thevillagecharlatan

Yves-Alain Bois: What I’m criticizing in a lot of cultural studies is the lack 

of mediation. It’s a model that says ‘go from here to there’! It doesn’t work like 

that for any of us, why should it be sufficient for an artwork? We don’t start doing 

something bizarre because of what we have just read in the newspaper. No, there 

are mediations. Things are filtered in a very strange way. An artist is never a 

polygraph test. 

I’ll probably be thinking about this quote for a while. It is always difficult for me to decide my tack and framework when making a claim and this made me laugh out loud. It also makes me feel better about disliking Hamilton’s dissertation on postwar assemblage. Sometime I should think about this more, especially in relation to Ed Ruscha’s comments about his own work. “‘Boss’ is just a word that we all used back then. It used to mean ‘cool’.” What to do with that? These things are all clustered in my head right now, even though Ruscha has very little to do with Burri or Arman or Rauschenberg. Never mind, Ruscha has everything to do with Rauschenberg. Fuck. I need a proto-blog where I work some of these things out before they reach the public. Maybe this is it. 

I came across one of Carolyn Steedman’s online sylabi for University of Warwick undergrads today, and it looks terrific. Steedman is a historian of mixed feminist stripe, specializing in domestic relationships; children; the development of the novel since 1700; motherhood; autobiography, and other good things. She instructs her students to start a reading diary here (what’s up with no html abilities?): http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/undergraduate/modules/novel/diary , and I may add this to end-of-semester tasks, possibly to add to the website. I’ve already meditated on (and tried, briefly) the idea of the looking-diary in my old Livejournal, but I was really only concentrating on it while trying to find a Master’s thesis topic. Is there a Wordpress feature that allows for steno-notebook style lists, one of words and one of images? Here are some things I have read: Landscape for a Good Woman (40 pages); a review called “Women of the Weimar Era, in a Social Context” by Charles Hagen in the NYT (April 1995); some descriptions of the Estorick collection of Modern Italian Art; some Pro-Quest dissertation abstrcts; and various boring and short emails. I wonder what all this means.

Today I’m reading interviews with English biographer Richard Holmes, who revolutionized the practice of biographical writing by precisely tracing the travels of his subjects. His book, Footsteps, made him seem at first like a twat to me, traipsing about in his 19-year-old rich ex-boarding-school Bohemian rags, speaking bad French in conversations with country folk about Robert Louis Stevenson. But then I thought of my friend Christy and I traveling together in Rome when I was 22, and wondered about privilege. Going to Europe and sleeping on trains because you can’t afford a sleep-car ticket: is this the very epitome of privilege? I simply bought my way into adventurous poverty. It was very exciting. One night Christy and I tried to sleep in Termini station but were ousted at 5 am by officious carabinieri, poking us with their boots, demanding identification. I suppose this is akin what Sir Joseph Banks felt when he saw the Tahitian natives surfing and thought about his boring office back home at Oxford. A new sensory economy of modernity.

Made some insane baked goods last night, and I now consider my baking phase officially closed. I’m putting a moratorium on anything containing flour, sugar, or butter. I’m currently giving myself a diabetic headache with some kind of cookie pizza that I made, and now my mind is spinning. In other news, I was clicking around some Eastern European contemporary art websites and read the word “truancy” and decided that it was good. Another title was “Wash your dirty money with art” and that seemed pretty good too. Titles are important.  Apparently not many people apply for Fulbright scholarships in Eastern Europe. It would be pretty great if I could put together a 2- or 3-country tour of land art sites in those countries. Sometimes I can be such a dilettante.

Today I am stuck indoors doing internet searches and reading Deleuze and Guattari’s “Year Zero: Faciality” for a project on Byzantine art. What I’m doing is starting to feel spurious, but then I’m the type to suspect that anything theory-heavy is spurious. It is my Spring Break, and I didn’t expect to be feeling any of this infectious Spring Breakery, but I’m fresh and frisky as a spring lamb right now. Down with work. Down with comparative studies of Sartre’s and D and G’s opinions on the face. I want to take my dog to the park and read on the grass, but all these Obligations prevent me from, you know, being a human being. Look how scattered and uninteresting this entry is! You all would rather be having beer with me in a field than reading this. P.S. I got my home school to increase their offer to $16k, with potential for more. Blueberries, here I come.

Two pieces of information: 1) Today is the birthday of the artist whose work I’m writing about for my MA thesis. He was born in 1912.  2) Heard from my home school. They offered me $14k a year with potential for MUCH larger dissertation fellowship than UIC can offer. Also quicker time to graduation (though in this economic climate, one cannot necessarily count that as a good thing). This $14k was about what I was expecting them to come back with after finding out about UIC’s offer. No word from CUNY yet, but I’ll probably get in there with no funding because everyone gets in there with no funding.  Oh! Which would you rather make next year: $14k with a $45k job waiting for you, or $20k with probably no job waiting for you outside of the one that your wits could procure? So tough. I know what I’m going to do, but I’m still going to pretend that $20k is a possibility because I like imagining what I would buy with the money. Ugh. Someday blueberries will not be a luxury item for me. 

Here are some photos of the recently collapsed Cologne archives building. It collapsed on the night of March 3, 2009, for reasons still unknown to observers and researchers. The structural integrity of the building was assumed to be superior among other buildings of its type, and was never questioned until the day after its collapse. The disaster cannot be explained, and many people in the building perished because no one was expecting such an event. Major structural re-evaluations will probably take place with respect to other city archive buildings, because for Cologne it’s too late. Architecture is never the enduring phenomenon that it’s expected to be. 

Ugh, so tired today. Am far too tired to think up new and interesting content for you people, but I’ll try. I could talk about internal matters (”today my fourth-grade best friend found me on Facebook”) or external matters (”today I read an article about a topless coffee shop that just opened in Maine”). Exhaustion breeds narcissism, so unfortunately all you people will have to hear about my fourth-grade best friend.

Seeing this woman’s Facebook profile (we’ll call her P) made me think about the many ways in which people measure achievement.  P has two children now, the second just recently born (come to think of it, she might have opened the FB account purely to make her baby photos more public), and is married to a man who appears (in the photos, anyway) to be healthy, involved and present. Some people feel as though these things are a good measure of progress: children and so on. Probably according to these people, I’ve done very little with my life, and have even regressed since first building my Facebook profile in January of 2008. When I began that profile, I was married and owned a house. You know, fast-tracking to heteronormative success. A colleague discovered I was married and exclaimed, “Wow, I have GOT to get my shit together.” An old friend found out about my breakup last month and exclaimed, “Oh no! I had been so impressed with you!”

Am I not enough of an adult to recognize my regression into queer single PhD studenthood? Will the folly of all this one day become clear to me as I telescope all kinds of bitterness onto 2009 (”I was Married, I Owned a House… I really had my shit together”)? Or should I continue to frame the marriage and the house as an interesting experiment with no intrinsic value beyond personal growth?

Anyway, P’s Facebook profile is probably a lateral deviation from my own White Lady in Late Twenties profile. She is the While Lady in Late Twenties who has a husband, a brief career in the military, and two lovely babies. She probably didn’t eat acid at a party in Los Angeles this past weekend like I did. It’s all a tradeoff.

Well, I got that offer. It has morphed from a nomination into a “Please take our money and come to our school, no fooling” email from the dean of the department. Soon I will have a letter with some numbers on it. One of the numbers will be $20,000. It will probably be the largest offer I will get, as my other schools are all state universities known for bad or uneven funding. I should have applied to Duke or something just for the hell of it, so that I could have a wider array of numbers to leverage into something higher from my home school. I’d like to do my PhD at my home school but they have terrible funding packages and so I have to hustle to get a larger aid package. That’s the only reason I applied to other programs, really. The fight’s not over yet - I’ll need to secure some good numbers from my home school or it’s off to another state with me.

Do you go to conferences? I’m at a big one right now, the most important annual conference in my field. I have been ducking in and out of conferences like some looky-loo teenage asshole, taking catty notes and thinking about Important Matters. Having Important Conversations. Seeing friends. Laughing and having a good time in the halls with these friends to show what an erudite and socially integrated scholar I am. It’s all starting to wear on me, truth be told, and it was nice to get a break with a session called “Queering Craft”. I entered the conference room during the Q and A, having missed the presentations, and so I just listened to the funny jokes that everyone was telling about queerness. I’m not explicitly a queer theorist but enjoy hearing (and sometimes participating in) those conversations. Since my current project (my pregnancy panel is over so I’m over that research for the time being) involves masculinity, today I imagined that I was doing something queer by studying an overtly masculine, annoying, taciturn, and difficult artist who plays with clay and sews. That’s not how I frame him in my writing but I enjoyed thinking it today just the same. Maybe I should mention this to the Queer Queens running that session. One of them is in this computer room with me right now, possibly blogging about this same Queering Craft panel like me.