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

Miscellany

1)This post reminded me of Paul Fussell's carping in Class about "legible clothing." (Stolen from one of Alison Lurie's books, I believe. But my copy is back at my parents' house, and I'm still in MA.) Though I agree with Fussell on fashion grounds, the result of the case is absurd on 1A grounds.

2)A well-written post that provides a helpful anti-paternalism data point.

3)I am reluctant to comment on anything history of the civil rights movement related here because it hits too close to home (home = work.) But I thought these posts interesting. Note that interesting /= substantive commentary.

4)I think I was born without some crucial gene that allows people to feel outrage. It reminds me of the time that I told Pnin that I am not actually from Venus, and he is not actually from Mars; rather, I suspect that we are both actually from Vulcan.

Can I call myself a non-mystic nationalist?

I recently finished two of the new biographies of Ayn Rand (both Jennifer Burns's & Anne Heller's. ) One or both recount a story where some annoying know-nothing nativist goes off on a rant against immigration in front of Rand.* And she replies, "I chose to become an American. What did you do?"

This anecdote popped into my head as I've been reading the Jonah Goldberg/Will Wilkinson/PEG exchanges on "mystic nationalism." Unlike Rand, I can't say that I chose to become an American. (Though my maternal grandfather did as recently as the 1960s.) But the Rand quote encapusulates the kind of patriotism I feel and want other Americans to feel. I'm not proud of my country because I feel some kind of sappy atavistic pull toward the flag or apple pie. I'm an American because I'm rationally convinced that I live in a wonderful country.

I'm willing to allow that perhaps it would be good to have a pro-nationalist default rule in place. That is, if you're thought about a particular public policy a lot and are genuinely unconvinced that your country's right, go with being a patriot by default. Again unlike Rand, I'm willing to allow that there's much more room for uncertainty and ambiguity in human affairs. But sorry, I don't get much more mystic nationalist than that.


*I'm at my future in-laws' house in Massachusetts and don't have the books handy. Thus the story might be imprecisely rendered -- sorry! -- but that's the gist.

The ill-fated Battle of the Ilyas

I'd been meaning to link to this for a few days. But those interested can hear my Ilya compete against the other Ilya in a trivia contest to retain the name of Ilya. Definitely some amusing moments.

The real meaning of Thanksgiving

That private property is awesome.

Despite ladyblogging, feminism is doing just fine

I get weekly(ish) e-mails from the America's Future Foundation, the most recent edition of which contained a link to Helen Rittelmeyer's "Average Janes" and billed it as "provocative." Well, I've read more provocative, but I'm not buying it entirely.

The piece's tag line is "To save feminism, get rid of the lady blogs," which I take is Rittelmeyer's thesis. The piece does offer up some pointed criticisms at Slate's Double X. But it mentions virtually no other ladyblogs -- the ill-fated conservative-leaning Culture 11's Ladyblog, is notably absent, for example.* Does Rittelmeyer think Culture 11's attempt at ladyblogging worked out better? If yes, why?

Also, Rittelmeyer never quite makes her case that ladyblogging is fatal to feminism. Okay, I'm willing to bite that Double X, Jezebel, etc. are kind of like Cosmo for the overeducated urban woman. But even if these sites are dumber than they might be, how does that threaten the most essential gains of the feminist movement? It's not as though fluff floating around the internet prevents women from becoming engineers, scientists or corporate executives. Nor is online dreck leading anyone to call for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment.

The old saw has it that feminism consists of the radical notion that women are people. And people are flawed creatures who like anti-intellectual pleasures sometimes as well as intellectual ones. So, too, women can have equal rights under law and still enjoy guilty pleasures.

Rittelmeyer notes women who have succeeded in blogging by avoiding traditional ladyblogging, such as Ann Althouse and Megan McArdle. Ann Althouse is a little bit of a weird example to choose here. While she is wildly successful at drawing traffic, her style is chatty, discursive, and distinctly feminine in the way that Rittelmeyer purports to dislike. But their successes only prove my point. Clearly the existence of ladyblogging doesn't hold back women who want to do something more wonkish like write about finance or law. So some women have a comparative advantage at the serious stuff, and others at fluff, and the latter doesn't seem to be holding the former back.

I fear Rittelmeyer's also under-estimating the non-seriousness of even traditionally serious blogs and fails to note that the non-seriousness can also serve an important purpose in bringing a blog's readership together. One of my friends from undergrad observed that reading a really good blog feels like sitting next to a really smart friend on a bus. He's right: it's a feeling akin to that which draws me back to some of my favorite blogs, at least. I also really like blogs that draw a small but intelligent and consistently interesting group of commenters. Yet it's hard to build and nurture that kind of community if you adopt a cold and distant tone, or write only about abstruse subjects on which you're an expert. Thus the mix of high and low on even many of the most traditionally serious political blogs.


*I believe Rittelmeyer herself contributed to Ladyblog, but I might be wrong about that, and it looks their archives have vanished from the Internet. Someone please yell at me if I'm mistaken about that, though.

Miscellany -- of i-phone Kindles and The New York Times

1)Sublime ahead of the curve, not terminally geeky. True, I downloaded the Kindle for I-Phone app, not the I-pod touch. It's nonetheless amazingly nice not to lug a book (or two, if I'm approaching the end of one) on the Metro or bus in anticipation of a long ride. My phone, my music, and my distracting reading material can all be in one convenient place. How marvelous! I suppose I would be tempted to shell out for Kindle proper the next time Pnin and I take a long flight, as Helvidius's* battery life is not that long.

Speaking of the Kindle for i-phone, I recently finished Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy on this device. This review by Matt Yglesias and this one from Crooked Timber are both very good. As Yglesias says, the book's so unorthodox that it's hard to do justice with a short summary. It's an extended riff on autism spectrum disorders, yes, and as someone who tests positive for Asperger's by the admittedly imprecise metrics of Internet quizzes, I find this stuff fascinating. There is also stuff on Sherlock Holmes, why our civilization has never made contact with aliens, Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, and Facebook and Twitter. For all its extraordinary breadth and range, nothing about the book feels forced.

It's marvelous. One of the best non-fiction books I've read this year. Highly recommended.

2)I have some empathy, but not much, with Susan Goldberg's picky eaters rant (via) On the one hand, I recall trying to plan a dinner party in college with one guest on the Atkins diet and another who was a vegan. I threw up my hands, realizing there was nothing they could both eat, and finally decided to go with having two entrees. The two entree approach, of course, has the added benefit of providing the guests without dietary restrictions with a wider range of choices.

On the other, trying to plan around different people's dietary restrictions is sort of like doing an LSAT logic game. You would think that this would bring back traumatic memories of a life trial now long past, but you would be wrong. I kind of enjoy feeling that my brain is still sharp in this way. Being able to pretend that I am good at logic games also lets me fantasize semi-plausibly about leading another life in which I might have made Chicago or been able to crack legal academia or something.

3)At his new blog at The New York Times, Ross Douthat has a post up about how conservative Christians have slowly come to accept women in the workplace. I'm torn on how to respond. I can't quite decide if I want to pick on it as an easy target for snark, or if I should acknowledge it as a good faith gesture toward arch conservatives recognizing that sometimes evolving with the times is good.

I fear Douthat also fails to note that working class women did commonly work outside the home before 1960 or so. Both my grandmothers did, after all. Staying at home a la Betty Draper was something of a luxury even in the 1960s. So evangelical Protestants who grew up working class, with working mothers, might find women in the workplace less weird than Douthat thinks.


*My i-phone is named Helvidius, in honor of a pseudonym James Madison used while writing the Federalist Papers. Pnin and I discussed this in the AT&T store, I'm sure much to the amusement of the salespeople present. Having an i-phone named Helvidius is terminally geeky rather than sublimely ahead of the curve.