Freckles & Doubt

This is currently my favourite random image in the stream which flows incessantly and sometimes repetitively over Tumblr:



Damn, it has anxiety. In particular, it has anxiety if it's a student whose exams have just been summarily relocated by two weeks. You would not believe the degree of chaos incurred for the workings of plane tickets, travel arrangements generally, accommodation, planned holidays, planned vac work, parental travel plans for graduation, and interesting new religious conflicts. (Diwali). The conceptual high-water-anxiety-mark on the walls of my office is higher than it's ever been. I have spent the bulk of the last two weeks soothing students, often through the medium of cut-and-paste, because there's a limit to my ability to be originally soothing twenty times in a row.

However, the protests seem to be (touch wood) over: the students, bless them, have pretty much swept the board with achieving their goals (0% fee increase for next year; university commitment to insourcing; lifting of interdicts and dropping of charges against protesters; a ban on police on campus). How the hell we're going to finance all of the above is another story entirely, the government is going to be a broken reed in this department, I can tell you right now. But I'm back in my office, at least, and none of my plants died, and the level of office-renovatory chaos is at least no greater than it was before the involuntary two-week freeze, and we have dates for rescheduled exams so I can start allaying anxieties in a slightly more concrete fashion.

These student protests were, I think, necessary, and certainly powerful, and in the long run have a chance to materially improve the lot of our most disadvantaged and financially precarious students. There's a cost, though. And while a middle-class student is likely to be able to absorb a R4000 airline ticket reschedule, or pay for accommodation for an extra two weeks or to write a supp, our poorest students won't be able to. If we have to fling sacrifices into the maw of the political volcano god, it seems particularly cruel to have selected for these ones.

(My subject line is still "Teach your children well", incidentally. Because it's still relevant).

It's possibly a little too apposite that my car music should have just cycled into Diamond Dogs, as I've been at home for three days owning to a closed campus - the students are protesting. They barricaded the campus on Monday, and did again with added flame on Tuesday, after by all accounts an uncomfortable night at the admin building in which attempted discussions with university management eventually broke down just before midnight with a bunch of arrests. I managed to leave the house before yesterday morning's emails warning us that campus was closed for a second day, so trundled up to a bizarre, deserted, post-apocalyptic landscape in which the few students wandering around looked confused and slightly hunted, and there was a very slight haze of burning tyre smoke over everything. Today we're also off campus, which is closed for students nationally to yell at the government, to which I say yay. The government needs yelling at.

I have found my own reactions to be strangely complicated. On the one hand this seems fairly standard - students will demonstrate, bless them, and we've had a good couple of decades of relative ideological apathy, so it's rather reassuring to see that the current generation is capable of this sort of generalised moral passion. I do wish the protesters wouldn't break things, but I know how mobs work, particularly when passions are high and when there's a whole entrenched history of disadvantage vs privilege embodied in the buildings of our campus. And their thesis - that fees are too high - is absolutely valid. Our fees are too damned high - in my job I see a continual succession of these poor kids in the direst financial straits, struggling to make it work under the double whammy of high fees and under-preparation by Matric. Our fees should bloody well be protested. And while it's a lot more complicated than the students would like to believe (if we cut fees as demanded we'd go under, as far as I can tell, and the institution, far from screwing the working poor with a jaunty laugh, does put a buttload of money into financial aid), with any luck the nationwide nature of the protests will be enough to force the government to at least divert some of their corruption earmarks into our severely under-subsidised tertiary education.

What I wasn't prepared for, however, was the trigger effect of all this. I started university in South Africa in 1988, still under the apartheid government. While I was possibly the world's most unpoliticised and oblivious undergrad, and experienced only the trailing tail-end of the student protests, there were still marches on campus in my first couple of years, and protesters tangling with the police water-cannon on Adderley Street (the purple shall govern! Ye gods, I was only hazily aware of the whole Purple Rain protest at the time, and a quick google reveals that I had remembered the details perfectly accurately. It clearly made an impression.) The police cars all over campus yesterday and Monday, and the burning barricades, and the footage with flash-bangs and loud-hailers outside the admin block on Tuesday night, even the raised fists and shouting, catapulted me nastily and viscerally back into that far more tense and horrible time. Let's just say that students vs. government has some unpleasant historical precedents in this country, shall we?

So protesters are hard-coded as "legitimate" to me in a way which actually transcends the validity of their current point of protest. It engenders a cold, sinking feeling to have our current government by implication put into the same frame of reference as the bad old apartheid one. (I had an identically emotional response to the police casspirs in District 9). And if nothing else, my Cherished Institution has handled the whole thing with conspicuous tone-deafness, to haul in the police so early on in the process, to descend immediately into "this is illegal" in a way which instantly overwrote "let us discuss the valid point you have here", and to re-create with such fidelity the traditional battle lines of police and stun guns and armoured vehicles as the threatening backdrop to student protest. It's perfectly obvious to the most untrained eye that that was never going to go down well.

In all sorts of weird ways South African apartheid was never my battle, but in all sorts of weird ways it is, not just because I was there for its fall and live here now - because these are my students, and the effects of apartheid are still playing out in their lives, and one upshot of my job is that I feel protective and worried about them, and very invested in their happiness and success. Some of them have crossed lines they shouldn't have in these protests, and are going to face potentially life-ruining consequences. We have had lectures disrupted, and exams might still be affected, and I know that I'm going to be dealing with emotional and physical fallout from these protests as students wander through my office attempting to unravel the ramifications for their studies. And I can only hope that it's all worth it, that it works, that our thrice-damned government will remember its roots enough to respond appropriately.

And because that's all too damned serious, I shall end with entirely another sense of emotional trigger that is equally about history and investment and struggle and moral polarities: the new Star Wars trailer made me cry.

It's now officially registration season, in that I have now gone through the ceremonial annual benediction of an incensed parent shouting down the phone at me because their offspring is unhappy with an answer I gave her. Ten minutes. Continuous anger. Refused to let me get a word in edgeways to explain or otherwise. Reduced me, as is traditional, to tears, because I'm exhausted and reserves, not so much, and I eventually said "I'm sorry, this conversation is inappropriate and I am ending it now," and put the phone down. I hope that's my one for the year, any much more is going to erode me to a sort of soggy indeterminate thing which simply collapses sadly when more pressure is applied.

Registration/orientation this year has been particularly fraught and filled with loathing, but has been infused with additional merriment by a number of external factors apparently sent by the Cosmic Wossnames expressly to try me. Viz.:

1. Heatwaves. Hideous sticky heat both during the day and at night, leading to irritability and insomnia and the desire to emigrate immediately to Canada in a marked manner and never return.
   
2. Building operations. In my building, in surrounding buildings, in buildings around where I usually park. Noise, dust, paint fumes, scaffolding, unavailable venues, weird extrusions of fencing which block off whole scads of parking places so that parking, already a bugger on this semi-vertical campus, is now a thing of nightmare and sin. I've had to park on a yellow line on two separate days, because there simply wasn't any option, and despite the fact that I am hardly alone since campus has been festooned by similarly benighted motorists parked in every odd corner where they specifically shouldn't, that sort of thing niggles wearingly all day at a girl's Lawful Good. Also, my horrible complicated day last week was further complicated by the sudden discovery that none of the bathrooms in the building were operational, because renovations. Taking a bathroom break between the two meetings for which you are double-booked is not actually possible if the bathroom is in, so to speak, another castle.
   
3. Load shedding. Eskom, bless its inadequate electric socks, is running out of power, and while it's being pretty good about sticking to a timetable and advertising the random swooping in and out of load shedding periods, orientation is quite complicated enough without suddenly having to evacuate 450 students from a pitch-dark lecture venue. (Not that I've actually had to do that, but the constant fear and planning wears on the nerves a bit). Also, I am prone to be denied vital tea supplies at strategic moments. This is not a good thing, at this time of year. Homicide results. I drove home last night from dinner in the pitch-dark of load shedding at about 9pm, and it was surprisingly weird and slightly freaky. On the upside, candlelight, and that cute solar-powered lamp thingy Vi gave me. And the excuse to retire early to bed and read Inquisition fanfic cunningly pre-loaded on my cunningly fully-charged Ipad.
   
4. Political shenanigans in the faculty office, leading to administrators backing me into corners for twenty minutes at a time to have a full-scale meltdown about how awful the boss is being. I have personally experienced the boss as actively detrimental to morale and am full of sympathy, but I don't have time to make reassuring noises for twenty minutes while students pile up, mournfully puppy-eyed, behind me. The administrative processes behind reg have been somewhat under par this year, because everyone is unhappy and freaked, and it really doesn't help.

My car music trekked through New Model Army and into OK Go, who are generally happily bouncy but from whose lovely depressive ballade "The House Wins" my pleasingly surreal subject line is taken. I love that song: tuneful, wistful, bleak. "You don't have to be alone to be lonely, you might as well give in ... the house always wins." I've subsequently ploughed through a plethora of Pixies and am into Seu Jorge, because apparently I am materially soothed by acoustic David Bowie covers in Portuguese. As one is.

Now I go forth to wrangle advisors for change of curriculum next week. Aargh. This all cannot end too soon.

I am in the sweary stage of paper writing. It's fighting me; I'm wrestling it, it's largely winning. I hate it, and myself, and my writing, and African fairy-tale film, about equally. I am horribly bored by the need to finish the damned thing (it's now nearly a week after deadline) and the fact that I can't permit myself much in the way of socialising or happy domestic fuffling until it's bloody well done. Alarmingly enough, this is all familiar and status quo: never underestimate the extent to which the relationship academics have with academia is basically abusive. I'll finish it. This too will pass. Until then, swearing, and loathing, and hedgehoggy hermitting. But especially the swearing.

I did, however, track down the volume on African folklore which I'd randomly packed at the bottom of a whole box of Pratchett and Moorcock. This has led me, as a knock-on effect, to throw out more books, as I had to unpack and repack a bunch of them. I'm still obscurely enjoying the catharsis of the clear-out.



There should be an almost complete Elric in the Moorcock, and a couple of other series as well - Corum, and Dorian Hawkmoon? I have kept the Jerry Cornelius ones, because postmodernism, and the Dancers at the End of Time ones, because I don't do hallucinogenic drugs and a girl has to have some substitutes. I am forced to admit that I've pretty much outgrown Elric, I haven't read them since undergrad. The John C. Wright are buying it because the frothing homophobia of the writer's online presence is having the Orson Effect, namely an inability to read his fiction without a sort of Pavlovian response of annoyance and distaste. Also, he's a sexist sod, frankly; I really like some of what the Orphans series does, but its ideological irritations are now outweighing its enjoyments. Never trust a writer who feels impelled to spank almost all of his women.  I have retained only the remnants of my Heinlein collection which are (a) genre classics and (b) I am able to read without actually throwing the book across the room, which in the event turns out not to be many of them. I've turfed out the young adult stuff, because frankly there's better y.a. sf out there, but they're actually fun and comparatively inoffensive - Pam, you might like them for the young'uns? The Michael Scott Rohan are swashbucklery fun, but I've kept Scott Lynch for that.

If anyone wants to appropriate any of these, please let me know! So far only the Kay and the Aldiss have been bagsed from the previous group.

Today's favourite quote about slash fan fiction:

"A woman ... has published a sexual fantasy about men for other women without a single care for the hurt feelings of the patriarchy’s death-grip on pleasure."

Part of the reason why I love this stuff is because it's so deeply, radically subversive. At the most fundamental level, slash permits a conceptualisation of sexual experience which is intrinsically shifting, free of the inbuilt assumptions about power which bedevil even the most utopian and egalitarian heterosexual encounter. Good slash is based in fluidity. It contradicts the drift towards active male, passive female which is the reductionist extreme of conventional male/female relations, but which is woven into the basic fabric of our patriarchal culture. Slash fic watches two men in a sexual encounter: neither is necessarily dominant, and the writer is free to conceptualise the power relations as she sees fit.

But if this were the only point, there would be far more femmeslash on the net than there is - it's actually a tiny fraction of the whole. That's because slash isn't just a celebration of fluid power roles, it's explicitly and deliberately a subversion of the heterosexual status quo. It's a giant up yours to the patriarchy, in fact. Watching two women addresses the desire for equal power, but femmeslash also takes place in a space outside the patriarchal order - it provides an alternative without actually threatening the patriarchal assumption of male dominance. Slash is as threatening as hell. It says, hello, patriarchy! we appropriate your dominant, heterosexual male characters, the ones which are so much more central and better-developed than the women in so many of our popular mass texts, and we rewrite them in a sexual image we prefer. Also, in sharp contradistinction to the largely male-owned and male-oriented porn industry, we're girls doing this. Sucks to be you.

Which, of course, also goes some way to explain why I seriously do not enjoy the locked and exaggerated gender roles of the Omegaverse, which in political terms is entirely vindictive: it assaults patriarchy by rewriting male characters as caricatures of female biology. I find it uncomfortable and cruel and lacking the potential for subtlety of more fluid slash.

(It also explains why the frothing homophobia of the religious right is so much more strongly directed at gay than at lesbian partners. Lesbians escape the patriarchal order. Gays deny it; in fact, their existence actually assaults it. I am a wholehearted supporter of LGBT rights because that's the only possible human, moral or intelligent stance, because I'm proudly South African in the constitutional sense if nowhere else, but also because the damned patriarchy should be assaulted early and often and anyone who's doing it on any level deserves my support.)

The subject line is David Bowie, because who else could it be given the topic of the post. "Boys keep swinging" is one of the great parodic takes on machismo.

I don't know if it's possible to be South African and not be moved, in some way, by Mandela's death: I know I started crying when I saw the newspaper headlines on the way up to work. He's such a figure of integrity, a miraculously unblemished icon whose image has managed to survive the self-seeking venality of modern politics almost unscathed, a gentle, paternal guide to our flawed and struggling democracy. He embodies, in a sense, reconciliation: he's the hook we've hung it on. With the possible exception of AWB die-hards and their noxious and irrelevant ilk we all love Madiba, if only in the unrealistic and complex way we invest in him as a symbol entirely apart from his actual identity as a man and his inevitable errors as a politician. And his death is both loss, and a curious relief: he was very old, and very tired, and very helpless, struggling under the load of a disgusting family embroiled in disgusting squabbles as well as the weight of emotional and ideological investment of the nation and the world. I'm glad we finally let him go. He deserves a rest.

But there's a very specific way that Madiba's death impacts on me given that I'm not actually South African. His life has, after all, a whole new layer of meaning and implication if you're a Zimbabwean, because he becomes the emblem for a process of political change which has worked, for a given value of "work", in South Africa in a way it has no-where else in Africa. Modern politics is an ugly landscape anywhere in the world, riddled with self-serving, power-hungry viciousness harnessed largely in the service of a moneyed elite whose religion is the absolute validity of accumulation by depriving others. In Africa, with its horrible colonial legacy, that global tendency is exacerbated by a fabric of power warped and twisted by a history of racial division and inequality, adding further awful resonances to entitlement and redistribution. Zimbabwe is one of the most disastrous and unpleasant examples of the classic African regime change, a new black political class adopting wholesale the least defensible and human aspects of the Western political system - corruption, greed, callous disregard for the powerless, all masked or justified by ideological spouting. That unchecked political selfishness has destroyed the country, reducing the viable economy of an agriculturally rich and productive nation to rubble, through which an oppressive political regime still picks for scraps.

Losing Madiba feels as though we've lost both a possibility, and a perimeter. Zimbabwe is irredeemable, but as long as Mandela existed there was a sort of symbolic assurance that South Africa would not share its fate; that the greater good of the country was actually more important than the personal aggrandizement of politicians; that Zuma would not turn out to be Mugabe. Of course, Mandela has not literally been a moral choke-chain on South Africa's potentially ravening pack of political hounds, because the poor man retired from politics a decade ago and presumably had very little input on policy in recent years. But to someone already rendered paranoid by the destruction and loss of their country, the relative lack of disaster in the last couple of South African presidencies is only a precarious hope: global and African trends alike suggest that it could all go to hell in a handbasket as a moment's notice. Mandela's legacy has felt the stronger and more instrumental because of his actual existence; now, in his definitive absence it's as though a constraint has been removed, a moral centre has been lost. And I hope to hell that I'm simply caught up in the process by which we've constructed him as a figure of fatherly oversight, and that these are entirely irrational insecurities, but I'm not only sad: I'm (a bit, irrationally) afraid.

Subject line from Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine", which is the piece of poetry which, quite apart from my love of its heavy, drowsy, sensual cadences, most embodies my consolatory sense of death as rest.

I do not appear to feel much like blogging at the moment. Right now that's possibly because I have a Horrible Cold In The Head, courtesy of my mother, who also has a Horrible Cold In The Head which she picked up from my niece. Children are plague pits. Fact. Anyway, we're both dragging ourselves around the house gravitating to heat sources (it's bloody cold, there must be snow on the mountains), her with a pestilential snuffle, me with a head full of cement. I have re-read two-thirds of my Phryne Fisher collection in the last three days. Bohemian flapper detectives may be keeping me sane.

In default of anything more intelligent, I present for your delectation the intelligence of others.

This is an incredibly interesting interview with William Gibson in which he talks about his own influences and writing processes, but even more about the interaction between the world and science fiction. My favourite bit is the ending:

If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they’d have read your proposal and said, Well, it’s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. ... Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences. There’s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexual disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled throughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United States in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. ... You haven’t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction.

By way of antidote to all this contemporary bleakness, this is a rather lovely graduation address which exhorts graduates to be kinder, and thereby gives me lovely ammunition in some of the recent arguments I've been having with my therapist. My commitment to the therapeutic process has a very well-defined limit beyond which I simply don't buy the idea that it's OK to prioritise yourself above all else. It is an index of the success of the therapeutic process so far that I'm actually capable of arguing with her about it.

I need to go and blow my nose, again. I hope you are all well.

Subject line quote is, of course, from the opening sentence of Gibson's Neuromancer, which he apparently wrote without having any idea of where the novel was going to subsequently go. Writers' differing processes are fascinating.

So, Jo and I had one of those Girly Movie Evenings last week, wherein, in the absence of stv, we watched Magic Mike. I am compelled to admit that, on the evidence, we probably don't get this Girly thing in the terms in which we possibly should. Because there we were: us girls together, a movie about male strippers, a bottle of wine, appropriately phallic hot dogs for supper, a general predisposition to giggle, and a completely unblushing tendency to pause the movie frequently at precise psychological moments in order to ... seriously discuss the implications for gender politics in the scene. As in:

"Gosh, the body language is interesting..."
"Yes, watch the women: open mouths, hands over mouths. They're shocked at themselves, caught doing something they shouldn't. Totally different to men at a strip show."
"It's still about male sexual dominance. Look at how often they use the women in the audience as props."
"I don't find them attractive. Should I be finding them attractive?"
"They're still filmed like sex objects."
"It's not about the sex. This is a sad movie."
"Millennial generation, it's all about drifting without meaning."
"Stripping is actually just a metaphor for empty display."

I found it very odd to watch: the cultural coding of almost naked men on display for a female gaze is radically different to that of men watching women strip. (We conducted further research by digging up clips from a bunch more male stripper movies, and they're all pretty much the same). It's not actually subversive of a gender paradigm in any way, because there is a clear sense in which the male stripper is getting off on the attention: that is, he's a subjectivity more than he's an object. As Jo pointed out, he has none of the subtext of shame which attaches to a woman in the same position, and a very clear sense that attention paid to his sexual flaunting is somehow his right. (Which is probably why I am profoundly not turned on by the display). The ramifications of this in the overall plot, and the development of the character called the Kid, were bloody terrifying.

Charming Potato, however, is moderately endearing in the actual story part of the lead role, and he's clearly a dancer - he moves beautifully. Matthew McConaughey made my skin crawl, as did the character development of the Kid. But it's not a bad film.

I'm rather late on the bandwagon with this - I've seen mention of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on the web over the last year or so, but what with the urgent need to read all the Avengers fanfiction, never really got around to watching them. (Apparently internet distraction time is finite rather than infinitely expandable. Which, given the infinite expandability of the internet is something of a problem. Oops.) Today I am wandering around in a bit of a daze, bumping into things, because I was up until after midnight fascinatedly watching a modernised Lizzie Bennet deal with Darcy revelations and Wickham fallout, and am consequently somewhat short on sleep. I'm at around episode 90 out of 100 (it's just finished, making this a good time to leap on board for people prone to my need for instant narrative gratification). It was significantly difficult to drag myself away in the small hours.

The Lizzie Bennet diaries are two things: (a) a beautifully-realised and highly intelligent modernisation of Pride and Prejudice via social media, and (b) proof positive that Jane Austen still has a fan following - still speaks to people, even modern internet-savvy people whose lives revolve around phones and tweets and job opportunities rather than marriage and social class. The show consists of 100 2-5 minute weblogs from Lizzie herself, with extensions into Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr accounts and a couple of offshoot video blogs (Lydia, mostly), and a fan following who interacts with the characters as though they're real. It strips down Austen's narrative to show only central characters, while peripheral characters such as Mr and Mrs Bennet or Catherine de Bourgh are represented by quick (and often very funny) theatrical impersonations by Lizzie and various hapless assistants. It's a show about social media on several levels, not just in its own transmission formats, but in the daily life and concerns of its protagonists. At the heart of it is an intrinsically conscious equation between Austen's social awareness and social media awareness, an insistence that culture is culture regardless of its technological paradigm.

I love and frequently re-read Pride and Prejudice, and I love this adaptation: it's funny and sensitive, and above all beautifully acute in its awareness of the central themes of the book, and the way in which they transcend historical context. The equivalences the show makes for Charlotte's pragmatic acceptance of Mr Collins, for Wickham's desecration of Lydia, for the whole socio-economic edifice of Pemberly and Darcy's wealth, beautifully encapsulate the spirit of the original while cheerfully updating its letter. (Their version of Mr Collins is sheer genius, both in concept and in execution. Also, obviously Darcy is a hipster. Suspenders. She says darkly.)

Where the series most blows me away, though, is in their treatment of the Wickham/Lydia plot. I was a bit dubious about how they were going to handle it given contemporary sexual freedoms, but updated, and with Lydia's greatly increased interiority, it becomes heartbreakingly cruel. It fascinates me, that the trauma and heartache displayed on video in this version are such an exact and faithful match to the trauma and heartbreak (although more restrained in expression) in Austen's original. She wrote about people, how they love and betray and survive, and above all how they agonise about their appearance in the eyes of the world. Even more so given the power of our technology, so do we.

God, but horrible things happen to students. I have just sat in a readmission appeals committee for six hours, giving curriculum input on all these poor kids. Apart from the usual transition shock and the need to struggle through the challenges posed by finance, housing and travel issues and the truly appalling academic grounding provided by all too many of our schools, we have today contemplated the lives of young people suffering date rape, violent rape, assault, theft of laptops and books, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, unplanned pregnancy, serious illness, hospitalisation, AIDs diagnosis, estrangement, the illness and/or death of sometimes multiple family members, bizarre legal wrangles, learning disabilities, social stigmatisation, victimisation, stalkers, and the occasional curse. I can identify what I call a "depression transcript" at a single glance - the horribly revealing slow slide from competence into lower marks, a few fails, and finally the long, telling strings of absences. A day like that, you start wondering if anyone ever succeeds at anything at all before the inevitable nastinesses get them.

I want to have several cups of tea, a good cry, and an evening of vegging out on the sofa in front of something incredibly Hollywood and fluffy. Except I can't, because they stole the TV. It'll have to be the old fallbacks, viz. Skyrim and fanfic. Anything that distracts from the feeling of complete helplessness in the face of evil.

If I meep and tremble at odd stimuli a bit in the near future, please don't hold it against me. I have too high a bloody empathy stat for this job, is all.