Enjoy the silence

No, this post is not a tribute to the band that dominated my life's soundtrack in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside Erasure, The Smiths, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, and other Screamers of the Week featured on WLIR.

As I was preparing dinner, I was listening to an interview on "Fresh Air" that considered the importance of silence. The interview was with George Prochnik, a journalist and author of a new book titled In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise.

This is from the article posted on NPR:

Prochnik says that on trips to a Quaker meeting and a monastery, he learned that absolute silence doesn't exist but that quiet spaces are essential because they "can inject us with a fertile unknown: a space in which to focus and absorb experience."

"What surprised me is degree to which the monks don't associate silence with gloomy overhang," he says. "There's sense of joyfulness of turning themselves down to be conscious of greater things."

Calgon, take me away!

Or at least, I think I need to get this book on my Kindle.

By the by, dinner was farfalle with asparagus sauteed lightly in olive oil with garlic, then tossed with black olives and corn (both leftovers in the fridge from separate occasions) and with fresh tomatoes and basil and a crumble of grey sea salt. I know, I know - how bougie, but I love grey sea salt. I even love to spell it "grey."

Naturally, Beanie and Bubbie had farfalle with butter and Parmesan cheese, with carrots and ranch dressing on the side.

Sophomore slump

Miserable is the ABD anthropology graduate student. Approximately as miserable is the PhD who seems to have no second project.

That would be me. The latter, I mean.

I have a few irons in the fire, but with a 4/3 teaching load - yes, you read that correctly, and no, I do not teach at a two-year / community college - the fire burns low and slow.

A project with which I am flirting is the anthropology of spas, in particular looking at contemporary American ideas and practices surrounding hydrotherapy (water) and balneotherapy (baths).

In my random readings, I found an article titled, "The Bath: A Nursing Ritual" by Zane Robinson Wolf (1993), which considers the importance and meaning of bathing (especially others, but also selves) for the profession of nursing. "The nurse who learns to perform the bath artfully is proficient, knowing, subtle, and able," Wolf wrote. She concludes with a reflection on the importance of the bath as a ritual of knowledge and healing:

Consequently, it may be professionally hazardous for nurses to discard the bathing ritual by giving it up to nonprofessional personnel. The bath is more than a standardized and repetitive series of activities; it may be required by the rules of nursing (Gluckman, 1975). The bath can be viewed as a healing rite with great healing power; it may symbolize order, solidarity, and purity (Douglas, 1970).

This calls to mind the emphasis placed on the newborn's first bath (which nurses perform after the birth) and on the need for parents to learn how to bathe the infant properly - that is, safely and hygienically and so on. Following the cutting of the cord, the first bath in the hospital seems another step in the process of individuating (infant from woman), but also of socializing.

A bath is not always just a bath.

Keeping up with The Times

I knew it, I knew it! In her "Well" blog today, Tara Parker-Pope confirmed what StraightMan and I long had suspected:

Working parents perpetually agonize that they don’t see enough of their children. But a surprising new study finds that mothers and fathers alike are doing a better job than they think, spending far more time with their families than did parents of earlier generations.

As half of a dual-full-time-academic-career couple with two kids, I feel vindicated.

With all due respect and affection to my parents (in particular to my mother, the primary caregiver) - and meals together in our house were the rule, not the exception - I remember a lot of the time we spent together as benign inattentiveness. For example, my brother and sister and I were encouraged to play together, in the backyard, or to read in our rooms on our own.

We kids had our own ways of getting along (or not). Something that I encourage Beanie and Bubbie to develop and explore, too.

A break

That describes this week for me.

Not a vacation. Which is perhaps what my students take and what other people working in the real world claim as a benefit.

Not true in Higher Ed.

Back to grading...

Prep Personae

This might be a shameful admission, but I am delighted to learn about plans for an update to The Official Preppy Handbook.

I still have my copy of the original, which I bought when I was in 7th or 8th grade. Then, I had only the foggiest notion that the book was satire. There are actual check marks penciled in on page 59, “The Basic Reading List,” which listed “books about Prep schools, books read in Prep schools, books by Preppies, books about the joys and miseries of being Prep.” The two titles leading the list – The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, both of which I considered my favorite books at the time – seem to say more about being an adolescent and feeling out of place. I mean, I just knew that I would be much happier attending a boarding school in New England than mixing with the hoi polloi at a suburban high school in New Jersey. (I tell you, Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep captures truths that are not often spoken.) In New Jersey, I stayed.

By the end of my time there, however, I had become practiced in the kind of sarcasm and irony that occasionally rises to wit. Or at least I started to recognize it in other sources, like The Official Preppy Handbook. In my mind, I was Dorothy Parker stuck among mall rats. Or at least I knew who Dorothy Parker was. (Who was, I believe, not a preppy and certainly is not included in “The Prep Pantheon” features on pages 196 to 199.) Eventually, I attended one of America’s 20 preppiest colleges where I met actual preppies and still other wonderful, interesting, and clever people. (Including StraightMan, who other people assume is an actual preppy, in part because it is true that Brooks Brothers seems to have proportioned their trousers and shirts to fit him exactly.)

I think that my early interest in The Official Preppy Handbook alerted me to thinking about “class” in the United States as not wholly or even significantly defined by money – which I find that my students, as an example, will assume. To which the preppies raise their bloody Mary’s in agreement. On the other hand, I am not talking uncritically about that other notion of “class” as good breeding and so on.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu made the study of “class” and its reproduction in education and in language central in his life’s work. Is it possible to engage in a productive consideration of class in the United States a la Bourdieu?

Apparently, the new book, to be called True Prep, will include material on gay prep life and black preppies (e.g., the Obamas). I think it will be interesting to see what will be the so-called preppy take on changes in American life between 1980, when The Official Preppy Handbook was published, and today. It seems safe to say that there have been changes in the climate or environment of humor – I wonder how that will affect the production and consumption / reception of True Prep as satire? What can we say about "class"?

To be continued.

Stand-Up Anthropology

This morning, I derive entertainment from the caustic self-derision of anthropologists who were blogging on April 1:

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) made the announcement today that its Joint Committee for Publishing and Employment Services unanimously recommended the immediate dissolution of the AAA, stating there was nothing left to study.

See the full story here.

See a response to it here.

2 jobs + 2 kids = 2 much

Every night, after the kids have been tucked in, StraightMan and I give each other winks and nods and nudges - from across our adjacent desks in our home office, i.e., the back area of our living room, which is blocked against children by a couch and a baby gate, and where we dig in the trenches of Higher Ed, reading, grading, answering e-mail, and preparing PowerPoint slides.

Not romantic, but I have to say, rather comfortable and companion-ly.

Last night, there erupted much guffawing over this story in America's finest news source.

I am trying to decide whether or not I am "in" on the joke or if the joke is on me. Which seems to be a common thread in this blog b/c it seems to be the warp and woof* of my life.

*That is a shout out to my fiber crafting friends who are reading this occasionally. See? I get your images and metaphors.