There is the thing and there is the folding. There is both here. In time I will explain. But how would someone who is losing memory write? What would be the affect, the stylistic choice and the preoccupation of an affected body and mind? There is a lot of hurry to hold onto things, a lot of repetition of words one is proud of, there is a lot of searching the mind for that thing, that song, the words, who said that thing, did we have the conversation? Then embarrassment because it is still early stages and it all comes back to you, it was that other person I said this to. It doesn't matter. I am calling it all stress. Apparently stress makes you forget and blank out. So this is the folding in this post, the larger concern behind wanting to pen otherwise sort of routine things. But the preoccupation with and awareness of memory loss makes one a kind of writer who quickly puts titles and makes blank sections for the self that is soon going to forget what the original aim was.
Moving on, as I was recently telling a colleague who thought I was angry or unhappy about some discussed research collaboration, I quickly clarified that it was literally because I was in a lot of bodily pain. And the diagnosis of fibromyalgia was on my mind when they asked me to mentor someone. That once someone had put a label on my chronic pain, it had become easier to visualize the geography of my pain, two circles behind the elbows, the desire to dig my thumbs into my scapular ridges - it all became a contained and mapped phenomenon. I was too busy thinking about it and being irritated and bloated with the medicine that the collaboration wasn't on my mind at all, even less the terms of it.
And as I've been saying to some of you who might read this, it is both well known and theorized how embodiment generates a certain sensibility and the sensible and often creates the path for a certain life philosophy or even politics. Disability studies and Queer studies have taken this formative ground of experience, non-normative experience and altered experiences as the beginning points for reimagining the world. There is also this paper on cochlear implants that has definitely stayed with me and then my colleague told me of someone's work on epileptic seizures and how it has created a differential understanding of space, spatiality, the dangerous potentiality of objects when and if one is about to have a seizure but also a keen and different ability to sense (sense-ability) if someone else might be about to have one. I am now reading Elaine Scarry's important book (The Body in Pain). An accidental loss of hearing or a prolonged loss of memory then become personality. Having PCOD turns into cysterhood and a new visibility that lets you identify others like you, the discomfort housed in innocuous ticks and gestures (why is she constantly adjusting her hair? Oh I know). I guess the newest addition to my sense-abilities is both, my pain but also the loss of my erstwhile near eidetic memory.
It was scary at first, I am not used to blanking out when I close my eyes to access my mind palace (for those who know me, know I do this). It was part of my superpower repertoire, alongside the abilities to hear when phones are charging and to be able to go into rooms and retrieve objects without switching the light on. Now I just forget things. It sucks. But it has made me better as a person I think. Having grown up as a convent school kid, being raised on punitive rewards - being on time and remembering things were in themselves the mark of good character. I think they are good things but like all other good things they have assumptions of neuro-typical and normative living. Hopefully I will be more generous henceforth with people who forget things. For now I frantically calendar to cope with my forgetting. But committing it to writing is also the folding, for when I might forget this too.
The other thoughts I want to commit to writing are my feelings about the latest and probably the last season of GLOW. For a few years now, there has been a solid return to the US 80s in pop culture. The first time I guess I noticed it was with the success of the movie Drive and its music and clothes. But now consuming retro or consuming a certain slice of the past is mainstream. We are yet to fully dress like that but it's as if living for the 80s nostalgia is very much a part of living in 2019 (at least to me). There is obviously Twin Peaks, Mad Men, Stranger Things, the various reboots of older shows but also more recently Pose, GLOW etc that made me think about something else. So while reading critical theory one is often cautioned against a 'presentist' mode of engagement, meaning that things must be historicized, they must not be read as if they are written in the present time or for us right now. [Aside: must-read on "how to read" texts: http://dumit.net/how-i-read/]
Especially when texts like Lolita are criticized, people are reminded when pedophilia (or rather love for younger women) became problematic and outlawed. And so on it allows for a more generous or purposive reading of everything from Marx to Gandhi to whatever else. It also in some sense allows us to excavate radical potential - a Jean Rhys or an Ambedkar writing and saying things that once historicized appear so ahead of their times, it would take a historical mode to recognize that. Some of these underlying tensions have also informed why people including me, are frustrated with a certain feminist politics from older (aged) feminist women who called out #thelist (because it is a temporal move, against zeitgeist, it took us so long to temporally drag everyone here and here we have come far). Anyway, coming back to GLOW and Pose also, while watching Pose (also Paris is Burning), I was just constantly marveling at the audacity of queens to ask for treatment and rights, walk and wear things, just do things that felt very contemporary in 2019. Of course in Paris is Burning, there is this beautiful sequence where queens hold a downtown business fashion ball and ridiculously dress up as very serious business men in ill fitted suits and boring glasses. It was beautiful, to be able to reveal the absurdity of a cultural form in their own times (when these businessmen were truly taken seriously).
But it did not strike me until this recent season of GLOW where one of the lead characters who is dating a rancher is suddenly reminded that she is not his (business) partner but his girlfriend. And then she just pauses and her face changes expression for a while which gave me enough time to interrogate my desires for her ending. I started wondering if the directors would, like the recent spate of lazy social justice commentaries ("let's just make Bond a woman"), give this 80s woman a contrived ending and would she just say fuck you and walk out (like a 2019 woman) or would she fall back in her own time (which would also be sad and lost opportunity like in Mad Men). Not revealing what happens, I must say that I really enjoyed how they resolved her dilemma eventually. But importantly, I got so fascinated with the retro as a genre because it is indeed very tricky to animate the retro (use past time as canvas) to do anything - you could just tell an old story, induce nostalgia, rewrite stories, shift focus on minor characters. I am sure there is a lot of writing available on the retro as an aesthetic and as narrative form but I am still gathering my thoughts. I do think that GLOW found clever ways to use retro to speak to contemporary women's concerns perhaps by playing with time and empathy - times when one relegates actions to their time and times when actions were eternal, as if establishing ethic through action. This also reminds me of the time when I really got into sound studies and for anyone who might reach the end of this post, please do read this: https://soundstudiesblog.com/tag/falguni-pathak/
:D
Moving on, as I was recently telling a colleague who thought I was angry or unhappy about some discussed research collaboration, I quickly clarified that it was literally because I was in a lot of bodily pain. And the diagnosis of fibromyalgia was on my mind when they asked me to mentor someone. That once someone had put a label on my chronic pain, it had become easier to visualize the geography of my pain, two circles behind the elbows, the desire to dig my thumbs into my scapular ridges - it all became a contained and mapped phenomenon. I was too busy thinking about it and being irritated and bloated with the medicine that the collaboration wasn't on my mind at all, even less the terms of it.
And as I've been saying to some of you who might read this, it is both well known and theorized how embodiment generates a certain sensibility and the sensible and often creates the path for a certain life philosophy or even politics. Disability studies and Queer studies have taken this formative ground of experience, non-normative experience and altered experiences as the beginning points for reimagining the world. There is also this paper on cochlear implants that has definitely stayed with me and then my colleague told me of someone's work on epileptic seizures and how it has created a differential understanding of space, spatiality, the dangerous potentiality of objects when and if one is about to have a seizure but also a keen and different ability to sense (sense-ability) if someone else might be about to have one. I am now reading Elaine Scarry's important book (The Body in Pain). An accidental loss of hearing or a prolonged loss of memory then become personality. Having PCOD turns into cysterhood and a new visibility that lets you identify others like you, the discomfort housed in innocuous ticks and gestures (why is she constantly adjusting her hair? Oh I know). I guess the newest addition to my sense-abilities is both, my pain but also the loss of my erstwhile near eidetic memory.
It was scary at first, I am not used to blanking out when I close my eyes to access my mind palace (for those who know me, know I do this). It was part of my superpower repertoire, alongside the abilities to hear when phones are charging and to be able to go into rooms and retrieve objects without switching the light on. Now I just forget things. It sucks. But it has made me better as a person I think. Having grown up as a convent school kid, being raised on punitive rewards - being on time and remembering things were in themselves the mark of good character. I think they are good things but like all other good things they have assumptions of neuro-typical and normative living. Hopefully I will be more generous henceforth with people who forget things. For now I frantically calendar to cope with my forgetting. But committing it to writing is also the folding, for when I might forget this too.
The other thoughts I want to commit to writing are my feelings about the latest and probably the last season of GLOW. For a few years now, there has been a solid return to the US 80s in pop culture. The first time I guess I noticed it was with the success of the movie Drive and its music and clothes. But now consuming retro or consuming a certain slice of the past is mainstream. We are yet to fully dress like that but it's as if living for the 80s nostalgia is very much a part of living in 2019 (at least to me). There is obviously Twin Peaks, Mad Men, Stranger Things, the various reboots of older shows but also more recently Pose, GLOW etc that made me think about something else. So while reading critical theory one is often cautioned against a 'presentist' mode of engagement, meaning that things must be historicized, they must not be read as if they are written in the present time or for us right now. [Aside: must-read on "how to read" texts: http://dumit.net/how-i-read/]
Especially when texts like Lolita are criticized, people are reminded when pedophilia (or rather love for younger women) became problematic and outlawed. And so on it allows for a more generous or purposive reading of everything from Marx to Gandhi to whatever else. It also in some sense allows us to excavate radical potential - a Jean Rhys or an Ambedkar writing and saying things that once historicized appear so ahead of their times, it would take a historical mode to recognize that. Some of these underlying tensions have also informed why people including me, are frustrated with a certain feminist politics from older (aged) feminist women who called out #thelist (because it is a temporal move, against zeitgeist, it took us so long to temporally drag everyone here and here we have come far). Anyway, coming back to GLOW and Pose also, while watching Pose (also Paris is Burning), I was just constantly marveling at the audacity of queens to ask for treatment and rights, walk and wear things, just do things that felt very contemporary in 2019. Of course in Paris is Burning, there is this beautiful sequence where queens hold a downtown business fashion ball and ridiculously dress up as very serious business men in ill fitted suits and boring glasses. It was beautiful, to be able to reveal the absurdity of a cultural form in their own times (when these businessmen were truly taken seriously).
But it did not strike me until this recent season of GLOW where one of the lead characters who is dating a rancher is suddenly reminded that she is not his (business) partner but his girlfriend. And then she just pauses and her face changes expression for a while which gave me enough time to interrogate my desires for her ending. I started wondering if the directors would, like the recent spate of lazy social justice commentaries ("let's just make Bond a woman"), give this 80s woman a contrived ending and would she just say fuck you and walk out (like a 2019 woman) or would she fall back in her own time (which would also be sad and lost opportunity like in Mad Men). Not revealing what happens, I must say that I really enjoyed how they resolved her dilemma eventually. But importantly, I got so fascinated with the retro as a genre because it is indeed very tricky to animate the retro (use past time as canvas) to do anything - you could just tell an old story, induce nostalgia, rewrite stories, shift focus on minor characters. I am sure there is a lot of writing available on the retro as an aesthetic and as narrative form but I am still gathering my thoughts. I do think that GLOW found clever ways to use retro to speak to contemporary women's concerns perhaps by playing with time and empathy - times when one relegates actions to their time and times when actions were eternal, as if establishing ethic through action. This also reminds me of the time when I really got into sound studies and for anyone who might reach the end of this post, please do read this: https://soundstudiesblog.com/tag/falguni-pathak/
:D
