in which she thinks bourdieu was right about cultural capital

i've been pondering social capital in recent days. pierre bourdieu's distinction lays out the theory and i read it a number of years ago when husband was working on his master's. it comes back to me again and again...basically, we are all born with a cultural, social capital at a certain level and it's very hard for us to change that. it shapes who we are and is not easy to escape.

i had occasion to observe someone trying to overcome their social capital in recent days. and it is a painful sight indeed. because cultural capital is a mysterious beast and it's definitely not easily overcome. the efforts involved are superhuman and if they're not, it ends up somehow sad and pathetic. sad to have reached a mature age and not be able to accept who you are. sad to be trying so hard and so strenuously to so little effect.

society is harsh and it has programmed us not to accept people's attempts to rise above their station. despite all that talk of the american dream and being whatever you want to be, there is still a scent of tastelessness over the nouveau riche. so if the person trying to climb up out of their social layer doesn't actually have the benefits money brings, the attempt is all the more unpretty. a set of strange rituals that are awkward and stilted because they're so unnatural.

i ended up with a kind of perversely fascinated revulsion to the sight and although i wanted to have a more anthropological view on it, i will admit that i was quite disgusted at the sight. a mixture of pity and loathing rose in me. unless you have a special talent, without education and sophistication, it's simply not possible to change your cultural capital. isn't it really just better to be content with who you are?

* * *

if you'd like a bit of a diversion from all this cryptic seriousness, why not try to mad men yourself?

books bring comfort

as i write this, i feel a little like i'm coming down with a flu. there's something going around. and coupled with grey, rainy weather, it has me thinking about comforts. like curling up with a good book. bee wrote a couple of weeks ago about her comfort reads (and a lot of other favorite book categories) and so i've been thinking about this for awhile. when polly wrote about it too, that sealed it. i've got to make lists of favorite books--my categories are, for the most part, loosely adapted from bee's and polly's...

childhood favorites:

1. really rosie - maurice sendak (i had both book and record - we still play the music in the car when we travel as a family)
   
2. chronicles of narnia - c.s. lewis (i still reread these every once in awhile. and i truly didn't get the christian references as a kid. i just wanted to be lucy.)
3. little women - louisa may alcott (i read this dozens of times and fancied myself as jo)
4. little men - louisa may alcott (ditto this and i think i even liked it better--i wanted to live in that big old house with all those boys)
5. the little house books - laura ingalls wilder (i had dresses to dress up and played little house for hours on end. i even went to the LIW pageant in DeSmet, SD, tho' all i really remember were the mosquitos because it was outdoors.)
6. fox in socks - dr. seuss. (still love this one and read it with sabin regularly)

comfort reading (to which i return again and again)

1. no. 1 ladies detective series - alexander mccall smith (i love mma ramotswe. period.)
2. harry potter series - j.k. rowling (yup, i return to this one again and again - they're just such great characters and they do fit together wonderfully--she had to have really planned them out in advance)
3. master & margarita - mikael bulgakov (talking cats and people who materialize on street corners - ya gotta love it)
4. what i loved - siri hustvedt (although i siri-ed myself out last year, i'd be ready to go back to this one again now)
5. a widow for one year - john irving (i love the sweep of this one and although i fancy myself as ruth (there's a recurring thing here wherein i place myself in all of the novels), there is something sorrowful over eddie that i love as well)
6. the bean trees - barbara kingsolver (the quotes that stick best in my head are from this book)
7. one hundred years of solitude - gabriel garcia marquez
8. the unbearable lightness of being - milan kundera

favorite theorists

1. the indivisible remainder - slavoj žižek
2. problems of dostoevsky's poetics - mikael bakhtin
3. mythologies - roland barthes
4. after theory - terry eagleton
5. distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste - pierre bourdieu 

the russians 

1. the brothers karamazov - fyodor dostoevsky
2. pushkin house - andrei bitov
3. master & margarita - mikael bulgakov (yup, on this list too)
4. notes from underground - fyodor dostoevsky
5. pale fire - vladimir nabokov

best i've read in the past year

1. dance, dance, dance - haruki murakami
2. hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world - haruki murakami
3. the short wondrous life of oscar wao - junot diaz

non-fiction faves

1. black lamb and grey falcon - rebecca west
2. lucy: the beginnings of humankind - donald c. johanson and maitland edey
3. origins - richard leakey
4. devil in the white city - erik larson

ones which i've only pretended to read in their entirety (had to slip in a confession)

1. ulysses - james joyce (had a whole course devoted to this and STILL didn't make it through, tho' i wrote a great paper)
2. satanic verses - salman rushdie
3. the odyssey - homer (i've come closest to reading it all on this one)
4. faust - johann wolfgang von goethe

strangely have never picked up

1. lord of the rings - j.r.r. tolkien
2. proust
3. tess of the d'urbervilles - thomas hardy

play along if you'd like to make lists of your favorite books. and i'd love to see some confessions on what you've only pretended to have read. because you know there's something.

memory and forgetting

still working on those bookshelves...it's a LOT of books we're talking about here. and i'm remembering so many things about who i was. i was a person who wrote a 32-page scholarly paper (that got an A, i might add) on madonna. for that purpose, i bought books called things like deconstructing madonna and the madonna connection and from hegel to madonna. it was quite fashionable in the mid-90s to write serious, scholarly cultural criticism on people like madonna at arizona state. there were elvis studies departments at major universities. ahh, those were the days. as i recall, my madonna paper was really more about me than her, but i digress...

i also was a person who read (and extensively underlined) slavoj zizek. he's still churning out books, one every 3-4 months, but i can't keep up anymore. i used to purposely feed my inner homicidal maniac with doses of dostoevsky. i read balkan history for fun. i paged through coffee table books on the world of art movement. i used to dream that i was alive and at my prime in 1913 (who knows, maybe i was...but that's a whole 'nother posting).

i was totally into postmodernism, but didn't agree with jameson that it was the cultural logic of late capitalism. i thought it grew more directly as a reaction to modernism and my explanation of how it came about had more to do with russian formalism than anything. ostranenie. making strange, now there's a word i haven't thought of in awhile. the constant search for the new...aren't we still doing that?

how could i have forgotten that person? lost touch with her? life clearly took me in another direction. and i don't regret it, but i do wonder how i've lived without her these past few years. but i am happy i can stroll down the memory lane of my bookshelves and get in touch with her again. because she's right there, within me, just waiting for me to pluck down baudrillard or bourdieu or kristeva or maybe even zizek from those shelves. better yet, how about some of that dostoevsky...

turning off the inner anthropologist

i'm finding that i'm developing a work-related injury as i work on this piece on the danish welfare state. it's an injury more mental than physical - i simply can't turn off my inner anthropologist. everywhere i go, i'm observing and analyzing (i suppose regular readers of this blog know that this is actually nothing new), but it feels somehow different. it's become more systematic, perhaps, than my usual musings.

last evening, i attended a large party and had occasion to do a lot of anthropological observation of the natives in their natural habitat (if indeed their natural habitat can be said to be a rather large exhibition hall transformed into dinner seating for 7700 people and the swedish 90s band roxette). and in my observation (and mental application of various theories), i realized that playing the role of anthropologist tends to make me hold back from participating fully in the moment myself. i end up sidelining myself as mere observer (at least i restrained from scribbling notes in my little notebook, tho' it was in my tiny little purse and i was sorely tempted). so while i gain a great deal from the experience in one sense, i come away from it feeling that i wasn't truly there, except in some abstract theoretical sense (filtered heavily through bourdieu).

and while these clinical anthropological skills are all well and good for the purposes of the book, i do hope i can achieve some degree of being able to turn it off again - because it's making me effectively miss the party.

dinner party fantasies

i've spent some time today, pondering my thanksgiving menu. we've invited a bunch of family and friends and their expectations are high as to experiencing an authentic american thanksgiving dinner, so i've been planning ahead. (the photo above is from last year, where it was a much smaller affair.) i love to cook and i love to have diverse guests and i love to see what happens when people meet and get to talking. so i'm looking forward to that, although i will undoubtedly be in a horrible panic on the day and forget to put at least one key dish on the table. things kind of spiral from my control at the last minute, but i'm old enough now that i've come to see it as part of my charm. or so i tell myself, as i take a giant swig of wine to calm my nerves.

but in all this planning, i got to thinking about dinner parties and guests. and that classic old question about who you would invite to dinner if you could invite anyone, living or dead.  what group would you put together around your table?

some names sprung immediately to mind. dorothy parker for one. her sharp wit and cynicism would be most welcome. slovenian philosopher and prolific writer slavoj zizek would also be most welcome - he straddles postmodernism and whatever it is that's coming next and i'd like to talk about contemporary politics in that light. for husband, we'd have to invite pierre bourdieu, because nearly all of husband's theories about everything are based on his notion of cultural capital. for husband's sake, we'd also have to invite nytimes columnist thomas friedman. i'd love to see what would happen between him and zizek. and because i would have written my dissertation on their works, i'd have to invite russian writer andrei bitov and yugoslav croatian dubravka ugresic. i think orhan pamuk, turkish nobel literature prize-winner would add something to the group as well. for a bit of glamour, i was thinking about nigella lawson, and she could maybe even help me out a bit in the kitchen. i'd like an artist or two, but can't really settle on one in my mind...matisse, perhaps? or asger jorn?

of course, this isn't to say that i'm not perfectly happy with the guests who are coming. i am, among them are some of the most interesting people i know...art historians, a musician, an actress, a policewoman, a head of entertainment at a t.v. station, and a couple of the most creative, funniest people i know. but i know that those who are coming would get a big kick out of dorothy, slavoj, pierre, thomas, andrei, dubravka and orhan and they would ADORE nigella. for sure. i mean, who wouldn't?

who would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?

from whence surplus?

i had a long conversation last night about that whole concept of overskudsmennesker (surplus people) and underskudsmennesker (deficit people) that i believe i've mentioned here before. those words are so wonderful and packed with meaning in danish, meaning that's not contained in the literal translation, nor in any more metaphorical one i can come up with. even tho' we lack a word for it, i know you know people in both categories.

overskudsmennesker are largely positive. they have time for things. they are creative and their actions reflect both an open mind and a big heart. they're able to see situations from all sides. they are good at having an overview. when someone presents an idea, they run with it and expand on it, instead of shutting it down or making fun of it.

underskudsmennesker, as you might imagine, are the opposite. they have something negative to say about everything. they aren't open to new ideas and they often are critical naysayers in the face of other people's ideas. they're the ones who you'll hear say, "we tried that before and it didn't work." they are often utterly unable to see a situation from another perspective.

i know i show traits of both at times, because i don't think that anyone is ever always on top of things. we all go up and down, depending on our energy levels. but i've come to think that once again, whether you are generally in surplus has a lot to do with social capital (i know, i'm always bringing it back to that, but i think bourdieu was right). do your background, education, upbringing and situation equip you to deal positively with the world or not? do they enable you to see the big picture? i think for many, the answer is no and it means they wallow in their own perspective and their own negativity, never lifting their head above the horizon to really look at things. never having the surplus to do so.

i don't mean to say that you have to be educated to be happy (tho' somewhere inside i probably do believe that to an extent), but that you need to be equipped with a broad way of looking at things in order to see situations for what they are and not get bogged down in some minute and unimportant detail. one that drains your energy and the energy of those around you.

another thing i've noticed is that when you have many passionate people involved in something, those passions will clash and result in a disturbing draining of energy that leaves everyone feeling like an underskudsmennesker, at least at that moment. great passions are energy dynamos, but that means that they are also energy drains. and sometimes we're so caught up in them we can't see that we crossed the line from surplus to deficit.

living the right life

living the right life. how can we ever really know? we're so in the middle of living our lives, that how can we ever see if it's the right one we're living or not? twelve years ago, i was living the wrong life. only i didn't know it. i was practically a newly-wed when i headed off on my fulbright. why did i go away to an obscure balkan country, leaving my new husband (he was an old boyfriend, so it didn't feel that new) in a new city (we had moved from arizona to chicago)? i thought i did it because it was an academic/professional opportunity that i couldn't pass up. i mean, who turns down a fulbright, especially for a guy? that would just be silly if not downright stupid.

when i was in that balkan backwater, i encountered a lot of lost souls and i silently thanked my lucky stars that i wasn't one of them. because i didn't think i was. i even had a conversation with a friend one evening about how so many of the people around us seemed to be running from something...responsibility, loneliness, boredom, relationships (or lack thereof), a picture of themselves they didn't have to face when there were there outside of their "real" life. i remember that we decided we weren't running from anything. and i meant it at the time. i felt not so much like i was running away as running toward. towards a career that i could see on the horizon and to which a fulbright was an essential component, just like presenting at conferences and scholarly publication.

but, about halfway through my time there, i realized that i was in fact running away from a life that wasn't working. i had gotten married for all of the wrong reasons. it was a combination of a lot of factors...peer pressure--all of our friends were getting married, even the ones who hadn't been together as long as we had. his residency was ending. we'd been together for years. people thought we were a great couple--being with us was like hanging out with paul and jamie from mad about you, only even funnier and wittier and not at all annoying (or so we thought). he was a doctor, so i didn't have to explain what i was doing studying russian literature. he was funny and nice and i liked him. key word being liked. i wasn't in love with him and never had been, but the time was simply right, so we got married.

but i didn't know, or at least didn't admit, any of this, especially not to myself, until i actually had met the person i should have been spending my life with. he too was funny and nice and so cute, but was so much more than that. he challenged me--i remember a heated discussion about postmodernism at a cafe high on the hill in thessaloniki, warm summer breezes wafting in from the aegean, him waving a forkful of cool honeydew melon at me while telling me that postmodernism was just laziness, it wasn't possible that everything was equally good. and in challenging me, he took me seriously in a way that my starter husband never did. he indulged me, but never took me seriously. and in taking me seriously, i realized that j-p respected me. and he made me laugh and do silly things (stealing fries from some friends of ours who were standing in line in bull's (a greek equivalent of mcdonald's) even tho' we didn't even know one another at the time. we immediately started in on the practical jokes together, already then. it was destiny that we would be together. meeting him made me feel like i'd been holding my breath for such a long time and could at last breathe for real. it was the great love that i had stopped believing could exist outside of big-budget hollywood films.

we had to go through a lot to be together. it's one thing to meet one another and fall madly in love when you're both out of your element, away from your everyday life and your everyday responsibilities. but we knew we wanted to try to be together back in the real world as well. we talked openly about how we had each been living the wrong life up to that point and we didn't want to wake up in another twenty years and realize that it was too late to correct it. so we went through the pain of divorces and not having much money and transporting me to a new culture to which i am still at times resistant. but we were always resolved in wanting to have lived the right life and to treasure the great love we had found together.

and today, we've been married for ten years. what a life it's been. i didn't end up the academic i expected to be, but then i would never have traveled the way i have, nor had the experiences i've had career-wise. and today, on our tenth anniversary, i'm completely sure that i'm now living the right life. and we still have the great love that we found in one another back in that balkan backwater. it's deeper and more sure than ever.

we still discuss deep issues like postmodernism and social theory and evolution and the shockingly aphoristic, crap-like quality of business/leadership-related books (even those from harvard university press), if not daily, then every other day. sometimes we have these discussions in bed at night, giggling in the darkness as we elaborate on bourdieu's notion of cultural capital or whether the next steps of evolution are taking us into cyberspace. and these discussions keep us vital and engaged in one another and in the world.

he builds me things, like my beautiful kitchen and my writing house/atelier/studio/building-in-the-garden-that-i-don't-know-what-to-call (so he had the help of a wonderful polish guy named rafy on that one). we have a style together that we've developed over the last decade. it encompasses everything from our home to our cooking to our music collection (admittedly, i influence that rather heavily because i'm the one with iTunes and have banished his 18 supertramp albums to his workshop--didn't they only have the one song, you ask? yes, and they did it over and over on many albums, but i digress). but we have come to a place, after ten years, where we know who we are as us.

although we each have a professional life that is individual, we are definitely living our life together and it feels like the right life, even more so ten years in. and i hope it goes on for several more decades before that plane crash, but today, we will celebrate that first decade.

oh, and it's also husband's birthday. that way he couldn't very well forget our anniversary. clever, eh?

husband, you are my life.

ten years ago...

i heard on the radio yesterday that it was ten years ago that the columbine tragedy (i was gonna link to it on wiki, but i can't really bring myself to do so) happened. i have a clear memory of standing in a little studio apt. on the north side of chicago, watching oprah talk about it with tears in her eyes. just as it did then, it feels remote from me now. i can't even relate. it's incomprehensible to me and so far from anything i can imagine. i feel for those people, but i cannot even wrap my head around it.

but what it does make me remember is that ten years ago, i was teaching a course in 20th century russian culture at the U of C. i made the mistake of proposing the course together with a fellow graduate student who was taking his exams that quarter. it was a mistake in the sense that taking your Ph.D. exams at the U of C brings you to the brink of a nervous breakdown. and by to the brink, i mean over the brink into a full blown nervous breakdown that you yourself don't notice, but everyone else does. so i ended up teaching alone, which was ok, it just wasn't what i expected.

since i lived in denmark, i also foolishly accepted my fellow graduate student's offer that i could live with him at his place, since it was only 3 months. but living together with someone who has had a nervous breakdown that he doesn't really notice himself is, to describe it lightly, not healthy, so i got my own temporary apartment on campus.

that turned out to be a good thing, because it was in that little bitty apartment, within a block of The Reg, that i learned to make risotto, which is a skill i still enjoy. tho' it took several tries. i had no t.v., which was also wonderful. i also ate a lot of paté on crackers. because that's what i imagined that a graduate student at the U of C should eat. i still haven't decided if that was true or not, but it was decidedly part of my own engagement in bourdieu's cultural capital (attempting to raise mine, undoubtedly).

as for The Reg, i spent so much time there in my study carrel, that i began to glow in the dark. (that's the standard U of C joke, since The Reg was built over the bit where they did the Manhattan Project.) but seriously, being left alone teaching a course (albeit undergraduate) at the U of C, is no small project. luckily, we had modeled it around matei calinescu's five faces of modernity, which meant that we covered modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch (my fave) and postmodernism (my REAL fave, at least at the time), which was an ingenious idea (even if i do say so myself). but my very, very favorite was sneaking in alcoholism, because of its importance in russian culture. vodka is a diminutive of the word for water, which illustrates its importance as a life force in russia and russian culture, because what is language if not the manifestation of culture?

it was both a great time and a stressful time, and i'm sorry that it took columbine to remind me of it, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. i'm grateful for the opportunity to say i taught at the U of C, it's not everybody who has done that. but i did. and so did obama. he's, of course, done a little better than i have, but i'm cool with that.