A modest wrecker of this reader
Somewhere around six months into my thesis (which took me four-and-a-half years to complete and submit), my aesthetic broke and I retreated, so far as literature and much of film was concerned, to live amongst subtexts and metanarratives. I can’t tell you why this occurred with any clarity, but I can tell you when: as I read the death of Stephanie in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life, which I was anxious to finish before heading out to a job I had helping a high-school student with English language. That, too, would end badly, but not for a few more weeks. In the meantime, however, my willingness to immerse myself in realist simulacra of human suffering as a form of recreation atrophied, in a manner that seems to have become permanent.
There was still plenty to read: poetry, criticism, archival fragments, all the arcana and ephemera through which I travelled in search of an argument. Within a few years there were extensive online newspapers and journals, and later blogs in all shades of serious- and light-mindedness. There was more reading than ever before. The fact remained however that I was unable to immerse myself in the modern literary novel to any other than a minimal extent, a poor and sure handicap for someone who had continuing aspirations of writing literary fiction herself. Others posted lists of the fifty or one hundred books they had read in a year; I counted myself lucky to make a dozen read start-to-finish, outside of my professional obligations.
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This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
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I was delighted some weeks ago to be asked by Helen Heath to submit a poem to be her Tuesday feature. This modest and friendly gesture was one of a handful of reminders for me that I have slipped sideways from being someone mucking around with words on the internet into that rather more solid category of Poet. This is a joy, but a joy with a history and rather a curious effect on the present.
For most of my life I have been either a poet or a recovering poet, a fact of which I was reminded in my recent initiation of the domestic decluttering initiative. Reserved from a previous clear-out was a small stack of manuscripts and typescripts, some dating back to primary school and completed in felt-tipped pens and paints, some word-processed and ink-jet-printed. Together they formed a creative slice whose themes were largely melancholic but observational, and whose style tipped, over time, from doggerel into various forms of blank verse (as opposed to free verse, which was, confusingly, called blank verse by my primary school teachers).*
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I look forward daily to the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I have praised elsewhere on these pages. In addition to the reasons I cite there, I wonder also if it is because his work exemplifies my sense of what reasonable argument can be: steady, reflective, connected to experience but also to the wider culture, discreetly slangy, thoughtful.
This morning’s short essay on Prince, “All of my Purple Life” was a typical treat.
One thing I’ve appreciated about Prince, as I’ve aged, is that he knows how to sing about sex, like a man honestly singing about sex. Much of the misogyny in hip-hop (and I suspect in other art forms too) comes from, forgive my profanity, a deep-seated fear of ass. Men–and especially young men–fear what they will do to be physically involved with a woman with whom they’re infatuated. They compensate by turning this fear on its head and projecting. They make women into temptresses, gold-diggers, and villains, and make themselves into conquering heroes. Pussy don’t rule me, they’ll say–even though pussy ain’t thinking about them. Which is the problem, or rather their problem.
I think writing about gender and pop culture needs more of this kind of careful, humble, exploration of what can easily turn into a call to arms or, worse, an outbreak of hnurgh, hnurgh, hnurgh. To what extent is a fear of someone else assuming power over us a fuel for all kinds of hateful, or even hate-skirting, words?
I see this morning that Deborah is leaving The Hand Mirror. I wanted to note what I think has been a significant contribution of hers there, cross-posted from her own blog, and that is the Friday Feminist series.
I came to feminist theory at university, where the reading I did for my literary studies subjects ranged across some of the thinkers and writers cited by Deborah, along with others. It was that sense of having a written heritage–some of it difficult and contentious–that enabled me to define my own thinking, amorphous though it remains.
Feminist theory has also, I think, given feminism legitimacy in the academy by virtue of being published and citable. There’s research involved in collating these extracts and I hope Deborah will continue to do so at her own site. This explanation of her intent is also helpful.
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Inglorious Readers, Inglorious Viewers
23 January, 2011
in commentatrix,O internet,writing & research
A modest wrecker of this reader
Somewhere around six months into my thesis (which took me four-and-a-half years to complete and submit), my aesthetic broke and I retreated, so far as literature and much of film was concerned, to live amongst subtexts and metanarratives. I can’t tell you why this occurred with any clarity, but I can tell you when: as I read the death of Stephanie in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life, which I was anxious to finish before heading out to a job I had helping a high-school student with English language. That, too, would end badly, but not for a few more weeks. In the meantime, however, my willingness to immerse myself in realist simulacra of human suffering as a form of recreation atrophied, in a manner that seems to have become permanent.
There was still plenty to read: poetry, criticism, archival fragments, all the arcana and ephemera through which I travelled in search of an argument. Within a few years there were extensive online newspapers and journals, and later blogs in all shades of serious- and light-mindedness. There was more reading than ever before. The fact remained however that I was unable to immerse myself in the modern literary novel to any other than a minimal extent, a poor and sure handicap for someone who had continuing aspirations of writing literary fiction herself. Others posted lists of the fifty or one hundred books they had read in a year; I counted myself lucky to make a dozen read start-to-finish, outside of my professional obligations.
[click to continue…]
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