The Appleton Octoberfest:
The Car Show
September 30, 2006
Octoberfest has begun here. Yes, I know it is not yet actually October.. It was a night when people came out to walk down the "Ave" and look at classic cars. Emily brought a sandwich, but I treated myself to a brat, a burger, and a slice of pizza. It was a real street food bonanza for me. And I dreamed about my future car, which will be an Austin Healey.
But I would probably settle for a classic Mustang:
A Wisconsin state trooper had his car there.. giving people the chance to look inside and talk cars with a real trooper. I didn't do any chatting, but I sure took a look in the window.
Quite the crowd showed up to the event.. Most, like me, probably walking around and imagining themselves sitting in a cherry classic. Personally, I feel like I have a repressed classic car side.. How can you care about old roads and not care about the old cars that drove on them?
Impoverished by Improvement
September 27, 2006
In the introduction to Globalization and Its Enemies, Daniel Cohen notes the strange case of a village in Algeria:
...let us consider the surprise of Germaine Tillion, a French Anthropologist who had lived in a mountain village in the Aurès region of Algeria in the 1930s, when she returned to the region 20 years later. The Aurès society that Germaine Tillion first knew, a society that she perceived as "balanced and happy in its ancestral tranquility," had become impoverished. What had been the cause? "Nothing of scarcely anything." Believing they were helping Aurès by bringing civilization, the French dispersed DDT in the ponds to combat malaria and typhoid fever and built a road to end the region's isolation. Then they went home. These two innovations produced a chain reaction. The eradication of typhoid and malaria triggered a demographic explosion. In one generation the population doubled. To meet the needs that resulted from this increase, shepherds had to enlarge their herds. The livestock rapidly destroyed the soil. Thanks to the road, some people were able to export their surplus stock. Some became rich; others fell into doubt; some were ruined. The inequality became apparent. The richest members of this society sent their children to the school in the nearest large town. The Koranic tradition was quickly devalued. [2]
It is not the case that the people of Aurès were doing anything wrong, they just lived by a system that was easily thrown out of whack by major changes like the sudden growth in life expectancy and increased ease of communication. This is a single example of a phenomenon that affects the world: modern improvements bring change to systems that have had no preparation. Cohen compares globalization to the diseases brought by the Spanish to the New World—the native Americans had no resistance to these diseases, to which the Spaniards had a developed a resistance (4). Similarly, people living in traditional societies have no built-in resistance to the changes that overtake their culture as it comes into contact with the modern world.
At the end of this paragraph Cohen notes an interesting result of cultural disintegration: "The Koranic tradition was quickly devalued." That seems logical enough. What would replace this traditional education? I think it would be something a lot like fundamentalism. The religious tradition ends, and after a while someone tries to reinstate the older tradition. Yet the village has changed: it has exploded in population, the employment patterns have shifted, and the problems of the neighboring city have come to the village. Someone may want to go back to the old system, but one can't reinstate the old system in the midst of a changed world. That is the definition of modern fundamentalism: the attempt to replant a bush whose rightful soil has disappeared. What was once a natural outgrowth of a culture now seems a little monstrous..
The Violence of a New Start:
A Review of Badlands
September 25, 2006
America has a central narrative: the possibility of new birth. It crops up regularly in political contexts, from Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign to George W.'s vision of a new Middle East. It is of course a central trope of American religious thought, centering as it does on the need to be "born again." Then when you turn to American arts and letters, it is right there again, staring you in the face: the re-invention of the self.. the new start.
Terence Malick's film Badlands begins by offering a vision of a new start.. it is one that instinctively appeals to us. A charismatic guy (Martin Sheen) falls for a young girl (Sissy Spacek). Her father forbids them to see each other, so they run away to start their own life together. They begin by going out into the woods and living off the land, like some modern Thoreau. When the law gets close to them, they take off across the countryside. It is hard not to root for them. The only problem is that they are killing people as they go. The girl's father.. police officers.. anyone who happened to run into them.. are shot and killed.
There is an innocence to the young protagonists. The girl dreams about getting married.. and blithely narrates her hopes and feelings to the audience. The older guy has a can-do spirit and seems affable.. as if he had never shot a friend. But then what to make of the trail of violence? The sight of death does not necessarily make innocence disappear. In the vision of this film, violence is even an outgrowth of that innocence.. something that comes easily.. nonchalantly.. from the choice to start a new life.
It is common for Noir films to point out the folly of a genuine escape from the past. It is the genre that is most ready to break down the overriding American theme of a new birth. But Malick seems to go a step farther in Badlands: not only is the dream of a new life a folly, but it unleashes something terrible. Watching the film in 2006 it is hard not to think about the American actions that have led to so many deaths. Like the young man in Badlands, we have easy explanations for why it is OK to kill.. and somehow the horror of it all.. the horror.. does not break through. There is something terrible about innocence.. especially national innocence.
My Office at Lawrence
September 24, 2006
Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt. 3
September 24, 2006
During my years at Prairie in Alberta, I remember looking up at the iron-blue sky, unobstructed by mountains on any horizon. It was different than the penned-up sky of mountainous Southern California. The sky there looked like the biblical firmament.. ready to crack and pour down deep blue. I am sure that an extended flat prairie.. and freezing air.. helps to heighten that brittle appearance.. but still, it seemed like there was something unusually cold and distant about the sky. It never looks like that to me now.
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
[third stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
In the course of "Sunday Morning" there are two stanzas we could label as "pagan". This is the first. The introduction of Jove (the opening word!) pulls us out of what had previously been an internal dispute between the waking life and the dark shadow of "silent Palestine."
Jove is not introduced as an alternative God.. the name offers Stevens the chance to unspool a philosophical myth.. a mode Plato would have recognized. The myth is about the presence of an abstracted god among his creation. It is an abstracted god since he has no mother and no land.. that is to say, he has no context in reality. Jove walks among his creation with his "mythy-mind". That phrase I take to be the key point here: Jove represents the the rational and constructing intellect.. the source for all human myths. The god of myth is a stand-in for myth-making itself.
The image of intellect taking its place among human beings is that of a magnificent muttering king among his hinds (i.e. lowly peasants). The two have nothing to do with each other: the king mutters of something unknown, the hinds go on with their lives. That disconnection rules "until" these two elements become mixed up.. commingled.
The key line for this stanza is "...The very hinds discerned it, in a star." The "it" must go back to the "requital to desire" of the previous line. Lowly ones, mixed with the myth of intellect, discover a physical answer to the desires stirred by the myth-making intellect.. and they see that requital imaged in a star. Suddenly we are back in Christian territory, as the star must be the star leading to Bethlehem. That incarnation representing a stupendous mixing of myth and reality.. the possibility of human idealism.
The next two lines offer two alternatives. The first question is "shall our blood fail?" Which must mean a failure of the mixture.. we could either become abstracted or lose the capacity for abstraction. But if the mingling works, our blood shall become "the blood of paradise".. and along with that the earth shall "Seem all of paradise that we shall know". Any notion of paradise would be impossible without a sense of myth and possibility. Likewise if paradise remained a myth it could never be lived and felt.
Were this commingling successful, the sky would look different to us, "much friendlier than now." Our vast blue canopy would not stand as an image of transcendent and unreachable values.. of another world up there. It would be a partner with us. A partner in our labor and pain even. We would feel at home in our world.. an odd thought, I know.
V.S. Naipaul and Kevin Starr:
My History of Thinking about Place
September 21, 2006
Last week the New Yorker had a review by David Denby of the recent movie The Black Dahlia. The movie is based on the book by LA noir writer James Ellroy. Denby begins his review by noting the image of LA as constructed by these films:
Events from decades ago—a famous murder, a Hollywood scandal, a corrupt real-estate deal—serve as the basis of L.A. novels and screenplays, and the movies made from these fictions become part of the cities sense of itself, and that, in turn, gets fed into new novels, screenplays, and journalism.
Denby is describing something like a feedback loop. Long ago something happened.. some crime was committed.. but then that crime is written about, filmed, re-written about, and filmed again. Pretty soon that feedback loop takes on a life of its own and comes to define the version of Los Angeles that lives in our imagination. Images from Chinatown and Raymond Chandler novels becomes somehow more real to us than the city itself.
I have been thinking recently about the origins of my interest in place. I think it goes back to my fascination with California and its socially constructed meanings. In my early twenties I read through the first three of Kevin Starr's history of California series (which continued on to several more volumes after my interest had wandered). The opening volume concludes with a chapter entitled "Americans and the California Dream":
In the years of its emergence as a regional civilization, what California meant, and what it would continue to mean, was never resolvable into a clear formula. The experience had been so haphazard, so bewildering in variety, that even its most devoted protagonists could not agree on one single interpretation. [415]
Starr's history is essentially a record of the "meaning" of California through its short history. As we expect from a serious historian, Starr does not read a contemporary interpretation back into the earliest periods of the state, but stops at each period and looks for the ways that the meaning of California is contested and transforming.
In the second volume of this series, Inventing the Dream, Starr writes concerning early Hollywood:
...Southern California found its function and identity further fixed by the presence of Hollywood, which by 1920 or so had become its leading social metaphor. By the mid-1920s myth and reality, dream gesture and landscape had so interpenetrated each other in an actual place... that each aspect of architecture and lifestyle, social psychology and infrastructure bespoke an integrated condition based upon the Hollywood myth. [334]
There, once again, is reference to a feedback system. This interchange between actuality and meaning is the crucible of place construction. Geographical space comes to hold a certain weight and value in the imagination.. hold certain associations. California, being perceived as a land devoid of historical references, is an especially interesting case study of place construction.
My continued reading of V.S. Naipaul has brought me to a book of collected essays entitled The Writer and the World (see on right). The essays at the beginning of the book focus on India, and these are also his earliest travel-writing pieces. India is quite a place on which to cut one's travel writing teeth. It seems like a bewildering country.. although I think that is itself a view constructed by my reading of Passage to India and such works. India stands in my mind as many-voiced and complex. Contemplating India is like looking into a deep well.
One can feel Naipaul working through that received version of complex India, searching for mental leverage. Naipaul starts to get this leverage as he departs from that view of India:
To see mysteriousness is to excuse the intellectual failure or to ignore it. It is to fall into the Indian trap, to assume that the poverty of the Indian land must also extend to the Indian mind. It is to deal in Bengal Lancer romance or Passage to India quaintness. It is, really, to express a simple wonder. [18]
Naipaul is not about to blame the versions of India peddled by Forster and others on western "orientalism".. a move which Edward Said would make a decade or so later.. The "mysteriousness" of India is—for Naipaul—a version of the country generated by Indians themselves. A few pages later, commenting on the Indian novel, he offers the following critique:
The ritual of Indian life smothers the imagination, for which it is a substitute, and the interpretation of India in the Indian novel, itself a borrowed form, is at a low, unchanging level. [27]
Right there he identifies the "mystery" of India as a result of a feedback system. A version of India is propagated and re-used by generations, and India is raised in the imagination as a spiritual land.. and that version is spread to the rest of the globe by writers less analytical than Naipaul.. who buy into the self-presentation of the country.
Naipaul works to pull away the cover of mystery.. that is his foothold. We get critical passages such as the following:
Magic is an Indian need. It simplifies the world and makes it safe. It complements a shallow perception of the world, the Indian intellectual failure, which is less a failure of the individual intellect than the deficiency of a closed civilization, ruled by ritual and myth. [24]
But Naipaul is a lonely critic.. his books hardly popular enough to sway the public imagination. The forces that create the world of our imagination.. the Indias and Californias that live in our heads.. are much grander than any single critic. They are the products of national cultures.. which by definition have myth-making capability.
Daytrippers to Neenah, Wisconsin
September 18, 2006
Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt. 2
September 17, 2006
Taking our dog out for a walk at certain times of the day has proved to be an interesting discipline. First of all, it keeps me conscious of the weather every day. That may seem odd, but after working on my dissertation for a couple of years, I know that a day can pass and I know nothing about what it is like outside. Taking the dog out also lets me get a sense of the immediate neighborhod.. a sense that is a little more intimate than the one I develop while driving from place to place. I find favorite houses and streets. I guess I would say that walking the dog is a discipline that leads to greater awareness.. it leads me to feel more awake to the actual world. And it is in that spirit that I want to approach the next paragraph of Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning."
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
second stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
This stanza starts to define the waking life and its inherent divinity. It begins by breaking away from the trend of the last stanza, which had started with coffee and oranges and the "green freedom of a cockatoo", but then wandered into the darkened thoughts related to the "old catastrophe." With the opening questions of this stanza our narrator pushes back: "Why should she give her bounty to the dead?" Or, why should the world of shadows and dreams overpower the present waking life, which includes so much simple and clear good?
What of those simple and colorful details that started the poem? They are things "to be cherished like the thought of heaven." It seems to me that lying behind this is the idea that what takes our attention away from the here and now is the sense that something better lies ahead.. in the next world.. and that easily becomes the focus of the imagination to the exclusion of the common waking world. But these common things can mean so much more than we suspect: they can be "like the thought of heaven".. if we simply turn our attention toward them.
The line "Divinity must live within herself:" points ahead, as is made clear by the colon. What follows is a laundry list of emotions and moods.. "gusty/ Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights". Emotions and the weather.. two of the most notable elements of waking life. This stretches our conception of waking life. It is not composed solely of calm Sunday mornings, with the complacencies of the peignoir, but includes all the possible feelings that accompany life.. the elations and sadnesses.. "all pleasures and pains". All this waking life is not to be passed over for future consolation, but to be experienced for itself.. as an end in itself.
"These are the measures destined for her soul." A counter-argument will be introduced soon.. but for now we see that waking life is the standard by which a soul is to be judged.. has this person been alive to the gusts of wind and elations of feeling? Or has the soul been carried away to a great procrastination, letting the thought of heaven.. or some other shadowy and dreamy thing.. to be the balm of this life.
Using Google Earth
September 16, 2006
I realized the potential of Google Earth when I saw the way Chris at Bowen Island Journal posted an annotated map of his island, complete with place markers for everything of interest on the island. He posted this as a .kmz file, which can be accessed on the website.
Google Earth allows me to set down with precision the places Emily and I will visit.. As we assemble a personal map of Wisconsin and our experience of the state, we will be able to chart exactly where we have been. The following is a preliminary attempt to use Google Earth in this blog. It is a tour of our afternoon trip to Sheboygan and Lake Michigan. The trip took us off the main highway and let us see a little of the Wisconsin countryside.. small towns and corn fields. I was negligent and both my video camera and regular camera ran out of batteries early on.. and so I did not get much of a visual record of the trip. Nevertheless I can recreate the trip for you!
Press here for the .kmz file of our afternoon trip.
Press here for the Google Earth site so that you can download the free software to view this tour.
Five Years On.. Tardy Reflections on 9/11
September 15, 2006
Events.. even those that result in terrible losses.. are inevitably taken up into language and converted into symbol. They wind up being a shorthand reference to an abstraction. In the case of 9/11 the event has been used so often to justify an ongoing and pointless war, along with hard-knuckle political tactics, that the pathos which ought to be stirred by reminders of 9/11 is absent for me, replaced by anger. Anger at what has become of the America I thought I knew. Of course "America" is just a word too.. but the shine on that word has done us plenty of good in the past.. building trust and hope. The shine is gone; it is leaving the temple.
Instead of engaging in a debate about what to do in the current mess.. and a mess it certainly is!! why not think about what could have easily happened in the space of five years. Most obviously we should have seen people prosecuted for their role in terrorist acts. A fair and public system should have been devised for their trials.. and only a minimum of concessions would have been necessary to get ALL Americans aboard. A fair and open process would have also allowed us to free the innocent people who are being held in places like Guantanamo (and the evidence is strong that there are innocents there). How different we would appear in the eyes of the world! How much less divided we would be as a nation! But that is just the point: the process of justice has been used as a political card.. as a way to divide us. Painting liberals as wimps and appealing to the darkest fears of Americans. Division is a political strategy for re-election.
The convenient thing about fighting terrorism is that it is a relatively inexpensive war to fight. Realistically we are fighting a few thousand hardcore Islamists worldwide who are willing to give their lives in the attempt to kill people. After we settled Afghanistan we had no outright wars to fight. We had only to tighten international agreements and work with our allies to control this deviant force. I don't mean to minimize that work, but it should not be man-power intensive in the way that invading a nation is. Above all we should not allow ourselves to be seduced into seeing the world through the prism of a war on another religion—i.e. the perverse religious prism of Osama bin Laden. Incredibly, five years on, we are bogged down in an insurgency and trying to frame the conflict in language that recalls the clash of civilizations.
As soon as one expresses these thoughts one can hear the I-know-better voice of our Vice President saying: "That is an opinion that reflects a pre-9/11 viewpoint." The demand that there be some kind of before-and-after break in history marked by 9/11 is silly. Yes, we must be vigilant, but our economic and cultural trends have been constant. We are not different than we were before 9/11, unless one counts a greater awareness of our global context. We are the same people who pursue the same lifestyle. But this whole "9/11 change" trope has been extremely useful for Cheney and co. since it functions as a fig leaf for the implementation of their own pre-9/11 goals. These are people who lamented the loss of presidential power in the 70s, and who looked for reasons to attack Saddam Hussein.. their pre-9/11 hopes are well documented.. so was it just coincidence that 9/11 proved to be a justification for these very things??
Since 9/11 is intimately connected with Bush's subsequent actions.. and is used to justify our aggressive and fearful stance toward the rest of the world.. I will politely refrain from taking part in the political memorials that surround the events of this date. That may be the best way to be true to a senseless tragedy.. staying away from the shitload of bogus meaning that has been piled onto this day. I will mourn equally the 40,000+ Iraqi civilians who are now dead. Most of whom would be alive today had Rumsfeld and our leaders bothered with a plan for the occupation. Or how about the innocent individuals around the world who have been caught up in the senseless net of our anti-terror efforts? (No innocents? try this article).
The Century of Destruction:
Preservation, pt. 9
September 13, 2006
In the opening chapter of Anthony Tung's Preserving the World's Great Cities, it is bluntly noted:
The twentieth century was the century of destruction. This is the first and foremost fact concerning the preservation of historic cities around the world. It was a century of dramatic urban expansion, improvement, and redefinition, but it was also a century when urban architectural culture was destroyed at a rate unmatched in human history. [15]
First the mind goes to the devastation brought by the World Wars.. and that partially accounts for ruined cities in Europe and Asia. But the destruction is much broader than what came about as a result of war. Tung lists cities that have lost a major portion of their architectural heritage in the last century, and that includes cities like Istanbul, Athens, Moscow, Cairo, and Singapore.. i.e. not cities that were devastated by war.
It seems that the cultural landscape is passing through a period in which unprecedented destruction is being wrought. 19th century travelers arrived in cities like Cairo and Istanbul, and found them continuing as they had for centuries. They were not static.. I don't mean to imply that.. but they were stable. So what happened in the course of the 20th century to change that, and to bring about the destruction of cultural heritages all over the globe?
Tung points to population as the culprit. In 1900 13.6% of the world's population lived in cities, and only 8 cities had a population of a million or more. Contrast that with the state of the world in the year 2000, when 323 cities had a million or more residents (17). Tung also cites a United Nations report concluding that in 2025 61% of the world will live in cities. So what marks this century more than any other is the explosion of human beings on this planet, and their increasing congregation in cities.
Tung does not go into reasons for this explosion, but the answer must be modern medicine.. right? The near elimination of many epidemic diseases, the advent of infection fighting drugs, and our better understanding of health issues across the board.. We must applaud those advances.. but it also seems evident that cultural systems, developed over centuries, were not ready for what this would mean in terms of exponential population growth. That growth pushed world cultures into a quite novel situation.. the new reality was upon them before they had time to develop new sustainable patterns.
Medicine cannot be the only explanation for the changes in cities. The mechanization of agriculture has meant that fewer hands are needed to work in fields.. and those extra hands seem inevitably to find their way to cities. New methods of transportation have also disrupted traditional systems of circulation within cities.. leading to a vast remodelling of the modern city.
In short, there are many pressures.. most of them relating to modern technology.. which have been exerted on modern cities. And the result is an unprecedented pressure on the cultural heritage of cities. Important cities were destroyed in the past.. like Baghdad by the Mongols, or Corinth by the Romans.. but those were individual instances, and not part of a global epidemic of heritage destruction. What Tung adds to the discussion of preservation is precisely this consciousness, built through a series of chapters on different cultural capitals around the world, that our cities face common challenges from a common antagonist. Preservation is an attempt to mitigate these global pressures.. and to be effective it must learn global lessons.
A Brewers Game
September 12, 2006
It was not too long ago (OK, twenty-years) that out of all the cities hosting professional baseball or football teams, the two I would have had the most difficulty finding on a map were Milwaukee and Green Bay. I just never figured out where those two were. No mystery now.. Green Bay is the large city to the north and Milwaukee to the south. One Sunday we headed out to our first exploration of the southern city.. Milwaukee.
Miller Park in Milwaukee.. the home of the Brewers.. from a distance looks like an outsized trilobite. Its external ribs like some impervious exoskeleton. It is set into an industrial landscape.. which included a large Miller Beer brewery within sight of the stadium.
A baseball game. It was a perfect family outing.. Baseball has such a calm and almost meditative pace that it is perfect for a small close group. I think of football games as being more hardcore-fan oriented.. ditto for basketball.
This game was free hat night.. The first thousand or so fans through the turnstiles got a free hat. Thus we were confronted with a large group of people with brown Brewers caps. The crowd itself was quite friendly.. I didn't get the feeling that the people up front were yelling nasty things or that there was a rowdy group anywhere.
My biggest surprise was how young all these ball players looked! The pitchers and batters looked much younger than me.. like kids almost. How did that change? When I was younger and went to ball games these professionals looked like grown-ups.. and now someone my age would be a veteran.
I video-taped the game, and I hope to put up a compilation of my images and comments soon.. In fact, that partially explains my lack of a blog for a few days.. I thought I could finish this video.
After the game we took a drive through the city.. thinking about where to stop next time. I would not call the downtown particularly vibrant. We saw some much more lively streets in other sections of the city.. such as that in which UW Milwaukee is located.
Milwaukee sits right up against Lake Michigan. An impressive stretch of green park runs along the lakeside, complete with sandy beaches. The main attraction of this lakeside is the Milwaukee Art Museum.. designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2001. It is one of the many show-stopper museums that have opened since Frank Gehry's Bilbao. This museum and the extensive lakeside will be our next Milwaukee destination.
The temptation in travel writing is to portray a city or region as a done deal.. something experienced and seen.. known once and for all. One advantage of the blog format is the ability to capture the small steps by which a region enters the consciousness.. its routes and points of interest becoming mapped upon the mind.. becoming an assumption.
Looks Like a Girl!!!
September 8, 2006
Emily claims to have known the gender of our baby for a long time. I thought that confidence was a little misplaced.. like being confident about a heads-or-tails call. But Emily was fervently sure.. wanting to talk only about names for girls. Now she looks prophetic, since indeed the growing baby has turned out to be almost certainly a girl.
We have watched Emily's tummy expand little by little.. and we have known (of course) that something was inside. It was different to hear the quick whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the baby's heart. Then we were taken into a little room and watched the images of the baby thrown up on a screen above Emily's bed.
We got a couple good views of the baby, and I am posting them here. These are the first views of a new human being.. a new little Smith..
For a name Emily favors Angelina Peace. I like Imogen Peace.
We Ain't Got No Home: A Review of A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
September 6, 2006
Perhaps there are two ways to deal with region in a work of fiction: generational or panoramic. The generational novel (think Marquez' Hundred Years of Solitude) portrays a family over the course of time. Almost inevitably the generational approach turns into an opportunity to tell the history of a region through the particularities of a family. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979) is an example of the panoramic approach. We get a tour of the different social layers of a region, that region being an unnamed town at a bend in the river.. somewhere in the interior of Africa. The main character, Salim, an African-Indian-Muslim merchant whose family had been established on the African coast, burrows into his new African town and through his eyes we meet all classes of people. This panoramic approach is ideal for sketching the quicksilver changes of identity.. not in recalling the continuities that build strong generational identities.
A repeated theme is the need for characters to adapt their identities to the new world appearing in front of them. This is most conspicuous in the case of Indar, a friend of Salim from a coastal town where they grew up, who escapes political turmoil by going to school London. He casts about for an identity and a place in the modern world, growing angry, but finally:
I began to understand.. that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream or isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For me there was only one civilization and one place—London, or a place like it. [151-2]
The choice, then, is between a retreat to some kind of "home" or an acceptance of the modern world and its possibilities.
This is the choice not only for someone with a "complicated" identity (like an African-Indian-Muslim merchant), but for everyone. It had seemed through the novel that the tribal African was the only person with a home to return to.. but then at the end even that is gone, as the young African official Ferdinand explains:
"...I began to think I wanted to be a child again, to forget books and everything connected with books. The bush runs itself. But there is no place to go to. I've been on tour in the villages. It's a nightmare. All these airfields the man has built, the foreign companies have built—nowhere is safe now." [272]
The generational version of a region embodies the history of a particular region, but the panoramic version of a region is available for wider application. Naipaul keeps his city at a bend in the river anonymous.. partly to keep away from telling the story of any particular place.. which in turn allows for this as a work to describe the peculiar stress felt by the majority of human beings in our globalizing world. When the main character Salim gets to London, he finds a crowd of people in his same situation:
I was one of the crowd. Koreans, Filipinos, people from Hong Kong and Taiwan, South Africans, Italians, Greeks, South Americans, Argentines, Colombians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, a lot of black people who've cleaned out places you've never heard of, Chinese from everywhere. All of them are on the run. They are frightened of the fire. You musn't think it's only Africa people are running from. [234]
By this parallel, the city at the bend in the river becomes a version of the world, everyone everywhere trying to adjust to the new reality coming down the line. This is expansion is also why I think Naipaul is such a valuable writer. His concern is to contemplate the world, and to portray it carefully, but then to hammer out a way of living in the modern world.. not just for people who live in one particular place, but for people allover the world. He is a contemplator of the inner life of our globe.
How should we live? His wisdom is in the very first line of the novel:
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. [3]
The lines are mystifying, but the novel goes on to provide some clarity. "The world is what it is"—i.e. there is no place of retreat, no home to dream about. "Men.. who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it"—i.e. people who just drift or dream find themselves left out of the new world. The key is to act.. to create something out of life in this new world:
There could be no going back; there was nothing to go back to. We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed... Get rid of that idea of the past; make the dream-like scenes of loss ordinary. [244]
Fun Labor Day Cookout
September 5, 2006
Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt.1
September 3, 2006
Churches have an advantage in organizing social groups: they have a book everyone agrees on, the Bible. Vibrant churches spend a lot of time getting people to engage with that book, which has built-in cultural authority. I know the Bible is a lot broader than conservatives would have us believe.. but I am still frustrated that so many cultural battles must take place on that same narrow plot of ground. I don't think that either the prophet Isaiah or the Apostle Paul.. no, nor Jesus.. has a corner on wisdom. But try to get people to come together on Sunday morning to talk about the Stoic philosopher Epictetus! Not going to happen. On Sunday mornings I am going to work slowly through various forms of secular scripture. I invite anyone to consider my meditations.
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Enroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
[first stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens]
The focus is on a woman, wearing an informal peignoir and sitting carelessly in the sun on a Sunday morning. She is clearly not doing what one should be doing on a Sunday afternoon.. she is not at church, nor doing anything remotely religious. The details in the first five lines sketch her careless position in colorful strokes: oranges, coffee, sunny chair, green cockatoo, and a rug. It could be a bright still-life.
The poem changes tone in line 6. "She dreams a little".. and then comes the approach of that "old catastrophe." There are several mentions of a dark event through the stanza, and by its end she is on her way to Palestine, "dominion of the blood and sepulchre." Clearly the reference is to the crucifixion.. an event central to the experience of Sunday morning for most Christians.
The stanza darkens. The elements that at the beginning are part of a bright still-life portrait, a few lines later have been recruited as part of a darkly colorful "procession of the dead." The calm and careless Sunday morning is on the way to becoming a time of remembrance of that serious event. The woman sitting in her peignoir must defend her carelessness from the call to religious seriousness.
Reading the stanza this morning I noted especially the difference between waking and dreaming. The opening seems vibrantly (if lazily) awake and conscious of the world. It is as she "dreams a little" that the elements of her world are re-arranged into more fearful patterns. And by the end her "dreaming feet" are taking her across the seas, to silent Palestine. The poem as a whole is defending exactly that first state of guiltless consciousness of the world.
"The day is like wide water, without sound.." I think one thing that was re-awakened for me last year as we attended Quaker meetings in Atlanta was my need for a place of calm and silence.. for contemplation. I want that kind of quiet to be a mark of my life.. but without the fiction of thinking "religious" thoughts.
Emily Buys Anything Green
at Appleton Farmers Market
September 2, 2006
We recently acquired the software to do some video editing, and we will see if this can improve our ability to report the world that surrounds us. This is a first-time try at using the editing tools.
Our Modernist : A Review of
Bob Dylan's Modern Times
September 1/2, 2006
The title of Dylan's newest album is not the "modern times" one might assume.. nothing to do with the present. The album cover is a detail from a photo that looks as if it were a semi-finalist for the cover of Dylan's 2004 autobiography Chronicles:
Both pictures call up a nostalgic view of the city.. the lush black and white photography recalling classic films. In Chronicles the image made sense, as a large portion of the book was spent recalling New York in the early 60s. The reason for the image on the new CD is more mysterious.
Dylan's previous album, Love and Theft (2001), was resolutely southern and rural in its song settings. Listeners were treated to rebel rivers, tobacco fields, and moonlight on the water. Besides the references and allusions to lines from old blues songs, the album as a whole could be interpreted as a song cycle of themes developed by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. In Chronicles Dylan sketches an image of his younger self sitting in a library reading through old newspapers:
...I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald and Cincinnati Enquirer. It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency. [84]
I find it hard to believe that this describes Dylan's reading in the 60s, but it would be the perfect way to pick up the American milieu evoked by Love and Theft, especially in its southern details.
Modern Times inherits much of the sound and feel of its predecessor. Both were produced by Jack Frost, a pseudonym for Dylan. The new CD is also steeped in the language of the past. His song "Nettie Moore" builds lyrically upon a 19th century song (see here). The challenge of tracking down all Dylan's references will be a serious piece of work for critics of the future. How tricky it can be was handily illustrated by an early review of the CD in Slate by Jody Rosen, in which she writes:
"Rollin' and Tumblin'" is a rewrite of a Muddy Waters number. But Dylan surrounds these borrowings with his own brilliant and uncanny poetry: "I'm walking with a toothache in my heel"...
On our first listen to Modern Times Emily had caught that strange line about the "toothache in my heel" and recognized it as a borrowing from "Old Dan Tucker" (recorded recently by Bruce Springsteen on Seeger Sessions). This serves as a warning that before you cite a line as an instance of Dylan's poetry, you better Google it! This kind of allusive density we are more ready to study in the work of modernist poets.. but here it is in a popular music CD.
There is a curious form of nostalgia at work here in this kind of language work. It is even present in the above quotation from Chronicles, in which he states that in reading these newspapers he was not "so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and the rhetoric of the times." His is not a nostalgia for a bygone period and its social mores or political values, it is a nostalgia for language.. a way of talking and expressing the world.
For pre-ordering the Dylan album we got a complimentary CD featuring one of Dylan's hour-long radio broadcasts on XM Satellite Radio. This sample broadcast was on the topic of Baseball.. and Dylan's approach to the topic was revealing. There was none of the relish of the baseball fan for actual moments.. pennant winning hits or beautiful catches. Dylan's appreciation centered on the rhetorical world of the game, and at one point he rattles out a string of nicknames: the Sultan of Swat, the Splendid Splinter, the Georgia Peach, Joltin' Joe Dimaggio.. The choice of songs also tended to highlight baseball as a language code for talking about life.
This kind of language nostalgia has left Dylan in an unusually good position to thrive commercially. He may complain about the poor sound of modern recording studios (as he did recently to Rolling Stone), but he evidently does not feel compelled to privilege vinyl albums.. or even to cumbersome 78s. The physical form has no real pull on him.. it is the language of that bygone time that stirs his feelings. So he releases his music in all the latest digital forms and broadcasts by means of satellite, but gets to praise and imitate all things old.. all things that remind him of that great linguistic America, the land of Mississippi, Catfish Hunter, and ol' Dan Tucker.
This allusive and modernist approach can be off-putting, despite the strength of the songs. Certainly it lacks the immediacy of an album such as Neil Young's passionate Living with War.. which pointedly brings up "listening to Bob Dylan in 1963.." If one is looking for an unambiguous political or personal statement, then Dylan is not the place to come.
The closest Dylan comes to saying something about our current situation seems to come from "Workingman's Blues #2" when he says: "They say low wages are a reality, if we want to compete abroad." It is only a shadow of the protectionist sentiment in the 80's with "Union Sundown" (on Infidels), but a hint that Dylan has some opinions on national events. At one point on Workingman's Blues #2 Dylan seems to step back and address the common man:
In you, my friend, I find no blame
Want to look in my eyes, please do.
No one can ever claim
that I took up arms against you.
So Dylan has been on the side of the workingman all along? Maybe we should allow that to pass as a statement of principle..
Dylan does not really address the modern world, at least as we encounter it in the daily newspaper. A sample of his likely defense for this is outlined in the passage above from Chronicles. Defending the continuing power of an old way of speaking that he found in the 19th century newspapers, he writes: "It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency." Underlying most everything that Dylan produces these days is a faith that an old way of talking can address with power the contemporary world. The metaphors and bone-felt values of the past continue to speak to us in a fundamental way.
I am not sure how to argue with that.. maybe he is right. I wonder: how will some thoughtful person look at this album in 200 years? Will it be a refreshing statement of great human themes recorded at a time when others were preoccupied with transient things? Or will it be an example of the kind of inward-looking half-intentional blindness that swears fealty to the American past at a time when that past was becoming more and more untenable. Perhaps Love and Theft (released on 9/11/2001) was the last true statement of that kind of postwar faith in Americana.. an artistic creed which perhaps began with the publication of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953.
Dylan is at the top of his game.. a real pop-music cleanup hitter. His albums since Time Out of Mind have been strong, and he has skillfully expanded and re-contextualized the public view of his earlier years. One has to switch over to English literature to find a model for this kind of expansive artistic development. Dylan is an artist who has a masterful "late period".. like William Butler Yeats. But like Yeats, one is also tempted to wonder whether there is something deceptive and empty about this late mastery. In Dylan's case, that mastery may come at the price of ignoring our true modern times.
