Do We Read Clothes?

One of my recent audio/pop culture pieces is on the textuality of clothing and how clothing could be read.

I compiled a few questions which I asked a number of people in my email and phone address book. The contributors come from different walks of life and I found their answers most helpful. I am posting some of the answers to the first question of the survey:

Question 1: Is clothing "text"?

1) Dad: It is a text. Clothing serves as a commentary on form. And, let's face it, it's not just in architecture, where both form and content are important.

2) Mom: It is a text. The form reveals much about the content.

3) Uta: Clothes are even more prominent than language. You notice one's style before that person has a chance to open her/his mouth! It also shows one's intentions i.e. respect vs disrespect.

4) Benjamin: Clothing is an immediate communicative symbol. It is used to express style or merely express conformity. Ideally, I'd only wear Orvis clothing. If that doesn't say anything about me...?

5) Nola: Both. Attends to the sense/reason paradigm.

6) George: Absolutely darling, and it speaks volumes about you, your perception of the world and how you relate to your audience ( you know, when i don't give a 'flip' about them, I just wear flip-flops).

7) Joanna: Ahh, the question. Roland Barthes tried to make a semiotics of fashion. He was determined to prove that each style gesture "said" something that could be decoded. He gave up. Perhaps he gave up too soon.

8) Dorothy: I generally read clothing as how comfortable people are with their bodies and their needs at the moment. If they come to a meeting casually dressed, I assume they are not trying to impress with anything other than their abilities. If they come to a meeting dressed up, I assume they're trying to impress or the situation requires business dress.

9) Carrie: Yes, because clothing says a lot about who the person is. brand/designer, ironed/wrinkled, preppy/punk/emo/average/prude....

10) Paul: Clothing is text. Like when people look at me they know they're looking at a minimalist.

New 'Beatles' Book

The new "Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America" by Jonathan Gould offers a poetic and informed take on the musical greats' music, life philosophies, and cultural context in which they worked and morphed their genius.




graph per amazon

Jonathan Haidt: The new synthesis in moral psychology

I just returned from a lecture given by Jonathan Haidt. I was impressed by his elegance of speech, ease of delivery, and enthusiasm for the topic.

It was refreshing to hear his presentation in which he clearly stated that we are more likely to co-exist well if we include and try to decode the 'other.' For instance, in stead of marginalizing conservative opinions and beliefs, liberals need to be cognizant of them and try to understand them.

Here's the abstract to one of his recent articles.

Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316, 998-1002.

Abstract: People are both selfish and morally motivated. Morality is both universal and culturally variable.

Such apparent contradictions are dissolving as research from many disciplines converges on a few shared principles, including the importance of moral intuitions, the socially functional (rather than truth-seeking) nature of moral thinking, and the coevolution of moral minds with cultural practices and institutions that create diverse moral communities. I propose a fourth principle to guide future research: Morality is about more than harm and fairness. More research is needed on the collective and religious parts of the moral domain, such as loyalty, authority, and spiritual purity.

For more information, read up on his work at:
www.jonathanhaidt.com

Joanna Straughn's definition of emotion.

Joanna Straughn is one of the most talented and linguistically sensitive individuals I know. She gets language. And she gets poetry. She doesn't just get it, she also makes it.

I employ what I call 'Straughnisms' in my speech. A good example would be the high-frequency noun phrase: 'disturbance of creation' which I first encountered in one of her poems from the collection entitled "Instincts".

I was reading her blog today, zeitgeistboheme.blogspot.com, and the following stood out as a start statement:


"I'm a poet. I've made a career out of defending emotion- the ethical perspective to which it can guide us, inspire us, and move us. A cold, clinical view of the world is my idea of hell; however, emotions can undermine our most vaunted goals and undo our efforts."

Quote of the Day

"What happened to the fish? It's frozen. That's the state of the fish."

Quotation of the Day

I am now starting a new blog subject I'm calling, 'the Daily Best.'
The Daily Best will contain be the most comment-worthy sentence I hear on any given day.

Today's gem is:

"How many languages are you bilingual in?"

If you don't like a movie, you can get your money back!

Nicholas Tabarrok, a Hollywood movie producer has come up with a notion which, I think, is pretty cool. The premise is:

If you don't like a movie, you can get your money back!

Simple as that.

As he observes:

"It occurred to me that this is a common thing... If you buy a product and you're not satisfied, you get your money back..."

I concur entirely.

Read more:

http://www.playbackmag.com/articles/daily/20071011/releases.html

Alex Ross: "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century"

Alex Ross' new book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century", seems to be a proper hit with academics and classical music lovers at large. The book is also reviewed quite generously by a number of blogs I read regularly.

Naturally, I had to investigate.

Ross attempts to contextualize the music of the 20th-century and while doing so he provides much cultural information. Impressive writing, no doubt.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a hefty 640 pages and reading from it while standing and sipping one's lunch, is not the easiest thing. However, it's worth some measure of time, especially if one is interested in knowing how to place music historically and culturally.


graph per amazon

The Gathering by Anne Enright gets 2007 Man Booker Prize

Ireland's Anne Enright was awarded the Booker Prize for her fourth novel The Gathering.

The novel covers three generations of an Irish family and is set in Ireland and England. Its title refers to the funeral of Liam Hegarty, an alcoholic who committed suicide in the sea at Brighton. His mother and the nine surviving Hegarty children gather in Dublin for his wake. The novel's narrator is 39-year-old Veronica, the sibling that was closest to Liam. She looks through her family's troubled history to try and make sense of his death. She thinks that the reason for his alcoholism lies in something that happened to him in childhood when he stayed in his grandmother's house.
(as per en.Wiki)

Another favorite Booker prize author is South Africa's J. M. Coetzee who was awarded the prize first in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K and later in 1999 for Disgrace.

Stephen Colbert's coined 'truthiness'

And here is Stephen Colbert's coined 'truthiness' as per English Wikipedia's entry:

Truthiness is a satirical term created by television comedian Stephen Colbert to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts. Colbert created this definition of the word during the inaugural episode of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd". It was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster. By using the term as part of his satirical routine, Colbert sought to criticize the use of "truthiness" as an appeal to emotion and tool of rhetoric in contemporary socio-political discourse.

Courtesy of Wikipedia