Fun With Anxiety Dreams, Again

[dr_pretentious]

The Hunger Games surprised me--the book and film both. The film was a distant second choice when Dan and I arranged our date night too late to see John Carter [of Mars] in the theater, but our distant second choice really blew us away. I burned through the first novel as soon as I could get my hands on it, and am halfway through the second. My brain is working on a blog post about how Suzanne Collins twists and sometimes inverts the current conventions for the blockbuster novel. Shh, don't tell anybody, but there's a lot of subtle brilliance hidden in that rollicking adventure story. In the meantime, my brain has amused itself by playing me a Hunger Games/academia mash-up anxiety dream:

The social sciences departments at Rutgers held a secret gladiatorial competition among grad students. Apparently the founding faculty members in those departments spent too much of the 1920's reading The Golden Bough, and so instituted a formal system for scapegoating and sacrificing one student a year from each of their graduate programs, to ensure their funding and prestige within the university.

In this nightmare, I was a dissertation-stage student in the Anthropology Department. Actually, that would be a nightmare in itself, even without the human sacrifice part, but my unconscious mind likes to go for broke. As the lone anthropologist among the chosen gladiators, I was the first to recognize our situation for what it was. There we all were, pale and bespectacled scholars baffled by the bladed weapons on offer in the arena. The faculty and administrators loomed above us, barely visible past the glare of the stage lights, as I shouted at the tribute from Sociology and the tribute from Economics, "Don't you get it? Don't you people read James Frazer?!" The guy from Linguistics cut his own finger off trying to pick up a punch-dagger, to uproarious cheers from the stands. I surveyed my fellow departmental tributes and was heartsick to discover one was a younger cousin of mine. "Why are you here?" I demanded. "I told you what grad school was like!"

That was when the comedy overpowered the anxiety enough to wake me up laughing. Thank goodness.

Comments

[bicrim.livejournal.com]

I also find I have a lot to say about the Hunger Games. The one thing that I keep coming back to is that they are perhaps the only novels I have ever read that are not sexist in any way. They just..aren't. It sort of blows my mind.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That is pretty striking. There are divisions of labor that have a gender component--very few women work as coal miners, for instance--but the structures of privilege and enslavement in Panem simply don't fall along gender lines.

What's especially weird about that is, there seems to be no access to birth control, or even knowledge about birth control, in the Districts. Katniss intends a life of celibacy for herself, despite having two good, heroic men who genuinely love her, because she can't bear the thought of bringing a child into the world. Her mother's an apothecary, for goodness sake--surely she could drink some tea about the problem from time to time. But in three volumes in Katniss's POV, we never see the possibility of sex without procreation mentioned. Given what we do pick up about Panem's problematically low population, post-cataclysm, it's probably a deliberate choice on Collins's part, one of her subtle world-building details about what is and is not available and to whom.

But in a society where the only option anybody has for controlling the number of children they have is celibacy, it is surprising that women are as likely to hold any (non-familial) social role as men are.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the Hunger Games yet. But I love how your brilliant, twisted mind works! I can really picture that scene.

[kistha.livejournal.com]

As usual your sleeping mind is delightful. That's hilarious.


The Hunger Games books were something I had no intrest in reading by thier description, children fighting and dying in an arena, PASS!

But they are fantastic, and I'd love to chat with you about them. Speaking of which do you do Skype at all?

Loves!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I tried Skype a bit back when Gareth was the same age Conrad is now. Even with scrupulous attempts to time his naps and bedtimes, it was just this side of impossible to Skype anywhere in the house without waking him. And I've long since given up trying to conduct a phone conversation of any depth while the kids are awake and present. (One of my mom-friends will only initiate phone calls while driving, because only when her kids are strapped down in five-point harnesses is it possible to keep the phone out of their hands. It's crazy to do that, but I can see how she reached that craziness.)

The first time I heard The Hunger Games mentioned, I got the impression it was about competitive anorexia. No, thanks. The second description I picked up emphasized the dystopian elements of Panem, so I thought it was based on Kafka's "A Hunger Artist." (Actually, I still think it might be, but in a totally different way.) Because I live under a rock, I only copped a clue about the gladiatorial aspect when the film was about to come out.

It's a nice rock I live under. Very cozy.

[laradionne.livejournal.com]

I first heard about the Hunger Games when a blogger that I occasionally read started gushing about how she couldn't wait for the movie. After seeing a promo shot of Katniss and her bow, I snapped up the whole trilogy and blasted through it in a wild orgy of weekend reading indulgence that ended around 4am on a Monday morning. I was really impressed at how much Susan Collins managed to cram into those novels. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm hoping to get to a theater while it's still out.

Speaking of grad school, I have some questions for you if you've got some time for a chat =)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Time for chatting could be late at night after my small people are asleep and my teaching is done, or during the day if you want to come in person and don't mind getting climbed on by the small people while you're mid-sentence. I'd love to chat. About grad school, though, it's hard to imagine a question to which the answer would not be, "Nonetheless, don't put yourself through it!"

Collins's worldbuilding is amazingly efficient, and the amount she's able to imply obliquely through the gaps in Katniss's first person narration is really impressive--see the above exchange about population decline and the apparent total ignorance of birth control in the Districts.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Oh my god...all those years of suffering have been tattooed into your subconscious.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

This year will see the tenth anniversary of the completion of my doctorate. I'm still processing the nuttiness of those years.

[pyraxis]

*cracks up laughing*

sabrinamari linked me here. I just saw The Hunger Games for the first time a couple weeks ago, and with both my parents in academia, I can totally see it. My father actually advised me not to get a PhD in about the same tone I can imagine you saying it to your cousin.

I listened. :P

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

By the time people got serious about warning me, I'd started subscribing to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and refused to leave without what I'd come for. Oh, well. I met a lot of amazing people in academia, and I'm glad to have them all in my life. sabrinamari is one of them.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

I tried reading this out loud to T, but kept cracking up. I can totally see it, and imagine you shouting about James Frazer..!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

What makes it even funnier is, most Anthro grad students probably haven't read much Frazer, either. He's more widely read among literature scholars, for his influence on people like T.S. Eliot, than by anthropologists, for whom he's the ultimate unfashionable antecedent.