I’ve no intention of seeing the Sex and the City film, obviously, but the sheer intensity of the media push for it has got me thinking (one of those eerie media campaigns that, like a Grant Morrison villain, becomes a piece of actual reality through sheer force of the imagination). Sex and the City, for all its purported shockingness, is an extraordinarily nostalgic show; an hour-long cry of “awww, aren’t 1950s gender roles sweet.” A bit like a 21st century Happy Days, but less funny. But this combination of the shocking and the nostalgic isn’t contradictory at all, indeed, the two support each other: it’s “shock” that we’re supposed to be nostalgic about. It’s very comforting to imagine that, once upon a time, there was a time when transgression was thinkable.
“In general the close connection between advertising and the cosmic awaits analysis” wrote Benjamin (Arcades, 175). Indeed, and the connection would only become closer in the 50s; when, meanwhile, the phalanstery was finally conquered for the suburbs.
A happy coincidence that Infinite Thought should tag me with this meme when I’ve just finished grading a stack of papers and so been thinking a bit about what I’m doing when I’m teaching. This semester I’ve been teaching an introductory writing course, which is apparently a fixture of American universities, but is perhaps particularly important somewhere like Berkeley, where new students have such a wide range of writing abilities. There are, of course, structural reasons for this, including the fairly large number of students who don’t speak English at home (but who may never have received formal education in any other language), and the appalling underfunding of California’s public schools; but it’s interesting to see how these structures manifest themselves, because they don’t simply appear as an absence. That is, it’s not, strictly speaking, that those students who struggle haven’t been taught to write; they’ve all, or almost all, attended school for 13 years, after all. But during those 13 years, they have been taught to write badly. It seems like it would be an interesting research project in the sociology of knowledge to figure out how this happens. Everyone in the world knows that the five-paragraph-essay structure is stupid and harmful, yet students still get taught it. It’s aggravating; students would come to my office hours with incredibly interesting and insightful responses to the stuff we’d read, but be completely incapable of expressing themselves on paper (and, if it’s aggravating for me, it must be many times worse for them).
On with the meme. Read more↴
Just when I was beginning to get bored of their mindless, ever-so-slightly reactionary new-ageism, they go for some good old fashioned, properly reactionary, sexism.
I may be missing something, but INTERPOL seem to have “verified” the data that the Colombian government claim proves a connection between Venezuela and FARC by checking the timestamps of the files. Just as well there’s no way the Colombian government could have changed those timestamps then, eh?
A wholly splendid article by Raymond Geuss on Richard Rorty, including a defense of internationalism which culminates in:
The reason [for the fact that the Pope always turned out to be Italian] most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day. I have since myself adopted this diet for long periods of time without thinking it gave me any claim on the Papacy (via).
I have very fond memories of Geuss’s lectures at Cambridge, particularly (and I think I’ve told this story to more-or-less everyone I’ve ever met), Read more↴
