Tour of Lambeau Field in Green Bay
March 31, 2007
In My Room, The Beach Boys
March 29, 2007
In my continuing acquisition of everything Beach Boys I came to the album Surfer Girl, released in 1963. This album contains "In My Room".. a song that I can listen to over and over. The first line is perfect:
There's a world where I can go...
So brazen to simply label a room as a world! Rooms should be closed and confining.. when you are in trouble as a kid you are "sent to your room". But Brian Wilson is going to be describing a whole world.. a universe of personal meaning.
It is very much a young person's vision of life.. a room where you can be alone and have your thoughts all to yourself. It is exactly the small bedroom I knew while my family lived in Redlands. It was a small white cube where I slept and where I laid down and listened to my music or read something from an unending stream of books. Nothing was more highly anticipated than just being alone. It is weird to think back on those days, since I now look forward to coming home and seeing Emily (and Rory!).. not a room. But I can still remember the old relief of closing the door and being by myself.
In this world I lock out
all my worries and my fears
In my room
In my room
I doubt it is just me who can relate to Brian Wilson's sentiments. It strikes me as a pretty common part of American teenage life.. a shared experience that is delicately caught by Brian Wilson.
It is a sentiment that would not be so easy to understand for teenagers living in other place in the world. Listening to this song I have tried to recall the family I lived with in Morocco in the summer of 2001. Four kids in the house, the oldest being about 17 and the others ranging down from there. The hardest thing about staying here was my inability to get real alone time.. people were always coming up to talk.. the television was on loud. There seemed something unnatural to them about a person just sitting and staring. The "room-world" that I expect for myself was just not there.. and I don't think anyone knew what that was. Brian Wilson would find it hard, I think, to communicate his vision to that audience.
What goes on in this room-world?
Do my dreaming and my scheming lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing laugh at yesterday
The room-world is described in thoroughly imaginative and emotional terms. There is no busy "doing" here. In a remarkably compressed two lines Wilson gives us no less than seven internal movements.
Lines like these wrap up the American house in emotional meaning:
Those lines require a certain spatial literacy to look at them and imagine walking into a simple American house. Note those three bedrooms.. one master and two smaller ones. In a thousand years such a floor plan may be as incomprehensible as the layout of the ancient city of Çatalhoyuk (7000 BC) is to us now.. In vain one tries to figure out how ancient people inhabited their dwellings.. to imagine the emotional resonance of their living set-up. If someone in a thousand years wants to understand the worlds inside our American dwellings, they could do no better than to give "In My Room" a close listen.. noting the emotional values settled firmly over spatial layouts.
As a coda to this post I should note how odd it is that the album Surfer Girl, containing the ultimate "interior" song, should simultaneously be concerned with songs that overtly map social identity.. notably "South Bay Surfer" and "Our Car Club". The latter song contains the following chorus:
We'll set a meet, and get a sponsor, and collect some dues
And you can bet that well have our jackets on wherever we cruise
That contradiction between interiority and group identification is a persistent issue in the music of Brian Wilson. What is interior can on the flipside become Ra Ra be true to your school!
Flat-Texting: The Layers of Scripture
March 28, 2007
When thinking about a book like the Bible one should imagine the way it would appear in Adobe Photoshop. There are a series of layers piled up on top of each other. Each of these layers represents a book.. (or even sections within a book in cases like Isaiah). These layers represent different time periods and points of view. The interpreter must distinguish the layer that is under discussion and not conflate it with ideas drawn from another layer. That way of thinking is complex, but it comes naturally to anyone who gets accustomed to the way Photoshop works. It takes a little longer to develop in students of religious texts.
In Photoshop there comes a time, image completed, when you press "flatten image". In a moment those multiple layers are condensed.. the complexity of stacked sections gone. That is the way the Bible looks to many people.. as a unified book bound between two leather covers. My private verb for this kind of reading is "flat-texting". In other words, no history or context distinguishes the sections, they are just words to be read together and used to interpret each other. There is a mental button for "flatten book".
The Qur'an came into being in the course of about 20 years at the beginning of the 7th century AD. Its layers are therefore not as starkly diverse as those of the Bible, but it is still necessary for scholar and believer to separate the layers of the text. The fact of the Qur'an as a layered text is implicitly recognized by the identification of each Sura as Meccan or Medinan.. i.e. early or late in Muhammad's life. The Qur'an is divided into Suras (individual units of revelation), but on top of that schema is a second system: sections. The Qur'an is divided into thirty equal sections.. and these sections are marked within the text of all Qur'ans.
The odd thing about these sections is that they can fall anywhere in a chapter. They do not follow the sense of a passage but simply divide it spatially. The following is the beginning of a list as to where these sections fall (ajza'):
- 1 – Al Fatiha 1 – Al Baqarah 141
- 2 – Al Baqarah 142 - Al Baqarah 252
- 3 – Al Baqarah 253 - Al Imran 92
- 4 – Al Imran 93 - An Nisaa 23
- 5 – An Nisaa 24 - An Nisaa 147
As you can see the sections cut right into the middle of the Suras.. the organic units of the Qur'an. The reason for this division is obvious enough: it allows for the completion of the Qur'an in the course of a month by reading roughly equal sections. This style of division strengthens the flat-text approach to the Qur'an. It would be as if the "Through the Bible in a Year" schedule got set into the margins of the Bible with as much formality and standardization as the verse and chapter divisions..
Perhaps flat-texting should not be seen so much as an issue for believers in sacred texts as an issue for consumers of anthologies.. which is, after all, a word that includes both the Bible and the Qur'an. Both scriptures take and bind together sections/books that had an original context elsewhere (Paul's letters, Psalms, Muhammad's revelations). In the process of binding these works together they become anthologies.. and anthologies encourage readers to see texts together.. to read them as unities. It would be like giving out an anthology of Classical Greek and Roman literature from Homer to Sophocles to Virgil. Who would be surprised if students let those texts run together in their minds? The "book" format prompts us to understand a text as unified.. and we push that "flatten text" button in our minds.
Songs as Bonds of Union
March 26, 2007
I looked up "song" on Wikipedia and found what I suspected: it is not a sexy topic. I would define a song as a short musical composition accompanied by words. Two clarifications might be in order. I say "short" because the final "Ode to Joy" section of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is too long and complex to rank as a song. And I say it is "accompanied by words" because if the voice simply outlines a melody or uses scat then we do not have a song.. we have a musical piece that uses the voice as an instrument.
In the past if I had been called on to rank musical forms, the song would have gone pretty low.. behind such obviously weighty compositions as symphonies and sonatas. But I think now that I would rank the song as a marvel of life! It represents a mash-up of two distinct ways of meaning. There is music, able on its own to communicate an emotional state. There are words, processed as language.
In The Singing Neanderthal Steven Mithen argues that music was a pre-verbal stage of communication. In his timeline of human development there comes a fork in the path where verbal communication splits from music.. and becomes more and more dominant in human experience. We still have music around.. thank God.. and it still serves as an important method of communication.. but music so often lives out there away from words. The humble song is the place where music and words come together to form a bond of union.
What implications does this have for interpreting songs? If language and music are two different sets of meanings then the interpretation of songs must proceed in something like a contrapuntal manner. Words must have their say; Music must have its say. These two elements will contradict or reinforce each other.. but that interplay of two meaning systems must be at the heart of song interpretation.
Songs are endlessly fascinating precisely because the combination of these two systems often results in something that the creator may not have total control over. My review of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" touched on this complexity. What does it mean for George Harrison to sing these spiritual lines to the tune of "He's So Fine"? And variations on that question could be asked with respect to many songs..
My Sweet Lord, George Harrison
March 25, 2007
My parents recently dropped off my cache of LPs.. which had previously been collecting dust in their garage. The sight of all these albums.. with their big fold out images.. made me glad I was born in time to have an active memory of a time when listening to music meant putting these black discs onto a turntable.
Among the LPs in my cache was one beautiful old album: All Things Must Pass by George Harrison. It was not just an album, but a triple album. Two full records and a third record of long jams. Opening the album box I found the poster that came with the album.. and which I had hanging in my dorm room in college:
The poster and album cover are brooding.. although not without a bit of humor either.. with those gnomes on the cover! But no one would gainsay the fact that this is a serious looking album. It is as far away from Sgt. Peppers as one can get.. as if he really believed the lines from "Within You Without You":
When you've seen beyond yourself
then you may find
peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come
when you see we're all one
and life flows on within you and without you
Those sentiments have always seemed to rest uneasily with the thrust of Sgt. Peppers.
There is plenty of life wisdom on All Things Must Pass.. more than in most serious books. Many times when I am amazed at how human beings find ways to hurt each other, I catch myself singing:
Isn't it a pity,
Isn't it a shame
How we break each other's hearts,
And cause each other pain
How we take each other's love
Without thinking anymore
Forgetting to give back...
There is also the darker musing of "Art of Dying".. unrelenting in its confrontation with the final question.
The best known song from All Things Must Pass is "My Sweet Lord". Lyrically there is not much one can say about the song.. It is simple enough:
My sweet Lord, I really want to see you
I really want to be with you
I really want to see you Lord
But it takes so long my Lord...
It is a pure spiritual cry for closeness to God. The drama in the song, if I can call it that, comes with the backing vocals, which begin with "hallelujah" and after continuing for a while suddenly veer toward the Eastern spiritual interests of Harrison to include Vishnu and Krishna. You could see it almost as a musical bait and switch.. aimed at more conventional religious types.
The song ran into legal troubles because of its close resemblance to "He's So Fine" recorded by the Chiffons in 1963. I tend to agree with the verdict that this is a case of unintentional copying. But the ins and outs of the legal case is not interesting to me.. more notable is that when trying to express something deep inside himself.. a groping after spiritual closeness to God.. Harrison landed unconsciously on the melody of a girl group singing some rather banal lines.
Fine, you might say, he liked this melody.. no big deal! But I think it would be a bigger deal if I could demonstrate that this is not just Harrison borrowing a random tune, but that major rock musicians made a habit of reaching back to just these simple tunes and shallow lyrics to express their spiritual feelings. In their adoption of these classic lyrics they characteristically imparted to them a further layer of meaning. Van Morrison is a great example of the layered use of the R&B past.. What did Jackie Wilson say? And "Stay" as the conclusion to Jackson Browne's "Load Out".. with the high voiced "Oh won't you stay, just a little bit longer?" We hear it so often that we hardly notice.. old standards worked into rock's expressive vocabulary.. and in the process these older words and tunes gain a greater hold on us.
"My Sweet Lord" is an expression of spiritual longing, but it also teaches us to hear spiritual longing in the musical standards of the pop past. We could call it the spiritualization of popular music. It is no secret that Harrison was always interested in this kind of project, writing some of the most introspective lyrics of the period.. but we should expand our notion of this project to include his use of different registers of pop music.
Fear of a Wired Planet:
Technology in the University
March 24, 2007
The Washington Post carried an interesting editorial on the use of the internet in schools by Jacqueline Hicks Grazette ("Wikiality in My Classroom"). The first half of the editorial was ho-hum.. a student turns in an exam that cites Wikipedia but provides no clue as to how the article was used. That is a problem for any citation, not just one that comes from an internet source. This stuff was a little too ethic-y for me.
The article moves on to more interesting ground at the end as it comes round to provide a couple of examples of the positive use of the internet. A history teacher gets students to create a wiki-page on a topic that they have researched. Grazette herself has students listen on the Internet to oral arguments presented before the Supreme Court. She then winds up by commenting:
Making use of kids' natural comfort with online learning may require a different skill set for teachers. Most schools do not evaluate teachers on the innovative use of online technology... Changes will be needed in how teachers are trained and rewarded to fulfill the Internet's educational potential.
Now there I fully agree.
I have spent the last few days thinking about the syllabi for two courses I will teach in the spring term. In both I am trying to imagine the best ways to get students to use the resources provided by the internet.. and prodding them to be creative. I have a few principles swirling in my mind:
1) Students need a better philosophy of the internet. College is a time to transition from being a consumer of web information to being a creator. This re-frames the issue from what can I or can't I get from the internet, to what can I add to the internet? Assignments can push students to contribute new information, and by that very goal they will be driven to non-web sources. For example, why not ask students to write a Wikipedia entry on a topic/person that is not well covered? In such a case students can hardly crib from Wikipedia.
2) Traditional student papers go from the student to the teacher.. get a grade and then fall into a black hole. Why not allow student work to gain a wider audience? Last fall I had individuals work on a final project in which they marked on Google Earth important historical sites in Middle Eastern cities. At the end of the term I gathered their work and posted it as a single .kmz file (posted here). I have watched proudly as that .kmz file gains exposure and attracts hits from Google Searches.
3) The so-called Web 2.0 philosophy that encourages sharing and collaboration can apply well to the classroom. Wikipedia has the following to say about it:
A social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and "the market as a conversation"
That sounds like a classroom ideal to me. This would mean finding ways to let classes pass on their knowledge to the next class. I have been toying with the idea of assigning the work of a past class to an incoming class.. and then finding ways for the new class to add something that could be passed on to the next class. This may not result in a project that experts in a given field will find interesting, but it does allow for a learning experience in which sharing and collaboration is built in.
4) A concern of mine is that students do not generally become well-rounded in their writing ability. They are pushed to write academic papers but do not learn to switch modes.. perhaps write an opinion column for a local paper or longer article for a magazine. Obviously the writing of an academic paper is important.. especially since many students go on to graduate school. But if we think in terms of a life skill, then writing could be seen as a mode of self-expression.. a habitual part of a thoughtful life. If this is a goal, then blogging has a lot to offer. It is a format that allows for direct engagement with ideas.. and a working of those ideas out in words. The web allows us to present writing as a part of daily life. Imagine if all incoming freshmen were told that they would be required to blog regularly for four years! What could be better for intellectual development?
Coleridge as Blogger
March 24, 2007
In the April 12 edition of the New York Review of Books Richard Holmes has a review of a new book on the friendship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. As perhaps the great biographer of Coleridge, one might have expected Holmes to be in fault-finding mode.. but there is none of that. He has many kind words for Adam Sisman, author of The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge.. and Holmes takes the opportunity to reflect on the nature of this passionate friendship.
Toward the end of the review I let out a cheer as Holmes tied Coleridge to bloggers:
...Coleridge's Notebooks, still insufficiently known, may be considered as an inspiration to all confessional writers, and may even become—in their wild informality—the secret bible of Internet bloggers.
I could not agree more. Twice I have tied the project of blogging to Coleridge's journals.. most notable here, but also tangentially in my very first blog.
My fascination with the Notebooks is the way Coleridge writes through theories about art and philosophy.. along with the books he is reading. I consider them one of the great monuments (if that word can apply to something so fragmentary) to the human creative consciousness hovering over the experience of the world. The Notebooks are ephemera that are not, in the end, ephemera. Coleridge points the way forward.. I certainly believe that..
Wonders of the World
March 22, 2007
While I am on the topic of Frank Gehry, I should write something about the experience of his buildings. The two photo in this blog are from our last trip to downtown LA. I wanted Emily to experience a Gehry building. It really is something to see these silver billowing sails set amidst the smog-silver skies of LA. The entrance stuns you, however, with a sudden switch away from silver abstraction. The carpet has a bright floral motif and wooden columns rise tree-like from the floor. I may be attacking Gehry, but I want to make clear how much I enjoy his buildings.
For some time I have wanted to develop a taxonomy of place experience. Many places get their emotional tug by being associated with some level of identity.. it might be the house in which I grew up (personal identity) or a battlefield like Gettysburg that holds national historical significance (national identity). These identity associations explain why we travel long distances to experience certain places.. which we commonly call a pilgrimage.
Another reason we travel long distances to see a certain place is because of its perceived value as a "wonder". This is the tallest building in the world! This is the biggest airplane ever built! This is a house built out of bottles! The status of "wonder" is a powerful draw. It hardly counts as a pilgrimage though.. it is a wonder-trip.
Gehry's buildings gain their popularity from their status as "wonders".. that is to say, they are not buildings that have gained cultural status by linkage to a landscape and gradual assimilation into visual symbol. Instead they shortcut that process and because of their amazing structural qualities take their place as destinations in and of themselves.
Some cities seek the virtuoso architectural coup.. of course. Any city looking to regenerate or recreate itself will embrace the chance to instantly become a destination. (Think Bilbao.) The traditional route to urban significance is the growth of a culture.. and the sites that mark the common life of a culture inevitably gain the importance of associations. Cities like New York or London are rich in these kinds of meanings.. and it is no accident that they are often hostile to Gehry's style of architecture.
I don't grudge cities the opportunity to recreate themselves.. or jumpstart their cultural life through the addition of a Gehry building (or a building by some other superstar architect). But I sense that this modern demand for architectural wonders masks insecurity about meaning and identity. No doubt globalization brings with it some anxieties. One of these may be a general loss of faith in the ability of local places to generate strong associations.. and that will leave people longing for an architectural deus ex machina.
Having framed the issue like this, it is clear that Old Roads must part company with Frank Gehry.. no matter how beautifully the light bounces off the silver panels. One of our strong missions is to encourage the local associations that go into the creation of places.. to look for the old roads and not the big new highway. Gehry most certainly represents the big new highway.. just note how he is patronized by entrepreneurs from Microsoft and Disney!
Frank Gehry an Old Roads Artist?
March 20, 2007
Should Frank Gehry be credited as an Old Roads artist? Not too many months ago I would have answered strongly in the affirmative. My fascination with Gehry dates back to the summer of 2001 when I walked through Frank Gehry, Architect, an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Gehry's early "drafts" for buildings were displayed there.. from jagged scribblings to pieces of rubbish piled on top of one another. His work represented the extension of the abstract style of artists like Pollack and Rothko into the solid forms of architecture. I always like these transfers of artistic method from medium to medium..
Last fall we watched Sketches of Frank Gehry.. and that was a turning point for us. With Sydney Pollack directing, this documentary placed Gehry squarely within a Hollywood and celebrity context of which I had previously been unaware. Then there was Michael Eisner talking about the design of Anaheim Ice in California:
I was looking for the next generation of American architects… and he was on the list of architects who were pushing the envelope. We bought a hockey team. We needed a practice rink. He designed for us the hockey rink in downtown Anaheim.
Now I know it is usually wrong to judge an artist for who appreciates their work.. but in this case I find it hard to resist. Here is Eisner commenting on the style of Anaheim Ice:
The inside is reminiscent of those hockey rinks that Frank grew up with in Canada; all wood, all trusses, it looks very traditional… like you could be nostalgic for being in Toronto in 1940-something...
At Old Roads we admire obsessive attempts to re-create or understand the past.. but this project by Gehry is different. It is the suggestion of a past, but not in fact an engagement with the past. It is a "making new" with only enough old stuff to stir up feelings of quaintness or nostalgia. It is the sort of use of the past with which a Disney executive could feel at ease.
This past Sunday Emily pointed out the glossy advertisement on the back cover of the New York Times Magazine.. and what do I see but an advertisement for a line of Gehry-designed jewelry, done in association with Tiffany & Co. The tag line for the Gehry collection is "Beauty without Rules" (see official introduction to the collection here). The collection does not strike me as a natural expansion of one medium into another.. rather the expansion of a brand name into a new product. I am uncomfortable with that.. and it has brought about a shift in the way we see Gehry and his larger artistic project. From now on we will be leaving Gehry to the millionaires who can afford his ice rinks, concert halls, and jewelry.
Aurora at Two Months
March 19, 2007
Aurora went in today for her two month checkup and weighed in at a whopping 12 pounds 6 ounces. That boosts her from being a quite small kid to being in the 85th percentile. So "Tiny" will no longer be appropriate.. The following is a video of Rory playing with mommy and the "Big Guy" (daddy):
And then her two month mark has been made even more special by the presence of Grandma and Grandpa Smith.. who have enjoyed seeing their new grandchild for the first time:
This is the second visit for Rory from grandparents. She is a well-visited baby! In late January she had Grandma and Grandpa Bowles show up just to see her:
Looking at those two pictures, it hardly looks like the same baby! Note the jowls on her now! Just call her "Pudge"..
Something in the Way, Nirvana
March 18, 2007
The Beatles are an abiding presence in the music of Nirvana. They turn up in the unending lists of musical influences that Kurt Cobain jotted down in his journals. On one such list they turn up #2, behind the Stooges but before Leadbelly. The Beatles album that Cobain points to first is Meet the Beatles, but he crosses that out and writes in Something New. These are both early Beatles albums.. and Cobain's admiration for the Beatles was tied to their early work.
Cobain's biographer Charles Cross writes the following about the genesis of the song "About a Girl":
"About a Girl" was an important song in Kurt's development as a writer... it was so unabashedly melodic that in Nirvana's early live performances, audiences mistook it as a Beatles' cover. Kurt told Steve Shillinger that on the day he wrote "About a Girl," he played Meet the Beatles for three hours straight to get in the mood. This was hardly necessary: ever since he was a toddler he'd studied their work... [118]
While I find it unlikely that "studied" was the correct word for the toddler Cobain's interaction with the Beatles, it is reasonable to recognize the Beatles as an important influence on Cobain.
If you are a Beatles fan then you can close your eyes and remember those magical opening words sung by George Harrison:
Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover...
The song "Something in the Way" from Nevermind, after a subdued opening, picks up a delicate soaring melody that recalls the ethereal melody by George Harrison:
Something in the way, mmm
Something in the way, yeah, mmm
It is a striking transformation. We expect a conclusion to the phrase "something in the way".. but it does not come and all we get is the meaningless "mmmmmm". "Something in the Way" must now stand alone as a statement, which we could paraphrased as "there is something between me and a goal". Of course we are never told what that goal might be. We are left with the unidentified anxiety that there is something wrong.. something stopping a movement.. something not right.. "something in the way".
The song contains one stanza repeated twice:
Underneath the bridge
The tarp has sprung a leak
And the animals I've trapped
Have all become my pets
And I'm living off of grass
And the drippings from the ceiling
It's okay to eat fish
'Cause they don't have any feelings
"Underneath the bridge" is a reference to a place that has taken on a somewhat mythical status. Cobain claimed that he spent some nights under the Young Street Bridge in Aberdeen, Washington when he got kicked out of his mom's house. The biographer Charles Cross is at some pains to deny this ever really happened.. and that seems a reasonable conclusion. But if Cobain's sister is right in claiming that neighborhood kids would go there to smoke pot, then it is easy to imagine that Cobain had some experience underneath the bridge.
For a stunning panoramic view of this American place see this website.. It is an image that will add immeasurably to your appreciation of the song.
With the reference to a tarp springing a leak and drippings from the ceiling we can imagine a dark damp place.. a young man coiled up inside his own mind. The notion that he has "trapped" animals briefly creates the vision of a self-reliant survivor making good. Then right away that vision is contradicted by the non-survivorish action of befriending and making pets out of those trapped animals. Refusing to eat the animals, we are told that he is "living off of grass" and "drippings from the ceiling". By "grass" he could mean pot (and I can almost hear the snickering).. but it is more interesting to think of this line in terms of the biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar II who lost his sanity and had to live as an animal for seven years. The story was illustrated by William Blake:
That image works perfectly as an illustration to "Something in the Way".. It catches the dampness, lostness, and animality that Cobain expresses. Those eyes express something similar to the way Cobain comes across in his journals.
Yet there are redeeming factors in the song. We can start with the touching solicitude for other creatures.. the inability to hurt anything that has "feelings". That solicitude is anchored in Cobain's biography, where we encounter surprising incidents of care for animals. Then those soaring broken-off lines: "something in the way.." hint at some further point, some place to which his spirit could soar.. if only.. if only there wasn't this something barring the way. I am haunted by the image of a lost young man able to sing is lostness through the great soaring melody of love-found..
[note: Old Roads is not united in its support of Nirvana and its music and there is at least one member of this team who disagrees with the prominence given to the band.]
Watching Chimps for the First Time
March 17, 2007
Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man was published in 1971, and it contains an account of her experiences observing the chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania. In this early book she employs an eyes-wide-open prose style that is both descriptive and excitable. She is perfectly willing to turn from chimpanzees to narrative animal encounters such as this:
One evening when I was wading in the shallows of the lake to pass a rocky outcrop, I suddenly stopped dead as I saw the sinuous black body of a snake in the water. It was all of six feet long, and from the slight hood and the dark stripes at the back of the neck I knew it to be a Storm's water cobra—a deadly reptile for the bite of which there was, at that time, no serum. As I stared at it an incoming wave gently deposited part of its body on one of my feet... [44]
Could this be the end of Jane? Get the book and read on.
The picture I am getting of Goodall is of a young woman immersing herself single-mindedly in another world.. the world of the chimpanzees. She describes herself thus after 18 months of constant work in the mountain reserve:
My alarm clock was always set for five-thirty in the morning, and after a slice of bread and a cup of coffee I would hurry up after my chimps. I never felt the need for food, and seldom for water, when I was roaming the forests... And then, after returning to camp as darkness fell, always there were notes to transcribe... [62]
Her goal through this time was simply to get close enough to the chimps to intimately observe their world.
Goodall documented the use of tools on the part of chimpanzees, noting early on the way a chimp would use a grass stem to draw out tasty termites from a mound. This simple observation brought about a closer look at the nature of a human being.. who could no longer be defined as the only "toolmaker". It seems like such a simple observation.. but it would be repeated often as an example of advanced primate behavior.
I find it odd how something so important can result from such a simple project: observation. Could it really be that chimpanzees had been present all these thousands of years but nobody really knew much about the way they behaved in the wild? Nobody had bothered to figure out how these creatures live? It was all just hearsay. Just a few weeks ago there was even the shocking story of chimps who had used sharp spears in a hunt. These were chimpanzees in Senegal (a long way from the Gombe in East Africa.. but it demonstrates the continuing importance of observation. In fact, it makes you wonder how much more is sitting out there waiting for someone just to bother to take notice.. It could almost be a parable for life: the really important thing is just to observe the world. That is what 99% of the population is trying very hard not to do.. shocking but true.
[For a glimpse of this world of observation look at the Google Earth-based blog for the Jane Goodall Institute. This is a beautiful example of how well place can be documented by the tools available on the internet.]
Construction Zone! Obama Going Up!
March 15, 2007
Today I came across the following discussion about Barack Obama:
Perhaps, ultimately, this is his real value right now. Not as the perfect vessel for a shining new world order. Though, of course, he is just that: Who could better reassure a jittery and suspicious world that America is ready to resume global leadership than a new young president who is the son of a black African father and a white Kansan mother, with a Muslim middle name who grew up in Asia? Rather, Obama's value is as someone with the courage, independence, and basic common sense to declare, without equivocation, that America's loss of global leadership is a result not of the inevitable breakdown of the existing structure, but of the Bush administration's radical and disastrous policy decisions.
What interests me here is the whiff of character construction. Reading this is like peaking through the plywood boards to glimpse the foundations of a new building going up. Plainly Obama's self is in the process of becoming symbolic.
Just a few years ago Obama was probably a lot like the rest of us.. a product of a complex past that was hard to understand. He woke up and was perplexed as to how he fit in. The American political process can be understood as a process of character construction. Now he wakes up and his sense of self must be quite different. He finds his past no longer hard to understand, but symbolic of something greater.
This transformation is only partially the result of a candidate's individual imagination. We should understand a high profile candidate as a group-self. Advisors are always there to suggest to the candidate better ways of presenting oneself. Then there are the journalists and advocates who from a distance are squinting and imagining the candidate.. and if these opinions are read by advisors or by the candidate (and we know they are) then they will shortly be incorporated into the self presentation of the candidate.
It would be fascinating to get ahold of an autobiographical narrative by Obama dating from a few years back.. before the presidential race.. before the senate race. Plain Obama. The self would be more diffuse and unexamined.. without the symbolic values that begin to adhere to a candidate. This is not to be cynical about the authenticity of Obama.. it is to be cynical about authenticity itself. The presentation of self is eventually the self. If that presentation is aided by advisors and the media process, then that self is a group-self.
This is the heart of why I could never seriously run for political office. I value too highly the self-creation of my own imagination. It would bug me to start seeing myself through the eyes of advisors or bloggers.. even if they could create a more colorful and polished self for me. I just like my own versions too much. This is one advantage of spending one's life outside the great eye of mass media.
Putting al-Maqrizi Online
March 14, 2007
One of my important purchases over the summer was this six volume set of the al-Maqrizi's Khitat. Actually the title is much longer than Khitat, as you can tell by the long title running down the spine of these volumes.. but the work is universally known as the Khitat ("Districts") of al-Maqrizi. Neither the shorter nor longer title does a lot to help people grasp what these volumes are about. They unrelentingly describe Egypt in general and Cairo in particular. They begin by setting the geographical place of Egypt within the known world and end by working through the topography of 15th century Cairo.
This work has never been translated, and I have often wondered about that. It is not that they are unimportant.. they are a necessary reference for any work on Cairo's history and cultural landscape. But it is a lengthy work.. as is evident from those six big volumes in the picture above. One can also blame the lack of a critical Arabic text.. which was the direct result of the popularity of this work. There are simply too many variant texts sitting in libraries across the world.
There is one more reason the Khitat has not been translated: it is an inherently difficult text for the modern reader. Not so much for the concepts as for the topographical references. It is humorous to read al-Maqrizi trying to explain the reference of structures that existed several centuries before his time by means of references to structures and landmarks that existed in his own day. Fifteenth century Cairo no longer exists and references to it do not clarify matters for the modern reader!
This layer of place references can be supplied by the use of maps, photos, and site plans. Such visual material can illumine the topographic references.. and give readers a visual key to the structures that al-Maqrizi is describing. The lavish new edition from the Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation tries to supply this layer of visual references:
You can see how photos and site plans can be used to illustrate the text. But as nice as these new volumes are, they cannot hope to compete with the kind of paratextual possibilities afforded by the internet. Besides they are too expensive for anyone except a library or specialist.
My contention is that what the Khitat needs is a web-based translation that will allow for rich layers of visual material. The Khitat is one of those great works that cannot come into their own until they receive multi-media treatment. The standard modern "book" is simply not the right medium for this work. For examples of other such authors who need such special treatment look to our official Old Roads Sites list.. where we are starting to collect these authors, which include Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Blake. Hopefully it will not be too long before al-Maqrizi is included on that short list.
Floating Weeds and Double Lives
March 13, 2007
Yasujiro Ozu's two versions of Floating Weeds, packaged together by Criterion, turn out to be a fine way to survey the work of this director. A Story of Floating Weeds is a silent film from 1934. The story centers on the leader of the troupe who has a former lover and a grown son in the town. For a while he succeeds in spending time with this "family" and strengthening the bond with his son. But like some American film noir, he cannot escape his past.. and his son starts up a relationship with one of the women in the troupe.. something the father cannot allow since he wants his son to become a great man.
Floating Weeds (briefly reviewed here) is Ozu's 1959 remake of this same film. The story is the same as described above. His re-use of this story allows us to get an unusual view of his stylistic development. We get something similar from watching the 1934 and 1956 versions of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. (Could Ozu have been responding to Hitchcock by remaking a film he had made in 1934? Could he have been fascinated by the formal challenge of such a remake?)
By 1959 the stylistic features that are evident in Ozu's earlier version have become settled. His method of using still-lifes in transitions and carefully composed scenes has assumed a dominant place in his work in the later film. It strikes me as a useful example of the way style can constitute a temptation for an artist.. the inner push always being to let what is most striking about an individual style grow more pronounced. Having seen the lightness with which Ozu could move through the story of Floating Weeds in 1934, the later version feels somewhat mannered.
The Criterion set allows for this kind of comparison between films by the same director. But as with my last two reviews of films by Ozu I think he is coming into focus for me as I compare him with works by other directors. My most recent accidental film mashup comes from my viewing of The Double Life of Veronique by Krzysztov Kieslowski.
It is possible immediately to group them together as humanistic directors. Ozu is patient with each of his characters and at no point does it seem that the director is delivering a punishment to people he does not like. In Floating Weeds both the leader of the troupe and the son are treated with respect. A break develops between them, but Ozu is hardly there to assign right and wrong.. he is a documenter of dissolution, not a moralist. Kieslowski is likewise not interested in judging characters. They act, they hurt others, they find peace.. and his special strength is in giving his character space to grow internally. That internal space is how I would define a humanistic director.. and to get at that internal space the director will often find it convenient to displace plot and move toward a slower paced film.
If I had to locate a major area of difference between Ozu and Kieslowski it would be in the latter's international sensibility. The two Veroniques that make up the double plot of Kieslowski's film are located in Poland and France. The movie calls attention to dependencies and alliances that move past borders.. even for two young women who never knew each other. This kind of spatial orientation brings about a more adventurous approach to telling a story. There is something about Ozu's resolutely local viewpoint that keeps the story telling grounded in linear events. For Kieslowski, whose films are interested in human parallels across spatial divides, story telling becomes fractured and suggestive.
Man or Butterfly?
March 11, 2007
I find that one of the hardest things to communicate in the classroom is the idea that a text is doing something. Students are generally comfortable with the idea that a text is saying something that can be discussed. They are also generally comfortable with the notion that a text might be pleasing aesthetically. But that a text is working to make them think in a certain way or pushing them to action is a much harder sell.
In wrapping up Freshman Studies we looked at a work I had not read: Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (Burton Watson translation). A well known passage from this work is the one about the butterfly:
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. [45]
There is a level of teaching in that passage, no doubt. The change of states is something to be accepted and definitional clarity is to be avoided. Also there is a level of humor in the passage that is hard to miss. But the passage flits away from either an expository or aesthetic interpretation.
I would argue that the butterfly analogy is also meant to suggest a way of thinking about mental states. It is not the case that anyone will ever really be confused about whether he is Chuang Chou or a butterfly.. but it is the case that one should live as if this confusion were possible. By thinking a lot about this passage.. repeating it in your mind perhaps.. you can start to see the world in a better way. With this, though, we have arrived at an altogether different way of analyzing a text.
The parables of Jesus came up as we talked about Chuang Tzu. The term "parable" seems somewhat limiting, and it would be hard to classify a passage like the one above as a parable. But the mention of the parables was helpful since they are embedded in a narrative and therefore obviously doing something in a context. You can read the parables and think about reasons why the Jesus of the Gospels is telling such mysterious stories. They are stories with a purpose. Harder to get across is the idea that the Gospels themselves are motivated texts.. just like the parables but without the narrative frame to explain that.
You could imagine the passages from Chuang Tzu within a narrative framework. We would find ourselves in a setting and a learner would come to Chuang Tzu to ask a question.. to which Chuang Tzu would perhaps tell a story or cite some authority from the past. Then we would see how the learner responded and whether he was praised or not. Within that framework it would be easier to understand the way passages are meant to affect change and not to be subject for debate. But since the passages come bundled together with no framework, the reader must learn to mentally build in that framework.. by pondering: if I were the historic learner, how would this passage be aimed to make me act in the world? That question will get us closest to the intent of the passage.
Panic, The Smiths
March 10, 2007
Let me admit right away that this is an album that goes way back for me.. like to the 8th grade. I can reliably date my Smiths listening because of this picture of me wearing a Smiths t-shirt:
I remember vividly my precious Louder Than Bombs cassette and the unfolding liner notes with that wealth of lyrics. I listened to these songs a lot.. I mean a lot.
Much of the music I listened to back then has dropped away from me. I have no desire to listen to the Cure again.. nor to Bauhaus.. and the list could go on. But beginning a few years ago the Smiths and Morrissey made a strong comeback. Why them? The short answer would be that they are great.. and I mean that. A longer answer might be that the music of the Smiths allows for two distinct ways of listening, one for an adolescent and one for an adult. Morrissey is expert at presenting the kinds of emotions running through an adolescent. Here are some lines from "Unloveable":
I wear black on the outside
Because black is how I feel on the inside
I wear black on the outside
Because black is how I feel on the inside
And if I seem a little strange
Well, that's because I am
I listen to that now and hear it as a morbidly introspective spoof of "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones. But back in the day it meant something more to me.. and I again have photographic proof:
I certainly felt a little strange.. and I dressed in black too.
With a decade's worth of distance between me and adolescent angst, the Smiths and Morrissey started to sound not like the voice of adolescence as the ventriloquist of adolescence. That is to say, I could hear that Morrissey was presenting knowing vignettes of adolescence.. and using the "heaven knows I'm miserable now" emotions to draw characters.
"Panic" is a song that stands out from Louder Than Bombs. It was released first as a single in July 1986.. and only in 1987 did it get released in the US on this album. It begins with a bang that is never quite explained:
Panic on the streets of London
Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
Could life ever be sane again
On the Leeds side streets that you slip down
I wonder to myself...
This is the language of riots and violence. Panic! Life will never be the same! But at the heart of this alarm is an emptiness: what is causing this stir? We don't know and are never told. The music pushes forward.. and we are still running:
Hopes may rise on the Grasmeres
But Honey Pie, you're not safe here
So you run down
To the safety of the town
But there's panic on the streets of Carlisle
Dublin, Dundee, Humberside
I wonder to myself...
That reference to the Grasmeres recalls the pastoral world of William Wordsworth. That green world may be where "hopes may rise".. but the narrator pointedly tells his "Honey Pie" that she is not safe in this quiet place.. perhaps she too is strange. And when this girl runs to town she finds herself no safer, but is caught up in some kind of panic.. still unexplained.
The place-name dropping song has a long pedigree in rock music, from Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" to the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA". The grandfather of this kind of list-it approach to place would be Walt Whitman. In each case the motivation is the one articulated best by Stephen Vincent Benét:
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin titles of mining claims,
The plumed war bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
All those wonderful names continue to run around in our heads.
Morrissey drops place-names for a different reason. He begins with London and then moves on to Birmingham. But then we get to Leeds with the "side streets that you slip down".. and Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside. Morrissey is hardly evoking a landscape to be explored and enjoyed.. rather a landscape of empty urban shells. Large and small these places are caught up in the panic.
Although we will never be given the cause of this panic, we are finally given the aim toward which Morrissey would like to direct the enraged crowds:
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life
Having evoked swirls of rage, he now throws everything at the DJs.. and the song will end with Morrissey chanting over and over again: "Hang the DJ!" This condemnation comes about because the music that the DJs play "says nothing to me about my life".
We can infer from this that Morrissey's musical program is quite different.. his music will say something to the listener about his life. It will be relevant and timely.. and deal with the places where people actually live.. not some fantasy world. Thus his shout out to urban centers great and small.. known and unknown.. is a strategy for telling listeners that this music will address them.
One can listen to this song as a wished for attack on the unimaginative music system.. and that is probably the way this song was meant to be heard. That call can be broadened to address any system that fails to address the real issues of our lives. From movie makers who churn out empty computer animated visions, to politicians who keep us in a fantasy world, to scholars that engage in issues that "say nothing to me about my life". It is too bad we cannot conjure a panicked riot to tear all that down. That dream of destruction and change is what Morrissey gives voice to.
Here is the song in the version it was shown on MTV's program 120 Minutes.. and there was a period in my life when that program was very important..
Imagining the World After the Ice
March 9, 2007
The opening chapter to this book by Steven Mithen has an unusual emphasis on the imagination. Its subject is human history between 20,000 and 5,000 BC. The catalyst for this history is the development of the modern mind.. which is to say a mind "with seemingly unlimited powers of imagination, curiosity and invention" (3). This is an odd way of thinking about history. It is not made by powerful leaders, nor by human greed and lust.. rather the imagination leads the way. History is the result of the human ability to imagine the world in a new way and to combine cognitive domains. It is hard not to paraphrase Shelley: the imagination is the unacknowledged creator of history.
After a couple of pages the imagination returns with a new sense.. this time as it relates to methodology. The challenge in telling the story of human beings from 20,000 to 5,000 BC is the lack of written records and monumental remains. Mithen must piece together events through scarce archeological evidence.. excavated camp sites and some rock art. The portrayal of this ancient world will thus require a healthy dose of imagination on the part of the historian.
Mithen goes on to assign a value to this kind of imaginative work:
This is what archeology can do for all of us today. As globalization leads to a bland cultural homogeneity throughout the world, imaginative travel to prehistoric times is perhaps the only way we can now acquire the extreme sense of otherness by which we recognize ourselves. [6]
That might be a surprising claim: if we want to experience human cultural difference we should not travel to some far-flung corner of the contemporary world and live among the natives. The "bland cultural homogeneity" has spread broadly.. so that even in that far flung corner you will encounter Coca-Cola and television. I remember reading an Arabic newspaper years ago and coming across the statement that George Bush gave Ariel Sharon the "green light" to carry out some plan. I realized then that I was reading Arabic but taking in a modern view of the world. Mithen points us to the really distant past as the true far-flung corner where we can get out of ourselves. Through an act of the imagination which allows us to inhabit that world and even see human beings as they once were we are able to return and see ourselves differently.
This is similar to the stated goal of Old Roads.. except we are not insistent on archeology as the main path to "extreme otherness". Old texts can be as useful as abandoned campsites for getting outside the modern world. Our guiding principle is the importance of human cognitive diversity.. and that diversity naturally results whenever the human imagination is given free play to create and find meaning. There could be not greater subject than to meditate on that process.
The Cool Thing About Travel Narratives
March 8, 2007
The archeological reconstruction of material culture is comparatively easy in comparison with the archeological reconstruction of the perceived world. It is historically unusual for writers to describe in a close manner their cognitive response to what surrounds them on a daily basis. Travel, however, results in a spike of novel situations, pushing the traveler to note a higher level of incident. I can think of three specific ways that travel narratives let us catch a glimpse of a human consciousness:
Identity commitments. A useful text in discussing this question is A Shi'ite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885-1886 by Mirza Mohammed Hosayn Farahani.. a Persian. Farahani experienced the Hijaz as Shi'ite and Persian. He was concerned to describe Shi'ite sites and worship, but nationalistic Persian concerns were never far from his mind. It would have been more accurate to title this book A Persian Pilgrimage to Mecca. A reader could diagram by means of circles of varying size the constellation of identity commitments held by the author.. and this could be accomplished by noting the types of places he describes and the places he passes over without comment. Such identity commitments are one way to distinguish authors of different time periods. A common fallacy is to ready contemporary identity commitments back into time. So for example the American preoccupation with race can be read backwards into people whose identity commitments did not include that one.
Sources of Perception. People see the world in terms of what they already know. Reading the account of the hajj by Malcolm X, I came across a passage where he describes the rich and colorful cultural traditions that confronted him upon his arrival at Mecca.. and then he describes this as a scene right out of National Geographic. That comparison comes and goes.. and would be easy to miss.. but it is a clue as to what formed Malcolm X's perception of this new world.. and it turns out to be a magazine that has a central place in constructing American views of the outside world.
Guiding Metaphors. George Lakoff has written about how our cognitive world is governed by a set of underlying metaphors. We can talk about our interior world only because we have learned to describe it in terms of the physical world. Meaning is constructed as concrete events and actions are mapped onto a metaphor. What does the hajj mean? Well, perhaps like Pilgrim's Progress it is a journey that symbolizes life. Or perhaps each of the rituals of the hajj can be mapped onto physical death and standing before God to await judgment. Or maybe the rituals can be likened to the internal movement of meditation. Or perhaps there is a complete absence of metaphoric meaning.. and all a person experiences is a legal concern to meet God's requirements. These are ways to understand the hajj. The goal of the scholar when reading an historic travel narrative is to watch for the ways that actions get mapped onto meaningful metaphors.
These are three partial windows into the cognitive world of a person who lives in the past.. and has left a record of his/her experiences when in a foreign place. In each case the danger is to assume a constant cognitive make-up.. which is actually something that is always changing through time.
Of Human Bondage in the 30s
March 6, 2007
Hollywood in the 1930s was an interesting place.. and it could produce a picture like Of Human Bondage (1934) with Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. The narrative movement of the film often seems overhasty.. the visual effects ambitious but not quite right. These technical issues will be smoothed out by the time Hollywood hits the 1940s.. a period marked by technical grace. Of Human Bondage falls on the edge of strict Hays Code implementation.. and I don't think the story of a bad girl getting pregnant and continuing to haunt the existence of a young man would have a place in the Code period. This is another example of how Hollywood at this point had not quite reached the "agreed framework" that would underlie its golden age classics. This
is exactly what makes me want to watch more films from this period.
Watching Of Human Bondage I had to control my impatience with the main character Philip Carey (Leslie Howard). He falls in love with a young and obviously low class tearoom waitress Mildred (Bette Davis). She is willing to go out with him, but then abruptly announces that she is going to marry someone else.. a loudmouth older man who also comes to the tearoom. This will be the pattern repeated through the film: Philip falls for the girl, gets his hopes up, and then the woman meanly trashes him. Even though Philip meets a couple of nice and attractive women who love him.. he is compelled to drop them when Mildred shows up yet again. That is where my impatience came in. I found it hard to fathom why he could not respond to the new women in his life and get rid of the mean one.
It occurred to me that Of Human Bondage would make better sense if I recognized Philip as gay. That low class waitress would then be not a specific woman, but an attraction to men.. the sorts of rough relationships that I associate with docks and parks. His lack of interest in the nice women that fall in love with him is now easy to understand: he is not attracted to them. At the end, when he learns that Mildred is dead, Philip proposes to the nice woman Sally.. but there is still an emotional void. I don't think Mildred will be gotten rid of so easily in real life.
A similar translation of sexual roles is necessary for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. The protagonist (Brick) is unable to respond to his wife on account of the suicide of his friend. Watching the film for the first time it did not all seem to add up. What exactly is making this guy treat Elizabeth Taylor this way! If you think about Brick as gay, then the emotional knots of the story start to make sense..
This seems like a reasonable strategy for gay writers in the past. How do you write about your experience? At most points of the last century you could not really talk about your feelings.. not in a popular forum. So the answer? To transform those feelings into a more acceptable form.. changing gender roles being the easiest way to do this. That works fine, but then the risk is that the true motivation for actions will begin to make less sense to the audience.. and the story gains a certain emotional opaqueness. That was the cause for my rising level of "frustration" with the characters in a film like Of Human Bondage.
The First Believers:
The Evolution of Religion
March 5, 2007
To my surprise it is possible to know something about the first people who believed. The first question to ask is: what are the cognitive demands of belief in gods? The answer must be the presence of symbolic thinking. Steven Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals summarizes the necessary mental components:
...the Homo Sapiens mind is also based on multiple intelligences, but has one additional feature: cognitive fluidity. This term describes the capacity to integrate ways of thinking and stores of knowledge from separate intelligences so as to create types of thoughts that could never have existed within a domain-specific mind. For instance, a Neanderthal or pre-sapiens Homo in Africa could not have taken their knowledge of a lion (from natural history intelligence) and combined it with knowledge about human minds (from social intelligence) to create the idea of a lion-like being that had human-type thoughts... [264]
This same cognitive ability will be necessary if a person is to think about gods. A Neanderthal man (skull above) might have buried a family member.. and felt sadness at death.. but he could not have mentally constructed a version of an afterlife.. nor imagined gods. This symbolic thinking was the domain of Homo Sapiens.
The last dispersion of Homo Sapiens into the world from Africa took place about 50,000 years ago. Human beings everywhere go back to this dispersal. And what do we see immediately in the record as Homo Sapiens starts to spread? The evidence of complex symbolic thought:
...the indicators of modern, linguistically mediated behaviour appear suddenly and as a single package: visual symbols, bone tools, body decoration, ritualized burial, intensified hunting practices, long-distance exchange, and structures at camping sites. [260-1]
Since belief in a gods is a human universal, the presumption must be that such belief came along with the same package of human characteristics described above. These beliefs were now possible on account of symbolic thinking.. which Mithen speculates may have itself been the direct result of language processing, in which different mental domains could mix and become blended. If we are looking for the first believers, they must be these Homo Sapiens who could process the world in new ways on account of their linguistic ability.
I realize that I will never be a specialist in human evolution.. which is the domain of anthropologists and scientists—not textualists like myself. But recent work on human origins can be used to construct a theoretical framework through which later religious phenomena (and texts) can be viewed. What would this framework look like?
- human beings are a part of the natural world
- religion is a result (byproduct?) of cognitive development
- behind particular religious traditions will be a set of broader human concerns. The identification of patterns will be of particular importance.
- though religious traditions will try to convince us of their uniqueness, we should not believe them.
- ethics should be rooted in what it means to be human.
- texts should be examined not for objective teaching, but for what they have to tell us about the human drive to create meaning and to harmonize contradictory claims.
Which is all another way of saying that we should have this picture hung up in our offices. This is a small piece of stone, dating to about 70,000 years ago, carved with some sort of cross-hatching.. likely for a symbolic purpose. When we study religions that is what we are studying.. the human ability to manipulate symbols. And if you are in a religion department then it is best you enjoy such things. Richard Dawkins obviously doesn't.. so that is not a human universal!
Ramblin' Round Single:
Marriage and Economics
March 4, 2007
The Washington Post today reported on the connection between marriage and wealth. Marriage is a luxury that is turning into a class marker:
Marriage has declined across all income groups, but it has declined far less among couples who make the most money and have the best education. These couples are also less likely to divorce. Many demographers peg the rise of a class-based marriage gap to the erosion since 1970 of the broad-based economic prosperity that followed World War II.
Among religious conservatives the decline is marriage is often taken as a sign of moral decline. The very idea that gays and lesbians could get married calls out the direst scenarios. The institution of marriage is commonly said to be "under attack". But look, if you want empirical evidence about the decline of marriage as the preferred option, that decline has everything to do with economic issues, specifically the rising gap between rich and poor:
"We seem to be reverting to a much older pattern, when elites marry and a great many others live together and have kids," said Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising firm.
Presumably that trend would be of concern to religious conservatives. But here is the irony: because these religious conservatives are so worried about issues like gay marriage, they are more than happy to align themselves with the corporate interests of this country under the tent of the Republican Party. Yet by strengthening the economic policies of this administration—which by all accounts is increasing income inequality—they strengthen the trends that are undermining marriage.
I find that amusing sometimes.. but then I remember real people who want to get married and make a go of life. The lines from the Woody Guthrie song "Ramblin' Round" strike me as a statement of the basic economic foundation of good things like marriage and children. Here are the lyrics as I remember them sung by Odetta:
I wish that I could marry,
Lord knows I wanna settle down,
But I caint save a penny
As I go a ramblin' 'round,
As I go a ramblin' 'round.
My mother prayed that I would be
A woman of some renown,
But I'm just a refugee
As I go a ramblin' 'round,
As I go a ramblin' 'round.
Sure if everyone could live with a house and car and security, they would love to get married and live that way too. A terrible error of religious conservatives is to mistake moral failure for economic instability.
Make no mistake: the alignment between religious conservatives and corporate/business interests will someday look like the greatest foolishness.. consider the economic policies they support:
- growing income gap between rich and poor
- growing expense of health insurance and the impossibility of affording it for millions of citizens
- encouragement of corporate system which causes high level of social mobility
- acquiescence in corporate system that maximizes shareholder profit at the expense of workers
I have trouble imagining a more anti-family set of policies. Sometimes, as if in a dream, I imagine religious conservatives thrashing around.. striking out against external foes that seem threatening, but by their movements only sinking deeper into the very moral hole they fear..
An Ancient Indus City Walk:
A Website Review
March 3, 2007
One major genre of website I would call the storehouse site. These sites dominate a particular band of information and tend to be group projects.. as opposed to an individual site. The site Harappa.com is certainly a storehouse site. One look at its credits page gives an idea of how many people are involved: more than a dozen individuals plus numerous institutional connections. There are lots of information packets available on the site.. but it lacks an overall stamp of personality.. which is something I miss.
There are surprising bits of information on the site. You can listen to an audio recording of Gandhi or view 19th century lithographs of India. Then again, you can go deep and view the archeological finds from the ancient Indus civilization that flourished from 2600-1900 BC. My own interest is in this ancient material, and that is what I concentrated my browsing upon.
The information gleaned through archeological work is crucial for understanding the past, but I am generally disappointed with the uncreative presentation of this material.. the articles come out all layers and graphs. I want not just facts, but a presentation that makes this culture present in my imagination. I realize that this goal can only be realized after many layers and potsherds have been analyzed.. but the same could be said about translating a book. A translation project is only finished when it can be presented in a form accessible to readers.. even though there has been much unseen linguistic and cultural excavation going on in the process of finishing the translation.
Harappa.com offers "Ancient Indus City Walks" (the Indus is the river alongside which this early civilization took root). One of these walks consists of a guided tour around the archeological site of Harappa itself. The tour is excellent in terms of showing us the archeological site.. and the first slide entitled "background" describes the history of archeological work at this site. This leads to my major complaint about the site: it is great at documenting archeological work, but not so great at trying to instill life into this site.
Now to be fair, there are lots of questions about this site and the script has not even been deciphered yet. So I recognize that there is plenty that we do not know about Harappa. But with the use of maps that give an overview of the site and more use of modern artistic renderings of Harappa this "walk" would better reach the ideal sketched above.
In the final slides there are some attempts to connect modern practices and structures with what is seen in the archeological remains from several thousand years back. Then in four audio tracks there is a similar attempt to give the modern context of the ruins.. the sounds that envelope this place. This was the most interesting part of the virtual "walk" around Harappa. In the final audio track we even get a man telling a short moralizing tale about the destruction of the city. I would have liked to see some of this same zeal in the earlier slides.
Old Roads Rating: B-
409, The Beach Boys
March 2, 2007
Above is the first Beach Boys Single, released June 4, 1962. The song "Surfin' Safari" hit #14 on the charts.. and Capitol Records took the hint and got them into the studio to record a full album. In this post I want to concentrate on that other song.. "409".
This song celebrating the Chevrolet 409 has two quite different album contexts. It was included on their first studio album.. Surfin' Safari.. where it stands out as the single car song among a group of songs celebrating aspects of American youth culture. A year later in the fall of 1963 the song unexpectedly got a second album setting on Little Deuce Coupe. The album consists of a group of songs on the theme of cars.. and although "409" sounds slightly archaic next to the newer songs, it retains its anchoring position.. as on the first album it is the last song on the first side.
This second album context brings to the fore the specific car knowledge contained in "409". Here it is surrounded by songs that show a deep familiarity with cars. I can hardly understand the references! Try figuring out these lines from the song "Shut Down":
Pedals to the floor hear the dual quads drink
And now the four-thirteens lead is startin to shrink
He's powered by ram induction but its understood
I got a fuel injected engine sittin' under my hood
I would almost have an easier time with Ezra Pound. There is a joyful knowingness about those lines.. Add to this "Spirit of America".. a song about the car that set the land speed record on the salt flats in Utah:
It is the kind of newspaper story that would infallibly draw the eye of a car crazy young guy.
With this car context in mind we can look at the two stanza lyrical movement that makes up "409". (I can sing these lines by heart now.)
Well I saved my pennies and I saved my dimes
For I knew there would be a time
When I would buy a brand new 409
Giddy up giddy up giddy up 409
This is a classic Brian Wilson perspective: thinking about the possibilities of growing up. I imagine a high school guy daydreaming about buying a car. Perhaps it is the same guy who defends his school in "Be True to Your School"? Someday he will get his dream car..
When I take her to the track she really shines
She always turns in the fastest times
My four speed dual quad positraction 409
Giddy up giddy up giddy up 409
Quickly we are rushed forward and the guy has his car.. which he takes down to the track. It seems like it must have been possible for guys to take their cherry coupe down to a track to test them out.
His 409 succeeds at the track and then comes perhaps my all-time favorite pop-song line: "My four speed dual quad positraction 409". Every word is a mystery to me.. but they sound so good to sing!
To understand this line of masterful concision I had to Google it. The identity of the 409 I was quick to discover:
Then I found a website (Driving Today) that explained the historical context for the lines:
At the wheel of 1962 409s Hayden Profitt won the Mr. Stock Eliminator title, while "Dyno" Don Nicholson copped a second Stock Eliminator title at the Pomona Winternationals. That same year a Bel-Air sport coupe version of the car equipped with the "four-speed, dual-quad, Positraction" equipment prescribed by the Beach Boys managed an astounding 12.22-second quarter mile at 115 miles per hour. Zero to 60 miles per hour could be negotiated in four seconds flat.
On inspection the lines turn out to be a polished time capsule of American car culture. It could well be that the line was ripped directly out of a newspaper account of this speed performance. This technical line to us might have seemed the most unpromising one in the whole article.. but Brian Wilson seized it and dropped it right into the final stanza of his song.
If you ask me why the Beach Boys will last, I would say that it is not only because of Brian Wilson's harmonic genius. Another quality we love about their work is the way they freeze frame views of American material culture.. and those views sound stranger and stranger as the decades pass. He takes the technical language of daily life and plunges it into widely shared longings and fears.
The race tracks where guys could take their cars to try them out.. those may all be gone. But this car crazy world still lives on.. if only in the imagination of car buffs. Someday perhaps I will make models with Aurora.. and we will both learn something about this strange America that so naturally stands out as the classic version of ourselves.
Here is the song.. and someone has illustrated it with pictures of classic muscle cars (although not all 409s):
Lawrence Winter Scenes
March 1, 2007
This has been an indoor winter for us.. on account of the Wisconsin chill and then the arrival of our little girl, who is not ready for snow shoes. I think both Emily and I are ready for some outdoor time. As soon as this snow gets gone we will have more color to put up on the website.
Here are two scenes from around Lawrence:
