Recently in culture & politics Category

Thanks to Maureen Dowd for today's quotable quote:

If roughly one out of nine Americans is gay, why shouldn’t one out of nine Supreme Court justices be?

Rock 'n' roll, Maureen.  Thanks for having more guts than the White House's PR machine.

Onto more literary issues:  I love this post about writerly self-censorship by Tayari Jones so much, I'm going to link to it from my syllabus.  It's a classic:  sane, sound, humane.  If you're a writer, read it.  If you teach aspiring writers, send them there.

And in terms of dishing too-much-information in your memoir, I had to laugh out loud when I read this interview with Sarah Silverman about her new book The Bedwetter:

Q:  Your former boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel is barely mentioned.  Why did you refrain from spilling your secrets?

SS:  I guess mostly because I'm not a desperate douchey scumbag.

And on that note, gentle readers, I'm back to work.

Dearest all, I will be quick, because I'm in the thick, thick, thick of grading.  But I saw this at the gym yesterday and couldn't help laughing out loud.

Vicky Ward's forthcoming book about the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Manhattan financial firm that went bankrupt in 2008, is excerpted in the April 2010 Vanity Fair (which someone had left at the Y).  The article is specifically about "the plight" of the wives of these guys who pulled down $15 million annual salaries.

Describing the long-suffering, loyal wife of one philandering deputy to the C.E.O., it includes this immortal line:

She had stuck with him through tough times when they were so poor they couldn't afford blinds for the windows in their house.

No blinds?  Gasp.  The tragedy. 

So this is just a little shout-out to all of you who wouldn't consider the absence of window treatments to be "tough times," exactly, together with a wry little moue in the direction of Wall Street. 

Ah, what delicious praise that would be!  I wish I could be in NYC on Thursday to hear Tom Mendicino read from the timely debut novel that elicited it:  Probation. 

Here's the word:

"A middle-aged married man whose indiscretion in a men's bathroom forces him to re-evaluate his chosen life becomes a surprisingly sympathetic narrator in this potent debut."  --Publisher's Weekly

"If you're looking for a smart, engaging, witty, sad and unusual book about the complicated nature of family and love, try Tom Mendicino's Probation.  You'll be glad you did."  --Bart Yates

"If David Sedaris were cast as Willy Loman, it might sound something like Probation.  Andy, a sharp-tongued traveling salesman, gives us the life events that led to his being taken away in hand-cuffs, and the hilarious and agonizing self-inquiry that follows.  Snarky yet profound, it is a bold examination of the destructive effects of a life spent in the closet, reported with a Carolina twang."  --Vestal McIntyre

If you'll be in the vicinity, the reading's at the Barnes & Noble at 2289 Broadway & 82nd Street at 7:00 p.m.  Congratulations, Tom, and good luck!


 

If you'll be in Lincoln this weekend, consider attending the screening of the award-winning documentary The Greatest Silence:  Rape in the Congo, with a discussion led afterward by a local psychologist who does trauma work with survivors.  Filmmaker Lisa Jackson, a survivor of gang rape herself, has won multiple awards for her documentaries over the past 30 years. 

This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.

It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies:  Women Changing the World.  It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15.  A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world. 

Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:

Film Discussion:
THE GREATEST SILENCE
with speaker Megan Watson, PhD, LMHP

Saturday, Feb. 27 - Film begins at 1:00
Discussion following film (approx. 2:20 p.m.)

Admission to the discussion is free and open to the public. Admission  
to THE GREATEST SILENCE is at regular Ross prices.

Megan Watson is a psychologist in private practice who works with  
treating immigrants, refugees, and torture survivors. Watson does  
trauma work and focuses on culturally competent, holistic treatment.

Before its closure, Watson spent three years working at the FIRST  
Project, a torture treatment center in Lincoln.

THE GREATEST SILENCE: RAPE IN THE CONGO

Winner of the Sundance Special Jury Prize in Documentary and the  
inspiration for a 2008 U.N. Resolution classifying rape as a weapon of  
war, this extraordinary film, shot in the war zones of the Democratic  
Republic of Congo (DRC), shatters the silence that surrounds the use  
of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.

Perhaps the only thing more special than experiencing a major wardrobe malfunction--as in, your adorable silk wrap blouse comes unwrapped without your knowledge--is experiencing it in front of 30 undergraduates, while you stride blithely about the room, lecturing, unaware of the silk ties dangling down like lovely fluttering tails. 

That was Wednesday.  We were doing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Alas, a mere safety pin of one's own would have done nicely.  Woolf might have expected, 80 years on, that women would have managed to not only have careers but also dress themselves.  Sigh.

Once I discovered the malfunction, I managed to finish class by pinning my elbows to my ribs, holding the slippery thing in place and faking (unconvincingly) aplomb.

I'm laughing even now, typing this.

Women readers who are also writers of personal narrative or poetry, here's a publishing opportunity for you, a collection edited by my lovely graduate intern, Jill McCabe Johnson, who's a poet herself. Jill also directs Artsmith, a nonprofit with residencies, workshops, and more up on Orcas Island.

Work has been crazy, people.  I've been serving on two search committees (very exciting), while simultaneously reading a kajillion grad apps (impressive yet demoralizing--so much talent that won't get in), while preparing, in my spare time, that dreaded annual summation of one's worth:  the Merit Review File. 

Ah, the ritual of the Merit Review File.  Listing every last professional thing one's done over the year is a recipe for madness, and trying to squish it all into a coherent narrative?  Well, human, please.  And just rereading those stacks of student evals is a test of courage.  (You want me to provide what?  I mean, I like my students, and I care about pedagogy, but the student-as-entitled-consumer model sometimes gets a little out of hand.  Oh, for those halcyon days of pipes, sherry, elbow patches, and unquestioned professorial authority to slap an unexplained grade onto work--oh, wait.  Maybe not so blissful.) 

Knowing that your senior colleagues will be judging it all--and that their judgment will translate into dollars, or the lack thereof, in your paycheck each month--makes the whole process a little nervewracking.  This year, we have to go through the motions (and get ranked) even though there's likely to be a salary freeze, which makes the whole thing seem like a exercise in wasted effort.

If you're an academic yourself, you've probably already heard this sad story of a woman, a gun, and a tenure denial in Alabama.  As a kind of snapshot of public opinion, the many comments after the story interested me; they reveal the general public's skepticism toward tenure as an institution, academics' frustration with the difficulties that sometimes plague the tenure process, conservative glee that a highly educated "elite" snapped, and liberal dismay about gun control laws--as well as surprise that a woman has now joined the job-related mass-shooting club.  I feel so sorry for the professors who were cut down, and for the families who mourn them.  (Thanks to Barb for the heads-up on the story.)

Just briefly, I want to express gratitude that my own tenure process at Wabash was so clean.  It's true that I did work at an all-male school, and it did lean right, while I lean left.  I experienced my share of nasty sexist exchanges during my ten years there.  Yet when it came to tenure and promotion, I was treated with tremendous fairness at every level of review, from my department all the way up to the president of the college.

Since then, as a participant in tenure decisions, I've always seen them handled with immense care, generosity, and scrupulous professionalism.   My experience has not included the kind of factionalism or personal vendettas that some of the New York Times readers' comments imply.   If someone does make an unprofessional comment during discussion of a file, that view gets corrected and sidelined.

With only 35% of teaching carried out by tenured professors now, you can see why the decision process would be so fraught, and why a professor like Amy Bishop would feel outraged.   It's part of larger systemic problems in academia that have, for financial reasons and driven by administrators importing a business model into the academy, shifted the bulk of teaching to underpaid, undervalued adjuncts and TAs.  (I liked the comment that said no administrator should make a higher salary than the lowest-paid instructor.)  It's wrong.  It raises the stakes.  It makes people crazy.

But it's not worth killing or dying for.  It's just a job, people.  We need to disinvest our sense of identity from our careers.  We have passions, the natural world, families, lovers, children, pets, our neighbors, the guitar, painting, singing--whatever moves us.  We're rich beyond measure.

Professional rejection hurts, and it's humiliating.  Yes.  Been there.  But the thing to do is to go home, cry, lick our wounds, get hugged by our loved ones, and get back up on the pony--or pick a different pony altogether.  

Kindness--not just to our peers but to ourselves--is always an option.

If you have only five minutes for a quick overview, Tracy Kidder offers this rundown of the centuries of political and economic injustices against Haiti that have placed the nation in this extremely tenuous position.  As Kidder writes, "while earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade."

Avaaz, a terrific worldwide peace-and-justice organization, offers a secure and reliable way to donate.  President Obama's take on the situation and call for donations are here.  For a way to donate $5--immediately, from your phone--Tayari can hook you up.

Love going out to Irma, Enek, Luke, and Jennifer in Texas.

Costa Rica does.  Try investing in education and the environment, not artillery.  And note this:

Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys. Mexico and Colombia rank higher than the United States in self-reported contentment. Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital. . . .

Beaches probably don't hurt, either. 

Me, I'm staying in the hot shower until the weather breaks.  ¡Viva Nebraska!

Okay, so I'm getting to this late, but I do have to wonder about these lines from Obama's Afghanistan speech on Tuesday night.  This part comes toward the end, when he's talking about the moral authority of the U.S.:

For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for — and what we continue to fight for — is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

Sitting there listening and watching, I was like, "Nuh-uh.  He did not just say that."  Because of course, "[o]ur union was founded" precisely by means of the successful attempt "to occupy other nations."  That's exactly what happened.  The founders of the United States did indeed "claim another nation's resources"--and not just the resources of the first nations of the North American continent but also the human resources of multiple African nations.  They claimed these resources--land, materials, and human labor--by means of lethal force and the imposition of tremendous suffering. 

Yes, "our union was founded in resistance to oppression"--for some.  Not for all.  For some, it was founded precisely upon oppression, to the point of genocide.

And really, to say "we have not sought world domination"--does that square with every epoch of American foreign policy as you remember it?  If our government and/or populace has ever wanted to be the single superpower in terms of military and economic might, doesn't that count as "domination"? 

Come on, Barack.  I'm all on board with the restoration of the United States' moral position in the world via the re-abolition of torture and so on, but let's not erase or distort our national past for the exigencies of the moment.  Your speeches matter.  Don't pretty stuff up.

Dear and lovely readers, I am pained and worried by the President's scheduled announcement that the United States will be sending 30,000+ additional troops to Afghanistan.

As a teacher of literary modernism, I'm familiar with the notion that World War I, The Great War, functions as the "absent signifier" in much literature of the period--Eliot's Waste Land, and so on.  The war was so centrally, so painfully, on everyone's mind that literature and art were profoundly about the war even when they never mentioned it explicitly. 

War and torture have been very much the absent signifiers in my work for the last eight years--perhaps always.  I've been struck by the corollaries between sadistic child abuse and torture (and the long-term trauma both cause), and I have long been obsessed with learning about both--understanding the psychology that motivates and allows such acts, understanding what can be done to prevent them.   Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain:  The Making and Unmaking of the World has been very important for me in this regard (as has all the work of Alice Miller). 

Similarly, I'm swayed by the argument that callousness toward any living being can be employed toward and amplified into a similar and destructive apathy toward other people.  We wouldn't be able to rationalize or ameliorate the emotional difficulty of wartime killing by reducing the enemy (through language and imagery) into animals and insects if we didn't, as a culture, already believe that it was all right to kill animals and insects with impunity.  The Quaker and Buddhist visions of radical pacifism attract me.

Now here we are, on the verge of sending 30,000 more young people into violence.  Bob Herbert writes in yesterday's Times:

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

Years ago, on the eve of the U.S.'s initial invasion of Afghanistan, and again on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I felt alone (in my certainty that invasion would solve nothing), crazy, and desperately sad.  Everyone seemed to support war.  There was so much fear in our country then, and I silenced myself, thinking I must be wrong, naive, foolish.  Now I'm similarly tempted to think, Well, if Obama thinks it's necessary, with all the inside information he has, and with his lefty commitments, then it must be necessary.  After all, what do I know?  I'm an English teacher. 

But my true tendency in this regard is toward moral absolutism:  Thou shalt not kill.  Period.  Ever.  Gandhi, Jesus, Dr. King, Mother Teresa.  Which divides me from all my just-war, pragmatic friends--and even divides me from myself, when I think of what I'd do, without hesitation, to someone who tried to hurt my son, or in other morally vexed situations.  It's an issue that confuses me.     

Because I didn't want to keep this huge concern, which compels me so obsessively and which matters to all of us, an absent signifier here on the blog, I thought I'd share my current private reading list with you, in case you're interested:

Political scientist Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy (Princeton UP, 2009) investigates the connections between forms of torture and forms of government.  It's a harrowing read, and huge.  It's taking me forever to get through it, in part because it is so upsetting and I have a painfully vivid imagination.  I have to set it aside sometimes.













Ethicist Jonathan Glover's Humanity:  A Moral HIstory of the Twentieth Century analyzes wars and genocides in terms of the various psychological mechanisms that enable people to kill other people--and looks at what kinds of moments disrupt the human ability to do so.












Political scientists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude:  War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin, 2004) is the most hopeful of the lot, because Hardt and Negri see possibilities for global networks that resist the state of permanent war and offer truly democratic alternatives.








Not exactly light reading, but they're helping me understand the things that most baffle my heart.

Food politics are on my mind.  Our son Grey can't join us for the Thanksgiving holidays this year, so we sent a big box full of James's amazing orange-cranberry bread and chocolate-chunk cookies to Oberlin.  Since Grey's a strict vegan, they were made with Earthbalance and powdered egg substitute instead of butter and eggs.  And you know what?  They tasted great.  (Yeah, we sampled.) 

If you're pondering what to put on the table this Thanksgiving (if you celebrate Thanksgiving), you might be interested in how Gary Steiner, professor of philosophy and "a really strict vegan," breaks it down. 

From the other end of the spectrum, Jennifer Reese slaughters her own rooster and wearies of Jonathan Safran Foer's urban sighing.  Pragmatic and unblinking, she writes: 

From the age I could sit in a saddle, I knew what meat was.  My grandfather and great-grandfather were ranchers whose land was suited for little but running cattle.  From earliest memory, I accepted that a steer was also a steak the way I accepted that water was also steam.  It seemed neither mysterious nor tragic.  Animals died all the time in rural Wyoming, frequently for reasons that had nothing to do with us.

(Her essay at The Week is only available to subscribers right now but should be generally available in about a week.)

There's more I wanted to tell you, but James just announced that our dinner--a delicious carrot-curry soup, coincidentally--is hot and ready.  More soon!