“I am a Giant Cockroach”

Excerpts from “Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa’s Disability Claim” by Alex St. Andrews, in The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes:

The Decision on Gregor Samsa’s Case

You listed the following impairment(s) on your SSI application:

I AM A GIGANTIC COCKROACH
DEPRESSION
BACK PAIN

You said the above impairment(s) affected you in the following way(s):

I CANNOT STAND OR WALK UPRIGHT OR SPEAK ANY HUMAN LANGUAGE.
I CANNOT HANDLE OR MANIPULATE OBJECTS WITH MY MANY LEGS OR ANTENNAE.
WHEN I AM ON MY BACK I HAVE DIFFICULTY RIGHTING MYSELF.
MY FAMILY HAS IMPRISONED ME IN MY ROOM AND IS FEEDING ME SCRAPS. [...]

Doctors and other trained staff looked at this case and made this decision. They work for the state but used our rules. The following findings were made:
- You are not engaged in any substantial gainful activity.
- Your impairment causes more than minimal limitations.
- Although your impairment(s) result in some problems for you, which are more than minimal, they do not equal any of the impairments listed in Table 2 of Appendix 1 to Subpart P of Chapter 20, Part 404 of Federal Regulations (“the Listings”).
- You are not able to perform your previous employment. You listed the following job(s) in your work history report:
TRAVELING SALESMAN
- We have determined that your impairment prevents you from continuing in your previous employment, because you cannot handle or finger your sample cases, you cannot speak any human language, and your customers will be frightened by your monstrous clicking mandibles.
- You are able to perform other work which exists in substantial numbers in the national economy. A vocational expert was consulted, and determined that your Residual Function Capacity (RFC) allows you to perform the following jobs:
STAPLING MACHINE OPERATOR
NUCLEAR WASTE MANAGEMENT
ENTERTAINER (foreign cinema, circus)
TAX PREPARER

I ♥ Discourse

I read an article in the New Yorker a while back called “I ♥ Novels.” It’s about a new genre of writing that has emerged in Japan over the past few years called keitai shosetsu, or cell phone novels. Most of their authors are young women who write novels in short installments from their cell phones, often under a pseudonym. I’ve never read a keitai shosetsu so I don’t know how good they are, but I find the general concept very compelling. Technology is changing the way we tell stories. It always has, of course, but I feel like we are in the midst of a significant shift.

I recently signed on to Twitter and, for the moment, I think it’s the greatest thing ever. We can now follow each other throughout the day by means of one line comments or status updates, but without the added apparatus of a Facebook or something like it. The only common tool I can think of right now that is similar is text messaging. But with text messaging there’s always the expectation of an immediate response and an ensuing dialogue, whereas with Twitter people don’t have to respond at all. One can update as much for themselves as for others.

I am a little excited already to look back on my updates after several months have gone by. Imagine how interesting it would be to reconstruct a story of your day-to-day activities and impressions using random single lines.

Organizational Guru

In a roundabout way, I came to this Wikipedia summary of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It is a book about organizational strategies meant to bring order to your everyday life, and apparently has been quite well-received.

The thing is, with the exception of his “Tickler File” — a filing system containing 43 folders and designed to jump-start your memory — all of the things he describes are things I just do intuitively already. So either his whole method is simple and obvious, or I should have written a book about being organized.

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”

In a previous post I had mentioned that I haven’t changed the desktop background on my laptop in over 6 years. Well, today I finally changed it.

My lovely friend Emily runs a feature on her blog each week called “Illustrating Democracy.” Every Thursday her readers post suggestions for a theme and she then posts her interpretation of that theme as an illustration. This week she posted an illustration to accompany T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” one of my favourite poems. And the illustration includes a coffee cup with a spoon in it to reflect my favourite line: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

In two weeks I have to write my major field exam on 20th century British and Irish Literature. I’m a little nervous about it but I am doing alright. What I need is to constantly renew my motivation, to remind myself every day that I am doing this because I love the material, and to remember that it is so much more to me than just a hoop I have to jump through. And having J. Alfred Prufrock looking back at me every day is exactly what I need to accomplish that.

For the Love of God

I saw the movie Amadeus when I was 7 years old. It is based on Peter Shaffer’s play about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life and music, and his relationship with rival composer Antonio Salieri. At that point, I had been playing piano for 2 years already and Mozart quickly became an obsession for me. It was several years before I discovered just how much of Amadeus‘ plot was fictional, and several more years before I came to understand the power of that genre of storytelling. I suppose you could call it a historiographic metafiction, a sub-genre of postmodern literature, although I didn’t see this until yesterday when I read the play for the first time. Historiographic metafiction usually includes rewritings of historical characters and events and is written in a self-reflexive way that draws attention to the construction of the story and the apparatus through which it is being told. The best example I can think of is Jeanette Winterson’s fiction, but it is very common in all postmodern literature. Hollywood conventions necessarily rendered the film version of Amadeus as a biopic, but the structure and presentation of the play is entirely different. Salieri narrates the story directly to the audience as he is taking part in it, instantly making it a metafiction by drawing attention to the medium through which the story is being told. Although Salieri narrates the film as well, voice-over narration and flashback have become so naturalized in film that audiences barely notice them as conventions anymore unless the character speaks directly to the camera. Another major difference is in the structure. Shaffer wrote the play so that it would flow as Mozart’s music does. There are no scene breaks — the action is continuous and the sets are changed as the story is moving along. The dialogue is also very rhythmic and musical. Before I read the play I thought there would be very little I could take away from it, but it exceeded all my expectations and really drew me in. It was so powerful and beautiful and if I ever get a chance to see it produced on stage I would be ecstatic.

There were a couple of points that I noticed in the play that I never noticed in the film. Considering how many times I’ve seen the film I was feeling a bit stupid actually for not having seen them before. For example, there is a scene where Salieri writes a Welcome March for Mozart and Mozart unintentionally mocks him by playing several much more complex variations of it after only hearing it once. What I didn’t catch is that the final variation he plays is one of the movements from his Opera The Marriage of Figaro.

But the big thing I had missed is the title — Amadeus. It had never once occurred to me that there was a reason for calling it such and not Mozart or something similar. “Amadeus” means “the love of God” and the story is about Salieri’s battle with God through Mozart. And there’s another thing that had never really struck me before. Though I was aware in watching the film that Salieri was angry at God for making Mozart his instrument, it hadn’t really sunk in that that was the true conflict. Did I ever feel stupid when I finally figured it out. But then, I guess because the film comes across as more objective, I had never thought about the film as meaning anything beyond the obvious story it was telling.

If you have an hour to kill and you for some reason feel like reading a fantastic play, pick up Amadeus, it will be worth your while. And, even better, if you get a chance to see it on stage, GO! After reading the play yesterday I went to my parents’ house and played Mozart’s 12 Variations on A Vous Dirais-Je Maman (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) on the piano for 2 hours and I’ve never enjoyed it more.

If Only I’d Gotten There First!

Do you ever read something and think to yourself, “that was the book I should have written”? Or heard a song and thought something similar? I’m not just referring to things you really like. I mean creative output that is so close to home that, had you taken the time to make it yourself, it would have come out almost exactly the same.

Here is a brief list of things I should have made but I’m too lazy so someone beat me there (not to suggest I’m actually quite that multi-talented…).

The book I should have written: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus.

The poem I should have written: “The Legs” by Robert Graves. (*see full text below)

The song I should have written: “One Two Three Four” by Feist.

The movie I should have made: Nowhere, dir. Gregg Araki.

The music video I should have made: “Here It Goes Again” by Ok Go.

Wow — that makes me sound really pretentious, doesn’t it? I don’t actually believe I would have done as good of a job with any of those ideas, but who knows cause I never tried!

—

“The Legs”

There was this road,
And it led up-hill,
And it led down-hill,
And round and in and out.

And the traffic was legs,
Legs from the knees down,
Coming and going,
Never pausing.

And the gutters gurgled
With the rain’s overflow,
And the sticks on the pavement
Blindly tapped and tapped.

What drew the legs along
Was the never-stopping
And the senseless, frightening
Fate of being legs.

Legs for the road,
The road for legs,
Resolutely nowhere
In both directions.

My legs at least
Were not in that rout:
On grass by the roadside
Entire I stood,

Watching the unstoppable
Legs go by
With never a stumble
Between step and step.

Though my smile was broad
The legs could not see,
Though my laugh was loud
The legs could not hear.

My head dizzied, then:
I wondered suddenly,
Might I too be a walker
From the knees down?

Gently I touched my shins.
The doubt unchained them:
They had run in twenty puddles
Before I regained them.

The Meaning of Life

In a review of Dorothy Richardson’s Interim (1919), the 5th installment in the 13-volume novel Pilgrimage, Katherine Mansfield writes:

For them [certain modern authors] the whole art of writing consists in the power with which they are able to register that faint inward shock of recognition. Glancing through life they make the discovery that there are certain experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs. There is a quality in the familiarity of these experiences or in their strangeness which evokes an immediate mysterious response — a desire for expression. But now, instead of going any further, instead of attempting to relate their “experiences” to life or to see them against any kind of background, these writers are, as we see them, content to remain in the air, hovering over, as if the thrilling moment were enough and more than enough. Indeed, far from desiring to explore it, it is as though they would guard the secret for themselves as well as for us, so that when they do dart away all is as untouched, as unbroken as before.

But what is the effect of this kind of writing upon the reader? How is he to judge the importance of one thing rather than another if each is to be seen in isolation? [...]

In it [Interim] Miriam is enclosed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, and though she receives, as usual, shock after shock of inward recognition, they are produced by such things as well-browned mutton, gas jets, varnished wallpapers. Darting through life, quivering, hovering, exulting in the familiarity and the strangeness of all that comes within her tiny circle, she leaves us feeling, as before, that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance.

Precisely the thing that Mansfield felt was a shortcoming of Pilgrimage is what I find most interesting about it. It seems to me that by focusing on the subjective experience of everyday moments and objects, and by refusing to frame them as part of a larger, more meaningful narrative, Richardson expresses that which is nearly impossible to express: the everyday itself, that which cannot be contained in any single detail but persists in the whole.

Mansfield’s argument that assigning “equal importance” to every detail causes every detail to become equally unimportant is exactly the mode of thought that has taken us away from the everyday. We focus on the marvellous, the inspirational, the philosophical, those things that stand out from the ordinary, and thus sacrifice our understanding of real experience as consisting of the mundane.

This is exactly why I love Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. “What is the meaning of life?” It seems like such a big question. But it’s really not. Life is birth, death, sex, work, love, friendship, laughter. Life is, quite simply, the everyday.

The Winter of our Discontent

So lately I’ve been reading loads of feminist theory and am slightly shocked to discover that many of these works from the 1970s still speak an undeniable truth. I’m definitely not a feminist type, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, but some of what I’ve read has roused unexpected and passionate feelings in me. Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray both take Freud to town on his portrait of femininity and it is truly a joy to watch them do it. But it’s interesting too, to see how some of the things they are deconstructing are stigma about women that still hang around. Freud talks about woman’s sexuality as a “dark continent,” he talks about “the riddle of the nature of femininity,” men as “active” and women as “passive,” masochism as “truly feminine,” women as naturally hysterical, and he essentially implies that women’s function in society is to be men’s objects of desire. And then there’s the one that makes me blindly crazy whenever I read it: “Women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization.” Except, of course, plaiting and weaving, which he argues is somehow an imitation of our natural shame about being women. You can certainly dismiss much of what Freud says by recognizing that he was a man borne of a particular time in history, which is what I’ve always done. But let’s face it, the discourse of psychoanalysis is so deeply embedded in our culture now that we have sustained many of these views without even acknowledging it. How many of us women out there have been brushed off as “crazy” or labeled as incomprehensible. Femininity as a “riddle,” feminine sexuality as a “dark continent,” still seems to me to be the dominant discourse about women on an everyday level. Sure some of our material conditions have drastically improved in the past hundred years, but as far as I’m concerned we’ve got a long way left to go. And it’s not about having more rights necessarily — it’s about how we are talked about, how we talk about ourselves, and how we talk about each other.

Cixous says that men have pitted women against each other. And isn’t that still true? Even still, in my adulthood, in the 21st century, I find it difficult to avoid competition and bitterness amongst groups of girls. She also talks about the limitlessness of women’s desire. But don’t many of the women you know still find satisfaction by simply subjecting passively to sex? I know that’s a gross generalization, but I am constantly amazed that so many of the women I’ve spoken to about it over the past few years experience desire under totally masculine terms.

All I’m saying ladies is that we have a long way to go. And it amazes me that the concerns of 30 years ago are still around to such an extent.

Civilization and Its Discontents

I learned something today while I was studying — first and foremost, when you are not in a very healthy headspace reading Freud can be very unsettling. In fact, it can be downright depressing at points and encourages a kind of destructive self-analysis best avoided. That said, it wasn’t entirely unenjoyable either. I just finished Civilization and Its Discontents and, even though it took me about ten times longer than it should have to get through, it’s pretty dope.

There are a couple of points that need thinking over a bit, but I’ll only touch on one for now. Freud has a view of ethics that is so vastly different from Derrida’s. I say this because I was reading Derrida’s Specters of Marx just before this and it was fresh in my mind. Derrida feels that ethics is all about responsibility to others, and the most ethical position you can take is to recognize that you will never completely fulfill that responsibility. Not that you shouldn’t try to treat every person and every situation in the justest way possible, but that you must be aware of an ongoing debt to society that is embodied in the person you may inadvertently treat unjustly in the process. If this isn’t clear I think I talked about it a few months ago in another post about ethics. Now Freud also talks about a responsibility to the other, as is represented in the maxim “love thy neighbour as thyself.” However, he believes that although this is valued as one of the highest ideals in human relations it is inherently impossible because human beings are instinctively aggressive towards one another and will always be enemies and competitors at their core. He even goes so far as to make a value judgment on the ideal, claiming that to love his neighbour may actually be unjust in some situations. He argues that some people may be unworthy of love, and that by extending the same understanding to them it devalues the love we share with the people who actually deserve it and is thus unjust towards them. He presents it with a nearly airtight logic — but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.

Though Civilization and Its Discontents is a well-written and fascinating read, it is deeply pessimistic. There is much more to it than I have the energy to go into right at this moment, but suffice it to say he paints a very bleak picture of the state of civilization and human relations. It is interesting to suggest, as he does, that all of culture originates in a struggle between Eros and Death. But it is also a rather hopeless view of the possibilities for humanity’s future. This requires a much more extensive explanation, which I may get into later. For now though, I think I’ll try to suppress my self-destructive death drive and actually get some sleep.

Everyday Myths

I’m not currently working on my dissertation — no writing yet, no research for now — as I am far too occupied with studying for my candidacy exams. But I did come across something today which is plainly related to studies of the everyday. I was reading Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and, though I’ve read it before, I haven’t thought about it for quite awhile. What struck me is just how much Barthes’ work falls in line with other theorists of the everyday. He even returns to Baudelaire, Proust, Mallarmé, Bataille — all modern writers to whom other theorists of the everyday refer.

Mythologies in particular is about how various cultural productions, from texts, to photographs, to advertisements, to everyday myths and narratives, are at their base ideological. Even the most taken-for-granted truths or the most benign or neutral-appearing representations carry the traces of an ideological message. He makes connections between cultural representations and the material conditions of existence; for instance, he suggests that the specific chemical structures of cleaning products directly correlate to the real conditions of the women who use them: “the chemical fluid is an extension of the washerwoman’s movements when she beats the clothes, while powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and rolling the washing against a sloping board.” In addition, the advertising of those products is intimately connected to the idiosyncracies of class: “Persil Whiteness for instance, bases its prestige on the evidence of a result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with appearances, by offering for comparison two objects, one of which is whiter than the other.” This particular example also carries the connotations of racial distinction.

What Barthes makes apparent is not just that everyday representations are ideological, but that ideology is most effectively disseminated through coded everyday representations. I can’t help but wonder why Barthes has not made an appearance in the canon of everyday life theory. Especially considering that it is essentially a branch of cultural studies and Barthes could easily be regarded as a forefather of the discipline. Perhaps because it is still a developing field and no one has made it into that corner yet. Or perhaps people in the academy are not particularly interested in Barthes right now (I’ve certainly gotten that impression in general). Or maybe he doesn’t really fit and I just don’t know enough about this particular field to see that yet. I have to say though, if Barthes suddenly makes a splash onto the everyday scene in the next year or two, without my having already made my comments on him, I’m going to kick myself for doubting it.