More truth from The Nation's Finest News Source

I have always known this to be true.

In fact, Bubbie knows it to be true, too: I mean, we are talking about the voice of Chick Hicks in "Cars" and Ken in "Toy Story 3."

Speaking of which, this commentary describes exactly how StraightMan and I feel about our boy's Pixar fixation.

***

We have been on "break" this week. Which just means that I gave exams and assigned papers last week, with the notion that I might grade them this week. Ha.

A friend and I have managed to be rather productive in terms of circulating e-mails, i.e., organizing a panel for our discipline's annual meetings in the fall: A task in academic life that richly deserves lampooning.

Seoul sister

As I was logging onto the Web to check my Inbox, the title "Going Korean" caught my eye on the New York Times, which is the home page on my browser.

Kyopos and / or the people who know and live with us might want to read it: To know and live with us with an understanding of why we live in mortal terror of ajooma.

When among acquaintances and casual friends, I am vigilant to string up white lies like police tape around my personal details. But a nod from any woman born earlier than 1970 on our Asian peninsula flanked by the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, however, awakens pre-programmed behaviors I can’t control. I answer every question to the best of my ability, and make my own polite inquiries, always careful to employ deferential syntax, the doily-lined, dustier version of the language that rarely appears in pop songs or the revenge trilogies I stream from the Internet.

I remember when I worked briefly at a maternity clothes store (as part of anthropological research), a well-heeled Asian woman about my mother's age, carrying a nice purse, came in with her pregnant daughter, who was about my age, and like me, wearing no make-up. Ajooma looked me up and down, addressed me in Korean, and asked me oh-so-sweetly to do a good job taking care of her daughter, who was a doctor, and had no time to shop, but needed new clothes. The daughter looked at me pleadingly: Can we do this quickly? My mother is embarrassing me. Please do not hate me. When I was in high school, I dyed my hair blond and ran around with a white boyfriend with a Flock of Seagulls haircut. My mother, though she never speaks of it, has not forgotten. Or so I thought I could hear her trying to tell me...

Unfortunately, both the daughter and myself were much. too. weak. to counter ajooma. Even the non-Korean store manager was powerless to do much other than fetch additional sizes and colors.

BTW, author Mary H.K. Choi is spot-on about David Chang. When StraightMan and I had my celebratory 40th birthday lunch at Momofuku, part of the enjoyment, I felt, was being "in" on the joke: I liken it to Ding Dongs made "upscale" with molten Valrona chocolate and creme freche. There we sat, eating Korean comfort food made with ingredients whose organicity / sustainability / provenance would register no response from my mother. "Heirloom pig? Who care? Just more expensive," I can hear her saying now. Is she wrong?

As I get older, I sometimes wish I were a bit more Korean because then I, too, could become an ajooma.

The Good Enough Baby

I know that this piece in current issue of The New Yorker is intended for yuks - The Good Enough Baby - but as with so much humor, it offers a reality checklist: Is my baby clean enough? Is my baby well fed enough? Is my baby stimulated enough?

The last item, on stimulation, especially interested me as a parenthropologist:

During the past few decades, early-development “experts” have stressed the importance of so-called “enrichment activities”: reading to babies, singing to them, even talking to them. We are now finding that these activities, in addition to being excruciating for the parent, may actually be harmful to the baby...

In their 1996 book, Parents' Cultural Belief Systems: Their Origins, Expressions, and Consequences, anthropologist Sara Harkness and psychologist Charles Super noted the differences in what they called parental ethnotheories given to describe and explain an infant or young child's behavior. In particular, they found that when an infant cried, American middle-class parents interpreted the cries as expressions of "boredom," which needed to be remedied with stimulation, like a new (different) toy. In contrast, Dutch parents interpreted the cries as a barometer of too much stimulation, so that the child required quiet and calm.

When I first read Harkness and Super's work, I was pregnant with Beanie. It became a running joke between StraightMan and me, who to be perfectly frank are low-stimulation people, that we would raise her Dutch...

As a parenthropologist, I think Harkness and Super's observations that American parents place value on stimulation is important. It allows us to see "boredom" as a cultural and social construction: For example, we make boredom explicitly through use of talk like "I am so bored..." and implicitly through use of talk like "This is so exciting..." We learn to feel and to give name to feelings as boredom and excitement.

Which is not to say that I am immune to such feelings: Blah blah blah. Yawn.

(Shout out to DoulaK and SustainabilityK in Prague: What are Czech ideas about boredom?)

Feeling my ethnicity

As an anthropologist, I am all about questioning essentialisms like race and ethnicity. Yet, as a person, I also feel their significance.

For example: This evening, an invitation comes through my Inbox to come out to a Little Feat show.

I turn to StraightMan: "How do I answer this? What is Little Feat?"

I entertain the possibility that it might be my age - the Wiki on Little Feat gives me the impression that the band had its heyday during the 1970s? I mean, look at the photo above.

StraightMan, also my age, however, exhibits a brand of familiarity and ease with (and enthusiasm for) Little Feat that provokes in me an emotion that ought to have a German word giving name to it: A response that is connected with the surprise of the familiar being made suddenly strange, like looking at one's own face in the mirror and not recognizing it, like talking with one's spouse and realizing that there are depths there that I fear to plumb.

So, I have to ask him: "Is this one of those bands that white people like?"

A pause. "Maybe." Another pause. "Probably."

Linguistic laughs

I am having one of those I-probably-should-not-laugh-but... moments while sitting here, hunched over my keyboard while eating my Kashi Sweet & Sour Chicken for lunch and reading this post on nicknames for Mexican drug kingpins, which appeared on The Economist's language blog. Which itself is called Johnson. Which makes me want to laugh, too... My favorite is "El Pozolero" for its contextually clever, gruesome wit.

Parody

This might reveal supremely bad taste or judgment or both, but I had to share this from the feminist philosophers blog - an example of a new genre of so-called "Hitler parody" that apparently is being posted on YouTube.

This example is titled "Hitler as a teaching assistant" - I agree with the feminist philosophers not only that it is gendered, but also that it is funny (esp. in the world of academia / higher ed), and begs the question of why it is funny.

I am not a historian, but "Hitler parody" seems to have existed since Hitler himself was alive. (Were I a historian, I might know exactly the right citation to insert here. You know where to e-mail me...) He must have been aware of the resemblance to Charlie Chaplin, who would have been quite a celebrity at the time. Also, if you have never watched the original 1942 version of "To be or not to be" (which Mel Brooks remade in the 1980s), put it on your Netflix queue. It contains memorable (and hilarious) sequences concerning "The man with the little mustache..." and a joke that begins, "They named a brandy after Napoleon..." (and ends with the Fuehrer as a piece of cheese).

Ha ha ha - ow!

The nation's finest news source hits on yet another painful truth.

That not-so-fresh feeling...

Sitting here at my desk, eating my Kashi Southwest Style Chicken for lunch - which I nearly spit all over my brand-fraking-new iMac - when I eyeballed this post on feminist philosophers.

The connection between bodily hygiene and success is not novel in itself. Remember the TV commercials for Sure deodorant / anti-perspirant ("Confident, dry, and secure... Raise your hand, if you're Sure...")?

What had me laughing aloud

Oh, David Sedaris... If only they could bottle you...

See his essay, "Standing By: Fear, Loathing, Flying," in the August 9th issue of The New Yorker. I was reading it aloud to StraightMan as he washed the dishes. It was hard to get through because I kept choking with snortles:

Everywhere I go, someone in an eight-dollar T-shirt is whipping out a cell phone and delivering the fine print of his or her delay. One can't help but listen in, but then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when travelling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!"

I am laughing aloud, again, as I type this.

I confess that this comment felt spot-on to me:

It was one of those situations I often find myself in while travelling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue I need to know whom you voted for in this last election.

If the grandmother's criticism was coming from the same place as mine, if she as just being petty and judgmental, we could go on all day, perhaps even form a friendship. If, on the other hand, it was tied to a conservative agenda, I was going to have to switch tracks, and side with the [teenage father wearing the T-shirt printed with] Freaky Mothafocka, who was, after all, just a kid."

Petty and judgmental, but no friend of Glenn Beck, thank you.

Conspicuous consumption

How has the existence of this not come to my attention before?!

Bits of inspiration

I am writing this post on the spanking new iMac in my campus office. The screen is about as large as our TV at home! Which might say as much about the smallness of our TV as the largeness of my new iMac, but in fact, I am trying to make a point about the latter. I find myself sitting back in my desk chair b/c the sheer magnitude of the screen is causing me horizontal vertigo. See the above.

Otherwise, I am continuing work on my syllabi and on this Monday morning, not feeling esp. interesting or interested. Sigh. So, I am looking to others for bits of inspiration:

StraightMan claims that Katha Pollitt's column by itself is worth the price of our subscription to The Nation. Which is why I tell Beanie that when she grows up, she could do a lot worse than finding a partner who is a lot like her daddy - and why I want to raise Bubbie to be that kind of man. In her most recent column, Katha takes on the latent (and sometimes overt) hostility to women and girls in current media coverage on the so-called end of men.

Ooh, look! Goodies for feminist mothers or mothering feminists, whichever we choose to refer to ourselves. I kind of regard this like a box of chocolate truffles - I am thinking about each title and which one to sample...

free range kids published an interesting post on the prevalence of the sand table in pre-school America. As an anthropologist, I appreciate the material culture approach that is demonstrated here - take an object that we might take for granted in the pre school classroom, consider its history, and uncover the ideas and practices that we rarely make explicit.

Finally, here is proof again that the fake news is better at telling us what really is going on, from America's finest new source. Sitting here at my new iMac, all I can say is that I believe, I believe, I believe... Sucker.

Hello, Ephs

From That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo:

She thought Laura should go to Yale, of course, and turned up her nose at the small liberal arts colleges where she and Griffin's father had once hoped to secure jobs. "Safety schools" was how she now regarded them. "Dear God, not Williams," she told Laura. "Do you know the kind of people who sent their progeny to Williams? Rich. Privileged. White. Republican. Or, even worse, people who aspire to all that." Not so unlike your other grandparents, she meant. "Their kids aren't smart enough to get into an Ivy but have to go somewhere, so God created Williams."

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.