throbbing light machine

Welp - I keep posting these declarations that I'm doing better, and then I don't post again because I don't want to have to eat those words. Not doing better; pretty crazy this last week, maladaptive & panicky. I've got this problem where university stuff (deadlines, expectations, evaluations) makes me crazy, and my crazy makes me not good at university work, which feeds the crazy even more. I think I'm going to see if I can get permission to take my prospectus defense in the fall, instead of 3 May when it's currently scheduled, because I'm driving myself to distraction with panic over it; note that I have still not pulled it together enough to tell my advisor this, being vastly ashamed of my own inability to overcome my crazy. I did tell my father, though, which is almost harder for me.

It's Wednesday, so now that I've depressed myself let me talk about what I'm reading. I rbrought Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs to class today for a student who turned up absent, so I spent most of my office hours rereading it myself. I really, really dislike the judgmental quality of Levy's prose, but do find myself in accordance with her upset at the empornification of contemporary feminism - although I feel like growing up in fandom, and pretty isolated from mainstream pornography and raunch culture, gives me something of an oddball perspective of the issue, because for me porn is associated primarily with freedom from the male gaze and the need to please it. I've also been working through Rachel Ablow's The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Marriage Plot, which is super interesting but also somehow disappointing. Ablow argues that Victorian novels function as wives, teaching good moral and sympathetic values; but there is, I think, a more radical question to be taken up about the emotional nature of that sort of teaching work - what's the difference between a gentle maternal spoon-feeding of sympathetic values, Dickens style, and more Brontean demands for recognition and valuation whether the reader wants to or not. And then I also, because I was feeling sad and wanted to turn it into angry because angry feels stronger to me right now, picked up Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth - and because it fascinates me the same way Dune used to, where I feel like there's something big and important and flawed and fascinating in it that's just out of my reach.

As you can tell from the promiscuity of this reading list, I've been feeling narrowed down and understimulated - my brain is full of the nineteenth century and nothing else, and I don't think it's doing my particular brand of obsessively anxious crazy any good. So I'm trying to feed it some different stuff - and I wanted to ask the math&science-savvy among you for book or - ideally! - documentary recommendations. Not too jargony, not too sexist? I could go back and rewatch the old Nova specials that I was obsessed with as a kid, but somehow it seems like a bad idea to spend too much time poring over science that's nearly thirty years out of date!

My brain feels narrowed down and

Good maude today was a long day. Warm and rainy, and dark - I really, really didn't want to get out of bed this morning. Then, teaching, which today involved analyzing lynching postcards. Sometimes I wonder if my practice of building my syllabi out of objects that have haunted and/or traumatized me is a good idea.

But I was a good girl and went to a feminist candidate search lecture this afternoon all the same. And now, I suppose, I'd best get back to wading through Ruskin apologetics. I get that Kate Millett's positions on him could use some nuance, but does all post-1970 feminist writing on the guy have to center on how he's feminized himself and also look how much power he gives women he makes them ~QUEENS~ of their own gardens?

ERNEST. Must we go, then, to Art for everything?

GILBERT. For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. This results not merely from the fact that nothing that one can imagine is worth doing, and that one can imagine everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like the forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy. One can feel so much, and no more. And how can it matter with what pleasure life tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one’s soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed one has found the true secret of joy, and wept away one’s tears over their deaths who, like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio, can never die?

ERNEST. Stop a moment. It seems to me that in everything that you have said there is something radically immoral.

GILBERT. All art is immoral.

ERNEST. All art?

GILBERT. Yes. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organisation of life that we call society. Society, which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each of its citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the common weal, and toil and travail that the day’s work may be done. Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas ‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another. They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk. Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious. But some one should teach them that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.

Oh my god, you guys, I just finished reading through Freud's "Dora" case history in full, and I don't think I'll ever feel clean again. I knew there was some bad shit behind this one - I read about it when I was researching psychoanalytic perspectives on father-daughter incest for a paper on the Donkeyskin fairy tales - but I wasn't prepared for just how horribly obvious it would be that Freud was denying this girl's experience of rape and using her to flatter his own egotism, as well as to bolster his psychiatric career.

She's eighteen, she says she was propositioned, touched, kissed, by a friend of her father's. She's close to her daddy; he denies her rape, says she's making it all up. He brings her to Freud; Freud determines that she wanted to fuck the friend, that she wants to fuck her daddy, that she wants to fuck Freud himself, and that she masturbates. Also, he decides that she's abnormal for reacting to a man's advance with repulsion, even though she didn't ask for it, didn't consent to it, didn't want it. It's sickening. Utterly utterly sick. I want to scream and yell and punch something and rend him limb from limb and just. Can I kill them all, please.

I ... kind of don't know what to do with the mass of my own anger and repulsion. I've also got "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" on my list, and I've read a lot of that one and know I like it better, know it's one of the ones where Freud is more smart than stupid, but I don't think I can keep reading him right now. If I hadn't been reading on my computer, if I'd had a book, I think I might have torn it down the middle.

I kind of actually want to go buy a copy so I can do just that. Instead I'm going to go read Toril Moi's critique of the case history for some second-hand cleansing and catharsis.

I just finished the 2011 Great Expectations miniseries, because fuck if I'm rereading Dickens, y'all - and, tangentially, oh my god Gillian Anderson makes the most luminously wonderful Miss Havisham in the entire world, I am sorry for the Victorian Era because they did not get to see her performing this role, oh my god oh my god - but, what I actually came here to say was this:

Avengers AU.

So Steve Rogers is this scrawny little working-class kid - is this a no powers AU? I think it is, but could be convinced otherwise - and Nick Fury washes up in the marshes and of course little Steve brings him meat pie as well as the requested file, of course he does. And then Steve's parents send him to Stark House, where the eccentric heartless (rich) gentleman Howard Stark needs someone for his little Tony to practice breaking hearts on. And Steve thinks all these gifts he's getting are Stark tech, but it's all actually being channeled through Mr. Shield the lawyer by Fury, who's still hiding out in Australia. Howard's an unfeeling asshole, nothing new there, and he's training Tony to be a slick amoral bastard just like him, and little Tony is this halfpint with big eyes who's trying really really hard to be a bully but he's just no good at it and it doesn't take very long before Steve starts seeing through him and asking if he's ever lonely and not caring when Tony sharpens his tongue on him.

And Steve grows into a young man of Great Expectations, and (with the help of some sort of gift from his benefactor?) gets much less scrawny, and he's convinced that he's meant to marry Tony, but Tony goes with idk Ty Stone instead, and Steve's shocked when it turns out the gifts were from Fury all along.

... hang on, did I just make Nick Fury Tony's biodad? It is too late at night for this, clearly, so I'mma hit post now.

I've picked up Charlotte Brontë's The Professor half a dozen times since high school, but never managed to finish it before. (The first chapter is very dull, and also I'm not sure one could read it successfully without knowing a little French, which until recently I did not.) And, indeed, I could scarcely finish it now. Only the expedient of my exam list got me through. Because oh, I found it so inexpressibly painful, uncomfortable, and generally pitiful that reading it physically hurt.

This is the first book she tried to publish, before Jane Eyre. She plundered it later to write Villette, and the novel itself was published posthumously in 1857 by her husband. The weird - and painful - thing about it, though, is that it's Villette from the other side. The pov character, the "I," is the brusque older male teacher, and through his first-person narration you watch him falling in love with the shy, clever, poor, plain, young female instructor.

And it's - it's impossible not to read the biographical in here, but - it's watching this young writer trying to write herself as lovable, especially knowing that in life, the beloved object didn't return her passion, that's so absolutely excruciating. The point of view is strangely attenuated - it keeps stretching out to encompass the girl-lover's feelings and impressions, which of course Charlotte knows, but I also feel that in the scenes of classroom instruction there's something in Charlotte that delights in inhabiting such an absolute position of disdainful masculine superiority, in tearing down the stupid vain girls and patronizing the prim schoolmistresses. Of course her analog-character never does this, but is meek and quiet, but in the same way that Agnes Grey clearly draws on a personal experience with childcare, so The Professor draws on Charlotte's own experience as a teacher.

The whole thing is really making me crave Snape/Hermione fic.

John Stuart Mill on the tone argument, from 1869:

"Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent....

With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions."

If he gets it, that far back, why in infinite hells is it so hard for us to grasp this principle nowadays?

I am safely transported & tucked in to the lakeshore in Michigan City - I went swimming yesterday, even though the water temp is still hovering just under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, because I needed to be in the Big Water and also that's just how I roll.

Disappointingly, missed passing the Spanish proficiency test by a single point; will retake in August, shouldn't be too much of a problem, I've already googled up correct answers to three questions I was unsure of, and the test given hasn't changed in like forty years.

At some point during this week I'mma go see The Avengers in the cinema, because they'll screen it for non-3D-enabled persons here. The cam dl is simply not enough, I need to see my babies large as life and twice as beautiful.

Am reading Mary Barton. It's all right, I guess, but I haven't managed to get any more pleasure out of it than that sort of pleasant meandering boredom that long realist nineteenth-century novels so often produce.

... fuck, Thomas Carlyle, I'm not really having any trouble figuring out why the fascists liked you so much. Yadda yadda great men this, yadda yadda great men that, kneejerk universalism, Progress-with-a-capital-P, and an amazingly casual ability to dimiss other cultures or moments as "stupid." I hate having to deal with discourse; counterdiscourse is almost always so much shinier. But such is the life of the exam-preparer, or so I'm told. Bloody discourse. And the retrograde ones are always longwinded, have you ever noticed that?

In other news, the X-Files! So somewhere toward the end of the third season it stops being a show and becomes a Show. It's like they suddenly figured out what it was for. Which is interesting timing; usually that sort of thing happens in the second season or not at all, from what I can see. Also, 4.04? Hello hometown! Although wow that episode is really not set in Traverse City, Michigan even a little bit. Even at all.

I'm reading James Eli Adams' book A History of Victorian Literature - exams approach apace - and thinking about a conversation I had with my mama over holiday about history and social justice. Neither of my parents quite understand how they came to raise a Victorianist. I think papa was hoping for a philosopher or a mediaevalist, and mama for a poet. And mama was asking me why, if I was bent on doing this feminism thing, I'd choose such a repressive era. (Oh, historiomythic accounts of the nineteenth century!)

Adams articulates, in his introduction, something that I tried to point out to her (though with less rhetorical aptitude): "Much of the elaborate etiquette that we think of as distinctly Victorian – rituals of introduction, calling cards, the chaperoning of unmarried women, intricate decorums of dress – is at root a strategy for coping with social mobility, by affirming one’s own claims to recognition while at the same time maintaining a distance that allows one to “place” new acquaintances (Davidoff 1973). The Victorian novel developed into a form uniquely suited to represent these dynamics, capturing the textures of social interaction, aspiration, and anxiety, within which social hierarchy could seem both a stimulus and a barrier to personal achievement" (&). This seems really key to me: the moment when society pushes hardest on the brake has to also be the moment when everything is already different, and folk just haven't figured out how to deal with it yet.

Which, actually, gives me some hope for the present political scene. This much repression must mean that, somewhere down deep, we're doing something right.

Tangential, but not unconnected: I have a politics question for those of y'all who inhabit the United Kingdom. I have a feeling that the very simplistic definitions of "whig" and "tory" I've hacked together aren't capturing the entire social context. In my own milieu I can trace all the strands of culture and lifetyle that make up US Republicans and Democrats, even down to breaking each group into a number of subsets: Repubs = Boston Brahmins, The One Percent, Rural Racists, Christian Evangelicals, ect. But I can't seem to get a real grip on Whigs and Tories. I'm guessing they don't just simply map onto US political categories, amirite? How do you understand those terms/groups/identities?