Edie Sedgwick: R.I.P.

Obit-mag.com, an online magazine devoted to death -- or, as they say on the website, "What death can mean to the living and what living may have meant to the dead" -- reminds us with this story by Paul Wilner that November 16 was the 37th anniversary of Edie Sedgwick's death. She died of a lethal dose of pills and alcohol, ingested accidentally, like so many fabulous people of that drug-addled era.

Sedgwick, a society hanger on of the Factory crowd was, as you may recall, one of the few celebrities associated with Warhol who was already a celebrity in her own right. She also brought money and class to a very ambitious artist at crucial moment in his career when he had neither.

But for my money, the best thing about Sedgwick (other than that she serves as the focus the book that best evokes Warhol's early Factory years, Jean Stein's Edie: An American Girl) is that she may have been the inspiration for Bob Dylan's song "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat," from the Blonde on Blonde Album. Even if you don't care for the half dozen Warhol movies she starred in (which for many of us are unwatchable without some kind of chemical intervention), you've got to admit she made cultural contribution there.

And speaking of cultural contributions -- Obit.mag seems to be defining itself in contradistinction to something we generally call "history," but which might be the cutting edge of a new field called "Death Studies"? Just guessing.

Notes on the End of Spring Break

Spring break is almost over: in fact, you could say it is over, since around mid-afternoon, various beloved family members descend on our normally secluded life. So, much as I would like to write something fun for everyone today, I have to take a stab at doing some of the things I have left until the last minute. Although I am pleased to say I have accomplished much over break (in addition to screwing up my right knee, so that until I got a lovely shot of cortisone under my patella I spent several days on a cane imagining myself lurching aggressively around Zenith for the rest of my career, like an academic version of Dr. House.) An yet, there are a number of items that remain on my list.

Like grading my midterm exams. Some things never change, eh? Even though I am at a stage in life where I have a grader to help me I still can't pull myself together to finish. Only my compulsive over-identification with students who actually took the exam two weeks ago will get me to do it at all before Tuesday, when I see them again.

I have, however, taken the time to add Easily Distracted, otherwise known as Timothy Burke, to my blogroll. Burke is a cultural historian at Swarthmore College. Those of you who read the comments as well as the posts at Tenured Radical will have already taken note of Burke's sane and thoughtful blogging style. If blogs had editors, I would make him one of mine. The other reason to add Tim is that both of my parents went to Swarthmore, and like nearly all Swarthmore graduates, believe that neither of their children have been entirely successful because we both eschewed invitations to attend the Pomona of the East as a way of saying that we wanted to carve out distinct lives of our own. This may or may not have been an error. Only time will tell. But in addition to enjoying Tim's posts, and believing that you will too, mother would want me to link him.

Letter To An Anonymous Blogger

I just posted this as a comment on Tim Lacy's History and Education: Past and Present, and realized that, although it is part of an ongoing discussion Tim has been trying to spark about anonymous blogging, the post I attached it to was old enough that it might get a little lost. This is my own reflection on anonymity, and on having come out as a blogger. I have edited it a bit more because I am a compulsive re-writer; I have also not included a link to the blog under discussion so that no one is confused that it is a critique of that blogger. It isn't: this is a smart blog by a graduate student, with great posts, and you can find it over at Tim's place.

Dear Tim,

Thanks for sending AnonymousBlogger to my post about relinquishing my anonymity -- I do think anonymity raises ethical and practical issues that everyone at all ranks of the profession ought to think about on an ongoing basis, and not just those unprotected by tenure. As I reflect once more on my blogging life prior to my decision to give up anonymity, several things come to mind.

When we publish things anonymously that are incautious, and we are more likely to do that when we believe ourselves to be anonymous, there are immediate and sometimes long-term consequences for ourselves and for others. There's the equivalent of the flaming email phenomenon -- putting up a post in a fit of rage, or self-righteousness, or manic humor -- in other words, making a set of thoughts public in a way that doesn't engage one's own super-ego as it should. I know because I've done it, and I had to go back and edit or delete a bunch of stuff once I came out that seemed funny at the time (was, in fact) but was potentially hurtful since the humor depended on sarcasm or on exaggerating the characteristics of composite characters that real people were too likely to see as themselves. I remember at the time how differently I saw some of these posts once I had to imagine the reality of them being attached to my name, and to real people at Zenith. That change in perspective is a learning experience I have not forgotten.

But even when the posts are serious and accurate, I do think you need to ask yourself, before publishing something that is critical of others, would I stand up for this in public? After all, simply because something is the "truth" doesn't mean you should publish it. If you can't imagine saying such a thing to someone's face, or don't want to engage your own critics publicly, you probably shouldn't put something up on the web.

I want to emphasize that I personally don't feel critical of anonymous bloggers, and complications in my blogging life will not necessarily be problems on your blog. I am, after all, well known in my real life for taking all kinds of risks either to get a laugh, to make a teaching moment work in a memorable way or to get something done that I think is important. But assuming that your identity as a blogger is privileged information still means that you risk having to be personally accountable for what you write anyway. There is a high risk that some people will discover who you are eventually:it's clear to me that a number of anonymous bloggers' identities are well known to a circle of friends, for example. If you have been hiding your identity to avoid consequences or retaliation, that will be over in a flash when someone -- anyone -- who gets really angry at you wants it to be. And things could get really ugly -- people might know for months before you have any kind of tipoff and have re-thought your blogging ethic.

There are also intangible questions about how the people around you may perceive collegiality and professionalism. Whether what you have been posting is truthful or not, some people will think you have been dishonest in spirit if perhaps not in fact by recording and publishing things without their permission or without attribution. That really is damaging to a reputation, and you can't control the damage, because the people who will think that don't necessarily know you or want to know you. The ones who do know you may feel betrayed -- and this is drawn from my experience of discovery: a variety of people who knew me and thought I was a decent person felt puzzled and hurt when they thought I was blogging about them (when in fact I was not.) And that required a lot of straightening out -- from friends, to students to casual acquaintances -- and I am quite sure I will never really have an honest exchange with everyone who was upset or misperceived a post. Now that I am out, if someone is offended or thinks they have been written about, they can just drop me an email and we can straighten it out. If they don't, it's not because they can't, and it's a decision that I am not responsible for. More important, someone can look at me in a meeting or during a conversation and say, "I hope you aren't going to blog about this." And I can reassure them that I won't -- even if I want to!

Now I want to say that your blog, AnonymousBlogger, is a wonderful, thoughtful contribution as many anonymous blogs are, and I really love hearing things that graduate students and untenured people might be hesitant (afraid?) to tell me in my potential role as gatekeeper to success. These are things I need to know. But I have also been in the position of having been abused by anonymity and it has changed my view of it a bit. This may seem unfair or irrational, but I must warn you that there are many people -- if you are using your blog as a place to address charged topics -- who will simply think anonymity is cowardly. I certainly thought all the racist and anti-semitic stuff I got from the "anonymous" commenters in relation to the Duke lacrosse affair, in addition to being offensive, was deeply cowardly. And I continue to think that the historian who turned these people loose on me by posting my email address on his blog, behaved in a highly uncollegial, unprofessional and frankly, unethical, way by exposing me to what was not critique or criticism -- it was just crazy abuse, where anonymity became a weapon that he deployed through other people to punish and intimidate someone as an object lesson to others. So did HNN, in fact, where this person is listed as a regular contributer: they chided him in a column, and as far as I know he never responded to them. I know he never explained his actions to me.

The most serious problem from my point of view is that this person and I had a genuine difference about the content and meaning of my original post, and his took a great stretch of the imagination to either articulate as genuinely harmful or justify such a public, personal and vicious verbal assault. What the blogger and his cronies said I did, I did not do: I did not spread or make false charges about the students under indictment. Actually, I reported on coverage of the case, not the case itself, in the service of making an argument about race and culture that compared how those students were depicted in the press to another case. Frankly, even if I had made false charges against these students, it would have been without material consequence to them because I have no standing in their lives, their community or in the legal case. I was in no way responsible for the situation that brought on the press coverage in the first place, or Duke's decisions about how to deal with it. But the anonymous people attached to this blogger wrote emails and letters to my colleagues, officers of the university, trustees and to me: as I came to understand, they have also been sending abusive, obscene and racist email to members of the Duke faculty. Only when I began to investigate their real identities by filing complaints with their servers did they stop. I still don't know, because of the multiple anonymous comments and the accounts opened under pseudonyms, whether these were many real people, a couple real people, or whether it was just the blogger himself in a fit of paranoid rage and grandiosity. And not inconsequentially, although the blogger claims to be engaged in a campaign for justice that has held up factually in recent decisions in the Duke case, that he deliberately misinterpreted my post and fails to exercise any retraint over the "anonymous" comments to his own site, many of which seem to be from right-wing conspiracy theorists, frankly calls him into question as a scholar as well as a colleague in my view. As far as I can tell, he has one identity as a historian and another as the convener of a bizarre, right wing conspiracy group. And the two identities cannot help but overlap because they belong to the same person.

This is all a way of saying that the question of one's reputation, and one's responsibility for the reputation of others, is a very serious one indeed. It has many dimensions that anonymity makes very, very ethically complex. I don't want to be hard on you or any other anonymous blogger, because I'm not against anonymity in principle, but in no way should you feel that you are protected from the consequences of other people's perceptions of you because your name isn't on the blog, nor should you think you are immune from people making judgements about you that may be really unfair. It simply isn't so, and even if you wish to remain anonymous, you need to write as if you were not anonymous. And you need to police other people on your site who are anonymous, because no one knows that a comment written under another pseudonym, or by an anonymous commenter, isn't also *you.* That said -- as people advised me when I was pondering the question of coming out -- remaining anonymous is useful because it makes it harder for people to google you and have your blog come up before any of the articles and books you have written!

Good luck, and happy blogging, AnonymousBlogger: I will continue to read your blog which is, if I have not made this point sufficiently, very fine;

TR

One Thing Leads to Another: Blogging Dilemmas and the Sopranos Upcoming Finale

OK. So I was adding a final comment to the previous post, in which a Zenith student has raised some interesting issues about sexual identity and classroom dynamics in the Hallowed Halls, a conversation enriched by several contributions from Gayprof and Adjunct Whore. And as I was doing it, I was having the conflicted feelings I always experience when I end up writing in response to an issue that is specifically about students and life at Zenith. I can only express the attraction-revulsion dilemma this way: remember when Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, I believe in Godfather III, (having mistakenly thought he has taken the business entirely legit and cut his own ties with organized crime) snarls: "The family. Every time you think you have gotten away they reach out and suck you back in again." Godfather purists will forgive me, I hope, for having the quote, and possibly even the movie chapter, slightly wrong. But it is one of the down sides of being "out" as a blogger: one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place was to have a space in my life that was not governed by Zenith and its peculiar ways. And yet, inevitably, I am asked direct questions about very specific doings there, because students lurk on my blog, and they are actually interested in how things work and why. And part of me wants to say, look, this blog is not office hours. And part of me says, yes, you have a right to be interested in this, and it is a piece of why you are interesting to me that you care about these things, so I will do my best to answer your question. That's when I get sucked back in. Again.

I have no solution to this problem. I think it is, perhaps, My Fate. The topics of Fate and Family lead me to my real preoccupation-- the end of The Sopranos, my favorite television series, which is imminent, and something to which I can pay complete attention now that school has ended for the summer.

Last night, Bobby "Bacala" Bacalieri was killed, and Silvio was put into a probably irreversible coma. Tony is now holed up with Paulie Walnuts and a few other retainers in what I believe is Junior's old house, cuddling a nasty looking automatic weapon and probably watching his life pass before his eyes. N says she is sure Tony will be killed, an idea I am resisting. And before all this happened, Dr. Melfi dismissed Tony as a patient and AJ, Tony's pathetic excuse for a son, was only able to respond to the threats against his family by blubbering, "How am I supposed to maintain with all this going on?" His father, rightly, picked him up out of bed and threw him into the closet.

I know there is going to be a shriek of horror from a lot of bloggers out there who actually know what they are talking about, but this is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy in my book. I was immediately reminded of the several stagings of Macbeth I have seen in which the damned trees really do start walking and Macbeth goes down alone. As he has known he will. As we *all* know we will. In other words, I am well-educated enough to understand that this is how it must be, but I am devastated all the same. Moreover, unlike Shakespeare, who had all of English history to draw on (as well as a lot of excuses to make for the Tudor monarchy) and was, therefore, always ready for a sequel or prequel to be commissioned, part of what the Sopranos' producers are doing is ensuring that the series can never, ever be revived.

And yet, must everybody die? Even Paulie Walnuts? And at the hands of Phil Leotardo, a man whose family, as Phil himself once memorably said, was mistakenly named at Ellis Island "after a ballet costume?" I know the New Jersey bunch are all murderers themselves, but it seems hardly fair to ask all of us to have bonded with Tony, his crew and his family, over the years and then make us all watch them die. And yes, I get it that part of the point may be making us all shift our ethical perspective and understand that our pleasure in watching the show has made us complicit in some terrible way: just as complicit as Carmella who, for all her pain over Tony's infidelities, has neatly compartmentalized how she profits from his "business;" just as complicit as Meadow, who hopes to go on to law school and work for social justice, paid for by her father's blood money.

This would be the point in the post to say that my preferred ending is that Meadow will step up at the last minute, help her father take charge, and take over as consiglieri, an idea I am sure I should take to therapy myself, along with how pissed I am at Dr. Melfi for cutting her ties to Tony at such a crucial moment.

I probably realized the depths of my own complicity a few episodes back when Christopher Moltosanti, having once again slipped back into his personal hell of drug and alcohol addiction, rolled his car and was bleeding to death. He looked up at his uncle and said: "Help me, Tone." Tony reached over and squeezed Christopher's nostrils shut, suffocating him (and significantly, leaving no clear heir to leadership in the family, a role to which Christopher had revealed himself as deeply unsuited over the course of several seasons.) Of all my friends, I was the only person who believed that Tony was doing exactly what Chris was asking him to do. I guess I'll take that one to therapy too.

In the end, when these television programs become so important, the endings can never be satisfying: Mary Richards turning the lights off in the studio; the last helicopter taking off from the MASH camp; that weird final episode of "Seinfeld" where everyone ends up in jail, a grim commentary on how trapped they were as actors by the success of the series. My least favorite was the end of "Queer As Folk." This was a series I loved because it allowed me to stay in touch with the pleasures of a queer community I left behind in New York (not to mention with my twenties) and could never have in Zenith or Shoreline; ultimately you could say it foundered because not even TV characters can stay young forever. This otherwise fabulous show ended with homophobes blowing up Babylon, the disco - sex club, and all the characters retreating into marriage, affluence, parenthood and middle age. The lesbians, having survived infidelities of various kinds, moved to Canada with their babies, where life was supposedly safe from the effects of homophobia. Yuck.

Really successful television programs can mark off a whole historical period in a person's life, which I suppose is why their endings are such important cultural events. When the Sopranos began, I was living in Zenith, had not yet gotten tenure or finished my first book, and was geting the first seasons on videotape at Blockbuster. So in a sense, Tony and I grew into middle age together. And he is going to die, and leave me to deal with what comes next by myself?

The bastard.

On the other hand, the new season of Big Love starts next Sunday. And in a polygamous Mormon family, you are never really alone.