Prepare yourselves, WWPD readers, for what shall be the most momentous announcement of WWPD history: On this very day, I went and got a driver's license. It actually happened. After two failed road tests in Red Hook, after actually getting a car and practicing since June, after putting my husband through the unique agony that is teaching a loved one how to drive, after panicking just about continuously from the time I set up this road test, the day finally came, and I managed to not massively screw anything up. Yes, my foot was quivering on the brake, and yes, my shirt, if not the entirety of Mercer County, was drenched in sweat. But it's done! I'm so happy to never, ever, ever parallel park again. If this means not driving to Philadelphia, so be it.
So, now that that's out of the way, the official WWPD guide to getting a driver's license as an ancient person:
-The biggest obstacle to this ended up being my so-so proof of address (which turned out to be OK, long story), so I recommend holding onto recent first-class mail, in your current name, if you've changed it. Don't get tripped up by something you can totally control.
-Use lessons strategically. Learning to drive with lessons alone is theoretically possible, but it helps tremendously to get a feel for just basic maneuvering. To pay for this with lessons would get expensive rather quickly. But just practicing isn't ideal, either - you want, at the very least, to take a lesson right before the test. That way, someone who knows the local DMV gives you whichever tips, plus you've gotten over the most extreme nerves an hour or so before the test itself. The only downside is, the car will be unfamiliar. But if they're not too different (i.e. you hadn't been driving something closer to a truck), you'll be fine. Also useful: take a lesson where your instructor tells you you're ready, then practice for several months more, and only then take the test.
-Practice with someone who got a license somewhere with a much more difficult test than you're going to take. It helps to find a Belgian - their test is on normal roads, and using a manual. What you want to do, as with any test, is overshoot the mark in preparation. (I think my husband should be able to put 'taught badly-coordinated native-New-Yorker wife how to drive' on his CV. I think this counts as astrophysics.)
-With parallel parking, you will spend a lot of time perfecting the maneuver, but what you really need to know is how to correct for having entered the spot incorrectly. On my test, the parallel parking came immediately after a right turn, so there was no time to straighten out the car. I could tell how wrong the angle was, but figured once I was in the spot, using some combination of lesson-techniques and Belgian-driving ones, I'd get it in there. Which I did, but with a hubcap touching the curb. Which, with more time, I'd have corrected, but DMV examiners need to get on with the day.
-Pray for a lenient examiner. And I think this falls into Dan Savage's category of things atheists might make an exception and pray for.
-Re: psychology: one thing that can help or hurt, depending, is to remind yourself that everyone has taken this test and passed. This isn't like getting into college or grad school, or like getting any job whatsoever. This is open admissions, as it were. Remind yourself that you're not special, not uniquely incapable of doing this basic thing that everybody does. Unless you do have a condition that prevents you from driving safely, in which case don't drive. But if you're just run-of-the-mill clumsy, remember that this skill isn't the same as being good at sports or ballet. Don't assume that mediocre spacial reasoning, or a poor performance in high school physics, disqualifies you from the basic way Americans and many others get around.
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
WWPD Guides: OMG DRIVERS LICENSE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! edition
Monday, January 07, 2013
A serious woman
It suddenly occurred to me why that makeup "Room For Debate" hit such a nerve.What the makeup conversation is really about, if you dig a bit, is whether it's acceptable for a woman to want to look good to men. To men generally, to the men she finds attractive, or to only her boyfriend or husband - the number of men is not the issue here. And it's not so much that makeup itself attracts men (and it can, in subtle ways - the men who profess to liking a woman with a half-inch layer of foundation on are few and far between), as that wearing it - often if not always - announces the intention to do so. But this, I think, gets at why we're incapable of having a straightforward discussion about women's motivations for wearing the stuff. The various defenses of wearing it tend to involve a great deal of insisting that this is something women do for themselves, because it's like art, but god forbid because they want to appeal to the opposite sex. 'I do it for me,' as if 'me' couldn't possibly want a dude. Yet I think we realize, on some level, that most women are interested in attracting at the very least one man at any given time. Makeup use represents women desiring men, pursuing them, even. Which makes us uncomfortable.
As for why it makes us uncomfortable, it comes down to a three separate and somewhat contradictory issues. First is that it's taboo, in an outdated, misogynistic, "The Rules" sense, for women to want men. (The 'Ew, gross, this guy totally asked me out, who does he think he is?' line of thought.) It's seen as less feminine for a woman to pursue a man, and also as futile - either you do it for him or you don't, so why humiliate yourself by asking the question? Along the same lines, a woman who says, look, yes, I wear makeup because it makes me look more attractive to men, is saying that without it, she doesn't look so hot. This is the opposite of what men want to hear, because they unanimously demand 'natural' beauty. The effort can't be visible. Thus the very women wearing makeup to attract men could well be the ones most likely to make a fuss about how they barely wear any at all, just a teensy bit, nothing more. It's shameful to be seen trying. It ruins whichever archaic dance.
Next is the ostensibly feminist 'male gaze' argument - one that defines male-female relationships as about a woman's desire to appeal to men/some men/a particular man. This, I suppose, comes from second-wave feminism - this notion that just as a woman can never choose to wear makeup in a society that demands that self-presentation of them, a woman can never be attracted to men/a man except within the context of a society that demands that she find a dude. It's the idea that female heterosexuality is inherently submission to the patriarchy, and never just about, you know, most women being wired the same as we modern folks understand gay men to be. Indeed, as I've argued here before (links to the various posts assembled here), it is this understanding of female heterosexuality that leads some women to identify half-seriously as gay men trapped in women's bodies.
A third, something of a depoliticized version of the second, is that a woman who likes men, a girl who likes boys, is less serious of a person than one who doesn't get what all the fuss is. As a kid, were you the nerdy, bookish girl who felt alienated when your childhood girlfriends began swooning over male classmates or rock stars? Whereas we basically expect boys and men to desire someone, in most cases women, and don't think a boy is less serious, a man less intellectual or capable, if he sees Beauty and responds in one way or another. It doesn't detract from a man's respectability to love, lust, whatever, because the male perspective on romance is, you know, Art. But also because when a girl or woman desires, this is assumed to be the desire to get a boyfriend, get a husband, raise some kids. That, or - goes the thinking - she's effectively a prostitute. A serious woman with a life of her own won't get tied down by any man, neither a Wall Street tycoon nor a slacker. While adult women are sometimes able to reconcile this approach with, well, hormones, we-as-a-society continue to love the idea of the tomboy who just has more going on in the brain department than her boy-crazy peers. So this relates to the much-discussed slut-stud dichotomy, but that doesn't get at all of it.
Anyway, long and blathery story short, a woman who wears makeup to look good for men/a man disappoints traditional feminists as well as gender-role traditionalists. Progressives and reactionaries alike, albeit for different reasons, find female desire for men suspicious as well as basically incomprehensible. We-as-a-society on some level understand that desire for men is what's behind much if not most if not virtually all makeup usage. Thus, we must talk around the elephant in the room, and pretend that makeup is innocent self-expression or this dreadful chore one must do to look appropriate at the office.
Sunday, January 06, 2013
Inauthentic Asian cooking class with WWPD
Dumplings! Such an outside-only food, right? Not so! You, too, can make your suburban New Jersey scientist-housing into an inadvertently-vegan dim-sum emporium. This will probably have to be something I make when we have people over, because I have a tendency to overdo it with these, and am parked on the couch now for that very reason.
You will need:
-An Asian supermarket or grocery. (Such as.)
-Japanese or the slightly thicker Korean dumpling wrappers, preferably the ones without egg or strange preservatives. I say this because that's what I've used thus far - with eggs and with possible carcinogens might work fine, too.
-Ginger, finely chopped
-Scallions, finely chopped
-Pea shoots or bok choy, finely chopped
-Extra-firm tofu, diced
-Rice vinegar
-Soy sauce
-Sesame oil (of which there can never be too much, although opinions differ)
You may add:
-Chopped garlic
-A dash of wine
Quantities? Anything goes, just make sure the whole thing isn't too liquidy.
-Fill a small bowl with water, and use that to seal as much of the filling as comfortably fits in each wrapper. And really pinch them closed, so the filling stays in!
-Heat (medium-high flame) a large pan - non-stick might help - and put some but not too much peanut oil in.
-Place the dumplings in, so as to just about fill the pan.
-As soon as they're in, they're already quite fried. At that point, toss in some water - perhaps the water you'd used to seal the dumplings? - and quickly cover the pan.
-Check your email or something. Post photos of your pet to Facebook. Better yet: start prepping the next batch of dumplings. Just be sure to let them steam, without leaving them covered once the water's gone, in which case they're likely to burn.
-Lift the top off the pan, and let the water cook off.
-Once the water's cooked off, either the dumplings are done, if you prefer a kind of half-steamed, half-fried approach, or you can flip them and go with unambiguously-fried. Just make sure, either way, that they're out of the pan before they even come close to charred.
The dumplings are ready! Serve them with a dipping sauce, aka soy sauce in a small bowl, or something involving lime, hot sauce, probably other sauces as well.)
Someone was right on the Internet
Chris Schonberger, Nick Schonberger, and Foster Kamer wrote this endlessly compelling if somewhat NY-centric list of "20 Things Everyone Thinks About the Food World (But Nobody Will Say)." It's so much more spot-on that something like that seems like it could be, without being gratuitously contrarian. It's refreshingly not yet another revelation that your food was prepared in less sanitary conditions than you might have hoped - thank goodness, because we know, and choose not to think about it. (Even when, as happened yesterday, one's preferred Philadelphia Vietnamese restaurant serves up a spoon with a startlingly fresh noodle already on it, and plates that look clean on top but are coated with grease on the bottom.)
My take on the list, item by item...
Largely endorse:
#1: "Refusing to spend money on non-Western restaurants is racist." Meaning, "Why is it that people are willing to spend $20 on a bowl of pasta with sauce that they might actually be able to replicate pretty faithfully at home, yet they balk at the notion of a white-table cloth Thai restaurant, or a tacos that cost more than $3 each?" An excellent point, although some counterarguments spring to mind. As commenters point out, Japanese food isn't 'white-people' cuisine (see: Masa).* Also relevant: once you take any cuisine past a certain fanciness threshold, it starts to taste generically upscale, probably something to do with cream sauces. This can work for French or Italian, but any cuisine known for intense flavors is going to suffer. So it's not necessarily that customers wouldn't pay more for higher-quality Thai or Mexican food - it could be that past experience has shown that as the price goes up, the taste gets worse. But yeah, caveats aside, point taken.
#3: Yes, there is a conspiracy to make us think Scandinavian food is something to be consumed on a regular basis outside Scandinavia. Which also gets #16 - "Not every country's cuisine is worth celebrating" - out of the way. Exception: gravlax. And to be clear, I say this as someone whose own ancestral culinary heritage is, what, a kosher version of Polish cooking? Also not a cuisine anyone who didn't grow up with it is going to want to eat terribly often.
#5: Someone in the comments protested that this should be "undocumented" not "illegal," which, fair enough, but semantics aside, yup.
#6: A fine critique of the food movement: "Locavorism has become the newest outlet for yuppie guilt, providing a feeling of living ethically and supporting a cause, but too often the onslaught of kale and artisanal pickles blinds us from looking at the deeper problems affecting America’s food system."
#2: re: NYT restaurant reviews, #9 re: Anthony Bourdain, #14 re: molecular gastronomy, #15 re: anonymous critics, and #17 re: sexual harassment in kitchens.
Beg to differ:
Re: #4, New York bagels are just fine, and moving elsewhere even within the same region, it becomes immediately obvious how tough it is to get a good bagel. Not all bagels in New York are good, some are rolls shaped like bagels, but that's not even the issue when people claim a problem with New York bagels. No, it's this whole thing about how bagels these days are too doughy, and it sounds sophisticated and adult to prefer the version that sounds old-timey and less like toddler-food. But this is, at least from my born-in-1983 perspective, an overhyped concern. As long as you go to a place that's an actual bagel shop, you will get an actual bagel. Some of the best (Ess, Absolute) are doughy and excellent. Murray's is maybe too dry, and Bagel Bob's, well, you have provided more $2 grad-school lunches than you know. The Montreal bagels are good, but when outside Montreal, a novelty item.**
Re: # 19, I already have a post addressing why I don't think it's the same when fancy food-professionals celebrate grease as when people who actually influence what people who don't merely pick at a meal at high-end establishment consume.
*I was once wasting time on the internet and on the Yelp (?) page for Masa, a restaurant I've never been to and probably will never go to on account of it's the most expensive food establishment ever. And there was this one review from someone who said something along the lines of, 'My girlfriend and I were near Columbus Circle and really hungry, so we went to grab a bite at this nearby Japanese place,' and you see where this is going.
**Philadelphia has Montreal-style bagels, which I, as someone who has also had the original, and who's of partial Montreal-Jewish heritage, let it be known, for authenticity's sake, can confirm are close enough. New York apparently has some as well, now that Mile End has decided to stop importing bagels from Canada. How was that consistent with the locavore, new-Brooklyn ethos?
Friday, January 04, 2013
More interns-and-housewives
OK, so make this reminder number I'm not sure how many, this week alone, that I need to pitch more articles. There's now a really great story in Dissent (where, during college, I was a paid intern), by Madeleine Schwartz, about interns and housewives, which brings in a gender dimension to all of this. I'd figured that more unpaid interns were female, but Schwartz brings some jarring data: "According to one study by Intern Bridge, a research and consulting firm, more than three in four unpaid interns were women." Yikes.
Anyway, kicking-myself aside, I really like Schwartz's point about the cheery passivity expected of unpaid interns and housewives:
Advice for interns usually stresses their need to be adaptable, as well as enthusiastic, submissive, and obedient. Common tips available on the Internet include that the intern “be a chameleon,” shifting his or her behavior to suit the current workplace. Another counsels constant apology: “I would suggest starting off [emails] with ‘Sorry to bother you’ the first few times.” Countless job descriptions repeat their demands: “flexible, energetic, creative, and enthusiastic”; “flexible, enthusiastic and highly motivated with a positive attitude”; “enthusiastic and flexible learners, capable of both taking direction and working independently.”
But a college student or grad not getting paid for administrative work in a climate-controlled office, boo hoo. Also a woman who snagged a husband and doesn't now need to deal with the drudgery of the workplace - what interests Schwartz is household labor itself, but I'm thinking also of the work women who are not primary breadwinners do outside the home. What about the women whose looks-and-charm privilege weren't so extensive? Aren't they the ones we ought to care about? We view the troubles of the intern and housewife as the non-problems of people who don't need to work. Never mind that youth and marital status are precarious: that students - even ones who don't need to work while in school - will generally need to pay back loans or at the very least support themselves later on, or that breadwinners can leave, die, or abruptly announce a transition to Apatovian-protagonist sloth. Never mind that work deserves compensation.
The gender angle Schwartz brings to this issue might help us out of this mess, because it's clear that the absence of a certain form of privilege is what leads some but not others to take unpaid internships. But I'm not so optimistic. The spoiled early-20s girl - as represented by none other than Lena YPIS Dunham - is such a cliché at this point that it's going to be tough going, convincing anyone that these are workers in need of protections.
Indeed, the unpaid-internship problem is as intractable as it is precisely because we keep talking about how certain young people have the privilege of working for free. Rather than looking at unpaid work as a problem, we act as though it's a problem that not everyone gets a chance to sign up. This framing impacts our approach, and draws us to patchwork solutions like offering competitive scholarships for those who've already secured an unpaid internship, or making internships for college credit, thereby incorporating them into college, however that's being paid for.
Meanwhile, we could say, look, of course life is easier for young adults who can afford not to work than for those who do. But once unpaid internships cease to exist only as a way to give socialites and rock-stars' offspring a wholesome-sounding activity, once they come to replace jobs, they themselves are the problem. Again, it's not that unequal access to unpaid internships isn't a problem. But the deeper problem, as well as the one that might be easier to solve, is that they exist in the first place.
Thursday, January 03, 2013
Insufficiently-critical shopper
Oh happy day, Princeton now has an Urban Outfitters.
A sentence like this needs context: until the arrival of said Outfitters, if you wanted low-end, there was, what, J. Crew? Which, especially these days... kind of mid-to-high-end. New additions in town include a deck-shoe store and a Brooks Brothers, but there's also Ralph Lauren, J. McLaughlin, Kate Spade, I think a Lilly Pulitzer. Oh, and the Princeton-sweatpants store. What am I forgetting? The lacrosse shop. In other words, although I'm not averse to clothes-shopping, I had managed to live here, what, a year and a half, most of it time without many trips into the city or a car, without buying any clothing whatsoever in town.*
Say what you will about Urban Outfitters - that it's vintage-knock-off, poor-quality, overpriced junk aimed at those too square for real vintage-shopping; that it's mall-clothing for 12-year-olds; that it's a subliminal plot to turn young people into Republicans; or that it's generally obnoxious. Say it - you're not telling me anything I don't know. But when it comes to town, I'm not what would be called a "critical shopper." There is now a store I could walk (OK, bike) to that sells normal clothing. $40 jeans. $15 (U.S. union-made, apparently) hats. Actually, really gorgeous $15 hats (we will look past the fact that a similar hat is cheaper in Japan, even though I think they're made in Pennsylvania or possibly even New Jersey - Princeton is Princeton, and if a hamburger's $14...). I broke my no-garments-purchased-in-town policy to buy the absolute perfect gray hat, one I can't find a photo of online, but that's basically the acrylic version of this. It's just so cool, so Acne, so A.P.C., so Gwyneth-on-a-good-day, this thing that I bought in Princeton.
*While I've come to accept online shopping as a fact-of-living-in-the-woods, online clothes-shopping, not so much. Meanwhile, to give town its due, there is also a consignment store where the less-exciting Talbots goes to be subtly reduced, as well as an out-of-the-way, barely-counts-as-in-town, has-some-potential thrift shop where they make you check your bag, which, if you want this to be a dissertation-break, means you end up holding your computer as you browse, which is not necessarily worth it.
"You're schmoopy"
-Via Facebook, a truly amazing ad that was apparently in the Harvard Magazine. The hotel defended itself, kind of, by claiming this not at all the same photo as its inspiration.
-Via Prudie (sorry, JTL), we now know of a new trend in bridezilladom: you're-not-invited announcements. As in, rather than knowing you're not invited to an event on account of, you weren't invited to it (that is, if you're even aware of the event in the first place), the hosts will notify you, unprompted, that you didn't make the cut.
I agree with Prudie that if this is a thing (if! although as the letter-writer indicates, there's some evidence that it is), it relates to social media, on so many levels. If you get married, friends you haven't spoken to in years may still feel close to you, because they've been following your status updates or photos... even if there's no way they were going to invite you to their weddings, once actually sitting down and writing a guest list. And if you post photos of your celebration - and if there are 8,000 such photos, why not all? and perhaps in dozens of installments, such as to dominate the news feeds of everyone who hasn't yet hidden your updates - then by a certain point, even people who would have not wanted to go to your thing in the first place will on some level wonder why they were left out. (Not unrelated: the couples that get all lovey-dovey before an online audience, an audience knowing, on one level, that this is inappropriate and insecure, yet on another, experiencing a pang of irrational envy. The human psyche, never as straightforward as all that.)
In the past, there simply wasn't the same opportunity to feel excluded from events one had nothing to do with. But this mostly comes down to a more timeless and genre-independent fact of life: There will always be those who assume an invite from them is the most sought-after piece of paper imaginable, and that the kid who sat next to them in freshman biology will quite possibly never get over the hurt of having not gotten one. And there's apparently, via one such forum, a converse of this - invitees afraid to decline, for fear of hurting the couple, because a 'no' from this uniquely vibrant individual would in fact ruin what would have otherwise been a delightful celebration.
And yes, from these two items above, I'm starting to see where the women who want lifetime-monogamous-commitment-to-dude but not "marriage" are coming from.
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
The Final Word:* makeup UPDATED
Everything there is to say about makeup. Everything! (Did I miss anything?)
-Yes, heterosexual men, whether or not women wear makeup is all about you. So, now that that's out of the way: There are men who prefer women not in makeup. This is on the one hand good to know (some women really are dolling-up to attract men, and could save time/money), and on the other, much larger hand offensive (who says the makeup is to please men generally/you in particular, Mr. Presumptuous?). Also offensive because of the implication: this man wants a naturally beautiful woman, and considers artifice deceptive, perhaps for some primal reason having to do with biological children he's theoretically having with this woman. (Like I said in 2009, 2010, like Amanda Marcotte now says. See Resolution #4.)
-And then there's the small matter of, men don't notice makeup unless it's really garish. There's on the one hand fuchsia lipstick, on the other concealer. It's not that concealer is invisible, so much as that we're so used to seeing women in makeup that up to a certain threshold, it's not really noticed, even by other women. A woman who usually wears concealer, but skips it one day, will look not so much barefaced as tired or blotchy.
-As much as some would like to believe it, the world isn't entirely made up of men who find makeup revolting, and women who'd look better to men if barefaced. Some women are going around doing the unthinkable, intentionally and successfully attracting more men than they would otherwise on account of carefully-applied face-paint. Sometimes, makeup works, in the most banal possible sense.
-On the one hand, makeup's expensive. This is money that women are spending, and men are not. Unfair! On the other, if you, dude, aren't much to look at, there's not a heck of a lot you can do about it. The gym doesn't change your face. Eyeliner, however, does just that. Sucks for men, kind of, that this isn't a socially-acceptable option.
-Makeup does not need to take very much time. So arguments about oh, how terrible, women need to wake up an hour before men do, these are not so convincing. Of course, if we're including hair... But a woman can go out looking plenty made up, and this can turn out to have taken less than one minute.
-Some women would look better in less, or different, makeup. Others would look better with a bit of lipstick on. As much as we might want it so, we wouldn't all look better without makeup. Not wearing it sometimes means living with looking worse.
-Effort is sometimes appreciated even if it's not improving, per se, someone's looks - thus the appeal of lipstick (worn by the same woman) that makes the lips lighter or darker. Or: nail-painting. A woman with red nails isn't correcting for the fact that her nails aren't naturally red. Artifice in and of itself reads as pretty, feminine, whatever.
-Virtually no woman wants to identify as so shallow and/or ugly as to need a lot of makeup, so you'll hear about a low-maintenance routine that involves 'just' primer, toner, tinted moisturizer, taupe shadow, lip tint, and of course mascara. And some blush, maybe, but only on special occasions. Keeping it simple. (Even Marcotte takes the time to mention that she doesn't always wear makeup. The pressure to be naturally beautiful runs deep.) Women who don't wear foundation, especially, will claim to not wear makeup, this being, for reasons I don't entirely understand, where the consensus is that a line should be drawn.
-There are certain instances when not wearing makeup indicates a problem: a guy drawn to doing so, but held back because of societal homophobia, transphobia, etc. A woman who did wear makeup, but has stopped, and has, coincidentally, also lost interest in life more generally. Extrapolating from these unusual cases, we might infer that there are well-adjusted, as well as cisgender, women who actually like wearing makeup. Not to mention, there are women who wear 'too much' makeup - too much to be widely thought desirable, hirable. It's not all the patriarchy.
-'Normal' varies by subculture. You may have lucked/maneuvered into one where women really do have a hygiene-only approach. You are, however, the exception.
-Yet one also doesn't want to see proliferation of what's necessary. If, baseline, to leave the house, a woman thinks she needs to spend three hours primping and use $50 worth of product, or to have cosmetic surgery, then yes, we can point to a problem with her as an individual or with life for women in her subculture more generally. How to stem the proliferation without falling into the natural-beauty trap remains a mystery.
-Makeup is a set of products sold in a capitalist society. Companies use marketing, CEOs want you to buy their goods. If you want to be a good hippie, you kind of can't use makeup, even the dubious stuff sold at Whole Foods.
-Makeup is made by workers not as well-compensated as you are, Western office-worker. It's made out of chemicals you might not want to consume in lab-rat quantities, and all those plastic containers, well, that can't be good - landfills, BPA, and all that. It's consumed (by silly, silly women, at that), it's not essential, so it's unhealthy and unethical. Or so we're meant to believe - the medical and the moral get a bit blurry. Do women who just use soap actually live longer than those who wear makeup, parabens and all that? Or do we consider artifice decadent, and romanticize the healthy flush of the unpainted woman?
-Oh, and look what I didn't do in this post: go into which makeup I personally do and don't use. This is information you could figure out elsewhere on WWPD, but having established that there's no neutral way to talk about this, no way not to phrase it as 'I only use this and that, and totally go bare-faced some of the time, because I'm so naturally delightful', I'm going to hold off adding any of the personal to this post. All I'll say, for readers requiring a personal hook, is that I've got one of these, and it's not empty.
*A new series for 2013, in which I exhaust a topic. Or my readers. Or both.
UPDATES
-Autumn Whitefield-Madrano has a great round-up of responses to the NYT "Room For Debate," and I promise I don't only say that because mine's one of them.
-Meanwhile, Into The Gloss knows when it's summoned, and responds to the "Room For Debate" as well, sort of. I say "sort of" because the post is anchored by the following message: "Saying makeup is anti-feminist is borderline crazy. In our book, being a feminist means supporting women, no matter what they look like or what they want to do. (A resounding “You Go, Girl!” here, please, thanks)." Also because the post ends with a link to where you can purchase "Tom Ford's four-piece Lip Color Boxed Set," for a mere $192. This was such a missed opportunity for them to bring back Edith Zimmerman.
"The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice, I warn my classes. If you want to be popular with your parents and siblings, try cookbooks."
While Literature used to mean subtly alluding to anything racy, we're now in the age of Real Housewives on toilets, of Lifetime Movie fiction, but most of all, of the overshare. Rather than channeling our observations of humanity into novels or short stories, we're now expected to tell the truth, the whole truth, with bonus courage points for any loved ones we take down along the way. (See also Susan Shapiro's interventions in the comments to her essay. The personal is the personal.)
And I think that's a shame. There are so many advantages to telling "your" story - the one, or ones, only you could tell - through a genre that doesn't promise truth. Fiction of course varies tremendously in terms of how closely it mirrors lived experience. But once you've labeled a document "fiction," the premise changes. Maybe these are the author's experiences and grievances, or maybe the author heard/read about something like this, or maybe it's pure invention (as much as such a thing is possible). I have trouble articulating exactly why fiction is the way to go, but my impression is that it's the route to bigger truths than the ones you can arrive at trying to adhere to your own precise experiences.
This is an issue I've been thinking about for some time. Even in high school, when "creative-writing" class brings about what are clearly individual's own life situations verbatim, whatever the characters are called, I was never able to write "fiction" about myself. Part of it was that doing so led to the obvious writing trap of, there are all these details I would know, and would assume a reader would as well, but how on earth could anyone other than me know what I was talking about? (To give a theoretical example not from my own life: say your protagonist's parents had a bitter divorce, which you take for granted because you are the protagonist, but which could well be information the reader needs but lacks.) Inventing characters forces you to paint the full picture, to tell as much as is necessary. It also just didn't seem interesting - I know that my own life interests me insofar as I'm experiencing it, a likely universal human experience, one that makes all of us biased when telling our own stories. Point being, even apart from whichever ethical qualms keep me from going the dirty-laundry route, I'd also find it more difficult to write about my own personal life, in a way that could possibly be of interest to anyone other than myself.
And yet, this blog. Sometimes I worry that all this blogging - first-person, but not confessional - has damaged my capacity to write fiction. Blogging, but also Facebook, an online presence in general. I know, a huge loss for world literature, but bear with me. Like every other literature grad student since forever, I'm always starting a novel, conceiving of pieces of one. But I fear that I've become so accustomed to writing only from my own perspective, to presenting myself, to adhering to the truth, to keeping everything safe for an audience I can only assume includes the full gamut of family, social, and professional connections, that I'd be incapable of shutting the self-censoring impulse. Even when talking about made-up situations and characters. Because fiction or not, it still comes from my brain, my keyboard. Because I'm so used to thinking of my writing-voice as me, it seems scandalous to write about a character thinking/doing something that isn't something I would admit to thinking/doing (whether or not I have!) on-blog. And I don't even necessarily mean scandalous topics. I mean anything that would cross the line.
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
"'The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people'"
While I personally didn't need convincing, I fear that the specifics of Abramson's story, though, may not win over the unconvinced:
Of all the examinations and personal questions I had to endure about the status of my relationship and the quality of the condoms I bought, the meeting that stands out the most is the one with a social worker. The pleasant woman who chose the most giving profession on earth tossed questions at me from an official form. She could not understand why a healthy, educated young woman of 24 would not want to continue her pregnancy.
“Why do you want to have an abortion?” she asked in astonishment. “Because even though I want to keep on living with my partner and have children with him eventually, I’m still studying for my bachelor’s degree and working part-time, so I don’t see any way I can raise this baby.” Surprised at my honesty, she asked what my partner thought. “He feels the same way I do,” I answered. “We want to live together without children at this stage in our lives.”Maybe it's that I've been reading about the perils of thinking one can always have a baby "eventually," but as much as I agree with Abramson that she was treated terribly, and that nothing good can come of society outlawing abortion in these circumstances, this is a case where I see the right but - and here, the perils of overshare, the temptation it brings to judge individual cases as opposed to societal trends - find myself wondering if this is really the case that best gets the point across. If you do want kids, and with your current partner, and so does said partner, but at 27 (say) rather than 24... I suppose where I'm going with this is, there are reasons other than More Jewish Babies, other than an abortion-is-murder stance, that someone might question the wisdom of this particular woman's decision. Especially given that (as is my understanding? has this changed in recent years?) Israel has more of a social-safety net.
But maybe that's precisely what makes this the right story to use to make this point. If we learned of a woman carrying a fetus with major, life-threatening deformities, or one that resulted from rape or incest, or if the "woman" was a 16-year-old girl, or a grown woman without a partner/support system, we might conclude, individual circumstances trump More Jewish Babies, assuming we were on the MJB bandwagon, which, of course, we are not. But here, it's a clear-cut case of choice. Abramson knew what was right for her, and as much as the reader might find this not the best reason to get an abortion, it's not about the reader, but the woman who would or would not be carrying this pregnancy to term. Only Abramson could know what was right for her, and it shouldn't have had to fall on her to articulate why she wanted an abortion in a way that some panel (or Haaretz reader!) found sympathetic. It comes down to something every woman at a given time knows - if she's prepared to give birth to (and likely raise) a child at that point or not, something that quite possibly can't be explained sufficiently to others whose uterus it is not.
In other words, even if some will find Abramson's reasons "decadent," the deciding vote, womb-wise, goes not to the party with the best argument, but to the one whose womb it is.
Monday, December 31, 2012
2013 imminent
Oh, there are more, but here are some of the more important ones. OK, readers, hold me to this:
-Dissertation.
-Driver's license.
-Not quite so much pasta. Or at least whole wheat pasta. Something.
-Actually pitch articles, as opposed to blogging some idea, only to see that idea in print, three weeks or years later, written by somebody else. As in, aggressively, none of that 'but I emailed this one editor one time three years ago and never heard back.'
"Crazy curious"
Just the other day, I was in a supermarket in Los Angeles and I saw this guy checking out this girl. He was standing next to her in line at the juice bar. He kept looking at her, and she kept looking down … at the Facebook app on her iPhone.
Now, I know some of you right now are thinking, maybe she wasn't interested. That wasn't the issue. Because what I'm about to share with you is something most of you have probably done.
He gave up and disappeared. But I was crazy curious so I stood next to her in line and got real close and peeked at what she was typing into her phone.
Her status update: When am I going to meet a nice guy? It seems like all the good men are taken.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Mont Oriol, Part II: the perils of mésalliance
Maupassant kind of redeemed himself, maybe. I ended up really getting into the novel, which given the vaguely nauseating scanned computer-screen format is saying something. I found, though, that if I switched between the novel and Facebook on occasion, I started blurring the two somewhat, imagining that among my friend-list were decadent aristocrats, lovesick peasant girls, and so forth. Then I went and interspersed the novel my husband just got me, The Middlesteins, and... here it was less confusion than something else. It's weird to go from a story about a Jewish family, one with really impeccable character development, to one where there's The Jew, whose function is basically to only care about money. In any case, make that two more novels read in 2012, although I long ago gave up on the idea of counting this.
Reading Mont Oriol for the Jewish angle (which I effectively had to stop doing to get any enjoyment out of it, but I noted the relevant pages enough to do what must be done), I ended up finding the novel not so much virulently anti-Semitic as 1886-ish-ly un-PC. As in, if one was going to have a money-hungry, Parisian yet vaguely foreign financier, one would, by convention, make this character a Jew. One doesn't get the sense that Maupassant was preoccupied with the so-called Jewish Question, only that he wanted to represent this type for various other plot points to fall into place. It needs to be that Christiane can have an affair without cheating on a husband we sympathize with. And if we don't sympathize with William Andermatt, it's less because he's so preoccupied with business, and more because he's the husband in an arranged, loveless marriage.
The cruelty of the portrait, then, comes primarily from the sense one gets that Maupassant was able to imagine the inner life of all the main characters - male and female, rich and poor, young and old, rural and urban - with the exception of this Andermatt. Andermatt doesn't come across as shadier than the other characters - think decadent aristocrats crossed with 1980s-movie cads - just as less present. The Other, I believe, is the technical term for this. He's just this utter non-entity. What would he think if he realized his wife was having an affair? It's alluded to that he must not find out, but it's also kind of unclear that he would even care, presuming it didn't impact his finances.
What's interesting for my dissertation, at any rate, is that Christiane gives birth to a daughter whose biological father is a new-money but Catholic playboy, but whose presumed, legal father is Andermatt, Christiane's husband. On the one hand, we're meant to believe that a Christian(e) and a Jew are of practically different species and thus cannot conceive, or perhaps that Jewish men are infertile, although the latter seems dubious given the popular stereotypes about Jews being too fertile. On the other, Jewish difference is not presented as visible, such that it would be obvious upon seeing a child if it was or was not half-Jewish. For all the ambient racial anti-Semitism in 1886 France, a Jew was still white.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Of lost time
I know you are under the impression that a PhD that focuses on the themes of inter(text)uality in medieval basket-weaving would be a surefire route to a high-paid career with 1950s-breadwinner-style job security. I know, it's a common misconception. And the only way you'd possibly learn the truth is that every so often, a wise adult issues a Don't-Go, warning the likes of you that grad school is a terrible mistake.
The mark of a Don't-Go is that it will be phrased as a question: should you go to grad school? But the moment this has been asked, the answer has been given, and apologies for the passive voice. The most fun Don't-Goes try to reach the widest audience possible by refusing to differentiate between MA and PhD; humanities, social sciences and sciences; funded and not; elite U or not. This is to confuse you, such that when you're admitted to a joint PhD program in all quantitative disciplines, with a joint appointment at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, you can turn it down, because it's only sensible to do so.
Ron Rosenbaum, the latest author of a Don't-Go, limits himself to literature grad school, which, if you were considering/are currently in literature grad school, will cause you to read the thing, and the comments, and let's be honest, it's not like you're needed desperately at the office. What gives Rosenbaum his authority is that he himself went. To Yale. For one year. In 1969.
That Rosenbaum then had a successful career in journalism either a) gives us hope or b) tells us that in 1969, that was a viable career path, or c) makes us wonder if maybe having been a literature grad student at Yale (where he also did his undergrad) gave him an edge. Which is often the missing piece, as with the Harvard college drop-out legends. A place can lend you caché even if it doesn't grant you a degree. A commenter though, put it best:
I love you, Rosenbaum, but here's what I'm hearing: if I can manage to get myself into undergraduate school at Yale University in the middle of last century, I will have a good shot at getting a good job in the field of journalism, which (since it's midcentury) still has many years of plenty ahead of it? Well then, my mind is made up!
Anyway, I have nothing against the Don't-Go concept, but I want to see one that tells college seniors and recent grads to rewind the clock and pay more attention in high school math classes, to bond with teachers of something other than creative writing, to do whatever it is one does that leads to being a consultant, banker, air-conditioner-repairperson. Give us something we can work with.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
And now, the outrage
OK, so while everyone I've shown Jillian Keenan's post about parental overshare to (people who may have been hearing me go on about "dirty laundry" since forever) has either endorsed it/my enthusiasm for it or not said either way, the NYT parenting-blog readers almost uniformly denounce it. This may have something to do with the tendency of readers of a parenting blog to not take to well to the idea that parent-blogging is an inherently problematic enterprise. Here, some of the key points that arise:
-The mental-illness stigma: Whenever this comes up, some will argue that mental illness shouldn't be stigmatized, and that if we ask parents not to write about their children's such illnesses, we're part of the problem. Never mind that the stigmatization of mental illness does exist, this is the world we live in, and it therefore is quite possible that writing about how your child is clinically insane might not only embarrass your child but also impact your child's later life (the potential-employers argument). But we're missing the point, I think, if we look at this as a question of mental health exclusively. A parent also shouldn't be writing a tell-all about a child's physical illness or physicality, period, particularly if it's the sort of thing that impacts future insurability, hireability, marriageability, etc. (Imagine an essay: 'My child's struggle with the giant hairy mole on his back, and the pains he takes to hide it at the beach.' Or: 'My child might look like a boy, but he has ambiguous genitalia.') I might make an exception for parents of children who, due to the severity of whichever condition, will clearly either not live to see whichever article or ever have the mental capacity to do so. But let's focus on the less extreme examples. If you already know that Potential Hire or Potential Spouse X has whichever issue in his past (and different issues would of course matter in different contexts), all things equal you might well go with someone else. It's naive to think that's not how the world works, and it should thus be up to individuals to decide how much of their not-immediately-visible bodily particularities they wish to share. If this is tough to wrap your head around, imagine a 22-year-old author writing an article about a 54-year-old parent's physical illness, without that parent's consent.
-The thing with the knife: Readers agree that then-15-year-old Keenan's having brandished a knife in front of her mother and injured herself with it makes her an untrustworthy source. But they're split over whether the problem is that she, unlike Adam Lanza, was just melodramatic, and therefore she's comparing apples with oranges, or, conversely, that someone who for goodness sake wielded a knife at her mother is telling other people how to live. Clearly both of these can't be true, so let's look at them separately. In the first case, it's the notion that it's different to mommy-blog about teen angst than about teen mental illness. Re: this, see the item above. In the second case, I'm not sure quite what the argument is. Keenan isn't saying that her mother would have been wrong to do anything about her admittedly off behavior, only that her mother would have been wrong to blog about it.
-At least one reader thinks that as a non-parent, Keenan is in no place to judge parents, particularly those of troubled, potentially dangerous kids. This I really don't understand, but I suppose that's because I also don't have children, eh? But if this is an argument about a wrong done to a child, why should it matter if the now-adult child in question has children? More to the point, why does personal stance matter at all here? I never wielded any knives, so am I not qualified to say that I agree with Keenan on this? Keenan does acknowledge that parents of troubled kids have it tough, but it's not as if, if she knew just how tough, as one only could from personal experience, she'd be likely to change her view and think confessional mommy-blogging in these cases was just fine.
-Some readers comment on the ethical dubiousness of overshare in general, including dirty laundry that belongs to one's fully-grown friends and relatives. Also of sharing things that might be upsetting to her own entirely theoretical future children (!) Keenan has, after all, told a story about her mother, and earlier told a fairly racy one involving her fiancé. As someone who writes in the first person, but whose line is drawn somewhere rather more conservative than Keenan's (thus explaining why Dan Savage has never interviewed me on his podcast), I do kind of get this. But as Keenan herself points out, adults have legal recourse if problematic things are written about them, and will often be asked to consent (as her fiancé was) before being written about. And more broadly, adults are not at the mercy of anyone else, the way a child is of his parents. The power balance in that situation is quite unique. And it's as good as meaningless to ask your very young children (11 and eight!) to consent to stuff you share about them online. Both because kids that young don't have the judgement to decide what to put online about themselves, and because they want to please their parents.
-Across many of the comments, there seems to be confusion between a parent's right to vent and a parent's right to vent to a mass audience. Parents of troubled as well as ordinary kids complain about their kids, just as the children of ordinary and troubled parents complain about their parents. The problem comes when children do not feel safe in their own homes, their secrets potential fodder for mass entertainment consumption. Parents totally should whine about their kids, or, if something serious is going on, seek appropriate help. None of this has anything to do with the ridiculous 'awareness-raising' aka self-promotion that is sacrificing one's child's privacy for a mass audience.
"[T]he media has an important responsibility not to republish gratuitous material that could damage a child’s long-term personal or professional prospects."
It looks like the national conversation emerging from the Newtown tragedy is one I've actually been going on about for some time (that's 2008, folks): the acceptability, or lack thereof, of parents writing tell-alls about their own children. Will Baude first made the connection with my "dirty laundry" tag, but it just keeps going.
The issue of mental health in children and adolescents is critically important, and families who are struggling deserve nothing but help, support and understanding. But it frightens me that personal blogs and major media outlets have suddenly become acceptable venues for parents to publicly speculate about whether or not their children are mentally ill.And:
Parents should be the first line of defense to protect their children’s privacy, but sometimes they aren’t. In those cases, children have few avenues for protection or defense. Defamation cases involving minors can be tried in civil court, but because children have no legal standing, a parent or other adult would have to file the lawsuit. Those cases would also be very difficult to prove, since the potential long-term impacts of childhood defamation are hard to measure.And:
So, in the absence of other protections, the media has an important responsibility not to republish gratuitous material that could damage a child’s long-term personal or professional prospects. A few months ago, when I wrote an essay that described my relationship with my fiancé, he had to give his consent to The New York Times (in writing, no less) before they would publish it. Because children don’t have that opportunity, major news outlets need to exercise more discretion. Parental consent is important, of course. But it’s not the only important factor. A child should never be drafted against his will as a public symbol of mental illness and violence, or anything else.The only slight thing I'd disagree with in Keenan's post is her use of the word "gratuitous." Whichever details (an act of near-violence, an arrest, a diagnosis, an especially bratty breakdown or an especially disappointing college rejection) could well be essential to telling whichever story; the "gratuitous" is the identification of a real-life child.
I'm thus going to reiterate my own suggestion that there oughta be a law. Newspapers are going to go on printing these things because everyone loves a parenting tell-all. These things go viral. Nothing like a juicy revelation under the guise of this is a very serious issue someone was courageous enough to bring up. These hyper-public confessions aren't going anywhere.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Mont Oriol Part I: up to page 100 of the defective, unprintable PDF
Don't try this at home, kids, but I picked a dissertation topic before I knew if there would be enough sources to swing it. I mean, I did start out with a different vision for the project, one that ultimately wasn't possible because those sources didn't seem to exist. But I really wanted to write about Jewish intermarriage in nineteenth-century French literature, without being entirely sure that there was a heck of a lot of it.
Well, there is, in fact, a heck of a lot of it. A never-ending virtual pile of PDFs. So I learned while doing research in Frahnce and, less glamorously, on Google Books and Gallica. One of my committee-members just pointed me to another, one I'd made a note of but had not realized was top-of-the-pile material: Maupassant's Mont Oriol, which is indeed a find, and which has odd overlaps with, of all things, Into The Gloss. It's all about - OK, not finished yet - the magical power and/or sneaky marketing of French eaux minérales. The French have been spritzing themselves with snake oil since long before Emily Weiss began documenting it.
The great twist in this novel is that rather than a belle Juive, there's a sweet innocent blonde aristocrat, a woman whose charm apparently consists in having no hormones whatsoever, having not given any thought to love (which we take as a euphemism) despite being 21 years old and two years into her marriage. Her husband is the Juif, and in a shocking turn, his obsession is kesef, moolah, that sort of thing. He has no passion, and thus has failed to awaken the passion of his wife, because women can only become passionate when a man does this.
Early, early on, as this is all presented, we learn that her brother has this friend, and it's like, so that's who she's going to have the affair with, and who'll no doubt impregnate her, because her marriage to the Juif is of course not producing children, because marriages between Jews and Gentiles, according to the pseudoscience governing this literature, cannot. Let me be clear: this book was recommended to me not as compelling literature, or as a guide to living well, but as important for my project, which it most certainly is. Another odd twist - the Juif is described as not laid (as in, French-for-ugly, not as in getting-some), whereas the Gentile love interest is described as laid, at least in the eyes of the vapid protagnonesse. But because this is a crummy novel, there's probably no broader significance to this. The best I can think of is, it's about how manly appeal comes from not being a pretty-boy, something an author bemoaning decadence might conceivably have argued, right?
So. The Juif makes an investment in this French water that comes from the deepest terre itself, meaning that he's not only pillaged and plundered France via his marriage to a Real-French woman (the thèse of all these stories) and his no doubt usurious loans to his useless-aristocrat brother-in-law, but also the land itself, land owned by some old-timey paysan vinters. I don't know exactly how it'll end, but I don't think either the belle or the Juif will develop a distinct personality of any kind.
Part II, stamina-willing, shall follow.
Requisite Jewish Christmas post
If you're Jewish, and do the thing of treating non-celebration-of-Christmas as the major, definitive Jewish holiday, what actually goes on on this day for those who do acknowledge it remains something of a mystery. That it is often a drag, or just something like Thanksgiving, never occurs to you. It must all be really magical, or else why are Jews obligated to show their non-celebration of the day by being miserable? By bemoaning the fact that nothing is open, even things that you would never notice weren't open on some random weekend?
It was only as an adult, I think, that I realized there was a whole tradition of Jewish Christmas, a cheery day with Chinese food, movies, and of course singles mixers, so that more non-Christmas-observing babies might be born. Although it's possible my family did this (not the singles mixers, just the dumplings) and I somehow never put it together that this was part of some larger tradition, and assumed it was that one would year after year run through all the things that weren't possible and come up with Chinatown and movie theaters by process of elimination. (Childhood's a bit of a blur, I suppose. No "Angela's Ashes" coming from me.)
Also as an adult, it's something of a fluke that I don't celebrate Christmas - my husband's family does, but they live far away, off in Gérard Depardieu territory - well, the same country. If I were one of the Jews who had always dreamed of celebrating the holiday, I could do as apparently many in my situation do and use intermarriage as an excuse to go all-out. This is, if the social-media site mentioned below is any guide, a thing. The quasi-guilty, massively-enthusiastic celebration of that which was once taboo. But I don't really get this - it's precisely because the non-Jewish world is no longer a mystery that Christmas is no longer a mystery, just a holiday my husband's family does and mine doesn't acknowledge, much like his family, not being American, doesn't do Thanksgiving. Not exactly the same - it's different to be Jewish in a majority-Christian country. But not all that different. If I were in Belgium this time of year, I'd go in for it, especially given that the "it" of all Belgian celebrations involves eating copious amounts of delicious pie. Although Easter's somewhat more intriguing, what with the chocolates. And because non-celebration-of-Easter isn't one of the major laws of secular Judaism, I can eat as many white-chocolate-praliné eggs as I want guilt-free. Jewish-guilt-free, at least.
But the weirdness of December 25th for the likes of me, it really is about being Jewish, not merely non-Christian. It might be PC to frame it as time of the year is for non-Christians, but from what I can tell, other non-Christians either just don't care or celebrate it as a secular holiday. And obviously not all Jews care - some go in for it (old-time German Jews, more recent Russian-Jewish immigrants) even without an intermarriage as cover. But I do wish - as I think I ask every year - that the secular-of-Christian-extraction community would get that this is and is likely to remain a thing for some Jews, and would not insist that Christmas is a secular rather than a religious holiday, get-over-yourselves-already. And that this isn't because Jews are being difficult, but because Jews are projecting onto Christianity that same blurry is-it-a-culture-or-a-religion identity that constitutes Judaism. Christmas, to many Jews, feels Christian, is Christian, even if it's a secular/cultural/"pagan" variant. Along the same lines, even if you-the-secular-but-of-Christian-extraction don't identify as Christian, you may be identified as such by Jews, who are merely responding to the fact that they get identified as Jews regardless of religious affiliation. If any of that makes sense.
At any rate, a holiday that involves putting up a decorated tree and placing gifts under it doesn't seem even remotely compatible with ownership of a naughty and hyperactive (impervious to dog runs, woods walks...) miniature poodle. No menorah, alas, for the same reason.
Monday, December 24, 2012
I am not 16
"I tried to dance Britney Spears./ I guess I'm getting on in years." - Rufus Wainwright.
So I'm officially too old for Facebook. This was bound to be the case, as I was the right age for it when it was new. So far, in the past few lazy vacation days, I've tried and failed to categorize my various "friends" as those who would and would not be interested in my updates (quite possibly posting updates only to high school acquaintances and people I met once at a party eight years ago); "liked" a video someone had posted that I had clicked on (forgive me, gods of anti-procrastination, but it's December 24th and last-and-final chapter is in another window - if you are my friend on Facebook and you're posting videos this week, damn straight I'm watching them*) but not, as far as I could tell, "liked"; and attempted to narrate the pasta I'd consumed that day by referring to having had pasta lunch after pasta dinner, which, despite the fact that I do eat a lot of pasta, wasn't the order I meant. If you want to communicate with me socially, try parchment and quill. It's simply beyond my capacity to use that site.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Shorter Sunday Review
-Ross Douthat pulls a right-wing YPIS and accuses Mayor Bloomberg of being a coastal elite in his pro-gun-control advocacy.
-Frank Bruni assures us that It Gets Better, if you happen to have a platform for your views on gay rights in the NYT. As in, if you turn out to be not just gay, but a really big-deal gay person, your father might be so proud of your professional successes as to get past his homophobia.
-A doctoral candidate who isn't me has an op-ed in the Times, so if I disagree with it, I'm just being, as they say on "The Only Way Is Essex," jel. But, like, I thought Science had shown that as a rule, girls prefer girl-toys and boys boy-toys (such an unfortunate expression). I thought the goal wasn't to scrap gender-roles, but to allow for the fact that some girls will prefer trucks, some boys dolls, and that we-as-a-society need to accept this, and to teach our children to accept this as well. (Just like some men are drawn to wearing eyeliner and dresses, some women are as well. It's not all the patriarchy.)
-Or is the problem not so much gendered toys, as toys whatsoever? Because, as we learned a couple days ago, materialism is evil - consumption is never about enjoying beautiful things and spending within one's means. If you prefer shopping to Nature, your parents taught you wrong.
Friday, December 21, 2012
Sticks and stones
A day late and a dollar short, but this kind of only could be posted today. Bear with me:
-My first reaction to head-on-a-stick-gate: Yeah, count me in. Erik Loomis's violent rhetoric (macho posturing?) is not my style, but yes, I believe the N.R.A. is an evil organization, and only just recently compared the pro-gun side to those who supported slavery or Nazism when those were normal, an intentional (if hyperbolic, as they always are) Godwin with the point being that sometimes ordinary individuals believe what they've been taught to believe and don't know how wrong they are. The leadership in these cases is where the evil lies, and I should think the dude who's head of the N.R.A. should count. To reiterate: if you yourself happened to be raised in Gun Culture, I don't think this makes you somehow a worse person than people like me, who happened not to be born in that culture. But I'm not going to equivocate when it comes to declaring what you were taught to be wrong. I'm not going to act as though it's my duty as an American to on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand about this issue, to ever-so-sympathetically acknowledge the centrality of guns to American culture, just not the fake-American culture I grew up with.
-My second reaction when first seeing Loomis's tweets, including the ones above-and-beyond head-on-a-stick, with ample use of variants of "fuck," was that someone in an ordinary job would be in trouble, and that if we establish that tenured and tenure-track profs should not be, that's nice for them but useless for the rest of us. More specifically, I thought of that teacher (of regular kids, not college students) fired for appearing on Facebook drinking a glass of wine while on vacation in Europe. And of the many more college adjunct instructors, who quite simply don't have time to tweet about heads on sticks, what with teaching non-stop for not even a living wage and no benefits. Not, of course, that all of this need be zero-sum. But there's just so much cause for outrage in terms of how teachers are treated, which superhuman feats are expected of them, that the mistreatment of a swaggering blogger with the support of everyone who matters (what a list!) did not, immediately, strike me as a cause I needed to get involved in. I agree with the prestigious horde, but this seemed well-covered without me.
-First plus second reactions combined to my thinking that Loomis's job should absolutely be safe, but that as much as I want the anti-gun side to take a more radical (i.e. no private ownership of guns) position (either, a girl can dream, for that to happen, or at least to shift the center of the debate), I don't think this type of rhetoric is the way to do it. While they probably came from a place of sincerity and genuine outrage, they read as someone getting a real kick out of seeing how far he can go.
-Complicating all of this: The particular group one has beef with if one picks on the N.R.A. is a particularly shall we say armed segment of the population. Maybe the admins of the University of Rhode Island just don't want to be, like, shot?
-And then there was today's announcement from head-on-stick himself, Wayne LaPierre, calling for oh-so-effective armed guards at all schools. Still not convinced Loomis's rhetoric is the most effective (again, not because it's too radical, but because obscenities and threats of violence are just going to alienate potential allies), but it does feel a notch more justified.
But who will review the reviewers?
A. O. Scott's review of Judd Apatow's latest, "This Is 40," tells us basically that the movie is about first-world problems. Scott even links to the First World Problems website, informing us that such a site exists. And that really is the gist of the review, tempered but dominant: that Apatow's privilege is showing:
Cushioned by comforts that most of their fellow citizens can scarcely imagine, they nonetheless feel as if things were starting to go pear-shaped. (Only metaphorically: The two of them are enviably trim, in spite of Pete’s weakness for cupcakes. He bikes a lot.) “Do you still even like me?” Debbie asks her husband in one of many moments of vulnerability. An entirely plausible answer would be: Who cares? We’ve all got troubles, sister.Scott faults the protagonists (well, their creator) for not being do-gooders, for not, I suppose, owning their privilege: "In a town that runs on philanthropic fund-raisers and celebrity activism, Pete and Debbie support no cause beyond themselves." This strikes me as a baffling critique of a movie about the inner workings of a marriage. How "entitled" someone comes across at home is probably not all that related to how much good they do when out in the world. Should they have met some kind of community-service requirement, with this somehow woven into this movie that I haven't seen and might not get around to seeing because I'm far more curious about "Guilt Trip"?
"Freaks and Geeks," the reason we care about Apatow in the first place, was also first-world problems - reasonably-well-looked-after white kids navigating the social minefields and unrequited crushes (James Franco before he was James Franco, sigh) of a suburban American high school. Why is this now, suddenly, a concern?
It seems important, then, that Apatow 'discovered' Lena Dunham, is deeply involved in the show "Girls," and includes Dunham in this latest cast as well. Entertainment had been about the petty problems of well-off, well-connected white people since forever, but we-as-a-society somehow only noticed when Dunham came on the scene. (Perhaps because the petty problems of white men, or super-good-looking white women, are more what we're accustomed to? But I digress.) The issue with Apatow had been sexism - flabby, stoned man-children paired off with taut but humorless blondes. But now it kind of has to be YPIS, because he's behind the Dunham phenomenon.
Anyway, the other gist of the review is that this sounds like a mediocre movie that's semi-autobiographical in a self-indulgent way. This is a valid criticism to make of a film (of this one I can't say), but it's something different from first-world problems. Also, that tag - which I use! - needs to be wielded with some precision. Existential angst, love-troubles, etc. might be experienced some of the time by bratty rich people, but these are not first-world problems. (Is Anna Karenina first-world problems?) First-world problems are - and I will give an example from my own stash - things like, the difficulties of finding iced coffee while on a research trip to Paris. Meanwhile, a deeper problem might well hide under the guise of a series of first-world problems, like, say, a 40-year-old couple fighting over seemingly petty things but really there's more to it. Which might be that movie, or not, but it sounds kinda crap so I don't plan on seeing it. Or, if I'm ever on a flight where it's the best option, I'll watch it, but grudgingly, and that can be my very own first-world problem.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
One last email from the university before the world ends
Spent far too much time last week trying to track down my lost winter-wear, returning to the lost-and-found when I was told to return, and then again, and again, and back to the building where I'd originally lost the stuff that was officially known to be in the lost-and-found, and so on. Mystery solved, ish:
I was writing to let you know that your pink scarf and your gray hat were turned over to NYU Public Safety. Your property was turned over with other items of clothing to our command center. There was an odor with-in the clothing pile we had received. The sergeant, who was on duty, at the time determined the clothing could not be kept due to that odor. He discarded the clothing.There's a number I can call if I "wish to discuss this." That stuff is gone. I'm just going to go with my own theories, I think.
Holiday fashionz UPDATED
On the day of my own department's holiday party, I first had to take NJ Transit, submit grade sheets, and otherwise be practical, so the thought of dressing up never even entered into it. I went the usual nothing-stained, nothing-torn approach... only to see a department administrator all sparkly and think, man, that looks like fun! I had also not dressed up the previous Friday, when I did the unthinkable and went out in the big city - dinner at Prune and a party in Williamsburg. It was chic; I was not.
Well, this afternoon is my husband's work party, and there's precisely nothing I must do, other than walk the poodle, before the big event. And it's being held basically a few yards from our apartment. I have no excuse not to wear something fabulous. But what? Vogue, you are of no use here.
UPDATE
As predicted, at a party for scientists, held in the middle of the scientists' workday at that, I was massively overdressed on account of wearing something that wasn't jeans (knee-length black shirt, long-sleeved t-shirt, the height of glam) and, OK, maybe a bit of sparkly makeup. My problem, not theirs, but not really a problem because I'm in favor of getting dressed up for even the slightest hint of a reason.
