pieces of history

Some people who buy used clothing become fascinated by their previous owners. They want to know why the person originally bought the item and when he or she wore it.* I usually have no interest in the “personal history” of used clothing, but earlier this week, I had my moment of historical fascination.

After picking up prescriptions, I decided to browse in this thrift store on 19th street between Market and Chestnut. I don’t even know its name, but it’s one of those “real” “hole-in-the-wall” thrift stores. The stuff is cheap, it smells funny and there was a homeless man, or atleast a man who smelled homeless, sitting in the store, talking to one of the employees.

In any case, I bought three 100% wool skirts.** All three of them had ILGWU International Ladies Garment Workers Union “Union Made” “Made in the USA” tags on them.


Founded in 1900, ILGWU was one of the most progressive and important unions in the United States, reaching its peak of power in 30s and 40s. It began to decline in the 1960s and eventually merged with two other textile unions in 90s. Aside from being a union, ILGWU was also primarily a women’s union and given its start date, it was giving women economic and political representation even before they were allowed to vote.

So I feel like I’ve brought home three little pieces of history. (In fact, I feel reluctant to take out my scissors and do my usual round of alterations). I wonder about the women who produced them. Where did they work? What were their working conditions like? Did their union involvement make them feel like they had some control over their jobs?

It’s difficult these days to find union-made clothing. “Made in China” is a far more common label. Yet buying these three old skirts reminded me that this was once not the case.

Speaking of buying stuff, please refer back to last year’s entry for sources for buying fair-trade or ethically-produced gifts. I also seem to regularly rant about labour issues.

And speaking of the holidays, here's some light and pleasant reading suggestions. I actually haven’t read most of these, but they are all on my never-ending to-read list. The first book is political philosophy about community organizing. The next two are written by journalists about working conditions in America, either based on first-hand undercover experience (Ehrenreich) or interviews and research (Greenhouse). The latter three books are written by academics. Class Acts is, if I’m not mistaken, based on participant observation and research at a luxury hotel and is primarily concerned with the relationships that develop between the rich clientele and the hotel workers. The final two are more theoretical works about the organization and structure of labour.

• Reveille for Radicals (Saul Alinsky)
• The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Steven Greenhouse)
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (Barbara Ehrenreich)
• Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (Rachel Sherman)
• The Ownership of Enterprise (Henry Hansmann)
• Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Michael Burawoy)

Note: I actually wrote this entry in late November. I just haven’t had a chance to photograph the skirts and post the entry until now.
* I also hate it when people distinguish between “vintage” and “thrift” clothing. To me, used clothing is used clothing. Some items may be better quality than others and some may be older, but I don’t find clothing called “vintage” inherently more valuable than clothing called thrift. (Then again, it could be more valuable in that I could probably sell an old skirt called “vintage” for much more than thrift store skirt). It’s marketing. Vintage shop geniuses who make money off ugly 70s polyester dresses.
** I initially planned to buy two skirts, for a total of $14, but the cashier decided to give me one of the skirts for free. After buying these skirts, I noticed another skirt and decided to try it on. Unfortunately it had a small stain on the front so I decided it wasn’t worth the $10. The cashier was disappointed that I wasn’t going to buy it so he offered to sell it to me for $2. That wool fabric alone would cost me $20 to buy, so I bought the skirt. Three skirts for $8, the price of a Center City lunch. Nice! This is why I love *real* thrift stores, as opposed to pricey consignment shops.

on being feminine

I occasionally like to visit the website Real Simple for recipes and organization tips. One of my secret indulgences is reading “how to organize your life” books and articles. It makes me feel like I am actually organizing my life, rather than just reading about it.*

This poll appeared on one of the side panels:

What is your favorite type of book?
a. A good mystery.
b. A heartfelt romance.
c. A historical novel.
b. A memoir.

If you haven’t noticed already, NONE OF MY FAVOURITE TYPES OF BOOKS are in this list. General journalism? Sociology? Theology? Even science fiction? I suppose I’m not Real Simple’s target audience and that I don’t have typically “feminine” tastes in books. In fact, I find it insulting that the poll suggests that women mostly like fiction (mystery, romance, historical fiction) or “emotional” non-fiction (i.e. the memoir).

But atleast the poll suggests that women read. Most women’s magazines would lead me to conclude that women are only interested in losing weight, attracting men, buying clothes, planning weddings, cooking, hosting parties and keeping a house clean. Not that male-targeted magazines are any better. What’s the tagline for Maxim again? Girl. Sports. Beer. Gadgets?

Our mainstream representation of gender is limiting and depressing. Is being feminine about shopping, watching chickflicks and dressing like Carrie Bradshaw? Is being masculine about drinking beer, watching sports, and checking out girls?

In any case, I had no particular agenda for this entry. Much like my ethnicity, I don’t often reflect on how gender affects my life and others’ perceptions of me. But it does become relevant from time to time. I especially find it amusing that I have a “masculine” personality type (INTJ), but feminine hobbies.

If you’re interested in exploring media representations of gender, Sociological Images is a great source. Check out their tag for gender. A few highlights:

• Should a phone be masculine or feminine?
• The infamous I’m a boy, I’m a girl books
• Business Week posts a story about women hedge fund managers that mentions nothing about families or motherhood under the “Working Parents” section of their paper
• The uncanny juxtaposition of girls playing with "boy" toys
  

Other interesting stories I’ve stumbled upon:

• We use men and women’s names differently
• The mockery of Twilight is a gendered mockery because it's easy to hate on teenage girls

*One of my other secret indulgences is reading “Top 10 Trends” list. I like to read them so I can conclude that all the trendy items are ugly. As a result, I can feel superior because I'm not a slave to fashion. But if I realize that some cheap shirt I picked up from the thrift store is on the list, then I can also feel superior because I own something fashionable . It’s a win-win situation! Instant smug satisfaction boost!

an ethic for knowledge

The notions of 'scientific' detachment and objectivity in ethics research appear illusory at best, a betrayal of both our respondents and ourselves, at worst. Yet, if all truth is subjective and shared meanings are impossible, are we wasting our time as scholars, conducting studies to satisfy our own selfish pleasure in the discovery of the particular-- with no hope of finding something of value to say to those who inhabit the world we examine? If that is the case, shouldn't we perhaps move on to a more productive line of work-- writing fiction or making widgets?

~ Jeanne Liedtka from her article "Exploring Ethical Issues Using Personal Interviews" published in Business Ethics Quarterly Vol. 2 (1992)

Something of value to say to those who inhabit the world we examine. If I ever do become a serious researcher, that's what I hope I can do. I want to contribute to knowledge (knowledge with a lowercase k), that helps people better understand their lives. Otherwise, I might as well just knit socks, because we all know there is much weariness in the making of many books.

In any case, I finish my class on Thursday. I promise that I will post ten gazillion blog entries after that. Then again, knowing my incredible powers of concentration, I will probably post ten gazillion blog entries before my final proposal is due.

when words hide their meaning

We rarely evaluate anything as morally right or morally wrong anymore. Those terms seem outdated. Many of us celebrate this cultural shift as it suggests freedom from oppressive social norms. But while we no longer resort to a vocabulary of right and wrong, our language can still speak with power and oppression.

From Edward Skidelsky, Regular Words that think for us:

Beyond inappropriate

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.

This linguistic shift is revealing. Improper and indecent express moral judgements, whereas inappropriate and unacceptable suggest breaches of some purely social or professional convention. Such “non-judgemental” forms of speech are tailored to a society wary of explicit moral language. As liberal pluralists, we seek only adherence to rules of the game, not agreement on fundamentals. What was once an offence against decency must be recast as something akin to a faux pas.

But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.

The point can be generalised. As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground. “Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are the catchwords of a moralism that dare not speak its name. They hide all measure of righteous fury behind the mask of bureaucratic neutrality. For the sake of our own humanity, we should strike them from our vocabulary.


We speak like enlightened relativists, circumscribing our judgments within the rhetoric of tolerance. In the end, we judge everything without believing in anything.


*This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s saying: A cynic is the one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Being cynical, I suspect his witty phrase applies not only to cynics, but to our consumer society as a whole. We know the price of everything (and how to shop for the best price), but of value, we know little.

it's a wonderful life revisited 2008

Excerpts from the article "The Rise and Fall of Finance and the End of the Society of Organizations" cited from the death of the corporation? on orgtheory.net:

The traditional model of banking is fairly simple: Banks gather deposits from savers, who are paid interest, and lend it to borrowers, who pay it back at a higher rate of interest.

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, banker George Bailey explains this model to his anxious depositors, who are causing a run on the bank: “No, but you . . . you’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?”

The best-known form of securitization is mortgage- backed bonds, in which hundreds or thousands of mortgage loans are pooled together and then divided into bonds that, by the law of large numbers, have more predictable and “safer” returns. This practice allows banks to free up funds for additional lending and generally lowers the cost of taking out a mortgage. Rather than relying on a local bank and its depositors to fund their home purchase, buyers can access funds from dispersed investors around the world via mortgage-backed securities.

A modern-day George Bailey might have a more difficult time explaining contemporary banking: “No, but you . . . you’re thinking of this place all wrong, as if I held your mortgage on my balance sheet. I sold your mortgage to Countrywide 10 minutes after we closed the deal, and they sold it along with 3,000 other mortgages to Merrill Lynch, which divided it into bonds that were bought by a Cayman Islands LLC, which bundled them together with other mortgage-backed bonds into a collateralized debt obligation that Citigroup sold to a Norwegian pension fund. Now what are you going to do? Stop making your payments and force those Norwegian retirees to go back to work?”

obscenely rich

To be rich means... to live in more than one room... to own more than on pair of shoes... to have a choice of what to eat...

It’s humbling to be reminded of how obscenely rich we are.

a new species (2)

I would have just twittered this article, found via orgtheory.net, but it was too good to pass up for a quick late night quotes-only blog entry:

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

...

On today's court, the direction Justice Sotomayor suggested is unlikely to prevail. During arguments, the court's conservative justices seem to view corporate political spending as beneficial to the democratic process. "Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election," Justice Anthony Kennedy said during arguments last week.

~ Jess Bravin

I'm sure it's a real hard guess as to who I agree with more. =)

true understanding

For those who become serious scholars, the ultimate test of a good idea is the taxi-driver test. If you are on your way somewhere to present your idea and you cannot in five sentences explain what you are talking about well enough so that your taxi driver or the person in the adjacent aircraft seat can understand it and see why it’s interesting, you don’t really understand your idea yet. You aren’t ready to present it. This holds no matter how complex your idea is. If you can’t state it in everyday terms for an average person with no special interest in it, you don’t understand it yet. Even for those working in the most abstruse formalisms, this is the absolute test of understanding.

~ Andrew Abbott in Methods of Discovery

Think back to your first years in graduate school. The most mathematically complex papers required a great deal of time and effort to read. The papers were written as if to a private club, and we felt proud when we successfully entered the club. Although I copied the style of these overly complex and often poorly written papers in my first few research attempts, I grew out of it quite quickly. I didn’t do so on my own. I was lucky to be surrounded by mature confident researchers at my first academic appointment. They taught me that if you are confident in your research you will write to include, not exclude. You will write to inform, not impress. It is with apologies to my research and writing mentors that I report the following events.

The preference falsification in which I engaged was to intentionally take a simple clear research paper and make it so complex and obscure that it successfully impressed referees. That is, I wrote a paper to impress rather than inform—a violation of my most closely held beliefs regarding the proper intent of research. I often suspected that many papers I read were intentionally complex and obscure, and now I am part of the conspiracy.

~ from economist David Hakes, quoted on orgtheory.net

the recovery of virtue

After many months of what appeared to be politics as usual, President Obama managed to give me hope again with his speech on Wednesday night. (And I can only hope that his rhetoric is matched with substance—integrity is after all often defined as coherence between the internal and external).

I was especially moved to hear him quote Ted Kennedy towards the end of his speech:

[Ted Kennedy] repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."

…

That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
…

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter - that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.) noted back in 1985, the loss of the notion of civic virtue and warned of its potential consequences. Obama’s speech suggests that we recover the value of virtue and character in our national discourse. While the concept of virtue may not give us clear answers about the size and role of government in our technologically complex society, it can atleast be a guiding principle in how we frame our public debate about how this country should be governed.

From Habits of the Heart:

We spoke of the belief of Madison and the other founders that our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. It was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and public good. Without civic virtue, they thought, the republic would decline into factional chaos and virtue, and probably end in authoritarian rule. Half a century later, this idea was reiterated in Tocqueville’s argument about the importance of mores – the “habits of the heart” – of Americans.

…
As the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important through most of our history, has begun to slip from our grasp. As we unthinkingly use the oxymoron “private citizen”, the very meaning of citizenship escapes us. And with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “we the people” are a “special interest group”, our concern for the economy being the only thing that holds us together, we have reached a kind of end of the line. The citizen has been swallowed up by the economic man.

Yet this kind of economic liberalism is not ultimately liberating, for, as became quite clear with the final two visions of the public good described, when economics is the main model for our common life, we are more and more tempted to put ourselves in the hands of the manager and the expert. If society is shattered into as many special interests as there are individuals, then, as Tocqueville foresaw, there is only the schoolmaster state left to take care of us and keep us from one another’s throats.*


* I realize this quote may suggest that one-payer government-run healthcare system would be the perfect example of putting ourselves in the hands of the manager and expert and handing the disciplinary ruler over to the schoolmaster state (you know with the death panels and all). I am not inclined to read the passage in that way, especially not in the context of the book, but I will leave it up to you ponder.

instant gratification

With class starting this fall (I am a teaching assistant for one course and taking another course) in addition to my full time job, I suspect this blog may fall into neglect. That being said, I want to try to update this semi-regularly. So here goes:

After working on never-ending projects with teeny tiny needles and sock-weight yarn, I’ve forgotten how quickly you can finish something if you use thicker yarn.

Project: Gretel Hat Attempt #2
Pattern: Ysolda's Gretel
Yarn: Cascade 220 in Black
Needles: Size 4 for the ribbing; Size 6 for the cable section
Size: Knit size regular but omitted rows 6-9 in the "Regular and Slouchy Only" section
After a failed attempt to knit this hat earlier this year, my second attempt turned out fairly successfully. The hat fits well, does not make my head look like a gigantic balloon, will be warm and does not clash with my coat or scarves. In my book, that counts as a success. More photos can be found here and here.


Project: Very Fetching Mitts
Pattern: Fetching on Knitty.com
Yarn: Patons Australia Merino Deluxe DK (a gift from Australia from Matt)
Needles: Size 4 circulars
Modifications: Added an extra set of cabling at the wrist.
Yet another pair of fingerless mitts to protect me from the cold that will be our house this winter. These ones are thicker, looser and cover less of my fingers than my other pair. We'll see which one ends up being more practical. This project was also incredibly quick to knit! It only took me about 4 days of regular knitting. I believe the hat took about 1-2 weeks of regular knitting.

In comparison, normal socks take me about 3-4 weeks of regular knitting. Fancy socks take about 4-8 weeks. And good old tangled yoke cardigan is probably going to take me 20+ weeks of regular knitting to make, if not more.

I guess if I like instant gratification, I should try sewing more.


*Note: Photos are courtesy of hubby whose status as a rock star has made his blog more popular than mine. I am slightly jealous. Every blogger secretly dreams that he or she can blog full time and earn a living, and then win a Pulitzer Prize for "Serial Online Commentary".

what does it mean to own something?

As Matt and I adjust to renters and new neighbours, we wonder what it means for us to own a house, the pivotal piece of our private American dream. What does it mean to own something? Most would say that owning something entitles you to use it however you wish, as long as you do not harm anyone else or cross certain cultural taboos (e.g. sale of organs etc…).

But as with any concept, our understanding of ownership has been culturally determined. Nowhere is this more evident than our understanding of a corporation. Currently, a public corporation, or more precisely, a for-profit publicly-traded private company exists to increase shareholder value. What is owned serves solely the owner. And what is owned by the corporation must serve the owners of the corporation. But our understanding of corporations and of ownership was not always so, and many wish for a change.

From Habits of the Heart:

Henry Lee Higginson, a leading member of Boston’s business establishment, wrote in 1911, “I do not believe that, because a man owns property, it belongs to him to do with as he pleases. The property belongs to the community, and he has charge of it, and can dispose of it, if it is well done and not with the sole regard to himself or to his stockholders.”

~

The word [corporation] refers to any association of individuals bound together into a corpus, a body sharing a common purpose in a common name. In the past, that purpose had usually been communal or religious; boroughs, guilds, monasteries and bishoprics were the earliest European manifestations of the corporate form… It was assumed, as it is still in nonprofit corporations, that the incorporated body earned its charter by serving the public good… Until after the Civil War, indeed, the assumption was widespread that a corporate charter was a privilege to be granted only by a special act of a state legislature, and then for purposes clearly in the public interest. Incorporation was not yet thought of as a right available on application by any private enterprise.

~ Alan Trachtenberg

Reasserting the idea that incorporation is a concession of public authority to a private group in return for service to the public good, with effective public accountability, would change what is now called the “social responsibility of the corporation” from its present status, where it is often a kind of public relations whipped cream decorating the corporate pudding, to a constitutive structural element in the corporation itself. This, in turn, would involve a fundamental alteration in the role and training of the manager. Manager would become a profession in the older sense of the word, involving not merely standards of technical competence but standards of public obligation that could at moments of conflict override obligations to the corporate employer.

~

There’s a recently-created legal entity, known as the low-profit limited-liability company (L3C) that has been structured to be a business entity for the public good. While reading and hearing about the L3C, I was struck by how the language and the hype surrounding this new legal entity was rooted in pragmatism and lacked a greater moral vision.

The public good is privatized as L3C’s must “significantly further the accomplishment of one or more charitable or educational purposes,” as though “charitable or educational purposes” are but fragmented demands and desires of special interest groups. It is designed to attract program-related investments from foundations and hopefully obtain certain tax benefits.

I have yet to read anything that suggests the L3C could be part of building a moral vision of stewardship. (But if you do see anything, please let me know!) In fact, its very existence reinforces the idea that private companies and public corporations serve the private interests of their owners. That being said, I do commend the creators of the L3C for making a legal entity that could be a better vehicle for improving the common good.

Rather, what all this suggests is our collective poverty of language and imagination. We are caught in thinking in categories of for-profit, non-profit and government. And when we think about ownership, we are foolish enough to presume that our property really is ours.


*This was supposed to be a quotes-only post. Oops. I guess I like this topic a lot.
**It feels rather self-aggrandizing to bold your own text. I suppose they are my little delusions of grandeur in this little corner of the interweb. Alternatively, I could also argue that I bold text because I don't actually believe anyone will read this entire blog post...
***Sigh, time to make my mortgage payment. Ownership is only enjoyable when you get to exercise tyranny, not when you assume the liabilities.

bursting at the seams

I almost forgot that I will be going up to Boston this weekend for a wedding. Aside from good times with friends, the long road trip will translate into plentiful mindless knitting time. This fall may turn out to be insanely busy on the books/words/intangibility facet of my life, so I’m trying to take advantage of these last few summer weeks to spend extra time on the tangible side of things.
On this trip to Boston, I hope to make progress on my Tangled Yoke Cardigan. I have been lusting after this cardigan ever since I started knitting almost three years ago. I have been working on it since March, even hauling it over to Europe. The sleeves are finished and I am about a third of the way up the body, so perhaps only halfway done overall. I am excited about completing the sweater, but not so much about wearing it. That’s my unfortunate gripe with knitting – there’s no instant gratification, so often by the time I finish a project, I no longer like it. My Ms. Marigold sweater vest is currently languishing in the bottom of a dresser drawer, on the verge of being donated if it weren’t for sentimental reasons (it fits small to medium, does anyone want it?), and my purple short-sleeve cardigan is experiencing the frustrations of being a short-sleeve heavy sweater, weather appropriate for only two hours out of two days of the year.

Meanwhile, I’ve been able to complete two other projects that will hopefully be more useful:
Herringbone socks for my husband which turned out beautifully despite many sloppy errors that I will choose not to disclose. The pattern and the yarn went together perfectly. As beautiful as the final sock turned out, I will never use this pattern again, because it was too annoying to knit. It requires you to knit two stitches, slip them back to the left needle, slip another stitch over, and then slip two stitches back. These socks probably took three times longer than usual to knit. The pattern also requires your full attention and yet was boring to knit. (Usually, boring things to knit don’t require attention so you can watch TV or read at the same time, while things that do require attention are quite interesting to knit).
Blue & blue endpaper mitts to keep my hands warm in the winter, since our house will be kept frigid now that we’re paying the actual heating bill. They are slightly tight, but will hopefully loosen with wear. My first colorwork project.

In examining the stitch quality of the endpaper mitts, I’ve noticed that my colourwork skills seem to atrophy quickly, so I’ve already started working on the gorgeous Selbu Modern hat in lovely lavender and white to keep up my technique. This is all with the end goal of knitting in the distant future the Autumn Rose sweater, which I now anticipate, I will no longer like once I have spent 500+ hours knitting it.

I also plan to re-complete my Gretel hat, after my previous sizing disaster. I’ve started it, but I’m currently stalled in my usual state of indecision about which size to knit.

Otherwise, once the Tangled Yoke Cardigan is complete, I may hunt for another sweater project (currently considering: Farmer's Market Cardigan, Millefiori Cardigan, Oriel Lace Blouse, Carnaby Street Pullover, Lace Cardigan, Printed Silk Cardigan and a few sweaters from Feminine Knits) but I may also get started with stash-reduction and gift and charity knitting. In this pile of lovely yarn, I see socks, lace shawls, hats and scarves! (There's actually two drawers, not just one, filled with yarn). I may even try to design something myself again. If you praise my knitting enough, you may receive something, but no promises.

In the sewing world, I finally mustered up the courage to install my walking foot and quilted two placemats. After weeks of procrastination because I couldn’t find an appropriate quilting pattern, I improvised, which proved to be easy, fun and successful.

Unfortunately, this also means I no longer have an excuse to avoid working on my Bento Box Quilt, which I started in June 2008. The quilt top is complete. I just have to sew and measure the backing and then it should be ready to quilt. I still have no idea how to quilt it beyond ‘stitching in the ditch’ (in other words, stitching along the seamlines), but hopefully if I stare at the quilt long enough, inspiration will strike.

I also need to muster up the motivation to complete this New Look halter dress, which I also began last summer. After frustrating alterations to the bust, I gave up and let the dress sit. It would be nice to be able to wear it before another autumn rolls around.

I’ve also noticed that I’m more interested in alterations to clothing, rather than sewing them from scratch. I’m not sure whether this is related to wanting instant gratification or whether there’s something intimidating about starting with just cloth and tissue paper. We shall see. Meanwhile, despite a few thrift store alteration failures, there have been a few successes. Perhaps I will post pictures in the weeks to come.

Phew! Now it felt good to get that all out! I can pretend to be all intellectual, writing about society and culture and smart stuff like that, but what really gets me going is talking about my knitting, my sewing and what I ate last night. If you don’t believe me, you can just ask my husband. He spends plenty of time listening to my endless mundane ramblings sans theoretical or philosophical musings. Or atleast I think he's listening...

nonprofit news

In Dallas, Plano children’s clinic refuses county funds because of reporting requirements, which would force them to screen patients’ income and citizenship status.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s budget impasse is wreaking major havoc on Philadelphia nonprofits, including childcare centers and other social service agencies.

a new species

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Great and rational organizations- in brief, bureaucracies- have indeed increased, but the substantive reason of the individual at large hast not. Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men often cannot reason about the great structures- rational and irrational – of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any ideas of the ends they serve, and there is the increasing suspicion that those at the top as well- like Tolstoy’s generals- only pretend they know. The growth of such organizations, within an increasing division of labor, sets up more and more spheres of life, work, and leisure in which reasoning is difficult or impossible. The solider, for example, ‘carries out an entire series of functionally rational actions accurately without having any idea as to the ultimate end of this action’ (Mannheim, Man and Society) or the function of each act within the whole. Even Men of technically supreme intelligence may efficiently perform their assigned work and yet not know that it is to result in the first atom bomb.

~ C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, quoted previously

Whatever kind of future suburbia may foreshadow, it will show that atleast we have the choices to make. The organization man is not in the grip of vast social forces about which it is impossible for him to do anything; the options are there, and with wisdom and foresight he can turn the future away from the dehumanized collective that so haunts our thoughts. He may not. But he can.

He must fight The Organization. Not stupidly, or selfishly, for the defects of individual self-regard are no more to be venerated than the defects of co-operation. But fight he must, for the demands for his surrender are constant and powerful, and the more he has come to like the life of organization the more difficult does he find it to resist these demands, or even to recognize them. It is wretched, dispiriting advice to hold before him the dream that ideally there need be no conflict between him and society. There always is; there always must be.

~ William Whyte. Jr., The Organization Man

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when ascetism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate the worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determines the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Since ascetism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history…

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained level of civilization never before attained.”

~ Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

on a superficial note

you are what you spend

Americans can spend quite a bit of money on their beauty routines. After seeing this, I was curious to see how much I spend each year on “beauty” so I made a list.*

Makeup
Illuminare Foundation Shade Sienna Sun (once or twice a year) - $30 - $60
Powder (once a year) - $10-$20 depending on the brand
NARS Blush Shade Mata Hari (once every 3 years)- $25 or $8/year
Revlon 12 Hour Eyeshadow in Berry Bloom (once every 2 years) - $8 or $4/year (The colour looks amazing but the pigmentation isn’t great. I may buy similar colours in MAC next time around. That would bring this up to $50 probably)
MAC Fluidline in black (once or twice a year) - $18 - $36
Nailpolish (once a year) - $5
Makeup brushes (I have enough for now, because I bought a whole bunch around wedding time, but let’s say one per year) - $10-$20

Makeup total: $85-$153/year or $7-$13/month.

Hygiene
Eyemakeup remover (once a year) - $10
Facewash – usually CVS rip-off of Cetaphil though I’m using Chinatown stuff right now (once a year) -$10
Bodywash - $15/ year (I’m a sucker for stuff that smells nice)
Deodorant - Tom's of Maine (once every two years) - $5 or $2.50/year
Toothpaste - $5/year
Floss - $5/year
Toothbrush – FREE. My dental hygienist always gives me lots of toothbrushes! I once got 4 toothbrushes on one of my visits!

Hygiene total: $47.50 annually or $4/month

Hair
Hair Elastics/Bobby pins/Claw clips (if only I didn’t lose them or break them so easily!) - $10-$15
Haircut (1-2 a year) - $50-$100
Shampoo/conditioner (My husband and I use the same stuff and even though I only wash my hair twice a week and he only washes his hair once a week, I feel like we are ALWAYS BUYING conditioner) – So maybe $20-$30/year just for me?

Hair total: $80-$145/year or $6.50-$12/month

Misc
Facial moisturizer/Sunscreen - $10/year
Sunscreen - $10/year
Random chapstick/lip balm purchases -$7/year
Regular moisturizer (I am finally trying not to buy the expensive smelly kinds) - $7/year
Eyebrow wax (once or twice a year) - $10-$20

Misc total: $44-$54/year or $3.50-$4.50/month

GRAND TOTAL: $256.50-$409.50/year or $21-$34/month.


It’s a large annual total but seems reasonable on a monthly basis and not bad compared to the others who were profiled by the photographer. The large expenses are haircuts, good foundation and eyeliner. I try to buy drugstore brand as often as possible and I try to keep things very minimal—I don’t buy perfume (it’s all about asking for free samples), hair product, shaving cream, mascara (it irritates my eyes), lipstick (it rubs off in about… 2 minutes off whatever I happen to be eating or drinking at the time), concealer, toner, spot treatment, primer etc… etc…

That being said, this list does not include impulse purchases and other things I probably forgot like hand soap, cotton balls etc. I’m not sure what that would add up to—it depends on the year-- but maybe anywhere between $30-$75/year.

In any case, the prospect of posting this blog entry is making me feel exposed. At work, we frequently say that looking at someone’s finances is like going through their underwear drawer. I suppose the same applies to one’s spending habits.


* Please excuse the brand names. I had a strange urge to shamelessly promote products that I really like. As a result of deciding to do my own makeup at my wedding, I spent about a month browsing beauty stores, buying and returning products. I proudly managed to mortify a Sephora associate by buying blush the day before the actual wedding. That being said, I probably won’t buy anything from Sephora anymore because I found out that they’re owned by LVMH conglomerate. In any case, if there’s a brand name listed, it’s because they’ve got me with the whole “I really like the product/brand” loyalty thing.

of making many books

Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.

~ Ecclesiastes 12:12

Today’s elite educational institutions often seem more intent on churning out more books (publish or perish as they say), than teaching students how to become good citizens. So it was refreshing for me to stumble upon this blog entry. Below is an excerpt from sociologist Monte Bute's column in the American Sociological Association's official newsletter, written in 2004. His blog, entitled Backstage Sociologist, is worth following.

An outsider to the disciplinary canon, Alfred Schutz, developed a sociology of knowledge that poses an alternative to this elitist paradigm of practice. He distinguished between scholarship aimed at the “expert” and scholarship directed to the “well-informed citizen.” American sociologists once saw the well-informed citizen as their primary audience. Conversely, the disciplinary elite today sees fellow experts as their only audience.

How do we restore sovereignty to that large majority of sociologists who toil under a more populist paradigm of practice but remain second-class citizens within the profession? The state professional association is one important venue. As an apprentice to the craft, I found congenial homes, first in Sociologists of Minnesota (SOM), and later in the National Council of State Sociological Associations (NCSSA).

I was welcomed by colleagues who refused to be constrained by the “expert” model but were engaged in scholarships of integration, application, and teaching. I was mentored by master teachers who prided themselves in conducting three to five sections of undergraduate classes each semester, devoted to developing a sociological perspective in students who may never take another course in the discipline. These folks practiced service the old-fashioned way; a “good citizen” took on those often-thankless tasks on campus and in the community that needed doing.

~

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

~ Proverbs 22:6

when words lose their meaning* (6)

Christians love the word “community” and we like to use it liberally in our conversations, our blog entries and our prayers. There’s just something about the phrase “building community” that seems to justify any activity or desire.

It’s not just Christians who are fond of the word. Nonprofit mission statements often reference “serving the community”. We talk of the artistic community, the anarchist community, the gay community etc… The Internet has further nurtured the growth of various communities. For instance, sites like ravelry.com, craftster.org and personal blogs have contributed to a vibrant knitting and crafting community.

But what do we really mean when we say we build community or that we are part of a community? What is the nature of this community that we refer to? What exactly is our commitment to it? Is it just a group of people who share conveniently common interests, tastes and perhaps even religious beliefs? Or is it, or should it be, something more interdependent and inclusive?

Whereas a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life and of the different callings of all, lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebrates the narcissism of similarity. It usually explicitly involves a contrast with others who “ do not share one’s lifestyle.” For this reason, we speak not of lifestyle communities, though they are often called such in a contemporary usage, but of lifestyle enclaves. Such enclaves are segmental in two senses. They involve only a segment of each individual, for they concern only private life, especially leisure and consumption. And they are segmental socially in that they include only those with a common lifestyle. The different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. They may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one’s own lifestyle enclave.

Even those of us who are trying to create true community inevitably find ourselves in a lifestyle enclave:

(Wayne) sees his life as that of a full-time activist contributing to the community by organizing its members in efforts to create a more equal and just society…. It does not denigrate Wayne’s aspirations to point out that Santa Monica (where he lives) is a very special kind of place with a very high concentration of people like Wayne. Even more to the point is that Campaign for Economic Democracy activists share a lifestyle, even down to similar tastes in music, wine and food. Thus even those who would most like to think of our society in organic communitarian forms cannot avoid the lifestyle enclave as the effective social expression of our personal lives.

We say we go to a certain church because we enjoy its diversity. But when we embark on our church-shopping, we’re most likely intent on finding a church where there are like-minded people who we would enjoy spending time with.

To be fair, "most groups in America today embody an element of community as well as an element of lifestyle enclave". But it bears asking whether the activities we conceive of as “community-building” are more about lifestyle and preference than interdependence and commitment.


*Despite caring deeply about what words mean, I seem to use the wrong words ALL THE TIME. For instance, a few entries ago, I initially used the word "mulch" instead of "munch". And at home, I always say one noun when I really mean another: I'll say "cup" instead of "plate" or "downstairs" instead of "upstairs". Sigh. I have some bizarre form of verbal dyslexia.
**All italicized sections of the above blog post are from Habits of the Heart, a book that I am enjoying immensely in case you haven't picked that up yet. It might even get 5 stars.

can means justify the ends?

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”, we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.

~ Jacques Ellul

Thus all four of the persons whose voices we have heard assume that there is something arbitrary about the goals of a good life. For Brian Palmer, the goal of a good life is to achieve the priorities you have set for yourself. But how do you know that your present priorities are better than those of your past, or better than those of other people? Because you intuitively appreciate that they are right for you at the present time. For Joe Gorman, the goal of a good life is intimate involvement with the community and family into which he happens to have been born. But how do you know that in this complicated world, the inherited conventions of your community and your family are better and more important, and, therefore, more worthy of your allegiance, than those of other communities and families? In the end, you simply prefer to believe that they are better, atleast for you. For Margaret Oldham, the goal of a good life is liberation from precisely the kinds of conventions that Joe Gorman holds dear. But what do you aim for once you have been liberated? Simply what you yourself decide is best for you. For Wayne Bauer, the goal of a good life is participation in the political struggle to create a more just society. But where should political struggle lead us? TO a society in which all individuals, not just the wealthy, will have power over their own lives. But what are they going to do with that power? Whatever they individually choose to do, as long as they don’t hurt anybody.

The common difficulties these four very different people face in justifying the goals of a morally good life point to a characteristic problem of people in our culture. For most of us, it is easier to think about how to get what we want than to know what exactly we should want. Thus Brian, Joe, Margaret, and Wayne are each in his or her own way confused about how to define for themselves such things as the nature of success, the meaning of freedom, and the requirements of justice. Those difficulties are in an important way created by limitations in the common tradition moral discourse they- and we- share. The main purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding of the resources our tradition provides- and fails to provide- for enabling us to think about the kind of moral problems we are currently facing as Americans. We hope to make articulate the all-too-inarticulate search of those we have described in this chapter to find a moral language that will transcend their radical individualism.

~ Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart

I am falling behind (2nd quarter + July books reviews)

I have read around 10 books in the last quarter + July and have failed to keep up with the reviews after I read them. Buying a house, going on tour to Europe and moving may have had something to do with it. But now I am backlogged, so I will be brief.*

I had briefly considered abandoning the practice of reviewing books, but for an unapologetic skimmer like me (my favourite justification “It just wasn’t worth my time to read more closely”—blame it on the Twitter pace of contemporary life), this is critical in helping me retain atleast some small fraction of what I read.

Sociology/History
**** Forgive and Remember (Charles Bosk) ~ I was delighted to discover that one of the judging criteria (atleast according to Wikipedia) of an ethnography is “aesthetic merit”. While this book is not primarily aesthetic, it is a well-written and compelling scholarly work. It is an ethnography of surgeons-in-training, with a focus on medical error—which errors are considered normative and forgiven, and which errors are not. Bosk also reflects on his research methodology and choices.
** The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber) ~ This is perhaps one of the most quoted and most famous works of social science. Unfortunately, it can be tedious and dense to read as Weber traces the development of the spirit of capitalism from the protestant understanding of work and labour. He spends quite a bit of time explaining the different religious sects of Protestantism, setting up his question and justifying his conclusions. His most compelling chapter is the final one, entitled, “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism”, which traces the transformation of the protestant work ethic into its modern secular instantiation.
*** The Overworked American (Juliet Schor) ~ An approachable, mostly statistics-based analysis on American work habits over the past century. Schor demonstrates that American work hours, both at home and at the workplace, have increased. Though most households have appliances such as washing machines and microwaves designed to save time, Americans now spend more or the same amount of time on housework as they did before. And generally speaking, most employees will prefer higher pay as compensation rather than more flexible or reduced hours. In addition to making these observations, Schor provides reasonable explanations: higher standards (e.g. cleanliness etc...), labour market competition, corporate incentives and consumption habits.
**** White Collar: The American Middle Classes (C. Wright Mills) ~ As always, I enjoy C. Wright Mills. In White Collar, he explores the transformation of America’s middle class from small property-owners or entrepreneurs to white collar workers, cogs in the bureaucratic corporate machine. The introduction is absolutely fantastic to read. The rest of the book is more methodical, but remains enjoyable, informative and thought-provoking. Mills describes the old middle class, the bureaucratic structures of corporations, common white collar professions, but also reflects on the changes in the meanings of work, success and status.
**** The Illusion of Freedom and Equality (Richard Stivers) ~ This book is extraordinarily well-written, easy to read and understand. Yet because of the subject matter, it requires rereading to fully absorb the extent of Stivers’ ideas. Stivers traces the transformation of Freedom and Equality as conceived by 18th century thinkers to its modern day conception. I considered trying to summarize his book in my own words, but using some of his chapter sub-headings would be more helpful. Freedom and Equality as the Modern Ideology: Freedom as Consumer Choice and Abundance, Freedom as Individual Right, Freedom as Technological Possibility, Plural Equality, Cultural and Communicative Equality. The Reality of Freedom and Equality: Freedom as Forced Consumerism, Freedom as Legal Process, Freedom as Technological Necessity, Equality as Group Conformity and Competition, Equality as Uniformity.
**** The Cold War (John Lewis Gaddis) ~ An excellent, well-written and balanced book about the cold war. Gaddis manages to be honest about America’s numerous failures and shortcomings without idealizing other countries or cultures. Gaddis also ties chapters together with thematic interpretations rather than chronological ordering. I found this book enjoyable to read and informative for someone who usually finds history books boring.
** People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (David M. Potter) ~ The beginning half of this book addresses the difficulties in assessing and describing “national character”. The second half explores how the specific characteristic of economic abundance has affected some aspects of American character. Potter indicates that his analysis is only a sampling and by no means comprehensive. He explores how the nation’s economic abundance affected democratic ideals, social mobility and consumption practices. The book’s ideas are well-thought out and fairly interesting, but there were several sections that were a bit tedious to read.
*** Organization Man (William Whyte) ~ Written in the 1950s, this book is a classic study of American middle class conformity. Whyte describes the organization man—his aspirations, his training, his workplace and his residence of choice—the suburbs. Whyte’s journalist background is evident—the book reads well, with the exception of the first section, a theoretical reflection on individualism and conformity.
*** The Power Elite (C. Wright Mills) ~ Mills describes the various cross-sections of the American elite. He explores each group’s characteristics, but focuses mostly on the influence they have in decision-making. Mills particularly highlights the close connections between corporate, military and executive power as well as the gridlock of Congressional, representative government. He asserts that most decisions that affect American lives, are made without democratic assent.
*** The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Joan Jacobs Brumberg) ~ A historian explores the changing attitudes of girls towards their bodies by reading diaries from the 1830s to the present day. Brumberg particular highlights how girls’ relationships to their bodies were once primarily mediated by their family and relatives, while now it is mostly affected by the media and their peers.

Christian
*** Courage and Calling: Embracing Your God Given Potential (Gordon Smith) ~ I read this book over a 24-hour women’s retreat and remember that it was calming and reassuring in my never-ending struggle to figure out what to do with my life. If I remember correctly, the book explored the idea of vocation—that God calls us to specific tasks (not necessarily in the form of career) in different seasons of our life.
*** The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics (Ched Myers) ~ A set of essays on economics in God’s kingdom, reflecting particularly on what regular debt forgiveness and repatriation of land would mean in today’s society. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s an excellent introduction for those interested in the topic.

Fiction
? Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (Yu Hua) ~ Sometime in April, I felt compelled to read a novel about China. There was nothing available in English so I picked up Chronicle of a Blood Merchant in Chinese, because the author Yu Hua, is known to write in very simple Chinese. Yu Hua’s other novel, To Live, which has been adapted into a movie, is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. So far, Chronicle is much more light-hearted, though not as good…. Then again, I haven’t finished reading it yet… and I’m not sure when I will. I guess I will re-review it later.
** Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi) ~ This graphic novel narrates the childhood of a girl living in Iran during the political unrest of the 1970s to 1980s. I wanted to like the novel but to be honest, I was disappointed. If this wasn’t a graphic novel written about Iran by a female, I doubt it would have gained quite as much acclaim. The story is simple narration via a child’s perspective. I found it interesting from a factual and historical perspective, but did not find it emotionally moving. It reminded me of Art Spiegelmann’s Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, but not quite as compelling.

* After completing these reviews, I noticed that very few of them were actually brief. Once I started, I guess I couldn’t stop. But I did use the same words over and over again: "enjoyed", "well-written", "tedious" etc...
** Enough with the computer screen, off to read and contemplate. I am currently munching on: Habits of the Heart.

cleaning and purging

I have finally admitted that it takes me longer to figure out what to throw away than it does for me to just pack it up. Fortunately, I have discovered that it's easier to throw things out after you move, when you realize that despite moving into a larger space, there's still not enough space for all your crap.

So continues my constant struggle not to hoard, lest I become this Asian woman. (There are better photos here and here). I know I already have a tendency to hoard up plastic bags because they’re so “useful”.

Going through my stuff and living in a lower-income neighbourhood reminds me of how wealthy I am. (And it's about what you own, not just what you make). And I am trying to think about what I actually need versus what I think I need.

In addition to recognizing my wealth, I also have to acknowledge my snootiness. Apparently, I like smart people books.

Then again, what makes a good life is rarely tied with wealth or worldly achievement, but rather relationships and social adjustment. I’m sure a healthy marriage would help to that effect.

But if history and statistical research determines my life, then I may have a few more husbands in store. In the meantime, I am thankful to be in an egalitarian marriage and not an extreme complementarian one.

But I’m still glad I’m a girl, just not in the way that this book would suggest. The book now sells for $270 on Amazon.

And if you can’t get enough of learning more about your gender, you can try the Exciting Career Game for Girls. Your options are endless: model, actress, ballerina, nurse, teacher or airline stewardess! Sure beats becoming a fallen Disney princess.

And a random list:

• Another call for duty and virtue
• Day in the life of an elderly folks care home
• American Apparel ingenuity, hipster stupidity
• And censorship does not always come from the government
• And as always, remember to care for the introverts in your life

life on hiatus

(written last week)

After 14 days on tour with my husband’s band, it’s a bit of a shock to be back home. While the first few day were challenging, I grew accustomed to packing up my bag every morning and moving on to the next location every night. Towards the end, I felt like I could continue indefinitely. Wake up. Walk around and explore. Pack my bag. Get in the van and go on to the next location. Repeat. Again and again.

Life is simple. Everything I needed fit into one bag. The immediacy of each location kept me from worrying about the elusive future. So despite constant change and movement, and little sleep, the trip ended up being mentally refreshing.

And now I’ve returned to my boxes upon boxes of possessions, a 9-5 desk job, a mortgage, and all those other lovely American dream promises that seemed so distant while I was gone.

"centrally-administered materialism"

David Warren wrote an excellent editorial in commemoration of the Tiananmen massacre and D-Day:

The Second World War ended in split decision. There was victory in the West, and nominal victory in the East, but as Churchill said, an Iron Curtain fell, and those to the east of it were abandoned to a Communist tyranny little different from the daily Nazi tyranny that had preceded the war; indeed, worse for being prolonged. Two generations were condemned to slavery: whole lives passed under the twitching thumbs of party apparatchiks, with only the briefest respites, in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Prague. And each of those respites, bloody.

It was a mixed result also within the West, for it seems today that we learned nothing, and the principles for which men and women once died have been progressively abandoned in our public life. Yes we have democracy, of a sort: mass democracy, and rule in the name of numbers. But the numbers have been used to establish Nanny States that deeply impinge our freedom, and to advance the very cause of atheist materialism that once marked Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes as exceptional.

The people of China are now passing out of the third generation of Communist tyranny. Outwardly, it has eased. The Red Chinese state has relaxed its controls over minor arrangements in everyday life, to the extent of permitting the kind of "capitalist" consumerism that can enhance its own power.

We have been left with less to choose than we think, between the two systems, for we now have centrally-administered materialism in both East and West.

The soldiers who fell in Normandy were not fighting for swimming pools and home entertainment centres. They had before them a view of the dignity of man: of things worth more than life itself. The students who stood in Tiananmen Square -- who raised the home-made statue of Lady Liberty -- did not die for the sake of cellphones, and skyscrapers in Shanghai. They faced the tanks and bullets of the "People's Revolutionary Army" with something more substantial in their hearts.

Yet the generation after them, there as here, has been largely bought off with the false promise of material prosperity. There, as here, we have agreed to become a kind of indentured labour, on the promise that we will be taken care of, cradle to grave.

Let us at least celebrate, for a moment in time, men and women who were better than we are.

But perhaps more revealing about modern China was a joke made by a Chinese visiting scholar– “Nobody’s thinking about Tiananmen in China, they’re all thinking about Gao Kao.”

Gao Kao is the National Higher Education Entrance Examination that takes place over 3 days in China every year. It is basically SAT on steroids. If I’m not mistaken, it occurs only once a year and it completely determines where one goes to college. It conveniently occurs in and around the week of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.


*On an unrelated note, here are some more encouraging slopes relating to the decreasing incidence of bike casualities in NY.

the slippery slope

Improved technology and more goods and services have raised the standards for what is acceptable in our culture. While there is more to choose from, we also have more to live up to. The introduction of indoor plumbing, electricity and household appliances into our homes have only pressured us to maintain higher levels of cleanliness. While wrinkles were once an accepted symptom of aging, we are now pre-occupied with anti-wrinkle creams and Botox treatments. The greater variety and availability of clothing has only raised expectations for our appearances (It’s not terribly acceptable to wear the same thing every day, unless you’re my husband. He somehow manages to get away with it).

The odd thing about the constancy of (housework) hours is that it coincided with a technological revolution in the household. When the early studies were done, American homes had little sophisticated equipment. Many were not yet wired for gas and electricity. They did not have automatic washers and dryers or refrigerators. Some homes even lacked indoor plumbing, so that every drop of water that entered the house had to be carried in by hand and then carried out again.

By 1950, the amount of capital equipment in the home had risen dramatically. Major technological systems, such as indoor plumbing, electricity, and gas, had been installed virtually everywhere. At the same time, many labor-saving appliances also came into vogue- automatic washing machines and dryers, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and freezers, garbage disposals. By the 1990s, we had added dishwashers, microwaves and trash compactors. Each of these innovations had the potential to save countless hours of labor. Yet none of them dead. In terms of reducing time spent on domestic work, all this expensive labor-saving technology was an abject failure.
…
Laundry provides the best example of how technology failed to reduce labor time... Laundry that had previously been sent out began to stay home. At the same, standards of cleanliness went up… In the (colonial) days, washing would be done once a month at most and, in many families, much less—perhaps four times per year. Nearly everyone wore dirty clothes nearly all the time. Slowly, the frequency of washing rose… Standards have crept up for nearly everything that housewives do—laundry, cooking, care of children, shopping, care of the sick, cleaning…

One 1920s housewife realized: Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for daily immersion. If our consciences don’t prick over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking.

But we were not always like this. Contemporary standards of housecleaning are a modern invention, like the vacuum cleaners and furniture polishes that make them possible. (The culture of cleanliness) was delayed because it was expensive. The labor of colonial women was far too valuable to be spent creating spic-and-span…

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American

Likewise, more freedom around what parts of our body we can display has resulted in more concern for how those parts of our body appear.

By the 1920s, both fashion and film encouraged a massive “unveiling” of the female body, which meant that certain body parts-such as arms and legs- were bared and displayed in ways they never had before. This new freedom to display the body was accompanied, however, by demanding beauty and literary regimens that involved money as well as self-discipline. Beginning in the 1920s, women’s legs and underarms had to be smooth and free of body hair; the torso had to be svelte; and the breasts were supposed to be small and firm. What American women did not realize at the time was that their stunning new freedom actually implied the need for greater internal control of the body, an imperative that would intensify and become even more powerful by the end of the twentieth century… cultural pressures have accumulated, making American girls today, at the close of the twentieth century, more anxious than ever about the size and shape of their bodies, as well as particular body parts.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project

No doubt we have made progress since the early twentieth century. And while most of these accomplishments have materially improved our quality of life, we continue to expect more. Improved technology designed to make life more convenient has not given us more leisure and rest time. And more freedom to choose what we wear and how we appear, may have only increased anxiety and worry.


* Somehow I feel a bit better that my apartment is not Real Simple-worthy. There are piles of books and papers stacked up in the corners collecting dust. Our bathtub is developing a ring of soap and scum residue and I believe our sink is building a lovely layer of grime. Yes, I would like my home to be cleaner, but I’m just too damn lazy to do it myself or to nag my husband to do it. But now I can say something elitist like I’m intentionally being counter-cultural and protesting the absurd standards of hygiene in our society… or tell everyone that I’m saving the environment. But don’t we often discover that our practical decisions end up being political? We didn’t buy a car, because we’re cheap. We line-dry our clothing, because there was no room in our apartment for a dryer. We try to reduce our meat consumption, because I don’t like cooking meat…
** Did you see this study that asked households to rank appliances as luxury or necessity? Fascinating!

fashion victim

Before World War I, girls rarely mentioned their bodies (in their diaries) in terms of strategies for self-improvement or struggles for personal identity. Becoming a better person meant paying less attention to the self, giving more assistance to others, and putting more effort into instructive reading or lessons at school. When girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they almost always focused on their internal character and how it was reflected in outward behaviour.

In 1892, the personal agenda of an adolescent diarist read: “Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self restrained in conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”

A century later, in the 1990s, American girls think very differently. In a New Year’s resolution written in 1982, a girl wrote: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.” This concise declaration clearly captures how girls feel about themselves in the contemporary world. Like many adults in American society, girls today are concerned with the shape and appearance of their bodies as a primary expression of their individual identity.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls

Not to suggest that life was better back in the nineteenth century, but merely to point out that we really do follow the fashions of our time. And when it appears that we have the greatest abundance of choice, we are often less free than we think we are.

confession: I like clothes*

Lotus Dress

Question: Is it less superficial and materialistic to like clothes if I make them myself?

I’ve spent a lot of time recently altering and reconstructing thrift and consignment store clothing that I’ve purchased in the last few years. (In some ways, I’m on a permanent Wardrobe Refashion Pledge—I only buy used clothing). While this activity is a creative and technical process, it also conveniently gratifies my constant craving for new clothing.

I may escape some elements of shopaholism, but some minor (or major) spirit of clothing consumption still holds me captive.

In any case, I have been working on a blog post or series of blog posts relating to fashion and clothing, which may eventually see the light of the internet. As luck would have it, I got stopped on the street today, photographed in an awkward pose by SnapGlow TV from Philly.com because my outfit “was fantastic”. Now I am the laughing stock of my husband, if I wasn’t already.


* And I suppose I have to add purses and shoes to that list.
** The dress above was sewn by yours truly using Amy Buter's Lotus Dress pattern. Sewing your own clothing from new fabric is unfortunately not terribly economical. I probably spent $50 on the fabric for the dress, though there is plenty left-over. The pattern also cost about $10 or $15. Sewing clothing using fabric from thrift store clothing, however, can be quite budget-friendly.

the chief end of man...*

Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for satisfaction of his materials needs.

~ Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the words of the English historian E. P. Thompson, time became “currency: it is not passed but spent.” As employers consolidated control over their workforces, the day was increasingly split into two kinds of time: “owners’ time, the time of work”; and “their own time, a time (in theory) for leisure.’ Eventually, workers came to perceive time, not as the milieu in which they lived their life, but ‘as an objective force within which [they] were imprisoned.'”

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

(The source of the last passage should be fairly self-evident. And in case there is any confusion, it is not from Philip Pullman's Golden Compass)


*and a different sort of iron cage.