‘Feeling blue’: the ordinary pleasures of mundane motion

Abstract

“… and how far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground?”

(Virginia Woolf to Janet Case, cited in de Mille 2011, p. 376)

“Perhaps I am no one.

True, I have a body

and I cannot escape from it.

I would like to fly out of my head,

but that is out of the question.”

(Anne Sexton, The Poet of Ignorance, in The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975)

Keywords:

• autoethnography
• mental health
• gender
• rowing
• pleasure

Acknowledgements

An early version of this paper was presented at the Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines (CEAD) conference at University of Waikato, New Zealand (2012). A sole-authored paper is rarely the work of one person and I am grateful to the following colleagues for sharing their views and for helping me with this experimental autoethnography: Beccy Watson, Bob Rinehart, lisahunter, elke emerald and Dan Burdsey.

Notes

1. One of the ways I capture the personal and biographical is through flash fiction. Flash fiction appeared as a named style of writing in 1992 in Thomas’ edited anthology entitled: Flash Fiction: Seventy-Two Very Short Stories. Flash fiction is a form of short-story writing. It is usually sudden and brief, although there are variations on how brief (wordage).

2. The style of this piece is inspired by the writing of Raymond Carver and his short story Fat, which is in his collection entitled ‘Will you please be quiet, please? (1992)’. Carver was an accomplished writer of the everyday and ordinary. He had an exceptional ability to capture complex human interactions and feelings through simple, minimalist prose. The story Fat is an exemplar of how Carver was able to do this as well as represent the temporal layering of social meanings. My adoption of his style reflects the abilities of an academic writer, not a successful writer of fiction. And yet, I take this approach because I think it is a valuable and previously underused way to offer a commentary of the everyday, ordinary and routine of our socio-cultural worlds.

3. In addition, I argue that the mundane and slowness have little social, economic and political value in these contexts.