Author: Ophelia Benson

And more. Another item from Normblog, that made me laugh a good deal. About people who pontificate in a repetitive repetitive manner about clichés and the end of civilization as we know it. I know people like that, I’ve been trapped at dinner tables and in cars with them on more than one occasion. (Some people even think I do that! Would you believe it!) Drone drone drone they go, droning about droning bores. Rather the way I am now. I’ll let Norm tell it:

Not only that, there are ‘more dangerous’ clichés, says Mortimer, like ‘”the war against terrorism” when we aren’t at war with any country’. One reads this sort of thing so often now, I’m thinking of charging a small fee to explain in simple language to those a bit on the slow side usages of the word ‘war’ not involving simple bilateral conflict between sovereign states. Anyway, Mortimer regrets that ‘political ideas have become clichéd’, and laments a lost time ‘when sentences and our language were used to mean something and sound well’. Harrrrumph! I invite entries of no more than thirty words saying in the most clichéd way you can that we’re going down the tubes because of slack speech patterns.

Good old days, verbs as nouns, they don’t, nobody, any more, you used to be able to, why I remember when, subjunctive, they when they mean he, heorshe, politically correct, between he and I, a good book, tv, youth culture, time was, Orwell, never use a long word when a short one will do, tell what you know, simple, good Anglo-Saxon, Latinate, jargon, sociologese, schools these days, illiterate, teachers, Book of Common Prayer, coughcough hack wheeze.

That was fun. Next. There are a lot of interesting items at Cliopatria. This one for instance on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and a critique of it in ‘Dissent.’ The author of the critique comments there too. And then there’s this and this on the departure of Invisible Adjunct – which has caused a lot of reaction in blogoville, but the comment at Cliopatria is particularly interesting since it comes from colleagues. IA is a historian. Historians regret her departure. This whole adjunct thing is – well, let me put it this way, it’s the market going one way and ethics going another. PhDs are a dime a dozen therefore we can underpay and overwork them therefore we will. Peachy.

More of the miscellany. I want to look at a sentence or two from a comment on the hijab issue – a comment prompted by this article. I’m not bothering to link to the comment, because it’s quite typical and not all that interesting, in my view. It’s the typicality that makes the sentence worth looking at. It’s the kind of Everyone Says It sort of thing that – well, that everyone says, without really thinking about it much, or perhaps at all. So people go on saying it, and they hear it, and no one ever (or hardly anyone hardly ever) stops to take a closer look at it, and it infects public rhetoric more and more. A meme, in short. Which of course is not to say that I never do that – only to say that I like to point out the ones I notice. Including my own when I notice them.

The action that causes problems, in short, isn’t scarf-wearing at all; it’s intimidation, backed up by credible threats of violence. So why is the solution scarf-banning, rather than making schools safe places to express one’s preferred interpretation of religious faith?

Er – is that what schools are supposed to be? Safe places to express one’s preferred interpretation of religious faith? If so, why? And what other kinds of things is school supposed to be a safe place to express one’s preferred interpretation of? Suppose one has a preferred interpretation of race relations, for example, or sexual orientation, or equality between the sexes? Is school supposed to be a ‘safe place’ to ‘express’ those? In what sense? In what sense of ‘express’ or ‘safe place’? What, in fact, do those fuzzy mushy woolly feel-good words even mean? Does anyone know? Or care? Or do we just like to say them without bothering to think much. And as for that clinching, argument-closing word ‘faith’ – what I just said goes double for that.

Next item. From Scott McLemee’s site a comment on Invisible Adjunct’s departure, including a comment on the vices of anonymity and the admirability of IA’s avoidance of same.

It was last December that IA provided a link to my incredibly vile, destructive, mean-spirited, sarcastic, bitter, and altogether unconscionable effort to destroy the Modern Languages Association, by placing tongue-in-cheek. (Or maybe tongue-in-chic.)

Yes I remember that. As a matter of fact Scott and I were emailing about the IA thread at the very time the yells of rage were at their loudest. I also remember well that the ones that were by far the rudest came from an anonymous blogger – which is one of Scott’s points about IA: that she didn’t use her anonymity to hurl insults.

Anonymity does not seem to bring out the best in people. Someone using a fake name can be just as much of a blithering, ranting, resentment-crazed, semi-autistic creep as he wants to be. No accountability! Woo-hoo! It’s a virtual paradise for any chump with a chip on his shoulder.

Eeeeyup. We’ve seen quite a lot of that kind of thing here. All the more unfortunate that an anonymous who did not go that route is leaving, taking her good example with her.

Dang, I’ve been having a hard time keeping up lately. Not very surprisingly. This writing a book caper does tend to take more than a few minutes a day, after all, and the time has to come from somewhere. And there are other odds and ends, and so – items I want to comment on have been piling up. I do what I can, I wake up nice and early, a good deal earlier than I would like to in fact, but still the piling up goes on. So I’m just going to do a miscellany, a grab-bag, an everything all at once comment, and whittle the pile down a little.

There’s this from Normblog on something George Monbiot said the other day.

The ‘fury it generated among Muslims’. So ‘Muslims’ are entitled by their reactive fury, are they, to determine whether the lives of the people of Iraq may be freed from the tyranny of the Saddam Hussein regime? Would Monbiot allow the same veto power to, say, the racist reactions of some British people over how the issue of asylum-seekers should be handled? It’s not only how people react; it’s whether they have any business reacting in that way.

Just so. And that’s true even if the people doing the reacting are in some sense part of an oppressed group. I’m not sure people always hold that thought firmly enough in mind. Next up, Timothy Burke on Rigoberta Menchu.

The question for me was, “Why did she, with assistance from interlocutors, refashion herself into the most abject and maximally oppressed subject that she could?” The answer to that question, the fault of that untruth, lies not so much in Menchu but in her intended audience. Here I think the academic left, that portion of it most invested in identity politics (which is not the whole or necessarily even the majority of the academic left), takes it on the chin. Menchu is what some of them most wanted, a speaking subaltern.

But read the whole thing. It’s really very good. Farther down we get this:

You want what people in my field call “the African voice”. If you don’t have it in the syllabus, in your talk, in your paper, in your book, somebody’s going to get up in the audience and say, “Where is the authentic African voice?” and mutter dire imprecations when you say, “I don’t have it. I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist”. You may quote or mention or study an African, or many, but if they’re middle-class, or “Westernized”, or literate, or working for the colonial state, somebody’s going to tell you that’s not enough. The light of old anthropological quests for the pure untouched native is going to shine through the tissue paper of more contemporary theory.

Right, that’s enough for this one. I have to get away from this dratted desk for awhile. More later, from Scott McLemee, Cliopatria, Panda’s Thumb, Terry Eagleton.

Right, well as long as I’m in a plaintive vein, a threnodic vein, a sorrowful, plangent, mournful, whingey vein – I think I’ll just take a moment to ponder the grief of living in an out of the way corner of the world. And corner it is, too; tucked or rather jammed up in the far far far northwest corner of the whole damn country, not on the way to anywhere except Alaska (and maybe Japan but only if you’re starting from Idaho). It’s not Los Angeles, it’s not San Francisco, and it sure as hell is not New York or Paris or London. It’s not central. It’s not a capital. It’s not a place where things happen and interesting people sooner or later end up, so that one can just walk out the door at a leisurely pace, no need to rush, stroll along to the tube and in a few minutes be chatting with, I don’t know, Umberto Eco or Yo-yo Ma over lunch.

Well, yes it is, actually. People do come here. It could be much worse. It could be Puyallup or Sequim (you don’t know how to pronounce either of those, and I’m not going to tell you), to which people really don’t go. But people do come here on book tours and lecture circuits. And besides, it was my idea to come here, I wasn’t dragged here in chains. And I like it here. It’s just that –

Well it’s just that my insufferable colleague and his colleague are having lunch (have already had it by now, unless they opted for a very very late lunch, more like pre-dinner, or high tea) with Alan Sokal today. And I’m not. I’m over here, in this hick town, facing the stupid Pacific, missing all the action. And I am devoured by jealousy. Consumed by it. It is so unfair. There they are giggling and chewing and telling jokes about Lacan’s mathematics and Butler’s transgressions, and there I’m not. It is so unfair!

It’s not, of course, it’s not a bit unfair. And it’s also not geographical. If I were there, would I be there? No! Because I wouldn’t be invited, because there’d be no reason for me to be. So it’s not in the least unfair, and I know that perfectly well. But I’m just so jealous. So I’m having an Unreasonable Moment. You don’t think I’m always rational do you? No, of course you don’t.

No, I just thought I would pine a bit, to relieve my feelings. Sokal is something of a hero to people who dislike Fashionable Nonsense. Well he is to me anyway. The parody was such a brilliant idea, and he carried it out so well, and it worked so beautifully, and it made them all look so silly and self-serving – how could one not admire? So one does, and one wishes one could have been there, to ask the great question of our times: why do Americans like pizza with pineapple on it? But I’m an adult, and semi-rational some of the time, so I’ll get over it. I just wanted to pine first.

Update. Just to clarify, by way of making sure no one misunderstands. That is of course mostly joke. It’s quite true that I’d have loved to be there, but that’s all. I’m not really pouting. Sobbing gently now and then, but not pouting.

Second update. You’ll be pleased to learn that my guess was right – they really did laugh about Lacan’s mathematics. I’m clairvoyant.