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At long last
Jul. 28th, 2004 11:47 pmInterview meme from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theodora
1. Fill in the blanks: I was a teenage ____ for ____.
You know, it was this question that tripped me up. I couldn't figure out what to put in the blanks. Also various bad 80s movie title-inspired inanities kept besieging my brain. I was a teenage Faustus for Satan? I was a teenage Tit for Tat? I was a teenage Something for Nothing? I cannot for the life of me answer it. I don't think I will be able to answer it. It belongs to some weird lacuna never to be mastered by my immigrant brain that vaguely alludes to the first generation of video games and the "who's on first" word game. I am completely incapable of answering it, or even attempting to, except in pathetic paroxysms of contrived cleverness, like inserting "flowers" and "Algernon" in the blanks. Alas.
2. Masculinity/femininity. Which is more essentially fraudulent? Why?
It's a trick question because the default answer is, of course, both are equally performative. However, I think the schizophrenic contradictions are more obvious in masculinity. If we look at the historical cultural imaginary of both masculinity and femininity, before "feminism," the discourse of masculinity is far more bipolar than that of femininity. So, femininity was composed of the following possible tropes, in various permutations and combinations: frailty, sorcery, enchantment, instability, emotion, etc. None of them are really in conflict with each other; frailty can lead to overcompensation via enchantment or unbridled instability. Being ruled by emotion, rather than reason produces the instability, which is, nevertheless, enchanting as radical alterity. However, masculinity containts opposite, even mutually exclusive tropes, namely stoicism, formation of identity through hardship and self-denial, and absolute self-containment and aggression and ur-entitlement, jealousy, anger. The only way they could be mediated is through an uneasy dialectic of sublimation and return of the repressed, and that's basically what happens.
3. List three foundational stories of your childhood. (As example, three of mine: The Neverending Story, The Last Unicorn, Watership Down.) How did they affect you?
Well, that's a hard question. My father collected fairy tales like other people collect matchbooks. That is to say, in our house we had collections of fairy tales from every country in the world. In fact, my theory as to why I became an anthropologist is that I failed to process a single normative cultural code and internalize/naturalize my own culture because my learned second-order symbolic structures were from all over the place. It's like being raised a super-polyglot, but with cultural units, instead of linguistic ones. In a way, it was overdetermined that I would become an anthropologist. But as to the stories themselves. It's hard to pick, and I could just respond to this question with three of my dad's fairy tales (see below), but I will try to diversitfy my response. So, first let's talk about the most terrifying story I have ever read.
The Golden Bird, a short story in an anthology of Romanian fairty tales, scared the shit out of me. I've referenced in on livejournal before, not too long ago. Basically the story follows a child who is washed up on the seashore in a net. He is adopted by a fisherman and his wife; he grows up into a handsome, healthy young man, but the net grows with him; it cannot be cut. So he becomes known as a guy-in-a-net. As a result he never fully acclimates, and when he comes of age he goes on your standard Campbellian/Proppian garden-variety quest to find out what's what. He ends up on an island where things are not going well. There is a Golden Bird statue on an island, it's huge, with rubies for eyes, encrusted with precious stones. The statue had been installed on the island as a malevolent gift that's like the evil cousin of the Trojan Horse. Every night the statue comes to life, and walks around. As it walks, it shoots out lightning, night becomes as light as day, and all the residents of the island become overwhelmed with uncontrollable primal terror and to run to each other for comfort. Except, whoops, the bird's other magical power turns all the islanders' arms into swords, so everyone ends up stabbing their near and dear ones. Every morning the dead are burned at funeral pyres, as their relatives that killed them weep in fear and remorse. People start hiding from their family members before nightfall, but nothing really helps. The net guy ends up not being affected by the curse, he takes the bird away from the island and drowns it, then he has more adventures, and eventually his net falls off. But the thing that scared me was the inexplicable evil of this bird, the unmitigated terror, and the ambivalence of the categories of good and evil, the lack of climax where the former definitely triumphs over the latter. It was more like an episodic, picaresque narrative that featured a monster that scared the shit out of me, and my fear was not mediated by an allegorical defeat. As a result, my fear lingered. For years. That story still freaks me the fuck out.
Moving on.
I absolutely loved the Moomintrolls series by Tove Janssen. The books were really more about the world of the Moominvalley, rather than the specific stories, which were often more character-driven than plot-driven, and whimsical at that, at times even melancholy, and I liked the sense that there was this unhurried life that constantly existed in a world that required no ontogenesis or cosmology, it just existed. That mattered more to me than the particular adventures. If I had read them as an adult for the first time, I would have attributed my enchantment to the well-developed themes of a community that priorotized ethics and was based on diversity without any hint of moralizing or didactic rhetoric that often rears its head in its special incarnation in children's stories, that the adult/kid binary was fluid, that the family seemed largely matriarchal, and that the threat to community by the outside was always resolved through acceptance/integration/reintegration. But at age 10 I just found the entire universe offered up in those stories extremely satisfying, without relaly knowing why.
Finally, in answering I think this is a good place to explain that from the time I was five until I was about eight my father told me fairy tales that he made up every night. I became spoilt and I refused to go to sleep unless he told me a fairy tale. When he was out of town, my mother tried to fill in, but her rehashing of stories I had already read incited my anger, because they weren't my dad's fairy tales, which were mostly wonderful, although in retrospect I think some of them were rather bizzarre stories to tell a child. It's important to keep in mind that a lot of my father's stories kind of followed a Guy De Maupassant model where someone sacrifices everything for one thing, and in the end they lose everything in a bitter ironic twist. Not all; some were bittersweet, and a (very) few were unambiguously light and sweet. One invovled a man, obsessed with Boticelli's The Birth of Venus spending his life building a machine that can be hooked up to a painting and will transmit the audio of what was going on in the room while the painting was produced, only to find out at the end, that the model for Venus was a cheap street hooker. Anyway, this was the story that probably affected me the most:
ON THE ORIGIN OF CHESS
( an original fairy tale by my dad )
4. "Love at first sight." What's going on with this? Is it: chemical? Psychological? Paranormal? Delusional? How do people get the sense they get off each other? What's going on?
It's a variation on narcissism. We fall in love at first sight when we see someone who would be the ideal partner for our ideal self. Someone who it seems to us would want our ideal self. The more descreptancy there is between our real self and our ideal self, the more potential there is for various trajectories of pain. Also, the greater the descreptancy, the greater our proclivity for projection, which obviously can severely distort our vision of our new object of desire.
5. "Suspicion on our part justifies deceit in others" - La Rochefoucauld. Discuss.
Causes? Sure, a dialectical model is always useful. Justifies? Oh, no. That's blaming the victim mentality. Tricky quote, obvious agenda, unfair verb.
bonus: Which of the seven deadly sins do you most embody and how does it fuck up your life?
Hm, I don't know. The Christian discourse is something that I am familiar with only on a very literary/metaphorical level, those categories mean very little to me, and thus practically they translate into very banal concepts in my life, like "timing." I kind of don't know how to answer that question, because I am not sure what it means to embody a deadly sin, so I in a way I can only engage with with the second part of the question, because practical consequences are easier to assess. So, which "deadly sin" fucks up my life the most. In general I am very in control of my impulses and behaviors. I guess I would have to say lust, not because I think it is, but, again (and it might be by conjecture demanded by the paradigm of this question), the only area in my life in which I am compulsive could be roughly, crudely designated as "lust" with an insistent caveat that the map is not the territory. It's not really lust, it's less physical, and has more to do with desire as the lizard's tail that it is in psychoanalytic theory. Again, I measure this very crudely. But I think only something of this nature could ever cause me to betray someone, therefore it is something that is less subservient to my almost-mathematical control-freak ethical paradigms. But, I guess, if you ran my mind through a babelfish translator set to "medieval" your would get "lust." And that would be about as accurate as "Coca-Cola brings back your dead ancestors."
theodora1. Fill in the blanks: I was a teenage ____ for ____.
You know, it was this question that tripped me up. I couldn't figure out what to put in the blanks. Also various bad 80s movie title-inspired inanities kept besieging my brain. I was a teenage Faustus for Satan? I was a teenage Tit for Tat? I was a teenage Something for Nothing? I cannot for the life of me answer it. I don't think I will be able to answer it. It belongs to some weird lacuna never to be mastered by my immigrant brain that vaguely alludes to the first generation of video games and the "who's on first" word game. I am completely incapable of answering it, or even attempting to, except in pathetic paroxysms of contrived cleverness, like inserting "flowers" and "Algernon" in the blanks. Alas.
2. Masculinity/femininity. Which is more essentially fraudulent? Why?
It's a trick question because the default answer is, of course, both are equally performative. However, I think the schizophrenic contradictions are more obvious in masculinity. If we look at the historical cultural imaginary of both masculinity and femininity, before "feminism," the discourse of masculinity is far more bipolar than that of femininity. So, femininity was composed of the following possible tropes, in various permutations and combinations: frailty, sorcery, enchantment, instability, emotion, etc. None of them are really in conflict with each other; frailty can lead to overcompensation via enchantment or unbridled instability. Being ruled by emotion, rather than reason produces the instability, which is, nevertheless, enchanting as radical alterity. However, masculinity containts opposite, even mutually exclusive tropes, namely stoicism, formation of identity through hardship and self-denial, and absolute self-containment and aggression and ur-entitlement, jealousy, anger. The only way they could be mediated is through an uneasy dialectic of sublimation and return of the repressed, and that's basically what happens.
3. List three foundational stories of your childhood. (As example, three of mine: The Neverending Story, The Last Unicorn, Watership Down.) How did they affect you?
Well, that's a hard question. My father collected fairy tales like other people collect matchbooks. That is to say, in our house we had collections of fairy tales from every country in the world. In fact, my theory as to why I became an anthropologist is that I failed to process a single normative cultural code and internalize/naturalize my own culture because my learned second-order symbolic structures were from all over the place. It's like being raised a super-polyglot, but with cultural units, instead of linguistic ones. In a way, it was overdetermined that I would become an anthropologist. But as to the stories themselves. It's hard to pick, and I could just respond to this question with three of my dad's fairy tales (see below), but I will try to diversitfy my response. So, first let's talk about the most terrifying story I have ever read.
The Golden Bird, a short story in an anthology of Romanian fairty tales, scared the shit out of me. I've referenced in on livejournal before, not too long ago. Basically the story follows a child who is washed up on the seashore in a net. He is adopted by a fisherman and his wife; he grows up into a handsome, healthy young man, but the net grows with him; it cannot be cut. So he becomes known as a guy-in-a-net. As a result he never fully acclimates, and when he comes of age he goes on your standard Campbellian/Proppian garden-variety quest to find out what's what. He ends up on an island where things are not going well. There is a Golden Bird statue on an island, it's huge, with rubies for eyes, encrusted with precious stones. The statue had been installed on the island as a malevolent gift that's like the evil cousin of the Trojan Horse. Every night the statue comes to life, and walks around. As it walks, it shoots out lightning, night becomes as light as day, and all the residents of the island become overwhelmed with uncontrollable primal terror and to run to each other for comfort. Except, whoops, the bird's other magical power turns all the islanders' arms into swords, so everyone ends up stabbing their near and dear ones. Every morning the dead are burned at funeral pyres, as their relatives that killed them weep in fear and remorse. People start hiding from their family members before nightfall, but nothing really helps. The net guy ends up not being affected by the curse, he takes the bird away from the island and drowns it, then he has more adventures, and eventually his net falls off. But the thing that scared me was the inexplicable evil of this bird, the unmitigated terror, and the ambivalence of the categories of good and evil, the lack of climax where the former definitely triumphs over the latter. It was more like an episodic, picaresque narrative that featured a monster that scared the shit out of me, and my fear was not mediated by an allegorical defeat. As a result, my fear lingered. For years. That story still freaks me the fuck out.
Moving on.
I absolutely loved the Moomintrolls series by Tove Janssen. The books were really more about the world of the Moominvalley, rather than the specific stories, which were often more character-driven than plot-driven, and whimsical at that, at times even melancholy, and I liked the sense that there was this unhurried life that constantly existed in a world that required no ontogenesis or cosmology, it just existed. That mattered more to me than the particular adventures. If I had read them as an adult for the first time, I would have attributed my enchantment to the well-developed themes of a community that priorotized ethics and was based on diversity without any hint of moralizing or didactic rhetoric that often rears its head in its special incarnation in children's stories, that the adult/kid binary was fluid, that the family seemed largely matriarchal, and that the threat to community by the outside was always resolved through acceptance/integration/reintegration. But at age 10 I just found the entire universe offered up in those stories extremely satisfying, without relaly knowing why.
Finally, in answering I think this is a good place to explain that from the time I was five until I was about eight my father told me fairy tales that he made up every night. I became spoilt and I refused to go to sleep unless he told me a fairy tale. When he was out of town, my mother tried to fill in, but her rehashing of stories I had already read incited my anger, because they weren't my dad's fairy tales, which were mostly wonderful, although in retrospect I think some of them were rather bizzarre stories to tell a child. It's important to keep in mind that a lot of my father's stories kind of followed a Guy De Maupassant model where someone sacrifices everything for one thing, and in the end they lose everything in a bitter ironic twist. Not all; some were bittersweet, and a (very) few were unambiguously light and sweet. One invovled a man, obsessed with Boticelli's The Birth of Venus spending his life building a machine that can be hooked up to a painting and will transmit the audio of what was going on in the room while the painting was produced, only to find out at the end, that the model for Venus was a cheap street hooker. Anyway, this was the story that probably affected me the most:
ON THE ORIGIN OF CHESS
( an original fairy tale by my dad )
4. "Love at first sight." What's going on with this? Is it: chemical? Psychological? Paranormal? Delusional? How do people get the sense they get off each other? What's going on?
It's a variation on narcissism. We fall in love at first sight when we see someone who would be the ideal partner for our ideal self. Someone who it seems to us would want our ideal self. The more descreptancy there is between our real self and our ideal self, the more potential there is for various trajectories of pain. Also, the greater the descreptancy, the greater our proclivity for projection, which obviously can severely distort our vision of our new object of desire.
5. "Suspicion on our part justifies deceit in others" - La Rochefoucauld. Discuss.
Causes? Sure, a dialectical model is always useful. Justifies? Oh, no. That's blaming the victim mentality. Tricky quote, obvious agenda, unfair verb.
bonus: Which of the seven deadly sins do you most embody and how does it fuck up your life?
Hm, I don't know. The Christian discourse is something that I am familiar with only on a very literary/metaphorical level, those categories mean very little to me, and thus practically they translate into very banal concepts in my life, like "timing." I kind of don't know how to answer that question, because I am not sure what it means to embody a deadly sin, so I in a way I can only engage with with the second part of the question, because practical consequences are easier to assess. So, which "deadly sin" fucks up my life the most. In general I am very in control of my impulses and behaviors. I guess I would have to say lust, not because I think it is, but, again (and it might be by conjecture demanded by the paradigm of this question), the only area in my life in which I am compulsive could be roughly, crudely designated as "lust" with an insistent caveat that the map is not the territory. It's not really lust, it's less physical, and has more to do with desire as the lizard's tail that it is in psychoanalytic theory. Again, I measure this very crudely. But I think only something of this nature could ever cause me to betray someone, therefore it is something that is less subservient to my almost-mathematical control-freak ethical paradigms. But, I guess, if you ran my mind through a babelfish translator set to "medieval" your would get "lust." And that would be about as accurate as "Coca-Cola brings back your dead ancestors."
