2010.11.10
Days Remaining: 200
1. After my post yesterday I started doing some poking around about the metis in Canada, and got to thinking about something I had thought before: it's a damned shame that we don't learn about Canadian and Mexican history growing up in the US. Why don't we know, for instance, that Louis Riel, the "Father of Manitoba" (the Canadian province) was convicted of treason and executed for leading an armed uprising (they even have a name for it: The North-West Rebellion) against the Canadian Confederation? He also heard voices and thought that God was calling him to found a "new" Catholic Church, one based in Montreal, focused upon the needs of the Metis populations of Canada. This guy was one of Canada's founding fathers. And I thought Ben Franklin was interesting.
2. Anyway, the metis are really interesting, and are a good illustration of one of my favorite analytical terms/ideas: ethnogenesis (literally, in Greek, "the generation of a people"). Basically, this is the term to describe the myriad ways that groups identifying themselves in ethnic (as opposed to national, religious, class-based, etc.) terms come into existence. This is neat because the entire underlying claim of an ethnic identity is predicated upon shared descent from a common ancestor or group of ancestors: identity is tied in with genetics. The problem, when one looks at this in history, however, is that many "ethnic" groups seem to appear rather suddenly on the stage of history without actual evidence of large migrations into an area (although migration legends are often developed as a way of explaining the presence of an ethnic group in a specific location). Even worse is that many ethnic groups, when examined closely, contain a surprisingly complicated series of apparently contradictory data that makes the idea of singularity problematic.
3. One of my favorite examples of this is that Attila the Hun, leader of the Huns (usually thought of as an ethnic group arising in central Asia) had a name, "Attila" that is actually Germanic (technically Ostrogothic) and means "little father" ("atta" was father, and "-ila" was the diminutive, usually used affectionately). So why did a Hun from central Asia have a German name? Well, because the "Huns" weren't actually a single people, probably, and as a polyglot and poly-sourced group, incorporated "Germans" (actually Ostrogoths) into their confederation. Attila was probably either partly Ostrogothic, had a (probably Turkic) name translated into Ostrogothic, or became famous first among Ostrogoths, who then had the privilege of providing his public name. In fact the "Huns" empire collapsed relatively quickly after Attila's death, and somehow this did not leave lots of stateless Huns decamped all over Europe. Instead, a lot of folks who were otherwise Germans, Celts, Greeks, etc. suddenly stopped being Hunnish and went back to whatever was going on locally. The lack of political cohesion stopped the process by which all of those disparate people were beginning to reimagine themselves as one people, the Huns.
4. Successful versions of the process underlay the emergence of the modern nationalities of Europe (most "English" people are descendants of pre-Celtic Britons or of Celts, not invading Anglo-Saxons or Normans, most "French" are descendants of Gauls and Romans, not the Franks, and so on). In those cases the leaders of invading groups were able to provide incentives to the conquered folks to move away from their previous identities and reimagine themselves as part of the invading group. This happened in Egypt, where the majority of the population are descendants of ancient Egyptians (they've done genetic testing to demonstrate this) but think of themselves on some level as being Arabs.
5. In North America, on the other hand, ethnogenesis is most readily attested for groups emerging from demographic collapse. So the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Mvskoke), Seminole and others are all historically recent groups that coalesced out of the remnant populations of earlier groups. At the time of European (specifically Spanish) contact, there were lots of distinct groups in the southeastern parts of the continent, but epidemics destroyed their social structures and cohesion. What happened afterward is that the descendants of those who survived slowly began to form new groups with different social structures (loose confederations instead of highly organized chiefdoms, for instance, and villages instead of centralized towns) and in the process began to think of themselves as parts of new groups (the "tribes" of American history). We see this most clearly in the case of "tribes" whose members didn't all speak the same language (most famously the Creek Confederacy, where there were at least four major languages present in various Creek villages). Where's the ethnogenesis? Well, despite these internal differences, Creek folks organized themselves and identified themselves as being Creek (technically, Muskokee), albeit perhaps "Creek from Town X" as opposed to "Creek from Town Z"). They developed a whole range of common rituals and practices, including stories about their "single" origin (this also happened among the Cherokee and Choctaw), usually an emergence narrative, where Creek ancestors came into this world from another through a hole in the ground (which was the sky of the previous world). That story would suggest a single, unified origin and common descent therefrom.
6. That's ethnogenesis: the process by which disparate groups of people come to imagine themselves as part of a group united by common descent. We see traces of this in the development of ancient Israelites, Greeks, Romans, the Japanese, Arabs, etc. But we're so used to thinking in ethnic terms that it's hard to remember that ethnic identity is constantly being reimagined or renegotiated, as opposed to a natural "fact." The metis in Canada are a good example of this: there was no single origin point for them, the metis populations developed over time from an ongoing process of intermarriage between (usually French) European settlers and Native American women. As the children of these marriages grew in number, despite having a range of Native ancestries - Chippewa, Ojibway, Potawatomie, Cree, etc. and a range of European ancestries (very broadly French and English, but recognizing real differences within each of those two groups) to think of themselves as a single people. Nowadays Metis is a distinct ethnic designation in Canada, with at least one major Metis language (Michif - French nouns and Cree verbs; apparently it's very hard to learn) and a strong internal sense of shared identity. We all know that they were a very heterogeneous group to begin with, but somehow it's become normalized to think of metis as a self-evident ethnic identity, where any given metis is assumed to be more like any other metis than like a non-metis person.
7. So, that's today's thinking on a topic of no importance to the vast majority of anybody. But this is what I have been thinking about since mentioning the metis yesterday.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
A Little Bit Of Soul...
2010.11.10
Days Remaining: 201
1. First off, the title for today's blog has no great significance whatsoever. It is, however, the title of the song (by the band Music Explosion) currently playing on my iTunes program as I sit here and begin typing.
2. Second, for any of you who have tried to post a comment as per my request but were unable to do so because you didn't have a qualifying account, I have fixed the problem, and anyone can now post comments as "Anonymous" if they would like to do so. My apologies for the previous setting, I apparently didn't set this account up quite as correctly as I had thought. Anyway, it's now open season on postings, for anyone reading.
3. I got a very interesting question from one of my Native American Religions students last night; this week we're discussing Native American Christianities (in general and under the course topic/unit of "revitalization movements"). One of the essays they read was for yesterday was about the religious cultures of the so-called Old Colony (basically Masssachusetts before Rhode Island and Connecticut officially hived off on their own), and the ways in which Puritans' and Native Americans' religious traditions actually had quite a bit in common. So this student wrote and asked me if this was a religious version of a phenomenon called "the Middle Ground" (analytically developed by a historian named Richard White in a book entitled "The Middle Ground"), where two cultures (specifically French/English and Native American) come into contact and develop a whole range of shared values, institutions, etc. This student's query is such a good question! Basically, I responded that the essay we read is about what I'd call a proto-Middle Ground; there were movements towards developing shared institutions, values, etc., but the English just kept immigrating, and didn't like doing things like intermarrying, and so eventually they drove Native Americans away or isolated them in specific "Indian towns" (this happened in Delaware, home of my heart, btw). This got me thinking about exactly how much Anglos (and later Anglo-Americans of many different ethnicities) at a certain point stopped intermarrying, and how much that shaped US history and culture. We know of lots of intermarriages in the Middle and Southern Colonies from New York to Georgia up through the early 18th century, but then things get complicated. Many of the leading figures in Mvskoke (Creek) and Cherokee history in the 18th century were the descendants of European-Native marriages, but Anglo (and then American) societies increasingly viewed them as exclusively "Indians" and thus radically different from Europeans. This is particularly striking because the timing aligns well with the development of institutionalized racial slavery in Virginia in the late 17th and early 18th century (see the book Foul Means by Anthony S. Parent). So, basically, English colonial societies in North America began to shift towards racial theories of human nature (and politics) in the late 17th century, and we've been paying for it ever since. This is terrifying, but also, I think, highlights one of the key lessons history has taught me: we can't change the past, but we are gravely mistaken to underestimate the consequences of human agency. The world we live in is partly our inheritance, but it's also partly the result of our decisions, which become our successors' inheritance in turn. This, plus the realization, based on anthropological data, that there are very few (though important - physicality and location being the biggest ones) ahistorical factors determining our behaviors (i.e., culture is really important). We have options, and all we have to do to exercise them is live with the consequences.
4. This is one of the reasons why I am fundamentally not a conservative. Aside from the specific current political alignments and issues, at heart I just don't believe that it was inherently better before, or that we are best off not changing anything now. I see too many options, and too much historical contingency around me, to commit to an underlying social system as "natural." I'm also anti-authoritarian (though, in the interests of self-awareness, I admit that I have Thomas Jefferson's disease, and am really committed to the proposition that no one person should have absolute power, unless they are me), which aligns nicely with a deep resistance to conservatism, but since liberalism can produce despots just as easily, I can't be an absolutely committed liberal either, though at present many of the societal problems we're faced with are best, I think, dealt with via varying degrees of state action. On the other hand, I am committed to many ideals I see articulated in the Bill of Rights (which I see as amenable to being interpreted as either a conservative or liberal document, though its historical genesis is profoundly anti-federalist - see Woody Holton's excellent, though dense, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution).
5. Anyway, I don't have a major point there, but it's something I was thinking about today. On that note, here's something else that I've said in various contexts over the years, but which I think I managed to articulate clearly (at least for myself) when talking to Octavian about politics a few months ago. One of the benefits of a solid education is the ability to understand what and why words mean things. I don't think that there is such a thing as a "natural" meaning, but it's useful to be able to figure out what any word means in a particular context, and to be able to figure out if this meaning is intended or accidental, clear or unclear, useful or unproductive, and so on. One of my betes noirs in the past several years is the term "Islamo-fascist" (usually, though not always, used by those who identify as conservative or neo-conservative in American politics). Used as such, this term is an attempt to co-opt the general meaning of "fascism" as "un-American" or "evil" and apply it to certain groups of Muslims and their theological and political claims. I'm not in favor of those specific groups of Muslims, but in fact I can't see how the word "fascist," used with any historical specificity, actually applies to them. When the Encyclopedia Britannica (prior to WWII) included an article on "Fascism," they invited Mussolini to write it, and his essay (whatever one thinks of Mussolini) makes it clear that "Fascism" is about the relation of the state to the individual and about the ways in which the state relates to the economy. Classical Fascist theory differs tremendously from the intellectual and social theories of Communism and Socialism. What it had in common with them in the mid-20th century was that all three forms of government were eventually manifested in dictatorial states (Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's USSR, and Hitler's Germany). But conflating the three of them because of this is to ignore the socialist states that didn't become dictatorships, the complexities of how fascism (for instance) developed and functioned outside of Mussolini's Italy (such as in Peron's Argentina), and thereby to impoverish our ability to analyze and compare productively.
6. Because what we're really talking about in equating those three different types of government are two things: 1) the underlying claim, made by Americans, that anything not capitalist and democratic is bad, and 2) that dictatorships are bad. Now, I agree with the second claim, but I'm not as dogmatic on the first (especially since this country has had a mixed capitalist/socialist economy for a long, long time). The only thing that the various Muslim terrorist organizations have in common is a theocratic ideal used to justify actions by stateless actors. Compare the Taliban with al-Qaida - the Taliban had a theocratic ideal in place as a state, whereas al-Qaida is deliberately and explicitly only interested in a government if it is the restoration of their idea of what the caliphate was - anything less than that is insufficient. Functionally, al-Qaida, the Taliban, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and others are alike primarily in their willingness to use violence and terror (i.e. threat of violence) to achieve their ends. But, and this is crucial, that wasn't an explicit part of Mussolini's theory of Fascism (though I would argue that any system that privileges the system over its constituent members will tend in that direction).
7. Even more interesting is that repressive states are pretty much always governed by either a monarchy or an oligarchy (rule of the few, whether a Party, a junta, a specific economic class, or a series of ministers) who use the available technology to monitor and control their citizens. It doesn't matter if this is justified by communist, socialist, fascist, or capitalist ideology. What matter is whether or not the state behaves in this fashion. By using the god awful portmanteau "Islamo-fascist" we're misidentifying al-Qaida as a state-focused group, but they have never given any indication of wanting to found a state of their own. That's important, because it means that we can very easily misidentify their goals, values, and methods. It also means it's easy to assume that what al-Qaida opposes is diametrically opposite to "fascism." But many things that we have done in the war on terror, under both Bush and Obama (elements of the Patriot Act's attempted negation of civil liberties, the use of extrajudicial torture, various powers claimed for the office of the president, etc.) are actually more aligned with the idea of privileging the state over the individual than we would like to admit. That is, some of our responses to the War on Terror actually look kind of like Mussolini's fascism.
8. On the other hand, calling Bush a "fascist" isn't right either. Cheney, you could make the argument either way. Far more troubling is the expansion of authorized state surveillance, lack of accountability or oversight, and (in Cheney's case) the collusion of industry and state to dominate major sectors of society without any public knowledge (I'm talking here about his Energy Task Force). But if we don't know what Fascism was, then we can't make a productive comparison to current events. And the use of the term "Islamo-fascism" distorts the word's meaning so much as to render it simply a synonym for "bad." And even if you were using Mussolini's definition of Fascism as your guide, it's not at all clear to me that calling someone a "fascist" would have to be an insult or accusation. We live in a democracy, we need to be able to judge between various competing choices. Being able to see what those choices involve and to characterize them in relation to each other and history is important. And precise use of language will help with that tremendously. There are things that one can say in defense of Cheney's idea of government (whether one agrees with them is a different matter) but in order to do that, we need to be able to identify what that idea of government is like in historical and contemporary terms. But we've lost the easiest way to do that by letting our terms drift into pointless generality.
9. When I spoke on the telephone with my Mom on Monday afternoon, Euander insisted that he wanted to talk with me, and when he got on the telephone he informed me that "[I] didn't come to [his] party [on Sunday]." He's four, and he has mastered Avuncular Guilt Production.
10. And that's about it for now.
Days Remaining: 201
1. First off, the title for today's blog has no great significance whatsoever. It is, however, the title of the song (by the band Music Explosion) currently playing on my iTunes program as I sit here and begin typing.
2. Second, for any of you who have tried to post a comment as per my request but were unable to do so because you didn't have a qualifying account, I have fixed the problem, and anyone can now post comments as "Anonymous" if they would like to do so. My apologies for the previous setting, I apparently didn't set this account up quite as correctly as I had thought. Anyway, it's now open season on postings, for anyone reading.
3. I got a very interesting question from one of my Native American Religions students last night; this week we're discussing Native American Christianities (in general and under the course topic/unit of "revitalization movements"). One of the essays they read was for yesterday was about the religious cultures of the so-called Old Colony (basically Masssachusetts before Rhode Island and Connecticut officially hived off on their own), and the ways in which Puritans' and Native Americans' religious traditions actually had quite a bit in common. So this student wrote and asked me if this was a religious version of a phenomenon called "the Middle Ground" (analytically developed by a historian named Richard White in a book entitled "The Middle Ground"), where two cultures (specifically French/English and Native American) come into contact and develop a whole range of shared values, institutions, etc. This student's query is such a good question! Basically, I responded that the essay we read is about what I'd call a proto-Middle Ground; there were movements towards developing shared institutions, values, etc., but the English just kept immigrating, and didn't like doing things like intermarrying, and so eventually they drove Native Americans away or isolated them in specific "Indian towns" (this happened in Delaware, home of my heart, btw). This got me thinking about exactly how much Anglos (and later Anglo-Americans of many different ethnicities) at a certain point stopped intermarrying, and how much that shaped US history and culture. We know of lots of intermarriages in the Middle and Southern Colonies from New York to Georgia up through the early 18th century, but then things get complicated. Many of the leading figures in Mvskoke (Creek) and Cherokee history in the 18th century were the descendants of European-Native marriages, but Anglo (and then American) societies increasingly viewed them as exclusively "Indians" and thus radically different from Europeans. This is particularly striking because the timing aligns well with the development of institutionalized racial slavery in Virginia in the late 17th and early 18th century (see the book Foul Means by Anthony S. Parent). So, basically, English colonial societies in North America began to shift towards racial theories of human nature (and politics) in the late 17th century, and we've been paying for it ever since. This is terrifying, but also, I think, highlights one of the key lessons history has taught me: we can't change the past, but we are gravely mistaken to underestimate the consequences of human agency. The world we live in is partly our inheritance, but it's also partly the result of our decisions, which become our successors' inheritance in turn. This, plus the realization, based on anthropological data, that there are very few (though important - physicality and location being the biggest ones) ahistorical factors determining our behaviors (i.e., culture is really important). We have options, and all we have to do to exercise them is live with the consequences.
4. This is one of the reasons why I am fundamentally not a conservative. Aside from the specific current political alignments and issues, at heart I just don't believe that it was inherently better before, or that we are best off not changing anything now. I see too many options, and too much historical contingency around me, to commit to an underlying social system as "natural." I'm also anti-authoritarian (though, in the interests of self-awareness, I admit that I have Thomas Jefferson's disease, and am really committed to the proposition that no one person should have absolute power, unless they are me), which aligns nicely with a deep resistance to conservatism, but since liberalism can produce despots just as easily, I can't be an absolutely committed liberal either, though at present many of the societal problems we're faced with are best, I think, dealt with via varying degrees of state action. On the other hand, I am committed to many ideals I see articulated in the Bill of Rights (which I see as amenable to being interpreted as either a conservative or liberal document, though its historical genesis is profoundly anti-federalist - see Woody Holton's excellent, though dense, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution).
5. Anyway, I don't have a major point there, but it's something I was thinking about today. On that note, here's something else that I've said in various contexts over the years, but which I think I managed to articulate clearly (at least for myself) when talking to Octavian about politics a few months ago. One of the benefits of a solid education is the ability to understand what and why words mean things. I don't think that there is such a thing as a "natural" meaning, but it's useful to be able to figure out what any word means in a particular context, and to be able to figure out if this meaning is intended or accidental, clear or unclear, useful or unproductive, and so on. One of my betes noirs in the past several years is the term "Islamo-fascist" (usually, though not always, used by those who identify as conservative or neo-conservative in American politics). Used as such, this term is an attempt to co-opt the general meaning of "fascism" as "un-American" or "evil" and apply it to certain groups of Muslims and their theological and political claims. I'm not in favor of those specific groups of Muslims, but in fact I can't see how the word "fascist," used with any historical specificity, actually applies to them. When the Encyclopedia Britannica (prior to WWII) included an article on "Fascism," they invited Mussolini to write it, and his essay (whatever one thinks of Mussolini) makes it clear that "Fascism" is about the relation of the state to the individual and about the ways in which the state relates to the economy. Classical Fascist theory differs tremendously from the intellectual and social theories of Communism and Socialism. What it had in common with them in the mid-20th century was that all three forms of government were eventually manifested in dictatorial states (Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's USSR, and Hitler's Germany). But conflating the three of them because of this is to ignore the socialist states that didn't become dictatorships, the complexities of how fascism (for instance) developed and functioned outside of Mussolini's Italy (such as in Peron's Argentina), and thereby to impoverish our ability to analyze and compare productively.
6. Because what we're really talking about in equating those three different types of government are two things: 1) the underlying claim, made by Americans, that anything not capitalist and democratic is bad, and 2) that dictatorships are bad. Now, I agree with the second claim, but I'm not as dogmatic on the first (especially since this country has had a mixed capitalist/socialist economy for a long, long time). The only thing that the various Muslim terrorist organizations have in common is a theocratic ideal used to justify actions by stateless actors. Compare the Taliban with al-Qaida - the Taliban had a theocratic ideal in place as a state, whereas al-Qaida is deliberately and explicitly only interested in a government if it is the restoration of their idea of what the caliphate was - anything less than that is insufficient. Functionally, al-Qaida, the Taliban, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and others are alike primarily in their willingness to use violence and terror (i.e. threat of violence) to achieve their ends. But, and this is crucial, that wasn't an explicit part of Mussolini's theory of Fascism (though I would argue that any system that privileges the system over its constituent members will tend in that direction).
7. Even more interesting is that repressive states are pretty much always governed by either a monarchy or an oligarchy (rule of the few, whether a Party, a junta, a specific economic class, or a series of ministers) who use the available technology to monitor and control their citizens. It doesn't matter if this is justified by communist, socialist, fascist, or capitalist ideology. What matter is whether or not the state behaves in this fashion. By using the god awful portmanteau "Islamo-fascist" we're misidentifying al-Qaida as a state-focused group, but they have never given any indication of wanting to found a state of their own. That's important, because it means that we can very easily misidentify their goals, values, and methods. It also means it's easy to assume that what al-Qaida opposes is diametrically opposite to "fascism." But many things that we have done in the war on terror, under both Bush and Obama (elements of the Patriot Act's attempted negation of civil liberties, the use of extrajudicial torture, various powers claimed for the office of the president, etc.) are actually more aligned with the idea of privileging the state over the individual than we would like to admit. That is, some of our responses to the War on Terror actually look kind of like Mussolini's fascism.
8. On the other hand, calling Bush a "fascist" isn't right either. Cheney, you could make the argument either way. Far more troubling is the expansion of authorized state surveillance, lack of accountability or oversight, and (in Cheney's case) the collusion of industry and state to dominate major sectors of society without any public knowledge (I'm talking here about his Energy Task Force). But if we don't know what Fascism was, then we can't make a productive comparison to current events. And the use of the term "Islamo-fascism" distorts the word's meaning so much as to render it simply a synonym for "bad." And even if you were using Mussolini's definition of Fascism as your guide, it's not at all clear to me that calling someone a "fascist" would have to be an insult or accusation. We live in a democracy, we need to be able to judge between various competing choices. Being able to see what those choices involve and to characterize them in relation to each other and history is important. And precise use of language will help with that tremendously. There are things that one can say in defense of Cheney's idea of government (whether one agrees with them is a different matter) but in order to do that, we need to be able to identify what that idea of government is like in historical and contemporary terms. But we've lost the easiest way to do that by letting our terms drift into pointless generality.
9. When I spoke on the telephone with my Mom on Monday afternoon, Euander insisted that he wanted to talk with me, and when he got on the telephone he informed me that "[I] didn't come to [his] party [on Sunday]." He's four, and he has mastered Avuncular Guilt Production.
10. And that's about it for now.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
2010.11.07
Days Remaining: 204
1. To start off, happy birthday to my dad (now 71) and my nephew, Euander (now 4). Euander had a birthday party this afternoon involving a hayride and a bonfire, and this evening the family is having a meal to celebrate my dad's birthday. I wish I could be there, guys! The biggest limitation to being able to travel is money, and if/when I move back to Delaware in May, one benefit will be easy access to family and friends' gatherings. On the upside for now, this will be the first year in four that I'll be in Delaware for Thanksgiving, so that's a plus.
2. When I called Euander this morning to wish him a happy birthday, his mom Selena (my sister - remember, she self-selected her name so it doesn't follow the System) put Iunia (his sister) on the phone and told her to tell me "about the dog across the street." It turns out that their new neighbors have a Rottweiler who has the same first name as me, which made Iunia laugh. Then when I told her not to get confused and call the dog by the kids' nickname for me (redacted for anonymity purposes), she started to do her belly-laugh, which is one of the most infections sounds I know. I love those two kids. Selena made Euander a Wolverine-decorated cake, which looked fantastic. Euander is apparently a big Wolverine fan, of which I completely approve.
3. This weekend has been kind of odd, activity-wise. I've been grading and doing various types of work around my apartment, and have had Netflix and/or Hulu playing in the background throughout. Yesterday I finally watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in its entirety for the first time since I saw it on HBO when I was very young. I was really surprised by how good a film it was. I mostly remember, as I think many of us do, the finale at the Devil's Tower, but the entire narrative worked wonderfully. In particular I thought there were very interesting psychological and existential parallels between Neary's experience and those attested by religious visionaries or prophets (Speilberg has acknowledged the parallels between Neary and Moses in the story's progression - a little-commented detail struck me forcefully with the sunburn Neary gets from being scanned by a UFO and the passage in Exodus where Moses' face, when descending from Sinai, is said to have light streaming from it). Anyway, the film struck me as nailing the attraction/fear that is often mentioned in encounters with deities (how many angels in the Bible, when they appear to a human, first say, "Fear not"?). The actual aliens were the only part that disappointed me. I remember being terrified of them when I was a kid (the late-70s/early-80s nexus of In Search Of episodes, TV "specials," etc. about alleged alien abductions reduced me to a quivering fetal position in my bed late at night). Anyway, the actual aliens in the film were somehow not believable (partly a function of the costumes - compare this with the beings in the Abyss, essentially a CEotTK knock-off, but with far better creature-effects), compared with the ships or the human characters.
4. Minor side note: when my parents went to see CEotTK in theaters on a Saturday date night, I remember asking my mom, the next morning, about the movie. I was very curious to know what had happened to the kid, Barry, who gets abducted in the film's scariest scene. My mom told me (I remember this vividly, because it was so comforting) that inside the ship there were lots of people and (this has stuck with me for 30+ years now) they also had ponies. When I was little, pony rides were a regular part of our recreational life. So the alien abductors were completely down with making sure their abductees had a rich array of entertainment on the glowing UFOs. This is even funnier to me because I now know that in the original release there were no shots of the interior of the ship(s) at all - though later during a re-release they included an entirely superfluous scene inside (which Speilberg now regrets ever agreeing to do because it lessens the mystery - he's right). Even in the re-release, though, no ponies.
5. My enjoyment of CEotTK stands in contrast to the other long-overdue viewing (granted, this is "viewing" while working on grading, so it's not the most dedicated/focused activity) from yesterday, Heavy Metal. This became, for me, a testimony to how dated a revolutionary work can become; I thought it was boring and uninteresting (and although I can post facto sympathize with the teenage boys' fantasy/over-the-top sexuality throughout the film, it struck me now as annoying and regressive). I completely missed this one growing up, although I knew it by repute (both conversationally and in relation to the ongoing publication). But by the time I had any awareness of Heavy Metal, I was already in my late teens or early 20s, and the adolescent-focused work in the magazine had lost a lot of its appeal. So I never bothered with the film, but Netflix, eh, it's there for viewing with no work, so I figured, why not? I get the revolutionary aspect (this and Fritz the Cat strike me as fundamentally similar in that regard), but I didn't enjoy the visual aesthetic at all (some of the soundtrack was still appealing, though). On the upside, this really underscored for me how generic the sci-fi/fantasy stuff continues to be in film - especially the post-apocalyptic parts. That might sound negative, but I actually found it really interesting to see how much things haven't changed, and how much of that comes out of the visual productions of the late 60s (primarily book covers as opposed to their actual contents) and the 70s (and, yes, I know that Heavy Metal came out in 1981).
6. I stand by that general historico-aesthetic assessment because I also, late last night, discovered that Hulu had some old He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoons, and I watched two episodes. These were mainstays of my afternoon viewing for much of my pre-Junior High life, and I remember them fondly. But they have not aged well. Anyway, the visual palette was almost identical with that from Heavy Metal (why do so few people in fantasy cartoons from the 80s believe in blue skies or green plants?), despite the very different animation styles. The landscapes and technology depicted were almost interchangeable. It was very surprising to see this apparently common visual culture in one of the theoretically iconic productions.
7. One of my Netflix standby shows is No Reservations (Anthony Bourdain's international food show). In the 6th Season he has had several shows based in US cities, and I've begun to collect a list of restaurants to try if I'm ever in Chicago, NYC, or DC (so far) with time to kill and money to spend. This is both diverting and frustrating, as I now wish I were wealthy and had ready access to these restaurants. Because I like my cooking, but I don't have enough money or resources to do much that's particularly interesting right now. Lately I've had a hankering for Korean Barbecue, which is available nowhere nearby, but which I can get on Kirkwood Highway in Delaware.
8. And on that gustatory note, I'll sign off here. Out of curiosity, if you read this, could you post a comment, so I can get a sense of how many readers I (still) have?
Days Remaining: 204
1. To start off, happy birthday to my dad (now 71) and my nephew, Euander (now 4). Euander had a birthday party this afternoon involving a hayride and a bonfire, and this evening the family is having a meal to celebrate my dad's birthday. I wish I could be there, guys! The biggest limitation to being able to travel is money, and if/when I move back to Delaware in May, one benefit will be easy access to family and friends' gatherings. On the upside for now, this will be the first year in four that I'll be in Delaware for Thanksgiving, so that's a plus.
2. When I called Euander this morning to wish him a happy birthday, his mom Selena (my sister - remember, she self-selected her name so it doesn't follow the System) put Iunia (his sister) on the phone and told her to tell me "about the dog across the street." It turns out that their new neighbors have a Rottweiler who has the same first name as me, which made Iunia laugh. Then when I told her not to get confused and call the dog by the kids' nickname for me (redacted for anonymity purposes), she started to do her belly-laugh, which is one of the most infections sounds I know. I love those two kids. Selena made Euander a Wolverine-decorated cake, which looked fantastic. Euander is apparently a big Wolverine fan, of which I completely approve.
3. This weekend has been kind of odd, activity-wise. I've been grading and doing various types of work around my apartment, and have had Netflix and/or Hulu playing in the background throughout. Yesterday I finally watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in its entirety for the first time since I saw it on HBO when I was very young. I was really surprised by how good a film it was. I mostly remember, as I think many of us do, the finale at the Devil's Tower, but the entire narrative worked wonderfully. In particular I thought there were very interesting psychological and existential parallels between Neary's experience and those attested by religious visionaries or prophets (Speilberg has acknowledged the parallels between Neary and Moses in the story's progression - a little-commented detail struck me forcefully with the sunburn Neary gets from being scanned by a UFO and the passage in Exodus where Moses' face, when descending from Sinai, is said to have light streaming from it). Anyway, the film struck me as nailing the attraction/fear that is often mentioned in encounters with deities (how many angels in the Bible, when they appear to a human, first say, "Fear not"?). The actual aliens were the only part that disappointed me. I remember being terrified of them when I was a kid (the late-70s/early-80s nexus of In Search Of episodes, TV "specials," etc. about alleged alien abductions reduced me to a quivering fetal position in my bed late at night). Anyway, the actual aliens in the film were somehow not believable (partly a function of the costumes - compare this with the beings in the Abyss, essentially a CEotTK knock-off, but with far better creature-effects), compared with the ships or the human characters.
4. Minor side note: when my parents went to see CEotTK in theaters on a Saturday date night, I remember asking my mom, the next morning, about the movie. I was very curious to know what had happened to the kid, Barry, who gets abducted in the film's scariest scene. My mom told me (I remember this vividly, because it was so comforting) that inside the ship there were lots of people and (this has stuck with me for 30+ years now) they also had ponies. When I was little, pony rides were a regular part of our recreational life. So the alien abductors were completely down with making sure their abductees had a rich array of entertainment on the glowing UFOs. This is even funnier to me because I now know that in the original release there were no shots of the interior of the ship(s) at all - though later during a re-release they included an entirely superfluous scene inside (which Speilberg now regrets ever agreeing to do because it lessens the mystery - he's right). Even in the re-release, though, no ponies.
5. My enjoyment of CEotTK stands in contrast to the other long-overdue viewing (granted, this is "viewing" while working on grading, so it's not the most dedicated/focused activity) from yesterday, Heavy Metal. This became, for me, a testimony to how dated a revolutionary work can become; I thought it was boring and uninteresting (and although I can post facto sympathize with the teenage boys' fantasy/over-the-top sexuality throughout the film, it struck me now as annoying and regressive). I completely missed this one growing up, although I knew it by repute (both conversationally and in relation to the ongoing publication). But by the time I had any awareness of Heavy Metal, I was already in my late teens or early 20s, and the adolescent-focused work in the magazine had lost a lot of its appeal. So I never bothered with the film, but Netflix, eh, it's there for viewing with no work, so I figured, why not? I get the revolutionary aspect (this and Fritz the Cat strike me as fundamentally similar in that regard), but I didn't enjoy the visual aesthetic at all (some of the soundtrack was still appealing, though). On the upside, this really underscored for me how generic the sci-fi/fantasy stuff continues to be in film - especially the post-apocalyptic parts. That might sound negative, but I actually found it really interesting to see how much things haven't changed, and how much of that comes out of the visual productions of the late 60s (primarily book covers as opposed to their actual contents) and the 70s (and, yes, I know that Heavy Metal came out in 1981).
6. I stand by that general historico-aesthetic assessment because I also, late last night, discovered that Hulu had some old He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoons, and I watched two episodes. These were mainstays of my afternoon viewing for much of my pre-Junior High life, and I remember them fondly. But they have not aged well. Anyway, the visual palette was almost identical with that from Heavy Metal (why do so few people in fantasy cartoons from the 80s believe in blue skies or green plants?), despite the very different animation styles. The landscapes and technology depicted were almost interchangeable. It was very surprising to see this apparently common visual culture in one of the theoretically iconic productions.
7. One of my Netflix standby shows is No Reservations (Anthony Bourdain's international food show). In the 6th Season he has had several shows based in US cities, and I've begun to collect a list of restaurants to try if I'm ever in Chicago, NYC, or DC (so far) with time to kill and money to spend. This is both diverting and frustrating, as I now wish I were wealthy and had ready access to these restaurants. Because I like my cooking, but I don't have enough money or resources to do much that's particularly interesting right now. Lately I've had a hankering for Korean Barbecue, which is available nowhere nearby, but which I can get on Kirkwood Highway in Delaware.
8. And on that gustatory note, I'll sign off here. Out of curiosity, if you read this, could you post a comment, so I can get a sense of how many readers I (still) have?
Monday, November 1, 2010
Dia de los Muertos
2010.11.01
Days Remaining: 210
1. So I've been profoundly unproductive, blog-wise, for the past 3 weeks. Some of this has been due to getting very, very busy, especially with grading (3 classes in full swing can lead to a massive influx of essays each week). In the midst of all of that I had a trip to Delaware, and then following that I had a very difficult (not a plea for sympathy, btw, just reporting what was going on) run of days centered around the 21st of October, which was the 4th anniversary of my wedding. It was also the day when my ex-wife returned my wedding ring (it arrived that day, I didn't pick it up until Monday 25 October). This combination kind of sucked my energy down quite a bit, and on Tuesday I dove back into working and grading. So the last week or so was exhausted, and the ones preceding just busy.
2. Before going any further, a birthday shout out to Octavius (30 October) and Belisarius (01 November). Both are now 35; we three were all born within 6.5 weeks of one another (Octavius eldest, me youngest), and so Mischief Night every year is the day when I actually begin to feel like I'm growing older. I've never been particularly concerned about aging; I know people who are majorly concerned about it, but I've had trouble keeping track of my own age (I often, if asked without preparation, am off by a year or two) for years now. I had gray hair when I was 10, apparently from stress as it faded as I lived past the aftermaths of the divorce, but my paternal uncle had gray hair in high school, and so I had an expectation that I would go gray early. In fact, I didn't. My beard now has two distinct white-ish areas that, because in this at least I'm lucky, are developing into two parallel bars from the corners of my mouth downwards to my chin, framing a still-dark center stripe. They are roughly symmetrical, approximately the same size, and their only downside is that during my recent visit to Delaware, my beloved niece, Iunia, informed me that I should "make the white hairs brown." Sigh. I shall remain firm, though, in resisting her order. I don't mind aging. It's natural.
3. Speaking of my niece brings to mind my nephew, Euander, who won the AC Moore costume contest on Saturday past, in his guise as "Dancy" (his choice of names) the Robot. Congratulations, kiddo!
4. It's growing colder here, we had unseasonably warm days at the beginning of last week, but around Thursday the nighttime temperatures began dropping into the 50s, and then by Saturday night into the 40s. I still leave my tiny window open all day to keep fresh air coming in, but haven't opened the sliding glass doors in days. This temperature shift was caused by a massive cold front that blew through, and led to an enormous amount of wind the past few days. I actually thought, twice, that someone in my building had a major plumbing disaster because of the sudden onset of what sounded, to me, like rushing water. It was, in fact, enormously powerful and sustained winds blowing through the trees near my building. I mention the weather so frequently in these posts because I am confined, when working, to an interior lifestyle, and thus think a lot about the world outside. I'm not just including filler.
5. Over the past week or so I was invited to give 3 talks on campus (2 in dorms and 1 to a local public school students mentoring group) on "Scary Stories." This has grown out of my "Supernatural in American Popular Culture" course (offered last Autumn and again this upcoming Spring), and I do my best to not only tell "true" scary stories but to inject some critical thinking on the subject into the presentation. The stories are all "true" insofar as I focus as much as possible on firsthand accounts of personal experiences with ghosts, night hags, house spirits, and so on. I warn the students that I cannot personally vouch for the meaning or proper interpretation of any of the events I narrate, and we discuss some of the options that are available. What I love about this each year is the way in which stories I tell almost always trigger responses from my audiences, who begin raising their hands and saying things like, "One time I was in my cousin's house..." It's also fun to actually scare some folks (last year one of my students ended up needing to be walked back to her room, in the same dorm, because she didn't want to be alone - she didn't even need to go outside); this year I had in two different sessions people curling up in each others' laps and one person actually yelled out loud when I got to the conclusion. I firmly believe that Halloween should involve an element of eeriness, which one can turn into either fear or exhilaration (preferably oscillating between the two). I gave the 3rd talk last night, and so I got to see what Halloween looks like on Baskerville College's campus. Basically, it was dark and pretty quiet. Granted, it was a Sunday evening, but I was still expecting more going on. Another bonus: I heard about ghostlore on campus, one story from which actually said that one my classrooms this semester is haunted, and that my office building is haunted as well. Creepiest story I heard? Apparently a long-standing patron of the college's theater department attended plays in the campus theater (was seen by multiple witnesses and spoke with several people) for up to 6 months after she died. Her various interlocutors didn't know that she was dead, and apparently neither did she.
6. In case anyone is following after the long lacuna, I did read the Story Waiting To Pierce You about which I wrote in my last post, and once again was struck by the combination of acute analytical intelligence and totally self-serving, answer-predetermined, argument. Because Kingsley is very smart, I was on guard reading the book, and had to parse out as I was doing so why certain logical progressions were defensible and others were not. It takes a great deal of energy to do this with his books, and it's one of the few times where being widely-read and familiar with a range of texts is almost a necessity for dealing responsibly with a single text. His arguments and evidence were all over the map, sometimes justly, and sometimes less so, and so I couldn't simply dismiss things about which I was skeptical, or accept things that I thought sounded good. I had to prove/defend every critical response I had. Still, it was elegantly written and the stuff worth taking away from it was really worth taking away.
7. On the topic of books, the author of one of my favorite books of all time (Ceremony), Leslie Marmon Silko, has just released a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, her first book in over 10 years. I am sometimes guilty of a typical tendency in mainstream American culture to romanticize the Southwest. Why that area in particular strikes so many people as being distinctively spiritual, interesting, and even seductive is unclear to me, but somehow the deserts and mountains of New Mexico often fit into New Age speculations, back-to-the-land movements, and certain type of hipster aesthetics. Given that I've only driven through the area once, when en route to California with my family in 1993, and we were really in Colorado, not New Mexico, my abstract affection for it really must be a combination of cultural knowledge (things we all "know" about the Southwest) and what I've read, specifically the novel Ceremony and several short stories by Leslie Marmon Silko. I think that one of the biggest draws for me is how pervasively hybrid the cultures there are: Spanish, Anglo, Native American (of various sorts), African American sources are all present and overlapping, and rather than blending seamlessly they sort of co-exist in a complicated cultural stew (not so much a melting pot). All of that takes place against a backdrop of clear light and achingly beautiful landscapes (plus coyotes!), and I am, at least, intrigued. Anyway, Silko's memoir is apparently a mix of family histories, nature observations, and religious autobiography, and I cannot wait to read it.
8. I'm also excited by the release of a very neat album by Jordi Savall and the Tembembe Ensemble Continuo titled El Nuevo Mundo, which consists of songs from the time of Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica, and works to show the ways that this led to the creolization of Spanish music by incorporating Mesoamerican and African elements into Spanish music, and Spanish and African elements into Mesoamerican music. The best part is that it costs $24.98 on Amazon.com and $9.99 on iTunes. I heard a review of it on NPR last week, and was really impressed. I'm not a huge fan of classical music, at least not enough to put the time and effort into having a strong intellectual grasp of it, but I know what I like. In two weeks I get paid, and I'll have a new book and a new album.
9. Moving on from my gross consumerism, something else has been on my mind quite a bit lately. After the rash of nationally-reported suicides by LGBTQ teens last month, the LGBTQ Center at Baskerville College sponsored a "Teach-In" about LGBTQ issues both on campus and in general. I was personally invited by two of my students who were presenting, so of course I went. The event was interesting, to say the least, and extremely well attended (it was standing room only in the back). One element that I found particularly interesting and even a bit troubling was that many of the presenters expressed a strong dislike (to the point of rejection) of the word/concept "tolerance" or "toleration." This was developed in various presentations as a critique of the inadequacy of tolerance (since one tolerates what one does not like or finds offensive) and an argument that we should be aiming towards "embracing." One presenter articulated this by saying that parents of LGBTQ kids "should love their kids because their kids are LGBTQ." So here is where I become troubled: I would have said, "love them because they're your kids." I can imagine laws that prevent (or regulate) intolerant behavior (exclusion, bullying, etc.) but I don't know how one can possibly actively coerce people into being accepting. The race-focused Civil Rights act makes this clear (though obviously there are a host of specific factors that differentiate the two situations): we can police racism, but we can't stop people from being prejudiced. I was struck, at this teach-in, by the question of whether or not tolerance and the development of supporting community structures in addition to the existing biased community structures would be adequate, or whether we need to do something far more penetrating to properly assist our LGBTQ citizens. But if it's the latter, I have no idea how to do it in a focused purposive way. I'm also uncomfortable telling people that they are "wrong" to be homophobic. I can argue with specific homophobic claims (about marriage, adoption, military service, safe sex, etc.), I even feel comfortable speculating about the historic and cultural roots of pervasive homophobia, but to me the best we can do at a macro level is address this through anti-discrimination laws and the egalitarian enforcement of the Bill of Rights (equal protection, etc.). I don't know how to make people less homophobic. I do know how to make sure that they cannot manifest their homophobia in explicit/direct fashion. I can't make people like this situation, though. And I'm not sure that I would have the right to do so, even if I knew how to do it. Like I said, I can bring suit against someone for discriminating against a racial or gender minority and thereby violating federal law. But I don't know how to bring suit against someone because they believe, in their own heads, that African Americans or Women or any group are somehow inferior. I will argue with them vociferously on this, but that's not coercive, it's attempting (usually unsuccessfully) to be persuasive. Hrm.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Sunlight and Breezes
2010.10.08
Days Remaining: 234
1. Though we had nothing so severe as the rains and flooding in my home state of Delaware, the weather in my current neck of the woods has been gray and overcast, with intermittent showers and downpours, for over a week. That is, until last night, when the clouds began to break. This morning dawned clear and bright, and there are strong, though gentle, breezes. This is one of my favorite types of weather, and in good time, too. I've got my one tiny window and my sliding glass door wide open with the fan on my AC wall unit blowing in, and my little floor fan blowing out. My apartment had been feeling very close, air-wise, and smelled kind of stale (its size and lack of windows on more than one wall means that air does not circulate much at all). So now it's as wide-open as I can make it, and the difference is noticeable, both in terms of ambient feel and underlying, almost sub-conscious, scent. Much better!
2. I went back to Providence yesterday to retrieve the divorce documents and mail them to the sheriff who will serve them to my ex-wife. Once again, the lack of clear instruction struck: I had prepared stamped envelopes for mailing the documents based upon what I was told, but then discovered that the "successfully served" form is to be mailed back to me, not the RI family court, which meant I had to go find a new envelope, go to the Post Office (as opposed to using the mail box directly next to the court building), and mail it from there. This is not a problem, as such, but annoying because it's not what I was first told. On top of that, when I arrived to get the forms, they had been misfiled and a clerk had to dig through a pile of cases to find mine. It took her 10 minutes, but now the whole thing is as done as I can make it. The actual court proceedings are scheduled, because Murphy rules all, at 9am the morning after my birthday. At least this means that the process should be finished by New Years.
3. For the past few weeks I've been corresponding with my friend, Silvanus, a professor of ancient history, about a sort-of academic author whose work we have both been reading over the years. This author is a trained classicist who wrote several excellent books on ancient Greek philosophy, but who has clearly moved onto a new phase of his expertise, becoming a mystical actualization guru. This development is all the more intriguing because he remains a classicist and uses ancient texts as part of his overall programme, lecturing on Parmenides and Empedokles. Anyway, his next book is on Pythagoras, and I'm bemusedly and eagerly awaiting its arrival. The thing with this author, Peter Kingsley, is that he is both 1) brilliant, and 2) a non-academic advocate. So his books are a profoundly entangled mix of acutely argued scholarship and religious fervor that goes beyond what I call analysis (or, rather, he becomes someone who a scholar of religion would study, rather than a scholar of religion himself). So reading them is challenging, enjoyable, and frustrating all at once, as I try to tease out what is of value to me in his work, and what is of value only to his disciples. This is an interesting problem that one finds more frequently in the work of scholars who identify with a living religious tradition (like reading Cardinal, now Saint, John Henry Newman - both brilliant and a hardcore Catholic, which impacts his analytical work and conclusions), so it's fascinating to experience it with texts from long-gone cultures like the ancient Greeks. If you're interested in seeing how this interplay works out in practice, just look at his website's listing for the book: http://www.peterkingsley.org/Details.cfm?ProdID=60&category=2 The various supporting blurbs are written by a mix of academic classicists, self-help gurus, and alternative-track medical doctors.
4. I'm also very excited by another book that has just come out, though I haven't been able to get a copy of it yet either, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy And Identity In Indian Intellectual History (you can see it on Google books if you're interested). I've taught Hindu Traditions in two different places, and one of my most important teachers, at Syracuse, was an anthropologist who specialized in Indian religions. I've also used Indian materials as comparanda for my own work, and try to keep tabs on interesting new work in the field. This book is striking because one of the major disputes in the study of Hinduism is whether there was ever a unified tradition that can be called "Hinduism" before the period of the British Raj, when British administrators and scholars began using the term to mean all non-Buddhist, non-Jain, non-Sikh, non-Muslim Indians. Some have said this means that there is no underlying unity or meaningful coherence to "Hinduism" before the 18th century, and others say that this is silly, of course there was, there just wasn't a need for a single term before then. I'm actually more of the first camp with the reservation that "meaningful" is a tricky word, and that it's more interesting to see how people on or near the subcontinent interacted with each other and their historical antecedents, including when and how they choose to adopt or give distinguishing corporate names to themselves and others (i.e, when do I start saying that "they" are Xists, and I'm Yist?). This new book is about one of the major pre-colonial attempts to formulate a sense of Hindu-ness, by Indian philosophers, and the previews online make it look very interesting. So I've got two books to which I'm really looking forward to reading.
5. Belated acknowledgment: Happy Birthday to my friends Livia (Monday) and Romulus* (Wednesday)!
* Romulus' name may have to change, as I need to check something but don't have the necessary information to hand at the moment.
Days Remaining: 234
1. Though we had nothing so severe as the rains and flooding in my home state of Delaware, the weather in my current neck of the woods has been gray and overcast, with intermittent showers and downpours, for over a week. That is, until last night, when the clouds began to break. This morning dawned clear and bright, and there are strong, though gentle, breezes. This is one of my favorite types of weather, and in good time, too. I've got my one tiny window and my sliding glass door wide open with the fan on my AC wall unit blowing in, and my little floor fan blowing out. My apartment had been feeling very close, air-wise, and smelled kind of stale (its size and lack of windows on more than one wall means that air does not circulate much at all). So now it's as wide-open as I can make it, and the difference is noticeable, both in terms of ambient feel and underlying, almost sub-conscious, scent. Much better!
2. I went back to Providence yesterday to retrieve the divorce documents and mail them to the sheriff who will serve them to my ex-wife. Once again, the lack of clear instruction struck: I had prepared stamped envelopes for mailing the documents based upon what I was told, but then discovered that the "successfully served" form is to be mailed back to me, not the RI family court, which meant I had to go find a new envelope, go to the Post Office (as opposed to using the mail box directly next to the court building), and mail it from there. This is not a problem, as such, but annoying because it's not what I was first told. On top of that, when I arrived to get the forms, they had been misfiled and a clerk had to dig through a pile of cases to find mine. It took her 10 minutes, but now the whole thing is as done as I can make it. The actual court proceedings are scheduled, because Murphy rules all, at 9am the morning after my birthday. At least this means that the process should be finished by New Years.
3. For the past few weeks I've been corresponding with my friend, Silvanus, a professor of ancient history, about a sort-of academic author whose work we have both been reading over the years. This author is a trained classicist who wrote several excellent books on ancient Greek philosophy, but who has clearly moved onto a new phase of his expertise, becoming a mystical actualization guru. This development is all the more intriguing because he remains a classicist and uses ancient texts as part of his overall programme, lecturing on Parmenides and Empedokles. Anyway, his next book is on Pythagoras, and I'm bemusedly and eagerly awaiting its arrival. The thing with this author, Peter Kingsley, is that he is both 1) brilliant, and 2) a non-academic advocate. So his books are a profoundly entangled mix of acutely argued scholarship and religious fervor that goes beyond what I call analysis (or, rather, he becomes someone who a scholar of religion would study, rather than a scholar of religion himself). So reading them is challenging, enjoyable, and frustrating all at once, as I try to tease out what is of value to me in his work, and what is of value only to his disciples. This is an interesting problem that one finds more frequently in the work of scholars who identify with a living religious tradition (like reading Cardinal, now Saint, John Henry Newman - both brilliant and a hardcore Catholic, which impacts his analytical work and conclusions), so it's fascinating to experience it with texts from long-gone cultures like the ancient Greeks. If you're interested in seeing how this interplay works out in practice, just look at his website's listing for the book: http://www.peterkingsley.org/Details.cfm?ProdID=60&category=2 The various supporting blurbs are written by a mix of academic classicists, self-help gurus, and alternative-track medical doctors.
4. I'm also very excited by another book that has just come out, though I haven't been able to get a copy of it yet either, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy And Identity In Indian Intellectual History (you can see it on Google books if you're interested). I've taught Hindu Traditions in two different places, and one of my most important teachers, at Syracuse, was an anthropologist who specialized in Indian religions. I've also used Indian materials as comparanda for my own work, and try to keep tabs on interesting new work in the field. This book is striking because one of the major disputes in the study of Hinduism is whether there was ever a unified tradition that can be called "Hinduism" before the period of the British Raj, when British administrators and scholars began using the term to mean all non-Buddhist, non-Jain, non-Sikh, non-Muslim Indians. Some have said this means that there is no underlying unity or meaningful coherence to "Hinduism" before the 18th century, and others say that this is silly, of course there was, there just wasn't a need for a single term before then. I'm actually more of the first camp with the reservation that "meaningful" is a tricky word, and that it's more interesting to see how people on or near the subcontinent interacted with each other and their historical antecedents, including when and how they choose to adopt or give distinguishing corporate names to themselves and others (i.e, when do I start saying that "they" are Xists, and I'm Yist?). This new book is about one of the major pre-colonial attempts to formulate a sense of Hindu-ness, by Indian philosophers, and the previews online make it look very interesting. So I've got two books to which I'm really looking forward to reading.
5. Belated acknowledgment: Happy Birthday to my friends Livia (Monday) and Romulus* (Wednesday)!
* Romulus' name may have to change, as I need to check something but don't have the necessary information to hand at the moment.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Nature and movies
2010.10.03
Days Remaining: 239
1. This evening I watched the Black Stallion and Black Stallion Returns films on Netflix. I've been intending to view them for a while, as I had fond memories of both from my childhood, but they only recently became available for streaming, and I figured this would be a lovely way of spending the evening. The two films have different directors, though Francis Ford Coppola executive produced both, and they had the same actors (even the same horse as playing the Black, though there were apparently supplemental scenes with another horse in the second film). I enjoyed both of them, and they are largely as I recalled, plot-wise, but the difference in directors was nothing short of astonishing. Carroll Ballard directed the original film (he also directed Fly Away Home and, most recently, Duma) and it was far and away the superior of the two. First off, there is almost no musical soundtrack throughout, and when you do hear music, it is all the more compelling for its otherwise absence, as well as the way in which the classical music is allowed to integrate into natural sounds at both the beginning and end of its appearance (one crescendo actually blurs with waves crashing, for instance). Second, the film has very little speech throughout, and allows ambient sounds to filter through. When the protagonist and the horse are stranded on an island, you can hear the loneliness, and when the horse is spooked by a thunderstorm later, you can feel exactly why.
2. The reason I mention this is that I have been having a very interesting email exchange with one of the students in my Native American Religions class. I had them read Leslie Marmon Silko's short story "Yellow Woman," which is a retelling of a traditional Laguna Pueblo (southwestern Native American) story about a woman, Yellow Woman, who is abducted from a river bank by a spirit being and taken to his home on a mountain top. In the modern short story an unnamed narrator meets a strange man by a riverside and goes with him to his house up on a mountain. The narrator is never certain if the man is human or a mountain spirit, and cannot tell if she is role-playing a story she once heard, using the story as an excuse to do something she would otherwise not do, or if she is living out the story literally. One of the things we talk about is the problem of the man's nature and why Silko would retell a traditional story (commonly, but problematically, called a "myth" by most academics) in such a way as to leave the narrator and audience never quite sure what is going on. It's a very skillfully executed story, one of my personal favorites, and the students were left unsure what to make of it (which, I believe, is Silko's intention). I offered one internal detail that leads me to think that the man may be a spirit (though in the end, it's only one detail and not decisive). So my student wrote to me after class and said that she had other reasons to think he was a spirit, and laid them out. I responded with counterpoints to her arguments, and asked for her further reflections on what it would mean for the story if the man was a spirit: how would she read it differently than if he were just a man?
3. Her response was especially intriguing. If he were a spirit, she said, then it would be more straightforwardly fiction, and become comparable to fantasy literature and films. She offered, as a follow-up, that the entire story felt like a dream recounted, and said this was due to the occasional extremely lucid detail about the physical environment offered throughout (very vivid visual description, or close attention paid to some minor element of the setting). This, to her, felt like details in dreams, rather than in waking conscious apprehension of the everyday world. I had not expected this at all: my general understanding of this element of Silko's style is actually the opposite of the dream interpretation: I think these details are interwoven to ground the stories in physicality and render them, in some way, believably concrete. They also, I think, highlight the general deadening of our senses in industrial culture, where we are both subjected to constant overwhelming data streams demanding our attention and asked to handle them in a very quick fashion. Specific hard details that arise in our consciousness in punctuated fashion or over time often strike us a incongruous or even unsettling, but they are more what our systems evolved to handle.
4. This is where the Black Stallion cinematography and soundtrack come back in. The director chose to tell a story, one based on a book, in such a way that the natural world (and the horse within it) spoke much more directly and meaningfully than as background. They were brought into focus throughout as crucial elements to the viewer's perception of what is going on in the story; not scenery but characters in their own right. It served to integrate the boy and the horse into the world so that they only way to understand them was to see where they were and to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing. Ballard used to make documentaries, and it shows. The sequel, directed by someone else (can't remember right now and don't care enough to look it up) is a much more typical movie with intrusive soundtrack, animate character-focused plot and background for the sake of getting the action going. I preferred the first film tremendously, though I enjoyed the second. If you get a chance, I recommend both, but especially the first.
Days Remaining: 239
1. This evening I watched the Black Stallion and Black Stallion Returns films on Netflix. I've been intending to view them for a while, as I had fond memories of both from my childhood, but they only recently became available for streaming, and I figured this would be a lovely way of spending the evening. The two films have different directors, though Francis Ford Coppola executive produced both, and they had the same actors (even the same horse as playing the Black, though there were apparently supplemental scenes with another horse in the second film). I enjoyed both of them, and they are largely as I recalled, plot-wise, but the difference in directors was nothing short of astonishing. Carroll Ballard directed the original film (he also directed Fly Away Home and, most recently, Duma) and it was far and away the superior of the two. First off, there is almost no musical soundtrack throughout, and when you do hear music, it is all the more compelling for its otherwise absence, as well as the way in which the classical music is allowed to integrate into natural sounds at both the beginning and end of its appearance (one crescendo actually blurs with waves crashing, for instance). Second, the film has very little speech throughout, and allows ambient sounds to filter through. When the protagonist and the horse are stranded on an island, you can hear the loneliness, and when the horse is spooked by a thunderstorm later, you can feel exactly why.
2. The reason I mention this is that I have been having a very interesting email exchange with one of the students in my Native American Religions class. I had them read Leslie Marmon Silko's short story "Yellow Woman," which is a retelling of a traditional Laguna Pueblo (southwestern Native American) story about a woman, Yellow Woman, who is abducted from a river bank by a spirit being and taken to his home on a mountain top. In the modern short story an unnamed narrator meets a strange man by a riverside and goes with him to his house up on a mountain. The narrator is never certain if the man is human or a mountain spirit, and cannot tell if she is role-playing a story she once heard, using the story as an excuse to do something she would otherwise not do, or if she is living out the story literally. One of the things we talk about is the problem of the man's nature and why Silko would retell a traditional story (commonly, but problematically, called a "myth" by most academics) in such a way as to leave the narrator and audience never quite sure what is going on. It's a very skillfully executed story, one of my personal favorites, and the students were left unsure what to make of it (which, I believe, is Silko's intention). I offered one internal detail that leads me to think that the man may be a spirit (though in the end, it's only one detail and not decisive). So my student wrote to me after class and said that she had other reasons to think he was a spirit, and laid them out. I responded with counterpoints to her arguments, and asked for her further reflections on what it would mean for the story if the man was a spirit: how would she read it differently than if he were just a man?
3. Her response was especially intriguing. If he were a spirit, she said, then it would be more straightforwardly fiction, and become comparable to fantasy literature and films. She offered, as a follow-up, that the entire story felt like a dream recounted, and said this was due to the occasional extremely lucid detail about the physical environment offered throughout (very vivid visual description, or close attention paid to some minor element of the setting). This, to her, felt like details in dreams, rather than in waking conscious apprehension of the everyday world. I had not expected this at all: my general understanding of this element of Silko's style is actually the opposite of the dream interpretation: I think these details are interwoven to ground the stories in physicality and render them, in some way, believably concrete. They also, I think, highlight the general deadening of our senses in industrial culture, where we are both subjected to constant overwhelming data streams demanding our attention and asked to handle them in a very quick fashion. Specific hard details that arise in our consciousness in punctuated fashion or over time often strike us a incongruous or even unsettling, but they are more what our systems evolved to handle.
4. This is where the Black Stallion cinematography and soundtrack come back in. The director chose to tell a story, one based on a book, in such a way that the natural world (and the horse within it) spoke much more directly and meaningfully than as background. They were brought into focus throughout as crucial elements to the viewer's perception of what is going on in the story; not scenery but characters in their own right. It served to integrate the boy and the horse into the world so that they only way to understand them was to see where they were and to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing. Ballard used to make documentaries, and it shows. The sequel, directed by someone else (can't remember right now and don't care enough to look it up) is a much more typical movie with intrusive soundtrack, animate character-focused plot and background for the sake of getting the action going. I preferred the first film tremendously, though I enjoyed the second. If you get a chance, I recommend both, but especially the first.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Benu Birds and Pouring Rain
2010.10.01
Days Remaining: 241
1. It's been 10 days since my last post, a lacuna far greater than I would have intended if I had planned it, instead of making a series of incremental decisions both active and passive resulting in posting nothing new. Some of it, I suppose, has been particular days that were chock-full of work. Some of it was feeling less than great due to the lingering effects of whatever respiratory infection I had last week (I'm still coughing wetly periodically). Some of it has been laziness. But most of it has been based substantially upon mood in its basest form: I've been out of sorts and sad off and on for days now.
2. I've commented, in direct conversation, to many of you that the most emotionally difficult part of my divorce has been leaving behind my dog, Herman. I sometimes wonder if missing Herman is somehow emblematic of, or encapsulates, the rest of the emotional turmoil that understandably attends a divorce. Maybe if I had been able to get custody of him I would have been sad about something else. My apartment is far too small for a 65 pound German Shepherd/Husky mix, and it would have been a major source of complications in making plans if I had him. But I really do find myself missing him tremendously. This was the case even when I was staying with my parents this summer, so I don't think it's just a specific focus of general loneliness. My ex-wife sent me a message and photo of Herman on Monday this week; she's begun giving him half a can of wet food as part of his dinner each night (he loves wet food, but we couldn't afford it as anything more than an occasional treat). I was kind of jealous, because I had suggested, last year, that maybe we should do this, but we were constrained by money at the time, and now she can do it (the cats eat wet food each meal because even with three cats, it's vastly less expensive than feeding a full grown dog). Apparently for the rest of that first night Herman would go back to his bowl repeatedly on the off chance that there was any more wet food that showed up while he was in another room.
3. I formally filed for divorce on Wednesday, finally. My money situation is such that I don't have a lot of spending cash on hand, and so I've been very careful to not make more trips to Providence than necessary. After my first, thwarted, attempt to file for divorce on 15 September (stopped cold by the fact that I didn't bring my Marriage Certificate with me to the Family Court - because when I called twice to ask what documentation I needed to bring, both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention the Marriage Certificate), I had to a) find my Marriage Certificate buried in packed boxes and b) do another 120 mile round trip to file. I had a therapy appointment this past Wednesday morning and so that was when the filing would have to happen.
4. Though I was successful this time around, the process is almost comical in ways that it isn't easy. I was given an Instruction Sheet along with the forms and told to follow instructions closely, because there are parts of the forms that are supposed to only be filled in by the court personnel. So, okay. The forms were 14 pages long, and the Instruction Sheet's instructions stopped at Page 7. So I filled out everything I was told to do through Page 7, then went back up to the desk. Then I was informed that I needed to fill out Pages 8-14, and that I had left substantial portions of Pages 1-7 blank. When I pointed out that I had only filled out what the Instructions told me to fill out, the clerk was very unhappy with me. I cannot be the first person to have noted the Instruction Sheet's incompleteness, but in the clerk's eyes I was clearly at fault for having an Instruction Sheet that didn't work. So back I went to fill in the rest, including all of the places where the clerk marked Xs on Pages 1-7 to show what I had missed. Then, after doing this, I went back to the desk, and discovered I was still missing some things, including boxes she hadn't marked with an X (though, by this time, she was becoming generally nicer for some reason - maybe because she realized that I was there to file for divorce, something that is probably (not inevitably) emotionally difficult.
5. Then, when that was completed, she took my check for $120, my Marriage Certificate (they want the original for this process), and informed me that this "won't be filed today." She said I should call them on Friday to see if it was done yet, but no promises. And, of course, today I am not free to drive to and from Providence (at least 2.5 hours of traveling, parking, etc.), so I'll have to go back on Monday, if the forms are, in fact, filed by that time. Why do I need to go back? Because they won't mail them to the Sheriff's office to be served to my (not quite yet) ex-wife. I offered to give them the stamped envelopes etc, but they "don't do that." So I have to go back to pick up the forms and put them in a mailbox.
6. It took 10 minutes and $30 to get the marriage certificate. According to Delaware state law, you can actually just declare yourself married if you have the certificate. You don't even need an officiant. But if you want to get divorced, oh, the state will not make it simple (I doubt that they could ever make it easy). Granted, this process is complicated by my distance from Providence, but on general principle they should at the minimum make the correct information available and be able to provide a realistic timeline for the processing of the suit.
7. Anyway, I'm now much closer, in legal terms, to the formal dissolution of my marriage. I have never yet had a second thought about the correctness of my decision to leave. But I do go through periods of missing my ex-wife, and regretting that things have come to this. As I walked out of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, having just turned over the forms, my Marriage Certificate, and the processing fee (i.e., everything done in order and set to go), I said, out loud, "Goodbye, wife." I don't know if that was some sort of self-inflected melodrama or something else. But the sense of finality was really...immediate. I had done it, and this is where I am, now, formally and officially.
8. Classes are going well; in fact in some ways they're excellent, if exhausting (the lingering respiratory symptoms make lecturing for 5 straight hours difficult). I was asked to do two dorm talks this coming month on Halloween and ghosts. I did this last year, and they were apparently very popular. The second talk this time is probably going to be on Halloween itself, which is kind of neat. I've also been very encouraged by the slowly increasing number of students who have been coming to office hours or sending me emails wanting to discuss further things we talk about in class. It's not all of my students, but I really enjoy knowing that the classes motivate some of them to want more and to think further on their own.
9. There are a lot of other things I've been thinking about over the past week and a half, but I need to get to campus to grade essays, do office work, and then participate tonight in the dreaded Houndalympics (goes from 7pm-3am...sigh). I will work harder to not let the long gap between posts occur again.
10. Oh, and a shout out to my niece, Iunia, for being appointed Student of the Week at her kindergarten class, and to my nephew, Euander, for scoring a goal in a soccer game last weekend. I'm very proud of you both!
Days Remaining: 241
1. It's been 10 days since my last post, a lacuna far greater than I would have intended if I had planned it, instead of making a series of incremental decisions both active and passive resulting in posting nothing new. Some of it, I suppose, has been particular days that were chock-full of work. Some of it was feeling less than great due to the lingering effects of whatever respiratory infection I had last week (I'm still coughing wetly periodically). Some of it has been laziness. But most of it has been based substantially upon mood in its basest form: I've been out of sorts and sad off and on for days now.
2. I've commented, in direct conversation, to many of you that the most emotionally difficult part of my divorce has been leaving behind my dog, Herman. I sometimes wonder if missing Herman is somehow emblematic of, or encapsulates, the rest of the emotional turmoil that understandably attends a divorce. Maybe if I had been able to get custody of him I would have been sad about something else. My apartment is far too small for a 65 pound German Shepherd/Husky mix, and it would have been a major source of complications in making plans if I had him. But I really do find myself missing him tremendously. This was the case even when I was staying with my parents this summer, so I don't think it's just a specific focus of general loneliness. My ex-wife sent me a message and photo of Herman on Monday this week; she's begun giving him half a can of wet food as part of his dinner each night (he loves wet food, but we couldn't afford it as anything more than an occasional treat). I was kind of jealous, because I had suggested, last year, that maybe we should do this, but we were constrained by money at the time, and now she can do it (the cats eat wet food each meal because even with three cats, it's vastly less expensive than feeding a full grown dog). Apparently for the rest of that first night Herman would go back to his bowl repeatedly on the off chance that there was any more wet food that showed up while he was in another room.
3. I formally filed for divorce on Wednesday, finally. My money situation is such that I don't have a lot of spending cash on hand, and so I've been very careful to not make more trips to Providence than necessary. After my first, thwarted, attempt to file for divorce on 15 September (stopped cold by the fact that I didn't bring my Marriage Certificate with me to the Family Court - because when I called twice to ask what documentation I needed to bring, both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention the Marriage Certificate), I had to a) find my Marriage Certificate buried in packed boxes and b) do another 120 mile round trip to file. I had a therapy appointment this past Wednesday morning and so that was when the filing would have to happen.
4. Though I was successful this time around, the process is almost comical in ways that it isn't easy. I was given an Instruction Sheet along with the forms and told to follow instructions closely, because there are parts of the forms that are supposed to only be filled in by the court personnel. So, okay. The forms were 14 pages long, and the Instruction Sheet's instructions stopped at Page 7. So I filled out everything I was told to do through Page 7, then went back up to the desk. Then I was informed that I needed to fill out Pages 8-14, and that I had left substantial portions of Pages 1-7 blank. When I pointed out that I had only filled out what the Instructions told me to fill out, the clerk was very unhappy with me. I cannot be the first person to have noted the Instruction Sheet's incompleteness, but in the clerk's eyes I was clearly at fault for having an Instruction Sheet that didn't work. So back I went to fill in the rest, including all of the places where the clerk marked Xs on Pages 1-7 to show what I had missed. Then, after doing this, I went back to the desk, and discovered I was still missing some things, including boxes she hadn't marked with an X (though, by this time, she was becoming generally nicer for some reason - maybe because she realized that I was there to file for divorce, something that is probably (not inevitably) emotionally difficult.
5. Then, when that was completed, she took my check for $120, my Marriage Certificate (they want the original for this process), and informed me that this "won't be filed today." She said I should call them on Friday to see if it was done yet, but no promises. And, of course, today I am not free to drive to and from Providence (at least 2.5 hours of traveling, parking, etc.), so I'll have to go back on Monday, if the forms are, in fact, filed by that time. Why do I need to go back? Because they won't mail them to the Sheriff's office to be served to my (not quite yet) ex-wife. I offered to give them the stamped envelopes etc, but they "don't do that." So I have to go back to pick up the forms and put them in a mailbox.
6. It took 10 minutes and $30 to get the marriage certificate. According to Delaware state law, you can actually just declare yourself married if you have the certificate. You don't even need an officiant. But if you want to get divorced, oh, the state will not make it simple (I doubt that they could ever make it easy). Granted, this process is complicated by my distance from Providence, but on general principle they should at the minimum make the correct information available and be able to provide a realistic timeline for the processing of the suit.
7. Anyway, I'm now much closer, in legal terms, to the formal dissolution of my marriage. I have never yet had a second thought about the correctness of my decision to leave. But I do go through periods of missing my ex-wife, and regretting that things have come to this. As I walked out of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, having just turned over the forms, my Marriage Certificate, and the processing fee (i.e., everything done in order and set to go), I said, out loud, "Goodbye, wife." I don't know if that was some sort of self-inflected melodrama or something else. But the sense of finality was really...immediate. I had done it, and this is where I am, now, formally and officially.
8. Classes are going well; in fact in some ways they're excellent, if exhausting (the lingering respiratory symptoms make lecturing for 5 straight hours difficult). I was asked to do two dorm talks this coming month on Halloween and ghosts. I did this last year, and they were apparently very popular. The second talk this time is probably going to be on Halloween itself, which is kind of neat. I've also been very encouraged by the slowly increasing number of students who have been coming to office hours or sending me emails wanting to discuss further things we talk about in class. It's not all of my students, but I really enjoy knowing that the classes motivate some of them to want more and to think further on their own.
9. There are a lot of other things I've been thinking about over the past week and a half, but I need to get to campus to grade essays, do office work, and then participate tonight in the dreaded Houndalympics (goes from 7pm-3am...sigh). I will work harder to not let the long gap between posts occur again.
10. Oh, and a shout out to my niece, Iunia, for being appointed Student of the Week at her kindergarten class, and to my nephew, Euander, for scoring a goal in a soccer game last weekend. I'm very proud of you both!
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