Dumbledore "is" gay, part the second

In his NYT piece, "Is Dumbledore Gay? Depends on Definitions of 'Is' and 'Gay'," Edward Rothstein opines that even if Dumbledore "is" gay, the books make him asexual, like all proper old wizard dudes.

This is why Dumbledore’s supposed gayness is ultimately as unimportant as Ron’s shabby clothes. These wounded outsiders recognize the nature of evil, and finally that is what matters.

But what does "asexual" mean, when the default is heterosexual? Isn't the wise mentor figure above "sex" because he is above women, who are simply defined as the sexual?

When Merlin "falls," for example, isn't it to female pollution, as opposed to the pure Socratic bond with Arthur? It seems disingenuous to suppose that there is no economy of gender at work in the genre, even surrounding the "asexual" mentor figure (isn't it convenient that they're all men, however "asexual"? and that their mentees are similarly male?). Suppositions of sexuality, or lack thereof, are finally not extricable from the gender values that surround them.

I think that if Rowling is arguing for tolerance, as she claims, then it seems odd that she would create a "homosexual" character with, in fact, no discernible sexuality in the books.

It also seems odd that the sole homosexual encounter of the series (if we take it as such) is tragic (not to mention undertaken with a Hitler figure).

Rothstein takes this to mean that we can ignore Rowling's pronouncement. He seems to breathe a sigh of relief, as gayness is brushed to the side as irrelevant.

I'm not so sure.

Wallace Stevens. T.S. Eliot. Dana Gioia. I think I see a lineage!

From the NYT, of course (via Silliman, source of the best linkspam around):

I’ve always thought of myself as having two careers, one as a poet and the other as making a living. I figured that since Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot managed to combine business careers and literature, I could do the same.

The child as ideal automaton

Apparently I can only post about children's lit lately, but I swear this comes from a non-children's lit source.

I attended Scott Bukatman's keynote address at the ParaSite New Media Symposium today. The talk, titled "Disobedient Machines: Autonomy and Animation," discussed the tradition of created beings (e.g. the Pygmalion myth). Bukatman, reading Disney’s Pinocchio, noted that interesting automata in film —- the good kind, the kind that really come alive —- always rebel. Their disobedience is a sign of their autonomy, a sign that creation was successful (insert long passage from Paradise Lost here).

Bukatman discussed this in terms of cinema’s creations, specifically the uncanny (but cute) disobedient creatures of animation (which are subsequently schooled, like Pinocchio or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and the sublime disobedient creations of live-action film.

But what struck me was his revelation that many of the 18th century automata (the clockwork mechanical bodies some folks were apparently fond of constructing) were automated children. Bukatman’s talk raised the idea of the child as a kind of disobedient (and therefore successful) creation. As Anne Scott MacLeod and Myra Jehlen have observed, American childhood (boyhood, in their formulations) is seen as constitutively disobedient, and this disobedience and unsophistication (construction as children’s literature) only makes it seem more quintessentially American (the American is the infantile, the unmediated), such that Huckleberry Finn can be pronounced the American novel. The resemblance between Twain’s project of vernacular realism and Disney’s project of simulated photography in films like Pinocchio -— both projects that seek to render the created boy “real” -— is striking, especially given how that realism is figured as specifically American (at least for Twain; I don’t know that much about Disney). I’ll have to think more about this.

Dumbledore "is" gay.

From the great swamps of authorial intention:

JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay

The Ruby in the Smoke

I read Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke recently.

From the Gosh, I Sure Am Surprised department comes the initial description of Sally Lockhart, the protagonist,

alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose.

. Beautiful? Check. Pale? Check. Slender? Check. Bonus points for blond hair? Indeed! Fortunately, Pullman didn't go all Tamora Pierce on us and actually give Sally purple eyes, but our Waifish Victorian Heroine has a lot more going for her.

As if emerging triumphantly from a secret notebook of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sally has Connections With The East. The beloved father isn't a dashing Anglo-Indian Army officer, but rather a former dashing Anglo-Indian Army officer turned shipping agent, and he croaks on schedule before the novel begins. Mother is of course also dead (double-plus dead, as it eventually turns out). Sally is left alone in the world with just her wits and her education.

Oh, and her education? Sally's education is explicitly masculine, capitalist, and imperialist.

Mr. Lockhart taught his daughter himself in the evenings and let her do as she pleased during the day. As a result, her knowledge of English literature, French, history, art, and music was nonexistent, but she had a thorough grounding in the principles of military tactics and bookkeeping, a close acquaintance with the affairs of the stock market, and a working knowledge of Hindustani.

I was fascinated by this choice because this is not the average YA protagonist skill set. In the books I've been thinking about recently, including His Dark Materials, protagonists have to acquire specialized humanities training, usually in the form of special reading skills (for instance, Lyra learns to read the alethiometer). In The Ruby in the Smoke, it turns out that the humanities (English literature, French, history, art, and music) are worthless. When reading skills are needed, the best training comes, not from The Golden Bough and the Blue Fairy Book, but from penny dreadfuls -- and it isn't Sally who reads them.

"It was Jim," Rosa explained. "He -- you know these stories he's always reading -- I suppose he thinks like a sensational novelist. He worked it out some time ago."

Of course, as I mentioned above, The Ruby in the Smoke is not fantasy, and I suspect the demand for humanistic knowledge is particular to fantasy as a genre. Sally, for her part, finds happiness in accounting.

The story rests on some charming period standbys like a Chinese woman full of cryptic wisdom; a victim of sexual violence who's turned into a mad, greedy hag; and a double-crossing Eurasian.

Oh, Philip Pullman. Always so partial with the surprises.

I'd like to learn woman-French, please.

The Guardian has published some excerpts from linguist Deborah Cameron's new book The Myth of Mars and Venus.

The idea that men and women "speak different languages" has itself become a dogma, treated not as a hypothesis to be investigated or as a claim to be adjudicated, but as an unquestioned article of faith. Our faith in it is misplaced.

Cameron cites Mark Liberman's heroic denunciation of the false claims made in Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain. (You can hear Charlotte Perkins Gilman snorting in the background. "The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.")

Liberman closes the loop by posting on the Guardian's coverage of Cameron's work.

One of the most interesting things that Cameron mentions is that she's noticed a trend in contemporary analysis: all social and political problems are attributed to problems in communication, as if, if we could just talk, everything would be solved. I'm not sure what to make of this yet, but it's an observation that strikes me as plausible. A quality of the information age, I suppose.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

Allen Ginsberg's Howl was deemed too obscene to broadcast.

Whereas, apparently, spending millions on a home and then spending millions more to furnish and renovate it is not obscene.

Ph.D. comics

Piled Higher and Deeper appears to be the grad-student-centric web comic of choice. Unfortunately, PHD is all about engineers. The recent addition of a humanities grad student (Gerard, the medieval Scandinavian philosophy student) only drives home that the author of the comic knows almost nothing about the humanities, and considers disciplines legitimate only insofar as they are quantitative.

On the other hand, there is Dinosaur Comics, which is pure brilliance.

We Have to Save the World (of Warcraft)

In the New York Times today:

Limbaugh Latest Victim in War of Condemnation

Victims of real war: soldiers and civilians injured or killed in Iraq; displaced and impoverished populations; children permanently traumatized by war.

Victims of metaphorical war: Rush Limbaugh, criticized by Democrats.

Upcoming poetry readings

Rae Armantrout, Th 9/27 at UC Berkeley (Holloway Series)

Ron Silliman, Tu 10/2 at Mills College (details)

Teaching issues: Back Then ™

One problem I keep running into in the classroom is my students' vague sense of history.

In a way, they're not at fault. There is no history prerequisite for my class, and high school history tends to focus on wars and various dudes seizing power rather than the way people lived, worked, ate, or amused themselves.

On the other hand, when my students this semester wrote a paper on "Cinderella," which specifically marks its historical vagueness with "once upon a time" (or in the translation they used, "once"), over half of them wanted to refer to a "back then" with no there there. Back Then™, women had to get married. Back Then™, beauty was really important (unlike, apparently, Today™). Back Then™, the prince had lots of power.

A fairy tale makes itself historically indeterminate: "il était une fois." But because of my students' lack of historical background, the performed indeterminacy of the story was not distinguishable from their own fuzzy grasp of history.

I'm working on ways to counter this. Of course I gave a spiel about the "Since the dawn of time" introductory paragraph and its Badness. Also, my students often use "back then" and "at the time" as markers of historical distance. I am trying to replace these terms with more specific markers, like "among servants in mid-eighteenth-century Britain." Finally, I try to give historical context to the things we read in class.

But it's an uphill battle, when they've been trained in presentism for years. I wonder if there's any pedagogical literature out there on bringing a historical mindset to the classroom.

Hardy and Ramanujan

Gilbert and Gubar open The Madwoman in the Attic provocatively with the question, "Is the pen a metaphorical penis?" Their aim is to show how literary creativity has historically been figured as specifically masculine. It's a nice opening, because it makes you think, "oh, those crazy 70's feminists!" And then they go on to quote male author after male author who makes it clear that he thinks the pen is a metaphorical penis.

I recently ran across an article [.pdf] by Moon Duchin that touches on the same subject, only with respect to the idea of mathematical genius. Moon's language is, of course, much more measured than Gilbert and Gubar's, but it's a fascinating read even sans provocative introductions.

A more substantial difference is the way that Moon addresses mathematical genius in particular. Mathematical genius and any other kind of genius were once pretty much the same (masculine) idea, but mathematical genius has since branched off and become a special creature on its own, due in part, I suspect, to the redistribution of cultural capital that attended industrialization. The article gestures toward some reasons why mathematics as a field has become the location of genius par excellence, which is in itself an interesting question.

One of Moon's examples of the mythologizing of mathematical genius is the biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan (the Wikipedia entry, as of this writing, reproduces many of the features Moon identifies--and his "genius" is brought up in the very first sentence). I didn't know much about Ramanujan before reading Moon's article; I'd always thought of him as "guy whose name is attached to theorems I don't understand."

This week the New York Times has a review of David Leavitt's novel The Indian Clerk, a fictionalized account of the relationship between G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. I'm almost tempted to read it to see what it does to the genius paradigm. Predictably, the review contains some howlers, to wit:

Class, like mathematics, consists of complex equations that may shift with the substitution of different values for X and Y, but the equations themselves remain rigid and fixed.

I'd be interested to see what, exactly, Leavitt does with class (surely he doesn't evaluate some equations).

I've long been contemplating a "poetry for physicists" syllabus, but I'd never considered using a novel (it would ruin the poetry gimmick, don't you know). I guess The Indian Clerk goes somewhere at the bottom of my reading list.