Capitalism and its discontents
It’s late and I should be in bed but I’m not—I’m awake and thinking about money. Last week I went to lunch with a friend of Flint’s from Reed (who I, of course, recognized, but for whatever reason hadn’t officially met before). We had lunch and had a good conversation about life post-Reed, particularly how we, as English majors, had had a hard time getting back in to reading for fun (foreshadowing what will come later in this post, these days I mostly read about food). She works for Goodreads now, though, and they’ve started a monthly book club that has kept her on track. Last month they all read Lean In, and she lamented the fact that she’d somehow become the radical voice in her workplace—everybody else loved it, but she was annoyed by it’s flippant analysis of queer families (when it mentioned them at all) and it’s assumption that a person’s value is measured by how much they can accomplish on behalf of their employer. At Reed there was always someone more left-leaning than you, which was comforting. In the real world, Sheryl Sandberg is accepted, uncritically, as inspiring.
I wish I could dig up a link to it but I keep seeing an article popping up about “The New Domesticity” and how a lot of middle class women are removing themselves from the workforce and homeschooling their children and pickling things and then blogging about it, rather than working 80 hour weeks a la Ms. Sandberg. The author brought up a very good point about the fact that a lot of the most successful “Mommy bloggers” aren’t actually normal middle class people but incredibly wealthy (The Pioneer Woman, anyone?), but she (I think it was a she, but I may be making an incorrect assumption there) also took issue with the idea of women staying home. By continuing to work, they reasoned, women could change the system from within by working to create better conditions for the people/women who don’t have the choice to stay home—stuff like paid family leave or eliminating the wage gap.
I see their point—to work a nontraditional job or to not work at all requires a degree of stability that the vast majority of the population will never have access to. On the other hand, I absolutely hate the idea that I have to use my productivity to create profit for companies that I don’t give a shit about. I like most of my clients, and I love that I have a job that allows me to swan around in PJs eating granola and practicing calligraphy in the morning instead of commuting, but I HATE that I’m enabling my clients chronic overworking and that half of what they pay my company is going to support a growing infrastructure that encourages my Randian CEO to believe that she’s changing the world. And I really, really hate that I have to care about all this. I’m kind of behind on things right now because the last couple weeks have been kind of busy, and I feel bad about it, but really everything I’m doing is pretty trivial so why should I feel bad about it? None of it matters! I like to joke about general lack of meaning, but I don’t feel this way about everything and I do have things I really value. These things don’t have any monetary value, however.
I really believe that my current job shouldn’t exist. The whole idea is basically that our clients are so busy and important that they need to add an extra 10-50 hours a month to their life in order to get everything done that they need to get done. Why not just cut 10-50 hours of crap out of you life and take care of yourself? But apparently someone has to sell luxury adventure travel experiences to rich silicon valley tech entrepreneurs, or sell training videos to startup companies, or create better technology for affiliate marketing. And apparently it takes a lot of time, so here I am scheduling meetings and buying plane tickets.
I’m not totally ruling out the possibility that there’s a workplace out there that I’d want to lean in to, but right now (and here’s where I take this midnight rant to a new level of ridiculousness) all that crap is just making me think of Littlefinger’s deranged rant about ladders on Game Of Thrones last week. I mean, climbing is cool I guess, but what’s up at the top that’s so much cooler than what I have right now? I guess if I had more money I’d buy more expensive yarn, but I’d probably be working more so I’d have less time to knit. It’s always a tradeoff.
Basically what I’m trying to say here is that I would much rather live simply than work my ass off trying to create more profit for rich assholes in order to buy a bunch of crap I don’t need. And if it were ever an option, I’d like it even more if I could pickle things and raise alpacas all day. But when the vast majority of the population still lives in poverty, how self-indulgent would that be? Probably at least as self-indulgent as working in marketing and buying a new iphone every year. Or writing long tumblr posts at 1 AM on your $1500 laptop that’s keeping your boyfriend awake.
I don’t even know guys, maybe Zach is right and we should eradicate income inequality by eating the rich, as the bumper stickers suggest, and then we could all like together as happy members of the Socialist Kollective. Unfortunately I don’t think the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world would ever allow that to happen.
![apiphile:
persisting:
A group of 22 of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars have come together to produce a book that details what they consider to be definitive evidence that the Bard really did write his own plays.
Since the 1850s, 77 people have been suggested as the likely author, with Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere – the 17th Earl of Oxford – and Christopher Marlowe the most popular candidates, and Queen Elizabeth I among the most outlandish. The academics feel the anti-Shakespeare campaign has intensified lately, and that the elevation of Shakespeare authorship studies to master’s degree status has been the final straw.
Three eminent experts on Bacon, Oxford and Marlowe are among the Shakespeareans who demonstrate in a series of essays precisely why only Shakespeare could have written his plays and poems, apart from his collaborations. Cambridge University Press will publish Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy on 18 April, days before the Shakespeare birthday celebrations in Stratford-upon-Avon on 20-21 April. The publication – which they say will be scholarly, but accessible for general readers – is co-edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, noted scholars from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the academic charity.
Edmondson told the Observer that Shakespeare academics have until now had their heads in the sand, hoping the doubts were ludicrous enough to fizzle out. However, they have been alarmed by the spread of authorship challenges in universities on both sides of the Atlantic – at Brunel in west London, and Concordia in Portland, Oregon. He told theObserver: “The University of Brunel has an MA in Shakespeare authorship studies and, as part of that, they could write a dissertation on why they think the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare, for example. It’s absolutely crazy.”
The academic debate has descended into personal attack. Edmondson was shocked to discover a recent paper by an Total-cunt academic entitled The Factual Desert of Stanley Wells, which compares the emeritus professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University to the farmer describing a creature in his pasture: “Half-man and half-bear, and the other half was pig. No matter how he told the story, it didn’t add up.”
Signatories to an online “declaration of reasonable doubt” – which affirms a belief in an enormous gulf between the author’s life and the contents of his works – include leading actors such as Sir Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and Michael York. Hollywood sparked further outrage in 2011 with the film Anonymous portraying Shakespeare as an inarticulate buffoon and the Earl of Oxford as the covert author.
Edmondson said of the new book’s diverse textual and biographical evidence: “This is the first time the discussion has been treated by so many different people in one volume.” For example, discussing the “stylometrics”, or “computational stylistic” tests, MacDonald P Jackson of the University of Auckland concludes that Shakespeare’s and Oxford’s poetry are “intergalactic distances” apart. “De Vere’s models are of the mid-16th century and earlier, with heavy use of alliteration … and a liking for metrical forms with long lines of 12 or 14 syllables. No Shakespeare poem is written in these metres.”
David Kathman, an independent scholar, writes on Shakespeare and Warwickshire, showing how the works are “peppered” with signs that the author came from around Stratford, pointing to local dialect words such as ‘“batlet”, a paddle to beat laundry.
Charles Nicholl, the Marlowe scholar, concedes that at least Marlowe, unlike other contenders, was a major poet and dramatist in his own right, but points out that he was killed in 1593 and was therefore dead when most of Shakespeare’s plays were written. He ridicules Marlovians who, ignoring a coroner’s report, suggest that his death in a brawl was an elaborate hoax to escape charges of heresy.
Carol Chillington Rutter of Warwick University takes issue with those who argue that Shakespeare was not educated enough to have written learned works. She demonstrates the intense rigour of Elizabethan grammar schools, where children could translate Latin into English and back, could recognise the most intricate rhetorical tropes and figures (metaphor, allegory, hyperbole) and got through reading lists that would today constitute a university classics degree.
James Shapiro of Columbia University in New York, says that doubters will not disappear, but adds: “This volume will make responding to the next film, or the next campaign, or the next question posed about Shakespeare’s authorship that much easier.”
However William Leahy, head of Brunel’s school of arts, justified offering a master’s in Shakespeare authorship: “I find it disingenuous of them to say that this is not a rigorous academic course. There is a problem with the idea that Shakespeare wrote all of the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him.”
[Source: The Guardian]
“an Total-cunt academic” ahahahahaha
I really have to remember to turn Ponify off when I’m copy-pasting things.
Anyone who says Shakespeare didn’t write the plays of Shakespeare is an elitist asshole. SIR DEREK YOU HAVE BETRAYED ME!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/17b0437c1c9e75073c76a92a215f8a9e/tumblr_mkiu4bjS7Z1qb93qso1_500.jpg)
