The Langoliers are Coming!

Sinister ergonomics

2010-04-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Does anyone still read this? I apologize for my long silence, but anyone who reads this has probably been in contact with me otherwise so it doesn’t really matter. I’m on a train right now and have finished reading the book I brought so I’ll write something.

Wow, it’s been like two months since I’ve updated this. Shockingly little has happened to me in this time. I’ve been pretty stationary, living in Paris, doing research, etc. I don’t have much to write about except for my actual research, which I don’t want to get into here. If I had a way to make it seem interesting, I wouldn’t waste it on a blog. There were only two real events of note during my tenure in Paris. I organized a conference, which brought a handful of Columbia students to Paris, and then my girlfriend came to visit. Both of these events were marked by exceptionally ill-timed bouts of food poisoning, but otherwise went well.

The past two weeks, though, have been a whirlwind of activity: I left Paris for Belgium, then for Montreal, then for Paris, then for Cambridge, then for Florence, and then back to Paris. I was supposed to go to Caen, too, but that was pre-empted by the Volcanic Explosion of 2010. It goes without saying that this could not have happened at a worse time for me. If it had happened when I was not supposed to travel, I would have sat back like everyone else and thought smug thoughts about our over-reliance on air travel, etc. And then I would have enjoyed airplane-free skies. Instead, what I did was sit in Montreal all by myself, in misery, waiting on hold to talk to airline personnel. I don’t even know why I kept calling; I sort of assumed that the airline people had secret information about the eruption that would only be revealed if you were willing to wait on hold for an hour. In fact they did not, and seemed to have less information than the average reader of cnn.com. In the end it turned out relatively OK, and I even Had A Beer with a guy I met at the airport, which is the kind of thing that I never do. The reason I don’t do it is because it’s awkward and you’re charged $12 for said beer, but still I felt like A Real Boy for doing it. Also on the airplane I watched “Twilight: A New Moon”, which was even dumber than I had allowed myself to hope.

All of this has led me to reflect on three things, in decreasing order of interest.

First, I really hate to travel. This isn’t news, but it’s reached a new level of loathing, and I am essentially in existential despair from the moment I enter the airport until I arrive home. Sometimes this has been many hours: I spent a desperate night on the floor of London Luton airport, which is less fun than it sounds. Europeans have the ability to sleep anywhere, like dogs. People all around me were just laying on the ground and falling asleep. I worked very hard to create a comfort-nest, made of my belongings, on the linoleum floor, and still could not sleep, and then this guy came up next to me, just laid FACE-DOWN on the floor, and started sleeping!

Part of the reason for my renewed vitriol is that I’ve been flying budget airlines, and have had lots of flights cancelled, both of which reveal the cold black heart of the airline industry, which gets papered over by most American airlines, who at least pretend to care about your comfort or well-being. I flew from Paris to Montreal with an airline called “Air Transat”, which might beat out “Air Tran” for least appealing airline name. This was a night flight, and the innovation here was that they don’t give you pillows or blankets or earplugs anymore. You have to buy them, for $7. They justify this in two ways: first, it is unhygienic to share blankets (by this logic, you should have to purchase your own seat). Second, the blanket serves as an “Air Transat keepsake” (by this logic, everyone likes to commemorate their worst experiences with cheap blankets).

And then, on Easyjet, they have a very strict rule: you can have only one carry-on bag. Not a bag and a personal item, but one bag. In preparation for Easyjet regulations, I had even purchased an extremely small rolling bag for 12 euros, but was forced to check it for 22 euros, even though it is essentially lunchbox-sized (keeping in mind that my ticket, from Paris to London, cost 20 euros). This made me furious. My solution for my flight from London to Florence, which seemed ingenious at the time (this after 36 hours with no sleep) was just to wear all of my clothes at once, and then I could fit my computer bag inside my rolling bag. So I put on two pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, one T-shirt, two button-down shirts, three sweaters, and a hoodie. Although I did save 22 euros, there were some problems with this plan. The first problem is that the plan is stupid, and 22 euros is not very much money anyway, especially as I probably ruined some of my clothes in the process (through stretching). Second, it made me even more miserable during the flight. It was quite hot in both London and Florence that day. I was too tired and out of it to read or work, so I just sat there in agony, breathing heavily and sweating profusely, through the flight and the two-hour journey from the airport (Pisa, actually) to my hostel.

OK, second, I kind of like hostels. I criticize them a lot, and they make me nervous, but I’ve stayed in probably ten of them over the course of the year and have had a surprisingly good time in each. For much of this, granted, I’ve had a room to myself: I’ve been traveling in weird times and places (Montreal in April, Düsseldorf in January, etc.). But when I’ve had roommates they’ve always been surprisingly nice. Whenever one comes in, I am deeply suspicious and for some reason convinced that all they want to do is steal my passport. Like, when I go to brush my teeth and my passport is still in my bag when I return, I’m pleasantly surprised. But not only has nobody stolen my passport, everyone’s been pretty great (except for one guy in Montreal who snored like I have never heard, and then woke up early for an outrageously long vomiting session). As a proper historian-in-training, I have a primary source document about this. When I was in Bonn, I shared a room with a youngish German librarian. We talked about only mundane things, focusing for some reason on the vicissitudes of the hostel shower. One day, when he left before I had even woken up, he left me a LETTER, in shaky English, detailing the proper means of shower operation (with a proper salutation and everything)! And then last night, in Florence, the potential passport-stealer was an Armenian guy who offered to walk me to the train station and help me buy my ticket. I don’t care what the Bible says, people are good.

Third, academic conferences are a joke and almost uniformly a waste of time. Most of them, at least. I’ve been to three this semester: the German one I wrote about before, and then two huge inter-disciplinary conferences, one in Ghent and one in Montreal. The German one was pretty good, academically speaking: there was plenty of time to discuss each paper, and there was only one panel at a time so there was a healthy audience of knowledgeable people. But these things are not true at the big conferences, at which the audience is usually exceedingly small, and the panels are packed so tight that there is essentially no time for discussion, which is the only thing that would possibly justify traveling for several days in order to read a 15-minute paper. I was on a panel that had five papers, in one hour and forty-five minutes, which is absurd. We had come from all over the place, just to read a paper for 15 minutes to an audience of about 5, and then receive no questions. I can read out loud and not receive questions at home, for free. This was, I should say, not a problem with either of these conferences as such, but with the organization of academic conferences in general. I had a great time at both of them, and they were good for “networking,” I guess.

Another insight from attending these inter-disciplinary conferences: inter-disciplinarity is not really happening. I guess that historians read philosophers sometimes, but not really; normally we just employ some sort of Foucault-lite to prove that “context matters,” and anyway we read the late Foucault who wasn’t trying anymore to be a “philosopher” as normally construed (show me a historian who has dealt with “The Order of Things” in any serious way). I don’t think I had ever really seen a political science presentation before last week, and it was like entering another world. Not only did it seem wrong, it seemed absolutely crazy, as though she was using tea-leaves or entrails instead of actual argument. And as became clear in the Q&A part (in this panel, there was one because two of the presenters didn’t show), the fault was my own; the poli-sci people in the room treated me like a deluded child who did not understand the rigors of social-scientific thought. One of them came up to me afterwards and said, “So, you don’t know much about social science, do you?” (translated: “So, you sure are a big idiot, aren’t you?”). Then he recommended some panels later that would have “stories”, which he assumed I would like, because I am a historian and I like fun little stories, full of intrigue and derring-do (sp?). I think everyone assumed that historians spend their time debating what kind of cherry tree George Washington chopped down, and doing voiceover for History Channel specials about the Golden Gate Bridge, while the real work is done by sociologists and political scientists.

Then again, this sort of blanket dismissal on my part isn’t going to further inter-disciplinarity. Maybe we should just give up that ghost: what it does, perversely and paradoxically, is allow the disciplines to exist independently, because the veneer of interdisciplinary centers, etc., allows us to assume the necessary dialogue is taking place, even when it’s not. What we need is DISCIPLINARITY: a real sense of history as a discipline, in which we stand up for, and fight for, its epistemic superiority vis-à-vis the other disciplines. Only a lazy gardener lets a thousand flowers bloom.

And ANOTHER thing (this is turning into a rant; I think that my upcoming flight is making me bitter): the sort of triumphant disciplinarity that I want will require historians to stop saying that “all truth is relative” or “all history is political, so I can't claim absolute authority for my interpretation,” or whatever. None of us truly believe that, it’s just a thing that we say, and it's become depressingly boilerplate. If we really believed that, we wouldn't be historians; the discipline assumes a "fidelity to the facts," whatever we might say to ourselves in our brief moments of methodological reflexivity. The move we need to make, though, is not towards boring-old empiricism, but a recognition that THE TRUTH can be political. The equation of the political with the fictional is debilitating.

Back in the Habit

2010-02-28T01:33:00.000-08:00

So the German conference about which I was so apprehensive turned out to be really awesome. In a way that’s almost sad: confronted by increasing evidence about the impossibilities of the job market (I just heard a story about a bright young literary critic who was forced to take a job in Omaha and lives in snow-shoveling misery), I’ve been thinking recently that I wouldn’t mind leaving academia that much, if it came down to it. But the reason so many people are drawn to it is that it can sometimes be pretty great: everyone at this conference was extremely bright and fun and nice, I got to go for free, etc. I felt like one of those people playing their violins while the Titanic sank.

The monastery was pretty cool and, as expected, a bit creepy. The nuns were nothing like my only other experience of nunnery:

When I first showed up I barged in the front door with my bags expecting to find, I don’t know, a lobby or something, but it was actually the front door of the church and there was a gaggle of nuns chanting. It’s not really a hotel in the normal sense; there are just a few rooms that are, I’ve since learned, primarily for pilgrims. Each room is complete with a large crucifix. Nuns care for your every need with fearsome efficiency. Once I left my room and walked about three minutes before realizing I’d forgotten something and went back. In this 6-minute interval, a nun had been in my room, cleaned everything up, given my new towels/sheets, and disappeared. Maybe she was hiding in the closet. It did seem, though, like the kind of place where there might be a murder which would be covered up by the crooked town police in cahoots with the wicked head nun (the town, which has under 20K people, was quaint in that sinister kind of way).

The conference itself—my first in Germany—was pretty different from an American one. Instead of having a panel of several papers that would then have a response and questions addressed to the group, people presented one at a time and then stood up there all alone while people fired questions at them. When this firing is taking place at rapid speed in a language that is not your own, this yields maximum stress. Thankfully, there was not much actual question and answer; usually the handful of prestigious older professors would make a long-winded comment that did not require response. I was hoping that nobody would ask me an actual question, and I almost lucked out. The first two talked quickly, and while I got the gist of what they were saying, I was not sure whether or not it was taking the form of a question, but they finished with a declarative and not an interrogative ending so I was spared. The last guy, who talked at such a blistering pace that I actually had no idea what he was talking about, unfortunately ended his babbling with an interrogative lilt and a look of expectation. When I responded with only a look of horror and shame, he caught himself and repeated himself slowly, and overall the whole thing was less humiliating than expected.

My favorite part of the weekend was this one older guy who stood behind the Powerpoint screen while his introduction was being read (you could see his little legs sticking out the bottom). And then he tottered out when the chairperson said his name. I thought this was so funny. I expected a burst of steam and “ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?!!” Also an older woman who came up to me and said, “It was so nice to hear a real Boston accent!” As she had clearly been prepping this sentence (in English) in her head for some time, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had only been to Boston for about 48 hours in my life.

And another thing: I am currently in the Munich airport where, loyal readers might recall, I have written before (the Munich airport is my cork-lined room, you might say). I got here two hours early, sailed through security, and was feeling pretty good that I had bested the airport that had so destroyed me a few months ago. But this was hubris. What I did then, in my ecstasy, was enter the wrong terminal: the one for true international departures, and not intra-EU travel. I thought it was a little weird that I was getting my passport checked, but EU regulations are mysterious to me so I didn’t think much of it. After wandering around the duty-free shops for a while, I noted that my gate was not there. So, 30 minutes after legally exiting Germany, I had to legally enter it again, and explain this to the passport man and get a new stamp. This then spat me out in international baggage claim so I had to rework my way through the whole airport and go through security again. And this time the line was long, there was a large family w/ baby in front of me that seemed to have bones made of metal, and the kid right in front of me: a) had a Zippo lighter, which had to be completely disassembled by a squad of Lufthansa people for some reason; b) was trying to travel with some kind of big metal thing that is used to soup up car engines. I don't know what it was, but it looked just like a bomb from a movie and is definitely not the sort of thing that belongs in one’s carry-on luggage. This caused a great to-do. So anyway, despite all my precautions, I almost missed my flight.

Damn you, Munich Airport! You may have won this time, but we will meet again!

[update to the above, which was written at the gate: Actually, Munich Airport was not done with me yet. The flight was delayed by two hours, I was seated next to a violently ill ten-year-old, and the train into Paris was closed for repairs, so everyone had to wait in the rain for a very long bus ride]

Masses of fun

2010-02-24T14:06:00.001-08:00

One of the perks, I guess, of studying Catholics is that you get to stay in weird Catholic places like that place I wrote about earlier, next to the Church in the middle of nowhere. Tomorrow I'm going to another place in the middle of nowhere for a Catholic conference, in Germany this time. The organizers have booked me a room in a monastery. On the website is the following photo:
Is that creepy or what? What is that nun doing? Maybe she comes with the room.

I've been careful thus far to restrict myself to events that are about Catholics in an academic sense, instead of the infinite number of events that are actually for Catholics, and are more religious than purely academic occasions. Judging from the other papers, and the nun in my room, I think that this time I have misjudged. I am slightly alarmed about this because my paper is about conceptual links between Catholicism and Nazism. Might be a tough crowd.

linguistics part deux

2010-02-22T23:42:00.001-08:00

The same phenomenon is not unknown when speaking in your mother tongue. For instance, I was speaking on the phone the other day with someone (let's call him or her "Larry Paddocks"), and this person fell asleep briefly, had a micro-dream, woke up, and said, "One million pictures of Gerard Depardieu."

For bandwidth reasons, here's just one:

linguistics

2010-02-22T13:17:00.000-08:00

One thing that happens when you are uncomfortable with a language is that, when people tell you something weird, you assume that you are misunderstanding even when you're not. This has happened to me twice recently.

1. Today, an old man came up to me in the library, where I was using a microfiche machine. He held up his library card and asked me where to put the card to use the machine. I stammered that I didn't understand, because microfiche machines do not require you to insert your library card. They are extremely primitive; essentially it's just a piece of glass and a flashlight. And then he made a quizzical face and started, like, rubbing his card on the machine to find the slot.

2. A few days ago, my roommate/landlady was telling me something very complicated and then asked, "Do you understand?", and I did not, but I said yes anyway because normally these things aren't important, then I felt guilty and asked for more clarification. It turns out I was right the first time; the message was, "Next week a scientist is going to come and measure the angle at which the sunlight hits your window. This is on account of a lawsuit being waged against the neighbors and their outdoor movie screen."

Snomageddon

2010-02-22T00:44:00.000-08:00

In a thousand years, aliens will visit our planet and, upon seeing the tips of golden arches peeking out of the glacial mass covering the remains of Florida, will wonder what could have happened to such a civilization. Then they will see the following video, and they will think, "Oh, that's what."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRvxvl8ZYi4

Justin Bieber, for those who do not use Twitter, is some sort of teen heartthrob.

Dissertators, of the world, unite!

2010-02-15T03:43:00.002-08:00

We have nothing to lose but our fellowships!

"It is not enough to declare a political commitment for or against capitalism. One has to declare one's theoretical commitment also. One has to choose: either to regard the whole history of society from a Marxist point of view, i.e. as a totality, and hence to come to grips with the phenomenon of imperialism in theory and practice. Or else to evade this confrontation by confining oneself to the analysis of isolated aspects in one or other of the special disciplines. The attitude that inspires monographs is the best way to place a screen before the problem the very sight of which strikes terror into the heart of a Social-Democratic movement turned opportunist."
--Lukács, History and Class Consciousness [emphasis added; that sentence was obviously a nightmare for the poor translator]

Even more guilt-inducing than Tony Judt. Does this explain the special love of monograph-writers, myself included, for Barack Obama? Is there petty-bourgeois opportunism hiding in the form of my academic specialization?

But, as sagely observed in the NYT, "The library is a place. A learning place." Not a place for staging revolutions!

Paris in the the winter

2010-02-12T14:34:00.001-08:00

Short update for those keeping score at home. Paris is pretty nice, much better than Munich in almost every way. My roommate is a highly mysterious but very nice Argentinian woman, who manages to both be a psychoanalyst and write a book about Borges without, so far as I can tell, ever leaving the apartment. My room itself is more of a cell or a garret than a room, but it is not without charm.

Although human contact has been minimal, compared to my month in the wilderness (January) I have been a social butterfly. Today, in the library, a young woman across the table handed me what I thought was a note. I got excited about this, thinking that it was some admirer from afar giving me her number. I've heard tell of this kind of thing happening, although it has never happened to me. I was all prepared to let her down gently and was actually composing this in my head in French when I realized that it was not a note at all, but a Kleenex. Because, you see, I have been kind of sick recently and had obviously run out of Kleenex and my face was covered in snot. So what I read as attraction was pity and/or disgust. Story of my life!

Speaking of which, one of the quirks of Paris is that at the swimming pools everyone is required to wear a Speedo. It's a regulation. This seems so stereotypical to me that I couldn't believe it. It's almost like a policeman came up and said it was against the law to bathe, or to not wear striped shirts and red kerchiefs. And if you don't have a Speedo, or have left your Speedo at home, every swimming pool is equipped with a Speedo-brand Speedo vending machine! It's just like the sort of machine that usually dispenses M&M's, but it dispenses Speedos. You can also buy bathing caps there, which are another requirement.

In other random news, I thought that "In the Air" was horrible. I can understand, though, why it has been so praised: it has a twist (the ending), but it's a false twist because what's really different about this movie is the OPENING, so the twist just brings us back to convention and normality. So it gives us the sappy feelings we want re: the economic crisis, but the movie pretends that's not what it's doing.

This review (http://www.tnr.com/book/review/gulag-humor) is going to give me nightmares. Why would The New Republic pick out a random academic press book, and then review it and say it's too academic? Is this going to become a regular thing? I mean, it's good for academic books to get press but not if they are going to be criticized for being academic! This is like when Pitchfork sometimes picks completely random bands nobody has ever heard of and gives them a terrible review. What's the point except to make other bands/academics nervous?

The perils of multi-kulti

2010-01-23T14:16:00.000-08:00

It was kind of a stupid thing that made me remember that I had a blog. Probably everyone else has forgotten but I'll write here occasionally anyhow. Make that two stupid things. First off, a sign from the shower in a hostel I stayed in last week:
Doesn't this make it look like the shower will change your gender? Like, it looks like a sequence.

OK, the other thing: I am currently in France, having spent most of January traipsing around different parts of Germany. I stayed in a bunch of hostels, which was more or less miserable except for one great encounter that maybe I'll write about eventually (I've been archive hopping). I spent last week at a miniscule little village outside Strasbourg. I mean, smaller than you really thought existed anymore. When I think "small town", I think "American small town", i.e. "the town in which I grew up", which features many Checker's, Applebee's, etc., and I didn't think that in France it would be any different. But it was. The view from my street:

Not only are there no Sonic establishments, there is only one place in the WHOLE TOWN to buy food, at all, and it's only open a few hours per day. I felt like I was on an Antarctic science mission, periodically getting supplied from the mainland. To get meat: you are supposed to order it a day in advance, and then this little van comes through the town and a siren goes off, and all the peasants scurry out to get their meat! It was bizarre. Also, I was staying in a little compound that was more Catholic than the Vatican. My room featured a creepy angel, watching over me while I slept and condemning my dreams. It was also directly next to the church; like, it shared a wall. I think I was next to the bell, because when the bell rang it was earth-shattering inside the apt. And the bell rings all the time, presumably to structure the daily lives of the village people, but the # of times it rang was mysterious. Most prominently, it rang precisely 102 times every morning, at 6 AM.

But anyway that's all a digression: my point is about this guy I stayed with the night before the village, in Strasbourg proper, where I stayed in a hostel. My roommate was an Algerian guy with whom I had a short, painful interaction in French (my French is currently atrocious), and then the guy gave me a huge box of dates! He held out this bushel of dates to me and I took one, not thinking much of it, and then he pushed the whole thing at me and said it was a gift. I don't know how to describe the size of this box of dates. It is very big and extremely heavy (I just finally ditched it this morning). He also gave me a sandstone painting of his hometown in Algeria, which helpfully says "SOUVENIR" across the top.

Anyway, I'm not much of a gift person, and I definitely did not know how to respond to this potlach-level of extravagance. It made me extremely nervous. I didn't even want the dates. I do not like dates, especially not 5 pounds of dates that I would have to carry around with me. I had a minor mental freakout in which I tried to cycle through possible gifts I could give in exchange, as I didn't have a crate of oranges on hand (a pair of my shoes? an ipod cable?). In the end, I gave him nothing and instead made a big show of how the dates would not fit in my luggage, which they would not. His smile said, "Yes, it certainly is a huge box of dates! You are welcome!"

So after this I did some research and ascertained that, according to the interweb, gift giving is a very important part of Algerian culture and is not uncommon. So then, yesterday, I was at a restaurant staffed by Algerian people, and they put down in front of me a beer that I had not ordered. I attempted to draw lessons from my Google-anthropology, and instead of saying something I thought, "They are giving me a gift! It is part of their culture!" So I drank it, and was duly charged for it. Thus I have learned an important lesson about cultural essentialism.

Sing, O Muse, of the Wrath of James

2009-11-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

Or: Life’s Not Short, It’s Long!

At this moment, I should be sailing through the skies between Dublin and New York, about to enjoy my long-awaited homecoming and see my girflriend and cats. I am, instead, in Munich, sitting on a chair emblazoned with car rental ads and designed for discomfort because I’m not yet allowed into the actual waiting area. The depths of despair into which I have sunk are kind of new to me, so I thought I would strike while the iron was hot and write about it.

The story is this: There were two legs to my flight, one from Munich to Dublin, another from Dublin to New York. Unbeknownst to me, the first flight was cancelled some weeks ago and I was booked onto a later flight to Dublin. This had me missing my connection to the second leg by six hours. This second leg of the flight was not rebooked, and per my official Orbitz page, my time to make the connection was, thus, “-6 hours”. As in, negative six hours. This would have been quite a feat even I had been aware of the change, but I was not, having received no notification and, in fact, the Orbitz page still showed me as confirmed on the morning flight, in addition to the evening flight, which discrepancy I did not note when I checked it this morning. Orbitz and Aer Lingus blame this debacle on one another, but primarily on me, for reasons that remain unclear.

The upshot is that I have been in the Munich airport for nine hours, and am looking forward to a night spent in the Dublin airport because hotel accommodation is not forthcoming, either from Aer Lingus or from Orbitz. This depite numerous fabulously expensive calls to Orbitz from a public phone, during which conversations I spun a tale of woe, Dante-esque in ingenuity, false in details but true in spirit (pennilessness, the missed wedding of a dear friend, and so on). The numerous voices on the other end were less than interested. To add insult to injury: whenever I called, I had to navigate the complex voice menu before I could be granted a live voice. I mashed “0” and asked for customer service at every opportunity, which did not perturb the pre-recorded voice. And the recorded sample that says, “Oh, you want customer service?” is actually recorded in an incredulous voice and, I swear to God, begins with a little snort of disbelief; this leads to another array of electronic options before I’m granted the opportunity to speak to the least empathetic people in the world. They had me longing for the human touch of the pre-recorded messages.

Like everyone else, I have had my share of run-ins with flight mishaps and delays, although none as serious as this or as inexplicable: this was COMPLETELY avoidable, if someone had just thought to tell me the problem, or if either Orbitz or Aer Lingus had some kind of automation that would flag obviously impossible flights that require time travel. Also my desire to come home is, this time, immense, and my time in New York was already truncated as it was.

The first few hours I think I was actually in shock (I was also tired, having woken up very early to catch a flight that did not exist). I had a desparate desire to commit some sort of violence, but all I could think to do was commit an act of violence against my own body. So I ate the biggest and most disgusting McDonal’s meal that I could find. This is the only way I can justify it in retrospect: I actually walked quite a ways, lugging all of my bags, past numerous healthy restaurants because I knew that a McDonald’s was in the distance. This made me feel better in some twisted way. Since then I have been roaming the halls of the airport, unable to concentrate enough to read. I just watched a bunch of children ice skating at a little rink outside the airport and found myself hoping (a) that the children in said rink belong to officials of Aer Lingus and Orbitz, and (b) that said rink would be struck by a comet.

It’s not so much the pragmatics of the situation: it’s the feeling of being caught, completely helplessly, in the wheels of a bureaucratic machine that seems hellbent on blaming and hurting me. That is: It’s not so much that the people don’t care: the bureaucrats to which I’ve been entrusted are surely nice people, just doing their job, and right know they’re probably listening to some poor sap whose insulin, or father’s ashes, or whatever, was dropped into the ocean. And I know, rationally, that this is simply The Way We Live Now. But, as a child of privilege, I have seldom had to face this humiliating objectification myself. Diabolically, capitalist society builds a web of goodwill and warm relations—even institutionally—around the privileged. This is especially true of academics, those with the ability and the access to discursively protest: although not financially compensated, we are protected from the ravages of institutions by well-placed phone calls and the vestiges of aristocracy that cling to the university system. I don’t really know what it’s like to have problems with health care, with visas, with the police and neither, I propose, do most people who produce the cultural capital that remains (maybe for not much longer?) necessary to prop all this up. But the airlines are different: I really am, to them, an entry in an accounts ledger and no more. I have never laid eyes on an Orbitz employee, perhaps because they only come out at night, or live in a lair at the center of the earth. But for just this reason, the airline industry is the most perfectly democratic institution that we have. It’s only here that I am actually equal: that egalité triumphs especially obviously over its brothers, liberté and fraternité.

What does this say about democracy, about our place within it?

Well that was a cathartic thirty minutes. In only three more hours I’ll be on my way to sleep in an airport!

[update: I am now in a somewhat better mood, as I’m ensconced in the Carlton Hotel, overlooking the beautiful Dublin Airport, courtesy of Aer Lingus. Against the odds, they came through in the end. I will leave the above untouched, as evidence for future generations of the despair to which modern American man will sink when faced with relatively routine airline mishaps]

twinsies

2009-11-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

Every day at the library I walk by an exhibit in a glass case with a bunch of pictures. I never really paid it any heed, but thought in the back of my mind, "How strange that a German library would have an exhibit dedicated to Sean Connery!" For some reason, today I actually looked at it, and the exhibit is in fact about Thomas Mann. He is much more dapper than one would think!

Micky von Maus

2009-11-13T09:31:00.000-08:00

I came across an amazing article today in a reactionary Viennese Catholic journal from 1932 (never thought I would type a sentence like that!). This was right when Walt Disney announced that he was going to make Mickey into the star of some of Grimm's fairy tales. Predictably, German nationalists were furious about this. This makes perfect sense, given the role of these fairy tales in the development of 19th-cent. German nationalism, although I'd never thought about it before. Anyway, here's my translation of (most of) a short article about Mickey.

Note: In the part that I didn't translate the author suggests that Mickey star in the Book of Job, or that Marlene Dietrich play Joan of Arc. It is probably a sign of decadence that these parodic suggestions seem perfectly reasonable and profitable. And now, on to the Kulturkritik!

"Every moviegoer knows Mickey Mouse, the creation of the artist Walt Disney. We often see this grotesque image of soulless buffoonery between the news and the film, and every time we become furious that the German public has fallen for this un-German idiocy with such zest. But Mickey Mouse achieved national fame. There are Mickey Mouse brooches, Mickey Mouse tie pins, in short, Mickey Mouse ornaments of every variety; in a place of pilgrimage near Vienna, we even saw Mickey in a devotional shrine between the crucifix and the rosary beads! A hideous heresy. But the soullessness of American filmmakers has become uncontroversial to such a degree that nobody senses any more the the miserable forsakenness of this mouse-creation, completely abandoned by God. It has nothing of the spirit of German fairy tales or ancient myths. Mickey Mouse is a product of cold virtuosity; only idiots can laugh at the adventures of this black and white forgery."

[for those of you in cultural studies who might happen onto this through Google and want the citation, it is: Anonymous [probably Joseph Eberle], "Micky-Maus entdeckt die Grimmschen Märchen." Schönere Zukunft 8, 43 (23 July 1933), 1037)

Heidegger, again

2009-11-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

Two posts in one day. I would only do this if it were an extreme emergency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/books/09philosophy.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

I can't believe that this was printed. In the New York Times, of all places. This article does nothing other than mention the same three pieces I discussed, throw in a quotation from Richard Wolin that says essentially nothing, and then end with a bizarre stream-of-consciousness section about Heidegger's thought, and then the concluding one-two punch here:

"A verbal brawl over Heidegger’s theories should not be surprising, though. After all, the classic American position on how liberal societies should treat dangerous ideas is worth more discussion.

That is precisely what Mr. Faye says he wants. In his view teaching Heidegger’s ideas without disclosing his deep Nazi sympathies is like showing a child a brilliant fireworks display without warning that an ignited rocket can also blow up in someone’s face."

What precisely is the classic American position? What does its worthiness for discussion have to do with this article? Mr. Faye says he wants to discuss the classic American position about dangerous ideas? Why is she calling him Mr. Faye? And the last sentence is kind of uncontroversial, although the image is unnecessarily grisly—of course the Nazism should at least be mentioned—but Faye, according to her own account, goes much further than that ("classing as hate speech" is different from a "warning").

But Faye's book is beside the point. Is this a book review, or what? Cohen seems to have not read Faye's book—she doesn't quote from it or anything. This "article" is based on online articles, and the comment section of one of those articles, and two e-mails that she sent. But it's also not an essay in the sense that it has any discernible argument or point. Bah! The weird thing is that I don't even care about the Heidegger debate that much. It's just maddening to see complex philosophical texts turn into warring and senseless screeds, which then turns into a mushy bland article in the NYT that reads like an extended Twitter.

Author! Author!

2009-11-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

[This turned out even more long and boring than the last one! I will write about my trip to the hospital, and my adventure changing a bike tire with an anti-papist Hungarian, eventually]

About 30 minutes ago, I sprayed deodorant into my eyes. A whole series of missteps led to this, the first of which is the apparent unavailability of normal deodorant in this country. Also my shampoo had exploded in my bag, and it was very slippery. But as I was wincing in a public shower, I thought to myself, "Do all authors go through this? Behind every book, every article, is there some poor sap fruitlessly trying to wash deodorant out of his eyes?"

Of course, the answer is yes. It's kind of counter-intuitive though, at least to me. I never really thought about the authorship process of a book/dissertation in any serious way before this trip. I guess I still kind of imagined the author as a magical, wizard-like figure, from whose head chapters spring, fully-armed. This made me think about the whole "Death of the author" thing. "Death of the author" is one of those phrases, like "the end of history" or "il n'y a pas d'hors-texte", that is much more interesting for the hysteria it's created than for what it actually meant to begin with.

This is a tangent, but I am sick to death of the phrase "trendy post-modernists" or some version thereof. Almost all of those Heidegger articles contain something like that, and I really don't think the word "post-modernist" or even the word "theorist" really appears anymore without the addition of that word. The word "trend" means, "The general direction in which something tends to move." I challenge anyone to prove that academia is moving towards anything that might be called post-modernism. I have been in academia for ages and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything positive about post-modernism, or the figures who apparently represent it (Derrida/Baudrillart/Lyotard/whatever). This includes classes in English, philosophy, and history (presumably the three most po-mo disciplines) at two northeastern universities that are presumably the target of all these attacks. Even at Columbia, which should be ground zero for this stuff, every student reads essentially the same "great books" curriculum that people read at finishing school 50 years ago. In graduate-level English classes, invocation of any theory was met with collective eye rolls. Am I missing something? Are students across the land forced to read de Man and told that there is no such thing as truth? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. And if it's not, everybody who wastes so much energy lampooning post-modernism needs to think of a different, and better, reason why nobody cares about the humanities.

(See this for instance: what is the point of this? Nobody talks like this in the universe. So what psychological need is it fulfilling? The same thing for those post-modernism sentence generators: what is BEHIND this animosity? The ideas themselves are irrelevant, something else is going on)

Anyway, so the "Death of the author" is one of those things, like "postmodernism," that is only really talked about by people who hate it. The critique of the idea (not the idea itself) has filtered into the general culture, too: I heard a non-academic the other day dismiss the thesis, apropos of nothing. My point with all of this is not to prop back up the death of the author thesis, or to add to the avalanche of critiques by saying in some facile way that "the author's intentions matter" or "context matters" or whatever. I mean: the debate about, "Is the location of meaning the author or the reader?" is stupid. Or at least seems to miss the point, because it misses everything that comes between the author and the reader, which seems way more important than the input of those two suckers.

So little of my time has been spent sending thoughts out of my brain and onto a page that it's changed the way I think about "writing" as an activity. It seems like the best way to think of an "author" is not as a "source of meaning" or even as a "function" of a text, but as himself an institution. The amount of resources necessary to write is enormous: Library cards, special access, visas, grants, university affiliations, police registration, and on and on. This is not just ancillary stuff, but is constitutive of the whole project. What the finished product "means" seems kind of beside the point. The function it serves—the FORM, which is always more important than the content—is structured by all of these institutions. It is a piece of a job application, and a necessary hurdle to the PhD, first and foremost. And isn't all writing kind of like this? I'm looking through the papers of all these interwar writers, and they never say, "I have serious meaning I wish to impart!" They say, "Oh man, I am out of money so I need to sell this article."

The author can't be dead, because someone is applying for grant money.

But I do, of course, have something I want to say. The pages will not be blank in the finished product. But why do I want to say it, and to whom? When I examine my motives, it is not really, "I want more people to know about this part of European history." What do I care? People can get on perfectly fine without knowing about my topic. If I really cared about that, wouldn't I post all of my writing online for free and spam the whole internet with the address? I'm writing this because it is necessary; it is part of my job description, the way joy buzzers are in the job description of clowns. It actually helps me to think of it in this way. It's easier to get up in the morning to complete a job you've been assigned than it is to serve the interests of civilization.

Rosenbaum on Arendt/Heidegger

2009-11-02T10:40:00.000-08:00

[Caveat lecteur: this got kind of long and boring]

For whatever reason, the Heidegger controversy is happening again. There was that article in the Chronicle for Higher Education by Carlin Romano. That wasn't and shouldn't be taken seriously, as Romano is a known hack. The response in the New Republic was pretty weak, I thought. Linker accepts the basic principle of Romano's essay ("Heidegger was fundamentally a political thinker, and an evil one at that") and Romano's basic stance ("I am not a Nazi, but rather a liberal democrat"). He just changes it a little bit, by saying that we should read Heidegger because it is an intellectually exhilarating challenge to our liberal democratic principles, but of course we will not change anything because Linker is "not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more 'primordial' encounter with Being." Not inclined! This from the guy who's supposed to be defending philosophy!

This article is the most infuriating of the bunch, I think. Sloppy thinking is not in itself infuriating. We're all guilty of it. But this is published in a pretty high-profile online journal, and will be read by lots of people who don't know any better. That's what's so maddening about it. It's also evidence of a horrible but very common way of reading philosophical texts. According to this strategy, there is one obviously correct way to think. This correct way can be found by observing my gut instincts. Philosophers are to be judged to the extent that they meet this criteria or not. This hermeneutic is not even just a denial, it's a negation of the whole principle of philosophy. ALSO it goes beyond the standard Heidegger polemic by trying to drag in Hannah Arendt.

Here is Rosenbaum's argument: there have been lots of recent revelations about Arendt and Heidegger, which demonstrate that the latter was a horrible Nazi and the former was deeply influenced by anti-Semitic sources, including Heidegger. This should lead us to question the phrase, "the banality of evil," and see what hokum it is.

The non sequitur is tremendous, no? It's not any more sensible in the actual article. There are two unrelated claims: (1) Hannah Arendt was a bad person. (2) "The banality of evil" is a bad idea. There is no connection between these things. The attempt to connect them in the second to last paragraph makes no sense, either logically or historically. Both points are overstated. The part about Heidegger bears no relation to either of these points, although I guess it helps his ad hominem case against Arendt. It does give him a chance to demonstrate that he is deeply philosophically illiterate (again, there's nothing wrong with that. I know nothing about botany. But I don't publish muckraking articles in botanical journals).

Point (1) There are no new revelations about Heidegger or Arendt. That's his hook for the whole article, but I don't see anything that isn't blindly obvious, or known for 20 years already. I like Wasserstein, and haven't read his article, but I certainly hope it's more nuanced than RR says. Arendt used anti-Semitic sources, RR reports, when writing "Origins". He focuses primarily on J.A. Hobson, which is ridiculous: Hobson said a few nasty things about Jews (this was c. 1900 after all), but he was in no way a proto-Nazi. He had far worse things to say about Englishmen. The greatest inheritor of Hobson's ideas was Lenin, not Hitler. He's still taken seriously by prominent and probably non-Nazi scholars of imperialism (Cain/Hopkins). RR lists a few genuine Nazi or anti-Semitic sources that Arendt used, but his arguments are purely ad hominem. He quotes Arendt saying that these sources are useful, and then we're supposed to assume that they are not because these people were Nazis. This is not an argument. This is the same as those fliers you get in the mail saying, "Adolf Hitler supported gun control," and you're supposed to conclude, "Therefore gun control is bad."

Point (2) The critique of "banality of evil." Sure, this idea can be criticized, but not by saying, "Hannah Arendt is bad." RR's argument seems to rely on a gut emotional instinct but he gives it a facade of logic:

"To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase [...] Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on."

Only the best of arguments requires the phrase, "Come on, people." Also that "of course" is a red flag for a missing logical step. His whole argument is: "Evil is not banal." That's not an argument, it's just a counter-assertion. How is "banality of evil" linguistically or metaphorically "wrong"? That doesn't even make sense. RR's argument at the end rests on the belief that Eichmann knew that what he was doing was evil. First off, this commits him to a Kantian ethics that is not shared by Arendt, but RR is not interested in philosophical niceties. Second, he has no evidence for this, and I don't see what kind of evidence is possible. All evidence points to the contrary, it seems to me. The final sentence is a blanket assertion, based on nothing and so meaningless that it is neither true nor false.

But he's not through yet. He has an alternative: "Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, 'radical evil.'" Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it." You know it when you see it! Now that's what I call slam-dunk argumentation. I actually don't know it when I see it. RR should give everyone updates on this. Maybe RR should be kept in a secret lair, like the diviners in "Minority Report," and he can watch things and tell us whether they are evil or not, using his special spider-sense to detect radical evil.

He has some praise, though, for "The Origins of Totalitarianism" because it allows him to call states fascist, which is a very productive thing to do. Here's RR: Totalitarianism is "a concept that has great relevance right now because there are still those who don't understand how theocratic police states can be called 'fascist.' Duh! It's because they're totalitarian." Duh! The whole point of Arendt's book is that fascism and totalitarianism are not the same thing. Duh! She actually thought that Fascism proper (i.e. in Italy) was not totalitarian.

Man, that was cathartic.

A Very German Weekend, I

2009-11-01T22:47:00.001-08:00

Ask anyone, or look in Lonely Planet. The two most characteristic things to do in Germany are
(1) Go to Neuschwanstein, a castle a few hours from Munich
(2) Experience socialized medicine in an authentic German emergency room

This weekend, I did both of these things. I'll only describe the first, as the second is not fully over (i.e. I have to go today to get my bill, about which I am very curious). Neuschwanstein looks like this:
Even though this is the most tourist-y thing in the whole country, I had a strong desire to go for some reason. I can't think of what the equivalent would be in America: probably colonial Williamsburg. The real Germans that I know in Munich, even those that are from here, have never even been. The Germans that go are, I think, Bavarian patriots. I was talking in the train, in English, about my dissertation topic, and expounding on how closely the early Nazi party was linked to Bavarian Catholicism. This is true, by the way, which I've only recently learned about: Hitler portrayed himself as a practicing Catholic until at least 1923, and found lots of his early allies and funds from Munich Catholics. Anyway, this stern German man next to me, who I later noticed was wearing a button depicting King Ludwig II (of Bavaria), very ostentatiously got up in a huff and moved to a different row.

The weird, and kind of amazing, thing about Neuschwanstein is that it's not (like Versailles, or the Tower of London, or the Forbidden City, or whatever) a tourist-y veneer over what was once a functioning set of buildings. This castle was ALWAYS a tourist attraction, and never really a castle at all. The reason it looks more like a stereotypical castle than any castle you've ever seen is that it was designed with that stereotype in mind. The castle is very new: it was completed in 1886, which is the year that Coca-Cola was invented, and obviously never had any military significance or anything. The gift shop, founded in 1926, is nearly as old as the castle itself. Also: Ludwig II died in 1886, under mysterious circumstances (many Bavarians obsess about this), before the castle could be actually completed. It was turned immediately into a museum, and he only lived there for a few months. So it's not the case that Disney copied Cinderella's castle from a real life European castle. It was always already Cinderella's castle.

The coolest part is this room in the middle that is designed to look like a cave, which looks just like something you'd find in Disney world. When asked the very reasonable question, "Why is there a fake cave in the castle, right next to the bedroom?", the tour-guide explained, "It's a scene from Wagner's Tannhäuser." This is not an explanation at all, and only makes things more mysterious. In general, the tour guides were the most uncharismatic lot I've ever seen (you have no choice but to take a tour; it's the only way inside). This is probably because they have to give the exact same tour about 20 times every day. This had the biggest impact on their humor. Tour guides are generally not funny. But when you add the fact that they were speaking in English, not their native language, and that they delivered the same jokes 20x/day, the jokes just came across as very sad. One of them involved the phrase "hanky panky."

One more remarkable thing. The two images below represent both sides of the same sign.
The sign on the left says, "Souvenirs for sale. Everything for 1/3 price." So Germans were getting a better deal, by 1/6! The pain this caused was somewhat assuaged by the fact that the only souvenirs remaining were Neuschwanstein vanity plates for people with extremely uncommon names like "Adelheid."

Caption Contest Scandal

2009-10-29T12:03:00.001-07:00

So there's a feature that allows you to look at all of the entries, which is kind of addicting. Last week's cartoon is here:
The winner was, "Brother, can you spare a lime?"
Kind of lame. But the amazing thing is that the same caption was submitted, literally, hundreds of times. There are 8 pages worth of submitted captions, and I went through two of them, each time finding between 50 and 60 captions that were exactly that one, or very close ("Hey buddy, can you spare a lime?", etc.). This means that about 400 different people submitted this caption. I would think that being so uncreative would disqualify you, but I guess not. The other most popular option, of which there are about 100, involved the word "stay-cation."

Some other favorites, which make me feel good about my chances of eventual victory:

What! You expected this in Florida, or something?

INFINITE TO INFINITE

Hey man, where are you going?

HAY MAN! HOW ABOUT A LITTLE BREAD ? YOUR NOT GOING TO NEED IT WHER YOUR GOING.

They foreclosed on my house. "my wife toldme to get any job." thank you thank thank you.

PENNY FOR THE GUY!!

Two things i love

2009-10-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

1. Chinese food, specifically hotpot. To that end, I am venturing to a hotpot restaurant on Friday. This might move into the "things I hate" column. Germany has, in general, atrocious Chinese food. It's possible that this will be better, as it comes with vague recommendations from faint acquaintances. However, the only review I can find online gave it one star out of four, claiming that it led to Übelkeit (this could simply mean "queasiness" but could also mean "vomiting").

2. The New Yorker Caption Contest. I go through fits and starts with it. Before I die, I would like to win one. Here is this week's cartoon. My captions are below. If any reader wins this week, I will give him/her a "The Langoliers are Coming" T-shirt.
1. "Now that's one way to get ahead!"
2. "I've heard of headhunters, but this is ridiculous!"
3. "I'm sorry, Krang, I don't know when your suit will be fixed."
4. "I'm going to have to let you go. My old paperweight wasn't so nosy."

Two things that I hate

2009-10-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

1. I hate it when, in order to make a case about some perceived Western failing, people compare prosperous nations to other, putatively dismal, ones. This happens all the time in health care journalism. "The United States is ranked 40th in the world when it comes to low infant mortality rates. This puts us below Bosnia." "Britain is ranked 50th in the world in terms of intrusive government surveillance. This means it's worse than Singapore." These are two examples that I've come across recently, the first from the NPR and the second from the Guardian. If you look for it, this kind of strategy is used all the time. No story about failing American education can resist the temptation to compare our math scores to other countries of which he have bad impressions, or by which we feel threatened.

It goes without saying that this is not an argument but a rhetorical tool. We're asked to think, "The United States [or Britain, or whatever] is a good Western country. Yet we are worse at [whatever] than these third-world hellholes. The idea that these places could outrank us in any statistic whatsoever is outrageous and points to flaws in the system." It's just annoying that "The West is obviously better than the rest" still works as persuasion. Of course, the rhetoric says on the face of it, "In this case the West is worse", but the ploy is only effective if we implicitly follow this up with, "And that is an assault on the natural order."

2. I hate it when books or movies have nameless protagonists. This seems so common at this point that it's almost refreshing to read a book in which people have names. This struck me as I've recently seen "Antichrist" and am reading "The Invisible Man" (Ellison, not Wells). I also read "Breakfast at Tiffany's" a few weeks ago, and just read a review of Colson Whitehead's "Apex Hides the Hurt" in The New Republic. All of these books/films feature unnamed protagonist(s). I propose that this is almost always a bad idea. In "Antichrist" there is no reason to leave them unnamed; it only adds to the mythological pretensions, which turned a possibly interesting movie into something stupid. In "The Invisible Man" it makes sense. In "Breakfast at Tiffany's" it is pointless. I haven't read the Whitehead novel, but it sounds pointless there, too. Every Everyman has a name.

Nothing is certain but death and lions

2009-10-25T12:44:00.001-07:00

In case you do not slavishly follow Facebook feeds, I wrote an article that can be found here.

Also, I went to a museum of medieval and early modern art. I've gone ahead and admitted to myself, a lifetime of cultural conditioning notwithstanding, that I don't really enjoy art museums. This one was different, though-- medieval art is really fun, maybe because "art" as we know it did not really exist. There were lots of dragons, people being martyred in gruesome ways, etc. I can see why so many people's fantasy lives (role-playing games, D&D, etc.) revolve around tropes from medieval art, and not abstract expressionism. The coolest thing is pictured below, and was appropriately called "Death Riding a Lion". The most amazing thing about it: in the 16th century, when it was made, it also functioned as a clock. Every hour, death would smash that bone onto the lion's head, which contains a bell.
I can't imagine where this would be an appropriate piece of furniture, except for Skeletor's castle.

I had a weird experience going through newspapers the other day. I was looking at a left-wing Catholic newspaper from 1930 until it was shut down in 1934. This period covers lots of events with which we are familiar from history books: Reichstag fire, etc. It was really creepy, though, to watch it happen sequentially in a newspaper. Like, I watched the lead-up to the 1932 election, in which the Nazis won huge gains and it became kind of clear that they could take over the government. They were heartbreakingly optimistic: in the weeks before, they thought all these Catholics would win, and then on election day there was a sticker saying "Vote Zentrum [Catholic Party]", and then the next day this huge horrible headline about how Hitler had won so many millions of votes out of nowhere, and then it was downhill from there. It was like watching a movie that you've seen before, but you hope that somehow it will turn out differently.

This is probably an experience that real historians have very early on. For fake historians like myself whose research mostly involves J-Stor, it was a revelation.

dissertating, again

2009-10-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I've posted, I see, except for that cryptic haiku, which came about because I was thinking about a board game I used to love that had riddles, and I was also thinking that it should be a phrase to say, "Stop being so Web 2.0."

The most exciting thing I've done of late was to have brunch in a bowling alley. This is the kind of quasi-surreal thing that maybe would not seem so weird if it happened in America, but everything in Germany is already a little weird so stuff like this seems off the charts. I was having brunch with a bunch of other people yesterday, and there was no room in the restaurant. But then this one, apparently maverick, waitress, said, "Why don't they sit downstairs?" And all of the other wait-staff thought she was crazy, but she carried the day. We went downstairs, where there was (unadvertised!) a bowling alley, which was completely empty and dark. There was one table at the corner, at which we sat, and it had one flickering light bulb. It was all kind of like the end of "There Will be Blood." The best part was when people came down looking for the bathroom, and instead of a bathroom they found a huge dark bowling alley and 7 people eating omelettes. Then I went to another carnival, which was completely unremarkable except insofar as it demonstrated again the incomprehensible but enormous love that Germans have for carnivals.

Oh, and I heard someone say what I've decided is actually the most American phrase of all time. It is not, "There's not enough parking at this Chili's." It is not, "I'm gonna rip you a new one." It is, "Hang a louie."

Also I watched a German game show devoted to RV-parking. There were all these German Dad-type figures in lederhosen, and a studio audience. Their task was to park an RV as fast as possible. If this were in America, they would not be portly Dads, but celebrities in bikinis, and they would have to, I don't know, juggle while they did it. But in this case it was just very serious-looking Dads, looking the way that Dads do when parking, while the audience went wild.

But mostly I've just been dissertating, which is, you know, hard. The closest thing I can compare it to is putting together a puzzle, but the pieces are scattered all over the world, and you don't get to look at a picture while you do it. There are lots of ways to go at it: you could group everything together by color, but since you don't know what the whole will look like, maybe some objects will be multi-colored. Or you could start out by looking for the edges, which is definitely the way to go in puzzles and hopefully in dissertations, because that's what I'm doing now. There is always the possibility that, when completed, the puzzle will be of a completely stupid object, but that's best not to think about.

Maybe my mind first leapt to puzzles because I have a bad memory about puzzles. When I was little, I loved puzzles. But then, one fateful day, I sent a piece of a Hulk Hogan puzzle, along with twenty dollars in cash, to the Hulkster himself, who had pledged via the box to sign said piece and return it to me. He never did this, and I will never forgive him.

Late night haiku

2009-10-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

For complex reasons, I just endured a lengthy walk home in the rain at 2 in the morning. During my walk, I composed a haiku, which is recorded here for posterity. Clap along!

Globalization!
The poison's in the ice cubes.
Yo, Web 2.0!

Scattered observations

2009-10-05T00:27:00.001-07:00

I just had the strangest revelation (this is what drove me to post). I have not, in the 37 days I've been in Germany, consumed or even seen a piece of ice. Isn't that weird? On one level, it's a stupid thing to even notice. But on another level, it seems highly bizarre, like if I realized I hadn't ever worn socks or used the letter E. There are two main reasons for this. The first is mundane and specific to me: I'm somewhat frightened of the freezer in this apartment, so haven't attempted to make any ice myself. Whenever I've opened it, an avalanche of frozen peas comes out. The second, more broad, reason, is that Germans have very different attitudes towards liquid consumption than Americans. I don't understand how they don't all die of dehydration. In America, I probably drink liters and liters of water every day: water is thrust at you in restaurants, available at water fountains every 30 feet, etc. None of this is true in Germany; you have to buy any water in a store and carry it around with you, and if you order water in a restaurant you have to pay for it (and it is wildly expensive: the one time I did this, it cost $3 and still contained no ice). Even at the cafeteria this is true (you have to buy expensive bottled water). So I almost never see German people drinking anything besides beer. Maybe they have humps, like camels, and they all go down to a river every night. So I guess what I should do is buy bottles of water and fill them up at home, etc. But this makes me paranoid because I don't want to ride a bike with water and my computer in my bag. So, in reality, I just remain parched until I get home. Or, sometimes, I drink out of the faucet in the library bathroom, like an ANIMAL, which is very embarrassing when someone comes in, but until they spill their hydrating secrets they will have to deal.

Non-ice-consumption is probably the most interesting thing that's happened to me recently. I did go back to Oktoberfest the other day, with the same people as last time. We decided that we would actually like to see it, instead of just being herded into a beer-tent. I can't say I'm really that much more impressed by it, but there was more going on than I expected. It's pretty much like a state fair in America: the same rides, the same surreal music choices and carnie banter, etc. The only thing I actually paid to go to was a "mouse circus," which sounds, if I'm not mistaken, really awesome. I don't think I thought it through rationally, but I sort of assumed there would be a tiny three-ring circus, and mice dressed up like circus-performers, etc. I thought, in perfect seriousness, "I wonder if they will shoot a mouse out of a cannon." In reality, it's pretty much like going to a petstore. There were three big mouse cages with maybe 100 mice, sans costume. Their special talents included: (1) sleeping; (2) running in a wheel; (3) obviously having sex with one another despite signs assuring us that they were not. This is very much unlike any circus I have ever been to. There were half-hearted attempts to make the cages appear circus-like, but they just made it seem more sad than it already did. German children were decidedly unamazed despite enthusiastic parents who wanted their 2 euros' worth. Most of them just tried to grab the mice, which is obviously not allowed and which caused the mouse-circus employees to bellow in rage. I decided that I would not enter any other Oktoberfest attractions, despite an enticing flea circus, with a sign that was, for no reason, extremely racist.

The best part was probably the art on the rides, which is the same as art on American carnival rides, but I never noticed how interesting they were before because, as a child, I didn't know what a "postmodern pastiche" was. Below are some of my favorites.
This is for a ride called "Techno Power," and I'm not mistaken that's Coolio on the side, and possibly Frankie Muniz with him. I love the guy in the back flipping off the riders. Also they are in space.
This was for a funhouse, and for some reason I found it extremely creepy. It's obviously some version of the last supper, but it seems to be populated with obscure 80s celebrities, plus Jon Lovitz as a waiter, a possible Seth Green eating a sausage, and a sheepish-looking Bavarian man on the right side. There are lots of disturbing details if you look up close. For one thing, there are huge pigs under the table, which you can't really see because of people's heads. Disco Stu there on the left appears to have a dog instead of a hand. The guy/girl in the back (the one that looks like either Siegfried or Roy, who were all over the place at this carnival) is holding a key that says "501". I've looked on the internet, and the only possible reference I can find is that, last January, a woman (from Munich!) was murdered in a hotel room in Düsseldorf, in Room 501. I think this is a clue.
I really have no idea about this one. The only thing I can say for sure is that if I ever get a tattoo, I want it to look like this.

Oktoberfest

2009-09-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

I went to Oktoberfest yesterday. I wasn't all that pumped about it, really, but I would have felt ridiculous if I hadn't gone at all. People come from all over the world to come to this, and I live literally a mile away. So I went with two vague acquaintances to see what all the hubbub was about. The hubbub, I now know, is about drinking. Of course I knew that Oktoberfest revolved around drinking, but I assumed that there would be the pretense that something else was going on (this is what happens at Mardi Gras, or at weddings). But in true German fashion they don't beat around the bush, and Oktoberfest is really no more than a million tables at which people sit and drink beer. Sure, there are funny clothes and oom-pa-pa bands, but those are all over the place in Germany anyway. Also after around 9 PM the oom-pa-pa music is replaced by techno music.

The drinking, though, is taken very seriously. You can only buy drinks in one-liter containers, and only special Oktoberfest beer is served. I've since learned that this beer contains much more alcohol than normal beer (7% or so). Drinking one of these liters is roughly equivalent, then, to drinking a bottle of wine. But if someone said to you, "Let's go and sit at a table and we'll each drink four bottles of wine and then go on a slide and then almost fall into the train tracks" you would say, "No thank you." But this is, really, all that Oktoberfest is.

What makes it especially deadly is that each drink doesn't seem like a bottle of wine; it seems like one beer. So you don't really notice what you are doing. I've had to use context clues and photographic evidence to piece together the last few hours of the evening. The only thing I'm completely certain of is that I arrived home without losing my wallet, and at some point I must have fallen because I have a big bruise on my hip. Actually I must have fallen twice, because I remember one uncatastrophic fall. We went on this huge slide, and to get to the top you're supposed to step onto this speedy conveyor belt that, theoretically, zips you up. If everyone had been of sound mind, and/or we had been boxes instead of people, this would have worked OK. In reality, it was much slower than stairs because every single person immediately fell down and many of them didn't seem that interested in getting back up again.

So the drinking part of Oktoberfest is dangerous and kind of banal, but the relatively unsung cuisine is much better: the best part of Oktoberfest is probably the pretzels. I love pretzels of all shapes and sizes, and Oktoberfest has the biggest and most delicious pretzels I have ever seen. They are literally about 18 inches across. In keeping with the reductio ad absurdum nature of Oktoberfest, all of the beer snacks are incredibly salty. One guy was selling huge platters of tasteless radishes absolutely covered in salt; this was a short step away from simply paying someone to pour salt down your throat. It was amazing.

Also these two extras from Joe Dirt were at Oktoberfest, which was nice.

Youtube is superior to reality

2009-09-23T15:05:00.001-07:00

I have just wasted an inordinate amount of time watching Youtube videos. My current favorites:

The Original Magic Bullet

The real highlight here is the part about the muffins, which starts around the 2 minute mark. Wait for Hazel to come lurching into the shot at 2:15, followed by the mixing of blueberry muffins that look exactly like tar.

My other favorite is the whole family of "Windows 7 Launch Party" videos. I have watched all of them, which took about 30 minutes. The best one is still, probably, "The Introductory Video." If you watch the oven timer you can see that this informal gathering took over two hours to shoot. My other favorite might be the "Turn Your Party Into a Movie!" video. The true aficionado will note that the pictures on the screen are not from the right party, but rather from the "Snap, Shake, and Peek!" party, which features old people and apparently an outdoor portion in which everyone hugged each other. There's something mesmerizing about the sheer audacity of this campaign. They want us to have Windows tutorials at our homes, with our multiracial group of friends, for fun! "Gather round, friends, and we'll install printer drivers and anti-viral software!" Also, who on earth actually puts out balloons at a party?

In other news, I just saw a New Zealand band called "Die! Die! Die!" at a club called 59:1. The band was actually pretty good, like a mix between the Blood Brothers and Tokyo Police Club. But the venue was tragic and extremely Munich. For one thing, there was almost nobody there. 10 people, maybe. That is not necessarily a terrible thing. But the whole place seemed like a simulacrum, somehow. Everything was just kind of off. The DJ before played nothing but Foo Fighters, except for one Marcy Playground (!) song. The walls had, predictably, promotional posters, but for bands who had never even played at this venue (i.e. the posters advertised shows elsewhere in Munich). There were also two framed posters right next to the stage, one of Henry Rollins and one of the Ramones (nothing is more punk rock than tasteful frames). Top it off with a few stickers halfheartedly placed on the bathroom wall, and you have the Epcot Center version of a normal venue.

Q: Wie viel Uhr ist es? A: Party-Zeit!

2009-09-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

My roommate, Flo, had a birthday party on Friday. Birthdays are handled strangely in Germany: in America, the birthday boy/girl is usually pampered a little bit. People buy him/her dinner, organize a gathering, whatever. In Germany, you have to shoulder onerous responsibilities on your own birthday. The night before Flo's birthday, he was baking a cake to bring into work. So on your birthday, you are supposed to bring cake and give it to other people! Then you have a big party at which you buy copious amounts of food/drink with your own money, and that of your reluctant roommate, and then tons of people come over and don't bring you anything. No drinks, no presents. So basically on your birthday you have to entertain everyone you know, at great personal cost.

Also, if it is around Oktoberfest, everyone will wear lederhosen. Even though Oktoberfest had not technically started, I guess everyone was welling with so much Bavarian pride that all the men wore lederhosen, and the ladies all wore a dress called a Dirndl, which looks a milkmaid's dress. What's amazing is that there is absolutely no sense of irony about it. As can be seen in this blurry photo, I myself wore a pair of lederhosen; Flo for some reason has two. I found them very funny. Objectively, they are ridiculous. The cut is very unflattering, there is ornate embroidery all over it, and a huge flap at the front which is only used for going to the bathroom. Those who are really with it have complex suspenders, a hat, and special leather shoes. Even though everyone is dressed like lumberjacks at the prom, they dance to techno music and drink complicated shots and do everything else that Germans normally do at a party. It is very surreal to watch a roomful of men in lederhosen dancing to "Blue."

This was the longest social event I've ever been to that was conducted solely in German. I did pretty well for the first hour or so, when it was relatively quiet. But when everyone started pouring in and yakking at light speed, I was completely lost. I found, though, that by concentrating on facial tics and body language, I could figure out my expected contribution to the conversation without knowing what it was about (laugh, nod, say "huh!", etc).

This was very taxing and not a great deal of fun, so I went to sleep pretty early (i.e. around 2). Unfortunately, for complex architectural reasons, the party was still technically going on in my room, while I was sleeping (still in my lederhosen). One girl was somehow under the impression that I was Norwegian, so she shook me awake and started talking to me in Norwegian. If you are very tired, this is the one thing that is bound to make you exceptionally angry and disoriented. I mean, even if I were Norwegian, this would not be a normal thing to do. I think that she spoke no other languages. Anyway, I certainly could not communicate with her, so through gestures I asked her to leave me alone and not steal anything. Ah, new friends!

Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins, Marx, Madonna

2009-09-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

Interviewer: I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.

TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist.

Excursus on living online

2009-09-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

I'm in Germany, technically. But not really. Really I'm pretty much on the internet, which feels kind of weird. It seems like it was only a few years ago that the interweb was used mainly for watching dancing baby or downloading Green Day albums from Napster. But now I receive almost everything I need from the mysterious world wide web: on a normal day, I conduct a fair amount of my research online, I talk to people on Skype, I waste buckets of time consuming internet idiocy, and I download and watch TV shows (there is a TV in my room that I've barely turned on). Pretty much everything I'm used to in America is available online; I remember the first time I lived abroad, and it was a completely different and much more alienating experience. But maybe that was a good thing. Because I could think, you know, the internet sure is making this living-abroad thing easier, especially as I didn't really want to do it anyway. But then the scary thing is that I live on the internet as much when I'm at home as I do here. So if I'm not in Germany when I'm in Germany, am I in America when I'm in America? Where am I? Living on the wires like Lawnmower Man, I guess.

I think that, since I spend all day reading writers from 100 years ago who were absolutely convinced that their generation was in complete spiritual collapse, I've started to feel the same way by osmosis. Two quotations that have struck me recently:

Péguy: "We are practically specimens ... We are ourselves going to be archives, archives and charts, fossils, witnesses, survivors of these historic ages. Charts that one consults. We are very badly situated. In chronology. In the succession of generations ... We are the last. Practically after-the-last."

Father Zosima (1880!): "We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people."

Also I found a funny thing in the archives: I was reading through the retreat notes from Quickborn, an important Catholic youth movement (someone had written a sort of chronicle of their trips). Mostly it says things like "heard a lecture from so and so" but then without fanfare it announces (my translation): "In the afternoon, around five, mountain sickness broke out. 86 boys and 72 girls suddenly had summer diarrhea." What do you do if 158 people all get diarrhea at once?! I think that it was divine payback for having such terrible handwriting.

Second thoughts

2009-09-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone studying German history should be aware that, in addition to the German language being very difficult already, in ye olden days they made it much more difficult by using an impossible-to-read form of handwriting called Sütterlin Schrift. I did not know of this until today but it is now destroying my life and my vision. The alphabet is reproduced above. Imagine if those squiggles were much sloppier. Look at that lower-case y!

I'm not here to feather my ruffle

2009-09-12T23:40:00.000-07:00

I have become newly obsessed with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArZRWJwKdWs

The highlight is around 2:40, when the holy trinity of sales brokers appears.

First Paul tells us that, if we don't buy his margarine, we can go to hell. In case it's not obvious, he didn't come here to "coo and cuddle."

His successor, Gary, leaves us with the perplexing, "You'd better buy my brand. It's Hawaiian punch. When it comes to other drinks, I'll eat your lunch." The circumstances in which he will eat my lunch are very unclear.

Last up is Ronnie, "giving service with a smile because I know my fate." Years of despair are summed up in this poignant lyric.

Redundancies

2009-09-09T23:18:00.001-07:00

[Two posts in one day! I'm making up for lost time and forgot that I really wanted to publicize this]

Academics, beware. We are about to be out of a job.

http://www.chronaca.com/

I don't know quite how to react to this -- on one level, it is somehow tragic. At the same time, I admire the iconoclasm of it, and while I think he's wrong-headed in his attempt to fix American education, at least he sees the problem and dedicated billions of hours to fix it, for what I doubt is very great remuneration. My favorite part is here: this section is designed to show the usefulness of the poster, but does the exact opposite.

I think that when I'm a teacher, I'll assign this as reading for the first week. Then I won't have to waste so much time teaching them that Christopher Columbus sailed to America at the same time as "cossacks first formed into bands in Ukraine."

Dissertating

2009-09-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last update, faithful reader(s). Rest assured that I am not holding back awe-inspiring experiences. My days have looked, almost without fail, like this:

7: wake up

8-6: work

6-11: I actually don't know what I do during this time. Definitely nothing productive. I watched the German version of "American Idol" and the American version of "Pimp My Ride," which inexplicably appears here without dubbing.

This has been enlivened by bureaucratic inanity and trips to the pool (these are not necessarily separate things; I'll describe the pool at some point later).

My German has been getting better, at least in terms of speaking enough to get around without humiliating myself. People still ask me for directions, though, immediately in English. I don't know why this is. I must exude an aura of fruited plains, purple mountain majesties, etc. I had another massive faux pas at the official registration office (to detail all of these would require a blog of its own). Everyone who stays here more than a month has to register their address. I'm sure there are perfectly good reasons but it seems like a complete waste of time. They didn't ask me any questions or anything; all I had to do was show up, say what my address was, and I was on my way. When could this information ever be useful to the city of Munich? If the mayor of Munich ever wakes up and says, "I wonder where that James Chappel is living," I'll eat my hat. Anyway, I was doing the whole thing in German but it was obvious as ever that it's not my Muttersprache. So the woman decides to switch to her own atrocious English, unnanounced, and she says, "Floor?" (asking me what floor I live on). I understood "Flo" and excitedly said, "Yes, he's my roommate! Do you know him?" (somehow she allowed this lunatic to register, which further demonstrates the absurdity of the process). The other German troubles have been of the unamusing, "I can't really read this even though I need it for my dissertation" kind. This is only funny if you hate me.

Oh, but at the library yesterday, the man told me that I could check out 5 items at a time, so 5 on Thursday and 5 on Friday. Not quite understanding, I said, "Do you mean five o'clock in the evening?" I understood his sentence just as soon as I'd finished mine and wanted to burst into flames. He allowed me a modicum of dignity and did not even respond.

I attended an "expat event" last week, for which I hated myself even before I went. I was trying, I guess, to preemptively ward off loneliness. I'm not really lonely, though, so my heart wasn't in it: my roommate is very friendly and, thanks to Skype, I have talked to my parents and girlfriend far more than I ever have in my life. Anyway, this event was an absolute nightmare. I won't name the event because it's a recurring thing, to which many are very attached, and I don't want them to read this and firebomb my house after looking up my address at the registration office.

Expats are extremely weird people, as a general rule. Almost everyone was over 40, which did not bode well. If a 20-year-old is in Munich, it could be for all sorts of exciting reasons. My reasons are not exciting but at least valid. But most of these people are here for no real reason at all: they've been here for ten years, some of them, and they still hang out with strangers from the internet. The strangest part is that everyone was extremely reluctant to talk about themselves: their pasts, their work, why they live in Munich, why they have no real friends, etc. It was like having dinner with a bunch of serial killers, except, judging by their conversation, their secrets would be extremely boring. I asked people why they had stayed in Munich for so long and the answers were extremely depressing: "Good beer, good food" was the most common one. This is not a reason to live in a country for ten years. This is a reason to go to Applebee's.

One of them asked me how long I was staying, and I said three months. "That's how it always starts," he replied.

Bad Tölz

2009-09-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

I had my first, and likely last, Alpine adventure on Sunday. My roommate is apparently very gracious, because he responded to my malapropisms by inviting me to come along with his friends to a "Sommerrodelbahn" at Bad Tölz, a little Bavarian resort about 90 minutes south of Munich, which serves as a ski resort in the spring and tourist/death trap in the summer. At the time I had no idea what a Sommerrodelbahn was—it was described to me in German, and instead of admitting that I had no idea what they were talking about I nodded and said it sounded great.

After a harrowing journey from Munich (open-container laws are much more lax than in the states), we arrived at this big mountain with a chair

lift. After a long walk up a very steep hill, we arrived at a long line, composed primarily of children. You're supposed to take one of these little blue scooters and sit on it while you shoot down this concave path that looks like a luge track. You can see a picture of a very happy family doing this here.

You have almost no control: only brakes. I assumed that, since there were toddlers doing this, it could not be difficult and that one should simply sit there and wait until the end to apply the brakes. This attitude leads to injuries like this one (this is after I cleaned it up with soap; it seemed much more bloody and serious at the time):

Here's what happened: apparently the others had decided that they would all stop after the first curve so that we could ride together. I either was not told this (my contention) or did not understand (the more likely scenario). Either way, the end result was that I came roaring around the first curve, expecting to find open track in front of me but in fact finding four burly Germans. They were yelling "Bremse!", which apparently means "brakes," but I was too flustered to do anything. I don't think I've ever thought before that I was actually going to die, but I seriously did for a split second. I bowled into them and went flying into the woods. Only one of the others was at all hurt (the one in the green shirt in the picture above), and while my injuries seemed deadly serious at the time, in retrospect they are not.

They took it in stride, and had a jolly time telling all of their friends about the idiot American who nearly killed them. I'm always proud to be an ambassador.

My other favorite moment:

Andy [one of the Germans]: "Where did you learn such good German?"

Me [not comprehending the sentence]: "What?"

Andy: "Umm ... Where did you learn such bad German?"

Arrival in München

2009-08-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

All three posts I have made on this blog has been made when I've been jetlagged and didn't know what else to do with myself (the rant about that random NYT article will, hopefully, not be repeated). It is currently midnight in Munich, although I feel like I'm essentially detached from normal temporal cycles altogether. I just slept for about four hours, so I'm partially awake now and have the delightful prospect of a sleepless night in which I'm too groggy to do anything actually productive. Hence this blog post, even though nothing remarkable has really happened. I've moved into my Wohnung, which is really nice and features a piano (isn't that the kind of thing you would expect would be in the ad? What if there were a harp, or a tuba?). I didn't want to sleep all afternoon, so I biked to the university library to attempt to register. This was a bad idea, as my German is atrocious even when I am alert. The whole adventure ended in confusion on both sides. I'm pretty sure that I did not successfully register and that a whole battery of official papers will be required before I can enter the hallowed halls of LMU-Bibliothek, which looks really nice on the outside but feels kind of like a public swimming pool inside (everything is linoleum and grimy, at least outside the reading rooms, and everyone has to use lockers). Nobody else who matters works on Friday, so I ate an enormous kebab and pretzel before taking the aforementioned nap.

I'm attempting to speak in Germany with my roommate, but his English is of course much better than my German; it remains to be seen whether he will be willing to keep up this charade. I have only uttered about 10 sentences to him, two of which contained howling errors. When he was giving me a tour of the neighborhood, I told him I wanted to go to the pharmacy to buy "Senf." This means "Mustard." What I was trying to say was "Shampoo". The way to say shampoo in German is "Shampoo". There was a complex set of mistakes in my head that led to this result, which I won't go into here. The end result is that I seemed like a maniac. The kicker is that he didn't ask me to explain; he just looked puzzled and said OK and left. Maybe I should just embrace it, and try to act like a person who after 20 hours of travel wants nothing more than a nice jar of mustard. I turned it all around when I got home by asking him for the password for "der Strom." Strom means "electricity" and in Germany, as elsewhere, electricity does not require a password. What I meant was internet. The correct way to say internet in German is "Internet."

Louvre

2009-08-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

I can't let this article go without writing something about it. Everything about it makes me furious: the smug tone, the picture of tourists that we're supposed to judge, etc. Michael Kimmelman is one cultured mo-fo, and far be it from me to begrudge him that. Having degrees from both Yale and Harvard, including a PhD in art history, it is not surprising that he knows his art. He does not use this to question the position of art in society today: it functions as—in addition to opera—the most thoroughly classist medium I can think of. It's actually better than opera because if you are very rich you can buy some for yourself. Instead, he criticizes the rest of us for not being like him. I only spend so much time on this because his attitude is pretty typical among academics.

So to research this article MK went to the Louvre one day and he did not like what he saw. There were many people there who were less cultured than himself, and who perhaps had not even been to Ivy League schools. Instead of dawdling in front of pictures and admiring them for hours, as art historians do and as apparently was done in the 18th century, these barbarians walked through the museum quickly and even took pictures!

He begins by praising two women who happened to be browsing in this one particular room, before chastising those who either read the labels or breezed through the room without stopping. This could be read as evidence that they were on their way somewhere else, as the Louvre is very huge, and to spend the two hours per room that our sage recommends would take weeks. Instead, he reads it as evidence of our cultural crisis: after the collapse of our artistic canon, we no longer have any markers of value and just wander aimlessly (as though the persistence of the Louvre and the "scrum" around the Mona Lisa were not evidence that academic trends in art history have had precisely zero impact on the average tourist).

This is bad because, you see, in the 18th century, Europeans who went on the grand tour would study very hard, and learn French, and speak with philosophers when they arrived. So why, today, doesn't every tourist learn French and then book some meetings with a handful of French philosophers?

Kimmelman's answer: We live in a decadent society.

The real answer: The "grand tour" was taken by invariably high class people, who were freed from the need to labor so they could study French and art history all day to bolster their cultural capital. Even then they hardly took it seriously: read, for instance, "Portrait of a Lady." We now live in a different world: one in which you can't simply book an audience with a philosopher because you are high class. Instead, we live in a world where people have more disposable income than before and want to boost their cultural capital with a trip to the Louvre. These people work for a living, and have not been schooled by private tutors. Instead, they have gone to shitty public schools that do not offer art history, as mine did not. HOWEVER, because of people like Michael Kimmelmann, they believe that true culture requires a viewing of major art works. So they go and they aren't sure what to do when they are there, because it requires a lifetime of training to consume art the way MK wants us to, and so they go on tours or go right to the big stuff that MK-style experts have recommended they see.

Also: the very existence of museum culture is evidence of this mass-ification of aesthetic experience that Kimmelman turns his nose at. The great age of the museum is the 19th century, and the Louvre as we know it is a product of the French Revolution. The fabled Grand Tourists of the 18th century were not waiting in line at Met (opened 1872) or the National Gallery (1824): these institutions were provided in order to expose artworks to a broader audience who would not have had access before. They remain, however, frozen out culturally by articles like this even if their feet are allowed on the hallowed marble.

Finally, the sketching:

"Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds [unwashed Goths!] occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be."

First off, it seems to me pretty unlikely that sketching used to be normal. He provides no evidence, and it definitely is not obvious. It may have been normal for people like MK. But he completely ignores the fact that it is now NOT normal. It used to be normal to do all sorts of things: murder Catholics, take ten wives, wear a top hat, whatever. Just because something was normal once does not mean that it is normal and unremarkable forever. But let's grant that it was normal, at least for people like MK with the money and inclination to take ten-year old's to St. Peter's. This is not evidence of particular virtu, but rather of a very particular conjunction of economic and cultural capital that has had its heyday and the existence of which MK is perpetuating.

Insomnia

2009-08-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

This blog was conceived in insomnia -- I was awake at 4 AM, for jetlag reasons, and couldn't go back to sleep. I was, however, not really awake; I was in that sort of in-between space that comes right before you see the beginning of the sunset. I was having lots of weird dreams about time-travel and jetlag. No matter how rationally I know the nature of the world temporal system, it still boggles the mind that one can, for instance, leave Japan at 3 PM on Wednesday and arrive in New York at 3 PM on Wednesday, as I did.

One of my dreams was about The Langoliers. For those of you who might not remember this book/TV movie: it's about an airplane that goes through a time warp. It doesn't go to a different time, exactly, but rather gets left behind in the stream of time. The cosmology of the Langoliers: time moves forward at a steady pace, and each moment leaves behind it a kind of shadow, that fades and is finally eaten by big brown time-monsters called Langoliers. In this temporal shadow world, matches don't burn, food doesn't taste like anything, etc. This reminded me of what insomnia feels like. It also kind of reminds me of the process of writing in general, or at least writing about your own life.

Other than this little story, I'm not sure why I started this, and far less sure that I'll keep it up. I do know that I tend to love it whenever my friends have blogs, whatever they might put there. So in the hopes that everyone loves procrastination and voyeurism as much as I do, I present my blog. RSS me.

[later update: I meant for the below to be its own post, but I accidentally added it to the former. For future historians, context clues date this at around 1 August. The post above was written before leaving for Israel and after coming back from Japan, dating it to around 28 July. I don't know why the datestamps have disappeared]

I'm currently experiencing insomnia again, which I thought merited an inaugural post. I'm staying at a woman's house in Jerusalem, which is exceedingly generous of her, as I don't even know her -- actually, we don't even know any of the same people, so it's highly mysterious how I ended up here and possibly a mistake. Anyway, the only downside to this house is the noise. I'm not talking about, you know, creaking doors. There is a dog who stays on a balcony right outside my window. This dog insists on disrupting my life every second that I am here. When I am not in bed, the dog is trying to bite me or my shoelaces. When I am in bed, the dog howls, all night long. This sets off a cacophony in the neighborhood, both of other dogs and of a bevy of do-gooders who think that by shouting continuously or slamming doors they will socially coerce the dog into silence. I possess a pair of those bright orange foam earplugs, which were not designed for noise such as this. I have been sent into depths of my soul that I did not know existed. I have very seriously considered murdering the dog, although I decided this would, actually, be pretty hard to do. So instead I lay in bed with my hands over my ears, praying for the merciful Langoliers to devour me.