Harvard’s schizophrenic position on gender segregation of its gym is only one manifestation of the utter confusion that pervades academia and its crazy aunt “women’s studies.” Feminists in academia are split on the issues of pornography and prostitution. Those opposing pornography find themselves uncomfortably allied with anti-feminists and Christian conservatives. Those advocating legalization of prostitution find themselves uncomfortably allied with the English language. Prostitution has been gussied up as “intimate labor,” and the definition is expanding to sweep in traditionally noble work in the home: maids, nannies, nurses, and wives. Prostitution can be grouped with these others because they all result from the tyranny of patriarchy. (You have to ignore the fact that prostitutes generally do not work in the home.)
Last fall, the University of California at Santa Barbara held a conference entitled “Intimate Labors: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Domestic, Care & Sex Work.” No less that 50 papers were presented by professors from across the U.S. and Canada. The paper titles and abstracts give us a peek at this exciting field of scholarly research.
John Kaiser lays out a nice introduction:
“Intimate labor” is itself a compelling choice of words, as it draws attention to distinctions around what may be analyzed as “intimate” or not and what may be considered to be “labor.” One useful way of exploring intimate labor as a category of analysis is to think about the importance of contexts in the way intimate labor articulates with power, gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and other lines of experience.
It’s apparently important not to focus on gender alone, but to bring in other factors like race and class. Immigrant status is a favorite and migrants are everywhere.
The UCSB conference is so rich in material, it seems to be ripe for a new kind of Bulwer-Lytton contest. Reading the abstracts is like reading the opening line of a bad novel; the prose is as contorted and the concepts are as disjointed and nonsensical. I can handle only three examples today.
Lachelle R. Hannickel wins the award for fantasy. She begins her abstract by creating her own ambiguous word and noting its ambiguity:
The (im)migrant worker has long occupied an ambiguous position in France.
(Yes, in France and elsewhere.) But this is especially true with domestics.
The role of the (im)migrant domestic has been particularly difficult to define, as she works and, in many case, resides, in the private space of the home.
I can understand the concept of an immigrant domestic, but what is a migrant domestic? Does she migrate from one home to another, or does she merely migrate from the kitchen to the laundry room?
Laura Agustin can’t figure out where customer service ends and sex begins, and has trouble distinguishing prostitutes, singers, and tour guides:
What’s the difference between loving and caring? Or caring and cleaning? What about tending, assisting, listening, advising, explaining, putting at ease? Where does sex begin - with the flirting, the first kiss or the bed? What happens when one of these activities metamorphoses into another - when, for example, the carer offers caresses or the prostitute wraps a warm towel around a spent penis? . . . [T]ea-sellers, karaoke performers, tourist guides, hostesses, . . . migrants offering quasi-domestic services in their homes and prostitutes who sell from the street all describe situations in which a positive feeling for a customer can appear at any moment and result in a less mechanized, more affectionate and intimate encounter.
Migrants offering services in their homes? Well, never mind. Laura wins in the romance category. We have prostitutes with hearts of gold, a first kiss, and an affectionate encounter with a tea-seller. Positive feelings are just around the street corner.
Neel Ahuja wins the thriller award, slaying academia’s favorite bogeyman.
In my presentation, I will review the history of the 1942-1943 venereal disease dragnets that the U.S. and Panamanian governments collaboratively carried out in the Republic of Panama. Officials attempted to strictly segregate white U.S. soldiers stationed in the Panama Canal Zone from multiracial (Asian, black, and Latino) Panamanian and Caribbean migrant women. As an initiative aimed at criminalizing sex work near major U.S. military bases, the dragnets ultimately criminalized the public life of women in Panamanian cities as new medical diagnostic technologies helped enforce hospitalization of large numbers of women associated with venereal disease.
Sex work here becomes a locus of political struggle as it is in part a result of U.S. presence and as it threatens the racial-sexual logics of wartime U.S. imperialism (in both its military and client state manifestations). The fact that the dragnets spurred women’s political resistance to U.S. empire demonstrates the ways in which the development of new carceral approaches to medicine and health across colonized space provided important terrains of subaltern political mobilization.
This thriller abstract has it all. The evil U.S., suppression of the intimate worker trade, racial prejudice, prejudice against migrant prostitutes, and denial of the freedom to be “associated with venereal disease” - all carried out as part of wartime U.S. imperialism. But it has a happy ending apparently as multiracial call girls migrate peacefully across colonized space to threaten racial-sexual logics and to resist having to go to the hospital for treatment.
Steven Malanga at City Journal still is not convinced that Richard Florida knows what he’s talking about. Florida authored The Rise of the Creative Class, which argues, in essence, that economic development is directly proportional to the number of well-educated, creative workers a city attracts. Four years ago, Malanga pointed out many flaws in Florida’s thesis - primary among them that his case runs counter to the data.
A generation of leftish policy-makers and urban planners is rushing to implement Florida’s vision, while an admiring host of uncritical journalists touts it. But there is just one problem: the basic economics behind his ideas don’t work. Far from being economic powerhouses, a number of the cities the professor identifies as creative-age winners have chronically underperformed the American economy. And, although Florida is fond of saying that, today, “place matters” in attracting workers and business, some of his top creative cities don’t even do a particularly good job at attracting-or keeping-residents.
Now, Malanga says, Florida’s latest book, Who’s Your City?How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life,takes a position contrary to his original thesis.
Trying to suss it all out, Florida decides that to be a real winner a region needs to have not just lots of creative-class types, but the right personality. And, he admits, changing a region’s personality to reprogram it for success is not easy.
All of this is fine, even intriguing, but one can’t help wondering about those mayors and governors who rushed to build bike paths and subsidize music festivals and are now being told that it isn’t quite that simple. Not only do they have to attract creative-class types, they also need to figure out how to change their cities’ or regions’ “personalities” to make sure that they get the desired economic payoff. One might have expected from Florida himself, if not a little contrition, then perhaps a moment’s pause to acknowledge that his latest theory could explain why his original list of creative-class cities contained a few economic clunkers. No doubt these cities merely lacked the proper “personality.”
If economics is truly the dismal science, Florida managed to wrap it in a pretty package. His half-baked theories had instant appeal to a powerful constituency. I don’t doubt the value of a thriving artistic community, and I’m all in favor of aesthetically pleasing public spaces, but at some point somebody has to grow some food or make a widget.
Last week’s martini post was superseded by Good Friday. The good news this Friday is that you are free to engage in additional field research at the local bar.
Those who are serious about their research and martini history need to check out Martini, Straight Up, by Lowell Edmunds.
Bernard DeVoto called it the “supreme American gift to world culture,” and H. L. Mencken said that it was “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.” FDR served a Martini to Stalin at the Teheran Conference in 1943 and asked him how he liked it. “Well, all right,” the Russian said, “but it is cold on the stomach.” Stalin’s successor was served a stronger Martini than the rather bland sort that FDR mixed. Khrushchev called it “the U.S.A.’s most lethal weapon.”
You see, it has serious political implications. I also noticed this unassailable observation:
[The Martini’s] return in the 1990s is the return of the image. Only a few diehards still drink the old straight-up gin Martini. . . .
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), novelist, playwright, and statesman, has among his credits The Last Days of Pompeii and Rienzi.But his most famous line is the opening to Paul Clifford:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
In homage to this overwrought verbiage, the English Department at San JoseStateUniversity initiated the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”With numerous categories and 25 years of history, the Bulwer-Lytton contest has generated a vast compendium of awful prose.The 2007 winner:
Gerald began–but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash–to pee.
Other winners and honorable mentions abound, and you will find your search for intentionally bad writing amply rewarded.You may be impressed by irony . . .
With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.
. . . or revel in the linguistic descent through multiple layers of nonsense.
Professor Radzinsky wove his fingers together in a tweed-like fabric, pinched his lips together like a blowfish, and began his lecture on simile and metaphor, which are, like, similar to one another, except that similes are almost always preceded by the word ‘like’ while metaphors are more like words that make you think of something else beside what you are describing.
Harvard Professor Harry Lewis recounts the controversy over the school gym, which has instituted women-only hours, and gives a brief history of Harvard’s policies on discrimination.
Harvard’s nondiscrimination policies now cover “race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age,” and a few other things, and the same absolutism applies to all categories. Harvard has no ethnic or single-sex housing. Women’s groups have to allow male members. The Black Students’ Association can’t close white students out of its meetings.
Harvard justifies its gender segregation of the gym as a courtesy to Muslims. So how does Harvard apply its policy to ROTC?
Harvard bans ROTC because the military violates the “sexual orientation” part of Harvard’s nondiscrimination policy. Harvard students can participate in ROTC at MIT, but Harvard will not provide them meeting space or any other support - even bus fare down Massachusetts Avenue. . . .
Is the gym exception merely a reasonable kindness to conservative Muslim women? Then Harvard’s failure of courtesy to its cadets suggests that politics determine what forms of discrimination are inoffensive.
Lewis understates his case. Harvard and many other schools bear an animosity toward the military that reached full flower in the Vietnam era. ROTC programs were banished before homosexuality became the driving issue, and there can be little doubt that these schools would find other reasons to disallow ROTC programs even if the homosexuality issue were resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
Charles T. Downey at Ionarts pays tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel on the occasion of his last concert in the U.S.
We had gathered to give tribute to an astounding career of sixty years at the piano, to the mark the man has left on the fairly narrow repertoire that was his signature. Brendel devoted himself not to Apollo or to Dionysus, but to the cult of eloquent sound. A Brendel performance rarely says too much but is committed to and achieves, especially in Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert, the elegant expression of every detail in the score.
Also at Ionarts, Michael Lodico reports on the conversation with Brendel the next night at the Austrian Embassy in Washington. Brendel spoke on a variety of subjects, and was asked specifically about humor in Haydn’s music and Brendel’s article “Does Classical Music Have To Be Entirely Serious?” Humor is based on a departure from established forms and expectations, and to understand humor in anything, one has to understand the framework and share the expectation. Brendel wrote:
Why does classical musical lend itself so readily to comic effects? Because it seems to me to reflect, in its solid and self-sufficient forms and structures, the trust of the Enlightenment in rational structures that rule the universe. The spirit of classical music seems to imply the belief that the world is good, or at least that it could become so. For the Romantics, there was no sense of order to rely upon; it had to be found and created in oneself. The open and fragmentary structures of romantic music, as epitomized by the fantasy, aimed to be as personal, and exceptional, as possible. Where, as with Berlioz, surprise becomes the governing principle of composition, and music a succession of feverish dreams, comic effects have little chance; they have to be achieved as an assault on what is proper and predictable.
Brendel is correct, and we should answer the question: No, classical music does not have to be entirely serious. For those who like to contemplate the future of classical music (or, indeed, the future of our culture in general), this would be a good place to focus some attention. Our capacity for humor may be a good bellwether.
Will Rogers said, “I have always noticed that people will never laugh at anything that is not based on truth.” And G. K. Chesterton said, “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly; devils fall because of their gravity.”
Religion has become a wedge issue in politics. Despite the silly protests that some politicians are attempting to impose a Theocracy in America, religion is becoming a more prevalent issue because its decline, not its resurgence. So argues R. R. Reno in First Things.
Citing the civil rights movement as the most important post-war achievement, Reno says that the mainline Protestant churches held sway over the opinion makers.
Mainline Protestantism had the ear of the richest and most powerful Americans, some Roosevelt Democrats and some Eisenhower Republicans. And the pastors did what they were supposed to do: They shepherded their well-heeled, influential flocks toward a consensus about civil rights, which was why Lyndon Johnson could sign a civil rights bill with overwhelming bipartisan support in 1964.
The societal consensus of mainline Protestantism exists no more.
I don’t think I’m breaking news when I report that our current secular elite invariably seems to think differently than the typical churchgoer. We see it in the divisive cultural issues of our day: abortion, euthanasia, genetic manipulation, and gay marriage. But it was already there in earlier efforts, stimulated by John Rawls (perhaps unwittingly, but that’s another story), to redefine “public reason” so as to exclude religious believers. Thus our current situation: Faith matters so much in politics because, for some, it ought not to matter at all. A secular “no” has given rise to a vigorous, religious “yes,” as the emergence of First Things in 1990 testifies.
Two kinds of views get no attention: those everybody shares, and those few believe.
When we had a religious consensus, there was no controversy.
This is no longer the case, as everybody realizes, and it is precisely because religion is less ubiquitous that it has become more controversial-and more noticed-in the public square.
The Wall Street Journalpraises Hank Brown, departing president of the University of Colorado.
Mr. Brown proceeded to oversee a complete examination of Mr. [Ward] Churchill’s work, and the ethnic studies professor was eventually fired because of fraudulent scholarship, not his politics. Mr. Brown then initiated a complete review of CU’s tenure policies, making it easier for his successors to get rid of deadwood. He also took on the equally sensitive subject of grade inflation, insisting that the university disclose student class rank on transcripts. If a B average puts a student at the bottom of his class, future employers will know it.
That all sounds like a good day’s work to me. Meanwhile, the selection of incoming president Bruce Benson has ruffled some feathers. From The Denver Post:
The 69-year-old oil executive was a controversial choice from the moment he emerged as the lone finalist for the job, despite his long history as an advocate for education.
He has only a bachelor’s degree, raising concerns about his academic qualifications to lead a research university. That might have been overlooked, but he made remarks during forums at the university that raised the anger of an already skeptical audience, among them a suggestion that climate change could be an unproven theory.
We will have to wait and see how this appointment works out. Benson’s lack of academic credentials puts him at a disadvantage. On the other hand, we are now told that most college courses are being taught by non-tenure-track faculty and the majority of full-time higher-education employees are administrators, not faculty.
Universities have become top-heavy bureaucratic nightmares, and college presidents are forced to spend an inordinate percentage of their efforts on fundraising. In this environment, the regents may be justified in placing more weight on management and fundraising skills than a record of scholarly achievements.
Unfortunately, the criticism of Benson from faculty seems to degrade rapidly into complaints about his political views - not that he is partisan, but that he supports the wrong political party. This, along with Benson’s questioning of liberal orthodoxy, leads faculty to charge that the university has sold its soul to the devil.
“Whom are you looking for?” I couldn’t help but wince at this perfectly acceptable, but jarring translation from the Passion Gospel. There we go again, I thought. Yet another translator caving to “casual” in the desperate hope of being more effective!
The Latin Quem quaeritis - rendered best in English “Whom do you seek?” - radiates enormous power. Spoken by Jesus to those sent to arrest him, the phrase found its dramatic potential as the Angels’ question to the three women visiting Christ’s tomb. In Western music, the tri-fold exchange Quem Quaeritis became the generating nugget of Medieval liturgical drama:
Interrogatio. Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae?
Responsio. Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae.
Angeli. Non est hic; surrexit, sicut praedixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchro
Question: Whom do ye seek in the sepulcher, O followers of Christ?
Answer: Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified, O heavenly ones.
Angels: He is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he is risen from the sepulchre.
- Translation: John Gassner, editor, Medieval and Tudor Drama.
The force of this exchange, set first to simple chant, then adorned by melismatic vocal lines, is assessed in the first volume of Howard Smither’s eloquent four-volume A History of the Oratorio:
A germ from which the visitation sepulchri dramas grew was the “Quem quaeritis,” a brief dialogue that first appears in manuscripts of the early tenth century. . . . This dialogue was performed before the mass of Easter morning. A gradual process of elaborating the “Quem quaeritis” resulted in a group of extended visitatio sepulchri dramas for Easter, as well as dramas modeled on them for the feasts of Christmas, Epiphany, and the Ascension.
Although three centuries would elapse between early liturgical utterances of Quem queritis and full-blown development of Italian oratorio (and without “continuous development from the former to the latter,” in Smither’s authoritative assessment), we still do well to remember the power of the word. The closer any translation can come to reflecting the force of the original, the better. Since English-speaking moderns (especially journalists and advertisers) have fled from the use of “whom,” and lapped up the casual construct “looking for” as a substitute for the verb “seek” - I find the combination “Whom are you looking for?” as odd as a woman dressed in a sequined top and worn-out joggers.
I wonder what kind of artistic development such a loosey-goosey translation is likely to engender in future generations.
I have been tempted to write on many things between Good Friday and Easter – mostly things that annoy me. Journalists are writing silly articles about Easter, looking for a new angle on something they consider dated. But those things happen every year. Fortunately, so does this:
Defending Western Culture and traditions through a rational discussion of the arts (emphasis on durable music) with unavoidable references to politics, religion, law, ranching, and the quest for a good martini.
Last week’s martini post was superseded by Good Friday. The good news this Friday is that you are free to engage in additional field research at the local bar.
