Tag Archives: postaweek2011

Bands that Begin with “D”, Pure Happiness, and the “New Orality”

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Apparently, I love any 80s band whose name begins with D. For some reason, when I bought this shirt and put it on, it made me happier than I’ve been in ages. It was like, perhaps, that elusive perfect Christmas present. Or ice cream on the first hot day of summer. Or hearing the chords of your favorite song on the radio when you are driving to the beach. You remember that, right? Happiness. It’s a feeling that you used to get regularly prior to all those adult responsibilities you have now.

In the spirit of taking myself less seriously – especially as I continue to write about serious subjects academically and worry incessantly that my love of writing this blog and embracing my inner dilettante will hurt my academic career – I present you with the Def Leppard slide show. These pictures represent a part of who I am – probably the best part. Scholar Walter J. Ong has argued that the internet is at least partially about “orality” and the mimicking of early oral methods of storytelling. In essence, Ong argues that social media feels different from the written word in books because it is less formalized, more user-friendly. It’s like we’re “talking” to each other, less formally, and yet saying something important (well, at least some of the time). In a sense then, social media is revolutionary because it represents a “new orality” and fosters far-flung connections. Somehow, we all find each other and we find interesting things in this chaos of information. And it “feels right” because it calls to those “older” parts of our brains that are used to talking to small, close-knit groups. The genius of the internet is that, though it literally connects millions of people, it feels like a small social gathering.

Listen to me being all “positive” about the social effects of technology. It must be the shirt talking.

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Divorcing Duran Duran: Series Introduction

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I have an advanced degree in anthropology, so I might be forgiven at first for assuming that I had a slightly better understanding of why human beings act the way we do. And yet I quickly realized that this couldn’t be true as I prepared to press the play button on an audiotape that I hadn’t had the guts to listen to for over ten years. It’s physical evidence, basically, of me semi-stalking a member of the 80s band Duran Duran.

I’ve tried, over the years, to come up with a nicer-sounding label for myself than “semi-stalker”. I’ve tried out “Duranie” and “really big fan”, but they never quite captured the essence of my fascination with the band’s bass player, John Taylor. The trouble is, that even at the height of the story I’m about to unfold, I never felt like anything was amiss in feeling love for a man I had never even met. Everyone I knew had, at one time or another, been infatuated with someone. My best friend in high school used to break into the soccer star’s locker to read through his notes and leave him Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups anonymously. My best friend in college dragged me to every hockey game and after-party because of her obsession with the team’s goalie. She also bought him sweatshirts and baseball hats as gifts (and she was NOT his girlfriend). Girls did things like that to express their, well, great affection. Or something. Maybe it reflected an adolescent need to be closer to someone, to know something intimate about someone else, or possibly even to know something deeper about ourselves.

The fascination with Duran Duran began in the early 80s when I was twelve-years-old and they were at the height of their career. Imagine the scene: me and my best friend, C, sitting on the carpeted floor in my den with a pink ghetto blaster nestled between us, an open Tiger Beat magazine on my lap, the tape recorder running. We are flipping through a special issue and taping ourselves talking about Duran Duran. Using seventh-grader logic, we have decided that Duran Duran would naturally be fascinated to hear what we are saying about them, so we are planning to ask my mom to send the tape to Duran Duran’s fan address. *

What I am about to listen to now, however, is not that tape. The tape we made in 1984 would have been cute or funny or more easily forgivable. The tape I have here, that I’ve been afraid to replay ever since it was recorded nearly a decade ago, when I was 27 and living in New York City, is far less adorable.

The British voice in the recording belongs to none other than Duran Duran’s John Taylor. In 1998, and after months of scheduling and rescheduling with his PR manager, John Taylor finally called me. Our conversation, an interview for an article I was writing about him for Time Out Magazine, lasted a total of 30 minutes. There were only two problems with this scenario: I wasn’t a reporter anymore and I didn’t work for Time Out Magazine. To be fair, the interview wasn’t based on a total lie. I did have a degree in journalism, I had once been a reporter, and I did know an editor at Time Out. But the article I was writing hadn’t exactly been accepted. I was writing it “on spec.”

Whenever I think back on my not-so-logical reasoning for prevarication to get an interview with John Taylor, I always end up asking myself the same set of questions: Why did I go to such extreme lengths just to talk to him? What is it that drives us to do things that we would never otherwise do? Obsession? Desire? And, maybe even more importantly, why was I holding on to a mirage? It was 2011 and I was still purchasing Duran Duran albums, going to their concerts, and wearing their t-shirts (occasionally in public).** Why do women, in particular, seem to form such strong attachments to one member of a band from their youth and then hang onto that infatuation for decades?*** What is it, exactly, that we are holding on to? I was hoping that listening to this tape might provide me with some answers.

My voice sounds strange to me, like I’m a teenager trying to sound like an adult. Talking to John Taylor has sucked me into a time and space warp. I’m desperate, at this point, to keep it together. The last thing I want to do is to blurt out something ridiculous like “I love Duran Duran.” Or worse, just “I love you.” It isn’t audible in the tape, but I know I’m sweating. By this point, I’m fighting an intense urge to explain everything to him. Not only about how I’ve lied to get him on the phone, but about how my brother died in an accident, and then my mom in another car accident, about how I went to live with my alcoholic father in a strange city after my mom’s funeral at age 14. That the only thing that made getting through everything easier was listening to his band, Duran Duran, locked away in my bedroom, staring at his pictures and dreaming about a better life.

In the background on the tape, I hear the voice of John Taylor’s small daughter.

Instantly, I cut to a memory of me carrying file folders down to the trash can in the basement. I’m crying bitter tears as I pass my dad on the stairs. “What the hell is going on?” my dad says. I snuffle and say, “John Taylor is getting married. It was on MTV News. I’m throwing out all my Duran Duran stuff.” My dad is so stunned by this revelation that for a second he doesn’t say anything at all, then shakes his head. As he gets to the top of the stairs, I hear him tell my stepmother that I’ve finally gone completely nuts.

To be continued. . . .

*[Footnote: C and I maintain that my mom never actually mailed the package, despite the fact that we never found it in her belongings.]

** [Footnote: Duran Duran recently released their new album, All You Need Is Now, and are on tour to support it. Go to their website for more info.]

*** [My best friend, C, had a serious obsession with Michael J. Fox that continues to this day, so I don't mean to exclude actors here. However, there seems to be something in particular about members of bands or singers that makes teenage girls especially insane. See Justin Bieber and "Beliebers" for a recent example.]

A Modest Proposal to Prevent the American Poor and the Elderly from Being a Burden

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My fellow Americans,

In the tradition of my great-great-great-great-great grandfather Jonathan Swift, I offer this modest proposal for solving our country’s current economic woes: Let the poor eat the elderly and collect their medicare and social security checks for the average estimated length of time that they might otherwise have been expected to live (75.6 years of age for men, 80.8 for women). I suggest that we begin with those over 75 and work our way down until we have balanced the budget.

Certainly, the meat of the elderly will be chewy and might best be consumed as ‘jerky’ – but would still provide the necessary proteins and reduce the environmental degradation that comes from the production of other forms of meat, such as cattle or pork. The additional bonus to the environment of shaving off the extra years that the elderly would be consuming resources is an another bonus of the plan.

It’s very sad, after all, to see many impoverished Americans – many of them children – languishing from hunger. Their depressed demeanor is a blight on our streets, and this proposal would go far in alleviating their suffering.

There is another great advantage to this scheme, that it will significantly reduce the cost of medical care in the country by making obsolete the hospitalization or care for the aged in their final years. Thus, there will be no need to reform healthcare, which would release us from what Republicans assure us will be a heavy debt burden on our nation. The shame of an ignoble death, then, will also be entirely avoided. The elderly will know in their final moments that they are, indeed, serving the needs of their country.

Since the elderly do not, as such, typically work or provide childcare or otherwise benefit the nation directly, I see no reason why my proposal should be greatly opposed. In exchange for the continuation of the social benefits accrued to the elderly, the young but poor shall be forced to sign labor contracts in perpetuity and without recourse to collective bargaining. I feel this is only fair to those owners and scions of capital, to see a real return on their tax investments. Indeed, as a result of this proposal, we can honestly say that we will have no need to raise taxes in order to take care of the infirm, aged, or poor.

The expectation is that once the “baby boomer” generation has been consumed, the country will be back on its feet again and the proposed plan can be “shelved” until another fiscal crisis occurs or when growing poverty returns as a pox upon our land. Surely anyone who loves this country will see the wisdom of this proposal and heed its call.

Sincerely yours,

Julie Swift

Which is Harder? Revisions or First Drafts?

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After my friend’s mock job talk today (for non-academics: a job talk is basically like an all-day interview for a professor’s position at a college and involves giving a talk on your research as though you were ‘teaching’ a class), we went to a café to have lunch. As we discussed what kind of revisions she might need to do for the talk, we had a short debate over the relative difficulty of writing first drafts (of anything – papers, articles, novels, poems) and revising drafts. Which one is harder to do?

For me, it’s revisions. I hate them. They are necessary, but they are evil. They make my writing stronger, but I loathe sitting down to attack a draft. Why?

Because it’s harder to know where to start or what to “do” to fix it.

Usually, if you change one thing, you need to also retool the things around it. So, depending on the problem or the rewrite, you have one hell of a task before you. You have to start somewhere, but the “beginning” usually isn’t the best place. Do you tackle structure first? Or clarity? Or add in what is missing? Or subtract whatever isn’t necessary?

This usually leaves me with a pounding headache and a need to get in my car and drive to the border. I’m pretty sure you don’t have to revise drafts in Mexico or Canada. (This only applies to Americans, however. Mexican and Canadian citizens have to do revisions in their own countries. The border is magical, a ‘get out of anything you don’t want to do’ car, in case you were wondering.)

My friend, on the other hand, argued for first drafts. Why?

The dread of the blank page. The need to write BEFORE you know what you are saying. The stopping and starting and staring at the cursor. The cobbling together of words to create sentences that you then find yourself wondering if make any sense at all. The feeling that you need to do anything at all rather than write that first draft. Like clean out your filing cabinets or scrub your kitchen tile grout with a toothbrush.

For me, however, first drafts are always easier. I think that I hate revising because I work so hard on my first drafts that I fall in love with them. It’s like taking apart the house you grew up in brick-by-brick. It hurts. I want to keep every sentence, even if I can’t. I hate cutting paragraphs; you may as well tell me to give away my cats (whom I adore, BTW). It’s an impossible situation. It makes me grouchy.

But I do it.

Because as writers, we have to and it’s part of the process.

As someone once told me, writing isn’t about being “happy” writing, but about doing something that is important to you. So whether you hate first drafts or revisions more, fellow writers, god speed. God speed.

And I’ll see you in Cabo next week.

 

Anger is the Zeitgeist for the Internet Age

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Is it me? Or do people – especially online – seem really, really pissed off? Especially in the past year or so, I’ve noticed a building pressure on social networking sites and in the comments sections of any article in the Times or the WSJ or the Atlantic. I have seen arguments in YouTube comments that made me feel like murder was about to ensue over whether or not (insert older artist) was better than (insert younger artist).

Look, I don’t know about you, but this trend disturbs me. Deeply. It makes me feel as though I’m living in a nation where all the denizens are angry at each other, at strangers. Why? Because, as far as I can ascertain, they have different opinions about Justin Bieber.

All of this anger is starting to make me feel a bit crazy. Why? Here’s why:

In my teens and twenties, I was a pretty angry chick. My childhood, like so, so many of us, was less-than perfect. And that, my friends, is putting it mildly. I’m not the product, like so many writers, of a middle or upper-middle or just-plain-old rich home. I have vivid memories of my single mom juggling bills so that from month to month our electricity wouldn’t be shut off. I grew up in a double-wide trailer in the middle of a small town in the Midwest. My mom constantly compared me to my brother – who died when I was 4 – and was, by all accounts, a saint. I was not a saint. You can draw your own picture. My mom was “depressed” – although in the late 1970s that’s not what they called it. And when my mom died at 14, I had to move to a suburb of Boston to live with my dad. Let’s just say that I figured out why my mom and dad divorced when I had to live with my father. A lovable, funny, horrible drinker. I spent so many nights awake before tests that I have no idea how I graduated in the top 10 of my class. I finally moved out when I was 18 to escape and, here’s the kicker, my dad dies from a bee sting.

So, I was an angry chick. I felt, well, cheated by life. My friends had won the family lottery, as far as I was concerned, if they had money to pay bills, didn’t have parents who were depressed and/or alcoholics, and supported them emotionally and physically.

Now, nearing my mid-life, I can look back and start to process all that anger. When I read angry comments on the web, or see someone yelling at a stranger on the street (which happens about once or twice a week here in Berkeley), I feel a connection with that residual anger inside myself. Which makes me want to ask those angry commenters and posters the following question:

What the hay-ho are you all so angry about? Seriously. I’d like to know.

These would be my follow-up questions:

Is it the injustice of the economic divide – the difference between rich and poor not so great since the Robber Baron Age?

Is it that you feel cut off from people – you know, the actual people who you seen offline? Do you have a lack of close relationships?

Is it because you feel angry about your own lives and you have to take it out on someone (the best someone being a stranger online or on the street or in the grocery line)?

Anger, at least in my experience, doesn’t come out of “nowhere.” It has a source. Usually a painful one. The “objects” of our anger are usually blank screens onto which we project our beliefs about the world or about ourselves. A lot of this “anger” – especially as provoked by a difference of opinions – seems to be related to some crazy idea that the world is black and white and that people are either wrong or right. No gray areas, no in-between. Polemics. That’s what we are left with, as a society, instead of thoughtful writings on a current issue.

In an effort to shield myself from all this anger, I’ve cut myself off from the comments. I just don’t read them anymore. I read an article and I think about my reaction and then I read something else. Period. I don’t engage with all the hateful (worse part of the spectrum) and crazy (middle-ground) and ideological nonsense (best part of the spectrum, but still).

I’ve also quit Facebook so I don’t have to get angry myself over people’s incessant need to broadcast their best possible selves. In essence, I wanted Facebook to reflect a person’s reality. Instead, it’s like a large, continuously updating version of the high school yearbook, with everyone jockeying to be better and more successful (using different metrics, to be sure, but still) than their peers. It made me crazy.

I’ll leave you, my three readers, with the following thought-provoking reflection from the husband of the “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers” (from the NYT Magazine article this past Sunday): Hate sells better. Hate is more lucrative than love for a site.

To me, that’s a terrifying thought, even if it’s probably always been true.

Observations on Quitting Facebook: Week One

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Withdrawal.

I deactivated my account and deleted the bookmark from my web browser. My morning habit was to check my mail, then Facebook, then Twitter. This morning, it still feels a bit strange not to reflexively hit the Facebook tab.

Observations from week one:

1. I’m saving time. Facebook really was a time suck. I get right to work after checking my mail and reading a few articles linked in tweets.

2. I’m worried about “missing out” on news from my friends. This despite the fact that Facebook seems to be about people talking about the weather and traffic and posting YouTube videos. All the best articles and “news” came from Twitter anyway.

3. I’m worried about “staying connected” and yet I feel less stressed out about maintaining connections. It’s ironic that having less access is making me less anxious about maintaining my “position” in my social network.

So far, the benefits of quitting Facebook are pretty solid. The upshot of this is also that I will tweet and blog more, which – in my humble opinion – are still the best ways to “connect” through ideas. Facebook is connections through past experiences and other people. It’s not as serendipitous as Twitter or blogging, where you “run into” people online that you would never otherwise meet.

And did I mention that I’m wasting less time? I didn’t realize how much time I spent each day checking Facebook. Actually, it’s embarrassing.

I might actually have time to work on the book manuscript now. Uninterrupted.

P.S. If you’re looking for me on Facebook, and we used to be friends, I didn’t de-friend you. I de-friended Facebook. If you want to connect to me, get a Twitter account or email me. Or use the prehistoric method of the telephone.

Why the Dilettante Isn’t So “Daily” – Future Projects

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I decided to choose Daily Dilettante as my domain name for this blog for two reasons: 1.) It sounded good. Come on, what self-respecting, book-loving nerd doesn’t like alliteration? ; and 2.) I wanted to push myself to write “often.” Maybe not “daily” – but I didn’t want this to devolve into a situation where I post on a “monthly” or “bi-yearly” basis either. So, then, it was an aspirational choice as well.

This blog provides me with an outlet for writing that is not related to my dissertation. And for the past year, the dissertation project has been a 270-pound gorilla taking up space in my study. When I try to write something else, the obese gorilla slaps me off my swivel chair until I repent and promise to only write prose related to flu and global public health. Trust me, he’s serious about me finishing this damn thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my dissertation topic. I do. I just don’t want to focus on it 24/7 and slowly drive myself insane. Sure, addle-brained professors make good movie characters, but not-so-great “real-life” teachers or researchers.

In the next few months, as I wind down the first draft of my dissertation and start writing the next two chapters of a book based on my dissertation, I want to spend more time writing for the Daily Dilettante. Hell, it might even start to resemble an actual “daily.” The dilettante part, for good or for bad, I already have down cold.

Projects on deck here (for the three loyal readers I know are out there):

1.) Divorcing Duran Duran. My humorous retelling of my up-and-down, fictional relationship with the band’s bass player, John Taylor, told in relationship to the various themes running through DD songs. Really, the essays will be about my doomed search for “the perfect relationship” and a PC-version chronicle of my awful dating history.  My ex-husband once lamented that he could never compare with the fantasy of JT. Years later, I finally realized that he was right. I had to divorce Duran Duran before I would ever be able to find and keep a “real” relationship.

2.) The Rio Project. See entry number one for back story. This March, I turn 39. On that day, the countdown to 40 begins. I’m sure there will be plenty of  “not-so graceful” stories ahead. In the early summer of 2012, on the 30th anniversary of Duran Duran’s album Rio, I will be hosting a recreation of the original video in Antigua. Yep. I’m serious. I’m talking about a shot-by-shot remake of the video. Growing up, I always wanted to become Rio, and it took me awhile to realize that I could do it without the band. This is about embracing a childhood dream and crafting a new destiny – all in one fell swoop. And you, my three readers, how could you miss that?

3.) The Clothes I Throw Out Daily Booth. My closet runneth over. I have too many clothes. And shoes. So in preparation for 40 and moving, I’m going to be wearing everything – EVERYTHING – I own one final time and snapping a photo of my outfits for posterity. My mom used to let me wear whatever I wanted (within reason) with the caveat that she be allowed to take a picture of me before I left the house in the morning. I used to think it was because I looked so cool. Now I know that my mom wanted photographic evidence of my stupidity. I am continuing the tradition here. Think of it as including my mom (she died when I was 14) in my 40th birthday celebrations.

OK. That’s it. Stick with me, kids. It should be a fun and eventful 18 months.

A Post for Single People on Valentine’s Day: To Brag is Human

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Ah, Valentine’s Day. That day of the year when people in relationships feel free to openly brag about the quality and duration of their love. On Facebook, people have already happily changed their avatars to couple photos and status updated about how long they have been married and how wonderful their spouses are. To which I ask: truth, hopeful self-delusion, overcompensation, or sheer braggadocio?

I’ve been single on many, many a Valentine’s Day and I always wondered why my friends insisted on telling me how lovely relationships were. I wasn’t alone because I hated men or love, people, I was just single. And now that I’m married – or remarried, I should say – I retain that same single-person feeling about Valentine’s Day. I have never understood the public celebration, or parading, of relationships. Especially when 8 out of 10 couples I know seem absolutely miserable on most other days of the year.

Maybe some of us are hard-wired to be suspicious of public professions about the status of relationships because we have been in some pretty terrible ones ourselves. In my first marriage, no one knew I was sad and unhappy for years. I hid it from even my closest friends and family. Why? Perhaps partially because everyone was so busy exclaiming how happy they were in their own relationships. I felt like I had done something wrong, or there might be something wrong with me, for not being able to be “happy” in my own.

Anyway, I think it’s normal to brag about what is good in your life. And sometimes proclaiming that you are happy makes you feel happier (see parents on children for a pertinent example – who claim over-the-moon happiness even when a bevy of psychological studies say it ain’t so). We need to feel good about our life choices. Otherwise, we’d have to fess up that we might have made some “mistakes.” If we did that, then we might have to make changes. And ask any psychologist and they will tell you: People don’t really like change. It stresses us out.

So, single people, I’m with you. I get it. Have a drink on me. Or a pint of ice cream.

For today, just grin and bear all those obnoxious status updates, flower deliveries, and candy boxes. Tomorrow people will be back to normal and it will be your turn to brag about how exciting it is to do whatever you want when you want to (without compromise), stay out late, sleep in late, and sleep with different people.

A Cacophony Of Blog Voices

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According to “Freshly Pressed”, today there were 467,441 new posts, 416,073 comments, & 92,239,400 words posted. That’s a multitude of voices joining the biggest online chorus in history. The blogosphere is loud, it’s noisy, it’s chaotic. And I’m adding to all that noise right now. But why?

Why do we “blog” – those of us who do – especially when we don’t do it as a business or to promote anything? I understand why the famous and infamous blog, or why already-famous writers and pundits blog, but why do the rest of us keep sending strings of words out into the world if we don’t have a large built-in readership? As promoters and fans of the wildly popular YouTube and Twitter suggest, isn’t blogging already dead? Are more words being written with fewer people to read them?

In my teens, I kept a journal. I wrote it in the same style as I write this blog. I act as though someone is reading all of this, but really I’m talking to myself. I’m keeping track of what happens to me, or what I’m thinking about, or whether or not a Snowmageddon just occurred. It’s a digital posterity that I’m crafting here, and who knows when or if it will ever be really useful to anyone other than myself.

In some ways, blogging is like all other writing. It’s done out of a need to communicate something; those somethings feel important enough to say “out loud”. It’s an act of faith and of leaning into the future. It’s a way of battling the passage of time, too, since each blog entry is a marker in the sand. I was here.

I’m a graduate student, and so I spend a lot of my time writing in other venues. In part, I blog because it’s an outlet that usually has nothing to do with my chosen career. I blog, too, because it reminds me of my brief time as a journalist, when I wrote stories on a daily basis and saw them in print the very next day. I miss that. It made me feel like a real writer, not just a dilettante. As the world and our lives get more complex, I think the feeling of being an amateur or a novice gets stronger. The more there is to know, to read, to keep up with, the less we feel that we are “on top” of things, that we know anything about anything.

Most days, I simply believe that it is my life’s quest to know a little about a lot. I’m a throwback to a different age when being a dilettante meant that you were a great dinner party guest. I’m not comfortable with the idea that to be successful – as a blogger and maybe as an academic – I need to specialize so much that I know a great amount about only a little slice of the world.

So I read widely and randomly. I write that way, too. And I hope that it’s enough.

Sex, Humor, and Positivity = Readership

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The other day, I was randomly going through my Twitter feed when I clicked on a link to a report about what characteristics of a blog post led it to be shared or forwarded on Facebook or Twitter. As it turns out – and I can’t seem to find the link anymore to prove this with data and shiny graphics – the most-forwarded, most-clicked-upon links were those blog entries or stories that were positive in tone, about sex or dating, and funny. Go figure.

These days, I’ve been blogging more and have made up my mind to try to post something new about 3-4 times a week. In the back of my mind, however, there’s this feeling that a blog is like a journal or a diary. You write the entries as if someone else were reading them, but there’s a good likelihood that no one actually is. Except your little brother and your mom. Which is, let’s face it, not much of a readership.

As an academic, I am specialized. But I don’t necessarily want to blog about infectious disease (so much for positivity) or academic life (so much for humor) or epistemic thoughts (so much for sex). Sure, there’s an audience for those things, but it’s probably limited and it’s probably better to reach those people through the traditional methods of writing academic articles, publishing books, and going to conferences. This blog is supposed to be about other things – hobbies, interests, just blabbing on a topic.

Part of me knows that I’d be better off specializing and writing on a single topic. Those hot, funny moms have the women’s market cornered! Those funny, hot sports fanatics have the men’s market sown up!  But that’s just not me. And what would be my topic? Pop culture? Fashion? Music? TV? Aren’t there already people out there who do that better than me?

I suppose I could take the professionals advice and spend hours posting on other people’s blogs and linking my own blog to other sites, but I have a dissertation/book to write. That’s just not going to happen anytime soon. Despite the fact that EVERY successful blogger I’ve read advocates doing so.

So, here I am, blogging regularly about random topics and NOT guest blogging or commenting on blogs just to drive my own blog traffic. And while I don’t blog about sex, and I’m not very positive in general (it’s just not in my nature), I am occasionally funny. One out of three isn’t great, but it isn’t bad either.

The Dilettante could not have been a better name for this online diary.   Who knows what you’re going to read next, mom!