Flop d’estime

Well, I’ll need to work a bit on the choreography, but first day classes were suffered through with a modicum of elegance and a minimum of drama. This semester I am teaching two classes on the same day: Intro to My Specialty Studies, and a general education course on American Immigration History. Needless to say, I dazzled the smaller Intro class with my élan, my grace, my charm, my handouts! What can I say, when it’s your specialty, you’ve got materials to the rafters to snow them under in what passes for prep, sort of like an all-you-can-eat Sizzler or Chinese Buffet (don’t lie and say you don’t know the type: they’re all called China Rose or China Flower or something like that, and they all feature the same overly-fried and relatively tasteless food and the same surly waitresses and bored cashiers): quantity in place of quality rules the American brain like Mom, apple pie, and interstates.


In any event, yes, back to the handouts. They were, ahem, suitably impressed. I had actually prepared them last year for some community service event I did for a local K-12 school district, an in-service teacher training, so therefore they were written to be accessible, visually friendly, and relatively comprehensive (I had two hours to communicate a whole mess of stuff to a bunch of teachers who were remarkably like many, although not all, university students: coerced into being there and kept placated by bagels and coffee). Ironically, the suit I wore to class this week was the same I wore last winter to present to the teachers, but instead of shivering (Who needs an overcoat? The door is only twenty metres away. It’s only 20° today!), I was for the first class on the verge of shvitzing, and for the second that verge slipped into a damp and slightly embarrassing reality. What can I say? Fat guys shvitz!


In any event, perhaps because it is my specialty or because it was the first class of the day or because it was smaller, that first class seemed to flow much better than what was to follow. Standard practice at my institution is to hold a full class session on the first day, only part of which can be consumed with syllabus review, no matter how slowly one reads it or how many languages one asks their students to translate it into right there in class for polyglot diversity. Ergo, the handouts. Blitzed by enough snow white copy paper to kill a small forest of innocent, beautiful trees, I reviewed the material, then offered an online tutorial on how to download most of our reading for this semester (NB: While there are many academics seemingly involved in my area of specialty, there is a complete dearth of decent introductory anthologies to use in places where one book counts, i.e. public universities serving working class students. Such a dearth, in fact, I am considering editing a volume myself! This PDF shit is for the birds! I guess it beats actually photocopying. Remember readers? Remember Kinko’s Professor Publishing? Ah, the innocence of the 1980s!)


Two gay students stood out amongst the crowd as possibly interesting, talkative, perky and alert and very “now” gay (e.g. moderately metrosexual, except a little too put together and a little too toned to be truly str8. Oh, they also were carrying the latest edition of Cold City’s gay rag under their arms, so it wasn’t exactly rocket science. Even I don’t read that trash, so they MUST be gay! I mean, who else would bother, unless you had absolutely nothing else to read?). A few older women, always good for measured conversation and really good questions, a couple of jocks (one was falling asleep, just barely, sort of like his no doubt impending performance), some very put together girls (full-face makeup), a handful of students of colour, both "new" and "old" American— in other words, the usual cohort of students one will find in a Cold City U. classroom. No angry older white dudes though, which was unusual. I was to see them later. There was one angry younger white dude, but I couldn’t tell if he could be slotted into the gay sub-group. It is so hard to tell nowadays!


So, feeling fresh, after the successful and brilliant conclusion of Class #1, I jumped in the car and ran across town to get a video from the public library for the second class (lacking the requisite handouts), grabbed a delicious hamburger, and made it back with some time to spare for Class #2. Larger (because it meets general ed requirements), more ethnically diverse (with the angry older white dudes and J-Lo type Asian girls, vaguely fabulously attitude-nous, standing out in the crowd: a potentially spicy mix), and more cautious, it was also much closer in the classroom with 32 bodies present (i.e. it got hot). But I had at least five returning students (it’s nice to be liked), and syllabus review et al went well. I plop in the video and think, “OK, we’ll watch a little of this, then have a conversation based on the video, right?” Well, we did, kinda sorta, but slow, slow, and not very engaged. So then, I fall into an error I am particularly prone to: I start to pontificate. This, that, and the other, blah blah blah, until their eyes glaze over and I know dinner is ready! Ding! Time to leave.


Now, I think on some level pontification is a natural consequence of the practicum of egg-headetry. I yak, therefore I am. It’s something we learn in high school (Pick me!), reinforced in college (I still cringe remembering the time I mouthed off on Maoism, of which I had no idea, in an art history section and was rewarded with the TA’s gracious and laudatory commentary; after that, yakking in class became like crack, and I was Whitney!), and cemented in the graduate seminar room (at times like a gaggle of Canadian geese, honking and barking and shitting everywhere), along with its flipside: sullen, resentful silence (I guess in this sense we come full circle). Prancilla told me a story of a grad school colleague of hers who once had a, ahem, disagreement with a professor at the commencement of a class, and for the rest of the session she sat silent in the seminar room and stared at the professor, throwing daggers with her eyes while at one point, as Prancilla put it, “she slowly unwrapped and ate her sandwich, never once taking her eyes off the professor.” Ouch!


Well, the worst part of the pontificatory moment was the shvitz! So bad I had to start fanning myself with the syllabus. And of course once the schvitz starts, you can’t take off your coat. You have to ride it through, like the soldier you are. It all ended well, mostly, and my pontification tends to be relatively coherent (I try not to veer too far off topic. I'm no Jean Brodie, although I've had my JB moments for sure), earning at least the backhanded compliment of “He’s smart” from students even as they grow bored and restless. Partially, this is due to the fact that the first day one has very little to bounce off of (no reading), to reflect ideas back to students, to foment discussion. Oh, sure, I could have taken out my bags of tricks: groups, free writes, name games, debates, etc. But what would I do later in the semester? But also, larger classes tend to self-regulate their verbal contributions in ways that are hard to see when you are on the stage, and are used to (and perhaps even love) the attention of being the centre of attention, in the luscious limelight. Students, even talkative ones, are cautious as cats, conscious of speaking and what speaking means, the attention it focuses on them, their perception of vulnerability. In the end, they are actually not like us, luminous creatures of the lectern, popping our eyes and offering our overly educated (and most of the time unasked for) opinions about this and that at the drop of a pin. Diálogos impertinentes indeed!


That’s OK, it will get better, but it did leave me feeling a bit deflated. It doesn’t help that Mr. Gordo is at a super-fancy conference in Mexico (loving it, btw, but who wants to talk about the banalities of class when they're in wonderful and horrible Mexico City? Even I'm not that masochistic!), so I have had no one to immediately process all the little fears and paranoia that always plague me on the first day of class (and come to think of it, on many subsequent days of class as well). But thanks to the lovely La Vickstix, Miss Oso has some cash to go get some dinner tonight! I'd love to drown my sorrows, however small they may be, in an In-N-Out burger, but alas, La Vicks didn't send that much money.

In any event, to paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara, there's always next week...

Doll Parts

I'm just a simple girl
In a high tech digital world
I really try to understand
All the powers that rule this land
They say Miss J's big butt is boss
Kate Moss can't find a job
In a world of post modern zen
What was good now is bad

[...]

You look at me
but you're not quite sure
Am I it or could you get more?
You learn cool from magazines
You learn love from Charlie Sheen

— Jewel


Classes start this week, and I have spent the weekend avoiding finishing up the revisions to my syllabi, more out of boredom than revulsion. I managed to lose two twenty dollar bills yesterday someplace along a disparate route of errands, and when I queried the clerk at my bodega today as to whether anyone had returned some lost money, he dryly reported that “When people find money on the floor, they usually don’t tell us about it.” Ya think? It was only as I left the bodega and stood on the corner under an uncomfortably hot sun that I realised the ridiculousness of even inquiring. Now, forty dollars may seem negligible in the larger scheme of things, but this week in particular it is a painful loss; in point of fact more annoying than agonizing, but still depressingly indicative of how close to the bone my financial situation has become. Will I starve? No, of course not (I don’t think). But I better not have to see my doctor ($25 co-pay) or get a flat tire ($$ who knows? $$) before Friday. Perhaps it’s a useful exercise in financial discipline? In any event, this is perhaps more reflective of how absent minded I have been since returning to Cold City that I, in a exceptionally tight week money-wise, would lose a significant percentage of my weekly allowance by happenstance, slipping out of my pocket as my mind was elsewhere.


In point of fact, being mildly depressed, as I have been since my return, is good for the waistline and budget (at least the food budget), since I don’t really eat like a normal person while in residence chez Cold City. What’s my secret, you may ask, envious? A pack of cigs for breakfast, a pack of cigs for lunch, then a healthy sensible dinner! (This dark irony reminds me of Big Sis’s riff on commercials for Xenical, the diet drug whose primary and infamous side effect is fecal incontinence: “I shit my pants, but now I have my life back!”) If it’s fancy dress, than this healthy sensible dinner would include a warm protein, cooked in a skillet, and a salad. If it’s casual, peanut butter and an apple sometimes suits me just fine, maybe some hummus, lettuce out of a bag, and toast. Ah, toast: a bachelorette’s best friend! When I told my nurse about my diet secret, she noted that it was important that I was getting adequate nutrition, to which I replied that that’s what multi-vitamins are for. The look she gave me indicated that might not be quite enough.


Come to think of it, in the year I have lived in the garret, I have never once used the oven: not to bake a pie, warm up pizza, heat a chicken pot pie, nothing! Initially I think this was out of a paranoid concern over the fumes from whatever oven cleaner had been used before my arrival. Now, it is perhaps more related to the fact the cuisine de garret has not one cookie sheet, Dutch oven, ramekin, or brownie pan. I don’t even store things in the oven. It has just sat there, empty, for a year. Back when I was living with Mr. Gordo, we tended to be big eaters, especially around dinnertime. As far as I can tell, Mr. Gordo has not lost that beat, for the other night when I queried him about his supper, he replied he had pasta (gasp!). Pasta is his comfort food, but for me tends to influence my glycemic index too dramatically to be all but an occasional treat (also, terribly fattening! Doesn’t the word fattening seem so quaint, so old fashioned, so innocent? Before insane weight-loss, oops, I mean healthy lifestyles became the American quotidian, I suppose). Perhaps this winter I can start making casseroles and succotashes and pies to help warm up the place (literally, with one radiator). Until then I think I’ll stick to the toaster and skillet set. I have to start saving up for a Le Creuset Dutch oven (once I manage to figure out how to keep my money in my pants).


But I digress! The first days of a class are always full of some excitement, some nervous energy, and some disappointment, as the cold realisation of the presence of class deadweights makes you wonder about the course of the term. But then again, it’s new, it’s fresh, it’s the cyclical rhythms that seem both worn and incredibly redemptive, sort of like Catholic confession. As various bloggers detail their reentry into professional duties, I have turned to think about what all this means, the first class thing, one's syllabus presentation, the tension and stress but also the stage of expectation and most especially the performative aspect of our work. I have increasingly thought of teaching as entertainment, ideally not in an empty vacuous sense but as the struggle to maintain attention and enthusiasm, especially as the semester grinds down to the nubbin between the twelfth and fifteenth weeks, when you hate the sight of each other, loathe your bad students with a passion, and are just counting the seconds until you can run out of the classroom (screaming and pulling off your wig) never to see this particular collection of ungrateful faces ever again (or at the very least until the beginning of the next term)!


We’re not there just quite yet, however. Back to new and fresh! With the entertainment principle so firmly entrenched among students of all ages, being a professor is no longer really about transmitting knowledge, per se, but is more like a multi-media performance given weekly, twice-weekly, or thrice-weekly, depending on how bad one has been in a previous life (Who do you have to sleep with to get out of this show?). As I walk onto the stage that is my classroom, I think of myself as the greatest divas: Liza, Liz, Diana, Divine, Bette, Joan. Pop, Dip, Spin! C’mon, girls, it’s SHOWTIME! I would love to stride in, old school style, with beads and feathers, a nude one-piece beaded maillot with legs up to here and a huge feathered headdress, with full makeup (the eyes, baby!) and backup dancers (what true star doesn’t have backups?), march up to the podium, and start a cute little song and dance, very jazzy, a little disco, very now, about the class, with flashing lights and orchestration by Giorgio Moroder. Of course, our students often react the same way that the pensioners respond to such lavish spectacles chez Vegas: with boredom, ennui, ordering another drink (or four) while distractedly noshing on bacon-wrapped scallops as the floor show proceeds to wear down the wood of the stage, two times an evening.


My hand on the door handle, a peek inside the classroom showing my students waiting, my mind flashes to the introductory sequence of Mommie Dearest, as Joan channeled through Faye Dunaway finally faces the camera after an agonising delay of tracking shots and cuts, AS Joan on the set of The Ice Follies of 1939 (literally eliciting gasps from audiences in 1981 with the power of the verisimilitude): “Let’s GO!” And like Dunaway channeling Joan, we too are consummate professionals: waking early, scrubbing our nails and arms and face (!) with a stiff brush, carefully toning by dunking our head in a bucket of ice and alcohol, and at the studio early. Beauty, perfection, and professionalism: all ephemeral qualities that we must work to achieve and sustain. Being smart is not enough anymore (if indeed it ever was), for we must entertain and cajole as well. So, if one must entertain, let’s give ‘em a SHOW. As I have implied before, I believe teaching is more art than Techne, although one needs both to successfully pull it off, like any true star. And what seems so important (and rightly so) for so many of us is the very appearance of both technocratic ability and artistic position, the classroom version of talent: How do I look?


Aside from Showgirls fantasies of spectacle, our options are increasingly determined by the consumeristic modality of education that is ascendant in North American universities in particular, where judging a book by its cover is almost de rigeur. When I taught at Sadistic College, and at my very laid-back graduate institution before that, it was all-casual, all the time. Jeans, a button-down if you were being formal. Now, I face my students the first day in a suit, and always wear at the very least a pressed shirt to class, with appropriate slacks and shoes. I walk in with a jacket, even if I take it off after a bit. They address me now as Professor Raro, exclusively (No more Oso this and Oso that). Like the star, I want to exert control over my audience using distance channeled through familiarity. Approachable? Yes. Your friend (or worse, employee)? Decidedly no. After all, it is my stage, the spotlight is on me, and I want to make the best of it. The proscenium that separates student from professor is one that occasionally can be crossed (sometimes should be crossed), but as I have taught more, that very line that divides me metaphysically from my students has come, at times, to be like a warm blanket, like protection, like makeup and costume and lights and smoke and mirrors. I play my role, the role of a lifetime (twice a night): lipstick applied, mascara daubed, hair teased, mic checked— opening night perfection, even if by the end of term I resemble Kiki more than Joan or Bette. Put down by critics on the left and the right, academics are some of the hardest working entertainers in the Biz. To paraphrase vaguely Addison DeWitt, we are the original displaced people, we bookish folk. Which is why, on some strange level, we share so much with entertainers in the theatrical and filmic traditions. Maudlin and full of self-pity, we are magnificent.

I may want to play the star in the classroom, but really we are singing for our supper in the end, not vanitas (well, at least some of us, at least some of the time). The modern educator must balance the demands of entertainment (which in the classroom increasingly reflects the values of infotainment) while not getting lost in the act. How to distinguish the dancer from the dance? Poupée de cire, poupée de son? A struggle we work through every term, as values and demarcations become increasingly muddled, even to ourselves. Where does the star turn end and the teaching begin? Or, as I suppose I am implying here, are they really one in the same? And, moreover, is that always already a bad thing?

I’ll let you know how it goes. I have to work on my leg lifts now.

Work it, Girl!

I’m back. It’s not pretty. I did make it out today, briefly, to the bodega for cigarettes and my overpriced boutique supermarket for some food, which is hardly surprising considering I didn’t even have a Tab in the fridge. But loathe to move the car (Doris Day parking for Cookie Gomez [my sobrenombre for my car] right in front of the garret and she needs gas. In short, bleh…), and after a late-night viewing of The Warriors Director’s Cut DVD (along with all its inane features), I woke up late enough to justify a slow, slow unpacking, which consisted on one hand of putting clean clothes and toiletries away and on the other of stuffing all the papers, receipts, and collected papers from my time in Big Eastern City into a file drawer. Like magic! A welcome lunch for new faculty tomorrow, which I’m hardly in the mood for, means I will have to shave, at the very least, and make sure I look as cute as possible. I’m not sure how exactly to do this, since I won’t be able to see my barber until Tuesday, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. I’m good at that sort of shit.


It’s not a happy time. Returning to Cold City has rarely brought me joy, but I think there was maybe one moment, in the late spring and early summer, when I began to think of Cold City as a home, of sorts. Now that sentiment has fled, and I feel like I did exactly one year ago, alone in a strange and unfriendly city, with a new job and miserable. Except now the job isn’t new, which is even more depressing, because I’m still alone, still broke. Like starting again from zero, which is an incredibly frustrating feeling, matched only by the claustrophobia of attempting to find an escape hatch, like Papillon and his myriad cavales (escape journeys) from Guyana. Will it be a boat and supplies garnered from the friendship of lepers, or a raft of coconuts? Leaping off a cliff into the sea or fighting the tide into the wide expanse of the ocean?


Mr. Gordo is in his own process of cavale, and we spoke often this summer of the need for flight, for freedom, for being together but finding solutions to our individual dreams, however inchoate they might be in this, the proverbial season of our discontent. As I consider the job market, I feel I am not ready. Between the new prep work at Sadistic College (12 new preps in four years), the subsequent turn in events there, which landed me in a deep depression and on the market at the same time, and then my first year at Cold City U., I feel my professional publications have, um, lagged. Service and teaching I have under my belt in spades: an impressive teaching dossier, strong evaluations, well-designed syllabi and assignments, dedicated pedagogical work and writing. After some initial pratfalls of my first job at Sadistic College, and departing from the lessons learned there, I have cultivated an enviable reputation at Cold City U. as the consummate colleague— attentive, responsible, interested, engaged. But, we all know “careers” aren’t made on teaching and service, the poor and distant stepchildren to publications at the R1 institutions that can offer the substantial increases in salary and perquisites that make them so attractive.


A few months ago, my girlfriend Mrs. Dash put me in touch with Professor Latino, recently turned down for tenure at Mediocre State U. with a story of backstabbing and skullduggery remarkably similar to mine. My last week in Big Eastern City, I met him for an afternoon of pharmacy touring (where I finally found some of this), coffee, and scrumptious turkey and cream cheese pastilitos at a recently opened (and horribly overpriced) Venezuelan bakery. We commiserated over our focus on teaching and service, our lack of active publication histories, the dearth of self-marketing and networking that might have made the difference between our being retained and being canned. As Professor Prissy once put it at Sadistic College, “Always make yourself more valuable to the institution than the institution is to you.” Of course, this was easy for her to say, married to a bazillionaire and depositing his entire annual salary into his TIAA-CREF account. When you don't need the job, the job loves you even more. Such dilittante-ish noblesse oblige has been common in many professions, not the least of which is university teaching. Perhaps the real change and challenge to the university over the last forty years has not only been the introduction of racial diversity but rather also class diversity within the ranks of the professoriate.


Oh, sure, I’ve got some essays here and there, and the reasons as to why I would not have a super-dooper publication record are also there on my CV: teaching and service, 15 new preps over 5 years at 2 different institutions, and absolutely no fellowship or sabbatical time. I’ve been working since I got my doctorate, unlike so many others who even after years and years and years of fellowship time here and there, still haven’t managed to get their long-awaited “Lesbians! Monkeys! Flaming Cheese!: A Methodological Critique of Anderson-Hysgaard's neo-Foucauldian Problematic” (title grace à Dean Dad) volume published. These people still profit, because everyone loves a winner, even if that winner has nothing to demonstrate their talent other than a propensity for striking the right cord with fellowship committees.


So, life’s unfair. What’s new? Something Professor Latino and I talked about was the need to work, not necessarily for erudition or interest or even professional recognition but to carve a pathway out of our current circumstances, to give us options, here in the Shop or elsewhere. A cavale, if you will. A conclusion that Mr. Gordo and I reached over the summer is that this has to be my year for work, on the manuscript, on whatever essay might be handy, on whatever will get me some name-recognition, a fellowship, a new job, whatever (whatever seems to be the theme here). Of course I have been working, but not the right kind of work, if you know what I mean. Most of this desire for professional advancement in my case is material: quite frankly, I’m just not making enough money. I have lovely colleagues, a sane Dean, interesting students, a good working environment that is supportive and free of the paranoia and fear of Sadistic College. But as I look at the repairs I need to make on Cookie Gomez before the winter sets in, as I watch my IBook screen flicker (it’s still working, for now) and fizzle, I wonder how the hell am I supposed to cover $1000 in car repairs, potentially a new computer, and everything else a girl needs (insurance, student loans, rent, designer shampoo, etc.)? Ain’t gonna happen on my salary is all I have to say. And that is in the end much more important than anything else going on right now in my life. Mr. Gordo suggests another job (moonlighting), but I'm not sure what exactly that would be, other than working nights at Super Target. At least I would get the discount.

Then again, one can feel so trapped by these things. Is this why dead wood is privileged (tenured) but also angry, so very angry? Because of the paucity of publications, I feel awkward about approaching my letter writers. “Hi, again!” Nothing new to show, but will you support me? I feel like I need another year, that vaunted “another year.” I’ve had a lot of those. I’m such a hateful procrastinator that it’s always easy to see beyond the current moment, in terms of doing something useful. Of course, some of this emotional energy also feels rather circular, come to think of it.


But then again, if one has to work (and this one has to), then I want that to be as pleasurable and rewarding as possible. I don’t want to slave away for peanuts and end up the academic version of an old queen winning grand prize at a ball. Thanks, but, uh, no thanks. Sadistic College taught me the lie of that particular moral tale. No, this bitch has got to get her some. Something Professor Latino mentioned I found intriguing: that those who act like Divas get treated like a Diva. Should I begin to act like a Diva? I already have those qualities, in modest doses. Maybe it’s time to start playing the role in a more dedicated way. Firstly by stopping the good girl colleague role-playing and prioritising what’s important, in other words myself. That doesn’t mean becoming a department barracuda (necessarily), but rather saying days X, Y, and Z are unavailable for meetings/seminars/memos/luncheons. Partitioning one’s professional selves is a lesson we aren’t really taught, but one that strikes me as much more important than anything else one might learn in graduate school. Then again, is it possible to do all three well? The R1 folks I have known, either as teachers or colleagues, were generally also bad colleagues (department citizens) and teachers, but excellent researchers. There is honour in teaching and service, just not the kind that pays, unfortunately. To paraphrase Harvard clerical workers in their unionisation drive of the 1980s, we can’t eat honour. Maybe we can snack on it, but a full-fledged meal? Nah...


Working through my depression today online (where else?), I came upon this treasure trove of New York ultra-gay disco classics from the eighties and nineties (Check out Jade Elektra's Whatevah if you're interested in hearing an abridged version of a conversation between Miss Prancilla and Oso Raro). These songs made me happy, not only for reminding me of the time I could go to a disco without feeling embarrassed, but for the energy and attitude they project. I’m feeling the need for some of that sassy, bitchy, finger-snapping diva-ness right about now (especially since Miss Prancilla, one of the few who can understand and appreciate such positionality, is currently in the land of vanilla ice-cream sundaes). Not only that Z-formation snap bitchitude, but also the principle of “work,” both in an academic and the wonderful faggoty sense: What does it mean to work (it)? What are the elements of the drag queen version of the Protestant work ethic? Confidence, a sense of superiority, and self-centeredness in the best sense of the word: self-preservation (and looking good while doing it). So, in spite of the miserablism of the moment, at least I have a project: to become the fabulousness that I am. I’ll, um, keep you posted on my progress.

In the words of RuPaul— you better work, bitch!

Memories of Overdevelopment

Mr. Gordo and I just returned from an extended holiday in the surf and sun on Cape Cod, which was absolutely delicious (or as Mr. Gordo would say: day-lee-shus). The roar of traffic and sirens outside the window of Mr. Gordo’s Big Eastern City Easy Bake, and my impending return to Cold City on Saturday for the commencement of the school year, threaten to push aside both the idyllic images of lovely beaches, blue skies, and deep-fried everything on the sunny porch of Captain Frosty’s as well as the less halcyon queues of traffic on the road to Hyannis, crowds of ugly and beautiful people packed onto small beaches at high tide, and the horrors of trashy tourism on Commercial Street in Provincetown.

Grace à The Beautiful Lisa, my cuñada who lives in Yarmouth Port year-round, we were able to descend into the fantasy of an almost two week holiday by the sea, at relatively little cost to ourselves (not counting Captain Frosty’s and extraneous trips to Christmas Tree Shop for beach junk and the CVS in Hyannis for Vichy). For the better part of the trip, The Beautiful Lisa was away in Caracas caring for a friend undergoing chemotherapy, so we had the house (and her luscious Turbo Jetta) to ourselves, aside from a crowded first weekend when Big Sis, her partner The Printmaker, and the familial unit of La Antropóloga, Mr. Polemic, and El Babycito (plus the proverbial visiting Israeli cousin, who turned out to be lovely) all arrived practically simultaneously for a couple of nights with us, in The Beautiful Lisa’s fantastic house, with all the mod cons and more. It took me three days to finish the laundry from that initial, semi-bacchanal weekend.

We settled into a somewhat predictable pattern: mornings spent watering the garden, maybe some weeding, over cups of coffee, then figuring out a meal of some sort (In or out? Breakfast or lunch? Fried or deep-fried?), with afternoons dedicated to finding a beach that was not completely inundated by fellow Cape visitors. For this last part, we were only partially successful, but wanting to avoid stinging jellyfish, we tended to stay on the bay side of the Cape, in particular venturing lazily over to Dennis (the next town over) and lounging on the beautiful tidal beaches of Chapin and Mayflower: two beach chairs, an umbrella (!) and books. I made my way through Arenas’s Before Night Falls and Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills while basking under the glorious late afternoon sun (Mr. Gordo is sun-sensitive, and who wants a sunburn anyhow?). The photo above was shot by Mr. Gordo as I waded into the sea during one of many spectacular sunsets.

Of course, we went to Provincetown for a late day at a cold and windy beach (Herring Cove, but we found out later that we made the wrong turn at the entrance and were on the “straight” part of the beach), with an evening spent with Ms. Bounder, a beautiful ex of The Beautiful Lisa, sharing delicious fish sandwiches at Clem and Ursie’s and continuing on to see Hedda Lettuce’s show in town. While Hyannis and Provincetown seem a million miles apart in terms of their socio-commercial raison d’être, the long and powerful reach of American capitalism has turned both into strange examples of overdevelopment and excess: Hyannis with its big box stores on its large boulevards along the northern edge of town and its relatively anemic Main Street (whose only saving grace is Tim’s Books, with a remarkable collection of used and hard to find material; amazingly, I was able to find this and this and this there), and Provincetown, with its gloriously overdeveloped and pretty Commercial Street weighed under with the dreck of T-shirt shops, tchotcke shops, gelato shops, postcard shops, “gay” shops (rainbows everywhere, and not a drop to drink), and overpriced fish and chip stands. Bleh! While venturing through the various commercial wonderlands of the Cape, I wondered about how this all happened, and what brought people (people like me) back to these places? There was beauty, under all the makeup, somewhere, but certainly not in the dreck of Commercial Street nor the all-American contents of Hyannis’s shopping malls.

The only true difference between Hyannis and Provincetown I could spot was that the former was straight, and the latter decidedly LGBT, with a deadening commercial effect on both. Oh, and P-town has pretensions to a better class of people, although all that seemed to indicate to me was that things were more expensive in P-town, and therefore “better.” In fact, the open presence of LGBT sexuality in Provincetown was nice, if a bit alarming (even in the city, people aren’t so open about their affections; perhaps it is the effect of the sun and sea?). The highpoint, or low point, of the visit was the outrageous Human Rights Campaign STORE on Commercial Street. You read that right Mary, a store, dedicated to all sorts of objects/crap bearing the HRC’s signature Equality logo: book bags, caps, t-shirts, mouse pads (who uses those anymore anyhow?), mugs, shot glasses, hoodies, windbreakers, flip flops, and even a beach ball! Mr. Gordo was strangely fascinated by all these objets trouvés, while I was reaching for the barf bag, which no doubt also had an equality logo on it. I’m, ahem, as proud as the next queen, but why would I want to parade around with an HRC hoodie and matching flip-flops? I already loathe the flip-flop trend anyhow (more bad, bad American sartorial choices). Besides, I hope people can see my gayness from 50 metres, like a big searchlight, therefore making advertising redundant.

Other moments: A gaggle of early teen girls, wearing matching Cape Cod hoodies (in different colours), too much makeup (The light touch, honey, you’re already pretty. Jesus, honey, you’re fourteen! You’ve got years yet to use the trowel!) and bored out of their minds, wandering around Inaho during dinner while Mr. Gordo and I demolished several scallop hand rolls. The silence of the ocean just a few metres from shore. Quiet nights reading in bed, or smoking outside under the stars. The Brazilian grill in Hyannis with delicious feijoada, diet guaraná and a rude waiter (although cute). Racks of hats that didn’t fit at the Yarmouth Port Christmas Tree Shop. Buying matching chiquititos with Mr. Gordo at Ocean State Job Lot (primarily because I had brought my clothes up in shopping bags, which Mr. Gordo labeled as “rancho”). Eating scrumptious clam pie with The Beautiful Lisa upon her return from Caracas. Collecting rocks and seashells with Mr. Gordo along Sandy Neck and Yarmouth Port’s “secret beach” on Barnstable Harbour. Irish girl hostesses, Irish girl shoe clerks, Irish girl fish and chip slingers. The young Lithuanian waitress at the Optimist Café straight out of Almodóvar, running around with an understaffed kitchen in heavy, clunky heeled shoes, exasperated and comic all at the same time. Sand, everywhere (the car, the sandals, the porch, the rugs, the bathroom, the chiquititos).

I have only a few more days here in Big Eastern City, and have turned anxious, and not only because I will have to negotiate Prancilla’s no doubt spider-filled garage in the dark without a flashlight when I return to Cold City late Saturday night (Prancilla, having decamped to Staid but Multi-Culti Eastern City for his new job [sob!], left my car at her as yet unsold but empty house). Having a long-distance relationship means, on some level, always saying good-bye, and that has made me sadder than the impending doom of the school year, which promises to be rather spicy (new department faculty arriving, new challenges, refining my teaching, getting some work done, etc.). My garret waits in Cold City, silent and dusty and no doubt stuffy as well, since the windows have been closed since July 2nd. Prancilla is gone, and I have no one to ring on Saturday night upon my return to celebrate with, for Prancilla was really my only true friend there, and now he is gone. Oh, sure, I have things to do: clean, stock the fridge, get a haircut, and the meetings, already the meetings, begin Monday. Oh, yea, and write a couple of syllabi. So, hopefully idle hands and devil’s playthings will be kept at bay, for the moment at least. But, I am feeling sadder and sadder as Saturday comes closer and closer.

Ambivalence, regret, sadness, hope, inspiration, et al. Some of this is leaving the heavenly embrace of Mr. Gordo, who is always soft and warm as a child’s bath, as mother’s breast (mine personally had the intoxicating liquor of Chloé and Virginia Slims, a smell that can bring tears to my eyes), as milk with cookies. Some of this is returning to a (s/cold) city minus your bestest doublegood girlfriend [double sob!]. But no doubt some of this is also just the end of summer, finally, irresolvably, again. But I have a nice tan.

The Devil Reads Butler

Or Foucault, or Jameson, or Hardt and Negri. Last night, Mr. Gordo and I went with the fabulous G-Girl, currently remaking her life, Mary Tyler Moore style, in BEC, to see that little confection of a film The Devil Wears Prada. It has been, as in all eastern seaboard cities, terribly hot here lately and the ultra A/C of the theatre was decidedly bracing, especially considering how sultry it was outside, even into the evening hours. I had heard of the book, knew it was a roman à clef about life at Vogue Magazine with the legendary editor Anna Wintour (known by her fans and detractors alike as Nuclear Wintour), and hadn’t been terribly interested in the film (pop fluff) until I read this intriguing review in the Times, which made me reconsider.

It actually is an interesting film, in many ways, if one can see beyond the mainstream shilling of tired clichés and honey-coated endings. Anna Hathaway, the Disney ingénue (of Princess Diaries fame, yuck) who plays the principled but clueless Andrea, assistant to Miranda (aka Nuclear Wintour, played comically and subtlety by Streep) is tiresome, and the film drags towards the end when it reaches for central casting stock resolutions to the complex questions of ambition, image, and success: Girl gets job, Girl makes good, Girl gives it up for integrity/love/self. To which all I have to say is, Girl please! But if one can see beyond such saccharine moralism, the film actually offers a compelling, if somewhat mainstream, disquisition on success, mentorship, and the micro-professional worlds we inhabit.


Andrea’s purported moral and ethical superiority is contrasted to Miranda’s cynical and manipulative nature, and the film unwinds along some very traditional lines of young Turks and Old Greeks. We are offered some nice montage sequences of Andrea’s transformation from Ivy League duckling to fashionista swan, without descending into the fashion victim outrageousness more common to Absolutely Fabulous. As noted in some of the reviews, the film makes an effort to distinguish the fashion world as an important and influential enterprise, not just frivolity (the ugly business of beauty, etc), but this message is a blunted by the fact that ever since the era of the Super Models our popular culture has been inundated by Fashion, Inc., so the mysteries of frivolity are worn a little thin here. Andrea loses herself to success, only to wake up and realise she’s on the verge of “losing what’s important” (which here seemingly is her annoyingly Seventeen-like boyfriend/chef, who looks like an extra from My Bodyguard).


But what’s wrong with success? The naïveté of the film’s narrative is one of the reasons that, arguably, American popular culture remains infantile and generally incapable of complexity. But complexity is to be found buried under the narrative, in Streep’s fascinating portrayal of Nuclear Wintour, a woman who knows how to maintain her position as ruthless Queen of the Fashionistas. Differing from the book upon which the film is based, Streep blunts Nuclear Wintour’s edges and turns her into something more than an empty paradigm of the worst boss ever. Miranda/Wintour sees in Andrea shades of herself, her ambition, her talent, and when she tells Andrea this, Andrea promptly gives it all up because she doesn’t want to end up like the monster Miranda/Wintour. The gendered elements of this particular lesson are especially disturbing. Tiresome, really.

For ambition and success mean making bad choices, making imperfect choices, and, above all, growing up and out of simplistic fantasies of moral and ethical superiority. As I watched this film, my mind turned to the question of how we learn what we learn, who mentors us into the arts of adulthood and career, and how we come to operate and survive in imperfect professional worlds. I have written on academic mentorship before, but the intriguing characterisation of Streep’s Miranda/Wintour made me think of the academic monsters we have lived under and learned something from, both good and bad. The professional economy the film presents is in some ways remarkably similar to academia, in its ruthless struggle to the top, competition at all levels, and the need to transform oneself from duckling to swan (although if only academics could look as fetching as the fashionistas, it would be a better world).


Miranda is all the intemperate PoMo academic stars come to life, of which I could offer an incomplete and indiscrete list, more paradigmatically than literally: Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Spivak, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek. At one time, they all were on the top of the heap (in some quarters they still are), and deservedly so, for they were talented in the same ways Miranda/Wintour is: ambitious, unsentimental, principled, devotees to a higher cause, practitioners of faith (fashion, theory, all the same here, for one must believe). And all with accompanying stories of Miranda/Wintour like star turns and tantrums. To be a graduate student under them (or any of the other equal or lesser stars), so I've heard, was both torture and education in the most fundamental sense. The academic version of Miranda/Wintour tossing her fabulous coat and bag onto Andrea’s desk every morning has its academic equivalents in the hoops we must endure to maintain our acolyte status under the stars, and the academic stars are as infantile and immature as Miranda/Wintour is initially portrayed. In the most basic sense, the film reflects the standard hierarchy present in both the corporate and academic worlds. Eat shit, and bide your time for the rewards to follow. As Miranda/Wintour tells Andrea at the moment that Andrea decides to make her break, “Everyone wants to be us!” And sometimes this feels the same way in academia. Who wouldn’t want to be the acolyte of the star, eventually the star him or herself? The little groups of academic star acolytes and theory heads in their black suits and private giggles in conference hallways can make one feel like Marcia Brady on the first day of high school.


But why, I wondered, was I so fascinated by Miranda/Wintour and not so much by the academic glitterati that she so resembled? Was it because academics are always badly dressed (although the true PoMo crowd could give the fashionistas a run for their money)? Or was it because the material rewards of the fashionistas seemed so much more attractive than mere ideas, than the talented regurgitation of theoretical complexities and nuance that now, in our post-theory world, seem as quaint and archaic as the ability to speak Sanskrit? Or was it because the fashion business, in its imperfect filmic reflection in popular culture, seems more vital than the world of theory, more crucial to the quotidian (as represented in Miranda/Wintour’s brilliant if overbearing little speech to Andrea on the complex financial and sartorial history of the colour of her sweater)? How come the film left me wanting to be Miranda/Wintour’s little go-fer girl, but the thought of doing the same for Butler et al left me feeling cold, if not actually repulsed?


The last thought is what is so contradictory about how we think of ourselves as academics. If my larger observation about academia is true, then the business of fashion and beauty are similar to the business of thought, and tutelage under the stars does have (sometimes) its material rewards (although if I had a penny for every complaint by a student of the stars about how they didn’t get any help securing jobs, fellowships, and the like, I could probably buy exactly one tube of Vichy Capital Soleil). But there are some star students, some outstanding pupils, who learn and become close to the stars, who indeed become their currency, circulating and profiting from their relationship with the stars, and are fierce defenders of the faith, partisans and scrappers who made our lives hellish in seminar rooms with their singular devotion to their theoretical truths, who we now amusedly listen to at the MLA, with their theoretical references and belief in the transformative and definitive power of the critical apparati. Revolted with myself, I wonder if I am really like Andrea here, refusing success for ethics? I would like to think not, for in point of fact we all fall into schools of thoughts, streams of identification, that identify and circumscribe us as much as any acolyte of the leading postmodern theorists. We just like to think we're not as trendy.


Andrea’s choices are presented in the context of a Hollywood moral play, with the crucial difference between this representation and life being that for most of us, the means and ends are not so neatly tied up at the end of the film that is our life. The reasons as to why some of us can become star acolytes and others of us, lesser beings (poorer and without the ear of grant committees) are both structural, in terms of who qualifies as acolyte material, and individual, in that some of us are incapable of the blind devotion (not to mention the tedious reading) required to attain that success. At the end of the nineties, as the curtain was drawing to a close on almost thirty years of increasing theoretical sophistication (matched proportionally by an increasing density of texts), my girlfriend La Connaire sighed at the lack of new theoretical initiatives, and declared without irony that we were all waiting on the next thing from France, for as he said at the time, “it can only come from France.” Such sentiments speak to the power of theory at a particular moment as well as sound hopelessly naïve.


Those of us who tired of waiting on France make little sense to the theoretical equivalents of the fashionistas. In fact, the debates within the profession on the role and place of theory arguably put us in an opposing camp. I have nothing against theory, per se, but I want it to work. I’m not interested in words solely on the page, they must inspire my mind on some greater level. Theory heads are rightly accused of turning intellectual practice into technocracy, but that is also a function of how theory has operated professionally in the North American academy in particular. This perspective runs the risk of being anti-intellectual, but in the cyclical world of academia (a pattern matched in the fashion world: what’s old is new again), I have returned to the text: novels, memoir, reportage, not just as a cipher for theory, but rather as useful in and of themselves. How old fashioned! I have tasted, although not lived completely, the world of the academic Miranda/Wintour star turn, and found it lacking. I could never get it together enough to rouse such enthusiasm. This doesn't make me a better or more true scholar, just maybe lazier, since I never wanted to work that hard (and still don't), or maybe abjection didn't hold such a fascination for me. I would be lying, however, if I denied there wasn't a moral quality to this stance, but I'm just not sure how to figure it against all I know about the profession.

Je suis, donc je suis

Today, Scott McLemee in IHE had a musing on the recent conference associated with the Future of Minority Studies Project (a horrible title, but what can one do?), that encompassed presentations connected with the emergent school of post-positivist realism. The nature of the theory itself was a bit murky, but some of the tenets of the influential anthology of writings on the subject are described in a link within the piece that is useful, if a bit long.

Post-positivist realism could be understood as an attempt to negotiate the shoals between essentialism and poststructuralism, with an eye on the material, lived effects of identity on subject formation and narrative. In essence, how do we think through the effects of experience (and differences in experience) without falling into a simple essentialism or a dismissal of experience grounded in poststructuralist approaches to reality and objectivity? This project is somewhat exciting for those of us who have felt the need for such a critical enunciation, although I would be hesitant to describe myself as a theoretical adherent, only because in all honesty I’m not sure what school of thinking I fall into (as I was once described at Sadistic College, I am an assistant professor of This ‘n’ That). However, an interesting aspect of McLemee's article was the observation of cross-disciplinary conversation engendered by the project. I would agree that such conversations are crucial in approaching something as varied and complex as racial identity, and the fact that they seem so unusual speaks to both the disciplinary roles within which we are circumscribed, as well as some limitations on how we imagine the disciplines and their function in the university.

For arguably, in the last thirty years, we have all become interdisciplinary on some level. The cross-pollination of thinking, especially between the humanities and social sciences, has enabled (some) scholarship to imagine a greater conversation of knowledges (situated knowledges?) in attempting to achieve understanding of the intricate states of human being. One of the roots of this interdisciplinarity, at least in the study of race, gender, and sexuality, has been the influence of sixties social movements on our thinking, both in shaking up established notions of knowledge and knowledge production (that which is a legitimate area of study), and enabling a certain political value contained within such work.

Interdisciplinarity has a longer, more complex history than I am sketching out here, but suffice it to say that at least for me (and others like me), this sixties history of racial critique coexists and is in conversation with other, disciplinary histories (especially in English, History, and Sociology) of critical approaches to and within the academy. And although the IHE piece does not say this, the scholars of post-positivist realism are responding to some of these sixties political exigencies in attempting to carve out a space of theory that reimagines and recentres identity experience in both theory and practice.

The legacy we inherit from the social movements around identity (race, gender, sexuality) from the sixties is a complicated composition of radicality, professionalism, success, guilt, and guilt tripping. Too often an uncritical mimicry of (the assumed) political parameters of the era (revolution, radicality, resistance) can work to turn off critical thinking in one’s approach to the study of these categories, and the mind games of the graduate seminar room can burn many years later. For some of us who have persisted in trying to critically engage with this history, there is little real, material reward. For all the talk in post-positivist realism circles of institutional marginality in the application and acceptance of the approach, the school has a fairly distinguished pedigree and sponsorship (The conference discussed in IHE was held at Stanford after all, hardly the marginalia of the academy). This talk of marginality may reflect a simple knee-jerk response (“we are oppressed”), which is hard to break, and is reflective of resistance passion plays in Cultural, Ethnic, and Women’s Studies that is simultaneously apropos and at odds with the reality of lived experience of scholars themselves: apropos because scholars of colour are indeed marginalised and tokenised, at odds because there are rewards for both sides of the token coin that work to undermine the oppression Olympics in crucial ways.

Several years ago, at a colloquium on Chicana/o Studies, a very prominent Chicana professor tenured at a top university declared to wild applause her affinity with workers in maquiladoras along the border. It wasn’t just an empathy with their struggle, but an actual identification with their status and state of being. And I wondered what exactly does a tenured professor at a private, illustrious university in the United States have in common with an underpaid, exploited, and illiterate worker in a fabrication facility in Mexico? What struck me most about this moment was the need (on the part of the tenured professor) to close the distance between herself and the object/subject of her political critique (of capitalism, of racism, of gender oppression).

So, for all our fancy talk of theories and appropriate and new approaches to the study of race and gender and sexuality, there is still a need, however inchoate or unconscious, to collapse our (real) differences in class, experience, and training, not only to advocate but to be that which we study or alternatively, represent. This conundrum leads to some strange imaginations and pathways (such as Ms. Tenured claiming identity in common with the trabajadoras in the maquila), which I would argue serve more to undermine ourselves and make us look foolish rather than truly challenge the paradigms of oppression we seek to destabilise. This, in case you haven’t figured out, is the subject of my own monograph, which I am trying to jump start this summer (more on that later), but aside from my own personal musings on the subject, I think that scholars of colour are caught in an unenviable trap between being and representation, a hole that is very hard to climb out of.

As Richard Rodriguez once said, “Success is a terrible dilemma for Mexican Americans,” and I think that holds true for many scholars of colour: sleek and professional and assimilated into the superstructure of knowledge, how do we (can we?) maintain a connection to the social movements of the sixties (and the communal experience they represent, however rightly or wrongly) grounded in a certain alterity and critical position, yet still remain ourselves (or who we have become)? For me, this is also a reason as to why the resistance pathway in Cultural Studies has been so popular among younger scholars of colour, for it gives us a way to resolve this contradiction smoothly. This could be summed up in the following utterance: “I may not be on the streets with the people, but I can represent those radical interests both in my scholarship and my professional being (the old saw of the “activist-scholar”).” Some (but not all) aspects of post-positivist realism strike me as attempting to renegotiate this old struggle with new clothes, which makes me cautious. I am not sure there is any meta-solution to the problem.

For I do think we must leave the house of comfortable things (family, community, experience) into the wide world of, to put it mildly, alienation, and we must do so openly and honestly. “You can never go home again” is the truism, one that works well in our individualist, brutal culture. And while this may be true, that doesn’t mean one cannot imagine new homes, which is what many cultural producers of colour (Moraga and Lorde immediately come to mind) have attempted to do, with uneven effect. If post-positivist realism allows this to happen more cogently, then it may prove to be useful. If, however, it turns out to be the latest coping strategy for scholars of colour looking to salvage their irredeemable, corrupted selves, then I must say no. Because for me, being irredeemably corrupted is the greater glory of what we do in the academy, it is a modus for becoming conscious of the world around us. If I didn’t want to change, I would have stayed home (and “become a mechanic,” in one of my mother’s more famous utterances/critiques of how I had changed through education). And theories (whether new or old, and which by their nature tend to be uniform and hegemonic) are little help for this paradox. This is the difficult work of the self, which while often shared and exposed, is ultimately private, tortured, idiosyncratic, and above all personal.