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Saw Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson (in the round, rotating stage, she was two feet from me at several points and she's got a picture of David Duchovny in her attic I swear); great performance, hideous play that can't become unstageable soon enough for me.
Marie Kondo, Spark Joy: Followup to her book on organizing/tidying, with illustrations about how to fold things and more specific instructions for organizing different kinds of things. Probably only for people who are seriously into the method already.
Randol Contreras, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream: Growing up in the Bronx, Contreras watched a number of people in his neighborhood make fortunes in the drug trade. He tried, failed, and took a different path, to a Ph.D. and this sociological book, which chronicles the trajectory of several other people from the same area. When the drug trade stopped being lucrative, they didn’t have skills that would pay in the legit economy, so they switched to robbing drug dealers. “[T]hey knew how to manage drug spots, negotiate drug deals, and act around drug dealers— everything that had little use in a service economy demanding more subservience, less masculinity, more education, less resistance, and more middleclass etiquette.” (A fascinating aspect is Contreras’ claim that poor New Yorkers who grew up in the mid-1990s had seen the horrors of crack and stayed away from it in favor of pot and alcohol, contributing to the decline of the cocaine market.)
Contreras argues that the robbers were ultimately motivated by the same ideologies that motivated Wall Street bankers (greed is good!) and that were celebrated by conservatives (you are responsible for yourself and only yourself). He also argues that toxic masculinity—reinforced by stays in jail—played an important role in the choices that they saw available to them. Also, the men he dealt with looked down on women, for much the same reasons, considering them all fundamentally degraded and buyable—whereas Contreras considers the fact that women were attracted to his money-dropping friends a way of trying to make the best of very limited options.
It’s a gripping and saddening read, and includes graphic accounts of the torture his subjects inflicted on their victims. Ostensibly dealers couldn’t give in without torture because, if they did, their suppliers would assume they’d participated in a fake robbery to cheat the suppliers. Often, the robbers were clued in by an associate of the dealer, but they had to pretend not to know where the drugs and money were in order to prevent implicating the associate, again meaning that torture was required. To justify themselves, the robbers blamed the victims, said that they were no different from corrupt police, and distinguished between the professional torturers who did only what was required and the amateurs who went overboard. Both among dealers and robbers, “[d]ouble-crossing was the norm”—Contreras reports incidents that sound like TV show storylines, where the men debate whether it’s simpler to murder a robbery partner or pay him his share, and then greet the partner with hugs and good wishes.
The male robbers worked with an attractive, underpaid “girl” in order to get an entrée into a dealer’s place or to get the dealer to brag about important details; though dealers were suspicious of men, especially when she approached them in front of other men, “[t]he girl meant potential sex in a bedroom, an alley, or rooftop. The sex meant demonstrating manliness to peers.… [T]hese drug robbers set what I call a masculinity trap, a play on a male’s manhood to victimize him…. A lone woman buying marijuana from a street peddler is perceived to be open to sex: she is bold (no male accompanies her).”
Paula S. Fass, The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child: The peculiarities of American childhood among Western nations, Fass argues, have long been in place, since authoritarian control over children gave way very early to increased freedom even before the American Revolution. “Europeans often described American children as rude, unmannerly, and bold. Americans were eager also to see themselves as different—fresher, newer, younger.” Wide availability of land, the ability to move away from constraining relations, and lack of specific laws governing inheritance lowered parents’ ability to control their children, even in the early generations of the United States when children went to work early in life because of persistent labor shortages. Work, in fact, provided young people with “a sense of the importance of their contribution and of their ability to create their own place in the world.” “Nowhere,” a nineteenthcentury French commentator said, “are children so free, so bold, such enfants terrible, as in America.” (Compare Lincoln’s unwillingness to discipline his children.) So complaints about our manners are old hat.
Fass also spends time on the dangers of the nineteenth century: “By the time they were sixteen, one-third of all slave children had been separated from their parents by sale or transfer, and this was likely an underestimation because it is based on the experiences of former slaves interviewed in the 1930s who were still young at the end of the war.” Nor was this experience of loss absent outside of slavery: “Before they turned twenty, almost half of American children in the decades from 1860 to 1880 had lost one parent.”
Industrialization and the end of slavery, Fass argues, crystallized a perceived crisis in children’s lives, leading to a public focus on protection for children and the use of public institutions “when parents seemed inadequate to the task.” While poorer and immigrant families required children’s labor to survive, “[t]he new standards of the family were class standards as the reformers incorporated class ideals into the very notion of family decency.” By the late nineteenth century, children faced new restrictions, and fostering desirable independence and good habits then became a problem to be solved by science and professionals.
By the 1930s, mothers (and immigrants), in particular, were supposed to look outside the home to learn childrearing principles. These principles were supposed to produce the independent child valued by American culture, but this was a challenge because improved health care and lower birth rates allowed American mothers to focus more resources and attention on each child, creating the perceived risk of coddling.
Astonishingly, from 1890 to 1930, the U.S. built an average of one high school per day, and high school enrollment rose from 18 to 73 percent from 1910 to 1940; these numbers were unequaled by any other country for a long time. As a high school education became more important, the resulting extended period of non-work and non-home immersion with peers shaped adolescence in uniquely American ways. High school meant a new kind of independence from parents while children were still economically dependent. Also, professionalization across occupations meant that there were fewer ways for children to make their own paths; they increasingly had to adjust to the larger society in order to succeed, but that didn’t require obedience to parents any more. Instead, especially among immigrant children, peers and teachers taught the American ethos. Kurt Vonnegut said in 1970: “High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.” (Fass doesn’t talk much about what high school was like—or, often, not like—for African-Americans, especially in the South.)
This extended period of non-working life, Fass suggests, eventually lay the groundwork for the student protests of the 1960s as well as sexual experimentation. She points out: “Had [college students] been raised at an earlier time, most would have been considered adults.” In a nod to my latest fandom, she notes that Todd Gitlin, one of the New Left’s leaders, was the same age as Alexander Hamilton when he became Washington’s right hand man.
Getting to today, Fass contends that what’s different is that childbearing is no longer seen as part of the natural order, and instead is treated as a choice (that no one else, including society at large, is under any duty to support). Compared to European parents who emphasize regularity and family time, American parents are more likely to emphasize individual attention and active interaction to develop a child’s independence—which leaves them (us) exhausted! Terrified that the slightest error will mean that their children will fall out of the middle/upper class, wealthier parents seek as much control as possible. The result is that children are encouraged to make choices without real responsibility: “overcontrolled and overindulged at the same time, while mothers are run ragged.” The fact that schooling has to last so long delays the perks of adulthood; high schools aren’t adequate stopping points for middle-class aspirations, and they also don’t provide enough vocational preparation. So high school isn’t the transition into adulthood any more, and no one really knows what is.
Kids in immigrant families face their own special challenges, when parents’ “lack of facility with the English language, unfamiliarity with the culture and with how American institutions operate provide one child with the opportunity to become mature, dependable, and knowledgeable long before similarly aged or placed American children are.” Such kids can feel unprepared for the adult matters they’re exposed to, and overworked, but they also get to be resourceful and upset the usual hierarchies in their families. While high schools were previously a force for assimilation, in the last third of the twentieth century they resegregated with a vengeance, so “[t]hose students who moved most strongly away from their parents’ culture moved toward peer cultures and values that were not middle class and devalued schooling.”
Damon Tweedy, Black Man in a White Coat: Memoir of Tweedy’s education as a doctor, grappling with microaggressions from teachers and patients and learning what his race could and couldn’t do in enabling him to connect with his mostly poor, black patients. A good read, albeit saddening.
Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: Thomas Jefferson again! The man had an enormous capacity to write beautiful sentiments and then not live up to them, that’s for sure. Ellis, writing before the DNA testing became definitive, expresses doubt about the Sally Hemings story as inconsistent with Jefferson’s fear of race mixing, but he doesn’t exclude the possibility. Basically, what Jefferson’s detractors see as his two-facedness, his fans see as flexibility and desire to smooth over conflicts. (By telling different people different things.) Most notably, Ellis discusses Jefferson’s free-spending ways in private as contrasted to his fear of public debt; instead of seeing this as a contradiction, he charitably attributes Jefferson’s anti-debt stance to his awareness of his own financial precarity, because Jefferson—like many of his compatriots—didn’t understand the difference between personal and national accounts. So “your debts are paid ‘cause you don’t pay for labor” is only partially true.
Marie Kondo, Spark Joy: Followup to her book on organizing/tidying, with illustrations about how to fold things and more specific instructions for organizing different kinds of things. Probably only for people who are seriously into the method already.
Randol Contreras, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream: Growing up in the Bronx, Contreras watched a number of people in his neighborhood make fortunes in the drug trade. He tried, failed, and took a different path, to a Ph.D. and this sociological book, which chronicles the trajectory of several other people from the same area. When the drug trade stopped being lucrative, they didn’t have skills that would pay in the legit economy, so they switched to robbing drug dealers. “[T]hey knew how to manage drug spots, negotiate drug deals, and act around drug dealers— everything that had little use in a service economy demanding more subservience, less masculinity, more education, less resistance, and more middleclass etiquette.” (A fascinating aspect is Contreras’ claim that poor New Yorkers who grew up in the mid-1990s had seen the horrors of crack and stayed away from it in favor of pot and alcohol, contributing to the decline of the cocaine market.)
Contreras argues that the robbers were ultimately motivated by the same ideologies that motivated Wall Street bankers (greed is good!) and that were celebrated by conservatives (you are responsible for yourself and only yourself). He also argues that toxic masculinity—reinforced by stays in jail—played an important role in the choices that they saw available to them. Also, the men he dealt with looked down on women, for much the same reasons, considering them all fundamentally degraded and buyable—whereas Contreras considers the fact that women were attracted to his money-dropping friends a way of trying to make the best of very limited options.
It’s a gripping and saddening read, and includes graphic accounts of the torture his subjects inflicted on their victims. Ostensibly dealers couldn’t give in without torture because, if they did, their suppliers would assume they’d participated in a fake robbery to cheat the suppliers. Often, the robbers were clued in by an associate of the dealer, but they had to pretend not to know where the drugs and money were in order to prevent implicating the associate, again meaning that torture was required. To justify themselves, the robbers blamed the victims, said that they were no different from corrupt police, and distinguished between the professional torturers who did only what was required and the amateurs who went overboard. Both among dealers and robbers, “[d]ouble-crossing was the norm”—Contreras reports incidents that sound like TV show storylines, where the men debate whether it’s simpler to murder a robbery partner or pay him his share, and then greet the partner with hugs and good wishes.
The male robbers worked with an attractive, underpaid “girl” in order to get an entrée into a dealer’s place or to get the dealer to brag about important details; though dealers were suspicious of men, especially when she approached them in front of other men, “[t]he girl meant potential sex in a bedroom, an alley, or rooftop. The sex meant demonstrating manliness to peers.… [T]hese drug robbers set what I call a masculinity trap, a play on a male’s manhood to victimize him…. A lone woman buying marijuana from a street peddler is perceived to be open to sex: she is bold (no male accompanies her).”
Paula S. Fass, The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child: The peculiarities of American childhood among Western nations, Fass argues, have long been in place, since authoritarian control over children gave way very early to increased freedom even before the American Revolution. “Europeans often described American children as rude, unmannerly, and bold. Americans were eager also to see themselves as different—fresher, newer, younger.” Wide availability of land, the ability to move away from constraining relations, and lack of specific laws governing inheritance lowered parents’ ability to control their children, even in the early generations of the United States when children went to work early in life because of persistent labor shortages. Work, in fact, provided young people with “a sense of the importance of their contribution and of their ability to create their own place in the world.” “Nowhere,” a nineteenthcentury French commentator said, “are children so free, so bold, such enfants terrible, as in America.” (Compare Lincoln’s unwillingness to discipline his children.) So complaints about our manners are old hat.
Fass also spends time on the dangers of the nineteenth century: “By the time they were sixteen, one-third of all slave children had been separated from their parents by sale or transfer, and this was likely an underestimation because it is based on the experiences of former slaves interviewed in the 1930s who were still young at the end of the war.” Nor was this experience of loss absent outside of slavery: “Before they turned twenty, almost half of American children in the decades from 1860 to 1880 had lost one parent.”
Industrialization and the end of slavery, Fass argues, crystallized a perceived crisis in children’s lives, leading to a public focus on protection for children and the use of public institutions “when parents seemed inadequate to the task.” While poorer and immigrant families required children’s labor to survive, “[t]he new standards of the family were class standards as the reformers incorporated class ideals into the very notion of family decency.” By the late nineteenth century, children faced new restrictions, and fostering desirable independence and good habits then became a problem to be solved by science and professionals.
By the 1930s, mothers (and immigrants), in particular, were supposed to look outside the home to learn childrearing principles. These principles were supposed to produce the independent child valued by American culture, but this was a challenge because improved health care and lower birth rates allowed American mothers to focus more resources and attention on each child, creating the perceived risk of coddling.
Astonishingly, from 1890 to 1930, the U.S. built an average of one high school per day, and high school enrollment rose from 18 to 73 percent from 1910 to 1940; these numbers were unequaled by any other country for a long time. As a high school education became more important, the resulting extended period of non-work and non-home immersion with peers shaped adolescence in uniquely American ways. High school meant a new kind of independence from parents while children were still economically dependent. Also, professionalization across occupations meant that there were fewer ways for children to make their own paths; they increasingly had to adjust to the larger society in order to succeed, but that didn’t require obedience to parents any more. Instead, especially among immigrant children, peers and teachers taught the American ethos. Kurt Vonnegut said in 1970: “High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.” (Fass doesn’t talk much about what high school was like—or, often, not like—for African-Americans, especially in the South.)
This extended period of non-working life, Fass suggests, eventually lay the groundwork for the student protests of the 1960s as well as sexual experimentation. She points out: “Had [college students] been raised at an earlier time, most would have been considered adults.” In a nod to my latest fandom, she notes that Todd Gitlin, one of the New Left’s leaders, was the same age as Alexander Hamilton when he became Washington’s right hand man.
Getting to today, Fass contends that what’s different is that childbearing is no longer seen as part of the natural order, and instead is treated as a choice (that no one else, including society at large, is under any duty to support). Compared to European parents who emphasize regularity and family time, American parents are more likely to emphasize individual attention and active interaction to develop a child’s independence—which leaves them (us) exhausted! Terrified that the slightest error will mean that their children will fall out of the middle/upper class, wealthier parents seek as much control as possible. The result is that children are encouraged to make choices without real responsibility: “overcontrolled and overindulged at the same time, while mothers are run ragged.” The fact that schooling has to last so long delays the perks of adulthood; high schools aren’t adequate stopping points for middle-class aspirations, and they also don’t provide enough vocational preparation. So high school isn’t the transition into adulthood any more, and no one really knows what is.
Kids in immigrant families face their own special challenges, when parents’ “lack of facility with the English language, unfamiliarity with the culture and with how American institutions operate provide one child with the opportunity to become mature, dependable, and knowledgeable long before similarly aged or placed American children are.” Such kids can feel unprepared for the adult matters they’re exposed to, and overworked, but they also get to be resourceful and upset the usual hierarchies in their families. While high schools were previously a force for assimilation, in the last third of the twentieth century they resegregated with a vengeance, so “[t]hose students who moved most strongly away from their parents’ culture moved toward peer cultures and values that were not middle class and devalued schooling.”
Damon Tweedy, Black Man in a White Coat: Memoir of Tweedy’s education as a doctor, grappling with microaggressions from teachers and patients and learning what his race could and couldn’t do in enabling him to connect with his mostly poor, black patients. A good read, albeit saddening.
Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: Thomas Jefferson again! The man had an enormous capacity to write beautiful sentiments and then not live up to them, that’s for sure. Ellis, writing before the DNA testing became definitive, expresses doubt about the Sally Hemings story as inconsistent with Jefferson’s fear of race mixing, but he doesn’t exclude the possibility. Basically, what Jefferson’s detractors see as his two-facedness, his fans see as flexibility and desire to smooth over conflicts. (By telling different people different things.) Most notably, Ellis discusses Jefferson’s free-spending ways in private as contrasted to his fear of public debt; instead of seeing this as a contradiction, he charitably attributes Jefferson’s anti-debt stance to his awareness of his own financial precarity, because Jefferson—like many of his compatriots—didn’t understand the difference between personal and national accounts. So “your debts are paid ‘cause you don’t pay for labor” is only partially true.
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anyway, I see that she's written a memoir/history of her family's experience in the Shoah and suddenly she's not odd any longer, she makes perfect sense.
thanks for the trip down memory lane ...