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In 1987, when I went to see U2 in Tempe, Arizona, I was 17 and my mom had to drive me all the way from San Diego. I barely had the funds to buy the tour T-shirt that I plan to wear tonight (I think I paid in quarters).
Now, over 30 years later, I'm taking my own 16-year-old daughter to see the band in Philly, and I have enough money to buy us both T-shirts!
My original tour shirt from the concert where they filmed Rattle & Hum
Two tickets for the floor!
These arrived in the post yesterday. These are the bound galleys that will go out for long-lead media and potential blurbers. After months of slaving away on this, it's so satisfying to see my words manifest in print.
In my research on the Bulgarian typewriter factory in Plovdiv, I stumbled across a couple of earlier models. The German Erika is probably from the 1920s, and I bought it and brought it home with me to the United States to add to my growing typewriter collection. It needs a good clean up, but otherwise it works like a charm.
Some scenes from Plovdiv. The first image shows that Plovdiv was once the sister city of a place called Leningrad.
I spent Sunday with my Bulgarian friends in the village of Lyuti Brod, which is close to the place where the great poet, Hristo Botev, was killed by the Turks on the 2nd of June, 1876. Every year, the village hosts a special historical reenactment of the battle.
Since Bulgaria holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, the center of Sofia looks gorgeous, especially the the areas around the National Palace of Culture where the Council is meeting. In over 20 years of visiting Sofia, I've never seen this area look so nice.
A beautiful May evening in Sofia.
A sweeping history of the Cold War, but Westad doesn't have much to say about women. So far, I've found only one relevant paragraph which segues immediately into a discussion of militarism.
A perfect book for Bassett hounds and history buffs.
“One of the biggest changes throughout the Communist world was in the position of women. All over eastern Europe and eastern Asia the position of women had been governed by patriarchal traditions that gave them little say over resources, work, or family affairs. In areas that had had a taste of capitalism, new opportunities for women were mixed with increased social and economic exploitation. The Communist parties set out to change this sorry state of affairs, and at first many women were able to benefit from the new policies. Access to education, work, and child care improved dramatically in many places. So did women’s control over their own lives. The right to divorce and availability of birth control made for big changes in gender relations. But women were still kept out of political leadership positions, and as the regimes wanted to increase their populations, many women found themselves increasingly caught between work and duties to their families. The dual burden on women turned out to be as troublesome in societies that called themselves socialist as they were in the capitalist countries, and the on-going conflict between progressive ideas and traditional norms at least as intense.”
Daisy models Axel Honneth's excellent (and short) book, The Idea of Socialism
“For decades, despite a number of attempts at mutual rapprochement, the relationship between the socialist workers movement and the emerging feminist movement remained tense and unhappy. Although it became increasingly clear that women’s liberation not only required greater equality in terms of voting and labor rights, but also a more fundamental cultural change beginning with established forms of socialization if women’s voices were to be freed from the gender stereotypes imposed upon them, the worker’s movement remained blind to such conclusions, clinging instead to the priority of the economic sphere. How different the relationship between socialism and feminism could have been had socialists only been willing to take account of the functional differentiation of modern societies by interpreting the sphere of personal relationships as an independent sphere of social freedom. Had they done so, the moral standard of free cooperation in social attachments based on mutual love soon would have opened their eyes to the fact that the oppression of women begins within the family, where stereotypes are imposed upon them with open or subtle forms of violence, leaving them no chance to explore their own sentiments, desires and interests. The problem, therefore, did not so much consist in involving women equally in economic production, but in granting them authorship of their own self-image, independent of male ascriptions. The struggle for social freedom in the sphere of love, marriage and the family would have primarily meant enabling women to attain as much freedom as possible from economic dependency, violence-based tutelage and one-sided labor within the hatchery of male power. This would enable women to become equal partners in relationships based on mutuality, and it is only on the basis of free and reciprocal affection that both sides would have been capable of emotionally supporting each other and articulating the needs and desires they view as a true expression of their selves.”
“We are unable to anticipate social improvements in the basic structure of contemporary societies because we regard the substance of this structure as being impervious to change, just like things. On this account, the inability to translate widespread outrage at the scandalous distribution of wealth and power into attainable goals is due neither to the disappearance of an actually existing alternative to capitalism, nor to a fundamental shift in our understanding of history, but rather to the predominance of a fetishistic [and fixed] conception of human relations”
Tina Fey on David Letterman's new show on Netflix: "It feels like talking to anyone anywhere in 2018 is just landmine hopscotch."
I just returned from a trip to give a talk in the anthropology department at my old alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, where I graduated in 1993 with my Bachelor of Arts. I have a very hard time believing that this was 25 years ago, but when I started college in 1988 the Berlin Wall was still standing. My, the time has flown. Santa Cruz is beautiful, but it felt weird to go back. The campus has grown and changed so much that it doesn't quite feel like the same place I went to school all those years ago. But I will be forever grateful to the taxpayers of the state of California who made it possible for kids like me to get an excellent education (BA, MA and PhD) at such phenomenal public institutions of higher learning. California is proof that the public provision of heavily-subsidized or free higher education is a great investment in the future.
I'm rereading Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation. It's an old book (2000), but I find it a provocative little essay to help rethink the Marxist view of human nature. Can we evolve to be more cooperative? Are Darwinism and Marxism compatible? This is a wonderful little book for discussion groups.
I drove up to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton today to have lunch with Freeman Dyson after finishing his new book, Maker of Patterns. I tore through the book in one day, and enjoyed it immensely. Dyson narrates his life through a collection of letters he wrote home to his parents and later to his sister Alice. It is a remarkable jaunt through the second half of the 20th century – both personally and politically – and it is a real literary triumph. If anyone wants a good summer read, I highly recommend this book. At 94, Dyson is still a formidable force and a wonderful conversationalist.
My daughter made this mood board for me yesterday, collecting together many of the things I love: popcorn, typewriters, books, travel, coffee, vinyl, fountain pens, and photography. Of course, she forgot to include the thing I love the most: herself!
A Mother's Day Mood Board
Just in time for Mother's Day, a first edition of George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Women's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism from 1928. Written for his sister-in-law, and including some marginalia from the original owner of the book. This one gets a prominent place on my bookshelf.
I spend so many hours each day in front of my workstation that I have endeavored to make it as user friendly as possible. I am especially a fan of my Qwerkywriter mechanical keyboard.
All I ever wanted was my very own Gnome Chomsky. I saw one of these many years ago when I was renting a summer apartment from Warren Goldfarb in Cambridge, MA. I fell in love with the idea of a "garden Noam," and yesterday my wishes came true.
I had a lot of fun answering these questions from Maryna Bazylevych for the Soyuz Network for Postosocialist Studies.
Screenshot from the post in Anthropology News
Kristen Ghodsee and Joao Biehl at the Slought Foundation on April 19, 2018
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