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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, March 06, 2005

SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME

PAUVRE


Although UD’s physical appearance may strike one as odd, and even pathetic -- she almost always wears lived-in (occasionally slept-in) jeans, a black turtleneck, a loose dark jacket, and an expensive scarf (scarves are her one clothing indulgence) -- it turns out that, as usual, she has her finger on the pulse of hipster culture.

As in - what are they wearing at NYU these days? NYU -- hippest of colleges, home to multimillionaire film star undergraduates Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen -- is featured on the front page of today’s New York Times Sunday Styles section, with plenty of photos of its two famous admits slouching around the city in … well, there are already many names for this look … the article mentions

Bobo (bourgeois bohemian, after the David Brooks book)
high hippy
bag lady
ashcan chic
dumpster chic
pauvre.

As for the deep dark cultural reasons wealthy American women are wearing “grandma’s crocheted shawl, moth-eaten cashmere sweaters and scuffed cowboy boots,” “mixing one or two expensive pieces in a wardrobe otherwise straight out of ‘Les Miserables,’” and, in a “forcefully unostentatious” style, “dressing like an unmade bed,” the Times mentions that old standby, ambivalence about materialism and conspicuous consumption.

UD finds this funny, because whenever there’s a grunge-trend in American fashion, analysts say we’re anguished about being rich. Weeks later, when the trend’s over, it turns out we’re okay about being rich. But the analysts don’t say this. They wait until thready clothes come back in, and they announce again that Americans are anguished about being rich.




At the very end of the Times article, the reporter stumbles on a Pepperdine student shopping at Barney’s who understands what’s really going on. She decides to buy a certain sweater because “it works very hard at looking like it’s not trying too hard.”

Here, UD would suggest, lies the beating heart of pauvre. Americans have wealth. This they know. But they also begin to intuit - from European travel, from college classes, from who knows where - that they don’t have class; or more specifically, they don’t have that “escape from class” and from the whole anxious class racket that Paul Fussell, in his book Class, calls “the X way out.” The journey to pauvre is not a moral so much as an intellectual and spiritual journey.

After all, pauvre is hitting the Olsen twins in college, a place where, after years in Hollywood, they are being introduced to principles other than profit and self-promotion. Here (at least in some of the more serious humanities classes) the human ideal is not the high-intensity Hummerian Arnold Schwarzenegger, but unwashed ironic meditative types like Iris Murdoch, and, well, James Joyce.




“Since there’s no one they think worth impressing by mere appearance,” writes Fussell, “X people tend to dress for themselves alone, which means they dress comfortably, and generally ‘down.’” “The upper … classes,” he writes elsewhere in the book, “like to appear in old clothes, as if to advertise how much of conventional dignity they can afford to throw away … .” He quotes from a study of the English gentleman: “[They] may wear their suits until they are threadbare but they do so with considerable panache…”

Of course UD likes to think she’s more or less X, but in this, as in many things, she may be self-deceived… For what it’s worth, she has found, in her latest reading of Ulysses (her Irish Literature class is deep into Joyce’s novel right now), a description of an X person - Leopold Bloom is describing this person, and he doesn’t at all approve - that UD thinks corresponds pretty closely to herself, and she will now introduce it to University Diaries as a kind of personal motto, a UD-specific identifier:

‘NO TIME TO DO HER HAIR DRINKING SLOPPY TEA WITH A BOOK OF POETRY.’