More Blog Wars

Well, if the Chronicle of Higher Ed isn’t enough to get academics in a tizzy, there’s always the New York Times, which ran a story yesterday about a woman who fired her nanny for blogging. There’s tons of commentary: here (Steven’s blog first hipped me to it), here, and here.

For me, this is less a story about blogging than about soclal class (okay, granted that it was probably a bad idea to give your employer a link to your blog). The blog’s just a vehicle for something more disturbing.

A great deal of the work that goes into nannying or any other domestic job is emotional labor. People who leave their children to nannies probably want to believe that the nanny’s work is “more than just a job” to the nanny (it is their kids we’re talking about here), even though it is obvious that money drives the whole thing: the parent has the money and needs to buy the time, the nanny has the time and skills and needs the money. In this case, we’re talking about a woman, Tessa, who aspires to go to graduate school and (I imagine) herself attain a level of success and income like that of Olin, the woman for whom she works. The real motivation for firing came when Olin read a poem that she imagined to be about herself. She imagined that she saw herself through the eyes of her nanny, and it was too much to take. At that moment, all the fantasies about being a “cool” mom who just needs a little help around the house came crashing down into Barbara Ehrenrich Nickel and Dimed territory. In the end, Olin was paying for emotional labor that was given as exactly that — not a true expression of Tessa’s inner feelings (though remember, the conceit of the story is that the blog is a confessional space where Tessa reveals herself, when in fact this need not be the case at all) but as a performance for money. Olin wanted to pretend away her privilege, which the existence of the blog disallowed. And forcing Olin to confront her own privilege is, apparently, such a transgression that she feels entitled not only to fire Tessa but also defame her in the pages of the Times.

NB: I don’t mean to moralize about hiring childcare. I have no problem with people who can afford it hiring nannies or daycare (well, EVERYBODY ought to be entitled to daycare) or people to clean their house or whatever so long as the employees are fairly compensated (this is obviously a whole other conversation about unpaid domestic labor that usually falls to women, at least in heterosexual couples). The horrific thing is the way in which Olin wields her privilege, the conceit that she is entitled to a piece, essentially, of her employee’s soul and the vengeful behavior that sits atop the self-reflective stance. Oh, and a pox on the Times for printing the piece.

Now I “Get” Sleater-Kinney

For the longest time, I understood that Sleater-Kinney was a band I was supposed to like. My friends did. The critics did. And yet, I just couldn’t get into them. The songs didn’t do much for me, and the singing grated on me. But I heard a couple tracks off the Woods and there was something that grabbed me this time. Maybe it’s the sheer amount of guitar distortion, or maybe the way the whole thing is produced like some 60s record. Either way, it works for me. So there.

I should mention, however, that I tend to “get” bands later than most of my hipper friends. A lot of 90s indierock was uninteresting to my until later in the decade, and I finally broke a string of getting into bands after the break up when I managed to catch Archers of Loaf on their farewell tour just a couple months after I decided to like them. When all the ex-punks went country, I joked that I’d discover alt.country sometime around 2005.

Let me tell you, the alt.country thing? Not going to happen. I’m just not into authenticity as a musical stance.

And now, just for Z0R, Tet writhing. Notice how soft the belly looks:

/></p> </div><!-- .entry-content --> <footer class= Posted byJonathan SternePosted inUncategorized5 Comments on Now I “Get” Sleater-Kinney

Reason #572351 That I’m Glad I No Longer Live in Pennsylvania

A really stupid piece of legislation, based on David Horowitz’s academic bill of rights, that makes it easier to harass professors for their political views. Michael Berube has a good blog entry on the topic. I doubt the bill will make it into law, but even so, how lame is it that the house of representatives passed it?

Somewhere in the back of my mind, there’s a link between this kind of thing and the anti-blogging stuff I discuss a couple posts below. I’m not yet sure what it is, since I do believe in certain kinds of professionalism and formality for professors, but I know it’s there. Anyway, I notice that Steven and Charlie are now on to the topic as well. This is what the kids must call a meme.

Primer

is a movie about time travel. I love movies that mess with time, either in a science fiction way or even just in their narrative presentation. Primer is one of the best in the genre, and to top it all off, it was made for $7000 (of course, that figure doesn’t include the cost of prints), which just goes to show that it is still possible to make good science fiction without a lot of special effects. Last night, Carrie and I watched the movie for the second time in two nights. It has the virtue of being short, true, but the reason we watch is to figure out the time stuff. It is confusing and convoluted. I even went poking around the web for an explanation and the written explanations don’t make much sense. By the end of the second viewing, we were starting to get it, but we had to pause the DVD, backtrack and discuss a couple times. I would love to see the storyboard for it.

Leaving Out the Important Things

Or maybe just not blogging enough. After my big declarations about being a full time audio engineer, I’ve been back at work for “the man” for the past couple days to catch up with some promises I’d made long ago. Such is my lot. Mixing will resume on Thursday or Friday, by which time my permission codes for a tasty new reverb plugin should have arrived.

I have been trying to think of something profound to say about the London bombings, but I’ve got nothing. Here’s a Bad Subjects editorial on them, though.

Bienvenue a Quebec

or so said the post-it note on the letter we got from Quebec immigration last week. We have officially received our certificates of selection, which means that we probably are about halfway through the process or a little further. They didn’t even interview us, though we had to have a friend sign for us. All that’s left is for us to be fingerprinted, to write to the FBI and State Police, take a couple medical exams, and of course about $3000 later and we should have permanent residency by this time next year if not sooner. I’m psyched.

I also learned last week, and a cursory web search seems to confirm this, that it is no longer the case that becoming a Canadian citizen endangers one’s American citizenship, unless the person deliberately renounces his or her US citizenship (nb: this is a very bad idea and makes people at the consulate very angry). It would be nice to be able to vote here. . . .

Blogxiety, or a Meta-Note

It occasionally weighs on my mind that this blog is public, under my own name, and on my own professional website. A Friday op-ed in Chronicle of Higher Education(1) basically casts bloggers as shallow, unprofessional or out and out stupid (granted that yes, if you blog under your own name about your job search, maybe the search committee will be pissed off and maybe your are stupid). In general, I think a lot of academics, like a lot of people, have a hostility to the genre if they’re not particularly comfortable with the ‘net, or not familiar with the wide range of blogs out there.(2) It’s not unique to me — my friend Kim Dot Dammit expressed a similar anxiety earlier today. Granted, her blog is way more confessional than mine but I think we’re on the same continuum.(3) While I will cop to some personal foibles now and then, you won’t find me airing out my colleagues’ dirty laundry or disclosing personal secrets (like the real identity of “anonymous football fan”). And still, since I don’t fancy myself an amateur journalist (that’s amateur musician and engineer thankyouverymuch) , there’s going to be an element of banality to the writing, especially since I pretty much only read blogs by my friends. It is probably weird that such a blog appears on my professional website.

But then, I’m a real person. I guess that’s the whole point to the blog, to my (granted, sorely-in-need-of-updating) music page, and a variety of other parts of my site. It does suggest that something important is changing about self-presentation among academics in the humanities at least. I’ve tended to be against the neverending expansion of informality in the university that masks power relationships where they remain and where they are relevant. But this, this is something different again.

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1. The one publication that does more to profit off job market anxiety in the humanities than any other.

2. The notion of blogging as self-indulgence or aggrandisement, or worse, as existing in a zero-sum relationship with other writing, is particularly noxious.

3. Interestingly, Kim made the very conscious decision to blog under an alias awhile back and still has this concern. I also notice that most of the grad student bloggers in AHCS blog under aliases. Probably a good idea if you’re going to be confessional.