Ten by Abbas Kiarostami
September 28, 2007
I would rate Ten a step ahead of Taste of Cherry. Both are wonderful, but Ten is a truly rare film. The entirety of Ten is shot from inside a car.. and we watch one woman talking to her son, her sister, a friend, and several strangers to whom she gives a ride. Through these sometimes emotional sometimes everyday conversations a convincing portrait emerges.. a portrait of a woman caught between responsibility and freedom.
The camera faces either the woman (driving) or the person accompanying her in the passenger seat. The camera is static and stays focused on a single character. At the same time the viewer's eyes wander to the portion of the screen in which the Iranian world is passing. We see people on the streets, cars, a mosque, shops, freeways, night scenes, and street after street. This constantly changing portion of the screen satisfies the documenter in me.. while the slowly opening and expanding story of this woman keeps my mind occupied in a narrative.
I like Ten enough that I plan to show a portion of it in my Islam class this term. It should complement Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. This graphic novel works in my class on account of its ability to surprise people with the way secular and genuine lives go forward in the midst of a society that looks to many Americans as if it is wholly dominated by religion. Ten, like Persepolis, is hardly a theological work, but it portrays a woman who is enmeshed in a religious culture and finding room for herself to maneuver as an individual.. a task that is hard to bring off.
The dashboard film style employed by Kiarostami in Ten opens up formal possibilities. It might seem like a gimmick.. but that is to miss the point. Kiarostami has found a style that frees him from the weight of film production and a large crew. From his point of view this simplifying of film technique allows for a tighter and less mediated grip on reality. In the documentary Ten on Ten that accompanies the DVD of Ten, Kiarostami singles out the freedom that this style brings: artists are allowed to work alone again; investors and technical skills become devalued. It is a style that will never produce a Matrix.. or for that matter any Hollywood style film.. but if we can be content with just life, it is perfect.
The digital camera is finally what enables this style. A traditional film camera could hardly have been mounted on a car's dashboard. According to Kiarostami, the small size of the digital camera allows people to act more naturally than they would when someone yells "sound, camera, action". When he mentions his experience with a digital camera in Uganda, Kiarostami calls the camera a "digital pen".. meaning that the camera functions as a kind of journal.. due, i imagine, to its portability and the possibility of filming almost constantly without worrying too much about film costs.
I am becoming a believer. The idea that filmmaking can be an artistic endeavor by an individual.. and represent a personal vision of the world.. that has dawned on me as a revelation recently. I think the next step that Kiarostami could travel is to break away from the world of Cannes and important film festivals and allow his takes on life to flow in some of the democratic channels of opened up by the internet.. which is the necessary companion to the digital camera.
Visions of Blogging
September 27, 2007
It turns out that Andrew Sullivan will be coming to Lawrence University later this year. In today's convocation I found the way in which Sullivan was introduced to be quite interesting. He was called a senior editor for the Atlantic Monthly and a frequent columnist for the Times of London. Then we were told that he is often a commentator on television. Oh, and he wrote a book about lost conservative values.. which is connected to what he will talk about when he comes. But there was no mention of the format in which Andrew Sullivan is surely the most influential.. the blog!
Oddly, the blog is also the format in which students would have the easiest time accessing Sullivan. Considering that the convocation speech was on the topic of student engagement with political issues, this failure to mention Sullivan's blog seemed a missed opportunity. The blog is an avenue of political and social expression that is open to everyone.. including students.
This is post is not a complaint, just an observation as to the way the blog has not gained broad acceptance. It sometimes leaves me scratching my head how an article published in some God-forsaken journal has a high academic prestige while a blog.. even a widely read blog.. is somehow a lesser creation. The justification for this will always come down to peer review.. and attempts to re-think the blog as a more academic enterprise inevitably make some effort to introduce peer review.
The blog requires a fair amount of imagination with respect to futurity. A few guesses:
1) Work in the humanities will be threatened by the Internet in the same way that print journalism is now being threatened. It will take a few years, but the profit basis of academic publishing (journals and university presses) will erode. Research in the humanities will be done, but it will be contained within formats that are are virtually free to publish (websites or online PDF files).
2) The Internet opens up new methods for editing and commenting on texts. That's well known. But this may push academics toward a "Criterion-ization" of their work. The popular DVD publisher Criterion puts out classic or forgotten films that are buttressed by a host of contextual aids. Original radio programs, trailers, interviews, and alternative versions are included in their videos.. and this provides a different model of scholarship. Instead of writing about connections and crossovers, the scholar can make these available to a viewer/reader.. and the interpretation is open.
[Broadview Press does something like this with their editions of literary texts, but what happens when the literary work and all the minor works become available online? The contents of a book could be contained in one page of links. These kinds of smart scholarly mash-ups of information will proliferate—a reasonable response to the mass of texts now available.]
3) The aims of scholarship in the humanities could be clarified by forms of Internet scholarship. In the sciences knowledge builds upon itself. A scientist today can safely ignore works from 75 years ago. That knowledge has already been accommodated and assumed by successive generations. It is this stepping-stone structure of knowledge that makes academic journals necessary in the sciences: articles give a claim of priority to individual researchers. The humanities do not build anywhere. It may yet be important to read Henry James on fiction or on Hawthorne.. or Pauline Kael on a film. These are not opinions that are subsumed by those who come later; they are sensitive interpretations. I am not convinced that the academic journal is quite so necessary in this case.. except to provide the illusion of building through the employment of technical words. Individual sensibility counts for a lot in the humanities and blogs/websites could be a natural vehicle for that. Such blogs/websites could then be taken as occasions for modeling critical frameworks for reading.. and therefore gain a pedagogical purpose.
I may be wrong about some things, but I don't know how anyone can read the tea leaves and not see that the intersection of academic work and the Internet is going to take some serious sorting out. At this point the important thing is not to get too hung up on the notion of a "blog".. which tends to be defined as short and ephemeral.. at the expense of imagining the multiple ways Internet publication could look in the future. Here at Old Roads we are interested in hybrid forms..
Islam in The Yacoubian Building
September 25, 2007
The Yacoubian Building (2002) by Alaa al Aswany pulls no punches when it comes to its portrayal of Egyptian society. Corruption is present at every level.. and the best one can do is get out. The following is a short diatribe against the state of life in Egypt:
If there were any justice in this country, someone like you would get educated at state expense. Education, medical treatment, and work are the natural rights of every citizen in the world but the regime in Egypt is determined to abandon the poor like you to ignorance so it can rob them. [183]
These words are put into the mouth of a character, but they accurately summarize the events of the novel. This does not amount to a Faulkner-like "I hate the South"; it is a steady accusation of institutional failure.
Islam is not spared. Two of the several interlocking stories illustrate al Aswany's views of Islam.. and can even be said to present something of a theory of Islam.
The first is the story of Taha el Shazli, a young man who grows up the son of the doorman for the Yacoubian building.. one of the decaying yet classic structures of downtown Cairo. Despite his low social position Taha is a high achiever in school and works toward entrance to the police academy. On his final interview one of the questioners asks about his father's occupation.. and when Taha is refused entrance to the academy it is clear that his low social position was the cause.
His hopes for advancement dashed, Taha starts classes at Cairo University. Here he falls in with a crowd of poor students that gravitate to the mosque and religion:
...in fact from the first moment, just as oil separates from water and forms a distinct layer on top, so the rich students separated themselves from the poor and made up numerous closed coteries formed of graduates from foreign language schools and those with their own cars, foreign clothes, and imported cigarettes.... The poor students, on the other hand, clung to one another like terrified mice... [90]
Through his acquaintances among this group of poor students Taha is introduced to the thought structures of Jihadist Islam. I won't say more about what happens to Taha, but for al Aswany the key motive for Taha's turn to an extremist form of Islam is his experience of state sanctioned corruption. Islam becomes a way for him to hold his head high.. and functions also as a social net for a class of poor and rural types.
The second story that illustrates Islam is that of Hagg Azzam. In this case we see a businessman who owns a store on the first floor of the Yacoubian building. Hagg is wealthy, but he wants more.. and to get more he is going to run for a place in the Assembly. To get this place Hagg must get the approval of a corrupt man who acts as gatekeeper for the "elections" in Egypt. Commenting on this gatekeeper the narrator states:
...it is also true that [the gatekeeper] is endowed with a real talent for politics that would necessarily have enabled him to assume the highest positions of state even in a democratic society. The same authentic talent, however, like so many talents in Egypt, has been diverted, distorted, and adulterated by lying, hypocrisy, and intrigue... [81]
That is perhaps the single strongest denunciation of Egypt in the book.. and it can't get much stronger. The point seems to be that Egypt perverts its genuine people.. forces them to lie and thereby ruins them. That is the nature of the gatekeeper with whom Hagg must deal.. and it also becomes the story of Hagg.
Islam enters this story as Hagg seeks to justify his demand that his second wife get an abortion. He brings along a Sheikh to make his argument.. and the Sheikh dutifully makes it sound as if the abortion will be fine.. and even falls within the laws of God. This same Sheikh, we are told, is prominent on the lecture circuit with his defense of the American presence in the Middle East during the first Gulf War. This is an Islam that is the mirror opposite of the radicalism that Taha embraces. It is an Islam that, like Hagg, has been "adulterated by lying, hypocrisy, and intrigue."
No positive narrative of Islam is written into The Yacoubian Building to counter these two views of Islam. I am not always sure about the extent to which I believe al Aswany in his portrayal of Islam. The class-based theory of Islam that arises in the story of Taha does not fit what I have seen and read. But it is a compelling view of the way religion is deformed by a political/social sickness. The outsiders are pushed to extremism and the insiders are made into hypocrites. Islam as it is presented in this novel thus mirrors the lines from Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Museum Building: Identity Building
September 23, 2007
In the process of editing my Dearborn documentary, I have come to the section in which I discuss the Arab American National Museum.. and so I have been watching the video of an interview with the museum's director Dr. Anan Ameri. At one point I ask about the role of the new museum in forming an Arab American identity, and Ameri responds quite correctly that the Arab American identity had been around for some time.. and the museum can hardly be said to construct this identity. Her underlying view, then, would seem to be that identities form on their own and then institutions reflect and serve those identities.
I am interested in a more dynamic model of the relationship of personal identity and an institution such as a museum. Quickly we get into a feedback loop in which identity and institutions are mutually supporting. Yes, the Arab American identity has been around, but its self-conception will become more focused and coherent as it receives treatment in a museum, and as this identity category is strengthened, there will be a larger audience ready to patronize cultural institutions. So around and around we go.
An individual's vague sense of how he or she fits into a group will be clarified and strengthened by the experience of a museum. In the Arab American National Museum this identity is clarified by means of four distinct strategies:
1. The development of a broad-based historical narrative. The cultural accomplishments of the people who have inhabited the Middle East are highlighted. Individual accomplishments from a range of cultures and time periods are blended to create a surprising whole. Read: This is a history in which you can take pride.
2. The development of canonical figures is another museum strategy. Who would ever have related Edward Said to Kahlil Gibran? After a tour of the Arab American National Museum these two will appear as figures within a distinct group. The work of a museum is to train people to perceive such a group. The museum thereby creates an intellectual pedigree to which an individual could attach himself or herself.. and find significance.
3. A third strategy is to demonstrate the ways that Arab American identity intersects with broader American culture. In one section of the museum we get a tour of a Lebanese kitchen and other views of everyday life. The message is: this is how the Arab American identity looks. People obviously cook and smoke and gather with family because that is what they know; it comes naturally. Having walked through this museum their personal experience might be more coherent. They would be aware of how their practices fit into a larger group pattern.
4. A continuing connection with Arabs living in the Middle East is encouraged. A traveling exhibit of traditional Palestinian textiles was on (temporary) display when I visited. The Arab American identity is rooted in history but it is also tied to the cultures that still exist and thrive.
These four strategies for constructing and strengthening an identity commitment are on display at the Arab American National Museum.. but they are also four strategies that I think we could locate in many museums. It is no accident that ethnic groups of all sorts feel the importance of building a museum.. and I think we can trace this building urge to an inner need to set up boundaries and definitions for a group identity.
A Working Class Library
Is Something to Be
September 22, 2007
Photo credit: Flickr User OZinOh, used under Creative Commons License.
At the beginning of his biography of Walter Reuther, Nelson Lichtenstein briefly narrates the story of the public library of Wheeling, West Virginia. When Andrew Carnegie was giving out large monetary grants to enable cities to build impressive public libraries, Wheeling hesitated. Labor organized to block the construction of a Carnegie-funded library.. and therefore turned down a large pot of civic money. Lichtenstein adds:
The city eventually built its own public library, with its own funds, in the very heart of proletarian South Wheeling. [3]
Above is a photo of the library that Wheeling built in 1911.
Such a fight over philanthropic funds for a library may sound silly.. but let's try to think about this from the point of view of the unionists who lived in Wheeling. Acceptance of the Carnegie funds would have meant a free library, but it also would have brought about an industrialist/capitalist reading of their city. The evocation of great literary names from the past (Shakespeare Plato Emerson) would have helped to set the city into a common Western framework. By turning down these library funds, unionists in Wheeling allowed for an outsider reading of their city. Their library would later be built (according to Lichtenstein) in a working class area.. and, as the picture shows, it is a building that makes no overt reference to the great literary tradition. The battle over the construction of a library was not what we might call a mere "symbolic battle".. it was a battle for the interpretation of a city.
Lichtenstein writes about this struggle:
...the labor assembly's fight against the Carnegie library was but a skirmish in the larger,protracted struggle waged by so many turn-of-the-century Americans to define and defend a consciously working-class citizenship. [2]
His term "working-class citizenship" I take to be a reference to an identity category. Labor represented an understanding of the self that had the emotional power of today's identity categories such as GBLT or African American or Hispanic. It is hard today to think of labor within those strong categories, but it once did have that kind of power.. at least in some parts of the country.
An interesting aspect of identity categories is their tendency to work themselves out in a symbolic manner in the physical world. By the use of monuments, parades, banners, and all kinds of symbolic representation, an identity comes to locate itself in a place. A careful observer can then "read" a place and understand something of the identity commitments of the population. The story of white and black appropriations of the southern landscape is told by W. Fitzhugh Brundage in The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory.. and this view of the connection between personal identity and the built landscape is central to my own video explorations of places.
A library is important for another reason: for the books it carries. Here again I think we have a hard time thinking about the social value of books and ideas. The idea of "great books" makes it sound as if there is a floating mass of books that will somehow improve us all if we read them. But people do not read books as universalists; they read with their identity commitments intact.. and form canons based on these commitments. African Americans develop an African American group of literary and musical references that speak to them. White Americans do the same.. but they have the annoying tendency to universalize their preferences and act as if everybody should like these books (they are the best!). At one time there was a similar Labor canon.. and control of a library meant control of the presentation of this canon.. and therefore some control over the formation of group identity.
Lichtenstein writes the following concerning the Labor canon of writers:
Goethe and Schiller, Lincoln and Jefferson, Darwin and Huxley, were all part of an expansive socialist lexicon studied by self-taught and intellectually hungry young workers like Val Reuther. Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle... won a vast audience, while the novels and stories of Jack London could be found in almost every schoolboy's bedroom. [4-5]
There are "great books" in that list, but it is more important to recognize that this is a canon of texts that connects directly to an identity, i.e. Labor. Today Jack London is embedded in general America literature.. and his actual readership early in the 20th century is forgotten. But when studying a text these kinds of social questions should be in the forefront of our critical inquiry.. since it is a fact that identities attract canons.
Spatial Representation on YouTube
September 20, 2007
One of the coolest theoretical aspects of the Internet is its opening up of new ways to represent and annotate places. Just a few weeks ago I caught an NPR discussion on the new digital atlas that is arising from social networking sites. Maps are interactive and annotated with personal memories.. but the aggregate of these personal memories seems sometimes to be on the verge of becoming a great democratic atlas.
Video (sometimes linked with other media) is another way to represent places. Video has been around forever.. so that is obviously not new.. but distribution mediums such as YouTube allows for a whole new aproach to film. I want to comment on two approaches to place that could never have existed without the Internet.
This video entitled "Where the Hell is Matt" hardly needs any publicity. Over 7 million viewers watched it before me! It is a really fun 3:42.. so I recommend that everyone give it a view. The Matt that dances at tourist sites all over the world was a video game designer who quit his job and traveled around the world. In an interview also posted on YouTube Matt explains that after finishing high school he worked at a video game store.. a job which turned into a work for a video magazine.. and then at 19 he switched to a job designing video games. At 26 he quit that and with his savings took off on a trip around the world.
The sense of wonder in the video is captivating.. but the video (this one and others) makes no attempt to interpret what is in front of the camera, it simply records Matt's presence at various places. It can be thought of as an animated succession of traditional postcards. Many a traveler has sent back home a series of such postcards.. and this video captures perfectly that tourist pleasure in postcard scenes. Just like those postcards, this video lacks any context and any suggestion of the work necessary to understand a culture.
This video from The Daily English Show takes us along on a road trip to New Denver, British Columbia. The calm voiceover from Sarah allows us to follow the trip with ease. Even though she and a friend are hitchhiking, she is able to get footage through the car window.. and at least one driver pulls over at different places so that she can take pictures. Step by step she documents her progress and then gives well chosen views of the small towns in which she finds herself. I would say that this is the most successful video travelogue I have yet seen.
Part of its success as a travelogue may stem from the fact that the central idea of The Daily English Show is to provide (almost) daily clips of people speaking English.. with a view to helping viewers learn English. This practical concern with language makes for a cool willingness to talk about small daily matters.. and that in turn makes the video much better than a succession of postcard views. It becomes a video guide to an area that is off the beaten track. What is it like to travel through this region of the world? What sorts of things does one see while traveling? Those are questions answered by this documenting video. I wish Sarah would do more of these travelogues..
Ideas That Fall to Earth
September 18, 2007
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) directed by Nicholas Roeg feels like a film I have already seen. David Bowie plays the part of an alien who arrives on earth and immediately sets about making his way back to his own planet. Through flashbacks we see images of his dry planet and the family he left behind. With his red hair and flare for odd fashion, Bowie's rock character infiltrates the science fiction plot (and how not, when his 1972 album Ziggy Stardust had already cast him as a space oddity?).
The story of the film can be mapped onto Steven Spielberg's E.T. (1982). An alien arrives on earth, gets sort of adopted by a human, works to return home, gets caught by authorities who want to experiment on him, and then finally gets free again. The story in its basic outline is virtually indistinguishable.. but no one would ever confuse the films, and the reason for that is instructive.
E.T. is a film that is thoroughly at home in middle class America. The hero is a young boy; the setting is the suburbs; the bad guys are government authorities. The film also raises the cute quotient of the alien and tones down the sex and anything that could be upsetting. The Man Who Fell to Earth, on the other hand, enjoys its status as an outsider film.. and the production was carried out on a budget. As for David Bowie's sexless alien, he is hardly going to be embraced by middle America as a cute hero.
The trajectory then could be said to flow from daring and rough to pleasant and smooth. That trajectory is key for understanding American popular culture. Forms begin in some kind of rough and unpopular way.. breaking ground but remaining unconsumable for the majority of "popular culture". Then those forms fall to the earth and take on a smoother and more ethically digestible exterior. This occurs at the hand of a master of popular culture, like Spielberg. This trajectory should be counted as a fall because the forms take on a progressively less interesting exterior shape. What is dangerous becomes common.
This trajectory brings with it another oddity: even as the forms fall and become less interesting, their exterior becomes more highly polished. At every step downward the story is robbed of its challenging status, but it is presented in an ever finer and more expensive shell. The production values for E.T. (or for the impending remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth) are high as can be. Those production values mark the film as "quality". The shell of top-notch production values is a way of signaling to a mass audience that this is a film worth seeing.. and simultaneously disparaging earlier efforts that seem by comparison amateur.
We should resist what is smooth and seek out what is rough.. that, at least, is the Old Roads philosophy.
Sausage & Cheese Festival in
New London, Wisconsin
September 16, 2007
The newest Old Roads video essay is now complete..
American Landscapes of the Coen Brothers
September 14, 2007
Emily and I have been on a Coen Brother viewing spree. Having now watched a good portion of their films in close succession, what strikes me is the consistently strong use of a specific American landscape. Let me lay out the films and their settings:
Blood Simple - Texas
Raising Arizona - Arizona
Hudsucker Proxy - New York
Fargo - Minnesota
The Big Lebowski - Los Angeles
O Brother Where Art Thou - the South
The Man Who Wasn't There - Northern California
Intolerable Cruelty - Los Angeles
The Ladykillers - the South
I have not yet re-watched Miller's Crossing, but it has many scenes set in New Orleans.. and that adds another distinctive landscape to the mix.
Looking at this list of settings, it is notable that the Coen Brothers have treated several of the most distinctive regional landscapes in the US. It is as if one element of creating a film is to look around the country and decide on a landscape.. and then the story gets draped over the setting. That scenario especially makes sense with a film like Ladykillers that is relatively unsuccessful in terms of story but has a strongly imagined physical setting.
Several doubles appear in the list above, but these often resolve when carefully considered. Intolerable Cruelty and The Big Lebowski are both set in Los Angeles, but these two views of Los Angeles are hardly mutually recognizable.. the one filled with upper crust scenes and the other with Ralphs and a bowling alley. Taken together these two films could be considered a stereoscope of Los Angeles. Something similar could be said about the historical/mythical south of O Brother and the contemporary south on display in The Ladykillers.
In their sense of place the Coen Brothers are the heirs of 19th century American regional fiction.. although obviously not limited to a single region, they accomplish the same end: establishing versions of American landscapes that are entwined with fiction. Their settings tend also to be historically related to genre choices (Chandleresque noir in LA, screwball comedy in New York). They expertly settle a type of story in a real place.. and thereby affirm a kind of regional identity.
In contrast to the sureness of the landscape, the central character of a Coen Brothers film is often blank.. oddly passive. This characteristic is present in its most extreme form in The Man Who Wasn't There.. in which Billy Bob Thornton is a passive black hole that sucks down everyone around him. But in Fargo (Marge Gunderson) and The Ladykillers (Marva Munson) the central character is positive, but is nevertheless strangely passive in pursuing the good.
What we don't tend to find in a Coen Brothers Film is a self-directed character who can manipulate his/her environment with correct knowledge of the situation. The bad guys often think they can control what is around them.. but fail comically and horribly. The good guys are usually a long way from the truth.. but triumph anyways (think of Abby at the end of Blood Simple who shoots her adversary.. but thinks he is somebody else: "I'm not afraid of you, Marty!" But it is not in fact Marty that she has shot!
Thinking Through Peace and Power
September 12, 2007
Sometimes at the tail end of a cold I get a cough that hangs around for a few days. The way to combat this persistent cough, I have found, is not to cough as hard as possible in an effort to clear it out of my system.. that only makes the cough grow worse. The thing to do is to try to suppress the annoying cough itch for as long as possible.. and let my throat build up resistance. Getting rid of the cough means vigilance in avoiding a big flare up.
Fighting for peace is similar. The goal is not to outviolence the violent.. believing that if we could get just one decisive flare up we could establish the peace. A better goal is to smother violence wherever it threatens to break out.. as soon as possible. Violence dies down not after a final conflagration, but as little by little a resistance to violence develops.
This philosophy of constantly settling violence, and refusing to meet violence with violence, is directly contrary to the dominant political language of our time.. which rests confident in its ability to manage violence. Where has this dominant philosophy gotten us? Violence begets violence.. almost inevitably. We congratulate ourselves for giving the Soviets a black eye in Afghanistan.. only to find out that we had been training jihadists to take their battle against us. Israel invades Lebanon in the 80s and radicalizes the Shi'ite.. and thus create the problem of Hezbollah. We mess around with violence.. using it to our advantage.. only to get a serious dose of blowback.
I would not call myself a pacifist.. since every level human society needs authority. At the point when early humans abandoned the self-governing tribe they needed people who could keep order through the threat of violence. The result is an ever expanding circle of security.. from personal security to police forces to national military forces. I am fine with that basic set up.. or at least see no way out of it. But this system should be tempered by a peaceful philosophy.. one that recognizes that the use of force tends to rebound and should therefore be used only in the most limited of cases.
Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of 9/11.. I made no comments. What I wrote last year holds up. It is one of the saddest things I can imagine: that an act of extreme violence against us could be transformed into a call for war.. and not just a "war" but the GWOT which would be run on a rolling and interminable basis. Perhaps with time.. and dedication.. the day can become something more: a time to reflect not on good and evil, but on the false human confidence in the use of violence to solve problems. That time seems a long way off.. but it will be one of the revolving themes of this blog from here on out.
A Darker Tokyo:
Ozu's Tokyo Twilight
September 10, 2007
At the heart of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Twilight is the story of Akiko. We follow her as she searches for her boyfriend.. and then we learn that the urgency of the search is caused by her pregnancy. The boyfriend Kenji turns out to be a coward.. but the film does not care about that youthful relationship. The deeper story turns out to be the place of Akiko's mother.. or rather, the absence of her mother. The mother turns up in Tokyo.. having long ago abandoned the father to pursue an affair begun during wartime. The two sisters, Akiko and Takako, have thus grown up with only their father.. and Tokyo Twilight is a meditation on the consequences of that disruption of the family..
Consider the following exchange between Takako (the older sister, Setsuko Hara) and her father. The elder sister has left her husband and brought her baby daughter with her. The father tries to mediate:
sister: Wasn't it awkward?
father: what?
sister: meeting with him..
father: of course not.
sister: but...
father: He's changed. He wasn't like that before. He used to be more cheerful. I was thinking on the train home that I owe you an apology.
sister: For what? Not at all.
father: I should have let you marry Sato. You seemed to like him.
sister: It doesn't matter now, Father.
father: I pressed you into marrying Numata.
sister: I'll check the bath.
The younger daughter is the one who has the gravest problems, but even Takako, as we see from her forced smile in the picture, has regrets. She was pressured into marrying a man who turned out to be a selfish drunkard. The lack of a mother is not mentioned in this brief dialogue, but in Ozu's very next film, Equinox Flower, he will highlight a mother's positive role in convincing the stubborn father to allow his daughter to marry for love. The mediating force of a mother is lacking.. and the results are evident in the lives of both daughters.
In the discussions about the younger daughter Akiko the theme of the absent mother becomes more pronounced:
father: She's impossible. How could she ever turn out this way? What a disappointment.
sister: Akiko's lonely. I'm sure of it. Father, please be more gentle with her. She grew up without knowing a mother's love. That's why she's lonely.
father: I tried hard to keep her from feeling that way.
sister: But without a mother...
father: I've always tried to dote on her... I made a mistake somewhere. Bringing up a child... isn't easy.
sister: Father, please go to bed.
Young Akiko is in way over her head. She is pregnant and then gets an abortion when she despairs of her boyfriend helping her. On the heals of that drama she discovers that her mother is still alive. In her despair she is struck by a train.. and although an explanation is given, I think we are meant to understand that this was a suicide attempt. Lying in the hospital she murmurs to her father and sister:
Something went wrong that is beyond the immediate issue of a love relationship that went too far. The problem is way back there.. at the start when Akiko lost the love of her mother. Ozu pushes us to imagine what could have happened had a mother been present. The situation is tough.. but not unsolvable.
The mother is ends up bearing the strongest condemnation. Upon the death of Akiko, the elder daughter Tamako visits her mother with a chilly message:
This condemnation seems to reflect not just the anger of a character.. but also that of Ozu. Tokyo Twilight keeps coming around to the absence of a mother as the cause for later pain. The mother is a nice woman; she's no spiteful person. It is obvious that she has her own needs and desires. But Ozu is not willing to let her off the hook for abandoning her family.
At the close of the film the audience waits for some kind of reconciliation. The mother delivers flowers to Takako and then slowly walks away.. we wonder: will Takako follow and forgive? As the mother gets aboard the train to leave Tokyo for good, she continuously looks out the window in the hope of seeing her remaining daughter. There will be no reconciliation.. at least where we most expect it. Ozu instead allows us to see Takako's change of heart with respect to her husband:
This is the reason I cannot get enough of Ozu these days. I know it seems like a simple message: family is important. But Ozu so patiently examines every angle of the family.. freedom and duty, old and young, mothers and fathers, tradition and novelty, work and private life. With unusual fairness Ozu thinks through the demands of every party in the family.. and in this case he comes down hard on the mother who made unredeemable choices long ago.
Becoming a Bookseller
September 8, 2007
In an effort to begin saving money for a new video camera, and in the hopes of drawing down our book inventory, we have begun listing used books on Amazon.com marketplace. With every book I list I am curious to learn its market worth.. and I run into plenty of surprises! The best thing to have is a nice hardback edition of a book that was not a bestseller but which turned out to be a classic book in its field. Academic books (if they are important) keep their value. Bestsellers of almost any kind are hardly worth the paper they are printed on. If there are a lot of copies of a book floating around out there, they will have a solid presence on Amazon.com and its price will be quite low. As for common paperbacks.. they can be treated basically like the newspaper. If you don't want them throw them away (or prepare to do a lot of work to make 1 or 2 dollars). A few widely assigned paperbacks buck this trend.. such as my Norton Critical Edition Ibsen's Selected Plays. The price holds up because it is a common textbook.
In the process of listing all these books I thought back to how fun it once was to browse a good used bookstore. There were always surprises and possibilities. I would have titles running around in my head.. and sometimes I bumped into what I was looking for. My experience these days in a used bookstore is much less exciting. I rarely buy anything. The titles I most want are easy enough to find on the Internet. Even if I were to stumble upon something interesting at a used bookstore, I would just make a mental note and search later for the title online (where it would probably be less expensive). It is a loss.. but I don't much enjoy used bookstores anymore.
A system like Amazon.com Marketplace must be devastating to booksellers since lots of people, in effect, become small time booksellers. But since it is not their livelihood, these small-timers have no compunction with respect to lowering their prices to the rock bottom. These are people who in the past would just drop off books at the library or give them away at a garage sale. But now they enter the public market with the desire for a small profit. The professional bookseller has to sell books at a high enough price to pay mortgage and put food on the table for a family.. but now they are competing with people who just want to make a buck. Another problem for booksellers has got to be the dissemination of price knowledge that comes with a large online market. In the past the bookseller needed an eye for what books would sell.. and for which books were important. It took a quick eye to spot a valuable book. Now that expert eye is hardly needed as the online market prices almost anything.. or at least puts you in the ballpark.
Thinking Old: The Study
of Hebrew Scripture
September 7, 2007
When reading about the fluid composition strategies that go into ancient texts, I often try to think of music CDs. Books are fixed entities for us.. so fixed that they offer poor parallels with what we know about the genesis of earlier texts. A music CD is something else; it can be added to in a casual manner and our sensibilities are hardly ruffled. A Philip Roth novel is a Philip Roth novel.. no one is going to insert a short story or essay and tack it onto a novel entitled American Pastoral. But this happens often with CDs: for re-releases of classic albums by the Byrds, the Who, or the Beach Boys it is common for additional songs to be added. These extra songs may be marked on the packaging but in the listening experience these all bleed into one new and larger album. A few classic musical texts (such as Sgt. Peppers) have attained a "no touch" status.. but mostly we allow tampering with albums (the whole premise of iPod).
Karel Can Der Toorn's Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible will be a strange book unless one is able to keep an open mind with respect to the meaning of a book:
...the prophets who gave their names to the books wrote neither those books nor the oracles they contain... The scribes who composed the books used written records based on the recollections of partisans and supporters of the prophets; separate oracles existed in written form before the collections took shape. [203]
Van Der Toorn is not saying that Amos never delivered any of the prophecies that are credited to him; he is claiming that Amos had nothing to do with the composition of the book of Amos. The books of prophecy are thus similar to the music CDs that collect the songs of popular artists who released 45 singles. Chuck Berry released singles, but he had nothing to do with the later compilation of the CD entitled The Great 28 (a collection of his greatest hits). Such a CD becomes canonical, but it is hardly a final product that Chuck Berry could have envisioned. Berry's original view was limited to the 45 single, which had its own market and formal demands.
Van Der Toorn's work is part of a growing body of texts that take as their subject the way particular systems of knowledge (in this case the place of the scribe in the Near East) shape and decisively change traditions. In the penultimate chapter "Inventing Revelation" we learn how the idea of revelation, once the privilege of oral communication, was connected to the written page. As so often in religious history, great conceptual changes are not driven by geniuses, but rather material changes in technology that put the past in a wholly new light. The emphasis here on "scribal culture" allows us to see the changes in the Hebrew Bible as reflective of social changes.
One issue I have is Van Der Toorn's treatment of the so-called Confessions of Jeremiah (pgs. 188-93). These are a series of passages that sound like the prophet is speaking of himself and his experiences with an intimate and personal voice. Van Der Toorn makes short work of this idea and demonstrates that all these passages that seem autobiographical borrow heavily from the stock motifs of the Psalms and wisdom literature. Now, it may be true that these Confessions were written by a scribe.. and not Jeremiah.. but I have never understood why stock language is an argument against the presence of authentic personal expressions. Plenty of Hallmark cards speak the true emotions of its purchasers. Plenty of bad poets speak from the heart when they recycle earlier expressions. So why could not a prophet speak through the language and images he knows so well?
Yellow Arrows and Processing Places
September 5, 2007
For the second day in a row I spent a lot of time taking notes and learning about various online projects and possibilities. Today's NITLE session was on wireless and mobile technology, and once again it was led by Bryan Alexander (blog here). What caught my ear was a reference to various ongoing efforts to create an annotated geography of various cities. One effort in this direction is Yellow Arrow.
The idea of Yellow Arrow is that someone will set a Yellow Arrow sticker on a building or sign.. and then post online a note about what is unique or interesting about that spot. Anyone who comes across the sticker can send in its code from a cell phone and receive via instant message the note about that particular place. If enough of these yellow arrows were to get placed, there would be a virtual democratic geography of a city.
The goal of these yellow arrows is not to mark history's great events (the brass plaques do that just fine).. but to mark the everyday places that acquire individual significance. This idea works best in a large city like New York with lots of people willing to step into the role of geographer of personal space. For a nicely done introduction to the goals of this group press here. It is hard not to be swept up by the vision of humble spots all across the city that are important to someone.. if only because this is where someone catches a bus every morning.
This project ties in perfectly with my book project (How to Build Places with Words: The Narrative Construction of Sacred Places). My argument is that place gains significance as people attach stories to physical sites. Some of these stories (death of Jesus, place where someone proposed to his wife, or site of national tragedy) acquire immense significance for group or personal identities. The Yellow Arrow project is an example of this phenomenon at work.. only it takes place almost entirely on the level of personal identity. I doubt anyone is marking 9/11's ground zero with a yellow sticker.. the goal here is more modest.
The temptation in studying something like Yellow Arrow is to think of it as a unique outgrowth of our digital age. But this work of connecting places to stories is something that takes place in every culture. What underlies this response to place is our human cognitive reliance on narrative to build meaning and identity. A project like Yellow Arrow makes that process visible in a new and unique way.. but it is a human response to place that is as old as the earliest human records (see someday my chapter on Abydos in ancient Egypt).
I think it is important to recognize the limitations of a project like this. If it worked perfectly and a large body of individuals covered a city with yellow arrows and personal commentary about sites.. what would be accomplished? It would be a version of a city that captured a cross-section of its lived experience in our own time. What I am after as a scholar of the city is to imagine the way the city was experienced 100, 200 or even 1,000 years ago. If Yellow Arrow had been around back then, what would the text messages say? What zones of human misery or triumph would we discover? The work of the scholar is thus essentially a creative work..
Yellow Arrow, it should also be noted, does not allow for any differentiation in historic layers or class/ethnic differences in perception. The result is a "melting pot" model of human geography in which everyone is part of a human present. That may be a preferred version of the world.. but it muddles the fractured human geography that scholars must pursue.
Web 2.0 and the Classroom
September 4, 2007
Today Lawrence University hosted a NITLE workshop on the use of social software in an academic context. The workshop was led by Bryan Alexander (you can visit his blog here). The focus was really on introducing faculty and staff to tools such as Del.ic.ious bookmarks, RSS feeds, Flickr photo sharing, and YouTube videos. In the past I have written about my philosophy of using these internet tools in an academic setting, but I would also like to set down some further thoughts on this topic.
During the workshop we got a chance to poke around on different sites.. and I searched for Mecca on YouTube. I came across the following video:
There is nothing too special about the video.. it appears to be a participant's view of the circumambulation of the Kaabah. Portions of professional videos (by National Geographic, for example) are also available.. but these personal non-professional videos I find the most interesting.
Such participant videos and photos are some of the most important contributions of social sites such as YouTube and Flickr. People whose experience would otherwise have gone unnoted and unrecorded are now available. The camera is jumpy and the creators are uncritical.. but that is the point of participant views. When sites like YouTube are critiqued it is often because the information peddled on them is unreliable.. somehow students might get the wrong facts. But this misses the point of the material: it is not direct a purveyor of information.. no, the material itself is an object of study.
In my class on the Hajj we found representations of pilgrimage on YouTube, on Flickr, and on personal pages hosted by FaceBook. All of these presentations of personal experience can be read and interpreted. In other words, they represent a mountain of raw cultural material to be digested and worked through by a critical viewer. This requires a fundamentally different way of approaching internet content.. but it is much less worried about factuality.
On a different point.. it sometimes seems a certain level of dissonance between the stated goals of Old Roads (to reinvigorate and preserve old ways of thinking and perceiving) and the medium of the internet. I feel this same dissonance in discussions about the role of the internet in higher education. What could be more inimical to the academic goals of reading and writing than the mushy and multiplying content of the internet?
My internal riposte to these questions runs something like this:
1) critical thought and argument is a cognitive process that infuses oral cultures, written cultures, hybrid cultures, and our own (perhaps) growing digital culture. We must keep our eyes on the cognitive process and not the media skin.
2) I am a bibliophile.. I might as well admit. I don't believe there is any way to study the past without engagement in primary written texts. I acknowledge that for many people the internet is a tug away from books.. but for those of us who still love books the internet can teach us something about our love.. and allow us to approach books with more respect for their place as physical artifacts of cultures that inevitably change.
"Help My Distrust":
Melville's The Confidence-Man
September 2, 2007
In today's New York Times Magazine there is a brief article explaining the origins of the current housing market crisis. Roger Lowenstein ties the crisis to the liquidization of the housing market. As loans get traded and consolidated, there is less reason for the banks to closely vet their home loans.. and the corporations who end up holding the loans are several steps removed from them. Lowenstein cites John Maynard Keynes in his conclusion:
"Each individual investor flatters himself that his commitment is 'liquid,'" Keynes wrote, and the belief that he can exit the market at will "calms his nerves and makes him much more wiling to run a risk." The catch is that investors, collectively, can never exit in unison.. Whenever they try, panic and losses are the sure result.
Confidence, then, is a key ingredient in the markets. The lack of confidence is what sets off stampedes for the door.. and what destroys fortunes.
Melville's last novel, The Confidence-Man, was published in 1857. It is the perfect book for anyone looking at the world with newly shaken confidence. Melville constructs an episodic tale in which a single confidence-man (in the sense of swindler) gains the trust of a succession of individuals that are traveling on a steamboat down the Mississippi River. The trick of the novel, which is rather thickly laid on, is that the confidence-man is also a preacher of the value of confidence as a social good. His job in every guise is to build confidence and trust.
Melville introduces the economic distrust that brings about the dreaded "bear" market:
"The depression of our stock was solely owing to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears." [891]
This economic lack of confidence is multiplied to every aspect of human experience:
...these same destroyers of confidence, and gloomy philosophers of the stock-market, though false in themselves, are yet true types of most destroyers of confidence and gloomy philosophers, the world over. Fellows who, whether in stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion—be it what it may—trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness... [891]
Something like this suspicion of negativity remains at large in America.. and you can pick your level of discourse: the war, the markets, spiritual concerns.
This spirit of positivity is what Melville is hunting throughout The Confidence-Man.. but he goes about it in an oblique manner. On the one hand the importance of confidence in all human endeavors is portrayed. But then those with confidence are apt to get ripped off by the swindler who is always on hand to manipulate confidence. The other option would seem to be suspicion toward all social ties.. but that does not seem to quite work either. Melville appears to paint a world in which we need confidence, and in which we can't help but be ripped off if we do have confidence.
In one brief chapter entitled "Worth the Consideration of Those to Whom It May Prove Worth Considering".. a title that begs for confidence in the writer, I might point out.. Melville proposes a theory of fiction. His main contention is that human beings are too complex to be caught easily in fiction:
That fiction, where every character can, by reason of its consistency, be comprehended at a glance, either exhibits but sections of character, making them appear for wholes, or else is very untrue to reality.
I hear that as an attack on genre fiction of all kinds.. which has as its central assumption the idea that characters fit into recognizable types. A better methodology is for authors to present humans as "duck-billed beavers".. that is, as creatures whose parts do not fit together in an understandable way. This is, needless to say, not a theory that lends to confidence in human beings.
At various places in the novel Melville sets his characters to discussing people who are not as easily classified as the characters would like. The best example is that of the "Indian hater" Colonel John Moredock who likes nothing better than to head out into the woods and kill Indians.. yet who is also a loving husband and father, and citizen who is almost persuaded to run for governor. The confidence-man cannot abide the story:
To me some parts don't hang together. If the man of hate, how could John Moredock be also the man of love? Either his lone campaigns are fabulous as Hercules'; or else, those being true, what was thrown in about his geniality is but garnish. [1008]
The strange inconsistency of human beings will not be allowed by the confidence-man.. who after all depends on making people feel that the world is comprehensible.
Melville's game is quite different. He is letting a certain philosophical cat out of the bag: the world is not simple and one best deals with it by recognizing its complexity. Everything, from participating in the housing market to engaging in wars to sizing up your neighbor, should be done with circumspection and caution. That is not a message that has ever been popular in our country.
