A little sample from last night.
Teenage Medusa
19-Dec-08New School
18-Dec-08
I stopped by the New School briefly, which has been occupied by students since last night. You can read about it at the New School In Exile site. Although there are demands being made by the students inside, including for President Bob Kerrey to step down, the demands and the occupation seem not to be linked that strictly — the occupation is for occupation’s sake, i.e. space for students to hang out, study, collaborate, etc. CUNY is part of a consortium with the New School, but the consortium seems to be on hold at the moment, so I couldn’t get past New School security to get inside.
Busy Clippers
17-Dec-08David is in London, so in honor of the occasion, some classic Moz below.
Speaking of London, and music, my band will be there beginning of January as part of the Dissertation, What Dissertation? Tour, so if you’re British, come say hi. In addition to the home of the brash, outrageous and free, over the first two weeks of 09 we will be visiting Hamburg, Stockholm, Munich, and Glasgow, and maybe a few other places. (Details, as well as a weird hippie kaleidoscopic band photo Greg made some beautiful new art by Daniel Barrow, at the Ballet website.) I’m pretty excited, although, as a sign of my age, I’m also worried about my feet getting wet and being cold.
And if you’re local, you can say hello/goodbye at our show Thursday, at the Bell House. We’ll be playing some new arrangements of old songs, some new songs, and maybe even a cover, if you’re lucky, and things don’t fall apart. We go on first, say 8-ish, so we can all be in bed at a reasonable hour.
The Exhausted Horses Are Shot
12-Dec-08I 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.)
Study Break
11-Dec-08In which I take a break from my usual grind to engage in some study. The arrival of a book I’d ordered months ago and forgotten about, White Logics, White Methods: Racism & Methodology, has sent me on a Google Scholar chase that thus far knows no limit. Especially occupying my mind: Tracking down Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s 1997 ASR article “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Interpretation” led me to a critique of the piece by Mara Loveman (December 1999 ASR), which then sent me to Bonilla-Silva’s reply (obvs, also December 1999). I’m trying to sort my head around a sense of how this argument in the sociology of race/ethnicity parallels (or perhaps underwrites?) a debate in political sociology of the welfare state about whether or not racialized disparities in social entitlements are a side-effect of something else (i.e. class subsumes race), or whether (and of course this is where my intellect/politics lean) we should understand the structure of the U.S. welfare state as itself a product of racialized social strucutrers, i.e., a “weak”* federal government and “states rights” as mechanisms developed to maintain racial apartheid or inequality. I don’t even know what I’m typing at this point…
*I think weak is the wrong word for the U.S. federal government. I understand this classifcation is meant to point to the lack or relative limits of universal programs in the U.S. But my diss research suggests that the federal government exercises quite strong authority over programs it does not directly administer, a power of delegating tasks that also produces pockets of power at subnational levels. Or something. What am I thinking? This is not way to lure back readers!
I’ve Missed You!
08-Dec-08But now I’m back. I was buried in work, and then occupied with rebelling against work, then suffering from post-rebellion malaise. Now I’m returning to work, happily, maybe even with some enthusiasm. Since last we spoke, I finished a draft of my introduction, which felt significant. Though I will undoubtedly have to change it quite a bit once everything else is written, I felt at some point here in the middle of the dissertation that I needed some direction, and writing the intro seems to have served that function. Speaking of intro’s, next on my to-do list is revising the intro for the anthology Patricia and I began editing oh so many years ago. But, finally, the review process is over and a contract is on the way. University presses, take your time much? I’ve been re-reading the articles, and making some notes for the authors, and that is the kind of work I really enjoy, thinking about people’s writing, and ways to help the brilliance shine through. On the top of my procrastination list right now is the R&R for an article that I just got back. Can’t… bear…. to touch it. But I will get to it soon, else this roll I’m on rolls off and leaves me and the article behind.
In other news: Looking for a job in a recession? I don’t recommend it. I got I think my 7th notice yesterday that a job I applied for has been callled off, not to mention the handsome pile of rejection letters that has accumulated. I wonder if Obama’s plan for federally-funded highway construction projects might include some post-doc positions… I still have a handful of active applications, but I’m making Plan B’s, which I’m feeling good about, and I’m in the very lucky position of being able to renew my funding next year, should it make sense to sit on the diss and wait to defend until something else opens up. I will say this about applying for jobs — it makes me really enjoy and appreciate time spent on the diss. The dissertation is a pure delight compared to preparing job applications. Pure delight.
David and I took a pie-baking class at the Brooklyn Kitchen. It was pretty much totally awesome. Today I thought I’d lost my pie on the subway,
which would have sucked, but then I found it in my apartment. I tried to get some ice cream to go with it, and had agreed with myself I could spend $5. The first deli I went to charged $6 for a pint of Haagen Daz, so I left for what I thought would be the cheaper deli down the street. Same pint, $7. Make a fool of me once, shame on you. Make a fool of me twice… No ice cream.
Sunday, the band is reuniting upstate for some fall harvest hoe-ing down with all your favorite farmers. If you’re running around upstate this weekend, come join us!
Racism without Race
16-Oct-08The chains of signification being mobilized in this last leg of the presidential race — Obama – Hussein – Anti-American/Other (“doesn’t see America like you and me”) -Terrorist – Muslim – Arab — is almost too stunning to catch. 
By never having to say “Black,” McCain’s campaign and followers are able to disavow race and disassociate themselves from overt anti-Black racism while invoking and reproducing a racialized nationalism and xenophobia that undermines African American political legitimacy all the same. Obama then carries a doubled-up burden of needing to repudiate the racialized attacks without naming the attacks as raced, while also invoking a xenophobic nationalism (“Borrowing money from China to give to Saudi Arabia”) that threatens to exclude him. And this is topped off by the only permitted public confession of hurt being McCain’s white pain at being called racist. Undoubtedly, when Obama is sworn in as president, everyone but him will be noting the historical event his election represents. He will have to claim it as a victory of “all Americans coming together” that has no special significance for a racially subordinated population. Right?
(With thanks to Jacque for the photo.)
Happy Birthday, Michel Foucault
15-Oct-08
Foucault would be 82 today. It is hard not to regret all the pages he never got to write, but I also think his early departure lucked the rest of us into a special task — to keep revising his work in relation to the world of today, without him doing all the thinking for us. I can’t really come up with another recent writer whose work has been as influential and as reviled. I’m still amazed when sociologists dismiss his work (and those who use him) as “trendy” – forty years plus seems a bit long for a trend, no? But as Charles Tilly pointed out, the chances are good that work with the greatest impact on a field will likely receive the strongest opposition (h/t to WITW for reminding us of this).
In Foucault’s own words:
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ”politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas… that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
That’s Morning Time, Before We Got There
14-Oct-08For people in New York, I have been meaning to say: Make sure you go see my friend Matt Wolf’s documentary about musician Arthur Russell, Wild Combination. It has been held over again at the IFC Center so you still have time. It is a beautiful and moving and sweet and smart look at Russell’s time in NYC making music. You don’t have to be a total music-head to enjoy the film — if you are not familiar with Russell’s music, the film is a lovely introduction to it. It is also an important contribution to a queer archive of the impact of HIV/AIDS on experimental art-making. Go see it.