tactical

Remembering Farrah Hair

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:27:25 GMT

There's a lot of people around me, on twitter, on facebook, and elsewhere, expressing irritation at others "mourning" celebrities in the wake of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson's deaths. Like it's stupid, or inexplicable. That irritates me, but I didn't want to post about why, really. What I want to post about is Farrah hair.

Oh how I wanted and tried to have Farrah hair. I did my best, for a while, but it isn't a style my hair could hold easily. My hair's blonde, but curly, and while Farrah hair requires a lot of time with manipulating the movement and hang of hair it's not about curls so much as about sweep, or maybe voom. Straight hair was not impossible for me, at least not when I was young and it was very long and my Nan would brush it from wet to dry in the sunshine or in front of the heater every time. But it took that kind of discipline; a kind of hair discipline I've never had on my own. So from the time I had my hair cut back to shoulder length at 10 or 11 - 11 I think - I could never get it to be straight. And Farrah hair is straight hair under very careful control. I know I wanted Farrah hair at least as much for the controlled skill it represented as for its glamorous California Girl look.

I remember playing Charlie's Angels at primary school. I was Jill. A girl named Tracy Everingham was Sabrina. No idea where Tracy is now. And I wish I could remember who was Kelly, but I can't at all, except for knowing it was someone with long brown wavy-but-not-curly hair. Our roles were decided by hair - hair colour at least - although I don't think I'd have played at all with much enthusiasm if I couldn't be Jill. And Jill was all about the hair. The hair was her freedom and her commitment.

I've been looking through old photographs trying to find evidence of my struggle to have Farrah hair. The closest I can find is one with me in a lemon yellow terry towelling dress that's clearly my attempt at California Girl but is definitely entirely wrong. And definitely not something I want to share with the mix of work colleagues, friends and family on facebook (as I thought I might). The photo I do remember and wondered if I had it is of me with my best Farrah hair on in a short white t-shirt style dress that had a leopard or a tiger (I can't remember which) printed across the whole upper portion and wrapping around the side. I think it even had shoulder pads but it definitely had glass pseudo-stones in little copper claw settings where the animal's eyes were. It was very Farrah meets Sheena Easton meets Star Hotel (an Australian in-joke, I guess, but most of you can probably make it work).

Anyway, I don't have the photo. Perhaps my ex-husband has it, or perhaps it was with my Nan's photos that all went to my Aunt's when she died or maybe it belonged to friends. But wishing I had it reminds me that we identify with dead celebrities first of all by remembering ourselves (for which they don't have to be old or has been at all)... looking to pin down some moment or some desire we can't otherwise recall perfectly enough. Of course they're dead people too but that's not the point. And whether or not we thought they were incredibly talented is also sort of beside the point. I started this post and then nearly deleted it because it seems so obvious and hardly worth saying even with the addition of amused recollections of myself. But the comfortable annoyance people are expressing with caring about whether FF or MJ are dead seems off to me for just that reason. Is identification supposed to be some mystery to us now, or not good enough for thinking persons? Celebrities aren't people in a straightforward way and surely those people too smart to care about their deaths should be too smart to forget that.

I'll never want anything like Farrah hair again. I not only wouldn't take the time it just wouldn't ever appeal to me. But I can half remember the girl who really wanted it. And when something reminds me of her I can't help but be more than a little sorry she's gone. She wanted so much that now seems unimportant to me, but she wanted it so hard.

work/life

Wed, 06 May 2009 12:28:59 GMT

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who doesn't see the messiness of work/life boundaries for the "cultural studies" academic as a good thing (this also goes for the other disciplines where your "own" culture is a key object) . In various contexts I hear either that this is an ideological delusion which allows me to be exploited, or an ethical dilemma because I can't neatly separate some image of "my work life" from some other image of "my social life". I think it's funny that the former charges me with too assiduous a professionalism and the latter with not enough.

Anyway, it's usually case that when you think you're "the only person in the world" who thinks something you're completely wrong - either because you're not thinking about it very clearly or because you're just not talking to the right people. So here I'm talking to different people.

I love that my life and my work combine sometimes, intermingle at others, squabble occasionally, but generally have a lot to do with each other. I love that my practices, preferences, the process of what I learn and do every day has a direct and immediate impact on what I write about, how I teach, all of that. I don't care if that means sometimes I find I've been working from breakfast to bedtime on a Sunday, because generally that "working" was combined with and/or directly involved a whole lot of stuff I love. And, to be honest, that's fairly well balanced by the days I don't get much work done at all because the less institutionally productive dimensions win out entirely.

It's not as if I don't have a lot of power over where or when I do work. So I tell undergraduate students "I'm not a teacher" on FB and don't add them, not because I don't supervise postgrad students there and negotiate meetings and plans etc with colleagues there, I do. But it's like "working from home" on days when what I don't need in my work/life is random questions and problems knocking at my door. It's organising types of work in some places and moments and not others.

I have no idea if this is a work journal or not. It's not *not* a work journal, because it has a work ID attached to it, but I only do work here in some ways and not others, and if it's pretty unclear here when I'm working or when I'm not then that's exactly what I'm talking about. It hasn't escaped me that I do no more "work" here in most respects than I do on the apparently non-work pseudonymous journals. I write "for work" about LJ (or journalling, if we want to be post-LJ about it), about online communities and so on, and so everything I do on any journal is going to be a bit work, right? But at the same time everyone I've added here also posts about those things to some extent, it's not a specialized academic practice in some clearcut way at all. And that's part of what I mean too.

So here's a "work" comment then, which is also a "life" comment in response to a "work" colleague on her "life" Twitter account (hi Jean!). On this computer, where I have twitterfox on all the time, Twitter is like the group mode of instant messaging (from long ago now days when groups on Y!M was what I used to do something more closed and focused than IRC). On my other computer, where I don't use that client, Twitter is more like FB in status-update-only mode, with a little haiku-style email thrown in. This isn't a mind-blowing realisation or antyhing I just enjoy it for the way it shows quite specific elements of a program making a platform into something new. If my Twitter was public, if I'd added some people I haven't, or of course if I didn't work at an internet-connected computer all that would be different as well, but the client is designed to be used that way.

I'm sure there's a message in there somewhere for people anxious about LJ/IJ/DW/etc tensions. I haven't worked out what quite what is yet but it probably has something to do with the comment-chanelling.

Look! Two public posts on this journal in a week, what's up with that? Am I doing too much work, or not enough?

Because I was asked to post it publicly...

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:41:27 GMT

"This is not a blog" from Feminist Media Studies, 8:2. Get the journal issue for the whole set of pieces on "The New Architectures of Intimacy? Social networking sites and genders", edited by Usha Zacharias and Jane Arthurs, which also includes a piece by my collaborator Melissa Gregg.

This is not a Blog: Gender, intimacy, and community

According to a whole range of authorities 2004 was the Year of the Blog.1 It is appropriate then that 2004 was also the year in which I decided that I didn't particularly enjoy blogs and would never have one, even though it was coming to be almost de rigeur to blog if you wrote on online culture. My emerging prejudice against blogs had everything to do with gender. While this isn't another piece about why women are not heavily represented in the lists of acclaimed blogs (see, for example, Rantliff 2003), the problem with “blogs,” for me, has come to summarise the problems and possibilities of talking about online gender.

The question of whether gendered hierarchies which privilege either male authority or masculine modes of address is replicated online has been often raised, with contradictory data and analysis, ranging from Turkle's (1997) belief that the internet would facilitate making such binaries obsolete to Herring's (1996) insistence that perceptions of online gender equality are not borne out by empirical research. My early experiences on mailing lists which were also communities, such as Bad Subjects (“Manifesto for bad subjects” 1995), suggested that gender affected activity in online communities not only as an ingrained disposition (like Bourdieu's “habitus”) but as a sense of facility with the literacies framing that community. The stronger the sense of community formed on such lists the more such codes could be reflected upon, so that it was the social dimensions of Bad Subjects (in comparison to mailing lists for the exchange of scholarly resources) which allowed people to discuss gender and participation.

By 2004, I was firmly embedded in a set of livejournal (L J) communities doing research into fandom. I'll call them L J communities but in fact they were a web of assembled cross-platform communities. A single named community might have a website, a bulletin board hosted somewhere like Yahoo!groups, internet relay chat (IRC) channels as well as an L J community which links all its members' personal journals. These often formed smaller sub-communities (for example, via instant messaging networks), extended out to larger thematic archives and overlapped with other communities. But L J was the heart of it. Since I was working with fandom communities almost all of the people I worked with were women (see Busse & Helleksen 2006) and so the apparent dominance of women on L J didn't immediately strike me as notable.

The idea that L J is dominated by women is empirically hard to support, given that although L J, like other online “social networking systems” (Boyd & Ellison 2007), meticulously collects data about its users, it is possible to leave gender “unspecified” or, of course, to fictionalise one's gender identity. However, there is not only an assumption that, like other social networking sites, the users tend to be younger and female (Thelwall 2007), but the characteristics of L J itself are frequently discussed as appealing to a particular kind of user who is also younger and female. Herring & Paolillo (2006), using the “Gender Genie” which circulated widely on L J for some months and was principally compared to blogs on Blogspot, argue that it supports the idea that the platforms themselves—that is, the journal rather than the weblog format—were read as feminine. In 2005, Danah Boyd's call for the specificity of L J to be respected when it was sold to Six Apart describes it this way:

L J challenges a lot of assumptions about blogging, and its users have different needs. They typically value communication and identity development over publishing and reaching mass audiences. The culture is a vast array of intimate groups, many of whom want that intimacy preserved. LiveJournal is not a lowbrow version of blogging; it is a practice with different values and needs, focused far more on social solidarity, cultural work and support than the typical blog. It is heavily female, young and resistant. (2005)

In response to Boyd's “Turmoil in Blogland,” a whole range of L Jers protested its characterisation as populated by subcultures in need of an emotional safety net and as dominated by teen angst and “freaks, geeks and queers,” but there was little or no comment on its gendering. There certainly are L J communities in which women are not dominant—some of the political and sports communities, for example—but the fact that the characterising L J as “feminine” passed without comment across academic, pop culture and fandom communities had me thinking again about gender, genre, and authority. There are two elements of L J that are singled out when people discuss its gender: the filtering system, in which I'll include the use of pseudonyms and communities, and threaded comments. Both of these are also used to distinguish journals from blogs.

In 2004 I had been posting on most days to L J, to different combinations of many thousands of people. Unlike most other Social Networking System (SNS) formats, L J's design prioritises filtering, so that a single journal can include posts which are public (although some L Jers debate whether these should be seen as publications), posts which are private “diary” style entries, and posts which are “filtered” to one or more groups of the journals assigned “friend” journals. In addition, each journal can join “communities” and post to those and comment in entries on other people's journals. Additionally, given the tendency of L Jers to use pseudonyms and to have multiple L J identities, there are not only multiple spaces in which an L J identity can speak but many degrees of publicity, community, and intimacy for those posts. There is no single place where identity or community takes place and this works against certain kinds of hierarchisation, including clear lines of authorship for many things spawned on L J. L J is not all about the personal, but it is all about assembling layers and clusters of intimacy.

This multiplicity and reciprocity fits neatly with traditional images of women's difference from models of the sovereign individual subject and of their responsibility to maintain intimate relationships. But such productions are also obviously carefully crafted and controlled by individuals with, at least, the aim of ongoing inclusion in the communities they've chosen. Many forms of audience management are required for this, as is the capacity to form closed and largely hidden sub-communities and the tendency to require ongoing input from accredited community members, including a commitment to synchronous conversation that can be very time consuming.

The L J plane of intimacies works in banal, comforting, challenging and creative ways. My L J matters most to me when I'm traveling overseas, as a forum for supportive connection. But L J communities are part of my everyday sociality—a web of friendships and peer groups that are not a “safety net” but a set of pleasurable obligations. The “scramasaxx” scandal in the Harry Potter fandom, on the other hand, where a fanfiction writer was outed for cross-gender performance that had extended into intimate friendships and thus troubled key codes of behaviour for some L J communities, shows the disciplinary force of intimacy as a form of authority. And the 2007 “Strikethrough” debacle shows a dramatic instance of L J's community structures deployed to protest Six Apart's use of censorship, change its Terms of Service and even design withdrawals from and community-led alternatives to L J.

But the intimate practices of community formation or even just filtering are not the signals by which women choose whether to blog or L J. Those are not apparent unless one makes an effort to explore the site. Even the interactive discussion valued so much by L Jers—L J comments are structured differently to blogs, as a conversation between the poster and her interlocutors—isn't what one first sees. The most visible features of L J both work against it locating any kind of authority. First, it is riddled with generic conventions—memes, emoticons, and webspeak shortcut communications and posts—which stress its everydayness, emphasise minor events, common routines, and shared personal experiences. Second, almost all L Js are pseudonymous, a distancing from “real life” furthered through avatars. Caught up in both distraction and immersion, unauthored and unpublished, L J is thus dramatically different from the blog as public opinion. And most importantly, women usually come to L J through or for a community rather than in search of a place to record anything in any name.

In 2005 I began an L J with an identifiable “real life” username, which seems to put me in the position of speaking as and from an authorized position, but it has never quite worked that way. Even a clearly academic L J entry invites response in overwhelmingly personal terms because readers are framed as friends and acquaintances and discussion as something without public significance. Thus, on the shell that remains of the L J she abandoned (not at all coincidentally in 2004), Boyd says that the environment was too personal and exposing to be comfortable (Boyd 2004). Blogs and journals are not only different genres but different technologies, which doesn't mean people don't hybridise them as many discussions on blogs and/or L Js suggest (see, for example, Rubio 2005).

In 2007 these issues were raised for me again when I participated in a series of discussions of gender and fan culture on Jenkins' blog (Driscoll & Hills 2007). From the dialogues between what Jenkins framed as “fangirls” and “fanboys” emerged some odd consistencies, including an association of female scholars who worked on fandom with both fanfiction and L J and in turn gender issues with this nexus. The effort to bring “fans” who critically reflected on fandom to this conversation often returned to the difference between the professional academic blog on which they were hosted and the types of community-based conversations common to L J.

L J clearly provides a platform with tools that many women deem useful to online community formation; which differ from the authority shaping “the blogsphere”; and which are widely perceived as more “feminine.” But beyond this too much generalisation seeps in when we gender L J rather than connecting specific communities with specific practices. Online communities both respond to and produce a range of discourses on gender and gendered experiences. What I want more of is attention to the way in which online practices are inflected by and interact with pre-existing ideas about gender in their ordinary everyday practices. This doesn't mean that we cannot point to the power of dominant associations such as that between women and intimacy. Intimacy is undoubtedly an important set of skills in contemporary online culture—it's both a currency and a literacy. Women may have easier access to online intimacy in both these senses.

Across online social networking systems a range of tools/applications appear to exist solely in order to articulate intimacy. But it is not enough to ask how tokens like kisses, hugs, and cute gifts express and arrange gender. We must also ask how they engage with the forms of authority that all communities establish. The intimate structures of authority on L J may work in different ways, but ignoring them not only imagines communities of women as unsubtly utopian but misses how authority and intimacy work together online as well as off. On Facebook, for example, the plethora of happy warm gestures expressing nothing but connection interact with more authoritative ones like, demonstrations of expertise and forming public “causes.” The contrast between L J and blogs is useful for seeing how this works—how by strategies of representing intimacy and authority at once an L J becomes central to a community or sub-community.

Gender is one factor influencing where we think we have command of the specific literacies valued in a communicative context. The expectation that women will be literate in the values and mechanisms of intimacy both orients them to L J and enables them to feel they understand the rules. It is easy to relegate this to a stereotype, but such skills are a highly developed cultural literacy in contemporary online culture. L J provides not only an example of how a currency of intimacy works, but locates communities of women staking a claim for its value.

Catherine Driscoll, University of Sydney

Acknowledgements
Thanks to my online friends, past and present, across numerous platforms and many profiles. Thanks Auden, Charlie, Doug, Femme, Jonathan, Lola, Meiji Mo, Mel, Nina, Rat, Ruth, Steve, and Ted! Thanks to the Bad Subjects list, LBO-talk, Livejournal and Facebook. Thanks also to Melissa Gregg in her more authoritative persona with which I am co-authoring a book on presence, intimacy and community in online culture (See, for example, Driscoll & Gregg 2008).

NOTE
1. Bruns and Jacobs summarise some of these in their Uses of Blogs (2006), but see also Pulver’s (2004) prediction and McGann’s (2004) recap.

REFERENCES
BOYD, DANAH (2004) ‘Zapophenia’, Livejournal, 4 Feb. 2004, [Online] Available at: http://zapophenia. livejournal.com/ (20 January, 2008).
BOYD, DANAH (2005) ‘Turmoil in blogland’, Salon, 8 Jan., [Online] Available at: http://dir.salon.com/ story/tech/feature/2005/01/08/livejournal/index1.html (20 January, 2008).
BOYD, DANAH & ELLISON, NICOLE (2007) ‘Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13, no. 1.
BRUNS, AXEL & JACOBS, J. (eds) (2006) Uses of Blogs, Peter Lang, New York.
BUSSE, KRISTINA & HELLEKSEN, KAREN (eds) (2006) Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, Macfarland, New York.
DRISCOLL, CATHERINE & GREGG, MELISSA (2008) ‘Broadcast yourself: moral panic, youth culture and internet studies’, in Youth Media in the Asia Pacific Region, eds B. Smaill & U. Rodrigues, Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle, pp. 71–86.
DRISCOLL, CATHERINE & HILLS, MATT (2007) Gender and Fan Culture. Round Twelve, Part One: Confessions of an Aca-Fan, [Online] Available at: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/ gender_and_fan_culture_round_t.html; http://henryjenkins.org/2007/08/gender_and_fan_culture_round_t_1.html (4 September, 2007).
HERRING, SUSAN (1996) ‘Gender and democracy in computer-mediated communication’, in Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, ed. R. Kling, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 476–489.
HERRING, SUSAN & PAOLILLO, JOHN (2006) ‘Gender and genre variation in weblogs’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 439–459.
‘MANIFESTO FOR BAD SUBJECTS IN CYBERSPACE’ (1995), [Online] Available at: http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/18/manifesto.html (18 January, 2008).
MCGANN, ROB (2004) ‘Blog readership surged 58 percent in 2004’, [Online] Available at: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page¼ 3453431 (20 January, 2008).
PULVER, JEFF (2004) ‘2004: looking forward to a great year ahead!’, [Online] Available at: http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/000361.html (20 January, 2008).
RANTLIFF, CLANCY (2003) ‘Whose voices get heard? Gender politics in the blogosphere’, paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Antonio, TX.
RUBIO, STEVEN (2005) ‘But do I really want to talk?’, Livejournal [Online] Available at: http://masoo.livejournal.com/6653.html (18 January, 2008).
THELWALL, MICHAEL (2007) Social Networks, Gender and Friending: An Analysis of MySpace Member Profiles, [Online] Available at: http://www.danah.org/SNSResearch.html (21 January, 2008).
TURKLE, SHERRY (1997) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon & Schuster, New York.

And yes there are two published pieces of that collaboration (both 2008)
"Broadcast Yourself: Youth, Community and Intimacy Online". In Usha Manchanda Rodrigues (ed.) Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia-Pacific Region. Cambridge Scholars Press.
"message me: temporality, location and everyday technologies". In Media International Australia, 128: Special Issue on Digital Literacy.

There, see, I can do self promotion after all.

off to work...

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:28:19 GMT

But the second part of my exchange with Matt Hills is now up here, or here.

Gender and Fan Culture: Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills (and other stuff)

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 14:48:07 GMT

Go here, or here, for the first half of Matt Hills' and my contribution to Henry Jenkins' fan culture discussion series.

Also, does anyone know was there a list of delegates for Sectus? I promised a copy of my paper to a few (post)grad students, and I've lost one of the addresses - too many pieces of paper.

Finally, this CFP for a collection on Internet Fictions came my way. There's no way I have time, but I thought someone who passes through here might be interested.

Cfp: Internet Fiction(s): Collection to be published with the Cambridge
Scholars Press
Deadline for Submissions: Sept. 15, 2007
Deadline for finished articles: Jan 15, 2008

A small number of contributions is still being sought for a collection
of essays on Internet Fictions, under contract to the Cambridge Scholars
Press and due to be published in 2008.

The collection combines a historical and a systematic perspective on
fiction and the Internet, and is divided into the following sections:
*Classic Points of Departure*, *Appropriations and Inflections
of the Classic Patterns*, *Theoretical Takes on Internet Fiction*
and *Customers and Victims: Fictions and Financial Interests*.

For section two, we still require a contribution from the field of
Gender and Internet Fiction (slash and/or straight and anything that
might lie in between).

The editors also see a certain scope for considering proposals for
additional contributions to these sections that might enrich the
collection and broaden its frames of reference.

Deadlines: Please send a one-page abstract to the editors by Sept. 15,
2007. We will respond to you by the end of September. The deadline for
the finished articles is Jan 15, 2008.

Here, for your reference, is the blurb for the projected collection:

The Internet remains a massive, amorphous, rhizomic collection of
information, fantasy, madness, debate, criminal energy, big business,
stupidity, brilliance, all in all a seemingly limitless multiplication
of voices, all clamouring to be heard. As such, it is a medium which
proliferates stories, narratives, fictions, in ways which are both new
and familiar. It is as a generator of fictions that the Internet seems
to be just waiting to be explored by the disciplines of literary,
cultural and linguistic studies: Fan-fiction, slash and straight; scam
baiting; fan sites; *wild* or *rogue* interpretive universes;
gossip. As a singularly unstructured - and hence as yet uncanonizable -
body of texts, the stories told on the Internet have a distinct element
of *grass-roots* fictionalization and so offer an unprecedented
opportunity to access, hear and investigate the stories and fantasies
woven by non-professional writers alongside their more formally
recognized colleagues. As a medium which is beginning to investigate
itself by means of various meta-debates within the vast community of
Internet fictionalizers, it is also a location where emergent phenomena
may be debated in their process of being generated.
This collection seeks to explore this for the most part uncharted
territory in creative, innovative, theory-savvy ways using the manifold
fictions the Internet generates. Its intended readership will be found
in the field of academic debate, but as the internet fictions
environment does show a marked tendency of providing and researching its
own theories and meta-discussions, its practitioners can also be
expected to exhibit a certain interest in our academic discussions. We
are therefore committed to producing texts of sufficient linguistic
accessibility and lucidity to be of use to non-specialized readers.

Please send one-page abstracts to any one of the editors by Sept. 15:
Ingrid Hotz-Davies: ingrid.hotz-davies@uni-tuebingen.de
Anton Kirchhofer: anton.kirchhofer@uni-oldenburg.de
Sirpa Leppänen; sleppane@campus.jyu.fi

</p>

Goldsmiths

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:10:59 GMT

Melissa Gregg and I gave papers from the book we're writing at a special seminar at Goldsmiths last night. It was fascinating, really, seeing how our different perspectives, well, differ, but also intersect. And that's before we swap pieces to write our hybrid chapters. We've not presented in process pieces - pieces that we hadn't both already equally contributed to - in that way before. Enjoyed. Co-writing this book has been both interesting and fun thus far.

Oh, our papers?

Dr Melissa Gregg (Univ of Queensland)
THANKS FOR THE AD(D): NEOLIBERALISM’S COMPULSORY FRIENDSHIP

Dr Catherine Driscoll (Univ of Sydney)
THE ORDER OF PIXELS: A GENEAOLOGY OF ONLINE CULTURE

More soon on filter about London, but can I say that BBC1 is the most boring TV I've seen in ages. Right now I've another conference to think about.

The real reason for conference travel

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 23:14:33 GMT

Now I had heard that the PRC was deploying a range of filters to limit "inappropriate" content on websites. I'd heard it and I'd filed it away in the basket of attempts to govern the internet that would never really work - the way age limits etc on porn sites never really work - because of the dispersed structure of the net itself.

But in the PRC for a conference, despite paying for a "digital room" my internet didn't work. This was not because I couldn't get access - frankly, because I also work in "rural studies" (despite doing so, I hope, in ways rural studies mostly wouldn't be happy with), I am used to unstable or non-existent internet access - but because my sites were not allowed.

Livejournal is one of those sites. We could talk about why and what that means. In fact I intend to talk about why and what that means. But before going there I want to note that all usyd.edu.au sites were also "banned" - meaning all my work mail but also providing a really interesting twist on the amount of money my university assigns to "promoting" itself in China. An "engineer" had to be brought to my room to allow sites on that domain.

But my search for blocked sites has been really interesting. I know myspace was targetted, but I can get that. I can also get all the other social networking sites I can think of right now. I can get all the fanfic archives and all the mainstream light porn I can think of, so that's not it. I can get onto some blog hubs but not others - wordpress is out, diaryland is in, for example. But then if you have your own url - as Mel does, for example, then I can get there (even though she's "powered by wordpress").

Naturally, as I'm posting this, it can be got around. Thanks to Femme I have a whole series of "anonymizing" links that have let me onto different sites in different ways. But I have so many questions about what's been listed and what hasn't, what was taken off the lists and for what reason, and so on. Are corporations paying a premium to get their sites/hubs permitted in China?

Also, when the net in China is such a growing thing what does this mean about our sense of the way "social networking" works online, and what kind of networks get formed. So, conferencing today, and really hoping to find some people to answer questions I would never have had if I didn't travel to this conference.

shifting planes

Wed, 30 May 2007 22:53:42 GMT

So the first of those HJ fandom discussions is now up here. I have commented there, but blogs being blogs there's really no way of following a comment there with actual discussion so I'm linking to it here. In order to do that I have to link to this journal in the "outside" (meaning non-LJ) world, which I have never done before and never intended to do. I feel highly ambivalent about it, but I guess it's been coming for months, ever since Mel and I decided to do the book.

Comments on my comment are welcome here (once it's been authorised by the blog owner and is actually visible).

The questions about authority within the academy clearly are linked to those which distinguish academic "places from which to speak of culture" from other positions. When jostling for a place from which we can speak through publishing contracts, negotiations around promotion and tenure, and the use of affiliations and networks to authorise statements that appear outside academic publishing and teaching, we clearly do set up some special claims about the usefulness or perceptiveness of acadmic knowledge in comparison to other kinds of knowledge. So I'm glad this was raised at the outset because it does matter to what academics and non-academics do with fans and fandom. It's a big part of why the "meta" produced by fans isn't going to circulate in the same way as academic publication (and personally I see KB and KLH's book as an academic publication and as not really shifting that situation much).

However, I've got a few questions or doubts as well and I want to mention just two here. First, we shouldn't make fandom out to be some sort of egalitarian world in which there are not extremely fraught contestations over authority and very powerful striations of communities in terms of who has the power to speak, and how, and to whom. Second, I don't think that the question of gendered authority in the FanLib debate is at all the same as that which propels discussions about academic authority to speak about fans, and I don't think it's helpful to homogenise it.

I have a lot of questions about what it means for someone like JM to say that study fans and fandom but not fandom as an object, but I think I've said enough and those are likely to be questions that come up more than once in this series.

PS. the post actually freaked me out because it's dated June 1 and I thought I must have slept through a whole day in jetlagfugue, but my computer agrees with me that it is only May 31.

searchable Henry Jenkins post

Fri, 25 May 2007 03:21:01 GMT

Thing 1) icarusancalion's just been cited on Jenkins' blog. I know she knows, as she's commented to him, but woohoo! for a post that didn't come through the authorised-academics-posting-for-each-other channels getting a cite on a well-tracked blog.

Thing 2) Henry mentioned today finding references to himself on LJ that seemed too personally inflected to comfortably cite or perhaps even respond to. We've been to that topic before, of course, on various filters and off, but I thought it'd be interesting to note that academics not working in LJ also don't really know what the rules should be around personal posts - I'm still down with what was agreed under a discussion moderated by idlerat: if you don't filter, it's there for anyone to find and thus quote; it's a publication whether you think of it that way or not. The proviso, of course, is that you're identified only in the ways you choose to identify yourself on your LJ.

Thing 3) Is LJ too enclosed? HJ suggested that the fact that you have to have an LJ makes it hard to interact with. And other people have said that here, of course. I suppose I think the fact that they're free and easy to get makes me think it's not much of an issue. But I didn't say to him that he should just get an LJ then, because I know why not - it's about keeping all the academic work coherently together under an academic name - and so the blog is the right medium.

conference land

Wed, 23 May 2007 20:38:01 GMT

So, I've arrived in San Francisco, and the ICA is one of *those* conferences. You know the ones. Meat market + schmoozefest with very little interest in anyone's papers. And thousands of people. I'm here for my panel/workshop, and to meet some people I'd like to meet, so for me it's not so painful, but I can taste the desperation wafting around some of the arriving people... eau de abd.

In other news, Sectus wrote to me asking me to give a lecture there. Not only can I say yes, but I can even offer them a discount as I was already going to a conference in London that weekend. I'm glad because I was pretty much resigned to more serious commitments keeping me away from that conference even though I felt like, for community participation reasons, I should be there.

Less up... I'm so tired. I was already tired and I could not sleep on the plane.

And the reason why being in America makes me want to journal is probably so obvious I don't even need to say.

americana

Sun, 20 May 2007 03:21:53 GMT

I'm off to California this week - anyone going to be at the ICA that I don't already know about?

Fun with the politics of culture, art and law: Stanford's Fair(y) Use Tale

LJ vs MySpace

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:09:17 GMT

I don't make a lot of public posts here - I suppose that's because this journal is in my own name and so it feels as if a post here should be so much more *important* if it's accessible to any but a select group of friends or peers. It feels like *publishing*. I know I know, been around this topic before, but there is a reason.

Some of you know, but Melissa Gregg and I are writing a book together. It's called Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy and Community Online. So all my ranting here and elsewhere about blogs vs journals and networks vs communities (no I'm not totally buying those oppositions either) and around the ideas about subculture, resistance, conformity, technodeterminism and utopia that get tossed around regarding "online" culture - and yes all the stuff I do online that in this context gets framed as "participant observation" - well at least some of that will end up there.

So I figure it's only right that this journal tracks some of that publicly, whether or not I sort of half regret it.

Last week we presented a paper called "my profile: the ethics of virtual ethnography" (why bother reposting the abstract, Mel has it here). Some of you heard or read a paper I gave on a very similar topic a while back in the States, but we're talking about ethnography online in general, as opposed to focusing on fan communities where my published stuff on online culture has been focused.

So I have a question, based on a run of conversations I've been having with students about this. What do you think is the in practice difference between the self-presentation and community formation on livejournal and on myspace? I think that myspace (or its clones, and I *feel like* you can gather facebook and its clones into the same group) works quite differently in social/cultural/personal terms than livejournal (and its clones). I'm totally prepared to accept that I might be wrong about facebook and myspace being that similar, but I am really interested in how different the uses of myspace and livejournal seem to me.

I've made this anonymous and will never use it for more than helping myself *think* about this (it's not carefully enough structured to prove anything anyway). Even if you don't want to comment on the above question, I have a poll type situation.

Obviously, if you can fill this out, you have a livejournal. What I want to know is what else you have and whether you think it's different (and possibly how you think it's different). If you feel it's appropriate, please pass this poll link on to other LJ users.

View Poll: LJ and other networking sites

I know I'm not going to get any sense of what even this small group of people do with, or how they weight, these options from a poll like this. I'm just developing some ideas about it and I'd like to start questioning them before I get too confident. So, if you can be bothered and want to tell me what seems different to you about LJ in comparison to other networking options (I'm especially interested in MySpace, I guess), then I'd be excited and grateful to hear about it.

ETA: Damn, I meant to include del.icio.us, and forgot. Can't edit the poll though.

stuck in an airport waiting for my suitcase...

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 18:12:15 GMT

Checking my email I found this article on self-deprecating bloggers, quoting Ana Marie Cox. I can't help it. I can't. I have to say it.

My cat should keep a blog. Except, he wouldn't, not because chasing magpies is more fun than sitting around in pyjamas, but because a blog is a claim to cultural authority most people don't feel equipped to make, let alone most cats. The rest of us have journals instead. No, okay, I didn't quite mean that. I'm not in the least hesitant about coming forward with my opinion, but I don't think it's worth *advertising space*.

Bloggers are less quick to make fun of themselves than they are quick to make fun of a genre to which they think themselves and their preferred set of links are an exception. Saying her cat could do it is so obviously not any kind of comment on blogging that it only works as charming paid-speaker banter. I'm so irritated I'm not even linking to her "winner 2005 bloggies best political weblog". Of course, maybe I'm irritated because my luggage has been delayed. I can be shallow like that, I don't have to justify my paid space.

Bill Maher

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 19:46:15 GMT

Via my friend Doug Henwood (who really needs to get a sexier this-is-me page), I received this must share kind of thing. So, even if you've all already seen it: Bill Maher on President George.

okay

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 14:07:26 GMT

Someone somewhere wrote something about girls and fanfiction communities spinning off Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Of course, more than one person has done that, directly or indirectly, but this one has a title which plays on "A Room of One's Own". I seem to have cut it from every working bibliography on the topic, so... any ideas?

ETA: Urgh. I suppose it's rude to be invited to a conference on a particular author in order to speak about that author and to in fact spend your whole paper trashing that author.

life; London; this moment in June

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 21:33:52 GMT

No one writes diary entries like Virginia Woolf now. Seriously. I mean there may be people out there who want to, but no one does because no one can.

So I'm reading, you guessed it, Woolf's diaries. Or, rather, I'm scanning them for something I'm working on that isn't quite about her but only because it's not supposed to be about her. It's a struggle, I'm telling you, because I'm much more interested in her just now than in what I'm supposed to be writing on.

“this moment I stand on”, she says. No one can write that now. Is it that we don't feel we matter enough, that our moments matter enough? Is it just the specific rhetorical posture of admitting we think we matter so much that we can't do? What does it take to have the arrogance and yet the insecurity to ask to one’s own diary, “Now is life very solid or very shifting?” and seriously mean it. I know there’s a history or rather several histories in this but has anyone done it? Is it a rhetorical history that would make sense to me of how the journal, the diary, moved from Pepys to Woolf to, well, not me, certainly not me, but this. I'd love to read someone really take on the trajectories along which genres like the diary and the essay have moved. My journal vs blog piece is never going to cut it as that kind of history, and I don't mean it to, of course, but there are connections.

So I'm wondering if LJ is a field of journals. I think the answer is obviously no, and mainly because everything I write here is talking to people. If everything was privately filtered, of course, but why use LJ for that at all? Which means, going back to my earlier points about the authority of blogs and how monologic they are, that I think blogs are much closer to diaries/journals than livejournals are. It's not just an accident of nomenclature though because, on the other hand, LJs take on all the crappy bedroom culture connotations of the diary.

Only one sort of diary, however, and certianly not Virginia's. Wherever it's quoted I've noticed they quote only the most grand moments of what she writes there. Nothing else is worth quoting? Or does she just always have to look like Virginia Woolf (Seminal Author)?

I actually wrote the above in a train station. I was in that station for a very long time and I had nothing else to do, so I thought, if I were writing a diary entry right now, what would I write?

A black girl carrying pink faux alligator and the autobiography of Malcolm X. Throws ice at her sister and fights with her mother on a mobile phone. They groan at the mention of Greensboro and roll their eyes at the Asian college girl who moves away from their laughter to keep on studying further along the row of chairs (she starts marking the page against her ruler; I take notes about her).

Will there be a 27 June 1941?, Virginia wonders. I wonder how long it must take the blonde and pink tinted sisters to dye and crimp their hair. If I was to write my diary, then, it sounds more like Between the Acts than like Woolf’s reflections on the state of the world. Which is great, in one sense, I mean I love that book with big time love, but it's not what she's doing. When Virginia writes about hair and why girls hate other girls it's still about the state of the world. It really isn't for me. And don't say postmodernism right now or I will make faces at the screen. That's a nothing answer.

Where do I go to reflect on the state of the world? BBCworld? Left-inclined majordomo groups? Maybe it's better that I don't do it in a diary, that I do it somewhere with other people. But I'm still reading her diary and I still feel like something is lost.

“Perhaps it may be that though we change; one flying after another, so quick so quick, yet we are somehow successive, & continuous – we human beings” (more from VW's diary)

Things I Like About North Carolina

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:32:40 GMT

I've promised myself to be positive, so here it is. A few more days to settle in, I suppose, also a visiting friend with a car (thanks femmequixotic!) - the magic power of CAR unlocks much in this area - and I have some things I'm enjoying. As well as better access to sources of fresh food, CAR provides tours of other parts of North Carolina to compare to this one.

So, things I like...

The email notices from the library come signed "Sincerely, Circulation" - which, really, is just charming.

There's a quaint sort of naivety about the grand gestures made hereabouts - exhibit a) the pseudo-gothic "university chapel", like something out of Disneyland, which resembles an eighteenth century English Cathedral, simplified, built at half size, and painted out in pastels; exhibit b) enormous sandstone facia carved out with enormous gilded letters memorialising a woman who inside, appears to have provided six paintings and a clock to warrant this (granted one of the paintings appeared to be of Albus Dumbledore, which was kind of neat, and there was also a bronze of President Polk, of whom presumably Ms Morehead was a fan and its nice to see some idolising of one of the, to me, unknown presidents).

There's also a quite different sort of gothic thing about here, which makes a new kind of sense to me of texts like Twin Peaks and which I'm enjoying in what I suppose is a not terribly flattering way - like the little plastic monkeys in little plastic space suits sold by blank-faced doll-faced girls as if there wasn't something equally horrific about both of them.

Discovering that Richard Nixon lived in a house that almost but not quite backs on to mine while he was at Law School here may also, somehow, belong to the latter category, and I'm enjoying that too.

Squirrels. I don't care if they're fuzzy rats, they're both exotic and sweet-looking. (um, sorry, idlerat, but I'm not a rat fan, I hope that won't come between us).

The Outback Grill chain is going strong around here, teeming with people who like pseudo-Australiana labels on their food, and while it's horrendous in its own way it lets me sketch Australia in interesting negative terms - Australia is where they don't deep fry entire onions, serve them with thousand island dressing, and call them "Bloomin"; Australia is where they don't drink a lot of peach schnapps and eat 20oz steaks (though I like that Melbourne gets that honour - so much for your claim to be more tasteful than Sydney, Melbourne, you're a slab of meat and Sydney is some sort of fruity variation on a cosmopolitan); Australia is where they don't say 'have a bonzer day'. The Outback is a little like a Queensland RSL club in a tourist zone taken over by the manager of a creole theme park and staffed by robots. Though the onion was kind of tasty in that junk food way. The whole thing was rather fun.

Booths. Diner booths. Diner booths everywhere.
Oh and the IT helpdesk is actually helpful. Which goes against the laws of nature from an Australian point of view.

More Weird America (entirely food related)

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 20:33:46 GMT

There is corn syrup in the vanilla. I don't mean the cheap "imitation vanilla", I mean something priced as if it should be proper vanilla.

There seem to be almost no fresh herbs. I've found bunches of fresh mint once, and potted basil, which I'm trying to grow, but everything else is in little airtight plastic boxes, which you don't have to be a horticulturalist to know is not a good idea. I picked up some rosemary yesterday in a hurry. Under the uppermost cluster, where it was actually getting some light I suppose and not sweltering in a crush of plant and plastic, it was brown. A purplish damp brown. This is my fourth bad herb experience, and on other occasions I have tried to choose carefully but the packaging makes it difficult and none of it looks really fresh. So, I ask about a fresh market... and I get a recommendation for the Wholefoods supermarket I'd been going to anyway. I don't get it - there's space, even farms, there's clearly money around here - why are the herbs so utterly terrible?

The quality of the fresh fruit and vegetables is also nothing to write home about, but not in the same league.

While I have found acceptable milk, I'm still on the look out for decent tea and fruit juice that doesn't taste like it came out of a post-mix dispenser.

Mushrooms should be stored in paper or cardboard and not - again - in plastic boxes, which makes them sweat and become gross.

Because my experience of American made cheese has not been good, I've been buying imported cheese. I picked out a french brie without paying much attention, it had to be reasonable, surely, only to discover it was only *called* French brie and was in fact made in the States. The label, however, was printed in France.

I'm going out to dinner tonight for the first time since I arrived, so I'm sure I'll find something to whine about there. :)

But because my whinging is reaching English proportions I thought I better add some positives. Nice icecream. The little sticks of butter are so cute (even if I can't see why on earth anyone sweetens butter before it's packaged). And the salmon, while different to what I expected, was quite good.

Framing all this, usually when I go overseas I'm very keen to eat local food and I'd hate to be the sort of traveller who only ate what they saw as their own sort of food when abroad. I've been thinking about that, because there's no way I want to eat all this microwaved frozen food that dominates the supermarkets, or that I want to eat fried battered fried things for all three courses when I go out. So two things about looking at my own whining about the food. The first is that it doesn't have any aura of exoticness about it for me, so I wouldn't eat it just to experience it. While I think it's all mostly inferior it's not exactly foreign to me. Just inferior and sort of misdirected versions of food I know really well. And when there are exceptions, because we don't have say 30 varieties of frozen enchilada meals, it seems so overly manufactured that it's hard to see it as food that belongs to a particular place or people in that place. And that's the second thing. Which is, I know, a completely ridiculous idea about the relationship between food and place, but that still doesn't make me want to eat it.

So if anyone wants to recommend American food to me, or especially food from this area, then I want to try it, as long as it doesn't come in a box with microwave instructions. Wine, especially. I'm drinking Australian and European wine here mainly because all the America wine is giving off 'sweet and crappy' warning signals to me. Which can't be right. I've tried a couple and not liked them. I've had a few recommendations, but I can't find any of those around here. So tips would be good. Usually, in this heat, I'd drink beer, and I do like some American beers, but the airconditioning of life here is so extreme that it feels too cold to drink beer, unless one was to be outside, but it's too hot and humid to be outside.

/whine (or, at least a pause - tell you what, next American thing I want to whinge about I'll try emailing a friend and not haranguing you all)

Weird America #2: between biscuitville and god's anointed ministers

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 11:42:27 GMT

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

So, I can't sleep. So can't sleep. My life is like a mix of wake up at 5am or sleep till 1pm, but there is no appropriate sleeping no matter how I force myself away from the computer and it's time reorientation of my life, the weird television, the weird pseudo downtown, and the weird neighbourhood with its weird neighbours. I make myself go to bed, and can I sleep? Of course not... you all may laugh! I cannot sleep.

Weird American things:

self cleaning ovens

private universities

traffic lights that a) talk to you b) count down the seconds during which you can walk

insane mobile phone plans that are so confusing I want to cry

The WB channel, which appears to allow only comedies about black people (I cannot yet tell whether or not black people are supposed to be watching this and enjoying it)

no clothes lines</i>
more frozen food than god could comprehend

banks that want me to estimate my net worth

unspoken rules against walking

the Mystery of Coupons

the colour line...

Ten years ago I spent a while living in Texas. There was this highway that crossed the city and on one side pretty much everyone was white and on the other side pretty much everyone wasn't. We had some interesting experiences being very poor there but in a very white student way. I hadn't been here long at all and I noticed, in a day's hectic touring of different university departments in, okay, one university... that service jobs belong to non-white (black, hispanic) southern people and more privileged jobs belong to white non-southern people. I met one and only one exception to this, although theoretically I know there are black academics here. The distinction that's so obvious to me has got to be obvious to everyone else, but the experience of it made me really uncomfortable.

Now Australia's racial politics is in many respects dodgy to hideous, depending where and what racial differences you're talking about. And there are lots of areas where the only reason the lowest status jobs aren't occupied by nonwhite people is because there are none. In the field of racism, Australia is an international competitor, so I'm not looking down my nose. But there's just an out of my world additional dimension here.

Saturday morning, I'm up at insane hour of the morning. I mean, really insane, don't talk to me about it insane. And at about 8am I've done everything I could reasonably do in this cheesy little flat and decide to go and see some of the town. I walk. I walk in the direction of the mall where I believe I can buy a mobile phone. When I get there, the mall is shut until 10am. But between here and there, the walking experience doesn't go well.

Really soon I'm feeling like I'm not meant to be walking where I'm walking. I keep walking, trying to work out if there's a thing I might have done or a line I might have crossed. Small children stare at me, and not in a cute photogenic way. People who are neither small nor children stare at me in a way that would be filmed only for a certain type of film. I wonder if it's because nobody ever seems to walk anywhere here. But yeah, that's probably not it. It's a poor neighbourhood, yes, and just to round out the cliche everyone I see is not white.

Except for the man in what is the U.S. equivalent of a blue Torana who starts following me. He drives back and forth, says hello to me out the window one way, and then on the way back, and each time I sort of missed it, not expecting it, and then he turns round and drives back again and says hello and this time I don't feel like it at all. I think I nodded. He's turning the car around again, so I cross the road where there are some other people, even though I feel stupid doing it. Hell, it's 8.30am on a Saturday morning, and it must be the lack of sleep making me into this paranoid cliche. By the time I get there there's one girl, holding a sign that says "Car Wash: Support the AKA Cotillion". A dance, I think. I add school to that in my head, she seems kind of young. I say hi. She looks at me like i just vomited on her sign.

Oookay. Whatever that was about I don't know. But I don't know is definitely the theme for the morning and I'm tired of feeling stupid, so I go right down to the mall. Torana!man is passing me when I realise it's closed and I'm not going to wait there for half an hour. As I turn around he says hi to me again. And it's just "Hi", right, but still it's too creepy, so I take the most open route that cars can't drive on and try and find my way back to the flat.

Now, two things. I know I it's nuts for anyone to think I was in any danger. Torana!man was flirting and the people whose neighbourhood I'm walking just wondered who the hell I am, because not only do people not walk around here but, when I talk to the landlord later in the day about walking to the mall only to find it closed, he tells me I can't walk that way. I can't walk, he tells me, North of Green Street. It's "the wrong part of town". So, if people don't go there who don't live there, then clearly they're going to notice a stranger. But, the other thing. The attitude of 'just don't go there and everything's fine' is just so insane. I thought segregation was, like, over. By decades. What is this thing, on both sides, because everyone seems to accept that there are two sides, of enforcing the line I shouldn't cross without making everyone uncomfortable. I'm excluding Torana!man, because he had the magic power of CAR which seems to rule all in this world.

Sunday afternoon, landlord sends his son to advise me about "crack neighbourhoods". On the one hand I want to shake him, and on the other, I want them marked on the map, because while I don't think they're neighbourhoods full of crack dealers or whatever exactly a crack neighbourhood is supposed to be here - clearly the girl washing cars for her dance had a very unnecessary cover story if that's the case - it was unpleasant and I'm not in a hurry to repeat the experience. And it's all just a bit sad from my admittedly touristico perspective. Because I wanted to eat at "Biscuitville," just because I remember Southern biscuits fondly, and I thought God's Anointed Ministries - which is a lavender-painted, well, shack, for want of another word - looked like something I'd be interested in, being a churchaholic as I am. And I could make myself go back, just to prove a point, except that they didn't want me there, that was damned obvious, and so, considering everything including my privilege outside the streets where they were not happy with me being, what right do I have to go?

No, I don't know what the point is in writing it down, only that urge to ask people what the hell is up with this and how does a foreigner respond in a way that doesn't involve just drawing lines on a map and not crossing them (and instead spending time struggling with weird wachine machines or laughing at the insanity of garbage disposal units)?

And now I've two hours to get to work on almost no sleep and I can't even quite remember what it is I'm meant to be doing today. Does anyone have a sure fire cure for what seems to be unconquerable jetlag? I'd even have a go at a completely crackpot cure at this point.

Weird America #1

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 12:34:42 GMT

How could I forget how strange America is? Strange in lots of different ways in different places, but today, 24 hours after arriving (half of which I've spent in airports and planes), I'm back in that weird headspace where America is a lot like walking through a TV series I don't much like.

Weird American things at 7-8 in the morning:

Plane ettiquette. If I'm randomly seated next to you on a plane, I will be friendly. We're in uncomfortably close physical proximity and not being friendly would make it worse (a la Parisiennes with whom I once shared a very unpleasant couchette cabin from Venice to Paris). However, what possesses Americans to think that means I want to a) know their life story b) have them read over my shoulder c) psychoanalyse them?

Hooters. The airport informed me, as I was collecting my bags, that there are two Hooters - um, outlets, are they outlets? anyway, Hooters places - within a 15mile radius of the airport. Why? The demand cannot be quite that great, and it's tres weird to have a big poster of some girls breasts greet me in that way.

Milk. It's not meant to be oily and bitter, people. It's really not. Stop doing whatever you're doing to the milk now. And why are there vitamins added to this milk? Milk has all the vitamins it's supposed to have already, doesn't it?

Carolina Houses. Houses should not be pastel. It's an aesthetic error. Okay, I may be just a little tired and grumpy, but if one person quirkily wants a pastel house then fine, the rest of the street should shake their heads in an amused fashion but they should not also paint their houses in pastel colours. The effect is just creepy.

Radio. I think I'm listening to a university radio station. But if I am, why is it all about Christianity? Darwin vs creationism story has been followed by a story about whether the bible is opposed to homosexuality. Recommendations of a radio station in Nth Carolina would be very welcome. (okay, now it's about Tiger Woods, which is probably an improvement of sorts)

The one that needs more attention, however, is this weird place to live (taking place in the literal sense).

I know there are lots of cultures in which the conspicuous consumption of space happens. In fact, Australia certainly has its own mainstream fantasy of the 1/4acre block for everyone's own house and yard and enough space between people is an important part of how Australians live. (I wanted to write habitus, and you know I'm jetlagged when I want to spontaneously spout Bourdieu.) But in this place a whole acre doesn't seem to be enough. The houses are on simply enormous blocks and the whole effect seems to be to make things as *large* as possible in every element.

Why do Americans, at least outside NYC, I'm not sure about houses in other places, have this freaky obsession with enormous houses? That's at the base of that whole "American gothic" thing, somehow, but my brain won't sort that out right now.

For a while, in England, I stayed in a gated community in Surrey. Well, it was free accommodation with easy access to London, so don't look at me like that. It seemed bizarre. The lawns, the houses, the gardens, the furniture, everything was this strange magazine layout uniformity and so so oddly expensive for something so unpleasant. This is not a gated community, it's just a suburb, I guess, though it's right near "downtown" there doesn't actually seem to be a residential "downtown" in any sense I recognise. But it feels like a gated community. I've already met the neighbours on both sides even though I arrived after 8pm.

Dear Secretary of Homeland Security

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 22:42:11 GMT

Hi Tom,

I realise that I'm not a U.S. citizen, still less a U.S. government official, and thus hardly part of your declared constituency, but I thought you might like some feedback on all this Homeland Security business from someone who is admittedly no fan of your government's foreign policy, or even of your government in general, but is certainly not an enemy of "America" or anything like that. I've recently been through the long process of gaining a visa to spend half a year in the States. I promise I have no terrorist or even criminal intentions there, and I was happy to tick the little ticky box affirming that I was indeed not a terrorist, even though I was a little sceptical about whether any terrorist would fail to do so. I was happy to tick all the boxes about not kidnapping children and not planning treason and so on although, again, I'm not really convinced that's a useful way to filter out people who do those things.

So it's not the forms I object to, although quite why you need me to fill out the same one three times was lost on me. Perhaps you think you might catch the odd nefarious person out, accidentally admitting that they are a terrorist just because you asked them on a morning when they'd missed their pre-breakfast coffee, but I think your average terrorist is probably a bit more together than that. I mean, it requires concentration and application, right, to carry out those sorts of endeavours, and I don't think the ticky boxes are ever going to trip them up. I also think the list of my last five employment positions complete with contact numbers on the last form was a waste of everyone's time, because frankly anyone with enough comrades in bombs to be a terrorist is going to be able to provide five phone numbers, and you didn't call anyone's numbers in any case as the timing made very obvious. But okay, it was probably no more than an hour or two of my life in total filling them out and another three or four waiting to hand them in so if I want to be in your country then I suppose I can tolerate the remarkably silly forms.

The fees were more annoying. I don't necessarily object to paying more than $600 to get into the U.S. although as my visa costs no more than the student visa I do think it would be pretty prohibitive for many, and it really doesn't seem to be the terrorists who are likely to lack that kind of money, if you see what I mean. So your motivation is clearly acquisitive rather than preventative there and that's fine; I'm an Australian and not nearly as opposed to taxes as you all are. But it would be less annoying if you could just charge the actual fee, rather than one fee for the application, one for reading it, one for getting the visa, and the euphemistic SEVIS fee to pay for your own Homeland Security business. Usually I'm in favour of transparency in invoicing, but the fees did rather mysteriously multiply, and it was a bit galling to be scanned five times for weapons and fingerprinted just to pay for the reading of an application I'd paid for, all the while knowing I was paying for the honour of being so monitored and recorded. Before I drop the question of fees let me also mention that it's nothing but very rude to charge anyone ringing your consulate or embassy $11 for the privilege. Especially when you repeatedly tell them to call back on numbers that charge them again. You're the United States of America, and you can't be that hard up.

However, I think that paying several hundred dollars for the maintenance of Homeland Security makes me something like a subscriber, so after a browse of your website I thought I'd let you know that the whole thing looks a little ludicrous. A little like a Monty Python skit with its comic mix of beauracracy and pointless bravado. Try to take this as constructive criticism. I think most of the world understands why the World Trade Centre made you all a little jumpy and inclined to shout at spiders and bark at passing cars. I've told my story about signing in twice and passing through a chain of security guards in pairs who scanned and processed me and searched my bag twice and then xrayed it and detained my mobile phone and finally being fingerprinted by a laser - cool - for the first time in my life, and everyone more or less understood. For complicated reasons, in which you are far from innocent, but I do see that's not the point at present, people want to blow you up. And it's reasonable that you want to stop that happening. But here I get to the really serious point in my letter... only people who didn't want to blow you up would go through all this.

I live in a country with which you have a visa waiver agreement. If I want to get into the U.S. I just have to buy a return ticket and show up with my passport at the airport. As long as I don't say I'm staying longer than three months, no one is going to care about letting me in. They won't charge me these fees, they won't make me wait in four sequenced grey waiting areas, and they won't collect four photographs of me and my fingerprints. Only if I ask to jump through these hoops by saying I generally intend to be there five rather than three months do I need to. Doesn't that strike you as a little stupid? Because not only are terrorists obviously very busy people - all that training and preparation means they have less time for the queueing and the forms - they probably will choose to lie.

I mean all this in the nicest possible way, really, because even though I think it's stupid I'm not without sympathy or understanding in terms of how this situation came about. So I'll go back today and collect my stamped passport, and I'll probably discover that there's a collection fee, which I will also pay, and I will go to my non-immigrant registration session the day after I arrive, and I will keep my papers in a safe and accessible place at all times, and I will try not to think of you all as farcical and fascistic because I can see how it happened, but now might be a nice time to reflect on what the fuck you think you are doing and whether it will help.

Yours,
C.

Porn IV

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 13:49:21 GMT

Frances Ferguson - yes, yes, idlerat, I am slightly obsessed with her at present, it's best not to ask - summarising arguments she attributes to Gayle Rubin and Linda Williams:

Pornography... has developed to the point of dividing into a variety of genres with a variety of target audiences; it performs a major service by educating a self-selecting audience into the possibility of sexual self-realization. The meaning of the pornographic object, in other words, is its audience's self-image. From this perspective, pornography teaches by giving one anticipations of certain actions that are merely an incidental expression of the sexual identity one has already (if only proleptically) achieved.

I've never read either of the pieces she's citing here, and it's worth saying that she goes on to argue more or less against what she calls this "anti-censorship position", but I was wondering... anyone have thoughts or opinions on this? I'm kind of divided on it, mainly because I think self-realisation is a fantasy of pornography-as-a-genre but doesn't necessarily either project or rely on "the audience's self-image."

Statically speaking

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 09:57:21 GMT

My first book was called Girls. A friend of mine just pointed me to this Amazon page, which now includes the following quite hilarious "stats". Well, they're hilarious if you wrote the damned thing.

Most used words (the large and bold is #1, surprise surprise, and the bold is #2)

adolescence adolescent age always analysis audience barbie becoming between body bridal bride century changes claims cultural culture daughter desire development different discourses does dominant even example experience family feminine feminism feminist field film focus forms freud gender genre girlhood girls groups however idea identification identity image including individual late less life magazines market might model modern mother narratives new object often own period popular position power practices process production puberty public question range rather relation representations role see seems self sex sexual sexuality social space specific studies subject teen terms theories thus time understanding wedding woman women work young youth

I understand most of these, though I didn't know I wrote that much about Barbie. Or Freud. What's weird is, the first thing I thought is that I should set myself a challenge - use all these words in this order in less than 500 words. And then I thought... my life has become very strange.

Also funny: In U.S. currency, apparently you get 5,283 words per dollar in that book (no wonder it seemed like so much work); average syllables per word is apparently 1.9 (! - that doesn't seem very much), and my "complex words" rating is 25%, although I have no idea whether that's a lot); but the funniest thing is that 4/6 "books on related topics" are about anime (wtf? is it because I had a short section on Sailor Moon - the last time I was here it was all about Foucault).

Oh, did any of you know that the first professional training I had was as a statistician. Go on, laugh.

"On Angst"

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 00:09:08 GMT

It is, indeed, no ways extraordinary that the mind should be charmed by fancy, and attracted by pleasure; but that we should listen with complacence to the groans of misery, and delight to view the exacerbations of complicated anguish, that we should choose to chill the bosom with imaginary fears, and dim the eyes with fictitious sorrow, seems a kind of paradox of the heart, and can only be credited because it is universally felt. Various are the hypotheses which have been formed to account for the disposition of the mind to riot in this species of intellectual luxury. Some have imagined that we are induced to acquiesce with greater patience in our own lot by beholding pictures of life tinged with deeper horrors, and loaded with more excruciating calamities; as, to a person suddenly emerging out of a dark room, the faintest glimmering of twilight assumes a lustre from the contrasted gloom. Others, with yet deeper refinement, suppose that we take upon ourselves this burden of adscititious sorrows, in order to feast upon the consciousness of our own virtue. We commiserate others, say they, that we may applaud ourselves; and the sigh of compassionate sympathy is always followed by the gratulations of self-complacent esteem. But surely they who would thus reduce the sympathetic emotions of pity to a system of refined selfishness, have but ill attended to the genuine feelings of humanity. It would, however, exceed the limits of this paper, should I attempt an accurate investigation of these sentiments. But let it be remembered, that we are more attracted by those scenes which interest our passions, or gratify our curiosity, than those which delight our fancy: and, so far from being indifferent to the miseries of others, we are, at the time, totally regardless of our own. And let not those on whom the hand of Time has impressed the characters of oracular wisdom, censure with too much acrimony productions which are thus calculated to please the imagination, and interest the heart. They teach us to think, by inuring us to feel: they ventilate the mind by sudden gusts of passion; and prevent the stagnation of thought, by a fresh infusion of dissimilar ideas.

Anna Barbauld, "On Romances", 1773

Huh.

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 11:28:42 GMT

This has got to be a great essay for thinking about blogs. Not that I will, because it's not my thing, but if anyone else wants it...

"For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert even if not on a subject but only on the post he occupies—he gains access to authorship."
(Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" in Reflections).

ETA: All right, changed my mind, I'm going to use it anyway.