Why Chicago?

“I think everyone is familiar with Chicago’s well-known mythology – Al Capone, hog butcher to the world, Saul Bellow, But Chicago now is something less well-known, and the gap between those two things – the reality of the city today and the mythology of its yesteryears – creates a winning sense of ownership among people who live there, of guardedness, of toughness and skepticism, which is uniquely Chicagoan. It’s a big reason why I think we should pick Chicago as a city over, say New York, which mulches its outward image annually in the arena of pop culture. I felt for this reason the issue would have something truly new to say about the city, and by extension, about America.” – John Freeman, editor of the Granta literary magazine, on why the magazine chose to feature Chicago as the theme for its upcoming issue.

This was via a review in New City.

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Categorized as chicago

Why Chicago?

“I think everyone is familiar with Chicago’s well-known mythology – Al Capone, hog butcher to the world, Saul Bellow, But Chicago now is something less well-known, and the gap between those two things – the reality of the city today and the mythology of its yesteryears – creates a winning sense of ownership among people who live there, of guardedness, of toughness and skepticism, which is uniquely Chicagoan.  It’s a big reason why I think we should pick Chicago as a city over, say New York, which mulches its outward image annually in the arena of pop culture.  I felt for this reason the issue would have something truly new to say about the city, and by extension, about America.” – John Freeman, editor of the Granta literary magazine, on why the magazine chose to feature Chicago as the theme for its upcoming issue.

This was via a review in New City.

Working

I’m reading Studs Terkel’s Working:People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. I’m not exactly sure why I chose this books, but in part, it has to be because I currently have a full-time, 9-5 job, commute and all, for the first time in a very long time and I’m finding it tough to adapt. I’m also trying to reconcile the conflict that I see in the naivety of thinking something like “fuck work”, which I’ve heard a million times in DIY punk lyrics, and really feeling that working full time doesn’t afford me, and likely many others, very much time to do things that are meaningful in life.

I’m only into the introduction of the book, but so far I’ve come across a few snippets that seem relevant to these questions:

“… his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community …” – Sigmund Freud, quoted from Civilization and Its Discontents

“Learning is work.  Caring for children is work.  Community action is work. Once we accept the concept of work as something meaningful-not just as the source of a buck-you don’t have to worry about finding enough jobs. There’s no excuse for mules any more. Society does not need them. There’s no question about our ability to feed and clothe and house everybody.  The problem is going to come in finding enough ways for man to keep occupied, so he’s in touch with reality.” – Ralph Helstein

These two quotations sum up my conflict – not working seems to disconnect one from reality in a way, because work is such a huge part of so many’s reality.  However, work disconnects one from reality in other ways.  I want to believe that Helstein is right, that we can define work in different ways so that we can really be “in touch with reality”.

Mansplaining

One of the interesting things about the technological world is that new, precise terminology develops really quickly. This can be confusing and a barrier to understanding things, but when it bleeds over into culture surrounding technology (e.g. newsgroups back in the day and social networking sites now), there’s great jargon that really captures cultural phenomenon.  Today, I learned the term “mansplain” through meta-comments about a blog post.  Urban Dictionary defines “mainsplain” as:

To explain in a patronizing manner, assuming total ignorance on the part of those listening. The mansplainer is often shocked and hurt when their mansplanation is not taken as absolute fact, criticized or even rejected altogether.

I’ve definitely been guilty of this.  The example that weighs heavily in my memory happened on a trip back home during my freshman year of college.  I had just participated in reading Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth” as part of a university-wide reading program.  It was really an eye-opening book for me because it described cultural pressures and beauty standards that, as a man, I really didn’t have to think about or deal with.  I was excited by my new-found consciousness and filled with moral outrage about the injustice of gendered beauty standards.  On my trip back, I went with my family to one of my brother’s quiz bowl competitions.  In talking with one of his female teammates, the subject shifted to gender and appearance.  I began to describe “The Beauty Myth” and how culture and mass media oppressed women and suggested that she read the book.  My brother’s teammate cut me off.  “I don’t read that dykey stuff,” she replied shortly.

Until recently, this story sat in my mind as an example of how ideas that restrict someone can be internalized, but now I see it as a possible response to my mansplaining.  Surely, a young woman participating in an intellectual competition, thick with geeky connotations, where women were definitely in the minority didn’t need to have gendered double standards explained to her.  This kind of mansplaining seems particularly problematic because it’s pedantically clobbering someone about issues of gender.  This is easy for me, and likely other men, to do because part of male privilege and the expectations and behaviors that perpetuate it is that men aren’t supposed to think about how our lives are mediataed by gender.  So, it’s a lot easier to try to front with presumed expertise when we learn about how gender works in our society from books or descriptions of other people’s experience than to describe and analyze our own experiences with gender.

What is the remedy?  It seems so difficult when I feel conditioned to mansplained. The familiar elementary school report is just one example of how our culture values singular expertise on a subject and assumes that the non-expert doesn’t have anything to contribute to the teaching or learning process.  I feel like I get most of my validation from the things that I do that are perceived as having the most exclusive knowledge.  Do I get validation because I enjoy writing computer programs or do I write computer programs because it’s something that is culturally perceived as challenging and talent-requiring?  What can individuals do with skills or knowledge other than demonstrate their expertise?

I can answer the last question at least.  We can do stuff.  And one thing that is incredibly helpful to me is to do things where I am most definitely and perpetually not expert.  It forces me to appreciate the abilities or knowledge of others and learn from them.  Playing music is one of those things and playing soccer is another.  When I think about gender, it’s hard not to think about soccer because playing it, for me, has always involved playing with women, but the institution has also seemed so male dominated.  It’s easy for me to fetishize women who play on otherwise all-boys high school teams, or who are the sole lady at the pick-up game, and it’s compelling to say, “I know what you’re facing, I can see how the pressures and expectations of gender are playing themselves out on this field.”  But, really, we know these things because we live them, on one side of the gender divide or the other, and we can do our best to make these spaces in our lives more gender equal.  Finally, I rely on soccer as an example of personal changes in gendered interactions because it’s so obvious that what, beyond “teaching” someone skills or pointing out their minority status in the game, what will really benefit women playing in mostly-male soccer games benefits most men too.  It doesn’t elevate the game when any player makes assumptions about the skills of their teammates.  It’s not fun for everyone when two dudes start yelling at each other over some foul.  And it doesn’t make anyone more skillful when a handful of skilled players hog the ball and are oblivious to their teammates.  It’s pretty clear in this example, but generally true, I think.  While gendered expectations benefit men in a lot of ways, they also restrict us.

Tormenting the poor

Judah pointed me to Barbara Ehrenreich breaks it down in her NYTimes op-ed, Is It Now a Crime to be Poor?:

Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

This is definitely something that Bloomington should keep in mind, and I suspect a lot of people who live in neighborhoods and communities that are confronting more visibly human faces of poverty.  Still, I’m not content with criticizing middle-class suburbanites|yuppies|city governments|business associations|police are whack for tormenting people experiencing poverty or trying to ignore it.   I feel like I’ve inherited, despite my best efforts, the cultural anxiety with poverty and I think we need to have a frank discussion about what scares us so much about poverty and poor people and how we can get over it.  One of the problems with intense efforts, over time, to racially and economically segregate our communities is that many of us in this country who grew up in those segregated places have no tools to accurately assess our real safety.  We just rely on the mythologies about the potential dangers that people who we perceive as different than us might pose.  I don’t think the antidote is to fetishize poverty either, but I hope there’s a way out.

Untitled

I’m excited that some of Decarcerate Monroe County’s ideas have become projected into the mainstream media, like this from a July 26 Herald Times op-ed:

Some of his numbers also should give pause to our criminal justice hierarchy. Why is it that while incarceration rates have gone up nationwideby 38 percent from 1994 to 2007, the rate here has gone up 53 percent? And why is it that fully 87 percent of the jail’s inmates haven’t been convictedof anything but are simply awaiting trial?

Hacking the Drupal Administration Menu

The Administration Menu module revolutionized my Drupal experience.  At CRL, we wanted to use it not just for our administrators but for our regular users.  We needed to customize the menus produced by the module to make it easy for content editors to use.  We could have modified the menu, or we could have followed the suggestions in the README and copied the CSS into our theme.  However,  I wanted to avoid having multiple pieces of code to maintain and keep my modifications in one place.  So, I tried implementing a module that used admin_menu’s hooks to add and manipulate menu items.  It’s kind of hacky, but a good start for others who want to accomplish similar things.  Read more about the module.

Disabling Windows Live Messenger at Startup

I couldn’t find documentation on this elsewhere on the net so I decided to add a note here. I have to use a Windows XP workstation at my job and I’ve been annoyed that the Windows Live Messenger program seems to start up every time the system restarts. Disabling this was non-obvious:

  • Open Windows Live Messenger
  • Click on the question mark icon on the right hand side of the window.
  • From the popup menu choose Show the menu bar
  • In the menu bar (at the top of the window) click on Tools -> Options
  • Click on Sign In in the left hand side menu
  • Uncheck the checkbox that says Automatically run Windows Live Messenger when I log on to Windows
  • Click the OK button.
  • Quit the program

    • Geography, Safety, and White Flight

    It’s after bedtime and things I’ve been thinking about all day seem to be converging.  One of the biggest changes in moving to Chicago is hearing about shootings on a daily basis.  I found this map today and I don’t know how to interpret it, but it’s staggering, horrible, and also engrossing. I can’t help but overlay the map with my hasty impressions about the different racial and class makeups of neighborhoods across the city.

    View Chicago homicides map in a larger map

    The transit ride is about an hour to and from work but it doesn’t feel oppressive. It helps me block off time for reading and I can finally get down to finishing the book Sundown Towns. The added dimension of reading it now is that I get to also see the flip side of white flight: the concentration of Black residents in cities rather than their absence in certain suburbs or rural areas. Thinking about race and technology, I came across this quote from interviews with youth conducted by Danah Boyd:

    Tara (16, Michigan): [Facebook] kind of seemed safer, but I don’t know like what would make it safer, like what main thing. But like, I don’t know, it just seems like everything that people say, it seems safer.

    This sentiment refers to a digital geography, but it is so familiar to the way that people talk about safety in towns and cities. It is easy to ridicule those with these attitudes as paranoid or even prejudiced. The problem is not that concern for safety is unwarranted, but that segregation has ensured that everyone loses the ability to realistically assess safety and move towards a safer world/

    Neighborhood Names

    There was a pretty good article in the Redeye this morning about the confusion surrounding the names of neighborhoods in Chicago.  Living at the cusp, or at least what some bar owners want to convince people is the cusp of Lakeview and Wrigleyville (or is Wrigleyville part of Lakeview?), I feel this for sure.  Just as real-estate developers and realtors can create new names and changing populations can provide the momentum to change the name of a neighborhood, I think its also possible for names to be totally out of whack with the reality of the neighborhood.  2 weeks ago, I went to the Little Italy neighborhood with Chiara, and she was disappointed by the few remnants of Italian or Italian American culture that remained in the neighborhood.  Googling after we got home, she found out that the Italian American community there was largely displaced by gentrification cased by the expansion of the UIC campus.  I had remembered reading Florence Scala’s obituary in the paper, and though it was sad to see the changes that had affected her community, it was awesome to see the concrete reality of the place where she passionately worked to hold together a community.  I found out about Scala from a Wikipedia entry which quoted interviews that she did with Studs Terkel.  It seemed like such a great combination of old and new media.  I don’t know if I would have come across Scala’s story without Wikipedia, but Terkel’s interview added such richness to the telling of her story.