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.

Oh Young Conservatives.

I was registered to attend parts of the Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference, but when I got to the venue this afternoon, their spokesperson wouldn’t let me in because I work for part of a progressive think tank. I don’t know whether to be irritated or highly amused. This is what happened:

I had barely told the people working registration my name when Jason Mattera, YAF’s spokesperson, came running up.

“Who are you with?” he asked me.

After some miscommunication, we established that he was asking where I’m an intern, and I replied that I’m an intern here at Campus Progress. There was an awkward pause.

“Sorry,” Mattera said.

“What do you mean, ‘sorry’?” I asked. “I received an email confirmation that said I was registered. I don’t see what the problem is.”

Mattera explained that the problem was that I’m a Campus Progress intern, and that since I’ve been liveblogging the conference all morning, I wouldn’t be allowed in, since blogging isn’t allowed at YAF’s conference (despite the fact that attendees have been tweeting about the conference all day). I told Mattera that struck me as bizarre, and a little bit like censorship. He suggested that I tell this to my “friends in the White House, and maybe they’ll pass a law to make us let you in.” Mattara is, apparently, unaware of the fact that it is Congress, not the White House that passes laws. Politely deciding not to embarrass him further, I instead pointed out that Campus Progress’s National Conference welcomed attendees of all different viewpoints and encouraged them to blog and tweet about the conference—some did.

Mattera told me this was “comparing apples to oranges … this is a conference for conservative students.” In fact, the two situations are kind of the same thing, and it’s YAF that looks bad. Campus Progress sponsors a conference with progressive themes, and yet it includes students who hold a wide range of views, and it certainly doesn’t turn students away on ideological grounds after previously confirming their registration.

I asked Mattera why his organization was so desperate to keep students with different viewpoints out (okay, I used the word “censorship”), and his response was that I could watch the livestream online. It seems strange that Mattera is willing to broadcast the event to the whole Internet but won’t let registered interns in to the event.

“Well, if this is what the conservative movement is doing to attract young people, I’m not sanguine about its future,” I said.

Mattera laughed at me, and then replied, “Goodbye—oh wait, here, have an Obama fist bump.” I refused his proffered fist, and he added, “Why don’t you move to Canada?” He seemed to think this suggestion was hilarious. (The fantastic thing about Mattera’s parting shot is that I do, in fact, have dual citizenship with Canada, have lived there, and will actually be going there in just under three weeks.) I turned and walked back into the elevator.

If there are young conservatives reading this, I really hope Jason Mattera doesn’t represent how you address your political ideology.

The Importance of Things That Are Not Politics

I had two conversations today about, basically, why I’m not interested in making a career in politics or political journalism or Washington, and because of the way my social life looks today I suspect that I might have more of this type of conversation later on. So I figured some of this bore rehashing and explaining, because here in Washington I feel sometimes as if it’s very difficult to justify an interest in anything other than politics and policy and government. What follows may seem unbearably personal and navel-gazing, but I do believe it’s relevant and something that deserves to be unpacked, so please bear with me.

In short, it comes down to preference. I’m interested in history, in things that aren’t happening right now. I try to keep up with the events that happen every day, but I find it exhausting, and I don’t think it always gives me the perspective I’d like to observe longer-term trends and patterns. I think I can help inform what’s going on every day by providing the historical context, and that’s something I want to do as a professional historian when I grow up. Somewhat secondarily, I’m interested in doing cultural history, and while I find political history interesting (I’m currently a research assistant on a really cool project that has much more to do with politics and Washington, and that’s fun), it’s not my main research interest. It’s not what I want to write my senior thesis on, for example, or eventually my dissertation. And mostly I think that’s okay—I think it’s okay to agree to disagree on what is most interesting; we do that on a daily basis. I also don’t follow sports or television, and I don’t have a lot of qualms over the fact that I don’t find those things very interesting.

But here in Washington, where I work (albeit in a very small insignificant capacity) in progressive political journalism, I am inclined to feel that the stuff I write about in this space, in particular, is quite uninteresting, quite insignificant, and quite irrelevant. I see this break down along a line I can almost gender: I feel as if the world which values an understanding of policy and political science and academic political theory is concrete, physical, quantitative, precise, aggressive—masculine. And I feel as if the world I inhabit of queer theory and social history and literature and countercultures is wishy-washy, abstract, irrelevant, and sort of “soft”—feminine. I know what sexist territory I’m running into by breaking things down that way, but I’m doing so because I think it goes a long way towards explaining why I get the sense that educated Washington society values one and not the other. It’s no secret that “masculine” things are valued more highly over “feminine” things in our society, which is a perfect example of why our society is sexist and that’s something anyone who does gender studies could tell you (though of course gender studies falls into that “insignificant” realm that I feel my stuff falls into). So it doesn’t seem like that illegitimate of a claim to make. But it sucks.

Of course, if I feel insignificant, it’s because I am, but not for systemic reasons. For example, if I don’t want to make a career in political writing, my friends in progressive political journalism don’t want to make a career in academic history and cultural studies. Why should they read my blog? Why should they link to it on their blogs? It doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with sexism or with politics or with how the rest of the world perceives academia. It’s just that what I do doesn’t really pertain to what they do. And that’s okay too.

Or is it? Because what I came away thinking after the two conversations I had today is that political journalism and academic history/cultural studies have more to teach each other than we might otherwise think. Both professions live in worlds which are at risk of being dreadfully out of touch with the real one, and I think we’re all aware of that. But that means we have a moral imperative (I believe) to try to engage with the larger population of the country, to write things that will be relevant and meaningful and comprehensible to people outside our immediate communities, to try to address the issues that other people are facing and not just the ones that we face. I very much want to go into academia, for example, but if I can’t find a way to make whatever I choose to focus my academic career on relevant and interesting to a wider audience, I’m going to have to find another line of work. Likewise, I believe that if a political blogger’s blog is incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t have the same depth of knowledge of current events that the blogger does, that person is doing something wrong.

And as much as we have to engage the outside world, I think that we specifically have to engage each other. The connections between politics and history are very strong even when you’re not studying political history, because a knowledge of the development of the country’s social landscape is necessary to assessing the motivations of political factions and the impact of policy upon the world outside of Washington. “Continuity and change” is the mantra of history, and for someone like me who’s interested in modern history, that arc of flux and stability runs right up to the present, where a map of the cultural and ideological layout of the country is an imperative.

So, in short, I don’t think I’m wrong to do what I do, and I don’t believe it’s less legitimate than what my friends do. I’m glad that I have friends who do different things, because it means we can have interdisciplinary communication. I hope that all us college kids with our different career tracks don’t grow up and bury ourselves so far in our towers (ivory for me, digital for my political blogger buddies) that we cease to acknowledge each other’s relevance and importance.

Self-Promotion Never Got This Shameless

But it’s for a good reason: I’ve cracked the mainstream media! Yeah, I know, it’s only the website of the New York Times‘ “Ed Life” summer supplement, but my photo of the oven on Firestone Library’s B floor was one of the finalists in a competition they held for essays and photos about kids’ college experiences:

I love finding instances of surrealism in my daily life, and what could be weirder than an oven hanging out in Princeton’s collection of law-related books?
——————–
Emily Rutherford, Princeton University, class of 2012, history major

Ladies and gentlemen and non-gender-identified individuals, it is very gratifying indeed to see your name in print at nytimes.com.

Nature, Vacations, and a Sense of Place

I found myself with a sudden deep longing for nature, for woods and wild animals and deep, blue-green ocean. This summer is my first experience living in a city for a decent period of time, and it’s claustrophobic-making after a life of suburbs and small towns and—of course—the experience every so often of rural nature. I’ve come to a love of a natural, rural environment relatively late in life; it took the perspective and life experience of leaving home and seeing some of the world to realize that I do not need an internet connection every second of the day and I need time to read and to go on long walks and to listen to the ocean. It took the self-assurance to realize that my friends will not cease to exist if I drop off the face of the earth for three weeks. And it took the basic calm and slowing-down-ness that a little maturity and outgrowing of adolescence brings to realize that home is a wonderful thing when it looks like this:

Changing my voter registration to Mercer County, NJ, as I did a couple weeks ago, represented the divorce of my North American regional identity from suburban southern California. I’m lucky that I get something of a choice in these matters, and that I do have family roots in British Columbia, Canada. I’m doubly lucky that I’ll actually be there in just under a month.