Vacation-time Fun

We went to see the beautiful film "Atonement" this afternoon in Emeryville after a leisurely day with the family. Ba and Lolo called this morning at 10:00 to ask if we wanted to join them for Belgian waffles.

We went together down to the Grand Lake farmers' market and got a mess of delicious waffles from the Waffle Mania truck there. I teased the owner that I had high standards since I'd tried waffles on the streets of Bruxelles, but he didn't seem fazed and I wasn't disappointed. Apparently the authentic yeasted dough is shipped directly from Belgium.* The finished waffles have a crispiness, sweetness, and caramelization that make them unlike anything you've had in an American style waffle, even most of those that get called "Belgian waffles". If you're a Bay Area person, try them. If you're not, then you'd better just high-tail it to Oakland or Brussels, whichever works better for you.

(Photo borrowed without permission from a fellow blogger and waffle enthusiast in Marin.)

We washed down the waffles with some fine Hawaiian coffee. Then we came home and Mom made some more food, fried eggs and ham leftover from Christmas eve. By then it was about time to take a nap. Then we went down for the film, which was excellent, and went out to Yoshi's for delicious sushi and other Japanese specialties.

Tomorrow I head to Yosemite for New Years. We'll bring in the new year with hiking, snowshoeing, and cozy games with a friendly group in a hotel room in El Portal. And then, shortly after driving back to the Bay Area on the 1st, it'll be back to Michigan, lickety-split, to start the new semester.

Below is a taster of the beauty of Yosemite, borrowed from a fellow blogger. Yosemite falls is one of our favorite hikes in the area.


*For more press on Waffle Mania, see this article in the Marin Independent Journal.

Why don't you write about your family?

"Why don't you write about your family?" my mother asks. I've been home for a few days now, and it's clear that she's a bit hurt that I don't seem to deem it worthy of a few lines of type.

She doesn't seem to understand the nature of my blogging, the source from which this writing emerges.

Years ago, I started journaling when I was a junior high school kid in an English class where we were required to keep journals. The habit stuck, and I continued for years after that to maintain paper journals, writing at least every few days, sometimes including photographs, clippings, collages, rough drawings in pastel, and whatever fit at the time. But mostly just writing. Poems, snatches of essays, straight diary entries. Sometimes what I would now call ethnography, though I didn't have that language at the time. I loved to ride the train and bus into San Francisco, watching people, meeting people I never would have known except through the unusual social networking mechanisms I had discovered, and writing about what I saw and experienced. And, being an adolescent, and struggling like all American adolescents with the odd social situation of adolescents in relation to the categories of child and adult, the inherent incongruencies and tensions, as well as the particularities of my own personal family situation at the time, I wrote a lot about my parents, most of it not very flattering.

I've gone through several incarnations of my own journal-writing since then. I started blogging many years ago, but I struggled with the public-private divide, the notion of "writing for an audience" and the essential functions of synthesis, memory stimulation, and the forging of personal meaning that I accomplished through my own journal-writing, which I didn't want to relinquish completely in shifting to an electronic medium and a public forum. I've had various ways of finding that balance in blogging, none of them entirely satisfactory, but all of them geared more toward my own needs than toward writing a narrative that would be appreciated, understood, and valued by a broad audience.

Since I've started this journal, the impetus behind the writing has been, largely, to give my family and friends in faraway places some idea of what my daily life is like in Michigan, since most of them have never been there. The loneliness and alienation that come with living so far away and doing the inherently solitary work of a doctoral student are sometimes rather difficult to bear, and I thought that this link might help to bridge the distance. (Not to say that Ph.D. work isn't also intensely social, and dependent on many, many people . . . but that's a whole other conversation!) The bottom line is that it's fun to write sometimes, and engage in a conversation about whatever random connections I'm making between my studies and my conversations in everyday life and the deluge of media images and narratives that inundate us every day in our modern existence in the West. And particularly since I made my move to the country, I wanted to capture for myself something about the reconfiguration of life that I've been trying to engage in, to document the beauty of the world around me, and in the process, to remember something of what a spiritual life, a life of living deliberately, means for me.

To write about the people I know, in detail, to provide biographies and images, pushes the envelope for me in terms of where that balance between public and private ought to rest, and also, in my mind, violates in some way the autonomy of the actors in my life to choose the degree of privacy or publicity they wish to live in.
I never forget as I'm writing here that this is not only a space for my family, but also one viewable by anyone who happens to pass by here. And that has an impact on the ethics of representation, if the writing and images are not only for me and my inner circle.

It's only my dearest friends and family who understand the deep love and ambivalence with which I always approach my home in California. It's situated entirely in the context of experiences only they know. So that is one reason it just doesn't make much sense to write about my family in terms of the purpose of this journal.

But there's more, too. That image above is one I know my mother will hate. My loved ones never seem to love the images of them that have meaning for me. They always see the flaws, the awkwardness, the misplaced hairs. And I see the joy and love in the eyes, the downy softness of the rose-colored robe Mom is wearing when I hug her good morning, the coffee we share with no one else around, the pajamas just like the soft gray ones I wear on these intimate mornings with just the two of us.

The beloved image only I carry with me in my mind -- that is the only one I think is worth conveying, but it isn't necessarily the one to be published for an audience. So I'd rather stay silent, sometimes, than write something inauthentic for the masses. We live so much of our lives before a public. The version of ourselves that we are in the world that we mark for ourselves as private, and the tenor our lives take on in this context, are often the ones with the most meaning for us. I'd rather just live in that than try to reshape it for an audience.

In other words, Mom, I love you most especially the way you are with me.

No place like home for the holidays.

Let's come together

I found out about this advertisement for the EU arts subsidy program through a particularly funny Wait Wait Don't Tell Me this past weekend.

Lone walker on the lake

A shot from the lake shortly before I left Michigan.

I had thought all these shots got lost from my card; I was so delighted to find it was hiding out somewhere in the recesses.

Laura and I took Mancho out to Point Isabel today. It wasn't quite as stunning as usual given the overcast weather and the narrow path flanked by a chain-link fence protecting the newly seeded grass on one side and the caution tape preventing access to the polluted water on the other, due to the recent oil spill. It was the regular dog-fest, though, and we were particularly struck by a trio of incredibly massive dogs that probably came up to our bustlines, or perhaps just our waists. But anyway, they were the kind of dogs that sort of take your breath away. Two were silver-gray, one was brown. I don't know my breeds well enough to say what they were.

We talked about going dancing at Cocomo tonight, and I was planning on joining Brian in The City first and meeting his girlfriend Alison and joining them for a learning with the Mission Minion, but I think I'm in for the night. I picked up a bit of a cold in the chaos of the end of the semester and the travel and debauchery here, and now I just need to rest to get over my sore throat.

Family readers, I have posted new Christmas photos on Flickr. If you don't have an account, it's free and easy to create one so you can view them. Just write me a note so I know who you are :)

Home at last . . .

Merry Christmas, everybody.

It's a relief to be among friends and family and in the warmth of California. I slept for close to twelve hours today, and overate extraordinarily. A nice change from typical Michigan routine. I have a feeling this week is just what the doctor ordered. I've downloaded an offline blog editor that I'm experimenting with by the fireside in my mother's living room. I should be helping clean up some more, but instead I'm just sitting here, having finished a couple little glasses of Bailey's. From here I can hardly even see that the Christmas lights are decorating only the lower half of the tree. :) Dinner was scrumptious, roast beef and lots of vegetables rich from roasting in juices. Wishing you all joy and peace.

The eternally surprising discovery that is friendship.

All these years, I'd been misremembering a quote by Jean-Paul Sartre. I'd thought it was "Nous ne sommes riens qu'aux yeux des autres." But no.

« Nous ne sommes nous qu’aux yeux des autres, et c’est à partir du regard des autres que nous nous assumons comme nous » (see?)

(which is, approximately. . .) "We are not ourselves except in the eyes of others, and it's from the gaze of others that we assume the status of ourselves" (I'm a little unsure about this translation; "s'assumer comme quelquechose" is a turn of phrase that is so particular, I did some searching to see if anyone else had translated it, and ended up surfing to an academic article, not too surprisingly, about Simone de Beauvoir. And I found the wonderful passage:

"Now, what specifically defines the situation of woman is that she-a free and autonomous being like all human creatures-nevertheless discovers and chooses herself in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.3 They propose to turn her into an object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is for ever to be transcended by another consciousness which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject-which always posits itself as essential-and the demands of a situation which constitutes her as inessential." (SS, 29; DSa, 31; TA)

Following this characteristically beautiful writing by Beauvoir, Toril Moi offers the following interpretation:

"This is perhaps the single most important passage in The Second Sex, above all because Beauvoir here poses a radically new theory of sexual difference. While we are all split and ambiguous, she argues, women are more split and ambiguous than men. For Simone de Beauvoir, then, women are fundamentally characterized by ambiguity and conflict. The
specific contradiction of women's situation is caused by the conflict between their status as free and autonomous human beings and the fact that they are socialized in a world in which men consistently cast them as Other to their One, as objects to their subjects. The effect is to produce women as subjects painfully torn between freedom and alienation, transcendence and
immanence, subject-being and object-being. This fundamental contradiction, or split, in which the general ontological ambiguity of human beings is repeated and reinforced by the social pressures brought to bear on women, is specific to women underpatriarchy. For Beauvoir, at least initially, there is nothing ahistorical about this: when oppressive power relations cease to
exist, women will be no more split and contradictory than men."

The idea here is deeply suggestive to me about the existential situation of any group facing structural alienation, not only women on the basis of sex in a patriarchy, but also, for instance, the oppressed group in a colonial context. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's leave aside Beauvoir and Moi for the moment. And back to Sartre, which is what I meant to talk about in the first place. And to my life, which was really the starting point for all of this talk in the first place.

Last night was a magical dance of three active minds in the playground of my little cottage in the country, that lasted until past five o'clock in the morning. Katie and John came over sometime around nine or ten, on their way back from Jackson. When I heard they were coming, I pulled myself together a little after feeling rather funky all day long, and put a chocolate sour milk cake in the oven and mulled wine on the stove, with green cardamom, white pepper, cloves, cinnamon, a bay leaf, turbinado sugar, Grand Marnier, and some thinly sliced, succulently ripe Valencia orange. And together, we talked, laughed, ate, drank, read poetry aloud, listened our way through any and every kind of music you could think of, played music on the accordion and the guitar, unearthed old travel photographs hidden away in the vintage suitcase behind my sewing machine, told stories, opened books of anthropologists, womens studies scholars, biographers, and journalists, and ate a 3 am snack of cream of tomato soup with spinach and rye bread with stinky brie. I introduced them to palinka and slivovic, we finished off the fig brandy from Croatia in the plastic bottle I carried back from someone's garage on the southern part of the island of Krk, and we found recesses of the mind and life that, well, at least in my case, hadn't been dusted off or looked at in years.

And so, this morning, seeing their little note of thanks and the neatly folded blankets on my big red couch in the living room, and the thin photographic evidence of this whole experience that we accumulated, I couldn't help but think of Sartre. Because no matter what you imagine yourself to be, whatever layers of experience you accumulate in a lifetime, it never seems to have any meaning until you are yourself with others, and they see you, and you become yourself. So it isn't just hell that is other people. It's also heaven.


For more on this:
Ambiguity and Alienation in The Second Sex by Toril Moi. boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), pp. 96-112. doi:10.2307/303535 Link through jstor if you have institutional access.

I laughed with joy when I saw the photo of my dear friend Gul's beautiful little girl Ayla in the holiday greeting card she sent, complete with scribbles and the greeting that she misses me and wants to paint with me again. (Her little pink barrettes, and her long slender arms -- she's grown so much, she's not a baby anymore.) And then, I had the sudden and unexpected reaction of breaking down crying, hard. I want a little girl . . .

And I also want to hear from my sweetie.

And I think I've been pushing myself pretty close to the edge the past couple of weeks. And today was. . . a hard day.

I'll be good to be at home, methinks.

I got a card from Debs, too. Oh, I love the photos. You all look so nice. Mal looks so pretty in her dress with that beautiful necklace. And I can't get over what a sweet young man Michael is.

Even my neighbor sent me a Christmas card. And I still have the card sitting here I wrote and addressed to Sandy when she was in the hospital. I just can't keep up with correspondence anymore. It's so depressing, how life passes you by. I look in the mirror and wonder how another year has passed. At least my hair is growing back.

Loose ends

Well, just one more big messy hurdle to get through.

Or . . . one big messy day, three big messy hurdles. Return the student papers, finish out my time at AFG, and submit my field paperwork for my MSW.

It'll be nice to be back at AFG; just sad, since it'll mark the end of an era there. But I'll be back in January to do some more work on the evaluation. So the only difference will be no more clock ticking, no more surveillance of the same variety. I don't like to be surveilled.

I have submitted the student grades, submitted all my work for the time being, and am now sorting through the detritus of the end of the semester. I got to the bottom of the laundry hamper and realized two interesting, if slightly disturbing things: (1) I had clothes in there from Thanksgiving, which means I probably haven't done laundry since then, unless I did it and just left the handwashables at the bottom (which is possible, but in any case, I can't remember, and that in and of itself is kind of telling) and (2) my laundry was so cold, there is no doubt that it helps to insulate the wall the hamper sits against in my office. Hmm.

Well, now I have both the washing machine and the dishwasher running, and I'm debating what to do next. Something about having an intense stress-induced adrenaline rush for several days makes it a bit anticlimactic just to go to bed, though it probably would be wise. I feel a bit too pumped up for that, anyway, though. If I drive to the supermarket to buy O'Douls and get gas, though, I'll probably be done for the night. Well, at least I wouldn't have to stop for gas in the morning on the way to Detroit.

One option would be to work on my field paperwork now, but my arms are tingling from all the typing for days. So I probably shouldn't be blogging, either, I know.

I did buy a ticket to California, FINALLY. Hooray. And I've left enough time for me to clean up the house thoroughly before I go, so everything will be pristine and fresh and tidy and all my personal crap will be a little less overwhelming. So I pulled out a suitcase, and can finally start thinking about being a person who is something other than a teacher and a student and a social worker, for at least a few days.

Oh, just to give myself a sense of accomplishment, I just tallied up my writing I've done since Thanksgiving: 1 28-page paper, 7 pages of short response papers on readings, 1 23-page paper, 1 35-page paper, 1 8-page paper, and 1 page of prelim questions. That's 102 pages, and just shy of a hundred if you knock out title pages and bibliographic material. Nutty. And that doesn't even include comments on student papers, or emails, or blog writing. I guess it's been a productive few weeks. I'm not saying all of it is good. Heck, plenty of it isn't. But a little of it, I think, actually is.

Between that and the very exciting meetings with a few faculty members I love, I think I'm going to head off to California pretty blissed out despite all the last-minute stress of grading and running around for field placement.

Little victories

Well, having eaten enough to sustain a small village for a night or two (bacon and pierogie fried with onion right in the bacon grease, covered with sour cream, and washed down with a bottle of nonalcoholic beer, perfect food after working for two days straight with hardly a crumb in my stomach, and then trudging home in the snow), I'm going to bathe and go to bed for a few hours. I pulled my second all-nighter last night (okay, okay, I slept from 8 am til 1 pm on Monday and 5:40 to 8 am this morning, but that doesn't really count) to get the portfolio finished for my democracy course, but it is FINALLY in. I'm accepting incompletes in my independent studies, and have worked out the arrangements with the professors. Now, on to finish my undergraduate grading, and to magically make an ungodly number of field work hours and my final field work paperwork happen between now and Friday, and I'll be finished with this semester of craziness. Thank God I never have to be a first-time Anthropology 101 GSI ever again. Next time, it'll be the second. And that makes all the difference in the world!

By the way, my final paper for Democracy ended up being 35 pages. And you know, I feel pretty good about it. I hope she likes it too.

The other good news: I have a prelim committee forming, and prelim ideas being generated, for Social Work. And the whole team is people I think are amazing and fabulous and whom I love working with, and am excited to spend time getting to think with. And they seem enthusiastic too. About the ideas and about each other. Score. Like, major score. I just need to talk to the last of the four (four is the upper limit; three is typical and I've already got three on board), but assuming she has time, I'm pretty sure she'll be game, because I know she's positive about working with me although I haven't approached her specifically about prelims. She gave me an A+ in her class. So yeah, I think I can hope for her support. :) So, life is looking nice from here. Although it's a little blurry, since I need to rest my eyes. Now, on to the bath. Hello and good tidings to you, world.

Well, I just stayed up all night working. After staying home all weekend working. Now I'm going to catch a little snooze for a few hours, before I hopefully finish up my paper and the rest of the course portfolio for this class, so I can turn it in. I'm meeting one of my favorite professors at 3:00 today . . . and I'm just hoping I'm vaguely coherent for that.

Coulda woulda shoulda

I should have been in Budapest today.

But instead I am writing. Writing, writing, writing. It's late, but it's coming, finally.

'Tis good, though. I think that what I'm writing isn't crap. Lately that feeling is pretty unusual, I have to say. Actually, I think it might even be good. But it's early to tell.

It's taken me AGES to get through my field data from Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania to the point that I can make heads or tails of it. I didn't leave my house all weekend, and today only went as far as the cable company a few miles down the road to restore my troubled internet service. I filed away about two inches of papers into a three-inch binder, added tabs to six field notebooks, and have been creating indexes for myself. I feel like this is the kind of stuff they don't teach you. An archival methods course would be so handy. I know there are probably more intuitive digital ways of creating cross-referencing tools. But I'm just working with the skills and tools I've got. This is even before transcribing, which will add PILES and PILES to the data I've already got in the form of field notes, photographs, and documents from field contacts.

I've started making a more comprehensive database than I've had up until now, except the one in my head, and realized today that I probably have met at least a few hundred people "in the field" at this point who have something to do with my project. No wonder I feel a little loopy sometimes, and like I haven't had a real chance of synthesizing my life while I've been doing coursework. Thank God I took a semester to do independent study so I could start to process this, a little.

wordpainting

These things I see, I could not create if I tried . . .

A gruff man in a cowboy hat with a lit cigarette hanging in his mouth, sitting with the engine running in his tan metallic long-bed Ford pickup truck with a full load of firewood dusted with snow, waiting outside the cable company . . .

The golden stubs of a corn field poking their stalky fingers out of the thick blanket of white, against the fading pale pink horizon. . .

A weathered red barn, the wood in danger of collapse at any moment, against the stark winter landscape. . .

A tiny round bird resting beside a tuft of snow in the bare stalks of the hedge in my front yard . . .

The morning sight of a lone figure making his way on cross-country skis across the lake . . .

In the afternoon, another with a device like a massive corkscrew, shuffling on foot back from a center point where he has drilled, presumably to test the ice thickness for its readiness to hold the ice fishermen . . .

And then the narrow glimmering fingernail of moon rising in the pale blue arc of the sky at sunset over the cottage when I arrive home.

They are things I drink in every day, images I think I will carry in my heart for life. It is so very beautiful out here.

(Despite the 40 minutes of shoveling the driveway this morning . . .)

Japanese Video -- What to do if Mugged Abroad

Passed along to me by a Hungarian friend through Facebook. Oh, our wonderfully globally connected world is good for something. Apparently posted on YouTube by someone who found it on Kontraband.com.

I'm dreaming of a California Christmas . . . but it sure is white outside.

It is so incredibly snowy here, you would hardly believe it. But we're expecting up to 8 inches in Southeastern Michigan. And it looks like there already nearly that much piled up on the whole world around the cottage. It feels a little like being in a gingerbread house with icing piled up around it.

I've added some posts over the past couple of days to Our Lady of the Woods, a place I envision for environmentally-oriented posts, links to media reports, information about consumption, and so on. It may be artificially segmenting my life to section those things off, but I envision this spot as a little more personal -- not in the sense of more important to me, necessarily, but just more chatty, more about my quotidian life, and far less likely to be of general interest to someone who doesn't know me. Also, I know Mom is deeply disturbed by my Keeper, so this way she doesn't need to hear all about things like that if she doesn't want to. :)

I am sitting here hidden away in my winter wonderland, reading my field notes from Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, in 2006, trying to make sense of everything, and thinking about bonds, partnerships, "sweat equity," and participation in housing programs in Central and Eastern Europe. I love the idea of this paper, but it's going to be hard to pull it together in the next day. I seem to be headed in the direction of thinking about global housing builds as a simulated religious experience for international volunteers, drawing on Victor Turner as well as an outstanding book called Participation: The New Tyranny? edited by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari. I'm also going to be drawing on the readings for a course I took with Julia Paley last spring, on Democracy: Ethnography and Social Theory. Great class, great readings.

Now I just need to pull it all together . . . . and keep my mind calm while knowing that I still need to grade 15 more undergraduate papers, all (75) of the last quizzes, and check off the museum assignments of my students, and issue their final grades by the 20th, as well as writing my evaluation report for AFG and finishing up 22 more hours of field placement work. Luckily I can be writing my report in those hours. But still. That's all I have to do by the 21st. That, and work out the details of my academic planning with my advisor, and meet a professor to talk about prelims and hopefully manage to convince him that it's worth it to work with me even though he's about to leave the University of Michigan.

And my family wonders why I can't fathom talking about when I'm coming home for Christmas. Well . . . Mom, that's why! :( I miss you guys . .

Little saviours

I was really horrified the other night to find that my digital image files on my SM card had effectively disappeared in my struggling to get them to be read in either my card reader or my camera, plugged into my computer via USB. So, it was a huge relief to find that I could recover them rather painlessly with free software called Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery 3.1. It's small, quick to download, and completely free. Consider me a new fan.

The other software that makes my life happier on an almost daily basis is Google Desktop. If you're not familiar with it, here's how it works. Imagine the capability of google for searching the web. Now apply that to all the files on your computer, divided into categories such as web pages you've visited, emails you've sent and received, and documents, images, and other files you have saved on your hard drive. You can set it to include or exclude certain files, like an external hard drive or a certain folder, or whatever. It is how I magically found the photos I thought I'd lost for good, from my trip to Europe in 2003, that I just posted earlier today. It was also really handy two days ago when I decided I wanted to write some prelim questions for Social Work, and knew I had written some previously, but hadn't the foggiest idea where I'd filed them away. When you search, you can identify what particular type of file you're looking for. . . Yeah, it just rocks.

Mom, my first issue of Martha Stewart Living has arrived, with "all the comforts of home". :) Thank you so much. It's nice study-break reading.

I totally covet the high-tech/old-fashioned kitchen on the cover, though I would substitute warm, sunny yellow on the walls and red or blue accents in place of the pale yellow ones.

All this makes me think, though. I finally share the opinion that Martha is rather retchingly bourgeois. Of course, it would be swell to have a hydraulic lift in a linen cupboard that carries a hidden flat-television screen upwards to watch the Daily Show before bed and then tucks it away under a piece of wood that is seamlessly integrated into the surface of the furniture when you're finished with Jon Stewart. But give me a break. Who has that kind of money and space, besides Emily and Richard Gilmore?* Really. Seriously. It's too much.

No wonder everyone thinks Americans are crazy, and we are spending all our money on consumer goods made in China, and making our houses bigger and bigger all the time to make room for all these things. "In my house, all the juices, fruit and vegetable, have to be FRESHLY SQUEEZED." And in mine, Martha, I'll accept nothing less for cream for my coffee than the milk fresh from the bosoms of my ladies in waiting, which they provide right after polishing my silverware, and right before getting on their hands and knees to scrub my grout with a baby toothbrush.

Oh, oh, and you know what else? Her cat is named Vivaldi. Are you serious!? It almost makes me want to get a cat to name it Poulenc or Shostakovic. But that would be cruel, and having an ironically named pet is almost as bad in my book as getting an ironic haircut.

Still, though, I love the gift, Mommy, and I will happily take her magazine with me into the bath, to manufacture desire. You know I need something to get pedantic about sometimes.

*I just made my way through season 6 again, and it made me remember how good The Gilmore Girls was before Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband Daniel left for greener pastures. (What a shocker. The network was withholding a decent contract to them. Seriously, isn't this case-in-point about the importance of good writing to good television. Things went south SO fast when they left.)

P.S. I just got the news in email. My Nigerian payment slip is ready. I am SO EXCITED.

Oh my GOD, I thought this scam would surely be finished by now.

Radio -- NPR, Radio C, and the whole world at your fingertips

I love radio.

When I was younger I never really understood the point. I was irritated by most radio announcers who seemed to have little to add to any conversation. And why just listen, when you can watch, I thought? TV seemed infinitely superior to radio, which seemed like its ugly cousin. And why would you want to listen to the music someone else had selected, anyway, when you could choose it yourself with tapes and records and then, wonder of wonders, CDs? (Yes, kiddies, I'm that old.)

Well, I've come around completely, and for many years now radio has been rather an obsession. I think I "discovered" (American) National Public Radio when I was on a road trip -- maybe when I was driving up to northern Minnesota with Mom and all we were able to find was the worst top-of-the-charts country, some evangelical Christian talk radio, and NPR news.

I became a real junkie around the time I started commuting by car between San Francisco and Emeryville to a job at Avalon Travel Publishing years ago. And I've never looked back. When I was in Hungary, and the streaming technologies were just getting going, and I had an incredibly crappy ISDN line for internet, I used to lie on the parquet floor underneath my desk where my laptop slowly and laboriously downloaded a program in fits and starts and I would tingle with emotion, a strange mix of homesickness and relief.

KQED was my most beloved station for a very long time, and even when I spent two years listening to KUT in Austin, I longed for its programming and schedule, which had come to feel natural as a heartbeat to me. When afternoon rolled around and I didn't hear All Things Considered, I felt irritated, slighted. Didn't they understand it was the time for that unique blend of quirky, funny, heartfelt, and off-the-beaten-track you find there?

Lately, though, I think I've been won over completely by Michigan radio, which has some wonderful programs I had never heard back in California. Through it I've discovered the joys of Lynne Rosetto Kasper's Splendid Table, Dick Gordon's The Story, which often leaves me open-mouthed with wonder, and the ever-incisive Diane Rehm, who has an amazing knack for keeping her finger on the pulse of the American zeitgeist.

Since radio broadcasts have started becoming available over the web, it adds a whole new level of possibilities. Downloading podcasts for long drives, or walking commutes. . . it's a wonderful world. But I also really appreciate the streaming capabilities, particularly with non-US-based radio stations. One day, just for the hell of it, I decided it would be quite interesting to listen to a radio station in a place I know next to nothing about. So, I settled on Namibia. And then Besim, who was sitting on the couch wondering what was going on, directed us to Trinidad and Tobago. You can go most anywhere to listen to both majority and minority stations at RadioStationWorld. You might be surprised what you find.

One station you won't find there, though, as of yet, is one that is very near and dear to my heart for a variety of reasons, one I sometimes tune in to, thanks to streaming technology, and turn on at full blast on my favored PC in the doctoral lab when it's late at night and I'm there by myself trying to finish a paper. Rádió C, short for cigány, or the Hungarian word for "Gypsy," is a station that started several years ago in Budapest. It's been plagued with financial troubles, accusations of corruption, and loads of other troubles, but for now it's still in business. Sometimes I think I need to write at least a bit about it in my dissertation.

Why is it great to listen to? Well, think about Romani musical talent, for a moment, whether or not you buy into the "it's in the blood" ideology that even Roma themselves often promote. And then think, don't musicians always listen to the coolest music of all? Well, I sure think so. There's lots of Hungarian Romani music, for sure, but they also play unexpected jazz, plenty of pop from all over the world. You even hear Hindi filmi music sometimes. And sure, yes, they announce in Hungarian, and have some talk-radio shows. But most of the time it's music, and a mix you won't hear anywhere else. Check it out. (Just choose your preferred media player and format under the heading "Élő adás!")

They say about themselves: "Budapesten és környékén körülbelül 200,000 cigány ember él (ebből csak Budapesten több mint 100,000!). 2001. október 8-a óta létezik egy rádió, amely közvetlenül nekik szól, az ő nyelvükön, az ő problémáiknak hangot adva. Ez a Rádió ©."

"In Budapest and its environs, about 200,000 Gypsy people live (out of which, in just Budapest, there are more than 100,000). Since October 8, 2001, there has been a radio station that speaks directly to them, in their language, giving voice to their problems. That is Radio C." (translation by yours truly.)

If you find yourself wanting a Hungarian-English dictionary while looking at the site, I recommend the SZTAKI dictionary. However, given the intricacies of Hungarian grammar, with its prefixes and suffixes, and all, it probably won't get you very far. So, I'd encourage you instead to ask your favorite Hungarian-speaker to help you navigate, if you get as far as their website! :)

You may think that this is what those Romani musicians look like.

Well, maybe they do when they dress up in costumes to perform in a square for a Hungarian public. (I took this photo in Budapest at the Spring Festival in Erzsébet tér in 2003.)

But when they're just hanging out, playing music, they're more likely to look like this.

These are my friends Orhan (on accordion) and Dragan (on guitar), at the Amala School of Gypsy Language and Culture in Valjevo, Serbia, in August of 2003.

Orhan is (or was, back then) a director in a Romani theater in Skopje, Macedonia. (I've lost track of him and would love to know what happened to him if you know him!)

Dragan Ristić is the head of the band Kal, which he founded with his brother Dušan. It has an album out that has become immensely popular in Europe, according to my friend Sani Rifati, founder of Voice of Roma. Yup, and they've even made it onto Wikipedia. I should be up on these things, but I've been hiding out in my little world in Detroit & Ann Arbor. But lucky for us, Sani is helping to organize a tour for them in the United States in fall of 2008.

Okay, now, um, back to the task of grading undergraduate papers, which I'm doing a very good job of avoiding here, clearly.

The thin ice of modern life

So, after my walk today, I was 100% convinced that it was time to buy a thing I heard about from a hard-core runner from the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for those of you who aren't Michiganders) in one of my MSW classes: Yaktrax. Why is this so important? Well, the driveway to my cottage is so thoroughly glazed with ice, I almost did a full slide down it when I got to the top of the hill, found myself sliding, and had to move with hands AND feet toward the side of the road to avoid falling completely. A neighbor on her way into the subdivision in her car seemed to be having a good laugh at me. I was a little irked.

Well, I've started salting the driveway, I've been parking at my neighbor's for the past few days, and I've ordered my Yaktrax over the internet. Now, it's time to see about getting snow tires. As a Californian, I'm a bit clueless about this stuff. Smart Michigan friends, do you have any suggestions?

waiting for persephone (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens)

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I run into David in the entryway of the Social Work building and he tells me he is writing villanelles, and I am reminded of the artistry of Sylvia Plath, and her Mad Girl's Love Song.

. . .

It's hard to convey the import of the gift of a blue sky to those who see one daily.

The light is so unexpected, it makes the world look iridescent.


Still, it doesn't exorcise the sense of abandonment here, like a resort emptied of its vacationers.





I feel oddly drawn to the desolate beauty anyway, the vastness of the space of silence, the heavy linger of death, or hibernation.




somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence. . .
(e.e. cummings)

Tony Kushner documentary airing on PBS Wednesday

Hey (American) folks with TVs, there's a new documentary about the astonishingly wonderful playwright Tony Kushner, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, that is airing tonight on PBS. He talked on NPR's Talk of the Nation about it today.

It's times like these I wonder if it wouldn't be worth it to foot the cable bill. And then there are the rest of the days of the month . . . :)

Graffiti Removal Verité

this is intriguing.

remember me to one who lives there

My hardy little survivors in the herb garden. They are an inspiration, really.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Still so very grey. The fog brings snow, then ice, then pure rain that melts away the ice from the lake's surface. And just this weekend, I saw the little kiddies out there playing hockey on the ice. And wondered at the daring of their parents, to let them out there so shortly after the surface had hardened.

I have to search to find color in the surroundings, when the lovely birds have finished pecking at the trees outside my living room windows. But there is beauty all around, and with a little patience, I see the colors through the gray.

Shakespeare in the Bush

I realize that it is time, when I finish my work for the semester, for me to read Laura Bohannan. Shakespeare in the Bush is calling to me since I heard Dr. Peters-Golden speak about it the other day.

Bohannan writes: "You Americans," said a friend, "often have difficulty with Shakespeare. He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular."

Parenthood, Childhood, and the State -- starting the first draft.

Well, I've written the beginning of a draft of my paper for Parenthood, Childhood, and the State.
It's funny, I sometimes get really passionate when I write papers for social work.

Want to see what I've got so far? If it's boring to you, by all means, you can skip it. :)

Just one other thing. I got a personal thank-you note in email tonight from one of my students. Aww, I feel all warm and fuzzy now.


So, here's the beginning of the draft. No title as of yet, and don't even really like the subtitles. It still needs work, editing, and a lot more thinking. But if you do read it and you have a comment, I'd love to hear it, especially if it might help with the conceptualization of what I'm trying to bring together. It's still not clear yet from what I've written so far, I'm afraid. I've got a veritable tower of books here I'm still sorting through and trying to think about, and realistically, this is probably going to feed directly into my preliminary exams, since I know I'm not going to get the mastery of the material that I want to in the next ten days. But, still to come is: Meredith Small, Margaret Mead (somewhere I need to work in those wacky videos!), Foucault, Ann Stoler, more history and law, some historical sociology on Hungarian social welfare (Lynne Haney), some stuff on the control of reproduction, and some interdisciplinary stuff on child welfare, child abuse and neglect, the framing of child development in social work, and some more policy stuff. In other words, it's a right mess and I really need to figure out how to pull it all together.

My Point of Entry for this Inquiry

My interest in drawing together a rather disparate body of literature on parenthood, childhood, and the state, in this course, originated out of a nagging sense that policymakers and social workers ought to pay more attention to anthropology and history. Social work courses at the master's level often take as a given social constructions that we consider an object of inquiry at the doctoral level, and the treatment of childhood and the relationship between the state and the child in particular were two areas that had troubled me in my MSW courses. "What are the goals of childhood?" asked one instructor at the beginning of a course on Child and Infant development, yielding a series of student responses such as "learning language", "learning to walk," "play," "going to school," "learning to read and write," "learning math," and so on. The implication that this was a scientific question being presented to the class, one that could be answered in a way that could apply to all settings, concerned me deeply. The very framing of childhood as a context where goals ought to be made, striven toward, and accomplished seemed odd to me. With regular social contact with communicative adults, every child without specific limitations comes to be able to communicate through language and walk without assistance. The concept that these processes require specific parental (or social work) intervention is one that is patently untrue, and one that promotes an ethnocentric view of families where childhood is not a "project" to succeed or fail in and of cultures where work, rather than play, is the emphasis for children.

After all, setting aside our own enculturation as Americans and emotional cues to the contrary, there is nothing that makes our categorization of a menstruating twelve-year-old female as a child any more appropriate or natural than that of another culture that may view her as ready for marriage. Such arguments, when they arise in international media, frequently yield cries from international experts who cite apparently harmful physiological effects of early child birth, economic and social effects of curtailing her enrollment in formal public education, and human rights established and agreed upon in some international forum. I do not mean to dispute any such claims in this instance, but merely to point out the remarkable variation that has existed across time and space in (1) what we consider a child, (2) what roles we consider appropriate and inappropriate for someone in that category, (3) what modes of interaction we consider appropriate between parents or other caregivers and children, and (4) how and when we believe we ought to intervene in these interactions as a public (whether as a state representing the people, or as other authority figures or neighbors in a shared community).

There is no doubt that there are trends and even universals in human development across the life course, and I don't contest that these features are important for future social work practitioners to learn. But it is my contention that the ahistoricism and ethnocentrism that plague many practice-oriented social work courses do a profound disservice to both practitioner and client in the long term. Why? Because it robs the social worker of an education in critical theory that could aid her or him in contextualizing — and challenging — the normative, and ultimately could shape a profoundly more radical version of social work than currently appears to be inculcated in schools of social work.

In order for real social change to occur, a systematic and thorough understanding of the current situation is necessary, and such an understanding is impossible without knowledge of what has preceded. In the words of Robert van Krieken, a "lack of historical understanding" . . .

encourages the tendency to see promising novelty where there is often recycling of old ideas and old recipes, and disables us from perceiving long-term trends. As David Thompson puts it, to neglect history "means that we often fail to appreciate that the options facing us now are very familiar to those considered, tried and discarded by previous generations which also had to decide how to care for the lonely elderly, the husbandless mother, the parentless child or the unemployed family man (Thompson 1986:357)" (van Krieken 1991:2).

Furthermore, I would add, as globalization continues to reshape our social world in quite profound ways, and social workers are more and more likely to come into contact with clients socialized in environments dramatically different from those they grew up in themselves, the lessons of anthropology become increasingly important to integrate into the training of social work practitioners. The application of a tried-and-true method in a culturally inappropriate setting is arguably no less foolhardy than the application of a method that was "tried and discarded by previous generations". However, without placing a greater value on the contributions of both anthropology and history to the education of those conceptualizing interventions, these are both inevitably mistakes they will make.

* * *

Weapons of the Powerful

Debates for or against a particular change in policy often draw on the public's emotions by rhetorically establishing a frame of normalcy, then placing a certain belief or practice outside that frame by invoking what is natural or what is universal. These constructs, however, almost never are used with the basis of scientific evidence that informs of what was practiced by our ancestors, or how practices vary across human populations. In the area of the family, this type of rhetoric is particularly popular for attempts to discredit such far-ranging practices as polygamy, homosexuality, various approaches to parenting, and the list goes on.

In just one of the more recent of such debates, calling for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, President Bush made the following statement:

The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honoring, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.

Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.

Within two days, the American Anthropological Association stepped forward to dispute the claim President Bush had made, stating that:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

Anthropology and history provide powerful tools for challenging commonsense understandings of the natural by countering assumptions about what is universal with empirical evidence of how human social structures have varied over time and space.

Works Cited

AAA statement on Marriage and the Family, issued February 26, 2004, available at: http://www.aaanet.org/press/ma_stmt_marriage.htm

Bush, President George W., Statement of February 24, 2004, "President Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage," available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040224-2.html

Van Krieken, Robert (1991). Children and the State: Social Control and the formation of Australian Child Welfare. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Grey ice fisherman eating banana bread and bathing babies in three cultures

Grey, grey, unrelenting grey.

The lake appears to be frozen over completely, though it is still on the thin side in parts. The boats' cold grey metal matches the ambient air and the ice all around. Only the bits of exposed grass and wood of trees and tree stumps provides any color contrast at all.

It takes a second or third look before I even notice anything but the flat grey of the ice. But here's something interesting. . .

It appears someone has been out there . . .

Could it be that the ice fishermen are already testing the thickness in anticipation of their favorite winter pastime? And are those hockey goals? And human footprints?


Most of the evidence I see around here these days is from my other neighbors.


I tried this morning to make friends with a squirrel sitting and taking a drink by licking at the snow accumulated on the railing of my back deck. I was slow and steady in offering an outstretched hand of sunflower seeds, but the animal was not eager to trust me. Perhaps it's just as well; I have some ambivalence about humans forging paternalistic relationships with our other animal neighbors.

. . .

I woke briefly at 7:00, but returned to sleep and didn't get up again until 1:00 this afternoon! That's what Tylenol PM does for me, I guess -- a bit over nine hours of uninterrupted sleep and then a whole day of foggy semi-delirium. But better that than the tossing and turning of most nights, especially when I'm writing and navigating multiple deadlines.

Last night, after collecting a mass of article printouts, films, library books on children, parents, adoption, children and the state, children and anthropology, interdisciplinary perspectives on child abuse and neglect, etc, for the paper I'm working on for Dr. Sarri, and splurging on a manicure that helped a bit with the eczema I get on my hands in this weather, I met up with Zac, Alice, and the gang at Leopold's to celebrate Zac's birthday. Shayla stopped by to pick up my copy of Discipline and Punish, reinforcing my latest habit of never going to a bar without an academic text in my handbag. We had a grand old time, and I had a fabulous conversation with an old college friend of Alice's, Tim, who's in the B school and the school of public health. We talked about Brazil, and Roma, and community development practices in Detroit, and so many other things I lost track. . . lovely indeed to make a new friend.

We all shuffled over to Happy's Pizza at about 1:00 or so and shared some surprisingly good pizza in the rather surreal, very un-Ann Arbor-like environment there. Of course it was about 3 by the time I got home to the cottage, and I followed what's become my standard practice of putting on my slippers, turning up the heat, and remaining in my down coat to watch an episode of something on ABC's website to distract me until the house isn't quite so frigid.

Last night it was the second half of the Grey's Anatomy cliffhanger. I enjoyed it, but . . . I don't suppose I'm the only one who's finding this season to be rather dull in comparison to previous ones? Does this have to do with the writers' strike? I wish the f-ing networks would just settle with them, already. It's time to recognize the importance of the contribution they make to good entertainment. I'm a little embarrassed by how attached I've become to silly TV programs, but they really help me relax and unclutter my mind when so much of my day requires so much of my brain capacity.

. . .

Anyway, it was because I didn't bathe and crawl into bed until almost 4 am that I slept so bloody late, and I'm actually still finishing up my "morning coffee." It took me about an hour to get my computer to recognize my external hard drive, for some reason. Just one of those days, I guess.

It was just the right kind of day to bake, so I made a loaf of banana bread, just the way I like it, scant on the sugar, heavy on the bananas, with loads of walnuts, and just whole wheat flour with a hint of buckwheat flour added.

While I was waiting for it to finish baking, I settled down on the couch to watch some old ethnographic films by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, in the Character Formation in Different Cultures series. I didn't know anything about the films, but I found them through Mirlyn when I was doing research for this paper, and they caught my eye. I thought they might have some piece of interest in this rather amorphous paper I'm working on for Dr. Sarri. And I knew they'd also have really great ethnographic footage, because I'd expect nothing less from Margaret Mead.

And finally, I have a lot of interest in a few related things that make me keen to give some more attention to the Boasians: (1) how anthropologists present (and have presented) their findings to the/a "public" beyond the academy, particularly through museum exhibitions and films, but also in other media (2) the use of film by ethnographers, both as a data collection tool as well as a medium of "writing up" or codifying findings into a final product, (3) how these products, in turn (from both items 1 and 2), have shaped, reinforced, transformed, or otherwise influenced discourses about culture, difference, and boundaries, that circulate in popular media, and (4) ethnography and activism.

They're odd little films, both of them, illustrative of the typical concerns of the Culture and Personality school in American anthropology (see also Alabama students' site) -- childrearing practices and their influence on the development of adult character and human behaviors within a given cultural context. They also demonstrate the same kinds of flaws I saw in other works from this school's work when I was reading Mead and Benedict in Traditions a couple years ago -- a nagging essentialism (a tendency to see culture as a reified and bounded set of traditions, practices and beliefs, rather than as a process and series of relationships), a tendency to exaggerate certain similarities and differences, and an apparent action agenda imbedded in the

One is called Bathing Babies in Three Cultures and it documents the bathing practices of a handful of mothers in New Guinea, the United States, and Bali. First, we see two Yetmo mothers going in succession to the Sepik river in New Guinea to bathe their children in the river, all "brisk and businesslike," working quickly with one child at a time, holding the child at all times, in an environment that frequently has crocodiles.

Second, we see two examples from the United States, first from the 1930s and then from the 1940s, demonstrating what Mead describes as the "careful, conscientious" approach of the American mothers, who keep their hands nearby, "ever watchful, while giving [the child] an illusion of independence". Mead notes the continuities between the '30s and '40s in American mothers' bathing practices: They both bathe the children in a porcelain tub, take time to play patty-cake and with rubber bath toys, and dry the children in large towels, and immediately diaper and dress the babies. But she also points to a departure from the 1930s concern for a regimented day according to the clock in the later bathing sequence, and the consequent increase in the mother's apparent calm. "The child is fed when he is hungry," not according to a schedule "mediated by the clock" that makes mothers anxious, she says.

Finally, we watch a couple bathing sequences in Bali. Here, the child stands in a small tub for the bath. The first mother is relaxed, and very playful. The mother splashes the child, the child splashes back. This apparently forms the basis for Mead's characterization of Balinese mothers' "playful, teething, but inattentive" manner of bathing their children, in contrast to the ways of American and New Guinean mothers. But I wonder why she makes the claim so strong when her second example, of an older mother who is bathing her youngest child, who demonstrates "not as much inclination to play" as the first mother does, and is from my observation, almost as "brisk and businesslike" as the New Guinean woman dipping her baby into the Sepik river.

The second film, A Balinese Family, follows about a year or so in the life of one particular Balinese family, the Karmas of Bajoeng Gedé. The family is quite large, with six children, and some of the children live not in the nuclear family home of the Karma parents, but the homes of their grandmothers. Mead (writing and narration) and Bateson (photography) guide us through a series of observations of parenting practices, and interactions between parent and child, and among the children. At the risk of sounding essentializing, myself, and noting that this is one family observed at a particular point in time in the 1940s, I'm noting down some of the more salient points for my purposes right now:

• At least in this larger family, there is childrearing of older children by extended kin in separate housholds
• Balinese children are fed by giving them a coconut bowl that they can carry as they walk about, feeding themselves at their own pace.
• Rather young children are assigned the duty of being a "child nurse" to his or her younger sibling. The child-nurse learns to wrap the baby in a carrying sling to hold him or her against the child-nurse's hip.
  
• This child-nurse is responsible for carrying the baby around in this fashion for a whole year
• When the baby grows to be too large to be supported by the child-nurse, an older sibling takes responsibility for bathing the child
  
• Support for children learning to walk is provided in the form of a "walking rail," a single dowel elevated by two stakes and placed in the center of the courtyard, where very young children can use it to balance themselves for standing and walking around it, without being confined (as in an American playpen). They periodically fall on the ground and stand up again without parental intervention.
• There's are distinctive affects, according to Mead, that characterize youngest and second children, and even in this family, where there is no youngest child after Kenjeon, she begins at a point in time to demonstrate the typical "unresponsiveness of a second child in the Balinese family".
  

(That last point is one I'm curious about, but anyway, that's what she says.)

Hmmm. Nothing more to say about that at the moment, but it was an intriguing thing to watch while slowly making my way through my coffee and eating my first couple slices of banana bread.

Okay, well, thanks for humoring me while I think through the films a bit. I think I'm demonstrating that I'm just about ready to go back to the rhythm of seminars again, since I'm seeking the opportunity to talk about my research in the bar and in my blog. Ack.


Some stuff for further reading:

Stocking, George, ed. (1986) Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and others : essays on culture and personality.

Robert A LeVine (2001) Culture and Personality Studies, 1918-1960: Myth and History.
Journal of Personality 69 (6), 803–818.

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film
Ira Jacknis
Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 160-177

Husmann, Rolf (1992). A Bibliography of Ethnographic Films. Berlin
-Hamburg-Münster: LIT Verlag.

Ulewicz, Monica and Alexandra S. Beatty (2001). The Power of Video Technology in International Comparative Research in Education. National Academies Press.

Hockings, Paul (1995). Principles of Visual Anthropology. Walter de Gruyter.

Web links:

Ethnographic Film Series

University of South Carolina Educational Films Database

Carnegie Mellon Anthropology Video Filmography

Overview of Methods in Visual Anthropology