Here’s a last little excerpt; as always, please keep in mind that it’s very rough, first-draft work:

Jay spun around and lunged forward, aiming low and holding his forearms braced over his head.

He rammed into the hips and groin of the man who’d opened the door, driving him backward and into the hallway.  Somebody swore and Jay threw himself to one side, kicking out. His heel hit something and he used it to push himself farther away, rolling over the floor and up to his feet.

Two men there, one he recognized from the autocarriage, one — the one on the ground — whom he’d never seen before.

He spun and ran off in the opposite direction.

A window, a window — he needed a window without bars, but all that lined the hallway were closed doors. The stairs he’d climbed up were behind him. He hoped this corridor wasn’t going to dead end; what kind of building would that be? There had to be another stairwell down at the other end of the wing.

He spun around a corner. Two men — he angled himself toward the wall and sprang up onto it, crouching low and running as fast as he can. Startled, both men jerked away in surprise as he ran across the wall and past them before kicking himself off and back to the floor again.

“Jay Whitsun!” one of them shouted. Jay faltered a second before catching himself.

It wasn’t Bishop’s voice or a member of his family’s, and he didn’t give a damn about anyone else.

“Stop!”

Not a chance. He careened left and spotted stairs. Perfect; the architect hadn’t let him down.

“Somebody — stop him!”

Up or down? Usually he preferred up — few men were willing to chase him onto the rooftops — but in a building with barred windows, he had no guarantee of finding easy access outside. On the other hand, down likely meant more guards and that damned glass-shard-covered wall again. But down meant doors, too.

He made up his mind and dashed down, only two see two large men running up with leather-wrapped clubs in their hands.  He jumped up onto the wooden handrailing and leaped foward over their heads, tucking his knees to his chest and allowing himself to spin once in midair before opening his eyes. Off — he braced — and landed, hard, dropping to one knee that slammed against the floor. He winced and stood. Pain in his hand, pain in his knee, pain in his ribs.

Then somebody tackled him from behind, arms wrapping around his midsection and throwing him forward. His injured knee gave out and he landed badly, hissing as he reached out to break his fall with his wounded hand and it slapped against the floor, leaving a smear of crimson from his blood-soaked bandages.  He started to squirm, but an expert arm wrapped around his neck and began applying pressure.  He struggled as his vision began to darken.

As always, my thanks to the good folks who put on National Novel Writing Month each year; it’s always inspiring to participate!

Anyway, an excerpt. You know the “it’s all raw” drill by now, right?

Jay studied Bishop’s profile, seeing the small, pale scars that criss-crossed the left side of his face, the glimmer of silver where the inspector’s eye used to be.  It wasn’t that Bishop was a handsome man.  Striking, but not handsome.  Not the kind whose face would spark romantic interest in most other men … well, or women. Jay had found himself drawn in by Bishop’s intensity, at first, and then of course he couldn’t fail to have been touched by Bishop trying to save all those innocent people in the Haulyard Riots and nearly losing his life in the effort.  The inspector had a good heart, although he tried his best to hide it, and the more Jay got to know him, the more he wanted to touch that heart.

“Here —” Bishop turned, holding a piece of paper, and then froze.

Jay’s heart thudded as he realized the inspector had caught him staring. Their eyes locked for a second that seemed to stretch on forever.

Bishop broke their gaze first, dropping his eyes to look down at the sheet of paper in his mechanical hand. The paper began to rattle as his prosthesis jittered. He’d sketched something on the sheet, but the image didn’t interest Jay. What interested Jay was the slow crawl of red moving up the inspector’s cheeks.

He’d provoked that flush twice before, once inadvertently when he’d been changing his clothes in this room and once intentionally when he’d been teasing Bishop in the coffeehouse.

But he wasn’t doing anything now that might embarrass the Stoic-minded inspector. Nothing but look at him.

“Dammit,” Bishop breathed, grabbing the paper out of his shaking metal hand. He thrust the sheet forward, still avoiding Jay’s eyes. “Look at this. Do you recognize it?”

Oh. He was embarrassed by his malfunctioning hand. Well, that wasn’t quite what Jay was hoping for, but it was a problem easily solved.

“Just a minute.” Jay leaned forward and grabbed Bishop’s hand, wrapping his fingers around the cold metal.  “All right. Take a deep breath and relax.”

“It’s not —” The inspector broke off whatever he was about to say with a frustrated hiss.

“I think it’s caused by the temperature change.  Your hands seems to twitch more whenever you move indoors or outdoors.”  Jay wrapped both of his hands around Bishop’s prosthesis to warm it.  “I noticed it back in the autocab the other day, and in the coffeehouse earlier, and now.”

“It’s not the temperature,” Bishop said, his voice tight. “The damn thing’s just broken.”

“Well, warming it up seems to help,” Jay said, feeling the metal shudder one last time before it stopped moving between his palms. “See?”

“Whitsun….”

“It’s all right.” Jay leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees while he clasped Bishop’s hand. “I don’t mind. The metal should be room temperature in another minute or two.”

Bishop fell silent. Jay didn’t want to look at him, afraid that doing so would trigger the older man’s defenses again.

Besides, it was nice just to sit here in the lamplight, their knees nearly touching, and hold his hand.

He heard the inspector sigh. Then the sheet of paper was placed on the bed next to him. The inspector tapped it with the hand that wasn’t being held.

“The design. Have you ever seen it before?”

Evocative objects are objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves or on other things. Put otherwise, they give us materials that help us to do this in new and richer ways. Objects can be evocative for many different reasons. Some of these reasons have been widely studied. So, for example, objects that are “betwixt and between” standard categories are classically evocative because they cause us to reflect on the categories themselves. This is why computational objects, standing between mind and not-mind, between the world of the animate and not animate, have been so evocative as objects-to-think-with.Other evocative objects partake of elements of what Winnicott called “transitional objects.” These are objects that blur the boundaries between self and not-self, object that we experience as being in a special, blurred, sometimes fused relation to self. Here, too computational objects have had a special role to play. From the very beginning, people experienced a kind of “mind meld” when using software, saying things such as “When I use Microsoft Word I see my ideas form someplace between my mind and the screen.” Now, in talking about always-on-them digital devices, there is an ever greater sense of the device being part of the body.

Evocative objects provide a special window onto life experience, one that is grounded and cannot avoid issues of depth psychology. Science studies, sociology, anthropology have each in their own way welcomed the study of objects but have been hostile to depth psychology. When one pays careful attention to evocative objects, one “hears” psychodynamic issues, one “hears” family history, one “hears” a close attention to personal narrative and the texture of a life in all of its peculiarity and deeply woven interconnections with others. In science studies, studying objects and life narrative has the additional virtue of making the point, which seems to need making for every new generation of students, that technologies are not “just” tools, that our relationships with objects are profoundly interconnected to how we make meaning out of lives and think through who we are as people.

Because liminality fascinates me and because I pursue minimalism, I found Turkle’s comment on evocative objects to be, well, evocative. My dissertation was on clothing and the ways people used it to escape and to enforce categories of gender, of race, of social status. In the old days, clothing, like computational technologies today, allowed people to try on different selves, to exist (or imagine they existed) in some liminal space between categories. Clothes and computers are both, in other words, potential tools of transformation.  Other objects and behaviors hold the same magical transformational promise; I wrote in 2008 about magical possessions, magical ownership, and, in 2010, even about magical thinking about minimalism.

So, to turn to a different kind of technology … what is it about steampunk’s artefacts that’s so evocative?  Is it the transformative promise of steampunk cosplay and artefacts, suggesting that we can return to a time when clothing and objects were made to higher standards of material quality and aesthetic design?  Is it the promise of a return to some neo-Victorian form of ultra-polite social etiquette and interplay, a la Stephenson’s The Diamond Age? Is it the promise of a return to a simpler time, when technologies were controllable rather than controlling, as some steampunk scholars have suggested? (Of course, this wishful thinking ignores the dark side of the Victorian Empire; those wise in the ways of myth will remember that Cinderella’s slipper was stained with blood….) Is it just another form of technology promising to erase, or permit, or ease, liminal existences? (Click on the image and read artist Molly Friedrich’s description of the mechanical womb for a case of liminality & steampunk.)

I don’t know. I’m just throwing ideas out there right now, inspired by Turkle’s lovely phrase, “evocative objects.”

— Dru

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
Special Issue on Boys’ Love Manga
Abstracts due by October 14, 2011

Guest Editors:

Mark McHarry, Independent Scholar
Kazumi Nagaike, Oita University, Japan
Dru Pagliassotti, California Lutheran University, USA

Boys’ love emerged in the late 1960s as women in Japan began creating commercial manga (comics) about young males in homoerotic relationships and self-publishing similarly-themed comics called dōjinshi using young male characters taken from popular shōnen (boys) manga. The stories show the characters trying to overcome obstacles in order to connect or bond romantically. The genre has gained popularity in many world regions. Beginning in the second half of the 1990s, boys’ love became popular in the West, where it is generally called yaoi, from the acronym of the tongue-in-cheek description “yamanashi, ochinashi, iminashi,” or “no climax, no point, no meaning.”

Fans use the genre in subversive and oppositional ways, reading or creating boys’ love as a form of resistance and challenge to gender norms, such as the female-objectifying “male gaze,” and as expressions of ambivalence in relation to these norms. The latter, in particular, is shown in the recently recognized fact that a number of heterosexual males also create and consume BL narratives.

We seek to make this special issue inclusive of expressions of boys’ love and yaoi worldwide, multifaceted and interdisciplinary. We hope to reflect fan diversity, explore previously unexplored areas, and suggest ideas for future research.

We are seeking essays of 5,000 to 7,000 words.

Topics might include:

• The history of shōjo (girls’) comics in Japan as it influenced, framed, and grounded the development of the boys’ love genre;

• Current legal and censorship issues related to boys’ love, especially in the context of comic history, such as the recently enacted youth protection amendment in the Tokyo prefecture and the proposed Internet filtering in Australia;

• The practices and identities of fans who create and consume this genre, including fujoshi (female BL fans), fudanshi (self-identified heterosexual male fans), and otaku (all fans);

• The inception, growth, and marketing strategies of the publishing industries that include or are entirely dedicated to boys’ love comics, especially compared to those that publish gay comics or heterosexual adult comics;

• Concepts of “race” and ethnicity as they manifest in boys’ love and yaoi;

• Discursive analysis of media responses to the boys’ love/yaoi genre and to fans’ activities;

• Queer discourses within and about boys’ love and yaoi, such as their potential for a subsumption, by female boys’ love artists and writers, of gay/queer male discourses;

• Comparison of boys’ love and yaoi expressions in world regions;

• Reading strategies of fans;

• The distribution of boys’ love comics over new media, such as mobile phone novels, microblogs, and image boards such as 4chan;

• Copyright issues related to boys’ love, such as the ethics of making scanlations of untranslated works and the poaching in dōjinshi of commercially published characters;

• Artistic and iconographic developments and differences within the genre over time and between national cultures;

• Self-reflexivity within the comics as males read boys’ love comics for same-sex romantic or sexual “tips,” are supported by female boys’ love fans, or work within the manga publishing industry.

We are looking for articles from multiple disciplines and theoretical approaches. The primary focus would be manga (printed and electronic), but we would hope to include at least an overview of non-manga genres, too, to provide context and a sense of the genre’s scope.

Please submit abstracts of between 250-300 words no later than October 14, 2011 to editors@yaoiresearch.com

PDF call for papers: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/rcomcfp.pdf

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=2150-4857&linktype=38

It might seem odd that I love the sumptuous lace, brocades, velvets and jewels of those days, given my personal preference for simplicity. One could argue that the clash of fabrics, colors, and textures is all visual clutter, of course, but it’s so lavishly exuberant a form of visual clutter that I can’t help but admire the men and women who carried it off with such confident panache. Very few wear their clothing with such style today; I know I certainly don’t, although perhaps if I could just find more blazers boasting such rich fabrics and flattering cuts….

One of the projects I hope to get to this year will be putting my dissertation, Apparel and Attribute: The Social Construction of Status in New England Colonies and the United States online!

Moving into a new office was a great chance for me to reduce my paper. I’m not entirely paperless — for example, I study BL, so there are a number of BL books on my shelves, as well as the textbooks and references I use in class and other books currently unavailable in either digital form or from the local libraries. And I haven’t attained a stark, modernist, minimal look — I don’t care for the impersonal coldness of that aesthetic, anyway — but I’m pretty happy with the space. This new office is definitely much more open and peaceful than any of my previous offices, and I’m very fond of it and of the airy feel of the Swenson Center in general. (Office photos below the cut.)

The skulls, statuary, and shadow box were inherited from my mother. The art was mostly done by students and friends like artist Rich Brimer; the stained-glass windows were made by my mother. A small iguana “shrine” on the left side of my desk includes an oil painting by Stella Violano; I love iguanas!

Listen to an MP3 of the show on the Subversities blog!

We would like to get together with other BL scholars, fans, and interested parties at Yaoi-Con on Friday, Oct. 29, probably at the hotel’s Knuckles bar (which allows in people under 21) — I’ll post more about it here later as we firm up the time. You are going, aren’t you?

But in the meantime, I have some bishies and betrayal on Uraboku to return to….

I’d love to talk to other BL or m/m romance researchers, writers, and/or fans! Or, heck, we can talk steampunk or horror, too … don’t hesitate to drop by and say hello!

The Edo-Tokyo museum is filled with artefacts, dioramas, and reconstructions from, yes, the Edo period to the 1940s. It was filled with school children and features reproduction fire standards to hold up, water-carrying pails to shoulder, palanquins and rickshaws to sit in, and buildings to walk through (shoeless, of course), as well as glass-covered displays. I took numerous photos of the printing technology and a replica trading ships; I’ll spare you the photos, since they’re mostly for my writerly reference.

After lunch at the museum we split up; most of the students headed to Asakusa and Akihabara (and then clubbing). Two headed off to Tokyo Disney and one came back tonight with over $600 of Stitch paraphernalia! Akiko and I, however, headed to Otome Road, colloquially nicknamed “Maiden Road,” the prime Tokyo destination for women who are fans of BL. We wandered in and out of various anime/manga/dojinshi stores; I picked up a dojinshi based on the manga I mentioned yesterday, but I haven’t opened it yet.

When our 4:35 reservation time arrived we headed to the Swallowtail Cafe. This is one of the very few butler cafes in the world; the more elegant of the two Akiko located online. No photos were allowed inside, unfortunately — it would ruin the mystery and atmosphere! However, my online Tokyo album shows the entrance.

At the bottom of the stairs and were greeted by a slender man in a swallowtailed black butler’s tuxedo who bade us wait. Then we were allowed inside an entry hall and waited a little longer outside what looked like a mansion door while we watched other women leaving, giggling wildly. At last we were ushered inside and greeted by handsome young men in tuxedos as though we were the owners of the mansion — “Welcome home, mademoiselle!” The interior was designed after an elegant English tea room, full of brass tea carts, delicate china teacups and saucers, crystal chandeliers, a great faux-baroque fireplace, lace curtains, and ornate furniture.

Most of the other guests were more elaborately dressed than we two tourists, many of the young women in lace-and-ruffle covered Lolita dresses. Akiko and I were led to our table in a quiet lace-curtained alcove flanked by “English library” leatherbound books. We chose a light Diane Rose tea and the Victoria platter — a scone and preserves and several finger sandwiches, with a platter of sweets for dessert — all served to us on pretty, floral Noritake china.

Although I didn’t understand the Japanese, Akiko translated as the stunningly bishonen head butler checked on us and our unfortunately less-amazingly BL-mangalike waiter described the food, the type of china we were using, and so forth. We were given a small bell with which to summon him, and he hovered nearby to dotingly refill our teacups or exchange our plates — one doesn’t do those sorts of things oneself when one is the mademoiselle of the mansion, after all!

Our waiter seemed tickled to be serving two Californian teachers and asked us a lot of questions, probably breaking his role to do so in a way he wouldn’t with local guests. Few foreigners visit the cafe; after all, only manga fans — and probably only BL fans, really — would know to go looking for a butler cafe. Not that there was any BL going on between the waiters to watch, it was all very formal and proper.

At any rate, guests only get 80 minutes to enjoy their food — no extensions! — so we had to leave sooner than we would have had we been given more time. We were escorted out again by the waiter and head butler, who carried our bags until draping them over our shoulders at the door, sending us off as the Japanese do, both bidding us come back “home” again soon as they opened the door to let out out into the “front hall” once more.

The experience was a little pricey — and we chose the relatively inexpensive ¥3,200 tea!　— but my attitude over years of traveling has become “enjoy unique local experiences and don’t worry about the money.” After all, when will I be back in Tokyo again, or find a butler bar in any other country? Nobody blinks at the thought of men wanting to be served liquor by beautiful women, but the thought of women wanting to be served tea or wine by handsome men just isn’t in most cultures’ social vocabulary! I regret that I don’t speak Japanese, though, so I couldn’t appreciate all of the details.

Since our reservations had been late afternoon — the cafe books up early and quickly — our initial plan had been to grab a few drinks afterward. However, we were so full of sweets that we ended up not bothering, instead walking around Akihabara’s “electric town” so I could see all the neon signs lit up before heading back to the hotel.

The article is about how library cuts may adversely affect the library’s manga collection. Too bad. I know that many people don’t consider reading “comic books” to be reading, but I believe that anything that gets kids interested in following written narratives is a Good Thing. I know from my own experience that learning how to read manga as an adult was as challenging in its own way as learning how to read a book as a kid, and manga’s stories are quite often morally, emotionally, and culturally complex.

Speaking of culturally complex … I’m off to Japan tomorrow morning and will be there until June 10. I’ll be posting about the trip on this blog whenever I get the chance! Hope you don’t mind a little personal travel narrative for a change of pace….

(Photo by Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)