Having nothing to do with sociology, or the usual stuff on this thing. I really must say that I’ve been enjoying Panda Bear, making me suspect the better instincts of Animal Collective are thanks to Noah Lennox.
what i have not read
Slate had a nice set of blurbs about what ‘great books’ authors have not read. The Bible. Gravity’s Rainbow. Moby Dick. Harry Potter. Aside from the obvious question of whether or not a Harry Potter book is ‘great,’ I’m happy that I’ve covered those. (Ok, three-fourths of the Bible.) Faulkner. Ulysses. The Brothers Karamazov. I have just not gotten to and suspect I should. I’ve read more than the average American, I’m sure, but at times I need coercion: I had to bring Gravity’s Rainbow as my only reading material for a trip to Europe to force myself to get through it. The same with Quixote on this summer’s trip to Scandinavia. I was once with a famous sociologist and s/he asked what I was teaching in my theory class that day. I said, excitedly, “The Frankfurt School.” “Who’s that?” s/he asked. At the time I was appalled, but maybe I’ve mellowed out over the years, or realized that I have plenty of blindspots of my own.
One of those blind spots is the entire populist oeuvre of Jonathan Kozol. Maybe it’s because I missed a general education in my undergraduate studies while studying architecture (I took a year off between college and grad school, in part, to catch up on Hemingway, Kafka, Calvino, Ondaatje, and the like), but I never got around to Kozol, who must be assigned in every third undergraduate class. Regardless, Kozol gave a talk at Mt. Holyoke College to promote his new book. It was mostly pretty interesting, but he kept insisting that ‘sociologists’ were to blame for the mechanized, overly rationalized No Child Left Behind. Wa? He also complained about academics who use big words, like ‘hegemonic’ and ‘Hegelian.’ As one of my students told me afterwards, “He sure didn’t seem to have any qualms about ‘pedagogy!”‘ I’ve always thought that I’d like Kozol, and I admired his better instincts, but I was a little underwhelmed.
Other ‘classic’ social science books I need to read? Hmmm. I’m still hoping to get to Origin of the Species. (Interesting fact, maybe: Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess’ An Introduction to the Science of Sociology–the ‘Green Bible’–includes some real interesting gems, including Darwin. We’ll be reading essays of Darwin’s on Blushing and Emotions from there our theory class this semester. It’s nice to think of the very foundation of our discipline in the U.S. is a little more interesting that we think.) Others?
(As a postscript, mention of Kozol’s concerns over language sparked a fabulous discussion about Durkheim, education, and stratification in theory class yesterday. Sharp thoughts that tapped into all sorts of issues of race and power.)
summer pool
Now that I no longer live in Williamsburg, I miss out on the McCarren Pool parties. It was one of those ideas that just was so brilliant it took off and became co-opted in the span of 30 seconds. Being at these shows was a blast the summer before last, and I’m sad to have missed Every Single One this summer. (The free ones are the brain-child of my good friends at Jelly NYC, FYI. It was their idea first, Live Nation!) I take small comfort from the fact that the Times has allowed one of my favorite blogger people, Andrew Kuo (in the blogroll on the right as ‘Emo + Beer = Busted Career‘), to provide his chart-review music events, most recently, on the Pool Parties (and here’s one of Cat Power). I’ve said it before, this guy’s a hipster Edward Tufte. Here’s a part of the chart (click here to see the rest):
Just imagine if the AAUP delivered a similar chart for the news a few posts down. Suffice it to say, I’m going to begin to push my students to think about different kinds of presentations of data…
punk + emile
A student passed along this old piece from The Onion. I guess the upshot is that getting students to connect social theory to everyday issues is out there in the zeitgeist, which is a good thing. Parody from The Onion, however, less so. There’s even a nice echo of what I have to write in the margins every week:
Basile, who has not yet decided on a grade for Hoyer’s paper, said he encourages “thinking beyond the textbook” and has no problem with students expanding an assignment to incorporate non-traditional subjects like punk rock. He noted, however, that he “would ideally like to see at least a 50/50 ratio.”
“Look here on page 6. This long section on the anti-societal statements punks made by wearing torn clothing and dyed hair is an obvious place to work in something about Durkheim’s distinction between societies maintaining mechanical versus organic solidarity,” Basile said. “But instead, he just keeps hammering home the same point about Malcolm McClaren’s ‘Sex’ shop.”
bad predictions
A very fun list of bad predictions, exhibits a great deal of fear and concern over seemingly every new technology. My favorite, though, is:
I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here… We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.
-Simon Cameron, U.S. Republican Senator, on the Smithsonian Institute, 1901.
shock doctrine
I like to teach Economics and Politics together in my 101 courses, and for pretty obvious reasons: Corporate contracts, corporate welfare, etc. It’s usually a pretty rowdy discussion and a good thing to end the first half of the semester on. I usually show the first few minutes of The Corporation, wherein they detail how corporations were the dominant users of the 14th Amendment in their claims of ‘corporate personhood’ rather than individuals and newly freed slaves. (This, by the way, is not a old argument: Just a few years ago, Wal-Mart made the same case in court.)Now Naomi Klein and the fabulous Alfonso Cuaron have put together a clip that will bump my earlier one: The Shock Doctrine. Check it out:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc&eurl=http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film]
making connections as both a hobby and a job
I came across an interview with Umberto Eco, while looking for a line he wrote about the good fortune of having your hobby be your job. I’m currently tackling the issue of how there are multiple career trajectories that lead people into nonstandard work, tourism, and how larger forces of deindustrialization and service labor affects the world of the walking tour guide. Anyway, this wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it’s close and interesting enough. It also gets at why I really believe that walking guides are doing intellectual work in the streets.
TAIJE SILVERMAN: You’re likely in a single paragraph to describe Superman, Santería, California’s wax museums, Communism, and the Middle Ages, and make them all seem effortlessly connected. How do you keep so much information in your head at once? Is your tendency to cross-reference so wildly an intuitive one, or is it more that you are just having fun?
UMBERTO ECO: Well, I know a lot of people who keep more information in their head than me. And live happily forever!
I think the moving element is a curiosity. If you are curious, you absorb what you see and you keep it in your memory. And in learning it, you feel pleasure. Even though it can be tiring. This problem, I know, belongs to the privileged person like me. Many of my fellow human beings work, and then when they are free they cultivate a hobby. For people like me, the job is the hobby. They’re the same thing. So you can work even during the night, and still have fun. I know this is a privilege. A lot of people cannot do it. They are obliged to work, perhaps at an office, making calculations. And then they might read a book.
The other side of the story is that if your job is the same as your hobby, you can, unfortunately, never have the pleasure of sitting down and reading a book. Because even when you read a book, you’re speculating about it as if it were your job. So you lose some of the pleasure which other people might get. But in general, I think, yes: the fact of identifying two sides of your activity is a real fortune.
TAIJE SILVERMAN: Are you constantly making connections between everything?
UMBERTO ECO: [Laughs] No! I spend my time stopping myself from making connections. Trying not to exaggerate.
visual information
I’m getting increasingly interested in unconventional visual representations of data. My old roommate, Ben Stewart turned me on to Edward Tufte, and since then I’ve also become fond of ‘Earl Boykin’s‘ fantastical charts. Flowcharts, however, appear to be the wave of the future. (The first one might need a little more thinking through, since I think that ‘Tell Them’ may or may not need to be connected to ‘Oh Snap!’)
From Flickr, Boing Boing, & the adorable (and available on a t-shirt) Toothpaste for Dinner. But there is also Junk Charts and Sociological Images that are both worth checking out.
