JT Leroy’s Blog

Wow. Some background. JT Leory’s story is very similar to another you may be familair with: that of Anthony Godby Johnson. The Wikipedia articles above should give you the background. Basically LeRoy/Johnson were/are potentially fictitious authors who ‘live’ very secluded lives, and tell stories about their tortured childhoods. This is in effect the modern literary hoax, and I couldn’t be more interested.

I think JT LeRoy is much less cut and dry than AGJ, in AGJ’s case, there were certain legal and medical records which didn’t exist, which should have been part of the public record, possibly of course, and the complete dirth of cases, lead to a fairly logical situation. JT, on the other hand. shrug

I’m fascinated by this, and aperantly, my source(s) tell me there’s an upsurge in chatter about LeRoy. I think the connotations of identity here are huge. I keep saying that ‘how others see you’ is potentially as much about “who you are” as, how you see yourself; and this sure throws a wrench in it.

Thoughts? Questions? I recognize this is a pretty week post, and relies heavily on the wikipedia accounts (which are by my reading dead on; the LeRoy one, leans a bit in LeRoy’s direction, but no matter.)

I had heretofore been completely oblivious to it’s existence, and while I don’t actually want to read the blog, its existence is most interesting…

This post consists of a definition. I’d like to see what people thing the word is. Post your responses in the comments, and no fair googling.

The often internally conflicting interrelationships of groups of people in ‘society’.

Frankly, it’s my favorite definition of this word. It’s also a rather uncommon one.

An academic group, interested in memory and narrative started to write a blog in october, but hasn’t had the follow through that one might hope for. But then it’s an academic blog, and getting academics to collaborate on projects like this, is terribly difficult. Maybe we’ll see some more. I’m pulling out interesting bits from the intro post, and I’ll keep you all posted, if more interesting things start appearing.

This interesting little bit from the first post. Not so much a summary, just something that got my eye….

Introducing the Popular Memory & Narrative Study Group:

“…the starting point for sociology, almost by definition, has been ‘society’ and its ‘institutions’; whilst in versions of structuralist social theory the individual has been something of a vanishing point, disappearing without trace under a deluge of language and discourse. Instead, a reinvigorated focus on narrative begins with individual stories, memories and life-histories and traces these outwards (and upwards) to the social structures and collectivities of which individuals are a part.”

(Via Memory and Narrative blog.)

Exactly!

Freaky? Economics > “This is a book about feminism and racism written for people who feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome in the great conversation North American society has been having about feminism and racism since the 1960s. It presents an authoritative alternate language in which — not to participate in, but—to dominate that conversation. Dubner and Levitt assure their readers that ‘economics’ is the value-free idiom with respect to which those other, value-laden, idioms can be shown to be misguided at best, stupid at worst, and almost always dead wrong.”

(Via Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog.)

Savage Minds is something I’ve really enjoyed a lot in the past few weeks, so you should check it out, but I really liked this analyis of the pop-social science, book “Freakenomics.”

I must admit that I haven’t really read this book, and I really have no interest, but a lot of people seem to like it which I totally find troubling. Here’s a book which takes social science in the wrong direction: reductive; objective-oriented; and quantitative superiority. Which while not without its merit, is deplorable at its best because it works to invalidate alternate methods and ways of knowing. Which in this case is not at all called for. In my humble opinion. So there.

Cheers, Sam

I’m not too sure where to put all this academic content.

It’s all meta blogging on the state of the academy, and I found it in my search for Narrative/ID social science material. As ‘everyone has a story’ the the most generally focused academic, category. Representing ID (in this case ID is Identity, not inter-disciplinary. Oh if there were only more letters….) is more specifically academic, but it’s a project blog, not a meta blog.

In that end I’ve added a new category called “The Academy,” to TealArt. This one won’t get it’s own sub-site: after all, http://tychoish.com/ is really still where it’s all at.

In that direction there are two sites that I’d like to point out right now.

First off it’s Dean Dad, Confessions of a Community College Dean, which is really a delightful site. I mean, it should be more than enough to convince anyone not to dean, (I love how Dean and Adjunct are verbs, but strangely tenure track and full time faculty (to professor?) haven’t made the syntactical transistion.) But it’s clear that someone has to do it, and frankly I think this is the kind of guy who should be doing it.

Secondly. Jill, of Jill/txt, a Norwegian professor blogging (in unsurprisingly flawless english), discuses academia, linguistics, identity, and all sorts of other fascinating stuff. I’m enjoying it a lot.

Cheers

Ok, this was fascinating. From my stash of cool academic blogs..

The end of insight?

“In my own field of complex systems theory, Stephen Wolfram has emphasized that there are simple computer programs, known as cellular automata, whose dynamics can be so inscrutable that there’s no way to predict how they’ll behave; the best you can do is simulate them on the computer, sit back, and watch how they unfold. Observation replaces insight. Mathematics becomes a spectator sport.”

(Quoted in Marginal Revolution.)

So it had to happen. Not the movie, me weighing in on the subject. I suspect I’ll have occasion to way in more after I’ve actually seen the movie. At the present point, I’ve just read the story and seen the preview. Bear that in mind.

First off, I think it’s horribly named. I haven’t been able to look at a poster, or read the title, without seeing the word “bareback” once. It still flies out of my mouth from time to time, which I’m really not in favor of. One big thumbs down there.

But more seriously folks.

I have a friend who noted that, it wasn’t so long ago, that “gay” themed art/literature was criticized for not expressing universal themes, which of course is a display of utter homophobia. I mean really, love stories are love stories, right?

Now, all anyone can say about Brokeback is that it expresses universal themes. Which on the simplest level I think, displays reviewer’s good intentions while safely avoiding engaging with the content of the movie. I would submit that very few movies deal with universal themes: Brokeback Mountain, Bridget Jones' Diary, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Erin Brockovich, and Ladies in Lavender, don’t deal with universal issues. They’re still good, though. What about Far From Heaven, I mean it’s depressing but the guy comes clean and goes to live with his lover, and that wasn’t

I mean, really, actual gay cowboys,

I guess I’m just holding out for the day that an urban gay romantic comedy called about high powered executives leading double lives called: “Teamroom Traders,” to be praised as having “universal themes.”

Having said that, the story didn’t thrill me. It was a delightful short story. If it were any longer, I probably wouldn’t have read it, but it sort of felt like she was writing a novel and got slapped with a word limit. But it worked, so there’s that.

I was sort of pissed off that she/they needed to resort to death to catalyze the story. Queerness isn’t tragic, we know that. So why are all the “great” queer love stories, tragic? Blame it on Romeo and Juliet if you must, but that’s a cop out, As You Like It and All’s Well that Ends Well were perfectly good plays and not all tripe like. If Strong women can be portrayed outside of the Hedda Gabbler/Emma Bovary/Edna Pontellier archetype, then queer love can be portrayed outside of the death drive. Just saying.

Maybe I’ll have more to say after I’ve actually seen it.

The astute among you will notice that the “Blogging” category of TealArt has been moved under the “everyone has a story,” (the dandy new Narrative Studies section of TealArt, on the premise that blogs, at least as Chris and I are likely to write about them, are a narrative device, and should be included this discussion.

As I was writing a post about this blog, I noticed that the author referred to “web blogs,” which is testament to the fact that blog is indeed a word in it’s own right, but is in fact a combination of words which should never occur. Weblogs are logs, journals, which are made special/unique by a) the fact that they exist online and more technically, b) the software used to maintain them (this is a defining feature, and that’s why I feel it’s relevant to talk about WordPress upgrades on this site.)

Just saying!