Have Radical, Will Travel: Or, Some People Do Go Both Ways

Tenured Radical is over at Cliopatria today, with an original about a conservative history flack, Texan David Barton, that will not be cross posted here.  In an attempt to remain a legitimate member of the Cliopatria team over at History News Network, I'm going to try to post original material in each place from here on out. We'll see how that works: going rogue seems to be more my strength.

In other Radical news, you can go here for an interview with moi written by Zenith cub reporter Abbey Francis, who made serious effort to make me sound less ungrammatical than I usually do.  Go here for a list of summer reading on Africa compiled by Swarthmore's Tim Burke (dude, the only book that you cannot leave off this list is Jonny Steinberg's Sizwe's Test:  A Young Man's Journey Through the South African AIDS Epidemic.)

Monday Found Objects: Or, What Wisconsin Republicans Would See If They FOIA'd My Email

Little things come in, and I sock them away.  But so that no one has to file any paperwork, or break my system passwords, here's what's lying around my email box today:

 How do I get these things?  Go here to buy a set of Prince William and Kate Middleton paper dolls, each with fifteen different outfits.  The dolls themselves are in their underwear, which I think is kind of interesting in the sense of what a future monarch and his queen might not have permitted even twenty years ago.   I would have understood if I had received an email soliciting me to purchase the "Past Presidents of the AHA Paper Doll Set," promising hours of fun as we cross-dressed Barbara Weinstein and Tony Grafton, but this one's a mystery, Governor Walker.  My guess is that they bought the American Studies Association mailing list.

 Do the AHA survey, save a tree.  Have you ever wondered -- as I do -- why there isn't an app for the American Historical Association?  Well go to this survey and let the AHA know how you feel about electronic publication.  I think you have probably read gripes on this blog about the high-quality journals that are partially read and have to be taken out for recycling with a back hoe.  What Americanist has time for even the most intriguing article about Byzantium?  What Byzantiumist has time for the labor movement in Victorian England?  And how about those pages and pages of painstakingly crafted reviews of books you will never actually hold in your hand?

From Comradde PhysioProffe (who has recently changed the spelling of his name): "Holy Fuckeoly!"  OK, this came into my non-university account, because CPP is propriety itself when it comes to the boundaries between professional and public.  But for those of you who are as yet unaware of the creative use this scientist makes of the English language, his take no prisoners attitude, and his minute attention to good food and drink, go check in at his house.

Triangle Fire Memories:  Last week, as I was gally-vanting around New England, other bloggers memorialized the anniversary of the lethal 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York's Greenwich Village, still the worst industrial accident on U.S. soil.  Now, from Vineyard Video Productions, we have "You May Call Her Madam Secretary," a documentary film about the career of a woman who was inspired by that tragedy to pursue a life in labor policy.  Frances Sternhagen presents the words of the first woman Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, in a film that gives us the history of a generation of liberals who would have eaten Scott Walker's lunch.  Got any budget left?  The video is a steal at $49.95.

The H-Net job listing.   That's a joke son -- there are no jobs!

The Radical Culture Corner Corner: Sex, Lies and Videotape Edition

We at chez Radical went to Black Swan last night, by far the most over-rated movie of the season.  You know you are really in trouble as a movie viewer when the character you like the most is the predator ballet master who just swaps in one prima for another, asserting that ballet skills are all well and good, but what really makes you a star is getting in touch with your inner f**k-bunny.  "Go home and touch yourself," he advises the Natalie Portman character, after a particularly uninspiring rehearsal.  Ho-kay!

Trying to come down off the dreadful high of that movie, I turned to the New York Times Magazine and found myself literally dumbstruck for the next half hour at the story of how Melanie Thernstrom solved the heartbreak of childlessness after five rounds of infertility treatments.  She and her husband bought some ova, had them fertilized with his sperm, hired two other women to carry the embryos to term, and now they have (wait for it) "twiblings."  There are many things to shriek about in this piece.  Here's a taste:

After our son, Kieran, was born, the hospital set up something called a supplemental nursing system by taping a tube to my breast so that the baby could suck to get the first milk — the caramel-thick colostrum — that Melissa expressed.


When the nurse put Kieran on my breast to feed, I was in a daze of ecstasy and so focused on the astonishing strength of his newborn fingers curled around mine, I hardly noticed. But by the time he was hungry again, I was coming out of the trance and wondered about whether this feeding system made sense.


The nurse urged me to stick with it. “We don’t want you to feel like you can’t nurse,” she said. I suddenly felt cross. Did she really think I couldn’t handle the reality that my body was not producing milk after it didn’t give birth to my baby? I knew she was trying to be supportive, but her concern made me feel diminished, as if she thought the truth of my infertility were unbearable (yet so easily disguised with plastic tubing). I looked down at my breasts, and they looked awfully small, whereas Melissa’s were enormous, dripping with fecundity, like a relic of a fertility goddess. I ditched the tube.


Please, read the whole story yourself.  It's just insane. 

The answer to childlessness is, of course, that if you have enough money in America you can do anything you want, but if you are poor you can't.  Like get an abortion.  But now everyone who gets an abortion is not just responsible for moral decline, but also for the fact that people like Thernstrom have to go out and make complicated arrangements to buy babies rather than just go to the BabyMart.  Ross Douthat (don't you just want to say Douche Hat?) follows up today on the editorial page with a plaintive appeal on behalf of the unborn and grave concerns that TV and media representations about unwanted pregnancy, in which the situation is almost uniformly resolved by the baby being carried to term, is covering up the reality that abortion is all too common in America.  Only four out of five pregnancies are carried to term, he laments, and no one knows it because of feel-good stories like Juno (in which a teenager gives birth, gives the baby away to a couple of her choice, and then returns to her life as if it never happened) and Madmen (in which the ever-luscious Joanie is pregnant by a man other than her husband and plans to pass it off next season as her old man's baby.)

So what is deceitfully good about these media fictions, you understand, is not just that the embryos will get to grow up into real fetuses and live, a ridiculously uncommon scenario in a country where we wade through fetuses just to get to the bus stop. It is that one woman will suppress the fact that she ever had a baby, and need massive amounts of therapy later; and a second woman is planning to live the rest of her life lying to her child and it's two fathers.

Douthat then goes on to lament the effects of the Pill, which cause women to "forget" to have babies until too late, and argue that it is just too bad that Thernstrom had to go through all those in vitro treatments, and then resort to renting other women's bodies to have babies for her, because if those selfish women who she does not know would just stop having abortions, she could have had their babies instead.

This idiocy reminds me of those economists and policymakers who think that if 500 men become unemployed in a Kansas City meat packing plant and a box factory opens outside Savannah that has 500 jobs, you should be able to just swap the unemployed workers into the new jobs.  Therefore, unemployment benefits are a bad idea because it will de-incentivize those fellas in Kansas City to take the box factory jobs.

Click here for the economists who won the Nobel prize for arguing persuasively that this is a stupid idea, as opposed to the rest of us who instinctively thought it was a stupid idea but couldn't say why.

Weird History Department News: Thad Russell Has The Last Word

Angry young man? Photo credit

Today's HuffPo has a blog post by former Barnard adjunct prof Thaddeus "Bad Thad" Russell who, by his own account, was kicking a$$ in History and American Studies on the Upper West Side of Manhattan until his colleagues finally found out what he was teaching.  The story is a little murky, it's true.  Russell, who took his PH.D. at Columbia, describes himself as an "eccentric" and claims to have been highly influenced by his counter-cultural upbringing and education.  He gave a job talk which horrified his colleagues and their counterparts at Columbia and, after four years of impermanent work at Barnard, was not offered a tenure-track position.

If Russell's job talk was anything like this post about the job talk, I can see why.

What kind of a teacher/scholar is Thad Russell?  Again, not clear: some of his work is terribly conventional, some aggressively unconventional. He seems happiest proclaiming the qualities that make him unclassifiable as a scholar, listing the many varieties of academic cant on the right and on the left that he smashes every day before breakfast.  Not surprisingly, Russell claims to have been a very popular teacher whose devoted students labeled him "Bad Thad" for his out-of-the box ways.  Students totally dig cant-smashers, except for the ones who don't:  this fringey conservative student website listed him as an "enemy professor."  That's cool.  However, in his current "I hate everyone and everyone hates me" mode I have difficulty understanding what Russell is talking about or what he actually believes about history, even after having read his descriptions of his scholarship and teaching philosophy several times. It is within the realm of possibility that the people who heard his job talk may have had a similar problem as Russell performed a celebrity "Bad Thad" persona that seems to have been aimed less at reinterpretation than at letting "the establishment" know how boring and ignorant it is.  For example, as Russell writes,

My students were most troubled by the evidence that the "good" enemies of "bad" freedoms were not just traditional icons like presidents and business leaders, but that many of the most revered abolitionists, progressives, and leaders of the feminist, labor, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the cultures of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the flamboyant gays who brought homosexuality out of the closet.


I had developed these ideas largely on my own, in my study and in classrooms, knowing all the while that I was engaged in an Oedipal struggle to overthrow the generation of historians who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, controlled academic history, and had trained me. They were so eager to make the masses into heroes that they did not see that it was precisely the non-heroic and unseemly characteristics of ordinary folks that changed American culture for the better.


Are you confused?  I am.  I just keep thinking, What is it that you do exactly? And, is anyone editing the Huffington Post nowadays? Go here to see a list of things that Russell has written, including a new book called A Renegade History of the United States, which is the only book I have ever known to be endorsed by both historian Nancy Cott and sexpert Susie Bright.  He is currently adjunct faculty "on special appointment" (whatever that means) at Occidental College, and seems to have transitioned to a freelance writing career.

A few lessons drawing on what I can understand from Russell's account of his unhappy termination at Barnard come to mind.  One is that senior people should never say, even lightly, that a visitor has has a good shot at making his or her job permanent.  It's very careless:  the visitor takes it seriously, and the people who say such things often have no power over that decision, no clue how it will be made, and no idea who the person they are talking to really is.  The second lesson is:  at life-changing moments, try to keep your pants on.  For example, when invited to give a job talk or any kind of scholarly presentation, going out of your way to show how unbelievably far out and unique you are can really backfire.  A group of historians is unlikely to start falling all over themselves with delight when they discover that a job candidate is a self-described eccentric who thinks his future colleagues are full of $hit.

The final lesson, I suppose, is a happier one.  If you think you have ideas, and you believe in yourself, when the scholarly establishment says "no," find a way to keep on writing anyway.  I had never heard of Thad Russell before tonight and now I have.  And so have you.

Tales From The Archives: Or, Past Life Shockers

On Friday, I was happily pawing through an unprocessed collection at a famous nearby archive, when I came upon one of the little treasures that illustrate the hot-house crypto-lesbo atmosphere of radical feminism in the 1970s: the mash note.

This figure (who will remain nameless for reason that become obvious below if they are not already) had drafted a letter to the object of her affections. The letter may, or may not, have ever been sent, and was redrafted at least once. It detailed the progress of the crush over time and lingered over explicit descriptions of the feelings that the crusher excited in the crushee. Most importantly, it used the effort to unveil that-which-had-never-been- spoken as a form of seduction. A particularly fine touch was the admission on the part of the author that what had tipped the scales into full-blown lust was the Object of Affection's ravishing butch haircut. Not only does this speak to the whole question of sex roles, which was one crucial focus for radical feminist critique, but the particular style chosen by the crusher caused her, in the eyes of the crushee, to look remarkably like the popular New Age guru with which they were both spiritually involved.

Having worked in numerous collections, needless to say, I have found more than one of these documents, and I don't know what to do with them. There is the Famous Feminist who claimed not to be sexually involved with women for years -- until she left her husband and was involved with women, as if this had never been an issue. But the archive also reveals (drum roll) that from about 1970 on, she got tossed at nearly every conference. Long, admiring letters and bashful cards tucked here and there into the archive detail the intensity of these encounters for the little nobody who provided the service. The absence of a response from the Famous Feminist makes it equally clear that she had been less permanently moved by the encounter (one winsome note from a one-night stand confides that a plant had been purchased and named after the Famous Feminist, a totem on which affection could be lavished until a unnamed, and entirely unanticipated, date of return.)

Finding these documents is like being at a really cool Easter egg hunt planned for feminist historians.

But they do present a problem: what to do with past life shockers? Would anyone be shocked by them really? What, if anything, do they contribute the history of radical feminism I am working on? Do they amplify the atmosphere for my reader that will better evoke the period? Do I risk losing the trust of second-wave feminists now collaborating with me if I seem to have bad judgment? (I'm thinking the answer to this is yes.) Should you publish any document about a person of interest that you wouldn't want published about yourself? And yet, why did these women leave these love notes in their papers if they didn't want me to know?

Readers?

Extra, Extra: Introducing The Sunday Radical Roundup

In an effort to post more consistently and also to celebrate the Lord's Day in a traditionally Protestant way (what the Lord actually meant by "resting" was that he would get some work done on his Book), I am hereby inaugurating the Sunday Radical Roundup. Following a practice that is common in the blogosphere, but most expertly performed by Ralph Luker in his daily series of Notes at Cliopatria, every Sunday I will produce a series of short items, old and new, that I want to bring to the attention of my loyal readers.

Additions to the Tenured Radical sidebar links include The Book, a new book review blog that has been launched by The New Republic; The Book Bench, its predecessor at The New Yorker; and Constitutionally Speaking, a blog written by South African Constitutional scholar Pierre de Vos of the University of the Western Cape.

Registration is now open for Reblaw 2010, February 19-21, 2010, an annual student-run law conference at Yale School of Law that brings progressive activists, practitioners, and scholars into conversation with each other. Registration is also open for the Transgender Lives conference at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, on April 17, 2010

Cultural studies, museum folk, historians and American Studies scholars might want to check out the website for the District Six Museum which is not in the least new, but was newly discovered by me two weeks ago prior to visiting the museum itself at 24 Buitekant Street, Cape Town, ZA. Memorializing the 1966 destruction of a multi-racial urban community by the engineers of South African apartheid and the displacement of that community to the Cape Flats, the exhibits themselves are more like a talking book than a museum. If you are doing a website evaluation in one of your classes this year, this is a great example of what a good museum website can do. If you are going to Cape Town, make sure this moving and nuanced collection is on your agenda.

Those still planning their classes might also want to check out the website for the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 ephemeral films now owned by the Library of Congress. I found the Prelinger collection because of a Cold War-era short film circulating on Facebook instructing teenage boys on how to detect pedophiles, the collection includes "films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions."

And last, but not least, the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender History has migrated to a new web address and will be undergoing redesign in the coming months.

Anything you want announced in the Sunday Radical Roundup should be sent to tenuredDOTradicalATgmailDOTcom.