"The Obvious Child" by Paul Simon
September 29, 2009
For reasons I've already hinted at (here), Paul Simon is an artist particularly meaningful for me now. Rhythm of the Saints is an album I bought in 1990; I bought it on vinyl and listened to it over and over. The tunes come back to me like an old friend.. like car keys that slip into my pocket. The song that keeps grabbing my attention is "The Obvious Child," which opens the album with its distinctive drum patterns.
The song works by developing phrases that sound innocuous at first, but which then gain meaning as the song proceeds. In the first instance "obvious child" sounds like an address to someone:
I’m accustomed to a smooth ride
Or maybe I’m a dog who’s lost its bite
I don’t expect to be treated like a fool no more
I don’t expect to sleep through the night
Some people say a lie’s a lie’s a lie
But I say why
Why deny the obvious child?
It's tempting to hear that final line as "Why deny the obvious, child?" But there's no comma and Simon is speaking of something definite. The religious nature of the song is already taking shape in these first lines. Life is in some sort of crisis as the smooth life has hit a rough patch. Staying up at night with anxiety is now common. And finally some story is dismissed as "a lie's a lie's a lie." But to this the singer asks, innocuously: "Why deny the obvious child?"
The next stanza moves us further into this line of thought:
And in remembering a road sign
I am remembering a girl when I was young
And we said these songs are true
These days are ours
These tears are free
And hey
The cross is in the ballpark
This is a move back into the days of the "smooth ride".. youth and the idealism of love. The songs all seemed true then! And then comes another obliquely religious line: "And hey/ The cross is in the ballpark." In the context of youthful idealism it is something of a throwaway: the cross is out there somewhere and its unclear just where. It's something for some other time.
One of the most difficult questions about "The Obvious Child" is how to interpret the parallel story of "Sonny":
We had a lot of fun
We had a lot of money
We had a little son and we thought we’d call him Sonny
Sonny gets married and moves away
Sonny has a baby and bills to pay
The "we" could be the continued stream of thought of the singer, now turning to consider a son who is growing up. Or Sonny could be in the process of becoming the singer. Certainly by the next stanza there is not a lot of daylight between Sonny and the emotions of the singer:
Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls
Runs his hands through his thinning brown hair
These third person observations on Sonny are ambiguous.. and should be seen as narrative vignettes that complement the first-person thoughts of the singer.
And the thoughts of the singer are turning more and more in a religious—and Christian—direction. The "obvious child" morphs into an unambiguous reference to Jesus:
I’ve been waking up at sunrise
I’ve been following the light across my room
I watch the night receive the room of my day
Some people say the sky is just the sky
But I say
Why deny the obvious child?
We are back to the image of troubled sleep, and from that place of anxiety the singer refuses to believe that the sky is just what it appears to be, without any further meaning. The doubts begin to gather force: why go on denying the "obvious child"? To conclude the song Simon repeats the first stanza, but now mixes his two oblique lines:
Some people say a lie is just a lie
But I say the cross is in the ballpark
Why deny the obvious child?
The "cross is in the ballpark" is no longer a dismissive phrase, but an admittance of the possibility of faith. The cross is a live question.. it's in the ballpark.. there's no longer a reason to deny the obvious child.
Now I should back up and say what else is "obvious": Paul Simon is not a Christian or anything like that. But a careful listen to his music at almost any point in his career will impress with his probing on religious issues.. and here in "The Obvious Child" he is pushing on the possibility of faith. Compare this to another statement on faith from his most recent album Surprise:
I don't believe a heart can be filled to the brim then vanish like mist as though life were a whim.
Maybe the heart is part of the mist. And that's all that there is or could ever exist. Maybe and maybe and maybe some more.
Maybe's the exit that I'm looking for.
A life can't just end, Simon feels.. there must be something more. Characteristically Simon falls back into uncertainty: "Maybe and maybe and maybe some more." He realizes that there is only speculation and no real answer to be had. But perhaps he can live with that uncertainty, which after all is better than absolute certainty about the nothingness of death: "Maybe's the exit that I'm looking for." That is pretty much a restatement of "the cross is in the ballpark." Religious faith can't be dismissed, even as it can't quite move to the center of life. We can hold on to "maybe".. although proof is the bottom line for everyone.
Gleanings from Maqrizi VI:
Flashes of Humor?
September 28, 2009
Humor in medieval Arabic literature is not hard to find.. you just have to look in the right place. Every year in my Islam class I assign some pages from The Book of Misers by Jahiz. Students tend to be a bit mystified, and then in class I try to convince them that it's hilarious. Jahiz is a humorist, but where else could one look? Popular literature such as the 1,001 Nights is always there. But even Maqrizi in his Khitat gives us flashes of humor.. although one has to know what to look for.
My first example of humor comes from Maqrizi's recounting of the opening of the Mosque of Emir Sarghitmish in 1356 A.D. It's an amazing mosque which somehow I never gave much attention since it sits right next to the famous and older Mosque of Ibn Tulun.
Maqrizi lists some important officials who attended the opening of this mosque and the great repast in which the water of the fountain was flavored with sugar. Then he writes:
He rewarded on this day Qawam with a splendid robe and had him ride upon a royal mule. He also bestowed upon him 10,000 dirhams for the following verses in praise of him, which are the height of unseemliness:
This Qawam was clearly a favorite, and he had gotten himself appointed teacher of Islamic law at this mosque (an indication of the interconnection between Cairo's religious leadership and the leading mamluks). Maqrizi notes his large reward for a poem in praise of Sarghitmish and then mentioning its unseemliness he goes on to cite about twenty lines from this poem. The reader will right away understand why it could be deemed "unseemly":
Have you seen the one who has strength
and arrives near to God and expels suspicion?
He appears as a banner and grows like a grape vine.
He progresses forward having taken the victory!
Being impassioned for piety, true guidance, and liberality,
he takes his repast and stretches forth the meal with affection.
He exemplifies custom; he makes vivid the sunna.
He sweetens our time with his excellent judgment.
This one Sarghitmish, the days of his princehood
have sent forth nourishing rain clouds...
We would all be slightly embarrassed to have that poem read out about us.. but it could get you a great position in medieval Cairo!
Now, my question is what is Maqrizi's attitude toward these lines? There's no doubt some moral censure in that declaration of the lines as "unseemly." And that would match what we know of Maqrizi from his biographies; he has a distaste for this kind of political favor-currying. That moral judgment does not explain the twenty lines of citation. It's a lengthy passage and the only real explanation is that Maqrizi finds the whole thing funny.. hilarious. It's as if Maqrizi is writing: "Here's
a specimen of over-the-top praise that you just have to read!" The shear length of the quotation shows that Maqrizi intends more than moral censure, but also active enjoyment of the absurdity of the poetry.
A second example of humor comes in the section about the Mosque of al-Hakim. This mosque was completed in 1013 A.D. by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, but its story doesn't end there. Like all mosques that survive, it is continually renovated and reclaimed. That this renewal continues to be the rule is evident even today in the total makeover given to this mosque by the Agha Khan:
Sultan Hasan in the mid-14th century devoted extensive property to the maintenance of the mosque. Unfortunately he made a mistake. The close advisor al-Hirmas was expelled and had his property seized by the Sultan. Shortly thereafter the Sultan was establishing a waqf (or pious foundation) and to avoid the long drawn out reading, he simply had recited the introductory matter for the waqf and then it was signed and ratified by the proper witnesses. Everyone had forgotten that within the body of this waqf was a large grant to the formerly favorite advisor who the Sultan had just expelled. That was awkward! So now the Sultan wanted badly to invalidate the waqf document. The problem was that this was not easily done since waqfs are supposed to be inviolable and untouchable.. that's their point: they are a way to lock down wealth so that it can't be grabbed by the next Sultan.
Maqrizi lays out the basic story succinctly and then provides several paragraphs of legal wrangling about what to do. I found this section difficult to translate since it turns on quite obscure points of legal theory. Here is an example:
So Sultan Hasan asked the muftis for a legal opinion on this situation... These muftis agreed on the invalidity of a judgment settled with such invalid testimony and invalid execution. But the Hanafi judge was the one to make the decision and the others to implement it. The Hanafi judge said: “The waqf, if it originated in the correct manner, upon the principles of the Shari’a, then it cannot be invalidated by anything a witness says, and that’s the final answer to this incident.” The Shafi’i judge wrote an opinion supporting that: “If his legal school demands the invalidity of what he had first deemed correct, then it makes valid its invalidity.” The upshot was that the judges answered that the waqf was valid; the muftis that it was invalid.
You get that? It does make sense. The Hanafi judge, backed by the Shafi'i one, asserts that a waqf correctly implemented cannot be invalidated even if it turns out that the testimony of a witness is invalid. And if that is the case, then the large grant must go to the guy the Sultan just expelled.
The next move of the Sultan was to convene a group of scholars at his summer retreat at Siryaqus. You can almost see the Sultan's eyes glaze over as the legal scholars go at it contradicting each other as to whether and how this waqf can be overturned. Maqrizi describes the Sultan as yielding "after being worn out by the learned ones in the gathering and by his sharp discomfort in clarifying the paths they explained in looking for the truth." The final solution was to impeach the witnesses and render their testimony invalid. This involved some injustice to the poor men who were at the time following the orders of the Sultan..
The only possible reason for relating this legal argument at such length is humor. The scene is meant to tickle us. There's no importance to the debate in a historical sense. It is might be important to learn how seriously waqf stipulations could be taken with a conscientious judge, but that limited goal could have been communicated with a much shorter recounting of the controversy. Maqrizi loves telling this story, in all its legal obtuseness and hair-splitting. It's a funny!
Glenn Beck and Zoo Radio
September 25, 2009
Salon's three part series "The Making of Glenn Beck" should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. What I found most interesting is the information about Beck's past daytime top-40 radio work. This video clip gives a sense of what that looked like:
The Salon piece helps put this in perspective: Beck was a practitioner of "Zoo Radio," which thrived on manic, thought-association talk and wacky stunts. Once I saw the description I could remember this kind of programming from the 80s. It's the kind of thing I would catch snippets of, but I was never in an environment where this style was playing regularly.
I have a soft spot for this kind of creative work. But it becomes kind of dangerous when your zoo radio DJ is informing a large section of the population on the constitution.. which is the current situation. This is not a guy without any real knowledge about American history or traditions, and yet he has a media megaphone that allows him to shape the opinions of millions. Would we otherwise let the zoo radio DJ inform us on a topic? Wouldn't we find that absurd?
But beyond that, Glenn Beck has pulled a neat media crossover. Having been schooled in the style of zoo radio, he has essentially brought that style into television political commentary. Here is Salon:
"You can see the influence in everything Beck does," says zoo pioneer Scott Shannon, now boss jock at New York's WPLJ and the official voice of "The Sean Hannity Show." "The timing, the voices, the inflections, the whole approach -- so much of it is from the old Top 40 morning style."
Brian Wilson, one of Shannon's original inspirations for the zoo idea, likewise notes Beck's successful adaptation and carry-over from 1980s morning radio. "His performance in talk radio and television is full of hangover of basic Top 40 elements, formats and principles," says Wilson, now a libertarian talk show host. "The sound drops, the effects, the 'wackiness' -- he's doing the same thing, only minus the music."
So a style that has its roots in 80s radio has now been successfully transferred to television in the 00s. This style allows for the presentation of a populist political message that goes down surprisingly easy.. despite the anger that lies behind it.
The tracing out of these media mutations should be a priority in a serious history of the imagination. These mutations are everywhere, from the ancient Greek copying of wood designs into stone for their temples, to the importation of novelistic narrative devices into film, our creative formats are advanced and transformed largely by adopting standards and styles from one format to a completely different one. That new format does not allow for a perfect mirroring, and so defects in the copying become the basis for a new canon of style. I continue to wish there were a theoretical language for talking about these media crossovers and mixtures.
I will end with the irresistibly funny video clip of Glenn Beck "throwing a frog" into boiling water. It didn't happen, of course. But think of it as a brilliant attention-grabber.. a zoo DJ move..
Return of the Compiler?
September 24, 2009
When al-Maqrizi (the 15th century Egyptian historian I am always talking about) introduces a quotation from another book he uses an odd construction. He often writes "the compiler of such-and-such book." The Arabic word for "compiler" is jâmi'—which means: a person who collects or brings together. That will strike most modern readers as an odd way to refer to an author. Our authors create, they don't compile.
If you read medieval Arabic histories you will immediately perceive the aptness of the term compiler. These often have the feel of cut and paste jobs.. although learned ones, to be sure. They are large multi-volume works put together from reports and anecdotes from past works. As al-Maqrizi set out to write on elements of Egypt and Cairo he could at times do no better than simply to excise the passages from earlier histories that covered a certain topic. On some topics—such as the pyramids—he had nothing very personal to add, so what we get is a pile of citations.
For a compiler originality comes in the act of choosing the topic and organization. Many authors probably touched on events that occurred in a mosque in the course of writing a linear history, but al-Maqrizi might be the one to arrange these scattered references into a topic headed by the title of that mosque. That pushes the act of creation back a stage. It's now about organizing material in a novel way instead of creating new material. Medieval Arabic writers had a much easier handle on this topic than we have.. but I think we need to get some of this back.
The Internet offers lots of opportunities for re-conceptualizing scholarship, but getting back to this idea of compiler is one of the most exciting. Why should history be driven so strongly by a narrative? Why do we need that hand of God on our shoulder all the time? Once the historian was working away in archives that were voluminous and which could not be reproduced, so the aim was to summarize and connect the dots. But those archives are now mostly online.. or getting to be online. So instead of writing the next biography of Abraham Lincoln, why not select the important passages and letters and speeches that everyone goes back to, and compile them on a site so that a reader can walk through them?
Not everyone wants to go wading through the literature on Lincoln or Jefferson, so arrange it in an order of centrality.. sort of like the songs on iTunes Essentials: the basics, next steps, deep cuts, complete set. There would obviously be some haggling as to what winds up in which category, but that should be a group decision and would not require a massive new biography out of anyone.
The thing to be avoided is a selection like this one, set up by Barefoot Bob Hardison:
A compilation is often used, both on the Internet and in print, as an implicit claim to authenticity: "See, it's in his own words!" But obviously the critical role of compiler is glossed over. And that is the whole point of this post: be a compiler! Build a narrative out of words lost in the archive! God knows we don't need another book on How the Greeks Saved Civilization or How the Empire State Building Created Modern America.. all these bullshit titles which result from the need to have a grand narrative.
photo "WeinerText" ("Photograph of Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, by Lawrence Weiner"). Photo used under GNU Free Documentation License.
Katyn
September 23, 2009
What makes the film Katyn (2007) so interesting is that it does not really focus on the massacre per se. The director Andrzej Wajda does come round at the end to show us scenes of systematic slaughter, but by this time he has spent the majority of the film examining the uncertainty of the wives, sisters, and children who lived to see the end of the war. You could see it as a film about how to choose between the past and the present, and given that it's no surprise to see this reference to Antigone come and go:
The play by Sophocles examines the conflict between what is owed to the dead and the living. Antigone chooses to disobey the ban by the ruler and bury her disgraced brother.. out of a sense of obligation to the dead. For this crime she is sentenced to be buried in a cave. It is the classic case of destroying the present in order to fulfill obligations to the dead.
Poland as a nation appears to have been in a similar situation after World War 2. They are occupied by the Soviet Union, who were the perpetrators of the massacre at Katyn. This massacre at Katyn and elsewhere took almost 22,000 Polish lives. A horrific number, but made worse by the fact that these were the officers and intelligentsia of the nation. So it was something of a decapitation of Polish leadership. So the question arises, how should one live after the war? Is the correct path unending hostility to the occupiers? Or does one try to get along and keep the embers of Poland alive until some unknown future time? Wajda evidently has no real answer to that question. His characters embody the spectrum of choices, and none of them appear satisfactory.
To make things more complex, the Soviets tried to blame the massacre on the Nazis and constructed an elaborate narrative to deny their responsibility. (This was the official Soviet version until 1990!) The movie gives us hints of the battle of narrative that ensues. The correct dating of the massacre and the naming of its true perpetrators becomes an act that the Soviets cannot allow. One woman tries to set up a memorial for her brother, and is not allowed to place it in a church.. and when she has it set up in a cemetery it is broken down.
This is a reminder that national narratives are constructed by monuments and tangible things. The battle to tell a narrative is not just about writing history books, but also about controlling stones and statues. In this case no amount of official vigilance was going to keep the story obscured. But that only goes to raise the question: why not trust in the future and keep the truth within oneself, and dissimulate on the outside and learn to make do in the occupation? Do the dead command that much from us, that we should give away ourselves and our children for the sake of truth?
Photo "KatynPL-mogily" by Smolensk Memoryal. The photo is public domain.
Lehnert and Landrock in Egypt
September 20, 2009
Two photographers, Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock, set up shop in Egypt during the 1920s, and by the looks of their collection of prints they got around pretty well. They made images that became classic postcard prints. A wide collection of their prints is now available online through the website of CULTNAT (Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage). The goal of this institution is to document the "tangible and intangible" cultural heritage of Egypt. It takes a little poking around, but a persistent viewer will come upon a dynamic presentation of the photos of Lehnert and Lambert.
I have mixed feelings about the style of the presentation. The images swirl in a helix that can be sped up or slowed down by the viewer. Individual photos can be clicked on to view in a slightly larger format. Since this is all embedded within a Flash file, it's difficult to do anything with the image files.. there's no way to download them or magnify them so far as I see. And that is to me a real drawback. I just don't get the utility of putting up a catalog of photographs that nobody can do anything with. A site like this can only be treated as a museum gallery.. something to be viewed on its own and then walked away from.
Strangely a Google search for the terms "Lehnert Landrock Egypt" does not turn up this site in the first few pages, which indicates that it is pretty well buried on the CULTNAT site. Too bad! What does come up in a search is the excellent TIMEA site (Travelers in the Middle East Archive) administered by Paula Sanders at Rice University. This entire site is governed by a Creative Commons License so material is open for use with proper attribution. And I can put in an example of a postcard by Lehnert and Landrock:
This freedom of use allows someone to do something with the photo, even if it is only to make a few comments on the unpaved streets and lack of cars. I don't complain about this lack of openness with images solely as a blogger who likes to use images; I look for visual sources that allow students to use the images and perhaps use them as examples in a paper.
I just don't get why people are so interested in padlocking material. I can understand it from a profit point of view: someone is looking to sell access and make money. But for a non-profit it makes no sense and defeats the goal of disseminating the information and allowing educators to use the material in classes. CULTNAT appears to be working on a lot of projects, and it can only be hoped that in the future it will keep a looser grip on its material. If they continue to present material in Flash format (as they also do with the related Description de l'Egypte site), they might consider providing an alternative format with accessible image files.. and for God's sake make use of a Creative Commons license so that there are defined parameters of re-use!
Through New York City with Herzog
September 18, 2009
It's one thing to follow the lines and notations on a map, something else entirely to hear the personal and idiosyncratic associations built up by an individual who travels a route day after day. It's something like this I was trying to get at in my virtual walk through Redlands (here) and that I have remarked on in connection with medieval Cairo (here). There's nothing I find more valuable than a running commentary on the world as it strikes a fellow human being.
This is what I find so remarkable about Saul Bellow's Herzog. In the process of working through the story of a middle aged man going through a divorce, it offers a meditation on private life and all its varied scenes. Take the following passage, which comes and goes:
Then he ran the water in the sink. The crude oval of the basin was smooth and beautiful in the gray light. He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fingertips and breathed in the water odors and the subtle stink rising from the throat of the waste pipe. Unexpected intrusions of beauty. [636]
Archeologists would give their left arm for a similar passage that shows how someone once experienced the physical things that survive from their culture. There's obviously a lot more close description of things available in the modern world, but surprisingly little gets at the real experience of something. We have lots of photographs and moving images.. and fantasy stories.. but guides to our rich mental associations of things and places are hard to come by.
My favorite section of Herzog is a six page section in which Moses Herzog travels via the subway to the apartment of his mistress. It is a rich description of getting through New York, including this descent into the subway:
...he hurried underground, listening for a train, fingers examining the coins in his pocket, seeking a subway token. He inhaled the odors of stone, of urine, bitterly tonic, the smells of rust and of lubricants, felt the presence of a current of urgency, speed, of infinite desire, possibly related to the drive within himself... [593]
My attention goes to that image of nervously fingering the coins in your pocket, turning them over and over, perhaps in impatience. Then the attempt to recognize the token amidst the coins, and thereby avoid taking everything out from the pocket. It seems so small, but these are the things that need to be written.. not least because this is a long way from the contemporary experience of the subway. I found this image and accompanying note on Flickr:
Three essentials for getting around town. The wonderful MetroCard, which you swipe to get onto the subway, and then you refill it whenever its value gets low. A handy map of New York's subway lines, streets, neighborhoods, certain landmarks and attractions. Just handy enough without trying to be everything to everybody. And my cell phone, with which, if I'm lucky and actually can get a signal, makes it possible for me to contact friends, coworkers and emergency works
To rewrite this section of Herzog now—more than 40 years later—would mean adding an unbelievable dose of technology to the description. We walk the same streets but the inner experience is different.. and someday all these things talked about by Saul Bellow will seem odd.. and then someday after that they will be incomprehensible and the domain of the historian to explain.
Bellow has Herzog look to the walls of the subway:
Herzog made a tour of the platform, looking at the mutilated posters—blacked-out teeth and scribbled whiskers, comical genitals like rockets, ridiculous copulations, slogans and exhortations. Moslems, the enemy is White. Hell with Goldwater, Jews! Spicks eat SHIT. Phone, I will go down on you if I like the sound of your voice... Filth, quarrelsome madness, the prayers and wit of the crowd. [594]
It is the ground to be covered by Simon and Garfunkel in "Sound of Silence".. a song written in the same year that Herzog was published. Simon appears to have a similar scene in mind with these lines:
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whispered in the sounds of silence.
Both Bellow and Simon use the image of graffiti on subway walls as an apocalyptic sign of the times. The subway doesn't have that kind of salacious resonance anymore (although see image below for throwback!).. but these two portrayals of the subway from 1964 make us see and smell and feel a different world that is the same world.
First photo "New York Subway" by Flickr user jon starbuck, used by Creative Commons License.
Second photo "MetroCard, map and phone" by Flickr user Paul Worthington, used by Creative Commons License.
Third photo "Hipsters Eat $#@%" by Flickr user J.L. McVay, used by Creative Commons License.
Gleanings from Maqrizi V:
Poetic Justice for a Minaret's Collapse
September 15, 2009
The Mosque of al-Muayyad (1418-20 AD) was undergoing restoration last time I was in Cairo, and I was thankful this time to be able to go through it. Since it is located right next to Bab Zuwayla it is a mosque I had walked past many times. The interior turned out to be more magnificent than I expected with its elaborate marble paneling, at least on the side of the mihrab. That inlaid wooden minbar (pulpit) is original and its intricacy becomes clear close up:
In his Khitat the Egyptian historian Maqrizi treats the mosques of Cairo in chronological order and since this mosque was completed just twenty years before his own death in 1442 A.D., it's one of the last mosques that he writes about. Maqrizi lived through the construction of this mosque, and a certain familiarity creeps into his description. There are no longer lengthy citations from other sources; he's writing what he knows.
One episode that Maqrizi reports is the collapse of a minaret during construction of the mosque. One day a lean was noticed in the minaret and the engineers recommended it be pulled down before it fell. The Sultan al-Muayyad immediately gave his permission to tear it down. Only they could not get it done fast enough:
Then the minaret collapsed on Thursday the 26th day of the month of Hajar, destroying the property facing Zuwayla Gate and killing a man underneath it. Zuwayla Gate was closed on account of fear on the part of passers-by.
This would have been a major event since Bab Zuwayla marked the entrance to the major thoroughfare of Cairo. The accident attracted lots of attention and poets were especially busy. They took to writing clever lines about the reasons for the accident. Maqrizi gives us six short passages on this topic. Here is the first:
The mosque of our master al-Muayyad is splendid;
its minaret is radiant with beauty and adornment.
You say, after it had leaned over them, they proceeded slowly.
For there is not on my body anything more harmful than the eye.
The lines are somewhat clunky, and they might leave you scratching your head, but at the end there's a reference to the "evil eye" that can do damage through its envious gaze. Maqrizi finds in the lines a hidden allusion to a man named Shaykh Badr al-Din Mahmoud who was called "the Eye." So with this interpretation the lines contain a veiled reference to a particular person understood to be a damaging member of society.
The poet who wrote those pointed lines was named Hafiz al-Waqt Shihab al-Din Ahmed ibn Ali ibn Hajar the Shafi’ite. His name happens to contain the word "Hajar" which means "stone" in Arabic, so "the Eye" responded with some lines of his own:
A minaret when revealed is like a handsome bridegroom;
its destruction comes through the judgment of God and fate.
They say: “it was struck by ‘the eye.’” I say: “That’s wrong!
Nothing imposes destruction except worthless stone [hajar].
It's an error to say that the minaret was struck by the evil eye, when everyone knows that only worthless stone (hajar) will bring about such a collapse. Those in the know would understand that the other guy is now being called worthless.
Maqrizi clearly finds this exchange entertaining (the only possible reason he would include it in his book), but he sees the limitations of this kind of clever exchange:
Neither of these poets achieved his aim, for neither “the eye” Badr al-Din Mahmoud, overseer of pious donations, or Shaykh Shihab al-Din Ahmed ibn Hajar had any real relation to the minaret so that he might serve as a useful metaphor.
That is a useful note on what makes for a successful literary jibe. In this case neither man can reasonably be connected to the collapse of the minaret, so it's an ultimately pointless poetic exchange.. fun only because of the cleverness of the put-downs. Maqrizi provides for the reader a passage he considers more successful:
Upon the tower [burj] of Zuwayla Gate was founded
a minaret of the house of God and place of safety.
That damn tower [burj] abandoned it, causing it to lean.
So, people, shout: “Damnation to the tower [al-burj]!
In sense this is similar to the first two passages, only now the tower (burj) gets the blame. The poet ends by calling out "Damnation to the tower!" Maqrizi considers these lines a success since they are an allusion to the man put in charge of building the Mosque of al-Muayyad, Baha’ al-Din Muhammad ibn al-Burji. That last name "ibn al-Burji" connects him verbally to the tower that is condemned.. and he happens to be a legitimate target for public ire at the accident.
A section like this is an example of the parts of Maqrizi's Khitat that most interest me. The historical information about when, who, and how can be found in modern history books on Cairo.. if that was all I wanted I would not need to read Maqrizi. These digressions go unreported in books on Cairo's history. What we get from his digression on the poetry passed around at the time of this accident is invaluable: a sense of the contemporary discourse for explaining and discussing events in the city. We find a fair amount of stock pious language in these lines, but most striking is the extent to which personal rivalries are pursued under the slight cover of literary nicety. This was obviously a competitive society.. and one in which attacks and recriminations were circulated widely among the crucial literate learned class by means of poetry.
Zappos Identity
September 13, 2009
I would suggest an eccentric way of reading the recent New Yorker essay on Zappos.com ("Happy Feet: Inside the Online Shoe Utopia" by Alexandra Jacobs). Think of the essay as a description of a emergent identity category that finds itself in competition with religion and the nation-state. This identity category is the current corporation.
An issue that must be solved by a corporation if it is to compete with the allegiance of the nation-state is to develop a values-system that elevates the corporation as the primary community for its workers. In the past corporations were limited because their workers understood themselves based on class divisions— the driving force for labor unions. A man on the assembly line was not primarily a member of GM, but of the working class. More recent corporations have cut out the entire rationale of unions by encouraging a direct identification with the corporation, from the lowest levels on up. This process is evident in the essay on Zappos, when CEO Tony Hsieh muses:
"I just liked working for Zappos," he said. "It was about: What kind of company can we create where we all want to be there, including me? How can we create such a great environment, where employees get so much out of it that they would do it for free?" And, in fact, some Zapponians, as they are known, draw a wage as low as eleven dollars an hour.
The ideals expressed here I don't have much to say about, but the result is important: employees view themselves as showing up to work to have fun and participate on a team. This sense of identity ("Zapponians") is meant to trickle down to even the lowest paid workers. A labor union in this environment is impossible to imagine as it would mean, by definition, not being a true Zapponian; it would be an admission that work is not fun. By the emphasis on fun and equality a major problem in the old-style corporation is overcome: the primacy of class identification. That issue of class was a major impediment to the development of the corporation as an all-encompassing identity that could compete with the nation-state.
Now think of how religion offers value and meaning for individuals. Religions will set out a code for life. Usually in a religious context this code comes mixed up with metaphysical claims, but those are not a necessary part of a code for life. Zappos has ten "core values" that have a distinctly religious sense to them:
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble
To begin with, ten "core values" is an obvious contemporary skewing of the Ten Commandments. The extent to which these add up to a lifestyle and way of being is clear in this Zappos-produced video:
Watching more of their videos (such as "Why Do People Work At Zappos?") the smiles and forced creativity can seem grating. It's reminiscent of the way presentations of church life start to seem saccharine and shallow with the non-stop procession of smiling happy people.
Hsieh has a thing for happiness, writing a book entitled for now "Delivering Happiness", which will be "a combination of talking about Zappos, the culture, core values, and the science of happiness..." I personally don't resonate with the notion that "happiness" is something around which life can be organized. To my way of thinking happiness is a byproduct of a correctly ordered frame of thinking (I'm a Stoic!), and something that therefore finds you when you stop thinking about it. But any discussion of happiness takes us into the orbit of religion, and to the extent that Zappos is a corporation dedicated to a version of happiness, it's also a religious organization.
Ask yourself: could a fundamentalist Christian work well at Zappos? Not that there's any overt discouragement as such, but a fundamentalist would surely find the "open-minded" and "growth" values difficult to fathom.. and the idea that happiness can be embodied in a corporate culture? "Come again?" the fundamentalist would ask. This style of corporation needs a certain type of individual, and where a fundamentalist would fit in well in certain hierarchical work structures, Zappos calls for someone at home in contemporary popular culture and the kind of diversity values that are everywhere today.
photo "Packed with Happiness Zappos Box" by Flickr user ShellyS, used by Creative Commons License.
Miller Park Narratives
September 10, 2009
I went to a Milwaukee Brewers game a couple of nights ago and I just realized I didn't know who won the game. We left in the 8th inning with the Brewers up 3-2, but I see from reports that they lost the game 4-3. I've always enjoyed watching baseball.. and I'm sure that's something I'll never lose. But the outcome doesn't mean that much to me anymore. I can enjoy a game for eight innings and not feel an overwhelming curiosity to know what happened. Just to go theoretical for a moment, this could be related to my non plot-oriented enjoyment of books and films. It could also be related to the fact that I have no context for the plot-line of the season.. so the proper analogy might be someone picking up a book and flipping it open to somewhere toward the end and reading a couple of pages, but not being able to "get into" it.
Our American leisure time is dominated by narrative. We watch a television show and thus take in a narrative that has been produced for us. We watch a baseball or football game and we see a narrative unfold in front of us. The rules of the game allow us to "read" the action and find the story. Sometimes the game is a gripping story that comes down to the last pitch thrown, other times the game is a 13-0 blowout. But television shows and movies have about the same ratio of duds to exciting stories. Narrative is the common denominator. Television shows, books, and sports games all hook us by means of it.
And just what keeps us watching a ball game? I would argue two things: plot line and lyricism. Every narrative builds energy by creating a desire to know what happens next. That is what keeps someone turning the page or waiting until the next inning. At the same time the purest pleasure of a narrative comes from the exceptional moments of language or action. In baseball this comes in the diving catch, the perfect double play, or the sweet home run. In books there are moments of poetic language or imagery that make a reader hold his breath. These moments run in counterpoint to the plot-line energy of the narrative. I would define myself as a reader who emphasizes the lyrical over the plot-line, and that habitual manner of approaching narrative carries over into baseball.
To sit in a modern ballpark is to be surrounded by advertising. It is a motley sight, with all kinds of fonts and symbols confronting one and jostling for attention. For an American this high concentration of ads could pass unnoticed, but if we imagine a visitor from outer space in Miller Park, the spectacle would befuddle. Even the between-innings games and trivia have sponsors, so the advertising infiltrates aurally too. In more and more cases the stadiums themselves bear a corporate name (Miller Park, Staples Arena, Minute Maid Park). Narrative is valuable because it draws our attention, and advertising loves to piggy-back on that attention for its own gain.
One of the well known events at Miller Park is the sausage race. Various varieties of sausage (hotdog, Polish Sausage, Bratwurst, Chorizo, and another I can't remember) race around the inside of the stadium. This is of course a running advertisement for particular sausage makers who sponsor this. The sausage race is a nice example of how local color gets into a heavily corporatized event. Much depends upon national corporate sponsorship, but there is a special emphasis on locally based corporations (Harley Davidson). These local corporations may specialize in locally popular products, whose advertising thus adds a local dimension.
Just for the fun of it I'm going to post a video of the sausage race, which has a fair amount of representation on YouTube:
Cairo and Beijing
September 7, 2009
I recently came across a new book on Beijing, City of Heavenly Tranquility Jasper Becker. I read the introduction and was surprised at the degree to which Beijing has been destroyed over the past two decades.
I doubt there is another example in history of an ancient capital being destroyed and rebuilt so thoroughly and in such a short space of time. Even Baron Haussmann left 40 per cent of nineteenth-century Paris untouched, but Beijing will be left with less than 5 per cent of its buildings. Out of the 25 square miles of largely Ming buildings that had survived into the 1950s, just three have been kept. If one subtracts the sizeable grounds of the Forbidden City, just twenty-five historical areas have been kept as isolated pockets in a new city that sprawls over 50 square miles. [8]
I find that depressing, if familiar. With classical manuscripts it is common to breathe a sigh of relief for that one manuscript that made it to the modern world and was printed and saved. We are thankful for the fragile artwork that lasted until it could be preserved in a museum. Getting to the modern world equals safety for cultural artifacts. But when it comes to cities and landscapes the modern world has and continues to be utterly and remorselessly destructive.
The story is not quite as simple as it sounds. History gives us a few examples of states that were actively hostile to the past. In Anthony Tung's Preserving the World's Great Cities there is a chapter on Moscow and Beijing entitled "Ideological Conflict with the Past." In these extreme cases there is not only the modernist conflict with traditional society, but an actual goal of uprooting the past. But while that attitude was part of the legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, the greatest destruction of Beijing came under a more nationalist oriented government. This current Chinese government would deny destruction of the past:
Even as they were destroying Beijing's past, the authorities boasted of how they were spending US$ 800 million on preserving its traditional culture. [12]
So the current government is receiving and preserving much from historical China, but it is doing so in bits and pieces. Note how in that first long quotation there are 25 historical areas kept as "isolated pockets" inside Beijing. The real problem is that culture and landscape are not being treated as wholes, but as bits and pieces.. beautiful relics that can be exhibited individually to visitors.
This approach to preservation is quite common, and perhaps China is unique only in its ability to overnight, as it were, tear down and reconstruct. Over the past few decades Cairo has been going through the same thing, only without much evidence of planning. The traditional city is being lost right in front of us. The Egyptian government belatedly realized the tourist value of its Islamic history, and turns to preservation. It does a beautiful job in some ways, and the buildings are restored and spiffed up. But even while this preservation is taking place, the texture of the traditional city is being lost. What one ends up with are small pockets of preservation within an unhistorical city.
At the top of this post I embedded a slide show of the mosques that line Bayn al-Qasrayn in Islamic Cairo. The mosques look great, and the lighting brings out the marble patterning in a way that the hard sunlight of the day can't. These mosques are now being worked into the tourist economy of the city.. and stripped out of any living memory.
On this last point Becker makes an interesting point about the preservation of Beijing:
This was conservation only in the sense that the British Museum preserves such dead cultures as the Assyrians or ancient Egyptians. [12]
As a museum preserves beautiful objects cut off from context, so this approach to preserving the city creates remarkable little set pieces within a modern city. The loss is that there will no more be experiences like that of Amina, the wife and mother who is central to The Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz has her look out her balcony upon these same mosques in Bayn al-Qasrayn:
There was nothing to attract the eye except the minarets of the ancient seminaries of Qala'un and Barquq, which loomed up like ghostly giants enjoying a night out by the light of the gleaming stars. It was a view that had grown on her over a quarter of a century. She never tired of it. [6]
As you can see from the slide show at the top of this post, these mosques are hardly "ghostly giants" anymore. They are lit up with lots of drama. They are the spectacular companions of the ever-changing crowd of visitors, not the silent overseers of a traditional and locally rooted life.
Jasper Becker. City of Heavenly Tranquility. Oxford UP, 2009
Anthony Tung. Preserving the World's Great Cities. Three Rivers Press, 2001.
Naguib Mahfouz. The Cairo Trilogy. Everyman's Library, 2001.
Countryman Rastafari
September 6, 2009
Countryman (1982) is not a film I would recommend. It's plot is contrived, but I wanted to see its representation of Rastafari culture and values. The main character is Countryman, who rescues a young white male and female survivor of a plane crash and hides them from corrupt Jamaican leaders. The plot is not worth spending much time on. The real goal of the film is to portray Countryman and his Rastafari values in a positive light. In the above picture he is smoking ganja and preparing a natural meal for the two survivors, who despite their danger will eat quite well. The film begins with the white woman losing her top and sitting at this meal topless, but Countryman barely looks at her and has perfect sexual control. In fact, there is really nothing for which Countryman could be faulted. He is an amazing athlete, perfectly uncorrupted, and razor sharp.
Countryman is not so much a character as an embodiment of the religious ideal of the Rastafari faith. The movie opens with the Bob Marley song "Natural Mystic", and Countryman illustrates what a perfect natural mystic might look and act like.. to sometimes humorous effect (control of lightning?). From the largest perspective the film captures the important elements of Rastafari belief: natural living, simplicity, dissociation from worldly power, and community life. But from the start it banishes realism for the construction of a Rasta superman. This portrayal of the Rastafari borrows a page from past idealized portrayals of natives. They become people who are perfectly at home in their environment and deeply wise.. although they are not "natives" at all.
While Countryman fails to portray Rastafari culture except in the most idealized form, it does deserve credit for trying to introduce a popular audience to another culture. We find scenes like this:
Jahman (playing himself) gives a lesson to children using an illustrated board. Again the idealization sets in quickly, but we do get a sense for the way Rastafari faith is not just about Bob Marley records, but actually exists in villages and involves education.
An alternative portrayal of Rastafari faith comes in The White Diamond (2004), a documentary by Werner Herzog set in Guyana. As so often in Herzog's work, he appears to find his theme spontaneously. One of the local workers is Rastafari, and his simplicity is used at several key points as a contrast to the educated scientism of his main subject.
In our first meeting of Mark Antony he is sitting back and talking poetically:
That is a beautiful view. It has the sunset and there is the balloon, just floating around, aimlessly. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's just fantastic.
After some more verbal wandering he compares the balloon to a white diamond.. and thus the title! But while Herzog is clearly fascinated with the simple values of Mark Antony, it is impossible to imagine this guy in the role of Countryman. He is not about to run unbelievably fast nor control nature nor be perfect at anything. What we get is something quite a bit more interesting: a realistic if limited portrayal of a Rastafari man.
Many of the same broad characteristics as seen in Countryman come out in Mark Antony:
He knows where to look for medicinal herbs, and subscribes to natural remedies to the exclusion of anything else.
In this hilarious scene we glimpse something of the poverty and simplicity of Mark Antony. He's quite proud of that rooster! Herzog seems to grow fonder of Mark Antony as the film progresses, and by the end he is a countryman.. and one of the best and kindest portrayals of a Rastafari that I have seen.
U R Not A *
Portraits by J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
September 5, 2009
This last Thursday I attended a gallery opening at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The show consisted of portraits by John Shimon and Julie Lindemann, two colleagues of mine at Lawrence University. Reflecting on the title I just wrote at the top of this post, it's now occurring to me that U R Not a [asterisk] and U R Not a [star] are two quite distinct things to write. The first would be to tell someone that they are not unimportant in life.. not a footnote that nobody reads. The second would be to tell people that they are not as important as they might think.. "Don't think you're all that!" Alas, I'm not aware of a star character on the keyboard.
That last meaning is the title for this gallery show but it hardly comes off as an address to the audience. One could imagine attending a show filled with images of real celebrities, and a title like this could be seen as mocking the nobodies in the audience. In this case the title mostly bypasses the audience and clearly has something to do with the relationship between sitter and photographer. Each of the characters in the show has some claim to local renown, or at least personal visions of local renown. Within this group of photographs the title U R Not A [star] should be understood as either the photographers' cool response to the sitters (embodied by the prose descriptions) or the sitters' cocky assertion of their own star-power in the presence of the photographers. This last possibility is the one actually present in the photos, since a detail of the photo "Brett & Nigel with Huber (No. 4)" is the source for the show's title:
Embedded in the photograph, the phrase seems to be a challenge to anyone looking on.. aimed at the photographers first, but then secondarily the audience. But as soon as the image is captured that kind of preening claim to stardom becomes objectified and turned on them. Look at the whole picture to see what I mean:
There is a celebrity aesthetic at play here, hinted at most obviously by the poster of Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols in the background. Still the audience is most likely to recoil from this.. feeling, if not thinking: "You are not a star."
What I'm getting at is that the title for the show cleverly introduces the viewer to the key dialogue that's taking place in these photos.. the dialogue between the claims of the sitter and the objectivity of the photographers. As Shimon and Lindemann mentioned in the Q & A session, these photos represent people who are artists in some fashion. They are all interested in presenting themselves as creative and unique. It is that sort of character that Shimon and Lindemann have a real knack for engaging in dialogue on film.
This show reminded me of a photo that I recall from their show at Lawrence University last year. One photograph was of two normal looking girls (sisters) with the landscape of their farm spreading in the background (I can't find the photo on their site so I am going from memory here). I remember sympathizing with the photographers: How does one take a successful photo of average people living average lives? In this case there seemed to be no claim or anything beyond two average girls. This new show points out their need for sitters who are engaged, which entails some kind of preening and confidence in self as star. Two sisters on their farm don't make that same kind of visual argument for the camera.
One way that Shimon and Lindemann get around this is to take photos of average people at work, and thus their portraits of someone at a tanning salon or working a drive-thru last in the memory. Something about the workplace stirs up the need for self-presentation.. and thus this visual dialogue. The best part of the gallery show at UWM (curated by Rachel Vander Weit) is this focus on performance.. which turns out to be a key concept that can illuminate much of Shimon and Lindemann's work.
Watch their talk from the gallery opening:
Gleanings from Maqrizi IV:
A Medieval Jane Jacobs
September 3, 2009
Above is a photo I took in the Mosque of Sayyida Zaynab in Cairo. It's a popular mosque, and one mark of that is the large number of people literally lying around. In mosques oriented toward tourists, such as the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, there's little or none of this. Which model is most helpful for imagining a mosque in medieval Cairo? Maqrizi leaves no doubt that the lying-around model is the one we should keep in mind.
Maqrizi's section on the Mosque of al-Azhar gives some of the clearest indications of the rich social life rooted inside the walls of a mosque:
There continued in the Mosque of al-Azhar, since it was built, a number of poor Sufi brethren who took residence in it. Their number in these days reached 750 people, split between Persians and other foreigners and people from the Egyptian and North African countryside. Each contingent had a colonnade called after them.
The Mosque of al-Ahzar is a good sized mosque, but it had to serve as a spiritual hotel for 750 Sufis. That's a lot of Sufis. They were divided by place of origin and each group took over a colonnade as their own. Maqrizi goes on to mention the activities you would have found here in the 15th century AD:
The mosque continued to thrive with reading from the Qur’an and ongoing study and instruction. It was busy with varieties of learned sciences such as hadith, Qur’an commentary, and Arabic grammar. There were also sessions of exhortation and circles for zikhr. A person who entered this mosque found familiarity with God and satisfaction and refreshment for the soul such as he found in no other mosque.
Walking into a mosque is not like walking into some giant cathedral where your footsteps echo into the air. The mosque has always been a social place. The kind of spiritual practices that go on within it are social ones. The sound of the Qur'an being read would always be in the background, as would the hum of people talking. There was a mixture of serious study groups and Sufi circles performing zikhr, or "remembrance" of God. The common denominator here is group activity.
Maqrizi adds a laudatory note that anyone who entered the Mosque of al-Azhar found "familiarity with God" and "refreshment for the soul." Those are categories worth remembering for the experience of a medieval mosque. It points to the acquisition of two things: knowledge of God and personal spiritual benefit. Both stem from taking part in social activities.
The masters of wealth began to come to this mosque with varieties of charity, giving gold, silver and coins to support the sojourners within it, in service to God Most High. People of small means brought varieties of food, bread, and sweets to them, especially during festivals.
The spiritual density of the mosque attracted the wealthy and the common people. All give from whatever wealth they have and underwrite spiritual activities.
Urban planning theorist Jane Jacobs would have appreciated this state of affairs. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a lengthy argument for the value of social interaction within an urban landscape. She worried that plans for "urban renewal" would destroy the organic social mixing that took place in a great city. Jacobs would have loved the mosque as portrayed by Maqrizi here: it's everything the urban environment is supposed to be. The mosque functions as a stage for all kinds of social interactions.
Although urban renewal as an official philosophy was centuries away, Maqrizi documents a similar impulse in a certain emir who decided that he did not like the crowdedness of the Mosque of al-Azhar:
Then the emir... ordered... that the sojourners be expelled from the mosque and banned their residence inside the mosque. He also expelled from the mosque all their cabinets, storage places, seats, and Qur’an copies, claiming that this would be among the works that God would reward him for. But it was nothing but the greatest and gravest of sins for the harm it brought.
The actions of this emir are presented as motivated by a sense of piety. He kicks out the Sufis and believes that this will be one of the actions for which God will someday reward him! He is perhaps purifying the mosque from the noise and smells of all these hundreds of people. The emir could pat himself on the back. This impulse to purify the urban world by destroying the social fabric is what Jane Jacobs fought against. Maqrizi, while recognizing that the emir was acting out of a sense of piety, calls this act a grave sin.
It gets worse. The emir shows up one night after the last evening prayer and harasses all the people who were trying to pass a summer's night in the mosque. These people include businessmen, spiritual seekers, military men, and people just looking for refreshment on a hot evening. The mosque would have looked like a more crowded version of the photo at the top of this post. Maqrizi, as always, is a defender of traditional Cairo, and he is happy to report the bad end of this emir:
God struck swiftly the emir..., as the Sultan arrested him in the month of Ramadan and imprisoned him in Damascus.
If only the anti-urbanists of our own time could be dealt with in such summary fashion! Imagine: "God struck swiftly those who tried to make our cities like unto suburbs.." I guess the point, though, is that the impulse toward purifying an urban environment can exist in many different cultural environments.. as can the defense of these urban environments. In this case both sides are expressed in the idiom of medieval Islam.
Although most mosques in Cairo long ago lost their connection to higher education, the Mosque of al-Azhar is still a center of learning. I saw the following schedule of classes posted in the courtyard of the mosque this past summer:
The third column (from either the left or right) lists the subject matter of various courses being offered at the mosque. From top to bottom these are: Hanbali legal theory, principles of Shafi'i legal theory, logic, Maliki legal theory, Sufism, Arabic grammar, Sufism, and Shafi'i legal theory. Again, the Mosque of al-Azhar is pretty much unique now in offering all this, but in the medieval period lots of mosques/madrasas would have had offerings like this.
