Narcissism

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This, and That

April 3, 2009 in Dissertating, Narcissism, Politics, Reading by Craig | No comments

I’m pretending I’m an art student today, hanging out in the very pretty but comfortable offices over at Steinhardt, doing work and drinking tea.  When I imagine an alternate life at an imaginary university in Europe somewhere, my imaginary office looks a lot like the one I’m in right now — stacks of magazines, slide trays and house plants jockeying for space with the Macs. Not a Dell in sight. An email from TSM’s California Comp Lit informant reminded me that the bleeding of work into life I wrote about last week can also be a bleeding of life into work. So I’m letting myself enjoy that I get to spend my days reading, writing and chatting with smart and interesting people. That’s not so bad, right?

Earlier, was browsing the latest copy of Left Turn magazine, a new issue on “Igniting the Kindred: Visions of Queer Radicalism.” As the letter from the editors says, the articles prompt thoughts on the history of multi-racial, multi-issue queer politics, and what that history offers for thinking through social movements for queer/trans liberation today.  Dean and I are excited and honored to have a little review in it we wrote of Milk, or really some thoughts on Milk in the era of Obama and Prop 8.

The Exhausted Horses Are Shot

December 12, 2008 in Blogging Blogging, Narcissism by Craig | 3 comments

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.)

Best Recent Google Search Leading to This Blog

September 24, 2008 in Blogging Blogging, Narcissism by Craig | 2 comments

new york sucks + pretentious

That Dream Within a Dream

April 30, 2008 in Dread Pirate Roberts, Narcissism, Politics by smalinky | 2 comments

Apparently the fact that wealthy white gay people want to be just like other wealthy white people is news again. The Sunday Times magazine had a story on how young gay boys are nuts for nuptials, profiling a handful of white Boston gays in their 20s who have gotten legally wed. The interview subjects discuss such pressing issues as “BMW vs. Honda.” The retro-nostalgic portraits of white domesticity that accompany the article offer a perfect example of what Jasbir Puar has called “homonationalism” to describe the folding of white gayness into nationalism and the war on terror. As The Specials once sang, “If that’s a happy marriage, I’d prefer to be unhappy.”

Over at Details (ok, not the most sociological of sources, but at least as widely read as ASR) a story about a supposed gay male baby boom suggests that having babies is the logical outcome of “the growing prevalence of domestic partnerships, civil unions, and gay marriage.” And the rise of these relationship formations apparently results from the magic combo of “greater freedom and acceptance” and “AIDS.” As in get-hitched-to-avoid-getting-HIV. If the preferred prophylactic against HIV-panic is now legal marriage, what do I need to avoid the next round of gay male staph infection freak out? Will dinner and a movie suffice?

For more on marriage (and with thanks to Greg for sending links to the above), I recently posted a law review article Dean and I wrote about biopolitics, sodomy laws, and same-sex marriage on the Writing page, but you can download it here. For a sloppier, shorter version of some of the same arguments, here’s the text of a talk I gave on marriage fever a few years ago. But really, I found out everything there was to know about marriage and weddings from  The Princess Bride, so click and learn:

If a Blog Falls in a Forest…

April 28, 2008 in Blogging Blogging, Narcissism by smalinky | No comments

Aim high indeed! Linked to by The Soc Shrine! But I wonder what this means for the Life Course of this blog. How does exposure on the internets correlate to aspirations, plans, and attainments?

Over at cruciferous, Dean has posted and commented on a talk that addresses the “cognitive surplus” of blogging, suggesting that attention and energy cultivated by watching TV is now being channeled into the blogosphere. One thing the talk fails to address — how about all the blogging about watching TV? Although on second thought, maybe that just makes the point of the talk. TV’s all, “Let’s give them something to blog about.”