So many books….

Every day, I’m aghast by how many books there are that I haven’t read, that I should read. Every time I go to a bookstore (which is relatively often at times like now, when I’m living in a city with good independent bookstores), I come out with more books that sit piled on my desk, or occasionally actually do get read. Every time I go into a library, I check out armfuls, and too often they come due before I’ve read them. I’m painfully aware of how little I’ve read, particularly the painfully obvious things that someone who wants to do what I want to do should be reading. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve smiled and nodded and pretended to know what’s going on when someone references Foucault, for example.

Sometimes I blame my post-Prop. 13 California public school for my under-read nature. I thought only this could explain my glaring gaps in classic British and American literature in comparison to my peers from east-coast schools. But maybe it’s just that I’m lazy; the internet, with its easy access to blogs, newspapers and magazines, means that I read fewer novels. I also favor the esoteric over the edifying; I’ve been meaning to read Jane Eyre for months, but every time I think I finally will go get it from the library, I get sidetracked by another memoir of gay life in the 1970s.

The British academic-humor novelist David Lodge writes about characters who play a game called “Humiliation,” wherein they try to win by naming the most embarrassing work of literature they haven’t read—one English professor wins by confessing that he’s never read Hamlet. Well, I’ve read Hamlet (and I was, if I say so myself, a very good Horatio in my 12th-grade English class’s reading), but I could think up a dozen equally embarrassing things I’ve never read. Jane Eyre, for instance, as I mentioned above. Pride and Prejudice, or indeed anything else by Austen. The Grapes of Wrath (which I faked my way through having read when it was assigned in 11th-grade English). Anything by Hemingway. I started One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but never finished it. I’ve never read one of the more “grown-up” Dickenses—just A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield. Never read a Russian novel.

I also have to read theory, the stuff I need to talk about gender and sexuality with my friends and peers. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been told that something I wrote related to an idea advanced by Judith Butler—but I’ve never read Butler. Never read Eve Sedgwick. Never, as I mentioned above, read Foucault. Or Freud. I purport to be an American cultural history major, but I never finished Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, and as far as most other famous American historians are concerned, I can only recognize names and titles. I came to American countercultures, queer theory, and literary history through the Beats, but of Kerouac I’ve only read On the Road. Of Burroughs I’ve only read Naked Lunch. I have, however, read quite a lot of Ginsberg.

Of course, it does me little good complaining if I keep bringing home book after book that I never read. This summer, partly thanks to my daily commute on the bus, I’ve rediscovered reading for pleasure, and it’s been incredibly exciting—I can’t think of the last time I read so many books in one summer, but it must have been before high school, before I was really reading only adult books. But as I take on the task of catching up in the adult world of cultural literacy and start the background reading I’ll need to dive into my independent work at school, I’m daunted by how much there is to go. I’m sure that when I’m really an adult, I’ll still have glaring gaps in my literary consumption—everyone does; that is, after all, why “Humiliation” is such a successful joke in Lodge’s writing—but it would be nice to think that I’ll eventually catch up to the wide breadth of literature that my friends and family are able to reference.

Gay-Friendly Campuses–and the Princeton Review

From Inside Higher Ed:

The Princeton Review regularly is criticized for its ranking system, which is based on surveys of students — a system that critics find unscientific even by the standards of college rankings. At the same time, the Princeton Review is popular with students in part for providing analyses of many unofficial issues, such as which institution is the top “party school.” On Thursday, the Princeton Review was attacked by a gay rights group, Campus Pride, for using its regular surveys (which on many campuses may be filled out largely by straight people) to rate colleges on how gay-friendly they are. “This list is an erroneous, misleading indicator of acceptance for LGBT youth and their safety on campus,” said Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride (which does its own “index” on colleges for gay students, based more on policies or programs than a broad student survey). Robert Franek, senior vice president and publisher of the Princeton Review, noted in an interview that many gay groups have praised his publication for making gay inclusiveness a measure of college quality. Franek also said that his publication believes students “are the experts” and so he sees no reason to change the methodology.

I was particularly interested to see this because I wasn’t impressed to begin with by Princeton Review’s treatment of LGBT students’ college experience—the fact that they used the phrase “gay-friendly” instead of “LGBT-friendly” and titled the list of the least welcoming schools with the phrase “alternative lifestyles” says a lot about how much they sought to get a sense of the LGBT communities on the campuses they surveyed (the survey question, “Is there very little discrimination against homosexuals?” sounds as if it hasn’t been revised since the 1960s). And as Campus Pride (an awesome organization, by the way) said in a press release:

Their rankings were based off one single question asked to 122,000 students at the 371 top colleges — whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “Students, faculty, and administrators treat all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.”

“This list is an erroneous, misleading indicator of acceptance for LGBT youth and their safety on campus,” said Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride and the author of The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, the first-ever guide profiling the 100 Best LGBT-Friendly Colleges, released in 2006 by Alyson Books. “The majority of students responding to such a question – irrespective of response – will be straight. Their perceptions of equality are likely quite different from those of LGBT students.”

To me, this makes perfect sense.

Campus Pride uses its own methodology to rate—instead of rank—colleges on a variety of criteria including availability of gender-neutral housing/restrooms, LGBT-related course offerings, student organizations, staff diversity training, and that sort of thing (interestingly enough, Princeton gets five stars out of five—which makes sense, as its institutional community really is one of the very best—it’s the organic, noninstitutional community that could use some work). Looking at Campus Pride’s list is an interesting counterpart to some of the weirdness of the Princeton Review list—such as the suggestion that Stanford is more LGBT-friendly than Reed or Simon’s Rock—or indeed Berkeley, which doesn’t appear at all on Princeton Review’s list, but which offered the first undergraduate queer studies course in the country, as early as 1970.

Rankings are so pointless that it’s pointless to discuss how pointless they are, and so it seems worthwhile, I think, to draw a contrast between using criteria to grade an entity on how well it accomplishes something and trying to put the entity in a list that compares apples and oranges—Princeton Review puts liberal arts colleges and research universities, religious schools and military academies, all together, and that’s just not sensible.

Oh yeah, and I have one final question for Princeton Review. Why, in their “Alternative Lifestyles Not an Alternative” list, are the five military academies (which actively discriminate against LGBT students under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell) not at the very top? That alone should be enough to call Princeton Review’s rankings into question.

Woodstock

I have been trying to think of something to say about Woodstock, which is experiencing its 40th anniversary, but this is one of the rare times when I stop being so presumptuous and actually realize a 19-year-old proto-historian’s lens can’t do the event justice. I said some things earlier this week, but primary sources are better right now, I think.

If you haven’t seen the Woodstock documentary, you should watch that—I have it on DVD, and I’ve watched it many, many times. See it before you see the new Ang Lee film, about which I’m very skeptical. Or, if you’re pressed for time, put on Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock”, and then look at this slideshow of reader-submitted photos from the NYT. It’s awesome.

Gay Culture; or, In Which a Nerd Tries to Talk About Lady Gaga

While I don’t really know anything about or take the least bit of interest in Lady Gaga, I was interested by something she said in an interview with OUT Magazine:

That’s another clause in the Gagaland constitution: Gay culture shall gush undiluted into the rapids of society. It shall not be co-opted, fancified, dolled up, or Uncle Tommed. “I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream,” she says, “It’s not an underground tool for me. It’s my whole life. So I always sort of joke the real motivation is to just turn the world gay.”

I have had some awfully strange conversations in my time about whether there is in fact such a thing as gay culture, but let’s for a second accept that there is, since it’s my main research interest (if I may be so presumptuous as a college sophomore as to have a “research interest”). In any case, as much as I admire this liberationist sense of bringing gay culture to the masses and therefore making a space for it in a hostile world (and I do think it’s interesting that what we’re talking about here is gay culture, in its historical, pre-liberation, campy sense, not LGBT culture), I don’t think that’s going to work. Gay culture has always been a subculture, an underground culture, a counterculture. So many of the hallmarks of this culture—its language, its celebrated heroes, its sense of fashion, its codes of behavior—are based in the need to remain visible to people in the life (to appropriate an early 20th century term) but invisible to those outside it. The construction of a heterosexual identity may have come in response to the construction of a homosexual identity; the straight state may have emerged in response to gender and sexuality nonconformity, but gay culture has always been in the position of subverting the mainstream, undermining it, reacting to it, questioning it, parodying it, etc.

An easy example is the phrase “coming out,” which long preceded the metaphor of the “closet”: it was appropriated from upper-class socialite lingo, where it meant a young woman’s introduction to high society, such as in the form of a debutante ball. It was only one of many ways in which early urban American gay culture parodied high society and its social functions, and thus it subverted the expectations of gender roles, marriage, and domesticity that pervaded how that culture regarded young people, particularly young women. While some of this is wrapped up in the way that homosexuality was sometimes interpreted as an issue of gender identity rather than sexual object choice, and involved a lot of men whom we would now regard as gay identifying with an explicitly feminine-centric image for that reason, it is as clear an indication as any of how gay culture has an identity that is inherently anti-mainstream.

Lady Gaga certainly isn’t the first person to seek to bring gay culture into the mainstream public eye, and it’s undeniable that young urban culture in particular has appropriated a number of pieces of culture that were once exclusively gay. But as much as I believe that what we call “gay culture” is and has always been about so much more (as someone once tried to tell me) than anonymous sex in bathhouses, and therefore ended with AIDS, I do think that it will cease to be unique if it becomes sufficiently mainstream that it no longer has a different culture to react against.

However, what I do see happening already, and which I think will continue as homosexuality becomes less stigmatized and more incorporated into western democracies’ legal frameworks, is the separation of “gay culture” from exclusive identification of “men who have sex with men.” There is a whole trend of straight men who have an affinity for gay culture tropes, and of course (all that “gay best friend” talk aside), a lot of women who are increasingly taking part in a culture that has had a tendency towards quite a lot of sexism. Gay culture is also more welcoming to transfolk these days, and while I’m hesitant to make broad cultural declarations based on limited personal experience, I know a few transmen who, whatever their sexual orientation, have a strong relationship to pieces of gay culture and gay aesthetic. And as gay culture becomes about something more, or something different, or something that is anti-mainstream but not underground (an important distinction, I think), it becomes a radically different mode of identification from that which typifies the gay cultures of, say, the 1920s and ’30s. The gay New York of George Chauncey’s book would, I think, seem very foreign to today’s gay New Yorkers.

So is that what Lady Gaga intends to do? To make gay culture something accessible and identifiable to people who aren’t homosexual men? (I hope you see why I’m using the word “homosexual” here, even if it’s not the preferred term.) It’s understandable given what little I know of her career and her cultural aesthetic, but it means that we may have to start considering to what extent gay culture ever really was about sex—and what purpose it serves if it is no longer an identity for the outcast, the marginalized, and the underprivileged.

Americans and Objective Truths

I do not understand the American obsession with ranking things. (It does seem to be a quite American thing, doesn’t it?) I thought of this because I was just looking at Newsweek‘s Top 100 Books list, and the “most important books EVAR” thing is certainly a trope, but there’s also the series of college rankings from a variety of different publications and companies (I thought Princeton Review‘s were so ridiculous that I wrote a rare humor piece mocking them). It’s a cultural phenomenon, this conviction that there’s an objective truth of what is Best, which some nameless experts have evaluated using some sort of scientific metric, and that it’s possible to make this kind of evaluation regardless of any arguments that the merits of individual works of literature might be an objective thing, or that different colleges might suit students’ needs differently.

I had an American history teacher in high school who was very enthusiastic about rankings of the best American presidents, and took a great deal of interest in what the rankings said and whether they were accurate. It’s true that these types of lists can be mildly diverting as polling data—I remember that there was a certain amount of interest a few months ago in how far down George W. Bush would fall on the presidential rankings when he left office. But that’s all they are, and a list with 43 slots isn’t going to convey the incredible nuance you get when you take four or eight years of daily policy decisions and try to make a determination about how effectively someone ran the country. Those sorts of opinions are also going to vary in accordance with political ideologies and differing historical frameworks. There isn’t an absolute right answer.

And if there isn’t an absolute right answer with presidents, how can there be one with books, or with colleges? I don’t see how it’s possible to arrive at the conclusion that War and Peace is an objectively “better” book than 1984 (as Newsweek does), when they were written at different time periods in different countries by different authors exploring different themes. I’m sure someone could write a very interesting paper comparing War and Peace and 1984, but those kinds of papers don’t attempt to rank the works of literature they compare. I’m sure many critics have written many different reviews of Tolstoy’s and Orwell’s writing, but that kind of qualitative assessment is very different from assigning a hard numerical evaluation to each book. Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Other Poems changed my life, but am I upset it didn’t make it onto this list? No, because it’s a volume that’s personally significant to me. I don’t expect anyone else to find the same beauty in Ginsberg’s language that I do, and in fact many people think I’m hopelessly gauche for liking him. The thing that matters is that his writing is personally significant to me and my life experience, and that’s what writing is supposed to do. I would no more esteem writers simply for being on this list than I would wish that I were attending Harvard because it surpassed Princeton on the US News college rankings. I’m happy I go to Princeton because it’s the right school for me, not because it’s ranked highly. These rankings are largely irrelevant to our personal lives, and it puzzles me why Americans seem to set such great store by them.

But what is even more puzzling to me is how many Americans seem to desire the imposition of concrete data upon wishy-washy cultural phenomena, but are very keen to disregard it when it comes to health care reform, or Obama’s American citizenship, or what it is the organization I work for does, exactly. I’m not equating listmania with extreme right-wing nutcases, but it strikes me that whereas Americans often like to use lists to simplify things they don’t know a lot about, like historical analysis or literary criticism or educational philosophy, there are certain instances when being uninformed is perfectly acceptable, and it is practically mainstream to compare moderate reformist policy with the Holocaust, or even to suggest something as ridiculous as that Stephen Hawking is not British, or indeed that Barack Obama is not American. Whither has this obsession with objective truth gone when we actually are confronted with verifiable facts?

My Member of Congress Is Better Than Your Member of Congress

Unless you live and vote in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional district, that is, in which case your member of Congress is the highly intelligent and articulate, C.P. Snow-quoting, Ph.D.-holding, science-championing, youth activism-praising Rush Holt. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to interview Holt for Campus Progress. Here’s my favorite part, after I asked Holt about the many colleges and universities in his district:

I came of age in the 1960s, and so I have long believed in the power of students. I watched students bring down a president and begin to change a war. Ultimately, it didn’t quite happen—bringing Vietnam to a sane and a rapid end—but nevertheless I have seen the power of students. I have always believed in it. Sometimes, I have longed for it to come back, and in spurts it has. I think Campus Progress is very promising; it’s knowledge-based activism. It’s not just activism for activism’s sake, flailing out about everything, but it’s combining good policy analysis with activism. So I hope that it achieves its potential, and I am encouraged by promising signs in recent years of student activism. At colleges and universities, I think, students should be sharpening their values, because much of the rest of life is designed to wear away at those values, to round the corners, to blur the sharp distinctions, to really weaken one’s principles. And so you want to be as sharp as possible when you’re in an environment where you’re able to do that. Traditionally, going back over the centuries, that’s what a university was supposed to be. It was not a trade school—it was an environment for a moral education, a policy education, as well as a so-called “classical” education. Too often, I think, the non-trade-school part of the university education is lost, and so I hope Campus Progress helps fill that dimension.

Unlike some members of Congress I could name, he even got the organization’s name right.

But seriously: I decided to switch my voter registration to New Jersey because I was tired of getting form letters from Duncan Hunters pere and fils of the CA-52 (the son succeeded the father in the last election) gently suggesting that we agree to disagree about reproductive rights, immigration, same-sex marriage, the stimulus, and a variety of other issues. There is little point, I think, in being represented in Congress by a representative who doesn’t represent you. Most of what I knew about Holt before I registered in NJ was that he was a Democrat and a physicist, which was good enough for me. But the more I read about him—particularly after doing this interview with him—the more I’m proud to be represented in Congress by someone so intelligent, and who so much stands for the governing—and societal—values that I believe in.

Sometimes I Wonder What the World is Coming To

I think the last time I complained non-stop that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, we had just passed the 4,000 casualties mark in Iraq. Well. I cannot fucking believe that this is a serious headline reported entirely non-satirically by one of the country’s foremost daily newspapers:

Obama says ‘death panels’ aren’t on his healthcare overhaul agenda

Holy shit, LA Times! No fucking way! Now this is NEWS! I just can’t believe that such a crackpot conspiracy theory doesn’t actually exist!

This is like something out of a political satire. This is like an Onion headline. Journalism is dying, Washington is going batshit insane, and I clearly need to get the hell back to the ivory tower. It’s like a mid-20th-century surrealist drama, where all the other characters are so insane that the protagonist starts to doubt her own sanity. And it’s only 10:20am….

Fitting In Academically

My heart goes out to a 19-year-old Northwestern Law student, whose story appeared in the Orange County Register. Kate McLaughlin graduated from UC San Diego at the age of 17, and apparently is wicked smart but has difficulty relating to other people her age. This is the most telling bit, I think, which maybe won’t seem as heartbreaking to other readers of the Orange County Register:

But to say McLaughlin’s life has been easy – or that her parents haven’t struggled to raise a child who was constantly bored with school and couldn’t relate to her peers – would be to dismiss the painstaking, lonely path that McLaughlin has chartered.

She has been burdened all her life with finding a place that would fulfill her insatiable quest for knowledge, a learning environment where she wouldn’t feel like an intellectual oddity.

The Register lists McLaughlin’s academic indices—her LSAT score, her UCSD GPA, her IQ—just as you’d expect. I’m a middle-class SoCal-er from a neighborhood not unlike a lot of Orange County. This fetishization of scores is familiar to me. So is the idea that someone would compare an English major who’s an avid reader and writes a webcomic, and is headed to law school because of a passion for social justice, to Doogie Howser. But what is even more familiar to me are those two sentences I quoted above: the sense that a “painstaking, lonely path” where you “feel like an intellectual oddity” are less significant than the grades and scores and how quickly you move through a prescribed curriculum and move on to law school. It sounds like McLaughlin didn’t find a way to fit in at UCSD, and she didn’t find the work challenging/stimulating enough. I know a little about UCSD, and that doesn’t necessarily surprise me. I hope she’ll find a better environment at Northwestern, but at the risk of stereotyping about law school, I worry that it would be just as lonely-making.

Now, I’m no genius. And McLaughlin is clearly very intellectually gifted. I know it’s not necessarily appropriate to compare my educational trajectory to hers, or feel as if I can relate to her situation. But as someone who was lonely and depressed and bored with school before I got to college, and as someone with an “insatiable quest for knowledge,” I hope it occurs to someone who reads the Register article, or the NYT blog post that links it, to consider what our culture does to smart kids by emphasizing their numerically-based achievements over their intellectual and emotional fulfillment.

Progressive Blogosphere-style Post of the Day

(Could that be abbreviated “PBsPotD”? Anyway…)

Ta-Nehisi Coates very frequently makes good points, and I particularly like this one, from a post responding to a letter sent in by one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers:

I’ve often wondered how much of Andrew’s conservatism, and really the politics of the “serious” left (TNR, Slate, Washington Monthly, a chunk of the Atlantic) is rooted in an utter disdain for the late 60s–the riots, free love, the drugs the Panthers etc. It’s understandable, but obviously very weird for me.

I’ve wondered this too, and don’t know what to make of it personally. I came to American cultural history from my idealistic and naïve passion for Woodstock, banned books, the Beats, Berkeley and Columbia protesters, that sort of thing. And all that I’ve read about this attitude towards the political establishment informs my own politics, too, even in a more pragmatic and cynical and “within-the-system” age. To me, both student radicalism and African-American civil rights activism (whether it be Dr. King or the Panthers) are a reminder that it is worth entirely reimagining the status quo, and that we don’t have to settle for what we have. Radical anti-war activism helped to turn the tide against Vietnam; obviously the civil rights movement had a profound effect on real political outcomes.

I’m sure that the smart bloggers/writers I read and work with acknowledge this; most of them have a better understanding of American sociopolitical history than I do. But I think, as Coates suggests, there is a tendency now for those analysts whose lenses are narrowly focused on Washington to think themselves and their politics above these movements that turned 1960s and ’70s society, culture, and politics upside-down. And I always feel a little ridiculous, a little stupid, a little childish in comparison, because I think there was a certain beauty in those movements’ investment in the creation of a better world.

Vietnam was huge. The generation gap because of it was huge. The civil rights movement was huge. But that is not to say that there are not still questionable and unjustified interventionist wars, that there are not still vast generation gaps, that there are not still civil rights battles to be fought. When we do so, it is perhaps worth looking backwards to groups of people in a particular era who firmly believed in the promise of a better world. We can debate how much of an effect these groups had on discrete political decisions (the civil rights movement’s was certainly pivotal; the antiwar and countercultural groups’ were somewhat more varied); but their immense cultural impact is surely worth something.

UPDATE: A truly wonderful article by Maurice Isserman from the Chronicle of Higher Education Review about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is relevant (subscription required). Some selected paragraphs:

Blight has argued that the purpose and spirit of Civil War commemorations underwent a significant shift in the decades following the 1860s. At first such gatherings served as a reminder of the issues and passions that had driven North and South into their conflict. But by the time veterans of the Blue and Gray met at Gettysburg, 50 years later, the anniversaries had come instead to symbolize the end of sectional division and the eclipse of the issues (including, unfortunately, any national commitment to black equality) that had loomed large during the war and in its immediate aftermath. Woodstock nostalgia and commemorations, on the contrary, have tended to be about reconciliation, with an emphasis on the values that unite Americans across generational and partisan lines. Woodstock’s enduring mythic legacy—a dream of innocence, redemption, self-reliance, and self-invention that owes so much to the traditional American narrative—began to define the event in popular and historical memory even before Jimi Hendrix brought the concert to an end on Monday morning, August 18, 1969, with his inspired retooling of the national anthem. […]

Woodstock would go down in history as a moment of reconciliation rather than confrontation largely because, in the end, nobody wound up beating up or shooting or cursing at anyone else. Police officers, hippies, and Bethel’s residents were on their best behavior, and a great sigh of relief was heard across the news-media landscape. So Woodstock became, on the one hand, the quintessential “60s” event, the culmination of a decade of challenge and change, but was also thought to stand apart from the decade’s darker impulses, as a moment of restored innocence and good feeling in a time of turmoil and discord. Wadleigh’s documentary, Woodstock, opens with a view of Yasgur’s fields in the days leading up to the festival, with two hippie guys riding by on horseback, their blond, flower-child girlfriends clinging behind, while Crosby, Stills and Nash can be heard on the soundtrack singing, “It’s been a long time coming.” Cut to the cows. Cut to the tractors. Cut to the Woodstock stage under construction. Welcome to the American Eden. […]

Woodstock was not a protest, and many of those attending never had attended, and never would, a political demonstration. (That applies to a couple of the friends with whom I attended the concert.) But without the political insurgencies that preceded it, without the vision of the possibility of change and self-definition that began with the civil-rights movement and was taken up by more and more Americans (students, women, and, earlier in that summer of 1969, gay people), Woodstock would never have happened. Richie Havens, in opening the festival, extemporized a song around one word: “I start strumming my guitar and the word ‘freedom’ comes out of my mouth as ‘FREE-dom, FREE-dom’ with a rhythm of its own,” he would later recall. “This was the same feeling I’d been experiencing all along. The feeling that Bethel was such a special place, a moment when we all felt we were at the exact center of true freedom.” No one listening to Havens’s ode to freedom in 1969 could hear it without being reminded of Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s martyrdom in 1968. Lang describes the Movement City that Abbie Hoffman and other New York-based activists set up on the hillside, which came equipped with the usual movement paraphernalia: radical newspapers, leaflets, a mimeograph machine. All that proved unnecessary. As the days rolled by, Lang writes, “I noticed fewer and fewer people manning the Movement City booths set up by the various political organizations. The entire gathering had become Movement City.”

The generational upheaval, of which Woodstock was one expression, had yet to reach its crest. A few months after the festival, in October and November 1969, many Woodstock veterans, and many others inspired by what they had heard about the gathering, would take part in the huge Moratorium and Mobilization demonstrations against the Vietnam War. And the following spring, in May 1970, they would be among the hundreds of thousands taking part in the national student strike following the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State University and Jackson State University.

The Movement City part of the Woodstock legacy tended to be forgotten in the years since, if not necessarily by the veterans, the musicians, or the organizers, than by Woodstock acolytes among succeeding generations. Certainly there was little of that legacy in evidence at the Woodstock commemorative concerts of 1994 and (especially) 1999. Woodstock is reduced in popular memory to a weekend of blissful abandon, a chance to dress up in flower-child trappings, a brief excursion to nirvana and back. Maybe on this 40th anniversary, at a moment when the country faces challenges and decisions every bit as important —and divisive—as in 1969, we can remember Woodstock as a more complicated, less “innocent” phenomenon. It was Eden, but it was also Gettysburg (or Agincourt, as The Times would have it). And, thinking back, I still stand a-tiptoe at the memory.

Sense of Place, Again

Warning: tedious introspection and I-statements to follow.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about sense of place (if we absolutely must quote John McPhee, “a sense of where you are”), and the regional allegiance I feel both to my relatively new home in New Jersey and to the places where my dad’s family is from in suburban and semi-rural British Columbia. It seems a very North American thing to cultivate regional identities like this; I see it in other continents and countries too, but not to quite this extent, and I’m sure it has something to do with the size and geographic diversity of Canada and the United States.

That said, I’m presently in Princeton for the weekend, in order to see some friends I missed very much and just to get a change of scene. Some of my friends were surprised I voluntarily came up here; they thought it was rather silly that I would take a mini-vacation to Princeton of all places. In the groups of people who don’t fit into the mainstream undergraduate culture, I think it is something of a ritual, or a fashion, or a way of establishing community, to disparage and complain about this campus and this town. It’s something I do often enough when I’m here during the semester—bitching about the eating clubs, about loud drunken groups of students, about anti-intellectualism, about the quality of the dining hall food and of the school paper.

But in reality, this place has so absolutely become my home that it’s where I immediately thought to come when I decided to hatch a plot to get out of D.C. for a few days. Maybe I feel so much affection for it because I don’t fit in, or maybe because it enables me to create a fantasy in which I do, irrespective of what’s actually going on. I think that in many respects, the collegiate gothic architecture, the old books in the library, the perfectly manicured quads, allow me to cultivate this quasi-Oxbridgensian fantasy of what I have always imagined and desired university/academe to be.

I am sitting now in a room in the basement of the library (most of the library is in the basement), across from a good friend. He and I have faced each other across this table several times, he no doubt doing far more substantial things than I am, if his status as a grad student, his mountain of books, and their impenetrable titles is any indication. It’s an emotionally warmer room than most of the rest of the library, with older furniture and filled with books and even with a little natural light. It’s a much more congenial place to work or study than, for example, Georgetown’s cinder-block monstrosity. And it’s a room that’s been popular among a similar set of students for multiple generations—I know people who worked in this room long before I was here, and I feel a sort of emotional connection to that tradition of sitting somewhere and reading and thinking that stretches across time at a university like this one (even if, in keeping with America’s sense of “old,” it has only been around for 260 years).

I think that because of this sense of continuous production of ideas or writing or scholarship, when I’m on campus I feel rooted to something. I don’t feel that in the neighborhood where my family lives in southern California, which has only existed for about fifty years, and where very few people are interested in or do the things I am interested in and do. I also don’t feel that in my apartment on the first floor of a row house in Georgetown, where there is a distinct sense of impermanence and a culture of “summer in DC” that is already beginning to evaporate and, by the end of August, will be gone entirely. Both San Diego and Washington seem also to be driven by a sense of fast-developing modernity and immediacy: DC quite literally runs on the 24-hour news cycle; people’s careers and lives develop based on what happens each day in politics. And my experience of San Diego is of a culture that thrives on being materialistically up-to-date, that prizes instantaneous communication, that drives everywhere and gets its coffee at Starbucks to go.

It is quite strange to say this in the context of any 21st-century college experience, but it is being at Princeton, I believe, that drove me to want to take my greatest pleasure from an anachronistic sense of learning how to be a scholar and specifically a historian. A year at Princeton made me want to send actual handwritten letters and postcards to my friends this summer. It vastly diminished my interest in experimenting with drugs and alcohol. It instilled in me what almost seems like a nerdy hedonism: where fulfilling my desires entails a reasonable degree of disconnection from peer pressure, from trends and fashions, and from the minute day-to-day changes in the state of the world. I could maybe feel that somewhere equally old and Europhilic, like Harvard or Yale, but I doubt I could feel it anywhere where I do not sense a connection to past decades and centuries. I would less want to sit here in this room in the library basement if I didn’t feel that I know people of previous generations who have sat here before me, and that their predecessors sat here before them, and that the developments of the decades have made it possible for a woman, and specifically a woman like me, to join that tradition.

So how surprising can it be that when I tire of my heart beating in time to the rhythms of the 24-hour news cycle, I come to sleepy, boring, summertime Princeton to sit in the library with my friends? This is my home, and I don’t see how it could possibly be otherwise.