Can I choose "none of the above?"
Howdy! Hellsapoppin’ here. While some of you in the East may be shoveling yet more snow today, we in the West have got more than a few stalls to muck out today, and a lot of fences to mend. Here are some items for your delectation and consideration:
- National Politics: What’s up with our Transformational President? Well, not his approval numbers, that’s for sure. Jonathan Last offers an analysis that says it’s the Clinton primary voters who jumped off the bandwagon first, and looks at the recent election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts from that perspective. Michael Lind writes that the Republicans have nothin’–but that won’t stop them from winning because of Dem fecklessness, diffidence, and/or incompetence: “Buyer’s remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait — which party are we talking about here?” Meanwhile–there are open rumblings about the incompetence of the Chicago bubble that appears to have been more effective at getting President Obama elected than they are at governing. (H/t RealClearPolitics.)
- Local Politics: Our new U.S. Senator, Michael “Never Won a Single Vote” Bennet is sinking like a stone against Republican front-runner Jane Norton, and even against Weld County D.A. Ken Buck. (OK, so they’re only Rasmussen and DailyKos polls, but wev–that’s all we’ve got.) Gee–who ever would have predicted that it might be a craptastic idea to crown this guy Senator? Meanwhile, a guy who actually ran a few successful campaigns and won a lot of votes is now in the lead to replace Gov. Bill “The Family Guy” Ritter. Go figure! Historiann might be voting Republican for the first time in her life come November–unless Andrew Romanoff wins the D primary, and even then, I might vote Republican anyway. Why should I reward bad behavior by all of the d00dly d00dz who think they run this state? (Of course, we’ll have to see how Norton and Buck play their hands, too.)
- Literature: Leonard Cassuto considers J.D. Salinger’s Bartleby-like retreat from literary celebrity, and predicts that his reputation is likely to “drop like a stone” once the probably mediocre “lost works” are published: “Rebuffing the literary anthologies may prove to be Salinger’s most consequential decision in that regard, because it has kept his writing from the eyes of succeeding generations of readers. Most young readers encounter classic authors in the pages of such collections, and these encounters lay the foundation for their later reading. Salinger’s work is increasingly invisible to younger people now, so his reputation won’t stay aloft once the brief, titillating pleasure of revealing what’s in his writer’s cupboard is satisfied.”
- Speaking of literary celebrity: Squadratomagico comes to see that one of her early idols in her field is a mere trafficker in gimmics. She asks, “have any of you lost any scholarly gods through disillusionment?” (This is a password protected post.) I haven’t–but then, I never worshipped an academic “god” in my field. But, I have come to see that some of the works in history I admired as an undergraduate are really not that interesting to me now–but that’s more because I’m likelier to be astonished and impressed by the incredible creativity and erudition of my colleagues today. For example: I’ve just finished reading Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009), and am really impressed by her ability to bring together the histories of medicine, science, technology, sexuality, race, material culture, religion, and women’s and gender history, among many other fascinating sub-fields. This is a book that we’ll be reading and talking about for years to come. (You can see Brown discussing her book in the University of Pennsylvania History Department here.) The problem is that the whole time I was reading the 367 pages of text while reclining in my home office, I was plagued by the feeling that I really should be up and cleaning something, or doing another load of laundry! Perhaps it was all of those vivid descriptions of vermin infestations that were endemic in early America before 1830 or so.
- And now, we’ll close with some cleansing images of the Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia. I used to run along the paths on the Schuylkill River, which have a lot of extremely interesting art and architecture to look at along the way. (Photo by Brandin McDonough.) The neoclassical Water Works buildings are the ones perched on the river’s edge–they’re very small, not much bigger than children’s play houses. (That’s the Philadelphia Museum of Art rising monumentally behind them.)
Historiann 
Your governor’ss race dilemna reminds me of my choice in the 2006 Illinois governor’s race. The major party choices were Rod Blagojevich (nuff said), and Judy Potinka, a cog in the Republican machine. Lacking a Libertarian option, I ended up voting for Rich Whitney, the Green Party candidate.
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First, never vote Republican; it’s a biblical and Koranic command. Never.
The denial is boundless, Hillary people, devil Rahm, stupid Chicago quartet, and it takes time. The door is widely open and more skewed and violated ideas will pop up soon.
Clinton didn’t succeed in everything in his first year, but didn’t lose balance and didn’t lose his wisdom. He made mistakes, he lusted too much, but was focused and had more than a decent presidency.
Obama isn’t wise. Obama doesn’t get it. Obama is said to be smart. As they say – a smart person can get out of problems a wise person doesn’t get into.
In French, we are fucked.
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Profane–I think you mean senator, not governor’s race. I’ll vote for Hickenlooper for guv, although I wish I could vote for Diana DeGette.
If there’s a Green or Constitutional Party candidate, I’ll certainly consider going that way. But, why shouldn’t a feminist want to put another woman in the U.S. Senate? Norton strikes me as something of a dim bulb, by-the-book conservative. But, here’s one thing we can say about Republican women in the Senate: they don’t sell out women the way men do, both Dem and Republican. They’ve never been anti-abortion nuts like Tom Coburn, Bob Casey Jr., or Rick Santorum (or in the House, Bart Stupak.) So it may well be that Jane Norton is the lesser of two evils, if my only other choice is a squish on abortion rights (or someone like Obama, who will sell out fast on them for nothing.)
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I voted Republican once, many years back, for Arlen Specter, regretted it, swore off from the practice, reconsidered, still swore off, never did again, and might be doing it again in November, for Arlen Specter. Life’s a koan. Do what’cha hafta do, Historiann.
Ouch. Can almost see my place, just off to the right of that picture. Not shoveling yet, but it’s coming down again, and the predictions are fairly dire…
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Re literacy celebrity and historical idols: I don’t know if I would say that I have ever been disillusioned in the way that Squadratomagico describes (based on Historiann’s capsule summary), but I will say that my appreciation for the work of different scholars has waxed and waned over the years, especially as I finished the long slog of getting a book done. Getting my own publication done made me more conscious of history as an interpretive craft, which in turn made me more critical of scholars whose interpretations seem somewhat…convenient. I am more sensitive, I think, to authors that work too hard to bend the evidence to suit their book’s thesis, or who rely too much on narrative sleights of hand. (There are a couple I could name, but won’t.)
At the same time, I think I am more appreciative of scholars who show range over the course of their careers. The extent to which some scholars, if you look closely, seem to be doing variations of the same project several times, really astonishes me. There are a couple of scholars who have risen greatly in my estimation as I’ve realized just how difficult it is to retool oneself from book to book. I think that Kathy Brown’s book is a good example of this–similar thematically in many ways to the first book, with with a far greater chronological, geographic, and even conceptual scope. But then–there were 13 years between the first and second books. In many departments (including mine), there’s pressure to turn around fresh scholarship more quickly, which makes it harder to start from scratch, so to speak.
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Thanks for the link, Historiann!
I think John raises an interesting point about how writing a book alters one’s evaluations of other books; maybe I’ll post (more openly) about this question soon. I found that writing a book was way more intellectually stimulating than simply writing the equivalent number of pages in article format. For me, my book taught me much more than, say, writing 7 articles would have (instead of 7 chapters). More apropos, however, is the way it altered my outlook on others’ books. As John suggests, once you have been through the process, you sometimes feel less indulgent towards certain short cuts or facile moments: having seen the temptation to such things, and not given in, one can detect such stratagems more readily in others’ work. On the other hand, it also can make one more forgiving of certain kinds of sins — little inconsistencies in complex thought, momentary lapses — because one knows, now, how hard it can be to keep control over all the pages and references and ideas one is handling. I think writing a book increases one’s respect for really great books and arguments, even if they have a few flaws; and decreases one’s respect for books that really are just inflated articles or full of tendentious shortcuts.
In my case, I genuinely respect the author I wrote about, and learned a great deal from hir at one stage of my career. It’s just that I lost my youthful admiration for hir, and like all youthful passions, this one must be mourned even as it is acknowledged as behind me.
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Squadrato–I’m just glad to see you back online! (Although your radio silence makes me think I’d better stay in the meat world and get some writing done this semester.)
I have to say that the process of writing my book made me much, much humbler. As a friend of mine likes to say, there’s only two kinds of books in the world: those that are published, and those that are still in a drawer or hard drive. I came to really appreciate books I had blithely dismissed as a much more “sophisticated” graduate student. Writing my book gave me an appreciation of how difficult it is to write any book, let alone a good one. (As you say–it’s harder to write 7 consecutive chapters in a coherent monograph than to write 7 articles.)
John S.: I think most historians–if we’re lucky–get one big idea in our lifetimes. Most of us write the same book in different versions for the rest of our careers. So, I agree with you on range being impressive. Kathy’s new book is really great, and she pushed far beyond her original area of expertise. I’m not sure that she “proves” every aspect of her larger argument, but it seems like a great achievement to me to make so many suggestive connections across 400 years, as well as to have chronicled for the first time a number of details about intimate care of the body that will fascinate most social and cultural historians.
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Yeh, I’m working towards a deadline; Blogging will be sporadic until spring. I do get more research-writing done in the “meat world,” as you put it, if I cut down on blogging (and circussing, and socializing, and everything else).
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Second Historiann’s point on book-writing and humbler. I learned this from my advisor–in an advisory sort of way–but you don’t really learn it until you stumble across the finish line with seven whatever-they-are, chapters, articles, fragments, and say to an editor, here, please weld these things together around an ISBN. I’m trying to do that stagger a second time this semester and I don’t even want to think about the “one big idea” question, except to say that I think I gravitate to the array of (much?) smaller ideas model. If I do ever raise a brood of them, they’ll be as alike as second cousins– several times removed.
In fact, I sometimes feel sorry for some really major names in this or that subfield who reach the point where they can’t take this or that idiosyncratic thing from way back that they might really enjoy doing now out of the “drawer or hard drive,” precisely because it would fall outside the “brand” niche that everybody has come to expect them to work in. I’ll never have to worry about that, though, I must say.
That storm sort of played cat-and-mouse last evening, but we’re getting hammered pretty good now that it’s daylight. I don’t mind, just so’s I can travel on Friday.
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I third Indyanna and Historiann’s remarks about book writing creating humility. I just finished my book ms and I feel *much* more generous towards all my colleagues with finished books than I did as an unrelentingly critical grad student. I remember one particular delusional phase while I was writing my dissertation when I thought it might be “important.” By the time I was finished with, I settled for “complete.” So it was (sans hubris) with the book ms. It’s done. I’m likewise impressed by range – by scholars who aren’t afraid to step outside a narrow band and try something more ambitious, more synthetic, or even more “popular” (because I think that very well done AND very accessible history is hugely challenging).
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That post by Squadratomagico is password protected.
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