The Amboy Dilemma
October 30, 2006
Today in class I mentioned some of the traumas that swept over the Islamic world from the 13th century AD on. One important event was the European discovery of a direct route to India by sea. The wealth that accrued to Egypt and other countries as important middle-men in the trade of spices quickly nose-dived. These macro-changes are an unsung aspect of world history.
It is reminiscent to me of Amboy, a tiny town in the Mojave desert. It is one of those gas-station/diner towns that lined old Route 66. Life was good, I suppose, as long as the road in front of your diner was filled with cars, but once the new highway took a slightly different course, bypassing the diner.. well, life took a turn for the worse. There is not a lot that people in Amboy can do about the situation. Being "more industrious" will hardly help the situation—there are no cars going by!
If you are lucky enough to live in the United States, and your formerly profitable diner is caput.. don't panic. You can take a loss and move back to Los Angeles.. start again. On the international scene the choices are narrower. We are talking about a whole region or country. The economy must adjust to the new situation, and individuals cannot easily change countries. In effect, a whole region becomes like Amboy.. an area which no longer gets business.
It's not hard to think of places that fit this description: Caribbean islands that produce cheap sugar or areas in Afghanistan that were once on the spice road. These and other places have been bypassed by the world economy, and since they are their own country.. with no vote in an economically important country.. that is simply too bad. And we wonder about why anger boils over in parts of our world.. I'd be upset if I had to live in Amboy for the rest of my life.
Indian Mounds and Angels in Beloit
October 29, 2006
Political Fantasy Defined: The Writer and
the World by V.S. Naipaul
October 28, 2006
Naipaul's essay "The Overcrowded Barracoon" is another portrait of place on the margins of what Naipaul will later call the "Universal Civilization." The place this time is Mauritius, an island sitting deep in the Indian Ocean.. but its internal social dynamic, along with its economic dependence on sugar, makes it hard to distinguish from any of the Caribbean islands that Naipaul describes. The essay is notable, however, for the clear fashion in which one of Naipaul's principal themes is sketched: the destructive power of political fantasy.
Naipaul is relentless is pointing out overpopulation as a key problem for the small island.
In 1931 the population was more or less what it had been in 1901, just under 400,000. Then the disaster occurred. In 1949 malaria was finally eradicated. The population jumped. It is now about 820,000. Three Mauritians out of five are under twenty-one. No one knows how many unemployed or idle people there are—estimates vary from 50,000 to 80,000—and the population grows by about 12,000 every year. [107]
This essay was written in 1972, but a little internet research shows that today the population of Mauritius is at about xx.
How do people on such an island survive? What should they do? And we should note that there are no truly indigenous people on this island. The Dutch discovered the island in the 17th century and settled it to produce sugar. It changed hands several times, but always remained a plantation for the production of sugar. Now sugar has little value and the population is growing exponentially. The island is a prison for those who cannot leave.
This is the setting for political fantasy. We should follow Naipaul in his description:
The government recognizes a problem of unemployment. A White Paper says that 130,000 new jobs will have to be created by 1980. The government doesn't recognize a problem of over-population and discourages investigation of its effects. It disapproves of "crude" family planning programmes on TV. Mauritius is a conservative, wife-beating society and the government doesn't want to offend anybody. [111]
So problem #1: people in political power do not want to talk about the primary economic concern for the island. They prefer to coddle the culture and avoid undue conflict. So enter problem #2:
So, by stressing unemployment and by playing down over-population, the government defends itself and seeks to remain the instrument of protest, as in colonial days. Protest against the rich, so often white, whose talents and money are yet needed; protest against the sugar-cane, the slave crop, hateful yet indispensable. [111]
We could define this as protest in place of policy. There must be someone to blame for this worsening situation, and who easier to blame than the rich whites who are on the island? What easier to hate than sugar, symbol of colonialism? This protest has no answers, though. It identifies an enemy, but it fails to confront head on the challenge of globalization, and what this modern situation demands of them.
Naipaul catalogs the creeping depression of life inside this prison, which can look "happy-go-lucky" to visiting travel writers (let us vow to avoid such writers!). He gives us the malaise and fantasy world of powerlessness. There is one place, however, where he spots someone with a ticket to escape. Naipaul cites his response upon being questioned about what he will find in England:
He is absolutely unconcerned about racial problems in England; it will not matter to him what people say to him or about him; and he doesn't care if he never sees Mauritius again. He and his friends have given up local politics. Politics can't help anyone in Mauritius now. The government can't help anyone now. "The MMM is also the same. It is better to depend on yourself." [126]
Those could be the very words of Naipaul as he left Trinidad in 1950 on scholarship. There is not comment given by Naipaul on these words, but the reader senses that this is where victory lies.. an unsentimental willingness to take life's hard knocks and to to what is necessary without complaining. Anything less.. to build up an elaborate protest for past injustice.. to fall prey to slogans of resentment.. anything less than a willingness to create a real life, is to fall into fantasy.
The Writer as Politician: The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul
October 24, 2006
There is an essential difference between being a writer and being a politician. The writer is involved with the particular, and works upward toward the general. The politician starts with the general and tries to pass that off as a solution to the many particulars of our world. We pay writers to give us a new and unsuspected window onto the world; we vote for politicians that mirror our own values and worldview. It stands to reason: the writer makes a poor politician. This is exactly the point of interest in V.S. Naipaul's essay "New York with Norman Mailer".. a description of a writer running for local office in New York City.
The opening tells us something about the pressure of being a politician:
Norman Mailer always campaigned in a correct dark-blue suit. Towards the end he cut his hair short. A week or so before election day the Mailer campaign staff lost some hair as well. [315]
It reads like a throw-away opening, yet it also signals the conflict between particularity and generality that will mark a writer's attempt to cross-over into the political world.
Naipaul points out the continuing color and edge in Mailer's pronouncements: "Crime will be on the increase as long as it's the most interesting activity" (316). The writer remains. But the stance of the politician appears to dull certain aspects of the writer's sensibility. Naipaul witnesses Mailer at a rally in front of the Old Treasury Building. He is struck by the cacophany.. "the famous street in the famous city, the buildings, the flags, the rhetoric and history in the Washington statue." But then:
When I talked to Mailer a week after the election I found that his own memories of the Wall Street rally were vague; the details of the campaign, of particular scenes and particular words, had blurred. [325]
If Mailer ever wanted to go back and recover some of these particularities, there could be no better source than this essay, which is built out of these very things.. scenes and workers and conversations rendered in detail. The essay itself is an enactment of the distance between Naipaul and a politician. These are the scenes that a politician could not get down in words.. even if that politician were a writer!
In the end Mailer loses. There was never any question of him winning. Mailer contemplates whether becoming a politician had made him duller.. and whether a duller candidate would possibly have done better. In the last paragraph Naipaul picks up on that word:
Dull: it was the recurring word. It was as though, during the campaign, Mailer had redefined his writer's role by negatives. He couldn't assess the value of the campaign. "If you don't win, you change very little." [333]
Which is just another way of laying out the difference between a writer and politician. Writers win our approval by being interesting; politicians gain our trust by being predictable. Mailer's attempt at being a politician brought out a curious negative quality.. the writer turns himseld inside-out for the voters. In losing Mailer became again much like a writer: who by definition, it seems, is someone who changes very little in the world. Mailer can go back to writing. But one wonders whether a winning politician could ever really see the world again, in all its individual scenes and characters.
Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt.5
October 22, 2006
Every now and then someone asks you to think back to the happiest moment of your life. My mind for some reason goes back to an odd moment: a home run I hit in little league baseball. I must have been in the 7th grade, as we were living in Redlands, and we were playing on the baseball diamonds behind my junior high school. A friend of mine was pitching, a guy names Raul Diaz. Not a great pitcher. He served me up a good pitch and I connected fully to the baseball. It is hard to explain to someone who has not played baseball what that feels like, but when it happens it is just a peaceful effortless thing. The ball cleared the high right field fence and bounced into the street. I rounded the bases (understand that I was never a home run hitter) and I don't think I fully felt my feet hitting the ground. I made it around the bases and stamped on home plate. I don't think it made any great difference in the game.. I think we were ahead anyways.. but I sat in the dugout and felt numb with happiness. I remember my dad sitting in the metal bleachers to the side of the dugout, and he gave me a proud nod. That is what I always think of as my happiest moment.
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
fifth stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
Again the stanza begins with a question from the woman sitting outside on a Sunday morning. She has understood the answer of the invisible narrator.. approving of the idea that spring in its annual return has a measure of eternity. But still she is not satisfied, and she begins with the disjunctive "but": "But in contentment I still feel/ The need of some imperishable bliss." That is to say: "I long for the happiness that will stay forever".. as if that feeling of hitting a home run could be permanent.
The longing for permanence is not easily discarded, and Stevens will now devote two stanzas to the question. This first one looks at it from a positive viewpoint, while the next one imagines a counter-factual world.
In both cases the answer lies wrapped up in the simple assertion: "Death is the mother of beauty"—repeated in both stanzas. I guess that is a tough one to accept at its face value. A couple of days ago I walked past the tiny shrivelled corpse of a squirrel. That was death, and it was not beautiful.
For the first few lines Stevens does not defend his assertion, he simply draws the conclusion that must follow from its truth: "hence from her,/ Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our desires." The "her" here and the "she" in the following lines must refer to death. If death gives rise to beauty, then it is to death that we must look for the fulfillment of dreams and desires.
Continuing from this statement and conclusion is a complex sentence that begins with "although". Yes, death scatters "sure obliteration" on every experience. Human experiences must be imagined as multiple paths that one walks in life.. an endless tangle of them.. ranging from sadness to elation to the touch of love. All these human paths are ephemeral by nature, and doomed to obliteration.
Now come back to the main thought: although it is the case that all these human paths are doomed to pass away, "[Death] makes the willow shiver in the sun/ For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze/ Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet." The previous stanza pointed to spring and summer, but now we have settled into fall. The leaves of the willow quake in the sun, and in the last line the maidens will be straying in the "littering leaves". What do those maidens do? They sit in the grass, "relinquished to their feet". The world is theirs, but it is a decaying world.. the young green shoots sacrificed for their brief pleasure. And what about the boys? They promptly pluck the plums and pears. Yet another reminder of the way experience depends upon change.
The strength of this line of reasoning will not be clear until the next stanza, when we are asked to imagine a very different world. But for now we contemplate an idealized scene, resembling somewhat a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.. with its maidens, boys, fruits on a plate, and strewn leaves. It is a step away from the reality of "coffee and oranges in a sunny chair", but still a portrait of waking life. Through accumulated references to small seasonal changes and heedless thoughtless enjoyment of the world, Stevens underlines the presence of death in human experience.
The woman's question is thus answered in the negative: no, there is no imperishable bliss, and it should not be looked for. What makes a beautiful moment perfect is in fact its very context within a dying world. If beauty is located contextually, then there can be no point in imagining an imperishable beauty. The moment of beauty comes, and it is that fleeting quality of beauty which in fact defines beauty. Death is the mother of beauty. Beauty, can never be eternal.
There Oughtta Be a Word For It
October 21, 2006
During the debate between congressional candidates John Gard (R) and Steve Kagen (D) there was an interesting verbal attack. Responding to a question about global warming, Gard pointed out that Kagen arrives to events in a large gas-guzzling Suburban. For Gard it was a chance to point out the hypocrisy of a liberal. Kagen did not respond, and I assume that it is true that Kagen uses a large vehicle for his campaign.
Stop and consider that charge for a moment. Is Kagen really supposed to show up to campaign events in a small electric car, so that he can be un-hypocritical? I hate big vehicles, but if I were running for office, I too would strongly consider such a vehicle so that I could travel with a group of people and perhaps even talk to reporters while in transit.
What would happen if Gard arrived at a campaign event in a gas-guzzling SUV? No one would mention it because Republicans are supposedly in favor of consumption.. and so the "hypocritical" factor would be dead.
This is a common strategy.. and as far as I know there is no name for it. Conservatives undermine the large-scale policy goals of liberals by pointing out personal choices that are in contradiction to them. It is an unfair argument for the simple fact that everyone must play with the system that is present now, and wanting to change the system does not mean one stops living. For example, I may be in favor of greater funding of public transportation, but just because I drive to the grocery store every week (and avoid an inconvenient bus schedule) does not mean I am a hypocrite.. although that would be an easy charge to make.
Gard made a similar charge against Kagen when it came to his proposals for health care. Apparently part of Kagen's plan for reforming health care involves prescribing a certain amount of transparency as to pricing. Gard immediately asked that if transparency is so necessary and helpful, why doesn't Kagen (who is a doctor with his own clinic) practice that transparency? Again the implication: Kagen is a hypocrite. I assume that the value of transparency would come only if it were generalized. A lone clinic practicing transparency would be a case of clinical hare kare.
I mention these cases because I think it is a common mode of attack in politics today.. and it is a way of making a side that is in favor of change look ridiculous. But that should be the tip-off that it is a false argument. It is a line of attack that cannot possibly be turned against the side in favor of the status quo. Dick Cheney can arrive to campaign events in a Hummer; he can be a millionaire; he can visit expensive private medical centers.. and no one will ever call him a hypocrite.. this is the world he perpetuates. But let a liberal try to change anything about that world, and every little step will be critically examined for evidence of hypocrisy.
"Nowhere Near the Threat
I Had Hoped to Become":
A Review of Arlo Guthrie and Family
October 19, 2006
Certain songs stir up memories, and it was the strangest thing last night in Oshkosh.. as Arlo Guthrie played "City of New Orleans" I remembered listening to it years ago in my 4th floor dorm room.. looking out over a cold and empty prairie. I remembered the swirl of emotions stirred by Guthrie's plaintive question: "Don't you know me, I'm your native son?" In the song that question seems to be directed at the landscape hurtling by in the Mississippi darkness. That was my question to the landscape also.
Last night the song took on a different meaning for me.. as this son of the folk singer.. the son of the 60s.. played to a small audience, and sang once again that question: "Don't you know me, I'm your native son?" As I thought about how mercilessly Arlo would be skewered by Bill O'Reilly or any right-wing talk host.. I wondered if his country really would know him.. if it would recognize this true native son.
Why skewered? Go back and listen to "Alice's Restaurant" again (which he sang for us!). The military is not treated with kid gloves, but criticized.. the morality of the drop-out comes up against the morality of the state, and wins. In our concert there was a humorous monologue about how airport security has always been around.. bringing up the drug use of the past—and making us laugh about all that. There was also the moment in which he mentioned how much convenient the world today is, because there has never been a time in history when it has been possible to do so much good for so many people with so little. How much less convenient it would be if the world was going right!
Refreshing as his views are, they struck me as being radically out of step with the America that is growing up around us. Underneath the self-effacing humor, one senses that Guthrie knows it. He recounted explaining to a young customs agent: "I am nowhere near the threat I had hoped to become." In that answer is all the drama of the lost 60s.. the fall from relevance.
But who cares about relevance? Better to listen to the message that comes through loud and clear in this music. There is a gentleness.. a love for peace.. that exudes from this long white-haired ex-hippy. A sense that he will do good. A sense that he loves freedom. As he closed with "This Land is Your Land" he introduced the stanza that his dad taught him specially:
Nobody living, can ever stop me
As I go walking
My freedom highway
Nobody living
Can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me...
And I guess that's why we and most of the people in the small Oshkosh opera house gave him a standing ovation. It was about a spirit that still believes.. not in celebrity, not in power.. not in art.. but in freedom and the core values: mercy, pity, peace, and love. These are native values too, although it is hard to see them watching tv. Why must we learn these things again?
Fall Apple Picking
October 17, 2006
8th District Debate: Kagen vs. Gard
October 14, 2006
Friday evening Lawrence University hosted a debate between the two candidates for Congress in Wisconsin's 8th district. There was the Republican John Gard and the Democrat Steve Kagen. The debate was broadcast on television, as is obvious from the photo. I was surprised at the way the podiums were inset far onto the stage and then obscured by three large cameras. There may have been some 400 people in the audience, but clearly the primary audience was that unknown crowd of people sitting at home. We were the live viewers, but oddly we were never particularly engaged by the speakers, nor by the moderator who was some local announcer from a Green Bay station.
In the above photo, Kagen is on the right and Gard on the left. I came in rooting heavily for Kagen, and in truth he had my vote locked up since I could not bear to send a positive message to the SOBs who lead the comedy/tragedy in Washington.. but I also cannot say I came away enthused about Kagen. I would not call him particularly dynamic, and he seemed to be chasing hard after conservative voters who might have bought into the attacks insinuating that he will raise their taxes or give amnesty to illegal immigrants. At one point Kagen even made reference to growing up in Appleton and the fact that 9 out of 10 of his friends were Republican. Those were the people he was appealing to.. not the liberal professors who might be sitting in the crowd.
I thought I would take notes on the debate, but after a few minutes I realized that there was little worth remembering. Most interesting was the general angle taken by the two candidates. Gard was the most detail and issue oriented. He has evidently served as a representative in state government, and now wants to move on to Washington. He made every effort to point out his experience on the state level and to talk about specific initiatives that he supports. Kagen, on the other hand, spoke much more broadly.. even on the issue of health care, where, as a practicing doctor, I expected him to be highly specific. For example, on the question of Medicaid he ended up spending much of his time talking about a living wage. He was also at pains to talk about the Bush and the current Republican leadership.. these were labeled "my opponent's supporters." Kagen expects to capitalize on the low approval ratings of Bush, while Gard hopes to keep people thinking about the specifics of his own career.
Now, there was one humorous exchange which I had to write down. This one involves the slippery ground that Kagen wandered into as he was trying to portray himself as tough on terrorists but careful about our rights. Kagen declared that he was not afraid of terrorists.. and then said: "If a terrorist is on an airplane, I will put my foot down and take him out." This from a smallish man.. a doctor. People laughed. I took this as an identification with the passengers aboard flight 93, who crashed into an empty field Pennsylvania because of a passenger revolt.. and the recent film United 93 recounts this story. Kagen, it seems, would have been one of those storming the cockpit.. A few moments later when it came Gard's turn to respond, he came up with an equally inane reply: "I don't want a terrorist to get on a plane—that's the difference." What?? As if Kagen's rather grandiose statement had anything to do with letting terrorists get on planes! That hardly makes for a "difference" between the two candidates. I guess this all kind of summarizes a general disappointment on my part with the level of discussion that takes place in politics.
I was surprised at the number of young people out there working for Gard. How many failures does this administration need to have before these people start to question its leadership.. and the leadership of someone who would vote with them on most issues? But the Republicans do have a strong organization.. and that is certainly still at work.
Republicans in Dallas: The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul
October 12, 2006
Why didn't I discover V.S. Naipaul earlier? Well, I did read House for Mr. Biswas a few years back.. which I enjoyed.. but I was dissuaded from continuing because of something about Naipaul's reputation. I had a classmate in my Arabic program who casually referred to Naipaul as a racist.. and although I have never been an admirer of Edward Said, I did know that Naipaul came in for his ire. So Naipaul just did not move into that "must read" category (where he now is for me).
Not the least among the essays collected in the book The Writer and the World is a curious bit of reportage entitled "The Air-Conditioned Bubble: The Republicans in Dallas." It is an essay from the Republican convention of 1984.. in which Ronald Reagan gains his party's nomination to run once again for president. The essay manages to demonstrate that Naipaul's critical dissection of popular fantasies does not end when he leaves third-world countries.. but continues, sharp as ever, even in the midst of the great quadrennial gathering of American conservatives.
The humor of Naipaul's observations sometimes take a little time to get.. I was struck by the cleverness of his metaphors:
The occasion, with its magnification of man, had a feel of religion. Not religion as contemplation or a private experience of divinity; but religion as the essence of a culture, the binding, brotherhood-transcending material need. That, rather than political debate, was what people had come to Dallas for. The scale and the mood, and the surreal setting, made me think of a Muslim missionary gathering I had seen five years before in a vast canopied settlement of bamboo and cotton in the Pakistan Punjab. [447]
It comes and goes.. but there it is: the Republicans in Dallas remind him of Pakistani Muslims at a missionary gathering. One can only imagine the horror that the Baptist preacher Dr. W.A. Criswell, who gave the benediction one night at the convention, would feel over the comparison.. not to mention all the other self-important members of the party.
Reading about this convention a little over twenty years later, one can see that the Republican party has not really changed all that much. The general lionization of Ronald Reagan makes it easy to forget that American conservatism has not become a symbolic husk, but was empty already in the 80s. This belies the chorus of conservatives now wailing about the betrayal of true conservatism by those who occupy the White House. One would have to go a lot further back to find the source of such a betrayal.
Naipaul's reportage thrives on spotting fantasies.. and there was no lack of them at the Republican convention:
The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self. [441]
How deadly this "ism" could be is visible now.. for anyone who cares to see. The hard-shell of American identity covers the eyeballs of a nation.. making it hard for us to see our situation in the world: a nation that is hardly humble, that according to its own strategic position-papers is looking to create a unipolar world, and has the nerve to ask the people of Iraq to say "thank-you." Even those in opposition have to couch their criticisms in an optimistic cloak, allowing assertions of national greatness to stand.
Since this essay is set into a large collection of essays, the reader is reminded that self-deception is the general state of human cultures. It is surely more difficult to respond truthfully to the world than to buy into fantasy constructions. But whereas I can read about the leaders and lies of far flung sites (Maritius, say) and be amused, it is harder to be amused by those nearer to home. After describing a gala fundraiser set on a Texas ranch, attended by the very wealthy of the Republican party, Naipaul describes the benedictor:
The benediction was spoken by Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher, the religious star of the right, who was to speak the benediction next day at the convention itself... He addressed God directly: "This evening is dedicated to Thee." Texan whoops followed the "amens." [454]
What I admire about Naipaul is the way you can't ever imagine people shouting out whoops after his observations. He is too committed to contemplating his world, and contemplation does not mesh with whoops. I can imagine people shouting whoops at Edward Said.. in fact, I have witnessed that.. when he spoke to us at the American University in Cairo. Not Texan whoops.. but partisan whoops, nevertheless.. Reality will be found elsewhere.. away from all such forms of group fantasy.
The Magnificent Leopard: A Review
October 9, 2006
Watching The Leopard it was hard for me not to think of Orson Welles' mutilated film, The Magnificent Ambersons. Thematically and stylistically the two films are twins. Both represent careful historical reconstructions, The Leopard being a portrait of 19th century Sicily in the throes of political change, and The Magnificent Ambersons a portrait of America at a cultural crossroads. Both filmmakers approached their subject with a deep store of sentiment.. but not nostalgia, as the changes are inevitable and the representatives of the old order partially to blame for their own troubles. Both films are based on a novel; both (at least in their original versions) extend to about three hours in length. The Leopard upon its release in the United States was butchered pretty badly and promoted as a vehicle for Burt Lancaster. Thankfully, the original Italian version directed by Luchino Visconte is preserved. With The Magnificent Ambersons we were not quite as fortunate.. the original version was destroyed. But The Leopard manages to give a sense of the kind of complete and bittersweet work that Orson Welles had in mind.. but lost.
The Leopard comes out of the heady years of Italian cinema. Listening to the music I thought I detected the sound of a Fellini film, and sure enough the music was by Nino Rota, Fellini's collaborator. It is as if the artistry of the high modern films of Fellini or Antonioni got channeled into a historical epic.. something belonging more properly to some earlier era of filmmaking.. but now brought forward to the present.. and alive with all the strength and natural grace that we expect from the aging and aristocratic protagonist of the film. The world will shortly be filled with jackals and hyenas.. but this is a masterful creature.
The landscape for The Leopard is California-like, with its dry golden mountains. In an American film, anything that looks like California probably is California, drafted to stand for some foreign locale. But this was obviously not California, this was different: Mediterranean Sicily. Into this unique landscape comes change, and the old noble family of Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster) must make new unaccustomed choices in the new world. Tancredi (Alain Delon) is the scion who embraces the new Italy.. marrying a beautiful representative of it who happened to come with a store of new wealth. But the Prince stays aloof, and while recognizing the tide of change.. and its inevitable outcome.. is too proud to bend. It is a scrappy and poor ancient landscape, and the Leopard is hardly going to change its spots.
The film is filled with grand scenes, but still somehow feels small and careful.. not at all what you might expect from a film that belong properly in the genre of Gone with the Wind. We expect such films to be impersonal.. to reach beyond the vision of a mere director.. but Visconte has made something quite personal here. It is a trick also performed in the scenes that remain from the Magnificent Ambersons, which returned Welles to memories and places in his past. I would even say that these are the only two films I know of which successfully tame the epic grandeur into a personal vision of loss and destruction.
High Cliff State Park
October 8, 2006
One of the fun things about starting up at Lawrence is the chance to get to know some new people. Peter-John Thomas is the new faculty hire for the Russian department, and has his office up on the fourth floor along with me. Yesterday we went out for a fall hike at the High Cliff State Park, on the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago. Pictured from right to left is Max, Peter, Emily (looking pregnant), Benjamin, and Leah.
Fall is certainly upon us. Looking out into the trees to the side of the trail you can begin to glimpse the bare winter treescape that will soon confront the visitor.
Why is it called "high cliffs"? That is obvious. But why are there high cliffs? I wish I knew. Mental note: buy book on geology of Wisconsin. Those cliffs also allowed for some nice look-outs over Lake Winnebago:
A little suburban neighborhood has sprout up near the state park, complete with golf course. Looking beyond the houses in the midground one can see a few buildings in the distance.. that is Appleton, sitting on the Fox River which runs out of Lake Winnebago.
These big lakes are something new to me. Again, not a great lake.. but large enough. Peter and Leah say that in the winter there will be ice fishers out there.. which will be an event worthy of a blog.. or a video.
But for now no one is ice fishing, just trying to catch a memory of one of the last really beautiful days of the fall.
If you would like to see the site for the High Cliff State Park, then click here for the .kmz file. [You need the free Google Earth download to see it.]
Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt. 4
October 8, 2006
"I am content" is a phrase that demands a period, a full stop. It is hard to say, and made harder as it runs counter to American values. I mean the values of television ads and billboards.. and the general tenor of the American Dream, which is all about getting a little more and living a little better. We have an economy that enshrines those values.. to the extent that spending money can be equated with patriotism. And if we shed the desire to acquire, then what about the desire to succeed? To make something of oneself? We are trained from the cradle to want to be a superstar, to want to be the Michael Jordan of some career or other. When can we say "I am content"?
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophesy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.
fourth stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
One could say that this is the most Pauline of Wallace Stevens' poetry, in the sense that what propels it forward are a series of imagined questions, which are answered by the narrator.. much as Paul propels his letter of Romans by means of imagined objections.
The first question asked by the woman sitting outside on a Sunday morning picks up on the rhetorical question in the previous stanza: "And shall the earth/ Seem all of paradise that we shall know?" The idea that this earth could be a paradise makes some sense to the woman, who notes that on a cool morning, as the birds warble their "sweet questionings", she can say "I am content". That is fine in the spring, but what about when winter comes, and the fields are bear and the birds gone? "Where, then, is paradise?"
The narrator meets this objection squarely, listing a series of places vaguely reminiscent of different religious conceptions of the afterlife. Golden underground, isle melodious, visionary south, and any other imagined version of the paradise to come after death are dismissed. None of these places has endured "As April's green endures." The point is simple: sure, spring passes every year, but just as certainly the spring returns the next year. As an annual fact of human existence, spring can be counted as eternal.. at least as eternal as the changing fictions concocted by humans concerning the afterlife.
April is eternal in a second way: it endures in memory. Here Stevens comes as close to William Wordsworth as he ever gets. There are spots of time that cling to the memory and provide comfort in life. The cool green of April departs, but its peace and beauty remain in the mind.. that earthly paradise is never really gone.. certainly not in the winter. The "desire for June" is eternal in the same way.
The valorization of human waking life—at the expense of imagined visions of the next life—leads to the experience of earth as a paradise. If this present—right now—thinking and knowing is all there is, then one does not pass over a Sunday morning thinking about another world, but awake and feeling.. simply enjoying the sound of wakened birds, testing the reality of the misty fields.
Two Essays, Two Islands:
A Review of V.S. Naipaul's
The Writer and the World
October 5, 2006
Two essays from The Writer and the World treat two Caribbean islands: St. Kitts and Anguilla. The islands lie close to one another, but their populations responded in remarkably different ways to their place at an the edge of the modern world. Together, they can be see as an example of the inevitable failure of any attempt to gain independence from the modern world.
St. Kitts is an island led by a charismatic folk-leader. Naipaul sketches his biography:
His fame came early, as an organizer of the sugar workers; a thirteen-week strike in 1948 is part of the island's folk-lore. But Bradshaw's plantation victories mean less today to the young. They do not wish to work on the plantations. They look for "development"—and they mean tourism—on their own island. [74]
The leader of a populist rebellion in the end becomes vulnerable to the next generation's populist rebellion:
Like many folk leaders, he never moved far beyond his first inspiration. It is also true that, like many folk leaders, he is responsible for the hope and the restlessness by which he is now, at the age of fifty-one, rejected. [75]
The political challenge to his rule is led by a man named Herbert, holder of a Ph.D. But his is just one more patriarchal vision of leadership. The "papa" becomes a "doctor."
What is crucial in Naipaul's description of politics on St. Kitts is the meaninglessness of political discourse. It is an island of history.. where the remnants of a colonial town still remain for all to see.. but those remains are important only as a prop for protest. As soon as papa starts losing, he introduces the message of "Black Power." But the complexities of that position are lost as the message is disseminated on the island, and Naipaul notes:
It can now be heard that Bradshaw, for all the English aspirations of his past, is a full blooded Ashanti. Herbert is visibly mulatto. [81]
The protests about the colonial past.. the slogans of Black Power.. these are veils for a population that is willing to put aside the real issues that face them and get lost in words.. and the basest kind of racial resentment. This seems to define one wrong turn that a culture can take: to give in to the temptation of resentment and protest.. these being the tools of empty leaders.
Anguilla is a totally different case, as presented by Naipaul. If St. Kitts is the island led by a popular folk leader, then Anguilla is the pastoral republic. History is not visibly present.. there are no relic structures from the colonial past.. and so there is no ground for the popular leader to stoke resentment. Naipaul highlights the local confusion about the history of the island:
About the arrival of the Negroes there is some confusion. Many know they were imported as slaves. But one young man was sure they were here before the shipwreck. Another felt they had come a year or two after. He didn't know how or why. "I forget that part." The past does not count. [84]
There could be advantages to living without a past, and one might be the chance to develop a tiny but prosperous independent community. It seems even that a certain professor Leopold Kohr saw this in Anguilla:
Kohr has long promoted the theory of the happy small society... In 1958 Kohr addressed the Welsh Nationalist Party that wants Wales to break away England... Kohr feels that small communities are "more viable economically than large powers," and he thought Anguilla "the ideal testing ground." [90]
But, of course, the actual story that Naipaul traces is not at all a pretty pastoral story of a small culture prospering outside the influence of world powers. It is rather a humorous sketch of the petty greed that erupts as soon as independence becomes a fact:
Responsibility, acquiring lusts and fears now balancing the old certitude, had brought dissensions, the breaking up of that sense of isolation and community which was the point of independence. [91]
By dismissing the hopes of both St. Kitts and Anguilla, Naipaul makes an even larger point—one that is entirely characteristic of him: he denies the ability of any culture to cut itself off from the mainstream of the modern world. Whether the avenue is popular protest for historical wrongs, or an attempt to live in happy isolation.. both mark a way to fall from the cultural responsibility of engagement with the modern world. Naipaul, who with his own Caribbean island background has felt the allure of both routes, is ever intent on holding up for criticism any attempt to fall from engagement.
Atmospherics
October 4, 2006
Political Nullification
October 4, 2006
Moving to Appleton we subscribed to the local newspaper. It was novel to realize that we were actually living in a battleground state. (Come 2008 we might even get to see presidential candidates around here!) In the run-up to the midterm elections the Post-Crescent ran some introductions to the local candidates, and I noticed how many of these candidates have a local background. It is nothing but good for a candidate to be able to claim to be a native son or daughter of Appleton or one of these other cities. Which makes sense: people want their elected representative to really represent them.
I sometimes meditate on the reasons for the electoral powerlessness of academics. There are many reasons, which include the kind of straw-man argumentation of conservative talk-show hosts.. but beyond that there is something in the academic system that leads to the virtual nullification of political influence. The system that produces Ph.D. graduates and then university professors is stacked against local continuity. I moved to Atlanta to go to Emory University.. and then spent 6 years in which I think I lived in 6 different places.. including one year out of the country. None of the graduate school experience makes for local connection. Then the job process means another re-location. So here we are with another important election coming up.. and without the roots to really have a voice.
Of course there are upsides to this system.. I love our current place. But I think we should be frank and admit that what the system produces is a rank of smart and drifting young professionals. That means a loss of political voice. This changes some as professors find their "home" and settle into a place.. but most professors could still not ever run under some kind of native son or daughter banner.. they will always be from the outside.
It is possible that this afflicts professionals of all kinds. Successful people tend not to stay in the same place in which they grew up.. and therefore trade local continuity for professional prestige. But I suspect this is less extreme in professions such as law or business.. or even medicine. For academics it is the rule.
There must be some way to better tap the political sensibilities of academics. If academics all lived and voted together in South Florida, we would receive a daily stream of political candidates swearing fealty to our causes. Given our permanently scattered status, we are ignored and lambasted on talk-shows. There must be a strategy for dealing with this.
A Visit to Aldo Leopold's Shack
October 1, 2006
I have also made a .kmz file for anyone with Google Earth who cares to see the location of places in this video. That file is available here.
