"anyone can do it, if they want to be peculiar enough" [AL Kennedy]

Thanks, AL Kennedy. The Blue Book 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.

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 Guardian) 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?]

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.

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 There is No Dog, 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)?. 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 her blog), 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.

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 The Future.

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.

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.

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.

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 -- for 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.

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 KI Press has a terrific sequence in Spine that explores the odd taste left in the mouth by that marriage). Reviewing Arrietty for Eyewear, I suggested that

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.

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: Kristin Hersh talks brutally about it in today's Guardian, about whether making music is worth the elation, depression, possession she experiences.

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:

"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.

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?

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.

"Death is now. And now. And now," or, The Work of Life in the Age of Digital Pre-Production

This 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 Wears the Trousers, my favourite music blog. It's particularly good on PJ Harvey and Portishead.
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 (Birds' Eye View film and music extravaganza 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 Alex Ross 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.
Portishead and Godspeed You! Black Emperor both had video projections behind the band: Jem Cohen'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.
Geoff Dyer refers to the quality of certain photographs as "the ongoing moment," 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.
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 recent article 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.
Digital technology, as Laura Mulvey 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?
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?
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.
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 rape at Latitude last year.
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 fatal crush at Love Parade, 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.
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 Dominic Fox 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.
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 Amnesty International, and their oblique lyrics are often dense with a desire for decreation, or grief in the face of impossible loss.
As Wears the Trousers point out, both nights, “Wandering Star” was the stand-out song of their set. This unbearably fragile song of mourning, 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.
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.
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.

Divorce: A Love Story

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 excellent article 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.

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.

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.

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 Mysteries 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.

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.

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.

The film is easy and hard to summarise (Peter Bradshaw's review 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.

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.

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 Divorce Iranian Style -- 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.

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).

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.

Far from the Madding Crowd: Biophilia, Live Music, and Face Time

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 Biophilia 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.

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 faciality 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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?

I Am a Lonesome Hobo

Where another man's life might begin
That's exactly where mine ends

These weren't the lyrics I was expecting to stick in my head from last night's Thea Gilmore 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.
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 (Just Kids is crying out for an adaptation) and cast her in the lead.

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 Caroline Sullivan 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.

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.

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 is 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.

Nowhere is this clearer than on Kristin Hersh's ferally brilliant album Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight, 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 Strange Little Girls, 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.


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?

Singing the Pirate's Gospel

...which is what I have been doing for the last week, since seeing Alela Diane 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 Peggy Sue, 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.

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.

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.

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 PJ Harvey 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?

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 Tori Amos 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 Kristin Hersh'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.

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 SlutWalk is all about. And I am all for it.

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?

For Joanna Russ, imaginaire extraordinare

Little Endless Delirium with some of the Women's Press Science Fiction 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' The Female Man and The Hidden Side of the Moon.

Feminist science fiction pioneer Joanna Russ has died, aged 74, on 29 April after a series of strokes. Christopher Priest's obituary for The Guardian does an excellent job of explaining why her work was so important (and unjustly neglected), but it doesn't describe the impact of reading it: while Eleanor Arnason writes that she found Russ' work abrasively angry, she also notes that thinking about Russ moves her to want to write more.

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 Chinks in the World Machine, 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.

In reworking, she salvages and surfaces the unpredictable: not just untold stories, but untellings.

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.
So there's me also.

While Joanna [Russ] has died, Joanna (and her parallel selves Jeannine, Janet and Jael) show us possibilities for who we can all be, also.

"With his kiss the riot starts": What Hades Has to Say about Poetry

Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown 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).

Reviewing the London performance of the opera at Union Chapel for the Independent on Sunday, Simmy Richman concludes:

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."

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.

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 Greg Brown, 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.

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.

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.

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:

Hey little songbird, let me guess
He's some kind of poet - and he's penniless
Give him your hand, he'll give you his hand-to-mouth
He'll write you a poem when the power's out

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.

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.

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 event for Chinese Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo tomorrow night). And this raises a profound question for me about vulnerability, one that has been mulling since I read Judith Butler's Frames of War.

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?

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: ‎

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?

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."

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.

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.

You can see why the Pentagon banned those poems. Hades does the same.

Peace News from 2011/1966

American Eagle beating its wings over Asia
million dollar helicopters
a billion dollars worth of Marines
who loved Aunt Betty
Drawn from the shores and farms shaking
from high schools to the landing barge
blowing the air through their cheeks with fear
in Life on Television
Put it this way on the radio,
Put it this way in television language
Use the words
language, language;
"a bad guess"

Found in Oxfam Books and Music.
Published in 1966 by Peace News, still resisting war and violence from Caledonian Road, N1.

A Frayed Knot: Unpicking Susan Hiller @ Tate Britain

My earliest memory is of a dream. It was the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in the upper room. That I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. it was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad. (Anne Carson, 'Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)', Decreation, 19-20)

Walking around Susan Hiller's retrospective at Tate Britain is like walking around the living room in Anne Carson's dream. Here are the familiar materials of contemporary art: for the film installations, projectors and speakers and benches and headphones arranged in small dark rooms down narrow, dark, baffled corridors; for the rest, hyper-realist photographic reproductions and scientific diagrams and found objects and automatic writing and text panels and vitrines and series and repetitions.

And in the middle of it all, "The Writing on the Wall," a living room with a dark sofa and chairs and a television on which a video of a flickering fire plays. Softly lit in amber, this is a womb-like space. Comforting -- except for the haunting singing and child's voice and readings from distressing news stories playing almost inaudibly from speakers. Think Sarah Palmer moaning on the floor of her living room in Twin Peaks. I sat there with my co-conspirator in all things art for ages; we hugged cushions to our bellies and told stories of disturbed nights, possessed bedrooms and all things unhomely until we freaked ourselves into freezing cold.

It is in this territory of the embodied uncanny -- the gesture, object, ritual, sound just slightly out of place so that it shows the whole system is skewed -- that Hiller works. She is best known for "From the Freud Museum," an installation of vitrines containing Cornell-like boxes (except far more organised, their apparent rationality and decorum underlining their intuitive and disturbing associative illogic) that respond to objects owned by Freud and displayed in his museum in Hampstead. Although it's in Tate Modern's permanent collection, it is exhibited here in a new arrangement.

To get a sense of the variety and precision of her practice, as well as her assiduous engagement with verbal language as part of the texture of visual art, here is a list of the words Hiller uses to describe the composition of each individual box in "From the Freud Museum":

annotated, edited, collected, portrayed, collated, addressed, curated, indexed, extracted, displaced, realised, navigated, filed, diverted, presented, witnessed, classified, explored, represented, designed, compiled, assembled, positioned, practiced, surveyed, manifested, preserved, researched, acquired, included, remaindered, clarified, validated, labelled, processed, registered, analysed, organised, sampled, found, boxed, rated, bound, fitted, located, acquired, extracted, finalised, displayed, situated.

To which I could add, in terms of the effect on the viewer, stimulated, invigorated, dizzied, nauseated, disturbed, and slightly obsessed.

This is the sixth time I've seen "From the Freud Museum" and the second time I've seen a Hiller retrospective, which adds to the uncanny feeling of furniture just out of place. At the Baltic in 2004, "Witness" (a forest of speakers relaying stories of alien abduction) was installed in a bright, white high-ceilinged room that referred architecturally to the minimalist spaceships of our cultural imaginary. At Tate, the piece is installed in a smaller, darkened room with a round light in the centre: we are on earth, at night, perhaps on a highway where the streetlights have failed, and the spaceship is hovering above us. Claustrophobic and distinctly creepy, it was less moving than the Baltic installation, but also less clinical -- more uncanny, as I felt less an identification with the speakers, and more their urgency requiring that I believe.

Also in the dark are the video installations "An Entertainment," a Punch-and-Judy show I find too disturbing to watch (especially to the embarrassed accompaniment of undergrad art student high-pitched giggles), "Magic Lantern," an experiment in etheric voices and optical illusions that is at once blissful and disturbing, and "PSI Girls," a cultural history of telekinetic female film characters that moves from the joyous and chaotic energy of the pre-pubescent Matilda to the violently phallic, attenuated adolescent focus of Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney) in The Craft.



But the most striking piece was one I hadn't seen/heard before -- the equivalent of that dream where you discover an impossible room in your house (as in The Eleventh Hour in the most recent season of Doctor Who, or the impossible extra spaces in House of Leaves or Coraline). "The Last Silent Movie" (2007) is described in the accompanying text panel as neither silent, nor a movie. Although it is a video and audio installation, I thought it was closer to 'Sisters of Menon,' Hiller's experiment in automatic writing, in the notes to which she writes that

MESSAGES SUPPRESSED BY THE SELF DO NOT CEASE TO EXIST. MESSAGES SUPPRESSED BY THE CULTURE DO NOT CEASE TO EXIST.

'The Last Silent Movie' recuperates suppressed messages: specifically, archival recordings of last or late speakers of two dozen languages worldwide. These messages are represented by an audio track, a video of white-on-black subtitles translating the recordings into English and naming the languages, and framed oscilloscope traces of the recordings, accompanied by striking phrases translated into English. (You can see and hear samples here.)

Perhaps the most striking phrase is an unbearably sad annotation that appears in the subtitles and on the oscilloscope reading for Kulkhasi, a language no longer spoken in South Africa.

Her language is extinct and her song cannot be translated.

The film offers up an inverse Rosetta stone, a record of languages eradicated by colonialism and globalisation even as we apparently enter a golden age of communication technology. The recordings are at once amazing and salvific and, made by Euro-Western anthropologists and at academic conferences, a trail of destruction, of information without understanding. Hiller is an anthropologist by training, which sharpens the installation's critique, the despairing EuroWestern fantasies of both erasure and recovery at the white man's hand balanced by a respectful sorrow towards necessary strategies of silence:

We learned to hide our language and our secrets

states the oscilloscope from Jiwarli, a language from Western Australia.

It is these oscilloscopes that most closely fulfil Hiller's declaration 30 years' previously in month seven of '10 Months' that 'There is no distinction between "reading" images and reading texts.' This is the third in the month's list of 'Knots and Knows, Some NOT's and NO's about art.' For Hiller, the k/not of signification is negative insofar as it is fixed, positive insofar as it is always available to be undone and rebraided. The first large work in the exhibition, the remains of a performance called 'Work in Progress' (1980) make this plain: over the course of a weekend, Hiller unwove the canvas of one of her abstract paintings into its constituent threads, which she wound into a ball, strung across the wall (in homage to Duchamp's Witch's Cradle, or Deren's deeply uncanny film thereof?), and plaited into a thick braid which is attached to the wall at the Tate with silver nails.

Witchlocked, the tail of a night mare, a fetish, a Victorian love charm, a female craft (the only female invention, according to Freud), a model of human interconnection, a quipu, a Surrealist crucifixion: the braid knots together the sources of Hiller's work across myth, occult, antiquity, anthropology, craft, modernism, deconstruction, and embodiment. In its simplicity and its visual arrest, it sums up my reaction to her work: a frayed.

Squint Your Eyes and Look Closer, I'm Not Between You and Your Ambition

© Natalie Harrower, 2011.

Some weeks it's good to be a(n ageing) riot grrrl (woo grrrl, did this article from Friday's Guardian with "20 years ago" in the headline make me super-aware of my growing Sontag). But I'm not alone in growing old disgracefully and ever more riotously (can you be a riot wrrrrmrrrrn?). Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney badass, is writing a TV comedy series called Portlandia for IFC, which includes the (so, so untrue ;) Feminist Bookstore sketches (early versions can be seen at ThunderAnt). PJ Harvey has a growly-melodic wild new album (the aptly named Let England Shake) out soon, and Patti Smith said in an interview that she's been

listening to Polly Harvey's new song – she has this new song, The Words That Maketh Murder – what a great song. It just makes me happy to exist.

And, oh yes, this Saturday I went to see Ani Difranco in play a solo set in Dublin with my friend Natalie and a group of women from Running Amach.

Natalie and I worked out that we'd been to at least three of the same Ani gigs before we even knew each other -- bound by the solidarity of queer/feminist independent music (the Righteous Babe pose is pretty much the secret handshake you always wondered if queer women had to find each other ;). We also worked out that this was the best gig we'd seen for years: the most energised, inventive, alive and well, rioting. There were a couple of new songs -- Amendment and Promiscuity -- that offered complex, narrative analyses of politics and people as they entwine (the set list we reconstructed is here -- and more photos here, by Rosa Paolicelli).

Ani gigs, being a rare constant in a blurry, confusing life, often make me remember previous Ani gigs: the first one I saw (after winning tickets from DIVA!) in Shepherd's Bush in 1997, when she played "Swan Dive" and I instantly gave my heart to her (for some reason, I love songs where the female singer uses the word "tampon" -- blame riot grrrl). Or the first gig I saw in Canada, in the gym at the University of Guelph, two hours after being dumped; riding home on Coach Canada through the flattest flat fields in the world, listening to "Providence" and crying. Happy times. Whooping with a crowd the size of Lake Ontario outdoors at Fort York when she sang "To the Teeth," ending "I'm gonna take all my friends / Move to Canada / And die of old age" as the lights flared pink against the summer twilight. It was during Ani's set at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2000 that I decided, for definite, to get my first tattoo; decided what it would be and where it would go. "Five foot two, wriggly and giggly," it feels sometimes like she's a livelier, brighter, more musical, more passionate (and more tattooed, although only just) version of me, leading the way out there.

Because -- confession -- long before I ever wanted to be a poet, I wanted (needed?) to be a singer. Raised on Joni and Carole by my child-of-the-sixties mother, I grew my hair long and wrote lyrics (boxes and boxes full o' lyrics) on my grandmother's old Olivetti typewriter, bashing away in my room to silence out everything else. Sadly, musical talent passed me by, and I couldn't master those teeny keyboards you got in going-home bags let alone a full-scale instrument (despite my passion for Jacqueline du Pré). So instead I committed the lyrics of Little Earthquakes to memory (and analysed them for months in my diary). And how excited am I about Tori bringing a musical to the National Theatre next year? Already saving money for a sleeping bag to camp out for tickets. Second confession: I know it's much cooler to be a riot grrrl, to worship at the altar of Patti Smith and PJ Harvey (and I do). But the wellspring of my poetry is a response to the more lyrical, more trebly, more folky, more (gulp) girly vocals and versification of Tori and Ani.

This blog post honestly feels like a form of coming out. The critical consensus on cultural cool is such that there is a canon of alt.rock acceptable to cite in poetry, or even describe as poetry - Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joy Division, maybe the Pixies. Patti Smith seems to have made it there since Trampin'; Paul Muldoon has a PJ Harvey poem. (Everyone has a Dylan poem.) But those flauntingly emotive, excoriatingly intimate, musically brilliant female singers? Not a chance (although Ruth Padel has a poem about Tori Amos' Bosendorfer piano). They don't really do irony. They don't really rawk. Their voices are high in the mix, their lyrics treble and tremble with confession and the contortions of conscience. They are about tampons and goddesses and mothers and abortions and not being a pretty girl. But still being a girl. If that's even possible. They want to know who you are.

They sing straight out to the audience, to you in the audience, to you at home in your room with your Walkman on trying really hard not to hear anything beyond the headphones. They say "excuse me, but can I be you for a while" and demand that you be present, you be really there. In poetry, the invocation of 'you' is called apostrophe, and Jonathan Culler argues that apostrophic address (‘O beloved as thou art! // O lift me from the grass!’ from Shelley's 'An Indian Girl's Love Song') is almost absent from contemporary poetry because it exemplifies ‘all that is most radical, embarrassing, pretentious, and mystificatory’ about the act of writing poetry -- of addressing intimate thoughts and visions to an assumed, absent audience. It's scary stuff. It means opening yourself up.

So if loving Ani and Tori is embarrassing and pretentious, which I can sometimes feel in hipster poetic company where I don't get every Dylan reference, then it's also radical and mystificatory because of its vulnerability, its openness to the possibility of being undone. Not a bruised, wounded drawl but tears. But the tattoo of a wedding ring. Something previously unheard and singing.

Holiday Reading, or Order vs. Chaos

…in which I continue with the questions asked in the previous post about the randomness/associatedness of any given stack of books. Given that no selection is entirely random (not least because I bought or borrowed all the books and so my taste is a major associative principle), but also that some associations are unpredictably weird (both Jenny Diski and Margaret Atwood cite Franz de Waal's study of brown capuchin monkeys and their cucumber/grape value system -- zeitgeist?) I am also curious about why some books satisfied and others irritated, particularly relating to ideas of order and chaos.

So, the books read were (in order, as far as I can remember):
Samuel Delany, The Einstein Intersection (thanks to Theo Chiotis for the recommendation)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show
Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Jenny Diski, What I Don't Know About Animals
Doris Lessing, Shikasta
Ariel Dorfman, Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Frances Presley, Lines of Sight
Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain
Margaret Atwood, Payback
Patti Smith, Just Kids

One obvious connection/division arises instantly: science fiction and non-fiction. Pleasure/work? Or work/pleasure (or cucumber/grape, in the de Wall duality) (to risk echoing those irritating HSBC ads that accompany the journey into hell/the Ryanair boarding system). The books I was most excited to read were Anathem and Just Kids, having waited for all 1000 pages of the former to appear in paperback. I made a seemingly random decision (based on Ryanair's draconian cabin baggage policy and the capacity of my coat pockets) to begin my reading orgy with the relatively slim Delany -- and this may have been a strategic error. After Delany, most other SF seems laboured, laborious and portentous -- some would say that Stephenson and Lessing, both wordy authors with a love of didactic world-building, are prone to those faults even without comparison to Delany.

Einstein Intersection, from its euphonious title to its limpidly beautiful conclusion, might be a tenth of the size of Dhalgren, but is packed with similar ideas about travel, cyclicity, community, desire, curiosity, urbanity, and entropy. Its final lines are indicative of its ambiguous and generous nature: "As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it." I love that idea that turning towards the dawn is also following darkness.

Alas, none of Stephenson's atomic explosions could compare to that sunrise. Sylvia Townsend Warner's historical lesbian romance, set during the Paris Commune and told though the cycle of seasons and sunlight (as the title suggests), fared better in the inevitable comparison stakes: absorbing, witty, prickly, intelligent. It also shared with Delany's novel what's conventionally called an "open ending"; that is, that the final paragraph finds the protagonist setting out on a new adventure after failing to complete the quest that has taken up the course of the book. In each case, the protagonist spends the bulk of the novel striving for the love of a particular woman, and ends by losing that love to death. Lobey, Delany's Orphic protagonist, learns through an encounter with Le Dove (a Persephone figure) that he can change the myth, and journey rather than grieve -- an exciting conclusion that suggests change is possible.

Likewise in Summer Will Show. The majestic, infuriating Sophia Willoughby stays in the apartment of her dead lover, revolutionary Minna Lemuel (formerly her husband's mistress), rather than return to the living death of her Aunt Léocadie's patrician circle. She too starts on a journey, one that begins: 'A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.' Sophia ends the novel 'obdurately attentive and by degrees absorbed' by the Communist Manifesto. A highly dangerous text when Warner was writing in 1936, the Manifesto wrenches open not only the end of the novel but the very idea of the fictional narrative as having an ending -- and thus the relationship between writing "The End" on the final page of a novel, and the changeable nature of living history.

The Einstein Intersection was composed as Delany travelled around Mediterranean Europe, and shares with Summer Will Show a restless engagement, by rewriting, with European mythic history. Shikasta likewise grapples with myths, or rather with Myth, taking on Genesis and Exodus, explained as a Chinese Whispered account of the enlightened beings of Canopus colonising Earth (known in its latter days as Shikasta, the Broken). I initially pinned the novel as satirical, a dark comedy about the dangers and hypocrisies paternalistic imperialism, and I think that reading stands (why else write a novel that consists primarily of reports by alien/angelic functionaries, alternating in the latter stages with the diary of a character who is sacrificed to their 'higher' ends?) but there is a deadly (as in deadening) moral seriousness that accompanies it. The ending of the novel seems "open" -- in that it posits the rebuilding of Earth according to Canopean principles, and in that the book is the first of a sequence -- but in fact slams closed. The rebuilding of towns by a United Colours of Benetton assortment of well-intentioned characters is a nostalgic return to Edenic first principles bathed in the Canopean glow of SOWF, sense-of-we-feeling.

Anathem ends with a similar scene of communitarian rebuilding that is in fact a repetition of patterns sealed by a novel obsessed with geometry and things carved in stone; it doesn't mention Neolithic stone circles as Lessing does, but they appear in Frances Presley's Lines of Sight: not as Canopean symbols of cosmic alignment, but with their mystery intact. Stephenson, a mathematical whiz, loves a neat equation: whether algebraic, geometric or narrative, he likes his sums to come out right. For me, this makes his novels zero-sum games, which is after all the conventional structure: the story begins with order; chaos comes; order -- a slightly better, more thoughtful/wealthier/more pair-bonded order -- is restored, better protected against the coming of chaos. And they all live happily ever after.

In fact, Stephenson's novel is about the orderliness of order: it posits alien beings from other versions of our cosmos who (apart from a slight different in nostril shape) look just like us! How convenient, one might suggest, to erase in one stroke the metaphor of the alien as racial/sexual Other. These other humanoid beings have dyadic sex/gender, innate drives towards progress and violence, and (of course) Euclidean geometry. Orolo, the novel's expositionary character (in a novel that is 90% exposition, Orolo's use as the Basil stands out), leads the protagonist Erasmas in a "dialog" (the technical term given to Anathem's version of Socratic discourse) towards the realisation that this means that the bipedal, bilateral, heterosexual human form and attendant "human nature" are the closest to the ideal form (ie: Platonic) and therefore the best of all possible outcomes tended to across the polycosmi. This inclines Erasmas and the people of his version of the cosmos to welcome and collaborate with the incomers after scaring the bejayzus out of their leaders with a vision of the handily-named Everything Killers.

Sense-of-we-feeling, the notion that we are all the same under the skin, has been a valuable tool for peace-making and post-war reconstruction work, as well as for civil rights and human rights movements, and Lessing's impassioned denunciations of racism and sexism (as well as the amazing feat, at least in the edition I read, of featuring a character of colour on the cover of a science fiction novel -- something Ursula K. Le Guin has written about in relation to the continued whitewashing of Earthsea) are to be respected rather more than Stephenson's supposedly gender- and race- blind writing in which all the main active roles fall to white males. This is a problem with SOWF: that it inclines towards the sense that everyone is like us, where "us" means a dominant culture, handily allowing the representative figures of that culture to carry on carrying on, because they are now representative of everyone.


This is something that Jenny Diski and Giles Tremlett both touch on in their approaches to two very different dyads: human/animal and the two Spains (generally interpreted as Left and Right, but also expandable to nationalist/federalist-separatist; Christian/non-Christian; urban/rural; Barcelona/Madrid; men/women, and other variations that don't quite fall into line along left/right divisions). Diski is brilliantly insistent on the absolute Otherness of animals and the uneasiness that creates for humans as cultivators and companions (it also gives her an excuse to repeat the phrase "Derrida's pussy", which I found funny every time). She writes incisively about attempts to make animals like us (ie: to include them in SOWF), most wittily in her reading of LOLCat and the LOLCat Bible, which does a much more convincing job of revealing the strangeness of Genesis -- and the way that Genesis tries to harmonise the strangeness of existence -- than Lessing does in her systematic account of Canopean contact.

Rather than chaos, with its negative religious associations, maybe I should make the other term in my dyad strangeness. Although Housekeeping is, in its enchanting way, a hymn exactly to chaos: to the entropic, to letting go, to stepping outside order. The chaotic is a principle of strangeness, of the interruption of a system by something outside it, something with its own kind of order, like aunt Sylvie in Robinson's novel, who lets leaves blow into the house, but rinses and stores jars in the living room. Sylvie gives to Ruth, the young narrator, the gift not just of strangeness (difference) or chaos (interruption) but its refusal to conform to the system: a resistant Otherness. Ruth frequently uses the word "ordinary" for that quality she associates with her grandmother's house and the town of Fingerbone: a word that etymologically suggests the place of order in dominant ideals of human culture.

Much praised for its orderly, almost processional, use of language, the novel retains a formal strangeness (like Diski, it associates this strangeness -- and the chaotic tendency of human narrative -- with Genesis, rewriting the story of Eden and the Flood; Ruth and Sylvie, like Delany's Lobey, are destined to become errant wanderers, reversing the grand narrative of civilisation's "progress" from hunter/gatherer to settlement). Narrated by Ruth in the first person, it includes passages that offer impossible access to the thoughts and deeds of other characters (particularly her grandmother, long before her birth). While it appears to narrate the present through the convention of the past tense, suggesting that the narrative voice is close in time to -- possibly even coincident with -- the events described, the end of the novel suggests that it is very much a distant reflection from years later, a different kind of open-endness in its temporal reversal that is as dizzying and lovely as the repeated image chain that associates, inverts and reconfigures drowning in flying, and flying in drowning. The image chain does not draw to an orderly conclusion, but keeps generating, pushing at the strangeness of human movement through the elements. Like Ruth and Sylvie, Robinson's prose opts for a resistant Otherness.

Patti Smith is insistent on the significance of this quality for her gallery of artist-heroes in Just Kids (Rimbaud, Blake, Kahlo, Hendrix): not in the sense that artists are Other than human, but that they are compelled by the dense, irresolvable mystery of what is not-I/us; not compelled to resolve or normalise it, but to enter into it. This doesn't preclude them from some of things associated with SOWF (kindness to others, generosity, material beauty, community), but it does mean they are uneasy about the homogeneity, passivity and -- for want of a more precise term -- niceness that SOWF implies in Lessing's and Stephenson's "let's all pitch in together" heartwarming big finales. Warner's Paris Commune is a less harmonious but more exciting vision of divergent personalities, aims and discourses united not by SOWF but by a healthy respect and curiosity about the difference of difference (the very difference that motivates the curiosity of Delany's Lobey). Smith draws a distinction between the 'incestuous community' of the St. Mark's Poetry Project and the mutuality of her connection with Robert Mapplethorpe: 'I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.' Trust is one name for what occurs between Diski and her cat, a surrendering of loneliness that is not a merging of discrete entities, but an echoic resonance replete with caution, tentativeness, contingency and commitment. Trust is open-ended, whether between living entities or text and reader.