"Religion" vs. Religion

Over at Emery's place, they're having a comment war worthy of a high-profile blog; it's mainly here but perhaps also here.

I think some of the invective develops out of a confusion over the difference between religion and "religion." Emery is concerned to talk about the former, in the terms of how we might define it, by just looking at the content of various religions and trying to come up with its minimal content. TenaciousMcD, in the comments, offers a political response, that I think is focused on the latter: the discursive and therefore political use of the term, what it means in context. The evidence for my hypothesis can be found within the flame war between TMcD and CuratLex, where the latter does in fact assume that the former is not religious precisely because TMcD supports the democrats.

I'm thereby reframing TMcD's original argument, but basically I buy what he says:

what exactly are the minimal requirements to qualify as "religious" in today's non-creedal America? I think there are really two: 1)you profess to believe in God; and 2)you at least lean Republican on cultural issues (abortion, gay rights, etc.). The sign of being VERY religious is that you strongly support the GOP on BOTH cultural and economic issues.

Now this may not make much logical sense since the major criterion (the second) is not religious at all. But what I would suggest is that, precisely due to the lack of natural common ground among believers of disparate faiths, politics has filled the gap, and the GOP has rushed to offer a unifying political content to vouch for "religious" credibility.

My sense of things after a few months in the UK, is that this political construction of "religion" ("filling the gap") has not occurred here, and for that reason religion doesn't matter much at all (which is not to say there are no believers here). This creates a context in which it would be easier to have the discussion that Emery initially aimed to have. I think that in the US it's almost impossible to talk about religion without invoking the politics that TMcD describes, and that's because of the success of the radical right's effort to tie religious symbols to political affiliation, and vice versa.

I wonder if it doesn't also have something to do with faith. I don't know many folks who have genuine faith, but the one's that do (one sometimes reads this blog, and one is TMcD himself) don't seem to have any interest whatsoever in politicizing that faith. When those on the right in US politics politicize theirs, I tend to assume, then, that they don't really have much faith at all.

Who Would you Vote for?

Here's The Guardian's Description of the new leader of the Tory party, David Cameron.

This afternoon he will visit east London to talk about social justice; a speech on the environment will follow within days. The coming weeks will bring an announcement on measures to increase the number of women MPs, a theme he stressed in his victory speech yesterday. ...he intends to abandon such things as education vouchers and support for private healthcare. As a leader who describes himself as a small-l liberal he will calm the party's obsession with issues such as asylum and immigration, and not just for symbolic reasons.

Yes, folks, the Tories are the party on the right in this country. So if you thought of yourself as being somewhere on the left of the so-called political spectrum, and you had to choose, hypothetically, between...oh, I don't know, say, John Kerry, and this guy, who would you pick?

Giant 1956

I recorded Giant, that mid-50s sublime, sweeping, elegant, and I would even say expressionist film starring Rock, Liz, and James. What a trio. I had seen it years ago in my teenage James Dean phase, which only later I realized very few girls in the 1980s went through. I blame/thank Mom for this one. Giant is an amazing film, and only in seeing it again this past week (and yes, it was seen over the course of a week in small chunks. the thing is hours long!) did I recognize its brilliance. It has everything: class warfare (nouveaux riche meets rancher/Texan rich meets Maryland aristocracy), gender (boy howdy Liz's character is a firecracker, and Luz? one of the most poignant portrayals of queerness from the 50s, if I may be so bold), race (the fight in the diner is still one of the most horrifying scenes on film), nationalism/Texas separatism/patriotism (eg said fight with the Yellow Rose of Texas blaring from the jukebox), and modernity in all its glory (the rise of the oil rich and the entry of technology, from phones to planes, alongside the o-so-fabulous interior design choices at the mansion. sigh.)

Can James Dean act? I don't know. It seemed as though the director was more interested in fun noir lighting whenever we had a closeup of him, and thus it's unclear. But the range of emotion/age he is asked to portray, and the line he walks between sweet and lecherous is just too precise to really be an accident. I'm going with yes, good acting, and boy did Brad Pitt steal everything from this guy.

Rock Hudson's opening moment, with the camera sweeping across the Maryland landscape to the train and then to the window and his chiseled face--how striking. The hat! the look! His portrayal of the well-meaning but ultimately backward-looking patriarch was touching, humorous, and a perfect match for Liz...

who, let's face it, as my mother and I used to say, aged much better in real life than she did in the film. a few too many surgeries, darling, but ya look great.

life, with less reflection

blogging is about reflecting on the world around us and our participation in that world, or at least our movement through it. over the past few days I've reached the conclusion that perhaps a "less-reflected upon life" might be a better life, or at least a balance between the whole "living" thing and the "thinking" thing might be good. (see Tarn's rumination on "fallow" periods and cycles of being in the world...this has had me thinking since she posted it ages ago.)

tough for someone who ostensibly "thinks" for a career, hence the problem, but I think that I'm trying to articulate different kinds of action: action/work that involves thinking versus thinking constantly about actions one is failing, entirely, to pursue. so I'm looking to immerse myself a bit less in the minutiae of the web, planning for a nebulous future, and reflection and a bit more in, well, doing what I do and living.

sounds good from here.

PS apologies for using the phrase "being in the world" in this post. those who are now inadvertently, against their will, "thrown into" a discussion about Being, being, and ontology will please absolve me of any blame...

Really?

Here's the 'top stories' listing from the main CNN.com homepage this morning. Is there absolutely no quality control whatsoever?

Last week they had a story about the snow and cold temperatures in Europe; they reported that temperatures fell to minus 10 Celsius, and then they said '(minus 23 Fahrenheit)'. Of course, minus 10 Celsius is actually plus 14 Fahrenheit, so they were off by almost forty degrees. I emailed them (yes, I'm that pathetic) and informed them (not necessarily politely, but not utterly rudely either) of their error. I never saw the story changed (yes, I checked).

But this thing this morning seems beyond the pale. They cannot even get the short phrase headlines correct: instead we have a major in New Orleans, and France biting people Africans. I like to check the CNN headlines, just to know what's making the agenda in somethign near the center of American journalism. Perhaps I should give up and just stick to European press.

Whew!

Can you sense my relief and exhaustion? That's right: this week brought to a close a full four weeks of teaching. It was gruelling, let me tell you. Even worse is the knowledge that I'll have to start up teaching again a mere 2 months from now!

But seriously, while there's less teaching here, it's made up for in many other ways. For example? How about my 90 minute 'admissions committee' meeting today, or the 3 hours of candidate interviews I conducted earlier in the week. All of those things that US University administrations do, we do here through the department - including the entire admissions process. Next week begins the 'marking' period, where ALL of the assesment materials will have to be read by the department as a whole, with 2 markers assigned for every piece of work. Each of us gets a number assigned for the centralized distribution of marking. Mine is 300 and some change, and I've no real idea what that means. I do know that there are 3 to 4 weeks of the year where the entire department is marking full time.

Also, keep in mind that a 68 would be an outstanding mark, a 50 is not too bad, and anything above about a 76 is unheard of.

My Restraint

I wanted to post a ranting response to this rant, itelf a response to this article on, roughly, the state of feminism and gender relations today.

Instead, I fooled around with the blogroll thingy that Paul set up. I now seem to have it working, but the layout is missing the cool little blogspot bullets. I'm hoping that Rebecca will figure out how to fix that, since on blogroll it looked like it involved css or some other technology that's not my friend.

But I will say two quick things: 1. go read the first article, but 2. please do so with this in mind, a point missed by the ranter: it's not about YOU. It's about the broad ambit of gender relations in society today, it's about an effort to shift and change those norms, and a worry that today they resemble 1955 more than 1985. And, if anything it really ought to be, in this particular case, more about men than women.

they rebelled

there are many of us with unspoken or even spoken, shouted, freely admitted rituals surrounding our televisions and viewing thereof. these rituals, like all traditions, are living and change, adapt, welcoming in new content, new genres, old stories in new garb. rituals are calming, centering. they ground you particularly if and when you are in transition (for however long that may last). and even when you're not in transition, they help to remind you who you are, where you come from, where you might be going. comfort. And so it is without much surprise that Sam and I have developed a ritual of watching at least one Battlestar Gallactica (new series) each night. What is it about BG that is so compelling? It's not a stretch to suggest that this story has indeed been told before (um, can you say 1980s series? can you say the book of Exodus? can you say 'frack me'?) and yet the way they have put this one together (naturally, many of the special effects guys worked on—you guessed it—Firefly) is unbelievably compelling. Visually, in terms of the familial relationships on board, in terms of the political and societal tensions that go along with being under siege and trying to save your species from extinction. It is the entire package. Plus, the enemy is embodied by blonde leggy hotty, and although she's a bit skinny for my taste, her character is fascinating.

The real reason we watch, of course, is for the "previously" narrative they put at the beginning of each episode. It's right after the Universal studios musical banner, which is also fabulous. Something about the imperial "universal" word curving around the bluer-than-blue globe, from India to Africa, and the horns playing, and the tympany. But then they have this lovely syncopated single note that grounds the backstory, brilliantly illustrated not only by film images but also by this wonderful text that fades in and out in exactly the correct and proper manner:
The Cylons were created by Man
They rebelled
They evolved
They look, and feel
human
Some of them believe they are human
There are many copies
And they have a Plan.

hee hee!

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Having finally finished the book listed at the right for the past month or two, I felt it appropriate to join the bandwagon of reviewing such things and share some thoughts.

Apparently this was the unofficial book of the month club book in the UK a few years back, and thus everyone here has read it. Which is good—it's a sweeping tale of several families living in north London (where the author is also from), reaching back into their pasts (and ancestral pasts) and peering into their futures. Oddly, though, unlike sweeping epic sagas of family this doesn't truly sweep: it's more intimate than that, following particular characters through the choices they make and the struggles they have with their own limited worldviews.

It's about feeling displaced, the core element of diasporic living, and about trying to figure out what your culture is when you can't go home again. The families are Bangladeshi, white-white/Jamaican, and waspy mcwasp, and you get this wonderful clashing among them, portrayals of partial friendships that don't quite know how deep to go (or how deep they really are), do-gooder white folk who end up learning more about themselves than helping anyone else, and various problematic religions, from the Jamaican Jehovah's witnesses to the Bangladeshi son's sliding into Islamic fundamentalism to the deluded animal rights group FATE.

The novel is in the vein of Rushdie, in the sense that it picks up his magical realist flavoring without going fully into it (no Gibreel surviving a plane crash here). But certain elements of the narrative and the characterization have that flavor, from the name of the fundamentalist Islamic group (KEVIN) to the over the top self-righteousness of the Reason-worshipping, over-achieving, patriarchal Chalfen family.

My primary critique of the book is that like Rushdie, things are connected in ways one isn't expecting, but unlike Rushdie, here it seems a bit forced. It's her first novel, and it's quite brilliant—nothing glaring at all—but there are passages where I thought it might be better to take some time, slow down, and not try to make the connections so quickly. And other moments in which the slower, methodical pacing of the novel, character development, scene-building, attention to spaces was abandoned with a quick flourish (I'm thinking here of the scene towards the end where the twins finally confront one another).

That said, the book has wonderful sections where she isn't rushing. Her discussion of what it means to be "involved" with someone, someone's family, someone's history is amazing (somewhere between the "v"s it happens); her care and caring for the mother of the Chalfen family despite Joyce's unbelievable blindness to what her actions are truly doing; her portrayal of spaces, from the no-pork Muslim-run pub that serves primarily chips and beans to the differences between rooms piled with expatriate "stuff" and the Chalfen patriarch's office space. I'm looking forward to reading her more recent works, including On Beauty, which was nominated for the Booker this year.

Michelle WieBeats or ties FORTY Male Professional Golfers

If you glance around this morning, you'll find no shortage of the following headlines: 'Wie Misses Cut Again'. The message is direct and simple, though lengthy. It says: 1. Michelle Wie is a failure, 2. Wie chokes under pressure, 3. Women cannot beat men in sports, ever, full stop.

This sort of reporting captures both an essential misunderstanding of golf and an essential, distorted, and ultimately failed attempt to assert male superiority. First, when you miss the cut in golf it means you are just below average. Being .500 in baseball is considered pretty good. Wie was one shot away (and she missed 5 foot putts on the last two holes) from being above .500; instead, she was one shot below .500. This is not a failure. Before Tiger Woods, the top players in the world missed numerous cuts throughout the year; Phil Mickelson missed 5 this year (Tiger, two).

The headlines would all have us believe that Wie has once again proven that women can't beat men. But the headlines fail to mention how VERY close she was to making the cut: the SI story and many others FAIL TO MENTION WHAT THE CUT LINE WAS AT ALL!!!!!!. This is convenient for their framing, since it lets them say, simply 'she failed' but not to let us in on the actual facts of how close she was. Moreover, they also neglect to tell us this: 100 professional golfers played two rounds of golf; a 16 year old girl beat or tied 40 of those 99 other male, adult professional golfers. Hence my headline.

If you took every man in the world who plays golf, Michelle Wie would annhilate about 95% of them; she would consistently beat another 3% of them; she'd be close to the next 1%; and probably the top 1% of male golfers in the world would beat her consistently. Thus, the top 100 players in the entire world can rest easy, knowing that they would consistently beat the 16 year old girl.

But to EVERYONE else out there, to all of those reporters and bloggers producing the headlines about her failure, just keep this in mind, she may have missed the cut, but she would KICK YOUR ASS!

(Sincere apologies for repeated use of screaming all caps, but I really felt like screaming when I read these headlines.)

welsh thanksgiving: redux

cranberries!
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

we had a fabulous and authentic welsh thanksgiving over at Keri and Alan's yesterday, followed by snow this morning covering everything! very exciting. pictures up on the flickr site...

hope those in the US are having a wonderful shopping day on Black Friday, and we'll let you know when we're recovered from the excesses of yesterday...

a traditional welsh thanksgiving (preview)

Straight from the bog to your holiday table!

Status update

finished:

• cranberry sauce (homemade) and cranberry sauce (procured, canned)
  
• plantain stuffing
  
• pumpkin and butternut squash (adaptation) soup
  
• baked apples (currently in oven)
  
• cornbread baked and crumbled ready for cornbread stuffing
  

to do:

• cornbread stuffing
  
• green bean casserole

The glories of the interwebs have provided me with various ingredients peculiar to Thanksgiving, such as the Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce, Libby's Canned Pumpkin, and of course French's Fried Onions. Like July 4th, which is sponsored, you will recall, by Old Navy ("oh say, can you save..."), Thanksgiving is branded by French's, Libby's, Ocean Spray, Kraft (for Stove Top) and of course Pillsbury, the geniuses who invented easy to roll out, guess-free crusts. We love those guys. Despite their corporate greed, destruction of America's small farms, over use of high fructose corn syrup, and the like. I mean Stove Top people!

The interwebs also provided me with every recipe with the exception of Jackie and Tim's apples and the phronesis on Liz's pumpkin soup (which she has beautifully adapted from the internet, by the way), and Sam's family cornbread stuffing (which they call dressing, but what can you do?).

I found it fascinating that so many people post their family recipe on line, and even better that the subsequent "ratings" involve really helpful discussions of what worked and what didn't. So you get the phronesis through the web. Who cares if we're bowling alone? We're cooking together!

PS: I also found a site for Dad and engineers everywhere: Cooking for Engineers. I love the charts.

I have been honoured...

...by being cast in the role of 'Calvino' in Paul's most recent, and (I think) final post on Bayes and doom and odds and such. This will be my final thought as well, as I'm not sure anyone but Paul and I are still paying attention. Still, I needed to say not only that I wept from laughter while reading this, but also that I finally got the distinction Paul was drawing beetween my critique and his. And yes, he was up to something more radical. Indeed, I think his position (with whihc I wholeheartedly agree) undermines the grounds upon which the vast majority of modern social science has been built. Of course, it's no secret that the stars are falling from the sky...

holla back

I find the holla back nyc site linked above very interesting for a variety of reasons. I believe I got there from this article on Salon.com, where they point out some of the benefits and drawbacks to this sort of thing, but it is a nice intersection of community-building, alleviating the isolation of being stared at/heckled/objectified in public spaces, and the use of the cameraphone for panoptic policing in the hands of those who normally don't have much say in what happens when heckling begins.

In India they call this behavior "eve-teasing" and as in the US, it's not just innocent fun or words or even threats with no physical consequences. It's about fear and the inability even to go to a museum without being chased through it "just to talk." It reminds me of a rather cathartic talk session I had once with four other women who study India--we were in a cab sharing our worst "grope stories" from our research days. Not one of us didn't have one, and some were much worse than I had experienced. But of course it doesn't need to cross the line into physical contact directly--it all affects your physical being, your ability to move around, to dress a certain way (although I found that it didn't matter how baggy my trousers were or how potato-sack-like my tunic was, they still stared), your blood pressure, your psychological well-being.

It also reminded me of an afternoon session on protecting oneself from physical assault run by IMPACT that involved teaching women (and they have some courses for men--the gendered nature of self-defense courses is a bit of a problem) what to do and what not to do in situations where you do feel threatened and thus are threatened. One of the women in the group was younger (high school) and so would talk back in situations rather than attempting to extricate herself. It was interesting because I completely get her feeling of wanting to take back the power by talking back, wanting to rise to the heckles, act like a man, but she ended up putting herself in a more vulnerable position by answering, revealing things about herself, her plans for the night, whatever it was, that then the heckler-cum-attacker used against her. So this hollaback site seems to be a good thing to me. shame a few people, perhaps. not give anything away except that you have a cell phone (and could call someone or the police) and you've taken their picture (thus recording their face for any future legal action).

I can recommend IMPACT to anyone in a city where they do courses--even the few hours I spent there gave me a good sense of what instincts to trust and what not to trust in a threatening situation. The main thing I took away from my short course was the ability to speak the word "No" and have it be heard. They teach you how to break through your politeness training into a forceful verbal negative. In other words, they make girls learn how to shout, once and for all. How great is that?

It would be a great world in which hollaback and IMPACT didn't have to exist, and yet. and yet.

the odds are in no way 99

I have discovered in the last few days of posting, commenting and discussing that there is a simple chemical equation out there:

me + discussions of statistics ==> stupid me
anyone else feeling this?

I think it was the moment I read the link from OaO's blog that first fateful day that pointed to a helpful explanation of the Doomsday argument, here.

I suppose my problem is this: I'm not good with assuming abstract things and then applying said abstractions to made-up physical, real-world hypothetical examples (that, by the way, are supposed to make it easier). So, for example, when asked whether I'm in the first third or the last two-thirds of humanity, I of course first think: how could one know this? And then I think, hm. Well, the population hasn't been constant at all since the purported beginning of humanity, what with the whole black death thing, the exponential growth post-industrial revolution, and now the leveling off and even negative growth in some wealthier regions. I think about the effects of dentistry on eating habits and life span, the brutal conditions for agrarians in various periods, the fact that Mumtaz Mahal died bearing her 14th child (and didn't that just suck), the nomadic practices of various groups of Mongolians in the 10thc. And so you see: I am an historian.

I get the situated knowledge thing (I've read some recent anthropology, people!) and so it just seems that these questions that statistics asks and answers, or should I say this particular question, strikes me as silly. And it offends me that it makes me feel "stupid" not to follow something so clearly ridiculous as using basic logic and some 18th c. guy's theory about stats to figure out which number human you are. Shouldn't we be more careful with the questions we ask? Is there an ethics of statistics in which certain questions, which may prompt folks to argue about the precise location and identity of human number one, for example, as well as the precise date and time of the end of days/rapture, to be ill-formed? She asks these questions having not herself questioned their ethics?

Herewith endeth the 99th post of our blog.

Randomness vs. 'Random Sample'

Excuse me, everyone, for using this space for my own education and not for, well, whatever else it is supposed to be for. Señor gadfly writes in the comments:

what it [the doomdsday argument] tells you is that if there are two choices, ten time marbles or a hundred time marbles, you are (much) likelier to be in the former case.

Yes, but it only tells you that if I think that I have drawn myself from a random sample of all possible marbles. Before I draw myself, I have to assume, as a prior probability, that there is an equal chance of humans living for just a little bit of time, or for a very long bit of time. It's only after the sample is drawn (i.e. us) that we can revise to a posterior probability that doomsday comes early. And we cannot make that statistical leap because we are not a random sample.

Finally, and more importantly:

it's 2005 and I'm alive on the earth. What are the odds I'm American? Do the math and you'll come up with an answer that's around 1 in 24, or about a 4% chance. And you're wrong, the Odds Are One™, I am in fact American. Bayes says I should bet on me being not American, but if I were to do so, I'd lose. Don't get me wrong, I think the Doomsday Argument is totally, utterly invalid, but I don't think it lies in deciding whether you're a random human or not, because it seems very difficult to show that this isn't the case, just as it's difficult to show that it is. I think the answer is really more Platonic than that--you and I can't be defined as random human number 60-billion-and-some-odd, because we cannot be separated from our 20th century-ness, our American-ness, our iPod-having-ness.

Two things: 1) I'm totally with the Fly on the notion that we aren't random humans and we can't look back at prior events and say in a meaningful way 'what are the odds that would have happened' when, in fact, they have already happened. The odds are one (can I say that without getting sued? Any chance any lawyers read this blog?). 2) However. Before knowing who you are, you should bet on your not being 'merican. But once you 'sample yourself' as it were, wouldn't Bayes say you should revise your probabilities upward? But the Bayesian logic depends on the notion not that YOU are random, but that if we have chosen you, we have chosen you from a random sample of ALL humans. Bayes isn't even telling us about the odds that you are American. He's telling us, about the chances that there are only Americans in the world, with the prior possibility being X and the posterior possiblity (if you've picked an American) being a much larger X. That breaks out as follows:

A. If I say, I'm going to pick a human being (not me) at random from the billions of us out there, then the odds are 1 in 24 that I will pick an American.
B. If I say, what are the odds that I'm American, then 'the odds are one'.
C. If I then say, from out of the entirety of human history (forward in time until its end) what are the odds that I would pick someone who has lived prior to 2005, then the odds are slim. However, to then sample from the population alive today, I break the primary rule of statistics, in that we are not a random sample of all humans.

What I'm trying to say - if anyone still cares by now – is that point C and point B are very much distinct. The Odds are One (point B) is an argument about how we aren't random humans, and about how we can't look back in time and attribute statistical probabilities to things that have already happened. Point C is merely the assertation that we can't sample from the PRESENT and presume it is a random sample of ALL TIME, because we aren't living at the end of time.

On the other hand, maybe the Fly's point is simply beyond me, and involves something far past the simple Bayesian logic. But I still think that Bayes tells the Fly nothing about his being an American, until after he has found out his IS American, at which point Bayes and the Fly agree, in that the latter says 'the odds are one' and the former says, 'we do not have a random sample any longer, so my logic does not apply'.

Temporality

Paul is at it again, making me and others think about statistics, and analytic philosophy. Damn him, doesn't he know that if I wanted to think all the time I would have wasted the last decade or more trying to be an intellectual?

I've never studied the Doomdsday Argument, because I've never done serious analytic philosophy but more importantly because (after looking at the argument) I think I got a better training in statistics than all that. In other words, it seems to me that one does not need to make a philosophical critique of the argument, because it's based on an utterly invalid application of Bayesian statistics. Bayesian theory tells us that we can revise prior probabilities in light of new information. Like most probability theory it relies heavily on the idea a random sample. This paper that Paul linked to is actually much clearer than the link above. It gives the example of balls in an urn: if we don't know if there are 10 balls in the urn or 100, then our prior probability is .5 for each possibility (10 or 100). If we then pick one ball out of the urn and it turns out to be numbered 1 through 10, we can revise the probability of there being only 10 balls upward (since the chances of picking 1-10 if there are only 10 is much higher than picking 1-10 if there are 100). Fine by me. Go Mr. Bayes.

The Doomdsday argument says we can apply this reasoning to the population of the species. If you sample US - that is, the human population today - we seem to be the 1-10 balls, increasing the chances that there are only going to be 10 or so balls, ever. But we aren't a random sample of the entire history of the human species! I don't know if it's bad philosophy, but it's awful statistics. If we went to the end of time, when the human species was extinct, then sampled from all of human history and picked one of us that would tell us that there's a good chance humans didn't live very long. But we are not at the end of time, we are in time and we always will be. Sometimes we want to freeze things to look at statical samples, but we can never do that with humanity as a whole and certainly not with the future history of humanity.

Part of the problem with applying statistical theory more broadly - to thinking about human problems, politics, history, the world, etc. - is that it has no space for a sense of temporality. It is either completely static, or it moves through points in time in the most fixed and linear sense possible. Statistical reasoning is almost always very contrained by its prior assumptions of a random sample (and others). And the world we live in is filled with patterns and choices that make it only rarely a random sample. The world (and us) is marked by a temporality that will always thwart our own efforts to fix that world in place with logic.

the sand

the sand
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

the last two weekends one or both of us has walked from our place in Sketty to the Mumbles, which takes about an hour and 15 minutes or so, depending on how fast you walk. when I did so two weekends ago the tide was out, hence the pic. it's quite dramatic when the tide is out, as you can walk directly across the bay to Mumbles rather than taking the path around the bay. that is, if you're brave and know the tide timings, which I do not.

elevation: hilly or flat?

the first song on my ipod's "running #1" playlist is U2's elevation. I usually put the ipod on shuffle, so songs that follow vary, but the first one is always elevation. and the first part of my chosen running path is this serious uphill climb, going from our place away from the water on a sidewalk that is just this side of needing to be steps.

and so, as I get my bloodrate going by pounding up this insane slope (Sam confirms its insanity, by the way) I'm listening to elevation. and it is interesting musically in that neither the words nor the music really go "up" in any real way. Yes, there's the interval between "a" and "mole" in the chorus, repeated several times, but it's ironic that the one upward movement in the music fails to match the lyrics: "a mole, diggin in a hole, diggin up my soul now goin down excavation" primarily a downward, hole-digging lyric, no? and when you get to the denouement of the song, where the Edge is doing his thing and Bono is in falsetto it's all moving down the scale. and so my question.

elevation: hilly or flat? discuss.

in search of an axiom

yesterday, as you will recall, I posted that two boxes remained missing from our group sent from Redlands. we listed what was in the boxes, or what we thought was in there, sympathy abounded, no one got to go shopping, etc. etc. and then today, in an act that I can only describe as karmic, the boxes showed up! and my thought was that this deserves an axiom or law of its own: not the whatever can go wrong will, because that's clearly not what's happening, boxes or no boxes. but more along the lines of: as soon as you give up on something, it will appear at your doorstep. okay, okay, not the cheesy: if you love something set it free thing, but more in line with the material goods aspect of this experience. as soon as you order a replacement credit card, yours turns up in the dryer. as soon as you replace all the locks in the house, your lost keys show up in the basement. that sort of thing.

I looked for such an axiom on line and did not find one. I did find several that I find hilarious, including Huminston's Law: When you are up to your ass in alligators, it is hard to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp.

and I went over to Katharine's quotegeek site of yore to see if I could find anything, only to get sidetracked re-reading the quotes from My So Called Life. What a great show that was, no?

I'm happy to report that the pieces of suiting, corduroy jacket, entirety of Sam's dress shirt collection, his Minnesota Golden Gopher hockey sweater (!), the professorial-patch sexy wool sweater, several items I was sure I'd given away, and perhaps most importantly our sheepskin slippers were all there. very exciting.

and now I can stop watching for the delivery truck (o-o the wells fargo wagon is-a, comin' down the street...)

murphy's law

it has been almost three months since our good friend Joel spent precious time carrying our boxes to the post office in Redlands and mailing them to us. And we have received seven of the nine boxes he mailed, as well as all of the boxes Liz, Simone, and Mom kindly mailed from Denver, which contained our books, so as academics that's key. But of course, the two boxes missing contain some interesting and crucial items, things we've actually been missing despite the fact that even having sent less than 20 boxes o' stuff, we *still* have too much crap.

One box is Sam's clothes, one box is mine. In Sam's box (we think) we are missing the cold-weather running pants and shirts and his mid-weight corduroy coat, all of which would be perfect for this weather, of course. In my box I'm missing my entire black suit, the upper half of my new JJill suit (don't ask why I separated it—you try packing for a hypothetical move 4 months in advance), a lovely mid-weight London Fog coat, and my red wool turtleneck with the obnoxious elbow patches that reference old professors just enough without taking away any claim to "sexy young woman" I might still retain.

Our friends in Edinburgh had a bit more of a chaotic departure from the US and thus don't have a precise count of their boxes but we both suffer from this nagging feeling of: where is that thing? Did we leave it in storage? is it on the Atlantic somewhere? did these two boxes get diverted via New Orleans before the hurricane? did I give that away in a fit of puritanical, anti-materialist rage?

And then the last thought: does this mean I get a fun shopping spree for new stuff??

Bill Maher Gets It

Our 'Chambers production' Gopher Hockey games have been arriving with DVD Bonus material, in the form of episodes of Bill Maher's HBO Show Real Time. Thus, we're watching, but we're a few weeks behind (everything in the UK is a few weeks, to a few months, to a few years behind the US).

I disagree with Maher's positions about 30% of the time, and I disagree with the way he articulates them a majority of the time. But there are a few issues on which he really just 'gets it' in a way that the mainstream of American politics never seems to be able to do. I would include his tirades against the food industry (and the obesity epidemic), as well us his positions on the environment in this category.

Most suprising of all, though, may be his sexual politics. Maher is a middle-aged straight man who is not married and does not want to be (ever!), and one gets the sense that his sexual appetites are varied. In short, with respect to the dominant sexual norms, Maher is queer. If this sounds far-fetched, then I provide as evidence his 'new rules' from 14 October. Maher says that the 'real reason' the right couldn't handle Harriet Miers had nothing to do with her 'qualifications' or her positoin on Roe. The former never bothered the right in the past, and the latter really was assured (a Catholic who is born-again as an evangelical just isn't pro-choice folks). What really bothered the right about Miers, then? They couldn't make sense of or accept her (a)sexuality. As an unmarried 60 year-old, says Maher, Miers was either celibate, gay, or a slut – in other words, once again, queer with respect to the heterosexual norm. Go read the whole thing.

superstore

the writing is getting a bit easier, linked to a newfound arrogance that involves me acknowledging to myself that I actually do know this stuff and have a mastery over it, despite its breadth and general insanity. I am halfway through and have worked in the Maori tattoos, Robert Smithson, the Norse stuff, the Stele school of Chinese calligraphy, Bierstadt, Indo-Caribbean performance, Hawai'ian quilts, and the Elgin marbles.

more importantly, however, is that I have placed my first on-line order for Tesco, grocery superstore, to deliver groceries to my door this evening. specifically between 9 and 11 pm. I will report back on the outcome. I am currently debating whether or not to tip the delivery person, and if so, how much. I'm leaning towards yes, and £2...thoughts? too chinsy? makes the person feel cheap to tip them? hm.

know when to stop.

writing is difficult. I am rediscovering this as I write an entry for the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World (modern = 1750-present in this case) entitled "Art—Overview." Art. All of it. 1750-present. I could cop-out and write it as the story of art historical progress from Romanticism through the Neo-Classical and Realist periods, on to Impressionism, the Modern movements (Surrealism, Cubism, etc.), Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, and The Postmodern. And yet, I am not that guy. I'm the fool who wants to solve the world's problems in an encyclopedia entry. thus I am attempting in 3000 words to do justice to "Art—Overview" on a global scale, including the practices of tattooing by the Maori, sculptures of deceased twins in western Africa, Qing ceramics, Hiroshige, the revival of Norse mythological subject matter, the folk art of the Appalachias, Socialist murals in Mexico, Stalinist propaganda posters, and of course, the musical sculpture of Tipu's Tiger, made in advance of the southern Indian king's victory over the British, a victory that in fact never happened.

I am slogging through.

After writing about 450 words this morning on the period 1750-1880, I penned (typed?) this glorious two-sentence summary of Orientalism.

This period also saw the birth of Orientalism, or the construction of an object (“the Orient”) that could be studied by Europe. The Orientalist genre of European painting spans the stylistic movements of Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, and Impressionism and focuses on the cultures of northern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, depicting scenes that supported the idea of the Orient as place of lasciviousness, barbarity, and sloth populated by inaccessible scantily-clad concubines, ruthless warriors, and indolent sultans.

and we're done writing for the day.

doings

ostensibly one of the reasons for the blog is to keep friends and family far away up-to-date on our thoughts and doings. thoughts, we seem to be doing well on. doings, not so much. so herewith, a brief synopsis of our day-to-day:

we are happily watching Battlestar Galactica's first full season, having finished Gilmore Girls' fourth season last week. GG's ending was traumatic, but had that wonderful mix of horror, mourning, happiness, excitement, and humor that GG on good day can deliver so well. BG is exciting and intriguing.

we are also very excited that Jon Stewart is on More4, the new station that launched in early October. we are sad that we don't get to see the Colbert Report as well. can't have everything...

went to the boot sale again today (we don't go every weekend or anything) with three specific goals in mind: 1. drop off empty egg cartons to egg guy who is always asking for empty egg cartons. 2. buy a beard trimmer for Sam. 3. buy some sort of exercise bike such that we can work out when it rains, which turns out to be fairly often. As you may know, attempting to purchase anything purposively at a boot sale/flea market is folly. Folly! And yet, we succeeded on all three counts, including having the exerbike delivered to our doorstep by friendly Welshfolk (we told you they are friendly!!)

it is chilly. we are cheap. we have begun turning the heater on in the front room for 15 minutes or so each night, which warms it up nicely (this is why they invented doors, my friends. open-plan living is not so great for chilly). we have central heating only in the sense that the on-off-switch is in one place, near the water heater. no thermostat, so we just turn it on full-blast, turn off the radiators in rooms we're not using, and voilà. somewhat toasty.

have thus far tried over 6 different varieties of sausage at the local butcher. a sign there read: "pork, prune, and apple sausage: try it, it's awesome" I kid you not. Minted lamb burgers still the best burgers ever. New international market opened down on St. Helen's Road, with the most beautiful okra you've ever seen. Eid Mubarak all around, folks.

we have discovered the health stores in city centre which stock natural peanut butter by the tub. yes, just like those old school ice cream tubs we used to get... remember? imagine that filled with yummy crunchy peanut butter, no sugar, just peanuts. heaven.

Tim and Jackie send us DVD packets each week that contain the previous weekend's Gopher games, expertly edited by Jackie on the TiVo. We get instant replays, pauses to view the stats tables, and all the commercials edited out. Fab. it's like watching it with them. only a week late. so no spoilers!

Sam's job continues to go well; he has his first intensive teaching this week, and we will report on the whole "tutorial v. seminar: what's the difference?" debate.

I will be teaching a 2nd year module (trans.: sophomore-level course) in the spring entitled "Colonialism and Nationalism in India" in the Politics department. this means I have transitioned from humanities softy to hardened social scientist! I'm very excited. I plan to do a week on "the clothing of nationalism" which will involve study of the Nehru collar, the Gandhian dhoti, spinning, and fashion in general. should be fun...

I interviewed at Open University in Cardiff, but they didn't have work for me despite liking me quite a bit. perhaps something will come up later on. attempting to keep the faith there. I'm going in to chat with the fine arts department at Swansea Institute in a few weeks about possibilities there.

signed up for a library card at Swansea public libraries. they rent DVDs and CDs, which is very exciting. Libraries in general are exciting, wouldn't you say?

we may go to see the film director and writer Peter Greenaway of The Pillow Book fame talk next week as part of the Dylan Thomas festival here in town. the Welsh stick together, I think.

and the usual working, sleeping, eating, of course. and walking. lots of walking.

learning from your mistakes

what I love about Catholicism is its long view of history and its awareness of past mistakes (if not present ones, but they will, eventually, become past mistakes and thus the Church will become aware...)

referring back to our earlier musings on evolution, I ran across this AP wire today which details the Vatican's on-going discussions about evolution:

Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed John Paul's 1996 statement that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis."
"A hypothesis asks whether something is true or false," he said. "(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof."

first of all, what an acronym! second of all, anything with the phrase "ontological quest" has my vote. third of all, I love that the Vatican has a website for STOQ and that the papacy clearly is in the age of the internet, while they also, in the same AP piece, referred to earlier mistakes in the on-going discussion between religion and science, mistakes they regret, such as the whole Galileo "thing":

The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." [...] "The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future," Poupard said.

what I love about this is that it's not like the Galileo case is new news, and yet, in Church Time, it kind of is. Perhaps the longevity of the Catholics might be a lesson to those claiming Christian status and behind the whole intelligent design thing. But I suppose that would mean learning from history, or even knowing history. oh well.

"Odds Are One" 2ndAmericano Style

As I've suggested in the past, I know that Paul's not just talking about statistics, or math, or programming when he's talking about...well, statistics or math or programming. After some political theory reading this morning, I'm better able to specify that intuition. Here's what I read:

‘in our personal lives [as in human history] our worst fears and best hopes will never adequately prepare us for what actually happens—because the moment even a foreseen event takes place, everything changes, and we can never be prepared for the inexhaustible literalness of this "everything"’ (Arendt 1994). Her point is that when an event passes from possibility to actuality—regardless of how probable or improbable we may have taken it to be while it was still only a possibility—something changes in a different register; namely, the register in which happenings are not only caused states of affairs but also meaningful events, features of a world, and, in particular, occasions for response.

politics of the everyday

I suppose as a response to comments on my earlier rant regarding the topic: "Feminism: still relevant? still useful? discuss." and given that others too, seem bothered by the post-feminist assumption that we're over it already, or perhaps even more to the point: get over it already, I wanted to note a particular tenet of mine. Which, in the end, relates to the religion/faith discussion we had earlier. I'm also prompted to link to the even earlier discussion about how there is only one narrative, really, and here we are again.

Yes. Hilary in '08. Absolutely. Hilary-Obama or perhaps Obama-Hilary. mix it up a bit. but as friend Dan knows quite well, the political also occurs on the everyday, minute level. the level of: here's who I am, and I'm not going to be cowed by your assumptions about who I am into being someone else. this goes for being gay, a woman, or just in general queer. and by that I don't mean gay. I mean undercutting the norms in general.

So if that means speaking your mind in a meeting, interrupting or cutting off someone else in a loud voice, even if you don't have a penis (sorry Mom—so hard to say that word in front of your Mom, no?) then that's what it means. And yes, it's not a battle that one signs up for. Or gets paid to do. It's a daily, groveling, crap battle that demands nuance, respect for others, wit, and a generosity of spirit. Often, it is fought by those with cynical, small, close-minded ways who demand others bend to their will, or risk being labeled "fascist." [Sam and I call these types of people, usually left-leaning and well-meaning, "close-minded open-minded people"] but one hopes, for the future of the universe, that it is fought from the generous side of listening but then also arguing for what is, fundamentally right. Like equal opportunities for each person, the right to work for a living wage, the right to maintain one's health without breaking the bank, the right to speak your mind in meetings or on the web regardless of the expectations of gender or race or class. These are things that we do not yet have. Perhaps will never have. And yet they are still important to argue for and stand up for. In a generous, open way, but one that promotes debate and discussion not: I'm okay, you're okay.

so it's not about squashing others' opinions, it's about fighting for something that is right. And everyone's opinions are, in the end, not equally correct or right. one only needs to read a few undergraduate papers to learn this universal truth. we need to stop looking at the sexism thing as about individuals, individual choices, or individual opinions. it's not about blaming some single person, it's about recognizing the atmosphere of misogyny and ameliorating it where we can. it's a systemic, all-encompassing sludge that we are all in: women, men, transgendered, and the rest. our job should be to try to clean up this sludge one molecule at a time.

(don't know where that metaphor came from. sorry about that. damn you metaphors!)

happy halloween

herewith the halloween picture. this is, in fact, the first picture in my iPhoto library and dates from halloween 1999, when Greg and Rick visited us in Fredericksburg. weird how long ago that is.

boy how jack-o-lantern fashion has changed, no? wow I would never carve my pumpkin like that now. of course. goes without saying, really.

Things You Should be Reading

• Bono Interview Podcast
  It's still as good as we said it was, but now you can listen to it.


• Emery's Blog
  You are reading it, aren't you? Much smarter than anything you get here.


• Anything by Richard Powers
  How many times does Rebecca have to blog about it?


• Veronica Mars
  Because we can't, and because Joss said: 'BEST. SHOW. EVER.'
  What more do you want?
  And, yes. Yes, you can read TV.

riding the second wave

so moving every year, buying two houses (and an embarrassing number of cars), being partnered and then, due to the outrageous expense of our principles, married, and having job and then not having job: these experiences have made something abundantly clear to me recently, something that is coming to whack dear friends in the face. We live in an utterly sexist world. still. perhaps this will inspire me to actually write the book I've been threatening to write for a couple of years (Wife! if you must know...) and just get this all out there. But, as my friend getting face-whacked wrote me:

have been feeling like i have just been being a women's studies teaching feminist freak, but now i realize, no, i am totally totally right. stupid capitalist patriarchy.

This is also how I've been feeling recently. Some questions to flesh this out a bit:

• why must they always put the man's name first on every bill, from phone to city tax? even, I might add, in supposedly progressive southern California? (not that Virginia should get away with this treatment simply because they are supposedly "red state," mind you)
  
• why do I need to provide proof of my degree in order to get my title changed from "Miss" to "Dr" when my partner does not?
  
• why can't both names of partnered or married couples go onto a lease or mortgage? Why must it be the man's? Even when the woman has done all of the communicating to find said property, such that the estate agents don't even know the man's name and must ask for it???
  
• why do they ask me for the "groom's name" when I go in to ask for a copy of my marriage certificate?

and of course this is more complex than just these simple questions, which individually can be dismissed by post-feminists (those that think, erroneously, that we're over this whole inequality thing) as "no big deal" but together become this mass of "why are you treating me this way? is it the boobs? what?"
the complexity stems from the systematic secondary status of women over time. so that women get paid less and are seen as secondary in the whole arrangement of who's bringing home the bacon, such that even though I was in fact getting paid substantially more than Sam for the year we were in Redlands, we had to fight to get my name first on the mortgage, sending the papers back for correction several times.
All of this is convincing me that while the tactics of the second wave don't continue to be helpful, and thus I find third wave feminism much more convincing, the questions and issues of second wave feminism are by no means resolved and in fact we have slid quite a bit backwards.
I suppose the bottom line is this: folks need to stop telling me these little things are no big deal. Certainly, if one assumes that one's relationship will last forever in MB (marital bliss—shout out to José) then it's no big deal that only one person technically leases your place or owns your home. And one assumes that in my friend's case and my case, that will be the case. But it doesn't make it right or okay that we live in this world that privileges a certain group of people because they can grow facial hair, fail (usually) to grow bumps on their chests, and have something between their legs. And it is a big deal.

Paul Started It (sort of)

I thought I could get away with linking to the images and be done with it. Because as someone who is not a 'believer' in the traditional sense, I find nothing more annoying that proselytizing (also in the traditional sense). And, beyond that, people do seem to get quickly annoyed with me when I talk about u2. But it's precisely as someone who was raised a heathen and has never been attracted to what we call 'organized religion' that I feel the urge to share my u2 experience. Paul's post gives me occasion to share just a tiny bit more. I pretty much buy what he's talking about there, but it's essential to add: this isn't something Bono (or anyone else) can do by himself. A u2 concert with a lousy crowd might still be a decent concert, but it is not a religious experience. Bono only refers to the auditorium as 'church' on those occassions when the crowd makes that possible.

And thus - and this will come as a shock to preciselly no one - let me heartily second Rebecca's recommendation of the new Rolling Stones mammoth interview with Bono. Folks who tend to be skeptical of (or just plain hate) u2 because of a) their religiosity, or b) Bono's megalomania, or c) the way in which they have supposedly 'sold out' may be surprised by what they find here. I particularly enjoy Bono as critic, 'reviewing' all the u2 albums. He finds the lyrics on most of the either weak or crap, and he's particuarly critical of all the early work. They may also be surprised to hear him give SO MUCH credit to the Edge, even saying at the end of the interview that he couldn't get along without the band, but the Edge would lead them just fine without Bono. (Bono is right about this, by the way; folks who see u2 religiously tend much more toward worship of the Edge than of Bono. And you'll note that the photos I took were from the far left side of the crowd, giving closer access to stage right.)

Finally, a quote, one that resonates with Paul's post, in answer to a question about what they try to accomplish in relation to the audience:

To lose my own sense of self, self-consciousness - and theirs. It's an amazing thing. We're not really a rock band...[W]hat we actually do is something completely different. Our set list is designed in a kind of three-act structure, to get people out of themselves and to get ourselves out of ourselves. And to get to that place where everything feels possible and you want to call your mother, leave your wife, start a revolution or crack open the piggy bank and go on holiday for a year.

the professional photo

so the tour company that employs me to chat about Indian art in front of the monuments in India to paying tourists, a wonderful gig and one that allows me to stay in five-star hotels, meet interesting people, and teach the art to people who want to learn, has asked me for a picture of myself for their website. If you go there, you'll note that other scholars have their pictures up, usually in front of some sort of ruin or jungly landscape, and they are all distinguished. The distinguished quality comes from, in large part, age, although having not met them I imagine they are indeed distinguished. I have no such photos. It's not particularly that I find myself unphotogenic (which I don't think my blogging friend is either), but it's that photos of me tend to be taken in fairly casual circumstances (I suppose this is true for everyone) in which I tend to look a bit too ridiculous and certainly not in any way distinguished. Here are my choices:

There's quite a nice photo of me in faux-feather boa and blinking magnetic earrings from Christmas several years ago. I of course have not showered and thus the hair is questionable. But I look quite good, all things considered. Probably not the one to submit.

There's the photo on my birthday from some years back in which I am wearing a Barry Manilow tour baseball cap. I look fab, but frankly the hat does detract from my professorial persona.

There's the one where I'm in the kitchen at Thanksgiving making faces at the camera in my kitchen...

There's the one from Japan that a colleague took, so great on exotic locale (although wrong exotic locale, as it turns out) but not so great on me, as it's hot as hades (Japan in July, very fun) and I'm clearly exhausted.

There's the one from Seattle when we visited back in 2001, where I'm pretending to be intense urban hipster in coffee shop. I no longer wear glasses, so that element is no longer accurate, and it's more intense/scary than distinguished/impressive. Seattle also not so exotic.

I have drawn several conclusions from this survey of my iPhoto library:

• I am invariably either (a) unshowered or (b) in a reclining position or sometimes both
  
• I am rarely photographed on my own, whether it's with dog, human, or vehicle
  
• My silly-face quotient is high in photos in which I am on my own
  
• and perhaps the most telling observation: I look younger now than I did 5 years ago.
  

The last one I can thank my genes for (specifically Mom—thanks Mom!) and also my current laid-back lifestyle, certainly less stress than the St. Mary's years. Plus there's the lack of glasses, demoting me from "potentially distinguished" to "silly girl, trix are for kids!" So I'm left with a dilemma on the whole distinguished photo front.

I think some photoshop-ing is in order. Perhaps I can cut and paste my older, distinguished self onto an exotic background. We'll see.

The Closest I Come to Religion

Vertigo
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

Many of you out there will find this post yet another occassion to laugh at me. Just check out the pictures. But before you do, just let me say in all honesty that this may have been the best show in terms of the quality of the music and the intensity of the crowd (folks in the top row of the upper deck, completely behind the stage, NEVER sat down) that I've yet seen. And yes, I've seen 15 shows.

back in Wales

still half an inch off.

I should correct myself. it was half an inch to the right, not the left. must have been the non-existent jet lag typing.

I read Bono's lengthy interview in Rolling Stone whilst traveling over 7000 miles from San Diego to here yesterday/today/tomorrow/whenever it was. It was quite fascinating, and I highly recommend it. also recommend using whilst more.

more blogging once my soul has caught up, platonic or not....

travel and soul lag

in William Gibson's recent novel Pattern Recognition one of his characters, the main one, actually, is constantly on the move from one continent to another—today it's Japan, tomorrow, London, the next day, Moscow. And unlike other books or especially TV shows (can you say Alias?) that seem to move folks around the globe as if this was no big deal and only takes a commercial break, Gibson actually discusses the problem of world travel, and encapsulates it in a single phrase: soul lag. It's not that you're tired, or that there's some mysterious thing associated with jet travel known as "jet lag" (which, much like allergies, I find is something difficult to believe in. "allergies" is for another post...). instead, he acknowledges that one feels, well, not quite all there when one gets to another place, as if your soul, unlike your body, cannot travel as fast as an airplane and therefore takes a little while to catch up with you. I find this a brilliant insight, one I am experiencing right now. it's like you're existing about half an inch to the left of your actual body, and you can't seem to reconnect with it. my soul is likely somewhere over Ontario right now, wondering where the hell we're going and why I decided to fly halfway around the world for a conference. sometimes, in extreme circumstances, your soul never catches up. I think this is in part what happens in Lost in Translation. and has happened to all of us in one international place or another.

at least it's beautiful in San Diego, at least it's beautiful half an inch to the left of myself...

on being nice

each place we've lived we've weighed the various versions of "nice people" we've encountered. this started, i think, in Minnesota, where it is widely known and said that the people there are "nice." this is true, but they aren't usually truly, deeply nice—it's more of an obligatory nice that's on the surface, the kind of nice that takes 4 years to crack past into an invite to a "little lunch." the kind of nice that leads people to stop—and I mean fully stop—in the middle of the major freeway in order to let someone on the on-ramp in. it's very nice to live in Minnesota as a result, but you never quite know how deep the "nice" goes.

in Virginia, people on our block were nice in a more southern way: open, chattin' across two porches, "I made sure your wife was safe while you were away" nice. chivalrous, in a good way. again, tough as a (clearly, unmistakably) northern Yankee to crack the surface. people in the service industries were plain rude. having done retail work I get it, but it was psychologically damaging to enter into a retail environment in Fredericksburg, unless you went to one of the quaint antiquey shops downtown, which, let's face it, you can't buy basics like tortillas or soy milk in.

in California, people were nice, but distant. Californians don't seem to have problems with folks from elsewhere, it's just that they tend to like their space, and so we missed a bit of the porch thing. retail-wise, we were back to nice, and we were convinced that it wasn't so much genuine as that there was a drug in the water that everyone was taking in order to make them that happy. particularly at Trader Joe's and Starbucks, it seems they spike the water with Prozac.

so in Wales, people are nice. and it seems on first glance that they are truly nice. they remember us from day to day (we're the only americans on the block, so it's easy) they ask us how we liked the lamb burgers we bought last time, whether we're interested in the history of the miners of the area, would we like to try some Welsh cheese along with the Gtost we've just bought, if we know how complicated translating US prescriptions to UK ones is, and isn't it funny.

so when my bus was stuck in traffic for over an hour this morning on the way to my interview at Open University in Cardiff (went well, I think!) the bus driver kept telling us what was going on, and apologized individually to each of us as we got off the bus, even though it was completely not his fault that there were two major accidents on the M4. and when I called the OU to tell them that despite my anal-retentive planning to get there over an hour before my interview, I was still going to be late, they said: why not just come by when you get here, no worries. and then, when I apologized once I showed up, and mentioned that I should have taken the train, the woman interviewing me said: oh, yes, but then there would have been leaves on the track or some such. why are they so nice?!? I'm sure we'll have a more elaborate metric for nice-measurement in Wales in a few months. but now I continue to be surprised, happily, that the norm is: not to worry, it's fine, can I do something for you? bizarre and strange. perhaps I should be testing the water here too.

High Fidelity

Just finished Nick Hornby's first book, High Fidelity - a witty, wonderful, and swift read. (I was going to go with 'whirlwind' for the perfect alliteration, but that's not really accurate to the book, and 'swift' does just as good a job on the poetic front, I think.) I came to the book in a rather roundabout way. First, I saw the John Cusack movie from 2000, not even knowing it was based on a book. Next, I read About a Boy, Hornby's second book (loved it). Then I saw the Hugh Grant movie from 2002 (liked it). Finally, I read Hornby's first book.

The John Cusack movie is about an American who owns a record store in Chicago. The book is about a Brit who who owns a record shop in Camden. The move folks evidently saw it as no problem at all to change the setting, and the movie was fairly successful as far as I recall so perhaps they were right. And yet, the book is nothing like the movie, and the difference is really all to do with the setting. Both movie and book are about two things: music, and relationships (to family, to friends, to lovers). Despite the fact that the story tries to tap into certain commonalities in the human condition concerning music and relationships, those variables change dramatically when one switches countries. Our protaganist's relation to his parents is thoroughly English in the book; his central relationship is refracted through his one-night stand with an American singer-songwriter and it's crucial that she's American; all of the norms of couples are distinctly different in the British context, with marriage playing much less of a role; all of the commentary on class, status, fashion, trends, etc. play out through the demographics of London neighborhoods; and the humour is, obviously, unique as well. In short, the book tells a completely different story than the one in the movie.

Or, to put it differently, there's a significant amount of cultural translation going on when one makes the move from 'pubs' to "bars," from 'mates' to "friends," from 'snoggging' to "making out." (None of this is to mention 'shagging', a term for which I can't think of even a good rough translation - "sex" seems too clean and clinical and "fucking" too crude to get at it.)

Of course, it's obvious why this all fascinates me. Just as Hollywood assumes the simple translation from UK to US context (and back again), so do most Americans (and probably a majority of Brits as well). And yet, in the lived experience the sameness is all so very different. And if that doesn't make any sense, then rent the DVD and read the book (in whatever order you please) and I think you'll see what I'm getting at/living.

slow food

there's a scene in 28 Days Later, a film that haunts me for some reason, in which the family on the run from a fatal infectious pandemic (I hope I'm just kidding with that link there) finds a grocery store, abandoned since the initial infection 28 days earlier. they run around throwing food into their baskets—soda, bags of chips, boxes of whatever, cans, and then we see the father running into the produce section which is, as one might imagine, a pile of mold. except for one section of apples or similar fruit, which looks perfect. he shouts with irony: thank god for irradiation and genetic engineering! [all quotes and summaries of this film are from my foggy memory of seeing it years ago, so don't hold me to this...]

the film is set in England and with its strident anti-GMO stance the moment is particularly striking. It makes you wonder if the entire produce section in the US would be, well, just fine after 28 days. probably not. But likely more than just one kind of apple would have survived.

which brings me to food and slow food. OddsareOne's tales of debaucherous eating and cooking and living over the course of one afternoon also struck a chord. not only of missing friends far away, as one might expect, but also of celebrating a life-shift toward cooking and away from preparing/zapping/grabbing food. It's been several years since Sam and I seriously attempted to formulate strategies for eating non-takeaway, non-processed food, and it meant a decent amount of change to our lives, including not going into the middle of the grocery store, purchasing more fresh veggies and meats, and cooking almost every meal, including breakfast and lunch. this is extremely difficult, not least because in the US, aside from the major urban areas and coasts where most of our peergroup lives, it's very difficult to purchase fresh veggies and non-processed food. the "instant grits" selection at our Food Lion in Fredericksburg was enough to make you want to give up entirely.

Liz gave me a cookbook last Xmas on sustainable cooking which was fascinating. not so much because of the recipes, but because it was written by a team of chefs in Oregon who tailored the recipes to what they could get locally. they were big proponents of the "local food" movement, supporting local farmers, stopping the pollution of the environment by eliminating the plane flights through which most of us get our foods, eating seasonally. as a result, sad to say, the recipes didn't so much work in the middle of PA, where we had a lovely grocery store but not the particular kind of mushroom, onion, fish, or whatever called for in the recipe. but it was an interesting and illuminating read because it revealed the limitations of this "slow food" "local food" movement in the US: it's fine for those (wealthy folks) in the big cities with access to exotics like "olive oil" but for those in rural areas, or even just outside of those big cities (as Fredericksburg is), finding the local, the clean, the fresh is a huge chore and sometimes impossible. This of course links back to OaO's blog about finding enlightenment: sure, if you're not worrying about money or where you're going to sleep that night, it's easier to devote yourself to things like slow food or meditation. But even if you want desperately to eat locally and avoid processed foods, and you live outside of an urban area, you must make what I consider to be a superhuman effort to find the organic farm that perhaps delivers veggies to your door once every two weeks, or travel to the farmer's market (that's open only 6 months out of the year) to get your food, or drive an hour each way to the nearest whole food-type store, or spend several weeks canning and preserving, as many people do, but again, few have time for this.

and the UK is not immune to this class-division in what goes into the body. we went into this store called "Iceland" yesterday to see what it was: it's a store entirely made up of packaged frozen food. poor folks and pensioners shopped there. we fled back to our farmer's market, french festival, best-butcher-in-wales lives, but it was haunting as well. how do we stop this madness?

merry-go-round psychoanalysis

it's the most gorgeous day ever today. literally. high 60s, clear, blue sky, slight breeze...Sam and I went down to the city centre to get Sam a haircut and have some lunch, wander around. it's our new-found Saturday thing, sometimes called a "weekend." very exciting.

and there's a French fair downtown--that's right, haricots verts, fromage, pain au chocolat, the whole thing. so we had a toulouse sausage (avec moutarde, s'il vous plait, natch) and sat by the merry-go-round watching kids go in circles. it was a small little thing, probably 8 vehicles on it--a double-decker bus, a fire truck, a mermaid ship, a motorcycle (from Australia with Florida plates--very confusing). and we mused on the reasons for its attractiveness to kids of a certain age. it's fascinating.

They all drive or pretend to drive, so there's something about independence there, and control, heightened by the fact that it's a bit confusing so there's a danger (not a real one, but nonetheless the scent of danger) of losing one's parent who's paid a quid to watch you go around in circles for 3 minutes.
And because of the spinning perhaps, they get to be alone, in charge of their lives and bodies, for that 3 minute span. and mom's approved of it. some kids would look for their mom each time around, others wouldn't respond when she'd yell at them to smile for the camera. they were in their own little world--truly on the motorbike or the top of the double-decker.
and then there were the ones who recognized that they were the object of jealousy. they would sit up straight, big smiles, knowingly lording it over the kids waiting for the next go-round.

once you're old enough to have more independence in your daily life, say once you start going to school at 5, I imagine these things become less exciting. less of a novelty. but it was fun to watch the ones for whom this was the best part of their day. sometimes I wish I could be as easily entertained. instead I demand well-written dialogue driving intelligent narrative and accompanied by brilliant directing. perhaps if I just tried the mermaid ship, everything would change....

earthquake relief

with the death toll at 25,000 and the relief efforts patchy at best (and the governments involved coming under strident criticism—good to know the US isn't the only one....), it's tough to know how to help out the survivors in Pakistan, India, and Kashmir. A recent post to the H-Asia discussion list (link above) gives an annotated list of relief agencies that need money and will actually purchase what people need, as opposed to giving them wet, oversized clothes when they really need shelter from the current cold and the oncoming winter.

as discussed earlier, some of these regions and cities are in constant crisis mode, but this particular situation is of course way over the top, and while we tend to think of India as a hot, humid country, that is a legacy of our colonial, orientalist past: India's climate ranges quite a bit, and the areas hit are some of the coldest in the country come winter.

define "mass"

cool mod building
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

the most non-touristy picture ever.

two questions:

• what is it about concrete that's so sexy?

and

• why is it that one can never purchase enough hangers when one moves into a new place?

Edinburgh

wow
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

We have successfully completed our first 'mini-break'. I'm a fan.

Edinburgh is beautiful. Truly a city and yet rather small and utterly manageable. Highly recommended.

p.s. Thanks to all for suffering my Serenity propaganda, and for going to see it. It's certainly not going to be a financial hit, but it might make a buck or two.

serenity and the big city

Sam and I just got back from a lovely visit of our friends Steve and Kim and their son Teo in Edinburgh. Hence the delay in posting and the gap in our bloggedness.

We of course, along with walking many if not all of the streets of the city (this according to my feet/legs/hips, by the way) also saw Serenity again at the big-city movie theatre in town. very fun, and the second viewing revealed a few more elements of the film that were interesting, predominantly the directing. the near "one-er" from the title through the next, oh, 5 minutes, in which we are introduced to everyone and the ship in one long, uncut shot (except for a bit of fudging as they go from upstairs to downstairs), was amazing. the way Joss framed individuals from steep angles above and below was quite effective, I thought, to heighten the mood/make you feel trapped/whatever he was going for at that time.

I'd like to comment on a few things noted elsewhere. Yes, the uber-state theme is seen in other SciFi contexts, from Star Wars to Star Trek (on next generation it seems that the heroes are in fact part of said uberstate as well), and all of the distopic scifi contexts you can name. Unlike many of those, and Star Wars in particular, the driving thrust of this film is not the overthrow of the Alliance, (that battle is lost prior to the film's timeline) but the negotiation of the Alliance—a much more Foucaultian understanding of power and the state, in which Mal's crew is able to retain freedom, liberty, whatever "value" you'd like to call it by following the path of the Western: being outlaws when the law is, well, not so hot. or not so hot for you and yours. And, like the Klingons (my heroes and a blog for another time) the crew has a code, not ultra codified, but one that Joss articulates in brief, clear moments, whether the early encounter between Zoe (fab fab fab. we love her) and Mal over the man he sentenced to death in an earlier scene, or the protestations of Jayne regarding his ostensible distance from the approach of the Reevers to killing people.

We talked after the film about how Joss was trying to do so many things: the genre of the western, with its cameradierie, outlaw culture, and internal code; the humor sometimes found in those westerns, but often not, set up not with one-liners or slapstick but by characters colliding and situations allowing it to come forth; the message about governmental fiddling with societies and the problematic outcomes of most if not all of these fiddlings over history; the action-movie requirements of the studio that led him to spend a bit too much time on fights and action and not quite enough on character development/relationships.

All this to say that my earlier assessment still stands: Joss is a serial type guy, and this film is awesome. But it's not Firefly. What to do?

it looks like it did alright in the US on the first two weekends, so let's hope for one of two outcomes: either Universal grants Joss the 3-pic deal to continue its fabulousness, or perhaps (and one can only hope) Joss decides that a return to the serial format is where it's at, HBO gives him unlimited funding, and we all live happily ever after.

Seriously Folks

I'm feeling rather hurt. Emery is watching Battlestar Galactica - a very legitimate choice, but not to be chosen first. Greg went to see Flightplan - unconscionable!

Trust me, just go see Serenity, if not for me, then simply because you will be glad you did afterwards.

Then, please come back here and make your apologies.

blue sky

Cardiff: Civic Centre
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

in addition to the blue sky of Cardiff last weekend (I've uploaded a few more for you, taken with a "real" camera) the sky is blue today as well, which is lovely, as they say here.

the folks at stonesthrow and at odds are one are much better at epistilary writing than I—heck, Greg wrote his dissertation on it, for god's sake. but I do have to say that I enjoy this sort of "open letter" format. it's very different from what the late 20th century considered letterwriting, and it bucks the trend toward some sort of overweening need to protect "privacy" as if we had that in the first place. (just because you're paranoid, right?) however, it does foreclose the possibility of direct responses, one-to-one. and so:

Greg: you're not a slacker. you're just happy. most of the time. not Sound of Music, twirl on the hilltops happy necessarily, but pleasantly happy. and yes, very passionate about things. standards. brunches. singing. gameshows. friends. Rick. this is fabulous and why we love you.

Paul and I will continue the general freak out for the rest of us. you may now return to your regularly scheduled rerun of the Pyramid. Maybe you'll catch the one with that guy from PA...

Show Me

For the last couple of years I've been carrying around this quote from Wendy Brown and posting it on my door. It's rather long, but it ends as follows:

theory is never ‘accurate’ or ‘wrong’; it is only more or less illuminating, more or less provocative, more or less of an incitement to thought, imagination, desire, possibilities for renewal.

I spent yesterday reading al these texts that are tangentially about Butler. They were very disappointing, as they wasted all their time talking about a dozen different theorists and how each one was wrong or limited in just these ways, and then bouncing on to someone else in order to say the same thing. The argument ended up being that we 'needed' theorist A mixed with theorist B, but in just this one sort of way.

Reading this crap made me realize why I love Brown's description of theory. I want theory (or anything else I read, really) to show me something. It strikes me that there are three ways that theory can show:

1. A truly great theory or theorist (there are very few of either) shows me the world in a way I hadn't seen before. It puts things together, reveals connections or ruptures, remaps bodies and matter in a way that had simply never occurred to me. Thus, after reading a great theory one simply sees differently. And yes, that's why the Greek word theoria means seeing and showing.


2. Thus, it is appropriate for writers, sometimes, to spend their time and energy simply talking about another theorist. In trying to figure out what they are saying/showing, this secondary work shows us something as well.


3. But theory need not be about only itself. Often theory can be best used to show us somethig about the world, to take the theory as already written and then put it to work to reveal or illuminate concrete events or cases in the world.

What theory should not be, however, is about moving around theories and theorists as if they were pieces on a chessboard. The approach to theory that treats 'theories' as monolithic entities that are somehow valuable in their own right – and then spends all their time doing 'math' (i.e. adding and subtracting) with these theories – does not show anyone anything at all. This is the work that always trots out 'standard critiques' as if they are givens. To criticize a theory can prove very important, if the criticism itself shows something. But hearing things like, 'Foucault can't account for agency', 'Butler is determinist' over and over again, can quickly lead one to that ridiculous conclusion that theory proves onanistic.

This cannot be described as a problem with theory, however. It's a problem of bad writing, of poor argumentation (over here they'd call it a bad narrative, and I wouldn't disagree) in which theory gets used as the crutch. In other words, if they weren't babbling about theorists, the authors I read yesterday would have had nothing whatsoever to say, because they had nothing to show me at all.

Rugby in Cardiff

Rugby!!!
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

We only watched the match for about 5 minutes, but that's all it took to understand completely why the Brits make fun of American football. The play you see above is a set 'throw in' play. I don't know the real, technical term, but I do know that the guy being held up in the air (and the guy holding him up) are both designated to do so - was told a lovely story of a 2 hour train argument between Welsh folks about who should play these roles.


In Wales, by the way, Rugby is the sport of the people and is taken very seriously. In England, by contrast, football (i.e. real football, what Americans call 'soccer') is the working class sport and Rugby is seen as a bit of an upper class game. In Wales that's reversed. It's funny: from the States, 'UK', 'Great Britain', and 'England' all seem to be roughly the same place 'over there'. It took about a week here to grasp the fact that wales is not England; they are utterly different nations (literally).

As a side note, if you check out this photo group on Flickr you'll see why I'm now convinced that the convergence between mobile phones and digital cameras makes sense.

on weekends

the lack of blogging over the weekend can be blamed on our newfound conviction that one should, indeed, celebrate the weekend with its traditional rituals: reading, walking, watching movies, shopping, hanging out with friends, eating meals at restaurants, and exploring the countryside.

the shocking thing is, that's precisely what we did on Saturday and Sunday. that's right—two full days of weekend.

for those who don't know us well, this is revolutionary because it perhaps marks one of the first times we've done such a thing, other than in conjunction with plane travel, since I can remember. seriously. I'm trying to think about graduate school and whether I ever took a weekend off but I can't think of anything.

at St. Mary's and Redlands we had to plan ahead (sometimes weeks) to take a full, single day off—to just be with each other, watch the latest Joss Whedon show (did ya see Serenity yet?), eat at our comfort-food Mexican or Salvadoran restaurant, walk the dog, drink coffee, whatever. and of course that sacrosanct day was preceded and followed by panicked 18-hour days, in which e-mails were checked up until the midnight deadline, student papers frantically graded, and endless meetings stretched before us.

so it has been a strange thing to take two days off, in a row. we went to Cardiff on Saturday, explored the town, wandered through its huge park, ate some of the local food (sandwiches—they are obsessed with them here), wandered through the used bookstore underneath the victorian arcade. we returned to Swansea for a dinner out with many people from the university, which began at 8 pm (horrors! people eat this late?) and continued until midnight, at which point we walked (no one drove, very refreshing) to Sam's colleague's house where we drank peach schnapps and beer (not both, some of us drank the schnapps, some the beer) and talked until 2 am. I haven't been out that late since college, sad to say.

we got up late on Sunday (of course) and finished our books (harry potter for Sam and American Gods for me—thoughts on that to come), ate some food, watched Motorcycle Diaries and some british TV. drank tea. very relaxing.

keep posted. we may try this weekend thing again.