I have decided to take a little break from blogging. I’ll be back, maybe after the summer? I’m working on developing some healthier boundaries in my relationship with my computer. This may or may not have something to do with having recently seen Wall-E. In the meantime, I’m trying to cultivate some more analog activites into my daily routine, including but not limited to: coffee breaks, walks, and letter-writing. Feel free to get in touch and suggest other such activities you’d be interested in pursuing along with me.
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The two first items on my Google Reader today: Tina at Scatterplot, writing that misfortunes highlight how lucky I am, and A. over at On My Commute, who is feeling lucky no longer putting off the inevitable. A double-whammy of good advice to quit whining and get some perspective — coincidence, or just good luck? So as I grind through the end of one more semester, no job on the horizon, but a very generously-funded fellowship, a great group of scholar-friends, and hours every day to do work I deeply enjoy, I think — eh, not the worst life in the world, not by far.
A few random items, because that’s how my mind rolls on a Wednesday:
- Last week’s episode of 30 Rock was pretty stellar. Not only do we get the return of the Beeper King, but we also learn a new term for laughing so hard you pee your pants: “lizzing,” as in laughing + whizzing. Btw, for no particular reason, if you’re on the FB, you can be a fan of Dennis Duffy here.
- Next time you’re in the frozen food aisle, go ahead and skip over Amy’s Broccoli Pot Pie. Just not very delicious.
- But speaking of delicious, foodies or South Floridaphiles should visit my old friend Trina’s wonderful food blog, Miami Dish.
- And, for the librarians and other library workers, check out this CFP for a new collection, Out Behind the Desk: Workplace Issues for LGBTQ Librarians (in the form of a Google doc, no less). Hopefully the collection will answer once and for all the question haunting sociologists and law professors everywhere: “Do library workers really have more fun?”
Am writing from Philadelphia, where I’m attending the Rethinking Sex conference. It’s a real who’s-who of queer studies people, and my brain is pretty mushy after a long day of concentrated rethinking. A few observations: I am more sociological in my approach to questions than I realize; the UPenn campus is kinda dumpy, which surprised me for such a fancy school — it looks less ivory-towerish, and more like somewhere I might go; getting to stay in a hotel right near a conference is infinitely more pleasant than my usual routine of staying on somebody’s floor many dozen public transportation stops away from the conference.
And a h/t to Omer, whose blog inspired the title of today’s post. Off to see what tenure-track electronic music sounds like.
In bad news, I got called a moralistic, over-wrought navel-gazer. In good news, blog stats are up and visits have quadrupled in the past few days. I’ll take it! Welcome new readers, hope you remembered to bring your bongs.
I decided not to weigh in over there since I felt trying to defend myself or challenge interpretations of what I’d written wouldn’t add anything productive to a conversation that was about much more than my post, and which was moving along fine without me. I do want to add something about what was seen as an overly-dramatic use of the word “trauma.” I don’t have a problem being called dramatic. (I am, after all, a gay, and we take pride in our dramatics, even if, on occassion, as Danny Noriega would say, “Some people weren’t liking it.”) But I did want to say that in my use of that word, I’m drawing from a body of literature that might be of interest — in addition to Cho’s work, I’m thinking of David Eng and David Kazanjian’s Loss, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and E. Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture. Some of these and other recent works on race and trauma draw from psychoanalytic theorists Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, and their notion of “transgenerational haunting,” as well as sociologist Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
And, in related news, the mayor of Los Alamitos, a small city in Orange County, CA, sent an email postcard to a colleague that featured the White House lawn as a field of watermelons, with the note “No Easter Egg hunt this year.” When the recipient, an African American woman who volunteers with the city, objected, the Mayor explained he was unaware of any racialized content in the image. He stated, “Bottom line is, we laugh at things and I didn’t see this in the same light that she did. I’m sorry. It wasn’t sent to offend her personally – or anyone – from the standpoint of the African-American race.”
I haven’t quite been able to wrap my head around the conversation about racism over at scatterplot. One thought I’ve had is that the pain inflicted by the cartoon under question, the pain of viewing the cartoon for people who know that monkey means them, has gone largely unacknowledged by those who question the racist content of the image. Thinking about that pain and how to attempt an account that can approach it, I thought of the work of Grace Cho (a graduate of my program and now a CUNY professor). Cho’s beautiful and brilliant Haunting the Korean Diaspora contributes to a body of literature that addresses the affective experiences and costs of racialized subordination, and the press of history that accompanies present-day experiences of oppression. Cho writes that “an unspeakable trauma does not die out with the person who first experienced it. Rather, it takes on a life of its own, emerging from the spaces where secrets are concealed.” Cho is dealing with the history of the “forgotten war” of the U.S. against Korea, and in mentioning it here, I don’t mean of course to locate racism against African Americans in our past. Rather, I mean to pause and remember the force of the accumulated and collective traumas of racism, and to think about what sort of failure it is for sociology to refuse a consideration of that force, and to what new traumas that failure contributes.
We interrupt this blog briefly to bring you this other blog: dearjuliedavidandted.
Happy New Year dear readers reader. The band leaves tomorrow for two weeks of shows in Europe, so I don’t expect to be on this thing much. I look forward to posting, reading comments, commenting on comments, linking to posts, and wasting time looking for stupid photos to add to posts with you in 2009.
I really have been out of the soc blogosphere loop — I had no idea The Soc Shrine was back! I was very sad to see them go. I really enjoy those little nuggets over there, and I never had the issues with them some bloggers seem to have. But I also have no problem at all going along when I have no idea what the topic of conversation is, or what the words mean. When I did my study abroad term in college at the University of Amsterdam (let’s just say… not my my most focused semester), I connived my way into this amazing graduate anthropology seminar. The class was small, maybe ten people, and though graduate classes were taught in English, for many of the students, that was their 3rd language, Dutch being their 2nd… so class usually slipped into Dutch at some point. My Dutch skills consisted of “Stok brood met kaas, alsjeblieft” (“Stick bread with cheese, please!”), but I just sat there happily all semester having no idea what anyone was talking about, enjoying the conversation nonetheless. At the end of the term, I wrote a paper about Shaker influences on modernist design, because I walked past a fancy furniture store every day on my way to class.
Anyway, voting for Best of 2008 has commenced. The Skinny Malinky has stopped campaigning among librarians and bike riders — we figure we’ve got those votes locked down — so we’re concentrating our efforts in swing states, stats departments, the heartland, and Home Depot, with phone banks dedicated to reaching gun owners and life-long ABD museum guides. As they say at the neighborhood gay bar, “Yes she can.”
(The title of the present post, btw, just to tie it all together, is how my Danish friend made during aforementioned semester abroad translated back into English the Danish version of that Pollack/Fonda masterpiece. Always intrigued by her synopsis, it was years until I was able to track the movie down.)
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