Movement on Poetics of Being Two and its abstract

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.

Update on Poetics Book

At stunning long last, I have all the copyright permissions for the book together. I have not done an official tally of cost, but let's just put it around $2000. Lesson: from now on, Be Stingy With Quotations and Stop Being So Helpful With Quotations. My sweet stars.

Included with the valuable permissions is the marketing material.

Now, all I need is the peer reviewers comments back and at least one answered email from my new editor dude. That would be greaaaat. You know, since this book was supposed to be, like, done now and coming out in March.

But, we're closer! We're very late, but we're closer.

Prices of Mind

People I want to visit soon live in South Carolina, Oregon, Texas, New Mexico, San Franciso (temporarily), New York and Europe.

Europe is a conference and some editing on the other book, so that has to happen.

New York is a 40th b-day thing and much needed sister-friend vacation, so that has to happen.

Total spent on copyright permissions for the book, so far, and we're not done: $1500.

Royalties expected from literary critical book: not a lot, and not for a good long while.

So, don't take it personally if that trip I was dreaming with you to see you doesn't happen.

Which, guh.

It Is Done

A Poetics of Being Two, draft one, is in the mail to Lexington for peer review and the beginnings of the rest of its life.

Whew.

Not feeling joyful. More like worried and scattered. Possibly in need of a good cry. It's just been this huge thing, and now it's poof.

And there are Piles of Books and Files that need sorting and putting away and clearing out for the next projects.

However, I am declaring None Of That until next Monday.

But, if you feel like celebrating, friends who read this, please do. I'm sure the vibe will travel up my way.

TaDa!!! (nearly)

And there it is. The complete draft of the poetics book. A bit of tweak and edit and a bibliography and I am there, baby!!!!

Makes a girl want to get dressed up and cause trouble!

Why It Looks Easy to You

Much of academic work is like this: "Did You Publish Today?" at The Chronicle.

It is just so true. But, I post it since at the Chronicle, chances are only other acadies will read it.

Also, as if Cosmos were tickling the scillia of my inner ear: three nice jobs at small colleges and uni's have shown up, and M said to me yesterday, when I told him of the detachment registered about conference and book, "Hey, not every one has even a little dream. Especially a dream they're good at. Don't give it up."

One is a one-year non-renewable at Fontbonne in StL over in U-city. Nice hold-over if I get it.

So, for the summer, I do not give it up. Plus, because if they'll just Talk to Me, I'm in.

Murdoch Conference in Kingston UK

It's an odd feeling.

My paper on Murdoch and Irigaray is accepted to this kickass conference, organized by a kickass scholar, Anne Rowe, in a town near London that is so damn adorable I might never go into London while there. I'll run up to Cheltenham to visit with A and work on the Murdoch anthology for a few days, and likely meander about in the oh-so-soul-feeding English countryside, plus the happy goodity of A's company. She's such a big-sister/mom type with funky cool edges and a razor of a mind (she digs Ricoeur, I dig Ricoeur, it'll be fun to talk about his work too) that I always feel totally relaxed around her. Last I saw A was in Dublin with Lioness.

The conference: Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity: Iris Murdoch. And here's where you can gaze pics of the town. Just the sort of place I like to be. Kinda like my little town, only British and older and cuter and smack on the banks of the Thames. Some of the local propaganda, too. And they brag about their shopping and food and coffee and beer, with which I have no quarrel what so ever. Several of the authors in the Murdoch anthology are attending, so I'm excited to get to meet them and visit. If their writing is any indication of their persons, this will be a lovely time indeed.

Normally, I would be buzzing-excited about this. But, here comes the odd bit. In composing the conclusion to the poetics book yesterday, I wrote a sentence that let the Whole Thing Go. It said that here at the end of this project, I see that the collateral goal (a real job at a real school) is no longer my concern. Yep. Just like that.

I now wish that I had written the whole book under that assumption because the conclusion is turning into a personal essay about many things, most them having to do with what all the several hundred pages before have to do with living life in this world under these conditions. A whole study on Irigaray and these poets written in a more affective mode would have been more fun than even this was (and it was Fun), and probably would have been more honest about the deep reasons literary scholars do what we do. It turns us on. Everything lights up.

That after scrapping a 20 or so page conclusion that tended in this direction but had lots to say about irony (chez Rorty) and the freaky way that the bad relativisim the conservatives used to bash PoMo intellectuals for is now their favorite tool, and then some stuff I'm keeping about love and bell hooks and disobedience and White. But, really, who in their right mind would want to read that? How many literary studies end with this summary-implications conclusion that makes you wonder why it was ever committed to the corpses of trees better left standing? Gah.

But something just gave out. Not hope really. Just, something akin to need, to identity. To an idee fixe whose time had run out.

So, here I am, fixin to go to England, to another conference, and I'm just about ready to get my soul out of the whole game. Maybe write stuff, but only because compelled, not because I'm knocking on the door of a club I likely cannot enter for reasons the MLA people know allllll about concering the cancer in our profession. And there's this book that people like a lot, and this conclusion turning into a exercise in non-attachement, and a sense that I have no other plan for my life.

Between now and my birthday in November, there will be another plan. In fact, that's my birthday present: I'm going to ask all my sharp, loving friends to help me dream up my new plan. What does PRSC do next?

Derrida gets fears, I get 'stupids' about writing

but seeing this, like reading Ronell on stupidity in the writing process, just makes me feel BETTER.

YAY, the book

Editor says:

This is absolutely fine. I understand all of your reasoning and I agree with you absolutely. I believe that when a contract is offered on an unfinished work that it should be allowed to develop organically. I do hope you will further pursue Stein, perhaps, as you suggest, in a second book. I think you should proceed exactly in the way that you lay out in this email.

I say:
Whoooooohoooooo! Hippety Hop!!!

Nail Biting

In which our heroine continues to blow her authority effect in blogging about the book:

So, I've sent the email below to several friends who might either know or at least have an intuition about how to proceed here in the To Stein or Not to Stein crisis.

One has sent back that he can't think because his beloved dog just died. So face Jerusalem and send him love. Because this is terrible and shattering.

One wrote back that "editors are very simple people" and to just send them the book as I choose to complete it, not bother the seriously overbooked acquisitions editor with compositional and thematic issues about which they will know not too much and will have to consult with review boards. A good point.

One wrote back that I might simply send a revised chapter summary reflecting the changes. Give, as is my impulse, full disclosure and show that:

the new shape of the book is simply so much more compelling elegant and leads to this gorgeous sort of meta-historical moment of writing about these poems that are constructed dialogically, and that moreover, and to boot!, Graham's poems in two of her books are very much having a conversation with Bonnefoy and Perse!! And all that neatly theorized in the poetics of being two, you see, because it so works.

Because honestly, Stein and all that is another book about this poetics, but about Another Poetic Tradition -- not so organic as I had wanted to cram it into being. (a move quite contra the whole ethos of Irigaray's ethics and the poetics, moreover) (the quite clever conclusion solving a major critical cat fight-- a ha!)

This is my impulse. Fair warning, chance for them to think about it. It might also just be suicide, since the peer review person/s will have no idea what the proposal said.

So, if you haven't answered my email, do. I need to take the temperature. And if you happen to be or know someone with practical insight here, do let me know.

Meanwhile, I maunder on.

Oh ... No

So, I'm sending the following letter to my editor:

As I complete the chapter on Perse and return to the chapter on Stein, I am finding that the fit is not good. The chapters on Bonnefoy, Perse, and Graham are close and interconnected readings. The chapter on Stein is becoming more clearly inorganic to the rest of the project. It’s turning into a bridge to another book, a metacritical piece on Stein as the Objectivists and Language poets quite consciously descend from her work. Those schools are so coherent, and so critically conscious of their relation to Stein, I am finding that while their poetry and critical work can be thought through under the umbrella of a poetics of being two, cramming that other branch of poetry into this book, even a little bit, is not an elegant approach. I had thought that the difference in origins would not matter so much, Bonnefoy, Perse and Graham descending more clearly from the Symbolists – but it does.

To a good reader, a refusal to recognize these points of difference in a project very much about how difference matters would seem confusing at best and quite simply stubborn at worst.

So, I propose this change: the book still develops Irigaray’s ethics as a critical frame, as a poetics toward and around which Bonnefoy, Perse, and Graham are writing; but with the added dimension that both Bonnefoy and Perse are influences on Graham’s work heretofore not discussed. Every critic connects her to Stevens, but no critics have yet connected her work to Bonnefoy and Perse. The echoes of them in her work are quite strong, sometimes nearly imitations at both the level of structure and linguistic style.

The result of this change would be a more aesthetically organic project that develops a poetics of being two, and establishes (the beginnings) of a line of poets who approach that poetic. The key to this line of reasoning lies in the performance of close readings on the terms of the poetics I develop, and since both Bonnefoy’s and Perse’s poems are quite long (both in the range of 80 to 100), we won’t have to worry about the book seeming ‘thin.’ Further, those close readings fully prepare a reader for the readings of Graham’s poems, which are considerably shorter, but can run to three and four pages and whose themes and metaphors develop across whole books (one result of Perse’s influence).

In short, it’s making more sense to go for depth rather than breadth. I had very much wanted Stein and the introduction of the tradition that descends from her work in here. I think it’s an important bit of reading to do for the purposes of feminist aesthetics, but it simply does not fit in this book. The work on Stein’s poem, the critical readings of them, and the poets related to her simply do not fit the larger direction or style of this book.

My deepest hope is that this realization is not a major impediment for you and Lexington. The book you will be receiving will, I think, be the stronger and more compelling for the change – the work in it and its implications the clearer for the shaper focus.

**********************

Mercy. -- No, the iPod had nothing to do with it. Really. REally. I've just been W.R.O.N.G. about this all this time. As I said to Red Lotus, writing is mostly listening and crashing into your own stupidity, as I glean from the honesty of Avital Ronnel. It's just so true.

Weather, Politics, Writing

Seasons: Sunday was late spring with 78 degrees and balm for the soul. Fleur and I spread mulch on all but two gardens (which F. created, no landscapers here). To the tune of 56, 3 cubic feet each, bags of somtimes half frozen mulch. Place looks fantastic. The robins and the kildees rode the warm air and awakening insects at least this far north to be freaked out by a fresh snow of 4" to 12" around here. Poor birds. And the mockingbirds are chasing them around to boot. Also, winter wins, at least, I'm tired of every single of one of the wool sweaters I almost never wore in Texas. But, I am going sledding and building some snowpeople (if the snow is still sticky).

Guests: the wife of one of Hemingway's best pals is staying with us for a few days. Her brother-in-law is in the hospital. The only problem with this is that she is one of those people who cannot Not Talk. Y'all know how I feel about that. Sigh. A small thing to help her support her family.

Politics: Sen. Clinton has hinted at a shared ticket with Sen. Obama. Might be machiavelian shenannigans, might be a fucking great idea!!!! I wouldn't care who's on top of the ticket (though, one can settle that by totalling the popular vote), but I can say this: if Obama were Prez, the racist fuckwits probably wouldn't try to kill him because then there would be Clinton -- white and black women and people of color would ALL get their historical sea change and not have to hem and haw over gender or race justice movements, a problem nicely addressed by several feminists in The Nation just now -- we would have two (or three, or four? Michelle is no slouch) whip smart people in the Executive Branch who would do good things and, I think, create a situation in which the Boomers and Xers work together (Obama not quite being an Xer but lots of us and lots Millenials are voting for him) and maybe do some longer term thinking (I salivate at the possibilities for the line up of advisors and Secretaries of This and That) -- and those white men who just can't vote for a woman for any number of wholly emotional and irrational reasons would get their sexist commupence! The general election would be the most interesting, maybe even the most particapatory in, like, ev-er. Quite a test of the country's "progress": almost progressive black man and white woman vs. old guard white guy. That's an experiment I would Deeeelight to see run. And the poor press, what would they do if they couldn't play race against gender in their little observations? Really, the triangulation would be fascinating!

Books by other people: Seems Oprah's been duped by another "memoir". No dis to the great O. Some writers just don't have the chop to call their book a NOVEL and compete with all those really good writers. Not to mention the insult to all the real memoirs, stories by people who lived them. Hence the word "fraud": you "memoirists" didn't earn it either way. Seriously, do not "cover" for your lack of writerly or personal chop by appeal to "being real" and being "not a writer" but some battered soul who just had to tell us about the heroine habit you screwed your dealer to support and hid from your nice suburban family for ten years, mommy. Nooooo. Go learn to write and call it a novel. Novelists go to a great deal of trouble to create convincing worlds, even worlds that examine contemporary social phenomena, and they don't fraudulently import cache and voyeuristic atavism from the word "memoir." They just do the goddamn work. Also, I smell a cultural bleed from "reality" TV to the "reality" memoir, and that cannot be a good thing -- for writing or for reality.

Books by me (and other people): A friend is writing a novel, a sort of magical realist multicultural western (which works Much better than it sounds put that way) , and sends a draft to me with this message in the email, "I am having real trouble with this." The sound of a writer in panic. No pointed questions about this or that, just the general, "Arrrrrrrgggghhhh!" -- I know the feeling. I'm having it this week. This is the hard thing about writing creative and scholarly work that makes it different from journalism (not that journalism is easy): there are any number of points in the process where you do not know what you are doing, or do not know whether what you are doing makes any sense at all. It is very, very scary given the irrecuperable Chunk of your life on those pages. It is a fear that takes lots of energy to kick through (because that is your only option). It is a fear and a kicking that makes you sullen and a bit short at the dinner table. It is almost always a total illusion. It's only good purpose is to make you stop, re-read, think harder, and then do well. Without these moments of What The Fuck Is Going On Here, writers of poetry, or fiction, or scholarship write crap.

Creating Order

First, the unknown in the lover: turns out M was unavailable by phone allllll day Super Tuesday. I was going to invite him to come vote with me (should we vote at the same polling location) or meet after (should we not). But, nooooohoohoo, Mr. Very Available to Moi was not so. Why? Why? It was strange. Because, he was an election judge. Just another reason to admire him: he does good things, and doesn't brag. And I voted, which was an attempt at a new order, too.

Second, the unknown in the self: I had an organizational fit. Like, I think, most people, I do not purge objects in one concentrated blitzkrieg of shedding. I do this in bits and peices: some books here, some papers there, some clothes here, etc. So, part of the rainy Super Tuesday cum Mardi Gras, I was sorting out my desk (which had slowly become clogged and useless -- father's daughter there) and my dynamite box in which I keep an assortment of files and old copies of poems (same problem). Low and behold, I ascetically sent to the burn box all the drafts of old poems. Whatever those thoughts were, it seems someone else had them, and most of the poems were crap anyway. But, again, low and behold, a Whole Bunch of Notes and Research For The Poetics book about which I had totally forgotten and now pretty much can't use (meaning, fit into the book, not that the work of these Esteemed Others is useless). F*ck. Here I am, face to face and mano e mano with my impulse to compendium, not so much totality as transparency, and cornucopia, not so much responsibility as generosity. Oh well. Am going to have to just Stop All That.

Just know that when you read this book, there's lots of sources that I could have referred you to that are not in it. There are plenty to get you oriented, but just not every single one.

Third: the unknown book: The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, a Brit, which is very much about one fellow's rather serious difficulty in finding a new order for himself. It's subtle and smart fun with all manner of synchronicity and mythos layered in, and some hope in it. Do read it. You'll have to order it used since it's out of print in the US (if you're in the US, that is).

Conclusion: Time to stop the Klage.

Addendum: I have lots of looking up words to do. I generally LOVE Fowlie's translation of Perse's Amers, but there's a word here and there that in French I suspect carries valences we need two words to carry in English (because that IS the nature of that particular interval), and because his choices seem occasionally a shade too dark. Though the poem is not without this darkness, threat, danger, I'm just not sure it's as terrible as he does. We shall see. Picture me with dictionaries, sorting through French words I don't know / forgot. (Hmph, in looking for that link, I discovered that Perse was buddies with Dag Hammarksjold, second secretary-general of the UN and rather interesting ethic0-mystical thinker. Not too shocking, P was a diplomat for France for a much of H's tenure. But, Hmmmmm... speaking of synchronicities).

Funny thing about writing

is that I can look and look and look at a section of an essay and not be able to make it make sense...sometimes for a month or more. Then, one day, usually while working on something else, or reading something unrelated, I get this "psst, hey...." feeling. I go back to the section, I add two or three sentences here and there and, WHAM--clarity. Just. like. that.

This is one of the reasons that we need people in our society who are not ruled by outcomes and productivity. The human brain is not a linear sort of creature.

Also, if you have not read Hans-Jost Frey's Interruptions, you really should. It's an interesting space in which to let your brain work on whatever it wants. Which, for me, is the mark of a really good book: that I'm very attentive to it, and myriads of thoughts and conjectures and connections bubble at the same time.

Editors make me cry

Just how many projects is your average acquisitions editor running? Why are they the point people with authors? Aren't they just about ready to cry with the madness of it all? I ask because I've just been "reminding" my own two AcqEds that a) I exist, b) there's some questions to sort out, and c) that without their responses I do not have a clear map for what we are doing here.

Example: No where in Lovely Publishers guidance materials is it clarified that a copy of the ms for peer review Need Not be (and indeed is not at all the same thing as) the camera ready copy with all the formatting pinned and pleated.

Or, forgot to send along the contract.

Nor have the mental breathing space to sit a for a minute, look in a file, see where a project is, and respond lucidly to a writer.

Gah. Really, if I'm frustrated, they must be wall to wall with Too Much.

Screw it for now. I have writing and seasonal shopping to do.

What's hard?

I said this morning to M, "I'm sorry I'm all abstracted. I'm turning my mind back toward the Poetics book, and I'm worried for it. Part my brain keeps whispering that I should be in a state of panic. "Only six months," it whispers. I refuse to panic. I'm going to be like this anytime I'm allowed a few seconds to lose focus. I'm worried, and I'm trying to see it before I make it, which never works, so I'm not going to be a very relaxed gal for the next months."

M: "It's hard work slaying dragons. It's admirable. I'm in awe that you're still doing it."

Me: "I just have to get in there and stay in there. And I'm not trying to kill a dragon. I'm trying to birth one."

M: "Even harder. Do you want some coffee?"

Thanks be that I sat on that chair that night with that Guinness to listen to that band and just bumped into this man who gets it, and me, and can calmly and surely look me in the eye and mean by it that I'm going to do this just fine and well and not to worry. Doesn't quite make the scared in spite of knowing I can do this go away, but it's sure a marvel to have him get my back.

Irigaray Circle and The Last Couple Weeks

Rest, as Jason Bourne's mantra goes in the novels (which, are super good stories in their own right and rather like not at all the excellent films), is a weapon. And my cache got low. Two weeks at nearly a dead run, and much too much socializing. Good socializing, but too much for this sometime introvert.

The introversion is necessary because while I'm in NY at the conference, or on a plane, or in a classroom, or catching up on grading , or crash-prepping courses due to travel (all of which count as extrovert activities for me), friends are going into labor, breaking their wrists, worrying over dissertations and motivations, quitting a crap tenure track job, and me in a widening fondness for an interesting man, and my brother is moving to a new shot at some Nice Green Cash in Arizona.... so, I had a few other things to process and offer energy to whether directly or vibrationally. So, once again, my debt to Hotel Hill-Ries in the Bowery. Y'all are too good.

Plus, in the world o' books, McFarland's Editor Cat is being a little funky, and not in the groovy way. We're still talking, which is good. But, we're sort of moving through discussions one little step at a time that could felled in one graceful swoop with a full proposal. Sewwww, I've dived into All That. Nearly there. Just a few more notes on audience and competition, and the selection of a couple essays as samples, and Editor Cat will simply have to, by force of conscience, commit to this anthology. Meanwhile, I'm nervous. What's with the string-along, and especially when between 12 and 15 people have a stake in this book, and lots of them are Amazing Young Scholars, and what's the matter here? So, a bit busy with that, too.

And stressing in a background kind of way about that and the other book, and wondering: Did I get ahead of myself ? Seriously. Like maybe, way ahead and in much too much of a hurry by which I will be crushed like an old cricket by a spry cat? We shall see.

Et, aussi, des bonnes nouvelles! Five of the ten Motif Series poems will be published in Arabesques (see the roll, it's on there somewhere), which is hip, and peace making, and international 'n shit. V. Excited there. -- perhaps also a hint about which of the sorts of poetry i write the world wants to eat.

But, all That aside: this year's Irigaray Circle was simply amazingly tasty. My compliments to the organizers for the depth of the panels and for keeping up that relaxed-and-smart atmosphere the meeting had last year. It's good to be part of a good community. And a moving circle now: the conference will go to Hofstra next year, and then either to Wash U or Webster U, or more hopefully to Paris on the suggestion of Claire Potter. It's dicey, in some ways on the French side there, but she's willing to try to make arrangements, make sure Irigaray hears these engagements and celebrations of her work before she, well, dies. She is of that age, healthy though she is now. Plus, you know, I like these people, and several more are about to become correspondents, and yay.

As always, everything was smart, every paper was rich. But, we had a minor revolution that nearly made me jump up and cheer. Elizabeth Grozs's paper! (of which, must have copy) What a RELIEF. I did whooop a little when it was over, but tried to keep my voice down.

Here's the gist: title "The Ontology of Sexual Difference." Yep, that's what she said. A new account of the real, one that makes it quite clear, thank you, that sexual difference is the reason that there is complex life, that if in the real it is two that makes our life (and with it the symbolic &c.) even possible, then a merely accurate symbolic and metaphysics would be of two, by two. This point is made, gently but pointedly, into a defense of Irigaray's work against recent (or constant) and mistaken (!) critiques of it as homophobic, eurocentric, or colonialist. Why? Because except in a few rather discrete moments, Irigaray is not doing social politics. She's doing ontology, which has implications for social or cultural politics, but is not that, not addressing those valences of our experience. On the political and symbolic valence: Sexual Difference inflects those differences but is not the same category: it's not like race, or religion, or ethnicity, or sexuality, or ideology. Sexual Difference is, eventhough it is also constructed.

"Sexual difference," saith Grosz, "is the generator of the new ... is the failure of identity and sameness ... is overcoming in a Nietzschean sense." It is "the failure of death." (squirming with happiness)

There are connections to three D's going on this thought: to Derrida, to Deleuze, and to Darwin.

Sexual difference is a kind of ontological rhizome (my prhase, I'm summarizing a bit messily), and thus our connection to Deleuze (or one of them). Sexual Difference is everywhere a kind of moving substrata of other differences and runs across or through cultural expression and social organization.

It is sexual difference that "opens life to chance, to contingency, to possiblity." This is for Grosz both a Derridian and Darwinian point. In Derridian differance, opposities (and remember, a binary is just one and it's opposite, a unity, G so perfectly says) have to be placed into play and slippage, into connotation, to discover their sameness and at the same time open up to real difference, two genuinely not-like terms, and once that happens, meaning MULTIPLIES and becomes undecidable -- that is, life becomes possible. Where the unity of the One and its abject is not at all life (and here see Derrida or my paper for Dublin) -- it's that insidiously smart attempt at closure that the whole PoMo geist points out just ain't so and my haven't we been mistaken.

Now, in an analogy I admire for its adventure, Grosz moves to Darwin to point out that in science (one method for encountering the real, or trying to), or in evolution chez Darwin, there are several aspects of difference at work, or play. One: there's just plain old biological or sexuate difference. Boys and Girls. And the fact of that difference allows for RNA and DNA to do their thing and create infinite variation. That is, "Sexual difference, the genuine interaction of two in difference, multiplies difference infinitely." And there goes your critique that we can't get from two to the many. Wham. Two means many. It's in a world without, or rather that fails to acknowledge difference (twoness), and its operations that we can't get to the many. REmember, binary is just one. (gah)

Bonus, in Darwin we have the little discussed theory of sexual selection (not nearly as closely examined as, say, natural selection, fittest, etc.). Herein, Darwin points out that our physical characteristics are not ONLY about getting food, defending from predators, or surviving sudden environmental ruptures: they are ALSO about getting other members of our species to want to have sex with us. That is, on a real level, to want to engage in that difference. Yep. She's not kidding. (and my notes get sketchy in the places where i was utterly tuned in, so take her word for these things, not mine)

Sexual selection, argues G, drives genetic creativity. The simplified example: giraffes have long necks because they help to reach leaves, thus to survive in the dry seasons, BUT also because GIRAFFES FIND LONG NECKS SEXY. See?

Now, me here, that feedback loop in nature might be mild, but in culture it's very strong, We have the symbolic and imaginary to deal with and deal in and make and manipulate. We encode what we find sexy (or nice, or moral, or true, or right) into the symbolic and then enforce it, which then shapes what we find sexy, and affects how we interact in our difference. This, of course, is why IRigaray's critics are concerned. But, G points out, Irigaray interventions in the symbolic are only openings, cracks, possibilities WE will have to exploit and explore and negotiate because all (ALL!) she's done is point out the hidden fact that the real, or it's philosophical correlate ontology, is sexed. From there, the imaginative work (yes, she uses the word) is up to us, as Irigaray has said, each starting from where we are: in our moments, contexts, bodies, sexualities, and so on and on. We will have to do the inventing of forms of life more suited to us, and once we get clear on SD and the way it inflects or cuts across (and morphs in relation to) other differences (like, the butch-femme spectrum in many lesbian communities: a scale of relative masculinity and femininity, partly symbolic, partly a nod at the real, partly just real, and also evidence of differences infinite creative capacity), the more effectively we can create life and lives that allow us our becomming, our own evolution. Since, an ontology of sexual difference is an ontology of becoming, where ontologies of identity are of stasis -- which the real (and the imaginary or the symbolic) do not do, after all.

Or something along those lines and far more coherent than this remembered summary. This paper has to get into print soon, and I'll be just sooooooo waiting for it.

Oh, and people liked my paper too, and some didn't, and you know how that goes. The paper was the Irigarian reading of Graham's poetics, and the responding question, picking up on the ethical/spiritual thingy, asked: Well, that's all very nice, but isn't this harder done than said? Which, well, yes, quite. Not a compelling reason not to try, and fail, and try, and fail, and keep on with it in becoming, which is, you know, contingent, and open-ended, and non-linear, and imperfect, and the only honorable choice, and whatnot.

All of Which was better than the turkey sandwich I bought at the "deli" in the Newark airport, and the unfamiliar whinging noise the plane made for a few seconds during take-off, and the fact that I'm at odds with an economy in which everything costs more while being crappier.

But, there's a bunch of 20th C Lit gigs up this year, so maybe next year I'll be able to afford more crappier stuff and talk about poetry and theory three days a week. Applications Ahoy!

Wonder and Amazement

and many prostrations of thanks to y'all who've held good thoughts for me in the last year. Between your good wishes and my insane plan, it's all worked out. McFarland Press is This Close to offering Co-Editor and I a contract for the Murdoch anthology!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Like, Editor Cat says that he'll be in touch next week about details &c., and so there we go. It's almost embarrassing. With this news, I have officially completed the making possible of my whole list of projects and the reason for my bailing out of that smoking plane known as my former job. Blessings on all of you, again, as well, an many-fold in return. Sometime in the next year or so, you will have the opportunity to read Iris Murdoch's Scenes: An Anthology of Moral Imaginations. (And a little book called A Poetics of Being Two, you know, because thanks to you and me, I have two books in the hopper just now.)

Now, on to a dumbassed teaching moment. We're reading DeLillo's "Videotape" in class, sort as an introductory study about fiction. One of my students suggests that the narrator is the serial killer. This is not computing for me because I'm all focused on how the story comments on the itch to see the bad thing happen inculcated in us by the news media's way of playing on our voyeurism. So, like an ass, I say I just don't see it. Because, I just don't see it. Which so totally does not mean that it's not there. Then, I'm driving home (which takes a hour plus), and my Brain says, "Excuse me, dolt, it's a totally reasonable reading of the story, here's all the evidence for it, yes the possible meanings of the story change, and you need to back on Wed. to apologize this is kid and do another lesson on that story and how meanings and ideas change depending on, well, everything." Mercy. I hate when I do that. Not because I have to apologize, but because I sometimes fail to be, well, open enough. What I should have done was say, "I've not thought of this. Show me why you did." Geeeeez.

A funny story about my neighbors who used to "own" Jack. One, at the bonfire they informed us that they now call him Traitor Jack because he chose to live with us. OK, look, you people were neglectful enough of a dog that sleeps by the front door ALL DAY waiting for Fleur to come home, he is that loving and loyal, that he moved out of your lives and into ours -- and you have the narcissistic audacity to call him a traitor? More like political refugee from a cruel and unpredictable dictatorship, I say. Now, I told you that story in order to tell you this story. --- Yesterday, I am told, Jack was up by the road and sort of close to their house. They called him over, all friendly and hi and nice to see you. He looked at them for a second, ears perked....

and BOLTED back to our house.

That's about all that needs saying anymore, ever, about that. Personally, I revel in calling him Traitor Jack.

DUBLIN!!!!!!!

Well, this child of the Irish Diaspora gets to go home!

Thank you for your abstract. It is exactly the kind of work we were hoping our event would attract. I have read quickly through your paper and can see that you are taking the debate to where it needs to go.

I think you will be very excited by the contributions of our other speakers, especially the keynotes, all of whom in different ways, take up what you call the "invitation".

Please assume that your paper will be accepted. (I am jumping ahead here because I recognise the value of your work and its relationship to our overall theme) .

I note that you are an independent scholar, but hope that you can find the resources to make it to Ireland.

Are you kidding, dear woman? My credit card is humming in my wallet. Dublin, with world changing hopeful freaks like me, and with Lioness, on my birthday? Oh, I'm there. Challenging Cultures of Death is just my game. This also means that the Poetics books is taking "the debate" where it needs to go. So, color me all tickled. -- Once I figured out that the 10 minutes was an editorial oversight, that presentations were the usual 20, it only took about a week to get that all worked out. Wheeeeee!

Also, nifty little piece on this year's Irigaray Circle in the NYSun. Pretty cool that. Anyone in or near NY that weekend should give me a head's up. Maybe we can hang for a few hours.

AND, at the bonfire the size of a house, we did not burn down Alvin's corn crops in the dessicated late summer because Dead Craig made the rain the come just enough to keep that tragedy at bay, but not too much to make us stop having fun. Next morning, six exhausted people and a pile of five dogs watched golf after waffles and mimosas. Because that, children, was one lovely and taxing party.

AND, I'm going to see Henry Rollins in October. So, things here are just peachy. Gratitude being the order of the day.

Ah-HA!

My horo-koan:

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): [Editor's note: To prepare this horoscope, I stole some of the lyrics from Yoko Ono's song "Revelations" and added some words of my own.] Bless you for your anger, Scorpio. It's a sign of zeal. If you transform it into creative fire, it will transmute your relationship with any situation you're angry about. Bless you for your greed. It's a sign of great capacity. Honor the law of karma by giving as much as you want to get, and your greed will drive you to grow generous. Bless you for your jealousy. It's a sign of immature empathy. Ripen it into admiration and what you admire will become an inspiring part of your life.

OH I LOVE The Paradox. Always trust a paradox. But, it's funny because things are humming just now. It would seem that where I am angry (The Jena Six situation), or greedy (to publish/to edit), or jealous (of blithe self-interest and the positions of power in which it manifests), I am not, in fact, a danger to the world just now. BUT, this is good advice no matter who you are. And, maybe a head's up that something's a brew.

Also, turning down the art people was v. smart. The adjuncting gig at Wildwood is going to work out very well indeed. Three classes, two preps, precious little grading due to curricula and non-intensive regular semester schedule, two commutes, AND all this is a totally geeked out classroom, in a totally and sincerely green building that it's a pleasure to walk into and be in, AND three classes is a bucket more money so now I can actually afford all the conferences/other travel/monster commutes to work coming up this autumn of which there is quite a lot thank you. I'm actually all excited about teaching again. Which, who'da thought That after the squirrel cage that was my last gig. WHEW! Thanks Cosmos for listening. My diabolical plan is working, with your help.

And, HA, I don't work with the crazy art people. La, la, la -- La-la.

The Murdoch anthology is super! We're set for essays, we're moving into serious editing. I'm writing the proposal. I'm getting lots of other young scholars published in this thing and feel I'm doing the world a service. Which is getting me over my irkedness-at-self for leaving my essay On A Plane! and having to start over in my revisions.

Plus, I'm almost sure I'm having the idea needed to for the Challenging Cultures of Death conference in, oh poor me, Dublin, on my birthday to which Lioness and I will travel. I know, thank you, I feel your sympathy. It's a trick, this paper, because it's only ten minutes.... and I'm not what you would call an ascetic writer. So, churn, churn.

The Poetics book too is seeming more like a friend than a chore. Like, I'm sitting my butt down in the 'brary today to order the rest of my research. And off we go.

In the next few days, a package will arrive by post that contains Proust and pants. (heart you lioness)

It's good to be grateful. Grateful, grateful, grateful. Grateful things are opening, grateful I'm open just now.