Writing performatively

I have experimented over the past ten years or so with writing performatively, or rather, representing in text what I am trying to accomplish visually and aurally. Several examples are available on my webpage and include the results of an interview with Mary Gergen, the script for an A/V production about Klaus Riegel and Ken Gergen, the script for my Princess Margaret A/V and a very early piece about Akira Kurosawa and Gerotranscendence.

The Kurosawa presentation holds particular memories for me. I took a slow boat to Bergen, Norway to present it at a conference. It was mostly me rambling on about my idea that Kurosawa's main character was a fine representation of Tornstam's Theory of Gerotrancendence; I played clips from Kurosawa's film, Ran, (with sound) behind me whilst reading my paper (I seldom do this anymore, read directly to an audience, that is), trying to build a 'performative' montage of sorts.

Those were early days. The audience didn't seem to get it at all. No one would sit with me at lunch following the presentation. I should have known then that I was on to something.

I draw attention to these early attempts at writing performatively for several reasons.

First, I think it is important to revisit the initial motivations behind these early efforts and even try to recapture a bit of their naïveté and enthusiasm for finding new ways of expressing our scholarship. As my work becomes more sophisticated (even 'skillful'), it is important for me not to abandon such initial struggles and uncertainties which represent the creative part of the process.

What was involved in all of these early pieces was creative problem-solving --being presented with a particular puzzle or challenge and then finding the tools from the arts (using text as graphic illustration; mixed media including TV, overheads, audio, etc.; radio script writing; and film as background montage) to respond to such questions. This is what Performative Social Science is about and should be doing. I am often reminding myself and others of this fact.

I did not suddenly decide to turn myself into a graphic illustrator, script writer or filmmaker. I remain a social scientist with a particular story to tell or message to get across who is exploring which media would best help me to accomplish that. I don't worry about whether I am very good at the use of a particular medium but rather, wonder whether the medium will serve the purpose. I then begin the struggle with the particular new means of communicating. This process itself holds many of the joys and frustrations of each project, but also the opportunities to really explore the creative process.

I have mentioned recently that the 'writing up' of our projects should be ancillary to our work, not the main reason for doing it. For me, more interesting are the scripts themselves, the notes, the diagrammatic evidence that our projects leave behind as a kind of record. If we must publish, these would certainly hold more interest for me.

(I have a coffee table piled with beautiful books; I do love publications, especially ones with pictures! Illustrated above.)


Publish or perish drives much of academic life. It has its origins in hard science where the first to get his experiment, finding, theory, etc. into publication won. Other academic disciplines followed suit by imitating this system. It has developed both a 'style' of academic writing as well as a vetting process that are both by now antiquated and suspect.

Recently, I had an email from an academic who was exploring the performative and experimenting with the means available to him. The enthusiasm in his message was palpable and I expectantly opened the accompanying published paper that he had attached to his message. I was met with pages of dry 'scholarly' justifications for what he was trying to accomplish performatively, instead of anything I could really find inspirational or even helpful to the work of others.

We have all been caught up in this bind from time to time, me included. Fortunately, publication itself is being forced to change and more and more, multi-media is now often requested as part of the publication process. These changes are driven mostly by economics, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a good time to take advantage of the opening up of narrow prescriptions for publication of our work. Even 'tenure' requirements are beginning to include not just X number of published papers but also the possibility of outputs through alternative media. Funders are looking for outcomes from their investments in us and want to know how we will affect change in the wider world; i.e., the world beyond the very few other academics who happen to read a journal article. This time of flux should be seen as an opportunity to get our alternative responses to dissemination of social science data out there.

I enjoy writing here for this blog. It began as an experiment for me; once again, I started out not sure of what I was doing or how I would go about doing it. I was uncertain of the outcome as well.

One result for me is that I am less and less interested in writing that does not communicate more directly with an audience and include my 'self' in that process. All I really have to share with anyone else is my own experience. It may be flawed and/or of little value to anyone else. For these reasons, I try to find a way in which what I write here will be both of some usefulness to others in their own work, but also attempt to write it with some skill and craft at the same time.

Nice to chat. Gotta go.
Kip

PS Hope to see many of you at the Bournemouth Qualitative Conference in September! About one-third of it this time is performative!

Embracing Serendipity

I am getting old enough now that I finally realise that certain times/moments in my life were pinnacles, not predictors of things to come.

I recall the dizzying heights of firsts: the initial film that spoke to me personally, the foundational book that changed my thinking, that earliest piece of music that clutched my heart and made me cry. I thought that such moments would continue through life ad infinitum. Never mind a love that I thought would last forever, a body abused that I assumed would always recover, the promise of undying friendship that simply withered away. Indeed, I now find myself no longer astonished when people lack integrity, but am surprised that I still have some. Today, that fetching glance from a stranger is more about what might have been, a beautiful idea is no longer a grand painting, unnumbered days are now more finite, but nonetheless their numbers ignored as they always were.

I write these things down because I think about them. I know that simply thinking up a grand idea, plan or work of art is a half measure and I have grown more and more suspicious of those who think their lives away instead of living them productively and creatively. Roddy suggested that I do something with the first sentence of this piece when I first wrote it. So I have, because it is the nature of the artist to do so. Art is action.

So many people seem unaware of what art is about. What it is about is, in fact, constantly changing. The art of today is often amorphous, gaseous and without formal structure. Some grasp habitually at a definition of the ‘self’, mistakenly constructed outside of community. Much of today’s art proposes a naïveté unavailable to a Western eye, a Western experience. It becomes, therefore, a pre-art-historic pantomime. As art always has, however, it simply reflects the time in which it is made. Within this peculiar parameter (historicity) and with some relief, at least we can call it art.

I felt sorry for the art students at Goldsmiths documented in a recent television programme (Goldsmiths: But Is It Art?) that I watched . Skill seems no longer a requirement for admission or even taught. (Contemporary musicians still learn to play their instruments, thankfully). The study of art seems to have abandoned such practice. This is a pity, because much of producing visual art is about seeing. To become skilled at seeing better, learning to draw helps. The Goldsmiths students were more concerned with ‘concepts’ and the ideas that occupied their heads. They thought about them and made grimaces and worried most about the competition, but in a business-like way. The problem seemed to be that they had little skillfulness to execute their ideas. A shame, really, because some of them seemed talented.

I have been revisiting Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies and other arts-based generative processes to rethink our School’s structure and roles within that structure. Every member of staff has been invited to express their vision (‘ReThink’) for the School in Moleskine Japanese-style sketchbooks. An exhibition of the books will then be held at the end of the exercise.

I love that there is buzz around this project at community level ⎯in some ways, an unexpected one. The unanticipated can be one of life's pleasures, particularly when it is positive. The project proceeds bottom-up rather than managerially top-down, stimulated by creative encounters within the interface between materials and concepts, and a notion quite new to most of the people engaged in this ‘product as the process itself’. Colleagues who are somewhat deadened by systems and structures, formats and formulas are being asked to reinvest the personal in their workplace, be creative and produce an object that documents, even stimulates and expands, their own ideas for a better School.

Many of us are recoiling these days from the tsunami of “business management style” that has washed over academia in the UK. It has resulted in universities that are managed for management’s sake, some calling it ‘a confident, businesslike approach’ (Beer, J. Oxford Brookes University). Once the many meetings have been held, the strategies imposed and the management structures layered with more tiers than a wedding cake, the administration sees the job as a fait accomplis. Except for the counting; there will always be counting.

The actual work of facilitating learning and discovery seems almost abandoned in the need to mimic a management style that would itself be more comfortable in the 1980s. In fact, it is the equivalent management approach that was superimposed upon many not-for-profits in America at that same time. The identical omission is being made again: managers are forgetting that these organisations are about people first and that they will always work best when loosely structured and even a bit messy.

The irony of finding a business academic talking about using oblique strategies or ‘obliquity’ as he calls it, then, came as quite a surprise to me. John Kay, a visiting Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, defines obliquity as ‘an extremely useful strategy for getting the most out of life: stop pursuing your goals and you are far more likely to achieve them’ . It’s like love: we never find it when we are looking for it. Once, it was just standing there, next to a popcorn machine. It took me about 45 minutes to realise it.

Kay believes ‘that most of the challenges we face involve too many intricately connected factors to ever be fully understood. It is only by embracing this fact that we can learn to make better decisions’. He continues that the most profitable companies in the world are not dedicated to profit; the best cities in the world are not the planned ones .

According to Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, linear thinking is not the best way to find creative solutions. Mixing it up, serendipity and even chaos all contribute to eliciting ideas that promise freshness and innovation. ‘Breath more deeply’ and ‘Do nothing for as long as possible’ are two of my favourite suggestions from the Strategies. Mash-ups in music and on television (Glee, for instance) demonstrate that freshness and innovation can be accomplished by combining two or more often-old ideas or forms, creating new ones that are more than the sum of their parts. These are all processes that we are suggesting in our School’s ‘ReThink’ project.

When I was writing my PhD thesis, I used to keep a notebook near the television. If some phrase or word caught my attention, I would enter it into my notebook. When I was in the throws of writing the 80,000-word thesis and words escaped me or my language had simply become tediously repetitive, I would flip through my TV notebook and find a fresh bon mot or phrase that would either stimulate my writing or work directly on my page. In fact, I used philosopher Alain de Botton’s clever word that I heard on TV, ‘Proustifications’, for one of my Chapter titles. Later, when I met him, I confessed and sheepishly apologised for stealing his word.

“Wasn’t that plagiarism?” someone once naively asked me.

“No” I responded, “It was art”.

I still keep a TV notebook. For your pleasure, I end with a few entries:

“A new language requires a new technique” ⎯Philip Glass

“This isn’t the kind of job you do to send out precise messages. You do television if you want to send out precise messages” ⎯Italian artist

“You don’t have to be watching a story to feel something” ⎯George Balanchine

“I would rather wear out than rust out” ⎯Dolly Parton

My contribution to my School's ReThink project using Eno's Heroic Strategies and a Moleskine Sketchbook.

18 May 2010

You can now view photos of our School's sketchbooks and exhibition.

A Roundtable Conversation on Tomorrow, In A Year

A Roundtable Conversation on Tomorrow, In A Year from The Knife on Vimeo.
With The Knife (Olof and Karin), Planningtorock (Janine), Mt. Sims (Matt).
Performed by Olivia Plender. Images by Hort

Hotel Pro Forma

My (fake) Dazed and Confused Interview

Skimming Dazed and Confused online this morning, it finally dawned on me that they probably will never ask me for an interview after all. Hmmmm. Years ago I would have slumped in a corner and licked my wounds. Not today! I publish below my answers to a typical D&C interview (with myself):


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WHAT’S…

...so special about you, then?
I find inspiration in the ordinary and don’t act my age

…the last film you saw?
The Singer

...the last song you heard?
Loin De Paname (Paris, Paris)

...the song you wish you had written?
Ode to Joy

...the best piece of advice you've heard?
“It is what it is ‘til it isn’t.”

...better, dusk or dawn?
a dusky dawn

…so good about Bournemouth?
It’s usually one degree (Celsius) warmer than the rest of the UK

...your favourite piece of clothing?
My black, red and gold Diesel trainers

...the world coming to?
a teenager’s idea of pornography in 3-D

...the name of your hero?
Ken Gergen

...so special about your hero?
He wrote academic prose that made me cry

...your worst fashion secret?
I like to wear the same clothes daily in my flat

...this future going to bring?
more art, more performance, more relaxed scholarship

...your favourite website?
kipworld of course

...at the top of your shit list?
Academics pretending to be managers

...at the top of your wish list for 2010?
become a film maker

How would you describe your work?
Treacherous and blissful

Chopin and Me

‘I began to wonder what it would be like if the University hired Chopin to compose music, but then asked him to give piano lessons’.

I realised somewhat later that I had been drawn into a ‘debate’. Now the British love debate just about as much as they fancy baked beans (QI fact: 'Britons eat 97% of the world's baked beans'). It’s cultural and we foreigners just have to get used to it if we are going to live and work here.

On the other hand, this was a mistake on my part. It was a blunder because my position is one of congeniality and co-operation, not confrontation. Not even trying to win the point. What’s the point?

In a nutshell, the whole ‘conversation’ or debate was about our time and energies being micro-managed, knee-jerk responses to management’s change for the sake of change and how these changes are ‘sprung upon us’ with little or no input from us in the first place. There is a lot of politics involved in this: positioning to solidify positions. It reflects a warped sense of what management is about in the first place. In the end, it is mostly about people doing whatever is necessary to pay their mortgages. This makes me very sad because any integrity goes completely out of the window-- abandoned in a smug and self-congratulatory way. Congratulations for having a survival instinct.

After this to and fro by e-mail, I needed to calm down. I was hurt and disappointed and even somewhat insulted that no one seemed interested in hearing my position on these changes. I even felt somewhat scorned for having a position or response in the first place. The silence from most was deadening (some did come to me privately the following day to congratulate me and quietly voice their approval).

Later that evening, I decided to tune into Donald Macleod’s Radio 3 Composer of the Week programme to calm myself down. This week it happens to be Chopin. Macleod has presented some wonderful programmes in this series (his week on Astor Piazzolla, the king of the tango, was amazing for its depth-of-knowledge and variety). He also presents somewhat obscure composers as well and they are a real education for me.

Macleod began by recounting the period when Georges Sand convinced Chopin to spend a winter in a run-down monastery on Mallorca. Cold and damp, Chopin became quite ill whilst there. I have visited this very monastery on a cold and damp day myself. The rooms are completely made of stone. On the day that I was there, a Spanish chaperone guarded the room that Chopin worked in by leaning her bosom over his piano and clipping her fingernails … all the while with a military eye on visitors to the room. Anyway, not a great place to compose music, I think.

The radio programme proceeded with some of Chopin’s Mazurkas. I began to fall into a dream-like sleep (I would say I was having another Keanu Reeves-like narcoleptic episode, but my GP says this is impossible). I began to wonder what it would be like if the University hired Chopin to compose music, but then asked him to give piano lessons.

This is the situation I am in. It is not that I would not like to impart my wisdom to freshers, but I think that my energies are better spent doing the job that I was hired to do: secure the funding to produce cutting-edge internationally important research. I write about it, make films and videos about it and it is shared in a very democratic way with all through the Internet. I have been doing this for some time now. My work is easily available to any student who wishes to access it. This very blog is a tangential and free-form educational tool. I have made commitments to write two books for publication which should benefit students for some time to come. My door is always open and I am available by e-mail at least 12 hours daily. I am willing to chat with anyone about my work or theirs.

I just do not have the time or the energy to commit to ‘teaching slots’ for undergraduates en mass who most likely are not up to speed and not yet very interested in the specific field in which I plough. This job is better reserved for those with subject expertise and experience as teachers at undergrad level.

A portion of my time (40%) is committed through external funding to leading a research project. I supervise PhD and Masters students, which is also time-consuming. The remainder of my time is devoted to making my contribution to the Centre for Qualitative Research and its activities and working across boundaries with The Media School. Enough is enough.

I am in the business of doing what I do best. This is as much as I can do.

‘But your no Chopin’, you might say? Oh, yes, I am.

Synchronicity

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

--Cole Porter

I have been hoping to blog about two things: our recent Masterclass in Theatrical Interpretation of Research Data and Carol Channing.

The Masterclass was a great success. Sharon Muiruri, the facilitator, was a real star and the participants, for the most part, really dug in and contributed to developing this emerging concept of using improv as an interpretive tool to interrogate research data. I had a few ah-ha! moments of my own, particularly in regards to the script development for our eventual film for the Gay and Pleasant Land? Project.

With little connection at all (ah, but with typical kipworld synchronicity you might say?), except that I have been rethinking corporeal theatre and how expressing life story metaphors and developing characterizations might be accomplished physically, I wanted to write my Carol Channing story. In a recent interview, Channing talked about Stanislavsky and ‘the spine of the character’ and how, astoundingly, she used Stanislavsky’s method to develop her title role in the musical, Hello, Dolly!

I was going to write my own personal recollection about meeting Channing in the green room of an American television talk show. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she transformed into the character ‘Carol Channing’ right in front of us. This was accomplished with a wig, false eyelashes, crimson lipstick, some spit and a tin of Stein’s theatrical grease paint, much to the astonishment of all, including Mary Kay of Mary Kay Cosmetics who sat transfixed, yet horrified. I promise to tell the complete story at another time.

In the meantime, you may think that I have totally gone off the deep end and all ‘show biz’ on us here! This is not at all the case. I am still a social science researcher, I promise. Herein, however, lies the conundrum (and its synchronicities) behind what I would like to write about now.

Is Performative Social Science (PSS, for short) Art or Social Science? It isn’t either. It is a fusion of the Arts and Social Sciences, creating a new paradigm where tools from the Arts and Humanities are explored for their utility in enriching the ways in which we research social science subjects and/or disseminate or present our research to our audiences. This does not mean that we simply ‘put on a play’ (I have written about this elsewhere) or even make a film (and I need to constantly be wary of that pitfall myself these days in lieu of our Project's promised cinematic output).

It certainly isn’t taking academic prose (or interview transcriptions), leaving out a line or two here and there, and then rearranging it on the page in stanza format mimicking poetry, then passing it off as ‘poetic inquiry’. (Even worse: then calling ourselves poets.) It isn’t thinking that our lives (the ‘snowflake’ phenomenon) are so precious and unique that surely the world wants us to interpret our individuality (too often through the device of painful self revelation and angst). Usually to a captured audience, these academics perform their stories by crawling around the floor for an half hour or so and calling it dance or producing a monologue that seems never to have a conclusion.

Instead, let’s return to what we should already know quite well: academic research. I recall the standard rule-of-thumb suggestion that we make to postgrad students all of the time: ‘Find a research method that best fits the research question(s)’. This imperative applies to PSS as well. Within the vast richness of the Arts and Humanities, which lens, device, technique or tradition might deepen our research process or expand our dissemination plan? Do we automatically put on a play or make a film from our research data because we are so many frustrated actors or film directors, without ever asking which art form best fits the research question and the data that it has produced?

Many of us have turned to the arts for both inspiration and practical assistance in answer to our own frustrations with more standard research protocols and outputs. Perhaps our methods have become shop worn (routinely slotting vast amounts of data into ‘themes’ and then banging on about ‘rigour’ comes to mind as an example)? Perhaps the problem lies within our methodologies? Do we write too glibly about the ‘evocative’ without knowing what it is that is being evoked and how or, better yet, what our work might provoke instead? Do we falsely champion the ‘embodied’ without realising that through this binary by default we risk painting ourselves back into the Cartesian corner of mind/body duality that we are supposed to have abandoned in post-modern times? Yes, we turn elsewhere, rightfully so.

In addition, we have been encouraged to find ways to reach wider audiences by funders and, because of this, we have begun to look beyond academic journals or narrow academic subject groups (conference presentations or what I like to call ‘preaching to the choir’). Funders now want to know the benefits to society of our research and how it might affect society –the ‘outcomes’ of our efforts.

Performative Social Science, when it is at its best and humming along, is a synthesis that provides answers to many of these very requirements. Ideally, our audiences should be almost unaware of the seams where we have cobbled together in-depth, substantial scholarship with artistic endeavour. In my estimation, part of doing this 'performative social science' is the breaking down of the old boundaries, but also the old expectations and frameworks of what research is supposed to look like after it is ‘finished’. I am more and more convinced these days that any academic written texts reporting research should be 'supporting ancillary documents' to productions, not the final results or raison d’êtres of research efforts.

Nonetheless, we are researchers. We are not actors, directors, filmmakers, dancers, poets and so forth. There are vast opportunities and outlets (and frustrations and roadblocks) for those who wish to pursue those professions. We can learn a great deal from these folks who often needed to wait tables and do other menial jobs in order to pursue their dream profession. They may help us look at our own field through new lenses, but let’s not insult them by falsely assuming their hard-earned mantles.

In return, a word of caution to artists who might be drawn to working with researchers: the world of academia is not simply a new venue for you to put on a play, dance a dance or publish a poem. There are both constraints and opportunities in the academic world as well, which we are happy to share with you through our collaborations.

Through interfaces with techniques from the arts and humanities opportunities are presented to work with social science material and expand its means of production and dissemination to novel and creative levels. This requires the fusion mentioned earlier. This necessitates co-operation and collaboration. Communication and common ground are key to successful collaboration and fusion.

A closing word of caution: there are a few reptiles perched on the periphery of our pleasant pond. PSS, as the concept and its terminology become more familiar, runs the risk of providing a phrase or two for academics who would rather incorporate the language of what we are doing into their own outputs without really challenging either their own thinking or work. They subsume the language of PSS, but never really re-examine their own procedural techniques or output methods (and our developing terminology is, in this way, incorporated within standard academic journal writing rather than through any meaningful reinvention of research methods and dissemination). As Pollyanna I occasionally forget that there are a few academics lying in wait like lizards whose tongues dart out as soon as someone else's hard work and new ideas come into view from their lily pads. Let’s call them on this when they do so.

Most of all, however, we need to be careful not to implode PSS through an overblown sense of what we are about. In our enthusiasm, let’s not be too quick to anoint ourselves as poets, actors, dancers or magicians. When we do become one of those, I am sure others, more qualified to judge, will quickly let us know.

Anything goes? I don’t think so.

“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, awfully difficult.” *

I am glad that I set the TV to record lots of programmes while I was away recently, particularly some movies that I would otherwise have missed. Last night I watched “Grey Gardens”, the HBO movie drama based upon the Maysles brothers 1975 documentary of the same name and winner of the 2010 Golden Globe for best motion picture made for television.

Following the film, I watched the documentary as well. A few things stood out for me: one being how much of the dialogue from the documentary is included in the film’s script. The second was how cleverly the actors took on the nuances of the characters, again based upon attention to the details provided in the documentary, but also by digging deep into archival material beforehand.

Jessica Lange, playing ‘Big’ Edie Beale, is just not acting by means of a fantastic ageing transformation accomplished by make-up. She has also done her homework. In one scene in the documentary, Edie removes and then replaces two horn combs from either side of her aged grey hair. In the drama, Lange does the very same bit of ‘stage business’. It is through this attention to personal detail that the character becomes believable and real. The comparisons between the two efforts go on; what is important here is to note how in-depth ‘research’ is being used to produce dramatic story telling.

These are details that take on importance for me in our writing of the script for our project, Gay and Pleasant Land?. At this juncture (where most of the research has been carried out and we are just beginning to use improvisation for script development), my viewing of these two films has added poignancy. Albert Maysles, one of the filmmakers, has stated that the characters are ‘just like anybody else, but more so’. Elsewhere, Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon) reports: ‘It’s very simple to get a cross section of society within a village; you get a microcosm of the social macrocosm’. Our film about being gay and living in a rural village should do exactly that. This is what we hope will give it its universality and connection with the audience.

Grey Gardens (both the drama and the documentary) has been compared to a Greek tragedy. Describing the mother and daughter relationship, Scott Frankel (composer of the musical version of Grey Gardens) has stated that "in this complicated relationship it is always the parent who both inflicts the severest wounds and also bandages them with the most tender care." A decision has been reached that our short film for Gay and Pleasant Land? should be character driven. By creating ‘composite’ characters based upon our research, our ‘docu-drama’ has a better chance at reaching those wide audiences and changing hearts and minds.

Our efforts here (as well as in other filmic work being carried out by myself and Trevor Hearing at Bournemouth University) begin to reshape our thinking about what documentary filmmaking is and how we might change it. No longer satisfied with the slick news reporting style of documentary making, we are beginning to look around the edges of production and reinvest the medium with the creativity it deserves. One such way is by looking at how dramatic interpretation (resulting in a renewed and active audience participation in interpretation) can revamp the medium. Concepts such as ‘beyond text’, death of the author (and yes, even ‘death of the subject’, at least in terms of camera focus) are all now in play in our creative experimentations.

The paradox of ‘death of the author’ became clear to me when watching Grey Gardens last night. Although I was involved and absorbed by the story of these two women, it became clear to me that I also had my own story to tell, one that reflected the setting of Grey Gardens, perhaps even some of its story. I questioned if the only story that any of us have to tell is our own? In blurring the relation between the writer and his characters, which am I? How transparent am I really then, in telling someone else’s story? What rings true for me in this case is that Grey Gardens moved me profoundly because I found my own story in it.

When I was 21 years old, I spent the summer living with a family in Chestnut Hill, a part of Philadelphia which was a 19th Century escape from the heat and disease of summer city dwelling. My roommate at Art College came from Chestnut Hill and took me to visit for a weekend at the end of spring term that year. We stayed for the whole summer.

The family in this case was Irish Catholic and, therefore, outsiders in Anglo-Saxon, upper-crust Chestnut Hill (in the 1920s locals burned down the only Catholic church in the area). The family’s two daughters were day students at Raven Hill, the same private school run by Catholic nuns that Grace Kelly (another upwardly-mobile Irish-Catholic Philadelphia family) attended.

The house was a huge Victorian pile with lots of rooms and a widow’s walk perched on top. It was painted shades of grey at the time and a bit dilapidated. The owners of the house and parents of the two Raven Hill girls, Anna and Charlie Meehan, were struggling financially. The house reflected this, with its former glory furnished with the Meehan's well worn fittings that had seen their day. There were lots of rooms, just like Grey Gardens, a big kitchen that surely servants had once laboured in, and floor to ceiling windows on the ground floor which opened onto a spacious verandah. A large standard poodle, Poley, bounded in and out of the door-like windows. Before the Meehans moved in, a small swimming pool had been added to the overgrown back garden, but was still useable.

The parties at the house were fantastic events and the girls had lots of college-aged friends who came around for them. Anna Meehan was ‘liberal’ in her permissiveness in terms of the girls’ behaviour, probably wrongly assuming that Catholic nuns had done their job and put enough of the fear of Jesus in them to keep them virginal. Charlie wasn’t around much because he was trying to get several failed or failing business back on track. Anna was director of a nursing home somewhere and seemed to provide the main source of income for the family. Their lifestyle was one of assume the position and it will follow you.

Anna had invented a background of Austrian Catholic roots and even given her daughters names of which the Von Trapp family would have approved. Adopted by a modest couple of Austrian lineage herself, Anna had used this fact to deny the truth that she was Irish Catholic by blood; this was only compounded by the other fact that Irish-American Charlie got her pregnant and so she ended up married to an Irishman after all.

After I had stayed a few weeks at the Meehan’s and feeling somewhat guilty as the long-term guest who had come to dinner, Charlie Meehan had a heart attack and died suddenly. The family was devastated. Anna, who had fought with Charlie constantly, was beside herself with the kind of grief only guilt can produce. Still, life must go on; the show must go on. This was a test of Anna’s will to survive all obstacles and she rose to the occasion. I offered to pay rent to stay at the house for the summer, and Anna agreed (quietly and in private, of course). After a lavish funeral and a week or two of mourning, the parties resumed. It was summer after all and the girls were teenagers. It made sense to carry on and show Chestnut Hill what they were made of.

It was my Grey Gardens summer. The house itself with it many rooms, many pretenses, its peeling paint and systems in need of repair was like the film Grey Gardens in the early years, some time after the husband left and the money to support their lifestyle dried up. Anna was ‘Big Edie’ with her silver grey hair, sometimes tied up in a bun, other times falling around her shoulders, her lack of grooming and the comfort of a chenille robe, except when business called her away. Anna was full of ambition, full of unfulfilled promise, wanting what she never had for herself for her daughters, whilst at the same time keeping them in check by vetting the boys allowed through the front door. A summer consisting of parties and a funeral, all produced through the mirage of a warped sense of the upper class and its supposed expectations of the newly arrived. We all know, of course, the newly arrived are never really welcome.

For me, it was a summer of love, a devastating platonic love for a sixteen year old boy whose mother came after me with a butcher’s knife. Position and pretense coupled with a romantic youth had convinced me in my naïveté that anything was possible, even this. The hard lesson learned that summer was that this in not the case, and never would be. This was a summer of beginnings, and an end.

* In the film, Little Edie dreamily tells this to David and Albert Maysles.

Call for Abstracts: Bournemouth Qualitative Conference

8th International Qualitative
Research Conference

6 – 8 September 2010

Talbot Campus
Bournemouth University

Call for Abstracts

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/hsc/international-qualitative-research-conference-2010.html

Including:

Performative Social Science

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/hsc/international-qualitative-research-science.html

PERFORM, INVOLVE, PARTICIPATE

Sometimes I feel like Susan Boyle...

Jeffrey is using his blog and autoethnography to navigate his PhD at Lancaster. He often asks me short, concise 'just the facts, ma'm' kinds of questions on the blog or in response to my postings.

I feel like Susan Boyle. She is answering questions such as 'What's your favorite meal? What's your favorite show tune?" in videos on her website. Yoko Ono answers 10-15 questions from 'readers' a week on Twitter. The era of the fast and furious, no-nonsense reply is upon us.

Jeffrey asks (Do you like that use of the newspaper-style breezy present tense?):

• Kip, I think you hit on the reason why autoethnography may be so contentious a method! From this vantage, how would you define this (especially for those who find it easy to confuse the two)?

'My personal story is simply one of the raw materials used to produce my product. What I construct stands alone for what it is (a story, a painting, an A/V production), but comes to life when it engages with the response that it instils in the reader/viewer/audience, “… those wonderful people out there in the dark!”' Rough talk and chocolate brownies

In the best autoethnography, I am always a minor character and/or a conduit to a time, place and other people. I become fictional through writing. I am the sorcerer who reminds the audience of themselves.

Reflexive writing is more like a diary; private thoughts that perhaps I share, perhaps I do not. They remind me of myself. I get to be Proust in private.

To do good research, it is myself that often that I need to get out of the way, so writing about my self may help me accomplish this.

A 'personal journey' PhD is often boring and usually takes about twice as much time anyway. If you already know the subject of your research, what is the point of investigating it?

Hubris is one of the best Greek words.

[Your supervisors should be discussing all of this with you. You can say I said so!]

... a roving and disconnected type of writing ...

'... the exposition of an idea through fragments, through a roving and disconnected type of writing, can sometimes better circumscribe its object than can a more linear approach'.
--Nicolas Bourriaud (2009) The Radicant