Poly and Continuous Partial Attention

So in a fairly typical manouvre, in that I'm doing this about 3 three years too late, I have been reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism and Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman. One of the interesting confluences between the two is in their analysis of contemporary capitalism's demand that we be constantly 'plugged-in', leading to what Fisher describes as ' twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.' In this post, I'm trying to think through this phenomenon in relation to the practice of polyamory. Fisher’s analysis is based on Linda Stone's notion of Continuous Partial Attention, so here is a link to it if you want take issue with any of the things I’ve written. http://lindastone.net/2009/11/30/beyond-simple-multi-tasking-continuous-partial-attention/ - Oh, and here is the MANDATORY DISCLAIMER in which I say that obviously, there are as many ways of doing poly as there are people who do it, if not more, and I don’t want to generalise about other people's relationships on the basis of my own etc etc etc. I am definitely an anarchist and definitely not telling you what to do, honest.

Stone's definition of Continuous Partial Attention, as opposed to what she calls 'simple multi-tasking', lies in her sense that in the latter we focus our attention on a primary task, but are also completing a menial job that requires little mental effort - for example, talking on the phone while stirring soup. Continuous Partial Attention, by contrast, involves a state in which we are engaging in two activities which require similar levels of intellectual engagement - writing an email and talking on the phone simultaneously is a good example. Stone suggests that Continuous Partial Attention is not an intensification of multi-tasking, but is characterised by a different productive mode - so, in multi-tasking, we understand that we are engaging in two tasks in order to free up our future time for something more interesting, whereas in Continuous Partial Attention we are constantly searching for 'scanning for other people, activities, or opportunities, and replacing the primary task with something that seems, in this next moment, more important.' She suggests that although such a mode of congnition is useful for short periods of time, we risk stress-related unpleasantness such as the inability to sleep and cravings for sugary foods if we habituate ourselves to it. Incidentally, her sense that eating sugar and consequently gaining weight are prima facie ills really irritated me. Whevs, Stone. WHERE'S MY TAZ BAR?

This struck me as an interesting concept to think through in relation to polyamory, mainly because discussions with people who don't 'do'/'get' (for which read 'approve of') poly often focus on precisely these kinds of issues. I've found a widespread belief, often only half articulated, that there is something emotionally suspect about poly; that it revolves around a kind of 'twitchy, agitated... inability to concentrate' on just one person, just one relationship. The way that Stone makes the link between this kind of intellectual engagement and the consumption of sugary foods is also relevant to the way poly is conceived of as in some way being about greed and dissatisfaction – symptomatic of the consuming desire to constantly consume. There's a pervasive sense that choosing to do poly relationships opens one to accusations of 'scanning for other people, activities or opportunities, and replacing the pirary task with something that seems, in the next moment, more important.'

I'll be honest about this: it's not an easy accusation to refute. Polyamorous relationships *do* openly acknowledge the possibility of change and flux; that there might be someone around the next corner who will be super interesting and important. Of course, this possibility exists in monogamous relationships as well, and one of the things that irritates me about comparisons between poly and monogamy is that this doesn't get full recognition. Anyway, my feeling about this is that there's an crucial difference between an acknowledgement that there might be other people in the future who could be important and different and new and exciting,  and understanding this as necessarily implying that the person that this happens with is necessarily *more* important than whoever you're currently going out with. It strikes me that one of the crucial aspects of polyamory is that it becomes necessary to understand that there are different kinds of importance in relationships. The explosive febrility of getting involved with a new person, the exciting newness and magpie shininess that this entails, functions in a completely different register to the intimacy of a long-standing relationship. In fact, I've found that getting involved with someone new can underscore the ways in which the older relationship is important and unique. This is particularly the case if you understand romantic relationships as being a part of your life that you engage with intellectually - something that you keep working at, trying to understand better, get a deeper and more functional knowledge of.

Stone characterises Continuous Partial Attention as demanding that your attention is constantly diverted towards the 'next link'. Perhaps. However, if we understand having more than one partner as in some way analgous to this, then it's important to conceptualise said relationships  as forming links to one another - between you and your partners, but also between your partners themselves, and between you and your partner's partners. It's imprtant to remember that the metaphor of 'the link' doesn't necessarily impell your attention towards abandoning your current set of concerns in favour of chasing after a constantly receding future event. As anyone who habitually has 40 tabs open in their internet browser at any one time will know, links work both ways - forward and backwards. They provide roots. They make networks. There's nothing about the 'link' metaphor that necessarily implies a superficial or shallow emotional engagement - you could equally argue that if you are in a poly relationship, you're forming a network of links around you (and your partners, and your partner's partners) that centre and ground you (and the people with whom you're in a relationship) and that this stengthens your ability to relate to other people rather than weakens it. Poly can mean that you're more involved, not less.

Of course, this way of thinking about poly relationships has some difficult implications. One of the things that I find trickiest about it is identifying the boundaries of where my relationship with them ends, and where their other relationships begin. Some people seem to prefer not to discuss their other relationships at all, some feel that there's a sense in which talking about their relationships will be hurtful, either to the person who's being talked to or the person who's being talked about, some people over-share. When I was first in a poly relationship I blankly refused to engage in any discussion of my partner's other relationship, simply because thinking about it was too painful. And then there's also always the possibility that you might just *not like* your partner's other partners (although thankfully I've never had to deal with that issue.) Equally, I'm aware that my sense of the importance of network formation might intrude on another person's need for privacy. Just because I'm seeing someone, doesn't necessarily mean that their other parnters will want to have anything to do with me. All of these are important considerations, and obviously I would never advocate forcing a relationship, or set of relationships, into the paradigm discussed above. But I think that it's important, if you want to do poly - if you really think that the whole model of dedicating your entire sexual life to a single person FOR EVER AND EVER AND EVER AMEN is a wee bit problematic - then it's important to think through the most aspects of different ways of doing things. This post is really about offering a way of thinking about poly that makes a virtue of what is often considered a vice.


*as an aside - what is it about it being 2013 and people still being embarassed about having met their partners on the internet? Seriously, you guys, I mean: it's fine.

15 Albums That Mean Something to Me: 'Alopecia', Why?

Basically, you just can't ignore an album the first lyric of which is

I'm not a ladies' man I'm a landmine 
Filming my own fake death. 

Can't ignore, can't argue. I STILL get goosebumps every time I listen to it. It is one of the ones whose lyrics I have shamelessly plagiarised in my own writing. This is probably one of the few albums that makes it on here according to musical merit more than the memories I directly associate with it - mainly because, unusually amongst these records - it was recommended to me by someone that I didn't know very well, and chased it up simply because I was looking for new music (well, mainly. Also he had trendy glasses and LOOKED LIKE A YOUNG STEVE ALBINI.) We still don't know each other terribly well, so it wasn't one of those albums that became friendship/relationship defining (let's not beat about the bush, I pretty much only ever check out music because someone I crush on recommends them to me.)* However, this is a bit of a double edged sword, because I do feel a sense of ownership over Why? that I have with very few other bands. You know how, if you get introduced to a musician by a friend or a lover, there's often this slight sense that you're an imposter - not *truly* a fan, just someone who likes this band because someone older/wiser/better-informed/looking/in some other way unattainable - knows a lot more about them than you do. You know that feeling, right? Of course you do, because you're reading about music on the internet, and the ONLY reason anyone ever does that is because they're looking for that elusive sense of belonging. I'm right, yeah? That sense that you know enough about a band to not be embarrassed when someone calls you on your knowledge. Otherwise, why would you give a fuck what the name of the bassist is, would you? You don't. I know you don't. You know I know you don't. You and I both just don't want to look stupid.

But yeah. With Why? it really wasn't like that. The boy I was trying (VAGUELY) to impress didn't live in my city, so basically I was just allowed to get on with it. They were kind of my secret, you know? Which meant that I didn't have to know the names of all the band members or the chronology of their different releases: I could just listen. Really listen. And I lapped this album up in a way that happens very rarely to me. And it's so meaty - lyrically, it's just unbelievably dense, and even the resonances in Yoni Wolf's intonation repay seriously close attention. One of the lyrics from the album runs:

'I'll suck the marrow out - and rape your hollow bones Yoni'

Right, so *I'M NOT WEIRD* - but this feels to me like an apt metaphor for what you do with this album. It's undeniably lyrically oblique - abstruse, even - but it's insistent and when you listen to it, you force meanings onto it. Meanings, perhaps, that doesn't quite fit the individual lyric or the delivery but makes perfect sense to you at the time - and for me, that means that this listening from one end of this album to another is stuffed full of memories that have literally nothing to do with the album itself. For posterity, I will now record the most prominent example:

'You're a beautiful and violent word
With the skinny neck of a chinese bird'
('These Few Presidents', Alopecia)

This never fails to remind me of Sam, who's always struck me as birdlike. This was particularly the case when we were first going out because he had a fuzzy shaved head which really put me in mind of unfledged down. I remember going to stay at his house after Christmas, when we hadn't seen each other for a while, and I'd been listening to Why? a lot in the interim, and we were in bed together and it felt so nest-like that the image stayed with me, and it's now become an integral part of the way that I think about him.

Jesus. It is too much to talk about all the different things this album means to me. Take it as read that EVERY song on this album has three or four moments in it that have memories that strong - that fucking physical - attached to them. And that, my exciting TWO READERS, is why it is in my top 15 albums ever.

PS: After I am done with my Top 15 albums, I may do a Top 15 Why? lyrics, and go into more detail about the images they evoke for me. PROJECT JAZZ HANDS! 

And here endeth the lesson.

 *For the purposes of pointless autobiographising, I have for years been vaguely meaning to organise my record collection according to which boys I was trying to impress with each purchase. This has never happened due to SHAME, but perhaps now is the time.

15 ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME #3: STOP MAKING SENSE, TALKING HEADS

So, not that many people have been reading these posts (2 for the last one I wrote. A WHOLE TWO. One was my boyfriend; who was the other???? SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW ME PERSONALLY IS READING SHIT I AM PUTTING OUT ON THE INTERNET OMG I AM FAMOUS)

Annnnnnnnywayyyyyyyy...

There aren't that many of you all out there, but the two people who have read the last posts I did about '15 Albums That Meant Something To Me' may have noticed that they are usually associated with a specific time and place. In this respect, 'Stop Making Sense' is a trend-bucker. It sort of forms a refrain throughout my life: In fact, I can't remember a time when I *didn't* know that album - it's always, always sounded familiar to me. Trying to imagine what it was like to hear it for the first time is a bit like trying to remember what it was like to learn to write: except even vaguer and stranger, because no one ever *teaches* you to listen to Talking Heads, although if I had my way and also magically became education secretary despite not really being very pro this whole 'parliamentary politics' endeavour, I would probably make laws to ensure that this did happen. Anyway, it's always been familiar because it was one of those pieces of music that my parents had on tape and played in the car on long journeys, so until about 2001 I mainly associated it with the M4 (visiting grandma) the M1 (visiting other grandma) and the M11 (going on middle-class holidays.) Actually, there's a weird beauty to parts of the M11 route - mainly the fens- that works surprisingly well with the edgier tracks on 'Stop Making Sense' - try being 7 (in fact, it being your 7th birthday) and your parents getting you up while it's still dark to beat the traffic out of London and then falling asleep wrapped up in a duvet and being woken up with the sun full in your face in the middle of flat-as-piss-on-a-plate East Anglia BY THE LIVE VERSION OF PSYCHO KILLER WHICH IS JUST DAVID BYRNE AND A TAPE RECORDER. Plus you're about to stop at Little Chef to receive birthday donuts AND a copy of the Walt Disney Robin Hood film on VHS. Perfeck.

The coup-de-grace for me, though, and the real reason why this album makes it on here as opposed to any of the other parental car-based cassettes, is because when I finally got around to buying my own copy of the album (on CD this time) it was an extended version with an extra six songs tagged onto the original album track-list. So there I was, happily nodding along to 'Psycho Killer' and 'Burning Down The House' and then I went to the toilet and then I came back and WHAM BAM IT WAS 'THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (NAIVE MELODY)' AND SUDDENLY I WAS IN LOVE. IN LOVE. I've never, before or since, felt the shock of something so utterly and devastatingly beautiful emanating from something so familiar. It was so unexpected. I don't have children, but it felt like what I imagine it must feel like the first time you see a child of yours and for a minute you don't recognise them because you have suddenly grasped, in your bones and stomach, that they're not a child any more - they're an adult, and they're beautiful. Generally, you know, I don't go for beauty in music. I care about energy, and conviction, and sex, and intelligence. If it doesn't make me want to dance, or fuck, or cry, or inscribe the lyrics into my flesh (cf John Darnielle) then, for the most part, it can go hang. But this song, and this album, is beautiful, undeniably. It has the quality of something uncanny about it, for me. It keeps coming back, in slightly different forms. That's partly to do with the proliferation of different versions of the songs - firstly from covers (recent once include The Arcade Fire and MGMT, as I'm sure you know) and secondly due to the fact that, because Stop Making Sense is a live album, different versions of most of these tracks appear throughout the Talking Heads oeuvre. But I think for me there's something a bit more going on here. This album reminds me that even when you think you've got a band, or an album, or even a song, pinned - when you really think that you've wrung all the juice from it that you're ever going to get - you're wrong, basically. Music will always, always have the power to come back and bite you on the arse. And that, actually, is what you want it to do.

Here endeth the lesson.      

15 ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME #2: THE FUTUREHEADS, BY THE FUTUREHEADS

The first time I heard this album was in the Fopp on Rose Street in Edinburgh, August 2004. You remember back in the day, when most people didn't have the internet or iPods or anything and if they wanted to buy an album they hung around in record shops and waited for the grumpy dude behind the counter to put the record they were interested in on those little banks of headphones where you could stand and look really cool and hope all the boys noticed? Well, yeah, I was doing that, and to be honest I just stuck the Futureheads on because the other records available were Gang of Four's Entertainment!, which I mistrusted as too highbrow, and some irrevelevant shitey jazz that you're not legally eligible to listen to if you're female or less than 47 years old. Anyway, that probably holds the record for my 'best-single-music-related-decision-originally-taken-to-impress-boys'; it certainly outweighed spending 25 quid on Dylan tickets because I had a crush on some knobhead who thought he was the best musician that ever lived (spoiler: HE'S NOT). Anyway, I liked them immediately: the way that occasionally happens when you meet a friend of a friend in a bar and know by the end of the evening that you're going to spend a bit too much of the next decade making fart jokes on their Facebook wall. All of this was great, for two reasons. Reason 1 was that it meant that I knew of the Futureheads before they became famous for being That Band What Did A Cover of 'Hounds Of Love' Which Is Possibly More Eccentric Than The Original. I don't usually have the energy to know about good bands Before They Get Famous, so this was a rare treat. The second reason was that the second week I was in Edinburgh, I lost the CD carrier I had brought with me (yeah, 'CD carrier' muthafucka. Remember them? No, of course you don't, because you're on the internet and therefore 10) so the only music I had for the six weeks I spent there was the CD I had playing in my Discman at the time - this one. This is probably the one album associated with a specific time and place more strongly than any other piece of music I've ever listened to, ever. It's weird, because the album sounds definitively modern: those precise guitars and sweet-voiced, I-don't-give-a-fuck-about-gender-paradigms harmonies never fail to recall for me bruised, brooding, historical, masculine Edinburgh, but there you go. Memories that involve music are always like that: endlessly contradictory, endlessly compelling. And also, this album is so good. Just so fucken GOOD, man. I'm re-listening to it now, and I still can't fault it. Do you remember those chocolatey pretzel crisp things that you used to be able to buy around 1998/9? The ones that worked because they were all crisp astringent interior and then melty sweet chocolate on the outside, and then part of the pleasure of them came from just how unexpected they are? This album is like those guys: there's the crisp, brittle precision of Dave Hyde's drums, then the sugariness of the famous acappela backing vocals, and THEN ON TOP OF THAT THEY TALK ABOUT MURDER AND PEADOPHILIA AND SHITTY LOW PAID TEMP JOBS AND THEN THEY WHIP OUT THE KATE BUSH COVER AND START CHATTING ABOUT MAN RAY. Seriously, re-listening to this album now: these dudes are so under-rated. Everyone liked them, but no one seemed to think they were that interesting. And damn it, they are! They're clever and funny and interesting and actually, I'd really like to be friends with them. Even if in 2004, all I cared about was that they wrote kick ass music for indie kids to dance to and I thought that if I listened to them enough I would magically be transformed into the kind of girl that boys who look good in tight trousers wanted to kiss.

This was meant to be a facebook post, but then I got qualmist about how maybe it was a little bit too personal for friends only,and decided instead to post it to EVERYBODY ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET. HURRAH. Ok, here it is. It's about music, predictably: 15 ALBUMS: [The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what albums my friends choose.] DISCLAIMER: These are not the 15 albums that I love the most, or the ones that I think are best, whichever criteria it might be that you're using to define 'best' at any given moment. They're the ones around which memories have crystalised and hardened to such an extent that I fully expect to be hanging on to them long after I've started mistaking my children for my siblings and have been packed off to the nursing home/labourcamp/privatised incinerator for the elderly and infirm which will no doubt be the only option for impecunious OAPs once this government is through with our health service. ANYWAY THAT IS NOT THE POINT I AM NOW TALKING ABOUT MUSIC THAT I LOVE AND CARE ABOUT: 1 - The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee I first came across the Mountain Goats through the good offices of a close friend who was going through a horrendously painful break-up and, as a result, linked me to possibly the most acrid divorce ballad ever written, 'No Children'. Although I thought it was great, I was a callow 23 year old at the time, and was more interested in taking ecstasy and listening to Dodgy's 'Staying Out for The Summer' and Das Racist's 'Pizzahut/Tacobell' remixes to pay much more attention. When I finally got round to following up the tip, I bought the only MG album in the shop, the excellent but slightly less mindblowingly, accost-you-in-a-dark-alleyway-and-hold-a-knife-to-your-throat-while-divesting-you-of-small-change-family-keepsakes-and-probably-underwear arresting 'We Shall All Be Healed'. So I forgot about them for a while, and listened to some more Dodgy. Hey, I thought. Mountain Goats. They're on the longlist. I'll get round to it one day. It didn't matter that my friend was practically howling at me to buy Tallahassee. What the fuck, I thought. He howled at me to buy St Vincent, too, and he was definitively wrong about that. More Dodgy. When I finally did get round to buying it, it sat virtually unlistened on my iPod for a few months. And then it was November, and it was a pisswet day, and I was hungover as hell and I had the glaze in my eyes from too much shagging and I also had the sinking feeling in my stomach that, at the age of 24, I was learning to recognise as an early sign that I was falling in love (again) with the wrong person (again) and suddenly 'Staying Out For The Summer' didn't seem quite the thing. I was walking down Crookes Valley Road in Sheffield and put Tallahassee on - maybe because I wanted something to match the bile and dread of 'No Children', maybe because I was going to work and I knew that if I listened to it, I'd have something to talk to my friend about which wasn't this new and painful dread in the stomach. And then I heard: 'I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing On which our survival depends People say friends don't destroy one another What do they know about friends.' Bizarrely, that love-affair - despite possibly the most acrid beginnings in the history of relationships that John Darnielle might plausibly write a concept about - worked out pretty well. In fact, if anything, it's the only time I have ever fell completely, besottedly, and embarrassingly in love with two people at the same time. One of them, predictably, was John Darnielle.

Flights of Fancy from a Mind Jailor

As I mentioned in my last blog, I have recently started working as a teaching assistant. This has simultaneously been one of the most rewarding and most frustrating decisions of my life to date. Obviously, I could use this opportunity to go off on one about how fucking awesome it is to teach a kid how to use commas properly (surprisingly awesome) or to rail against the iniquities of an education system that insists that at age 11, all children - whether they can read and write or not - should be able to identitify a metaphor as opposed to a similie (rail rail) but I'm not going to (or at least, not very much.) This blog is actually about a thought experiment. It is aimed at those who believe that the human race are inherently slavish followers of their given authorities and that because of this a society which is organised around the interests of the people who live in it rather than a disproportionately influential - and therefore priveliged - group of financial and political power-mongers.

Think back to when you were at secondary school.* Do you remember how many hours of every day were spent arguing with your teachers about the rights and wrongs of every un-written homework assignment, every incident of name-calling, every time you tried to throw a chair at another student and accidentally broke a window? Do you remember how many times the scary kid (his name was Bradley. It's always fucking Bradley) at the back of the class got up and marched out because he quite fairly believed that it really wasn't necessary for him to know the date of the invention of the Spinning Jenny?* Do you remember how loudly he slammed the door? Or, for the more studious amongst us - do you remember how many times you forged a sicknote excusing you from P.E? Do you remember when you told your physics teacher that you'd spent two an a half hours finding your way back to the science block from your violin lesson? Do you remember bribing the kid in the NUS office at sixth form college to lie about your age on your student ID? Do you remember traipsing an hour and a half across town in the rain because you had £8.25 and you needed £7.50 of it to get an ISIC card with said fake d.o.b proudly emblazoned across it?

Course you do.

I'm not trying to say that the model society would look anything like a modern secondary school (I did write the bit about the iniquities of the education system, right?) But - and here's the thought experiment - imagine if all that energy - that sheer bloody-minded teenage tenacity - was directed at the people who were *really* trying to screw you over. Imagine if, when the HR guy at your work comes round to inform you that, because you're only in the first six months of your employment, you're not going to get paid for the day you had off sick - oh, and also that the free-lance work that you did for us is now part of your job descriptiona and you won't be getting the six hundred quid that you thought you were. Imagine if you could summon that level of pure ballsy not giving a shit-ness next time you're working in a café where they take all of the credit card tips and half of the cash ones and stick it in the till at the end of the day. Imagine if you could bust it out every time you saw The Times Weekend Magazine.

Imagine if you could get that angry at the people who wrote this year's budget. And I think I know why it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen because the people who you see, face to face, aren't responsible for it, are they? Of course not. But imagine if instead of letting that anger dissipate, you simply asked - as politely as you knew how - to see the person who was responsible. Or at least the person who's next in line. And when you worked your way back through the H.R managers and the C.E.O.s and the junior ministers and the cabinet secretaries and finally got to George Osborne and he said 'there's no one there. There is no one behind me, yet I am not responsible: the system is to blame' you were allowed to say 'Fine. You have said that you are not responsible. I will be responsible for this. Me and the thousands of other poor fuckers who can't pay their heating bills any more. But that means you need to fuck off. And also, you're in detention until you die.'



*This may not work if you went to a fee-paying school.
*1764.

University fees and other major questions that have occured to me in the past six months.

K, I haven't been on line for about six months. I'll talk about that at some point, but not right now. Right now, I felt it was important to talk about some of the things that I've learnt about the world and the way that it's organised since I started working as a teaching assistant.

Oh, wait. Ok, I am definitely going to do this, but not right now. I will do this tomorrow instead.

Sorry to get you all excited.