lotesse: (feminism_writtenonthebody)
I owe some back-comments, but as I seem to be getting sick y'all just get linkspam today.

on #yestogayYA, [personal profile] via_ostiense, Just Buy More Books!: a timely critique of systems of capitalism & consumption that underlie this whole imbroglio

at [community profile] chromatics, Four artworks of Sekhmet: because awesome lion-goddesses = never not good

over at The Chronicle, an article on On Shame in Academic Writing

and a bloody fascinating piece on tarot-reading: The Querent
lotesse: (porn)
For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.
lotesse: (academia)
So I was sure when I got a snotty email in my inbox, sent from one of my professors to the entire class, banging on about the use of "they" as a generic pronoun rather than "he," and calling the entire thing a grammatical error - the best part was when he lamented that soon the war would be "lost," and we wouldn't be able to enforce patriarchy on our own students - that if I was not the main target I was at least included. I'm the most vocal feminist in the class, certainly. And so I was sure that I'd be marked down, and I was sort of bracing myself to write letters and possibly contest the grade if that bit of sexist pedantry was my only sin - and then I opened my grades, and the bastard gave me an A. He never gives As! Sir, I'm confused.
lotesse: (myth)
Heard the most fantastic lecture last night from Marina Warner, whose book From the Beast to the Blonde I had a passionate love affair with some years back. She talked about Freud's Smyrna Rug, and the Arabian Nights, and the connections between dreaming and sex and storytelling and psychic healing.

I fangirled at her briefly after; I totally want to be her when I grow up.
lotesse: (vindicate)
I had a jonah week of it this last - too many readings that made me feel angry, attacked, policed, chastised for my politics and for the way I want my politics to interact with my scholarship. (One of my classes is stuck on surface vs. symptomatic reading, and neither camp seems to speak for me, or in any way that I find useful. it's been very irritating.)

But - blessedly! - I get to read Virginia Woolf for next week. It's been so soothing, so comforting. Reading her makes me cry - I weep with her, but I also weep because it feels so good to have her state, with her own inimitable grace, the truths that I hold most dear. She gives me solid ground to stand on, and as grad school thus far has been an exercise in painful attempted destabilization, I felt pathetically grateful to come back to her.

Three Guineas has new resonance for me this time around, now that I've moved up a layer in the academic establishment. And this long passage in particular made me weep and sigh and cheer, rather embarrassingly as I was reading in the grad student work room:

*

'But it is also plain that outsiders who find you thus occupied must ask themselves, when they receive a request for a contribution towards rebuilding your college, Shall I send it or shan’t I? If I send it, what shall I ask them to do with it? Shall I ask them to rebuild the college on the old lines? Or shall I ask them to rebuild it, but differently? Or shall I ask them to buy rags and petrol and Bryant & May’s matches and burn the college to the ground?

‘These are the questions, Madam, that have kept your letter so long unanswered. They are questions of great difficulty and perhaps they are useless questions. But can we leave them unasked in view of this gentleman’s questions? He is asking how can we help him to prevent war? He is asking us how we can help him to defend liberty; to defend culture? Also consider these photographs: they are pictures of dead bodies and ruined houses. Surely in view of these questions and pictures you must consider very carefully before you begin to rebuild your college what is the aim of education, what kind of society, what kind of human being it should seek to produce. At any rate I will only send you a guinea with which to rebuild your college if you can satisfy me that you will use it to produce the kind of society, the kind of people that will help to prevent war.

Read more... )
lotesse: (btvs_sarcastic)
Just got through an almost painfully enraging class - working through an essay that argues for the freedom from the ethical imperative to act on knowledge. By reading lyric poems. Gah. Because the feelings of the poor woobie men who can't decide if the Other has a soul or not are obviously the most important thing ever, and we need to devote our lives to talking about them, and progressive scholarship is overly heroic and whatever.

I don't feel like I have freedom from that ethical imperative. I can't imagine wanting it. You're supposed to care about other people's pain and/or existence, fuckheads.

If I ever show signs of turning into that kind of literary critic - if I ever put aesthetic modernist masculinist concerns over work against oppression, over compassion and awareness that other people have feelings too - shoot me please?
lotesse: (academia)
Ugh. I'm at once immensely tired of my coursework, and feeling really unprepared for the end of term. I keep psyching myself out over not much really, but somehow since it's grad school it feels like it's all Important and Hard and Scary.

The ideal length of time for a class is an interesting question - I was talking to someone in my cohort about how our 14/15 week semester feels too long to me, and she said that on the contrary, she'd really prefer at least 17 weeks. I think I'd like 11/12, a little longer than my undergrad trimesters, but still brief enough to never turn into a slog.
lotesse: (feminism - Buffy)
Two things that got me out of my black mood -

1. Patricia Hill Collins. I think the mess yesterday hit me harder than usual because I'd just been really grappling for the first time with Foucault and postmodern despair. I'd just come out of a classroom session that was very heavy on the nothing is possible, everything is coopted end of deconstructionism, and everything that was happening seemed to me to be only demonstrating the proof of that. Depressing. But - god, I don't know where I'd be without the power of Black feminism. Hill Collins has an absolutely gorgeous critique of the postmodern edifice - one of those readings which in retrospect seems so clear, so obvious - in her book "Fighting Words." The relevant chapter is "What's Going On? Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Postmodernism," and the whole thing is almost available on GoogleBooks here. It's worth a read - I really wish someone had handed it to me before the four hundred pages of Foucault.

2. This morning, for totally unfun class-related reasons, I found myself on the front page of the Project Muse journal database. And I saw this image:



looking up at me from the new arrivals section. I'd heard that the issue existed, and I'd actually read some of the articles all ready, but I hadn't heard about the cover. To see that lovely still - a still from a fanvid! - representing me, us, in all our nerdy and bespectacled glory, made me absolutely gasp. Congrats to everyone who printed in the issue - I'm going to hunt it down this afternoon in the Uni library, because I really want to hold a hard copy in my hands of this - an academic journal, in a University library, with a still from a fanvid on the front cover. Just. wow.

Aug. 25th, 2009 02:53 pm
lotesse: (literature - Victorian)
In just a few minutes, I'm off to the first orientation/ meet and greet of my graduate program. And I still kind of can't believe that this is happening.

I agonized so much, last year, the year before, about getting into school. I didn't go home for Christmas, and filled out applications instead. I was so afraid, and so miserable - and I was so thrown last year, when my first round of applications didn't get me in anywhere. I know that the first real rejection had to come some time, but it was a blow, one that I think I'm still recovering from.

The uni I'm starting at this week rejected me, that first time. It's funny the way things go.

But I'm so glad to be in a program, so glad to be in this program - mainly, glad to be safe in an institution with a place laid by for me for at least the next six years. The outside world was starting to get awfully close, and it's scary out there. I'm so grateful that the thing that I happen to be good at has so much infrastructure already set up for those of us who want to get in - otherwise, I don't know what I'd do.

Here goes nothing. Second star to the right, and then straight on till morning.

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