Three Cheers for Empathy
I'm so psyched about Justice Sonia Sotomayor, her fantastic record, and her excellent chances of being confirmed. As Jeffrey Toobin observed on last night's Daily Show, there have been 110 justices on the Supreme Court during the U.S.'s history, and 106 of them have been white men. It's about time. Sorry about the squeals she's provoking from the right, but folks rarely relinquish unearned privilege gracefully. Why the right is trying to scare people off the word empathy, though--and why Dems are capitulating--is beyond me. I wonder what George Lakoff would say. Progressives currently have power and the will of the people behind them. It's our turn to shape the discourse, and leaders should take the wheel in that regard.
Ain't I a princess? Disney's drawing fire for The Princess and The Frog, an animated film due out this December that features Disney's first black princess, Tiana. Oprah consulted, and parents are happy, but critics voice concern that the prince is not black enough (or not black at all) and that the princess spends a good chunk of the movie as a frog herself (in a divergence from the original).
I was wondering why, instead of reshaping a classic European tale (the film retells the Grimms' fairy tale but sets it in 1920s New Orleans), Disney didn't just look to either African or African American narratives. If I wanted to create a tale that highlighted a black princess/heroine, I'd start by looking at some culturally indigenous stories. Just a thought.
If you get a chance to see Examined Life, a documentary of public intellectuals gabbing and moving, go. It's more accessible than you might think, given the status of some of the subjects as high-powered theorists, and it's often humorous (intentionally or otherwise). My favorites were Avital Ronnell, who talks about anxiety and ethics (pointing out the way that Bush was notoriously un-anxious about the death penalty in Texas and various crimes against humanity since), and applied ethicist Peter Singer, who questions our moral responsibilities to one another vis-à-vis the issue of conspicuous consumption in front of Fifth Avenue's windows full of designer goods. (Singer's remarks actually helped me think through a chapter I'm revising, so that was an unexpected plus.)
Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the filmmaker's sister show up in the film, too, as does Judith Butler, who is much sexier than I'd guessed from her prose. (Of course, a doorstop is sexier than I'd guess from Judith Butler's prose.) Sharp hair, Judith.
Thinking about the Other is all over the documentary, so empathy, though not called that by the philosophers, was a theme. How do we design and implement a just society when people have such different capacities and values? How do we imagine our way across vast differences into another person's perspective?
Many thanks to Sonam, Amalia, Julia, and Jon for going with me and talking about it afterward, and to Sonam for dreaming up the outing in the first place.
Today's Grey's first day on the job at a bookstore in Austin, where he's spending the summer, so my mom-heart is all wondering about how it's going for him. Good luck, Grey!
With the end of classes, I'm getting just a ton of revision done. A character completely surprised me last night; I love it when that happens.
I'm so grateful to be a teacher and thus to have summers off. For three months a year, I get to live and work like a real artist, to dwell in the imagined, constructed worlds of creative projects. It's such a gift.
I think it's a gift back to our students, too, though. If we didn't have this concentrated, different sense of focus on our work, we wouldn't be able to do our work as well, and then we wouldn't have sufficient experiential knowledge when we teach. In fact, I wish university administrators really comprehended artists' processes better and would structure more "studio" time (time for jello-mind, time to write for hours on end) into the school year, so we could stay juiced up all year long, instead of sticking us onto committee after committee. I have a few scholarly friends who genuinely like committee and administrative work, and more power to 'em. I wish they could do it all. I'd like to just teach and write, teach and write, and then, for the summers, just write.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Ain't I a princess? Disney's drawing fire for The Princess and The Frog, an animated film due out this December that features Disney's first black princess, Tiana. Oprah consulted, and parents are happy, but critics voice concern that the prince is not black enough (or not black at all) and that the princess spends a good chunk of the movie as a frog herself (in a divergence from the original).
I was wondering why, instead of reshaping a classic European tale (the film retells the Grimms' fairy tale but sets it in 1920s New Orleans), Disney didn't just look to either African or African American narratives. If I wanted to create a tale that highlighted a black princess/heroine, I'd start by looking at some culturally indigenous stories. Just a thought.
If you get a chance to see Examined Life, a documentary of public intellectuals gabbing and moving, go. It's more accessible than you might think, given the status of some of the subjects as high-powered theorists, and it's often humorous (intentionally or otherwise). My favorites were Avital Ronnell, who talks about anxiety and ethics (pointing out the way that Bush was notoriously un-anxious about the death penalty in Texas and various crimes against humanity since), and applied ethicist Peter Singer, who questions our moral responsibilities to one another vis-à-vis the issue of conspicuous consumption in front of Fifth Avenue's windows full of designer goods. (Singer's remarks actually helped me think through a chapter I'm revising, so that was an unexpected plus.)
Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the filmmaker's sister show up in the film, too, as does Judith Butler, who is much sexier than I'd guessed from her prose. (Of course, a doorstop is sexier than I'd guess from Judith Butler's prose.) Sharp hair, Judith.
Thinking about the Other is all over the documentary, so empathy, though not called that by the philosophers, was a theme. How do we design and implement a just society when people have such different capacities and values? How do we imagine our way across vast differences into another person's perspective?
Many thanks to Sonam, Amalia, Julia, and Jon for going with me and talking about it afterward, and to Sonam for dreaming up the outing in the first place.
Today's Grey's first day on the job at a bookstore in Austin, where he's spending the summer, so my mom-heart is all wondering about how it's going for him. Good luck, Grey!
With the end of classes, I'm getting just a ton of revision done. A character completely surprised me last night; I love it when that happens.
I'm so grateful to be a teacher and thus to have summers off. For three months a year, I get to live and work like a real artist, to dwell in the imagined, constructed worlds of creative projects. It's such a gift.
I think it's a gift back to our students, too, though. If we didn't have this concentrated, different sense of focus on our work, we wouldn't be able to do our work as well, and then we wouldn't have sufficient experiential knowledge when we teach. In fact, I wish university administrators really comprehended artists' processes better and would structure more "studio" time (time for jello-mind, time to write for hours on end) into the school year, so we could stay juiced up all year long, instead of sticking us onto committee after committee. I have a few scholarly friends who genuinely like committee and administrative work, and more power to 'em. I wish they could do it all. I'd like to just teach and write, teach and write, and then, for the summers, just write.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Leave a Comment: