Telephone; or, Some thoughts on publicness

Please note that my office telephone has been disconnected due to budget cuts implemented by the state of California.

    --Professor Ian Duncan's email signature file

Call all you want, but there's no one home

And you're not going to reach my telephone.

    --Lady Gaga

There's a Telephone-like quality to news of the effects of the statewide California budget cuts on individual UC campuses, departments, and programs. You remember the game from early childhood--you pass a message around the room, whispering from ear to ear, and then giggle at the end when the original message is juxtaposed with what the last person finally heard.

This is partly because it is genuinely difficult to understand the distribution and effects of budget cuts (why were East Asian language courses radically cut just when a new East Asian library building was going up? an observer might, with fairness, ask).

But it's also because it's difficult to get an official account from anybody. With budget cuts comes a stigma, and therefore a dilemma. It is difficult to fight budget cuts without clearly representing how badly they damage the department and the university. But as soon as a department or a campus admits to having been hurt by cuts, it faces a loss of prestige and a concomitant flight of talent. Part of the damage that the budget cuts inflict comes from anybody knowing about the damage--or thinking they know.

The result is a mixture of genuine confusion and official obfuscation, in which information flows primarily through rumor and statistics--the latter to be understood as the superlative successor to Mark Twain's "lies" and "damned lies."

And that's how the UC budget cuts' effects on my department came to be emblematized, through a Telephone-like process, by telephones.

It's well known by now that English faculty at Berkeley no longer have office phones. Ian Duncan (to his credit, in my opinion) said so in his email signature file for about a year. Evidently there are members of UC administration who consider us a "bad" department for having let on about this fact. Anecdotally, I hear it's whispered among (and sometimes, by competing departments, to) prospective graduate students that our lack of phones is an emblem of how terrible the cuts have been for us.

Well, it is--an emblem, that is. But surely we English scholars can think a bit critically about just how that emblem signifies.

William Deresiewicz's recent, much-circulated, and rather good article in The Nation casually dropped the following statement: "Stipends are so low at the University of California, Berkeley, the third-ranked research institution on the planet, that the school is having trouble attracting graduate students."

I can't speak for other departments at Cal, but I know that the statement is not true for English--at least not this year. It's not that graduate stipends aren't low (they're graduate stipends; they're low by definition), and in fact we also had unusually low yield this year. But informal surveys (rumors, rumors) suggest that our peer departments did too.

So while it's tempting to make a causal narrative out of it, as Deresiewicz does, in this case the narrative seems unsupported by the evidence.

In fact, graduate stipends in Berkeley's English department are commensurate with those offered at much wealthier peer institutions. For instance, although we joke about our transbay colleagues at Stanford ("You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!"), the truth is that their fellowships ^for incoming students as of this year^* don't materially exceed ours. It's perhaps a little janky that our fellowship packages are often cobbled together piecemeal due to the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies and, yes, economic constraints, of being at a public university. But that's always been true of Cal.

Here's the thing about the phones: they're symbolic, in more ways than one. Part of the reason they seem like such a basic infrastructural need is that they're such an old infrastructural need. In point of fact, they don't get a lot of use, and are a low priority--that's why getting rid of phones was a very reasonable response to budget cuts. The Wesleyan historian Claire Potter, who blogs as Tenured Radical, recently wrote, "Take my phone. Please." After all,

By doing this, you could free up some money in our zero-sum budget game to reduce the cost of my benefits or bump up my research money. Or give me a tiny bonus to subsidize my cell phone costs. Or keep the money and allow me to deduct the cost of my mobile from my taxes as a legitimate business expense. And it would clear a lovely space on my desk where I could put a vase of spring flowers -- or a box of Kleenex, to prepare for the next round of budget cuts.

She's alluding to budget cuts at a private university, by the way.

Sure, it's pretty bootleg that we can't afford phones, and if you have enough bootleg working conditions it becomes a serious problem. If anyone from the state legislature is reading this: THIS NO PHONES SITUATION IS COMPLETELY BOOTLEG. But in and of themselves, office land-lines are not indispensable for teaching or research. In contrast, graduate fellowships are, increasingly, indispensable. So yeah, there's no phone on my desk, but our entire incoming graduate cohort--of modest size, for us, but nonetheless bigger than the incoming cohorts of our peer departments--is funded, because people in the department worked to make it happen. It's about telephones, and it isn't.

A department's reputation is as fragile as a lady's, and as easily damaged by rumors, whether accurate or not. Much ado about nothing can still make young Claudios considering graduate study wary of committing to a Hero who seems less than virtuous solvent.

But the aptness of the analogy should make us pause over how we are tempted to react to rumor. Ought we try to hide the damage the budget cuts inflict, as if defending our maidenly virtue?

I'm inclined to agree with the aptly named, clear-sighted Krystal Ball, the 2010 congressional candidate who refused to be intimidated when opponents challenged her virtue by circulating sexual photos of her on the internet. Instead of trying to suppress the photos, she challenged the premise on which they were meant to discredit her--what she correctly identified as "the tactic of making female politicians into whores," as if the unseemliness of being both a woman and public made her (tautologically) unfit for public office.

After all, what do the rumors say? That UC is struggling economically?

Shocking.

Let's re-examine the premise that the cuts that we are continually fighting are some kind of embarrassment for the department.

Berkeley English is and has been great, but it was never because it was rolling in cash. We've always been public.

To suppose that Cal's vulnerability to cuts is embarrassing--to whisper, Telephone-style, about our telephones--is, fundamentally, to think that our publicness is embarrassing. It's worth noticing that that's a political premise. Like a woman running for public office, or the rumors themselves, we do a little too much circulating for comfort, it seems.

What has happened to our national discourse when the idea of a truly great public university seems an oxymoron? Not to put too fine a point on it: if you think Berkeley's publicness is an intellectual liability, then you are part of the problem--the national problem of that perverse and pervasive neoliberal reflex, not "always historicize" but "always privatize." By the same tautology as that applied to women running for office, the very fact that we're public is assumed to be a disqualification for serving the public. Always privatize.

The Berkeley English department challenges that premise. Cal's publicness is part of its greatness, across the university and within the English department. There were UC-wide faculty and staff furloughs last year; it was the faculty that pushed for a graduated scale that would at least partially protect lower-earning university employees from the full force of the impact--an improvement on the blunt two-tiered model first proposed by university administration. And I've repeatedly seen Berkeley faculty stand up for the labor rights of graduate instructors and of non-academic staff. Our graduate students--and our postdocs--are unionized. Are yours? Or have your tenured faculty persuaded themselves that graduate instructors are "apprentices"?

People don't come here for the money--you couldn't, really. It's an exciting place to be, partly because, frankly, we can't just buy famous scholars (ten years after they've made their marks on the field)--we have to cultivate them ourselves. Our undergraduates, largely products of the California public K-12 system, are often less polished than those at private institutions, but they're also creative and diverse and ferociously intelligent. Some of our best are community college transfers--mature, curious students who really know what they want out of an education.

Economic scarcity makes some things difficult at Cal: that's a fact. We can ill afford further cuts. I'm furious at public disinvestment in higher education, and I fear that recent drastic tuition hikes will forever alter the quality of our wonderful student body. Also, whoever it was who floated that online course evaluations idea: total fail.

But we know how to make the best of what we have, to protect the least secure among us, and to advocate for humanities research and teaching. We do it damn well, all while producing some of the best research and best-trained students in the country.

No need to whisper. No need at all.

[UPDATE: Dean Andrew Szeri's response to Deresiewicz (scroll down)]


*clarification added 5/14, in a characteristically slimy way.

Goble, Mark. "Cameo Appearances; or, When Gertrude Stein Checks into Grand Hotel." MLQ 62.2 (2001): 117-63 [pdf].

Halberstam, Jack. "You Cannot Gaga Gaga"

Posted without comment.



Via @wynkenhimself.

Am I the meanest teacher? Maybe. I think I'm about to get a really terrible song stuck in my students' heads. But it's for Learning!

The timbre of sincerity

Just to be clear: Lady Gaga is about (primarily visual) spectacle, not about music per se. That's not to say that her spectacle is necessarily immersive in the sense in which we classically think about spectacle. (By "we" I mean people who sit around thinking about panoramas and wax museums and are very fond of the work of Alison Griffiths and Vanessa Schwartz and spend rainy weekend afternoons leafing through The Arcades Project, which is to say all of us.) Her videos are not made for IMAX; they're made for YouTube. They are miniatures in their bigness.

To me the canonical Lady Gaga video remains "Bad Romance." I haven't even heard her new single; there's no video yet, so what's the point?



Notwithstanding the primacy of the visual in Lady Gaga, there's something that continues to fascinate me about the sound of "Bad Romance." I'm sure the observation has been made better elsewhere, but I'm still trying to figure it out. There is something about Gaga's vocal timbre that sometimes conveys irony, sometimes sincerity. Compare "love, love, love" at 0:55, 1:12, 2:16, and especially 2:32 to "I don't want to be friends" at 3:50 and especially at 4:05.

"Love, love, love" is gritty, a little nasal. It doesn't care. The air is contained; it's high in the throat; it's whatever air Gaga happens to have sitting around in her upper respiratory system. Nothing's being pushed. The quality of the sound tells us that "love, love, love" means something like a casual if ruthless desire.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends" is open-throated. There is diaphragm involved, projection, technique. It is what they call "belting." It's a little Broadway, a stylized sincerity augmented by the reintroduction of the "unadorned" Gaga close-up.

"I don't want to be friends" is the video's emotional climax, the sticky moment of investment and utter, fixed attention in an otherwise brittle, aggressive performance. Compare. The video starts with Gaga covered in a metal façade, and ends with her character, accessorized by matching flamethrower and cigarette, absently reclining next to a charred corpse. Most of the time the Lady Gaga character isn't "all there," whether her eyes are hidden behind a variety of shades or masks or popping wide open in a head-lolling stupor.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends"--that belting of air from the bottom of the lungs--physically performs focused, self-possessed, fully conscious desire. It constitutes a break, and it's a break that you hear. The thorough integration of vocal texture with narrative is part of what makes this video brilliant.

It took a highly creative extended reading by Jack Halberstam to get me at all interested in the "Telephone" video. But "Bad Romance" belts its artful construction very loudly.


Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland, and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

Griffiths, Alison. Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Print.

---. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print.

Everything sounds better

The tag-line for the Gregory Brothers' Autotune the News series is "everything sounds better."



I'm fascinated by the internet principle that there is almost nothing that cannot be improved by a dance beat. The Gregory Brothers (a misnomer--they are actually the Gregory brothers and sister-in-law) capture the highly mediated, corporatized medium of television news and mediate the hell out of it, editing, remixing, inserting themselves into the videos, and of course turning media and political celebrities into American Idol-like singing contestants. (Each Autotune the News video ends with awarding the unwitting participants "best accidental singer" rankings.)

In reappropriating the news, the Gregory brothers trivialize it, but perhaps not more than it has already been trivialized by the news media itself. There's a way in which Autotune the News performs the same work as the classic spoof trailer of The Shining, which pitches the horror film as a goofy family comedy:



It reveals the extent to which music and framing tell us what to think about the film we're watching. But Autotune the News doesn't just reframe; it also insists on a particular kind of reframing through music--patently derivative but joyous nonetheless. The "serious" news--where seriousness has been produced by grave tones and facial expressions, music, and infographics--becomes an occasion for catchy pop play.

This ethos seems to find the ultimate expression in the "Bed Intruder Song." The song is based on real news footage--a moment of the same kind of outbreak of human passion that Autotune the News celebrates. Regular guy Antoine Dodson delivered a brilliantly enraged rant on the news in response to a terrifying home invasion and the attempted rape of his sister Kelly. Breaking out of the dampening mediation of the interview format, Dodson addressed the public and the fugitive attempted rapist directly, expressing his righteous rage and heaping indignant insults on the criminal. The Gregory Brothers autotuned and edited the video to create the Bed Intruder Song:



Tellingly, Dodson was surfing Facebook at the time of the invasion, and later took to the Bed Intruder Song with glee ("it's my ringtone!", he acknowledges with some joy). Dodson himself is a part of the internet culture that believes that "everything sounds better" autotuned and set to a dance beat. And why not?

In the only logical turn of events, Dodson later performed the Bed Intruder Song live (but still autotuned!) at the 2010 BET Hip Hop Awards, with a Gregory backing him up on keyboard:



(Various other remixes and covers were inevitable.)

Even Carl Sagan sounds better with a beat, as one obsessive musician has demonstrated:



Perhaps naïvely, I see the "everything sounds better" ethos as a resistance to the corporatization of art and media and the utilitarianism of the information age. Students are increasingly trained vocationally; they're made to feel guilty for taking courses that don't feed into their pre-med requirements, or for (heaven forbid) majoring in music or theater or German (or French, Italian, Russian, Classics, or theater, the programs being cut at SUNY Albany, or philosophy, which is on the chopping block at, of all places, Howard University). Making art and engaging in critique, they're told, must be left to those who can make a living at it, and the people who can make a living at it are those who work for the major media corporations.

But people can't live without making art and engaging in critique; more to the point, they don't want to. Ordinary citizens who aren't going to win American Idol (one of the Gregory Brothers--sadly I haven't had time to research this in any detail--was briefly a contestant on one of these shows, I believe), at a time when everybody knows that breaking into sanctioned corporate art depends on luck and popularity with focus groups, rebel by reappropriating corporate media, often flirting with copyright violation in the process. Corporate media becomes everybody's media; CNN cannot do better than I can do, because "everything sounds better"--and a little funny--with a dance beat. Supposedly utilitarian information, routed through the infamous 24-hour news cycle, is revealed as entertainment--entertainment that now "sounds better." Sometimes it's creative and original (I think the Carl Sagan song definitely qualifies as original) and sometimes it isn't. But it's pop culture, and it's ours.

I was amused by this ad:



You, too, can make math and science seem almost as awesome as the arts. We need more math and science teachers! But not more art teachers. That would be absurd.

"WHHHHY?": still cute, now with different video

I feel like my earlier reading of Cee Lo's "Fuck You" is very much backed up by the developmental narrative (from childhood through adolescence to the present) of the new video:



It gets extra cuteness points for the mother slapping the boy when he lip-synchs the "fuck you" refrain, the video's only coy acknowledgment of the incongruity that's runs throughout the song--the childishness on one hand, the adult profanity on the other. The deferral of the bridge-tantrum to near the end of the song gives the lie to the progress narrative suggested by the succession of years and the announcement, via title, that Cee Lo is now a "ladykiller" (a word whose aggression is, in context, infantile).

There's a lot more to say about the new video.

It's chilling to see a small girl alluded to as a "gold-digger," for instance.

The video is also very pointed about the lip-synching, since Cee Lo always sings the lead and various actors mouth it. This also conduces to the gender-bending that Kevin mentions, particularly with the (very funny) trio of female backup vocalists mouthing what are audibly male backup vocals.

No time for a dissection tonight, but I assume the internets will be picking this one up and running with it.

Puerile desire and the cuteness of "WHHHHY?"

[Welcome, readers from 33 1/3!]

There are a lot of f-bombs in this post. Just saying.

Puerility is a powerful mode for a number of the authors I study, so you can imagine my delight when the internets deposited the following gem before me:



We learn that there is going to be no claim to dignity from the very first line, even before the endlessly catchy refrain:

I see you driving 'round town with the girl I love, and I'm like, "Fuck you!"

"I'm like" lets us know before we even arrive that this will be no haughty drama; no grand passion; no cold, dignified rage. It acknowledges at once the immaturity of responding to heartbreak with "Fuck you!" The song subtly clues us into the conjectural status of the "gold-digger" theory of rejection as well: "I guess the change in my pocket wasn't enough." Translation: you must have rejected me because you're a venal, flat stereotype of a woman. Cee Lo indulges in the most simplistic of interpretations, the one that makes a rejection into something other than a real rejection. There's a vicious pleasure and satisfaction in facile interpretations (viz. cable news), and Cee Lo both embraces that pleasure and acknowledges it for what it is: puerility.

As Kevin points out, the song's "fuck you" is universal ("fuck you and fuck her too"--which is to say, fuck everybody). The song's first sentence lets us think the addressee is a competitor for a woman's affections, but it quickly slips back and forth between addressing the competitor and addressing the woman herself. Eventually the universe of the song expands to include an appeal to "Mamma," whereupon the singer is once again denied and handed off to "Dad," in a deft Freudian disciplinary gesture.



The song invokes a queer triangulation of desire (of the woman, of the competitor), but despite the proliferation of f-bombs, in the end it is not an adult song at all but a childish immersion in polymorphous desire. This is why it makes perfect sense that a key metaphor revolves around more or less awesome video game consoles ("Xbox" versus "Atari"), why it "ain't fair" seems like a valid complaint, and why the bridge devolves into explicit (and hilarious) whining, an actual tantrum. By the end of this bridge all pretense that the gold-digger theory could have actually been valid has been abandoned in favor of the open, raw howl of "WHHHHY?" He doesn't know why. It's all a free-flowing libidinal soup now.



The clever lyric video supports the polymorphous libido of the song by refusing distinctions between reasonable and unreasonable, important and unimportant, figure and ground. Every last word of the song is printed before our eyes, in time, including backup vocals and non-words like "OOO, OOO, OOOO" and "UH." (Follow the bouncing ball?)



This is perhaps the best use of puerility I've seen in a while, and like some of Mark Twain's funniest rants, it's characterized by an unusual energy, a full-fledgedness that's hilarious, in part, because it's so very cute--an impotent, multidirectional, adorable rage. This is how the song manages to be intense and light at the same time, angry and hilarious--like some of Twain's less sporting pot-shots at the literary lights of a previous generation. It's indulgent, childishly so, and that's what makes it appealing.

As with Twain, there's a dark dimension to this humor as well. First, it depends on our willingness to take childish anguish lightly, and to laugh at what is intensely, if incoherently, felt. And second, puerility (that is, the tantrum of the male child) here becomes the humorous grounds for perpetuating a deeply misogynistic narrative. She isn't really a gold-digger, no, but Cee Lo gets to say she is, over and over, and we'll laugh at it, because puerility excuses it. Female desire is reduced to a cipher for our amusement. There's no resolving this, I don't think. Humor always has its undertow.

[Update as of 9/1/2010.]

I know this is absolutely pathological, but I'm a little bothered that the apostrophe in front of "round" is pointed in the wrong direction. Someone didn't override smart quotes?

Also, it strikes me as ingenious that the video emulates film stock, but I'm not sure why.

On cuteness:
Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2004): 811-47. Print.

Nerd alert: University of Washington Information School librarians significantly improve upon Lady Gaga's "Poker Face":



[Lyrics][Via Lisa Gold.]