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epitome of incomprehensibility
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I woke up dizzy. This was 2012, in the middle of my Master's degree in Ontario, but I was staying at my parents' house for the weekend. Why? I was presenting a paper at a Concordia graduate conference on apocalyptic literature.
I woke up dizzy when my mom knocked on the door. I complained of this, how I'd gotten only three hours of sleep. She knew I'd been through a lot lately, so she babied my anxious mouth with a sandwich, my closing eyelids with the promise, "Go back to sleep, and I'll wake you up later and drive you."
In the car later, I last-minutely crossed out swathes of my original paper. Put lines through paragraphs I wasn't going to read.
Despite the exhaustion and rush, mine was a cheerful apocalypse. (I wrote "cheerful conference" by mistake just now. It was that too.) My book was Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. When the world ends, it's all rather matter-of-fact. The main character has already been unsettled by her move to a nursing home, which is revealed to be a surreal dreamscape - what's a little apocalypse on top of all that? She can have an afterlife at one end of the world or another: the underworld isn't burning hell, but cozy warmth; the overworld is a flight of fancy, maybe too cloudy and with less community.
That's what I remember of the book. I wrote how it subverted the conventions of apocalyptic literature, and maybe this fit into the keynote speaker's theme (our world-ending-suddenly apocalypses have issues: they blind us to real, gradual problems like global warming). Maybe this fit in with the keynote speaker's theme, but my paper got put into a quirky not-apparently-apocalyptic panel. Odds and ends, labeled something about gender.
There were two other readers. I don't remember the guy's paper, but the other woman there presented one about James Joyce's letters. Her theory was that the erotic letters started by Nora Barnacle, later Nora Joyce, helped J.J. shed his inhibitions about writing about sex. In short: no sexy letters from Nora, no Ulysses. Maybe.
Now, the actual letters from Nora's side haven't survived, only James'. So we only read her sentences when he's quoting her. He had enough horniness of his own; Kate Beaton has a comic about his letters: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=32
Anyway. So the girl reading the paper reads something like, "So when Joyce quoted her sentence, 'I want to be fucked by you...'" and this is the moment when I happen to look at my mother, who's in the audience. Surprised face! Shocked face! The "F word" in a respectable conference paper: it IS the end of the world!
I was both amused and embarrassed - a sort of secondhand embarrassment, because this didn't directly have to do with me. On my part, I thought I'd read my paper well, and answered questions confidently. But sharp-eared Mom had a criticism: "You didn't really answer the second person's question. You answered the first question very well, but I thought you dodged the second one."
She was right: I did dodge it. I didn't know what to say, so I talked about something that I *did* know instead. Embarrassment enveloped me, there in the car on the way back.
I don't remember now what the question was, or what my answer was. I do remember that I turned inward to critique the wording of poor Nora Joyce, who couldn't defend herself. To myself, I wondered:
"I want to be fucked by you"? Why the passive verb? Why not "I want to fuck you"? Or, if in those days "fuck" was considered synonymous with penetration, why not "I want you to fuck me?"
We interrupt this segment for an ad. Ahem:
Grammarly suggests using ACTIVE VERBS rather than PASSIVE VERBS in your correspondence to give it more zest and zing. You never know when your horny letters might get quoted at a conference on apocalyptic literature! You never know when some sleep-deprived grad student might nitpick their wording!! Beware!!!
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