Baptist Landscapes
February 28, 2008
photo used under Creative Commons License, by Flickr user Amber Rhea
In my Cairo class I continue to point out ways that religious concepts and values make their way into the landscape. Today my example was the notion of a Baptist landscape. Baptists, with their insistence on congregational autonomy, are hardly going to tend toward the development of unified religious landscapes. We may be able to find patterns that Baptist churches follow, but we will never find hierarchical and ordered landscapes such as we find in Catholicism with the Vatican and subsidiary points in the hierarchy.
I should add that this is definitely a dynamic relatioship. One reason the Baptists are so numerous in the South must be that this autonomous way of thinking about groups has a certain resonance with the population. In the end a religious system and regional culture end up mutually strengthening each other. It is not important to separate those two elements.. just to recognize that ways of thinking and religious values end up finding their way into the design of landscapes.
Denver Lecture
February 28, 2008
Tomorrow morning I am off to Denver, Colorado for a talk to Lawrence alums. My talk is titled "Islam in America: A View of Dearborn, Michigan." It will draw on my trip to Dearborn over the summer, focusing on two major mosques where I conducted interviews: the Dearborn Mosque and the Islamic Center of America. My ideas are more fully developed in my short documentary (coming soon to the website, I hope!).. but this talk will let me spin off some of this material into a different form.
The talk is most exciting because of the opportunity to make use of a multi-media approach. The meat of my talk will be my own words, but at various points I will project some video clips of scenes in Dearborn or bits of interview. When your point depends upon a sense of physical context and location, it gets hard to verbally describe a scene effectively. I find it is more and more true that for me to convey my ideas I need to show images and maps.
I
think often about the possibility of a multimedia essay.. not necessarily delivered in person, but mixing words and images in an interpretive mode. My YouTube videos represent one approach to this, but maybe this weekend excursion and talk represents a second approach to the same goal?
Tlön, Uqbar, Old Roads
February 26, 2008
On this re-reading of some short stories by Borges it occurred to me that he deserves to be included as an Old Roads author. This recognition usually goes to writers who describe and imagine actual present or past worlds. We like reality here. But Borges lavishes so much care and attention on imaginary worlds that he gains a place.
For example, the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Uqbar is an imaginary country, missing from most encyclopedias but mysteriously present in some editions. The literature of this imaginary country centers around Tlön—an imaginary world for an imagined country. Borges goes on to imagine the alternative worldview held by denizens of Tlön, complete with a description of their odd use of language and thoroughly idealistic habit of perception. Finally Borges delights in the intrusion of this imagined world into the real world: "Almost immediately, reality 'caved in' at more than one point." The fantasy of Tlön suddenly takes its place among other fictional systems that human beings have devised.. and which they live by. Our terrible desire for order and symmety..
OK, but despite Borges' swipe at fictions such as "dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism" he is not really on the attack against importing imaginary worlds. One could say that he welcomes nothing more. It is here that I began to perceive how closely his imaginary projects aligned with what we do at Old Roads. Next term I will be teaching a course on the religion of ancient Egypt.. and what I love about ancient Egypt is exactly the strangeness of its thought. Our bodies and the natural world, life and death, wisdom and the ordering of chaos are all present.. but in studying ancient Egypt there is this feeling we are stepping out onto another planet. The short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" reminds us that any imagined world is liable to intrude on our present world. The work of the scholar and the fantasist come awfully close to being the same thing.
I am tempted to pass over his gnostic notions about all writing emanating from a single intelligence.. with the result that the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights can be read as coming from a single author. We need more attention as to the ways reading changes and de-historifies a work.. but to take that as a reading program is to, well, get lost in a library.. when our goal should be to think clearly and understand the way culture narrows and guides perception and creative expression. But this all depends on how far one wants to take Borges.. and I think it is perfectly possible to let him shine a light—through fantastic creations and wide claims—on the power of the human imagination. Read this way (how could Borges ever complain about the way he is read?) his work becomes a restatement of that Shelleyan principle: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Fatimid Fascination
February 25, 2008
Going over André Raymond's book Cairo, I am reminded once again of the attraction of the Fatimids, the Shia dynasty that ruled Egypt from 969-1171 AD. It may have something to do with their library:
It contained eighteen thousand manuscripts on the sciences of antiquity alone. The books were arranged on shelves all around the rooms. The shelving was partitioned and enclosed behind shutters equipped with locks and bolts. In all there were more than one hundred thousand bound volumes. These included works on the laws of every religion, treatises on grammar and lexicography, collections of traditional lore, history books, royal biographies, essays on astronomy, works relating to the supernatural, alchemical research, all in various forms of writing. [Gaston Wiet by way of Raymond 47]
This is all made even more alluring by the Fatimid faith—an ancestor of today's Ismailis—which in its esotericism and insistence on an interior meaning allowed for a highly creative interpretive lens. So it is not simply the presence of so many books, but the unloosed interpretive imagination that was at work in these stacks.
At the heart of the Fatimid city was a palace complex:
image from electronic edition of Writing Signs by Irene Bierman
That palace was of course stupendous. The Persian traveler Nasir-i Khusraw describes it as like a mountain when seen from afar. Since none of this palace exists today we have to make due with imagining something like Alhambra in Spain.. not in details, but in effect.
I think that is part of the allure: those central palaces are gone and so Fatimid Cairo has now become a city that lives in the imagination. But at the same time since some of these mosques and monumental gates remain (as seen in the picture above), something of the scale and economy of the Fatimid city can still be felt as one walks around. It becomes something like a mirage.. something dimly glimpsed. This makes it a different experience than studying, say, Alexandria in the Hellenistic period. That city is just gone.
I feel a certain challenge when looking at images of the Fatimid city: how to better preserve this city for the imagination. The current Egyptian state efforts to turn this zone into a tourist friendly "Fatimid Land" are absurd. Why not find a way to preserve this city through the resources of the internet? Travelers' tales, architectural notes, and contemporary images can all coexist and give substance to this place. This attempt at digital preservation is finally the academic goal I am coming to for the next few years.
The thick mixture of religious values and human landscape give this project an unusual theoretical edge. Here (as in so many areas) I take a cue from Clifford Geertz:
Chartres is made of stone and glass. But it is not just stone and glass; it is a cathedral, and not only a cathedral, but a particular cathedral built at a particular time by certain members of a particular society. To understand what it means, to perceive it for what it is, you need to know rather more than the generic properties of stone and glass and rather more than what is common to all cathedrals. You need to understand also—and, in my opinion, most critically—the specific concepts of the relations among God, man, and architecture that, since they have governed its creation, it consequently embodies. [51, The Interpretation of Cultures]
A place is always more than just what is there on the ground. It is also a system of thinking and perceiving. This is an unusually good rationale for a historic city to exist in virtual space.. since it is only there that some of this conceptual world can be recaptured and reapplied to this space.
Plagiarism You Can Xerox
February 22, 2008
I agree with commentators like Kevin Drum that the issue of Obama's plagiarism is silly.. and should disappear. But given our past interest in the constructedness of Obama as a candidate (see here and here), this story about Hillary Clinton's charge of plagiarism is just too good to pass up.
Plagiarism is a strange word to throw into a political battle. The moral bite of plagiarism must take many people back to their days in high school and college, when the demand was that they produce for a class something that was specifically their own work. In such a contest a student is not allowed to hire the best thinkers on a subject and crib from their suggestions. But that is exactly what politicians do on a regular basis: they talk to experts and adopt what seems like the best plan of action. This plan politicians then present to the public in speeches and debates.. rarely adding footnote about who gave them this idea. But we are fine with this arrangement, and policy wonks have a way of getting insider credit as the "architect" of this or that successful policy. So we should recognize once and for all that in the political world we are really and truly "out of school".. and plagiarism is a word with practically no meaning in this context.
Presidential speeches these days are committee projects. Recently I saw a picture of George W. Bush sitting with Michael Gerson and Karen Hughes going over drafts for one of his State of the Union addresses. Every word that comes out of a president's mouth in a formal setting must be assumed to have been conjured up by some paid writer lurking in a small or not so small room in the White House. Every candidate that has any real prospects hired a team of writers a long time ago (with the possible exception of Mike Huckabee whose material nobody else could make up). I find this layering of an individual voice behind the words of paid writers a frustrating aspect of modern politics. In essence every candidate should not be thought of as an individual, but as a representative of a deep body of people. Obama stands out to us as a uniquely refreshing candidate, but that should not blind us to the fact that his responses and messages are intensely coached and thought out.
I wonder if a politician could not be profitably compared to a folk singer. The folk singer borrows melodies and words to construct a performance that appeals to a broad audience. When this works right a performer seems to channel the past. Now consider a politician. The goal is to grasp onto the memes that will form the broadest possible coalition of supporters. Words like "change" get picked up (after Obama's success we saw almost everyone in both parties scramble to incorporate that word). Phrases like "no new taxes" or "universal health care" get used. Around these policies a whole mess of arguments and attack lines arrange themselves. This all begins to take on a life of its own.. but at no point is "uniqueness" the key point. These words, phrases, and arguments are lying out there ready for politicians to pick up and use. Thus congressmen, Democrats and Republican, will be furnished by their party with a list of talking points that have tested well on specific issues. Our image of the candidate in the midst of this should not be of a solitary individual meditating at night on the best position, but rather as a relentless purveyor of commonly owned verbal arguments. Lining up these arguments with specific constituencies is the challenge of the politician.
Hardware and Software
February 21, 2008
Thinking through the relationship of culture and human nature, I find myself slipping into a computer analogy: the mind represents hardware while culture is software downloaded onto the mind. This manages to preserve both "psychic unity" and immense human variation. The notion that culture can be seen as a form of "software" is backed up at various points by Clifford Geertz in his essay "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man":
...culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters—as has, by an large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call "programs")—for the governing of behavior. [44]
Just a few pages later he writes: "By submitting himself to governance by symbolically mediated programs for producing artifacts..." [48]. That is not too bad considering Geertz is writing this in 1966! The metaphor of software has obviously only gained further traction in the intervening years.
I use this software metaphor in my introduction to religious studies class.. pointing out how religious responses to the world may be based in hardwired human propensities, but since religion is expressed in thousands of different ways, it is a component of our software package. (The way religion has come to be a "part" of our software instead of the software itself is a fascinating question. For an ancient Egyptian, with no word for "religion," it would be exceedingly difficult to separate culture from religion.. while for a modern American it would seem that there is a broadly shared culture into which religion can be nicely fit.)
My reading of The Agile Gene by Matt Ridley has made me re-think this metaphor a bit. The key point of the metaphor is that software and hardware always remain essentially separate. You can delete the software and have a hardware system upon which it would be possible to download something else. But it seems to be an important point to say that this is not the way it works with humans: we cannot possibly imagine erasing culture and then getting a second cultural download. At the earliest age hardware and software are growing together. Our synapses and mental wiring has been formed by the ideas, object relationships, and emotional situations we have confronted. This is a process that never really ends, but which leaves culture and mind bound together.
This is a topic that I get to think about every day has I watch Aurora grow. I don't have the temerity or expertise to do experiments.. or even take systematic notes (I prefer just watching things happen). Still, I wonder what are the things that shape Aurora's view of the world? Often we hold her and walk her through the house.. and that system of the house must come to mean something to her. She would understand space differently if she had grown up in a mansion or in a teepee. The music I listen to with her (Raffi and Beach Boys) must imprint chords and modal relationships on her. The way Emily and I interact sets a pattern of expectations. Even the use of shelves and boxes must order the way her mind works. The point is that the sum of these things are more than software: they are writing their own biologically firm set of connections into her mind. Being raised somewhere else in the world would have led to a different set of connections.
Winter in Wisconsin
February 21, 2008
Voting for Obama
February 19, 2008
The presidential primary circus landed in Wisconsin today, and Emily and I cast our votes at Edison Elementary School. During our brief time in the sun our area got numerous candidate visits. If it weren't for the 8 1/2 inches of snow on Sunday, I might have heard Obama speak in an auditorium 10-15 miles away. But it was not to be.
I have done a fair amount of wavering between Clinton and Obama. I am smack in the middle of Obama's preferred demographic.. and that makes me suspicious of myself. Clinton's appeal to blue collar workers is nothing to take lightly. In fact, they may well be right that when it comes to getting through congress the bills that will most help them, Clinton would be stronger. I would also like to register a high level of discomfort with the focus on Obama as someone who personally represents change. These are the kind of Romantic hopes that are always dashed. If we elect Obama in November we will wake up the next morning and still be faced with the same problems and the same intractable politics. Republicans will still sabotage good legislation (as they are currently doing). Gas will still be too expensive.
Obama feels more and more like a big play man.. someone who could push the ball forward thirty yards or so. Clinton feels like a vote for a first down. (To use a football analogy.) I find it hard to resist going for big yardage in this election.. one that could break us out of the tired mold. Couple that feeling with the lame attacks coming from Clinton about plagiarism and his refusal to debate her.. and the way her camp hints that they will stop at nothing to get the nomination.. and I start to look more confidently toward Obama. But that being said, I wish the rhetoric around him as a person would cool off.
Newspapers and Novels
February 18, 2008
On Sunday the New York Times ran a front page article on Egypt. The title was evocative: "Stifled, Egypt's Young Turn to Islamic Fervor." Reading through the article I was struck by how the situation paralleled the representation of Egyptian society in the 2002 novel The Yacoubian Building. Here is the case of a twenty-two year old woman:
She was engaged to Mustafa... for more than two years. The plan was for Mustafa and his family to take a year or two to construct and furnish an apartment. But Mustafa’s father had no money left after setting up two older sons, and the young man was unable to raise enough money to finish the construction. Ms. Ashour wanted to help, secretly, but she has been unable to find a paying job. When her mother told her to end the engagement, something snapped, and she sought solace in increasingly strict religious practice.
So the progression is: 1) social engagement and optimism, 2) modest social goals blocked, and then 3) joining in with a radical Islamic group. Alaa al-Aswany in the Yacoubian Building details this same process. I have elsewhere called this a theory of Islam.
This ties in with my musings about the importance of popularity. If the Yacoubian Building had simply been a novel written by an outsider for an outside audience, then we would have no idea if this book had captured something important. Since the Yacoubian Building was an immense hit, we can surmise that something about this novel is true. When this is backed up with an investigative journalistic piece, we can conclude that this depiction of corruption and the attraction of radical Islam is an element that appealed to a wide range of people. Every person that reads a novel or goes to see a film can be thought of as a voice saying: this work is important to me. Part of the job of interpretation is to figure out not just what is objectively excellent about a work, but to ask: why did all these people find this an important work?
The Difference Between History and Religion
February 18, 2008
My comments on the academy are often shaped by my sense of how I feel things should be, and not how it actually is. I am an academic idealist who has an easier time thinking out a perfect academic Republic than suggesting small changes to what is present here and now.
History could be defined as the study of the nation state. As one moves backwards to study periods not dominated by the nation state, history departments begin to hemorrhage.. and their work is assumed by classicists or the interdisciplinary soup that is medieval studies. If one were to brainstorm the events and persons that are squarely the subject matter of a history department, the listings would tend to be things like the French Revolution, the Civil War, the partition of the Middle East after World War I. When historians work on periods that precede the establishment of the nation state, there will often be a focus on matters of interest mostly to nation states (democracy in Athens, taxes after the Arab Conquest, the story behind what became a "national epic").
The nation state is not simply a global institution, but also a social group with which individuals identify themselves. How well America or Ghana does in the Olympics brings on a level of pride in their citizens. In a large part of the world national identity is the strongest form of personal identity. Plenty of people consider themselves Americans above anything else.. and their Christianity has become a part of their nationality. So when we talk about the study of history we are talking about the study of the period of time in which nation states became the dominant form of cognitively organizing the world.
Religion could then be seen as an earlier form of history.. since it too is the study of an identity category. In this case identity is not based on territorial boundaries, but on commitments to a certain set of symbols and confessions. Christianity and Islam both legitimize forms of identity that were able to break down the more constricting local identities of tribe or ethnic group.. and I imagine the same thing could be said about any international religion. Although it is now difficult to imagine, there have been periods in which religious identity trumped other forms of identity. The power of a religious identity lies in its appeal to another world (a concept that can turn conduct on its head) and its ability to create binding symbols. The work of a scholar in religion is to trace this alternative form of identity.. which at one time was the main game in town.. and now is a sideshow for the machinations of nation states.
Nations Layered upon Ethnic Groups:
Shadow of the Silk Road
February 15, 2008
As I near completion of Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, I am growing convinced that it will be a classic. As with many travel narratives, there is an element of luck to its success. This book captures a region—the old silk road through central Asia—that is in the midst of change. On the Chinese side there is rapid colonization and modernization, with ethnic groups struggling to maintain their identities. In the countries formerly administered by the USSR there is instead the depressing feeling of emptiness and the loss of a conceptual framework. The reader can feel one cultural tide pushing in even as another recedes.
Thubron seeks remnants past, but while he knows something about the archeology of many sites, he is not satisfied with imagining the past. He adds his own lively reflections about how contemporary peoples relate to their past. It turns out that relating to the past is a task that makes fools of most people. We are treated to the sight of the people of Uzbekistan heroizing the conqueror Tamerlane as the father of their nation.. even though the Uzbeks themselves arrived in this country after Tamerlane. So here, as in so many other cases in Central Asia, we have a national tradition coalescing out of the thin air of history.
This attention to the conceptual changes that living in a nation state introduces is valuable.. pointing up something central to our own time:
So the tsarists, and the Bolsheviks after them, entered a land without nations, where a state was only the outreach of a ruler. Its heart was not an abstract institution, but a living dynasty. Its frontiers were blurred opinions. Craving order from this multilingual soup, Moscow prescribed labels, tinkered with languages. allotted suitable heroes, and carved out countries as best it cold. By the time Uzbekistan lurched to independence in 1991, the nation was a full-blown Russian invention. Its rulers, part of the myth themselves, discovered legitimacy in the Soviet fantasy of a pre-existing Uzbekistan, embracing the glory of Tamerlane now, and fading back into an indefinite past. [201]
Note the relation here between nations and the previous mixed ethnic groups. We can imagine the "multilingual soup" as a complex patch-work of colors laid out over the landscape. The nation state, despite its claim to being natural, imposes a monolithic demand upon that patch-work of colors. The outsized puzzle pieces of nation states—as we know them from our maps and globes—lies uneasily upon the actual ethnic landscape inherited from centuries past.
This is the central drama of our time:
the reconciliation of ethnic mixture with the demand of national unity. One of the most shattering and violent processes of all human history has been this slow motion struggle to impose nation status upon the patch-work of ethnic groups. Over the past few weeks we have watched Kenya show signs of buckling as its ethnic groups fight for supremacy.. and Thubron provides rich documentation of the same kinds of struggles within the states formed along the former Silk Road. In a zone whose glory is exactly its mixed status that is inimical to the nation state.. we discover the ways that such ethnic mixture can be explained away and controlled by the nation state.
Tokyo Panoramas
February 15, 2008
The Washington Post today has a multi-media presentation on Tokyo. In addition to some video explorations of the city (which seems like standard journalistic stuff) there is a series of panoramic photos of places in Tokyo. These photos have a clarity and crispness that I find beguiling.. and they are eminently browsable. These panoramic photos would be much more effective if presented with links to a map. Suddenly the city itself could be explored. To me that is the goal of all these efforts: to create an Internet experience that allows for a city to be experienced on multiple levels.
Religious Doctrines
February 14, 2008
Last week I was asked by a student about the Islamic view of the origin of evil. This is the sort of religious question I never quite know how to answer. My mind runs to the works that might touch on this issue, but this instinct hardly counts as knowledge of an official Islamic position. And that's just it: I don't care much about theological positions.. especially over the long haul. My attention is drawn to how that position worked in this specific historical context. Religious traditions are very good at maintaining a uniform theological discourse across time, but that discourse often means something different at different times. So why get caught trying to put together an "Islamic" view of anything?
Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism can be read as a case study in how to handle religious doctrines. His thesis is that religious concerns about the afterlife led to the development of a way of life conducive to Capitalist practices. He points to a number of Protestant religious sects that carried within them a constellation of ideas that led to a worldly asceticism. He examines Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism, Baptist sects, and Quakerism.. each of which lead, in Weber's view, to a similar way of life. Now, these religious groups hold some very different doctrinal positions, so how can they each be engines for the same way of life?
Weber addresses this question as follows:
We shall see that similar ethical maxims may be correlated with very different dogmatic foundations. Also the important literary tools for the saving of souls, above all the casuistic compendia of the various denominations, influenced each other in the course of time; one finds great similarities in them, in spite of very great differences in actual conduct. [55]
That first sentence is all important: doctrinal formulations that seem far apart on paper may actually converge on a similar way of life. Thus Calvinists and Methodists may be marked by a shared way of life. This is not to say that a belief in human free will or predestination will not manifest itself in life differently.. but there may be even greater similarities. In short, Weber is completing a complicated move in this passage. He is affirming the importance of studying the doctrines of a sect, but then denying that those doctrines are actually important as intellectual positions. The importance of these doctrines lies in how they lead to a way of living in this world. Doctrines are thus important to analyze in detail (as Weber does), but they are not important for their actual content.
I take this for a model of how to work with religious beliefs. It affirms the importance of beliefs in a way that a Marxist would find uncomfortable, but it also refuses to buy into the intellectual scaffolding of religious doctrinal formulations.. and act as if such formulations were actually important.
Online Publishing
February 12, 2008
It was easy to miss an article today in the New York Times on a proposal at Harvard University to publish academic papers for free online. Here are some of the details:
Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.
I am all for this kind of arrangement, believing as I do that our system of journals and conferences contributes to the great gulf between the academy and broader culture.
My sense is that things are heading in this direction. Online publication would allow for the easy publication of photos and other multi-media works. Its unlimited capacity means that a lot of work on subjects for which there is no immediate book-buying market could get published.
The only real attack is in the possible vacuum of academic authority:
Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo.
It is true that there is lots of junk online.. but there is also lots of junk printed in the form of magazines and books. We naturally look past the magazines we encounter in line at the grocery store, but we take a closer look at the serious magazines at the bookstore. Information funnels happen; human beings develop ways of sorting endless minutiae.. this would happen online just as it happens in ever other part of life.
But OK, since you asked here is my vision for academic work. Scholars interested in a topic would join research groups. I, for example, would be interested in a Cairo group, a pilgrimage group, an Egyptology group.. and on the list could grow. Each research group would be connected to an interactive website.. much like the Daily Kos. Various people would play an active role in posting regular thoughts. Longer essays could be solicited and then archived. A wiki on the topic could be maintained. The peer review at such a site would be immediate.. much like it is on a political site. Various respected voices would gradually emerge on each topic. Instead of spending the enormous resources involved in going to far flung conferences, these research groups could hold online conferences through video hook-ups.
This system would also discourage the scientific model of research in the humanities. (Something I hate!) Human culture and behavior is so fundamentally complex that there is no such thing as a growing body of work that year by year comes to better describe and capture the world. There is no incremental growth in our understanding of art and literature.. or culture. Better instead to opt for incessant conversation.. and the introduction of students to this conversation would be the highest aim of our work.
Catholics and Protestants:
Four Days in July
February 11, 2008
Mike Leigh is at his best when catching class differences through the inflections of conversation and mannerisms. In American films it is generally assumed that everyone functions with a single mental operating system.. and the only real divisions are those of wealth and opportunity. Mike Leigh conceives of people as perceiving the world through multiple operating systems. This emphasis is present in later films like Topsy-Turvy (1999), but to my mind splendidly realized in Four Days in July (1985).
Four Days in July is a series of sketches of life in Northern Ireland. The sketches rotate between scenes from a poor Catholic couple and ones from a Protestant couple. The wife in both couples is pregnant.. and they end up delivering their babies at the same time.. and recuperating in a hospital bed right next to each other.
The conversations throughout the film are colorful and brilliantly inconsequential. These conversations are not so much for the purpose of moving the story forward as for portraying different ways of relating to the world.
The Catholic couple (above) are always talking to friends. They rely on locals to fix things around the house. There appears to be no book culture.. everything that matters is conveyed orally. There is no particular plan for getting through life. Everything is makeshift. The house seems like a collection of disparate elements. A picture of the Pope can be glimpsed hanging on a wall.
Watching and listening to the Protestant couple we discover a middle class way of life. The baby room is made up ahead of the arrival of the baby and decorated cutely. There are some books about. The husband is in the military and living according to schedule. We see him working out. He resists social visits to the family of his wife. He has buddies who come over to drink.. but no long informal talks with neighbors. There is a constant backdrop of national symbols.
Leigh obviously respects and prefers the Catholic version of life, with its neighborliness and sharing. But he deals fairly with the Protestant couple.. and portrays the way social connections are found in symbolic events like a bonfire or march.
In one scene the Protestant husband steps out to his car and gets ready to go to work. First he has to go through a little ritual of checking for bombs under his car. This unthinking caution (which we also see in other scenes) is part of the price of the Irish Protestant way of life. It could be viewed as the mental tax for maintaining the class system.
In the final scene the Catholic and Protestant mothers are in the same hospital room.. holding their newborn babies.
For a couple of minutes the two women talk, sharing the bond of an intense shared experience. They begin to realize their religious differences.. and the conversation drifts off. The Protestant woman (on the right) seems especially intent on not sharing anything more of a personal nature. It is a powerful ending because we are presented with the way the mental operating systems of class get replicated and passed on to the next generation.
What makes the film worth watching is its refusal to simply identify bad guys. We see two different modes of life at work.. two distinct mental operating systems. Having just re-read Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism I went back in my mind to Leigh's fully articulated vision of class divisions in Ireland. Four Days in July can be seen as an alternative to Weber's thesis. It shows a class system that happens to be defined along a religious boundary.. and not religious values getting worked out into the economic sphere.
Egyptian National Cinema
February 10, 2008
Today I got back from a weekend trip to Bjorklunden in Door County, Wisconsin, where Lawrence University has a retreat. It was the first annual Cairo Film Fest! It was no Sundance, but I am hoping that every year a subset of my Cairo class will be able to spend one weekend during the term watching films made in Egypt. By that I mean not just international films set in Egypt, but films made by Egyptians for Egyptians.
We saw the recently made Yacoubian Building (2006), but the other two films were from the early 60s, the tail end of the golden age of Egyptian cinema. I have a hard time calling these films "art".. they have an obvious popular appeal and engage in little if any questioning of the audience's assumptions. But that does not mean they have nothing important to say about Egyptian culture and society.
Contemporary international films are made for an international audience, mirroring the diverse sources of funding that appear in the opening credits of a film. A film that included scenes from Egypt could conceivably portray people and places in a realistic manner, but it would say little about the way Egyptians see and understand themselves. On the other hand the generic films of a national cinema manage to capture these internal values quite well. Repeated scenes and character types are tremendously insightful with respect to the self-definition of a society.
To some extent my line of thinking here mirrors my earlier thoughts about the importance of popularity in interpreting a work. We could say that national cinema is an institution (loosely defined) that allows for the development of a shorthand manner of representing a society. A single popular comic strip (like Peanuts) could yield insight into a society, but a succession of Sunday comic sections from a widely circulated newspaper would go even further in defining a range of moods and attitudes. A national film industry functions sort of like that Sunday comic section.. that is, it provides a context for understanding individual works. It is the water in which every work must swim.
The recent New York Review of Books has an article on the Polish film Katyn. Anne Applebaum explains the director Andrzej Wajda's view of national cinema:
...Wajda seems to be saying something rather different about the need for a national cinema. By making Katyn he wanted to create something that would get Poles to talk to one another, to reflect upon common experiences, to define common values, to admire similar virtues, to forge a civil society out of an anonymous crowd. Katyn is deliberately intended to inspire patriotism, in the most positive sense of the word.
Egyptian cinema does not rise to the level of a national cinema like that of Poland (various reasons for that). But in classic Egyptian cinema the geographical and political references are much more narrow than would be the case if these films had a real international audience. As is evident in the passage cited above, a national cinema is valuable for its ability to help create a civil society by means of a shared outlook on the world. That shared outlook is what we can get at by watching the repetitive scenes and characters that take shape in the inevitable genres that develop in the midst of large scale production of popular films. The elements that make films "popular" instead of "art" are often the most insightful when it comes to interpreting a social system.
Coffee & TV - Blur
February 7, 2008
It could only be so long before Old Roads gave a nod to a band that released an album entitled Modern Life is Rubbish. The song "Coffee & TV" comes from 1999.. when they had left behind some of the social critique and satire that came with albums like Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995). But stylistically this song is a throwback to the music of those earlier albums.
Let's work through the song:
Do you feel like a chain store?
Practically floored
One of many zeros
Kicked around bored
Your ears are full but your empty
Holding out your heart
To people who never really
Care how you are
The opening line is ponderable: what would it be like to feel like a chain store? A chain store is very similar to a whole bunch of other stores. It lacks personality. It is expected. It is scorned. The question also seems to point us away from a possibly working class background and toward a bland service sector position. Once we have identified ourselves as being chain store like, it is not too far of a stretch to picture us there hollow and holding out our heart in earnestness to people who couldn't care less. These lines end up being a compact reference to life in the city: "one of many zeroes.."
The next stanza is the chorus, to be repeated several times:
So give me coffee and TV
Peacefully
I've seen so much
I'm goin blind
And i'm braindead virtually
Sociability
It's hard enough for me
Take me away from this big bad world
And agree to marry me
So we can start all over again
Coffee and TV enter as a sedatives to mask the chain store emptiness. But now the life that coffee and TV encourage unexpectedly come in for a critique. Presumably it is the TV that enables the singer to see so much that he feels like he is going blind. Coffee is a social drink.. and the singer finds this sociability likewise a burden. But now comes the strangest turn in the entire song: the singer calls out to someone with a marriage proposal: "Take me away from this big bad world/ And agree to marry me/ So we can start all over again." It is the romantic vision of a new start.. a marriage proposal that could be ripped from the pages of any cheap romance novel. It is hard to know whether we should take this outburst seriously.
The next stanza brings us to the second and final verse, which lands us in an explicitly romantic situation:
Do you go to the country?
It isn't very far
There's people there who will hurt you
'cause of who you are
Your ears are full of the language
There's wisdom there you're sure
'Til the words start slurring
And you can't find the door
This is a reference to William Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads".. in which he argues that the language of rustics is more pure and metaphorical than that of city dwellers. If the first verse of "Coffee & TV" is addressed to someone long pent up in a drab urban world, this second verse asks about the alternative of getting out to the country. For a second time this person's ears are said to be "full".. but this time it is with the language of the country people.. where there must be wisdom. But the singer warns that the country is not such a great escape: people get violent and drunk.
We now get the chorus repeated a couple of times.. and finally it gets pared down to just "we can start over again." This beautiful line is haunted in the background by some troubled guitar work and sonic fuzz, but its sentiments seem the real anchor of the song.
I wonder if Blur is parodying the harder "Cigarettes & Alcohol" (1994) of Oasis.. only from a more grown-up thirty-ish perspective. The sentiments for this song run along recognizable lines:
Is it worth the aggravation
To find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?
It's a crazy situation
But all I need are cigarettes and alcohol!
The repeated line in "Cigarettes & Alcohol" is the call: "You gotta make it happen!"
Those lines smell of a quite different social situation: to be 20 years old and looking for the standard rock and roll escapes. Blur sets out "Coffee & TV" as the escape for a more philosophical type of angst. The Romantic hope that "We can start over again" hovers over the song.. but we cannot tell who the singer is talking to.. nor does the reference to a "big bad world" fill us with hope that this is anything more than an idle dream. And so perhaps one is left with just coffee and TV?
Remembrance of a Dear Friend
February 4, 2008
Last week I received the news that Phil McDermott died after a three year battle with brain cancer. The past few days, in the moments between tasks, I have been thinking back on our friendship.
Phil was a regular at the literature reading group I inherited when I began to work at Vromans Bookstore in Pasadena. This was back in '97. I knew him first as a distinguished voice in an interesting crowd of readers. I wouldn't call his comments sharp, since they never had a cutting quality. He listened well and his voice, with humming and hawing, set out ideas that came from his deep reading.
Phil was the one who strongly pushed Master and Margarita and The Good Soldier on the reading group.. and steered us toward other books that always managed to surprise me. One of his reasons for attending a reading group was so that he got the enforced opportunity to re-read books he liked. Later as we became friends and spent a lot of time talking I came to value even more highly his sense for books. There were few important modern authors that he could not place for me.. and recommend the best place to start reading. Even today I find myself remembering his advice what to read and what to avoid. I am sure that I will never again find someone who so well filled the role of reading mentor.
Phil went from reading group acquaintance to friend on the mysterious occasion when we both got pretty sick (summer of '98). In his case it was a diagnosis of liver cancer; for me it was a late attack of mono that hit me hard. We were both at weak points I think.. and we began to go see a movie together in LA on Sunday afternoons. At that point I had little interest in film.. having decided that Hollywood did not do anything for me but knowing little about the pleasures of lesser known foreign and independent films. As I understand it, Phil had originally come to LA to go to film school.. and not finding that to his liking he dropped out and pursued writing. But good humanistic films (not so much experimental ones) remained a love of his.. and that is something I caught from him and have never lost.
On a couple of occasions I went over to Phil's house to watch a rented movie. Once he chose Night of the Hunter; another time we watched a film that he introduced as his favorite film: McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In the final scene John McCabe succumbs to death as the snow flakes gently cover him. I remember not quite knowing what to say, as I was watching this with someone whose future was uncertain.
Phil's health cleared up almost miraculously. The liver cancer, upon being operated on, turned out to be nonexistent. It had responded well to the radiation treatment and Phil had a chance to continue living and watching his son grow.. something he wanted. At the point when we started becoming friends he was still pursuing his writing. He was working then on a novel about anti-abortion activists. (That may even have been part of why he first wanted to talk with me.. to sound me out on religious attitudes.) After his bout with cancer he never, to my knowledge, got back to seriously working on his novel. He wrote a published work in which he presented himself as "rejected".. but it always seemed to me that in the process of what could be considered failure in his writing, he was becoming a winner at life.
In the fall of '99 I moved away from Pasadena to enter a Ph.D. program at Emory University in Atlanta. Whenever I came home to visit my family I made my way out to Pasadena to see Phil.. sometimes we got down to LA theaters on multiple occasions these winter breaks. I loved going back to Emory having seen all the films that would not hit Atlanta for another month or two. We corresponded a lot and exchanged news about what we were reading or watching.. or notes about life. Even in the midst of grad school I knew of no fellow student who could talk so easily about books and reading.
Somewhere in there our correspondence trailed off. Phil began to have seizures and was taking medicine that hurt his memory. Eventually he got a diagnosis of brain cancer, but I am unclear how this related to his earlier health struggles. It seemed horribly unfair for a person who had such a gem of a mind to be attacked in that very place.. and the strong medications he took to combat the cancer had additional side effects. The last time I saw Phil, which would have been in fall '05, he seemed to have aged quite a bit. He was as kind and caring as ever, but it was clear that his energy would be spent with his family.. and I don't think we ever exchanged another letter except for Christmas greeting cards.
I have not mentioned his political temperateness. Something he kept right up through the last time we talked. He was a liberal.. a regular reader of The Nation.. but he exemplified a form of liberalism that was willing to see the world through the eyes of a person who saw things differently. This did not have the effect of relativizing his viewpoints, but gave him the ability to watch political goings-on with a fair dose of humor and compassion. I think he was ultimately pessimistic about political change.. and about the human capacity to look realistically at the world.. but he was in the best sense a humanist who gave himself wholly to no party or group.. and strove to understand.
My best wishes to Irene and Peter.
The Pentagon's Dreams
February 3, 2008
The bloodshed is down in Iraq, but the dollars keep flowing. George W. Bush's recently announced budget includes almost $142 billion for Iraq in 2008.. and there is a strong possibility that the actual cost will run quite a bit higher. Much of this money is spent inside the United States and goes for American products.. but I guarantee that someday we will look at the expense of this war and imagine how we could have invested that money in projects closer to home.
The regular Pentagon budget spikes up dramatically in the president's 2008 budget. It will come in at $481.4 billion for 2008. So here is my question. It is well known that much of America's industry is fleeing overseas. We don't make a lot of products here in America. But what happens if what we do make is overwhelmingly military in nature? Since this is an industry that for national security reasons cannot migrate overseas, we are left with a huge domestic war industry. To someday cut into this Pentagon budget will therefore require hurting American industry to an extent that may well prove unpalatable.
This is another example of the way Americans are currently locking themselves in to a way of life that is not sustainable. One of the most obvious needs for our country is to cut back on military spending. Our greatest threat comes from non-state terrorists that should be fought through international treaties and policing. But instead of working to slowly cut back on military spending we are building up an economic dependency on military spending. And where there is a large military there will be some politician who wants to "lean forward" and get some use out of the equipment.
An Unspoken Urban Drama
February 1, 2008
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz is helped quite a bit if the reader knows something about the Egyptian urban landscape of the 1940s. Concentrating on the life of a narrow alley, Mahfouz never steps back to clarify and explain the larger world his characters inhabit. One reason for this may be that he was at this point writing for a local Egyptian audience which needed no cues about how Cairo worked.
From the 1870s through the 1940s Cairo was a city split in two: a traditional city and a modern city. Looking back on that time Alaa Al Aswany, author of the Yacoubian Building, limns the nature of this modern Cairo:
Downtown remained, for at least a hundred years, the commercial and social center of Cairo, where the biggest banks, the foreign companies, the stores, the clinics and the offices of famous doctors and lawyers, the cinemas, and the luxury restaurants. Egypt's former elite had built the downtown area to be Cairo's European quarter, to the degree that you would find streets that looked the same as those to be found in any of the capitals of Europe... It was considered quite inappropriate for natives to wander around in Downtown in their gallabiyas and impossible for them to be allowed in this same traditional dress into restaurants such as Groppi's... [32]
It is hard for Americans to get their minds around the colonial urban experience. Imagine if some foreign nation took over the US and looked down terribly on our way of life. They set up shiny new "modern" cities just outside our own cities.. and then disallowed Americans from entering these new cities in their normal clothes! The restaurants and cinemas would come to reflect a foreign taste.. as would the high end stores. We in the US have bouts of xenophobia when some foreign country buys up one of our corporations.. so I can only imagine how we would respond to colonization.
But strange as it may seen, this was the reality Egyptians lived with. This is what one must understand when reading Midaq Alley. The alley—located near the mosque of Hussein in the heart of the traditional city—is portrayed as a place that has lived through multiple historical dynasties and will continue after the present turbulence. Through the course of the novel the alley acquires a chain of symbolic meanings: the alley=Islam=contentment=sleep. It is a world that to some degree reflects traditional Islamic values.
When poor Hamida follows her ambitious and covetous heart and runs away, she finds herself in a very different place. It is the modern city.. the colonial city.. where a different set of values are adhered to. Here is Mahfouz's description of the transition from traditional to modern city:
The streetlamps were lit, and traffic flowed on, indifferent to the change from day to night. The whole surface of the earth seemed to echo and resound with ceaseless noise. Streetcars rumbled by, auto horns blew, vendors shouted their wares, and street musicians blew their pipes, while people bustled all around. Coming in from the alley to this street was like a translation from sleep to noisy wakefulness. [279-80]
This quick portrait of the modern city goes some way to clarifying the second chain of symbolic meanings: modern city=Europe=ambition/desire=wakefulness.
Part of what is hidden in the novel is that we are not talking here about a transition from a residential to a shopping district.. or from the suburbs to the city center. Those are our own familiar urban transitions. But in Midaq Alley we see reflected a much more tightly defined transition that occurred over the course of really a very small area. These two distinct sections of the city then are taken up into the weave of associations and assigned meaning.
It is possible to read Midaq Alley as a drama of the urban landscape. The characters in this reading are most important for the way they embody responses to these sections of the city. There is the call to contentment in the alley and the siren call of desire emanating from the modern city. But to understand this urban drama the American reader must forget about what he/she knows about cities and imagine life in this dualistic colonial construction.
