Cox Crow

Cricket, one of the cats, stands patiently next to my head. She’s purring quietly. I will notice her and remember she is /waiting/ for food. Luna, the other young one, runs in to say she is also up and oh good you are too look there is no food and ok I see you are moving now let’s go!

No. 2 Daughter made what she calls excellerated brownies yesterday. They start as brownies from a box mix, and then she adds more of everything. They are good: taste like brownies.

This box is strange. Betty Crocker makes her brownie mix in the United Arab Emirates. This makes no sense. All of the ingredients are imported. The box is imported. Somehow materials, transportation, and labor is so cheap that the supply chain moves everything to a small spot on the Persian Gulf, assembles it, ships it to New York, and General Mills and the grocer still make a profit on 18.5 oz. of sugar, flour, and cocoa sold for $2.00–8¢ in 1913 dollars, when a pound of flour was 3¢ and a pound of sugar was 5¢.

My family has the strange habit of buying books whenever possible, so sometime in 1984 or so I read the 1983 edition of The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943 (1952). What you do doesn’t need to be large or dramatic; everyone can do something.

Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and a handful of others started and led the White Rose. On Thursday, February 18, 1943, they were arrested by the Gestapo, and executed on the following Monday. She was 21. The day before her arrest, she wrote a friend:

I’ve just been playing the Trout Quintet on the phonograph. Listening to the andantino makes me want to be a trout myself. You can’t help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad at heart you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky and the budding branches sway, stirred by the wind, in the bright young sunlight. I’m so much looking forward to the spring again. In that piece of Schubert’s you can positively feel and smell the breezes and scents and hear the birds and the whole of creation cry out for joy. And when the piano repeats the theme like cool, clear, sparkling water – oh, it’s sheer enchantment.

Sophie Scholl, to Lisa Remppis, Munich, February 17, 1943
(At the Heart of the White Rose, Inge Jens, ed., J. Maxwell Brownjohn, trans.)

Intersectionality seems a very big word for the idea that people cannot be reduced to a single component part and need to be treated as an approximation of a whole. And the sort of thing that would only arise from initially treating people as being reducible to certain significant features: for example, that because I am a man, it automatically follows that I think such and such, do so and so, and have these other features. It’s the sort of error caused by over-classification, segmentation, and assumptions. One might also call this error stereotypical prejudice. Intersectionality attempts to correct the error, by adding other factors to the analysis.

Analysis, the breaking down of a thing to its component parts in order to understand it, is a useful diagnostic tool. Presuming from that analysis to predict and then control is a severely flawed presumption. Synthesis, the re-assemblage of those parts, does not always result in the original plaything.

And what significant categories would I be parsed into? White, middle-aged, college graduate, male. How many do you need to predict my buying patterns at Target or who I voted for in 1989?

But intersectionality still does not see a whole; the underlying error of fragmentation remains. Though a useful corrective, intersectionality, as now popularly applied, reinforces the error because it prevents knowing people as themselves. We combine multiple assumptions in our illusions. What results is some kind of Frankenstein’s monster assembled from leftover bits and pieces. One must ask if there’s a soul.

Monday morning dawned with new snow. I woke up with a hangover and a house with 16% humidity, and began simmering water to add some back to the air, and drinking to add some back to me. On dehydrated days like these I wonder

• Are desert peoples perennially irritable and more violent than others because they are dehydrated?
  • Are desert peoples
    • dehydrated?
    • perennially irritable?
    • more violent than others?
      • Where did they get this reputation?
        • Do they have this reputation, or
          • Is this just something I have imbibed from
            • Dune
            • Lawrence of Arabia
              • Arabia is not the only desert.
                • So is Arizona.
                  • The Hopi have a peaceful reputation.
  • Maybe there’s a paper on this topic….
• Hmm.

You know, for every dollar a man makes
a woman makes 63 cents.
Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents.
So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888
before we make a buck.

Laurie Anderson, “Beautiful Red Dress,” Strange Angels (1989)

Jon Boeckenstedt made this graph of the number of colleges awarding baccalaureate degrees, organized by which gender was awarded more degrees and the type of institution. Most college attendees have been women for some time now, which is not surprising considering that women are about 51% of the population. What is surprising, to me at least, is that there are so many more women than men in college, 57.5% to 42.5%, and that even more graduate, 58.5% to 41.5%–which is down from a high of 59.7% in 2005. The last year that women received bachelor’s degrees in close proportion to their share of the general population was when they finally reached that milestone: 1988, the year I entered college. Check out Mr. Boeckenstedt’s fuller discussion of the trend at Higher Ed Data Stories.

There’s a tiny outlier in the data: engineering schools.

Someone, I forget who, noted a while ago that a profession becomes less valued (less well compensated, that is–economists use compensation as a proxy for value) the more women enter it, such that overall wages go down to a greater degree than would be expected from an increase in the labor supply, and that the more highly-compensated and highly-thought-of a profession is is fairly directly related to how exclusively male it is. I’m not sure they included sanitation and transportation in their analysis; they may have focused on The Important Professions.

I’m curious as to whether there’s a relationship between the perceived value of college and the rather large difference in male and female attendance rates, or to co-education and the decline in single-gender colleges. That is, does college seem less valued because significantly more graduates are women? Or is my question rooted in invalid assumptions and anecdata?

I tend to think that the question of the value of education is more of a perversity in American thought: the one that sees everything in terms of dollars and cents, and wants colleges to be trade schools for the desk-bound class at the same time it spits on the trades. But I would not be surprised that at least some of the downward pressure on the wage differential accruing to college completion is due to who has a degree, not just to how many do.

What are the men doing while women attend college?

I’m reading Nietzsche at the moment, and put on Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1896). No. 1 Son, who had not before heard any of it, except the first movement opening 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), walked by and commented, “That’s a little aggressive.”

Parts of, I think, the third movement remind me of the fanfare from the theme for Star Trek (1966).

Just discarded James Agee’s book 10 pages in. The topic was interesting enough, as were the prefaces, though they were a bit too self-congratulatory and overblown. The book itself? Feh. I suppose some others might like it, but I was repulsed rather than enticed by how he put sentences together.

And while on the topic of famous men, I’ve no idea why either Ezra Pound or Friedrich Nietzsche are famous. Both are full of themselves and how wonderfully right they are, but write like bloggers who are too tired from reading Twitter all day to finish an argument.