I wonder if that will actually make me post more? (I have been saying, after all, that I think that WP could really, really, really use a post-by-email feature.) We’ll see.
Life continues to be very busy, dear reader(s). Let’s call this a holding post, innit.
I struggle with my privilege, mostly because I know that I’ve got bucketfuls of it. I’m western, white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, and educated. The only area I don’t have privilege in is my gender (although I am cisgendered). But I’m not doing too badly, overall. I’m not ashamed of my privilege, but I am conscious of it. Most of my ‘qualities’ afford me a much easier life than others who do not have those ‘qualities’. I suppose, if I’m honest, that makes me uncomfortable. I am aware of my privilege, and I do own it, but I’m not convinced that that’s enough. I was born with this privilege, and I will have it forever. I don’t want to contribute a system of inequality because of it, but I know I do. The privileged always do, whether they are aware of it or not. Simply by benefiting from privilege, we are contributing to a society which embraces it.
I really troubles me.
This blogger says it much better:
Hey you in the back row with the unacknowledged privilege, I am talking to you. That’s right, I am pointing my long black finger at you. It is time to listen up and learn. Privilege is an extremely loaded word. Many will not acknowledge it, preferring instead to focus on their good deeds. Privilege can come in many forms, you can have race, class, gender, western, cis, ability, etc, and it is important to recognize each and every single one of them, they are a part of your being and can not be halted at will any more than you can stop breathing.
I am black, western, straight, middle class, educated, and able bodied, all of these factors combined create who I am and colour how I view the world. Had I been born elsewhere, and were illiterate and poor all of the comfort that I view as everyday occurrences would not exist in my life. If I am hungry I walk into my kitchen. I can kiss my unhusband in public and know that the stares we receive are because of our racial differences, and not because of our sexuality. My education ensures that I will have a good chance at achieving and maintaining good paying employment, and it further empowers me to discuss ideas, concepts and ideologies from a detached academic point of view. This is who I am, and I own all of it.
Owning privilege is not about feeling ashamed, it is about acknowledging the benefits that one receives without having to work for them. It is about realizing that people born to different circumstances will not receive these benefits as a consequence of our skewed understanding of worth and value. It is further about realizing that no matter how many good and charitable works I perform, my body will always exist with privilege. No matter how often I donate my time to food banks or homeless shelters, I cannot undo the class privilege into which I was born. No matter how valiantly I advocate for fair trade, and an end to things like the western fuelled wars in Africa, I cannot undue the damage that my government has done in my name. As sickened as I am about the systemic inequalities that plague humanity, I am privileged and I own it.
It is not acceptable to say, I am not racist, sexist, homophobic etc and therefore any accusation of privilege is misplaced. These privileges are encoded to the body before birth simply because of the society we are all born into. We do not live outside of socialization we are the product of it.
To become defensive and immediately stammer, oh no not me, is a clear indicator of denial. It is this very state of denial that allows privilege to maintain its insidious grip on society. One cannot actively fight against interlocking isms while continuing to deny the effect that they personally have on you. How are you to convince anyone that inequality is systemic, if you as an individual continue to benefit without acknowledgement? It is dishonest and begins ally work from a false groundwork. It’s like saying I’m not racist because my best friend as a kid was black. People see that kind of commentary for exactly what it is.
Understanding and owning privilege does not mean that you must live a life of shame or guilt, it does however mean that you owe a debt that must be repaid. For each advantage that you are given, you must at some point attempt to mitigate some of your unearned privilege. This will never absolve you of said privilege but over time, if enough people equally dedicate themselves to mitigation it will lessen privilege through the changing of ideas of what it means to exist as a specific body.
We spend far too much time saying oh no not me, or feeling shame for things that are out of our control. A dear friend once told me that she felt ashamed and guilty because of slavery. I was actually dumbstruck for a moment before I responded, “you have never personally enslaved anyone, the issue is not history, the issue is how you continue to be advantaged because of history.” This is central to the point that I am trying to make. No one individual can bear the sins of the world, but each individual continually recreates these sins by failure to acknowledge the degree to which we are socialized to accept that certain bodies are somehow less than. There is no righteous person, only righteous thoughts, deed and emotions.
[Source]
I watched Made in Britain last week. I put the DVD in one evening when I was bored and wanted to pass a hour or two before bed. I didn’t realise that it would be quite like it was, and I certainly wasn’t prepared for the intensity I experienced. Tim Roth’s performance was the best I have ever seen in a film – do you know he got the role quite by accident when he walked into the auditions looking for a bike pump? – and even when he wasn’t speaking (shouting), he was absolutely gripping.
I was intrigued because the film started out with a young offender’s – Roth – appearance in court. He was sent to an ‘assessment centre’, and I assumed that we were going to see a tired and predictable tale of redemption and rehabilitation. Oh, how wrong I was. ‘Trevor’ was relentless in his deviance and defiance the entire way through the film, and used every opportunity to subvert the system. He was rude, violent, contemptible, and terrifying; but I developed an affection for him immediately. This wasn’t because he was so clearly troubled, but because I couldn’t help but admire his absolute defiance of everything that we ‘normal’ people subscribe to. He didn’t care, but he vehemently cared about not caring, and I was very drawn to that quality to him. His confidence in himself and his views (however vile we perceive them) was astounding, and he was absolutely unapologetic about who he was.
His life was clearly doomed to prison, and a career of crime, but he completely embraced it because he had found where he believed he belonged in the world in ways some of us never will. I wouldn’t want to be him – no one would, frankly – but in his own very strange and upsetting way, he had it all totally sorted.
I’ll usually talk about anything. Indeed, the more I shouldn’t talk about something, the more I’m likely to talk about it. But the case of the Austrian father is too much even for me. I probably should want to theorise, ad nauseum, about why he did what he did and what his compulsions and motivations meant, but this case feels out of bounds. Speculating intellectually about events such as this is most often the preserve (and privilege) of those who have nothing better to do and who have never experienced anything like it. I draw the line at that in this case. My only thoughts on this whole ordeal are with the victim and her children (also victims). They deserve not to become a case study for the rest of the world.
It’s all just a scare, of course, and it’s impossible to know the merits of each of the contributing studies in this meta-analysis, but I’m going to post about it anyway in case any of my readers are rabid vitamin munchers like me. I take about 10 different vitamin and mineral supplements a day. I kid not! I eat healthily as well but it’s become something of an obsession and addiction. I know, I know…
Today, the BBC news revealed that some vitamin supplements do not extend life and could even lead to a premature death.
Oh dear!
A review of 67 studies found “no convincing evidence” that antioxidant supplements cut the risk of dying.
Scientists at Copenhagen University said vitamins A and E could interfere with the body’s natural defences.
“Even more, beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E seem to increase mortality,” according to the review by the respected Cochrane Collaboration.
The research involved selecting various studies from 817 on beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and selenium which the team felt were the most likely to fairly reflect the impact of the supplements on reducing mortality.
It has been thought that these supplements may be able to prevent damage to the body’s tissues called “oxidative stress” by eliminating the molecules called “free radicals” which are said to cause it.
This damage has been implicated in several major diseases including cancer and heart disease.
I’m not buying it, even if I should. Mobile phones are bad for you, mobile phones are harmless; fairy liquid causes cancer, fairy liquid’s harmless, etc. etc. I’m going to keep on munching my vitamins regardless (and you should too). In my experience, meta-analysis are not hugely reliable and are often refuted in a short space of time. Besides, issuing blanket advice on whether or not someone (anyone, everyone) should take vitamin and mineral supplements is vastly irresponsible.
Take no notice, vitamin-lovers; they’ll be telling you something different next week.
I’m off to the Motherland for a week. I leave you with this deliciously biting piece from Marina Hyde in today’s Guardian.
The price of Cole could leave you feeling a bit sick.
Summary: Ashley Cole is an arrogant, conceited, nasty little fvckhead.
I don’t always like Hyde’s opinions but she’s spot on here.
The piece, for the link-adverse, is after the jump.
Here be the twelve [very brief and disconnected] book reviews I’ve done on the Facebook bookshelf application. (It’s only the second application I’ve ever added on Facebook, I addition.)
I’ll be doing more ‘reviews’ when I get a chance, I hope.
On The Body Artist (Don DeLillo): Impossible to wade through.
On Cock and Bull (Will Self): Hilarious. I don’t care if Will Self’s far too pretentious for his own good; his ability to make me laugh is second to [almost] none.
On A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess): Possibly the best book ever written (1).
On Dead Babies (Marin Amis): Dead Babies was my first Amis read, and it got me hooked on him. Amis can turn his hand to dark comedy like few others can. Just don’t expect to like any of his characters that much.
On The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen): I can’t remember a thing about it, although I know I’ve read it. Something to do with a big family?
On Girlfriend in a Coma (Douglas Coupland): Overrated. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, frankly.
On The Girl and the Lion D’Or (Sebastian Faulks): So dull. I think I fell asleep in between each page.
On On the Road (Jack Kerouac): I wonder if anyone else agrees that this book is too long, too dull and too overrated.
On This Other Eden (Ben Elton): Elton’s satire is very clever, but his writing style lets him down every time. It turns a great idea into something very tedious and predictable.
On Brave New World (Aldous Huxley): Possibly the best book ever written (2).
On The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho): I couldn’t understand what any of the attraction was to this book. I hated all of it.
On The Trial (Franz Kafka): Kafka scares the bejaysus out of me. I’ll bet he does the same to everyone. He’s in good company with Huxley and Orwell when he describes a world we should be very afraid off.
It’s hard to know where to start describing Will Self’s Book of Dave. Nay, it’s hard to know where to even start thinking about it.
It’s sometime in the future – we’re not sure when – and London has been devastated by flood (familiar to anyone?). The post-flood London we’re introduced to is very different to the one we know now, in every way. Back in our own time we meet Dave the black taxi driver, his wife for a time, Michelle, and his son, Carl. In brief, Dave and Michelle’s marriage ends, and Dave sees less and less of Carl as the years move on. Eventually, during a period of dementia, Dave writes a book (based on his own experiences) about how he thinks the world should be managed – for example, he advises a ‘Changeover’ twice a week where children are handed over from the mother to the father (and vice versa), based on the principle that ‘mummies’ and ‘daddies’ should never be together. He has this book printed on metal somehow or other, and he buries it in Hampstead, behind his son’s new home.
When the Book is found in ‘The Ham’ in ‘New London’ years later, it becomes the inhabitants’ bible, and they make sense of Dave’s advice by instituting a number of increasingly grotesque and uncomfortable rules for life. Anyone who breaks the rules is ‘broken on the wheel’, the significance of which is not revealed until near the end of the novel. The dialogue between the ‘Hamsters’ is written in phonetic cockney-speak, and the words most commonly used seem to have a basis in Dave’s cabbing language of our time: foglamp is the sun; screenwash is rain; and intercom is how they communicate with ‘God’ (Dave). The novel follows the lives of a few of these Hamsters, in the main, and how they choose to make sense of the world around them.
We never get to see any of the Book of Dave so we have to decide for ourselves what he wrote and how he wrote it. The details themselves are strangely not important, however. What we do get to see is the way in which the contents of the Book – whatever they were – are used and manipulated by the powerful – whoever they are – to make the weak frightened and submissive. It’s implied that this was never Dave’s intention (he didn’t have any intentions, really) but it’s supposed to be a reflection of our own society where religion has been used by the powerful to subdue the weak; and where the fundamental messages of our ‘visionaries’ have been distorted for other and competing agendas.
It’s a big read, the Book of Dave, and it’s not always pleasant. Self has long had a penchant for the detailed description of physicality and he doesn’t hold back at all in his latest novel. I find that element of his writing unnecessary but I always enjoy his message nonetheless.
The Book of Dave is [probably] a must for those who enjoy their satire and [definitely] a must for those who don’t mind their literature getting a little too close to the bone. He might be an arrogant prick, Will Self, but he’s still a bloody great writer.
(FYI: I’m largely offline this week because I’m Ooop North working. I was looking forward to an Internet-free week, but I cracked and came to a Starbucks this evening. As it turns out, I haven’t really missed all that much in the 52 hours I’ve been offline but I wasn’t to know that. I’ll probably be back here before I return to Oxford. Probably definitely.)
Man, I think it’s ruined my week you know. Doctor Who, that is. I’ve been in a constant State of Frown since 8.00 on Saturday evening, so I can’t deny the correlation. Not only was Saturday’s finale painfully dissapointing but, looking back, I now realise that I found the whole series very dull in places. Smith and Jones didn’t thrill me (and certainly didn’t hook me into the new series); The Shakespeare Code was very dull (and I tried to like it by watching it three times); Gridlock was a disgrace; I think I fell asleep during The Lazarus Experiment; I can’t even remember what 42 was about but it had Cindy Beale I think; and until the last five minutes of Utopia, I don’t think I even bothered watching.
Now, I’ll admit that I enjoyed the return of my beloved Daleks immensely, and Human Nature, The Family of Blood and Blink were nothing short of genius, but this series leaves me feeling very sour indeed. My ratio of tedium to genius speaks for itself, and the numerous wasted opportunites for legendary television with the Doctor and the Master are just unforgivable. (And whoever decided to turn the Doctor into Gollum for half an hour should be forced to move to a desert island with nothing but peas to live on.) Part of me even resents The Sound of the Drums now for making me believe the finale was going to be beautifully magical. For it really was as woeful as it could be.
Tennant gets better and better and make no mistake (which is no mean achievement given what he has to work with), although I’d advise him to pick his companions a little more astutely from now on; and it’s always nice to mess around with Captain Jack for a couple of episodes. But all in all, I’m not inclined to be thumbs-up happy at all. I think I even want them to give it up for a little while until it can find its feet again. That’s me saying I’d go without my David for the sake of the people, ye hear?! It must be bad…
[Edit on 04.07.07: what was I saying about picking companions more astutely? Man alive!]
I haven’t been keeping up with my monthly downloads at all. I keep running out of patience and time alas. And I seem to be too busy doing Other Stuff.
In any case, June downloads will be the following:
The White Stripes – Icky Thump. Q describes it as ‘their strangest record yet’. It’s full of Celtic folk, poetry and bagpipes, it goes on to say. I hate it already. Truth be told, I’ve hated the White Stripes since about two months after everyone (including myself) started to like them. The brother (or whatever the hell he is for those who care) is an obnoxious idiot and I’m convinced that there’s actually something wrong with the sister. Still, though, I always download their albums to see what they’re up to. From the sounds of it, this’ll be my last time.
Editors – An End Has A Start. I frickin’ loved the début album from Editors, The Back Room, and would happily include it in my favourite albums of 2005 and since, so I’m excited about their second effort. The reviews I’ve read thus far haven’t been as promising as I’d expect, but never would such a thing stop me. I’ll let you know…
Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger. I have to say, I do try to dissociate Adams from his alt-country reputation because I still equate country music with the likes of Big Tom. Nonetheless, I could listen to Adams all day, although I’m happy to leave the more personal lovin’ to Lism. The reviews I’ve read so far are favourable, and he seldom releases anything below par. Nuff said.
I’m sure I’ll also go for a new compilation of songs by Buckley for the sake of completiveness and because everyone should.
That’s it for now.
– –
Briefly, the downloads from March until now have been (so far as I can remember): Sia’s Lady Croissant, BRMC’s Baby 81, Rufus Wainwright’s Release The Stars, The National’s Boxer, Elliott Smith’s New Moon, Feist’s The Reminder, Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’s Living with the Living, and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver.
Looking at that, it seems like I haven’t done too badly, really. I still need to find the time to give some of them a good listening to, though. Grr for life taking over.
