Saturday XXXVII: The Dry Soul Is The Wisest · 5 January 2008

The barometric pressure and the local news have been building up for a gale. Very exciting—unless you are on the streets, where dryness strategy in this town is thin—but where is our inundation? Still it’s grey and 100% humidity—a luxury only because it’s such a contrast. Turns down the volume on the outside world and brings the dissertation on strong. Mmmm. What if I ever return to my Pacific Northwest? The years in Seattle and Portland drove me to prolixity, writing-wise. Soul drunk on moisture, with Heraclitus insisting this was not good for me. Why? Maybe this seduction for rain will only make me more prosey and I should orient to… Elko?

Anyway, it is wet. And I love what a storm does for the inside spaces mental and otherwise. Steamy mysore rooms; intimate cafes; sheltering car; and my apartment so cozy for being in.

Speaking of everyday life, we decided to start going to the movies more than once a year. Both the good art-houses are within blocks, but since we saw I’m Not There at the new Landmark, it’s the only place I want to go. Place is crazy! It recalls theatres in poor countries (where rich people zones are—in the absence of a middle class—injected with markers of extreme class domination, such as ultraplush giant seating and snack-delivery direct to your seat courtesy some minion). But I guess the polarized class structure of the Westside increasingly resembles that of Latin America, so it’s no surprise. And FWIW, the Landmark is a trip. You select your seat numbers when you buy tickets from the “host,” wait for the show in an ultramoderne cocktail lounge, order fresh bruschetta, and piss behind frosted glass. Another “host” introduces the film and stays onhand in the aisles in case you need her to bring you a tissue or read you subtitles. Is this a strange place to go see Persepolis today after my always-unmentionable activities at the Masonic Temple conclude?

● Freerice. If you have a problem with this, holler at Patrick. Not me.

● Orlando posture enforcement.

● This year’s World Question is What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

● Ok. Hilarious. The sociology blogosphere just got really excited about this crude “How privileged are you?” survey. Sociologist are brilliant at parsing hierarchy… and they can also be totally self-deceiving about it. Cartographers of race, class, gender and national origin; appraisers of intellectual, cultural and money capital; and inventors of the backasswards “I’m more oppressed than you” game. Ohhh, confusing ourselves with our own categories. But this is interesting as a vague social locator and, more than that, an a suggestion of all the income-independent ways we are enriched. (Yes, I changed my mind about materialism a long time ago.)

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Categories: markets-networks-society , science , social theory

Comment

1. Yeah, but icicles hanging off of the eaves make the inner spaces even better.

   Posted by: Tim · Jan 5, 11:10 AM · #

2. Hi (0v0)
   I like the Orlando posture enforcement. When I lived in downtown Orlando, which coincided with my early yoga days, I lived in front of the administrative offices of the county. There was a homeless person who used a bench to sleep there nightly. I used to forego giving money at church and would instead give it to this man. Do you know what the city did to get rid of him? They got rid of the bench. That’s unfortunate, since it was at a bus stop. Orlando has it’s share of homeless people. So I’m not surprised at the wacky sign. I wonder how you came across the sign.
   Cheers, Arturo.

   Posted by: arturo · Jan 5, 03:16 PM · #

3. Arturo, Orlando is such a passive-aggressive city! Good thing you got out. I saw this notice when I browsed through boingboing this morning.

   Karen continued the sociology meme on her blog, so I said I’d follow up. Briefly, i’m 17 Yes and 17 No. Not a lot of money, but a lot of cultural capital in my house when I was young. We may have lived in the boondocks and grown our own food, but my dad taught me Greek and my mom read me Louisa May Alcott.

   Our cultural capital decreased (in a sense) when my dad becaume a preacher. Then, there were purges of a lot of music and some books, and many “worldly goods” and activities became prohibited. (A nice indicator of the ignition of the culture wars: family friends’ throwing out a Little Mermaid video beacuse it featured a “Satanic” character.) But by the time the religious revolution began, it was already too late to protect me from such “worldly evils.” Once you’ve seen The Little Mermaid, it’s all over for you.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 5, 06:42 PM · #

4. y=20
   n=14

   Posted by: R · Jan 5, 08:05 PM · #

5. y=30, n=4. But I’m an only-donkey.

   Posted by: eor · Jan 5, 10:33 PM · #

6. y=23; in rereading I noticed how quite a few would not apply in the same way to kids growing up before the 1980s – when prep courses, IRA/Mutual funds, middle-class cruises, & kid credit cards had not yet been rolled out.

   Posted by: Tim · Jan 6, 05:35 AM · #

7. Suddenly I feel so underprivileged. Which is hilarious, of course, because if you export this survey out of America, it turns into a whole ‘nother game.

   It reminds me of an old SNL skit, where Eddie Murphy was the city kid taking some SAT-type test where the correct answers were along the lines of: “Appropriate for a black tie event,” and “You’d wear boat shoes, of course,” and he kept choosing the wrong answer: “Take the ‘A’ train.”

   Posted by: karen · Jan 6, 11:25 AM · #

8. 26 yes…8 nooo.

   Posted by: Susan · Jan 6, 06:04 PM · #

9. I’m apparently as overprivileged as your average donkey!

   Posted by: cody · Jan 7, 10:41 AM · #

10. 27 yes 7 no. I didn’t grow up in the continental US. I turned out OK, not spoiled. And that is because after you are brought up, the rest of the world keeps bringing you up. (The old adage that it takes a village…) So I’m a product not just of my early environment, but also of my colleges, friends, employers and cities I’ve lived in. I also chose a difficult profession. Oh, and Tim is right, I was raised before TV in my own room, IRAs, cruises for the family, etc. Cruises for the family for us consisted of going with the family to the Virgin Islands in my godparent’s boat.

    Posted by: arturo · Jan 7, 07:55 PM · #

11. Hilarious. I get yes on 12 only, and consider myself ridiculously privileged in the measures that matter. (As if phone in room/name, which a large number of the U.S. urban poor have today, equates with “parents set you up to consider college even as an option in the first place”—not on survey).

    Posted by: dailymiltonian · Jan 8, 01:09 PM · #

12. Yes, it’s funny that sociologists of class are themselves so locked in middlebrow ideas about culture when they design their analyses.

    For example, family cruises? Speaking from multiple experiences of butter sculptures and staff renditions of A Chorus Line, cruisline vacationing is from many perspectives seriously tacky. And the only people I know who grew up with less TV than me had it excluded from their upbringing because parents saw it as culturally demeaning.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 8, 01:17 PM · #

13. This survey strikes me as less written by a sociologist than a hack writer for Mother Jones.

    Posted by: dailymiltonian · Jan 8, 01:24 PM · #

14. AKA: a ‘public sociologist.’

    Don’t even get me started.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 8, 01:28 PM · #

15. Equivalent: unthinking class exercise gone viral:

    “From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Indiana State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

    http://wbarratt.indstate.edu/”

    Posted by: dailymiltonian · Jan 8, 01:30 PM · #

16. Oh, sorry! Well we acknowledge your intelluctual property, William! Auto-google at will.

    I don’t see a real “copyright” there: may I recommend the community-minded, non-IP mongrels at Creative Commons ?

    Is this public sociology?

    God, something tells me the community around this blog could come up with a much more accurate list of social differences that do—and do not—make a difference.

    Is privilige a list? Or is it network potential, resource disposal, looks, insurance of all types, free time, the imperative to sell your time to survive, capacity for realization? I wish (not really) these factors could be integrated into a single dimension of social class and a single number (I’m a 17!), but that’s just not as interesting in post-industrialism.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 8, 02:05 PM · #

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