(Illustration from Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest.)

Saturday, October 20, 2001
 
 
Grrr. Last post lost when I was concomitantly downloading Shockwave and it started installing itself without giving me a chance to quit out of other programs. Whatever. Wasn't saying anything worth keeping anyways.

The weather has been gorgeous here the last few days. I'm sitting inside my office right now with the shades mostly drawn, but the sun still peeks through. It's such a happy feeling. The sun has been shining so brightly, but temperatures have stayed comfortably in the sixties and seventies. The leaves are a beautiful mixture of greens to reds, with the breeze blowing ever so softly through the shedding trees. (I was thinking about a post I made about a year ago about the swirling yellows, oranges, and reds of the leaves on the sunlight-mottled street as cars flashed by. I guess I've been at this blogging thing for a little over a year now. That's the longest continuous stretch of time I've written in a journal. Go me!)

I got the [Gorillaz] cd yesterday. I'm not quite sure why. I like the fact that they're a cartoon band. I'm not sure what to think about them overall, though. There seems to be some sort of racial-play, too -- and I can't tell if they're people consciously playing with stereotypes of Asians, blacks, latinos, etc.

***

I thought [David Eng's] talk on Thursday afternoon was very interesting. It was titled, "Queer Diasporas/Psychic Diasporas: Structures of Kinship in Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together." I like what he's trying to do, thinking about the psychic and affective dimensions of racialization. I think he gets a lot of criticism for taking up the language of psychoanalysis, but I think he is very conscious of what he is doing and very aware that psychoanalytic discourse is traditionally very problematic in its conceptions of homosexuality and race. But anyways, I can't say that I really understand all the nuances of his argument or how he is making an intervention specifically into a traditionally materialist-based analysis of Asian American studies. Maybe I'll try to e-mail him. But how likely would it be for him to respond?

In his talk, Eng described the two main characters of Happy Together as men who refigure each other as mother-figures in the Oedipal scheme of socialization. The movie is notable for the absence of mothers (and women in general). Rather than rely on the specifics of the Oedipus Complex, Eng sees the underlying dynamics of loss, rejection, and re-socialization of the Complex as an appropriate structure in thinking about how Lai and Ho (the two men) relate to one another and ultimately move away from one another. Very interesting idea...

 
Thursday, October 18, 2001
 
 
Can you tell I'm finally on Fall Break?
 
 
[Ascending Peculiarity], Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey.

Here is Gorey in his own words, ruminating on everything from French symbolist poetry to soap operas, from George Balanchine and the unique beauty of ballet to Victorian photographs of dead children. We meet the artist in his ramshackle book-lined studio in Manhattan and his equally bizarre house on Cape Cod. We listen as he describes his legendary upbringing and vast range of influences, as well as how he managed to work amid all his cats.

***

['Ascending Peculiarity': How Gorey Became Gorey]

"The artist and author of more than 100 meticulously hand-lettered, intricately rendered little books had to all intents and purposes become one of his own drawings."

 
 
What was I expecting? After all, Superman is the ultimate protector of the "American" way, the modern hero whose deeds establish him as the perfect man of his adopted country. But I was disappointed by the first episode of [Smallville], the new WB show about Clark Kent's life before he became Superman. I'm also not sure what to make of the modern update of the story. This high-school freshman (ha, the actor is like, 25?) Clark Kent lives in the present, albeit still in rural Smallville. I guess it's the show's way of trying to bring the idea of a superhero like Superman into the 21st Century. Do we really need such a hero now?

What disappointed me about the show was the insistence on Clark Kent's wanting to be "normal." And while I understand that's a common trope for TV shows set in high school (including the first seasons of Buffy), I thought Clark would be more aware of the problems of a "normal" culture that defines itself by excluding others. And yet, he wants to join the football team. He wants to be a jock so he can be with Lana, the cheerleader. It's all so "all-American." And utterly uninteresting. Still, there is some hope for the show for me. Obviously, Clark will have to come to terms with his outsider-ness. He's just learned he's an alien, after all. And he seems to have known always that he has these superpowers.

 
 
Yesterday morning I dropped my comb into the toilet. It was a very disturbing moment in my usual morning rush. Not that I do much in terms of hair care, but I had just in the past week started combing my hair because it's finally long enough to run a comb through. And then to have to fish out the comb from the toilet . . . it went straight into the waste basket.

Watched [Wong Kar-Wai's] Happy Together again last night at a screening in advance of [David Eng's talk] on the film.. There was so much in it that I didn't remember . . . Such an amazing movie. The strange thing is that I haven't been much impressed by Wong Kar-Wai's other films. But this one -- likely because of the central gay love story -- just makes me want to cry. I just bought the dvd, too, even though I don't yet have a dvd player. I figure I can force people I know with dvd players to watch it this way. And I can watch it at school.

I'm thinking about doing an independent study with [Tyler Curtain] on legal understandings of sexual orientation. I know that's a really broad topic at the moment, but I know next to nothing about how the law understands sexual orientation / identity / actions. I want to figure out what allows sodomy laws are still "on the books" in so many states, for example. I want to understand why and how discrimination against gays is legal (in the Boy Scouts, the military, etc.). What got me thinking about these things is the little I've read in Critical Race Theory, a legal discourse, largely marginal, that critiques the limitations of rights laws in regards to race (and gender). It got me to thinking about the possibility (or redundance?) of something that might be called Critical Queer Theory. One confusing thing is that I think so many people outside of the law (like me?) have taken up the term "Critical Race Theory" as any theorization of race and discrimination. I want to delve into CRT and understand specifically the goals and issues of CRT in the legal context -- the problems legal scholars of color face when thinking about race in the law -- as opposed to a general critique of racial discrimination. And then I want to see if there could be something similar done with thinking about sexual orientation.

The "queer theory" part, of course, comes in both in a particular understanding of sexual deviance as something more than identity and as a conscious (and conscientious) stance against the normalization and policing of sexual and other behavior. Because what I've seen so far of legal discourses of difference and discimination is kind of disturbing -- in order to be protected under the law from discrimination, you have to argue that you are bound by immutable characteristics. Even the term sexual "orientation" falls into this kind of thinking, a move away from the term sexual "preference" (which I prefer). Talk of homosexuality seems largely to have shifted away from a choice, a desire, and to an unchangeable, biological essence or trait. Why is that a problem, you might be asking? It isn't necessarily, except when that "essence" has been distilled, isolated, fixed -- and then what we have again is another site of the normalization of identity and actions. And again, there will be people who fall outside those definitions, more vilification, etc. What needs to happen is a shift in how we understand these things -- a focus, perhaps, on what constitutes desire, agency, will, consent . . . But I know these are difficult concepts, always easily convertible into their opposites. (I just read some of Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection in which she discusses how female slaves were both willing to have sex with their masters -- they are insatiable creatures of lust -- and utterly lacking in will or agency -- so they couldn't possibly have been raped because rape implies lack of consent.)

Anyways, if any of you lawyers or anyone else has any ideas on how to help me define my project, please drop me a [line]!

 
Wednesday, October 17, 2001
 
 
[Our First Line of Defense]. Laurie Garrett on the public health system. Heard her give an apocalyptic talk on bioterrorism back in the spring of 2000. She doesn't see a very effective public health system in place to deal with epidemics. She differentiates the public health system from medical responses and political responses. I think I agree with her that knee-jerk reactions to bioterrorism could have wild consequences, but I don't quite understand what an adequate public health system would entail. Mostly I think my problem is not understanding the specifics of the public health system. Understandably, though, in light of Garrett's argument about the lack of attention paid to the system by the general public, medical practitioners, and politicians alike.
 
 
 
 
I. Totally. Totally. Give. Up.
 
Tuesday, October 16, 2001
 
 
So Joe and I rented a movie to watch for the first time in a months. Unfortunately, we didn't pick a very good movie. We saw [Gypsy Boys]. It was a very trite presentation of gay men looking for love in the bar scene. I'm confused by the use of the word "gypsy" in the title, though. I don't recall the word being developed much (if at all) in the film, and so I'm kind of wary of the gesture towards the racialized type of gypsy-wanderer as analogy for wandering-in-love gay men. [One] of the actors was really cute, though, and as Joe pointed out, he was really the only good actor in the movie. The others played like played-out stereotypes of bitchy queens, arrogant attractive guys, and deceiving manipulators. (I think the imdb.com review describes the acting as "soap opera" level.)

I'm usually not impressed by movies about the "guys looking for love in the gay bar/club scene" anyways. But it does seem to be the kind of life some people lead, at least. I can't understand why people can reconcile the sexually free space of bars and clubs with their romantic ideals of monogamous coupledom. I have a friend in NYC who consistently goes to gay clubs, hooks up with guys, and then laments the inconstancy of their "love." Look, they were there to have fun and hook up. It doesn't mean they're bad people. It doesn't mean sex is bad. But it just isn't the place people really imagine as the meeting ground of future husbands. At least not in my perspective. And if it is, not in the way of random hook-ups -- possibly through chains of friends, meeting new people through your friends and your friends' friends as you bump into each other.

 
Monday, October 15, 2001
 
 
[Daffy Duck]

It's no wonder Daffy Duck has a split personality. In his early years, Daffy was manic, explosive, and unpredictable, engaging in adventures that seemed outlandish even to him. As his personality gained depth at the hands of Warner Bros. cartoons' directors, the little black duck became more self-analytical, competitive, peevish, paranoid, and neurotic. Eventually, Daffy found himself more and more at the mercy of a universe that seemed to favor everyone but him. So why do audiences love him? Despite his failures, Daffy, like the Greek hero Sisyphus, is a victim of injustice who continuously protests. And it's his refusal to surrender his will to the whims of the conspiring universe that makes him heroic. How could one not feel sorry for an ill-equipped duck with Daffy's voice that just can't seem to get a break? At least Daffy aims high. And when he fails, he resets the bar . . . even higher.
 
Sunday, October 14, 2001
 
 
"The Clash of Ignorance" by Edward Said

A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."
 
 
I love the driving rain outside. I love the sound of the raindrops falling on trees, on gravel, on pavement, on cars. I especially loved driving in the rain, coming back from a professor's house. I felt enclosed by the rain, a haze of whiteness hanging on the ground from so much rain falling, bouncing off the ground, kicked up by cars. The rain is oddly comforting. Despite the dangers of driving in such weather, I felt safe; it felt like my sadness was alternately so trivial in the grand scheme of things and that the world was mirroring my feelings.

Now in my warm, dry apartment, I have the music up high. It drowns out the sound of rain outside. And sometimes I turn it off and just listen to the rain. The whistle on my kettle calls to me. I make some coffee. It's sort of dark outside, though night has not truly fallen yet. I want to be in a small circle of light, just enough for me to read and sip my coffee.

 
 
I'm aware that there's a sense of superiority in the Brontës' attitudes towards their pupils, but I can't help but feel similar resentments and frustrations in my situation as a teacher. In her novel, The Professor, Charlotte Brontë presents a [passage] describing a young woman's difficulties with being a teacher. And I couldn't help but feel that the description could very well describe how I feel about myself and my students. It's about something fundamental to pedagogy -- the relation between teacher and students. What characterizes that relationship? Is it about power, domination, submission? Is it about indoctrination or enlightenmnet? What is it that we teach (facts, skills, ideas, modes of thinking, . . . )? And the difficulty is that there is no simple answer. Teaching is always all of these things and more, paradoxically encompassing contradictory notions in its nebulous relations.

And like many other people, I am fascinated by the biography of the Brontës. The three sisters who each went off to take positions as governesses in houses, as teachers in schools, or abroad as students in a foreign country -- all returning dissatisfied with and unnerved by the outside world. I think about how much I want just to withdraw from things, to return to isolation. To live apart from others, content in reading and writing for myself. But then I think, how selfish that seems . . .

 
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