*

For me, the course description above raises as many questions as it answers. As we move through the semester, I hope to challenge preconceptions and dominant notions about theatrical practice, theatre history, and the theatrical present, as well as the meanings of terms like “the West” and the role of theatre and performance in the larger culture. Questions I hope to explore include:

• What is theatre? Why do we make theatre? Is theatre important?
• Who is the “author” of a theatrical production?
• What constitutes “good” or “important” theatre?
• What does theatre tell us about the culture and politics of a given historical moment?
• How can studying past events help us to understand the present and shape the future of both our art and our society?
• What is “the West”?
• What is the canon?  How do we choose which texts make it into a course on theatre history?
• Whose stories do we erase by focusing on a handful of figures in a handful of countries?
• Why should theatre practitioners (actor, directors, designers, etc.) care about theatre history and theatre theory?

I am much more interested in your ability to engage with such questions than I am in your ability to memorize series of facts. Unless specifically noted, you should feel free to consult your notes and texts for all assignments, including exams. Information is widely available. What is less common than access to information is the skill required to navigate, evaluate, curate, and interrogate that information. I am not here to dispense knowledge, but to facilitate learning

[T]he idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Back in the dark ages, young women and girls were automatically segregated off to home-economics classes, where they were indoctrinated with the belief that cooking was one of the essential skill sets for responsible citizenry—or, more to the point, useful housewifery. When they began asking the obvious question—“Why me and not him?”—it signaled the beginning of the end of any institutionalized teaching of cooking skills. Women rejected the idea that they should be designated, simply by virtue of their gender, to perform what would be called, in a professional situation, service jobs, and rightly refused to submit. “Home ec” became the most glaring illustration of everything wrong with the gender politics of the time. Quickly identified as an instrument of subjugation, it became an instant anachronism. Knowing how to cook, or visibly enjoying it, became an embarrassment for an enlightened young woman, a reminder of prior servitude.

Males were hardly leaping to pick up the slack, as cooking had been so wrong-headedly portrayed as “for girls”—or, equally as bad, “for queers.”

What this meant, though, is that by the end of the ’60s, nobody was cooking. And soon, as Gordon Ramsay has pointed out rather less delicately a while back, no one even remembered how.

Maybe we missed an important moment in history there. When we finally closed down home ec, maybe we missed an opportunity. Instead of shutting down compulsory cooking classes for young women, maybe we would have been far better off simply demanding that the men learn how to cook, too.]]>http://www.toofrank.com/journal/rss-comments-entry-8319462.xmlfilmnew york citypoliticsrantsexuality and genderFrank EpisaleThu, 03 Jun 2010 14:47:48 +0000http://www.toofrank.com/journal/2010/6/3/consumption-destruction-and-sex-in-the-multiplex.html342987:3631452:7854968I've never been a Sex and the City kind of gay.

Divas, excessive consumption, class envy, and dreams of an all-White Manhattan don't do much for me, and I've long been quietly frustrated at mainstream gay culture for being so much about such fantasies. My sexuality-related fantasies are much more queer than gay: about rejecting and destabilizing existing systems rather than fabulously infiltrating and inhabiting them. Drag, for example, is exciting because it deconstructs all gender as performance, not because it reifies gender categories. Difference is exciting because it points to ruptures in normative assumptions and ideologies, not because it allows high-end designers to cater to a wider variety of airbrushed skin tones.

While I don't often live up to my own ideals, I do believe that every purchase is a political act, that we have a responsibility to educate ourselves about where the products we consume come from, who makes them, and what kind of damage we're doing when we encourage more such products to be made. I believe that the accrual of wealth is, at the very least, ethically fraught in a world where so many have so little. Etc.

Sex in the City frames Prada and Manolo Blahnik as second only to long-term gender-coded monogamy (preferably with an emotionally fragile billionaire) in terms of the ultimate fantasy, the material expression of a fulfilling life.

Not my cup of tea.

I've long been baffled by Chris March breaking into worshipful tears at the chance to design (sans pay) for Sarah Jessica Parker, and by my moderately successful architect friend who lives in one of Manhattan's smallest apartments but loves it because it's just a block away from SJP's. When an out-of-town ex visited New York and wanted to see the first SATC movie while he was here (simulacrum, anyone?) I was troubled by the audience of women and gays who applauded and squealed in delight when Big built Carrie an enormous closet, and who gasped in horror when the depth of Carrie's despair was indicated by a shot of SJP without make-up. During a montage in which Carrie is trying to find an assistant, I was startled to see a seemingly ideal candidate dismissed as shockingly, laughably unsuitable because he was wearing women's shoes with his sensible suit, a disturbing about-face given the show's up-with-stereotypical-gays reputation. And I couldn't help but notice that the only non-whites in the movie were servants, and that the filmmakers tried to make up for this by giving one such servant (Jennifer Hudson) a heart of gold and wisdom beyond her years. Furthermore, while the series as a whole has taken a lot of heat from social conservatives for a supposed glorification of promiscuity, I've often found it to be a lot less pro-sex and sexually progressive than it might seem, though I'll refrain from detailing that argument here.

With the release of Sex and the City 2, which by most accounts may be the worst film of the year, I was considering jumping on the anti-SATC bandwagon as a means to rant against the increasingly irritating, increasingly commodified mainstream gay culture, a largely depoliticized subculture producing artifacts like this one at an alarming rate.

And yet...

The current backlash against all things Sex and the City has an ugliness—and arguably an hypocrisy—to it that I'm not entirely comfortable with. My friend Alex Morales has been following the backlash with irritation, bristling both at the gleeful attacks on a franchise that has provided him some escapist comfort over the years and, more compellingly, at the uncomfortable, genre-delineated sexism that seems to underly quite a bit of the criticism.

Before reactions to SATC2's ludicrous storyline, cultural insensitivity, etc. began to emerge, the film's negative buzz focused on the usual (and typically distressing) mainstream hetero complaints: SJP getting too old to be playing sexy; boyfriends being dragged to the movie by swooning, ditzy, fashion-obsessed girlfriends who need something to occupy them between Twilight films; etc.  People who found nothing insipid or offensive about Transformers 2 or Iron Man 2 railed against SATC2 in a way that implied that fantasies about traveling to exotic places and spending lots of money are only valid if you get to blow some shit up along the way. Destruction, violence, and sexual imperialism are fine, but high heels, cosmpolitans, and, well, sexual imperialism are corrupting, feminizing, groan-inducing. You can see the movie, but only if your girlfriend can't get her pet gay to join her. It's something you might have to put up with in order to get laid. And of course you'll have to pay for the ticket and probably won't be allowed to put any of that delicious butter flavor on the popcorn.

So this isn't a bandwagon I can jump on, I'm afraid. As much as I still want to rant against diva-obsessed gays whose greatest political ambition is to be the target of advertising for luxury products, I'm not willing to do so by playing into a misogynist uprising masquerading as a critical narrative. If I'm going to rail against mindless consumption, I should at least take a moment to recognize that spending all that money on overt violence and bombastic pyrotechnics is arguably worse than spending it on a tasty drink and a nice pair of shoes.

Excerpts:

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, currently enjoying a twice-extended run at the Public Theater, re-imagines our sev­enth president as a post-punk, emo pop-rock star whose emotional scars drive him both to greatness and to geno­cide. There’s a touch of genius in framing Jackson as an emotional adolescent who over compensates for both his own insecurities and his distrust of authority by adopting a swaggering, hyper sexual confidence. As played by the ridiculously sexy Benjamin Walker, this Jackson wears skin-tight jeans and form-clinging long-sleeved t-shirts, brandishing his pain (and a holstered revolver) as a rallying cry against “Washington elites” as he rides his war-hero status and his populist rhetoric all the way to the White House. He wears black eye liner, he massacres the Creek and Seminole tribes, he cuts his arm in the manner of a bipolar teen, he balances the budget, and he sings power ballads.

Photo by Joan Marcus 

[...]Unfortunately, though, BBAJ is also a little smug, a little glib, and a little pat. While it pretends to challenge viewers to reexamine their preconceptions, it is actually designed to elicit self-congratulatory laughs and knowing nods from an audience that already shares its point of view. Its humor is almost entirely derisive and dismissive, particularly (but not only) when directed against Jackson and his admirers. Jackson is presented as with out redeeming qualities, not only anti-intellectual but down right stupid. His persuasiveness and charisma are reduced to, and dis­missed as, a result of the fit of his jeans and the cut of his pecs, a genuinely amusing conceit that cuts off any possibility of real engage ment with the strength and appeal of his persona and his rhetoric. The show’s vision of Jack son also leads to a certain amount of musical confusion, conflating emo with cock rock, and emo fans with frat boys. Neither of these genres is executed particularly well; some of the songs are catchy, but the ridiculousness, the intentional badness, is painted on in thick layers.

[...]

[Toshiki Okada's] Enjoy, which is just finishing its English-language premiere in a production by thePhoto by Carol RoseggCompany, follows a handful of temp workers at a manga café as they drift through their lives, careers, and relationships. They over-think the triv­ial in order to distract themselves from more pressing matters, including the identity crisis brought on by entering one’s thirties while working part time in a manga café.

Ogawa’s remarkable translation seems to capture Okada’s tone perfectly (think Waiting for Godot meets Clerks or Slackers, only in Tokyo.) This is a very Japanese play, but American generations X and Y will find much to relate to if they allow themselves to relax into the show’s static pacing. Director Dan Rothenberg (of Pig Iron) directs a solid, occasionally extraordinary cast with a deft hand. Okada’s work is poised to take on a higher profile in New York’s experimental scene (his 5 Days in March, which Okada’s company presented at the Japan Society last year, is about to open in English at LaMama); consider this your chance to know about him before all your friends do.

Full review(s) here.

*

In a particularly self-indulgent blog post a few years ago, I wrote that I needed to stop falling in love with the gorgeously fractured shells of broken men. I don't mention this out of a need to confess my extended emotional adolescence, or to offer a glimpse into my romantic travails, but because I was reminded of this post recently, while reading a passage from Chuck Mee's beautifully written memoir, A Nearly Normal Life.

Reflecting on how his struggle with polio has influenced his work, Chuck wrote:

I find, when I write, that I really don't want to write well-made sentences and paragraphs, narratives that flow, structures that have a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. Intact people should write intact books with sound narratives built of sound paragraphs that unfold with a sense of dependable cause and effect, solid structures you can rely on. That is not my experience of the world. I like a book that feels like a crystal goblet that has been thrown to the floor and shattered, so that its pieces, when they are picked up and arranged on a table, still describe a whole glass, but the glass itself lies in shards. To me, sentences should veer and smash up, careen out of control; get under way and find themselves unable to stop, switch directions suddenly and irrevocably, break off, come to a sighing inconclusiveness. If a writer's writings constitute a "body of work," then my body of work, to feel true to me, must feel fragmented. And then, too, if you find it hard to walk down the sidewalk, you like, in the freedom of your mind, to make a sentence that leaps and dances now and then before it comes to a sudden stop.

Aside from the gorgeously rendered prose, what struck me most about this passage was how much light it seems to shed on Chuck's plays. In many of them, of course, he takes this process a step further, shattering not one crystal goblet but several, and throwing in bits from jelly glasses, stained-glass windows, and cathode ray tubes.

Postmodernism, and the pastiche technique that characterizes it, are often criticized as being so referential, so soaked in irony, and so mistrustful of narrative that such works are unable to engage with emotion, with politics, with history. They are accused of being all surface, all product, and largely without conscience. If ever there was evidence that this need not be the case, it is the playwright we're here to celebrate tonight.

While it is difficult to apply any one phrase to all of them, Chuck's plays are often deeply personal, highly emotional, politically engaged conversations with, and meditations on: history and fantasy, war and peace, love and loss, art and life. His writing is marked by restless intelligence, relentless curiosity, and genuine compassion. Yes, he challenges the metanarratives of history and identity formation, but he does so in a way that respects and glories in story and experience, opening up the narratives—personal, cultural, historical, political—not to destroy them but to give them room to breathe.

--

When I saw True Love at the Zipper a million years ago, I didn't know much about Charles Mee. A friend of a friend had gotten his first off-Broadway contract, his first Equity show, and a bunch of us went there to support him. While I imagined myself an adventurous theatregoer at the time, the truth is I didn't have much of a context for the play.

But I knew I hadn't seen anything quite like it. The mix of high and low cultures, the on-stage rock band, the explicit references to Greek tragedy, the collision of a working-class vernacular with Chuck's trademark flights of philosophy and poetry, and my long-haired young friend roller-skating around the stage, and then dancing naked with the actor playing his mother, all on a set designed to evoke a run-down garage, "an abandoned gas station." Once I knew the playwright's name, of course, it was everywhere. True Love, First Love, Big Love . . . 

There's a joke in there, I'm sure, but I'm also sure someone else has already made it better than I would have, so I'll skip it.

Years later, I saw Chuck at a Prelude festival, here in this building. I was a new PhD student here, and my friend and classmate Kenn Watt—who we'll hear from a little later—was directing a play called Gone, by Charles Mee, whose work I knew quite well by this time, though I wasn't yet referring to him as "Chuck." After we watched the work in progress, the director, the playwright, and the cast took some questions. Chuck was very open about the fact that Gone was unlike anything else he'd written. He wasn't sure what it should look or sound like on stage. He wasn't sure it could work in performance. But he liked and trusted Kenn, and the enthusiastic young actors of the ensemble, and he was excited to see what they would come up with.

Everyone I know who has worked with Chuck—directors, actors, playwriting students, academics—talks about his generosity in that regard. Every time a playwright throws a fit about over-reaching directors as if railing against "activist judges," I think of Chuck, who writes his plays to be directed, who is not afraid of losing his identity as an artist just because someone else asserts theirs. He knows that his plays are not "finished' as written any more than the material he drew on while writing was "finished" when he found it.

They're broken. They're fractured. They're fragmented. They leap and dance before coming to a sudden stop. They're heartbreaking, and funny, and challenging. Sometimes they succeed spectacularly. And sometimes, frankly, they fail. 

Because: like the artist who wrote them, they're too smart, too ambitious, too interesting, and too beautiful to be perfect. 

Some of Fela!'s scenes work powerfully, while others fall a little flat, but the point of this show, really, is the infectious, groove-based Afrobeat music. Oh, and the dancing: the most astonishingly athletic, committed, sensual, full-bodied dancing I’ve ever seen in a Broadway theatre.

Photo by Monique Carboni

The quality and energy of the ensemble can’t be overstated. The group dance numbers, from overtly sexual hip grind­ing to a spectacular variation on a Yoruba egungen ritual, are the heart of this show. Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones has put together an ensemble that rules the stage with grace, power, and spec tacular athleticism. As for the singing, Kuti’s songs only occasionally give the lead actor the opportunity to show off his pipes in an American Idol sort of way, but Lillias White, as Kuti’s mother Funmilayo, and Saycon Sengbloh, as the American woman who intro­duces him to the notion of “black power,” more than make up for it. Fela!’s design team also impresses, particularly lighting designer Robert Wierzel and projection designer Peter Nigrini, who both know when to use their virtuosity to dazzle and when to use it in support of the action on stage, helping to make the show as immersive as possible given the venue.

. . .

Elegantly directed and beautifully acted, The Pride is at turns moving and funny, but it is also puzzling and ultimately disappointing on a number of levels. The dual-decade struc ture cries out to be read as a statement on the state of gay culture, but what ever message Campbell has in mind is muddled. . . . Political inscrutability is not always a liability, but in this case it doesn't seem to be the result of complexity or individuality or even just dis regard for identity politics; it seems rather to be a play that is try ing to say some thing specific but can’t quite get its message across.

Photo by Joan MarcusA description of a pride parade in one of the 2008 scenes comes closest to clearing things up: “It’s a demonstration, a celebration, and a fashion show, in that order.” Whatever its flaws, The Pride has clearly struck a nerve with its audience, earning an extended run of sold-out houses largely on the strength of word-of-mouth publicity. More than a century ago, Shaw famously claimed that “problem plays,” plays that engage directly with social issues can only hold an audience’s attention for as long as the controversies they’re addressing remain relevant. When there’s no longer a “problem,” the problem play is forgotten. Based on the success of The Pride and its brethren, then, the closet door hasn’t been blown off its hinges quite yet. In the context of true equality, and true acceptance, there would be little need for assertions of “pride.”

Full review here.

I'm very curious to see how many students decide to participate; I'd also be extremely interested in seeing the assignment adapted to other cities.

Extra Credit Opportunity: Treasure Hunts

You may undertake a maximum of five treasure hunts this semester, each worth one point of extra credit toward your final grade. These hunts involve finding some site of artifact related to theatre history, most (but not all) in Manhattan: some things are directly related to our studies this semester; others fall outside of the scope of this course but are otherwise related to theatre culture and history.. You must do two things to complete the hunt successfully:

1.  Take a photo (with yourself in it) by/with the treasure.

2.  Hand in a brief explanation (one page) per treasure as to how it relates to theatre history. This needs to be in YOUR OWN WORDS and you need to cite any sources (Web sites or otherwise) that you used to track down the treasure and/or find out its relevance to theatre and performance.


Happy hunting!

1.  A vase painting with the Greek god of theatre. Hint: it’s housed in a building on the east side of Central Park. And remember to turn your flash off for the photo!

2.  A theatre riot took place here in 1849.

3.  During digging to start construction on a federal office building in 1991, this burial site was discovered.

4.  Beginning in 1821, this was where African Americans could attend theatre and spend leisure time (though it didn’t last very long).

5.  If you’re willing to wait in line early on a summer morning, you just might get to see a free show at this famous outdoor theatre.

6.  You could see opera, theatre, performing arts students, modern architecture, and a performance archive all at this one site.

7.  This is the point where several streets met, and was New York’s most infamous neighborhood in the nineteenth century.

8.  This building once housed a café widely considered to be the first off-off-Broadway theatre.

9.  This theatre, founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, was one of the first off-off-Broadway venues and continues to host performances from around the world.

10.  The country's oldest continuously operated performing arts center was founded in 1861 in Brooklyn. While the original building burned to the ground, this larger, grander venue opened in 1908.

11.  This theatre, opened in 1916, introduced Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill, among others, to the Little Theatre movement. It was recently the subject of controversy when the current owner of the property sought to "renovate" the space.

 12.  The building that houses this theatre was designed for the 1964 World Fair by famed  architect Philip Johnson.

 13.  This "gentleman's club," established in 1888 by prominent actor Edwin Booth along with such founding members as Mark Twain, did not admit women until 1989.

 14.  The theatre that once stood on this location became New York’s first theatre to be lit entirely by electricity.

 15.  In 1903, this theatre, which would become famous for innovations in lighting technology, opened with an inaugural production starring Ethel Barrymore.

[There are a few clumsy passages, I'm afraid; I found both of these shows tricky to write about and didn't give myself enough time to edit.]

The concept of Medea and Its Double is to split the title character literally into two parts: the (jealous) lover and the (loving) mother, thus physicalizing Medea’s internal struggle and making the narrative more about her anguish than her crimes. Director Hyoung-Taek Limb adapted the story from Euripides, but only kept a fraction of the original text. In keeping with his company’s mission, Limb and his cast incorporate elements of Viewpoints and Grotowski tech­niques (which he picked up while an MFA student at Columbia) as well as elements from “traditional” Korean forms rang ing from martial arts to p’ansori to masked forms like t’alch’um and ogwang-dae.[...]

Photo by Zita BradleyIt’s impossible for me to judge the quality of Limb’s textual adaptation, but it seems clear that his work with the per­formers is his real accomplishment here. While the staging is reminiscent of work from Joseph Chaiken, Anne Bog­art, and other luminaries of the Western avant-garde, this Medea, ultimately, is one that could only have been cre­ated by this company. That specificity, that commit ment to growing a piece of theatre from the bodies and personali­ties of the performers rather than mapping it on to them, is what renders Medea and Its Double more than the sum of its parts. [...]

Masataka Matsuda’s dense, difficult [Auto Da Fe] is a meditation on history as an act of erasure, of creative forgetting. Set outside of time in a place called the “History Processing Center,” the play finds Odysseus (or a version of him) abandoning the battlefield and seeking a kind of peace. [...] To transform war into history, workers at the Processing Center shuffle papers, bathe soldiers, write articles, sing ballads, cart files, and tell stories. Little by little, the present recedes, trauma becomes mythology, and entire cultures are erased in the service of a grand narrative.

My own response [to this production] was a mixture of admiration and frustration. International WOW’s aesthetic ambition and political engagement remainPhotos by Piotr Redlinksi worthy of praise, but their work [here is] intellectually and emotionally muddled, [exhibiting] a lack of conceptual and intellectual rigor. [Director Josh] Fox clearly has a knack for eliciting incredible commitment from a large cast but, thirteen years after the company’s debut, and nine years since they garnered attention with one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11, his work doesn't seem to have developed much beyond its initial (considerable) promise. 

Read the full review here.

Because my roommate recently ate their and enjoyed it, because today brought a much-needed beautiful and temperate afternoon, and  because I have a great deal of work to do and am looking for ways to procrastinate, I decided to take myself to lunch at El Coyote and judge for myself. I overspent and overate, ordering drinks and dessert, justifying the expense and the carbs with the idea that I would post my thoughts about the meal on my neglected blog. So here goes.

My first impressions of El Coyote were generally positive. Pleasant décor, straddling elegance and kitsch, clean and well-kept. A fully stocked bar. The first indications of attentive service. Sadly, though, the room was almost empty, carrying the faint but unmistakable scent of desperation, of a business in danger of closing if traffic doesn’t pick up.

My host and waitress was extremely friendly, and didn’t bat an eye when I said “Just me for lunch.” She left me with water, a food menu including lunch specials, and a drink menu, quickly returning with chips and salsa, far more of each than I needed than I needed since I was eating alone (assuming I was going to order food), but they were tasty enough and clearly made this morning, or yesterday at the earliest.

I ordered a “lime boat margarita” ($9), supposedly made with Sauza Gold, Grand Marnier, Cointreau, and fresh squeezed lime juice. The “boat” was half of a lime, presumably having been squeezed into the drink, that had a little pool of extra tequila floating in the dent formed by the squeezer. Also, a tiny paper Mexican flag (one of the kitschy touches). The drink was bit sweet for my taste, too heavy on the Grand Marnier and too light on the lime, but I tend to like my cocktails with more acid and less sugar so this was no big surprise.

I ordered from the lunch menu, choosing enchiladas with mole poblano ($6.95), which would come with soup as well as a choice of salad or rice and beans (I asked for the salad).

The soup came first. Celery, carrot, dark chicken meat in a light broth. As with what would follow, the good was that the ingredients were fresh; the bad was that they were under seasoned. It could arguably have used one more skim of oil off the top, too, but that’s open to debate.

The one ding against the otherwise excellent service was that I was brought rice and beans despite having asked for the salad. I should have said something, but I’m a little weird about that, and almost never send anything back. So rice and beans it was.

Neither mole nor black beans photograph all that well, particularly in low light, but both continued the theme of competently cooked, slightly under-seasoned fare made from admirably fresh ingredients. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have the layers of flavor, the juxtaposition of strength and subtlety, the balance of bite and sweetness and heat that inspires pilgrimages to Oaxaca and Puebla.

By the time I’d eaten most of this, I was full, but I thought I should at least take a look at the dessert menu. Having taken a look it seemed only fair to have a bite of something and post a picture and a few words… 

I opted for the “bananitas,” sweet bananas flambéed in sugar and brandy and served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream ($4.50). I wasn't quick enough with my phone to catch the flames, but they were a fun touch. The bananas were firm and sweet, with just enough caramelization from the flambé. I finished with a smoky Cabo Wabo Añejo, which was served with a salted Virgin Mary shot and a wedge of lime.

While I have to agree with some of El Coyote’s critics that the food doesn’t stand up to some of the neighborhood's divier, grungier options, attentive service and relaxing atmosphere are sometimes worth considering. Your date or your Mom isn’t always in the mood for an “authentically” delicious adventure. Sometimes a smiling waitress, a clean tablecloth and a flickering candle are called for, and Jackson Heights, for all its foodie splendor, has limited options on that front. And the $6.95 lunch menu is a pretty great value.

That said, the most memorable moments of the meal by far were the bananitas and the Cabo Wabo. Everything else cried out for a little more salt, a little more acid, and a little more heat. I’ll be back to El Coyote at some point, I’m sure, and will try to stop by during dinner or happy hour to sample some things I might have missed. In many ways, this restaurant is a valuable addition to our community, but I don’t know how long they’ll last if they don’t realize that this is the wrong neighborhood in which to hold back on the spice.

A friend recently re-posted a status of mine, which read: "Every time someone says 'professorial' like it's a bad thing, I want to defend Obama even if I disagree with him. Fuck anti-intellectualism."

The various responses to his post prompted the following rant, from me:

 ---

"Anti-intellectualism" as a term isn't about your ex with Asperger's or your blowhard friend, or your pretentious, insecure cousin. It's a thread in the US culture that has been remarked upon and documented since at least the 19th century (Tocqueville) and was more fully articulated in the 1960s by Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life). 

It's that aspect of our character that calls kids with good grades "nerds," that accuses those who learn grammar of not "keeping it real," that condemns the family genius as being "too big for his britches," or losing sight of her "roots." 

It is the absurd reality that speaking in complete sentences and thinking in paragraphs is considered a political liability, that researching difficult issues and attempting to address them in an informed, nuanced way is somehow a betrayal of the American notion of the "gut." It is embodied by the false idea that there is an inherent distinction between the "authentic" and the "educated," between thought and emotion, between analysis and action. 

"Professorial" means "professor-like," and the fact that some interpret that to mean "out of touch with the 'real' world" (as if some parts of the world were more real than others) is a direct by-product of the "ivy tower" fiction, the myth that thinking about something removes you from it in a way that renders you less able to engage on a visceral level. Calling a politician "professorial" when s/he discusses war or economics is, essentially, an assertion that decisions about life and death should be made based entirely on "gut" reactions, inspired by impulses for revenge and "justice."

As for "over-analysis," that's usually a misnomer. Most discussions labeled as overly analytical are a) bad analysis or b) inconvenient. Sometimes it is about your asshole boyfriend who won't stop picking away at your eating habits. Sometimes it is about the uncomfortable fact that the Twilight books are thinly disguised socially conservative propaganda designed to promote abstinence, condemn abortion, reinforce gender binaries, and reify a dangerous love-at-first-sight soulmate mythology.

All of this is evident in the fact that the statement that started this thread was about a specific political situation, but the responses that followed had nothing to do with that context. The opportunity to hate on the socially crippled ex, or the teacher who gave you an unfair C, or that coworker who can never just have a good time trumped any possibility of engaging in a productive conversation about our current political climate. Perhaps that's because politics, history, war, identity, etc. are too complex to be considered "real," and because anything beyond an individual's bank account is too abstract to be worth our attention. I hope not.