You cannot tell from this blog, but I am culturally undernourished and I lack exercise. This is a Wandering Post because this weekend, I have been strolling. As it is the weekend, I am also singing. I sing that T. and I are about to go eat rico menudo in the real barrio, and that I have found a new ceramics studio. In honor of that most notable discovery, I offer a really cheesy song by Tommy Rey:
Antes nunca estuve así enamorado,
ni sentí jamás esa sensación
la gente en las calles parece más buena,
todo es diferente gracias al amor.
La felicidad ja, ja, ja, ja,
me la dio tu amor jo, jo, jo, jo,
hoy hace cantar ah, ah, ah, ah,
a mi corazón oh, oh, oh, oh,
La felicidad ja, ja, ja, ja,
me la dio tu amor oh, oh, oh, oh
hoy sé cantar ah, ah, ah, ah,
gracias al amor,
y todo gracias al amor.
This is Tommy Rey himself, a Saturday night entertainer. The video is funny:
Watching Tommy Rey is far more lively than hiring, an activity wherein we are trying to find a candidate whose PhD is from an institution like ours, so that they will not be too shocked upon arrival. My insight is that it is not your PhD granting institution that indicates which tenure track job you will be happiest in, or at least understand. It is your undergraduate institution.
Meanwhile my friend the former German professor, who long ago took a job in business, reminds me he is opposed to tenure. The dead wood take up the tenured jobs, so the good new PhDs can only get adjunct positions. If there were no tenure, only good people would have jobs and it would also be easier to move around.
From this conversation I realized yet another reason why this plan would not work in practice: people would not really move that much. Their universities would get used to them, and they would get used to their universities, so they would stay, as the instructors do, albeit without tenure. Alternatively, everyone would always be on the job market and the tenure track.
Also while wandering through museums and galleries last night in clearheaded weekend fashion I realized what my mental fog is, that lack of focus and shutdown that I had decided to associate with PTSD. It is more specifically the confusion that means you have been assaulted somehow. I always had it around the edges of my mind, and if it came closer in I would say to it, get back! Later it took over much more, sometimes completely. I think it is a symptom of being in an abusive relationship. I think that what many people learn on the tenure track is how to enter into an abusive relationship with themselves.
My students, who also appeared at the museum, said that certain books I am teaching, classics on the supposedly universal theme of identity, are in fact about the midlife crises of straight, white middle class men in metropolitan countries. It is very funny and it explains why I did not really understand these books when I read them at their age, but understand them now.
Then I strolled home. One of the ways to walk to my house from downtown is through a poor neighborhood where most white people only go to buy drugs. It has wonderful architecture, though, and I would move there if anyone would sell a house to a gentrifier, which they will fiercely not. I like to go home that way because it reminds me of New Orleans, but police cruisers sometimes follow me – not because they think I am buying drugs, but because they imagine I am hooking.
More than once I have had to show my university ID and they have called in to make sure I have not stolen or faked it. They have told me that white women do not walk for exercise while wearing regular clothes: I should signal that I am a mere exerciser by wearing exercise clothes, rather than the ladylike skirt and blouse I teach in. This means I have been an object of police inquiry for walking while white.
So do you think harassment of women by men is increasing? It has seemed so to me for about ten years, and it may only be a function of where I am. Or am I merely becoming more conscious of it? But if it is actually on the rise, is it a phenomenon on its own, or is it part of a general increase in harassment?
Speaking of which, my student from urban Florida seems to have had the same experience I have here: male friends offer to do free work on one’s house, give free haircuts, or whatever it is, but then ask for other services in return. Apparently she asked one of these people: Are you asking me to trick? I laughed because this is how I have responded a few times over the years. My “friends” have found it insulting, which amuses me since I consider myself to be the injured party. This has never happened to me in the city and it is one more reason why I want to move back.
Far more interesting than all of that is Cuban salsa:
And Oscar de León on Suavecito, con mucho swing:
Eso sí que tiene asé, so watch that video if you watch any of these.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
So do you think harassment of women by men is increasing? It has seemed so to me for about ten years, and it may only be a function of where I am.
I suspect that it has increased with a shift in the Western zeitgeist. It may have something to do with the death of God (of course in the Nietzschean sense). I think that the men believe that the women have taken their divinity away from them. They do not realise that even under a regime that supported and upheld a strong belief in Christianity, they were creating whatever was glorious and transcendent-seeming, themselves. But now they have lost the will to create something that transcends a merely selfish accumulation of wealth. They feel that they are no longer transcendent, that they have been stymied somehow, and that they have lost their historical place as beings in possession of a nature something more than animalistic. Instead of understanding that the challenge for them (as well as the challenge for women) is to CREATE a situation for society that is indeed glorious and transcendent, the men simply accuse women of having taken their natures from them.
We were having a conversation in this vein today re patriarchy, Cajuns, Saudi Arabians, and pornography – believe it or not!
I find black Zimbabweans are generally not habitually abusive — at least not to me, a white woman — because they still believe in God. White Zimbabwean men, however — those who identify as ex-Rhodesians — seem to have lost their belief in God and are very abusive in general.
…because, I suppose, of having reified everything. What isn’t a mere object is a scary phantom / a projection of their own fears. Interesting – as capitalism gets more extreme, so does patriarchy …
?
T. says Saudi Arabia is an “all-male postmodern capitalist Hell.” Interesting formulation.
I think reification is a large part of it, but they are also guilt ridden. They have had one encounter with reality too many — that was when the wool was pulled from their eyes when it was discovered that there was no god who would protect them from the raging of the black hordes (and others who are lacking in the benefits of social wealth). When they were colonials, they were mostly innocent in their naive beliefs — and therefore could afford to be limited also in their brutality. However, once their self-deception was revealed to them, the insight partly shattered them. Now, they can no longer go their way in a relatively innocent state of mind: Now they MUST brutalise (themselves and others) in order to reinforce their place in the world; ie. to convince themselves that they have a right to belong.
This reaction is, I should also mention, the opposite of the shamanic reaction, which would be to accept the necessity for the disintegration of self in its present form. Where shamanic regression and reconstruction of self are called for, the reich wingers instead push ahead regardless.
“Now they MUST brutalise (themselves and others) in order to reinforce their place in the world; i.e. to convince themselves that they have a right to belong.”
Yes – this comment (the whole comment) actually explains a lot and not just about Rhodesians.
…so please remind me, if I ever forget, that in the above formulation of choosing one’s response is an element of will that defines Marechera’s approach as progressive rather than being bitter.
Yes – I’ll do that!
So do you think harassment of women by men is increasing? It has seemed so to me for about ten years, and it may only be a function of where I am.
I don’t think it is increasing, I think it is becoming more transparent. I watch old movies, real old movies and the harassment is there, it is however, sugar coated, deeply sugar coated. Now the men are more impatient and the women are more astute. The men want a reaction quicker and the women are more apt to give a reaction. When I watch old movies, black and white movies, the man, a stranger tells the woman he will help her home, find her way, get her purse back, call a taxi and she just follows him mindlessly. It still happens now, but now women stop more and say who are you? what do you what? why are you interested? These questions make men angry thus exacerbating their harassment. How dare a woman question him, even if that question is reasonable? Case in point, last night when we were having dinner Mr. Glendower was correcting the child about something, right after I told her that she is really becoming a bull in a china shop. To be honest she has been demonstrating behavior I would consider that of a boy, a reckless and careless boy who in his pursuit to climb a wall will break a curio stuffed with trinkets all the while not feeling any remorse. The husband in response to my bull in a china shop comment said something like “I know, I felt my anger at her surfacing today when we were in the store and I had to check myself.” After inquiring what it was all about I discover that he had no right being angry. They were putting yogurt in the shopping cart and she put a vanilla one in. He told her to put it back that it was nasty. She responded with “At least let me try it first.” That is when he had to check himself. His knee jerk reaction was to tell her to put the damn yogurt back, he says it is nasty so she should accept his opinion and like it. While she was of a clear mind, realising that she had not ever tasted vanilla yogurt that she can recalled and that she would like to make the decision if it was nasty or not on her own. I was so proud of her. I had to go around the world and tell him to imagine if his father had shut him down like that. He must have understood because he did not continue, something he does when he thinks he is right. But it was there, that desire of him being a man and demanding she likes what he likes was there and his knee jerk reaction was to punish her for challenging him. Men harass women because women are removing their goggles and making it more and more obvious that women are not the afterthought of men or something to be lead by men but human beings worthy of equal standing.
Ah yes – as Momo would say: you stand up for yourself, so they increase the abuse!
I think the abuse started with me when I was of an age that I began to ask questions which my parents felt they couldn’t answer. If something was a certain way in the world, then I would want to know why. However, my parents were satisified with not knowing or with knowing very little. They thought that I should also be that way. Yet lack of knowledge created a gnawing hunger in me — something painful. So this is where I began to show a predisposition to part ways with my parents, and this was the point that they began to think that somehow I was not their child. Perhaps I was a changeling?
Anyway, that is when the abuse started — and it certainly had a gendered aspect. The gender side became more apparent later. It was like I was developing a mark of Satan on me that had to be thrashed out of me one way or another.
I was being trained into a gender role from very early on and it definitely involved learning how to limit oneself, and to accept irrational limits – and strange rituals of intellectual disorientation.
The religionists got to me too late.
Here’s our friend Merry Cheer-a!
”
These Christian beings are lavatories full to the brim
I squat over them shit spasms of thwarted freedom
Dawn pulls up my trousers night’s dreams desert me
They send me to advice law centres my legal existence in uproar”
“Merry Cheer-a” – that’s great!
Lol! JCW, I think you’ve got the western boys’ disrupted quest for transcendence exactly right. Poor stupid things. They don’t know who they are any more; they don’t know what their power is; they’re concerned about their value; they need women to stand still so that they can use them for contrast.
The problem is not, I think, the death of that particular kind of transcendence but the desire for transcendence of any kind. The ideal always finds a way to disappoint in the end. We are at our most human when we get solid with being here together in the world, all imperfect and unsatisfactory as we are. No one needs a “right to belong.” We just do, what else is life but our various belongings. Contingent rights to belong require Stalins to adjudicate the insides and the outsides of those boxes we put ourselves and each other in.
I’m also pleased by the daughter’s good sense about the yogurt, and proud of dad for shutting up about it, for whatever reason. He did NOT increase the abuse when she stood up for herself. She and he can work with that.
No one needs a “right to belong.” We just do, what else is life but our various belongings.
If only it were actually that simple. Whilst that may be the ultimate moral perspective we need to take on (a universalist one), the internalisation of tribal values have been with us for a long time, historically. The Aztecs used to make captured warriors of opposing tribes into humiliated sacrifices, to bolster their own self esteem. There is a large part of this mentality still with us today. Those who have been defeated in war have something of the residual feelings of the Aztec sacrifice about them. Those who have been victorious in ideological or literal war have something of the Aztec complacency and enjoyment of suffering of their victims. So it goes. So, on a (transcendent) moral level we shouldn’t need to strive to belong. Yet on a psycho-social level, we often feel that we do.
Yes. JCW you’re right. I don’t think universal belonging is possible or even desirable. Tribalism is real and makes emotional and historical sense, just as you say. But I am a big fan of multiple belongings and fuzzy, flexible boundaries between them. Let other people be the Stalins. That’s a kind of power but not the kind we want.
But I am a big fan of multiple belongings and fuzzy, flexible boundaries between them.
I’m happy for such belongings to take place — but I would hope that if I ever had to call upon somebody to defend me, they would be able and willing to come to my aid, without just seeing a lot of fuzz. I don’t consider setting myself up as a victim in Fuzzyland is any way of avoiding the Stalins — quite the opposite.
I am a secular humanist.
Defense, right. Conflict is true sometimes, a useful metaphor some other times, and not at all the point most of the time. People who make those most of the times about conflict are a real drag, aren’t they. 😉
I’m not myself a martial artist, except intellectually. The one that appeals to me is aikido. It takes imagination to neither fight nor be a victim.
Genuinely, Carl, I think we’re on a different wavelength.
I like the point about the fuzziness.
But the fuzziness doesn’t need to be manufactured by me or by you — it’s a feature of the static of political and social life, jamming communication.
It seems to be the aura of wishy-washy liberals, postmodernists of a certain stripe, and neocons…(?)
It seems to be the aura of wishy-washy liberals, postmodernists of a certain stripe, and neocons…(?)
Yes, there is that. But fuzziness as a MORAL position is something that demands investigation and unpacking.
I’m inclined to think that this is about having one’s cake and eating it too. Fuzziness LOOKS like a form of solidarity, whilst being on the pretext of identity — hence inherently passive. Am I gay or straight, man or woman? This is the question it seems to raise. However, why assume that being fuzzy is a way of strengthening rather than weakening one’s position? — which is the question one MUST ask if one presumes even a basic level of self-protective interest on the part of the subject who assumes this idea (we must first assume that something is at work other than self-destructive masochism — that is, a mode of self protection).
My conclusion is that fuzziness might count as MULTIPLE IDENTITIES rather than as obscuring of identity (for, the latter effect would often make one less in a morally authoritative position — which is a contradiction of the fuzziness position as a moral imperative). So maybe there is much social capital to be harvested in investing in multiple identities?
YES. I have to think about this more and could say some fragmentary things about it if I weren’t in the middle of a bunch of other stuff today. I’m going to send you something on it. This is a Smart, Suggestive Comment and it helps me with a) my article and b) figuring out what is happening with my youngest brother, who is invested in fuzzy identities. I’m going to e-mail you my article draft.