admin Clothes, Culture, Faculty

Frump and Circumstance

At the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association meeting in Toronto in August 1997, I was riding the escalator down into the atrium of the conference hotel with my fellow sociology graduate students Josh Rossol and Black Hawk Hancock. Black Hawk noticed alot of people milling around, so he turned to Josh and me and asked, “How do I know which ones are the sociologists?”

To which Josh famously responded, “They’re the ones who are dressed like flood victims.”

Of course, this flood victim chic is not limited to sociologists, as pointed out by Tim Gunn of “Project Runway” and former chair of the department of fashion design at the New School of Design (interviewed in the Chronicle of Higher Education):

But for so many people in the academic world at large, I really believe that disdain for fashion is something that they are quite proud of, and that they want to demonstrate in what they’re wearing and how they’re wearing it. It’s a kind of an intellectual snobbery that says: My brain is important to me, and how I look is not, because it goes beyond the clothes. They’re poorly groomed, they’re schlumped over and practically drooling. I mean, I’m making some exaggerations here, but when I go to meetings with the rest of Parsons, I look around and think: Just comb your hair!

 

I think it has to do with the academics’ perception of lifestyle in general, which is that they drive beaten-up, rusted-out old jalopies of cars, they tend to live in environments that are messy, piled high with stuff-mainly books-and covered with dust. I say it comes from a disdain, but in some ways even that can be cultivated, though, so that is looks almost studied, like: Gee, did you buy a bag of dust and spread it around before I came over?

 

admin Culture

What White People DON’T Like

I blogged earlier about the ever-more famous “What White People Like” blog. The popularity of the blog (and the impending book based on the same idea) has created considerable discussion/debate. Is the site a critique of Whiteness or a veiled celebration of it?

Among the more entertaining (to me) and pointed comments is from the Undercover Black Man blog, called “Stuff White People Don’t Like.” I quote a part here:

Here are a few things that white people don’t like:

1. Black bosses.

2. Mexicans.

3. Being told they’re wrong.

4. Panhandlers.

5. Black people on magazine covers.

6. Islam.

OK, so this level of discourse doesn’t exactly contribute to positive race relations in America, but race relations in America are so bad, you just have to laugh sometimes to keep from crying.

admin Culture

Stuff White People Like

I came across this site recently: Stuff White People Like. It is HILARIOUS. Just as an example, here is an excerpt from #91 San Francisco (close to my heart being from the Bay Area):

Much in the way that white people in Brooklyn feel a strong and unfounded connection with The Notorious BIG, white people in San Francisco feel the need to identify with rappers from the East Bay. Interestingly enough, the further they venture from San Francisco, the stronger their need to represent their region.

 

“Oh man, I went to the show last night. So hyphy man, so hyphy. You should come by some time and we’ll ghost ride the Prius.” When you are presented with statements like this, the best response is to say “Berkeley is close to Oakland,” and the white person will likely nod and throw up some sort of west side hand sign.

admin Culture, New Media

Facebook, R.I.P.

A.J. Jacobs, in Esquire magazine, has once again published his year end obituaries. Among the sad deaths he notes for 2007:

The Street Cred of Facebook, at 4

The street cred of Facebook, a popular social-networking site, died Wednesday in St. Louis. It was four years old. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2004, Facebook gained a respectable level of hipness by catering exclusively to college students for several years. The average Facebook page included photos of awkward hugging at the bowling-alley arcade and quotes from Anchorman. It turned seriously ill in 2006 when it became open to anyone from corporate America, and finally expired when Josh Kimberling, a successful optometrist in St. Louis, created a page that included photos of his wife’s dressage horse and a quote from George Will.

admin Books, Students, Writing

No reading, bad writing

Everyone I know who is a good writer is also a good reader. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, then, helps to explain why so many of the students I teach are (to put it bluntly) bad writers.

The article reports on a study released by the National Endowment for the Arts called “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence.”

Among the findings: in 2006, 15- to 24-year olds in America spent just seven minutes on voluntary reading (including online reading) per day during the week and 10 minutes a day on weekends. On the other hand, they spend 2-2.5 hours a day watching television.

There it is.

admin Culture

INjustice in the legal system

In class the other day, a student made a presentation on his desire to become a lawyer in order to ensure greater justice in the legal system. Among other things, we talked about people convicted of crimes they did not commit.

Coincidentally, the New York Times ran a cover story over the weekend presenting their analysis of the lives of 137 men who are among the more than 200 individuals who have been imprisoned and then exonerated since 1989 by DNA evidence. The interactive feature on the Times’ web site especially puts a human face on the lives that were destroyed by this injustice. (They can probably relate to the Duke lacrosse players, but maybe not shed any tears for them since their more privileged backgrounds helped them establish their innocence prior to incarceration.)

Imagine facing a judge at your sentencing and hearing what Jeffrey Deskovic heard:“’Maybe you’re innocent,’ the judge conceded before sentencing him to 15 years to life. ‘But the jury has spoken.’”

Since he was exonerated, the Times story reports, Deskovic has struggled:

“Having spent nearly half his life locked up, accused of brutalizing a high school classmate he hardly knew, Mr. Deskovic was sent into the world last fall lacking some of life’s most fundamental skills and experiences.He had never lived alone, owned a car, scanned the classifieds in search of work. He had never voted, balanced a checkbook or learned to knot a tie.

He missed the senior prom, the funeral of the grandmother who helped raise him, and his best friend’s wedding.”

The Times identified their cases using the database kept by The Innocence Project, which I’ve mentioned before. Their website also does well to put a human face on the tragedy of this injustice.

admin Books, Students, Writing

Spare Prose PLEASE!!!

Somewhere along the way, probably in high school, college students learn that “good” writing means long sentences and big words. But in my experience, most students don’t have the linguistic dexterity to pull this off. It just becomes an overwrought jumble of words and punctuation.

Not that I can do much better myself, but I do try to take the advice of William Zinsser in On Writing Well to cut everything I write IN HALF.

I was reminded of the strength of spare prose in a review of Run by Ann Patchett in the September 30th issue of the New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Leah Hager Cohen writes, “Among the many things to admire about Ann Patchett is the lack of frivolity in her prose. She prefers nouns and verbs to crowded flights of lyrical adjectives and adverbs, and she doesn’t dally excessively over a pretty phrase. Patchett is more hammer and nails than glue and lace; small wonder, then, that her books tend to be such solid, weight-bearing constructions.”

admin Culture

Lower-Back Tattoo, R.I.P.

I saw recently, in the May 2007 issue of Esquire magazine, a story called “Obits of 2007” by A.J. Jacobs. I was interested, though not sorry, to read of the passing of the lower-back tattoo:

Lower-Back Tattoo, 13, Is Dead
The trend of getting a tattoo on the lower back as an erotic decoration died February 4 inside a Safeway supermarket in Bethesda, Maryland. The cause of death was Kathleen Dawkins, a forty-eight-year-old mother of three who leaned over to get a large package of Brawny paper towels, exposing a band of Celtic characters above her ass crack to a horrified stock boy. It was thirteen. Born in 1994, the lower-back tattoo was designed to accentuate the curvature of the lower female figure. It was soon adopted by a number of influential women, including Nicky Hilton, Jessica Alba, and Christina Aguilera. Inspired by her eighteen-year-old daughter, Dawkins got her tattoo three months ago to celebrate the escrow closing of a new five-bedroom split-level home in a gated community. “I wanted to give my husband a sexy surprise,” she told friends. She also bought size-16 Paige Premium low-riding blue jeans, which she was wearing during the fatal incident.

admin Culture, Music

What’s Gangsta? (Part Two)

First Diddy, now Nas has weighed in on what “gangsta” means now that the pioneers of gangsta rap are pushing 40 (or, in the case of Dr. Dre, are 40-something).

According to Nas, “These days, to be gangster is to grow, to survive, to inspire, to change the world.” –Esquire, January 2007.

admin Culture, Music

The Message 2006

Rhymefest updates Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic in “Bullet”:

Straight outta high school he didn’t know what to do
Wanted to go to college but no money was nothin’ new
Wanted to get away go see the world and do somethin’ new
He got approached in the mall by the army recruit
Told him “If you wanna go to school we got money too,
Sign up at eighteen you be you when you twenty-two”
He joined the army airborne got his uniform went to bootcamp got some
discipline Iraq is where they shipped him
He’s in the mission where bullets flyin’ and missin’ him
Wishin’ he was a kid again with his family in Michigan
In the midst of fightin’ militiamen, one round took down six of them
He ain’t really a killa though, takin’ a lotta risks
This is what a poor person do for a scholarship
He turned around and got a face full of hollow-tips
But don’t be mad, he died for the flag

[Chorus: Citizen Cope]
Now what you’ve done here, is put yourself between a bullet and a target
And it won’t be long before, you’re pullin’ yourself away
What you’ve done here, is put yourself between a bullet and a target
And it won’t be long before, you’re pullin’ yourself away