#maybe the writers should read foucault

[roublardise]

5x11 Sam, interrupted is such a strange episode to me.... interesting dean studies but please. i can't get over the technicalities here. what on earth is up with their neurobiology. i swear each time i watch this ep it makes less sense 🧍🧍 'crazy brains get soaked in dopamine and adrenaline and all sorts of hormones and chemicals' YEH LIKE? ANY BRAIN GET THOSE? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING GURLLL 😭😭😭😭

[futureghost97]

if you’re an academic writer and you prioritize sounding smart over being comprehensible, I am killing you ♥️

[bettsfic]

I'm really enjoying your craft essay commentary! I have to read more in 2023, too. If you have anything in mind, it would be cool if you posted the list so we could take a look and join you! (Or if anyone has recs?)

i honestly wish i was one of those people who could make a reading list and make my way through it, but since reading is my job, when i read for fun it has to be either 1) entertaining, and/or 2) enriching, and it's surprisingly rare how few books there are that seem to fit into either category. which has nothing to do with the books and everything to do with my weird personal tastes.

but! here's what i'm hoping to make my way through in the coming weeks.

novels/memoirs

return of the king (re-read) and maybe some other tolkien stuff (i went on a used book store spree recently)

in the dream house by carmen maria machado (a christmas gift from @significationary!)

furnace creek by joseph allen boone (just preordered it in paperback)

the last 3 books of the neapolitan quartet by elena ferrante (i already read my brilliant friend)

the last samurai by helen dewitt

the color of sin and father of lies by janet inglis (these were very hard to get my hands on; i don't think they're in print anymore)

the locked tomb series? at least, another attempt will be made. the first time i tried gideon the ninth, it uh. didn't seem like my thing. but enough people have rec'd it that i'll try hard to stick with it.

maybe i'll finally read mdzs

i'd also love to pick up some classics that i'd intended to read for my comps, or maybe take a crack at smiley's list of 100 novels

nonfiction

authoring autism (this is going to take me a while, because it's a little over my head and also a very emotional read for me)

both tin house writer's notebooks

13 ways of looking at the novel by smiley

anatomy of criticism by frye (i think)

mystery and manners by o'connor

my narratology and rhetoric books (there are 2 narratology books that are based entirely on foucault so i'm gonna have to read him too probably)

and i have a bunch of other craft books on my shelf, plus a lengthy craft book purchase list, which i'm not letting myself touch until i've made a dent in what i already have

what i would love more than anything is to find a book or fic i can't put down, that i read until five in the morning and then pick up again as soon as i wake up (entertainment). or i'd like to find a book that's maybe not super interesting on a conflict level but which is so beautifully or weirdly written that it either teaches me something new about writing, or does one thing so remarkably well i might want to teach it in a class one day (enrichment).

last year, the best thing i read was a 700k fic that's not even on ao3 anymore, that was both entertaining (so sickeningly dark, with such high stakes) and enriching (i learned a goddamn ton about scene-level pacing and honestly just what it means to stare the present moment in the eye? i still can't even articulate exactly how masterful it was on a scene level). i also read when meat loves salt by maria mccann, which should have been a slam dunk for me (gorgeously written, historically accurate, extremely fucky gay relationship), and i did really like it but i read it in fits and starts throughout the year because it couldn't seem to keep my attention for long.

i thought the problem was that i was poorly medicated so i couldn't focus on anything. but now i can focus on stuff and i'm still putting down most of the books i pick up out of sheer disinterest. so i'm hoping this year i can kind of target that problem and figure out what my deal is, or find a way to reliably find books i know i'll like.

i always appreciate recs of the "this is the most exceptional thing i've ever laid eyes on" variety, so if anyone's got any of those, i'd love to hear them.

[grandhotelabyss]

Both sides are melodramatizing here, I think. I don’t know exactly what it means to feel unsafe while reading a book. Even books brandishing threats of physical violence didn’t make me feel insecure in my person. Books that shifted my thinking I experienced in an Emersonian way, as my own neglected thoughts returned to me (as if to say, “I knew that somehow; I just never knew how it might be articulated or organized”). Books I violently disagreed with left me safe in my convictions. Books that “triggered” unpleasant memories or sensations did so by virtue of the experience recalled or evoked, not the book, which, in any case, could be put down. Writers like Spinoza or Kant might come closest, because you can’t even begin to read them without accepting that you will have to spend a lot of time in incomprehension, abandoned to your own intellectual inadequacy (or maybe it’s just me). While I obviously dislike the deliberately imprecise and manipulatively mawkish “safe” language as soft totalitarianism and bureaucratic passive aggression, it is a reaction, even if an overreaction, to the real conversational and casual brutality prevailing in academe as late as a decade ago without constructive purpose. One professor I knew has committed totally to the therapeutic DEI sensibility, yet I refused to work with him in graduate school after he wrote “ugh!” in the margin of my seminar paper. I didn’t feel “unsafe,” but neither would I allow myself to be addressed that way. (A parvenu, I’d overestimated scholarly discourse.) The advisor I did work with would write “hmmm....” in the margin if you advanced an unconvincing argument. When she retired, she sold all the books in her office to the used bookstore I frequent; browsing her marginalia in the store, I was gratified to see that she gave the likes of Bakhtin, Foucault, and Jameson the “hmmm...�� treatment too. Ideally—though experientially this probably isn’t possible—we might be free from insult while accepting that not a single one of our claims should be safe from scrutiny, no matter who we are.

[the-everqueen]

why i disliked “the traitor baru cormorant”

so...recently i read Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant. i bought it thinking, Cool, an insightful fantasy series for me to get into while i wait to hear whether i passed my qualifying exams! i have some time before the semester starts! 

and then i absolutely hated it and spent every minute cataloguing what i thought Dickinson got wrong.

...uh, if you want to get the tl;dr of the liveblog i gave the gf, here’s the top three reasons i disliked this book:

1) not a fan of the “strong female character” trope

yes, Baru doesn’t sling around a sword or shoot arrows better than Anyone In The Whole World. but Dickinson IMMEDIATELY tells us (not shows, tells) that she’s good at math, she’s clever at picking apart strategic scenarios, she’s a savant. (tbh, i don’t love how he shows this, either, with the standard child-prodigy-who-catches-the-attention-of-a-powerful-adult trope.) in Dickinson’s crafted world, her math skills aren’t entirely unusual: women (for...some reason?) are stereotyped as being good at calculations, despite also being aligned with hysteria and too many emotions. this bothers me more than it’s probably supposed to, because the sexism in this novel doesn’t really seem to follow an internal logic. i guess it’s so we can have a woman as the protagonist? also...hoo boy...her “savant” characterization bothers me because...she’s heavily coded as South East Asian (...maaaybe Philippines or Native Hawaii, but as i’ll get to later, Dickinson doesn’t make a huge distinction). uh...model minority stereotypes anyone? yes, within the text, plenty of people associated with the Empire comment that it’s impressive someone of her background got into a position of power so young. at the same time, i’m sure that sounds familiar to so many Asian-identified people! the constant tightrope of being expected to perform to a certain (white, Western) standard while also being Othered. mostly this bothers me because Baru is also characterized as...a sellout for the Empire. sure, her stated goal is to undo the Empire from within, but [MAJOR SPOILERS] in the end it appears that her actual goal was to attain enough power that the Empire would let her be a benevolent dictator over her home island? and it’s only after a major PERSONAL betrayal that she revises this plan? [END SPOILERS] Baru also assimilates without much pain or sacrifice. she hardly ever thinks about her parents or her childhood home. she willingly strips herself of cultural signifiers and adapts to Empire norms (apart from being a closeted lesbian, which...yeah, i’ll get to that, too). and it’s not that Dickinson doesn’t TRY to make her a nuanced character, but...to me, it feels so painfully obvious that this is not his experience. it feels almost...voyeuristic. 

...much like his descriptions of wlw desire!

2) we get it, you read Foucault

the categories of sexual deviance are based entirely on a Western Victorian-era medical discourse around non-heterosexual forms of desire, but Dickinson ignores the network of sociocultural, religious, and historical contexts that contributed to that specific kind of discourse. he uses the terms “tribadism” and “sodomy” but those ideas CANNOT EXIST outside a Euro-American Christian context. yes, a huge part of the 19th century involved the pathologization of sexual and romantic desire (or lack thereof). but that in turn goes back to a history of medicine that relied on the “scientific method” as a means of studying and dissecting the human body--and that method in itself is a product of Enlightenment thinking. Theorist Sylvia Wynter (whomst everyone should read, imho) discusses how the Enlightenment attempted to make the Human (represented by a cisgender, heteronormative, white man) an agent of the State economy. every categorization of so-called deviance goes back to white supremacist attempts to define themselves as ‘human’ against a nonwhite, non-Christian Other. and IN TURN that was ultimately founded on anti-Black, anti-Indigenous racism. at this point it’s a meme in academic circles to mention Foucault, because so many scholars don’t go any further in engaging with his ideas or acknowledge their limits. but SERIOUSLY. Dickinson crafts the Masquerade as this psuedo-scientific empire that’s furthering erasure of native cultures, but...where did these ideas come from? who created them? what was the justification that gave them power? [MINOR SPOILER] blaming the Empire’s ideology on a handful of people behind the Mask who crafted this entire system makes me...uncomfortable, to say the least. part of what gives imperialism its power is that a lot of ordinary people buy in to its ideas, because it aligns with dominant belief systems or gives them some sense of advantage. 

also speaking of cultural erasure...

3) culture is more than set dressing

again, to reiterate: Baru does NOT think back to her childhood home for longer than a couple passing sentences at various points in the narrative. but even though the early chapters literally take place on her home island, i don’t get a sense of...lived experience. this is true of ALL of the fantasy analogues Dickinson has created in his Empire. i felt uncomfortably aware of the real world counterparts that Dickinson was drawing inspiration from. at the same time...there are basically no details to really breathe life into these various fantasy cultures. i HATE the trope of “fantasy Asia” or “fantasy Africa” or “fantasy Middle East” that’s rampant among white male sff writers. Dickinson does not get points from me for basically just expanding that to “fantasy South East Asia,” “fantasy Mongolia,” “fantasy South America,” and... “fantasy Africa,” plus some European cultures crammed in there. he’s VERY OBVIOUSLY drawing on those languages for names, but otherwise there’s no real sense of their religious practices, the nuances of their cultures, the differences between those cultures (besides physiological, which...oh god). part of that is probably supposed to be justified by “well, the Empire just erased it!!!” but that’s not an excuse imho. 

also...in making the Empire the ultimate signifier of the evils of imperialism...Dickinson kind of leans into the “noble savage” stereotype. Baru’s home island is portrayed as this idyllic environment where no one is shamed for who they love and gender doesn’t determine destiny and there are no major conflicts. (there is a minor nod to some infighting, but this is mostly a “weakness” that the Masquerade uses as an excuse to obliterate a whole tribe.) Dickinson justifies young Baru’s immediate assimilation as her attempt to figure out the Masquerade’s power from within, but given that the Masquerade presumably killed one of her dads and her mom maybe advocates a guerilla resistance...it’s weird that Baru basically abandons her family without a second thought. yeah, i get that she’s a kid when the Masquerade takes over the island, but...that’s still a hugely traumatic experience! the layers of trauma and conditioning and violence that go into this level of colonization are almost entirely externalized. 

(later it’s implied that Baru might qualify as a psychopath, and tbh that feels like an excuse for why we haven’t gotten any sense of her inner world, not to mention kind of offensive.) 

this isn’t exhaustive but...

it’s not that i don’t think white people shouldn’t ever address POC experiences in their books. just...if your entire trilogy is going to revolve around IMPERIALISM IS BAD, ACTUALLY, maybe you should contribute to the discourse that Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors have already done. reading this book made me so, so angry. i did not feel represented! i felt like i was being talked down to, both on a critical theory level AND on a craft level. there are SO MANY books by actual BIPOC and minority authors that have done this better. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy and her current Cities series. Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House remains one of the more powerful novels i’ve read on how The System Is Out To Destroy You, That Is The Point. (Bardugo is non-practicing Spanish and Moroccan Jewish on one side of her family, and her character Alex is mixed and comes from a Jewish background!) 

...

there’s not really a point to this. i get a lot of people have raved about this book. good for them. if that’s you, no judgment. i’m not trying to argue IF YOU LIKED THIS YOU ARE PROBLEMATIC. i’m just kind of enraged that a white dude wrote about a Brown lesbian under a colonial empire and that THIS Brown lesbian under a colonial empire couldn’t even get behind the representation. also kind of annoyed that it’s the Empire of Masks and Dickinson either hasn’t read Fanon or didn’t see fit to slip in a Fanon reference, which like. missed opportunity. 

[star-anise]

I feel a little bit odd asking but I've been searching your blog for works to read for critical theories on many different topics (the first ones that come to mind is queerness, feminism, racism, etc) and I haven't come across one or maybe I haven't been searching the right tags? I don't know, if you have a list, could you link me to one or could you give me some books/authors that I should become well-versed in?

Can do! For people following along at home, I talked to @antiquatedlemons to get a better sense of just what was wanted, which is a deeper dive into the lineage of ideas we take for granted now as Social Justice 101. So this list is going to be a lot of older works, because they give you a window into when these ideas were new and hot and controversial, and what kind of work it took to get them accepted.

So, like, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984) is an amazing look into the activist 60s, 70s, and 80s. Lorde was primarily a poet, but these are her speeches, essays, and letters; she writes about the beginning of a feminist consciousness among women of colour in the Civil Rights era, her experiences as a Black lesbian woman and mother in radical feminist spaces, and her disputes with other feminists. It was absolutely groundbreaking; it laid down much of the essential foundation on which intersectional feminism was built.

Feminism is for Everybody (2000) by bell hooks is explicitly written as a Feminism 101 primer, but I think its emphasis on explaining the diverse history of feminist thought and using real-life examples of people, issues, and movements mean that it might help you get a slightly deeper sense of where these currents came from and how they expressed themselves.

I’ve done an earlier roundup on books about lesbian history and queer theory. I’m honestly not sure which of the more theoretical books would be better, because I haven’t got my hands on all of them. I kind of suspect the anthology PoMoSexuals (1997) would be the most useful for giving you a diverse collection of foundational queer theorists. Public Sex (1994) by Pat Califia can make a lot of this history really vivid, but it’s much more one person’s history and viewpoint, with a much narrower topic focus.

Since what you want is to get a deeper look at the origins of a lot of things, I think James Baldwin is also another writer really worth your time. I’ve read some of his essays from anthologies, but I’m still on my library’s waiting list for his longer works so I don’t know what, specifically, to recommend; I know a lot of people point to Notes of a Native Son (1955) as being an absolutely foundational work of Black American literature; it’s a blend of autobiography, historical account, and literary criticism. The thing that keeps me coming back to him is that he was really fighting for a way to think about and express his life before there were words for it. For a long time he’s been viewed very solidly through a racial lens, but he was also homosexual and didn’t really have any sense of belonging in the LGBTQ+ community. He’s got a lot to say about being alone, being an outsider, about the ways he came to understand and reconcile with himself, that really fascinate me and, well, that’s why I’m on the hold list.

I want to keep naming book after book after book, but I’m also kind of aware that this is a lot already, and the more you look into older books, you’ll come across people and events and ideas that make you want to pursue them yourself.

(Sigh, should Michel Foucault and Franz Fanon be on this list? They’re way more theory than history, and while they’re incredibly important, it’s also like… idk, reading a book about internal combustion engines. Yes, now you know so much more about how the car goes! But that’s not the same thing as reading a map or a travelogue. Or maybe I was just an overtired undergrad and they’d be delightful and relevant if I revisited them now.)

So, um… there’s somewhere to start!

[blogs-from-europe]

Paris

We did not intend to come to Paris. We had planned ot head to Venice, but the coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy was kicking off and it seemed stupid to charge into the middle of it. Instead, we re-routed to Paris with no real plans for what we were going to do for the next month.

We took the Eurostar high speed train from London to Paris: there was wifi, cushy chairs, and some catered snacks we purchased from Marks & Spencers. The dining in London was meh, but their store-bought snacks blow Australia out of the water. Down with the Coles / Woolworths duopoly!

We arrived into Paris around 9pm and walked from the train station to our hotel. This may displease some of the parents reading this missive, but Matt and I did not check Smart Traveller before booking to go to Paris. It turns out that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade considers France quite dangerous! The whole country has been slapped with an "Exercise a high degree of caution” warning, and this isn’t because of the coronavirus, this is down to the amount of violent crime tourists are likely to encounter (armed robberies on trains, car theft, etc.) and the riots. Oh and the likelihood of terrorist attacks. We certainly noticed in France that the cops were heavily armed: we saw a police officer cradling a machine gun during a friendly exchange with a citizen to give directions.

On our Sunday night walk from the train station to our hotel, the streets were mostly empty. We passed a number of sex shops, massage parlours with red lights, groups of men standing around apparently doing nothing, sex workers, and suspicious men selling cigarettes on street corners. We were on high alert for pick-pockets and the violent crimes which Smart Traveller had warned us about: with our enormous backpacks we were effectively wearing neon signs saying ‘We are tourists! Please rob us!’. Despite our fears we made it to the hotel safely. The hotel was a last-minute booking as part of our rescheduling to avoid Italy so we didn’t have many options when booking online: I think it would be safe to say that our hotel was one of the worst in Paris. We were given tokens to access the shared shower down the hallway from our room: for our three night stay we were given four tokens, effectively rationing our showers for the stay. (Again, parents reading this may be troubled to learn that we only ended up using three of the four tokens – the person who only showered once has a name beginning with ‘M’ and ending with ‘atthew’.)    

Another charming feature of the hotel was the low ceilings, roughly only two meters in height:

For our first day in Paris, it rained all day. 

To stay out of the rain, we picked a couple of indoor activities: a visit to the Musee de Cluny (famous for its Lady and Unicorn tapestries and various other medieval art) and a visit to the Pantheon. After paying to get in, we realised that the Lady and Unicorn tapestries section of the museum was closed. Disappointingly, a promising section of the museum called ‘Treasures’ was also closed – I must confess, Matt and I did inadvertently go into the Treasures section and stole a fleeting glance at a magnificent tapestry before a strict Frenchman told us (in French so this may not be an exact translation) “Can’t you see this section of the museum is closed? No treasures for you! Get the hell out!”. Utimately we only got to see some old rocks and a bath. Overall rating for Musee de Cluny is 1/5. Matt observed that it should really be called the “Musee de Close-y”.  

Next we trudged uphill through heavy rain to the Pantheon. Matt had expressed his indifference towards visiting churches, but I thought Foucault’s pendulum (housed in the church) might be of interest to him. Turns out, the Pantheon has many great qualities: it’s an amazing sandstone church built in the 1700s. During the Enlightenment, the church became a sort of secular shrine to the great figures of France including writers, politicians, scientists, etc. In addition to looking through the church (which included a huge dome, Foucault’s pendulum and some cool paintings of Joan of Arc) we got to explore the crypt which was much more pleasant and well-lit than you might expect a crypt to be.

Contrary to popular opinion, we did not find the waiters of Paris to be particularly snooty (maybe this is because we are residents of Fitzroy, which is home to many snooty waiters – mostly with fluoro hair and ripped jeans) but we did notice that they would greet us assuming we were French with a ‘Bonjour!’ or ‘Bonsoir!’ and when we would respond in attempted French they lose a little of their joie de vivre and would immediately switch to English. This was obviously intended as a kindness and did make things easier for ordering and finding a table, but meant we were robbed of the chance to practice our French. This also suggests that our pronunciation of ‘Bonjour’ is so poor that we cannot even pass for particularly uncultured or stupid Frenchmen.

To get around we tried renting electric scooters and bikes via Uber, with mixed results: there was terror, joy, and some frustration with Uber’s capricious parking rules.

For the super-interested, here are some other things we got up to in Paris:

Montmarte: We rode our electric bikes to Montmatre, an area famous for Sacre Coeur, an old church with a fantastic view, and the Moulin Rouge. The ride was mostly uphill, but on the electric bicycle was quite easy.

Wine tasting: We also did a wine tasting via Airbnb. Key takeaway: Chardonnay in France is not aged in oak barrels, meaning it doesn’t have that strong oaky taste (which I often find to be kind of cloying). Matt and I never really liked the taste of Australian chardonnay, so this was probably because of the barrel flavour. We also learned about tannins (broken down grape skins which appear in red wines) and about how rose is made (red grapes, but the skin is taken out sooner!)

Catacombs: There are old mines under Paris, which were the source of the sandstone used to build many of the city’s great buildings. These were later filled with bones after the central cemeteries were filled. We both regretted visiting the catacombs as it was very somber and confronting: millions of bones, hundreds of years old, piled on top of each other in a network of disused mines. Who enjoys this stuff?? We both felt sad and flat after the Catacombs, but then stopped for a hot chocolate and apple pastry which improved the mood. Afterwards we agreed to not visit any more mass graves.

Champs Elysées: We walked past the Louvre and gardens, Champs Elysées, Arc de Triomphe – a lovely area. We stopped for crepes and paid 1.5 euro (~$2.50 in Australian dollars) to use a public bathroom.

We also spent some time watching street hustlers. In the photo below, just below the Eiffel Tower you’ll see a ring of people in black. 

We watched them for half an hour or so. They stand together all day pretending to play a three-shell game, betting 100 euro a pop. The idea with the game is that the dealer hides a ball under one cup, then quickly shuffles all three cups to ‘hide’ the ball - the person who paid to play can then pick the cup which they think holds the ball. If they are right, they get 200 euro; if they are wrong they lose the lot. We inferred the people dressed in black are working with the dealer, spending all day pretending to play. They win some, they lose some, they clap and say “bravo!”. The idea is to make it look like riotous good fun for people passing by so that they might be tempted to play. They’re essentially just shuffing money around within their group. A key part of the scam is that after each shuffle one of the group picks a cup which, if you’ve been paying attention to the shuffle, clearly does not hold the ball - the incorrect guess is jeered at by the group and then someone else guesses correctly to much cheering. This makes the game look easy, and probably fools observers into thinking they’re especially good at the shell game because they can find the ball every time. I can only assume that when someone is playing the game for real, the shuffle is much faster and tricker to follow.

After watching for a while, we saw a middle-aged tourist approach the group, watch from the side for a while, and then scurry away to pull cash out of his money belt. His friend tried to talk him out of it. He played anyway. We watched him lose. His friend walked off in disgust. He lost again. He walked off to find his friend. The shell game people packed up after that. I assume they also pick your pockets when they can.

There were a few more tourist-scams going around, but we didn’t have any trouble. We don’t know why these three golden retreivers were standing sentinel outside the subway...

... but we can only assume it was a part of some kind of elaborate hoax.

Matt and I are now in Chamonix, a ski town in the French alps. He is practicing the ukulele and I am writing this. We’re staying in an Airbnb - our hosts are have at least three cats (two of whom have deigned to let me pat them) and we were warned that if we hear a noise like someone tapping on the window during the night it is just the local deer inadvertently banging their horns on the window while they try to eat whatever bits of grass near the house aren’t under snow.

[walpurg]

8 people i’d like to know better

I was tagged by @mykeywithawhy (Thanks a lot! But I have to say that English is not my first language so there may be some grammar mistakes (I’m really sorry about them!))

name / alias. My name is Alyona/Алёна (I’m Russian but I don’t really like to talk about this fact here 'cause people often presume that I’m homophobic (despite the fact that i’m a part of the lgbt+ community myself) or Putin’s supporter, which I’m not) (+ my pronouns are she/her)

birthday. July 26

zodiac sign. Leo

height. 5'8" (~173 cm)

hobbies: Writing, painting (I’m not really good at it but I still think it’s fun), creating characters (not writing about them, just creating them), theater (I love visiting theatres in my hometown (plays here are actually very good) and I also love just listening to the broadway musical’s songs). Thanks to my university I don’t have a lot of hobbies (I just don’t have enough time)

favorite colors. Purple and black

favorite books. «The House, In Which…» by Mariam Petrosyan. As far as I know in English speaking counters it was published as «The Gray House».

last song listened to. Gold by Spandau Ballet

last film watched. Midsommar

inspiration for muse.  My inspiration comes from a lot of random things. Like from other people’s stories, or from aesthetically pleasing pictures, or even from a good cup of coffee. Honestly it just hits me and I’m being like «well I guess I have to write something or I’ll die»

dream job. I would love to be a writer. Writing has always been my passion but I know that due current political ideology in Russia I won’t be able to write about some things that I want to write about. So right now I’m studding to be a lawyer, its quite interesting too (and honestly it’s just necessary if you’re openly in opposition to current government and want to protect your rights without asking European Court of Human Rights for help)

meaning behind your url. Well when i was 15 or 16 my history teacher asked me to write an essay about witchcraft in folklore, so somewhere in the process I found something about Walpurgis Night, and I remember that it was like super late and my brain didt really work, so I’ve decided that changing my url to Walpurgis would be really cool. And then I thought that maybe I should make it shorter and delete last three letters. So I did this. And then continued writing my essay. And, well, back then I didn’t use my blog as often as I do now, so I forgot about this whole situation. Next time I visited tumblr I realized that my url has changed, but I was too lazy to change it back (plus I didn’t like my past url either). And then I even started to like it  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

top three ships. Kirishima/Bakugou from BNHA, Connie/Steven from Steven Universe, Emma/Regina from OUaT

lipstick or chapstick. Lipstick

currently reading. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

I will tag @im-in-way-2many-fandoms @masterofpretending @lilyblacksoul @starfish-without-stick @batgirl-87 @firstruleofcloneclub-felixisking @allwillbe @the-light-of-stars Hope you guys like tag games, but you dont have to do it if you don’t want to. Have fun!

[hayingsang]

Read in 2021

Julia Kristeva, The Samurai

I must have read this book sometime after buying it – it being published in 1992, that means presumably around that time – yet I couldn’t recall a thing about it, and (re)reading it brought back not a single echo. So maybe I didn’t in fact read it. Except I do have some kind of memory of the time/place where I read it, perhaps in the flat I first lived in when I moved to Hong Kong, or perhaps on Lantau island, where I spent a fair bit of time around 1992/1993.

Anyway, it’s been sitting on my shelf for a second look for a while, and casting around for something I decided to give it a second go. First impressions: I loathed the typeface – several times it brought me to a stop to take a look at its peculiarities: its “s and ”s, which often seemed to be the wrong way round; its deeply unpleasant shrunken italics; its low x-height, so big upper-case letters and enormous em-dashes. I don’t think you should notice a book’s typeface; doing so must mean it’s a problem, which this book’s was. (The only other book I’ve read recently that was worse was Rachel Cusk’s Outline which horror of horrors used a sans-serif face that I found hugely distracting. Perhaps that was deliberate; the one in The Samurai just felt bad – as if the designer didn’t know much about books/reading.)

I can’t think why I wouldn’t remember the book – about a subject/with characters I’m familiar with. The story’s straightforward: Olga, a young writer from the Soviet bloc arrives in France in (I’m guessing) the early/mid-1960s followed by an account of the lives of various French intellectuals through to the start of the 1990s; clear nods towards Foucault, Althusser, Lacan and Kristeva herself, plus some I think I can guess (de Beauvoir? Sartre? Deleuze? Hervé Guibert?), plus others I don’t know. There’s a wonderful trip to China in the early 1970s, quite a lot of sex and psychoanalysis babble, a great description of the northern France bourgeois family from which Olga’s husband comes, a kind of clumsy use of the birth/early years of their child to remind us that there’s more to life than theory. All very roman-à-clef.

I liked the spacy way in which the book moved through its decades, letting its characters live through events such as May 1968 rather than offering accounts of them. The views of those characters, eg, the descriptions of their inner lives, I drifted through, finding little to catch my attention (other people’s interior monologues, like their dreams, may be of interest to them, less so to others).

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but in a lightish way. I do have an interest in that French 1960s-1980s intellectual milieu, but didn’t feel like I was pulled in enough, more seeing a sketch produced (almost) for Kristeva’s own benefit and perhaps those already familiar with its characters. Now I would like to go and find a proper intellectual history of those decades, one that pulled together the same bunch of characters and showed how they related to each other.

I also found the prose a little clunky. As the book was published by Columbia University Press, I wondered whether that was due to it being translated by an academic; no – its translator, Barbara Bray, had a long track record of translating major French writers. Hm. Me or her? (Or maybe the typeface/design?)

[tianqichen17055127-blog]

Critical Analysis

Micheal Foucault was a very critical philosopher as he tended to include writing works in all subjects, including scientific and literary ones. He even said he should have spoken of the 'author-function' in painting, music technical fields and so forth. I believe it is true that there are many common things in creative work and their 'author'. The essay is the text of a lecture presented to the Societé Francais de philosophy on 22 February 1969 (Foucault gave a modified form of the lecture in the United States in 1970).

When I first ask myself this question, I feel it quite easy to be answered. ‘An the author is the person who creates literature or artwork.’ I answered myself. But when I think deeply about this topic I felt a little bit confused as there are lots of restrictions for a writer to become an author. Maybe someone who published his or her own idea? But not all of them are willing to show their identities to the public. What about those who stand behind their thoughts?

As an art student, one of the most significant parts of our study is to identify the ‘author’ and to give some critical ideas upon them. Indeed, we are not that sure who the real author is but we need to give them a name as they are definitely the target of our study. Thus, the author in my perspective is more like a person who takes the responsibility of ideas or works. After reading this article about the identification of the ‘author’, I found more new perspectives in understanding this question.

First of all, the author's function is related to legitimacy and how it is constrained in an institutional system. In the past, people in the ruling class care about what they are written in historical records since even after they die, the future generation will discuss them, in other words, the writing records of their life determine how they 'live' eternally after they die. Therefore, authenticity was a big issue in the past and there were institutional systems to ensure authenticity and to ensure their ruling with 'the legitimate ideology' and to exclude other opinions such as heresy and slanders. Nowadays, in the capitalist world, works of writing become the property that someone can possess. As we do academic writing, if we forget to affix the original author in our writing, we may be recognized as plagiarism. The author's name here presents possession and authenticity.

The second point is arguing that the function of an author is not universal or constant. For example, the three texts with the same Greek myth. They are telling the same story King Midas and the Golden Touch, but usually no one would look for the author and just pass down the story to the next generations till now. But when it came to the Middle Ages, the words or writing could only have credibility when it is from an authority with enough. For example, 'Walking is men’s best medicine.' This simple opinion doesn’t need much unpinning evidence but the name of the author, Hippocrate, could earn much trust, who is considered an outstanding figure of medicine at that time. When it came to the time that people value science, the theory work becomes the author's other name in return. That's why Foucault said the function of an author is not universal or constant across different subjects and ages.

Besides, he talks about the fact that in recent times ‘literary discourse’ is only accepted if it had the author's name attached to it. It had to ‘state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing’. This enables the writing to have meaning and value placed on it. In the text, Foucault describes ‘the the author as a unifying construction’, allowing seemingly very different texts to be unified under a single concept and allowing new texts to be ‘evaluated against old texts for consistency of quality’. He goes on to observe that in ‘modern criticism there is a desire to recover the author from the work’. He talks about the authors name not being enough to describe a piece of work to an author and compares the author construction to the method Saint Jerome used to authenticate the work of an author using four decisive factors: texts which are inferior must be eliminated; ideas that conflict with those expressed in other texts; a different style of writing and the author is the historical figure in the scheme of things.

The the third point is that the function is not formed spontaneously but is constructed through a ‘complex operation’. The social environment would influence the function of the author, without a doubt. If we hind the name of an author, we can recover them from the details, for example, writing the date, where it was done and what was his or her opinion on a certain issue. This is especially true in literary articles since they are more subjective. People would like to classify work by its author, which becomes a label for people to remember. Some well-known authors even became a brand that encourages people to consume their time or money, which also became a kind of topic for higher classes.

The the fourth point, from my understanding, is taking an author as a normal person, who can write and can play different roles when they are writing different kinds of content. It is a little bit like a man in life can be a father, a husband and a son simultaneously. So as a writer or an author, something they play as editors, inviting people to write something within the same theme and publish the articles together as a book. However, they usually are also a writer. They, at the same time, can do criticism work. This example may be over figurative. I am trying to explain their 'multiple egos' may arise because of the different audiences they are facing. Then you cannot deny the audience has not a participant in their writing.

Foucault refers to writing as an action or a gesture as opposed to a ‘thing’. He sees it as being tied up in an institutional system and talks about ‘the form of property they have become’. Since the 18th century, it has been caught up in systems that determine a violation of social and moral boundaries. Foucault uses the phrase ‘the danger of writing’ which sums it up well. He goes on to say that scientific texts were only considered authentic in the middle ages if the name of the author was clear. Today ‘Authentication no longer requires reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness’. Instead of a body of theories and hypotheses that are credible due to the process of ‘Empirical knowledge’– knowledge acquired by the means of observation and experimentation.

Gerard Byrne, an Irish artist born 1969 who uses lens-based media to produce large scale installations which reconstruct imagery found in magazines from The 1960s–80s. He produces ‘carefully reconstructed images of particular historically charged conversations originally published in popular magazines from the 1960s -1980’. From which I noticed similarities to the work of Michel Foucault.

In conclusion, the name of an author is more like a slogan of the theory. Sometimes it may look like a brand. It is quite ironic that no one can tell the author of an old famous book without knowing from others. It is to say we are not that sure if the author is ‘the author’. By reading this text, I started to think about the concept of the artist and their artworks. And started to develop a consciousness of understanding the artists and stories behind the images.

Foucault, M., 1969, What is an author.

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/foucault.author.pdf

[x-tra2018-blog]

Summary, Reading I  Elisabeth Vesanto

31/10/2018

I was not in the reading group meeting because I was planning to stop and do this course next year. These readings felt so difficult to me and impossible to write thoughts from the text that you did not really understand. I felt I needed more time (at least one year) to practice and read English scientific texts. But finally I am here after few months writing this last summary from the hardest part of the reading. This must and has been really teaching experience for me and I am glad to realize that reading is more fluent and even writing own ideas starts to be more clear and easier. This course has been giving many new skills. Not forgetting all the knowledge what we got from the writers, which are hopefully coming more useful among with the studies.

I needed to write my summary by reading other group members texts from our blog. It is not giving so many new dimensions for my writing because I could not talk about my ideas what came up when writing own intro. Now I can also see the importance of reading croup meetings. Those conversations have been really useful for enriching the ideas to the summary.

My reading group has been talking about fashion, fur industry and styles. I don´t know how to fit this topic with the readings. But I read Sofia´s shared link about Foucault´s text: What is an Author? https://educationmuseum.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/michel-foucault-what-is-an-author-1975/ There was interesting fact about how the time has change the author function. In the history before the seventeenth art, literature, music etc. became accepted into the culture without author´s name. But works of science would only be acceptable if there would be respected scientist behind the knowledge. I feel like, it has changed opposite way in our time. In the news you can read more often about new research projects from unknown scientist or group of scientist. For example the Finnish biochemist group created new material invention called Sulapac. They have been able to challenge super famous plastic. It is really big step to invent something new for the world. Somehow I feel scientists are having easier ways to become famous in our time. Maybe because we need new material solutions and people´s are desperate about the destruction what humans have done to the earth.

What new ideas and solutions designer and graphic designers could give and how they could come to the main page? I think we should also start to change direction of the boat and head to more experimental waters. And start to find out new solutions by exploring, trying and doing. We should stop following the famous authors/names and create something totally different. Designers should be braver and try new methods and break the “famous fashion”. We should spread new ideologies through our designs and try to communicate knowledge though creations.

[victoriagloverstuff]

Edmund White: Reading is a Passport to the World

When I was a little child, my sister, who was nearly four years older, was astonished that I couldn’t read. We were in my mother’s old Ford, driving around the main square of Hyde Park, and my sister pointed to a sign and said, “You honestly can’t read that?”

“No,” I said sullenly. “What does it say?”

“Graeter’s,” she announced triumphantly, the name of Cincinnati’s premier ice cream maker. “Can’t you see that? What does it say to you?” She wasn’t being mean; she was genuinely puzzled. Reading was a magical portal—once you passed through it, you couldn’t even imagine going back.

I must have been four. Two years later I could read, or at least “sound out” syllables (that was the method then). When I realized that I could interpret these hieroglyphics, I felt so free, as if a whole new world had been opened to me. Now I could herar a chorus of voices, even those coming from other centuries and cultures. I was no longer bound to the squalid here and now, to my mother’s web-spinning of agreeable fantasies or my father’s sudden eruptions of rage, to the sweating summers of that age before air conditioning.

I remember toddling into my mother’s room, where she was taking a perfumed bubble bath in the late afternoon. I announced (or maybe thought), “I’m free. I can read.”

Could I really have had such an improbable thought at age six? Or have I just told myself that that thought occurred to me then? And yet I remember my mother’s sweetness, the good smell, the afternoon sunlight, and my very real feeling of joyful liberation. And, quite concretely, reading has always struck me as a passport to the world, one in which characters are more real than actual people, where values are more intense than in the dim light of reality, where characters fly up into destinies rather than paddle around in ambiguity.

I felt like a blind person who’d just regained his sight. I was no longer a Cincinnatian but rather an earthling. If things were clearly written in English, there was no text that was off-limits. I never read the standard children’s classics. No Wind in the Willows. Only recently did I get around to Treasure Island.

In my twenties and thirties no book was too ambitious for me; I worked my way through Theodor Adorno and Heinrich von Kleist, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, though I was drunk most of the time and often had to hold one eye shut. I suppose I was hanging out with a pretty brainy crowd back then, and I felt I had to keep up. I doubt I retained much, though in my thirties and forties I reviewed several books by Barthes and Foucault.

I was so driven back then, it never would have occurred to me to reread a book! My goal was to have read everything, or at least the major works that appealed to me, that seemed essential. Perhaps because I’d never done any graduate work, I felt inferior. I’d never read The Faerie Queene. Worse, I’d been a writer for eight years for Time-Life Books, the ultimate home of the middle-brow. Although I invariably said defensively, “I’m not an intellectual,” I wanted to be one—or at least to be able to refuse demurely that title. Sometimes I took comfort in the idea I was an artist, not an intellectual. I even resorted to the ridiculously snobbish notion I was a “gentleman amateur” and not an intellectual. But I’ve always wanted to have the choice to join any club, especially one that might reject me. For instance, I made a major effort to join the Century Club, for which one had to be sponsored by 11 or 12 current members. Two years after I was accepted, I resigned. Too many lawyers.

Now I do reread at least two books every year—Anna Karenina and Henry Green’s Nothing. Although these two novels are so different one from the other, they both reward closer scrutiny, so much so they scarcely resemble the same book one remembers having read the year before. People complain about the Kitty and Lvov parts of Anna Karenina, but that’s a frivolous charge. Their love stands in dramatic contrast to Anna’s and Vronsky’s passion and is the necessary counterweight to that tragic tale. In the same way, some readers treat Nothing the way they regard all comedy—as lightweight. Actually it is a profound study of the generations and social classes—and unexpectedly it sides with the older, richer people.

“Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity.”

The other book I’ve reread five times in my life is Proust’s. When I was a teenager I read it as the bible of snobbism; it gave me a whole vocabulary to describe this vice that Proust calls “narrow but deep.” Now I read it as the definitive condemnation of snobbism.

For my memoir, I’ve reread a few favorites by Colette, Nabokov, and Tolstoy and read for the first time novels by Guyotat, Giono, and Malaparte. Do we prefer to revisit books we love or to explore the unknown? Are we happier to find new things in the old or to detect familiar themes and strategies in the utterly new and startling? The brilliant novelist of modern manners Alison Lurie once explained to me why she was more popular in England than in America. “For the English I’m writing about an unfamiliar subject [American academic and artistic life] in a familiar style of social satire, whereas for Americans I’m writing in an unusual style about familiar subjects.” Has she touched on an explanation of why we like certain books and not others?

*

Joe Brainard reportedly said on his deathbed, “The best thing about dying is that you never have to go to another poetry reading.” How many times I’ve had to sit through poetry readings in a stuffy room with subaqueous light at the end of a long day and fight against falling asleep! The mind loves a narrative, and in my half sleep my poor brain has spun cartoons made up of chance words, my embarrassment, trace memories (what Freudians call dismissively “the daily residue”), and my shipwrecked will to wake up, or at least not snore.

Everyone says poetry is an oral art, and perhaps some of it is meant to be read out loud. Good actors can make us understand passages in Shakespeare that use obsolete language, though I hate it when pedants hope to indicate the line break or the caesura. I could never make sense of The Tempest until I saw it onstage. On the page I could never keep track of all the characters. Charles Lamb argued in an essay that reading Shakespeare is preferable to seeing him produced, and maybe hammy acting and garish sets and thundering exits and entrances do topple certain of Shakespeare’s cloud castles, but great performances can dial into sharp focus even the vaguest verse.

But does modern poetry gain from being recited out loud? James Merrill was a smooth, trained reader and the smile in his voice could give the reader permission to laugh at his improbable mixture of metaphysics and gossip. His light social tone so often gives way to the sublime that a reader less civilized than he scarcely knows what is funny and what is serious (sometimes both at once, since he thought wisdom was expressed in puns and that the language itself is the collective unconscious).

Percussive poetry like Pound’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon The Seafarer as read by the author himself to the beat of drums can be riveting; a casual scanning of the page would never render the granitic, prehistoric force of this masterpiece. In his recitation (now on YouTube) Pound rolls his r’s, thuds the final d’s, and maintains a shaman’s monotone. Maybe Paul Verlaine’s musical verse (or John Keats’s) is improved by being read out loud, but most 20th- or 21st-century verse is too abstract or too dense to be understood on a single hearing. The mise-en-page, the line breaks, the Latinate or Anglo-Saxon origins of the words, as in tomb and grave (“The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay”)—these are all elements that surrender themselves only to close reading.

With prose the problem is the speed. Everyone reads at a different pace, and some texts are not interesting or intricate enough to be dosed out at conversational speed. We get it; we want to scan it. Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity. It may be valuable for the fiction writer to gauge the response of his audience, to listen for contradictions or unintended echoes, to detect where people’s attention wanders. But do these practical benefits for the writer outweigh the torture undergone by the public?

Silent, solitary reading (if the book is good) is the best conversation, with all the uhs and ahs edited out, the dead metaphors buried, the dialogue sharpened, the descriptions vivid, the suspense rising, the characters hovering between the unique and the representative. In the great Italian and French guides to good conversation during the Renaissance and 17th century, conversation must avoid pedantry and cruelty and seek above all to please and to entertain. Finally it must be natural; affectation is the worst sin, far worse than flattery, which may even be desirable. In her definitive study The Age of Conversation, Benedetta Craveri (granddaughter to the philosopher Benedetto Croce) argues that good conversation should not make anyone feel inferior or ill at ease but rather the object of a total consideration. And Simone Weil, the French religious philosopher, thought paying attention was a form of prayer.

The novelist or essayist should never mystify for no good reason. We should know why the marquise goes out at five o’clock (if it’s relevant). In an essay we should not be thrown off by academese. An idea may be difficult, but not its expression, as I learned from my beloved Marilyn; the words should be as lucid as possible. The assumption should be that the reader is intelligent but not necessarily informed.

__________________________________

Good read found on the Lithub

[barnabytaylor]

Hi Everyone

Today I want to mention some advice I was given about improving my presence online on sites like Goodreads. I discuss this more in my video above and on my YouTube channel but ultimately the first top tip I was given was that if you want to be taken more seriously as a writer then you need to present yourself more seriously as a reader.

Goodreads is a great resource for authors to get involved with but only if you are prepared to use the platform for what it was intended for. It is not enough to just post all YOUR book-related stuff on your profile – you know; your books, their editions, the covers, and any trailers or other related wares – and then expect people to engage with you.

Other members can tell if you are only using Goodreads to try and sell your books. They can tell by the way that all the groups you have joined are about book promotion, or getting reviews. They can also tell by the way that you have no books listed in your reading or to-read sections. This is especially telling if you don’t leave any reviews of the books you have read either.

So I have begun to add books that I have read and am reading. I have started to leave small reviews of the books I have read. I have also started adding some of my favourite books to the list. Authors like Jack Kerouac, Iris Murdoch and Norman Mailer were very important to me when I was younger. They still are now, just in different ways.

When I first left home I moved into a flat near a second-hand bookshop and one of the great pleasures in life I learned from my Dad was to spend hours browsing the shelves of this shop. I can still picture the tight space between the shelves in my head, the heady aroma of old paperbacks, and the profound pleasure of simply reading the spines.

I was young and eager and impressionable and hungry for something; knowledge, culture, experience, something to inform my fledgling ambitions as a writer. I discovered books as wonderful as Under the Net, On the Road and The Deer Park. These are books I still have and though my life has changed beyond recognition from those early days in a drafty flat with a two-bar gas fire and a 50p meter in the hallway, I still fondly recall the first thrill of folding over the corner of these already corner-turned novels after reading a chapter.

So, this revelation of myself as a reader was the first top tip I was given this week. The second top tip is a more playful one but comes directly as a result of the first tip.

Following on from the advice I received regarding how to use Goodreads more responsibly, I reached out and asked an author how hard it was to write their latest fantasy novel. I have always imagined that writing a fantasy novel is really complicated. You need a convincing world, suitably esoteric names and, most importantly, an absolute, rock solid guarantee that no one can ever accuse you of ripping off Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones.Or worse still, 1969’s Bored of the Rings.

Just as an experiment I found a fantasy novel random title generator and here are some of its suggestions for novel titles: The Sword of the Fortress, The Hidden Deathgate, The Well of the Alchemist, The Hero of the Wind, The Horse of the Adept, The Alliance of the Dream and my favourite, The Hanged Whale.

  If all of this seems a little bit too Foucault’s Pendulum for you then please don’t worry, I am not about to write a book using devices like this – though it would be a fascinating experiment. In fact, and absolutely no disrespect to fantasy authors all around this happy world, I’m not going to ever try to write a fantasy novel ever, my geography is just not that good. To tell you the truth, I never got further than oxbow lakes at school.

In any case,the author I reached out got back to me and gave a very considered and comprehensive overview of how they went about creating the world of a fantasy novel and the characters that are required to inhabit it. I fact, so comprehensive was this overview that it confirmed all of my feelings regarding such a venture and became, for me, the second top tip I (inadvertently) received this week; namely, on no account should I ever try to write a fantasy novel.

That is not to say that I’m not interested in other people’s thoughts and feelings on this subject. Maybe you are writing a fantasy novel even as you read this. Perhaps you might share your thoughts and feelings about such a venture in the comments below?

Speak soon,

Barnaby

  Two Top Writing Tips I Learned This Week Hi Everyone Today I want to mention some advice I was given about improving my presence online on sites like…

[topmixtrends]

This essay is excerpted from The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, edited by Houman Barekat, David Winters, and Robert Barry, and out this month from OR Books.

¤

RECENTLY I WAS EMAILING with a friend about the new book by Geoff Dyer and I said:

Is that piece he wrote for the LRB about having a stroke in it? My take-home from that was a deep envy of the “twice-baked hazelnut croissants” he ate every day in LA. Come to think of it, I remember a croissant in the piece he wrote for Yoga too. I think it was almond. Maybe he really likes croissants.

A few emails before, my friend was telling me an anecdote about the French author, Michel Houellebecq, who is a regular visitor to a bar where his friend works. We speculated about Houellebecq’s tastes as evinced in his writing — which, like Dyer’s, is often autofictional — for “fancy French reds.” We wanted to know more about Houellebecq, about Dyer, and we combed their texts for clues, as though knowing were the point. Reading this way made us feel cool. It also made us feel a bit fake.

In 1967, the French theorist Roland Barthes said the author was dead, shifting the burden of textual meaning to the reader. “To give a text an author,” he wrote, “is to impose a limit on the text.” In What Is An Author (1969), often considered a response to Barthes’s work, the French theorist, Michel Foucault wrote: “The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” It was around that time that my parents, who loved books, bought vast numbers of cheap paperbacks, which were cheaper than they had ever been. My parents rarely saw even a jacket photo of these books’ authors who, until they died and their biographies were written, gave little or no account of their lives outside what could be deduced from within the limits of the texts they produced. Just as the idea of the author provided limits for the textual meaning, the texts provided limits within which these limiting author-figures could be constructed.

In 1967, it really was possible to be a “book lover.” What readers loved about books was sometimes the language, the story, but this very seldom occurred without their also loving the characters. To love a character could be, to paraphrase Barthes, a way of putting a limit on love. Characters could also be, after Foucault, the ideological figures by which one marks the manner in which we fear love’s proliferation. This love was accompanied by the anxiety of their knowledge that these people were fake.

¤

In 2007, the author Sheila Heti wrote, of her autofiction How Should a Person Be?: “Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just — I can’t do it.” The line between “fiction” and autobiography from the 20th and into the 21st century has acted as an increasingly sharply acknowledged focus for anxiety grouped around ideas of fakeness, and consequently of authenticity, and so of “virtue” in terms of moral good and quality of writing. But it is “fake” writing — the ability and intention to make up a “persona” — that has historically been seen as “good” writing. Autobiographical writing in fiction has been decried as “bad” writing, and an admission of autobiography as what identities a “fake” writer.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger thought autobiography had nothing to do with “good” writing. Of Aristotle he said: “He was born, he thought, he died. And all the rest is pure anecdote.” I cannot track down this quote to identify it with its speaker, as the story is itself anecdotal. It was told by Jacques Derrida in the film, Derrida (2002), a purely anecdotal biography that shows the French philosopher making some breakfast that is not a croissant, and choosing his teaching suits, but little of his work, other than what is revealed through his everyday activities. Jacques Derrida, author of Circumfession, an autobiography written in collaboration (“this book presupposes a contract”) with the scholar Geoffrey Bennington, and published in their jointly written book, Jacques Derrida (1999), valued autobiography in a writer’s work. In the biographical film, Derrida, he asked “Why have [philosophers] effaced their private lives from their work? Why do they never talk about personal things? I’m not saying someone should make a porn film about Hegel or Heidegger. I want to hear them talking about the part love plays in their lives.”

In 2012, Sheila Heti responded to critics who panned her book for directly discussing the part love (both friendly and erotic) plays in her life: “People who look at themselves in order to better look at the world — that is not narcissism. It is, and has always been, what people who make art do, and must do. You cannot do it blind. You cannot do it by looking at a toaster.” Heti implicitly accepts her critics’ point that a “narcissistic” author-position — presumably one that demands and relies on a legitimizing response from the reader — is both morally undesirable and produces “bad” writing. In 1948, Truman Capote published Other Voices, Other Rooms, a novel he only later recognized as autobiographical. “Rereading it now,” he said later in 1972, as related in an anecdote written by Gerald Clarke in his biography Capote (2013), “I find such self-deception unpardonable.” The autobiographical material about the part love played in Truman Capote’s life in Other Voices, Other Rooms was hidden in fiction and the author escaped accusations of “narcissism” exactly because his material was considered “immoral” enough for him to — by fictionalizing it — practice a deception on himself and, by extension, his reader. That the fictional and the immoral are close companions can be revealed only when fiction is “narcissistically” confessed to be autobiographical, at which point its writer encounters the double bind of having written not only “immorally” but “badly.”

While the potentially controversial autobiographical subject matter of Other Voices, Other Rooms went under the radar, Truman Capote’s “seductive” author photo appearing, unusually for the time, on the book’s jacket made him instantly recognizable, and caused, wrote his biographer Clarke, “uproar […] He had not foreseen that the picture would overshadow, and in some ways trivialize, the work it was promoting, transforming the real right thing into something that many dismissed as the product of a brilliant publicity campaign.” Clarke relates how Random House’s publicity posters for the book showed the photograph, with the strapline: “This is Truman Capote.”

Capote’s image became his acknowledged avatar, a communiqué from the author that bypassed his work. Another Clarke anecdote goes that, while Capote denied complicity with the campaign in public, he colluded with it enthusiastically in private. In The Words of Selves (2000), Denise Riley wrote: “[M]y self-definition can be a determined appeal for recognition […] In [some] sense it may well be a performative, like a first declaration of love.” Wikipedia puts the date of the “Affective Turn” — the rise of the study of affective theory and emotion in the humanities and sciences — also in the year 2000. In 2015, the star of approval on Twitter turned into the heart of affection. We are no longer giving prizes for writing: what we are giving is (and is for) something else.

I think my metaphor is falling in love. Wait, I didn’t mean metaphor, I meant métier: some kind of work. Of art.

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In 2016, I talked to the American poet Anne Boyer about the regular “suiciding” of her Twitter account. She had, she said, become addicted to self-destruction. She also spoke of the labor of accounting for yourself in writing. In Wages Against Housework (1975), Silvia Federici says:

Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the reduction of wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself.

Or she could have said:

Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which authors express in discussing wages for accounting for yourself stem from the reduction of wages for accounting for yourself to an object, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for accounting for yourself as an object rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself.

In 2016, an author undertakes the labor of self-accounting online. Of course it is possible to avoid self-accounting, just as it would have been possible for Capote, in 1948, to have written a novel that gave an open account of his life, but the demands of contemporary culture weigh against both. On social media authors fake themselves, drawing up accounts of themselves as digital objects, differently from the ways an author-figure can be constructed via the pages of a book. Dyer’s croissants made me and my friend feel cool as readers not only, perhaps, in the sense of being post-morally disengaged from the affective possibilities of the text (its characters, its language) but also in the McLuhanian sense, drawn into a critical game of constructing the author from a series of associated objects across different media, in this case crucially beyond the limits of the text. The game (as Federici says, the “perspective”) seemed the point.

An object in digital programming is not, as Federici puts it “a lump”: it works a bit more like an anecdote. It is a set of data, plus a method. A programmed object is its characteristics, plus how it is used: its data is encapsulated in its functions. Why call it an object at all, why fit it to a figure of speech? Well, programming is semantic. Names are grasping tools, bridging the gap between concept and code, and what they grasp is physical, or so it appears. The language of programming is one of metaphor: its “objects” correspond to things found in the real world. When we think of data + method as a “library,” or a “checkout,” it’s easier to understand, to maintain, to evolve the virtual, but this also means our behaviors are carried over from the meatspace. A programming “object” is a real white elephant in the room, a whatnot, a bibelot, a conversation piece: useless in itself until it demands our response. Its metaphors are social, familial, the stuff of private lives, or anecdote (as in the real world, “inheritance” give rise to a “hierarchy” — behaviors are carried across from one object to all its “relations”). Textual meaning is best located in the author-space into which can be put any number of possible anecdotes (a.k.a. digital objects) hinging on seemingly 3D anecdotal objects such as croissants, teaching suits, and fancy French reds. The burden of fakeness shifts to the reader. Now it is as possible to fall in love with a croissant as a book. And I mean the word “croissant.”

(In the meantime, I would like to read a novel about a toaster.)

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The Italian writer Elena Ferrante does not have an author photo. This is not the same as not having an author photo in 1947, or in 1967. It is her lack of photo that now invites anecdote. To have a biography means you must not account for yourself.

“The anecdote,” said the poet Anne Boyer, when I met her for the first time in the flesh and not on Twitter, in 2016, “resists authority.” Until late 2016, there were no anecdotes about Elena Ferrante, only about readers’ experiences of accounting for Elena Ferrante, including guesses as to her age, sex, nationality, inheritance, hierarchy, and familial and professional relations. Ferrrante was not a “dead” author as she had no public identity from which to “suicide” (the only contemporary option open), and so provided readers with no limit, no ability to mark their fear of love’s proliferation. Given few other objects to work with, readers often tried to identify her by traditional means, via her books, and the accounts she gave, in them, of her characters’ lives. This labor, shifted to the reader, is not in an appeal for recognition by the writer, but marks a corresponding desire, in the reader, to recognize. With books no longer a reliable holding zone for implicit autobiography, Ferrante’s refusal either to admit or hide her “narcissism” shifted the moral burden of creating meaning back to her readers who, once more, were left to attempt to mark their anxiety via the limits of their creation.

“They say it is love,” wrote Silvia Federici in Wages Against Housework. “We say it is unwaged work.”

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Joanna Walsh is a writer, literary journalist, and activist. Her latest books are Seed, and Worlds from the Word’s End.

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