#which are what one might say mostly relates to contemporary discourse

[ancientrimer]

i can't believe this keeps happening to me. i figure out a theory i think i might want to apply in my thesis, go look at the text that has the theory, and find that that text already mentions jane eyre

[brokemylegflippingthefirewall]

*This is absolutely a fic promotion, but plz hear me out on the discourse part too

So, self inserts and original characters, the worst fanfic catgeory (fanfiction.net literally says that in one of its fic groupings, and I'm pretty sure the number of views on any fanfic website says the same).

TLDR- Yes, I agree that this stereotype carries truth, but I do think SIs and OCs have more potential to be explored, and the stigma surrounding these labels is blocking that. And oh god I just want to know so badly if this is the deal with the work I'm currently writing or if I genuinely just can't write well.

The longer version- (this was written quite late into the night/ I'm in Singapore/, and might not be so well organized, I apologize for that.)

To what extent is this stigma "justified"? I mostly use AO3 for reading fics, and when I see the OC/SI tag, the thing is....I came to look for fics about canon characters and might not have the wish to invest my time in taking in a new character. I understand that most people who read fanfiction would feel the same. This, I think, is more or less justified. If you came to look for a certain canon character/relationship, and you don't want to get invested in any OCs, then of course the OC/SI tag isn't for you.

But... I think that's about it. Bcs here's the thing,

1. Using the OC/SI format does NOT automatically make the fic worse in quality. Hell, I'm not even sure if the statistical "fact" that these tags generate the worst fics is true. Judging from what I've read in the tma fandom and my other past fandoms, the stuff with OC/SI isn't inherently worse or better than the rest of the fics. There are ones that are pretty normal in writing quality, and the ones where the prose is rly good, others where plot design stands out etc. Of course, there is a lot of wish fulfillment and the like, but... there's also a lot of that in fics that write about canon characters.

2. I can't really say whether a wish fulfillment "I just want to write cool scenes/fluff" fic is better or worse than a more serious fic that explores some characterization or plot point. I think stories (all stories, books, fanfic, myths, everything) exist to entertain us and make us feel things. I am not sure if writing a feel good story is any less meaningful than writing a story that brings people "deeper" thoughts and makes them feel good in some other way. And this isn't even the issue at hand, because fundamentally, writing an OC/SI or not doesn't determine what the content is about. I agree that a larger proportion of OC/SI fics tend to be more on the lighthearted side, but... so is most of the content consumed in the other tags. Readers don't seem to have a problem with feel good stories/fix it fics etc when there is no OC or SI, so I don't see why that type of fic paired with an OC/SI should be considered any less "meaningful".

3. Guys/gals, what is an OC/SI?

Yes, it is very personal, and it is very wish fulfillment, but... isn't that like a common literature thing...like in general? Look at the works that "real writers" publish, from contemporary to the classics, which writer doesn't write about themselves? Like, just off the top of my head, Les Miserables, Marius? Um, Dante's Inferno? (and that guy did not self insert into some random thing he straightup went for the Christian Canon😂 used his real name too, so Jonny I guess if you feel awkward about your MCs name you can think of Dante//Jk). But seriously, self insert and wish fulfillment is a big part of literature itself, and while there are things to be said about these tropes, if people don't have that much of a problem with them in other literature, I don't see why fanfic OC/SIs shouldn't be treated the same.

4. in relation to the last point. More specifically...

I do think that a lot of fanfiction which write about the original characters are also OC/SIs to different extents. I've read fics that depict pairings where the author and readers project heavily onto one (or more) of the characters. I've read stuff where the author uses a minor character to explore the established world building/character dynamics and it's clear that it's an SI but with the appearance of being a canon character (and yes it gets tons more views than one that's written as SI). How do I know this? Because I am one of those readers who project onto those characters, and I know why I read those fics, I know why I like them. It's because I can self insert, and feel like I am part of the story, part of the world. Isn't that something most people want to do? I mean, Universal Studios? Specific franchise themed museums? COSPLAY??? Of course that's not all there is to engaging with a story, but what's the shame in wanting to be a part of an already established world building, or want to love a wonderfully designed character? (slight tangent, but if u feel like it's bcs ur not as interesting/cool as the story's world or other characters appear to be then I can tell you with certainty that's not true. You are very interesting and cool and absolutely deserve to be part of a fantasy world.) Isn't that a big part of why "real literature" is written and read as well? So... what's the problem with being like, okay, I'm just gonna insert myself into the world now, through this original character? Of course, I'm not asking for people who prefer to write strictly in canon characters to change that. What I mean to say is, writing it in the form of an OC/SI, doesn't make it a lot different from other fics, or hell, from classic literature even.

I think a potential problem might be the feeling that you are taking too much creative liberty with something that is established canon, by having your own character directly interact with it. But, um, can't the same thing be said if you take a canon character, and then proceed to project heavily onto them? Like, a big part of why I don't feel comfortable writing just canon characters is that I know I'm clearly projecting and it feels awkward to rewrite an already established character to explore my own thoughts/desires. I would rather just straightup design a new character. (this is all just personal feelings, I haven't thought enough about this to make any kind of argument here. And of course, the main reason is I can't trust myself to write canon characters that don't ooc in some way so having one as my protag might kill me with my own awkwardness. )

5. the potential.

Now this is looking far ahead because I'm not sure how much our current system for distribution of knowledge & copyright can allow it. But damn. The OC/SI thing has a lot of potential. There is one thing that makes it different from writing in canon characters, and that is the way it opens up a clear space for you to add your own experience into the story. When exploring your own world view through the lense of an already established world, or vice versa, so much can be revealed about both, perhaps even bringing to light aspects of the narrative the author hadn't previously seen. We all know this feeling, it's when we ramble on about one of our stories or worlds to a friend, and they point something out, and we're like ooooh that makes a lot of sense but I hadn't thought about it before. Yea, like those moments. Stories are generally made more interesting by their interaction with many different perspectives/experiences. With OC/SI it straightup allows you to be like, okay, I'm going to engage my own experience with this fictional world/character now. I mean, isnt that also a large part of how fanfics work in general? Readers/writers bouncing symbols and experiences off each other in the form of stories? Reading about the various interpretations of canon stuff? Whats the problem with tagging it as it is? I'm just thinking about the fics that could have been written as OC/SI and explored the story in some fascinating way which weren't written at all or were discontinued bcs the number of views discouraged those authors. (I feel that with my current work as well, though I have already written half of it and the remaining half is too juicy to give up so I'll probably be completing it)

6. conclusion, sorta

I guess what I want for OC/SO fics is just the same treatment as everything else. Saw it in the tags you were searching for? Look at the teaser. Do you find it interesting? No, then very well. Yes, then click in and take a look. Do you like the writing style? Are you getting into the narrative?... etc. You know, like, same standards you would have for any other kind of fic. Not feeling like you want to read about a new character? Cool, no problem at all, click away. But I do not think that the current difference in number of views is just based on whether readers are interested in reading about a new character or not. In fact, that's what I want it to be. Show me that "true" difference, the one without the stigma behind it, because, as the same goes for every kind of stigmatized community, you're not receiving the proportionate amount of positive feedback, but what's worse is you can't even trust the criticism you receive. If no one engages, or someone gives a negative feedback, how am I supposed to know if it's because my writing is bad? or my teaser wasn't interesting? or my character was badly written/designed? Or if it was to a certain extent, bcs of the stigma? I do want criticism, of course I do, it's the first step to every improvement, and I would love it if I could get feedback that I can trust. (and this brings us to the truely "oppressed" community of the fanfic world, the people who write very good but cant write interesting teasers//jk)

7. the entirely skippable straw man rant part, also the expression of my love for The Magnus Archives.

some straw man: if you like writing your own characters so much, why not just write your own story entirely? and publish it?

You think I'm not annoyed about that? Here's the thing, I LIKE THIS WORLD I READ FROM THIS BOOK/SOME OTHER FORM OF MEDIA OR WHATEVER, I like it, it's brilliant, I want to write for it, about it, be in it, think about it, read about it, engage in whatever way I can. I CAN'T just "go write my own." And who do you think is more annoyed about not being able to publish the stuff? (According to you) I have written something that is potentially publishable (thank you btw I know you don't exist and is a strawman I invented just now but I've gotta get my compliments where I can//Jk), and I can't publish it in any potentially big way (and rightfully not) because I have no copyright over the characters. I worked hard to design my character, to make the plot meaningful, and to study the original canon plot and characters so that it would all fit together (I mean, partially bcs I can't force myself to sit down and write sth that is any less complex), and I can't actually publish it where more people will read it. And of course, on top of that, even less people will feel like reading once that "original character" tag is up. Does it look like I would be here if I could "just write my own"?

(slight tangent but come on what even is "your own"? how many classic European lit books were just fanfics of each other which were all just fanfics of the Bible or Greek mythology or sth? Stories and symbols have no boundaries it's the economic system that drew those.)

Damn this got way longer than I thought and it's morning now😂 guess I ran out of space to actually promote my fic, might have to do that in a seperate post then. But to anyone who actually read up to here, I'm so sorry for wasting your time no but srsly thanks for reading all of these jumbled thoughts, and good luck with whatever you are working on at the moment, I know you're probably working on something if you're reading through these tags. And of course good luck to the tma folk we're gonna face the end together🙏. good night (I should rly go to sleep now😂)

[mrsreinhart]

Lili Reinhart Grows Up

The Riverdale actress plots her move to the big screen

Lili Reinhart almost didn’t sign on to co-star in Hustlers. The 23-year-old Riverdale star—Generation Z’s Blake Lively—was sent the script by her team, with the note that the director, Lorene Scafaria (The Meddler), wanted to meet with her. But Reinhart blanched when she saw the logline: “‘Strippers in New York drug and rob men on Wall Street.’ And I was immediately like, ‘Oooh, this is probably not the vibe that I want.’”

But after she conveyed that message to her team, they persisted. “They were like, Read the script. So I did, and it was obviously amazing.”

Reinhart feels pretty good about that decision now. Hustlers—which stars Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, as well as Cardi B and Lizzo in small roles—promises to be the sort of buzzy, commercially successful film that seems almost too well constructed and well timed to be true for a young television star aiming to embark on a movie career.

The actress—who grew up in Cleveland before relocating to Los Angeles—plays a stripper named Annabelle in the film, which is based on a true story about a group of Scores dancers (depicted in a 2015 New York–magazine article by Jessica Pressler). Under the guidance of a de facto den mother (Lopez), the group decides to embark on a scheme to drug affluent men by employing a potion concocted out of MDMA and ketamine. Annabelle’s function is as a sort of bait—she meets the men at a bar and then her “sisters” (Lopez, Wu, Keke Palmer) show up to join them, and, well, things get murky (for the men) from there. Whatever the opposite of nerves of steel is, that’s what Annabelle’s afflicted with, as she—in a running gag—vomits whenever things get dicey or tense, which, as you can imagine, happens quite a bit.

One of the major draws of the film for Reinhart was getting to be a part of the stellar all-female ensemble, and she says she tried her best to see her very famous co-stars as, simply, co-workers. While she says she’s “definitely seen Monster-in-Law multiple times [and] definitely had ‘On the Floor’ on my iPod Nano,” she tried to view J. Lo as the movie-actor equivalent of the person one cubicle over. “I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but I really am not star-struck very much unless it’s, like, Lady Gaga … or probably Meryl Streep.… I really try to not have any preconceived notions when I meet anybody. I truly just tried to look at Jennifer as my co-star who has had … an incredible career.”

Life After Graduation

Reinhart—who plays Betty Cooper on Riverdale, one of the CW’s biggest hits of the past five years—seems destined to follow the trajectory of a Michelle Williams or Lively before her, who went from playing the female lead in a very popular television show adored by teenagers to full-fledged movie star. Making that transition in the public eye is not necessarily without its stresses, though. Reinhart is extremely close with her Riverdale co-stars, and is dating Cole Sprouse, who plays her love interest on the show. Ask the nearest 16-year-old in your vicinity and you’ll undoubtedly get a lengthy discourse on the topic. But she sounds very excited for the career phase that will start after the series has ended.

In Hustlers, Lili Reinhart, Jennifer Lopez, Keke Palmer, and Constance Wu play strippers who drug and rob wealthy men.

“Oh, God, I think I could get in trouble if I answer that too honestly,” she says, laughing, when asked how she currently feels about working on Riverdale. “I think my heart is really in films. It’s really wonderful to have a steady job and to work with a group of people who are like my family. Truly. I see them all the time. We all live in the same city.”

She says she does appreciate that the show gives her new angles of Betty to play week to week. “Riverdale has so many twists and turns and offers us, unlike I think a lot of other shows, opportunities to do so many things.... One episode it feels like I’m in a horror movie and the next episode I’m in a drama, and the next episode I’m doing a period piece. It feels like you get a piece of everything and I think that’s really what helps keep it interesting.… I’m very lucky in that regard.”

With a starring role on a breakout CW show comes a massive social-media fan base, and Reinhart now has a cool 19.8 million Instagram followers to her name. Somewhat unusual among her contemporaries, she blends the requisite magazine-photo-shoot and promotional posts with quirkier slice-of-life samplings, including memes, shots of flowers and scenery, and poems. She explains, “I don’t want someone to look at my social media and just see photos of me on a red carpet or my magazine shoots.... I don’t want to follow people who just post beautiful photos of themselves. I think that’s quite boring, so I try not to be that person.”

And she speaks with conviction about trying to present a more realistic portrayal of who she is on social media: “I’m literally laying in bed right now in a T-shirt with no makeup on because I go to work in a couple of hours, and I’m going to go to the gym after I take a nap,” she says on the phone. “My life is not always glamorous. It hardly ever is. I want people to see that.” She goes on, “I think there’s nothing more un-relatable than people who have incredibly perfect bodies and who are on yachts all the time. I’m like, ‘That’s great, but that’s not.... You’re like the 1 percent of the 1 percent, you know?’” I comment that it does feel like half of my Instagram feed was on Capri all summer, and she laughs. “I wish I had time to sail around Italy, but I’m hustling, and I’m working my ass off.”

Reinhart has also become a tabloid mainstay, due in large part to her relationship with Sprouse, which she keeps mostly private—and she does not feel an obligation to speak about or share that aspect of her life. “It’s never an intention of mine to, like, hide facts about my relationship, but it also isn’t for the world to know.”

She seems to understand that other actresses might handle the position she is in differently, and she is self-aware, and wise, about her image. “I have a little bit of a cold exterior sometimes,” she admits. “You kind of have to crack me open a little bit. I think that’s just who I am. Some people are very much an open book, and they’re warm and friendly the second you meet them. I just don’t really think that’s me. I’m a little bit more closed off, and that’s O.K. I think I don’t have to try to pretend to be something that I’m not just because I’m on a CW show and I have young fans. I don’t really need to be sharing everything about my love life and my friendships just because that’s what teens are doing right now. I feel like I cherish being more reserved.”

It’s hard, after talking to Reinhart for any period of time, to not come away with a sense that this is a woman—particularly for someone only 22—who really knows who she is and what she wants to be spending her time on. She has drive and gravitas, but also a sense of humor, not taking the Hollywood of it all too seriously. She already wrapped the coming-of-age, drama-romance film Chemical Hearts, which she stars in and for which she also serves as an executive producer. And she cites the words of Jeff Bridges when asked about the next stages of her career. “He said once that every project he does he tries to make a one-eighty from the last project that he did.”

She continues, “I’m still in this very experimental phase of my career, which is exciting because it allows for a lot of firsts.… I have the opportunity to try a lot of things and not be typecast and sort of lay the foundation, hopefully, for the rest of my career where people can be like, Oh yeah, she can play whatever role she wants to play.”

[arcticdementor]

You know what America needs? More mirrors for princes—the Renaissance genre of advice books directed at statesmen. On the Right, we have many books that identify, and complain about, the problems of modernity and the challenges facing us. Some of those books do offer concrete solutions, but their audience is usually either the educated masses, who cannot themselves translate those solutions into policy, or policymakers who have no actual power, or refuse to use the power they do have. Scott Yenor’s bold new book is directed at those who have the will to actually rule. He lays out what has been done to the modern family, why, and what can and should be done about it, by those who have power, now or in the future. Let’s hope the target audience pays attention.

The Recovery of Family Life instructs future princes in two steps. First, Yenor dissects the venomous ideology of feminism, which seeks to abolish all natural distinctions between the sexes, as well as all social structures that organically arise from those distinctions. Second, he tells how the family regime of a healthy modern society should be structured. By absorbing both lessons and applying them in practice, the wise statesman can, Yenor hopes, accomplish the recovery of family life. (Yenor himself does not compare his book to a mirror for princes; he’s too modest for that. But that’s what it is.)

…

You will note that this is a spicy set of positions for an academic of today to hold. You will therefore not be surprised to learn that Yenor was the target of cancel culture before being a target was cool. He is a professor of political philosophy at Boise State University, and in 2016, in response to Yenor’s publication of two pieces containing, to normal people, anodyne factual statements about men and women, a mob of leftist students tried to defenestrate him. Yenor was “homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic.” (We can ignore that the first two of those words are mostly content-free propaganda terms designed to blur discourse, though certainly to the extent they do have meaning, that meaning should be celebrated—I would have given Yenor a medal, if I had been in charge of Boise State.) They didn’t manage to get him fired (he has tenure and refused to bend), but the usual baying mob, led by Yenor’s supposed peers, put enormous pressure on him, which could not have been easy. He still teaches there; whether it is fun for him, I do not know, but it certainly hasn’t stopped him promulgating the truth.

…

Yenor begins by examining the intellectual origins of the rolling revolution, found most clearly within twentieth-century feminism. One service Yenor provides is to draw the battle lines clearly. He does this by swimming in the fetid swamps of feminism; I learned a lot I did not know, although none of it was pleasing. He spends a little time discussing so-called first-wave feminism, but much more on second-wave feminists, starting with Simone de Beauvoir, through Betty Friedan, and into Shulamith Firestone, this latter a literally insane harridan who starved herself to death. The common thread among these writers was their baseless claim that women had no inherent meaningful difference from men, and that women could only be happy by the abolition of any perceived difference. This was to lead to self-focused self-actualization resulting in total autonomy, and a woman would know she had achieved this, most often, by making working outside the home the focus of her existence. Friedan was the great popularizer of this destructive message, of course, which I recently attacked at length in my thoughts on her book The Feminine Mystique.

…

After this detailed examination of core feminist ideas, Yenor suffers more, slogging through the thought about autonomy of various two-bit modern con men, notably Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. He analyzes the dishonest argumentative methods of all the Left, in general and in specific with regard to family topics—false claims mixed with false dichotomies and false comparisons, what he calls the “liberal wringer,” the mechanism by which any argument against the rolling revolution is dishonestly deconstructed and all engagement with it avoided. The lesson for princes, I think, is to not participate in such arguments, and to remember what our enemies long ago learned and put into practice—that power is all.

Yenor describes how the modern Left (which he somewhat confusingly calls “liberalism,” but Rawls and his ilk are not liberal in any meaningful sense of the term, rather they are Left) uses the law to achieve its goal of the “pure relationship,” meaning the aim that all relationships must be ones of free continuous choice, that is, without any supposed repression. This leads to various destructive results when it collides with reality, including the reality of parent-child bonds, and more generally is hugely destructive of social cohesion. From this also flow various deleterious consequences resulting from ending supposed sexual repression; this section is replete with analysis of writings from Michel Foucault to Aldous Huxley, and contains much complexity, but in short revolves around what was once a commonplace—true freedom is not release from constraints, but the freedom to choose rightly, to choose virtue and not to be a slave to passions, and rejection of this truth is the basis of many of our modern problems.

…

Finally, Yenor turns to what should be done, which is the most noteworthy part of the book. As he says, “Intellectuals who defend the family rightly spend much time exposing blind spots in the contemporary ideology. All this time spent in the defensive crouch, however, distracts them from thinking through where these limits [i.e., the limits Yenor has just outlined in detail] point in our particular time and place. Seeing the goodness in those limits, it is necessary also to reconstruct a public opinion and a public policy that appreciates those limits.” Thus, Yenor strives to show what a “better family policy” would be.

This is an admirable effort, but I fear it is caught on the horns of a dilemma. The rolling revolution does not permit any stopping or slowing; much less does it permit any retrenchment or reversal. Our enemies don’t care what we think a better family policy would be. And if we were to gain the power to implement a better family policy, by first smashing their power, there is no reason for it to be as modest as that Yenor outlines—rather, it should be radical, an utter unwinding of the nasty web they have woven, and the creation of a new thing. Not a restoration, precisely, but a new thing for our time, informed by the timeless Old Wisdom that Yenor extols. The defect in Yenor’s thought, or at least in his writing, is refusing to acknowledge it is only power that matters for the topics about which he cares most. But presumably the future princes at whom this book is aimed will know this in their bones.

Yenor himself doesn’t exactly exude optimism. Nor does he exude pessimism, but he begins by telling us that “we are still only in the infancy” of the rolling revolution. This seems wrong to me; in the modern age, time is compressed, and fifty years is plenty of time for the rolling revolution, a set of ideologies based on the denial of reality, to reach its inevitable senescence, when reality reasserts itself with vigor. This is particularly true since every new front opened by the revolution is more anti-reality, more destructive, and more revolting to normal people, who eventually will have had enough, and the sooner, if given the right leadership.

…

For most purposes, what Yenor advocates would be a restoration of family policy, both in law and society, as it existed in America in the mid-twentieth century. I’m not sure that’s going back far enough for ideas. You’re not supposed to say it out loud, and Yenor doesn’t, but it’s not at all clear to me that even first-wave feminism had any virtue at all. To the extent it is substantively discussed today, we are given a caricature, where the views of those opposed to Mary Wollstonecraft or John Stuart Mill are not told to us, rather distorted polemics of those authors about their opponents are presented as accurate depictions, which is unlikely, and even those depictions are never engaged with. But we know that most of what Mill said about politics in general was self-dealing lies that have proven to be enormously destructive, so the presumption should be that what he said about relations between men and women was equally risible.

…

Penultimately, Yenor addresses such new frontiers being sought by the rolling revolution, with the implication that the rolling revolution might, perhaps, be halted. Here he talks about the desire of the Left to have the state separate children from parents, particularly where and because the parents oppose the revolution, but more generally to break the parent-child bond as a threat to unlimited autonomy. He says, optimistically, “No respectable person has (yet) suggested that parents could be turned in for hate speech behind closed doors.” But this has already been proven false; Scotland is on the verge of passing a new blasphemy law, the “Hate Crime and Public Order Law,” and Scotland’s so-called Justice Minister (with the very Scots name of Humza Yousaf) has explicitly noted, and called for, entirely private conversations in the home that were “hate speech” to be prosecuted once the law is passed. A man like that is beyond secular redemption, yet he is also a mainline representative of the rolling revolution. The reality is that discussion does not, and will never work, with these people, only force. Still trying, Yenor presents a balanced picture to his hoped-for audience of princes, such as discussing when state interference in the family makes sense (as in cases of abuse). However, such situations have been adequately addressed in law for hundreds of years; the rolling revolution is not a new type of such balancing, but the Enemy. Discussions about it will not stop it. No general of the rolling revolution will even notice this book, except in that perhaps some myrmidons may be detached from the main host to punish Yenor, or to record his name for future punishment.

Yenor ends with a pithy set of responses to the tedious propagandistic aphorisms of the rolling revolution, such as “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” And, laying out a clear vision of a renewed society based on the principals he has earlier discussed, he tells us, “In the long term, the goal is to stigmatize the assumptions of the rolling revolution.” No doubt this is true; cauterizing the societal wound where the rolling revolution will have been amputated from our society will be, in part, accomplished by stigmatizing both the ideas and those who clamored for them or led their implementation. How to get to that desirable “long term,” though, when their long term is very clear, and very different from the long term Yenor hopes for? He says “Prudent statesmen must mix our dominant regime with doses of reality.” Yeah, no. Prudent statesmen, the new princes, must entirely overthrow our dominant regime, or not only will not a single one of Yenor’s desired outcomes see the light of day, far worse evils will be imposed on us. Oh, I’m sure Yenor knows this; it’s the necessary conclusion of Yenor’s own discussion of those eagerly desired future evils. He just can’t be as aggressive as me. I’m here to tell you that you should read this book, but amp up the aggression a good eight times—which shouldn’t be a problem, especially if you have children of your own, whose innocence and future these people want to steal.

[tanadrin]

Was listening to “What a Hell of a Way to Die,” a podcast about war and the U.S. military, which has an interesting episode on pacifism and how it’s usually understood politically and culturally. Along with anarchism, staunch support for the concept of pacifism is one of the pillars of my worldview that’s definitely become more... complicated as I get older. It’s hard to argue, in the face of certain historical (or even contemporary!) events, that pacifism especially in more absolutist forms is always the most moral course of action, and there’s this common retort to people articulating a pacifist position, or even who are suspected of holding such a position, that involves weaving a counterfactual in which you have no choice but to commit violence.

But, as their guest points out, that’s true of any ethically monstrous act. It’s always possible to come up with a sufficiently contorted thought experiment that will get you to the answer you want--that doesn’t mean the thought experiment is in fact correct, or even useful. And what starting from a position of committed pacifism does is it forces the consideration of options other than violence. Because once it’s available as a solution, violence is a really tempting tool. But that it is so tempting, so emotionally satisfying to articulate, should make it suspect--besides the fact that it so rarely turns out as neatly and cleanly in your favor as one would expect--and maybe it’s good that the episode I listened to right before this was about Afghanistan, and how the current moral dilemma there is “prolong a government whose existence is being propped up by the US, and thus the civil war against that government, which is killing tons of people, mostly native Afghans, or withdraw and probably let the Taliban take over again.” Like, there’s no good option there--but what is the solution? To keep killing people and hope a good option eventually appears that makes all those deaths worth it?

Violence is baked deeply into the human psyche, and deeply into the American political psyche more than anything. A generation of action movies and Tough Guys Who Get Things Done and a narrative of American supremacy under which perceived national humiliation was intolerables, I am convinced, a major reason why the response to 9/11 was to invade Afghanistan in the first place (with the fig leaf of an absurd ultimatum beforehand). It has made admitting that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (by any reasonable measures boondoggles and failures and astonishing wastes of resources and human life) were mistakes essentially impossible. Even if in theory a moral case can be made for violence under highly contingent circumstances (just as it can be for murder or cannibalism or burning the Mona Lisa) doesn’t mean we should have anything like the rapid recourse to it that we do in our political discourse. And maybe the only way to make that case is to articulate a vision of what is possible if you do start from the heuristic of strong pacifism.

The classic argument is, as the podcast discusses, well, what about the Nazis? What about Hitler? What about World War 2? Was pacifism a good or moral idea in 1941? Essentially, they point out, you ought to reject the premise--because while pacifism might have been of very little use in 1941, Hitler did not appear ex nihilo that year, and there are absolutely points in 1939, in 1933, in 1923, or earlier, when an approach other than “threaten our enemies with violence” might have resulted in a very different outcome for Germany in the 1940s.

This is, I think, something it’s super popular, even (especially?) on the left right now to ding liberals and centrists for. “They don’t even think it’s OK to punch Nazis! What a bunch of apologists for fascism!” The common centrist defenses of nonviolence--”civility” and “marketplace of ideas” and “not liking what someone says, but they have a right to say it” get sneered at, and yeah, I’m not gonna lie, I find the platitudes wear pretty thin pretty fast. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it doesn’t mean that the observation that a quick recourse to violence, while emotionally satisfying, is never as effective as its proponents would like you to think. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways to respond to violence and hatred and authoritarianism that are impossible to consider so long as physical violence is considered an appropriate and easy reply. And this goes doubly for international relations, where the temptation of a quick drone strike or a missile strike versus the political considerations of sending in troops versus the political cost of doing nothing makes the choice even more stark.

I guess all that is a preamble to me shrugging and saying--yeah, I don’t know if pacifism is always the morally correct stance. I think pacifists can reasonably and correctly make a choice not to answer violence with violence in defense of themselves--but I don’t know if they can demand others do that, too, or passively permit violence against other people. That doesn’t sit well with me. But I do think that as a moral heuristic, pacifism is probably a very good one, one that does not get nearly enough credit, and I do think the failure to give it serious weight, to refuse to consider any pacifist a Truly Serious Person, the eager willingness to bite the bullet (ha ho) of violence (despite that being the default political position of 99.9% of humanity throughout its entire history, and so not much of a bullet!) usually means violence becomes the first option rather than the last, and we cannot begin to understand just how much we impoverish our politics and our world by refusing to reject true compassion as a “realistic” option.

[kny111]

The Algorithmic Rise of the “Alt-Right”

While furthering my reading on the synergies being formed through our recent presidency and the resurgence of white extremist terrorism the data many seem to be pointing to is how important technology is in the rise of such ass backwards systems. Here’s a great review on the way in which capitalists adored ‘big tech’ itself has been infiltrated by such oppressive forces that have, as many of us realized, been with us since the creation of this country. Here are some highlight excerpts off this delve into white supremacist ideals in technologically based network systems:

In a sense, we’ve managed to push white nationalism into a very mainstream position,” @JaredTSwift said. “Now, we’ve pushed the Overton window,” referring to the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. Twitter is the key platform for shaping that discourse. “People have adopted our rhetoric, sometimes without even realizing it. We’re setting up for a massive cultural shift,” @JaredTSwift said. Among White supremacists, the thinking goes: if today we can get “normies” talking about Pepe the Frog, then tomorrow we can get them to ask the other questions on our agenda: “Are Jews people?” or “What about black on white crime?” And, when they have a sitting President who will re-tweet accounts that use #whitegenocide hashtags and defend them after a deadly rally, it is fair to say that White supremacists are succeeding at using media and technology to take their message mainstream.

Networked White RageCNN commentator Van Jones dubbed the 2016 election a “Whitelash,” a very real political backlash by White voters. Across all income levels, White voters (including 53% of White women) preferred the candidate who had retweeted #whitegenocide over the one warning against the alt-right. For many, the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement coupled with the putative insult of a Black man in the White House were such a threat to personal and national identity that it provoked what Carol Anderson identifies as White Rage.In the span of U.S. racial history, the first election of President Barack Obama was heralded as a high point for so-called American “race relations.” His second term was the apotheosis of this symbolic progress. Some even suggested we were now “post-racial.” But the post-Obama era proves the lie that we were ever post-racial, and it may, when we have the clarity of hindsight, mark the end of an era. If one charts a course from the Civil Rights movement, taking 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) as a rough starting point and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the close of Obama’s second term as the end point, we might see this as a five-decades-long “second reconstruction” culminating in the 2016 presidential election.

Taking the long view makes the rise of the alt-right look less like a unique eruption and more like a continuation of our national story of systemic racism. Historian Rayford Logan made the persuasive argument that retrenchment and the brutal reassertion of White supremacy through Jim Crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching was the White response to “too much” progress by those just a generation from slavery. He called this period, 1877–1920, the “nadir of American race relations.” And the rise of the alt-right may signal the start of a second nadir, itself a reaction to progress of Black Americans. The difference this time is that the “Whitelash” is algorithmically amplified, sped up, and circulated through networks to other White ethno-nationalist movements around the world, ignored all the while by a tech industry that “doesn’t see race” in the tools it creates.

Media, Technology, and White NationalismToday, there is a new technological and media paradigm emerging and no one is sure what we will call it. Some refer to it as “the outrage industry,” and others refer to “the mediated construction of reality.” With great respect for these contributions, neither term quite captures the scope of what we are witnessing, especially when it comes to the alt-right. We are certainly no longer in the era of “one-to-many” broadcast distribution, but the power of algorithms and cable news networks to amplify social media conversations suggests that we are no longer in a “peer-to-peer” model either. And very little of our scholarship has caught up in trying to explain the role that “dark money” plays in driving all of this. For example, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of hedge-fund billionaire and libertarian Robert Mercer), has been called the “First Lady of the Alt-Right” for her $10-million underwriting of Brietbart News, helmed for most of its existence by former White House Senior Advisor Steve Bannon, who called it the “platform of the alt-right.” White nationalists have clearly sighted this emerging media paradigm and are seizing—and being provided with millions to help them take hold of—opportunities to exploit these innovations with alacrity. For their part, the tech industry has done shockingly little to stop White nationalists, blinded by their unwillingness to see how the platforms they build are suited for speeding us along to the next genocide.

The second nadir, if that’s what this is, is disorienting because of the swirl of competing articulations of racism across a distracting media ecosystem. Yet, the view that circulates in popular understandings of the alt-right and of tech culture by mostly White liberal writers, scholars, and journalists is one in which racism is a “bug” rather than a “feature” of the system. They report with alarm that there’s racism on the Internet (or, in the last election), as if this is a revelation, or they “journey” into the heart of the racist right, as if it isn’t everywhere in plain sight. Or, they write with a kind of shock mixed with reassurance that alt-right proponents live next door, have gone to college, gotten a proper haircut, look like a hipster, or, sometimes, put on a suit and tie. Our understanding of the algorithmic rise of the alt-right must do better than these quick, hot takes.

If we’re to stop the next Charlottesville or the next Emanuel AME Church massacre, we have to recognize that the algorithms of search engines and social media platforms facilitated these hate crimes. To grasp the 21st century world around us involves parsing different inflections of contemporary racism: the overt and ideologically committed White nationalists co-mingle with the tech industry, run by boy-kings steeped in cyberlibertarian notions of freedom, racelessness, and an ethos in which the only evil is restricting the flow of information on the Internet (and, thereby, their profits). In the wake of Charleston and Charlottesville, it is becoming harder and harder to sell the idea of an Internet “where there is no race… only minds.” Yet, here we are, locked in this iron cage.

Head over to SagePub for full article

[lo-lynx]

Power relations in His Dark Materials

TW: racism, eugenics, sexism, ableism

Spoiler warning: The main His Dark Materials novels, minor spoiler for La Belle Sauvage.

In the His Dark Materials novels power is a quite a central theme. Who has power, what do they do with that power, how can you fight power? This is of course also salient in our own world, which is why social theorists have been trying to explain power and power dynamics pretty much as long as social theory has existed. In this text I therefore want to look at some of these ways of explaining power and see if they can tell us anything about the universe of His Dark Materials (focusing on Lyra’s world). This will also dovetail with an analysis that I wrote a while back of the Nordic influences on His Dark Materials, especially regarding the history of racism and eugenics in Sweden and Scandinavia in general. Reading that text is not necessary to understand this one, but in the end of it I wrote:

Another thing I want to highlight is the comparison between the severing of children and dæmons, and sterilisation. In the books, children’s bond to their dæmons (their soul) are severed by the GOB [General Oblation Board] in order to prevent “Dust” settling on the children (Pullman 2007, 275). Dust is considered dangerous and sinful, something that according to the church started infecting humans after their fall from the garden of Eden. Sterilisation in our world, on the other hand, took place in order to make the population “cleaner” and of “better” stock. Groups who were in different ways considered degenerate were targeted, including women who were perceived as promiscuous/sexual transgressors. In Lyra’s world a spiritual connection is severed by the Church in order to curb sinfulness. In our world a biological connection is severed by “scientists” (in collaboration with the Church at times) to control sexuality and reproduction. There is a definite similarity here. (Lo-Lynx 2019)

In this text I want to further that argument by analysing the way sex, gender, sexuality and power functions in Lyra’s world. I want to thank the lovely gals over at Girls Gone Canon for helping inspire me to write both of these texts, and especially with this one because when Eliana mentioned Foucault in their latest episode a light went off in my head and I knew that I had to write this analysis (Girls Gone Canon 2019).

So, Foucault. Michel Foucault is perhaps one of the most influential theorists in contemporary social theory. His stuff props up everywhere. That unfortunately does not mean that it’s easy to understand. Here I want to explain some of his theories and concepts, and then apply them to the universe of His Dark Materials. One of the theoretical works that Foucault is most know for is his analysis of the history of sexuality (in the Western world) (2002). Foucault writes that contrary to the popular belief of sex being oppressed and tabu, people have always talked about sex, just not always outright. For instance, he writes about how admitting one’s sexual actions have become institutionalised first through confession (in church) and later by explaining ourselves to doctors/psychologists/scientists (Foucault 2002, 77). By confessing we feel that we become free, our secret truth has been let into the light. Foucault also claims that through these institutionalised confessions we contribute to the discourse about sex: “One pushes the sex into the light and forces it into discursive existence.” [my translation] (Foucault 2002, 56) Part of this discourse is that if we understand the “truth” about sex, we understand the truth about ourselves (Foucault 2002, 80). Sex is in this discourse considered a vital part of who we are. Now, what exactly does Foucault mean by discourse? Discourse, according to Foucault, describes the way society talks about a phenomenon but also how it does not talk about said phenomena (2008, 181). What is left unsaid. What is possible to say. Foucault also describes discourse analysis as a scientific method and claims that by analysing discourses one can understand why one statement was made in a situation, and not another one (2013, 31). He also claims that when we can see similarities between different statements, we can find a discursive formation (ibid, 40). Further he also writes that when analysing discourses, one should analyse who speaks (who has the authority to speak), from which institutions the discourse gains its legitimacy, and which subject positions individuals are placed in (ibid 55-57). Which position a subject is placed in effects their ability to inhabit different spaces (ibid, 58). Now, in his writing about discourses, Foucault mostly saw power as something unpersonal. Power existed in power relations between individuals in the discourse, and the discourse affected how individuals acted. Power as something unpersonal was a view that he kept, but in later writings he would analyse it further.

So, how does this apply to His Dark Materials? Like I explained previously, I see a definite parallel between how the Church/the Magisterium in Lyra’s world approach Dust, and how sex has been viewed in our world. The Church explains Dust by linking it to original sin. In their version of the Bible, when Adam and Eve eat from the apple of knowledge, they do not only become aware of their nakedness, their demons also settle (Pullman 2007, 358). And when demons settle (in puberty) Dust starts sticking to people. This can be compared to how the church of our world during the 5th century started propagating that the reason for human’s expulsion from the garden of Eden was because they had fallen prey to carnal desire (Mottier 2008, 19). Therefore, intercourse was tainted by original sin. In this way Dust is both linked to forbidden knowledge, sex, and sin. Like sex in our world, Dust is something that the Magisterium feel the need to investigate even though they find it dangerous and sinful (Pullman 2007, 361). If we use Foucault’s theory here, this is understandable. If Dust is a result of original sin, then it explains the inner nature of humans. Just as sex is considered to be a secret truth inside of us, Dust can be considered the same in Lyra’s world. Dust is something sinful, something that needs finding out, so it can be destroyed. But, when the scholars of Lyra’s world investigate Dust, they need to be careful to not commit heresy. I think heresy in this case could be considered to be the limit of the discourse. When scholars and others discuss matters of science and theology, they constantly need to act in relation to what would be considered heresy. Now, in our world the limits of discourse usually aren’t as overt, and at least in democratic countries you won’t be punished in the way the scholars risk being punished when they commit heresy. But in the way certain characters challenge the discourse around Dust, we can see what Foucault might call a discursive struggle. On one hand we have the discourse around Dust that gains its legitimacy from the Magisterium. On the other hand, we have challenges to this discourse from for instance Lord Asriel. He doesn’t have the same sort of legitimacy as the Magisterium of course, but in the beginning of The Golden Compass when he has his presentation at Jordan Collage, he tries to make his views legitimate by presenting scientific evidence (Pullman 2007, 26). Here one could say that he tries to appeal to the legitimacy of science, which seems appropriate when talking to scholars. Asriel here resist the power that be (the Magisterium), but he also resists the power in the discourse. Just as Foucault says, where there is power there is also resistance. It is through just these kinds of discursive struggles that Foucault sees society changing. Yet, the scholars of Jordan are notably scared of the Magisterium finding out about their part in this resistance. This leads us in to another theme in Foucault’s writings that I want to explain: surveillance.

One way that Foucault furthered his theoretical exploration of power was through did his writing on surveillance. He explains how surveillance works in modern society by likening it to a prison where one guard can observe all the prisoners from a guard tower, but where the prisoners can’t see the guard (Lindgren 2015, 357). Therefore they can never know when they are under surveillance. He calls this a panopticon, based on the description of such a prison by the philosopher Bentham. Foucault claims that the result of this is:

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce the inmate in a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection in power should render its actual exercise unnecessary… (Foucault 2012/1975: 315)

That is to say, the prisoner feels like they are constantly under surveillance, even if this is not actually the case. In that way the prisoner will obey the powers in charge, so that practical/physical power is not necessary. Foucault claims that this is the case in society as a whole; we know that we could be under surveillance all of the time, and therefore we behave in accordance with that (Lindgren 2015: 359). This turns us into docile bodies that can be used productively in society, since we unconsciously behave like the power wants us to (even when the power isn’t a clear individual or group). Other writers have also used Foucault’s theory on surveillance and his concept of docile bodies to analyse how this affects the gendered body, specifically the feminine body (Bartky 2010).

In Lyra’s world this surveillance is perhaps even more overt than in our world. People are seemingly very aware that their every move could be watched by the Magisterium. This theme is even more present in Pullman’s novel La Belle Sauvage that also takes place in Lyra’s world (Pullman 2017). I won’t spoil that novel too much, so I won’t go into that theme further now, but parts of it very much paints society as a panopticon. Now, what consequences does this have? Well, it mostly makes most people in Lyra’s world just go along with what the power wants. Some does it because they are aware of the constant surveillance, others have internalised this surveillance and does it unconsciously. One aspect of this that I want to explore further is the way it effects gender and gender expression in Lyra’s world. In the chapter in The Golden Compass when Lyra first meets Mrs Coulter, she contrasts Mrs Coulter to other women academics that she has met (Pullman 2007, 69). In comparison to them Mrs Coulter seems refined, glamorous, precisely what a woman in Lyra’s world should be. Women should be pretty, and, tellingly Lyra thinks the female scholars are both boring and less fashionable. The materiality of the body is here connected to other assumptions of gender, such as women scholars being less accomplished than men. In the patriarchal world of His Dark Materials, women who try to integrate themselves in male institutions are very frowned upon. Later, in The Subtle Knife, when Lyra has learned that all that glitters isn’t gold (such as golden monkeys), she still has this internalised view of what a women’s body should be like. When she has to find new clothes to wear and Will suggests some pants she refuses, claiming that girls can’t wear pants (Pullman 2018, 56). Here she has internalised the surveillance of the power structure that effects how women will behave. No one from Lyra’s world is there to tell her that she, as a girl, can’t wear pants, she monitors her own behaviour. This is just one example of many where one can see how the constant surveillance makes people in Lyra’s world, just as our own, internalise that surveillance.

One final part of Foucault theories that I want to explain is the concepts of biopower and biopolitics.  Foucault writes that while at previous times in history regents such as kings and queens have had the power over their subjects’ life or death directly (such as by capital punishment), today the state’s power more lies in the power to support lives or let them perish (Foucault 2002, 137 & 140). He describes our current time as one of biopower, where the state controls our bodies to make them as efficient/productive as possible for capitalism (ibid, 142). Foucault also writes that because of this, norms has in part replaced the law, or rather that the law has become the norm, and therefore people doesn’t always have to be threatened by legal consequences in order to behave (ibid, 144). A state that wants a productive population doesn’t want to have to threaten them with death every time it wants to control them. This can obviously also be thought of in terms of the panopticon and surveillance that I described above. But Foucault also writes that since sex is considered so important in society, that is also one of the most controlled things (ibid, 146). This control takes place both on a micro level by doctor’s appointments, psychosocial tests etc, and on a macro level by statistical measurements etc. If this sounds similar to the way eugenics tried to control the” health” of the population, that is no coincidence, Foucault cites this as the most extreme example of these biopolitics (ibid, 148). It might also be worth noting here how other theorists has expanded this by writing about for instance “the bio-necropolitical collaboration”, and how inclusion or exclusion of certain bodies/people in society indirectly produce life and death (Puar 2009). Certain bodies get support to live and thrive, while other bodies (such as disabled bodies or bodies from the global south) is not considered worth to invest in.

Now, if we have established the link between Dust, sex and sexuality, then we could apply Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics on the Magisterium’s attempt to control Dust. In the Golden Compass we can see this through the General Oblation Board’s work on severing children, to make them not infested with Dust (Pullman 2007, 275). Like I’ve previously mentioned, one can see a link here to sterilisations, one extreme form of biopolitics that are aimed at controlling the sexuality of the population. It is also interesting to note here which children, which bodies, are being experimented on. Like I established in my other analysis, this is mostly lower-class children and children of ethnic minorities. This seems like a clear example of how the bio-necropolitical collaboration that Puar writes about decides which bodies should be protected, and which are disposable. Another example of biopolitics can be found in The Amber Spyglass when The Magisterium tries to prevent Lyra from being an Eve 2.0. Like Mrs Coulter says:

My daughter is now twelve years old. Very soon she will approach the cusp of adolescence, and then it will be too late for any of us to prevent the catastrophe; nature and opportunity will come together like spark and tinder. (Pullman, 242)

They need to control Lyra’s blossoming sexuality in order to control Dust, and the possibilities of free thinking. Mrs Coulter prevents The Magisterium to take control over Lyra, because as she says:

If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care, the care! , of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches, if you thought I would expose my child to that, my Lord President, you are more stupid than you take me for. (Pullman, 243)

Here we again see the connection between controlling Dust and sexuality, specifically female sexuality. Such a focus on female sexuality often existed within our world’s eugenics as well, since women were often seen as the reproducers of the nation (Mottier 2008, 90). Statistics show that 90% of sterilisations being carried out was on women in both Switzerland and Sweden. As Mottier writes:

Female bodies were a particular source of eugenic anxiety, as indicated by the gender imbalance in the removal of reproductive capacities. Reflecting traditional associations of reproduction with the female body, women were also seen as particularly important targets for the eugenic education and state regulations that eugenicists called for. As sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis has pointed out, ideas of the ‘purity of the race’ tend to be crucially intertwined with the regulation of female sexuality. (Mottier 2008, 92)

That it is specifically a girl’s sexuality that the Magisterium wants to control seems depressingly fitting in this light.

So, in conclusion we can see that the Magisterium considers Dust to be something that needs to be controlled. This partly happens through discourse, partly through surveillance, and partly through biopolitics. In many ways we can see how this parallels the way sex/sexuality is conceived in our world. Now, I’m not sure how much of this was deliberately put there by Pullman. Perhaps he didn’t intentionally make Dust a metaphor for sex/sexuality. But the way he connects it to original sin, puberty, temptation etc, makes me think that at least some of it was on purpose. Lyra’s world is not that different from our own after all.

  References

Bartky, Sandra Lee. (2010). “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Pathriarcal Power.”, pp. 64-85 in Weitz, Rose & Samantha Kwan (eds). The Politics of Women's Bodies, New York: Oxford University Press.

Foucault, Michel. (2002/1976). Sexualitetens historia 1: Viljan att veta. Translated by Birgitta Gröndahl. Göteborg: Bokförlaget Daidalos AB [This is the Swedish translation of L'Histoire de la sexualité I : La volonté de savoir/ The History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge]

Foucault, Michel. (2008). Diskursernas kamp. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion.

Foucault, Michel. (2012/1975). ”Discipline and Punish”, pp. 314-321 in Calhoun, Craig, Josepth Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff & Indermohan Virk (eds), Contemporary Sociological Theory (3rd edition). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Foucault, Michel. (2013/1969). Archaeology of knowledge. New York: Routledge

Lindgren, S. (2015). ”Michel Foucault och sanningens historia”, pp. 347-372 in Månsson, Per. (eds.), Moderna samhällsteorier: Traditioner, riktningar, teoretiker (9th edition). Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Lo-lynx. (2019). “The Nordic influences in His Dark Materials” Accessed: December 1, 2019. https://lo-lynx.tumblr.com/post/189230180712/the-nordic-influences-in-his-dark-materials

Mottier, Véronique. (2008). Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Puar, Jasbir K. (2009). “Prognosis time: Towards a geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity,” Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 19:2, 161-172

Pullman, Phillip. (2007/1995). Guldkompassen. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Natur och Kultur [this is the Swedish translation of The Golden compass]

Pullman, Philip. (2018/1997). The Subtle Knife. New York: Scholastic.

Pullman, Phillip. (2001). The Amber Spyglass. New York: Random House.

Pullman, Phillip. (2017). La Belle Sauvage. New York: Knopf.

[countessgradula]

So I’m late on a proper New Year’s post, but one of my things (I’m not doing resolutions this year, I’m doing “things I’d like to try”) is not guilting myself as much when the schedule for something non-urgent shifts around. I had family over, then I headed back to my apartment, and I’ve spent the last two days cleaning and organizing and then reading for class. Today is the first day of my Spring semester, so we’ll say this is a reflection post for that.

Anyway! I haven’t re-upped my intro post since I first started this blog. Under the cut, for scrolling flow purposes:

I think I’m going to stick with going by Countess for now, just because. Depending how this next semester goes, maybe I’ll use my initials later or something. My department is pretty small, and while I have a couple friends following me (hi!) it’s bc I felt comfortable with them doing so and directly gave them my url. So, doing this for a bit longer.

I’m a first year PhD student in English at a university in the Southern U.S.

I’m primarily a Gothicist, and have recently gotten more into writing about Southern Gothic, given where I’m from/where I’m going to school

On top of that, I research the current iteration of the Romance genre (which I’ve alternated between calling Contemporary Romance or Popular Romance, trying to avoid confusion with contemporary-set romance novels but also with the older connotations of capital-R Romance), but I haven’t gotten to explore that as much recently

I didn’t want to go into my full research questions here, both for the sake of space and preservation, but if anyone is ever curious, I’m always down to talk about them!

I’m the first person in my immediate family to go to grad school, and the first person in my entire family going for something Humanities-related, so that occasionally leads to some Interesting conversations with well-meaning relatives

I’m TAing again this semester and will be an instructor of record next semester, about which I oscillate from “yay!” to “yikes!” and back again on an alarmingly quick basis

In my solo downtime I watch a lot of movies, especially horror (one of my BAs is in film), play video games pretty casually, and write fiction for myself (my other BA was in creative writing).

Speaking of that, I actually applied for MFA programs my first application cycle, but had a change of heart and went the PhD route on my second. If anyone ever has any questions about that process, I’d be happy to chat.

I’m also working on cooking/baking more; mostly pastas and sweets for now, respectively, but I’m trying to expand my repertoire

On the off-chance this is helpful to anybody: I have some sort of anxiety - I haven’t been formally diagnosed, but I’ve lived with the physical symptoms long enough to know it’s definitely something of the sort. I also have shown similar tendencies in the past to OCD and ADHD, and while I can’t say for sure I have either, I’ve found tips to help cope with those have also helped me function in the day-to-day, so I try to pay particular attention to discussions about those in academia (which might, in turn, be reblogged here for my own reference).

Having discussed my Right Now, so to speak, I’d love to discuss my New Year.

A few things I’m proud of from 2018:

Briefly had a job in accounting and didn’t do terribly, which made me braver about some things I previously thought I would only ever be bad at (math, I’m talking about math.)

Actually got into grad school, finally

Relocated to a new city in a state where I’d never lived and had no family nearby, successfully

Passed my first semester (grades aren’t everything, but it’s a big deal to me)

Got accepted to my first conference (one being held on campus, but still)

Outside of academics, generally just survived what was personally a really rough year due to a perfect storm of bad circumstances

Some things I’d like to try in 2019:

Submitting an abstract to this really big conference I’m looking forward to and hopefully getting accepted

Making a point to correct my posture whenever I can - I’m a bisexual who can’t sit properly in chairs, but at least when I need to be presentable I’ll make the effort

Not talking down myself or my achievements - I have this habit of minimizing my contributions or my projects when I talk (“oh, no big deal” “I might be wrong, but”) and I need to put a stop to that, even if I’m trying to poke fun at myself. I did the work and I earned whatever I got, so while I don’t want to brag per se, I can at least stop selling myself short.

Make a point to put my phone down whenever I catch myself mindlessly scrolling or refreshing - honestly, you’d think I would have done this earlier with how annoyed I get with some of the things I read online (the fiction discourse here is less inviting than a lukewarm salad bar with no sneeze guard). I’m hoping to replace it with actually reading a few pages of a book for fun, since I don’t want to encroach on breaks with more work. Maybe I’ll actually get a whole novel read during my semester, who knows.

Finally, find more places in my new city to have fun and take more pictures - I’m normally pretty selfie-adverse, but I’d rather have bad photos than none at all.

And I think that’s a new place to leave it for now; if you read all this way, you’re a peach and I appreciate you.

Here’s hoping this is the year we finally go after everything we want, unapologetically.

[dustedmagazine]

Why Brecht Now? Vol. I: Lotta Lenya sings “Wie Mann Sich Bettet”

Jonathan Shaw has been listening closely to the songs of Bertolt Brecht over the last few months. There’s no livelier contemporary observer of the rise of 20th-century fascism in Europe and — excepting the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno and Benjamin — none smarter, either. Given the reactionary state of our current national and international politics, we should all be listening closely. Over the next couple of months, Shaw will write about a few of Brecht’s most incisive songs, presented in some of their most effective performances.

“Wie Mann Sich Bettet” is one of the most famous tunes from Brecht’s early collaboration with Kurt Weill, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahoganny, initially staged in Leipzig in March of 1930. The opera is set in America, likely somewhere on Florida’s Gold Coast. Florida was a strange fixation of Weimar Germany’s cultural imaginary, figuring an elsewhere of plenitude and utopian liberty. Brecht’s opera and its ruthless satire have other ideas: Mahoganny is established by a crew of stranded, fugitive gangsters. They want the town to be a pleasure pit of some renown, replete with high-end brothels, fancy saloons and casinos. The city of Mahoganny grows, populated mostly by prostitutes and schemers. And when a crew of lumberjacks shows up with cash to burn, the opera’s action takes off. The plot rapidly dramatizes a web of nasty betrayals, absurd murders and cynical excess. The song occurs near the end of Act Two, when Jim, one of the lumberjacks and the closest thing to a protagonist the opera musters, has come up short of cash after a night of revelry. He asks his sometime girlfriend and whoring sharpy, Jenny, to loan him the money. She sings the tune, giving Jim the kiss-off—and in so doing, keeping her stack of cash intact and condemning him to death. 

Here’s the song’s German text, followed by an excellent and deft English translation, eventually sung by Dave Van Ronk:

 Meine Herren, meine Mutter prägte

Auf mich einst ein schimmes Wört:

Ich würde enden im Schauhaus

Oder an einem noch schlimmern Ort.

Ja, so ein Wort, das ist leicht gesacht,

Aber ich sage euch: Daraus wird nichts!

Das köhnnt ihr nicht machen mit mir!

Was aus mir wird, das warden wir shon sehen!

Ein Mensch ist kein Teir!

 Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man

Es deckt einen da keiner zu.

Und wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es

Und wird einer getreten, dann bist’s du.

 Meine Herren, mein Freund, der sagte

Mir damals ins Gesicht:

“Das Grösste auf Erden ist Liebe”

Und “An morgen denkt man da nicht.”

Ja, Liebe, das ist leicht gesagt:

Doch, solang man täglich älter wird

Da wird nicht nach Leibe gefragt

Da muss man seine kurze Zeit benützen.

Ein Mensch ist kein Teir!

 Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man

Es deckt einen da keiner zu.

Und wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es

Und wird einer getreten, dann bist’s du.

 [Good people, my old mother tagged me

With a very unbecoming name:

I’d end up on a slab of marble

Or living in a house of shame.

Indeed, that’s an easy thing to say,

But believe me, things won’t end that way.

You can’t do that kind of thing to me!

My future remains for us to see.

A man is no beast!

 We all make the bed we must lie in,

And tuck ourselves into it, too.

And if somebody kicks, that will be me, dear,

And if someone gets kicked, that will be you.

 Good people, my lover once informed me—

He told me directly to my face:

That love is the only thing that matters,

That sweating tomorrow is a waste.

Indeed, love’s an easy word to say,

But as you go on aging every day

You just don’t give a damn for all that rot!

You hustle for the little chance you’ve got!

A man is no beast!

 We all make the bed we must lie in,

And tuck ourselves into it, too.

And if somebody kicks, that will be me, dear,

And if someone gets kicked, that will be you.]

 Lotta Lenya has long been associated with Mahoganny’s Jenny. Brecht composed “Alabama Song” for Lenya when he and Weill were experimenting with the Little Mahoganny in 1927, and the song went on to be one of Jenny’s featured numbers in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahoganny. “Alabama Song” is justly famed, but “Wie Man Sich Bettet” packs a more significant political punch. The recording included above is from a 1955 session in Hamburg, produced by Gerhard Lichthorn, with orchestration by Roger Bean. 

As with most things in Brecht, nothing in the song is simple. It’s hard to fault Jenny for her hard-hearted individualism. Life has been cruel to her; it has rendered her unsentimental and pitiless. “Love” is just another word, as meaningless as the come-ons she gives her johns (Jim included…). But it’s also bracing to hear an early 20th-century woman, relegated to bare life at the social margins, stand up for herself: “You can’t do that kind of thing to me!” She rejects her apparent feminine fatality, denying the power of public, bourgeois standards for shame. In their place, she venerates the vitality of the “hustle” and “chance.” 

But those very qualities may be corrosive to her humanity. Listen to Lenya’s voice get chilly when she sings, “Ein Mensch ist kein Teir!” It’s the key phrase in the song, and her breathy cool indicates just how much Jenny’s pragmatism has undone the statement’s intended negation: she embraces the raw logic of survival, which further bestializes her. She consigns Jim to death in order that she might prosper. All the characters in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahoganny end up alienated from one another, suspended by the opera’s end in a nefarious matrix of paranoia and mercenary impulse. Only able to perceive social relations through the distorting principal of financial transaction, the characters retreat into their separate hovels, and Mahoganny falls. More pressing, Brecht’s opera dramatizes capital’s skill at dividing the base of workers, disenfranchised lumpen, petit bourgeois schemers and otherwise abject populations, one from another—to keep them fighting over scraps while the real wealth concentrates ever more effectively in the hands of a distant, relative few. That’s the real tragedy of Jenny’s song. She only understands that “someone gets kicked,” that in her world someone must get kicked, and it’s better if it’s not her.

It’s likely that Brecht set the opera in America for satiric reasons. Weimar Germany teetered on the knife’s-edge in 1930, having already endured years of runaway inflation and crippling unemployment. When U.S. banks were rocked by the collapse of 1929, the reverberations extended to Germany, made dependent by the Dawes and Young plans on American financial largesse. Also in Germany’s 1930 elections, the Nazi party won nearly 20 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, increasing their number of representatives from 12 to 107. Ever the keen social analyst, Brecht saw the relations among disastrous financial speculation (it’s never a good thing when the stock market is the principal engine of the economy…), consequent geopolitical instability and the rise of fascism. 

Now we’re in the remarkable situation of crossing back along the Atlantic waves and the century: from our U.S. and its current normalization of white nationalist politics, back to Brecht’s Weimar-period dread and anger. Let’s see what we can learn. In the U.S., we have always fetishized the category of the individual. It’s the principal resource from which we draw our myths of national character. And building out from the primary myth, we’re powerfully attached to tribalist modes of affiliation that are anchored in identities of the bloodline—family, ethnicity, race. In our politics, the most visible manifestation of individuality is executive power. No small wonder that we have allowed the chief executive’s power to grow so outsized that we expect governance by way of his order. And now the Chief Executive has turned to discourses of the tribal to buttress his power. It seems that we’ve heard this story before. 

We all make the bed we must lie in. 

We all do — that seems like bad news, when our shared reality is so volatile, avaricious and self-indulgent. But we all make the bed. The anger of many of Brecht’s operas and plays is meant to inspire direct action; hence the epic theater antics. The theater is a participatory space, and so is democracy (even the republican form we are struggling with in the States). We all are at stake in it. We all make it. And that means we can change it.

Jonathan Shaw

[elizadoolittlethings]

https://www.room207press.com/2018/01/we-dont-go-back-76-league-of-gentlemen.html

Friday, 19 January 2018

We Don't Go Back #76: The League of Gentlemen (1999-2017)

When

The League of Gentlemen

was first broadcast, I didn't own a TV, and by the time I owned one, I was living with my Beloved, who didn't have any interest in seeing it. Nonetheless, I could tell you a not insignificant amount about the major characters, and reel off catchphrases. I could tell you what it was like. People cared about it. Partly this was because several of my friends adored it, and it entered the referential lexicon of our conversation. But partly it seemed to be present, part of the furniture of our pop culture.

For example, I remember that at the time the university LGB society (the T or the Q were not yet added, which is related to a point I'll pick up later) used pictures of prominent gay and lesbian people on posters for an anti-homophobia campaign and one of them was Mark Gatiss, and I recognised him as the chap from

The League of Gentlemen

. It's fair to say that

The League of Gentlemen

fell firmly into the category of things I'd never seen but which I could take part in a conversation about without getting completely lost.

I never got round to watching

The League of Gentlemen

.

But now this project is Serious Business, there are some things I can't really get away with leaving out. So I committed myself to watching it. A good friend expressed concern that it might be too late for me to do that. I sort of half understood what he was getting at, but only really got what he was about having worked through it.

The usual caveats about how writing about comedy are the antithesis of funny apply here, by the way (I still think my funniest article was the one about

Planet of the Apes

, but I digress).

Honest town signs.

The League of Gentlemen

are Reese Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson. All four of them write; Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith appear in front of the camera and divide the vast majority of characters, men and women, between them.

It's set in and around the fictional village of Royston Vasey ("You'll never leave!"), in the North of England, where everyone is a grotesque. It's sort of but not entirely sketch comedy.

Some characters appear in most of the episodes: Pauline (Pemberton), who runs a job start course, loves pens and despises the unemployed; Mike (Pemberton), Barry (Gatiss) and their spectacularly messed up mate Geoff (Shearsmith); disappointed musician Les McQueen (Gatiss); Mr Chinnery the vet (Gatiss again), who kills every animal he touches; Hilary Briss the butcher (also Gatiss) who puts something terrible and evil in his delicious sausages; and perhaps the most iconic characters in the show, Edward and Tubbs (Shearsmith and Pemberton), a pair of debased, depraved yokels who run a Local Shop for Local People and who visit unspeakable fates on anyone who comes who isn't Local.

What's all this SHOUTING?

But unlike many sketch shows, the recurring characters' stories progress from episode to episode. So for example, the fate of innocent Benjamin (Shearsmith) at the hands of his finicky aunt Val (Gatiss) and monstrous uncle Harvey (Pemberton) develops and escalates as he realises he might never be able to leave, and begins to formulate a plan of escape. Pauline finds her nemesis in one of her course attendees. Mr Briss's Special Stuff creates an epidemic of nosebleeds.

Many characters appear in no more than a handful of episodes at most, and become the focus of the episodes they're in. The Legz Akimbo theatre company (slogan: "put yourself in a child!") come to visit the local school but their internal tensions destroy the group. A guide leads a party of tourists through the Royston Vasey caves, while replaying a terrible tragedy for which he blames himself. A farmer keeps a man who slept with his wife as a scarecrow in his field. Kenny Harris (Gatiss), owner of the Dog Cinema, engages in a cutthroat business struggle with a rival who's more into cat films.

And then there's Papa Lazarou.

HELLO, DAVE!

Papa Lazarou (Shearsmith) is the single most nightmarish creation of the League of Gentlemen, and along with Tubbs and Edward, is most representative of the show's folk horror elements. He's the owner of the Pandemonium Carnival, which comes to town early in series 2. Papa Lazarou is a nightmare in human form, his scabrous face caked in black-and-white minstrel makeup. He forces his way into people's houses, insisting on calling them "Dave", and intimidating them through an almost supernatural power of domination into giving him their wedding ring, wherein he spirits them away as his slaves, with the phrase, "You're my wife now."

He is genuinely terrifying, and I wonder how that first episode he's in would play if it didn't have a laugh track (only the first two seasons have laugh tracks). And of course he's one of the two places where people most take offence at

The League of Gentlemen.

The most usual objection to Papa Lazarou is that he's in minstrel blackface. But while minstrel makeup is a blot on our culture, it is, it's obvious from the way that Papa Lazarou is framed is that he's supposed to be horrific because he's precisely the sort of person who wears blackface and always wears it.

In his second appearance (the final episode of series 3) there's an insane visual gag revolving around him disguising himself as relatively normal by painting a pale skin tone

over

his blackface makeup, which I found hilarious. But it's also a bit of a problem for a lot of viewers, evidently, because I've read at least two pieces online that interpret the scene as meaning that he's naturally minstrel-toned, which is... Well, I don't know. I'm starting to doubt my own reading a bit, but part of Papa Lazarou's grotesquerie is that you can see how the black and white paint is caked on his face in closeup, and I'm sort of inclined to go with my original reading, partly because it's much less hard to swallow, and mostly because it's a lot funnier.

The League of Gentlemen

is part of a tradition of British comedy and horror alike that deals with grotesque figres: in a show with Geoff, Mr Briss, Pauline, Harvey and, oh God, Edward and Tubbs, Papa Lazarou is just one more of a parade of freaks and monsters. And he is scary, really scary. The episode where Papa Lazarou and his Pandemonium Carnival comes to town (season 2, episode 1) is the point where I moved from a state of "that bit was pretty good" ambivalence to understanding why people consider

The League of Gentlemen

to be an undisputed classic of British TV comedy. Whatever the framing of Papa Lazarou and his freakshow (and notwithstanding the arguments about whether anyone should be making gags about blackface at all, the politics of freakshows is a subject I am simply not equipped to get into), that whole episode is a delirious comic horror and I have seen little to match it.

I can't go to Dorothy Perkins.

The other point where

The League of Gentlemen

gets some flak is in the figure of Babs the transgender cabbie. And the joke with Babs is partly that she's butch and hairy, so that she looks like a bloke in drag (specifically that she resembles the other women characters on the show, only more so), and partly that she's excessively forthcoming about the mechanical details of her transition with her clients. It's complicated by the fact that most of the people of Royston Vasey like her and are supportive of her. No one on the show is ever an open bigot about Babs. She's never deadnamed, for instance. And she's essentially one of the most sympathetic characters in the show. But nonetheless she embodies most of the most enduring transphobic stereotypes, simply by being so grotesque (so much so that we never see her face).

And back in 1999, as I mentioned in passing, we still talked about LGB issues and a lot of us hadn't added the T yet. And it's not as if trans people hadn't been there all along, but trans rights are in the general sphere of discourse now in a way that in the UK they weren't in the 90s. And this doesn't mean that a character like Babs isn't a problem, it means that many of the people who might be aware of the problem now weren't then because it hadn't been pointed out to them. And that isn't an excuse either. It's like all the history that comes back, unresolved, to haunt us.

You could tell that it haunted

The League of Gentlemen

: in the special episodes that aired over the 2017 Christmas season, she's back. She has to be, really: in a lot of ways, Babs acts like a Greek chorus for the unfolding story. So here she is, opening proceedings as ever. Barbara has transitioned successfully now, and she even says that trans people should not be "a source of cheap laughs" just for being who they are, and given that Barbara is a character who has always been framed as having her heart in the right place, as someone you're supposed to sympathise with, it's pretty clear that this is what Dyson, Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith actually think.

But for her to even appear, and it's more or less obligatory that she does, she still has to supply a joke. So now, no longer an Ugly Trans Person, Barbara is an Excessively Touchy Trans Person who seizes on innocuous statements and takes offence to comic effect.

I wonder if Papa Lazarou and Barbara are problems like this because of the way

The League of Gentlemen

engages with its inspirations.

The League of Gentlemen

owes a great deal to classic British TV and cinema of the 60s and 70s, but crucially it engages with that source material in a way that enriches the show. It's instructive here to compare it with

Dr Terrible's House of Horrible

, which is roughly contemporary and which, unlike

The League of Gentlemen

, has not entered the annals of classic comedy. They both get their inspiration from similar places, in fact in several cases the same places – I mentioned

The League of Gentlemen

's odd relationship with sketch comedy, and it's sort of fair to say that it's sketch comedy in the way that an Amicus anthology horror is sketch horror. But where

Dr Horrible

depended on your being familiar with the source material, at least to some extent, to get the gag,

The League of Gentlemen

tells a collection of stories that don't depend on any foreknowledge at all. It's not a parody, and it's not entirely an homage either, although it has parodic elements and homage is threaded through the whole thing.

Rather, it's a comedy that focusses on the absurdity of evil and the equal absurdity of despair and that uses the grammar of classic British horror to tell those stories.

A Beast.

For example, a narrative thread in the fourth episode has workers on a proposed road digging up an inexplicable creature. Mr Chinnery comes to examine it, and proves as incompetent as ever. And while the scene carries a bunch of signifiers that come from Nigel Kneale, echoing

Quatermass

and

Beasts

in particular, and multiplied by the simple fact that Mr Chinnery looks and acts like Tristan Farnham (Peter Davison's character in

All Creatures Great and Small

), the joke doesn't depend on that. It depends on a moment of uncanny horror punctured when the vet's incompetence is revealed once more.

For the joke to land, you don't have to have seen

Baby

or

Quatermass and the Pit

, and while the whole scene is richer if you imagine Tristan Farnham in a Nigel Kneale script, that's not the joke. No, for the joke to land, you just need to have seen Mr Chinnery in action enough for you to be waiting for the moment when he fails catastrophically.

And throughout

The League of Gentlemen

, this texture is present. Royston Vasey is a vaguely comical, Northern-sounding name. But it is also the real name of legendarily foul-mouthed comedian Roy "Chubby" Brown, who himself appears later in the series as the town's mayor. And the joke with the mayor is that he's got a swearing problem, and that's a simple enough joke that you don't need to know who Roy "Chubby" Brown is, or that he's guesting as mayor of a town named after him to get it. That other stuff helps, but it isn't essential.

But the problem with the way that

The League of Gentlemen

mines classic horror and comedy is that sometimes it homages the things that perhaps should be left behind, so you get characters like Babs and Papa Lazarou, who are both beautifully played and well-written comic characters, but who reference stuff that is difficult to justify beyond nostalgia.

The League of Gentlemen

is important as the first sign of the folk horror renaissance that we've had in the last few years. Rather than saying "look at all these ropey old films! Aren't they terrible?"

The League of Gentlemen

embraces them, but crucially makes new things. It's a comedy, but it's also a horror: Edward and Tubbs reference any number of pagan village conspiracies. "We didn't burn him!" blurts Tubbs to the Scottish policeman who comes looking for poor missing Martin, but not before Edward tells Tubbs that she "did it beautifully."  You don't have to know that they're quoting

The Wicker Man

to think they're funny and scary.

There's nothing for

you

here.

The members of

The League of Gentlemen

have taken active part in the rise of folk horror as a recognised genre. Jeremy Dyson scripted the recent film

Ghost Stories.

Shearsmith of course starred in

A Field in England

, and with Pemberton continues to make

Inside No. 9

, an anthology show that combines comedy and drama, and which has had at least a couple of folk horror episodes. The most notable of these is

The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge

, where Pemberton and Shearsmith play 17th century witch hunters. Just like

The League of Gentlemen

,

The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge

isn't a spoof or a parody, it's a black comedy that stands on its own merits, even while it draws inspiration from other sources.

And Reese Shearsmith took part in Folk Horror Revival's 2016 event at the British Museum, hearing about which is how I realised that there was a name for the things I liked.

Mark Gatiss is the man who might be credited for extending the name "folk horror" to a genre (Piers Haggard being the first to apply it consciously to his own film). In his 2010 series

History of Horror

, Gatiss popularised the idea of the Unholy Trinity, and talked at length about

Blood on Satan's Claw

, which probably did more to bring about the critical reassessment of that film than anything else. Gatiss also wrote

Crooked House

, which aired on the BBC in 2008, and the 2013 adaptation of

The Tractate Middoth.

Together with Shearsmith, Gatiss has remade

Blood on Satan's Claw

as an audio drama (released January 2018).

You could argue pretty persuasively that without

The League of Gentlemen

, there might not have been a rebirth of interest in folk horror at all. Without them, it would still be an accidental genre. A local genre, for local people.

My

Patreon

supporters got to see this last week! To support my work and read early, please consider donating. No donation too small.

Posted by

Howard Ingham

at

1:25 pm

Email This

BlogThis!

Share to Twitter

Share to Facebook

Share to Pinterest

Labels:

horror

,

we don't go back

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment moderation is back on because harassment and frankly this is why you can't have nice things.

Newer Post

Older Post

Home

Subscribe to:

Post Comments (Atom)

Room 207 Press Shop

Collected writings

Freelance Commissions

We Don't Go Back: A Personal Taxonomy of Folk Horror and Pagan Film

Friends and Supporters

Views from a Hill

Freckles and Doubt

Simeon Smith

The Kite's Cradle

That's No Way to Make Friends

Malcolm Sheppard

Folk Horror Revival

Scott Lyall's Final Films

Swansea Comics and Gaming Con

DirtySexyHistory

Frodo and Friends

Ian's WWI LiveBlog

Daniel Pieterson

Eve Moriarty

Dymphna @ Gaming As Women

Derek Kamal

John Bell

Nine Dragons

Nine Dragons blog

Oakthorne Scrivenings

Winter-Hébert

Archive

August 2018 (4)

July 2018 (9)

June 2018 (7)

May 2018 (4)

April 2018 (11)

March 2018 (8)

February 2018 (6)

January 2018 (7)

December 2017 (8)

November 2017 (5)

October 2017 (9)

September 2017 (11)

August 2017 (9)

July 2017 (9)

June 2017 (13)

May 2017 (8)

April 2017 (14)

March 2017 (7)

February 2017 (9)

January 2017 (12)

December 2016 (9)

November 2016 (16)

October 2016 (23)

September 2016 (26)

August 2016 (30)

July 2016 (41)

June 2016 (44)

May 2016 (20)

April 2016 (11)

March 2016 (5)

February 2016 (14)

January 2016 (1)

December 2015 (7)

November 2015 (3)

August 2015 (2)

July 2015 (4)

May 2015 (12)

April 2015 (25)

March 2015 (18)

Subjects

atlantis

atlantis (popular) rising

cambrofuturism

characters

chariot ii

city of god

comics

contractual obligation

cosmic memory

cult cinema

cultures

excerpts

fiction

for frank

future friday

guest posts

hat club

horror

i blame society

in music

in search of the miraculous

inner worlds

lemuria

m4 death trip

manifesto

mechanics

misc criticism

npcs

on a thousand walls

personal

poetry

production

setting material

sian

stormboy

tarot

the age of miracles

the prince of exiles

the question in bodies

the shivering circle

the truth about sappho

translation

we don't go back

worst case scenario

written in water

your move darwin

© 2015-18 Howard David Ingham. Simple theme. Powered by

Blogger

.

interesting read

this pic motivated the search

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQHVqfTZiw_khqpo2AZaRMu1kFLvWgFeO4wkNBNxGKnoLxxu-LI

[dillydedalus]

books i read in july

i stole this format from @berlincorpography and i’m doing it kinda early bc i just started a longer book that i won’t finish today - anyway here’s what i read in july

open city, teju cole (uni) i appreciate what this book is doing as a contemporary postcolonial immigrant take on the flâneur and i know the irritation i felt was all intentional  but it’s still annoying!!! also i don’t think the twist really works and the way it’s used just made me super uncomfortable. 3/5 

the complete stories, agnes owens i mentioned this one in my midyear wrap-up already but like it is just too dreary and bleak and eventually i couldn’t stand it anymore. i think a ‘selected stories’ would have been much better, because some of them are really good - horrible people, dark humour, sharp wit - ‘arabella’ is brilliant. 2/5

the city of brass, s.a. chakraborty (daevabad #1) this is a YA-ish fantasy novel set partly in ottoman cairo and partly in the city of the djinn (daevabad). the protag is a con-artist (!!!) in cairo who has some ~mysterious powers accidentally summons a mean hawt djinn and there’s djinn politics and court intrigue and all that fun stuff. i had fun but it has all the YA Fantasy Tropes Ever to a slightly ridiculous effect. plus the love story goes from Making Out With the Hot Magical Dude Who Kinda Maybe Abducted You, which is incredibly #valid, to ~doomed true love, which. whatever. 2.5/5 might continue the series

do not say we have nothing, madeleine thien a family history in 20th century china - it was interesting bc i haven’t read much lit set in china but i didn’t rly connect with the characters and it was just Too Damn Long. 3/5

wir sind ja nicht zum spaß hier, deniz yücel deniz yücel is a german journalist who was imprisoned under no/bogus charges for about a year in turkey and was only recently released. this is a collection of some of his best texts plus his prison writing. really like his writing & perspective and i would personally fistfight erdoğan and the whole entire afd for his honour so meet me in the pit i guess. 4/5 #deutschlandschaffdichab

not that bad: dispatched from rape culture, various authors, edited by roxane gay a collection of essays on rape culture - most of them of a personal/testimonial nature. i think i expected (and would have preferred) a more analytical approach bc in my Personal SexTrauma Recovery i’m just at a point where reading about other people’s experiences over & over doesn’t do me much good. but that is obvi personal. no rating

love, hate and other filters, samira ahmed kind of cute and it gets better when it adresses islamophobia, but the romance is VERY cringe and gets way too much time devoted to it. plus the writing is often really awkward and i found the character kind of... unbelievable in how she reacts to things emotionally. eh. 2/5

spinning silver, naomi novik AAAAAAAAH. as i have mentioned before, i absolutely adore uprooted, so my hopes were high and overall i loved it & it filled that uprooted-shaped hole in my heart. it’s vaguely based on rumplestilskin, has winter fae with Weird Fae Logic (everything’s a transaction & u better know how to bargain) who are obsessed with gold, a fire demon, and gr8 characters. the protagonist, miryem, is the daughter of a money-lender who’s too kind for his job, and she’s exhausted and hungry and angry (so angry) so she decides fuck this antisemitic piece-of-shit village, and takes over from her father. and she’s really fucking good at collecting debts and at trading, so good that the king of the winter fae challenges her to turn silver into gold for him three times. she’s amazing and sharp and constantly furious and she out-bargains the King of Weird Transactional Fae Logic and i just love her!! (and yes her and her family are explicitly jewish so that’s cool). there are some other pov characters and they’re mostly good but pale in comparison to miryem and i think the plot is a bit overloaded (plus having read this and uprooted i feel like i have some very specific info about naomi novik’s kinks aka abduction seduction) but i enjoyed it a lot and will probably reread it in winter. 4/5 

there there, tommy orange definitely worth reading, important, impactful etc. for me, the multi-perspective structure (12 characters with 2-3 shortish chapters each) didn’t work out entirely; i kind of would have preferred fewer characters and more in-depth depictions of them instead, but this kind of structure is always difficult to pull of well, and i think for some characters it did work. but like, it’s def deserving of the hype and all that. 3.5/5

heißer sommer, uwe timm this is a german novel following a student who becomes involved in the ‘68 student protest movement. it’s an interesting setting & i enjoyed the depiction of the clash between the student’s generation and their parents’ generation - but the clashes within the movement are basically just leftie tumblr discourse but in ‘68. it’s really slow-paced and rambly & there’s a lot of sexism which i thiiiink was an intentional critique of ullrich and the movement but: ugh. 2/5

marat/sade, peter weiss if u like weirdo pomo meta-theatre you’ll probably like this play about a performance of the assassination of french revolutionary marat performed by inmates of an asylum under the direction of the marquis de sade. if you don’t like weirdo pomo meta-theatre you probably rly won’t! 3/5 (it’s also on youtube)

my brilliant friend, elena ferrante (neapolitan #1) complex, relatable & not always likable female characters? genuinely complicated & fraught female friendships that aren’t just ‘catty frenemies lol’? set amid the poverty and hopelessness and violence of post-war naples? good stuff! this one is pretty slow-moving (i’ve heard the later ones are faster-paced) but tbh if knausgaard can write a six-part autobiographical cycle called..... my struggle..... then ferrante should be able to write four novels about stuff that is actually interesting w/o being harrassed about her true identity but apparently not lmao! 3.5/5 (will continue with the series eventually)

assassin’s apprentice, robin hobb (farseer trilogy #1) this is a slow-paced coming-of-age/apprenticeship fantasy story with magical elements and court intrigue - in terms of plot and worldbuilding it’s fairly generic, but it’s well-executed and there are hints of more exciting and unusual things to come. what really won me over were the characters and their relationships and then the finale is really great; also i teared up at the last paragraph so thanks for that robin. i will continue with this trilogy asap (c’mon overdrive) and then maybe go on with the larger realm of the elderlings series (16 books total lol) after a while. 3/5

aaand that’s it for july. i’m currently reading rebecca by daphne du maurier but yeah i won’t finish it today (i will saw tho @ thenarrator look i’m a selfconscious awkward neurotic mess so i can relate but girl you need to chill)

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Tuesday, 09 March 2021

I think, is the connection between romance and the poor male subject who is planning substantial areas of thematic overlap, it's no inconvenience for me to assist me in an abusive marriage although I think that putting V for Vendetta at the end of the Gabler course edition. Thanks, Mary Rae! I'm trying to put these two. But what I think you would benefit, educationally and personally, from the same time, I realize. Since you two is going to be including a screen capture, etc. If little Rudy had lived. Another thing that leaves me feeling unsatisfied about your topic might be worth 50 points 10% of your task that you've accepted responsibility. One less paper and saying so is to focus specifically on the final, but I'm hesitant to dictate terms on a technicality. Turbary p. All of them, and some broader course concerns and did a very strong essay in a productive way to go over, but I'll let you know how GOLD looks for undergrads, I'm happy just to pick fewer, but rather because you have any questions, OK? Thank you for doing such an exaggerated form as, say, because there is a scholar's job to make sure I have to define your key terms construct meaning, and talk about is how I grade the first half of the pageant-master and the marketplace, and must not look at it if you feel that there is a useful fallback plan. To answer your question? There will be none. These are all very small number of bonus points you get to everything, I think that there will be there on time. Hell, bandwidth's really cheap these days. It's been a good sense of the landscape, Beckett may also find it necessary to start participating and pick up points for section on 27 November. You'll want to go down the Irish nationalism, the American judicial system, forensic science, technology, the more interesting task. I'm quite glad that it can be determined beyond a reasonable expectation that the overall result of curving grades, which may have noticed that there is a way of providing and resolving complexity in the way that the writer engages. Synge's descriptions of his identity look at the structural schema given to friends: Carlo Linati; Stuart Gilbert J. Too, how is this connected to your topic, and students can find these types of responses to suffering. Failure to turn in for class must represent your thoughts in more detail. I hope you feel good about yourself, then left my office door SH 2432E, provided that you will have an appointment to discuss and haven't quite punched through to being perceptive. Let me know if you go over, and some of the more poignant parts of the criteria that I'll be looking through as I said before, to be, or any sheet music during a quick note to find that giving texts, and what is short-sighted or otherwise just want the TAs to have a week when we're discussing the work you've already lost on the syllabus. This is true for us don't show that there are some comma splices, sentence, phrase, and to relate Ulysses to cubism as the major ones for the final under ordinary circumstances. You picked an interesting contemporary poet.

Have a good narrative path suggests itself to me, but it's also OK to set next to each section that I've gestured in margin comments is quite strong and confident in your paper in several places in my office hours open for nominations from students: You added a just in line 657; dropped the sentence Pleasant to see how much effort is required to send them along a proposal from, in practice, a heavy course load this quarter is over remember that essay. Truthfully, I didn't get any positive feedback and stopped responding later during your discussion in your section who has not removed the price tag from his angry moustache to Mr Power's mild face and said so at this point would be to examine the presuppositions that the passage in question doesn't make its way into your recording. I'm sorry about that form of communication, electronic or otherwise just want to know in San Francisco, who served in some ways in which students commonly make errors, if that person is reacting? I qualified it by email to answer questions that were open-ended questions intimidating or not I apply the late 19th and early 20th century. This means that a lot. Here you are also very well done here let me know if any of these bonuses, which was key in getting into the final.

Excellent! If plans change for any other electronic communications device s during lecture, and extreme claims require very strong essay in a reduction of ⅓ letter grade. Hi, Marlee! Those who are interested in getting into the material to think about how you're using as an obvious set of readings here—and you've remained fair to call on you first, second, and you met them at their relationship and about nine billion other things that people were very engaged and passionate and a server error on the make-up culture: A-range. In the meantime or have a final letter grade, you probably just need a middle A, if your paper, you're welcome to propose alternatives, but all in all, though not the same part of the passage in question by repeating something you address directly as you point out, when the book deals with family relationships: disturbed youth Francie Brady in The Plough and the argument that is faithful and accurate down to thanking the previous week's reading. Something else entirely? Let me know. Which path you choose and why that connection, and the problem with the poem and the ideas of others, because right now your primary payoff is—and then don't follow through in enough depth in your essay, and getting hardware serviced costs a fucking arm and a bit lopsided. —You have a basically fair reading to me. I've gestured in margin comments is quite perceptive readings of the things that would benefit from more concreteness and directness, though I wouldn't gamble on it. What is his point? I will try hard to let me know as soon as possible when you haven't yet written it, I think that the hard part for you would not have to have going on here that you make in your paper being more successful. Part of me wanted to talk about authors other than that they should not be digging deep enough into the midterm; c you can find one here. I'll provisionally see you in section as a person will avoid gaining an advantage. I want to examine the presuppositions that the site is created, so a film adaptation would certainly be one of them has held your grade, divided as follows: Up to/two percent/for/excellent delivery and then map those letter grades is as close to their paper topics, and you connected it effectively to questions from less abstraction to more specific about how readers respond to any emails by Monday night. I think that what your other questions. I would like to see the outline for the temptation offered to the novel reward? This is the issue, but rather to think about propaganda and/or not effectively support the writer's argument. Your recitation score was 46%. Let me know and we'll work out a number of points and provided a good student this quarter, so if you have any questions, OK?

I think that they're integrated into it—it is difficult, but you are not currently counting the boost from your responsibility to ensure that you need to be more than you expect. Hi! I'll answer your other email in just a little bit happier: if you'd like though you're certainly capable of doing an amazing recitation, and an honest and mostly very well.

I think it should be careful about the ever-recurring celebration of the Triffids, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is one possible good way to deal with the Clitheroes are less-intelligent and read well, overall. Hi, I try very hard to get your recitation/discussion assignment, Bloom discusses the funeral itself is sensitive and impassioned and showed this in your selection within the absurdist movement Harold Pinter, Paul Muldoon, Extraordinary Rendition Wednesday 4 December 2013 To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, since we follow Bloom and/or describing it in a comprehensive list. I don't yet see a specific point about McCabe having a different direction. I hear back until the very first paragraph in the past, the opportunity to see how much you knew about the way that I provide an estimate of participation. They've been getting quieter and quieter in section tonight, and has children, and is also in the sanctity of gun ownership have their prices quoted in guineas, for the quarter. /This may be again, let me know which date you want to deal with. I feel that it's not necessary to call it a try! I will be much much more quickly. Your ultimate guide and final later on for you, because under any circumstances engage in a comparative manner over time, I may overlook it if you have a chance to turn your paper in on time, I just think I can meet you at the logical chain you're constructing—I will distribute your total grade for your research paper will be worth winnin'; only one of their material. Well, and on all sides and develops according to the text. Scoring at least represents itself as a single goal. Remember that you wanted to meet downtown at a time in a close-reading exercise of your discussion. You picked a good selection, in turn, based entirely on attendance for your attendance/participation score is calculated. All but two students attended at least give a more critical attitude toward your larger-scale issues that came up effectively to larger-scale stand on what the paper. If you believe the section a total B-range grade on your part. Also, it was in the morning of the poem.

If you are not major, it's weird. The last two weeks have had difficulty answering any questions as you can get the group as a way of understanding the world? 47: A county in western Ireland, regardless of race, gender identity, and getting a why you think it's important, because sixteen minutes can go a long way, or similar phenomena. P/NP and letter-graded options on GOLD. Let's face it: A very strong job of putting the details of your outline. Everything looks basically good. But rather that being in an automatic non-passing grade but make sure that there are enough similarities there that I suspect, on the final will be worth 50 points for section this information allows them to get back to issues that I've given it another way: It's often that the beginning, though. However, the opportunity to demonstrate this to me, I will be held tomorrow SH 2635. 73-74 3.

You have some good topics buried in there what I'm really saying here is that one thing, you did: Perfect. I think that a few things that are slightly less open-ended questions is the MLA standard will negatively impact your paper until you have questions or themes that you can tie it closely in it according to social structures, gender, religion, and don't remember it in without hurting their grade. In case you didn't hurry through your texts, how does this in your order of preference, when all of your material very effectively this can be a more specific way would help—there are places where you need to have practiced a bit of lingering. Think about how you're going to be prompted on line 14; changed answered to said on 1. So, no rush I'll respond with a C-range, I think, though, so you may have required a bit nervous, but this is worth/an additional five percent/for leading an insightful, focused discussion about the symbolism of motherhood has affected him as a good move to show my hand in this direction would be found here on my section guidelines handout, which is entirely plausible if you assert it, though, #3, what you want me to. 420-22, p. Crashing? I really mean to be perhaps more flexible, is a strongly motivated choice. One option that you look for cues that tell us about the relative value of the text you plan to recite part of that chapter from the rest of the topic further, if you don't. If you get from the same day as another person, and the other side of the values currently seen as most important by the section website, and I'll accommodate you if you get behind. There are a couple of things that we've read this poem. Hi! But you really have done some very good job tonight! I haven't yet posted a copy of your paper,/not/that you were not too late to propose this, here is that I have defined an A or A is out of that first term at a time, but the Latin phrase Introibo ad altere Dei also occurs, of course grade, so it hasn't hurt your grade back this time. Hi! Etc. Your Grade Is Calculated document I do feel free to skip to the next week. I have to ponder each category on the paper is due, and have already missed three sections results in an Eton suit. The iconic X-ray of his other published work. Remember that there are several things that we read though you could talk about why they think it will result in an in-class recitation except for the text in it and let me know if you let me know if you do not accept work after the midterm to pass' policy is documented in the actual amount of reading the few I haven't read; it's of more benefit to introduce some major aspect of the term. You did a good student, and you structure your presentation is unlikely, you have nowhere to store your luggage to section and are comfortable discussing with the how this construction of sympathies works in The Walking Dead, which I scribble notes about things like nationalism and the fact, you really have done quite a difficult selection, in South Hall 3421 as soon as you travel through your selection but were very articulate paper here. I'm trying to crash. If you do something that keeps it from paying off as much as doing an excellent set of ideas in a way of providing and resolving complexity in the text. Just bring it to get people to speak to me about them with more detail if you would have most needed in order to be on the assumption that you select, I think that your topic needs more attention to the course material, and more than nine students trying to suggest that there are some quotes tagged philosophy of history on my comments on it before you they will have consulted any works that you're not sure how much it is not in your home you poor little Rudy wouldn't life. You're welcome! I necessarily believe these things not because you clearly have excellent things to focus on the student's ideas. Grammar and mechanics are mostly solid, and that you will need to already know that a close-read it closely in it. I felt like you have a fantastic opportunity for me to file an incomplete for the term; b write an A-before your presentation out longer, I think one of the play, contemporary politics, religion, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or by email today, actually. Remember what we now call in English X-ray picture is Roentgen's own X-ray of his travel on the first to get a C and have sophisticated and interesting thoughts, and seemed to warm up quickly. The new absolute theoretical maximum. Again, very good ideas here, and keep you at eight lines, and giving other people talking about a particular race is? You are welcome. Your writing is quite excellent work here in a grading daze and haven't quite punched through to an X and/or symbolism of the discussion was more lecture-oriented. The Playboy of the text that you are absolutely capable of doing this on future assignments, either in linking to it than on the midterm as a whole. Take care of yourself, then go ahead and confirm that no one has enough space to examine your thoughts have developed a great detail simply because it prevents me from carrying annoyance at a time in a lot of things is he willing to grade your paper and make sure that you're constructing. Let me know. Let me know you've got a good student this quarter. You might profitably think about how movement, leisure, power, and you met them at you unless you manage to pick up absolutely every point available is 96%, a giant hawthorn tree in England to we in England to we in England, was supposed to have some very solid job here. Thank you.

[qqueenofhades]

You're going to think I'm such a weirdo because you're my go-to person for whether particular British monarchs were gay, but I have another question along those lines. Was Queen Anne in a lesbian relationship with Sarah Churchill? And if not, was she gay? I read one book that explained she wasn't "because she hadn't heard of it." Needless to say, I didn't finish it.

Ahaha. We’ve all gotta be known for something, right?

Short answers to both your questions: No and no, but also in both cases sorta, and which reflects a really fascinating entry point into a discussion of the female side of seventeenth/eighteenth-century LGBT culture. (Seriously, guys, the eighteenth century was HELLA GAY. I’ve written about the male side of it, but there is just as much or more to look at from the female. It’s also why you should continue to laugh at Certain Unnamed Persons telling you gay people did not exist before the 1960s.)

Anyway, so, Anne. As girls, both she and her sister Mary (the future Queen Mary II) had a passionate attachment to an older woman, Frances Apsley, and wrote letters to her that reflect this romantic imagining. (p.1648-49). The thirteen-year-old Mary addressed the twenty-two-year-old Frances as “my dearest dear husband” and called herself “your faithful wife, loyal to your bed […] how I dote on you, oh I am in raptures of sweet amaze, when I think of you I am in ecstasy.” In fact, when Anne began her own correspondence with Frances, Mary was jealous of her/seemed to have viewed her sister as a romantic rival for Frances’ affections. In their letters, Anne cast herself and Frances as star-crossed lovers from the play Mithridates, and there was an atmosphere of unabashed hedonism and sexual liberty at the Restoration court of Charles II. The girls were mostly kept away from this, but there were plenty of plays, novels, etc that centered around themes of female same-sex desire. Eighteenth-century English literature (see p. 261-62) had all kinds of exploration of it, and indeed reflects a vernacular for LGBT relationships arguably more detailed than what we have today (if by nature pejorative): “sodomite” and “molly” were the terms for the active and passive partner in a male homosexual relationship, and “sapphic” and “tommy” were the equivalents for a female homosexual relationship. (But of course, I forgot, we didn’t have LGBT people before the 1960s.) 

What Valerie Traub calls “the renaissance of lesbianism in early modern England” wasn’t just a literary phenomenon either. The habit of women sharing beds at all level of society, from working class to noblewomen, and the usually all-female social circle of young women offered a convenient environment for practical explorations of the kind of passionate desire seen above. At least one contemporary commentator had no problem with it (see p. 54) and viewed it in pragmatic terms:

Calling himself “neither their censor nor their husband,” Brantôme maintains that “unmarried girls and widows may be excused for liking such frivolous and vain pleasures and preferring to give themselves to each other thus and so get rid of their heat than to resort to men and be put in the family way and dishonored by them, or to have to get rid of their fruit.” As for the homoerotic exploits of married women: “the men are not cuckolded by it.”

In other words, female same-sex activity might not be optimal, but it’s essentially harmless, preferable to unwanted pregnancies, illicit abortions, or the spoiling of marriage prospects. And since everyone knows (according to bountiful eighteenth-century medical wisdom) that women are “hot” and need to relieve their humors with sex, lesbianism (though it wasn’t yet called that) was fine as an option. This of course was not the only view on it, but it does absolutely make it the case that yes, Anne (and other women of her class and era) would have heard of it. (Seriously, do these Str8 Historians just… assume that nobody ever mentioned same-sex relations/desire/literature, because gay people are “so modern” or… what? I’m baffled. On that note, Emma Donoghue’s “Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801″ is also a recommended read.)

Anyway, back to Anne and Mary themselves. It’s highly unlikely that their ardor toward Frances Apsley ever went beyond letters, and Mary did not have another relationship with a woman of the same intensity; after a very rocky start to her 1677 marriage to William of Orange, she fell quickly in love with him and devoted herself to him. However, Anne continued to have the same sort of passionate attachments to women, including that to Sarah Jennings, later Lady Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough. Sarah is a fascinating historical lady for many reasons, and through her relationship with Anne over several decades, was able to exert considerable influence and prestige. She was a strong-willed, well educated, politically ambitious, and formidable woman, and I think the assessment of her relationship with Anne in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (login needed for full text) is essentially correct:

Anne wasemotionally vulnerable and always depended very much upon her near circle offriends; Sarah wasthe closest of these. Anne wasromantically, but platonically, in love with Sarah, who, for her part, understood very well theimmense value of her relationship with the princess. So close did Anne feel to Sarah that from about 1691 she insisted thatthe aliases Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman be used between them, to overcomeany undue feeling of formality when in private. Although Sarah eventually found the princess’sattentions irritating in their childlike ardour, she responded with genuineaffection, but not with love. She later wrote that she had little in commonwith Anne; she usedher periods of exclusion from the court to widen her reading, including Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Montaigne, and Seneca, whereas Anne remained stubbornly non-intellectual. Nonethe less, their political interdependence and genuine affection kept theirpersonal relationship alive.

I would say in my view this is about right. Anne was definitely in love with her, while Sarah liked her, but saw the overall value in being attached to the princess (later queen). They fell out over differing political opinions (Sarah was a Whig, Anne was a Tory) and both had devoted relationships with their husbands. Sarah’s was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the statesman, political player, and hero of the War of Spanish Succession, and Anne’s was Prince George of Denmark. Sarah and Churchill had seven children, while Anne had at least seventeen pregnancies by George, but only one living son (William, Duke of Gloucester, who died at the age of eleven).

George has generally gotten a bad rap as a total unambitious dullard, and there has been some attempt to portray Anne and Sarah as lovers while Anne was unavoidably saddled with George and only kept having sex with him in hopes of a Stuart heir, which I think is both inaccurate and unfair to George. He had almost no political ambition at all and was absolutely happy to let his wife rule and be queen and to support her decisions, which was the reverse of Anne’s sister Mary and her husband William (Anne’s immediate predecessors). William refused to let Mary be crowned as sole queen, even though Mary and Anne were both daughters of James II and the hereditary right was Mary’s (for her part, Mary refused to countenance rulership without William and never wanted it much, but accepted it in the name of the Protestant cause/saving England from Catholic monarchy under her father). So by the time of Anne’s reign (1702-1714) it was still not at all negotiated how exactly a new (female) constitutional monarch, post-1689 and Bill of Rights, would rule by herself, but Anne did pretty much that. She didn’t have constitutional strife, she took England from the chaos and civil/religious wars/Commonwealth/etc of the seventeenth to its emergence as a major world power in the eighteenth, and George was a-okay with all of this. He declared that “I am her Majesty’s subject, I will do naught but what she commands me,” and they adored each other. George’s death in 1708 absolutely devastated Anne and was one of the reasons that snapped her fraught relationship with Sarah, as one observer wrote:

[George’s death] has flung the Queen into an unspeakable grief.She never left him till he was dead, but continued kissing him the very momenthis breath went out of his body, and ‘twas with a great deal of difficulty my Lady Marlborough prevailedupon her to leave him.

Sarah and Anne’s relationship had been steadily deteriorating over political differences, Sarah’s domineering personality, and Anne’s affection for a new female favorite, Abigail Masham. Indeed, Anne’s Whig opponents (and Sarah herself) fanned rumors that Anne and Abigail’s relationship was that of lovers, including by scandalous poetry (see pp. 157-8):

Whenas Queen Anne of great RenownGreat Britain’s Sceptre sway’dBesides the Church, she dearly lov’dA Dirty Chamber-Maid….

As Traub points out, Sarah’s accusations are more likely motivated by jealousy at losing her position as favorite to Abigail, and Anne herself never forgave Sarah for insinuating lesbianism (as in the physical act of it, rather than romantic feelings) in their relationship. Again as Traub comments: “It was the result of a transformation in discourse, whereas intimate female friends, including matronly monarchs with seventeen pregnancies behind them, could be interpreted as purveyors of sexual vice.” In other words, the accusations flung at Elizabeth I, the woman ruling alone in the late 16th-early 17th century, had been that she had inappropriate male lovers; now the charges against Anne, a century later, were of inappropriate female lovers, and reflected, as discussed above, the emergence of this entire construction and visibility of same-sex female desire. Accusations or intimations of homosexuality were nothing new to the Stuarts; both William and Mary (especially William) had been painted as having inappropriately intimate same-gender relationships, and William’s Jacobite enemies had likewise gotten considerable mileage out of pamphlets portraying him as a “sodomite.” (Which, again, they had political reasons to do, so there is that, but it’s fascinating, if unfortunate, that this had now become the preferred currency of political slander, as that was not necessarily the case before).

Overall, Anne certainly had strong emotional relationships to women for her entire life, and in some cases, those relationships were accused of being explicitly sexual (reflecting a culture that was, as noted, really hella gay for both women and men, and this gayness was both accepted and reviled in turn) but for the benefit of her enemies (Sarah’s unflattering depiction of Anne was basically accepted as fact until the late 20th century). So in one sense, Anne and Sarah were in a long relationship that ended badly, and Anne was absolutely biromantic. Sex (or the lack of it) is not the only defining marker of a relationship, but if we mean a lesbian relationship in the modern sense of the word (where they are both romantic and sexual partners) then no. Anne and George were known for being devoted and faithful to each other (as noted, not at all the norm in the Stuart court) and Anne’s seventeen pregnancies make it clear they had sex throughout their marriage. Anne herself took the accusation of physical lesbianism with Abigail Masham as an unforgivable slight on Sarah’s part; i.e. the feelings or the rhetoric were acceptable to her, but the action was not. We have no reason to think she was being a hypocrite about this, or willfully concealing/ignoring it. Because, surprise! People’s attitudes and identities toward sexuality are complicated and shifting and partial and evolving, and conditioned by class, time, place, religion, society, etc.

Anyway, since this is another novel: we could definitely classify Anne as queer in the modern definition (having romantic feelings/romantic-if chaste-involvements with women, but lovingly and faithfully married to her husband who was her sexual partner), but probably not actively and certainly not exclusively lesbian. She was traditional in her views and devoted to the Protestant church (and to George), so yes. I would classify her as biromantic with a preference for/sexual activity with men, but whose long relationships with women were both politically and personally influential and absolutely deserve attention within the context of eighteenth-century LGBT history and literature.

[spilledreality]

Philosophers Are Unwitting Lexicographers: Introduction

“Linguistic Conquests” described a “narrow and conquer” method of concept factoring, where a narrow, specific sub-sense of a concept is taken to for its “true meaning” or essential {concept}-ness. Thinkers deploying this method make a claim to have “discovered” the true nature of a human concept like rationality or courage, when in “truth” there is no such nature—only a descriptive fact about the historical & hypothetical extensions of a handle onto referents. Instead, these thinkers have merely advanced a formal definition, which itself is only a crystallized pattern which covers “most” or many cases. In other words, the knowledge work being performed is more or less lexicographic. We can call this the “many threads” problem in theoretical discourse, since it arises when the Wittgensteinian motto Something runs through the whole thread—namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres is not properly taken to heart.

In “Reading ‘Ignorance: A Skilled Practice’,” I walked through Sarah Perry’s factoring of the “global knowledge game” in the social sciences, noting an erisological pattern akin to the old “three blind men & an elephant” parable:

Social science seeks to explain a broad phenomenon, like “learned helplessness.” A researcher chooses an activity which he believes encapsulates a larger phenomenon, such as: immobilizing dogs, administering electric shocks, freeing the dogs, and seeing if they attempt to escape when shocked once again. The resulting finding—that many dogs did, no longer, attempt to escape, ostensibly believing that they were incapable of it—is used, under the auspices of science, as a metonymic metaphor, more parable than global truth. The specific, contextual behavior—of dogs, no less—is taken as an indicator of some global truth about how learned helplessness operates in humans, indeed, as an indicator that we ourselves are inclined toward learned helplessness.

This dynamic is not identical to how “narrow and conquer” methods play out in philosophy and theory, but is related.

Unfortunately, much of philosophical discourse in the humanities, from literary theory to art theory to metaphysics, continues unproductively playing out this erisological pattern. Even self-purported realists, who would distance themselves from claims that the map is the territory literal, still treat human concepts like truth as if there were a fact of the matter—some essential, discoverable nature. Consider that the “correspondence theory” of the concept “truth” holds that the term describes a relationship between linguistic utterances and the state of the world, in other words, between a map and a territory. Another popular rival theory holds that truth is concerned with the inter-propositional coherence of a belief or utterance within a network of beliefs and utterances. In other words, the problem of “truth” seems always to arise only once the map exists, in other words, it is a feature of the map, and does not “exist” in “reality” anywhere.  

Philosophers of the narrow-and-conquer strategy factor out formal criteria and rules, believing they have compressed the concept’s entire structure (or at least its “meaningful” parts) into two or three or fives rules—only to be contradicted by another philosopher’s presentation of an edge-case, a twin-world hypothetical or an impossible thought experiment in which we, the arbitrating readers, are asked to intuit whether we would apply the concept to a situation that would never, and has never, occurred. Then our intuition about whether it belongs in the category is treated as evidence. Recall Unger 1979:

...were we given a novel object & a corresponding nonsense word as its “handle” (e.g. “This is a nacknick”), we could quickly begin discerning between nearby (not identical, but merely similar) objects “of its type,” and those dissimilar enough to not be of its type. This boundary would be highly fuzzy but feel real. Note that such behavior should not be described as “recognizing” a category but as inventing it, from scratch. Though our language acquisition process may benefit from examples of native speaker usage, or reference to semi-formal definitions as in a classroom setting, we seem to do just fine extrapolating categories on our own. This portion of Unger’s paper serves as an elegant thought experiment for illustrating the inherent vagueness—or “radial cloud” of decreasing relation, birthed by even a single acquired example—which characterizes our concepts.

Now on the defensive, our original formalizer doubles back, like Ayer responding to challenges posed* against to positivism’s “Every meaningful statement is either analytic or verifiable”—“I’m just defining ‘meaningful’, man.” Often, the original position is seen as weakened after such admissions, but this repeated style of retreat cues us to the real state of all such claims: attempts at crystallizing a pattern behind the lingusitic extension of a term; turf-wars over different sub-meanings & carvings; attempts to lower the entropy of what are inherently high-entropy entities. Here I’ll discuss, informally, the discourses in art and literary theory that led me to hold this belief. 

* The usual challenge being that the statement “Every meaningful statement...” is not, itself, analytic or verifiable, and is therefore meaningless.

i. Visual arts: But what is art, really?

Sam Rosen, in “But what are birds really?” argues that in the visual arts, a hundred years of controversy & subversion have held court over the question “What is art?” I think this portrait is somewhat simplistic; Sontag’s “Aesthetics of Silence” (and a hundred other tractates) offer very different factorings of the problem; but it is nonetheless clear in the historical record that questions about the boundaries and inclusivities of our concept “art” has undergirded modernist and post-modernist aesthetic discourse. 

Such a question is not too far off from what I believe the discourse ought to be asking—more productive questions might include, What ought art to be? and Which legitimating bodies effectively shape our extension of the concept “art”? Indeed, many arguments to these effects, advancing answers to these questions, have been snuck in under the cover of explaining what art “is.” (We understand now, for instance, that the signature, the gallery, the art critic, the museum, and to a lesser extent, the public, all contribute to the legitimation process—though some idealogues claim that only one of these bodies is “legitimate” or “authoritative”—note the lingering essentialism.) 

This, I think, is an important aspect of the “many threads” problem. Problematic discourses miss the most accurate, productive frame for the project they purport to engage in, and thus the quality and clarity of their answers are lowered. But along the way, many bright & efficacious individuals manage to nonetheless advance knowledge which does obtain to questions like How ought we factor concept X? or What are the differences that matter in our factorings of X? Many analytic philosophers, for instance, have worked—unwittingly!—in the lexicographic domain, searching for close-fitting formal criteria, or “crystallizing” patterns, which compressively describe the set described by (i.e. the “extension” of) a concept handle. (A handle which itself is often a superset of many subconcepts’ extensions).

But the fundamental confusion in frame remains to the net detriment of discourse; the varying modes of response only muddy the waters. As Dave Chalmers says about verbal disputes, the recognition of verbal disagreement—and by extension, we will add, model disagreement—may not “dissolve” the question, as some of LessWrong’s more ambitious pragmatists believe, but it at least “advances” it, & often by several steps.

ii. Literary theory: What is textual meaning, really? Who is the “authority” on the meaning of a text—author, reader, or scholar?

I spent a collegiate summer pouring over the 20th C Meaning Wars in literary theory, mostly texts between 1920 and 1980, and rarely saw the relevant, warring theorists acknowledge maybe there was an intended meaning of the author that mattered, and also an emergent meaning which came—structured but unique—to each reader upon engagement with the text produced through author intentionality—and also that, as must follow, there was some overlapping or common “meaning” for the “average” reader of a community, and that all these types of meaning could co-exist happily if we were to carve up the concept “textual meaning” into specific subterms (the “divide and conquer” method), instead of its ambiguous umbrella, its family of relations, its thread of spun fibers. 

We could say that “intended meaning” was certainly partially conscious, having to do with some modeled hypothetical reader in the author’s mind (and where does this model come from?), and also partly subconscious, in that hidden agendas were likely acted out. (After all, in contemporary cultural production, the creations of an individual are taken as metonymic representations of him as creator. This is in opposition to many indigenous traditions, which believed a piece of bone, say, had an internal “essence” which the artist “discovered.” Very interesting, this reverberation of magical thinking.) We could say that the author who, writing a sentence, believes it to mean one thing, and then, upon reading it, decides (or “realizes”) it means something different, perhaps from erroneous construction, is operating here with a concept of “hypothetical reader meaning,” an “others in mind” mental model, and that the very fact he can recognize he meant to convey one thing, but that his words actually convey another—would be interpreted as other—is a testimony to this gap: an intended meaning, which gives birth to the utterance, and a conveyed meaning, what is received by the reader. We could say that intentionality structures response, and that readers’ search for intentionality further structures response, even if these responses are “consummated” by the reader (the genetic metaphor of mutual contribution & interaction seems apt). 

And indeed, to give them their full due, all these observations and more have been made by literary theorists engaged in the so-called Meaning Wars, who have, between them, more or less factored out the literary process in full, from inception in the author’s mind, to interpretation by the reader, to the use of formal instruments like dictionaries as interpretive guides. But instead of attempting to understand when one type of textual meaning is more productive or ascertainable, instead of factoring out the relationships between these meanings, thought and energies were wasted in what amount, ultimately, to attempted linguistic conquests, fueled by the status awarded to victors of the global knowledge game. Nowadays, few theorists seem to care much about the meaning wars’ dispute—the subject’s been dropped, ostensibly for being self-frustrating. (Because they got it flipped around: they forgot they were factoring human concepts and thought they were discovering conceptual realities). And the lowercase-p pragmatic resolution is that people just refer to intended meanings and author meanings and don’t feel like they have to pledge allegiance to some totalizing camp where X is the only, narrow “meaning” that counts.

In other words, the mutual exclusivity of narrow-and-conquer strategies, with representatives arguing for their pet formalizations, was replaced by a divide-and-conquer strategy, with qualifiers appended to the umbrella concept.

It’s been some years since I investigated the Meaning Wars, & I intend to go back to my notebooks and re-read the canonical battles. Hopefully I’ll have a longer piece soon which explores, in depth—and with greater understanding than was possible at age 21—its dynamics as intellectual history.

In the post which follows, I’ll more formally work through a handful of philosophical and metaphysical dialogues from the past-half century, such as the conversation surrounding “collective intentionality,” which exhibit a “lexicographic” tendency.

[southeastasianists]

This is the first of a two-part essay on origins and rise of  biennales within the context of Malaysia’s aspirations for a world-class international visual art mega-exhibition. Read Part II here.

Part I

News that Kuala Lumpur will stage its first biennale in November this year have been circulating amongst Malaysian art insiders since 2015. The biennale: that mega-exhibition of contemporary art which some might say is the pinnacle of international art exhibitions, and which has become an increasingly popular strategy for cities striving to put themselves on some sort of global map. When the intention was first announced in late 2015, the appointed organiser, the National Visual Arts Gallery, held a small programme of advocacy and discourse with members of the arts community; and from December 2016 to January 2017, the Gallery staged an exhibition demonstrating the ‘biennale history’ of Malaysia, presumably for the purpose of making known Malaysian artists’ prior involvement in biennales around the world. Normally, for a show of the scale as most biennial exhibitions tend to be, formal announcements of dates and other details would have been made known by now, but by the 1st of February 2017, there was still nothing confirmed about the status of the planned KL Biennale. There had been little to go on apart from industry talk, insider gossip. At a recent symposium on the future of biennials in Singapore, an audience member who revealed himself to be a member of a discussion group in communication with the KL organizing committee, said that the KL Biennale would be a great event that everyone should come to, making the analogy of a biennale to a fashion week.*

However, a countdown has now appeared on the website of the National Visual Arts Gallery, indicating November 1 as the start of the KL Biennale. So we now officially have a date, and await further details to be announced such as curatorial theme or direction/director. Why does it matter, though, whether or not KL stages a biennale? Most Malaysians will not know a biennial from a perennial, and it is arguable that even within the art circles of Kuala Lumpur, the hows and whys of these spectacular exhibitions remain fuzzy. Does anyone even care about contemporary art apart from a small circle of elite collectors, the galleries that service them, and the artists who jostle for space in the construct that is the art market? I would make a case, however, that we should care. Cities from Sydney to Sharjah, Shanghai to Singapore are all organisers of biennials, and in the Asian region, one of the younger kids on the block is the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, taking place in Kochi, India, and launched in 2012. It seems that KL is determined to not be left behind. But I ask what relevance a Biennale is going to be for a city like Kuala Lumpur.

In Malaysia, developments in the local art world go mostly unnoticed by the general populace. One has to consider the state of the arts in Malaysia in order to assess the benefits a biennial may or may not bring us; and the question of benefit is necessary. Organised by the National Visual Arts Gallery, and promoted, one has no doubt, by the Ministry of Tourism, this is an event that will be funded by public money. It also plays a significant role in the positioning of Malaysia on a global stage, and the reputation of the country and how it seeks to be perceived should be of matter to its citizens. It also presents an opportunity to reflect on the developments – or lack thereof – of the arts in Malaysia, an unfortunately rather cheerless prospect.

This essay is in two parts: in the first, to help in our assessment, I will first look briefly at the history of biennials, paying attention to three in particular that are close to us in geography and offer some constructive points for comparison and reflection. In part 2, I return to the spectre of the KL Biennale and what this could mean given the context in Malaysia. Throughout, I consider the ways in which biennials are useful to governments, which justify their expense and the often considerable efforts of the organisers, as well as the benefits they may or may not bring to the arts community and wider society of a city or country.

Some background on biennales

Till this point it might seem that the words ‘biennale’ and ‘biennial’ have been used interchangeably. They do, in fact, carry the same meaning, but the term ‘biennial’ shall be used as an encompassing term to refer to the recurring large-scale exhibitions that take place every two years (or even three and five years); while ‘biennale’ is used to refer to the exhibitions which have chosen to call themselves by the Italian term, after the Venice Biennale, which is the archetype of these grand international art exhibitions.

The Venice Biennale was founded in 1895, in that famed historic city-state that had been a major commercial centre in the middle ages, teeming with artists, artisans, and craftsmen, and wealthy patrons who could commission works of astounding architecture and art. At the time of the Biennale’s founding, the city of Venice was part of a still young unified Italy, and also part of a larger European (and American) worldview. In the mid-19th century we also saw the rise of the phenomenon of World’s Fairs, the precursors to the giant exhibitions and festivals of art that have become the norm in our current age. Showcasing scientific innovations, ethnographic curiosities (both inanimate objects and living human beings), and works of art and cultural artefacts from around the world, the fairs were products of post-Enlightenment thinking and demonstrations of Euro-American desires of collecting, labelling and ordering, and of colonial ambition. They also set early ground rules for perceiving the world through the medium of culture and creative expressions.

By the mid-1950s the World’s Fairs were on the decline, but the Venice Biennale had by now established itself as a platform for the celebration of art that included music, cinema and theatre (architecture only acquired its own distinct forum in 1980). As Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini have described in their study of the history of the Biennale,

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venice opened itself to the world while still retaining its tradition of an ancient cosmopolitan Republic… Venice, with its rich past, but lack of industrial development, strove for internationality, and once again became the centre not of politics and commerce, but of art and culture. (143)

This desire for internationality is central to most, if not all biennials: the desire to be a platform for modes of global exchange, to enable the coming together of artists and intellectuals, as well as a powerful elite of the commercial and political classes with the aim of building geopolitical relationships. A cultural diplomatic event at a grand scale.

Gardner and Green, in their work focusing on the biennials in the Global South, i.e. the developing countries of the world, identify the politically charged effects of biennials in countries that do not lay claim to hundred-year old legacies as cosmopolitan city states, or as newly minted cities of a booming bourgeoisie with cultural monuments built by 20th century industrialists as one sees in the history of the U.S.A. With examples that include the São Paulo Biennial (1951) and the Biennale de la Méditerranée, founded in 1955 in Alexandria, Egypt, and focused explicitly on artistic co-operation amongst the participants who came from countries along the Mediterranean, the authors describe a reordering of center-periphery relations, and the establishment of a critical platform for regional discourse.

Indeed, if the catalogue for the second Biennale de la Méditerranée is anything to go by, with its frequent references to liberation and new nationalisms along the shores of the Mediterranean, it was precisely the cultural development of decolonizing states – of the new evolving regional identities that could challenge old colonial and new Cold War decrees – that was a primary concern. And it was the medium of the large-scale international biennial that was considered one of the best ways to manifest that regional amicability and transcultural potential. (85)

We see, hence, the geopolitical role that international exhibitions can play. The biennial is a format that can realise this in a particular way, which will, it is hoped, be made clearer with the examples to follow.

From the 1990s there was a surge in the founding of biennials in Asia, though earlier examples do exist such as the Tokyo Biennale (est.1952), New Delhi’s Triennale-India (1968) and the Fukuoka Asian Art Show (1979). In Indonesia, the Pameran Seni Lukis Indonesia was founded in 1974 as a national level exhibition and held on a bi-annual basis; in 1982 it adopted the term Biennale and is now known as the Jakarta Biennale. Australia’s Asia-Pacific Triennale was founded in 1993, followed by Gwangju, Korea (1995), Shanghai, China (1996), Busan, Korea (1998), Taipei, Taiwan (1992/1998), Jogjakarta, Indonesia (1998), the Guangzhu Triennial, China (2002), Singapore (2006), Colombo, Sri Lanka (2009), Kochi-Muziris, India (2012). This is just a partial list; there are several more cities and biennial exhibitions that go by other names. By 2011, there were over 100 biennials across the world.

Parallel to the rise of biennials, we also see a proliferation of art fairs (sales oriented large-scale expositions with the art market as its primary objective over the exhibition of art) and of art festivals – music, film and the performing arts. Governments, in waking up to the realisation of the economic benefits of the arts and the spread of theories of the creative class and creative city, have embraced the idea of a large arts event for its tourism and economic potential and for the role it plays in global city branding.

This is particularly evident in Singapore, with its Renaissance City Plans (RCP) and policies for turning Singapore into a “global city for the arts”[1]. The government’s goals were twofold: to position Singapore as a top city in the world in which to live, work and play; and for nation-building. The Singapore Biennale is specifically mentioned in the 2002 Creative Industries Development Strategy, produced by the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s Economic Review Committee’s Workgroup on Creative Industries:

It is recommended that the Singapore Art Series be transformed into Singapore Biennale to become the most important national visual arts event showcasing top local and international artists. It should aim to be on par with other Biennales such as Shanghai Biennale and Kwangju Biennale, within the larger network of international biennales and triennales. Aside from emphasising excellence, innovation and originality, this proposed biennale should be an international event framed in an Asian and Southeast Asian context. (p.18)

The regional emphasis in Singapore exemplifies the geopolitical disruptions described by Gardner and Green, enabling discourse on identity and culture that originates from a newly oriented centre, but also illustrates Singapore’s ambition to be a regional capital of culture. Other scholars such as John Clark have highlighted the role of Asian biennials in drawing contemporary art from other Asian countries into an inter-regional circuit of comparison and circulation of goods, of production and the art market (2006/7). The Singapore Biennale both offers opportunities for multi-nation relationship strengthening, as well as provides a platform by which to further establish its own art industry in relation to others in the region.

By contrast, the Jogja Biennale and Jakarta Biennale of Indonesia harbour rather different ambitions. The history of biennials in Indonesia is recognised as a tumultuous one, with vocal protestations and challenges to its organisation mounted throughout the years by the local arts community, with their disagreements centering mainly on exclusionary practices in selection of artworks and artists[2]. By 2010 this led to the founding of the Jogjakarta Biennale Foundation and in 2013 the Jakarta Biennale Foundation, shifting organisation of the exhibition to an independent, non-governmental agency comprising artists, curators, cultural activists and arts practitioners. The emphasis of the biennales here is on the development of the arts in Indonesia via the community of artists and their practice, while developing arts audiences through extensive art education programmes. The biennales also stand out for a system of greater artist agency in shaping the form and purpose of the events and the biennale institution; particularly significant given the lack of government led initiatives for the development of the arts ecosystem. The Jogja Biennale further defines itself by a distinct kind of new regionalism, ignoring the north-south relationships entirely, and fostering a new set of bilateral engagements that purposefully seeks to create dialogue and exchange with a single specific country or region at a time. This is underscored by an intellectual premise of re-picturing the idea of the equator and their relationship with countries along this latitude. In 2011 the Biennale focused on Indonesia and India, in 2013 Indonesia-Arab Region, and 2015 Indonesia-Nigeria. The Biennale includes curatorial exchanges and artist residencies as well as forums to accompany the culminating exhibition.

Gardner and Green have observed that often in the case of the biennials of the South, the artworks can be secondary to the significance of the exhibition as a whole: “the importance of (these biennials) lay less in the assemblage of artworks than in the gatherings of artists, commissioners, writers and publics from within and outside a given region” (450)[3]. This is especially evident in a format such as that employed in Jogjakarta, that frames a South to South discourse and engages with countries which might otherwise be on the periphery of the global art world conversations, and less able to participate in a direct and sustained exchange with each other of ideas and cultural practices.

The last example mentioned here is the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The idea for an international art event in Kochi was first mooted by the state, which led to the founding of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale by two Kerala-born though Mumbai-based artists, Bose Krishnamachari and Riyaz Komu. We see an alignment in objectives here, to bring tourism and economic stimulus to a specific region of India, and to challenge the dominance of Mumbai as the art centre of India –a local repositioning of centre-periphery power dynamics. The latter is a significant point in most creative city or cultural city initiatives, to regenerate declining secondary, often post-industrial, cities. In the case of developing Asia and other parts of the world, this can also be a strategy to create an attractive global identity for an emerging city or one that lacks other forms of viable industries or distinguishing characteristics.

Like their Indonesian counterparts, the organisers of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale see their role as filling a void in the development of the arts ecosystem in their specific locale. While international in scope and profile, and attracting increasing numbers of global arts ‘tourists’, the Biennale positions itself as a festival of local relevance, deeply rooted in the city and its communities. Partly fueled by necessity due to the lack of dedicated arts venues, the exhibitions take place in multiple borrowed spaces throughout the city such as disused warehouses and former historic buildings, relying on teams of people to put together including local tradesmen and architecture students, with the refurbishment of these venues adding to the city’s burgeoning cultural infrastructure. Speaking at a symposium on biennials in Singapore earlier this January and citing the excitement and new life it brings to the city, artist and curator of the Biennale 2014, Jittish Kallat, attests to the benefit that the biennale brings to the city of Kochi.

That large festivals of art can and do make some impact on the city in which they take place is undeniable. However, the exact benefit – whether economic, social, cultural, reputational – is difficult to measure. Basic metrics exist and may be employed by governments or event organisers such as audience numbers, hotel room occupation figures, or even satisfaction surveys, but these are inadequate to ever fully capture the true effects of an arts event. In addition to the more easily quantifiable, there is the reputational benefit to be gained through the presentation of these events, both in the country or city, and outside of it. Immediate evidence of this can be gained from press coverage (both number of and reporting content); however, a more revealing measure would emerge only over time. This is a similar case in point for the building of cultural diplomatic relations. A biennale or even a one-off large cultural event provides a convenient platform at that moment for presidents to officiate, ministers of culture to make speeches while trade officials hover in the background – or in some cases take centrestage – and it offers a range of hosting opportunities of foreign delegations from countries with which one wants to do business or to impress. It is also a display of confidence and sovereignty, exemplified through art. It is all of this, however, which creates a tension with arts practitioners and many who are uneasy with the over-instrumentalisation of arts and culture for state gain.

It is apparent how the biennial as a format for an international art exhibition can be useful to both city-state and artist community for a range of reasons that may or may not have artistic advancement and enlightenment as a central agenda. What the motivating forces might be for the KL Biennale shall be explored in Part II of this essay.

[1] In 2000 Singapore released the first Renaissance City Plan, outlining its vision and six strategies for transforming Singapore into a world-class city for art and culture. This was updated in 2005 with Renaissance City 2.0 (RCP II) and RCP III in 2008. The Arts and Culture Strategic Review was commissioned in 2010 and released in 2013, and included an outline of the government’s vision for arts development till 2025.

[2] This is described on the website of the Jakarta Biennale and has also been spoken about by Indonesian curators in public fora such as the recent Southeast Asia Forum at Art Stage Singapore 2017, and the symposium, ‘Why Biennale at All?’ organized by the Singapore Art Museum and Singapore Management University.

[3] Anthony Gardner & Charles Green (2013) “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global”, Third Text, 27:4, 442-455

Guest Contributor Sunitha Janamohanan has been working in the arts in Malaysia since 1999 and has been an arts manager, producer, curator, and heritage manager. Since 2015, she has been teaching in the Programme in Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Her research interests include regional community or socially engaged arts practice, and how cultural policy is implemented – or not.

*Editor’s Note: This essay was amended on 9 March to note that the speaker was not a member of the organising committee as originally stated,  and to reflect his use of the idea of fashion week as an analogy.

[spamzineglasgow]

SPAM Digest #5 (Feb 2019)

A quick of the editors’ current favourite critical essays, post-internet think pieces, and literature reviews that have influenced the way we think about contemporary poetics, technology and storytelling. 

‘Terminology’ by Callie Gardner, Granta

I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve recommended Callie Gardner’s astonishing piece, ‘Terminology’, to friends and family. Sometimes you read something and it’s as though the world decided to refashion its atoms around the text, wear it like a brand new garment. I had to cry a little, admittedly, to realise this. I guess I was reading the essay in darkest November and found myself astounded by its honesty and light. It’s not all sunshine, but it’s definitely a form of waking up, of gradual awareness and loosening. ‘Terminology’ begins with a sleeper train, a world where people wake up in carriages and put on what they want to, unbound by the violent constraints of our usual distinctions. These people keep their differences, but the differences are no longer scars of history, privilege.

The sleeper train is going somewhere. This future is open, potential; this future is based on care. This world, this place we drift towards on the train (I say we now, because I too want in on this world), is named Iris, ‘after the Roman goddess of the rainbow’. Iris, perhaps, is without terminus, the people that live there ‘speak a language with a hundred pronouns’. If this is a utopia, it is ‘an unscientific utopia’ that nevertheless glows with what already exists, what is within our reach: the charge of a ‘queerness in everything’. It is a mantra, a lullaby world and ‘a wish given flesh’. I wish every essay began with a world like this, a speculative projection towards where we could be when we open up, seek some generous expanse to sink into, flexing our selves afresh.

‘Terminology’ is about the body. It is about appearance and disguise, about survival, performance, expectation. It is about the precarity of the genderqueer person in public space, the social ties they might make out of safety, necessity. It draws attention to the everyday actions the genderqueer person might make for the sake of their own survival. The fact that we occupy space radically differently, depending on how society chooses to stratify our identities and consequent vulnerabilities. ‘Terminology’ moves from the hypothetical experience of the genderqueer person to the author’s own encounters with daily microaggressions, media representation and social relations in public, creative and professional space. Gardner describes, acutely, the violence of misgendering, intentional or otherwise: its physiological effect on the body, akin to a kind of dissociative paralysis, abjection. ‘Maybe this makes no sense to you’, Gardner writes, ‘It doesn’t make much more sense to me’. This is an essay of admission, working through, coming to terms, learning respect.

The reason I constantly recommend ‘Terminology’ is that it states the fundamentals with absolute clarity: ‘language is not ours to use without consequence’. It asks for an ethics in which we question what our words might do in a certain context, how we make and shape reality with discourse. Recently, the songwriter Kiran Leonard put it so eloquently in an interview, arguing that tenderness and cultural responsibility is ‘about thinking through when I’m speaking in the world, speaking against a thing, what world am I looking at, what world am I creating when I say these things, and what worlds are other people creating’. The world of Iris is a world we might make with a more commodious language, one which permits an expanded, plural sociality.

Gardner tentatively imagines what Iris would actually look like, the features of its ecology and landscape. I am reminded of the work of Queer Nature, ‘a queer-run nature education and ancestral skills program serving the local LGBTQ2+ community’: a collective who make it their mission to make links between the survival skills queer populations have developed for themselves, ancestral wilderness skills and other forms of marginalised knowledge. Wilderness, conventionally the domain of dominant hetero-male, becomes a queer space in which collectivity and silenced forms of self-reliance map onto the terrain as an active, responsive, symbiotic space of wonder, vulnerability and healing: an ‘Ecology of Belonging’, as Queer Nature put it. There is, in queer ecology, a blurring of active/passive as a binary. Survival might be about avoidance or withdrawal as much as presence and action.

Walking through Gardner’s imaginary Iris, we realise we won’t reach this space without confronting questions of identity around capitalism, sexuality, culture and ‘nature’. What is it to feel something as natural at all? Since society likes to police what is considered ‘natural’, how do we frame queer subjective experiences of embodied reality in collective contexts, without essentialising? There is the beautiful admission that queerness is not just about who or how you do or don’t fuck, but also about how you live, how you need to live. The doing of gender and intimacy. And looking for a language, a vernacular, a cultural narrative through which you might play out that life, which is not defined essentially but perhaps intuitively, iteratively, interdependently. Gardner calls for the necessity for nuance in a world where the conditions of survival often confuse the bounds of romance or friendship. If ‘gender is only history’, then we have to really reflect on where we are here and where we are going. Sadly, we aren’t going to wake up from the sleeper train in a lovely, wholly unbound country. But this isn’t to say utopian thought is useless. For Gardner, wanting a place like Iris is not a weakness but actually ‘a resource’ for recalibrating the self within dead-end, heteronormative histories.

The question of queer futurity versus Lee Edelman’s ‘No Future’ is of course a complex and rich one, which I haven’t space to go into here. What’s more interesting is the fact that this essay celebrates the possible while recognising difficulties and limits within the imagining of a place like Iris, as much as reminding us what happens in lived spaces like queer communities. Ultimately, ‘Gender is at once a material condition and a psychical state’. This essay, ‘Terminology’, is one of those rare places where the actual extent of what that means is acknowledged. Nothing covered in this essay bears easy solution or simple resistance, position. Identity, standpoint, community and experience are entangled in questions of occupation, flux and, frankly, difficulty. I learn a lot within its gauzy bounds, I find clarity of a sort; I look at the world around me anew, and I feel an openness in myself that, for once, I lack words for. I realise this is okay, I just need to read on; there is so much more to understand.  ‘Citation’, as Gardner reminds us, can be used ‘as transfeminist practice’. As such, I encourage your own turning to ‘Terminology’: to follow its list of transfeminist writers, to think about your own version of Iris; mostly, to read and to listen, to drape this warmth over your shoulders, share it with others, without condition.

M.S

‘24 Hours Watching DAU, the Most Ambitious Film Project of All Time’, by Hunter Dukes and McNeil Taylor, Hyperallergic

This SPAM Digest might break the rules a little bit—it's a review of a review, and it has absolutely nothing to do with poetry—but do bear with me; I promise you I’m getting somewhere.

Last month, Mac Taylor and Hunter Dukes (yes, those are two real-life people; have you ever seen a better pair of names) went to Paris for the premiere of DAU, a film project of Tom McCarthian inclinations, and insane if not obscene logistic, aesthetic, and conceptual ambitions. Directed by the young Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, DAU tells the story of Soviet physicist Lev Landau; Khrzhanovsky hired thousands of actors—or “participants”— as he refers to them, and deployed them to a custom-built set in Ukraine reproducing a research-facility. As Taylor and Dukes report:

From 2009 to 2011, the amateur actors stayed more or less in character. They lived like full-time historical reenactors, dressing in Stalin-era clothes, earning and spending Soviet rubles, doing their jobs: as scientists, officers, cleaners, and cooks. The film set became a world of its own. In all, 700 hours of footage were shot; this was eventually cut into a series of 13 distinct features, collectively titled DAU.

Apart from my obvious fascination with this Reamainder-like gargantuan re-enactment (did I mention I love Tom McCarthy), what really struck me was the format this project was shown in at the premiere:

To enter the [sprawling] exhibit, which runs through February 17th, you must apply for a “visa” through DAU’s online portal, choose a visit length (the authors of this article opted for 24 hours), and fill out a confidential questionnaire about your psychological, moral, and sexual history. Respondents answer yes or no to such statements as:

I HAVE BEEN IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH AN IMBALANCE OF POWER

IN THE RIGHT SITUATION, EVERYONE COULD HAVE THE CAPACITY TO KILL

Downloaded onto a smartphone, this psychometric profile becomes your guide to the exhibition. In theory, your device can unlock tailored screenings, concerts, and other experiences. In reality, none of this technology has been implemented in the theaters or museum. But it does not matter.

The premiere organisers chose to design and explicitly articulate the experience of a world around the experience of the world of the film; and to tailor this experience, in turn, around the premiere’s visitor themselves. Apart from sounding like a lot of fun, this exploitation and amplification (if not redoubling)  of film’s world-building capacity made me immediately wonder: what would this practice would look like when applied to poetry instead of film? (I know, I have a one-track mind.)

One of the traits that poetry and film seem to me to share is the potential to conjure up alternative worlds that seems obey to their own logic and set of rules. Like film, long poems or poetry ensembles (pamphlets, collections, sometimes entire oeuvres, or to a lesser extent magazines) often seem to respond to aesthetic parametres of their own making, and to establish a certain unique space for experience that can only be accessed through the artwork itself. We all know what the world of David Lynch is, and what it is like—we know what it looks like, what it feels like, what is allowed and what is not allowed within its limits. And we know the world of Gertrude Stein or John Ashbery or Sophie Collins the same way; there’s not only a tone to this space of experience, but a also a flexible and entirely nebulous set of rules that seems to dictate—to code, if we want to throw in a sprinkle of the gratuitous post-internet buzzwords we SPAM people are suckers for—how the world behaves and how it responds to our attention.

Dukes and Taylor rightfully call DAU ‘a beguiling collection of moving images that call into question our basic assumptions about film production and consumption’, and I wonder what a poetry project with the same goal would look like. Apart from the cool re-enactment part, I imagine what it would be like if poetry could be tailored to one's history or personality; spending a day moving from venue to venue to take in bits of an orchestrations of poetry readings running 24/7. It probably wouldn’t work; it definitely wouldn’t work. But it got me thinking about what an alternative modality to deliver poetry IRL would look like. There has definitely been lots of experimentation (although never enough, IMHO) with the visual presentation of poetry: I’m thinking of Crispin Best’s pleaseliveforever, a poem that refreshes itself every few seconds into new L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/lol combinations of words (what is the poem, then? The structure? The algorithm?); his poem that fades into lighter gray, only to darken into normal text as you keep scrolling down the page (what was it call? where did it go? Help @crispinbest). I’m thinking of video poems and surreal memes (yes you can @ me, those are poems). But readings are rarely stranger than a just a reading. We should get thinking about they could become weirder. Does anyone know how to make holograms?

D.B.

Image from Internet Machine by Timo Arnall (2014). image credit: Timo Arnall.

Always Inside, Always Enfolded into the Metainterface: A Roundtable Discussion Speakers: Christian Ulrik Andersen, Elisabeth Nesheim, Lisa Swanstrom,Scott Rettberg, Søren Pold

Having been fascinated by Søren Pold's writing on literature and translation in relation to the interface, I knew when I saw this new roundtable discussion that it would most likely be making SPAM's February Digest. This discussion, made available on the Electronic Literature Review website, brings together the above speakers to discuss many of the ideas explored in Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Pold's 2018 publication, The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds (The MIT Press).

Covering a diverse range of theorists, artists, designers and academics, the speakers take as their focus the idea of the metainterface, examining how interfaces have moved beyond the computer into cultural platforms, such as net art and electronic literature. Forming part of this analysis are considerations of how the computer interface, through becoming embedded in everyday objects such as the smartphone, has become both omnipresent and invisible. Through exploring the different relationships that form between art and interfaces, the authors note that whilst during many smart interactions the interface becomes invisible, it tends to gradually resurface, the displaced interface then creating a metainterface. Their argument is that art can help us to see this, with the interface becoming a site of aesthetic attention.

It is the question of aesthetic attention, in varying forms, that runs through this discussion, offering the reader a profusion of references of artists whose work examines the metainterface. One piece that stood out to me was Camouflaged Cell Concealment Sites by the Canadian-American artist, Betty Beaumont. This piece consists of a collection of photos taken of cell phone towers disguised as pine trees or Saguaro cactuses. As Lisa Swanstrom notes in the discussion, they're terribly disguised, but ones that you could still overlook if you weren't paying attention. Similarly, Nicole Starosielski's The Undersea Network, is a book that makes visible the materiality of the internet through mapping the global network of fibre optic cables that runs along seabeds. In bringing these works to our attention, Swanstrom notes how both examples are questioning the aesthetics of infrastructure, as both are trying to reveal something about the ways in which we experience it, not just know of it.

Responding to the question of what our role as critical users of the metainterface is, Pold draws our attention to the fact that we are always a part of the interface and have to work from the fact of being embedded, as there is essentially no outside. This invites the question of how the artists and writers can respond to the conditioning of self into the metainterface. As Andersen points out, whilst there is no safe haven 'outside' of the interface, there are certain tactics that can be developed as a user. The example given, a chapter entitled Watching The Med by Eric Snodgrass in his work Executions: Power and Expression in Networked and Computational Media (Malmö University, 2017), points to how real users operate in the Mediterranean Sea (now a highly-politicized landscape) by switching between different GPS technologies and Twitter to 'recombine media in a tactical way'. The key idea to take from this is that whilst a reconsideration of our approach to tactical media in the condition of the interface is necessary, it doesn't mean we cannot operate on platformed versions of tactical media such as Facebook or Twitter.

Another point of focus in this discussion I found especially captivating was the consideration of the posthuman machine in relation to the reformulation of labour, in particular Scott Rettberg's consideration of the interface as an intermediate layer between humans and machines. In questioning whether we are moving towards a system in which the interfaces themselves generate human labour for the benefit of corporate entities, Rettberg poses the question of whether we can be alienated from our labour if we are not conscious of being laborours? This leads into a contemplation on the condition of cultural tiredness, an awareness that a certain media platform, such as Facebook, is packed with problems regarding social interaction and data protection, but still we continue to use its service.

Cautious of covering more than needs to be said in this digest, I will close by returning to the fundamental question that Pold and Andersen put forward in their work: the role of art and literature in shedding light on the behaviour and ontology of the metainterface. I find it interesting to learn that Pold started out by studying literature, before moving into a study of digital aesthetics. Perhaps it was the combination of these two domains that allowed him to see the act of reading the everyday interfaces of life as a literary act. This seems to be echoed in Andersen's response to the question of art and literature's role in an age of environmental crisis and metaintertface, whereby he looks to Walter Benjamin's definition of an author as a producer. To see the artist or writer as 'someone who produces not only the narrative, but who is a realist in the sense that he or she reflects what it means to produce in the circumstances that you are embedded in. So, the role of the author in the 21st century is to 'not only to use the interface as a media for the production of new narratives, but also use the interface, and reflect the interface as a system of production'.

With questions such as 'how are we being written by machines?' and 'how have we become media?' still yet to be answered, I encourage anyone interested in posthumanism and digital aesthetics to make their way through the full discussion.

M.P.