It was totally fricking hot and humid last night, and while I went out intending to repeat my crazy-dancing-like-a-fool Thursday night action, the heat (and rather ordinary floor) disuaded me. I ended up hanging out with Bert*, who’s not been out dancing in FAR TOO LONG.
We are stunt buddies from way back (remind me to tell you about the time we convinced a group of Taswegians we were professional stuntmen/women. Truly. And the best bit was that we look like people who like to prop up bars. Because we do), and while we’re both a little out of condition, we decided the front stairs of Forever Dance have gone too long without our attention. My describing pakour in great detail only encouraged our belief in our own abilities.
Unfortunately, we discovered it’s been a bit of a while since we were in proper stunt condition. Coming down the first half of the stairs on my chest/shoulders/back I realised I had no actual control and was actually falling down the stairs. I decided I’d quit while was ahead – a bit of carpet burn and a slight scare was enough. I was also a little put off by the way the carpet grit was clinging attractively to my supersweaty skin.
But, as Bert has pointed out on prior stunt occasions, stunts aren’t for babies.
So we tried a little pakour, using available resources (mostly just two hand rails down the stairs, a couple of door knobs and a side table). Despite our clear ‘thinking like a child’ skills, we failed to anything other than very B-grade traceurs. Unfortunately Bert’s recent intensive spate in musical theatre** has served him up an order of pointed-toes and glamour-arms. And my recent spate of uninterrupted gluttony and sloth has gone some way in reducing my aerodynamicness. I also found that pakour + serious heat and humidity + laughing uproariously at oneself = difficulty breathing.
The most important thing we learnt last night was that pakour goes far better if you shout “Pakour!” as you throw yourself into the air.
*Bert watches old 20s/30s/40s comedy films to rip off stunts – he’s into things like Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the three stooges, etc.
**He really has been doing musical theatre. I was very disappointed when his brush with drag queening was necessarily brief – only one scene in Shout. I had high costuming hopes.
she’s a freakin’ gun
Apparently Sylvia Sykes is coming to Sydney (and Perth – but that’s far away) in February (23rd, 24th and 25th to be exact). That’s a bit exciting. I’m seriously considering going, and trying desperately to find a way to afford it.
See this clip below? That’s Manu (my lead-hero and one of my favourite teachers) dancing with her in a Jack and Jill in 2002. In a J&J you’re paired up with a partner on the spot – so it’s all improvised, all made up, and you often don’t know your partner or have never danced with them before (though in a pro J&J, that’s not always the case. Pro J&J’s are really good fun to watch. See Manu’s response to discovering he’s dancing with Sylvia? That’s how everyone would feel – this chick’s a freakin’ gun.
Sylvia is one of the original revivalist dancers, a serious balboa specialist (check her out here, dancing balboa with the partner who’s coming to Australia with her) and all round blow-your-pants-off amazing dancer. She is a Hollywood style lindy hopper (or was – now she’s just dah bomb), and I amn’t, but I’m really keen on learning from her. When she writes on her site that she is a ‘teacher’s teacher’, it’s true – she’s the person teachers learn from. There’s been a ripple of interest all over Melbourne, and even hardcore un-balboa people are interested. Even Frankie* wants to dance with her.
Thing is, watching her, you mightn’t think she was all that, especially compared to the flashier, younger doods. But she’s a crafts(wo)man. That’s some freakin’ amazing technical action.
*Frankie Manning is in his 90s now (!!!). He’s one of the most famous choreographers/dancers/performers from the 30/40s and you can see him in Hellzapoppin’ (in the routine he choreographed – I think he did… I forget…) in a pair of overalls. He likes the ladies.
Sometimes when I’m thinking ‘dang, I’m too old for this lindy shit’, I think of Frankie and realise I have about 60 years to go before I can claim I’m too old for lindy. And even then…
…I have to add, all the clips in this post feature unchoreographed dancing… Sylvia is just following, and following three blokes with completely different styles.
the thought of dancing in the third person
If you drop in over here, you’ll see that things are sounding a lot like a whole lot of swing dancers with too little to occupy their immediate attention.
I have only two things to add:
1. I wrote my thesis in the first person and began each chapter with an anecdote, not to mention peppering the whole thing with talk about me. This is partly because I was actually spending a bit of time talking about how to do research as scholar-fan (to use Matt Hills’ term)/member of the community you’re researching. But mostly it was because I am a hopeless narcissist. It simply became ridiculous to write about this stuff without the first person – imagine all this in not-first-person (apologies – this is from a not-final-draft):
My earliest experience with swing dance was framed by university culture. As the social convenor for my postgraduate association in 1999, I was asked to organise a group expedition to a local venue that featured a live jazz band and swing dance classes. I fell instantly in love. Moving to Melbourne in 2001 for postgraduate study, I found the local swing dance community offered a natural complement to the work and culture of academic life, and quickly became a ‘serious dancer’. Five years later, I am well familiar with ‘the zone’ and all its attractions, have devoted countless hours and dollars to its pursuit, and become firmly entangled in both the local and international swing dance community. This doctoral thesis signals not only the completion of years of academic study in cultural studies and media studies, but also my critical engagement with a community and hobby which has played such a large part in my life.
During my time in the swing dancing community, my interest has frequently been arrested by:
1) the encouragement and embodiment of traditional gender roles and social relations in the dance;
2) the ways in which these embodied dance practices and representations of identity are managed by communications media and technology; and
3) by the discursive activities of institutions and organisations within the community.
I am continually surprised by the way traditional gender roles are enforced in contemporary swing dance culture, despite the more liberal examples offered by the African American history of swing dances. I am also struck by the capitalist nature of contemporary swing dance culture articulated by dance schools and institutions, again, despite the social history of African American vernacular dance. These issues have led me to a more comprehensive research project where I asked how embodied dance practice in this community have been mediated by technology and institutions, and what are the effects of this mediation?
Much of what I have observed in terms of media practice in contemporary swing dance culture echoes the literature dealing with media fandom in cultural studies. In this small community of interest, members adopt active and creative approaches to texts and discourse, routinely poaching ideas and structures from official discourses and media texts to create new creative works. Fan studies offers me a means by which to approach my research, not only in terms of theoretical frameworks, but also in terms of considering my role as a researcher who is also a member of the community I am studying. Despite my interest in media use within this community, swing dancers are, above all else, dancers, engaged in embodied discourse and cultural practice, always with an eye to social engagement with other dancers.
A large part of the introduction, from which this bit was taken, is devoted to my figuring out how to talk about and write about a community of which I am a part. I did try writing in the not-first-person. It was mostly ok until I started trying to talk about what it felt like to actually dance. Then it just got dumb.
In fact, one of the major arguments in my work is that the divide between performer and audience in concert dance is a marker of middle class Anglo ideological stuff.
Here’s some stuff from the paper I’m trying to write writing.
African American vernacular dance of the swing era, with its emphasis on improvisation and the creative contribution of individual dancers, rather than the prioritisation of choreographed performances and of choreographers as orchestrating artists, presents a public discourse that demands individual contributions. Social standing is assured by the ability to produce improvised or innovative new steps or variations on familiar steps, making public contributions to public discourse, representing the self in community discourse. A popular phrase in contemporary swing dance culture, shouted to encourage dancers in competitions or in jams or battles on the social dance floor, epitomises this notion: “Bring it!†And what is being brought to this discourse is an authentic or convincing self. Make it real or dance real feelings (whether these are anger or joy or derision or ironic humour), or stay off the floor.
…and then…
Ward makes this distinction: “there is a categorical divide between dancers and the audience in performance dance …that does not exist between dancers and spectators in social dance, where those roles are interchangeable†(18). I read this dynamic relationship between the roles of ‘spectator’ and ‘dancer’ in social or vernacular dance as a clear example of the ways in which readers participate in the making of meaning in textual interpretation. Thomas DeFrantz describes the call-and-response between performers and audiences in African American music and dance in “Believe the Hype”, arguing that this structure is carried on into other media forms, and he takes music video and film as his key examples.
In the case of dance, the text is a dance, or a dancer’s body, or just ‘dancing’, and the reader makes meaning through reading this text not only as a spectator, but also through their knowledge as dancers. This ability to make meaning even from unfamiliar choreography is facilitated by the cultural knowledge of movement that we all learn as social beings within a community. We know that this is dance, we recognise it as such in this moment, because we have danced, we have seen dance before. We have occupied and are occupying the roles of spectator and performer and are culturally familiar with this as dance.
I can promise you only that more quotes from my thesis will be forthcoming. No one will ever read the bloody thing if I don’t, and fuck, we endorse strutting in our house.
I will also, no doubt, continue to quote from papers until I get them under control. I am working at home, alone, and don’t see another acka type person more than once or twice a semester. This is the online equivalent of talking to yourself.
But, wait, my second thing:
2) If the first person is using ‘I’ and the third person is saying things like “dogpossum disapproves of most things” and “today dogpossum will take her tea at her desk, though she will consider wearing pants so as to avoid unfortunate scorchings”, what’s the second person? Is it (to make oh, perhaps another quote from a little thing I’ve just finished)…
In the zone, you respond without thinking, your senses taken up by the music, by your partner and by your own emotional responses in a state or way of being that can only be described as – thinking with the body.
???
I think this is the sort of question that &Duck could answer.
…. look, I’m still giggling at the thought of dancing in the third person. One of the indelible rules of partner dancing is that you have to stop thinking to make it work. And one of the most excellent bits of my research has been the way thinking academically about dancing on the dance floor is the one sure way of having a really crap dance.
oo, oo, I’d really like to write a bit about choreography and the ‘third person’ in that process. There’s some really fabulous stuff written on the choreographic process and its ideological function/context. I’m a big fan of the idea of improvisation as choreography, which suggests that you make shit up as you go along, so the new steps you create are necessarily function-first. This is of course in direct contradiction with the sort of tortured-artist-in-an-ivory-studio idea that gets trundled along in ballet and concert dance (and much of dance studies – you should see how excited they get about the idea of geneologies of dance – where they trace the influence a particular teacher had on a line of dancers/students).
[edit: oops. forgot some references:
DeFrantz, Thomas. “Believe the Hype!: Hype Williams and Afro-Futurist Filmmaking.†Unpublished paper. Spectacle, Rhythm and Eschatology: A Symposium. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 24th July 2003.
Ward, Andrew. “Dancing around Meaning (and the Meaning around Dance).” Dance in the City. Ed. Helen Thomas. London: Macmillan, 1997. 3-20. ]
[another edit: I also like the way it’s assumed that blogging is about telling the truth. Whether you’re writing with emotional honesty or with careful logic and supporting linkage. Surely I’m not the only one who’s digging the implied gendered assumptions about writing here?]
happy coincidence
I’m doing a bit of research on youtube for this paper I’m doing (and discovering in the process that deciding to ‘stop reading’, while a fabulous tool for getting the thesis done, has left me… oh, at least a few years behind the published world of academia), and have come across this neat article on M/C by Paula Geyh. Do go read it – it’s only a little thing, and does the nicest job of combining talk about bodies, urban space and D&G I’ve seen yet.
I am a massive big nerd for anything to do with bodies and dance/gymnastics/beautiful, rhythmic movement, and this stuff on parkour (which I’ve also heard referred to as urban junglism) is absolutely right up my alley.
To quote directly from wikipedia:
Parkour (IPA: [paÊ.’kuÊ], often abbreviated PK) is a physical discipline of French origin in which the participant — called a traceur (/tÊa.’sÅ“Ê/) — attempts to pass in obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible. The obstacles can be anything in the environment, so parkour is often practiced in urban areas because of many suitable public structures, such as buildings, rails, and walls.
And to continue with a quote from Geyh’s article,
Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacleâ€, the practice of “parkour†or “free running†constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hourâ€, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceursâ€), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space.
So when we watch footage of that parkour stuff, we’re watching a combination of practical (yet wonderfully imaginative and creative) urban locomotion. But the bit that catches my interest is the repeatedly quoted line from Sebastien Foucan,
“And really the whole town was there for us; there for free running. You just have to look, you just have to think, like children.” This, as he describes, is “the vision of Parkour.” (Wikipedia article)
I like that idea – thinking like a child. This is play. But it also involes a creative and unconscious approach to physical activity. One of the things I’ve noticed about swing dancers – they’re particularly keen to try new things, particularly sports, physical activities, games, tricks and ‘stunts’. I think it’s because they’ve discovered that you have to just try things (as Sugar Sullivan would shout at us in class – “If you don’t try to dance it, you will never dance it!”), throw yourself into activities, even if you’re likely to look foolish or fall over. When you know the limits of your body, you can trust yourself to do things which appear physically difficult. And when you’re used to experimenting physically, you stop worrying about looking foolish or being embarassed.
As an example, I am frequently (if not always) the only woman leading in aerials classes. I hear comments about how leads (or bases) should be physically strong, and there’s certainly a degree of posturing by some male dancers in regards to being a base. But the truth of the matter is, if you have good technique and do moves correctly, you don’t need to be ridiculously strong at all. I’m no stronger than the average woman, and certainly not as strong as most men my size, but I know that I can lift my partner up onto my shoulder and flip her over. Because I know how to use my body effectively, and work with her body. You are in greater danger of hurting yourself or your partner if you enter these activities with some grandiose idea of your own strength, or, conversely, with the idea that you’re going to get hurt. In learning aerials, the conventional ‘female = weak/vulnerable’, ‘male = strong and protective’ is rubbish. Self reliance, good communication, solid technique and using spotters are key parts of safe aerials
But back to the parkour people…
There’s lots of talk about military obstacle courses and so on in discussions of parkour, and escaping and leaping and reaching (the latter two I quite like, as ideas), but I’m really struck by the emphasis on creative responses to obstacles, yet with a practical eye. Ostentatious flips are debated – are they un-pakour because they’re aesthetic (an unnecessary) embelishments?
But the part of this that I’m really interested in, is Geyhr’s references to flow:
One might even say that the urban space is re-embodied — its rigid strata effectively “liquified.†In Jump London, the traceur Jerome Ben Aoues speaks of a Zen-like “harmony between you and the obstacle,†an idealization of what is sometimes described as a state of “flow,†a seemingly effortless immersion in an activity with a concomitant loss of self-consciousness. It suggests a different way of knowing the city, a knowledge of experience as opposed to abstract knowledge: parkour is, Jaclyn Law argues, “about curiosity and seeing possibilities — looking at a lamppost or bus shelter as an extension of the sidewalkâ€
Flow is something that’s come up in swing dance discussions. I’ve mentioned it very briefly in my own work, but without using that term.
Dancers often talk about being ‘in the zone’. As with that notion of flow, the zone is the place where you stop consciously directing your body, but respond to the music, to the weight changes and posture and movements of your partner on an almost instinctive level. I think it’s important to point out that this point of flow or zone is only achievable if your body and reactions are at a particular level of ability. To make this work, you must have a degree of body awareness, a stability of core, clear lines of alignment in joints and muscles and bones, some level of fitness and a willingness to ‘give in’ or ‘surrender’ what I call ‘high brain stuff’. You have to stop planning and to just give in and move.
Needless to say, this is one of the most wonderful parts of dancing, and the point to which most dancers reach toward. It’s often the motivation for travelling internationally or interstate to attend exchanges, where the sleep deprivation and intense socialising helps bring that point of flow closer. It’s something that newer dancers don’t feel, but suddenly, at about a couple of years, suddenly do feel, and get seriously addicted.
The thing that catches my attention in the discussion of parkour is that this flow is about the relationship between body and environment. With dancers, it is about body and body and floor.
So go read that nice article, if only to check out the neat clip.
Geyh, Paula. “Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour.” M/C Journal. 9.3 (2006). 18 Jan. 2007
Photo from this site, a photo by a parkour dood, uploaded to parkour.net
youtube = great
Hey, homies, has anyone seen Birds of Prey? The telly series from 2002? It looks like exactly my cup of tea. I suspect it’s supercrap, but if I can watch Aquaman, the Smalls spin-off, I can certainly handle a little Batkid action.
I gots a look at the promo thing here (and here with the alternative, hawt Sherylin Fenn action) but haven’t managed to figure out which clip comes next.
Youtube = great.
…but dang this media convergence thing. Is it still telly if it was never screened on telly, but you watched it on youtube? Does the form determine ‘tellyness’, or is it the mode of reception?
telly update
I need to get you all up to date with the telly I’m watching.
As you know, I’m a big fat Smallville fan, and cannot justify this passion with any sensible reason. I don’t find the protagonist (or anyone else in the program) particularly hawt (though Lana’s real-life athletic ability blows my brain. I LOVE that she’s far more athletic and body-aware than Clark’s actor). I don’t much care about the story (though I do like the idea of a pre-superman Clarky, and have speculated at length about his eventual superhero/secret identity split, not to mention the relationship between Clark and Lex as possible motivation for their falling out – slash-gone-wrong!).
I think it’s a combination of speculative fiction-ness + bright colours + teen telly + serial narrative.
We are still waiting on season 3 of Deadwood. Now that’s the fushizzle.
We have just finished season 5 (or is it 4?) of The Sopranos, and while I’d really like to see the next season(s), I do find it a bit dark and distressing.
We have given up on rewatching Buffy and Angel, but you know.
Forced to the point of desperation, I decided to start on Supernatural. Browsing my local video shop, it was either that or Party of Five (goddess forbid). It’s ok, I like it. It looks good (though there are some dodgy moments – don’t pay too much attention to where the window frame is when the boys are talking while driving in their car), the characters are hawt (Lana’s boyfriend is here, as Dean – and much better cast), we keep running into people from Angel (Angel’s son, Fred and – most fabulously – Darla, in a top episode about faith healing) and there’s a big fat muscle car that would make Glen weep.
It’s the big fat muscle car that kind of set up my viewing for me, really.
Does anyone else remember Good Guys Bad Guys? I think, more importantly, does anyone remember a) the car? and b) Marcus Graham, gay man extrordinaire? Watching Supernatural, all I can think of is that excellent Aussie drama, particularly when the boys slip into their eternally-shiny muscle car.
Maybe it’s just that I’m geared towards romantic comedies with a supernatural twist, but I need to see a little unrequited lust action. As with Lex and Clark, I just know that Dean and Sam are suppressing deep, reciprocated, yet repressed desires. The whole being brothers thing? Ah, we all know it’s a sham, a cover up. And I’m sure I’m not the only one noticing this relationship – the doods are continually checking into cheap motel rooms together. And remember that episode Bugs, where they were mistaken for a couple investing in a property on a new housing estate (not once but a few times)?
I don’t really know what I like about this program. I’m easily scared, and get a good scaring each episode (sad but true). I get a bit annoyed by the excessive contrast – too much dark. Too much blue light. I know that’s the point and that this is a semi-horror show, but…
I’m also a bit annoyed by the sloooow meta-arc (is that the term – you know, the overarching story arc that links all the episodes in the season together). These are in part problems resulting from my binge-viewing (man, who watches telly one episode at a time any more? That’s crazy talk!), but perhaps also part of the first-season problems that happen with most of these programs. I’m also a bit yeah-yeah, monster of the week, but that could improve – look where buffy went from there.
I’m also a bit unsure of the gender stuff. So far (I’m only part way through season one), girls are to be ogled (usually by Dean, though surreptitiously by Sam on occasion… though he spends far more time looking at Dean), saved and then left behind. Except for that hitchhiking wicca chick. But I just figure, this whole program is so mega-masculinity it kind of topples over under its own weight, crumbling into delicious homoerotic subtext. No one does uber-macho like a gay man.
But if you’re looking for beautiful fannish stuff (and we are, of course), then you have to check out the Supernatural action on Misplaced Moments. If you’re a Buffy, Firefly of other supernatural fan, you’ll find plenty of other lovely things on that site.
And beyond Supernatural, we’ve also gotten hold of the first eight episodes of Heroes, which we’re… hm. I want to say enjoying. But goddamn, that’s some gorey shit. I don’t much like guts, and Heroes is riddled with it. I’d definitely not let a kid watch it, so I’m not sure what Channel 7 (or is 9?) are thinking with their advertising. I’m not sure about the gender stuff there yet, either. All fairly traditional stuff, and the writing is a bit ordinary (at episode 3), so I’m not expecting anything particularly subersive. I’ve also noticed a few too many continuity errors, which does not please me. But I need some good, solid telly action, on DVD so I don’t have to fool with ad breaks and not seeing the whole thing all at once.
Shameless, however, rocks the free world.
[EDIT: I had to add that pic of the Heroes doods because I’m a bit fascinated by the whole ‘ensemble cast’ thing in these sorts of telly shows. I remember Joss Whedon explaining that Firefly wouldn’t have really worked long term because the cast was too small – too few major characters to sustain a program over a long period of time. This is an interesting thought, and makes me wonder if it’s a marker of nowen days telly. Did programs like …um, name blank. That 70s cop drama with the two women cops. Anyway, did it have a big ensemble cast? Is it a drama thing, because shows like Raymond (gag) manage with a small cast. If you have too small a cast, do you end up in monster-of-the-week territory (poor Sam and Dean. Destined to travel the deep south scuffling with monsters til someone discovers they need a few more characters. Sigh)?
2nd EDIT: I forgot to mention. The thing that I REALLY hate about Supernatural is the way the supernatural stuff is always really evil. There’s no sitting down at a poker table to gamble for kittens with these doods.
3rd EDIT: Link to official Supernatural via Glenn’s interesting post. I am so five minutes ago.]
someone else said it betterer
Stephanie pointed me in the direction of this nice blog. There, Meredith has said far more succinctly what I was trying to say in my last post:
I had promised myself for a year or so that when I finished my PhD I’d start a blog. Marrickvillia was a reward to myself, away from the academic grind – a place to write lightheartedly. It also turned into an escape…
probably too long and definitely unfocussed
There’s been a bit of a scuffle going on around the Golden Bloggies lately (you can read an installment on LP, and I have to confess, I have mixed feelings. I tried to read up on the awards on the official sites, but lost interest fairly quickly (mostly because I couldn’t find the rules or the list of entrants or understand what was going on). I heard about these things first from Mz Tartan, then nick cetacean, then from some other people on some other blogs (I can’t remember where or when – it was over christmas and I was busy).
I’ve had a look at a few of the winning posts (there were a bunch short listed, and they’re being reposted over the next bit of time), when they’ve been linked to by other people, but mostly I’ve not bothered.
I think it’s because I’m not really sure there’s much point in a bunch of awards for blogs.
Frankly, the thought scares the living shit out of me – I really can’t stand the thought of there being people out there reading this mass of dance-nerdery and recipes (the swing dancer alternative to photos of cats, unicorns and purple cursive font action) and assessing it seriously. I read and write for a job, and for me, a blog – this blog – is a chance to just write and write and write and write and not edit (I just write into the box on movable type here – that’s why I have so many typos. Sometimes I go back to fix a post with masses of horrible mistakes, or to fiddle with layout). I can just write down a bunch of crap, add in a picture (if I can be bothered), click post and then walk away.
Writing here is a chance for me to write crap that has no real point, isn’t developing another point, and doesn’t necessarily make any sense. I like just floating ideas without citing sources or supporting arguments. I prefer posting here on my blog to participating on discussion boards, because here I have complete control and can just delete the comments made by people I really can’t fucking stand who give me shit on other online spaces. I love that delete button.
I like writing here because it’s a chance for me to keep my writing hand in when I get all blocked on my work writing. There’s nothing so debilitating or distressing to someone who’s job is all about writing, or for whom their entire working self is all about writing than to suddenly find they can’t string a sentence together. During those moments when I’ve gone back through a day’s worth of work and thought “Holy shit, I frickin’ suck. What the FUCK am I doing?”, being able to just open a tab of Movable Type, blurt out a bunch of ramble and then move on is WONDERFUL. And it’s because I know this writing is just for fun, I don’t get all blocked, and I don’t worry about whether or not this post is good enough for publishing, and I don’t try to write about things other people will find interesting and I don’t try to impress people. I write as if no one was reading. Ahaahaha. That’s a lie.
Sigh. Sometimes I do, anyway. Mostly I treat this as a chance to work through an idea I’ve had. That’s where all that dance stuff comes from – I have to articulate these ideas, and goddess knows I don’t see another postgrad/person-formerly-known-as-postgrad from one semester to another, so I need to do this this way. It’s a really useful process for me – creative, constructive, low-stress.
I could, I suppose, just write all this in a file and leave it on my desktop. Or I could keep a proper journal. But when I’m writing here on the internet, I feel like I’m writing as if there could, one day, be someone reading this. Not many someones – maybe just two, if I’m lucky. One of those will be The Squeeze, out of duty. And the other will be another googler looking for pictures of Dennis the Menace. So I have to try, at some level, to explain my idea. Or to write as if I was writing an explanation.
I think I’ve contradicted myself here quite a bit. Ah, fuck it.
But here are a couple of things I wanted to write about, in regards to this whole Golden Blogs thing (you know, I’m actually having real trouble writing today. It’s fucking hot, I’m sitting here riddled with hormones and trying not to think about the paper I’m trying to edit).
Mark on LP, using skepticlawyer’s comment, pointed out that Tim Blair doesn’t like ‘I’ in blog entries.
I can’t fathom that. Nor can I go on to read the comments in that Tim Blair post – play nice, kiddies.
That sort of action is the reason I don’t like to read conservative blogs. Blogging is meant to be fun (and blogging = writing blogs, reading blogs, posting on blogs, receiving posts on one’s own blog), and I really don’t need to read that rubbish. Head in the sand? Up my own arse more like – I prefer my own company to hanging out with meanies.
I don’t really understand how these doods can on one hand revile the use of ‘I’ and personal anecdotes on a blog, and yet also hoe in with incredibly aggressive personal attacks (mostly in comments it seems – I guess comments are the ‘less formal’ bit of blogging, huh?). It seems a bit contradictory to me.
I wonder if, perhaps, this insistence on no-I-word and less-on the ‘personal’ stuff is a manifestation of the idea that we should keep personal stuff out of the public sphere?* That the private should be private, and the public… I was going to make a joke about public assets and Telstra but can’t. It’s too hot.
This whole issue strikes me as odd, as blogging seems one of the most personal spaces or modes of address or whatever (look, it’s frickin’ hot, ok?) on the internet. If we remember the roots of blogging, we’re talking home pages. Home pages.
The Squeeze is reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the Origins of the Internet, which contains this little gem:
Rumours had persisted for years that the ARPANET had been built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear attach. It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long enough to become widely accepted as fact. Taylor had been the young director of the office withn the Defense Department’s ADvanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started the ARPANET. The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions – to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew the ARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war – never did…
Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth.
I’m not sure how reliable this book is (though it seems better than most of the bios of the internet and computing getting about), but this point really caught my interest. I’d only ever heard the story where the internet had been invented as a way of localising US military computer resources and information, so as to avoid complete obliteration if one, centralised site was hit by cold war missiles. This alternative story really warmed my spirit ( :D ). It’s so much nicer to think of the internet as doing what we bloggers do with it – share stories of our everyday. So my everyday doesn’t include much talk about electronic switches and mainframes and hardware (so to speak), but it does have a whole bunch of fairly specific knowledge and practice which I can’t really share with every person in my life. It’s pretty specific stuff, and the internet gets me in contact with other people who share that particular discourse. And what could be nicer than finding a bunch of like-minded people with whom to share this stuff?
So the internet’s very purpose was to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and individual people’s social networking. Basically, the internet was designed for nerds to talk crap. Right on!
With that in mind, as Jeff Beck points out in a gentle observation about the Golden Blogs,
A few of the posts are worth reading but most are tedious, self-indulgent bullshit from self-important lefty academics. If this is the best the blogosphere has to offer, it’s fucked.
And that’s entirely the sort of sex I like. Really, we don’t use the word ‘blog’ for nothing: long and boring. It’s nice that people have high hopes for the internet (I, too, like to think that somewhere out there someone is tapping out a ream of Great Art or Important Contribution), but I think it’s ever so much more interesting to think of all the ordinary things people are doing with the internet out there in their bedrooms and studies and workplaces and classrooms and loungerooms. And it seems a bit silly to me to pretend that the internet has no domestic or private or everyday elements, when it is being made on people’s laps on couches all over the world (or desks or kitchen tables or wherever). Though, it could be fun to imagine, just for a minute, that I’m wearing a suit and glasses, my brow furrowed with concentration and Serious Thoughts, rather than sitting here in front of the fan in my bedroom doing a little nuddy typing and considering running to the fridge for snack before I cruise Youtube for more hawt lindy prn.
So I guess I do have one problem with the Golden Blogs. When I read, for example, ducky’s entry in Online Opinion, I was struck by the way reading this post out of context stripped so much of the meaning out of it for me. When I first read that post on duck’s blog, I’d been wondering where she’d been for a while. I’d been reading her blog for a while, sucking up the bits of her life she put online. For me, ducky’s story meant more as a chapter in her ongoing blog/life than as an isolated moment re-contextualised in an awards series. When I first read it, I teared up and suddenly wanted to do something for ducky, even though I don’t know her, have never seen her, and would probably have felt really strange talking about this with her in person then. The first sentence,
Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t been writing more about progress on my letterpress project and my arts grant.
which Tim Blair picks out as his special favourite in a list of ‘dreaded I’s’ means so much more when you have been keeping in touch with ducky over the past year or so. We’d read about her grant and been pleased and excited for her (yet also understanding the new challenges of the project). We understood that she was a big printing nerd and thought letterpress(es?) were the best things since sliced bread. For us, to not hear about a bit of ink-and-tickle was an indication that something was amiss. Or that, perhaps, there were other more important things going on in her life.
I think that Tim Blair has missed the point with this derision – he hasn’t understood that ducky was pointing out that her everday life had been interrupted, that the sorts of things that consumed her everyday had recently been pushed aside. That suddenly printing wasn’t at the fore of her mind, and her priorities had shifted.
It worries me that Tim Blair might be so profoundly lacking in empathy that he could read duck’s entry and not see it as an important bit of writing about something very important to duck, and through their assocation with her through her writing, to duck’s readers and online friends.
But then, thinking about it, I wonder if this sort of response was encouraged by the out-of-context-ness of duck’s post on Online Opinion. I remember being moved by the everyday language of the entry when I first read it. I was far more affected by her ‘normal’ tone than I would have been by wailing and gnashing of teeth. When she wrote
Lying on a bed crying just feels like I’m indulging myself too much. I know, go figure. It’s not like I don’t indulge myself in other ways.
On the one hand I thought, ‘you silly – of course it’s not being too indulgent’, but on the other, I thought ‘I know what she means’.
I had this feeling that she was somehow kind of suspended in that space where you move between uncontrollable crying, where you just don’t have that conscious control of your mind and body – it’s like the emotion and the sheer physical experience of that emotion have opened up a clearway to the rest of the world. You wouldn’t normally shed a tear in public, but you suddenly find yourself with snot and tears all over your face. You’d normally try to keep it together for the sake of your family who are also worried. So lying on a bed crying does feel like indulgence.
Because I had been reading her blog for a while, I was most moved by her bravery and trying to keep it together, but then I was really touched by this bit:
Actually, I’m telling this tale at this point in time because tomorrow morning at 10.00am I’m going under the knife to get Wellsley Giblet (see, we’d nicknamed it already!) scraped out.* And I’m scared. I want lots of blog-reading good vibes to steady that surgeon’s hand and keep me safe. Last time a stupid doctor perforated me three times, and I bled for two months. This is a different hospital, a more experienced doctor, but the same soft mutant fibroid-filled womb. It should only be a day-visit, and I should feel better in a day or two. If all goes well.
Wish me luck.
. It’s the way duck moved from bravery and clever writing and a touch of humour to suddenly admitting – I’m afraid. I’m afraid of being hurt, of things out of my control. And I just want you wish me good luck.
And I don’t know about the rest of the people reading duck’s blog, but I was wishing her all the good luck, hoping someone would hold her hand and tell her it was all going to be ok. Reading the comments on her original blog entry, you can see that I wasn’t the only one. But when you read the entry out of context, you don’t see all that rallying-round. All the people holding hands for duck and thinking of her. Not in the sort of in-your-face way we would have in person, but in the more manageable way the internet does it.
And when you’re reading that post on the Online Opinion site, you don’t see the ‘textbreak’s duck inserted through her original post, which I read as big breaths, or clear pauses, or literally, breaks in the text. And the fact that duck is a printer, who is all about the mechanics of words on papers, a text break, in her font, lent weight to the pause. Then, of course, when you’re just reading that one post on OO, and you haven’t been reading duck’s blog, you’re not reminded of the follow-up post, and this line, that stuck in my memory:
To his absolute credit, there is no pressure from BB’s side. He and Bumblebee have been seriously scared on both these occasions (more so last time) and they keep insisting that it’s totally my choice whether I want to go through it again.
This bit sticks with me because it so nicely sums up the complexities of wanting children, not wanting children, having a child whom you love and adore, a partner who loves and adores you, and perhaps most importantly, a child who loves and adores you as well. I think I was most moved by the BBs’ worry. I don’t know where they stand on duck’s resolving all those issues of body and work and motherhood. But they’ve definitely got duck’s back.
That whole follow up post, with the discussion of having children, when to have them, how to have them, the physical experiences of pregnancy and all of that – all of that is what goes in to deciding when and whether to have a child. Abortion and contraception and children and bodily health are all things that pop up a lot in the blogs, and in the month following duck’s post there’s been a few posts about motherhood by women who read duck’s blog.
That sort of trickle-on effect of a really good blog post can’t be indicated or measured in blog awards thingy which cannot map the temporal (as well as ‘spatial’) relationships between individual blog posts, posts on a single blog, posts cross-posted between blogs, between blogs, between blog authors, and so on and so on.
All of that talk about ampersand duck’s post has suddenly made me feel uncomfortable – I don’t know if I like taking apart ‘someone’ and their feelings like that, and I guess that’s the kernel of my argument: this is emotional and personal, domestic and private writing. Blogging isn’t always, but when it’s part of your everyday, when you engage with it by commenting and writing your own posts as well as reading (not to mention the emailing and snail mailing and face to face catch ups), it’s not just words on the internet. So why should it always be calm and cool and detached? Why shouldn’t I be in the words as well?
I’m not saying that everything we write or read on the internet should be emotionally loaded. Sometimes it’s nice to read or write a bit of cleverly cool and detached academic writing or a bit of well-crafted mass media. But social networks are complicated. We don’t ever leave our own persons behind when we write or read. We are always there, there is always a body in the net (to quote Katie Argyle and Rob Shields**). So why pretend that there’s not?
*I can’t be bothered revisiting Nancy Fraser and the feminist stuff on the public sphere, so just imagine I did, ok?
**Argyle, Katie, and Rob Shields. “Is There a Body in the Net?” Cultures of Internet. Ed. Rob Shields. London: Sage, 1996. 58 – 69.
Tim Blair didn’t think there were enough links in the winning OO blog entries. Does citation like this count? What is the importance of linking? Is it citing sources? Or would he like to see more text on cats? If he was a lindy hopper, I just know he’d like to see more of this hawt shit.
quick film recommendation
We went to see The Prestige at the Astor (a double session! What excellentness!) and it was GREAT. I mean, it was AMAZINGLY GREAT. If you can get to this before it goes off the cinema (good luck), do so immediately – it’s really worth it for the mood of a big screen. And this film is all about spectacle, so it’s worth it.
Will write more when I have more time.