Tag Archives: T-shirts

Day 123: in which several transgressions are duly noted

Despite the fact that they regularly breach accepted norms of polite society (e.g. prancing around in their underwear into which they have stuffed some lego and shouting “look at my penis!”) preschoolers can also be sticklers for form. That is to say, they police social norms and are quick to express outrage over even subtle deviations from standard protocol.

Hereunder, I provide three examples.

  1. All does not mean “some.”

Elder: Whose house are we at tonight?

HWMBP: My house, we’re all at my house tonight.

Younger: Not all! Not Mom! [jovially]

D-R: Ha [laughing, painfully] Right. Not Mom.

  1. There’s this thing called “narrative point-of-view,” Mom

Yesterday, the younger wanted to wear as a T-shirt the top of some pajamas. She refers to it as her “whale shirt” because it has a picture of two whales on it. For me it is more notable because it has the words, “I love my Mom” emblazoned on the front, which always makes me cringe a bit, a) because I always cringe when I am interpellated as a “Mom,” and b) because when she wears it in public I always feel like everyone is thinking, “what douchebag Mom makes her daughter wear an ‘I love my Mom’ T-shirt”?

So, anyway, we’re in the playground and she’s swinging above me from some high monkey bars so the phrase on her T-shirt is right at my eye-level, which brings it to my attention. As she drops from the monkey bars and I catch her, I ask her, genuinely curious, “do you know what it says on your T-shirt?”

“I love my Mom,” she replies.

“That’s me! I’m the Mom!” I declare smugly.

“No,” she clarifies for me, patiently, “she loves her mom; the whale loves her Mom. Which whale do you think is the Mom and which is the baby whale?”

I am unable to answer this question because I am too busy being floored by her response. My children constantly outsmart me, but never have I been so devastatingly out-English-professor-ed.

“What,” I want to say, “are you, like, teaching a graduate seminar on focalization?”

“Is Gerard Genette like, your best friend?”

  1. Get Yer Kilt Off

“Mom!!!” in scandalized tone. “You’re wearing a MAN’S SKIRT in this picture!!!!”

“I’m wearing a what?” I ask, genuinely puzzled.

I look at the photo. I’m about 8 years old and I’m wearing a kilt. So: technically, she is right.

For the record, the younger’s Scottish grandmother agrees with her granddaughter that a kilt on a girl is quite improper. In fact, that may be precisely why I insisted on wearing one.

But, Scotsmen, you can rest easy tonight, safe in the knowledge that an Angeleno preschooler is out there bravely decrying Sassenach females’ unconscionable appropriation of your MAN’S SKIRTS.

 

 

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Day 83: Because literary criticism is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete. (Shh!)

At Joshua’s birthday party I met a lovely couple of philosophers, by which I mean both that they were two philosophers, each lovely, and also that they were a lovely couple. [1]

At some point I was telling them excitedly about Jayne’s upcoming MLA roundtable on “Uselessness” and apropos of that subject one of them mentioned this passage by Adorno (you know, as you do). [2] Since they couldn’t remember it verbatim (I know, what are academic cocktail party standards coming to?), afterwards I hunted them down on facebook to verify the actual quote and its source, which they obligingly provided. It turned out not to be about uselessness, exactly, but about the “good for nothing,” which is certainly related to, if not synonymous with, uselessness. Here’s the quotation:

“Anything that has a function is already spellbound within a functional world. Only a thinking that has no mental sanctuary, no illusion of an inner realm, and that acknowledges its lack of function and power can perhaps catch a glimpse of an order of the possible and nonexistent, where human beings and things each would be in their rightful place. Because philosophy is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete; philosophy should not even invoke this point, lest it blindly repeat its wrong: self-justification by self-positing.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998),  pp. 5-17. p. 15.

The only part of this essay I have read is this one paragraph, which comes two pages from the end. So I’m not at all sure that what I’m getting out of this paragraph has anything to do with the general gist of the essay, or with what Adorno was hoping I’d get out of it. I just really like this paragraph. In particular, I like the two statements, “anything that has a function is already spellbound within a functional world,” and “because philosophy is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete,” each of which has a pleasingly epigrammatic quality.

I would argue that us littératrices and littérateurs should adapt this last sentence in order to make the case that because literary criticism is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete. But if Adorno is saying what I think he’s saying in the final part of the final sentence, then I quite deliberately won’t argue that, because to do so would be to counter-productively justify literary criticism, to argue for the instrumentality of literary criticism’s non-instrumentality, which would leave us back where we started. You can only break the spell by giving up the claim to functionality.

Because it’s a justification that turns upon the counter-productiveness of self-justification, it’s tricky to see how it might be adopted as a save-the-humanities rallying cry. On the other hand, it’s an appealing rallying cry for people, like the duck-rabbit, who are not really into rallying cries. Just imagine it on a poster or a T-shirt:

Because literary criticism is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete.

(TELL NO-ONE)

Because literary criticism is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete.

(DO NOT INVOKE THIS POINT. YOU’LL BE SORRY.)

Because literary criticism is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete.

(IS WHAT I WOULD SAY IF I DIDN’T KNOW BETTER)

Because literary criticism is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete.

Thinking up ridiculous posters is helping my June gloom, which is all inside my head, and has nothing to do with the weather, which is bloody-fucking-sunny, just to spite me. Bastard.

Notes

[1] By the way, I don’t recall if we’ve discussed this before, but it annoys me that there is no noun in English to describe a literature professor. (No, smartarse, “smartarse” does not suffice). I mean there is no equivalent, in English, of “philosopher,” “historian,” etc. to designate “one who studies letters.” I like the French littératrice or littérateur. I think we should adopt it.

[2] Are you non-academics laughing at the kinds of conversations I have at parties? Well, the joke’s on you because … just because, OK? Ha!

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