My dear boyfriend set this up for me. In about 5.5 months, I have some 320 essays on Facebook notes. He has been telling me for a long time to set the blog up but being technologically backward, I resisted for a long time. My notes break down (approximately) as follows: 60% pop culture, 15% high culture, 15% memoir/autobiographical and lifestyle writing.
I've been in the city now seven days and came down to the third floor of the building where I stay at the apartment of a dear , old family friend who has always been so loving and supportive to me. I feel truly blessed to have a fabulous place to stay in the city whenever I scrounge up the money for a ticket on Jetblue, about every 2 to 3 months.
I live in Santa Barbara with my boyfriend most nights, though I maintain a separate residence. I also stay with my parents in West Los Angeles about 8 days a month in two to three day intervals because my father, while fit and active and mentally sharp, is 86 and cannot see well enough to drive. I am "schlepper number one" (Dad is Jewish and "schlep" is Yiddish for drive/take). I am enormously close to my parents, though there were many years of estrangement, and speak to them each separately on a daily basis, when in SB. I "kibbutz" with Dad, a larger-than-life personality who flew B-24s in WWII over Germany, before going to USC Law School on the GI bill. He retired his bar membership after 50 years in practice. My mother still works in a high profile government position (law not politics).
I would like to finish my dissertation some day: "Ethical Fictions: George Eliot and the Narration of Life." At the moment, I do not have a chair and am six months of full time reading away from being able to write the next chapter of this philosophy/literature (ethics /aesthetics) dissertation which explores Eliot's roots both in British Romanticism (Wordsworth in particular) and German Idealism (Kantian aesthetics primarily). It's a monster dissertation and on the tail end takes up the way in which Eliot's fiction anticipates the moral fiction of Henry James, as conceived by the cottage industry of James scholars in the 1980s, beginning with Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond and Richard Wollheim. My greatest debt, however, in the final chapter of the project was to Robert Pippin's groundbreaking book, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
It would be superfluous to list my favorite films, TV shows, albums and books, as these are listed (not that many books, very hard to list books for an ABD girl whose life has been literature, and then in college, philosophy to some degree). My FB profile is public, though the wall and most photos are private. When I get back to CA, my boyfriend will teach me how to transfer the essays I wish to have on my blog from FB notes. About half of those notes are currently public. I'm not politically correct and my favorite comedian is Denis Leary, and my language reflects both of these facts. I'm also 100% secular, but have vast numbers of conservative , religious friends on FB. (I even got defriended by a great guy who was going out of his mind reading posts and comments by Tea Party people.)
Finally, my life has become significantly more public in the last few months, due to a very kind, extremely conservative GOP person, formerly in Bush White House, a blogger and serious presence on FB: Gregg Hilton. Between his two pages , which are an interesting mix of public policy/political discussions and what he calls "The American Scene" (this includes celebrity news/pop culture but little or no analysis of aesthetic objects, that is film, TV, music), he has 7.5K friends. He posted a joke about me, saying I was a "rare Ivy liberal" with tact, intelligence, and a sense of humor, who should replace Obama's Social Secretary. Gregg is a funny man with an appreciation of female beauty and a highly aesthetic sensibility and he did not pick a conservative photograph (a knee-length red Cosabella piece, not a dress, but it might have been one, rather than a negligee). It has, quite honestly, been a whirlwind which has brought highly educated, mostly conservative friends in my life, with whom I disagree politically on almost everything, but agree on almost everything culturally and personally in life.
Gregg is an extraordinary man, with deep sincerity and integrity, though I confess I do not understand his enthusiasm for and allegiance to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But he is a very good person, at once religious (Christian) and ethical.
I have not asked Gregg if he consciously borrowed "The American Scene," from the very important non-fiction work by Henry James of the same title. The "AS," as Pippin refers to it, belongs to the genre of travel writing. But it truly is a profound work of anthropology as well as cultural/social criticism, with some political implications, but this is not the predominant valence along which the text functions.
In the blog, I will continue to observe the percentage breakdowns I enumerate above. But I also hope to write some about the depression which prevented from having the career as an English professor that pretty much everyone expected me to have from high school on. I'm content and I enjoy tutoring and am blessed not to have to worry about paying the rent. But I am blessed. The part of not being in graduate school , or being a professor, that pains me the most is not having a circle of truly intellectual people around me, i.e. professors of English and philosophy with whom I can discuss ideas for hours on end. But I do have some very well-read new friends on FB, many of whom have doctorates. I truly am grateful for FB for connecting me to such people, because I have no affiliations anymore with UCSB (one dear professor who is very busy and a mother of two teen boys), and in SB, there simply is no opportunity to meet real intellectuals, or, for that matter, high powered lawyers or finance people (though as you will all see, I am NOT enamored of the finance industry)!
Doctors tend to associate with doctors and quite frankly, I've never really related to doctors. My best friend in college is a doctor in Oregon and I love and miss her but she's a new mother and extremely busy. Doctors in SB are also all married and they tend also, in their rare free time, to be with their families. It's just not like a real city where there are single professionals of a certain level.
Of course, you also don't meet talented actors, writers, directors in SB. There are plenty of rich actors or movie stars with homes in Montecito, but they are established older people who wanted a great house by the beach, not working, everyday talented people who may never make it at all, let alone make it big. There is, then , an absence at once of intellectuals, professionals, and talented/creative types which for many years thrust me into a profound and crippling depression.
It was not all the fault of SB. I hated the English department at UCSB, or at least the graduate students. I had very few friends and no dates. I loved some of my professors, profoundly, but the department is 80% "CS"--Cultural Studies--and coming from Yale, I was interested in language-based criticism, not just deconstruction, but close reading. While I am a liberal in politics (and an ultra-liberal on social issues like gay rights and abortion), I am a conservative in the cultural domain. I like history and politics but I don't want to mix my literature (particularly my field, the 19th-century) with them. Thus, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (and obviously Marxist anything, ugh) hold zero appeal for me. (In Renaissance Studies and also the 18th-century, these approaches do have a place, not the Marxist tripe, but the other two influential critical movements, due to the highly public, political, and social nature of the literature of those periods.)
I am not interested in the relation between literature and race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, economics and the other disciplines that have invaded and overtaken English departments in the last 20 years or so. This is not to say I don't enjoy reading the work of others on occasion who practice this sort of criticism, but I have zero interest in writing anything on these issues. I am in love with philosophy and wish I had graduated from college in four rather than three years so I could have double majored in English and philosophy in the Golden Age of philosophy , at least one of them, at Yale (early 1990s). I actually care about the category of "the literary," a passe notion in most departments today (some are even worse than UCSB, for instance Duke). I care about ethics, aesthetics, language itself. I am highly invested in notions of mind and consciousness more particularly. I love both poetry and fiction, and poetry has become a smaller and smaller part of English departments, sadly, since so many courses focus on texts after 1800. Yale had four pre-1800 requirements when I was there, which translates essentially into four poetry courses, after the famous 2 semester 125, Major British Poets (Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Yeats/Bishop/Eliot/Stevens--one of these).
I am truly happy now, but SB is SB and I am so grateful I get to spend time in LA and NYC, as I really am both an LA girl and an East Coaster. I recently attended a dinner party with my wonderful boyfriend and met a tremendous woman my age with little boys, 1.5 and 6. I wrote to Gregg that I'm sure if you are married with kids, and can meet other great and smart women at school, you can develop a group of engaging friends. But for a single woman in SB "of a certain age," it's just extremely difficult.
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