Bear With Us

September 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .)

A couple of days later, Lisa at Sociological Images had a post reminding us that pink was once the color for boys. She linked to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian.

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the colour note on the little one's garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

Goldacre uses this bit of history to debunk the claim recently made by evolutionary psychologists that girls’ preference for pink was an outcome of evolution.

But what about the teddy bear? Isn’t there something feminine, a maternal instinct perhaps, that leads girls to keep these soft, childhood objects? It is only girls, right?

Wait, now I remember seeing NYC sanitation trucks with a teddy bear mounted on the grill like a bowsprit mermaid. And Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited who takes his bear Aloysius with him to Oxford.

Now there’s a DVD* about a Teddy bear snapshot exhibition by Canadian Ydessa Hendeles – thousands of photos from the early twentieth century of people posing with their bears. And it’s not just girls.

*The DVD is of a documentary film by Agnès Varda, who interviews the visitors to the exhibit.

Hat tip to Magda

Happy Blogday to Me

September 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

This blog is two years old today so I’m allowing myself one day of what Chris Uggen calls “self-indulgery.” In nearly every other post, I’ve tried to follow the rules for this blog that I started out with:

• Posts would be something our undergraduates could read and would want to read.
• Posts would have some sociological content, however tangential.

In other ways, the blog has turned out differently from what I first expected.

• I set it up as a department blog, hence the name, but it quickly became a solo effort.
• I thought that the readership would be mostly our undergraduates, but few, if any, of them read it.
• I originally thought of posts as something like op-ed pieces – 700-800 words weaving together two or three related strands of thought. Now, I try to keep posts shorter, with more graphics, and with only one idea per post.

I never imagined that I’d wind up writing 300+ posts – three a week for two years. At first, I thought I might manage one or maybe two posts a week for at the most two months. That’s why I thought it would have to be a group blog. There were times times when I felt I had absolutely nothing left to say. But then something would spark my interest, and ideas for posts would pop out of every corner. I have a file of unused ideas, most of them past their sell-by date.

The rewards of blogging, at least for me, are two: First, as a friend put it, blogging is instant gratification. The turnaround time between writing and publication is zero. You get an idea or take an interesting photo or find some data. You write it up, you click, and it’s out there. Second, blogging has allowed me to make some contact, however minimal, with other bloggers, and they are a smart, funny, lively, and friendly bunch.

My main disappointment is that the readership is small, and the comments sparse (I was encouraged by Andrewska’s kind words on his blog). I feel like a comedian in a radio studio telling a joke and having no idea if anyone out there laughed or even if anyone was listening. If I do shut down the blog – and I have often thought I might – that will probably be the reason why.

I have now gone back and read through the posts, and I was surprised to find that I liked most of them. The list below is not necessarily the ten best. They’re just ten that for different idiosyncratic reasons I’m fond of.

The Pursuit of Bada Bing, April 13, 2007
I, You, We, May 14, 2008
The Institutionalization of Hysteria, September 29, 2007
Contributions and Attributions, April 18, 2007
Mendacity, October 27, 2006
Cheating the Executioner, November 5, 2006,
A Fine and Public Place, November 8, 2007
Sweat Equity and Magical Thinking, December 3, 2007
Moral Nostalgia and the Myth of the Authoritarian Past, February 27, 2007
Closed for vacation? May 15, 2007,

That’s My Narrative, and I’m Sticking To It

September 18, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The narrative about A-Rod and the Yankees hasn't changed from the start of the season (NY Daily News)

I wasn’t all that surprised to see the word narrative turn up in the sports pages of the Daily News. You see and hear the word everywhere these days, even in cooking.

For Ms. Dunlop [author of The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook], Hunanese food ''embodies a narrative of place.'' (NY Times)

Every time I hear narrative, I ask myself whether it could be replaced by the simpler term story. Almost always, the answer is yes.

It’s hard to pick one narrative. The Palin narrative is she is in a war with the mainstream media. (Jim Pinkerton of The American Conservative on Fox)

I watched [McCain] begin that long narrative about his prison camp . . . (Wall Street Journal editor Dorothy Rabinowitz on Fox)

I'm used to all the faddish terms that come from sports and business. (The bottom line is that we need a new game plan.) Issues, replacing the more prosaic problems, crossed over from psychotherapy, but now everyone uses it, even people not usually given to psychobabble. An e-mail at work informed me that the maintenance department had taken care of the “issue” that had shut down the elevator for two hours. And before the start of football season two years ago, I heard a retired linebacker say on ESPN, “Well, the Jets have right tackle issues this season.”

But how many of these crossover words come to us from semiotics and lit crit? Now, even the right wingers who decry and denounce English professors for their impenetrable language and leftish views freely throw narrative into their commentary.

Articles from US and World Publications and TV and Radio Transcripts containing the word narrative.

My own sense that narrative had fully entered the mainstream came about four years ago. The teenager formerly in residence was in ninth grade, and that season he was watching “The Apprentice.” One evening, he said that two of his friends watched it and discussed the show the next day in school. “But their narrative is often different from Mark Burnett’s narrative.”

I had a sort of "Watch your language, young man" reaction. When I was his age, I would have thought that “The Apprentice” was Donald Trump’s show, not what’s-his-name. I wouldn’t have known the name of the producer of this or any TV show. Nor would I have known that the producer, far more than anyone on screen, was the true force shaping the program. I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what the producer did. And if I had known, I wouldn’t have thought of it as “creating a narrative.”

Politics - The Hollywood Version

September 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s like a really bad Disney movie, “The Hockey Mom.” “Oh, I’m just a hockey mom from Alaska,” and she’s president. She’s facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It’s absurd.

Matt Damon knows the movies. He has picked up on a theme that has run through American films for decades: the triumph of innocence over intrigue. Damon is thinking of Disney comedies, but the idea is so deeply embedded in American culture that it underlies darker entertainments as well.

Typically, the ordinary American – honest, incapable of guile – lands in some nefarious web of intrigue and deceit woven by powerful but evil people. These are often foreigners, but they can also be domestic gangsters or malefactors of great wealth, the kind of people who drink expensive wine or collect modern art. In a word, elitists.

The official authorities, especially if they wear uniforms, are no help. They are either incompetent or in cahoots with the bad guys. In fact, they are usually a hindrance, threatening or even imprisoning the hero. Yet our hero, through good old American straightforwardness and resourcefulness, outwits the baddies, disrupts the their plot, rescues whoever was in danger, and restores the world to order. If there’s a pretty, single girl, he winds up with her too. Innocence beats intrigue every time.*

It’s not just Disney, and it’s not just Spiderman, Batman, and other films derived from children’s comic books. It’s Capra, Hitchcock (“The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “North By Northwest”), and dozens of lesser directors. Maybe it’s even Matt Damon movies (I confess, I have not seen or read “The Bourne Ultimatum,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if it contained some of these elements.)

At least Damon has the good sense to know that the world of movies is not the real world, and that being the plucky hockey mom might not necessarily qualify someone to be one septuagenarian heartbeat away from the presidency. But the PR strategists that work for our politicians try to present the real world as though it were a movie, and the public often seems to accept that presentation.

The networks should be running “Wag the Dog” on a continuous loop.

*My favorite counter-example is “The Third Man.” The protagonist (played by Joseph Cotten) thinks he’s in an American film, but he’s not. He’s in a European film. His friend, the man whose innocence he tries to prove, turns out in fact to be a baddie, just like the British officer has said. And even though Cotten realizes that the British officer was right and winds up killing his friend, the intrigue, conspiracy, and evil in Vienna will continue. And he doesn’t get the girl.