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.

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.

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?

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

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.

a quiet sunday

it's raining one of those bone-chilling cold rains--the kind with really big drops that somehow land exactly down the back of your neck when you poke your head out the door or dash back and forth to feed the fire in the studio.  so, we sit, the three of us, here indoors, each at our own computer, quietly existing in our own mutual but parallel worlds. we'll soon take a fika break to eat hot banana bread together, fresh out of the oven.

it's the kind of day that breeds introspection, but introspection is the last thing i'm feeling that i need these days. i've had quite enough of that lately. i'm reading malcolm gladwell's blink, which is a book that explores intuition and our decision-making processes. and i'm led to believe that all this introspection is keeping me from my intuitive side. there is such a thing as over-thinking. so i'm trying to get away from that today.

but my mind wanders to the dinner party we went to last evening with husband's old work team. it was at his old secretary's house. it was a nice evening with catered food and everything. the hosts had prepared a powerpoint slide show of photos of their holiday last summer. they'd done a grand tour of the US--starting at niagra falls, then going to hawaii and ending up in las vegas and the grand canyon/zion. then, another of the couples happened to have a memory stick full of pictures of their recent safari in kenya. although i inwardly groaned when the powerpoint opened, both viewings and hearing the stories attached to them were actually both amusing and interesting. i will, in the interest of trying not to be so introspective, spare you my thoughts on the bourdieuvian cultural capital present last evening. at least until another day.

and so my thoughts turn to how awesome sabin looks on a horse and it's only her second lesson. she would seem to be a natural, tho' she hasn't gotten the thing with posting the trot. she's fearless and she just sits so well. definitely makes me very proud.

my latest eyeball-related project is shaping up nicely:

on thursday evening, i was IMing with a friend who has recently gotten back from a six-month stint in china. she does a lot of painting and so i sent her a link to an art exhibition where you can buy a stand and be part of it--showing and selling your art. it takes place at the end of october in a nearby town. anyway, during the course of our conversation, we decided to go together and get a stand! so yes, i'm going to do an art exhibition in october! i'm a girl who needs an assignment, so i figure it's the best way to kick start my production, since i'm full to the brim with inspiration. so, on that note, i think i'll go out and work on these:

 photo taken the other day when the sun was shining.

i'm working on another something that's really exciting and i'll be back to share it with you later today. in the meantime, don't forget to go vote for my photo assignment!