Historiann

In the spirit of all of the complaints about young people today, I present you with a guest post by Mrs. Norbert Thrummox (nee Delphine Brumley), my entirely fictional great grandmother.

We didn’t have anything, get anything, or expect anything.  Christmas was pretty much like every other day of the year, only colder.  Our parents didn’t even know our birthdays, let alone celebrate them with cake and presents!  We never heard of such luxuries.

Breakfast was weevily cornmeal sprinkled on a half-sheet of newspaper, lunch was what we could forage on the playground at school, and supper was what we could beg from the bar we’d have to drag our daddy from at closing time.  (Mostly pickled eggs, or sliced radishes in summer.)  This was difficult, as we’d have to get up at 5 a.m. to make it to school by 8, but we were usually good and hungry for our suppers by 1 a.m. or so.  But we didn’t mind!  We were free.  Most things were free, because we didn’t have any money.  Theft was non-existent in our community.  I’d like to say that we never locked our doors, but that would imply that we had doors.  Most of us didn’t. Continue Reading »

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The media are at it again–announcing the discovery of another ”new” cultural “trend,” that is, and publishing a series of “You Kids Get Off My Lawn” type articles complaining about young people these days.  It’s the Great Recession, or the Second Great Depression, or whatever–so there’s another panic about the extension of childhood to age 30 and what’s-wrong-with-kids-these-days.  Sometimes today’s 20-somethings, who are the children of baby boomers, get the advantage of more sympathetic press coverage–see this New York Times magazine article, for example.  But a lot of this nonsense is pretty hostile, and unfairly harsh on a whole generation of Americans, like these cranky rants published today in the Denver Post:  “Generation Y Bother” by Ruben Navarette, Jr., and “A Generational Collision is Coming”by Tom Downey.  Guess what?  The rising generation is optimistic, idealistic, and isn’t professionally settled–GASP!!!  And old farts in their 40s on up feel free to condescend to them.  Thank goodness the media is on this story.

Pull up a chair on the porch and let Grandma Historiann give you a little history lesson about the days when we were all smelling the teen spirit, wearing our ballcaps backwards, and affecting the heroin chic look in imitation of Kate Moss.  Back in my early postcollegiate days–the early 1990s–there was a recession on, and a lot of wailing and rending of garments about what a pathetic bunch of losers we 20-somethings were.  A lot of people I know lived with their parents after college graduation and sometimes during grad school, or at least while they tended bar/coached junior high soccer/planned their next degree and/or move.  We too were lectured by older people and looked down on as “slackers,” stereotyped as unmotivated baristas with useless Comp Lit and Art History degrees.  A lot of ink was spilled on the return of ink–that is, tattoos–on a lot of our bodies, and whether or not we’d ever get “real jobs” after getting sleeved.  Then guess what?  Continue Reading »

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Inside Higher Ed reports on an interesting recent survey of Sociology majors in 2005, which said that “70 percent were satisfied with their major when they were seniors. By 2009, asked whether they were satisfied with their major after having been in the world of work or graduate school for a few years, only 40 percent were satisfied.”  Of course, this survey may just have been timed spectacularly poorly, asking recent grads in the midst of the worst recession since World War II how they feel about their college majors, and the article notes this unfortunate coincidence.

The survey raises an interesting question for those of us who are skeptical of the value of customer satisfaction surveys end-of-semester student evaluations:  how do students think about their educations over time?  I myself tend to think that students gain more appreciation for their courses over time and after they see how incredibly random and corrupt adulthood generally is.  But the survey results here suggest another possibility.

Now that I think of it, I was very satisfied with my education at the point I had completed it.  I wrote an award-winning Senior thesis, and I had been admitted (with a T.A.-ship) to my top choice of graduate programs.  So, mission accomplished, right?  Well, sorta.  Continue Reading »

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Some of you easterners probably saw this on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning already, but if you’ve got a spare 20 minutes and you’re so inclined, take a look at Daphne Merkin’s essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called “My Life in Therapy.”  She writes really thoughtfully about her experience of therapy, and wonders what (after 40 years) it’s done for her.  Part of the problem, she notes, is that psychoanalysis and its offshoots tends to be an end in itself without fixed goals or an endpoint, unlike a consultation with an allopath or a dentist to fix a specific problem.  You have a toothache, or a bodily pain?  The doctor will diagnose it and make you feel better.  The psychoanalyst’s approach isn’t always diagnostic, and even when a problem is identified, what a patient should do about it isn’t always clear.  Merkin writes about going to yet another therapist.  Would this one help her?  And how would she even know if his approach was helping?

And then there was my feeling that I better not get in too deep. I was wary by this point of the alacrity with which I attached to shrinks, each and every one of them, as if I suspended my usual vigilant powers of critical judgment in their presence merely because they wore the badge of their profession. The truth of the matter was that in more than 40 years of therapy (the only person I knew who may have been at it longer than me was Woody Allen, who once offered me his own analyst), I never developed a set of criteria by which to assess the skill of a given therapist, the way you would assess a dentist or a plumber.Other than a presentable degree of intelligence and an office that didn’t set off aesthetic alarms — I tended to prefer genteelly shabby interiors to overly well-appointed ones, although I was wary of therapists who exhibited a Collyer Brothers-like inability to throw anything away — I wasn’t sure what made for a good one. I never felt entitled to look at them as members of a service profession, which is what, underneath all the crisscrossing of need and wishfulness, they essentially were. The sense of urgency that generally took me into a new shrink’s office was more conducive to seeing myself as the one being evaluated rather than the evaluator. Was I a good-enough patient? Would this latest psychiatrist (I saw mostly M.D.’s) like me and want to take me on? Or would he/she write me off as impossibly disturbed under my cloak of normalcy?

I knew I wasn’t the most promising candidate — I was, in fact, a prime example of what is referred to within the profession as a “difficult” patient, what with my clamorous ways, disregard for boundaries and serial treatments — but perhaps this time, after so many disappointments, I would get lucky. Somewhere out there, sitting in a smaller or larger office on Central Park West or the Upper East Side, tucked behind a waiting area furnished with a suitably arty poster or two, a couple of chairs and old copies of The New Yorker and National Geographic Traveler, was a practitioner who would not only understand my lifelong sorrow and anger in an empathic (but not unduly soppy) fashion but also be able to relieve me of them. Just as some people believe in the idea of soul mates, I held fast to the conviction that my perfect therapeutic match was out there. If only I looked hard enough I would find this person, and then the demons that haunted me— my love/hate relationship with my difficult mother (who has been dead now for four years), my self-torturing and intransigently avoidant attitude toward my work, my abiding sense of aloneness and seeming inability to sustain a romantic relationship and, above all, my lapses into severe depression — would become, with my therapist’s help, easier to manage.

Merkin doesn’t address gender issues in her article, but throughout I couldn’t help but see her problem as a gendered one.  Why should she feel like her therapist was someone she needed to please, someone from whom she couldn’t demand results, however modestly or vaguely defined?  Continue Reading »

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Forgive this solipsistic post–those of you who aren’t interested in la vie Historiann can just click away.  But, yesterday Tenured Radical said that I don’t “reveal the nature of [my] sexuality, [my] relationship or [my] parenting status on the blog, and is a pretty radical feminist,” which is a little inaccurate.  Longtime readers know that I “came out” on my blog as a married heterosexualist last year, although I grant you that there’s nothing more specific about my sex life here.  I thought about it a while, and decided that these were pretty good representations of “how pleasant is the life [we] lead” here at number 17 Cherry Tree Lane.

First, here’s Historiann:  “We’re fighting for our rights militantly–never you fear!”

Next we have Fratguy:  “It’s grand to be an American, in 2010.  King Obama’s on the throne–it’s the age of men!” Continue Reading »

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If you recall, when Tenured Radical and I broke off yesterday in Part I of our discussion of Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings, we were talking about the odd attraction and revulsion that characterizes relationships between academics and public intellectuals.  At least, it’s why I’ve always forgiven Gore Vidal for his nasty swipes at the “Assistant Professors” of his imagination, who according to Vidal were always scurrying off to write something narrow and pointless.  Vidal never went to college.  (The Deuce had a lot to do with that, since he was Philips Exeter Class of 1943.)

So here we are again–gossiping about Susan Sontag!  Today, we’re moving along to some of the even knottier issues that The Professor raised in our minds, those of desire, longing, and the price one pays to join the academic club.  And as some of you have reported here, sex is one way young scholars can gain admission, or at least imagine that that’s what they’ve done.

Tenured Radical:  I think it’s important that Sontag isn’t a feminist, even though she has always been honored by feminists. In contrast, I’ve begun to develop a relationship with a highly successful feminist writer from the 1970s, and she seems to be very clear why our work is differently important, and she is making a point of being generous about the kind of collaboration that can be possible between two very different kinds of writers.  It’s just one example, but it is a strikingly different experience than I have had in the past with “famous” people who rely on me for all kinds of support, but wouldn’t dream of offering to introduce me to an agent.  I think the Sontag essay also illustrates two paradoxes that you allude to in your comments, paradoxes that actually structure the whole book.  The first is that the cost of being smart and accomplished as Castle is – particularly because she is a woman and of working-class and immigrant origins– is the ever-present fear of humiliation, that humiliation that comes from not belonging. In “Courage Mon Amie,” Castle’s essay about her love affair with World War I, she emphasizes the inescapable humiliation of being female in a world where female heroism is impossible, and particularly impossible for those who suffer from the dread and fear of not belonging.  “I was female,” she writes dolefully about her inability to face the post- 9/11 world with stoicism; “and a wretched poltroon.” (21).

The second paradox you raise is that we academics seek out larger than life “female/heroes” like Sontag and The Professor, but inevitably, the heroism of such people is not unconnected to their narcissistic need to humiliate us.  The question is, are we drawn to them because somehow we actually know that they will do that thing which we fear the most?  In this sense, all the essays strike me as exercises in coming to terms with humiliation and the longing to be part of the most exclusive club.  It’s no accident, I think, that Castle’s obsession with Art Pepper, maniac cockmeister and a sublime, brilliant drug-addicted jazz musician covered with tattoos, takes hold at the exact time she is driving around in her persona as a respectable professor with a trunk full of research intended for an article she knows, in her heart, she will never write.  Continue Reading »

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What does it matter?

Last week’s discussion of helicopter parents inspired a lot of comments.  But, I felt a little bad about having started the conversation without more of a setup or guidance from me.  (Aren’t any of you away from the summer, or unplugged from blogs at least?  Jeezy Creezy!)  After all, the author of the original article opened up her life and her parenting to close scrutiny by the general public, which I think was terribly brave of her.  (If I am a parent, I certainly am not courageous enough to write about my family life like she did.  After all, I won’t even tell you if I am a parent!)  I didn’t mean for our discussion to be a pile-on of one woman, and I was really pleased that the discussion you all generated remained focused on the issue of helicoptering generally rather than on one parent personally.

But, really:  why should college or university faculty care about the parenting styles of our students’ parents?  Is this discussion of parenting just an online form of rubbernecking and taking easy shots at what goes on in other families?  (After all, I’m the blogger who has urged us all to refrain from judging parents too harshly because of the bucketload of cultural assumptions and expectations we put on parenting, and on mothering in particular.)  Continue Reading »

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Unsound methods

Is it possible that “helicopter parents” are just responding to incredibly needy and dependent children?  (Is it possible that some children shouldn’t be sent away to college, but continue to live at home while they study?)

Mobile phones and the erasure of long-distance charges has enabled this kind of codependence, or whatever you want to call it.  I also completely understand the urge to answer the phone when a child is calling.  When I was in college, it never dawned on me to call my parents with every question or concern that popped into my head, and not just because it cost more money than it does now.  I was happy to be away from home and my parents–even if it meant screwing up or not taking care of myself as I probably should have.  Continue Reading »

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I sure am envious of you folks out in California this election season.  I think the race between Meg Whitman (R) and Jerry Brown (D) will be one of the few worth watching, if only because I’d be waiting and hoping for a reporter to ask Brown about this classic from 30 years ago:

“You will jog for the MAS-ter race, and always wear the happy face. . . The hippies won’t come back, you say?  Mellow out or you will pay!”  Ah, if only Jerry Brown were elected President in 1980. . . (For those of you born either before 1960 or after 1980, that’s the Dead Kennedys, fronted by Jello Biafra, performing “California Über Alles.”  I’m assuming that the rest of you Gen X-ers will just play through.)  Continue Reading »

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This creepy doll by Hans Bellmer, 1935

I can’t let the coincidence of this pass me by, since we’re talking about dolls and the objectification of girls’ and women’s bodies again.  Squadratomagico has a great post up on the off-label hormonal engineering of baby girl fetuses who have tested positive for (gasp!) Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which means that they frequently have ambiguous genitalia, may possess a strong interest in softball, and “as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role.” 

(Well, what thinking woman doesn’t agree with that last bit?  Seriously:  if you dig scrubbing crusty surfaces and wiping snotty noses and bums, that should be a symptom of clinical depression, not normative behavior in any adult, male or female.  Most of us do that junk because we don’t want the state condemning our houses and taking our kids away.)

Click immediately on this link to join the discussion.  I left a comment over there, so I’ll be following that thread.  Something else I didn’t mention in my comment is the odd equation of childhood behavior with adult predisposition for motherhood among these alleged sufferers of CAH:  “As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”  What a stupid way to think about children or the importance of play.  Continue Reading »

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