The day after the previous post, thanks to a long barefoot walk and run along the North Sea coast, I tore a muscle and tendon in my left calf.  "It will get better in about two months," the Dutch physiotherapist accurately predicted. "Just one thing: don't get fat.  Your calf has enough to worry about."
Sadly, a season of immobility -- even when one writes at a standing desk, as I must now do, by doctor's orders -- means gaining a couple of pounds is inevitable.  On the benefits side, I didn't have the gym or the prospect of climbing my beloved White Mountains peaks to distract me from writing and reading, so while I've been working hard I've also indulged myself without stint in novels, poetry, and one or two works of non-fiction.

In the last category falls C. V. Wedgwood's epic monograph The Thirty Years War.  In a few months I may not remember the particulars.  I'm already grabbing futilely at fading memories -- who ended up with the Palatine Electorate, which margraviates and landgraviates were Calvinist and which Lutheran, why exactly the Swedes didn't return to Sweden after the death of Gustavus Adophus.  What will stay with me are the characters who willfully mis-ran the war year after year, an all too believable assembly in our age of outright conflicts and simmering unofficial hatreds, from Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, the two Sudans, Congo, Mali, the southwestern United States and Mexico.  The vacillations of John George of Saxony, the uncertain leadership and self-destructive greed of Maximilian of Bavaria, the emperor Frederick's self-deceptive vision of a wholly Catholic Germany, the stubbornness that led to the Czech warlord Wallenstein's assassination by order of his own imperial patron, the mercenaries who sold their armies from prince to prince, Richelieu's devious diplomacy -- so devious it blew back on him, and on France, more than once.  Below all these lie the peasants whose misery can only be guessed at.
Wedgwood has an eye for the awful unforgettable detail -- the burgher who, when seeking justice for his daughter, raped and murdered by occupying forces, was informed by the local commander that had she not been so niggardly with her virginity, she might still be alive; the city councilman who scrawled a desperate prayer on the back of an imperial command to feed and quarter troops, "Lord Jesus and Mary help us."  
It was a war so obscure that even the treaty conference at Westphalia asked for a special meeting to decide on the reasons it was being fought -- over a year after the conference began, and four long years before the fighting finally ended.  Recommended reading for anyone insisting that Islam is a specially murderous religion or that only Muslims try to convert people at swordpoint.  

In sum: I'm gradually recalling the world and my obligations to it.  More soon on why my passion for genre fiction might be related to my love of classical texts, and my fortuitous encounter with a Carl Andre sculpture in a Franconia vacant lot.
 

Surprised by Ernst

I dislike Max Ernst's works more often than not, but Ernst surprised me the other day at what has become my favorite museum in the Netherlands, and one of my favorite museums in the world, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, or the Municipal Museum of the Hague.   More on the building later.   The picture is called "The Entire City," and its technique (frottage) involves scraping away layers to reveal color beneath.  It is as good a representation of any I've seen of the plural feel of city life and the historical layers of urban history.  The thorny growths outside the city bristle threateningly but they also twirl with awkward delight, especially at the margins.  (Here the technique as it's practiced today affects my reaction to the picture, because I remember doing frottage with crayons from grade school art classes.)    

Some days I believe with Simon Critchley that philosophy begins from disappointment rather than wonder.  This is why looking at art has become so crucially important to me: it is an experience of wonder, especially when an artist surprises me, as Rembrandt did earlier this year.  Wonder matters.  

Retromania!

Today my colleague here at the NIAS, Mitja Velikonja, lent me a new book by Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past.  Its first footnote (really a marginal comment at the bottom of the page -- the NIAS' writer-in-residence has alerted me to the nuances here) is making me wonder if I could write something similar about Augustan culture, circa the year zero (a great title, by the way).   Here's the marginal comment, with my rewrite below:

THE RETROSCAPE
2000/April: The Smithsonian Institution's Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum opens >>>> 2000/May: Julien Temple's Sex Pistols doc The Film and the Fury is released, kicking off a decade-spanning trilogy of punk documentaries... >>>> 2000/June: The Experience Music Project, a huge rock 'n' pop museum founded by billionaire infotech mogul Paul Allen, opens in Seattle >>>>> 2001/July: Garage-rock revivalists The White Stripes release their commercial breakthrough album White Blood Cells to huge acclaim >>>>  etc etc
The note runs along the bottom of the book's first fifteen pages.  

So:
THE RETROSCAPE:
39/April (let me make up the months): Gaius Asinius Pollio's Great Writers of the Past public library opens >>>>> 37/October: Vergil's ten Eclogues, adaptations of Theocritus' third century Bucolica are released, kicking off a short-term fashion of ten-poem poetry collections and a longer trend in bucolic songs... >>>>> 24/May: The Experience Hellenistic-Persian Gardens Project, a huge music 'n' art complex founded by billionaire banker Maecenas, opens in Rome >>>>>>  23/November: Lyric-elegy revivalist Horace releases his commercial breakthrough collection Odes to huge acclaim >>>>>> etc etc
Classicist readers may supply their own notes on Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Valerius Maximus, Livy (perhaps the Retromaniac par excellence) and others as they please.  

Happily at work:

Back

Delays in posting happen.  Why?  In my case, I agreed to serve as dean of humanities at NYU starting in September, which has already led to a surprise extra trip back to New York and a good deal of time on skype, phone and email learning the ropes.  I've experienced the rapture of art by Mondrian, Calder (heart-lifting wire sculptures and miniature-circus films), and Sol LeWitt at the marvelously refreshing Gemeentemuseum in the Hague.   LeWitt's slabs of bright color on the wall slammed me back into my body after a couple of days I'd spent floating in thought -- the best path back to the world after burying yourself in writing that I know of.  Then after those blasts of color, Mondrian's wonderfully meticulous designs that somehow give the impression of being both careful and carefree.  I'm participating in a series of conferences, most recently on Dionysius of Halicarnassus at Leiden University, admirably organized by Casper de Jonge.  My nights and a few very early mornings have been absorbed in novel-reading -- Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, H. F. M. Prescott's Man on a Donkey, and now Laurent Binet's brilliant HHhH (the perfect book to read while you're writing your own: hardworking authors take note!).  And drawn by provocative parallel lines of thinking in Axel Honneth, David Velleman, Cicero, Horace, Paul Allen Miller, Judith Butler and Simon Critchley -- the kind of crazily heterogeneous yet utterly sensible reading list I most love to build up -- I've dipped into Levinas.  From there it's impossible to resist following a few smoke-puffs of thought that relate to my next hoped-for project on ethics and literature:

The proximity of things is poetry; in themselves the things are revealed before being approached. In stroking an animal already the hide hardens in the skin. But over the hands that have touched things, places trampled by beings, the things they have held, the images of those things, the fragments of those things, the contexts in which those fragments enter, the inflexions of the voice and the words that are articulated in them, the ever sensible signs of language, the letters traced, the vestiges, the relics—over all things, beginning with the human face and skin, tenderness spreads. Cognition turns into proximity, into the purely sensible (Collected Philosophical Papers, 118-119).

Strange new design

Just wrote a long post that somehow disappeared into the ether!  Blogger has a new posting design that, clearly, I need to spend some time figuring out.  Alas.

Short version: 1) I gave a bunch of lectures this month, and had the privilege of hearing thought-provoking presentations by Ineke Sluiter (rumor, gossip, and theory of mind in Greek epic and tragedy) and Tazuko van Berkel (how economic concepts like exchange colonize and trouble representations of friendship and other human relations in classical Athenian drama and philosophy) here at the NIAS on Friday.

2) Go read John Williams' Butcher's Crossing, a mid-20th century Western about an 1870s Harvard student who heads to western Kansas to join a buffalo hunt.   I was turned on to Williams by Michèle Lowrie, who recommended his epistolary novel Augustus.  That was perfectly good, but the Western is more to my taste these days (I've been hoovering up Elmore Leonard short stories late at night lately, e.g., "The 3.10 to Yuma").  I'll save Williams' semi-autobiographical novel Stoner for another day: college novels (with the striking exception of Amis' brilliant and hilarious Lucky Jim) rarely hold my attention for long -- or if they do, I can't escape the feeling that the pleasure is just omphaloskepsis.

At a recent dinner a fellow classicist/hiker made me reconsider the joys of bushwhacking.  I tend to aim for a telos when I hit the countryside, evidence of which is that my partner and I are gradually knocking off all 48 of New Hampshire's 4000-footers.  But his inspired Thoreauian descriptions of what it's possible to see, hear, and smell while off-trail -- animals, animal sounds and traces, tiny flowers, mushroom patches, the deepest of mosses, trickles of water too small to call a stream -- resonate with the rich descriptions of the Kansas plains and Colorado mountains in Butcher's Crossing.  You can read the novel as a psychological study of postbellum (and contemporary) youthful malaise, and it surely is that, but its pictures of nature also tap into the woe of the taming of the American West.

 

O tempora, o mores!

The Republican presidential candidates' rhetoric reminds me of Frederick Dolan's insights in his Allegories of America, where he represents American politics as "entirely given over to phantasms and simulacra but whose actors are driven by the need to reduce the interpretive ambiguity of their world to the reassuring forms of a metaphysical allegory." 


It also recalls Bonnie Honig's dry comment in her brilliant book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics: "The perpetuity of contest is not easy to celebrate." 


No wonder I'm finding it easier these days to read political theory, novels, poetry, and art criticism: all grist for the mental mill -- to quote Pierre Rosanvallon in Democracy Past and Future, literature and poetry open us up the the presence of the world by the devices of language; art surveys the ambiguity and clears the silence of language; it remains open to the contradictions of the world and never allows concepts to exhaust the density of the real.  


Now back to figuring out Nadia Urbinati's concept of representativity.  

Aesthetic judgment and moral judgment

Anyway, the sheer pleasure I take in art is only part of its fascination for me.  I am also intrigued by the connections between aesthetic judgment, or taste, and moral and political judgment (for me these latter two are closely aligned: like John Dewey, I divide up judgments into private and public ones, and the latter are political).  Hannah Arendt makes a move that never ceases to shock me, first because it's so radical as a way to think about Kantian thought, but second because it's so familiar: it's a classical move.  (I want to specify "Roman," because the automatic connection might appear to be a Greek one, since "to kalon" means "good, noble, beautiful"; I do think it is a move associated more profoundly with Roman than Greek concerns, but that's a separate point, so I'll go with "classical.")

Arendt notes in her lecture series "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" that Kant analyzed aesthetic experience in terms of judgment -- and only aesthetics, as opposed to morality, because "it seems to him that only in this field [aesthetics] do we judge without having general rules which are either demonstrably true or self-evident to go by."  Then the kicker, in the next sentence: "If therefore I shall now use his results for the field of morality, I assume that the field of human intercourse and conduct and the phenomena we confront in it are somehow of the same nature."

How does Arendt justify her application of Kant's work on taste to moral judgment?  Because she believes the fundamental element of the human condition is plurality.  You are not I, I am not you, I am not the person down the hall, but we co-exist.  And only in the case of aesthetic judgment, she points out, did Kant "consider men in the plural, as living in a community."  It follows that it will be worthwhile to reflect on the experience of why we find a particular painting beautiful, because it turns out that this kind of judgment is a common-sense one, in that it occurs not strictly within the self alone, but in the imagined company of others, starting with the internal conversations we hold with ourselves.  So with moral judgment.  The people who refused to go along with the Nazis explained their choice as deriving not from any sense of moral law, but from their sense of intense internal disharmony at the prospect of giving in and going along.  They had the ingrained habit of living with themselves, that is, they had the habit of judging and testing their judgments within themselves (and perhaps some friends or family members).  When they found they faced acting in a way that they couldn't account for in the common-sense company of themselves, they had to resist.

The promise that her writing holds out is reflected, for me, in the best writing about paintings (and perhaps music, though I don't know that field at all).  This writing draws my attention to the way the world (even in the form of abstract drips or blotches) presents itself to me, how I experience what I call "harmony" and "balance" and "inconcinnity" and "chaos."  The experience of close looking drives me into myself and also to the person next to me in the gallery, whose reactions I'm curious about.  It focuses me on the grain of the everyday, and from time to time, I feel deep down in my gut that I am seeing the everyday in a different way than before -- because of that Sanraedam, that Motherwell, that Bronzino.  Am I better?  No.  More thoughtful?  Yes.  More open to the lived experience of the world?  Yes.  Alive to the judgment of others experiencing the same?  Yes.  More attuned to injustice?  Well...perhaps.  

Obviously the habit of aesthetic judgment as Arendt describes it isn't the whole picture (no pun intended).  Hang out with a bunch of artists or art historians, it's no moral utopia.  But I think of her reference to Cicero's comment that at the end of the day, put Protagoras against Plato, and he would rather be wrong with Plato, the question is, whom we wish to be together with: "our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company."  The problem is what to do with those people who'd rather have a beer with George W. -- or these days, a glass of milk with Rick Santorum.    

Art, taste, pleasure

I've mentioned my interest in aesthetic judgment before.  Part of it arises from pure pleasure in looking at art.  I've met perhaps ten people in as many years who tell me that they just don't understand art, or they don't like it (one of them, as I will never forget, in the middle of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, steps away from Titians and a Bronzino that take your breath away).  It's difficult to know what to say to these people, except "why?" but to that question I've rarely got a good answer.  The man in the Pitti was depressingly typical in his struggle to reply.  "It's boring," he stammered, "I feel like there's too much to know...really, the paintings all look the same."

As someone who, until well into her twenties, had virtually no knowledge of classical music except the few pieces I practiced on the piano or that my mother played on records when I was young (Smetana's "Moldau" stands out in my memory: why that piece, I wonder?), I can easily remember the bewilderment and boredom I felt in my first few classical concerts.  Even Verdi's "Otello," my first opera, which I attended at the age of seventeen because my residential college was giving out free tickets, left me impressed by its Zeffirelli grandiosity but mostly unmoved by the music.  The few moments that struck me as genuinely beautiful, where I glimpsed a flash of how a person might come to love this artform, were drowned out by long stretches where singers sang, sets moved, and I waited for the show to end.  But it never crossed my mind to say "I don't like music," or "Music is boring."  So the experience of ignorant confusion doesn't help me understand the people who dislike art, and if anything, since I've long moved on, it makes me more impatient with them -- though I suppose it's inappropriate to feel impatience with people suffering from what I can't help calling a disability.

Art criticism and its surprising delights

One of my deep if unsecret vices is reading art history and art criticism, especially of a philosophical bent -- Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Yve-Alain Bois, Arthur Danto, Timothy Clark.  It's a true vice, because what fascinates me about it has just enough of a connection to my professional interests that I can all too easily convince myself that a day spent reading this stuff is essentially a day spent working.

The best critics have a way of working from close descriptions of paint and canvas, line and color, that causes you to see things in paintings and to think thoughts about paintings that you would never otherwise have done.  This may sound like a banal thing to say, but their capacities of detailed description need to be read to be believed: from the thick impasto of details arise audacious insights.  They inspire me to read the Roman authors I'm working with now, mainly Sallust and Horace, with greater care for small effects and the larger trains of thought that these effects generate.

Take Clark on Cézanne's Bathers at Rest: "Never, for a start, has a picture declared itself so openly -- so awkwardly -- as made out of separate, overdetermined parts coexisting only on sufferance.  The paint is piled up and up around the contours of the bather in the center, or the one lying on the ground, or the smaller one at rear staring off into the landscape, and the build-up in each case seems intended to effect some final disengagement of figure from ground -- some absolute, and no doubt absurd, isolation of the body not just from the others next to it but from anything else.  Even from light (which snaps at the heels of the figure in the background like an ineffectual shark).  The picture is paratactic... Even the clouds seem to participate in the general dementia.  They peer down on the poor bathers' doings with shocked solicitude, inquisitive despite themselves, like the gods in Homer."

Having read Clark -- clouds peering down like Homeric divinities! -- I can't help but see this picture as a time-lapse portrait of Odysseus cleaning up on Phaeacia, Nausicaa's island.  More seriously, I see a personalization of nature that gives the painting a manic tone, both anthropocentric (the trees and clouds bend themselves around man) and alienating (as in a de Chirico cityscape, man seems fundamentally out of place).  I find Cézanne difficult to think about and Clark's close-to-offhand comment brightens and energizes my thoughts, like the triangle of sunlight nipping at the heels of the bather in the back.

Another more surprising pleasure involved in reading about art is the sheer delight the writers take in reading, not the work of other art critics but poetry, film criticism, novels, philosophy, musicology, histories, you name it.  If you have to guess the academic field where you're most likely to meet Pollock, Gramsci, Pound, Levi, Beckett, and Pasolini on the same page, it's this kind of writing.  These names appear on p 407 of Timothy Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.  And here's the real point of this post, with apologies for the delay and the awkward translation.  It's a poem about the poor, the left-wing dream or fantasy of the masses' possession of political power, the terror of the knowledge that history in the progressive sense has vanished and along with it, perhaps, the hopes of the left.  

from Pasolini's The Ashes of Gramsci (1954)

eccoli, miseri, la sera: e potente
in essi, inermi, per essi, il mito
rinasce... Ma io, con il cuore cosciente

di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita,
potrò mai più con pura passione operare,
se so che la nostra storia è finita?

(Look, the wretched ones, at dusk. And powerful
in them, defenseless as they are, through them, the myth
is reborn.  But I, with the knowing heart

of one who can live only in history,
shall I ever again be able to work with pure passion,
when I know that history is finished?)

Erotic panegyric

Statius is a Roman poet who wrote several fascinating panegyrics of the Roman emperor Domitian.  The one I know best opens a collection of poems called Silvae, occasional pieces Statius wrote for patrons and friends.  Dedicated to praising an enormous new equestrian sculpture of the emperor, it sews references to the statue's enormous, almost monstrous, size together with admiring commentary on the gentle grace of Domitian's expression and gesture.  The effect is sensual, slightly comical, and (for a poem about an autocrat) oddly humanizing.  

I thought of Silvae 1.1 when I read this erotic panegyric by Jonathan Galassi on the plane to Amsterdam last month. It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title "Tom in Rome." Its tone of rueful infatuation rings truer than most. 


Bolder than Antonio Canova
outdoing the Apollo Belvedere,
you demolish every Red Guide reader’s
half-baked callow notion of an
adequate response to what we see:
forensically investigating Daphne,
how she limb by limb becomes a tree,
you scant the art, stern sage who’s always known
what matters in a figure is the stone.

You are toffee, you are sand in sunlight,
you are handsome, winsome, bright, and lithe:
chaste Carrara, blue-veined Parian,
hand-warmed Pentelic when you buck and writhe
more contorted than Laocoön,
diminutive fine subtle lordship, master-
work surpassing alabaster,
as I am tufa to your travertine.

Go ahead and shame us in the Forum
with your ironic fine decorum, do:
Antinous with glasses and umbrella,
deus ex machina of the novella
whose story was that my roads led to you.

Sallust's appeal

The Roman historian Sallust never ceases to fascinate.  His tale of the north African king Jugurtha, who makes war against Rome in the late second century BCE, the Bellum Jugurthinum, constantly strays from its own narrative line and undercuts the oppositions it sets up at the start.  He cuts off thoughts before they are fully articulated, jumps forward and backward in time, and makes a show out of silencing himself ("Now I return to my story," he says more than once).   

Contrast Sallust to Walter Benjamin’s ideal storyteller, who has the ability to recount the whole life, not only of another, but of himself: he is the man who, letting his life “be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story,” becomes a sage for the multitudes.  But Sallust, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Syme, is “cut short” both in his brief careers as politician and writer and in his choice of a startlingly choppy style.  

Perhaps the strangest story in the BJ is the digression prompted by Sallust's reference to the town of Lepcis, which finds itself caught between Rome and Numidia. "Now that we've reached this region, it seems not unworthy to recall the outstanding, amazing deed of two Carthaginians," he says by way of bare introduction.  

Once upon a time, back before the last Punic War, the powerful states of Carthage and Cyrene disagreed over the exact location of the boundary between them, which lay on a totally featureless sandy plain.  After a long struggle on land and sea, the two city-states finally agree to a settlement.  Each will send out envoys from their capitals, and the border will be established on the spot where the two groups meet.  Two Carthaginians and two Cyrenians are chosen and the date of their simultaneous departure is set.  The Carthaginians make excellent time, but the Cyrenians are delayed, whether by laziness or sandstorms, Sallust says, is impossible to say.  When they finally meet well into Cyrenian-claimed territory, the Cyrenians (terrified of returning home to explain their failure) accuse the Carthaginians of cheating by leaving their capital early.  Preferring to bargain rather than go home and start the war all over again (or maybe they're suffering from guilty consciences?), the two Carthaginians demand a new agreement, so long as it's fair ("tantum modo aequam").   The cunning Greeks -- Sallust suddenly starts referring to them at this point as "Graeci" rather than "Cyrenenses" -- devise an awful choice: either the border will be set on the spot where they met, but the two Carthaginians will be buried alive there; or the Carthaginians will allow the Cyrenians to advance the line as far as they wish, with the same capital condition applying to them.  The Carthaginians accept these terms as fair, and they are buried alive (79.2-10).  The city of Carthage sets up altars in their memory on the spot.  And that is it.  Nunc ad rem redeo, Sallust says: "now I return to my story."  

What's the point of this story that literally comes out of nowhere, geographically as well as narratologically?  It exposes the mortal investment men make in political conflict; it turns conflict into a game of sorts, where virtue contends with cunning; it asks us to balance the value of lived life against eternal memory and civic greatness.  It is typically Sallustian.   

Brilliant civic vision

Rick Santorum's empty-headed comments on JFK's speech on the separation of church and state, as well as his dismissal of university education, call to mind John Adams on education:

“Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.”
That's a private letter, but in his draft of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Adams writes:
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people."

Look Homeward, Angel

Reactions to Thomas Wolfe are severely divided these days.  Elizabeth Hardwick, writing on the occasion of the centennial of his birth in 2000: "He is too much, too many rhapsodies, an inundation.  Not a man you'd want to deal with.  Drunken pages and drunken he often was as he prowled the midnight city.  And yet the mystery of the books is that they are written with a rich, fertile vocabulary, sudden, blooming images, a murderous concentration that will turn everyone he meets into words."
I have always loved Walt Whitman, who if he has written perhaps some of the worst lines of English poetry has also written some of the best.  So I'm well prepared to take on Wolfe's linguistic exuberance and fascination with his own powers of perception.  Knowing his reputation, I expected the repetitiveness, the snobbery, the offhand racism, the inconsistent characterizations masquerading as something more under a load of narrative and descriptive detail (Gant's mother Eliza suffers the most in this respect).
What I didn't expect was the bitter comic self-consciousness that expresses itself in terms of national identity.  Just two examples.  First:

Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on.  Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides in the wilderness.
       Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America -- more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly.  He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food.  He was reading of ancient sorceriers and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land?  The ghost of Hamlet's father, in Connecticut:
        '......I am thy father's spirit,
         Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
         Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.'
       He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation.  Only the earth endured -- the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets.  Only the earth endured -- this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it....  Nothing had been done in stone.  Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides.  Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
        O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own.  The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five.  Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound.  Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget.  We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough.  And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near.  And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.

Later, Wolfe describes Gant (modeled on himself): for me, a portrait of the Tea Party voter in an especially depressing election year.  Watch the movement from contentment, which first appears to excuse Gant's political ignorance and apathy, to discontent to fantasy to -- the most brilliant move -- fantasy that "found extension in reality":

Yet, Eugene was no rebel.  He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all.  He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose.  And he did not care under what form of government he lived -- Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist -- if it could assure him these things.  He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if only he could find them.  The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it.  He felt sure things would be better elsewhere.  He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
         It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it.  He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places.  He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles.

I stayed up late to finish the book, and I'm glad I did: another sleet storm hit around midnight, short but intense, just like the one that caught me today as I biked back home to the NIAS from Leiden.  On my slanted skylight window, the noise of the sleet is thunderously beautiful.  

Settled in and thinking

So what was the nature of my Rembrandt revelation?  Svetlana Alpers, in her famous book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, argued that Dutch painting should be understood as describing the world as it is seen, rather than as imitating or alluding to the world (or texts, or language, or traditions).  She put together the northern European interest in seeing the world more clearly through telescope or microscope with the close attention to detail that appears in the earliest Dutch Madonnas and landscapes, and then lets the concern with seeing guide her through the paintings.  She was able to notice new details about the experience of seeing -- how, for instance, landscape artists like Ruisdael played with the placement of the viewer.  As the viewer of a Ruisdael landscape, where exactly are you standing?  It's not clear: perhaps a neighboring hilltop?  A low-hovering helicopter?  And she puts into words the marvelous feeling that many Dutch landscapes convey, the sense that there's a world beyond the picture frame, that the frame of the painting exists almost by accident, that it doesn't act so much as a window as it does a surface.              

And with the surface is where I started to see Rembrandt afresh at the Mauritshuis.  I've never had much patience with Rembrandt's meditative studies, especially the self-portraits.  (Dramatic corporate pictures like Nightwatch captivate me.) There are too many of these studies, they seem gimmicky, they're burdened with the weight of too many pretentious scholarly claims (the invention of the individual, etc.), they often convey a sense of self-pity that gets on my nerves (though not as much as the complacency of your standard Rubens portrait).  This 1669 example above, in fact, fit all these categories, and when I first entered the room I walked by it without stopping.  I went instead toward his Homerus, kitty-corner to the self-portrait.

For many minutes (was it Robert Hughes who said you need to look at a painting for an hour to get a sense of it?) I just couldn't find my way in.  Homerus is a brown study, "rich with pathos" you might say.  I was about to give up: and then I caught something that doesn't show up on the tiny copy above, a sheen of almost sheer paint in broad vertical stripes on the right-hand side, almost invisible unless you look very closely.  I couldn't identify the color: brownish-black?  But immediately it struck me as a much subtler version of the dramatic stripy effects in Francis Bacon's Innocent X -- to the degree that I began to wonder whether Bacon's Study was as much a reaction to Rembrandt as to Velasquez.  There was something happening on that surface that, I thought, had nothing to do with the clichéd questing blind gaze of the figure.  But then (I thought in the next moment), the effect relates somehow to the subject of the painting: it's inches away, one can only ignore the figure by doing experiential violence to the work.  Perhaps simply virtuoso texture-creation?  Or something else: not the veil before the poet's blind eyes, exactly -- the near-evanescence of the effect made it impossible for me to interpret it as in representational terms -- but a gesture toward the cloudy distance that separates us from Homer, a gesture toward the impossibility of representing the distant past.
Re-energized and now curious, I turned to the self-portrait.  Again it eluded me: I felt impatient and bored.  Then I began to notice the red and ochre threads of paint in Rembrandt's grey hair--or rather, since I'd noticed them earlier, this time I started to think about them.  Ghosts of color, they rusted his head, combining with the black and grey patches in the pinkish face to create the effect of fleshy corrosion.  The theme is extended in the bloody scrapings of vermilion over the black waistcoat.  And here the astonishing mastery of paint, which never ceases to astonish, did the work stylization nearly always does: it distanced the pathos, made the painting a matter of surfaces rather than depth (the false depth that tends to self-dramatize both the subject and the viewer of the painting), re-made the work as something not to fall into but to reflect on, in the deepest sense of the word "reflect".    
I still have more to see in Rembrandt, but this was a major step.  Today I travel to the Franz Hals museum in Haarlem with the other NIAS fellows.  I hope to see more Ruisdaels and -- something I wouldn't have said before Saturday -- more Rembrandts.

Gerhard Richter

After a week of freezing cold and several inches of snow, it's raining today, and the serene view of trees outside my slanted office window, very slightly fogged from the heating unit just below it, recalls Gerhard Richter's blurred landscapes, like Troisdorf (1985):

    
I got a chance to see Vermeer's View of Delft at the Mauritshuis on Saturday, my favorite Vermeer, along with everything else in that famous collection.  It was about 22 or 24 degrees, too cold for your average tourist, I gather, because the galleries were nearly empty.
As happened to me most memorably in the MOMA Dada show, I had a revelation at the Mauritshuis, regarding Rembrandt.  More after the Five Minute Lecture downstairs.    

In the Netherlands

Blog silence is due to transition to the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, where I'm basking in the literal glow of the sun setting over the North Sea coast and the metaphorical one of having time to myself to think and write.  They look after us very well here, and my colleagues are a fascinating, friendly bunch.

SOTUS 2012

Opening: celebrating leaving Iraq, daring the Republicans not to cheer, not to call leaving Iraq a "victory."
Now there are "no Americans fighting in Iraq."  [Not in the armed forces, perhaps, but we're still indirectly paying for mercenaries there.]  "Courage, selflessness..."
Reminder a couple minutes in: Osama bin Laden is dead.
The armed forces win because they work together.  "Imagine what we could accomplish if we worked together."  [But we're not an army: we're a diverse collection of individuals, boisterously so.  Unfortunately, he'll come back to this at the end.  Ring composition.]
Education; high-tech manufacturing.  [Manufacturing?  Yep, this is a key theme of the speech.  Wonder if Obama read this terrific article in the Atlantic about the challenges of change on the manufacturing front in this country?]
Yes to energy "that we can control."
Yes to "an economy built to last."  [Unfortunate auto industry associations.]
Rewarding responsibility, rewarding hard work.  [A missed opportunity.  Surely an orator as good as Obama could find some way to talk about why the economy has changed, why blue-collar jobs don't pay like they used to, why corporate ethos has changed to allow for late-career lay-offs and gigantic pay raises for successful -- and failing -- CEOs.  But no.  Rather --]
"We can do this."  Grandfather made it on the GI Bill, grandmother on the assembly line.
"This is the defining issue of our time": how to keep mid-20th century opportunities alive.
Restore an economy "where everyone who works hard gets a fair shot."
"Bankers made bets and bonuses while everyone looked the other way."  [Did I write too soon?  Is the big-picture critique on its way?]
Finally: "The state of our union is getting stronger."
Manufacturing, again.  [Scratch comment above.  The laundry list of tax credits and spending programs begins.  Shades of Bill Clinton.]
I saved the auto industry.  GM is top of the world, ma!
Stop tax deductions for companies that outsource jobs.  Lower taxes for companies hiring in-country.
Support community colleges and partnerships with business.
A jab at teacher unions.  A call for merit pay and firing bad teachers fast.
Raise the minimum school age to 18?
Colleges and universities had better keep costs down!  [But why have they gone up?]
Let illegals who go to college become citizens; let foreigners who earn college degrees here in the US stay here.
Expand tax relief for small business.
Spend more on research.
Spend more on energy research.
Spend more on clean energy subsidies.
Open more domestic oil fields and gas resources.
The Department of Defense is going green!  [What a relief.]
Responsible homeowners need to be able to re-finance easily.
Regulation is good.  [The base knows this: and he doesn't really make an effort to convince the unbelievers.  Another missed opportunity.]
The Deficit.  "We need to make choices."  We need to tax millionaires.  This is not "class warfare"; it's "common sense".
Americans are cynical about Washington.  So let's "ban insider trading" for members of Congress.  [Insider trading? That came out of nowhere.  But the real problem is: not a whiff of real reform of lobbying (a missed anti-Newt opportunity); not a breath of campaign finance reform.  But then again, the pig doesn't set the trough on fire.]
We need Consensus.  Let's Stop Fighting.  Or rather, let's Keep Fighting, but Together, like members of the team that assassinated Obama.  [What did he just say?]

As real bloggers like to say: Reax.  As I listened to the speech -- and this is sad proof of the sharp recent decline in American political oratory -- it struck me as fairly well-constructed, effectively if not brilliantly delivered, statesmanlike without pomposity, a bit laundry-listish but a reasonable balance between concrete proposals and the typical platitudes.  A safe election-year speech, as opposed to a riskier visionary one.
Yet as I type my notes, I can't help being discomfited by just how squarely conventional the speech was: how Clintonesque, how compromised, how different from the promise and the vision of his speeches during the 2008 campaign.  This isn't a deep surprise to me -- I'm used to being disappointed by this president, though I'm not half as bitter as Andrew Sullivan or many New York liberals -- but I remain unsettled by Obama's choice to avoid taking the big issues.   He repeatedly told his audience tonight, "we can do this." But he, it seems, cannot do this -- when "this" means hard-hitting, thoughtful, accessible analysis that grounds a powerful call for justice.   Nor can he recover the freshness, the sense that here was someone thinking new thoughts, that he brought to those early election-year speeches.
And the ring composition about the military, which ended with a call for Americans to imitate the military and "watch each other's backs," was awful.  What are we supposed to be fighting against?  This is a good example of pro-warrior republicanist rhetoric gone bad.  It leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

SOTUS blast from the past

For over a decade, just about every year, I've taken running notes on the State of the Union speech.  Some flashes of yesteryear: guess the year!
"We will answer every danger and every enemy that threaten the American people."
"Our faith is sure."
"...excessive litigation..."
"...faith-based programs...transform America one heart and one soul at a time."
"God does miracles in people's lives."
"End partial-birth abortion."  "No life should begin or end for an experiment."
"Our calling as a blessed country..."
"...scattered network of killers..."
"Many others have met a different fate.  Let's put it this way: they're no longer a problem to the United States...One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of justice."

And here's another:
"We love our freedom and will fight to keep it."
"Radical Islam is a perversion by the few of a noble faith."
"We will not retreat from the world and never surrender to evil."
"We accept the call of history to aid the oppression...We have a clear plan for victory in Iraq."
"I am confident." (repeated at least twice more)
"We are in this fight to win, and we are winning."

And just before everything falls apart:
"Unemployment is low."
"...school choice...vouchers..."
"We see a future of hope and opportunity."
Handle illegal immigration "without animosity, without amnesty."
And here's a kicker: he actually mentioned "global climate change" (which Obama did not do tonight)


Answers: 2003, 2006, 2007

Face-to-face vs Facebook

You've had enough of students checking Facebook and online shopping in lecture.  Can you ban laptops and smartphones and tablets?  Yes you can!  Won't the students revolt?  You can expect some push-back, but if you explain yourself clearly, firmly, and with a sense of humor, it'll dissipate fast -- and even if there are a few holdouts, you're certainly not obliged to give into them.    (The exception is students with learning disabilities, which requires a note from the Moses Center.)  Some students may even tell you how glad they are to be free from their cybernetic overlords.  

Since many students, even sophomores and juniors, still don't know how to learn effectively in the lecture setting, the first week of class is a perfect chance to ask them what they expect to get out of the lecture and what kinds of notes they're taking -- and explain what *you* want them to take away from lecture and what you advise them to write down.  Along the way, you can lay out your policy on machines and the reasons for it. 

I present my no-laptops/tablets/phones rule not as a ban (though if pressed I make it clear that it is in fact a ban), but as an opportunity -- an opportunity for the students to exist for a brief time in space free from the internet, to meet and chat with seatmates instead of staring into a screen, to engage with me.  As the teacher, I tell my students, I want to look them in the eye, I want to connect with them, I want to be able to ask them questions, I want some energy in the room.  If they're staring at their screens, all that is impossible.  Yes, of course, students doodle, doze, space out, stare out the window.  But just as we work hard to develop interesting material and well-structured lectures to keep students' attention, we can keep the machines that distract them outside the classroom doors.  The addiction to email and Facebook affects even the soundest students, and this policy takes the burden of choice, which is itself distracting ("is he about to say something really important or can I check my friends' status?"), off the students.  

Most importantly, I tell them, if they're trying to write down everything I say -- typical of those who beg the most passionately to take notes on their laptops -- they're almost surely not *thinking* about what I'm saying, and so they won't be able to track whether they understand my points, and they will have a very tough time asking or answering questions.  But lecture isn't a movie: it's an opportunity to engage and think, and students should aim to be active listeners.  What does this mean in terms of concrete note-taking?  I tell students to jot down my main points, the main examples supporting the points and the reasons why.  I tell them to listen for the signs that reveal the structure or arc of my lecture, because part of getting the most out of it -- a skill that will help them in meetings and strategy sessions their whole lives -- is learning how to follow the verbal expression of complex ideas.  There is value in training the brain to concentrate for longer than five minutes at a time.  (For all these reasons, I don't hand out lecture outlines unless a lecture has been so chopped up by questions -- mine and the students' -- that it feels impossible to follow: then I post my lecture notes online.)

I've found that opening up these issues in the first week creates a healthier dynamic in the room, a sense that the lecture is a collaborative enterprise, even though (despite occasional questions from me or the students) I am the one doing nearly all the talking for nearly 75 minutes.  It makes the classroom not quite a "student-centered" classroom, as the education gurus call it, but an idea-centered classroom.  It also helps me monitor myself more responsibly throughout the term.  Having demanded their attention and engagement, I have to live up to my side of the bargain: I make more of an effort to pause to underline the most important points in lecture, to sum up at the end of lecture consistently, and so on.  When I break the news about laptops, and whenever I have to remind someone who unthinkingly lifts her computer out of her pack that she needs to put it away, I tell the class that my main reason for doing this is to use the time in the lecture hall as effectively as possible.  I remind them that I'm always working on making lecture clearer and more interesting, and I ask them what arguments have been hardest to follow, what kind of information helps make points stick.  (Keep these evaluative questions as specific as you can.  If you ask, "What bores you in class?" you're guaranteed to get some joker who says "Everything: this class sucks", etc.) 

Suggest that they take notes in a notebook.  Tell them that the lecture form developed in a handwriting culture and there are good reasons to think that the typing culture isn't well suited to the lecture scene.  You might also tell your TAs to ask to see their students' lecture notes in an early recitation, so that they can see what students are writing (in a non-judgmental way) and give them advice on note-taking.

Should we discourage would-be PhDs?

I never learned calculus.  I didn't understand basic concepts in physics until my twenties, when my partner, a philosopher of science, had the grace and patience to start explaining them to me.  (This side of my education continues: just the other day, I got a refresher course in the physics of sound over a tasty dinner at Simpson Wong's new Chinese fusion place.)  My ignorance is mostly my fault -- I've happily exercised my capacity of rational choice and concentrated on things I was good at and found pleasure doing -- and partly the result of baneful external influence.  By the time I was twelve, I'd been convinced by a few small-minded teachers that girls weren't really suited to math (this in a girls' school!-- with terrific teachers of English, religious studies, and history, I might add).  My high school physics teacher, now retired, was perfectly friendly to me on a one-to-one basis, but I have clear memories of his boasting that his AP Physics class was all boys -- proof, to him, that it was a tough and serious class.
Partly thanks to this experience, I don't have a blanket policy of discouraging students from any course of action.  Who am I to tamp down another person's desire for knowledge?  Who am I to say whether a student who comes late to the study of ancient history or Greek won't be the next Peter Brown or Froma Zeitlin -- or Michel Foucault, for that matter?   This is what Peter Abelard would have called the sic, the "yes."
Now for the non.  There are very few jobs out there.
Here's another non -- to me, the most important.  I would ask any student seeking employment in an industry or government agency where questions of ethics immediately arise, say, the tobacco industry and the CIA, whether she or he has thought about the ethical implications of doing such work, if parents or friends are the driving forces in the decision, whether other desires or interests are being sacrificed and for what reason.  I no longer give academia a free pass.  I'll ask any student considering pursuing a PhD to consider what she or he is getting into, institutionally and ethically.  The university has a lot of self-examination to do, as an institution, and I think that we need to focus intently on how we operate and how we govern ourselves before we throw more students into the churn.
Here are some of the questions faculty need to ask themselves about the institutions that employ them, how they're run, and where their resources are going:

• What work am I being paid to do?  Does the institution operate in such a way that I can do that work?  For example, if I am being paid to do research and teach with some service (a typical answer at a research university), how much time am I spending on service?  
• Do I have sufficient administrative support?  Am I losing time I would have spent on teaching and research to filling out forms, assessment exercises, reimbursements, xeroxing, maintaining websites, managing student files, and other jobs that may have been done by administrators or admin aides in the past?  (Worth talking to older colleagues to get a sense of history on this one.) 
• Is work on departmental and university-level committees distributed transparently and fairly?  Who in the department and in the dean's office keeps track of this?  If I want to raise a question about my assignments, may I do so without raising a firestorm?  If a colleague wiggles out of work, who manages the problem?  May I complain without being a snitch?  In sum, do management procedures exist and does everyone know about them? 
• Another management/accountability question.  When someone's teaching is not up to standard, what happens?  Is there a process in place by which legitimate student complaints can be distinguished from whining about low grades or a stern personality?  Is this run by faculty or by deans who have not stepped into a classroom in years? 
• Does the university reward teaching to a degree that professors are encouraged to improve?  
• A few meta-management questions.  Who runs the place?  Aside from the president and (in many places) the provost, how many vice-presidents, associate provosts, vice-provosts, special assistants to the president/provost/vice-presidents, and so on are on the payroll?  What's the size of their support staffs?
• Is the administration dominated by people with PhDs in "higher ed administration" or professional fields like law or engineering?  If so, how do they value teaching and research in the non-professional parts of the academy, which we used to think of as the core -- namely, the humanities, arts, and sciences?    
• What work does the institution reward faculty for?  How does this work affect or connect to the students who are paying the bulk of our salaries?  (True at most institutions, barring the super-endowed places like Princeton, at 17 billion and counting, and Harvard, an eye-popping 32 billion last year.)  
• What procedures are in place to change the university's priorities or to establish big projects, and what role do faculty play?  

I don't think I'll succeed in turning away students from academia in large numbers, and part of me doesn't want to do that anyway.  My aim is rather to get them in the habit of asking these questions in the first place.
Academics are great critical thinkers, but as I'm far from the first to note, our critical faculties wither when we turn them on ourselves.
 

Should we punish silent students?

Sorry for this long post.  I'm still figuring out how to set up a "read more" link.

When I was a student in high school and college, I loved the give-and-take of the seminar and dining-table debate: I scarcely gave a thought to the quiet students in the back or those who put up tentative hands only to recuse themselves in a panic when the teacher's eye bent in their direction.  This isn't to say that I always found the scene of discussion comfortable.  Unlike many of my friends, especially in college, I grew up in a family that was neither academic nor particularly invested in debate.  They liked to talk, but talk, of course, is not debate.  During a typical meal, my parents solicited news of my sister's and my doings, exchanged family news and neighborhood gossip, and told stories of their own -- about what they'd done that day, childhood memories and the like.  To move from that to the hothouse of collegiate argument over sexuality (it was the late 80s/early 90s), the Iraq war, Andrew Ross' "Television" course (a radical offering for Princeton at that time), Spivak, Derrida, postmodern architecture -- for me, trained to attend more carefully to the table's ease and comfort than to whether we were getting anywhere with our ideas, it was a leap, and often an awkward one.  Despite my sense that I was struggling to catch up with minds and tongues whetted sharp by years of parental pressure, though, silence was never an attractive option.
As a young teacher, largely thanks to memories of those flashes of nauseated anxiety, I sympathized with students who rarely or never spoke up in class.  I tried notes of encouragement in my paper comments -- "Great insights here: the whole class would benefit from hearing them!" and so forth -- but I recall only one person over whom they exerted any influence.  Perhaps there were one or two more.
Now a middle-aged teacher, I have done an about-face.  Very few of my undergraduates can speak well and with confidence, and some of the confident ones shouldn't be.  Most students grope for words, repeat themselves, say "like" every few words, deploy a limited vocabulary, and admit that they can't say what they're thinking.  "You know what I mean?" takes the place of explaining what is meant.   To paraphrase Darth Vader, I find the lack of words disturbing. Since (unlike Vader) I don't want to strangle my students -- they're doing a good enough job to themselves already -- I decided to make speaking in class compulsory, I made participation count for 20% of the course grade, and I wrote this handout:

You may find it tough to believe when you’re crammed into a windowless room in the basement of Bobst, but the recitation is preparation for many moments in your future: the start-up strategy meeting, the graduate seminar, the environmental activism group, the art/architecture “crit,” the neighborhood council, the PTA.  In all these places you need to be prepared to speak your mind clearly and to explain your reasons; to listen with a critical but civil ear; to engage with others’ ideas; to think on your feet; to be willing to change your mind to incorporate another viewpoint, or even to reverse your original stance.  For some of you, the recitation will be the perfect place to develop the nerve to talk (fear of public speaking affects most people).  Or you’re the kind of student who welcomes the opportunity to think out loud.  Or you may treat the recitation as a totally open opportunity to think about big, sometimes messy ideas—the kinds of ideas that shape the world.  

Part of the point of the discussion section is to learn how to have an effective discussion.  It’s not the same as hanging out with friends, but it’s not an oral exam either.  So long as everyone does his or her bit, recitation will grow more interesting as you learn each other’s views and preferences.  

Speaking with eloquence and verve about complex ideas is a skill that will bring you satisfaction forever, regardless of what you pursue in life.  It takes practice.  Some ways of talking are more convincing, thoughtful, inspiring, and well-informed than others.  Part of the college experience—the reason you’re paying so much money to be here instead of living with your parents and taking courses online—is to learn how to speak in an intelligent, well-informed way.  This means that your instructor may comment on your comments, so that you and the rest of the class will understand on the spot what works and what doesn’t.  Don’t take it personally.  Where else will you gain experience in expressing your thoughts in front of a random assortment of people?  Here’s Dewey: 

The winged words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech… Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are…broken and imperfect thought.  

The basics. We expect you to arrive in class on time capable of briefly summarizing the argument and/or the main points and themes of the reading, and to be sufficiently alert to answer elementary analytic questions.  We won’t always ask for volunteers, and we won’t allow the same people to speak all the time.  You should speak up at least once in each class meeting.  Most recitations will include a few minutes of Q&A, often at or near the beginning.  (“I don’t know” or “I didn’t finish the reading” don’t count as answers.)  If you don’t know how to answer a question, don’t worry: chances are you’re not alone, and unless you come in unprepared week after week, your grade is not on the line at that moment.  The key is to give it your best shot.  Feel free to ask for a lifeline—for example, a passage to comment on.  At these moments, the instructor is evaluating two things.  Have you prepared responsibly?  Can you respond intelligently to the question, even if your answer is wrong or temporarily leads the discussion off the track? 

Our aim is to foster intelligent conversation about the ideas in our texts.  Once it’s clear to the instructor that the class understands the main points of lecture and the readings (this can take anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour), the class shifts into a higher gear.  Now the class becomes a kind of lab or brain-storm exercise or town meeting, where ideally you will take a position about an idea or a text, explain or defend it with evidence and logical argument, and listen and respond to others.  From time to time, you’ll need to think “meta”—take a step back and consider criteria, methods, and unspoken assumptions.  

How do you prepare for this?  Do the reading, obviously, and jot down a few notes.  Read the syllabus, where weekly themes are listed for the recitation.  Listen at the end of Wednesday’s lecture for hints of what’s to come.  Your instructor may email you to solicit questions or reactions.  

The APA

Just back from the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, where I organized a panel sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (CSWMG, fondly pronounced "Sea-swimming") that followed a format new to the American Philological Association.  What is the APA?  The answer displays the stunning diversity of the field we tend to refer to with the shorthand "Classics."  The APA is the professional association in North America for classicists (a label that formally implies concentration on ancient literature but that also is used by synecdoche to describe the whole field), ancient historians (who may focus on politics, military history, social history, gender, or the economy, to name a few), archaeologists, epigraphers (experts on stone or metal inscriptions), papyrologists (who study the usually tattered remains of texts written on papyri and other soft materials), numismatists (scholars of coins), art historians, ancient philosophers who may also belong to the "philosophical" APA -- and anyone else connected with the study of the literature, history, thought, culture, religion, and art of the ancient Mediterranean world.  But the APA also includes scholars who study what is sometimes called "classical reception" or "the classical tradition," that is, the impact of Greek and Roman thought, literature, and art on later periods, up to and including the contemporary world.  And I still haven't captured the whole picture, because the APA also makes space for people who work on societies like Egypt or Persia that neighbor the ancient Mediterranean, who might be housed in their universities in departments of Near Eastern Studies or Anthropology.
The APA Annual Meeting brings hundreds of these people together to listen to scholarly papers, hold job interviews (see my post below on job-hunting), meet with editors, browse the huge book displays run mostly by university presses, and schmooze.  The schmoozing is facilitated in the Philadelphia Marriott by the so-called "circle bar" in the central lobby of the hotel, where most of us are tempted to drink far too many martinis far too late into the night.  
For my panel, I borrowed a format used by the philosophical APA: "Authors Meet Critics." The CSWMG chose two recent outstanding books on the reception, or to use the panel's preferred term, the engagement of African-American and Caribbean writers with classical literature, Emily Greenwood's Afro-Greeks and Jim Tatum's African American Writers and Classical Tradition (co-authored with Bill Cook).  Four critics responded to the books: Simon Goldhill (Cambridge), Patrice Rankine (Purdue), Sydnor Roy (Temple), and Cornel West (Princeton).  More on the panel in a few.

De Kooning at MOMA

What struck me most today at the crowded, impressive, almost overwhelming De Kooning show:

• one prominent black drip from an eyeball-shaped figure in the righthand side of Asheville (1948), which proclaims the presence of unrestraint in a piece otherwise straining with the tension of its own meticulous composition
• the close relationship with Pollock's color and composition in works like Untitled (1948-49) and Painting (1949-50)
• the depth of the lemon-beige overpainting in Excavation (1950), which simultaneously obscures and unveils figures of people, houses, trains, and objects, nestling in folds outlined in black 
• the raw flesh tones of Interchange (1955), against a background painted by Diebenkorn on Adderall 
• the adventurous blocking of Gotham News (1955), a painting whose colors are held apart by slashes of cornflower blue and slate gray
• the box of turquoise sea with a small sea monster swimming within in Fire Island (1946) 
• the vermilion blotches in Collage, which every photograph I've ever seen bleaches out
• January 1st and Easter Monday, hanging as a pair, Diebenkorn kelly greens and mustard yellows leaping out across the room. Both works prompt the question, how and why do large globs of paint mean?  I see their three-dimensional mass (especially in January 1st) as metonymic of the painter's hand, even his whole body; M sees them as paint transformed into masonry.  

What De Kooning's work is not: sly.  Before today I would have added "serene," but serenity was present in some of the rural landscapes -- perhaps not Merritt Parkway, but Bolton Landing (though it is far from my favorite work).

More Occupy links

A large and I think ongoing collection from the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. I recommend the pieces by my NYU colleague Nicholas Mirzoeff, Jason Adams, and (surprise) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Occupy (at) the APA

I'm preparing for the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, where I organized an "Authors Meet Critics" panel on race and the reception of classical literature, as well as an informal Saturday roundtable to discuss the Occupy movement, and I recommend this collection of short essays on Occupy in Theory and Event as well as the papers by George Shulman and others posted at the Social Science Research Council website.  
A panel discussion at the APA (Philosophy) about Occupy organized by Purchase philosopher Jennie Uleman drew 150 people -- great job, Jennie!

John Ford

After watching My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache, a very brief note in praise of John Ford and Robert Pippin's recent book on John Ford.  Ford was Catholic, Republican, and Irish: he turned a blind eye to the experience and character of women and people of color (and when he looked at them, his vision was usually blunted and his humor crude). But those limitations are part of what make his movies great.  Combined with a marvelous eye for framing stylish, even baroque images, his embedment in prejudice -- of which he seemed to grow more critically aware as he got older -- make his movies into living documents of mainstream America in the early and middle twentieth century.  Terrific stuff.  Go here for more.

Going on the Market

Probably my most popular publication is the handbook called "Going on the Market: An Affable Guide" that I started work on over fifteen years ago, at first in collaboration with Jacqui Sadashige, a graduate student and then assistant professor in the Classics department at Penn.  Long before it became fashionable, Jacqui was keenly attuned to professional socialization, especially the habits of confidence and self-presentation that often accompany gold-plated educations like the one I was lucky to get.
In terms of background our cohort at Penn was a pretty varied bunch, as Classics departments go: among us were students from Brigham Young, Penn State, and the University of South Carolina as well as Princeton and Oxford.  Class, race, religion, the proportion of family members in academia, and how these things affected our career prospects were frequent topics of discussion among us.  We generally agreed that students from less privileged economic circumstances (today we might say the 75%) as well as students of color -- and in our small field, even students who didn't go to an Ivy League-type school -- sometimes hit the wrong note with faculty and other students because they followed a different social rulebook.  We weren't talking about not knowing about opera or fine wines so much as the ability to grasp academia as a hierarchical network, with rules about whom to know and whom to know about, and with codes of dress and deportment that seemed more constrained than we expected.  Intimate knowledge of the field comes most quickly from personal mentoring by people at the center of it, and students trained in small programs where faculty published relatively little felt out of the loop.  And though this was not a major issue at Penn, where faculty had (and have) broad tastes and an egalitarian style, at conferences and dinners with guest lecturers, it seemed clear to us that the opera and fine wines mattered too.
On top of this, the unwillingness of many academics to talk frankly about the concrete details of making a living -- how much salary to expect and ask for, how to ensure getting fair letters of recommendation, what to expect at a job interview -- meant that even "pedigreed" students, especially shy ones, found themselves at sea when it came to getting a job.
Never one to sit back when she could actually do something about a problem, Jacqui wrote a short handbook about writing cover letters and preparing for interviews at the APA annual meeting.  She circulated it around the Penn department, and if I remember correctly, it got passed around to other graduate students in the area in xerox copy -- this was before email!  When I left Penn for the University of Washington, Jacqui was moving onto other things, and I got her permission to develop the handbook.  It ended up over twenty-five pages long, and was posted at the Women's Classical Caucus website and (for a while) at the APA website.  Today I gave it a much needed update.

Committing to art

Two years ago -- from late December 2009 to March 2010 -- I spent a few exhausting but rewarding months in the Guggenheim from eight to sixteen hours a week working as an interpreter for Tino Sehgal's artwork "This Progress."  I say "working," but making the piece come into being felt more like an intense form of play.  There are plenty of descriptions of Tino's work (the Times review of "This Progress," for instance) so I won't bother recounting it here.  What I'm interested in this New Year's Day is recapturing why, for me, making art is so laden with meaning, insight, and pleasure.
Each December I carve and block-print holiday cards.  I've done this for years.  This summer for the first time I began to paint with a brush, usually cards I use to thank dinner hosts and the like.  Most of my designs are simple arrays of stripes and polygons, half-conscious responses to work by Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, or Donald Judd.  But not long after starting to experiment with painting on sketchbook pages, most often rough, blurry abstractions drawn from memories of hiking in the White Mountains or walking in the Botanical Garden, I had the epiphany that I suspect happens to most painters when they're about twelve years old: I realized the complexity of the flow and drip of the paint on at the tip and up and down the edges of the paintbrush, how little I understood about controlling it, and how stimulating it was to feel that for an instant I had controlled it, that I'd managed to get a line or an arrangement of lines and color right.  The deep sense of rightness, which I experience both as a capacity of reflective judgment and as an instinctual reaction, is much stronger when working with the paintbrush than when carving and stamping printing-blocks, especially when multiple colors are in play along the brush-hairs--or brush-tines, as the case may be, since I am so unskilled that my paint clumps, making my paintbrush look rather like a paint-fork.
In his review (abstract) of the enormous De Kooning show up through next week at MOMA, Peter Schjeldahl noted that when you look at a De Kooning painting you feel "anchored." That word captures something at the heart of my sense of rightness (or wrongness) when I paint a line.  Something about the relation of line to line (especially in my Stella-like stripes) reinforces my sense of myself in relation to the object.  But this does not, importantly, lead to egocentric self-reflection: I am not feeling more myself.  I am feeling myself in relation to something else whose motivations I need only pause and reflect upon (if I'm willing and able to devote some time to it) in order to grasp.  Which makes me leap to the question -- what values and expectations go into creating that sense of anchored questioning?
Jeremy Tanner, an art historian I met this summer at a conference on aesthetics in London, commented in his TLS review of Richard Neer's study The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture on the "informing polarities" that Neer sees in Greek image-making: "surface/depth, presence/absence, body/soul."  This year I want to dig into the informing polarities of image-making in both politics and art, and I think I will gain insight into them by making more art.