Category: Blog

Intrusion of academia upon my life

I was writing a ramble on my life’s trajectory in the past four or five years, and in the context (don’t ask. It’s complicated), a phrase from “Howl” came to mind. That phrase is “the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising,” and it’s rather odd that I thought of it, because the context had nothing to do with nitroglycerin, shrieks, fairies, or advertising. So quite odd.

But, see, the problem is that I was thinking of “fairies” with a totally different connotation than the one that I’m pretty sure Ginsberg intended. In my sex and gender class this week, we learned what “fairy” meant to urban folks in the early 20th century: it connoted a certain homosexual prototype. Before we (as American culture) got used to conceiving of homosexuality as being defined by whom you’re attracted to and have sex with, it was defined according to gender characteristics. Therefore, a man who dressed and behaved in what was considered an effeminate manner was classified as a “fairy,” and was considered to be “other” or “deviant,” though were often tolerated as an amusing novelty in places like New York. On the other hand, the men who picked up and had sex with fairies, because they were assumed to be penetrators as opposed to penetratees, were considered “normal” men—they weren’t stigmatized or considered “other.”

So now that we know what fairies were in the popular culture of Ginsberg’s period (basically think of the most offensive effeminate gay male stereotype you can, then import it to the early 20th century), we’re stuck. What can they possibly have to do with my high-school experience in suburban California, far removed as it is from the Bowery and the Village?

Well see, this is the thing. Because before my history class taught me what it meant to be a “fairy” in 1940s New York, and perhaps before my latest close-reading craze, it would never have occurred to me to get so stuck on the meaning of this word that I couldn’t finish the ramble that brought it to mind. I’m glad that I’m learning to think this way, and accumulating the knowledge that enables me to do so. This is, in part, what college is about—and I love every bit of it.

You Learn Something New Every Day

… and I learn a ton of new things every day, actually, because I’m a college student at, if I do say so myself, an excellent university, taking some mind-blowing and challenging classes. But today was one of those days overarched by a big academic concept that you know is going to stay with you for years to come, and that academic concept was this: word choice is vital.

This afternoon I had two “firsts”: my first-ever precept (Princeton calls discussion sections “precepts,” because it is full of itself) and my first one-on-one conference with my journalism professor, a very eminent professional writer whose name I won’t drop because that’s just too crass. I was nervous to the point of nausea for both. The precept was not only my first at this university, it was for my English class, and English is a discipline I am neither confident in nor good at. I am very much in awe of my journalism professor, who absolutely deserves all his renown, and was apprehensive as to how he would evaluate my writing.

To spare you the suspense, I must have come off as an idiot in precept—I was right; I can’t close-read literary passages for shit—and I was blown away by the fact that my journalism professor gave me some positive comments on my assignment. But the theme that connected both idiocy at literary analysis and an apparent ability to write decently was the utmost importance of minutiae.

As you might know, if you’ve studied literature at all, and as I discovered today, an author’s very specific word choices are absolutely vital in determining the meaning of a passage and the author’s intentions with it. Since my course is in English literature, I can mention that there are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, and since my course is in English literature in the 14th-18th centuries, I can say that English has undergone some seismic shifts in vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, orthography and everything else since Alfred the Great’s scholars codified what was then called “englisc” in the 9th century. And so there is an incredible corpus of English words to draw from—some of them, since my precept was discussing Chaucer, extinct today—each of which could be employed to subtly alter what can be gleaned from the text. I’m not used to reading literature in this way: as a proto-historian (that is to say, I will probably be a history major in 18 months), I usually read literature, if not for pleasure, to gain insight into a particular time period or culture. I’m unused to examining it unto itself. It was an alien and deeply challenging experience for me, because I came into the class with so many things to say and then found that very few of them were at all useful, as we pored closely over the meaning of each word in a single paragraph. And all of those words suddenly grew more significant to me, more powerful. I was daunted by their potency and my complete inability to manage them.

If that weren’t enough, immediately following that ordeal I ascended a rather odd set of stairs to the frigging turret of a building I’d never before visited to meet with my journalism professor. This went considerably better, because the craft of writing is something I can claim to have some instinctive understanding of—more so than literary analysis, anyway. Since it was just us (which is totally ungrammatical but I don’t know how to rephrase it), and since I respect his talent so much, I didn’t feel any more hopelessly insignificant than I should have. And since the overall conceit of my piece was solid enough, we were able to focus on those same minutiae. My professor pointed out some words I’d thought deeply about and some words I hadn’t, addressed my punctuation choices, and questioned the meanings imparted by one way of expressing an idea versus another. It was as if he and I were applying those same close-reading tactics to my work, except instead of being a dead writer whose intent we can only speculate about, I was right there next to him, and I knew what my intent was. I was able to ground my understanding of the words in reality.

But in any case, the point of all this rambling (which, the WordPress word count tells me, is going on for far too long) is that it is vitally important to examine things incredibly closely. There is deep significance—academically speaking, at least; I couldn’t tell you about real life—to all these details, and I should be paying more attention to them, whether to learn how to think in more disciplines than my chosen one, or whether to aid me in becoming better at this writing passion of mine, such that it may become a skill or even a talent. And, moreover, it pays for me to throw myself into my work, doing more than just glossing over my readings or hacking out a paper or an article. It pays for me to hone every detail of everything I do, out of concern not just for my future as writer or academic, but also in the interests of my own pride and self-worth.

Campus Dailywatch (2009-02-10)

IvyGate’s roundup of today’s headlines in the Ivy dailies mentions the Daily Princetonian‘s above-the-fold piece about Meg Whitman’s bid for governor of California. This, indeed, is a rather silly article, very much in the mold of every Ivy League daily’s tendency to run a story every time some alumnus does something in order to fill space. To be fair, there is some decent Princeton-focused reporting in the article, but also a fair amount of cribbing from the WaPo and the Sacramento Bee.

But what I really wanted to mention is that IvyGate is overlooking the most incredible thing to come out of the Prince today—more incredible even than one eating club’s computer fuck-ups: a very odd column by opinion editor Barry Caro in defense of bicker.

Keep in mind that I hate bicker. It’s a disgusting institution that for several decades has been a stain on Princeton and a major detractor for a lot of folks who consider going here. So keep that bias in mind. Also keep in mind that Caro professes to be no fan of bicker himself—after all, he says, he joined a sign-in club. But statements like this still get to me: in response to other writers in the Prince who criticized bicker’s exclusivity and cliquishness, he writes, “I must have missed the all-Street meeting where club members are told that our mission is to mercilessly mock people.” Oh, so there has to be a meeting for something to be true? I’m not such a hardline radical that I don’t understand sarcasm, but cliquishness is kind of the entire point of eating clubs. Some people get in; some people don’t. That’s especially true for bicker clubs, where getting in is based not on a lottery, but on an evaluation of one’s personality and in some cases one’s appearance, one’s family background, and other such factors. This isn’t an overtly acknowledged factor, but even this freshman can see how folks posture and pretend and flip out about trying to act like the sort of person Club X would accept. It’s like the middle-school popular crowd all over again, but even worse—because now it’s 20-year-olds who really should know better.

Caro also says, “I’m also curious how Loh holds what I believe are two completely contradictory critiques of the eating clubs together in his head: that they both enforce conformity and are a reflection of social balkanization.” Clearly he hasn’t been around many young people’s social groups, because it’s perfectly obvious to me that when self-segregation according to stereotype occurs, there’s a certain amount of pressure to then live up perfectly to that stereotype. Think of the jocks, the drama kids, the rich and popular kids, all those groups from high school. And think about the social influences all those groups exert. Don’t you have to dress a certain way, hold a certain set of interests, profess a certain set of beliefs, in order not to get weird looks? I can’t believe that I’m the only kid who had that experience—and I know that, too, because I look around Princeton and see hundreds and hundreds of kids who are too scared or too unimaginative to break out of this heightened preppiness that the social environment at this university engenders. Even I’ve felt it—I came home at Christmas and bought some nicer clothes, so that I wouldn’t feel underdressed in class. I’m consciously trying to learn to modify my rhetoric so that it’s acceptable to the Princeton style of discourse. And I’m careful of the things I say so that I’m accepted, even if the groups from which I’m seeking acceptance are “alternative” crowds. It’s how the world works. Caro’s living in a fantasy land if he thinks that’s not what people do.

Caro concludes by saying that the eating clubs are what make Princeton special, and that if you don’t like it you should go elsewhere. Well, in a way that is a valid point, and many people have gone elsewhere. I almost did, and I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve talked to who didn’t apply to Princeton because they were so disconcerted by the Street. But personally, I don’t see a huge problem with making eating clubs an accessible option to everyone, regardless of financial ability or gender or social status or anything else. I think it’s deeply troubling to have it publicly acknowledged that exclusive elitism is at the center of Princeton’s social scene. And I’m angered and disgusted by folks who are so disinterested in making this university a place where anyone could want to go to benefit from the world-class academics. I really don’t think fulfilling President Tilghman’s green-hair line is too much to ask.

The Prince wrote me an email today, inviting me to come to their open house this week. I told them I wasn’t interested, and after reading this column (and the full-page ad from the Cato Institute on the facing page), I’m even more sure of that. I, after all, proudly write for the Nassau Weekly. It may be its own self-selecting social scene, but at least we publish coherent and intelligent articles that aren’t predicated on upholding everything that is wrong and outdated and elitist and exclusionary about Princeton’s social environment.

Campus Dailywatch (2009-02-09)

I don’t think any of today’s headlines can possibly surpassed by those of my own college daily. A couple highlights:

Thirteen go to hospital post-Bicker, proof of how disgusting, not to mention anti-intellectual, Princeton’s selective eating club scene is.

Class of 2012 president resigns to take off spring semester, for “personal reasons,” you see. I’ve heard rumors, but I probably shouldn’t repeat them on the interwebz—needless to say, the scandal that continues to plague our student government is pretty fucking entertaining.

On an unrelated note, I picked up a card from the table in the dining hall at lunch today. On the front, it says, “If you could ask God ONE QUESTION, what would it be?” The reverse lists some dates with discussion topics: “Why is there suffering?” “Who was Jesus really?” “What about Science [sic]?” “Is Jesus the only way to God?”

I won’t lie: I laughed for like five minutes and continued to repeat those questions over and over again in silly voices to the folks I was sitting with. Yeah, I know, I’m a terrible person.

Juan Way Tour

One of the greatest books I’ve ever read was Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Yes, I love the way Wolfe wrote it, all that new journalism stuff about how he gets across exactly what’s so new and exciting about the drug-fueled zaniness of Kesey and co.’s zipping around America in a bus, but I also find wonderful the very fact that Kesey and co. were zipping around America in a bus.

Imagine my delight, therefore, when I discovered a while ago that fellow Pushback alum Ned and some of his friends will be criss-crossing the country in a bus this summer, except without a speed-fueled Neal Cassady at the wheel, which I think can only be an appropriate concession to safety. I’m thrilled by what they’re doing, both because they’re breaking out of the pre-professional, job/internship mold that I think a lot of college kids (myself included) see as the only way to spend one’s summer, and because they’re getting in touch with a notion of idealistic Americana that seems to make so much sense in this brave new world of the post-Bush era. That’s how I’m reading it, anyway. Maybe I’ve totally misconstrued their ideas. In any case, the hippie in me thinks this is like the greatest idea every, and I wish I’d thought of it first. I applaud their determination, too, in making what for me would just be a pipe dream into a really cool reality.

That said, they need our help to make what they’re calling the “Juan Way Tour” successful. If you know what your plans are this summer and where you’ll be (cause I don’t, yet), you should totally go to their website and fill in their “Help Us” form. Let the power of the Internet come together to support all awesome, out-of-the-box ventures!

I think now would be an appropriate time to invoke Ken Kesey, as painted by Tom Wolfe: “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.” Make of that what you will.

On Being Older

I did mean to update this blog quite often, but having to read roughly 600 pages per week has put a damper on that, you see. I’m taking five classes this term, and all of them with much heavier reading loads than last semester. It makes me feel quite the scholar, though, in that funny little pretentious undergraduate way. I like affecting a retro collegiate posture, with my political buttons and my blazers, lounging on my couch reading Lillian Helman or John McPhee and drinking tea.

I spent a lot of high school trying not to seem quite so nerdy. I trained myself to swear more regularly; I studied popular music and television; I made an effort to take an interest in baseball and soccer—though try as I might, I could never really get into football. I suppressed my desires to pontificate about history and read fantasy novels. Instead, I was able to channel my faux-scholarly impulses into modern American history, and a fascination with the Beats and other controversial American literature and culture that’s popular in a sort of hipster sense. I got comfortable talking about sex, and studying sexuality became not only a vehicle for answering my troubling questions about my own identity, it became a way to fill classmates and roommates and other innocent bystanders with an amused interest in the scandalous that was as close as I seemed capable of coming to popularity. I managed to be socially acceptable, but in a way that most of my attention came from people wanting answers to questions—about their math homework, their Latin translations, or even things like sex and drugs that I don’t actually know nearly as much about as I let on.

But college, now, is starting to become a synthesis of all these things. I have never been so single-mindedly radical as I feel right now, or as the past few weeks have desired me to be. And yet my nerdiness, lain dormant for the past several years, is beginning to flourish again. Living in silly faux-gothic 19th-century buildings, and having friends whose cultural literacy exceeds mine, makes me want to rekindle my Anglophilia and my youthful exuberance for military history and dead languages. It’s starting to become a challenge, too: I was looking at study-abroad programs in France and England, and thinking that it’s going to be challenging to go abroad in Europe while still majoring in modern American history, which is what I think I intend to study. I find the tea-drinking, blazer-wearing, borderline-pretentious part of me to be at times at odds with the part of me that writes and rants with anger in my voice and knows Part I of “Howl” off by heart. I can’t uphold conservatism and radicalism at the same time, nor do I want to.

But I think this is the paradox of basically any clichéd retro student, and maybe it’s why I like aspiring to this stereotype. When I was a kid I loved the boarding-school novels and movies about boys who rebelled against the status quo while wearing coat and tie. Trust me, it’s a genre—and I devoured it, perhaps for more reasons than the one I’m describing, which I needn’t go into now, but if I can effect change while being a pretentious git who knows a lot of trivia, so much the better.

And what’s more, I think this is still a way of rebelling. Because my school is still Princeton, not some idealized, Americanized, Oxbridge fantasy. Princeton in reality has a very intellectual academic layer, but its social layer at times is positively anti-intellectual. It is almost, I think, a form of rebellion to be the student who actually does the 600 pages of reading per week, and who cares, and tries to balance too many other writing commitments besides. And, nevertheless, the resurgence of my youthful posturing has not been so absolute that I don’t go to Terrace every week or two, that I don’t still devour anything that’s shocking and controversial, and that my hippie tendencies haven’t been obliterated. In fact, I think I’m more “me” than I ever was, because in college it is increasingly possible to find people who will “get” you, whatever “you” is, and you don’t have to mold yourself into something that folks will understand.

I titled this post “On Being Older” because it was my birthday yesterday. I’m 19 now, which seems so much older than 18, so much farther over the threshold into legal adulthood, so much more of a collegiate age. And while 19 means that I can drink in Canada, and buy cigarettes in New Jersey, it also means that I am continuing that oh-so-very-collegiate process of who I am, how I present, and what I want folks to take away from the concept of “Emily Rutherford.”

My self-thesis of the day about a week ago was that I’m so glad I wound up at Princeton, and not at a hippy-dippy liberal arts college, because I think it’s important in my life right now to have something to rebel against. I tend to define myself by what I’m not, by whom I am and am not aligned with, and I think the resurgent Anglophilia is as much a part of that as is all the writing and ranting. I’m still figuring out how it all goes together; what sort of person I’m going to be, really. But I guess I’ve got time. Nineteen really isn’t all that old after all.

Fun fact from my schoolwork

I found, in the reading for two entirely different classes, indications that liberal magazine The Nation once held some kind of non-progressive views. In the first place, as I learned from an article by Rogers Smith called “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” it wrote in 1898 that “the varied assortment of inferior races” in new American acquisitions such as Puerto Rico “of course, could not be allowed to vote.” And then I see that a book called The Grounding of Modern Feminism by Nancy Cott observes that the early 20th century Nation was extraordinarily condescending to the nascent feminist movement.

How times change.

What marriage means to me

I got an email yesterday from Equality California, an organization that is fighting to overturn Proposition 8. Those of you who know me might be aware that this is a ballot initiative whose outcome I was very invested in, and whose passage reawakened in me the desire to do something about my country and make it the sort of place I want to grow up and raise children in. In any case, this email asked me to tell three people who might not otherwise be sympathetic to marriage equality what marriage means to me. Now, everyone in my family, and all the friends who I talk to on a regular basis, are pretty liberal, so I think the closest I can get to fulfilling Equality California’s request is to hold forth on the Internet. So.

You know, the funny thing is, I don’t even see marriage as something at all relevant to me. I’m pretty cynical about Long-term Committed Relationships and Me. I don’t envision marriage as something in my future. Furthermore, I find myself appreciating, in a lot of ways, how the LGBT community has led the way in breaking down the traditional marriage paradigm. I don’t think a formal long-term monogamous relationship is necessarily the right way for every couple to exist, and I don’t think it should be held up as a higher moral good than any other form of sexual and/or romantic commitment. I actually often have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of marriage, especially when it’s put front-and-center in LGBT rights campaigns, because it reeks to me of assimilation. It’s almost as if the mainstream of the LGBT movement feels that the only way to create a future where queer folks are treated fairly is if they try to emulate the domestic habits of what my history of sexuality professor calls “institutionalized heterosexuality.” And I don’t think that’s true at all.

But. But. But just think about what marriage means in this country (which is America, for you foreign readers, but it probably means many of the same things in your countries too). It means security and stability for your children, if you choose to acquire any. It means all sorts of legal headaches erased or made much less painful, from taxes to green cards. It means hospital visitation rights. It means, most basically, public validation that your relationship deserves and has the right to exist. And we (as the queer community) can choose not to play that game; we can choose to say that we reject the outdated and inherently inequitable institution of marriage (if you do believe it to be outdated and inherently inequitable, that is). But on the other hand, reality for a lot of people is keeping their kids safe, keeping each other safe, and just living day to day. Not everyone wants to struggle through their lives just to make a social point. And we should respect that too.

The fact is that marriage is an item—a really big item—on the very long list of things that LGBT folks are denied in America. And yeah, there are some other things I would definitely like to see worked on: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Employment discrimination. Bullying and harassment in schools, and sex ed that generally ignores the existence of LGBT kids. Simple visibility and loudness and outness, teaching folks that there is nothing shameful or wrong about the nature of the people whom you’re attracted to or about the identity you were born with. Just making it clear that queer folks exist and that everyone probably knows at least one. Yeah, those are all hugely important things. Maybe they rank above marriage.

But the way I see it, that doesn’t change the fact that California granted LGBT couples—and the queer Californian kids like me who would like to think that their state cares about their future—a very basic right, and then snatched it away. When I visited home in the last week of October, right before the election, I drove down my street and saw Yes on 8 signs on the lawns. I would see my neighbors, out washing their cars or playing with their kids, and think about how these people who live all around me, and their kids who went to the same schools I did, do not believe that I should have the same rights that they enjoy. And that, to me, is inexcusable.

So, I guess, that’s what marriage means to me. It means, whatever you believe about the institution itself, a basic sense of recognition and validation from your government. It means that your government grants you the right to exist. And, really, is that too much to ask?

UPDATE: That Equality California email was linked to an awesome campaign called Tell 3, which everyone should totally get on board with. The ACLU blog has more.