I read Emily Gould's NYT Magazine piece "Exposed" following Kenny's recommendation, and in turn, I recommend it to you. Kenneth identified it as a compelling read. I agree, and I'll add that it's dishy and awful and nauseating and say what you like about Emily Gould, the chick can write. Her prose seems effortless, plain, and yet it's riveting. She's tremendously though quietly deft.
The whole shebang makes me want to write a post about why I blog. Maybe I will. But for now, I'm interested in picking over and fiddling with a couple of details, neither of which is necessarily central to her story.
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As a writing teacher, I often stress the idea that there's no single correct form of English usage but rather that we all speak and write multiple Englishes and adhere to different levels of correctness, different sets of rules-- each tailored to the particular situation and particularly to the discourse community we want to identify ourselves with. In addition to debunking the notion that "English class" English is an ideal (an ideal, incidentally, which most students find unreachable and thus irritating), the concept emphasizes the social function of language and the politics of inclusion and exclusion which are inextricably woven into language (note the unreachable in preceding parenthetical expression for more on in/exclusion; see also DFW's essay "Authority and American Usage"). Each discourse community has its own set of grammatical rules and understandings about what content, what inflections, are appropriate. Or inappropriate.
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Emily Gould writes,
Once [on my blog], I made fun of Henry for referring to “Project Runway” as “Project Gayway.” He worried that “people” — the shadowy, semi-imaginary people who read my blog and didn’t know Henry well enough to know that he wasn’t a homophobe — would be offended.In blogging about "Project Gayway," Gould shifts the context and, importantly, the audience of Henry's remark. The public readership of her blog is a very different discourse community from the one that existed, as I imagine it, in their apartment when and where Henry made the comment.
I, personally, find "Project Gayway" to be undeniably inoffensive, capturing as it does a facet of the show that's irrefutable even when we discover it in the most homophobic of minds and mouths. I don't care to emphasize this particular comment but rather the fact that, in closed company, innumerable discursive understandings about acceptability are constantly in play, are constantly being negotiated.
Kenneth and I regularly say awful awful things when we're alone together: our intimacy is defined by-- among many other things-- viciously sharp language, multiple forms of biting caricature, sarcastic mocking, and hideously rude comments, most all of which are directed outward, not at one another. Directed at one another in our lovers' discourse: numerous special voices (which I, borrowing from a friend of a friend, secretly call doll voices), quotations from shared texts and friends, cryptic phrases, and exuberant nonsense syllables.
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I'm fascinated by the fact that in a recent interaction-- in which I was chided by a colleague who characterized my assertion of cultural difference between Mexico and the US as racist-- he declared, "I think it's fine for you to say that just between you and me, but I think that we should be on the vanguard of debunking racial stereotypes." For the record, I simply suggested that Mexican culture is different from American culture without prioritizing the latter, I never invoked race, and I think the racist component of our exchange was his conflation of race and culture, but I digress... It's the "just between you and me" that interests me. It's that place of language that I find fascinating and terrifying and all.
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Emily Gould: "I still felt unmoored in the way you can only feel after a breakup, as if you’re the last living speaker of some dying language."
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My mind is pretty much blown by Gould's suggestion that the loss of an intimate engenders the loss an entire language-- or the ability to speak actively that language. She structures the idea as a simile, but I think she's onto something much more direct and real. The end of or abrupt shift in an intense relationship shatters all kinds of habits causing multiple uncomfortable difficulties, but, for someone like me if not for everyone, surely much of the pain is the slow death and decomposition of a discourse. Discourse, after all, being at the very heart of what holds any two people together. And after a break up, as I imagine it, the brain slowly, diligently plows under millions of linguistic paths which mapped out all that former closeness. Or, eventually allows them to fall into disrepair, grow moldy, broken, and indistinct.
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If I sound maudlin, it's only the counterpart to the lush intensity and wildly fecund liveliness of discourse in my humble understanding of things. It's because I cherish so dearly the intimacies of language.
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