Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Sydney delivered a paper at his department workshop this afternoon. This is the paper that he’s been fretting about for some time and has been pounding out on my keyboard for the last several days. He did quite well! I can’t speak for the brilliance of his argument, but he talked on solidly for an hour, took an hour of questions, and then got several (seemingly genuine) compliments from peers and profs afterward. Better yet, he’s still standing!

I find it intriguing that Sydney’s paper was on disagreement (something about how it is that we can rationally disagree even when both parties have the same evidence in front of them, or how we disagree even when we think the other person is more of an expert, etc.). Maybe if he pursues this long enough he’ll have figured out disagreement in marital relationships, as well! That’s one way to make philosophy pay the bills . . .

Erin

I think I met our opossum again today. At least he looked the same and was near where we saw the one yesterday. But today he politely stood at the side of the road until I passed.

Sydney

This week I’m teaching my students part of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of reading it, it’s a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve in order to “justify the ways of God to men,” or, in other words, to try to explain how evil entered the world through the Fall (but in a way that won’t make us angry at God). Although Milton was Christian, his views aren’t necessarily orthodox, so in his work literature and theology interact in interesting ways. Some highlights from my students this week:

– “Why doesn’t Satan just kill Adam and Eve and get it over with?” This precipitated a discussion of free will, which seemed to be a phrase my students knew but not one they had really spent time thinking about. Sometimes I worry about my students.

– “Wait, ‘three-person’d God’?” Yeah, you explain the Trinity in five minutes. This same issue came up last week when we read John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. I hope they don’t just think I’m “being contradictory” and throw out my explanation.

– “Why is Pan in Eden?” So Milton has this habit of drawing images from all of literary tradition (he’s trying to write the English epic, set himself up as the British Homer), so he often calls up images from Greek mythology. Some of my students then get a bit confused, thinking there is a whole cast of figures residing in Eden, thus missing that Milton is simply using those other figures as analogies.

I really love teaching Paradise Lost. I’m going to have to find a way to teach a class just on Milton someday (hmm, I also have to make sure I’m qualified to do that, since it’s 300 years off my area of specialty). Amazing how much more complex literature gets when it draws on a whole religious tradition and all of the interpretation that has come with it. But meanwhile I’ll just give my students a taste of complexity and hope that, in the process, I haven’t committed too many heresies of my own as I dance between “Satan says in line 854 . .” and “Well, so Milton had some funny ideas about the makeup of angels . . .”

Erin

As we drove home from campus this evening, we came across this huge opossum sitting in the middle of the road. He looked a bit scruffy, like he hadn’t had time to groom himself after a long sleep. He also didn’t quite seem to have all of his wits about him yet. For a while he didn’t seem to know exactly what he wanted to do, as we sat and looked at him. Finally he decided that running away might be a good idea. But his idea of running away was to run exactly along the yellow lines. Never mind getting off the road. So we got a long, rather amusing look at his rear end bobbing up and down. He followed the lines very accurately, though. At least he wasn’t drunk.

– Sydney

“Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people – there are many of them – who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke out interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling round them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behavior – flirting – and if carried far enough it is punishable by law. But no law – not public opinion even – punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of those?”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . from Howards End

Erin

A week from today we’ll begin spring break. Wonderful! A whole week in which we won’t have to go in to campus every day, and I won’t have to prepare for and teach a class (much less grade papers!). But Sydney’s swamped with work and I think I’ll be writing a paper, which I haven’t done in awhile, so it may be an angst-ridden week despite such lovely advantages.

But when I was thinking about my upcoming papering, I realized I’m going to have to shift my entire schedule around. Although I’m usually an early riser (though I think Lisa has me beat at 5:30!), writing papers requires a whole different personality. I slowly work up to the project all day (stuffing my head with ideas and details) and finally by mid- to late-evening I’m typing away. However, if I go to bed I have to start the process all over again the next day, so I try to stretch out those evenings. I seem to work like a crock pot: put all the ingredients in, turn it on, and you’d swear it does nothing for hours and hours, until suddenly the house is filled with good smells around dinnertime. Okay, okay, so the crock pot might be more reliable than I am . . .

Erin

Just in case we don’t have enough things on this blog about the v-word, I’ve been wandering around for weeks in a daze after reading about the following case:

A theatre in Florida, deciding to change the name of the play to “Hoohaa Monologues” during its run there, ran up against opposition from the play’s organizers, a group of Florida Coastal School of Law students. Although the law students (perhaps quite rightly) claim that they only had rights to the play if they didn’t censor its content, one of their leaders then offered this stunning elaboration of their position:

“‘We are not allowed to censor anything because the whole play is about being a woman, about telling certain women’s stories. V– is the essence of a woman, and if you’re going to suppress the name, then you’re suppressing us as women,’ said play organizer Elissa Saavedra.”

“V– is the essence of a woman”??? Hmm, well, I’m glad I didn’t hear that one before I was old enough to laugh . . . or cry.

A little bit of background. Most of you have probably heard of this play that’s been getting quite a bit of attention called ‘The V Monologues’ (personally, I don’t have much of a problem with public use of the terms for any body part you like, assuming there is some more or less intelligent reason for doing so; but not everyone feels that way, so I’ll use ‘v’ for the remainder of the post). From what I’ve heard, it sounds to me like the play contains some good ideas mixed with a healthy dose of nonsense, of both the pernicious and merely silly varieties. So I didn’t think it merited the attention that it is receiving, but that’s hardly surprising news — I think that of a fair number of recent cultural items.

Anyway, three high school girls in Cross River, N.Y., were recently suspended for using the v-word at a high school forum where they were reading a selection from ‘The V Monologues’ (if you care to, you can read more about it here). Naturally, they have become a bit of a cause célèbre. After all, we clearly want teenage girls saying things like the following in front of their peers: ‘My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women’s army. I declare these streets, any streets, my v’s country’. How utterly paleolithic of the school administrators to protest. (Thought experiment: what do you think would happen if a group of male students had done a reading in which they said: ‘I declare these streets, any streets, my p.’s country’?)

In case it isn’t just perfectly obvious to you why saying these things publically is desirable, here’s the argument for why it’s so important that we do so: ‘It’s important to get things out in the air that might be uncomfortable to talk about. V is a part of the body, and it’s not vulgar, it’s not profane. It’s important to put that out in the open and to make people feel comfortable about it.’

This is the standard argument that one hears in association with ‘The V Monologues’; it also appears in many other contexts. As far as I can tell, most people think this is a sensible argument. Some people might think there are other relevant factors that should be considered that end up overriding this argument. But most people seem to think there is something to the argument. People listen respectfully and nod their heads when they hear it.

Here’s a different case. Suppose a close friend of mine confided in me and shared his deepest desires, struggles, etc. with me, i.e., said the sorts of things that you say in heart-to-heart conversations with people that you really trust. Now suppose I posted what he said on this blog, talked about it to my colleagues, and so. After all, it’s important to get things out in the air that might be uncomfortable to talk about. Such desires and struggles are part of our lives, and they’re not vulgar, they’re not profane. It’s important to put them out in the open and to make people comfortable about them. (This is where you’re suppose to listen respectfully and nod your head.)

So why exactly do people take this manifestly doltish argument seriously? (If you can provide me with an elided premiss that makes the argument sound plausible, I shall be impressed.)

Sorry for the long rant — I just heard this stupid argument one time too many and had to get if off my chest.

Sydney

I got an email from my department today announcing that we would not be required to put in hours as research assistants and such for our summer stipend. Although I would in general be happy to be given money, this comes as a nice surprise for four reasons: 1) Last summer I worked in a classroom every day and spent the rest of my time making up syllabi, worksheets, exercises, and such. It was a long, stressful summer that ended with my first set of graduate exams. Needless to say, I am happy not to face another one like it this year. 2) The amount of work and stress of being a research assistant has been very much luck-of-the-draw in past years, so you never know going into things if you’ll be showing up to help move furniture all summer long, or if you’ll be allowed to take time for your own work. 3) I want to get started on dissertation thoughts and the like, and it will be really helpful to have big swatches of time to do that in. I’m also hoping to tackle French, so I might actually be able to fit it in this summer. 4) Sydney and I intend to be on the road for part of the summer (mostly visiting family, which is always a loooong drive), so we can now do this when we and they would like, rather than have to work around a school schedule.

Had to share the news. I’ll try not to sit back and think of the freedom of my summer – time to get back to work!

Erin

James Howard Kunstler, best-known for his rants about the evils of suburbia and oil-based companies, has a cool feature on his website called ‘Eyesore of the Month‘. His pictures and acerbic commentary are wonderful for those of us who tend to think that modernism and postmodernism were unmitigated disasters in architecture. Here are my favourite examples that I’ve stolen from his site:

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto:

Peter B. Lewis Building for Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management — a Frank Gehry piece:

Another Gehry piece — this one at MIT:

And the new Ontario College of Art & Design:

Feel free to comment and tell me what a philistine I am.

Sydney