel farther (and faster) than Jane: not only around the country, but into themselves and their futures. <div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-13256171568184440942012-08-30T01:32:00.001+01:002012-08-30T01:32:28.818+01:00Doorstoppers & Other ExcusesThe Alexandria Quartet.<br />
The Master and Margarita.<br />
Star Maker. (And Last and First Men.)<br />
Ilium. And, indeed, the Iliad.<br />
<br />
It's been a summer of big books: physically large and intellectually capacious. Each of them plays crazy games with scale, whisking the reader from 1930s Moscow to Herod's Jerusalem to Walpurgisnacht and back, or billions of years into the future and light-years across space, or into the perception of character after character viewing the same compressed events. <br />
<br />
Hence the radio silence. Not only because reading the books demands time and attention, but because I've been obliquely focused on trying to work out how they do what they do: shifting scale (and even tone) yet following a thread; offering both a gripping narrative and a theory of narration as a way of being, a metaphysics.<br />
<br />
There's no diagram, or even argument, I can offer: this apprehension is not outwardly analytical (that energy has been taken up with Margaret Tait and Maya Deren). It's a kind of proprioception, a thinking out of the corner of the mind. It doesn't (just) demand a graphed structural analysis but an observation of both the text and the reading experience.<br />
<br />
I am trying to put into words something that remains, importantly and resolutely, unverbalised in my thinking. Not to mystify it, but to allow it to operate without the intensive censorial forces that operate in second-order thinking. It's as if I push the process wilfully into the unconscious, even though it is willed and analytical.<br />
<br />
But perhaps that makes sense, because at the same time -- in writing -- I am trying to move unconscious processes into conscious access without compromising them; subjecting them to the rational order of the alphabet, syntax and literary history (among other constraints). And perhaps that's why the Alexandria Quartet is the text that most haunts me, as a story of exactly that process: it's a book about a writer turning his most intimate experiences over in words, only to be forced to re-view them through others' (equally unstable) perceptions. Durrell was well-read in Freud: in the books, that's mostly apparent in the metaphysics of sex, but sex -- and Justine -- are (as in de Sade, to whom the book is dedicated epigraphicallu) figures of the operation of the unconscious.<br />
<br />
Bulgakov's rowdy, melancholy novel is also a series of interlinked incompossible iterations that try to capture the internal truth of the writing process. Folded into the external bleak comedy of bumbling, pompous producers, publishers and poets -- all the external apparatus of the literary industry -- is a burnt novel about a man who keeps writing the wrong thing (Herod) -- and bridging the two, the figure of the Lovers.<br />
<br />
Even Olaf Stapledon's treatise (he never called it a novel) is framed by the device of the Lovers, as the unnamed narrator contemplates his partnership as a model of the forces holding together and driving forward the universe -- well aware of the fragility of the relationship, and of relationship itself.<br />
<br />
Ilium, Dan Simmons' acclaimed take on the Iliad, is also about text -- but about reading rather than writing. It's less honest -- no, less sincere -- than the other three books. But it's interesting that modish, tech-savvy SF should still be so concerned with high EuroWestern literary culture, and indeed with the physical object of the book and the skill of reading, not to mention authenticity. It feels very conservative compared to the others.<br />
<br />
The inevitable fate of genre fiction? Of postmodernism compared to the modern? I don't think so. Its scale remains compelling (the book as object again). Other questions: all books by white men. It's true that few women essay texts on this scale. Or if they do, they are often forgotten or ignored. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy is up next for re-reading: definitely a metaphysics of generation and culture. And Abdouramen Waberi's In the United States of Africa after that (when it arrives). There is something about a big, ambitious book -- a book that restructures the reader's spacetime -- that I need right now. Not just the shift of scale or play of ideas. Not escapism or hand-ache. Ambition? Edge? The limits of the novel form? Yes.<br />
<br />
More though: a teemingness that presents other minds observing the crisis of their time in all its awful complexity, and turning insistently to language, thought, literature as media for that complexity and as a bulwark against the awfulness. A Romantic, humanist notion, no doubt, to prefer books to protests, and unresolved contradictory masses of ideas propounded by flawed beings to hard and fast manifesti. But the need for expansiveness -- spacetime to think, to be in the full multilayeredness of being in history and a body -- that's what these books offer. Now, how can I do that in my work?<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-90398599431530745602011-11-18T15:52:00.001+00:002011-11-20T14:39:06.512+00:00In Tents/Intense, or Why Be Outside When You Could Be Inside?1. In Tents<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 23: 42-43)</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If you want to save souls - and who doesn't - then a tent seems to be the best kind of temporary structure. It is a metaphor for this provisional life of ours - without foundations and likely to blow over. It is a romance with the elements. The wind blows, the tent billows, who here feels lost and alone? Answer - all of us…<br />
In a tent you feel sympathy with others even when you don't know them. The fact of being in a tent together is a kind of bond. (Jeanette Winterson, <i>Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?</i> p.71)</blockquote>
October in the Jewish suburbs where I grew up was Tent City, so it felt entirely appropriate that <a href="http://occupylsx.org/" target="_blank">Occupy the London Stock Exchange</a> should pitch itself outside the Tabernacle on the intermediate weekend of Sukkot (Tabernacles).<br />
<br />
Sukkot was as close as I got to camping, on the reckoning that Jews had had their fill of nomadic life long ago. All those patriarchs and matriarchs welcoming angels at their tent flaps were a thing of the past. We were intent on settlement, presented as the natural desire of a people forced into exile repeatedly, and then much mocked for their wandering, to stop, and be safe. Unlike the Pentecostal sect in which Jeanette Winterson grew up, Jews don't do tent revivalism or metaphors for provisional life.<br />
<br />
But once a year, a little like middle-class kids heading to Glastonbury to 'rough it', we ate all our meals (with added daddy-long-legs dressing) under cover of leaves. With much swearing at his tools (hallmark of the bad craftsman) my father would erect the requisite booth. Hadar trees (Biblically mandated) being in short supply in North London, pine uprights and cross braces not dissimilar from the materials of our flatpack self-assembly beds were substituted, draped in a double thickness of flyblown plastic sheeting. As the trees in our garden were generally losing their leaves by this point in the year, leafy branches were purchased at the garden centre to create the 'roof.'<br />
<br />
The letter imitating (and thus diminishing) the spirit, one could say. There was nothing natural about our sukkah; the natural world was something to be feared, despised and bug-sprayed, the opposite of culture, domesticity and divinity. God, of course, created the animals, mountains, etc - but that was just the prototype. Jewish life 2.0 took place indoors, estranged not only from nomadic, but also agricultural, life, smoothly assimilated into the post-industrial West. The prayer book held blessings to be recited on seeing certain animals and on seeing the little folk, and I only learned the latter. It seemed more likely to me.<br />
<br />
But for seven days, that world-building aeon, we suffered the wind and rain and late, last insect life, claggy inside our plastic booth like overcoated end-of-pier mermaids. And on Shemini Atzeret, we returned - with abject gratitude - to the warm embrace of the dining room. Saved from the outside world for another year. It seemed inevitable, and appropriate, that the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/16/newsid_2533000/2533219.stm" target="_blank">Great Storm of 1987</a> should occur as Shemini Atzeret slept into Simchat Torah. Sukkahs, held together with last year's nails and a prayer, were scattered to the four winds while their owners rested in the knowledge that they no longer had to eat in them.<br />
<br />
The overall message being 'outside bad, inside good.' Outside the house, outside the community, outside God's embrace, you are lost to the wind, and a tent is no protection. Homemaking was the task of the Jewish woman, with the traditional tools of the exorcist: bread crumbs, books and candles. That warm, bosomy fantasy of home is emotively exemplified in Primo Levi's poem 'If This is a Man', which opens with an address to 'You who live safe / In your warm houses' ('Voi che vivete sicuri / Nelle vostre tiepidi case'), in contrast to those exposed and expelled from the domestic as a sign of the human. <br />
<br />
But because Levi is an excoriatingly honest writer, he makes clear that the safety of those warm houses is a fantasy, one that is at once dependent on (ignoring) the exclusion of others from the boundaries of security, and on the precarious and temporary nature of that security itself.<br />
<br />
God had the right idea, after all (not something I readily admit): a week of eating dinner in a booth should remind us that the security we seek and cherish is provisional, haphazard, and exclusionary. That we should live the '<a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/112-precarious-life" target="_blank">precarious life</a>' of vulnerability and dependability to others that Judith Butler advocates. Instead, it made us flee back into the consoling embrace of sofas, sideboards and second dishwashers, into the pretence that four brick walls could not be blown down by the Big Bad Wolf.<br />
<br />
No wonder the temporary tent cities erected across the globe are freaking out the settled folk. As Jay Griffiths points out in <a href="http://www.jaygriffiths.com/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Wild: An Elemental Journey</a>, the animosity between settlers and nomads is perhaps the oldest violent binary in human history. The tent cities of the Occupy movement are like those of Sukkot: voluntary, intentionally provisional, intensely visible and highly symbolic. They quote the form of, but are not, the residential tent cities of necessity/desperation that are called 'shanty towns' or not called anything at all but swept away, as the <a href="http://action.web.ca/home/housing/alerts.shtml?x=2509&AA_EX_Session=bf3bdcb2d1cb9544d74efba233e4a349" target="_blank">Toronto municipal government</a> did for the visit of the IOC in 2001.<br />
<br />
That's not to say they are not pragmatic and useful: some Occupations have worked to provide housing and shelter for many people living on the streets (although this has also been a source of some conflict within the core Occupy movement, which is largely from the settled middle class; thanks to <a href="http://maysie.ca/" target="_blank">Maysie</a> for linking to this <a href="http://www.poormagazine.org/node/4158" target="_blank">excellent article</a> from POOR magazine on the settled/settler attitudes operative at many of the Occupations; more on that at the end), as well as a free meeting place for discussion and connection that is increasingly hard to organise or discover in our increasingly privatised cities - the libraries and Workers' Institutes that Winterson remembers from her childhood in Accrington being slowly erased or, more insidiously, institutionalised into pay-to-play.<br />
<br />
Perhaps Occupy, wherever it stands, is more like a revivalist tent than it cares to admit: a centre of charismatic speaking, gatheration, community feeling, action plans for saving souls, and the pragmatic and attractive benison of tea and sandwiches. A carnivalesque relief from the burden of maintaining our belief in the sanctity of property and the safety of houses. A moment of making a home in each other, while feeling the wind and rain on our faces. At <a href="http://poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com/2011/11/concrete-no-act-play.html" target="_blank">John Kinsella</a>'s reading at Tent City University, unlit and unheated, I found myself experiencing a fierce ecstasy (ex-stasis, standing outside) at the sound of the rain, at the billow of the canvas Winterson describes, at the provisional rawness of the moment and the solid warmth of the crowd inside. Kinsella's work speaks fiercely and precisely about the living world (acknowledging the problems and possibilities of that term, ie: defiantly not a 'nature' poet, as he <a href="http://poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-am-not-nature-poet.html" target="_blank">writes here</a>) and our interconnections with it: it's a knowing un-pastoral engaged with the astonishing violence of the settled towards what unsettles them, be it animal, vegetable or human Other(ed).<br />
<br />
While there's nothing to cheer or relish in the sadistic violence of police action against Occupiers, there is something ecstatic about the collapsible, moveable, resituable nature of this movement and its camps. The symbolic work of the carnival or revival is to be temporary and provisional and contingent, flexible and unexpected. 'We Shall Not Be Moved' as a song of protest re-interpreted to imply reclaiming all space as public, not putting down roots in a single spot and self-kettling into the illusion of stability.<br />
<br />
2. Outside In<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There was a person in me - a piece of me - however you want to describe it - so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace.<br />
That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage arid on the rest of the territory…<br />
The lost furious vicious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn't the creative Jeanette - she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life. (<i>Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?</i> p.71)</blockquote>
But here's the thing: we all need to be held. In Sandrine Bonnaire's beautiful documentary about her sister, who is living with autism, <i><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/jun/20/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic27" target="_blank">Elle s'appelle Sabine</a></i>, the therapist at the care centre (which Sandrine shamed the French government into co-funding after her earlier investigations revealed the brutalising conditions in which Sabine had been imprisoned for several years), tells Sandrine that (and I paraphrase) she interprets autism as a disorder in which a person struggles, more than normal, to sense the boundaries between self and world. They live completely without walls.<br />
<br />
Temple Grandin, the celebrated animal psychologist and an autism sufferer, thinks similarly. Studying cattle as they massed together, she realised that there was something profoundly comforting to her, as well, in the idea of being 'cow crushed': having her head gently but firmly immobilised. Sabine's therapist argues that some of the key 'anti-social' behaviours associated with autism can be read, compassionately, as sufferers attempting (and failing) to find limits, boundaries that will stand. Autism is an amplification of both the necessity and impossibility of finding safety, something we all experience.<br />
<br />
As Winterson reveals in her memoir, adoption can be another similar amplification. She writes movingly of her struggle to redefine and then create a home -- at once bricks-and-mortar, and interpersonal -- never more so than when she says that, after childhood experiences of being locked in a coal cellar and of having no privacy in her own bedroom, she only feels at home in her house with the doors wide open. Winterson's solution, her route to plenitude, is fascinating because paradoxical. It's a poem: to feel safe behind an open door.<br />
<br />
To me this is a heart-striking way of thinking through the vexed question of outside and inside that we experience in the home as a manifestation of the body, and which informs not only domestic and relational negotiations, but the very idea (I think) of property and its 'proper' protection. We build walls to shelter from the storm -- but the very existence of those walls reminds us that we are not, and cannot be, safe (because the storm is inside us). So we put locked doors in the walls. Then we alarm them. Then we build electrified iron fences around our properties, with armed guards outside them: each gesture that should make us feel safe(r) simultaneously reminding us that we feel unsafe. Freud says that's how the fetish works, constantly reminding us of the lack we want it to supply.<br />
<br />
I thought about the fetish of the house a lot while watching <a href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/uk-andrea-arnolds-wuthering-heights" target="_blank">Andrea Arnold's adaptation of <i>Wuthering Heights</i></a>, which - like Winterson's memoir - is a story of adoption, something that had never occurred to me before encountering the two texts concurrently. Arnold's 'controversial' casting of two dark-skinned British Caribbean actors to play Heathcliff (the controversy's utter risibility being that this casting is textually accurate) intensifies and crystallises the novel's passionate politics of love as the freedom from all oppressions, not least by focusing the viewer on Heathcliff's difference, his outsiderness. His inability to find and trust boundaries (both because they have been taken away, and because they are later used to exclude him) is performed in the film through a behaviour that is common for people living with autism: head-banging, a literal attempt to reimpose boundaries on the frightened and flailing self.<br />
<br />
As an adoptee (Mr. Earnshaw finds him on the streets of Liverpool), Heathcliff -- like Winterson -- is hungry for a home. The film suggests that he finds this home (safety) initially in a relationship with Catherine, and in the space of the moors where they are equals in, and equalled by, the force of the land and elements. Arnold's adaptation traces, subtly through costume, light and framing, the shift that occurs as Catherine is coerced into increasing identification with the domestic space of Wuthering Heights and then -- as her only possible escape from poverty and oppression -- with the wealthier domestic space of Thrushcross Grange, which, with its higher walls and refined wallpaper, appears to promise her security.<br />
<br />
Heathcliff, in exact opposition, is forced out of the house and into the stables, and into a labouring relation with (or rather, in alienation from) the land. What had once been an affective, ecstatic identification -- Heathcliff, moor, horse, wind, rain, desire -- is brutally inverted by Hindley's assertion of his power. Afraid, Hindley takes the associative chain and puts it in its cultural place: outside bad, animal bad, desire bad, Heathcliff bad. In turn, driven by Catherine's choice (that is not a choice: her coercive consent) to marry Edgar Linton for his money and property, Heathcliff becomes fixated on the values Hindley values. His revenge, when it comes, is propertied: he buys Wuthering Heights out from under the drunken Hindley, and (although Arnold leaves the unto-the-second-generation aspect out of the film) attains control of Thrushcross Grange through his daughter by Isabella Linton. Then he neglects both.<br />
<br />
The film ends with Heathcliff, having bought Hindley's son's birthright after breaking into the house the previous night, walking away from it. A film that's almost obsessively conscious of framing shots through windows, door frames, cracks, takes off into the moors for the final time (which is, in ritual time, the first and forever. Momentarily secure in his ownership of the Heights, Heathcliff also secures ownership of his memories of himself and Cathy playing un-house on the moors. It's an uneasy and untriumphant ending, a vicious revenge fantasy that Arnold does her best to unromanticise.<br />
<br />
Instead, she admits Heathcliff, in his grief for Catherine, to a temporary reprieve in his turning-away to the moors. And, in making him the point of view character of the film -- often framed in tight close-ups -- she brings us into the painfully uneasy, almost unnavigable relationship for Heathcliff between being held and being trapped. Central to this is the wall that borders Wuthering Heights, a marker between domestic and wild space. It's a tumbledown thing when young Heathcliff arrives, jumpable but jumbled enough to hide behind on the wild side. It's the only wall to his and Cathy's 'home', the divide they cross to come together.<br />
<br />
When Hindley assumes ownership of the Heights, he sets Heathcliff and Joseph to rebuilding the wall. In a scene that places slavery squarely in the heart of the English literary canon, Arnold has Heathcliff pounding rocks with a sledgehammer, building the wall that will keep him in/out. Defiant, Heathcliff downs tools to run about with Cathy, but this adventure leads them to the Lintons' house and a higher wall to scale -- a wall they fail to reach on the return in time to avoid the Lintons' dogs. While neither wall offers much physical challenge to the young, strong Heathcliff (and he continues to use the over-the-wall route to Thrushcross once he's a legitimate visitor), the social boundary of class and race hierarchy that they signify remains impassable. Until he buys his own walls.<br />
<br />
Winterson's description of her destructive, unheld, abandoned, angry aspect applies to Heathcliff too: the part of him that is a "war casualty" returns, takes over, makes him destroy the possibility of love-freedom. It's an anguishing spectacle (bewildering that so many people find it romantic). Arnold's version is unblinking on the bitter unstoppable replication of degradation and oppression. But the film also asks, not least in its casting choice, what other option does Heathcliff have? Beaten, spat at, abused, unhoused, made wild and degraded, what tools or skills or hopes has Heathcliff been given to do anything but aspire to unseat and replace his tormentors?<br />
<br />
That's the most frightening spectre the film offers: our society. Full of "lost furious vicious child[ren]," myself included, oppressed by walls that exclude us, and by walls that trap us, and by those that promise a safety whose lack they point to insistently.<br />
<br />
3. Unbuilding the Wall<br />
<br />
In Ursula Le Guin's <i>The Dispossessed</i>, the protagonist Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is lured from his revolutionary anarchist society to the fraught capitalist society that his parents left behind by the promise of research funding, time and space. It's a fantasy that, for those of us toiling in the bottom rungs of academia, is increasingly and apparently threadbare. Not only has the corporate university torn away the veils draping research in romantic notions of high-minded independence and social good, but the walls of the university themselves are utterly pervious. As students and faculty at Berkeley and UC Davis have encountered this week on their own campuses, the university is a walled institution, and will do whatever it takes to protect its walls.<br />
<br />
On his return -- possibly to death or disgrace -- Shevek comes with only one idea in mind: to unbuild walls. Specifically and literally the wall around the space port that had long prevented any curious anarchists from travelling off-planet to visit the decadent society on the planet that gleams in their night sky. But what that might open up is left open. What we're left with is Shevek, in orbit around his home, planning to land publicly and to meet protestors and supporters with 'open hands.' As <a href="http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en" target="_blank">Judith Butler has argued,</a> one thing the Occupy movement has
demonstrated is that there is no such given as public space or the
commons (the other side of the nostalgic/utopian fantasy of complete
intimate/domestic security is that of complete public freedom): public
space occurs where bodies declare themselves to be public, and that is a
risky business.<br />
<br />
Metaphorically and affectively, the walls we internalise -- our fears of abandonment and invasion, our sore lack of boundaries -- which we build outside us, and which are never high enough. And those walls persist in at Occupy: as a number of indigenous activists have pointed out, Wall Street has been Occupied for four centuries: as Ray Cook writes in <a href="http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/a-haudenosaunee-observation-of-the-ows" target="_blank">'A Haudenosaunee Observation of Occupy Wall Street'</a> (thanks again to Maysie for this link).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The children of the West (Americans) are fighting amongst themselves
(again) over distribution of a wealth that does not belong to them, a
wealth derived from Indigenous lands. The opportunity to redefine <a href="http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/business/" target="_self" title="ICTMN Business Page">wealth</a> based on a more realistic view of the earth and an understanding of man’s place may be now.</blockquote>
What's necessary is <a href="http://slowcialism.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/decolonize-wall-street-who-is-the-99-percent/" target="_blank">Decolonize Wall Street</a> / Oakland / Toronto / <a href="http://decolonize0vancouver.wordpress.com/tag/decolonize-vancouver/" target="_blank">Vancouver</a> (where the decolonisation struggle has become immediately and pressingly centred on the Keystone Pipeline) / Melbourne -- and even St. Paul's, in multiple complex ways. It's not just a change of vocabulary: to decolonise, rather than occupy, is to rethink the Eurowestern-dominated language of political protest at the same time as rethinking ideas of settlement, security and possession.<br />
<br />
We need to know, and acknowledge fully, the history of the
ground we stand on (which is never an island) in order to decolonise
it. I'm reading <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/02/eagle-of-the-ninth-rosemary-sutcliff" target="_blank"><i>The Eagle of the Ninth</i></a>
by Rosemary Sutcliffe with my students at Middlesex this week;
re-reading it, as I loved her books at about the same time I was
grizzling miserably in a sukkah. While all the stern bivouacing
adventures she puts her characters through never really filled me with
the call of the wild, re-reading the book I have a startling sense of
recognition: it's a book that's dramatically and passionately against
colonisation (even as it has a Roman soldier as a main character) and
slavery. The Britons have a coherent, complex culture (not the painted,
child-killing savagery seen in the film), one that even Romans might opt
into. The book made me think about Britain as a (multiply) colonised,
as well as colonising, country: Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans. In our historical fantasy, the loss of the commons has been, since the
Levellers of the English Civil War, associated with the Norman invasion. Can the British Empire be read as an acting-out of the scars of colonisation?<br />
<br />
The great skyline of London, from Hawksmoor's and Wren's churches via the British Museum and Tate Modern to the execrable Shard, is funded by, and founded on, British imperial ambitions (much as the great era of the English novel was concurrent with Empire, and few readings are, like Arnold's, bold and brave enough to look that imbrication squarely in the face). London glistens with money made in slave-trading and plantation-owning (both, in their day, supported by and enriching the Church), and now the new imperial hegemony of financial trading, which politicians on all sides are so revoltingly keen to keep in London. London is in urgent need of decolonising, as much by recognising this heritage as by the important investigative work by <a href="http://www.iainsinclair.org.uk/" target="_blank">Iain Sinclair</a> and Patrick Keillor (<a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/distribution/robinson_in_ruins" target="_blank">Robinson in Ruins</a>) into the creeping colonisation of both city and countryside by the military-industrial-financial complex.Occupy LSX shifted from its original target of Paternoster Square because that land is privately-owned and thus has bigger-better-stronger walls.<br />
<br />
So the invisible walls of capital are left unbroached while the visible walls, a rainbow of slogans, protests, mantras, shouts of joy, sit ecstatically outside St. Paul's. But the walls remain.<br />
<br />
4. Armour<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Water resounds like stock epithets, strains<br />
at our neglected gutters – tomorrow<br />
score-marks of run-off, potholes dusty hollows:<br />
the ground, a gullet, swallows the rain. (John Kinsella, 'Gullet,' <i>Armour</i>)</blockquote>
John Kinsella's latest collection, nominated for this year's TS Eliot prize, is called <a href="http://www.picador.com/Poetry/Collections/Armour" target="_blank"><i>Armour</i></a>. It's a strange title for a collection by an anarchist-pacifist poet. Hidden inside the bristling exterior of the word is its root: arm, the body part that has become militarised, a metaphor older than the Roman occupation of Britain. The body part we use to grasp, but also to hug; to punch, but also to help. Strong in and of itself, its strength extended by the fetishes of armour and weapons. How, the book asks, can we refind our arm (note the first-person plural: the arm as shared vulnerability and mutual assistance, as never possessed by the fiction of the 'I') under the armour?<br />
<br />
Sitting under the rain in the tent at Occupy St. Paul's, listening to Kinsella's open field compositions crossed by rail lines and songlines and atomic scars and toxic salt pans and family journeys and bird migrations and long memories, I was scared. Scared by the intensity of Tent City. It's not just the numinous aura of the bells of St. Paul's, or the shadowy twilight in the unlit tent, or the silent, focused listening of the people huddled on cushions (different in quality from any other poetry reading I've been to: seeking something different in the listening). It's the thought of uncovering our arms and unbuilding walls, person by person. <br />
<br />
And also of putting our arms to work building new kinds of walls: shelter is a paramount animal need. Walls can protect, gather, offer communion -- but they can also be an armour of exclusion. Is it possible to have one without the other? A house that is defined as home by its open door? To carry, even within brick walls, the thought that this is but a booth? At the end of Gwyneth Jones' <i>Bold as Love</i> series, the Chinese army arrives in revolutionary England with its secret weapon: a nanoculture that produces a living fabric called <i>di</i>. The walls of the Chinese occupation are alive. They billow as a tent billows. They are provisional. They are a recognition of where magic meets technology. They are a utopian dream.<br />
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But we are all made of living fabric. We are <i>di</i>. Maybe we can't build houses that can change shape and move, can fold down and be erected and expanded at need. But within ourselves, we can make an inside that is open to the outside. Uncovered arms, released from flak jackets and badges and wristwatches and bags and all the other forms of armour (defensive aggression) we carry. Arnold's <i>Wuthering Heights</i> stops before the end of the book with the hope that Heathcliff can recall himself: that outside, on the moors, he can be free enough in himself (of others' oppression) to stop the cycle. To grant others' freedom. If Heathcliff -- beaten, abused, degraded -- can go outside, leave the 'filthy abandoned lair' that is deep inside the fantasy of home, can't we?<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-56019700409196987822011-10-07T12:57:00.000+01:002011-10-07T12:57:02.005+01:00Fascinating Ada: There are more women scientists than you think, and some of them are filmmakers and poets7th October is <a href="http://findingada.com/">Ada Lovelace Day</a>: a global opportunity to celebrate Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace and the <a href="http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html">founder of scientific computing</a>. It's both moving and vexing that Steve Jobs is not here to celebrate Ada's work with Charles Babbage on the Difference Engine which made modern computers possible.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiK3I-FcuhG6olLSxvaXbLg6N13JLT_jcu0Rvl7gqs3Qxs57CVObghz8EfG1L1lATnjBhsk7VWPZdSrhWguAKIyK9qmn5-5qNyRA_IzbEY18SM_ofBa9gs55yNKgt7fAlKqXza/s1600/Babbage-Difference-Engine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiK3I-FcuhG6olLSxvaXbLg6N13JLT_jcu0Rvl7gqs3Qxs57CVObghz8EfG1L1lATnjBhsk7VWPZdSrhWguAKIyK9qmn5-5qNyRA_IzbEY18SM_ofBa9gs55yNKgt7fAlKqXza/s320/Babbage-Difference-Engine.jpg" width="292" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles Babbage's Difference Engine</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I first encountered Ada as a fictional character: the daring hero of William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, which saluted its heroine by inventing steampunk to devise an alternate 19th century in which the <a href="http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/thedifferenceengine.html">Difference Engine</a> had been more than a prototype. But before I met here there, in my Cybertext Theory and Practice class (which also introduced me to cyborg feminism and feminist philosophers of science such as <a href="http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/biography/">Donna Haraway</a>, <a href="http://literature.britishcouncil.org/sadie-plant">Sadie Plant</a>, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/321487.html">N. Katherine Hayles</a> and <a href="http://sandystone.com/">Sandy Stone</a>), I'd encountered her in Lynn Hershmann Leeson's <a href="http://www.industrycentral.net/director_interviews/LHL01.HTM">Conceiving Ada</a>, starring a young Tilda Swinton.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LmTjqS2w20o" width="420"></iframe>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.lynnhershman.com/">Leeson</a>'s early video projects and online installations are a reminder that science and technology are not only driven by experiments in laboratories. As Haraway argues in "<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html">The Cyborg Manifesto</a>," the military-industrial complex is the testing ground for many innovations, but -- from tempera to Pixar -- the arts have also provided a messy, alternative laboratory where 'discoveries' can be made. These may not have the commercial applications or textbook documentation of what we think of as scientific research, but they are part of technologically-driven cultural change.<br />
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Ada, daughter of Lord Byron, was a writer and translator as much as a mathematician: working at the tail-end of the Enlightenment, where arts and sciences could be pursued inter connectedly as "philosophy" by someone such as Coleridge, Lovelace is not only a reminder of the achievements by women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), but of the close interrelations in experimental thought. So it's perhaps no surprise that <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/315">Gertrude Stein</a>, perhaps the most ferociously experimental of Modernist writers, received a training in rigorous scientific process studying <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/2711342">experimental psychology</a> with William James.<br />
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At the same time (the turn of the nineteenth century) <a href="http://www.pitt.edu/~gillis/dance/loie.html">Loïe Fuller</a> (a close friend of Marie Curie's) was developed a number of innovations in relation to her dance films. Twenty years later in Hollywood, <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/exclusive/arzner.php">Dorothy Arzner</a>, the first woman to make Hollywood features (and still the most productive), famously invented the boom microphone. <br />
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Although experimental filmmaker <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/newsandviews/comment/women-film-writers-wall-of-inspiration.php">Maya Deren</a> held no patents, her films and critical writing make clear her engagement with cinematic technology. Her development of creative editing to free film narrative from realist strictures of time and place is as related to quantum physics as to her studies in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. For Deren, cinema was a site of experiment in its natural philosophical meaning, motivated by her youthful Trotskyism (particularly Trotsky's belief that artists would perform the experiments that produced the new society): aesthetics, scientific ideas and political ideology all converging to formulate a future with a difference.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3pTVbQilDqY" width="560"></iframe><br />
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Deren's work and legacy is being celebrated with a season at the BFI, opening with a <a href="http://as part of their Deren season">conference tomorrow</a> -- there will be a focus on her pioneering work as an ethnographic filmmaker, but also consideration for her technological innovations: her recognition of the camera as a difference engine.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-33192212583058198422011-09-06T15:36:00.001+01:002011-09-06T15:36:04.824+01:00Not Drowning but ReadingI think I forgot how to read.<br />
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I think I developed -- what to call it -- an affective dyslexia. I could make letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into narratives, narratives into worlds. I could be excited, moved, engaged by what I read. Even made to gasp by its audacity, wit, anger, beauty.
But still: I think I forgot how to read. How to read as I did when I was a child. How to be taken over by reading.<br />
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The only childhood photograph of me that still exists (there was a bonfire mandated by vanity) shows me in the corner of a hotel lounge, my hair falling over my face, my face turned down into the pages of a book. Out of the frame, undoubtedly, my siblings and the other kids staying at the hotel are running around making mayhem. I'm the girl in the corner.<br />
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The girl in the book.<br />
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She grew up, and to all intents and purposes remained the girl in the book. I've predicated my working life on reading: as an academic, a critic, a bookseller and a writer. But as reading has become work, it has lost its edge. An edge, because the imperative of articulation has also whetted reading's keenness for me, has made it social and reciprocal and pliable and playable. But a private has been foregone, an inwardness of the reading experience. A writer/critic can no longer be the girl in the corner: I am answerable to an (indeterminate, possibly fictional) public. And that's the whetstone that keeps me sharp.<br />
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Reading-writing enabled the girl to grow up *in* the book, but also to use the skills learnt therein to affect life beyond the pages. Books are no longer my only safe space. 'Reading', as a complex and rewarding labour of awareness and articulation, has superseded 'reading' as an immersive line of flight. It keeps me present and engaged. If I want to lose myself, there's music (which I don't make, and rarely write about), contemporary dance and live performances of all kinds.<br />
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So maybe it's no surprise that it took a book in which rock and roll fuses religion, politics and scientific breakthroughs to re-immerse me, to shake my senses, to absorb me completely that I'm missing bus stops, tripping down bus stairs, gasping up from the pages as if hauled out of a dream or the sea. For 'a book' read 'books': nothing more satisfying than a series, Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love five-parter.<br />
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But the point here isn't to analyse or articulate why. It's to state the rush that has returned. Adults are supposed to put away childish things, like reading when they should be working/socialising/engaging in adulthood. But there is something that feels undeniably mature, more adult, in reading with the rush: being open to immersion. What was a necessity as a child now requires a kind of courage, to drop the critical armature. To risk (after a fashion) addiction.<br />
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<blockquote>
<b>What's that? The thrill of transgression? Fuck no, <i>boring</i>. It's the thrill of permission. The moment when the world says <i>yes!</i> to something they told you was impossible, was forbidden: more of that, always more of that.</b> Gwyneth Jones, Band of Gypsys
</blockquote>
A sexually-charged science fiction/fantasy hybrid with radical leftist politics (but more concerned with administrative detail), a sprawling narrative structure, narrative voice that drops in and out of different characters in close third (sometimes in the same paragraph): something they told you was impossible, something that works by its continual increase, its refusal of closure.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-19367618442531066392011-08-23T13:27:00.009+01:002011-08-23T14:50:27.848+01:00"anyone can do it, if they want to be peculiar enough" [AL Kennedy]<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR7tyTL40KfWF7AEZL_qclDh-0HF2boPEAbHpUKDf3gH6FgLs9dvh1Mu4zeyI86VamQj_pxdCKlZD74JxsNxE6KjEXXng4ZdV6SVc7hQ3eH85bwUMbQ7Ej48wuei68aT666Vrh/s1600/bluebook2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 197px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR7tyTL40KfWF7AEZL_qclDh-0HF2boPEAbHpUKDf3gH6FgLs9dvh1Mu4zeyI86VamQj_pxdCKlZD74JxsNxE6KjEXXng4ZdV6SVc7hQ3eH85bwUMbQ7Ej48wuei68aT666Vrh/s320/bluebook2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5644030053525429362" /></a>
<br />Thanks, AL Kennedy. <a href="http://www.a-l-kennedy.co.uk/index.php/books/84-blue-book">The Blue Book</a> pretty much cancelled me. With its sleight-of-hand whereby a seeming cynicism, all-pervasive, is turned into bittersweet sensation, the absoluteness of open emotion. No, not sleight-of-hand: that's to slight the magic. Beth, the protagonist, loves the word 'prestidigitation', and Kennedy, I suspect, does too: loves it as a diversion from what she's really doing. "Look, all hands/no magic," The Blue Book says. Fiction is just cold reading, performed chillingly in interstitial chapters that address "you," building up a portrait of the reader through small ephemera that seem impossibly accurate -- until you read a description of how Arthur (Art, haha) and Beth use informers and cold reading to build similarly accurate (because close observation marks us all, generically, human) pictures of the audiences for their psychic shows.
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<br />But Kennedy's a Penn-and-Teller of a magician: even as she appears to unfold the secret of the trick, shaming the reader for being gulled and the writer for gulling, she recuperates that shame by finding, in it, a necessary generosity, large and stunning. A final reveal that Kennedy's bone-deep irony and bitterness (as exemplified by her endlessly readable columns on writing and politics for the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/alkennedy?INTCMP=SRCH">Guardian</a>) are manifestations of a skinning, shredding love. She lurves humans, she does. To which she responds: "No, I don't. I don't love humans. And if you tell anyone, I'll kill you." [A for Anyanka, anyone?]
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<br />Almost impossible to read, The Blue Book: I can't imagine what it was like to write (and I don't have to: what the columns don't cover, the book describes -- as having fingers in the guts of the grieving). Kennedy's advice to would-be fake psychics - "anyone can do it, if they want to be peculiar enough" - is, I think, also her advice to writers. It's a bloody peculiar thing to do, make up lives and codes and patterns, lead the reader by the nose, for their own good. And then there's that "enough," referring to both "want" [if they want it enough] and "peculiar" [to be peculiar enough]. In each case, the word is an empty silk top hat with a rabbit (not) in it, the opposite of what it seems. Enough means "there is no enough." Not in a Zen "there is no spoon" way. In the sense that anyone reaching into that peculiar space will - must - find that the limits and boundaries keep falling away.
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<br />Which is why, despite being over-awed by the majority of the book to the point of burning my manuscript and keyboard, I found the very end made me go: huh. It was the second such 'huh' in as many days, the first belonging to Meg Rosoff's <a href="http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/books/there-is-no-dog/">There is No Dog</a>, a book that answers one of life's most pressing questions: is God a spoilt, sex-obsessed eternal adolescent boy (who happens to be very, very good-looking and occasionally inspired)?. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6rFH0cv6U6WQtFqGBj7_hvsLaTOfeAriY1R2L0UcnNPhv8TuUdoApFbV0yzHURhrMXR3QxKb86mk30ZxRLrknp5BjZ5P_kpgKqLBWyGGgL8Rlc6Eej_5GPXzt3NSXSYmnWlz-/s1600/there_is_no_dog_tshirt-p235283488095082961trlf_4001-375x375.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6rFH0cv6U6WQtFqGBj7_hvsLaTOfeAriY1R2L0UcnNPhv8TuUdoApFbV0yzHURhrMXR3QxKb86mk30ZxRLrknp5BjZ5P_kpgKqLBWyGGgL8Rlc6Eej_5GPXzt3NSXSYmnWlz-/s320/there_is_no_dog_tshirt-p235283488095082961trlf_4001-375x375.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5644032593138962450" /></a> The book's answer is 'yes and no', and it's absolutely brilliant. Like The Blue Book (oddly, Rosoff's book is also blue -- night sky in the UK edition, summer's day in the US), There is No Dog is about authorship and authority (and Rosoff writes just as well as Kennedy about the impossibilities and painful peculiarities of authorship on <a href="http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/2011/08/23/writers-secret-revealed-the-muse-is-a-bastard/">her blog</a>), about taking dazzling narrative leaps, and about how absolutely amazingly amazing sex is. Well, desire. It has more testicles and wanking (or, curiously, "wanting" according to my spellcheck) than an episode of the In Betweeners, but it can't find a way out of the conundrum of desire -- either God's desire for Lucy, which causes the weather to go haywire (phew, not global warming then, off the hook for that one), or Lucy's desire for the eminently unsuitable Bob (God's actual name), which causes her to lose a capybara. No-one else even likes Bob -- Kennedy's Beth finds that her father feels likewise about Art.
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<br />And yet each novel offers Romantic Lurve as the Solution: coupling up being, apparently, as good as it can get. Lucy sees the Error of her Ways as far is Bob is concerned, but there is (of course) the Better Bet waiting to Complete Her. And Beth hardly marries Art in a flourish of tulle and confetti, but the end of the book uses the reader's hope to bring them together. Or rather, to hold them in a limbo that is only possible because it is suffused with our hope for their togetherness, tempered by the knowledge that they have each done Terrible Things. This is a problem. And there it was again last night at the end of Miranda July's <a href="http://thefuturethefuture.com/">The Future</a>. <iframe width="560" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/y_l05MZ9y8A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<br />What I love about all three of these works (The Blue Book, There is No Dog, The Future) is that they ARE peculiar enough, as peculiar as the world is and in love with that peculiarity. And I love that all three of them are about hesitancy, complexity, doubt, multiplicity, indeterminacy and really, really great sex. Let's hear it for female desire and amazing depictions of orgasmic embodiment. But… but… but… is what lies beyond orgasm really, only, ever able to be: waiting. For him to come and find you. Really? I'm all for vulnerability, openness, companionship and even (I have problems with the word and its history of asymmetry and violence) love, but I feel like there's a dual, interrelated problem here: neither the novel nor love is peculiar enough.
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqQtbueA6ZcdlFsHF_oC2HlooNjPHDCKkYk44YADvWlwRUOQj1Nid0Mqht4GhIB0XecDbGhAGwJhD-d5vkneo1mUWftLTAWb9g1ghEl3vo9WoP2Gl444oQso94u5Tuf5JjRg6D/s1600/Screen+Shot+2011-08-23+at+14.12.41.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 41px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqQtbueA6ZcdlFsHF_oC2HlooNjPHDCKkYk44YADvWlwRUOQj1Nid0Mqht4GhIB0XecDbGhAGwJhD-d5vkneo1mUWftLTAWb9g1ghEl3vo9WoP2Gl444oQso94u5Tuf5JjRg6D/s320/Screen+Shot+2011-08-23+at+14.12.41.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5644038836470855618" /></a>
<br />To deal with the peculiar -- the particular, individuated, sui generis -- is to deal with the shift in the word's meaning, its encoding that whatever is remarkable and particular to a person/situation/place/object is deemed to be an enormity: that the individuated (not in the sense of individualised trainers), the contortions of a specific psyche, the instances of a history and their working-out, needs must be socially conformed. The novel as a form trembles on the cusp of the Enlightenment argument for individuation and utilitarian/economic arguments for the mass. It serves both tyrannical masters. Characters must be peculiar - but that peculiarity has to be either condemned or smoothed out. Kennedy is a genius of the peculiar: her short stories often leave me gasping at their intensity of intuition.
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<br />But the novel (and the novelistic narrative film) is resolutely not a peculiar form: no time-based narrative really can be, unless taken totally apart and restructured according to other, rigorous rules. At first, I thought The Future was making these new rules -- in relation to films such as Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann, which is similarly concerned with wayward dailiness whose cyclicity cuts against the linearity of cinematic time; or Sally Potter's Tango Lesson, which uses the temporality and hapticity of dance to create an unusual rhythm that twines, thyrsus-like, around the forward movement of the narrative -- but it abandons or unravels them.
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<br />What derails The Future, There is No Dog and The Blue Book is the insistence of coupled love as closure. This is not peculiar. It's neither particular nor strange. It's normative. It conforms (to) the novelistic shape of narrative, trapping its characters, foregoing larger questions of responsibility and forgiveness, questions about authorship in fact. All three texts hold up their injured paws at the end and ask us to love them -- <i>for</i> all their flaws and failures and half-starts and lack of finesse, which is peculiar and which draws me to these particular artists (artists of particularity). But to love these books (and their authors) all the same: to look away, to be sleighted. To love the form, even as we've been shown its foibles and failings. To love its reliance on (and our [manufactured] desire for) closure -- even as each text works towards openness, that expectation is invoked and so The Future feels hesitantly, indecisively unfinished rather than open; There is No Dog has its romantic ending by deus ex machina (in a new sense, but still); and The Blue Book asks its reader to become Art, and thus to be a figure of desire -- and then to desire.
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<br />There are other ways, I think: they're rare and complicated and perhaps too peculiar for anyone not peculiar enough. Charlotte Brontë's last novel Villette chooses a deeply perverse form of waiting-that-is-not-waiting, a wild temporal and affective leap, that perhaps explains why the novel is not as popular as Jane Eyre, which delivers: "Reader, I married him" (although Canadian poet <a href="http://www.kipress.ca/">KI Press</a> has a terrific sequence in Spine that explores the odd taste left in the mouth by that marriage). <a href="http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/08/sophie-mayer-reviews-kangurashi-no.html">Reviewing Arrietty</a> for Eyewear, I suggested that <blockquote>Arrietty doesn’t give the audience what it wants, but what it needs. Rather than a closing a satisfying narrative about how non-human Others (toys, pets) should love (ie: submit adoringly) their human masters and conform to a human-shaped world, as the third Toy Story film did relentlessly, the end of Arrietty opens out into risk, an unfamiliar gesture for a children’s film. Arrietty lights out for the territory.</blockquote> That movement towards freedom (independence within relationality) is a movement towards the peculiar, towards a space in which to be individuated without being isolationist. Anne Carson, who says she wants to be "unbearable," produces that space for her protagonist Geryon, at the end of Autobiography of Red -- and in the epilogue interview with Stesichorus/Gertrude Stein, who speaks about the vocation of peculiarity as an unblinkingness. That painful difference again: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/aug/22/kristin-hersh-memoir-interview-edinburgh">Kristin Hersh talks brutally about it</a> in today's Guardian, about whether making music is worth the elation, depression, possession she experiences.
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<br />Maybe, brought up in the Messianic tradition of Judaism, in which waiting for Him is all, I hate it particularly -- and find that model infuses so many Western texts. Both the waiting and the satisfaction, which is another form of waiting (happily ever after, really? Surely not. Surely just waiting for another in the catalogue of Terrible Things that make up the shape of narrative). I like endings that are beginnings: open, ecstatic. Endings that leave behind the lack that the story sets out the start: I want this. I don't get it. Fine: I'm free of wanting. That's a story of creativity too: I want to make this. I don't make it perfectly. Fine: I'm free of wanting to make it. It's made. It's gone. Paradoxical Undressing suggests that Hersh makes/records music in order to be free of its wanting, its demands on her. For music, we could put: love, humanity, the form, creativity, this one person, whatever. But at the end of the interview, she suggests something, an ending, peculiar enough: <blockquote>"But what if we die?" she says. "What if we die and there's music everywhere?" And she laughs at what a great cosmic joke that would be.</blockquote> What if, at the end, the desire that has hounded us -- the writing, the loving, the person -- is just "everywhere"? What if the bond of demand is relinquished, if we go into that which we want and wants us, but without want?
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<br />I don't know how to write that kind of ending: elsewhere in the interview, Hersh suggests such an ending is suicidal. But when I read those lines, I know that's what I want to find/to write. And so begins the Buddhist conundrum of not wanting to not want. Enough/not enough.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-14684950289236245292011-07-27T13:36:00.004+01:002011-07-28T18:28:00.465+01:00"Death is now. And now. And now," or, The Work of Life in the Age of Digital Pre-ProductionThis was written during the Liars' set at ATP: I'll Be Your Mirror on Sunday. I've just learnt the acronym TLDR [too long, didn't read] so warning: this is going to be a long post. The Liars, like many of the bands playing ATP, are pretty committed to sustain (Godspeed You! Black Emperor were averaging 15 minutes a song). I'll try not to drone on, but I want the post to reflect the immersive experience, the drench not just of NOIZE, although Swans in particular certainly brought that (to the extent that I've been feeling strange and deafened the last few days, like I should be hearing that constant barrage of sound), but of sustained attention and development. And the half-formed thoughts it prompted, which I am leaving somewhat fragmented, totally unsubstantiated and rather feedbacky. If you want a (partial) review of the event with some very atmospheric photos, check out the multi-contributor diary on <a href="http://www.wearsthetrousers.com/2011/07/review-atp-ill-be-your-mirror-london/">Wears the Trousers</a>, my favourite music blog. It's particularly good on PJ Harvey and Portishead.<br />My ATP experience began with PJ Harvey on Saturday night (well, with the line-ups for chips, but let's skip that experience of duration), and with the odd realisation that I was framing my experience of the concert through the expectation that I would write about it here as part of the irregular series of female performers. That sense is nothing new, in a sense: I watch films and read books with pen in hand, even when not for publication. I've also reviewed dance and live theatre, but never live music (<a href="http://www.soundandmusic.org/features/sound-film/live-scores-and-spectacular-sound">Birds' Eye View film and music extravaganza</a> aside). While live music often prompts poem-thoughts and leads me to grappling for a notebook in my bag while going 'woooooooooh', it's not an experience that I filter critically or philosophically, despite adolescent plans to be a music journo. Being utterly unmusical, I can't <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/alexross">Alex Ross</a> it. It's embodied: sensory saturation (which isn't to say that its production and performance is unintellectual, or that I'm not learning and thinking). But while trying to catch a glimpse of PJ Harvey's extraordinary feather-hair arrangement, and feeling England shake, I was also framing her performance in words -- and, worse, in the viewfinder of my phone's camera. I should add that I'm a terrible and irregular photographer, but the iPhone camera works well for me (with its point-and-shoot absoluteness). So I took some crappy pictures of pixie people flared out in stage lights, more as a response to the crowd of camera screens waving in my vicinity than any internal compulsion.<br />Portishead and Godspeed You! Black Emperor both had video projections behind the band: <a href="http://jemcohenfilms.com/">Jem Cohen</a>'s impressively inchoate and melancholy films for the inscrutable Montréalers (whose sense of humour was abundantly demonstrated in their band bio in the programme, where they compared themselves to Rush), and faffy sub-Jem Cohen guff for the Bristolians. In between the lame films, Portishead did have live digital projection in over-exposed black-and-white, sometimes sequenced or mixed, but often extreme close-ups of Beth Gibbon. Film screens at large concerts, particularly festivals, are nothing new, but the use of grainy b/w appeared to be making a claim towards an affinity with Bertrand Tavernier's film Round Midnight and the jazz club photographs that inspired it -- and that also inspired the Super 8 depiction of the Velvet Underground scene. Think of Nick Cave performing in Wings of Desire. So it was a concert film that harked back to analogue grain and rawness, but being both captured and projected while the concert was ongoing.<br />Geoff Dyer refers to the quality of certain photographs as "<a href="http://geoffdyer.com/2011/04/06/the-ongoing-moment/">the ongoing moment</a>," a paradoxical perpetuity of the instant (or instantaneous eternity) that is a direct descendant of Roland Barthes' argument about the photographic punctum, the inscription of the photographic subject's death that makes portrait photography so moving. But these pictures were not being taken to be viewed, or reviewed, as mementos in the future, either the distant future after the subject's death, or the near future of communicating the experience to real-world friends. Instead, they were taken for the moment and for the immediate future: to review a minute or an hour later, to relive the concert that evening. Not as mementos to secure memory as it might fade, but as a record of an experience people were not having in its lived time.<br />There's a name - well, an acronym - for this kind of delay, and it's not TiVo. It's PTSD: post traumatic stress disorder, perhaps the defining condition of post-9/11 EuroWestern society, as this <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/20/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd?INTCMP=SRCH">recent article</a> by Gordon Turnbull suggests. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler suggests that the realisation that the West is as vulnerable as the Rest has prompted a kind of social PTSD, complete with repetition compulsion; Turnbull's article suggests the ways in which we can learn from trauma _not_ to repeat, instead to recognise our shared vulnerability: that is, our shared proximity to death.<br />Digital technology, as <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo3771036.html%E2%80%9DLaura" mulvey="">Laura Mulvey</a> has suggested, a kind of death of death: the end of the stillness of the photographic still that makes up film, as well as the end of indexicality, whereby a photographic negative physically (that is, chemically) records the light bouncing off the subject of the photograph. The practical eradication of physical printing, as well as the development of wireless transmission, challenges the ongoingness of the photographic moment. Instead, the camera becomes an electronic amygdala: that is, it records what we can’t quite experience, and distributes it, diffusing its effect. Rather than be present in the moment of the music (and some of the moments, such as Swans, demanded intense presentness from the musicians and audience through their use of sustain, drone, build and volume), the digital photographer defers his or her experience, sharing it later in the ‘safe space’ of the online community. Their post asks – implicitly – exactly the questions posed by trauma survivors when their memories return: was I (t)here? What did I feel? What has it made me?<br />And, perhaps most crucially, how did I survive? Thinking about digital technology and/as amygdala gave me an intuition about the traumatic memory, the ‘shell shock’ dream images produced from/by photographic memory, which repeat always the same, unprocessed, uncondensed. Freud intuited that this meant the images had not been seen at the time; they had not been captured by the conscious and thus sent through the unconscious. Instead, the conscious mind had averted itself in order to survive a violent/violating experience. I think we can take this further: these are images the mind never expected to have to process, to store in memory. They are the images of the seconds before death, the unseen instants carried, eventually, by everyone: not the famous ‘life rushing before one’s eyes,’ but the precise circumstances of death. That which one would never expect to see. So to replay that black box record within one’s own mind raises the question: Am I dead? If I am, how can I remember? If I’m not, how can I not remember?<br />So these precious, tortuous images induce survivor’s guilt through their painful clarity, the very fact of their availability proving both that we are not dead, and that we should be. While it’s an exaggeration to claim that a music festival is a site of trauma that one must defer, and then mourn, it’s an exaggeration with at least three contributory thoughts: first of all, the volume of articles published each summer on how to prepare for attending such festivals (mainly shilling for specialised wellies, tents, earcans, etc), suggest that this is an event to be survived (although not necessarily survivable); one could go so far as to argue that, given the obsession with detailing the boggy conditions at Glastonbury, music festivals are described in the register of accounts of trench warfare from WWI, and may even be a cultural substitution for the rite of passage constituted by national service. They are certainly a version/descendant of the rambling/back to the land movement that started in Germany in the late nineteenth century as an outgrowth of Romanticism: the reification of ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ as separate spheres from the urban, to be enjoyed by city folk en masse, sporadically and passively.<br />Reason two is, perhaps as a dark reflection of the war zone, the physical assault of noise and crowds that are generally regarded as unpleasant (say, in the London Underground), but welcomed at a festival as part of the authentic experience – although this experience can be differentially assaultive depending on your vulnerability. Despite utopian arguments to the contrary, festivals are temporary autonomous zones that (as ever) tend to favour the autonomy of those wishing to take power-over, as with the incidence of <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-10676193%E2%80%9D">rape at Latitude</a> last year.<br />The intense experience of being in a crowd of strangers, one where ordinary social controls and supervisions may not apply, is intensified or underlined by reason three: a year after the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/20/love-parade-crowd-safety-crush%E2%80%9D"> fatal crush at Love Parade</a>, it was also hard not to be hyper-aware of the dangers of the crowd itself. Furthermore, the urban crowd has been, since Dresden at least – or maybe Peterloo, the target of military and militant assaults. A crowd is an attractive target. It was difficult, at ATP this weekend, not to think of Utøya: a similar autonomous zone, one where youth, music, exchange, and many of the ideas and beliefs reflected by the festival’s line-up were shared. To be in a crowd is thus to be vulnerable: to other individuals therein; to the mass movement; and to individuals outside.<br />So perhaps those digital photographers had the right idea: record now to watch later. But can you live life like TiVo? Watching the sea of digital phone cameras capture and immediately transmit (to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MMS, etc) a film being immediately captured and transmitted, I wondered what had happened to death. Not least because of Harvey's "All and Everyone" with its standout line: "Death is now, and now, and now." That, I felt, was what missing. Not in the negative, Nietzchean, rather adolescent sense of "militant dysphoria" that <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/book/detail/349/Cold-World">Dominic Fox</a> proposes, but as the defining, enlivening aspect of lived experience. The death that makes the music I heard at the festival so haunting and compelling: music at extremities of aural violence and vulnerability, spectral dynamics of sound and silence, of density and spareness. It was music that demands you stand to attention, salute it: the music of war and the mourning of war.<br />Harvey and Beth Gibbon of Portishead, in particular, as female frontwomen, not only take me back to my formative years in the mid-90s and so probably define my idea of female performance, but also seem haunted by an older tradition: they are both keeners. Professional mourners. Let England Shake is the album George W. Bush and Pericles would both have banned: an angry, provocative work of mourning for the war dead. A recognition and a cry for justice. A making-audible of the death that saturates the English landscape. Portishead have recently recorded a song for <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://www.protectthehuman.com/videos/chase-the-tear-2%E2%80%9D"> Amnesty International</a>, and their oblique lyrics are often dense with a desire for decreation, or grief in the face of impossible loss.<br />As Wears the Trousers point out, both nights, “Wandering Star” was the stand-out song of their set. This <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/portishead/wanderingstar.html%E2%80%9D">unbearably fragile song of mourning</a>, bleak and beautiful, was performed by Gibbon in a rocking crouch, her eyes drawn closed, her face turned down. Not the most expressive, outward performer (she hunches her shoulders and draws her belly in protectively while singing, and faces the back of the stage while not; in fact, her singing posture was uncannily similar to that of the burned, bowed body of Joan at the stake at the end of The Passion of Joan of Arc, which was screened, with live accompaniment, on Sunday afternoon), Gibbon appeared to cave in on herself for the most intense performance of the set. Uncommonly, the whooping crowd fell silent, even when the vocals dropped out (which prompted cheers and applause during all the other songs), in the presence of an intensity and rawness of feeling that – perhaps – we struggle to process, especially in the close proximity of so many (sweaty) others.<br />It’s the rawness of a collective mourning we no longer undertake, a collective witness to our vulnerability and connectedness. “Please could you stay awhile to share my grief,” the song asks. Death is now, and now, and now. This is what live performance demands: an affective, sensory apprehension of the layers of meaning in a ritual/performance, and our role in it, that is neither Dionysiac abandon (which inevitably leads to both risky and selfish behaviour, placing a premium on the expression of individual experience) or Apollonian triumphalism (which demands that the individual sublimate their experience into a cohesive performance directed towards a larger power). Obviously, blogging about this demonstrates that I have lost this sense/ability as much as anyone has, and that while trying to recapture it at ATP, I also found myself mourning it – and I have found myself grieving for the end of the festival since Sunday evening, when we heard the final notes of ‘Wandering Star’ and felt complete; sustained.<br />Through (re)writing these notes, I am seeking to reconnect to the brief glimpse of the needful network that sustains and shapes (not prescribes, commands or conforms, as religions and political parties do) the apprehension described above. Can there be a network without a system? A crowd without power? If there can, it must reside in the work of art itself, in its resistant liveness that defies the cultural determination that it has been staged in order to be instantly digitised. Performance, which contorts and absorbs the body, which makes shapes of yearning and desire, touches us kinaesthetically – not least with the desire to touch the performer, if only with our eyes. Sound, which moves through us in waves as light does not (which is why photography is possible), which is felt in the tympanum and the bones, which works on the nervous system, is a powerful medium for securing the interdependence of vulnerabilities necessary to be in the precarious now. And now. And now.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-37690017219758254062011-07-15T13:07:00.005+01:002011-07-15T14:29:09.060+01:00Divorce: A Love Story<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/images/722/normal"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 555px; height: 290px;" src="http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/images/722/normal" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Coincidence or zeitgeist? This week I've seen two works that use divorce as at once a lens onto the personal intimacy that shadows public policy, and as an analogy for the necessary separation of church and state. The works are as different as different can be: Asghar Farhadi's film A Separation, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin in February, and Howard Brenton's play Anne Boleyn, revived at the Globe this summer after a successful run last year. Anne Boleyn takes up the famous story of Henry VIII's dual divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the Roman Catholic Church, but suggests that Boleyn was not simply the strumpet of historical repute: she was a passionate, well-read Tyndale Protestant saving the soul of King and country. Brenton has an <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jul/08/anne-boleyn-howard-brenton-globe">excellent article</a> about the genesis of the play, where he reveals that it was seeded by Dominic Dromgoole's suggestion he write about the translation of the King James Bible, which marks its 500th anniversary this year. <br /><br />Theatre, like Biblical translation, depends on a scrupulously accurate choice of words; unlike Biblical translation, that choice has to be made to allow for -- even create -- ambiguities, ironies and fatal double meanings. Brenton, like Shakespeare, uses a court setting to show how assiduously language is politicked, how weighty its precise dualities can be. He also follows the conceit of lovers speaking most truly in the language of metaphor: Henry and Anne sing to each other when and what they cannot speak openly. They long, in verse, for a pre-linguistic island idyll where they could communicate without or beyond words.<br /><br />Yet it is Anne's copy of Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man, annotated for Henry, that provides her with life after death when James I discovers it in a secret panel in a trunk (hoary but effectively done by the brilliant James Garnon playing James as a ticc'ing, dancing, roaring cross between Eddie Izzard and Billy Connolly), as the book itself preserved the ideas and words of Tyndale even when the man himself (and many copies of his books) were burnt. And this small black book containing sedition becomes an effective theatrical device, a loaded secret passed from hand to hand across time. On the one hand, it liberates Anne to follow her conscience; on the other, it liberates Henry to take total power and, just outside the timeframe of the play, leads to the rise and rise of the mercantile Puritans, to the colonisation of North America and beyond. <br /><br />All this turns on a book and a divorce, on the swearing of oaths (sometimes under torture) and the promises of lovers tested against the word of God. The value of giving one's word is measured against divine and human authority on the one hand, and against the individual conscience and heart on the other. Within the closed and corrupt world of the court, it seems like neither truth is possible -- theatre relies on that slippage and impossibility, but at the same time, on the verbal contract between audience and performer that we accept these words as a promise of a complicated kind of truth, one hidden within what is seen. This art of revealed mystery seems to me to be a manifestation of Christianity (the Globe is staging the <a href="http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/on-stage/the-globe-mysteries">Mysteries</a> later this summer, currently being advertised by one of those posters that makes me want to smash my head into a wall -- God as a grandad in an armchair and, oh look, sexy naked Eve, the only woman featured) -- or Christianity itself a development of the religious mystery of Athenian theatre, which itself has a strong relation to the language and form of the law courts.<br /><br />That's also the case with A Separation, a legal drama not in the sense of Law and Order or even Twelve Angry Men: instead it's about how the nature of litigation pervades every aspect of life as two families become entangled in a mesh of constant cross-questioning, assertion, delayed revelation, evidence, self-betrayal, and negotiation. <br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/x0qpJQpqYVc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />This trailer has no subtitles, but its sense is clear: this is a film about argument. An argument between individuals, in a series of small rooms. People who are connected to each other not only by incident, but by the passionate debate and desperate negotiation that ensues. Here are people living through language: verbal and gestural. In the film, all the crucial action moments that would be front and centre in a mainstream film occur offscreen, loading the dialogue of each scene with tension and revelation. In other words, it's great, necessary, brilliant, terrifying filmmaking. <br /><br />The film is easy and hard to summarise (Peter Bradshaw's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jun/30/a-separation-review">review</a> for the Guardian does a good job), but the opening seconds make clear that the titular separation (the full title is Nader and Simin: A Separation) is one that is prelude to a divorce, as Nader and Simin argue their case before an unseen magistrate, whose place is taken by the camera and the audience. So from the start, the viewer is pulled in to the film's talky vernacular, its back-and-forth of assertion and contradiction, of eloquent body language and unspoken secrets. We are put in the position of adjudicator.<br /><br />When I say the film is "talky," it's not like Woody Allen: although people quibble about definitions and verbal felicities, although there's a fantastic small scene where Nader takes his daughter Termeh to task over an English-Farsi vocabulary test. When she offers an Arabic word for 'guarantee', a word given to her by her teacher, he tells her to use the Persian word, even if it risks losing a mark. Not only does it reveal Nader's letter-not-the-spirit prideful personality, which is one of the motor's of the film's grindingly tragic events, but also the significance of language as cultural inheritance and legal formality. Yet even 'guarantee' is not a guarantee of anything: all words are translations, and therefore treacherous.<br /><br />And that brings forth a question central to the film, about the arbitration of meaning. For the opening of the film to defer that arbitration to the camera/viewer is a bold move in a country where magistrates are not only legally, but theologically, bound. When we eventually meet a magistrate, he is revealed -- like the judge in Kim Longinotto's documentary <a href="http://www.secondrundvd.com/release_disr.php">Divorce Iranian Style</a> -- to be an intelligent, thoughtful and just man, but one operating in an impossible system. The conundrum is evident from the start, where Simin presents her case for divorce thus: she has applied for a visa to America, where she believes that she and her daughter will find more equal opportunities; Nader is blocking the move because he has to care for his elderly father who has Alzheimer's. An impossible, perfect, parable-like paradox is presented: Simin is arguing for divorce on the grounds that she is currently in a position of inequality; but divorce cannot be obtained on her terms, because of that inequality. Were there full equality before the law in Iran, she would not be seeking a divorce. Simin can travel to America alone once she is divorced, which Nader wearily (and fatefully) agrees to, but Termeh can only travel with her father's permission, which he will not give. <br /><br />The giving of permission, and one's word, proves crucial as each character is asked to present their version of events on oath, most crushingly when it is Termeh's turn. As in the Tudor court, oaths are always taken under coercion, whether human or divine. Such politics of fear raises the question of whether truth can be thus obtained (as in the debate about torture); feminists have coined the term 'coercive consent' to describe the situation in which a person with less power enters into a sexual or other relationship with a person with significantly more power (student/teacher, servant/employer), where the coercion may not be overt but may relate to implicit fears such as loss of earnings, grades or even immigration status. I think a similar term can be applied to the oaths taken and confessions made in A Separation and Anne Boleyn, particularly by the women, while the men can better afford to cling to pride and honour as justifications for following the letter of the law. (Echoed in this week's New Yorker cartoon-in-search-of-a-caption).<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2011/07/11/p465/110711_contest_p465.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 465px; height: 377px;" src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2011/07/11/p465/110711_contest_p465.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> <br /><br />There's no real conclusion to this post, as there's no real conclusion to either the play or the film: Anne Boleyn ends with a whimper, unable to face up to the torture and murder of its deeply sympathetic central character, or to the less savoury consequences of the Reformation and James' scholiastic rule; A Separation ends with one of the most audacious final scenes in recent cinema, one that is both a still tableau, an agony of waiting that pulls us deeper into the titular characters' as it reinforces our role as magistrate, and one that, through the placement of the camera and the use of sound, shows that a divorce -- any divorce, not just that of a king -- takes place in, and as part of, a social maelstrom of other lives and losses. Like Nader and Simin, we are all still waiting to see what could happen if a full divorce of church and state, of authority and intimacy, were to take place, and how language, truth, heritage and even love -- forged in a crucible of religious tradition that we still cannot shake -- will resolve themselves.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-19702406107995966252011-07-10T13:16:00.006+01:002011-07-15T14:16:50.015+01:00Far from the Madding Crowd: Biophilia, Live Music, and Face Time<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbumBQvSOc6qqGuZJOoOOm68w3saGfv6aZlJlohTaqaLQ749qJ_3ljQclqHLdQ_VbobFFCldUCqh3fU9Fkwm4SHBeJEgHf994ByOKsDepaZcZdoZyLr1UpxEmqneLcsv6nsSsj/s1600/Bjork_Biophilia_live_4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 222px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbumBQvSOc6qqGuZJOoOOm68w3saGfv6aZlJlohTaqaLQ749qJ_3ljQclqHLdQ_VbobFFCldUCqh3fU9Fkwm4SHBeJEgHf994ByOKsDepaZcZdoZyLr1UpxEmqneLcsv6nsSsj/s320/Bjork_Biophilia_live_4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5629567391854529346" /></a><br />Welcome to another in this summer's irregular series of posts on women and live music performance. This one was prompted by a review of Bjork's show <a href="http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2011/07/biophilia_bjork">Biophilia</a> that appeared on the F-Word. I saw the same show, on the same steamily humid day. Like Ruth Rosselson, I felt disappointed at first: distanced by the performance in the round framed by screen media (I found the videos inventive and distracting), music engines (likewise), the avenging angels of the choir (likewise and more so), and the Victorian architecture, which made me feel like I was at a cattle auction in a Hardy novel.<br /><br />Which made me wonder: what exactly is it we're buying at live performances? Rosselson's review points out that the performance in the round meant that Bjork was facing away from 3/4 of the audience at any given moment, a gesture compounded or highlighted by her Braveheart/Boudicca-style wig and make-up. Like Rosselson, I found myself longing for face time: that intimate connection that seems promised by the yearning, direct, bodily intensity of Bjork's music. That <a href="http://immanentterrain.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/year-zero-faciality/">faciality</a> is the key mode of Western culture is a truth widely recognised, particularly in contrast to the place of the face in relation to identity in Islamic cultures. I found myself somewhat chastened to realise that what I was bidding for in my shuffling, head-winding position on the elevated terraces of the market hall was a chance to "own" a moment of Bjork's face, to "own" a direct connection with the singer/performer, as if she were singing directly to me.<br /><br />That seduction is of course the predicate of musical and theatrical performance dating back at least to the eighteenth century and the appearance of women on stage in England in the Restoration: precariously paid and in social limbo, female performers were often perceived as prostitutes "offering" themselves on stage and off. That association, which was sometimes literalised under economic and social pressure, still haunts the presence of the female performer and the desire of the audience.<br /><br />What's particularly interesting to me about Bjork's music -- and particular her new material -- is that, in all sorts of subtle ways, it plays with this desire and the idea of the face. David Attenborough's pre-recorded announcements -- brisk, associative, three-word captions -- couldn't be more different from his precise but flowing narration for BBC wildlife documentaries. Rather than naming and narrating species as they appear on screen (and particularly, with mammals, as their binocular vision engages ours), these captions present the theory or theme of the track that follows as an experiment rather than a confession. <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wondermonkey/assets_c/2011/07/448_survival-thumb-448x287-77311.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 448px; height: 287px;" src="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wondermonkey/assets_c/2011/07/448_survival-thumb-448x287-77311.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Eye contact is a powerful experience, not only with a non-human Other whose eyes appear to offer recognition and reflect intelligence. It's one that shapes us from infancy in the maternal dyad, and one that can offer a guarantee of our existence and value in adulthood: but it is far from definitive. A partially-sighted person could have thrilled to the varied and palpable sound world of Biophilia, not least the absolute commitment of Bjork's voice to fill the space and engage her audience.<br /><br />The video screens above the stage act as a reminder that confession is now (is always?) a mediated act, and our expectations of face time are not a nostalgia for an organic age of close connection with performers, but rather a product of cinematic technology, specifically the close-up and the video diary, which create the sense of public ownership over performers that generates paparazzi (Bjork has little patience with them as a species). <br /><br />In place of this false nostalgia/claim to faciality, Bjork's new show offers a radical idea: biophilia. Love that relates to the life in liveness, not to appearance. The liveness of the voice as expression of embodiment, rather than the face. Of movement and co-operation (as when Bjork was surrounded by the choir as a mass of bodies) rather than the singular artist selling face time. Its radicalism stretches far beyond the commercial music business or issues of celebrity to speak to how we construct our relations with every aspect of the biosphere. Do we need eye contact with every refugee in order to protest draconian immigration regulations? Will we not save endangered animals unless we can have face time with them (every Friday, as per WWF's facebook stream)? Must something _have_ a face for us to engage with it -- to believe it is engaging with/imploring us? <br /><br />Or can we read Bjork's costume and staging as a plea for escape from faciality: for returning the (pathless, faceless) rock to rock music?<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-22713804861230531172011-05-25T13:46:00.003+01:002011-05-25T14:49:11.253+01:00I Am a Lonesome Hobo<blockquote>Where another man's life might begin<br />That's exactly where mine ends</blockquote><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OkAMDdjyB0k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />These weren't the lyrics I was expecting to stick in my head from last night's <a href="http://www.theagilmore.net/welcome.cfm">Thea Gilmore</a> gig at Union Chapel. In fact, it wasn't really a gig I would have bet on myself attending, being that she was covering Bob Dylan's album John Wesley Harding in its entirety to mark the legendary almost-Crouch Ender's 70th, and I am not what I would call a Dylan fan, in that I've never been electrified by his music. But I was electrified by Cate Blanchett's performance as the beautiful, androgynous, charismatic imp in I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' strangely magical anti-biopic of the anti-rock star.<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/roj1BQWCsuo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <br />Despite my lack of Bob-knowledge, I was exhilarated by the film's freewheelin' turn through Greenwich Village, outlaw country, Gospel choirs and back - but what's stayed with me are the performances by Blanchett, Julianne Moore (playing a female folk star who is in no way based on Joan Baez) and Charlotte Gainsbourg -- although what I remember most about Gainsbourg in the film is thinking that someone should write a biopic of Patti Smith (<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/13/just-kids-patti-smith-biography">Just Kids</a> is crying out for an adaptation) and cast her in the lead.<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xxygqSTO1lQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />That says more about my preoccupations than about the film, or indeed about Dylan, whom I was undoubtedly turned off male professors with a tendency to waving around a rolly in one hand and a battered copy of Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin in the other, while exhorting us to "fucking read Dryden." No thanks. So I'm no Bobsessive, but I love Thea and loved her cover of "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" so I was willing to see what she'd come up with. While <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/19/thea-gilmore-john-wesley-harding-review">Caroline Sullivan</a> of the Guardian called Gilmore's recorded version of JWH "for completists only," the live show brought out something that's perhaps less palpable on the record, and excitingly strange: a female artist singing these incredibly masculine songs.<br /><br />It's not just the lyrical content that could loosely be described as pretty male, but the stance of the singer: the inheritor of St. Augustine, the frontier dweller -- and the hobo. Figures of wandering, of travel and movement outside of social norms, whether sinners or saints (who were once sinners), the characters and narrators of the songs are facets of a male archetype. Which is not to say that women don't wander, move (or sin), but that the conservative patriarchal forces of Euro Western society have largely conspired to keep women in the house (where they belong!), so that any wandering woman is automatically errant and aberrant, as a symbol and in actuality.<br /><br />So for Gilmore to claim the hobo's harmonica (I'm dying to say the hobo's oboe, but it would be a lie) is visually as well as audibly powerful. Where a man's life might begin <i>is</i> both traditionally and symbolically, exactly where a woman's ends: at the threshold. In the story of Dinah, the Old Testament makes it clear that a woman outside her front door cannot be raped, because if she's out there, then she's declared herself common property; an attitude that persists today in shaming rape survivors based on their location and clothing. Which surfaces the other sense in which a woman's life might end where a man's begins, a sense that is threaded throughout the history of folk music: in murder ballads that often hymn the end of a woman's life at a man's hands, often for her presumed infidelity, but sometimes just because that's the way things are between men and women. Willie Nelson's "I Can't Let You Say Goodbye" (used to excellent effect as the killer's theme in Jane Campion's hugely underrated In the Cut) makes the point chillingly: "Please have no fear, you’re in no harm / As long as you’re here in my arms / But you can’t leave so please don’t try…” The archetypical male/female erotic relationship is not a model of love, but of murder.<br /><br />Nowhere is this clearer than on Kristin Hersh's ferally brilliant album <a href="http://outdoorminerdos.blogspot.com/2011/04/kristin-hersh-murder-misery-and-then.html">Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight</a>, which brings new life to old songs by revoicing them -- not from a female perspective, but as a female singer, in an act of transgendering. Rather than rewrite the lyrics to give us female murderers (there are a few of them in the old ballads as well), or happy endings (the Disney post-feminist princess trick), Hersh - like Gilmore with JWH - stakes a claim to the songs and the masculine archetypes they contain. Hersh's jangling take on classic American folk songs (including lullabies with dark intentions) preceded, by three years, Tori Amos' better known project <a href="http://www.toriamos.com/go/galleries/view/56/1/29/albums/index.html">Strange Little Girls</a>, a cover album that identified female personae within and as narrators for songs by male artists, playing with goddesses and (as this Red Riding Hood-inflected video shows) fairy tale heroines. <br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/M260wOm_csM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <br /><br />But unlike Disney re-ups, Amos' strange little girls -- with their wigs and wolves and vaginas raining blood from the sky -- show that femininity is a performance, a put-on (or stick-up), a costume: one that is often worn under duress, or interpreted as putting oneself at risk. Stranger still, Dylan's JWH ends with a song that might suggest the same about masculinity. "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" -- if you look at the title objectively, what it offers is a position of vulnerability: not I'll be your lover or man or master, but "baby." Yes, it's also a little creepy. But the nursery rhyme-like lyrics ("The big old moon's gonna shine like a spoon" -- what do you make of that little gem, Ricksy-baby?) and suggestion of escape and the abandonment of social norms and the outside world - close the door, kick your shoes off - creates a space beyond gendered identities (OK, so the singer is pretty bossy and demanding -- "bring that bottle over here" -- or maybe just wants to go the whole baby fetish...), a space where men can admit to vulnerability. And sung by a pregnant Thea it has something extra, some enlargement of the aspects of human life that tend to appear in pop music. Open your eyes, open your door, maybe? <iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Rq7RW0nrxn8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-75000713363161521462011-05-18T15:43:00.005+01:002011-05-18T16:19:52.282+01:00Singing the Pirate's Gospel...which is what I have been doing for the last week, since seeing <a href="http://www.aleladiane.com/">Alela Diane</a> at the Scala. I am an Alela nerd (yes, limited edition vinyls, SXSW sessions, semi-legal download of her unreleased first album; even an Alela-hand-made quilted T-shirt) but her new full-band project Wild Divine leaves me... hmmm. Part of it is that I think it would be weird to go on tour with your dad and your husband, but I have neither so who am I to say. And part of it is that the swinging 70s rock-out sound is not one that means much to me, compared with a girl and her guitar. Especially coming on after the support act -- a wildly brilliant, triple-drumming <a href="http://peggywho.com/">Peggy Sue</a>, who played a kicking set while dressed in homage to John Hughes' movies that they are TOO YOUNG to have seen first time round, which was adorable/made me feel ancient -- the whole Fleetwood shtick felt old to me.<br /><br />Which is maybe its point: homage, retro, etc. So why was it not as adorable to me as Peggy Sue's drummer rocking an Eric Stolz fedora? It's not like I love the 80s in any way. Alela, incidentally, was wearing a low-backed, knee-length fringed black dress. Her all-male band were in jeans. And there, for me, is the bind: that 70s sound is, well, kinda floozy. Maybe then it was in a good way, but now it seems to part of the flow of the sexualisation of women in the music industry rather than a protest against it. And here's the double bind: while Alela absolutely has the Lady of the Canyon voice to sell the songs, even over the great wash of guitar and bass that her producers have thumped her with (the bonus CD showcases the pre-wall of sound versions which grab me much more), but she can't channel Stevie Nicks via her hips.<br /><br />And nor should she have to -- or feel she has to. But somehow that sound demands a performance of free love female sexuality. Which brought home to me just how far our perception of female performers in the music industry depends on how they perform with their bodies -- not just Rihanna and Xtina and etc., but ALL female performers. If they're folky, they're expected to be coy, virginal, or medieval: it's not just a beard/no-beard or plaid/no-plaid deal as it is for male performers, but about the interaction of the triad of their voices, their bodies and their accessories. And while many reams have been written on the agential performativity of sexuality by Madonna (etc., etc.) and, conversely, the sexualisation of male performers (differently) in hip hop and boy bands, I feel that it skirts the issue. <br /><br />So I'm particularly excited by Peggy Sue and their keening monotone, which is full of desire and rage and anomie, and is queer without being Song of the Week on Glee. And also about seeing <a href="http://www.pjharvey.net/">PJ Harvey</a> later this summer, because Let England Shake doesn't just raise the envelope or push the bar or dance circles round the box of female performers' sexuality, it just walks straight past. Having screamed her desire for her ex-lover's "fucking ass" on A Woman A Man Walked By, perhaps she feels she's gone as far as she can with the straight-talking, SlutWalking style she pioneered. And it's not that the historical/geological palette of Let England Shake is _better_ than her unquestionably feminist and intensely exciting previous material, but that she's found a way to do something _different_ (following in the barefoot thoughtsteps of Patti Smith's Trampin' in some ways). Let England Shake's sense of the bodily as earthly/earthly as bodily -- in this case applied to mapping the traces of wars 'abroad' in England's landscape -- first appeared on White Chalk, where the wars were within a woman's body. The albums, for me, are a pair, and I'm intrigued to see how she'll follow up her White Chalk show which I saw at the Royal Festival Hall: Edwardian gown; toy instruments; soft-voiced, inter-song banter. How will she make Alexandra Park shake?<br /><br />This all matters to me not only because pop music is a huge tranche of dominant culture and socialisation, but also because poetry, for me, is -- very deeply, almost unacknowledged -- a substitution or sublimation of my primary desire to be a singer-songwriter. Blame/congratulate my early exposure to Joni Mitchell and Carole King via my mum's own Lady of the Canyon period. Or my surprise encounter with <a href="http://www.toriamos.com/">Tori Amos</a> pre-Little Earthquakes (and I'm very excited about the new Tori album AND about a Tori poetry tribute I'm going to be involved in this summer). Or discovering Tracy Chapman just when I needed her most. Or being arrested, breathless, by the video for <a href="http://www.kristinhersh.com/">Kristin Hersh</a>'s Your Ghost on MTV. Or even blame my parents for my Hebrew name, which means little bird. I've always wanted to sing but I'm beyond unmusical. <br /><br />So poetry it is, but always in relation to that (r)evolving group of female musicians who dominate my stereo/iPod. Hence the question of performance and sexuality feels very personal: what to wear to a reading, which poems to choose (rude or not rude), how to banter/flirt -- all with the aim of "selling", which is itself, of course, highly sexualised, especially for women who are still perceived as selling themselves (ie: their sexuality; ie: the only thing they have -- although don't own) whenever they appear publicly. Which makes all the choices non-choices: Victorian nightie? Basque and chaps? Meat dress? It's always a complicitous critique because it engages in the discourse set up by patriarchy in which a woman is defined by what she wears, and is thus always defined as sexually available by dint of wearing clothes, as all clothing either reveals or conceals the body and can thus be interpreted as sexualised. This is what the <a href="http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/04/slutwalk_london">SlutWalk</a> is all about. And I am all for it.<br /><br />But I feel like, rather than wanting/needing to wear a short skirt and clumpy boots (I spent my 20s doing just that, and it was great, actually), I need the outfit equivalent of Trampin' or Let England Shake: a performativity that doesn't even get into the argument, that says something different on its own terms. Any suggestions?<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-52174473545428341882011-05-13T23:26:00.005+01:002011-05-13T23:53:07.319+01:00For Joanna Russ, imaginaire extraordinare<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizqVmyBCV5jCXs04R0cdogs2_NmJ1z8aSC_crzDTnGYvx6UfHsoS33vnjv4KeccczopjxS7a244GJ6Vj6PxsuI3-TvFfVlOPJwoKHITmdoO058_-emHbE2r8q-CkTL1eaVbiV4/s1600/IMG_0387.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizqVmyBCV5jCXs04R0cdogs2_NmJ1z8aSC_crzDTnGYvx6UfHsoS33vnjv4KeccczopjxS7a244GJ6Vj6PxsuI3-TvFfVlOPJwoKHITmdoO058_-emHbE2r8q-CkTL1eaVbiV4/s320/IMG_0387.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5606331556907424354" /></a><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Endless_Storybook">Little Endless</a> Delirium with some of the <a href="http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=The_Women's_Press_science_fiction_series">Women's Press Science Fiction</a> to be found in Delirium's Library (well, all that could be found: the rest has been put somewhere Very Important and Easy to Locate that I now can't remember - hence the name of the library) including Joanna Russ' <a href="http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=The_Female_Man">The Female Man</a> and <a href="http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=The_Hidden_Side_of_the_Moon">The Hidden Side of the Moon</a>.<br /><br />Feminist science fiction pioneer Joanna Russ has died, aged 74, on 29 April after a series of strokes. Christopher Priest's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/12/joanna-russ-obituary?INTCMP=SRCH">obituary for The Guardian</a> does an excellent job of explaining why her work was so <a href="http://www.queertheory.com/histories/r/russ_joanna.htm">important</a> (and unjustly neglected), but it doesn't describe the impact of reading it: while <a href="http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/eleanor-arnason/joanna-russ">Eleanor Arnason</a> writes that she found Russ' work abrasively angry, she also notes that thinking about Russ moves her to want to write more.<br /><br />As much as the sexual anarchy and political energy of Russ' work, it is this will to write - to share stories, to reinvent them - that I take from her work. Her humour, her generosity to her characters (who tend to reappear from short story to novel), her critical thinking about writing, are embodied in her appetite in later life (according to Priest) for slash fiction, which derives part of its charge from busting open canonical texts, and part from doing so in a supportive, reciprocal community. In her introduction to <a href="http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=In_the_Chinks_of_the_World_Machine">Chinks in the World Machine</a>, Sarah Lefanu notes that many feminist SF writers began by writing slash or (earlier) novelisations of TV episodes. That idea of fiction as a communal practice, as a shared art, a conversation -- and refuting the denigration of such an idea within capitalist patriarchy with its demands for the Author and [his] Originality -- is central to both Russ' embrace of science fiction as a recyclic genre, and to her witty (and yes, purposively angry) critical writing. <br /><br />In reworking, she salvages and surfaces the unpredictable: not just untold stories, but untellings. <blockquote>When Janet Evason returned to the New Forest and the experimenters at the Pole Station were laughing their heads of (for it was not a dream) I sat in a cocktail party in mid-Manhattan. I had just changed into a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man, of course; my body and soul were exactly the same.<br />So there's me also.</blockquote> While Joanna [Russ] has died, Joanna (and her parallel selves Jeannine, Janet and Jael) show us possibilities for who we can all be, also.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-7429034682630210842011-03-19T14:25:00.003+00:002011-03-19T15:52:44.402+00:00"With his kiss the riot starts": What Hades Has to Say about PoetryAnaïs Mitchell's <a href="http://www.anaismitchell.com/home.html">Hadestown</a> has been on my mind (and in my ears) constantly for the last few days. When it came out last year, I was struck by its ambition (the story of Orpheus and Eurydice retold as a modern folk-pop-blues opera) and its reconfiguring of lyric, ie: songs of love, of which Orpheus is the mythic father. The economic, political and affective complexities of the male poet hymning (always-already lost) love are laid bare through the subtle shift of the story into multiple perspectives, including Eurydice's.But relistening to it in the last weeks, what has come to the fore is its political observations, which seen incredibly timely -- Orpheus the folk poet-hero of a revolution against a tyrant who has imprisoned his songbird (who stands for freedom). <br /><br />Reviewing the London performance of the opera at <a href="http://www.unionchapel.org.uk/">Union Chapel</a> for the Independent on Sunday, Simmy Richman concludes: <blockquote>At the show's centre is a song so sensational that even the discomfort of our hardwood pews is forgotten. "Why We Build the Wall" is both the story of life in the mythical underworld and as potent a parable as it is possible to write. "Why do we build the wall?/We build the wall to keep us free/And the wall keeps out our enemy/What do we have that they should want?/We have a wall to work upon/We have work and they have none/That's why we build the wall."</blockquote> When I read the review in January I was more compelled/intrigued by the start, where Richman admits that "finding out about the best album of 2010 a few weeks after compiling your end-of-the-year list is about as grave a mistake as it is possible to make if you review music for a living," which made me think cynically about the multiple ways in which the UK music press ignores a class of female singer-songwriters whose work is not "freak" enough to fit their hipster folk tastes, or poppy/pappy enough to be patronised.<br /><br />But it's the wall that I have come back to, and to the character of Hades, "king of the kingdom of dirt," "a mean old boss / With a silver whistle and a golden scale," sung on the album by <a href="http://www.gregbrown.org/">Greg Brown</a>, with a thrilling depth and steeliness. Hades only has one solo, "His Kiss, The Riot," where he lays his plans to trap Orpheus in the mythical double-bind of the terrible "don't look back." "Nothing makes a man so bold / As a woman's smile and a hand to hold / But all alone his blood runs thin / And doubt comes in, doubt comes in" he concludes, leading into Orpheus' and Eurydice's duet "Doubt Comes In." Though he uses it cruelly, Hades knows his psychology: he knows Orpheus, like all of us, is susceptible to fear (as is Hades himself), just as he knows -- and uses -- Eurydice's fear of poverty in "Songbird," when he seduces her to stay in the Underworld.<br /><br />In "His Kiss, The Riot," Mitchell offers a fascinating insight into the psychology of dominance: her reading of Hades makes it clear that tyrants are not enormities, bizarre distortions of human nature, exceptions to the rule, aberrant perversions or magicians who put whole populations under a dangerous spell. They are human and -- under capitalism, with its structuring metaphor of competition -- they are inevitable. Hades speaks the language of spin, with its niggling, irritating grain of truth under layers of nacreous polish, when he says that "All my children came here poor / Clamoring for bed and board," arguing that he offered the miners, gravediggers, and -- in that spectacular image of the futility of capitalism and empire -- wall-builders work to raise them out of poverty (while of course, as Persephone's seductive "Our Lady of the Underground" hymns, keeping them in poverty by selling them illusions to buy with company scrip). "Now what do they clamor for? / Freedom! Freedom!" Hades protests, the music dropping away behind his barks of "Freedom!," as if there were no music that could support such a word. For him, it is the disruptor of harmony, of his perfect, closed system.<br /><br />In Hades' cry, we can hear Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi, the House of Saud -- but also every politician and manager who believes in the system. But the song also suggests just how vulnerable the system is, if it can be brought down by a kiss (or the image of a suicide, or a cardboard sign, or a line of poetry), and how insecure every tyrant, every person of power, is concomitantly. Power's main belief in itself is in its unshakeable stability: if it's not perpetual, it's not power. But Hades is "stricken… stung" by Orpheus' song -- so stricken that, after this cruel unfolding of his well-laid plan, his voice is not heard again. Orpheus falls away, as Hades predicts, and it is Eurydice and Persephone who end the opera, mourning and remembering him.<br /><br />Hades is troubled by Orpheus because his devotion to love suggests that there is another way of life, one that is potent and provocative: "With his kiss the riot starts." That kiss awakens not only love, but love's insurgence, its refusal of ownership and hierarchy, its need rather than want, its poetry of productlessness, the very qualities that Hades puts forward so snidely when seducing Eurydice: <blockquote>Hey little songbird, let me guess<br />He's some kind of poet - and he's penniless<br />Give him your hand, he'll give you his hand-to-mouth<br />He'll write you a poem when the power's out</blockquote>Again, there's that irritating grain of truth: Orpheus is a dreamer, offering to get the river, trees and birds to arrange a marriage; the fear of poverty and hunger is real. But Hades, with his clever lines (as the Devil gets the best tunes, so Hades gets the cleverest turns of phrase, which in itself becomes a kind of cheapening of the poetic power of language), presents the symptoms (poverty, hunger) as the disease. Orpheus isn't poor because poverty is the natural state of poets, but because the society Hades runs doesn't value their labour -- and demands that they pay for the necessities of life.<br /><br />But Hades' words are persuasive: "Hey, Little Songbird" is not a solo, but a duet, as are "Why We Build the Wall" (with the Hadestown Chorus) and "How Long" (with Persephone). Hades' system works because others are complicit in it: his workers and his wife. But complicit is a complicated word: Hades and his lifestyle are powerfully charismatic. "Seems like he owns everything / Kind of makes you wonder how it feels," Eurydice sings. And there Mitchell pins the biggest problem of power, which is that it itself is seductive. Rather than protesting, dismantling or exiting the system, the Workers and Eurydice want to use it, to become like Hades; to shelter in his power and thus to have it. Orpheus, compelled by his love of Eurydice, needs and offers something different - an outside, an unravelling of the whole system.<br /><br />But Hades identifies that Orpheus, too, thrives on power of a kind: "Bravery can be contagious / When the band is playing loud." As well as the touch of a woman's hand, Orpheus -- as a poet -- depends on his audience and his culture for support. He needs to be heard, he needs to be approved, to move, to connect. And so he is vulnerable to the machinations of power that would separate him from that audience (and this is the springboard for much of the work of PEN, like this <a href="http://">event for Chinese Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo</a> tomorrow night). And this raises a profound question for me about vulnerability, one that has been mulling since I read Judith Butler's <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/460-frames-of-war">Frames of War</a>. <br /><br />That question is about how to sustain vulnerability when it is exploitable by power - but is also, Butler concludes (in alignment with Gandhi), the most durable form of resistance to power's depredations. I don't know how -- but Tahrir Square seemed to me to offer a model. My friend Rebecca passed on a translation of a sign she had seen there: "I was afraid -- and I became an Egyptian." Rather than repressing fear, as power does, or buying goods to cover it up, as power exhorts us to do, the protestors walked into, and with, their fear as a shared expression of being human. Not just "I was afraid," as Orpheus finds at the end of the song, but "and I became an Egyptian." Rather than putting the author out front in a combat for hearts and minds, or in conflict with his forefathers, or trying to win his crust, is there a poetry that can sing this shared consciousness?<br /><br />Butler thinks that this is exactly what poetry (and only poetry/song, freed from the cause-effect constraints of narrative), removed from the marketplace, can do. She says: <blockquote>When the Pentagon offered its rationale for the censorship [of poetry by Guantánamo detainees], it claimed that poetry 'presents a special risk' to national security because of its 'content and format'… Could it really be that the syntax or form of a poem is perceived as a threat to the security of a nation?</blockquote> and concludes that its not the syntax of form of the poem that's a threat, but its relation to the body and its relation of vulnerability. Even Hades, when he sings, sings of emotions -- song itself breathes with and from affect. Orpheus, who is all poem and no body (as the end of the classical myth recognises), finds himself overwhelmed by doubt -- that is, a belief in his own isolation -- and loses Eurydice, who asks him to "hold on tight."<br /><br />Hadestown agrees with Butler, that interdependence and vulnerability (Butler calls it injurability) are inextricably linked and are definitional of life; they also agree that poetry is the form for voicing this injurability. But poetry also needs to "hold on tight", not to the sound of the band or the praise of the crowd, not to its reflexive, hyper-critical sense of itself as poetry, but to its relations with life, the body and freedom. It needs to feed us more than rivers and trees. It needs to "hold on" to its connection to us all -- and so it needs to have an informed comeback to Hades' clever lines and cutting insights in order to keep language vital. This is another way of saying that poetry is always political, that the lyric cannot shut its eyes against that busie old fool the sun and the world it brings in. <br /><br />Hadestown shows this subtly: in between "How Long," Hades' duet with Persephone where he argues that "nothing comes of the songs people sing / However sorry they are" and the collapse of his wall in "His Kiss, the Riot," comes Orpheus' solo, a reprise of his earlier song "Epic," which is a description of Hades and his world. Envisioning Persephone "in her mother's garden" he sings that "suddenly Hades was only a man / With a taste of nectar on his lips." Love undoes even Hades. But it's not just the lyrics, which contrast the man of steel with the woman of flowers and pollen; the song is followed by an instrumental "Lover's Desire," a traditional Afghani piece. Persephone's image is at once Greek and part of the tradition of ghazals and shash maqam, the musical styles of Persia and Central Asia. And she is married, inextricably (if seasonally) to Hades: by kidnapping her, he has connected himself to her forever. Interdependence begins in vulnerability -- but acts of violence cannot destroy it, only secure the bonds tighter. That allows, just maybe, for that vulnerability, for the party that has remained vulnerable, to begin -- amplified by poetry, perhaps -- to effect change, to destabilise the violator. Just maybe. <br /><br />You can see why the Pentagon banned those poems. Hades does the same.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14223799.post-70669750139372104982011-03-12T16:29:00.004+00:002011-03-12T16:38:59.967+00:00Peace News from 2011/1966<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7pGFu3KeVdG0cTmv2Ggsl8h4NT1JQJR0FqKl9PQliVAEEeJ767Kq7o68oKNfnXNnLGjjpmGuxhVGrlD8BAZMISf4fL8wK162htwRSrR_8yZi4POhkEzUCpaXXdVVLj_CXUg81/s1600/Wichita+cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 262px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7pGFu3KeVdG0cTmv2Ggsl8h4NT1JQJR0FqKl9PQliVAEEeJ767Kq7o68oKNfnXNnLGjjpmGuxhVGrlD8BAZMISf4fL8wK162htwRSrR_8yZi4POhkEzUCpaXXdVVLj_CXUg81/s320/Wichita+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5583232111813204274" /></a><br /><br />American Eagle beating its wings over Asia<br /> million dollar helicopters<br /> a billion dollars worth of Marines<br /> who loved Aunt Betty<br /> Drawn from the shores and farms shaking <br /> from high schools to the landing barge<br /> blowing the air through their cheeks with fear<br /> in Life on Television<br />Put it this way on the radio,<br />Put it this way in television language<br /> Use the words<br /> language, language;<br /> "a bad guess"<br /><br />Found in Oxfam Books and Music.<br />Published in 1966 by <a href="http://www.peacenews.info/">Peace News</a>, still resisting war and violence from Caledonian Road, N1.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Read more at http://www.sophiemayer.net</div>Delirium's Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13213875721316857164noreply@blogger.com0