I’m excited to be headed back to the American Comparative Literature Association conference this spring, which is being held in Toronto. Last year, when the conference was in Providence, I gave a talk tastefully titled “Fucking Fiction, Fucking Fact,” on Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s pornographic graphic novel Lost Girls. This year I will yet again be that panelist (the one dead set on close reading texts that make us feel funny in our pants). The 2013 conference theme is “global positioning systems,” i.e. metaphors of technology and place. In line with the work I’m presenting next week at the New Media DE panel, I’ll be talking about setting in text-based cybersex. Here’s the paper title and abstract:

“Online Sex Nowhere and Everywhere: Writing Place in Text-Based Cybersex”

Erotica’s long history is not only filled with fantasy acts, but also fantasy places. The chateau at Roissy, the Sadeian boudoir, the porn-set apartment where the leaky faucet calls for a strapping repairman. When we read longing, we also read location. “Sexuality is never expressed in a vacuum,” Angela Carter reminds us, and we could say the same of sex itself: it must always happen somewhere. Except, it would seem, on the internet. Cyberspace, hub of erotics in the digital age, strikes us as existing nowhere and everywhere; at any given moment thousands of internet users from across the globe are entwining their virtual bodies in the wireless ether.

Online sex takes many forms, some surprisingly literary. In addition to consuming and producing internet pornography, individuals regularly engage in one-on-one intercourse: stripping down in front of web cams, for example, or locking genitals through avatars in virtual worlds. Most longstanding of these practices is text-based cybersex — sex performed through instant messages or chat rooms. In these exchanges, lovers act out erotic encounters entirely through language, creating impromptu pieces of erotica as they describe kisses, moans, and (most importantly) steamy locations as backdrops to their passion.

This talk combines contemporary new media scholarship with literary close reading to examine how cybersex uses text itself to create erotic spaces, reintroducing the geography of fantasy into the unlocatable “where” of the internet.

I’m honored that the talk has been picked up by what sounds like a totally awesome panel called Intimate Mediations, organized by Christopher Grobe of Amherst College and Shonni Enelow of Fordham University. They write: “This seminar explores the rhetorics and techniques of intimacy created around emerging media or genres, from the novel to the blogosphere and beyond. We are interested not only in ways that intimate relationships are represented in media, but also in how media are used intimately.” Mmm, media intimacy. Now to snuggle up on the sofa with Scott’s adorable, squishy, anthropomorphized iPad named “Gary.”

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about my presentations, but this next one will be right here at Berkeley, and all are welcome! Next Wednesday, 11/14, from 3:30 to 5:00, three of us New Media DE grad students will be presenting from our work. The event will take place in 340 Moffitt, the Berkeley Center for New Media commons — also known as that classroom right near the entrance to Free Speech Movement Cafe. Any supportive, curious, or generally nerdy/pervy faces would be a welcome sight!

The talk I’ll be giving will generally lay out my research (on perversion and media). As a case study though, I’ll also be comparing love letters written by Franz Kafka to transcripts from text-based cybersex. Here’s the official description:

“Writing the Virtual Body: Kafka’s Love Letters and Text-Based Cybersex”

Online sex has many forms, some more literary than others. Text-based cybersex, the internet’s longest-lived form of erotic exchange, takes place through simple chat. Two or more partners write their bodies into virtual intercourse, leaving behind a transcript of their encounter: collaborative erotica generated in real time. However, such transcripts rarely find their way under the microscope of literary scholars. These high-tech texts go overlooked because they emerge from a confusing (yet crucial) new realm of authorship and expression, one in which language, media, and corporality blur.

Cybersex might not be such a strange new technology, though. Even the literary purists can agree on the value of close reading Kafka — and Kafka sent extensive love letters over the years to his partners Felice and Milena. At a time when the high efficiency of the postal system was itself a booming technology, the melancholy lover from Prague wrote missives that, similar to cybersex transcripts, also conjure up the virtual body through text. Indeed, we find this same intersection of technology, writing, sex, and the body in Kafka’s, “In the Penal Colony,” in which a high-tech execution machine sensually and painfully inscribes the sentence of each condemned man onto his flesh.

By reading Kafka’s letters and fiction alongside a sample transcript, we can begin to fashion a literary approach to analyzing chat-based cybersex, allowing us to consider questions like: How is language forming the virtual body? How does text transform into action, words into touch? What does it mean to write a fictional self for the sake of real-life pleasure? How is presence constructed in these media of separation?

I can’t promise sexy Powerpoint pictures of Kafka, but I can promise steamy cybersex transcripts projected on the big screen. I can’t promise Kafka slash fiction, but I can promise wanting to write some…

Thank you to the review committee for considering this grant proposal for my performance art project, “I Love You I Have Always Loved You: Masochist Encounters with Large-Scale Public Art.”

Describe the nature of your project: I will be traveling to various American cities to visit large-scale pieces of public art in urban settings. Instead of experiencing these works from a respectful distance, however, I will be challenging the nature of the art/viewer encounter by interacting with them so intimately that I intentionally hurt myself. I will climb tall, dangerous sculptures with “do not climb” signs in order to fall. I will embrace rusted metal statues in order to draw blood. When a piece of public art is too “safe” to hurt myself on (such as a smooth-sided, prominently displayed bust of a memorialized politician), I will camp out beside it without shelter, occasionally getting down on one knee on the crowded sidewalk to proclaim, “I love you! I have always loved you!” — with the goal of inflicting upon myself personal emotional turmoil, or inciting a judgmental passerby to shame me with laughter, whichever comes first.

What does your project offer that other contemporary work does not? There is plenty of great art that tries to affront, overwhelm, or change the viewer. However, our culture promotes well-being first and foremost, and we experience even the most arresting art with the remove of the museum-goer or the passerby. Our unwillingness to put ourselves in danger, physically or ideologically, often leaves us numb. Some performance and sculptural work, like that of Kal Spelletich, does tease us with the threat of physical harm. I’m not teasing. I want to remind people that sculpture is real, physical, there for us to wrap our arms around, whatever the consequences. And I want to show that, if we embrace an art object hard enough, it can affect us to much that it really does hurt.

How will your project impact the community? I expect that local communities will be pretty uncomfortable and confused about “I Love You I Have Always Loved You,” and that I may encounter problems with law enforcement. However, I hope to share my work with the large artistic community by posting online videos. Also, I feel good about making people uncomfortable and confused. I’m an art object too, in this piece. If they want to hug me hugging art until I bleed until they bleed, I encourage that.

What were your inspirations for this project? I recently saw Mary Coss’ “Three Graces.” Her sculptural figures have lower bodies made out of barbed wire, and are surrounded by white ropes that keep the visitor at a safe distance. This made me want to run past the rope and cling onto them. Without the illusion of safety and distance, I may not have felt the contrasting desire for physical connection and pain. Some of the barbed wire had gotten really rusty.

How much funding does your project require? I am estimating $2,000 in travel expenses, as well as an additional $2,000 in medical bills. I am currently insured, and will strive not to break any limbs, but feel I should be prepared for wherever the art encounter may take me — which is to say, possibly to the emergency room.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sculpture parks are a mixed bag. The best integrate form and material with environment. The worst plop overly sentimental or corporate-esque art into a preciously bucolic setting. Even Burning Man’s art-filled open playa, which the Artery carefully arrays like a vast, dusty sculpture park, has its stunning moments and its underwhelming ones.

The sculpture park on San Juan Island (between Washington State and British Columbia) offers a sometimes confusing mix of the good and the bad. The setting is calm and sylvan, but from the road the park looks silly at best. Statues of children frolicking with ponies join replica globes hugged by giant hands. However, there are some surprising opportunities for individual exploration, including a number of tiny trails down to the water’s edge. On a rainy, chilly October day, I had the place to myself, so I was all the more struck when I stumbled into a clearing and found Mary Coss‘ installation, “Three Graces.”

The piece consists of three female figures, each about 10′ tall, with nude cast-metal torsos, barbed wire skirts, no heads, and tree branches for spines. They stand in a triangle, with their backs together, each cordoned off by a white rope. If we take their title at its word, they represent “charm, beauty, and creativity.” Since they’re amputated, rusted, and hollow, we might want to look for some less graceful interpretations.

The circle of figures, almost a memorial, gives off a number of eerie impressions. They women seem simultaneously like ghosts, like once beautiful statues eroded by age, like female Christs at their crosses, or even like the bodily remains of a witch burning. The white safety rope, while inelegant, actually creates some interesting tension of its own: it becomes crime-scene chalk marks, the boundaries of magic circles, the edges of graves we’re peering into, platforms for an execution, or just a reminder that the art in front of us (which tempts us to reach out and touch its barbed wire) is dangerous.

Coss’ use of materials is really fascinating. You can see here that the skirts (or are they lower bodies with overly pronounced hips, or flames, or upward rushes of water?) are made from two types of barbed wire interwoven to make almost comically comely stripes — turning “female” arts like sewing and fashion into something gnarled and cruel. She incorporates the environments by using wood for the figures’ back supports; if you look closely, you can see that, because of the damp air, the wood has actually begun to grow fresh moss. Life is slowing creeping in despite the air of death and fracture that surrounds the Graces.

I had troubling finding information through the San Juan Islands Museum of Art, the organization based in Friday Harbor that runs the sculpture garden, but the signage on-site made it seem like the installation was up for all of 2012. I can’t help but think that fall was the best time to see it though: the falling yellow leaves caught in the barbed wire, the cloudy skies bringing out crumpled pocks in the figures’ nipples, the feeling that the Graces were trying (and failing) to cover themselves to keep out the wet and the cold.

“Three Graces” comes with a price tag ($1,700 a piece, $5,000 for the set), but it’s hard to imagine this piece outside its site. As public, urban art in would need to be sturdier, less prickly. In someone’s garden it would be too safe; the female figures would be protected by walls, hedges, each other. Does anybody own a largely uninhabited island?

Mary Coss seems to be largely based in Seattle, but I’d love to see what she would create for the playa, or even for the Black Rock Arts Foundation.

Another day, another bizarre intersection of quals reading and real life.

This afternoon I was sitting in a coffee shop in Pac Heights, doing reading about literary violence. The cafe was crowded; the only available table was tucked tightly against another next to it. Sharing intimate quarters with strangers while we pretend we’re not sitting on each other’s laps — this flips some animal switch in my brain, and makes me want to jump up on the table, hiss at my attackers, and run out on all fours. But I was waiting for someone, so, in an effort to concentrate, I found myself reading and re-reading the following quote from Bataille:

“I believe that there is nothing more important for us than that we recognize that we are bound and sworn to that which horrifies us most.”

The couple sitting next to me had seemed pretty standard Pac Heights: older thirty-somethings styled by the Gap, sharing a quiet moment over their mutual, rapt interest in their respective iPads. The woman seemed to know the waitress well; a cookie was brought over on the house, and they chatted. The woman joked with the waitress about her children’s Halloween costumes; what kids want to be bats? Then the waitress asked whether the woman had any Halloween plans herself. I personally suffer from obsessive Halloween glee, and hoping for some vicarious pleasure, my ears perked up. Here was her (surprising) answer:

Woman: No, I don’t have any plans. I… I don’t like Halloween.
Waitress: You don’t like Halloween? Why not?
Woman: Well, first of all I’m scared of it–
Husband: (Not looking up from his email) She’s got a lot of problems with Halloween.
Woman: I’m scared of it, and I don’t like getting dressed up–
Husband: Her house was broken into on Halloween when she was a kid.
Waitress: Oh my God, really?
Husband: Yup.
Woman: He, um, came in through a window. He was wearing a Halloween mask. I didn’t even like Halloween before then, but after that… It was really terrifying.

When this exchange started, I thought to myself, “What kind of horrible breezie hates Halloween?” Then I thought, “I strongly dislike you, business casual male spousal unit.” By the end of it, I was trying to imagine what life would be like if I too had 1) had my home broken into 2) when I was a child 3) by a guy WEARING A HALLOWEEN MASK 4) presumably, given that I was frightened by his mask, while I was in the house. And as much as I love Halloween, I had to exonerate that woman, because goddamn.

But, of course, when I looked back down at my book, there was Bataille telling us to acknowledge that we are inextricably linked to the things that most scare us. And maybe, in some version of reality, I should have turned to the woman and told her that her story, which she tried to laugh off, sounded genuinely traumatic, that I totally understood why she would be frightened of a holiday I adore, and that (this is the fun part) it is therefore all the more important the she “recognizes that she is bound and sworn to” Halloween. Go trick-or-treat, lady; embrace the flashbacks.

I kept my mouth shut, but I did think twice about my own “bounds” with the holiday. I can’t say Halloween horrifies me — but it is pleasantly Bataille-ian to love something that revolves around fear.

Funny that, while taking a work break after re-reading Kafka’s short story “The Vulture” (“Die Geier”), I should encounter this animal interest piece about a beluga whale caught on tape sounding an awful lot like a person.

According to i09, “for the first time ever, researchers have presented audio evidence of [whales] spontaneously mimicking human speech,” though marine researchers had long reported rumors that marine mammals seemed to be playing back some of their own speech patterns underwater. Eerily enough, it took researchers a while to figure out it was the beluga “talking” when they seemed to hear far-off voices: a diver, who had been in the tank with the whale, surfaced and asked “Who told me to get out?” His colleagues eventually concluded that the “‘out’ which was repeated several times” came from the whale.

Uncanny, right? A whale talking like a person tells you to get the heck OUT. Eerie how the whale had been presumably listening to, and even maybe understanding, human speech for long before researchers realized. Though, admittedly, the audio recording is pretty unthreatening and adorable; it sounds like someone gave a giddy ten-year-old a kazoo.

“The Vulture” has its own uncanny animal whom you don’t expect to understand human speech. The story is about a man whose feet are being hacked at by a vulture. When a gentleman passes by and asks the man why he doesn’t fight the vulture off, the man explains he’s worried the bird will just go for his face. The gentleman offers to go home and get his gun. Here’s the narrator:

“During the conversation [between the man and the gentleman] the vulture had been calmly listening, letting its eye rove… Now I realized that it had understood everything; it took wing, leaned far back… then, like a javelin thrower, thrust its beak through my mouth, deep into me. Falling back, I was relieved to feel him drowning irretrievably in my blood, which was filling every depth, flooding every shore.”

Some fun parallels (yes, I have a twisted sense of fun): not just does the vulture listen and understand, but like the beluga he also mimics human behavior — leaping forward to murder the man before the man can murder him. Plus, we’ve got water imagery any self-respecting whale would appreciate: blood that drowns, blood that floods, blood that fills up shores. What’s creepy in both cases is that a creature we think we’ve got figured out has in fact figured us out. The next time house guests joke about eating my pet rabbit, I’m going to warn them she might go for the jugular.