Philoillogica

Toaster: 1, Cat: 0

Somehow, the fact that my cats can open the microwave doesn't seem so impressive now.

On sitting down to read King Lear once again

Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt for looking backwards, and I think that's meant to be a reminder for us all of the dangers of unbridled nostalgia:

And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city. And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters; the LORD being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth, and set him without the city. And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed ...The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.  Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.   But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

And maybe this is why skin tastes salty, because we're all so tempted to look backwards the way we've come, instead of keeping our heads inclined dutifully forward into the promiseland of the future. Our myth of a golden age, passed down from time immemorial, tells us that the world is, and always has been, going to hell - the past isn't prologue at all, really, but an inaccessible perfect space where laws are followed without question, where fruit always sweetly hangs from the trees and where we never knew shame at our nakedness.  How can any future possibly compare to such paradise?

And so we look back. 

And just like saltwater fails to quench thirst, encouraging the shipworn to drink deeper and deeper, a prolonged stare at our past can trap us into a nearly unbreakable internal gaze which can no longer see a future at all. 

The Golden Age, much stronger and more woebegone than the opposing myth of progress, is a crippling siren song for a graduate student, whose job is to rewrite herself a future out of the narratives of the past.

For the past five months of studying for the first of my three comprehensive exams, I've been reading obsessively, hysterically trying to chip away at my ignorance and fill the gaps in what I think I know with cursory, desperate gulps of literature.  Exclusively reading drama, my mind is a maelstrom of strange, transitory worlds that last "but two hours traffic upon a stage", worlds where revenge is possible, where love is rewarded, and where clowns always have the best lines and the last words. 

Exploring these worlds five hundred years after their construction, my audience of one sees the characters in these plays returning again and again to the myth of The Golden Age, fleeing to the freedom of the Edenic forest of Arden, or chastising a poet for failing to properly endorse the myth of progress.  Troilus and Cressida walk their play self-consciously, painfully aware that their story has already been written, their very names Renaissance iconography for a doomed love affair.  Trapped in the past, the characters can't look forward, and Fortune marches on, crushing the blind beneath her wheel. 

It's a truism amongst Shakespearean critics - whose banner, I suppose, I'm squired beneath - that as he aged, Shakespeare became more and more interested in the relationships between individuals that can forgive the horrors and terrors of a cruelly systemic world.    While most of his early comedies end in marriage, his later "problem plays" and romances end in silences and miracles, a more mixed and complicated message than "love is all you need."  But before the harmony threatened by the trials of the first four acts can be restored, Shakespeare's characters experience turmoils of regret and longing for an elevated past.  Otherworldly magic may make Prospero's reconciliation with his usurping brother possible, or restore the marriage of Leontes and Hermione or the life of the entombed Thasia, but these events are less spectacular than the desperate need these characters have for reunification.  Their guilt and longing is driven by their yearning for an inaccessible past that they can not reclaim without the magic possibilities of romance.

And just like a Florizel who flees kingly authority for the freedom of a shepherd, in my revelry and word-bathing, I want to stay in those worlds long enough to savour them,  lingering over Marlowe's Tamburlaine and fussing over Bartholomew Fair long enough to make even Jonson approve.  But such looking back is discouraged, and there's no time to explore as I rush through my list and gulp down the next narrative of the past.  I suppose it's his job, but I can't help resenting my supervisor as he wrenches my head back around to keep my future squarely in view.  In retaliation, I construct my own Golden Age, one where I could read for pleasure surrounded by others doing the same, in reading rooms with proper chairs and adequate light, where decompression with a cheap pitcher of beer and a cathartic argument could make everything right with the world again, and where the homefires burned brightly all night long.

So I can't help but look back, and I sympathize for Lot's nameless wife, eternally punished for her inarticulate longing for what has come before:  

Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's messenger
His huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed his wife and spoke to her:
"It's not too late, you can look back still

At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
The square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
At the empty windows of that upper storey
Where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.'

Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
Of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
Her body turned into transparent salt,
And her swift legs were rooted to the ground.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she will never be lost
She who gave up her life to steal one glance.

-- Anna Akhmatova

As Keats settles down to pay homage to the past, he too is struck "Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay".  Recognizing that inherent in his backward glance is the threat of a potential loss of self, Keats embraces the past and sets it ablaze, letting himself rise from the ashes of what has come before:

Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

 

Maybe Keats' efforts to thwart "our deep eternal theme" are right - maybe we should just springboard from our prior narratives into a self-fulfilling prophesy, leave melodizing and the Queen of Far Away entirely for the more practical experience of flying at our desire, heads wrenched forward into an uncompromised future. 

Hmph.  He must've been speaking with my supervisor.

Men piss, women tinkle: study

Why, WHY I keep subjecting myself to the National Post I'll never know, but here's some more on the "women are weird" front, brought to us ripe from the WTO.

Guidelines issued on the weekend by the National Environment Agency in Singapore, where the WTO is based, would mean women have at least equal facilities to men.

The code requires medium-sized restaurants, bars and nightclubs to have as many female cubicles as they have male cubicles and urinals.

Larger venues, and those such as theatres and cinemas where usage is confined to peak periods, would have to favour women's facilities by a ratio of 14 to 10.

Isn't that a fantastic thing for the WTO to concern itself with, after the loads of criticism leveled against their refusal to take women's domestic work - the sustaining feature of all societies - into any account of labour activity?  FINALLY, the World Trade Organization is stepping up, recognizing their gratuitous ignorance of third world living conditions and -

What? It ISN'T the World Trade Organization? Then who...?

Wait a minute...did you say World Toilet Organization?

The misery women go through all over the world queuing for public washrooms would be eased under new principles proposed by the World Toilet Organization.

Oh.  Right.  I forgot. Women don't like those icky economic thingies with the thinking and the numbers and the sitting still, and it's not like we can lift those heavy briefcases anyway.   

But thanks for the recognition that women wait longer in lineups to use the bathroom.  That's pretty nice, right? I mean, it could be worse - you could be trying to rationalize social behaviour by offering a belittling "scientific" explanation or something.

''The human female tendency to go to the lavatory in pairs is a natural instinct that has evolved over millennia, and is merely reinforced by social practice,'' said Elisabeth-Maria Huba, a German social scientist with the WTO.

''This is something that can be observed all over the world. It's in the brain, it is not learned socially. Men have it quick and easy. For a lot of women the toilet is a place they are afraid of.

It's true - we're scared shitless, actually.  It's the flush.

''When there are no toilets, or only disgusting toilets, women go together to protect each other.''

And didn't that work out spectacularly well for the refugees in the Superdome.

She cited a U.S. study in which girls would go in pairs, even though only one needed to use the lavatory, and the other, asked why she was also going, said: ''I don't know, but I didn't want to leave her alone.''

Like I said.  Soooooo thoughtful. 

Women-blaming still fun: study

As I gear up for yet-another holiday season of not-so-casual glances at my flat belly and the two-drink minimum question of "so, when are you two having kids?" perhaps I'm being a bit oversensitive to the media's almost hysterical preoccupation with motherhood. 

All I want to do is read the paper in peace while I rub the sleep out of my eyes and mainline coffee, learning perhaps about a bit of technology or the latest dinosaur bone or how we're all going to die from this week's latest Ebola virus.  So I gotta ask - is it absolutely necessary to pepper the science section with a blatant misrepresentation of the results of studies?

This morning, gearing up for a familiar battlefield of estrogen-trapping pseudoscience, I was drawn to the headline "Mother's love may alter genes: study"

"And what fresh hell will this bring? "I sighed, and clicked the link, fully expecting "proof" that the children of stay-at-home-mothers are immune to AIDS or that handmade Hallowe'en costumes protect against tooth decay.

But it was nothing so exciting, merely the old "nature-verses-nurture" chestnut with a dash of mommy drive-by thrown in:

You are what you eat.

And who you hang out with, and the weather and the way your mother raised you, say gene researchers at McGill University.

Contrary to popular belief, recent research at McGill helps to prove your DNA alone does not determine who you are, says Michael Meaney, a neuro-biologist at the university.

WHAT?  You mean, in order to be a real human being, I've got to LEARN STUFF?  God dammit!  Here I was thinking that I was born with an innate understanding of Jacobean revenge tragedy, passed down through the family genome.  Man!  Now I've got a whole lot more work to do! 

But hey, at least author Dene Moore managed to twist the knife a little bit with endorsing the idea that women hold the sole responsibility for nurturing humankind.  Thanks, Dene!  There I was getting all uppity, forgetting my birthright and all, like gender was a construct or something! 

Aren't I just the luckiest thing, now that you've managed to turn my whole outlook around by amplifying this teeny tiny part of the study and then belying its truth in your misleading headline?

Researchers have mapped the billions of building blocks that make up human DNA and it seems every day they isolate another gene linked to specific characteristics or illness.

But scientists have known for some time that it is the chemical coating on the surface of genes that determines which genes in the cell will be activated and which will not.

Diet, maternal nurturing and even the weather can trigger changes to that chemical coating on the surface without changing the genetic code within.

You know what, Dene? I think you're right: nobody would ever read an article with a headline like "Study proves weather influences behaviour" or "Nature AND nurture work in tandem, scientists report", since neither one offers that popular misogynist tang that stays so crunchy in milk. 

Bah humbug.  It's not even December yet and I already know there isn't enough rummy eggnog in the world to get me through the holidays smoothly.  Maybe I should just stuff my laptop under my shirt and mime giving birth to my thesis.

Chardonnay: exposing lesbian subtext since confederation

Sarah: "You know, I think I'd sleep with Steve Martin if given the chance."

Abby: "No shit.  Hell, I'd sleep with YOU and Steve Martin if the opportunity ever presented itself."

Racing to blame

It is incredibly bizarre for a native Torontonian to read the city's news from afar. 

Growing up in central Scarborough, I'd been immured to Toronto's omnipresent violence, learning early on to look behind me when I walked at night, swinging my umbrella like a weapon and forking over countless $20 bills for taxis to quench that nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach that now was not a time to travel alone.  I wasn't allowed to walk to the corner store by myself until I was ten, and in high school, my curfew was a midnight pickup at the Kennedy Station kiss-and-ride to save me the fifteen minute bus ride and ten minute walk home through deserted parking lots and ill-lit streets. 

It wasn't paranoia - just common sense.  When the media presents your hometown as a riotous place of people doing dreadful things to each other, you just don't tempt fate.  In your desperation to keep yourself safe, you engage in a blame-the-victim mentality to offer yourself the illusion of control:  "She shouldn't have been walking there alone at night.  I don't walk alone at night, therefore I am perfectly safe."  "I don't let my children out of my sight. Therefore my children are perfectly safe."

And feeling like you can guard against the bad things is comforting.  Blaming the victim is comforting, because it means that violence isn't random or systemic, and that you have some sort of control over your undiscovered future. It usually means that you don't have to do anything - you don't have to shift paradigms, or consider your own privilege, or speak out or draw attention to yourself.  In fact, blaming the victim often means not doing things out of your own perverted self-interest - not walking alone, not using an mp3 player, not living in St. Jamestown.  When visibility becomes criminal, you're willing to modify your behaviour to a grave extent just to avoid being conspicuous, as if the sale of your personal liberty is able to buy you "perfect safety".

But deep down, you know that you are not perfectly safe.  Nobody is, in no town in any place in the world.  Anything terrible could happen to you at any time, and you might as well accept it.  You need a healthy dose of nihilism to keep you grounded, lest you succumb completely to fear.

Toronto's violence was, and remains, simply a part of life in a city of that many people, and while inevitable, a common response to it is for everyone to look out for themselves and their own above all else, blaming the victim whenever necessary to avoid facing larger problems.

So I can't really blame the parents of the fifteen black male students charged this week with repeatedly raping one of their white female fellows for their descrying of the arrests as an act of systemic racism.  I know that from their perspective, they're just looking out for their own, trying to keep their children perfectly safe from the dangers of our ambivalent city life:

One mother, speaking loudly outside the court in explosive, staccato rhythms, as other family members gathered and nodded their heads in agreement, said the police and justice system are racist, and that they're responsible for criminalizing black youth.

"This is wickedness, wickedness," she said. Her son was only permitted to phone her yesterday at 2 a.m., she said, after being held by police for more than 14 hours. Her daughter, who was at her side, asked how her brother would be able to go back to his community group, where he had been working on a project to build trust between police officers and youth in the Jane-Finch area. She said this arrest would mark him for life, leave him distrustful of authority, force him out of his school and endanger his future.

"What they've been doing to us is injustice," another parent said. "We need to get together as a black community, because these are our kids, and it is unjust."

But I also know that there's an even bigger picture to hold in view, one that should include consideration of the seriousness of the charges:

Police say the young woman, a Grade 11 student, was approached in a school hallway last month by a male student and forced into a stairwell, where she was sexually assaulted. She was allegedly then taken to a bathroom on another floor and assaulted again.

A month earlier, police said, the girl walked into a bathroom at a fast food restaurant and was followed by a 15-year-old boy. The boy is alleged to have locked the door behind them and demanded that the young woman perform a sex act, but a restaurant employee intervened, allowing the girl to escape.

The girl was also allegedly harassed for months as boys, many of them popular students, approached her in school and demanded sexual favours.

All the accused in this case are high-school students aged 14-18, and some of the allegations of harassment date back to September, 2004. Four boys, one of whom was granted bail last week, have been charged with sexual assault and forcible confinement, and 10 others with criminal harassment. Two girls are charged with uttering threats.

In light of the horrific nature of the accusations - a protracted series of coordinated sexual assaults on a single victim - complaining about the metro police's failed attempts at community-building seems terribly callous.  No-one seems to be at all concerned that that some of the accused engaged in repeated sexual acts with the victim, and they appear to be preparing a coordinated "she asked for it, but not from me" defense:

One student shook his head and mouthed the words, "All lies," as he sat listening to the Crown's arguments at the bail hearing, which are subject to a publication ban. When he was released, the same student, asked whether the allegations are indeed all lies, replied: "It is. Most of them."

He denied even knowing the alleged victim, as did three other boys who spoke briefly to the media after being released.

"I don't know her at all. I just got accused of doing something I never did," one said.

"I'm innocent, and so is every single one of us," another said. "I never talked to her in my life."

Later, a fellow student opines that there were several other girls at the school who allegedly performed such acts willingly.

"I was there one time. She was not forced," he said.

The only thing that seems clear is that something is terribly, terribly wrong at James Cardinal McGuigan High School, where students are more offended at the presence of police walking their hallways than they are about the possibility of rapists in their classrooms:

Sixteen-year-old Moe Raza, who is friends with most of the 14 people arrested during Monday's police raid, said many of his classmates were angry at the way the arrests were handled.

"Everybody knows it's not fair what's going on. They just came into our school and slapped cuffs on all these people," he said.

"People drove by thinking it was a shooting or something."

As I sit apart from Toronto, reading the newspapers, part of the bigger picture I see is the collision of -isms that manages to thwart any attempt to make the city a safer and better place for everyone.  The modern liberal impetus to recognize the inequalities of the world we've made in terms of the hot trio of race, gender and class is being torn apart, as infighting over who has it worse is becoming more important than how to fix the problems of the system. 

The Globe and Mail, splitting the difference, fronts its article in terms of race, downplaying any hint of gender until late in the story.  The headline reads: "Abuse stirs racial tension", and the initial paragraphs read like an account of the efforts of Atticus Finch defending the spurious accusations against Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird.  In that famed book too, the black man's defense was "she asked for it", and it is the supposed victim's lechery that leads to his tragic death. Subsumed into the narrative of racism at work "in a sleepy and tired town," the simple message is that women lie about rape and cannot be trusted, and that the white poor are incestuous criminals.

This book, a standard text in the teaching of tenth grade English, the age of the accused and the victim, tells us that issues of race, class and gender cannot be simultaneously examined, but must always be diametrically opposed.

And so too, does The Globe and Mail, where it is only at the end of the article that the issue of gender is brought up by a single student:

But a female Grade 11 student jumped in to the conversation and disagreed.

"How can you say she's a liar? Yeah, I feel bad for those guys getting arrested at school. [But] no one knows what she's feeling right now, so you can't say anything," she said.

"If you do it 100 times, it's okay 100 times. When the 101st time she says no, you have to stop. It's rape. It's not consensual the 101st time."

It's this kind of opposition that suggests that you can only fight one battle at a time - that if you are committed to gender equality you do so at the expense of fighting racism, as if there is only so much justice in the world to go around, and progress must occur unilaterally if it's to be considered progress at all.  As if your commitment to equity is common property to be distributed at the whim of an objective judge of who needs help most, as if "women have no right to complain about sexism, because racism still exists," or "women are discriminated universally, and therefore women's rights surpass all others in the consideration of injustice."

This myth, widely perpetuated in the media, is simply another justification for inaction, telling us that it is okay to do nothing because we cannot do everything.  In endorsing this myth, we waste energy on trying to determine which group needs our contributions, our words, and our voices the most instead of just jumping right in.  This false zero-sum game of playing oppressed groups off each other is getting old, and I'm amazed that we still fall for it every time. 

There is no dichotomy in this sad case.  The players aren't racism verses sexism verses classism, but complex individuals each stereotyped by the values society places on those markers of distinction. 

So I'll be watching this Toronto case from my Maritime perch afar, rejecting the specious arguments that racism is enough to make a woman cry rape, or that the North Toronto community always plays the race card, or that modern high school girls are whores who like to serve their male counterparts.

I know that the picture is actually much, much bigger.  Provided, of course, that ones willing to step back far enough to actually see it. 

Now isn't the winter of her discontent

Sarah: "It's snowing."

Abby: "You know what makes more sense than 69?"

Sarah: ...

Abby: "An inverted 77."  <mimes obscenity>  "Think about it."

I always do what the memes tell me to

You Should Get a PhD in Liberal Arts (like political science, literature, or philosophy)

You're a great thinker and a true philosopher. You'd make a talented professor or writer.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

Christmas shopping made easy, via msn

Sarah: "You know you could've asked me that, like, four years ago, when it happened."

Ashley: "Yeah, it's just that we never had much of a sisterly bong."

...

Ashley: "...bonD.  Sisterly bonD."

Sarah:" 'course, we never had much of a sisterly bong, either."

Incest, adultery, lust, murder, mayhem, rebellion, ribaldry? Bring it.

...because I'm so ready for you, Renaissance Drama comp, I've even bought special underwear.

Seriously? Who can fret about the tragicomic methodology when you've got pompoms on your underpants?

T-minus six days, and counting...