Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Margaret Soltan's all over Harvard's scandalous endowment. I'm not normally one to participate in the (admittedly enjoyable) ressentiment-related activities of despising some entity's wealth, but in this case, I have to agree and second. Dear Alma Mater of blessed memory operates with tax exempt status while charging one hell of a tuition bill that it could clearly afford to foot for everyone for, like, five hundred years, and I still spent the better part of last night sorting through old papers in preparation for tomorrow's move, a not-insignificant number of which were those familiar cream laid solicitations for my hard-earned, taxable cash. So in addition to begging for my money in order to re-invest it, spending nothing on the activity that earns them tax exemption (like some wino on the corner with a sign around his neck asking for bus fare when, by common consensus, he's going to buy a fifth the second you're out of sight), they're also cluttering up my personal space. Given my feelings about clutter, I'm not really sure which is worse.
Fortunately, some of my cleverer classmates have come up with a way to bite their thumbs (sir) at this gross violation of the spirit of the tax code. From now on, whenever I receive one of those beautiful, tree-killing solicitations, I'll donate a small sum to Harvard Alumni for Social Action, which funds African graduate students and African educational institutions. I encourage all of my fellow alums to do the same.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
moving on
Dear Craigslist,I would never deliberately underrate your many excellent qualities. You are, for all intents and purposes, my link to the real estate market, the only means by which I seek apartments, free ugly couches, and sundry other goods--moveable and immovable, tangible and ephemeral--and, occasionally, my source of entertainment. (That ad from 2006 where the guy was asking for sex in exchange for a room in an ugly house in Riverside County? Brilliant.)
But it's come to my attention--as I attempt to find a new place to live in San Francisco--that you're not living up to your potential. Half of your ads seem to be written in all caps: which, let's face it, hurts the eye and sounds not so much like the shouting to which it is often compared as it does the ranting of some teenager on MySpace whose best friend just hooked up with her crush: "GO AWAY ASSHOLE I DONT LIKE YOU ANYMORE YOU SUCK." This jejune impression is only confirmed by the general lack of grammar and observance of any consistent spelling rules. Just a hint: you don't capitalize after a comma.
All of this would be nothing, if not for the fact that your ads haven't kept up with the technology that makes them possible. I've heard tell, from the elders of my tribe, that ads for apartments used to appear in newspapers, which charged by the word and which led to a series of commonly understood abbreviations: 4/3/2 w/Chn & gmtk in HD. Which was all well and fine when one was being charged by the word, but with essentially unlimited bytes available for all of our gushing about how wonderful our 450 square foot studio truly is, why do these forms persist? And why--why oh why oh why--in the age of cheap and easy digital photography does anyone bother to put up an ad without pictures?
Perhaps I should provide and illustrative example, chosen at random from the San Francisco board and apparently posted by a professional realtor:
"Rent $1050 deposit $1000.00 2 bedroom 1 bath carport
garbage is paid ava. 4/25/08."
Where's the rest of it, you ask? Well, you see what I mean. This is it. No pictures. No mention of a pet policy. Nothing besides what one could have easily gleaned already from the title of the ad, which was "$1050/2br 1710 Magazine St," other than the status of the garbage pick-up--and I don't know about you, but whether I'll have to shell out $20 a month for my trash disposal needs is the first thing on my mind when I go to look for a new place.
So, Craigslist, I think you'll agree that we have a bit of a problem. I'd like to make a proposal, and I hope you'll consider it carefully. At a minimum, your ads for apartments and homes should include:
1. The price and number of bedrooms in the title, and repeated in the post.
2. The number of bathrooms.
3. Whether it is a freestanding structure, and, if so, whether it has a yard and whether a gardener for that yard is provided by the landlord.
4. What utilities the landlord intends to pay for. If at all possible, these shouldn't break the laws of the relevant state.
5. Pet policy.
6. Any special amenities or features, i.e. ocean view, washer/dryer, bathtub with those nice little circulating jets, comes with its own harem, etc.
7. Amount expected for deposit.
8. Pictures. And not just exterior ones on sunny days, either. You could have punched a hole in the drywall for all I know. Or your bathroom could be pink.
What it should not contain:
1. Any subjective, unverifiable praise. I don't care if you think it's the nicest house on the block. Let me decide that, and then decide whether I care.
2. Barking about how you want good tenants who won't wreck the place. Of course nobody wants tenants who will wreck the place. That's why saying so is completely unnecessary. Offensive, too.
3. Suggestion that I will like it so much that I need to bring a completed rental application and a gigantic check to the first showing. It smacks of desperation and the delusion that the housing market hasn't experienced significant declines since the bad old days of 2004. In all likelihood, you're some speculator who bought up houses by the dozen because "everyone" was making a killing in real estate and you're now trying to unload them as rental properties, but simultaneously sticking your fingers in his ears to avoid hearing the daily reminders that each of your houses is worth $100,000 less than you paid for it. Don't inflict your insecurities on me. I wasn't stupid enough to buy back then.
4. Complicated series of demands about how and when I should get in touch with you if I'm interested. You're the seller here, and in a depressed market (see above). If you don't make things as easy as possible for me, I'm going elsewhere. Your condo is what's known in economics as a commodity: virtually identical in every way to the condo sitting next to it. If your neighbor is easier to reach, I'm going to choose your neighbor. NB: If you're advertising, you know, electronically, you should probably have some sort of electronic way for me to get in touch with you. I hear there's this newfangled thing called "e-mail," which stands for electronic mail. Know it, love it, use it.
If you follow these simple rules, Craigslist, I foresee our relationship as a long and mutually profitable one. If not, I'll probably still use your services, but I'll grumble about it a lot.
Sincere best wishes,
Shannon
Monday, April 14, 2008
The Suburban Condition
I've been tearing through the subgenre of suburban lit in all of its various manifestations: Cheever, in particular, like I'm on a train fast approaching the hamlet where everyone drinks too much on a Saturday and can't stop talking about it Sunday afternoon, but also some nonfiction anthropological stuff and pop sociology (Perfect Madness, The Mommy Myth, etc.), too. It strikes me that we call Roth a self-hating Jew for Portnoy's Complaint, we don't call Cheever a self-hating suburbanite for "The Swimmer" or "The Five-Forty-Eight." Surely "suburban" is as much a cultural category as Jewishness, for the latter is often denoted as cultural instead of religious. Granted that the former is of a somewhat more recent vintage, but still, it's hard to find a writer raised in its midst who doesn't either reflect its angst or react against it.I've become something of a self-hating suburbanite lately, cheering on Cheever and shouting at the stroller brigades (inside my head, anyway) to pack it up and get back to work. This trend coincides with something similar in my mother, who--retired now--finds herself appalled by the bunko ladies and soccer traveling league mothers in Michigan and is veritably tetchy with the urge to do something, anything, again. (Spot the heredity.) We have long and involved conversations about the current political situation, which, sooner or later, boil down to a plaintive condemnation of the inwardness of the suburbs and its subsequent bright intense focus on the nuclear family circle to the exclusion of the darkness beyond. "If only they were just aware of something besides midget football league scores," we moan to each other. "Like, you know, the fact that Homeland Security can deport anyone, for any reason." I've started to mix my stereotypes, and categorize suburban mothers with other hated groups, like women who use and/or care about cosmetics too much. In fact, as anyone who's seen a mommy lately could probably tell you, she might be wearing mascara but you'd never know it under the flakes of pureed carrot and oatmeal dregs that have, somehow and improbably, ended up on her eyelashes.
If I were Greek and a peripatetic philosopher, I'd respond to myself as such: It is impossible to know another person's mind completely. Perhaps these so-called soccer moms (itself a troubled and ambiguous category) can spare a few moments from shepherding their wee ones from ballet to Kumon to Tumbling Tots to think about what lies beyond the gates of their stucco subdivisions, and do. Maybe, like the housewives of the Vietnam era, they are the organizers of boycotts and consciousness-raising groups, the creators of entire worlds unknown to those of us who drive out of those gates at 7am every day. Denying other people inner worlds as complex as mine is perhaps my worst and most alarming character flaw, and the first step to all sorts of appalling conclusions with disturbing historical precedents. And it occurs to me that my favorite Dostoevsky novel, The Devils--also set in the suburbs, or a sort of Russian equivalent--is about essentially the same thing: denying human complexity to entire swaths of people. I've always believed that we're drawn to what repels us about ourselves. I suppose I'm drawn to Cheever and the entire class of suburban lit. because that part of my personal history offends me; but then the offended part hits upon The Devils as an antidote to that smug superiority. Literary taste as a regulating system. I like that idea.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
The Berkle
(I don't know why I call it that, but it feels right.)Provided my husband finds a job offer to his satisfaction, I'm moving to San Francisco to attend Berkeley's PhD program. As reported somewhere below--back when, you know, I was still updating my blog--the visit weekend was incomparable, the faculty smart and genial all at once, the fellowship offer generous, and the department in general conducive to pursuing my research interests in literatures outside of English. I've agreed to write up the narrative of my grad school application season (which I'm tentatively calling A Season of Migration to the North) for the livejournal community which held my hand through the heart-piercing anxieties of the last couple of months, and possibly host on this website other accounts of the same, written by my friends. Much is said about the competitiveness and general cutthroatiness of English graduate students, but our livejournal cohort--and we kind of are our own cohort, no matter where we go--proved itself quite the opposite, quick to jump on the negative, identify it for what it was, and dismiss the occasional anonymous commenter with little ceremony. Helpful and cheerful to a fault, we were genuinely happy to see each other get into programs, even if it meant others of us were out. So much for that myth.
Moving comes with its own anxieties, and I don't even want to admit the amount of time I spend on Craigslist looking for a new place. We're thinking a loft in not-quite-gentrified Oakland or smallish house farther north. I'd like to avoid another Pit of the Soccer Moms, the corresponding one of which my sister-in-law tells me is located somewhere around Walnut Creek, but other than that, I'm pretty open to whatever happens our way. Cheerful, even. For instance, I've stopped composing the list of things and people I hate in my head for most of today.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
interdisciplinarity
My final paper for my Dostoevsky class examined D.'s use of Hamlet--as the quintessential Western text--to portray Russian misreadings of Europe across the character of Ivan Karamazov, an inverted Hamlet with his own response to patricide. So, in short, a ton of fun to write. I seized upon the fact that Ivan's apparition doesn't wear a watch. This paper by Liza Knapp argues that Ivan's devil can't tell time because he doesn't need to, and all of this points to an understanding of theoretical physics--specifically, time as the fourth definition--well before Einstein invented it. I argued that this was a reference to Hamlet's and Horatio's confusion about the time before they see the ghost of Hamlet's father, but that these two interpretations weren't mutually exclusive.One of the best things about my husband is that he's right-brained enough to read and critique my papers. One of the unfortunate things about my husband is that he's left-brained enough to question the grand theories we humanists tend to invent out of his training as a physicist. Apparently, the idea that Dostoevsky would have thought this up is laughably anachronistic, even if he was familiar with some of the pre-Einsteinian arguments about time, because those arguments weren't about relativity at all, and Knapp's understanding of Ivan's devil relies on relativity.
And thus we see the both the benefits and the pitfalls of interdisciplinarity.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Berkeley was, like, totally awesome
Well, it was. And that I find myself reduced to Valleyspeak to convey its general excellence--brilliant, accessible faculty; brilliant, friendly classmates; and, you know, the actual town of Berkeley itself, not to mention its proximity to San Francisco--should say something that my list of superlatives doesn't and can't really communicate. By the time I left, there was talk of an interdisciplinary history of the book reading group established with the Townsend Center's funds and any concerns about constantly battling the system to do work in Russian and French literature or in entirely different disciplines altogether had been put entirely to rest. Nobody made me feel the least bit bad about being interested in seventeen different things, and it turns out that roughly 80 percent of the other students write or want to write fiction and aren't particularly afraid to admit it--and one of them even got something published. Even my least favorite event of the weekend--a large and incoherent house party at which nothing was said and nothing was heard--gave off a strong whiff of the collegiality of the graduate students. (Was it the pink lighted punch fountain? Probably.) As per usual, I took my sweet time at Moe's and came home with quite the cache of lovelies, including Bakhtin on Dostoevsky and the first volume of Boyd's Nabokov biography (I bought the second last time I was there). I hesitated over the double set of Moretti's novel anthology, but ultimately returned it to the shelf because of my backpack's space constraints. Later, as I was hiking up a very steep hill to the Berkeley Rose Garden and a view of the sunset over the Bay, I realized I'd made the right decision, as each volume is 700 pages or something like that.So, in summary: at least seven or eight faculty members with whom to work, the best place in the U.S. to live, a very decent fellowship, classmates who won't cut your throat while you sleep, and the opportunity to work on more or less anything...yeah, Berkeley WAS, like, totally awesome.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Cynical, momentary deviation from the usual topics
Client No. 9's problems have thus far provided endless hours of distraction from less important occupations, like answering emails, raising our children, and, you know, governing this nation, and one almost hates to add to the noise, noise, noise...but alas, I, like everyone else, Have an Opinion. Fortunately, Slate intuited my opinion and printed it up in an easily read format for wide distribution over the Internet. I think it's fair to say that sympathy for Tilda Wall Spitzer has reached that level called "outpouring" by uncreative journalists searching for a cliche, and that's not a bad thing. Blaming the victim is just as futile here as it is in any situation when a person does something this wicked and stupid to another person, especially one he claimed to love. But every time I see another friend or classmate pick a job because she thinks it will give her the flexibility to go part-time when she has children, or quits because she finds that the world of work is not quite as pliable as she thought it was, I want to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense (and a work ethic) into her. What's going to happen when he leaves you? Or he dies in an unfortunate midlife crisis-related accident? Or the two of you just get sick of each other? Linda Hirshman argues pretty persuasively that the opt-out revolution (whereby highly educated women quit their jobs to raise their children and perhaps do some nominal unpaid charity work) is the worst thing to happen to women...well, ever. She proposes the following rules for use by women who don't want to end up in Tilda Spitzer's situation:- Don't study art (or music, or theater). Use your education to prepare for a lifetime of work.
- Never quit a job until you have another one. Take work seriously.
- Never know when you're out of milk. Bargain relentlessly for a just household.
- Consider a reproductive strike.
- Get the government you deserve. Stop electing governments that punish women's work.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
A good poem is hard to find
Or this one is, at any rate. My husband is a Google black belt, and it took him at least fifteen minutes to locate this K. Amis gem, one of my favorite short poems in English.So in the interests of making Great Literature more available, even to those of us who aren't professional class Googlers, I bring you Aberdarcy: The Main Square.
By the new Boots, a tool-chest with flagpoles
Glued on, and flanges, and a dirty great
Baronial doorway, and things like portholes,
Evans met Mrs. Rhys on their first date.
Beau Nash House, that sells Clothes for Gentlemen,
Jacobethan, every beam nailed on tight--
Real wood, though, mind you--was in full view when
Lunching at the Three Lamps, she said all right.
And he dropped her beside the grimy hunk
Of castle, that with luck might one day fall
On to the Evening Post, the time they slunk
Back from that lousy week-end in Porthcawl.
The journal of some bunch of architects
Named this the worst town centre they could find;
But how disparage what so well reflects
Permanent tendencies of heart and mind?
All love demands a witness: something "there"
Which it yet makes part of itself. These two
Might find Carlton House Terrace, St Mark's Square,
A bit on the grand side. What about you?
Suggested use: Give it to someone planning a romantic getaway in a hideous place. If you really dislike the person, that is.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Memoirs and Consequences
Another day, another literary hoax. There's something simultaneously unsurprising and interesting about the typical locus of this increasingly common form of fakery, which I'll call the tribulation memoir. The pattern is beginning to calcify into its own genre, with its own conventions:- Americans write about drug addiction; Europeans about the Holocaust. The explanation for this seems to lie in an equivalence between the two, but, of course, there are differences. World War II and the Holocaust were a narrower period of climatic change, an abrupt upheaval, an earthquake. Drug addiction/regulation is erosive, a stream slowly eating away the bricks, a common experience only by virtue of the fact that it occurs in many families and many places. Both appeal broadly, but differently.
- The unmasking of the hoaxer occurs in the paper of record, but not necessarily by the paper of record (it's usually accompanied by some favorable excerpt from the book review, as if to preempt the bloggers who will--make no mistake about it--dig this out of the archives within an hour or two. It says, "Look, we know we were wrong about this. We're all human. We were fooled, too.")
- The hoaxer provides a minimum of three reasons: one socially altruistic ("I did it for the voiceless, those suffering from addiction, those who can't tell their own stories, etc.", "It's the same book, whether it's truth or fiction," and, finally, the selfish one, "Perhaps I did it to get published."
- The editor and publisher rush to assure us all that they were victims, too.
- The reportage always opens with a short summary of the book, followed by the second paragraph punchline, "But none of it was true!"
The tribulation memoir plays a variation on this theme. The hoaxers make a decent argument: why are their books less worthy as fiction than as non-fiction? Ultimately, in asking this, they misunderstand what their audiences seek in reading about descent into addiction, madness, the bowels of the Los Angeles County Child Protective Services, etc. The memoir is a way to circumvent the suspension of disbelief compact, to get a hit of artfulness without the subsequent crash when you realize afterwards, in the cold hard light, that it was all made up. Memoirs are broadly novelistic--and often analyzed as novels--in the sense that they attach themes to otherwise random occurrences, but without the niggling sense of having wasted all of that time and caring on people who don't actually exist. The standards for style can be lower because the style is not, in fact, the point. The point is the suffering and redemption, underlined by a Law and Order-like declaration that this happened to real people (perhaps continues to happen to real people, in the American manifestation of the genre). Of course, no memoir is ever absolutely truthful--any piece of writing is someone's approximation and stylization of reality--but unmasking the outright hoaxes is a kind of affirmation of the memoir genre itself. It reminds us of the differences between stylization and lying, and it should remind us that even non-fiction is a compact between reader and writer. Changing a name or a place or adding an overarching theme to a life that really just is a series of random events involves an acceptable suspension of disbelief; creating an entirely different childhood for yourself to secure a publishing contract is not.
Labels: fakes
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
мороженое для каждого
One of my Russian classmates was talking about a hammer and sickle t-shirt bearing the legend "мороженое для каждого!" ("Ice cream for everyone!") on something he called "Cafe Express." Having searched this out and determined that he probably mean Cafe Press, I'm still coming up empty handed on the t-shirt. And I kind of gotta haves it. Anyone seen it? I suppose the good thing about Cafe Press is that if it doesn't exist, I can create it.Also, if there's anything more insidious than the way that DaVinci Code references have permeated popular discourse, I don't know what it is. Twice in the past few days I've heard someone use the phrase "sub rosa" when all they really mean is obscure or hidden (or, amusingly, password protected). Interestingly, we were just having a discussion about a similar phenomenon in my Dostoevsky class today. In "The Grand Inquisitor," the eponymous character deliberately confuses the words "tайна" (meaning mystery, as in 'mystery of faith,') and the more provincial "секрет," as in something that children keep from each other. The Grand Inquisitor reduces the mysteries of Christianity (perfect faith) for the dirty little secret that the Church keeps (i.e., that it's really in thrall to the devil). This confusion underpins most of the third part of his argument.
I think what I love most about Russian is the way that it has about five different words to every single English general purpose usage.
Labels: banality, russki yazik