Back to the UK

My God! another Mary Gauthier fan.

Slocum, fuck you.

So, still a bit of jet-lag then?

nope, slocum, I only took the tube into work and I heartily endorse Chris’s view on this one.

So, you don’t think that the universe of university towns is somewhat insular and homogenous? I’ve found that when I’ve visited university towns in the U.S. and Europe that I’ve felt ‘at home’ almost immediately–same book stores, coffee shops, pubs, entertainment, politics. The students dress pretty much the same, and so on.

Glenn White said:

There is the United States. Then there are select, sane islands of sanity in the United States. Madison figures among the latter.

And how, really, is that less provincial than thinking of ‘Outback Steakhouse’ as an island of culinary sanity in Korea? Now, I like Korean food well enough (we’ve got a bunch of Korean places here — doesn’t every university town?), but if I had to choose between Bi Bim Bop and a thick, juicy steak for dinner, chances are I’d go for the steak.

If you knew what you were talking about you’d know that Chris doesn’t live in a University town (except in the rather trivial sense that it has a university in it).

Has it occurred to you that your response to european university towns reflects your own lack of insight rather than any genuine similarity? Or that American university towns have lives outside the campus (which Chris, if he’d ot been working hard, might have seen a good deal of). Or that, in fact, american universities are quite different in their cultural lives from european universities (and european unviersities from each other).
Unreflective, rude, self-absorbed — those qualities can be found anywhere, even among commenters on crookedtimber.

Has it occurred to you that your response to european university towns reflects your own lack of insight rather than any genuine similarity?

Obviously, there are differences as well as similarities, but to a significant degree, there is much actual migration and much more in the way of the flow of ideas among grad students, post-docs, and faculty through the ‘university sphere’ and this mingling of people and ideas has consquences (would you rather it didn’t?)

I live in a university neighborhood and my kids went to an elementary school that had about equal numbers of kids from ‘local’ families (many with the U) and grad student housing families. It looks like a friggin’ Benneton ad. One day a kid showed up on the bus on the first day who spoke only Farsi. Took ’em about 5 minutes to find another kid in a different class to come down and translate.

This kind of environment is in no way a bad thing, but amidst all the diversity there is also a considerable degree of academic culture uniformity. The population the local elementary school consists of kids from everywhere and yet, at the same time, is remarkably non-diverse in a socio-economic sense. Almost all the kids have one or more parents with graduate degrees, education is vitally important, even if they are not wealthy, the families tend to travel internationally during holidays, they know people from all over the world, and so on.

Why would you want to deny (or find offensive) the idea that there is an internationally-oriented class of academics that lives in these places and imparts to them many common characteristics?

But as someone who lived in the working class part of one university town in my teens, but now lives in a very different town as an academic, I am perhaps more aware than some of the way that some people simply see the “college experience” and ignore everything else that a city has going on. Most people who visit Oxford, like most students in Oxford, never make it past Donnington Bridge Road, and think that is all there is to Oxford. Its not. You see what you want to, but you don’t look for much.

But that’s exactly the point. You can fly halfway around the world and not travel nearly as far as you would if, say, you were at a conference at the University of Chicago and inadvertently walked a few blocks out of Hyde Park in the ‘wrong’ direction (not that I’m necessarily recommending that as a good idea).

The sneer, though, was offensive,no? That’s what I was responding to. If you didn’t intend offense, do a careful study of what might have prompted it.

I guess I’d say the intention was more to provoke than offend. Finding Mary Gauthier (and fans of hers) in Madison is no more surprising than finding her in the UK at the Cambridge Folk Festival or in Austin, Boulder or Ann Arbor. But a mile or two south of the University of Chicago?

So, you don’t think that the universe of university towns is somewhat insular and homogenous?

Actually, I was agreeing with the “fuck you” bit.

Is Alfred McCoy still at that place?

Did you meet up with him?

Did you ask him whether or not the closure of K2 will have an effect on Poppy Bush’s business?