A few thoughts on "Page Count"

Apologies for those on Facebook - some of this might be repetitive. But I am currently and endlessly stuck on 34 and it's driving me crazy.

The page count is cruel and heartless.

Page Count is not a "Count" in the royal title sense. Nor is it a "Page" in the job title sense.

Page Count might have been created by Dick Cheney. Or Rumsfield. And no doubt it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment by the rules of the Geneva Convention.

I would like to be released from page count jail with the other prisoners of Guantanamo Bay.

My four year old nephew can count better than the page count.

I should have been writing rather than coming up with page count witticisms.

Anybody else have any?

The Living Mannequin

Between the years 1920 and 1940, designers used living mannequins to sell their clothes, somewhat like the models in runway fashion shows we see today, but in the stores and on the floor, changing their clothes and altering their appearance to best sell the fashions. The practice of living mannequins came between when designers stopped using wax forms (not very stable in a hot studio) and before mass production could create reliable (and cheap) plastic forms, the ones we see in retails shops today.
Jean Rhys worked for a brief time as a living mannequin and wrote about it in a short story aptly named "Mannequin." In Quartet, Marya considers finding a job as one as well. I am interested in this idea of mannequins for a few reasons. First, it brings up the question of authenticity. The plastic mannequin "wore" makeup - to appear more "real" and the "real" woman was reduced to a type, an idealized slim and white woman who had endless purchasing power. It is arguable as to which succeeds at being more real - at the very least, plastic mannequins have been more successful at their craft (when was the last time a salesperson at the Gap offered to bring out a model to show off that new long sleeve tee?) Second, both the living and plastic mannequin came about as the result of mechanized production - the ability to produce a large number of items that are exactly the same (like photographs, of course). As clothes began to be made by machines and ready-to-wear products the norm, shop owners needed more ways to show off the many options they could now offer. Did women feel that they too needed to perform as if they were mass produced, to act as reproductions in function and form?

Can we ever be individuals again considering how we are inundated with examples of what it means to be woman before we can perceive ourselves distinctly in the mirror?

Random Post: The DSM

If there can be a book that defines mental disorders, shouldn't there be a book the acts as a guide to normal behavior? Otherwise, it occurs to me that all human behavior might eventually wind up in the DSM.

So, how is the dissertation going?

I am still at work on Chapter 1, Jean Rhys. The first part of the chapter on Voyage in the Dark is essentially done, until I get some feedback. I am now working the second half of the chapter on Quartet. I think this novel is a favorite and might be the one I recommend to readers who have never encountered Rhys's work before. For Voyage, I argue that Rhys uses the photographic form as a way to implicitly criticizes the ability of a photograph to capture a subject. For example, Rhys points that the characters are oppressed by what I call a tyranny of sameness - all the places and all the people seem exactly the same, like photographic reproductions where there is no original, only copies of copies.




In the part of the chapter about Quartet, I refer to a concept called "appearing" that I read about in a fascinating book, The Spectacular Modern Woman by Liz Conor. This concept is influenced by photography but not reliant on the mechanized reproduction of an image. Conor explains that “‘appearing’ describes how the changed conditions of feminine visibility in modernity invited a practice of the self which was centered on one’s visual status.” Conor additionally argues that modern experience in the 1920s was based on an “alteration in human perception through visual technologies…the visual realm…became a primary site for contesting…identity” and that, as a result, “for women…the performance of their gendered identity had to take place within the modern spectacularization of everyday life.” In other words, for Rhys and her modern female counterparts, everyday life is a performance where a woman must be aware that she is being seen, even if the medium that records such a performance is absent.

I will also be discussing the mannequin in relation to this concept of appearing but you will have to wait until next time to learn more about that.

Adages of the Day

Hello all! Is there anyone out there? Apologies for the extended break. The holidays and other stuff going on was a little distracting. But I am back and so is the diss.
I few adages I learned this week that are helping me motivate:

"Most people would prefer to clean bathrooms than write."

and

"There are two types of dissertations, Done and Not Done."

The first I like because it reminds me that the ickiness I feel when I sit down to write does NOT mean that I don't like my project or that I am not a "real" writer, but rather that writing is hard and everybody struggles. The second is helpful with the inner critic, that bitch, who likes to undermine me by questioning the quality of my work. The point is that I need to birth this baby; not birth it, raise it AND send it to college.

Troubling Trouble Troubles Me

I came across this troubling quote in an essay on Jean Rhys's Quartet this week: "Central to modernist art is the concept best exemplified in English by Joyce and Eliot of the impersonality of the arts; the notion that the artist was to be refined out of the work of art: an art so impersonal that subject might well follow the contours of the autobiographical self such as Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, but the artist himself remains beyond his handiwork, refined out of existence." According to this critic, however, Rhys's work is not a product of this particular distancing characteristic of the modernist movement because her work is too personal. I am troubled with the distinctions this writer makes. How can the artist be "refined out of the work of art" yet still offer a work that is autobiographical? And why is Joyce such a success at this while Rhys's "developed out of an intensely private world?" Is it the character of her work or merely her character as a woman? Theses questions might be difficult to answer - and might very well be what my dissertation is in part based on. Although I am committed to unwrapping this particular package, I am perturbed by this writer's confident assertions. His tone seems to imply that the reader should know exactly what he is talking about, when in fact he has a lot more to do if he is going to convince this particular reader.

The brilliance of creative chaos

In the spirit of the post where I submitted a photograph of my office, I found this lovely article on desk-related chaos.
Here's a quote that details an experience that I have often gone through:
"There are books that I know I own but I have to buy them again because I can't find them."
I found this article a relief because I always thought my chaos was evidence that I wasn't the intellectual I thought I was. My dissertation advisor, for example, is the picture of perfect organization. It turns out, if the article is to be proof, that I am on the right track. One needs chaos in order to pontificate. However, unlike the author, the only thing growing hair in my office is my cat. As far as I can tell that is.
Read the article here: The brilliance of creative chaos
And information about the exhibit that inspired the article: Eamonn McCabe's Writers' Rooms exhibition at the Madison Contemporary Art

First post written on a mac. Phew!