| thoughts from a cunning linguist | |
It's the end of term and I'm tired. I'm tired of doing somersaults trying to explain why students should care about language and art. All these people want some sort of evidence (i.e. a degree) that they have exercised their intellects. But if they can get the degree with the least amount of intellectual exercise, all the better.
And who can blame them?
How few people care about ideas, about what makes people tick and behave in the ways they do? Intellectual life is out of fashion. It's not efficient. It has no use-value. Who should read "theory"? It's elitist with its big words and complex concepts. I'm so drained at the thought that ideas need their very existence to be justified. Why can't everything be spoken in "plain language"? What's plain language, anyway, and who decides? And isn't the world a complicated place? No one ever asks a scientist to speak in plain language: they accept that science requires 11-syllable words. But, no, people and society and art should never require such words.
The battle inside and outside the classroom these days is the same: people seek you out for your critical capabilities. They want to know how to critique and understand the complications of the world. But only until they have to face their own confusion, the undoing of their own assumptions and expectations about themselves or what they want to believe about the world. My friends are often like my students: they want my advice, they want to know what I think about life, about the world, but really what they want most is to know what I think about them. They compose creative questions, solicit information. But when they don't like the answers or the responses, they say "you're too critical," "too negative," "you intellectualize everything."
How weary to be both exalted and denigrated because of your brain.
Is it too late to be labotamized?
The time has come in my Cultural Studies class when we talk about internet culture and the nature of online subjectivity: the extent to which technology makes us cyborgs (sharing bodies and minds with digital phenomenon) and whether this interaction creates a new kind of human relationship.
Tomorrow we discuss Mouchette: fascinating, disturbing, multilingual, sexual, infantile. The only thing I can say is: go look for yourself.
And I have no good excuse like a business trip to explain myself. I look at my blog and on all the little numbers that have not been highlighted in the last little while. I also don't have anything nearly as interesting as a story about getting stuck in a snowstorm to amuse you with upon my return.
So what's a bush to do?
I haven't been blogging because I've been preoccupied. With what? Well, with trying to decide how much of an asshole I am. Remember that bush I was whacking and the whole story about my refusal to go out in straight drag, etc? Well, ever since then, I've been avoiding her. Haven't seen her. Don't call her. Don't talk much when she calls me. I guess I'm just putting her off.
I'm much happier as a result. There's just always that last, tedious conversation to be had. I'm not preoccupied because I feel guilty about not wanting a relationship with her or because I should have gone out in straight drag or anything like that.
I feel guilty for feeling happy about avoiding the situation. I'd like to think it's more cosmically significant than that. Guilty for being happy when there's a war on, guilty for feeling reponsible for someone else's emotions. But no. It's guilt for putting myself at the centre of things for a while by going to the gym, cooking good food, indulging in my on-line flirtation.
Now how screwed up is that?
I've just done the grand tour: clicking on all the sites of all the people who have added me as a link to their blogs. It makes a bush burn with envy to see how fabulous everyone else's sites look. I'm definitely a neophyte when it comes to webpage construction, though thanks to Maurice, I'm learning more and more all the time. (It only took me 6 tries to get that link to the Blarney Stone right the other day--and even then....sigh....it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to.) Blog aesthetics: a girl (am I a "girl"? not usually) can always dream about dressing herself up in a new blog.
Blog drag? I'll have to think about that one.
I have to admit, I'm also curious to know what all the people I'm six degrees of separation from in the blogosphere are saying (if anything) about this war. But, I digress: that's the politics of the blog..... More on that later.
For now, sleeeeeeeeep..........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
(and dreams about what it would be like to have a really cool-looking blog......)
It's St. Patrick's Day and I'm a Newfoundlander and I'm not drunk tonight. What's wrong with this picture? God knows a little numbness might be a relief after all this talk of peace. Isn't our cowboy just an Orwell for our times.
When you eliminate the doublespeak, though, what this Bush heard the other Bush say tonight was "God Save the Oilwells." Mmmmm....Texas tea.
Seems like a load of
Blarney to me.
Over the last few weeks I've been dating a woman who still has one foot in the closet. Sometimes that one foot drags her whole body back in. I've been out of the proverbial closet for a long time now and I'm never quite sure how to deal with other people's closets. I know only that I'm not about to go back to my own. (Hell, I think I sold the thing at a flea market a few years ago.)
So what to do when I'm invited out with this woman, a bunch of her friends, and her brother and brother-in-law. My first question is: who am I, as far as they're concerned? I'm her "friend," I'm told. Well, how am I supposed to act? I can act like "myself," I'm told. What does that mean? Well, I'm told, she is going to act like I'm her friend, so I guess I am supposed to follow suit. Given that I've never been her "friend" before, I guess I'm not supposed to act like myself after all--just some de-sexualized version of myself. (Gee, whatever would I wear?)
I've pretty much decided I'm not going out with them. It just seems like too much of a performance. Maybe if I cared more, maybe if I weren't as cynical as I am, I'd be up for the doing the "friend drag." After all, it's not exactly "simple" to be in the closet and not know how to get out. She's young; she's been with other women before, but not with other lesbians; most of her friends are straight. In that sense, I constitute a first.
But it's a big deal being a first for someone, especially when that person is not a first for you in any respect--it takes reminding oneself that there might be a discrepancy in perceptions about the significance of this affiar. It requires carefulness with the other person's emotions and creative boundary-keeping so that the wrong signals don't get sent. I like her and we have fun, but I'm nowhere close to being in love. Yet she has told me that right now, I'm the best thing in her life. In a few weeks, she will leave for Edmonton for the summer. In August, I will leave for New York for the year. This is a very short-term, casual thing. But how much carefulness is required and expected when one is the best thing in another person's life, however casual a thing one might be?
At times like this, I think it's more of an ethical dilemma dealing with someone else's closet than dealing with one's own. Eve Sedgwick was right: closets have their own epistemologies, and coming out does not eliminate closets. It just enables different closets to exist and lets us see the same old closets in rather more complicated ways.
I just spoke to my downstairs roommate, a nurse who has lived in my building for eight years now. She' been the one to take the garbage out when the lanlord's been too lazy. Likewise, she's been the one to clean and vaccuum the hallways and replace lightbulbs as needed. She is moving home to PEI because her parents are aging and unwell and her sister died rather tragically last year, leaving a young family. She's going home to help out.
But she's going home really pissed off, too. Joel, the landlord, is jerking her around and taking her to tenants' court. After all she has done to maintain the place when he refused (and note, her apartment has not been painted once in those 8 years!), he is taking her to court to get his money from her and humiliating her in front of potential tenants (yes, he's actually trying to rent the place, too, but refusing to let that count for the rent she owes him!). He brings people in and then tells them that "she's only bounced 3 cheques in eight years," thing like that.
We've all known that the guy's an asshole. But the building we live in (an old Victorian home with beautiful found windows in a turret up the side, that is basically my living room) is really well located and architecturally interesting. Joel has told me many times that he could rent my place in a heartbeat. Mine is a two-bedroom (that I've shared with many a roommate over the five years I've been here: the girlfriend I moved in with, two different law students, one lawyer --whom the girlfriend above (once she became the ex) actually slept with as a housewarming present--and now one manager of a Club Monaco store). Eleanor, my neighbour, lives just under me in a one-bedroom with a similar layout to my place. He could easily rent her place in a heartbeat, too. He's just choosing not to allow her to benefit from that arrangment because being an asshole comes too easily to him.
It doesn't occur to him to do maintenance on the place or to give her a break for all the years that she picked up his slack and because her sister just died or because it might be the decent human thing to do for all the reasons above. Nope, a contract is a contract, says he.
Oh, and by the way, he also has an MBA, teaches Business/Commerce at many universities in town where he uses his tenants as case studies. I'm sure Eleanor's situation warms the cockles of his capitalist heart. AFter all, he can get rent paid to him twice.
I had dinner with an old, dear friend tonight who has just returned from Bathurst, New Brunswick. She was there as the Communications Director for the Canada Games (the Nova Scotia team's Director, that is). Maurice has been filling you all in on the coldness of life here in the last little while. But Adele remarked that the weather here was pretty balmy compared with the below 0F temperatures in Northern New Brunswick. We then talked briefly about the phenomenon of talking about the weather itself. Is it peculiarly Canadian? There is now an ad on Canadian television for Ford cars: "Built for life in Canada." It asks, for instance, "What is -10 and snowing in Winnipeg?" The answer: Spring.
But the fact that Canadians seem to be weather-obsessed can only be recognized, I think, by imagining places where the weather is not news at all. I can think of San Franciso, where, I'm told (I've not been there, unfortunately), there are not four seasons. And another friend, Jenny, who lived in Mexico for years, says that no one ever talked about the weather while she lived there.
Leave it to two Canadians to find the fact that weather is not news in a particular place worthy of conversation--one might even say "news to us."
I am coming to the end of a lengthy collaborative project--co-editing a collection of essays with a colleague (and former friend). And there's a snag. One of the people whose essay is going to be reprinted in this collection has included images in that essay. As the editors, we overlooked this fact by mistake. Yes, the mistake was made by a research assistant who did not scan in the images when she scanned in the text. But in the end, the error is ours. We did not, therefore, negotiate with the press to have these images (there are 6) included in the book. The images are not *essential* to the argument of the essay. But they are published with this essay elsewhere. Before telling the author about this rather significant oversight, we thought we should ask the press what they thought. The guy who is in charge of the project said he would prefer to lve the images out and asks if we can just "let the author know."
Of course, this is not just a matter of letting the author "know." How do we broach the topic with her? My colleague has suggested that we make much of the fact that the press wants to keep costs down and that, after all, the original contract does not make any stipulations about images. And we conclude our message to her by saying "I hope this is okay with you."
Except...
This doesn't seem to give the author much sense that she can respond to the matter. She is being informed instead. And, if the images were not going to be published with the essay, should we not have told her this *before* she signed the contract? I think so. Then she could have made a more "informed" decision about signing the contract itself.
I would hate to be "informed" about such a matter, myself. But I also hate being the informant here. Although more to the point, I hate that we've fucked up.
That Catholic guilt again. Is it time to confess? Would confession make it better? Or is pragmatism the way to go and avoid the confession altogether unless it becomes necessary?
Argh.
Time to sleep on it, I think.
I am beginning to think that every job needs to come with a couple of "get out of jail free cards." It is still cold. There is too much work to do. There is not enough time. There is not enough sleep. I am in the doghouse, not having seen the bush in well over a week. And I think I'm getting sick. The question is, do I take a day off (cancel two classes) to prevent the onslaught of full-blown sickness or do I plod on?
It's awful being a Recovering Catholic. Is there anyone interested in buying a lifetime supply of guilt?
This one is dedicated to all of us who have ever fallen in love over the internet.
My story begins, though, not online, but in an office at a university. It begins with a mistake inspired by a website. A textbook representative researches the professors she will target. She approaches the office of one who does queer work. She comes to his office, but finds me, not him. The connection is electric. But she is on a flight back to New York that very evening. We exchange e-mail; we plan to have coffee the next time she's in town peddling her wares. I expect to see her in months.
A couple of weeks later, I receive a sample textbook. I e-mail to thank her. It's all business--for the first few messages. Then it turns. The e-mails are coy, provocative, sexy. Soon we are e-mailing incessantly. And then comes IM (Instant Messenger, the MSN kind, in this case). Then sleep disappears. Over a four-day period, I have about 5 hours of sleep. We both work in the day and talk non-stop at night. When an internet connection is severed at 5 a.m., she calls all the people with my name in Halifax, even though those sleepy heads are not on our time.
She has a girlfriend, she says. But she can't stop thinking about me. I don't seem to care that there's a girlfriend. I want her. She wants me. Does the girlfriend matter? I'm in love. So is she.
But what makes that possible? She is wonderful, yes. When we see each other in person, it is sublime--in both the blissful and awe-inspiring ways. In other words, it is tantalizing and terrying all at once. At times she cannot deal with the intensity. As exhilirating as the connection is in the space of the present, though, she runs scared. She must go back to the hotel, get behind her computer, where can eliminate her inhibitions. She needs the mediating space of technology.
I still love her. But she's still afraid. She loves the girlfriend and is afraid to leave the security of the relationship. I don't know if their connection is as electric as ours, though I do know it can't be any more intense. But is it our personalities that make the intensity possible or is that intensity facilitated by the structural realities of being online, living in virtual time and space?
I'm never surprised to hear that people fall in love online. It's based in a paradox that enables people to open up in ways they might never have imagined. Connections can be instant in a way that is possible only in person or on the telephone (or perhaps by satellite connection). You can be engaged with another person and get her response almost instantly. There is a particular form of internet time. Emotional barriers can be eliminated because there is always the mediating factor of keyboards and computer screens (webcams if you're lucky--though I've never tried one myself). The text, the web, and the technology makes it possible for two people to have the illusion of total intimacy and immediacy in the sense of time, but not of space. The psychological barriers can come down only because the physical ones are held in abeyance.
It's no wonder people fall in love with the help of the internet. The damned thing is, it's a hell of a lot harder to fall out of love this way, too.
Here I am. The bush still burns, though it has no time for bushwhacking. You know you've been busy when.....
Sigh.
In the last few days, I've been gradually smothered by work, inspired by ideas, and stimulated to argument. It is all about teaching, really--and culture itself as pedagogy.
(For more on the business of popular and mass culture as pedagocial implements, read below.)
So now, having devoted my week to union meetings and academic talks and dinners, I have a stack of marking to do that horse couldn't jump over. And what am I about to do today? I'm going to the gym with the She-Woman to see what fresh tortures I can gleefully engage in. And then I'm going to watch curling. The Nokia Brier (which decides the men's national champion in Canada) is being played in Halifax this year and tonight is the championship game.
Hee hee! (Am I the only person you know who gets excited about curling?)
Thursday and Friday, I spent much time in the presence of a very humble, but interesting mind--a visiting scholar to one of the universities at which I teach.
The topic was the discipline of Cultural Studies and how one establishes a program in this field in a university. The speaker suggested that mainstream culture (he uses the term "popular culture"; I prefer the term "mass culture") acts as a pedagogical tool--that it, in fact, "schools" its audiences. According to his argument, Cultural Studies should therefore focus on this engagement (between mainstream culture and its audiences) as an object of study--not of popular culture itself as an object of analysis, but of the relationship of mainstream culture to people as the object of argument.
But many questions persist:
(a) Whose version of pedagogy are we dealing with here? What kind of teaching relationship exists between culture and its audience?
(b) What kinds of cultural relationships exist between audiences and aspects of culture they _don't_ engage in for pleasure, in their leisure time?
(c) How does pedagogy in a classroom work if you're assuming culture is already part of the experience of culture--does that make teaching a kind of counter or competing pedagogy?
Interesting, curious, and maddening questions.....
(This one's for you, Maurice.)
My grandmother (we call her Nan) has a phrase for every situation--even now as she sits in a long-term care facility, recovering from the massive stroke she had last summer. She could always speak paragraphs with one sound: hmmmmmmm. That "hmmmmm" provides her with as many different "words" as the Inuit (Canada's northern native people) have for snow.
You just know, that when the "hmmmmmm" comes out, you're somehow in trouble or she has noticed something she disapproves of.
And that "hmmmm" precedes many a clever and colourful remark.
For example, in my grandmother's world, one is not a pushover. Rather, someone, is "soft." And not just soft, either--"soft as a cabbage stump." [A cabbage stump, that is, which has been boiled for hours on end stuck in the same pot as salt meat (a saltier, fattier version of brisket for you Americans)].
But there's even more to the saying. The full phrase?
"Hmmmmmmm......She's soft as a cabbage stump. She'd give away her arse and shit through her ribs."
Since Nan might never get to speak that phrase herself again, it's high time the rest of us started putting it to use.
So West Side Story went lesbo this weekend in Halifax--in a church, no less. The singing, the dancing, the acting--overall quite good. In fact the quality of most parts of the production was so strong, that some very particular things irritated me beyond belief. When a production is a quality production, the shortfalls do seem rather glaring--especially when they centre around the very centre of the play: the lesbians themselves.
Now: correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're the lieutenant in a gang (even if you seem to be outside said gang at the beginning of the play) AND you're a dyke, then you probably don't wear a pink shirt tied up just below your boobs with white pants. And you probably don't wear sparkly studded earrings, that flicker your femininity at the audience every time you move, right? Right? Am I the only who sees a problem with this? This is supposed to be a butch character. I'll be the first to acknowledge that not all lesbian relationships are butch-femme (nor should they be). However, if you want the Tony character to be a lesbian and not a man, should this character not be butch? Should that character not be as "tough-looking" as all the other gang members (among whom there were some pretty masculinely clad women)? The mannerisms, the inflections of voice, the dress--all feminine. Tony was a femme gangster all the way. Just goes to show that no matter how many women wear pants, female masculinity is still pretty taboo (EVEN, or perhaps especially, when it comes to representing lesbians!) We wouldn't want anyone to be _really_ pushed outside their comfort zone, now, would we?
If this were not enough to burn my bush (and, need I say, not in the good way), off I go to the bathroom during the intermission only to be subjected to yet another performance of the "comfort zone." Here are the straight people discussing their "genuine" confusion. One thought this was going to be like opera where if a female played a male role, the character in the play was still male. But she could not make sense of why other characters on stage were referred to Tony as a woman, and why Tony's full name was identified as "Antonia" (as opposed to Anthony). They stacked up more and more evidence from the play that attested to their bafflement--all of which was clear evidence that the play was being staged as a lesbian love story.
There I am, caught between an on-stage performance that is not queer enough and a bathroom assessment of that performance that is queer only in its oddness.
The moral of the story? Don't go to lesbian theater in a church.
The first thing a bush whacker does in the process of turning 30 is freak out for a week before the fact about not being able to type 47 wpm. When the day arrives, however, the Bush Whacker celebrates in the following ways, some of which extend beyond the designated 24-hour period of "the day" itself):
1. By reminiscing about all the bushes she's whacked (othewise known as the "To all the Girls I've loved Before" moment").
2. By allowing She-Woman to take her to the gym and her have her way with her (three days running; three days stiffening).
3. By being geek enough to attend an academic talk that has nothing to do with either bush-whacking or turning 30.
4. By being geek enough to rearrange a date with the bush she's whacking, so she can go to said academic talk.
5. By having lunch in the European style (soup is not appetizer, but one of four courses--at lunch, remember. The Bush Whacker is amused, recalling that the only four-course lunches she has enjoyed in the past have included the lunch companion as one of the courses.)
6. By seeing The Quiet American with her aMMusing friend, the Queen of Sheba, and the Grand Poobah of Culinary Delights.
7. By slurping down oysters, an event she enoyed for the very first time (though the texture sure was familiar).
8. By talking excessively in the third person.