• Who is Callista Bisek Gingrich, and why does she appear to be a strangely convincing Mad Men-era historical reenactor?  Ariel Levy offers some insights:  “She does not seem like a forty-five-year-old, or at least not like a forty-five-year-old of this era. She has the style and smile of an astronaut’s wife, even in her downtime. Once, in Cedar Rapids, I happened to run into her in the women’s bathroom at the airport. In her suit and pearls, with her stiff coiffure, she looked as if she had just exited a beauty parlor in 1962.”  (My theory:  it’s all in the coiff.  She may have been a wash-n-wear kind of gal back in the day, but once you’re spending that kind of time and money on an oddly unfashionable hairdo, you’re all in.)
• From the right Alana Goodman argues that the Stepford Wife persona doesn’t actually make voters forget she’s Newt’s third wife.  Rather, it makes the Gingrich marriage appear even stranger and more off-putting.  I think the public should leave the spouses of the candidates alone, since after all they’re not running for anything, and if their wives or husbands win they won’t not be offered a paid position in the government.  But Goodman is probably right that the deadeye Pat Nixon impersonation is only going to invite unwanted speculation.  And those of you on the left may well think it only fair play given the ugliness that Michelle Obama has had to deal with, which has been clearly and persistently racialized. 
• Who would have thought that Mommie would turn out to be one of the more interesting and powerful First Ladies on the Republican side?  Give me Nancy Reagan any day, in her off-the-shoulder Galanos gown over Nixon or Barbara or Laura Bush.  Cue the Dynasty soundtrack!
• In “Who in God’s Name is Mitt Romney?” Frank Rich argues that the mystery in the riddle wrapped in the enigma that is Willard Mitt Romney is in fact his religion, which although agressively evangelical is also famous for keeping its secrets and sacred rites to members only.  Romney has devoted a great deal of his time and treasure to the Latter-Day Saints in his lifetime.  Until he finds a way to talk about his faith more specifically and openly, Rich argues that Americans on the left, right, and center will continue to see him not as a man, but rather as as a disturbingly lifelike hologram of a presidental candidate.
• I don’t know if that’s true, but it has worked in the recent past when candidates have explained to the voters what their beliefs are and how those beliefs jibe with their politics.  (See for example:  John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.)
• With Romney on an anemic rise and no plausible challengers to his right , it’s no wonder that many on the right are praying for a “Sweet Meteor of Death” to rescue them from a Romney run in the fall.  Too funny!  I’ll say this about the 2008 Dem primary:  as nasty as that got, I don’t think any but the most die-hard Obamabots or Hillary Clinton fan boys and girls were praying for planetary devastation so as to save them from having to support the other candidate’s nomination.  Keep your eyes on the prize, my Republican friends!  There’s always the chance that the Eurozone will pull the U.S. economy off a cliff again, and/or that Sweet Meteor of Death will strike.  Remember, think like Ronald Reagan:  sunny optimism, sunny optimism!

Doesn’t President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan remind you of the time that George W. Bush went to Notre Dame and Bob Jones and told them to stop being such one-issue whiners about abortion?  Or like that time he went to Haliburton and lectured them about keeping costs down, otherwise he would de-fund the National Security State?  Yeah:  just like that!

Personally, I liked this response– mysteriously, it was the final paragraph in the Denver Post this morning, rather than the lede:

Although I have nothing against her politics, I’m glad that Gabrielle (Gabby) Giffords finally resigned.  Her recovery appears to be remarkable so far, but it’s been apparent for months that she is not up to really serving her district in the way it deserves.  It’s monstrously unfair, and I still think her shooting and the deaths of so many others should be discussed in terms of a political assassination attempt, but still:  she can’t represent Tucson at this point in her life.

We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

Sarah Palin.

Barack Obama.

Motherhood.

Breeder.

Breastfeeding.

TimTebow.

Flame on!  Comments that deliberately miss the point, insult me, introduce straw persons, lecture me, mansplain, demand that I address it, jack the thread, and/or get progressively longer, angrier, and more filled with invective are especially appreciated.  They make running this advertising-free volunteer blog all worthwhile.

detail from Carrie M. Becker's "Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse"

Via Susie at Suburban Guerilla, we learn of “Barbie Trashes Her Dream House” by artist Carrie M. Becker.  Be sure to click the previous link and marvel at the level of detail and layers of junk that Becker meticulously crafted, including an extremely disgusting toilet in the Dream House bathroom.  (I’m only slightly ashamed that my office looks a bit like this detail, at right, only with many more books and many fewer cardboard file boxes.)  If you live in or near Witchita, you can go see the installation yourself in September 2012, when Becker takes hoarder Barbie to the Riney Fine Arts Center Gallery at Friends University.

Speaking of real life in miniature:  remember that miniseries about the Kennedys that was protested by Kennedy loyalists and then dropped by the History Channel?  I’ve watched 6 episodes so far, and it’s really quite entertaining.  I can’t speak to its historical accuracy on the fine points, as I’m not a modern U.S. political historian, but Greg Kinnear’s performance as John F. Kennedy is pretty good and rather sympathetic.  It looks like all of the men who play JFK’s inner circle–McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, etc.–are having a blast playing dressup and Situation Room together.  Those of you who remember fondly The West Wing and 24 will appreciate the similar style of the script, cinematography, and musical score.

There appears to be nothing libelous in the movie–all of the less attractive stuff about the Kennedy family saga is very well-known and extensively documented:  Joe Kennedy’s history as a bootlegger and adulterer, his softness on Nazism, and his political ambitions for his sons; John Kennedy’s Addison’s Disease and orthopedic problems stemming from his war wounds; JFK’s other women.  If anything, the movie downplays JFK’s extramarital sex life inside the White House because (I think) it wants us to see Katie Holmes’s Jackie in a favorable light, and if it portrayed the full extent of the President’s priapism she’d look like too much of a victim for modern audiences to still like and respect.

The actors do their best to imitate the unique Kennedy diction.  All I can say is that their Kennedy accents are less annoying than most other attempts to mimic them.  If any of you have seen The Kennedys, I would welcome your opinions in the comments, especially those of you who can speak to its historical accuracy.

Finally, have any of you seen my watch?  It went missing two days ago, and I can’t tell you how out of synch I’ve been ever since.  Maybe I should mow that pile of crap off of my desk, and see what turns up.

Fat, drunk, and stupid is apparently no barrier to a career in philosophy!

Via Inside Higher Ed, I learned today of the tradition of the “smoker” at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting:

Over the years, the reception at the APA eastern conference has functioned as a job fair of sorts, where, over free-flowing booze, candidates talk to potential employers.

For weeks, philosophy blogs had been alive with discussions about how women job candidates feel vulnerable at the reception, how some of them had been hit on as they talked to recruiters, and the sheer awkwardness of trying to navigate job interviews with a beer bottle in hand. While many disciplinary meetings feature departmental receptions, they tend to be for alumni gatherings and outreach as much as anything; the philosophy reception is one event where candidates say they are urged to schmooze simultaneously with hiring committees, random others, and competitors for the jobs they want.

Ugh–for all of the reasons that the women philosophers note in the linked blog posts above, of course.  But this is also clearly the bright idea of a profession in which the job market is almost entirely a buyers’ market rather than a sellers’ market.  As a tenured professor, I must admit that it would be a lot more fun for me to conduct quasi-interviews over cocktails instead of meeting in the pit in a drafty hotel basement with a sad water cooler the only refreshment.  It would also be a lot of fun for me to ask job candidates to wear silly hats, sing show tunes, and pass trays of hot appetizers of their own devise.  But then, the job interview process isn’t about me, is it? 

Ideally, the job search process in any profession should prioritize professionalism and fairness as well as the preservation of the dignity of all participants.  There are a lot of people who might well feel uncomfortable with this unseemly mixture of interviews and socializing over alcohol–Mormons, observant Muslims, and recovering alcoholics, just to name a few.  Most campus academic job interviews are fraught with enough fake-socializing events like lunches, dinners, and coffees, but most everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a purely social event on a job interview.  Furthermore, there’s more than just alcohol on the menu at those events.  (That is to say, not drinking alcohol is more typical than usual for job candidates, and asking for a soda or a hot cocoa in a cafe instead of coffee isn’t regarded as an oddity.)

Tell me your stories of job interview hell, with bonus points for tales of alcohol-fueled bad behavior, in the comments below.

Hope your 2012 is Dy-No-Mite!

Well, friends, Happy New Year and all that crap.  We’re back home on the High Plains Desert, and it’s sunny and reaching into the 50s and 60s this week.  Fun!  I will miss feeling like Jaime Sommers running at sea level for the past two weeks, but it’s time to get back into running at 4,713 feet elevation-shape again.  While I’m out, here are a few linky-dinkies to keep you amused, if not informed. 

• Kyle Smith of the New York Post asks, “Why do feminists reject their ultimate icon, Margaret Thatcher?”  Maybe the better question is why isn’t Margaret Thatcher a feminist?  “‘I owe nothing to women’s lib,’ Thatcher said, and at another point she remarked, ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.’”  Duh.  I forgot:  feminists never do anything right, and everything is always our fault.  Women’s careers are never enabled by the work of previous generations of feminists–no, in fact women only profit by heaping scorn on feminism and feminists.
• From the annals of it’s all mom’s fault:  this problem has a name, and it’s mom.  Yes, 1950s middle-class mothers, in addition to being blamed over the years for causing autism, “smothering” their children, and sending a generation of upper-middle class Easterners into a lifetime of psychotherapy, are now being blamed for Public Health Menace #1:  OBESITY!  Awesome!!!  It’s like there’s nothing that can’t be blamed on a generation of women who were just following orders–doctors’ orders, as the article makes perfectly clear, but I guess “1950s physicians may have triggered obesity epidemic” wouldn’t generate as much interest.  Heaping blame on a generation of women who survived the Great Depression in childhood, answered Uncle Sam’s call to labor for the war effort in the 1940s, and then obediently gave up their factory and office jobs to returning servicemen to go home and make babies and participate in consumer society in order to combat the Communist Menace, is not just historically dubious, but it’s also just nasty and aggressive.  Someone has a mommy issue, I guess.  (Don’t miss the advice she gives about breastfeeding, which of course is the solution to all ills:  “Women should breast-feed for at least six months after childbirth or — better yet — take one year off from work and breast-feed.”  Talk about re-creating the 1950s all over again!  I need a Mother’s Little Helper after just reading this bullcrap.) 
• Tenured Radical offers a thoughtful post on “What I learned at my first job,” as she prepares to move to another institution.  Congratulations and good luck!
• Here’s a question for all of you historians and grammarians out there:  do you say or write  “a historian,” or “an historian?”  I’ve always thought an historian to be a rather affected (as well as outdated) construction, but I learned recently that a colleague of mine is telling our graduate students that an historian is correct.  (Here’s my personal beef:  no one ever considers how dumb and distracting this sounds to people named Ann or Anne, for some reason, and there are an awful lot of us who are in the historical profession.)  So I say “an historian” no, Historiann yes!  (After all–as Eddie Izzard might say, “because there’s a f^(king AITCH in it!”)

The Violent Femmes, from sometime in the 80s, judging by the cut of the trousers, the wife-beater tees, and the style of Gordon Gano’s dress.