Copying toastykitten's idea of doing many 2013 meme topics at once
Day 24: Are there any minoritarian takes on what has happened in history (I am avoiding the phrase "conspiracy theories") that engage your curiosity for one reason or another?
No. Well, that was easy! Ha. I really don't give a shit about conspiracy theories and I think they're 100% bullshit.
Day 25: What is this War on Obesity all about?
This isn't so easy. I think there is a lot going on here, from simple capitalism (the weight-loss industry is ENORMOUS and enormously profitable, from corporate behemoths like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig to fly-by-night internet commandos who tell you about "one weird rule for flattening your tummy!" to food industry titans who produce Splenda (hi, Northwestern... or maybe your researchers invented that earlier one, in the blue packet?) to Olestra to blah blah blah) to the inevitable results of cars and decline in walking, to the unknown results of pesticides and toxins in our environment -- as far as people generally getting fatter, and as far as capitalism succeeding at making money off of that. Then you add the United States' insanely libertarian counterintuitive notions of privatized healthcare, and punishing and excluding people who in actuarial terms will cut into insurance profits. Culturally, the contemporary social policing of acceptable bodies (particularly women's "acceptable" bodies) collides with these factors and with the moralizing examples of anti-smoking campaigns, anti-drugs campaigns, the "War on Drugs" rhetoric, and stigmas around class and consumption, you get Michelle Obama's "War on Obesity". It's incredibly oppressive and horrible. The idea that someone's workplace could punish them for their weight, for example, is horrifying. And it's happening. The cultural and political opposition to this -- fat studies, fat rights, Health at Every Size (HAES), the harm reduction model -- all of those are helpful, but it's an area where the viciousness and prejudice is widespread and often ignored, even by progressive or left wing culture, such as that is. All very difficult, and I live it every fucking day.
Day 26: If you could time travel and be a time-anthropologist for a while, without sticking out like a sore thumb (you have the language and clothes and appropriate money and a reasonable back story) when and where would you go? (I might repeat this question more than once; I can think of several time periods to write about)
This deserves a longer answer. Dunno if it will get that right now. I'd love to see what the insides of the suffragist movement and other early 20th C. reform movements were like, for example -- to live at Hull House for a while, and see what Chicago in 1910 was like, immigrants, and women, and progressive reform, and cranky Anarchist celebrity widow Lucy Parsons, and visiting speaker Emma Goldman, and women trade unionists -- oh, man the Triangle Fire, though in New York City and a year later -- and American socialists and the IWW and my own Southern biracial union, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which struck and was destroyed by lumber operators in 1910... Yeah. Say, June 1910 to June 1911 in the United States, able to travel around. That would be FASCINATING. I could meet people from my (unwritten but fully researched) dissertation!
Day 27: Why do you think people delude themselves that getting rid of anonymity makes the world a nicer place?
I guess they think that anonymity online allows people to be meaner assholes. But it seems to me that even having your identity linked online doesn't necessarily make people nicer (witness Facebook posts, where MOSTLY people use their own names) even among friends.
Day 28: Who is a historical figure you find interesting, and why? (Again, this is repeatable multiple times)
My classic answer would be Rosa Luxemburg, who has fascinated me since I was a (revolutionary) child. I read a volume of her letters to Leo Jogisches, her mostly long distance lover, in college at the University of Sussex, and its kittenish, vulnerable, emotionally dependent tone (contrasted to her public contempt for socialist "women's" politics) satori'd me straight into feminism, which I had not at all understood the need for, before that. But there are other historical figures I would love to know more about (or, in the case of the earlier posited historical time-traveling anthropology, to meet and possibly get to know). Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr (Hull House, lifelong companions); Eleanor Marx; Mary Wollstonecraft; Aphra Benn; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Victoria Woodhull; Isabella Beecher Hooker; and oh, why not -- Lucy Maud Montgomery and Frances Hodgson Burnett and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yeah, the whole Beecher clan (Catharine included, but Lyman and Henry definitely EXCLUDED) utterly fascinate me. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper; Herland) is part of that clan, too...
Day 29: What fiction that you have read recently would you review/recommend?
Let's see. Of re-reads, I would always recommend Margaret Frazer's Sister Frevisse mysteries, set in the 1430s in a Benedictine priory. They're much more serious and better researched than the Brother Cadfael mysteries, although I like those for what they are, as well. Also Frazer's Player Joliffe series. Of books new to me, my niece (and John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars) both recommended to me, one directly and one via an internet list -- a trilogy by Veronica Roth with the titles Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant. I have finished the first two books -- sort of a mash-up of ideas from The Hunger Games and Lois Lowry's The Giver series, but set in an a post-apocalyptic ramshackle downtown Chicago, on the shores of the brown, mostly dead, Marsh Michigan. So I guess the apocalypse was at least partly climate-related? The Bean is mentioned. Also the Hub (former Sears Tower), the Merchandise ("Merciless") Mart, the Hancock building, and the stone buildings across Michigan Avenue from Millenium Park. Very odd. They're interesting, very action-oriented for this generation of action junkies, somewhat thought-provoking as to how a person defines their basic characteristics or aptitudes. Not very deep. Enjoyable. What else? Another YAF book -- it's not incredibly new, but I hadn't read it before, though I'd seen the cover and title and thought, "Oh, I should read that." It's really good -- Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye, who is a Palestinian-American poet and songwriter and author. Older than I thought. The novel is about a Palestinian-American girl whose father moves them from St. Louis to just outside Jerusalem. Its detail of the country and the conflict is deep and also poetic.
No. Well, that was easy! Ha. I really don't give a shit about conspiracy theories and I think they're 100% bullshit.
Day 25: What is this War on Obesity all about?
This isn't so easy. I think there is a lot going on here, from simple capitalism (the weight-loss industry is ENORMOUS and enormously profitable, from corporate behemoths like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig to fly-by-night internet commandos who tell you about "one weird rule for flattening your tummy!" to food industry titans who produce Splenda (hi, Northwestern... or maybe your researchers invented that earlier one, in the blue packet?) to Olestra to blah blah blah) to the inevitable results of cars and decline in walking, to the unknown results of pesticides and toxins in our environment -- as far as people generally getting fatter, and as far as capitalism succeeding at making money off of that. Then you add the United States' insanely libertarian counterintuitive notions of privatized healthcare, and punishing and excluding people who in actuarial terms will cut into insurance profits. Culturally, the contemporary social policing of acceptable bodies (particularly women's "acceptable" bodies) collides with these factors and with the moralizing examples of anti-smoking campaigns, anti-drugs campaigns, the "War on Drugs" rhetoric, and stigmas around class and consumption, you get Michelle Obama's "War on Obesity". It's incredibly oppressive and horrible. The idea that someone's workplace could punish them for their weight, for example, is horrifying. And it's happening. The cultural and political opposition to this -- fat studies, fat rights, Health at Every Size (HAES), the harm reduction model -- all of those are helpful, but it's an area where the viciousness and prejudice is widespread and often ignored, even by progressive or left wing culture, such as that is. All very difficult, and I live it every fucking day.
Day 26: If you could time travel and be a time-anthropologist for a while, without sticking out like a sore thumb (you have the language and clothes and appropriate money and a reasonable back story) when and where would you go? (I might repeat this question more than once; I can think of several time periods to write about)
This deserves a longer answer. Dunno if it will get that right now. I'd love to see what the insides of the suffragist movement and other early 20th C. reform movements were like, for example -- to live at Hull House for a while, and see what Chicago in 1910 was like, immigrants, and women, and progressive reform, and cranky Anarchist celebrity widow Lucy Parsons, and visiting speaker Emma Goldman, and women trade unionists -- oh, man the Triangle Fire, though in New York City and a year later -- and American socialists and the IWW and my own Southern biracial union, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which struck and was destroyed by lumber operators in 1910... Yeah. Say, June 1910 to June 1911 in the United States, able to travel around. That would be FASCINATING. I could meet people from my (unwritten but fully researched) dissertation!
Day 27: Why do you think people delude themselves that getting rid of anonymity makes the world a nicer place?
I guess they think that anonymity online allows people to be meaner assholes. But it seems to me that even having your identity linked online doesn't necessarily make people nicer (witness Facebook posts, where MOSTLY people use their own names) even among friends.
Day 28: Who is a historical figure you find interesting, and why? (Again, this is repeatable multiple times)
My classic answer would be Rosa Luxemburg, who has fascinated me since I was a (revolutionary) child. I read a volume of her letters to Leo Jogisches, her mostly long distance lover, in college at the University of Sussex, and its kittenish, vulnerable, emotionally dependent tone (contrasted to her public contempt for socialist "women's" politics) satori'd me straight into feminism, which I had not at all understood the need for, before that. But there are other historical figures I would love to know more about (or, in the case of the earlier posited historical time-traveling anthropology, to meet and possibly get to know). Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr (Hull House, lifelong companions); Eleanor Marx; Mary Wollstonecraft; Aphra Benn; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Victoria Woodhull; Isabella Beecher Hooker; and oh, why not -- Lucy Maud Montgomery and Frances Hodgson Burnett and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yeah, the whole Beecher clan (Catharine included, but Lyman and Henry definitely EXCLUDED) utterly fascinate me. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper; Herland) is part of that clan, too...
Day 29: What fiction that you have read recently would you review/recommend?
Let's see. Of re-reads, I would always recommend Margaret Frazer's Sister Frevisse mysteries, set in the 1430s in a Benedictine priory. They're much more serious and better researched than the Brother Cadfael mysteries, although I like those for what they are, as well. Also Frazer's Player Joliffe series. Of books new to me, my niece (and John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars) both recommended to me, one directly and one via an internet list -- a trilogy by Veronica Roth with the titles Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant. I have finished the first two books -- sort of a mash-up of ideas from The Hunger Games and Lois Lowry's The Giver series, but set in an a post-apocalyptic ramshackle downtown Chicago, on the shores of the brown, mostly dead, Marsh Michigan. So I guess the apocalypse was at least partly climate-related? The Bean is mentioned. Also the Hub (former Sears Tower), the Merchandise ("Merciless") Mart, the Hancock building, and the stone buildings across Michigan Avenue from Millenium Park. Very odd. They're interesting, very action-oriented for this generation of action junkies, somewhat thought-provoking as to how a person defines their basic characteristics or aptitudes. Not very deep. Enjoyable. What else? Another YAF book -- it's not incredibly new, but I hadn't read it before, though I'd seen the cover and title and thought, "Oh, I should read that." It's really good -- Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye, who is a Palestinian-American poet and songwriter and author. Older than I thought. The novel is about a Palestinian-American girl whose father moves them from St. Louis to just outside Jerusalem. Its detail of the country and the conflict is deep and also poetic.