Historiann

Historiann went to see Elvis Costello and the Imposters and The Police last night at Red Rocks.  This was my first show at that venue–it’s a gorgeous setting in a natural red rocks amphitheatre, very beautiful as the sun sets behind you and the lights of Denver appear.  I never went to any really big acts back in my youth in the 1980s and 1990s–I was more of a cult-band in a nightclub kind of person than an arena rock fan.  But, a very generous friend had a free ticket, and it was a great show.  Elvis performed a few of his newer songs, but mostly golden-oldies like “Watching the Detectives,” “Radio Radio,” and “Alison,” with a few of his quirkier old songs like “Beyond Belief.”  (I was hoping he’d play something from my favorite album of his, King of America, but no such luck.)  The Police performed their oldies too, completely without any of Sting’s solo act numbers.  It was interesting to be reminded, in their versions of “De Do Do Do De Da Da Da” and “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” of when the band was more sonically connected to The Specials, English Beat, and other late 70s/early 80s British and Anglo-Caribbean ska band than they were to the emergent 80s power rock acts.  The Denver Post reviewed Monday night’s performance here yesterday, which turned out to be an exact prediction of the show we saw last night.

Aside from my first show at Red Rocks, it was also my first “nostalgia act” show.  Man, was it strange to be surrounded by old people at a rock concert!  The only shirtless young guys were in the parking lot outside of the venue hawking cans of beer and bottles of water.  The men inside the theatre kept their shirts on–thank goodness!–since most of them were in the 35-to-55 age range.  The men in the bands looked pretty good–or at least, no worse for the wear, since they’re all in their mid-fifties too.  The crowd looked like a giant twentieth or twenty-fifth high school reunion!  Sting was as handsome as ever, although he is manorexically thin and rather Alfred Packer-ish with a short, scruffy, gray beard that crept down his neck practically to his shirt.  Elvis looks pretty much as he did the last time I saw him, in Philadelphia in the summer of 1989:  pudgy, sweaty, and overdressed in a suit with a cravat, but his “new” band (which consists of his former “Attractions” bandmates Steve Nieve on the keyboard and Pete Thomas on drums, with Davey Faragher on the bass) was tight and fun.  It was especially great to see Elvis with Nieve, who ended the set with a flourishing homage to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Why the title “Please don’t stand so close to me” for this post?  Interestingly enough, after writing about men’s presumptions on women’s bodies, time, and space yesterday, I had a related real life experience.  Towards the end of the main set, Sting was setting up a call-and-response (one of those ay-oh, ee-yo-yo-yo things that he does) with the crowd.  I wasn’t really into singing along, but was swaying and enjoying myself.  Apparently, that was insufficient for the middle-aged stranger standing behind me in row 28, seat 98 or 99, who decided to reach over and rub his hands all over my neck, back, and shoulders, and admonish me to do better!  And, did I mention that I was wearing a mostly backless yoga top, because it was 100 degrees in Denver yesterday?  Eeeeeeeeewww!!!!!1111!!!!eleventy-ones!  It was made even creepier by the fact that this was during an extended version of one of those obsessive breakup songs (perhaps “Can’t Stand Losing You?”)  What made him think that that was appropriate behavior, aside from good, old-fashioned male privilege?  I know he was feeling the music and all excited, but please.  (And, his female companion/girlfriend/wife thought it was all in good fun, when I turned around in stunned horror to see who on earth was manhandling me!)  I’ve been in clubs where everyone was hot, sweaty, and jumping on each other’s feet all of the time, but this wasn’t one of those situations.  Well, I’m not a large person, nor am I a male person, and (I think this is key, too) I wasn’t with a man, but with a woman friend.  Ergo, random men think it’s OK to put their hands on my body?

If you know Historiann in real life, you know that although she’s a petite-ish woman, she’s not the kind of person who hugs new acquaintances (or even old ones!) or otherwise sends out vibes suggesting that its OK to touch her body.  Ugh.

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Call me a freeloader, but this seems totally ridiculous.  Since when is it inappropriate to use a university e-mail account and letterhead to apply for another job?  Over at the Chronicle blog “On Hiring,” Gene C. Fant, Jr., writes,

When I see applications coming in, I really like to see people using their own private e-mail accounts, home or cellphone numbers, and “From the Desk of” letterhead. The use of campus e-mail and phone numbers doesn’t spoil me on a candidate, but I have to say that, for the sake of both stewardship of resources and confidentiality, I like to see personal materials used.

Good grief!  Tom Benton had a good reply in the comments to the post above:  “There is no generally accepted rule that graduate students and faculty should not use university letterhead and email addresses for job searches, and in fact some encourage graduate students to do just that. In my view it is unethical to start setting ad hoc ethical traps for people at other institutions who are acting in good faith.”  In my first non-tenure track job, I was urged by the Chair of that department to send out applications on department letterhead–so long as I was using it for professional purposes and not my grocery list, I was told that it was not only acceptable but one of the perks of employment.  Many fellowships include an e-mail address and the use of fancy letterhead, which is a big bonus for otherwise unemployed graduate students and recent Ph.D.s–why shouldn’t an actual employer offer the same? 

Furthermore, applying for other jobs is very much a part of professional life and development in modern academia, whether or not one has tenure or a tenure-track job.  Please advise me if it’s different where you work, but at Baa Ram U., the only way to get a substantial raise is to attract an outside job offer, so the university’s own incentives clearly encourage us to apply for other jobs.

I’d also like to note something that Fant overlooks:  affiliations don’t just work one way.  I’m not just affiliated with an institution, Baa Ram U., Baa Ram U. (Sheep be true!) is also affiliated with me.  The university gets to list me and all of my colleagues on its website and use our names, publications, grants won, and areas of specialization to attract interest from students and impress the taxpayers, so I fail to see why faculty should hide their affiliations in the name of not “misusing campus resources.”  I’ve chaired a search committee and served on several others–if someone claimed to be affiliated with an institution but didn’t use their campus e-mail, contact information, and letterhead, that would suggest to me that they’ve got a good reason to seek employment elsewhere if they feel that unsafe from spies and retaliation.  It would strike me as eccentric in the extreme to see an application on blank paper with only home or private contact information from someone with a job and an affiliation.

But, let’s pretend this is just a bean-counting exercise.  Imagine, if you will, that you’re a department Chair or a Dean.  How many job applications would your faculty have to send out every year, year after year, that it would make a serious dent in your stationery budget or server space?  (Psst:  if your faculty are sending out that many job applications, wouldn’t that suggest that you’ve got bigger problems?)  Duh.

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I’m not sure what I think about this installation at Burning Man 2007, “Barbie Death Camp,” but since this blog is one of the few places on the non-peer reviewed internets where you can find deep, intellectual discussions of Barbies and dismembered doll parts, I suppose I have to cowgirl up.  (Be sure to click on the link above to see the whole slide show–this still photo is just one of many.  Thanks to Historiann’s newly tenured friend G.S. for the tip.) 

This blog says that “Barbie Death Camp” is clearly anti-consumerist, anti-corporate satire, but I’m not so sure it can be viewed only or primarily through this lens.  Looking at the slide show is disturbing–is it a feminist commentary on the  commodification and dismemberment of women’s bodies?  Is it a commentary on the ambivalent relationship girls have with their Barbies, since they frequently train their aggression on the dolls, cutting their hair and frequently removing their arms, legs, and heads?  Or is it just another example of female bodies being dismembered for our pleasure and entertainment?  (You can’t see it in this photograph, but the yellow school bus near the lower right corner has “DIE BITCH” scrawled on the side, so it’s not accidental that it’s a Barbie and not a Ken or G.I. Joe Death Camp.  I’m not sure how I feel about the appropriation (complete with toy ovens) of a specific historical event, the Holocaust.  Does it trivialize the attempted genocide of Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Poles, and disabled people in the twentieth century?  Is there an implicit commentary of the uniform perfection of Barbie bodies being destroyed in the same manner as the “racially inferior” or otherwise imperfect victims of the Holocaust?  Is it an accident that the Barbies in BDC look like they’re all white and are overwhelmingly blond, too?  What if it had been called “Middle Passage Barbie,” “Barbie Trail of Tears,” or “Killing Fields Barbie?” 

Reflecting on Historiann’s recent foray into contemporary feminist art, this project seems like it could have been included in the recent The Way that we Rhyme:  Women, Art, & Politics exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  It shares many of the same features:  the use of found objects in particular, but also the ”outsider art” fetish that many “insider artists” have affected lately, an aesthetic of amateurism and bad taste.  (Actually, in many ways, “Barbie Death Camp” is more compelling and provoking than many of the installations at the YBCA, which seemed to labor rather humorlessly under a different kind of historical weight.)

For those of you interested in pursuing some of these issues in a more serious forum, at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, we’ve got a panel on “Gender, Torture, and Memory,” which features papers on American POW’s in Korea, Femicide in Guatemala in the Cold War to the twenty-first century, and women in Stalin’s Gulags.  (Unfortunately, our roundtable on “Women and the Holocaust:  Reshaping the Field in the 21st Century through Oral History and Personal Narratives,” was cancelled.)  We also have a roundtable on “What (if anything) Can Women’s History and the History of Sexuality Teach Us about Genocide and Extreme Violence,” and a Sunday morning seminar on “Historicizing Sexual Violence,” led by Estelle Freedman of Stanford University, which features many papers about rape and sexual violence in wartime and in occupied or colonized countries:  colonial and postcolonial India, Nazi-occupied territories, 17th century Ireland, 1950s and 1960s Argentina, and 19th and 20th century Kenya, South Africa, and Costa Rica.  (You can find the full program here.) 

What do you think?  Is “Barbie Death Camp” funny?  Horrifying?  Feminist, or anti-feminist?  Too clever by half?  Or just really good bad art?

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While we wait to see the results of today’s primary that will surely force the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign even if she wins, let’s tour the non-peer reviewed internets, shall we?

• Bob Somerby has a really interesting ethnographic analysis today at The Daily Howler, arguing that the press corps’ dominant Hillary hatred can be traced to middle-aged ”East Coast Irish Catholics” prominent at NBC and the New York Times, and the particular stew of “psychosexual lunacies” that their mid-twentieth century upbringing has wrought.  Check it out:  he writes that ”[Maureen] Dowd and [Chris] Matthews are the press corps’ leading psychosexual nut-cases.”  Somerby (an East Coast Irish Catholic himself) also enlists the assitance of Gene Lyons, another East Coast Irish Catholic who affirms that it’s all part of the culture:  “Having basically grown up in a Maureen Dowd column, albeit with less wit and more profanity, I’ve known this variety of Irish Catholic misogyny forever. My sainted mother warned me against the cunning and duplicity of women almost to her dying breath. It’s a sorrowful remnant of sexual Puritanism.”  (We’ll just let that adjective ”puritanism” used to describe Catholicism go this time, m’kay?  No one likes a pedant…)  Is the press corps–and possibly the nation–being driven by Irish Catholic psychosexual anxieties?  (Or does that question creep you out too much to consider writing a comment?)
• In any case, you’d think the Irish Catholic luminaries listed above might have a few questions for John McCain and his endorsement by Pastor Hagee, who is just as insanely anti-Catholic as Cotton Mather, instead of pestering Barack Obama about his pastor, who might once have said something nice about Louis Farakkhan.  (Do you really think a white congregant from that church would have to answer those questions?  Think, people!)
• I posted this in a comments thread below, but it deserves a promotion:  a clear-eyed analysis of the nefarious, dirty-trickster Hillary Clinton and her plan to win the White House by winning the Democratic Primary!  Who does she think she is?  It’s not like she’s also rebounding in the national polls!  Oh noooooo!  Quick!  Everyone, STOP VOTING NOW!  Your voting is disruptive of party unity and the democratic process!  (H/t to Correntewire, which also has a good roundup of people hating’ on the Hillary.)

UPDATE, March 5:  Dowd’s latest hairball is mind-alteringly stupid.  She writes that in the Democratic primary, “All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts. People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?”  That’s right–I guess if you’re a rich, white New York Times columnist, you can pick either/or on this question!  (Intersectionality, much?)  And the winner of the Democratic primary means that his or her single “oppression” will be erased for all Americans, as though with a StainStick!  Does anyone else find it, um, interesting, that the fifty-six year old Dowd sniffs at the support HRC has from older women, and tries to align herself with the views of a “post-feminist” nineteen-year old college student?  As patronizing as her comments are about African Americans (”vicim lock”, anyone?  What does that even mean?), she outdoes herself by furnishing further evidence of what Somerby (above) called “psychosexual lunacies.”  In her parting shot she ventriloquizes a putative college student, who shouts at President Clinton, “‘We love you, Bill!’ yelled one boy. ‘You did a good job, except for Monica.’”  Historiann votes for Professorblackwoman to get the big bucks at the grey lady to brain the place up.

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Seriously.  What is wrong with her?  And why does the New York Times pay her money to puke this stuff up?  In one column, she likens Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney, Mommie Dearest, and (get this!) associates her with murderous mom Andrea Yates.  She actually uses the adjective “hysterical” and the verb “snipped” to describe Clinton’s response to a reporter’s question.  Her obvious loathing for women is only acceptable because of her own XX chromosome status–if she were a man, no editor would allow his work into print because of its obvious misogyny.  But, women who are willing to do the boys’ work for them are richly rewarded for their work, aren’t they?  (P.S. to Michelle Obama, who got an honory mention today:  If Hillary isn’t the nominee, you’re the next person Dowd will have in her sights!  UPDATE, March 3:  And we’re off!  Joan Venocchi concern trolls Michelle Obama in the Boston Globe on Sunday.  Isn’t it nice that she points out that it will be “A delicate line for Michelle Obama,” as though the unfair scrutiny she has already received is her fault?  Via firedoglake.)

I know it’s been terribly fashionable to disdain the wakeup call ad, but I’ve got news for you blogboyz:  women 40 and older don’t always see the world the same way younger men (and Maureen Dowd, who’s closer to HRC’s age than she’d like to admit) without children do, and most of them don’t read your blogs.  I don’t see how this ad is “fearmongering” at all–this comparison with the “Daisy” ad is ridiculous.  Most parents go on occasional if not nightly patrols like the one shown here, and the ad is clearly connecting Clinton to a sense of vigilant maternal protection.

My diagnosis of Dowd is that she’s pathologically envious of other Baby Boomers (women especially, but consider her treatment of Al Gore too) who have accomplished something she hasn’t, and she suspects that her position is  highly conditional–that is, she’s only welcome in the boys’ club so long as she does her catty bitchiness routine.  It’s sad for a person of her stature to be so obviously insecure–but then, a strong, confident, tough woman would never get a job as as the token girl on the op-ed pages of the New York Times! 

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Helicopter parents:  are they 1) a media creation hyped by the New York Times?  Are they 2) a regional problem of the New York Times readership basin (i.e. the orange schmear on the map of North America demarcating the urban corridor from Boston to Washington D.C.)?  Or 3) are they everywhere now? 

Historiann has had only a few phone calls or e-mails from parents in the past 11 years.  Usually, they were writing or calling so that they could hear the bad news from me directly–why their daughter wasn’t in fact graduating next weekend, or why their son who swears he had a “B” average before the exam failed the course entirely.  They’ve been uniformly respectful to me although disappointed by their child’s academic failings (which seemed to be not a total surprise to them, in most cases).  It was kind of sad, and I got the impression that they were trying to hold their kids’ feet to the fire rather than to plead their cases or bully me.  While I think Baby Boomer parents have fostered close relationships with their adult children, I haven ‘t seen too much evidence that these relationships are detrimental.  So far, I might vote for option #1 or option #2, but I’d like to hear from the rest of you out there, now that we’re approaching mid-terms and the zero-hour for students to withdraw from your classes.

(Update on Funeral Blogging:  thanks for the condolences–you’re all very kind.  Still light blogging as I’ll be in the ancestral homelands for the rest of the week, and am now poaching a mysterious wi-fi connection. . .)

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My apologies–I don’t know how to embed a video yet into a post.  (My brother-in-law has set this website up, and I don’t think that I’m allowed to have the keys yet for that particular vehicle.  Plus, he’s paying for the hosting, which I think might have something to do with this.)  Anyway, if Superbowl LIXIXIVVICMQ isn’t really your thing, and you’re really, like, ”whatevs,” every time you’ve heard the New England Patriots’ winning streak described as “historic,” click here for some real entertainment.  (Warning–not work safe, not family viewing, etc.  If it were, it wouldn’t be so freaking hillarious, right?)  Sarah Silverman = Historiann - 2 years + teh funny. 

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Over at Washington Monthly, and with the assistance of the L.A. Times, Kevin Drum looks behind the aggregate numbers of the drop in abortion rates reported recently by the Guttmacher institute.  He writes, “here are the basic numbers: excluding miscarriages, the pregnancy rate among women aged 15-44 has dropped by 13 per thousand since 1990. At the same time, the abortion rate has dropped by 8 per thousand. By itself this isn’t conclusive, but it strongly suggests that the reduced abortion rate is mostly due to fewer unwanted pregnancies in the first place. If increased regulation were the prime driver, you’d be more likely to see the pregancy rate staying about the same while abortions drop, and you’d be more likely to see bigger drops in states with more regulation. But that hasn’t been the case. So yes: better access to contraception, better education, and better access to the morning after pill seem to have made a difference over time. For anyone who’s pro-life but not anti-sex, that ought to be good news.” 

Well, good news for all of those pro-life, pro-sex, non-misogynists out there.  Yeah, that’s a big constituency.  (Wait–I think I know that guy.  Hello, Bill!)  And, like, duh, the feminist answer to unwanted pregnancies turns out to be the correct one.

Meanwhile, in pro-life, anti-sex news, Mike Huckabee says that homosexuality is the same as polygamy, child molestation, and bestiality (hat tip to Greg Sargent at the the Talking Points Memo Media Borg for that pickup.)  But he’s not judging–God is.   (Why does God have such a dirty mind?)

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New rule:  Apparently it’s now a bad thing for a Republican presidential candidate to be a “divisive vessel of religious and class warfare,” at least if your last name starts with Huckabee.  Surprisingly, in benighted, post-globalization Michigan, he drew only 15% today, at least as of 9:54 EST.  Let’s all pray that he doesn’t go Huckabroke on the way to South Carolina.

Historiann’s parents live in Michigan–Mom is a Democrat and voted for Hillary Clinton, and she was happy to lend Clinton her support because of all of the unfair, sexist coverage in the leadup to the New Hampshire primary.  Historiann’s father is a Republican–and a very faithful voter–and he didn’t manage to get out to vote today.

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