Saturday, October 31, 2009

the hippie that never was

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/education/edlife/01rotc-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

I had no idea that the student protests in the 60s resulted in the banning of ROTC at elite universities. WOW! Hehe, I think I am infatuated with the antiwar movement. Students, young people, changed things - they mattered. They made the Vietnam War look like the tragic joke it was, they coaxed the government into lowering the voting age, they set their draft cards on fire and ended up burning down the entire drafting system.

Okay, so I admit that I romanticize this era of peace rallies, but still, it saddens me that the antiwar sentiment is no longer as "cool" as it was 50 years ago. Sure, the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is not very popular, but because people don't seem to care very much. This war is the kid in school who nobody notices. The Vietnam War, on the other hand, was unpopular because it pissed off - it moved - the public.

Why is our generation so damn apathetic? Are we that much more selfish than our parents were? Are we preoccupied by issues our parents never had?


I don't quite understand my antagonism toward ROTC, or with the military. Not just our military. Everytime I'd watch YZNU's freshmen doing their mandatory military drills, I'd get the chills. I just find synchronized marching creepy. The fact that all freshmen in this part of the country are disciplined in such an overt manner is frightening.

Also, now that the newly-winged Eric is an Air Force rock star, my feelings toward the military are even more nebulous. How can I admire him without acknowledging all of the grand opportunities the military has provided him with? The military makes possible life as he knows it.

You could chalk-up my antagonism to the military to my general suspicion of all sorts of powerful organizations/institutions/etc. And yet, look at me, a Peace Corps Volunteer, for heaven's sake. I work for the government, I help to author the fattest institution of them all. Often it feels like it's our job to do damage control, to make sure nationals in other countries don't hate us too much for the coups and wars we've supported, the labor and natural resources we've exploited, and the bombs we've dropped. So in many ways, my role as a "peace ambassador" supports the military - it mollifies the international antagonism toward American violence. And yet, there are ways to go beyond, and maybe even against, what is expected of me as a representative of the US - not that it is my mission to blemish America's name. It's really quite the opposite.

Friday, October 30, 2009

party prep party

I spent the afternoon in Fuling with Kathy. Fuling DOES sell popcorn, thank God. We ate lunch at Dico's, a fast food joint I'd been trying my best to avoid, only because it's expensive... for a PCV, anyway. Ah, but the french fries were amazing. First fries I've eaten since June! I didn't think Fuling had any!

Unfortunately, one of the Mag7 got the (swine?) flu... but her slot was quickly filled by Luna.
The gang came over this evening with bags of veggies, meat and seasons. They pulled out my pots and pans, helped me hunt for knives and cutting boards (it was the first time my kitchen was being used!), and quickly got to work with making the jiaozi stuffing. Then they taught me how to fold the stuffing into the wrappers. We ate and ate and ate.

Then we had hot chocolate for desert - the dark chocolate Swiss Miss my parents sent me last week. It was a new experience for them. "We don't drink chocolate!" :)

I certainly had a good time. And now I am pooped.

The party is tomorrow!!! :)

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Death returned Michael Jackson's humanity?

"The Pop Spectacular That Almost Was"
by Manohla Dargis, New York Times
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/movies/29this.html?8dpc

"Death returned Michael Jackson’s humanity, and in a curious, tentative way so too does “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” a rushed and ragged monument to the man, his work and the commercial interests of those he left behind. At once a greatest-hits compendium and a suggestive glance at what might have been, the movie — which had its premiere Tuesday and opened Wednesday on a staggering 18,000 screens worldwide — has been so nakedly designed to serve so many different agendas that it seemed unlikely anything would be left for Mr. Jackson’s fans beyond the sheer spectacle of such colossal posthumous exploitation.

Yet something remains here, though it’s hard to know whether it’s the ghost or our love, perhaps both. "


What made MJ inhuman while he was alive? His awesome star power, his "freakishness"? Funny that he had to die in order to for us to be feel like we can relate to him. Suddenly, he is a person.

And yet, the movie, inspired by his death, "has been so nakedly designed to serve so many different agendas." Is that the essence of being human? Certainly that's how I sometimes feel.

cruel optimism

Time is unkind.


I just stumbled upon an old letter.
Funny how time fails to dull the sharpness of certain words. Just as I was beginning to consider a beginning without the author of such cruel words, I was taken in again, consumed by precisely that which makes his words so cruel: hope.

...you had your reasons for not responding and I value that so I drew the line and you became a friend. That doesn't mean that line cant ever be erased...

We were both victims of a wicked trick of time, yet I seem to be the only one who has yet to recover.

Aw boo, what could tempt me into opening old wounds? Nothing but the banal, conceited words of someone else. Words that are not his, words that have no meaning, words that have nothing at all to do with me. Perhaps this makes me banal and conceited. Regardless, I long to be caught in a whir of words that have everything to do with me - real words that do not merely make faint illusions to hope and promise.


*I realize that other than the title, this has nothing to do with Berlant. Well, Berlant, not everything has to be about you...

:P

Halloween

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I said "YES!" to a student to who asked for a Halloween Party. Today Yedda reported that there will be 160 students. I don't know how accurate this count is, but if that many students do show up... It's going to be chaotic, but fun.

I have 4 games:
Pumpkin bowling
Chubby Bunny
Footloose Balloon Pop
Balloon Squat Relay

- and there will be a costume contest IF students dress up
- and I will show "Hocus Pocus" IF (big, big IF!) the computer and projector work
- and I will give popcorn to all if Kathy can help me find some in Fuling tomorrow

My Magnificent 7 is coming over tomorrow for a final meeting. I am so, so grateful for their help. I was going to take them out to dinner, but then they asked to cook for me. Hah! Who would disagree? So tomorrow, they're making jiaozi at my place. :)

They came over last night too, and they asked me my age. I told them to guess.

"26? ... 25? ... 24? .... 23? .... 22?"

"Yes, 22."

"HUUUUHH???????"

That was the first time anybody has ever thought that I'm older than I actually am. =P

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

faith + postmodernism = humble mumble jumble

Do you think a Christian can believe in multiple truths? Of course it is possible for God to be as real to me as Guanyin is for a Taoist. This statement doesn't have to imply that both God and Guanyin are truly real. But does it even matter, so long as God is real to me? Is his reality in my life supposed to negate the universal reality, the truth, of Guanyin?


For me, faith is a fragile thing, yet it won't break. And that's how I like it. In order for me to live with myself, and in order for my faith to truly be strong, it must be weak. It must be humble, it must be receptive to questions and challenges.

My Kindle is obese with postmodern mumble jumble, that "other voice" that tempts me to question what I once believed was the only truth. Heck, Derrida's thought-children have me in agreement with those arguments that are premised on the idea that metanarratives are supreme bullshit, that all the world is (con)textual, and that Truth is an arrogant fantasy.

Yet metanarratives and faith are empowering, and they are not, I hope, inherently harmful. There is something awesome in their mere potential to unite people irrespective or race, sex, class, etc. Anyone can believe. But then we go and fuck up a beautiful thing. We create the categories of "believer" and "nonbeliever," of "right" and "wrong." We feel entitled to name things as false simply because we believe we know truth.

But do we know the truth? If we "knew," we wouldn't be asked to believe, would we? Scientific proof of the creation story is not necessary for us to be thankful for what has been and can be created - by evolution, by a higher power, by accident, by genius invention, by imagination.

Anyhow, I must disagree with a big part of the Christian community that sees postmodern works as crap authored by garden snakes. From time to time, postmodernity's intellectual criticism, its merciless questions, turn my faith inside out. They allow me to air out the stale aspects of my faith. They humble me in how I believe in the Christian God. They remind me of why I believe in Him. Faith and postmodernity do not have to be enemies. Postmodernity need not play devil to Faith, and vice-versa. Humility makes such a coexistence in the heart and mind possible.

Can a Christian believe in a non-hierarchical order of multiple faiths? Can she believe that all faiths are created equal - that as much as we are created by God, we in turn attempt to create Him? I believe so, if her faith is true. A true faith is a humble faith.


On a side note, even when my faith is so precarious that it seems as if it's on the brink of snapping, articles like these make me glad to have been part of Bluewater Mission, a super cool anti-slavery team:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/us/27runaways.html?_r=1&hp

Sunday, October 25, 2009

BBC Book Dare

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How many have you read?

*I will do this survey again in two years, after the Peace Corps. Maybe that would be one way to measure the amount of free time I have.
X = yes = 33
O = partly read

1 Pride and Prejudice X
2 The Lord of the Rings
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling O
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible - O
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens O
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller O
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare O
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurie
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaet Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy O
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez O
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie X
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry X
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables — Victor Hugo O

turbo jam

Pollution plus a belly full of peppers makes running painful, which is a shame because I love running in this cool weather. But today I found Turbo Jam on tudou.com, the in-China solution for the forbidden YouTube. Gen was right, Chalene is crazy but her dancing and boxing combos are fun! So this evening, I blasted Turbo Jam, not caring if it disturbed the visiting American who is staying upstairs. I know that's quite rude of me, but the first thing she said to me was that she worked for Bush. harrharrharr
She's also the reason Rach and I have to attend a rice wine marathon tomorrow night.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

the female complaint

Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is a gift that keeps on taking.

- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture


It does matter that I decided to stop giving.
It does matter that I will never live for him.
The bastard keeps taking.
And I keep complaining.

According to Berlant, the personal is general. If she is right, then you must understand.

Friday, October 23, 2009

(not predictable enough)

Parenthetically powerful:

(To readers who do think that women in the United States are subordinated no longer, here is another view. In modern liberal democratic societies, most inequality is partial, contradictory, and contested: it is often more informal [in behavior] than formal [law or policy]. Yet these complex conditions are not so complicated that their negative impacts are unpredictable. Disrespect for women is not unpredictable enough. It is more often affectively sensed or experienced in episodes than objective and dramatically fixable. Popular culture is terrible at dealing with mixed bags and mixed feelings when the register is ideological and the topic is intimate, and women remain the default managers of the intimate. Even if social negativity and antagonism are intricate and uneven and not merely top-down, the social field is still shaped powerfully by them.)

- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint



(Berlant is not saying that formal subordination no longer exists. Surely some women are formally subordinated more than others.)

sheaves of reality

I'm still stuck on Mrs. Ramsay. Why didn't she stand up againt her husband's "tyrannical" rationality? Why didn't she say something in her own defense? I don't buy that she's shy and docile by nature. Pshh.

I'm reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and while her sections on psychoanalysis are just mumble jumble to me, she's got quite a few powerful passages that make the book a worthwhile read for anyone as easily confused and bored by psychoanalysis as me.

This passage offers an explanation for Mrs. Ramsay's silence.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body.

- Monique Wittig

Discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression - that is, take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility or unintelligibility. This presumptive heterosexuality, she argues, functions within discourse to communicate a threat: "you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be." Women, lesbians, and gay men, she argues, cannot assume the position of the speaking subject within the linguistic system of compuslory heterosexuality. To speak within the system is to be deprived of the possibility of speech; hence, to speak at all in that context is a performative contradiction, the linguistic assertion of a self that cannot "be" within the language that asserts it.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Thursday, October 22, 2009

body: flying in the face of facts

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf beautifully illustrates the tension inherent in the Cartesian dualism of mind/body and its "tyrannical" inscription on the man/woman dichotomy. From a "female" perspective, the "male" virtue of rationality, when pursued for its own sake, as done by Mr. Ramsay, is nothing short of tyranny with a cool explanation.


"The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. 'Damn you,' he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine to-morrow. So it might.

Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack for consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said."

Monday, October 19, 2009

Just Do It! crisis

"The pressure to "do something" is like the superstitious compulsion to make some gesture when we are observing a process over which we have no real influence. Are not our acts often such gestures? The old saying "Don't just talk, do something!" is one of the stupidest things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense. Perhaps the problem lately has been that we have been doing too much, such as intervening in nature, destroying the environment, and so forth. Perhaps it is time to step back think, and say the right thing. True, we often talk about soemthing instead of doing it; but sometimes we also do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them. Such as throwing $700 billin at a problem instead of reflecting on how it arose in the first place."

- Slavoj Zizek, "To Each According to His Greed"
Harper Magazine, Oct. 2009

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

phallogocentrism

Thank you, Judith Butler, for the New Word of the Day:

PHALLOGOCENTRISM:

In critical theory and deconstruction, phallogocentrism or phallocentrism is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning.


And thank you, wise Wikipedia, for the definition.


10/22 update: wow, this is dirty at the core. lol!

Reading Lolita in China

"It is only through these empty rituals that brutality becomes possible," Nafisi writes in her memoir on her time in the Islamic Republic of Iran, lived and witnessed through the wide-eyed imaginations of literature's finest. Habits, particularly those that are hollowly performed, are fatal - in killing the mind, they obliterate reflection and creativity. What then, she seems to be asking, is to stop us from killing? Nabokov's term for this, Nafisi notes, is "poshlust." It denotes the "close relationship between banality and brutality."

An active mind requires much energy, and hegemony's poison, especially when offered in the form of convenience, is awfully tempting for lazy Wikipedia-reliant kids like me. Life would be much too rigorous if each experience was entirely void of familiarity, and certainly there is "good" to be found in tradition. But "good" rituals should be able to withstand our interrogation - they should not collapse from the mere puff of a question.

Nafisi picked out yet another gem from Nabokov: "curiosity is insubordination in its purest form." To wonder is to resist.

Somewhere in the middle of her memoir she backs this assertion, also what I take to be the underlying "moral of the story," with a quip from Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home."

Fiction opens for us a book-sized window to morality because it "question[s] traditions and expectations when they seem too immutable." And what lies at the heart of morality? Empathy.

Strange how, while reading Nabokov's Lolita, I found myself empathizing with the narrator, a pedophile who lives entirely to rape his 12-year-old step-daughter. To my horror, there I was, internalizing the turmoil of the very character who epitomizes immorality. But this is merely a symptom of Nabokov's brilliance - his words are laden with magic - they restore humanity, not only to the non-human Lolita, in her role as an object of perverted pleasure, but also to the inhuman Humbert. Lolita, is an extreme example of the power of the imagination.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

American Tune

by Paul Simon
(I recommend Eva Cassidy's interpretation)

Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Many's the time I've been forsaken
And certainly abused
But it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
When I think of another working day
I've just got to get some rest
I've got to get some rest

I don't know a soul who's not been battered
Don't have a friend who feels at ease
Don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh but it's all right, it's all right
We've lived so well so long
And when I think of the road we've travelled on
So far away from home
So far away from home

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
In a dream I was flying

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hour
And we sing an American tune
Oh but it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
And when I think of another working day
I've just got to get some rest
I've got to get some rest

"The Trials of the Academe"

NYT: "Think Again" by Stanley Fish
on Amy Gajda's "The Trials of the Academe"

"When I began teaching in 1962 at the University of California in Berkeley, I asked older colleagues about the decorums and rules of the classroom. In response, I was given the Myron Brightfield rule. Brightfield was then a very senior member of the department. His rule (and I paraphrase) was, When you close the door, there’s nothing they can do to you. Those were the days, and they had their injustices as well as their advantages. Now we have justice, or at least the demand for justice, all the time and it may, Gajda suggests, be killing us."




Strange how I feel so free while teaching in China. Stay away from the 3 T's, and when I close the door, ....
tis the Kacie Miura rule, a very junior member of the department.

Monday, October 12, 2009

obomba




Ah, don't get me wrong, Obama zhuxi is what I consider to be the closest thing to a living, breathing political hero, and it's not as if he asked for the peace prize. Perhaps in some revolting way, escalating the war is his way of achieving peace? The disgusting thing is that I ask this rhetorically.

The NYT's Peter Baker concludes his lyrical analysis of the irony of the Nobel-Afghanistan ordeal by posing these BIG 'ole questions:

With the Nobel medal staring down at him in the White House for the next three years or perhaps seven, will the designated peacemaker eventually figure out just what peace means in a land without it? Will he earn the prize he has already received?

Verses I thought were especially poignant in this tragic news song:

That was eight years ago last week and never on that night, as we watched the might of the world’s most powerful nation rain down on the primitive army of soldiers clad in rags and sandals, did it occur to us that America so many years later would still be trying to figure out how to win — or whether it even could. The journey from the rugged village of Topdara to the halls of the White House is a quintessential story about the limits of power and imagination.

The idea of clear lines and neat definitions does not apply in Afghanistan. Over the following few months, many of the themes of the last eight years would become clear. There were civilians killed by errant American bombs and intrigues among Afghans who ostensibly were our allies and common cause forged with a ruthless warlord who did just enough of the Americans’ bidding to stay on the payroll while waging his own private war for control of his local province.


And what is the Taliban, anyway? It was not just Mullah Muhammad Omar, the one-eyed master who forced women to wear burqas and banned music, dancing, alcohol and kites. It was the boys we met who fought for the Taliban because that was what everyone did. Or who did it for food and shelter. Or who were press-ganged into it without recourse to resist. The terms were binary — Taliban or not Taliban — in a country that was kaleidoscopic.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Frida

The movie, like the artist, is vivid, raw, poetic. My favorite verses: Frida's love letter to Diego and the speech Diego gave at Frida's opening show in Mexico.

On a postcard to Diego:
Dear Diego,
How are you, panzon?
Why didn' you tell me Paris was such a nightmare?
The French are the most pretentious bores in the world
I'd rather sit on the floor of a market in Toluca
selling tortillas than have to listen to the prattling
of the artistic bitches of Paris.
There really hasn't been as much interest
in the exhibition as Breton promised.
Mexican artists are nothing but an exotic curiosity here.
All in all, it's been lonely
and I crave news from home.
Diego, this letter's a lie.
Paris has been good to me,
but without you, it means nothing.
All the rage of our 12 years together passes through me,
and I'm left knowing that I love you more than my own skin.
And though you may not love me as much,
you do love me a little,
don't you?
If this is not true,
I'll always be hopeful that it could be.
I adore you.
Frida.


Diego at her exhibition:
There was this skinny kid with these eyebrows shouting up at me, "Diego, I want to show you my paintings!" But of course, she made me come down to look . I did, and I've never stopped looking. But I want to speak about Frida not as her husband, but as an artist. I admire her.

Her work is acid and tender
hard as steel
and fine as a butterfly's wing
loveable as a smile
cruel as the bitterness of life.
I don't believe that ever before
has a woman put such agonized
poetry on canvas.


For the moment, these are holding my eyes captive, and wouldn't doubt that they will arrest my dreams tonight as well:

Friday, October 9, 2009

flu to me

ummmm.
The world looks funny from this side of the sea, ten hours ahead of a reality I am aware of only via Facebook (<3). But time and space are nothing when you are flying. ummmmm.

A day of Nabokov (or more specifically, of his famous perv Hummm) and already my imagination has flown, literally flown, in a government plane named KC135, across the vast Pacific. An old friend flying fast toward a fuzzy-eyed me. Of course, not TO me, but in my direction... to those stubby, hairy-armed ancestral roots of mine, to the stubby, hairy-arms of my pride.

These spacio-temporal crossings, these high-altitude trips above unobjective truth up into the wiiiiiispy clouds of MAYBE, leave me airsick, seasick, totally unPacific. Those clouds are only wissssssspy in dreams. In the life of Us, they carry storms, don't you remember, Kacie135? ummmmmmmMaybe I am flying the "H-yi-N-yi"?

Fly, flew, flu........
forget, forget, forget

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

nellie bly

Nellie Bly -- a world traveler (literally), the investigative journalist who triggered a reform of mental institutions, and also the woman who inspired my days at the HA & TH. I am thinking that she'll make a great topic for our first women's group session. :)


www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/world/peopleevents/pande01.html

Monday, October 5, 2009

perverse progress

The Way We Live Now

The New Gender Gap

At first blush, the history of women in the workplace seems a trajectory of success. From the assumption that they would be secretaries to the expectation that they can be C.E.O.’s, they have crashed through ceilings (though not enough of them), made workplaces more flexible (not completely, but significantly) and transformed the face of work. They have gone from holding 34.9 percent of all jobs 40 years ago to 49.8 percent today. They are on track to hold more than half of them any moment now; it might have happened while you were reading this.

Under other circumstances, that would be cause for celebration. But women have gained this latest bit of ground mostly because men have lost it — 78 percent of the jobs lost during this recession were held by men. So not only is it unseemly to rejoice over a larger share of a smaller pie, it is also unsettling to face the fact that so much of the history of women in the workplace (both their leaps forward and their slips back) is a reaction to what was happening to men.

That was the case in the 1930s, when working women were dismissed so that they didn’t take jobs from able-bodied males with families to support. During the 1940s women were invited back in, a replacement work force when the men went to war. By the 1950s and into the ’60s women lost their higher-paying blue-collar jobs and took lower-paying ones in the expanding retail and service sectors or returned home; in the 1970s the most ambitious among them rebelled — a period when women truly commandeered the train and drove it forward, often sacrificing dreams of children to get ahead. By the 1980s mothers worked because of the growing feeling that households needed two incomes, and the realization dawned that the workplace was designed to fit the life of a man with a wife at home rather than a woman juggling work and family.

The next two decades brought adaptations — words like “telecommuting” and “flextime” entered the vocabulary — and because times were good, companies saw the benefits of going along. Also because times were good, some women who could leave did, opting out of a system that fit women only marginally better than before.

Now they seem to be returning. Women will soon be the majority of workers because some are opting back in, and many others, who never left, are more likely to find and keep their jobs than men. Once again, the reasons for this are not a function of the clout of women but of the predicament of men and less a sign of how far women have come than of how far they have left to go.

“The things that traditionally hold women back in the work force are working in their favor now,” says Heidi Hartmann, a labor economist and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “but those obstacles remain.”

Primarily, women are still cheaper. They earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man, and in a flailing economy employers see that as an attractive quality. Women who are returning to the work force after several years at home raising children are particularly cheap. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, has estimated that the penalty is 10 percent of income for every two years out of the job market, a loss that is never recouped. From the hiring side of the table, that may be a good bargain.

In addition, women are concentrated in lower-paying industries, like health care and education, where there have been fewer layoffs, rather than in higher-paying realms, like finance, construction and manufacturing, which have contracted. Why this is true has long been an economic chicken-and-egg question — are these professions less lucrative and prestigious because they are predominantly held by women, or are they predominantly held by women because men are less likely to take them given their lower pay and status? But whatever the cause, the end result is that the “female” professions have not suffered as much this past year.

Women also benefit from some employers’ presumptions that they will settle. When choosing among overqualified applicants for a position, employers often seem more comfortable hiring a woman for a step-down job. Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, says women might be seen as less resentful about taking a job with less money and authority, and they might also be less likely to bolt if something better comes along. Especially “if a woman is coming back to work and has had difficulty finding a job, the assumption is she is going to be more grateful than the man,” she says.

The point that the increase of women in the workplace is not somehow a victory for women is driven home by the fact that the most successful and highly paid women are losing their jobs at the same rates as successful and highly paid men.

There is also the fact that equality in the workplace has not translated into equality in the home, where women still do decidedly more of the work, on average, than men. That may change as more men are domesticated by unemployment, or it may become an additional burden of this new economy, because there is a different kind of tension in a home where a man is out of a job.

Adding to that tension is the fact that the scaffolding that women have struggled to build to help manage their lives over the years is eroding. The most recent numbers from the Society for Human Resource Management show that families are getting less help from their employers — in the form of flexible work options and other work-life benefits — at a time when workers arguably need them most.

Cataclysms are often classrooms. What we are learning from this one is that women have not reached parity, no matter what next month’s jobs data say. It is not good news when women surpass men because women are worth less. Perversely, real progress might come when we reach the place where a financial wallop means women lose as much ground as men.

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog. She last wrote for the magazine about women and philanthropy.