Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Laura!

In our continuing series, Yes, We’re All Staring at YOU (which just won the 2008 BiPM Award from the BiPM Foundation, of which I am the non-partisan Executive Director), we put front-pager Miss Laura in the hot seat for a grillin’. Caution: she’s feisty.

You were born in late 1976.  Do you have any regrets about missing America’s golden age—the Ford years?
I’ll just have to treasure the month I got.  Even though I can’t remember it.

What attracted you to blogging and how long have you been doing it?
I started blogging, as opposed to reading and commenting on other people’s blogs, for a completely utilitarian reason: I had moved to NH-02 and it was something I could do to support the congressional campaign of Paul Hodes. I had no need to be creative or express myself or anything like that. That was summer 2006. But I’d been registered and commenting at Daily Kos since October 2003. How I got to that point I told here.

You are currently the Mellon Fellow in Sociology at Dartmouth.  What does that mean and what is your favorite kind of melon?
I do some teaching and have more time for research. Cantaloupe.

What kind of music makes you feel invincible to the GOP horde?
I wrote my dissertation on a form of participatory harmony singing called Sacred Harp (no harps involved). It’s been an ongoing tradition in the southern US since before the Civil War, and I often go to Alabama and sing this music with people who include many quite conservative Republicans. One of the things my dissertation (and now book manuscript) focuses on is that people can find a meaningful community in this singing despite those political differences, and equivalent religious ones. So I guess I rarely feel more invincible than when I’m in a little country church on Sand Mountain, singing about God with people who I might see as part of the GOP horde if I didn’t know them and love them dearly.

Sacred Harp isn’t really listening music, though, and I listen to country, rock, folk. I most like voices with texture and depth. Probably my two favorite voices belong to Kasey Chambers and Tim Eriksen. In a small folk club once, I swear to you I felt the pressure on my skin from the sound waves of Tim’s unamplified voice.

One song I could listen to for hours at a time is “Easy Silence.” The Dixie Chicks version is great, of course, and then recently I found the version by Dan Wilson, who wrote the song with them, and now I can just alternate between them.

What’s the one book every Kossack must read?
You’re asking an indecisive person to name one? I guess I’m supposed to choose something high-minded, right? And if it’s just one thing, it must be supposed to be all things to all people.  Meh, I can’t do that.

I reviewed Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift, which is a really important one to read. Thomas Geoghegan’s Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back. But I’d also say Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, or Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift, because understanding how people raise their children and handle their marriages is a really important component of understanding our society and culture (and, ok, I’m in the middle of prepping a sociology of the family class). And I’d say Pride and Prejudice or Elinor Lipman’s The Inn at Lake Devine.

Finish this sentence: In the kitchen I make a mean…
Again with one? I guess you’d have to say my gluten-free desserts stand out the most on account of how not just anyone can make GF baked goods with a decent texture.  I love peanut butter-based desserts, because sweet and salty together is very, very important, and I’m a big fan of adding liquor to cakes. Usually amaretto or rum.

Now that it’s been officially announced that SusanG is the new senior executive viceroy editor in chief—the new “decider,” if you will—of Daily Kos, would you say the other front-pagers are resentful…or are they perhaps just so beaten down that they really don’t care?
So beaten down we all believed it when the Great Orange Satan told us we loved Susan and thought it was a good thing.

What do you do for fun when you’re not blogging?
Leave New Hampshire.  Once away, I sing Sacred Harp, shop with my best friend, or, if I can get to DC, drink with BarbinMD, DHinMI, and Trapper John and his wife.  Though it’s when emptywheel is there that people really get messed up.

Which congressional/senatorial races are you watching most closely?
Obviously the senate race in NH is going to be big – beating John Sununu is a major opportunity – and to keep up with that, I read Dean Barker at Blue Hampshire. At Daily Kos I try to keep a bunch of the Blue Majority races in people’s minds; I tend to end up getting interested in those races because I’m writing about them rather than the reverse. And I keep an eye on two big House pickup opportunities in Michigan – Mark Schauer in MI-07 and Gary Peters in MI-09.

What has surprised you most since you started writing for the front page?
On the good side, how much I love everyone I have the chance to work with. I’ve discovered that, given a reason and the sense of being part of a larger project, I can push myself to do things I wouldn’t have expected, like be on the radio (not saying I’m perfect, but I’m working on it). How little wingnut mail I get in general, and despite everything you read about how all women bloggers get horribly misogynist hate mail, very little of it is like that.  

On the sometimes-frustrating side, how much more difficult it is to find time to relax and have fun in the threads. When I’m on the site, I feel like I should be doing something, being useful in some way.

No waffling here: dogs or cats?
Both. It’s not a waffle, I really like them all. Just don’t call them f’ing pooties.

What are your favorite blogs besides Daily Kos?
Atrios, The Phil Nugent Experience, Swing State Project, Crooked Timber, Go Fug Yourself, Project Rungay (which Trapper John and his wife just told me about, so I’m still wasting too much time going through the archives), And Another Thing (Katha Pollitt’s blot at The Nation), Carpetbagger Report, lots of local blogs, I could go on and on.

Yes or no: the Democratic nominee will be determined at the Democratic National Convention?
In some official sense, yes. Hopefully unofficially before that…

I have one question left, but I gotta feed the meter.  Please ask and answer the final question yourself…

Why Miss and not Ms.?  (Thanks to georgia10 for providing me with a question.)
It’s another Alabama thing. I also think Ms. is an aesthetically unpleasing word, so I’d never use that. This is not exactly what I’d have chosen if I knew I was going to be making more than a few anonymous comments, though.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There’s Moreville… [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

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