That’s quite a lineup they have planned for this symposium.

In June 2008, the second and revised edition of Harrison White’s opus magnum Identity and Control was published (Princeton University Press). On this occasion, we plan to hold an international symposium for a discussion of the Relational Sociology around White in Berlin on the 25th and 26th of September 2008.

Goals of the symposium are to promote Relational Sociology in Germany (where it is still widely unknown), and, furthermore, to discuss its theoretical arguments, also in comparison to other theories of social structures, shed light upon its methodological implications, and highlight empirical applications in various fields…

Here’s the conference web site. H/t Tina Guenther.

Last night I dreamt I was in a noisy and crowded room, much like a high school cafeteria, and an unfamiliar professor appeared, gloating with malicious intent, and forced me to take my doctoral certification exam as a ‘pop quiz.’ To add insult to injury, the examination was on Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics,. Sheesh. Could this have anything to do with the fact that yesterday evening, for the first time in years, I took a drag on a cigarette? Or is it just a sign of the slow sociological warping of my mind?

Anyway, regarding dreams: in my last post I reviewed Joachim Trier’s film ‘Reprise,’ but I was remiss in not mentioning that the movie was his first feature film. In this respect it recalls the equally audacious debut by Erich Zonka, whose 1998 movie ‘The Dreamlife of Angels‘ was so !@$# brilliant that I still recall whole scenes from it, ten years later. Like ‘Reprise,’ it focuses on two young individuals, here working-class women in northern France, conveying the giddying sense of a developing friendship before going on to show its slow fraying and finally devastating end. Incredibly enough, I went onto Netflix and found out that there’s no DVD version of this film out as of yet, so this clip will have to satisfy. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the first minute or so to get a flavor of the film, but don’t watch it to the end if you want to remain in suspense as to its conclusion. The camera work in the first minute or so is just fascinating; note how it plays with distance as the emotional registers change.

Zonka’s apparently a slow and deliberate worker; since ‘Dreamlife’ came out, he’s produced one short 60-minute film in the years since, assuming his IMDB profile is up to date. This spring, though, he directed an English-language feature starring Tilda Swinton called ‘Julia,’ apparently an homage if not a remake of one of my favorite films, John Cassavetes’ Gloria, starring Gena Rowlands. I couldn’t find any information, however, about the possibility of a U.S. release for the movie. (The thought that a Tilda Swinton movie could not make it to these shores is incredible, and therefore banished.)

*Replete with SPOILERS*

I don’t go to the movies very often nowadays - it’s been a long while since I’ve seen anything especially entertaining, and so movie-going has devolved into a stress-relieving, work-avoiding, meet-up-with-friends and (especially during the summer) get some air-conditioning sort of thing. But early last week I decided to walk down to BAM to see the recently released Norwegian film Reprise, and was so enthralled and so utterly stricken with admiration for the movie that I went back a few days later, bringing a friend in tow (she didn’t regret it, despite misgivings at paying the $12 that’s now the uniform price of admission at movie theaters around the city). The film is the best thing I’ve seen in a long, long while; and while I qualify this in full acknowledgment that there have been many good movies that have come out over the past year that I’ve yet to see, I’d not hesitate to recommend it as something that ought to be caught while it’s still in the theaters. Reprise is on its face a quiet drama with dark and comedic elements, set against the overcast skies of a somewhat grey and drab Oslo. Yet, it has a style and wit and audaciousness in its rendering of life that demands and deserves a theater viewing. The film’s deceptive simplicity - it’s about a group of friends and their ups and downs, as they try to gain some footing in their world - masks a phenomenological complexity and sophistication that one is more likely to come grasp, and enjoy, in the darkened and hermetic enclosures of a theater, rather than as a DVD rental at home, where (if your home is like mine) a thousand and one things stand in wait as distractions. In short, the film distills seemingly ordinary experience into a visual language of extraordinary clarity - a language that attempts to show, as Erik (one of the film’s main characters) says, life in ‘all of its nuances’ - and deserves a measure of applause for even attempting such a thing.

The story itself would not seem to offer very promising grounds for something that ends up being so pregnant with meaning. It centers its attention on two young men, Phillip and Erik, both in their early 20s, each burning with literary aspirations. They’re surrounded by a small group of male friends, while women - girlfriends and mothers - criss-cross in and out of their lives. They live their lives enjoying familiar comforts that are nevertheless bathed in keenly felt uncertainties, both enjoying one another’s friendship and company while sniping at their respective insecurities. In fact, much of the film’s humor derives from the painfully smart-alecky jokes and jibes that they aim at one another, and which must have been the hallmark of the adolescence they’ve barely left behind. They’re well-read, culturally aware and yet, as one of the female characters rightly complains, horribly immature.

But however deft the film is in its humor and cultural observations, it seems to me more about the carving of time through the workings of the imagination; the film has a narrative and is, in a sense, about narrative. It begins with Phillip and Erik meeting at a mailbox, encouraging and motivating each other as they prepare to send off their manuscripts to a publisher. Phillip, perhaps the more talented of the two, has his manuscript accepted right away; but as the brighter flame, so to speak, we see him proceed in short order from the world of literary attention to a state of psychosis and breakdown. The film, as many films do nowadays, plays with sequence and chronology, so that we are initially led to understand his unhinging to have been caused by an uncontrolled obsession over Kari, his caring and loving girlfriend. But in the midst of laying this out, the movie sends him walking off carelessly into a street, distracted by his attentions to Kari, whereupon he is hit by a car. He gets up, seemingly unhurt, but the disorientations start soon after, and the film leaves us to wonder where and how the breakdown started - with his rapid ascent, with his budding relationship, with the car accident. Whatever the source of his troubles, the effect is devastating, and not only on him. We see the talents and successes he has managed to develop and accumulate over a young lifetime of dedication and ambition dissipate just as quickly and mysteriously - even though it reappears in flickers, as in a late sequence in which he manages to push out a story in a single night, despite the fact that his still-tenuous recovery has largely robbed him of the will to write.

As Phillip struggles, the film subtly shifts its attentions to Erik, his genial and warm-hearted friend. Though as passionate as Phillip to the task of producing great literature, Erik’s confidence is patchy, complicated by his eagerness to please. His manuscript, unlike Phillip’s, was initially rejected, and we see him regarding his words with uncertainty and self-doubt. In fact, the film gives us little clue regarding the quality of his (or Phillip’s) writing, but he’s confident enough to insist upon a difficult title for his book, even though he tends to distance himself from its themes by constantly “framing” his “observations” in “air quotes,” something for which he is roundly mocked - the film ironizes irony. Because his success is slower in coming, Erik spends much of the early portions of the film looking at his friend, worried and concerned. But after a much-revised version of book his accepted, he’s confronted with a series of situations that forces him against his own inclination and actions to harden his resolve and set out on a path of uncertainty and risk, rather than remain in the more familiar surrounds that’s shaped and governed his life up to this point. Yet this is something that takes the entirety of the film to accomplish. For most of the movie, instead, Erik glides by, telling stories that amount to nothing more than little white lies, allowing him to maintain his relationships in as painless a manner as possible. But this leads to a paradox: nagged by self-doubt, and motivated by a consuming fear of being viewed by others as shallow, everything he does as a result ensures that he becomes shallow. It is not until the end when, finally exposed, he attempts to demonstrate his depth by engaging in a rare but singular act of meanness and cruelty, setting in motion a chain of events that leads to the sundering of his relationship with Phillip. The film suggests that Erik recognizes that this the price he has to pay to redeem the ambitions which he and his childhood friend once shared together, but which he now carries alone; and yet he is the first to recognize what a burningly shameful thing he has done to get to this point.

The film makes a number of narrative leaps and jumps; it often takes a moment to grasp whether what you’re seeing on screen is a projection of what will happen, or a reconstruction of what has already taken place. And yet, while much of this done cleverly, it never seems smart: rather, these leaps backward and forward in time and thought, crossing boundaries between the imagined and the actual, strike me as true and faithful to a kind of experience of the world that’s arises in acknowledgment of and in response to its intrinsic uncertainties. The film both begins and ends with an unseen narrator drawing out elaborate futures for Phillip and Erik, working out arcs and pathways that bring them to a reconciliations of different kinds: in the beginning of the film, a reconciliation of both to the uncertainty and demands of the craft and vocation they’ve knowingly embarked upon; and in the end, a reconciliation with each other, showing Erik as now-confident novelist returning after a sojourn abroad to re-establish his friendship with Phillip, thereby healing the painful ruptures and the widening gaps in their respective life courses. These bookend narratives are both funny and moving, and yet we know by the end of the film that the first vision of reconciliation never came to pass as Phillip and Erik would have had it; and the second, we see in Erik’s face, will quite likely never come to pass. These kinds of visions of life both in and out of time, standing ‘out there,’ as a supply of possibilities, underwrites what I think is the film’s central sensibility: the reprise, the recurrent reliving in the mind of these possibilities, in hopeful anticipation of what could be despite what uncertainties await, or in rueful regret of what has been lost, but remains lingering about, as potent as ever.

I could easily go on, talking about the film’s appropriation of themes and motifs from other movies, its use of ‘turning points’ to structure the narrative, its sexual politics, and so on and so forth. But any energy spent reading my babbling is a waste; the better use of time would be to just see this film.

Holy Batman! I just noticed this blog is now a year old.

Excuse me for patting myself on the back for this minor accomplishment. Among my many shortcomings, perhaps the one that bothers me the most is my habit for starting on something with enthusiasm - various hobbies, PhD programs, whatever - only to drop it after a short while for lack of interest. I can’t count the number of languages I’ve studied for a year or two before wandering off: I can ask “How much is this?” in ten different tongues, but that’s pretty much about it. So that I’ve managed to keep this blog alive for a year is a good sign to me. I’m going to try for two!

Of course, I haven’t been immune to the temptation of shutting the whole thing down. I started out wanting to blog on the arguments and ideas in education, sociology, culture, arts…but then it became a chore, trying to ‘feed the monster’ with a never-ending series of substantive posts. It wasn’t so much that I felt like I needed to satisfy an audience (which was, and remains, pretty tiny). But it didn’t seem worth doing unless I had “something to say,” but what that was I often had hardly any idea. I’m just not that quick with insight or argument.

Well, about two or three months ago (coinciding, funnily enough, with the end of major, stress-inducing project), I just learned to take it easy a bit. I now see that this particular effort is a freshman one, and that my aspirations for something more sustained and expansive vis-a-vis my academic, intellectual, professional interests may come later: whether here or in a different blogging context, I don’t know. In the meantime, I’ve allowed myself to relax and not worry about whether or not I’m saying anything immediately substantive or on point. Just using this as a motivation to write is benefit enough. While academics, established or wanna-be, are supposed to write, and write often, opportunities to develop a personal style remain rare, and I think that’s one of the real plusses of being a blogger.

Blogging to me is still a fascinating endeavor. I started blogging because I loved reading and learning from other blogs, and engaging in the kinds of free-wheeling ‘aleatoric’ conversations, as I think Larval Subjects once described it that struck me as a virtue of communicating through this medium. A year ago that seemed naively doable, but after prolonged exposure to the blogosphere I have to admit I can hardly keep up. ‘Stuff’ - ideas, images, memes - circulate with a speed I find dizzying; and being ‘current’ with what gets said, or posted, elsewhere, is difficult, and often time-consuming. Yet it’s the best that we have as a contemporary equivalent to the by-gone salons and circles, and more democratic than those too, so I’m happy to occupy this little corner as best as I can.

I have to confess that until about 6 months ago, I had read very little of Howard Becker’s work. Then I came across his charming web site (well, I find it charming at any rate) and started dropping in every so often to read his articles and essays, some of them unpublished, apparently. He’s even managed to convince me to buy a couple of his books. That says something about being internet accessible, I guess. (Er…not ‘internet accessible,’ which makes it sound like he answers e-mail, which he may or may not do. ‘Web 2.0′ perhaps.)

Update: title edited to reflect that it’s the still-living Howard S, not the deceased Howard P, whose web site it is.

A friend recently pointed me to the on-line archives of The Mike Wallace Interview. The interviews are pretty fascinating for various reasons, the most immediately noticeable being the amount of smoking that goes on in them.* Part of the requirement of putting on the show, I guess, given that it was sponsored by Philip Morris - but still!

Yet the range of guests and the types of questions discussed - racial problems, religious intolerance, economic injustice, etc. - impresses, and confirms that today’s talk TV, while perhaps (and only perhaps) less tolerant of giving expression to rank stereotype and prejudice, pays a kind of price in terms of increased attention to surface and false unity. The exercise of distilling and discussing controversial ideas and arguments gravitated instead to ‘news,’ taking on the coloration of shock-value and attention-getting, rather than gaining footing in more conversational venues.

Well enough media theory. Of the interviews I’ve watched so far one of my favorites has been the one with Salvador Dali, a bit of which went as follows:

WALLACE: Dali, first of all let me ask you this, you’re a remarkable painter and you’ve dedicated your life to art, in view of this, why do you behave the way that you do? For instance, you have been known to drive in a car filled to the roof with cauliflowers. You lectured, as I mentioned, once with your head enclosed in a diving helmet and you almost suffocated. You issue bizarre statements about your love for rhinoceros horns and so on. You’re a dedicated artist, why do you or why must you do these things?

DALI: Because for this kind of eccentricities correspond with more important and the more tragical part of my life.

WALLACE: The more important and the more tragical part. I don’t understand.

DALI: The more philosophical.

WALLACE: Well, what is philosophical about driving in a car full of cauliflowers or lecturing inside a diving helmet?

DALI: Because discover and make one tremendous speech, a most scientific in the Sorbonne in Paris… of what my discovering of the logarithmic curve of cauliflower.

WALLACE: The what?

DALI: logarithmic curve of cauliflower.

WALLACE : Oh yes, the “logarithmic curve”… yes…

DALI: And if in time the logarithmic curve in the horns of rhinoceros — in this time discover, this is a symbol of chastity, one of the most powerful symbols of modern times.

Wallace flummoxed. I also tried to watch the interview with Rod Serling, only to find that his voice really does have the effect of inducing a trance. I couldn’t remember a thing of what he said:

Anyway, check them out, if you want a bit of a time capsule experience.

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*I just started watching Mad Men, the cable show about executives in an 1960s advertising firm busy in the business of inventing modern media. Aside from its depiction of rampant racism and sexism, the thing that gives the show its OMG! factor is the fact that no character goes a minute on screen without lighting up.

I’m only freelancing this conference as paid help, but the Society for Disability Studies is hosting their annual conference at Baruch College next week. The program looks interesting, and I just had lunch with a former president of the society who called my attention to how the field is proliferating across national contexts. So that’s something to think about, too.

http://www.disstudies.org/conference

The Times today reports:

The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.

The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.

But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.

Perhaps because I’m Asian-American myself (Japanese American, to be precise) and also perhaps because I’m often spectacularly out of touch, I’m flummoxed to find that this constitutes something surprising. Do we really need a report to poke holes in the idea that all Asian Americans are alike, or do well in school, or go on to become engineers and scientists and mathematicians? Honestly!

I don’t mean to belittle the fact that Asian American students are sometimes subjected to various demeaning stereotypes, or to deny that awareness of cultural differences among Asian nationalities is often virtually non-existent, or to dismiss out of hand the possibility that some (elite) universities may be trying to keep a lid, more or less, on their Asian American student enrollments. But I find it paradoxical that the point of the report was to emphasize that not all Asian Americans are alike but are actually quite diverse - without really telling us much about that diversity, other than to say that many struggle in school, don’t go into engineering, and don’t have a lock on admissions into an elite university. Of course, I’m being unfair to the report, since I haven’t read it, but the news summaries (not only in the Times, but Inside Higher Ed as well) suggest that the instruction we should take away is: look really hard, and you’ll see the differences. But we’re only going to give you hints about where and how to look.

Some of my irritation with discussions of this kind has to do with comparisons and gestures such as these:

The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”

To which my response is: Oh good grief. I’ve never felt like ‘a solution’ to anything, and I don’t know any of my Asian American friends or cousins who do, either. Of course, this limited sample, such as it is, hardly constitutes a refutation of the point; as I mentioned, I may simply be out of touch, and there may be hordes of Asian American students out there, laboring under the demand that ‘they are a solution.’ But I think not - they may be laboring under parental demands or various forms of peer pressure, and these can be significant, but I hardly think that the social burdens they carry can be even remotely characterized in this way, which invites a kind of comparison with the black American experience that’s not warranted. And so even to suggest that *this* captures the problems faced by young ‘Asian Americans’ (as a unit? as a whole?) is to succumb to or indulge in a kind of patronizing stereotyping itself.

Perhaps my incredulity at the necessity of being presented with such seemingly self-evident findings - self-evident, at any rate, to anyone who bothers to pay the least bit of attention - is the effect of living in New York, where the juxtaposition and overlapping of so many different communities induces awareness of ethnic and cultural difference, not only within the various Asian American communities but across the cultural spectrum. (Although this is perhaps a patronizing assumption of my own, about New York vis-a-vis the rest of the country.) Yet the report’s findings still strike me as truistic, rather than revelatory.

Lord. I may never sleep again, much less do anything useful. Construct your own font, if you’re so inclined. H/T Slate.

…while we do some remodelling around here. Time for a fresh coat of paint or two.

(Hours of fiddling later, I’m so dissatisfied with the various options available to me - and the custom image header function in WordPress seems to be having some problems as well - that I’m reverting to the most basic format that I can tolerate. Fiddling continues.)

Days later, I’m reverting back to the original theme, though I’ve decided to give the site a sepia-toned hue. It’ll have to last for a while; too many ‘real’ things to do.