Start spreadin' the news....I've begun blogging at Cliopatria -- something long intended and just as long delayed. Here's my first entry.

 

Meanwhile, I've been having some discussions with a friend who has undergone the unpleasant experience of writing something and then having dolts comment on it in a manner appropriate to their doltishness.

 

I can relate, oh yes. But it seems to me that, for a writer of any ability, there is an element of noblesse oblige involved. (At least there should be, though it can be difficult to maintain the poise.)

 

In short: It is necessary to let the stupid, the insane, or the hopelessly confused have their say without responding too much. Once in a while, it might be necessary to step in with a clarifying remark or two. But not always. And in any case, it can be the better part of wisdom to absent oneself from the forum of discussion at a reasonable point.

 

There is a lot to say for letting the other party have the last word -- especially when doing so leaves that party looking like, say, a shrill, strident, and clueless pedant. 

 

You thereby allow that person to enjoy the dignity that exists only in her, or his, imagination. Noblesse oblige. It's the least you can do, or the most.  

With this week's column, I followed up some developments, or tangents, from earlier Intellectual Affairs pieces.

 

In principle this should have been pretty effortless. The more casual-seeming the format, though, the more disproportionately taxing the whole enterprise usually proves.

 

Write write write, then cut cut cut. A casual effect does not come from a casual effort.

 

On the other hand -- and it amazes me to be able to say this, for nothing comparable has happened in a long time -- it was my only deadline this week!

 

Now I just have to read, as soon as possible, a 460-page Turkish postmodern novel. (In English, fortunately.) 

 

Other than that, the week is all gravy. 

 

 

 

Over at Cliopatria, I see that Ralph Luker has provided an interesting overview of the life of Sister Rosetta Tharpe -- far more about her than I knew, to tell the truth. I'd just seen clips of her in documentaries over the years and wanted to hear more. See also this short film of her performing, from 1941.

 

On another and very different tangent from New Orleans...

 

On my last day there, I got a message from The New York Review of Books about the death of Barbara Epstein, one of the two founding editors. This knocked the wind out of me.

 

She had sent a note at one point about writing for them, and I had responded with some ideas. Then work sort of clobbered me, as it sometimes does, and time passed.

 

According to an informed source, my best bet was just to phone her. I was working up the nerve to do so, but took my sweet time. And then...

 

If ever there were an editor I wanted to work with, she was the one, and now it won't happen.

At the end of the column yesterday, I mentioned buying some books at a store in the French Quarter. But the place that really got my discretionary bucks (such as they now are) was a CD shop roughly a block from the Sheraton.

 

I went in mainly looking for anything by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer and, arguably, the first rock guitarist. Here's a clip of Sister Rosetta performing "Down by the Riverside." (I'm gratified to see that she plays a Gibson SG; the sight of it makes me want to practice.) 

 

Anyway, I located a French reissue of some of her stuff from about 1950. It was volume 4 of a series that I'll probably never be able to complete -- but what the hell....

 

Then, in the bin right next to that CD, I found some compilations that I knew, at first sight, would be in heavy, heavy rotation back home. This hunch proved correct. 

 

The two volumes of Hillbilly Bop, Boogie & The Honky Tonk Blues -- covering 1948 to 1953, all in all -- each contain two CDs. Not quite a hundred cuts, most from small labels. My only gripe is that the liner notes are kind of perfunctory. A few of the artists are familiar even to a nonexpert like me (the great Spade Cooley, for example) but most aren't.

 

While on this YouTube kick, let me point out a short film on Spade Cooley, who went "from wild cat to hep cat." Swing it, daddy-o!

 

The stuff with the rodeo Indians is obnoxious, but it's okay otherwise. The comment from one viewer is pretty funny: "I kept waiting for Bob Wills to show up and punch Spade Cooley in the throat."

With Rita's permission, I'm posting the text of her message describing the bus tour of part of New Orleans mentioned here the other day. (See also this five minute digital film, if you haven't already.)

Back from New Orleans....On Thursday morning, there was a bus tour for people from AAUP (that's university presses, not professors...a bad case of acronym overlap there). The guides were from the University of New Orleans, which is no more than a few blocks from the river.

 

I won't try to describe anything now -- it was too overwhelming, plus I have a lot of work to get to now and over the next few days. But Rita shot some digital footage of parts of it. The clearest of the videos is available at YouTube, here.  

Off to New Orleans, where the Association of American University Presses is having its annual meeting. I'm giving a talk there at a panel on Friday.

 

With luck I'll be able to check my email at some point. And to purge it: Otherwise there will be six thousand messages from Teemes T. Dissociating, Oblige H. Cerebrums, and their friends informing me of the happy news that my Mortagge ratee iss approvedd! 

 

 

The author of this essay on Satan is Real by the Louvin Brothers has to stretch a little bit to compare them to the Velvet Underground.

 

But maybe it's worth the stretch. I take it that their testimony about Satan is well-informed, since Ira drank pretty hard and ended up in a shooting spree with his wife.

 

(Satan is real, and he wants you to empty both that bottle and that gun clip ASAP.)

 

Speaking of the Velvets....Did you know that the song "Sister Ray" knocked 'em dead on the Lawrence Welk show? Here's the proof. Wonderful, wonderful....

 

 

 

 

 

I've just noticed, thanks to an examination of recent traffic, that an article at Open Democracy by Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, links to my mini-essay on Joseph McCabe  from last year. Yay! That piece keeps in play, somehow.

 

Examining referral logs is the most interesting thing about maintaining a website. Also sometimes the most disturbing.

 

A case in point is the experience of my friend Tom, who runs Minor Tweaks. Suffice it to say that "minor" is often part of a search you'd probably rather not know about.

 

My favorite search leading anyone here (at least in recent memory) was one someone did for "hot girls reading heidegger."

 

Lord knows I searched for them myself, once upon a time, but that was in the dark ages, long before the Internet. Good luck, whoever you are.

 

But avoid "hot girls reading kristeva." More trouble than it's worth. Trust me on this.

 

As for the person who came here via "one does not simply walk into molten core," all I can say is: One might, but oughtn't.

 

Interesting to see this item by Caleb McDaniel (who I got to meet, all too briefly, at OAH in April) about a recent article in the matter of Emma Dunham Kelly.

 

The paper notes that the earliest known reference to her as black was in a bibliography from 1955. That had been my own finding, as indicated in a column from last year.

 

Which then went on to show how the whole dubious racial-identification process then kicked into analytic overdrive only in the late 1980s, largely as a side-effect of Henry Louis Gates's mighty cultural-capital accumulation machine.

 

No disrespect to Gates or anything. He's done important work, in his time. I'm just sayin'....

This week's column is an interview with Ophelia Benson, of The Philosophers' Magazine, about her new book.

 

Also -- proceeding, as ever, in a slow manner that defies the Web's instant instantaneousness -- I've just uiploaded a review of Simon Schama's latest. (My title is, obviously, an homage to CLR.)

 

At the time, my band joked about doing a side project. We'd be reborn as Motley Umlaut (there'd be an umlaut on every vowel) and record a concept album called Child of the Eucharist.

 

Now I just regret that we didn't go through with it. Our drummer was fast enough to pull it off, though the rest of us probably not so much. Might have gotten hurt come to think of it.

 

Red skinheads "acquaint the fascists heads with the pavement," as Trotsky put it.

 

Meanwhile, from another planet comes Sing, Slavoj, Sing. Words fail me....See for yourself.

Gotta do what I can to appease the demon. I've been working hard, but he keeps showing up, fierce and pissed off and hungry. This is not pleasant.

 

It's time to work out schedule and strategy to keep from getting utterly mired down.

 

Not much new on this site until I do, then.

 

I hate to discourage anyone who takes the trouble to come around, but this is serious....There's plenty of old stuff to look at in the archive and recent work sections -- terribly out of date though both now are.

The column for this week is about the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies. The timing was a total fluke -- I decided to do it about a week ago and wasn't really thinking about the fact that Rolling Thunder would hit DC over the weekend. But it turned out to be a happy coincidence.

 

The piece is accompanied by my first published photo credit, if you don't count the Cat Blog stuff here.

 

There are a couple of references in the column to academic work on the cyborg concept, which I wrote about in this cover story for the Chronicle a while back. 

The National Book Critics Circle now has a blog, Critical Mass, where the board of directors link to items of literary news. Thanks to this entry, I am reminded that I recently wrote about the new Wole Soyinka memoir.

 

The Newsday link they provide will only be good for another week or two. So now the piece is available here.

On a very different front....More excellent work from ConWebWatch, where they hold the right-wing bullshit machine up to minimal standards of accuracy and logic. (A full-time job, and thankless.)

 

This is part of the continuing story of Mansfield, Ohio, home of "the persecuted librarian," who I guess Bush will be giving a Medal of Freedom any day now.

About a week before writing yesterday's column, a friend pointed out that there had been about a million responses blog entries titled "Euston, We Have a Problem." What a cliche!

 

And then -- in a fit of meta, and also because no better title came to mind -- I decided to use the same title.

 

Thanks to MaxSpeak and to Sam Rosenfeld at The American Prospect's blog for linking to it. And for pointing out  The Morningston Crescent Manifesto.

Another site I've meant to link to here is The House Next Door, a group blog run by TV critics who do a remarkable job of analyzing (among other programs) The Sopranos.

 

In particular, I think Alan Sepinwal, who writes for the Star-Ledger, has a gift for almost instantaneous commentary -- something I first noticed circa 1998, while reading his recaps of NYPD Blue. Such things are easy to do badly, and almost never done well.

 

Various people at the group site have written about this final season of The Sopranos, and all of their contributions are worth a look. Scroll down the right-hand column and you'll find an episode list under the heading "TV Related."  

I've been meaning to say a word about the remarkable efforts of Tim Davenport in making available primary documents from the history of the American left available online -- in particular his site Early American Marxism, which covers the period 1865-1946.

 

Lately he has had a special emphasis on the period between about 1910, when the Socialist Party was nearing its peak, and the exceptionally complex phase of the first decade of American Communism. 

 

Historians have largely neglected the latter. It was a real mess -- especially the first few years of it, even after the Communist International told the factions to knock it off and fuse already. Davenport provides a good chronology of the period, plus various internal memoranda and pertinent documents from the International.

 

It's a rare and admirable example of serious nonacademic work in the field. Hats off to Davenport. Ideally the hats should be the cloth kind that Lenin wore.

It's difficult to convey just how huge Book Expo really is. I doubt there was any spot in the DC convention center from which you could have taken a photo that would have taken in the whole of the exhibits area; and even if you did, the sense of scale would be distorted. (Plus there was a lot more taking place outside that hall.)

 

I spent a very short time there on Friday, to rendezvous with friends. My plan was to stop by again the next day for a perfunctory visit -- but that was clearly absurd. This was my one chance to gather trade-press catalogs and talk to people. So after assembling a very long checklist of booths to visit, I spent about six continuous hours making the rounds on Saturday, ending up with my backpack weighing fifty pounds or so by the end of the tour.

 

The afternoon also demonstrated that people are actually reading my work, and that at least a few of them remember the speech from the NBCC awards ceremony a couple of years ago. And somebody from Prometheus Books agreed to send some copies of the collection of C.L.R. James writings that I co-edited in the early 1990s. They re-issued it a few years ago, with a different cover -- a thing that came to my attention by accident, only through seeing it in a bookstore at some point.

 

The LitBlog Coop had a party on Friday night -- here in the neighborhood, actually, in the basement of a restaurant much too hip for me normally to be allowed in. Being that I am neither all that up on contemporary literary matters nor particularly bloggy, I felt sort of the odd guy out. But I'm a fan of many of participant LBC site, so it was good to meet some of the people behind them in person.

 

Thanks, then, to Wendi (The Happy Booker) Kaufman for organizing the whole thing. If I fled the scene after only 45 minutes, it was not from unsociability but simply because my wife was bringing home Chinese food and it had already been a long day.

 

Favorite stray moment of Book Expo? Walking past a guy handing out books and dressed as a clown, I heard him tell say:

 

"That's right, I published it and I'm dressed as a clown." (It was the way he pronounced the word, both stressing it and stretching it out.)

Normally I am not at all speedy or regular about looking over the comments on my articles at Inside Higher Ed. But yesterday I did check the one on Kircher -- half expecting that it would generate no response at all.

 

I never expected to have pissed off the Esperanto people by referring to it as an "artificial language." Which (sorry, there's just no way around this) it certainly is, no matter how many strained analogies you make to calling a locomotive an "artificial horse."

 

Actually the more suitable reference would be to a Lionel Train. People do get passionate about their hobbies.

 

Okay, great, now I've really done it. The rest of my life, I'll be in fear of assault by Esperanto-American gang members.   

In calling for Athanasius Kircher to get his due, I wrote that at least he deserved to be on a T shirt. According to the blog of the Athanasius Kircher Society, such a shirt is, in fact, available. I would get one, except for already having more T shirts than I can wear in a month. Or two.

 

My column today is a plug for Athanasius Kircher -- who I've written about before, elsewhere.

 

Didn't think to mention it, but upon first hearing of AK, I wondered if he were someone's fabrication. But no, he's for real. It's an understandable suspicion though. If Kircher had not existed, Borges could have invented him.

 

The other day, going through some digital archives, one of the returns for my search was an article from a scientific journal circa 1720 citing a book by Kircher. 

 

I hadn't read an 18th century text in its original typography in a quite a while -- did a lot of that while studying the Mathers, Increase and Cotton, at one point -- but it was fun in this case. (As it is with Cotton Mather, sometimes: De Magnalia Christi Americana is strangely enjoyable, if memory serves.) The article concerned what sounded like some petrified human remains. The author indicated that Kircher's description of them was accurate.

 

It would be great if someone would translate Kircher's autobiography into English. All I've read so far is secondary literature.

Anthony Paul Smith should give us his (Deleuzean) take on the recent public event in Chicago devoted to Chairman Bob's adventures in the dialectic. 

 

Which he (APS) attended, and which was reported here by Iskra. I mean, Revolution. Whatever.

 

Chairman Bob himself was not on the premises. Somehow you figure Thomas Pynchon has more of a social life.

 

 

It's now got an interesting item about the case of the university librarian in Mansfield, Ohio -- a conservative Quaker who thinks he is being persecuted because the faculty responded in disgust when he sponsored a move to have incoming freshmen read a book discussing how evil homosexuals are.

 

There are reasonable question to ask about how intelligently the faculty responded to his move. But that's another matter. He's now being backed up by something called the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), and publicity for his story is being pushed hard by the website WorldNewsDaily (WND).

 

If Radio Pyongyang is trying to brainwash you by broadcasting Kim Jong Il speeches to your dental fillings, you are doubtless already a fan of WorldNewsDaily's fine blend of political news and social commentary.

 

Leaving matters of sanity to one side, however, the ConWebWatch article poses an interesting question. The book the librarian wanted freshmen to read is by an editor at WND. The WND articles call it a "best-seller," though it's not clear just what the source of that claim might be. (My guess: The sales chart at the back of each issue of The Radio Pyongyang Review of Books and Dentistry.)

 

In short, WorldNewsDaily has a vested interest in this librarian's story becoming a cause celebre du feverswamp. Or is that just a happy bit of synergy?

 

One element of the ConWebWatch piece makes me wonder. It is either clueless or a joke. I mean the closing line of the article, which reads:

 

"If WND genuinely cares about its journalistic reputation, both it and ADF need to come clean about their relationship."

 

WorldNewsDaily's "journalistic reputation"?

 

That's like appealing to me in the interests of my basketball career. 

 

Even supposing it actually to exist, it would not be anyone's idea of glorious.

 

 

 

 

 

Too many irons in the fire right now to write anything here -- and so it might be for the next few days, though I'll probably put up links to various items next week, in a somewhat hit-and-run fashion.

 

But for now -- as part of the gradual move into the realm of the audiovisual -- here's a link to our first YouTube short. (Best viewed in Internet Explorer, I understand, though my tendency is usually to avoid IE as much as humanly possible.)

 

Call it Friday Cat Video Blogging.    

Last week or the week before, BHL was on Charlie Rose, where he said, "Eye yam a lefteest." Now normally I would not present such a statement in phonetic transcriptions, but in this case the content was so jarring that it seemed necessary to rewind to make sure I'd heard correctly. Fortunately he repeated this sentence two or three times -- quite apart from what I did with the TiVo remote. I was incredulous even so. 

 

Definitely one of those, "Is everybody here taking crazy pills?" moments.

 

The man has no more worlds to conquer at home, so he's taken the act stateside, where the operative assumption "French intellectual = leftist" will pass without much inspection.

 

Unfortunately that makes it harder, in some ways, to introduce Pierre Rosanvallon, as I try to do in today's column. Rosanvallon is much closer to Hannah Arendt -- in terms of the kinds of questions he thinks about, and how he goes about framing things -- than he ever was to the New Philosophers, so-called, at any point on their trajectory.

 

Speaking of which....Here's a paper on the really strange text L'Ange, the gushing Lacano-Maoist prose poetry of which is worlds away from Rosanvallon's rather more dry style. Lately I have been reading various Cultural Revolution-era documents and come to think that Jambet and Lardreau were really onto something in making a connection between the Red Guards and the Desert Fathers.

 

Now I'll just sit back and wait for Adam Kotsko to hint that I have no damned clue about the patristics. (Which is true.) By the way, Adam  has published a review of the latest Zizek book, as I've meant to mention before now.

The column about Galbraith last week mentioned Report from Iron Mountain. I've just unearthed an essay on it that I published....what?

 

Ten years ago? That can't be right.

 

Just back from NYC -- about which, more later. At the moment I've got a string of deadlines coming down fast.

 

But for now, a quick music recommendation. Hurrying from one appointment to another on Thursday, I heard the sound of bluegrass in the air at Grand Central Station. Drawing closer, I saw that it was a couple of African-American guys. Not old men, let's say, but not youngsters either. They were into the flow of what they were playing, just tearing it up on the banjo and fiddle. In other words, this was music they knew and knew well.

 

That there was once a large black audience for country music (and that hillbillies were sometimes good bluesmen)  is one of those realities that's been forgotten, or covered over, by a certain dumbass essentialism that has both reactionary and "leftist" forms. I was really glad to see these guys, and shelled out the money for their CD immediately. It would have been good to stick around and listen some more, but I had to run.

 

It turns out they are called the Ebony Hilllbillies -- a trio, with a bass player, who wasn't there at the time. They have a website, where you can buy the CD via PayPal. Strongly recommended -- it's a good record.

I'll be off the grid for the next few days -- digging through primary documents in an archive, actually. And trying like crazy to get caught up on my backlog of work, when not doing that.

Just finished doing an interview with Dennis Johnson for Moby Lives Radio, which will be podcast this weekend. It's about the cell-phone column. (By now I must have wrtten about a hundred Intellectual Affairs columns, but that is the one anybody will remember.)

Anyway, doing radio -- or web radio, or whatever you call it -- was enjoyable. Much easier than actually writing, of course. I wouldn't mind doing that sort of thing more often.

But not on the tube though. Always remember the basic law:

Not everyone on television is evil.

However, all evil people do end up on TV.

Do particular cases come to mind when I say this? Why, yes....Yes they do. 

 

 

It well recalls the triumphs past
It gives the hope of peace at last
The banner bright, the symbol plain
Of human right and human gain

It suits today the meek and base
Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place
To cringe beneath the rich man's frown
And haul that sacred emblem down

With heads uncovered swear we all
To bear it onward till we fall
Come dungeons dark or gallows grim
This song shall be our parting hymn

We've both become quite fond of "God Only Knows" lately, in part through hearing it each week during the opening credits of Big Love. It's long been my favorite Beach Boys song, though "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is not that far behind.

 

But looking around for my copy of Pet Sounds, I realized it was a casualty of the format transition. I'd had it on tape, but not on CD. This is how capitalism sustains itself now -- by getting you to buy the same music several times.

 

It necessary to have a copy of Pet Sounds around. That's obvious. You can live without it, of course, but that's not really living.

 

Which brings us back to "God Only Knows." Only on the surface is this a charming love song. It's not just that the arrangement is breathtaking. I mean, rather, that it is actually one of the most beautiful yet terrifying confessions of emotional dependence imaginable:

 

 

In other words: "I wouldn't kill myself, just sink into a depression so total as to blot out the earth and the sun." 

 

Admittedly, if it weren't Brian Wilson's song, the lyrics might not have that connotation. 

 

But if it weren't his, it also would not be a piece of music so big that if feels like you can move into it. 

I try to keep the column as various as possible:  One week a report on some controversial topic, the next week an interview, another week a review, then maybe something satirical (the one about shooting cell phone users really struck a chord), plus the occasional "rediscovery" piece on a book that I like that seems like it ought to be better known.

 

I also try to cover the intellectual waterfront -- moving around various disciplines, handling titles of varying degrees of conceptual density. There is a slight bias in favor of giving exposure to the work of younger scholars, especially assistant profs, and people at the less well-known institutions. (That was always my policy at the Chronicle, too, not that anyone ever noticed.)

 

This week's column, while focusing on the Organization of American Historians, is not so much a report as a kind of journal entry -- not literally, of course, but an experiment with the personal essay format, anyway.

 

A few months ago, somebody pointed out that I have been doing what the writing-workshop people call "creative nonfiction." Well holy moley, so there's a name for it. The next step is to get somebody to invite me to teach it. That would be strange.

 

Here's the offer to any university administrators out there who are reading. (As if.)  Give me round-trip tickets, a reasonably comfortable cot, and a small tab at the campus dining hall, and I will come to your school and serve as pundit in residence, or visiting professor in grievance studies, or whatever you want to call it. 

 

My fall schedule is pretty much open at the moment, except for the grinding and interminable series of deadlines.

It was interesting to see that people were coming to the site from the New York Observer. It turns out the source was this column by Ron Rosenbaum, who mentions the new archival mirror site for Lingua Franca.

 

He mentions not being able to get to my Pynchon article, which is available here. It is also, as coincidence would have it, a piece that was (perhaps all too obviously) much influenced by Rosenbaum's own work.

 

While it's nice that the magazine is still remembered, I'm not at all sure it was the groundbreaking publication it is now sometimes taken to have been.

 

In 1995, when I wrote my first piece there, it went through without a single edit -- and not by virtue of having absorbed the house style or anything. Rather, I'd spent the 1980s reading the Voice Literary Supplement, not to mention Dwight Macdonald and Seymour Krim. Both dead, I think, before the magazine ever published an issue.

POSTSCRIPT. I don't mean this as a criticism of Rosenbaum or his article. (Over the years I have learned too much from his work ever to feel up to doing that.) 

 

For a cannier or at least more tactful person, the obvious policy would just shut the hell up and enjoy the inflation in value of one of the precious few stocks of cultural capital that he has ever managed to accumulate. Instead, I am more of the use-my-own-foot-for-target-practice type. The upside being that my aim is now pretty good.

 

 

 

 

 

A certain amount of traffic to this site over the past month has come from people doing searches regarding the "punky Chips Ahoy" commercials.

 

I am pleased to be able to report that there is now a website reflecting a pronounced anti-racist, anti-fascist tendency in the movement, at least in Europe -- the Trotskyist skins of  l'Alliance Skinhead de la Quatrième Internationale. No information about their snack-food preference is currently available.

 

**

 

My interview with the art historian about her book on pin-ups has, not too surprisingly, gotten more attention than my columns usually generate. We saw the Bettie Page biopic over the weekend and it lived up to expectations. For an interesting footnote, check out this article about Irving Klaw from the Austin Chronicle.

 

An entry over at Ahistoricality raises a question that passed through my mind while writing about Pin-Up Grrrls: How do you know when you've come up with the right unorthodox spelling of "girl"?  

 

Subordinate question: How come Big Star's alternative spelling never caught on?

I'm way behind on too many things, and stressed out, in appropriate measure. But the good news is that A Blessing and a Curse, the new DBT album, is now out. Parts of it have the feel of the Rolling Stones circa 1972, which is not an influence I've heard or noticed before.

 

Overall, it's the most country of their albums. It's unfortunate to put it that way, because it calls to mind either the present wave of Nashville product (which is to say, crap) or the label "alt-country," for which I have no particular use. But a song like "Easy on Yourself" could, with a different arrangement, have been on the radio when I was a country-music-loathing kid. (Today, of course, the stuff my dad played  then and that I hated seems like genius.)  

 

Ten years down the road you'll find

Via Maud comes the news that Muriel Spark has died. I've seen The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on TV a couple of times, plus we attended a staging of it at Studio Theater last month.

 

Rita's mother is a big fan, and might be shocked to think that Brodie is pretty much the extent of my familiarity with Spark's work. Then again, I know a lot more than she does about V. S. Naipaul. Thus does the universe remained balanced.

 

Anyway, even if you know very little about her work, it's worth reading my friend Caleb Crain's brilliant essay on Muriel Spark. Then again, I am mildly obsessed with W. R. Bion, so that may be coloring this judgment.

Jordan Davis has opened a line of thought it would be great to see pursued by others. I will not, however, be holding my breath.

 

Check out my friend Chris Shea's recent article on whether "balanced" journalism has had a pernicious effect on public understanding of global warming.

The column today, offering a solution to one problem with cell phones, comes in the wake of a lot of frustration. It seems like there ought to be at least a few places where you can expect that no one will use a cell. And a research library sure seems like one of them.

 

Another, as per its name, is the "quiet car" on Amtrak. I don't know how widespread it is, but at least in the NY-DC corridor, during the workweek, one car designated as a no-cell-use car. People still pull their phones out and babble, sometimes; and then somebody has to work up the nerve to be an enforcer.

 

Recently my wife was on a trip when this happened. By the time a conducter showed up, people in the car were yelling.

 

A subtle and dialectical relationship exists between violence and civility. My column, by acknowledging this, deduces the only really viable long-term solution.

My old friend (arguably that should be "my young friend," but we do go way back) Rick Perlstein has a snazy new website, which you should check out, and add to your bookmarks, and make it a point to visit regularly.

 

Rick is the voice of that wing of the Democratic Party that wants to see it return to the days of a muscular left liberalism, in which the labor movement and the quasi-social-democratic policies of FDR were the presiding forces.

 

I do not disagree, exactly, but also believe that we might as well also ask for everyone to have a pony.

 

Despite this, we remain friends.

Mulling over The Gospel of Judas for the past few days, I've been thinking of jotting down some thoughts on it....only to find that Adam Kotsko has already said pretty much everything that has crossed my mind.

 

Gnosticism, thanks to Elaine Pagels, had a pretty sweet reputation there for a while as the subversive heterodox tradition. But this really falls apart once you start looking very closely at it. Thus spake Adam:   

 

"Gnosticism wasn't necessarily this really cool thing that is being kept from us. Everything you hate about Christianity was present in Gnosticism, except worse. Do you object to Christianity's devaluation of the body? Gnostics were even worse. Do you think that orthodox doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation are needlessly complex and abstract? The multiple emanations of deity in the pleroma are much more complex, with seemingly infinite room for further complications. Do you find the symbolism and numerology in Revelation and other parts of the Bible repellant? Well then, you'll certainly hate most Gnostic texts even worse. Do you object to the almost instinctive anti-Semitism of the Christian tradition? Well, one of the leading Gnostic teachers, Marcion, taught that the God of the Hebrew Bible was evil and that Jesus came to save us from that God. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that a good first step in understanding Gnosticism would be to take the least appealling aspects of Christianity as popularly understood and then step [them] up a notch."

 

Precisely.....But that said, I'm sort of glad this discussion is taking place. Something I read over the past week grumbled about how Pagels, when quoted by the Times, said that awareness of the GoJ would undermine the idea of a monolithic early church.

 

"Who still thinks early Christianity was homogeous?" went the gripe.

 

Evidently some people have no idea just how ahistorical their fellow citizens can be. Put it this way: Anybody fascinated by the Left Behind novels is probably not also spending a lot of time reading the patristics.

 

They will, however, watch the incisive Stone Phillips investigative report, which will probably air any day now....

A surprise to find that an old piece of mine, from four years ago, has undergone something of a revival.

 

It started when a snazy new site called The Proceedings of the Athansius Kircher Society linked to my report on an event honoring AK sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities in May 2002.

 

Now Rob McDougall has linked to it as well, in a blog entry that implies I dubbed Kircher "Just About the Coolest Guy Ever." That actually was the doing, if I rememember correctly, of Ren Weschler, who at that point was head of the Institute.

 

Be that as it may, Athanasius Kircher was really something. If he hadn't existed, Borges would have needed to invent him. (Next month marks the 400th anniversary of his birth.)

My column for this week came in the wake of a pretty intense cycle of reverie over Austin, the passing of time, and the interesting question of what set of values might be involved in walking away from a secure and moderately prestigious job -- and towards a situation that offers considerably greater creative possibility, yet is also more worrisome. 

 

(Well, an interesting question to me, at any rate. There is nothing like second guessing the coherence of one's own life.)

 

Will probably head back to Austin for a little while this year. Watching Slacker on DVD (a film shot in my old haunts, with quite a few people on screen being friends, or familiar faces from back then) I have this nostalgic feeling of almost being able to revisit that period. But many of those places are gone, and most of the people must be, as well.

 

You can't go home again.

Conversation that has no doubt occurred numerous times, in sundry locations, since the debut last month of Big Love, that HBO show about "celestial marriage" in the Salt Lake City suburbs. (See recent column.) 

 

He:  You know, after thinking it over, I've decided we should not practice polygamy. It looks like it would get pretty complicated.

 

She:  I would say that is a wise decision on your part.

 

He:  Thank you.

 

She:  No problem.

 

 

I've just made the big investment -- well, by my admittedly much diminished standards, nowadays -- of getting a laptop computer. Haven't really written anything on it, yet, apart from taking notes for a couple of projects.

 

Actually, that was what finally make me break down and get one. Last week, I found it necessary to make extracts from a rather fragile document, so pulled out a spiral notebook and began copying a passage. After about two sentences, I thought: "Doing it this way is really stupid. No way is it anything but inefficient as hell."

 

Plus it makes it much easier to get away from the hermitage. The weather in DC for the past few days has been gorgeous, and staying inside seems like a sin against the Holy Spirit.

 

I've been flashing the memory of a spring afternoon in Austin in 1988 when, walking along the Drag, I saw Poi Dog Pondering (not yet signed to a record label) playing a set on the street, and sat down on the sidewalk to watch them.

 

Going out means there's at least a chance you'll see something new or unusual. Staying at home, the most that's going to happen is that one of the cats will throw up after eating too much cat chow.