Monthly Archive for May, 2008

BONUS! Secret Chord Blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 30, 2008
in Arts and Extemporanea
. 4 Comments

This is a brilliant piece of music criticism — I mean it, especially for those who attempt to sanctify love/heartbreak by looking at it via power relations — but the word I wish he’d find is “standard.”

It’s one of those brilliant terms whose secondary meanings also make at least some sense:

If you, like me, discovered “Hallelujah” by listening to it alone and didn’t think anyone else knew it until you heard the (better-than-usually-reputed) Rufus Wainwright version in the middle of Shrek–or if you’ve ever heard anyone call the song “their favorite” because “it’s so beautiful” (my favorite variation on this is “It’s so pretty that it always makes me happy”)–you know what it is to pull out the One True Version, waving your trump card like a flag.

I’m sure listening to even half of the dozen cover versions the author list must feel like watching the qualifying round of the pole-vault finals: can you get your ankle over the heartbreak?

And as for the usual meaning: well, it goes both ways. I’ve certainly sung this in late-night singalong chorus, though any of us with an ounce of sense felt at least a little shame for singing “Hallelujah” as if it were a melody rather than a heartbreak. But the more interesting way goes through a passage in On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which really you ought to read all of (it spans pp. 173-4) but which sums up what I mean with this:

When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of “Halleluiah” by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that’s right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

Old songs bring nostalgia, which sounds like the drug it is. Standards separate that which endures in a song from the circumstance of a given recording, and in doing so allow the listener to measure herself by them as well.

(As much as I’m in favor of covering the hell out of standards, though, I must ask that if you have a brilliant idea you leave someone with some talent to pull it off. This had the potential to be the saddest thing I’ve heard all week; as it was, but the impression is so bad that it becomes just a frustratingly nasal version of the song. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

Yes, he also got the looks in the family. What’s your point?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 29, 2008
in Navel Gazing
. 0 Comments

Another Reason Why I Couldn’t Be a Conservative (a Very Occasional Series):

My brother is 16 years old and has always been the most selfless person I know.

I’m serious. When he started accumulating piggybank money in kindergarten he spent weeks trying to persuade Mom to let him open the piggybank and go door to door in a poor neighborhood and give some to the person who answered the door at each house.

He’s somewhat more practical now; now he wants to be an elementary school teacher or learn agricultural science so he can train farmers in developing countries. (This is also the kid whose leisure reading last year included Berkeley, Kierkegaard and Hume, just so you have some perspective.)

I try to tell him that everyone I know in teaching or grassroots nonprofit work spends most of their time feeling like they’re hitting their heads against a wall, but there are only so many times I can say that without feeling like a total heel.

So when I see posts like this that are so dismissive of public service, I have to wonder: what can you do when you realize your worldview forces you to be dismissive of someone who is genuinely good?

I have a much better stage presence.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on May 29, 2008
in Extemporanea and Politics
. 1 Comment

Virginia is for lovers; DC is for bloggers.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on May 28, 2008
in Extemporanea, Media and Politics
. 3 Comments

I have been extraordinarily delinquent. In my meager defense, I’ve been moving all my earthly possessions (plus a box of borrowed books) variously into storage, back to Philadelphia, and down to DC for the summer.

I’m not really working for MoveOn (I think some people didn’t notice the date). Rather, I’m interning at the David All Group, where I get to turn an ungodly fascination with blogs into something resembling work. You can find my first work-related post at TechRepublican, where I’ll also be blogging this summer.

Also, I am going to beat my boss at Guitar Hero. One of these days.

Bloggers sink their teeth into David Brooks in an attempt to bleed him of indie cred: a vampire weekend indeed.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 27, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 1 Comment

I’m late to the party on this one, so I’ll just add a few thoughts.

1. Yglesias takes all the fun out of pop sociology:

I wish (these columns) came with footnotes or something so we could learn whether or not there’s actual sociology to back up the stuff Brooks is saying.

I won’t pretend to read sociology journals, but my hunch is that there isn’t a whole lot of research one way or the other on the phenomena Brooks covers. They’re pretty hard to legitimate quantitatively, for one. More importantly, it seems to me that the people most interested in this sort of thing are people like David Brooks who become pundits rather than sociologists. (The name recognition is certainly better, for one.)

2. Let’s face it, if you were an old-media columnist in a new-media world, wouldn’t you be super-careful about choosing your bands to give you some sort of street cred (or at least attention)? This is especially true for Brooks given that he actually does get decent reviews from Yglesias and other hip young bloggers who would be expected to disdain him. More generally, though, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that media outlets put a lot of effort into appearing just the slightest bit hipper than they (or their readers) actually are, so that reading them can be both a comfortable experience and an aspirational one.

Tuesday Anthro Blogging: in which Dara apologizes for her hermeneutic tendencies.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 27, 2008
in General Scholarship, Philosophy and Social Theory
. 0 Comments

I’m not sure I have anything interesting to add on pedagogy per se, but Helen (perhaps predictably) piqued my interest in this exchange by linkdropping my favorite half-guilty-pleasure anthropological article ever, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

When Roland Barthes unpacks the symbolic meaning of everyday things, or Clifford Geertz talks about what’s really going on in a Balinese cockfight, or feminist film critics say that screwball comedy is inherently sexist, they’re not pointing out possible interpretations; they’re calling attention to messages we’ve already received without necessarily realizing it.

First of all, of course, it’s sort of important to point out that we can’t know for sure if Geertz’s interpretation of the Balinese cockfight is definitely “what’s really going on,” because we only have Geertz’s account to work with. I’m sure there are other, contradictory accounts, but I haven’t read them and I’d be surprised if Helen has. (There is at least one line of enduring criticism of the piece that I’ve encountered, however, which is that Geertz somehow neglected to mention that Indonesia was in the midst of civil war and unrest while he was doing his fieldwork. It’s certainly possible that this had little or no impact on the cockfight, but is it really the job of the hermeneutist to bet against hidden connections between social systems?)

The broader issue here is that the sphere of things that are true about a particular text/film/phenomenon — messages that one can accurately say are embedded — is, if not infinite, incredibly vast. But it’s obviously true that not every message embedded in a piece is received, as any failed artist will attest; my favorite example of this, of course, is Brecht, who in attempting to make a theatre beyond the personal and the sentimental ended up inventing characters with whom his audiences sympathized madly. Sure, there’s an obligation to point out the influential messages, but doesn’t falsely assuming that a message has been influential distort the text rather than revealing it?

It’s also often true that messages are reflected rather than created by the text — while screwball comedy may have, in its way, reinforced gender inequalities (something to which those of us who consider ourselves genre conversationalists remain susceptible). Recognizing the difference between conduit and origin is important, sure, but a reflected message is only half the battle – it’s somewhat irresponsible not to try to go back and search for the origin itself, especially if you’re attempting to point out to your students/readers/audience messages that they’ve already received.

The enduring popularity of the essay, and Geertz’s work in general, isn’t because of its theoretical insights but because of its literary ones — hermeneutics requires a faithful representation of the text being considered, and “thick description” makes ethnography much more fun to read. Geertz does a brilliant job with narrative in the piece, but narrative really does require deliberate choices, and those depend more on the hermeneutist’s own perspective than we scholars, critics and pundits usually care to admit.

Will you still love a blog out of time?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 27, 2008
in Extemporanea and Navel Gazing
. 0 Comments

Apologies for the unannounced two-week hiatus: I was playing ninepins in the Catskills.

Posting resumes now, with forthcoming musings on: Shakespeare and cigarettes; Iron Man (timeliness? Never heard of it); some pitfalls of hermeneutics; and any other bright shiny objects that catch my eye…

 

Puts her cold feet on husband at night to warm them: minus one.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on May 14, 2008
in Extemporanea, Ladies and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

 

From the APA, a 1939 rating scale for spouses. (The rest of the chart, including that for men, is on Flickr now. I love the internets.) I get a 27. The boyfriend gets 45. I suspect this is because, in the absence of children, I can’t get many of the merits.

Well, either that or standards for good spouses have changed significantly in the last 70 years. I would suggest a few additional merits, especially for college students:

  • Shows a genuine interest in $PARTNER’s computer or video games.
  • Willing to share the last Red Bull with $PARTNER.
  • Buys embarrassing things at the drugstore if $PARTNER can’t.
  • Agrees with $PARTNER about abortion. (10)
  • Is capable of sleeping in a single bed without elbowing $PARTNER in the face.
  • Agrees with $PARTNER about postmodernism. (20)
  • Does not mock $PARTNER’s major. Well, not excessively. 

No, no, no one is Charlotte Simmons.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 12, 2008
in Ladies, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 0 Comments

I have no quibbles with the thesis of Phoebe’s prof-crush piece — that just because an attraction to an authority figure can’t be realized sexually doesn’t diminish its sexual nature — but given that she admits that her assessment of hookup culture (”When there is mutual interest, nothing is holding anyone back”) is derived from the media rather than direct observation, I figured I’d offer a corrective from a school whose men can occasionally be more assertive than its squirrels.

Setting aside the obvious objection — that crushes very rarely proceed so rationally as to jump ship at the first sign of improbability of fulfillment — the fact remains that hookup culture isn’t a monolith that engulfs the entire student body and whips it into near-bacchanal. (I love Tom Wolfe as much as the next person, but I Am Charlotte Simmons was downright irresponsible in perpetrating this stereotype, and it’s time real live college students stood up and said it.) In fact, it seems to have very particular second- and third-order effects among those who don’t get involved, and instead position themselves in reaction to the ready availability of casual sex.

It seems apparent to me that one of the biggest problems with hookup culture is the way it compartmentalizes interpersonal relationships, turning sex into an aerobic activity rather than an expression. One of the effects of this is that the everyday campus atmosphere probably winds up feeling less sexually charged than it would if people had a healthier, more integrative attitude toward sexual relationships. So it’s ironic that the hookup refuseniks (most of whom, I find, tend to be guys) are explicit champions of this same compartmentalization, insisting that sexuality is an unnecessary use of their time and that they ought to be focusing on more lasting and transcendent things. This may just be where I go to school, but I know plenty of guys like this. And no, none of them are considering seminary; they’ve just instrumentalized their college experience to satisfy particular personal goals and cut out anything unnecessary, and welcome the categorization of physical relationships — even romance of any kind — in the latter.

(There’s also a variation on this, which recognizes sex as a separable biological urge and therefore permits hookups under the logic that they’re “filling a need” — but won’t allow the student to hook up with anyone he might develop a lasting interest in, because that would constitute distraction. I know it’s perverse, but it’s also equally reliant on the divisions hookup culture imposes and on disdaining the side of that division it reveres.)

But the Bacchae and the refuseniks intermix freely in other settings — and as Phoebe mentioned, the dance floor isn’t the only way a crush is developed. Is it so unfeasible that even someone active in hookup culture could develop an interest in that adorable neo-Platonist in her seminar, only to find out that they don’t go to the same parties (whether he is a proper refusenik, a romantic or just a conscientious objector)? Not only does she have to figure out how to charm him the hard way, but she has to contend with the (not negligible) possibility that he thinks she’s a slut. Would it be less “pathetic” to get over it? Possibly, if sexual satisfaction is the end goal. But readily available, compartmentalized sex seems like a silly thing to be chasing, especially with women who often feel we have other “needs” to attend to, like being brought flowers and taken out to dinner. If we also want what he wants, or what we think he wants, maintaining a crush on him — hopeless or otherwise — vindicates our own past promiscuity by reveling in the “purity” of unrequited attraction as we first knew it.

There are also plenty of other reasons why sexual desire, even mutually felt, can’t be fulfilled in college. Most relationships spend more time being complicated than uncomplicated these days, which leaves people in a state of attracted-to-other-people-but-loyal-to-just-one for weeks or longer at a time. The assumption (more hookup-culture fallout) that sexual involvement ruins an otherwise healthy friendship can keep mutually attracted friends apart. And, of course (as Phoebe herself should know!), there are TAs — young enough to be single and even likely to frequent the same bars, with that frisson of authority that is so key to the professor crush. (This is the other point Phoebe misses: the allure of the professor-student affair isn’t pedagogy, but the mystery and suggestive power that comes from the unequal power dynamic.)

To be honest, I think these weird convolutions — which usually result in an over-valuing of purity among anyone not going out every Saturday — are worse for campus cultures than hookups themselves. But don’t count the crush among its casualties just yet.

Harvard Mafia Blogging (or, the Ivy Comes Out of the Woodwork)

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 12, 2008
in Navel Gazing and Yale
. 0 Comments

While my fellow Mafiosi and I have been wrapped up in term papers and final exams, it seems the alumni and affiliates of that other school have launched a stealth attack to take the lead in self-conscious Ivy League blogging. But given how ambivalent they seem to be about the place (Yugoslavia? Really? Really?), I can’t say that I mind.

Of the various “save Harvard” proposals, Reihan’s is easily the most intriguing, namely because it straddles the patently absurd and the amusingly familiar. Compare this:

What if Harvard cloned itself in India, China, and elsewhere, perhaps through deep partnerships with existing, cash-poor universities in those regions? Something like this happens on a very small scale. Harvard can do better, by farming out faculty and by handing out healthy heaps of cash. Perhaps Harvard could also partner with HBCUs in the American South that focus on, for example, on training teachers and healthcare professionals.

with this:

Yale professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Tian Xu directs a research center focused on the genetics of human disease at his alma mater, Shanghai’s Fudan University…Yale faculty, postdocs and graduate students visit regularly and attend videoconference seminars with scientists from both campuses. The arrangement benefits both countries; Xu’s Yale lab is more productive, thanks to the lower costs of conducting research in China, and Chinese graduate students, postdocs and faculty get on-the-job training from a world-class scientist and his U.S. team.

The latter is from a Newsweek cover story in 2006 written by…oh, that’s right, Yale President Richard Levin.

All of which is to say: five steps ahead of you, Reihan.

To be honest, though, I have to say I’m not sold on why a “global university” built on this model is necessarily a good idea. The best argument I can think of for expanding an American university beyond its natural base — “campus” as an area shapes the university experience so thoroughly, after all — is that which urges a more holistic kind of globalization than that in which we currently engage, exporting not only our most powerful brands (McDonald’s, Harvard) but also our most powerful ideas (democracy, liberal arts education).

Perhaps it’s just my undergraduate social-science major bias, but I worry enough that the ever-increasing emphasis on research and pre-professionalism will ultimately choke the training of “would-be change agents” rather than stoke it. An explicit commitment to producing leaders should of necessity teach doing good as well as doing well. (My favorite illustration of this is a story a friend of mine tells about a junior studying Ethics, Politics and Economics, Yale’s elite policy program, who couldn’t answer the question “What do you value?”)

Besides, branding is most effective when it’s about more than franchising, but about actively building an integrated community.

At the end of the day, though, this whole “how do we save Harvard?” trope is just so…Harvard. I’ll be the first to admit that the Harvard-Yale rivalry casts Harvard as the champion and Yale as the underdog, but I think that recently that’s worked out in our favor: one of the sociological fruits of underdoggery is finding a reason to be fiercely loyal, while one of those of championship is an irrational terror over losing ground in any way. So the value added is imperfect! So it can’t singlehandedly save global education! Around here, we’d just burrow happily into the Social Science building (or something else that inspired comparable affection – this comes to mind), treat that as the University we knew and cheer just as hard for it as anyone else. It’s only when your dominance leads you to feel you need to make a claim for universality that people are too busy trying to stay on top to remember how to have fun doing it.

Secret Ivy League message: 11.22.2008, Cambridge. Game weekend blogger rumble. Choose your weapons, Cantabs.