Term Paper Evasion: linking around

Grad students especially, but also everyone else: go now — now — to this new blog, The Economical Academic. Kermit’s post today about taxes made my heart sing — not because I’m afraid of taxes, but because it’s refreshing to see useful, clear information get disseminated with a view to actually helping people. Other posts on budgeting, debt, and so on promise that this blog will continue to be a productive, practical place. Huzzah.

Updating the blogroll to add:
Servetus, of (Almost) Without Footnotes. I have no idea what her deal is, really. And that’s what I like.

Margaret Soltan, of University Diaries. If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.

Cardinal Wolsey, of Cardinal Wolsey’s Today in History. Tudory goodness.

Kathy G., of The G-Spot. Great new cultural-political blog by a poli sci Ph.D. student. No idea where she gets the time for all those posts.

And please also go check out Luz, a lovely little web comic about sustainable living in urban environments, narrated by the very charming Luz, who puts me completely to shame.

Poetry to follow.

[This blog has not lost its politics. They are simply in hiding. Someday when they're a little less shell-shocked they'll come out to play.]

Inchoate rage, perplexity, fear, joy, regarding Coming Out

I am supposed to be reading a Certain Classic Text of early modern literary scholarship, but since I am sick to bloody death of hacking away with a blunt hatchet at what I sincerely hope has been for some time a very dead new historicist horse, I instead choose to spend these precious moments pondering this date, designated (American) National Coming Out Day.

A friend just pointed out in another venue, which is quasi-private and so not going to be linked here, that “coming-out” is laden with some pretty serious issues about for whom and where coming out is a powerful thing to do, about how issues of visibility and legibility are fraught with all manner of consequences (and not just for those queers who are “at risk,” as the quaint political parlance has it). I’ve never actually thought about it that way — I’ve thought about the marriage debate, certainly, in terms of visibility and legibility issues, in terms of how marriage is one among many means of making a public, theatrical (not to say performative) gesture that aims to render queerness legitimate, not to mention transparent, to a straight audience and within a straight structure. One reason among many that the ardent desire in certain homonormative circles to continue carrying the marriage banner, to the detriment of many other issues, really makes the little angry mouse in me go ROAR. (Thanks in particular to Professor Revolutionary and Pretty Dyke Friend for being partners — or, in the case of Prof R, commanding officer — in my coming to possess the tools for seeking articulateness on the issue.)

But it never occurred to me to use those terms to describe the coming-out narrative. Which is odd, I suppose, because I tend to think of coming-out as a kind of forced performance. Forced, because I find that I am rarely in control of the terms of that coming-out to nearly the empowering extent one would suppose available on the basis of the “You go girl!!” attitude many LGB(T) communities tend to use to encourage coming-out. I feel generally fairly settled, comfortable, happy in the rudiments at least of my own queerness until I am faced with a straight medium in which communication is for me unnatural. How, for example, to boil down years of feminist awakening, of assessment and constant re-assessment of my sexual, erotic, and political alignments in a form comprehensible to the straight men I now find myself living with?

My response to a query from one of them as to why I was interested to know if there were any interesting, attractive women — no, no, not men, women – in Brit Uni’s physics program, in which they’re Ph.D. students, was, playful-smirkingly, as follows:

“… Uh, because I’m a big dyke.”

Hello. You could hear the crickets all the way from Liechtenstein. Well, I’m guessing you could, because I couldn’t hear much for all the contained laughter going on inside my head.

It worked fine in the moment, answered the question, shut down a discussion I didn’t want started, and was just puzzling and freaky enough to please the part of me that believes that queer women should always do their level best to make uncritically straight men as uncomfortable as possible.

But it said absolutely nothing about me to its immediate audience, except perhaps that I’m maybe just a little bit tougher than they thought I was. Oh, and that I’m sexually off-limits to them (insha’allah). It wasn’t meant as a coming-out, as a declaration, as a dis-closure or dis-covery: on the contrary, it was intended to mark off an impregnable border, to close an open route into my personal life and sexual identity. Despite my sometimes exuberant attitude, despite my occasional explosiveness, I am a fairly reserved person in many ways, and becoming more so. Sexuality and eroticism are no more private to me than are most other aspects of my life, but they are private, and I feel no particular joy at the continuing need — practical and political — to keep making them public, making them objects of strategy and Identity, rather than revealing them as I choose to those close to me, as continually unfolding layers, pieces of myself given as gifts in trust.

If this is slightly incoherent or internally contradictory, it’s because I’m still working these things out as I write this, using the writing as a way to work them out.

Just now it occurs to me that that moment of non-dis-closure was embedded in more privilege (I mean that in a simpler sense than it seems) than I had considered. It brings me back to a moment during the fall of my senior year in the Petri Dish, a period during which I was for the first time hanging out with queers of an older generation (who weren’t drum-circle-belonging, Starhawk-reading, Michfest-going, Catharine Mackinnon-worshipping witch-lesbians), whose radicalism I admired but who maintained a healthy awareness of a danger I’ve never had to sense. These were people more or less like me — Northeasterners, white, middle-class — and yet their experiences were totally alien to mine. What it must have been like to be coming out at tradition-laden universities in the early sixties, or seventies for that matter, I can’t possibly know. What it must have been like to come of age in a time and a place where coming-out was actively dangerous, had to be strategically considered, where complex (and hilarious, and powerful) devices had to be constructed to disguise one’s sexuality from a given Authority, I really just simply can’t know. Those same places are familiar to me now as relatively safe ground for queers.

Shamefully enough, it was only then that I realized that, for a lot of people in a lot of different positions (even within, say, white, middle-class Northeastern America) there might be more at stake in coming-out than there is for me.

I have not addressed communities to which I don’t in some way belong, and I won’t, because in this venue, from where I sit, it would be presumptuous at best, condescending and appropriative at worst.

The point is that this coming-out thing is damned complicated. If I had my way, National Coming Out Day would not be devoted to self-identification, but to ambush. Not coming out, but leaping out armed to the teeth (with words, in my case — very voluble words) not to explain ourselves to the straights but to cause a genuine chaotic ruckus. (My own personal ruckus would be a discursive one — I’m anti-violence, but then that’s mostly just because I’m diminutive, not physically fit, and unskilled with heavy arms. So.)

But coming-out is almost never about a ruckus. It’s about rendering queerness legible to straight people, about constantly framing, explicating, packaging and labeling queer identities so that straights can understand them, it’s about making straights feel comfortable with queerness. And all of that fills me with rage. But perhaps it’s changing — I see my friends changing it every day. We rage together, we light fires in each other’s eyes and send each other out into the world bravely. And we get more brave every day.

For the most part, it must be said, I just sit quietly somewhere out of the way and don’t talk to anyone who doesn’t demonstrate being worth talking to. I am not an activist by trade. But behind the stack of books, behind the quiet focus and the ink and the jargon, there is that fire.

It’s never been in any goddamned closet, and it’s not coming out, today or any other day, just to warm you up or make you smile. It has things to do (like burn a hole through the carcass of a certain dead horse, mentioned above), and you and your complacent tolerance are not on its list.

Unless, of course, you’re queer too — by which I mean you’re doing some good, hard thinking about sex and power and gender and eros and just exactly where you sit in the whole mess — in which case, fuhgeddabout the whole damn thing, let’s have a beer and laugh and maybe throw some shit. Or let’s just cuddle.

In which mouse is embarrassed to find that her sense of entitlement is hanging out

So, reader. I said that I have no doubts or reservations of any kind about my new university. This is still, mostly, true. However.

The library.

Reader, I am so unbearably spoiled. I knew that I had been blessed by libraries, but I didn’t know how blessed, how spoiled. The libraries that taught me what libraries are include: the Petri Dish’s substantial collections beautifully housed, Georgetown University’s ugly, depressing but well-stocked system, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library’s Humanities branch. I spent more time than I needed to in one particularly Victorian reading room in Beloved Library during undergrad, or wandering the stacks, my fingers trailing over rows of spines, or curled up under Tolstoy, tucked away where no one could find me and my books and my papers. And that is where the self who decided to trip off across the ocean to nourish the Scholar Within was born.

Libraries, in short, are important to me, as they are to probably everyone who reads this, and probably in much the same ways. The space, as much as the content, of a library shapes my experience of work. I have been spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.

Yesterday, I had my first serious poke around Brit Uni’s library. What an incredibly, horribly depressing place. The light inside is the same colour as the light inside Penn Station. The walls are a greyish-brown concrete. The windows are small and ill-placed, the ceilings heavy and ponderous (also concrete). A sense of darkness huddles over every space. I can’t imagine doing work there — except, perhaps, for the chain-yourself-to-a-desk-because-this-has-to-get-done-NOW-no-excuses kind of work to which poor spaces are sometimes suited. Just as well, because it closes at nine. (What on earth do the undergrads do about that?)

And its collections are… well, sparse. It boasts a respectable number of volumes, but most of these are multiple copies of single books used in classes. The books are poorly looked-after, scribbled over and over and over, their spines cracking and bending. Many of them are paperback, and therefore disintegrating. Many Big Works of scholarship in the areas I’m familiar with (early modern and modernism) are not represented. Forget any of the Medium-to-Not-So-Big works. What is there tends to the radical, which pleases me — but seriously, kids. Are we really all traipsing off to the British Library every time we have a vague research need that can’t be satisfied by the internet?

“Yes, mouse,” will come the tired, impatient-growing reply, “we are. And you are effing spoiled rotten.”

I will note, however, that as far as I can tell the pre-modernists are conspiring exceedingly well to funnel as much cash as they can into special collections — as noted, this library holds a surprisingly spectacular array of early books, for which a brand-new, extremely shiny reading room has just been installed. For this, I am deeply grateful, and such a thing is not, ever, to be discounted.

What my experience of dismay comes down to, of course, is money, and the place of higher education within the socio-economic structure of this country (of most of Europe, for that matter). I never realized just how wealthy the Petri Dish is as an institution — a wealth that could only be accumulated in a culture that prizes higher education for its elitism, not, as in Europe, for its populist potential. The P.D. and Brit Uni are roughly equivalent in terms of “quality,” well-regardedness, general pedagogical philosophies, overriding political tone, and Archetypal Student. Except that (well, white, Northeastern, educated) Americans feel that an education that doesn’t cost a fortune isn’t worthwhile, while Britons are still scandalized by the fact that they have to pay anything at all for what was once free. And so the P.D. is shiny and bright, and its resource cup spilleth over, while Brit Uni is a little scruffy around the edges, and gives a sense of a bit of a scramble to maintain what it has.

I was aware of these differences, but they didn’t come home to me until I saw that library. It made me realize that I come not only from a wealthy family but from a whole culture of wealth — wealth of the big, material, institutional kind, and the expectations it fosters. I wonder what this has done to my brain. Am I intellectually “soft,” for having been raised on the educational feather-bed of a Northeastern SLAC? Has the fact that I have been accustomed to buying, not borrowing, my course books made me somehow weak? Why is it so embarrassing to discover that I am so deeply spoiled in ways to which I never devoted sufficient consideration?

(And, uh, that thing about tigers and stripes? Yeah, my next step today is to seek out a cheap copy of Renaissance bloody Self-Fashioning, because I refuse to use the one that has jargon spewed all over it in electric pink ink. We won’t even mention the state of the Shakespeare.)

An amalgam of largely unrelated things

Snippets from the Life of Mouse, in the form of, you guessed it, random bullets of crap.

• On Wednesday, reader, your Mouse took the Graduate Record Examination. She will refrain from the rousing chorus of whatthefucks and oh-em-gee-this-is-so-effing-uselesses that has been bursting to get out of her for days. She will, however, share the unease that came to meet her as she stared at the computer screen at the end of the Examination. After the computer tauntingly asked her – twice – whether she was really sure she wanted to accept her scores, she was confronted with two three-digit figures that entirely flummoxed her. These figures were delightfully high. She had to suppress a gleeful giggle. She sighed with relief. Then a queasiness set in. These figures are meaningless, she thought to herself. They are empty. This test is worthless and measures precisely nothing. So why, she wondered, was she so proud of herself for having caused those delightfully high figures to appear on the screen? Why has she allowed herself to be trained to believe that ultimately arbitrary test results actually say something about her? Is she really this shallow? More importantly, is the academy really this shallow? Please, she silently prayed, let neither of these be so. And still…. is she… is she, maybe, a little bit, allowed to be pleased with herself?

• If nothing else, should the humanities fail her, at least her math score comforts her with the knowledge that she might have an alternative career in astroengineering waiting for her.

• Because, after all, something you may not know about your mouse is that she once harbored ambitions in physics. Until, that is, she ran across a series of genuine trolls in the shape of mathematics and physics teachers and professors. When she got to the Petri Dish, this mouse was prepared to give it one good go, and registered for courses in advanced calculus, chaos theory, and astronomy. She found, of course, a much comfier, if frequently awkward and sometimes antagonistic, home in her two literature departments, and was delighted to be fostered by a third, eccentric aunt sort of department. But from time to time she misses shapes and numbers, vectors and dimensional multiplicity.

• Which is why she is so glad to have found an unexpected source of mirth in the physicist partner of her friend Professor Lyrical. At every available opportunity, Mr. Lyrical good-naturedly teaches her something about the life of Johannes Kepler, or the origin of quantum physics, or the conception of the atomic bomb. When he sees a merry-go-round, he wants to talk about how to build one from scratch. He is happy that she knows things about the seventeenth century, because he likes to talk with due reverence about Isaac Newton. He has a theory that “life,” that thing humanists talk about with undue reverence and to which we accord such infinite abstract complexity, comes down to a physical surfeit of energy. This theory makes your mouse intensely happy.

• In this bullet, the relative coherence of the list falls apart and I stop talking about myself as a third-person anthropomorphic rodent, so that in the next bullet I can talk about how

• Last night, my dear friend the Conscientious Orientalist and a queer kid we knew in high school and I went to our suburban New England county’s only gay bar. As it turns out, the region has its redeeming qualities. I now know, for example, that there is at least one space in which a genuinely racially mixed group of people can gather in this intensely segregated county. A critical mass of queer Latinos and Latinas eliminate the threat of house music and replace it with the joys of salsa. White men dance with men of East Asian origin. Black butch dykes exchange surreptitious smiles with white, J. Crew-clad, femme faghags. All riddled with tension, to be sure, and the uneasy sense that the wife of the middle-aged white dude standing over there with his hand on a seventeen-year-old’s ass might employ the sister of the Latina standing at the bar as a housekeeper. Nevertheless, watching this peculiar safety valve of a social scenario at work, I found myself comforted. And comfortable enough, for the first time since my return from France, to cut loose and dance, and dance, and dance. When the DJ announced to the room at large that he would like to talk to the “white girl in the glasses in the middle of the dance floor,” I realized it was time to go. The CO and I left our former classmate, the self-identified Straightest Gay Man On The Planet, in the company of a dweeb in a blue button down shirt and Dockers and revelled all the way home in our discovery that, even in Stepford, two snarky, overeducated expat queers can have one hell of a fun night out.

I Work in a Bookstore v. I: Whining and Ranting, or, Mouse Wants Her Mushy Liberalism on the Cheap

I work in a small independent bookstore in a small suburban town. The store has its limitations, but we justify its failings (an over-emphasis on tchatchkes, for example) with mushy-liberal soundbytes about how it’s “important” to have a bookstore in New Eden, and “supporting” independent bookstores is also “important.”

It’s not that I don’t believe those things. I do, firmly and totally. But, of course, there’s more to the bookstore problem than the comfort of wistful, wealthy New Edeners.

Because we’re such a small store, and because most of our clientele is so wealthy that they don’t bother to pay attention when I tell them their totals before swiping their Amex cards, we sell everything at full retail price. This means that even with my substantial discount, I can still generally get what I want — new — more cheaply on Amazon or at a megastore. Used, in like-new condition, I can get virtually anything I want for next to nothing on Amazon or eBay. These services are also substantially more convenient — we don’t have a huge inventory at New Eden Books, and special orders generally take five or six business days to arrive.

Now, while I realize that these differences are likely due in large part to the systemic favor conferred on big corporations by the publishing industry, I have trouble not believing that Amazon and the megastores are a democratizing force in the world of books. The two statements are not mutually contradictory.

The French have solved some of the problem with their “prix unique du livre” — by law, a new copy of a given edition of a given book must cost the same amount absolutely everywhere. (The same applies to cigarettes and gasoline.) This means that the only advantage the big chains have over independents is the size of each store’s inventory. The phenomenon, encouraged by the prix unique law, of flourishing specialized bookstores balances out this advantage. “Yes,” I think to myself, “I can get lots of books at Gibert Joseph, but I can get better books, and talk to knowledgeable salespeople, at Ombres Blanches.” The law has also encouraged a boom in the production of “livres de poche,” cheap (three-to-six-Euro) paperback editions, frequently of books that are also published in nice, expensive editions. And because the great publishing houses stand to gain a lot from the livres de poche market, these cheap editions are frequently very well executed. Gallimard’s Folio imprint, while not as bibliogasmically gorgeous as their fancy editions, produces excellent, frequently excellently annotated, editions of middle- and high-brow books. For this I am deeply endebted to them. In short, for a long while the law enchanted me as an example of a spot where, for once, socialisme à la française was working.

Then it occurred to me that the imposed market-control probably means that the price of books is set somewhat higher than it is in American megastores. So perhaps, while maintaining the illusion of socialistic idealism, the prix unique du livre in fact reinforces the status of books as an élite commodity.

Don’t worry, all this isn’t leading to some grand statement. I don’t know what the solution to these problems is, but I think about them more or less constantly at work. As I watch how hard the store’s managers have to fight to keep our little place alive, as I watch customers become frustrated with having to wait for a special order and huff off with a “Whatever, I’ll just go to Borders,” I realize what a miraculous thing a small-town bookstore is. I already know many of the customers by name. I have whole conversations with two-thirds of the people who come in, even if they don’t buy anything. In a town that’s, um, hardly known for its intellectualism, we at New Eden Books maintain a healthy bibliophilic haven.

But the reality is that on my salary, even with my discount, I can’t afford to buy as many books as I read at New Eden Books. I realize that I should discipline my book-buying habits, borrow most of what I read from the rather good town library, and only buy what really matters to me. Then I would be better equipped to support local bookstores. But I like books. I like their materiality. I need to own them. I am a book fetishist. I am therefore a full-scale devotee of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble (in that order). There will be more on this, I’m sure. For now, the point is: goddammit, I want it both ways!

That’s "fond" in the early modern sense

Oh, and: apparently being a “Teen Advisor” for a community-outreach abstinence-education group renders young women unable to write. Or think.

Yes, I’m saying I’m smart and (sometimes) articulate because I have good non-marital sex. With women. Deal.

In which mouse waxes still more francophilic

The joy of France is that a leisurely afternoon stroll on any given sunny Saturday afternoon frequently turns into a loud, joyous lefty street-party.

I don’t know enough about nuclear energy to take a position on it, but gee, the French actually think about nuclear energy enough to stage a relatively-massive protest in a relatively-miniscule city. Isn’t that nice?

And Toulouse is beautiful today, and has been for a week straight. I fell back in love, unadulterated by snark (okay, complemented by snark), with la douce France the moment my train from London emerged from the tunnel into the Norman countryside. I spun through Paris with my arms wide open, and today for the first time since fall Toulouse made me smile and dance all alone in the middle of that crowd and make friends with strangers. Sure, those strangers were all high as kites and la manifestation is nothing if not an elation-vehicle, but nevertheless. A little elation goes a long way to making me feel like a whole person again.