London 2012 as Masterpiece

Over the last fifteen days, I've fallen victim to the Olympics' siren call again and again and again. Much has rendered me sheepish -- maybe even ashamed. I've stayed up `till 3 (maybe, in all honesty, 4) in the morning, intent on becoming armchair proficient at every curve and every hill on the BMX track. I've decided that all must be right with the world now that Gabby Douglas and Missy Franklin have become America's official sweethearts; that Misty May Treanor and Carrie Walsh Jennings our official, ass-kicking best friends; that Claressa Shields is our new definition of fierce.  I've concluded that the world is unjust because Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte have gotten so much air time, and all at the expense of Nathan Adrian's megawatt smile.  I've cringed at every one of Aliya Mustafina's missteps; reveled in the great, speedy glories that are Allyson Felix and Carmelita Jeter; wished I were Grenadian so that the level of emotion I feel about Kirani James could be defensible; and padded around, crestfallen, after hearing that Mariel Zagunis had fallen to Olga Kharlan. As a bonus, after an accidental series of experiments which would make Pavlov (and Visa) proud, I now start bawling every time I hear Morgan Freeman's voice.

* * *

This happens whenever the Olympic Games, summer or winter, come around.  Or, really, when any sporting event I remotely care about begins to air.  My years on earth have convinced me that this love for sports spectatorship -- and for the Olympics and Wimbledon, in particular -- must be some Lo family phenotype.  Lakers, Clippers, Kings and Dodgers paraphernelia were nowhere to be found in our house.  Even the work of the Raiders and then the Rams went unacknowledged among us.  What else but genetic material could describe the synchronicity with which my and my parents' love for Pete Sampras soon turned to mild worship of Roger Federer?  And, sure, it might have been all too predictable that we would convert from Kristi Yamaguchi to Michelle Kwan once the former retired.  But our undying reverence to Paul Wylie, lasting long into his undergraduate years at Harvard and then through his MBA at Harvard Business School?  That was devotion. (Louisa Thomas's excellent "A Case of Olympism" is sure proof that there are other families with similarly coded chromosomes.)  

A month and a half after the Atlanta games, our family's relationship to these greats began to change as we started devoting a large proportion of our energies to a sport we had only caught snippets of that summer.  I was just going into ninth grade, and my high school was starting a girl's water polo team.  I was one of a few other incoming 9th-grade girl swimmers who thought that it might be an interesting way to get out of swimming countless laps.  I ended up getting the best pass a checked-out swimmer could get: they put me in the goal.  It was a fluke, of course.  I was (and still am) 5'3", with my growth spurt well behind me.  During practice one day, the coaches realized they didn't have someone to mind the net for the JV players, so I poked my head in, and instantly fell in love.  After getting my first piece of that whirlygig ball, my hands itched for the feeling again.  And as weeks of practice became months and then years, a few tricks started falling into place.  I surprised myself during one scrimmage when, after a teammate had cut loose for a breakaway, I made a pass all the way down to the other end of the pool and it landed perfectly in the catch of her stroke.  I grew more and more comfortable being a second pair of eyes for my teammates and an in-pool messenger for our coach.  I even derived a sick sort of pleasure from eggbeater-ing up and down the pool while lifting five- and ten-pound weights out of the pool, doing the first third of the length with with our hands out of the water, the second third with our elbows up, and the final stretch with our shoulders well above the water's rippled surface.  It's quite possible that I now do yoga in order to relive the feeling of rising out of the water and stretching towards the upper corners of the goal...  

I was never good enough to be scouted, and this made my loyalty to my teammates even stronger: our defense had to work as a highly practiced, scarily efficient machine.  Everyone knew that my short wingspan made for a less-than-ideal situation, so whenever we were down a girl my teammates in the field covered the near-sides of the goal by shooting up their hands and lifting their shoulders and torsos well above the waterline.  They worked small miracles -- kicking, grabbing, and scratching up our opponents -- to steal the ball as frequently as they did.  We doled out numerous high-fives to each other, immediately gave props for sweet goals and sweeter assists, huddled ear-guard to ear-guard, pumped each other up with the requisite pre-game "Eye of the Tiger," consoled one another with tight squeezes after our losses, and fostered general good will even though we came from all different precincts of our high school's social landscape.  

In their way, my parents followed suit.  Up until I started goaltending, our family had marveled at the greatness of lone, individual athletes.  But the fact that I would never be one of our team's marquee players didn't prevent my mom and dad from bringing to our matches the same fervor with which they had cheered for Greg Louganis at Seoul.  They'd learned early on that they weren't just cheering for me; they were cheering for all the Wolverine girls, in the pool and on the bench. Behind my mask of embarrassment, even I knew it was fantastic. 

* * *

Kids are a distant prospect for me, but if there's any Olympics I'll tell my sons or daughters about first, it'll be the one that's wrapping up in London right now.  Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt will surely get their due, but the minutes I'll spend on them will be brief.  What I can't wait to describe is not just the dominance of Team USA's women, but, more importantly, how effective, how unstoppable our ladies' teamwork has proved to be.  For good reason, everyone's favorite example is the phenomenal beach volleyball duo, May Treanor and Walsh Jennings. Their mind-meld is the stuff of psychics' dreams.  And, as Eleanor Barkhorn observes, this is not mysticism incarnate.  Having played together for years, they've developed a combined "physical toughness and mental agility [that] is a salvo against the whole history of assumptions that women have inadequate bodies and brains."  On and off the sand, they strike "a unique balance between humility and confidence." And when things weren't gelling in the months leading up to the games, they sought out a sports psychologist.  All this shared intelligence is evident in the quick encouragement they give to one another between points, whether it comes in the form of a hug, a high-five, a pat on the shoulder, a pat on the butt, or a decisive fist-bump.  It doesn't matter if they've won the point, they reinforce each other's mettle and renew their collective fortitude. It's awesome. 

And what's even more awesome is how abundant this fellow feeling has been, how's it coursed through all the American women's teams that are bringing home gold.  Cue the world record-breaking Smiley Group -- consisting of Missy Franklin, Dana Vollmer, Shannon Vreeland, and Allison Schmitt -- who eclipsed the rest of the field in the 4x200 relay.  Stand in awe at the superhuman Fabulous Five.  Consider Carmelita Jeter giving props to her relayers, Tianna Madison, Allyson Felix, and Bianca Knight, whom she knew would be "run[ning] their hearts out" as they smashed the 4x100 world record.  There was Hope Solo, telling Bob Costas that this is the first real team, from subs to starters, that she felt really worked as a team.  And then, when it came to my beloved women's water polo team, their coach Adam Krikorian was the first to stress that it wasn't all breakout Maggie Steffens -- "there's no way we do this without everyone else" -- and 4-time Olympian Brenda Villa confirmed: "It's nice to know that it pays off to really invest in something and be vulnerable and come together as a team."  It's been an absolute love-fest among American women in London.  And it's been a privilege to watch -- a privilege matched only by the pleasure of seeing that Samuel L. Jackson feels the same way. 

* * *

The day after tomorrow, I will suffer the consequences of my outsize obsession.  On my desktop wait an incomplete dissertation chapter, a backlog of meetings needing to be set, and dozens of emails that have been left without replies.  There's also half a season's worth of "Project Runway" episodes that have been wasting away on On Demand. But these are burdens I'm willing to bear.  For, despite the fact that Team USA is a convenient fiction, every two years, it provides me with something that little in our postmodern world can: a universally-acceptable license to let loose the corniest, most earnest, least ironic and--dare I say it?--most patriotic parts of myself. And this time, it has beyond exceeded my expectations.  We've been witness to so much camaraderie, such goodness, such grace.  Words seem inadequate to the task of describing the magnitude of these days of plenty.  But, as with most things, Beyoncé has always known what's up.  When she asks, "Who run the world?" The clear answer -- the only answer -- is "Girls." 

What I Think about When I Think about "Girls"

Over the last few weeks, I, along with some of my closest friends and some of my favorite strangers, have been trying to understand the magnetic field that is “Girls”.  How can I justify being pulled into the point of view of Hannah Horvath, a character so entitled and self-indulgent that she steals the tip her parents had intended for the hotel housekeeper?  What gives, exactly, when I watch in anticipation as Hannah’s friend, Jessa, so willfully, flagrantly, triumphantly misses her abortion appointment, and opts, instead, to blow a good boy’s brain with elicit bathroom sex?  Is my willingness to bear Shoshanna – the “Sex and the City”-obsessed coed, tormenting herself over her virginity at every possible opportunity and at every possible venue (from her frilly bedroom to rock clubs to, yes, waiting rooms) – borne of a deep sense of nostalgia for a past that simultaneously embarrasses, delights, and haunts me?  How to tolerate the bitter arrows that Marnie, a perfectly coifed gallerina, constantly slings at her inherently good boyfriend, whether it’s because he’s just shorn his locks for a colleague who’s contracted leukemia, or simply because he’s so squishily eager to please?  And why, for goodness’ sake, did I experience such relief knowing that Adam, Hannah’s repellent fuck buddy who ignores her and dominates her and does such a mean air-bicycle, would be sticking around? 

Part of the answer seems to lie with the high bar of specificity that Dunham has set for the show.  This means that its most tender moments – Hannah dancing in her bedroom, first by herself, and then with Marnie, to Robyn’s hypnotic single; Shoshanna basking in sexual possibility as a former camp friend insists that he wants to hang out tonight – and its most wounding – when, on the verge of telling her ex that she has HPV, Hannah finds out that he’s gay; Charlie performing Hannah’s somewhat poetic diary – cut so deep.  It’s strange and thrilling to see a world of flaws, stains, and flesh work so well.  These are pain’s more effortless varieties and life’s quieter delights. 

That the show blemishes perfection: this is why it’s such excellent television and also why it’s become such a lightning rod.  Some critics have taken up the cause of narrative plausibility, pointing out with good reason that a few key characters seem too outlandish for their own good.  Does Jessa, our resident rebel without a cause, really have nothing to offer but Rhianna’s ass and the face of Bridgette Bardot?  And what, besides the convenience of extended family, has appended Shoshanna, a mere undergraduate, to this trio of more experienced ladies (just a little more experienced, but more experienced nonetheless)?  Others wonder why there isn’t anything new that we’re learning from this portrait of Brooklyn.  Even though these nubile women face a set of age-specific trials, they simply seem to reinforce the Brooklyn stereotypes embodied by, say, the Humphreys of “Gossip Girl”.  And a few have issued grievances over these characters’ lack of likeability.  When will someone who isn’t set up to be a loser on this show do something nice for someone else? 

But the hot topic remains the show’s lack of diversity.  For all of Dunham’s commitment to realistic experience, it’s a rather curious choice to portray a group of liberal arts-educated, upper-middle class twentysomethings, living in Brooklyn, interacting so rarely with anyone who looks different.  I appreciate – and applaud – Dunham’s refusal to check the race box.  But it’s unnerving that everything but white has gotten swept to the fringes.  Given the decades-long efforts to diversify American education (especially its upper-echelons), the progressive values cultivated by most of the workplaces in which these characters find themselves gainfully employed, the number of industry parties in New York or Los Angeles that don’t merely bow to such criteria but are simply constituted by a wide array of appearances and voices, and, really, just keeping in mind the striking heterogeneity of a metropolis as big as New York and all its boroughs, it seems like more of an effort can be made than the caricatural running-into on the street and the superficial interaction at work.  The homeless black man in Times Square was perhaps one of the more egregious, cringe-inducing moments in a series that has otherwise felt so smooth.  But there have been other less obvious instances when Dunham and her staff could have done so much more when it comes to difference.  The only skills possessed by the Asian-American intern-turned-employee at the publishing house that forsakes Hannah were her yes-man attitude and expertise with PhotoShop.  The only gay man to appear is an ex-boyfriend who, after coming out to Hannah, shows his true, bitchy colors and is soon dispensed with.  The more middle-class women with whom Hannah now works are a bit better drawn: they tolerate their boss’s “touchy-feely-ness” because they need to pay the bills; they give her the excellent advice to drop Adam’s sorry, squirrel-attracting nether regions.  But as they fill out her eyebrows and dole out advice about just how supple sugar will make her skin, they intervene only to deform and denature Hannah’s face.  Adam’s avid response to her new look – “You look like a Mexican teenager!” – was so biting because it spoke to the extraordinary license that ironic othering and, by extension, ironic racism have been given to a show that’s ordinarily so thoughtful.

My first groans and increasing impatience with the whiteness of “Girls” have caused me to wonder why, not so long ago, I seemed to have had so few complaints about shows like “Sex and the City” or “Seinfeld” or the enormous ensemble set piece that was “Friends”.  Week after week, these machines of culture did little to foreground people who look like me and my friends.  I admit that my high school and early collegiate selves didn’t have as much of an investment in racial plurality (and feminism, for that matter) as the one who stands on the soapbox today, so, in part, I was simply ignorant that anything insidious was going on.  But there’s also the question of absurdism and fantasy versus realism that, I think, sets “Girls” apart from any of its chums-in-New York forbearers.  This is not to say that we can’t point out that “Friends” was a ludicrous vision of economic viability in Manhattan.  This isn’t to say that a black Miranda would have been an empty gesture.  But while these shows’ suspension from reality far from excuses the social conditions that informed the fantasies they offered, their weekly baubles announced the artificiality of the worlds they constructed.  These comedies worked at the time because they afforded so many flashes of recognition as their characters discussed conversations about nothing, sexual underperformers, and a longing to be loved.  But in peering into Carrie’s closet or wondering what the hell Kramer did all day, we could always comfort ourselves by asking: Who the hell lives like that?  

Dunham’s insistence on “gut-level”, lived experience, however, stacks the deck.  She wants to give us a funny kind of realism, one that, in its best moments, is more akin to Nicole Holofcener’s than Whit Stillman’s.  But whereas Holofcener’s most recent film, “Please Give” (2010), centers on the guilt of her privileged characters and, thereby, draws out a fragile web of tense (economic) relationships and their effects, Dunham’s characters are unknowingly – and, as a friend observed, uncritically – restricted to themselves.  Writing in The Hairpin, Jenna Wortham regretted that, indeed, it’s the potential of the show that makes this absence so grating.  “Girls” has delivered on so many of its promises that when Dunham says that she has only been writing to mimic herself and her closest friends, the absence feels all the more profound.  How can a show this smart, that takes so many risks about female desire, sexual compromise, about being young, and trying to find your way in the world be undergirded by such a lack of curiosity about the experiences of others?  Are they really living inside such a hermetically sealed few blocks?

It’s true that restrictions can very often generate vibrant creativity.  Think of Morandi’s trembling still lives; much of De Stijl; Agnes Martin’s grids; or Ad Reinhardt’s perfectly calibrated abstractions, which, he claimed, brought painting to its logical end. Dunham, by contrast, has ensured that we’re playing with a different set of conventions, not just a couple of bottles and geometric abstractions.  Hannah Horvath tweets, googles, texts, heeds booty calls, goes to the doctor’s office, and has job interviews, all in a densely packed city that (sometimes justifiably) thinks its melting pot is like nowhere else on earth.  Her allusion to potentially being the voice of a generation speaks to a willingness to engage in a social enterprise – in which proficiency in the following is required: reading social codes, detailing how her peers relate to one another, and trying to pinpoint what makes people who they are now.  Even if she’s just “a voice… of a generation”, Dunham has been careful to place Hannah in a very particular historical moment that feels much more interconnected, and less racially polarized than any before.1  And since there are lots of people, especially urbanites, who have friends with a plurality of differences, this homogeneity strikes me as a relic of an old world. 

And, yet, the question of just how old that world is and whether or not it is gone is perhaps why the criticism about “Girls” and race has been so fervent.  If “Girls” is but a pastiche of real-life situations lived by a very fortunate Dunham and the fortunate few around her, we are led to a rather disheartening question: is that world of white privilege, of a casual unwillingness to engage with racism’s persistent traces, really as old as we think?

---
Footnote (!)
1) And, while I don’t want to get too far off the beaten path, shows like “Lost” and “Parks and Recreation” have demonstrated how rich a world can become when a multitude of difference is the rule rather than the exception.  Of course, the situations in both those series were/are different: one threw everyone together in a plane crash, and the other is a diverse workplace that has fostered friendships.  But their very existence gives writers of all stripes something tangible to work with.

"Then I decided that this disorder and this dilemma, revealed by my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis--but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naïve it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system." - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 8.

"Is a verbal vision possible? Do not words, written or oral, interpose their opacity between readers and their visual experience of the world? Can language be effaced as such to the point where it become transparent to things, and can it from that point on display the thing itself in its truth even as it offers to the dazzled eye its simulacrum and its presence?" - Louis Marin, "Mimesis and Description," On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001): 64-84, 78-79.

How Now?

Yesterday, I set myself the task of reading Donald Kelley's "Intellectual History in a Global Age" a fine assessment of the tension between inside and out. And, more to the point, a bit of banner-waving for the linguistic turn. There were two moments that most intrigued me. To Kelley's mind, Ian Hacking, one of history of scien ce's most beloved philosophers of science, offers a lucid, cogent description of the inside-out problem in the following quote:

"External history is a matter of politics, economics, the funding of institutes, the circulation of journals, and all the social circumstances that are external to knowledge itself. Internal history is the history of individual items of knowledge, conjectures, experiments, refutations, perhaps. [...] We have no good account of the relationship between external and internal history." Hacking, "How Should we Do the History of Statistics?" The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago, 1991), 191.

Then, Kelley goes on to rescue Hacking's cliff-hanger:

"The one accessible place where internalist and externalist concerns seem to interact is language, which is internalized in individuals but which is also the object of science and which can be analyzed in terms both of both [sic] maker's knowledge and of social construction. [...] In these days of the linguistic and textualist turns one should substitute 'writing' for 'ideas,' 'sentiments' and 'thinking'; for it is in the effort of writing in particular that the subject -- philosopher, scientist, literary artist -- ventures out into the surrounding cultural space and perhaps historical notice. The author's thought is already a cultural construction, no doubt, but communication and dialogue gives it external form subject to interpretation and criticism." Kelley, "Intellectual History in a Global Age," Journal of the History of Ideas 66.2 (2005): 155-165, 164.

The questions that these snippets prompted in me might seem far too obvious. The first was, Where are pictures, even cultural practices writ large, in this schema? I think they, too, can be subject to the same sorts of analyses that Kelley applies to language. And the second was more of an observation, inspired by Kelley's upholding of language as the site of internal and external interaction. I began to think about how the dialectic that defines knowledge is the required interaction of the internal with the external, how the internal shapes the external and vice versa. Additionally, I'm wondering if it would be fair to say that ideas become knowledge once they move from one person to another. And if knowledge is social, it can't be made without individuals contributing to the circulation of ideas, generating new ideas to be swept into the tide. There will always be something necessarily cultural - or, at the very least, external to the thinker her/himself -- in the material with which each thinker works. But there is something mystifying about how each person synthesizes this social matter, and synthesizes it so differently.

I'm thinking about this on a pretty local level -- especially as I'm confronted with what strange alchemy writing is. I imagine there are multiple arguments that might be made for how peer-reviewed neuroscience papers suffer a different fate, and are much more social because they are subject to a stricter set of professional rules. Perhaps there are some practices that lean more towards the external end of the spectrum than the internal. And vice versa. My point is that I don't think we have entirely thrown out all that is internal. The reason why historians of science still have jobs is that we assess the manifold ways in which science - and knowledge, writ large - has come into being. This means we have a responsibility to both external and internal approaches. It means that we have to grapple with how thinkers secure the agency to build on each other's thoughts, and, just as important, we have to understand the institutional and cultural codes that define and refine their thinking. It's not just that new ideas change the way people think. They change social interaction. And what's more, social interaction changes the way people think, and the ideas they come up with, the ideas they distribute to one another. Whether we see this in pictures, turns of phrase, or other kinds of cultural practices (the organizing of information, etc.), the interaction of the external and internal is constantly at play. And it would be regrettable if we didn't think about this wondrous circuitry even harder. I think we have moved beyond the question of what material we might want to use in order to make this clear. Rather, the question that does linger is Hacking's: How can we best illuminate this exchange of inside-out, this mutually dependent shaping of knowledge?

For a few weeks now, I've been mulling the idea of reviving this blog. It's been a while since I put thoughts online in earnest. But I've come to the conclusion that writing a few times a week in a forum I know to be public (although frequented by few) would be a good way of keeping me honest and somewhat productive. I don't plan to do anything terribly radical with the space, as the aim isn't so different from what other bloggers do -- that is, collect things and thoughts that make enough of an impression on me that I have to tell someone else about them. My hope is that they will help me track some of my going interests, but, also, and more importantly, that they may be of some interest to people who stop by.

So, without further ado, the first in a little series of things that stir my admiration --

In early June 1962, while aboard the Queen Elizabeth, Nabakov granted an interview to a handful of journalists. He couldn't remember who asked what. But he remembered the questions and answers (and seems to have done some editing of both). I put an exclamation point next to this one:

"Still there must be things that move you--likes and dislikes.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting."

- Nabakov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill International, 1973): 3.

Images for Reviving the Weary

still from Hannah Schwarz, I Love the Body (2009)




Val Kilmer taking a photo of Ginny in front of Alice Neel's Ginny (1984)




Derek Fisher (and Kobe Bryant) at the White House on January 25th, 2010.