In the summer novel that the Skip Gates arrest has become, one wonders if the person responsible for jamming his front door will ever come forward.
Initial reports had suggested that someone had tried to burgle Gates' house while he was away. This would be robber was never noticed by a passerby it seems, or was he? Was the unknown door jammer hindered from entering Gates' house by the notice of another Cambridge pedestrian?
Will this supposed thief hold his own press conference?
Was he aware just whom he was messing with when he tried to force open Gates' door?
As the long string of consequences continues to unfold is there a moment to look back?
Can we ever know why the door was stuck and who had taken an instrument to it?
While all the participants of the beer summit eagerly look forward to moving on, is there anyone who can explain how it all started?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Repeating History
There are universities where no one, as far as I can tell, teaches the Italian Renaissance. There are Liberal Arts Colleges where the origins of the liberal arts does not merit a faculty member devoted to its study.
History is not a matter that is finished once it has been explained.
Some universities may feel that the Renaissance in Italy has been well covered, and it has, but the reality is that education requires repetition. Someone needs to repeat history.
Cutting edge academic work often means working on subjects few have considered before, and if we were racing for a cure to cancer or marketing the next new thing, who could disagree. However, the lessons of the Thirty Year's War or the many Sacks of Rome are soon lost on the next generation. Unless some grey hair takes it upon themselves to return to the well-trodden field, it will disappear.
The lesson that history is really a repetitive performance is shown most obviously in Holocaust studies, a vibrant historical discipline constant rediscovering arguments made decades before. So much has been written about the German killing of the Jews, that there is little that has not been documented, but since Daniel Goldhagen the cycle of interpretation has turned to the zero point. At first Goldhagen revived that old thesis that the Germans had been for centuries inherently anti-semitic. This argument had been already presented during the war by Hans Kohn, but it received a revival in the 1990s.
Now there comes Timothy Snyder's claim we have forgotten the Einsatzgruppen who in the first Nazi invasion of Poland and Russian slaughtered Jews, Communists and resistance fighters of any stripe. Anyone familiar with Holocaust studies has read about the devastation of the Einsatzgruppen, but apparently there are NPR listeners and general readers who are so focused on the horrors of Auschwitz that they do not recognize the massive killings carried out by the earliest Nazi campaigns against Jews.
Who could really have really forgotten this supposedly forgotten moment in the Holocaust? The Einsatzgruppen have long been recognized as the hands-on brutal beginning of the Holocaust.
Even Bernhard Schlink's The Reader recounts the example of a notorious photograph of the EInsatzgruppen killing heartlessly in Poland.
So who has forgotten? Presumably an undefined group of younger scholars who never learned the story in the first place.
The point is that history needs to be repeated in order not to be forgotten: this applies to the Italian Renaissance as much as it does to the Holocaust. Courses need to be taught that repeat already documented history. The obvious needs to be restated, repeatedly, not just for the worst, but also for the best moments
History is not a matter that is finished once it has been explained.
Some universities may feel that the Renaissance in Italy has been well covered, and it has, but the reality is that education requires repetition. Someone needs to repeat history.
Cutting edge academic work often means working on subjects few have considered before, and if we were racing for a cure to cancer or marketing the next new thing, who could disagree. However, the lessons of the Thirty Year's War or the many Sacks of Rome are soon lost on the next generation. Unless some grey hair takes it upon themselves to return to the well-trodden field, it will disappear.
The lesson that history is really a repetitive performance is shown most obviously in Holocaust studies, a vibrant historical discipline constant rediscovering arguments made decades before. So much has been written about the German killing of the Jews, that there is little that has not been documented, but since Daniel Goldhagen the cycle of interpretation has turned to the zero point. At first Goldhagen revived that old thesis that the Germans had been for centuries inherently anti-semitic. This argument had been already presented during the war by Hans Kohn, but it received a revival in the 1990s.
Now there comes Timothy Snyder's claim we have forgotten the Einsatzgruppen who in the first Nazi invasion of Poland and Russian slaughtered Jews, Communists and resistance fighters of any stripe. Anyone familiar with Holocaust studies has read about the devastation of the Einsatzgruppen, but apparently there are NPR listeners and general readers who are so focused on the horrors of Auschwitz that they do not recognize the massive killings carried out by the earliest Nazi campaigns against Jews.
Who could really have really forgotten this supposedly forgotten moment in the Holocaust? The Einsatzgruppen have long been recognized as the hands-on brutal beginning of the Holocaust.
Even Bernhard Schlink's The Reader recounts the example of a notorious photograph of the EInsatzgruppen killing heartlessly in Poland.
So who has forgotten? Presumably an undefined group of younger scholars who never learned the story in the first place.
The point is that history needs to be repeated in order not to be forgotten: this applies to the Italian Renaissance as much as it does to the Holocaust. Courses need to be taught that repeat already documented history. The obvious needs to be restated, repeatedly, not just for the worst, but also for the best moments
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
OK Michael Jackson
So what happened to all those mean people who hated Michael Jackson because they saw him as betraying everything he used to represent? They are all mourning his death now, it would seem.
I burned out on Thriller and stopped paying attention twenty years ago, and then suddenly last Spring I downloaded the same album for a party mix. Behold middle age.
But seriously there has been such a massive turn around about Michael Jackson, it cannot only be about speaking well of the dead, or even not realizing how excellent someone was until he died.
There has to be more going on here, some of it has to do with the way in which we are all trained to convulse through media, some of it has to do with a general realization that public opinion was harsh on Michael. The machismo that hammered him in the 1980s has worn off. Perhaps
I burned out on Thriller and stopped paying attention twenty years ago, and then suddenly last Spring I downloaded the same album for a party mix. Behold middle age.
But seriously there has been such a massive turn around about Michael Jackson, it cannot only be about speaking well of the dead, or even not realizing how excellent someone was until he died.
There has to be more going on here, some of it has to do with the way in which we are all trained to convulse through media, some of it has to do with a general realization that public opinion was harsh on Michael. The machismo that hammered him in the 1980s has worn off. Perhaps
Friday, July 24, 2009
Lost Theory
What a joy to find a long overlooked theory article! I know everyone writes that theory is over, but every now and then that old rush returns when I pick up an unfamiliar masterpiece written decades ago.
I had spent years reading Foucault and after relying on him to structure my dissertation turned into first book, I thought a break was in order. That first book was so thoroughly defined by my allegiance to Foucault. "The hand of the master is little too obvious," one of my writing group buddies said back then. Ok so I over compensated, avoided Foucault just as I had avoided Adorno and Benjamin after graduate school.
And then that little essay, really just a bunch of lecture notes, "Of Other Spaces," brought back all the old happiness. After nine years sitting in the wilderness, what a pleasure to read that old style intense language where every paragraph spawns a book. No more rambling current events blogs, no more unconnected contextualisations—no a short burst of closely packed ideas, strung together as assertions, almost commandments to reflect upon and critique.
Sure, I knew the essay was out there, sure lots of people give a passing footnote to his heterotopias. But those footnotes were always so pro forma, so empty of specifics, just a nod in the direction of Paris that I never felt drawn to the essay, until yesterday in the mad panic to construct a syllabus.
Boom, now I am loaded with a whole new terminology, all my geographical/spatial mutterings have a kick, that once upon a time surge of walking around the neighborhood packing, even its just my own basement study.
To read a fine essay, even as lecture notes published posthumously, brings to mind how dull things have become since the theory heads sailed away across the ocean of eternity.
I had spent years reading Foucault and after relying on him to structure my dissertation turned into first book, I thought a break was in order. That first book was so thoroughly defined by my allegiance to Foucault. "The hand of the master is little too obvious," one of my writing group buddies said back then. Ok so I over compensated, avoided Foucault just as I had avoided Adorno and Benjamin after graduate school.
And then that little essay, really just a bunch of lecture notes, "Of Other Spaces," brought back all the old happiness. After nine years sitting in the wilderness, what a pleasure to read that old style intense language where every paragraph spawns a book. No more rambling current events blogs, no more unconnected contextualisations—no a short burst of closely packed ideas, strung together as assertions, almost commandments to reflect upon and critique.
Sure, I knew the essay was out there, sure lots of people give a passing footnote to his heterotopias. But those footnotes were always so pro forma, so empty of specifics, just a nod in the direction of Paris that I never felt drawn to the essay, until yesterday in the mad panic to construct a syllabus.
Boom, now I am loaded with a whole new terminology, all my geographical/spatial mutterings have a kick, that once upon a time surge of walking around the neighborhood packing, even its just my own basement study.
To read a fine essay, even as lecture notes published posthumously, brings to mind how dull things have become since the theory heads sailed away across the ocean of eternity.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Twittering Up
Just joined twitter and right away it seems I am out of my depth. This constant updating seems appropriate for celebrities or fighter pilots sneaking in below the radar but I cannot (yet) take myself seriously enough to announce my breakfast to the world.
This network is all about the first person, the magnificently expanding subject who now is global, or at least the affluent and technological global, the small elite who stretch across the world at key nodal points.
Yet to ignore twitter is to fall behind—this has been the standard pessimistic argument for why one should be Modern, if you are not Modern , then you are forgotten. People have been arguing this point since the nineteenth century.
So first reactions: Twitter is ideally suited for Versailles and the court of the French king, where the rise and supping of the monarch was important news to the ten thousand who lived in his proximity.
Twitter is a new form of the levee. When we can read how Lance Armstrong was awoken by anti-doping control agents and what television program he watched before bed, he is acting not so very different than Louis XIV. Except of course the monarch would grant a duke the honor of actually entering the update, perhaps Lance, too, as a twitter aide.
Now we all get to experience ourselves as the sun king, so many sun kings, what is the value in such grandiosity when so many can sign up?
Here endeth the first twitter blog sermon
This network is all about the first person, the magnificently expanding subject who now is global, or at least the affluent and technological global, the small elite who stretch across the world at key nodal points.
Yet to ignore twitter is to fall behind—this has been the standard pessimistic argument for why one should be Modern, if you are not Modern , then you are forgotten. People have been arguing this point since the nineteenth century.
So first reactions: Twitter is ideally suited for Versailles and the court of the French king, where the rise and supping of the monarch was important news to the ten thousand who lived in his proximity.
Twitter is a new form of the levee. When we can read how Lance Armstrong was awoken by anti-doping control agents and what television program he watched before bed, he is acting not so very different than Louis XIV. Except of course the monarch would grant a duke the honor of actually entering the update, perhaps Lance, too, as a twitter aide.
Now we all get to experience ourselves as the sun king, so many sun kings, what is the value in such grandiosity when so many can sign up?
Here endeth the first twitter blog sermon
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Facebook Cocktail Party
Because Facebook relies so much on the idiom of pop music, there are clear limits on what you can express. You quickly learn that people only want to hear happy news.
If your marriage is a mess or you got laid off, there is really no room for such talk on Facebook. Here even pop love songs have more range, for you can always find a tune about love gone bad on the radio, but Facebook lacks the anonymity of pop. Public performance of a sad song does not guarantee an automatic link between the singer's personal life and the lyrics. Of course the audience always wants to connect the song to gossip about the singer, but we know it takes some effort, some speculation.
On Facebook, any sad posting is automatically attached to us, so we suddenly become very bourgeois about what we write. Facebook becomes an upscale cocktail party, witty banter that always shields the speaker. Here the clichés of pop music come to our rescue. If you want to say something sad, you can phrase it as a familiar refrain.
But even here, we middle aged users don't announce anything too intimate. We don't wear our alienation on our profile page. No Mohawks, nasty body art or chemical excesses to be seen. What's most amazing: these good manners are entirely self-imposed.
If your marriage is a mess or you got laid off, there is really no room for such talk on Facebook. Here even pop love songs have more range, for you can always find a tune about love gone bad on the radio, but Facebook lacks the anonymity of pop. Public performance of a sad song does not guarantee an automatic link between the singer's personal life and the lyrics. Of course the audience always wants to connect the song to gossip about the singer, but we know it takes some effort, some speculation.
On Facebook, any sad posting is automatically attached to us, so we suddenly become very bourgeois about what we write. Facebook becomes an upscale cocktail party, witty banter that always shields the speaker. Here the clichés of pop music come to our rescue. If you want to say something sad, you can phrase it as a familiar refrain.
But even here, we middle aged users don't announce anything too intimate. We don't wear our alienation on our profile page. No Mohawks, nasty body art or chemical excesses to be seen. What's most amazing: these good manners are entirely self-imposed.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Face the Face
Facebook is the pop song we all get to write. In the 60s everyone commented on how short pop songs were, that composers were allowed no more than four minutes. Now we are down to just a few characters, as the readers of tweetature know. The key change is that we all get to participate.
The democraticization of publishing your thoughts comes at the price of brevity. Everyone can put their inner monologue out for there but we don't get to go on and on like James Joyce. Instead we send out short bulletins from our lives. When we aren't borrowing from a pop song or Oscar Wilde, we are writing brief memos about ourselves.
Sometimes, when we are lucky, what's on our mind" sounds a line from a cool song, but we don't usually get to write hits. More writers doesn't mean more great one-liners, but at least we are having fun. Pop culture has become the archive and dictionary for our running self-commentaries.
The democraticization of publishing your thoughts comes at the price of brevity. Everyone can put their inner monologue out for there but we don't get to go on and on like James Joyce. Instead we send out short bulletins from our lives. When we aren't borrowing from a pop song or Oscar Wilde, we are writing brief memos about ourselves.
Sometimes, when we are lucky, what's on our mind" sounds a line from a cool song, but we don't usually get to write hits. More writers doesn't mean more great one-liners, but at least we are having fun. Pop culture has become the archive and dictionary for our running self-commentaries.
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