Learning is Fun!

It's bittersweet to be taking this graduate summer language program in the weeks before the semester begins.  I just started this French class on Tuesday, and the objective is to learn to read quickly enough in French to rapidly comprehend and translate articles toward a scholarly purpose (i.e. making sure some scholar in some French speaking country hasn't already written the dissertation I plan to write).  It's been fun and challenging to get back into French.

What's been unexpected about the class -- besides my incredible inability to identify the subject of an inverted sentence in French -- is the professor's deep understanding of many foreign and ancient languages.  Yesterday he took us on a 20 minute tangent to explain that the French word "tête" ultimately comes from the vulgar latin (popular latin) for the word scrotum.  It's a pretty long story, and he was able to tell us just off the cuff.  I love the classroom for this reason!  You can't replicate that in book learning, ya know.

Anyway, another fun thing happened today as he went around the room and asked us to guess how many words there are in the English language.  I didn't have a guess...but I'm not going to lie, I think I might have guessed something like 50,000 if he had asked me directly.  One guy came close by guessing 800,000.  Well, folks, it's old news, but there are a million words in the English language!  WTF?!  I had no idea!  Of course now I'm wondering, how many of those million do I know?!   I don't dare to ask.

I'm pretty sure my rusty French vocabulary is only somewhere near 100, but that is definitely increasing by the day!

The DNC Convention: Supporting My Future Employment!

Michelle Obama is amazing.  I admire her so much for her ability to be (among other things) warm and direct, fierce and totally charming!  Her speech tonight was really inspiring and helped me to feel more confident about this year's election than I was earlier in the day.

I watched the speech through PBS' online stream, in particular, because I think Gwen Ifill is one of the best commentators.  David Brooks was commenting on how the brilliance of the First Lady's speech was really the narrative.  That is the magic word, and that is what the title of this post refers to.  Political narratives like the one tonight are at the core of what I'm interested in studying, and I love examining what elements of these narratives really move people, not only to tears like we saw in the audience, but to ACTION!  

Of course, the democratic party is also currently supporting my future employment through their social policies like the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  I'm intrigued with the affect involved in a convention like we saw last week with the RNC and that we will see more of this week with the DNC.  There is undoubtedly a shared emotion that floods arenas when powerful speakers champion causes and rally us to support a candidate.  Part of that atmosphere tonight was created by Michelle Obama's ability to connect her story, which is so extraordinary, with the very specific details of our comparatively ordinary lives.

One of my favorite moments of the speech was when she mentioned the little rust hole that she could see in the door of Barack's car when they were first dating.  I too had a rust hole in the floorboard of my first car, a 1973 VW Beetle.  Her memory connected directly with my memory and showed that we shared a material experience of something. That something, that rust hole, created a connection between us, just like her experience as a mother connects her with mothers and her fight for workers connects her with workers, etc.  She doesn't just try to connect by condescension of "I know what life is like" or something like that, she shares the details of what make her a modern (or is that postmodern?) American woman and citizen.

Speeches like these and political narratives that express and reveal the seemingly insignificant details of American citizenship are what I will be studying intensively as a student and hopefully far beyond that into a long future of research and teaching.  This was an inspiring speech for me in more ways than one.

The Loooong Depression

I'm going through many cycles of enjoyment, boredom, and compulsion to continue reading Capital.  Right now I'm persevering through Chapter 15, which is 147 pages long and is entitled "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry."  It's like a book within a book.  It has a lot of graphs detailing the number of factories in England and Wales in 1858, 1861 and 1868 in comparison to the number of factories in Scotland and Ireland in the same time periods.  It's tedious.

Anyway, I'm finding some inspiration to keep going through this detailed chapter because it's Labor Day today.  Marx claims in this chapter that as the factory system expands and production increases, "the life of industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation."  This got me thinking about this cycle in terms of the U.S. and our current economic downturn.  In trying to understand what is happening today and the appropriate responses to the economy, people keep referring to the Great Depression.  But at least one scholar, Matthew Lynn, talks about how it is more relevant to the Long Depression of 1873-1896, which predicts that the end of our current depression will be in about 19 years.  

Yep.  How utterly depressing.

Marx attributes this cycle to a whole lot of things, and one important factor is due to the inherently unstable relationship between new technologies and workers.  According to Lynn's approach, the current downturn stems from a structural issue rather than a merely circumstantial one.  The system has to be fixed.  But "fixing" the system somehow doesn't equate to overthrowing Capitalism...the system will simply recalibrate and go on until I suppose moderate activity begins to sprout...and then, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation happens once again.

So, I wonder, will any scholars or revolutionaries out there be taking on mega-project that would rival Marx's Capital that might propose a new system that doesn't include this self-fulfilling prophecy?  I haven't heard of anything in the pipeline, but who knows.  

Street Art

This is a quick post for the day to share an interesting moment of our day in San Francisco.  As we were walking around the Mission District looking for used books and ice cream not only did we find both books and ice cream, we also found an entire alley dedicated to graffiti and street art.  I looked it up when we got home and found out it's called Clarion Alley and has been home to community mural projects for about 30 years now!

I loved the totally defiant spirit of these murals in all of their bright and vivid depictions of anti-capitalism and other powerfully normative forces like gentrification.  I don't believe I've seen too many community arts projects that are out in the open like this and have a decades-long history.  I think most of the community arts projects I've seen are tucked away on the walls of school buildings and/or community-based businesses, and the images are either static and don't change because they have received approval for the particular image painted at a given time OR they are temporary.  The one that held my attention was the feature of "Danny Developer" shown below.   

The Joy of Reading Marx

In many conversations about reading Marx's Capital, most of the people in my particular circle seem to assume that the desire to read this monstrous book is evidence that I am a Marxist.  This is not the case.  I know as well as anyone that Marx's revolutionary ideals failed in practice and am certainly not going to advocate for a return to Leninism or whatever.  Closer to the truth is the fact that I am deeply interested in Marx's analysis AND critique of capitalism and am eager to know more about his analysis since I understand from scholars that where he failed in providing an effective response to overthrowing capitalism, the man understood capitalism and its many dimensions better than any economist of his time.  

I would not be so arrogant as to read the book completely on my own knowing that my ability to understand economic theories and the like is average at best and probably more like below average.  So, I'm reading along with David Harvey's online lectures because I read parts of Harvey's The Postmodern Condition last year and appreciated his manner of thinking and the way that he communicates his ideas.  I'm learning a lot about key points of Marxist theory that I didn't quite grasp before, especially the term "circulation" and why this term is so important in contemporary theories of affect and the notion of movement in postmodern theory in general.

Aside from the insights, I'm also finding the reading of the book to be less onerous and more intriguing than I thought it would be.  Marx has a way of using strange similes and metaphors that give one pause...sometime because they have the air of anti-semitism (Marx was born into a Jewish family that converted to Christianity the year before he was born), but more importantly because these metaphors are glimpses into the subjective side of Marx's thinking beyond his methodical dialectic examination of capitalism.  

My favorite metaphor so far is from Chapter 10, The Working Day: "Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Oh la la!  Vampires?!  His vitriol toward the capitalist who he understands to value capital more than workers/people comes out in full force only in these metaphors.  His voice of general outrage is only hinted at when he explains algebraic formulas for pages and pages to illustrate how workers are exploited by basically being paid for 6 hours of labour each day that he works 12 hours (and yes, the gender is important because the book also nods toward a misogynistic view in which women entering the workplace would devalue the labour of men...).  These metaphors often come at the end of a mathematical analysis and help to punctuate his point in a manner that I'm not accustomed to reading.

I'm really enjoying Capital way more than I thought I would, and the good news is that because I'm not reading it for a class I can focus on the parts that interest me most.  

...and we're back!

I've taken an unannounced break, and now I'm back to blogging.  It's been quite a month -- packed up and moved out of DC, traveled 4,000+ miles across country from DC to Memphis, Memphis to Urbana, Urbana to Milwaukee, Madison to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Pierre, SD, Pierre to Rapid City, Black Hills to Little Bighorn, Yellowstone, Grand Teton to Reno, a stop in Lake Tahoe and finally, arrived in Santa Cruz.

One of the terms of my funding with UCSC is establishing residency ASAP, so my first order of business after unpacking our shipping container was registering my car and getting a new California license.  The woman at the DMV said "Welcome to California!  Now you can live la vida loca."  It made me laugh out loud, and I've been thinking about this general laid back attitude around me.  It's infectious.  Most of the people I've encountered at the DMV, the farmer's market, the shops in downtown, and even at big box stores like Costco and Target are polite without being in your face and pushy.  I think part of what I'm feeling is a real community vibe, like everyone knows that we share this space and that we rely on each other in some way as consumers, merchants, neighbors, etc.  I like it a lot so far.

In my own way, I am living la vida loca.  I have absolutely no obligations at the moment.  I don't know how to emphasize that I have never really experienced this level of freedom before.  I've been unemployed for only 2 stretches in my life: once after returning home from a year in France and once for a few weeks before I started the master's program.  Neither of those times were relaxed, however, because I was unwillingly unemployed and was consumed with incessant job searching during that time.  This is different.

I sleep until I wake up every morning. I read a lot and have already finished Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism, which I've been trying to read for a year now.  And I'm reading Marx's Capital (Das Kapital) in conjunction with David Harvey's online lectures.  I'm exercising daily at a gym with kickboxing and/or pilates.  I'm keeping in contact with friends through email and Facebook.  I'm  enjoying the ocean and the adorable downtown Santa Cruz, cooking everyday and eating healthy, and generally just being relaxed.  This is a crazy new kind of life for me.

Sure, school will be getting busy, but that's another month away. And I'm recalibrating so that I'm ready to be a normal kind of busy rather than a crazed-lose-my-hair-ruin-my-fingernails-can't-keep-up-with-friendships-no-time-for-exercise kind of busy.

Part of my crazy new life also includes writing everyday, so I'll be blogging regularly again.

Attachments

Have you ever had to get rid of a significant amount of your possessions?  An extremely unscientific survey of my friends suggests that a few people find this activity cathartic and the rest of us hate it with a passion.  And why is it that we hate it?

On the one hand, there is a redeeming quality of having to take stock of all of your belongings and either find a place for them to fit into the moving truck or toss it (or sell it).  But on the other hand, there seem to be an almost unending amount of things that you need (like organizing drawers/baskets) that don't seem to fit into things that you pack, but are necessary for having an organized home, and they can get expensive if you keep tossing them and buying new ones with every move. 

Then, there are those things that you are personally attached to, but don't necessarily have a great reason for your attachment.  Like, the lamp that has adorned my bedside for years.  I know that because I bought it for $20 eight years ago, the same type of lamp will cost $50+ nowadays and it won't likely be exactly what I like.  I find my mood takes a deep southward dive the minute I start thinking about getting rid of it, and giving it away, not even selling it!  Don't even get me started on how pissy I get the moment my shoes stop fitting into things and there isn't enough room in my jewelry box for large earrings.  Oh yeah, it's bad.

I mean, really, why is it that I can't seem to throw out these things without all of these feelings of attachment to these things?!  What is interesting to me is that I think this might be a fairly specific American problem.  It's not exactly hoarding because I'm not talking about collecting things compulsively and just accumulating things.  I can't help but wonder if, as Americans, our consumerist culture makes us inherently more attached to things because we see consuming as one of the most active modes of citizenship.  What I'm suggesting is perhaps the idea that because buying things is an articulation of our belief in America (I'm not going to cite sources here, but consumerism as an patriotic act is pretty widely studied) our things come to take on a meaning beyond just their utilitarian purpose.

It's just a thought.  And as I have a few more days of packing and getting rid of things, I might have more to say on this topic soon.