Gypsy girl from Turkey wakes up every morning and feels that today is like all the rest. She wears a red robe around the apartment, it looks like silk but was bought in Wall Mart for five dollars. She smokes in the balcony and underlines her favorite parts of “The Stranger.” The summer sun makes her red robe look shiny like those worn by movie stars. Gypsy girl from Turkey left her town and her father because she wanted to be a movie star in New York City. She now wears short black dresses with ruffles; she walks in platform shoes and has two shiny diamond piercings in her wrists. She takes Ballet lessons, voice lessons, acting lessons.
We walk together to the subway stop in the evenings, after our Ballet class. Sometimes a summer breeze from the Hudson blows in between her legs and she opens them, they are long and they must have resisted many men who attempted to…because in her home town, life was worth nothing. I heard that her father would drink and lock her inside a bathroom. I also heard that her father would drink and fall asleep with his cigarette lighted, and that he would start fires in the house. I listen to her stories and feel empathy, but this city has left me no strength to feel pity or compassion for anyone anymore.
Gypsy girl from Turkey left her town to be an actress in New York City and enjoys talking to me because I am from Argentina. This means that we both speak broken English. This evening before class she fixed my hair in a tight bun, and offered me some hand lotion. We now walk down seventy eight street and men turn around to stare at her long legs. We get inside the six train and sit together. I don’t talk much and mostly listen. She tells me about her latest purchase of underwear that says OPEN DAY AND NIGHT. She makes a joke about this and later asks me if I go to the tanning bed and if I like sex on top. Her anecdote reminds me of a confession by another friend of mine who recently told me, also while riding the subway, that she doesn’t know what to do to get her husband to pay attention to her. She has tried green underwear, red shimmery underwear, leopard printed underwear! I don’t understand underwear. But overall I don’t see why friends would ask a single person what underwear to buy or if she enjoys having sex on top. And I don’t understand why people always begin these conversations with me while riding public transportation.
The subway stops at Union Square and is delayed for thirty minutes. Passengers begin acting less and less patient. A man decides to express his anger by cursing loudly in my train but most people ignore him. A drunken lady is walking through the wagons singing out loud, her pants wet from her own urine, but most people ignore her. A homeless man is asking for some spare change, but most people ignore him.
Thirty minutes go by and passengers in the crowded subway get even more impatient, but gypsy girl from Turkey appears to ignore the crowd and enjoy my company. She opens her leather bag and puts on more hand lotion. She offers me more hand lotion. I see a big stack of twenty dollar bills rolled inside her bag and wonder how is it that she makes a living in New York City. I find out that she studies philosophy at Hunter College, and that her favorite subject is Ethics. I ask her how is it that she can afford to live in Manhattan, and she tells me that she has “Sugar Daddies” who help pay for her Ballet lessons, and for her acting classes.
I tell her that she is such a New York story, and she smiles at me like this is the best compliment anyone ever gave her. She smiles like if she just heard something she was eagerly waiting to hear. So I tell her that I will write about her. She hugs me good bye and I transfer to the seven and head back to Queens with fingers still greasy from her hand lotion.
Back home I find out in the local news that there was another suicide attempt in the Union Square Station tonight, and this is why our subway was delayed for so long. I wonder if this would have made a difference to those who complained. Probably not. I think of the violence in this city. I think of the racism I see everyday inside my subway wagon, not as much between whites and blacks, but rather and so bluntly between Asians and Indians, Dominicans and Mexicans, Indians and Chinese. I think of my latest conversation with another friend of mine who recently got into an accident and is required to wear a brace covering her entire upper body. How she confessed to me her biggest fear: “I fell yesterday on the street, and was afraid somebody would just step over me!” And that famous line in “Heart of Darkness” comes back like a song from the frozen sea. I remember the horror and then I realize that this world can be pretty sad, no matter where you go, no matter what big city or what small town.
Sometimes I wonder if I will ever see you again. I wonder if you ever feel any empathy. But I don’t blame you for feeling nothing but hundreds of neurons firing through your brain. I don’t blame you anymore. I blame this world which can sometimes be a sad place, no matter where you go. I think of the frozen sea and write about gypsy girl from Turkey instead.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Professor of Parody?
My friend Carlon sent me the link to an article (www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf ) where Martha Nussbaum presents a critique against Judith Butler’s position in Gender Trouble. He then asked me for my opinion. So here is an extremely long response to my friend.
“Carlon,
The Martha Nussbaum article that you sent me last week is the most famous, and most uncharitable, inaccurate critique of Judith Butler I ever read. I remember that my friend Hannah shared this article with me last winter, when we were both trying to make our way, and stumbling, through Frames of War. After reading this, I wanted to throw it against a wall. Not for what it said ( although I am beginning to anticipate how philosophy might, one day, give me an anger problem) but rather because it represented a lot of what is wrong in academia and especially in the world of Philosophy nowadays. So I wanted to give you my comment, mostly because Nussbaum’s critique of Butler and her misreading go back to a larger problem that affects politics in general. But also because deep down, I think that making one’s way, or stumbling through Butler’s work, is a worthwhile task.
I’m going to skip the part where Nussbaum declares Butler to be a “quietist,” politically “passive” and also the parts where she spends at least two pages laughing at Butler’s concept of “subversion” and later at her writing style. This is normal in the history of Continental Philosophy. Heidegger got laughed at by Carnap for being inaccurate and obscure about “dasein” a few decades ago. Yet very few take Carnap seriously nowadays, but we are all still reading Heidegger. So it goes.
I think the clear misreading appears in part III of Nussbaum’s article. In p. 5, Nussbaum claims that the main problem is Butler’s idea that gender is “a social artifice.” Here, I think that Nussbaum understands Butler as a post-modernist. I really think this is the biggest problem and I will explain this to you if you care to keep reading.
A lot of people understand Butler as a post-modernist although I don’t have enough citations to back this up.
This is not how I read her, and this is not how anybody should read her.
Briefly, post-modernism is a tradition of thought which declared the end of all grand narratives, the end of history, the end of art, the end of politics, the end of substance, the end of unity, the end of the end.. (A philosopher who defends this popular view teaches at my school: Hugh Silverman, but I don’t have citations to back this up either, so you will have to trust me.) Those who accept that it is the end of a lot of things, are now free of the constraining power of metaphysics, of grand-narratives, of the Hegelian struggle for self-realization. The term “anything goes” also represents this line of thought (especially in art). Now, post-modernism which sides with the idea of deconstruction, or the idea of a lack of unity (I am explaining this with no charity whatsoever) also adheres to an anti-essentialist stance. And although Butler holds an anti-essentialist position, she is not necessarily a post-modernist. Nussbaum, on the other hand, assigns to Butler the role of an anti-essentialist philosopher who is also a post-modernist. This leads Nussbaum to declare that Butler’s philosophy cannot get us anywhere politically, which allows her to laugh at Butler even more for being politically “passive” and for having no normative to accompany her thought.
And if Butler’s thought is understood as adhering to post-modernism, then for sure Nussbaum’s critique gains accuracy.
In my view, Nussbaum argues that to reach political action, we need some sort of conceptual, biological, metaphysical, or categorical unity. Without this, there is no representation. This is my reading of Nussbaum, and she is not explicit about this in her article, but she writes on p. 9 that “even where sex difference is concerned, it is too simple to write it off all as culture…” and that “feminists should not be eager to make such a sweeping gesture.” So the fear we find with Nussbaum, the “passivity” she argues against, is linked to relativism and to post-modernist thought where “everything goes” is fatal to politics. Nussbaum finds in Butler’s use of parody, of subversion… the end of real politics. So to gain representation, Nussbaum defends the need for a solid category (that of “women” for example.)
So let me defend this; that Butler is not a post-modernist, yet Butler adopts an anti-essentialist stance because, I think, she already previews the problems generated by essentialism in politics and gender issues. These are problems that Nussbaum completely overlooks. Butler also anticipates that before representation, comes recognition. I cannot tell you how important I think this Hegelian term is.
I know you read Gender Trouble so I’m not going to write about her theory of performativity, or about the entire problems Butler finds within our western “metaphysics of substance.” But a question that rises, or at least, something that I think is important to ask is, can we have anti-essentialism without post-modernism? A lot of Michael Kelly’s work in Aesthetics follows this line of thought. So I’ve had this question drilled into my brain endless times. But this question is important to me because it allows for politics and ethics, to enter the realm of anti-essentialism without having to give up the fight and surrender to post-modernism, allowing us in the end to actually do useful philosophy, or as Arendt claimed, allowing us to “think in dark times.”
I strongly believe Butler’s account of recognition is a key term to argue against the so called “passivity” that Nussbaum attributes to Butler’s thought. It is also a key term to link anti-essentialism to political action, and to develop a contingent ontology of the body. Maybe I am romanticizing philosophy too much; in that I think we can still change the world by reading a couple of old white guys, and a bunch of younger white ladies, but here is my constant love-hate affair with this discipline. I think that philosophy is a two sided coin: that it has the ability to harm, but also to aid us in the search for meaning and better lives.
Butler is not a “passive” philosopher. She sees essentialism as problematic because the more this thought tries to “embrace” persons, or forms of life under one category, the more it covers up or leaves out other persons, other forms of life. So her further goal, at least in Gender Trouble is to get to the root of the problem, to declare gender as a social construction, thus, allowing for more space towards the recognition of other forms of gender, of life, that also deserve to be recognized. So the main problem to Butler is that some persons (prostitutes, transgendered, black women, and middle-eastern women, children in Hamas to give a few examples) are less recognized, or not recognized as persons at all under a “metaphysics of substance” which unifies to the point where it problematically “covers up” the visible forms, the body, and life itself.
Nussbaum does not give us a solution to the problem that Butler is so strongly aware of. She rather turns to essentialism in her article, demanding we seek out for a normative, for another grand-narrative. So we could say that Nussbaum is also and again, a slave doing philosophy in the master’s house. But maybe I’ve been reading too much Hegel.
After finishing Philosophy of Right this week, what can I tell you? The concept of Recognition has come up again as a relevant problem to me. Two hundred years later, in the face of the ever lasting violence and never ending wars. So I am currently revisiting Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage, because here is where I find the master-slave dialectic that applies not only to gender and race issues, but also to the issue of personhood which Butler focuses on in her most recent work, when she asks: “what is a life anyways? And “what are the conditions to secure a life so that we don’t justify its destruction?”
Within Recognition I see the struggle between consciousness and self-consciousness, which is a constant struggle that keeps taking place, at every minute, in every corner of this world. When there is no recognition there is also no representation so representation presupposes recognition, although it should not. This is Nussbaum’s mistake, that she presupposes recognition within representation. But the way I read Hegel and consequently Butler is through this sequence: When there is no recognition there cannot be representation, so there is violence: If you don’t treat me as a human being, you refuse to recognize me as a person, or as a life. If you refuse to acknowledge that I exist as a living being, and rather rationalize my life as a life worth dispensing, then war and violence have a justification within the normative powers and frames at work. This happens on a large scale with war, immigration policies etc. but it also occurs on a smaller scale with domestic-violence for example. So this is how I’m reading Butler, through Hegel. This is how I see her anti-essentialist stance as one which is not post-modern at all, but can lead us to more egalitarian norms of recognition.
So Nussbaum argues against the post-modernist thought that she mistakenly sees in Butler, and Butler rejects essentialism. My point is that Nussbaum’s position assumes a little too much about Butler. It assumes Butler to be a “passive” post-modern thinker because of her anti-essentialism, it assumes post-modernism to be a joke, it assumes that representation is granted to every human being as a natural right, it assumes that relativism is the death of politics. Yet there is another reading to Butler’s thought. We can read her as an active political thinker who disregards both essentialism and post-modernism. And we can ask: who gets recognized within essentialism? Who might have the possibility to be recognized within anti-essentialism? And how can we do philosophy in dark times, in the face of violence, if we remain unable to grant recognition in more egalitarian ways?”
“Carlon,
The Martha Nussbaum article that you sent me last week is the most famous, and most uncharitable, inaccurate critique of Judith Butler I ever read. I remember that my friend Hannah shared this article with me last winter, when we were both trying to make our way, and stumbling, through Frames of War. After reading this, I wanted to throw it against a wall. Not for what it said ( although I am beginning to anticipate how philosophy might, one day, give me an anger problem) but rather because it represented a lot of what is wrong in academia and especially in the world of Philosophy nowadays. So I wanted to give you my comment, mostly because Nussbaum’s critique of Butler and her misreading go back to a larger problem that affects politics in general. But also because deep down, I think that making one’s way, or stumbling through Butler’s work, is a worthwhile task.
I’m going to skip the part where Nussbaum declares Butler to be a “quietist,” politically “passive” and also the parts where she spends at least two pages laughing at Butler’s concept of “subversion” and later at her writing style. This is normal in the history of Continental Philosophy. Heidegger got laughed at by Carnap for being inaccurate and obscure about “dasein” a few decades ago. Yet very few take Carnap seriously nowadays, but we are all still reading Heidegger. So it goes.
I think the clear misreading appears in part III of Nussbaum’s article. In p. 5, Nussbaum claims that the main problem is Butler’s idea that gender is “a social artifice.” Here, I think that Nussbaum understands Butler as a post-modernist. I really think this is the biggest problem and I will explain this to you if you care to keep reading.
A lot of people understand Butler as a post-modernist although I don’t have enough citations to back this up.
This is not how I read her, and this is not how anybody should read her.
Briefly, post-modernism is a tradition of thought which declared the end of all grand narratives, the end of history, the end of art, the end of politics, the end of substance, the end of unity, the end of the end.. (A philosopher who defends this popular view teaches at my school: Hugh Silverman, but I don’t have citations to back this up either, so you will have to trust me.) Those who accept that it is the end of a lot of things, are now free of the constraining power of metaphysics, of grand-narratives, of the Hegelian struggle for self-realization. The term “anything goes” also represents this line of thought (especially in art). Now, post-modernism which sides with the idea of deconstruction, or the idea of a lack of unity (I am explaining this with no charity whatsoever) also adheres to an anti-essentialist stance. And although Butler holds an anti-essentialist position, she is not necessarily a post-modernist. Nussbaum, on the other hand, assigns to Butler the role of an anti-essentialist philosopher who is also a post-modernist. This leads Nussbaum to declare that Butler’s philosophy cannot get us anywhere politically, which allows her to laugh at Butler even more for being politically “passive” and for having no normative to accompany her thought.
And if Butler’s thought is understood as adhering to post-modernism, then for sure Nussbaum’s critique gains accuracy.
In my view, Nussbaum argues that to reach political action, we need some sort of conceptual, biological, metaphysical, or categorical unity. Without this, there is no representation. This is my reading of Nussbaum, and she is not explicit about this in her article, but she writes on p. 9 that “even where sex difference is concerned, it is too simple to write it off all as culture…” and that “feminists should not be eager to make such a sweeping gesture.” So the fear we find with Nussbaum, the “passivity” she argues against, is linked to relativism and to post-modernist thought where “everything goes” is fatal to politics. Nussbaum finds in Butler’s use of parody, of subversion… the end of real politics. So to gain representation, Nussbaum defends the need for a solid category (that of “women” for example.)
So let me defend this; that Butler is not a post-modernist, yet Butler adopts an anti-essentialist stance because, I think, she already previews the problems generated by essentialism in politics and gender issues. These are problems that Nussbaum completely overlooks. Butler also anticipates that before representation, comes recognition. I cannot tell you how important I think this Hegelian term is.
I know you read Gender Trouble so I’m not going to write about her theory of performativity, or about the entire problems Butler finds within our western “metaphysics of substance.” But a question that rises, or at least, something that I think is important to ask is, can we have anti-essentialism without post-modernism? A lot of Michael Kelly’s work in Aesthetics follows this line of thought. So I’ve had this question drilled into my brain endless times. But this question is important to me because it allows for politics and ethics, to enter the realm of anti-essentialism without having to give up the fight and surrender to post-modernism, allowing us in the end to actually do useful philosophy, or as Arendt claimed, allowing us to “think in dark times.”
I strongly believe Butler’s account of recognition is a key term to argue against the so called “passivity” that Nussbaum attributes to Butler’s thought. It is also a key term to link anti-essentialism to political action, and to develop a contingent ontology of the body. Maybe I am romanticizing philosophy too much; in that I think we can still change the world by reading a couple of old white guys, and a bunch of younger white ladies, but here is my constant love-hate affair with this discipline. I think that philosophy is a two sided coin: that it has the ability to harm, but also to aid us in the search for meaning and better lives.
Butler is not a “passive” philosopher. She sees essentialism as problematic because the more this thought tries to “embrace” persons, or forms of life under one category, the more it covers up or leaves out other persons, other forms of life. So her further goal, at least in Gender Trouble is to get to the root of the problem, to declare gender as a social construction, thus, allowing for more space towards the recognition of other forms of gender, of life, that also deserve to be recognized. So the main problem to Butler is that some persons (prostitutes, transgendered, black women, and middle-eastern women, children in Hamas to give a few examples) are less recognized, or not recognized as persons at all under a “metaphysics of substance” which unifies to the point where it problematically “covers up” the visible forms, the body, and life itself.
Nussbaum does not give us a solution to the problem that Butler is so strongly aware of. She rather turns to essentialism in her article, demanding we seek out for a normative, for another grand-narrative. So we could say that Nussbaum is also and again, a slave doing philosophy in the master’s house. But maybe I’ve been reading too much Hegel.
After finishing Philosophy of Right this week, what can I tell you? The concept of Recognition has come up again as a relevant problem to me. Two hundred years later, in the face of the ever lasting violence and never ending wars. So I am currently revisiting Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage, because here is where I find the master-slave dialectic that applies not only to gender and race issues, but also to the issue of personhood which Butler focuses on in her most recent work, when she asks: “what is a life anyways? And “what are the conditions to secure a life so that we don’t justify its destruction?”
Within Recognition I see the struggle between consciousness and self-consciousness, which is a constant struggle that keeps taking place, at every minute, in every corner of this world. When there is no recognition there is also no representation so representation presupposes recognition, although it should not. This is Nussbaum’s mistake, that she presupposes recognition within representation. But the way I read Hegel and consequently Butler is through this sequence: When there is no recognition there cannot be representation, so there is violence: If you don’t treat me as a human being, you refuse to recognize me as a person, or as a life. If you refuse to acknowledge that I exist as a living being, and rather rationalize my life as a life worth dispensing, then war and violence have a justification within the normative powers and frames at work. This happens on a large scale with war, immigration policies etc. but it also occurs on a smaller scale with domestic-violence for example. So this is how I’m reading Butler, through Hegel. This is how I see her anti-essentialist stance as one which is not post-modern at all, but can lead us to more egalitarian norms of recognition.
So Nussbaum argues against the post-modernist thought that she mistakenly sees in Butler, and Butler rejects essentialism. My point is that Nussbaum’s position assumes a little too much about Butler. It assumes Butler to be a “passive” post-modern thinker because of her anti-essentialism, it assumes post-modernism to be a joke, it assumes that representation is granted to every human being as a natural right, it assumes that relativism is the death of politics. Yet there is another reading to Butler’s thought. We can read her as an active political thinker who disregards both essentialism and post-modernism. And we can ask: who gets recognized within essentialism? Who might have the possibility to be recognized within anti-essentialism? And how can we do philosophy in dark times, in the face of violence, if we remain unable to grant recognition in more egalitarian ways?”
Saturday, August 7, 2010
More Bargaining in Good Faith with Destiny
Here is another attempt to discuss life without mentioning love. I am not sure I will succeed at it, but I might just fool you into thinking that love is not important to me, that love can be poisonous, and that what matters instead is bargaining in good faith with destiny. This attempt will probably be a failure, just like all my attempts of writing an autobiography were a failure. Because all I can put down are fictional accounts of the way life feels like to me, and “how it feels like” never matches the reality of my circumstances, but this is usually for the better.
*
Speaking of fiction and reality, I went to a movie theater in Times Square with Dad last week. We watched a film about a group of experts who professionally entered people’s unconscious minds for a living, and who infiltrated in their dreams. I wasn’t extremely excited about the film. I, also, have the attention spam of a five year old. This plays against me when I have to sit through a two hour screening. But watching this film in 3D helped capture my interest, and Dad really enjoyed the movie. I think the twist to this plot was that, not only could these experts enter people’s dreams, they could also infiltrate inside dreams-within-dreams. This created an infinite regress of dreams within dreams which, I suppose, attempted to raise a deep and extremely original philosophical question which I am sure nobody else ever came up with, at all.
The question was of this sort: What is the difference, or is there a difference, between dreams and reality?
Hollywood is so mind blowing. Always one step ahead of Descartes.
But I found that this film could also raise a political question, which aligns better with the way life feels like to me these days. The question is of this sort: What is better, your dreams or your reality?
Let me explain the nature of this question to you.
When we got back home to Flushing, Queens, after the movie theater, our Filipino neighbor in his late sixties was riding his wheelchair backwards around the block. He appeared to be having fun, and did not even see us when he almost crashed into my Dad.
To this, my Dad politely said hello to our neighbor and kept walking towards our apartment building. But later he mentioned something to me that I would not forget, and it went like this:
“If I had known twenty years ago that I would be walking down the streets of Flushing, Queens, saying hello to my retired Filipino neighbor who rides his wheelchair backwards, I would probably think I was dreaming.”
And what followed...
“This could be just like in the movie! I am in a dream and I will soon wake up back in LA and realize that this is not my reality.”
To this statement, I just laughed and kept walking. Who can blame this man for not giving two cents about the philosophical difference between dreams and reality when what really matters at this point, what really makes a difference to him, is which one of the two is better?
*
Speaking of dreams, there have been times when I’ve fooled myself into thinking that a glass of wine would help me go to sleep faster. The effect has always been the opposite.
On nights of that sort everybody I could possibly want to really talk to, is asleep. So I have this new disease late at night involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk and call long distance to Argentina. The time difference between hemispheres helps me find others who are still awake. But what I love the most about Argentina is that we still have operators. So in my best drunken elegant voice, and using my best Spanish, I ask the operator to connect me with this friend or that one, with that cousin from whom I haven’t heard in years.
I got Mariana on the line this way. She was tall and I was short. I liked to read and she liked to draw. She had a scientific mind and I had a writer’s mind. We were best friends all through middle school. We got our noses pierced at the same time when we were in high school. At the age of eleven, we got locked outside of her house in winter while her parents were out of town. Her sixteen year old brother, who was supposed to be looking after us, came back home the next morning after partying all night, to find us literally sleeping in the dog house: Two eleven year olds and a dog, sleeping inside a doghouse in the backyard. I had forgotten all about this episode, but she remembered it well. So we bonded with that memory, after so many years.
I later asked her how she was doing, and she told me about her life. But then she mentioned something that I would not forget.
“I have this disease late at night involving alcohol and the telephone.”
I pictured Mariana in the southern hemisphere. Still up in her room, still reading while everybody else was asleep.
I felt lonesome no more.
*
*
Speaking of fiction and reality, I went to a movie theater in Times Square with Dad last week. We watched a film about a group of experts who professionally entered people’s unconscious minds for a living, and who infiltrated in their dreams. I wasn’t extremely excited about the film. I, also, have the attention spam of a five year old. This plays against me when I have to sit through a two hour screening. But watching this film in 3D helped capture my interest, and Dad really enjoyed the movie. I think the twist to this plot was that, not only could these experts enter people’s dreams, they could also infiltrate inside dreams-within-dreams. This created an infinite regress of dreams within dreams which, I suppose, attempted to raise a deep and extremely original philosophical question which I am sure nobody else ever came up with, at all.
The question was of this sort: What is the difference, or is there a difference, between dreams and reality?
Hollywood is so mind blowing. Always one step ahead of Descartes.
But I found that this film could also raise a political question, which aligns better with the way life feels like to me these days. The question is of this sort: What is better, your dreams or your reality?
Let me explain the nature of this question to you.
When we got back home to Flushing, Queens, after the movie theater, our Filipino neighbor in his late sixties was riding his wheelchair backwards around the block. He appeared to be having fun, and did not even see us when he almost crashed into my Dad.
To this, my Dad politely said hello to our neighbor and kept walking towards our apartment building. But later he mentioned something to me that I would not forget, and it went like this:
“If I had known twenty years ago that I would be walking down the streets of Flushing, Queens, saying hello to my retired Filipino neighbor who rides his wheelchair backwards, I would probably think I was dreaming.”
And what followed...
“This could be just like in the movie! I am in a dream and I will soon wake up back in LA and realize that this is not my reality.”
To this statement, I just laughed and kept walking. Who can blame this man for not giving two cents about the philosophical difference between dreams and reality when what really matters at this point, what really makes a difference to him, is which one of the two is better?
*
Speaking of dreams, there have been times when I’ve fooled myself into thinking that a glass of wine would help me go to sleep faster. The effect has always been the opposite.
On nights of that sort everybody I could possibly want to really talk to, is asleep. So I have this new disease late at night involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk and call long distance to Argentina. The time difference between hemispheres helps me find others who are still awake. But what I love the most about Argentina is that we still have operators. So in my best drunken elegant voice, and using my best Spanish, I ask the operator to connect me with this friend or that one, with that cousin from whom I haven’t heard in years.
I got Mariana on the line this way. She was tall and I was short. I liked to read and she liked to draw. She had a scientific mind and I had a writer’s mind. We were best friends all through middle school. We got our noses pierced at the same time when we were in high school. At the age of eleven, we got locked outside of her house in winter while her parents were out of town. Her sixteen year old brother, who was supposed to be looking after us, came back home the next morning after partying all night, to find us literally sleeping in the dog house: Two eleven year olds and a dog, sleeping inside a doghouse in the backyard. I had forgotten all about this episode, but she remembered it well. So we bonded with that memory, after so many years.
I later asked her how she was doing, and she told me about her life. But then she mentioned something that I would not forget.
“I have this disease late at night involving alcohol and the telephone.”
I pictured Mariana in the southern hemisphere. Still up in her room, still reading while everybody else was asleep.
I felt lonesome no more.
*
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Free-Lance Ballerina
The New York Times published this article today...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/arts/dance/18dancer.html?_r=1
which inspired my idea of becoming a Ballerina for hire.
I don't have time to do it professionally and am already committed to a teaching job and graduate school. But I am in the best shape of my life, have way too much energy for my own sake, can go on pointe, don't have a boyfriend (which gives me extra free time to concentrate on Ballet technique and go to auditions), live in New York City (the place where anything is possible) and need an extra job for the school year to compensate for other bills which need to get paid.
So I came up with the idea of being a free-lance ballerina!
What does a free-lance ballerina do? This is not related to stripping I promise. Free-Lance Ballerina goes to auditions for cheesy dancing roles, usually as an extra, or as a backup dancer with clothes on. If she gets hired, the job offers no benefits and lasts no more than one month, but offers experience in the dance world and a good amount of cash that goes into free-lance ballerina's rent and grocery budget.
For example, Radio City is conducting auditions next week for their annual Christmas Spectacular. And although I wouldn't show my legs in front of a crowd even if I got payed for it, I am willing to dress up as a bear and be part of the "little people performance crew" this Christmas. So I will attend my first audition next week. The role is as a bear dancer at the Radio City Hall Christmas Special this winter.
By the way, August is the best time for free-lance ballerinas because this is when they start recruiting people for all the cheesy Christmas musicals in this city. So if I get rejected as a bear dancer, don't you cry for me my readers, there will be more auditions to write about...
Cheers to this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/arts/dance/18dancer.html?_r=1
which inspired my idea of becoming a Ballerina for hire.
I don't have time to do it professionally and am already committed to a teaching job and graduate school. But I am in the best shape of my life, have way too much energy for my own sake, can go on pointe, don't have a boyfriend (which gives me extra free time to concentrate on Ballet technique and go to auditions), live in New York City (the place where anything is possible) and need an extra job for the school year to compensate for other bills which need to get paid.
So I came up with the idea of being a free-lance ballerina!
What does a free-lance ballerina do? This is not related to stripping I promise. Free-Lance Ballerina goes to auditions for cheesy dancing roles, usually as an extra, or as a backup dancer with clothes on. If she gets hired, the job offers no benefits and lasts no more than one month, but offers experience in the dance world and a good amount of cash that goes into free-lance ballerina's rent and grocery budget.
For example, Radio City is conducting auditions next week for their annual Christmas Spectacular. And although I wouldn't show my legs in front of a crowd even if I got payed for it, I am willing to dress up as a bear and be part of the "little people performance crew" this Christmas. So I will attend my first audition next week. The role is as a bear dancer at the Radio City Hall Christmas Special this winter.
By the way, August is the best time for free-lance ballerinas because this is when they start recruiting people for all the cheesy Christmas musicals in this city. So if I get rejected as a bear dancer, don't you cry for me my readers, there will be more auditions to write about...
Cheers to this.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Flushing, Queens, is the last stop of the seven train. It is also the most "exotic" neighborhood in New York City. It is the real Chinatown. But this is only according to the white people who live in Brooklyn. Flushing, Queens has ginger tea with honey and bubble drinks, it has Vietnamese food and seaweed snacks of all kinds. It has Chinese karaoke bars open until eleven am of the next day. It has Chinese ice cream trucks. It does not require it's neighbors to speak in English. It is crowded and it never sleeps, but Frank Sinatra would never have sung about Flushing. It is Love going to the Disco. It is home, somehow and magically, Flushing is home.
Teach to Learn/Learn to Teach
I have been working on my seventh and eight grade lesson plans this week, and besides all the boring Spanish grammar and workbook stuff, I decided to incorporate some experimental philosophy ideas such as:
Total installations: Immersing students in a sensory experience with objects/subjects. Re-arranging the things in the room. Making students match the Spanish word uttered to the object/subject in a language and reference game. Becoming aware of how important embodiment is in the acquisition of knowledge.
Undoing gender in the classroom (this might not work because it is an orthodox Jewish school): We pick a group of Spanish concepts that stand as universal signifiers for each gender and, through five minute performances we give examples of how we can undo gender (a drag show is not allowed though). We look at Latin American artists who present us with examples of undoing gender (such as Fridha Kahlo. And, no, we are not going to look at Lady Gaga.)
Escaping monologues and leaning towards dialogue, a Hegelian Experience: An example of communicative rationality, in Spanish. One student writes a simple monologue in Spanish and hands it over. The other student includes herself in the monologue of the other by re-writing it using sentences in the first and third person. The result is the Hegelian uniting of consciousness with self-consciousness between two students. They read it out loud to the class. We first study the spanish words, then become aware of the self/other dialectic. The goal is to understand how much we gain when we escape self-consciousness: when the other is included in our initial monologue and there is space for dialogue.
Creating your own Mexican Soap Opera movie script.(It cannot be based on your life though, or the lives of your family members.)
Forgetting to sit
Reading the Spanish textbook while walking (this might not work in winter).
Learning Spanish colors and shapes at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
Wearing costumes to teach a certain historical period.
Learning while making (Mexican wrestling masks, ten minute short films in Spanish, short movie scripts in Spanish).
Total installations: Immersing students in a sensory experience with objects/subjects. Re-arranging the things in the room. Making students match the Spanish word uttered to the object/subject in a language and reference game. Becoming aware of how important embodiment is in the acquisition of knowledge.
Undoing gender in the classroom (this might not work because it is an orthodox Jewish school): We pick a group of Spanish concepts that stand as universal signifiers for each gender and, through five minute performances we give examples of how we can undo gender (a drag show is not allowed though). We look at Latin American artists who present us with examples of undoing gender (such as Fridha Kahlo. And, no, we are not going to look at Lady Gaga.)
Escaping monologues and leaning towards dialogue, a Hegelian Experience: An example of communicative rationality, in Spanish. One student writes a simple monologue in Spanish and hands it over. The other student includes herself in the monologue of the other by re-writing it using sentences in the first and third person. The result is the Hegelian uniting of consciousness with self-consciousness between two students. They read it out loud to the class. We first study the spanish words, then become aware of the self/other dialectic. The goal is to understand how much we gain when we escape self-consciousness: when the other is included in our initial monologue and there is space for dialogue.
Creating your own Mexican Soap Opera movie script.(It cannot be based on your life though, or the lives of your family members.)
Forgetting to sit
Reading the Spanish textbook while walking (this might not work in winter).
Learning Spanish colors and shapes at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
Wearing costumes to teach a certain historical period.
Learning while making (Mexican wrestling masks, ten minute short films in Spanish, short movie scripts in Spanish).
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