The Radical Family has decamped for a few days on what we call a “writing vacation.”One of the places we do this is in the northwestern corner of the state where, since around 1930, the family of one of us has owned a rather large piece of land.The land is so large that, except for the occasional dirt biker or ATV-er who is trying to cut through on his way to the state forest, we see no one but deer, hawks, hummingbirds, and a coyote or two.
Sailor the dog does not care for the wildlife.At all.
Eighty years ago, the parents of one branch of the Radical family purchased this land, and the farmhouse that went with it, from a bootlegger who was on his way to the slammer.The site where the hooch was made and bottled still exists:numerous generations have taken great pleasure in exploring the site and digging up the now antique bottles that were broken there.
Several generations have also enjoyed writing here.About twenty years ago, when the land passed to our generation, the farm house and about thirty acres had already been sold, leaving over sixty acres on the edge of the forest and a good-sized wooden shed.We used the shed for what we called “fancy camping,” coming up here with our big red dog and two fluffy cats who, like all cats, had to be tricked into coming home at the end of each visit. With a little bit of roof tar every once in a while, it remained dry even in the fiercest of New England rainstorms.Prior to the inheritance moment, we had also invested in a 1960s-era camper, which allowed us to extend our season well into October some years, since it had a gas heater, stove and lights that could keep us passing warm.
Perhaps the longest time we ever spent here was the first year we figured out how to use computers that, not accidentally, coincided with the summer I really had to finish my dissertation.Understand:this was prior to the invention of laptops.One of us was still using a Kaypro, that shin-banging steel suitcase that required two discs to boot up on and that had nothing but RAM memory; and the other one of us was using a generic PC knockoff that was considered very advanced for its time.
How we did it was this:we purchased a Honda generator and, in order to filter out the “noise” in the electrical current thus produced, strung together a series of circuit-breaking power strips.We knew we had enough power strips when we could see the letters on the screen and the fuzzy static had gone away (my memory is that it took more than five and fewer than ten.)
The dissertation was finished that summer. It took around eight weeks, as I recall, and we were here for most of it.My routine was simple:after breakfast, and a quick shower via dumping buckets of water over my head, I fired up the generator and the computer.I wrote until 1:00.I turned off the computer, had a tomato and cheddar cheese sandwich, drank a cold beer (all of our food and drink came out of a cooler that had to be resupplied with ice daily), and knocked off work for the day in the company of a good novel.
I did this every day until my dissertation was done.Some years later, I revised that dissertation into the first draft of a book in approximately the same way. There's nothing like routine.
Now that little wooden house is gone, replaced with a real summerhouse, built by the next generation to whom we sold the land so that they could occupy it properly.We threw in the blessings that come with the land as a bonus, and they seem to want us to come as often as we want to be here.It is an excellent arrangement.Our splendid old dog and both cats are buried under a blueberry bush by the stone wall, where I occasionally take Sailor for inspirational lectures about facing down one’s fears of wild things. The trailer, which eventually became a massive field mouse condominium, and was so thoroughly moused that there was no rehabilitating it.Eventually, it had to be burned in the field:it turned out that the guy who had sold it to us had failed to transfer the paperwork, so no junk yard would take it, but I believe several family members had a terrific time hacking it up with chain saws and lighting a humongous bonfire.One only hopes that the mice escaped in time, but mice do have a tendency to take care of themselves.
And the writers?Well, I can reassure you that books are still written here.
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?
Diamonds are not always a girl's best friend. At least, not when they are given to her by agents of a head of state who is supporting a criminal insurgency; when she has gone and lost them; and when an international criminal court wants to know what she was doing with uncut, contraband stones in the first place.
Life as an international supermodel is, of course, super-full of important commitments -- beside which investigating rape, murder, slavery and impressing children as soldiers in a civil war surely pales. After reminding the judge that "it was a big inconvenience" for her to appear at the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, where a UN special court is trying former Liberian president Charles Taylor, supermodel Naomi Campbell admitted that she she had received a bag of "dirty pebbles" at 1:30 A.M. after having dinner with Taylor at South African President Nelson Mandela's house in 1997. Campbell, who says she is used to strangers dropping off gifts in the middle of the night, said she didn't know the rocks were blood diamonds. As she explained, she is used to diamonds being "shiny" and "in boxes."
Oh! Aren't we all, darling? And that cross Campbell is wearing (she is in the white dress, standing to Taylor's right) is encrusted with shiny diamonds, so you can see why Girlfriend was confused.
The famously ill-tempered Campbell claimed that she gave the "small, dirty looking stones" to Jeremy Ratcliffe, who runs Mandela's children's charity in South Africa, but they haven't turned up since. Taylor claims he had nothing to do with the trade in illicit diamonds, with which he is accused of having been paid in exchange for funding the dirty war in neighboring Sierra Leone.
Asked whether she had been flirting with Taylor at the dinner, and whether he had promised to send her a few diamonds, Campbell said that was nonsense: she had no idea who Taylor was, had no idea what blood diamonds were, and -- this is where the liberal arts education would have helped -- had never heard of Liberia before that night. This is particularly odd, since Campbell is said to be associated with a number of charities in the region, and claims to have a passionate interest in sub-Saharan Africa.
But perhaps its just the continent she cares about (a common problem among Europeans and Americans, many of whom speak about "Africa" as if it were one country.) Or perhaps it is only people who live a little further "sub" who capture Campbell's interest. Below is an April 23 2010 film clip of Naomi Campbell caring so deeply about the war-torn region in and around Liberia that she has not yet come up with a cover story about the blood diamonds, agreed to testify at the trial, or even admitted that she knew Taylor was present at the dinner.
Okay: there's going to be an appeal, and a Supreme Court case, in which a right-wing court is quite likely to find some tortuous way to deny GLBT citizenship again. But just for today, shall we celebrate? (Read the ruling here courtesy of Toweleroad.)
It's difficult to think about it while we still have three to four precious weeks of summer left. But on behalf of all the people who will begin full time teaching in the fall, I ask you to conjure -- for a second -- a week in mid-semester. Feel the pain as you stay up half the night to grade your papers! Experience the fear as you go into class half prepared! Recall being fatally short of sleep as you sit, dazed, through yet another search committee meeting, having driven yourself unsparingly through 100 applicant files the day before! Conjure the self-righteousness and hypocrisy, as you lecture yet another student that s/he could get hir work in on time if only s/he would get organized!
Yeah, baby. The problem is, there is almost no one I know in academia who has a job description that would give them a reasonable sense of where a professor's job begins and ends. Couple this with the reality of being tenure-track (or worse, a full-time visitor), which often seems like an endless exercise in pleasing everybody, all the time, in every way we can. Top it off with the fact that we learn early on not to complain about being overworked because some jackass will look at us piously and say, "You just have to learn to say no to things!" (subtext: say no -- except to me) as if you are overworked because, somewhere along the line, you forgot to say your safeword.
The result is that even many of us who actually have tenure end up hard-wired to do far too much, far more than we really want to do or are capable of doing well, even though we don't really have to anymore. We believe that we are powerless to keep unwanted responsibilities in check, that there are no grounds -- not to say no, but to figure out what and who to say no to -- and the result is a work overload. Inevitably, our health, our peace of mind, our good temper and emotional availability at home, and the pace of our scholarship takes the biggest hit. If you are like me, these marathons of overwork and frustration can produce moments when you start to hear Neil Young warbling:
Sedan delivery is a job
I know I'll like;
It sure was hard to find.
Hard to find a job!
Hard to find!
But never fear. Your Radical is here, with the fruits of a recent rigorous self-criticism. How can this year can be different? How can you create a plan of action that will make this year different? The answer is: Take charge. The answer is: Write your own job description, using these principles.
Knowing your appropriate load allows you to know your overload. In consultation with a senior colleague, figure out what are the minimum number of bodies you are expected to manage, and what the department average is for each category and at each rank of the faculty. In the category of "body management," I am counting major advisees, non-major advisees, enrolled students, honors students, and any other person you need to manage (postdocs, graduate students, other faculty.) These categories can overlap -- but count them twice when they do (for example, a thesis advisee who is also a major advisee = two bodies, as these are distinct activities that cannot be folded into the same hour of your time.)
Whatever the category is, count it and stay at, or preferably under, that number. Anyone extra is an overload. This is the basic outline of your job description, because whatever people say, a full-time teaching job is primarily about the students. That said, you have to come up with a strategy for how -- particularly if you are a popular teacher, or are teaching in an underrepresented field (more on this below) -- you are going to say no to students that you don't have time for; and you will send them away to someone whose job it is to help them. Liberal arts colleges have chairs, field advisors, and honors committees whose job it is to help these students; research universities usually have a Director of Undergraduate Studies as well. Whether you are new faculty or a full professor, don't kid yourself that you are turning a student out like one of the little lost animals of FarmVille if you refuse to take hir on as an overload.
If you have a joint appointment, total the activities of each part of your appointment and divide them in half. This means that you don't do all things in either place except go to department meetings, for which you should repay yourself by taking one fewer thesis, or two fewer advisees.You have to figure this out annually, and you must do so with both chairs in the room; if you are tenure-track, your mentor should be part of the conversation. The reason that joint appointments usually end up as more burdensome is because it is often assumed that "full participation" means full participation in both "homes." Not so. It means doing the equivalent of one job in two places. You did not decide the terms of your appointment: the university or college did, and it is up to them to make their expectations clear without, as they say in factories, "speed-up." If one chair needs more participation from you for a reason, the other chair needs to graciously give way. There may also be years when a particularly large amount of activity in one home pulls you away; that can be repaid the following year.
If you are a visitor or a post-doc, do your job well and politely decline to do favors or spend time on anything institutional you have not been hired for. Read your letter of appointment carefully, and have a meeting with the chair at the beginning of each semester to go over your responsibilities. You should also know that most students don't know the difference between permanent and temporary faculty, so that although their desire for your attention is a great complement, it should be firmly and kindly resisted. Don't take on advisees of any kind unless you have contracted to do so; don't go to department meetings, even if you are invited to them (believe me, no one really wants you there); don't agree to meet with job candidates unless they are friends of yours who need the inside skinny; don't get involved in campus or faculty politics; don't let an extra body into your class; don't have unlimited office hours with students who love,love, love you; don't listen to veiled hints that if you go the extra mile for this person or that person that there might be a job authorized in your field this year and you would be a great candidate (this is a lie); and don't bust your a$$ to be the best-est, most creative, Mr. Chips-iest teacher on the planet.
Limit the number of recommendations you agree to write, and be clear with students what they need to do for you. Inevitably, we end up writing recommendations off the clock, and you must set aside some time in your schedule after October 1 for getting this work done at the office within business hours. When done correctly, a recommendation takes between an hour and two hours to write; tailoring an old recommendation for a new purpose takes at least half an hour; and uploading a completed recommendation to an electronic system takes about ten minutes for each school. Insist that law school applicants use the services provided by the Law School Admissions Council. It is also worth your while to have a document, either on your web page or that you can send to students, that tells them exactly what you need, what they must do, and what lead time you need to get the recommendation done.
Inevitably, those of us who teach more students and have more advisees end up writing more recommendations too. This is because students have good reasons for seeing us as allies; because they are comfortable asking for something which is part of our job but that many colleagues treat like a favor; and because -- well, pretty much all students need recommendations for something. But the fact that you are already working too hard, and have no time, does not oblige you to write recommendations that you also do not have time for. Develop criteria and stick to them (for example, that you only write grad school recs for people who have done advanced work with you.) Be honest with a student when you have no basis for an evaluation, or if you can't honestly write a good one. Do not write recommendations if you are not a permanent member of the faculty. Do not "feel bad" when you have reached your fixed and immutable limit and must say no: that's what the other faculty are there for.
And here's a nugget of advice: develop boilerplate recommendations for the B.S. credentialing letters that study abroad programs require. All they care about is that the student can pay, and that s/he is not nuts in some way that will cause harm to self or others.
Do not volunteer, stupid. You know who you are -- whatever your biological gender, you are a girl. You are the one who finds the silence insufferable when the chair has asked for someone to step up, and you think it is your job to make everyone feel good again. Why you? And why now? At least go away and consult your job description before you go all Do-Bee on everyone. It isn't your job to see to it that everything gets done -- it is the chair's job, and believe me, s/he will figure out how to do it.
Underrepresented faculty in underrepresented fields have no obligation to extend themselves without end to under-served students. Sometimes I look around me and it is so frackin' obvious why the scholars who are perpetually sicker, angrier, more exhausted, and frantic about meeting deadlines for their scholarship share certain characteristics. We are queer, we are of color, we are international scholars, we are women, we are feminist men. We are the ones who, in order to make space for what we care about in institutions, do it ourselves. We invent the programs, then we chair them. This is what Jean O'Brien and Lisa Disch write about in an article I strongly recommend (and that partly inspired this post) "Innovation is Overtime: An Ethical Analysis of 'Politically Committed Labor,'" (Aiku, Erickson and Pierce, Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy Minnesota, 2007.) We are the ones that advertise our universities' "diversity" when we labor outside the classroom. We are the ones who students seek out to teach the things they never had a chance to learn in high school. We are the ones who students "like us" and the ones who hold similar political commitments flock to in droves.
Face it: certain faculty lines and programs have come into the academy as add-ons, and there is no intention at most schools to use what we interdisciplinary scholars know to transform the disciplinary paradigms that 95% of faculty are hired to support. There aren't enough of us, our faculties aren't diverse enough, and the culture wars of the 1980s permanently intimidated university administrations from appearing to be "too radical" by allowing what we do to impinge on core curricula. As an individual, yoy can't fill that dissonant gap even if you worked 26 hours a day trying to do so. It isn't your fault that there are too few classes in x; that the program in y is underfunded; that you are one of three z faculty. You didn't make the decision to grant a line to the Underwater Basket Weaving Department for a replacement who will teach ten students a term in the traditional field of Renaissance Wooden Needles that the administration just can't conceive of mounting a curriculum without -- while you are faced with sending forty students away from your Native Studies survey. Worse, the generative political urgency in the various fields that make up American Studies, Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies often moves us to throw our personal energy at immediate needs that are actually the result of long-term institutional dysfunction that our sacrifices help to maintain. Don't make up for the deficiencies of the institution by taxing yourself. Don't. The academic world is littered with broken and bitter people behind who thought that institutional neglect was only temporary.
The best thing you can do for your field is get your damn writing done, get tenure, become famous, acquire influence at your institution in a way that all those suits in the administration understand, and go someplace where the institution is committed to your intellectual commitments.
Which leads me to my final piece of advice for writing your own job description:
Your scholarship is part of your job. Schedule between 25 and 30% of the time you allot for work during the week to keeping your scholarship going. You know you should do this -- and yet, many of us see our writing as the thing that we have time for when our family, teaching and committee responsibilities are done. Which means it can get put off -- sometimes fatally -- for months at a time, causing us to get out of touch with projects we care about and go without sleep at various points in the semester to meet a commitment that has now become a burden.
So the next time you get angry about your perception that you are doing more work than other colleagues, remember: their "normal" is guaranteed by your overwork. Write your job description -- write it now, knowing that you will have to revise it and rewrite it as you figure out how to balance your life. Leave some space for things that may, in the end, be necessary tasks -- and if that space doesn't fill, use it for writing. And while you are performing that exercise, listen to this:
Who needs another blogger bashing Katie Roiphe for not being a feminist? And why read more about what is often obvious nowadays: that if you have decent writing skills, have gone to an Ivy League school, and have a mother in the business you can get published even if your ideas are peculiar, uninformed and often just wrong? And why belabor the fact that, while feminists can't get published nowadays, if you are willing to stand up and tell young women that feminism just doesn't matter, you can make a tidy living?
If, despite my advice, you were a blogger who wrote such a piece, Katie Roiphe would just say you are part of the victim culture bred by 1970s feminism, and you are so deluded.
Which brings me to what I really want to write about Roiphe's contribution to the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section today, The Allure of Messy Lives, in which she argues -- through a superficial reading of Mad Men and Cold War literary culture -- that nowadays people are just too uptight for words. Roiphe, you may recall, earned her chops among the backlash crowd with a book charging that "feminists" had made her generation fearful of heterosexuality by talking about rape and sexual harassment as if they were problems that required solutions.
Silly us: so sorry.
Now, it appears, Roiphe has a new mission: to debunk contemporary social myths that alcoholism, adultery, lying and hypocrisy are to be avoided. Were women and children actually harmed by men drinking and f**king around in the 1960s, when men had all the money, jobs, access to credit and the power of the courts behind them if they chose to dump their families entirely? Heck no: and imagine the price we have paid in lost glamour for giving in to the victim culture once again. After all, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson only used to beat each other up a little when they were drunk (which was pretty much all the time) -- and they were so witty! Using the popularity of Mad Men, which just launched its fourth season last Sunday, as her central text about Cold War culture, Roiphe asserts that:
The phenomenal success of the show relies at least in part on the thrill of casual vice, on the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior to our relatively staid and enlightened times. As a culture we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, and the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink.
Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the 7-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?
The world of the 1960s has been replaced by "tiny rebellions," she writes; "vices [that] are so minor and controlled" (like Adderall and hooking up? or eating packaged food with preservatives?) Gone the world of chain-smoking, cocktail quaffing pregnant ladies waiting for hubby to come home; gone the "fun"world of the executive suite, where men were men and women were absent; gone the sexual playground of the typing pool, where the real work "the girls" got promoted (to marriage) for was done on their backs after hours; gone the world of fabulously talented, well-paid male writers passed out in public at their desks after sucking down several dry martinis at lunch.
So sad. Gone, gone with the wind, along with electroshock therapy as cure for homosexuality.
As a historian, I can't help but notice the similarities between Roiphe'sandrocentric view of the Baby Boomer years and the popular post-Reconstruction literature known as "Moonlight and Magnolias," in which southern white women reminisced wistfully about a brutal plantation world they had never known. In the process, they transformed a land of white supremacy and black suffering into a glamorous lost "civilization" staffed with cheerful black slaves (who never got promoted either, come to think of it) and were forcefully separated from the white families they loved by cruel Federal soldiers. Disappearing slavery (as it was) required celebrating slavery (as it wasn't.) By 1900, such women and their male allies in all-white southern state legislatures had begun chartering Mammy Memorial Associations, and building public statues to "Mammy," that fictional, sexless black women who abandoned her own children to raise elite whites for permanent rule.
My connection here is that what Roiphe is celebrating in her nostalgia for the paradise of drinkin', and f***kin', and smokin' in Mad Men is something that even a more slightly subtle reading of the show uncovers: a world where women and children had few, if any, rights; and men did exactly what they wanted, regardless of the consequences. It is the world of the patriarchal family, a world of hypocrisy and lies dressed up as a lost civilization of glamour, creativity and liberated sexuality.
This is not to say that I don't love Mad Men: I do. Although the first episode of the new season was not the winner I had hoped it would be, when I MadMen myself, I identify heavily with the flawed and foolish alcoholic pussy hound Roger Sterling. But Roiphe's superficial gloss on the series is a poor counterpoint to what she claims is her generation's obsessive need for order and control in their own families. While Mad Men's award-winning design and the references to 1960s popular culture are nostalgic, the show itself is quite disturbing: the retro fashion and perfect sets only provide a brittle frame for a fraying heteropatriarchal culture where white people can almost -- but not quite -- ignore the change that is a-gonna come. Whether you think the series is, in and of itself, sexist and racist; or whether, as I do, you think it provides a forum for pondering sexism and racism, the evidence for a far more critical take on the world of my youth is what Roiphe deliberately ignores. For example:
1. The series is called Mad Men. This is hardly an accident, and it is also hardly an accident that nearly all of the older men in the show drink heavily and are also divorced or separated; while the younger men drink less, are more self-disciplined, and despite engaging in sexist banter, are better able to achieve intimacy and equality in their relationships with women. That said, the vast majority of women in Mad Men are on a short journey from their fathers' houses to their husbands' houses, with a stop at a Seven Sisters college and a couple years as an actress, model or secretary.
The few choices offered to women in the 1960s, and the costs of making those choices, tell us why marriage was what women invested in prior to women's liberation. By season 4, Peggy has become a copywriter and a player at the new boutique agency put together by the refugees from Sterling, Cooper. But she is still subject to abusive tirades from Don (do we think the drink in his hand plays a role?); and Peggy is the only woman executive. Don sometimes thinks better of his nastiness towards Peggy; but only once, when he was persuading her to jump ship with him at the end of season 3 and his marriage was collapsing, has he been able to admit how badly he treats her. Joanie, the office manager, as dedicated viewers of the show might recall, ended her regular nooners with married partner Roger Sterling to find a man who was actually available, only to see Roger dump his wife and children for a fresh-faced, new secretary. Later, the physician-fiancee with whom Joanie thought she would make a secure life raped her in Roger's office, and then joined the Army without telling her.
2. Don's drinking is directly connected to his f**king; Don's f**king is connected to his hard-wired need to lie to people he says he loves; and all are directly connected to his inability to care genuinely about anyone but himself as he maintains the parallel lives of home and work. In fact, Don might not be too drunk to function, and function well, as Roiphe points out. But he has certainly been drunk enough for three seasons not to be emotionally available to anyone in his family, and particularly to his wife Betty, who was catastrophically lonely. On top of this, Don's f**king kept him away from the house for days at a time while he assured Betty, and perhaps himself, he was "working" for the family's future. (And can I say that just because TV characters don't get drunk from drinking all day doesn't mean that real people can drink all day and function well?)
Granted, the writers introduced a peculiar subplot in season one, whereby we were given to understand that "Don Draper" was an assumed identity, and the protection of his real past created a context for Don's secretiveness that even he might not have understood. Furthermore, it was the exposure of this lie that was the precipitating event for Betty's decision to leave him for another powerful, wealthy man.
But there is a more significant historical thread Roiphe misses here, and it is about women at a crossroads between dependence and independence in the 1960s. While "Bets," as Don calls her, is an unattractive character -- child-like, ill-tempered, cold, selfish, punitive and unloving towards her children -- she is also a woman whose options have been narrowed by sexism, by her limited access to money, by her enforced immaturity, and by the assumption that women's highest calling is domestic and maternal. A graduate of Bryn Mawr (one is reminded of M. Carey Thomas's famous line, "Our failures only marry"), once Betty married and had children she had the choice of either putting up with Don's endless lies and ill-treatment or subjecting herself to the fate outlined in the punitive divorce laws that plunged many women and their children into poverty prior to the 1970s. When, at the end of season 3, she chooses to leave Don, it is as much for survival as for love, because she no longer trusts him to take care of her.
3. Don's drinking helps him control his own reality, and helps him control the people around him. For three seasons, Don has lied by commission and omission to his wife, and by extension to his children. Yet he views each collection of lies as singular and not as a string of events that point to his own emptiness and corruption. As a metaphor for advertising, I think this is very skillful, but as a recipe for being a human being it has devastating consequences for his family. In season one, for example, we learned that Betty was depressed; Don sends her off to a (male) Freudian therapist to be "cured" of "her problems." What Betty discovers in season two by listening to herself (no thanks to the therapist, who reports regularly to the husband who pays the bills) is that she is depressed because no one has listened to her, and because she is living in a fantasy marriage. Furthermore, she discovers that what she "knows" is that her husband sleeps around, and what is making her crazy is that Don (who has built a wall of alcohol and women between himself and his contempt for Betsy) keeps telling her there is nothing wrong and that she is the one with the problems.
The significancance of booze in this series is not its unimportance. Rather, alcohol is the elephant in the room, a force that is so fully integrated into daily life as to be indistinguishable from its effects. Mad Men is not, in fact, a portrait of a generation, as Roiphe would have it, and it offers far subtler advice to the contemporary world of men and women making lives than Roiphe perhaps understands. If the historiography of the last twenty years tells us anything, it tells us that you can't really generalize about "generations" very profitably, and you certainly can't once you understand that social inequality defies our attempts to synthesize a "generational experience." Finally, the question Roiphe fails to ask is whether the safety her peers desire has something to do with the safety they didn't experience as children, the vulnerability of their own mothers to the whims of fathers who had all the power, and the drinking that kept the whole project of family together.
Or is that the UI homophobia-in-the-classroom case? You figure it out. Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik updates us on the teaching status of religious studies instructor Kenneth Howell at the University of Illinois, Champaigne-Urbana. Howell came under scrutiny because of an email he sent to his class that articulated gay male sex acts as immoral and the equivalent of bestiality: you may recall that I wrote about it here. It appears that for years, Catholic thought instructors have been nominated and paid by the Newman Center, an institution that exists on many campuses to support the faith and the sociability of Catholic students. Although Howell has been reinstated for the fall, this incident has created an opportunity to end a curious arrangement that some faculty on campus have opposed for reasons you don't have to be skeptical of religion to understand. Think about it: would you hire someone nominated and paid for by BP, and approved by no department, to teach the ethics of offshore drilling?
According to this report, the agreement puts Howell (who is a published scholar) back in the classroom, and affirms that he is subject to public university guidelines around the expression of religious views (and presumably, expressions of prejudice that would not be perceived as discriminatory if articulated in a community of like-minded believers.)
A bigger question might be: are religious institutions a legitimate "student service?" And what is the role of clerics on secular campuses, unless they have been hired in a secular capacity as tenure-track faculty or administrators? This isn't something I have seen discussed much, and yet most campuses devote a part of their budget to doing so. The Howell incident should perhaps cause us to wonder why, in this day and age, secular institutions feel they have any obligation to provide religious resources to students at all: or, to put an even finer point on it, to students of some faiths and not others. I suspect the answer to the question is that when they do hire preachers of various kinds, for one low, low, price they get an adjunct teacher/psychotherapist/co-curricular coordinator all wrapped up in one.
But it is also one of those wheels within wheels situations that makes me happy I am not an administrator. Nothing I have seen has addressed the question of a complaint filed by a student not in the class: despite your views on faculty hired because they have been approved and paid for by the Vatican, all of us should find this a little scary. It has not exactly resolved the academic freedom issue, which may create difficulties for UI down the line. While Howell will have a contract for next semester, the religion department now has control over its hiring (as it should), and will decide whether to retain him in the future.
So here's the happy choice facing UI's chair of religion next year: continue to employ indefinitely an instructor who the department doesn't seem to care enough for to defend, and who it never hired in the first place; or decline to employ him further and risk a lawsuit backed by either the liberal AAUP, the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, or both.
Because it is summer, I have illustrated this post with James Tissot's "Jesus Teaching At The Shore," taken from this website.
Our friend at Historiann meditates today on the practice of women's history and why feminism matters. "Women’s history," she writes, "is a large and rich enough field that there are histories of women that aren’t particularly feminist, just as the history of women has expanded far beyond the history of just feminist women to include the histories of women who lived before the invention of feminism as a political movement as well as women who weren’t feminists or even worked actively against feminism." But, she asks: "What would happen if we just stopped writing it? Who in the larger historical profession would notice, or care, or complain?" The answer is not women would care, but feminists would care. "Feminists are the ones who would care if women’s history ceased production. Whether or not they’re women’s historians, feminist historians would notice."
Tie a thread to this post and run it through the blogosphere to Bully Bloggers where, after several days of silence, the comments section of Jack Halberstam's post on Lisa Cholodenko's icky lesbian movie "The Kids Are All Right." Interestingly, this post, on an academic blog that doesn't often attract people who don't get it, has become the site for a polarized conversation about what a "lesbian" movie is supposed to do for either a "lesbian" or a "mainstream" audience; what constitutes a "lesbian stereotype;" and whether it is acceptable for "lesbians" to criticize other "lesbians" for representing a film about a depressingly conventional film as a political triumph over a homophobic movie industry. A critical theme of Halberstam's review -- one that seems to be lost on hir critics -- is that this movie might be about lesbians but that doesn't make it progressive, nor does it represent a cheerful perspective on the state of the lesbian bourgeoisie.
Who notices that there are so few movies that choose gay and lesbian subjects that we over-invest in the ones that do as progressive and/or high art, whatever their flaws? To paraphrase Historiann, queer people do, that's who.
Not surprisingly, those of Halberstam's critics who believe the movie is "good" because it is "realistic" (i.e., represents their reality, and I say that with no sarcasm) also miss critical moments of racism (not to mention the ugliness of Nic's anti-feminist dominance of Jules) in "The Kids Are All Right" that others of us find agonizing. They view the depiction of upper-middle class life in Los Angeles as "mainstream," when in fact the vast majority of GLBT people, like all other Americans, are too poor to afford sperm donors, much less one non-working parent to take care of the kidz. These critics also perceive parenting as a burdensome but socially necessary task for which it is noble to sacrifice the personal and sexual happiness of all adults, straight and gay. The other big problem with these critiques is the assumption in many of them that if Halberstam doesn't get it that sex dies in long relationships, and that people with jobs and children are too tired to do the nasty, ze has never been in a long-term relationship, doesn't parent, and knows nothing about the "mainstream."
Well, take that, why don't you? The assumption that people who do not parent and do not commit to long-term monogamy have no authority to speak to or about those who do replicates the $hitty, narrow politics of the movie. It's not that lesbians committed to monogamy and child-rearing necessarily have bad politics. But they do when "seeing themselves" in popular culture excuses a range of other sins, like not seeing other people who aren't like them. And when they can't perceive that a movie script is sexist, racist, classist and often clunky, actually they do have bad politics, as well as bad taste.
Concluding where I began, Historiann (who does not reveal the nature of her sexuality, her relationship or her parenting status on the blog, and is a pretty radical feminist) has a similar issue with mommy bloggers (which will be revealed in the winter issue of the Journal of Women's History -- reserve yours now!)
People who know me are aware that I often rise at a grisly hour of the morning to row. There are a variety of advantages to this, including being too confused for lack of sleep to have that debate about whether I should work out or keep writing. The best one, however, is that I hear the first half hour of National Public Radio's Morning Edition on the way to the boat house. I have six miles of a workout in a single scull to think uninterrupted about whatever I have heard, and I can listen to the same stories again on the way back and decide whether any of them are worthy of a blog post.
Which is how I decided to write about yesterday's closing arguments in the Rod Blagojevich trial. Blagojevich, you may recall, is the former Governor of Illinois. He is being tried on multiple counts of corruption, including attempts to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. Defense counsel Sam Adams, Jr. made the argument we might expect: that the government's case is manufactured and that prosecutors have twisted circumstantial evidence to make the defendant appear to be corrupt.
Blagojevich is also, according to his attorney, a compulsive talker, and says all kinds of things that he either doesn't mean or that are open to interpretation by others. ("Never tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking again.")
But what explains all the evidence, and the witnesses who testified for the prosecution? They misunderstood "negotiation" for "extortion," that's all, and maybe Blogojevich should have said less and conveyed more clearly what he actually meant. Like, "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." It appears that the logic of the defense's position is that the former governor is "insecure" and not "the sharpest knife in the drawer."
Wondering about the corny Mafia theme? I haven't told you yet about Adams' sure-fire offensive ethnic humor strategy (law students, listen up):
At one point, the bombastic attorney launched into a story about his Italian grandmother, who shoots a mule dead after it stumbled three times. "Thatsa one! Thatsa two! Thatsa three!" Adam yelled, mimicking the accent.
When her husband called her stupid for shooting the mule, she warned him: "Thatsa one!"
Is this -- or is this not -- a great Chicago story? What NPR doesn't mention is that this little parable actually illustrates political bullying at its best.
And now, as we settle in to the last month of summer, here's a little more good advice from Don Radicale:
If you want to read the glowing review of Lisa Cholodenko's lesbian family flick The Kids Are Alright go to A.O. Scott (New York Times, July 8 2010). Michelle Solomon, in The Guardian (July 23 2010), is slightly more reserved, dubbing it a "relationship movie" and noting that the high-profile actresses will allow it to "[avoid] being pigeonholed as a 'gay movie.'" (Thank god for this, that's what I say.) If you want to read the intelligent review by a queer scholar, that will actually get into it why this is a lesbian movie, go here for Jack Halberstam's "The Kids Aren't Alright" (bullybloggers July 15, 2010).
My review follows: it is a terrible, awful, embarrassing, piece of crap film. I could have had a better time had I saved $11.00 ($22.00 + dinner for two actually); spent the same two hours reviewing some critical, and hideous, months in my own life; and then had a friendly dinner with my companion where we reviewed vivid memories of my own bad decisions and personality flaws in action.
For those of you who would rather hear about the film, Halberstam (who has what I consider to be an admirably high tolerance, and a keen intelligence, for schlocky pop culture) provides a concise plot summary to anchor the analysis:
"The Kids Are Alright" is a soul-crushing depiction of long-term relationships, lesbian parenting and mid-life crisis. Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are mushed into one category by their kids Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska) who call them “moms” or “the moms.” The moms have merged into one maternal entity and although they have distinct personalities, their parenting function is depicted as one amorphous smothering gesture after another. The kids suffer through the over-parenting but crisis ensues when Laser decides to track down his sperm donor dad, Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo. Once Paul rides onto the scene on his classic black BMW motorcycle, bearing organic veggies and good wine, the cracks in the façade of lesbian domesticity appear and a rather predictable cycle of betrayal, infidelity and domestic upheaval begins.
I'm clicking "like" on this one, and the only place I would disagree with the review is that whereas Halberstam describes Jules as "dowdy" further down, that didn't bother me. Face it, at this age many of us are fighting dowdy. It did bother me that Jules was dorky, and I thought if she asked one of the other characters if s/he wanted to "process" something one more time I was going to scream.
Like the son Laser, who periodically asks questions that no one answers, I often needed more information, despite the fact that I am a practicing lesbian, hung my shingle in 1975, and have been in practice continuously since then. If Jules had a gardening business, why did no one take the opportunity to make a leering joke about mowing the lawn? Why did the "Moms" watch gay male porn -- and porn from the 1970s no less? Is Annette Bening's vulva located somewhere around her navel, as it appeared in the excruciating rug-munching scene? Why did Jules insult, and then fire, the Mexican gardener (who seemed handsome and sweet) instead of having an affair with him? How did Paul manage a restaurant if he was as stupid and disorganized as he seemed? How do heterosexuals keep from getting concussions from smacking into the walls and furniture? Should heterosexual adolescents be counseled to wear helmets during sex? Why is Julianne Moore in so many gay movies? Why did Nic think that her son skateboarding -- without a helmet -- was less dangerous than her daughter riding a motorcycle with a helmet? Should I quit my day job as a tenured professor and make myself available as a Hollywood sex coach/stunt dyke in case bad lesbian movies really take off?
You have time to make lists like this when a movie is really, really bad. So instead of reviewing "The Kids Are Alright," I would like to suggest a few plot changes that would have made it better.
1. If Paul, the sperm donor, had been gay. Then, when he started boffing Jules, they could have done a whole thing about why a gay man and a gay woman might find themselves attracted to each other, and avoided the un-tense tension of whether Jules had joined the other team. What would have made this even better is if Paul had had a boyfriend who didn't want children and had been adamantly opposed to Paul making contact with the kids, but Paul went behind his back to do it.
2. If Paul, the sperm donor, had been better looking and/or an interesting person. Sorry, I think Mark Ruffalo seemed abnormally physically gross. Fortunately, I had a local informant who has played for both teams, and she explained to me that heterosexual women are attracted to men who look dirty, smelly and ungroomed; and who say almost nothing when they speak. This piece of information is what twigged me to the fact that this was not really a "lesbian movie."
3. If Nic and Jules had been "Nick" and "Julie." Is there anyone but me who thinks this originally came in to the studio as a treatment about a heterosexual couple and the sperm donor, and Cholodenko made it about lesbians to get it produced? What would have been even better would have been if Paul had been gay, and Paul and Nick had an affair! Now we are getting somewhere.
4. If Paul were transsexual, and had only donated sperm to finance the transition to a life as Paula. At sixty dollars a pop this would have taken a while, but added to a small inheritance it might have worked. What would have then been cool is if Paula was a lesbian, and had affairs with both Nic and Jules, and Paula knew where everyone's vulva was, and could mow the lawn like nobody's business, and after the awkward moment of truth where the affairs were revealed Nic and Jules agreed this was a good arrangement because she had revitalized their sex life, and the kidz ended up banging their heads against the wall because all their stupidity and brainless interference with their parents' lives had only given them a third mom after all.
4. If Paul had not agreed to meet the kids, but actually was their neighbor, and had been part of their lives, and of the household, all along, and no one found this out until the end when Laser needed a liver transplant after falling off his skateboard. Here is where I have to ask you: in what legal world would a sperm bank take a verbal assent over the telephone from the sperm donor as a go-ahead to release contact information to the children? But putting that aside, what would have been cool about this is that it would have put the question front and center: why does it matter to know who your father is? And under what conditions do intimate bonds form between adults, and adults and children, that surpass the conventions toward which we are all encouraged to gravitate? (I just threw in the liver transplant thing for fun.)
5. If Nick and Jules had been gay men, and Jules was living with HIV, and the children went looking for their bio-mom and she turned out to be a closeted lesbian running for governor of California on a family values platformand had to decide whether to sue the Dadz for custody; kill the children to keep them quiet and continue with her life as a conservative; or have a change of heart, convert the Tea Party to a full GLBT rights platform; then become the first woman president of the United States and cause Sarah Palin to have a complete aneurysm. Do I have to tell you that we are now cooking with gas?
Please feel free to add your own plot suggestions in the comments section, or get on with your day, whichever seems more appropriate.
To paraphrase Leslie Nielson in Airplane (1980), "No, not if we are firing black people in public service for talking about race -- and don't call me Shirley." Even out in Minnesota, where the Radical family was taking a vacation from all things political, everyone was aware that it wasn't a great week to be Shirley. Read good commentaries in today's New York Times from Frank Rich, a particularly lucid Maureen Dowd, and Van Jones on the Shirley Sherrod affair.
Sherrod's firing and rehiring by Tom Vilsack, a Midwestern progressive who should have known better (and a West Wing that either signed off or insisted on it) is a teachable moment. Ponder, if you will, what this event tells us about the cynical use of race in contemporary political culture. Why the Obama administration can't do better than it does, particularly given the historical lessons of the Clinton years in which accomplished black women routinely took it on the chin and were then hung out to dry by their allies, is something academics might want to think about too. Has anyone noticed that as women and people of color are breaking through to higher ed. administration in unprecedented numbers, yawning hiring, tenure and salary gaps persist, and are usually explained as the outcome of discrimination that only existed in the past -- discrimination that could not possibly be corrected in the present by women, people of color and self-proclaimed feminist men who now have the power to do exactly that?
But returning to the kamikaze political life that seems to be shaping the nation's destiny, I would like to add a few observations. As someone who is currently working on the history of radical feminism in the 1970s, it seems quite obvious to me that the political right learned to do this from the political left. Look at any New or Old Left social movement, and you will see a kind of winner-take-all viciousness in which a large scale ideological attack often took the form of taking a remark, or a political stance, as a thread that would then be used to unravel the opposition's whole sweater. Look at the dirty politics internal to mid-century American Communism; trashing in radical feminism; the decades-long success of the AFL-CIO in suppressing organizing among non-industrial labor; the internal struggles that ended with the expulsion of whites from SNCC (and the subsequent, less heralded, resignation of many black members of SNCC); and the number of queer organizations that have been founded, and then turned on, by Larry Kramer. In other words, there is some shared responsibility for the development of these practices and for the strategic deployment of dirty tricks, particularly statements that are spun out of context to "prove" a foregone conclusion.
This is not to say that the left is worse than the right in this regard: only that they shared in pioneering this behavior; that it has now been fatally merged with racist right-wing political tactics dating from Reconstruction; and that it is now being perfected in an age in which a media story can be transmitted in nanoseconds.
I would also observe that this is not just a political problem, it's a cultural problem. It is the kind of $hit that occurs daily on blogs: blogger writes a six or seven paragraph essay, and some a$$hat latches onto a sentence out of context, gives it a hateful spin, and writes a "comment" that is actually just a personal attack intended to discredit the blogger wholesale. The idea? Who cares about ideas? You would have to read the whole post to grasp the ideas!!!! How much easier just to move on to the next blog, knowing that the writer is exactly the putrid idiot you knew s/he was before you started reading.
Which is all to say: we have become Adderall Nation. Even our intellectuals and journalists often lack the attention span to read or watch anything all the way through. We tape everything on TV so we won't have to watch the commercials; we subscribe to Twitters from politicians so we won't have to read their position papers; and we read or view something just long enough to have -- not even an idea, but a reaction - and then we express our outrage as a character assassination of the person who provoked us.
Is it about the technology? In other words, if information could not be spread unchecked through blogs and other free social media, would a good woman like Shirley Sherrod have been assaulted in this way? Certainly the technology makes it possible -- but like any other phenomenon that has a history, it doesn't make it inevitable or necessary.
And as my mother used to say, it's the thought that counts.
This is the Part III, and the conclusion, of a discussion between Tenured Radical and Historiann of Terry Castle's "The Professor and Other Writings" (HarperCollins, 2010 -- if you are new to the party, you may wish to begin with Part I.) Yesterday, at Historiann, we discussed the themes of desire and longing that suffuse Castle's narrative about her emergence as an intellectual who has to cross class lines to chart her own path to become an adult, a feminist, a lesbian, an artist, and a deeply original and critical thinker.
Today's post consists of a single exchange in which we historicize the role of suffering in this story. We end with the question of whether, in a day and age in which sexual relations between students and teachers are widely perceived as harmful (and often proscribed by universities), whether the suffering of graduate students has been ameliorated, or it has just shifted to other realms of power, as graduate students continue to struggle to get into the "club."
Tenured Radical: I want to come back to the question of whether brilliance and suffering go together, which is a critical theme of the Art Pepper essay that we both loved. The way Terry Castle tells the story of her affair with the Professor, as you suggested yesterday Historiann, is a dramatic tour de force. But another way of summing up what we discussed, and what compels me, is the portrait of a young person who was so tightly wound and suffused with class anxiety, but also had access to depths of courage that are quite rare. What I wonder is, had she continued down the road she was on, might she have had a nervous breakdown anyway? On a certain level it was a mercy that it was a broken heart, rather than the anxious scholarly habits of her youth, that drove Castle into therapy and a lifetime of self-reflection. We are talking about someone who read all the books for a course before the semester began; and memorized, word for word, the essay she would write for a proctored exam. Something had to give -- or, arguably, maybe nothing would have given, and she would have ended up being a frightened, uptight, conventional little plodder instead of the fabulous Terry Castle.
But to shift gears slightly, I would like to expand the context for The Professor's predatory eroticism for our readers, and Castle's vulnerability to it. One of the things I love about this difficult essay is that Castle evokes the excitement and the contradictions of a 1970s lesbian feminist world. Lots of different things were going on sexually then (a former Zenith professor alludes in her memoir to what I have been told were rampant faculty affairs with undergraduates) and everyone queer was half in and half out of the closet. This is why Castle begins with a reflection on Alix Dobkin's music, which was coy and coded but to young lesbians seemed to really be about sex. It is also why, even though Castle frames the whole genre of "wimmin's music" as deeply dorky by today's standards (musical, feminist or lesbian), she bridles when her partner, Blakey (who came out a decade later), joins her in mocking it. Not so veiled references to masturbation in the lyrics, paeans to gym teachers, using the word "lesbian" over and over in a song -- it was a big deal back then. Someone who came out in the age of ACT-UP and Babeland might find that impossible to understand or misperceive the music as only dorky. One of the moments when I howled with laughter was when Castle did a textual analysis of Dobkin's "The Woman In Your Life," ending it with the command: "Ladies, start your labia!" (159)
But of course Dobkin, Meg Christian, Cris Williamson and that crowd were the soft side of semi-closeted lesbian life which, as Castle pointed out, offered little introduction to a pre-feminist, pre-Stonewall psychopath like The Professor. The coyness and messages to an "in crowd" in these songs also offered little in the way of a road map to becoming an actual lesbian: i.e., to having actual sex with actual women. Castle also emphasizes that much of what was more broadly available about lesbianism (outside of incredibly dense Marxist tracts) was still about women coming to a pathological, lonely and disgraced end (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Killing of Sister George.) Part of what I identify with most strongly in this essay is how difficult it was to actually have sex, and the things one might overlook to get sex -- as Castle did when she pursued an affair with The Professor despite the metaphorical road signs that said: "No!" This essay evokes painful memories of the fumbling, the oblique approaches, the meetings accidentally on purpose, and the sitting for hours smoking weed, trying to decide whether she had meant to bump my foot or was she just reaching for the cigarettes and oh $hit I blew it again. And frankly, although feminism provided a hot atmosphere for sex, the endless conversation about whether all wimmin ought to be lesbians on principle got in the way of figuring out who really wanted to and who didn't.
Because of this, I think Castle makes a great move when she raises the question of who was responsible for what in an affair that would now fit squarely in the category of sexual harassment. Now a middle-aged professor herself with a younger and clearly very self-sufficient lover, Castle wants to better understand her own agency in this affair, "just what it was about her that drew me to her: what peculiar pathos she evinced, and why I was so vulnerable to it." (201)
As you note, Historiann, The Professor is an excellent portrait "of the kind of professor that compulsively sleeps with students." It's also an excellent portrait of an academic atmosphere where women were provisional members of the club, something that had all sorts of deforming consequences. Including myself in this generation of aspiring female intellectuals, I would say that lots of us in the 1970s had our first big love affair with a woman who was, for whatever reason, unavailable, and who appeared to be holding the door open to a life that still admitted a precious few women. What Castle evokes so movingly in this essay is that she was willing to trade so much to be loved and admired. Although she was too naive to see that the affair she wanted was really a "horror movie" (that was a great comparison you made), the affair also freed her to be someone The Professor never could be: a lesbian intellectual.
What follows, I think, is that to become a successful professor is to necessarily become an object of desire. It is a burden and a great responsibility. The evening Castle and The Professor meet, this insecure, lonely graduate student experiences for the first time what it might mean to be an object of desire herself. "[The] Professor's eyes lit up with pleasure," Castle writes; "she kept a light sardonic gaze trained on me for most of the evening." (236) Castle is first welcomed as a guest into the beautiful, cultured world that can be hers as an academic when she sees The Professor's home. That moment really got me, because Castle is being introduced to the life she wants and will have, but she's really going to pay to get it.
I suppose I would link this theme in the essay to a bigger theme in the blogosphere that you and I have commented on: graduate students continue to pay heavily to get into the club, not necessarily with sex (although some do), but emotionally and financially. What is kind of tawdry about the world we live in today, one that is so deeply censorious in theory about sexual harassment (and not always in practice) is that graduate students are tested in such unromantic ways. They rarely have to reach deep inside to dredge out what remains of their self-esteem after a high-drama failed love affair. Instead, the academic marketplace and the profession beckons them, uses them, kicks them out with as little explanation as The Professor deigned to give her conquests ("there were so many excellent candidates -- it was really a matter of field"), or reduces them to unheroic proletarianized labor.
The Professor suing one of her former student-lovers for a sum of money she could have perfectly well afforded to give her strikes me as a parallel to contingent faculty paying back graduate school debt on meagre adjunct salaries.
Historiann: Good point. (And of all The Professor's cruelties, that one really frosted the cookie for me. Unbelievable! It makes one wonder about the depths of humiliation and fear of intimacy that must have been at the root of The Professor's compulsive seductions and manipulations.)
However, individual professors are personally responsible for seducing students. They may be complicit in a broken system, but professors are not personally responsible for the current state of the academic job market their students will face. Where I see the parallel here is in the willingness of the students to be seduced and taken advantage of. This goes back to what you called "the logic and erotic appeal of a secret affair," and the denial you note. It's not just that "she wouldn't lie to me," but also when faced either with a sex life that's an exploitative cliche or a life as a permatemp, it's a consoling belief in the face of the facts that "it won't happen to me. I'll be the exception. I will be loved/employed someday." This kind of denial may be necessary not just in some romantic entanglements, but also in the minds of people who want to pursue an academic career. We're all Clarissa, friends.
This returns us to a theme we discussed earlier--the working-class girl who makes it to Stanford. "The Professor" is fascinating because it makes her survival of her disastrous first Big Love appear to be a bigger triumph than her academic career. (Maybe that's the way it feels to her, and to many of us who made it to employment and tenure.) I still maintain--Pollyanna that I am!--that cruelty, abuse and exploitation aren't necessary either in romance or in our work lives. I really don't think it makes us better people or better at our jobs. But, as Samuel Richardson showed us centuries ago in Castle's second-favorite book of all time, it sure makes for a hell of a story.
Tenured Radical: It sure does. Historiann, I just want to leave our readers with a YouTube video that contains a live recording of Meg Christian singing "Ode To A Gym Teacher" in 1974 at the Full Moon Coffee House in San Francisco (a more recent, live recording of Christian that can't be embedded can be seen here.) But in a way this one is better, because it was put together by a fan who used a pastiche of "wimmin's music" souvenirs from the 1970s for the visual portion, something which Terry Castle the Visual Artist will appreciate, I think.
Susannah York, who plays the up and coming actress and lover to the older, fading telly star Beryl Reid in Robert Aldrich's classic The Killing of Sister George (1969),delivers this fabulous set-up line as she tries to deflect her lover's (accurate) suspicion she is having an affair.
"That is a misfortune that I am perfectly well aware of," Beryl Reid replies tartly. For your viewing pleasure, I provide the whole clip from this classic lesbian psychodrama below:
You can actually get the whole film at YouTube, if you are patient enough to find all the pieces. I now command you to go to Part II of the Terry Castle discussion, "Humiliation and Longing," and if you haven't been there yet, to our partner in crime Comrade Physioprof, who delivers a review of the book that is focused on the humor of "The Professor and Other Writings."
Several weeks ago we at Tenured Radical received an email from Historiann, who was reading Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings (HarperCollins, 2010.) She notified us that this book -- a combination of memoir and cultural criticism -- was right up our alley. Several days later, when this slim volume by a Stanford English professor I have long admired had arrived by three-day shipping (and all household activities had been put on hold indefinitely as we went on a binge of reading and downloading Art Pepper albums), Tenured Radical and Historiann agreed that a blog-to-blog conversation was in order.
This is the first of three posts taken from that conversation, which was conducted over email and then edited down. Day 2 will appear tomorrow at Historiann, and then you will want to return to here for the final post on Day 3 (Thursday, July 22). Stay tuned to Comrade PhysioProf, who also got hooked by this collection and will be chiming in with his own essay during our three-day special event.
Tenured Radical: OK, Historiann, here goes. Much as I want to cut straight to the essay about The Professor Herself, I think we owe our readers a little introduction to Terry Castle. I have been a fan since one of her articles, "The Marie Antoinette Obsession" (Representations 38, Spring 1992) showed up in a pile of submissions for the Berkshire Conference article prize. For people who haven't read it, the article is both historical and literary, and concerns a fin desiecle phenomenon in which Victorian women wrote vivid accounts about imagined relationships with Marie Antoinette's spirit. One woman had a fantasy about having been the doomed Queen's lover in a past life; another pair of women "encountered" her while they were touring Le PetitTrianon. The stories, which overlapped with the emergence of homosexuality and the definition of lesbianism as a female sexual category, became a recurring phenomenon in a very narrow time frame when sexology had emerged but was not yet dominant. In other words, Marie Antoinette encounters were occurring at an intellectual/cultural moment that followed the Oscar Wilde trial in which the idea of "homosexuality"carried legal and social stigma but the idea of sex between women did not, nor was lesbianism more generally understood as a scientific description for women who loved each other. Since it was widely rumored that Marie Antoinette had had affairs with women (it was one of the charges at her trial, along with the accusation she had committed incest with the Dauphin), she became a tragic figure into which late nineteenth century women inserted fantasies about "who they were." I remember thinking that this was one of the most intelligent and imaginative articles I read that year, and I wondered, who is this person?
But I never bothered to find out until you suggested I read this new book, The Professor and Other Writings, a collection of essays that are pleassantlyun-academic, but equally imaginative, intelligent, creative and quirky. And of course, you were exactly right when you said that Terry Castle is a blogger manque. Who knew the Stanford English Department harbored someone like us?
Historiann: Who, indeed. At first, her essays seemed rather discursive and not terribly argument driven, which is what made me think that they were written in more of a bloggy fashion than in traditional essay form. But, as on blogs that mix the personal and the quotidian with the professional and the profound, it works for her. For example, in "My Heroin Christmas," she explores her fascination with jazz musician Art Pepper by listening compulsively to his recordings on a DVD walkman and reading his semi-pornographic 1979 autobiography, Straight Life while visiting her mother over the holidays. (She calls Straight Life "the greatest book I've ever read. . . It knocked my former pick, Clarissa, right out of first place. As Art himself might say, my joint is getting big just thinking about it," 42. That was a pretty clever bit of foreshadowing there--pay attention!)
Towards the beginning of the essay, she notes that she's staying in a room in her mother's house that used to belong to "Jeff." Jeff? When I first read that, I thought, "how odd--or even sloppy--to mention a character who hasn't yet been introduced to us." But over the course of the essay in which she explores Pepper's outrageous, reckless life, Castle makes it clear why she is thinking and writing about Jeff and his role in her troubled family life. At the end of the essay, it makes sense that she riffs off of Pepper's music and autobiography in exploring the family life she lived as the child of divorce whose parents both remarried and introduced stepchildren into the family.
I also really enjoyed "Sicily Diary," a hilarious description of a holiday with her girlfriend in 2004 in which she memorably sees the Capuchin catacombs full of mummified corpses, picks up a stomach bug, and feels conspicuously middle-aged and Anglophone. Here's a sample: "Like a fool I kept trying to eat that night: had some tortellini with Maalox for supper, washed down by a large bicchierri of orange flavored Metamucil, the healthful fiber supplement B. [her girlfriend] had brought with us from California. Tottering around Lipari town that evening--everyone else in thongs and mini-shorts and see-through beach wraps--we looked pale and Victorian and ridiculously out of place. Lady Hester Stanhope and her Special Friend. Why hadn't we gone to Lesbos instead?" Another memorably funny passage inspired by her new dachshund pup, Wally: "Though only eight months old, Wally is as slutty and insouciant as Private Lyndie England. All she needs is a dangling cigarette and a tiny pair of four-legged camouflage pants," 84.
"Desperately Seeking Susan" is one of the two essays that has received the most attention in this collection, and anybody over the age of 35 will probably flip to this one first, because it recounts Castle's sort-of friendship with Susan Sontag, a public intellectual of great interest to many girls or young women who ever dreamed of living in New York and having people listen to them and take them very, very seriously. Castle got acquainted with Sontag when Sontag sent Castle a fan letter (really!) and then had a stint as a writer-in-residence at Stanford. But, being friends with Susan Sontag sounds like a lot of work and a lot of self-repression, because like a lot of smarty-pants people (regardless of celebrity, but magnified by it undoubtedly), Sontag sounds like she was mostly a condescending pain-in-the-a$$. Castle tells several stories of how she's reminded clearly and in no uncertain terms that she's not in with the koolkidz in New York: "I was never quite sure what she wanted. And besides, whatever that was, after a while she stopped wanting it. I visited her several times in New York City and even got invited to the London Terrace penthouse to see the famous book collection. (Of course, Terry, mine is the greatest library in private hands in the world.)," 98.
Who talks like that? Have you ever had a friend who repeatedly called you by your first name like that? I have, and I find it terribly condescending, as though I might forget my own name or my place (subordinate, always!) in the relationship.
Tenured Radical: Not exactly. But I do think it is a not uncommon experience for popular, non-academic writers to cling to academics with a combination of lust and loathing. And really famous people can be dramatically insecure - often all those dinner parties, fans and bombast are about bolstering their own egos. The public intellectual and the academic can be a perfect combination made in hell, if you think about it. They don’t have the credentials, and we do; we don’t have the audience we crave and they do. So it’s this nasty little circle of envy and dependence, where we are pretty much always the supplicants – except, as in the Sontag case, where the playing field was initially leveled because Sontag was out of her element during the Stanford fellowship and it triggered all her insecurities. I’m guessing that glomming onto Castle was her way of reassuring her self that she was still "Susan Sontag." She needed someone to perform in front of who also knew the ropes and customs of academia.
Historiann: Great point. There’s a similar kind of envy and loathing that characterizes the relationship between scholars and journalists in particular. They hate it that we have tenure, but we don’t have the audience that they do. (At least off-blog!)
I am Claire B. Potter, Professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. My blogging ethic is neither to name or to accurately describe individuals unless I am writing about a public event, or commenting on information already published about that person in a reputable source. Unless I note otherwise, situations, pseudonymous people and professional dilemmas described here are fictional. Uncivil or mean-spirited comments toward me or anyone else will be deleted, as will advertisements for products or services disguising themselves as comments. The Radical can also be found at her Zenith faculty page and at Cliopatria; scholarly and public writing can also be found here. The banner photo was taken from this page.
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