Brighton

I just got back from spending a fantastic day in Brighton. The Royal Pavilion was breathtaking, the shopping was fun, and the people were charming.
We arrived at the train station on time and looking beautiful (see, we can manage to do both sometimes), and set out for Brighton. When we got there, we went to the Royal Pavilion. The Pavilion is a stunning building inspired by Indian architecture, with the inside decorated in a dramatic mixture of styles from the exotic Chinese and Indian to the more typical classical style.
While looking at all the ornate rooms, complete with dragons on top of the chandeliers, snakes around curtains, and various objects from China, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The lavishness of the Royal Pavilion was the epitome of the aestheticism that Dorian so loved. While walking through such luxury, surrounded by beautiful things, and listening to descriptions of how the rooms were originally used, it was easy for me to imagine leading such a decadent lifestyle.
After the splendor of the Pavilion, we decided to wander around and go to some of the many shops. As we were walking down one of the streets, we saw a store with a rainbow and a scantily clad pretty girl on its sign. This seemed like a promising little shop, so we went in. After looking around for a while, we were a little confused. With a sign covered in a rainbow and a girl, we had thought that it would be a lesbian store, but it seemed just like any other sex shop. We started talking to the girl working there, and asked her about it. Apparently, the shop was originally a lesbian bookstore, but wasn’t really anymore. There were a few books in a corner, but not many, and certainly not many lesbian ones. The girl said that when they had really been a lesbian store, there were so many straight couples that came in, that it didn’t make sense not to cater to them as well. Unfortunately, the straight part of the store seems to have taken over.
We made up for our disappointing attempt at finding a gay store by just going shopping instead. This was very successful and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though the Batman dress didn’t fit.

London, it May be many literary tours but should not be confused with the Pursuit of Happiness tour.

I woke up this morning “unhappy.” Yes, I know that seems blasphemous to say that I woke up this miraculously once again sunny Friday morning in London, a morning that succeeded dancing to my favorite Lady Gaga tunes into the wee hours of the night in a club outside Soho Square, anything other than elated (my mother would die if she knew that her Friday paycheck financing this excursion, the one thing for which she woke up this morning on the other side of the pond, was going towards a less than ecstatic child), but it’s true. Terribly vivid, stressful dreams plagued my mind throughout the night, rendering it a restless sleep and a somber morning. I stepped into the shower hoping to rinse away the negative thoughts and perspiration from imitating the Fame Monster cooer that stemmed from the prior night. Yet as I pulled on my robe of bright pink polka dotted terry cloth, I was disappointed to find that while the cheerful scent of my tangerine sunshine body wash now replaced my former stench from the Soho night club, the equally jubilant disposition for which I so desired did not supplant my dismal mood, and the gloom most typical of a London skyline remained.

Along with my despondency, now set in guilt. How could I possibly be in London stressed, having nightmares? How, this morning, after seeing Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, touring literary Bloomsbury and the British Museum, philosophizing with great intellectuals of this city, (and did I forget about the dancing to Gaga), could I not find happiness? I must enroll in therapy as soon as I return to the states I began to think to myself! However, the perfect solace came to me much sooner than my expected return to the U.S. It came to me that very morning in the form of a lunch at the Wagamama noodle chain with Sarah Ahmed, queer theorist and professor in race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths University of London.

Author of The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sarah spoke on exactly the subject presently troubling my mind: my happiness, or lack thereof. Sarah focused on the etiology of the word, reflecting that “hap” means by chance, and powerfully proposed that happiness is not a guarantee of action but an occurrence of chance. She asserted that historically society, incorrectly, has made us to feel that we have the ultimate power and responsibility to control happiness, that in the words of Michael, “if you do all these things and you’re not happy, boy you’re fucked.” This notion against the conventional thoughts on the attainment of happiness was the most uplifting philosophy I have heard in ages. No longer was I steeped in remorse for my lack of glee. Now, it was a sense of freedom to let my joy “happen” that overwhelmed me. Sarah Ahmed transformed my Wagamama seat into a shrink’s couch, and unlike the costly, most often uninsurable, session with a psychologist, this beautiful conversation with the renowned philosopher was priceless.

In the spirit of chance, the theme of happiness ensued throughout the night. All dressed to the nines, we attended the play After the Dance at the National Theatre. Set in the time period directly proceeding World War II, the play focused on a rambunctious, drunken crowd of riches and lavishness, all of whom are masquerading in an act of happiness yet none actually achieving such. The main character David’s false pursuit of happiness sparks the tragedies of the narrative. After finding that her husband will soon divorce her for a younger woman, the wife of the protagonist, Joan, commits suicide at the very party she hosts. The play ends with David deciding to drink himself to death. Exploiting the notion that a life dedicated to only the search for happiness is a vapid and destructive one, the play was enlightening, the perfect fit to follow the morning’s discussion with Sarah, and as I rose from my theatre chair, I once again felt as though I was departing the comfy, lavish sofa of a therapist.

Last summer, in the scorching hot months of the states, the Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness album lyrics were the words by which I lived. This summer it will be the quite contrary philosophy of Sarah Ahmed to not pursue, but stumble upon, happiness. Today granted me the freedom to release the guilt for my own emotions, to let “happiness happen.” So in the words of Joan when asked how does she feel, I can gladly boast “I don’t know yet.”

(Note to reader: the moment of unhappiness of which I speak was very very transient. London is absolutely wonderful! And after my ridiculous shopping in the delightful beach town of Brighton, unhappiness may no longer be in my vocabulary.... until I see my bank statement that is)

It Seems Doubtful that London has Ever Been Queerer

For the purposes of crafting this blog post, I have taken my laptop out into Bloomsbury Park and am currently lounging in a grassy patch of London soil thinking about Foucaultian sexual politics, reading Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal and people watching. My life has certainly been in worse shape (and probably will be again once my credit card bill arrives). So far my time in London has been overwhelmingly fantastic. Two days ago, we went on a literary tour of Bloomsbury, home to Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury group and the site of Ted Hughes’ marriage to Sylvia Plath (runners up for the Grammy Award for “Stormiest Marriage of the 20th Century,” losing out narrowly to Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston). We also saw the house that Hughes and Plath first lived in following their honeymoon, on which the poem “18 Rugby Street” is based. I cannot find a link to the poem online, but if anyone knows of one, lemme know. Today’s discussion with Christina Perry was fascinating in the insight it provided into the English government, particularly with respect to the politics of LGBT legislature. I find the British legal system to be quite a bit more nuanced than our own and perhaps more complicated (partially due to my unfamiliarity with the system).

Michael Snediker was robbed at a Glam Poetry Slam, which I can only presume means that said Slam had little to do with either glam or poetry. Pictures are forthcoming, and we can probably promise that the Queen’s University provost won’t receive them in an anonymous email. I wonder if the wig category (which has never been more exciting) has ever seen a published professor before. Though the poetry was sub par, the Slam itself was actually quite a blast, even if Suzaana let Michael down...

I would like to return briefly to Tuesday’s conversation about Foucault, particularly with regard to the politics of sexual discourse. In this discussion, we explored the compression of sex into discourse, paying particular attention to the ways in which this compression is a method of concretizing and controlling sex, a way of wrapping a fist around sex, as it were. Our discussion seemed to paint this phenomenon as a largely negative occurrence; power acts through sex-turned-discourse to materialize other economic and racial constructs in what we seem to have construed as a largely repressive event. I wonder, however, if the discussion is somewhat more complicated than that.

Though sexual discourse allows outsiders (perhaps vaguely termed “Power”) to reach their fingers around our sexualities, substantiating sex in such a way also seems to grant us the ability to direct our own sexualities and identities; discourse seems to grant power over sexuality indiscriminately, offering control to outsiders and ourselves. To this end, agency (which is perhaps inextricably linked to power in a number of complicated ways) seems an important factor in the sex/discourse/power conversation rather than answers. For better or worse, at this point in the conversation, I seem only able to provide questions. Do we always possess agency over our sexualities? Is discourse a friend or foe in the quest for sexual autonomy, unavoidable though it is? Is our exchange with discourse one sided, or do we perhaps exert power over discourse at the same time it does work on us; are we in “discourse” with discourse? (That last one turned out a little more convoluted than I might have liked)

Edit: The people watching in London gay bars is fantastic and Lady Gaga sounds the same in every country, which is to say, significantly underwhelming. Perhaps Gaga is the great unifying mediocrity.

"Remember Us"

“The very air breathed with antiquity”: these were the opening words of our first reading for the day, “A Woman’s View of the Greek Question”; and as I walked into the Greek mausoleum of the British Museum, these are the words that shivered down my body like a bird of goose bumps. The headless marble torsos of Zeus, Dionysus, and Aries with their chiseled pecks and muscled abdomens seemed to mock the empty air where their legs used to be, almost laughing at Time who had left her teeth marks in the dismembered stone. Because even castrated and defaced, they held our attentions captive. Weathered frieze after weathered frieze lined the museum walls, the materialization of the stories we had read aloud in literature classes, scribbling hurried notes as our teachers lectured on their significance. They were all there – the kings of Assyria, the Gods of Olympus, the Roman warriors, the slaughtered women and children of their conquered lands. It was as if, as in our Harrison readings, Themis, “the spirit of assembly incarnate” the embodiment of “collective conscience,” had summoned the memories and stories of all peoples and gathered them together for one last banquet for which we too were being invited to take part. Vicki, forgive me, but it was a very spiritual experience as I marveled at the meticulous detail of each chiseled curl of hair, each engraved symbol – the kind of explicit detail that would have taken ages to create without our modern mediums and mechanized instruments. We had spent the morning queering ancient philosophy and dissecting Tipping the Velvet with Churnjeet (our brilliant visiting scholar), and my head was heavy with her words as she spoke of Waters’ use of synesthesia, her articulation of the sensual “allowing us to touch the text” thereby aesthetically queering our perception of a temporally distant narrative. And here in the museum, even in a space of marble columns and rigid ancient sculptures, I was still touching a text, touching a story that was not my story. I was queering time, because the past was the present in these rooms filled with Egyptian mummies and Olympian gods. I was deeply struck with the sense that they wanted us to know they had been here; I could almost hear them saying, “Remember us.”

Sign of the Four

Our class is off to a good start: two days of walking the city and discussing everything from sexual topographies and Victorian lamp-posts to E. M. Forster and Michel Foucault. In the category of personal achievements, I think I've now figured out the London bus system, which had always eluded me. Dinner at a French bistro capped off our first day together, much deserved by this jet-lagged and foot-sore but still enthusiastic crew.

We now turn the blog over to our students, who'll take turns reporting on our adventures. Expectations are high.

Tamarind

We’ve arrived. Aside from not having hot water, we’re delighted with our flat at Endsleigh Court, Bloomsbury. New mobile phone in hand, we ventured out to a restaurant reputed to be the most popular Indian joint in town: Tamarind. Our verdict: “popular” seems appropriate only with an accompanying qualifier: “among people who don’t really like Indian food.” From the rose-water martini to scallops and sea bass, we were first disappointed, then disgusted that a Michelin-starred establishment could be such a sell-out to mediocre palates: bland, bland, bland. We imagine vats of tomato paste as the base to most of what emerges from the kitchen, each dish nearly indistinguishable from the last. Shame on you, New York Times, for leading us astray on our first night in London.

Putting aside culinary disappointments, we’ve already swooned to London in the summer, catching glimpses in shop windows, light refracted over rooftops: signs of more good things to come. Early morning tomorrow to pick up our class from Heathrow….

Nearly Ready

Never having posted on a blog, I thought it'd be a good idea to experiment at least once before actually hitting the ground in London. Michael and I will be arriving Sunday, and our students follow Monday morning. Until then we're busily checking off to-do lists, cleaning house, and fervently hoping Iceland's volcanoes keep their ash to themselves.

For those of you interested, here's a link to our syllabus. You might also take a peak at the brewing transatlantic political storm we all may find ourselves navigating in the coming weeks. Wish us luck! We'll be posting more, and more regularly, from abroad.