While WILBing around during office hours today, I happened upon a Times opinion piece that calls into question the Obama administration’s verbal distancing from the Bush reign of (war on) terror. In the midst of a bunch of domestic turmoil, it helpfully reminds those of us in the U.S. about the continuation of wars and occupations under new names. It reminded me of a cab ride the band took this past January in Hamburg. Our Turkish German driven, upon discovering we were from the United States, asked our opinions on the election of Obama, and then cut in with something like, “Obama is the same as Bush. For Palestine, Obama is the same.”
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?”
Not to be out-done by Emily and her recent tourist adventures, I have headed over to Tucson, Arizona, to spend a few days with David, and his father, David the First. David the First lives at the foot of some hills, surrounded by endless, cloudless skies, and fifty-foot tall cacti. Did you know the “arms” of a cactus grow to balance it as it gets taller? And that cacti grow straight up because that way they get the least of the high noon sun? It is pretty incredibly gorgeous here.
Today, we drove north a bit to visit Biosphere 2. I can’t recall having encountered any scholarly articles about this experiment gone awry, but it seems like a science studies dream come true. The outside is pretty amazing, it’s like Caprica City, or something out of Logan’s Run, as you can see here. Inside, it’s a bit of a mess, but the underground tour of the “South Lung” — a giant steel and rubber structure that somehow allows the Biosphere to “breathe” so it doesn’t explode or implode due to external temperature changes — was pretty frakkin awesome. I also enjoyed the peek into one of the apartments lived in by the original “Biospherians,” as our tour guide referred to them.
After leaving Biosphere 2 for Biosphere 1, David 1 and 2 and I headed a bit out of the center of Tucson for a delicious Mexican lunch. Burritos here are called burros, and I discovered the Michelada, a tangy and delicious beer cocktail. The recipe here seems like a good version of what I had. And don’t skip the black pepper, it seals the deal.
I keep thinking back on Emily’s post of a few weeks ago about learning how to manage your time and be more productive, but also feeling suspicious of that tendency — like, wtf with all this being productive all the time? I’m wondering again why the work overload in academia goes so unquestioned. It’s complained about, for sure, but at the same time, undergirding a publish or perish imperative is an ethos of suffer or see-ya. As in — this is how it is, you must work all the time, and express your desire to work all the time, or this just may not be the career path for you. While I recognize the privilege of academic work over other kinds of labor, I also recognize that never has anyone suggested to me that a 40-hour work week exists in the academy. (And not that I think 40 hours is reasonable anyway…) For me, the great lure of academia is having less structure imposed on my time. The flip side of this, of course, is that work time bleeds right into living time. When I was temping, in the late 90s (ah, the heady late 90s), I felt I was much more engaged with others in a critique of capitalism in our everyday lives. And so when I slacked off at a temp job, I felt I was sticking it to the man. (I believe I actually referred to it, following Michel de Certeau, as la perruque, because I took myself just that seriously.) But I also just enjoyed it — long lunch breaks, writing letters to friends on the clock, learning about this thing called “the internet” and the various distractions it promised. Now, when I shuck off work, I just feel bad about myself.
So, in the midst of being behind on virtually everything I could feel behind on, I’m thinking about how to get stuff done, but go easier on myself in the process. I am thinking of this as really late capitalism — late to finish the draft of that revise and resubmit, late to get to the library. Hell, this blog post took me two weeks to write. But as Greg’s old supervisor used to say, “We’re living a life,” and I’d like mine to be lived a little more slowly. Is that so wrong?
Wandering around with my London houseguest Bob last weekend, we encountered two hacked digital roadwork signs. Did anyone else see these? On Houston, we found the friendly invite cited above in the header. The other, on Broadway in front of NYU — photograph below. Nice work, people!
As reported by Democracy Now:
In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has formed a pact with far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman in an attempt to a forge a right-wing government in which Lieberman would become Israel’s foreign minister. Lieberman has called for laws to require Palestinians living in Israel to swear loyalty to the Jewish state or lose their citizenship. Lieberman has been condemned by many moderate Israeli and Jewish leaders. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, recently described Lieberman’s run for president as an “outrageous, abominable, hate-filled campaign, brimming with incitement that, if left unchecked, could lead Israel to the gates of hell.”
More or less recovered from the conference and safely ensconced back home, Dean and I joined David for an early spring Sunday stroll through the WV and a delicious brunch. Afterward, David took his leave of us to engage in one of life’s simple pleasures while Dean and I headed uptown to MOMA for a performance of Yvonne Rainer‘s dance piece Trio A. The reinterpretation, performed by one formally trained dancer and two visual artists, took place in a corner of the second floor, against a projection backdrop of Rainer performing the piece in the 1970s (video below). The setting was perfect, and the performance was great. After, we ran into an old friend from Miami, a dancer, who filled us in on the historical significance of the piece: its “de-dramatization” of dance and emphasis instead on the everydayness of moving around. We liked the explanation, and proceeded to engage in our own everyday moving around, winding a bit about the neighborhood until finding a train to shuttle us back downtown.
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.
About to head to Western Mass for some time with the chosen fam. I’ve been promised cupcake-baking, Thomas the Train videos, and diaper duty.
In honor of my jury duty stint (which ended unceremoniously yesterday by getting excused early), I bring to those of you who haven’t yet heard of it, the “Kids for Cash” case — PA judges found guilty of accepting bribes from private youth detention centers for sending ‘em kids with minor violations. Amy Goodman did a show on it, obvs, and you can watch the video or read the transcript at Democracy Now.
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.”
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