The left and moral disgrace

Yesterday there was a report released by the National Council on Welfare about the cuts to welfare that have taken place in Canada over the last decade or more. We are talking shockingly low rates. Rates that are very, very difficult to live on anywhere, but are impossible to subsist on in expensive cities like Vancouver and Toronto, without supplement from food banks, missions, etc. We're talking rates that have gone down in some provinces (like BC) by 50%. We're talking single parents in Alberta, a province very rich with oil money, given a rate that amounts to 48% of the poverty line. We're talking a single person getting enough, in Ontario, to pay for a room in a shared house in Toronto; nothing more. (This is yet another blow to Canadians' placid contentment with our social safety net, which has disintegrated rapidly over the last decade and a half.)

What I find interesting, captured in this article, is the language of morality. The guy from the National Council on Welfare calls it "morally disgraceful". It reminds of that cover article in the New York Times Magazine, last winter, about how the left is making inroads in the fight for a living wage in the US by casting it as a moral issue.

Though I'm wary of morality talk in the public sphere because it sure hasn't, historically, been the friend of women, queers, and any marginalized group, I'm intrigued. I really, really wonder if this is the only way left to make an impact - to take the right's strategy and turn it around. Take the focus off the moral policing of social questions like same-sex marriage, and make of political economy a moral issue. I mean, obviously the left is guided by a set of values, principles. This would simply entail foregrounding that in particular, strategic ways, right?

What think you, blogosphere?

Tech culture

So yesterday I got a new phone. This was a big event for me – it was a cell phone. I had one briefly, five-six years ago, but got rid of it fairly quickly. No need for that, said I. With the kind of life I lead – working at home or at a home office, I’m always reachable. And if I’m not, I don’t want to be!

But for the coming year, I’m going to be dividing my time between Home City and New University City – spending half of every week in each. In University City, I’m excited to be staying with friends, who have very generously offered to lend me their guest room for the year. Since I don’t want to trample on their generosity by tying up their phone, I took the plunge and purchased a cell phone . Just chose the cheapest one with the longest battery life, not caring about any of the bells and whistles it came with.

It arrived yesterday. It took me hours – I kid you not – to figure out how to use it. Hours. I felt as if I needed a degree in wireless communication just to set up the basics. It took me 15 minutes to compose a one-line text message with the freaking unfathomable text system.

And there are plenty of things I still don’t know how to do, even with the help of the manual. The pictures I took of the dog? I don’t know how to locate them in the phone. The photo I emailed to myself? Never got to me. The mp3 player, video camera? Uh, whatever.

I was struck by the great, gaping chasm between myself and most of the students I teach, who could slice and dice this phone in fifteen minutes. Because they are growing up with this technology. It’s a second skin in a way it could never be for me.

I think this matters. I think it’s a key to a lot of what we face in the classroom. I think it changes their brains.

This is not a new insight, I know. But sitting on the couch struggling with that phone yesterday, I really felt a quite profound distance from my students. This is something I need to think about, because it makes me realize the extent to which – for me, at least – teaching them is a kind of cross-cultural communication, in very many ways.

Playing dress-up

Is anyone else looking forward to getting a wee bit dressed up when the year starts? (Or, since you seem to start the year earlier in the States than in Canada, perhaps already enjoying the feeling of being dressed up?) Last week - I can't remember why - I had the opportunity to wear something slightly dressy. And I thought, I miss this! I don't get terribly dressed up for work - I'm not a suit-wearer, for instance. But I realize - after three months of wearing bumming-around clothes and dog-walking duds, beat-up footwear and, if I have to go somewhere, some blah cotton skirt - that I look forward to having to pull it together a bit. Pulling out those light wool trousers will be nice, and that shirt with the cufflinks. That kind of thing. And different footwear...I can't wait!

Also, I ended up having to while away a very long rain delay (as a spectator at a fastball tournament) in an out-of-town mall on Saturday. I bought this fall jacket (I did need a fall jacket) and cannot believe how much I love it. I want the fall weather NOW so I can wear it. (God, it feels weird to be linking to a major mall retailer that sure as hell doesn't need my free advertising...oh well...)

Teaching and changing

So I did this little quiz I saw at PowerProf's. About how much I have changed in 10 years. (And am not reproducing the little thing here because I am such an idiot with this - know nothing about html - and it is reproducing all messed up and I don't know how to fix it. Fuck.) Anyway, it says "You have changed 40% in ten years. Ah, the past! You may not remember it well, because you're still living in it. While you've changed some, you many want to update your wardrobe, music collection, and circle of friends."

Now, I know I shouldn't take a blogthing too seriously. But frankly, there are some irritating assumptions in the little blurb...I'm certainly not living in the past...ten years ago I was living somewhere different, on the cusp of ending a very different relationship, beginning my fifth and last year of a BA, not imagining a future in academia but in magazine publishing (when I could imagine a future at all), spending time with very different friends, listening to entirely different music, and shy. Shy, shy, shy.

One of the things that makes me happiest about my life, though, is continuity with some friends. While I have continued to make new friends over the years, including some close ones over the last year, there are half a dozen people in my life that I've known for fifteen years or more. I love this. It doesn't feel stuck, to me; the relationships themselves change, too. A ridiculous ex of mine, whose reason for living seemed to be to criticize me, once told me that yet another sign of my essential evil was that I had so many old friends in my life (when I was twenty-three - good lord!). To her, this was an indication of my being stuck in some tradition-bound, conservative past. I scoffed as hard at this then - in the midst of making new friends and exploring decidely untraditional things in my first year of grad school - as I do now.

I digress, though. What I really came to Blogger to talk about today is personality change, and how lately I've realized that much of that has been accomplished through teaching.

That shyness that I mention above...the accompanying lack of confidence...? Not entirely banished, but certainly not debilitating. I can't say that I'm a big fan of the crowded house party full of strangers, but I can deal. And I can appear, in certain contexts, positively gegarious. (I'm pretty at ease with the social scenes of academia - I've always read this as a sign that I was meant for this life. By contrast, when I worked in publishing, I was a teeny, silent mouse...)

I realized a couple of weeks ago, when I was at camp-for-adults, just how much this has to do with teaching. I was a TA for six years, and in the midst of that, when I was off living in France, also an adjunct teaching one course. I remember that first year of teaching - I was teaching two-hour seminars - as one of the most frightening, nearly paralyzing, experiences of my life. I incarnated the publishing mouse in the classroom. But by the end of those years, I was a relatively confident teacher. And could feel a shift in the way I related to people outside the classroom...I did things - blind dates, etc. - that would have felt impossibly audacious, before.

And then I became a professor, last year, and taught much larger courses and many more students. And had to be "on", as a professional figure, constantly. Camp was what showed me just how much further this has pushed me. The last time I was there was before this year of full-time teaching. I remember the social awkwardness I felt there...who would I sit with for lunch? What would we talk about? Could I show up at this ostensibly open cocktail party even though I didn't really know the hosts? Etc., etc. This time, I didn't think twice about any of that. I was generally quiet, but not worried about claiming space.

I see this as a great thing. It is clear to me that teaching has had a transformative impact. I'm really happy for what it's done for me. Life feels easier.

And taking it back to the classroom, and my persona in there: What a treat it is to be going in to this second year of professing with the greater degree of self-possession that last year gave me. I was full of anxiety last year, and the first few weeks were terrifying to me. I was so negatively keyed up, so worried in front of my big classes. I couldn't sleep for fretting about it. This year, though I'm sure I'll be nerved out to meet new students (I hope I'll always have a small, healthy dose of that), I feel as if I can focus instead on the content of what I'm conveying to them in those first few, important meetings. Hooray for that.

Praxis

Speaking from my position in the Humanities/Social Sciences here…

Last night I went to the World AIDS Conference to wander around the part that’s open to the public, the Global Village . I must admit that sometimes I am envious of people who do work that demands thought and rigor, but also carries with it a sense of urgency, and indeed a great need to get right down to things immediately. There are 26,000 delegates from all over the world at this conference. It is more truly international than any conference I will ever attend. I know from glimpses of the politics of the thing that this world of AIDS research and activism I walked into is not perfect. It is riddled with cynicism over promised yet never forthcoming money, the appearances of the Bills (Clinton and Gates) at this conference, frustrating fights about treatment vs. prevention, wars with pharma companies, the neo-colonial status of afflicted African countries… But still. There was energy there. There was commitment and purpose. There were people really talking to each other across constituencies and cultures.

I compare this feeling to the one I get when I attend conferences, which are always just so…blech, really…just pulsing with people’s anxieties about jobs, appearances (on many levels), relationships. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me there’s much less room, in a conference like AIDS 2006, to worry about jobs, appearances, relationships. Because the stakes are so high, the consequences of not getting down to business too devastating.

This isn’t an anti-intellectual rant. The things I write and teach are theoretical and historical, and I’ve reconciled myself to what that means. I think it’s important, and I am a staunch defender of theory’s place in the academy and the world. But damn. Sometimes I miss the feeling that things are moving, that the intellectual work I do is will have immediate, concrete benefits in people’s lives.

That’s all.

Academic loneliness

I went out for a goodbye drink with a friend who's moving away to start a new job. She told me some distressing news. A former colleague in my PhD program has committed suicide. She wasn't someone I knew, really. She was a few years ahead of me in this program in which I was never very social, but I knew her to see her. I knew her, also, from her posts on the program's email list, which I am still on although I'm done with it- as was she even several years after she'd finished. She posted quite recently, in the same characteristic, quirky voice she had always used.

I have been told via a faculty source close to her that what drove her to end her life was her inability to find a job. She had been an adjunct at two universities for several years, trying to cobble together a living in an increasingly expensive city. Sometimes she would post to the email list on this topic - her posts conveyed deep disappointment, sometimes fury.

If it is true that her job situation led her to kill herself, then it is a terrifying measure of the psychic costs of the current academic job situation. I think sometimes we trivialize this, and this serves as a reminder of how the current model can have devastating consequences.

What strikes me even more than that, though, is the thought of this person's loneliness. She was quirky, odd. She wasn't ostracized or disparaged - just gently giggled about from time to time. But what is quite clear in retrospect is that she didn't have much of a community in academia. Not the way most others do.

As my friend pointed out, academia has its fair share of socially awkward people, and also its own social hierarchies - in which, sometimes, the awkward don't easily find a place. This death is a harsh reminder not to let those people become invisible.

To camp and back

I’ve been away from this blogging game for a couple of weeks now…First I was empty of bloggable thoughts, and then I spent a week at camp. Yes, that’s right. Camp for adults. Dance camp. My days looked like this: Eat ridiculously delicious breakfast. Dance all morning. Swim, sometimes read, sometimes have a drink in the sun. Eat heart-stoppingly good lunch. Read. Nap. Dance vigorously. Swim, read, sometimes have a cocktail-hour beverage. Eat astounding dinner. Dance all evening. Sometimes a post-dance skinny dip. Sometimes a party afterward. Sleep like a log.

It is a great thing to go to camp. At least this one in particular, which I’ve been to before. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so carried away from my everyday life. Really, I forgot for a week that I had work to do. It occurred to me on Friday, the last full day, that there were these specific things I had to do upon my return, that in fact September and a new school year were nearing. I literally hadn’t thought about any of that for six days. Not even once. It’s positively therapeutic, living in the moment and in one’s body, not really emotionally invested in anything but having fun. Feeling productive, but not of research or writing or planning…productive of something for your body, and of the connections with other people that can be had through that.

Now that I’m back, having arrived home in the middle of the night on Saturday, there are different pressures. A week of dancing has taken a surprising toll on my body, and I’m hobbling around with joints screaming their protest. I went for a run last night, and my legs weren’t ready for that, apparently, and now I feel as if my bones are going to break apart. I have horribly vivid images of my shins just splitting in two, lengthwise. Charming.

And then there is that strange mixture of apprehension, excitement, and resentment that seems to hit many academics around the middle of August. I was struck, in my catching up on blogs, at how many people are feeling unmotivated and lethargic. Back from camp and into the real world of plans and deadlines and the upcoming year at a new university, I feel the same way. I want to hold on to something of the summer. But at the same time, given my excitement about having a job at the new university, I am finding myself impatient with summer routines and ready to dive in there. None of this is conducive to work…it’s fragmenting and confusing.

Ah, well. I shall go and read a book I’ve been needing to get to, in order to write an upcoming conference paper…starting back to work is always the hardest, and I look forward to that moment when I’ve slipped back into those work-ish patterns of thinking without even realizing it…

Reading for Pleasure: Doomsday Book

I am going to try this Reading for Pleasure Wednesdays thing because, it being summer, I’m actually doing some reading for pleasure…I don’t know if it’ll be a regular thing, but I’ll try...

Last week, while away at the cottage, I did some reading on the advice of a blog commenter, Loren. He had suggested that I read Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book. This was in response to my writing, at the end of my list of 100 things, that I had always wanted to time travel to medieval Europe. I had also expressed that I, er, don’t like science fiction.

What a great read. Yes, it is science fiction – set about fifty years from now, at the University of Oxford. But it is an age that seems remarkably like our own (although featuring what seem to be more conservative social mores…), which is probably why I could handle it – I don’t like the extreme techno-futurity of many science fiction futures, which tend to feel cold and alien to me. In this Oxford, historians research their eras by traveling back in time to them…Historians, does this not sound positively to die for?

So we have a young woman traveling back to fourteenth-century Oxfordshire (so like the most inspirational book New Kid details today!)…She has been sent to the wrong time, though, and there is a parallel narrative set in the Oxford of the future, where her advisors are trying to locate her and bring her back. The two narratives mirror each other in some interesting ways that I don’t want to say too much about, for fear of ruining surprises. Suffice it to say that the dovetailing themes of the narratives have a satisfying relevance to contemporary social panics and anxieties.

There was so much to like about this novel. The plot was gripping – so gripping that my need to press on with it cut into the work I had brought with me to the cottage. It wasn’t just plot-driven, though; the characters were richly drawn. There was also an emotional resonance in the time-traveling character’s relationship with the people she gets to know in the Middle Ages – it seemed to say something about the possibility of connecting with people across our alienation from them.

Most of all, though, it was really just kind of a high to see, detailed there for me, the medieval time travel fantasy I'd had since I was about eleven. It's one thing to find a character or a situation in literature that you really identify with...it's quite another to have your left-field fantasies unfolded for you in ways you're not creative enough to imagine. It was like a gift. Wow.

Thanks, Loren.

A question of tone

What if a book you’re reading to review inspires in you feelings of outrage, shock, indignation? How do you translate those strong reactions into an acceptable tone for an academic journal?

Let me elaborate just a little bit, without getting too specific.

The book is polemical...it seems to have been written solely to cut down the group the author is writing about. The author even resorts – more than once – to calling folks in this group “ugly”, whereas she characterizes her “heroes” as beautiful and graceful! As well, the scholarship is notably and obviously questionable. The author fails to provide references for many of her more dubious claims. She makes claims that are patently false. She homogenizes a very diverse group in an egregious manner. She writes things like “[Scholars of X] have always written about X in such-and-such a way…” When I am alarmed by this misrepresentation, and very curious to know just who she thinks these scholars are – did I miss something important in my field? – I turn to the endnote and find that she has included a single reference, and it is to someone who really cannot be characterized as a Scholar of X! Further, the author doesn’t refer to any sources less than ten years old, when the stakes of the issue she’s writing about have changed dramatically in the last decade – there are prominent books published in the last eight or so years whose very existence invalidates her argument, full stop, and neither they nor their authors are mentioned.

Do you see what I mean? This is scholarship at its worst, and it makes me scream. It offends me, as I'm sure my liberal use of italics in the previous paragraph makes clear. I am certain, though, that a tone of moral indignation just will not fly in the academic press, dispassionate as it requires us all to pretend to be.

Have any of you had to write a review of such a book? What kind of tone did you adopt?

Mmmm, blueberry martinis...

I just saw this at lil'rumpus'.
A bit of a surprise (a party hopper??) but not too far off the mark.

You are a blueberry martini

You Are A Blueberry Martini

You are a eclectic drink - liking to change drinks and venues often.You are usually the first of your friends to find a cool new dive bar or cocktail. You should never: Drink mystery drinks strangers hand you. Unless you want to wind up in foreign country. Your ideal party: Is mobile, hopping from party to party. Your drinking soulmates: Those with an Orange Martini personality. Your drinking rivals: Those with a Chocolate Martini personality.

What Flavor Martini Are You?