Sunday, 17 January 2010

Lurker Amnesty Week 2010

Just because I like to have a sense of who exactly I'm writing for, I'm declaring  what began this morning at 12:01 a.m. to be Lurker Amnesty Week 2010. 

If you're reading this and comment all the time, skip the rest of this post.

If you're reading this and have never commented, feel free to leave a comment. 

If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment, feel free to send me an email at allmynamessquishedtogether at gmail dot com.  

If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment and don't do email, then I'm not even sure how you're reading this, but feel free to contact me via whatever medium is valued by your people.

Because as someone who spends his working days stressing the importance of knowing (and knowing how to manipulate) (not that I would) the audience one addresses, my ignorance of you is more than a little disconcerting.  You need not use your real name or even your regular pseudonym, but please do give a sense of who you are, how you got here and why you've stayed, so that I might make this place more hospitable to good folk like you.

Jan 17, 2010 9:43:21 PM | Weblogs

102 Comments

R

Former high school teacher and future PhD candidate in comp lit. I like your discussions of pedagogy and am interested in your thesis on evolution.

Posted by: R | Wednesday, 27 January 2010 at 09:34 PM

hrsn

Tenured prof at Ivy League U. Academic tales are very good. I surf over from LGM most of the time.

Posted by: hrsn | Saturday, 06 February 2010 at 11:45 AM

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Don Draper is, of course, never himself. Let me open with a quick clarification about the previous Mad Men post: as to the purview of self-fashioning, we all do it. In blog terms, you know me as this guy, i.e. the one who caught those students, made that other one extremely uncomfortable, is frequently victimized by the library, hid his cancer from his wife, etc. Those are the stories I tell about myself to explain myself to myself. To quote Gertrude Stein from Everybody's Autobiography: Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.The phrase "of course" captures the central irony of all self-fashioning: we know, of course, that we are more than the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and yet we only understand ourselves, and can only be understood by others, through those stories. In case you ever wanted to know why narrative diversity is important, there you have it: the more narrative modes available, the more possible understandings of themselves the people who encounter them can have. This is self-fashioning at its most mundane, and in terms of Mad Men, this is why Peggy Olson becomes more modern: once she understands herself in terms of the upwardly mobile career-oriented woman, the audience understands her frustrations in terms of the conflict between that meritocratic fantasy and the realities of being a woman in a male-dominated working environment. She becomes more recognizably modern not because the world she inhabits does, but because the way she responds to that changing world elicits a chorus of "of courses." Neither she nor Peter Campbell become "more real" as the series progresses—fictional characters, being fictional, can only aspire to escape the fictions they inhabit—but as the stories they tell themselves about themselves in order to understand themselves come to resemble ours, they'll seem more realistic because they're telling themselves the same stories we tell ourselves and we, of course, live in the real world. What I meant when I wrote the following, then, is that Campbell is increasingly understanding himself in reference to the same narratives we do, whereas Don Draper is not: Campbell is, in a sense, becoming us, and we revile his behavior to the extent that we recognize our sins in his actions. Draper, however, is becoming art, and as such we hold him as responsible for his actions as we would Emma Bovary. His self-fashioning was not merely based on literary precedent, it was an act of literature, if you will, and...

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