Chinese Psychoanalysis

Random note scribbled on a sheet of paper.  How convenient a categorization!

To capture contemporary China’s specific combination of stresses, the analyst Huo Datong separates problems into two categories: jiating xiaoshi, or household issues—the private dynamics of couples and families—and guojia dashi, national issues, the things, as Huo puts it, that “are handled by the ruling Party on a national level and which people are never supposed to express doubts about: politics, freedom of speech, the right to demonstrate, and religion.”


from Meet Dr. Freud: Does psychoanalysis have a future in an authoritarian state?
by Evan Osnos The New Yorker January 10, 2011.

Psychological Context of Russian Political Control

Those following Russia won't find this entirely surprising in general but I've not found it more succinctly stated: 

The creation of a virtually omniscient Kremlin may be less about enforcing active control of the social, political and economic space in Russia than it is about encouraging Russians in all walks of life to control and censor themselves.

It is not simply that there is no place for Russians to hide. Without clarity about where the red lines are for political and even economic behaviour, there is no way to hedge. One cannot carefully walk on the knife’s edge, when that edge itself is kept purposefully obscure.

From a book review by Samuel Greene on OpenDemocracy.net of The Red Web: The Struggle between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan.

Trollope Trending

Reading a very good article about the modern relevance of Anthony Trollope: 

Trollope Trending: Why He's Still the Novelist of the Way We Live Now

by Adam Gopnik

The New Yorker (4 May 2015) pp 28-32

One of several notable quotes: 

Trollope sees that the agents of reform are often ugly, that the beneficiaries of corruption are often graceful, that the effects of reform are often dubious, but that reform in a liberal society is nonetheless as inevitable as the standardization of measurement.

Where the F**k Was I?

Just came across this interesting melding of new and traditional cartography:

Where the F**k Was I by James Bridle, based on his iPhone geodata, self-published in 2011.

"....digital memory sits somewhere between experience and non-experience; it is also an approximation; it is also a lie. These location records do not show where I was, but an approximation based on the device’s own idea of place, its own way of seeing. They cross-reference me with digital infrastructure, with cell towers and wireless networks, with points created by others in its database. Where I correlate location with physical landmarks, friends and personal experiences, the algorithms latch onto invisible, virtual spaces, and the extant memories of strangers."

Read the blog post on what it's all about.

You can buy the book here if you want.

Manna from Heaven

For all of you with a baby and a dog… for those with only babies, for that matter….

(from Washington Post, 19 April 2015)

A Mile in Her Corset

It has been a while since I have read such an entertaining book review!  I'm not sure if I'm more curious about the book reviewed or those written by the reviewer….  Enjoy!

A Mile in Her Corset
Review by Judith Newman (published in The New York Times, 28 December 2014)
of How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

What’s the sexiest era? The Roaring Twenties? Hardly. The late-20th-century free-love movement? Not even close. The Victorian era is, unquestionably, the sexiest. What’s hotter than anxiety and repression? Or more titillating than the chasm between public and private behavior, between the pedestal-placing of the wife/mother and the enormous rise in prostitution? It’s no coincidence that one of the most erotic characters in literature, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, appeared in 1897, toward the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. (Remember: He had to leave Transylvania and come to England to feast upon pure blood, and open all those untouched . . . necks.) Even the thought of the armorlike clothing of the times coupled with the frilly nothings underneath makes me swoon. There’s a reason the most ubiquitous lingerie shop in America is called Victoria’s Secret and not, say, Richard Nixon’s Secret.

Living as we do in a culture so vulgar and permissive that a reality series entitled “Dating Naked” engenders a collective yawn, it’s perhaps not surprising we glamorize the Victorians as the epitome of both passion and restraint. (Ooh, restraint.) Yet this romantic perception is almost nowhere to be found in Ruth Goodman’s informative and quite startling “How to Be a Victorian.”

Goodman calls herself a “domestic historian,” and has participated in the kinds of British re-enactment-of-history series that have made her a celebrity. On shows with names like “Victorian Pharmacy” and “Tudor Monastery Farm,” she has spent months working, dressing, eating, bathing — and more important, not bathing — like her 19th-century ancestors. She is, she says, interested not in the kings and princes and politicians, “who honestly bore me a little,” but in the ordinary Victorian — “you and me.” This book is over 400 pages of you and me. If you want to understand how Victorians thought, you read Walter E. Houghton’s classic “The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870.” But if you want to know how they looked, sounded, felt and smelled, there is no better guide than this one. Goodman likes to get down in the muck — and there’s plenty of it in 19th-century Britain.

What’s most striking is the amount of effort it took just to stay warm, clean and fed. If Charles Dickens’s hearth scenes were indescribably delicious, that may be because he and his fellow Victorians spent so much time being so damn cold — the poor out of economy, the wealthy out of the belief that without a constant stream of cold fresh air the body is essentially poisoned. (It’s a cultural notion that’s still a little hard to shake. My 80-year-old husband is from Northumberland, and as a consequence I might as well live in a meat locker.)

Here are the things you don’t think about when you’re watching something like “The Forsyte Saga.” The choking air pollution from all the coal fires. The atrophy of a woman’s stomach and chest muscles from years of relying on a corset for shape and posture. The fact that a country that saw its population almost triple within a few decades had no real sewage system, which meant that by 1858, the Thames was overflowing with human waste. And then, of course, the potato blight meant that huge numbers of English citizens were also starving. Goodman notes that the poor were markedly shorter than the wealthy, and several inches shorter than the average Londoner today. “It takes a lot of hunger to do that to people,” she adds. But even when money wasn’t an issue, self-abnegation was. In many homes children were sent to bed without dinner not as a punishment, but because “the self-control and self-denial induced by hunger were thought to teach enduring habits of self-sacrifice and to aid in fashioning a more moral individual,” Goodman writes. (Our era is clearly not the first to connect slimness and moral superiority.)

There is enough detail here on the social significance of everything from bread to laundering to hair fixatives to satisfy the most ardent history-obsessive. As a hypochondriac, I was particularly drawn to the sections on Victorian medicine. Before antibiotics, and with the new crowding and population explosion brought on by the Industrial Revolution, cholera, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis and typhoid were looming threats. And with no regulation of the advertising industry, manufacturers could claim pretty much anything. Which is how the ingredients in Tuberculozyne, which purported to cure tuberculosis, could be potassium bromide, glycerin, almond flavoring, water and caramel coloring.

But drugs that did nothing might have been preferable to the “tonics” that did work, which often contained laudanum or mercury. It was speculated that as much as a third of the infant mortality rate in Manchester had to do not with disease but with drugging children. Popular tonics like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and Street’s Infant Quietness did indeed stop children from being pesky, as they were filled with opiates. Unfortunately they also stopped children from wanting to eat, and many an infant “slipped quietly away.”

Oddly, the details of Victorian life we’re most familiar with, or think we’re familiar with — the attitudes about sex and women as chattel to their husbands — are treated almost as afterthoughts. Maybe that’s because Goodman felt these subjects were well-covered territory already. Nevertheless, I did learn that women were supposed to enjoy sex — in the context of marriage, of course — and masturbation was considered a far more dangerous activity for men than women. Of course, that may be because so very, very few women indulged, as we all know. . . .

Goodman’s unique selling proposition as a historian is that she walks the walk of her time period, even when that walk involves hard labor in a corset and a hoop skirt. The book is peppered with her wonderful, and often wonderfully dotty, social experiments. For months on end she brushed her teeth with soot, wore the era’s recyclable sanitary towels (“an unusual idea to adjust to,” she says, in a moment of supreme understatement), set fire to herself cooking on a Victorian range and cleaned herself only with a linen towel, thus replicating the Victorian aversion to water, which was thought to possibly open the pores to infection. (PS, Goodman insists the dry-rubbing method works just fine.)

But even Goodman has her limits. She tried to make condoms in the Victorian style, “but the handwork required is remarkably precise and complex. The sheep’s gut has to be thoroughly cleaned, soaked in an alkali solution and stripped of all its adjoining tissue to leave only the gut wall.” One of the great pleasures of “How to Be a Victorian”? There’s a shudder on almost every page.

I had my own Ruth Goodman moment recently. After a trip to see his family in Britain, my venerable husband brought back some vintage cotton nightgowns from the 1880s for me. The cotton was superb, crisp, blindingly white and thick, like nothing we have today. They also stretched from my chin to my ankle. He wanted me to model them. I realized that somehow, to him, these were better than anything Victoria’s Secret had to offer. I tried to get in the spirit. But after I read Goodman, the romance and naughtiness dimmed, and the harshness of the Victorian life shone bright. I could think of this garment only for its warmth, and perhaps for a certain Miss Havisham-­ishness. I do plan to model the nightgowns — in my coffin.

Missing Hamster

This was posted on our neighborhood listserv and I just had to share it:


If anyone sees a hamster outside on the --- block of --- street, near --- avenue, please let me know. 
This photo was taken a few years ago. 

He answers to the name Benny. Kind of. 

My son left him out of the cage and he scooted out of the door as quick as his little legs would carry him. 

Thanks, ---

New blog?

Thinking of starting a blog called "sepia futures"

Designer Threads

Interesting!

New High-Tech Thread Can Help Customs Officials Detect Knockoff Designer Goods
Published by Jason Bittel  on May 8, 2013 on Slate

They didn't say where they would manufacture the thread... perhaps China?

I love this time of year in DC-- the cherry trees are blooming and the summer heat and humidity haven't  kicked up yet: 

There are a few hazards, though.  A few days ago, a thunderstorm swept through the area, with residents waking up to a light drizzle and a heavy, gray sky.  At around 7AM, there was an almighty crash and bright flash, virtually knocking anyone who was still in bed onto the floor.  A few minutes later, some more thunder and lightning but not nearly so sharp.  I stuck my head out the window and looked up and down the street but nothing seemed amiss.  Turns out a tree a block and a half away was struck by lightning.  I guess that's how the DC height restrictions are enforced!

This is what happens when your city infrastructure isn't updated!

Steam Pipe explodes under parking lot in Smolensk, Russia

Reminds me of the steam pipe that exploded in Manhattan during rush hour on a summer afternoon in 2007. 

Globalization of the Psyche

There has been quite a bit of research into the homogenization of the world through globalization, often in a tangible sense but I'm intrigued by a relatively new strand of research into the convergence of intangible patterns of thought and expectation.

An interesting case in point was mentioned in the New York Times Magazine  last Sunday:

What Does it Mean to Be Comfortable? The New York Times Magazine (January 27, 2013).

I've also been intrigued by reviews of Ethan Watters' Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.  Has anyone read it?

Spring has come early to Washington, DC

It's January but it seems Spring is coming early to Washington, DC.  This is what I saw under a bush on my walk home from the Metro.

The Rhetoric of Climate Change

Random thought for the day:

Climate change skeptics have a peculiar refrain every time the weather is unseasonably warm for the time of year. "So much for global warming!" they say. It goes without saying that this is pretty silly, since climate change is an aggregate phenomenon and any individual instance of weather doesn't make a real difference in such a vast pool of data. The problem, really, is coming up with a convincing way of communicating that in a pithy way to the skeptics. Something along the lines of an analogy: that weather is to climate as x is to y.

The only thing I can come up with at 3AM is the really boring one of: Weather is to Climate as a Trip is to Distance.

Anyone out there have better - more snappy (and perhaps more sophisticated) - ideas? Let me know! Hopefully this can lead to a better conversation than the stonewalling I've experienced in the past.

A shout out to all of my conservative friends!

Reagan’s Personal Spying Machine
by Seth Rosenfeld
September 1, 2012
The New York Times

A True Balkan Thriller

I'm really tempted to start writing a mystery/thriller novel in the face of the real-life story of the Serbian envoy to NATO, Branislav Milinkovic, killing himself a few days ago by leaping off a Brussels parking garage. The way of suicide is dramatic enough but now there are vague statements that Milinkovic had been just days before diagnosed "with a sudden and grave illness," the fact of which made it so, as his wife put it in a Belgrade tabloid (Kurir), he "could not bear the fact of living, as he put it, the rest of his life without human dignity." A perfect setup for the likes of a Hitchcock or Dashiell Hammett! More as it develops.

New band/blog name: Bruised male ego

I was really surprised to discover that nearly 700 handguns were seized by the Transportation Security Administration in just the first half of 2012. Really? That many in just six months?!? Amazing.... And that's only a count of handguns specifically.... they've also confiscated countless hunting knives, stun guns, throwing stars, even a bazooka round.... Wow- the next time I fly, I'm going to be much less frustrated by the screening process.

Not only that, the TSA blog comments that "In some cases, people simply forgot they had these items." How can you _forget_ you have something like that on your person?! And what does it say about our society that that can even happen? Oy!

Freedom of the Russian Press: a Story of Lost Trust

I've been going through my papers in preparation for our move. In doing so, I came across this piece; a rare multifaceted piece on the Russian media/political scene. It's highly recommended.

Freedom of the Russian Press: a Story of Lost Trust

Eurasia Daily Monitor
Volume 7 Issue: 209
November 17, 2010
By: Elena Chinyaeva

The recent attack on the Russian journalist and blogger Oleg Kashin left him severely injured. While he was still unconscious in a medically induced coma, an avalanche of speculation surrounded who might be responsible, with the so-called “liberal opposition” groups quarrelling with each other over who would issue the sharpest declaration implying the duumvirate is responsible, at least for a situation when such attacks happen frequently threatening the freedom of the press in Russia (Kommersant, 10 November). Some observers went as far as stating that “former Prime Minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, directly implicates Putin and Medvedev in the crime” (EDM, 11 November). While Kasyanov might be surprised with such interpretations, the newly-appeared Kashin sympathizers from among the “liberals” stress how critical Kashin was about the “vertical of power” in Russia. They conveniently overlook how bitter he was about the hypocrisy of those who call themselves “Russian liberal opposition.”

The Kashin case has indeed sharpened the discussions over the freedom of the press and the role of media in Russian society. Two legislative amendments were proposed in the State Duma, to class attacks on journalists as if on state officials punishable by 12-years to life imprisonment. However, as the latest Levada center poll indicates, these initiatives would only irritate the society in general. Over the post-perestroika years, the image of a journalist in the public perception has grown contradictory, as a person who delivers not only objective information but also lies. This year among the ratings of the most respected professions, journalism (8 percent), was the third from last, with only politicians (7 percent) and salespeople (4 percent) scoring worse (Kommersant, November 11).

Paradoxically, Kashin was a good enough professional to address the inconvenient question of why such lukewarm public attitude to journalists and the freedom of press has become reality in Russia. Just a couple of weeks prior to the attack, Kashin ran a series of interviews with some of the organizers of public action against the ruling bureaucracy in which they denounced “unpopular and senseless personages from political opposition,” who only hamper the attempts to develop a meaningful and effective civil protest movement in Russia. As they said, it has become a fashion among “political glitterati ” to show up at the protest meetings, though both “the authorities and the opposition continue to view ordinary people as scum of the earth,” substituting political work with political infighting, while the journalistic community use preset clichés to describe protest groups (Aleksei Navalnyi, Stanislav Yakovlev, Sergei Smirnov, Kommersant, October 19; Maksim Solopov).

In his Kommersant blog, Kashin stated, that in Russia today, with her one-party political system, the state corporations’ monopoly, excessive corruption and feudal-like bureaucracy, those in the Russian establishment who like to be associated with liberal values are in fact the co-authors of this system and their claim to Russian liberalism is no more legitimate than that of the former KGB types (Kommersant, October 29).

Indeed, it were the “liberals” in the then President Boris Yeltsin’s entourage who supplied him with an idea to choose his successor, flaunting the elections, and helped to pick the then FSB (former KGB) head, Vladimir Putin, and later elaborated Putin’s new political and economic agenda. The same people have also had their hand in turning the freedom of press into a phantom in Russia. Kashin is 30 and cannot remember the long lines at the press kiosks in the late 1980’s, when Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost created, virtually overnight, an enormous market for quality information in the Soviet Union. Just a few years later, this market was destroyed by the new Russian ruling elites, some of them still in the establishment, others in the “liberal opposition,” as they started to use the mass media for political manipulation and power brokering.

Capitalizing on the mass interest in quality information implied that long and hard work was needed to create an effective distribution and sales network. It was much easier to raise the needed cash from advertising or, better still, new owners. The mass media were soon divided between a few so-called oligarchs and reflected the problems of society in a crooked mirror of their owners’ clan struggles. The profession created its own myths. A media outlet was considered “independent” if it was critical, what or who it was about did not really matter, as criticism, peppered heavily with pathos and moralizing, was often pre-paid for by competing rivals. In the provinces, mass media were an even easier prey to financial and political influence, and still are often controlled by the local authorities or business groups.

A number of individuals who had helped Yeltsin secure his re-election in 1996 were later “rewarded” with access to state resources. One of them, Vladimir Gusinsky, borrowed freely from state-controlled companies, Gazprom and Sberbank, with little intention of repayment, to develop his NTV channel into Russia’s leading TV station. Seeing himself as a king-maker, Gusinsky decided not to support either the Unity party, a new “party of power,” or Vladimir Putin, during the parliamentary and presidential campaigns of 2000-2001. His rival, Boris Berezovsky, who then controlled Russian Public Television (ORT), did so, but while Putin came out the winner, none of the oligarchs succeeded. It took the new president a few months to put an end to the political influence of the oligarchs and their misuse of the mass media for their own ends. A hostage of oligarchs, the freedom of press then became a state possession.

Media wars undermined the public trust in the media and the respect for journalism as a profession. But with the 2000’s consumer boom and the advertising money estimated at 126 billion rubles in 2008 (over $5 billion), media mangers did not bother about either recovering this trust or widening their audiences (Российский рынок рекламы упал на треть, но не сломался). Unlike the Western mass media, with their ratio of sales and advertising money tipped towards the former, most Russian media came to depend on advertising, with their sales hardly covering distribution costs. As a result, today, the only media in Russia with mass audiences are the state-controlled TV channels with light entertainment dominating their programming, yellowish tabloids and some glossies, with Cosmopolitan being the market’s flagman. The quality press has long become the market niche.

That is why there is no need for the authorities to kill “critical” journalists, they are not heard anyway. Kashin has worked for Kommersant, which produces a high quality editorial material and prides itself in being influential. However, with its 16 pages, a 130,000 circulation and an issue’s federal audience estimated at 290,000 readers, in a country of 140 million, it can hardly command a tangible influence on the population (О Коммерсантъе). Rather, it is read by a relatively small circle of high-powered bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, its position thus being something between an analytical institute for, and a platform for information exchange between the ruling power groups.

Consequently, people have in fact developed a wall of indifference between themselves and the mass media. Even such a high-profile media story as replacing the mayor of Moscow little impressed ordinary Russians. According to VTsIOM’s poll, only 13 percent knew that Sergei Sobyanin had become the Moscow mayor (Kommersant, October 29). Widespread political cynicism among the authorities is only matched by even greater indifference and mistrust of the mass media among the population. That is the price Russian society has paid for the pleasure of some in the Russian establishment and the opposition calling themselves “liberals.” A pleasure that Oleg Kashin was bold enough to challenge. President Dmitry Medvedev ordered Kashin’s case to be investigated by the highest authority, the Main Investigation Department of the Investigation Committee of the Procurator-General’s Office. Kashin’s attackers might even be found and prosecuted. But would it help the Russian population recover their trust in the liberal values, the freedom of press including?

Customer Review of History and Education policy

Been going through a bunch of papers and came across this, that I thought others would appreciate:

History: The Customer Reviews
The New Yorker October 17, 2011

The Tsar Falls in Russia

I do not recommend the Russian Revolution. At first, I fell for the hype and was kind of excited to set fire to my landlord. But now it seems like it’s just getting to be a lot of yakkety-yak. What we need is already with us, as far as I’m concerned: breathing, harvest, an icon by Andrei Rublev in our church, some carnal relations.

We have enough trouble with Baba Yaga; we don’t need men from Moscow to tell us their dreams for our children. What do they think our children are doing today? They’re catching chickens and gathering damp birch sticks. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

This customer recommends the reign of Peter the Great instead.

---

On a slightly more serious note:


I've been reading The Anxiety Economy from the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of The Atlantic, which raises lots of issues but the most explicit is an (admittedly not very unique) point about education.

I may not have been following the presidential race as much as I might like, I feel his point of education barely coming up in the campaign is an understatement. It seems to me that there has been almost nothing on such a fundamental and potentially explosive issue. I really don't have good idea of where the candidates stance on education policy, especially Romney. The only specific proposals I really know of from Obama are the "race to the top" and educational debt relief. Have I missed something?