(no subject)

carbonelle pointed me to this:

Written fiction probably contains elements of both engagement of organizing adaptations and of pleasure circuit lock-picking, and different kinds of fiction may contain different proportions. Perhaps "great" works of fiction are those that most fully engage organizing adaptations, which is why they have survived the tests of time and translation, while "lesser" fiction, including genre romance novels, may primarily pick the locks of the brain's pleasure circuits.

Which is an interesting take on the appeal and pleasures of slash and romance, and I suspect psychologically a very useful contribution to the OTHER Endlessly Fascinating Question around here, which is 'So, seriously, why slash?', but primarily, it's a descriptive discussion on the appeal of genre fiction, and as literary critics, the writers (who let it be said are not, aside from that one remark, trying to be literary critics) strike me as making decent plumbers.

The question, I think, at least from the writerly standpoint, a position to which I am clinging come hell or high water for fear of opening up the possibility of truly endless digressions, instead of merely a Whole Lot Of Digressions, is the compatability of the two qualities in fiction, (or, says the woman who was quoting the Song of Songs in here the other day, in Arts and Letters.)

There's some discussion in there of men's preferences in porn -- which, as with women's preferences, are not monolithic, but there's certainly a strong overall divide in terms of numbers, and the comments I've heard from men who don't 'get' slash at all bear out the description of the difference in taste, if not the absoluteness of the divide, which gives me to ponder:

If I correctly follow their argument, the deliberate intermingling of "organizing adaptations and ... pleasure circuit lock-picking" will not appeal to most men, in fact each will have a cancelling function on the other, causing the reader/viewer to be unsatisfied by and therefore avoid the work.

(ataniell93, you may yet get at least the beginnings of a discussion of women's erotic production as a feminist enterprise this week ... I seem to have fallen into it after all)

If all that holds true -- big if, but it looks okay, let's fire it up and see if we can stall it -- then the literary conventions around sexuality and eroticism that render, for example, DH Lawrence, actively unpleasant to many women are precisely the conventions which allow the normative male to read and absorb works primarily preoccupied with presenting organizing adaptations (I seem to have caught a mild case of Academia from that article, excuse it please) which contain explicit sexuality without triggering that cancelling effect.

Which is all fine and good right up until the body of writing which accepts that particular series of conventions grabs the title of "The Only Serious Literature" and holds it tauntingly over our heads.

(Also? I want to say that though I can't pin the dates or places down, this does NOT cover all of literature -- the conventions do shift. Anyone got anything more solid there?)

Fan fiction seems to me to suggest that women DO find both emotional and mental pleasure in deft combinations of the two forms of experience -- as we seem to select texts wth very high levels of organizing adaptation and restricted or unfulfilled lock-picking triggers and deliberately and often very skillfully 'rebalance' them.

I mean, I hang around in a fandom that produces Frigging In The Rigging (well, wanking in the cable tier, and isn't it time someone wrote another one of those, please, please?) stories and complicated bits of Fictional Scholarship both, as part of the same overall narrative, and takes pleasure both in each AND in the notion of the two as interlocking narrative.

So it seems that the trick can be done, and that if it be done and done well, it will find readers, and those readers will encounter it as pleasurable on both levels.

There's some kind of connection here, I at least sort of suspect, between the kind of erotic writing I'm pointing at and mystical poetry which makes use of erotic imagery to make religious assertions, but this I have not yet got the LEAST kind of grasp on, so, gratuitous Donne:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

(Gratuitous Auden for benet, damned_colonial, and also for The Hellmuse: Is this why "nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter/Are shot to pieces by the shorter/Poems of Donne"? Discuss. :-)

ETA: If you don't feel like reading the article at this time, the bit you really need is this:

The first explanation is that human engagement in fictional experience is a functionless byproduct of psychological (brain) adaptations that were designed by natural selection to serve other functions. In this view, engagement in fictional experience is not something that we are designed to do but, rather, something that we are susceptible to, as we are susceptible to becoming addicted to drugs. This hypothesis is elaborated and championed by Pinker (1997), who argues that many of the arts are best understood as evolutionarily novel technologies that effectively "pick the locks" of our brain's pleasure circuits.

The second explanation is that human engagement in fictional experience is itself an adaptation; that is, it is something we are designed to do. Tooby and Cosmides (2001) champion this hypothesis. They begin by noting that some psychological adaptations may be designed to operate in two different modes: a functional mode and an organizational mode. When an adaptation is operating in the latter mode, it becomes better organized to carry out its function (the first mode). For example, rhesus monkey fighting is the behavioral outcome of the underlying psychological adaptations operating in their functional mode, whereas rhesus play-fighting is the behavioral outcome of these adaptations operating in their organizational mode (Symons, 1978). In other words, the fighting mode and the play-fighting mode are both functional, in the sense of being the designed products of evolution by natural selection, but their functions are different: The function of fighting is to harm one's opponent, while the function of play-fighting is to safely practice and thereby improve (organize) fighting skills (without harming one's play partner).

Tooby and Cosmides (2001) argue that human engagement in fictional experience may have been favored by natural selection over the course of human evolutionary history because it produced adaptive benefits.

Fictional information input as a form of simulated or imagined
experience presents various constellations of situation-cues,
unlocking [emotional] responses, and making this value information
available to systems that produce foresight, planning, and
empathy. With fiction unleashing our reactions to potential lives
and realities, we feel more richly and adaptively about what we
have not actually experienced. This allows us not only to understand
others' choices and inner lives better, but to feel our way
more foresightfully to adaptively better choices ourselves. (p. 23)

ETA 2: How far do we want to trust an article on fiction reading and writing which approvingly quotes people who can unblushingly put pen to page and bring forth such heresies as "foresightfully"?

(no subject)

carbonelle pointed me to this:

Written fiction probably contains elements of both engagement of organizing adaptations and of pleasure circuit lock-picking, and different kinds of fiction may contain different proportions. Perhaps "great" works of fiction are those that most fully engage organizing adaptations, which is why they have survived the tests of time and translation, while "lesser" fiction, including genre romance novels, may primarily pick the locks of the brain's pleasure circuits.

Which is an interesting take on the appeal and pleasures of slash and romance, and I suspect psychologically a very useful contribution to the OTHER Endlessly Fascinating Question around here, which is 'So, seriously, why slash?', but primarily, it's a descriptive discussion on the appeal of genre fiction, and as literary critics, the writers (who let it be said are not, aside from that one remark, trying to be literary critics) strike me as making decent plumbers.

The question, I think, at least from the writerly standpoint, a position to which I am clinging come hell or high water for fear of opening up the possibility of truly endless digressions, instead of merely a Whole Lot Of Digressions, is the compatability of the two qualities in fiction, (or, says the woman who was quoting the Song of Songs in here the other day, in Arts and Letters.)

There's some discussion in there of men's preferences in porn -- which, as with women's preferences, are not monolithic, but there's certainly a strong overall divide in terms of numbers, and the comments I've heard from men who don't 'get' slash at all bear out the description of the difference in taste, if not the absoluteness of the divide, which gives me to ponder:

If I correctly follow their argument, the deliberate intermingling of "organizing adaptations and ... pleasure circuit lock-picking" will not appeal to most men, in fact each will have a cancelling function on the other, causing the reader/viewer to be unsatisfied by and therefore avoid the work.

(ataniell93, you may yet get at least the beginnings of a discussion of women's erotic production as a feminist enterprise this week ... I seem to have fallen into it after all)

If all that holds true -- big if, but it looks okay, let's fire it up and see if we can stall it -- then the literary conventions around sexuality and eroticism that render, for example, DH Lawrence, actively unpleasant to many women are precisely the conventions which allow the normative male to read and absorb works primarily preoccupied with presenting organizing adaptations (I seem to have caught a mild case of Academia from that article, excuse it please) which contain explicit sexuality without triggering that cancelling effect.

Which is all fine and good right up until the body of writing which accepts that particular series of conventions grabs the title of "The Only Serious Literature" and holds it tauntingly over our heads.

(Also? I want to say that though I can't pin the dates or places down, this does NOT cover all of literature -- the conventions do shift. Anyone got anything more solid there?)

Fan fiction seems to me to suggest that women DO find both emotional and mental pleasure in deft combinations of the two forms of experience -- as we seem to select texts wth very high levels of organizing adaptation and restricted or unfulfilled lock-picking triggers and deliberately and often very skillfully 'rebalance' them.

I mean, I hang around in a fandom that produces Frigging In The Rigging (well, wanking in the cable tier, and isn't it time someone wrote another one of those, please, please?) stories and complicated bits of Fictional Scholarship both, as part of the same overall narrative, and takes pleasure both in each AND in the notion of the two as interlocking narrative.

So it seems that the trick can be done, and that if it be done and done well, it will find readers, and those readers will encounter it as pleasurable on both levels.

There's some kind of connection here, I at least sort of suspect, between the kind of erotic writing I'm pointing at and mystical poetry which makes use of erotic imagery to make religious assertions, but this I have not yet got the LEAST kind of grasp on, so, gratuitous Donne:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

(Gratuitous Auden for benet, damned_colonial, and also for The Hellmuse: Is this why "nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter/Are shot to pieces by the shorter/Poems of Donne"? Discuss. :-)

ETA: If you don't feel like reading the article at this time, the bit you really need is this:

The first explanation is that human engagement in fictional experience is a functionless byproduct of psychological (brain) adaptations that were designed by natural selection to serve other functions. In this view, engagement in fictional experience is not something that we are designed to do but, rather, something that we are susceptible to, as we are susceptible to becoming addicted to drugs. This hypothesis is elaborated and championed by Pinker (1997), who argues that many of the arts are best understood as evolutionarily novel technologies that effectively "pick the locks" of our brain's pleasure circuits.

The second explanation is that human engagement in fictional experience is itself an adaptation; that is, it is something we are designed to do. Tooby and Cosmides (2001) champion this hypothesis. They begin by noting that some psychological adaptations may be designed to operate in two different modes: a functional mode and an organizational mode. When an adaptation is operating in the latter mode, it becomes better organized to carry out its function (the first mode). For example, rhesus monkey fighting is the behavioral outcome of the underlying psychological adaptations operating in their functional mode, whereas rhesus play-fighting is the behavioral outcome of these adaptations operating in their organizational mode (Symons, 1978). In other words, the fighting mode and the play-fighting mode are both functional, in the sense of being the designed products of evolution by natural selection, but their functions are different: The function of fighting is to harm one's opponent, while the function of play-fighting is to safely practice and thereby improve (organize) fighting skills (without harming one's play partner).

Tooby and Cosmides (2001) argue that human engagement in fictional experience may have been favored by natural selection over the course of human evolutionary history because it produced adaptive benefits.

Fictional information input as a form of simulated or imagined
experience presents various constellations of situation-cues,
unlocking [emotional] responses, and making this value information
available to systems that produce foresight, planning, and
empathy. With fiction unleashing our reactions to potential lives
and realities, we feel more richly and adaptively about what we
have not actually experienced. This allows us not only to understand
others' choices and inner lives better, but to feel our way
more foresightfully to adaptively better choices ourselves. (p. 23)

ETA 2: How far do we want to trust an article on fiction reading and writing which approvingly quotes people who can unblushingly put pen to page and bring forth such heresies as "foresightfully"?

LJ posts I ought to make but may not get to

... A paen of praise for airline and airport employees, all of whom once again treated me with great kindness and courtesy in my journeying, because they don't get enough love.

... A thing about being poly and how one of the completely unexpected places it both enriches your life immensely and bites you in the arse is in the blurring of the boundaries between friends and family.

... A review of OddCon, expressed mostly in thinky-thoughts, as the conversations were the best parts.

... a post about Toronto Island Airport, which is stuck in the 1960s in all the best ways and has a ferry. A FERRY.

... Thinky thoughts about gay, queer, het, straight, heteronormativity, and the difference between what you, personally, mean by a word, what the denotation is, and what the generally accepted connotation is, the importance of defining your terms, and the air of futile hostility that ignoring such definitions when they are offered usually guarantees even the mildest discussion will rapidly develop.

... Stuff about the fires, about bad experiences, and about how memory and narrative work.

... Gloating about having aquired some very good books.

And probably some other stuff.

Instead of which I will just say that when I came home on the bus tonight, I noticed upon passing the University of Ottawa that someone had put a wineglass into the hand of the metal Jesuit on Simard's lawn.

And hey if he gets a drink -- I get a drink.

I did not walk here alone; not all who guided my feet agreed with me, nor I with them.

Once all this becomes old hat -- and by "this" I mean the assumption that women have the right to own their sexuality, on their own terms -- what's now considered the histrionics of a fat girl in overalls will seem quaint and trite. That's the tragedy of it all. I read the studies done a hundred years ago that "proved" women's reproductive organs would not be damaged by getting a higher education and, oh, I laugh and I laugh, not only because the question was raised at all but because the women who undertook this research did so with such a serious sense of purpose. Of course in the end that joke's on me, because if it weren't for them defending my right to an education I wouldn't be reading their old-fashioned studies in the first place. This is Andrea Dworkin already, and she hasn't been dead a week.

NAC Dance Schedule

The NAC 2005-2006 schedule is out, and it looks damned good

Including Dracula back on tour

And a new Kudelka

I feel a subscription coming on ...

Anyone want to come up for anything? I'm looking at you, trolleypup...

Let me know and I'll add tickets to my order. I'm thinking Canril and Series C...

Once more into the breeches ...

God, I am so behind on comments. Eventually I want to get down to chewy stuff about writing and how and where we write sex, and what works and what doesn't, but the more I shovel, the more there is to dig. *flails* Talk amongst yourselves...it's all good stuff, and I'm SO scatterbrained.

So I spent a large chunk of the afternoon talking black_hound's ear off about erotic art and trying to get my thoughts organised.

One of the issues that came up fairly rapidly was the idea that eroticism, being cultural, is subject to change and even to decay, and writing may be more vulnerable than most arts in that regard.

(I commend the excellent Pornokrates, which I had forgotten until BH linked me there today, both for excellent examples of this through the ages and also as a general resource for historical smut writers; it's always useful to know a bit about what sorts of smut your characters probably read.)

Written material that posesses ... I don't know what to call it -- that essential soundness and depth -- seems to survive the loss of its function as erotica (this makes me smile, as it does, indeed, argue that the combination is NOT some mad dream) and continue to function as fiction, often gaining repsectability along that way. Erotic writing that lacks that seems fated to dwindle into a curiosity, important only to geeks like us who want to know about historical sex.

... pictures have survived rather better and oftener than the written material, and (judging from the discussions of Faustus we've had around here lately, and the reviews seem to strongly suggest that it was not just the confirmed fangirls who thought that the Chichester and Liverpool performances were hotter than very hot things) theatre and dance and other performance work seems to survive best of all, because it has to be reinterpreted and filtered through our contemporaries, who generally add a lot of new wine to the old containers. Music, I think, may survive best of all, because it evolves the most slowly.

It's interesting to me that the presence of eroticism in respectable art -- or the respectability of eroticism's presence -- seems to be most at stake in written material, least in music. Only in written work do you get that really strong 'bastard stepchild' response.

So, possibly Porn for the Ages isn't something the written form can realistically expect to hit -- or not very often. There is, at least, a sort of dusty-rose quality that creeps in, or else a crudity, to which the written form is particularly vulnerable -- and yet -- something survives, some quality of emotion or tenderness or pure feeling, if the work is good, that performance or a sensitive reader can find and reinterpret.

So at some point I want to get into a discussion of techniques and approaches, vocabulary, themes, etc, that go into the sort of erotic writing that we (most of us, some of us) do, read, appreciate, find interesting ...

For now, I'm hoping to get a sort of Smut Symposium going and see how far we are able to analyse use of the erotic in fiction and in the arts as a whole.

Here are some audio files, as that is the most sharable form of performance I have handy. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and Henry V Act V, Scene ii: the Henry/Katherine scene. Both Sam West, because really, this is me, he was going to slide in here somewhere...

The first is generally considered romantic/erotic -- I myself have never had any trouble accepting Robertson Davies' assertion that it's an account of an erotic dream -- the second I have some reason to belive is capable in this version of laying a large proportion of my friendslist out flat and gasping. :-)

Also, because for the sake of manageability (gods, this topic is HUGE) I want to keep the discussion more or less along one axis at a time, both are generally regarded as being Art, Literature, works right smack in the centre of The Canon, so their respectability is at least relatively unassailable.

Text versions: La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Scroll down to 'Fair Katherine, and most fair'

Links are Yousendit for now, will be replaced by more stable hosting tomorrow:

EDIT: these are now stable links and will work until further notice -- *is eternally grateful to Black Hound*:

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Henry V, V, ii.

Immediate thoughts: The Keats is more distanced; whether this is to foreground the nostalgic, fantastic mood of the work, or whether it is because Sam-as-reader is acting less as performer than presenter, I am not sure, though I am inclined to the former, as the brief discussion at the end of the file has that immediacy and involvement which in the verses is muted.

The Shakespeare is very here-and-now, very immediate. The performances pull you in. The interpretation is more modern, I think, though I am not sure exactly how to quantify that. Or possibly just 'more free'.

To me, both are successful as both performance and as erotic performance -- the layers of meaning are not compressed or buried under the erotic content, but at the same time it's strongly present.

Where do we go from there, in analyzing erotic works?

*exits, flailing*

Once more into the breeches ...

God, I am so behind on comments. Eventually I want to get down to chewy stuff about writing and how and where we write sex, and what works and what doesn't, but the more I shovel, the more there is to dig. *flails* Talk amongst yourselves...it's all good stuff, and I'm SO scatterbrained.

So I spent a large chunk of the afternoon talking black_hound's ear off about erotic art and trying to get my thoughts organised.

One of the issues that came up fairly rapidly was the idea that eroticism, being cultural, is subject to change and even to decay, and writing may be more vulnerable than most arts in that regard.

(I commend the excellent Pornokrates, which I had forgotten until BH linked me there today, both for excellent examples of this through the ages and also as a general resource for historical smut writers; it's always useful to know a bit about what sorts of smut your characters probably read.)

Written material that posesses ... I don't know what to call it -- that essential soundness and depth -- seems to survive the loss of its function as erotica (this makes me smile, as it does, indeed, argue that the combination is NOT some mad dream) and continue to function as fiction, often gaining repsectability along that way. Erotic writing that lacks that seems fated to dwindle into a curiosity, important only to geeks like us who want to know about historical sex.

... pictures have survived rather better and oftener than the written material, and (judging from the discussions of Faustus we've had around here lately, and the reviews seem to strongly suggest that it was not just the confirmed fangirls who thought that the Chichester and Liverpool performances were hotter than very hot things) theatre and dance and other performance work seems to survive best of all, because it has to be reinterpreted and filtered through our contemporaries, who generally add a lot of new wine to the old containers. Music, I think, may survive best of all, because it evolves the most slowly.

It's interesting to me that the presence of eroticism in respectable art -- or the respectability of eroticism's presence -- seems to be most at stake in written material, least in music. Only in written work do you get that really strong 'bastard stepchild' response.

So, possibly Porn for the Ages isn't something the written form can realistically expect to hit -- or not very often. There is, at least, a sort of dusty-rose quality that creeps in, or else a crudity, to which the written form is particularly vulnerable -- and yet -- something survives, some quality of emotion or tenderness or pure feeling, if the work is good, that performance or a sensitive reader can find and reinterpret.

So at some point I want to get into a discussion of techniques and approaches, vocabulary, themes, etc, that go into the sort of erotic writing that we (most of us, some of us) do, read, appreciate, find interesting ...

For now, I'm hoping to get a sort of Smut Symposium going and see how far we are able to analyse use of the erotic in fiction and in the arts as a whole.

Here are some audio files, as that is the most sharable form of performance I have handy. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and Henry V Act V, Scene ii: the Henry/Katherine scene. Both Sam West, because really, this is me, he was going to slide in here somewhere...

The first is generally considered romantic/erotic -- I myself have never had any trouble accepting Robertson Davies' assertion that it's an account of an erotic dream -- the second I have some reason to belive is capable in this version of laying a large proportion of my friendslist out flat and gasping. :-)

Also, because for the sake of manageability (gods, this topic is HUGE) I want to keep the discussion more or less along one axis at a time, both are generally regarded as being Art, Literature, works right smack in the centre of The Canon, so their respectability is at least relatively unassailable.

Text versions: La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Scroll down to 'Fair Katherine, and most fair'

Links are Yousendit for now, will be replaced by more stable hosting tomorrow:

EDIT: these are now stable links and will work until further notice -- *is eternally grateful to Black Hound*:

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Henry V, V, ii.

Immediate thoughts: The Keats is more distanced; whether this is to foreground the nostalgic, fantastic mood of the work, or whether it is because Sam-as-reader is acting less as performer than presenter, I am not sure, though I am inclined to the former, as the brief discussion at the end of the file has that immediacy and involvement which in the verses is muted.

The Shakespeare is very here-and-now, very immediate. The performances pull you in. The interpretation is more modern, I think, though I am not sure exactly how to quantify that. Or possibly just 'more free'.

To me, both are successful as both performance and as erotic performance -- the layers of meaning are not compressed or buried under the erotic content, but at the same time it's strongly present.

Where do we go from there, in analyzing erotic works?

*exits, flailing*