Happy Accidents

Holidays, with a big difference this year. To celebrate the 25 years of our marriage, and some associated achievements like getting the house and car both paid off, we went to France for 2 1/2 weeks of food, fun and sun: Paris, Nice, and Avignon. I don't know how I got to be this old without having seen some of Paris, but that's not an issue now.

We had a range of marvelous times in the three cities, each so different in its ways of being "French."

Many of those times had to do with things we stumbled across getting from must-see place to must-see place. It rather reminds me of one of the concerns in Nora Young's The Virtual Self: the matter of what happens when self-trackers get so linked in to like-minded self-trackers, all sharing their knowledge of their shared interests, so that the "smart city" we live in and the virtual company we keep are all so integrated we end up in a life shaped by like-minded people, in a city so well known there are no surprises, no serendipitous "happy accidents."

I don't think she should worry too much  about this possible outcome of a McLuhanesque / Maffesolian new tribalism.  We still have to get from place to place and experience to experience, which means that even traveling on pre-set routes preferred by our peers, we expose ourselves to time/place combinations that cannot fully be "known," or tracked in advanced. And crossing from one peer group to another takes us down different virtual and "real" pathways.

That's partly because we will not always be traveling pre-set or recommended routes worked out by our peers, because in traveling from place to place, we might well be traveling from one tribal affiliation to another, from one logic of identification to another through a third that is transitional and connective.

The tribe that told us about the great place to end a bike ride, and the route to get there, will not necessarily be the tribe that told us about this great sidewalk pub where we could get the perfect local brew to ease our thirst. So in getting from bike stop to pit stop, we will have to work out a route of our own that is also the space between peer group and peer group and purpose and purpose. The surprises will come in those inter-group transitions. And the biggest surprise will be our own surprise at being surprised--at our own range of identifications, and the connections our varying loyalties create out of the differences. We make common connection out of the previously disconnected.

But as for walking into surprises, having happy accidents, in each city on our holiday, Eva and I had the experience of several times each day, going along and between nodes of known interest on the tour maps. We found places we didn't know we were looking for, and places we had planned to look for another time, but that popped up in the in-between. Not all the streets on these maps are fully identified, and what's on them is anybody's guess, at first.  Not all the angles are quite the same on the street as on the map, and not all the street names are consistently identified for non-locals.

And when we did get disoriented, locals would give us advice that was based on their own imperfect knowledge of their own home towns. At least I think they were locals. Maybe they were just French, which is not the same thing. Maybe they were not even French but other visitors having a laugh, like I did the afternoon two young North American males asked me "do you speak any English," and I modestly answered, "un peu," then gave them arm-waving instructions in French that was sufficiently less wobbly than their own that they could not detect the fraud, on to get to Champs Elysees from below the Eiffel Tower.  If they got my drift, they also got where they wanted to go. If not, they got somewhere else. In central Paris it does not really matter, unless you are crossing of a "must-see" list so you can say, "Been there."

But going from Rue du Louvre to Rue Montorgueil, for example, we were told by one older fellow to go right, up this little street, to the big church, then go behind it to the right and around to get to the street that would connect us. At least, that's what I think he was telling us, from the line he indicated on the map, and the directions he pointed in space. Maybe it had worked once, but there was a big construction project going on that cut the route, and forced us back to the starting point, where we took a left instead of his advised right.

We went up a small connector street, not marked clearly on our map and not named, and found a street of boutiques, orphaned temporarily by the construction. One boutique had in its window a dress in exactly the style and color Eva had been seeking for months. And it was on sale. Now, yes, maybe a maybe a tracker site would have spared us the detour that the maps did not. And maybe a community of trackers seeking the same dress might have got us to the boutique. And maybe there would have been one left in Eva's size after all or any other like-minded trackers of similar taste had got there first. But where would have been the delight of discovery?

I suppose, like Young, I can see how that's one thing I think the "smart city" reduces. Only the first one to make the stumble gets the fun. Everyone else gets the information, which is maybe more efficient, but not as entertaining.

And when we did get to Montorgueil, we did find the old patisserie we had been seeking, Stohrer's, the oldest patisserie in Paris (est 1730), a destination that was on many "must-see" lists (another form of sharing older than digital tracking). And it was worth the trip down mistaken by-ways that only enhanced the eventual success. I had the lemon tart. Eva the pistachio. Then we went back another day for other choices, went by a different route out of Place Bastille, because we took another wrong turn up Blvd Richard Lenoire, through a huge Sunday market, that took us out of a way we hadn't really planned, anyway. On our way through the market, Eva found a red Italian leather purse she didn`t know she was looking for, either. At least, the label said it was Italian. Maybe it was just the label that was `Made in Italy,' but it`s still a nice purse. And unlike the ones up by Sacre Coeur, it really is leather.

While on the topic (well, technically, beside it) of self-tracking and achieving community with like-minded peers of similar tastes and interests, a nit picks at the back of my understanding. What if my preferred activity is finding things for myself. Of haplessly going where others who have gone before have not documented, or have documented in places I do not search, and of not myself documenting it, either?

Try joining our community. It's out there.

We fail to meet each other all the time, all over town, irregularly and anonymously.

Seeking common signage

I’ve been prepping a reading of the first novel in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series for an upcoming “Issues in Popular Culture” course, dealing with the issue of community-building or tribalisms. Part of the motivation for the theme is from Michel Maffesoli, "The Ethic of Aesthetics." Part from John Fiske's idea that we create (or join) popular cultures from the cumulative consumer choices we make from among the products of the "culture industries." Effectively, consumption becomes an act of production as many, many individual choices combine into a community of common interest.

Three quotations rub together in this context: “A work of art only stirs those for whom it is a sign” (J.M. Guyau, Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, trans Mafessoli, I think, in “The Ethic of Aesthetics”: 17);  “In a ceaseless movement of actions and retrospective effects, I recognize a sign by recognizing it with others, and so I recognize what unites me with others" (Maffesoli); and “The combination of widespread consumption with widespread critical disapproval is a fairly certain sign that a cultural commodity is popular” (Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 106). Critical disapproval would be an ironic "stirring" of a different sort, by that combination. We can join with the lovers of the sign, or the haters: with those who see a positive, inviting sign, or those who see a negative, off-putting sign.  Or we can, after Stuart Hall, take a more "negotiated" position that sees or accepts some aspects as having value in our personal circumstances, but only when taken just so far.

 Twilight is certainly in the prime seats of Fiske’s arena of the popular: huge enthusiastic consumption combined with some of the most desperate and disparate critical disapproval. It is just as “popular” a different way to scorn Twilight, as it is to “consume” it. Of course, “consumption” is a loaded term when dealing with a vampire book, in which the heroine gets called a “snack” on one occasion. But the book can be “used up” a variety of ways. One novel option I read of was invented by Regina poet and educator Gerry Hill. He did an exercise with his writing class, giving each student a page torn from a found copy of Twilight, with the instruction to find something in the flattish prose to build a poem around. Not that hard, actually, if you get the right page, since Meyer does have a skill with description--so page 8, for example, provides a rich imagery of an “alien” landscape of too much green. But I have to admit, some of the pages of dialogue would pressure the most willing imagination to find some touchpoint from which to go somewhere metaphorical.

Yes, Twilight could use a serious edit as a single title and as a series. But it also provides so many points of connection and decoding for so many potential audiences, ranging through Hall's schema of reading positions from dominant-hegemonic to counter-hegemonic (oppositional). It develops lines and relationships that are right out of the formula that has made the romance novel a staple since the formula was first used “seriously” over two-hundred years ago. A heroine who has to overcome her own squeamishness about herself and others to accept the finer qualities of herself and of the hero (or to bring them out in him). A darkly mysterious but wealthy and caring hero who evolves into a “perfect” match once he overcomes a problem in the way he behaves or is perceived by the heroine. A “rival” (Jacob), who is also a stud, but not quite “perfect” for her—in this case too young. And, as it turns out, expresses himself through the wrong kind of inner animal to cure what ails her.

Fine. Harlequin has made a fortune off this formula, and it is one that actually does open up a wealth of signs. The solutions (love conquers all, after it soothes and humanizes the beast in the man) are often laughable, but the problems are real enough to stir something familiar in a reader, to stir that “ethical” attachment Mafessoli writes about: “something which leads me to recognize myself in something which is exterior to me” (“Ethic of Aesthetics” 17).

Just consider two of the “critical” points of departure: What do we usually call a 100+-year-old man who hangs about in a high school and picks up a seventeen-year-old girlfriend?  “Hero” is not quite it. (Dorian Grey, maybe?) Then again, Edward is an eternal seventeen-year-old himself, in one sense, having been "saved" to eternal living death at that age. In Washington State, Bella and Edward are at least past the age of consent--Edward WAAAAY past. The age of consent for sex, anyway. I have not been able to fine an age of consent for vampire conversion, for allowing oneself to be envenomed (serpent allusions, anyone) by the love bite of your boyfriend.

What do we call a man who hangs hidden in a girl’s bedroom, watching her and listening in on her when she talks in her sleep? “Hero,” again, is not quite it. Consider what Bella would say if some other classmate, Tyler for example, were found at her window at bedtime? Yet in Edward's case, all she can do is worry about what he might have heard. 

So where is Edward’s “heroic” quality? In his self-control, apparently. When he practices self-control, and prevents Bella from acting on some of her own self-destructive impulses (urges, stirrings---), he is exercising positive choice. Of course, as a 100+-year-old, he has a much bigger perspective than she has. And he is a typical older man in the way he controls her options. Model of self-control? Or control freak? 

Where do I recognize myself in Twilight? Where would I find my contact point with “others”? My "ethical vector"? The logical node would seem to be Charlie, the concerned father/law-and-order enforcer, who wants his child to have a normal and safe life, with lots of friends, but has no sense of what she has attached herself to (he defends the Cullens against local gossip), so has to be protected in and by his own ignorance of what’s really going on. Maybe.

I feel a more common bond with Tyler, I think: The class clown, the eternal optimist who thinks he’s finessed a prom date with the delectable Bella, and shows on the night up all tuxxed out only to be told she’s been taken by that weirdnik, Edward. Any of several of the high-schoolers, actually—maybe a combination of them, even if I’m maybe now almost as close to Edward’s true age as to the seventeen-year-old I once was. They have so much to learn about themselves and each other, our life-long pursuit. The big thing they have to learn is that they have a lot to learn. That's always such a downer.

I think what stirs me most is the sense I am just as glad not to have to be that age again (though it would be nice to be it physically, if I could age eternally like the hard-bodied Edward), needing to go once again through all that awkward socializing into functional adulthood. Then a sense of chagrin mixes in, and I have to acknowledge that we never really age past the need to adjust, explore, reread the signposts, and find our fit; we just move farther along in our starting (over) points.