VNV Nation is playing behind me--- "Praise the Fallen". Hard, dark, driven. Industrial-dance--- the kind of music I used to dance to as a Person In Black all through my clubland days. I still danced to it with Elizabeth-Claire in clubs at USM and Savannah.

The pettable little K-dot at citydress called me at my office to ask about bands this morning. Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Coil--- what else was out there in the genre? I had to think about that. SPK, of course. Sol Invictus. Controlled Bleeding. Clock DVA. Nocturnal Emissions. Vidna Obmana. I could remember those names from long ago. I've been away from industrial-dance and darkstep music for too long. I could only hope that the Small Sea Otter could take the recommendations and explore outward. I wonder--- would Shiva at ninjastyle or Deserie at eyelines be able to tell me about newer music in the genre. Carmelita at PansDaughter at D-Land almost certainly could.

Beautiful Pea-Green Boat--- one album, back in the later 1980s. One song that's worth remembering: "Hammers of Islam". Find it, if you can: eerie and beautiful and powerful.

Gray and cool and rainy outside. Winds in hard from the southwest, blowing through the treeline. Steady rain, though, not the quick Iso T-Storms of a usual day. I sat outside for a while earlier, letting the winds blow over me on the patio. I brought Listfield's "It Was Gonna Be Like Paris" with me and read about the East Village art world there in 1984. I will have to ask Gia-Carangi at D-Land if she's read it--- or Southeast there, or Lissy at emigree here.

Gray and cool and rainy outside. An evening for pouring out single-malt Irish whisky and talking in profile. I do wonder what a conversation with PondLife would be like there on a Charleston balcony. PondLife keeps aviaries--- there might be the sounds of tropical finches behind us. Conversations about...the coasts of Ceylon, and faded Nachsommer light in Austria, and old-established firms in the City of London, and wind in over the Keys. It's a conversation I will wonder about.

A girl I knew briefly years ago is now teaching law at Oxford. She's there on a postgrad program, writing a doctoral thesis. I don't know whether it's for a DCL at Oxford or a PhD at a university back in the rainy northwest of North America. Well, doctors wear scarlet, they say at Oxford. She'd look good in deep rich red.

She did ask why I didn't publish my doctoral thesis. I didn't quite know what to say. Fear of humiliation, of course. Fear that no one would want it. Also--- I had no idea at all of how to go about getting it published. My advisor offered no thoughts, and I had no idea which presses were most amenable to publishing new PhD work. Part of it, too, was purely mechanical. I didn't own a computer, and I had no access to a word processor. I type with one-point-five fingers. Typing and revising four hundred-plus pages just seemed...overwhelming. All the more so since I had no idea how to format manuscripts for publication--- as opposed to simple papers typed up for seminars. My family had paid for a professional thesis typist when I was preparing to submit my doctoral thesis to my university. That was something like fifteen hundred dollars. I didn't have that, and I couldn't ask my family for that kind of money again. I suspect that fear was the larger part of it all, of course. My committee had all had good things to say about what I'd written; the outside reader was very complimentary. But I was afraid that in the Grown Up World, the world with serious scholars and Grown Ups in Suits, no one would want anything written by someone from a small town in the Deepest South, someone who couldn't even get a girlfriend.

Now, yes--- I did say that to myself. I didn't have a girlfriend, so how could I be good enough to be taken seriously. If I couldn't even get a girl into bed, or out for a drink, how could I be good enough to be published? I said that to myself and believed it.

I have a ring from New Haven. I have two framed diplomas from New Haven. I have a gold signet ring with a crest and Lux et Veritas on it. But I still thought of myself as a small boy from a small town in the Deepest South. The work should stand by itself; I know that. But I've never felt like someone Serious People or Grown-Ups should ever take seriously.

Students don't know that, of course. I've never had a problem writing out lectures and standing up and talking. Not to undergraduates, not to grad students, not to Army officers, not to Turkish security police. I'll walk into a classroom today, now, anywhere you put me, and lecture. I'm good at that, and I know my subjects.

But submitting an article, submitting a book proposal--- I don't know how to do that. The girl at Oxford says that it's easy there. Publishers come by Oxford and try to sign up doctoral candidates, get them to sign contracts for as-yet-unwritten books. No one in grad school managed to offer up any information on how to get oneself published. And publishing is like using a laptop or an iPod--- I really do need my hand held the first time. I'm always paralysed by fear of falling off the learning curve.

And I'm paralysed by fear of public humiliation, of being told that I'm easy to see through, that I'm really not smart or talented or valuable. Publishing house readers and conference moderators are exactly like beautiful girls in that regard: they have the power to humiliate in public, the power to geld.

I used to say that I never presented papers at conferences because I was too poor to go to conferences...and because I've become afraid to fly. Both things are true. Going to Chicago or Boston to give a paper at a conference--- even going to Atlanta or Raleigh ---was just something I couldn't afford on my own. And I am terrified to fly these days. But it was also that I couldn't imagine that anything I had to say in response to a Call For Papers wouldn't just be derided and rejected out of hand. However good my research is, however good my writing is--- it's still from someone who grew up in small towns in a Deepest South state, someone who doesn't own a suit, someone who can't get a girlfriend. What could I possibly have to say to a roomful of Grown Ups?

A girl looked at me once when I explained all that and just stared. What you're saying, she said, is that because you're not getting laid, you must be a bad historian? Well...yes. I suppose I am saying that. And I do believe it--- I believe it on some very deep level. If I'm not valuable enough for attractive girls to take to bed, I'm not good enough to think about publishing. I tried to tell KdG at k_navit that once. KdG has known me since she was sixteen, known me half a lifetime. She has her own insecurities in her PhD program, but she did do six years in the Army. She's never doubted that she was a Grown-Up. KdG just threw up her hands. She goes to conferences and gives papers. I never would, and for the same reasons that I'd never speak to a girl like the younger Stella at stelladellasera or the younger Caitlin at kissmecaitlin, Genetikerin at D-Land, or Ms. cataplexis if I saw them at a club. Never compete where you can't win. And never compete where the cost of losing leaves you with nothing, whether that's a sense of yourself as sexually valuable or a sense of yourself as useful and competent.

I know people in grad programs who were told that they'd be taken to a conference to present a seminar paper--- presenting a paper at a conference was part of the class. I really do wonder... If I'd been taken by the hand and pushed up to a conference podium, would I have lost my fears, or at least lost my fear of not knowing how even to get to the paper-reading stage? I'm never afraid of the research and the writing, and I'm certainly not afraid of giving a presentation. I'm afraid of being told I'm not good enough even to be allowed to make the presentation. I can defend my work. I just can't defend who and what I am.

The girl at Oxford is younger than I am, of course. She's younger than I was at the same stage of getting a doctorate. She went to a good university, and she is very, very bright--- law review, certainly. Still--- I'm very bright, and I went to a couple of good universities. What perplexes me is where and how she learned not to be afraid. She's quite lovely, and she married well while young. Maybe that builds confidence--- as an attractive girl who speaks Latin, she's always had a kind of physical confidence that I lacked. In a room, at a conference, I'd automatically defer to her. She's a beautiful girl who went off to Oxford to teach and do a doctoral thesis. I'd take it as a given that I had to defer to her, no matter how sure I was of my research. On some abstract level, the work stands on its own, the work is independent of the person of the writer. But that's never true in the concrete world. She's beautiful and from a Cool Place. I'd take it as a given that she was ab initio right and I was wrong. I'd take it as a given that she deserved to be right.

Don't misunderstand. I like her, and I do admire her. I wish her well. I'll read her doctoral thesis when it's published. I hope her career arc is dazzlingly successful. But it still leaves me empty and self-loathing to realise that I'll always be too afraid to publish. Whether or not my doctoral thesis manuscript is any good, whether or not I could write anything for academic journals or law reviews--- I could never submit anything for publication. I'd never see myself--- not my intelligence or my research or my writing, just... my self ---as good enough to publish.

And it is all tied up with why I could never have spoken to Ms. cataplexis or a single Stella at stelladellasera or Ms. Chang. I'm not good enough to have a lover--- how could I be good enough to publish. If you don't merit the one, you don't merit the other. I don't talk to girls for the same reason that I never opened my law school grades or went to interviews, for the same reason that I don't submit for publication: because I know that I'm not good enough, that I'd be told that in public and left with nothing.

VNV Nation is still playing--- "Empires". Dark-synth, dark dance. I can hear the power in the music, thrill to the voices. It does make me want to dance again. It makes me want to be all in black and out on the dance floor with a girl in some backless black mini-dress and spike heels. Whoever I was in those days--- Eduardo-kun in clubland ---wasn't afraid to be seen on a dance floor, wasn't afraid to talk to wicked leggy clever sharp-hipboned girls. In those days I took it for granted that by now I'd have a couple of books published, that I'd be writing History and essays and fiction. I have no idea where that Eduardo-kun went. I did publish a run of book reviews, but I've come to accept that I'll never board an aircraft again...and that I'm not valuable enough either to publish or have lovers.