le projet d'amour

Au revoir

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 02:53:00 +0000

I leave next week for Israel, and I’ll be away for a month until the end of May. During this time, I’ll have intermittent internet access and little spare time, so there probably won’t be much blogging happening here. Apologies in advance if comment moderation will be slow over the next few weeks as I will only be able to moderate and publish comments in those instances when I have access to my email and internet. I will also be quite busy travelling, visiting my family, doing research and going to a huge family wedding. I expect my blog will be the last thing on my mind.

So, au revoir everyone!

Image credit: Paris, Février 1999 by Édouard Boubat.

Uses for Boys

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:46:00 +0000

[Content note: discussion of rape and sexual assault. Plus general plot spoilers.]

It’s been a long time since I read a book where I sobbed really hard at the end (and throughout, really). Or one that left me feeling so gut-wrenched. Erica Lorraine Scheidt’s Uses for Boys is one such book. I was going to save it for my flight, along with some other books. But yesterday, I started reading the first few pages, and I couldn’t stop. I finished it in one sitting. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s one of those books that if I had a daughter or a niece, I would give it to her. I will give copies to my younger cousins instead.

Uses for Boys is Anna’s story: a lonely teenage girl who is let down by just about every adult in her life, particularly her mother. As her mum pursues man after man, marriage after marriage, searching for someone to fill the void of loneliness, Anna is left increasingly on her own. When the story begins, Anna is a little girl. We jump straight into the confusion of her mother’s abandonment, new stepbrothers, new stepfathers. Anna doesn’t really know what a family is, she doesn’t know what love is; not the kind that holds you together, that provides something to cling to as you grow up. And so Anna begins to learn the uses for boys instead, and through them, the uses for sex.

This is not a didactic morality tale. Anna doesn’t simply turn to boys and to sex for comfort, love and a family. But it’s certainly one of the main reasons. Anna has sex to feel wanted, for pleasure, because of pain, because of nameless wanting and needing, because she has no mother and she has no father, because she wants a family, because she wants to be wanted, because it’s sex and she likes it, because it’s sex and she doesn’t like it, because she’s easy to manipulate when no one is there to guide and protect her and tell her all about her own worth, because she’s not easy to manipulate and strong, because she likes the way it feels, because she doesn’t like the way it feels. Anna is raped, and assaulted, and used. She is also loved by a boy named Sam. She is loved by his family too. And she is loved by a friend named Toy, and in her own inadequate way, by her absent mother.

This is not an easy book with easy answers. But it’s written in such a way that flows so beautifully, it makes you lose yourself to the rhythm and logic of Anna’s mind. Anna mentions numerous times how she’d like to climb into other people’s bodies and minds and simply be them. And I felt reading this story that I did just that: that through Scheidt’s writing, I had entered Anna’s body, I understood her logic, and I never judged her. I actually loved her, and admired her, and I had some choice words for the people who wrote those superficial victim-blaming reviews that didn’t get this book, and didn’t get her. It’s hard to explain, but I view Anna as a real person now, and so I feel protective of her. I think this makes sense though, and it isn’t that fanciful, since in some way or another, many teenage girls have been a version of Anna.

The thing about Uses for Boys is that it makes you realise what it means to be a teenage girl and a woman in the world:

I’m a slut before I even touch a penis. Before I even have sex. The space between Desmond Dreyfus with his damp palm over my breast while Carl Drier and Michael Cox watch to my mouth around Joey Sugimoto’s penis is very short. The girl I am now, at sixteen, was always present. She haunted the twelve-year-old me.

Haven’t we all been either sluts or virgins in high school? Haven’t we all been reduced to what’s between our legs, and how we use or don’t use it? Haven’t we all heard stories about girls like Anna, those easy girls, those easy lays, those girls you gossip about and the guys laugh about? And then you grow up, and you realise that girl, that easy fuck, had her own story. She wasn’t a disembodied hole to be screwed. Sometimes she had reasons for having sex, just as others had reasons not to have sex. Sometimes, no one had any reason to have sex and not to have sex, and everyone was simply playing a game of semantics: sluts and prudes, whores and virgins. Shit, I’m so tired of it all. As Anna says, “sex is the easy part”.

The hard part is wanting, needing, comfort, love, family, friends; it’s not how we use our bodies, how we punish our bodies, and how we have our sense of self defined for us purely through our bodies. In Anna’s own words again, it’s “being touched by a boy who knows what loves looks like”. It’s learning that slut and virgin, whore and prude, mean nothing; should mean nothing.

I’ve read some reviews of Uses for Boys. I mainly read the negative ones that simply didn’t get it. Apart from all the victim-blaming bullshit, I realised I was also fighting against the easy categorisation of ‘dark’. I’ve seen Uses for Boys described as a ‘dark’ book. To me, it couldn’t be further from that. There is nothing dark about this book. It is difficult and heart-wrenching and intelligently written and requires you to face the reality of teenage girls having sex (something that apparently a lot of people have a hard time trying to comprehend). It is also beautiful and thoughtful and presents an unforgettable character in Anna. I love her like a sister, friend, like myself, and not like myself. She is everything that we’ve been taught about ourselves as women and girls, and she is everything within us that fights against that, wishing for more. This is not dark, this is light. Anna fights for a story of herself that she wants, she doesn’t settle for the story she’s inherited from her mother, and the one her mother inherited from her own.

Uses for Boys, more than anything, made me want to go hug my own mother and father, and thank them for showing me what love looks like. Because of that, I know who I am, what I’m worth. And I wish every girl who is struggling to figure that out would receive a copy of this book from someone who cares for her. The empathy, the compassion, the sense of overwhelming belief in girls is evident in every page of this book. And girls need to be believed in, in a world that calls them sluts and virgins at the same time – in a world that teaches them all the wrong things about themselves. So until the world changes, I hope for more books like this one.

A Tonic

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 01:38:00 +0000

An unashamedly indulgent post filled with artwork that makes me feel good, because it’s been a long and tough week. I’ve been reading the Gardener’s Nightcap by Muriel Stuart each night this week. It’s acted like a drowsy tonic: I read it for five minutes, and start to feel sleepy. Not because it’s boring, but because it calms me down. A few passages I’ve ear-marked are little gems:

Many of these small things which show to the world the merest tuft of cobweb green, or a rosette of silver, have legs ten times as long, which must be allowed to stretch down, down in cool moist soil. It is a crime to possess oneself of plants without knowing how to rear them. We rarely make any other purchase in so casual a way. (p. 27)

There are flowers which resent disturbance. They have builded great beauty, compact, fragile, complicated; taking months, perhaps years of secret labour to produce their finished work of art. Why should they not resent being torn limb from limb between the prongs of forks, or being wrenched out like a drawn tooth? Butchered to make a gardener’s holiday? They resent disturbance. I do. (p. 197)

What could be more heavenly than to walk in such an orchard, to sit by the pool and watch in it the reflection of the still branches, to see the petals dropping on the quiet coloured stone, and on the moonlit night behold the trees in their ghostly bridal white? (p. 38)

What indeed. Have a good weekend everyone.

Image credits (top to bottom): Afternoon in the Cluny Garden, Paris, by Charles Courtney Curran; A Garden by Gaines Ruger Donoho; The Edge of the Woods by Charles Courtney Curran; Greenwich Garden by John Twachtman; Backyard with a Cat by Abbott Fuller Graves; In Vorhee’s Garden by Matilda Browne; Sleeping Cat by Pierre Auguste Renoir.

News from Nowhere 2

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:31:00 +0000

: : I’ve been following the news in horror regarding the Boston Marathon tragedy. I have no words. It feels strange to say and hear: ‘my thoughts are with you’ when such tragedies occur. It reminds me of what people say in funerals, at a loss for words. I think: what does that even mean? I guess it’s a gesture of common humanity in the face of inhumanity. If so, then yes, my thoughts are with everyone in Boston. It still feels inadequate.

: : I watched an interview on ABC news this morning with author Carrie Tiffany, the winner of the inaugural Stella Prize. It warmed my heart that she donated a large portion of her prize money to fellow authors. As she said in the interview, when you give authors money, you give them time. The luxury of time to write is one that most authors have to scrounge for in between other full-time work. If you’d like to read her book, it’s called Mateship with Birds.

Another thing that stood out for me in the interview is when Tiffany mentioned her annoyance at once reading an article where an editor or a publisher (I can’t remember which) mentioned how they don’t want to read such and such from authors anymore. Tiffany’s response was to do precisely what was suggested as a bad move in this article. She said that it’s not the place of marketing people or publishers to tell writers what to write, but rather, that writers have to discover on their own what they want to write about. I agree. There are too many rules and guidelines out there for writers, streamlining all our work into some marketable end product. Is that really the writing and reading culture we want?

: : I wrote an article for Overland Journal on Downton Abbey and the Heritage Industry. It’s an expanded and reworked version of the blog post I wrote on Downton Abbey here on my blog.

: : I also wrote this post on English ballerina, Mona Inglesby, who helped democratise ballet in England. I think her story is wonderful and should be more well-known.

: : There have been many articles on the proposed university cuts here in Australia, these are just two: Fear of death by 1000 cuts and University sector to be hit in Gonski reforms. This stood out from the first one:

“Professor Richard Teese, from the University of Melbourne, believes the cuts to universities are particularly cynical because Labor can bank on the fact there will be minimum electoral backlash. He says university funding has traditionally been something few voters have cared about.”

Yep. This country doesn’t give a shit about university funding, or universities full stop. Our university funding ranks 25 out of 29 advanced economies and is well below the OECD average. It seems incomprehensible to me in an environment where universities are already severely strapped for funding, that they are being hit with even more cuts. I really don’t know why I did a PhD anymore, there is very little future or a sustainable career path in academia. There are also no jobs, and most people work in short term contracts or casual tutoring. And they have to fight for that as well. It’s kind of pathetic to see a group of smart, enthusiastic and highly educated people compete for casual work, like dirt beneath someone’s shoes.

There is currently a petition against these cuts as well as a letter that can be sent directly to Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Craig Emerson, Minister for Tertiary Education. You can also take part in the national protests, with all the details here.

: : This was probably the most powerful article I’ve read on Thatcher, and we should all remember Clause 28.

: : Thanks Gwyneth, bunnies make everything better.

Image credit: Mona Inglesby and her dog Copper.

Rage

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:16:00 +0000

[Content note: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

I was actually going to force myself this weekend not to read articles online. Too late. This post comes from a place of rage, so if you’d prefer to read something more suited to the nature of weekends, read Vic’s excellent guest post instead. And sorry Vic, for publishing this so soon after your post, but the rage has taken over.

I read this article today about yet another teenage girl who has killed herself after photos from her sexual assault were shared online by her so-called ‘friends’. It’s similar to this story, and of course, Steubenville. It’s similar to probably tons of stories like this that occur every day but are not reported on the news. I mentioned on twitter that it’s hard to read story after story of this happening to young girls and women and not think that our societies just really hate women. And we do: we fundamentally hate women. A teenage girl is raped, and she is the one who is bullied. How is this anything other than misogyny? And this is not a culturally specific hatred, it occurs everywhere. I found it telling how certain people from Australia, UK and the US who commented on the various articles on the Indian gang rape victim who was so brutally raped and killed sought to make it a cultural or Indian problem. Sure, misogyny and rape are subject to particular cultural practices and beliefs, but they do not belong to one culture alone. All we have to do is look in our own backyards to know that’s true.

I just can’t even begin to express the sense of rage I feel when I read these stories. And it feels like indulgent rage sometimes because I’m not one of these women who have been raped, and I’m not a member of their families dealing with the aftermath of their death. But this rage nevertheless exists. It’s a rage that comes from a feeling of complete uselessness and hopelessness, and it’s also a rage to do with the fact that I recognise how little I’m worth as a woman in the world as it is. You know what reading these stories says to every woman and girl? It says this:

You are a piece of shit. You are not a person, you are a thing. You are worthless.

I read these articles, and I wonder: why do we even exist, to be treated like this? Because articles like this one show women what the world really thinks of them. And then you have some smart-arse dude wanting to argue with you that rape culture doesn’t exist and that misogyny is a myth. Or read a comment saying that the girl shouldn’t have been drunk if she didn’t want to get raped. Newsflash genius: THAT’S NOT THE FUCKING POINT. You do not get to demean, brutalise, penetrate, or treat another human being as anything other than a human being just because they are unconscious. Funny how my first thought when I see a guy passed-out at a party is not: ‘gee, let me sexually assault him with my mates, because that’s just so fun!’ I don’t know how in the year 2013 we’re still teaching boys that aggressive dehumanisation is an acceptable and endorsed definition of masculinity and girls that they are essentially a piece of shit. And I feel so useless writing this, because I know that tomorrow, or next week, or next month, I’ll read another article that sounds exactly the same. My rage is meaningless.

My Favourite Book: Victoria Hannan

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 01:41:00 +0000

Chances are, you’ve probably already visited Vic’s blog. But if you haven’t, let me introduce you to a treasure where you’ll find no biggies like total babes Bill and Hillary Clinton, Albert Einstein wearing fuzzy slippers, Susan Sontag wearing a bear suit, the couch Freud’s patients used, Johnny Cash’s to-do list and Sylvia Plath’s copy of The Great Gatsby. No biggie too that Vic is a super writer and photographer (and she really is). And no biggie at all that she’s written a wonderfully honest contribution to My Favourite Book, which I love. Read on (but no biggie). Thank you Vic!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

This is not my favourite book because it’s the best book I’ve ever read. That might be Lolita or Revolutionary Road, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby or those parts in A Farewell to Arms when Frederic’s floating down the river or when he’s rowing on the lake. This is my favourite book because of the impact it had on my creative life (which, actually, is really just my life life).

In 2006 I was working as a copywriter in an ad agency but I don’t think I could really write. I tried hard to write scripts, to write fiction, to write music reviews, travel articles. All of it. I’d read other people’s writing and I would think - yes! That’s writing! That’s how a writer writes! That’s how I’ll write! And then I’d write sentences in the voice of Franzen, of Salinger, of Plath, I’d adopt an accent or a style of another person or another time. But they weren’t real, they weren’t interesting, they certainly weren’t good because they weren’t mine.

Then I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWOSG), Dave Eggers’ surprisingly funny, beautiful, gut wrenching memoir about raising his eight year old brother after the loss of both of his parents to cancer. And I realised something so stupidly, glaringly obvious.

I went back through my work and I re-read all the forced sentences I’d written. Sentences that, while factually accurate, were without a shred of truth. Because I wasn’t writing with the voice in my head. I was writing the way I was taught I should, I was writing the way I thought I should.

Eggers writes what’s in his head. He writes things that other writers don’t in ways other writers can’t. Even in his fiction when he’s writing in the voices of characters, he’s present in his prose. And this is because he writes the way he thinks. He writes the way he thinks! I remember sitting at my desk at a job I hated in a city I hated and saying that over and over. He writes the way he thinks! A revelation.

Now I force myself to remember this:

Don’t write the way you think you should. Write the way you think.

It’s the simplest thing. But only once I adopted it did I really write, did I really understand who I was as a writer, and now, much later, who I am as a photographer, as a creative person. As a person.

If anyone ever asks me for advice (they rarely ask), I tell them we all have a thing that is distinctly ours. It’s what sets us apart from everyone else. It’s what makes us interesting, it makes us us. It’s the way we see the world and it’s the most valuable thing we own.

AHWOSG is my favourite book not because it’s funny, beautiful and masterfully written (and it is all of those things) but because it gave me a sense of myself in my work. It taught me an invaluable lesson that I carry with me every day. So while this book and Eggers and his presence in every sentence won’t be to everyone’s taste, I’ll be an evangelist for them forever.

Image credit: Untitled by Sofia Ajram (used with permission). The girl’s tattoo in this photo is the final words from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

Q&A: The F Word

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:24:00 +0000

On Monday night, I watched the ‘special edition’ of ABC’s Q&A titled “The F Word”. I don’t really know what I was expecting with this show, but I can tell you what my reactions were to the majority of the discussion around feminism, which were basically encapsulated by Helen Razer’s tweets throughout the show. It was a limited discussion. There were a few bright moments and good points raised by panellists, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable and resentful that feminist debate was defined by questions of whether Margaret Thatcher was a ‘feminist’ (seriously, this is the woman who called feminism a “poison”. This is not a hard question to answer: no, she wasn’t), men opening doors and chivalry (such a key and significant problem in our current societies – for fuck’s sake), whether sex workers can be classified as ‘feminists’ (sigh, really?), “is feminism obsolete?” (again, really?), Julia Gillard’s jackets (just kill me now), and so on. The more I listened to this, the more I felt like something sharp was gleefully and repeatedly stabbing my brain.

But let me focus on the interesting parts, and to me those were mainly two comments made by Germaine Greer and by Brooke Magnanti. Magnanti made a number of good points, not least of which was challenging Mia Freedman when Freedman claimed that no little girl wants to grow up to be a sex worker. In an industry where women are heavily exploited, commodified and trafficked, I understand where Freedman is coming from. However Magnanti pointed out that she has met sex workers who do view it as a desired career and if that makes Freedman uncomfortable, then tough. I thought this was a very interesting point. But it was one, like many others, which was lost in the haze of the word ‘choice’ and the statement ‘feminism is about choice’ which cropped up repeatedly throughout the show. I have to admit to rolling my eyes each time I heard both. I would have turned it into a drinking game if it wasn’t so irritating. I’ve written about choice politics on my blog, so I won’t go through my points again. But it’s safe to say that I think reducing feminism to individual choice is a cop-out. It’s a safe tactic that doesn’t address the real problems of economic, ideological and cultural inequalities that affect and disenfranchise women worldwide. You can’t fix these problems with personal choice because your personal choices are defined, dictated and limited by the society and culture in which you live. It seems astounding to me that we are still debating feminism through choice.

On to Greer. The comment that ultimately stuck with me from the show was Greer’s statement that “We’re not even there yet”. Meaning, how the hell can we talk about feminism being “obsolete” when we haven’t even achieved basic equality? But then she went on to discuss the need to also delve beyond equality. Equality is a necessary but very modest goal. Because what women are seeking now is equality with men in institutions and cultural practices that have historically been largely defined by men and that privilege men. Greer pointed out that we haven’t even begun to think about whether we want to shape a different world from the one we have inherited from history, with all its biases. This is part of what she said: “When we talk about equality, we’re actually enunciating a profoundly conservative aim. We just want to have what somebody else has got. We don’t really want to change the whole system. Now, it’s important that we do that stuff ... We’re not even there yet. Until we’ve actually worked out how the world, as we’ve inherited it works ... we cannot even see a way forward.”

I guess here, I agree with Greer: it’s necessary to keep fighting for equality in the world as we know it, flawed as it is. At the same it, it’s necessary to consider that perhaps part of the way forward is to reconsider what “the whole system” means to both women and men. This reminded me of Angela Carter’s words in The Sadeian Woman, where she writes: “Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations”. This applies to every other social, cultural and economic practice in our modern world. I’d like to hope that at some stage we won’t simply be aiming for the conservative goal of equality, but actually question the assumption that we’re “the slaves of history” when we are in fact its makers.

Image credit: 28 Daria quotes for any situation; by the end of the show, I re-fashioned this Daria quote in my head along the lines of: ‘Feminism is about CHOICE! I choose coffee, coffee for everyone!!’ This probably only makes sense in my head, but whatever.

News from Nowhere 1

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 03:40:00 +0000

I borrowed the title for my new blog ‘column’ from William Morris’ novel, News from Nowhere. Basically, this will be a purging and collecting of interesting articles and posts I find online in one place. I was so disappointed when Jessica announced that her READ.LOOK.THINK. blog column is on hiatus. There are many similar columns on other blogs, where a blogger does a round-up of links and articles at the end of the week. But anyone who reads Jessica’s knows her column is unique and more thoughtful. When she then announced that she changed her mind, I was relieved. But it got me thinking about how much time I waste by not doing something similar. I link some of my favourite articles on twitter, and then save them in a million other places I don’t remember later on. And I need some of these articles for my work. Whenever I go back and try to find them on the various places I may have saved them, I waste a considerable amount of time. So I’m going to collect them here instead and also share them with others who may be interested.

However, I’m not really one who can commit myself to posting a regular column once a week on my blog. So much of my work and my other freelance writing revolves around regular schedules and deadlines, this blog to me is like a relief from all that. My life is over-scheduled as it is. Most of my posts here are spontaneous, and I don’t like to plan when I post on my personal blog. So basically, I’ll just be sharing things whenever I feel like it, and I don’t promise consistency with News from Nowhere. I do suggest though that you sign up for Jessica’s column, as she is consistently excellent in what she finds.

So here’s the first ‘edition’:

: : Me and My Country, Where to Now? Christos Tsiolkas interviewed by Heather Taylor Johnson. I first read this in print in the latest issue of Meanjin, and was struck by the final paragraph:

“The other thing that makes me angry is the devaluation of education in Australia. I know through my own lived experience, and through being a child of people who were denied education, how important it is, how essential it is in creating the possibility of a future. This is where I feel the betrayal of the Labor Party most acutely, in their acquiescing in allowing neo-liberal economics to infect their educational commitments. Anti-intellectualism is pernicious and dangerous, a poison to a culture. I think the fact that Australian egalitarianism has been eroded over the last quarter-century is a result of not taking public education seriously and this explains the resultant poverty of our media, the bankruptcy of our political institutions and the increased inequality of our society. Allowing the education system to deteriorate to the extent it has is a national disgrace. We are a dumber country, a more myopic, more selfish country for it.”

I agree with every word.

: : Abbott’s climate change policy is bullshit by Malcolm Turnbull, written in 2009. It’s worthwhile considering his words now, when Abbott is primed to become our next Prime Minister in Australia. Please, can we have someone like Turnbull as the leader of the opposition instead?

: : Speaking of which, if you need more proof that Tony Abbott shouldn’t be the next Prime Minister, then here you go. I still can’t believe this man is an actual candidate and will probably win. A few years ago, most Australians rightly thought he was a joke. And he still is. People are free to dislike Julia Gillard for valid reasons of policy and decision-making, but the level of vitriolic hate I’ve seen aimed at her by both the general public and the media borders on the ludicrous. I don’t think she has been perfect, there are many things with which I’ve strongly disagreed with her, and there were many dumb moves made by the Labor party as a whole. But Tony Abbott shouldn’t be a viable alternative. He makes Australia dumber and meaner, and if he becomes our next Prime Minister, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

: : The curse of Australia’s silent pervasive racism.

: : Why is North Dakota Torturing Women?

: : Damn this article is good, just read every word.

: : Some of my best friends are women.

I have purged, I feel better - and theoretically, more organised now.

Looking for Alibrandi

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 06:36:00 +0000

My first book review as part of the Women Writers Reading Group! I first read Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992) as a teenager in high school when it was one of the set texts in my English class. I totally loved it and recognised myself in the book’s main character, seventeen-year-old Josephine Alibrandi. I recently re-read it as I was thinking about it nostalgically after writing this list. And I love it even more now in the context of the young adult novels that are aimed at teens (particularly teen girls) today. I know it’s a cliché by now to cite Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga as an example, but she really did initiate a whole type of young adult book trend. There are many things I dislike about the Twilight books, not least of which is the god-awful gender politics and the bizarre domination-and-stalking-is-romance theme. But one thing really annoys me even more about these books. Bella has her entire life decided for her all while she’s a teenager. By the time she finishes high school, she has a husband and a baby, and her future is planned out. There is no real self-discovery, no growth. When I think back to my teenage self, I had absolutely nothing figured out. I still don’t. It was only the beginning, not the end. But the Twilight books seem to suggest a simplified world for teenage girls in which their entire sense of self and fulfilment in life is found early through (impossibly perfect) romance. It’s a very limited world-view.

Looking for Alibrandi presents an opposite world and an opposite characterisation. Josie, like most of us mere humans, has no idea who she is, how to get what she wants and what she’s searching for. Looking for Alibrandi is an inconclusive novel of self-discovery and self-awareness in a very realistic context of day-to-day life in Australia in the 90s. It does not suggest romance and babies as the answer to all of Josie’s problems, and it does not present the reader with a simple model of growing up. And to both teenage and adult readers, it sympathetically suggests that we are always in the making, never fully ‘arriving’ anywhere, but continually searching and sometimes finding answers, sometimes not, sometimes finding somewhere to belong, and sometimes not. We need more books like this for young girls; we need more books like this for everyone.

The second thing that really stood out for me as I was re-reading Looking for Alibrandi is the context of racism and multiculturalism in Australia. When I was in high school, we studied these topics. I remember my history teacher making us sit down to analyse Midnight Oil protest songs (Blue Sky Mine, Beds are Burning, etc.) and Pauline Hanson’s racist maiden speech to the House of Representatives (1996), as we were studying Australia’s immigration history and indigenous Australian history. My high school was diverse and large; there were students from many places around the world. The things we studied were not theory to most of us, we understood the reality of racism, we understood the implications of multiculturalism, because many of us lived it daily. Looking for Alibrandi was a book we could all relate to because Josie, like us, lived with the reality of a multicultural Australia. Another reason we need more books like this one is that I feel, to a certain extent, we’ve stopped talking about racism and multiculturalism in this honest, sympathetic and realistic manner. It’s mainly talked about as political rhetoric and posturing, or distanced cultural theory. Josie represents something altogether more real, more authentic – she represents the opposite of bullshit to me. As a teenager, I knew exactly what Josie was talking about when she tells the reader: “Like all tomato days we had spaghetti that night. Made by our own hands. A tradition that I probably will never let go of either, simply because like religion, culture is nailed into you so deep you can’t escape it. No matter how far you run.” And most of my English class in high school knew exactly what she meant when she got angry for being called a ‘wog’:

I’m an Italian. I’m of European descent. When an Italian or another person of European descent calls me a wog it’s done in good warm humour. When the word “wog” comes out of the mouth of an Australian it’s not done in good humour unless they’re a good friend. It makes me feel pathetic and it makes me remember that I live in a small-minded world and that makes me so furious.

I’m sure there are plenty of us who can relate to this fury. So you know, I can’t give a crap about vampire books with idealised notions of belonging through a ‘perfect’ love story. I much prefer Josie’s imperfect personality and her imperfect world. And I deeply admire a writer like Marchetta who can get inside a teenager’s mind so well and navigate a story of first love, family dramas and ordinary life through the voice of a smart girl trying to find a space where she belongs.

Image credit: Film still from the film adaptation of Looking for Alibrandi.

Home is so Sad

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 02:15:00 +0000

I had a reading with a psychic (or is it clairvoyant?) last weekend at a hens party. It was supposed to be a bit of fun, and I’m wholeheartedly a sceptic. I mean, when you have psychic readings in between a male stripper walking around in his underwear, it’s not exactly supposed to be a touching moment. But strangely enough, it was. The first thing she said to me when I sat down was: “Are you a writer?” Creepy. Then she told me with extreme confidence that I write about things that concern women. Creepier still. I barely said a word in my psychic reading, but she went on filling the time with facts that were spot on: I’m quiet, shy, introverted, I don’t like to be around people; I’m addicted to education (she actually said that, so true); I’ll be writing a new book soon (yes, true, I hadn’t told anyone about that until after the reading).

Then she started talking about how I’m separated from my family, not just physically, but in terms of my values and beliefs in life. This made me feel strange. I’m very close to my family, but in many ways, I have separated some of my beliefs from their own. It’s a fragile balancing act for me between maintaining the cultural traditions that I’ve come from and which have helped shape who I am, and finding a place for my own individual values cultivated through thought, education and experiences. Sometimes things clash, other times they don’t. I feel like I’m perpetually caught between feeling so completely at home around my family in ways I can’t explain to my Australian friends, and feeling so completely distanced from them in ways I can explain to my friends.

This made me think of home. I’ve lived in Australia longer than I lived in Israel when I was growing up. And yet Australia will never really be home to me. But I will probably never go back and live in Israel. I feel comfortable in Australia, but it’s not home. I don’t feel comfortable in Israel, but it feels undeniably like home, despite my ambivalence, despite my resistance. I really wish our emotions and sense of belonging fit more logically sometimes with where we live. But they often don’t. The more I prepare myself for my trip to Israel next month, the more I’m filled with mixed feelings of excitement, pure aching homesickness, and trepidation. I don’t know why I’m so afraid, and why this fear doesn’t cancel out the sheer longing. I also know that the home I miss is not the home I’ll be coming to. The home I miss doesn’t really exist. That still doesn’t make me miss it less, or want it less.

I read a line from this poem in Jane’s article in Kindred. It seems so right at the moment, because home really is so sad, and yet so longed for:

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

–Philip Larkin

Happy Passover

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:24:00 +0000

Last night was Pesach eve (Passover), so I feel this nostalgic ode to my family is appropriate today. Although really, any excuse will do, I love digging through old photos (in case you do too, there are some more here and here).

The photos, from top to bottom: 1) My mum, taken by my dad at Mount Everest (although you can’t really see her, and she’s bundled in ten billion layers of clothes). Yes, they actually attempted to climb it, they were insane – and insanely fit; 2) My grandparents, the original hipsters; 3) My dad, in Israel; 4) My dad, reading. So sweet; 5) My grandfather, aunt and dad; 6) My dad and his sister; 7) My great-grandfather (my dad’s grandfather); 8) My grandmother’s parents and siblings. They were all killed in the Holocaust; 9) My dad again. He rocked the beard from a young age; 10) My grandmother’s photo in her Polish passport; 11) My grandparents’ passports. Every time I look at them, I feel a tug at my heart; 12) My grandparents on their wedding day; 13) Me, on my birthday, wearing a dress my grandmother made for me.

Happy Passover! I can’t believe I’ll see my family in Israel in only one month, I miss them so much.

From zero to intense

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 06:51:00 +0000

“You go from zero to intense in a second”. Someone close to me told me that a few days ago. Which is true, it’s a flaw, among the great many others I have. I sometimes think it must be really difficult to love me. When I plunge myself into something, it is with total concentration, and I shut out the world and everyone in it. That’s pretty much been the case in the last week or two until I submitted my grant application (which is thankfully all done now). I don’t remember putting so much of myself into one project in a long time; it almost felt like the last few weeks of my PhD, when I would sit and stare at the computer at the end of the day and realise I haven’t eaten anything all day. This is probably not the healthiest way to go on living life, but this is how I do things, and I’m so tired of fighting myself. I think when you go through periods of relentless stress, you project this idea of calmness, structure and purpose onto other people’s lives that your own is lacking. I turn this into a pointless exercise of ‘what’s wrong with me?’ Only this time, as much as I was stressed, I didn’t feel as if anything was wrong with me; which makes for a nice change. Anyway, if you believe in karma, luck, or whatever, keep your fingers crossed for me.

A few other things ...

Thanks for the super enthusiastic response to my proposed book challenge. I’ve now created a badge and an ‘about’ page for anyone who wants to join. I’ve also named it the Women Writers Reading Group. If you have any questions, feel free to email me, but to answer a few I’ve already received: No, the books don’t have to be in English, and no, the reviews of the books most certainly don’t have to be in English either. One of the reasons I didn’t make this reading group country or language specific is because I want everyone to be involved. Also, this is not like a regular book club: I’m not going to prescribe to people what to read, or when to read it. You basically pick whatever you like and read it whenever you like.

And I’ll leave you with a few articles I’ve been reading. I’m too tired to comment on them myself, but I think they’re important, and should be shared:

* Steubenville: this is rape culture’s Abu Ghraib moment
* Steubenville and the misplaced sympathy for Jane Doe’s rapists
* Online threats against women aren’t trivial and don’t happen in a vacuum
* Off the battlefield, military women face risks from male troops
* Some of my best friends are women
* The scarcity of women in peace negotiations

The Book Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:11:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about my last post. In fact, it’s distracting me when I should be finalising my grant application. So I figured the best thing to do is to get it out of my system by proposing a book challenge to anyone who is interested in joining me. It’s quite simple: Make a conscious decision to read more books by women, and write about them on your blog. I’m going to try do this myself – I’m going to try and review books primarily by women this year on my blog. If the statistics in my last post left you feeling likewise depressed and annoyed, then please consider joining my challenge. If anyone is interested, leave a comment here or email me to let me know you’d like to participate. This is not a particularly original challenge, as there are probably similar ones online via other blogs. But I think the more people who create these challenges and the more who participate, the better. If enough people are interested, I can make a small badge for us to put on our blogs. But if it’s just me, that’s okay too.

By the way, I did end up looking at my bookshelves, and this is only a select shortlist of the books by women I have in them (if we also include my kindle as a ‘bookshelf’):

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
• Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath
• Possession by A.S. Byatt
• The Shadow of the Sun by A.S. Byatt
• Sixty Lights by Gail Jones
• Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones
• Sorry by Gail Jones
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• The Waves by Virginia Woolf
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf
• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
• The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood
• Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
• Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
• Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
• Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
• Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• Keynotes and Discords by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne)
• The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
• Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
• Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
• Mariana by Monica Dickens
• The Far Cry by Emma Smith
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• On Beauty by Zadie Smith
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
• Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
• Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
• The Complete Poems by Christina Rossetti
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• The God of Small Things by Arundati Roy
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
• Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
• The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
• Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
• Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
• The Fifth Heaven by Rachel Eytan
• Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
• Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
• The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin

I would love to hear what’s in your own bookshelves.

Image credit: Woman Writing (1928) by Henri Lebasque.

Women in the Literary Arts

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:26:00 +0000

I received my copy of A Companion to the Historical Film yesterday, to which I contributed an essay. I gazed at the review snippets on the back of this book, where one reviewer has informed a potential reader that this book enlists “all the best names in the field” and allowed myself to feel proud for being published in this collection – no humble-bragging here, my contribution was based on original research and I’m proud of it and the work I put into it. Receiving this book in the mail yesterday made this post timelier for me, and reminded me that I need to keep on fighting in my field. Because the statistics for women in publishing and in the literary arts are still pretty grim.

The 2012 statistics gathered by VIDA examine several notable publications and the percentage of women’s input and representation in all. Going through them gets progressively depressing: The London Review of Books reviewed a total of 73 female authors, as opposed to 203 male ones; The New Republic has only 9 female book reviewers, compared to 79 males ones; 47 bylines for The Atlantic were by women, contrasted with 176 by men; The New York Review of Books has 215 male reviewers and a measly 40 female ones, not to mention the fact it reviewed 316 books by men, but only 89 by women; and The Paris Review, one of the oldest and most respected journals for new literature, included 11 female poets but 48 male ones last year. I could go on, but there’s an obvious pattern here: writing, reviewing and ‘literature’ are predominantly considered to be a male art. Women also fared terribly in 2012 with some leading Australian publications, including The Monthly and The Australian Literary Review.

There is nothing particularly new about these statistics, as they simply confirm what many female writers know to be true from their own individual experiences: there is an obvious gender bias when it comes to the production, reception and review of work by women. It’s a bias that seems to be getting worse, not better. So what’s going on here?

At the heart of the problem is of course institutional sexism, which infiltrates many working environments and to which the literary arts and leading publications aren’t immune. The same barriers which have stopped women from being hired because of their gender, and which have hindered their rise in various other workplaces, also affect the hiring, publishing and submission environments of many notable publications. It’s not always intentional sexism, but it exists because this is how our workplaces and societies have functioned, and continue to function. But added to that general institutional sexism is something extra: art and literature are considered ‘serious’ affairs, and women have traditionally been regarded as anything but ‘serious’.

As I’ve stated before, we only need to look at the way many books by women are received and categorised. Men get ‘literature’ and general ‘fiction’ sections, while women get ‘chick lit’ and ‘women’s writing’. Men get to speak for humanity as a whole, like a template for the universal human experience, while women can only speak for women. Their books are specifically marketed to other women, in a sexist assumption that what women write has a select audience only. Books by men, however, are marketed to all. In that logic, it makes sense that there would be a gender bias when it comes to the reviewing of women’s work. If women can only speak for other women as ‘special’ sub-categories in the human experience, then why should a male reviewer pick up a book by a woman and be compelled to review it, write about it, and take it seriously? Why should he relate to it and approach it as something that speaks of our shared humanity, rather than gender? And indeed, why should a leading publication pause to consider its own gender biases and practices when it comes to who they hire and who they consider worthy of being reviewed and published?

Change won’t really come until there is a deeper shift in consciousness about women’s abilities and their creative and intellectual outputs. There have been many feminist critics who have highlighted how intellectual thought, creativity and writing were always considered ‘masculine’ by nature, and we are still fighting against that dominant assumption. Women are traditionally aligned with their bodies, men with their minds. Until we can start to see beyond this binary, we’re all going to be stuck with more grim statistics.

So what can we do? VIDA offers some practical tips: “Count your bookshelves … Write seriously about works by women. Solicit and commission writing by women.” This is all absolutely necessary and it’s pretty basic stuff in the year 2013. Because you have to wonder why in a world where women make up 50% of the global population their perspective, their abilities and their works are still not afforded equal space in prominent publications. Now, go look at your bookshelves (I am).

Exhaustion

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:59:00 +0000

I’m completely exhausted at the moment, as I’m in the middle of applying for a very large and complicated grant. If I get it, then it will set me up through my university for the next three years to do research and write another book. There has been little sleep on my end. However, even when you are so focused on one goal, little things will enter into the periphery of your vision, like small jewels of respite. I have two such things to show you, and I think they’re rather lovely:

Long-exposure photographs of ballet dancers

Australian dancer Alison McWhinney takes part in a photocall ahead of the “Emerging Dancer 2013” competition. Photo by Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images.

English dancer Laurretta Summerscales takes part in a photocall ahead of the “Emerging Dancer 2013” competition. Photo by Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images.

Australian dancer Alison McWhinney takes part in a photocall ahead of the “Emerging Dancer 2013” competition. Photo by Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images.

Japanese dancer Ken Saruhashi takes part in a photocall ahead of the “Emerging Dancer 2013” competition. Photo by Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images.

I find these images quite breathtaking; the dancers almost look like butterflies caught in motion.

Soprano

Procrastinating on Pinterest can sometimes yield something worthy, such as this poem that I encountered through The Paris Review’s Pinterest page.

I’m also working right now on my final edits for my essay in the June edition of Meanjin, so if you read that journal, keep an eye out for it. And I mentioned that my blog was nominated for the Voices 2013 competition, but I seriously had no idea just how big this competition is until I received an email from the people running it. My blog has also been entered into the Sydney Writers’ Centre’s Best Australian Blogs Competition. To be brutally honest, my blog is not really ‘competition’ material. But there’s little point in being pessimistic, I just have to say thanks, and cross my fingers. More importantly, cross your fingers for me about the grant.

Critiquing Downton Abbey

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 02:45:00 +0000

A little while ago somebody sent me a very nice email asking if I would do a critical analysis of Downton Abbey. Since this kind of analysis is something that I’ve already done on so many British dramas in my book, I was reluctant. It would mean summarising many of the main themes in my book into one post, which is a difficult task. However, I like a challenge, so here’s my response.

While there has been considerable hype surrounding Downton Abbey as a brilliant new drama since it began, to me there is nothing particularly new or unique about it. It’s a natural extension and development of a mode of cinema and television drama that has been popular since the 1980s, if not before: heritage. ‘Heritage’ cinema and heritage drama are things I’ve written about a lot, but they can be summarised as historical costume films and period dramas, that have a very specific ‘look’, style, and mise-en-scène, that for some film and television critics, has been developed into a distinct screen genre (like say, horror, romance, or thriller, etc.). The term ‘heritage’ is often used to refer to a sanitised, stylised and nostalgic historical representation of the past in the present.

Another reason why such films and television dramas are referred to as ‘heritage’ is because they are boosted by and aligned with the work undertaken by official heritage bodies such as The National Trust and English Heritage. They are also aided by tourist companies who often exploit these dramas and films to promote a certain idea of what Britain and England represent to wider international audiences. This is not to say that all of these dramas and films are exactly the same, but it does mean that over the decades, a heritage screen ‘template’ has been formed via various films and television dramas that has come to represent a very familiar and very conservative idea of English national identity and British culture.

Downton Abbey sits very comfortably within the style I’ve termed ‘English Postcards’ in my book. That is, it relies heavily on repeated beautiful shots of grand country homes of the aristocracy as part of its visual appeal and heritage style; it relies on the representation of English space and English place as “postcard images of a stereotypically ‘old’ English home” (Cultural Afterlives, p. 106), that resemble those images tourists consume in gift shops. Those images aren’t just sold in gift shops however, they’re sold to us on screen too.

If you sit back and examine how certain scenes are shot in Downton Abbey, you’ll notice that characterisation and plot often play second fiddle to the aesthetic depiction of the house of Downton and its extensive luxurious grounds. This is common among heritage films and dramas, and relies on very specific camerawork I describe as “slow-moving and long-distance shots” which allow for “a contemplative and leisurely view of the scenery, but also frames the images within a picturesque logic of background, middleground and foreground” (Cultural Afterlives, p. 106). This picturesque logic, which developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting and art, was one of the key ways in which the landed aristocracy and the rising middle classes consolidated their social and cultural power through the beatific representation of their land and property. Just think of Gainsborough, and you’ll know what I mean.

I guess the question I always hear when I talk about all this with my friends is: where’s the harm? Where’s the harm in enjoying all this, and indulging in the beauty of these old aristocratic and privileged homes and lifestyles? Well, on an individual level, not much. But we don’t live as islands, we live in societies, cultures and countries. Where’s the harm? The harm comes in the fact that what is being promoted is a very limited and specific representation of English and British identity for modern audiences, who are increasingly living in multicultural communities and societies. On a daily basis, many of our politicians (in Australia too) exploit the uncertainty of modern times by reverting back to some idealised vision of national identity that relies on exclusion, privilege and creating borders between cultures and communities. These heritage dramas and films do the same thing (if, in a very beautiful and seductive way).

The landed aristocracy of the past relied on very distinct exclusionary boundaries of property, of who gets to have basic human rights, of money, of privilege, of land, and yes, of national identity. And by sanitising the inequality of these boundaries into some pretty imagery of luxurious houses paraded like heritage porn, we are also helping perpetuate inequality in the present. This is not to say that Downton Abbey doesn’t explicitly explore certain issues of class and privilege in its plot-lines, but it does so in a very safe manner that allows us to comfortably sympathise with those in power and their exclusionary world-views. As much as I too enjoy watching this drama for its aesthetic beauty, I feel there is also value in stepping back sometimes and recognising that it is also based on problematic premises about history, power and the present. And you know what? It is perfectly okay in my book to enjoy Downton Abbey, while still being critical of it.

Image credit: Image from here.

My New Portfolio Website

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 08:38:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to create a professional website that showcases some of my work and publications for a long time. And I’ve finally done it – here’s my professional portfolio website. A lot of hard work has gone into creating this, and I hope it conveys some of the work I have done over the years. The sections on this site include:

* About
* Education & Teaching
* Books
* Book Essays
* Print & Fiction
* Online
* Research & Editing
* Marketing

Feel free to visit and tell me what you think!

By the way, I have temporarily disabled anonymous comments on my blog, purely as a measure to combat the ridiculous amount of spam I get. I really dislike blogger’s CAPTCHA as a spam-fighting measure, so I would prefer not to enable that. But if you usually comment on my blog through your name and website alone, or anonymously (and you are obviously not a spambot), please email me to let me know and I will consider enabling anonymous comments again. I know it’s no big deal (and people often respond to my posts via email rather than comments anyway), but I sort of feel bad for disabling anonymous comments, and blogger doesn’t allow much flexibility when it comes to combating spam.

On Joy, etcetera

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 04:20:00 +0000

Every once in a while I come across an article that feels as if it has been ripped out of my heart and mind, but written with more skill and care than I am ever capable of expressing. This is the feeling I had when reading the essay, ‘Joy’ by Zadie Smith today. Smith, like Jeanette Winterson, has an ability to express sentiments, ideas and feelings in a way that just makes me want to join in with my own stories. It’s like talking to a friend, but a friend you will never meet (and a friend you envy).

Her essay distinguishes between ‘pleasure’ and ‘joy’. Like her, I don’t view them as the same thing; joy is something more profound, perhaps Sublime in its temporary annihilation of your ego, while at the same time reminding you of your fragility and your self. It is a messy and contradictory feeling, often inexpressible, but compelling expression like few others. In Smith’s words, joy for me is not “the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road”, but some “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight”. I guess that is an apt definition of the Sublime, but I want to call it so much more, that doesn’t seem quite adequate.

Smith outlines six or so incidents in her life when she felt joy. I don’t think I’ve ever really counted mine, but I can tell you about three that stand out at the moment. Two are ‘firsts’ – the first times I did/felt such and such – but one is absolutely nothing, and belongs in no particular narrative.

The first time I interviewed a Holocaust survivor: I talk about this a lot, I know. But this seems natural for something that has been imprinted on my personality like a stamp. I remember this day because I remember feeling myself permanently changed. And it was a day of joy. Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, or even insulting, to suggest that a day in which I talked to another human being about the worst things human beings can do to each other was ‘joyful’, but that’s what it was. It wasn’t pleasure; it was the exact opposite of pleasure. It was nausea and confusion, it was feeling my intact self being emotionally violated in some way I couldn’t name. It was sitting down and looking at a man’s trembling hands and thinking that I feel, see and recognise no difference between his hands and mine – that somehow, through the course of our interview, I had lost myself and become him, and vice versa. It was at once terrifying and delightful in some inexplicable way. Terrifying because in order to function in daily life, I have to separate my own ego from that of others. But delightful because in letting go of those boundaries, I felt an unbearable poignancy about the fragility of our humanity.

The first love: Most people go through this. The amount of metaphors you can string together to describe love are endless. But so many of them are metaphors of pleasure rather than metaphors of joy. Like many of my friends, I believed in the idea that being in love means discovering your other half – discovering something or someone who will finally complete you. With what intense confusion did I discover the exact opposite. This is another kind of delightful terror: the realisation that the person I love to a fever pitch cannot possibly complete me in any way, and that at any moment, he will be, say, or do something that conflicts with what I am; that experiencing real love is not to dissolve this conflict into metaphors of my ‘other half’, but to recognise it as yet another sign of our humanity.

On the bus: Boom, out of nowhere one day, while catching a bus to uni, I just felt like someone sucked the air out of me. It was early morning, I was sleepy. Other than that, there was no good reason to suddenly feel like that. It’s a feeling of almost complete alienation from myself; like looking in the mirror and not recognising my reflection for 5 minutes and then snapping back into logical reality. It was like being thrown a feeling to play around with and disrupt the flow of my day: catch the bus, go to the library, do some work, go home, eat dinner, go to sleep. My day was planned, and I even inserted moments of pleasure into it: what I was having for dinner, where I would buy my favourite cup of coffee before settling into work, finding my favourite seat in the library – this is all pleasure. But then I was given this feeling out of nowhere, and the day was heightened for no reason. This was joy that had nothing to do with my planned pleasure.

Then there is the joy of writing this, knowing that I send it off into the world in self-indulgent delightful terror that will probably either be met with eye-rolling or recognition. Anyway, Zadie Smith writes it better, so go read her essay instead.

The Spring Night

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 07:10:00 +0000

Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.

*

Come quickly—as soon as
these blossoms open,
they fall.
This world exists
as a sheen of dew on flowers.

*

Even though
these pine trees
keep their original color,
everything green
is different in spring.

*

Seeing you is the thread
that ties me to this life—
If that knot
were cut this moment,
I’d have no regret.

*

Sleeplessly
I watch over
the spring night—
but no amount of guarding
is enough to make it stay.

This poem is by Izumi Shikibu, a Japanese poet born around the year 974, who lived and wrote during the Heian period. You can find it in the collection, The Ink Dark Moon. As a teenager, I had this poem pinned above my bed, right next to my Nirvana poster. I don’t know why I thought of this poem today, but I’m glad I did, because it reminded me how beautiful I find it and with what intense obsession (as can only be felt when you’re a teenager) I loved it. Mind you, I did love Nirvana equally.

By the way, I received an email yesterday telling me that I’ve been nominated for this blogging competition. I was quite surprised. So whoever nominated me, I just wanted to say thanks.

Feminism Friday

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 01:57:00 +0000

[Content note: discussion of rape and violence]

Yesterday was 14 February on my side of the world, and it may still be this date on your side as I write this. For most people, this day is associated with Valentine’s Day. I really have zero interest in Valentine’s Day, but the date 14 February has another significance this year: it’s the One Billion Rising Day. This day, which you can follow with the hashtag #1billionrising on twitter (and support and follow in so many other ways), represents a movement to speak out against and help stop violence against women all around the world. With this in mind, I thought it appropriate to share the following:

Her name was Reeva Steenkamp

It’s just “his girlfriend” who’s been murdered; Pistorius is still alive, so he’s not “tragic” - he can be the butt of jokes (mostly focusing on his disability, though there are also some about the fact that this happened on Valentine’s Day), and Steenkamp is simply collateral damage, mentioned - if she’s mentioned at all - as “his girlfriend”.

On my Facebook feed today, I’ve seen sports fans snickering at those jokes. But a woman - a woman named Reeva Steenkamp - is dead, shot in cold blood. And it’s not funny in the slightest.

One billion have been rising today to protest the continual violence against women across the world. Seven billion of us saw today just why these protests are still needed.

Related to this:

* One of the ‘jokes’ mentioned above about Reeva Steenkamp’s death is Caitlin Moran’s now-deleted tweet. My first instinct as a feminist is not to make some flippant joke about the violent death of a woman. Obviously Moran’s is. So many people look up to Moran, I wish she was just better.

* The lowest of the low, I have no words.

* You Are Not a Family Man If You Kill Your Family: A Primer on Writing About Domestic Violence.

Wave of support to end violence against women (one of the many articles on One Billion Rising)

The UN reports women aged 15 to 44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria.

The 22 People Who Voted Against The Violence Against Women Act

CHRONICLES OF MANSPLAINING: Professor Feminism and the Deleted Comments of Doom

Like most women, I currently live in a society where violence, harassment and scary shit can break out at any moment, just because I told some random asshole “no” without bothering to be nice about it. Doing that is so dangerous that most women don’t dare; after a few scary incidents, they learn to make up excuses, to smile, to be sweet and welcoming, to act as if every single random asshole on the street is a precious new friend that they would just LOVE to stand outside of the Chipotle and chat with FOR HOURS, if only cruel fate had not intervened. That’s what it’s actually like, being a woman: Playing nice with every random asshole, because this random asshole might be the one who hurts you. And then, if he hurts you anyway, they’ll tell you that you led him on.

This post is so good, go read it in its entirety.

A Response

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:59:00 +0000

Jane published an excellent post yesterday, and I urge you to go read it now. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it – it’s one of those things you read and then turn over in your head in bed, instead of shutting your brain down and going to sleep. So Jane will have to forgive me here for responding to her article with my own perspective.

I couldn’t help relate Jane’s article to a bunch of ‘etiquette’ advice posts I’ve read on some big blogs lately. The sense of frustration I felt when reading these left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s clear to me that many such posts are created with good intentions, and no doubt many bloggers and readers out there would like to emulate the model of ‘success’ of the big blogs. But what we actually end up with is a flattening out of ourselves into some formula. Like Jane, what disturbs me the most is the advice thrown out to be happy, positive and avoid the negativity at all costs; to avoid criticism (both on the receiving and giving end), to avoid expressing sadness and to avoid calling people out. It’s like trying to sanitise both your blog and your life where the default tone is happy shiny positivity with a ribbon on top.

I’m aware that many of these blogs are businesses and so the people who run them feel they have to manage themselves this way in order to maintain their income. Fine, I get that. But maintaining a blog that is also a business does not mean having to rule out any space for critique, sadness and necessary negativity. It’s also about time the blog world learned the difference between abusive trolling and valid criticism. I’m sorry, but I do roll my eyes repeatedly when I hear a blogger exclaim in a preppy dismissive tone when encountering thoughtful criticism that ‘life’s too short, be happy and nice!’ I can definitely get behind the sentiments of being kind, giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating other people with decency and respect. What I can’t get behind is the assumption that I should just ‘get over’ stuff that is ethically wrong or problematic, simply because it is deemed ‘negative’ to raise these topics and discuss them honestly. Yes, life is too short; it’s too short not to fight for things that are worth fighting for – things that may make others uncomfortable, and things that may be difficult. Life is too short not to care. If I am only here on this planet for a short time, I sure want to live it as ethically and as responsibly as I can. I don’t want to gloss over the ‘bad’ stuff, I don’t want to look the other way when I see something that feels wrong, I don’t want to shut my mouth all the time and play ‘nice’.

These advice posts aren’t particularly unique as they speak of the general suspicion within our culture of any emotion that isn’t readily upbeat and simplistically ‘happy’. When somebody asks you how you are, you’re supposed to say ‘I’m great’, or ‘I’m fine’. If you tell the truth on crappy days you will most likely risk alienating people – because, after all, you’re supposed to be ‘happy’ all the time! This should be obvious, but life isn’t a freaking rainbow. Human beings have a wide range of valid emotions and our default setting isn’t HAPPY WITH A SMILE. And you know, sometimes responsible adults have to be negative, they have to criticise when they see something wrong, they have to call out unacceptable things. This is not being a grumpy nasty-pants, it’s called living in the world as a self-aware human being with standards and ethics. I am a human being, not a brand; I do not need to be fixed, managed, or marketed.

There is also another issue here. Because I regularly write about feminism on my blog and elsewhere, and because I have a PhD, I get repeated rounds of other condescending ‘advice’ via emails and comments (and sometimes twitter and tumblr) telling me how I am just so wrong about everything, right down to how I do my hair (gleaned from the one measly photo of myself I was willing to put up on this blog), to what I think about a certain film, to guys lecturing me on how my feminism is just bullshit and they’ll teach me how to live properly. I think my favourite ‘advice’ comes in the form of ‘what would your mother say?’ or some other lame attempt to infantilise me by calling upon the authority of my mother. Here’s a hint: only my actual mother can get away with this, because she is my actual mother. Everyone else who thinks they can talk down to me by virtue of my gender can fuck right off.

I know the inner tactics of this unsolicited ‘advice’ now. It took me some time to recognise how it operates through implicit sexism. But now that I know what it is, it simply comes across as desperate attempts to put me in my place. It’s perhaps the most demeaning and insulting form of the ‘be happy!’ advice that I regularly receive. Because it always comes masked as ‘concern’ when I talk about difficult and uncomfortable topics on my blog – fake ‘concern’ that my poor little female self just can’t handle life.

I guess what I’m saying here is that the imperative to ‘be happy’ comes in all shapes and forms, and whatever way someone tries to put you in your place, there is usually an internal bullshit-detector that will warn you of what they are doing. It takes time to find this bullshit-detector when it’s been buried under years of ‘be nice little girl’, but it’s there. And I hope everyone finds their own detector, because your humanity and individuality is a fragile and beautiful thing, worth preserving and worth fighting for – even if it means being (gasp!) ‘negative’ sometimes.

My Favourite Book: Sarah Nicole Prickett

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 05:43:00 +0000

I think Sarah Nicole Prickett and I developed a mutual appreciation of each other when we first discovered we both love Cathy from Wuthering Heights when we were interviewed on Aldrin’s site, The Iceberg (alas, this beautiful site is now no more). And really, it’s been a mutual love story of Cathy, feminism, writing and semi-colons from there. I think it’s safe to say that she’s really smart, and writes a hell of a lot. Sarah’s a Toronto-based writer who writes for the Globe & Mail, FASHION Magazine (Canada), BULLETT Magazine, The New Inquiry, Hazlitt, The Aesthete, The B-Insider, and more. She used to write for Eye Weekly, which became The Grid, and Dazed Digital, and in 2011 was an editor at the Toronto Standard, a Thought Catalog writer and a monthly columnist for the National Post. She’s also written for Dossier, Wallpaper and Style.com. Like I said, she writes a lot; and now she’s written for me. This is her great contribution to the My Favourite Book ‘series’ – thanks Sarah!

I can’t say what my favourite book is, let alone mean it, but I can tell you that two or three months ago I lent my copy of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis to a friend and since then I’ve missed it like I’d miss my own mother if I loved her. One day I bought a copy of Varieties of Disturbance, because I legitimately hated going to bed not having Lydia Davis at hand, but it didn’t feel nearly sufficient, because it’s not. To say that Lydia Davis is a master of the short story form is to be lazy. Lydia Davis is a seer. She’s a magician. In two paragraphs, less than a page, she can invent for you a new anxiety and provide the sense of a solution without ever once telling you what to do.

Sleeping with The Collected Stories makes me think this is how my parents must have felt about the Bible, or how their forebears felt about the Farmer’s Almanac. I doubt I’ve read every page, but I’ve read some passages or stories (some very short stories) a hundred times, and although I didn’t touch it for months, every week it’s not here I walk into my room looking for it before I remember.

But! I’m getting it back this weekend, he says. In the meantime here are some lines I know by heart.

I DO MEAN HEART:

Not only did his published name and works seem to belong to someone else, but he derived little joy from anything he wrote. Once he had done it, it was out of his hands: it lay in a no man’s land. It was neutral. It did not speak to him. He wanted to be proud of himself—that he had not done more, or better. He envied people who set out to write a book, wrote it, and were pleased with it, and when it was published read it through again with fresh pleasure and turned easily to their next project. He felt only a frightening emptiness ahead of him, a vacancy where there should have been plans, and all his work grew out of impulses.

Do you see what is done to us? Wassily, because this is from the short story Sketches for a Life of Wassily, is presented as a singular character, a character almost entirely composed of neuroses. Then he’s revealed to be exactly like us. You are singular, right? Is Lydia Davis clairvoyant? But no—you realize, almost too late, that so many of us are like this. It’s a perverse reassurance. You can’t sleep with it, but you can’t sleep without it, either.

Image credit: Martinique (1972) by André Kertész (when I read that passage Sarah remembered, this image immeditaley popped into my head).

Picturing Paulina

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 03:58:00 +0000

: : (Above) Untitled by Valeria Heine (I wrote a post about her a while back) : :

I don’t think I’ve moved on from my revived fascination with Charlotte Brontë’s Villette since I did a post on picturing Lucy. In my third year as an undergraduate, I wrote an essay about Lucy and Paulina and the imagery associated with both. In Paulina’s case, I was drawn to imagery of a lock of her hair being entwined with her husband’s and her father’s in an image of domestic ‘harmony’ (this seemed morbid or grotesque to me, rather than beautiful or sweet as I suspect it was meant to be understood); and imagery of her “smooth” eyelids as she sits quietly and sews while her future husband glances at her quick needle and “pretty golden thimble” moving like “some bright moth on a wing, or the golden head of some darting little yellow serpent”. I’ve always thought such imagery represented the subsuming of her distinctive character into her future husband, moving from her deep dark browns to his straightforward goldenness.

Paulina is one of Brontë’s underappreciated characters. When I first read the book, I felt she had so much potential. She is physically described much more than Lucy, betraying Brontë’s lifelong fascination with physical beauty. But rather than a physical image forming of Paulina, I ‘see’ her in my head through certain images that dissolve into deep colours like brown, dark rich red bordering on black, golds and dark yellows that melt into orange. These colours represent for me what Lucy refers to as Paulina’s “glow from the soul outward”, describing her as “a lamp” and “a flame vital and vestal”. Clever, beautiful, but more interestingly, underdeveloped and full of depth and promise, Paulina disappointingly collapses into a conventional Victorian tale of domestic disappearance. Even Brontë admitted in a letter to her friend that although she meant to make Paulina “the most beautiful”, she ended up becoming a diminished character – a type of ‘ideal’ woman who doesn’t really exist, a persona of a domestic goddess rather than a complex character full of depth.

There is so much potential to rewrite Paulina, and I keep wondering if some author will take up that challenge one day ... hmm, that gives me an idea. In the meantime, there is the undeniable pleasure of formulating my response to her through images.

: : (Top to bottom, left to right) Twenty Minutes Past Three (1886) by Tom Roberts : : A Sunlit Interior by Carl Vilhelm Holsøe : : Still Life with Sewing Basket (1897-1899) by Claude Raguet Hirst : :

: : (Above) Untitled by Valeria Heine : :

: : (Top to bottom, left to right) Screen captures from The Piano (1993) : : Still Life with Pipe and Tobacco (1891) by Claude Raguet Hirst : :

: : (Above) Across the Room (1899) by Edmund Tarbell : :

: : (Top to bottom) Screen capture from I am Love (2009) : : The White Tablecloth (1886) by Paul Gauguin : :

: : (Top to bottom, left to right) Screen capture from The Phantom of the Opera (2004) : : Still Life with Roses (1890) by Abbott Fuller Graves : : Glimmer by Sundari Carmody (whose exhibition I wrote about) : : Screen capture from I Capture the Castle (2003) : :

One final note: Julia Callon, the artist I wrote about here, has asked me if I would share a link to her profile on Wondereur: an arts publisher and ipad/web app that features weekly stories about artists, offering prints of their work for sale through the site. Of course I said yes, I love her work. I’m sorry I forgot to share this last week Julia, but it’s better late than never!

A Poem for Tuesday

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 08:33:00 +0000

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

–From Dream Work by Mary Oliver.

* * *

I don’t know about you, but I sure needed this poem today.

Image credit: Mary Oliver with her bichon rescue dog, Percy. Photo by Rachel Giese Brown.

The Cover Plot

noreply@blogger.com (Hila) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 02:09:00 +0000

I hope you all spend the weekend reading or outdoors, because I’m spending it working. So, I’d like to live vicariously through you. Maybe that’s why I’m also posting this photo of mine.

Speaking of books, have you seen the new awful cover for the anniversary edition of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar? Yes, I know everyone is talking about it, and yes, I read all those tweets saying to get over it and stop talking about it. No thanks, I’d like to talk about it. If only for the fact that it pisses me off and I’d like to procrastinate some more before I return to work.

I lent my boyfriend a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot recently, and when he gave it back he made a rather telling assessment: “If this was written by a woman, it would be classified as chick-lit”. True. It’s a love story (among other things), it has sex, it has some rather flowery talk about romance and desire. Those qualities in books by women get derided and defined as ‘romance’ and ‘chick-lit’, rather than simply approached as aspects of a character’s development. I read a lot of books classified as both genres, and just like in every other genre (including ‘literature’), there are varying degrees of good writing and good stories. You will find some gems in books called ‘chick-lit’ and ‘romance’, just like you will find them in books called ‘literature’. You will also find some duds. This is normal. What isn’t normal is classifying all these types of books according to gender.

Here’s the deal, if we keep using the model that what men write is general literature or fiction, speaking for all humanity, while what women write only interests and applies to women alone (and is ‘fluffy’ and inconsequential), then we are essentially saying that women’s humanity isn’t equal to that of men’s. It’s called sexism.

To me, the whole debate about book covers is a symptom and metaphor of all this. Why do books by women need images of idealised women? Or heels, or stereotyping pink colours? Does everything we do have to be reduced to our gender? Why do men often get the privilege of book covers that classify them as simply human? Does even the product of our minds, our writing, need to be constantly reduced to objectifying our bodies and stereotyping our gender?

I understand people will have different degrees of interpretation of the new cover of Plath’s Bell Jar. I view it as a defining of her work based on her gender alone. By the way, this is my favourite cover of her work.