building the civic ‘net'

Small plug. Given the fact that so many local newspapers are closing in the greater Detroit area, SA just started an initiative called “Building the Civic ‘Net”. The idea is to disperse small grants to encourage civic, cultural and educational institutions (as well as individuals) to develop online information resources that strengthen their local communities. For more information, take a peek at the Village Square blog.

"GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning."

LC sent me a link to this op-ed about the future of higher ed written by Mark Taylor of Columbia's religion dept.: End of the University as We Know It. It contains the usual depressing stuff, along with some rather bizarre insights about how to "fix" academia. (I want to join a "water" department myself...) The bit that I suspect will stay with me the longest is the opening line: "GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning." arrgh.

(By the way, I snagged these images of the abandonned Detroit railway station from Artificial Owl. For more pictures of this melancholy building, click over to their site.) I think that WG Seblad would have found this "city" rather compelling...

gardener

I am not as well-versed in the Bible as I should be, given my interest in literary studies. However, at Easter service on Sunday, the minister spoke a bit about a passage in John, chapter 20, in which Mary mistakes the reincarnated Jesus with a gardener. Given the premise that the figure of the gardener plays a central role in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, I figured that the Biblical passage might bear a little looking into. For one thing, this is the only time that the word "gardener" appears in the entire King James Bible... and it does come up in a rather pivotal scene:

"1": The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.
"2": Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.
"3": Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre.
"4": So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.
"5": And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.
"6": Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie,
"7": And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
"8": Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.
"9": For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.
"10": Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.
"11": But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,
"12": And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.
"13": And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.
"14": And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.
"15": Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.
"16": Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.
"17": Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.
"18": Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her.
"19": Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.
"20": And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord.
"21": Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.
"22": And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:
"23": Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.
"24": But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
"25": The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
"26": And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.
"27": Then saith he to Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
"28": And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.
"29": Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
"30": And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book:
"31": But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.

A couple of things immediately strike me as interesting here:
That a figure of/for the dead came back in a form that Mary mistook for a gardener.
That those who saw this figure were able to "believe". (Doubting Thomas was not with them when Jesus came and did not believe until he saw -and touched the wounds of- the gardener).
That, despite the fact that Mary's and the disciples' belief is based on first-hand observation: the chapter ends with Jesus asserting that the truly "blessed" "are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." This seems to imply that the ability to have faith is more important than the ability to verify something based on evidence (an idea that becomes quite important for Sebald in the context of remembering the unaccounted dead.).
And, finally, that although many other signs are "not written in this book", this particular story is written so that the reader will "believe" and "have life through his name". (The fluidity of naming becomes very important in Sebald's work as well.) And yet, while John's section of the new testament opens with a promise of linguistic certainty: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", Sebald's "word" or words expose layers of indeterminancy. Rather than inspire faith, they inspire radical doubt. When the narrator of The Rings of Saturn encounters various "gardeners" in the work, the process of seeing, touching, and gathering other forms of evidence only fosters their disbelief. The Rings of Saturn is less a book for the blessed than for those tormented by the weight, violence, and incomprehensibility of human history.

cognitive dissonance: not acla 2009

By contrast to my last post about acla 2009, I'm going to list two other events that I attended last week in the interest of keeping things surreal:

The Boca Grande Woman's Club Dog Show
Events: 1, Puppy Class; 2, Costumes; 3, Tricks; 4, Sporting Breeds; 5, Terrier; 6, Toy; 7, Combination Group; 8, Non-Sporting; 9, Musical Chairs; and (of course) 10, Owner-Dog Look Alike

I'm filing this posting under "lost" because somewhere between Providence and Ft. Meyers, my plane splintered in midair landing me in an alternate section of the time-space continuum. This was confirmed by my appearance (no one was more surprised than I) at yet another event The 17th Annual Hank Wright Auction to benefit the Boca Grande Health Clinic Foundation, Inc.. Here is one of the "items" for bid at said live auction:

"RUN FOR THE ROSES. Better shop for that special hat because it is de rigueur at the Kentucky Derby. W- and S- F- will host 4 most fortunate winners for a weekend to remember in Kentucky. Arrive in Lexington on Friday, May 1st in time for a tour of Lane's End where you will view man yof hte greatest stallions, mares and foals in America. Join the F-s and other guests for Derby Even Dinner at the Lane's End residence. On Saturday you will depart late morning from your provided accommodations for Churchill Downs where you will enjoy lunch, and be seated in a box on the finish line for an afternoon of supurb racing culminating with the running of the 135th Kentucky Derby. Minumum bid $20,000.00"

Damn, those F-s make things happen.

As a flutter of outrageously well-preserved sectagenarian hands sprang into action (the final bid was 25K), it became painfully clear to me that I was hearing another "global language" spoken in the context of a rather foreign (and very unusual) local culture. Yet through it all, I felt like Hurley in the waterfall... wearing decidedly the wrong shoes and dreaming of Kafka.

acla 09: global languages, local cultures

I had a great time at the ACLA last week. I went to the conference a bit preoccupied with my presentation (until it happened) but I still managed to soak up a lot of other good stuff. Here's a basic record of the events that I attended, probably more as my own memory aid than anything else. Still, read on if you are even faintly interested:

Thursday 3/26
4:00pm Registration: Emerson Hall foyer Brief chat with Damrosch, who happened to be working the "M" table. Learned that he is staying at Harvard for another 2 years
4:30ishpm Coop Grabbed some nonrawfish sushi at a Cambridge deli and browsed the Coop bookstore. Picked up James Wood's The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Woolf's Women and Writing, and Robbins' The Servant's Hand (which I never managed to read).
6:00 - 9:00pm Reception: Queen’s Head Pub, Memorial Hall I walked over with two lovely woman: Esther Peeren, from U of Amsterdam and Kirsten Strom, who teaches in Grand Rapids. At the event I briefly said hi to Joey Slaughter and met his partner, who teaches at U of Michigan. (I'm noting these names here for future reference,. How very Clintonian of me?). DD gave a welcome speech. The weekend was like attending his wedding. Everywhere he went, people stood up, he made a little toast, and clapping happened. Made me happy.
Friday 3/27
8:30 - 10:30 Seminar Stream A: My panel (The Cartographic Necessity of Exile) Karen Bishop did a great job organizing this panel. Heard the following talks: Randall J. Pogorzelski, UC Irvine:“Asia Media Patriae: The Exile’s Map in Lucan’s Bellum Civile”; Caroline M. Eades, U of Maryland: “Mapping the Return Home: From Homer’s Odyssey to Angelopoulos’ ‘Ulysses’”; and Nathan C. Henne, Loyola U New Orleans: “Where/Who am I? Mapping K’iche’ Textual Systems in Exile”.
Random take-away thoughts:
From Randall's talk: the idea of mapping as identifying where one is "not".
From Caroline's talk: the idea that the areas of the brain devoted to memory overlaps with areas in the brain that chart fictional relations; the contrast between American and European notions of exile (American myth shows no desire to return home, while in the European version, the idea of a return becomes part of a narrative tradition); the idea of being an "internal exile"; the relation between storytelling and path-finding (in The Odyssey, the story is only told and the map is only made once Ulysses arrives home); The Odyssey as filled with moments of potential forgetting... forgetting is the real human condition of being lost; the idea that "home" is "an imaginary thing that motivates one to organize memory into a map"; and the idea that the return home is a return to where maps are not needed anymore (yet, why is the homeland the place where, ultimately, Ulysses' story becomes fashioned into narrative?)
From Nathan's talk: idea that space is contingent on the position of the individual, that mapping itself is a literary act
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break in Barker
11:00 - 1:00 Seminar Stream B: The Headliner Panel... Led by Damrosch and featuring my grad school peer Jason Heard the following talks: David Damrosch, Harvard U, “Comparing World Literatures”; Jason Frydman, Brooklyn College, “World Literature and the African Diaspora”; Mariano Siskind, Harvard U, “The Globalization of García Márquez and Magical Realism: Towards a Historical Approach to World Literary Formations”;Djelal Kadir, Pennsylvania State U, “Old World, New World, Next World”
The room was packed and I was a bit too awestruck to take notes. DD was his clear, profound, charming self- absolutely in his element- and JF blew me away with the clarity and relevance of his presentation -quite humbling, actually.
1:00 - 2:30 ACLA Business Meeting: Memorial Hall Ate with a bunch of graduate students from Harvard who were working with Damrosch and helping with all the events. I wish I could remember all of their names. DD made a speech (again)
2:30 - 4:30 Seminar Stream C I had intended to hear Helane Levine-Keating's talk on “W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz: Nostalgia and Homecoming after the Holocaust” but I was a bit too tired. Instead I worked on editing my paper for the following morning.
4:30 - 5:00 Coffee breaks: Sever, then picked up my mother at the Queen’s Head Pub
5:00 - 6:30 Plenary Panel: Writing Locally in Global Languages Gish Jen and Elias Khouri: Sanders Theater, Memorial Hall Damrosch moderated this event. It was mind-blowing. I want Gish Jen to be my adopted aunt (Mona in the Promised Land is a hoot). Khouri is a very serious figure, but I suspect a wonderful writer. I'll have to try his novels when I have a bit more time.
6:30 Dinner We ate near a kind of modernist garden in a restaurant connected to a hotel. I wish I could remember the name. There were 9 gorgeous quilts hanging in a stairwell lobby.

Saturday 3/28
8:30 - 10:30 Seminar Stream A: My panel Heard the following talks: Lorena Cuya Gavilano, Penn State, “Multiple Exiles and the Impossibility of the Exile in Luis Sepulveda’s The Old Man who Reads Love Stories”; Elizabeth A. McArthur, Columbia U, “Mapping the Sinkholes and Caves of Global History: The Exile’s Narrative in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn”; Stephanie Maureen Lin, Harvard U, “Le voyageur avec bagage: Dai Sijie and Andrei Makine as Cartographers for a Global Age”; Rosemary Alison Peters, Louisiana State U, “The Empire Raps Back: The Canon, the Map, and the Flat Screen”
Random take-away thoughts:
From Lorena's talk: an unimaginable Venice (contrary to Calvino's always imagined city); Sepulveda as creating a space in which language does not offer a potential place for the exile, where the "impossibility of imagining other spaces is the impossibility of imagining literary spaces that are out of sight", the possibility that the condition of exile can not be mollified by reading in this text; a world in which there is no "literary compensation"
Related to my talk: expand the connection between gardening and mapping; explore the idea of the book's "legend" (is there a legend? is there an anti-legend? etc.)
From Stephanie's talk: Orhan Pamuk's Nobel prize acceptance speech; suitcases as repositories of identity; polyphonic novels; distinction between "migrant" writers and "exiles"; 4-dimensional mapping; a reminder of Four Quartets: "we shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time"
From Rosemary's talk: my first exposure to the French rappers Melanie Gargiades (Diams) and Nadir Kouiori (Ridan)
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee breaks: Sever
11:00 - 1:00 Seminar Stream B: Images of Order: Catalogs, Maps, Archives Heard the following talks: Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Harvard U, “Damage Control: Cartography and Contingency in Jomini, Clausewitz, Stendhal”; Cóilín Parsons, Columbia U, “‘A Full-face Portrait of the Land’: Ruins and the Archive in Irish Maps”
From Anders' talk: the link between warfare, triangulation, and cartography; prior to 18th century integration of tringulation into cartography, distances were measured by the time that a journey took; triangles provided graphic proof that maps were accurate; 1790s on- militaries race to make maps... "power over space becomes power in space"; maps as offering a way to visualize time; William James on classification: "... a monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the absolute loss and casting out of real matter. Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose. Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments"
From Cóilín's talk: 19th century maps of Ireland were intended to give a graphic account of land value however 6" to the mile was not enough detail for urban areas and too much for rural areas. The scale led to an investigation of Ireland in great depth-- linguistic, cultural, etc... result was an excess of information; the map can "depict topographical causes of military strife"; it can also "capture an anterior past by showing features that are no longer visible"-- all in all a very interesting and impressive talk by Cóilín. So glad he got such a cool job next year in South Africa...
11:00 - 12:00 Coop bookstore Bought a new copy of Mona in the Promised Land, Elias Khouri's Yalo, and Orhan Pamuk's Snow

1:00 Lunch Asian place in Cambridge, followed by a visit with the rest of my panel. Karen asked if I might prepare a version of my talk for a book that she is editing. Could be great. Hippy folk music in a park after. Then a walk towards the Law School to pick up my cousin's car and drive back to the hotel and on to Rhode Island with so much wonderfulness floating in my tiny brain that it felt as if it might explode. This was a good one.

I hope I can go to ACLA again next year (when it is in New Orleans). If anyone wants to co-propose a panel, send me an email...

the mongoose

Alvin turned me on to thedebate between Walcott and Naipaul at last year's Calabash Literary Festival. At the festival, Walcott presented his poem "The Mongoose". Here is a bit that has been lifted from Open Source. The spite here disappoints me- and makes me feel far less inclined to praise Omeros than I have done in earlier posts. It also gets me thinking about Woolf's thoughts on anger and writing-- something useful, I suppose, always to keep in mind:


In short, all this anger makes Walcott look weak to me-- like a tired old man grasping to make himself feel like he is still relevant. It would be much better if he would just let his beautiful old works simply speak for themselves.

picking up pieces

I have finished writing my ACLA talk and now I am reworking the larger Sebald chapter. It feels good to get something done and I'm excited to go to Boston this week and to get some intellectual stimulation Harvard-style. I have also reorganized a section of our apartment into a place where I feel that I can work. This was long overdue, especially since I equate controlling my workspace with controlling my academic production.

What else? I'm on week 23 of "that baby-growing thing". I haven't really mentioned this online before now, partly because the first stages of the process hadn't been particularly fun and I am deeply ashamed that I lost so much of this school year to various forms of illness. Between tearing my meniscus (and having a portion of it "flip" inside my knee cap) on Labor Day, having surgery, being bed-bound for a few weeks, and then doing 2 hours of rehab 3 days a week (coupled with a swimming regime) -and- having the kind of first-trimester wherein I could barely keep hydrated and barfed several times a day (not to mention an enormous scare at week 20 and an emergency amnio), I had very little energy for the dissertation. This was not helped by certain "fluctuations" in the economic climate (don't need to state the obvious here) or by the fact that every time I tried to grab my work reigns and reached out to a particular advisor (with a draft or just for advice), I was bitch-slapped so hard that my eyes watered--even over things as banal as whether the schedule I had made for myself was reasonable. "Schedules are from Mars," he said dismissively. This is a direct quote. Nothing like the unqualified support of a good teacher. No need to dwell on the past, though. I think the ACLA talk is pretty good and feel settled enough to work on the Sebald chapter rewrite. I need to take advantage of this small window of academic energy for as long as possible.

There has also been some good news along the way. Last week when I was in New York, I me with the GSAS associate dean who helped me "stop the clock" and also avoid paying for "sequential registration" next fall. Yea, maternity leave. I didn't quite make back the $1465, but at least I avoided having to pay it again during a time in which I will have no income. The dean also helped me switch my current enrollment status from part-time to full-time. This means that I have a bit more time before my student loans are due (this semester, plus an additional 6 months of deferment period). This is a big load off my mind. The other great thing that happened in New York was that I got to spend time with people who matter to me, who support my work goals, and who make me feel not-so-terrible about being pregnant. Here are a few of the people (or their initials at least) that I need to say thank you to, listed in order of appearance: AR; JS; JA; JW; STK; KL; HG; JB; FP; AH; LH; LW; AK-R; MD; LC; TO; and J, F, C, Y & Y McA. Wow. That was a lot of face-time for such a short visit to the area!

So back to editing (lonely, but necessary). Here's hoping something good comes from the next week's work.

coda: mini brainwave soundtrack
"Falling Slowly" Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová:
... take this sinking boat / and point it home we've still got time / raise your hopeful voice you have a choice / you make it now