To My YouTube Critics
April 30, 2007
I have told myself for a while now that when I get 10,000 views of my YouTube videos I would do a round-up of the comments.. and I am now at 10,333 views. When I first started putting up videos I did not expect an outside audience. I figured I would pick up views from people who visited my blog.. but then a funny thing happened: my YouTube numbers started going up modestly.. and people left comments.
My earliest video in Wisconsin was the Neenah video. It became the prototype for the rest of my videos in terms of style and narration. I just re-watched the video and if you haven't seen it, you might want to check it out:
There is nothing too controversial in there.. I don't make any spectacular claims. It is obvious that we are visiting and that I am trying to make sense of what is around me. But oh the ire that this video evoked from the Neenah crowd.
One early comment took umbrage at my reference to Neenah as a "town" and not a city:
also,its not exactly a little town. neenah high is the 3rd biggest high school in the state, and it has 8 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, about 4 privet schools, and 1 big high school. the total population is over 24000, idk how big that is compared to other cities, but you were in the smallest part of the city by far.
It strikes me that this is one of those "You know you're a redneck if.." kinds of comments. If you defend your cityhood by reeling off the size of your high school.. then you known you live in a small town. I mean, officially I am sure Neenah is incorporated as a city, but a population of 24,000 falls well within the semantic range of "town".
In the video I make a couple of innocent comments about paper manufacturing. There is a red smokestack of some kind and in giant letters it reads: "Bergstrom Paper". OK, so I don't know whether the mill is still running or not.. but I have decent visual evidence connecting it to this company. I also make reference to Kimberly-Clark in Appleton. It turns out I am wrong:
Not a very good video. and it was posted by someone completely unfamiliar with the area. First of all, Bergstrom paper does not exist anymore. They were acquired by Glatfelter years ago. Recently, Glatfelter closed the Neenah mill. Kimberly-Clark is based out of Neenah among other parts of the country, but not Appleton.
Somebody else informs me about the state of affairs with Kimberly-Clark:
I'm from appleton and also go to UWM. My father used to be a researcher at K/C. It's actually based in Texas and Menasha.
I am gratefully corrected for my ignorance concerning Glatfelter's acquisition of Bergstrom. But as for Kimberly-Clark's location, Menasha is a small town (sorry) right next door to Appleton. So I fail to see why it is such a mistake to reference Kimberly-Clark as being in Appleton. Another critic makes a similarly snide remark about my description of the Fox River Mall as being in Appleton:
When did the Fox River Mall move itself to Appleton? Ummm....
Of course.. silly me.. the mall is in Grand Chute, just outside the Appleton city line. These comments are stunningly geographically picky.. nothing like I would expect from my experience growing up in Southern California where city after city bleed into each other and I was often as not ignorant of where those lines might be.
Another critic takes me on for some other substantive issues:
i live right in neenah. its not a small town at all! and "city hall" isn't what u say it is, its just a big tower. and doo dads? we're just a regular city. (not town) and by the way, riverside park is NOT outside of town, its right in the middle. and the fountain doesn't really actually celebrate children, its just a fountain. i'm not saying this is a bad video, u just need to get ur facts strait.
Thank you candiekiss22292! The most amusing part of this comment is the reference to the fountain (as you will note from the video, it is decorated with bronze sculptures of children) which candiekiss22292 claims does not actually celebrate children.. "its just a fountain". I don't know what to say.
The reference to Riverside Park as being outside of town was misleading if taken in a literal fashion. But the park is outside that clump of buildings downtown. When I say outside of town I am not making a metaphysical claim so much as saying simply: "away from that area where the previous part of this video was shot.. which could be colloquially construed as central Neenah."
As for the rest of candiekiss22292's comments, I think they are damning enough as they stand.. (note the whole city/town issue again).
Another class of comments is pretty rude about the lack of research. In the video I mention that some of the nice houses on the shore of Lake Winnebago are outside the financial scope of an assistant professor. Several people pick up on my occupation:
I have lived in the area my entire life, so yes i probably know more about Neenah then most other people, But it would seem to me that someone who is an Assistant Professor would at least try to do some research and find something out about the town. Almost every landmark was misidentified.
Another critic is even harsher:
Perhaps if you learn to do better research, you might make full professor someday...
Again, fascinating comments. I think what lies behind them is a vague conception of the "expert".. which is not so much an academic category as a TV talking-head category. In other words, there is an expectation that someone will stand up and explain what is what. But here is my advice: If you want someone to tell you about Glatfelter's acquisition of Bergstrom, then fucking go to the website for the Neenah chamber of commerce.. or rent a fucking PBS documentary from your public library (which I am sure is HUGE). Plenty of people out there want to be experts.
What I am up to is a little different. I want to walk into a town without doing any research and try to read it. What kind of sense can I make of this place from visual cues? I may be way off.. but at the end of a video you can see for yourself how a visitor has pieced together clues from the landscape. That kind of non-expert information about how a town is experienced is valuable.. and not something provided by the chamber of commerce or any tourist center. That kind of information also happens to be what I most appreciate from the texts in my academic interest.. what could be more fascinating than a medieval Arabic travel narrative in which a visitor describes the landmarks of a town he has never before visited?
I should mention one more comment:
I have a hunch you vote Democrat, no evidence, just a good hunch. I enjoy the video, with commentary.
That was a kind comment.. and perceptive since we do indeed vote Democrat. But the world would be a better place if we just tried to be nice to each other. Thank you NewtonBrook.
NITLE Conference
April 29, 2007
The past few days I have been attending a NITLE conference on "Teaching with Media Resources in Middle Eastern and Asian Studies" hosted by Lake Forest College outside Chicago. NITLE is an acronym for something, but for what I am not sure. Its mission is as follows:
NITLE is a non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting liberal education. We provide opportunities for teachers in liberal arts contexts to create transformative learning experiences for and with their students by deploying emerging technologies in innovative, effective, and sustainable ways.
The important elements in there are that it is a non-profit organization that works with liberal arts colleges (such as Lawrence) to improve their utilization of emerging technologies.
I left the conference very encouraged. I ran into a number of other scholars that were making use of the web in their teaching and research. When I came to Lawrence I decided not to play things safe.. rather to take some chances with my assignments and research directions. After this conference I know that I want to continue pushing forward with these ideas.
There were a few specific things that occurred to me in the course of the conference:
- It is clear that a lot of academic computing energy is going into building bigger and better databases to house texts and images. This is no small thing.. and I got an introduction to several sites that will be useful for my work. But I think these kinds of large projects can sometimes pull attention away from the smaller sites that develop a single interest or group of interests. The web offers new ways of thinking about texts.. of guiding the reader to a new experience of places and subjects. To simply convert everything into a catalog of images is reductionistic. And so this is one major task of Old Roads: to be a site that sets a spotlight on small creative sites and comes back again and again to questions of creative form on the web.
- I see two main ways of looking at student projects. One colleague had students return from study abroad with photos that could be incorporated and commented on in a website. Such a project becomes a way to get students to look at their world critically while traveling. On the other hand I am often trying to get students to experience the Middle East at a distance through their interaction with web-based programs such as Google Earth or Flickr. Perhaps I could distinguish between a reflective and imaginative type of web assignment.
- I continue to think blogging could be a powerful tool for teaching writing. What if instead of required writing courses, all students were required to keep a blog and web-portfolio? This would help to create writing as a lifestyle.. which I don't think is accomplished in traditional writing courses. It would also provide a site where students are saving papers in which they have pride. Imagine how everyone at the end of four years could have a fine presentation website of their time in college.. complete with papers, reflections, art, and photos.
- I must learn how to do QTVR.. which is a 360 degree photo collage that allows you to "look around" a spot. It probably won't be too long before these show up right here in my blog.. which is where I often try to practice new things..
The Kebra Negast
April 26, 2007
The Kebra Negast relates the sacred history of Ethiopia. It begins with Adam and moves through Old Testament history. The central story concerns the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. Their meeting turns out to have involved not just an exchange of wisdom! The Queen leaves, but she is pregnant with a son.. and this son eventually returns to Israel to meet his father. Solomon tries to persuade him to stay but he insists on returning to his home Ethiopia. Solomon offers to send with him the firstborn sons of his nobles.. which turns out to be a mistake when they abscond with the Ark of the Covenant, taking it with them to Ethiopia.
This story is not just a fantasy fiction, but an example of an identity-forming narrative. Looked at in this way the Kebra Negast represents an intense act of the religious imagination. It draws together a number of biblical stories and molds them into a story that makes Ethiopia into the chosen people of God and the inheritor of Israel's promises. The dream of Solomon is an example:
...there appeared unto King Solomon a brilliant sun, and it came down form heaven and shed exceedingly great splendour over Israel. And when it had tarried there for a time it suddenly withdrew itself, and it flew away to the country of Ethiopia, and it shown there with exceedingly great brightness for ever, for it willed to dwell there. [35]
That is a borrowing of Ezekiel's vision in which he sees the glory of God departing from the temple.. only now that departing glory is transferable to a new place. Likewise the departure of Solomon's Ethiopian son with the firstborn from the nobles of Israel is likened to the Exodus from Egypt. The Kebra Negast may not be well written, but the complex religious imagination on display in it is marvelous.
I could at times detect a Quranic influence. The author lets Sheba explain her false worship:
We worship the sun according as our fathers have taught us to do, because we say that the sun is the king of the gods. [28]
Then we can turn to the Quran's version of the story of Solomon and Sheba. A Hoopoe tells Solomon about Sheba:
I come to you from Sheba with firm news. I found a woman ruling over the people... but I found that she and her people worshipped the sun instead of God. [27.22-24]
The Kebra Negast likewise confirms the Quranic legends about Solomon knowing the language of the birds.
It is interesting to try to imagine the process by which an imaginative work like this would come about. One crucial step is the identification of vague passages within a canonical text. These vague passages are available for narrative amplification. The queen of Sheba was from an unknown location.. and so she could be from almost anywhere. In the Kebra Negast she becomes the ancient Queen of Ethiopia. Some of the richest passages in sacred texts are those ones that leave the door open for such narrative amplification (consider the long interpretive history of Melchizedek!).
A second step is the identification of a guiding basic-narrrative. In this case the image of the glory of God departing from the temple in Jerusalem.. and the parallel notion that the glory of God could migrate to another nation.. is the basic-narrative. My notion is that this transfer of the glory of God was first identified as a basic-narrative.. and then the facts of the story of Solomon and Sheba were fancifully elaborated to fill in that basic-narrative with a faux history. The gravitational pull of basic-narratives thus emerges as a central factor in the creation of sacred texts.
International Religion
April 25, 2007
In an essay a student cited a description of the experience of the hajj:
I went to Hajj when I was 17. Didn't really understand
what it means. I was very uncomfortable because it was
very crowded and very hot. The truly awesome thing is
all these people of different countries, ages,
backgrounds were there thinking of God and how to
please Him. Hajj is like being born again, having all
your sins wiped out.
The "awesome thing" about the experience was the tremendous crowd and diverse backgrounds of the people on the hajj. This is a traditional Muslim claim about the hajj: it is a place where the diversity of the ummah is immediately apparent. It is as close as one can get to the gathering of believers at the resurrection.
That standard Muslim interpretation is followed, however, by language that sounds Christian: "Hajj is like being born again, having all your sins wiped out." The idea that completion of the hajj will bring about forgiveness of sins is present in the hadith.. but the close association here with being "born again" swerves this sentiment toward a more typically Christian frame of experience. This would be easy to understand if the source for this quotation had been a western Muslim convert.. or even just someone who had grown up in close proximity to Christian culture. But no.. the source is a Saudi citizen.
One element of globalization that does not get studied enough is the migration of concepts into different language systems. It is often noted that local languages are threatened by globalization.. but even languages that maintain their viability are infiltrated by outside concepts. This came home to me often while living in Cairo and reading Arabic newspapers. One day I came across the phrase: "George Bush gave Ariel Sharon the green light.." As Arabic gained the technical terms to talk about weapons of mass destruction, United Nations resolutions, American electoral politics, and modern economic discourse, it was fundamentally changed. The language has become a conduit for a globalized discourse.
Religious concepts are liable to a similar pattern of movement. Central ideas from one stream of religious thought can easily be translated into another religious tradition.. and find a new home there. This kind of concept migration can happen in any direction.. various religions contributing their distinctive concepts to our common stock of ways to interpret experience. The upshot of this process will be that religious traditions become more and more carriers of a single globalized religious discourse. They may maintain a disctinctive name and identity (like languages).. but the contents of these religions will come to look increasingly like the contents of other religions (again, like languages).
I should add that I find this kind of homogenization of traditions depressing.. and this is a major reason that I find studying ancient religious traditions so much more interesting than modern ones. Not that any tradition has ever been hermetically sealed off from all others.. but the traditions I study have been highly successful at interpreting human experience on their own terms. One of our principal goals here at Old Roads is to preserve some of the diversity of human experience of the world.. and to roll back a little the cognitive homogenization that would make us all see the world through the same mental frame.
Reading the Qur'an
and Listening to the Beatles
April 24, 2007
I have been thinking lately about the formal qualities of suras (chapters of the Qur'an). I enjoy reading the Qur'an.. but I also recognize the challenges it poses to anyone coming at it expecting it to read like a modern book.. with fast moving stories and plot lines.
The building blocks for the experience of reading the Qur'an are suras. They have titles such as "The Cow", "The Bee", or "The Dispute". They range in size from about 30 pages to a handful of lines. A large portion of the Qur'an consists of what I would call mid-size suras.. ranging from a full page to about 8 pages. When someone sits down to read the Qur'an, this is what will stick in his/her mind. Sura after sura take up the same narrow range of themes.
One way to view these themes is as building blocks. You could, I believe, set out a group of about twenty basic themes. Perhaps six of these we could label major recurring themes: the nature of the Qur'an, heaven and hell, past prophets, natural signs, rebuke to non-believers, and good works. The composition of the suras (however we imagine that process) would mean the fresh combination of these building blocks.
Unlike a modern novel, in reading the Qur'an the attention of the reader is not captured by the constant generation of new situations and novel themes. The reader must instead be satisfied with stock themes that are occasionally developed in novel ways. Once the pattern of stock themes is realized, the reader can focus on the variations.. which is where the richness of the Qur'an lies.
One could compare a sura to a Beatles album.. at least on a strictly formal level. What makes a Beatles album a Beatles album? Each album contains a handful of songs.. the songs are united by a general "Beatles" sound. From their first albums we can detect certain patterns developing: Ringo Starr always sings one song, George Harrison gets two songs, and then McCartney and Lennon trade off vocals. These are formal building blocks for the albums. (We know it when we are listening to a McCartney solo album largely because the formal feel of the album is disturbed.)
So how do we read a Beatles album? Not necessarily by going through the songs and figuring out how one theme leads to another and builds a coherent meaning.. in the way we would interpret a poem or short story. An album can be understood as a parcel of interrelated themes.. a constellation of ideas loosely held together. The unity of the album is not constructed through direct meaning, but by expected formal qualities that can be manipulated in different ways.
A sura can be experienced in much the same way as a Beatles album.. I would argue. The goal is often not to locate a meaning that comes from in a linear fashion through points A-B-C-D.. but rather through appreciating the loose grouping of stock themes and their surprising ability to surprise.
Victory and Defeat in Iraq
April 24, 2007
Victory and defeat are the frustrating keywords for the current debate about the Iraq War. VP Dick Cheney today accused Democrats of defeatism:
"What's most troubling about Senator Reid's comments yesterday is his defeatism," Cheney said. "Indeed, last week he said the war is already lost. And the timetable legislation that he is now pursuing would guarantee defeat."
And George Bush never misses an opportunity to mention that he is in favor of victory.
From their comments one might get the idea that the Bush administration sees the Iraq War as analogous to a baseball game that has unfortunately gone to extra innings. At some point, it is hoped, we will score the necessary points and the game will be over. At that point we will be the victors. Democrats who wanted to throw in the towel in the 15th inning will then look foolish.
The problem with this view of victory is that the Iraq War is not a game where at the end somebody wins. The language of victory and defeat is conspicuously inadequate for talking about the war. From an international perspective many of our central goals for the war (such as the encouragement of democracy and political liberalization in the Middle East) are dead. The US has lost immeasurable prestige and clout around the world. At home we have lost 3,200+ soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars. Not to mention the horrors being lived through by millions of Iraqis. These are all concrete LOSSES. Even if tomorrow the Bush dream came true and the insurgents walked out of their underground hideouts with their hands in the air.. we would find ourselves in a hole with little positive to say about our effort.
Even as these losses mount, the administration sticks to its language of victory. But what does victory mean? The word has already been defined downward so far that it is unrecognizable. Our best case scenario involves a Shi'a led government that would be allied to Iran and hard to distinguish from Lebanon's Hezbollah. But it is hard to shake the conviction that what we are fighting for is simply that word: victory. Bush appears to want more than anything else to be "victorious".. even if the word is emptied of all strategic significance. But he will not have lost a war.. he will simply have drug us into the biggest mess anyone can remember.
Happiness According to Ozu:
A Scene from Late Spring
April 21, 2007
Near the end of Late Spring is a scene that describes two distinct versions of happiness. Throughout the film we have watched as Noriko (Setsuko Hara) and her father (Chishu Ryu) tip-toe around the idea of marriage. Finally at the conclusion the two set out there contrasting visions of happiness. The following is a commentary on this critical scene.
As so often with Ozu, the transition to a new scene is done by a series of still life videos. Father and daughter are in Kyoto for a final trip before her wedding. These images encourage us to meditate on the rocks in the garden.. and given the themes of the film it is hard not to connect the solitary or coupled rocks to the characters in the film and the human endeavor to find companionship.
At the beginning of this scene we watch father and daughter packing up their things and getting ready to leave Kyoto. The father wishes they had made more trips like this.. and then notes: "This is our last trip together." It is a comment that might be seen as a bad move, given his daughter's obvious discomfort with leaving him. But it sparks a moment of human honesty.. and this ability to catch human beings being honest with each other is one reason I keep coming back to Yasujiro Ozu.
Quickly the father picks up a book to put in his bag. We know the father is a scholar.. so there is nothing out of place when we note that the book is Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietszche. We note the identity of the book only because of the slight purposeful tilt given to it by the father.
The daughter is moved by the idea that this is their last trip together.. and some of the final days she will get to spend with her father. Her hope is to keep things the way they are:
I want us to stay as we are. I don't want to go anywhere. Being with you is enough for me. I'm happy just as I am. Even marriage couldn't make me any happier. I'm content with this life.
We could call this the passive theory of happiness. Noriko has grown used to her father and feels happy with the life she has grown into. It is what she has always known and nothing about marriage seems to offer a similar sense of happiness.
After Noriko's defense of contentment, her father gets to step in and develop his own ideas about happiness. His first move is to root his conception of happiness in the realities of life:
I'm 56 years old. My life is nearing its end. But your life as a couple is just beginning. You're starting a new life, one that you and Satake must build together. One in which I play no part. That's the order of human life and history.
That is a strong point against Noriko's version of happiness. Contentment with the way things are sounds good.. but it is flawed since it does not confront the fact that her father will not always be there. Her father points out that this is the way life and history proceed.
The father next sets out an alternative version of happiness. This is not a happiness that is passively experienced, but one that must be actively constructed:
Marriage may not mean happiness from the start. To expect such immediate happiness is a mistake. Happiness isn't something you wait around for. It's something you create yourself. Getting married isn't happiness. Happiness lies in the forging of a new life shared together. It may take a year or two, maybe even five or ten. Happiness comes only through effort.
We could call this the active theory of happiness. The passive contentment of Noriko with her accustomed life cannot accommodate this active version. How she feels about getting married is beside the point.. the deeper point is that marriage offers the chance to apply yourself to the creation of something new and different.. and at the end of that process is something that can truly be called happiness.
The father winds up his argument about happiness with a reference to his relationship with Noriko's mother. He tells his daughter that often he found her mother crying by herself in the kitchen. His use of such intimate details is to point out to his daughter that the route to happiness is not easy.. in fact it is difficult and wrenching.
The father's argument about happiness does not stir any more resistance from Noriko. She looks up at him with tears in her eyes.. and apologizes for her selfishness. The father meanwhile expresses kindly how he wants her to be happy.
That glimpse of a text by Nietszche lets Ozu point out the intellectual roots of this conception of happiness. Nietszche is the preeminent philosopher of the will. The Overman.. as developed in Thus Spake Zarathustra.. is marked by the ability to create his own terms for happiness. The application of the philosophy of the Overman to gentle Noriko may strike one as odd.. but may be only because of Nietzsche's current reputation. His ideas, though extravagantly stated, point out a possible direction for an individual (and perhaps for a nation).
The scene ends.. and we leap forward in time to the day of Noriko's wedding. The transition presents us with an informal scene of three children. This is fitting since children will surely be part of the life Noriko and her husband will create. We also have just a moment to apply the active version of happiness to these young lives.. and project them into the future. Earlier we have seen them playing baseball.. and signs of western influence are littered throughout the film. The process of building happiness, we might conclude, will occur in the midst of daunting external changes.
The Baseball Card Effect
April 20, 2007
Recently my parents dropped off a few boxes of my old stuff.. and I found plenty of evidence for my youthful baseball fever. This fever manifested itself in baseball card collecting. The years from about the 4th grade to the 7th grade were my prime years. I have the necessary memories of trading the cards and opening the wax packs.. sometimes even chewing the gum. I collected for years.. used the money I earned from a paper route to buy old cards.. and acquired a few complete sets. Then in high school as I worked on another collection that grew to seem even more pressing.. namely, my music collection.. I took my most valuable rookie cards and two complete sets (1983 & 1984 Topps) and took them to the card and coin shop in Redlands. I got some cash and God knows what music tapes I bought.
For the longest time I felt mildly guilty about that transaction. It looked and felt like a trade-in of something that would be valuable in the long term for tapes that would be valuable only in the short term. Then this past summer I ran into an article on Slate which put my mind at ease.. It turned out that the baseball card market had gone belly up:
Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They've taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn't get out of the game took a beating.
This was naturally a comforting message for me.. after all, it would have been about 1991 that I sold those rookie cards and my two sets. So I actually managed to cash in at the best possible time. Suddenly I feel smart..
Since I learned this information about the fate of baseball cards, I often wonder what other bubbles there might be out there. The key point to consider is that many things appear valuable because of social pressures. Lots of silly things suddenly become "hot". The game, though, is to recognize what will have lasting importance and interest. We might ask: In 200 years, what among the myriad things that surround us will be seen as a genuine cultural artifact? That is not an easy question.. and for the true speculator it is a useless question, since between now and then random useless things will go through surges in price and popularity. My bet is that we can get rid of Barbies and Beanie Babies.. Anything that is collected for its own sake and does not have a genuine place in the economy of everyday life is worthless.. or will be before too many years.
The Language of the Piraha
April 19, 2007
The article entitled "The Interpreter" in the April 16 edition of the New Yorker grabbed my attention. It recounts the linguistic work of Dan Everett among a tribe inhabiting the Amazon.. the Piraha. Everett had a background I could immediately recognize. At seventeen he became a born-again Christian and attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. In 1976 he attended the Summer Institute in Linguistics (SIL).. training to translate the Bible into another language.
Representatives from SIL visited Prairie often.. looking for recruits to the summer seminar (who would go on to become missionaries). I remember a demonstration in which an SIL representative found someone from the audience who spoke a language he did not know and demonstrated to us the tools for picking up a language from scratch. The article describes Everett's use of this same demonstration:
...Everett regularly impresses academic audiences with a demonstration in which he picks from among the crowd a speaker of a language that he has never heard. "Within twenty minutes, he can tell you the basic structure of the language and how it works," Gordon said... [121]
It was impressive to see. But alas.. although missionary work did appeal to me, Bible translation was just not going to be my thing. (This was not true for some friends of mine.. Leigh and Barbara Labrecque went to SIL and then on to an island in the Pacific to translate the Bible.. here is their story).
Everett ended up working with the Piraha in the Amazon. It is not the kind of tribe that one might expect from reading Gates of Splendor.. they were not particularly dangerous.. but their language was unique: "The Piraha... have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each," "every," "most," or "few"" (120). Even more importantly for the field of linguistics, they have no recursion.. the property by which linguistic expressions can be expanded indefinitely.
Those may sound like facts of strictly academic interest.. but the implications for religion are hard to overstate. Everett notes that the Piraha have no collective memory and no creation myths:
...he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people's lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Piraha do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. [130]
If this were true, the Piraha could not have a religion as we recognize it. If one can only speak of what is here and observable, then obviously talk of God and the afterlife.. not to mention belief in sacred events of the past.. are not possible.
The Piraha seem to have had an influence on Everett's faith. His faith waned as he became "convinced that the Piraha assigned no spiritual meaning to the Bible..." (126). A religion such as Christianity that makes universal claims cannot abide by the idea that human cognition could be so different.
This makes me think back to promotional videos for groups such as New Tribes Missions.. which sends missionaries to Papua New Guinea. I have an image in my head of some middle-aged couple pointing to handy illustrations of the six days of creation and the nature of Jesus' sacrifice. I found the following tribal testimony on their website:
“This has been a good time for us now to see what Christ has really done for us. He died and his blood spilled out for our sins and then He rose and stomped on Satan’s head and crushed it. Now I am not afraid any more and my insides are no longer heavy. I am so happy.
“Before I understood that Jesus died for me, my sin – it was like I was carrying a huge string bag not full of sweet potatoes, but full of stones. I was hunched over under all the weight, staggering around walking on all fours like a pig because of the heaviness I was carrying. But Jesus just took the bag off of my back side, and now I can stand up straight and walk with ease like a woman and not a pig.”
I read these things now.. (just like I did back in the day when I was at Prairie) and think: hmm.. I am just not so sure that this is all what it seems. I mean, the externals may be there.. but does it all really mean the same thing?
It's not just religion that has an issue with cognitive difference.. my critique of the film Babel rested on the fact that Hollywood seems unable to think of human beings as different in any way beyond language and hygiene. The unspoken assumption is that if only we had a perfect voice-recognition electronic gizmo, we would see that we are all the same. The upshot of this article about the Piraha is that this is not true. Commenting on the attempts of another linguist to do field work with the Piraha, Everett comments: "Just because we're sitting in the same room doesn't mean we're sitting in the same century" (134).
Won't Get Fooled Again, The Who
April 17, 2007
On the internet there are a number of quality websites devoted to film.. but nothing like these exist for popular music. Film has a well developed critical language.. in plenty of colleges and universities you could take courses on film or even get a major in film studies. Just try to major in popular music. Yet this is our Romanticism! In the way that English majors work through 19th century authors.. students will someday listen to the major creators of rock music.
I don't throw around "Romanticism" lightly. There is a parallel between the flowering of rock music and the poetry that came to the fore at the start of the 19th century. We can begin with the spirit of revolution that both periods inherited. The essay by M.H. Abrams entitled "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" provides a helpful quotation from Robert Southey, contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge:
"Few persons but those who have lived in it," Southey reminisced in his Tory middle age, "can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race."
The Sixties awakened similarly radical hopes. Even amid the turbulence of those times, the positive sense of a new beginning is clear to anyone who studies the period.
Plenty of rock songs celebrate that new world of the Sixties. We could do worse than simply reading over the roster of the performers at Woodstock in 1969. Even more interesting, however, are the songs that come out in the early to mid 1970s.. detailing the failure of the Sixties. Visionary hopes gave way to more sober assessments.. and it is perhaps in this disappointment that we find the best and purest expressions of Romanticism.
Here again I see a parallel with the Romantic poets of the 19th century. These poets may have been inspired by the French Revolution and come of age expecting great things.. but their strongest work is often an effort to come to grips with the failure of political movements. I cite M.H. Abrams again:
In the other Romantic visionaries, as in Wordsworth, naive millenialism produced mainly declamation, but the shattered trust in premature political revolution and the need to reconstitute the grounds of hope lay behind the major achievements. And something close to Wordsworth's evolution—the shift to a spiritual and moral revolution which will transform our experience of the old world—is also the argument of a number of the later writings of Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, and, with all his differences, Holderlin.
That passage can easily be transferred to the central artists of rock music. The height of the Sixties elicited straightforward "declamation" but disillusionment stirred their greatest work.
Item A is the song "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who. The chorus expresses perfectly the movement from public hopes to private vision:
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
The narrator finds himself surrounded by newness.. a new constitution, new revolution, and "change all around". His attitude toward this change is an ambiguous "smile and grin". He is willing to recognize the new world.. "tip his hat" to the new order.. but he stops well short of embracing it.
The next lines are the central ones of the song: "Pick up my guitar and play/ Just like yesterday". This marks a retreat into a private world of artistic creation. Furthermore, it is a return to "yesterday"—not a step into the tomorrow of the new constitution and new revolution. Finally, from within this private world he prays "We don't get fooled again." Get fooled by what? The intemperate hopes of the Sixties, I would say.
The verses of the song uniformly underline the uselessness of historical change:
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that' all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war
Needless to say, this is hardly a conservative credo. There are no warm fuzzies for the system of the past. The message is not: change is bad, we should go back to the old ways. No, this revolution really did "liberate from the foe".. but the problem is that's all it did. At the end of the day the world looks pretty much like it did at the start.. which is to say crappy.
At the very end of the song the inanity of revolution gets concisely stated:
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Which explains why a person should not take part in a revolution.. there is no changing the world.. there is only the historical certainty of a new boss.
With that negative assessment of real change we can listen again to those important lines: "Pick up my guitar and play/ Just like yesterday". But play for whom? That is to me the mystery and interest of the Who. What seems like a private and quietist message is delivered with the rattling of Pete Townshend's power chords and the bombast of Keith Moon's drums.. not to mention Roger Daltrey's throaty voice. The Who were famous for the decibel level of their concerts. But perhaps the extreme noise level goes hand in hand with this message. The noise literally pushes all other concerns outside the hall.. it serves to create a private and shared experience. And the ritual smashing of guitar at the end of the concert? A way to further emphasize the private and unique aspect of the rock concert.. which at its heart is a way to "not get fooled again"..
Indian Mounds in Minneapolis
April 15, 2007
In a recent class on the effigy mounds of Wisconsin someone asked how people spot Indian mounds in the landscape.. and recognize it as a mound and not some natural feature. As I drove across Wisconsin I was thinking about that.. and how hard it would be now to spot mounds. We underestimate the degree to which modern earth-moving equipment has shaped the landscape.
Passing through the middle of Wisconsin I saw nothing that I could recognize as part of the Native American past.. even though early American travelers seem to always be aware of the presence of traces of that past. Now those traces are invisible, yet there is no missing the massive earthworks of our own civilization.. just look at any overpass:
Everything there is a product of earth-moving equipment. It is no wonder that with our acclimation to this kind of thing in our landscape we have difficulty spotting mounds constructed by Native Americans.
Before I left Minneapolis (to get home to Emily and Rory!) I wanted to visit the Indian Mounds Park.. which happens to offer a great view of the Mississippi River:
That water is on its way to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. From north to south this river cuts through our country. I have seen this river flowing through St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.. and somehow the river seems more itself further south.. but there it is way up north.. flowing through twin cities that I do not at all associate with the Mississippi.
This bluff overlooking the river appealed to Native Americans.. and they constructed some impressive burial mounds here:
These mounds seem so insignificant now.. up against the earthworks of a large modern city. They are always a welcome site for me because they remind me of the changeableness of national narratives.. there is another story possible for the land on which I live.
The different narratives sometimes leap dramatically into view. It is funny how even the mention of Indian Mounds can elicit a religious response. I am sure whoever did this is pretty thoughtless.. and this hardly stands for a general "Christian" response.. but it makes for a symbolically rich photo. It makes me think that one use for message-graffiti is to correct perceived affronts to popular versions of the past. Monuments that repeat the standard nationalist or religious interpretations of the past will tend to be sacrosanct, while outsider views will tend to attract corrective graffiti. Contradictory versions of the past thus emerge into visibility.
Driving to Minneapolis along the "ribbon of highway" (as Woody Guthrie calls it) I listened several times to Smile by Brian Wilson. The beauty of these songs can be overwhelming. One line stood out for me:
Ribbon of concrete - just see what you done -
done to the church of the American Indian!
But our churches do stand proudly in the landscape.. settled easily into the ribbons of concrete and iron that bind together our urban centers.
Travel with My Camera:
A Philosophical Defense
April 13, 2007
I spent a large part of my day driving across Wisconsin to reach Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Tomorrow afternoon I have to deliver a paper here at a conference). I could have flown, but it kills me to fly over ground I have never seen.. and so I drove. In the course of this trip I stopped to photograph/video anything that looked odd.. or expressed some quality I thought typical of the landscape.
Travel with a camera is often taken to be a way to miss the landscape. We have all witnessed unthinking tourists pull out a camera, snap a picture of a scene, and then hurry along. In this case a camera functions as an excuse not to really look at the world—presumably that will be done when the photos are developed. More subtly, cameras are sometimes thought to detract from one's ability to simply "be" in a landscape.. The implied goal for an experience would then be to escape any form of double consciousness.. that is, to not let oneself reflect upon the experience of a place.
For me a camera is a necessity in travel. When I am visiting a place and looking for photos, I am kept at a level of creative perception that I find exhilarating. Instead of wandering around in a passive manner, I search for the effects of light and work to bind together the elements of my experience into a loose narrative. The lack of a camera breeds (at least for me) a level of mental sluggishness. Without a camera I passively take in the world and notice far less. The camera therefore provides photos.. but more importantly spurs me toward finer perception.
The relationship between camera and life is analogous to the relationship between the law and faith in the writings of Paul.
Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith.
But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
[Galatians 3.23-25]
Paul is trying to make clear the connection between law and faith. Why, if faith is all important, was the law ever given? The answer as Paul works it out is that the law served as a tutor or "custodian" until faith came. The law is therefore unimportant in itself but useful because it leads one to faith.
The camera too is something of a tutor. In a perfect world I could imagine visiting places without a camera. In this perfect world I would experience what is around me with full perception.. and have no need to take a photograph. But the mind is so prone to wander, how I feel it! I am apt to become dull and lose interest in what is around me. This is where the camera steps in.. and like the law in Paul's scheme, it takes me by the hand and delivers me to creative perception.
I should mention that I do often forget to take my camera with me. Last week on the day after Easter we got a beautiful dusting of glistening snow. I drove to pick up a pizza that Monday night and before long I realized how sorely I would miss my camera.. These were beautiful photos I was passing by! But because I am used to thinking in terms of my camera, I looked at the world in amazement.. and on a more mundane level whenever I walk to school there are beautiful ordinary things that I can appreciate. This is the way a camera builds habitual perception of the world.. and does not need to be literally present to act as a "tutor".
This philosophy forms my approach to art in general. I have an inherent distrust of perfect photos.. as I have a similar distrust of "masterpiece" books. I prefer in almost all cases the unfinished and the fragmentary.. and when I do teach a "masterpiece" it is with the intent of pointing out how, rightly nderstood, a work is fragmentary.. not some perfect whole. That may sound odd.. but think about it in the light of the ideas spelled out above. Art, in this view, is a tutor and the true goal is creative perception.. which is a state of mind. Any art that sets itself up as an end in itself.. and not as an aid to contemplation of the world.. will not fit comfortably into my philosophy.. and there are plenty of works I am willing to discard as uninteresting.
Photos that have the look of a photographer waiting around all day for the perfect pitch of light.. or for the exact combination of people.. I dislike. Photos whose composition is too fine.. or whose value clearly derives from Photoshop techniques.. I dislike. Just give me the world perceived in a moment.. and then I can instantly see how someone else is responding to the world. Often it is from looking at the work of other photographers that I learn how to see elements of my own world a little differently.. and this is one reason I so admire the work of William Eggleston, whose photo of an oven is featured at the top of this post.
Radical Hope in Cultural Loss
April 11, 2007
This morning I was teaching the biblical book of Lamentations for my Intro to Religious Studies class. I love this little book.. which I think gets neglected because it is tucked into an out of the way place in the Bible.. sandwiched between two big books: Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The book of Lamentations is composed of a series of five poems that are laments for the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 BC. It offers a narrative to explain these events: Israel has sinned, God is angry and brought judgment, there remains a hope. This final theme of hope is most purely expressed by the great lines (which I can't read without humming the chorus): "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.." When you reflect upon the fact that the Jewish people survived this captivity as a coherent group of people.. with traditions preserved.. that speaks highly of the social value of religious narratives.
This morning before class, serendipitously, I read a review by Charles Taylor in the most recent New York Review of Books (April 26, 2007). The review was an erie echo of Lamentations. It examines a work about the fate of the Crow tribe as they were settled within a reservation. The leader of the Crow is named Plenty Coups (pictured above). His name comes from the Crow practice of marking boundaries by throwing down a stake.. The warrior who successfully defends such a position has won a "coup". Having explained a cultural detail like this it becomes evident why life on a reservation will not be easy: it is cognitively impossible. It is not just the case that warriors have to settle down and hunt less.. rather in settling down nothing about their values system makes sense. Taylor writes:
A culture's disappearing means that a people's situation is so changed that the actions that had crucial significance are no longer possible in that radical sense. It is not just that you may be forbidden to try them and may be severely punished for attempting to do so; but worse, you can no longer even try them. You can't draw lines or die while trying to defend them. You find yourself in a circumstance where, as Lear puts it, "the very acts themselves have ceased to make sense."
Here I would draw a parallel between the sack of Jerusalem described in Lamentations and the forced settling of the Crow on a reservation. Both cases mark a cultural disaster which could easily have marked the end of a people. Where the Crow example is helpful is that it acknowledges that cultures can be "sacked" cognitively.. have their thought worlds wiped out.
Taylor (and Jonathan Lear in the book under review) portray how the Crow find an escape from this threat of cultural death. The chief Plenty Coups received a revelation in a dream:
The dream told the Crow that the old standards of courage and shame were going to lost their validity. And yet they would not be left completely adrift in a world without meaning and direction; new standards would emerge if they learned to watch and observe like the Chickadee.
This sounds remarkable like Lamentations:
The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for one to bear the yoke in youth,
to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it... [4.25-28]
Perhaps it is possible to think of that waiting and silence as a cultural (and personal) mechanism.. to wait and consider and ponder the ways to move forward in the midst of devastation. (It also reminds me of Quaker meetings where the silence offers space to find internal direction.)
At the conclusion of his review Taylor moves from the specific example of the Crow to a broader discussion of cultural destruction as a component of globalization. We understand genocide.. but we don't so easily understand the way our spreading way of life eliminates.. sacks.. other ways of life. Taylor sees in the Crow a model for the way cultures can perpetuate themselves and in a deep sense survive.
The hope comes from Lear's account of Crow society: that human beings can find the resources to come back from a virtual dead end, and invent a new way of life in some creative continuity with the one that has been condemned, as the Crow did in embracing settled agriculture.
And one can add to this the remarkable return from a dead end as made by the Israelites.. who re-invented their religion (the synagogue system was begun in the exile).
Where I perhaps differ from Taylor is with his seemingly sunny faith that these cultural efforts always result in something positive.. something we would want to praise. My sense of fundamentalisms is that they are also a way to "come back from the virtual dead".. redefining traditional words to fit a totally changed context. But that is a process which we watch with fear.. even if it does stem from a radical hope.
Wikipedia Curiosity
April 11, 2007
Since Wikipedia depends on reader generated contributions, its collected entries represent something of a composite view of popular topics. The historical figures or places that receive only a stub or minimal entry from some public domain article are sometimes important.. but one would never know it by looking at Wikipedia. There are a number of interesting Wikipedia effects. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was reading about Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. I was surprised to find that the Wikipedia entry on the novel was considerably shorter than the entry on the 1934 movie. Yet any ranking of these two works by importance would have to set the novel several steps higher than the movie. How to account for this? Not too hard. LOTS of film buffs write on the web. The novel, by comparison, is a poor cousin. It does not have the same kind of fervent following. Wikipedia has lots of uses, but one of the most interesting is here.. in the clarification of what people, places, and events are living in the contemporary popular imagination. The answers are sometimes surprising.
Goodbye Monograph?
April 10, 2007
The internet has done plenty to ruffle the world of commerce. Lots of business models have had to be updated. Its influence will be comparable when it comes to academic publishing. I noted the following comment in the recent edition of Religious Studies News (March 2007):
Fifteen years ago Fortress Press could print 3,000 copies of E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), expect libraries to purchase 500 to 600 copies, and feel confident that they could sell the rest within three years. Today many publishers cannot afford to publish monographs at all, and those that do are more likely to print 300 copies than 3,000. [15]
That strikes me as a ridiculously small number of books to publish. Almost all of those will go to large research universities.. since monographs are priced out of the range of ordinary working mortals. All that work to write a focused book on a narrow topic.. and then it disappears into the stacks of a handful of research libraries.
I would not argue that specialized books have a terribly large public waiting to devour them. But they could be more widely accessible. Imagine this scenario: a web organization which publishes full-text PDFs of selected monographs. This would put the information directly into the hands of the few scholars who work on this material. Writers don't actually make money from such books.. so it is not as if anyone will feel a loss there.
The major issue with my internet publishing plan stems from the fact that monographs are valuable in the academic tenure process. A monograph published by Brill or Cambridge Scholars Press is an important career-helping work. My goal would be to set up a site that utilized a peer review process in order to vet the books that would be available online. Essentially there would be no limit to the number of books accepted.. nor any need to consider whether a book on the ancient Scythians has any real market, academic or otherwise. If it proved to be a well-researched book it could be posted on the site.
This strikes me as an obvious way to get out of the publishing logjam that is currently in place.. which is fueled by the need for academics to publish books but slowed by the small market of actual buyers of books. In the system I propose anyone who writes a good book could get it published online.. and then the trick would be publicizing that work and letting other scholars know it is out there.
If I could make one more point.. tangentially related. Not too long ago I watched the DVD extra that came with Neil Young's Prairie Wind album. It consisted largely of bios of the musicians who played with him on the album. I was struck by the random backgrounds of all these session musicians.. the unknown schools and odd paths which carried them into their musical career. In the end it was only whether they could play or not that got them a spot on the album. As I looked through those musical bios I reflected on how different the academic world is.. where pedigree means so much: where you went to school, where you work, who you worked with, where you publish. We live with all these signs of prestige. It would not be surprising to me if the internet and its open channels of information eventually knock down a few of those signs of prestige.. and make us a little more like musicians.
Dreaming of a White Easter?
April 8, 2007
Yesterday we had a bit of a snow.. and it was still chilly even today. We did not have a white Christmas but I guess a white Easter makes up for that? Wisconsin never ceases to amaze us. Easter is a day to celebrate life, and little Rory put us in the right spirit. Neither Emily nor I can imagine a sweeter little girl..
The Orient and the Fundamentalist
April 6, 2007
This is the program for the small conference being held here at Lawrence by Glow (Gay, Lesbian, Other, Whatever). If you look at the bottom right you will see.. in small print.. the title of my talk: "The Orient and the Fundamentalist: From Flaubert to Andrew Sullivan". (I thought the title had a sort of "Lexus and the Olive Tree" sound.)
I begin my talk with Andrew Sullivan. He is by no means a fear-monger in the way that so many commentators on the Middle East are, but rather a principled opponent of fundamentalism.. or Islamism. One issue that in particular animates his discussions of the Middle East is the treatment of homosexuals. It was by reading is blog that I first learned about these Iranian executions:
I stand with Andrew in condemning these executions, but I am also interested in the way such images come to symbolize the region. In other words, such stories take on a life of their own and color public perceptions of the region. If we try to locate the associations that come with the phrase "Middle East" we would have to rate high fundamentalism and images like this one.
I think my point becomes clearer when we look to past versions of Islamic countries.. specifically the accounts contained in 19th century travel narratives. Gustave Flaubert describes the following scene:
As dancers, imagine two rascals, quite ugly, but charming in their corruption, in their obscene leerings and the femininity of their movements, dressed as women, their eyes painted with antimony. For costume they had wide trousers… From time to time, during the dance, the impresario, or pimp, who brought them plays around them, kissing them on the belly, the arse, and the small of the back, and making obscene remarks in an effort to put additional spice into a thing that is already quite clear in itself... [84]
The 19th century traveler Richard Burton could be mined to provide plenty more excavations of the sexual world of the East. Orientalism is the word that we use to describe this literary construction of the East as an exotic and alluring place.
As soon as I bring up Orientalism I am in the realm of perception. Most would admit that the "Orient" peddled by writers such as Flaubert or Burton is a souped up and exaggerated version of the actual thing. I would argue that likewise the contemporary fixation on the Middle East as a haven for fundamentalists is likewise a flawed version of the Islamic world. It is a widely held perception which represents an exaggeration of what is actually there.
One could stop right there.. ending up with a sort of relativism of perceptions. The Middle East can be anything one wants! But that does not quite work.. I would hardly recommend to a gay friend that he vacation in Iran. So there is something to those perceptions. Likewise the Orientalist world encountered by 19th century travelers may have been an exaggeration.. but it similarly had a foundation in reality.
Instead of just calling it a case of perceptions
that randomly wander, I think it is better to look for concrete changes that have come to the Middle East. Think of Alexandria during World War I.. You could find the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy and the English novelist E.M. Forster hanging around there. Both used Alexandria as a potent setting for their work. At this point Alexandria was a city with a significant Greek and Jewish minority.. a cosmopolitan city.
The Alexandria that could support a Cavafy and a Forster is gone. The cosmopolitan character of the city was lost for various historical and political reasons.. and the city now feels much like any other big Egyptian city. If the earlier Alexandria was a place that could easily support an "Orientalist" version of itself.. allowing for two prominent gay writers to live comfortably.. then the current Alexandria is much more conducent to the fundamentalist version of the Middle East.
The example of Alexandria allows us to see how perceptions work. The social situation in Alexandria 100 years ago is widely divergent from the social situation today.. and the differing perceptions of the city that have held sway in these different times is related to actual changes on the ground. Changes in perception can be linked to concrete social changes. On the other hand, perceptions always outstrip those concrete changes. The Orientalist version of the Middle East exaggerated what was really there.. and the fundamentalist version likewise goes beyond what is actually there. Both are tethered to something real.. but push the perceptions into a realm of caricature.
Caricature is a good word, by the way. As I understand it, what a caricaturist does is look for a person's dominant physical features and then exaggerate them. A person with a large nose becomes a person with a supersize nose.. a person with ears that stick out becomes a person with elephant ears. We know how this works. The perception of places works in a similar way. We locate some characteristic but then the vagaries of media attention inevitably transform the public perception of a place into a caricature with exaggerated features.
A fascinating aspect of the perception of the Middle East is the way homosexuality is a key feature both in the Orientalist version and the Fundamentalist version of the Middle East. It is the nose.. or maybe some other bodily feature.. that constantly gets supersized as people gaze at the Middle East.
More on Obama Construction
April 5, 2007
An article by Ben Wallace-Wells in last week's New York Times Magazine proved to be a timely confirmation of my recent post "Construction Zone! Obama Going Up!" In that post I tried to point out the way high profile politicians inevitably have a lot of people writing about them and helping to construct a narrative that makes sense of their past. Such high profile politicians inevitably come to have group-authored identities as they try out and adopt new ways of talking about themselves.
How this process works was given a little more clarity in the New York Times Magazine article. One of Obama's closest advisors, David Axelrod, is the focus. The topic in the following passage is the creation of a video to showcase Obama:
There was a clip he found from the early stages of the 2004 Senate campaign of Obama, microphone in hand, introducing himself to a small group of voters at a coffeehouse on Chicago's North Side; when the candidate told them about his work in the early 1990s as a community organizer, there was a spontaneous, sustained applause. "I remember that!" Axelrod told me a few days later as we watched the finished product in his office the morning it was released to the public. "You know, we hadn't thought that was an important part of his bio, but people really responded to the fact that Barack gave up corporate job offers to work in the community."
That is as clear a statement of group biography creation as I can imagine. Parts of the past that Obama by himself might have missed suddenly get spotlight attention. After about the 50th time Obama has narrated this fact about himself it will be internalized as a canonical part of his personal story.
How do moments like this turn up and get crowd tested? We get a clue about that:
In the 15 years since [their meeting], Axelrod has worked through Obama's life story again and again, scouring it for usable political material, and he believes that some basic themes come through...
And what would it be like if we all had very smart people combing through our past to make sense of it?
I am not trying to pick on Obama.. I just think he is a spectacular example of this group identity creation. Right before our eyes we get to see the hopes of diverse groups get read onto the handsome features of Mr. Obama.. but maybe we should call him Mr. Obama, inc.
More Babble Please:
Foreign Languages in Recent Films
April 3, 2007
A few nights ago Emily and I watched Babel.. a film that wraps us into a story that travels to three continents and involves us in four distinct cultures. The film was reliant on subtitles for the Moroccan Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish portions of the film.. letting us fend for ourselves when it came to Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.
Reading the Moroccan Arabic subtitles it struck me how understandable everything was.. here we were in the Moroccan rîf in some stone hut and, if properly subtitled, we have no problem understanding the human beings on the screen. I once wondered about this kind of people while riding in a bus or shared service across the Moroccan countryside. I looked out the window and saw kids herding animals in the mountains.. one sitting in the shade staring straight ahead. What were those kids thinking? What were their hopes? What was the lens through which they understood what is around them? Those are depressing questions because it is immensely difficult to enter into a world whose cognitive terms are so obviously different.
For the makers of Babel there is no real difficulty here. People live in different ways.. stone huts in Morocco, high-rise apartments in Tokyo, small towns in Mexico.. and consequently they have different comfort levels with respect to hygiene and food preparation.. but if you get past these superficial differences people can be easily understood. At no point do the subtitles present us with concepts or ways of seeing the world that are not immediately graspable.
So what do I expect? I would like to see portrayals of people who perceive their world through unique cognitive lenses. That means allowing religious assumptions to have an active role in the thought processes of characters. It also means being willing to sort out surprising varieties of social or ethnic commitments. It would mean upping the "babble" quotient to the point that characters really seemed different.. acted on a different set of assumptions. But this would mean taking culture seriously.. and that is something I don't believe Hollywood is willing or able to do.
I would make the same charge against the films of Mel Gibson. Both Apocalypto and The Passion of Christ used subtitles to create a sense of cultural authenticity. But for all the time spent on the correct language (Mayan or Aramaic) there is no effort to separate the world of these ancient people from our own cognitive world. People from widely separate cultures turn out to be a lot like us..
Perhaps I was wrong all those years ago to look out the window at kids herding animals and feel dejected about the possibility of knowing them. I just needed to watch Babel and I would have gotten their world! Maybe the problem is in the title of the film.. "Babel" instead of "Babble".. The myth of the tower of Babel in Genesis tells of human beings being separated by language. Reading this account one could come to believe that all we need are subtitles underneath our every word.. then human difference would be solved. But that story was far too simple an account of human difference.. subtitles are not enough.
Taste of Sleep?:
Kiarostami and Ozu
April 1, 2007
My taste for Ozu continues to mature as I watch him back to back with other directors. In this case I watched Ozu's Good Morning and immediately afterwards Taste of Cherry by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. On the Criterion video there was an interview with Kiarostami, and he had the following to say about his filmmaking style:
But in all [my films], I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don't like in the movies. I think a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of films I like.
I am not sure I have ever encountered a more stirring defense of films that put you to sleep.
So I have been thinking about this. Is boring or "sleep-inducing" an aesthetic value I am willing to endorse? Perhaps not as a positive program, but if filming something of life is the goal.. and not the creation of some Hollywood razzle-dazzle dramatic situation.. then boring may well be a necessary attribute. Life is boring.. in the sense that if you trained a camera on any real person living a real life, you would quickly grow bored.. and sleepy.
Both Ozu and Kiarostami are liable to the charge of being sleep-inducers, but it strikes me that they arrive at this trait from very different directions. Ozu appears to want to make documentaries of ordinary Japanese life that have just enough drama—or in the case of Good Morning, melodrama—to justify the film as a film. The title Good Morning (which sounds something like O-Hio) points to the Ozu's attention to the daily salutations behind which lurk our feelings and social organization. When two boys take a vow of silence until their family buys a television set, a whole stream of small consequences follow. The spoken tokens of politeness turn out to be the grease of social life.
In the case of Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry we are given a most unusual situation: a man who wants to kill himself and needs help with the burial afterwards. The situation results in a series of interviews with ordinary Iranians.. lending the film a sense of reality. We get to know a Kurdish military conscript and and Afghan seminary student. We could imagine these people on some television interview show titled People From Around the World That You Will Never Meet. The talking heads ratio is approximately the same as in Ozu, but you could not use these scenes to re-create home life in Iran. In fact the beautiful scene at the end of Taste of Cherry where we see through a window the main character moving about restlessly inside his house, preparing for his death, is one of the most beautiful scenes I have witnessed in quite a while. That interior, framed by white branches, remains a mystery.
