Publicly Sponsored Hate Speech

May 1, 2013 By 3 Comments

I hadn’t intended to write another post about the virulent hatred of fat, fatness, and fat people that is currently shaping our culture. My previous post on the topic led to some interesting and intense conversation, but there are many other topics to discuss and many other dangerous political trends to analyze. Besides, this is a communications blog.

But when I came across this astonishing campaign image on the subway recently, I realized that it deserves its own post.

"Cut the Junk" NYC Campaign

“Cut the Junk” NYC Campaign

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Filed Under: Art, Culture, Health, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Science

Windows into the “Holiday Season”

January 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment

The marketing gods of Manhattan are rounding the bend into Valentine’s Day-themed imagery, but I’m still thinking about the “holiday season 2012” fervor.  Specifically, I’ve been caught up in the department store holiday windows. Minnie Mouse dancing with Sarah Jessica Parker.  Winged women in 1920’s-style flapper dresses floating in front of a kaleidoscopic glass and gold backdrop.  Santa leaning over a giant vintage globe in a musty study.  Carousel horses suspended from an ethereal blue mist.  In approaching the CUNY Graduate Center from most directions, these images were unavoidable.  What does it all mean?

Bergdorf Goodman

Bergdorf Goodman

The department store holiday window display tradition in Manhattan always seems anachronistic to me.  It seems like a throwback to less tech-savvy entertainments, such as nineteenth century panoramas, or the diorama book reports I made in third grade. They are also, of course, a symbol of the complicity between corporate commercial interest and the production of supposed mainstream national culture.  And I will admit, I kind of love them.

But what do the holiday windows communicate?  What do they say about attempts at constructing a cohesive narrative of the “holiday season” in the United States?  About the relationship between this amorphous holiday season and American trends in fashion and consumption?  About the carefully constructed neutrality of the concept of a “holiday season” itself?

The generic greeting of “happy holidays,” so ubiquitous in December in New York City, always makes me particularly conscious of the complexity of negotiating aspects of national culture in a country that has, perhaps, never conformed to the neat nation-state model.  This winter I noted how many times, in my Queens neighborhood known for its ethnic and national diversity, I had interactions with strangers in which we both wished each other a “merry Christmas,” after which I paused and considered how unlikely it was that either of us was planning on celebrating Christmas on purpose.

The holiday windows present an interesting text for considering the conscious choices that corporations make in communicating a particular vision of the holiday season.  The trend in the window themes this year seems to have favored topics without explicit Christmas imagery.  For example, local news sites identified a roaring twenties theme represented by Bergdorf Goodman’s jazz-age windows and Henri Bedel’s Great Gatsby-era windows.  Barney’s Disney-themed windows stuck to a generic treatment of the holidays with their “electric holiday” series.  Bloomingdale’s Cirque du Soleil theme invoked whimsical, otherworldly landscapes, meant, presumably, to speak to the transporting nature of holiday revelry.  I’m not sure what makes these themes “holiday” specific, aside from the vaguely religious imagery of winged angel women in low-waisted white fringe dresses.  More than anything, the common denominators deemed “safe” for these window themes seem to be material decadence and high-end nightlife.

Bloomingdale's

Bloomingdale’s

The Macy’s and Lord and Taylor windows stood out through their use of specific Christmas imagery.  The Macy’s windows, based on the story associated with the now legendary 1897 newspaper editorial “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” convey a family-friendly ethos with old fashioned charm, reminding us that childhood belief in the supernatural keeps alive a valuable spirit of possibility.  But is this kind of belief deemed universally valuable, or is it the specific trappings of Christmas imagery that are shown to be uniquely wholesome?

Macy's

Macy’s

It was the Lord and Taylor windows that most interested me.  The series, titled “Wish for Tradition,” depicted Santa in an old study, leaning over a globe.  The tones are muted, as though we’re viewing Santa lost in time.  The globe conveys a sense of world unity in diversity, just as “tradition” implies continuity between the contemporary world and the past.  But this global unity is limited; it is, apparently, only populations that Santa plans on visiting who are included.  The dioramas include a snowy central park excursion, a scene in an outdoor German gift market, a swanky party in an unidentified location (but mostly attended by white people), and a lantern-strewn bridge in Japan with people wearing both traditional and modern clothing.  Tradition, the title implies, is something we should wish for, something we are perhaps at risk of losing, something that might be given to us wrapped in shiny paper if we hope for it fervently enough.

Lord and Taylor

Lord and Taylor

But this glorified representation of tradition only applies to those parts of the world where December is a blanket of snow, or where holiday festivities are marked by buying things, or by a tuxedo-clad waiter carrying bottles of champagne.

Filed Under: Culture, Media, New York

“Trick or Treating” for Adults, After a Hurricane

November 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The day after Hurricane Sandy departed and left us with the mess, a close friend invited me to go “trick or treating” in the Carroll Gardens.  Now, you don’t have to twist my arm to ask strangers for chocolate; but this pre-Halloween expedition had a twist.  They were collecting provisions – flashlights, batteries, candles, canned goods – for people in the neighboring Red Hook, which had no electricity and was suffering pretty badly in Sandy’s wake.

I couldn’t join them, but a couple of days later I stole the idea and took students from a class I teach at Pratt Institute “trick or treating” in Clinton Hill and Fort Greene.  If we started off rather timidly, two hours later we were boldly knocking on doors and could barely carry everything we’d collected.   Our laden arms made for lighter steps: after days of being worried, sad, frightened, frustrated, cut off, and/or inconvenienced there was something alleviating and just plain fun about talking to people we didn’t know and witnessing their impulse to give…something.  There was a British man who didn’t think he had anything that fit our list.  He asked us to wait while he checked and returned a few minutes later with an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels.  “That’s non-perishable,” he said.  Much to my students’ chagrin I gave it back.

As people opened their doors we caught a glimpse into well-lit homes that seemed largely unaffected by the storm but for those minor inconveniences that make you realize how lucky you usually have  it.  Then every so often, one of us would point to something, like a car pancaked under a fallen tree, and we’d remember even life here wasn’t  exactly “like normal.”  What I could load on to my back and bike rack I took to Red Hook the following day; the rest we dropped off at the nearby Brooklyn Tech, which was being used as an emergency shelter for evacuees whose lives had been uprooted.  Opening the doors of the school was a glimpse into a starkly different world – with mounds of donations and people stationed near the entrance to check you in, a depressing feeling in the air, and some of the 500 evacuees wandering in and out looking worn down, bored, anxious, displaced.  Right before we left, a young woman who saw me holding a sketchbook exclaimed: “Can I have that?  I’m going to make art!!”  She seemed the kind of person you could picture smiling through the apocalypse and I hope she’s somewhere around me when that shit goes down. I gave her the pad.

Over the next two days I went to Red Hook, Brooklyn and the Rockaways, Queens.  Most of what I did in both places was to deliver food and provisions to the homes of the elderly or infirmed who couldn’t collect it and had no heat or light in their public housing buildings.  I met people who were just so grateful for a warm meal, a mother and adult son who were living with a leaking roof and gusts of cold air blowing through their broken window, children desperate for a flashlight.   On the way to these sites, I passed a standstill line of cars over twenty blocks long waiting for gas, kids playing on fallen trees instead of jungle gyms, and streets along the coast where houses had been completely decimated.   Returning to my warm apartment where everything was fine except for the cell phone service had the same strange contrast of “trick or treating.”  Just like there is something eerie about comparing photos of lower Manhattan where folks were groping around in the dark for days and people living in the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side still have no running water or flushing toilets to images of upper Manhattan, where as a friend aptly put it, women could still shop at Bergdorf’s and don their high heels.

But then this is New York.  Just walk down Madison Avenue from 120th to 80th Street sometime, think about the controversy over Stop and Frisk policing, or consider the city’s growing chasm between rich and poor and the effects of “city renewal” on the latter.   With Sandy, it was the very blatant division of have and have nots across new lines at a moment of collective uncertainty and crisis that had a visceral effect and appealed to an underlying ethic of compassion and justice most of us share.

Over the past days, I saw a lot of people coming together to help each other and themselves.  Many are people I know from CUNY who have been working morning to night since the storm to make sure their fellow New Yorkers have at least their very basic needs met.  Many are people who’ve been working on issues related to housing, debt, education, policing, labor, income disparity, environmental justice, you name it long before this storm hit.   I hope the important work of repairing and rebuilding the physical and social infrastructure of our city doesn’t stop with the obvious, but addresses some of the divisions that go back further and deeper so we can come out of this stronger than we’ve ever been.

Filed Under: CUNY, New York, Politics, To Ponder

Hard Copy Heaven: The NY Art Book Fair

October 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This weekend I attended Printed Matter’s seventh annual NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. A much-hyped event (in the art community, at least), the fair featured 283 vendors – more than any prior iteration – throughout Ps1s sprawling building. Some were crammed together, others with dedicated rooms of their own, the various stores, presses, not-for-profits, publications, and individual artists offered everything from lovingly crafted editions and xeroxed zines, to stacks of academic titles, to lush monographs and works of book art.

Wolf Vostell’s Unique Concrete Book Object, 1973 (with Josef Beuys’ 1970 recording Ja ja ja, nee nee nee, in background.

As someone whose idle fantasies continually circle back to a luxuriously appointed study that can comfortably house a growing personal library (in contrast to my current reality of shrinking bookshelves and desperate use of a batch scanner, and yes, I’ll happily take a cramped assistant professor’s office, thanks for asking) my walk through the fair was bittersweet. Unlike some of my colleagues, I wasn’t buying for an institution or a curated collection, and any indulgence was on my own dime.

In her 2003 essay, “The Problem of Reading,” artist and writer Moyra Davey writes incredibly eloquently about the ongoing turmoil of choosing what to read next (provided one isn’t reading for a specific writing project), tracing a literary thread on the creative work of reading – and the conflict of choice – through Woolf, Calvino, Bathes, Kafka, Perec, and Bloom. At the beginning of her text, she conjures an imaginary protagonist at home, drifting from book to book. “It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, wil choose her, redeeem her. Often what is at stake, should she want to spell it out, is the idea that something is missing, as in” what is the crucial bit of urgently needed knowledge that will save her, at least for this day?” The advice of various authors is woven throughout her text: Bloom advises returning to Shakespeare, which contains the “Freudian map of the mind” and is therefore crucial to understanding contemporary society, and Gregg Bordowitz advocates “promiscuous” reading, in which any planned faithfulness to a productive list is regularly cast aside, in favor of recommendations by anyone you might run into.

But the “art book” is a particular medium, in an extremely general sense: its objecthood communicates as much as its content. Its design marks its history, its physical form reflects its intended purpose: cold conceptualism, subjective meditation, or exhaustive compendium. It’s about more than reading: it’s about having.

One of my purchases, the main catalog for documenta (13) 2012.

Some tables were refreshingly austere, offering more information than heavy things to haul home. Curator and writer Jamie Sterns talked with me about the new media preservation and preservation work of NP. There was, of course, a book on offer: Travess Smalley’s Capture Physical Presence.

It’s hard to add new books (that aren’t critical to one’s dissertation) to an already unwieldy collection. But part of the reason I find culling books so painful is that it feels like letting go of not a piece of “knowledge,” but a piece of subjectivity, and of the potential for a rich-re-reading at a moments’ notice, just by reaching for it again on your crammed shelf.

Speaking of rich re-reading: these two original Kathy Acker paperbacks, which I really wanted, were something like $80 each.

A book is a cultural exchange, and a place for the exchange of books is, almost inevitably, a place where culture thrives. Presumably, it’s what the duo behind the upcoming LES bookstore, the Bureau of General Services, Queer Division, are banking on .

Donny Jochum and Greg Newton of BGQSD, with hot selling title No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (Justin Hall, ed.)

Perhaps, along with Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure and Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, and Greg and Donny will stock the latest issues of Pinups. Promiscuous reading, anyone?

Walking past this table, I was unexpectedly treated to the picture of a friend naked in the shower.

I picked up a copy of the brand-new anthology Where Are the Utopian Visionaries? from the Project Projects/Paper Monument table. The former is a terrific design studio, and the latter is an art journal that’s way more fun to read than October.

Rob Giampietro of Project Projects.

The fair is over, my desk is more cluttered, and my Amazon wishlist (for those things with an ISBN) is even more swollen. But, somehow, I’m still looking for the thing to read next.

As Davey writes, “The idea of a book choosing the reader has to do with a permission granted. A book gives permission when it uncovers a want or a need, and in doing so asserts itself above all the hundreds of others jockeying to be read. In this way a book can become a sort of uncanny mirror held up to the reader, one that concretizes a desire in the process of becoming.” In light of yesterday’s first presidential debate, this collaborative publication from the Badlands/Deste table seems perfect.

The inaugural collaborative publication between Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited and the Deste Foundation. Available on Kindle, if, like, me, you’re grousing about space.

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Fun, literature, Media, New York

FRO12: Now Much Artier

September 24, 2012 By 1 Comment

This summer Mikhail Gershovich and I re-wrote the three blog prompts required of all Baruch College students taking Freshman Seminar. The previous prompts, which we wrote a few years ago, were way too formulaic. When crafting assignments, you get what you ask for. We had asked students to tell us “this,” and they responded by writing “this.”

One of the goals of the freshman blogging initiative was to get a sense of who our students are. Instead, we were getting a sense of who our students felt we wanted them to tell us they were. Very few posts integrated media, and students responded to them as though they were a burden rather than an opportunity.

We feel these new prompts are much improved:

Post One, due by mid-September Create a two minute video, an eight image slideshow, or a ten song musical playlist that represents who you think you are to your classmates. Embed your creation in a blog post and then write no more than 500 words that explains how what you’ve created speaks to who you are.

Post Two, due by mid-October For this assignment, you must 1) post the self-reflective monologue you’ve developed in your seminar workshop AND 2) embed a self-portrait, which can be a photograph, an image, a cartoon, a drawing, or some other depiction of how you see yourself.

Post Three, due by early December Create or find a photograph or some other image (a meme, an animated GIF, etc.) that represents in some way your experience at Baruch thus far. Embed your image in a blog post in which you reflect, in no more than 500 words, on your impressions of your first three months at Baruch. Your response should be personal and creative. If you use an image that you did not create yourself, be sure to credit the source with a name, if possible, and a URL!

We trained the Peer Mentors who run Freshman Seminar in how to guide students through producing these posts, and gave them a range of tools that students can use. We also talked to them about the “why” behind these assignments. Each creates an opportunity to talk with students about intellectual property issues, about citation, about public and private publishing (students can password-protect their posts if they want), and about the network of publishers that’s emerging on our campus. In their coursework, we ultimately want students to break down artificial boundaries between the tools and ideas they use and engage outside of their schoolwork and what happens in school. We want to give them permission to apply the skills that power their hobbies to their academic pursuits. We want them to make some art, dammit. And we want them to learn how to do all this in a way that generates both specific expertise and “generalizable knowledge.” Doing so in a low-pressure setting like Freshman Seminar is a crucial first step.

We’re already seeing the fruits of this change in the first six hundred + posts that have come in. Want to see what college freshmen at public, urban university are listening to these days, and how they write about those tastes? Want to see New York City through the eyes of 18 year-olds? Want to see our students’ facility with the moving image (only a few have used video so far, but, this is great)? Then check out the 2012 Baruch Freshman Seminar Motherblog. This space aggregates feeds from around fifty individual sections of the course powered by the work of over a thousand students. That space will be filling up with work over the next few months, and we’re excited to keep looking at, listening to, and watching what our first year students come up with.

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Originally posted on my personal blog. 

Filed Under: Baruch College, EdTech, Education, Low-Stakes Writing, New York, Pedagogy, Teaching, Technology

A Glimpse of Themselves

September 21, 2012 By 3 Comments

Some years ago I learned of the existence of a “public editor” at The New York Times — someone charged with sifting through and consolidating the feedback and concerns of readers — an advocate or representative of sorts. I was delighted to imagine this direct line of access to the top of The Times tower, to someone actually desirous of productive feedback, and immediately conjured the concise, bullet-pointed letter I’d pen — one that would be received with deep gratitude (and likely produce an invitation to come on as a paid consultant). In straightforward language I’d point the editor to a variety of egregious oversights and mistakes he hadn’t yet noticed (including, but not limited to, The Times’ apparent understanding that the passive receipt and regurgitation of press releases from the agents of those who have recently produced corporate-sponsored art forms constitutes art and literary coverage). The fantasy withered, however, as I soon saw that a) The Times is fully cognizant of its inner logics and b) the office of the public editor blunts real critique by providing readers with an aggression-welcoming punching bag.

Defeated, I channeled my concerns into a private transcription of undeniable, mundane error, keeping a running record of grammatical mistakes and patterns. For instance (the comma seems to cause particular trouble):

  • Four of Mitt Romney’s sons get out the message, as well as, offer a glimpse of themselves.
  • In “A Singular Woman,” the author Janny Scott goes beyond what we know about Barack Obama’s mother — a “white woman from Kansas” — to portray a woman who took a more difficult path than her peers’.
  • Chrissie Miller of Sophomore, is still a social force, with a new store, 143.
  • Ms. Rowley poses with Leigh Lezark of the Misshapes, while Mr. Powers, chats with James Frey.
  • In that last montage, some months after East Dillon has done the inconceivable and won the State championship, they are shown as the East Coast people, Eric thought they could never be.
  • Wardrobe diplomacy: Tips on the perfect closet and, more importantly, how to share it your husband!
  • Chuck Close, wearing a colorful suit by the avant-garde fashion label, threeASFOUR.

This last line was published on the same day a thoughtful editorial on comma confusion appeared. Indeed, the newspaper excels in simultaneous grammar meta-commentary and error. An online column is dedicated to tracking the grammatical errors readers have found, and “grammar and usage” is an online “Times Topic,” introduced this way: “Why are people so obsessed with grammar, and so offended by real or imagined lapses? They argue over split infinitives and sentences that end in prepositions, almost to the point of blows…sticklers see proper grammar and usage as a baseline for a civilized society, or at least for a respectable publication. If writers don’t know the difference between “rack” and “wrack,” or between a gerund and a participle, why should we trust them on anything else?”

Once again they’ve beat me to it, anticipating my attacks by providing a column with which to contain them. But I remain undeterred. Perhaps it’s time to write to the public editor, explaining that grammatical outrage might be compensatory, might stem from sources other than grammar itself. In my case, it’s simply a stand-in for the fatigued irritation I feel each time I read about the varieties of fruit that fill Upper West Side blenders in the weekly “Sunday Routines” column.

 

 

Filed Under: Internet, Marketing, Media, New York

FATNESS, BODIES, AND HEALTH

May 22, 2012 By 22 Comments

I’m not astonished by the hatred of fatness currently present in our culture, or by the extent to which it has intensified over the past few decades. Cultures go through phases and cycles, and there are always scapegoats and victims of shame and blame. What shocks me is how fully this hatred has been adopted into public discourse.

I’m not going to rehearse the critique of anti-fat discourse in any depth here. Suffice it to say that statistical correlations between fatness and illness have nothing to say about the causes of such illness or how about how to avoid it. It is impossible to isolate the health effects of fatness in a context of rampant dieting, since dieting itself seems to be very unhealthy. Even if fatness were shown to be a predictor of certain kinds of illness, losing weight wouldn’t necessarily be a solution. And even if it were, a predisposition to illness is the last thing in the world that ought to provoke anger or scorn.

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Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Gender, Health, Internet, Law, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Scholarship, Uncategorized

The People’s Research Library

April 19, 2012 By 4 Comments

My post is an appeal to readers, writers, and scholars who use the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street central research library. That is, all people who make use of this amazing, impressive democratic institution. The NYPL’s proposed Central Library Plan (CLP) calls for a fundamental transformation of the 42nd Street space whereby the Mid-Manhattan Circulation Library (across the street at 40th Street) and the Science Industry and Business Library (SIBL, at Madison and 34th) would be incorporated into the 42nd Street location. Up to 3 million books from the central library’s research collection would be sent to an offsite storage facility in New Jersey and the seven floors of stacks that formerly housed these books would be demolished to make room for the circulation library, SIBL’s research collection, a multitude of public-access computers, and an internet café. The CLP will adversely alter the way the public can use the central research library and strike at the very heart of the research library’s egalitarian mission. In his recent article, “Stop Cultural Vandalism,” Scott McLemee rightly declares, “the CLP needs to be stopped” Together we need to decide how we will accomplish this goal.

Public Library

cc photo credit: Paolo Rosa

Implementation of the CLP will impair the ability of writers, readers and scholars to conduct research at the NYPL’s central research library. Patrons organize their library time around heavy, often complicated schedules. We therefore must maximize the time we spend in the library. My requested materials typically arrive together, allowing me to hunker down and get to work. Under the proposed plan, it is impossible to guarantee that all of one’s requested items will arrive together—a significant impediment to maximizing time in the library. What if a few books arrive one day and the rest trickle in over the next couple of days, but a patron cannot be back at the library for another week? And what about the patron who has traveled from outside NYC, and thus has a very limited timeframe in which to conduct research? Or the student who is striving to write a research paper under deadline? Architects of the CLP claim that requested materials would be available within 24 hours. In a piece titled “Improving a Treasured Institution,” NYPL President and CEO Anthony Marx argues that “24-hour turnaround is made possible by major enhancements already in the works, most notably by bar-coding every item.” Upgrading the means by which books are tracked makes sense. Moving the books offsite does not. Current turnaround for most materials is roughly less than an hour and that is because most of the collection is located in the stacks or in storage under Bryant Park. Touting a projected 24-hour turnaround as a benefit underscores a major flaw of the CLP and the myopia of its supporters: researchers should not have to wait 24 hours—and probably more—for their materials. Indeed, due to time constraints and deadlines, they often cannot.

A sectional view of the New York Public Library. (1911)

A sectional view of the New York Public Library. (1911) by leiris202, on Flickr

The CLP also fails to take into account the serendipitous aspect of research. While reading a particular text, I have often been guided to additional sources via footnotes and bibliographical entries. I then request those texts and receive them in an hour or so. Threads of thought have the best chance of coming to fruition when they are unbroken, when one can engage with several texts at the same time. Trying to hold on to a thread—before it even becomes an idea—for days before one can consult a needed text is difficult, if not impossible. A keyboard or a pen and paper are often not enough to keep an idea going. A book is vital to the development of an idea and, if the flow of research is impeded by having to wait longer for materials, then the quality of one’s research will suffer. Given the logistics of peoples’ schedules, many day readers may simply forego by necessity the opportunity to read the books they want to read. Books that people cannot find in circulating collections, books that are out of print, books that are unavailable digitally in their entirety, books that are unaffordable for personal purchase. Circulating and research collections are completely different from one another and one should not be the sacrificial lamb for the other. In response to a query on what will replace the stacks, the NYPL cheerfully declares, “Books!” Does anyone else see the cracks in this veneer?

It is disingenuous to argue that, after the NYPL’s largest circulating library has been folded into the nation’s second-largest public research library, research activities won’t be compromised. They will. Whether one is involved in a years-long research project or has devoted a day to read up on a topic of personal interest, the patron of the research library is there not only because of the collection, but also for the overall environment that the research library provides. The expansive Rose Main Reading Room, whether on a weekday morning or mid-afternoon on a Saturday, provides a conducive place to work. That is because people are there to read and write and this engagement is wonderfully palpable and inspiring. The anticipated spike in traffic from combing three libraries into one is enormous. Lauding this increase, the NYPL boasts, “[t]he number of visitors to the new Schwarzman Building will likely triple, and the percentage of people using the collections will soar.” Try conducting focused research under those conditions! Researchers working on long-term projects may apply to use the Allen Room or the Wertheim Study. There often is a waiting list, though, and access is limited. The CLP calls for the allocation of “dedicated spaces for up to 500 NYPL-affiliated writers and scholars,” however that will still leave the vast majority of research library patrons to try to function as researchers in overcrowded, mixed-use space.

The price of this overhaul is estimated at $300 million. The cost of this overhaul is well beyond dollars. One does not upgrade a world-class public research library by turning it into a glitzy, overcrowded facility. Nor does one upgrade the city’s largest public circulation library by shutting down its current location and reconfiguring it within an existing library. Public access computers can be added without gutting the stacks. Of course money is an issue. It always is. However, if the CLP is the best that the library’s executives can do in light of objectives and budgetary concerns, then they have failed in their stewardship of the NYPL. The library has a page on its website titled “Join the Conversation” through which the public can communicate its concerns. Yet, since comments are not shared through the site, a “conversation” never really materializes and how the comments are handled behind closed doors remains unknown. There is also a Facebook campaign dedicated to stopping the CLP. But we need to do more than “like” it. If we want to assure that the people’s research library continues to operate as such, then we need to collectively, vocally, and tirelessly speak out against the Central Library Plan until it is stopped.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Literacy, New York, Scholarship

Ethics and Politics in the Classroom

February 22, 2012 By 6 Comments

Last year I walked to class one day with a student. He told me that where he comes from professors are highly respected and that for him it was an honor to be walking to class with me. He also expressed surprise and curiosity about my being a professor at such a young age, since in his country the title of professor is usually attached to much older people. Finally, with no prompting from me, he began to explain to me why he is a proud Republican.

an honor to be walking

He told me that, as a devout Christian, he would like abortion to be completely outlawed. Furthermore, as an immigrant to this country, he would like all forms of governmental safety net to be abolished, forcing people to work harder and making things “more fair.” Finally he suggested that U.S. society can basically be understood as a conflict between white people and black people in which black people are responsible for most of the problems.

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Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Asides, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Debating, Education, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, New York, Pedagogy, Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized

Thinking Through Animals at the Westminster Dog Show

February 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

The emerging food movement, which has gained so much prominence in the past few years, is, surprisingly, entering the canon of composition curricula.  At Queens College, the new topics-focused first-year composition curriculum has an entire course devoted to “food.”  Last semester, following the layout of the composition reader I was using, I taught a unit of my first-year writing class on “the culture of food.”  We read essays on agricultural overproduction, the obesity epidemic, and vegetarianism.  But I have found, through my own experience and through listening to colleagues discuss their classes covering food, that it’s a difficult topic for the writing classroom.  Analyzing one’s political relationship to food requires a level of self-awareness beyond analyzing advertisements, mass-media, and education, all of which are cultural modes often explored in general composition courses.

It seems to me that at the heart of the food movement is a reconsideration of how we eat animals.  That is, we need to eat less meat and pay closer attention to how we treat the animals raised for slaughter. I hesitate to use the term “animal rights” because it sounds controversial, as though I am suggesting animals deserve the same rights as humans. Obviously, they don’t: they don’t get to vote or access public schools. But “animal rights” really refers to an idea that animals deserve to live out their lives in dignity, protected from abuse or exploitation. The question, then, is what constitutes abuse or exploitation. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I have very leftist views on this topic. I stopped eating meat twenty years ago, when I was twelve and when vegetarianism was still uncommon. I am also the kind of insufferable consumer, recently skewered on an episode of “Portlandia”, who grills the egg vendor at the farmers market on just how “free range” the free ranging chickens are. Are they pastured eggs, or just cage-free? Because I only eat pastured eggs.

On Monday, I attended the 136th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden.  I had never been to a dog show before, but my interest was sparked a few months ago when the New York Times Magazine published an article on the bulldog. Apparently, the bulldog’s breed standards, set in this country by the American Kennel Club, have led to questionable breeding practices, which produce a good-looking specimen beset with health problems and a reduced life span.  I was shocked to learn that a society devoted to dogs would sponsor, even demand, unhealthy practices.

I went to the dog show to explore this seeming paradox: that those who care most about dogs might not, in fact, care about their health and well being.  I had an image of the dog show as a place devoted to animal welfare, with booths set up supporting adoption or distributing information on canine care.  I was mistaken. While I don’tdoubt that everybody in attendance cared about their dogs, they clearly did not share my definition of “love” for animals. I saw more than one owner standing next to their show dog wearing a full-length fur coat.  To me, this seemed the essence of irony; at an animal-focused event, a participant was sporting a clear signifier of animal cruelty.

But according to a friend’s mother who was in town just to attend the show, the participants are only concerned with status, which explains the fur coats. My friend’s mother is a dog lover who regularly goes to dog shows, not as a participant but as a spectator.  Because I was new to this world, I had a million questions for her, the main one being, “why does anybody participate in this?” Her answer was simple: ego. She explained that that the animals’ wins are “power trips” for the owners. I asked her if she’d ever want to get involved. “I think it seems like a bad life for the dog,” she said. “They are treated like objects. I just like to go to watch.”

I, too, liked to watch. Mostly, I liked to look at cute dogs and discuss with my friend which ones we would most like to own, if we ever lived in apartments big enough for dogs. But it felt weird to admit that, though we recognized the animals were being treated like objects, we could take pleasure in the proceedings. The level of objectification seemed in some ways harmless, since these dogs were clearly healthy and cared for. On the other hand, pedigree breeding, which breeds for extreme traits, does lead to health problems. This leads us back to the question of what constitutes animal abuse and exploitation. According to PETA protestors, the answer is: The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. But for most of us, it is something less clear-cut.

Negotiating just how sensitive we should be to the objectification or improper “use” of animals is no easy task. The complexity of the issue runs to the heart of the human ego, which might be a touch too heady for a freshman seminar oriented more towards organization and clarity of writing. On the other hand, composition courses often aim to unsettle students’ world-views just a little, at least enough to get them thinking critically. And it would do us all well to think critically about how we share this world with the millions of other species on it, including the more adorable ones.

Filed Under: Culture, New York, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum
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