Christmas & More About School

I love Christmas. All of it. Carols. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Tacky Christmas decorations. Elevator music. Crowds. Lights. I don't much care about being stuck in airports overnight. But otherwise, I'm a big fan of just about everything to do with Christmas, spiritual and commercial.

I mention this because I get tired of the either/or mentality attached to so many things in our culture (like Christmas). I don't know where it comes from; I've run into it more since I returned to college (alongside phrases like "exclusive" and "hegemonic"). Not accepting an either/or mentality means you are naive since you don't grasp how truly divisive and class-oriented and exclusionary everything is. It's all rather pompous and tiresome.

I can't blame it all on the academics. I run into it other places as well. I can remember, several years ago, listening to some talkshow host going on about the horribleness of Disney, and how exposing children to Disney will damage them for life. This is a theme you will hear from conservatives and liberals. Disney is corporate and sexist and monolithic and the characters wear skimpy clothes.

I rolled my eyes. I watched Disney as a kid. And listened to Disney records. I also read Grimm, Perrault, Lang, Andersen (who I don't care for) and a host of other fairytale collectors/writers. Why choose? Why limit yourself? I certainly don't eat only hamburgers or only pasta--if I'm going to read fairytales, why deliberately limit my understanding and then get all angsty over it?

I feel the same way about the people who think you have to choose between the spiritual aspects of Christmas and the commercial aspects. And people who think that you can't like pop culture and classics and Elvis Costello and Shakespeare and T.V. shows at the same time. Who are these people?

They do exist. In one of my academic classes right now we are discussing "those people" (the great and terrible THEY!)--cultural arbiters who create canons and cultural programs. But instead of trying to understand the arbiters' motivations, their intent, their mentalities, we label them "hegemonic," "exclusive," "imperialistic" and well, that takes care of them now. But we ourselves never get behind the labels and the either/or mentality, never try to understand such cultural arbiters at the same time we are trying to understand people who resist the arbitration. Yesterday, we discussed Oprah's bookclub; the professor seemed more bothered by the idea of Oprah "arbitrating" a "classic" like Faulkner than interested in what Oprah's motivations might be, placing those motivations in their particular context and discussing whether, in fact, those motivations might be meritorious. We received no historical background to the rise of "middlebrow" culture (some of which I happen to know since I'm researching it for my thesis); placed nothing in its time frame; did not address the issue of personality development versus character development (thank you, Joan Shelley Rubin). Instead, it was more linking-things-together-and-insisting-on-similarities. (This is the class where I get accused of relativism if I want to avoid linking stuff up and accused of Jungian universalism if I want to insist that good literature actually is good.) But then, we spend a lot of time in this class coming to terribly profound conclusions like, "We are affected by our culture when we read books!"

I'm back on academe again. Either/or-ness isn't just an academe thing, although in general, academe does seem to be more obsessed with drawing neat lines between things than any body of people I've ever meant. Perhaps these people have always existed, and they are attracted to the academic environment because it enables them to draw lines around things. I suppose fundamentalists may be attracted to fundamentalism for the same reason. And extremists on both sides of the political continuum. But it does seem ironic to me that the people who beat their brows over Western civilization are so unwilling to construct a different framework for examining things. The language may have changed since the 19th century, but until we abandon our desire to label the past, we will simply be reissuing similar orders in a slightly different accent.

CATEGORY: HISTORY & LEARNING

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

I liked it. Although I will need to see it again to figure out if it hung together. Like the book (which I admit I barely remember), it is much more concerned with the increasing teenagery-ness of its principle characters. Unlike the book, it is tight enough plot-wise that the self-absorption, in-fighting and teenage angst doesn't get in the way of the plot. (Too much.)

In fact, I liked the teenagerhood stuff more than I liked the plot. One of the criticisms I remember hearing about the book is that Harry mopes around for so many chapters not doing anything. Which is understandably ennoying when you are reading, and he's still moping as much in chapter 7 as in chapter 3. But in the movie, Harry's moping is so real, so 14-year-old-ish, so completely believable, that it is rather touching. It's a great setting for exploring teenage behavior (rather like Buffy: the Vampire Slayer). I've always felt that the twins, for instance, were massively underused. In this movie, even more so than the last, you get to watch teenagers, including the twins, act like teenagers. Harry and Ron's "I'm sorry" conversation is quintessential male adolescence: it gives you shivers of nostalgia--for about two seconds until you remember that you would rather be dead than live through the teenage years again.

One of the things that is somewhat different from the book is Harry's utter reluctance to participant in the championship (if I remember correctly, he had mixed feelings in the book). It still raises the question of what on earth do these insane adults think they are doing exposing these kids to so much danger? But the movie raises the issue of adult culpability to the level of metaphor. The movie is really, in a way, about growing up--your friends change, you change, hormones enter the picture, emotions get overwrought, you find yourself in situations where you are shorter, less clever and more vulnerable than everyone else. The end scene (which I won't relate) gives Harry a positively heroic maturity.

And kudos to Daniel Radcliffe who evinces a quality of raw emotion that was missing in the other films. One gets the feeling that Harry is just tired--tired of the fights, tired of Voldemort, sick and tired of protecting people. It also emphasizes that Harry's gift--the reason we bother to read about him at all--is not his intelligence or even his broomstick riding. He isn't particularly chivalrous or honorable. He's just decent. Mostly decent. He's everyguy.

The movie, by the way, is exceedingly dark. I agree with my brother Eugene (see www.eugenewoodbury.blogspot.com) that Rowlings' emphasis on being "real" by killing people off in each book means she has to keep raising the stakes so that a bigger, scarier, yuckier death has to happen in every book. (This is not, by the way, particularly good writing: C.J. Cherryh never has to resort to it.) One of my other siblings once suggested that Goblet of Fire should have been the first book, rather than the book everything was leading up to. That being said, if the movie Goblet of Fire is taken by itself, rather than as one more saga in the "oh-is-it-dark-enough-yet?" Harry Potter plotline, the horror works. (Although, again, it is NOT for little kiddies.) The filming is not as atmospheric as in the last, but the movie does move a great deal quicker than the first two (and has the merit of feeling like a movie rather than like a filmstrip as the first one did).

All in all I recommend it.

CATEGORY: MOVIES

Sunday Philosophy Club

Alexander McCall Smith's Sunday Philosophy Club books cannot be read as mysteries. If they are read as mysteries, they will disappoint. You might call them "problem" novels rather than mystery or detective novels.

The books have the same gentle, almost whimisical, atmosphere as the Precious Ramotswe books. McCall Smith has a way of evoking large settings through the emotional insights of his characters (rather than through blatant description) so that the #1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels always give me a sense of vast skies and hot days and slow-moving cattle, even when McCall Smith isn't describing the vast skies and hot days and slow-moving cattle.

Unlike the Precious Ramotswe books, the Sunday Philosophy Club books take place in Scotland (Edinburgh) and have a European feel to them (more European than British, interestingly enough), although I always get a sense of sun peeping through uncertain rain clouds (which seems more British than European). And the Sunday Philosophy Club books don't really have set-up/pay-off mysteries. The Precious Ramotswe books usually do have a few puzzles--if no complex, Agatha-Christie-like corpses. I found this lack of crime a tad annoying at first, and I still feel that the books are wrongly genre-lized in the libraries. I have found, however, that if I read the Sunday Philosophy Club books as gentle dissertations on the oddity and complexity of human problems, I'm fairly well satisfied. They are the kind of books you can read before you go to bed (and I am usually opposed to the use of literature as a sleep-inducer) or while you are eating. I don't mean to imply that the books are boring. They are, rather, very soothing, like having a quiet, yet absorbing conversation with a very relaxed orator (who might even speak with a faint Scottish burr).

CATEGORY: BOOKS

My super ironic life

In the bizarreness of bizarro land, the most devastating criticism that you can make in the academic environment is that someone is being "relativistic." Which is fascinating in a "huh, where'd the sixties go?" kind of way. Relativism got "dirty" when academics realized that not only can you use it to defend feminist/Marxist deconstructionalist intepretations (of just about anything), people in Kansas can also use it to defend "intelligent design" (creationism). Which is seriously amusing, when you really think about it.

I mention it because I've run up against the accusation of relativism this past semester. This is due mostly to the fact that I am much more vocal this semester than in previous semesters about my distaste for what I call dot-to-dot formulations (and what I've heard called "mechanistic constructions"). Basically, dot-to-dot formulations means listening to someone use the word "ideological" about twenty times in the same sentence about the same topic.

I complain about this. I made it to my 34th year without hearing people use the word "ideological" twenty times in the same sentence, and I figure it's academic speechifying (rather than a real effort at communication). That is, it's a nifty way of trying to catalog and quantify a bunch of stuff that happened way back when. And it's a nifty way of creating a dot-to-dot formulations. "After all," says I, "it's us looking back at something and labeling it."

"But," is the answer, "that's what ALL historians do."

"But," says I, ignoring yet another generalization that may be completely ungrounded, "it prevents us from really looking at what's going on because we're so busy labeling stuff."

"Well," I am told, "you are being relativistic."

This exchange has become fairly standard since I've begun to verbally balk (hey, it's the end of the semester; all my serious brain cells have been used up; when all my serious brain cells get used up, my mental eyeballs start rolling all over the place), anyway, balk at this continual tidying of the past.

So, I'm relativistic. Except that I'm not. And I've determined that the problem is that my professors are so fixated on teaching the whole "history is a narrative" concept, that my balkings are just a huge nuisance.

The whole point of the "history of a narrative" concept is that the history that we tell each other is not necessarily the TRUTH. The TRUTH is out there; the story we tell utilizes facts and events and opinions about true events, but it's a selection (we can't capture everything that happened) and for that matter, what we are utilizing may not have been written down correctly or told correctly to begin with. My professors think this is REALLY IMPORTANT. They also think I should be shocked, well, not shocked, but surprised that people (like the Colonial Revivialists and such) have been allowed to get away with this selection process for so long. I think it's just human nature and a survival mechanism and my professors do it too, but, eh, everybody loves a conspiracy.

Don't get me wrong. I think understanding "history as a narrative" is important, but once you figure it out (which I did well before I left undergraduate school), it is kind of tedious to keep going on about it.

But my professors aren't concerned about me. They are all bent out of shape about all those IGNORANT, partially educated, GULLIBLE, victimized by their high school teachers, UNKNOWLEDGEABLE, dunce-like people out there who believe what they see on television and believe what they are told in museums and believe all those myths about Americana. THEY MUST BE SAVED. It's very Calvinistic. (And I'd like to note here that my professors--and a fair number of the students--really do believe that outsiders, people not in our program, are like that; seriously. It's one of those non-debatable assumptions. Now, I'm a religious person; I attend an organized church, and I'd like to say that I feel much more pressure to adopt certain attitudes about "the other" at school than I ever do at church.)

Fact is, I make a lousy Calvinist, besides which I already know all this "history is a narrative" stuff. I also took a class on Ideology in Literature when I was a senior at BYU, and then, well, I got over it. (At the time, I called it the "house of cards" syndrome; the desire to come up with a theory that explains EVERYTHING but which has to be continually discarded because, of course, it doesn't explain everything and because, too, theories tend to be dry and formulaic and miss the feeling or character or balance of an event. I ran into the "house of cards" syndrome when I was trying to come up with a theory that explained what makes a good book and what makes a bad book, and I had to keep changing the theory because there were too many exceptions. On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of "M" theory. If there is a theory of everything, I think it is like string theory: it will make the universe a bigger, more complicated, more wonderful place, rather than not.) In any case, I don't believe what my professors tell me anymore than I believe the television, high school teachers, or museums.

Don't get me wrong--I'm in a good program, and this semester has been much, much better than my last semesters, partly because I figured out that my professors were trying to SAVE me and decided to go ahead and not be saved; partly because I'm in elective classes which tend to be less heavy-handed than the core classes and partly because the students themselves seem less prone to ideological theorizing. And partly, because I finally figured out that most people are just there to get the class done. I'm the only one worried about the long-term consequences.

Which is super ironic, when you think about it.

CATEGORY: HISTORY & LEARNING

Election Day

Since it is Election Day, I thought it would be appropriate to publish my diary from the 2004 Election. I usually watch the conventions and the debates for the Presidential election. This diary is of the conventions. I should mention that some of my opinions have modified (after the debates, my opinion of Edwards went down considerably), although my aesthetic reactions are pretty much the same.

The posts are so long, I have split them into Convention Days: Democrats; and Convention Days: Republicans.

CONVENTION DAYS

Criminal Minds

I had class off last night and was finally able to catch a full episodes of Criminal Minds. Overall, I was impressed. It's not a terribly unique show. Bad guy. Lots of talking. The kill. The confrontation. But I have a penchant for "neat but not guady" storytelling. I also have a penchant for neat and gaudy storytelling. What I don't like is blathering plot lines. Criminal Minds doesn't blather.

I was impressed by Thomas Gibson. I liked him as Greg in Dharma & Greg, although I got the impression that as Greg, Gibson just kind of acted himself. He may still be acting himself in Criminal Minds, but he achieved a darker, less friendly-guy persona without too much difficulty.

The one bewildering thing about the show is the enormous cast. There's nearly seven major players wandering around the screen at all times. Kind of like Boston Legal with the difference that Boston Legal is really just a restoration comedy between Shatner and Spade with a supporting cast. Criminal Minds looks like being an ensemble cast.

Ensemble is okay to a point, but you still need a reference point (like Mandy Pantakin). I think this is the trouble with CSI:NY. Gary Sinise (who I admire) is so retiring, he doesn't serve (as Caruso does) as a focal point. And then there is Dr. House who most certainly does. And the (obviously) canon couple on Bones (watching Bones is just a bit like watching the canon couple in the Thin Man movies).

Speaking of House and Bones, I would like to thank Tuesday night for giving me the chuckles TWICE: in Bones, the line (these are approximate), "What? You wanted to listen to the crazy psycho speech?" and Wilson's line on House, "Now that is superior television," while Forman nods agreement.

CATEGORY: TV