the educated serf

Return to Blog

2009-09-14T17:13:00.003-04:00

After a book writing hiatus, I am back a little, just a little. Not that there was a huge groundswell of demand for me to return to this, but well, it's here when you find it.

In August I managed to finish a book, have interviews for two good academic jobs, return to Pittsburgh without major trauma, and well, isn't that enough?

I'll be posting soon on that new job (I got one of them) and other items, but here's a nice photo of the world's biggest gluten-free sign at Soergel's Orchard in Wexford, PA. They've opened a big natural foods and gluten-free section that's as grand as the sign.

Massachusetts State of Mind

2009-07-05T14:47:00.002-04:00

Well, we are here in western Massachusetts for the month of July. I am sitting in a Panera, the least local or interesting place where there's wifi and coffee, but it is close to the movie theater where certain minors are watching a movie on the most glorious sunny day imaginable. This is not the Allison Park Panera, where it's very folksy and familiar (as familiar as an overpriced chain can get) but also very homogeneous. I have managed to find things I like and people I who share lives and interests. There's a kind of adjustment that seems inevitable, but takes work.

Here's there's a set of grandparents, three kids, and a mom with a t-shirt that says "You know what's SO gay? My family..." So, yeah, you would not get that in western Pennsylvania suburbia (maybe in the city; just maybe).

Getting here has been like a bumpy landing while traveling on a propeller plane: it's scary before you're sure it's going to work out. The landscape is the same, though: it's beautiful, it's a bit too precious in its funkiness, it's familiar, and it's clearly not where I live any more. The house we still own is falling into some serious disrepair -- from simple things like broken light fixtures to less simple things like a deck that is completely rotted and sliding glass doors that barely work -- and it makes it hard to live there, especially when I go up into the attic to retrieve items for us to use as furniture while we're there and I see all the things I just left there, unwilling to deal with them when we moved, still unable to deal with them when I come back. Someone reminded me that lots of people have attics full of crap they don't want to face, roofs that need to be re-shingled, and a lack of time to fix even simple things. Coming from the pristine and intensely shiny suburbs, in the glare from their perfect lawns and clean porches, I have forgotten that this is true.

We are imperfect and it is okay.

Weeding Garlic

2009-06-08T13:37:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I spent some time out at Meadow Rock Farm weeding garlic. Susan, who lost her husband only a short while ago, is hard at work keeping the CSA running on her own. Her aunt and uncle and their honey-colored bassett hound were there hooking up some truck-based watering systems, washing out bins, and just generally helping out. I did not get to stay for hot meatloaf sandwiches, which is sad since it sounded better than sitting in the bleachers watching a soccer game with a lot of suburban live-through-your-kids types. I'll be going back soon -- I have more garlic to untangle.

My weeding skills are a little rusty -- especially when you're facing a plot that's had some heavy growth. Thistle and dandelions, I was prepared for. But wild geranium plants with carrot-like root structures were driving me crazy, especially since they like to grow right up against the garlic root bulbs. I wish I could run back up there today and do the other two thirds of the plot. But I'm supposed to be writing the book and indeed, my writing skills -- at least this kind -- are as rusty as my weeding. Needless to say, here I am writing something that takes a lot less hovering and fussing. I just wanted to get this out on paper to prove that I could and to possibly see if this voice could travel back over to the other page. In the book manuscript, started to write a sentence that said "people crossed over a threshold into our lives" and I thought, is that sociological? academic? too bloggy? My blog and other writing reads a lot more "academic-y" than it should anyway. Point is, I want to just take this voice, the good weeding skills that came back after an hour, and bring it off the posting and onto a piece of paper.

Wish me luck.

Sustaining Local Brilliance

2009-06-01T20:08:00.008-04:00

(image: gil and lisa listen intently; craig harris and abby on the right -- literally, not intellectually!)

Every year for the last eleven years, I've gone to a conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. Those names are a mouthful, but the issues discussed by academics and activists are practical, significant, and easy to digest if you care about the way we lead our everyday lives. We discuss sustainable projects ranging from growing methods to labor to consumption, the historical and contemporary conditions that produce cuisines through the mixing of cultures and ingredients, the unequal distribution of goods, services, technology, and information that shapes what we grow and how we eat. Well, the list goes on.

I have just returned from this year's conference, which was in State College, PA, a town I've been visiting regularly since 1981 (in-law family). Not as exciting as last year in New Orleans, you'd think, but there was beauty to be found, especially in the tours the day before the paper sessions began. I went on the Dairy Diversity tour, starting at Meyer's Dairy, a local milk and ice cream stand that we stop at all the time. The ice cream is good, the milk is incredible, and it was cool getting to go behind the scenes, walk through the bottling section and then into the walk-in freezer where you could stare out over the products on the shelf and into the store itself.

Then we went on to Triangle Organics, Elmer King's small Amish farm producing raw milk, ghee, and butter. A beautiful place where these lovely ladies live.

(triangle organic cows)

On to the Elk Creek Cafe in Millheim, with sustainable community, good beer, and local food in abundance (and more ice cream, the best of the day, I thought). More farms with, as one of my van-mates kept exclaiming annoyingly, "amazing camembert," made by an unassuming dairy farmer("it's just cheese," he said) who, when describing the process behind a smoked cheese, simply asserted, "when in doubt, smoke it."

We all want shirts with that across the front.

All weekend there was lots of evidence that the foodie label attaches to agriculture-types, agricultural concerns shape foodie interests -- it's a mixed up, shook up world. Finally, the tour took us to the Industrial Strength Penn State Berkey Creamery, where a dude in a suit described cows as "commodities who really are happy in their stalls" and stood beside the multi-million dollar equipment designed to train budding food scientists headed to Ben and Jerry's, Breyer's, and beyond. My favorite part was meeting Rufus, who is 4 and clearly a budding food scholar, and my best photos are of him, but I'm not sharing without parental permission.

Back in the insularity of the Penn Stater hotel and conference center, there were too many papers to describe, although as always, I was drawn to a ton of sustainability panels that I simply couldn't attend, heard some great papers on food and culture, and was profoundly impressed by the array of grad student work intermingled on all the panels. Finally, I think, we are taking race and class and gender seriously. The DeVault panels were solid all the way around. What's still in my head: Kerstin's happy take on German food blogs, Psyche's cut-to-the-bone analysis of the ways in which her husband's Ghanian sisters integrate their feeding work into her mixed-food-culture marriage, Liora's sensitive eye trained on the market in Tel Aviv, Kelsey's images of older African American women from Gee's Bend, talking about the changes in food over their lifetime, and Emily Bailey's contemplative stories about food in a convent where the average age is 69.

I loved talking over breakfast with the "older" scholars (I can say that, as Gil stands poised for early retirement, but he's not old in any other sense) whose calm assessments reassure me that scholarship keeps going despite recessions, intellectual fads, sexist department chairs who screw up your work environment, and worn idealism. I love knowing that Alex will wear his Spam t shirt some time during the weekend.

I watched Annie, with that deep hawk gaze, working hard with a group of presenters right before their panel, coordinating their talks. I thrilled when Jan P. told Syd that her paper provided her with excellent pedagogical evidence for the marriage penalty. I laughed til it hurt with Netta every time we went up the elevator and turned to the ENDLESS hallway down to our room (I'll try to post Kristina's image of it), enhanced by the optically challenging carpet design.

(image: endless penn stater hallway courtesy of kristina nies)

I am always thrilled to escape with Danny so that we can cover everything we need to (from kids to Chicago to teaching to community activism and beyond), walking, knowing he'll get us where we need to go (although this time I still have blisters...and his souveneir map). Talking with Jessica, Beth, and Syd over the din of the crazy Austrian bistro, Herwig's (finish your plate -- that's my only warning), meeting Martha, who (yes, academic rock star worship) personally KNOWS Dorothy Smith well enough to have her just read over her PAPER. Thanks for letting me crash on the memory foam bed in your hotel room, Martha.

I've forgotten the endless meetings already, but I felt like the Tazmanian devil, jumping up and down to make sure we got something done, wanting it to end before it started (the only time I felt that way all week), and sighing at how much there still is to do in order to keep this thing, this precious moment, and group that I love, going.

I posted this, added Kristina's photo, and now have to stop myself from deleting that last sentence. It's so raw -- I wrote it almost immediately upon coming home -- certainly not normative to have strong feelings about a marginal 300-person organization (that's not a cult) that could certainly survive if i were not in the forest to hear the trees falling. I'm leaving the sentence in.

Digging In

2009-05-21T13:59:00.004-04:00

(maybe some photos soon...i used real film in a 35mm camera. slows things down a bit...)

I bought some perennials on Monday. Things with silver foliage. Straw-like flowers. A scented geranium. Something with purple leaves. Variegated sage. A lupine -- because two tiny ones came back on their own and they're too fragile to accomplish much bloom this year. Cut them some slack -- give them a big sibling to do the work for this July and then next year they'll be big and this one will be setting up shop more permanently.

Last year I pulled out a corner of the endless pachysandra that wraps around our house and started planting a few things: a little mint and oregano and the lupine. They got all gangly by fall but they came back this year with more heft. Just today, I planted the whole corner full of what I bought.

I think it's because Zack rototilled a big area in the yard, serious about getting a vegetable garden in. It messes with the pristine yard effect, which I like. I raked about a third of it, put in beans, pumpkins, lettuce, and cilantro. Then I gave up for a while (although I have some things started indoors -- but those always disappoint. Start out strong, miss a day of watering and they turn into sad, dead, floppy things. Maybe this year they won't...).

But then he went and bought fencing material this week and in between bouts with allergies ("Is this allergies? Do you think that's why I'm tired?" "Yes, now just take something already.") is putting in the metal fence posts. Nothing fancy -- wire and those ordinary metal green posts, a temporary gate -- but the beans are already popping up and the deer here come in ravenous hordes, so we'd better get it protected before too long.

It's weird gardening in suburbia. We're on a corner, on the road that many people take to get into the development, although it's grassy on three sides, woods in the way back, and I haven't heard a car all day (lawn mowers, however, are constant. If I were a good backyard activist, I'd be dropping my dandelion seeds all over the place and sticking flyers in their mailboxes about reduced pesticide use). Still, when my butt is up in the air and I'm weeding, the cars that do go by certainly slow down and stare. These are the kind of people who talk when there's a rake left on the front steps or your fallen oak leaves aren't removed until Thanksgiving.

Why should this matter? I haven't done a vegetable garden since we first moved to Pelham, over 13 years ago. When we first moved out there, we were on what counts as a busy road in Pelham, enough so that we never wanted pets for fear they'd get hit by a car. When students left town, it became a thoroughfare, so we called it "the beach," sitting on the deck listening to waves and waves of cars. But the garden was in the back, by the big shed, Marcia and Lynn's cottage, and the tree with the orioles, so it seemed removed and protected and since I had no children to eat up my time, grad school to avoid, and a sunny flat yard, we had abundant vegetables and herbs. No fence.

Our next house -- the one we still have in Massachusetts -- was too deep in the woods and while my perennial beds and rock walls were nice (not as cool as my serious gardening friends, but hey, there's a big Buddha statue and gooseneck lustrife and a giant blue hosta), there were no veggies except in pots and window boxes. That's when we joined the farm and my love was channeled in the direction of well-tended acreage in Hadley. I wasn't doing the tending, per se, but I could go and pick whenever I wanted, walk around the fields, get cool in the store room, and soak it all in. I'm not lying when I tell people I miss the Food Bank Farm more than anything else in Massachusetts.

Three years into the experiment with life away from New England and into western PA suburbs, I am still not settled, always looking to find a way home, stifling my "it's because we're in Pittsburgh" response when something goes awry or an acquaintance says something stupid (because my friends and acquaintances in Massachusetts never said anything stupid. Never. And they could fly. Take that!).

But the rototilled space draws my attention. It made the decision to buy the perennials possible. I don't know why, but maybe because I've had the experience over and over of making things grow. Not perfectly, mind you. No one has that -- there's always squash bugs and drought or mold and rabbits. But successfully. My daughters have grown up in the house where veggies come in pots, getting their experience with agriculture at the Farm, a different kind of rooted-in love for over 10 years.

I guess I'm saying that the deer may eat every last seedling to the ground (my friend claims they even eat her jalapeno pepper plants!) and things may die when we do go to Massachusetts for July, but maybe it's good for me to dig in, put in some plants that will return for me next year, if I'm still here, or if not, give someone else a reason to poke around in the dirt.

What I hope I'll get in a few years:

image from "All That Grows in Gardens and Nature"

About Erik, On Grief and Hope

2009-05-12T21:40:00.010-04:00

This is a picture of Erik Selby, farmer and radio announcer. He and his wife Susan and his father-in-law ran a beautiful CSA called Meadow Rock Farm in Butler, PA. Erik passed away suddenly last week and I am saddened by it.

As writers, there are certain issues that draw us in but remain elusive. To speak about knowing someone and about loss is to enter into the realm of the cliched and the overwrought. For me, it's almost impossible to write without considering the ontological, especially knowing the Other, so I've got to enter that fray each day armed with descriptions, new and old. But loss is complicated in a different way. The losses in my stage of life, in my geographic, social, and cultural context are different from the losses of those who live with war or poverty or other hardships. I quote at length from a story by Jane Smiley, who has chronicled the kinds of worlds I often inhabit:

..it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is years themselves or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now, that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all -- after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if THEY were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.

(The Age of Grief, Ivy Books, 1977)

I find myself in the position of caring a great deal about people I hardly have the right to say I know.

Zack met Erik and Susan at a farmer's market outside of a local vineyard. In what I like to think of as a valiant attempt to make me happy here, away from my beloved Food Bank Farm in Hadley, he went in search of local farms and CSAs and he stumbled upon the most engaging couple behind a table with beautiful tomatoes, cilantro, fresh garlic, and lettuce. And Erik immediately saw in Zack that this was about the vegetables but not just about the vegetables. He loaded Zack and Zoe down with lots of extra goodies, which were brought home with enthusiasm that, for once, I did not squelch in a downpour of distain (because I am, unfortunately, a snob about the things I love). And, when with that enthusiasm unabated, Zack took me to meet Erik and Susan one Saturday afternoon, I couldn't help but share it. Erik was a person who radiated kindness (without guile or gumption) right through his eyes. Yes, it's a cliche, but dammit, you felt as if you knew him immediately -- and if you didn't, you walked away happy to have met him, wanting to come back for more. Knowing he and Susan were part of my world made it a better place, one with hope. There is nothing better to look forward to than beautiful things grown by people who take joy in each vegetable. Just look at how he'd photographed their produce, the garden, and the chickens and you see the maker behind the thing made.

Over the last year, we had a lively email exchange in which he (through Susan) made it clear that it warmed his soul to know there were people who loved the farm, wanted the CSA to succeed, and enjoyed eating their vegetables. They wanted us to come visit with the dog (even though I'm sure she'd wreak havoc among the fowl). They supplied me with enough to roast tomatoes for freezing, to make all the food for Zoe's bat mitzvah (100 people), and to enjoy garlic all winter long. This year they'd asked me to help them market the farm a bit more (in exchange for a share! Much too generous -- and too certain I actually had something to offer that was worth it). It was just after I'd written back with a whole list of ridiculous ideas, thoughts, and connections that Erik passed away. An unfinished conversation, I am now thinking about how I might be a small factor in getting Susan the farm help she will need to make it through this season. I cannot imagine even remotely what else I could offer for solace in her loss.

The cliches trail me: my imaginings of the world, my sense of its possibilities, of my own place in it, who I am and who I could be, and what we have to offer each other is much richer, wider, and hopeful because I knew Erik even for a little while. In that passage, what Smiley's character doesn't yet see (and perhaps what I am learning) is that the people we grieve for are sometimes the path to hope rather than resignation.

How to Prevent Swine Flu

2009-05-08T17:03:00.002-04:00

I just love this. I don't have the original photographer info -- it was circulated in a email -- but I wish I could get in touch with this person and tell them how much I love this. Anyone who's ever had a baby give you that kind of kiss knows that this is one happy pig. And having hugged a few pigs, I can say that the baby is clearly blissful, too. Pigs are good creatures. H1N1 really should be named the "Humans are disease-carrying messes" virus.

My apologies for not having more to say lately. It's all being absorbed by the great big end of the semester/finish a million projects writing machine.

Tom's Shoes Event April 16th

2009-04-14T07:46:00.003-04:00

Hey! Take your shoes off! Yes, well, it's still mud season here in western PA (and I'm sure it's just barely that in western MA), but Tom's Shoes, the great company that sends shoes to developing countries (NICE new beautiful shoes, too, not just your worn out Nikes...), is sponsoring an event on the 16th -- it's go shoeless day.

I explained the event in detail on the Green Connoisseur Blog on April 14th (today, underneath the morel mushroom mention...) so take a look and consider kicking off your shoes while your tooling around the office, walking over to lunch, or hanging out on campus. And if you've got the bucks, Tom's shoes come in an amazing variety of colors, shapes, styles (vegan, less vegan, yoga-inspired, and so on), and for each pair you buy, one pair gets donated to a kid somewhere who might get to school and back without risking infection and parasite-borne diseases through their feet.

With a little help from my friends

2009-04-10T17:52:00.005-04:00

If I were able to do this more, pretty much every single post would be about my friends. It's no accident that somehow the things I write about are, underneath, really about how we strive for these relationships despite all the obstacles.

I don't want to write about how much I miss the community of people who held me together in Pelham and Amherst. It's one of the other critical aspects of my life where words fail. I have been working hard on finding local friends. I'm doing okay at it. Not great, mind you, but okay. The cultural divide is sometimes uncrossable, the geography of suburbia unforgiving, and the weirdness of academia infuriating. The other day I compared it to how my African American students feel when they are in the minority in class and everyone expects them to "speak" for the black experience.

As. if. there. were. just. one.

Through all this, I am unaccountably blessed (and I almost never use that word) with a far-flung network of friends, most of whom are academics, most write about food, and most (but not all) are women. We usually see each other once a year at a conference, sometimes more by chance and luck. But we talk on email every week and by Friday I am always laughing. This week one friend (she is a budget goddess in an academic school) had a boss who really needs a time out (for those of you without kids, follow the link). Another has a new college president with plans for borrowing heavily and building an amusement park on the campus (I am honestly not exaggerating much here: an example and another). A third one spent the week doing administrative work requested by her chair (work the chair probably should have done herself), only to have the information deemed "irrelevant" in a meeting by -- you guessed it -- the same chair. My other two friends are struggling with tenure, underpaid, and have toddlers. That should be enough right there. Me: well, there's always a saga. This week I read the program for my beloved conference (the place where the universe comes together and the planets align) and lo and behold, the department chair who was central to my intimate understanding of sexual harassment as "hostile work environment" is presenting a paper at my conference. MY conference. where I go to be with MY friends.

Being my beloved friends, they devised at least seven terrific ways to make me feel safe, including something called the Cape Breton Liberation Army, which involves seagulls on laxatives. Since we'd all planned on coming to the conference in our favorite Michelle Obama outfits (yes, we love her), I suspect that our showing of arms (the flesh kind) will be enough of a wall of protection (although my Italian friend says he does not look so good in pumps and pearls...)

This Friday, we each strategized our survival: infusing ginger ale with alcohol, living closer so we can share hair dye (a joke I cannot explain, but I do not believe any of us actually use hair dye, although I think at least a few might have gone for purple in the 80s), and watching movies all weekend long.

Do you think this is what the Beatles had in mind? I do.

turtle image from here.

On Cats and Contradictions

2009-03-23T10:52:00.005-04:00

Quest is literally looking down on my work right now. He seems so cute and tiny in this picture as compared to his belly shot on the left (see "The CDC Can't Map Me"...).

I have been thinking about cats lately, even though the dog tends to occupy my imagination more fully. Warren asked, on his Facebook page (!!!), "do pets make us better writers?" and of course the answer is yes. Emmett is warming my chair right now.

Leah's 18 year old cat Fez passed away last week -- Arlene and Martha shepherded him through life without Leah and then a sad but safe acquiescence to age. His passing inspired a whole host of poems and reminiscences, not surprising since Leah's world was full of writers and cat lovers. Here is what I wrote to Arlene:

I am just back from Baltimore -- no people home (they are out eating Japanese, something I am sure they do regularly when I am away) and after the dog has wiggled and jumped on me and made it clear that she hates when I leave and has gotten a lot of attention and food, I am finally upstairs at my computer and the old cat Zuli has been keeping my spot on the bed warm and full of fur. The two younger cats want in and out of the house, just like the dog, but Zuli is here and he waits until I am settled and as soon as the computer is out of reach, he will lie on my chest and make the anxieties go away and we will talk about Fez because he understands what it means to keep going even with diabetes and autoimmune skin problems and cataracts and he will let me know when it's enough, but not quite yet.

Our cats (and dogs) are luckier than many other animals. We live in a world where folks are willing to spend thousands of dollars on acute medical care for their animals, but are equally willing to abandon them on the side of the road. My dog walks have been marred by the endless parade of dead creatures on the side of the road -- it is spring in Pennsylvania and the loss of raccoons, possums, squirrels, and cats is the main harbinger. I have to stop and check the cats, see if they have collars, move them out of traffic, and ask Zack to bury the ones that have been on the side of the road near the walking path for too long. I have a deep anger at not only the hit-and-run drivers, but the others who can drive on by, honk at me for stopping.

It reminds me of the disparities in the way we view people, too, lives that matter and lives that don't. In answering a question about violence to transgender folks, one of my students wrote, "if the murderer had been more understanding of her situation, perhaps she would not have ended up dead... he would not have used such violence against an innocent person." I love the students for their optimism and hope about human potential. I have to find ways to gently tell them the world they live in is not so straightforward, that innocence is no protection, and that understanding is a good first step, but it won't erase the contradictions of violence and love.

And here is Zuli:

p.s. Although today's post is about the cats, it's Scarlett's birthday. A good day for another walk.

Leah on my mind

2009-03-15T22:48:00.003-04:00

As those of you who actually read this schlock know, the last few years of my life have been profoundly shaped by the illness and loss of Leah Ryan. I still find it impossible to capture my relationship to Leah in words (she was my friend -- that's good enough), although I struggle almost daily to honor it in the things I produce (schlock comments aside), whether it's cranky and irreverent or subversive and commercial, high brow theory or kitsch. Leah's writing embodies all that and more and her outlook on life remains an enduring legacy that carries me through the day. I know I still have a lot of work to do to live up to what she offered, even if it's just the ability to enjoy life as it comes at you.

This weekend had a lot of the usual mixture of seriously mundane annoyances and little pleasures. The people here in Pittsburgh continue to challenge whatever tiny reservoir of patience I actually possess. (Today some parent tried to convince me that eggs were a Christian symbol that came before their significance at Passover. Skipping the absurdity of the whole debate, I think I outed myself as a non-believer when I mentioned that it's all co-opted from pagan religions anyway. Rule Number 43: Avoid too much conversation with the natives on Sundays -- even after football season is over).

Zoe and Esme keep making the world an interesting place, re-imagining things I'd experienced through their own eyes, whether it's fairy stories on an iPod and shared headphones at bedtime or sarcasm, the 70s, and foreign movies ("oh mom, of course i know we're going to watch the one with the subtitles. it's you, after all.."). I cooked: cassoulet of white beans, a Julia Child-like chicken with leeks, peas, and white wine, a buttermilk cake laced with chocolate and banana, and a few grilled bagels (yah, we are watching our cholesterol, sure). I tried to put some order in our chaos, dug out all the materials to do the taxes, drove to sports and Girl Scout cookie sales and Hebrew school, and walked the dog with Zack. I didn't do much to bring down the growing mound of unpaid academic writing that keeps me awake at night (book reviews, article outlines, a paper I have to give on Friday in Baltimore that is still superficial and fragmentary). But if it weren't for Leah, it'd be easy to see it as a few days in the loss column. In fact, just thinking of her helps me jettison that whole approach.

I miss you, Leah: the candle's still lit to celebrate your day and there are a whole lot of us here still holding on to the tail of your star.

New York, New York, It's a Helluva Town

2009-03-13T17:14:00.008-04:00

So, we went to NYC for Zoe's gymnastics meet, in which she placed first all around, (level 7, age 13 and up). Not so shabby, we think, but even better because afterwards we got to spent a lot of time in Chinatown and went to Canada (the gallery, not the place) and saw Xylor's work hanging up.

Here is one of her paintings -- to me, they feel a bit claustrophobic photographed this way, whereas in reality, you need the breathing space of a wall and the dimensionality of the canvas around it so the numbers and colors don't zonk you too hard. Or maybe I'm missing the point...

Anyway, we ate dim sum and went to the Armory show where Sarah's work was up in the Metropolitan 23 space. Here's the piece everyone liked the most.

Then we went with Saul to the top of the Empire State Building at night, which I'd never done before. It's a gorgeous building with amazing marble and endless ropes to guide you through their attempts to get you to spend more money. Fun and windy (photos later -- they all came out weird). And then Sunday more Chinatown, more dim sum, no cannoli, but then a drive out to Princeton and a Purim Carnival. All in all, not a bad vacation, especially because the people we know are all game for wandering around.

I don't have much more to say (I wrote some things about the intensity of digital screens all over the city in another blog, so no redundancy here), except that there is no place like NY. You can go to just one small section of the city and be immersed for a long time and still not see enough. Donna mentioned an article from New York magazine called the Myth of Urban Loneliness, which begs the question about why city people often live longer: to me, I am never lonely in NY, because there is so much to see and do and inevitably, I'm with people who like that part, too.

Thanks to everyone who fed and housed and shuttled us all over the place. Now it's back to work...

Lego People Business Cards and Emeril Cookware as Self Defense

2009-02-27T15:56:00.004-05:00

'Tis a bit of a random Friday.

The Girl Scout cookies have come in, which is rather ironic given that it's Friday and it's Lent here in the highly Catholic suburbs of Pittsburgh. Luckily for those that have not given up sweets, I am happy to point out that there is no lard listed in the ingredients...
The dog reverted to a feral state when she discovered an injured deer on our walk and as I slogged after them through deep deep muddy swamps I decided that, as a form of exercise, this was clearly inferior to yoga. I also take back anything I may have said earlier in this blog about her lack of instincts, which have now resulted in her being given some anti-inflammatory drugs, glucosamine, very harsh words, and an undefined term of house arrest.
My sister sent me this lovely bit about how employees at Lego get little lego people with their names on them to give out instead of business cards. If I worked for Lego, I would want a Xena the Warrior lego person to give out. This one is actually not a Lego, but a Mighty Muggs creation from Etsy.com
Finally, National Specialty Foods Memo (a great blog that's mostly very serious) had a Friday special about Emeril as an amazing brand (and now he's all like Mr Green Jeans while being owned by Martha Stewart. The pop culture postmodern mapping of that one could be really fun). But the memo isn't about Emeril, per se, it's about this 70 year old lady named Ellen Basinski who used an Emeril pan to take two swings at a band of teenage home intruders. The clip is all daytime news stupidity, but I'm thinking maybe I should ask Lego to make me an Ellen Basinski person, pot in hand, as my business card. We could still dress her up as Xena. Geez, I bet if I'd brought an Emeril pan with me on the walk, I would have had better luck convincing Scarlett that the deer should not be attacked.

Happy Weekend.

2009-02-17T12:22:00.003-05:00

Ten Second Rant

Tragic Misreadings, Gender Trouble, and Me

On my way to teach Paris Is Burning, Judith Butler, and theories of gender and performance। Seat of the pants, as they say, which is probably crazy given the subject matter. For some reason when I type in a title to this blog entry, it automatically converts to Japanese. That all pretty much sums up the postmodern condition as it exists today, here, in Pittsburgh.

Sometimes experiencing gender -- and drag in particular -- is a bit like cognitive dissonance. You know something's not quite as it appears, but you can't always name it, and in other ways, at the same time, everything is perfectly natural. Perhaps this is a drag life, in a way, since I have cognitive dissonance about my reality that goes way beyond the grumpy religion state of mind. Tragic misreadings of the map of power, indeed, Dr. Butler.

Today it's knowing how to explain Althusser and interpellation, understanding how that works in the other facets of my life (say, like for marketing and why certain kinds of campaigns are so powerful to people and others aren't). The irony of doing an enormous amount of intellectual work for academia, just to meet basic expectations (conference proposals, editing books, reviewing articles, sending in drafts of proposed pieces), while simultaneously trying to keep up on new marketing data, sorting out what exactly is going on in the consumer mind and who might actually be interested in customer loyalty programs, luxury green goods, and of course, technological innovation. for which I get paid. sort of.

I think I'm going to have more caffeine and go watch the movie with my students in the hopes that the latino/black drag scene from NY in the 80s and 90s will provide me with some deeper understanding of life right now. Either that, or maybe I just watch...

Grumpy

2009-02-12T11:13:00.004-05:00

Midget dogs don't usually inspire me much, but to me, this is the iconic image of grumpy. I am sitting in my windowless office, complete with a tan push-button phone, brown file cabinets, cork board, metal desk, and a chair with no wheels, no arms, and the exact ergonomically wrong size for said metal desk. I am not angry -- my partner of 28 years often collapses all my "not happy" moods into one lump category of "angry." But this dog pretty much sums it up. And honestly, I don't think we should give our emotional states too much press, if you know what I mean. The business of living is far too complicated to give in to feeling states. But I do know it's perilous to ignore them, too.

Being grumpy comes from surveying the landscape. We had what must have been the aftermath of the Oklahoma tornado blow through here last night: not the full brunt, but reported 90 mph winds knocking down branches and trees and a few power lines. That's a pretty apt description of the economic and social landscape right now too. The tornado's not here, but it doesn't look pretty, especially for those of us who were marginally rooted in the first place. Most of the people I talk to are openly frightened and we are, too, although we have been for some time now. But mainly I'm grumpy about all the waste, all the stupidity that puts us in a world of our own making (okay, some more than others had their hands in the clay). The joy we experienced in the changeover to an Obama future wasn't naive -- but hope was about the fact that at least with this version of government, we might get through it.

Still... I would like to find a way to banish stupidity, my own included. I stumble through bureaucracies (ironic that the American Sociological Association, a group of individuals that presumably has read Weber thoroughly, is so heavily loaded with institutional limits, membership gates, and insider knowledge). I trip over the piles of paper in my office that illustrate the sheer volume of things I have taken on just to continue to pay bills, remain engaged in intellectual activity, and successfully navigate the "mothering discourse" expected of me by my daughter's schools, music teachers, sports clubs, and such. I write about a thousand words a day, for various things (creating books and conference papers, supporting grad students in other places, complaining to my network of colleagues and friends about academic junk on a listserv, writing for this blog and all the other marketing ones I do, and of course, commenting on student papers). I doubt more than a third of it gets read, even less of it having any meaningful impact on the world. It's certainly not filling my pockets or helping me remodel the bathroom (no, I swear I'm not in the market for a $35,000 commode...)

I know this is not that bad. Really. But it could be a lot better.

I keep hoping somewhere in there Mr Obama is going to forgive us our sins, oh, I meant debts, and then I can start all over again, teaching somewhere part time and running a gluten-free deli in Easthampton with Sarah and Colleen... but of course, the sheer audacity (0f hope! hahahaha get it?) of my wishes is precisely the reason I'm probably not a spiritual person prone to prayer. My team never wins, I do not feel absolved, and I harbor deep suspicions that purgatory is more fun than heavenly rest. This week grumpy is my religion.

Sipping Tea Over Lost Diaries and Unread Blogs

2009-01-14T22:48:00.004-05:00

Remember when email was new and exciting and you sent it to everyone all the time and then sometimes people didn't write back immediately and you got annoyed and swore off email, but then, well then you were back again because it's how everyone communicates, even though there are still those people who never, ever, ever bother to grace you with a simple "I got your message and I'll get back to you later" kind of response? And then there's Facebook, where it's not really clear how much you really should be telling all those folks you friended because they were friends of your friends or you sort of recognize them from college but even then you weren't so sure what you had in common. And now it's blogs, where we write and write and sit dejectedly waiting for comments or followers or some sign that it's not just a lost diary in an attic that no one will ever read unless you have a kind uncle or an aunt who's a literary agent or you wrote the whole thing as a text message to Gwen Stefani.

Enough run-ons. This week I'm under an enormous writing gun. I thought it was intense with the last freelance project, but now I'm back, half swimming in the familiar world of academia and half keeping up with the day to day writing for pay. So I have two manuscripts to edit by, oh, yesterday (because it really doesn't matter if you tell people you need ten days, they can't hear you); I started teaching one real class where I already have assignments to read and return -- and maybe a few lectures to fuss over; The virtual class started tonight and the technical logistics are too frightening to discuss here (even though, as we all know, no one is reading this, there's always that chance that someone from that lovely institution will google me and find the one nasty thing I had to say), but suffice to say that I was supposed to have the ENTIRE semester's worth of lectures done in advance and well, I don't; Then the lovely editor from Academic Press X (University of I Love Your Book) has been back in touch and suddenly it would be really a good thing if I had the whole thing written so they can decide if they want it, but well, it's not. Oh, and some jobs that need applications; Oh, and an article for the Green Website. Oh, and MORE BLOGS.

With all this, I just wrote two or three rather cool entries in the blogs -- one that looks at the history of department stores, another that considers upscale foodies, and a third one on sustainable fair trade tea. I am pretty sure that the first two were cursorily read by the marketing people who speed read that stuff ("where's the money shot?") and the fair trade tea was read by my blog boss and the other writers on the blog, who are quickly coming up with something new to post to cover up my post. Yeah, it's a big conspiracy so that I don't get read.

Well, hell, if you read any of those things or even this, do find some way to let me know. A knock on my door would even be just fine. Meanwhile I'm going to sip some fair trade tea, fret over the two hour school delay for tomorrow morning, and think about something new to write.

(here's a picture of the cup of tea that was on my tea blog).

Destinesia

2009-01-07T10:49:00.002-05:00

definition: you have applied for so many jobs that you forgot what your core competencies are.

(source: http://artataq.wordpress.com )

I would like to say a few things about core competencies, but I am having trouble. I don't know if I've forgotten (so I'm not sure you could say I have destinesia...) but I definitely can't be sure they're functional. I did walk into a classroom of 40 people yesterday and manage to teach a whole session and no one ran from the room screaming, so I suspect it was fine. Some of them even talked to me after class, so I stand a chance of remembering their names. It isn't their fault that some of their professors are only tangential to the larger workings of the institution, so I do feel the usual (and entangling) pang of responsibility for their intellectual well being while they are in my care. Perhaps this is my core competency? Lately it has felt more like a big anchor tying me to something I love to do but which offers very little (financially or emotionally) back.

I think the larger issue is that there's really not much difference between this type of adjunct work and working at Starbucks. (At Starbucks, I hear they even have benefits nowadays...) At Starbucks, though, probably, the manager would hover over you to make sure you're doing a good job. Here, no one seems to notice I'm around and they presume I'm going to figure things out like, oh, say, where my classroom is, how to work the copier, how to put things on reserve, you know, the whole deal. Perhaps I have been spoiled at my previous non-tenured and tenuous employment situations (one of which lasted ten years), where they actually gave you an employee handbook, eye contact, information, and general support. Even at the Evil Unmentionable Place where I taught for a year there were actually A LOT of directions and too much faculty orientation (to be oriented in a place where others were not interested in having me oriented).

Barbara Garson again, commented that the thing about marginal labor is that you never really feel like you belong to anything, whether it's a replaceable employee at McDonald's or an adjunct professor at a college. Add to that the oddness of my other job, which is working from my desk all day with no real contact other than cyber-colleagues and the dog, and you have a very strange existence. If it were not raining ice, I would be considering moving in to a local coffee shop just for the regular company (in Amherst, of course, if I did this, I would never get any work done, because I'd know too many people).

I'm going to go work on that list of competencies -- I'll post if I have any luck. Too bad Artataq didn't offer information about possible treatment or cures. I'm hoping a big bowl of soup (in lieu of an actual full time job) will help.

The World of Good Giving

2008-12-17T21:03:00.003-05:00

I just posted a piece on the Green Connoisseur blog about Tom's Shoes, which is this great company that creates very eco-friendly shoes but, even better, donates one pair of shoes to people in Argentina and South Africa for each pair that gets sold. People who live in warm climates with a lot of volcanic ash in the soil can get podoconiosis, which is a disease of the lymphatic system caused by silicate particles in the bloodstream. It can be easily prevented by wearing shoes. The videos of shoe drops and earnest Tom's Shoe's workers delivering beautiful yoga-like slipons to kids in villages is more than any one heart can bear. And if you hurry up and buy some for your loved ones, Tom's might reach its goal of donating 33,000 pairs by Christmas.

And in case anyone who loves me actually reads this thing, that's the pair I want....

Giving Voice to Things Smothered in Cuteness

2008-12-04T11:20:00.000-05:00

We had friends over for Thanksgiving this year. Odd with no students, but we all had fun, including Scarlett, who had a dog buddy named Riley. I even think Stephanie, the four year old daughter of our friends, had a good time despite the fact that the other kids were quite a bit older. Stephanie is bright and funny and creative. I know she likes Hello Kitty! so before the holiday, we raided the dollar aisle at Target and got her some goodies.

I've never been a huge fan of Hello Kitty! although I have my own anime favorites and allow Zoe and Esme to spend way too much money on other San-X characters (the platypus!) at Kawaii (Kawaii means "cute" but it's also the name of a store in Pittsburgh that's full of the stuff). I did, however, like to buy Hello Kitty! for Leah, especially when she was in the hospital and needed goodies. It must have been a running conversation between Leah and Arlene (her mom) because I have at least two memories of Arlene making a face and saying, "It has no mouth!" And indeed, as feminists, it's a bit disconcerting to engage with this character, wildly popular among girls, but unable to speak.

So, anyway, this week Stephanie made us a drawing (as a thank you, I'm sure) where she used some of the Hello Kitty! stickers -- and when Zoe and Esme saw it (first Esme in the morning and Zoe when she got home from school), they both exclaimed immediately, "Look! She drew in a MOUTH!!!"

Here's a scan of her drawing. You can't see the mouth on the big HK, but look at the one sitting on the horizon -- it's HAPPY. I hope she doesn't mind that I posted it. Zack reported that Laura, Stephanie's mom, told him that she did the same thing to a very large mylar Hello Kitty balloon. Wish I had a picture of that, too.

SkillZ

2008-12-02T13:55:00.000-05:00

Have I got any? Does it matter?

I'm going to add a photo of my new flip-top mittens later today. I bought them from a Latin American couple who are street vendors on the Strip District. We'd already bought a few pairs for other people, some ceramic turtles, and I'm edging up to the nice sweaters, but they do look itchy and honestly, who has the money? Anyway, my pair does not have the flip top thumb because I do not want to be free to text and freeze my fingers. The inside of the entire mitten, including my thumb, has a nice fleece lining. These are warm warm warm. I wish I had the skills to make them, but I'm so glad to pay someone else who does. Lately, most of my positive contributions to society have been food related (good felafel yesterday...).

I am working on my spring course on the sociology of food and labor. (the course info is in the online catalogue) I am, of course, obsessive about covering everything. I now know way too much about the history of agriculture, although I'm not sure I could explain it out loud at this point (the Brenner Thesis? Help me out!). Ironically, I have found tons of interesting work on waiting tables and the invention of housework. The whole thing is about skill. What counts? Who gets credit for what kind of work?

I'm also focused on skills because being out of regular employment for so long is wearing on me. What do I have to offer? I hear Leah's voice all the time, reminding me that there's dignity in any paycheck, whether it's from writing about health issues for truck drivers, blogging about Chinese medicine for pets, ranting about the stupidity of market research in a lousy economy, or publishing a book. Still, today I'm in one of those moods where I'd like to pull Marx and Engels out of their graves and do a full overhaul of the whole system -- I hate Maureen Dowd, but I must have been desperate for good reading material this morning as I read her column about journalists in India reporting on news in Pasedena and getting paid so little -- what does it do to the creative act if writing is a paid by the word endeavor? The skill it took to make my mittens, to make the felafel, to write these words -- they're all necessary AND aesthetic at the same time and in different ways. I just wonder how much beauty we can continue to squeeze out of people under the guise of wages.

Unraveling Reason, Sustaining Food

2008-11-14T10:20:00.000-05:00

Reason is a magazine with a fair amount of bluster and intellectual self-importance. There, I've ruined my chances of ever working for them or making friends with their writers and editors. I suspect I never had a chance, having gone through only a relatively short Ayn Rand Libertarian phase when I was 17. Since then I've definitely lacked any enthusiasm for free market philosophy or economics and personally I've not been a very successful capitalist, that's for sure. But I'll take them at their word that their goal is to provide reasoned arguments about critical topics -- and so, I approached this recent piece by Ronald Bailey with a somewhat open mind. (It was only later that I realized this is the Ron Bailey who champions biotechnology without restraint and thinks global warming is a hoax. I'm not sure that's a reasonable starting point for someone to consider sustainable practices, do you?).

Bailey argues that food miles are a bad way to judge the environmental costs of what you're eating. Food miles are definitely an evolving and ultimately partial concept -- it's the whole life cycle of the food item that matters, the larger perspective on why we eat what we eat, how much of it, and overall, the impact of consuming that produce on a regular basis. Even a slight reduction in meat, dairy, and sugar consumption (avoiding those things for one day a week, even) would make an enormous dent in our current agricultural environmental mess.

What I'm interested in, though, is why suddenly Reason's interest in food miles when even the mainstream green media has put some boundaries on their usefulness? Does this diminish the overall "eat local" movement? Should the 100 mile diet and loca-vore (ugh) attitudes be castigated for being unreasonable? (Certainly moral superiority is a bad side effect -- I like South Park's "smug alert" about hybrid car drivers, but it won't prevent me from getting one)

First, of course, Bailey's got to position himself as an urban sophisticate (with international friends who can bring him "local" salmon..), disdainful of the young clerk with his Eat Local shirt. So, it look like that it's maybe not the idea of local foods that annoys him, it's the moral noise behind it (and, eventually, it turns out, the big hand of government guiding the whole thing). He cites some problematic research on food miles and then says:

As agriculture became more efficient, people were liberated from farms and able to develop other skills that helped raise general living standards. People freed from having to scrabble for food, for instance, could work in factories, write software, or become physicians. Modernization is a process in which people get further and further away from the farm.

Okay, so it just so happens that I am sitting here reading a bunch of historical books on the evolution of American agriculture. So far as I read, yes, it does indeed seem like people can do a lot more types of production if less of them are involved in the growing and harvesting cycle. I agree with Rachel Lauden and Jack Goody that global industrial food production has increased the living standards, nutrition, and variety in people's lives. I don't think we can manage without it. At the same time (and I think Rachel would agree with me, but I'll have to ask her), having a working knowledge of how food is grown, who grew it, and what it might taste like in a variety of preparations is a central factor in human social existence. The less we are involved in that as a species, the more our lives are diminished. And please don't take that as a Wendell Berry - Barbara Kingsolver nostalgia for a pastoral past. There are other ways to imagine a good food life, aren't there?

Consider Bailey's example: is factory work or computer programming intrinsically better and less miserable than farming? And does being "free" from agriculture mean a better life for everyone? I'm not so sure -- but I do know that there are still plenty of people who have to be involved in growing and producing our food and most of them don't make much money and work under unnecessarily awful conditions that are shaped by this idea of international choice. And it's the global "market" of pushing various countries to focus on single crop exports that is, I hope, ultimately behind the move to more local foods. French beans in northern Africa, Broccoli in Guatemala, Tomatoes in Mexico -- as they say on Seinfeld, "not that there's anything wrong with it"... EXCEPT that this leaves these economies entirely dependent on income from exported crops and dietary needs provided by imports.

But Bailey still thinks the "food miles advocates" are stupid because..."[they] fail to grasp the simple idea that food should be grown where it is most economically advantageous to do so. Relevant advantages consist of various combinations of soil, climate, labor, capital, and other factors. It is possible to grow bananas in Iceland, but Costa Rica really has the better climate for that activity... Desrochers and Shimizu argue that concentrating agricultural production in the most favorable regions is the best way to minimize human impacts on the environment."

That sounds just ducky, doesn't it? A world where we grow the right foods in the right climates. (and for the sake of less complexity, let's just bracket the biotech revolution that attempts to create hybrids that can grow just about anywhere.. I am sure Bailey embraces that wholeheartedly. Again, a place where moral and economic factors are much more complex than a simple "I'm for it or against it"...). Bailey blames government agricultural subsidies (by wealthier nations) for the distorted global import/export market -- he's not entirely wrong, but again, if you take away the attempts to control production and distribution at the government level, who or what is left to determine what's grown, by whom, and sold where?

Of course, the question we all get down to with this: who gets to decide where it's "most economically advantageous" to grow things? If you answered THE FREE MARKET, then you clearly have been keeping up on your paid subscription to Reason.

For me, I think I'll go waste some of my precious leisure and work time using my non-hybrid car to go pick up some local apples and a challah, some much-less local coffee. (Oh, and probably the lovely item above, which is sustainably produced, extremely expensive, totally not local, definitely not kosher, and amazingly delicious...)

Food Fights: Kindergarten, Bad Food Weekend, and Other Moralizing Moments

2008-11-10T17:17:00.000-05:00

I belong to a listserv of people who study food and this morning I posted an article that was in the New York Times about how the current nutrition obesity war climate has meant that many schools are banning bake sales as fundraisers. I just got this email from my friend Charlotte, who said:

Check out the second picture in the article ...there is a woman teaching a kindergarten class about "good foods" versus "bad foods". Apparently chocolate is a bad food, and its at war with sushi, which is a good food. And ice cream is a BAD food? Who knew. I thought it was yum yum GOOD and full of healthy things like MILK. I was so distressed by the good V. bad lesson and then I realized that it's from the very same school where Saskia will probably be going...!

Here is what I wrote back to her and our other friends:

Ah, California, where sushi is good but gay marriage is not.

When Zoe was little (Esme was probably too small to remember it much) we used to do what we called "Bad Food Weekend" -- I would go to the supermarket with them and we would buy all the foods we saw advertised on TV but never bought -- things like Fruit Loops and Fruit Gushers and PopTarts -- and then we would spend the weekend eating them. The funniest time was when we did it at my sister's house so the bad food wouldn't come home with us. Her kids were teenagers at that point and it was really interesting shopping with them because they stood in the frozen food aisle with anticipation, wanting to buy things like ice cream (which, in my household, will NEVER be a bad food) and cake (something we eat occasionally) and chocolate (also never a bad food) and afterwards they got Burger King, which appalled Zoe, who complained to me about the smell all the way back to my sister's house.

So, the lesson we got out of it was not that the food on TV tastes like shit (which, for the most part, it did. I think Lucky Charms was the only thumbs up) --- but that "bad" is relative. My version of bad is "what the food industry wants to sell you."

Back when I lived in the Not-As-Crunchy-As Oakland-But-Almost Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, my friend Tom (who owned an Asian noodle shop and whose kids eat things like pickled herring and wood ear mushrooms) and I were on the School Lunch Committee for all of about six weeks. It was all either of us could stand, especially since there was one woman we immediately dubbed Nutrition Nazi Lady who spent every week fighting with the high school student representatives -- who told her that if she took french fries off the school menu, they would just end up going downtown during their lunch periods and getting worse food. The things the kids were really concerned about were culturally appropriate foods (rice and beans), which to me made much more sense. What really killed it for me and Tom, though, was dealing with the distributor, who insisted it was simply impossible for them to get any other kind of fruit than Delicious apples and bananas and that the local food cost them more. This is in a place with tons of local farms, a community-based organization to support agriculture, and at least two colleges that used local milk and produce to feed their student population...

Yesterday I bought a book for Zoe (who is now 13) and Esme (who is 9) called HELLO CUPCAKE! Zoe wants a container of fondant for Channukah so she can learn to decorate cakes. But she's also asking me to make stir fried tofu for dinner every night. Esme is downstairs eating a snack: a bowl of brown rice and a sliced apple. I am sure she will eat her last bit of Halloween candy for dessert later tonight.

I think we'll have to send Saskia some cupcakes when she starts kindergarten... or in the meantime, get her the same book. Oh, and just in case the moral contradictions of sushi versus chocolate are too much for you, go to this website right now (it's where the photo above originated...).

Historic

2008-11-04T21:44:00.000-05:00

Pumpkins for Change

My apologies for my absence. Perhaps I can backtrack at some point and talk about the bat mitzvah, cooking for 100 people, having all the Massachusetts people, the Pennsylvania people, and the families from all over in one place, watching Zoe rock out in amazing style, and all the rest. There are even a bunch of dog stories with philosophical underpinnings that are begging to be told.

But right now it's the culmination of living in Pennsylvania in this presidential election year that has dominated my thinking, breathing, feeling self. Perhaps, also, it's the long term effect of having my personal political history dominated by Bushes and Reagan, of living in NH and PA and watching people vote on self interest rather than collective good, and of missing Massachusetts, where progressive is a good word.

I can't describe how we felt last night, watching Obama become presidential. I almost never speak of a "we," especially in terms of feelings, but it is the collective pride and relief that, even this next day, is staying with me and, I hope, with Zoe and with Zack (who wishes there was some way he could be in a basketball game at the White House. Is that so much to ask? Such modest goals, but isn't basketball the best link across race and class? And wouldn't it be fun? They are the same age...).

The Sociologists for Women in Society Listserv has been jammed with posts from people who campaigned in NH and PA and other swing states, who are distraught over the contradiction of a country able to elect a black man president, but deny affirmative action and the rights of gays and lesbians to marry or adopt children. We are all thrilled but ready for the long haul. I like the Onion's headline best of all: Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress.

Here is what I contributed to the listserv today, after reading about a friend who had campaigned outside the high school where I attended my first presidential primary debate in 1979, mostly fascinated by Ronald Reagan's hair:

I can just picture Miliann and Sangha flipping voters.... Having spent most of my voting life in NH, I have to say that seeing the state go for Obama and elect Jean Shaheen was one of the many exhilarating moments of the last few days. Living now in western PA reminds me of the 1970s and 80s in NH, where deep-seated racism and fear of government masquerade as "independence." I am so glad that all the hard work in both states and across the country paid off, that so many younger voters turned out, that McCain was, finally, gracious, and that Obama clearly understands what lies ahead of us. We face a long haul and continued work examining the nature of inequality and the goals of a democracy --- and part of me wishes I were back in Massachusetts, where socialism isn't necessarily a dirty word, gays and lesbians can get married, and smoking pot isn't such a huge offense.

The Randomness of Being

2008-10-06T23:37:00.000-04:00

Costco, the Partition of India,

a Bat Mitzvah, and a Box of Clothes

I keep saying I'm going to keep these posts short, but they're not.

I have, as of five minutes ago, finally finished the endless freelance project that will, I hope, pay some of my bills and, more likely, cover the expenses of my daughter's upcoming bat mitzvah. Which is, like, NEXT WEEK.

But before I put this curriculum-writing-induced migraine to bed so I can wake up fresh and make a round of phone calls to find a karaoke machine, a chocolate pudding cake, extra queen sized sheets (where ARE they? I know we had more), unemployment benefits, cat care appointments, and nice looking ceramic containers for the centerpieces, I had a few things to mention.

Barbara Gerson, a terrific sociologist (whose book about work I read in ancient times as an undergraduate), points out that one of the problems in the modern global economy is that with piecemeal work and a lack of company loyalty, more and more of us do not really belong to anything. We're marginal (my favorite descriptor these days), which is no surprise, but whenever I hear Gerson describing this in her familiar New York accent (as I have heard her, maybe twenty or thirty times in the great video Fast Food Women), I always feel a pang of recognition. Probably doesn't hurt that she puts adjunct faculty in the same category as minimum wage workers who could be fired at any minute. We are not serfs, but migrant workers.

I feel a new piece of this now that I am less and less connected to a job site (or an imaginary career in a future job site) or even a job -- fragmentation. compartmentalization. Things that shape my day, keep me interested in this less-than-perfect world, are spread out across a weird little universe.

For example, I swore this blog entry was NOT going to start with a story about the dog. And I have about four new ones, but dammit, I do have contact with real people, too. It's just not as consistent as walking the dog. But when you live like this, it's hard to connect all the dots and make a coherent whole, a well connected life. Here are the random bits that come together for me this week:

1. Costco. For some reason, Zack and I decided, after years of not really bothering with even department stores, that we would go to Costco and get a membership because we could get paper plates and chicken and other stuff we need for this bat mitzvah that we are doing mostly on our own. And, well, there's no "Deals and Steals" here like there is in Northampton, this weird combined shoe store and discount food and cosmetics and socks and organic remainder place that is in a brickfront building on one of my favorite Northampton streets. Costco is about a million cultural miles from that, but somehow that was what sent us to the big big box on a Sunday afternoon, no less, in Cranberry PA, affluent suburb of Pittsburgh. I'm not sure I have a reaction yet, so when I go back there this week I hope I can actually tell you something about it. I think it was overwhelming and my slim wallet kept me from succumbing to a kind of Depression era purchasing mentality ("sport socks! we need sport socks! they come in batches of 25!" "oh look, CHEESE, we can buy a giant tub of GREEK FETA CHEESE.").

2. The Partition of India. I finished the freelance project just a little while ago. Did I mention that? Did I mention that it was driving me crazy? More on the stupidity of de-centralized hierarchies another time, but just so you get an idea of my mental state: mixed in with the super-hyper-overabundance of Costco, I have consumed information about world history from the Russian Revolution through the rise of Fascism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Partition of India, African Independence movements, the Middle East Mess, global migration, environmental geography, and well, on to the stuff I do normally, like globalization and gender. Part of it has been fun (sneak in some Franz Fanon and Emma Goldman and Salman Rushdie).

But as a good friend of mine once said after watching too much tv, "my brain hurts." And I am sure to dream of midnight's children or Stalin smirking for the cameras with Churchill or Nkrumah speaking at the UN about Ghanian independence. And it will somehow involve a big vat of feta...

3. Perhaps the thread here is the bat mitzvah, that my Zoe is about to turn 13 even though she promised me she'd stay little forever. I'm not too sad, as I really like her in all her ages and stages (yes, even when her adolescent head spins 360 degrees from love to annoyance). The one thing I wanted to point out is that we are all walking around the house singing songs from Friday night services. We have a "no singing in the car" rule, as some people hum all the time and others find it grating. Others of us whistle to relieve stress while the one sitting next to them finds that stressful. So it's kind of funny that all four of us can't stop singing the songs from synagogue. I don't even know what they mean, but the melodies stay with me all day. I'm sure we'll slack off as soon as the bat is over and I'm sure the songs will settle back into an occasional obsession, but right now the soundtrack to our lives is definitely in Hebrew. (just a side note: as I'm back editing this in the morning, Esme is walking around singing Christmas carols and Hebrew songs and her violin music. Some of us have richer inner musical lives than others...)

4. And finally, yesterday a big box arrived in the mail from my friends Arlene and Martha. Leah, their daughter, passed away in June and they had gone through her clothes and sent me some wonderful things that they thought the girls and I might want. Leah and I were close to the same age and had a lot of things in common, even though on surface you wouldn't imagine it to be the case. Mostly we just understood each other. On a daily basis, I miss her so much, but I don't talk about it. Over the summer when we were in Massachusetts, I could share with Arlene and Martha, mostly at Martha's yoga classes, (which, by the way, saved me from anti-anxiety medication, department of social service phone calls, and the suicide hotline.) But mostly when I was with them, I could talk about Leah and not have to explain who she was to me.

Back here, in the land of busy and Costco and curriculum development initiatives and book proposals, I talk to Leah in my head. I imagine she is reading this and giving me a hard time about my sloppy prose. I think she would laugh at things that Esme says that I keep missing because I am so caught up in whatever I am doing right now. I think she'd say something wonderful, not insipid, about the Hebrew Prayer Soundtrack in our heads. In these conversations, I have to invent whatever I think she might have said. Talk about fragmentation and not really belonging to anything.

Anyway, I keep savoring the box of clothes, not wanting to wear any of it, definitely wanting to wear all of it, imagining I can conjure her words by staring hard at the black skirt with pink skulls. Maybe I'll be brave and wear it tomorrow when I go to Costco. Chances are I'll be singing in Hebrew too.

Bail Me Out, Too, George

2008-09-29T16:50:00.000-04:00

Hey, Barney, can you spare a dime?

This is a very short little comment, since, as you know, we serfs don't have time for contemplation and reflection. I have an unfinished post about something more intellectual -- but well, it will have to wait. I have to earn some money, which means blogging for peanuts, writing lesson plans with limited readings but lots of graphics, and sending out job applications, hoping they don't bear the tainted stink of failure that I truly believe is starting to adhere to me, just like the Steeler jerseys are adhering to the sweaty Monday Night Football fans I run into in CVS, the parking lot of the school, the neighborhood, and of course, the gas station, on this unusually warm September day.

But I'm having trouble reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, or thinking about my nonexistent bank account and the debts that we indentured types have stupidly incurred upon ourselves (really, wouldn't it be easier if we could blame the Great Chain of Being rather than free will?). At a soccer game yesterday I listened to a well meaning woman go on and on about how debt is our own fault, that we are as much to blame as any big investment banks for the current economy, because we all want bigger homes and nicer clothes and credit cards satisfy that even when we don't have the cash to back it up. I can't disagree with her, although I would bear the guilt more comfortably if, in fact, we had a big house and beautiful things and nice clothes, but we still live like tag sale happy grad students with student loans to be paid in perpetuity and a rusty silver Subaru that really should be quietly retired. I resist feeling as though we are profoundly stupid (we probably are), but after I listen to her for half an hour, I can't help but believe I am a bad person for having paid for graduate school on loans, buying my children middle class lifestyles (sports and music lessons, I suppose), and, oh yeah, not having a job anymore.

What I am sure, though, is that the folks at Goldman Sachs and Wachovia and all the other banks and investment banks that are about to drag us all down the economic poop drain, do not feel like they are bad people. The banks themselves show no guilt and no remorse, continually talking about themselves as if they are omniscent ("Wall Street believes.." is a phrase I keep hearing on NPR...) Not that guilt is a particularly useful state of being, but then again... as we head into Yom Kippur, I keep thinking it's not really us serfs that need to be deeply concerned about atonement.

Wait! Maybe I'm focusing on the wrong kind of feelings... or the wrong wronged party?

Just as I'm writing this, Barney Frank, crusty Massachusetts representative and chair of the House Finance Committee, just made fun of the Republicans who are crying that they lost votes for the bailout bill because of Nancy Pelosi's speech. Frank said he was appalled that the Republicans would put hurt feelings ahead of the good of the country. Listen, if we want to hold some people up to the emotional fire, please do call the folks who got us into this mess in the first place. I'm happy to attest to my share of the blame if they do, too...

Chasing Deer and Political Clarity

2008-09-19T11:52:00.001-04:00

When Scarlett and I walk in the woods, she generally likes to chase deer. We're in a part of Pennsylvania where deer are really plentiful. We joke that it took about three weeks after we moved here to get sick of them out in front of the house ("oh look! Bambi!" became "oh look! vermin!"). But they are beautiful in their own way, especially when the dog and I come across them, in various ways as we walk in the morning. She smells them before I see them, I see them before she chases them. Is she trying to catch and kill them? I don't think so. Squirrels, yes, she has a death wish for squirrels. We have evidence for that one. But the deer are big. And usually fast. So, sometimes Scarlett runs a bit until the deer have effectively cleared out or she can't smell them anymore and then she doubles back and finds the spot where they were sleeping, standing, peeing, and makes sure she smells it thoroughly, adding her own scent for good measure. Other times she chases them a long way, for a good run, and only comes back to me after a while. There was only one incident where I thought she was interested in hunting seriously, a story involving walking in the woods with my 80 year old mother and coming across a buck who'd been hit by a car. It wasn't pretty and I won't go into it, but I think that we can safely say that Scarlett has instincts but she's not using them most of the time.

That, I think, sums it up for me regarding Amazon's recent attempt to "map" the political landscape of readers by the red, blue, or purple books that are bought, by state. Red and blue, as you probably know, stand for Republican and Democratic. Purple is a political book they can't easily lump into one or the other category. So, we're supposed to get a sense of the country's reading and politics by this map. Hmm...

Well, first this reminds me of another blue/red map, created by Bill Dietz and the Centers for Disease Control when they wanted to convince people that obesity is an epidemic. Irrefutable evidence, you say? While I'm the first to acknowledge that there's definitely a public health problem related to our food system, I'm not jumping on the "obesogenic" bandwagon, especially since it's already pretty crowded with people who want to use that information for a whole host of unsavory campaigns to villify individuals for their "bad choices" and "lack of willpower." What amazed me when these maps came out was the way Dietz described his frustration in getting people to pay attention to what he saw as a growing problem and then his delight in creating this powerpoint, where the blue darkens, turns orange, and then red, creeping across the country. As he expected, it has become one of the most powerful tools in presenting the information in a form that encapsulated the points he wanted to make: that it was an epidemic, that it was spreading, and, given the not-accidental use of red, it was cause for alarm.

I love images. I'm enamored of mapping programs and graphing social trends, despite my lack of sophisticated computer skills. At the same time, I'm skeptical about a society that needs a graph rather than words to really grasp a problem. I'm in the middle of a freelance project (unnamed, but mentioned previously as "that damned project") where I'm expected to take an enormous amount of historical information and present it in a colorful, interactive, and "fun" way that "makes history current for students." I pretend that's not my mission or else I'd be gagging all the time, but yes, half of my day is spent evaluating bad powerpoints, youtube videos ("how America travelled west"), and interactive games designed to keep students engaged. The director isn't happy when I email him every few weeks stating, "can't they get that information by actually READING???" So, yeah, I'm having some problems with the whole notion of "visual interactivity."

But, back to Scarlett's deer chasing and the Amazon map. I think Amazon's map tells us about as much about America's reading and political inclinations as my observations tell us about Scarlett's instincts. I have no way of knowing what she really intends, nor do I have any tools to get beyond the superficial vantage point from which I see her world. I can draw a lot of inferences, but there's no causality here. I can point out all the obvious flaws with Amazon's technique: these are people who, based on my recent purchases, think that I'm an evangelical Christian interested in spiritual dieting and Jewish ritual and an avid sci fi fan who wants to learn fifty ways to draw birds. I'm also going through puberty and menopause at the same time, searching for out-of-print Shakespeare manga, learning to cook barbecue and vegan at the same time, and concerned about proper etiquette as an African American woman in the corporate world. I wonder if people actually READ the books they buy or if they sit on the coffee table, proclaiming their knowledge or get wrapped up for holiday gifts... Let's not even get started on the criteria they used to determine if a book was "blue, red, or purple." Honestly, I like to believe my deep blue friends in Massachusetts are actually reading Sarah Palin's ghost written autobiography -- mainly so they are actually informed about why she's not qualified -- and I know they're smart enough to get it from the library rather than actually paying $30 for it. (I, for once, am satisfied with Tina Fey's impersonation and Palin's response. You can watch the clip and Jon Stewart's reaction on the Daily Show.)

But why map the obvious to determine politics? Are political leanings developed only in direct relation to the world of elections, Washington politics, and international policies? What would the map look like if we charted people's other reading habits? My mother in law is just finishing a Faulkner phase -- who else is reading Faulkner besides college students? -- and she claims that Faulkner, who is writing about the south in an earlier time period, is teaching her a lot about the " bitter and angry" Pennsylvanians who live around her and why they feel that way. That's political education, isn't it? If you went to my "GoodReads" list and you looked at the fiction I like, would you color me red or blue? If I love Marilynne Robinson, does that mean I'm religious? If I'm bored by Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollen, am I a closet Republican?

I know Amazon isn't purporting to offer a scientific understanding of the relationship between book purchases and political viewpoints, but just as I wish I had some other skills to give me insight into what goes on in Scarlett's brain so I know what she's doing when she runs the deer, I'd love to play with more information about who reads and what they read and what it does to shape their thinking.

Sharp Shinned Hawks and Other Distractions

2008-09-12T19:21:00.000-04:00

The other day I was walking the dog in one of our usual places, which is very wooded, but rather contained -- in fact, it reminds me of what it might be like in an area set aside for "the hunt" in medieval times -- it's wild but it's tame.

You know you're going to run into some deer (inevitable) and possibly other creatures, but also other people, usually mountain bikers (okay, that ruins the medieval image right there) and sometimes other folks with their dogs.

It was quiet that morning and so we went pretty far back into the woods (knowing it's got a boundary -- this is a park, owned by the state, that was once someone's estate, complete with ugly mansion on one end, paved pathway with women in jogging suits around the perimeter, and of course, a holiday light extravaganza you can drive through for $18 while you listen to "the Twelve Days of Christmas" on your car radio.)

I can't describe the way the forest has a medieval cast to it -- maybe I'll get some images -- but that day, I was thinking about how much it reminded me of tapestry scenes and all of a sudden I saw this bird sitting on a fallen tree. It was very low to the ground, so clearly we had stumbled upon it when it was after prey -- perhaps having just missed. It sat and looked at me for a bit, not really disturbed by the dog, who was too busy sorting out other smells to see it. And then it flew away, low and silent across the top of the undergrowth.

I see a lot of red tailed hawks where we live. I used to hear an owl outside our window when we first moved here, but it's been quiet the last year or so -- the other night we were outside at dusk and there was a huge great horned owl in the neighbor's tree, the first time I've ever seen one that big out in the world. The red tailed hawks nest right near by -- but this bird in the woods was so sleek and elegant, it reminded me of the falcons used in medieval times. Probably didn't hurt that I've been reading parts of the Sword in the Stone out loud to Esme. We stopped, though -- it's one of those books that I think I remember being better than it really was.

What, you ask, does any of this have to do with being a medieval serf? Because for the last half hour, I've been surfing (not serfing, mind you) the web looking for images and information so I could figure out if the bird was a kestral or a hawk. (Sharp shinned hawk, I think, from the web-based evidence.) What compels us to spend our time searching for information, for answers to questions no one else really cares about? Why is knowledge so important in our lives, even if we're not going to share it with anyone?

Especially right now, this seems silly -- I have work to do! I've got maybe half an hour or so left to write while Esme is deeply invested in a game with the neighbor's children and it's Friday so it's not bed time yet. Zoe and her dad went to services, since her bat mitzvah is soon and some of us need to look like participating in our religious community matters to us... So I'm supposed to be writing, which I enjoy, but I am in the middle of two projects that are reaching the horribly annoying stage. One is a freelance job, which, in case you don't know, is one of the very modern versions of migrant labor. What serfdom has morphed into in contemporary times. I am writing curriculum for an online AP high school course and at every step of the way, my teacherly instincts are being thwarted in favor of cool interactive web based games. Students need visual guides and lots of hand holding or else they don't read, claims the director. I also need to churn out about twenty of these in the next week, which is a pretty brutal pace, if you ask me. I have been complaining a lot about the project, but it is paying the bills for the bat mitzvah, so I can't make too big a deal out of it, right?

The other are cover letters for academic jobs, the procurement of which would free me from the particular bondage of freelancing. Of course, I am in that state because the delicious freedoms that are supposed to be part of the academic life are, for me at least, elusive and not all they're cracked up to be. Still, it beats flipping burgers, as my friend reminds me. Does it? Does it really? At this point, I think, it'd be best if someone gave me the job and then I can make an educated and empirical evaluation of the options. Sound good? Good. So let me know if you have any ability to make that happen.

In the meantime, I'm going to sit here and think about my hawk a bit longer.

2008-09-12T18:45:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the educated serf. Being a serf, I can't imagine why you'd waste your time reading this, but being educated, I have not been able to eliminate a certain amount of reinforced hubris that suggests you might actually be interested in what is being said here.

The question, of course, is how to tell if she's a witch.