And Deirdre McCloskey wins the award for most ostentatious lameness. Not that I have anything really against Deirdre McCloskey; she’s an influential economist, a gifted writer, and has a compelling personal story to boot. But still.
Here’s the thing: the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a handful of academics to divulge their guilty pleasures. Seems like a potentially amusing parlor game, no? Well, as a moment’s reflection would reveal, no. Because you see, what could they possibly say? Most academics, for better or for worse, basically conform to the stereotype. They like reading books and teaching classes, not shooting up heroin or walking around in public dressed up in gender-inappropriate undergarments. (See, I don’t even know what would count as a respectable guilty pleasure.) And if they did, they certainly wouldn’t admit it. And if they did admit it, it certainly wouldn’t be in the pages of the Chronicle.
I was one of the people they asked, and I immediately felt bad that I couldn’t come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others.
But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.
But the award goes to Prof. McCloskey, who in a candid examination of the dark hedonistic corners of her soul, managed to include this sentence:
Nothing pleases me more than opening a new textbook.
Arrrgh! Stuff like that sets back the cause of academic non-geekiness for centuries!
The irony is, I totally know what she means.
Sheesh. Not only are academics lame, they can’t even answer simple questions.
The amusing thing is that Sean seems to have been the only one to really understand the question: what do you get pleasure out of doing which might be considered (by you or by others) to be wrong/damaging/declasse/perverted in some sense, which you might be (slightly) embarassed to admit doing?
A boring “guilty pleasure” would be something like “gorging on ice cream” or “watching soap operas”[*] or “reading Harlequin romances”, all of which are common and ordinary, but at least have some kind of stigma attached to them.
“Riding my bike” and “landscape restoration”? The people who mentioned those admit that they don’t even feel guilty about them.
To be fair, McCloskey’s answer is a sort of complicated rendition of “Something I keep trying to do even though I know I’m no good at it” (in her case, trying to learn foreign languages), which has a certain arcane perversity to it, I suppose. In a way, I think she has Sean beat: imagining that one should feel guilty about trying to learn foreign language is way weirder than imagining you should feel guilty about visiting Las Vegas (if admittedly far less salacious).
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c’mon Sean,
Chocolate covered bacon. no brainer.
by the way if you look in the bottom drawer of Feynman’s desk taped to the ….
e.
Mark – LOL
Still, at least none of them said “Lord of the Rings”.
Jennifer,
could you expand a bit on “yoga toes”? I’ve never heard that phrase before.
e.
Given his love of Las Vegas, I think Sean would be a natural to play the Frank Sinatra/George Clooney role in another remake of Oceans 11. ‘Eleven’ refers, of course, to the number of dimensions Sean uses to break into the casinos.
Has NO ONE here ever gotten drunk/stoned with one of his/her professors?
Good grief, what is the world coming to?
We should have a CV.com guilty pleasure thread!
Hey, I can relate with “riding a bike”, we’re not talking a leisurly cruise around the neighborhood folks, this is downright masochism. How many people physically push themselves to the point of unstoppable cramping/open skin sores/vomiting, & enjoy it?
Carl Brannen has it right, except I’d change dynamite in the desert to dynamite in your backyard, and add: oxy-acetylene powered cannons, putting your lawn tractor on methanol with a foot throttle & running it to 9100rpm, working over a chainsaw b/c “it just doesn’t have enough balls”, building your own speaker cabinets, changing the resistors & capacitors in your distortion pedal just to see what happens, etc.
I guess this could be summed up as destruction, hydrocarbons and noise.
mxracer652 @ 35 on riding a bike:
Yes, but where’s the guilt? Riding a bike is virtuous: it’s transportation without pollution, and it’s exercise. (And if you read the article, you’ll see that Jacob Hacker admits that “it’s not exactly a guilty pleasure”, thus treating the question as though it were something more like “What’s your favorite hobby?”)
JoAnne: I’ll take the old movies & wine at 3AM..I’m up anyway…
This reminds me of a scene from David Lodge’s “Changing Places” (which then crops up again in Small World, now that I think of it) where a group of English Lit. profs play a game called “Humiliation” where you win by nominating a book you have not read, but which all the players have.
One minor character (ok, spoilers follow) is so desperate to win that he blurts out that he has never actully *read* Hamlet, which leads inexorably to him losing the respect of his department, the denial of tenure, and his banishment to the midwest from “Euphoric State”.
Somehow forcing academics to name their guilty pleasures seems to work in much the same way…
Sean–
In a shameless, self-referential move (since I’m a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education), I posted a note on the Chronicle’s Footnoted blog about your post. Check out the comments that have accumulated on our website about the academic indulgences story, to which you contributed. The best are the new lyrics to “My Favorite Things” which includes this gem of a verse:
Beefing up a chainsaw or making fireballs with non-dairy coffee creamer is not a guilty pleasure, merely a geeky one (particularly if you preface the “boom” with a few remarks about surface-area-to-volume ratios). Singing along to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” is a guilty pleasure: I wouldn’t admit that, even to my fellow BDSM-fetishizing, hallucinogen-abusing, Sandman-reading friends.
Some things we keep quiet because of good taste; others because of the statute of limitations.
This is perhaps a better example: Being able to perfectly lip-synch “Mr. Roboto” is a guilty pleasure. Detonating liquid nitrogen depth charges in trash cans full of oobleck is a pastime.
Rich, we have a better word now for “shameless, self-referential moves.” It’s called “blogging,” and we heartily encourage it. (But it would have been too obvious to list as a guilty pleasure.)
Greg Egan (above) hits the nail on the head. From the perspective of adolescence, thrilling at a new textbook really is a guilty pleasure. Not that I’m trying to say anything about arrested development, of course.
I will forthrightly admit that one of my best Friday nights of recent memory (this was a warm evening in North Carolina, last summer) was cracking open a fresh copy of Zee’s Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. And, of course, proofreading the manuscript of Zwiebach’s First Course in String Theory is a memory soaked through with sentiment.
The problem is that (a) nobody around me right now thinks that’s odd in the slightest way, and (b) I was just like this as a teenager too. I can’t feel “guilty” about it, because guilt was never part of my emotional context on such matters.
Why would one feel any guilt whatsoever for their pleasures????? The guilt, or innocence, is always in the minds of others, some less fortunate and without passion for life. However, the comment about the statute of limitations may be substantive and even make wise economic sense, given this currently climate on punishing universities (and the wars on some behaviors of some) for inviting guest speakers (or dis-inviting them), and increasing restrictions on academic freedom. Thus banality maybe necessary in the form of smoke and mirrors to hide the real ecstasies and bliss.
Doesn’t the incredulous (even disapproving) response to McCloskey’s lame pleasure at cracking a textbook perversely validate her? I mean, she’s right – now it is a guilty pleasure.
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@ Peter E,
True, but we’re talking about two different things, riding for exercise/transportation is one thing, training to be a semi/pro cyclist is entirely different.
I think the point Hacker admits is that the amount of time that is necessary for training cuts into your family time, hence its inherent selfishness/guilty pleasure status.
Reading this blog is one of my guilty pleasures.
One of my guilty pleasures is arguing about metaphysical issues like God’s existence, the contingent nature of observed reality, the meaning of existence, multiple universes, modal realism, etc. in stupefyingly deep, perplexing, and intricate ways.