the guy by the door …

An explication of the relationship between Beauty, Sexuality, Marriagability, and Class. I’d love to write it right now, but I have to go guard the library. Read the next post down bbiab.

Jenna, Aggasiz Theater February 2006.

The Vagina Monologues

The Vagina Monologues has been performed on campus a number of times. I assume that all of them were in the Agassiz Theater in the Radcliffe Yard. I just discovered that Professor Juliet Schor, economist and feminist activist performed in 2000. I went in February of 2006. I did not know Jenna would be in it, but I was not surprised. I had met Jenna shortly after her arrival at Harvard at the Harvard Social Forum. She asked if she could interview me for a paper she was working on. I agreed on condition that I get to see the finished product. She seemed so delicate, I was afraid she would break if I even touched her. I was quite surprised when she was quoted in the Crimson. She was introducing Kim Airs, former HUCTW member, secretary to Dean Harry Rosovsky, and proprietor of the Grand Opening sex boutique. Jenna said, “Last year, before this, I thought I was having really good sex,…” At least, that’s what the Crimson says she said.

I was very impressed with the Vagina Monologues. It was highly graphic, but everyone was fully clothed. Most impressive was the comraderie nee sisterhood that permeated the cast and audience flowing seamlessly through the procenium.

The Women’s Center Art Show: More than Skin Deep

I am not free of sexism anymore than I am free of racism, anti-semitism, anti-Islamism, or any other form of xenophobia¹. I am very much a work in progress. I may have a certain vestigial prudery That is, I may have not fully escaped confusion about the relationship between Capitalism, Empire, and Sex. So when I received an invitation to the show, I wondered. I knew Jenna was in it. In fact, her’s was the “centerpiece.” Would she want me there to support her political activism? Or would she discover ways in which she is still a work in progress. That is, would she be creeped out showing a giant picture of her vulva to man in a dead end job who is older than her father? So I wrote to the curator of the exhibit. “By all means come, ” would have been fine. Or to tactfully decline with, possibly a hint about the reason, would have been fine. But what I got was no response at all. I feel that the Woman’s Center, an otherwise nobel effort, failed on that one.

I did realize there most probably are disparate views about how to address the relationship between class and sexuality. The woman HUPD officer, whose name I have temporarily forgotten, probably has a somewhat class bound view of things. Don’t get me wrong. The Center needs a Woman officer and self-defense training is highly recommended. But, the police should not be the major determinant of the sexual mores on campus. Similarly, the issue of rape, which Citizen Harry² regards as the most pressing issue of student life, cannot be solved by appeal to administrative authority.

¹Were I to include the full list it would consume a petabyte of storage on the server. [Canadian blogger jurgen claims this is half the content of all U.S. academic research libraries, but he gives no reference. Maybe j knows.] You may have noticed that Christianity is missing from the list. This is because having been raised in several disparate flavors of the Beast, my uneasiness is not based in ignorance as with those things I named. Based in familiarity, my critique of Christianity is somewhat more animated.

²“Citizen” is the appelation I use to refer to a member of the community who had administrative responsibility and subsequently returned to civilian life. I told Citizen Harry that I did so with love and he said he believed me. The statement about rape is from his book, “Excellence without Soul.”

For the couple from Seattle who came on Memorial Day. This it what it looks like when it’s working.

Thinking outside the rectangular parallelepiped.

*Thanks Joni!

The Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism wrapped for the year on Monday with student presentations:

April 28: New Research in the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism

• Meghan Morris: “Ethical Consumerism Meets Enviro-Capitalism: The ‘Moral Economy’ of Fair Trade Chocolate Production”

Meghan reported on first hand experience and struck a downbeat note:

… fair trade leaders forming part of the new transnational capitalist class disseminate fair trade ideology, notions of indigeneity and environmental sustainability, and the culture of ethical consumerism, peddling not only chocolate but transformed and reworked peripheral capitalisms, borne out of both resistance to and acceptance of the neoliberal paradigm.

On the other hand, Meghan won’t be at May Day - she will be making her compromise with the prevailing paradigm.

• Di Yin Lu: “Plunder and Profit: The Sacking of the Yuan Ming Yuan and the International Art Market”
• Shekhar Krishnan: “Bombay Cotton: Share Mania in the Colonial City”
• Caitlin Rosenthal: “Accounting for Labor: Information and the Factory in America, 1800-1850″

I will report on the other papers, but first… the practicum.

The Harvard contingent is just entering from the right.

The May Day Coalition website for 2008.

Tibetans and supporters have been in the Harvard Square Pit every evening since at least March 15 when they marched past the Winter Soldier gathering at the Unitarian Church.

Tibetan Monk in the Harvard Square Pit chanting ‘om mani padme hum’
- a mantra for compassion.

Sweat-free UNC banners outside the South Building University of North Carolina. [Photo: United Students Against Sweatshops]

University of North Carolina students are in day 5 of a sit-in of the lobby outside Chancellor James Moeser’s office. [Their statement via YouTube]

Similar protests ended in 31 arrests at Penn State, 6 at Appalachian State, and 9 at University of Montana¹.

¹The result of the U Montana protest was pointed out to me by Canandian blogger Molly who seems to know more than I do about what Boston’s anarchists are doing. Their link to the Boston May Day Coalition site is broken. Try this instead.

Stop torture took time from the home stretch pace of spring term to report on newly revealed remarks in the Whitehouse “Principles Committee”. Also, questions of the complicity of yet another Harvard Law School alum.

“Our Clothesline Project” by Take Back the Night April 2008

Guys,

You’re mentioned on the Take Back the Night “Our Clothesline Project” edition 2008. You’re not mentioned by full name and in mosts cases only by deed. I don’t judge, but I hear the pain in these women’s ‘voices.’ I simply want to share what I’ve learned. I’m am old bachelor. Desire is not as urgent as it once was, but I remember. Elektra says that because I’m a man, by definition, I hate women. I don’t believe it. I’ve done bad things to women. None of them would meet the legal standard of rape, but they might be called hateful. I don’t remember when I first began to realize it. Even in this very moment, I’m struggling to bring it further into the light. I’m afraid of women.¹ Part of it is her greater role in reproduction - the nearest reality to the impossible dream of immortality. That’s something well worth being afraid of. But it’s not the whole story. I remember when Faith was so desperately trying to get pregnant. It was like she was on trial. If she could not have a child, she would be condemned to a lesser class. It did not seem fair.²

In my youth, the conventional wisdom was that women want intimacy first and sex second - for men, the reverse. Young men would threaten to withhold intimacy to get their way. I played that game and sometimes it ‘worked’. But I didn’t win anything. For one thing, three minutes³ of panting and sweating lasts … well… just about three minutes. By the time you go through all the plotting and conniving, it really would be easier to take care of it by hand, unless … For another thing, if you think you have most of the say in the important things where women are concerned you’re an idiot. There really is nothing like it - when she has unambiguously, unmistakably chosen you.

I don’t know what I can tell you about intimacy, but from what I remember it was quite scary for me. From what I can see, it’s not easy for anybody. You might think staying aloof is the easy way out. I do not recommend it.

I gather from the shirts⁴ that listening and being able to hear is an important skill. Perhaps you can give it another try. Come hear the voices of women unheard. No one need know. Except you.

¹And yet I spend so much time thinking about them. But I’m told the younger men think a sexual thought every 7 seconds. I can go at least 10 without breaking a sweat. But seriously, I think about women often, but differently now.

²I was raised in the Episcopal Church - my mother’s church. I was at one point rehearsed in the six wives of Henry VIII - divorce, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. He declared himself head of the Church of England denying the authority of the Bishop of Rome. My mother denied, in a highly unspecific way, that Henry’s desire for a male heir was the cause. Catherine, the first wife got off easy. Her marriage was annulled, and she was consigned to living in minor castles with few servants for the rest of her life. Her successor, Anne Boleyn, having suffered more than one miscarriage and given birth to a daughter but no male heir, was beheaded.

³I know, stud. You can go sooooo much longer. Save it for the locker room.

⁴Some of the shirts are addressed to a male parent. I don’t know if I will have anything to say to them. I know only that when a child cannot say “no”, whatever “yes” might be coerced from her is bound to be meaningless or worse.

My mother Jo in the arms of Coco*, Pine St. somewhere in the South

My mother Jo, who as I mentioned, took me to see Gone with the Wind countless times. blamed slavery on the Northern businessmen. It may seem like a facile excuse, but apparently there is enough blame to go around.

Kathryn Boodry of Harvard presented her thesis proposal. Seth Rockman (Brown University) and Caitlin Rosenthal (Harvard University) were commentators.

Sven Beckert, Caitin Rosenthal, Kathryn Boodry, Seth Rockman, Louis Hyman. Beckert and Hyman are the unindicted co-conspirators cofacilitators of the seminar.

There were, in the antebellum period¹, two distinct sets of labor relations in the South and North - slavery and ‘free labor’ repsectively². According to Kathryn, the conventional wisdom is to view these as two separate economic systems. However, due to capital flows - trading and lending - the two are inextricably linked to the point that Kathryn proposes that they should be viewed as two parts of a single system. In fact, she finds including the end use of cotton in England to be essential to the analysis - not the American economy, the Atlantic economy. They’re kind of big on that kind of stuff at the Warren Center. A seminar participant from the Caribbean pointed out that due to trade in sugar cane and rum Atlantic economy should include the  Caribbean. Jack Womack was not there to represent South America, which does, if I remember correctly, border the Atlantic.

…more to come…

The workshop website.

*Coco was a servant at the time ~1917-18. My mother argues that the slaves must have been happy because they stayed on with the families as servants. My argument, underscored by an African scholar I know, ‘what choice did they have?’

¹I have to admit that in the preGoogle period, I never got it together to look up antebellum.

²Lauren Coyle, who was an editor of Unbound last year, objected that ‘free labor’ is a misnomer. “Where can you find working class people whose work is not coerced?” Professor Seth rejoined that there were differences in the details of compensation and the levels of violence used in the two cases.

You can honestly say that you don’t watch/listen to MSM [blogese for mainstream media]. On the left find a blogroll category “Actual News! Really!” cursor.org gives a concise well linked survey of the days print media and has an extensive list of links to other news sources. Democracy Now!, Link TV, Free Speech TV are available on cable as well as the internet. And there are several internet radio sources. Independent Media Center can be screechy, but then Fox has pretty much sucked any possible meaning out of “Fair and Balanced.”

Not a big deal, but noticable. I was asked about it by coworkers. One wanted to know about the lens I was using. I showed it to him. The other wanted to know why I was taking pictures of it. I don’t quite see why I would have to justify those pictures any more than any other. I was told that the Islamic students were asked to leave the Widener steps, but I was assured that on a previous occasion a Christian Fundamentalist preacher received a similar “request”. I was also told that there was discussion about whether the sound of the adhan constituted an imposition of belief on others. Analogy to blowing of the shofar was presented. However, the same source tells me that the same argument was used by denizens of Canaday to protest the ringing of the Memorial Church Bells. I’m told that these discussions were civil but animated.

… to “the guy who makes windows” wherein I will continue to recount tales of Sidney. You might say, “it’s been a while now,” to which I say:

rembrance is for the rememberers. the rememberee is otherwise occupied.

  -William F. Buckley, Jr.

Bill got one thing right in his life.

-the guy by the door.

It is, i am told, the Islamic Call to Prayer.

¹

¹

¹

Do I get what wearing the hijab is about? Egyptian Eyes told me, in somewhat legalistic terms, and I’m not sure I got it. But I did notice my attention being relentlessly drawn to her eyes. I was afraid to tell her how beautiful she is. I was afraid of causing friction between her and Allah. But she was disappointed with a picture another photographer had taken of her. She’s devout, not blind. If the eyes are the window to the soul, does the hijab focus attention on the profound?

Part of Islam Awareness Week sponsored by the Harvard Islamic Society.

¹Well, Joe it sure ain’t easy, especially trying to learn it as an old guy. I had ISO set all the way up from the night before. Hence much of the noise. More serious, I didn’t know what I had until later. I could not have gotten a close-up of the young man. I tried, but he had finished the adhan. But, as you can see I was near the women. A moment’s thought and I would have had something more than spectacular. But then perhaps it was not meant to be.

12:06 AM

…might explain some things.

Then again maybe not.

Harvard Masters of Business Administration 1975. [Photo: Wikimedia Foundation]

I have to go see Leo Godwin of the United States Internal Revenue Service in a bit. After seven years, he noticed that I sold $250,000 worth of stock. But what he did notice is that some of it was bought on margin. Which means, I didn’t have the money. And I sold it within a few minutes at essentially the same price because it was either moving the wrong way or was moving the right way and turned around. Most of the stock, I never owned, I borrowed it from the broker, sold it, and a few minutes later, bought stock to give back to the broker. This is called “selling short”. Some people make money doing this stuff, but I don’t have the constitution for it. It is a roller coaster ride powered by the conflict between fear and greed. I did it because I was pretty sure Harvard would succeed in outsourcing me and I needed to find some way to make money. That was not it.

Anyway, if you make money doing this stuff, it is taxed as income.¹ But Leo wants half of the $250,000, most of which I never had. Leo knows that there’s nowhere near that much in the account now. If Leo really wanted to be helpful, he would ask the broker if I every withdrew anything ‘cuz I didn’t. But Leo didn’t do that. Leo came to my apartment. Actually he met me on the porch, where I explained all this to him. He wanted me to fill out some forms and produce some records. I invited him in to show him why that was an unreasonable expectation. He refused. There’s a lot more to this story. Stay tuned. I do feel I owe an apology to that portion of the left that didn’t refuse to help me keep my job at Harvard, but not to the Gummint. Given that SCOTUS broke the court system in 2000 and the Executive … well… I’ll try the Legislative.

¹If you hold the stock for some period of months, it is then called “capital gains” and is taxed at a lower rate. The down side of that approach is that you actually have to have the money to buy the stock.

On Friday Feb. 15, 2008 Judge Jeffrey S. White of the U. S. District Court, Northern District of California, ordered Dynadot LLC, the Domain Name Registrar for Wikileaks.org, to “immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account to prevent access to and any changes from being made to the domain name and account information.”1 Wikileaks is the anonymized network that, among other things, released the Operations Manual for Camp Delta, Guantánamo.

A post in the wee hours of Saturday morning on Freedom4um noted the WikiLeaks either had Domain Name Service problems or was under a Temporary Restraining Order. Subsequent posters later in the morning confirmed that WikiLeaks was not accessible through its domain name wikileaks.org, but was accessible through some but not all of its Public Cover Names. Wired reported the story on Presidents Day [Monday Feb. 18, 2008].

I found out about this, NOT because Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society was practicing eternal vigilance. No, it was Havard’s Philosophy Librarian who still reads slashdot regularly who - in reporting on Google Knol - linked to slashdot. I followed the wrong link, scrolled to find Jason’s target, found this which points to an article by Apple employee #10 Robert X. Cringely.²

I do, at some point, want to get back to Jason’s Google Knol post, but the whole search business is such a can of worms. For example, what people with inside knowledge of Harvard’s deal with Google, went long on Google stock and shorted competitors? Does such conduct, if it occurred, “…conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness…”? Maybe the answer will appear on WikiLeaks.

¹This purported copy of the court order is being served up by WikiLeakS Christmas Island server. I suppose I could figure out how to confirm it’s authenticity, but the claim is there’s some law talent in the Berkman Center. Maybe they could do it more easily?
²He, among others, points out that the IP address [88.80.13.160] of the main U.S. site still works.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón visited his alma mater, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Some folks were not happy to see him:

Some believe he stole the election:

[Click no to fraud] With Nobel Laureates Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz^[1] on the board^[2], The Center for Economic And Policy Research is hardly a radical think tank. They found evidence of voting irregularities.^[3]

Two of the poorest of the Mexican states were represented. From Chiapas:

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN
or to us gringoes, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. They’re opposed to neo-liberal globalization. Probably don’t like the late Larry Summers either.

Representing Oaxaca, APPO Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca). They were formed in response to repression of labor organizing. Mumia Abu-Jamal writes.

I’m guessing at this point Calderon is being escorted out of the building.

The anarcho-syndicalists as well as the APPO are showing their flags. I have no idea what’s up with the Betsy Ross flag.

Caldergóne.

I have no idea what was said inside. I gave up trying to get into those things after the entire Kennedy School bought David Kaye’s Escherichia coli about Iraqi WMD, “We were all fooled.” All except the guy by the door. The proof is in the vault of the Clerk of the City of Cambridge.

Just prior to Calderón’s visit, Larry Cox of Amnesty International USA issued an open letter urging him to “…commit during your visit to ending serious human rights violations in Mexico…” Calderón is a KSG alum. Thanks to STOP TORTURE, we know about Alberto Gonzales. Today’s revelation is about Antonin Scalia HLS ‘80. What are we teaching these people?

A better world IS possible - precisely BECAUSE it is NOT INEVITABLE. What we do matters. All of us. Running around with flags in the cold, cold, dark is not nothing, but it is not a plan. What constitutes a vision seems to be in the mind of the beholder.^[4] The idea of a direction, allows for the possibility that folks might agree on something more than running around in the dark with flags. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s not looking too good for the Education Establishment as a vector for the urgently necessary progressive change.

^[1]In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz criticizes the methods of globalization used by the late Larry Summers during the “transition” of the Russian economy and later while Treasury Secretary.

²Note that Harvard Labor Economist Richard Freeman is also on the board. Most labor economists are paid by management to figure out how to “contain labor costs” i.e. increase profits at the expense of a lower standard of living for labor. Freeman seems to care about labor, but since Marty Feldstein is the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research and still has significant sway in Harvard Economics, it’s a tough row to hoe.

³In an earlier edition, I said they had found “voting regularities.” This was not a conscious snipe at the legitamacy of all electoral processes. However, my subconscious, if it exists, I cannot vouch for. A further apology: the post got too long to see the footnotes and get back easily. I’ve added bi-directional links to the superscripts. Hope that helps. I cribbed the basic hack from historian Roy Rosenzwieg and his bunch at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. But from the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ file, I had to ‘title’ some links and play with the typography especially when a superscript is attached to something already carrying a link. Mousing over the links will usually tell you something about the link that does not appear in the status bar. In some other cases I’m just being ‘high spirited’.

⁴I stole that from Noam. It started out, with respect to Iranian nuclear intentions, “Intention is in the eye of the beholder’. Vision is slipperier. For example, the Project for the New American Century is some people’s idea of a vision. The medium is not the same as the message. Content matters.

Eva Perón inscribed a “child’s text” about labor now on display.

My first choice of course was Elizabeth Kucinich. Dennis probably would be the best in the history of First Spice.

I’ve seen more Obama energy in and near Harvard Yard than any other candidate. Not a lot, but more than anyone else. If it comes down to it, I’ll gladly spend the hour it will take to vote for Obama. Hopefully, it will be an Obama-Edwards ticket. But the candidates “left standing” are all waffling on the Regional War in the Middle East. What’s wrong with America being number one in sustainable economic development? Or are we dedicated to My Lai on a regional scale? We have to destroy the region to save it?

We have a Supreme Court, largely Harvard trained, who clearly violated the legislative intent of the Constitution in 2000 and will be in place for another generation. A Congress unable to stop funding escalation in the region despite the Tide of ‘06 and a President who “signs away” a restriction on building a permanent presence and proposes to put more weapons in the region.

If we wait a year for change, it will be impossible. We need to be moving now, by every means possible.

Brothers consulting on their computing environment.

While not ready for Vista, we were ready for a new scanner/ copier/ printer.

Coco and Jo at Pine St somewhere in the South.

Jo was our mother. She took me to see “Gone with the Wind.” I don’t remember how many times.¹ My mother went into reveries about men with gleaming sabres on horseback². She remembers how handsome Billy Westmoreland looked in his uniform when he came to church³. I suspect “The Wind Done Gone⁴” is more my style.

¹Frankly Scarlettⁱ, I don’t give a damn.

²She was, however, partial to gray uniforms.

³I guess West Point Gray was close enought for herⁱⁱ. She could have held out for Annapolis Blue, but she married a Pennsylvania Dutch school teacher. Go figure.

⁴Make-believe, it would seem, in the Mind of the Law is real enough to merit the attention of the Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Was this case really about the money or was it about who owns history?

^IJo was a redhead too, but I was more circumspect with her.

^IIShe thought Billy got a raw deal about that “Viet Nam businessⁱ.”

ⁱShe was aware of the cautionary departing address of President/General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, for whom she and Guy both voted, but it seems to have had little or no effect on either of them.

[A picture of Gustavo which is in my other pants at the moment. Stay tuned.]

Actually, 9/11 truth has been in Harvard Square and Boston for quite a while, but this Saturday and Sunday folks from around the country will be gathering here to continue the investigation of the role that the Bush administration may have had in the events of September 11, 2001. Was it misfeasance or malfeasance aforethought? Former owner of Camp Casey¹, Cindy Sheehan, and former CIA agent Ray McGovern will be here.²

*If you don’t know this you’re even more nerdulent than I am. It’s Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in “A Few Good Men.” If you haven’t seen it Tom and Demi are both very hot in uniforms.

¹Peace and People with Disabilities activist Bree Walker bought it from Cindy.

²Ray is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Ray has supervised the preparation of PDB’s. [I can’t go. I have to guard the liberry. You can blog it!]

It was quite beautiful. Several acapella groups sang.
There was an intimacy. Was I intruding by being there?
But the message is for the world:

I’ve never known when it wasn’t this way.
I had forgotten that it doesn’t have to be this way.

It doesn’t. We must change it.

TeenAIDS.org is having a two day symposium webcast live. Day Two [today] is being webcast from Harvard. Curiously, they rented a satellite truck rather than use Harvard’s net. I’m guessing they understand institutional sociodynamics.  Put that in your Berkman Center and decrypt it.