Ladies Night

February 8, 2010 | Comments (1) | Permalink

I'm suddenly reading about architecture.

What happened was, I read two issues of the New Yorker back to back and was struck by two extremely subtle things that suddenly leapt out at me like terrible dark panthers and got me thinking about how weird and quiet and complicated male chauvinism has become in this country.

In Adam Gopnik's eulogy for J.D. Salinger, he's talking about how Salinger managed to tap into the way Americans talk, nailing it brilliantly in page after page of wonderful dialogue. Then he starts talking about how "Catcher in the Rye" is timeless--how he recently gave it to his own 12 year old son and the son loved it as much as had the father, 30 years ago. Okay, that's great! I love that book too, it's completely mind-blowing, obviously. Then he says:

"In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: 'Huckleberry Fin,' 'The Great Gatsby,' and 'The Catcher in the Rye.'"

What he means is that those are three really great books that should be called "classics." But he claims this status by arguing--or, not even arguing, just POINTING OUT, like it's self-evident--that these books are somehow universal, that they somehow speak to "every reader and condition." And I find that amazing. That a group of books in which each protagonist is a young, white man somehow contains all conditions. I'm not harshing on those books, which are all totally genius and beloved by me. And, Gopnik is of course not a jackass; he doesn't MEAN it like that, really...and yet, that's the way he thinks. That's the way we ALL think, basically. He would probably agree that something like "Beloved" or "Invisible Man" should be considered a "classic," too, that those are similarly Great (with a capital 'g') books, but he would never describe them as "speaking to every reader and condition." Those books speak to the AFRICAN AMERICAN condition, or to the AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN condition, and no other. By reading them, we gain insight into a different condition from our own ("we" being "white men"). They are great because they provide that insight, not because they are universal. Yet somehow freaking "The Great Gatsby" IS universal.

The apparent belief that a young Maya Angelou would read Catcher in the Rye and think "My god, it's like he's known me all my life" is pretty depressing.

From there, I went almost directly to this article about architect Jeanne Gang and her new crazy building in Chicago. It's evidence of something, already, that it took me awhile to realize that "Jeanne Gang" is a woman. I had just read "Jeanne" as French or something, even though even in French that would still be a woman's name. It would never occur to me that the architect being discussed in the New Yorker architecture section would be a woman. That first feminine pronoun literally shocked me and I went back and started again.

Paul Goldberger loves this lady and her buildings. He praises her for not being "showy," for designing things that are beautiful AND comfortable. She's not one of those egomaniac architects--she has "no interest in establishing a look that marks her buildings as hers." Faint praise indeed--and would a Gehry or Lloyd Wright ever be described as BAD because they mark their buildings too much as theirs? I honestly don't know. Maybe that is a common criticism of those guys. But from what I have read/heard of them, it's the very outlandish uniqueness of their styles that make them such hot-shots. Imagine saying "Oh, this building is so great, you can't even tell that Frank Lloyd Wright designed it!" What?

He also pushes continually the assertion that Gang is so great because she totally identifies with each client, designing something totally just for THEM, for THEIR NEEDS, not just to make her own art or put her stamp on a building or whatever. Her work is great in some ways because she HAS no personal style; her work is totally geared toward the desires of the client. And again, obviously these are good traits for an architect to have, but it's hard to imagine a male architect being described this way---or, if he were described this way, I could even imagine it being an insult. Oh, he has no personal style, he's all over the place, he's passive, he just does whatever the client wants, he has no powerful VISION of his own. But for a woman, it is a good thing to be ruled by the desire to please somebody else.

He begins the article by saying her new building in Chicago is "the tallest building in the world designed by a woman," and then says that that is a stupid observation and beside the point. So at first I was like "maybe this article will be awesome!" But then he goes on to talk almost exclusively about "female" architects--what they are all like, and how Gang is better than some more famous female architects because those female architects are too showy, and how there are all these other lady architects you never hear about but who are great because they just make comfortable, reasonable buildings. So it turns out, he thinks the whole "tallest lady's building in the world" is stupid only because it draws your mind to the tired cliché about how skyscrapers are phallic symbols and all the dudes are trying to build a bigger one. Yes, her gender is the primary thing defining her and that is all the article is going to be about, but let's not trot out that tired cliché about phallic symbols! Very confusing.

It got me thinking about this conversation I had with my adviser one time, about Schoenberg. And she was like, "it's all about fear of women," and I was like "HUH?" But she explained. Turn-of-the-century dudes were terrified by the burgeoning women's suffrage movement (please read Andreas Huyssen's now-legendary article "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other" for a much more extensive exploration of this topic). And from this era you get all the horrible modern shit that is all about purging beauty and comfort from the world. Modern architecture, all glass and points and metal and gray and brutal angles. Modern furniture, basically unusably uncomfortable. Turning the DOMESTIC SPACE, traditionally a space where woman is King, so to speak, into an uncomfortable, hard place purged of curves and pillows and things that are nice. Atonal music, 12-tone music, purging "the beautiful" from music and turning it into a rational, mental, mathematical exercise. There is this sense in which it is all an attempt to get away from things traditionally perceived as "feminine"--beautiful, emotional, comfortable/comforting. Indeed, in early musicology you see this fear writ large--those guys wouldn't even let Ruth Crawford Seeger into the ROOM with them while they were planning their new discipline and forming their scholarly society (the New York Musicological Society). Here are some cool quotes from a biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger (amazing musician and forcibly-amateur (they wouldn't let her join their club) musicologist, wife of Charles, important early American composer and musicologist, father of Pete):

"For Seeger it was out of the question that Crawford be invited to join, or even be allowed in the room when the second meeting took place on February 22, 1930...Crucial to Seeger's ambitions was that the society 'not be confused with a Women's Club,' 'because only women's clubs talked about music in the United States at that time, and we wanted to make it perfectly clear that we were men, and that we had to talk about music and women weren't in on it.'"

"Charles allowed Ruth to sit outside the doors that he agreed to leave ajar so that she could listen without technically being in the room."

"When Crawford arrived at her station, she found the door shut tight."

Ruth: "I turn my head toward the closed door and quietly but forcibly say, 'Damn you,' then go in my room and read Yasser's article. Later, my chair close to the door, I hear some of the discussion."

They later let her join the society as a "guest" rather than a "member."

Such terror of women! DON'T LET THEM SAY STUFF ABOUT MUSIC, OMG, WHAT IF THEY SAY SOMETHING GIRLY AND WE ARE ALL DISCREDITED. In early musicology there is this hysteria about turning the study of music into a science, into something you can analyze on paper, not just a bunch of sounds that make you feel stuff. They wanted to approach the study of music with EMPIRICISM. They were very careful to purge women, female composers, and any discussion of what is "beautiful" (unless it could be backed up with scientific evidence) from the pages of their early journals. This is where you get those crazy Schenker diagrams that "prove" why Beethoven is so great, using graphs. Then anything that doesn't conform to that same graph must be crappier than Beethoven. That's science!

Music is always problematic, because you can't touch it or put it in a box, and it plays on your emotions in a way people have always struggled with, for literally thousands of years. PLATO struggles with it. There's something insidiously sensual about music, and even the people who love it have often been troubled by what exactly it's DOING to you. Can it actually change you in some fundamental way, omg can it emasculate you? (Plato: "Big time! Kings shouldn't listen to dithyrambs because then they won't be able to win wars!!!!") So in the early part of the 20th century they've tried to contain it in various ways, explain it into a rigorously empirical category, etc. Also, since the 1800's music was appreciated specifically when it managed to somehow be "masculine" (also tied into the rise of German nationalism but lets not go there). So Beethoven--the most masculine of all composers, according to a couple guys who really liked him--writes these symphonies where one theme dominates and destroys a secondary theme (until recently, the technical term for the secondary theme was the "feminine" theme, no shit), which enables it to emerge fully-realized by the end of the piece. Individualism! Hero! Self-fashioning! Everybody thought this was great, so they set to work making the Beethovenian style (and not even his total style, just the style of this one period of his work now known as the "heroic" period (because let me tell you, shit gets weird as he gets older, sadder, and deafer)) THE NORM. After Beethoven, if you wrote a symphony where this kind of domination and individual self-actualization didn't occur, you were doing something wrong (see: Berlioz), or at least wimpy (see: Schubert).

I just deleted a whole huge thing about Schubert. I realize I am getting extremely side-tracked from my original point. luckily this is a blog and not my dissertation, so F off

ANYWAY since the late 1800's, there had been this fear of being seduced by alternatives to normative (aka "dominating," "teleological," perhaps even "violent") masculinity. You see it with reception of Wagner's music, even. People were afraid he would turn them gay (extreme simplification). His music manifests this weird different way of being super super sexy and sensual that uptight people were very uncomfortable with. Where are his triumphant authentic cadences? Oh god, the chords are slipping around all over the place, I can't even tell where the tonic is anymore, it's like he's raping my ear with his penis made of music (literally an image from a contemporary rude cartoon (okay, except he's not using his penis, he's using a hammer to drive a huge nail into someone's ear)).

So anyway, all this is to say that woman gets even more aligned with terms like "comfort" and "beauty" than she already was (as per my "History of Woman" entry a few entries back), because now that binary enters the world of art and design, because WOMEN are entering the world of art and design. So the stuff that is "natural" to woman gets mapped onto the art she makes. Now (turn-of-the-century now, I mean) art made by women, when it's GOOD, is soft and pretty and nice. And when it's BAD, it's strong or dark or violent. Great early example: Wuthering Heights. Published under a male pseudonym and beloved of male critics who praised its "virility" and "masculine outlook" and its totally dark and violent atmosphere of sexual terror. Then poor Anne accidentally spilled the beans about how they were all actually women, the Brontë sisters, and total pandemonium ensued. All those critics who loved Wuthering Heights so much either backtracked, now pointing out how weak and flawed and unbelievable the male characters were, OR THEY REFUSED TO BELIEVE EMILY WAS A WOMAN. "No woman could write such a book," was basically their argument. Some of them weakly advanced the theory that the Brontë's useless brother (Bramford?), known primarily for getting wasted every night at the pub until Emily came to get him and carry him home over her shoulder (LITERALLY), had actually written Wuthering Heights. Imagine! And of course Emily is just like "whatever." She's wearing her boots and shooting her gun and tromping around with her cool dog and refusing to get married, she doesn't give a shit. But anyway, I'm getting sidetracked into my deep personal love of Emily Brontë.

Now (actual now) this binary has gotten weird. So sometimes you'll see women praised for NOT being feminine. Her work, oh, it's so strong and virile, you can't even tell a woman made it. It's gotten complicated because now lots of times we don't connect the adjectives with the gender stereotypes that spawned them, but we still perceive "strong" or "dark" or "violent" as "good," and "soft" or "pretty" or "merely pretty" as "less good."

Or then it gets more complicated still, with articles like this one on Jeanne Gang. She's a female architect, which is crazy because there are hardly any! And you've never heard of her, because she's not as "showy" as these other more famous female architects who want to make showy buildings instead of comfortable buildings (and that's bad, but only when you're a woman). Gang makes things that are beautiful and comfortable, rather than showy and eye-catching or revolutionary.

And the article is totally strong praise, and it's not about "disagreeing" that her buildings aren't comfortable, or that that isn't a good thing. But it's when you compare the terms that new shit comes to light. I have read all the architecture columns in the New Yorker for years and I can't recall a male architect being praised for sublimating his own artistic vision into the will of the client, or being praised for making stuff that isn't showy but is very nice and comfy.

It's like what my old man was telling me about the two starkly different ways black and white football quarterbacks are described by sports commentators. Good white quarterbacks are praised for being "intellectual," for having a real firm mental grasp of the field and of strategy, etc. etc., while good black quarterbacks are praised for having good instincts--for not HAVING to think, because they just FEEL it, where the ball should go (or whatever; my grasp of who does what on a football team is slim at best. I think the quarterback throws the ball, but I could be wrong). He says once you start noticing it it becomes completely shocking. He says you can tell what race of quarterback the commentator is describing, just from the way they describe his abilities on the field. And again, these are all IN PRAISE of these guys. These guys are all great quarterbacks! It's not about saying "I hate black people and black quarterbacks are terrible." Which is what a lot of people will accuse you of accusing, when they don't want to acknowledge that something is racist/sexist/whatever. It's like the whole "but when I say Asians are all good at math, that's a COMPLIMENT, so how could it be racist!" thing.

Anyway, it got me thinking about Julia Morgan, the first female to be allowed into the École des Beaux-Arts. Morgan went on to build over 700 buildings in California, including the crazy bell-tower at UC Berkeley and the Hearst Castle. So, she's working in America in the 30's and 40's, mainly, and here are some of the things people said at the time, about her work (which I found in article about architecture on j-stor that I have since lost, which is really bad scholarship on my part, but again, this is a blog and not my dissertation):

One person called the bell tower "quaint and picturesque." Somebody else praised the tower for coming from "the genius of a woman's brain" but went on to describe that genius as the combination of "instinct with her creative spirit" (rather than of years of training at a fancy institution (a.k.a. Immanuel Kant: women have feelings and men have thoughts)). And, here we go, that same person commended Morgan for her "noblest self-sacrifice and whole-hearted devotion."

We've come a long way, baby, but not so long after all, when you get down to it.

So anyway, whatever.

By Regarding @ 7:13 AM | Comments (1)

He said that that 'that' that that writer used should have been a 'which'

February 6, 2010 | Comments (3) | Permalink

I'm deep within my own, in this weekend of solitarity (why isn't that a word? Let's pretend like I'm Shakespeare and I just invented a cool new word for you all to use), translating beaucoup de français and getting beaucoup de frustrated, but in a good way, like in the old days when I used to run track and I would push myself so hard to carve that final one second off my mile time. Just kidding I never did this, I was extremely lazy, and even when I was elected captain of the team my co-captain told me he didn't think I should be captain because I just "jack[ed] off during practice" (not literally). I used to pray for rain every time we had a meet. This probably is actually an apt analogy to my methods in learning French. I kind of poke around, basically.

But the thing about nineteenth-century French is, Jesus H. Christ, learn how to use a period! You never saw such doings in all your days. I spend hours on single sentences, trying and failing to trace the wily subject as it dodges and whirls betwixt and among more subordinate clauses than you could think possible, in literary writing that was meant for a newspaper!!!!

It would be like saying, in English, "the artist, who, so strong and wise, like the trees in the forest that grow tall even in the face of storms, which sweep them, coming from the sea like monsters made of wind that comes from Hell itself where the devils live, manages, like a lion in the jungle, to dominate all he sees"

In conclusion, das ist muy dificil und trés triste. Also Spanish and German keep interfering, although less often than they once did. Yesterday I couldn't remember the German word for "now" and I got really sad (it's "jetzt"). I am always looking up spanish infinitives for french conjugated verbs and then getting confused when the word seems not to exist. In French, "to have" is "tenir," not "tener." Il est trés dificil. I mean difficile.

It's really sad to have such a basic, mediocre grasp of so many languages. If I spoke just one of them fluently I would be happy. Instead, the near-fluency I had in Spanish has been utterly destroyed, first by my half-assed dabbling in German, and now by my insistent and prolonged study of French. So now I just know a bunch of jumbled-up words and phrases and my accent is simply wild.

Pauvre moi. Pobrecito. SCHNELL

And now my English is getting weird too. Three days of deep French and now I am writing things like "I am wishing strongly to request a favor of you" in emails.

Language is amazing. I remember when I first realized why there is the stereotype of the French speaker referring to inanimate objects as "she" and "he," and that it is because in French the nouns are profoundly gendered. This had never occurred to me before; it's presented in pop culture as evidence of the passionate touchy-feely poet that lurks inside all French people. Like PePe LePew. "The night, she is so beautiful."

elle est trés belle. ELLE! Doy! In English we just say "the," a weird word in itself if you think about it. Also check out my subject line! Does that blow your mind or what? Let's not even get started on the weirdness of the English language. I mean, in French you would never see something like that. "Le chose que que que que que le chien mangais," or whatever. My new thesaurus is really changing my life. I can't recommend it highly enough. It is called "the Oxford American Writers' Dictionary," and it was recommended to me by a friend and I bought it and it is so cool. First of all, it has TONS of synonyms, not just a couple like my previous thesaurus. Second of all, it is really a thesaurus for poets and writers. It relates words in the most whimsical ways. Among the synonyms, it will say, "maybe you mean more like THIS word," and direct you to some basically unrelated word that sort of somehow conveys some kind of similar vibe. Like, you look up the noun "five," and it gives you some terms and then it says, "word links: pentagon, pentagram, pentangle." These words don't mean "five," but they are cool five-based words, and maybe if you're writing a weird short story that will be helpful to you. Under "fish" there is a word link to "ichthyophobia." Fear of fish! Under "deconstruction" it says "see haiku." Under "rain" there is "pluvial: relating to rain."

Then there are also these amazing "usage" notes, peppered throughout the book, written by a fancy man who writes style manuals. So you look up the word "data" and you're given "facts, figures, details," etc., and then underneath that you get this little "usage" box, in which this guy writes at length about whether "data" is a plural or not, and how you should go about using it in sentences. "Datum, the 'true' singular, is sometimes used. Still, in nonscientific contexts, 'datum' is likely to sound pretentious." Good call!

THEN, there are these boxes called "Word Notes" under certain words. And these Word Notes are written by famous cool authors like David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and the guy from Magnetic Fields. The sentence in my subject line comes from DFW's Word Note on the word "that," which literally changed my life. (<--joke! See what I did there??). Or here's Jean Strouse on the phony word "problematize," which I myself am guilty of using: "The blame for this awful neologism lies with academia, where the word serves no apparent purpose except to demonstrate one's mastery of obscurantist jargon...Equally horrible is the related noun, 'the problematic.'" Ouch! I need to go edit my grant proposal tout de suite! And here's Francine Prose, on "ectoplasm": "I realize that this word does have a legitimate scientific usage--it's the part of the cell that lies just beneath the outer membrane--but the meaning that intrigues me has something (understandably vague and mysterious) to do with the spirits of the dead. It's the stuff ghosts are made of, or alternately, some substance that signals an active communication between spiritualist mediums and those who have, as the mediums themselves would say, passed over. It does make you wonder about the first moment when someone decided that there was a need for such a word, and that 'ectoplasm' would do nicely."

There are also boxes called "Easily confused words." So if you look up "include," there is a box underneath the synonyms that says "don't confuse 'include' with 'comprise,'" and then it discusses the extremely subtle differences between those two words.

And that's not all, THERE'S MORE!

There are also these incredible boxes called "word spectrums," where they take pairs of super-opposite words and slowly link them together with words that slowly move from synonym to antonym. Example: friend/foe:
friend
companion
soul mate
confidant
compadre
buddy
pal
sidekick
classmate
teammate
player
competitor
contestant
opponent
opposition
rival
antagonist
belligerent
combatant
enemy
foe

Here's Stephen Merritt on "fatigue:" "'Tiredness' and 'sleepiness' are synonyms representing the need for sleep, while 'drowsiness' conveys mental impairment; 'languor' is a pleasant sleepiness. 'Lethargy' and 'torpor' are extreme sleepiness. 'Exhaustion' is extreme fatigue, or extreme weariness or lack of energy."

WOW!

The real gem of the book, I mean the thing that finally blows people's minds out of their butts when you show it to them, is this crazy middle section called "Thematic Lists." These are enormously extensive lists. Just that: lists. Separated by all kinds of themes. "Animals" has sub-headings "amphibians" "birds" etc., then "birds" has subheadings "birds of prey" "chickens and ground birds" "seabirds" "penguins", then for example "penguins" has items: african jackass, blue, chinstrap, emperor, fairy, humboldt, macaroni, etc. Then "mammals", already a subheading of "animals," has its own subheadings of "bears" "cats" with subheadings "domestic cats" and "wild cats." There are dogs (affenpinscher, afghan hound, airedale, akita, alaskan malamute, basenji, basset hound, beagle, bearded collie, bedlington terrier), WILD dogs (arctic wolf, brush wolf, cross fox, dingo, jackal, swift fox, wolf), horses, marsupials, primates, rodents, and seals. There are whales (beluga, cochito, irrawaddy, hourglass dolphin, grampus, rough-toothed dolphin, tucuxi, white whale), "spiders and other arachnids," gastropods, cephalopods, crustaceans. Also dinosaurs (allosaurus, ankylosaurus, baryonyx, utahraptor, zigongosaurus).

Then there are architectural styles, apartments, houses, rooms, windows.

Clothing/coats and jackets/dresses/headgear/pants (baggies, bell-bottoms, bicycle shorts, britches, chinos, culottes, dungarees)

Dances, Drinks, Liqueurs, Liquors, Teas

Fashion, fabric, gemstones, hairstyles

Desserts: Cakes: baba au rhum, babka, mooncake, tea cake, vasilopita, wedding cake, whoopie pie

Furniture, Games, Geography

Rocks, Star Types, Winds

Language, Types of Poem (aubade, ballade, bucolic, chanson, clerihew, dirge, dithyramb)

Medicine, Psychiatric Illnesses, Doctors

Types of Jazz: acid, afro-cuban, barrelhouse, bebop

Plants, trees, flowers

Religions, Gods, Spirits, Myths

Science, Energy and Fuels, Engines, Tools (adze, air gun, allen wrench, frame saw, space, turret lathe, wrench)

Transportation: Horse-Drawn Carriages: barouche, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, hansom, phaeton, trap, troika

Then there are just lists of "archaic words" (ague, ambuscade, animalcule, bedlam, blackguard, crinkum-crankum, dandiprat, doxy, forsooth, lief, physic, picaroon, piepowder, quaggy, quidnunc, quoth, varlet, zounds), and "literary words" (accursed, achromatic, adamantine, lachrymose, lacustrine, nexcient, noisome, gloaming, vainglorious, revenant, thew).

Nothing in the world has ever made me love my mother tongue so much. If you have ever needed a thesaurus, I urge you to purchase this one, which last time i checked was on sale on amazon. No other thesaurus compares, I promise you. This thesaurus is to thesaurus.com as a Big Mac is to your mother's home-cooked lasagna where she hand-made all the pasta herself. And don't even get me started on the "Synonyms" your Microsoft Word offers you.

Thesaurus talk!

Now I have to go to CVS and buy a rubber bulb for nasal irrigation.

Best sentence ever? I just wrote a poem! A TRUE POEM

By Regarding @ 9:14 AM | Comments (3)

hope that I get old before I die

February 5, 2010 | Comments (2) | Permalink

How my glasses make me feel:
When I'm awake and up and it's light out and they're off, I realize how long it's been since I was last awake with them off (months; years?). Then I get sad, I realize, this is who I really am--this is how I really see the world. I spend 85% of my time staring at a glowing rectangle through thick lenses. My world is always mediated.

My old man likes to tease me, when my glasses are off in the morning in bed. "Can you see my face? What about now? How many fingers am I holding up?" He is always surprised anew to find how close he can be to me and still be a blur.

I remember getting my very first glasses. I was seven years old, and they came in the mail and my dad brought them to me at school. They were pink. I thought it was so cool, to have glasses. Nobody else had glasses. I of course was not thinking about the lifelong handicap just beginning. And anyway, as far as handicaps go, in this day and age I'd say this is the most manageable one. Still, to be so supremely handicapped should always give one pause. All the glasses-wearers of the world think sometimes to themselves of fires and cataclysms, of midnight rapes, and how helpless they would be. I think of Piggy breaking his glasses and then clinging desperately to the one lens still un broken but then everyone stole it anyway to make fire with and then Piggy totally got murdered.

I sometimes think I should write my prescription down on an ID bracelet so if the world ends I could break into an optometrist's office and find some contacts that matched my needs.

In conclusion: when I get me some money, I'm getting laser surgery. What's the point of advancements in medical science if you don't use them to make your life more awesome? And when I get laser surgery, I'm going to
- buy a real pair of sunglasses
- go swimming
- wake up in the night and go walk around the house like it's no big deal
- fall asleep laying on my side watching a movie
- bury my face in somebody's chest when they hug me
- play intense contact sports

By Regarding @ 7:51 AM | Comments (2)