Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

rating: 4 of 5 stars

About a month ago, online buzz surrounded a “gender analyzer” tool designed to determine whether a Web site was written by a man or a woman.

I was reminded of the flurry of indignation and amusement caused by the tool (on my personal site: “We guess http://kthread.com is written by a man (58%), however it’s quite gender neutral. Is this correct?”) in the review my friend David posted of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex the other day:

Despite the fact that the author of the book is male – as is the narrator – I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself – like Cal – somehow transcended the very concept of gender.

For me, the story’s gender play nestles in poignant details–the unexamined mention that Uncle Pete’s suspect chiropractic practice in a 1959 Detroit wasn’t for clients “to free up their kundalini,” that the narrator’s grandfather chooses Sappho’s glyconic poetry to translate for decades.

Less playfully, the narrator observes restrictive male desire:

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Eugenides channels earlier, Italian postmodernism to write an epic novel that undercuts the epic, grandiose authorial fashion of recent years. Middlesex is, at moments, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius because the reader watches as grandparents Lefty and Desdemona create their genealogical fictions (as the narrator “dutifully [oozes] feminine glue”).

Piscine metaphors stream through the text, schooling Callie/Cal in gender assertion–key scenes include bathing suits, sea anemones in locker rooms, battles between gravity and bodies of water, faked menstrual cycles marked by catacomb fish symbols on a calendar.

While the protagonist’s childhood years are charted by a procession of family Cadillacs (the ‘boys & toys’ model), the novel scolds Dr. Luce (and by extension, the reader) for wanting to read straight toward one event in Callie’s life without the greater familial context.

The future is in bed in Schöneberg, but that’s not the end of the book. There must be a return to the matriarchal line first, a presentation of self in a book about self-presentation. The scratchy intercoms in the Middlesex house without walls reconnect mother and child: outmoded technology delivers comic relief.

And harkening back to the reverberating rustles of her silkworm chorus, the reader joins the vindicated Desdemona in the last spoken word of the text, as she looks at Cal and says, “Bravo.”

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After a storm, suspended rain drops reveal hidden webs on plants, dot the insides of flowers.

On my way to the University of Virginia this morning, I paused at a small outgrowth that held up a canopy of interlaced threads, much like I was about to do for a small audience of colleagues in the faculty lounge of the English department.

For my dissertation presentation, I talked about food interactions and shifting patterns of consumption in online networks.

These are the slides from today’s talk,

and I’ve posted the working draft from the presentation on a new blog where I will, from time to time, post new working drafts and ideas.

The title of my project is Culture Modding: How We Play With Our Food, Money, and Beds in the Twenty-First Century and the blog is culturemodding.com.

After the talk, Dana and Will whisked me away to lunch (how I adore these two beautiful people), and then I walked back past the dewy webs to Ben’s, where the debris of a long night spent discussing theory, interventions, and counterpublics spread over the coffee table, my sense of gratitude renewed for this network of startlingly smart friends.

Here’s to a weekend of old friends, new areas of critical inquiry, and intriguing, flexible networks—

I went for a walk this morning, doing sun salutations,

looking at the dew,

laughing as spider webs swayed out of focus…

and this afternoon, digital scholar of note danah Boyd Twittered from the Knight Commission gathering in Aspen; “listening to madeleine albright talk about her pins. today: a spider since we are talking about the web. powerful women make me drool.”

I Skyped my boss Marc, who then took a video of Ms. Albright and said pin, posted it on Vimeo and Knight Blog, and I thought I’d share it with you:

Spiders often align with powerful, supernatural bodies, and I wonder what the spider means Ms. Albright’s mood was today. While Ms. Frizzle remains my fashion icon, Ms. Albright now joins her as my accessory role model.

All of which is to say, I’m a bit starstruck today and readying for the Perseids meteor showers tonight… (find your local star chart here)…

When not chasing spider webs, you might find me dodging grates in downtown Miami sidewalks as my high heels carry me toward the tall building where I work managing online community for the Knight Foundation.

As most of you know, I was hired three months ago to architect and implement a large community area that will span many the multiple project categories that Knight funds; I’ll share more about that closer to launch (likely late this fall).

For the past month, though, I have been working on another project that we’re calling the Garage. A brief overview:

The News Challenge is the contest most people associate with Knight Foundation; it’s a yearly contest that awards up to $5 million for ideas about local news delivery mechanisms.

This new Garage site is to help potential News Challenge applicants think through their ideas with the people in the best positions to advise them: past contest winners and expert mentors.

It’s an “incubator” site, and we (the Knight News Challenge team) hope it will be a place where ideas mature and strengthen, emerging from the Garage raring to apply, win, and implement.

Though an intentionally simple Drupal (an open source content management framework) site, this is an experiment that may serve as a model for how foundations can stage grant applications and help proposed notions solidify into ideas with longevity.

And I jumped at the chance to work with Susan Mernit, who continues to mentor me, and who let me lead the project.

An ambitious timeline, the chance to work with a tech diva I admire, projects that connect those who can improve local information chains for all of us—can you tell why I’m happy to dodge those Miami grates on weekday mornings?

The Garage lives at garage.newschallenge.org, and you should come have a look.

How can you pass up a chance to talk strategy with the venerable Brian Oberkirch, implementation with Mr. Messina, social media with Beth Kanter, video with Ryanne and Jay? And that’s not even half of the cool kids in Garage ready to mentor you.

Come hang out, and let’s see what kind of awesome local news ideas we can think up together…

p.s. The Garage stays open until November 1st for project mentoring–

“How did you get into photography?” Jessica asked this weekend while we were exploring South Florida’s curious culinary landmarks.

I bought a camera on eBay, I told her, opened the box, attached the lens, and went outside. The first thing I saw was a spider’s web, and I developed that first image of the first roll in a dark room later that week as part of a photography workshop.

Soon after, kthread was born, in May of 2004 (I started blogging later, so we celebrate those anniversaries in January). That first spider image became the background of the first kthread, a conceptual Flash site where a spider figures heavily in the navigation. More details on kthread design and cyberfeminism in the colophon.

Another spider hovers in the current header image of this blog, and the universe continues to place webs in my path.

With so much still to learn about photography, I’ve found webs difficult to capture (perhaps it’s the challenge I enjoy so)—the strands are too slender for the camera’s viewfinder, and it all dissolves into a beautiful blur.

(Read the rest after the jump.) More »»