(no subject)

This started out as a response to gement's comment on my post, here: http://tylik.livejournal.com/901772.html

But it grow so much out of control, I figured I'd make a post of it, especially since I haven't been making substantive posts much recently. (Though dear gods, the best comments are so often to the fluffiest posts.)

"K and I were talking about this a couple of days ago, and how class implications are complex and depend a lot on other elements of culture. When I mentioned the sense that buying new houses carried a whiff of the nouveau riche from how I was raised (with a few exceptions) he said it was rather like being "posh" rather than "common" and cited the example of how you don't buy new furniture - heavens, why would you do that? You already have more than enough furniture. Have some of it reupholstered, perhaps.

So... I think it could be very much a matter of subculture. If much of your furniture is antique, contact paper might be quite practical.

It's this kind of thing, for me, that makes class markers complicated. Particular subcultures have different values, and those include different ideas about what it's worth spending money on. I was raised with the idea that spending money on larger, newer houses or fancier cars was ostentatious, whereas spending money on education or cultural experiences was good.

...what's weird is how many of these values I still have. And how many, for that matter, that I didn't necessarily get from my parents, I cobbled together later on. We did have a lot of antique furniture growing up - my mother's family had a lot of furniture (and lots of people) and even spread out there's just a lot involved. (My father's tastes were both more modern and more random. Come to think of it, neither parent especially had taste.) On my own, I bought a lot of antique furniture... mostly carefully reconditioned older pieces but not the crazy expensive stuff. (Though, um, that also, I guess, is a matter of perspective. Much of it wasn't cheap, either.) But I almost never buy modern furniture new, because most of it seems like complete crap to me. There are exceptions: cheap bookshelves that I treat as disposable on the one end, say, and gorgeous handmade amish cherrywood on the other. Otherwise? Ugh.

Similarly, I can't deal with most commercial jewellery. I mean, first off, if you're getting jewellery, it should be made by an actual jeweller, and it should be an individual work of art. What's the point, otherwise? (Handmade things are always better than mass produced things.) Second, much of the artistry should be in the metalwork. Gems should ornament the piece, not be displayed in and of themselves - that would be ostentatious. The one exception being if the gem itself is beautiful and unique. (And there should be a story. Like, about how you picked this up after your motorcycle broke down in this little village in Bali, and you ended up staying in a barn full of turkeys, and then how the guy who finally fixed the motorcycle's wife had a side line as a gem cutter, and you saw this piece and...) And in that case the presentation should be simple, elegant, and leave the focus on the stone itself. Minimalist settings that display fairly pedestrian stones? *eyeroll* (Which is an awful lot of commercial jewellery, so it's kind of doubly cursed.)

Keep in mind that I don't wear jewellery these days. (Or own much in the way of furniture.) I'm not making a statement about any of these things being correct (especially since they seem pretty silly when I take them out and look at them, some of them) I'm talking about the codification of a set of values. And how it's not just about something being "high" or "low" in terms of class - what is high or low depends in part where you sit.

Another example: one often hears about educational disparities, and one thing that is cited as part of this is how more affluent families can afford to spend money on things like tutoring, or, later on, test prep courses. Now, again, some of this is probably the changing of the times, but... when I was growing up, spending money on after school tutoring was seen as ineffective (which the data at least somewhat supports these days) and a sign that either a parent was too pushy or that there was something wrong with the child. If you were going to do anything like that, hiring tutors would be appropriate, but even so that was usually about subjects not part of the school curriculum. A few years back, when I mentioned to my mother that I hadn't prepared for the GREs at all (and took them somewhat sleep deprived, and on a lot of pain meds) she stated that she never really believed in preparing for that kind of test. (And yes, this is my mom, and yes, she is a freak. Still. Oh, and yes, I did very well, though, I did make a mistake or three, and yeah, I feel a bit of the rue for not pulling perfect scores.)

So, which is "higher" - sending your kids for extra academic prep, or not?

I'm not trying to say that these things are all relative. They aren't. They heartbreakingly horribly are not, often. I think class is very important to talk about. I just think we need to talk about it in more dimensions than high and low, even though gradations of privilege and power are clearly part of the picture. And, in fact, I think the conversation is a lot more interesting when we do discuss it with that added degree of depth.