One Student's blog

I did note that Alex wrote a piece on genderqueer students at single-sex colleges; and I felt I ought to say something, since I identify as genderqueer, for lack of a better word or concept. But the thing is, it's intensely private. And the thing is, the problem of my gender identity is perhaps the only problem which I can't solve by writing and talking about it. A friend of mine (one of those LJ friends I've never met) commented thus on one of my entries in early February: 

Part of the reason I wanted to take this course is because I knew we would talk about blogs. But I have discovered that while I very much want to think about blogging as a genre, as a medium, etc. I don't want to talk about it within the context provided (thus far) by this class. I want to talk about it with fellow insiders, apparently, not with people who have never blogged in their life, or who blog in vastly different ways from me; and not while in dialog with texts by outsiders (who persist in calling blogs 'diaries', ferfucksake, for example) who focus on the blog as a primarily public sort of thing, and who see blogging's claim to fame as being tied to its readership and its potential to impact, I dunno, politics or whatever.

Laughter can only make people a little more thoughtful –Stanley Kubrick

 

I would think that people are much more likely to think if they don't find a joke funny, because then they discover that there is something about their basic assumptions and values which are at odd's with the jokes, and therefore they may ponder what their opinion on the subject is. 

"Roman satirists may be thought of as functioning within a triangle of which the apices are (a) attack, (b) entertainment, and (c) preaching. If a poem rests too long on apex (a) it passes into lampoon or invective; if it lingers on (b) it changes into some form of comedy; and if it remains on (c) it becomes a sermon." Niall Rudd, Themes in Roman Satire

What is striking and original about Rudd's application of this theoretical structure for satire is the fact that he sees a good deal of movement within individual pieces; the effect is on of hovering and flitting, like a bird that never alights. (Which is why my bird traps on the ground keep turning up with nothing more than handfuls of feathers, I suppose - time to construct a bow and arrow.)

            One of my basic, but as yet unexplored and unsupported, assumptions about genre is that ‘genre’ refers to structure, and that ‘genre’ does not give a very reliable indication of content or of function. Thus, I identify Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” as a letter on the basis of the structural elements at the beginning and end: the piece opens with “H.M. Prison, Reading” and “Dear Bosie”, and ends with “your affectionate friend, Oscar Wilde”, as well as putting the piece into the context of a history and a potential future of correspondence. However, on page 97 right near the beginning, Wilde refers to what he is doing as “writing your [Bosie’s] life and

"...there was nothing to hold her, she was free - what a terrible thing could be freedom. Trees were free when they were uprooted by the wind; ships were free when they were torn from their moorings; men were fre when they were cast out of their homes - free to starve, free to perish of cold and hunger." -The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall

Madness and creativity get associated, and this is not entirely inaccurate. Speaking for myself, depression and anxiety have broadened the range of my experience of the world in certain ways, have dislocated me in a way which makes me a more original and more challenging writer and scholar.

However, what I worry about is that people will only see this silver lining (which isn't common to everyone with a mood or thought disorder), and they won't understand how horrible mental illness is - the decrease in quality of life, the sheer suffering, the stigma, the lack of understanding, the expense, access to medical care, the side effects of medications, the frustration of not finding an effective medication, and so on and so on. 

In "Get Out of Gaol Free, or: How to Read a Comic Plot" by John Bruns1, Bruns writes that "a novelistic plot demands that we, as readers, must always be moving endward, in a more or less rectilinear fashion, towards resolution, closure, and understanding"; he opposes this understanding of the genre of the novel to the novel as "a way of enabling characters to engage in lively dialogues to which the reader can then respond". Bruns then goes on to say that "the comic plot, however has no demands, save one: that the reader must always be moving somewhere, moving anywhere. In the comic plot, characters needs not be understood - their movement alone

In the first chapter ('History') of Neil Bartlett's Who Was That Man? (a bio of Oscar Wilde), Bartlett describes three forms of gay narrative, three genres:

1) The personal coming out story.

2) The history of homosexuality.

3) And one which "combines the historical methods of the second with the individual subject of the first. The hero in this case is a single, usually 'great' homosexual. His fame rests in part on being hidden, on being in need of revelation ..."

I have felt very grudging toward usages of 'genre' which expand the word beyond a strictly literary term. Of course humans categorize all aspects of their existence, and there's no need to take terms from one categoried area and apply it to another. That increases the sloppiness of categorization, by using an unneeded metaphor.