“you and I are on the other side of almost everything” (pellucid)

a thought that perhaps speaks to the essence of romance. isn’t that what the feeling is with another person, that conviction of making another world, un monde à part, not just separate from “almost everything” but in some sense actually against it? and isn’t that in part what becomes so addictive about being with the other person? here i’m paraphrasing the backcover blurb of a little novel by kundera called l’identité (written originally in french but readily disponible in english). much of it is a meditation on the nature of couples, of what we seek in joining them and what is thereby gained and, perhaps, lost. I read it a couple of months ago – the prose is typically spare and limpid – and find my thoughts often returning to it. kundera is lucid, life rendered pellucid* (to deploy our WordOfTheDay).

I was put in mind of kundera by that thought, “you and I are on the other side of almost everything”, which is actually a song lyric I heard performed last night by the dears (though it could be “on the outside of almost everything”. I’m awaiting clarification, but “truth is subjectivity” to invoke the lonely daneofmanynames so I’ll go with my ears.) hadn’t seen them in a while nor indeed any live music in a proper concert setting for some time. a really wonderful show – sound, lights, ride cymbal, hearts-on-sleeves, the whole thing – for which I wanted to thank them. it’s always good to be reminded what humans can do when they get together.

(a sidebar thought on kundera: for anyone with some intermediate manoeuvres looking to work on their french reading chops, kundera novels are a great place to start; plus he now writes in french and personally revised the french translations of his earlier novels. he’s almost minimalist in his prose; short, polished sentences. you’ll have to start by looking up a bunch of words but then find they keep recurring. also the chapters are short and the pages go by quickly. important to have that feeling of accomplishment. l’insoutenable légèreté de l’être. you have to admit it does sound even better in french.)

*from the OED: pellucid, 1. Transmitting or allowing the passage of light; translucent, transparent.

(entry composed and posted with breakfast # 2 en plein air in bryant park in the midst of the preening madness of fashion week. I think I was offered about 6 copies of the times style magazine as I tried to navigate the well-calved crowds. inside the park, by the carrousel, the bust of goethe looks on impassively. I’m tempted to write stoically. the sorrows of aged johann.)

beards, armpits, eyebrows

Highly recommended New Yorker article. I’d create a category for it called “the social-anthropology of everyday life” but then that seems a tad long-winded.

*

‘On January 30, 1937, a letter to the New Statesman and Nation announced that Darwin, Marx, and Freud had a successor—or, more accurately, successors. “Mass-Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study man,” the letter read, “but it plans to work with a mass of observers.” The movement already had fifty volunteers, and it aspired to have five thousand, ready to study such aspects of contemporary life as:

Behaviour of people at war memorials.
Shouts and gestures of motorists.
The aspidistra cult.
Anthropology of football pools.
Bathroom behaviour.
Beards, armpits, eyebrows.
Anti-semitism.
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke.
Funerals and undertakers.
Female taboos about eating.
The private lives of midwives.‘

New Yorker article

Link to the author of the article’s blog with more information and links on Mass-Observation (and further down a great slideshow of Walker Evans’ photos) and a nod to the humble toilings of your very own didactique. First we take Manhattan…

sontag on sontag

31 December, On Keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts — like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.

NYT magazine

les classes sociales pas mort (homogamy)

One of the chief questions that exercise the good social theorists (and which the others, aka apologists for the status quo, would rather see exorcised) is how power relations are reproduced in a given society. Once we dispense with the anodyne notion that we all start life from the identical starting line with identical chances of winning the race, we’re forced to consider what gets passed on from generation to generation, how domination and classes function, how much mobility, permeability, between classes really exists. Certainly money is central here, but it’s not the entire story. There is capital also in a much more diffuse sense; the so-called cultural capital (see Bourdieu) that affords the legatee a kind of unerring sense for how to get ahead, an ability to navigate social situations, an unquestioned feeling of at-homeness in a given milieu (say that of an elite academic institution or a corporate boardroom). This is partly how to account for the stubborn fact that, statistically, people born into a given class are far more likely to stay within that class than, say, ascend into a class above them.

This posting was sparked by my reading of a recently published French sociology journal article,* taking on the third way “flat” world thesis of a social world where class is supposedly becoming an increasingly less salient means of understanding daily life. The author introduced me to a new word – homogamie, or homogamy in English. Selon the OED, it’s a biological term – (a) homogamous condition; fertilization of a flower by its own pollen or by that of another flower on the same plant. As often happens, the biological term migrated to the social sciences (and often such migrations come with unacknowledged costs, i.e. reducing society to a depoliticized “natural” biological mechanism). Homogamy came up as the French author, armed with a battery of stats, demonstrated how class continues to dictate many life choices, perhaps even more so now than before, and that like continues to marry like, people from working class backgrounds tend overwhelmingly to marry other people from similar backgrounds, and people from the liberal and professional classes, for example, tend to an overwhelming degree not to marry people from the working class. To borrow a citation from the OED definition: 1947 Evolution I. 270/2 “The concept of homogamy or associative mating states that within a population the most similar individuals will mate with each other.” The children of such associative mating are then ever more likely to grow up and stay within that association, reproducing the same power relations that contributed, along with cupid bien entendu, to their parents getting married, either not questioning their privileges, or not imagining such privileges to be within their ken.

None of this is a straitjacket of course, but class matters and efforts to suggest it’s an outmoded discourse – bearing in mind, as Tony Judt points out, that the Left itself bears a lot of responsibility for this discrediting – tell us more about the agenda of the person making the argument than the phenomenon itself. Anyone doubting this could consult the most recent staggering numbers on income inequalities in the US and conservative attempts to gloss them, a theme of numerous Paul Krugman columns.

*Chauvel (Louis), « Le retour des classes sociales ? », Revue de l’OFCE, n°79, octobre 2001, Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques/Presses de Sciences Po, p. 315-359.

and song for the lonely grad students

‘He hoped to study biology in school, but at the time most high schools shied away from teaching Darwin’s theories of evolution, and so [Stephen Jay] Gould read Darwin on his own, and his parents took him on amateur fossil hunting expeditions. He went on to study geology and paleontology and wrote his dissertation on an extinct land snail native to the Bahamas. He once said that his research on the taxonomy of the snail was of interest to about eight people in the world, but, he said, “Those eight people really care.” ‘ [my emphasis, nous soulignons]

Writer’s Almanac

self-imposed surveillance

“Imagine a device that monitors the social marketplace the way a blinking Bloomberg terminal tracks incremental changes in the bond market and you’ll get the idea.

‘That’s all anyone talks about on campus actually,” she said. “My day was totally messed up because of the new Facebook.’ “

NYT

if you’re going to have a tag called “libraries”…

…then I suppose one has to post this sort of library porn douce when it falls into your e-lap. besides, it’s kind of nice to imagine old karl (see impressive, hard-won beard on display in previous posting) ferretting out the inner contractions of capitalism during the endless days and nights in the reading room. selon engels, “later he withdrew into the British Museum and worked through the immense and as yet for the most part unexamined library there for all that it contained on political economy.”

pictures of impressive libraries

truly, a great read

take the time for this one, though it won’t require overmuch. vintage tony judt, and for those of you who’ve been following along, this time perhaps offering a slightly more balanced appraisal of the foibles of the left. (can i say “our” left? we all are on the same side here, n’est-ce pas?) deeply informed intellectual history, superbly written – agile, lively, considered, all of that. a fair bit to say too about that old question of “where are we today?”

NYRB Judt

math and the bomb (song for my father)

working in the math library today as i often do. for months there’s been an article up behind glass on the bulletin board from the times, an adulatory interview with one of the faculty here, a math prof named peter lax who won math’s “version of the nobel” (the abel) and who worked on the bomb at los alamos. a quote from there has long rankled me, both as a human and as your son. in it he breezily says, i paraphrase, “and los alamos was important for seeing how weapons work and for how high speed airplanes travel through the air.” and i’ve always been angered by that and wanted to say, “is that really all it taught us? shouldn’t scientists, and the rest of us, have drawn some pretty harrowing ethical lessons as well?” in any event, i just got up to go to the front desk to get some scrap paper – no shortage here for all the math nerds with their calculations and i need to brainstorm on old fashioned paper some ideas for my dissertation meeting in, oh, 15 minutes – so i’m at the desk and there’s an aged, stooped man talking to the head librarian and she’s being understandably incredibly solicitous and respectful and i realise, it’s him, it’s the man from the times photo whose quote i’ve read and reread every time i wait for the elevator back to fresh air, it’s peter lax. and i wanted to tap him on the shoulder and talk to him about what rankles me. and the librarian caught me looking at his back in an excited, expectant way but then, for better or for w., i thought better of it. could be he’s a pretty old dog. anyway, a dad moment i wanted to share. xo m.