Historiann

UPDATE, 8/29/10:  See Blake’s review of our Dinner at the Farm, including fire-breathers, fire dancers, and fireworks!  Plus cucumber and mint-infused G & Ts, a gorgeous view of the mountains at dusk, lots of friendly dogs, and much, much more.

It seems like almost everyone I know and love has a late summer birthday–ej, Mark, Kathleen, Blake, and Dad. Consider this a lazy, lazy happy birthday wish for us all!  (And it was coincidentally recorded last year on my birthday.)  For those of you who remember the 80s (and I know that all of you listed above do!), Comrade PhysioProf posted this birthday classic by Altered Images earlier this month.

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Happy Birthday, Dr. Crazy!

This cake is for Dr. Crazy, whose birthday I missed a few weeks back.  Since she’s 36 now, and I thought I’d share with her this article by Jessi Klein about declining her gynecologist’s suggestion that she consider freezing her eggs on the eve of her 35th birthday this year.  I met Crazy in person last summer and really enjoyed our brief lunch–and Klein’s article reminded me of Crazy’s personality and sense of humor.  Klein writes:

My doctor, who I adore, asked if I wanted to take home some “literature” about the procedure. (I never understand why these medical pamphlets are called literature, as if Faulkner was up all night feverishly writing about NuvaRing.) And in that moment, I made a decision. A decision about how I’m going to handle the fact that I’m thirty five (today!) and I don’t have kids and a kid-making partner isn’t currently on the scene. I decided I didn’t want the literature. And I don’t ever want the literature about anything related to the world of Fertility. It’s my big thirty-fifth birthday present to myself.

What–you missed The Loestrin and the Fury, too?  She continues:

I hate the fossilized fear of desperation. I know it well. My 20s were all about feeling desperate. Continue Reading »

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Eat your heart out, Judy Jetson.  I got a new car.  (Thanks, Fratguy!)  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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Tenured Radical has a brief comment in a web feature at the New York Times called “The Professors Who Won’t Retire.”  (An entirely unjudgmental and impartial title if I ever saw one!)  Read through all of the comments–a virtual rogue’s gallery of faculty and (former) university administrators if ever I saw one.  (Click over there–you be the judge.)  Many of the commenters (TR included) push back against the notion that it’s the “professors who won’t retire” who have cause the (40 years and counting) job crisis in academe, and not the “universities who won’t hire tenure-track faculty and hire adjuncts instead.”

That old expression “dead wood” appears in a number of the commentaries, and commenters either dismiss it as a figment of the imagination or wield it like a truncheon.  You all know what side of this I’m on–for a reminder, see my post about “dead wood” from two years ago.  I’ll just reiterate my suspicion that “dead wood” is mostly a political tool for those who don’t want to fully fund higher education and adequately staff academic departments.  (Why buy a tenure-track faculty member when you can get three adjuncts for the same price?)

I’ve been mulling our current conundrum lately since my last (not entirely articulate) post about the academic life and the three-legged stool of research, teaching, and service that’s supposed to be the foundation of our careers. I think commenter Perpetua expresses my thoughts (and perhaps yours, too) very well here: 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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Don't be a do-bee.

Tenured Radical has a nice, long, seasonal post full of advice for newly hired term or tenure-track faculty, and some pointed reminders for those of us returning to the same old positions in the fall semester.  Go read and cogitate, and let her know what you think.  I especially wanted to highlight these two paragraphs:

Do not volunteer, stupid. You know who you are — whatever your biological gender, you are a girl. You are the one who finds the silence insufferable when the chair has asked for someone to step up, and you think it is your job to make everyone feel good again. Why you? And why now? At least go away and consult your job description before you go all Do-Bee on everyone. It isn’t your job to see to it that everything gets done — it is the chair’s job, and believe me, s/he will figure out how to do it.

Underrepresented faculty in underrepresented fields have no obligation to extend themselves without end to under-served students. Sometimes I look around me and it is so frackin’ obviouswhy the scholars who are perpetually sicker, angrier, more exhausted, and frantic about meeting deadlines for their scholarship share certain characteristics. We are queer, we are of color, we are international scholars, we are women, we are feminist men. We are the ones who, in order to make space for what we care about in institutions, do it ourselves. We invent the programs, then we chair them. This is what Jean O’Brien and Lisa Disch write about in an article I strongly recommend (and that partly inspired this post) “Innovation is Overtime: An Ethical Analysis of ‘Politically Committed Labor,’”(Aiku, Erickson and Pierce, Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy Minnesota, 2007.) We are the ones that advertise our universities’ “diversity” when we labor outside the classroom. We are the ones who students seek out to teach the things they never had a chance to learn in high school. We are the ones who students “like us” and the ones who hold similar political commitments flock to in droves. Continue Reading »

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Triple suicide at fifteen paces!

Here’s your free laugh of the day, friends.  I bring you the return of Colorado’s crazziest Republican politician yet, Tom Tancredo!

Former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo issued an ultimatum Thursday to both Republican gubernatorial candidates: Drop out of the race or I will jump in as a third-party candidate.

Tancredo’s entry as an American Constitution Party candidate likely would create a GOP implosion, splitting the vote in the general election and handing a win to Democrats.

Campaigns for Dan Maes and Scott McInnis said the Republican candidates intended to remain in the race.  Continue Reading »

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I hope you’ve been following our discussion of Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings. Today, we’re back at Tenured Radical for Part III, the final installment of our conversations, “She’ll Always Be A Player On the Ballfield of My Heart:  Tenured Radical and Historiann Wrap Up Their Conversation about The Professor.” If you recall, we were talking about the function of villains in autobiography, and the need for female heroes, when I asked Tenured Radical, “Do you really think “Terry Castle” wouldn’t have turned out to be Terry Castle without her having endured this abusive relationship [with The Professor]?  Do you really think she wouldn’t have become such a “profoundly imaginative and original scholar,” or is that just what “Terry Castle” tells herself to justify the affair, to redeem it in some fashion, or at least to justify telling us the story?”  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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