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"Hoisted on my own petard" is a phrase I love. It certainly has happened to me before and it is almost certain to happen now and then to those of us who run our mouths or, here, our fingers too much about contentious matters. Michael Meo may rightly hoist me about my effort not to be so hoisted in his comment at"Yesterday's Memories." It is, perhaps, better for me to let others suggest that Chanukkah is an appropriate time to think about insurgency and oppression, about which is which and who's on first. As for me, I recommend this"Weird Al meets Outkast" celebration of the holy days. My favorite line:"Oy is just yo backwards." Hat tip to Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy.
While Michael hoists me high on my own lack of words, my cowardly failure to extend a thought to its logical conclusion, I'm getting a rather royal roasting from some female academics for"And, Another Thing, Becky.""Unfair" and" cruel" are the words I recall. Maybe Claire and Wolfangel should nominate me for a Malkie. It may be cant, but I don't recant. Becky's personal journal was instalanched because her fiancee called Glenn Reynolds' attention to it and Reynolds directed traffic to The Valkyrie of Discarded Thought because that's what he does. Why call his attention to your blog if you don't want the attention? And, what's more, why put your personal issues on the net, if you're unwilling for them to be discussed? Or, must the discussion only include approval of your position? I don't know whether the problem is because Becky is white or female or wealthy or bi-polar or what, but she's no more a conservative and no more an intellectual than George Bush is a conservative or an intellectual. Maybe she should buy a baseball team.
Update: Btw, good luck to Becky, who defends her M.A. thesis on Britney Spears this morning at 9:00 a.m., Arizona time. I rest my case. Lifting up your, ah, boobies for the camera to admire (not that there's anything wrong with that) and putting them on the net just isn't likely to invite being taken seriously in the academic world.
I looked up hoist in my dctionary. it says it originally came from the Dutch 'hoise', which I think applies to the side of the flag attached to the line -- the part by which the flag is lifted.
Wells and Taylor have the passage from the second Quarto as 'hoised' -- perhaps a corrected spelling, as others have 'hoist'. I therefore thought that perhaps 'hoist' was originally a past participle. A Shakespeare edition I just looked at indeed says that, though I'm not sure whether to believe them or not. It suggests that 'hoisted', the modern version, resulted from a confusion in usage, since 'hoist' was already a past participle.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/11/2004
Thanks, Brendan, for your very reasonable response. I read about Becky's passing the oral exams on her site and was delighted that she had. Obviously, I do think that posting certain kinds of things on the net is problemmatic and I hope that there are no negative consequences for either you or Becky.
Brendan Loomer Loy -
12/11/2004
P.S. By the way, the phrase "anonymous Internet idiots" in the linked post is NOT meant to refer to anyone here. You folks are neither anonymous nor idiotic. I was referring to some of the riff-raff who made their way over to the Valkyrie from Glenn's site and said things that were truly offensive and ridiculous.
Brendan Loomer Loy -
12/11/2004
It should be noted that it was I, Becky's fiance, who posted the "boobies" picture, not Becky herself. I don't think Becky minded (she certainly didn't say so), but at the same time, it was *my* decision to post the photo, not hers.
I posted the photo because I thought it was silly and funny. Could such "unprofessional" material create problems for Becky (or me, as I persue a law career) down the road? Perhaps, and we'll have to evaluate those issues as we go along. Needless to say, I would take down any picture of, or reference to, Becky if she asked me to, and I wouldn't post it in the first place if I felt that she would be uncomfortable with it. But for the most part, we're fairly unpretentious people, with a very good ability to laugh at ourselves, and I hope that comes across as a positive, rather than a negative, trait. I think for the most part it does, and in those situations where it doesn't, odds are the person who is offended is the sort of humorless soul I wouldn't want to be associated with anyway.
On the broader issue: "Why put your personal issues on the net, if you're unwilling for them to be discussed? Or, must the discussion only include approval of your position?" Of course not. The discussion can of course include disagreement and criticism -- and fair and reasonable criticism will produce a fair and reasonable response. However, when the critics makes statements that they do not have enough information to justify or prove (e.g., Becky is intellectually uncurious) or if they turn personally vicious ("Enjoy your beauty, your superficial values, and your wealth"), they can expect a somewhat harsher response. Although Becky, to her great credit, has been extremely reasonable in the face of ALL the criticism, fair and unfair, constructive and vicious. It's ME who has been popping off and picking fights with her harsher critics, which I think should be understandable to anyone who's ever been in love.
Incidentally, Becky passed her thesis defense with flying colors. Her committee chairman, who has chaired more than 40 master's committees, said it was one of the best theses he's ever read.
Manan Ahmed -
12/11/2004
Let me just say that South Park rocks.
Van L. Hayhow -
12/10/2004
Thanks. By the way I think the 10 year guideline for history you passed on makes sense. When buying history books, I generally use 20 years for American history as I tend to remember the more recent events and want to read about what I don't know.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/10/2004
Van, The name is from the television cartoon series, which is fairly profane. A Southpark Republican would be a libertarian on most, if not all, the social issues. Wants government out of our lives and off our backs.
Van L. Hayhow -
12/10/2004
Prof. Luker:
What is a Southpark Republican? Thanks.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/10/2004
Mr. Burkart, I recall one professor of American diplomatic history at Chapel Hill saying that he conceded the last 10 years to the political scientists. Anything prior to that was history. So the journalists and political scientists competed for current events. I'm not sure that that's correct, but there really is something to many historians' sense that a distance in time is one factor in improving our judgment about events.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/10/2004
Thanks for this, Manan. I really am sorry that the blogger you cite felt intimidated in any way. I do think that we all have to confront the fact that what we post becomes a matter of public record and has the possibility of turning up in contexts that appear unfair or demeaning. I'm still rethinking my reaction to Becky. There may be a generational element to it. She may be one of those "Southpark Republicans" that I read about and see elsewhere on the net. I don't mean to suggest that the values and behavior of a Southpark Republican can't be accommodated in the academic community, but I do think that there are some problems when self-revelation is out there to be read by whoever for whatever purposes.
Manan Ahmed -
12/10/2004
Incidentally, another academic blogger who blogged under her own name, just moved to a pseudonym and a new blog. See this. Because a cohort found her blog and gave her a "weird look". See this.
Now, this was a very nice, polite and thoughtful blog with nothing that would stand out as embarrasing in a professional setting - ok, at least not to me. But, the blogger felt enough discomfort to switch blogs.
Maybe all of us grad students addicted to writing and over-analyzing life's minutae or politics or our dissertations should rethink blogging.
Jonathan Dresner -
12/10/2004
You're right, but I wonder if the next best defense of our own privacy against "the personal is the professional" is actually our professionalism. Whatever my students think of me (it's not irrelevant, but I'm trying to start small), I expect my colleagues to be able to distinguish between my letter-writing and my scholarship, between my son's pictures and my syllabi, etc.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/9/2004
I take seriously the judgment of my colleague, Sharon Howard. "Lead me not into temptation ..." will be my continuing prayer.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/9/2004
Your observation brings us directly to a problem which I think we've handled rather badly. It has to do with the, by now, cliche', "the personal is political." I've searched and searched for the first use of that line -- it's lost somewhere in the 1960s or slightly earlier. First, I don't know exactly what it means; but, more importantly, it seems to me, it drops out of consideration another term: the private. To say that "the personal is political" invites excruciating examination of our private lives. When we put our privacy on the net, it certainly holds it up for public and for political scrutiny. When that happens, it is unlikely that anyone, so examined, will escape pilliage and embarrassment. Almost inevitably, it invites invoking that "private" life in contexts where we'd prefer it not be invoked. Does Becky wish to have undergraduates at Arizona State tittering (pardon me) over her photograph which can be found on the net? I doubt it. _We_ are, after all, the first line of defense of our own privacy and I don't altogether understand why one would so freely render it for close examination on the net.
Derek Charles Catsam -
12/9/2004
Jonathan -- you leave out the word that makes it even more ghastly -- a HISTORY MA on Britney.
dc
Carl Patrick Burkart -
12/9/2004
In some ways, I agree except for the fact that it is so recent. Wouldn't most historians be leary or advising a thesis on the 2000 elections? Of course, she may be placing Spears in a larger historical context. Perhaps she does examine how the recording industry has changed since the 70s. Perhaps she places Spears within a larger context of young female sex symbols--from the 1950s on up. I'm curious to see where individual Cliopatriarchs draw the line of history. How recent is too recent?
Richard Henry Morgan -
12/9/2004
The phrase seems to originate in a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It isn't in the folio version, which many consider canonical, but it can be found in the quarto version of 1604. My The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (3rd ed) has it "Hoist with his own petar"
My William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford, 1986) has it "Hoised with his own petard"
Each edition seems to have made its own compromises between original and modernized spellings. It would be interesting to see what the actual quarto says.
The dropped final 'd' may derive from the French pronounciation, as 'petard' was originally French. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor believe that both the 1604 quarto and the 1623 folio are Shakespeare's own, the latter being his revision of his quarto. Shakespeare may not have liked the phrase -- or at least its function within his work -- but it has become a favorite of English speakers nevertheless.
C. H.L. George -
12/9/2004
Yes it's not a bad thesis idea. I hope she does well. All you have to do is transfer it back to a 19th-century Britney and no one would think of knocking it at all.
Jeremy Rich -
12/9/2004
I don't think that the idea of writing a thesis on Britney from a cultural studies light is a bad one at all. When scholars do so in several decades time, I doubt there will be much stigma against it, just as historians are turning to the disco era (and even the 'disco sucks' movement!) now.
I second Sharon's point on this. I have been a lurker for a while and enjoy Ralph's comments a great deal, and I just think this case is just not worth the effort. She's leaving history behind, and she's made a good choice for personal and other reasons. Let it go.
(I make no judgements as to what the thesis actually contains. That's what the thesis defence is for.)
And, by the way, I refuse to get caught up in this ridiculous spat about an entirely unexceptional and not very interesting blog. So this will be my one and only comment here on the subject: Ralph, I'm not asking for any recantations, but leave off the personal abuse now, please? It's entirely out of proportion to Becky's, er, crimes. You could have criticised what she actually wrote; or better, criticised the use of her personal experiences of a particular department in the cause of a more general political crusade. What you chose to do instead does you no credit.
Jonathan Dresner -
12/9/2004
I wonder, though, whether we're not running into a potentially troubling area when we allow our personal and professional lives to be too intertwined. I'm not defending the images, but I wonder what really constitutes "compromising" and whether we should be required to be dignified and professional all the time in any venue.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/9/2004
Danny,
I'd just recommend that you keep your boobies off the net. However well endowed you and Becky may be, they won't help you get that endowed chair in Cambridge.
Danny Loss -
12/9/2004
I, erm, have also posted, um, "compromising" photos of myself on the web. It might take a bit of poking around on my site to find them, but they're certainly there.
Hopefully the dry-as-dust post that's at the top of my blog will convince people of my academic rigor...
Jonathan Dresner -
12/9/2004
It's nice to see that I'm not the only person out there who loves that turn of phrase. I'm going to start using it more often.
She's getting an MA for a thesis on Britney? Damn, I work way too hard. I'm officially opening up a discussion on whether or not Cliopatria should start offering MA degrees on-line.....
