Monthly Archives: March 2008

Friday Random Ten: “my wife’s in Boca Raton and I’m stuck in the San Gabriel Valley” edition

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My beloved will be back on Monday, and then all this traveling without me stops and we can start going places together again.

Both Girlyman and the Duhks are artists I discovered via Pandora; the first bonus track breaks my heart, and while #5 takes me back to high school, #8 brings me back even further.

1. “God Walks the Dark Hills”, Iris DeMent
2. “This Is Me”, Girlyman
3. “Samson”, Regina Spektor
4. “Dance Hall Girls”, The Duhks
5. “Two Suns in the Sunset”, Pink Floyd
6. “Umbrella”, Rihanna
7. “Tomorrow”, Rosie Thomas
8. “Summer, Highland Falls”, Billy Joel
9. “Radiation Vibe”, Hem
10. “Up to the Mountain” (MLK Song), Patty Griffin

Bonus Track One: “Promise, The”, Tracy Chapman
Bonus Track Two: “Breakin’ the Chains”, Dokken

Revive us again: noting an old post in praise of ED

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In my Humanities class on the “body” yesterday, I noted in passing that there was much to be said for erectile dysfunction. I have always maintained that men would be far more insufferable than they otherwise are trained to be if the penis was, in fact, a muscle entirely under their control. For those who want to read my original post on the subject, here it is.

The money quote: ED literally softens the penis; it can also figuratively soften a man by forcing him to rethink his allegiance to a cruel and unattainable standard.

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“We love your look, but lose fifteen pounds”: of modeling contracts, feminist principles, and the elitist politics of personal purity: UPDATED

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One of my students came to me yesterday with a question. “Carine” is twenty, and has already taken four of my classes here. She’s getting ready to transfer on to a four-year school, and she’s doing so — to my considerable delight — as a women’s studies major.

Carine is an independent student, and has lived on her own for several years. She’s entirely self-supporting, and her parents have contributed nothing towards her college education. (This is a very common story here.) She is taking a full load of classes, and working a great many shifts as a server in a West Los Angeles restaurant. Though the tips are good, she’s barely scraping by. Her twelve year-old Camry is on the verge of complete collapse. Something’s gotta give.

Since she was in high school, Carine has done a little bit of modeling here and there; it’s provided a little extra pocket money from time to time, nothing too significant. But now, with transfer looming and the economy hitting the restaurant business, she’s decided to investigate making her modeling more serious. She has the right look, and earlier this week, she met with one of the better-known agencies in town. They loved her face and her portfolio, and were quite willing to sign Carine to a “conditional” contract. The “conditions”: lose three inches off her hips and drop fifteen pounds off her already lanky frame. The agency would check in her with regularly to assess her “progress”; if she did as she was asked, she could be assured of steady work. There’s no question that taking this contract would make a huge difference to Carine. It will enable her to transfer, to stay on course for her degree (in women’s studies, heaven be praised), to remain independent.

Carine is a self-described “staunch feminist”. She took my women’s studies class and was hooked; she regularly e-mails me for “more books, please!” I send her reading suggestions at a staggering rate, and she ploughs through them just as fast. And Carine, like so many young feminists I’ve known, was worried about whether taking this contract would compromise those infamous “feminist credentials.” She said something like: “I know the fashion industry sends a lot of destructive messages to women. If I lose this weight, do I become part of that destructive message? Am I hurting other women as well as myself?” Continue reading →

Thursday Short Poem: Brackenbury’s “6:25″

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Alison Brackenbury’s short poem is the very thing for this first week of daylight savings time. It’s been awfully dark the past few mornings, and I was up a bit before the time she chooses as her title. Then again, I’ve only once in my adult life been in England in December; the lateness of the dawn was unbelievably dispiriting.

6:25

My day begins with darkness
Since I get up too soon.
Hung vast above the garage end
A brilliant moon
Ignores the morning radio,
White sea without an ebb
Freezes the lithe ash twigs
A glittered web.

The light is metal, deep and pure.
It is what Plato’s cave
Ached for, truth, the throb of power
His shadows gave.

It borrows from the animals
Snow of the owl’s wing
Flash of the badger’s white cheek, wet
From tunnelling.

Gleams slide from gutter, shed and slate,
The radio plays on.
I burn my toast. The east turns blue.
The moon has gone.

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Shared ambition, shared humiliation: some thoughts on women, marriage and public betrayal

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With complete predictability in the aftermath of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, the media has begun a frenzied analysis of how exactly it is that wives ought to respond to their husbands’ very public infidelities. The Los Angeles Times runs a story this morning about Silda Spitzer, connecting her to the suffering political spouses before her: Wife puts troubling face on the Spitzer scandal. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Joe Garofali asks Why do political wives stand by their men? And Dr. Laura, whose ability to find fault with women for everything is near-legendary, suggested on the Today Show that wives “share the blame” for their husbands’ philandering. (Next week, she explains how women’s materialism led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis!)

The feminist response to Spitzer himself is fairly straightforward: anger, shock, disappointment. But the media — and ordinary folks — seem eager for those who identify as feminists to offer up a “protocol” for how a “real feminist” woman ought to respond to the revelation of her husband’s betrayal. And the frustrating thing, of course, is that the spouse is immediately placed in a no-win situation. If she appears in public by her husband’s side (as so many have done), she risks the accusation that she is a “doormat”, or that she is willing to sacrifice her dignity for the sake of her husband’s career. If she doesn’t appear, she’s unsupportive, abandoning him in his hour of great need and crisis. She garners sympathy, but that sympathy tends to be contingent upon how well the wife lives up to the observer’s expectation of how a wife “ought” to behave. If she deviates from the script, the scorn that awaits her from all sides is as great as that directed towards her husband — if not greater. Continue reading →

A Cuppe of News

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My brother has a blog, of a sort: A Cuppe of News. It’s a bulletin board for information about upcoming talks in early modern studies throughout Southwest England. My little brother is senior lecturer at Exeter, father of three, and one of the men in the world whom I admire most.

And an archive of my little sister’s writing at the Santa Barbara Independent is here. She is 29 today, which is a splendid age to be.

“God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines”: more on Spitzer, sin, redemption

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As we await what must be the inevitable resignation announcement from Eliot Spitzer, it occurs to me I’ve posted a few times on the all-too-well-known theme of a fall from grace on the part of an admired — invariably male — public figure. Here’s a selection:

Private virtue, public justice: some very long thoughts on men, leadership, and the lie of “compartmentalism”

“There Never Was a War that Was Not Inward”: a long reflection on Ted Haggard

“The inner darkness of the redeemed”: in defense of Mel Gibson

Lengthy musings about Clinton, feminism, erotic justice

The titles of these posts are sufficiently descriptive as to require no further explanation. What I’ve said about Bill Clinton, Antonio Villaraigosa, Ted Haggard and Mel Gibson (an odd quartet indeed) more or less applies to Eliot Spitzer. And the bookers from the major chat shows have already called up the legion of pop psychologists who appear at times like this, all proffering an answer to the timeless question: “Why would a man like X, in his position, with so much going for him, do something so monumentally stupid?” By now we know all the answers: sexual addiction; deep-seated shame and the desire to be punished; self-destructiveness; mid-life crises; good, old-fashioned hubris. And because falls from grace are often breathtaking in their suddenness, we are fascinated as the ancients were fascinated. These are, as everyone points out, very old stories. Continue reading →

Facebook and teaching

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My former student Hilary is now at UCLA, and she alerts me to this article in today’s Daily Bruin: Instructors use tech to reach students. It’s about professors who give out their cell phone numbers or use Facebook to stay in touch with students.

My students generally don’t have my cell phone number, though most of the kids from my old youth group program still do. I have something like 470 contacts on Facebook, of which perhaps 125-150 are current or former students. I don’t list Facebook on my syllabus as one of the primary ways to contact me; I urge students to use email and office hours. At the same time, I’m happy to let those students who do prefer Facebook to contact me that way. I don’t like to answer lengthy questions using that format, but am happy to respond to shorter ones on the site. Continue reading →

Spitzer sadness

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I’m saddened by the announcement today that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a promising and exciting progressive voice in American politics, has admitted involvement with a prostitution ring.

Spitzer’s record on women’s issues has been solid. This revelation from the married father of three is devastating, not least because it reinforces what we all insist should still be seen as a myth: that progressive, pro-feminist men are incapable of matching their public language with their private lives. (Roll call: Bill Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Antonio Villaraigosa, Henry Cisneros, and so on and so on.) It’s not that only progressive men commit infidelity, and it’s not as if “ordinary” marital infidelity is entirely equivalent to involvement in prostitution. But those who work for justice for women, and do so publicly, connect the cause for which they fight with their own personality and their own behavior. I’ve made the case that private morality does matter, in this post here. Continue reading →