I learned to write with footnotes and I like footnotes. The format of the book for which I am currently writing a piece allows footnotes. Writing along, I realize the extent to which my struggles with writing have to do with not being permitted footnotes. If you must discuss everything in the body of your text it is far more difficult to place what needs to be there as background, in the background. It is therefore far more difficult to move ahead with what you have to say.
What skill do I still need to learn?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Wait till you can read footnotes on a Kindle! It’s wonderful. And I get hyperlinks to web sites that are cited, as well. The Kindle has web capacities. It’s a little slow now, but this will improve.
This really opens up a text while allowing the writer to make her argument without a lot of diversions.
More and more I’m thinking of a concept of core text with hyperlinks.
Today I have to do my general (non footnote) edits. I warmed up yesterday by editing someone’s poetry and putting it up on Lulu.
Meanwhile, I have a better description of that “Westerner” notion I seem to carry around with me. I think it has something to do with the fetishising of intelligence. They can’t simply let things be, and let people be who and what they are. Everything it linked to notional intelligence, which is linked to an idea that one either comes up with the right answer (proving oneself intelligent), or the wrong answer (proving oneself stupid).
The whole of identity (self value) stands or falls on whether one comes up with the right answer at the right moment. But it all has to be done very quickly, and so snap judgements proliferate, for taking one’s time does not give the impression of ‘intelligence’.
It seems to me that these are such people who do not allow themselves an identity in the real sense, at all. Nor do they know how to converse, so as to get to the bottom of things. And they are dangerous, very dangerous, because if they see anyone operating in a different way from them, they try to bring them down to their own level. They have denied themselves the right to be at peace with themselves, so why should you be any different? Why should you get to be at peace with yourself?
“What is it? Do you think you are smarter than me, or something?”
Hattie – I’m torn on the Kindle question because I don’t like reading on screen. But core text with hyperlinks I really like and it’s what I want to do to my novel.
Jennifer – Yes, lots of people are like that and it is mind boggling, but I also see it in a lot of people not from the central countries, and I don’t see it in every person who is from here.
Yes, good point. It is just that this quality is so far removed from my own that it always strikes me that I am in a foreign place when I come into contact with it. Zimbabweans are so very different.
My other point is that if you win on the basis of having to prove your intelligence, you really lose. It takes an enormous amount of energy to contantly one-up somebody, and it says nothing about the actual qualities of your core self. Actually, it takes energy away from one’s core self, so that this ends up emaciated.
And the other person is likely to forget that you one-upped them, in another minute.
Unless of course, you are using your higher “intelligence” to get them kicked out of a job, or to cause some strife. In that case, they are unlikely to forget you.
But the whole use of “intelligence” in this manner is distinctly unimpressive. It really makes everything sound and look very bad.
Comment 1 – I find it foreign also. And I tend to say “Californians are so very different.”
Comment 2 – Good point. And, it is why I am resisting the latest temptation to say something to “S,” not now to try to negotiate for a less harmful form of “friendship” but just to punch back at his allegation that I had no reason to be irritated.
(I want to say:
1. He knows I’m never pleased with his sallies about sex.
2. He knew I wanted to come straight to Maringouin.
3. He knew I was perfectly willing to pay for airport parking given all considerations.
4. He knew I had a place to stay in N.O. if I needed it.
5. He had ample opportunity to ask me about this motel plan in person and before I lent him my car.
6. The fact that he did not, and that he sprung it on me when I had already been in B 10 days, and he already had my car, and was going off line for 6 days, has all the earmarks of a planned hit and run.
7. He’s made inappropriate requests of me before that I have objected to, but he’s never forced a situation the way he tried to do this; it was an unmistakable escalation.
8. There’s no way he wasn’t trying to guilt trip me into a motel room — I know perfectly well what a drag it is to pick someone up at midnight at MSY from Maringouin, and how with winter plane delays it can easily turn into staying up all night; that was why I kept saying, are you sure you want to do this? because remember, I want to go straight home, and I had decided to pay for airport parking so I could do that!)
But there is no point in saying these things to him; really I only think of them as a defense against the insult to my intelligence the idea that I had “no reason to be upset” is; my correct audience is myself.
Reading from a Kindle is not like reading from a screen. It’s a completely different technology that you read in ambient light. Try one out. It might surprise you.
Interesting — I should visit you and look at it — I wish I knew someone here who had one!
There’s a reason why “not doing” is so central to shamanism, and that is because you get control over R-complex that way. Those strife ridden people always try to throw down a gauntlet, by suggesting that if you do get into a slanging match with them then your intelligence will be publically compromised. But the point is that once you get into that with them, more than your intelligence is compromised — rather your whole core being. For what is your core being worth to you if you will risk it for the sake of any old so-and-so, who happens to cross your path?
Intelligence, then, is a red-herring. So are other taunts concerning power and strength. If you are taunted into trying to display them, the foregone conclusion is already that you lose.
Yes, and this is something I still need to really learn / am really just learning (it’s one of those things I knew fairly well before 30 and then lost fairly completely…) !
I unlearned a lot of things when I came to this culture. Then I learned some very bad habits, as per above, because I thought, “This is Western culture. It’s how I need to be, to adapt to it.”
UNBECMING
Not long ago was the sweetest boy on the block
And got everything happening for him,
He was in control and was on top of every situation
That came his way,
He had all, all within his grasp
And then nothing seemed to be unattainable
He had real love and had it in abundance
And his soul was satisfied,
Not long ago, all he touched was turned to gold
felt enriched,
To talk of what used to be
Which is no more, pains and weakens me
‘cause knows it’s a phase in life
That he has to go through
Unbecming
–justice chikandamina
I thought it was adapting to adulthood and academia, but really it was adapting to mainstream (misogynistic) US culture.
Which would be what I’m “unbecoming.” It’s interesting – Reeducation would have liked that poem, it would have said one needed to lose one’s outer accouterments of glory which were necessarily vainglory and denial.
Really though it was different things I needed to unbecome. (Hmmm … I wonder if that’s what my last few years of semi stasis have been. Hmmm.)
POINTS:
1. My whole problem really, is that with Reeducation I added a lot to my superego and really let it get entirely out of control.
2. Getting rid of this “S” person really is epoch making, although I never considered him a major person in my life. But the facts are that (a) he was one of the first people I met in this town; (b) he has a lot of the same beliefs as my Reeducator, who was also from the Maringouin area; (c) when I dated him in 2002, it was because I was disgusted with the behavior of my mean ex (who was at that point just a friend) and wanted to spend time with someone more responsible; (d) I was not at all pleased with how he behaved toward me, however; (e) it was because of that behavior that I got together with my mean ex, actually: he said he’d never act like “S” (cold, dismissive, projecting); (f) he turned out to be much worse, of course; (g) “S” came back around as a friend when I was busy dumping my mean ex and he seemed great by comparison; (h) “S”‘s latest behavior reminded me chillingly of my mean ex’s.
So now I am finally about to experience this town without either of them present in any way — it’s a whole new world!
Got through correcting/updating two chapters today, after responding to the supervisor’s suggestions. I think that is enough for today. On the good side, my work is not a rambling mess, as it would be had I attempted a PhD 2o years earlier. Praise be to our respective deities!
On the bad — I need a wee break, at least until tomorrow, maniana.
—
The “unbecoming” is simply an automatic process that happens to us when our trust is betrayed. That is because we are intrinsically social creatures, who build our sense of self-identity in liaison with others. So, when others let us down, by such unremarkable human traits as backstabbing, we go into this mode automatically.
I remember it was like throwing all sorts of things out of my ship of consciousness, as if in a storm, in order to lighten the load.
Good for you re work!!! Unbecoming, I get it.
So now I am onto a couple more chapters today. I do not want to rush it.
—
One of the very strange things about unbecoming and then about trying to adapt to the power dynamics that you think actually govern a situation is that a quality of irony keep seeping through. Actually, my perspectives have always been exceedingly ironic, but I find that irony bursts to the surface like an uncontainable bubble whenever I am forced to act like I do not know something I know, or as if something were other than I know it to be. So even (or I should say, especially) when I try to adapt for my own benefit to a system of power (and of values) that is not native to me, there will be a symptom, a strong emergence, of irony.
I remember, for instance, trying to work with and develop my perspectives in accordance with a revelation I had had, that patriarchy requires us to lie all the time. We are supposed to affirm that bullying isn’t bullying, it is patriarchal care and concern, and that patriarchal outbursts are outbursts of authority and affection, and so on.
Actually, I thought this was the lesson that Western culture was trying to impress on me.
And so I would protest: “But I have difficulty lying. I can’t quite make it work!”
This kind of statement expressed within enemy territory is of course …..
But I have difficulty viewing anything that happens within the Patriarchy in an unironic way — even as I accumulate evidence of my personal sinfulness.
“We are supposed to affirm that bullying isn’t bullying, it is patriarchal care and concern, and that patriarchal outbursts are outbursts of authority and affection, and so on.”
Good for you re more work. Lots in your comment resonates with me but especially the quoted piece.
Anyway, I lean so heavily on intuition that sometimes it can be a liability. Other times it isn’t.
For example, last night I discovered a quote that reveals a meaning (or two) that I had imputed to Marechera’s Black Sunlight without really understanding why I did so at the time. Indeed I was puzzled as to how to give meaning to the sense of conviction I felt about it. Maybe I was wrong, I thought, since I had not approached the question through any system of logic as such, at least not on the conscious level.
As it turns out, Black Sunlight makes sense in terms of the shamanic logic of “recapitulation”. And it is an odd — paradoxical — logic indeed.
The particular issue I had been uncertain about was why I felt that the suicidal gesture at the very end of the book wasn’t quite real (if the book is read in this light as recapitulation). Was it the formal separation of the writer and the protagonist that gave me this impression? Or something else?
I have now found a quote in Casteneda’s The Art of Dreaming, that leads me to believe I was thinking in terms of shamanic logic all along.
To recapitulate is in fact, according to my reading of this quote, to engage with the forces of Thanatos in one’s life (“there is an inconceivable dissolving force in the universe”). By surrendering (temporarily and directly) to this force, one can become unintegrated with it in the general flow of one’s actual life. “[The old sorcerors] believed that since it is our life experience this force is after, it is of supreme importance that it can be satisfied with a facsimile of our life experience:the recapitulation. Having had what it seeks, the dissolving force then lets sorcerors go, free to expajnd their capacity to perceive and reach with it the confines of time and space.”
YES it is fascinating and I think this intuition is shared by various practitioners of literature…
And of course, this attempt to trick Thanatos is also linked to Nietzsche in his writings. Although basically shamanistic in his overall paradigm, Nietzsche makes a different use of some aspects of shamanistic logic and thinking. For Nietzsche, the social mask is a way of protecting one’s real life experiences against the deadly harm of the inquisitive other. It is still, clearly, a facsimile that Nietzsche suggests should be presented to most of the world at large, except for the most astute.
I think that all of the shamanic writers are interested in defending themselves against the destructive forces of life, in different ways. They have all discovered a paradoxical logic concerning the way that eros and thanatos are linked into each-other — that, for instance, if you pay your dues to “death”, then eros gives you a lift-off, and you end up flying. (One can see how primitive Christianity drew its conclusions about the risen god.) But this shamanistic logic is also drawn upon by the artist, according to Anton Ehrenzweig: Dissolution and undifferentiation of the ego is a temporary artistic state that allows for a clearer and more differentiated grasp onto eros. (The two forces work in conjunction, actually, as per my dream last night – a plane going down — not up — a ramp in order to gain speed can achieve lift off.)
Baudelaire: “De la concentration et dissolution du moi: tout est la.”
correction: “…that allows for a clearer and more *differentiated* grasp…”
Corrected it! 🙂
Disclaimer: I am not an academic. But if not being permitted footnotes is a problem for you, I would say write with footnotes. Let an editor reshape the manuscript into their house style later on: your role is just to express things clearly.
Ha! Editors don’t do all that work all the time. I’m just saying: it’s really interesting, the difference between writing while allowing for footnotes, and not.
World literature is going to be built on footnotes, is it not? Lead the way.
You are right and I should have known I would have your brilliant support on this. 🙂
On the positive side, I am permitted to use the Harvard system for my thesis. I imagine that this will save me some time.
“Look all the systems are impossible to understand because they are so detailed and cover everything. Mostly it’s in text citation and notes that need the work. I will show you what I use unless otherwise requested by the publishers which is often the case. It’s what I recommend for theses and is acceptable it seems to most examiners. If and when you try and publish bits you will have to change it to the system they require anyway, but for now I think a sort of Harvard method seems to work for most people. That is, bracket references in the text for citations eg (Brathwaite 2001), or if there are two pieces by Brathwaite for that year then (Brathwaite 2001 a) and (Brathwaite 2001b). You can either paginate it as (Brathwaite 2001: 233-264) or (Brathwaite 2001 pp.233-264). Doesn’t matter as long as it is consistent. Then all texts cited are listed AT THE END OF THE THESIS. If you want a bibliography of other texts you can either simply incorporate them in this or liust these as Works Cited and asdd a separate general bibliography for books consulted. I favor the former as simpler. Full reference here of course in the following form eg Brathwaite, E.K. (2001) History of the Voice, Beacon Books, London and New York, 1968. or Grungefuttock, K and Arthur Schnitzel (eds) The Anthology of Obscure Texts, Woodstock Publishers, New York, 1965. You’ll see that the first author of multiples is given surname first and the rest with first names first. The list is placed in the bib according to the first cited authors alphabetical position and is cited only once in this position. If it a book then italicise or underline the title. If it’s an article then use quotation marks and italicise or underline the journal title (as done with the books). e.g. R.M. Berndt “The moon-bone song cycle” , Oceania 15, 1, (Summer) 1948, pp. 233-269.
Notes with discursive material beyond a simple reference to the text quoted should go at the foot of the page or at the end of the chapters, not at the end of the thesis-this makes it easier for the examiner to see it immediately. For this reason I favor foot of page in theses. For more complicated issues that don’t arise more often we can discuss them case by case but this should cover 90% of cases.”
This is MLA style. My beef isn’t with the particular style, it’s with the general trend away from discursive footnotes. I’m old fashioned in that way.
Glad you can do this and that it will save time!