Kellee > Recent Status Updates

This book is great!

As a mass medium, TV was our public square. It was where the rules got enforced. It was also where we hashed out the news as it happened, where we looked for our reflections. Critical contempt for televition was like refusing to look into the mirror.” - page 12-13

“But even shows that weren’t polemical, that didn’t feature “very special episodes,” had a different sort of politics, the type that soaked through everywhere, disguised in the look and feel and structure...”

“None of these arguments were new, of course. Fights about art had always doubled as fights about what the world takes seriously - which is another way to say, they were fights about politics. They were fights about power. I wasn’t a fan of heavy-handed, pedantic TV, which had its own tradition in the medium (part of television’s legacy as a public resource, the aqueduct that everyone’s kids drank from.)..

“Centrally, these were arguments about whose stories carried weight, about what kind of creativity counted as ambitious, and about who (which characters, which creators, and also, which audience members) deserved attention. What kind of person got to ge a genius? Whose story counted asuniversal? Which type of art had staying power? ..

“When I proselytized for Buffy, or debated my fellow graduate students about Sex and the City, the fight felt like a way to hash out other questions - questions of values, which were embedded (and, often, hidden) in questions of aesthetics...

But, like liturgy, the work of cleaning draws much of its meaning and value from repetition, from the fact that it is never completed, but only set aside until the next day. Both liturgy and what is euphemistically termed “domestic” work also have an intense relation with the present moment, a kind of faith in the present that fosters hope and makes life seem possible in the day-to-day.

Things exercise a certain tyranny over us. Whenever I am checking bags at an airport, I recall St. Teresa of Avila’s wonderful prayer of praise, “Thank God for the things that I do not own.” Things are truly baggage, our impedmenta, which must be maintained with work that is menial, steady and recurring.

There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth. - Rumi

“Whether through the embrace of a queer sexuality or single status or a relationship in which they remain financially or psychologically independent of a man, women have spent the last two decades gradually disarticulating their destinies from men’s.”