Descartes before the horse

As promised, more dubious insights-- erm, meditations on Avatar... this time with 75% more links and up to three times the geekery!

Pandora is an interesting choice of nomenclature. Though I could write a hell of a lot on the myriad of mythology- and religion-based associations (fyi, Greek Pandora = Christian Eve), I'm going to go the less literature-grad-student route and talk about video games. To those familiar with recent PlayStation 3 games, this choice to call the planet Pandora is interesting because it's also the name of the alien planet in one of last year's big, hyped-up new releases, Borderlands. In fact, while there's certainly no conscious cross-pollination at work, there's more than a titular resemblance between the Pandora of Avatar and that of Borderlands. Both are fundamentally hostile places, both are populated by a particularly nasty breed of mammal-lizard hybrids¹, and both are home to a precious resource for which many humans would happily kill (though in Borderlands, that's actually a positive thing).

Of course, this kind of environment is far from new. Most sci-fi geeks pick up on the Dune thing right away. Additionally, the friend with whom I saw Avatar -- ironically, the same girl I saw Titanic with when it first came out! -- pointed out that the Na'vi are suspiciously similar to the Aiel in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy series, since, among other cultural overlaps, they also greet each other with the phrase, "I see you."

But gaming and sci-fi/fantasy have been eager bedfellows from the start, and given the title of the film, Cameron invites the gaming comparison first and foremost². Avatar the film is, after all, one giant, breathtaking, gravity-defying cut scene. Not that I mean to downplay my own enjoyment of it by putting it in these terms. I simply mean that Cameron has tapped into the whole "immersive" idea so often talked about with reference to video games and made it a big-screen reality. I spent much of the movie with thumbs tingling for a controller, and when Jake first gets to inhabit his avatar body and takes it for a barefooted jog, I totally teared up. In a sense, we're all Jake Sullys, living dull gray lives, dragging around dull gray limbs that don't function nearly as well as we want them to, and the idea of having a fantastical meat puppet to play with is what makes first-person shooters like Borderlands³ so addictively fun. Not only are you controlling a character, but in some ways you are that character, and you live and die through his/her experience.

What appeals to me about both Cameron's concept of the avatar and the gaming equivalent is something I've been interested in since I first saw Ghost in the Shell⁴. In Avatar, it's safe to say that Jake Sully gets the easy way out of the human-or-avatar conundrum. I don't want to drop spoilery spoilers, but let's just say he gets his gigantoid blue avatar and eats it, too. In contrast, Ghost in the Shell deals with the matter at a much higher philosophical level, engaging both Descartes' evil demon problem and the larger issue of the brain in the vat. What would it really mean for someone to inhabit an avatar? Would they go crazy wondering which part of their life, the avatar-life or the human-life, is the true one? And even after they'd made their choice to be one or the other, would they forever be haunted with thoughts that maybe, just maybe, a part of their true self, their "ghost" or whathaveyou, is forever stuck on the other side of the fence?

Obviously, it's not an ontological dilemma we'll be faced with anytime soon (I can turn the damn console off anytime I want, I swear!), but as technology advances, it might. I still wonder whether I'd be the kind of intrepid soul who'd jump aboard the virtual reality/cyborg body boat (I always take this rhetorical position in arguments about the brain in the vat or cyborgs in general), or whether, probably more in line with what I actually know about my own psychic limitations, I'd be unable to go through with it.

One last word on Borderlands. I've been waxing rhapsodic over the cover art for quite some time now, and here it is for your viewing pleasure:



Aside from the lovely Mad Max nod, I think it brilliantly encapsulates a certain facet of the gaming experience that's not often discussed by serious gamers who try desperately to sell the idea of gaming as serious business; that is, the gleeful nihilism, the sheer joy of literally melting your brain cells by engaging in hours upon hours of killing pixels. Now I'm wondering if my reading it this way doesn't provide an insightful Rorschach test into my own overly-conscious consciousness, and if someone (an ex-Marine, let's say...) who'd just see it as "Cool pic, bro," wouldn't be a hell of a lot more suited for a cyborg body in the first place.

¹Compare the skag of Borderlands to the thanator from Avatar. Essentially the same chimerical beastie.

²It's a shame that the actual game tie-in to the movie turns out to be, anecdotally, a piece of shit, but I think that just goes to show how much money, technology, and personal investment are available to the movie industry and not the gaming industry, despite the fact that games are capable of meeting or exceeding movie profits.

³To the purists: yes, yes, I know. It's not quite entirely an FPS; it's also an RPG. Get over yourselves.

⁴For the anime neophyte: this series originated in manga, moved to the small screen, then spawned movies, video games, and gave the Wachowski brothers the idea for The Matrix. The premise is fairly simple: William Gibson-like cyberpunk future, cyborg bodies. The protagonist, a busty ass-kicking babe, was outfitted with a cybernetic body at age 9, and the series revolves around the question of whether or not she truly has a "ghost" or soul.

SCIMITAR (err, Avatar)

I have every reason in the world to hate Avatar. For starters, there's this whole debate about Hollywood's downright uncomfortable portrayal of race, which points out that the storyline is essentially a mash-up of Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, Pocahantas, and The Last Samurai. Which is true. There's also this argument from Slate's Movie Club, from which I quote this pithiest of insights:

One of Avatar's many unintentional ironies (they have to be unintentional, right?) is how, even though it's about the use of technology to transcend technology and return to a noble precapitalist Eden, the movie itself is a triumph of both technology and capitalism.

Amen. These are just a few of the critical strands that raise my hackles and make me want to dismiss the whole thing as a corporate monstrosity whose sole purpose is to sell Big Macs to obese suburban youngsters. Oh, and let's not forget this. On a whim, I just Googled "Avatar orientalism," and this was the first hit (note to self: stop worrying so much if your mom/PhD adviser/landlord reads your blog and just make it available to search engines, already -- at this very minute, someone out there is desperately Googling "falling Paul de Man strip-mall" and coming up woefully empty-handed!). That blog post doesn't specifically mention Chateaubriand or his seminal work in the native-girl-makes-good genre, Atala, but when I first saw the splashy posters of Zoe Saldana all pliant and seductive-eyed, I immediately thought of that, mixed in with the Persians from 300, and how everyone got all up in arms about their overt sexualization -- but, of course, a girl being sexualized in Hollywood is like falling off a log, so.

As I said, I have every reason to hate Avatar. Every reason to walk out halfway through when I went to watch it tonight, in all its ridiculous 3D glasses glory. But, no. I sat through the whole thing -- and grinned like a blithering idiot through all two hours and forty minutes of it.

Here's the thing that no review of Avatar will tell you about Avatar: spoiler alert! it's about American cultural mythology. I know, I know... you might protest that I always reduce things to American cultural mythology, possibly because I still don't feel fully 100% integrated into your Borg or whatever, and that's just how I happen to approach your strange, inscrutable culture. But this time, I really mean it. Avatar is a glorious paean to America's perception of itself, in full-on technicolor rainbow capitalist mass-market new hoozit splendor. And guess what? Spoiler alert! America is pretty fucking cool.

But let's be clear here. There are ways of showcasing America's perception of itself that lack any self-awareness or sophistication, but unwittingly expose the ugly reality behind blind, narcissistic jingoism. Avatar is a far more nuanced exploration of the hidden binary framework behind America The Allegedly Beautiful, and in a way this answers some of the criticism about the storyline being dated and redundant. At heart, Avatar does what all those other movies (Dances with Wolves, espcially) do, but much more balls-out extravagantly, by merging the two archetypes nearest and dearest to American hearts: cowboys and Indians. And somewhere in that unstable melange, a nation was born -- or, perhaps more accurately, a nation's belief about itself, which is no less powerful.

Allow me to elaborate. The main character of the film, Jake Sully, is a typical American cowboy. Now, when I think of the archetypal American cowboy, I don't necessarily think Clint Eastwood or John Wayne; no, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s, and the first mental image that cowboy-as-archetype conjures up in my mind is that scene from Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know the one. Indy is in the marketplace, fighting all sorts of devilish Arabic bad guys (I'll hold off on the orientalist critique on this one, because it's fucking Indiana Jones, okay?), and just as he's done demolishing all of the lesser minions, the big boss with the scary swords comes out to play. Big Boss does an impressive sword routine, almost certainly taught to him by his father, and his father's father, and etc. etc. And then Indy pulls out a pistol and shoots him in the face^*.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is an American cowboy. He has no time for silly rituals, costumes, or tribal dances. He's not going to play by centuries-long rules, because he recognizes their inherent absurdity. And that, like it or not, is why America is on top of the game of global domination. It doesn't play by the rules. It doesn't really care about your Tree of Life, or your fuzzy-wuzzy quasi-Taoist global ecology movement, and especially not about your stupid glow-in-the-dark Ancestors. It just comes along, shoots you in the face, and gets what it wants for it and its own. And that's who Jake Sully is. He breaks the rules. Spoiler alert! He tames the big fucking dragon that nobody else can tame, because instead of cowering in fear, he just flies a little higher and jumps on the back of that sucker. And hell, that's obviously why the hottest chick in the village falls for him. Why else would she risk life, limb, and tribe for some ghostwalking schmuck? Why? Because we girls love our Dirty Harrys and our Indiana Joneses, and all those other untameable bad boys who might break our hearts, and who just need some sweet, sensual, monogamous-for-life-because-the-Tree-of-Life-SAID-so lovin'. Or so I've heard.

But, obviously, the cowboy thing is not all there is to Jake Sully. And, as I've mentioned, it's always that noble savage, doe-eyed native girl -- from Atala to Pocahantas -- who's instrumental in coaxing it out. Because the cowboy thing is not all there is to America, either. America loves its unrepentant opportunists, but it also loves the underdog. Again, see here. I'm not sure if this is the product of a long-standing colonial/continental inferiority complex, but there's definitely a hidden streak in the American popular imagination that gets off on thumbing its nose to "the man." The scrappy underdog versus slick establishment dynamic is omnipresent in Hollywood film, perhaps nowhere more clearly than that other great Harrison Ford franchise, Star Wars. The battle between Empire and rebellion has been the building-block of countless features, both big and small screen (the brilliant Firefly being an outstanding representation of the latter), and this dynamic relies to some extent on the sheer, ridiculous hopelessness of the battle (arrows and dragons and Nature against machine guns, yeah sure) but most importantly on the inevitable triumph of blithe idealism, no matter how absurd. And it's this tree-hugging, grassroots-network-forming, Obama-electing, kinder-gentler facet of America that saves it from being a complete monster. Because while America may steal your land and plow over your civilization, it will still continue to offer its children the attractive alternative of saying to hell with it, jumping ship, and going native. All the unobtainium in the world (seriously, UNOBTAINIUM; surreptitiously add that to the list of reasons why I should hate this movie) can't buy the things Jake Sully really wants. He wants to live free, to fly, to run, and to sex his hot 8-foot-tall blue girlfriend. He doesn't want to be generalissimo of the space brigade, or the head honcho of a big multinational corporation, or an orthodontist. He doesn't even really want to be chieftain of the Na'vi tribe. What he really wants is what this movie sells to you for a measly 10 bucks (with free 3D glasses! Does not include the price of popcorn): visceral pleasure. And on that front, it delivers. In buckets.

This is getting about as absurdly long and bloated as your average James Cameron fare, so I'll leave possible talk of the geeky-gamer implications (aka my favorite topic ever: CYBORG BODIES) for a future entry and close by giving the final word to Science. Sort of. According to Google, one hit of acid costs about 10 dollars. Avatar cost about 200 million dollars to make. So, if 200,000 people go see this movie instead of taking a hit of acid -- which is essentially what this tripped-out glo-light thrill-ride accomplishes -- the US economy will actually benefit, because that money will leave the realm of untaxed under-the-table transactions. And this is why James Cameron spending the GDP of a small nation on one movie makes sense. Yes. At least, I think this is how economics works. I don't know; I just read books.

^*May not be actual shot in the face: this scene comes to you from the working memory of my eight-year-old self

Tranche de vie

There is exactly one (1) good thing about New England winters. It is as follows: after the sun has set and the sky is dark, there is an occasional perfect melding of light, nature, and man-made contrivance, such that a smooth carpet of snow -- virgin white, totally unsullied by the vulgar gaping cavities of footprints -- is gently illuminated by the powdery pink-and-blue rococo tinges of strip-mall neon. It's as if these exact hues, which had just minutes earlier been present in the twilit wintry sky, bled out of the heavens and into the very earth itself, leaving the former black and blustery and the latter quietly luminescent.

Other than that, New England winters can pretty much suck it.

Of all the many affronts to human dignity that this world of ours offers, none are quite so painful as the remnants of heavy and prolonged snowfall. It is only then that the veil of modern convenience is ripped away from us, and we are exposed to the reality of a universe that has no concern for our safety, well-being, or sock dryness. It is also this time of year that highlights the reality of America's pedestrian existence as the halfhearted sham that it is. Sure, in summer, we can pretend that it's no problem to take public transit and trundle around to get where needs going. But in winter, all you need do to realize your pitiful place in the navigational hierarchy is look at the sad, neglected state of most sidewalks: caked in the yellow-gray detritus of snow plows, under which lurks the menacing frozen ooze of ankle-breaking ice. In stark contrast, a mere hour after the flakes start falling, the roads are as meticulously salted as the hallowed ground of Carthage. Thanks a lot, "America's Walking City!"

Obviously, I took my first long snow walk today, and obviously, I fell. Of the many affronts to human dignity that this world of ours offers, the absolute hands-down worst is slipping and falling on ice. Actually, probably the very, very worst moment in all of existence is that infinitesimally short instant when you realize that the ground you've stepped on is not the solid footing your boot was searching for. You know what's coming, and though you might splay out your arms to steady yourself, or make some sort of "oh oh ohgawd" noise to draw the attention of helpful passers-by or, at the very least, friendly dogs who might summon help, in the end you are powerless to stop your body's downward momentum. Paul de Man, with his esoteric interpretations of Schlegel and Benjamin, links falling with irony -- according to him, just as the fall makes us momentarily terrified that we will henceforth exist in a perpetual state of falling, so, too, does one instance of irony open up the possibility that everything around us is ironic and therefore chaotic, meaningless, absurd. Every time I fall, all I can think of is de Man's smug Belgian face breaking into an "I told you so!" grin, and then shuffling off to go mutter something pejorative about the Jews. Well, screw you, too, de Man. I like Benjamin better, anyway.

Діаспора

Let the record state: I love subcultures. Big ones, small ones, ones as big as your head. I love the simultaneous exclusivity and community-building of flashily displayed signifiers, be they dyed hair, Ed Hardy T-shirts, Timberland boots, or LOLspeak. My favorite thing about spending time in large, open areas through which herds of people migrate -- airports, train stations, mall food courts -- is watching the unspoken interaction of all these signifiers, the chaotic jostling of colors and brands. I especially love the zeal showcased by the younger members of the species, whose entire bodies, in spite of an insistent outward display of boredom, act like quivering antennae, submitting a dozen urgent signals to everyone in range: Hello, world. I may look young, but I'm actually really into The Clash, and also I like old-school gaming systems, but not ironically, unlike this SpongeBob T-shirt, which is sort of ironic, but if you look closely, you'll see there's actually a delicate vein of innocent, childlike love, too, which you'll find I also exhibit in relationships, and you may find charming if you're the Prince Charming type. But as evidenced by this studded belt, I'm obviously too smart to fall for the Disney princess cliche, because I'm actually very mature for my age. Even though it has very little to do with what I'm working on for my PhD, my favorite work done in an academic setting has been stuff on subcultures, and despite feeling somewhat dated, the Bibles of my inner bibliography include such sine qua nons as Dick Hebdige and Greil Marcus (unabashed shill for Lipstick Traces, the wackiest, most engrossing pseudo-academic, quasi-Marxist, mostly-memoiristic cultural study ever published by Harvard University Press).

...which is probably why I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to diaspora communities; aka, the reified remains of old foreign subcultures.

I've never seen it cohesively stated, but I'm almost certain that someone has already made the comparison between marginal ethnic communities and contemporary subcultures. The similarities are too seductive: both arise as a product of a too-broad and thus somewhat alienating dominant culture. For ethnic communities, it's the big multiethnic empires of the past two centuries (which is why Bavarians, with their Weißwurst and lederhosen, seem so much more authentically German than the cosmopolitan Berliners, giving us two German archetypes in the American popular consciousness -- quaint, robust lederhosen-clad peasants and soulless Bauhaus urbanites in black turtle-necks), and for subcultures, it's the global juggernaut of bourgeois conformity and capitalist mass culture. Also, both are created by a system of signifiers that turn the dominant hierarchies on their heads -- for example, ethnic communities subvert the official state religion by injecting it with old pagan practices, and subcultures revel in taking ordinary objects (sneakers, safety pins) and turning them into signs of rebellion. And, finally, both are selectively celebrated and repressed, according to the political climate of the day. Sometimes, it's in the dominant culture's favor to trot out the subculture as a symbol of diversity and freedom, and other times the subculture represents too much of a challenge to the universalizing rhetoric of the dominant culture and needs to be stamped out. Sometimes, the time-table for these cultural mood swings is incredibly narrow: one day, Stalin is singing the praises of the diverse Soviet nationalities, and the next, it's terror and the Gulag for Jews, Gypsies, and Ukrainians. Similarly, one day the Putin administration is heaping scorn on the cultural degeneracy of the Western-influenced Russian rap phenomenon, and the next day, this:



So, okay, the affinities are legion, but what complicates the matter is when ethnic communities emigrate and form diaspora communities, which are a strange hybrid of the ethnic and cultural categories. Take, for instance, this New York Times article on Veselka, the East Village Ukrainian diner. There are repeated mentions of hippies and beatniks who used to frequent the place in the 60s -- ostensibly, for the Counterculture Grand Central location and good, cheap food. But, obviously, I think there's more to it than that. I think subcultures naturally gravitate to ethnic joints because their signifying systems are extremely compatible. Moreover, these days, both the New York subcultures and Veselka have gone mainstream; the place was featured in the abysmal Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, for god's sake. Age-old story: something a few people love becomes something marketed to the masses, and all of a sudden you get Michael Cera selling you a Hollywood hipster fairy-tale.

Which brings me to my last point about the similarities between ethnic and contemporary subcultures: an uncomfortable dynamic of authenticity and artifice. Contemporary subcultures, as constantly evolving, living-breathing things, tend to cycle through signifiers at a dizzying rate. While it's fun to trace their trajectories (the reggae of the British slums moving to high-class London art students moving to American rock bands moving to Bob Marley posters on 1 out of 3 college students' walls), it's hard to ignore the artifice behind the whole subcultural enterprise. For instance, there may be some small percentage of early adopters or true aficionados who could argue that reggae was their music, or that punk was their style, but for the majority of the members of these subcultures, it was theft, pure and simple. Of course, that's part of the fun -- would dyeing your hair electric red and pretending to be an alien be so captivating if it weren't for the underlying acknowledgment of ridiculousness, sham, performance? But artifice and ethnic community don't mesh quite so well. Part of the marginalized ethnic project is, again, to continually insist on the authenticity of its cultural experience, in contrast to the artifice of the dominant culture. In diaspora communities, this insistence on authenticity continues to play out -- except the dominant culture is now American mass culture, with the ethnic acting as the marker of authenticity against the conformity of corporate capitalism. See: Gogol Bordello.

As someone with a toe in both worlds, I find the overlap equal parts fun and disturbing. Fun because, hey, my personality was forged in ethnic kitsch, and there will always be some part of me that gets off on foreignness as elite, exclusive subculture. But also disturbing, because this just hammers home how tendentious culture really is, and how insignificant ethnicity really is, except in self-deluding fantasy. And these days, I'm more comfortable with that level of self-delusion in the form of an American teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt, rather than a folk costume, if for no other reason than the disposability and mutability of the former as compared to the latter. But maybe that's just the impending citizenship test talking.

Fuck the police: three ways

In Postwar (a breathtakingly thorough overview of European history since WWII), Tony Judt makes an interesting claim about the progression of popular culture in the 60s and 70s. According to Judt, immediately following the violent, radicalized, leftist youth movements of 1969 -- the French student movements, American civil rights, second-wave feminism, various Marxist and pseudo-Marxist organizations -- came the much more solipsistic, hedonistic wave of the Sexual Revolution. Judt is fairly skeptical of the purity of the former trend, but the latter is clearly even more of a problem in his eyes, representing as it does the full-on self-indulgence and navel-gazing of the adolescent Baby Boomer.

While I was reading Postwar over the summer, "Mrs. Officer," that Lil Wayne song, was on heavy rotation on the radio. Arguably the best lyric in that song is, of course: "And all she want me to do is fuck the police." (Ha ha because it's about wanting to have sex with a female police officer, get it?) So, with Judt in mind, I wonder if it's not so outlandish to say that radicalism is generally replaced by a decadent period of sex and solipsism. When NWA first sang "fuck the police," it was all about violent machismo mixed with political subtext, heavily in line with the aesthetic principle of a Weather Underground^* or Black Panthers-style organization, but already declawed enough to venture into the mainstream. Today, when Lil Wayne sings his version of "fuck the police," it's self-conscious, childishly naughty, and totally harmless -- on par with the saccharine sex of early disco or the stage antics of Sir Elton John.

When I first thought of this brilliant cultural analogy, I saw the Lil Wayne "fuck the police" moment in Judt's terms: a degenerate version of the slightly (only slightly) more "pure" NWA moment. But when I was reminded of it by Ryan over brunch today, his argument for the Lil Wayne version really stuck. Ryan was much more willing to give self-indulgence the benefit of the doubt, and I can see his point about it being more honest with respect to the whole enterprise of pop music in general. By the time NWA came out with that song, rap was already appearing on MTV, marketed toward a suburban, white audience, and thriving on the manufactured controversy. Lil Wayne's whole "Young Money" project, in contrast, is unapologetic in its anti-topicality. From start to finish, it's pure, childish fantasy -- youth culture at its most honest and, arguable, at its best.

Which brings me to "Fuck the Police" mark 3: the 2001 song by J Dilla. So, a new iteration of the cycle through a return to radical, politically-conscious machismo? The circle of life, it moves us all?

^*Ironically, but further bolstering my rap dichotomy, the "Weathermen" moniker is being used today by a contemporary rap group recycling the NWA-like sound and ideology.

Edumacation

Kids want "practical" college majors; smart people collectively roll eyes.

Disclaimer: I'm coming at this from an elite Ivy League angle. In theory, I can see how more trade-school-type majors might actually be great for kids who aren't shooting for upper corporate management or presidential candidacy. In theory. In practice, I'm pretty sure "practical" majors at state universities will become the next decade's "Computer Science" (too broad, totally useless) or "Animal Husbandry" (too specialized, totally useless), and will just end up swindling and short-changing an underqualified, overeager, superfluous workforce.

I hear this kind of stuff coming from my students all the time -- they're all experts on the national rankings of every major and the star professors of every field, rattling off the pros and cons ("Econ will eat your soul, but you'll be rich," "nobody in their right mind majors in Art," "the only good thing about VES is free pizza") like talking heads on cable news networks. I figured this was just an Ivy thing, but I guess there's also a generational difference at work. When I went to college, I had absolutely no clue what rankings were. I was more interested in the New Orleans music scene, Mardi Gras, and, as a distant third, less-commonly taught languages. It also never entered into my head to plan a major that fed into a career. I took classes because I thought they were interesting, challenging, or both. Not to say this attitude toward higher learning was the norm or that it's actually ideal; it presupposes a certain personality type -- absent-minded professor, let's say -- that works for naturally grad-school-minded individuals, not ambitious go-getters who keep the world functioning. But it still dampens my spirits every time I hear a student with mind-blowing writing skills and an impeccable aesthetic eye express doubt in a Humanities major, because it's not highly ranked and won't set him/her on a career conveyor belt like neuro-bio-econo-whatever. In my darker moments, I wonder what's the point of teasing these kids with poetry or Russian novels, if it's all just a distraction from problem sets and lab reports?

The biggest problem with the "practical" undergrad major at a top-ten school, though, is that it doesn't actually teach anything. A class with 300 students, four TFs, and one dazzling star professor has all the heuristic sophistication of a feeding tube. Information goes in, and the same information, hastily chewed and poorly digested, churns right back out. But what use is information these days? Anyone can be a temporary expert in anything, and anyone can write (or assemble, or buy) a paper on any popular subject. On the surface, everyone wins: the star professor promotes his/her new book, and the students all get As (or, at the very least, B-, the "gentleman's F" of the Ivy Leagues). In reality, though, these kids increasingly think they're experts in their field and expect to be treated and paid accordingly, when they've just barely scraped the scummy surface of reality with one baby-pink toenail.

In a class with ten students on a subject that isn't "practical" and popular, the game totally changes. Instead of assembling a jigsaw puzzle of jargon, they're suddenly expected to think, rethink, and, in the process, generate the themes of the course on their own -- something that many students coming from conveyor-belt fields are totally incapable of doing. Not to rehash the somewhat tired arguments of this article by William Deresiewicz, but there's definitely a tendency toward groupthink, playing it safe, not rocking the boat at major universities, and given the radical, idealistic history of the American institution of higher learning, it's dispiriting to see the Polo-wearing contingent confidently taking over. I mean, they've been there all along, but at least they knew about Machiavelli, Marx, and Matisse along with marketing.

On anti-intellectualism

I have this problem. I think of it as my Savonarola side, named for the fifteenth-century monk who called for the bonfire of the Renaissance vanities and made famous the phrase "Vanitas vanitatum," which I kind of want tattooed somewhere on my body (Irony Win). The Savonarola side of me often kicks in late at night, after I've had a few drinks and have managed to extract myself, whether physically or mentally, from whatever social entanglement has come my way -- dinner with friends, rollicking house party, or even quiet evening alone with the husband. Suddenly, an internal switch flips, and all I can think is how incredibly repetitive and futile are all the conversations that human beings tend to take up: politics, religion, art, life. Everything becomes a tasteless gray mush of words, chewed and rechewed till stripped of all vital juices. And this ruminant cud gets passed from one mouth to the next with such revoltingly gleeful self-importance that I just want to drop out of the human project entirely, go live in a cave or a newspaper lined trash-bag cocoon somewhere far from the madness. I know how trite and childish it sounds, but, unfortunately, I also know some very un-trite and decidedly un-childish folks who had the same idea. Diogenes, among others.

The funny thing is, my religion-obsessed father has expressed an eerily similar sentiment. During a drunken rant at last summer's family gathering, he said he was glad to know there were acetic monks living in caves somewhere, because their piety was probably keeping the world from going straight to apocalyptic hell. When pressed on the matter ("If you like them so much, why don't you become one?"), he said he wished he could, but was just too weak -- read: too enmeshed in the meager pleasures of the bourgeois lifestyle, the regular paycheck and modest house and nuclear family. Well, minus the fundamentalist religious streak, I tend to feel the same way. If I had an ounce more testicular courage, I'd give the finger to my secure career path and go herd sheep in Argentina, because, at heart, I don't have much more faith in the purity of the organized intellectual pursuit than I do in corporate law or investment banking. Unfortunately, the play-it-safe bourgeois in me always seems to win, and it's only in dark moments of self-flagellation that I let Savonarola come out and put a match to my personal stacks of crepe and tissue tchotchkes, the pretty intellectual idols I've accumulated and used to decorate my inner chambers.

It's not that I hate intellectual endeavors, or the people who pursue them. I have massive respect for those few brave souls who manage to combine intellectual proclivities with an equally strong capacity for enthusiasm and love toward their arbitrary field of choice. Those are, hands down, my favorite kind of people. The problem is, in spite of everything, I've never felt like one of them. I can't quite get myself to see the forest for the trees, and the one big tree of knowledge is that we're all going to fucking turn to worm food one fine day, so why even bother. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

In other news, Happy New Year!