Artificial Scarcity

Jonathan Gottschall on Prehistory and Homer:

Reconstructing a prehistoric world from literary sources is rife with complications. But there are aspects of life in the Homeric era upon which most scholars agree. Homer paints a coherent picture of Greek attitudes, ideology, customs, manners, and mores that is consistent with the 8th century archeological record, and holds together based on anthropological knowledge about societies at similar levels of cultural development. For instance, we can trust that the Greeks' political organization was loose but not chaotic - probably organized at the level of chiefdoms, not kingdoms or city-states. In the epics we can see the workings of an agrarian economy; we can see what animals they raised and what crops, how they mixed their wine, worshipped their gods, and treated their slaves and women. We can tell that theirs was a warlike world, with high rates of conflict within and between communities.

This violence, in fact, opens an important window onto that world. Patterns of violence in Homer are intriguingly consistent with societies on the anthropological record known to have suffered from acute shortages of women. While Homeric men did not take multiple wives, they hoarded and guarded slave women who they treated as their sexual property. These women were mainly captured in raids of neighboring towns, and they appear frequently in Homer. In the poems, Odysseus is mentioned as having 50 slave women, and it is slave women who bear most of King Priam's 62 children. For every slave woman working a rich man's loom and sharing his bed, some less fortunate or formidable man lacks a wife.

In pre-state societies around the world - from the Yanomamo of the Amazon basin to the tribes of highland New Guinea to the Inuit of the Arctic - a scarcity of women almost invariably triggers pitched competition among men, not only directly over women, but also over the wealth and social status needed to win them. This is exactly what we find in Homer. Homeric men fight over many different things, but virtually all of the major disputes center on rights to women - not only the famous conflict over Helen, but also over the slave girls Briseis and Chryseis, Odysseus's wife Penelope, and all the nameless women of common Trojan men. As the old counselor Nestor shouts to the Greek hosts, "Don't anyone hurry to return homeward until after he has lain down alongside a wife of some Trojan!"

The war between Greeks and Trojans ends in the Rape of Troy: the massacre of men, and the rape and abduction of women. These events are not the rare savageries of a particularly long and bitter war - they are one of the major points of the war. Homeric raiders always hoped to return home with new slave-concubines. Achilles conveys this in his soul-searching assessment of his life as warrior: "I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women."

Notes:

1. I don't endorse the anthropology not-quite-cited here, but this is an important motif in Homer. I would almost rather have "Darwinian" literary critics misunderstand the science than misunderstand the text. Gottschall doesn't misunderstand these texts, at least at this level.
2. Should the banking crisis cause society to completely collapse, it's nice to know what we have to look forward to.

Narcissisms OId and New

Dan Piepenbring at if:book on Facebook's displacement of yearbooks, and what that tells us about the future of the book:

Despite the presence of “book” in its title, few critics to my knowledge have construed Facebook as the ultimate electronic yearbook. They focus instead on its broader “social network” applications. That’s all well and good, but what is Facebook if not the quintessential model of an electronic book done right?...

The site, then, is a better yearbook than any yearbook can be. It suggests that the networked screen is, at least for this purpose, an infinitely more versatile medium than the static page. In considering Facebook as an electronic book rather than as a mere web franchise, we see how this new medium can improve upon the tried-and-true formulas of the print age...

There’s arguably another, bleaker lesson to be learned here, which is that Facebook’s true victory over print is predicated on its ability to massage our narcissism. Perhaps MicCalifornia, a commenter on the Economist piece, says it best: “The first thing we do when we get our yearbooks is see how many pictures we are in. Who needs it when with Facebook, I am in all the pictures.”

If It Raines Or Freezes

Paul Newman Dies At 83.

Gobama

Image via this post @ Racialicious.

Restoring Confidence in Our Instruments

Charles Bernstein, "Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers":

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets...

Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems...

We are convinced that once we have removed these troubled and distressed poems from circulation, our cultural sector will stabilize and readers will regain confidence in American literature. We estimate that for the buyout to be successful, we will need to remove from circulation all poems written after 1904.

Or as I wrote to Charles, instead of trading mortgage-backed-securities, we should be dealing in high-energy poetic constructs, like Charles Olson advocated back in 1950 in "Projective Verse." On Citizen!

New York, New York

I know I promised light blogging while I get myself all pretty for the job market, but this week it's actually about geography. I'm in Manhattan for an MLA committee meeting, so between planning panels and projects and furiously finishing writing samples on Ezra Pound's hatred of classical philology and love for loose-leaf files (seriously) and perhaps a trip to the Superhero Supply Store, I am keeping my schrifts to meself.



















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Okay, here's the deal. I'm actually in New York for a super-secret meeting with Henry Paulson, Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, and John Maynard Keynes (who isn't really dead). John McCain was invited, but cancelled at the last minute for an interview with Katie Couric instead. We're going to get this mess sorted out. My proposal is that we start a cap-and-trade system whereby companies exceeding strict emissions standards have to buy troubled mortgage-based security assets from the government. We're going to use the money to pay for universal health care. Pray for us.

The Negatives of Negative Voting ("Delighting in Lamentations")

Daniel Larison, "Delighting in Lamentations":

Even though I was not a Bush voter and voted for Buchanan, I have to admit that my contempt for Clinton and Gore was so strong in 2000 that I was quite pleased when Gore finally conceded defeat.  I was no Bush partisan, but even then I could see that he was somewhat preferable to McCain, who promises once again to be much worse than Bush once in power, so Bush seemed the least awful of the lot of them.  What many conservatives would prefer to forget now is how much worse by virtually every measure Bush has been compared to Clinton, and Clinton was certainly no prize, which should be a humbling realization for anyone who thinks visceral reactions should guide political behavior.  The desire to see Clinton and Gore suppporters disappointed and outraged combined with a politics of contempt for these politicians, fueled by my distaste for the leading Democrats, worked to distort my assessment of Bush in at least the first few months of his administration.  That he launched an airstrike on Iraq within weeks of assuming office should have told me something about the obsession with that country that would cost us so much, but at that point I was still in thrall to my contempt for Gore.  If there is one last thing for which I blame Clinton, it is how easy he made it to despise him and his backers and how he helped pave the way for the appalling joke of a President we currently have.

Delighting in lamentations is a strong temptation, and it is one the selection of Palin was designed to provoke, as there is a powerful urge to cheer on Palin if it turns the likes of Mark “Obama is a Lightworker” Morford into more of an incoherent, sputtering buffoon than he already was.  Even so, we all know that this is a ridiculous way to respond.  It makes your loyalties hostage to the most idiotic of your opponents, and it compels you to ignore your interests and any semblance of independent thought.  I would add another point–even those who seem to break from the herd and back a candidate from “the other side” to repudiate all the worst elements on your own “side” are falling prey to what Conor calls the politics of Schadenfreude, as an important part of the rationale for conservatives backing Obama or conservative Democrats backing McCain is not that these candidates better represent them but that they function as scourges for elements in their own party that they find appalling.  We hear it all the time–an Obama victory would be a judgement on the neocons, or Democratic defections would be a repudiation of Obama’s progressivism–and somehow we do not see it as part of the same moral blackmail that keeps the two-party system functioning.  If we voted our interests and paid no mind to the kinds of people who would be outraged by the victory of one candidate or another, we would quickly realize that neither party represents us and serves mainly as a rallying point for our undefined grievances against other people, most of whom we have never met.

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

Sam Fulwood, "Why Obama Can't Get Mad":

This is a struggle that black men—especially those of us who work in professional settings and want to remain there—grapple with daily: Showing our anger, no matter how justified, is a death sentence. We feel outrage. We want to say and demonstrate our daily frustrations, but we don't dare because we know that the release of our pent-up emotions can't ever be explained after the fact...

Journalist Mark Shields said as much on a recent broadcast of PBS' News Hour, noting that Obama won the Democratic nomination because he didn't scare white people. "He has always been controlled," Shields said. "He's always been incredibly disciplined. And I think there is a concern about his ever becoming an angry black man that would somehow be a threatening figure to some voters."

Call it the Sidney Poitier syndrome. During the racially tense '60s, Poitier was a huge Hollywood-box-office draw. He made history in 1963 as the first black man to win an Academy Award for his role as a non-threatening Negro in Lilies of the Field. Rarely did he—or any iconic black male celebrity like Jackie Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr. or Bill Cosby—exhibit any public anger.

There is this great scene in In The Heat of the Night when Poitier's Tibbs slaps the racist Endicott back:

But the point is still a good one. The biggest problem, I think, with the "Obama should tear McCain a new one" argument is that this is a big party; the President-to-be needs to be a little bit above the fray, and the guys and girls in his party need to have his back. Democrats should be lining up to beat up on McCain and the Republicans. Where's Jim Webb? Where's Bill Clinton? Where's Harry Reid?

Every single prominent national Democrat should be clamoring for the megaphone, ready to indict this administration (McCain included) for the disaster of the past eight years, a disaster which is ongoing, like a smoldering grease fire with a hot lid on top.

The Uselessness of Yard Signs

Sean Quinn at FiveThirtyEight.com:

Organizers – the people out there killing themselves to win this election – hate yard signs with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.

Barack Obama’s organizers hate them. John McCain’s organizers hate them. It’s because yard signs don’t vote – but they do generate a ridiculous amount of complaining that must be patiently listened to. Until yard signs sprout little legs and go to the polls on Election Day, in a presidential election with universal name recognition they are just a nice little decoration.

They’re little feel good things, making you feel like you’re on the team. There is nothing wrong with that – that’s not the objection. The objection is that there is limited time for organizers to accomplish a wide array of prioritized tasks, and in this election they’ve chosen to prioritize identifying, registering, persuading and getting their voters to the polls. Yard signs cut into the organizer’s sleep time – literally.

A lot of people aren’t going to like hearing this truth, but organizers recognize that the majority of people who walk into offices for yard signs are, for volunteering purposes – and this is a technical term – useless. In the majority, these people are not going to knock, they’re not going to make phone calls. Instead, they are going to throw the organizer’s incredibly precious, sleep-deprived time down a bottomless abyss of irretrievability.

Read the whole post -- some of the best parts are Quinn's made-up responses to complaints about yard signs (e.g., Asked about this dire situation in Virginia, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe responded*, “You have got to be $@!#ing kidding me. Is this a joke? I’m busy, I have to go.” -- where * indicates, obviously, that this is not anything that Plouffe has said but surely, somewhere, what he would like to have said).

Lessons For Teachers, Pt. 2

From the NYT's special magazine on Teaching, Alexandra Starr's "Case Study," a look at Obama's tenure as an untenured senior lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago:

I recently spoke to many of Obama’s former students and asked them to speculate about how the teacher they saw manage a classroom might try to manage a country. Some students thought Obama’s teaching offers a more accurate glimpse of his potential presidency than the oft-cited statistic that he holds the most liberal voting record in the Senate. “I don’t think that there is a ‘teacher Obama’ and ‘politician Obama,’ ” said David Bird, who works at Reed Smith in Pittsburgh. “He came across as very practical and down to earth. I think that reflects who he is as a person and his experience organizing and in the legislature.” Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who lobbies for progressive causes in Illinois, agreed that his former professor isn’t likely to emerge as an ideological liberal if he indeed makes it to the White House. “Based on what I saw in the classroom, my guess is an Obama administration could be summarized in two words,” he said. “Ruthless pragmatism.” [...]

Dan Johnson-Weinberger studied voting rights with Obama two years after Turbes did. He remembers Obama as an able observer of the allocation of power in the American democratic system. As Obama shepherded students through the evolution of how Americans elect their representatives, Johnson-Weinberger told me, he emphasized how important the rules of the game were in determining who won elections.

That background in voting law, the former student said, played a factor in Obama’s primary triumph over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. “He understood how important the caucus states would be, and he grasped that voters in African-American Congressional districts would have a disproportionate impact in selecting the nominee,” he said. “I think one of the reasons he said yes to this race is that he grasped the structural path to victory.” [...]

Obama offered many hypotheticals in his courses to help explain cases. In a constitutional law lecture more than a decade ago, he tossed out one asking his students to imagine him as president of the United States, according to one who was present. Some giggles ensued.
What, he asked, is so funny about that?