Seventh Grade Vérité And You

25 Mar

Ah, adolescence. It’s great, right? It’s the absolute best time in one’s life. You’re young, you’re probably beautiful, you break rules and you party hard. In general, you’re the epitome of cool. Adults don’t get you, but they wish they did. They remember, from the sad trough of their encumbered maturity, the sheer delight of their own youthful peaks: they resent yours, and probably insist that you do your homework or something, only because they want to punish you for having what they have long since lost.

I mean, that’s what adolescence looks like when you’ve got a good production team. Let’s look back — way, way back — to the Shangri-Las. They’re brazen, they’re vibrant, they kiss bad boys, and they’re wearing terrific boots.

And remember Britney before her decline? So young, so vibrant, so coyly rebellious.So polished, so impressively choreographed and costumed…

Of course, the best teenagers are, very often young adults with top-notch production teams. Lately, we’ve had Ke$ha and Katy Perry. There’s some ambiguity in their presentation: Katy Perry says that her lover “make[s her] feel like a teenage dream”, and it’s entirely possible that Ke$ha has the bicycle because she lost her license, not because she’s too young to have one. But even if they’re playing at being teenagers, they’re doing a very good job…

 

And really, good for them. There’s something delightful about this sort of performance, yes?

But — what if you’re, say, an actual teenager, and your production team sucks? Well, you might just make the mistake of releasing a video that’s not a delightful performance of a classic teenage archetype. You might end up singing words that sound like they were written by a kid, and that include a way-too-bourgie reference to the most important meal of the day. You might be seen associating, in public, with girls who wear braces. When you sing, it might be apparent to the general public that your voice is not yet developed or trained.

You might, in short, reveal the flat reality of middle-class adolescent life. You might remind a broad swath of the public about  how boring and awkward they were at thirteen: about how they once wrote shitty rhyming poetry in spiral-bound notebooks, and were super-excited to have Friday night plans involving Sprite, pretzels, and a movie rental. You might remind a different swath of the public about all the fun they imagined cute girls with terrific hair to have on Friday nights, and yet another swath of the contempt they felt for putatively shallow girls like you, as they stayed home immersed in some geek passion (computer programming? indie pop? dystopian fiction?).

As a result,  you will be told that you suck, and that you are an affront to the ears and refined sensibilities of pop-music connoisseurs.

I don’t want to defend Rebecca Black’s musical talent, and I might indeed have some harsh words for the people who let her become so public with so little training and preparation. I don’t want to claim that Friday is a triumph of adolescent authenticity: the song and video come across as artless and clumsy because they are basically artless and clumsy. (And, let’s be clear: even those girls with the good hair and the Sprite have, at thirteen, a depth of mind and spirit that this song can’t access.)

But I firmly believe that when music makes people really, really angry, it’s got very little to do with sound or musicianship itself — and I think that this is a terrific case in point. Rebecca Black is a bad singer? Sure. Her lyrics are inane? Oh yes. She’s not a real artist, and her song is a straight-up commercial product? Okay, I’ll buy that. But on the whole, you could level those criticisms at a pretty huge proportion of pop performers. The real vitriol in the reaction to Rebecca Black has a lot less to do with musical aesthetics than with the aesthetics of imagined adolescence. She’s not a sex kitten or a rebel; she does her homework, sets her alarm clock, and wakes up in the morning wearing a t-shirt her mom probably bought at Target. She offers us not the thrilling prospect of transgression or erotic frenzy, but instead a bleak reminder of  our own middle-class banality and naivété.

And — okay, I’m not sure we need that kind of bourgeois seventh-grade vérité, but I also think that we don’t need to punish a seventh grader for indulging it. It’s not her fault that we’re boring too.

Leah, Leah, Leah.

26 Jul

Leah, Leah, Leah. The only way I can think to respond to your column on Saturday is as if you are a befuddled 18-year-old in a first-year university writing class. So – that’s what you’re getting.

************

Hi Leah! Good start with the column on Saturday. I like that you’ve made reference to a specific study (from the University of Leicester), and I think that you raise some interesting questions. There are, however, still some issues I’d like you to consider.

First, you need to provide much more information from that study. You paraphrase and comment as follows:

Researchers at the University of Leicester recently examined the stated values of 136,000 people in 48 countries and found that well-educated people are most likely to misplace themselves on the political spectrum. In particular, there was a tendency for educated, upper-middle-class respondents to identify as and to vote left wing despite holding views on wealth distribution that place them firmly to the right.

An interesting point, to be sure! But you need to consider these ideas of “left” and “right” or “liberal” and “conservative” with a bit more caution. It sounds like the respondents in this study might perhaps be socially liberal, yet fiscally conservative. When you say that they vote “left-wing”, can you be more specific? Does “left-wing” refer to centre-left parties, or does it refer to a more radical left wing?

Second, based on the information you’ve provided, I think that you need to reconsider your analysis. Is it terribly surprising that, for instance, you would find a substantial number of educated, upper-middle-class Canadians voting for the Liberal party (i.e. centre-left) and identifying as ‘liberal’, yet still holding fairly conservative views about taxation and social programs? To me, that’s 100% predictable, and not in fact evidence that supports your “conclusion” that “[t]he more brains you have, the less likely you are to admit to being conservative while privately holding right-wing views.”

To clarify your thinking in general, you might consider the possibility that wealth correlates to fiscally conservative views, while advanced education correlates to socially liberal views, and ask how those correlations might work together. Rather than thinking of political allegiances or preferences as existing on a single-axis spectrum, like this:

you might think about these allegiances or preferences as existing at least in a system of two axes and four quadrants, like this:

This way of thinking might help you to avoid a lot of the ambiguity you create by using terms like “liberal” and “left-wing” interchangeably. I know you’re trying, because you say later that politics is more complicated than you’d seem to have previously believed:

That’s the trouble with politics: It is much more complicated than politicians would have us believe. Politics would do much better on television, I think, if it was more like hockey. With hockey, you choose a team and you root for it, win or lose, no matter which bunch of overpaid thugs are playing, until the franchise gets sold, goes bankrupt or you get old and die.

By comparison, politics is difficult, not only because it isn’t just a brutish game that people play for money – although, more than often, it can be that too – but because, no matter which team you decide to support, someone will end up calling you a hypocrite in the end.

But you still need to consider these terms with a better eye to historical context, and to be more precise in the way you use them. This attention to context and precision might let you avoid, for instance, making a claim that it’s a “huge relief” to “some” to realize that it’s “okay” to be a conservative who “can meet [his or her]  friends for sushi after yoga class, roll [his or her] eyes at the morons at BP and not feel like a total jerk for driving Range Rover and sending [his or her] kids to private school”. Here, you’re very clearly confusing “liberal” and “left-wing”. A committed left-winger would likely not choose the lifestyle you describe, but a social liberal with a high income very possibly would. Again — it’s not a surprise.

Third, if you want to bring your personal feelings of relief into your writing, that’s fine, but you need to make it clear that you’re talking about personal feelings. (I always tell my students that it’s best to own up to a bias, rather than pretending to be neutral…) More problematically, your later comments about “champagne socialism”, “chardonnay socialism”, and “mojito socialism” are very confusing. These terms could be part of an interesting set of metaphors, but at times you fail to control the comparison, and it ends up seeming suspiciously like you are actually talking about champagne and chardonnay. There’s nothing wrong with talking about alcohol consumption in your writing (we’re all adults!), but you need to be more clear.

Finally, I take issue with your argument about “the way to approach politics”:

No, the way to approach politics is to take a stand you believe in and stick to it, whether it makes you popular or not. If you are smart, you will read all sorts of books and magazines and newspapers and blogs that reinforce your particular point of view so that, if anyone disagrees with it, you can shoot them down with pre-prepared diatribes on why, say, Muslim head scarves promote Islamofascism in schools or how factory-farmed chickens are systematically melting the polar ice cap.

Do you really think that the “smart” approach to politics involves picking a single perspective and sticking to it? That the best thing is to read arguments on  a particular issue from only one side? That’s probably a sure-fire way to avoid the accusations of hypocrisy that you discuss, but it’s also intellectually irresponsible. What does it say about the strength of your political convictions, if you’re not willing and able to study and consider different political convictions or positions?

I suppose if you’re mostly concerned about avoiding appearance of hypocrisy, your advice is solid. But is this a fashion and lifestyle column, or are you providing political comment? You need to choose.

All in all, I give this draft a tentative B minus: as a first-year effort, it shows promise, but still needs work.

Men and Women and Status

21 Jul

Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon Broadsheet wrote a comment today about the results of a pair of surveys conducted by AskMen.com and Cosmopolitan magazine. Among what she calls a “some surprising, and surprisingly refreshing, findings about modern manhood” are some stats about what male and female respondents to these surveys regard as “the ultimate status symbol” for their gender:

“The ultimate male status symbol,” according to respondents, isn’t a fancy car or a Budweiser-sponsored man cave — it’s having a family. (Not to interrupt the chorus of “aww’s” — but “a beautiful wife or girlfriend” ranked third.) As for what “defines a ‘real man’ in 2010,” they say it’s “being a great father and husband who takes care of his family.” That’s either retro (man brings home the bacon) or progressive (man helps to support his family both financially and emotionally), depending on how you look at it; the same can be said for the rise of a family as the ultimate status symbol.

Frankly, you men make us women look a little superficial: Cosmopolitan magazine did a sister survey of their female audience and found that 46 percent rank a “beautiful house” as the ultimate status symbol, and a successful husband or boyfriend came in at second.

I’ll admit that at first glance, the results in the Cosmo survey do indeed “make us women look a little superficial”. It’s hard to read anything but superficiality into responses that appear to value a beautiful house over a family, after all, isn’t it?

I think, however, that these responses could very well be read in a different way. First, it’s worth considering that the responses Clark-Flory cites from AskMen.com are not answers that indicate that the family (and care thereof) is the most personally or emotionally important thing in the lives of survey respondents. Instead, the survey indicates that being the head of a household is, for the self-selecting group responding to this survey, a marker of status and “real” masculinity. Clark-Flory acknowledges that there could be some “retro” values and ideals at play in these responses — but I think she underplays this possibility, in favor of making an optimistic claim about these results as proof of an emerging New Man. That’s not to say that Clark-Flory is wrong, necessarily, or that the men who responded to this survey aren’t a bunch of proud Papa Bears whose love of family would just warm your heart; given the language of the question that was asked, however, I’m not sure that conclusion is warranted.

Similarly, when taking the precise language of the questions into account,  it seems too easy to read the Cosmo results that peg “a beautiful house” as the ultimate status symbol for female survey respondents as evidence of their superficiality. Instead, I’d point out that respondents not identifying the family as a “status symbol” suggests that they’re aware of a catch. While a husband and children might be markers of elevated social status for women in some respects, the demands placed upon wives and mothers in our culture still tend to erode their social (i.e. economic and professional) status in other ways. For a man, having a solid career and a wife who takes the lead on childcare will quite reliably indicate, or translate into, elevated social status: conversely, a woman who tries to “have it all” will often face myriad professional challenges and prejudices that make it difficult to compete with her male colleagues. So — superficial, maybe. But also quite canny and revealing.

That’s not to say, however, that I read this response as an indication of some wave of feminist subversion. Instead, it seems to be “retro” in the same way as the male responses: there is, let’s be clear, nothing really progressive about a set of values that ascribes elevated social status to a woman who lives in a gleaming suburban palace. That is a very, very old measure.

(Why, Mrs. Helmer, have you gone shopping again? Silly thing. Oh, Mrs. Draper, I simply adore that sofa!)

Oh dear.

30 Jun

Oh, SPELL CHECK, how you have failed me, yet again.

DMCA Takedown (or, “Blogger cut off my telephones”)

22 Jun

Apparently somebody out there doesn’t want you to hear this, the admittedly crappy mash-up I designed to demonstrate some similarities between M.I.A.’s “URAQT” and Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”. Although I’ve recently made a move to WordPress, my old posts are still available at Blogger — and this morning, I received a DMCA takedown notice, indicating that somebody had filed a claim of copyright infringement (not specified, though presumably having to do with my sound clip), and that Blogger had removed my post from public viewing by setting its status to “draft”. (WordPress has sent me no such notification, so the post remains available here.)

As a Canadian grad student living in the US, with a legal defence fund of approximately eight dollars, I am in no position to contest this whole thing. If WordPress receives a similar notice and takes down this post, I will let them. But first, I want to say: this sound clip is a clear example of fair use. It’s a brief excerpt from two songs, placed on top of each other to show similarity, and framed by critical comment. (It’s speculative critical comment, designed to raise questions rather than to make a firm point, but I stand by it on those terms.)

I don’t know if this notice was the result of a blanket search of some sort, of if perhaps somebody is trying to avoid the kind of controversy generated by mash-ups of Avril Lavigne and the Rubinoos or Green Day and Oasis. If it’s the former, then there’s clearly a problem with the way in which that search was conducted, and in which that claim was filed. If it’s the latter — well, read the post, where I explicitly state that “I don’t think this similarity [between the two tracks] is theft of any kind”. That wasn’t my point; again, my point was to raise critical questions.

Too bad that Blogger, and whoever filed this claim, didn’t see fit to ask critical questions about the content of my post in return.

Leah McLaren makes me sad, but she doesn’t make me depressed.

20 Jun

Leah McLaren writes this week that depression might not in fact be a disease: it might be a diagnosis manufactured to allow drug companies to sell more medications to more people. Her arguments are pretty standard among those who question influence of Big Pharma on diagnostic criteria.

In [the view of Gary Greenberg, author of Manufacturing Depression], the game is rigged. As he told me in a phone interview, “the disease was invented to justify the cure.”

[...]

As a clinician he takes issue with the methodology used to determine depression. He points out that answering “yes” to questions like “Have you been feeling depressed lately?” and “Do you ever wonder if life is worth living?” may be evidence that you are a Prozac candidate or simply a natural response to watching the latest news on the BP oil spill.

“With clinical depression, the symptoms justify the disease,” he says. “There’s an infinite regress and no bottom. Don’t forget they used to be able to scientifically ‘diagnose’ homosexuality the same way.”

To some extent, these are important points. Uncontestably, the desire for drug-company profit drives a lot of diagnosis; uncontestably, we live in a culture that prefers quick solutions to complex problems; and uncontestably, there’s a lot of potential danger in defining traits of behaviour or character as medical problems. (I’d recommend Frontline’s documentary, The Medicated Child, for an interesting critical perspective on some of these issues. Or you could read Foucault.)

But there are still major problems with the argument. Let’s take this statement to start:

While Greenberg believes depression is over-diagnosed and anti-depressants are over-prescribed, he sees nothing wrong with experimenting with pharmaceuticals in order to alleviate sadness or mental suffering, which are of course as old as human consciousness itself. He just wishes we would understand that that’s what we’re doing, rather than convincing ourselves we’re suffering from a mental illness and in need of a cure. Such behaviour brings to mind my temperance worker grandmother who used to allow herself a thimble of whisky every night on the grounds that her doctor had prescribed it as “medicine.”

If by “wishes we would understand what we’re doing”, Greenberg means, “wishes we would understand the cultural and economic forces that drive medical practices”, then I’m on board. But if, as McLaren suggests, he means that we should understand that we’re simply dabbling with drugs in a nearly-recreational, physician-endorsed way when we medicate depression or anxiety, then I can’t agree.

There’s plenty of stigma about mental illness and psychiatric medication: talking about medication as something people take because it’s the ‘easy solution’ to problems that everybody has diminishes the courage it takes to seek help when one really needs it. This is the kind of thinking that makes people suffer without medication that they legitimately need, and the kind of thinking that makes people feel like mental health problems should be secret and shameful. They’re not. And if you’ve seen what happens to people who don’t get help they need because of this shame — well, you know why we need to get past this particular stigma.

Second, I am always irritated by discussions of diagnostic criteria that ignore the full list of criteria. In the excerpt above, McLaren focuses on symptoms that, indeed, everybody has from time to time. But not everybody experiences “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. “Clinically significant distress” might sound like a nebulous term — and it probably is an unsatisfactorily flexible term — but it’s a meaningful part of the diagnostic criteria for a lot of mental illnesses. In the hands of a responsible practician, it means that you don’t get diagnosed as having clinical depression when you’re bummed out about current events. And, frankly, the DSM-IV doesn’t require that a patient answer yes to the questions outlined in McLaren’s column: it lists symptoms of pervasive, most-of-the-day, most-days, can’t-eat-or-sleep-properly sadness.

People who have been in the throes of that kind of sadness know how different it is from regular variations in mood. Speaking from experience — the kind of experience that may cause you to dismiss everything I’ve said here — I know that there is a huge qualitative and quantitative difference between the way I feel when I’m anxious in a way that’s part of regular life, and the way that I feel when I’m anxious in a way that means that I need help. The former is unpleasant, but never unbearable; it’s usually focused on a quantifiable concern; and it’s something that I can forget with a bit of distraction. The latter sits very differently in the body: it’s always there, no matter what I do; it’s loud and cold and painful; it wipes out my appetite; it makes me shrink, queasily, from music I love; in public, it means that I use every ounce of my energy in the conscious performance of normalcy. In other words, the former is characterized by the brief appearance of symptoms that might irresponsibly be read as indicating some kind of anxiety disorder, while the latter is characterized by more symptoms, felt more intensely, and crosses into “clinically significant distress”.

It’s a position of enormous privilege to believe that these two things are interchangeable, and it’s irresponsible to speak as if they are. I’m all for cultural criticism of the medical and pharmaceutical establishments, but not when they’re simplistic, badly informed, and unsympathetic to individual experience.

Newfoundland and Labrador: "Discovery" & Regional Stereotypes

15 May

Lisa Wade at Sociological Images and Thea Lim at Racialicious have both commented on an advertisement for tourism in Newfoundland and Labrador.

(Text reads: Discovery is a fearless pursuit. Certainly, this was the case when the Vikings, the first Europeans to reach the new world, landed at L’Anse aux Meadows. While it may only be a three-hour flight for you, it was a considerably longer journey a thousand years ago. But it’s a place where mystery still mingles with the light and washes over the strange, captivating landscape. A place where all sorts of discoveries still happen every day. Some, as small as North America. Others, as big as a piece of yourself.)

Their comments are quite astute: Lim points out that talking about the “European arrival in the Americas as ‘Discovery,’ rather than Colonisation or Genocide,” both effaces a lot of colonial history, and effectively dehumanizes the indigenous peoples who were in Canada at the time of European arrival. She also points out that the discussion of “the land – or indigenous people, or their culture – as so mysterious and spooky” is at once way of dehumanizing and romanticizing indigenous peoples. (SocImages mostly restates Lim’s analysis.)

Perhaps one of the most problematic elements of Canadian culture is the tendency to claim victimization (at the hands of our British rulers or our powerful American neighbours), while apparently forgetting that the nation only exists because of a seriously brutal colonial history. (Or, frankly, while apparently forgetting that we rejected the American Revolution because we wanted to be part of the British Empire.) So — Lim and Wade are both 100% right about the problems with framing this ad. That said — I’d like to add a little nuance, because there’s more going on here.

First, Wade refers at one point to the Vancouver Olympics as “remind[ing] us relentlessly [that] Canada was home to many peoples when the Europeans arrived.” That’s true, of course, but it’s historically imprecise to talk about the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows as part of that bigger European arrival, or bigger colonialist project. L’Anse aux Meadows appears to have been maintained quite briefly around 1000 AD. Leif Ericson didn’t “discover” Newfoundland, but neither did he try to settle it beyond the one temporary outpost. (And, of course, this all happened about 500 years before Cabot made landfall in 1497, marking the beginning of real European rule of the region.)

All of this seems to confirm the suggestion that this ad “effaces” colonial history — in part by reframing European arrival as something separate from a bigger colonial project. It was separate, in the case of the Vikings at the beginning of the last millenium — but when Western Europeans arrived in the 16th century, it wasn’t. And as on the rest of the continent, it was brutal. (The Beothuks, as you all probably know, weren’t represented at the Vancouver Olympics because the last of them died in the early 19th century.)

Second, I’d like to add that this advertisement is also seriously problematic in its representation of Newfoundlanders. (Full disclosure: I’ve never lived there, but my relatives on both sides go back several generations in NL.)

It’s difficult, in general, to speak about Newfoundland in the same breath as the rest of Canada. The province joined Confederation in 1949, making it by far the last province to do so. Until that time, it was a separate Dominion of Britain, and was more-or-less directly under British rule. Historically, it’s been an economically poor (“have-not”) province — and it’s been regarded as a bit weird and backwards by the rest of the country. Newfoundlanders are stereotyped as poor, uneducated, simpletons with bizarre accents.

The children in this ad seem to be embodiments of this outpost stereotype. They’re pictured with dirt-smudged faces, in clothing that looks to be homemade (the cable-knit sweater) or cast-off (the rest). They’re playing with rocks in a grassy field, as what looks to be a bad storm rolls in. Unless I’m missing something, this is not how Newfoundlanders live. Certainly Newfoundland has a beautifully and distinctive landscape — and certainly most Newfoundlanders adore it for that reason. But, believe it or not, they’re fully modern there. Rural mostly, yes. But if you’re going there to see children with fairy-crowns of curly red hair whose parents for some reason don’t tell them to come inside when it’s obviously about to start pouring rain, you’re going to be disappointed. (Especially after making that three-hour flight all the way from Ontario or the northeastern US.)

Songs about telephones: Lady Gaga & M.I.A.

13 May

I should, at some point, write a longer post discussing songs about telephones. There seems to be a preponderance of them from the last few years, and it seems that they are working through some interesting issues in relation to cell phones as part of the soundscape. Or something.

For now, however, I’ll just post this, which is intended merely to point out some similarity between M.I.A.’s “URAQT”, and Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”. I don’t think this similarity is theft of any kind, to be clear — but it’s really interesting! How did the tempo and rhythmic content of these songs end up being so similar? Is there something about the actual “pacing” of the technology that’s they’re picking up here? Food for thought.

Anyway, you should find an illustrative sound clip here: right then.mp3

Maternal death rates in the Globe and Mail

12 May
With thanks to Mary, Queen of Thoughts, I give you this image from Monday’s Globe and Mail:
After talking to MQoT (one of my BFFs IRL!!!), I want to add a bit to her commentary. (Only to extend, not to contradict.)
First, as she and I discussed, it’s mind-boggling to use only two colour gradations here. I realize that this map comes from a G&M special issue dealing with Africa, and so it makes sense to foreground issues of African maternal health. I also realize that there are some substantial debates going on at present about the inclusion of contraception and abortion in the current G8 initiative. The G&M has historically been a Liberal-identified paper, so it makes sense that they’d foreground this highly partisan issue at this point.
By using only two colour gradations, this map gives the impression that Africa is much, much worse off than all of the rest of the world (with the apparent exceptions of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, if I’m reading this right).
Let’s contrast this to some other representations. First, I’ll include this diagram from ChartsBin (click for an interactive version):
This diagram uses progressive gradations of colour. It still shows that the maternal mortality rates in most of Africa are really elevated, but it also shows that there are elevated rates in parts of South America and southeast Asia that aren’t accounted for in the G&M version. The WHO site includes a less attractively nuanced colour scale, but gives a similar impression.

Again, by setting the numbers differently — and, crucially, by including multiple gradations of colour — this map makes it clear that there are regions of Africa that are comparable to regions of South America and Asia in terms of maternal mortality. It also shows that Canada, Australia, and Western Europe have lower maternal mortality rates, clarifying that these areas are substantially more privileged than much of the world. And it makes a distinction between countries with higher rates of maternal mortality. Setting the threshold for BRIGHT RED at 300 deaths per 100 000 live births makes it impossible to see that there are big differences between regions and countries in the continent.

But — perhaps that’s the point. Africa is still the continent that we love to talk about in terms of sweeping generalizations that efface the substantial differences between its regions and nations, as many have pointed out. It is indeed the only continent that it’s still acceptable to discuss in sweepingly generalized terms. While the G&M “special issue” on Africa might be well intentioned — and I haven’t read the print version, so won’t venture a guess on that — the basic effect of a diagram like this one is to reinforce the popularly imagined version of the continent as a unified, uniformly Othered place of disaster and suffering. There are major social justice and humanitarian issues to be considered in relation to the continent, and I’m willing to concede that many of those are out of proportion to what’s experienced in the rest of the world. I object, however, to the Globe’s sensationalized, uncritical depiction of the continent. If their goal was to explore a serious humanitarian issue with attention to economic, geopolitical, and cultural issues, they’ve failed. If their goal was to make Sub-Saharan Africa look like a pool of blood, however, I guess they’ve hit the mark.

BACKWATER

1 May

From Margaret Wente’s interview with Camille Paglia, in yesterday’s Globe and Mail:

Do you have any impression of the landscape in Canada right now?
I’m not that familiar with Canada. But when I was at York University a few years ago, I thought, “Oh my god, they are so shallow. Such a backwater.”

Thanks, Camille! Way to make me sorry that I assigned Break, Blow, Burn to my first-year writing students last year.

See, I’m on board with a lot of Paglia’s arguments — if not, precisely, with the ideology that underlies them. Take for example her ideas about education: she says in this article, as she has elsewhere, that teachers need to take a long view of history, and that we need to be pass on basic factual knowledge. That’s absolutely true. This is, in fact, why I assigned Break, Blow, Burn: most of its essays are real gems that show careful attention to poetic form, poetic content, and cultural-historical context. That’s exactly the kind of analysis that I wanted my students to see, and exactly the kind of analysis of which I hope they’ll be capable.

But when she says derisively that “teachers have no sense that they are supposed to inculcate a sense of appreciation and respect and awe at the greatness of what these artists have done in the past” — that’s where she loses me.

I’ve taught a lot of Beethoven this year. I fucking love Beethoven. I have two Beethoven busts, people; I frequently hop around a little when I listen to the Eroica; and seriously, I think an awesome first date would involve hand-holding at a performance of the seventh symphony. And, as you’d hope, I have a solid understanding of his works — of their form, their musical rhetoric, all of that. But it is not my job to make people feel “awe at [his] greatness”. I will demand that they can track key changes and motivic development, I will demand that they can find the secondary theme, and I will ask them about the dramatic function of the coda. I will wear my awe on my sleeve, but I will not demand that my students feel what I do. Neither do I want my scholarship to be about “greatness”.

In her interview with Wente, Paglia says, 

“Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power has defrauded or defamed or destroyed. It’s a pat formula that’s very thin.

The question I pose back to her is this: what’s the ideology involved in lamenting the lost prestige of the humanities, and in declaring that teachers need to teach “awe and respect”? That’s a line of thinking that reifies cultural hierarchies, and that leaves us unable to consider the ways in which these hierarchies reinforce particular forms of power.

And it’s the kind of thinking that leads people to declare Canada to be a “backwater”. Always has been. I know that, with very few exceptions, we fail on those kinds of hierarchical terms — the terms of progress, innovation, ‘universal expression’. But — that’s a problem with the hierarchy, not with the nation.

Of course, I could be wrong. I may have spent the last ten years working up to a “long view” of Canadian culture, but I suppose that a weekend in Toronto and a lifetime immersed in High Art might have saved me the trouble of thinking all of this through. Dr. Paglia, is that the kind of informed assessment you want to make? I hope you see that when you argue on the one hand for close reading and historical knowledge and thick criticism, and on the other are willing to denigrate a national culture you haven’t studied at all, it’s doubly insulting.

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