Shades of grey

Post-modernism is a talking point in our household because the F-word is an artist. To an artist post-modernism means something different from what it meant to me as an academic woman, and what it means to me now as a cultural participant. I think post-modernism is a uselessly, broadly accurate (not to mention ugly) term for a kind of relativism whose absence these days renders any academic or cultural inquiry worthless, and whose presence renders art wankerish.

But when it comes to cultural documents I sit around and read, keep your doubtless clever-ish post-war reinterpretations of everything, and give me a raging Oxbridge maso-queen who thought of women as 'raddled meat' and of Arabs as a society of lazy gorgeous dreaming males whose limbs quivered when they sexlessly, hygienically fucked each other in the sand.

Long way about of saying that so far The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an absolute lark. I don't know how long I'll continue with it though. 600 more pages to go, when there are so many other books in the world. . . And the bulk of my fascination with it is of the sort I feel when I'm listening to a sauced Englishman blathering about ethnic groups without any restraint borne of modesty or cultural relativism - I can enjoy it for an evening, and after that he's just another liquor-soaked twat who might as well be talking about football teams, and who thinks, if he thinks at all, that post-modernism is a communist tool to rob him of all credibility.

In that blathery sense The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is even better than my old favourite Wilfrid Thesinger - another of those hygienic, 'sexless' types who dug young Arabs and who had an enjoyably terse, funny writing style - because Thesinger seemed to have tried his best to become one of them (living for a long time with the Marsh Arabs in Iraq, who did badly under Saddam Hussein). Whereas, in his writing at least, Lawrence is so awfully English and the Arabs - not to mention the Turks and Jews - are so awfully not. I don't know if he loved them - he's certainly rather crueler than Thesinger about them - and so far he gives the impression that everything good they did was more or less an accident until he came along.

The thing is, books like Seven Pillars are the story of me, of us, as western Anglophones (nobody else reads this blog, do they?) - our identity documents. Post-modernist or not, I can't understand being impatient with or dismissive of these texts or the general Dead White Male canon, or primary sources in general. Incomplete, maybe; but meaningless? Certainly not! We can't invent a post-modernist past when we have such a profoundly pre-modernist history; we can't be revisionists; that's the only thing that's worse than being an asshole in the first place, and it stops us from knowing ourselves. When Lawrence writes that Arabs are incapable of seeing shades of grey, only being capable of seeing black and white, thus 'despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns', it tells us so little about Arabs but so much about us.

The Hormone Factor

Home again, thank goodness. It always shocks me how much I miss the F-word when I'm away. The last couple of days of this trip were rendered even more difficult by the onset of ovulation in a male-dominated environment - all these industrial conferences are just swarming man pits. High point of my estrogen-fuelled confusion was the mid-conference 'dinner-in-the-offsite-swanky-restaurant' event, when I was seated next to this attractive west-coast type I'd just met:

West-coast type: So what is it specifically that you do?
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm sorry, did you just ask me what it is I'd like to tell you to do?

Honestly, I totally thought that was what he'd said.

In the end it was a great event - I really enjoyed myself. The city was goddamn magical. And I think I have hit on a way of being social and networky at these events that doesn't make me feel like a massive corporate whore - using Elvis's old trick of being interested works really well; all these people are interesting, as long as I figure out how. Met some very nice people indeed. And had a little time to read, though the hotel's lovely spa seriously ate into my personal brain time. Also all the waiting around in aeroports was done with co-workers - a new and luckily pleasant experience for me. But on the plane ride there, I read Jamaica Inn; I played a bit of hooky during one of the sessions and read The Human Factor; and on the plane ride back, I read the first hundred pages or so of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Not as much time as I'd like to write about them this morning, but must say that The Human Factor is fucking awesome, as close to perfect as any novel I can think of offhand, from the first sentence to the last. I was very fond, as I wrote, of The Quiet American (fantastic narration) and less fond of The Power and the Glory (some good guilt but too much English-dagoishness); The Human Factor is quite different from those. It deals with duty and culpability in a more - adult? - way perhaps, in a less guilty, Catholic way. . . it's hard to say what I mean.

In all three books there's a sort of running thread of the inevitability of guilt and duty, but in The Human Factor it's as though the inevitability has overwhelmed the guilt almost completely. There's something more tired or resigned about it. When I have some downtime today I'll be interested to see when he wrote each. The Human Factor seems more like a book an old man would write and Maurice Castle seems more like an old man's hero. Top notch.

Briefly

I am a networking, gladhanding, business card throwing machine. It's worse for your brain than ecstacy.

Lisbon is a pretty great city. It makes me think of southern Italy without the utter hopelessness, stifling sexism, and filth. Before moving into to a hotel so swanky that the bathrooms in the double rooms have glass walls so you can watch your partner do their business (only the swanky are that pervy, I find), I was staying in a great non-swanky hotel in the Barrio Alto, where people offer you drugs and what feels like the whole city drinks and laughs and chats all night. Lovely. Good to get in that sort of quality time with a couple of my co-workers too, although I forebore to buy drugs in front of them. Must keep some mystique.

But this place is great - cheap, friendly, fun, and really really beautiful in a sun-baked way - and really full of the feeling that everything has been rough but is going to get better and better. Not like the south of Italy. This place feels both more cynical and more optimistic, somehow. Also very different are the women. Much, much more independent than in the south of Italy. Chicken-and-egg question - is that because the men are so much less insufferable? They smile and look up and down instead of catcalling and getting in your fucking way, as in Italy. God, Italian men. But that's a rant for another time. The important thing is it's been war menough for the construction workers here to not wear tps and that's awesome.