Battle Hymn of the Tigress Dnieperist Future Mother

Law professor Amy Chua has an article in the Wall Street Journal titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." In it, she defends traditionally strict Chinese methods of child-rearing over "softer" Western approaches. I have written on similar topics before, and so I agree somewhat with Chua -- although I would probably be far less strict than she. Half an hour of music practice will be enough for the future Pnins.

I am puzzled, however, by her emphasis on classical music performance as the extracurricular of choice for her children and by her equally fervent rejection of theater. (She notes that her daughters were never allowed to be in a school play and later, that no Chinese kid would ever proudly announce to her mother that she'd gotten a part in the school play.) I'm no expert, but the odds of being able to forge a career in classical music performance vs. acting seem about the same. Both are winner-take-all fields in which, unfortunately, most entrants won't win. Maybe that is Chua's aim, but I don't think it is for the typical Asian or otherwise Archerist-inclined parent. Rather, I always thought of academics as preparation for typical white-collar jobs as the true centerpiece of an Archerist upbringing.

Oh, and because I am a loon, I sometimes even fantasize about creating an Archer-Pnin dynasty of future libertarian law professors. Being a prawf is basically one of the most splendid jobs in the world, of course. Chua -- who is married to fellow Yale professor Jed Rubenfeld -- should understand this as well as anyone.

If the point is therefore in most cases to equip a child with some skills transferable to typical white-collar jobs, wouldn't theater actually be slightly better? Theater imparts some useful public speaking skills, after all. This is useful not just for offspring aiming to fulfill my weird dynastic ambitions, but also for litigators, corporate managers, and many other attractive careers. Former actors are good at reading body language and at modulating their voices to fit various social situations. My cousin is one of the few double majors in theater arts and math in the world. Though what she does day to day now draws more on the math, she said that she's aced every interview she's ever gotten because of all that theater training.

Actors also have to be unusually sensitive readers of text. I noticed in high school and college that classmates who had been in lots of plays were often much more insightful when discussing Shakespeare than those of us who had no such experience. Skill in close reading is extremely valuable in literature and of course law. Again, woo dynastic ambitions! Even future engineers and scientists usually have to take some literature and composition courses in high school and commonly in college. A's in high-school English are probably a nice plus even at science-oriented institutions like MIT or Caltech.

Pnin also raises the point that it is a bit ironic that Asian parents are shown here as so devoted to classical music over theater. Chinese drama has a long and storied history, whereas the introduction of Western piano and violin is a much more recent development.

From the flle of unlikely but pleasant intellectual coincidences:

I happened to read this Bryan Caplan post on "fear budgets" at the same time as listening to a recently downloaded song titled "There Goes The Fear." It's so rare that I read blog posts with appropriate musical soundtracks. For the record, I actually don't know what I think of the fear budget hypothesis; it's certainly interesting, but I have no real expertise vis-a-vis these things.

Side note: I've had surprisingly good luck finding likable music from whatever's being played over the store loudspeakers in Anthropologie, including the album from which "There Goes the Fear" comes. This fact is probably deeply probative of uncoolness on my part, but I never claimed to be cool. My music collection largely signals that I had two friends from the Dartmouth paper who were semi-serious music nerds who could orient me toward suitably cool music c. 2003. Since graduating, they moved to Brooklyn and took up endeavors like working for The Daily Show and various independent film and music producers. I, on the other hand, moved to D.C. and took up endeavors which involved working with actual Republicans, which made it harder and harder for them to stand me. So, thus lacking in guidance, my coolness has declined exponentially, and I flail about cluelessly. But at least I make a point of flailing non-pretentiously.

Merry Xmas, libertarian atheist style

Still, on this Christmas eve, we can all celebrate the marvelous world, so filled with uncountable comforts and beauty (including Christmas traditions and all its music), that men have built for themselves, whether through their own innate hunger for knowledge or with divine assistance. Merry Christmas!

-- Heather MacDonald over at Secular Right

I know, I know. I'm an atheist, and I suspect I'm walking around without some critical gene that enables people to feel sentimentality. Thus my lukewarm or worse feelings about nearly all Christmas movies. I'm happy to defend Scrooge, and I recognize Hayekian knowledge problems with gift giving.

Yet as MacDonald puts it, I do love the "marvelous world, so filled with uncountable comforts and beauty." Speaking of Christmas traditions and their beauty, many thanks to my kind relative who found online a CD version of the Christmas tape that I loved as a kid. While I can't stand most modern Christmas music, the Placido album is genuinely beautiful. Of course, my parents have been playing this tape repeatedly at the holidays since I was a kid in the mid-80s, and it's sort of on its last legs.

And on other examples of charming generosity overcoming Hayekian knowledge problems, a public thanks to Pnin for his generous gift of Spock Bear. Early in our courtship, we were talking about bears at some point, and Pnin pointed out that he thought that they had pointy ears. I insisted that no, bears have round ears, had he never seen pictures of bears as a child? He conceded that I was right after a Google Image search. I then later speculated that he might actually have grown up on Vulcan, and if Vulcan hominoids have pointed ears, perhaps Vulcan bears have pointed ears too. So imagine my surprise and delight to discover a pointy-eared Vulcan bear.

There's part of me that wants to spit out a dyspeptic post about health care. But not today -- not on my birthday/this festive holiday. Maybe within a couple days. Nobody should read its absence as a signal that I don't care. People should instead interpret its absence as a statement that sometimes, it's good for the soul to leave politics alone and think about the beauty of Placido Domingo's music and the wonderfulness of friends and family.

There's a part of the country/Could drop off tomorrow in an earthquake

As indicated below, I am in San Diego for work.

I am sort of afraid of California. When I think of it, I think first of Stephen Reinhardt, and then second of Hollywood and its swarms of attractive people. That is, the real Hollywood, not my own beloved semi-home which is Hollywood for ugly people. In that vein, I learned recently that one of the socialite girls of whom I was terrified in high school has is now in California doing entertainment reporting.That yours truly is what passes for a D.C. socialite of equal rank may say everything about the two regions.

I learned New York, long before ever visiting it, from the pages of various novels. I know virtually everything I know about California from various indie songs. See, e.g, Dar Williams' "Southern California Wants To Be New York", the Decemberists' "Los Angeles, I'm Yours" and more Mountain Goats songs than I can count easily. I know I should recognize that, of course, San Diego is not Los Angeles. At the same time, I persist in naively seeing California as a vast undifferentiated and scary mass. I have a hard time getting past the concept that states can be bigger than some kind of Platonic ideal of U.S. state-ness etched in my brain.

So far, though, California is less scary than I would have imagined. I found seals lying on the beach. The seals were nice, and perhaps another time, I will even post photographs of them. There are oddly high numbers of undergrads who walk around wearing fuzzy boots at the university that I am visiting. This is strange, given that is warm out, but undergrads are too young and naive and foolish to be scary. I have also even managed to do actual work and also, not die from the cat.

Work travel is also nice. I fear I am not used to travel being so nice and so feel absurdly guilty about spending any money on anything. I am not going to blog about the specifics. I fear that if I do, I will read this entry in ten years and ask myself, as Joan Didion did in one of her essays, "Was anyone ever really so young?"

Tomorrow perhaps, there will be a substantive post about policy. I briefly considered putting one up about Lieberman and health care but could not think of anything to say that would not sound like boring hackery. Again, perhaps, tomorrow.

Letters I will never send, #2

Dear Homeless Looking People Outside Of The New England Conservatory of Music --

Why were you standing outside of the theater before the opera on Sat. night, holding sign that say, "I need a ticket?"

I mean, are you just really passionate Handel lovers? So that you see your lack of season tickets as the worst aspect of your current economic predicament? I can't say I empathize -- I was born nearly tone deaf, and so my cultural inclinations run literary rather than musical. (Like Florence King, I suspect that I might have been born with
an ear for music gone awry. But that's another story.) And again fortunately for me, libraries are free.

But I fear that you are not really driven by love of eighteenth-century pastorals -- but rather, class warfare. And in that case, I do not get it. Do you really think that class war mongering will make people relinquish their tickets? Do you not think that they will not instead feel put off by your attempts to stir up ressentiment?

Alternately, are there not cheaper available alternatives for warm indoor places? Libraries -- yes, I know, again with the libraries. Bookstores? Coffee shops? Could you not stand outside of movie theaters, seeing as how movie tickets are cheaper? And some of them feature plotlines more interesting than love triangle among hot chick, hot shepherd, and Cyclops?

I fear I also do not quite see targeting opera as symbol of plutocracy. During my red state childhood, my parents often took me to opera and classical music concerts because they were supposed to be Improving. We used to run into one of my Sunday school teachers sometimes -- a woman whom I remember for her sublime voice and utter lack of imagination. Think Lily Fisher from Willa Cather's Song of the Lark. Teenagers in small towns across America do bad, bad things -- among them fad diets and Objectivism -- not to end up like that woman. I would know. So I associate the genre equally with a kind of middle-middle-class earnestness as much as with caviar-swilling aristocrats. That is okay -- beautiful things need not be defined by the likes of the people I like them.

Cordially,
Isabel

Geek Love and Finding the Perfect Wedding Song

Slate's Double X has a post up on the challenges of finding the perfect wedding song. I do fear to blog about my upcoming nuptials, lest To My Parents, Ayn Rand and God devolve into an abyss of pastels and questionable grammar à la theknot.com. But it is is something I've struggled with myself, as so many of the songs that I love most are ill-suited for weddings.

I've thrown out several suggestions to my fiance. Sadly, we cannot use the closest song that we have to *actually* having a song, which is Vampire Weekend's "Mansard Roof. The song came to be ours because he was going to teach a course in Argentina, and I'd hoped to come with him. I confessed once that I thought of this upcoming trip every time I heard the line in "Mansard Roof" about the Argentines collapsing in defeat. The trip then fell through because of budget cuts, so I suppose the Argentines really did collapse in defeat. Still, there is nothing that is romantic whatsoever about "Mansard Roof" or indeed about Argentines collapsing in defeat.

So, to the actual suggestions. First was Bob Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, which is one of the few love songs I find non-sappy enough to be bearable. "Situations have ended sad/Relationships have ended bad/Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's" may also be my favorite lyric ever.

Second, Buddy Holly's "Dearest." It is sweet, melodious, and lovely.

Third was the Velvet Underground's "I'll Be Your Mirror." This is a tougher question. It is one of the most beautiful songs I know, and it is actually rather perfect as a first dance for a wedding. On the other hand, it is not actually my fiance's and my song. Rather, it's an "our song" to a friend from undergrad and me. This would not be so bad -- "I'll Be Your Mirror" functions beautifully as either a song about two super-close friends or as a love song -- except that the platonic friendbecame a Catholic priest and once confessed that he had romantic thoughts about me, but had, um, decided to stay in the priesthood anyway. Further details of this situation probably properly belong off-blog, but one can understand the dilemma I face. Is it worth it to try to re-purpose the song, or just stick with the less emotionally fraught "Dearest?"

Although I must say I've never cared for "The Last Days of Disco," I suspect the Double X columnist might understand.