do no harm:


idit dobb-weinstein: "teaching is action and thinking at once. What I try to guard against most when I teach is not speaking as if my answer were conclusive, so as to avoid (to the extent possible) any kind of dogmatic appropriation. It is understandable why students might wish to imitate their teachers, but there are different modes of imitation. I try very hard to avoid the mimetic appropriation that is immediate, passive, and occludes thinking. One other reason is that if I made clear what my views were, and my views appeared as if they were final, it would preclude the possibility of first, students challenging me and second, learning from my students. The relation between the student and teacher is, to me, a dynamic relationship . . . Teaching and learning is a movement that occurs between. In other words, we are at once both agent and patient, both teacher and learner. If we are not very careful, we can do a great deal of harm. And that, too, I have learned from my teachers, Maimonides especially.

I believe my task is to provoke students to think and to engage them in genuine dialogue and questioning. To paraphrase a rabbinic saying, 'I have learned from my teachers, and I have learned from my peers, but I have learned most from my students.' And that is a continuous process of learning."

Thursday, 28 October 2010

they who purvey humiliation

i wonder which of the censorship-supporting professors at LACC would also support the wikileaks exposures.  that would be funny on the one hand, to ask me to whitewash their mis-statements and misdeeds, and then from the other side of their mouths proclaim a victory for human rights on the internet.  very fascinated lately with stieg larsson's novel men who hate women, man som hatar kvinnor.


i don't think anyone was especially hateful, but rather just ignorant and insensitive and verbally gauche.  but someone like stieg larsson could see actual malicious evil at work in the world which linguistically humiliates women, and then also enacts physical violence upon them.

my optimism is overwhelmingly naff.  really i ought to start believing in evil more.  when i think of all the sexist epithets i heard at LACC, i cannot believe i'm still like anne frank, convinced that all humans are good at heart.

if only i could understand the banality of evil, then too i might understand the banality of LACC, or the torture of the war, or domestic violence and all verbal abuse.

i think i am coming closer to understanding darkness.

bartelt purportedly specializes in occult studies or witchcraft, which does not bother me.
i was quite concerned when he spoke in his thesis about the male magic circle to which he became initiated.

i felt concerned that he would undergo an indoctrination without an egalitarian framework, admittedly with critique, but nonetheless undergo it.
and then in addition to the animal sacrifice videos, one of a chicken being thrown into a fire, and another of a disembowelment of a living being with a human's bare hands, he brought in one of a woman.

the woman was undergoing a treatment by male practitioners.  it was for some kind of malaise she experienced.  and then she allowed the videotaping of this i assume.

what struck me as uncanny was the very male gaze of both the healer and the videographer.  it did not seem critical of the ritual, or critical of her role as subject and patient.  the underlying sexism of male dominated healing paradigms seemed to me off-putting.  as if she was actually undergoing some finalizing propagandization of her subordination.

very victorian freud all over again.

as bartelt implied that the vegetarians who questioned the disembowelment (unanaesthetized too!) were racist against africa if we did not embrace animal torture as a religious practice----
he also too told us, that you  cannot be an anthropologist and a vegetarian or vegan, and that you must eat the meat of the cultures you study.

olivia was quite profound to push the vegan envelope that day.  i was not in the mood to be shouted at, so i said nothing, but merely wrote a few extra exclamation points.

something had changed for the worse.

in the winter term, i found it charming that bartelt made an avant-guarde statement about transsexuals being attractive.  it seemed the kind of statement designed to freak out the republican army homophobic types.
but the day he asked the girl, what do women really want in a man?

i felt almost enough ill to say, how dare you presume, and hetero profile her, and how is this helping us learn anything?

but i gave him the extra points american men get against their cultural brainwashing into sexist insensitivity.  i let it slide.  like, "oh well he's an american" and that explains why he is sexist, insensitive, rude, etc.

sadly i have had too many lovely men in my life to abide by excessive rudeness!!!!!


my dad for instance was literally quoting coleridge at two a.m.

he was the poet . . . wan and suffering . . . extolling the genius of emily dickinson and charlotte bronte and mary shelley and mary wollstonecraft.

so a more football and "girls gone wild" or fratboy or blame the rape victim (lanzer) approach to women is completely profoundly declasse to me.

it streams through my mind like a horror novel.

and cristy passman's protection of the abuse is most disheartening.

she is probably too drunk on smog to know better.  the older generation was not allowed to think independent thoughts.  it makes me feel sorry for them, that their minds got eaten up  by late night TV or whatever taught them to be so foul.  other classmates? parents? cinema?

the choice of words is a delicate thing
can you imagine if emily dickinson or virginia woolf had to suffer through the t&a lecture?  or the ridicule of anorexia and bulimia?

virginia woolf was kept out of school, by sexism.

if only she knew how retrogressive it might be.
she might be more happy reading greek in her dad's library.

but the entire aspect of not being taken seriously academically, intellectually, the offense of that stings and stings.

is it as though los angeles is in such a collective mass state of megalomania such that every prating fool finds himself to be a genius?  i think perhaps.  the people there have egos worthy only of gods.  every day is like the valhalla march, with egos so big, i can't believe they would allow themselves to say things so stupid.

i bet everything is better than it was there at that little school.  there is nothing in between.   just trees.  trees and smog down to LA.  and then poverty and horrors of insult and oppression.

i gave up on america long ago.  one day bartelt spoke deridingly of europe, and i agree somewhat.  but i love the culture of kindness to women.  when have i ever experienced it????   so rare it is in fact, i cannot locate a place it was to have happened.  even sweden has men who hate women, even if their laws most enshrine equality.

america has dismal governmental representation, dismal pay for women.  and really to get any school or work here, you must have nerves of steel to endure the harassment, and verbal denigration.

such that all i really needed was a gold star . . . or some other way of making it plain how doomed we were before we even opened our mouths at LACC.

and at that point, it just seems like a lot of dogs barking at each other.  for validation of course.

a more polite culture will not be found there.

the librarian, he never said a thing wrong to me there, where i'd go to read the daily journal.

and a dj in class, he was polite.  and kam pek, he noticed how the women cast their eyes down, when bartelt said disrespectful things.  he felt it. eric hamilton felt it.  the girl who eckford made cry felt it.  elizabeth felt it.  
humiliation.

and most of all for its purveyor.
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