Publish You’re Squarish

I read blogs.

Here’s something older from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,2003615,00.html

Stooopid happy hardkore/euro-pop/Hi-NRG music. Other than that my tastes are largely that of a Wire reader. But something about the beats/frivolity gets me every time. I pretend that its ironic, but deep down I know…

Mind you, the best way to watch an action film is with the sound turned down, and the gayest house music you can find. You’ll never see Arnie the same way again.

I have guilty pleasures, but I won’t be confessing to them.

What Eric Rauchway / #2 said – “I read blogs”

I’ll go him one better (or worse) – I write comments on blogs.

Someone should also have responded “I like reading the Chronicle of Higher Education”.

Any guy who doesn’t say that his guilty pleasure is porn is either not being forthright, or is rather unusual.

I was foolish enough once to suggest to some historian colleagues at a professional meeting that we should hold a future meeting in Vegas. It was sort of like suggesting holding Easter Mass in front of Aleister Crowley’s grave, or hosting a major feminist conference in a bordello in Thailand.

My problem would be that my ordinary, completely non-guilty, pleasures (heck, my research interests) would be at the outer limit of freakishness on the list Sean points to. “Let’s see, um, World of Warcraft, Rainbow Six, Halo 3 this week, also I caught a new Pokemon on my DS. Watched some cartoons. Picked up this week’s pull list at the comic book shop.” etc.

It could be excessive drinking plus porn, Lemuel. But really, excessive binge drinking is still rather romanticized in a youthful-Spring-Break way, and therefore respectable, in comparison, isn’t it? And not nearly as common for middle-aged academics, I’d guess. And if someone admits to having a drinking problem, they get pity, while admitting to liking porn… well.

Of course, if anyone ever gets on my case for writing this, I’d have to reply that I’m a rather unusual guy. Not like you pervs.

Walt, I doubt that the reason that all these academics aren’t mentioning it is because they’re thinking, “Oh, I could just say porn, but no one feels guilty about that anymore — I’ll tell them about going to Vegas, sudoku, or riding a bike.” I’d guess that most academics are feminists (for good reason, of course; everyone should be a feminist) and while it’s permissable for a certain kind of feminist woman to like it, or a certain kind of gay guy, for most people in this bracket I’d say that specifically feminist guilt would be enough so that they wouldn’t admit it. And the rare ones who are conservative anti-feminists will of course think it’s a sin or something, even as I suspect that their usage rate of it approaches 100%.

Many years ago (ten?), the American Society for Environmental History had its annual meeting in a small convention-only (read: no on-site gambling) hotel in Las Vegas. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued. Not only did people open new textbooks, they also went for walks in the desert, bemoaned the lack of used bookstores, and visited the Hoover Dam to discuss its environmental impacts. The real highlight, though, came when I happened upon Don Worster — noted Marxist, Great Plains enthusiast, and shepherd — wandering through The Tropicana. Imagine a very dour and rather tiny druid surrounded by bling. I think that memory is my guilty pleasure.

Hmmm… you’d think more would take this as an opportunity for gamesmanship: “When I’m not writing about the discourses of power/knowledge in late Sumerian practices of warehouse management and accounting, I like to read papers on the application of non-recursive B-tree searches in writing computer Go programs.”

Really, really bad movies. Joe Bob Briggs-type stuff.

Hammer? But really, if you disclose it, it isn’t really that guilty a pleasure, right? (as mpowell implies).

… also: still laughing at floyd @24.

All right, Patrick, that’s really uncalled for. At least this time around Michigan beat us without any help from the officials: this year we decided simply to cough up the ball — at both 10-yard lines, just to be fair and balanced about it.

Well, sarcasm is clearly not a guilty pleasure for any of us. And, re: comment 10, if anyone really read (let alone enjoyed) the Chronicle of Higher Ed then Scott would never need to blog again.
Henry got it right in composing this post – what folks really love and hate to admit is just how much they (we? naah, they!) get off on googling their influence/ checking amazon rankings / Web of science citation hits.

One of the more printable of my guilty pleasures is an obvious one: playing Civilisation and telling myself that I’m really learning something useful about the dynamics of historical development.

uh, magistra: if we required all civil servants to pass a Monarch level victory test at Civilization before they took office, we would–the world wide–have much, much better governments.

my guilty pleasure involves something in a size .357 and weighs in at about 158 grains.

Isn’t it odd that there were no really geeky or genre pleasures? Is that generational? I would think that if I sampled a dozen academics, at least one would say *something* about Civ/ comic books/ WoW/ D&D/ SCA/ SF novels/ SF movies/ shlock horror movies. Those are hardly the equivalent of ‘porn’ or ‘snorting meth’– they’re pretty safe for an academic to admit without losing positional points (admittedly also without gaining the positional points Kieran rightly mentions).

a million points should be awarded to anyone who answers that their guilty pleasure is plagiarism.

Seriously, I hate questions that are meant to elicit a response that shows you’re an acceptable level of naughty.

When confronted with the “what’s your biggest weakenss” question at a job interview, one should always answer “stealing from my employers.”

Guilty pleasures: reading legal history and Roman law texts in Latin.

Oh, and candied apricots dipped in dark chocolate. And Stilton with a good glass of Laphroig.