In honor of Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr

The blog in question is here. Basically it emerged from a debate between asexuals and sex workers on tumblr.  I really enjoy the way tumblr encourages all these different subcultural debates and I hope the CEO of Yahoo does too.

Links and Quotes

People always seem to think my bibliophilia/biblioklepsy is indicative of achievement, scholarliness, etc. They don’t understand fully how it’s another form of escapist ‘addiction.’ I think of Madame Bovary desperately attempting to read her way out of her French bourgeois household through her romances or La Maga and her long, awful Russian novels in Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (which the narrator later savagely parodies.) Sometimes I will read literally ANYTHING to keep from living.

-Caty Simon

I will certainly read anything to keep from fully experiencing waiting rooms, subways, and other public places.  I do occasionally think I should start trying to "be in the moment" in these places.  But that's really scary.  (Why is it?) Anyway I hear you, Caty.

She also has a piece up on Sarah Schulman and Empathy at Emily Books.

Links

• Emily Gould's post on the writing life and her cat, Raffles.  This is NOT the main point of the post, BUT-I'm frankly fascinated by her advice not to take advantage of a flexible schedule to run errands during weekdays, since I have doing that all the time this year and have been feeling deeply ambivalent about it.
• Response to the post here. This reminds me that I have a childhood friend who is an accountant by day and improv comic by night and on weekends.  She seems pretty happy.
• I really like this tumblr, hope the author gets a book deal if that's what she wants. As for that post  (now, forgive me if the comparison is a stretch or trivializes physical addiction) but the way the author writes about drugs reminds me of my attachment to certain times and places, how a place and a time can be a compelling context that heightens all relationships held within it.  I woke up today after what felt like hours of painfully nostalgic dreams about the first high school I attended, and going back to it to finish classes.  (In the dreams I never have my high school diploma, and I'm always explaining to people that this shouldn't really matter because I have a Ph.D., but nevertheless it apparently does matter and I have to take chemistry or something.)  These dreams are doubtlessly due to the "trauma" of having to move states half way through high school, but even knowing that doesn't make me love them when I wake up feeling disoriented and depressed.  I'm not sure what my point is . . . maybe mental equilibrium is knowing that some things that haunt you will never go away, there is neither return or "recovery," and you have to live with that?

Oh, p.s. my default is to view everything without a password as public, but I know some people view tumblr as a safe space of sorts; if I'm linking to you and you'd rather I don't, leave a comment.

Maurice on Livejournal, or What *is* the Queer Novel?

I recently read E.M. Forster's Maurice, an Edwardian novel about a gay man's coming of age.  Forster wrote it after his famous novel, Howard's End (1910), and before his even more famous A Passage to India (1924). But, due to the subject matter and the controversial happy ending, Maurice wasn't published until 1971, after Forster's death-and even then, it was met with a certain amount of critical snottiness.   

 I was an incredibly passionate fan of A Room with A View (1908) and Howard's End when I was a teenager.  But somehow I didn't get through Maurice, I think because I was uncomfortable about the themes in light of my own queerness.  Anyway last week I ran out of Sherlock/John fanfiction temporarily* and saw Maurice at the local library and picked it up sort of as a substitute.  So I had a far different motivation for reading this time around.

Then, after finishing the novel (which was great, I still love Forster), over the weekend I discovered the world of Maurice fanfiction.  I haven't read any yet-I made a flippant facebook remark to Caty about it, she posted and responded to it on her tumblr, and now there are some thoughtful tumblr posts on the topic "what does it mean to write 'slash' about Maurice?"

Yet another wrinkle: Rupert Graves, who plays Lestrade on BBC Sherlock, is Alec (one of the love interests) in the Merchant-Ivory production of Maurice.  If you go to the youtube of one of the love scenes from the movie (NSFW), you get some Sherlock fanpersons in the comments.  Someone has even written "lets just hope that mycroft won't find this," alluding to the fact that pairings between Sherlock's brother Mycroft and Inspector Lestrade are a subgenre of BBC Sherlock fanfiction.  Thus it seems that my semi-conscious connection of Maurice to Sherlock fanfiction exists in the internet's semi-conscious as well.

I was starting to feel like the main character of Barbara Browning's I'm Trying to Reach You, and not just because I was avoiding moving around punctuation in a paper I'm trying to publish from my dissertation.  Look, I don't want to idealize the internet, and what it's done to intellectual property. I don't want to say we dissolve our identities and disappear into anonymity. And yet--there's something so compelling about this extended text that the internet has enabled and that I can find so easily. There's something fascinating about the fact that the people on youtube who are writing about gay male pairings may or may not be gay men. If Maurice is, really canonically, the gay novel, Maurice plus all this other stuff is surely the queer novel.

*no, I have not read all 16,752, I just have to sort through them and that takes awhile

Internet Outrage of the Day (J.M. Keynes)

Not only did Neill Ferguson insult John Maynard Keynes for being gay, he suggested that real men don't like ballet or poetry.  Somehow I thought that level of philistine-ism was a strictly American phenomenon-but apparently British transplants are susceptible.  I would just like to take a minute to say that, whatever Christopher Hitchens' other faults, he never shamed people for liking, you know, art.

p.s. General Statement of Liberal Neutrality shout-out to Jonah Goldberg: NF is free to say what he wants; I am free to say he's an idiot; that queer people in general get tired of hearing selfish straight people vaunt their supposed moral superiority; and some straight women probably enjoy a spot of poetry before procreation.

My feminist operating system is called NoFedora

Somehow the name of this operating system is not exactly helping the image of open source as run by a bunch of insufferable naively libertarian dudes.

Traveling

I am about to go to Wollongong, a city one hour south of Sydney, to give a talk at the University of Wollongong.  Apparently the locals call it "Gong."