Me & my best friend!

Howdy, friends!  It’s lovely, sunny, and warm, so I’m off on a run.  Here are some interesting tidbits I found elsewhere on the world-wide timewasting web for those of you not enjoying perfect autumn weather today:

• Via RealClearBooks, Eleanor Barkhorn on “What Jeffrey Eugenidies Doesn’t Understand About Women,” after reading his new book, The Marriage Plot:  “There’s one way, however, in which [the protagonist] Madeleine defies believability: She has no true female friends. Yes, she has roommates and a sister with whom she once had ‘heavy’ emotional conversations, but these relationships are characterized more by spite than affection. And, sadly, The Marriage Plot is just the latest story to forget to give its heroine friends. There are countless other Madeleines in modern-day literature and film: smart, self-assured women who have all the trappings of contemporary womanhood except a group of friends to confide in.”  Have you noticed this about recent books and films?  I have to say that I hadn’t until Barkhorn pointed it out.  She concludes, “The great irony, of course, is that the old-fashioned, marriage-plot-bound books that Eugenides attempts to modernize in his new novel actually do a better job of portraying female friendship than The Marriage Plot.”  I think I may read this anyway–a library codex copy of the book, of course–because I’m a huge fan of “marriage plot” authors like Jane Austen and the many Brontes, but Barkhorn makes an interesting argument here.
• Isn’t it cute when right-wing religious nuts start condemning each other to hell?  Robert Jeffress vs. Bill Donahue, plus all Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, of course.  Taking victimology to new heights, Anita Perry cries that her handsome husband Rick has been “brutalized . . . because of his faith.”  Mark my words:  the majority of Americans will not reward this kind of religious pride, which just stinks of hubris and un-neighborliness.  Even if they privately agree with him, Americans are fundamentally uncomfortable with the Jeffress style of public religious condemnation.
• 1970s flashback:  Do any of you remember the sensational book Sybil, about the girl with multiple personality disorder?  Check out Laura Miller’s review of Debbie Nathan’s Sybil Exposed, which details the twisted relationship between “Sybil” (Shirley Ardell Mason) and her therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur.  Mason had finally moved out of Wilbur’s house and had achieved her goal of becoming an art teacher and even a homeowner by the time Flora Rheta Schreiber published her sensational account of “Sybil’s” 16 personalities, but sadly the publicity for the book (and the fact that Schreiber disguised her case study pretty poorly) led Mason to flee her independent life and move back in with her therapist.   
• John Judis actually reviews all 528 pages of Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men:  Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.  He finds it trustworthy on balance and the annoying small errors the result of “the current practices of some large American publishers, who spend little time or money on copy-editing or fact-checking and rush books out without much editorial pressure. As far as I can tell, Suskind’s errors are not discrediting.”  His problem is with the “education of a President” part of the book, as Judis disagrees with Suskind’s optimistic conclusion that President Barack Obama “gets it” about what went wrong in his first two years, and mocks the President’s interest in “telling a story” with his presidency:  “In fact, Obama had run for president and governed on the basis of a story—a story he articulated in his Democratic convention keynote address in 2004—of an America that is not red, blue, white, black, or brown, but a ‘United States of America.’ This appeal resonated during the election, but as early as January 2009, when he was informed that Republicans as a bloc would oppose his stimulus program, he should have known that it had little basis in reality. He clung to it anyway. It governed his attitude toward Wall Street and toward the hard-line Republican opposition; and it led him to jeopardize his presidency and the country’s future. Yes, there was a failure of communication, but it was not because the President didn’t have a story. It was because the story was pure fiction. . . . Suskind may have set out to write a book about a president learning from his mistakes, but he may have ended up writing one about a failed presidency.”  His words, friends, not mine, so don’t get your panties in a bunch this weekend, m’kay?

From my perspective, Jobs is an odd person to lionize.  Don’t get me wrong–he helped develop and sell a number of remarkably nifty gadgets, but he wasn’t the inventor.  He was the CEO of Apple–a company that moved most of its manufacturing to China.  So all of the comparisons to Thomas Edison seem way overblown, and quite frankly, I don’t think his business model was as progressive as Henry Ford’s.  Can the Chinese laborers who assemble our i-Pods, i-Pads, and i-Phones afford to buy them themselves, in the way that Ford made sure his employees were well-paid enough to afford cars of their own?  There is all of that River Rouge business, I know, but Jobs didn’t need to call the Pinkertons in to bust up strikes.  He shipped those manufacturing jobs overseas to an authoritarian country where they don’t have to fuss with unions, or strikes, or most of the other tiresome aspects that come with employing human beings.

‘Cos it’s a steady job
And it’s the only thing that makes me money
And it gives me something to laugh about. . .

Then don't bother writing for The Nation, darling!

Via TalkLeft, we learn that Katha Pollitt is (once again) shocked, shocked to find there’s sexism at the house organ of the so-called American “Left,”  The Nation magazine!

It’s been a long time since anyone seriously maintained that women in power, simply by virtue of their gender, are reliably less warlike than men—how could they be, given that men set up and control the system through which those women must rise? But apparently Nation blogger Robert Dreyfuss has just noticed this fact.

In a post entitled “Obama’s Women Advisers Pushed War Against Libya” (originally titled “Obama’s Women” tout court) he’s shocked-shocked-shocked that UN Ambassador Susan Rice, human-rights adviser Samantha Power and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were keen on intervening militarily in Libya. The piece is dotted with arch and sexist language—the advisers are a “troika,” a “trio” who “rode roughshod over the realists in the administration” (all men) and “pushed Obama to war.” Now it’s up to the henpecked President to “reign (sic) in his warrior women.” Interestingly, the same trope—ballbreaking women ganging up on a weak president—is all over the rightwing blogosphere.

.       .       .       .      .       .      .       .      

[C]an you imagine a piece in The Nation titled “Black President Opts for Bombs” or “Qaddafi, a Man, Threatens to Massacre Rebels, Most of Whom Are Also Men”?

Misogyny—it’s the last acceptable prejudice of the left. 

Yeah, you tell them, Katha!  (Only, did you sleep through all of the coverage your rag and its contributors provided of the 2008 Democratic primary?  And all of those stereotypes about what a horrible nut-crusher Clinton is, and what a horrible, bloodthirsty monster she is for voting for the 2002 AUMF?  I guess what I’m saying is that some of us were pointing this out more than three years ago, and some of us remember.) 

Yes, this is the same Katha Pollitt who wrote this paragraph last winter, too:

I’m still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something–whatever!–men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place.Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan–which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness–for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can’t blame this on a woman.

It looks like several of your dear colleagues on the “Left” have found a way to blame a woman anyway!  Cherchez la femme, toujours mes amies, cherchez les femmes.

What do you think, friends:  is Pollitt suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?  (She is something of a captive–it ain’t easy for feminist writers to make an honest living by their writing any more (and it probably never was), and I don’t hear mainstream rags like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books clamoring to publish a biweekly witty feminist column.  Maybe try Newsweek now that La Divine Tina edits it?  Because I’d advise her to start a blog if it could pay the bills, but alas.)  Although I usually like Pollitt’s work–brain farts like the comments from last February above aside–it seems like captivity is taking its toll.  I don’t think the boys read her work or care about it, because despite her senority her work certainly doesn’t change the tenor of the coverage over at The Nation. 

UPDATE, MARCH 23:  See Pollitt’s responses in the comments below, in which she reminds me of the columns and blog posts she wrote about the sexism displayed during the 2008 Democratic Primary.  It was hyperbolic and unfair of me to wonder if she had “sle[pt] through” the primary, because she wrote about the coverage of Clinton and was particularly critical of the sexism on the left and in the pages of The Nation.  I appreciate that she took the time to correct me and to engage in the conversation below.

Sit down and let me pour you a cup!

As you may have noticed if you are a regular reader of this blog, I like teh funny, and even if my sense of humor ain’t exactly your cuppa joe, I like to write to amuse myself, at least.  My problem now is that I can’t find a lot of humor in the book I’m writing.  I wrote a book about guys and guns and warfare in the Northeastern borderlands of what’s now the U.S. and Canada, so although that wasn’t a happy story for most of the people I wrote about, there were a lot of really fatuous English men and women I could mock in that book.  I realize it’s a low trick, but having a mockable bad guy or set of bad guys in your book is one way to leaven the story and add a little humor.  After writing about warfare for the better part of a decade, I looked forward to what I imagined to be a retreat into the relative safety and comfort of the cloister in order to write about a little English girl (Esther Wheelwright, 1696-1780) who was taken captive by the Indians at 7 and wound up in the Ursuline convent in Quebec at the age of 12, where she remained for the rest of her life.  

But, the problem for me right now is that there just isn’t a lot of humor in the story of a little girl whose life was filled with warfare and trauma for her English family, and the starvation, disease, and eventual destrution of her Indian family.  She arrived safely at the monastery and lived to the age of 84, but early modern nuns are just so earnest with their apostolic missions, such do-gooders that I haven’t found a lot of humor or texture in that part of the story, either.  They were not late medieval mystics who wrote long, fantastic narratives or offered descriptions of the various ways in which they mortified their bodies.  They were not aristocratic European nuns who flaunted their wealth and had men jumping in and out of their cells in between secret plots to make another Borgia prince the Pope.  They were teachers!  I’m a teacher, and many of you reading this are teachers–you know how boring and earnest we all are!  Who wants to read about about a bunch of teachers?   

In short, I have a humor problem with this book, and no really obvious bad guys to target for the cheap yuks.  (At least I’m having a hard time making scurvy and smallpox variola take the fall for everything.)

Last week I had lunch with a colleague who writes about one of the most humorless topics in world history:  the African diaspora and New World slavery.  He certainly sympathized with my problem, and suggested that I might look for humor in some of the cross-cultural misunderstandings between French missionaries and Indians.  I thought that was a great suggestion.  I talked to another friend of mine who writes American Indian history, and he told me that maybe I shouldn’t look for humor in a story that’s about warfare, famine, and disease.  I certainly take his point, because if one writes anything besides political or intellectual history, American history is for the most part a very un-funny story about the tragic lives and exploitation and abuse of the many by the few.  Then again, another friend who is a European medievalist suggested that there can nevertheless be humor in widespread suffering and certain death–she said that in the face of the Black Death, Europeans made a brave face with gallows humor. 

What--me funny?

Yesterday, I consulted another historian who recently published a biography of Emilie du Chatelet in which she was able to turn Voltaire–a character who is almost universally loved and admired by modern, secular historians because of his irreverent humor–into the bad guy.  She counseled that I’m just “clogged” right now, and that I should push on and get a draft of the book finished so that I can go back and find the humor, or at least the ironic moments, in my story.  I think that’s what I’ll do, but I’d really like to hear from the rest of you what you historians or cultural studies types think about this problem of finding humor in the history you write.  Do you also look for humor, or do you think that it’s perfectly OK or even preferable not to look for humor when writing about really heavy subjects?  

All I know fer sure is that I need to find a pretty funny subject for my third book, because the history I’ve written so far that that I’m writing right now is, like, totally bumming me out.  (Any suggestions?)  I may need to migrate into nineteenth century U.S. history, because that place was a veritable freak show of wacko religious beliefs, communes, colonies, and filibustering misadventures.  (On top of all of the continuing misery, exploitation, and abuse, that is–but by comparison to colonial history, it was a laugh riot.)

All kids love log!

Have you heard the pseudo-scientific news?  Human girls are biologically programmed to play with dollies like little mommies!  A recent study suggests that female juvenile chimps play with sticks and nurture them like babies, whereas male juveniles turn their sticks into weapons or other manly toys–it’s scientifically proven.  Echidne has the goods, as I knew she would.  She’s got an interesting follow-up post on a 2007 study of a Senagalese chimp community that found that female adult chimps led the way in tool-making and killing in their communities–but as she notes, that study didn’t go viral now, did it?  She writes, “[I]t’s every bit as significant as the new stick study, only it shows female chimps as tool makers and as killers. So are we going to draw conclusions about human society from that one, too?”

One of the aspects of these studies that purport to show the essential or biological basis for gendered behaviors in humans is how selective we are in looking to the non-human animal kingdom for justification of human behaviors.  After all, what is “natural” behavior?  $hitting outdoors, scratching our crotches, and smearing our scent everywhere is “natural,” I suppose.  Human societies have developed multiple different technologies and etiquettes for dealing with all of these “natural” needs and urges. 

Well, never mind the study from one community that suggests that female chimps are natural born tool-makers and killers.  Because of course the play of one community of chimps living in captivity can stand for all of chimpanzees worldwide, and juvenile chimps are the same as human girls and boys, all you need to get for the kiddies this Christmas is one stick each, and sit back and watch the fun happen!  (Is anyone else thinking of this classic from the 1990s cartoon, Ren and Stimpy?)

I’ve been dying to tell you about this for more than 18 months now, but I’ve been waiting for the publication of Women’s America:  Refocusing the Past (7th edition) to announce that editors Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron DeHart, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton have included a substantial excerpt from chapter 4 of Abraham in Arms in this latest edition of their American women’s history reader. 

I’m especially pleased about this, not just because Women’s America is one of the top two women’s history readers*, and not just because I’m in the company of leaders in my field like Sara Evans, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Mary Beth Norton, Jennifer Morgan, Carol Karlsen, Carol Berkin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Sharon Block, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Jeanne Boydston, not to mention Dayton and Kerber themselves.  I’m also especially thrilled because they picked a chapter about women that I was particularly proud of, and which has gone largely unremarked upon by my reviewers, most of whom have been military historians who are much more interested in my chapters on guys and guns.  (Go figure!  They have all reviewed the book favorably, for which I am truly grateful.)  I wrote what I thought was some pretty interesting women’s history too–and I’m so gratified to know that top scholars in my field like Kerber and Dayton find value in my work.

From the editors’ introduction to “Captivity and Conversion:  Daughters of New England in French Canada,” p. 103:

Ann Little’s essay introduces us to the geopolitics of the second half of the colonial period.  Protestant England and Catholic France, along with their independent-minded Indian allies, engaged in a succession of imperial wars involving North American territory from the late seventeenth century through the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63.  In 1700, English settlers far outnumbered the 15,000 French soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and habitants(farmers) clustered chiefly in settlements along the St. Lawrence River.  However, the English occupied only a narrow sliver along the eastern seaboard, while the French claimed authority (and established mutually adventageous relations with native groups) from Louisiana to Canada along the Mississippi River and around the Great Lakes.  It was not at all clear if one European power (France, Spain, orEngland) could gain ascendancy over the continent as a whole.

The author takes us on a detective’s journey to recover the voices of and find out what happened to the children, teenagers, and grown women who were captured from New England towns and farms in wartime raids by Abenaki allies of the French.  On arrival in Canada, English girls were typically schooled at Ursuline convents in New France’s principal northern towns, Montreal, Quebec (City), and Trois Rivieres.  Finding these New England women in the thorough records kept by French notaries–baptisms, marriages, deaths–means that they converted to Catholicism.  Letters exchanged with their birth families in New England confirm that a high proportion of them chose not to be redeemed or ransomed so as to return to their onetime homes.

Wasn’t that a nice touch–”a detective’s journey?”  I’d almost want to read my chapter, even if it were assigned to me on a syllabus.  Thanks Linda, Nina, and Jane!

Have any of you had the experience of having your books reviewed by people outside of what you thought were your major fields?  Were you surprised at the audiences who found value in your work, even when you weren’t writing specifically within that scholarly tradition?  Like I said, I’m grateful for the favorable attention military historians have paid my book, but I wonder:  if I had subtitled the book “Gender and War” rather than “War and Gender in Colonial New England,” would my book have been sent out to more women’s and gender historians from the first?

*I say that WA is one of the top two readers, because the other one, Major Problems in American Women’s History,is edited by my fellow WA anthologee Mary Beth Norton and my colleague here at Baa Ram U., Ruth M. Alexander.

The AISC has other podcasts that might be of interest to many of you:  Carroll also has posted a podcast of “From Ph.D. to Professor,” in which three MSU faculty members (Heather Howard, Susan Applegate Krouse, and Kimberli Lee) plus Susan Lobo of the University of Arizona discuss their professional development and the process of publishing their books.  Also, in “Inroads:  Episode #1,” Joseph Stahlman discusses his research in Anthropology at Indiana University.

Here’s a question I’ve always had about the audio world:  why don’t our voices sound the same in recordings as they sound in our head?  I’m always surprised by how young and high-pitched my voice sounds.  I sound much lower-pitched and more authoritative in my imagination than I do on my voicemail or answering machine.  I was interviewed for a program for BBC4 a few years ago, and I was amazed at how sonorous and rich they made my voice.  They must have a documentarian version of Auto-Tune that makes everyone they interview sound like Kathleen Turner or James Earl Jones.

For those who fear government and hold fiercely to the motto of New Hampshire — “Live Free or Die” — April 19 is both a holy and an unholy day; unholy because it marks the naked exercise of state power (at least in the case of Waco and before that of Ruby Ridge), and holy because it serves as a rallying cry for those who wish to “take back” their country from the socialists, communists and one-worlders who, they believe, have hijacked it. Blogger Eric Boehlert declares on Mediamatters.org that “April 19th remains an almost mythical date among dedicated government haters.”

For the government, April 19 is a day to worry about. When F.B.I. agents arrested nine members of the Christian militia known as the Hutaree in late March, they acted because of information indicating that the group was planning an attack on police officers sometime in April. The betting is that the date they had in mind was April 19.

Count me in the worried and watchful camp, not just because of these incidents of political violence (or of intercepted political violence), but because of the incidents of school and campus violence that were also in mid- to-late April.  Foremost among these are the murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999, and the Virginia Tech Massacre, which appears to have been planned in homage to all of these other incidents of domestic terrorism on April 16, 2007. 

And last week, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that the University of Colorado can’t ban guns on campus if people may lawfully carry them (thanks to our state’s 2003 concealed-carry permit law).  Baa Ram U.’s brand-new no-guns-allowed policy is likely the next one to fall.  Time for me to armor up, I guess.  (Then again, without metal detectors or security screening, our campuses are open to whatever people want to bring on them, no matter what the Court of Appeals rules.)  I was totally unsurprised to see the report that the U.S. has seen such a spike in violence on college and university campuses in the past twenty years. 

I really don’t like this time of the year much any more, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with end-of-semester grading, or final exams.  It’s too bad, because I’d like to be outside enjoying my campus, and the warm sun, the green grass, and the sound of the birds.

I guess the terrorists have won.

I heard the door open, slightly behind me, I didn’t look over. I was mid-sentence, and figured it was a student slipping in late.

Instead, a young man and young woman walked right into the center of the room and started performing part of the banquet scene from Romeo and Juliet.

We stopped abruptly. F()cking theatre kids, I thought. They must be advertising a production. A$$holes. But since I knew the scene, and they’d already started, I figured I’d let them finish–surely they were just going to do the shared sonnet, and would be done in another dozen lines.

But they got to the end, kissed, and kept going. 

The door opened again, and a third person came in: the Nurse. She got out a few lines, but when it became clear they weren’t going to stop, I stood up.

“Thanks so much,” I said sharply. “But you have the wrong semester: we do tragedies in the spring.”

For the first second or two, even after I’d stood up, they didn’t break character, but showed every sign of wanting to continue.

“You can leave NOW.”

They slunk, grinning and only slightly abashed, to the door. As they got there, the woman playing Juliet announced something about this being a senior project–guerrilla Shakespeare, or some such $hit.

Flavia had two reactions, which I think I would share too, were I treated to the same kind of “performance” as this.  First of all, it relates to the typical power dynamic in the classroom, which was definitely shaken up by the guerrilla performance.  She was angry, but her students were rattled:

[I]n the classroom. . . I’m in charge and I know I’m in charge. My students, in a way that I don’t often think about, are not in charge–even in a boisterous class where it can take me a while to get them to quiet down or to hush those having side conversations. Yes, they can tune in or tune out, and get up to go to the bathroom without asking my permission, but they don’t feel they have the power to change what happens in that confined space; when something does happen, all they’re able to do is watch.

Upon reflection, she was a little rattled too by the incident:

The interruption also made me think about how vulnerable the classroom is. We think we’re in a separate and semi-charmed space for those 60 or 90 minutes, but the world can come inside without our permission–whether it’s jerky drama students or a medical emergency or a kid with a gun.

It’s funny that she wrote this post this week–I’ve been thinking about how professors (at least most of us humanities types) are just bad actors who like having captive audiences.  That is, we like to tell stories and to be the center of attention, but we’re not good-looking enough or daring enough to risk performing for audiences who can walk out without fear of punishment in our grade books.  (This is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but maybe not too much of one.)

As faculty, our “performances” are privileged:  we have classrooms assigned for our use on particular days and times, and our “performances” are compensated.  This is not the case for a lot of people who lay claim to air time on college campuses:  I don’t know about your campuses, but mine seems to feature an awful lot of religious nuts who stand on milk crates to rant and scream about their ideas about Jesus and salvation most afternoons.  (Some of them deserve the title of “itinerant preacher,” and some are advertising for their local congregations, but a lot of them seem like random self-appointed God-bags.)  Recently, an observant Catholic colleague and I were walking on the plaza near our little “speakers’ corner,” when one of the really creepy ranters turned to look at us square in the face and screamed, “YOUR PROFESSORS ARE TEACHING YOU LIES!  LIES THAT WILL  LEAD YOU TO HELL!” 

Man, I really wanted to paste that guy, but he’s part of a rogue sect of Christianists that apparently does’t believe in shaving or common hygiene, so the thought of physical contact with that guy was too, too revolting.  (Delivering a baroque volley of profanity also crossed my mind, but I thought that would have mortified my colleague further.)  There are worse things, too:  twice a year, a big anti-abortion poster show pulls up and installs 10-foot high pictures of aborted fetuses, and the pro-choice campus group organizes a counterdemonstration.  My point here is that there are all kinds of “performances” going on on college campuses most days and nights, and that’s OK, so long as audiences are free to walk away.  In that sense, then, the encounter Flavia describes doesn’t seem like a “guerrilla theater experiment” so much as a gross imposition on her and her students without their consent in the semi-privacy of their classroom, or even an abusive one in light of all of the murderous office and classroom massacres that characterize life in these United States.

I’d like to know more about the “f^cking theater kids” and how they chose Flavia’s class or any other classes or spaces they “hit” with their performances.  It seems like it must have been premeditated, chosing a Shakespeare seminar (insetad of a large Chem 101 lecture or an upper-division Economics course, for example.)  In the end, what makes theater different from class is that the audience members can vote with their feet–and Flavia’s students were unable to do that.  In my opinion, it’s a performance FAIL if you just creep out your “audience” without their consent.