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.”
(It’s no Oscars night or VMA, but how else am I supposed to pass the time?)
10:20 — The halls of justice are really over-heated and dry.
10:28 — The halls of justice have internet!
10:34 — Have updated FB status three times.
10:46 — Man in charge of my jury selection room is inviting all of us to a spin-class fundraiser for Live Strong.
11:22 — Nothing has happened. It’s still too warm and dry in here. This plus worry over my laptop battery dying makes me feel like I’m on an airplane.
12:04 — Have scored a cubicle with outlet, no longer in panic over battery.
12:25 — I don’t always love Gawker, but I gotta hand it to them for having a category called Obama Hotties.
12:34 — Have been dismissed for lunch. Advised not to drink.
Tomorrow, I report for my civic duty: waiting around for two days while I am not selected to sit on a jury. I would love to make it onto a jury. But if ever for some reason I wanted to get out of jury duty, I would draw from Liz Lemon for inspiration.
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.
Rachel and I are doing some work at a cafe. We got the best seats, against a wall of windows, and our friends behind the counter are playing only good music. In between reading and writing we’ve been talking, mostly about reading and writing, and about how hard writing can be. And how finding a way to write (outlines? notes? a pile of articles? one perfect sentence at a time? pages of mess to be dealt with later?) is as big a struggle as figuring out the ideas. And maybe different ideas require different kinds of writing to reveal themselves.
Joan Didion, from “Why I Write”:
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
In my search for classic texts in sociology, I wound up uncovering the Pelican Project. Put together by things magazine, the project is a collection of beautiful covers from Pelican press, including the above. The covers are organized by decade, and then year. Why can’t books still look like this?
My eyes have melted into my skull. This year I’ve vowed to get a handle on my information flows. (“Vowed” somehow sounds more compelling than “my New Year’s resolution is” … those words are the death knell for a plan if ever there was one.) After heeding this helpful advice and purging my inbox of 2,325 emails, I’ve spent the past two days consolidating email addresses, exporting contacts, importing contacts, creating filters, building calendars, and syncing calendars. I am determined to know the things I need to know to get through a week, and to reduce the amount of time it takes me to figure out what it is I need to be knowing. 2009, it’s all about TSM vs. Web 2.0, and I’m going to win.
Speaking of modern struggles, it used to be at the end of a messy break-up you just filled up a shoebox, set it on fire, and changed your phone number. These days, you’ve got profile links to sever, emails and text messages to purge, Flickr accounts to shut down. Here to take all that painful work off your hands, The Museum of Broken Relationships (h/t The Colby Project). In their efforts to “preserve the material and nonmaterial heritage of broken relationships,” the Museum allows you to dump your detritus on them — and if you’re having trouble letting go, to lock it up:
By registering on the web pages of the Museum you become its donor and here you can store everything that reminds you of your bygone love: e-mails, photographs, SMS messages. If your memories still trigger off painful memories “lock” your exhibits for a specified period: 3 months, 6 months or however long you need for recovering.
Heartbreaking, sure. But amazing.
Our favorite local university librarian who lunches has requested a list of “classic/core” texts in sociology. I assembled the list below — additions anyone? I’m also compiling a secret subterfuge list of books that should but probably never will be as widely taught. The doors are wide open on that one for suggestions as well.
Marx, Capital, vol 1
Marx-Engels Reader
Weber, Protestant Ethic & Spirit of Capitalism
Durkheim, Suicide
Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents
The Sociology of Georg Simmel
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Hobsbawn, Age of Revolution
Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory
Mills, The Power Elite
Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Habermas, The Public Sphere
Parsons, The Structure of Social Action
Goffman, Asylum
Willis, Learning to Labour
Collins, Black Feminist Thought
Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology
Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society
Bourdieu, Distinction
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.
