The Rabbit Done Died

One of my favorite episodes of Mad Men is the one where Betty gives birth. I love the scene in The Group where poor Dottie sits in Washington Square Park with a diaphragm in some sort of complicated box contraption. I was completely transfixed by the horrific sex-ed scene in Frederick Wiseman's classic High School documentary. In short I have an unhealthy obsession with the horrors of pre-second wave medicine for ladyparts. Sometimes you hear people make a joke that the only thing the second wave ever did was get us women gynecologists, to which it made sense to me to say, even if that was true, daiyanu and we should make a shrine to them.

So I'm really really confounded that, until I came across this piece, I'd never known about the rabbit test. How could this be? What a crazy image, what bait for writers - this must be in The Bell Jar at least. Maybe it's one of those things you skim over and don't notice when you don't get the reference. According to our wikifriends, who love this sort of thing, it's been name-checked on lots of shows (including MM of course), but a full-on description, someone sitting at home waiting on the results of a rabbit autopsy - why I have I never read this scene? From what I could figure out with a little basic searching, it ended sometime in the sixties or early seventies - certainly recent enough to be part of our cultural memory. Is this something everyone but me knew about? Interesting that we're never too old for this to happen.

Interestingly, the linked article notes that, according to Kinsey's 1958 study, 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies chose illegal abortion. On MM we've now had all three of the main female characters have unintended pregnancies, and we've had two consider abortion but decide against it, and one be completely unaware until giving birth and then having a coerced adoption. Three more unlikely outcomes. Now, of course, only Peggy was single (though statistics on women married to one person and pregnant by another would be interesting, though impossible to obtain), and of course drama rests on improbabilities, but it's still revealing. I asked a friend who used to work at Planned Parenthood and she said, of course, we gave counseling to tons of people and they made all the different decisions you can make, but once they're in the waiting room like Joan was, they're not changing their minds. Again, drama rests on improbabilities, and no one story has to be another story. People often respond to the dodge of this issue in contemporary-set films by saying, well, if Juno or whoever had had an abortion, there would be no movie. That doesn't apply to Mad Men, with its ensemble and multiple plot lines. If Mad Men is a story about what it was like to be a woman at this time, an actual illegal abortion should be part of the story. Not that I'm not feeling ungrateful this week of assurance of its return, in whatever form.

On a somewhat related note, reading this made me wonder if, along with the attack on reproductive rights, the fight against asshole doctors will continue forever. No one cares about writers, except to ask for free books when they're come out from anesthesia. Jesus.

Against Professor X

In this political climate, it's tempting to say nothing about teachers or teaching other than politicians should stop messing with us, stop lying about how we created your problems, just stop. At the same time, as this article points out, a lack of a real progressive discussion about the real challenges and failures of teaching causes lots of smart and well-meaning people to get sucked into the current vogue style of "reform." It doesn't work, but at least people seem do be doing something, right? Whereas lefties are usually left to say, nothing will change unless fundamental inequalities change, but because people don't have hope that this can, they hear this as a surrender to the status quo.

So, I guess I should preface what I have to say about this article by saying, the exploitation of adjuncts is a scandal, and also that we should be wary of expecting all teachers to be heroic, and I respect teachers being realistic and self-critical about what they achieve.

That said, "Professor X"'s original piece in The Atlantic, and this excerpt from his book are truly crazy making. They are basically an account of someone failing at a job and therefore determining that the job can't be done by anyone, anywhere. Maybe it's in the book someone, but in neither of these pieces is there ever a hint of something like, "I tried this, it didn't work, so I tried this." There's not even really anything about teaching - he mostly describes handing out assignments and then his anxiety about how to handle their inevitable failure. The portraits of the students are generalized and stereotypical and give you a sense he didn't get to know them very well - which isn't his fault - as an adjunct with a day job, this would be very, very difficult to do. But if you're going to write a book about teaching, one that will most likely lead readers to conclude that there's no point in trying to make higher education available to working-class students, you have to be self-aware about what's going on. Maybe there's more context in the full book, but in both these pieces, there is fake self-criticism ("I feel so bad about giving Fs, but I do it because I believe in standards") but no real analysis (if "whole classes" are failing, is that really because they are so woefully unprepared, or that there is something wrong with the way I'm preparing them and/or assessing their work?) There's a little bit about how unprepared he is, but instead of calling for better training for adjuncts or trying to learn himself, he figures that there just must be nothing to be done. In the original Atlantic piece, he laments the students' inability to do research, but is profoundly uncurious about learning anything about teaching, and doesn't consider that his pedagogy (at least twenty years out of date when it comes to composition) might be a problem. And he knows that the likes of David Brooks, who blurbs his book, will praise his 'hard truths' when, like the 'hard truths' of a Chris Christie, they are the exact opposite of telling truth to power - they are telling power exactly what it wants to hear. For all that the "reformers" talk about every kid succeeding, there's the point at which you know they don't believe it. What they want is a way to be able to sort kids into successful and not successful with a good conscience. In What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain points to a study that says the most universally held quality of great professors is that they believe students can learn. They believe it's their job to teach all of them, wherever they're starting from, not to sort them. Of course there's a difference between graduate students and undergrad majors, between undergrad majors and folks in a survey, but you treat all of them seriously. This should be obvious, but if you don't believe your students have a right to be in college, things look different.

ETA: Looks like if anything I was too easy on Prof X. . . . In this great common sense response,

Lorraine Berry says much of what I'm saying here, with examples from her own teaching. . . apparently Prof X. also thinks the problem is that caring women are too nice to fail their students. Not like our manly Prof X. Glad to know I wasn't imagining the sexism of the Atlantic piece (he actually says his students have too high a sense of their abilities because of Oprah.) Some folks have written about the sexism of the current attacks on teachers. It's a dark triumph of propaganda that's managed to paint a female-dominanted profession as one of self-satisfied incompetents, because, while of course women teachers and women in all professions have the normal ranges of success, one thing women tend not to do is write books about how much they suck at their jobs and expect to be praised as truth-tellers.

The End of Don?

Now that the long form television as 19th-century meme has official reached its stunning apex (though I still think the Wire is more Zola than Dickens), it seems appropriate to be reminded that the two forms are also classic examples of all that can happen when art and commerce collide: from piracy and fanatical enforcing of spoilers bans to things like this. So, on the off, unbearable to think about possibility that there is to be no season 5, we are left with these thoughts: If this were really the end, and the official end of Don is that he goes off into the sunset with Megan, does this represent a very meta ending about the final triumph of the ultimate pitch? Or better yet, did Weiner set up his negotiating position perfectly: ie make an ending that cannot possibly be the ending, so that he really really really has to be brought back at any price. Of course not: networks don't care about the deep existential confusion brought about by the possibility that Megan is the last word on Don. Still, 2012 is a long way off; it's hard not to give way to all the fallacies of fiction ex-grad students like me should be immune to: where are Don and Megan all this time? By 2012, it'll feel like it's ready to be 1971, at least.

Some Thoughts On Identification and Viewing While Female

So, Daniel Mendelsohn doesn't like Mad Men. Well, to each their own and all that. It's a very stylized show, obviously, and I could understand why some people might find it mannered or stilted. I do agree with his assessment of how the show fails on race, and his point about fans being drawn to the shiny surfaces is a fair if obvious one, I suppose, but I don't think it's quite right. The Sterling Cooper world has to be attractive enough for Peggy to want to join it but corrupt and hollow enough that her success can't be purely triumphant. It's not just that she's trying to succeed among people who can't or don't respect her, it's that she's succeeding at a job that is ultimately about nothing - think of the brilliant episode from last season around the award show. Peggy's hurt that Don gets the credit for her idea, but the sycophantic silliness of the whole procedure make you relieved for her that she didn't get brought along.

But what I found most interesting about Mendelsohn's piece was that he seems very bothered by the uniform unlikeable nature of the boys over at SC/SCDP. Sure, the show wants to make a point about sexism, but do they all have to be so sexist all the time?:

the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s wearying rather than illuminating.

He criticizes the show for inviting us to feel superior to its characters, a criticism I've heard before but which really doesn't make sense to me:

For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering.

But showing both the appeal of the world and being unflinching in its depiction of its injustices is precisely the point. I don't trust this notion that depicting the sexism of the past has nothing to teach us but how superior we are. The idea that there's nothing in the show's sexism viewers can relate to doesn't seem right. Mendelsohn thinks it's hypocritical for the show to depict the men around Joan as louts but then show us how good she looks and invite us to leer. But what about a female viewer who is invited to share Joan's dilemma about the role she plays, and think about the double edged sword of beauty and being leered at? And even when the show does serve to show us how far we've come, isn't this a valid role? Take the scene in the first episode when Peggy goes to the doctor and tries to get the pill. (One of many, may scenes that belies Mendelsohn's claim that the appeal of the show is how the characters are 'unpunished' for what they do - and no, the men don't go free and clear either, even if the rations are skewed). If they're anything like me, viewers would leave that scene rushing for their credit cards to make a donation to Planned Parenthood - and is this such a terrible outcome, to feel so sharply what other women went through and feel grateful that we don't have to?

Mendelsohn gives a sense of where he's coming from at the end of the essay, when he argues that their real point of view on the show is the kids, and that the appeal to viewers is to see our parent's lives. There's certainly a lot to that, although my parents are a little too young for this to be largely the case for me and many of my friends who soak up the show so avidly. He seems relieved to have this point of identification, relieving him from being forced to identify with those unappealing lecherous boys of SC/SCDP. He seems to argue that somehow it's easier to see as complex the morally compromised figures of The Sopranos or The Wire, but in showing men who are attractive and intelligent to varying degrees and also refract, in their differing ways, the prejudices of the day, Mad Men just wants to rub it in. Well, I for one am glad the show dares to show sexism as the stew in which these characters simmer all the time, not just when it's topical, because that's how sexism works. If that makes some viewers uncomfortable because it makes them not want to identify with the protagonists they otherwise would, well, a discomfort in identification is nothing new to lots of viewers, especially those who have the unfortunate habit of viewing while female.

One Fewer Reason to Vote Democratic

Back in 2000 when I was a wee thing, all my friends were voting for Nader. Everywhere I went people were talking about him with lots of excitement; when he drew a full crowd and lots of celebs to Madison Square Garden I was ambivalent about him for lots of reasons, and went back and forth on how I would vote right up until I got into the booth - I even remember reading and thinking about all the 'swap a vote with swing state' schemes that were going on. Seems quaint, doesn't it? Folks who've been made to feel embarrassed in retrospect that they voted for Nader can take heart that at the time I was very embarrassed that I didn't end up voting for him.

One of my roommates at the time wasn't having it. All her friends were voting for Nader too and I remember the button she was wearing that she also gave me, that's probably lying around in my collection somewhere. It said, "it's the Supreme Court, stupid." Nobody had to tell me or anyone else what it meant: fall in line, vote Democratic, or else Roe gets overturned. I've known plenty of people for whom this was a deciding factor in not going third party, or in motivating them to vote when they were otherwise apathetic, as well as otherwise apolitical or centrist women (and men) who felt motivated to vote Democratic because of choice. One of the things that frustrated me about the discussion around What's the Matter With Kansas and the whole cultural versus economic issues frame is that, aside from drawing artificial distinctions (how is the denial of benefits for one kind of health care to millions of poor women since the Hyde amendment not an economic issue?), it led people to talk as if all the juice was on the prolife side, as if getting rid of the issue (which is difficult and who likes to talk about it anyway?) could be nothing but a boon to Democrats, in spite of the fact that their stand on the issue was being used to keep Democratic voters who had highly legitimate questions about what their party stood for in line.

This week a lot of folks are rightly up in arms about HR3, which has gotten the most attention for its 'redefining rape' bullshit, since withdrawn, but is terrible for lots of other reasons too. Nine of its co-sponsers are Democrats, and so when the DCCC sent out a petition attacking Republicans, Sady and others have done a great job calling them out. As many have pointed out, even the existing rape exception is pretty feeble, given the hoops it sets up for anyone who would want to access it. The longstanding existence of the Hyde amendment is yet another example of how successful Republicans have been in washing wielding their 'taxpayer's rights' crap while the rest of us are stuck paying tons more for torture and fail to make more than a peep about it.

Is this the plan of the new Congress - a kind of inversion of Frank's thesis: vote for tax cuts and get abortion restrictions?

Gornick on Bellow, with assist from Baubie

My beloved Baubie, who passed away on December 15th, was for many years a faculty wife extraordinaire at the University of Chicago. When my grandfather's department was recruiting new faculty, she would take them and their wives to the CSO or the art institute to show off the city she loved. She would help them find doctors and apartments and synagogues or churches to help them with the move. She nurtured many of his graduate students, some of whom were there at her 90th birthday party so many years later. I've thought about her sometimes during one of those endless conversations about the squeeze on academic labor - yes, of course, it's the switch to part-timers, but is there also not something in the loss of all that free and invisible labor done by the wives? (Of course, many times the part-timers are the wives, but that's another story.)

Baubie loved the intellectual stimulation of the Hyde Park Community. She was unfailingly warm, in her Minnesota way, about pretty much everyone there. (We once had an argument about her insistence that Milton Friedman was a really nice guy). One time when we were going through some old books, there was a stack of Bellow and I asked if she'd met him. "Oh, sure." I asked what he was like. "Well, you know," she said. Of course I didn't, but I did: that was as close as she would come to saying someone was less than wonderful. "His wife was a doll, though," she said then. "Well, you know, one of his wives." God bless Minnesota nice.

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So there's a volume of letters of Bellow's out. As I've mentioned before, I love letters and diaries and the ephemera of writers, so I was curious about them. Unfortunately I couldn't get through the reviews of them I'd seen, as each one began with a long lament about the eclipse of the great masters, how Bellow's readers were dying out, and on and on. Isn't after someone's dead a good time to stop kissing up to them? So I was delighted to see that Vivian Gornick had a piece about the letters in Bookforum. Reading it brought home what should have been obvious: the lamenters weren't only trying to win Bellow's favor, they were imitating him:

Then there is the unhappy transformation of his attitude toward the culture in which he found himself. In 1952, he wrote to Lionel Trilling: "Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But . . . things are now what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it! To identify oneself with a better past! No, no!" A decade later he was in the full, relentless cry against "the present" that made his books rise repeatedly to crescendoes of ridiculing bitterness against his own time.

Of course, you could argue he really was just growing wiser with age and able to see the corruptions around him more clearly, or that the world really was just getting worse. But as Gornick outlines, over the course of the letters, the world goes sour in much the same way each woman, and women overall, and friendships, went sour. There's a difference between being enraged by the world and having contempt for it. Having contempt isn't critique, it's a way of rejecting the premises outright, the way Bellow or Roth's characters accuse women or feminists of doing. As Gornick wrote in The Situation and the Story, being able to imagine the other isn't a question of political correctness, it's a necessary function of the literary imagination.

There are a number of reasons why reviewers might glide over this or struggle to frame it in more heroic terms. There's the natural pull towards canonization, of course, along with a desire to counter criticism deemed 'political' - even if it means ignoring the writer's own obsessions. There's also a kind of deference that I think is greater for book reviewers than those working in say film, in that reviewers are writers, so you're writing about someone who does what you do, and within that likely does things that you can't do, so who are you to say they have become solipsistic, self-justifying, self-pitying or what have you?

Take a sentence from Herzog Gornick quotes, when he says of women, "They eat green salad and drink human blood." Now, that's kind of a brilliant sentence. Beautiful, maybe? Is that the right word? But it's power doesn't make it 'true' in any of the ways a statement like that could be 'true.' Yes, yes, it's Herzog saying it, not Bellow, so you could say, it's a truth-telling statement about the thought process of a certain kind of betrayed husband. But it's a truth obtained by absorption in this point of view, not distance. Then, in a letter, we get a sentence like this one:

In a 1984 letter to a former mistress, he says of the fourth wife now leaving him almost exactly what he'd said of the second when she left him: "Where a woman's warmest sympathies should be there is a gap, something extracted in the earliest years of life which now is not even felt, not recognized as absent."

A less brilliant sentence this time, its ironies more obvious and bare. Why should we take the laments for the culture any differently? Baubie once asked me, when she was taking a retirement class on Nobel Prize winning authors, why they were all so dark, why weren't there any who could write about the joys of life. I mumbled something about how much harder that is to express, a wholly insufficient answer, because it's not just with sexism or cultural decline that literary folks seem especially vulnerable to equating bad news with truth.

There's always a pleasure in writers with voice and craft, and there's lots of reasons to read Bellow, to find him compelling. But there may also be moments when one finds it all a bit much, that life is short and art long and that, contrary to popular belief, there are limits to a woman's masochism, even as a reader. A lovely thing about no longer being a student and no longer twenty-one is the ability to accept this with relief.

On another note, I was delighted to read in her author note that Vivian Gornick is writing a biography of Emma Goldman. I love her autobiographical essays and her book on Stanton, and ever since discovering the unbelievable genius B. Traven, I've been itching to learn more about anarchism. It's not quite Minnesota nice, but at least there will be dancing.

The Idea of Datedness (with Jazz Hands)

This week I went to the ballet. The trip was inspired in part by my rant after seeing Black Swan about how yes, she lost a lot of weight and trained hard, but people who said Natalie Portman looked like a ballet dancer just don't know what they are talking about, and were doing a real disservice to the amazing artists the film was trying to be about. It also seemed like a kind of Social Network thing: let's make this world seem even more misogynist world than it is, and kind of condemn, that, but mostly wallow in it, because you know what isn't misogynist: Hollywood! Not to mention the idea of 'reinventing Swan Lake by making it visceral!" as some revolutionary statement. What's next, a visionary theater directory who wants to set Hamlet in Nazi Germany? Zany!

But, in any case, the movie made me want to go to the ballet. I complained to my friend that no one wants to go, and he gamely volunteered, so last week I saw a double Jerome Robbins program, "Dances at a Gathering," originally from 1969, and 1958's "NY Export: Opus Jazz." No offense to black block theaters and their folding chairs, but there's nothing like going to Lincoln Center in the middle of the week. "Dances at a Gathering" is the kind of modern ballet I love best: just enough story: no mythological frufru, no dead virgins, just friends coming together mixing, flirting, pairing off, repairing off, and quietly bidding each other off, all with a classical vocabulary, and gorgeous lines to match the single voice of Chopin's piano line.

But it was the relatively short "NY Export" that just floored me. My friend joked before hand that he wanted to see jazz hands, and he wasn't disappointed. Everyone has seen Robbins choreography, since he did West Side Story (along with Peter Pan, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof and others), and it always kind of kills me when people joke about the dancing gangs of West Side Story, as if musical theater was supposed to adhere to the Dogma rules of social realism. But it's not just the jazz hands: everything about this piece screams 1959, as much as the Weber paintings I last wrote about, from the sneakers to the gorgeous Ben Shahn backdrops. People make fun of the obsessive period stuff on Mad Men, but it's undeniably a huge part of what we love: the illusion of transportation, to which the visual is the best pathway. Nostalgia is dangerous in general, when it's for a time we never lived in as much as when it's clearly a proxy for our own childhoods. But it's also unavoidable, and, taking it with the proper suspicion, we can enjoy it as one of the transporting pleasures of art. I was trying to describe Ben Shahn and all I could think of was the line from Annie Hall, you know the one, "you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandies University, the socialist summer camps, and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings," and of course I'm not that at all, no one could be who isn't a good thirty years older than me, and even going back that wasn't really my family, but it's something to laugh at, and to explain why you like the "dated" more than all the things the hip people have "rediscovered."