…the moment you take for granted that a metaphor is the equivalent of the thing it describes or points to, is the moment when that metaphor is effectively dead. It’s worse than useless for thinking with. But usually people go on using such metaphors long after they’ve ceased to generate any new ideas–which is one of the things a metaphor is supposed to help us do. People will just keep walking on in the resulting conceptual daze, because to think about it is like looking at the end of the world. Some will invest heavily in re-animating the corpse and blame the demise on the usual suspects: the all-powerful and infinitely devious upstart poor and other outsiders. Kia in a commentat the Gift Hub
Now here’s a comment I just can’t let hang out there:
Despite the “progress” in decreasing the glass ceiling of wage gaps, educational attainment, fertility control, improvements in technological changes in domestic appliances, and more freedom in the market sphere, women are not any happier. Instead, career-women, failing marriages, neglected children, unkempt homes and general unhappiness are the hallmarks of feminism. [Zeal for Truth ????!!!!]
Well roll on the miserable floor, I just had to come up with something to counter that howling piece of miscreancy. And here it is, just in time, from BarbaraEhrenreich via Tom Englehardt:
Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.
On Slate’s DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that “the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women’s complaints disguised as manifestos… and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act — in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs.” Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: “[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach… [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”
But it’s a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone’s mood. [more]
Ehrenreich’s latest book is out – Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America at amazon.ca
Here’s Ehrenreich interviewed by John Allemang at the Globe & Mail, more stuff at The Situationisthereand a half-hour audio discussion at Talk of the Nation here
An online version of all 902 letters to and from Vincent Van Gogh, including sketches, annotations, transcriptions and translations is available at Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters. The website contains
all the known letters from and to Vincent van Gogh based on a close examination of the manuscripts and supplemented with explanatory notes. The text is presented in the original language and spelling, as well as in an English translation … we have tried to add all the information to the letters that present and future generations might need in order to understand what Van Gogh and his correspondents mean and to what they are referring. This mainly concerns the identification of individuals, of works of art by Van Gogh and other artists, of books and magazines. Wherever possible we identify the origin of allusions to (explicit or otherwise) or quotations from novels and poems, the Bible, publications of art criticism or art history, and other reading matter like newspapers and periodicals. Contemporary circumstances and events relating to biographies, cultural history and art history are also explained. These were either known or self-evident to the correspondents, but outsiders lacked the background to understand them – and that certainly applies to readers more than a century later. All this information is contained in the annotations to the letters. In addition, the lengthy study of the manuscripts and the literally countless investigations conducted in the most varied fields for the annotations, yielded more general insights. These are presented in this introduction. They also relate to the subjects discussed in the letters, to the historical context in which they were written, and the circles in which Van Gogh moved. As such they supplement the annotations, but adopt a wider perspective. However, it is not just a question of the referentiality of the letters. One can also detect patterns and tendencies in Van Gogh’s way of writing and in his treatment of the manuscripts and texts as letters. Attention is drawn here to the most important of these. [Van Gogh as a letter writer]
Bosses harvesting their subordinates for sex is almost always a bad idea.
Dr. Eric Steele on the opposition to gay/lesbian marriage (via Pam’s House Blend):
. . . the clothing of rationality and God’s word have been used forever to hide the naked truth of racism, sexism and other prejudices. The arguments against the right of gays to civil marriage is no different; if you peel off the clothing, what lies underneath most opposition to civil marriage rights for gays is just naked fear, ignorance and prejudice.
Football came of age at a time when America was embarking on imperial adventures around the globe. Football was seen as a way to toughen up the youth so they wouldn’t become “sissies” and a way to teach the very “values” of Christian expansion and manifest destiny. This philosophy was known as “Muscular Christianity,”and its most prominent spokesman was an aristocrat-turned-boxer named Theodore Roosevelt.
What happened was not some gray, vague he said/she said Katie-Roiphe-style “bad sex.” A 43-year-old man got a 13-year-old girl alone, got her drunk, gave her a quaalude, and, after checking the date of her period, anally raped her, twice, while she protested; she submitted, she told the grand jury “because I was afraid.” Those facts are not in dispute–except by Polanski, who has pooh-poohed the whole business many times (You can read the grand jury transcripts here.) He was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like many accused rapists, to spare the victim the trauma of a trial and media hoopla. But that doesn’t mean we should all pretend that what happened was some free-spirited Bohemian mix-up. The victim took years to recover.
A Future. Not A Past wanted to get a better estimate of girls on the street, so it funded independent researchers to track how many adolescent girls are being hawked. The research was based on scientific probability measures and estimates of the age of prostitutes, using methods similar to those used by scientists to determine the population of endangered species.
The number of young victims has been increasing since 2007, according to that research.
An estimated 374 juveniles were being commercially sexually exploited in August 2009 in Georgia, up from 251 in 2007 and 361 in 2008, according to Danielle E. Ruedt, public health programs coordinator for the Governor’s Office for Children and Families, which took over funding of the research from the campaign.
Numbers for the street, hotels and escort services have remained flat, but “the Internet number is going through the roof,” said Kaffie McCullough, campaign director of A Future. Not A Past.
Internet ads promising “young girls,” “barely legal” females and other code words for underage females got a much higher response from potential customers than other ads, the campaign’s researchers found.
While applauding the decision of Craigslist, an online provider of information about goods and services for sale, to eliminate its “erotic services” category, McCullough noted that many ads pimping girls have moved to other Web sites.
The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness [pdf], Betsy Stevenson & Justin Wolfers
Katha Pollitt on Stevenson and Wolfers (and Huffington):
But how happy were women, really, in that golden pre-feminist era? Culture critic Caryl Rivers pointed out to me that in 1973, studies showing that married women had the highest levels of psychiatric problems, including depression and anxiety, prompted sociologist Jessie Bernard to declare marriage a “health hazard for women.”
Isabel Murray, feminist columnist for the Free Press, takes Cosmopolitan to task for its heteronormative, male-pleasure-oriented approach, while pointing out that it and similar women’s magazines are nonetheless the only noncampus media addressing female sexuality (explaining why until recently it was the most read magazine among college women). People are downright uncomfortable with the concept of female sexuality: even at Dartmouth’s SexFest, where Murray managed a table, she was struck by how “hesitant and disturbed” people seemed by her dental dams and a two-dimensional model of a vagina–far more so than by the condoms and three-dimensional plastic penis. The most controversial Dartmouth sex column took heat for dealing too explicitly with female sexuality.
Women hang their vote on issues and often, on different issues than what men consider important. New Brunswick’s own Joanna Everitt, a political studies professor at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, is a Canadian expert on gender and politics. She says there are differences in how women and men vote, and that that split has been growing.
While men are more concerned with a candidate or party’s policies on the economy and federally, on the military, women are more likely to look at social policies, such as health care and education.
That difference has impacted the outcomes of some federal and provincial elections. Women and men vote in similar numbers, but differently, and parties need to be able to attract both genders.
Everitt recently concluded in a report, “If the (federal) Conservatives held as much appeal for women as they did for men in the 2006 election, they would not have ended up forming a minority government.”
When he was host of BBC Two’s The Late Show in the 1990s, Mr. Ignatieff was called the thinking woman’s crumpet.
But interviews with Canadian women voters – businesswomen, academics, writers, PhD students in their 20s and 30s – elicited words well removed from crumpet. They called him stuffy, drab, arrogant, inauthentic, paternalistic, unmemorable, unsexy and, most of all, untrustworthy.
Based on a similar map of St Petersburg by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter (**), this one places city-relevant quotes on a San Francisco map, where possible on the district the quote relates to. San Francisco Bay, cable cars, the Mission, the Tenderloin District and Chinatown are all name-checked in this map, which quotes following authors:
Alice Adams (Second Chances – 1988)
Isabel Allende (Daughter of Fortune – 1999)
Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – 1969)
Gertrude Atherton (The House of Lee – 1940)
Albert Benard de Russailh (Last Adventure – 1851)
Ambrose Bierce (The Death of Halpin Frayser – 1891)
Herb Caen (Herb Caen’s San Francisco – 1957)
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – 1968)
Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – 2000)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Dog – 1958)
Allen Ginsberg (Sunflower Sutra – 1956)
Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli – 2004)
Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon – 1930)
Robert Hass (Bookbuying in the Tenderloin – 1967)
Bob Kaufman (No More Jazz at Alcatraz)
Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men – 1980)
Jack Kerouac (On the Road – 1957)
Gus Lee (China Boy – 1991)
Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City – 1978)
Czeslaw Milosz (Visions From San Francisco Bay – 1975)
Alejandro Murguia (The Medicine of Memory – 2002)
Frank Norris (McTeague – 1899)
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49 – 1968)
Ishmael Reed (Earthquake Blues – 1988)
William Saroyan (The Living and the Dead – 1936)
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley – 1961)
George Sterling (The Cool, Grey City of Love – 1920)
Robert Louis Stevenson (Arriving in San Francisco – 1879)
Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club – 1989)
Michelle Tea (Valencia – 2000)
Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt – 1964)
Mark Twain (Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House – 1864)
I haven’t been posting much lately. I’m thinking. The world is spinning inside my head. I’m thinking Chris Hedges is right:
A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy. [more]
I haven’t retreated into fantasy but I’m less and less sure of how to talk about illusions of reality. I’m thinking.
I am but a common man, I am not a speaker but I have spoken. I am not all that tall but I have stood up. I am not a philosopher or poet or a singer or any of those things that particularly inspire people but the one thing that I am is the evidence that this country lied when they said there was justice for all.
Tellingly, his [Cronkite's] most celebrated and significant moment — Greg Mitchell says “this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million” — was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite’s best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do — directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won’t even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.
Despite that, media stars will spend ample time flamboyantly commemorating Cronkite’s death as though he reflects well on what they do (though probably not nearly as much time as they spent dwelling on the death of Tim Russert, whose sycophantic servitude to Beltway power and “accommodating head waiter”-like,mindless stenography did indeed represent quite accurately what today’s media stars actually do). In fact, within Cronkite’s most important moments one finds the essence of journalism that today’s modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility.
[...]
In the hours and hours of preening, ponderous, self-serving media tributes to Walter Cronkite, here is a clip you won’t see, in which Cronkite — when asked what is his biggest regret — says (h/t sysprog):
What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation.
It’s impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite’s death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that. [more]
There are no more Walter Cronkites in the mainstream media. The mainstream media is dying and that just might be one of the reasons.
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” originated as a kind of proto-podcast that Ginsberg intoned into an Uher tape recorder while traveling across the American heartland in the winter of 1966. Though the language of the poem is specific to the Vietnam War (which was escalating at the time), it certainly speaks to the conditions of 2006 — not only in its refrain about how empty language started, but cannot end, a military action, but also in its riff on the contradictions between distant Asia and the Middle American conservatism that has enabled a war there; in its alarm at the numbing impact of global telecommunications and the media preoccupation with statistics; in its despair at the hypocritical politicians and corporations that are profiting from the war. Fragments of the poem first appeared in the May 27, 1966, issue of LIFE, and the full text later debuted in a City Lights “Pocket Poets” collection entitled Planet News.
Ginsberg’s journey to Kansas, which he undertook in a Volkswagen van purchased with Guggenheim grant money, stemmed from his long-standing fascination with the state (in “Howl,” he mentions Kansas as the place where “the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet”). In one sense, Ginsberg felt that Kansas was politically representative of Middle American support for war and the military-industrial complex — a stereotype that presaged its current “red state” reputation by several decades. But beyond political generalizations, Ginsberg saw Kansas as the mystic center of America, celebrated by Whitman in Leaves of Grass (“chants going forth from the center, from Kansas, and thence equidistant / shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all”). The poet saw Wichita, the ultimate destination of his road-trip poem, as the symbolic heart of this transcendental American vortex. [more]
With admirable sincerity and making no bones about it, Ginsberg attempts to assume the role called for by Shelley in the celebrated if somewhat petulant assertion that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Ginsberg assumes this role when he attempts to legislate by declaring the end of hostilities in Viet Nam. . . . What makes this assertion so original is the means by which Ginsberg strives to give validity and authority to his act of legislation: he declares the end of the war by making a mantra. . . .
Hearing Ginsberg read “Wichita Vortex Sutra” during the war was exhilarating. In a large audience the declaration of the war’s end was collectively purgative. The text of the poem retains that fragile, deluded but dramatic effectiveness because it registers its unresolvable ambiguities with such clarity. [more]
all the known letters from and to Vincent van Gogh based on a close examination of the manuscripts and supplemented with explanatory notes. The text is presented in the original language and spelling, as well as in an English translation … we have tried to add all the information to the letters that present and future generations might need in order to understand what Van Gogh and his correspondents mean and to what they are referring. This mainly concerns the identification of individuals, of works of art by Van Gogh and other artists, of books and magazines. Wherever possible we identify the origin of allusions to (explicit or otherwise) or quotations from novels and poems, the Bible, publications of art criticism or art history, and other reading matter like newspapers and periodicals. Contemporary circumstances and events relating to biographies, cultural history and art history are also explained. These were either known or self-evident to the correspondents, but outsiders lacked the background to understand them – and that certainly applies to readers more than a century later. 
