IM Conversation with Little Sister

7:05 PM Krista: HI

7:14 PM me:
hi
what are you reading?

7:15 PM Krista:
nothing!
right now im not reading anything
why?

7:30 PM me:
aren't you supposed to be reading?
go read!

7:41 PM Krista:
well i am in the summer
im gonna try and start on thursday while in study hall
i need to get a head start so i can have some fun in the summer and have sleepovers
becuase mom wont let me have any fun

7:47 PM me:
dude, reading IS fun.

7:48 PM Krista:
dudet, not when its an old book back in the old in times


*er, something tells me she doesn't understand what I do for a living*

Happy Birthday Mrs. Gaskell

200 years ago, on September 29, 1810, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born. This year is her bi-centennial. If I lived in England I would likely be attending events associated with the Gaskell Bi-Centennial Celebration 2010. Even the English Unitarians are contributing to the Gaskell worship. One wonders what opportunities for public Gaskell appreciation exist for American devotees. One thinks one should make more such opportunities in one’s corner of America… At least I can participate on some online read-alongs, such as the one for Cranford in June hosted by A Literary Odyssey.

The Cranford read-along happens to be perfectly timed, for me, since I’m just about through with Ruth. When I set out to read all of Gaskell’s novels this year, I had no idea it was a commemorative occasion. (For a Victorianist, I am rather thick-headed.) In the fall of 2009, a colleague and I had decided to start a *non-academic* book club, to remind ourselves that it was possible to read for pleasure. We decided to read Wives and Daughters first; the reward would be watching the BBC adaptation of the novel, which I had recently garnered from the Amazon Free Shelf (source of all BBC DVD goodness in my life). The rules of the book club were: no analytical discussion of the sort one hears at conferences or in graduate seminars, no close reading, no “how would you teach this?” Rather, we gave ourselves permission to identify with the characters, to simply love Mrs. Gaskell’s complicated heroines—even the dull ones—and, because we’re American, of course, to dream about England. Needless to say, perhaps, thanks to our professional training, we were unable to adhere to these strict standards of pleasure. Our conversations quickly spiraled into close readings of passages and questions of contextualization. I think we even had a brief argument over the presence of domestic violence in the Hamley's marriage. The book club dissolved, or maybe it was absorbed into our academic obligations. As I've continued my reading, I have become eager to develop a course focusing on Gaskell's novels.

My colleague did not, to my knowledge, finish the novel. I finished it, skipped the movie, and went on to read North and South and Mary Barton. And now I’m almost finished reading Ruth (1853), Gaskell’s story of the redeption of a “fallen woman.” Overall, I find Ruth to be a bit too sentimental for my taste. Also, Ruth is portrayed as too young and naïve to have understood the consequences of her seduction, and so morally upright ever after as to seem rather unrepresentative of her type. Gaskell painted a more tragic fallen woman figure in Mary Barton, in which Aunt Esther, who has fallen so far as to have become an alcoholic prostitute, resists her niece’s invitation to redeem herself. The more of Gaskell I read, the more interested I grow in her variegated notion of feminine power. Her narrators, and some of her heroines, are preoccupied with it. More on that later, I suppose.

Freedom to Marry Week 2010

I just learned that it's Freedom to Marry week. The Freedom to Marry organization is Evan Wolfson's brainchild. Wolfson wrote Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry. (Guess what that's about? Go on, guess!) I admit that I never got all the way through Wolfson's book, because Wendy Brown's States of Injury had an influence on me in graduate school. If I remember correctly (and my memory is always in question, plus I may not have finished that book either... I prefer a scattershot reading practice), Brown asks us to consider whether appealing to the state is the best way to change things--whether appealing for equal rights will truly effect equality? She criticizes the liberal emphasis on granting rights through laws: when rights are granted, the state is empowered to protect rights and citizens are disempowered through a greater dependency on the state. Wolfson and his organization approach the same-sex marriage issue from the "equal rights" perspective, arguing that the way marriage is currently legislated, it excludes "gays" from full citizenship. (For the record, I take umbrage with Wolfson's insistent use of the term "gay." Same-sex is both alliterative and less exclusive sounding.) Like Brown, and unlike Wolfson, then, I'm not so sure arguing in favor of granting same-sex couples equal rights in marriage is going to make the institution any more just or accessible.

I am sympathetic to Wolfson et al.'s work toward achieving the "right to marry," but I am concerned about those individuals who do not or cannot marry (this is not a question of choosing not to marry--if one believes as I do that individual choice is so already circumscribed as to have a mythic quality). Marriage remains a privileged status: when someone says "my husband" or "my wife," that someone receives different treatment, typically more respect, than if someone admits to being unmarried or divorced. That privilege--as much economic as social--is enshrined in law. Marriage law creates a caste system. I'm currently of pariah status (if anyone was wondering).

I have been reading and re-reading (OK, memorizing) Mary Shanley's Just Marriage, a thrilling example of how difficult dialogues transform people. I'm not sure why Shanley gets the main byline; the book is co-authored by some of the coolest minds re-imagining (or dismantling) marriage today: Nancy Cott, Amitai Etzioni, Martha Fineman, Wendy Brown, Drucilla Cornell, and I could go on. Shanley starts off with an essay in which she argues that civil marriage should be re-fashioned to be a more just and accessible institution. Marriage, she claims, should be retained because it has civic value. Marriage is a "special bond deserving of public status"; a married couple is "something more than its separate members" (6). She initially rejects the contractualist position (which favors abolishing marriage as a legal status in favor of an alternative like civil unions-for-all, or state-sanctioned care-giver relationships--c.f. Martha Fineman's position in The Autonomy Myth). Shanley writes:

Despite [its] dismal history, the notion that marriage creates an entity that is not reducible to the individual spouses captures a truth about significant human relationships and could be used to reshape social and economic institutions in desirable ways. This understanding of the marriage relationship could be used in the future not to subordinate women but to press for marriage partners' rights to social and economic supports that sustain family relationships and enable spouses to provide care for one another...
Marriage as a status suggests, as the contract model does not, the role of committed relationships in shaping the self. The promise to love someone else, in a marriage or in a friendship or in a community, binds a person to act in ways that will fulfill that obligation. A contract also does not express the notion of unconditional commitment, either to the other person or to the relationship. Contract in lieu of marriage rests upon a notion of quid pro quo, in which each party offers something and agrees on the terms of an exchange as a rational bargainer. But the marriage commitment is unpredictable and open ended, and the obligations it gives rise to cannot be fully stated in advance. What love attuned to the well-being of another may require is by its nature unpredictable. (27-28)

What makes this little book thrilling is that fourteen folks contribute their critical response to Shanley's position. At the end one finds a short and heartening rejoinder by Shanley, in which she states that she has changed her thinking on the matter: civil unions win! You'll have to read the book to find out why. Go on, let yourself be transformed.

What Good is Mirage?

England experienced what I’ve referred to as a “crisis of marriage” starting around the mid-eighteenth century with Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, which was supposed to eliminate marital indeterminacy. That is, the 1753 legislation was supposed to help folks determine whether a marriage was legal and above-board. Given the vast range of marriage customs (broomstick wedding, anyone?) and conflicting laws (between Church and State, between England and Scotland, etc.) people weren't always certain if they were married or not. As it happened, the so-called 1753 Law of Clandestine Marriage was not that difficult to get around, as anecdotes, court cases, and novels subsequently proved. And instead of making marriage intelligible to its practitioners, the law only placed another in a series of mystifying veils over the institution, which grew more and more confused and vexing to its practitioners in the British Isles and throughout the British Empire over the next 150 years. Marriage was particularly susceptible to reforms in the Victorian Era, the “age of progress,” and these reforms were frequently described, demanded, and denounced in Victorian novels, poems, and stories.

We’re hearing echoes of the Victorian crisis of marriage in America today. We’re no longer certain what the point of the institution is, according to Robin West, a legal scholar whose work has been important in the Law and Literature movement as well. West writes that the question haunting us (U.S.) today is something like “What good is marriage?”

We—meaning all of us—need to contemplate this question, not only because it is an interesting one, but also because lawmakers will likely take steps over the next half century to change the legal contours of marriage. We need to raise the question regarding the good of marriage not only to deepen understanding. If we can go some ways toward answering the question, it will help guide deliberation on whether, and if, and how, we change it (Marriage, Sexuality, and Gender, 2007, p. 21).

She’s writing from the perspective of Law, and I’m frankly not sure who her audience is here. The book is a thorough description of three different stances folks take on marriage today: defending it, arguing to abolish it, and arguing to fix or redefine it. West herself takes the modest, moderate position that civil union law should be expanded as a socially legitimate alternative to marriage. But I digress: my goal here is not to review her important book, so much as to wonder aloud whether anyone is now writing fiction that criticizes today’s marriage laws? Are there novels that represent same-sex marriages? Are there stories that promote or criticize alternatives to marriage? Are American authors even interested in marriage anymore? It seems to me that the big names in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, Updike et al., were all-too preoccupied with adultery. Have they moved on to engage other issues around marriage, especially as the institution comes under increased strain?

Interview as Big as the Ritz

This is the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Philadelphia, the site of one of my MLA interviews. There were six interviewers, including the chair of the department and an interested graduate student. There was one interviewee triumphantly wearing her MLA suit, thanks to the MLA air diet.

Here's a sampling of the best interview advice I received this year:

1. Don't forget to sparkle.
2. Don't forget to breathe.
3. Talk about how your dream course serves the students, not yourself.
4. Go into more detail about what happens in your classroom.
5. Be yourself.*

*Last night at an informal UW MLA-attendee gathering, my own dept. chair was laughing red wine out of his nose at something I'd said, and spluttered, "Did you show your sardonic humor in your interviews?" When I assured him I had refrained, he replied, "That's probably a good thing." So perhaps as well-intended as "be yourself" can be, as advice from one's beloved goes, it may not be the savviest advice to follow.

This advice all came to me from good friends, and I'm grateful to each of them for patiently listening to me while I relentlessly practiced answering fake interview questions, even at times when they hadn't actually asked me any fake interview questions. Thanks to these kind friends, my interviews went very well.

And now for something completely different... overheard at the MLA:

"... do call me. I love giving presidential addresses--so many people come to them..."
--Gayatri Spivak

"As [so and so] says in a very fine essay entitled 'Pointy Penises'..."
--Joseph Bristow

"Really, it should be fine to look puffy all the time."
--Paige Morgan

MLA Suit Fugue

Both definitions of fugue were in full force on Christmas night as I was packing suit variations for the Modern Language Association's annual post-Christmas convention in Philadelphia. The trick is to figure out how to stretch one's limited supply of professional clothing as long as possible--crucial if one plans to wander around the streets and hotels of downtown Philly for more than two days.

When I was packing my bed looked like this:

My boyfriend patiently looked on as I talked him through the Sunday outfit, the Monday (interview1) outfit, the Tuesday (interview2) outfit, and the Wednesday (just-in-case) outfit, and then he quietly waited for me to finish packing and re-packing my suitcase, wisely offering no helpful suggestions when I realized that my favorite gray Clarks heels would not make it to the convention after all.

After a 5.5 hour flight, I arrived at the downtown Doubletree hotel. A noisy demotion from Nob Hill's Fairmont where I stayed for the MLA convention in San Francisco last year. I unpacked, and my fugue state shifted from variations on a theme ...



to being more of a really disturbed state of consciousness, as I realized that I would need to re-read my entire dissertation (completed in 2007) in order to remember what it was about. Sweet dreams indeed.

Grandma's Favorite Cookies Not Tonight

These are my grandmother's favorite Christmas cookies. A basic butter cookie with an orange-honey glaze, the dough is very pleasing to put together because of the scent that lingers on your fingers from the fresh orange juice and grated orange peel. They are then dressed with a honey-orange glaze and topped with chopped walnuts. I cannot reproduce the recipe here, because it's a family secret. Got it? No recipe. Thus this entire post is a teaser.

And I'll tell you why that's fair: every year at Christmas-time, the Modern Language Association holds its annual job-hunt/meat-market/fish-bowl convention. Folks hoping to obtain a job teaching in the Humanities in an institution of higher education, many of whom are under-employed as adjunct faculty or office drones or baristas, are required to spend upwards of $1,000 traveling to this convention in order to give interviews, if they are fortunate to have them.


But if one were, hypothetically, following my family's recipe for these scrumptious cookies, one might consider pulsing the butter and flour together in a food processor, but not too long because it should be light and fluffy.




This year's MLA is in Philadelphia, the week after Christmas. Three years ago when I commenced my tenure-track professorship quest, after an agonizing eight hours in a shopping mall, I spent over $200 on the most charming black and grey tweed Calvin Klein suit (with a slightly flared skirt) to wear to my interviews. Since last MLA (in San Francisco) I managed to gain enough weight to not fit into the Interview Suit. This has provoked a crisis in our community.

In fact, these cookies can hardly be thought of as innocent in my, um, augmentation.

However, if one were to persevere and figure out the recipe, one might like to know that one must refrigerate the dough for at least an hour before rolling it out.

There will be NO dough in my fridge this year, as I am now desperately following the MLA diet. Yes, dear reader, this means that I have been granted two interviews. And in lieu of purchasing a larger suit for the slim chance of a campus visit, I will lose the ten pounds preventing me from wearing Calvin without busting the seams.

But if one had chilled the dough, one would eventually like to roll it out about 1/8" thick, select several cookie cutters, solicit some assistance, and cut out shapes to bake. See the charmingly plump dough-children? I will not resemble them two weeks from now, in Philadelphia.


After baking them one glazes them. One might be deserted by one's helpers at this point, because picking cookie cutters is fun, while painting cookies with glaze is tedious and sticky. But all under-bakers and assistants swiftly return to sample these treats. Except those attending the MLA, who are neither baking this year, nor sampling. No, we are a committed lot: we are eating air, and we will get a job!