tamerlane

Vacation

2011-12-17T09:17:00.000+02:00

Museum of Islamic Arts, Istanbul, 11 December 2011

On vacation for a bit -- what was a sparse series of posts will become even more so. In the meantime, a few of my favorite posts that have come out of the past few months in Turkey:

"A National Catastrophe in the Arena," following Turkey's 3-1 loss to Croatia.
"Sahil Yolu, Baloons," just because I happen to think the photo turned out well.
"Sketching the World in Depth," because I was lucky with the sketch. [And if you happen to be interested in both sketching and Istanbul, please check out harika, an absolutely wonderful site.]
And "One More Folded Sunset," because the Elizabeth Bishop poem is that excellent.

And now to the airport.

The Forms of Heritage

2011-12-15T10:17:00.000+02:00

Istanbul Archaeological Museum, 11 December 2011

A bill just passed the United States House of Representatives calling on Turkey to "safeguard its Christian heritage." Leaving aside a debate on the merits and motivations of the bill, I was suddenly struck in looking at this photo by how rich and complicated that 'heritage' is -- How do we conceive of the 'Christian' in a 'Christian heritage'? Does this bust count? Why or why not? Interesting times.

Making Politics in Places

2011-12-07T21:58:00.001+02:00

A really fascinating meditation on the relationship between the built environment, politics, activity, and identity.

Tents are a threat when they signify people claiming the right to the city. At an English department meeting where we were discussing the police beating students for putting up tents, many students and professors began their comments with the phrase “I’m not that concerned about the tents, but…” or some variation on it. The students beaten bodies and the shredded civil conduct of the police were the issues. One professor, the great Mitch B, stood up and said something very succinctly that Iwas very glad to hear expressed: “I am concerned about the tents, and violence against the tents,” he said (or as I attempt to paraphrase, and inevitably mis-remember and re-write); “Those tents, and the artwork the students built alongside them, were the expressions of students trying to build something, trying to make something in a community they were claiming and inhabiting by the act of doing so. When the administration destroyed what they had built, the message being sent was very clear.”

I have heard a great many occupiers proclaim that “violence” against property is not violence. And I take their point; it is beyond obscene when media accounts of a protest dwell in loving detail on a broken window while gliding carelessly over the broken bodies of protesters beaten by police whose violence does not, as such, register as such. This is not meant to deny that point. But sometimes an attack on property is an attack on the existential habit of being human that we all share. And there is nothing more violent than destroying a home, be it a tent or a house or a street, that most basically necessary of human habitations.

It touches on some of the same issues as the recent article I found on New Cairo -- namely, the ways that the built environment can provide a context in which new kinds of political activity become possible; and as a consequence - as the story that zuzungu brings up about the Lulu roundabout in Bahrain makes clear - the fundamental importance of the actions that control, inhabit, police, transform, and ultimately, destroy the built environment.

Photography in the City

2011-12-01T21:30:00.001+02:00

Via The New York Review of Books, "Train of Thought"

Hard on the heels of their post about Civil War photography, the New York Review of Books adds an incredible reflection on the practice of shooting photographs in the city. Bruce Davidson describes one moment on the train:

He sat down across the aisle from me, gave me a hard look, and said in a low, penetrating voice, “Take my picture, and I’m going to break your camera.” I quickly said, “I don’t take pictures without people’s permission, and I always send them prints.” I reached into my jacket pocket for my portfolio, walked over to him, and slowly leafed through the sample photographs while sitting on the edge of my seat. After looking, he paused for a moment, then turned to me and said, “Okay, take my picture.” I went back to my seat and began to photograph, taking a few frames. Then I wrote down his address. He left, disappearing along the platform as the train gained speed. A couple of weeks later I sent him some prints of our encounter together, but the post office returned them with a red stamp on the envelope that said: RETURNED TO SENDER—MOVED—LEFT NO ADDRESS.

What made it so resonant for me was the fact that I'm struggling with some of the same issues that Davidson raises, but particularly this question of taking photographs of people. When is it ok to take photographs of another? (My answer, at the moment, is mostly obvious in not often taking photographs of faces.) Davidson's stance is not for everyone, but I think it's the right one for me; I've now lost count of the number of times I've found myself frustrated with tourists coming to Turkey and taking photographs. Photographs can both establish a kind of intimacy and be a kind of violation - always tied up in questions of access, mobility, power, relative status. It's for that reason that I found the ending of the story so moving:

At the next station I was met by the police, who escorted me to the station house where I answered questions and filled out papers. Later, two detectives in an unmarked police car drove me through the neighborhood. As we cruised through the sweltering streets, people sitting on tenement stoops looked at us in a suspicious way that told me this had happened here before. Sitting in the backseat of the police car, I was no longer the heroic hunter stalking dangerous prey, but just another pathetic mugging victim. The detectives took me back to the subway stop, and I decided to continue my journey to Far Rockaway and Broad Channel, to the ocean. Here the train crosses the bay on tracks just a few feet above the water, like a racing sailboat. Moving across the inlet, it flushes marsh birds and passes pleasure yachts heading for the open sea. The sun was now low in the sky. Young people returning from the beaches along Far Rockaway began to fill the train. They all looked like muggers to me, but slowly I began to make contact with them as I took pictures during the long journey home.

Find the whole essay here.

Cats as a Metaphor For Life?

2011-12-01T09:29:00.001+02:00

I was trying to think of ways in which this photo might be a metaphor for something - the look of incomprehension, the sense of being somewhere in which you don't exactly fit in, and so forth. But it's also just a hilarious photo.

Galata Foldies

2011-11-29T23:40:00.001+02:00

As a kid, I sometimes used to play a game called 'foldies' - each person would sketch a figure on a third of a page without reference to other two, and everyone would laugh when you put things together. Strangely - and without really meaning to - these photos reproduce something of the same effect. All from a brief walk around Galata one afternoon.

Shooting Soldiers and Other Ways of Dying

2011-11-29T15:00:00.000+02:00

Via The New York Review of Books, "Someone Else's Children"

A friend recently recommended Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering to me. The book explores the ways in which the Civil War forced people on both sides of the conflict to reconsider their relationship to death. Rather than organize the book chronologically, Gilpin Faust chooses to organize it according to a series of themes: "Death," "Killing," "Burying," "Naming," "Realizing," Believing and Doubting," "Accounting," and "Numbering." I've only made it through the first few pages, but I've been struck by the effect of organizing the book in this way - drawing on a huge range of primary documents, the book is both gripping and challenging.

But it was because I was reading the book that my attention was piqued by a review of Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography that begins:

My wife and I have two sons, aged eighteen and twenty-two. Both have registered for the Selective Service, as the law requires. (“Our objective is to register you,” the official letter reminded them, “not to have you prosecuted.”) We don’t have a clear idea of Tommy’s or Nicholas’s views regarding military service; we hope that circumstances won’t force us to find out. None of us knows any men or women currently serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are someone else’s children. We watch news reports of wounded veterans learning to walk with prosthetic limbs. Recent stories about body parts mislaid at the military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base fill us with outrage. Still, for many of us, it is a general, not an individualized outrage.

There are all sorts of contrasts to be drawn between our present and the Civil War, but one - drawing on Gilpin Faust - would be to point to how the encounter with death during that war has become so peripheral to American discourse during our ongoing conflicts.

Reflections on Cairo

2011-11-28T22:19:00.001+02:00

I spent a few months in Cairo in 2003, which has made the ongoing violence surrounding the elections particularly poignant (and especially see Jadaliyya's coverage) It was that in mind that I stumbled across a thoughtful description by Mohamed Elshahed of the new campus of the American University of Cairo and its position within what is now known as 'New Cairo':

New Cairo is neither new in its conception nor related to Cairo’s complex cumulative urban heritage. Cairo was never a colonial city the way Algiers was, for example, where a privileged minority lived in an exclusive part of the city segregated by an army from the majority of the population. Mubarak’s neoliberal policies have in fact created a colonial city condition in Cairo where a political and economic minority fills the role of colonizers. The colonizers are backed and protected by a militarized government at the expense of the majority of the population, create zones of exclusivity, enjoy special benefits from the state, gain direct access to resources, and exploit cheap labor. New Cairo is not for all Egyptians yet government funding and planning backs it. Within it is a collection of gated complexes within which are homes or businesses that also have their own gates and walls. The only thing new about New Cairo is its unprecedented politics. Riding the bus back towards Tahrir Square, I look forward to arriving at a place I recognize as a city and as uniquely Egyptian, it is everything New Cairo is not.

There are perhaps questions to ask about what it means to describe something as 'uniquely Egyptian', but all the same - a really thoughtful piece.

A Book is An Elegant Technique

2011-11-24T09:35:00.001+02:00

I've seen mention of Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City before, but I just chanced to run across Don Mitchell's review of her book for H-Urban. He quotes a lovely passage from her opening essay:

A book is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds. A city itself strikes me at times as a sort of library, folding many phenomena into one dense space ... a folding together of cosmologies and riches and poverties and possibilities.... A city is many worlds in the same place. Or many maps of the same place.

From books to libraries to cities - the ways we might move from words on a page to words on walls.

"Don't Spy On Me", Istanbul, Summer 2010

Geographies of News

2011-11-23T22:15:00.001+02:00

So much has happened - even in the last week - that it seems slightly frivolous to link to anything less than current, but I stumbled across an interesting passage. In Dean Starkman's Columbia Journalism Review essay about the Future of News, he has a great critique of seeing news as a 'commodity':

Seeing news as a commodity, and a near valueless one (Paton above says its value is “about zero”), is a fundamental conceptual error, and a revealing one. A commodity is the same in Anniston, Alabama, as it is in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Whatever local news is, it’s not that.

It's a bit of a shame to focus only on this passage, as there's a great deal more in the article, but the passage raises interesting questions not only about the value of the news, but also about the ways in which that value is geographically mediated. We might take it a step further to think about the process through which local news events - say, UC Davis - are mediated, transmitted, and reshaped into state, national, or international news items. Or conversely, the kinds of structures that make some news stubbornly local. Interesting.

"Occupy a Desk" and the Failures of Imagination

2011-11-18T20:58:00.001+02:00

I was scrolling through Facebook last night when I chanced upon this photo:

Wall Street Employees, 17 November 2011, via Think Progress and here

The comments seemed to echo a common theme: God, what douchebags. A few people had the grace to point out the factual errors in those signs: That many of those protesting did actually have jobs, and that their presence at Occupy Wall Street (or any of the other Occupy sites) spoke less to their unemployment as it did to a strange, almost quixotic, belief in the power of protest.

But for some strange reason, seeing the photos just made me sad. I’ve spent part of today trying to figure out why, and I think I’ve come to an answer: The signs made me sad not because they’re wrong (which they are), nor because they signal a culture of entitlement (which they do), and not even because they indicate an appalling level of self-centeredness. What saddened me most about the signs was the fact that they spoke to a complete inability to imagine a world other than this one, a world in which things might be different.

But why should we want to imagine at all, much less imagine something different? The best answer I can offer - and it’s not very complete - is that I can’t find any other way to deal with the world around me. But the imagination also provides something else: A means to try to begin to understand how people who seem completely different than you - say, a Wall Street employee confronting protesters in Zuccotti Park - come to believe what they do. To imagine is to admit the possibility that the world might be otherwise. To imagine is to recognize difference. But perhaps most importantly, to imagine is to recognize that the world in which we live is itself the product of a kind of imagination. There is a history to imagination.

So what saddens me so much about this photo is the way it signals a stubborn refusal to imagine a world in which the people outside that building where they work might have something to teach them. Why not imagine a world in which things might be different? Why not just try?

Remembering Atatürk in 1938

2011-11-16T14:00:00.000+02:00

Cover, Akbaba, no. 253, 17 İki Teşrin (November) 1938

If yesterday's post was about one memory of Atatürk in the present, I wanted to add this Akbaba cover from 1938, published a week after Atatürk's death (for other Akbaba, see here or here). The Republic of Turkey, represented as a woman in white robes (interesting Classical overtones) embraces İsmet İnonu, the man who succeeded Atatürk as President of the Republic, and says, "My İsmet!" In many ways, the comparison is between apples and oranges - but at the very least, we could point to the differences between the different way the Republic is visualized (here, as an allegorical woman, there, as a series of news photos with Atatürk pasted back in).

Remembering Atatürk

2011-11-15T10:12:00.001+02:00

November 10th was the 73rd anniversary of Atatürk's death. It was commemorated in a variety of ways - guards at attention in Taksim, pins on the lapels of small children, and so on. It was also marked in various ways in the daily press. Passing by a newsstand, I was fascinated by the front page of Sözcü, an Atatürkist daily paper (though while Sözcü is a national paper, it seems to be less widely read than the bigger dailies like Milliyet, Hurriyet, Sabah, and HaberTürk).

Front page, Sözcü, 10 November 2011

The main headline reads, "On the 73rd anniversary of Atatürk’s death we remember him with longing. If the Peerless Leader Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey and its number 1 citizen, were living today, look what he’d say."

Below the main headline, you find six images drawn from current events: (1) The ongoing debates about the incarceration of elected representatives on the basis of their association with the Ergenekon investigations; (2) the cancellation of the official ceremonies for Republic Day on October 29th; (3) the aftermath of the quakes in eastern Turkey; (4) the contested relationship between the BDP, a political party generally identified with 'Kurdish' identity, and the PKK; (5) protests about the future of education in Turkey; and (6) the still unresolved match-fixing scandal involving Fenerbahçe.

Detail, front page, Sözcü, 10 November 2011

Translated, the text reads:

“Our elected representatives are still in prison, my Respected President.”
“The length of incarceration is quite long, my Respected President.”
“It can’t be that way… In any case, let universal law be applied.”
“They are going to change the first four articles of the Constitution and take out Turkishness, my Respected President.”
“I placed one state, one flag, one language, and Turkishness in the Constitution, do not change them.”

Detail, front page, Sözcü, 10 November 2011

Translated:

“BDP representatives take their salary from the state and go to PKK funerals, it aches inside us to see this life.”
“Traitors martyr our children, their advocates are in Parliament.”
“Those in power bargain with those who reek of the stench of terror.”
“The military must travel a civilian route. This topic must be solved immediately [bir an önce]. Terror is defeated not with discussion but with struggle. Concessions must not be given. Wheresoever a terrorist goes he must be crushed.”

An analysis of the cover could go in several different directions, but I want to focus briefly on two issues: (1) The way in which these images collectively represent a certain version of what 'Turkey' is; and (2) the way they signal a very specific mobilization of the past for the present. If we think about a nation (or national identity) not as something fixed but as something that needs to be reproduced, mediated, and transmitted, we might read this cover as an attempt to mobilize a national community around these six images. These images have a clear politics - laicist, Atatürkist, and committed to a 'Turkish' Turkey - but it's precisely because their politics are so clear that they ought to be taken seriously.

Second, it's noteworthy to see the way that the images take a historical figure - Atatürk - and reinsert him into a present. It seems to echo something Esra Özyürek identified in her Nostalgia for the Modern, namely the recent tendency to deploy images of Atatürk in new (and often smaller, more portable) ways.

"A National Catastrophe in the Arena"

2011-11-13T09:43:00.001+02:00

First, the facts: Turkey lost the first leg of their play-off 3-0. As Zonal Marking concludes:

Turkey were dreadful, though – so much possession and hardly a sniff of a chance. The lack of creativity and thrust from the centre of midfield was amazing, and Tuesday’s return game will surely be Hiddink’s last as a manager.

An article in the Guardian adds,

There is little optimism that Turkey, who were booed and jeered as they imploded against Croatia, can inspire the massive swing required to rescue this play-off in Zagreb. Hiddink's instructions were to prioritise not conceding a goal, only for Turkey to trail inside two minutes. It went downhill from there. "I take full responsibility," Hiddink said after the first leg. "I think it's very important that the players play for their honour, for themselves, for their country, because, let's face facts, it's difficult, almost impossible, to qualify."

But what caught my eye the following day was the front page of FotoMaç, one of the many daily papers devoted to soccer.

Front page, FotoMaç, 12 November 2011

"Hayallerimiz enkaz altında kaldı." Below, it continues, "Türk Telekom Arena'da 3.0 şiddetinde bir futbol depremi yaşadık." Translated, "Our dreams were buried under rubble... In Türk Telekom Arena we lived through a 3.0 soccer earthquake." The earthquake on the field, of course, is meant to echo the earthuake(s) that Turkey has just experienced (according to recent news reports, rescue efforts have been called off as the region continues to struggle with winter weather).

What struck me about the cover was the way it reinforced not only the importance of the national team to 'us' but also signaled one further way through which the earthquake has been nationalized. The cover ties together a national community (the 'we' who watched the game and lived through the earthquake) with a sporting event (the match itself) with the Van earthquake. In a way, I think, it raises the stakes - for the earthquake but especially for the success (or failure, as the case may be) of the national team.

Photomontage on Fener-Balat

2011-11-12T18:05:00.000+02:00

Fener Balat from Fatih Pınar on Vimeo.

Via Mashalla News (or more properly, here), an interesting photomontage piece on the transformations of the Fener-Balat neighborhood, which is just down the Haliç from where this photo was taken.

Fish, Memory like a Game of Telephone

2011-11-10T22:03:00.001+02:00

Pazar, Bursa, October 2011

I snapped this photo while we were wandering through Bursa with my friend Elçin, but I remembered it tonight while writing another email. Some while back, I had been flipping through another Elizabeth Bishop book (her poems and fish seem to be emerging as occasional themes) when I chanced across a poem I liked. I copied out a stanza and promptly forgot about until this morning:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
for ever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

The lines come, I think, from a poem called "At the Fishhouses." In any event, there's only a faint echo between the photo and the poem, but the latter reminded me of the former. The strange ways the mind plays 'telephone' with itself: A poem about water and knowledge brings to mind a fresh tray of istavrit at the market in Bursa, some three weeks ago.

Her Şey Bedava Olsun

2011-11-09T05:00:00.000+02:00

Old çeşme, near Ayvansaray, 6 November 2011

Historically, çeşme - fountains - played a central role in the public life of the city. In a time before indoor plumbing, the public provision of water was one of the central roles of the municipality (and also a common function of the vakıflar, or pious foundations). The provision of indoor plumbing to the city rendered most of these fountains obsolete, and most have ceased to function. Walking by this one the other on the way to Eyüp, the graffiti scrawled on the wall caught my attention: "Su bile parayla. Her şey bedava olsun." Translated, "Even water costs money. Let everything be free."

Falling in Love with Documents

2011-11-08T21:00:00.000+02:00

At various points over the past decade or so, I've come across people who write about the seduction of documents. It's something I've noted in passing and found mildly engaging, but it has only been recently that I started to understand the ways in which we might speak of an 'archive fever.'

My first reaction to receiving my documents at the Başbakanlık Arşivi (or Prime Minister's Archive, where most of the documents pertaining to the Ottoman state are stored) was shock: "You mean they're actually giving these to me?" I thought. They're almost all written on thick, heavy cotton paper. They smell. Their edges feel not so much rough as warm, the way whittled wood feels in the palm. If we were to compare between different histories on the basis of their weight, the Ottoman past has a kind of presence that our digital present lacks.

Detail, Şehremaneti Petition, early 20th century

But what struck me most about the documents was how beautiful some of them were.* It's been a few weeks since I last worked at the archives, but I'm looking forward to going back. Even in the moments where it's most difficult to work with Ottoman, there's a certain consolation in merely being able to pick up the documents and wonder at the pen-strokes of what's past.

[*And there's another issue to raise here: How I've chosen to photograph. The oblique, shallow depth-of-field might make for a more pleasing photograph, but it also helps to empty the document of much of its actual administrative content. From municipal to figural?]

Sahil Yolu, Balloons

2011-11-08T02:00:00.000+02:00

Sahil Yolu, Üsküdar, 7 November 2011

Along the same walk as yesterday, somewhere between Harem and Üsküdar.

Sahil Yolu, Üsküdar

2011-11-07T17:56:00.000+02:00

Can, Sahil Yolu, 7 November 2011

I walked through Üsküdar today, through the cemeteries, out by the Selimiye Barracks and around back through Harem. While I was taking a photograph along the water, three boys called out to me, asked me to take their photo. "Do you have email addresses?" I asked. "No," they said, "but we have facebook."

Can, Emre, and a friend, Sahil Yolu, 7 November 2011

Jokes and Gender, 1947

2011-11-06T13:00:00.000+02:00

Akbaba, January 1947

-How's the new lighter that I got?
-Like you... with five or six strikes it barely lights!

For the most part, Akbaba seems to be a magazine for and of men - scanning its pages, I've lost count of the number of times in which a buxom woman in a short dress is the object of some kind of male attention. But, as this cartoon suggests, reading Akbaba in that way might not be so straightforward. After all, it's the woman who teases the man here. Visually, we might also notice the way it's her body that defines the cartoon; his body is almost an afterthought (compare, for example, to the cover from 1938)

I don't know enough about Turkish gender politics in the 1940s to say much else about the comic - there are all sorts of questions about sexuality (your lighter, my dead, doesn't spark), about dress (the woman's dress and stockings, a kind of over-the-top modernity), and about consumption (a modern, middle-class home, but what's the history of çakmakı in Turkey?) that we might begin to ask.

Flowers and the world

2011-11-04T13:00:00.000+02:00

Çavuşin, Cappadocia, Turkey

A few weeks back, I spent a few days in Cappadocia for the first time in almost 15 years. What memories I have of the place were mostly layered in the underground cities; as a consequence, everything left above ground came to me through the filtered glass of growing up.

One line of poetry that kept running through my head as we were wandering here and there was "the abandoned homesteads of exiles." I didn't remember any of the rest of it and so was left mostly just turning that line over and over in my mouth, the way that one might take a small stone and turn it nervously in one's hand.

It's now been some time since the immediacy of that stroll, but I finally took a moment to search for the rest of the poem (even if I started searching for the wrong poet). The line comes from an Adam Zagajewski poem, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," and begins:

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

(The poem, in full, can be found here.) The poem, I think, raises all sorts of troubling questions about the responsibility of poetry to confront questions of loss, violence, death, dispossession. Zagajewski seems to come down on the side of praising what beauty exists in the world, in spite of its violence. In a way, I suppose it's fitting to read the poem in full against a photo of Çavuşin, insofar as the current Turkish village sits at the base of the older, now abandoned, Greek village.

Four Fishing Scenes

2011-11-03T13:00:00.000+02:00

Beşiktaş, İstanbul

I.
In the mornings, you can see thickets of small fishing boats bobbing in the water just off the point south of Kuruçeşme. There must be a run of something, my uncle says, maybe bluefish. In the slanted morning light of late fall here, the boats look almost like darkening age spots upon the paler arm of the Bosphorus.

II.
One of the most tempting photographs in Istanbul is to shoot from the Galata Bridge looking toward Süleymaniye Camii on the ridge of the old city. If you position yourself just right, you can capture the men fishing from the bridge, the silhouette of their fishing rods at an angle against the bridge, trailing thin lines into the water below.

III.
İstavrit and hamsi, a waiter in one restaurant tells me, when I ask what the men fish for. Mackerel and anchovy.

IV.
The other day, I was taking the ferry to Eyüp. Through the window, I watched a man fishing from the edge of the dismantled bridge left beside Sütlüce. He stood some twenty or thirty feet above the water, and when he began to draw a hooked fish from the water, I could watch it wrench and gasp as it was drawn up. There was something sad about the whole experience, to see this fish as thick as a man's arm twist in the air (a kite on the breeze), but something oddly beautiful about it as well.

Celebrating Republic Day

2011-11-02T22:04:00.000+02:00

Son Saat, October 29, 1950

I've been spending a little bit of time in libraries in Turkey looking at old newspapers. As a research method, I have mixed feelings about the process: While moments of discovery feel rather miraculous, one quickly comes to realize just how tedious search for a needle in a haystack might really be.

That said, flipping through the paper in that way does provide unexpected pleasures. Here, for example, we have the front page of Son Saat, a paper that tended to support the Democrat Party during the early 1950s. Insofar as I've been able to tell, it was generally geared towards a culturally and more conservative readership, which is why I found this page as striking as I did. Despite the then current debates between the Democrat and Republican People's Parties, there was a great deal of agreement about the "Republic" as a thing to be celebrated.

Current debates, on the other hand, raise interesting questions both about the moments we take to be foundational of a national identity and the implications of publicly acknowledging those moments. The brief background on today's debate is this: Every year, the government plans a huge public ceremony to commemorate the declaration of the Turkish Republic. This year, however, the government cancelled the plans in order to show solidarity with the earthquake victims in Van (see Fatima Dişli Zıbak's op-ed in Today's Zaman for a summary of mostly positive coverage of the decision). When it emerged that several government leaders - including the prime minister - had instead visited a wedding on the 29th, they were roundly castigated by the opposition (see, for example, a Yusuf Kanlı op-ed in the Hurriyet Daily News).

For my part, posting the photo is certainly not a longing for the "good old days," but it did remind me of the ways in which Turkey continues to change.

Fun With Zeyreks (Actually, Zeybeks)

2011-10-04T16:00:00.000+03:00

Akbaba, no. 215, 1938

There are all sorts of reasons to love this 1938 cover of Akbaba, a humor and satire weekly published from the last years of the Ottoman Empire until the 1950s. But one particular reason is because the cover signals the co-presence of an Ottoman past within a Republican present. If I knew more about the zeyreks, I'm sure that one might raise interesting questions about representations of national identity (the modern woman dancing to a jazz orchestra with a romanticized figure of the Ottoman past) or about questions of sexuality and the body, but it's enough for the moment to simply remark at the joy of it - the brightness of the colors, the angular bodies, the energy of dance.

Update: As a friend was kind enough to point out, it's not actually zeyrek but zeybek on the cover - which as Wikipedia points out, was a type of play (and dance) local to western Anatolia.

Update 2: For a more thoughtful accounting of the violence to which the comments refer, see here.

"Europe's future must be like the Ottomans"

2011-10-03T09:00:00.000+03:00

The October 2nd issue of Radikal included the second part of an interview with Slavoj Zizek. I stumbled across it because a friend from the summer posted the link on Facebook. It seemed like an interesting exercise in translation. Building on a comparison between debates in Turkey about the status of Kurds and ongoing debates about imperialism, Zizek replies:

The issues here are related to the measure to which you will be able to achieve cultural and political autonomy. In my opinion, the Ottomans, by permitting local autonomy during and prior to the 19th century, did something correct; from today’s perspective I feel a sympathy for the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, which are considered two of the 19th century’s multinational empires. Because they were successful in understanding how to be democratic and very cultured. There was no internal need for their dismemberment. They were dismembered because larger countries started to act. Russia confronted the Austrian Empire in order to take Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire for the Mediterranean. It requires our not seeing these two empires automatically as having degenerated. Empires collapsed with the First World War and in exchange for the collapse of Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Second World War happened… Also in Turkey there are things that will be criticized, but I also remember that when I was a child, going to school in a primary school in Yugoslavia, it was taught to us that the Serbs who resisted the Turkish occupation were a heroic nation. I also began to read with interest about that topic. I learned that the Turkish occupation like we learned about in school wasn’t scary. There was a more open-minded and tolerant administration. Today we are correctly going to this type of country that possesses this more cultured formula. These paradoxical European models, maybe all of Europe, today must take on the shape of the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian Empires!

All errors in translation are, of course, mine. You can find the Turkish version here.

In the Nation of Turkey

2011-10-02T19:09:00.001+03:00

One of the (several) long-running political disputes in Turkey has to do with the continuing refusal of the Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, or BDP) to take their oath of office and join Parliament. The BDP, widely described as a pro-Kurdish party, had refused to take the oath because six elected deputies were arrested for their involvement in the Kurdish Communities Union trial. As of yesterday, however, the party decided to rejoin Parliament.

What I found interesting was a recent op-ed in the English-language edition of Zaman. In it, Markar Esayan describes the story of one deputy, Leyla Zana. Elected in 1991 as a deputy from Diyarbakır, she stated in Kurdish, "I am taking this oath for the brotherhood of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples." Uproar followed.

Fast forward to 2011. When Zana rose to speak this time, her words were different. As Esayan writes:

Two days ago, Leyla Zana again took the stage to take her oath, and she ended her oath by saying, “I solemnly take this oath on my honor before the nation of Turkey,” rather than “I solemnly take this oath on my honor before the Turkish nation.” This was a slip of tongue, but if this humane reflex had taken place a decade ago, Leyla Zana could have faced lengthy jail time for her honest mistake. Turkey has been changing: We need to recognize this, and should not resist this reality.

It reminded me of something that Aslı Bali had once mentioned in a talk following the referendum on constitutional changes in 2010. While the reforms were not perfect, she noted, they did hold out the promise of a national identity defined in civic rather than ethnic terms. I wonder if Zana's slip of the tongue - to say "the nation of Turkey" rather than "the Turkish nation" - signals something similar.

Update: This report in Radikal quotes Zana in Turkish as having said "Türkiye milleti" instead of "Türk milleti," although another section of the print copy from October 2nd paraphrases her as having said "Türkiye halkı" instead of "Türk halkı." I'm fairly certain the language of the oath is millet - but it raises interesting issues for translation if the oath actually uses halk.

Sketching the World in Depth

2011-09-29T22:38:00.000+03:00

Yeni Camii, 15 september

One of the things I've set for myself as a kind of project while in Turkey is sketching more regularly - more often than not, it's a simple object, usually in profile, but once in a while I have the time to sit down and spend some more time trying to figure out how the world is put together.

One of the things that sketching reminds me is just how difficult it is to render the world in depth - the things that we take for granted now as representations of the way the world 'is' (photographs especially, but film as well) themselves require a tremendous amount of skill and technique.

From the Docks, Late Afternoon

2011-09-26T11:30:00.000+03:00

Süleymaniye and Rüstem Paşa, 16 september 2011

One of the features of the late afternoon in Istanbul is the sheer intensity of the light. Waiting on the ferry at Eminönü and looking back towards the ridge of the imperial city, the sun drums off of the taut surface of the water. Once your eyes adjust to that, it becomes rather difficult to make out details of the neighborhoods between the docks and the ridge:

The horizon slowly filling with light that then spills over the ridge. And the sun upon the water, the light so bright as to be grasping at our eyes off the water.

One More Folded Sunset

2011-09-25T13:16:00.000+03:00

Boat to Arnavutköy

One, a photo of tea against a field of red; here, something to give shape to the sky. I took this photo as the boat pulled away from Çengelköy on the Anatolian shore towards Arnavutköy. By this point, most everyone had disembarked and the ferry felt almost as though the last colors of the evening were echoing about. Or maybe better, as the color drained from the sky, so too the tea.

The post's title comes from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, "Questions of Travel." Here it is in a little more context:

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

Late Afternoon on the Asian Shore

2011-09-25T01:00:00.000+03:00

Mihrişah Valide Sultan Camii, Üsküdar

Stairs, Istanbul

2011-09-24T18:27:00.000+03:00

Stairs on the way from Taksim to Gümüşsuyu

Wisconsin and the Public Interest

2011-02-25T17:32:00.000+02:00

On the note of illiberal legislation, this note in today's Paul Krugman op-ed:

And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”

What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”

It gives you some sense of the stakes of all this, doesn't it?

Constitutions and New Modes of Sociability

2011-02-25T07:02:00.000+02:00

First, if you haven't been stumbled across Jadaliyya, you should. Their analysis of the past few weeks has been nothing less than exceptional - presenting a wide range of thoughtful and critical analysis about the Arab world. One of their recent posts was an e-roundtable discussion about constitutional reform in Egypt, and I wanted to pull out some of what I found to be the most interesting sections.

Discussing whether or not Egypt needs simply an amended constitution or a new one, Alsi Bali writes:

Egypt needs a new constitution, one that shifts the balance between the branches of government away from the executive, introduces (or reinstates) institutional guarantees of judicial independence, lifts the emergency decrees and restores civilian judicial jurisdiction over most matters, strengthens individual rights protections and repeals emergency-based limitations, and establishes the basis for a pluralist party system. In other words, the constitutional architecture needs to be radically altered to excise the “legalities” of authoritarianism.

Responding to Bali, Samira Esmeir adds:

[The ongoing Egyptian revolution] has been claiming new grounds of legitimacy, while engendering collective political practices that defy the order of legality/security. A new revolutionary constitution, whether reformed or newly drafted, must inscribe in its articles this practice of disobedience and collective organization/mobilization; it must allow for the ongoing revolution to persist in making political claims.

A bit later on, responding to a question about whether or not constitutional reform is the most pressing issue at the moment, Hussein Agrama writes:

When a constitution loses its links to the powers that ostensibly established it, then its text becomes open to the widest interpretive distortions of legal and judicial thought. From the vantage point of the tradition of democratic legitimacy, what we saw in Egypt was a historic assertion of unbridled popular sovereignty – self-organized, sustained, focused and resolute. As a manifestation of constituting power, it sweeps away what came before and is itself the source of the legitimacy of what comes after.

There's a lot more to the conversation, but I want to try and pull out a few responses. As Bali points out, a constitution in and of itself is no guarantee of a liberal pluralist democracy. Indeed, Egypt's constitution functioned to render authoritarian practices legal. But it was Esmeir's comment that I found most suggestive - she describes the revolution as "claiming new grounds of legitimacy," which I absolutely agree with. Indeed, if you watch the Asmaa Mahfouz video that helped to spark the protests of 25 January, her language is shot through with appeals to a new politics, a new ground for critique totally divorced from the Mubarak regime.

Of course, the challenge of any new revolutionary constitution - as Esmeir rightly points out - is balancing that kind of revolutionary constitution of a new grounds for political authority and legitimacy with the actual functioning of the day-to-day. For better or worse, I'm strongly reminded of the French Revolution and its invention of the 'people' as the source of political legitimacy.

Indeed, in reading the revolution as a "manifestation of constituting power [that] sweeps away what came before and is itself the source of the legitimacy of what comes after," I think Agrama is saying much the same thing. To speculate: The revolution generated new kinds of social relationships - new modes of sociability - that mobilized existing networks of social, economic, and political relations but reconfigured them in radically new ways.

At the Barricades

2011-02-03T02:55:00.000+02:00

(photo from the New York Times)

In the wake of thinking about street battles, this photo seemed appropriate. More, as ever, to think about, but I'll pause here.

Street Battles in Egypt

2011-02-02T20:17:00.000+02:00

From the most recent article in the New York Times, this paragraph:

A block away, at Champollion Street, a similar battle raged. Several people tried to stop two young men as they hauled a case of empty Pepsi bottles to their car and tore rags, apparently attempting to make Molotov cocktails. The young men brushed those efforts off.

Almost eight years ago, I drank tea and smoked sheesha on this street. These street battles - surges from Talat Harb towards the Nile and Tahrir, I've walked those streets and can imagine the mass of people. And I'm suddenly struck by the echoes of Paris - the ways in which the European dreamings of the old Khedive gave downtown Cairo the broad boulevards modeled on Haussman's Paris, themselves the legacy of communes and rebellion. Now - once more - the stage for violence.

History in a Global World

2011-02-01T07:22:00.000+02:00

Just a stray thought as I skim through a quick post to L.A. Observed: By the time I wake up tomorrow, some kind of history will have happened in Cairo. I'm clicking refresh on the New York Times, but it's just past 5 a.m. in Cairo. The dawn prayer probably just over the horizon, even as we edge towards sleep in Los Angeles.

Just funny how history happens: An ocean apart and yet (seemingly) at my fingers. When I wake, it (something) will have happened. A world lived in the future perfect, I s'pose.

Notes on Egypt

2011-01-30T18:48:00.001+02:00

So much has been written about Egypt at this point that this is a drop in the bucket, but a small thought: I woke up this morning to a different kind of story. In the first few days of the protests, they boiled down to a confrontation between the people and the police - the representatives of the state. In many respects, this story provided a familiar narrative, both for the Egyptians on the streets and for everyone following along from outside of the country. Mubarak may have quickly realized that he wasn't going to win that battle, so he seems to have taken a new tack.

Instead of confronting the protests with the police, he's simply withdrawn the police entirely. The military is still certain a presence, but it's as though the state - understood as something that functions through institutions like the security police - has drawn in upon itself. What's left is something far more terrifying - depending on your optimism, it's either the people or the mob, but I couldn't shake the feeling this morning that Mubarak is planning to let the protests now feed upon themselves.

From the BBC live blog - but echoed in numerous other places: "With ongoing skirmishes between looters and vigilante groups, several hundred escaped convicts reportedly on the run, and a complete absence of police on Egypt's streets, the situation remains precarious." Perhaps it's Mubarak trying to remind the country why they need him - as that which protects the people from themselves.

I want to be optimistic, but it's difficult.

Istiklal Caddesi

2010-07-29T20:22:00.001+03:00

IMG_4762, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

Waiting for friends in front of Galatasaray Lisesi, I managed to balance my camera long enough to catch the evening light. The bright lights of the corn vendor; neon dreams; and a city for strolling.

Istanbul Streets

2010-07-17T12:34:00.001+03:00

IMG_4755, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

Walking up from the Galata Bridge to Istiklal Caddesi, this jumped out. There's not a huge graffiti culture here, but every so often you find pockets. A kind of thickness in some places, words written over words written over words.

A Moment of Levity

2010-07-11T19:55:00.000+03:00

It is, perhaps, unfair to point out errors in and of translation, but this seemed particularly ironic. Not as much as something like Guide to Spelleng, but it comes close.

Cemeteries of Exiles, Methodically Overgrown

2010-07-04T20:11:00.000+03:00

There’s an Adam Zagajewski poem I’ve had floating about in my head for years, with a haunting line about the houses of exiles, methodically overgrown, and it came to mind suddenly and forcefully while wandering the back streets above Arnavutköy this afternoon. I’d been heading to try and find an ultimate frisbee game which turned out to be cancelled, but while working my way down the hill I noticed a few marble crosses peeking over the lip of a high wall. When I came to the gate in the wall, I saw that it was open and pushed through.

There was a small house at the top of the first flight of stairs; through the window I could barely glimpse a family, perhaps gathered around the television, perhaps not. A man came quickly to the front door. I tried to stumble out the question, Can I go in? I don’t think he understood me, but if nothing else, my failure at Turkish convinced him that I likely wasn’t anything to worry about. He waved me in.

The first thing that struck me about the cemetery was how different it was from some of the Muslim cemeteries I’ve been wandering through in some of my spare hours here. If those cemeteries have almost been overflowing, broken Ottoman headstones balanced in corners, new graves built upon, beside, and beyond the old, a kind of continual writing and rewriting of the past, this cemetery had space. Its central feature was a series of staircases leading up the hill, a kind of straight path between tall dark cypress trees with the blue sky beyond. To either side were graves, always in Greek. Expecting to find remnants of some long-distant past, I was struck by how many graves postdated the Turkish Republic. Were these Greeks who had returned to be buried? Were they Greeks who never left? Seeing some of the faded artificial flowers balanced in small cracked vases, I wondered at who came back to care for their dead.

Turning right on one path, and then left back up the hill, I found a plum tree laden with small fruit. The plums were ripe, some strewn on the warm concrete, some still hanging heavy from the branches. They tasted faintly sour, in the way that spring nights might feel faintly wintry, and I threw the pit in the tall weeds that grew in thick clumps beside the past.

Climbing the hill, I remembered both Sebald’s work (especially his essays on Corsica) and that of Zagajewski - and the thought of a cemetery so clearly intended to hold so many more, now overgrown with weeds and lavender seemed suddenly to speak of those houses of exiles, methodically overgrown.

Living Room, Istanbul

2010-06-27T15:05:00.000+03:00

My grandmother spends most of her day in this wheelchair. Sometimes she clutches at a small blue elephant; sometimes a stuffed cat; after a trip to Ikea the other day, she now has a small soccer ball to grasp. Most of the time, she sits somewhere in the thickets of her mind, perhaps lost or perhaps exactly where she wants to be.

Ferry Crossing

2010-06-22T19:29:00.000+03:00

On the ferry between Beşiktaş and Üsküdar. This photo looks roughly east and south, with the ridge of old Istanbul that dark shadow on the right. Pulling away from the European shore this evening, a handful of dolphins breached alongside the boat, pushing their way north against the current. In the rain and this light, the waters of the Bosphorus seem almost green, as though glowing.

The Widening Spell of the Rain

2010-06-20T18:45:00.000+03:00

Driving back from the supermarket yesterday, my uncle turns to me when we crest the ridge of Sultantepe. "You feel how the air gets lighter as soon as we cross," he asks. Today, the rain follows us over that ridge; perhaps sweeping north, just from the Sea of Marmara, passing over the Princes' Islands and suburbs of Maltepe and Altıntepe. When I step outside for a moment, the sky over the ridge beyond our apartment is suddenly dark and the air smells thick. And when it begins to rain, it's as though the clouds that were trudging so slowly up the hill on the far side are now careening and stumbling down the hill towards the Bosphorus. In moments, the dark line of the bridge disappears, and you can hear the tankers call out in the sudden mist. Rivulets merge into momentary cascades, and the view suddenly smells of wet earth and damp pine, then the sharp stinging scent of bruised basil. The city beyond silenced, hushed under the widening spell of the rain.

Localisms and Regionalisms

2010-06-18T13:59:00.000+03:00

[from "Turks Put Twist in Racy Soaps," NYT, June 17, 2010]

In today's NY Times, there's a fascinating article about the success of Turkish soap operas in the Arab world. Trying to account for the success of the programs and what they might mean about global and globalized culture, Michael Kimmelman writes:

If [the success of these shows] seems like a triumph of Western values by proxy, the Muslim context remains the crucial bridge. “Ultimately, it’s all about local culture,” said Irfan Sahin, the chief executive of Dogan TV Holding, Turkey’s largest media company, which owns Kanal D. “People respond to what’s familiar.” By which he meant that regionalism, not globalism, sells, as demonstrated by the finale of “Noor” last summer on MBC, the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based, pan-Arab network that bought rebroadcast rights from Mr. Sahin. A record 85 million Arab viewers tuned in.
That said, during the last 20 years or so Turkey has ingested so much American culture that it has experienced a sexual revolution that most of the Arab world hasn’t, which accounts for why “Noor” triumphed in the Middle East but was considered too tame for most Turks. Even Mr. Sahin wonders, by contrast, whether the racier “Ask-i Memnu,” a smash with young Turks, threatens to offend Arabs unless it is heavily edited.

What's particularly interesting about the article is the distinction it draws between regionalisms and globalisms. Instead of signaling a commitment to some kind of global lifestyle (one implicitly Western), these soap operas - and their reception in the Arab world - signal a regional commitment. With more time, it might be interesting to try to link the popularity of these shows (and these notions of regionalism and globalism) with Anna Tsing's recent work - "The Global Situation" and "Inside the Economy of Appearances" in particular.

But as a brief conclusion, the NYT piece prompts us to think about the local variations and practices through which 'culture' is produced and comes to matter. And further: How are cultural productions like these soap operas also commitments to a particular way of thinking about the world, of drawing boundaries that help to constitute categories of 'us' and 'them'? Certainly not anything I have an answer for, but something to continue thinking about.

Soccer and Space Again

2010-06-18T08:16:00.000+03:00

In advance of the US-Slovenia game, an interesting echo. Writing for the NY Times soccer blog, Goal, John O'Brien makes some good points about the importance of space to the play of the game. He writes,

With the United States now playing two teams that will sit back, Slovenia and Algeria, they will need to have a good wide game. In the 2002 World Cup many important goals came from good crosses. Tony Sanneh served a brilliant ball to Brian McBride against Portugal for the third goal, and Eddie Lewis to Landon Donavon for the second goal against Mexico.

So who will provide the wide game for the U.S. this time around? If the lineup stays the same Steve Cherundolo is the only starter who truly plays like a wide player. His counterpart at left back, Carlos Bocanegra, is likely to drift forward and assist with some passing, but will not be looking to dribble by players, get to the end line, and serve in a cross. Both Donavon and Clint Dempsy are decent candidates for this role, yet they both tend to migrate from the wide position towards the center of the field, closer to the goal, closer to scoring positions.

In some ways, there are echoes of the untutored notes I made a couple of years back when Spain stormed their way to the European Championship:

I've been thinking a little more broadly about space, though, and its relationship to success on the field. More than that, however, it seems like this questions of aesthetics comes in as well: not only playing the game, but playing it beautifully.

There's been a lot of recent news about the links between basketball and soccer, and I'd like to spin out a couple of other things I've been considering. Henry Abbot at True Hoop has published a couple of stories (here or here) about a recent charity game organized by Steve Nash and Claudio Reyna, and they're well worth a read. One of the consistent themes that's stood out to me is the relationship between playing the point and playing soccer. There's something about the field sense that soccer requires, it seems, that carries over onto the basketball court.

There was something similar that came up during the Lakers/Jazz playoff series: Kobe Bryant noted (from Forum Blue and Gold) that a significant number of the Lakers had grown up playing soccer early on; and I feel like I came across mention of the fluid nature of the triangle offense, and how much it depends on movement without the ball. Something similar to soccer, I suspect.

Also fitting, perhaps, because of this.

Arrivals

2010-06-16T21:57:00.001+03:00

We landed in Istanbul somewhere around half past ten, just after the Turkish Airlines flight from Astana and beside the flight from Beirut. The passport queue filled up quickly and moved slowly, and under the low ceiling, I could try to guess where people were from by their passport, by their face, by small details I wouldn't otherwise pay attention to. After passing through JFK, I made a few notes in my journal:

The concourse had an almost claustrophobic, almost surreal quality to it. A liminal space, maybe - very much a space of transition, this kind of dissolving of national boundaries, and yet almost paradoxically it's a much more self-conscious performance of national identity... There's the whole question of the passport and its kind of performance, but its imbrication within a whole set of legal frameworks, state systems, and so on.

And I think arriving in Turkey had something of the same dimension - a jostling nationalism, cheek-by-jowl, the same and then dramatically different when we present our passports.

Later, on the drive to Üsküdar, a sudden traffic jam. We worked our way slowly through the press of cars until we made it to the front: A small yellow truck had overturned, and its cargo of watermelons was strewn across the road. Something of the color and the heat, red and deep green against the black, the haze of summer over the Haliç, and the driver - bandaged on one arm, but in one piece - leaning against the guard rail giving his story to the police.

What passes for a day

2010-04-20T04:49:00.000+03:00

I'm not much good at setting tasks for myself; too often, I wander, let myself be diverted (think a trickle of water). I often envy those who write directly (in the way that puddles dream of the sea). But in spite of that (or because), I sometimes pause: The world falls together in strange ways for me, and what passes for intuition is not so much a flash and certainly not anything as steady as a light, but something chanced, a furtive gleam.

Old Poems

2010-04-06T02:51:00.000+03:00

Not back to writing here consistently by any stretch, but it's funny what one can find amid the crevices of one's computer. A second poem about Santa Monica - or really, the transition from the end of the 10 and the transition onto PCH:
All of which is a long way of saying this is one reason to write: To return, revisit, and recover something of what passed. Not perfectly, and never completely, but something.

Kind of a Year in Review

2009-12-20T20:10:00.000+02:00

I originally started putting these photos together as a kind of year-in-photos sort of thing. It turned out as something slightly different, if for no other reason than the photos don't easily match up to life, but since this might be the only thing I publish here between now and the new year, a few scenes from the past months (click photos to enlarge and read the text):

Happy Holidays to everyone.

Southern California: Where Winter Never Is

2009-11-26T22:46:00.000+02:00

Seriously? This is November? Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Enjoy the day, and travel safely.

Why Sad Panda is Sad

2009-11-23T09:00:00.000+02:00

via LAist

Bike Help Needed

2009-11-16T06:35:00.000+02:00

From a story that begins well with the Bikerowave, and ends today:

Less awesome: The bike I was working on. I brought in an absolute clunker of a bike – an old Motobecane that had been sitting outside under the porch in Colorado for far too long and had then made the trip to California and spent most of its time sitting in our hallway. Less than awesome. There’s progress on the beast, and it was almost (briefly) rideable. But when I brought it home and inflated the tire a little more, I realized there was a slight issue. If the tire was inflated to the recommended psi (say, about 80), it bulged out seriously on the sidewall, so much so that it wouldn’t spin through the brakes. So I deflated the tire, tried to reseat the bead in the rim, then inflated the tire again. Same problem. Repeat, except this time I removed the tire and spread a little chalk on the inside between the tube and the tire, thinking that the tube might be getting bunched up when inflated. When I inflated the tire again (again, to about 80 psi, though the tire says it takes 90 psi), it seemed fine. I was psyched. Deflate the tire, slipped it back into the bike, tightened down the wheel a little, then pumped up the tire again. Everything seemed gravy, but within about a minute, the tire/tube was bulging back over the rim. I went to deflate the tire again to look at it when the tube (predictably?) popped.

Any thoughts?

Orhan Pamuk on his newest book

2009-10-28T03:27:00.000+02:00

(Thanks Jenny!)

Kitchen portrait

2009-10-27T03:57:00.000+02:00

Making fresh lasagna for dinner.

Rice fields, Syauli Bazar

2009-10-22T18:55:00.001+03:00

Rice fields, Syauli Bazar, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

At work on other things, but another shot of Nepal.

Call for Papers AAG 2010

2009-10-13T02:26:00.000+03:00

Call for Papers: 2010 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers
Representing Place: Methods, Tensions, and the Problem of Authenticity

“What I am describing may not, in the end, be special to Istanbul, and perhaps, with the westernization of the entire world, it is inevitable. Perhaps this is why I sometimes read Westerners’ accounts not at arm’s length, as someone else’s exotic dreams, but drawn close by, as if there were my own memories. I enjoy coming across a detail that I have noticed but never remarked upon, perhaps because no one else I know has either.”
- Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Part of Orhan Pamuk’s project in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, is the authentic representation of Istanbul as a place of vibrant experience. Yet in his representation of Istanbul, Pamuk encounters two related problems: First, almost all of the historical accounts of Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire were penned by Westerners, visitors to the city of sultans. Second, Pamuk remains self-conscious about the non-Turkish origins of his own literary craft. Is it possible, he asks, for a Turk to write a memoir (itself a mode of representation with its own specific Western geography) about Istanbul that relies on Western accounts?

Pamuk answers in the affirmative, but his memoir raises a set of questions of broad importance to geographers. How do we come to be able to represent a place? What is at stake in the representation of a place? Do modes of representation (novels, paintings, photography, film) have their own geography? If so, what are the issues raised by taking those modes of representation elsewhere?

Broadly, this session is organized around the recognition that any representation of place - be it image, text, or sculpture - does not simply emerge from an essential experience of place. Rather, representations of particular places (like Pamuk’s Istanbul) come from somewhere else. Thus, to represent a place is to both search for a genius loci and to articulate relationships with other places. In the case of Pamuk’s Istanbul, his memoir is both an authentic representation of Istanbul and an argument that Istanbul can only be represented by drawing on Western writers and modes of representation. Istanbul: Memories and the City introduces what might be a necessary tension in any representation of place: They always come from somewhere else.
This session aims to gather a diverse set of methodological and conceptual approaches. Possible specific topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

* Seeing the desert: ecology and imagination in the American West
* Bollywood and Hollywood: representations of India on the silver screen
* Representing jihad: the Middle East on film after 9/11
* Representations of the self in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North
* Learning to paint the world: Mughal painting under the rule of Jahangir
* Poetry and place: Robert Frost and “The Gift Outright”
* On the outside looking in: Representations of the United States in foreign media

The session will include 5 papers; presenters will have 20 minutes for their presentation and discussion. Interested parties should send a CV and a 250-word abstract to Timur Hammond at timur.hammond@gmail.com no later than October 25, 2009. Preference will be given to papers with a non-European focus, but papers exploring “Western” representations of place in a comparative dimension are also welcome. All questions will be responded to as quickly as possible.

Some explanation for an absence...

2009-10-10T04:24:00.001+03:00

Annapurna South from Ghandruk, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

I took a trip to Nepal. The centerpiece of the trip was 7 days trekking to Annapurna Base Camp (which sits a shade over 14,000 feet, but well below the summit of Annapurna itself). This photo is from our second day on the trail, a glimpse of Annapurna South before the sky filled in with clouds.

A world on fire

2009-09-01T03:16:00.000+03:00

We were driving east out of Santa Monica yesterday afternoon when we caught a glimpse of the clouds generated by the Station Fire. The heat is so intense that it's generated its own microclimate and sent plumes of smoke billowing into the sky. By the time we made it to Mar Vista, the clouds weren't nearly as dramatic, but there was something still almost apocalyptic about the view. Waking up this morning to news of the possible loss of radio transmission towers on Mt. Wilson didn't help.

But two other videos that I stumbled across today give a much better sense of the size and the scope of the fire:

Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

And Will Campbell's time lapse:

Framing the world

2009-08-28T20:28:00.000+03:00

I've been lucky enough to see both Lawrence of Arabia and West Side Story in their original 70 mm format, and it's a completely different experience. This video explains some of the reasons for that difference.

via kottke

Traffic arrives on LA streets

2009-08-25T21:42:00.000+03:00

Not sure whether to be thrilled or worried by the ability to now see how the surface streets are doing. On the one hand, it's great: It's a visual confirmation of apocryphal wisdom (like, don't ever take Wilshire through Beverly Hills unless you have to) and kind of convenient. On the other, it's always possible to worry: How will this new version of Traffic continue to change how people live and navigate in Los Angeles? Moving through the city becomes much less about a narrative experience of place and much more about a kind of schematized efficiency.

(via LAist and Google LatLong)

Will you pay for my Lap Band?

2009-08-21T11:00:00.000+03:00

Following up on my post from the other day and trying to extend the question: If universal health coverage ever comes around, should my Lap Band be paid for under the terms of my coverage?

On prose and parsimony

2009-08-21T00:27:00.000+03:00

Jenny raised an interesting point a couple of days ago. Writing about William Vollmann's Imperial, she asks:

What is it about McPhee’s writing (and I believe also Rebecca Solnit’s, though perhaps you are thinking of others) that effectively invites us in to look more closely at messy landscapes, the ones that, like Imperial County, are accident-ridden, heavily politicized, and full of scars induced by humans? [Suggesting that Vollmann's volume doesn't do this] .... Only a handful of writers have really crafted narratives about often undesirable cultural landscapes and left their readers feeling satisfyingly educated through to the end. It’s the latter which Vollmann unfortunately doesn’t seem to be doing for those who dare approach Imperial.

Jenny's concern (one that I mostly share), is that there's something in Vollmann's style that impedes our understanding of Imperial through Imperial. I don't know if it's that there's too much there, too little organization, too much of Vollmann's prose, or what, but there's something.

But stumbling through the interwebs, I chanced upon a quote that seemed to speak in favor of Vollmann's approach (and perhaps against that of John McPhee). It's from a Sherry Ortner piece entitled, "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal" (JSTOR). Ortner describes her "ethnographic stance":

It is first and foremost a commitment to what Geertz has called "thickness," to producing understanding through richness, texture, and detail, rather than parsimony, refinement, and (in the sense used by mathematicians) elegance.

The challenge, I suppose, is negotiating between parsimony and Vollmann's brimming-over-prose, but I think Ortner's suggestion is that we tend towards Vollmann's style: Rather than edit, select, and choose, write more, then write it again. Through repetition, something approaching the truth of a place might emerge.

Thinking, DFW, and what we love

2009-08-18T21:00:00.000+03:00

Stumbling around the interwebs, I came across the text of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to this past spring's graduating class of Kenyon College. Wedged a couple of paragraphs into the speech is this passage:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

His speech reminded me of a recent cartoon I chanced upon (both links via kottke). The cartoon is an illustrated version of a Neil Postman book that compared George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, and ends with this chilling image:

Please read.

Arguing against the old

2009-08-18T06:51:00.000+03:00

Polemical, to be sure, but an interesting set of questions in Richard Dooling's NYT op-ed:

With so much evidence of wasteful and even harmful treatment, shouldn’t we instantly cut some of the money spent on exorbitant intensive-care medicine for dying, elderly people and redirect it to pediatricians and obstetricians offering preventive care for children and mothers? Sadly, we are very far from this goal. A cynic would argue that this can’t happen because children can’t vote (even if their parents can), whereas members of AARP and the American Medical Association not only vote but can also hire lobbyists to keep the money flowing.
One thing’s for sure: Our health care system has failed. Generational spending wars loom on the horizon. Rationing of health care is imminent. But given the political inertia, we could soon find ourselves in a triage situation in which there is no time or money to create medical-review boards to ponder cost-containment issues or rationing schemes. We’ll be forced to implement quick-and-dirty rules based on something simple, sensible and easily verifiable. Like age. As in: No federal funds to be spent on intensive-care medicine for anyone over 85.
I am not, of course, talking about euthanasia. I’m just wondering why the nation continues incurring enormous debt to pay for bypass surgery and titanium-knee replacements for octogenarians and nonagenarians, when for just a small fraction of those costs we could provide children with preventive health care and nutrition. Eight million children have no health insurance, but their parents pay 3 percent of their salaries to Medicare to make sure that seniors get the very best money can buy in prescription drugs for everything from restless leg syndrome to erectile dysfunction, scooters and end-of-life intensive care. (emphasis added)

What does it say about a society in which medical care for the elderly is prioritized over basic care for children? I am, of course, being wildly reductive. The problem with even using a phrase like "medical care" is that it's sufficiently broad to be absolutely useless. It sounds good (and polemical!) but it elides the distinction between life-saving care and quality-of-life care (though some might argue that there's no firm distinction there either). But just speculating briefly: One of the many things floating around in my head right now is wondering at what people mean when they say that health care is a right.

At first blush, I'm inclined to agree. I think that arguing for or against health coverage on the basis of a cost/benefit analysis traps you into an econometric way of thinking that's ultimately reductive of human experience. At the same time, if we're going to talk about "health care" as a "human right", then we need to figure out what precisely "health care" refers to. Is LASIK health care? Is dialysis? Is a knee operation? Is bypass surgery? Is birth control? What does it mean to be healthy?

At its root, that question might come down to a question of how we frame what is (or is not) considered "human". If the "human" is some "natural" thing, then plastic surgery might not be an example of care that makes you healthy. But if the "human" is some potentially perfectable idea, then something like LASIK might well be a fundamental part of something that we think of as "health care".

What does culture do?

2009-08-16T04:05:00.000+03:00

A long passage from a devastating story about Dresden in the NYT:

All of which gets back to the problem of reconciliation: What are the humanizing effects of culture?
Evidently, there are none.
To walk through Dresden’s museums, and past the young buskers fiddling Mozart on street corners, is to wonder whether this age-old question may have things backward. It presumes that we’re passive receivers acted on by the arts, which vouchsafe our salvation, moral and otherwise, so long as we remain in their presence. Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.
The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even. Residents of Dresden who believed, when the war was all but over, that their home had somehow been spared annihilation by its beauty were all the more traumatized when, in a matter of hours, bombs killed tens of thousands and obliterated centuries of humane and glorious architecture.
The truth is, we can stare as long as we want at that Raphael Madonna; or at Antonello da Messina’s “St. Sebastian,” now beside a Congo fetish sculpture in another room in the Gemäldegalerie; or at the shiny coffee sets, clocks and cups made of coral and mother-of-pearl and coconuts and diamonds culled from the four corners of the earth in the city’s New Green Vault, which contains the spoils of the most cultivated Saxon kings. But it won’t make sense of a senseless murder or help change the mind of a violent bigot.
What we can also do, though, is accept that while the arts won’t save us, we should save them anyway. Because the enemies of civilized society are always just outside the door.

Echoes of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, especially in that last passage. What, Michael Kimmelman asks, is the point of art if it won't stop senseless xenophobic violence? Kimmelman suggests (and I think this is the echo of Camus) it's precisely because art can't act in the world in that way that we need to preserve it. Not because of, but in spite of its powerlessness.

Turkey is part of Europe?

2009-08-08T01:14:00.000+03:00

On the heels of my brief post about attempts to reframe Turkey's strategic role, an op-ed in the UK Guardian revisits the question of Turkey's relationship to Europe. He ends by writing:

We need courageous European politicians who will develop a new vision of Turkish-EU relations, who will remind their citizens that Turkey, by virtue of its economic power, geography, history and natural position as go-between with the "Muslim world", is a major asset for Europe and for its future. Instead of waiting until historical necessity forces the EU to incorporate Turkey, European statesmen should be working together to develop a clear, reasonable policy leading to Turkish membership – one that would respect political principles and recognise cultural and religious diversity. Welcoming Turkey into the EU would mean Europe would have to reconcile itself with its own principles: the principles it has all too often betrayed in practice.

A couple of things to point out: First, Turkey is again imagined as a "go-between," a kind of bridge between East and West. Second, as some things recently on my desk have pointed out, it's becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the Muslim world begins in Turkey (Germany, have you looked in the mirror recently?). Third, even arguing "Turkey is part of Europe" ignores or obscures the way in which both "Turkey" and "Europe" are constructed - they have a history, a rhetoric, and a geography to them. Arguing for the place of Turkey in or out of Europe misses out on the way in which Europe itself has been and continues to be problematically constructed, bounded, and demarcated. Finally, the comments (I only read a handful) are telling about the polarized nature of this debate in the UK today.

Thank god we don't have polarized debates here.

Kayaking the LA River...

2009-08-07T06:07:00.000+03:00

My colleague Nick is teaching a fascinating class on Metropolitan Los Angeles this summer, and this video seemed to speak to several of the issues he's asking his students to think about: How, for example, do we think about nature in the city? What's the place of nature in the city? In what ways is nature actually far more present around us in Los Angeles than we typically assume?

(via LAist)

Organic's Not Good For Me?

2009-08-05T12:00:00.000+03:00

Did you know that organic food is actually no healthier nor more nutritional than conventionally-grown food? (Somewhere, in Santa Monica, a baby is crying in the humid night.) Jenny Goldstein has the whole story at Earth Matters, but she adds a helpful (and perhaps hopeful?) note:

But more importantly, I think this is an opportunity for us to refocus, reclaim even, the discussion surrounding organic agriculture. It needs to be about the earth, not just about the produce that it yields and the vitamins we’re ingesting. We absolutely are paying for something, if not the guarantee that those organic grapes have more antioxidants than their pesticide-coated cousins. It’s a public good that we’re paying for with that label, a shot at staving off the depletion of our soil and water resources by entrusting farmers to use these organic production methods. Allowing organic food to be spun otherwise — even by the organic food marketers themselves — could prove to be much more dangerous to our, and the planet’s, health than that so-called nutrient-deficient organic banana you’re reaching for.

What she argues, in other words, is that we need to re-frame how we think about what "organic" means. It's not just a status symbol to eat organically grown food - it's making a larger statement about the world. I added my own brief thoughts to the end of her post, writing:

And then something else to add: How are you/we/they conceptualizing "health"? If you imagine that "health" is something that a discrete, individual, and clearly bounded individual can have (and has a right to?), then it might be possible to argue in some reductive way that eating organic is just the same as eating non-organic. But I also think that way of conceptualizing health - kind of the same way that we could calories - ignores the way in which health can (and should) be conceptualized as something that doesn't stop at the skin. I think Nick's work on the "extensible body" is really good in this respect, insofar as he's trying to think of ways in which the scale of the "healthy body" has changed dramatically. And I think that your last paragraph is spot on - one of the things that organic food offers is a way to frame our eating as something other than an individual act. Whether we like it or not, eating is always public. Right?

For Jenny's full post, look here.

If You Haven't Read Them, You Should

2009-08-04T11:00:00.000+03:00

Hilton Als, who normally writes for the New Yorker, has a beautiful piece on Michael Jackson in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books. It begins:

It's 1972, and "Ben," the fourteen-year-old star's first solo hit, is everywhere. The title song for a film about a bullied boy and his love for a rat named Ben (together they train a legion of other rodents to kill the boy's tormentors; eventually Ben helps kill his human companion), the mournful ballad quickly became Jackson's early signature song—certainly among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context, and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing. For it was evident by then that Michael Jackson was no mere child with a gift. Or, to put it more accurately, he was all child—an Ariel of the ghetto—whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs.

It's that last sentence that stood out to me (beacon on the hill, candle in a dark room).

Not topically related, but for a different take on celebrity, John Krolik tries to figure out how Stephon Marbury has become, well, Stephon Marbury. He asks:

But here’s the question that begs to be answered above all others: How did all of this happen? It was only two years ago that Marbury was a max-money starting point guard for the New York Knicks. How did end up spending most of his waking hours talking into a webcam, baring his soul to any of the increasingly few people willing to listen? It’s likely nobody really knows the answer to that question, including Marbury himself. But a look into Marbury’s journey to this point reveals reasons to believe that the factors behind Marbury’s fall from grace are more complex than they appear at first blush.

Well worth a read, if you have the time (thanks, TH).

And, thanks to a post on EotAW, I stumbled across an excellent discussion of George Scialabba's What are Intellectuals Good For? at Crooked Timber (the introduction is here, with the first two responses here and here).

Art Made Mine

2009-08-03T19:57:00.000+03:00

One of the New York Times' most popular articles at the moment comments about how our museum habits have changed, particularly with the invention of cameras. The author blames cameras for a lot of it, noting:

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

But he goes on to talk about walking through Rome with a sketchbook, and links that experience to a comment about how artists approach art museums:

Artists fortunately remind us that there’s in fact no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience. If you have ever gone to a museum with a good artist you probably discovered that they don’t worry so much about what art history books or wall labels tell them is right or wrong, because they’re selfish consumers, freed to look by their own interests.

All of which reminded me of a sketch I made yesterday. Kirsten and I were rushing through the morning, between our new apartment and responsibilities of the old, but she had to stop by LACMA for a class project. We didn't linger, but there was enough time to make a quick sketch of a Giacometti. On the facing page, I scrawled:

Always interesting to recognize how much of ourselves we put into our sketching. It is, I suppose, true of writing (in the sketches and empty spaces between scrawled lines), but not always as obvious. But always the traces in what we make of something like ourselves. What: A world always trapped between ourselves and truth.

I'd recognized something of myself in the sketch I'd made - and though it was true enough to Giacometti's bust, I was struck by how much of myself had slipped in. So when Michael Kimmelman writes in the NYT about the selfish capacity of artists, I recognize something of that in my sketch: Not only to make it mine (in memory), but to make it me.

Two Notes on Turkey's Foreign Policy

2009-08-03T14:00:00.000+03:00

Briefly now.

One of the things that stands out on a visit to Istanbul is the southern bridge spanning the Bosphorus. It's a sight that often stands in as a kind of synechdoche for Turkey: bridge between two cultures, two continents, two ways of life, two faiths, two histories, so on and so forth. (The tale of Xerxes lashing the Hellespont comes to mind.)

So with all of that, it's interesting to read an attempt to find a new metaphor for Turkey. In an op-ed in the English-language edition of Hurriyet, Gul Demir and Nikki Gam write:

I think there are two sides to this. The first one is the rhetoric of being a bridge; I think it does not serve Turkey’s interests. A bridge is something very static, which Turkey is not; it is an ever changing country. Secondly a bridge is something that connects two sides and has no influence on either side; the bridge is something that you pass over. You don’t pay attention to it. However, Turkey is not a bridge and I think we should forget using this rhetoric. We should drop this rhetoric from Turkish foreign policy. We are a kind of melting pot, a hub, a political, cultural, strategic hub, whatever you would like to call it, a center where people can meet together, talk together, and where they can interact together. So the tough side of this is that I oppose the rhetoric of the bridge in Turkish foreign policy.

All of which brings to mind another brief aside in a recent issue of the Economist. Discussing Turkey's changing foreign policy, they write:

Some credit [for Turkey's recent foreign policy successes] is due to Mr Davutoglu, who was a foreign-policy adviser to the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for seven years before becoming foreign minister in May. This spry former academic is seen as the architect of Turkey’s soft power, which blends realpolitik with a fierce pride. A pious Muslim with a moralistic bent, Mr Davutoglu has been among the most influential foreign ministers in the history of the Turkish republic.

His approach rests on two pillars. One is to have “zero problems” with the neighbours, many of them troubled or troublesome. The other is “strategic depth”. This calls for a Turkish zone of political, economic and cultural influence, primarily among neighbours (many of them former Ottoman dominions) in the Balkans, the south Caucasus and the Middle East.

From bridges to zones, and it's worth thinking about the ways in which metaphors (particularly spatial ones) end up structuring the political world in which we live.

Lies of Perspective

2009-08-02T20:21:00.001+03:00

But sometimes it tells the truth (meaning that everything looks larger when you shoot from a tripod on the floor). New apartment is in the works.

On Language

2009-07-31T11:00:00.000+03:00

Mostly so I don't forget, a quote that jumped out in reading today:

Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. (Walter Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle', p. 25-26)

Do I know what this means? Not really, but it reminded me of something I'm trying to work through in (still!) writing about Orhan Pamuk's memoir Istanbul.

Maybe this: Benjamin is insisting that the only way we can have access to the past is through our memories. All simple enough until we take stock of the problematically mediated nature of memory, its imperfect and imprecise status. That, I think, is the interesting link with Pamuk's work.

"Novel Ecosystems"

2009-07-30T19:10:00.000+03:00

Jenny has a new project up at a site called The Faster Times called Earth Matters. She wrote a piece the other day that caught my eye (though I like her description of geography) in which she called my attention to a recent article in Nature about "novel ecosystems". In short, they're ecosystems that aren't directly man-made but are completely implicated in and result from human activity. Read the whole piece, but in closing, she wrote:

Ecology’s lukewarm acceptance of these novel, dynamic, exotic—whatever you want to call them—areas within nature are perhaps a reflection of a bigger conceptual shift in our environmental thinking as well. As recently as 15 years ago, ecology as a discipline stood stalwartly by the biodiversity ethic that sought to preserve “wild” or “native” tracks of natural areas. Seemingly untouched wetlands and forests were, and to many ecologists still are, bastions of species biodiversity. These areas, like parts of the Amazon rainforest in South America or the Congo Basin forest in Central Africa, have typically been looked at with an eye towards preservation, or conservation. We must stop not only the rate of deforestation of these areas, say some academics and activists, but we must also maintain the diversity of plant and animal species that have inhabited these areas for longer than we humans have been keeping records of such things. To them, biodiversity is the gold standard. Extinction is the enemy.

Slices of land that are considered wild and are even quarantined from human access with a “Don’t Touch” sign—save for research purposes—can also be considered museum pieces, if they exist intact at all. But they are certainly not the majority of landscapes on the earth today, as “Ragamuffin Earth” points out, not even close.

The article raises more questions than I have time to deal with at the moment (such as: the idea of "wild" as culturally and historically specific; wondering at ways of linking debates about "biodiversity" to a liberal cosmopolitanism; the cultural currency of ideas like "intact" and "wild"), but it was enough to distract me from work I should be doing. Or it offered a release. Or something. Take a look if you have the time.

Interlude, II

2009-07-28T02:00:00.000+03:00

Reading Doreen Massey's "A global sense of place," where she arrives at a brilliant formulation of place:

What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each ‘place’ can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. Instead then, of thinking of places as area with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region of even a continent. (154)

And riffing briefly off that to think about Iran - one of the consistent tropes of American coverage of recent events has been the statement that "Iran has a long and illustrious history". Well, absolutely. But that doesn't sufficiently explain why "Iran" is such a potent place in the present - and this is I think where Žižek's project is so interesting: How do current events in Iran reflect larger processes at work in the world? How does thinking about capitalism (because that is one of Žižek's projects) give us a way to think about how Iran is produced and situated as a place in the present?

Interlude

2009-07-27T17:00:00.000+03:00

From a walk a couple of weeks back: edge of sunset, slim-wristed palms, apartments lit for dinner.

The Impossible "Over There"

2009-07-26T23:21:00.000+03:00

Tom Friedman has seen the truth, and it is good:

After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to northern Iraq, to Afghanistan and into northwest Pakistan — I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing.

Take a moment and notice his spatial logic: The "war on terrorism" has a "frontline" (granted, Friedman's front is not our grandfather's front - it could not be so, curled as it is over a map of the world), and that front demarcates the "good guys" from the "bad", which suggests that the two spaces ("good" and "bad" mapped onto a physical territory) are distinct and meet at this "frontline" from which Friedman has just returned. My quarrel isn't so much with the substance of Friedman's article - in spite of his attempt to discover "a vision of Islam that is perceived as authentic yet embracing of modernity" - as with that logic that cleanly divides the good guys from the bad.

Consider, as a different rhetorical exercise, Slavoj Žižek's attempt to link Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Silvio Berlusconi. He asks:

Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

He continues:

This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy. The American journalist Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘manufacturing consent’, later made famous by Chomsky, but Lippmann intended it in a positive way. Like Plato, he saw the public as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. The herd, he wrote in Public Opinion (1922), must be governed by ‘a specialised class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’: an elite class acting to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, which is its inability to bring about the ideal of the ‘omni-competent citizen’. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is manifestly true; the mystery is that, knowing it, we continue to play the game. We act as though we were free, not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction tell us what to do and think. [emphasis added]

What's striking about Žižek's account is the way in which he refuses to bracket off Iran as an "over there". If Friedman's column today depends upon an ability to distinguish between a modernity in which we live and something not-quite-modern on the other side of the frontline, Žižek's account forces us to think about the ways in which similar projects and processes are at work at both sides (if we can even speak of sides).

And when Žižek argues that "we need to confront [again the logic of fronts] the limitations of parlimentary representative democracy", it echoes something I've been thinking about as health care reform [or its impossibility] has become the topic of the day. More on that soon.

In the Mountains

2009-07-22T18:00:00.000+03:00

Even in the mountains, summer is still close, but we left the worst of the heat in the valley.

We left LA Friday afternoon, and slept in BLM land that night. Aaron met us at dawn the next morning after driving straight through from Las Cruces. We shouldered packs about 9 at North Lake and struck up for Piute Pass. We camped Saturday night at Desolation Lake, somewhere just above 11,000 feet. Sunday was a long loop around Desolation Lake before moving camp to Summit Lake. Monday was out, some 25 miles later. For me and K, it was back to Los Angeles. Peter and Aaron are still somewhere in the mountains.

The Flickr set is here.

A Story About Summer

2009-07-22T02:28:00.000+03:00

In the thick of summer, distances tend to disappear. Driving east along Venice in the winter, the San Bernadino Mountains stand out, backdrop for a scene in a movie yet to be written or just a reminder of a world beyond. This afternoon, there was only an opaque scrim of haze and ozone and exhaust, a gently curving dome arcing from the horizon somewhere up into the washed-out blue of an Angeleno summer.

I walked down the street for lunch when we made it home. Pigeons sniping at grass seed scattered on a newly plotted verge. Two men in white tanktops working at leveling the dirt of an apartment unit across the way that seems to be perpetually in a state of almost repaired. A woman is selling snow cones beside the grocery truck parked at Kenmore and 3rd. She is talking to someone while I walk by; almost past, and she calls out hopefully, Snow cone. I smile and say no thanks, cross the street. She'd been talking on the phone about just needing to make a little extra money, that was why she was trying this: a collapsible table with a thick plastic top, school fair size snow cone machine set on top with three half-filled jugs of syrup beside.

I step in for lunch across the street. Me da un burrito adobado, I say, y un medium lemonade. Para llevar? the clerk asks. Para aquí, I say, taking a seat. The restaurant is heavy with the heat of the grill. The women behind the counter talk slowly to each other. I sit and glance around the room: Jesus is My Lord Read the Bible in three languages on the walls, faded Pentecostal posters framed higher up. A man orders, sits down to wait for his food. Another man motions to him from outside. I can't make out what's so important until I finish lunch. The man outside has a parakeet on his arm, is trying to coax it onto a small plastic horse fit for children.

The grocery store across the street is at shift change, and people move through the aisles slowly: mothers sheltering small daughters through the produce, abuelas shell dried tamarind, me. Walking home with six dollars worth of produce, I pass by the woman selling snow cones. She is on the phone again, but pauses to call out hopefully, Snow cone? No thanks, I reply, shuffling my way up the block to an apartment still dripping with afternoon heat.

Tattered Maps in the Desert

2009-07-15T17:59:00.000+03:00

Some while back, Jordan pointed me in the direction of Strange Maps, whose most recent post reminded me of something. Introducing what was at one time the world's largest map, they write:

When this 130 by 166 foot plot of polished terrazzo tiling was inaugurated at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair, it was the largest map in the world. A facsimile extrapolation of a New York State road map by Rand McNally, the half-acre-sized piece of cartography today would still be the world’s largest map - if it had actually survived. But decades of human neglect and hard work by the elements have left their mark on the plywood tiles.

The Texaco-sponsored map was one of the eyecatchers at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, serving as the floor of the Tent of Tomorrow, which was later turned into a concert venue but fell into disuse by the late Sixties. By the early Seventies, the plywood tiles were covered with a layer of polyurethane and the area was used as a skating rink. It now is part of the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. With Ozymandias-like predictability, the Tent of Tomorrow’s 16 concrete pillars now support little more than sky. The only part of the New York State contribution to the Fair to survive unscathed is the Queens Theater in the Park, once the pavilion’s Theaterama.

I was immediately struck by the parallels with Jorge Luis Borges' brief story, "On Exactitude in Science" (this translation from his Collected Fictions):

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

And in turn, Borges' phrase about the Deserts of the West made me think about our trip down to Imperial Valley, and in particular, our brief excursion to Slab City.

Do the fleets of Snowbirds that come down for the winter think of themselves as "Animals and Beggars"? Probably not, but I think there's something suggestive about this place (about the whole valley, perhaps) as a material record of a way of thinking about the world. Slab City is built on the slabs of an old internment camp: The past persists in fragments.

Rory Stewart on Afghanistan

2009-07-14T21:00:00.000+03:00

There are ideas to quibble with in Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, but on the whole, Stewart's book is a sensitive and engaged portrait of a portion of an Afghanistan seen on foot. It's been a while since I last read Stewart's account, but I happened to stumble across his thoughtful and articulate critique of our current policies and politics in Afganistan.

As he reads it, there are two visions of Afghanistan: the dystopic potential narco-state threatened by the Taliban that justifies our military presence; and then what Stewart calls the "implausibly optimistic" vision of Afghanistan as a Western-style democracy. He continues:

Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

Stewart's critique is - in part - framed through his knowledge of Afghanistan's history. He suggests that even our present conflict (its protagonists, its small dramas) could not have been imagined 20 years ago, and it's irresponsible to suggest that we can finally imagine a future for Afghanistan. His point: That we just can't know. But how have we come to be able to imagine Afghanistan's future?

Policymakers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, ‘If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists.’

(As a brief aside, the geographer in me finds the notion of "ungoverned space" particularly suggestive. The equation of those kinds of spaces with terrorism even more so.) He continues:

We claim to be engaged in a neutral, technocratic, universal project of ‘state-building’ but we don’t know exactly what that means. Those who see Afghanistan as reverting to the Taliban or becoming a traditional autocratic state are referring to situations that existed there in 1972 and 1994. But the international community’s ambition appears to be to create something that has not existed before. Obama calls it ‘a more capable and accountable Afghan government’. The US White Paper calls it ‘effective local governance’ and speaks of ‘legitimacy’. The US, the UK and their allies agreed unanimously at the Nato 60th anniversary summit in April to create ‘a stronger democratic state’ in Afghanistan. In the new UK strategy for Afghanistan, certain combinations of adjective and noun appear again and again in the 32 pages: separated by a few pages, you will find ‘legitimate, accountable state’, ‘legitimate and accountable government’, ‘effective and accountable state’ and ‘effective and accountable governance’. Gordon Brown says that ‘just as the Afghans need to take control of their own security, they need to build legitimate governance.’

One of the themes of my teaching this past spring - by way of John May - was what we assume to be the "neutrality of technology": guns don't kill people, people kill people. To rephrase Stewart's critique: "state-building" is not and cannot be a neutral project. It assumes certain things about everything from the nature and role of the state to a conception of history. In the end, Stewart's suggests that for all the rhetorical brilliance of our philosopher-in-chief, both Obama and American policy remain hamstrung by a certain way of thinking about politics, history, and progress; a way of thinking established and situated within a very different set of cultural, social, economic, and political conditions than currently exist in Afghanistan. A fascinating critique, and well worth a look.

Summer, Like a Barking Dog, Returns

2009-07-14T06:30:00.001+03:00

Bridge over the Colorado River, Yuma, AZ

One of the side effects of summer is letting a week stretch into two and failing to be able to tell the difference. Other fine things I've learned since I last posted: Summer has decided to return to Los Angeles - or at least that portion of Los Angeles east of Fairfax - and it's not been shy about letting us know it's here. K. and I have been hunting for apartments, and there are few better indications of how you'll like a place than being shown a freshly-painted apartment that's been incubating in the heat for the past few days. (As an aside, apartment hunting is still a miserable project. There has to be a better way to set up an interface for landlords and tenants than the currently extant systems.)

But the above photo is one of a set I loaded from my trip to the Imperial Valley with members of the Landscape Fieldworks group a couple of weeks back. There are plans in the work to produce some sort of collaborative account (In spite of Jordan's tip that someone may already have beaten us to the proverbial punch), and my own abstract begins:

What does the water remember? Greek mythology speaks of the River Lethe that ran through the Underworld. Those that drank from its waters forgot their past life. The Old Testament story of Noah is built upon the power of water to erase the past. Christ is baptized by John in the River Jordan and washed clean of his past. Water, in its instability, its constant flow, seems to be both something that is incapable of remembering and that washes us clean of our past.

But at the same time, water carries a kind of history with it. One way to imagine the Salton Sink - what became the Salton Sea - is as a kind of Grand Canyon writ upside down. What the Colorado River has left is a geologic record, a memory in gravel and silt. There are two rivers that flow into the Salton Sea - the Alamo and the New. South of the border, the New River is known as the Rio Nuevo, but what the river carries with it is anything but new. The Sea itself is a record of everything the water has brought: salts, chemicals, human waste.

More to follow this week about water and California - heady news from up north about subsidence in the San Joaquin Valley. For the moment, you can see the rest of my set of photos here.

Salton Sea at Sunset

2009-06-28T04:44:00.000+03:00

Just returned from Imperial County. More photos to follow next week.

Robert Fisk at Dusk in Tehran

2009-06-17T08:07:00.000+03:00

Robert Fisk has been writing about the dusk. In Tuesday's Independent, he wrote:

By dusk, the Basiji were being chased by hundreds of protesters in the west of the city but shooting was crackling around the suburbs after dark. Those who were fatally too late in leaving Azadi, were fired on by the Basiji. One dead, thousands in panic, we heard behind us.

After every day of sunlight, there usually comes a perilous darkness and perhaps it was prefigured by the strange grey cloud that approached us all as we drew closer to Azadi Square yesterday afternoon. Many of the thousands of people around me noticed it and, burned by the afternoon sun, seemed to walk faster to embrace its shade. Then it rained, it poured, it soaked us. There is a faint rainy season in mid-summer Tehran but it had arrived early, sunlight arcing through the clouds like the horizon in a Biblical painting.

His story filed in Wednesday's edition published tomorrow (the occasional lapses of our post-global age) returns to the dusk:

As the fume-filled dusk fell over the north Tehran streets, the crowds grew wilder. I listened to a heavily bearded Basiji officer exorting his men to assault the 10,000 Mousavi men and women on the other side of the police line. "We must defend our country now, just as we did in the Iran-Iraq war," he shouted above the uproar. But the Ahmadinejad man trying to calm him down, shouted back: "We are all fellow citizens! Let's not have a tragedy. We must have unity."

Clearly the decision of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to instruct the Council of Guardians to recount Friday's election vote had done nothing to dispel the suspicion and anger of the reformist opposition in Iran.

First it appeared that the council would examine every election result. Then only a few. Then Iranians were told that it might take 10 days to learn their decision. It was as well, perhaps, that Ahmadinejad had flown to Yekaterinburg for the Shanghai summit to bore conference delegates with his speeches instead of the Iranian people whom he believes he represents. But on Vanak Square last night, all this meant nothing.

Plain-clothes cops – perhaps at last realising the gravity of a situation which their own obedience to Ahmadinejad's men had brought about – persuaded middle-aged men from both sides to meet in the centre of the road in the middle of Vanak Square's narrow no-man's-land. The Mousavi man, in a brown shirt, placed his hands around the arms of the bearded Iranian official from the Ahmadinejad side. "We cannot allow this to happen," he told him. And he tried, as any Muslim does when he wants to show his desire for trust and peace, to kiss the side of his opponent's face. The bearded man physically shook him off, screaming abuse at him.
The two rows of police were now standing shoulder to shoulder, their linked arms holding both mobs back, as they stared at their own comrades opposite with ever increasing concern. An American-Iranian a few metres away, shouted at me in English that "we've got to prove they can't do this anymore. They can't rule us. We need a new president. Either they get their way or we get ours".
It was frightening, the absolute conviction of these men, the total refusal to accept any compromise, one side demanding obedience to the words of Ayatollah Khomeini and loyalty to the ghosts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the other – emboldened by their million-strong march on Monday – demanding freedoms, albeit within an Islamic Republic, which they had never had before. Maybe they now have the police on their side; if last night's example was anything to go by, either some senior officer – or perhaps the cops themselves, appalled at their behaviour over the past four days – decided that the special forces would no longer be patsies to the frightening power of Ahmadinejad's ever-loyal bullies.

What do I add? It would have been nearing dusk when I stepped off the bus this evening at Wilshire and Vermont: The sun slick off buildings and aisles of palm trees, men selling Mexican squash and mangos on the corner in front of the gas station, the clutch and groan of evening traffic. A far cry from Tehran.

I woke slowly this morning to the radio, and in that dull murmur of NPR, I overheard Sen. McCain stridently declaring that the President ought to denounce the results of this most recent election. The good Senator is entitled to his opinion, but between this dusk and Fisk's dusk...

We'd be better served, I think, to watch closely: What new songs will the dusk bring?

Democratic Spaces

2009-06-14T21:35:00.000+03:00

Thomas Friedman is many things: A pessimist is not one of them.

Arguing that Lebanon's recent election signals the stirrings of a real democratic process in the Middle East, he lays out for four reasons for the change: First, the diffusion of new horizontal forms of media that allow for communication outside of state-controlled media outlets. Second, a new space (more on this in a second) for democracy in the Middle East as a result of Pres. Bush's policies of the past eight years. Third, the shift from Islamist to secular parties. Finally, there is the election of Pres. Obama and the United States' concerted efforts to push its "soft power". Friedman's argument is America-centric and perhaps too optimistic, but I want to briefly return to his comment about "space":

Second, for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”

What's interesting about Friedman's argument is the way it blurs the distinction between a material territory (the space of the nation-state) and a kind of imaginative space (one in which it's possible to imagine difference). I'm not sure that Friedman meant to do this, but it's an interesting idea - considering the relationship between material space and the possibilities of imagination. As a last question, what are we to make of a situation in which military power becomes the necessary precondition for "democratic" change? How do we think through that paradox?

A Range of Things

2009-06-13T06:47:00.000+03:00

Call it an inability to fix on anything in particular.

There's Stephen Colbert in Iraq, with a great comparison of Colbert and Bob Hope's trips to Vietman:

When Hope went on the road, and his trips to military bases spanned World War II and Operation Desert Storm, his audiences were young, overwhelmingly male and cut off from home. Even in Vietnam servicemen relied on letters and the occasional scratchy phone call. Hope’s lighthearted cracks about the military, war and women were tailored to amuse and comfort the men on the ground.
Mr. Colbert’s skits and stunts — a mock stint in basic training, a haircut administered by Gen. Ray Odierno (ordered, jokingly, by President Obama via a pretaped message) — were designed to hold the attention of easily distracted audiences back home.
Today’s troops are hardly starved for entertainment; they have laptops, video cameras, satellite phones and every iteration of the Internet, including Skype, Facebook and Gchats. They stay tuned to television, even Comedy Central. Mr. Colbert’s show is broadcast at 6:30 and 11:30 p.m. Central European time on the American Forces Network. He worked in references to “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” and even the bickering stars of “Jon & Kate Plus 8.”

The article continues:

There’s another difference. When NBC broadcast Hope’s Vietnam Christmas specials in the early 1970s (he performed on Christmas Day, but the fully produced shows were not televised until January), they drew 60 percent of the viewing audience. No conflict has ever been as instantly and closely covered as the Iraq War, but access spurs complacency. In the fractured universe of cable and the Internet, the entertaining of troops doesn’t get a lot of attention. World Wrestling Entertainment produces the annual tribute to the troops; Kellie Pickler, a former “American Idol” contestant who went to Iraq on last year’s U.S.O. holiday tour, made a video diary of her tour that was shown on GAC, the Great American Country cable network.

Not starved for entertainment in any way, there's Eric Neel's excellent piece on Lakers coach Phil Jackson (via FB&G):

[Phil's] not getting around quite as quickly as he used to. At 64, he battles chronic plantar fasciitis. He has had both hips replaced in the past few years and sits on the sideline in a special, padded orthopedic chair. He occasionally ambles gingerly from one spot on the practice floor to another.

He conducts one postgame news conference during the Denver series while standing up behind a microphone stand because someone has forgotten the staircase leading to the dais. When he hesitates beforehand, thinking of making the big step up onto the platform and then thinking better of it, the slight awkwardness, the little hesitation in the moment, resonates.

He says the momentum of a season, once it has begun, carries him along, but for how many more seasons will that be the case? What toll is the workload taking on his body now? Will he have the energy to mount another charge?

What else does he have to prove? He won his first title with the Bulls in 1991, and he's one victory away from his 10th now 18 years later.

Are we looking at the last stages of a remarkable run? Will winning or losing a title this season make him more or less likely to hang it up?

Will he have a chance to reflect on his record, on his legacy, at the close of this season? And what will it mean to him, if anything?

The questions seem to hang in the air.

"You sense those things," says longtime assistant Jim Cleamons, reflecting on his run with Jackson since the Chicago days. "Legacy, fatigue, pride, disappointment, you're aware of those things when you're alone in a quiet place, but they're just shadows. It's almost like you see them in passing, out of the corner of your eye. You don't look them straight on. You stay in the work."

And as a last brief note on craft, an interview with Malcolm Gladwell (via Arts & Letters)

Modesty may not be Gladwell's natural mode, but nor is he arrogant in any unpleasant way. But, yes, sir, he did do the necessary apprenticeship to become excellent at what he does. "There is this moment of mastery that descends," he offers. It happened for him as a reporter one afternoon in 1993 when a gunman had opened fire on a Long Island commuter train. Gladwell was the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post at the time. With the first deadline almost upon him, he made it out to the scene and dictated the entire front-page story over the phone without writing down a single word.

"In my first years I wouldn't have conceived of doing it," he says. "I just got on the phone and called it in and didn't think twice about it." He has since done a "back-of-the-envelope" calculation of the hours spent writing for the paper up until that day. Ten thousand hours, of course. "It's a marvellous moment. There is a reason why cognitively complicated jobs require long apprenticeships."

He puts journalism into this category deliberately. His other employer, aside from his publisher, is The New Yorker magazine, and his next submission will be an essay on the craft of news reporting and why it must be coddled and sheltered in an age of struggling newspapers. What makes him "mad" he says, is the notion that a newspaper is merely "a monopoly protected by printing press and that the thing being called a journalist is the chance to write the news, as if there isn't this separate set of skills that are difficult to acquire and worthy of preservation. You can't start blogging at 23 and call yourself a journalist."

Nor does one call oneself a writer when writing consists of Ctrl-V and Ctrl-C. Maybe more will tap its way along once I finish the stacks of grading in front of me. And jury duty. Can't forget about the jury duty.

[The irony of this post is that I started out intending to note something about Iran. And then I forgot (cue "modern age" music, inability to pay attention a function of too many tabs open in Firefox. Sigh.). So, in a well-rehearsed move, I direct your attention to the New York Times' (here) and The Guardian's (here) blogs on Iran. ]

Krugman's Nostalgianomics

2009-06-03T07:02:00.000+03:00

Paul Krugman's latest piece in the Times argues that the roots of the present (and still-continuing) economic crisis can be found in the financial deregulation that was ushered in in the 1980s (although one might argue Nixon taking the United States off the gold standard was itself an even earlier antecedent):

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.
Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.
On the latter point: traditionally, the U.S. government ran significant budget deficits only in times of war or economic emergency. Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us.

All well and good, and all very much in line with Krugman's recent tack: There was a historical moment in which we didn't face the problems we now face, and we need to understand the relationship between that past and our present. So it was with some interest that I found an interesting critique of Krugman's work (via A&L Daily) on the impressively named reason.com:

The sentiment [pining for an age of middle-class America] is nothing new. Political progressives such as Krugman have been decrying increases in income inequality for many years now. But Krugman has added a novel twist, one that has important implications for public policy and economic discourse in the age of Obama. In seeking explanations for the widening spread of incomes during the last four decades, researchers have focused overwhelmingly on broad structural changes in the economy, such as technological progress and demographic shifts. Krugman argues that these explanations are insufficient. “Since the 1970s,” he writes, “norms and institutions in the United States have changed in ways that either encouraged or permitted sharply higher inequality. Where, however, did the change in norms and institutions come from? The answer appears to be politics.”

Their argument can be boiled down to an argument of evidence: Krugman's statistics, they suggest, aren't complete, and don't take into account the way in which conservatives and liberals alike pushed for the changes in the nation's economy that have helped lead to this new Gilded Age in which we seem to find ourselves. The article's author, Brink Lindsey, goes to some lengths to point out how some of the liberal values Krugman aims to recover were themselves maintained by extremely illiberal policies in order to suggest that Krugman's present critique is hobbled by his overreliance on a kind of golden past. Closing his critique of Krugman's 'nostalgianomics', he writes:

The rise in income inequality does raise issues of legitimate public concern. And reasonable people disagree hotly about what ought to be done to ensure that our prosperity is widely shared. But the caricature of postwar history put forward by Krugman and other purveyors of nostalgianomics won’t lead us anywhere. Reactionary fantasies never do.

One set of questions, then, might be: On what terms can we return to the past? On what terms can we appeal to History? Lindsey is right to suggest that we cannot look to recover some economic model of past times. However, I think he errs in characterizing Krugman's project as mere 'nostalgia'. What is at work in Krugman's work is an effort to draw out the decisions that have put us where we are. If Lindsey's emphasis is on the broad categorical shifts we saw in the 1960s and 1970s, then Krugman's emphasis might be on the particulars of legislation and business. At his best, Krugman's writing checks us (optimistic Obama-ites and jaded souls alike) and asks us to reconsider the terms that have framed our present. Lindsey starts from a position in which he assumes that competition is always the best thing. Krugman - his nostalgia aside, though not excused - has the sense to ask how we arrived at that point.

Scraps of the Future

2009-06-01T01:25:00.000+03:00

Always interesting what surfaces - I don't remember when I found this on my desk, much less when I originally scribbled the list. But what was striking to me about it:

Not only that I took a time to list a series of writing projects, but that I thought them worth saving.
And then when I did find the list a second time (this is the way of my writing sometimes, to find a scrap many times), the fact that I took the time to scribble: relics of what I was wanting some time ago, driftwood, fingerprints, ephemeral.

All of which is neither here nor there, but the original paper is finally in the rubbish heap somewhere, digitized in a fit of pique or ordering madness. But always interesting for me to think about these scraps of paper I've squirreled away, as a kind of testament to dreams, ambitions, lives not yet lived.

California: [Insert Pun Here]

2009-05-26T00:32:00.000+03:00

A little more than a week ago, The Economist ran a piece on California. It opened:

ON MAY 19th Californians will go to the polls to vote on six ballot measures that are as important as they are confusing. If these measures fail, America’s biggest state will enter a full-blown financial crisis that will require excruciating cuts in public services. If the measures succeed, the crisis will be only a little less acute. Recent polls suggest that voters are planning to vote most of them down.

The occasion has thus become an ugly summary of all that is wrong with California’s governance, and that list is long. This special election, the sixth in 36 years, came about because the state’s elected politicians once again—for the system virtually assures as much—could not agree on a budget in time and had to cobble together a compromise in February to fill a $42 billion gap between revenue and spending. But that compromise required extending some temporary taxes, shifting spending around and borrowing against future lottery profits. These are among the steps that voters must now approve, thanks to California’s brand of direct democracy, which is unique in extent, complexity and misuse.

They continue (after a helpful aside about the Progressive origins of our system of propositions):

The broken budget mechanism and the twin failures in California’s representative and direct democracy are enough to guarantee dysfunction. The sheer complexity of the state exacerbates it. Peter Schrag, the author of “California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment”, has counted about 7,000 overlapping jurisdictions, from counties and cities to school and water districts, fire and park commissions, utility and mosquito-abatement boards, many with their own elected officials. The surprise is that anything works at all.

As a result, there is now a consensus among the political elite that California’s governance is “fundamentally broken” and that the state is “ungovernable, unless we make tough choices”, as Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles and a likely candidate for governor next year, puts it [likely only if you don't count Villaraigosa's Twitter followers, Kevin Roderick says].

Their latest article about California breaks down the post-election scenario:

As a result of California’s election, the state now faces a $21.3 billion gap between revenues and spending. Life, which has been no picnic for many in this state since the recession began, is about to get a lot worse. There have already been two rounds of budget cuts since last autumn. A third, savage, round must now follow.

Mr Schwarzenegger has already hinted at the cuts he will propose to the legislature. The easy part is to release prisoners. California’s 33 prisons, with about 168,000 inmates, many of them locked up because of inflexible sentencing laws passed by voters, are scandalously overcrowded. Mr Schwarzenegger is thinking about freeing 38,000 people. Half of them are undocumented immigrants whom he would transfer to federal custody.

But “the real money is where the pain is”, says Jean Ross of the California Budget Project, a research firm in Sacramento. In health care, for instance. Just as Mr Obama is trying to give more people access to medical care, California will be taking it away: by cutting funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s programme for the poor, and changing eligibility rules for another programme so that 225,000 children are likely to lose coverage. And this at a time when many of their parents are losing their jobs and their employer-sponsored insurance.

Again, slight mistake on the part of The Economist: It's not just the election that led to this budget shortfall. We might rattle off any number of reasons (I don't know, try Prop. 13) that have contributed to the current impasse, but still. $21.3 billion. With Google's rough estimate that the state is home to 37,756,666 people, that averages out to a little more than $564 per person. Not the worst thing in the world, but neither is it chump change.

The day after the election, Timothy Egan tried to strike an optimistic note, but the effect was a bit like the pot trying to tell the kettle it wasn't quite as black:

California’s problem is its democracy. The legislators, term-limited yet complacent, long ago threw in the towel. Now the citizens have had enough, expressing a pox-on-both-houses rejection Tuesday of every major ballot measure except the one that limited pay raises for politicians.

Think of Italy — which reminds me of California in so many ways — and its chronic inability to form a government. That’s California, with even better food and no parliamentary system.

l can’t blame the special interests: teachers, prison guards, the asphalt lobby. They’re only doing what special interests always do.
But I do blame the voters. They’re part-time citizens, and not very good at it. They shackled the tax system back in 1978 with Proposition 13, limiting how much government could take from a homeowner. It was a reasonable middle class revolt.

All of this is a long preamble to Paul Krugman's op-ed today (and judging by the number of comments, it's touched a nerve). He begins:

The recession has hit the Golden State hard. The housing bubble was bigger there than almost anywhere else, and the bust has been bigger too. California’s unemployment rate, at 11 percent, is the fifth-highest in the nation. And the state’s revenues have suffered accordingly.

What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.
Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.

His worry, I think, is one that a lot of people share: That California is a kind of barometer for the nation, a test lab for the future (the freeway, the mall, In-n-Out, Trader Joe's, Hollywood, Californians tend to wax effusive about how great we are); and since California is a kind of barometer, we need to look seriously about what's going on here. Krugman continues:

So will America follow California into ungovernability? Well, California has some special weaknesses that aren’t shared by the federal government. In particular, tax increases at the federal level don’t require a two-thirds majority, and can in some cases bypass the filibuster. So acting responsibly should be easier in Washington than in Sacramento.
But the California precedent still has me rattled. Who would have thought that America’s largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic?
On the other hand, the problems that plague California politics apply at the national level too.

The gist of Krugman's argument, insofar as I understand it, is that the tax structure that California has set up has hamstrung the state. Prop. 13, which limited the rate at which property taxes could be assessed, has forced the state to rely on income taxes to cover most of its expenses. So long as the state has been in a boom cycle (propped up all the while by cheap credit), it's been easy enough to collect taxes from incomes that skyrocketed on the margin. Now that we've all come back to earth (some of us never being all that high to begin with), California finds itself unable to square accounts.

Even worse, the state has found itself unable to sell bonds to finance its short-term needs. When it has been able to sell bonds, it's found itself saddled with higher interest rates, increasing its debt obligation in successive years. Krugman's larger concern is that if it can happen in California, it can happen at a national level. In other words, his fear is that the government, trying to finance its deficit-spending through the issuing of new bonds, is avoiding the hard political decision about raising taxes to maintain basic services. Of course, the Obama Administration can't very well abandon its deficit spending (so says the conventional economic wisdom: abandoning the stimulus now will worsen the recession, just like it did for FDR during the Great Depression), so Krugman is trying to keep both feet in the present with his eyes firmly on the horizon.

The implicit debate in all of this? What's the role of government? And what is to be its relationship to business? I found it interesting that the most popular article on nytimes.com at the moment is one about the death of high-school shop class - I guess it speaks to a kind of zeitgeist, a larger movement to get back to what is supposedly more "real". And I think you can link Krugman's work, even Egan's, to that kind of debate. The Economist, in its way, represents a way of thinking about the relationship between business and the government. None of this is to suggest that I have any answers (or even any clear questions), but I think it's important to begin asking these questions.

Besides, it makes for more productive conversation than wondering whether California is more like Italy (Egan) or a banana republic (Krugman).

Culling the Past

2009-05-24T02:18:00.000+03:00

One of those momentary and fleeting moods to cull my past this afternoon (it's such an aptly violent verb: to cull, as in to cull a herd of sheep; though this time only the past). At the tail end of it, I found an old box of checks in my closet. Taking the timee to chop my old unused checks into illegible scraps of paper gave me pause for a moment: An old check register from when I first started writing checks, my debits and credits faithfully recorded in the leaning script I used to favor. I tossed nearly all of it - save the register.

Maybe it's in the spirit of The Last Mughal, which I finished the other night after Jordan was kind enough to bring me back a bootleg version of the Indian press edition, in which William Dalrymple explains the amount of time he and his research assistants spent in the old archives, deciphering old petitions and bills, all written in the court's Urdu. There were no stirring narratives in those archives, he explained, but there was a kind of mute testimony: The tattered scraps of a life lived.

Did my checks have something of that? I think they might have - a record of rent mailed, bills paid, enthusiasms cultivated. There wasn't much point to keep the checks, but there was something kind of haunting to find my scrawl on duplicate checks. In the end, most of it went into the trash, but I saved one register. No reason for it, but it's a marker of a past that was, a person that was and in some ways continues to be.

Two other brief notes:

Jordan has a new project up called the Los Angeles Cycling Map. I'd encourage you to go take a look and let him know what you think. I was especially impressed by the idea to link Twitter into everything else, and I hope something good comes from it.
A couple of days late here, but get well soon Roadblock.

Thoughts on Riding the Bus

2009-04-15T05:42:00.000+03:00

Sometimes there's something heartbreaking about the bus.

On the 720 tonight, riding east on Wilshire from Westwood towards Koreatown. It's half past six, a blustery wind outside, the sky to the west incandescent. It's not yet the hour of desperate riders (that edging towards midnight, when bus service thins and the dinner shifts let out, people other than me with sore feet and lowered eyes, but also voices filled with sudden laughter) but it's the moment when people begin to slip home. We pass one of the locals at Western, the orange 20s that traffic in grandmothers and nannies, small streets between the boulevards, and a few blocks down, we stop just shy of the stop at Normandie. It's a red light, and drivers have been known to let passengers out before the stop proper so they might catch a transfer that much faster (the bus rider's fury: a transfer passing in the moment before you leave the bus). A man at the back door with two plastic bags from the dollar store calls to the driver, asks if he can be let out and if that orange bus, the local, is coming. The driver says he can't let him out, but the bus isn't coming. It's pleasant enough, but this moment of pleading in the man's voice, as if to say: Come on man, I just want to get home, can you let me out?

All well enough, the light changes, we pass through the intersection, stop, the man steps out and thanks the driver on his way. He has to cross back to the other side of the street to catch the bus, but he pauses a moment to hitch his bags more comfortably in his hands, looks to see if the bus is coming. It is, he breaks into a shuffling run, with that kind of look on his face that seems to say, Man, I can't miss this, I just can't.

And we've been talking through Goffman in class today, how Goffman sees the marking of the territories of the self. I don't remember exactly how he phrases it, but he says something to this effect: That in all of our marking of territories, we're trying to do both demonstrate our respect for others and establish a kind of regard in others for ourselves. And it's not as though this is ever a simple process, but I think it's easier to do in some places than others. What makes the bus such a heartbreaking place is how often you find the incommensurable moments between the territories of others and ourselves. More often than not, it's something between the bus driver and passengers, some way in which the driver closes out passengers, refuses to open the bus' doors, makes people feel acutely the sense of not being quite in control. And because I think there's something to that, some way in which the bus requires us (as passengers, though my escape is always the bike, the recognition or declaration that I could always ride my bike if the press of people got too bad) to accept the fact that we're on someone else's time and in someone else's place.

I don't think you have to deal with that in the same way when you drive a car (Joan Didion's quip that what makes Los Angeles unique is that it's the only city you could drive to buy a hamburger at 3 a.m.). There's something to the way in which cars become our territories of the self, and the way in which riding the bus forces people to confront the limits of their selves. And that maybe was what made this sight so heartbreaking: This man, when he got off the bus, would rather have walked calmly (be cool on the street, nobody wants to be the person running with your hands full, nobody wants to be seen as that guy) to catch his local transfer, but he would have missed his bus. And so something slipped, he broke into a shuffling run, hands clutching plastic bags of groceries, trying to make his way home.

From a Journal

2009-04-12T05:25:00.000+03:00

obituaries and writing

2009-03-28T00:13:00.000+02:00

Much of my reading in the past couple of months has moved between the New Yorker and The Economist, and I've spent the past couple of days flipping through old issues of both, pulling out articles that might provoke me somewhere down the line. In the process, I started thinking a moment about some of the differences between the two - chief among them the lack of by-lines in The Economist. It creates a particular type of writing, one in which the writing lays claim to a kind of clarity and transparency. This isn't so much to suggest that the New Yorker lacks either of those qualities as that their by-lines mean that one can never quite get past the personality of the writer. John Updike's pieces for the New Yorker are always, incomparably, Updike's pieces. Those in The Economist, on the other hand, have a way of standing apart from their author.

But going through old issues, I realized that the only thing I really found much use to save was their obituaries. The news briefs on business, Britain, the world, all sharply drawn but also made past (and it's with those that the transparent author is such a pleasure). But an obituary is different (and I've heard stories about writers who cut their teeth writing obituaries), it seems to require a writing subject (compare Adam Gopnik's and Roger Angell's for John Updike in the New Yorker). But then, to follow The Economist, perhaps not. Here are just a couple of the passages that stood out:

Anyone who had dealings with manual typewriters - the past tense, sadly, is necessary - knew that they were not mere machines. Eased heavily from the box, they would sit on the desk with an air of expectancy, like a concert grand once the lid is raised. On older models, the keys, metal-rimmed with white inlay, invited the use to play forceful concertos on them, while the silvery type-bars rose and fell chittering and whispering from their beds. Such sounds once filled the offices of the world, and Martin Tytell's life. (The Economist, September 20th, 2008)

But something happened to Miriam Makeba whenever she started to sing. After a slow-saunter onstage, gazing at her high-heeled shoes, she would suddenly straighten her back, flex her muscles, throw back her head and let loose an incandescent smile. Her strong, lithe body writhed and shook. Her shoulders shrugged, her hips gyrated. Slinky, strutting, wild-eyed and joyous, she danced as she sang. (The Economist, November 15th, 2008)

The elements of his craft seemed simple enough, when laid out on the page... But in Mr Lenotre's world the eggs were laid that morning, fresh out of the straw and kept for half an hour at room temperature. The butter (and cream) came from a dappled and contented cow, grazing under an apple tree in his native Normandy. Egg-yolks were to be beaturn until an egg-ribbon, trickled over the pale yellow surface, took five seconds to dissolve. Sponge fingers had to be baked until they were just springy to the touch, and not a moment more. (The Economist, January 24th, 2009)

What I find so compelling about the way in which they're written is this emphasis on the of this world. The obituaries often dilate about big issues (war, truth, God, culture), but they remain grounded in the particulars of a person and of a life. I've just finished John McPhee's Assembling California, and I found something similar in McPhee's writing: A love of things and of the way in which language provides us a way of talking about things. In a way, that last passage about Mr Lenotre could speak to a larger ethic of writing that one might learn from The Economist: The elements of craft seemed simple enough when laid out upon the page (a patient, etherised upon a table), but for them (the writer, Mr Lenotre, me) they had to be just so.

Weariness in the Eyes, Impatience in the Voice

2009-03-20T19:23:00.000+02:00

Breaking a moment from more important things (or in the moment before I really set to), a sparkling paragraph from A.O. Scott's review of Duplicity:

Along the way, Mr. Owen, on whom a two-piece suit becomes as brazenly sexual a uniform as anything you can imagine, opens many bottles of Champagne and looks hungrily at Ms. Roberts, even though Claire is more of a natural predator than Ray. For this film, her first real starring role in quite a while, Ms. Roberts has almost entirely left behind the coltish, America’s-sweetheart mannerisms, except when she uses them strategically, to disarm or confuse. Curvier than she used to be and with a touch of weariness around her eyes and impatience in her voice, she is, at 41, umistakably [sic] in her prime.

Spelling error aside, it's brilliant description: "with a touch of weariness around her eyes and impatience in her voice".

On the Science Question I Don't Know How to Answer

2009-03-16T19:00:00.000+02:00

I caught Jenny in conversation with a friend the other day about whether or not she was a social scientist. Asked to give a definition of what made a social scientist, I offered the flip, She uses numbers. Not terribly satisfying, and I seem to remember the conversation leaving us at an impasse.

Donna Haraway doesn't help us get extricate ourselves, but she does write this (from 'Situated Knowledges'):

So science becomes the paradigmatic model not of closure, but of what which is contestable and contested. Science becomes the myth not of what escapes human agency and responsibility in a realm above the fray, but rather of the accountability and responsibility for translations and solidarities linking the cacophonous visions and visionary voices that characterize the knowledges of the subjugated.

The key moment in a scientific project, then, becomes that in which science opens up a multitude of explanations, demonstrates not only what is but what is continually coming to be. Perhaps. I'll be honest - that second sentence eludes me, so I'll settle with a small comment: Cacophonous, literally defined, means Ill-sounding, having a harsh or unpleasant sound. To summon up cacophonous visions is something of a contradiction. I'm reminded of this only because I remember Denis making that point in seminar to a colleague of mine, who was a bit nonplussed. Does Haraway know that? She might, suggesting that one might read this as a rhetorical demonstration of precisely the partial and paradoxical projects she's arguing for.

(For a first response to Haraway, see here)

Thoughts on Palestine

2009-03-16T00:33:00.000+02:00

Via strange maps (and there by way of Guerre ou Paix), another look at Palestine:

They write:

This map excerpt of the environs of Jerusalem is strangely reminiscent of this one, showing Belgium partially submerged along ethnic lines. Both maps solve the seemingly intractible disputes inherent in their human geography by flooding out the “other”.
The full map is entitled Un monde à l’envers (’An Inverted World’) and can be found on page 129 of the 2009 edition of the Atlas du Monde diplomatique. It imagines the Palestinian areas, divided and separated by Israeli settlements, checkpoints and barriers, as an actual archipelago.

The excerpt shows Bethlehem as a coastal town on Holy Island, connected by ferry to Ar-Ram and Ramallah to the north, across the Jerusalem Canal. Other marine features on this map are Cape Elzariya and Cape Dibwan, the Ramalliot Archipelago and the Western Ramalliot Islands (both named, presumably, after Ramallah).

If recent thinking has been about Heidegger and the question of the limit in this articulation of what it means to be "human", this map might be read as another way of thinking about limits, about territory. It's also a remarkable demonstration of the tremendous rhetorical power of maps. To quote John Pickles roughly, maps precede territory, they precede an experience of it. What would it do to our understandings of the question of Palestine if nightly news reports used this map all the time instead of the normal map where Israel is shown beside its Occupied Territories?

Heidegger and the Post-Local

2009-03-13T06:50:00.000+02:00

Because writing here is a brilliant way to spend the last week of the quarter. But it's evening here and I've already resigned myself to not doing much of anything else, so I might as well take a moment to riff off of Jenny's most recent adventure (and if you stumble here from elsewhere and haven't read what she writes, please do) on the interwebs. She writes:

But I’m also interested in what life is like post-local, given that the “local” has been co-opted by the food authorities as a stand-in for the benevolent eating life, and is on its way to being applaud-worthy national rhetoric. But can we find a way to act globally in our local economies, and should we? Is there a benevolent global here in my neighborhood that doesn’t recall the particulate matter from China, that we don’t necessarily feel we have to resist with our proudly-purchased local roots and fruits?

It's a great question, and it makes me think of an answer to a question that I asked in class today. The speaker - while not really answering the question I had asked in the first place - said something to the effect of, "Well, our limits of what it means to be human are constantly shifting." Good point, and clear enough in its way, but that got me thinking of an enigmatic phrase in Heidegger's 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking'. There, Heidegger tries to articulate a notion of the horizon as that moment - that limit - from which a thing begins its presencing. The formulation has always struck me as an opaque one, but I think today's discussion actually helped me to clarify my thinking a little.

We define what it means to be human by drawing boundaries. Or, to put it in a more limited sense, I define what it means for me to be human by drawing boundaries in my own life. These might be moral boundaries - don't steal candy from babies, for example - or emotional boundaries - I love my parents - or political boundaries. The point it is that I construct a sense of who I am by articulating a sense of where I end, and it is precisely through that articulation of where I end (and not simply in a physical sense but also in an emotional, a philosophical, a social, what have you) that I distinguish between what is internal (and subjective) and what is external (objective, in and of the world).

I'm likely misreading Heidegger here, but Jenny's question about what it means to be local is a good one; more than that, it's an urgent one. What does it mean when we claim that we eat local? Sure, there are any number of benefits to eating local, but Jenny's question also makes me wonder about who gets left out. The answer - and I don't think this is Jenny's answer - one might offer is that cultivating an attachment to eating local could lend itself to the cultivation of a particularly parochial mindset, a way of interpreting the world through this lens of here/there, local/global, the good that is right here and the Other somewhere out there.

Nothing I have much of an answer for, but it's worth thinking about.

Like Writing Fresh-Painted Sentences

2009-03-10T15:00:00.000+02:00

I think it was Jordan who wrote to me a couple of weeks back and asked me if I'd read anything on John Updike passing away. I wrote back something to the effect of, No, never been much interested in him, plus there was the David Foster Wallace piece on Updike et al. that sank whatever interest I might have had in the man.

Snide response aside, I might be coming around, or at least learning something from Updike by way of the New Yorker. My mom passes her old copies down like so many second-hand shirts, and I thumb through them at spare moments during the day. Last night I happened to skim through Adam Gopnik's and Roger Angell's obituaries for Updike (Gopnik and Angell) and was struck. By what, precisely, I can't say, because on returning to the interwebs today, I couldn't pin down what exactly it was that touched a chord.

Gopnik writes of Updike:

Comedy was his default mode, though, and comedy is made of realism alloyed with love. A note of happiness rings through Updike’s prose, and draws us to it, makes us happy when we read it. It is not a fatuous happiness, or a happiness unaware of death (a preoccupation with death and dying was a steady feature of his work), but neither does it cede too much to mere mortality. One has a sense of someone who—as much as, though with more wit than, Andy Warhol—has spent a good deal of his life liking things. Women’s clothes, their hair, the hybridization of American accents; the way that the hyper-cold of the airline baggage compartment can be felt like a secret in the bag as you unpack—all these images and moments, recalled at random from his work, are not just reported but quietly rhapsodized, registered with love. It is his affections that rise, and that we recall.

Angell adds this:

Updike’s sentences are fresh-painted. In all his writing, critical or fictional or reportorial, he is a fabulous noticer and expander; he’s invented HD. So armed, he felt free from the start to take up and engage with all that lay within the range of his attention and put it down on paper. He had never to my knowledge written about sports when, on a morning in late September, 1960, he was stood up by a woman in Boston with whom he had an assignation and instead went to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox, in the final home game of Ted Williams’s career.

To write fresh-painted sentences. I think that might have been it that stuck out to me last night, but something also in Updike's affections for the world, for its joys and beauties. And while my life has not lacked for affections recently, I feel that my writing has lost a kind of vivid quality (if it had it to begin), a sense of being new on the tongue, in the mouth, at the fingers.

Not a new ethic by any means, but a helpful reminder about writing: The easy joy it can bring, easy not in the sense of coming without effort but in a different sense that the OED suggests: "Free from embarrassment or awkwardness". We'll see.