There are papers to grade, classes to prepare, a search to finish, a conference to pack for, and yet….that last post gets colder and colder as the days roll by. So without further delay, here are some shorts to brighten your day:
Fat Armpits Are The Worst. Before returning to Brooklyn Sunday, I was in the newly-ronovated Acme Market in Bryn Mawr, PA loading up on my favorite diet foods — Tastykakes, scrapple — and reading gossip mags in the checkout line. The misogynist gem to the right caught my attention. Kim Kardashian, who was on the rampage last year because everyone could have a baby but her, has learned to her horror that a growing fetus can make a girl look dumpy.
It must be terrible to be so fragile. According to celeb mag In Touch, Kardashian is on the brink of a breakdown, having discovered that aging leads to age and pregnancy leads to weight gain. In her seventh…
Sue Sylvester sez: just announce it, Jodie. Photo credit.
This week, in the aftermath of another Christ on a cracker we already knew banal celebrity coming out speech the action was hot on Tenured Radical‘s Facebook page. I had responded to the irritating status prompt “How are you feeling, Claire?” by writing that I was “feeling”:
…a little puzzled as to why Jodie Foster needed to do the drama queen thing about coming out at the Golden Globes. Since we all knew she was a lesbian, a press release would have been fine.
I have received many likes (I like to be liked) and many comments, only one of which has accused me of unfairly silencing the little lamb. How many ways can I describe my annoyance that Foster chose her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award (for excellence…
Yesterday your favorite Radical took some time off and bicycled over Manhattan to see the Bob Mizer show at Invisible Exports, a tiny gallery on Orchard Street. Born in southern Idaho, Mizer (1922-1992) was an early physique photographer, filmmaker and the founder of Los Angeles’s Athletic Model Guild. This post over at Remains of the Web can give you a brief history of his career, as well as an account of the Bob Mizer Foundation, established to catalogue and preserve the capacious archive he left behind.
The gallery made the wise decision to show only a few conventional portraits. Much of the exhibit is made up of “catalogues,” storyboards Mizer created from contact prints, each of which depict an erotic scene (for example, “The Cowboy and the Bandit” or “The Unfaithful…
Margaret “Daisy” Suckley is on the far left. Photo credit.
This has been Mass Market British Culture Week at chez Radical (perhaps tomorrow we will have an Austin Powers festival.) So far we have been:
A Day Late and a Pound Short. Monday I watched the first episode of Downton Abbey, Season Three, broadcast on Sunday. It clocked in at almost two hours, which was a bit like lying on the couch eating salt water taffy for the evening. I can’t tell you anything very specific about the episode because I am sure there are people out there who have not watched it yet. I do have a few comments:
Memories of the class warfare theme from #election2012 are still vivid. This may be why I was particularly struck by how the series has settled in to an utterly specious and ahistorical fantasy about the harmonious…
How do other bloggers keep up the page and still find time to read and watch new stuff? How do they even manage to read the newspaper every day — and if they do, how do they find time to read anything else? And if they read, how do they find time to watch TV?
This year, I did take Facebook off my iPhone: that saved about an hour a day. I’m going to take it off my iPad in 2013.
With this caveat about how much I miss in our media-rich environment, I offer you my best discoveries of last year. Remember, to make the Radical’s “Best of” media list, you don’t have to be new — just new to me. You cannot, however, win a prize if you are my friend (which, for example, would rule out awarding best blog relaunch to Madwoman with a Laptop, so we are leaving that crown vacant this year, or best #ASA2012 panel to Historiann, Madwoman, GayProf, Tenured Radical, and The Woman Formerly Known as…
SpongeBob SquarePants, a veritable font of gaga kid knowledge, debuted on the Nickelodeon channel in 1999.
Halberstam and I planned part II of this interview about Gaga Feminism: Sex Gender and the End of Normal (Beacon 2012) around the topic of taking the observations of children seriously. History then intervened. In Sandy Hook, CT, 20 children and 7 adults were shot to death by a young man barely beyond adolescence himself; suddenly, this post became difficult and poignant. However, as Jack pointed out in an email, “perhaps it is even more appropriate” to talk about what children know, and what they care about, at this time.
I agree. We at Tenured Radical honor all of the deceased in Sandy Hook by reminding ourselves of why adult teachers, six of whom deliberately sacrificed their own lives for their…
When is a poodle not a poodle? When that poodle is gay Uncle Poodle.
On the season finale of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a reality television show about the life and times of a seven year-old beauty pageant contestant in Georgia, some portion of the civilized world was introduced to Lee Thompson, Honey Boo Boo’s “Uncle Poodle.” The rest of us learned about him in a New York Times op-ed piece by UNC – Charlotte cultural historian Karen Cox, most recently the author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Perhaps in anticipation of National Coming Out Day, Cox used Uncle Poodle’s entrance onto the national stage as an opportunity to suggest that there is more than one way to be out and proud in America….
In the spring of 2013, my university is going to be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (W.W. Norton, 1963). It’s particularly fitting that we do it here at the New School for Public Engagement, I think, because a big part of our mission is to reach out to adults and non-traditional students who want to finish a college education that was foreclosed or interrupted. Although Betty Friedan was not that person, her activism and writing nonetheless caused women to finish their educations and get back in the workforce.
Betty Friedan was not so good on lesbians, however, causing people like Kate Millett and Ti-Grace Atkinson to abandon Friedan’s fledgling National Organization for Women in facor of the rock ‘em, sock ‘em world of radical feminism. Hence, let me be perhaps hte first to point out that 2013 will also be the fortieth anniversary of…
Comedian Michael O’Donoghue once wrote a poem that began, “A blizzard blew an Eskimo way down to Egypt-land. He found they had no word for snow, and he no word for sand.” The poem goes on to describe the Egyptian and the Eskimo’s search for a common language, “the thing that each man shares.”
In work avoidance mode this morning, I was scanning Facebook (when, oh when, will I have the courage to leave Facebook?) when I stumbled on this gem. Stuart Hodes, who blogs at 101% American, is 87 years old, a veteran of World War II, and a former bomber pilot. In the video re-posted below, “Mitt Romney Rap,” he summarizes the GOP presidential candidate’s biography, as well as the history of the Romney family in the Americas. Words and original posting can be found here.
Hodes, who has been blogging since 2011 and believes that the path to deficit reduction means paying his fair share of taxes, comes by his history chops honestly.
I am Claire B. Potter, Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement, New York, NY. My specialties are feminism, political history and cultural criticism. Selections from my scholarly and public writing can be found here.
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Doing Recent History
Contributors to this collection, edited by Claire Potter and Renee Romano, consider the wide range of challenges the practice of contemporary history poses. These essays address sources like television and video games, the ethics of writing about living subjects, questions of privacy and copyright law, and the possibilities that new technologies offer for writing history. Doing Recent History offers guidance and insight to any researcher considering tackling the not-so-distant past. Buy the Book
The Chronicle Blog Network, a digital salon sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education, features leading bloggers from all corners of academe. Content is not edited, solicited, or necessarily endorsed by The Chronicle. More on the Network...
Claire Potter's is the first book to look at the structural, legal, and cultural aspects of J. Edgar Hoover's war on crime in the 1930s, a New Deal campaign which forged new links between citizenship, federal policing, and the ideal of centralized government.
War on Crime reminds us of how and why our worship of violent celebrity hero G-men and gangsters came about and how we now are reaping the results.
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