martyns blog

Spring Photos

March 29, 2006

That time of spring where everything is showing signs of life, but the nothing has filled in all the way.

According to our address we live on "Dooley Drive." A street named after this skeleton figure. Dooley Days (or whatever they are called) used to be in the fall, but then a couple of years ago got shifted to the spring. Neither Emily or myself have ever found too much interest in Emory spirit things.

A Missing Scene:
The Computer in Welles' The Trial

March 29, 2006

The Trial was released in 1962, and a scene that must have been Welles' own invention was the one featuring a giant computer—the old-fashioned kind that read punch cards.

Josef K. is visited by his uncle and after the work day has ended, they walk upstairs to this long computer, with blinking lights to show it is working. The uncle refers to it as the "brain thing" (although the word "computer" does actually occur toward the end of this scene). He tries to convince Josef to ask the "brain thing" about his case.. but that is every bit as frustrating as asking the Advocate. If the Advocate, surrounded by candles, bespeaks the hopelessness of a spiritual answer, the computer scene extends that hopelessness to the realm of science and technology.

The computer scene, as it now stands, comes and goes quickly. But there was a longer scene cut from the film by Welles. This scene is recreated by the website Wellesnet in a clever way, providing stills from the cut scene along with the dialogue from Welles' script. It is an example of a website that recreates an experience. The image below is one picture from this sequence.

Josef K. standing in front of computer with data card. Note the widescreen format which is absent from a cheaper DVD (such as mine).

This scene brings out more clearly the inability of the computer (and therefore science) to answer human questions.

Scientist: Facts. The mathematics of probability.

Josef K.: But the questions I asked were...

Scientist: (interrupting him) I told you. All we can process for you are facts.

Josef K.: But I don't have any facts.

Scientist: Then what do you expect?...Give her moonshine and all you'll get back is silence... Oh, she can count the stars for you...

Josef K.: No thanks.

One can speculate as to why this scene was removed, which if it were still present would likely be among the best known. Perhaps it was the date.. 1962 is an extraordinarily early point for computers to be involved in this kind of moral-questioning framework. This was before 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), and from looking at Wikipedia's list of films that made reference to computers (which does not mention The Trial), it seems still clearer that this was an innovative early use. Perhaps, too, the full computer scene, with its straight metallic lines, just seemed incongruous with the rather tortured and maze-like interiors that dominate much of the film.

This scene shows Welles working creatively to attach to The Trial a critique of the growing contemporary interest in computers and their problem solving capabilities (certainly Kafka could never have imagined such a creation). It showcases Welles in all his humanistic splendor, setting human problems and struggles above answers from religion or science.

Japanese Gardens

March 28, 2006

Emily these days has been the one with time to check out websites. She came across a website dedicated to Japanese gardens, and pointed it out to me.

What is unique about this site is the way place is illustrated. It is one thing to show a map, and another thing to show a series of pictures, but neither one of these is satisfactory in building a mental picture of a visitation to the place. Pictures always seem out of context and hard to connect with each other, while a map is just a scheme.

The website on Japanese gardens finds a way to merge these two modes of representation. It provides a site map in the left corner, and then keys pictures to that map so that it is clear what direction and from what standpoint the viewer is looking. On this link press any of the yellow circles on the site map to see a picture from that point and in the direction shown.

This gives me some ideas about how to manage my own photographs of places—in my quest to be an amateur geographer. The key being to connect photographs with a site map so that the viewer can not only see nice pictures, but get a sense of what it is like to stand at various points along the way.

I think this could be used in tandem with a Google map, for example, with the points from which a photo is taken marked onto the map. It would then be a way to document a small town or a major downtown.. not to mention the kinds of sites I will be seeing this summer in Egypt. I think it would be quite useful to have a similar set up so that students could walk through, say, the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo.

This website on Japanese gardens also stirs something inside as I finish the last details on my dissertation and get ready to say goodbye to being a graduate student. Japanese gardens are beautiful.. but more attainable will be the art of Bansai. (The pictures for this entry are mine from the Japanese garden and Bansai exhibit at the Huntington Library.) These tended trees have always represented to me a life of simplicity and peace. I have often considered buying a Bansai tree.. just last year we saw some for sale at the Candler Park fall festival.. but were Katrina evacuees really going to invest in a Bansai tree? This year, though.. yes, we will.

Back to Blogging

March 27, 2006

After a month of almost daily blogging, I ran into a wall.. in the form of a dissertation that needed to have a final round of revisions added. Somebody must have already coined a law in life stating that no matter how much time one has, a large project will come down to the last minute. Whatever that law's name, it applies now.

Blogging has been an organic addition to my life. In the past I have kept extensive journals, and there have been periods (such as last summer in Washington, see below) when I have written regularly in the form of letters or reports. So this kind of forum fits me like a glove.

I have long thought that the most important moral compass for me is the word "exploration." I remember writing about this subject when I was 23, sending out a series of letters on pet topics. Exploration may not appear to be a promising moral compass.. but let me explain..

Exploration is to get to know this worldly life as deeply as possible.. its people and its places. It means to continue to open new doors in the world of knowledge. It means to enjoy all of life's successive stages as they come to me.

The danger some might see in this word is the inherent lack of responsibility to others, along with a tendency to pass too quickly over difficult topics. It seems at odds with altruism. But I don't think this is necessarily so. Any form of xenophobia (in which category I would include homophobia) stems from a failure of exploration with respect to those around one. It is to be so frightened for one's own point of view, that the point of view of someone else is denied or denigrated. And exploration would be misapplied if it meant a life endlessly chasing women (or men), which would mean to turn away from the full exploration of life and all its stages.. not to mention the deep knowledge of another person that comes with time.

Although blogging means a lot of things to a lot of people, to my mind it answers to the need for a reflection of this life of exploration. The older blogs now go back a handful of years, but what an accomplishment it will be to get 20 or 30 years of life down in this kind of forum.

Orson Welles' The Trial

March 22, 2006

Welles' version of The Trial is quite close to Kafka's novel, but had a heightened physicality. This physicality comes through in a terrifying way when Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) stumbles into the closet where the two policemen against whom he lodged a complaint are being savagely beaten in a dark little closet. That scene is in the book, but film accents the physical impact.. Then the sexual overtones are underlined. A great scene in the movie is when Josef K. talks with some executive for his corporation, while through glass windows his young 16 year-old cousin waves at him. The executive implies that something dirty is going on between Josef K. and his cousin.

I vaguely remember from The Trial that the Advocate's female helper has webbed fingers, but in the film she declares herself to have a physical deformity, and holds up her hand to the light. At one point Orson Welles goes too far.. in my opinion: when Josef K. attempts to help a woman dragging a trunk, we actually hear the creak of her metal brace as she limps along.

I would never deny that Kafka is a physical writer.. he gave us Gregor Samsa and his transformation one morning into a vermin.. definitely physical. But ask yourself how that looks? The second you actually picture a roach or some other real insect/vermin you have moved into a variety of realism that is distant from Kafka's work. For me Kafka has always been a master of parables on the page. The translation of these written parables to the visual language of film brings about changes in tone and meaning. Webbed fingers no longer haunt the mind as an odd and impossible to imagine fact, but sit there repulsively in the light.

The Trial is certainly ambitious, and in his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles admits the importance of the film within his body of work:

OW: Well, you know why I defend it—I suppose because it's my own picture, unspoiled in the cutting or in anything else. That's why I hate to hear that it is not as good, because I can't blame anybody for it [laughs].

It also seems different from his other films in being more of an "art film." The Trial was completed in 1962, and of course Welles knew about the kinds of formal experimentation represented by Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960). And that is perhaps exactly the problem with The Trial, although it has numerous Welles touches throughout, it catches its author in unfamiliar territory.

Maybe (and I should note that I am formulating an opinion that will be tested as I proceed with this project) we could call Welles a "Hollywood Classicist"—meaning that he was at home with the goals and aesthetic feel of Hollywood films ca. 1935-1950, although he had trouble operating within the Hollywood studio system that produced those beloved films. When he arrived at the threshold of a new era in film, ushered in by directors such as Fellini, he seems a bit out of place.

The Stand Up Comic:
Ray Davies at the Variety Playhouse

March 19, 2006

I didn't know what to expect when it came to seeing Ray Davies in concert. I have a pretty decent collection of Kinks albums, and can tell you favorite songs.. but I had no idea what Ray Davies' stage persona might be like. It turns out he is something of a goof. I mean that in a good way. He is engaging of the audience and willing to be silly—like putting-a-beer-bottle-on-his-head type silly.

Thinking about Kinks albums, I could never have expected a dour old guy to walk onto the stage. Ray Davies seems to occupy a zone of pop music that is not well populated here in America. We have our serious song-writers and bands.. the Bob Dylans and U2s. Then there are bands that celebrate drinking and partying and having a good time.. I am having a harder time naming examples because that is not my musical bag. But Ray Davies writes songs that are serious, but at the same time self-mocking and fun. Dylan or Neil Young can be up-tempo.. they can even have a light touch.. but they rarely make it to "fun." The stage presence of Ray Davies matched his offbeat musical personality.

One of the songs he performed last night was "Stand Up Comic", from his new album Other People's Lives. The song alternates between the voice of a stand up comic goofing off and commentary on that role. It was the beginning of the second half of the concert, and Davies was wearing his glasses and gray suit, goofing as if he were working the crowd like a stand up comic.

William Shakespeare is the schmooze of the week
and anyone who says different is a fucking antique
and Noel Coward has become very hard
and the comic says bollocks and everyone laughs

Those lines.. or at least those sentiments.. will feel familiar to a fan of the Kinks. A characteristic mode for Ray Davies is looking back to the past—not the past as a golden unity, but the past as more diverse and plain odd. The past was that time when you didn't have to be like everybody else.

Davies had played "20th Century Man" from Muswell Hillbillies earlier in the concert, which includes the following lines:

You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me William Shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I'll take Rembrandt Titian Da Vinci and Gainsborough

The lines, which are delivered with as much force as Davies can muster, are unambiguous in their relish for the past.. at the expense of the present.

So who is this stand up comic character, dismissing Noel Coward as too hard? The first answer is that it is ironic. Davies detests the entertainment pitch to the lowest common denominator and is making fun of it. Having listened to the song several times on the new CD, this was my interpretation.. it was a classic Kinks sentiment.

In concert the song comes across differently because Ray Davies so embodies the stand up comic—and does so without apparent irony.. in fact it was his normal stage persona pushed a little further. A similarly complicated view of this character is present in Ray Davies' liner notes for the new CD:

Sometimes when I am trying to introduce new material, I feel like a stand up comedian in a bar full of lager louts. Like I said, I tried to break away from my past but I had a back catalogue that would follow me wherever I went. When I would try to be a different person; a more caring and poetic individual, this STAND UP COMIC would turn up to sabotage my attempts to place myself on a new platform. This little demon will simply not go away... I'll call him Max in honour of the comedian Max Miller the great old London vaudevillian... I have tried to forget about this song and I even tried taking it off the album but the "Stand Up Comic" will not go away.

This sounds almost as if the singer/song-writer is being held back by this stand up comic persona. And in a way he is right. That need to goof off and talk about getting a drink at a pub keeps his songs from having gravitas, or whatever we want to call that sense of self-importance that keeps people quiet and impressed.

This stand up comic has been there throughout Ray Davies career. The connection of this stand up comic to the vaudevillian Max Miller is a clue that it is a positive character in the Ray Davies conceptual system. In "The Village Green Preservation Society" Davies sang "God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety." And on the cover of Muswell Hillbillies the band is standing in an old-fashioned pub. Vaudeville and pubs were always part of the Kinks. And if Shakespeare is an influence with Davies, it is the Shakespeare of Falstaff and the comedies who stands as the source of that influence. Which, it need hardly be said, is nothing to be shaken-off..

AFI Award for Welles

March 18, 2006

Writing about Orson Welles, I am seeing, will take years. I wish I could follow my typical fashion and just watch everything and read everything.. and then have Welles out of my system. Unfortunately, his work is still just trickling out little by little. In April Arkadin will come out on Criterion, and that will be new. In 2007 I think The Magnificent Ambersons will finally make it onto DVD.. with new footage? So blogs on this topic will just have to accumulate over the years.

This week we watched the German documentary, Orson Welles: One Man Band. The documentary accompanies the Criterion release of Welles' film essay F for Fake.. and is itself something of a film essay. The style for this documentary on Welles and all his multiple unfinished projects reminded me of last year's Grizzly Man, by Werner Herzog.

I found the opening to be the most rousing part of it, which featured Orson Welles receiving his AFI lifetime achievement award in 1975. After a gracious acknowledgment, he says:

This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. The maverick may go his own way, but he doesn't think that it is the only way, or even claim that it is the best way... except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different than yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work... in other words, I'm crazy. but not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could not have been made otherwise. Or if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is that I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it weren't for this: my own particular contrariety.

Let's hear it for the mavericks! The whole thing just makes me want to stand up and cheer. While careful to refrain from criticizing anyone, he defends his simple goal to make movies in his own terms. By all the usual measures for success— wealth or fame or respect—he really is crazy.. but for anyone who understands being driven by something further.. something wholly personal.. he makes all the sense in the world.

I was fascinated to catch snippets of some of his unfinished projects.. many of them unfinished or fragmentary. I think that in Welles' case the idea of "finished" is too restrictive. Someday all his fragments.. in whatever state they are.. should be edited and presented on a series of DVDs. Does that Merchant of Venice lack a crucial scene? Let it go. Are there only a few patchwork scenes of Welles reading scenes about Ahab from Moby Dick? Collect those. Let us see these fragments, and they will come to resemble those fragments of Greek poetry which exist only in a few tantalizing lines.. the rest destroyed by time.

At one point Oja Kador mentions that Welles would say that every human being should ask two questions: 1) Why did God create the world? and 2) What should I do next? And that final question, to me, is the most crucial.. to always be asking oneself about the next creative project. It may make on the laughingstock of Hollywood.. turn you into a ridiculous old man that has to do voiceover for Transformers.. but something will be yours at the end.

Spring at Emory

March 17, 2006

I have never taken pictures of spring at Emory.. and some of the trees are already past their prime. It will be our last spring at Emory and in Atlanta.

The sign in the background reads "From Pharaohs to Emperors"—for an exhibit at the Michael C. Carlos Museum. if it read "from Pharaohs to Caliphs" it could have been a subtitle for my dissertation.

That is another picture, taken from a slightly different spot. The buildings that line Emory's quad are distinctive for their white marble with touches of pink marble. The different buildings manage this differently, but the philosophy building uses stripes, as glimpsed above.

Last year we walked around Emory with a similar sense that we were saying goodbye.. but then we got washed back here on account of Katrina and consequently spent a year closer to Emory than ever before. It is a beautiful campus, but we want to say goodbye for good..

There is one thing for which I will always be grateful to Emory: it is here I met Emily. I turned around after taking the above pictures and saw her sitting on a bench.. making notes in her little journal. We had just eaten the lunch she had packed.. and as always she waited patiently as I took my pictures.

Comfort of Strangers:
Beth Orton Concert

March 17, 2006

Have I not yet mentioned that on Monday night we went to see Beth Orton at the Variety Playhouse? It is funny how ideas pile up.. much like the books and magazines here in our apartment. Her poster is now on our refrigerator.

She mostly played songs from her most recent album Comfort of Strangers, although there were also two acoustic interludes where she sang a selection of songs from her several previous albums. The concert was wonderful, and some of the songs took off.. I only wished she had given them a little more length. It seemed like they came and then they were gone.

Apples and Absinthe

March 16, 2006

One fact about modern life that often goes unobserved is the way certain popular foods and drinks have faded away.. become extinct. Large grocery stores are convenient for all of us, but they also have a finite number of slots for fruits and vegetables, and inevitably varieties get streamlined to meet the general taste. I have nothing but admiration for those who try to preserve old versions of food.

The New Yorker on occasion runs articles on this topic. In the issue that came out September 5, 2005 I found an article entitled "Renaissance Pears: Saving the favorite fruits of the Medici." John Seabrook notes concerning the peasants in Umbria and Tuscany:

The farmers planted as many varieties as possible, because the different trees would bear fruit at different times over the growing season. The mountainous topography of Umbria, and its lack of roads, insured that varieties common to one valley were unknown in the next. When a woman married, she often carried seeds from her family's farm with her, in order to prepare her mother's recipes, which were based on the particular varieties of fruit in her home valley.

The story continues, however, and this kind of local food culture fades after World War II. All those old varieties of pears and apples were forgotten. We now rely on a woman such as Dalla Ragione, who practices archeologia arborea, to rediscover these old varieties.. and give people a chance to taste these fruits.

Last week the New Yorker (March 13, 2006) came out with a similar article, this one on the drink absinthe. Emily assures me that this drink does exist and tastes something like black licorice. But this modern version of absinthe is quite distant from the liquor that was so popular in the 19th century—before it was banned in the early twentieth century and effectively became an extinct drink. The article by Jack Turner chronicles the efforts by Ted Breaux to reinvent this drink, famous or its bright green color.

Breaux tasted his pre-ban absinthe, and performed a chemical analysis, to give him an idea of what he was aiming at. Through archival research, he found the "protocols"—recipes followed by the great nineteenth-century distilleries—and stayed there late in his lab after work to make absinthe according to their instructions. His results, he recalls with a laugh, were not impressive: "What I had there didn't seem convincing." He began to realize that the knowledge communicable in a recipe was useless without the tricks of the trade that distillers failed to include in their protocols, perhaps unwilling to write them down.

That paragraph gives a sense of the labor needed to re-invent something that was perfected over a long period of time and for which all living traditions have been lost.

Why should anyone care about old apples and original absinthe? My answer to that is central to the aims of Old Roads and to my vocation as a teacher. An unsavory element of our increasingly globalized culture is the rift between our own experience of the world and that of people who lived in the past. In our cut-off modern world fundamentalisms offering false versions of the past flourish.. and we find it harder to understand who we are.. since we have no idea where we come from.

Having a sense for how apples and absinthe tasted is in itself no big deal, but in the aggregate these kinds of labors to rediscover the past build thin fibers of connection between ourselves and the past. One goal of Old Roads is to highlight these efforts.

Politics Today

March 14, 2006

Every now and again I get sent via e-mail a Christian news alert from well-meaning family members. Last week I got one that started as follows:

If you read a major national newspaper this week, you may have seen the screaming full-page ad beginning with this headline: "These Religious Leaders Have a Serious Gambling Problem..." The ad, which also runs on television, pictures Ralph Reed, formerly with the Christian Coalition, Rev. Lou Seldon from the Traditional Values Coalition, and Jim Dobson of Focus on the Family with a sinister photo of Jack Abramoff. Talk about guilt by association.

I was called the Nixon "hatchet man," so I ought to know a "hatchet job" when I see one, though I am not sure that I have ever seen anything quite this vicious since the McCarthy era.

The facts are these: Jim Dobson had nothing to do with the Indian tribes or Abramoff. The allegations in the attack are without any basis in fact. Jim has fought gambling in forty-three states. This is nothing less than libel.

The attack on these Christians is sponsored by a group called Defcon. Its website lists the people, a Who's Who of the extreme left, including same-sex "marriage" and pro-abortion activists, liberal professors, and ACLU luminaries. And they have the nerve to say that Dobson, Reed, and Sheldon have "waged war against our Constitution."

This piece, "Have You No Shame", distributed widely on the internet, comes from Charles Colson, whose sphragis denoting authorship comes in the second paragraph with the reference to working for Nixon. Today, of course, he is a well-known Christian writer and commentator.

What bothers me about this article is the tricky rhetorical bypass of the fact that Ralph Reed is deeply and factually implicated in the Abramoff scandal. Colson mentions an attack that included Jim Dobson of Focus on the Family, defends Dobson from this attack, and then proceeds as if Reed too has been defended. The reader is led to think that all these Christian leaders are being wrongfully smeared—libeled.

But such is not the case. Ralph Reed remains quite guilty, and a very careful reader will note that he is not actually defended here. Dobson himself, on his website, tries hard to distance himself from Reed.. surely a sign that all is not well. But Colson is intent on portraying this as a vicious attack, and does not for a moment allow that something may be amiss.

Colson is quite strong in his denial that Jim Dobson had anything to do with Abramoff: "The allegations in the attack are without any basis in fact." Well, in fact, there is evidence linking Dobson to Abramoff.. such as e-mails in which Abramoff mentions Dobson.. see the article by Max Blumenthal.

Now, I tend to believe that Dobson knew nothing about the machinations of which he was a part. I agree too that an ad attacking him for his unproven role was unfair.. but to ask him questions about what he knew is fair. And to say that those who attack him do so "without any basis in fact" is wrong.

It is interesting that Colson does not attack Blumenthal's article, but picks on a newspaper ad which pushes a legitimate question about Dobson's role a step too far. That step too far allows Colson to pitch the issue as an all out attack. He paints his attackers in the worst light he can come up with.. they are supporters of same-sex marriage and abortion along with liberal professors (that's me!) and ACLU activists. Oh my, what a group. But go to the actual list of those on the group's advisory board.. which Colson must mean when he writes "its website lists the people..." Read it and see if the above four categories seems reasonable to you, or rather a blunt and even "vicious" way of discrediting those who legitimately disagree with him.

I generally do not get too interested in the political back and forth. But this article by Colson is an example of what is not needed in our national discussion. I guess no one should hope that Colson and others on the left and right would stop writing articles like this, but as readers we have the responsibility to demand care from the news sources that we utilize.

I suggest two principles: 1) make sure those who are attacked are given decent representation, and not smeared with catch-phrases.. and 2) be offended at articles that try to pull the wool over your eyes with rhetorical tricks. Let's not give deceivers second and third chances.

Notes on Hokusai

March 13, 2006

I spent two afternoons in Washington looking at prints and paintings by Hokusai, the Japanese artist who lived from 1760-1849. The exhibit is being hosted by the Freer Gallery of Art and the Sackler Gallery, and runs from March 4 through May 14, 2006. Knowing how quickly impressions fade, I want to get down some ideas that struck me while I looked through the exhibit.

1. It was obvious that prints were displayed in Japan in ways that were quite different than what we expect. If I were to buy a print, I would immediately stick it in an unobtrusive frame and hang it on a wall. Many of these prints on display, however, were already part of a different frame. In these cases the print was the central feature of a long cloth hanging, often with two tones of cloth. Many of the larger paintings, on the other hand, were set in multiple panel accordion-like dividers. They were the sort of thing that I imagine would be used to divide a room, or to enliven a corner. One of the oddest formal arrangements was a small double wooden panel on which four painted fans were mounted on a screen. It seems that after Hokusai's death someone collected these fans.. three of which had been used, while a fourth was unused.. and mounted them so that they could be displayed. But there was very little in the exhibit to explain how these prints and panels would have been used.. where they were hung (in a house? in what room?). But that is a common complaint for an exhibit.. not enough information on the social niches which made possible these works.

2. This query concerning the ways that these prints and panels were displayed leads to a further comment. Works of art that transfer between cultures are those which can fit into the social niches of the new culture. These Japanese prints are beautiful.. but better than that, they can be framed and hung on a wall.. which is what we expect of art. The panel paintings which formed a series, on the other hand, were beautiful, but clearly harder to translate into out own domestic settings.. and so they remain slightly foreign.

3. I found the many books published by Hokusai particularly fascinating. In his lifetime there were 15 volumes of Manga, or random sketches. Some of these volumes lay open in glass cases, and I could see sketches of the natural world and day-to-day portraits. Among other books there was an Album of True Pictures. The pages open from this book consisted of blooming irises and their green stalks, splashing across the page. The book was small and contained maybe 20 more layouts like this, likely containing simply views of nature. I suppose these are early examples of what we think of now as a book of nature photography.

4. When I arrived at the small museum book shop I set about trying to find one of these books by Hokusai. Art books are much more interested in giving a purchaser the "greatest hits" instead of allowing us to glimpse how pictures worked together in a publication to build layers of meaning. I was in luck and found two books, both by Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji and a series of related prints entitled One Hundred Poets. The publisher George Braziller appears to have cornered the market on these reprinted 19th century Japanese books, with short commentary included. The introduction to One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji recognizes the uneasy translation of these art books to a modern paperback available for $20.95:

In viewing the One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, it helps to understand its character as a physical artifact, since a reproduction of the sort offered here cannot completely replicate the original. It is a book in three separate volumes: each roughly six inches wide, nine inches high, and one quarter inch thick...

it strikes me that the internet would be the perfect place to make available some of these books. There is not enough demand to prod a publisher to print many of these books.. and since it is art it is a costly prospect. But these are the perfect projects to set on the internet. They should all be in the public domain, and the internet actually could be a fitter home for these works than a paperback.

5. Hokusai painted landscapes.. and his most famous print, reprinted everywhere, is of a dramatically curling wave with a small Mt. Fuji in the background. In addition to these landscapes he also painted ordinary people going about their lives. There was a two panel painting entitled "Shinto Priest, Three Women, and a Child." In the painting three women holding pots on their head approach a priest for a blessing. Another example was entitled "New Year's Custom: Wish for a New Year's Auspicious Dream." In this case a woman sits preparing a pillow while beside her lies a picture of the seven gods of fortune, which it will be good luck for her to sleep on. Like realists from many periods, Hokusai seems to have been attracted to unique rituals and local customs. If one abjures any concentration on the unusual or fantastic, then an artist has to locate those elements in the everyday.

6. I have a soft spot for the Japanese poet Basho (1644-1694), whose The Narrow Road to the Far North was a major discover for me some years ago. Basho wrote an odd kind of travelogue, recounting a journey, but then providing short Haiku poems that capture the most transient elements of nature. Looking at the prints of Hokusai it is hard not to think that the spirit of Basho is not somewhere close by.. indeed a book of prints such as Traveling around the Waterfalls in the Provinces could be thought of as a Basho-like travelogue. As I made my way through the exhibit, I finally came across a painting by Hokusai captioned with a haiku ("Cormorant Fisherman"). And really, there is probably no reason to stop with a haiku, since the series of prints One Hundred Poets includes a line of poetry from a famous poet on the upper right hand corner of every print. The picture, although going far past anything that could be described in a line of words, strives to capture that single line of poetry.

Friends Meeting of Washington

March 12, 2006

Our goal for Sunday morning was to check out the Quaker meeting in Washington DC, located just north of Dupont Circle, on Florida Avenue. We knew going in that there would be a dominant theme in the comments during the meeting. At the end of this week came the news confirming the death in Iraq of Tom Fox, an activist with Christian Peacemakers. On Saturday morning the front page of the Metro section for the Washington Post had a picture from his memorial service, noting that Tom Fox was a Quaker.

Toward the end of the meeting, which started out quietly, Tom Fox got a string of mentions. One man clarified that he had not personally known Fox, but had attended the memorial service yesterday and heard numerous people testify about his quiet demeanor and testimony for peace. A few minutes later another man stood up and mentioned that Fox had talked about how many people were willing to give their lives in war, but few for peace. And this made the same man praise Tom (he was referred to on first name basis throughout the meeting) as the embodiment of the verse from the Gospels in which Jesus says a person must lose his life in order to gain it. Not to be outdone, another man stood up and used yet another verse from the Gospels: “Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for the world.”

At the end of the meeting, when the time came for announcements, a man walked forward to read a printed version of a short biographical note written by Tom Fox before he left for Iraq. The man stood quietly in front of the congregation and in an even voice read through this short document.. edited for our sake and for that of future listeners/readers. The details of the story are not important.. and I would probably mangle them as badly as I did the verses from the Gospels in the last paragraph. More important is to grasp the fact that this Tom Fox was given reverential treatment throughout the meeting.

Quakers use the Civil Rights movement as a touchstone. In that movement many Quakers risked bodily harm to stand up for what they believed was right. But I am not convinced that Tom Fox’s presence in Iraq should be considered analogous. In the case of Civil Rights the presence of white activists beside black activists was a powerful tool for drawing the interest of our nation and for making a statement about equality. In other words, that courageous stand was useful within a particular cultural context. I have serious doubts that peace activists inside Iraq are helping the situation.. at least as things stand now. They appear to serve as moving targets for those who want to express various political hatreds.. in other words opportunities for hate and violence.

I appreciate, as always, the Quaker sense that giving one’s life for peace is worthwhile.. but I had trouble believing that this was a smart way to give one’s life.. And I guess I missed a hint of warning to others that no matter how beloved this Tom Fox.. his was not the best path.

Record Heat in Washington

March 12, 2006

Returning to a city where one has spent a lot of time is enjoyable. In a new city or region there is always the push—at least I feel it distinctly—to see the sites. I don’t want to linger at any one spot too long since that means missing another site. In a city like Washington I can relax.. choose an old favorite or concentrate on some new exhibit.. or just sit on the mall and relax. That is the purpose of travel, it seems to me: not to cover territory, but to find places to which one longs to return.

These have been the nicest days I can remember. On Friday the weather was 78 degrees, with a cool breeze coming from somewhere. Newspapers reported that it tied the heat record for the day. Saturday was likewise warm.. and Sunday too. Nothing but blue skies and jet trails. On Saturday I walked back to our hotel on Capitol Hill through the very crowded Mall. The splotchy grass was filled with people doing every sport I could think of. There were footballs thrown, Frisbees hurled to acrobatic snatches, baseball mitts pounded, soccer balls kicked around.. I even saw someone getting ready for a game of croquet! Joggers huffed past me and over to the side a mother snapped digital pictures of her daughter turning cart-wheels on the grass. Ubiquitously there were individuals beckoning to a friend or loved-one to take a few steps away and pose for a picture with the white gleaming Capitol in the background.. or turn around and the great obelisk of the Washington Monument will be there.

Take a walk through the mall on such a day (alas, my camera batteries went dead almost as soon as I arrived in Washington!) and you realize the American urge to catalog.. in the manner of Walt Whitman. How else to capture this teeming world where so many things are happening.. and where no one is telling anyone: don’t do that. If I were ever asked by a foreigner: “Show me America! Something that will make me think differently about America.” I would be tempted to take them to the National Mall on an early spring day.. like today.. and let him or her watch the amusements and general chaos of our democracy.

A Motto for Teaching

March 10, 2006

Today I discovered a teaching motto in the Library of Congress. I remember noticing it often last summer, since it is well situated for me to glance at as I ascend the final round of stairs on my way to the Middle East and Africa Reading Room.. but I never thought of it in terms of teaching.

I think I will tuck that picture into my future syllabi.. and mention it on the first day of class.

Writing does make an “exact” person.. learning to take ideas and set them down in ordered form builds a habit of reasoned thinking. Numerous times I have started out with what I could have sworn was a great idea, but then as I started trying to write, it all seemed suddenly hazy and vague. Writing is a form of self criticism..

Reading makes a person “full.” That is a literal word for the feeling that one has after reading. I remember my year in Cairo, Egypt.. when I was just studying with no opportunity to teach.. and how unnatural it felt to be taking in so much without any place to go with it. Knowledge makes a person full in the sense that one is ready to overflow—i.e. share with others.. whether in the classroom, with family, or even with others in a community.

The most difficult of these three precepts to grasp was “conference makes a man ready.” Today came my breakthrough when I realized that “conference” was another way of saying social interaction. But then how does that make one “ready”? I take that to mean a person is able to think on his or her feet.. that person is ready to answer directly. That starts to explain why student participation is important.. something I have trouble explaining at times.. Sure students acquire knowledge, and sure they learn to write a good paper, but they also should be ready to state a point of view in a social situation.

I was thinking about another quotation today (these are just two out of many up there on the second floor of the library). This one asserts that “The true university of these days is a collection of books.” That would be the autodidact's motto, and it seems to come from a time when books were suddenly available to everyone.. in a lending library or for purchase. That must have been an exhilarating time, and there must have been something of the feeling that is now connected to the World Wide Web, which also inspires its share of exaggerated praise. And today while I did some work at the Library of Congress, I thought about how a library is a lot like the World Wide Web.. suddenly an immense amount of knowledge is open to someone like me.. But while I like the exhilaration that comes with all that open knowledge, I think a university is more than shelves and shelves of books.. or DSL service on a computer. A university adds a human dimension to all that knowledge, and nurtures a sense of wisdom from the use of that knowledge. That at least is how I imagine a university..

Flying into Reagan

March 9, 2006

One site I missed last summer in my survey of Washington DC was Ronald Reagan Airport.. naturally, since we had our car and airport security frowns on someone like me just walking in and taking pictures. But we figured that when you arrive as a passenger, there must be photography rights built into the ticket. So while Emily got hydrated, I walked around and snapped photographs.

A couple of years ago I flew into Reagan from Atlanta, and they were quite serious then about having everyone sitting in their seats a full half-hour before landing. The warnings were oh so stern.. if anyone was not seated then the plane would be re-directed to the closest airport, and besides the ire of fellow passengers that person would have to face law enforcement officers. The flight from Atlanta is quite short, and it takes a few minutes after take-off just to gain altitude and switch off the fasten seatbelt sign.. so essentially it was a seated flight. Between now and then they this rule was abrogated.. as with so many post 9/11 rules, it turned out to take a lot of effort and not really improve our safety.

Reagan is a small airport.. The planes sitting at gates were all smaller models.. no jumbo 747s or anything like that. I imagine all those bigger planes must use Dulles. As far as I am concerned, nothing beats the convenience of being able to take the Metro into the city.. we just hopped on the Blue Line and got off at Capitol South, a block from the hotel where we will be staying for a few nights. That is the exit closest to the Capitol building, which was visible from the windows at our terminal (see above). Just to the right was the bronze flame atop the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.. and it happens that the Folger Library.. where Emily will be attending a conference on the history of the book.. is just a block away from the Jefferson Building.

Reagan is modest.. but we could still look up at the cathedral-like rafters. Leaving, we could look down from a pedestrian bridge and see a rather impressive view of the access road passing by the baggage claim area on the lower level. The basic interior of the terminal was really indistinguishable from hundreds of other airport interiors. Each gate was marked with a large number. For each number there is a desk accompanied by a large screen that proclaims the next flight, the destination, time, etc.. Around those islands is a sea of lightly padded seats, where everyone endures the conversations of their neighbors on a cell phone. Nearby are the newsstands and sub-shops and smoothie factories and airport bars.. made to order for anyone who wants to get away from someone else’s cell phone conversation.

Airports are a peculiar part of our American landscape. This morning on our way to the Atlanta airport on the 285 Freeway, we passed some mighty earthworks, allowing the runways to extend over the freeway. An enormous bank of moved earth rolled along on our right.. a bank with a mass that would have stunned the pyramid builders. It will not be counted as a wonder of the world, though, since it just sits there, inert. I sometimes wonder what will happen as centuries pass and transportation modes change.. or as fuel becomes more and more expensive and travel more prohibitive.. what will these airports littering our landscape look like. Ghost-ports perhaps they will call them. And those people will forget how these hubs shaped our movement. And they will just wonder at the miles and miles of cement covering the earth.. quite uneven by that time because of slight shifts in the ground. These massive plates will be uneven as an old sidewalk.

Writing an Academic Paper

March 8, 2006

I recently came across an interesting document on the web, written by a classicist named Nita Krevans. It is fascinating for its introductory narrative about the genesis of a specific paper, early in her career, on the topic of "First Appearances in the Odyssey." It is a bit like those cartoons I remember seeing as a kid on how a bill becomes a law, only this time is is how an idea becomes an academic paper.

As this article traces the narrative of an academic paper, it inadvertently points up what I think is a blind spot in academic publishing—namely, the lack of consideration concerning the ultimate goal of academic publishing.

The first idea for this paper came to her while teaching:

Each time I introduced the epic by pointing out that the first time we see the suitors and Telemachos through the eyes of Athena, we learn a great deal about their characters just by noticing what they are doing and how they react to the appearance of the goddess. I would then add that they should be alert each time a new character is introduced to see what could be discerned about his or her character.

Nothing wrong there, of course. An important part of being a critical reader is formulating ideas and theories about a work.. thinking creatively about internal patterns and generic distinctions.

The next step we might think of as a forced rough draft.. an essay prompted by an opportunity:

I was invited to the University of Kentucky and one facet of my visit was to meet with a graduate seminar on Homer. Here was the chance to try out my ideas, so I quickly wrote up about twenty pages and sent them off two weeks before my visit.

After a new draft incorporating new ideas, and having a friend proof-read that new draft, there comes the inevitable application to deliver it as a paper at a major conference.. and only after that does she write up her paper and send it in to an academic journal. But that was not the end of the story:

After three months, the reports came back. Referee A rejected it for cogent reasons: I offered no rationale for including some examples and excluding others; I had not clearly defined what constituted a "first appearance" rather than, say, an introduction. Referee B was guardedly optimistic. She or he liked the overall idea, but found the execution inadequate. I was, of course, devastated.

It really does start to seem almost as hard to remember as that cartoon of how a bill becomes a law.. This story has a happy ending, and the academic paper is accepted by the sought for academic journal.

The general idea seems to be that a person develops an insight about a text and then inevitably starts working that insight up to the level of an academic paper.. with exceptions as an idea proves wrong or something. But is our goal really that everyone with an insight carries that insight to a publication? And what would that lead to?

What it leads to is easy to see: rows and rows of academic journals. I happened to be in the library today looking for an article, and came up against a sturdy wall of academic journals. Theoretically, I guess everyone will have their contribution to that wall. And as those insights add up, each field will advance, and the next generation of scholars will start off already knowing about the "first appearances" in the Odyssey, and build from that new platform.

This seems like a model more fitting for the sciences, where each generation really does start from the insights of the last generation. In the Humanities there have been some real breakthroughs that change the way people think.. like (in Classics) the connection of Homer to the techniques of oral poetry, or the re-discovery of Greek lyric meters in the last century. But pass over these and the scholar is left with an enormous wall of insights and good ideas to be mastered.. and pretty soon those insights become too ungainly for any one person to master, and so a field develops sub-fields.

Writing is of course a necessary part of being a scholar. But academic publications and presentations have more of a social function than is often allowed. That wall of journals does not represent pure knowledge, but the efforts of many many people to connect and exchange their insights. I guess I wish this social aspect of scholarship was more broadly recognized. And although the article by Krevans is all about adding another insight to the wall, she also manages to give a vibrant portrait of all the social interaction that comes with scholarly work. Each stage in the journey of an insight to an academic publication involves interactions with other scholars (read again each of the three brief quotations above).

The Stranger by Orson Welles

March 7, 2006

Since The Stranger (1946) was Orson Welles' least favorite of his own films, I was not expecting anything fantastic. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the brisk pace and strong characters. The film also has the odd distinction of being the first commercial film to use footage from the Nazi concentrations camps. In the interviews, Bogdanovich brings this fact up, and Welles answers:

Was it? I'm against that sort of thing in principle— exploiting real misery, agony, or death for purposes of entertainment. but in that case, I do think that, every time you can get the public to look at any footage of a concentration camp, under any excuse at all, it's a step forward. People just don't want to know that those things ever happened. [189]

This concentration camp footage is relevant since the movie is about the tale end of a hunt for a secretive and powerful Nazi, who had finally taken up residence in a sleepy town called Harper in Connecticut.

The film struck me as much more Hitchcockian than anything I have yet seen from Welles. At times the investigator Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) used psychoanalysis to predict the actions of the characters, which is an approach that is taken much further in Hitchcock's Spellbound from 1945. Then the idea of hunting for an escaped Nazi criminal gets put to use by Hitchcock in Notorious, also released in 1946.

Why Hitchcock would be an attractive model for Welles can be no mystery. Hitchcock represented a director who could successfully realize his own artistic vision, yet at the same time make money for the studios. In other words, he was an auteur who could survive in the studio system.

Welles, however, seems slightly ill at ease in this kind of film. First of all, the psychological thriller is not his forte.. Welles is more Shakespearian (something I will explore later) and his characters tend to be driven by appetite and passion rather than psychological drives hidden even to themselves. Second, Hitchcock is woodenly disciplined.. famous for his story boards.. and he seems made to work within studio strictures. Welles is simply not disciplined in the same way.. and that comes through everywhere, from his interviews to his best movies.

Welles gives a brief characterization of Hitchcock in his interviews:

There's a certain icy calculation in a lot of Hitch's work that puts me off. He says he doesn't like actors, and sometimes it looks as if he doesn't like people. [138]

That is something no one would ever say about Welles. If there is anything that stands out about his work, it is how human it all is.. how it stays focused on character, without getting sidetracked by abstractions.

But there were a few moments in The Stranger that I think showcase Welles. There were those scenes with the town druggist, gossip, and champion checkers player, Mr. Potter (Billy House). Welles' love for small towns and Americana I think shines through here. Then there is the scene where Wilson comes up with a quotation from Emerson on evil.. something about the world being covered with snow for the wrong-doer.. every step being recorded in the freshly fallen snow. And of course by the time we get to the end, the snow is falling in this small Connecticut town. These are exactly the kinds of details that mark even a middling Welles film.

Bush as Poster Boy for the Humanities

March 6, 2006

A flood of material recently on Bush's incurious temperament. Today I read an article in the New York Review of Books (March 9, 2006) about L. Paul Bremer's year in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. The writer, Peter Galbraith, notes:

Bremer says that Bush "was as vigilant and decisive in person as he appeared on television." But in fact he gives an account of a superficial and weak leader. He had lunch with the President before leaving for Baghdad—a meeting joined by the Vice President and the national security team—but no decision seems to have been made on any of the major issues concerning Iraq's future... The President's directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as "we're not going to fail" and "pace yourself, Jerry." In Bremer's account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States... [28]

"Bush is a great leader"—that seems to be the line that anyone who is serious about keeping administration ties has to use, but it looks like that was always only a line. Every time we get a glimpse of the president he is disengaged, such as last week when the video of his silent and disinterested showing during a briefing on hurricane Katrina (see article by John Dickerson from Slate.

In fact, Bush makes a great poster boy for the need for strong training in the Humanities. It is not enough to be proficient in management, or simply to have mastered some nebulous art of leadership.. at least if your work is connected to anything public and important. The kind of knowledge provided by the traditional liberal arts brings about advantages even in day-to-day practical matters. Bush, were he to take stock, might regret not paying attention in all those useless courses they made him take back at Yale.

His “either with us or against us” and “axis of evil” catch phrases, as is often commented upon, set up our world as a place where good battles evil. In Bush’s mind this may be a case of standing for simple moral truth, but from the standpoint of American popular entertainment, he stands in a very predictable position. Despite his abjuring of so much in popular culture (we never see images of him with, say, a film director or musician, only victorious athletes), he stands as a man whose opinions are derived wholly from that popular entertainment.

Lesson 1: Watching a good movie or reading a good book is not just about entertainment, but about forming an ability to read real-life situations accurately. Read novels that traffic in caricatures, you will see real people as caricatures. Read novels that provide representations of complex characters interacting with a complex world, you will have a much more dynamic frame of reference for the actions around you. The point of a liberal arts education is not to stuff students with the "great books", but to give them the experience of interacting a few times with those who have reflected on life.

After Katrina, Bush made a stirring speech calling for the restoration of New Orleans. Before that he had bumbled and seemed unconcerned about the fate of this city, one of the few real cultural capitals in the United States. He caught flack for joking about the days when he came to New Orleans to party. This is a president who has little sense of New Orleans as a cultural symbol. His speeches may be peppered with keywords for his Christian constituency, but one hears nothing about jazz, Tennessee Williams, or Anne Rice in his speeches. He talks about New Orleans as if he were talking about the restoration of Disneyland.

Lesson 2: Knowing nothing about the cultural geography of America—the literary and musical and artistic resonances of its cities and places—can bring negative consequences. A minimal exposure to America’s cultural heritage should have enabled Bush to know what was at stake in the destruction of New Orleans. It is impossible to know exactly what knowledge will come in handy, so the hopeful leader ought to read widely until the resonances of this country and our world become audible. Nothing worse than being deaf to the meaning of an event.. ask Bush.

The neo-conservative assumptions that led to the invasion of Iraq are currently being repudiated—even by those who might have called themselves neo-cons in the past. The most striking example being the article by Francis Fukuyama in last week’s New York Times Magazine. Then about the same time that article by William F. Buckley came out, calling the Iraq war a mistake. This war seems to have been launched on the basis of some remarkably abstract assumptions about the universal human desire for democracy, and the positive ability of the United States to steer clear of entrenched cultural divides.

Lesson 3: Although it was not too long ago that people were attacking Middle Eastern Studies for failing to predict 9/11, the folks in Middle Eastern Studies program now look kind of prescient. What would be more central to Middle Eastern Studies than the belief that cultures must be approached on their own terms? that understanding the particularities of a culture—its language and religious values—is essential for constructive engagement? Those are exactly the lessons that can be learned in a liberal arts environment.

Something else that comes with a bit of intellectual curiosity is a sense of how deeply human beings can mislead themselves, and how necessary it is to question yourself and your own motives.. to be critical. That last word should perhaps be the goal of every liberal arts program.. not to make "critics", but to make critical students.

"A Long Time Ago in Princeton":
Orson Welles' War of the Worlds

March 5, 2006

I stumbled recently onto a wonderful website that makes available most of the original radio broadcasts by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre. Naturally we started with his notorious War of the Worlds.

The entire broadcast—from October 30, 1938—lasts just less than 60 minutes. Of that time almost 40 minutes is spent on the fake broadcast sequence, which is the only part which would have stirred up fears. At the beginning, and then again for the final 20 minutes, Orson Welles, as professor Pierson of Princeton University, recounts his own actions and thoughts.

Far too much happens in the course of the 40 minute fake broadcast sequence for this to be mistaken for a real broadcast by any careful listener. Time is condensed and we are taken from vague radio mention of explosions on Mars—40 million miles away from us—to the final dramatic on-air gassing of the live radio announcers in New York, watching as the cloud of gas comes closer. In between we get the scene of terror as the metallic creatures emerge from their dark casings, sending out heat rays and annihilating an over-confident military detachment.. even airplanes get thrown at them, and we hear a broadcast from inside a cockpit. That would indeed be an eventful 40 minutes, all carried live on the radio. We can only assume that the listeners who were frightened did not pay too close attention before running into the street.. or whatever they did.

The fake broadcast sequence is really quite clever. I particularly loved the way the exchanges sent out misdirections. The experts keep coming on and insisting nothing is wrong.. the strange explosions on Mars are part a slight atmospheric disturbance, nothing to be worried about. But that information is contradicted by what we are hearing from eye-witnesses. The listener is encouraged to actively disagree with the "experts" and form his or her own opinion about the events.. which, of course, plays right into the hands of the dramatists.

Orson Welles seems to me to be the master of a popular lyricism. He delivers fast-paced drama, which I can easily imagine attracting average listeners to sit a little closer to their console radio, but then Welles allows for moments of real lyricism. Too much of that, and a listener might call his production "high falutin", but the lyricism comes and goes so quickly that it never becomes the dominant element. In his movies, too, camera and words are busy doing their practical jobs, but at the same time they allow for moments that serve only an aesthetic purpose.

At the end Welles, as professor Pierson, thinks for a few minutes about the utter change to the world. He recalls his life "a long time ago in Princeton." Even at the end, after the terrible machines have been destroyed by some virus, and they are displayed in a museum, like dark futuristic dinosaurs in some un-natural history museum, something remains changed in the world. There is something standing between professor Pierson and the past.

I think I catch there the Wellesian theme of change and destruction of the past. Again, from his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich in This is Orson Welles:

OW: Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive of such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. That the imagination of man is capable of creating the myth of a more open, more generous time is not a sign of our folly. Every country has its "Merrie England," a season of innocence, a dew-bright morning of the world. Shakespeare sings of that lost Maytime in many of his plays, and Falstaff—that pot-ridden old rogue—is its perfect embodiment...
PB: One critic, Andrew Sarris, pointed out that there is more in common between you and Ford then one would think at first glance—because both of you have a great respect and love for the past.
OW: Well, we're hooked on different pasts, of course. I'm interested really in the myth of the past, as a myth. Jack Ford is one of the myth-makers.

So this theme of change is one that recurs often in Welles, although in this case with a particularly dramatic break. With the conflict that would become World War II beginning to darken on the world's horizon (Welles even makes reference to it in the lead-up to the fake broadcast sequence), it is hard not to see those metal monsters displayed in a museum as a precursor to our own Holocaust Museums, and the consciousness of professor Pierson.. the sense that the world cannot be the same again.. is perhaps part of our own mental inheritance from that war. This was a War of the Worlds keyed to coming events.

Quaker Bumperstickers

March 5, 2006

Quaker meeting brings together a crowded parking lot of cars every Sunday, many of which carry a host of liberal-leaning bumperstickers. One car that often catches our eye is below.

These include the following:

Quakers: Religious Witnesses for Peace since 1660

Women are Great Leaders, You're Following One

Uppity Women Unite

Metaphors Be With You

A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle

Make Noise, Make Change: Youth Voice Radio

Build Democracy, VOTE

Quakers: No Bingo, Plain Lingo

Pepys as Blogger

March 4, 2006

The blog, it may have struck some of you, is really a glorified diary/journal entry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge used his journal to keep track of his thoughts on philosophy and literature, Samuel Pepys wrote about the every day events of his life, Thoreau made comments on the natural world, while Casanova would have noted his sexual exploits.. and I guess that kind of summarizes the opportunities for a blog. The greatest difference between an old-fashioned journal entry and a modern blog is the public nature of the experience.. one's thoughts are there for everyone to see, and that naturally enforces a certain amount of self-consciousness.. but come on, most authors were always busy imagining how people would read their journals.. someday, then the world recognized their genius.

How Samuel Pepys would have looked as a blogger is evident on one fascinating website. Some dedicated soul must type up his daily entries and post them. As time passes, certain key words and characters are glossed on the website, and the reader can track down some of the details of life in Restoration England. Another website tries to do something similar with Thoreau, although in this case the aim appears to be a little more inspirational.. although the same care is not taken to provide an historical context.

Many earlier writers would gain from having their journal entries posted in a blog format.. So often journal volumes are both expensive and unreadable, a deadly combination, and I hate to stoop to abridged treatments of an author since precisely what is interesting about a journal is the daily-lived feel they get.. the slow working out of ideas. That is lost when one just pulls out the "gist" of a journal. I would be absolutely devoted to any website that gave me a daily unshortened dose of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example..

Gwinnett Police Academy Graduation

March 3, 2006

Last night we experienced a police academy graduation for the first time. This was the 64th graduating class for the Gwinnett County Police Academy. When Emily worked at the YMCA in Gwinnett, a kid named Aidan used to come in, and over a few years Emily watched him grow up.. and even let him in without his ID card. (The sort of kindness every officer ought to recollect when tempted to issue a citation!) Emily's father talked to Aidan not long ago in the same Y, and learned that he was graduating from the police academy. When Aidan invited him to come, we got invited too. There he is below, second from the left, proud recipient of his new badge.

It was interesting to listen to the succession of speakers coming forward to congratulate the graduates and to give them their charge. Christian overtones were common, from the chaplain whose prayer invoked Jesus and and the Holy Spirit in addition to a Father God, to the administrative woman who concluded by asking that God place a hedge around the graduates. There was no doubt that we were in a Christian gathering.

Officer Blake Shaffer was voted by his fellow grauates as the spokesperson for the class, and his speech included plenty of references to inside jokes.. as one might expect after an intense 4 1/2 months of training. At the end of his speech he used a stock phrase I am sure he did not invent: Remember, it is better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. I don't see how that can mean anything except that one had better shoot first and stand before a jury of twelve to defend oneself than hesitate and be carried by six to one's grave. That struck me as a jarring note, although I don't doubt that several of these young men will need to make split second decisions about using lethal force.

There was also no mention of race throughout the ceremony, and nothing imploring these young men to be standard bearers for fairness in a diverse world.. This event was more about honor and uprightness.. without any doubts that such values could be perceived differently.

On a personal note, it was moving to see all these young men (and one young woman) advancing into a new stage of their lives. They stood there obviously proud to be moving into a new chapter of their lives, and I thought Aidan looked to be one of the most proud of the group. Emily and I avoid our own graduations as much as possible, but we too feel like we are graduating into a new chapter of our lives, and I think we would also hold up our hands and take an oath to administer our more bookish duties with honor.. as well as love.

Notes on Orson Welles

March 2, 2006

As the day draws to a close, Emily and I like to read a book together, which practically means that I read aloud while Emily falls asleep. Not every book works well as a read aloud book.. there generally needs to be some drama and dialogue. The current book is one that has been sitting on my shelves for a long time, a collection of interviews with Orson Welles conducted by Peter Bogdanovich (This Is Orson Welles). Welles is so lively and colorful in his answers that the book reads quickly and easily, providing a glimpse into a mind stocked with entertainment facts and history. Two paragraphs stand out:

PB: Well, you're shameless, but I think basically your taste is pretty—
OW: Low! . . . The truth is, Peter, I really am one of those I-don't-know-anything-about-art-but-I-know-what-I-like people. If there's no pleasure for me in it, I feel no obligation to a work of art. I cherish certain paintings, books, and films for the pleasure of their company. When I get no pleasure from an author, I feel no duty to consult him. My interests and enthusiasms are pretty wide; and I do try to keep trying to stretch them wider. but no strain. No. I am, indeed, quite shameless, as you say, about not straining to encompass what doesn't truly speak to me. [140-1]

I think it is just like in life, you meet people who consciously strive to "do the right thing", and then you meet people whose life choices are made from the heart. There seems something sterile to me about trying hard to act right, instead of actions flowing from internal standards.

OW: There is no "film culture," Peter—just an awful lot of films. We must "keep up with things," of course, but with the whole wide world—not just the movies. We must find out what we can about this place we're living in—this place in time—but we've got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it. Modishnes is the sure sign of the second-rate. We're finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it. [167]

What is refreshing about Welles—and perhaps also connected with his problems in Hollywood—is his sense that life is bigger than films—films being only one way to set down a slice of this world that rushes by us too quickly. Several times he articulates his strong dislike of "hommage" (71, 126), and it seems to me that this is an expression of suspicion toward those who let film dominate the perception of life. The stance he articulates at the end of the paragraph is that a creator is not to be a bystander reflecting the world.. something like what I recommended in my last blog.. but someone creatively interacting with that world.. finally producing an "individual response."

Pick a Paragraph

March 1, 2006

For the past two weeks in the "Islam and Africa" course that I have been teaching at Clark Atlanta University, we have been working through the passages in Ibn Battuta's Rihlah in which he describes sub-Saharan Africa. There are two relatively brief passages on this topic in the course of his voluminous travel narrative, one a sea trip down the coast of eastern Africa, the second a land trip from Morocco to Mali. (Both of these are reproduced in Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, edited by Said Hamdun and Noel King.)

My approach in teaching travel narratives is to milk them for cultural knowledge. They are doubly fascinating for their first hand representations of cultures which are on the periphery of the world stage and then for the assumptions that are betrayed by the traveler himself. I think by paying close attention to what someone like Ibn Battuta notices in the world around him, one can learn a lot about his own cultural point of view, and Islam in general.

My assignments for these past few days has been for my students to come prepared to talk about a favorite paragraph, walking the rest of us through it and talking about what we can learn about Islam at this time from it. I never worry about what paragraph anyone will choose since one could close one's eyes and choose a paragraph, and there will be several important points to be mined from it.

Take the following fairly typical selection:

When I arrived at the river just mentioned, I crossed in a ferry and nobody prevented me. I arrived at the city of Malli, the capital of the king of the blacks. I alighted by the graveyard and went to the quarter of the whites. I sought out Muhammad ibn al-Faqih and found he had rented a house for me opposite his own. I went to it and his son-in-law, the faqih and the Qur'an reciter 'Abd al-Wahid, came with candles and food. Then on the following day there came to me Ibn al-Faqih, Shams al-Din ibn al-Naqwish... [43-4]

So what do we learn in this fairly dry passage?

1. Islam had penetrated far into the interior of Africa by the 14th century.
2. There appears to be a sepaarte colony of Arabs, and one can sense the comraderie.
3. A Muslim traveler could find an immediate welcome and accomodation.
4. The existence of an African kingdom which was stable—e.g. rented houses and a ferry.

It sometimes seems to me that all a person has to do is capture what surrounds him or her, and those words or images will someday be of surpassing interest. Of course most word and images fail to represent the world.. they fall into expected categories. Like the millions of tourists who visit Yosemite looking to take their own version of an Ansel Adams photograph. Those images are governed by a pre-existing image. Better to just walk and take pictures at random, and with a little bit of cutting and framing one is almost guaranteed to have something worth preserving.

This website is an attempt to capture the world that surrounds me. One constant effort will be to get pictures of the places where I spend time. In that spirit I took a stream of pictures yesterday at Clark Atlanta University. What will always stay with me about CAU is the main walkway, which between classes is always crowded with students standing and talking, or sitting, or hurrying to class on the crowded sidewalk. Meanwhile, just on the other side of a row of buildings is the beautiful quad, which always seems deserted.

But What a Man:
Welles' Touch of Evil

February 27, 2006

The first time I saw Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil was in 1998 at the time of its theatrical re-release, forty years after its original release. I think Phil and I drove down to the Nuart in Los Angeles for one of our Sunday afternoon movie trips. That same year—1998—also happened to be the year that the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and consumed every vehicle for printed news. That scandal, with its powerful actors Bill Clinton and Ken Starr, served as the perfect framing-device for the movie.

The plot of the film is straightforward: during an investigation of a murder, detective Hank Quinlan (a rotund Orson Welles) plants two sticks of dynamite to frame the man he suspects of having committed the crime. The Mexican narcotics officer Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) realizes the frame and works to prove that Quinlan is a bad cop. This scrutiny drives Quinlan to worse crime in an effort to discredit Vargas, and the movie culminates with a scene in which Quinlan is taped confessing this frame-up and others. Quinlan’s career is over, and we see him at the end stumbling and falling into black dirty water. So good cop beats bad cop, and everyone can stand up and go home.

Not so fast. The genius of the film is the way that simple plot gets complicated through two sub-plots, both involving women. First in importance is the comical neglect of his newly wed wife (Janet Leigh) on the part of the Mexican officer Vargas. Right after the explosion marking the end of the long tracking shot that opens the film, Vargas says something like: “This is bad for us.” And his wife looks quizzically and asks: “How is it bad for us?” And Vargas corrects himself: “I mean for Mexico.” That sets up from the start the disconnect between Vargas the straight-as-an-arrow narcotics officer and Vargas the husband. He wants to get at the truth, but to do so he has to casually send his beautiful wife into disastrous situations.

Quinlan does not exactly have a love interest. He hangs out at a seedy bar owned by the gypsy-like Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), and we understand there was something between them in the past. Through the film we also get details about Quinlan’s motivations. He became a cop because of his wife’s death, and he claims at one point that not a day goes by without thinking of her. Given this history, it is hard.. impossible.. to imagine Quinlan acting like Vargas and putting off his wife in order to sort out a legal matter. In fact it is only because he lost his wife that he is at all interested in crime and his police work.

The two men proceed on opposite assumptions: Quinlan cares not a straw about law, only about life; while Vargas cares not a straw about life, only the law. In 1998 I saw that as a parable of Ken Starr, the ultimate clean lawyer who disregards the messiness of life in order to press home a legalistic charge. Like I said, that political situation was a convenient frame for the film.. although maybe that is the wrong image, since it was the film which allowed me to put the Clinton mess in a new perspective, crystallizing what I disliked about the morally irreproachable Starr.

That was a long time ago. Watching Touch of Evil again Sunday night, and knowing a little more about Orson Welles this time around, I was struck by how it seems to deliver a reading of his own life and career, not from the up-and-coming side as in Citizen Kane, but with the decline firmly in view. It is a film about the great man who cannot follow the procedural rules and gets brought down because of it. Quinlan and those who know him keep talking about “instinct”—and he does seem to get his murderers right—but he is brought down by numbers men, and in particular by a man who would leave his newly wed wife alone in order to prove himself legally right.

Quaker Meeting

February 26, 2006

It is a well kept secret, but Emily and I have been going to the Quaker meeting in Decatur most Sundays.. at least when we are in Atlanta. The meeting starts at 10 am and lasts an hour, although a battery of introductions and announcements can extend that time by about 15 minutes.

I have taken pictures of the outside of the building.. one of which I have posted below.. but I naturally do not take pictures inside during meeting. So despite the ever changing light sweeping into the hexagonal worship hall, and the seasonally varied views just out the large windows.. views containing a pleasing mix of natural and industrial elements.. the meeting remains off limits to photography. It is one of those curious public events that, by reason of unwritten social codes, admit of no visual representation.

Inside the meeting hall is a circle of chairs. Or, more accurately, there are eight distinct sections of chairs that face an empty center. Four of those sections are padded new chairs, and the other four are wooden benches saved from the first place of meeting.. which I think was at some school or other back in the 60s. In the center is always a colorful arrangement of flowers, sitting in a bowl upon a small wooden stand that is given a Zen meditative cast by unevenly cut angles.

Meditation, variously defined, is the goal of the meeting. There is no music and no sermon, just a long silence that continues until someone stands up to deliver a message from their heart, and then the silence reigns again. I generally look out the windows and think about life, watching the occasional jogger make his or her way down the concrete sidewalk or looking at the empty branches of winter and thinking about how seasons change just like life. The past two years have brought some dramatic examples of the way life can change from one week to the next. I guess it is fortuitous that, in the academic calendar, fellowship and job information come just as one starts looking for signs of coming spring.

Others are more spiritual about this experience, I know. They sit with head bowed and eyes closed.. and gently smile or nod as someone delivers a message. Some of the literature speaks in terms of interior doors that the Quaker should seek to pass through during the silence.. Emily knows more about this than me. Today one Quaker stood up to give a message about spiritual health: just as physical health is not about simply feeling good, but about enabling one to act and do things in the world, so spiritual health is not about feeling good, but about enabling one to do spiritual work in the world. By this analogy, Quaker meeting is something like a gym: a place to exercise spiritual muscles.

This kind of spiritual talk has come to mean less and less to me.. and although I do cherish a time of silence, I enjoy meetings in which a number of people speak up. I like the way, from a distance, characters and people start to develop in my imagination. There are lots of people in meeting to whom we have never spoken, but who are living characters.. with nicknames.. in our minds. I am always fascinated at the way meetings tend toward a narrative. Once one person speaks, there is an unspoken cognitive pull to build a line of thought and to find connections. In a more traditional church setting this might occur as one listens to disparate lectionary readings, and to find hidden connections. But in Quaker meeting such narrative construction is entirely built from spontaneous personal responses.. and it is amazing how often a strong theme develops.

Comes a Time for Neil Young

February 24, 2006

I could not have found a better contrast to Citizen Kane than Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, which Emily and I watched today at Tara Theater. There was Neil, moving toward the end of a long career, hunched forward with his guitar in that peculiarly active posture, and singing:

I have my friends
Eternally
We left our tracks in the sound
Some of them
Are with me now
Some of them can’t be found

And if it seemed to you that Neil was feeling right at home up there with all his old friends, well, that sense was reinforced by the cozy home interior backdrop, with fireplace and inviting chairs. His eyes were always finding those of his wife Peggy, whether she stood behind him or by his side. Here was a man who had followed every dream, gotten lost a few times at least, and now was right there where he wanted to be.. in something like a home.

If in Citizen Kane we watch an American who never learnt how to love, whose emptiness fuels restlessness, and who dies without a real friend, then Neil stands there as the image of a man who has felt that restlessness of soul, but who has learned to love and to accept the changes that come with time. And that image could be strangely moving. Emily lost it a little during “Comes a Time”:

Comes a time when you’re driftin’
Comes a time when you settle down
Comes a light feelin’s liftin’
Lift that baby right up off the ground.

And if you imagine us now, thinking about moving and even buying a house, then you can see how “Comes a time” could lift our spirits right up off the ground.

There were certainly alternative endings to Neil’s journey. In fact, no body of work from a contemporary musician is more eloquent about the nature of loss and snuffing the candle out early:

My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It’s better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my , hey hey”

In fact, Kurt Cobain used this song in his suicide note, so it in some ways represents the archetypal rock ending: the quick flare and gone.

But Neil had selected the songs for this concert—performed at Ryman Theater in Nashville—from his kinder and gentler strain: Harvest, Comes a Time, and Harvest Moon. If we think of Neil as having a few musical franchises, running concurrently, then this was his country-home franchise. His last album Prairie Wind belongs solidly in that group, with Old Ways from the 80s added as well.

The only time we directly looked into the abyss during this concert was his somewhat darkened rendition of “The Needle and the Damage Done.” On Harvest, that songs seems to look forward to the slashing darker albums of the mid to late 70s.. On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night. Now, some 30 years later, the song fits into this comfortable set as a glance toward the past, a past which included some precipices and alternate endings. Any thought that this note could again dominate his output is dissipated with a smiling look at his wife.

Contexts for Bob Marley

February 23, 2006

An interesting article on Bob Marley in Slate yesterday, written by Field Maloney. Most useful to me was the pinpointing of three albums besides Legend—a greatest hits collection—which form part of Marley’s “golden period”: Soul Rebels, African Herbsman, and Rasta Revolution.

It is a short article, but at one point Maloney ventures into the reception of Marley:

…Marley is an international star with a strong following in the Third World, especially in Africa. There, Marley fandom has a different dimension. Say you're a middle-class American white kid. It's spring term freshman year, and you've just discovered pot, Bob Marley, and ultimate frisbee. You really want to drop that organic chemistry course, but you know your parents will be pissed. In such a scenario, Bob Marley's songs, with lines like "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery" and "No chains are on my feet/ but I am not free," seem to be talking to you in a way that's deeply profound. Sure, that's laughable. But let's take a different scenario altogether. What if you're black? Or from the Third World? Then the lyrics take on a lot more historical force and contemporary urgency.

Embedded here is a moral gradation of audiences: American white kid in college below third world soul who can feel the real meaning. But it seems that in either case we find a secondary reception, which will inevitably pull Marley’s music away from its intended sense and embed it in new contexts. This kind of secondary context is among the most interesting of literary phenomena. We are surrounded by it, yet hardly know it.. from the use of the Psalms in personal devotions to the co-opting of the Blues by later Rock ‘n’ Rollers.

The college-age American white kid is the most fascinating of his two cases. Inevitably those college “kids” will be significant decision makers in the American future, and so to know something about how they process revolutionary political sentiment is an important project.. and for the record I do not think it is a process nearly as shallow as Maloney describes it. But clearly there will be some acrobatic mental maneuvering.

I had my own moment of recognition with Marley when I was in the Ethiopian city of Lallibela in the winter of 2003. I was walking up a hill after having visited the rock-cut churches of this sacred city that models Jerusalem in stone, heading for a café for a bite to eat with my friend, when I heard a Marley tune. The song was “Jammin” (or something like that), but I caught the words about Zion. And it struck me right there.. this is Zion. This place—Lallibela—is the exact place to which Marley was referring. One can listen to that music for a long time and not realize that there is something concrete underlying it all.. a religious symbolism lodged in specific references. In fact, I would bet that the Ethiopians playing the music could not have explained clearly how their own cultural heritage had found a secondary context within the Rastafarian religious tradition of Jamaica.

Charles Foster Kane, American

February 23, 2006

We watched Citizen Kane last night, and I guess if this blog must begin to mark my movies, then that is not a bad one with which to begin. I was moved at the end with the expanding views of stuff, the piles and piles of stuff that Charles Foster Kane had acquired.. just buying anything. From our vantage point, the historical connections to William Randolph Hearst seem irrelevant, and it is clear just how well Orson Welles has captured a peculiarly American personality. The election sequence calls to mind Bill Clinton, in his own quest for acceptance. The monumental acquisitiveness of Kane is played out in miniature all over America, as we, in our epigonal way, get more and more.. and demand that life turn out the way we want it to. It would be hard to point to anything about the personality of Kane that is not American.. from the entrepreneurial push to remake the Inquirer, to his incurable romanticism.. but these traits only serve to make the tragedy more American as well.

Today Emily and I went to the mall to get some clothes. Pulling into the Lennox Mall—where we had not been in at least a year—we were surprised to find that some of the up front parking was now open only to those who were willing to pay $3 for a space. It is stunning, sometimes, just how stridently profit-making moves into our national life, bit by bit. I took some pictures walking through the mall.. a small portrait of how we now acquire.

Dividing Knowledge:
My New Job at Lawrence University

February 22, 2006

The year was a dramatic one for us, beginning with an evacuation of New Orleans with Katrina bearing down. The drama did not end there, as this was our year for the academic job search. Thankfully, this search ended with an unexpected burst of drama. We needed to decide between two different schools. Our choice—settled fairly quickly—was Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Beginning this coming September I will be Assistant Professor in Religious Studies, my focus being Islam.

I approached graduate studies with a somewhat cavalier attitude. More than one professor felt called to warn me about possible difficulties on the job market with my academic profile. The issue was never my work, but rather how my work might appear. I never heeded these questions, although I do see I was running a risk. When I came to Emory I had promised myself that I would study what I loved and not make choices based on professional “necessities.”

Before this year I had never looked at academic job postings, such as are listed on the websites for various academic associations such as the American Academy of Religion or the Modern Language Association. At the beginning of this year.. shortly after our return to Atlanta from New Orleans.. I started filing through the postings, deciding where I could apply. I have always thought my best fit would be with a liberal arts college, both for teaching philosophy and for the obvious need for breadth when teaching in a small department. That assumption turned out to be exactly correct (see some basic facts about Lawrence here).

Looking over the postings set me musing about the way knowledge is divvied up in the academic system. Every scholarly interest must find a home in an actual department, and every department is associated with a larger group of distinctive questions. I started asking myself hypothetical questions.

Say someone had written a dissertation on “The Tale of Sinuhe”? Well, forget working in a Classics department, that department is bolted exclusively to teaching Greek and Latin. What about a Religion department? Well, “Sinuhe” is a literary work. What about an Art History department? Well, “Sinuhe” is not a work of visual art, and the more one’s study has settled on literary or philological questions, the more distant one gets from questions central to an Art History department. A Comparative Literature department should be a place for this made-up scholar of “The Tale of Sinuhe”, but today it is an outpost for “Theory" with a capital T.

Many scholarly interests suffer from odd placement. For example, a student could be writing about Hebrew scripture, and then be surprised to find that this necessitates work in a Religion department.. even though much Hebrew scripture was written at the same time as some Greek Classics, shares a common Mediterranean setting, and might even survive in ancient Greek translations.. It is nonetheless by definition material for a Religion department and not a Classics department. And how about a student who wants to write on a classic author from, say, the classical Japanese literary tradition? Be careful! To get hired into a Japanese department will likely involve language teaching and the push will be for knowledge of contemporary works that could serve as texts in an upper level course. This departmental need for language instruction—a requirement at many universities these days—will also push hiring practices toward native speakers. On the other hand, perhaps this interest in the Japanese literary tradition could lend itself to a Religion department? Right there you can see how departments act as gravitational pulls for scholarly work.

Works that fall outside this departmental purview are in danger of simply not being studied. It is stunning sometimes to realize how bunched-up academic interests can be. Is Tristram Shandy really a more important work than the “Tale of Sinuhe”? Yet I would bet that dissertations touching on Tristram Shandy outnumber those touching on “The Tale of Sinuhe” by about 1,000 to 1. The reason? Most English departments have an 18th century scholar, and writing a dissertation on Tristram Shandy is one way to qualify for that specific position. You qualify for nothing if you write on “The Tale of Sinuhe.” Just a big "congratulations Dr. So and So."

Humboldt as Guide

February 20, 2006

Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, most easily available through an abridged Penguin edition, mostly recounts his journeys through relatively unknown portions of the South American continent. As one might anticipate for this systematic thinker, Humboldt begins by setting out the aims of his travel through this strange abundant land:

…rather than discovering new, isolated facts I preferred linking already known ones together. The discovery of a new genus seemed to me far less interesting than an observation on the geographical relations of plants, or the migration of social plants, and the heights that different plants reach on the peaks of the cordilleras. [6]

While Humboldt was certainly collecting samples of plants discovered in the course of this travels, his overriding concern was to find systems. We might call him an ecologist on account of this passion for the system of nature. A little later Humboldt writes: “The great problem of the physical description of the planet is how to determine the laws that relate to the phenomena of life with inanimate nature” (7). A traveler with that aim would not simply describe curious natural phenomena, but also look for.. and sometimes find.. the underlying reasons for the phenomena.

Unfortunately most travelers lack the ability to seek out these underlying reasons, and contented themselves with simply noting the marvels they witnessed.

When I began to read the many travel books, which form such an interesting branch of of modern literature, I regretted that previous learned travelers seldom possessed a wide enough knowledge to avail themselves of what they saw. [6]

Now this website is something of a geographical project, which may yet reach the multi-volume heft of Humboldt’s Narrative. We claim no ability in the physical sciences, but we do begin with the goal of understanding the systems by which human beings make sense of this world. Such systems will not be discovered by scientific experimentation, nor will they ever be subject to scientific proof.. they are the outcome of careful attention to human beings and the cognitive constructions they spin out upon everything around them.

This is a human geography. Our laws will not be physical laws, but the laws of human cognitive experience. We will think about how meaning is organized and emplaced and socialized. Let the spirit of Alexander von Humboldt hover over this web project.

[References to Alexander von Humboldt. Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. New York: Penguin Press, 1995.]

A Lasting Blog

February 19, 2006

The ephemeral nature of a blog was a topic yesterday on Andrew Sullivan’s site—see here. The response on the part of Sullivan is also telling, which is to point to the similarly ephemeral nature of newspapers. The day-to-day stories and opinions that make up a newspaper are here and then gone.. yesterday’s newspapers are the reserve of historians, not active readers. So ok, blogs are no more ephemeral than newspapers, but that hardly seems a defense of blogging..

Today I saw that the defense had become more articulated. According to Sullivan, the act of blogging is a form of conversation, and just as speech slips away, never to be recovered, so the billions of words set loose on the internet will be lost. Yet all this chatter nevertheless constitutes the democratic conversation, the slow-motion act of formulating views.

Agreed, but I also think he underestimates the lasting value of the form, at least in potential. I am not convinced that the per capita writing quotient has actually advanced in the last few years, despite exponential growth in online writing.. think of all the handwritten journals and letters. The lasting value of a blog will be directly related to the lasting value of the ideas expressed in that blog. Any series of blogs with the imaginative sharpness of the entries in Coleridge’s Notebooks would be worthy of poring over far into the future.

As blogs center on the daily blips in our political life.. the shooting accidents and minor uproars of the recent days.. they become ephemeral. But as they approach principles and central issues, they can gain lasting value. It need hardly be said that this “lasting value” is the goal of this series of blogs.

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