Beyond Rivalry - consumption

Mimesis, Psych 201 and Jeans

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:27:01 -0500

Deep Glamour's "What Your Jeans Say About You" (other than, "These are the only ones I could find that fit me ...") reports on a ground-breaking study in the Journal of Consumer Research that finds that our 'attachment' styles determine what jeans we wear:

"See, when you were but a wee babe in your mother's arms you honed one of two attachment styles, 'anxiety and avoidance,' the authors explain. Anxious people view themselves as positive or negative and avoidance people view others as positive or negative.

'Anxiously attached individuals are more influenced by "brand personalities," the idea that a brand possesses humanlike traits, such as sincerity or excitement. "Because of a low view of self, anxious individuals use brands to signal their ideal self-concept to future relationship partners and therefore focus more on the personality of the brand," the authors write.'

The study seems to look only at people whose styles are attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance. The study summary says nothing about the jeans preferences of people whose 'attachment style' isn't anxiety, i.e., those with a 'secure' style; how do they make these ultra-important decisions? I couldn't find a free version of the full-text article to learn more.

The reason…

Markets in Everything, Xmas Edition

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:30:45 -0500

Marginal Revolution points to two tinsel-tinted selling opps:

(1) Crapwrap: Have your package wrapped as badly as you would do it. The service costs $9 and more than 500 people have signed up for it. "We're not given any instructions. I'm just asked to make a hash of it using lots of brown tape and making sure there are rips and untidy folds." (This wouldn't work for us; my spouse wraps with more care than I do.)

(2) Auctioning off the best seat at the family get-together. Daughter-in-law Alexis won the eBay auction with a bid of £13.50, outbidding 17 other family rivals for the prime seat in front of the TV, with a conveniently placed side table for drinks. Otherwise, there would just have been another Boxing Day row over this 'perfect seat.'

RIP Jdimytai Damour (1974? - 2008)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:30:00 -0500

You've probably heard about the Wal-Mart worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, who was trampled and crushed by a stampeding crowd of early-morning shoppers at a Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday -- shoppers who then "went on to scour the shelves for sales, even after being told a man had died." Damour died apparently of a heart attack of asphyxiation after the sliding glass doors he was holding shut shattered under the weight of the crowd of 2,000 or so who were trying to get in as the store opened at 5 a.m. for after-Thanksgiving sales. (Ludicrous comment by a Wal-Street employee in the store's electronic department: "'It was crazy. .. The deals weren't even that good.'")

Here's a bit of Damour's story, and here: "He loved to chat about movies, Japanese anime and politics. ... [H]e had a great sense of humor. ... He was the guy who was always lively." He was "an easygoing literature buff -- a fan of poetry and the late novelist Donald Goines -- who would put himself out for friends."

Having

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:20:00 -0400

Seems sort of fitting, after thoughts on wanting, to offer (someone else's) thoughts on having. Plus, it showed up in my RSS feeder this morning and I liked it.

At Get Rich Slowly, JD writes an interesting post on having. Having stuff. A few excerpts:

"'You know why you can't get rid of Stuff, don't you?' Kris had asked.

"'Because I want it,' I said.

"'You think you want it,' she said. 'You like the idea of having certain things, but you don't actually use them. You've got dozens of books stacked in the guest room. They've been there since the last time you purged Stuff a year ago. Have you needed any of those books in that time?'
"'No,' I said.

"After I told my friend Amy Jo about our clutter conversation last week, she shared her own thoughts. 'We each have so many interests, and certain things — like books — keep us connected to those interests, or give us the illusion that they do,' she said.

"'But they also clog up our lives and make us less efficient at doing what we are and what we want to do right now. It's hard to let go of the…

The Shame and Confusion of Wanting

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:37:35 -0400

"Small children have no compunctions about saying, even shrieking, what they want. At a critical point, though -- third grade, fourth grade, fifth -- the shame of wanting sets in."

Ellen Tien's essay, Just Say What You Want, makes a number of interesting points, not the least of which is that we are ashamed of wanting, and particularly of being seen as 'wanty.' We (men and women, but women more so) are afraid that if we "want too much, ... try too hard, ... commit to a desire," then people will label us "needy, bitchy, clingy, whiny. In other words, wanty."

I recognise myself here, in particular:

"Do we even allow ourselves to know what we want?

"'Where should we go for dinner?' I ask my husband.

"'Wherever you want,' he says.

"I suggest a nice barbecue place around the corner. No, he says, he doesn't feel like barbecue. Chinese? No, he had Chinese food for lunch. Italian? No, too heavy. Thai? Too much like Chinese. Where, then, I repeat, does he want to go for dinner?

"'I dunno. Wherever you want.'

I often feel like the husband here and speak his lines. It feels in these interchanges like I don't…

Meals

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:05:00 -0400

I feel like blogging what I'm eating and making for dinner these days, I'd love to hear what other people are eating and making, too. I'm trying to incorporate more fish and fiber into my diet. A lot of that happens at breakfast (fiber -- 10 gms. in the oatmeal!) and lunch (fish and fiber) but I'm focusing on dinner here.

Last Week

I was on vacation in Boston, MA, and in Rehoboth Beach, DE. To the best of my memory, this is what I had for dinner (I didn't cook any of it):

Saturday: I attended an outdoor wedding of people I don't know with X, who does know them. Ate some appetizers like spicy cold shrimp and spanikopita (one of my favourites), along with champagne, then dinner for me was veggie kabobs and something else veggie with rice. Red wine with dinner, and lots of water. Dessert (the wedding cake) was scrumptious, moist red velvet cake. We ate outside, overlooking a meadow, and it was idyllic. I talked with my tablemates (an interesting ex-Presby pastor now working with juveniles in the prison system and his wife, an Episcopal Sunday School teacher/learning disabilities teacher) about Girard and mimetic theory! God…

Life in These Sacrificial Unites States ?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:10:00 -0400

Dark thoughts last week as I was in the shower listening (thanks, showerbug!) to an NPR story about how China expels, arrests, and uses force to keep a lid on dissidents, in order to keep the society stable, and thinking about Girard's contention that the U.S. has managed to keep society stable without hierarchies, through social mobility, the legal and judicial systems, technology, and being part of global free market economic competition, among perhaps other ways he doesn't mention. I thought about how the U.S. maintains its fragile stability and two things come immediately to mind. We don't: the U.S. murder rate is far higher than any European country. According to 2000 data, the U.S. ranked #24 on a list of murders per capita, behind Colombia, South Africa, Venezuela, Russia, Mexico, some other bits of the USSR, and Thailand, but well ahead of India, Azerbaijan, Romania, Hungary, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Canada, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and all of Europe, which except for Finland (#30) and Portugal (#33) ranked from #40 to #58, out of 62. The 2004 data shows an increase in the murder rate in the U.S. to 5.5 homicides per 100,000 people, compared with 2 in Canada,…

Which is Greener: Renting DVDs Locally or From Afar?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:10:00 -0400

We have long rented DVDs from a local independent source (semi-local: a 20-mile round trip) but a few weeks ago began renting through NetFlix as well, for videos the local store doesn't have and won't buy -- notably, Julia Child's "The French Chef" episodes, which our local DVD provider considers a "How-To" DVD and which I consider instructional humour. Julia Child is a trip. (How about a last-minute dinner party for 300 people?)

Anyway, in case you wonder whether it's more sustainable to rent locally or from a company like Netflix that mails DVDs direct, Slate's got the answers (although they compare NetFlix with Blockbuster, a chain). They look at transportation, packaging, and computer use.

Transportation: "Even just a two-mile drive to the video store will consume a few hundred times more energy than the Netflix delivery from a distribution center 200 miles away [ours is about 35 miles away]."

Computer Use: "30 minutes spent reordering your queue -- in a well-lit, climate-controlled room with the computer running -- will use far more energy than the actual Netflix delivery and about as much energy as it would take to drive your hybrid to a store a half-mile away." Does anyone spend…

Evolution and Conversion, cont'd (7)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:25:00 -0400

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, here, here, here and here.)

Chapter 7, Modernity, Postmodernity and Beyond

There's a lot of content in this chapter, and quite a lot that I couldn't assent to or felt wasn't consistent with what I know of mimetic theory (which, obviously, is a lot less than Girard knows!). It's very hard to articulate those differences -- my brain gets a little unhinged trying to follow the logic that some other part of me intuits, accurately or not -- and I may not be able to go into much detail there.

Finishing the book, I felt as I always do when reading Girard or listening to him in a video or audiotape: I have so many different questions from the ones he's addressing or is asked to respond to!

For instance, in chapter 6 he says that in myths there"always seems to be a good cause for hating the victim, but in reality it is a spurious, illusory cause." He never says in this book or anywhere else I've read/heard whether it's possible to be a victim and be guilty. Are no victims guilty or hate-able? Are we all innocent? To clear this up seems…

Solutions: Bohemia (Notes from Status Anxiety)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:10:00 -0400

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eleventh post on this topic; the first is here.

PART II: Solutions

CHAPTER 5 - BOHEMIA

Bohemians came to prominence in France after Napoleon, 1815. Bohemians are found in all social classes, age groups, professions, and in both genders. They include Romantics, surrealists, Beatniks, punks, situationalists, Kibbutzbiks, et. al.

Bohemians lived simply, read a lot, didn't care much for money, were melancholic, had an allegiance to art and emotion, led unconventional sex lives, and ... some of the women wore their hair short! Most importantly, they did not fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.

Bohemians don't like the bourgeoisie, private schools, debutantes and 'eligible bachelors,' blood sports, missionaries, bores, and people who worry about their reputations.

Bohemians like men and women, Nietzsche, Picasso, Kokoschka, jazz, acrobats, Havelock Ellis, the Mediterranean, DH Lawrence, those who don't anticipate life after death.

Flaubert: "Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom."

The bourgeoisie are seen as prudes, materialistic, both cynical and sentimental, immersed in trivia and trivial pursuits.

'Real' bohemians were those who "set themselves up as sabatoeurs of the economic meritocracy." They valued 'sensitivity' over worldly ambition. Work and money,…