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.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Back in the Habit
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]
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Masses of fun
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.
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.
Monday, February 22, 2010
linguistics part deux
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:
For bandwidth reasons, here's just one:
linguistics
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."
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
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRvxvl8ZYi4
Justin Bieber, for those who do not use Twitter, is some sort of teen heartthrob.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Dissertators, of the world, unite!
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!
"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!
Friday, February 12, 2010
Paris in the the winter
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?
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?
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The perils of multi-kulti
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.
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.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Sing, O Muse, of the Wrath of James
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]
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]
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
twinsies
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!
Friday, November 13, 2009
Micky von Maus
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)
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Heidegger, again
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.
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.
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!
[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.
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.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Rosenbaum on Arendt/Heidegger
[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.
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.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
A Very German Weekend, I
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."
(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."
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Caption Contest Scandal
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!!
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!!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Two things i love
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."
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."
Monday, October 26, 2009
Two things that I hate
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.
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.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Nothing is certain but death and lions
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.
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.
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