So, my dear editor at my dear press tells me that the reader's report on the poetics book is just a few days away. After two whole seasons of impatience, I find I am now scared. What, oh what, will the reader report? It's been so long that this process has begun to feel like I'm a murder defendant waiting twelve hours for a jury to come to verdict. As defense attorneys will explain, that's not usually a good sign.
To cheer myself up, I present to you the chapter summaries of the first full length study of 20th Century poetry through an Irigarian lens, specifically that of her ethics of sexual difference. I add, should you have unlucky and never read these poets, go read these poets. They are simply astonishing. Especially St.-John Perse's and his Seamarks/Amers. You did not know that poets would try That!
Also, Well now, kids, to my happy astonishment, someone just dropped by and asked to be apprised of the publication of my book, should that ever happen... So I thought, hmmm, for his sake I should put up the chapter abstracts. Hence here 'tis, but modified as I discovered that the chapter on G. Stein is a whole other book on 20th C poetry, and is not in the present volume. Also said visitor, Paul, runs this cool poetry blog: Wordsalad. Go read it.
Ahem, the book:
Prologue: For Novices and Adepts (22 pp.)
Quick review of the position of Irigaray's work in the larger frame of feminist philosophy.
Introduction: What? How?
Overview of the book’s argument, organization, and style included with this proposal.
Chapter 1: A Tantric Ethics of Sexual Difference (60pp. ds. 11pt.)
This chapter describes the dialogical subject, or Diotiman relation, that Irigaray posits in her ethics and that relation’s parallels in Tantric philosophy. Through detailed explication of the terms of Irigaray’s ethics in terms of Tantra as explained by Octavio Paz, Andrew Harvey, and Miranda Shaw, I show that Tantra is a system in which two complex and nuanced subjects are taken to exist and the complexities of that relation are explored. The conclusion of the chapter shows this ethics to require a spiritualization of the carnal and carnalization of spirit in order for Irigaray’s ethics to address humans in their full complexity. Irigaray’s use of touch, the caress, as an important aspect of her ethics is given close consideration.
Chapter 2: Burn the Panopticon (60pp.)
This chapter moves from the symbolism of Tantra to an explication the central terms of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference through understanding her work as that of a “symbolist philosopher,” and develops a theory of poetics and the poetic subject (one model of subjectivity generally) in the spirit of that ethics. Imagination, in this ethics, becomes not the flight of fancy, but the risk of responsibly trying to imagine a life beyond the problematics of the postmodern. It is this texture of imagination that allows one to burn the panopticon to see and be otherwise. Having explored some of the sources of Irigaray’s thought outside the Western philosophical tradition, I turn here to the implications of this hybrid thought of sexual difference for poetry, poetics, and the poetic subject as a model for subjectivity in general (as the poet has thought of the poetic subject since at least the German Romantics). The chapter concludes with an examination of Irigaray’s response to Heidegger’s ideas of the poet and of the purpose of that subjectivity of risk and complexity in ethical love for poetry, but also as a site at which poetry can teach us how to be two (and more), that is how poetry can lead to an ethical and vatic sense of our being.
Chapter 3: For the Other in Yves Bonnefoy’s The Motion and Immobility of Douve (56pp.)
This long chapter is both an extensive close reading of Bonnefoy’s long poem and an exploration of how difficult it can be to arrive at a poetics of being two. Exploring the instances of the interval, and examining the subjective dynamics between the voices/characters, I will read this poem as ambivalent in regards to sexual difference. In one direction, its narrative and characters resist any possible trace of such an ethics or mode of being, while in another, theun-dead female figure of Douve presents readers with a textual representation of the sensible transcendental and a respect for the interval like few other figures in poetry. The poem is dramatic, narrative, disjunctive, and surrealist. In this matrix of cooperative, if sometimes dissonant, genres and styles a pair of lovers speak to each other across the abyss of death. Douve, the woman in the poem, is dead, and has taken a disruptive and antagonistic posture toward her former lover. The man in the poem laments the loss of his beloved, associating her with nature and its power, but also seeing her loss as tragedy only for himself in still fairly traditional patriarchal terms. The tension between the two, the insistence even from death that she is not as his fantasy wanted her, the failure to wonder and to allow the other-subject their existence in relation to their gender and their own unique being, threatens not just the integrity of their subjectivities but he integrity of the phenomenal world itself. The poem is examined as an opportunity to meditate on the dangers of refusing being two and on the difficulty of bringing this state of being to consciousness and culture.
Chapter 4: St.-Jean Perse and the Languor of Renewal (c. 35 pp.)
Perse’s poetry is also not yet a poetry of being two, but his sense of language and phenomena, of love and the sensual, and the pleasure and joy often found in Perse’s poems. Working primarily from the Irigarian terms mucous and angels, and her definitions of love of self and love of other, this explication of Perse’s poem focuses on Seamarks. This epic poem registers the complexity of Diotiman relation sometimes by considering human interactions, sometimes relations between humans and nature, and often represents these complexities in the interrelation of symbols and the layers of tension in his poems. Perse is poet of the water, of the wide open ocean, and drop of a tear, and provides an opportunity to explore the Tantric and contemplative paradoxes with which we will learn to live with confidence in a culture of being two: for, in it a city's women march to the sea to demand/pray for a world in which they exist as subjects-feminine, and a pair of lovers take to the sea for a year to be transformed into the founding couple of that world. They layers of Greek drama, Tantric-like cosmology, and frail human risk in the face of always possible failure demonstrate the leap that a culture of two would be, and the difficulty of leaping.
Chapter 5: Jorie Graham’s Parousia (40 pp.)
The close readings offered here focus on the use of multiple simultaneous perspectives, disjunction, and ambiguity to represent the difficulty, and sometimes the success of arriving at a being two. Graham’s work is as encompassing, interdisciplinary, intertexual and ‘difficult’ as Irigaray’s, partly because she working out in poetry many of the problems to which Irigaray applies herself in philosophy. While many of Graham’s astute readers have commented on these propensities of Graham’s styles, none has yet collected those comments into an understanding of Graham’s work as also thinking its way into being two. Jorie Graham is the first poet to write much of her poetry with the concerns and difficulties of Irigaray’s thought in mind. Of the poets I consider in this book, she is the only one to write after Irigaray. Graham’s interest in the stories of Daphne, Cassandra, Penelope, and Eurydice, many of the Guardian Angel poems, the Aubades, and some of her biographical poems directly explore the tension in our culture that Irigaray identifies as patriarchy’s foreclosure of sexual difference.
Chapter 6: This Impasse which Is Not One (40 pp.)
The book concludes by opening onto the wider scene of the present culture. If poetic subjects imply or suggest ways of being human when they are understood as having something to say to ethics and thus living together, this chapter explores, celebrates, decries and laments the trends in our culture at present that might let us move into a culture of positive differences and that frustrate, but do not render impassible, that horizon. This chapter brings the discussion of Irigaray’s ethics out of the “narrow” world of poetics and literary criticism to suggest some of the ways in which the reader might go and engage the world from this Diotiman point of view and where, in addition to Irigaray, feminist and other thinkers are imagining their way into a new world. The work of bell hooks and Ken Wilber and Curtis White, as well as several others, are addressed as to their resonance with Irigaray’s thought and the opportunities for a culture of life they open to us.
6.4.09
2.3.09
Twittering GOP at the Address to a Joint Congress
Dear GOP, MSM, and many blogs,
Others may have made this point, but I haven't drilled down far enough through the noise to find them.
Twittering during the President's address to Congress and the Nation was plain, old fashioned, inexcusably RUDE, CHILDISH, and PASSIVE AGRESSIVE. Such behavior tells me who you really are.
When I teach, whether in a lecture or discussion session, students I observe texting/twittering or Gods-forbid letting their phones ring in class, quickly find the room silent and The Prof standing next to them. I confiscate their mobile communication device. Class does not resume until the device is surrendered to my temproary proprietorship. It's all very embarassing for the student, but highlights the severity of the distraction, and then it never happens again.
In movie theaters, classrooms, churches and temples, court rooms, public spaces devoted to shared experience requiring full attention, One Does Not Text or Twitter.
If the GOP can't even manage basic mature politeness, then they should be treated accordingly. I suggest the guards present be empowered to appropriate MCDs at such events.
I mean really. The Dems often looked angry or bored when your guy was "speaking," but they did not just up and tune out. They sat and listened because that is the respect due the office if not the man.
That the MSM and lots of bloggers neglected to comment on the sheer hubris of these meaningless "twitters" (their very meaninglessness embedded in the metaphor of their name) is equally disappointing.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Those are your choices. Twitttering/pouting because you lost your monopoly on political power is not one of them. Deal. with. it.
Others may have made this point, but I haven't drilled down far enough through the noise to find them.
Twittering during the President's address to Congress and the Nation was plain, old fashioned, inexcusably RUDE, CHILDISH, and PASSIVE AGRESSIVE. Such behavior tells me who you really are.
When I teach, whether in a lecture or discussion session, students I observe texting/twittering or Gods-forbid letting their phones ring in class, quickly find the room silent and The Prof standing next to them. I confiscate their mobile communication device. Class does not resume until the device is surrendered to my temproary proprietorship. It's all very embarassing for the student, but highlights the severity of the distraction, and then it never happens again.
In movie theaters, classrooms, churches and temples, court rooms, public spaces devoted to shared experience requiring full attention, One Does Not Text or Twitter.
If the GOP can't even manage basic mature politeness, then they should be treated accordingly. I suggest the guards present be empowered to appropriate MCDs at such events.
I mean really. The Dems often looked angry or bored when your guy was "speaking," but they did not just up and tune out. They sat and listened because that is the respect due the office if not the man.
That the MSM and lots of bloggers neglected to comment on the sheer hubris of these meaningless "twitters" (their very meaninglessness embedded in the metaphor of their name) is equally disappointing.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Those are your choices. Twitttering/pouting because you lost your monopoly on political power is not one of them. Deal. with. it.
27.2.09
24.2.09
Train from Disney Land to Las Vegas, Dammit.
Listen up Rush, Fox News, Govenor Jindall (who is quite charming, Happy Mardi Gras to you, and laissez les bons temps rouler!) and my own dad.
The train. From Disney Land to Vegas-- full stop. Tone of paternalizing dismay. Sounds very much like a silly toy, a wasted gift, an extra attraction for tourists doubling their vacation.
Can you feel the whip of rotation? Can you feel both reason and planet shudder?
The Train is an experiment in high speed rail service for short distance runs. LA to Vegas. Dallas to Austin to Houston. St. Louis to KC or Chicago. The entire Eastern Seaboard. Orlando to Tampa. Name your short hop on a plane.
It is an experiment in taking short hop and Highly Polluting flights out of the skies. It is an experiment in decent and humane service (if we follow the European model). It is an experiment in the modernization of our passenger transport infrastructure.
Oh, no! NOOOOOOOO! Terrible. Symbol of Dem habit of throwing money around like Mardi Gras beads.
Get a real objection. Start singing about some serious new ideas.
On such a train, one sits in a comfortable seat, might eat a decent meal, watch the countryside roll by. One does not fear car wreck by drunk or by tractor trailer or plummeting from the sky.
Given the security delays at airports, on most of these short hops, the train will get us there with greater haste.
A gazillion people run that highway from LA to Vegas every day, every weekend, in cars that don't run on sunshine. Some are tourist, many are locals. It's a good location for the experiment.
Stop making it sound like an expensive toy. It's completely disingenuous and short sighted and anti-livable-planet and transparently stupid to do so.
Stop it.
The train. From Disney Land to Vegas-- full stop. Tone of paternalizing dismay. Sounds very much like a silly toy, a wasted gift, an extra attraction for tourists doubling their vacation.
Can you feel the whip of rotation? Can you feel both reason and planet shudder?
The Train is an experiment in high speed rail service for short distance runs. LA to Vegas. Dallas to Austin to Houston. St. Louis to KC or Chicago. The entire Eastern Seaboard. Orlando to Tampa. Name your short hop on a plane.
It is an experiment in taking short hop and Highly Polluting flights out of the skies. It is an experiment in decent and humane service (if we follow the European model). It is an experiment in the modernization of our passenger transport infrastructure.
Oh, no! NOOOOOOOO! Terrible. Symbol of Dem habit of throwing money around like Mardi Gras beads.
Get a real objection. Start singing about some serious new ideas.
On such a train, one sits in a comfortable seat, might eat a decent meal, watch the countryside roll by. One does not fear car wreck by drunk or by tractor trailer or plummeting from the sky.
Given the security delays at airports, on most of these short hops, the train will get us there with greater haste.
A gazillion people run that highway from LA to Vegas every day, every weekend, in cars that don't run on sunshine. Some are tourist, many are locals. It's a good location for the experiment.
Stop making it sound like an expensive toy. It's completely disingenuous and short sighted and anti-livable-planet and transparently stupid to do so.
Stop it.
2.2.09
Dear Super Bowl Advertisements:
I noticed two dominant themes in your work the first half of the game: anarchy and sexism.
In the current economic clstrfck, the anarchy was satisfying--aimed as it was at the innanity of office life, the fun of breaking things that don't work in our favor. It's an old theme, not very inventive, but in this moment it was hilarious and cathartic. Good on ya.
The sexism, however, was gratuitous--as it always is. Head's up: women watch football, eat junk food, drive fast cars, and not just because we can't avoid it. The sexism was adolescent in nature, silly that is, non-threatening, but sexist nonetheless. We can't avoid men (unless we can drive faster than they can, and I can). Yawn.
Next year, when people are still out of work, thinking a little harder about how to get at who screwed 'em--stick with the anarchy. If you can't have any new ideas, that is.
In the current economic clstrfck, the anarchy was satisfying--aimed as it was at the innanity of office life, the fun of breaking things that don't work in our favor. It's an old theme, not very inventive, but in this moment it was hilarious and cathartic. Good on ya.
The sexism, however, was gratuitous--as it always is. Head's up: women watch football, eat junk food, drive fast cars, and not just because we can't avoid it. The sexism was adolescent in nature, silly that is, non-threatening, but sexist nonetheless. We can't avoid men (unless we can drive faster than they can, and I can). Yawn.
Next year, when people are still out of work, thinking a little harder about how to get at who screwed 'em--stick with the anarchy. If you can't have any new ideas, that is.
30.1.09
Marketing? ... Anyone?
So, why-oh-why would one call it a Flammable Safety Cabinet? Paging Mr. Carlin. Mr. Carlin, there's a call on the line for you.
25.1.09
Languages? Maybe Not.
And we worry over our official language. We're I French, and I sort of am, and as an American English speaker of some literacy, I say, "Arrettez le Globish!!!! Immediatement! Sacre Monde!"
No metaphor. No humor. No connotation.
In both languages I say, "Fie on't."
Srsly.
No metaphor. No humor. No connotation.
In both languages I say, "Fie on't."
Srsly.
Fascinating and Problematic
NYT Mag article "What Do Women Want." I'm still processing, and it's preliminary. I would recommend reading the last few paragraphs first, and then dig in. Warning: some discussion of rape and rape fantasies, but nothing graphic. Will be back with more thinking. Am sure that the feminist and women's listserves and blogs will be very busy later today.
22.1.09
Dysfunctional Equine Relations
Right, I go to feed the horses tonight. I forget to turn on the barn light, which in winter is their supper bell. I whistle the horses up instead. They don't come. Get to the barn, turn on the light, and whistle. Galloping ensues. Mickey Joe trots up nicely on her side of the pasture. Hers is separate from Jack and Seeker's pasture because MJ is given to founder, that is she will eat herself to death, so smaller pasture. All good. Hay for MJ, no worries.
Galloping continues, and Jack all but body checks Seeker, heads up the hill to me and the barn at a dead run, stops dramatically as you have often horses do in westerns, and turns to, I am not kidding, guard the barn. Seeker gallops off into the dark. I recriminate Jack while also pitching him some hay in the barn. Jack doesn't so much as look at it, no. He's staring off into the dark with his ears back.
Yes, you're right, no one actually rides Jack. He's retired for reasons of personality.
So, I walk over to Jack and nudge him in the direction of the hay, patiently explaining that there's lots of it, and it's just as good, the same bale in fact, as the hay Seeker is about to get. He looks at it, at me, and stands his ground. I go back to the hay room, fork up another serving, and walk outside the barn to the spot by the trough where Seeker likes to eat -- where he can easily run away from Jack.
Jack saunters over and chows down on Seeker's hay. I walk about half way down the hill and whistle for Seeker. Jack, being Jack, trots meaningfully past me to the bottom of the hill and glares meaningfully out into the dark. I whistle for Seeker and call him, and Jack comes back up to resume his post, now guarding all the hay. Meanwhile, MJ is over on her side of the fence, content with her dinner.
So, I go back in the barn and move Jack's hay out and around the far corner of barn where there is no way he can both guard his pile and run Seeker off of the other. Whistle. Nothing. Seeker will have none of it.
Turn to close up, and Jack, I swear, gave me the evil eye.
Galloping continues, and Jack all but body checks Seeker, heads up the hill to me and the barn at a dead run, stops dramatically as you have often horses do in westerns, and turns to, I am not kidding, guard the barn. Seeker gallops off into the dark. I recriminate Jack while also pitching him some hay in the barn. Jack doesn't so much as look at it, no. He's staring off into the dark with his ears back.
Yes, you're right, no one actually rides Jack. He's retired for reasons of personality.
So, I walk over to Jack and nudge him in the direction of the hay, patiently explaining that there's lots of it, and it's just as good, the same bale in fact, as the hay Seeker is about to get. He looks at it, at me, and stands his ground. I go back to the hay room, fork up another serving, and walk outside the barn to the spot by the trough where Seeker likes to eat -- where he can easily run away from Jack.
Jack saunters over and chows down on Seeker's hay. I walk about half way down the hill and whistle for Seeker. Jack, being Jack, trots meaningfully past me to the bottom of the hill and glares meaningfully out into the dark. I whistle for Seeker and call him, and Jack comes back up to resume his post, now guarding all the hay. Meanwhile, MJ is over on her side of the fence, content with her dinner.
So, I go back in the barn and move Jack's hay out and around the far corner of barn where there is no way he can both guard his pile and run Seeker off of the other. Whistle. Nothing. Seeker will have none of it.
Turn to close up, and Jack, I swear, gave me the evil eye.
16.1.09
Dear SEC and Bush Co.
Madoff might not have made a single trade, according to Reuters. That, that is an epic fail. So, in honor of seeing the back of Bush and loving the sight:
Dear President Obama --
Make sure that never happens again.
Thanks.
Dear President Obama --
Make sure that never happens again.
Thanks.
11.1.09
2009 and the Detournment of My Quotidienne
(pardon the SI reference, but there was this review of a memoir by Guy Debord's lover in The Nation, and it got me thinking about those cats and that lingo lately)
A lull in the flurry of Father Care and visit from Tricksy (Speed's SO), and I feel that blowing off a bit of serious writing on the Murdoch essay (which is getting entirely off the chain)to read some friends' blogs is just the ticket.
Yeh. So Princess at Flooded Lizard Kingdom wrote herself some New Year's Resolutions, and tagged a couple blogs reflecting on the spirit in which to think and write them. So, agreeing with her, as I often do, I got to thinking about mine. Late, I know, but things have been a tad busy here.
Some are making lists of intentions for their resolutions, some keeping themselves to the one. Having made lists called "To Do --> Ta Da," including master lists of Things To Accomplish This Year, or Things to Accomplish This Summer, including action items like "Meditate more," and "Recycle More" and "Fix Your Bloody iPod" (that one's from five months ago) ... You get the idea. I'm not making a list, and I'm not limiting to The One Resolution.
Rather. My deal right now is that I don't feel all that resolute, or resolved, or fixed like the North Star at all. I feel very drifty, very much unmoored, but not in an entirely bad way. I'm unsteady, and processing a relationship, and seeing some patterns, and getting ready to "let what does not matter truly slide." A Situationist sentiment if ever there was one.
(What. Is. Wrong. With. San Diego. Tonight??? It's terrible when football teams forget how to play football.) -- pardon --
I shall instead drift, maunder, detourn, announce some very general intentions -- because if you read this you probably know me, and if you know me, you know what my To Do list looks like. I would like to wander down to not so much what I will do or what I will stop doing in my life, and get down to what I really do not want anymore. Ever.
Emotional confusion so deep that I cannot articulate it, barely let myself feel it, and try to soldier on in spite of it thinking that I Can Be Strong Enough and Up My Game and then All Will Be Well. --- Dear PMRSC, this is the stupid thing you do. Of the stupidest things you do, this is the really big one, and a root cause of many others. Hence forth, Dear Woman, you/I shall Call a Foul a Foul from now on. Challenge the play, and the call, and point out that Creating Insecurity Where There Need Not Be Any is plain not cool.
Mistaking momentary good/kind/attentive/generous/reciprocal behavior for a desire to behave that way on a regular basis. (See above.)
Attempting to reciprocate said behavior/tone/emotional motif later and being ever so gently looked at as if I've grown a horn, broken a rule.
I shall remember that my friends are not insane, and that if they had seen/heard the actions behind this New Year's Refusal, they would have duly chastised the offender right quick.
Hence, I shall try to sniff out new and deepen old relationships in which I am steady enough to tell the truth, all the time, without hesitation. People with whom I can glow, because they know how to. People with whom I can be small and need some help, because they have been small and needed help. People who will Feel All the Way Right Now because there is no later anyway. Because, I don't have to shield myself from such people while attempting to know them intimately as humans. Which, I am writing to remind myself, is not possible. Those to whom telling the truth (be it gorgeous, silly, serious, or ugly) feels risky or wrong or stupid are people I do not need to know.
For instance, people who say that "the problem is that this matters to you," and when want to parse the meaning of "matter to." Pretty pedestrian phrase in my book.
No doubt by now, you have figured that much of the above is break-up related. It is. But it is also a Pattern with Enough Men to Be Worth Thinking Now. And it is a pattern shockingly similar to my relationship with my chosen profession.
Both those men and this profession hold out just enough positive reinforcement to keep me in the game. Both those men and this profession seem good and reasonable and talk in even tones and make very few sudden movements, even when saying the most ludicrous and soul-wrecking things. Both assume that I will (because I have) accept "working" below my full ability or evolution, and for far less "pay" than my talents and acumen are actually worth. Both claim a kind of passivity that is really a position of perfect control. Both claim a desire to critique or live outside of the usual hierarchies and yet reproduce them in the form and content of their activity or organization.
The academic world of Literature/Philosophy especially. Like a partly-engaged lover, these professions waste talent and can only continue to operate under the illusions/seductions candied out to graduate students. They are, however polite, abusive systems. They refuse the obligations of their own professed values. They are, by the way, quite. fine. with. that.
Harsh? No. The MLA and APA and ACLA have, for decades, bemoaned the recursive problem of needing graduate students to teach first level courses (because the profs are soooo bored with those ingorant kids), and knowing full and well that whopping lots of them are being told they're brilliant and the profession needs them ... to adjunct. And if you just publish a few peer reviewed articles, and maybe a book, and drive a couple hundred miles between schools, and refer to the trunk of your car as your office, get paid 1/3 of your full-time "colleagues," and live w/o health insurance for just long enough, and keep applying for full-time jobs, you might, someday, get one. What they do is burn up good teachers and scholars--and they can because there are so damn many of us. In short, newbies, if you are not in grad school in a top 20 school/department, for-get your professional aspirations. You are padding as far as they are concerned, the padding between them and the ground.
Fact is, kids, that universities CANNOT operate any other way at this point. There is nothing for it. The professors who teach or taught us, who went before us, who manage and defend the profession --- sold out a couple generations of intellectual and pedagogical talent. They did not stand up to this waste of good human time and acumen, and in fact, encouraged us to this impasse.
Hence, I shall not subject myself to that particular waiting game, either.
The feeling in me that says, "See Me, Just See Me" -- yeh, next I have that, I am out. Because living in a place where I spend a lot of energy refusing to feel that, I become a complete nut case.
Glowing, burning as much as I can, staying with people who let me and whom I can encourage to do so. Working in some place or way that feels that way too. That's 2009. That's where I'm going to go in 2009.
The books are there for themselves, now. They're not signs of my belonging/qualification. They are self-referentially existent and meant to better the conversations they will enter. They are now pure things, in the old Symbolist sense no one uses anymore because it's obligations are just too, like, real 'n' shit.
I am now a Writer of Independent Means, and I plan to enjoy that rare status/identity thoroughly.
I shall, in Fleur's words, "shit-can" the whole thing once those books are done and, like the 20's expat I would have been, hie mine self to Europe to drift and detourn my previous social identity, re-edit the Coming Soon trailer of my future so that making myself and other people more of their own good-glowy-rightness the new motif.
Any thing, or situation, or person/s that interfere with that will be promptly allowed to truly slide. It's time. Here (spirit willing) endeth the lesson.
A lull in the flurry of Father Care and visit from Tricksy (Speed's SO), and I feel that blowing off a bit of serious writing on the Murdoch essay (which is getting entirely off the chain)to read some friends' blogs is just the ticket.
Yeh. So Princess at Flooded Lizard Kingdom wrote herself some New Year's Resolutions, and tagged a couple blogs reflecting on the spirit in which to think and write them. So, agreeing with her, as I often do, I got to thinking about mine. Late, I know, but things have been a tad busy here.
Some are making lists of intentions for their resolutions, some keeping themselves to the one. Having made lists called "To Do --> Ta Da," including master lists of Things To Accomplish This Year, or Things to Accomplish This Summer, including action items like "Meditate more," and "Recycle More" and "Fix Your Bloody iPod" (that one's from five months ago) ... You get the idea. I'm not making a list, and I'm not limiting to The One Resolution.
Rather. My deal right now is that I don't feel all that resolute, or resolved, or fixed like the North Star at all. I feel very drifty, very much unmoored, but not in an entirely bad way. I'm unsteady, and processing a relationship, and seeing some patterns, and getting ready to "let what does not matter truly slide." A Situationist sentiment if ever there was one.
(What. Is. Wrong. With. San Diego. Tonight??? It's terrible when football teams forget how to play football.) -- pardon --
I shall instead drift, maunder, detourn, announce some very general intentions -- because if you read this you probably know me, and if you know me, you know what my To Do list looks like. I would like to wander down to not so much what I will do or what I will stop doing in my life, and get down to what I really do not want anymore. Ever.
Emotional confusion so deep that I cannot articulate it, barely let myself feel it, and try to soldier on in spite of it thinking that I Can Be Strong Enough and Up My Game and then All Will Be Well. --- Dear PMRSC, this is the stupid thing you do. Of the stupidest things you do, this is the really big one, and a root cause of many others. Hence forth, Dear Woman, you/I shall Call a Foul a Foul from now on. Challenge the play, and the call, and point out that Creating Insecurity Where There Need Not Be Any is plain not cool.
Mistaking momentary good/kind/attentive/generous/reciprocal behavior for a desire to behave that way on a regular basis. (See above.)
Attempting to reciprocate said behavior/tone/emotional motif later and being ever so gently looked at as if I've grown a horn, broken a rule.
I shall remember that my friends are not insane, and that if they had seen/heard the actions behind this New Year's Refusal, they would have duly chastised the offender right quick.
Hence, I shall try to sniff out new and deepen old relationships in which I am steady enough to tell the truth, all the time, without hesitation. People with whom I can glow, because they know how to. People with whom I can be small and need some help, because they have been small and needed help. People who will Feel All the Way Right Now because there is no later anyway. Because, I don't have to shield myself from such people while attempting to know them intimately as humans. Which, I am writing to remind myself, is not possible. Those to whom telling the truth (be it gorgeous, silly, serious, or ugly) feels risky or wrong or stupid are people I do not need to know.
For instance, people who say that "the problem is that this matters to you," and when want to parse the meaning of "matter to." Pretty pedestrian phrase in my book.
No doubt by now, you have figured that much of the above is break-up related. It is. But it is also a Pattern with Enough Men to Be Worth Thinking Now. And it is a pattern shockingly similar to my relationship with my chosen profession.
Both those men and this profession hold out just enough positive reinforcement to keep me in the game. Both those men and this profession seem good and reasonable and talk in even tones and make very few sudden movements, even when saying the most ludicrous and soul-wrecking things. Both assume that I will (because I have) accept "working" below my full ability or evolution, and for far less "pay" than my talents and acumen are actually worth. Both claim a kind of passivity that is really a position of perfect control. Both claim a desire to critique or live outside of the usual hierarchies and yet reproduce them in the form and content of their activity or organization.
The academic world of Literature/Philosophy especially. Like a partly-engaged lover, these professions waste talent and can only continue to operate under the illusions/seductions candied out to graduate students. They are, however polite, abusive systems. They refuse the obligations of their own professed values. They are, by the way, quite. fine. with. that.
Harsh? No. The MLA and APA and ACLA have, for decades, bemoaned the recursive problem of needing graduate students to teach first level courses (because the profs are soooo bored with those ingorant kids), and knowing full and well that whopping lots of them are being told they're brilliant and the profession needs them ... to adjunct. And if you just publish a few peer reviewed articles, and maybe a book, and drive a couple hundred miles between schools, and refer to the trunk of your car as your office, get paid 1/3 of your full-time "colleagues," and live w/o health insurance for just long enough, and keep applying for full-time jobs, you might, someday, get one. What they do is burn up good teachers and scholars--and they can because there are so damn many of us. In short, newbies, if you are not in grad school in a top 20 school/department, for-get your professional aspirations. You are padding as far as they are concerned, the padding between them and the ground.
Fact is, kids, that universities CANNOT operate any other way at this point. There is nothing for it. The professors who teach or taught us, who went before us, who manage and defend the profession --- sold out a couple generations of intellectual and pedagogical talent. They did not stand up to this waste of good human time and acumen, and in fact, encouraged us to this impasse.
Hence, I shall not subject myself to that particular waiting game, either.
The feeling in me that says, "See Me, Just See Me" -- yeh, next I have that, I am out. Because living in a place where I spend a lot of energy refusing to feel that, I become a complete nut case.
Glowing, burning as much as I can, staying with people who let me and whom I can encourage to do so. Working in some place or way that feels that way too. That's 2009. That's where I'm going to go in 2009.
The books are there for themselves, now. They're not signs of my belonging/qualification. They are self-referentially existent and meant to better the conversations they will enter. They are now pure things, in the old Symbolist sense no one uses anymore because it's obligations are just too, like, real 'n' shit.
I am now a Writer of Independent Means, and I plan to enjoy that rare status/identity thoroughly.
I shall, in Fleur's words, "shit-can" the whole thing once those books are done and, like the 20's expat I would have been, hie mine self to Europe to drift and detourn my previous social identity, re-edit the Coming Soon trailer of my future so that making myself and other people more of their own good-glowy-rightness the new motif.
Any thing, or situation, or person/s that interfere with that will be promptly allowed to truly slide. It's time. Here (spirit willing) endeth the lesson.
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