Law and Letters

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

2008-10-12T22:59:00.001-07:00

Somehow, between the Dr. John lyrics from the last post, and the craving for red beans and rice, I've gone into a full New Orleans nostalgia tailspin. I lived in NOLA from spring 2003-spring 2004, and in most ways, it was a disaster -- my car got stolen, I was falsely arrested, I ended up doing financially ruinous things in the local music industry... I ended up fleeing in horror, shaking its dust from my feet and wishing I'd never gone in the first place.

And yet... and yet... the place still gets a grip on one.

Music follows.

weekend report

2008-10-12T21:29:00.001-07:00

Extremely awesome, from a really nice treat on Friday evening to really lazy gluttony day Saturday, to sailing today. While cool planes doing cool things flew overhead.

How was your weekend?

In other news, I am reading for fun Erik Larson's "Thunderstruck," and am extremely excited to find a $3 copy of a Nathaniel West two-fer novella set that I hadn't read before. The Day of the Locust/Miss Lonelyhearts are must reads, by the way. But I will have to let you know how The Dream Life of Balso Snell/A Cool Million work out.

roll out my coffin/drink poison in my chalice/pride begins to fade/ and y'all feel my malice

2008-10-12T00:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, those (lyrics to Dr. John's "I Walk on Gilded Splinters") are the most appropriate food-sounding lines I can find to express the usual consequences of my cooking. I think my culinary skills are, on the whole, less potent than the Night Tripper's musical voodoo curses, but just as malevolent.

Hmm... perhaps we should start from the beginning.

Have you ever wondered what happens when I try and cook even the simplest things? Many of you have seen my comments, here and elsewhere, expressing my fear and horror at the mere idea of preparing any food more complicated than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (once, I tried to upgrade the PBJ to an orange marmalade and nutella sandwich: it didn't work).

Well, tonight I decided to cook pasta. Without just pouring a can of tomato sauce in a saucepan. I even, for the first time in my 29 years (!!), decided to operate a frying pan unsupervised.

The plan (borrowed, but modified heavily by my own innovations and incompetence at following directions) was something like the following: boil a mess of farfalle. Prepare in some magical fashion the following things to go along with it: 2 chicken sausages -- with mango! -- bought precooked from trader joe's! -- a bad idea!, 1/4 onion, a chunk 'o garlic, parsley (fresh), bay leaves (not fresh), oregano (not fresh -- stupid grocery store), basil (ditto), salt, pepper. Toss some lemon juice on top, because everything tastes better with lemon juice. Add parmesan. Num num.

Things didn't quite work out as planned, though they turned out OK in the end.

Step 1: boil the pasta. As it turns out, the pasta would boil for a good 20 minutes, because it took me much longer than planned to handle the other steps. Whoops.

Step 2: Cut the vegetables up. Alas, this means cutting an onion:

So, story time. I'm so sensitive to the pain-generating properties of onions that I have actually violated the prime evolutionary imperative for sake of one. This was in my second year of law school. I'd gone to a halloween party, where I met this extremely attractive member of the opposite sex. She was dressed as a mermaid. It suited her. She was a student in the education school! Eventually, I got invited back to her place. Unfortunately, she had a housemate, who had also invited a gentleman home. More unfortunately, on this turn of events, some fool decided to cook stir fry. The moment the onions went on, my eyes started burning and watering. Pretty soon, I was basically curled up in a corner moaning. I finally fled. And never saw the girl again. Onions, you can see, are my enemy. But they're so yummy...

This also means trying to cut up the parsley. Unfortunately, I'm very bad at cutting up herbs, so I tried (against wise advice) deploying a flashy device that I found at target: a menacing looking multi-bladed herb mincer:

Alas, it did not work quite as advertised:

I decided that would have to be satisfactory.

3. After cutting everything up,

put in frying pan with a mess of olive oil. Cook it up. Given that it's a frying pan, and it used oil, I suppose what I was doing was frying it. But, really, I could have been fricaseeing it or poaching it or doing any number of the other cooking verbs that apply to unknown behaviors.

4. Toss in random quantities of tasty things.

Continue cooking.

5. At entirely arbitrary time when you realize the pasta's been on for what, now, seems like hours and hours, turn that off and remove it. Mix it in with the yummy stuff so it picks up the flavor.

6. Realize that you are now frying pasta. Become markedly alarmed.

7. Also realize that you've made far too much food. Oh well.

8. Attempt to grate the 3-week old parmesan cheese that one of your friends has assured you will still be good. Find that it's as hard as a rock. Persevere.

9. Combine on plate. Squeeze half a lemon over it. Consume far too much food:

VERDICT: passable. I certainly wouldn't pay anyone to feed me food like that. But it was edible.

The main problem was that it was far too sweet. Mango sausage sounds delicious in the store, but it's really not for pasta. I think I'll have the rest of those sausages for breakfast. And the lemon juice didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that I used waaaayyyy too much olive oil -- between those three ingredients, I couldn't taste the herbs at all. Nor even the massive quantities of pepper I put in. Poor yummy herbs. I should have tossed in some cayennes or something just to make SOMETHING stand out from the mango/lemon/olive oil madness.

I probably did lots of other things wrong too, but I'm not super sure what.

Lessons learned:
- Some ingredients taste stronger than others: it's important to know the relative strengths of your ingredients; you don't know the relative strengths of your ingredients.
- Timing is everything: it's important to know how long each step takes; you don't know how long each step takes.
- doom. DOOM!!!

This will be a series. You, yes you, will be able to track Childe Paul's adventures through the culinary land of the Giants.

tony! toni! tone'!

2008-10-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't love a band that plays with homophones and punctuation? Check out those fly ruffle cuffs.

where in the world is belle lettre

2008-10-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

Over at Amber's blog, beginning our epistolary exhange style of blogging. I'm waitin' on you, Amber.

our far flung reporter

2008-10-08T15:31:00.000-07:00

Reporting from the music library today. I was sitting next to this girl who was clearly actually studyin gmusic, which most people in this library do not (I see law students for sure, but there's other departments too as this is the only air conditioned library on campus). Her work looks so interesting. She had massive headphones, stacks of classical music CDs, and for some reason, a DVD of Buffy lying about. So I was wondering in my head (not out loud) whether she was writing a master's thesis on dramatic tension and the supernatural in musical composition, using Buffy as an example of how scoring can enhance the psychic disconnect between reality and the mystical. Or whatever, I am making this up as I go along, but now you know how humanities-minded people can work. And it's not so far fetched; when I was in college, one of my friends in the humanities honors program wrote her senior thesis on supernatural themes in Henry James's and Benjamin Britten's versions of The Turn of the Screw.

Right now I'm sitting across from some lovey dovey couple who cannot study without kissing every five minutes. Hmm. I am quite affectionate and may be even accused of being over-affectionate, but TD should be mollified that the last thing I want to do when I'm working is to cuddle. Also, the guy sitting across from me is wearing way too much cologne. It reminds me of my law school days when I lived in a converted house on sorority row, and the frat pledge dudes would come a-serenading ("you've lost that lovin' feelin') and it was like a olfactory assault in the form of 20 dudes wearing Acqua di Gio. Blech. I don't wear perfume anymore at all, because someone has a perfume sensitivity, and so now I'm all overly sensitive to scent as well, and it makes me sort of nauseous. Now I know the pain I used to inflict on others, except that Narciso Rodriguez for women is super nice.

In other news, I think I am sort of getting my head wrapped around how to do a case study of organizational culture and how it affects compliance with EEO mandates and labor regulations. I'm super excited. Well, off to my business school organizational theory colloquium, where no doubt I'll learn some new exciting area of research and learn some interesting methodology and hear people fight about making orthoganal points and such.

California voters: REGISTER NOW.

2008-10-07T22:59:00.001-07:00

This is horrible:

A new CBS 5 poll finds that California's Proposition 8 has picked up support in the wake of a television ad campaign that features footage of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaiming same-sex marriage is here to stay "whether you like it or not."

The poll conducted for CBS 5 by SurveyUSA indicates that support for the measure to ban gay marriage has grown among voters in the state over an eleven day period — most especially among young voters.

According to the poll, likely California voters overall now favor passage of Proposition 8 by a five-point margin, 47 percent to 42 percent. Ironically, a CBS 5 poll eleven days prior found a five-point margin in favor of the measure's opponents.

Admittedly, pre-election polling tends to suck ass, but this is still REALLY WORRYING. I haven't gotten around to re-registering after a short move (since I'm not going to vote in the presidential election for reasons expressed previously, and California's a lock for the dems anyway), but now I will. I encourage everyone else to do so too. This proposition is ridiculous -- a pure and disgusting attempt from the Christians to legislate their preferences for private morality. Those of us who support values like liberty, diversity, and equality need to beat it. If we can't do so in California, gay rights are doomed everywhere. This election is important.

The deadline to register in California is October 20, less than 2 weeks. You can get the form online.

how blogging changed john b.'s life

2008-10-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

What a great post. Read it.

I want to pick up this meme when the work slog slows down a little after 7 pm tomorrow (and after I finish my mega post) and then tag Amber and Paul.

when blogging is like work

2008-10-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

When you have been gearing up to write (for weeks) and then spend an hour writing and still do not finish a mega post on the sociology of culture as applied to the problem of love but trying to be serious in your discussion of heuristics, schemas, and the other minds problem, blogging feels a lot like work.

Also, the debates were way meh. If "my friends" was your drinking word, you probably died of alcohol poisoning in the first 20 minutes. I thought McCain sounded like a crazy old coot, but that's just me.

In other news, I want to buy a bunch of colored and patterned tights for fall. Purple, teal, dark gray.

inverse and converse

2008-10-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

You can design your own kicks at Converse.

Question: what would look better/be more traditional/not look stupid: a parchment rubber sidewall that has contrast racing stripes, or one that has no contrast stripes?

Question 2: Should the heel stripe be the same color as the rest of the shoe, or would it not look stupid if it were a different color?

Question 3: Is adding a monogram-like personalization on the heel stripe cool, or does that seem like writing your name on a jacket because there are too many hipsters at this shoes-at-the-door themed Soup-and-Cupcakes dinner party and must thus disambiguate, or are a child/developmentally disabled person who must be reminded of his/her name or would fear losing his/her own shoes if they were not on his/her own feet? I'm tending towards "awesome," but I'm one of those not-a-badass preppies who owns a L.L. Bean ginham trimmed boat tote with a monogram, and used to want to wear a signet ring with my initials for old school glam. So I have certain instincts, and yet usually have to be reminded not to go with them.

These are for a present. If you have no idea what I'm talking about but have an opinion on this (although, how could that be, except that it totally could), I'll email you pics.

Who are your Heavy Friends?

2008-10-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Isn't amazing how YouTube always seems to... amaze?

Here's the artistry of Screamin' Lord Sutch - who many consider to be the grandfather of Goth/Shock almost a decade before the Alice Cooper's of the world came on the scene. His most notorious album was Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, which had the likes of Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, John Bonham and is largely considered to be one of the worst albums of all time - as Sutch was lacking serious vocal talent, especially considering the musicians with whom he worked.

I was introduced to Screamin' Lord Sutch in 1991, when a buddy of mine picked up the "Heavy Friends" album on a whim.

Anyway, here's one of his most "famous" songs, Jack the Ripper (1963) - just sittin' right there on the internets. The week can only get worse from here¹.

¹ Unless the Angels beat the Red Sox tonight...

the hudsucker proxy

2008-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

An enjoyable film, available for instant viewing on Netflix! Kind of strange to watch it during the current economic climate, though. Also can't help but wonder what the rules about leveraged buyouts were in 1959, such that the board felt like it needed a dummy president to drive down the price of the company's stock so that they could buy up the shares.

I usually always enjoy the Coen Brothers' movies, but there's always some odd deus ex machina detail that rubs me the wrong way--here, the clock guy. Also, some unexplained baddie, whose motivation I can't understand--here, the door sign guy. There's always some sort of incongruity or strange romantic pairing. Although I did enjoy seeing the usually intense-in-a-dark-way Jennifer Jason Leigh as a fast talking Rosalind-Russell-in-His-Girl-Friday role. This is a popular archetype for the Coens, and any film buff knows that that's what they were going for in Intolerable Cruelty--fascinating, witty, sharp-tongued women were the best stuff of Howard Hawks and George Cukor screwball comedies. It's just too bad Catherine Zeta Jones is one of those beautiful women with no heat, intrigue, or fascination. I mean, Grace Kelly was coldly beautiful, but she was sexy and enigmatic. CZJ is the perfect T Mobile spokeswoman, like a facade, a veneer with veneers. How can you not have chemistry with George Clooney?

I have yet to see Burn After Reading or No Country for Old Men. The latter is an error that must be rectified, but I am not convinced about the former.

things I am excited about

2008-10-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

1. Cognitive sociology

2. Gerd Gigerenzer's heuristics literature.

3. Nicholas Epley's perspective taking studies.

All three are related, and were I actually fluent in the literatures I could explain how.

Also, admin law in the news.

weekend report

2008-10-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

What I actually ended up doing (and for which Wolfson will probably judge me and my tastes):

We didn't end up doing the performance art flash mob thing. Instead I made a pretty terrific baked challah bread pudding (made with homemade challah, my challah was a little dry but beautiful, but hey, it was my first time baking bread!). And then we went on a five mile hike up and down the summit of a nearby peak. It was really lovely, if alternately cold and hot. But it was tiring. And then we ate a lot of Chinese food, and watched Ghost Town, which was mildly amusing. And slept for hours. Today we ate fried chicken and waffles. All the restaurant supply stores were closed, and so we came back and I reclined on the couch while he brought me a wireless-ready laptop and a diet coke, which is like the most awesome thing you can do for a person. All in all, the perfect weekend.

So, right now I'm reading articles from the school server on culture and cognition. Hmm. What isn't a schema?

ig nobel

2008-10-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

Seriously, how do you use Diet Coke as a contraceptive? Like, do you pour it over stuff, or do you merely ingest it as usual? Look, the linked article doesn't say. But apparently the study is wrong, and I guess you would pour that effervescent stuff over junk as they did in a petri dish. TMI: I am drinking Diet Coke right now, after having consumed lasagna and a mini Twix bar.

Also, how cross-disciplinary are the Ig Nobel awards, that they gave the prize in literature to an org theorist? The study of perspective-taking is clearly psychology, if you want to parse disciplinary boundaries, but I suppose they were thrown by the idea that it's a "narrative understanding of indignation."

When I was in high school, I would spend hours every Saturday night listening to and taping off the radio the Dr. Demento show. Yes, I was a late bloomer. Anyway, one of my favorite novelty songs back then was "Carrot Juice Is Murder" by The Arrogant Worms. Mainly because it was ridiculous and preposterous. But anyway, the Ig Nobel prize in peace was awarded the Swiss Federal Ethic Committee for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. Read the table of contents, or the whole thing. I leave the editorializing to you. I am all for biodiversity as an ecological principle and for the sake of preserving the environment. But I am sure the philosophers among us can discuss better whether we should engage in the moral consideration of plants for their own sake, and whether they have interests of their own that must be protected to preserve their dignity (measured at collective, individual, or species level?) as living beings. Interesting question in the study: what has a good of its own, or its own interests? Follow up question from Belle: how on earth would you deal with the other minds problem with respsect to plants? Haven't you philosopher types been struggling with that question even concerning sentient beings or hell, mammals? Finally, how to compare and balance the dignity interests of plants with those of other organisms? Ultra-finally: who cares?!

Ok, slight editorializing: this is what happens when you stay neutral throughout wars and have too much time on your hands. For more Swede-bashing, they also apparently don't understand American literature.

Froomkin's Roundups

2008-10-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

Law prof Michael Froomkin publishes an excellent roundup of "McBush/McSame Bashing" every Friday that I always find informative and provocative.

and don't think I'm not serious about this

2008-10-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

If she says "Joe Sixpack" one more time, I swear I will bake another batch of challah so that I can punch down dough, because I'm like, non-violent and stuff.

The other option, were I the violent type, would be trying to track down a Palin-supporter in Liberal College Town and smacking them upside the head and telling them "now let that be a lesson to you all."

why sarah palin is bad for feminism

2008-10-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

Emily Bazelon says it all:

So instead of bowing out, she heads into her debate with Joe Biden with expectations so low either she or her opponent seems bound to trip over them.
For women who are watching this all unfold, this means a lot of analysis, much of it angst-ridden. Conservatives express straightforward disappointment. "I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful," Parker writes glumly. "Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted."
Many more-liberal women, meanwhile, make the point that Palin's poverty of knowledge is a big reason to doubt John McCain's judgment, as Ruth Marcus drives home in her column in the Washington Post this week. The problem is that Palin is a vice-presidential candidate who is not ready to be president, not that she's a woman who isn't ready. Given that, let her fail now, before she does real damage in office.
But Palin's gender is at the center of another set of reactions I've been hearing and reading among women who don't support her ticket, filled with ambivalence over how bad she is. Laugh at the Tina Fey parodies that make Palin ridiculous just by quoting her verbatim. And then cry. When Palin tanks, it's good for the country if you want Obama and Biden to win, but it's bad for the future of women in national politics. I'm in this boat, too. Should we feel sorry for Sarah Palin? No. But if she fails miserably, we might be excused for feeling a bit sorry for ourselves.
Palin is the most prominent woman on the political stage at the moment. By taking unprepared hesitancy and lack of preparation to a sentence-stopping level, she's yanking us back to the old assumption that women can't hack it at these heights. We know that's not true—we've just watched Hillary Clinton power through a campaign with a masterful grasp of policy and detail. Clinton lost in part because she was the girl grind. Complex sentences, the names of Supreme Court cases, and bizarre warnings about foreign heads of state invading our airspace weren't her problem. The fear now is that Palin is the anti-Hillary and that her lack of competence threatens to undo what the Democratic primary did for women. Palin won't bust through the ceiling that has Hillary's 18 million cracks in it. She'll give men an excuse to replace it with a new one.
Worrying about this can lead you to an odd, even self-contradictory amalgam of anger and pity. Judith Warner embodied this in the New York Times when she described watching Palin smile while sitting down with Henry Kissinger and feeling a "wave of self-recognition and sympathy" and an "upsurge of concern and kinship." In the next breath, in proper feminist fashion she points out that glamorizing incompetence "means that any woman who exudes competence will necessarily be excluded from the circle of sisterhood." But then Warner loops back to her opening sympathy and ends by casting Palin's nomination as not only "an insult to the women (and men) of America" but "an act of cruelty toward her as well." The suggestion is that John McCain inflicted the cruelty when he picked her.
As Rebecca Traister points out in Salon, there's an obvious feminist comeback here. Shut down the "Palin pity party," Traister urges. "Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness." Good point. And an especially pertinent one on the eve of the vice-presidential debate. Traister's argument refutes the McCain campaign's effort to spin the justified attacks on Palin as sexism. The campaign can't dismiss Palin's critics as sexist for jumping on her thin, stock-phrase-laden answers to reasonable questions. It would be sexist—and destructive for the country—to demand less. But the answer isn't necessarily to throw the sexism line back in the campaign's face, as Campbell Brown did on CNN last week. Brown scolded the campaign for treating Palin as if she's too delicate to handle the press. But where is Palin in this equation? Doesn't she have to account for the way she's been shielded from questions that shouldn't be hard for her to answer?
Traister is right that this is on Palin at least as much as it's on John McCain. Palin put herself in line for the presidency; she could have turned down the invitation to join the ticket. She gains from this campaign no matter what—before it, she had no national profile, now she has an outsized one, and all the criticism will just make her true fans love her more. (They're ready to eat Kathleen Parker alive.) She has cannily based her appeal on scorning the media, so it hardly makes sense to feel pity for her because the media are actually scornful, given all the fodder she's provided.
For all of these reasons, I should take Traister's advice and stop agonizing. I'm not ambivalent about Palin's positions on taxes, stem-cell research, or offshore drilling. Why should I be ambivalent about how she performs in the debate? What if Palin does unexpectedly well and gives McCain another boost in the polls? Better she should go down hard for knowing nothing about the Supreme Court than that the court should move ever rightward because the Republicans get to pick the next justices.
And yet. When I watch Palin, I can't help but cringe along with Parker. Call it women's solidarity, however misplaced. I keep coming back to this prim phrase: Please, don't make a spectacle of yourself. String some coherent sentences together. Your efforts to wrap yourself in Hillary's mantle make no sense in terms of what you'd actually do in office. But if you could pull off just a bit of her debating prowess—just a bit—I'll step a little lighter when I wake up Friday morning.

Although I actually hope that she crashes and burns spectacularly. I feel no sympathy or solidarity. As far as I am concerned, she is no sister in feminism, and not my representative for a woman in politics. I didn't think "oh no, now no one will take a female Supreme Court justice seriously" after the Miers debacle. Miers was deeply unqualified, but that didn't signify to me, and shouldn't have to others, that her failure injured the very idea of a female Supreme Court justice. Perhaps it is becuase that at the time, there were two other great examples on the Supreme Court--O'Connor and Ginsburg. O'Connor, whatever you think of her as a justice, is an inspiration of sorts to all female law students. Ginsburg is certainly my hero. Miers? I never reacted to her but as someone who takes the law seriously, and never once thought "well, at least there will be another woman on the bench, no matter how poorly she does." Down with identity politics!

Mere representational politics never fared well (see also Justice Thomas), and so why should I care whether Palin does a disservice to all female politicians by being incompetent, unprepared, inarticulate, and unqualified? I would consider those her own personal failings rather than qualities endemic to all women. Seriously, if this distinction must be made, let me shout it from the rooftops. I cringe with schaudenfreude, not solidarity. Palin should simply stopped being thought of as representative of all women, since she clearly doesn't represent all of our politics--and in fact flagrantly contravenes many key issues important to dominant women's groups.

She may be a woman, wife, mother, etc., but she professes to be the everyman, not to represent every woman. She also professes to be qualified and ready to be in the executive office. For these things I will judge her, not whether or not I consider her representative of my gender. There are plenty of other competent female politicians. Why should they be forgotten in the rush to sympathize with the way Palin is being "mistreated"? She is actually unqualified! It is not sexist to say that she is woefully ignorant of important issues and then question her basic comprehension skills (she apparently opposes Roe v. Wade and yet supports the right to privacy) and thus intelligence!

She's rolling with the soft bigotry of low expectations right now. She'll hurt women everywhere if she keeps playing to them. For this I judge her even more harshly, and I would expect others to as well. I don't hope that she'll do well. I merely hope that she is incompetent in gender neutral ways. She had better not start crying (cough Alito's wife cough) if dealt a tough question, or do as Geraldine Ferraro did to George H.W. Bush during their debate decades agoand accuse Biden of bullying and patronizing. But I bet you that if she "loses," and she should and I hope she does miserably and fails spectacularly (Emily! Get a mean streak!), the right will blame Biden's bullying ways and Gwen Ifill's militant black leftism. That's what you should get mad about--the harm her actually playing into these low expectations and stereotypes will do to women or the post-hoc construal of her performance, not what her poor performance will say in and of itself.

possible things to do this weekend

2008-10-02T13:07:00.000-07:00

None of these are really mutually exclusive:

1. Participate in performance art flash mob thing.

2. Try to find a showing of "Religulous."

3. Go to the planetarium.

Votes?

New Kid on one difference b/t law and grad school

2008-10-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

#1,004: You can wear bright pink polish unironically.

I totally gets what she means. At the graduate level in the humanities departments, you can only cop to liking mainsteam, plebeian amusements in an ironic way, or in a socially critiquing way. I suppose, if I liked watching shows about rich white people, I would say that I was ironically into Gossip Girl for a class analysis of the noblesse-sans-oblige and their Teutonic-sounding last names. Or whatever. NK brings up in the comments an example of a friend being "ironically" into Survivor, rather than admitting that s/he genuinely enjoyed Survivor. And Survivor supposedly has all of those class, racial, and political themes! Imagine admitting that you were into something as so gendered and imbued with patriarchy as pink nail polish, or heaven forbid, a Nicholas Sparks-based movie. (Admission: I sobbed during "The Notebook.")

There is much less irony in law school, perhaps either because of the less strident anti-majoritarian intellectualism in law school (we are all sellouts, of course), or because it's so damned miserable that you have to cling to such petty diversions much the way other bitter people cling to their guns and religion. Where I went to law school, the girls tried to imbue their sad days with a little glamour by wearing stilettos, very expensive jeans, and big ass earrings. As for myself, I recall embracing as an adult the pleasures of Sanrio school supplies. It sort of made it more cheerful to highlight my property law book with a Hello Kitty highlighter. I also wore a lot of pink and lots of shiny jewelry. I was kind of blingy back in the day. I am much more restrained now, and hardly wear jewelry. Perhaps because I'm happy. No matter how badly research is going, and it goes pretty badly, I am at least reading and writing what I want. So I don't need to be a magpie distracting myself with glitter and glam. I'm also filling in the emotional recesses by doing healthy, wholesome things like baking, knitting, hiking, being an awesome partner and friend, etc. awww, etc.

But yeah, I can totally understand how most law students (and most grad students too) cling to alcohol and simple pleasures. Of course, for law students, simple pleasures tend to be simple, whereas for pretentious literature grad student, it's reading Gaddis and Markson "for fun."

the soft bigotry of low expectations

2008-09-30T12:37:00.001-07:00

This is just plain sad:

“I think she has pretty thoroughly — and probably irretrievably — proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States,” David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush who is now a conservative columnist, said in an interview. “If she doesn’t perform well, then people see it.
“And this is a moment of real high anxiety, a little bit like 9/11, when people look to Washington for comfort and leadership and want to know that people in charge know what they are doing.”
Her halting interview with Katie Couric on CBS News alarmed many Republicans and gave fodder for a devastating parody on Saturday Night Live.
“I think the Katie Couric interview shows that she needs to be briefed more on certain aspects,” said Jim Greer, the Republican chairman in Florida. “She continues to be viewed very positively by the base of the party, but she needs to demonstrate that she’s got the knowledge and ability to be president should the need arise.”
Polling suggests that the number of Americans who think she is not fit to be president has increased since her introduction to the country last month. A number of conservative columnists and thinkers have publicly turned against her, or criticized Mr. McCain for choosing her, including George Will, David Brooks and Kathleen Parker, who wrote a column entitled “She’s Out of Her League” for the National Review Online.
Mr. Frum noted the difficulty that Dan Quayle, who was elected vice president in 1988, had in recovering from an early set of mistakes that led him to be ridiculed as an intellectual lightweight. “The story of Dan Quayle is he did probably 1,000 smart things as vice president, but his image was locked in and it was very difficult to turn around,” he said. “And Dan Quayle never in his life has performed as badly as Sarah Palin in the last month.”
Several Republicans said that all of this could ultimately play to Ms. Palin’s benefit, lowering expectations for her so much that a mediocre performance in the debate could be hailed as a success.
“Thanks to the mainstream media, quite a low expectation has been created for her performance,” said Ron Carey, chairman of Minnesota’s Republican Party. “The style of Sarah Palin is going to amaze people. She is going to be able to amaze people with the substance she is going to deliver.”
And Mr. McCain’s aides disputed the expressions of concern and said that if anything, the barrage of criticism and the performance in the few television interviews she has done gave her a low bar to clear in the debate. “I seriously hope that people continue to underestimate the most popular governor in America and a woman who speaks to the heart of America’s economic angst,” said Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain.

Tell me again how this woman is a symbol of feminism? Tell me again how calling her stupid, unqualifed, and a token diversity pick that harms the interests of women and equal treatment feminism is being sexist? Tell me again that this is not merely hypocrisy by the Republicans?

Warning: comments will be moderated.

jeremy thinks it's the end of the world. do you?

2008-09-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

My post-apocalyptic skills are as bad as Jeremy's. So, what do I do, knit my way out of this financial crisis? Bake cookies and hope that they can be exchanged for penicillin?

I was talking to TD about the financial crisis, and all I know is that the House rejected the proposal, thus fulfilling it's part of the bicameralism-and-presentment part of the whole Constitutional structure, but that the bill will probably be amended and adjusted and voted on again with the same mandatory Constitutional process, however long that takes while the economy goes further down the tanker. He told me what it meant in economic terms. It's pretty bad. It's not breadlines-resurrect-FDR-bad, but it's pretty bad, and he works in finance so he probably knows what he's talking about. The market plunged, people's housing values are falling, and people's pensions and 401Ks are in danger.

But he says that we'll probably get through this, that things could be worse, and that they're not that bad for us, and it's not like we're trying to get big loans and large lines of credit anytime soon, and I have no money in the stock market anyway. That soothes me somewhat, as well as a recounting of all of our blessings (health, each other, for him gainful employment, for me another two years of grown-up-life-avoidance, as for once it is a good time to be in grad school). So, mollified domestic statutory law scholar that I am, I am reading vehemently non-economic sociology of culture and administrative law, and knitting and looking at a recipe for challah. Buck up, Jeremy. You can always join my knitting-and-baking compound. When mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the laws of men won't matter anyway, nor their ways. We can build forts together!

not as advertised

2008-09-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

Things that lie:

1. Nextbus.com. Damn bus is never there, satellite tracking or whatever.

2. Peds' "no show" socks. They show!

3. CBS News. Journalistic integrity my visibly sock-clad foot.

weekend report

2008-09-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

What a great weekend. I don't have classes on Friday, and he took his Blackberry on the road and phoned it in (literally, as we had to pull over while he participated in a conference call). I found ingenious ways to pre-prepare and pack jambalaya and a gateau de crepes for his birthday dinner, and our one-room cottage was cozy and comfortable, with a little iron stove and a tiny kitchenette that reminded me of my 300 sq. ft. studio days. Except that my studio wasn't in the middle of a farmstead. We heard cows and roosters from our window. We were in the middle of nowhere though, so we didn't have any TV reception with which to watch the debates--so we tried to watch them online (we did have wireless internet), but the buffering kept stalling the transmission. So we found a stereo in the cottage and listened to the debates old school, FDR-style, in bed with a crackling fire.

Much delicious cheese was eaten, as well as full-fat ice cream from a local fatty, minimally pasteurized creamery. Yum. And lots of pate and fresh bread. We did a little hiking, or rather walking, but for the most part took it easy (and we can usually do an 8-10 mile hike) and slept a lot and ate a lot. And we watched a bunch of episodes from Season 1 of The Wire. I dig that show. The first episode was very confusing, but is so very interesting to not be able to identify good and evil clearly, much less who's on the right side of justice.

Unrelatedly, I want to bake this.

I Hate Gwyneth Paltrow

2008-09-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

I have a strange attitude towards celebrity culture--I hate it, but I can't seem to tear my eyes away from the stray bits of copy I might by chance encounter via Jezebel or the supermarket checkout line. It is not unlike watching a trainwreck. But while we may feel some obligation to look on the plight of our fellow man and sympathize and help (kind of like why some suggest making eye contact with a stranger during a crisis in order to get them to help you), there is nothing redeemable and everything awful with paying attention to celebrities.

Except when you can make fun of them. For being completely outside of the societal mainstream and exemplifying privilege of all sorts, and in the case of Gwyneth Paltrow, the ultimate white privilege. Like, her habitus is not our habitus. Her doxa is not our doxa. And by "our," I mean the great majority of us who do not eat macrobiotic rice and do two hours of yoga a day and then get all fucking sanctimonious about it.

I should disclose that I have long hated Gwyneth Paltrow, ever since she won the Oscar for her breathy portrayal in Shakespeare In Love ("and I shall have poh-ehtry in my life...and adventchah...") when clearly Cate Blanchett should have won for Elizabeth. But I sort of got over that, as awards clearly mean nothing. I also hated her for being a Yoko Ono type that made Coldplay suck hard with a turn towards the maudlin ("Green Eyes,"), but then I realized that they always sucked and so really, hard to pinpoint the blame here. So anyway, former bases of hate, were probably fallacious, but now, my friends, I have found a new basis of hate:

Her lifestyle site. Called "Goop", which reminds you, alternately, of unctuous, viscous black substances that either devour human flesh or form the basis of America's fossil fuel dependence (is there a distinction?); poop (heh); or the pejorative "gook," in which case I am offended! It's not an acronym. It's just a word. Launched last week, amidst the economic crisis, her exhortations to all Americans for reclaiming the good life just as everywhere everyone sinks into pre-Daddy Warbucks Annie days (although I prefer the Jay-Z version):

My life is good because I am not passive about it. I want to nourish what is real, and I want to do it without wasting time. I love to travel, to cook, to eat, to take care of my body and mind, to work hard. I love being a mother who has to overcome my bad qualities to be a good mother. I love being in spaces that are clean and feel nice.

Over the years, I have tried lots of different things. I have made lots of mistakes. But I have figured some things out in the process and would like to share them with you. Whether you want a good place to east in London, some advice on where to stay in Austin, the recipe I made up this week, or some thoughts from one of my sages, GOOP is a little bit of everything that makes up my life.

Make your life good. Invest in what's real. Cook a meal for someone you love. Pause before reacting. Clean out your space. Read something beautiful. Treat yourself to something. Go to a city you've never been to. Learn something new. Don't be lazy. Workout and stick with it. GOOP. Make it great.

(Tagline: nourish the inner aspect. unfortunately, aspects are the outer countenance, Gwyn).

Gah. Yes, I expect the rest of the site, when it finally launches, to be as asinine and full of Deepak Chopra + Paolo Coehlo + The Secret plattitudes. Clearly, most people's lives suck because they are lazy, not because of the economy, barriers to entry and advancement, the rising costs of basic household needs, the unavailability of universal health care and family care options...if only they were not passive about their lives sucking! Being proactive about your happiness would bring that organic produce market to their impoverished neighborhood, so that they don't have to go to McDonald's after their second shift or the little bodega across the street!

The classist myopia of "good life" proselytizers like Paltrow, Alice Waters, the "slow food" movement, etc., really irks me. Read also this post by Dana McCourt on the problems with Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. It says everything I would like to say, but better. Next week, I'll post a roundup of coverage on Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze, for more on the socioeconmic aspects of this deepening stratification between the haves-plenty and the haves-not.

But for more Gwyn-bashing, read this post at Jezebel, and this article devoted to explaining the "unsurprising" backlash at the LA Times.