Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Evening reading at the end of the semester

Found a wonderful web site put out by the Morgan Library of its holdings, a nice digital resource.  They give ordinary websters the opportunity to leaf through rare Flemish art works.  Tonight I am perusing a Book of Hours by Simon Bening, an early sixteenth century miniaturist from Ghent-Brugges.


For those of us unschooled in Flemish art history, it is easy to spot the connection to Vermeer through the way in which domestic spaces are depicted.  One main room is shown with people engaged in ordinary household activities and in the background there is a doorway opening into another lighted room in the back.  The eyes movement from this room to the one in the back uses perspective without relying on a natural landscape.



Then another page shows the connection between Flemish painting and Albrecht Dürer.  Bening’s sad-faced Salvator Mundi reminds me of Dürer’s intense self portrait.  From one face to another the internet lets you slide, and as more archival and rare book material becomes available on the web, the easier it becomes to more from one visual memory to the other.  The connection between Dürer and Salvator Mundi is of course a familiar one, but how easily we can confirm it now.




In the midst of this late night contemplation comes an email announcing the death of Richard Sheirich, a German professor at Pomona, 84 years old, did not know him but he looks a bit like Ben Kingsley in Hugo.




All this hangs together as the internet brings us the private views from devotional pages to the news of a colleague's death, someone we have never met before tonight.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Waking up from the Dream


Rude awakenings, when sleepers awake from a long dream they are often angry,
This happened to the PSU students who rioted after Paterno was fired.  They were distressed that his exit was swift and disgraceful, but they were also more broadly angry that the football myth had been betrayed from within.  They attacked the messenger, a media truck, --the medium that had fed them the illusion was now blamed for its demise.  They were not initially angry about Sandusky’s crimes, rather they were upset that their “college experience” had been spoiled.


“Awakening as a graduated process that goes on in the life of the individual as in that of a generation.  Sleep is its initial stage.  A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams.” 
 --Walter Benjamin, note on the Arcades Project

By no means is this desire to keep dreaming confined to students or the young.  This week’s Time magazine cover shows directly how American readers generally are encouraged to worry about staying in their dreamy beds rather than listening to the rumbling outside.



Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pederasty and Football

Just because you don’t follow football much and have been to only one game since you got here, doesn’t get you off the hook.  There is the horror at reading the wrenching details of crimes committed where you work.  Sorrow for the children put through awful misery.  That’s enough to send you into despair, without the mythic grandstanding that sports fandom creates.  You work at a place, you have to take responsibility for the bad things that happen there, even if you had nothing to do with them.  Yet that does not mean you have to accept collective guilt either.  One way to negotiate the distance between individual and group guilt is through critique.  So here goes.

Too much about the response to the pederasty reported at Penn State has revolved around the collective “we.”  Even the remorseful public gestures for the victims have the feel of one giant narcissistic ego convulsively seeking redemption.  When the real problem is the collective “we” in the first place.  We should not be such a “we.”   We should be individuals pursuing an education, not some vast horde chanting in unison.

The big hype surrounding the football program is what got those boys into the locker room with an old pervert in the first place.  They were in awe of the players and coach, so much so that they could be lured into awful situations. 

It is belief in the goodness and power of football that now leaves fans and players unable to fathom what happened.  Just look at the stammering of ex-football players, incapable of explaining how Sandusky could do such terrible things.  Blind faith is what leads to such speechless incoherence and rage.

The collective shock that Penn State has gone through this last week must lead to more critical thinking, to a complete re-evaluation of the college sports machine.  We cannot cure or undo the crimes by coming up with one giant collective act of atonement.  The crimes were a result of the disjuncture between our collective image and the terrible interests of one person.  The Sandusky case shows how the myth can be used for sick personal interests regardless whether they contradict the public image.  The collective “we” cannot solve the crime, nor prevent some future crime.  Individuals need to act on their own in defiance of what is good for the program.  They have to stop thinking for the team and instead think for themselves.  For as everyone who has seen the time line published in the papers, everyone who has read the one mother’s anguish that no one stepped into stop the rapes, it is perfectly clear that it was the breakdown of such personal moral decision making that caused the crimes to go on unabated.

Instead of acting as a group, we have to think for ourselves and abandon the Dionysian frenzy that sweeps across every weekend.   We have to dismantle the collective myth of football, understand that the game is an entertainment, rather than a higher calling.  Otherwise, more rot and corruption, more provincial self-congratulation at our own awesomeness will lead to some further yet unimagined abuse.  A university is a collection of individuals thinking rationally and critically for themselves—that is the definition of Enlightenment which, in the end, is not a team sport.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Goethe in Love

The cinematic event of the decade approaches.  Who can fathom the mixed emotions, the excitement, the worry--all evoked by this new film, a new sexy cinematic adaptation of Die Leiden des jungen Goethes.  Run to the movie theater now!  You will be showing this film to your students for years to come.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/younggoetheinlove/

Germany 1772 - the young and tumultuous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) aspires to be a poet; but after failing his law exams, he is sent by his father (Henry Huebchen) to a sleepy provincial court to mend his ways. Unsure of his talent and eager to prove himself, Goethe soon wins the praise and friendship of his superior Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). But then Lotte (Miriam Stein) enters his life and nothing is the same as before. However, the young lovers are unaware that her father has already promised Lotte's hand to another man. Director Phillip Stoelzl returns to the very wellspring of Romanticism - Goethe's loosely autobiographical masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther - and conjures up a beguiling and refreshingly innocent period romance.

Friday, October 21, 2011

What Kittler seemed to promise

The death this week of Friedrich Kittler reminded me of just how radical his Aufschreibesysteme seemed when it first appeared.  Discourse Networks, the English translation, continues to reverberate through English departments.  I remember vividly that it was the first book I photocopied in its entirety back in graduate school.  Standing in a copy store in Ithaca, I wondered what mysteries were in the pages that came spewing out the machine, which the intense, high-minded older students, who had driven me to xerox Kittler, already claimed to understand.

The radical potential of Kittler’s Habilitationsschrift was that it seemed to erase literature’s claim to uniqueness.  By setting novels equal to pedagogical manuals, Kittler was extending Foucault’s discourse analysis into art.  Foucault had really written little about literature after all, but Kittler was first and fore mostly, a Germanist—at least back then.

Kittler’s work promised to undo the most sacred tenet of German aesthetics—the autonomy of art.  People had claimed that Derrida and deconstruction would lead in that direction, but Kittler seemed to be one of the very first to thoroughly intermingle literature with other discourses, so that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was comparable to a book on language acquisition or medicine.  The one thing that Kittler left to literature was the claim that its best works contained more insights about the operation of discourse and power than non-literary texts.   Thus, a great novel might contain more social history than historical texts.

Looking back on the arc of Kittler’s influence, it seems clear that at some point this radical potential to knock literature off its pedestal has succeeded.  Literary studies today are hardly as important to students and colleges as they were in the 1980s.  Though, Kittler surely does not get the credit for the demise of literature.  Infact he probably gets the credit for driving literary scholars to reclaim the autonomy of art,  for there developed in the mid 1990s a backlash within literature departments against the pomo tendency to levelize all forms of writing.


The early works of Kittler presented a wonderful interpenetration between close literary analysis and cultural history relying on Foucault.  The subtle back and forth in his reading of Wilhelm Meister in Dichtung als Sozialisationspiel and Aufschreibeysteme's masterful leaps from a few lines in Faust to the entire Enlightenment held many of us in awe.  But eventually this tension tore apart, and Kittler wrote increasingly about social forces as largely determinate of subjective processes such as literature.  His essay "There is no software" had the same paranoid reductionism of bad old nineteenth-century Marxism, whereby individual expression is really already determined behind the scene by the forces of industrialization, or in Kittler's more updated form, machine language.


The alliance of theory interests which Kittler had forged with his first books fell apart with the technologically determinist work, and critics who had once participated int he project of discourse analysis turned increasingly into a close readings which neglected the social context.


One place we can detect this swing away from Kittler’s approach is in David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism.  Wellbery had always been seen as an ally of Kittler; their essays often appeared side-by-side.  Each had students that worked with the other.  Yet in Wellbery’s book on the young Goethe’s poetry, you can sense a decisive move away from the claim that literature is comparable to other discourses.  Wellbery says he's engaged in discourse analysis, but really he performs very little of the broad historical sweep that Kittler displayed.  Instead, Wellbery digs deeply into Goethe’s poems with Lacan-inspired close readings.  Powerful, compelling interpretations of individual poems that run on for dozens of pages—this is what Wellbery produces, so that in the end, he re-establishes once again Goethe’s pivotal place at the origins of modern German literature.  By the end of Wellbery’s book you are presented with overwhelming evidence of Goethe’s singular genius.  The old cult is back—and this is conclusion that Kittler might have held in private, but he would never have written a book establishing this point.

As Kittler’s career moved off into media studies, computer programing languages and the history of technology, Germanistik found new theoretical means to re-establish the primacy of literature, at least for those who understood narratology and Lacan.

In other words, Kittler’s radical potential was broken down into highly specialized disciplines.  If literature lost its claim to autonomy, it was not because of Aufschreibesysteme so much as because of the conservative turn among students, administrators and voters, who increasingly found the esoteric conversations of literary studies impossible to follow.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Metropolitan Modernisms

Here's the new course for the Spring 2012:

                                             

German 592                                                                           TR 2:30 to 3:45
Professor Daniel Purdy                                                        409 Burrowes Building

This course will interpret literature, film, architecture and theory from the last 150 years in order to examine the production of spaces within modern metropoli, concentrating fore mostly on Berlin, with additional texts and films about Paris, New York, Beijing and Shanghai.  We will ask questions such as:  How do places within a city acquire a specific ethnic, sexual, political or economic meaning?  What artistic techniques represent the experience of street life best?  How important are urban spaces for the operation of a political public sphere?  What does it mean to “occupy” a place? 

Our approach will compare modern industrial cities to one another.  We will first trace the formation of Berlin modernist aesthetics and then consider its global legacy in the 21st century.  Paris and Moscow will be important to understanding the modernism of Weimar Germany in the 1920s.  New York, Chicago, Beijing, and Shanghai will mark different stages in the diffusion of this early twentieth-century Modernism.

We will read German texts in relation to foreign cities.  We consider the implications of Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project) and Siegfried Kracauer (Straßen in Berlin) fascination for Paris.  New York and Chicago will be discussed in regards to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Bauhaus architecture of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.  Spaces marked in terms of alternative sexualities will be considered in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen, Magus Hirschfeld’s Transvestiten and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories.  We will read film theory on montage and the experience of urban streets, drawing connections between Russian revolutionary cinema and modernist experimental prose (Döblin and Musil). 

Our readings will survey theories of urbanity from Georg Simmel to Rem Koolhaas, Marc Augé, and Ackbar Abbas.  Finally we will conclude with contemporary discussions of “the European city” as a reaction against globalization generally and the example of China’s rapid urbanization specifically. We will discuss the places of historical preservation and memorialization in Berlin and Beijing by considering Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin.  By way of contrast we will consider architectural debates about preserving traditional urban spaces in China and contemporary Chinese films such as Ning Ying’s I love Beijing.   

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Hunting and the Revolution

Major upheavals begin with small gestures, as this eighteenth-century text, written by Matthias Claudius and translated here, can attest: 

"A LETTER FROM A STAG RECENTLY HUNTED DOWN 
TO THE LORD WHO HUNTED HIM DOWN, 
WRITTEN FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER 

I had the distinction of being chased down by your serene highness today and request most subservently that your lordship might condescend in future to spare me this ordeal.

If your serene highness should ever once be hunted in this manner, you would find my request not unreasonable in the least. I am lying here and cannot raise my head, blood is flowing  from my mouth and nostrils. How can your highness have the heart to drive an animal to its death, especially one that lives innocently, eating only herbs and grass.  Next time have them come out and just shoot me dead, that way it will be over quickly.  It may be that your serene highness takes pleasure in hunting, but if you knew how my heart beats, you would surely never do it again. . . .”

--This satire on aristocratic hunting, written in the manner of an administrative memo from a dying buck to his feudal lord, goes far beyond criticizing an ancient sport; in the stag's last request we hear bitterness and defiance mixed with helpless begging.  One wonders whether Kafka read this story, for the voice of an animal writing an official letter in bureaucratic German would surely have caught his attention.  The text draws us to identify with the dying animal and to recognize ourselves in him—as just another lowly subject driven to an exhausted death by a self-indulgent elite.  The dying buck stands in for all those (humans as well as animals) beneath the feudal lord, especially when he makes the revolutionary suggestion that the lord should himself be hunted down by dogs until he collapses.  With its last breath, the animal imagines a violent revenge whereby the arrogant abuses of feudalism are turned against its masters, and yet the beast is not strong enough, the lord’s hunting party too well armed, and so all the buck can do in the end is ask for mercy.  Still this satire was written in 1775 and you can sense that the hunt might someday indeed turn against the hunters, just as the dying deer desired.

The original you can find on Gutenberg.de and Zeno.de: 

SCHREIBEN EINES PARFORCEGEJAGTEN HIRSCHEN AN DEN FÜRSTEN DER IHN PARFORCEGEJAGT HATTE, D. H. JENSEIT DES FLUSSES


„Durchlauchtigster Fürst, Gnädigster Fürst und Herr!
Ich habe heute die Gnade gehabt, von Ew. Hochfürstlichen Durchlaucht parforcegejagt zu werden; bitte aber untertänigst, daß Sie gnädigst geruhen, mich künftig damit zu verschonen.
Ew. Hochfürstliche Durchlaucht sollten nur einmal parforcegejagt sein, so würden Sie meine Bitte nicht unbillig finden. Ich liege hier und mag meinen Kopf nicht aufheben, und das Blut läuft mir aus Maul und Nüstern. Wie können Ihre Durchlaucht es doch übers Herz bringen, ein armes unschuldiges Tier, das sich von Gras und Kräutern nährt, zu Tode zu jagen? Lassen Sie mich lieber totschießen, so bin ich kurz und gut davon. Es kann sein, daß Ew. Durchlaucht ein Vergnügen an dem Parforcejagen haben; wenn Sie aber wüßten, wie mir noch das Herz schlägt, Sie täten´s gewiß nicht wieder …….“

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

What ails Comp Lit? Its own cure

Comparative Literature is often described as “in crisis.”  How to define and defend against this threat to the discipline is an open question, a problem whose explanation almost always brings a solution with it.  If you can diagnose what ails comp lit, then you are two steps away from prescribing a cure.

But perhaps Comp Lit is not in crisis, rather it is the university around it that has grown intolerant of interdisciplinarity?  What was once taken to be height of the humanities, a learned ability to move between languages and literatures has of late been misunderstood.

So the worst thing Comp Lit could do is start acting like one of the old-fashioned territorial departments that long ago passed away. The great success of comparative literature in the 1980s—yes, the previous century—has lead to the general acceptance of literature departments to include scholars who work in more than one language, more than one canon.  So now comp lit faces the threat of its own success.  Everyone is doing it, so comp lit departments worry that they need to reinvent themselves.

The worst move would be for comparative literature to start acting territorial, to regulate its graduate students, to force them into a narrowly defined range of courses, to create a curriculum that precludes working with outside departments. 
For if comparative literature departments were to draw borders around itself, it would become the territory of non-territoriality, the discipline of inter-disciplinarity, the dogmatic negation of national identity.  It would set up rules and controls over which scholars and what methods are outside national literary traditions.  This would require, inevitably, that comp lit overstate how narrow, periodical and identity-driven other departments were.  “They are hung up on canons, we are without a canon, that is our canon.”

This kind of dogmatic negativity has been around for ages, longer than Hegel’s dialectic.  In the end it leads to its own internal critique, one which seeks to break out of the rules that proscribe interdisciplinarity in favor of that most dreadful of post-Soviet ghosts, ethnic identity.  The biggest groups usually win in such contests, if not English, for it does have its own department already, then Spanish and Mandarin. Comp Lit would suffer greatly if its literary curriculum were reduced to a question of population sizes--biggest enrollments, largest readerships.

Better to encourage and work with a cosmopolitan model of the university, better to indulge in world literature as a heritage all readers enjoy.  Better not to act as if only one department knew anything about the wonderful interplay of the Liberal Arts.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Charlemagne backs the Euro with Frankish troops

The FAZ reports that Jürgen Stark, a German economist on the board of the European Central Bank has resigned.
http://www.faz.net/artikel/S30638/ezb-chefvolkswirt-stark-tritt-zurueck-risiko-zentralbank-30683913.html

The Guardian explains that this sends "shock waves" through the markets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/09/stark-ecb-resignation-sends-markets-reeling

On the face of it, Stark's resignation shows that the ECB is divided on whether it should continue to buy government bonds of European nations that are in burden with debt.  The FAZ article reiterates an ancient North-South comparison, the idea that northern European nations, such as Germany foremostly, are obliged to financially obliged to support southern European nations, if they want the Euro to continue as a successful currency.

This North-South trope, whereby the South needs rescuing by the North, goes back centuries, it permeates European history from at least 800 AD onwards.  In the year 800, as students of German/European history know, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by a grateful Leo III, bishop of Rome and Pope.  Leo had had his eyes and tongue removed by a partisan Roman mob.  The presence of the Frankish army in the Eternal city reinforced, or rather rescued, his life and position.  The northern barbarians had been invited on the basis of a long standing, several generations-old policy, whereby various Popes had worked together with Charlemagne's forebearers for the sake of mutual political and from the Frankish side, military, support.

In today's financial market, there is no need to talk about Charlemagne as the founder of a unified Europe, but the old metaphors pervade.  Everyone in European politics knows them.  Sometimes these old comparisons are deliberately invoked, sometimes they pop up unexpectedly in the minds of journalists and readers, whether they are intended or not.

The markets are anxious presumably because the resignation of an important, conservative banker with long-connections to Germany's conservatives looks like a rehearsal for a larger resignation--a German pull out from continued support for the buying bonds from souther governments.  Like the emperor leaving the warm, lovely climes of Italy to head back north over the Alps to confront his own rebellious Dukes and Saxons.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Decline and Fall

It all started out so harmlessly, peruse an old tome about an ancient empire before falling asleep, edifying and soporific—that’s how Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ended up at the top of the bookpile next to my bed.  A few nights of calm reading followed by lights out.  The editor’s cheerful preface gave no clear warning of what would follow.  When he mentioned finishing Decline and Fall in three months, his pace seemed a bit ambitious, but perhaps it was merely the sign of a bookish bent.

But I am here to tell you folks—it’s a slippery slope.

After a hundred pages, it’s hard to stop.  Before you know it you will go to sleep hoping that you will be awakened again at 3:00AM, so that you read more about what really happened to Commodus—never mind Gladiator.  Insomnia becomes your friend. 

Before you know, you’re reading Gibbons at breakfast, then you start neglecting breakfast.  Instead, you pour another coffee and keeping reading.  A three-day weekend arrives and you’re on the sofa until noon still nestling the book that a week ago you said was just a “night-cap.” 

Eventually you turn on your computer, but not to check your email or go back to that half-baked article you need to revise.  No, you start checking to see what Wikipedia says about Gibbons’ wicked emperors and sacked cities.  Was he making this stuff up?  Is he hopelessly biased and thus unreliable.  That might be a relief, put an end to your mania.  But, alas, no.  A morning of switching back and forth from laptop to tome has Gibbons ahead by miles.  The internet is no match for his synthetic narrative.  Not only does he use all the same sources any modern scholar would deploy, he pulls them all together in a compelling tale told with clubby irony and wit.   No understatement here, just a catalogue of immorality and power-grabbing that keeps you reading for more.

You sense that Gibbons has a political ax to grind.  Sure he was a loyal subject of the English empire, but he’s clearly also an Enlightened thinker.  Very open minded about Zoroasterians.  He thinks mob rule is insane, distrusts democratic institutions, while deriding tyranny and absolute power.  He keeps a running tab of all the abuses that absolute monarchs impose about their subjects, like Amnesty International.  Let’s you feel the full disaster of military dictatorship.  In the end, you’re not really sure where he stands, a monarchist perhaps and no fan of the French Revolution, presumably, but a very reasonable fellow.  More progressive than half the Whigs on Masterpiece Theater.

Before you know it, you are checking out colleagues’ books on the gothic wars in third-century Thrace.  But still Gibbons keeps ahead of the pack.  The internet just confirms what Gibbons wrote 240 years ago.  Modern scholars provide commentaries that after 35 pages agree with his zippy paragraphs.  In the end, you're grateful he's not all wrong, because that means you can keep going.

Soon you have lost all track of time, you’re online searching out English translations of Gibbons’ late Roman sources.  Before you know it, you’ll be learning Latin.

Friday, August 19, 2011

German History of Chinese Globalization


Jürgen Osterhammel is one of those scholars whose writing seems to gain momentum the longer he works on a subject.  This summer, his latest tome, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, was omnipresent in book stores around Germany.  It looked like a promising read especially ebcause Osterhammel is described as an historian who writes within the context of globalization, that is to say that his 19th century would be a global one, not just a cross Rhine struggle between Germany and France.

But I was already schlepping one of Osterhammel’s earlier books in my suitcase, and some sense of middle aged decorum pressed upon me that I ought to finish this book before buying the next—blame it on the financial crisis.

Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (1998) is a superb book, a wonder and a joy to read. When I first came across it, I was delighted that someone had written vast scholarly work on how Europeans described China.  Osterhammel works through all the major sources, French and English to be sure, the Spanish and Portuguese accounts are integrated through translations, and the whole thing from a German perspective, just to give you a sense of how all these travel writings and anthropological theories were integrated into German thought.  A masterful work, to reviewed and mined for footnotes. 

But that was just the start, Osterhammel has an earlier work on China that covers a much wider sweep: China und die Weltgesellschaft (1989).  This earlier book tries to accomplish many things: it is in part a history of China, an account of modernization theory and a history of European engagement. It tries to write Chinese history as well as the historiography of European accounts of China.  The two levels get a little tangled up, so that Osterhammel takes seriously the many accounts of China as a tyrannical Empire.  Old tropes such as “Asiatic despoticism” appear along side more modern statistical accounts of rural development.  In other words, Osterhammel treats all writing on China as source material.  The second book, Die Entzauberung Asiens, corrects this tendency by providing an intellectual history of how Europeans envisioned China.  Die Entzauberung is more conscious of how metaphors and discourses shape knowledge-claims, and in that sense it is a much more valuable to book for literary scholars.  But read them all, because Osterhammel has a lot to teach about globalization and Chinese history in the first book.  For those of you not well-versed in the layers of China Studies, the first book will be a continued source of information, even as the second book examines how its tropological genealogy.  Someday it may seem self-evident, selbstverständlich, that histories be written with an understanding of the international networks that connect eventhe most isolated nations, and when that point is reached, Osterhammel’s work will have brought us there. 

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Standard and Poor

The German press responded cautiously to the S & P's downgrading of the U.S.'s bond rating. The FAZ has an a article quoting Chinese criticisms of the US, stressing in particular the ridiculous political circus --this allows the Chinese to criticize the democratic process as well as the particular instance.  Another FAZ article concluded that the US was now like other countries, the United Kingdom and Germany.  One implication between the Chinese and the German responses is that the US may well have to curtail its military interventions.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Guns or Espresso?

You know those guys in German cafes wearing stylish shirts over slim, well-trained chests sipping caffeine from a small cup while watching the world walk by at 5:30 in the afternoon.  That is what you get when you have a society geared toward leisure, with affluence spread across the population, limited working hours and a tiny military budget.

Robert Gates is on a well-orchestrated, diplomatically-timed grumpy tour, telling friends and allies what he really thinks.  Today he is chastising NATO for not having the military arsenal and stockpiles required to carry out a sustained campaign. 


He also correctly points out that important NATO countries have not demonstrated the political commitment to engaging their troops in Afghanistan.  Gates praises some small member nations, such as Belgium and Denmark, but he clearly means to criticize Germany as the leading nation to refuse to participate in American-led military interventions.  He does this just days after the President has awarded Angela Merkel with the Medal of Freedom. 

Of course, Gates has a point.  The reality is that NATO has always counted on the United States to take the lead in military assertiveness, even during the Cold War. All of Europe could get along as long as no one European nation claimed military leadership.  If the Americans take the charge, then Europe can find a means to follow.

Post-Communism, this arrangement no longer holds, for there is little consensus among Europeans for military intervention outside the continent.  Gates may fume all he wants, the reason Germany does not spend more on its military budget is because the voters do not want it to do so.  Whereas World War Two is continually invoked in the United States as a justification for projecting military power, the same war functions in Germany as a reason not build up the military.  The larger picture is that European countries would prefer to spend their tax money of social improvements.

Democracy in this case functions as a brake on military expenditure.  And who really would like to see Germany develop an interest in foreign military intervention--no one other than a few short-sighted American hawks.

The world is much safer with those two guys in the cafe sipping espresso, and they're happier, too.  It is only the Americans who feel the burden of domination.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Global Museum: Antwerp's opportunity


How does one design a global museum?  Any museum that is not a website, needs to contain its collection within a building and make sure to secure funding from a specific political entity, which usually means attracting the right kind of influential audience.

The new MAS in Antwerp has all the holdings of a museum about globalization and its history, but it has not put them all together into a coherent form. The MAS holds diverse collections brought together from many smaller museums.  The topics range from paintings and porcelain, the history of Antwerp, anthropological artifacts from tribal peoples in the Pacific, African and the Americas, the history of shipping, traditional folk culture in Flanders. 

How did the MAS end up with this hodge-podge?  It does not take too much imagination to realize that the content of these collections reflects the interests of Antwerp's ruling elite during the nineteenth-century. Some of the upper class wanted to demonstrated their refined taste by collecting European decorative arts, others were filled with civic pride and another group traveled the world.  All three could be spun together into a narrative of globalization.  If Antwerp were not such a major port, we would hardly have found a collection of Indonesian and African masks in the MAS.  Why not link the presence of these collections with Antwerp's colonial and global economic history? 

As the exhibits now stand, the history of the city is told compellingly in terms of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age as art historians sometimes still call it.  This historical narrative structures the most coherent and exciting part of the MAS, but with a broader and longer view, the history of Antwerp would easily be placed within the context of colonialism and the spread of European capitalism across the globe.  The curators have all read Ferdinand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein. Thus, it would not be so difficult to link Antwerp's history within the Spanish Empire and the later nineteenth-century anthropological collections.  But such a curatorial approach would require presenting Antwerp as more than just the gorgeous sacrificial victim of the Eighty Years War.  It would require the museum to address the question of nationalism, Flemish, and as well French and German.  It is not so hard to see how one group of nineteenth-century collectors would become fascinated with African art, while another would focus intensely on Flemish village life.   Domestic ethnography is the nationalist response to colonial expansion.  Finally, the museum's vast collection on Antwerp shipping provides the obvious link between all the other collections.  

Why not turn the museum into an investigation of Antwerp's global past?   The answer surely has everything to do with Belgium's awkward political present.   The conflicts between Walloons and Flemings are so exhausting that most Belgians just discreetly refer to them for fear of unleashing yet another ideological cavalcade.    This reticence, this desire not to wade into the broader terms of Belgian political history, stymies museums such as the MAS who are obliged to present more than their local heritage. 

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Touring the Site

Architourism has for centuries concentrated on ruins of great old buildings, but now we could turn it around so that we travel to sites to experience how buildings are constructed.  The first example that springs to mind, of course, is the World Trade Center site where for the last nine years visitors have stood to watch the slow progress in rebuilding the destroyed Towers.  Lately you have been able to see actual buildings emerge and I remember a particular thrill last time I was there just chatting with three construction workers leaving the site. 



Sometimes you stumble across construction sites by accident. There are maps of Antwerp that list the Red Star museum, with exhibits about the history of emigration through the port. If Ellis Island stands at one end of the Atlantic migration, then it would make sense that European harbor cities would build museums recounting the process whereby emigrants left their homes behind.  Fittingly, there have been conferences and publications on the topic, and I have even spoken with a professor who took a tour through the old Red Star ship line facility for processing emigrants. So when you are in Antwerp, and you're from New York, you might want to visit this historic point embarkation.

Alas, the maps are deceptive and the story about the tour not conclusive, because when you stand at the site of the Red Star museum as indicated by your official museum guide to Antwerp, you quickly discover that it is but the shell of a facade and a big muddy construction zone.  Sure, there is a giant placard with a computer generated image of what the museum is supposed to look like in two years, but the thing itself is just a husk of a building.  So when you get over your dismay, you realize there is another level of tourism, watching to see how an old, run down, relatively modern structure is transformed into an interactive cool space.
  



The construction site is porous, it allows you to wander through the empty lot, thereby revealing just how thoroughly historic buildings are stripped down before they are renovated.  Indeed, throughout Antwerp you can find late medieval buildings under historic renovation where nothing stands except the four outside walls.  The interior has presumably been catalogued so that it can be rebuilt wholly anew.   The historic character thus resides solely in the exterior walls and not at all in the high tech interior spaces.  A visit to the construction site makes all too clear how little history remains in contemporary preservation projects.  The creaky old floors, the tacky tiles, the moldy corners, the dim light, the labyrinthean layout have been replaced with a space that allows large groups to shuffle through an exhibition.

The latest architectural sensations foster in this fascination with the construction of museums.  The MAS, Antwerp's striking new city museum, has a book available for 20 euros that depicts its own construction.  The folks in Antwerp have learned plenty from Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.  When the Libeskind museum first went up, a variety of books were published recounting its design, yet these were published while the success of the museum was not yet obvious.  The folks in Antwerp have take a more aggressive approach.  They had a book recounting the construction of the MAS available on opening day, as part of a rather over aggressive strategy to turn the building into a Frank Gehry/Daniel Libeskind icon.  Pictures of its construction have become a necessary component in creating the myth of the building's uniqueness.  In won't be long before the next innovative museum project offers cognoscenti guided tours of the construction site just as you can tour the Roman forum to learn about what once stood there.  In Lower Manhattan, the lines would be too long and the large crowds would interfere with the construction work, to say nothing of the insurance and legal issues involved.  So for now, it is best to just walk onto an unsuspecting site on your own.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Antwerp's Museum at the River

There has been lots of warm, friendly buzz about Antwerp's new high-rise museum in the harbor district: MAS, Museum aan de Strom.  Check out Roman Hollenstein's excellent piece in the NZZ, available here in English translation:  http://www.signandsight.com/service/1284.html

The building is a  marvel and a delight, rising 60 meters high in a wide open area of docks and water.  It stands all alone; it has no need to integrate itself into an urban context, instead it allows visitors the opportunity to enjoy increasingly higher panoramas of the historic city and the industrial harbor. 



Each floor has a serpentine glass wall facing out into a different direction.  The floor are layered on top of each other in 90 degree turns, like a disheveled pile of books.  The red sandstone sets the building off from the rest of the city while also keeping a rough natural feel of quarried rock.  The stone has a raw, tactile feel even as it so obviously suggests a desert environment far removed from northern Europe. 



The architectural firm of Neutelings and Riedijk have raised a number of buildings through the Netherlands and Belgium that look like viewing platforms, and soon they will bring their techniques to the new Cincinnati Art Museum, their first project in the United States.  Cincinnati has already an avant-garde art museum designed by Zaha Hadid, which like MAS leads the visitor through a carefully arranged series of stairs, or escalators, so that the building becomes a spectatorial apparatus.  The visitors are guided along an ascending path with turns that provide them carefully chosen views.  In the case of MAS, the eye is allowed to wander across a vast panorama, so that each level is literally an elevation above the previous one.  Wisely, the highest floor faces the historic city center, so that the rising alternative views reach their culmination at a point that allows the viewer to enjoy a birds-eye view much like the historical prints shown in the exhibition.



The exhibitions include a selection of Old Masters lent from the royal art museum, placed in dark rooms with precise lighting. You can get your nose up close to a delicate van Eyck. 

The dark exhibition rooms have the added effect of covering over the fact that the interior spaces of the building have a rough unfinished quality, which at times is presented as "honest" reference to the harbor's business of loading and unloading ships, but at other points has the feel of rushed job when for example  2x 6 beams are thrown up to hold Golden Age masterpieces.  To carry on the harbor metaphors, the MAS feels like a ship on its maiden voyage:  the various collections ranging from the history of Antwerp to Indonesian and African ethnography are not given a meaningful connection.  The themes that are chosen to place them together, such as "Representations of Power"  "Life and Death" have all the credibility of a ninth grade social studies text book.  Added to this are distracting sound tracks in the exhibition spaces.  Why do you need to hear a man playing loud violin music as you are contemplating a gold coin with Alexander the Great's profile from the city's numismatic collection?  The staff throughout the museum were nervous and jumpy, especially as the electricity on several floors would intermittently fail.  All of this will presumably be straightened out: the staff will learn the ropes, the exhibits will receive a coherent structure.  As things stand right now, the museum's presentation of Antwerp's urban history is far too fragmented and jumpy, a far cry from Ghent's magnificent city museum.
Right now, the wonderful building (and the interspersed Old Masters) makes the short trip to the edge of Antwerp a delight, eventually the rest of the museum will be ship shape.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Where History Never Ends

We all know that you can read history off the walls of a cathedral, but you have to know what your looking for, and that is the hard part.  Happily, many churches provide you with a brochure, and they, too, help you read the history out of the church.

One wonders who writes these little brochures?  When you hold one in your hand, you see that they are obviously produced locally within the parish.  While they have an assortment of learned and curious facts about the church, they are definitely not written by either a tour guide or an academic, because they reveal a point of view that is neither scholarly nor customer-oriented friendly. 

Read one after the other as you wander from church to church in some ancient city, such as Antwerp, where I am walking my flat feet into the pavement, you can piece together a fascinating ecclesiastical history, one in which old grudges live on.

For example, one Catholic brochure cannot resist hitting back at the Reformation, and tries to do so by pulling the wandering tourist over to its side with the following warning: "Don't look for the original Gothic and early Renaissance pieces of art here; they were destroyed in the two iconoclasms of 1566 and 1581."

That's almost 500 years of carrying a resentment.  But if you wander into a Dutch cathedral further north (where the Calvinists ruled), you are confronted with an empty nave where the remnants of smashed saints and disciples still hang on the wall.  The marks of Calvinist assaults have been left unrepaired in Holland, a point of pride in the north but a deep injury in Catholic Antwerp.  

Today, somewhere in the folds of Antwerp's parishes (where the Jesuits drove out Calvinism 450 years ago), there are volunteers writing brochures for English-speaking tourists who are happy to throw a few elbows at Protestantism.
And really, it is quite wonderful to see that these ancient battles still bother and offend believers, that somewhere in Antwerp there are people who still resent the Reformation--as if it weren't really over.

In many churches, the Enlightenment is seen as an even bigger threat.  The French Revolution is mentioned with a shudder, because it meant that churches were shut down and stripped of all their valuables, while the monks were chased away.  The end of monastic orders meant the decline of all churches-- a barbarism so tremendous that the brochures' authors seem to struggle to hold back their outrage by confining themselves to a few shocked sentences.  The Calvinists were vanquished here in Antwerp, but no one believes that the French Revolution does not continue to hold sway over the political system.  And of course, the tourist holding the brochure may harbor some sympathies for the Revolution, thus "the less said, the better."

A simple question to a friendly guard at a small baroque museum showed me that locals still remember the churches that were secularized: After admiring a portrait by van Dyck of an intense-looking Italian diplomat, I pulled out my city map and asked "where is the church where this painting originally hung?" "It is no more," came the answer.  "Gone?" I asked slicing my hand across horizontally.  "No, it is now a school," was the final resigned word.

Then there is the occasional dead Emperor who gets a punch.  In one church (which shall remain nameless but is easy to surmise), Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Habsburg monarch of Austria, is repeatedly criticized for having covetously removed a beautiful Caravaggio painting of the Virgin.  In its place stands a copy of the same painting, made centuries after the mad genius Caravaggio had passed on to his reward, and underneath a placard denouncing the Imperial theft.

Museums in Turkey and India have such signs, objecting to colonial appropriations of their own antiquities, but to see a Catholic church rebuke (a not so pious) Catholic monarch is definitely an ecclesiastical form of inside baseball.

And it is really great reading!  What is not to like about such religious shots.  It shows that the church continues to have its defenders, that the centuries do not wash away the hurt.  So long as the fighting is confined to passing remarks in a church brochure, it only heightens the architectural experience.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Rough Justice

You cannot travel around Europe as an American these days without being asked what you think of the Strauss-Kahn case.  Back in the 80s everyone asked you about Reagan and at some point I just stopped talking about his politics, because the assumption is that you as the American are going to defend Reagan, or in this case the "Perp Walk."  The French outrage has focused on this admittedly humiliating violation of the defendant's rights to privacy and to being presumed innocent until proven guilty.  (I am not sure if he got the full Perp Walk treatment or if he was simply photographed in a court setting where anyone could be but most people are not.)  The Perp Walk amounts to parading the arrestee only for the sake of the cameras.

But the European shock and dismay at the New York police force is fairly overstated.  Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is shown on most major Western European televisions.  The first night I landed in Germany, I had the weird sensation of channel surfing between coverage of Strauss-Kahn and watching Ice-T dubbed into German.  Europeans all know how Law and Order works; they were just surprised at who made a cameo last week.

The key thing is that critics over here think that Americans don't realize that the Perp Walk is archaic.  Once you admit that it is, explain that it goes back to the days of arresting gangsters in the early 20th century, that it completely violates rights, but that it is a rough local custom, then some of the heat is off the attack, and there is the chance that our talk can turn to the issues of the alleged crime itself.

We know little about the details in the hotel room, but some things are worth considering:

Both alleged attacker and victim speak French.  They may not have known that at the time.  Whatever exchange there was, would probably have taken place in English.  The fact that they were both native French speakers points to the former colonial relationship between countries of origin, but the fact that these two people met in New York was more a result of global economics, the regulation of money flowing between wealthy and poor nations, producing and consuming societies, and the inevitable movement of people these relationships produce, whether it's financial managers or impoverished emigrants.  The guy tried to regulate the global flow of capital, the maid was carried along by the current.

The second global aspect of the case is tied to the financial, but runs on its own rules: the media coverage. 

The French media are using the opportunity to hammer at the Americans for being puritanical and disrespectful of human rights; the Americans are mocking French hypocrisy.  In an earlier age, say two hundred years ago, this case might have led to war.  Everyone can read about how the others are representing the case.  So we get British summaries of the French press, French recapitulations of the American.  In the end, French anti-Americanism seems to trump feminism.

Little is said in defense of the alleged victim, quite simply because the media does not know how to discuss someone who does not play along with their practices.  If you don't give interviews, avoid the camera completely, reject public statements, then there is little the media knows to say.  The alleged victim, nameless in the US, but described in France, simply refuses to participate.  The French media violates her right to privacy, just as the American media walks all over Strauss-Kahn's.

Justice will in the end be applied locally in New York to two people born and raised in foreign countries.




Thursday, April 21, 2011

Babel Backwards

The story of Babel is usually told backwards, the many languages spoken around the tower were not a punishment, they were a delight.  Any construction site in the world is filled with men who speak differently from one another, yet they always manage to understand each other after a few days together.  So if a  great emperor calls a large workforce together, they will surely include men from different corners of his kingdom.  Upon first hearing them speak, an outsider might imagine that they had no means of understanding each other, but this is clearly the opinion of someone immersed in just one language, someone like a priest who spends all his days reading the scriptures of his one holy language.  In the practical world of moving heavy stones and raising broad foundations, all languages are understood by everyone.  In a flash the man lifting a wide awkward bundle into a cart understands what the driver is telling him.  The crane operator knows what the laborers below him need lifted.  He hears them speaking and without worry picks up the right object.  The words rise up to him like a song he understands but cannot write down.  Only the priest who comes to visit the site, to judge the tower and the king who commands its construction, is confused.  Only he hears chaos.  And so when the king dies, and the work is left undone, the priest tells the story backwards as if the many languages flowing into each other were a sin, rather than a wonder.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Research as Work


Here is another weird twist in the debate over state funding for universities: academic research is what professors do for themselves and not for the university.  Increasingly this strange claim has seeped into the public discussion.  In today's local paper, a dean is quoted as saying that some faculty have adapted their schedules "to their own needs rather than the needs of the university."  As I read this I was waiting for the other shoe to drop--did we have a scandal in the making, another shot across the bow of the great ship decadence?  What have those faculty members been doing with their personalized schedules?!

I held my breath and read onwards...they have been "freeing up days for their research."   Shocking news.  I thought that research was one of the primary jobs of professors.  Publish or perish, remember that familiar refrain?

For the sake of collegial decorum, and on the off chance the quote was in error, I won't belabor the statement and instead offer you the link to read for yourselves:


In all the political posturing, let no one imagine or insinuate that research is personal free time, a time to watch old movies and eat bon-bons on the sofa.

Research is one of the things we do here at the university.  We read books and articles, we listen to lectures, we scour the world for new ideas.  It serves the university and society at large.  We are the grunts who pump out articles and books.  Research is not a perk, some special privilege that academics get to indulge in.

Just ask the assistant professor who has been denied tenure because their book came out too slowly, or the middle aged professor who has not produced a research agenda in the last decade.  They are judged first and foremostly by their research productivity.  Research is not contrary to the university's needs, it is one of the university's primary functions, along with teaching and public service.

So let us not create the illusion that intellectual endeavor in its most intense form is just personal time, it is work.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Standing up for your medicine, or facing the music?


When push come to shove, you can learn the meaning and use of a new word.  In this case, I was intrigued by the headlines in two respectable German language newspapers describing the referendum in Iceland where the population decided by a clear majority that the country at large, i.e. the population, would not cover the default of Iceland's largest banks.  The United Kingdom and the Netherlands had covered the losses that their citizens suffered by investing in Iceland's banks. The expectation from Europe had been that the Icelanders would and should cover these costs.

The vote went against that expectation and the common phrase is the Icelanders do not want to "stand up for" these debts.  "Face the music" is the usual translation, but
geradestehen" really means something like stand at attention while the "music" plays, i.e. you receive your punishment.   Does standing straight for your punishment mean take a beating or does it simply mean "stand at attention" while you listen to a criticizing lecture.

So do you think Iceland will be allowed to join the European Union anytime soon?  

Isländer wollen nicht für Bankenpleite geradestehen



Isländer wollen nicht für Bankschulden geradestehen

Yoko Tawada and translators

If you missed Yoko Tawada's recent swing through Pennsylvania as she performed with her translators, you can just zip over to Berlin for an encore


International
Lesung/Gespräch in der Mori-Ôgai-Gedenkstätte, Yoko Tawada im Gespräch mit ihrer Übersetzerin Bettina Brandt

  
17.05.2011, 10117 Berlin, Luisenstr. 39, zum Stadtplan 
Kostenlos, Einschränkung: 18:00 Uhr c.t.

zu Dejima, die Begegnung der Japaner mit der holländischen Sprache und der Neuerscheinung "Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik"

Dienstag, 17. Mai 2011, 18:00 Uhr c.t.

Mori-Ôgai-Gedenkstätte, Luisenstr. 39, 10117 Berlin, 1.OG.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Pretty German Politicians


German politicians have gotten better looking.


The new FDP chairman, Philipp Rösler, has a striking similarity with the CSU's fallen star Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.  Both are smart, well-spoken politicians who have risen quickly and dramatically from regional offices to national prominence.  Not only are they charismatic, both rely on their faces to project their political messages.  Guttenberg has been compared to a more rugged Roger Moore, not a bad thing for a Defense Minister.  When people predict that he will eventually return to the national political stage, they base their argument on the fact that many voters enjoyed his performance-- even in his recent  resignation speech, he had a swagger in front of the camera that was held in check only by his need to appear chastened and oppressed by the scandal over his plagiarized dissertation.  

Rösler has just arrived at the top of the FDP, but his handsome face has been included in group pictures for the last year.  His visage attracts the camera not only because of his earnest, clean, boyish "soft Tom Cruise with glasses" appearance, but also because he was born in Vietnam, then raised in Germany.  He has the Obama-quality of an interesting family story, coupled with academic hard-work (his medical degree is unchallenged).  Television viewers are invited to ponder his face as he speaks flawless academic German.  "Look at this thoroughly German sounding Asian," says the camera.  Rösler enhances the boutique appeal of a small party like the Free Democrats.  His face provides a means for the FDP to distinguish itself as sophisticated, free-thinking, hard-working.  These messages and more will swirl around his photo.

A far cry from Helmut Kohl and Franz-Josef Strauss, these new faces suggest that German political parties have an entirely new media strategy.  The first rule of being a handsome politician is to pretend that good-looks are unimportant.  No need for the ironic self-effacement of Marcello Mastrioanni, no need to sound like a French actress trapped by her beauty, but certainly the new handsome Germans will insist that they are there to discuss policy, nothing else.  "Read my lips" may have taken on a less macho meaning, but sticking to a political message while looking coquettish is crucial in order to not generate the envy of male voters.  Charismatic politicians have to work both sides of the room, without irritating either sex.  They don't want to become the pretty boys whom all the men despise.  Kohl and Strauss certainly never had that problem.   

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Art without Enlightenment



There is a striking disparity in news reports coming from China about the treatment and presentation of art.  On the one hand, the German government sponsored a long-term exhibit at the Beijing National Museum entitled Art of the Enlightenment which cobbles together an assortment of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German paintings all under the rubric "Enlightenment," a term no art historian would use to classify styles or movements.   There is no "art of the Enlightenment" per se, yet such a classification has been created in order to address the larger question of reason, science, progress and (maybe) political rights.  Paintings from Berlin, Dresden and Munich were brought together in Beijing with the German foreign office spending 10 million Euros and the foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, speaking at the opening.  Seems like a traditional form of cultural exchange in the name of high diplomacy. 


In the same week the very prominent contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, who has exhibited at the Tate in London and at Dokumenta in Kassel, mentions in an interview that he will set up a studio in Berlin.  He also speaks out in other interviews against the government's tendency to "disappear" outspoken critics, i.e. people who post on blogs and social media against official policy.   That very same week in which the Art of the Enlightenment exhibit opens, Ai Weiwei is stopped by police from travelling to Hong Kong, and then disappears.  Lisson Gallery in London announced last week that they would exhibit a new work by Ai Weiwei: marble versions of the security cameras that the government had placed around his studio.   

Enlightenment has its sinister sides, as anyone who has read Adorno/Horkheimer and Foucault knows.  It also has the particular meaning in Chinese political history as a term used describe the corrections taken against people who did not conform to the Communist Party's official position.  Ai Weiwei's arrest, the government shut down of his studio and its interrogation of his circle all directly demonstrate that this harsh form of Enlightenment is far more alive than any cosmopolitan eighteenth-century version.   Two years ago he had been arrested and beaten so severally that an emergency operation had to be undertaken on his head in a Munich hospital.  Where he has been taken now is anyone's guess.  The contrast between the officially sanctioned exhibit and the treatment of contemporary artists is brutal.



Here  are a bunch of English language links:


Saturday, April 2, 2011

Book Burning

So I want to formulate a new rule of thumb.  If you want to burn a book, go to where the people who really care about it live, people who read it, treasure it.  Let them see what kind of a person you are with your lighter fluid and paper back copies.  If you want to burn the Koran, then do it in Kandahar.  Why hide in Florida?  Why not go to where the believers are?  Then you can get a much more immediate response to your performance.  And your audience will show you directly what they think of your statement.  All those young men in Afghanistan, surely they will want to explain why they object to your burning their sacred text.

The Nazis burned books in Berlin on Unter der Linden.  They should have sent a few of their own to New York, to London, to Palestine or Marseilles, to carry out their bonfire. Why hide in the security of your own comrades?  Far more daring to burn a book in the company of those who care about it most. 

I admit this rule reflects my own childhood, it is a rule that comes from growing up in an ethnically diverse place. Don't insult Italians because they live over there.  Your neighbors are Jewish, so don't ramble on anti-semitically.  You don't like black people, well go to the next neighborhood over and explain it there.  It's really just a matter of getting along with other people.   

So if some fool burns the Koran in Florida, let's send him over to Afghanistan, free of charge, and invite him to repeat his actions, in public with as many of his hometown friends as are willing to make the trip in support.  That way poor Scandinavian idealists won't suffer the consequences for his rabid nonsense.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Irish Writers

"I know I am in the grip of a true poem when I can hardly bear to read it calmly at first, so all-embracing and far-reaching is its instantaneous effect on me. I realise I am about to meet with psychic turbulence; undergo a vast excitation of mind, soul and body that will turn me outside in. This is not something I can face lightly. I need to adjust and acclimatise - cool down, in short - before I feel capable of responding adequately to the emotional, musical and verbal demands of the poem. I avert my eyes for a while, blink in dazzlement or take a short walk… Robert Frost describes the experience exactly: "The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound. That he will never get over it."

Dennis O'Driscoll inteview

Dennis O'Driscoll has a great, dead-right description of reading a poem that squeezes the breath out of your lungs because its words so directly and artfully speak what you intuited but never could express.  There are moments in literary history where you similarly run across the article that so deftly brings together ideas that you can hardly stand to look at the page.

And it is not always on the first reading that you feel the delirious potion. Often it takes many tries, before the ax splits your head open, before the bullet finds your brain as you lie in bed 2:38 AM trying to read your way back to sleep, until the frenzy and amazement of the right poem makes you wish you never have to sleep again.  Nothing like a good Irish poet to make me want to clutter my sentences up with ordinary words that describe the extra-ordinary, to make me identify with that ritually broken skull they dug out of a Viking grave near York.

Last time I felt that way was reading the first 100 pages of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and then two nights ago reading Dennis O'Driscoll's "The Bottom Line."


O' Driscoll is fond of Brecht's poems but he goes out of his way not to read too much about him so that his admiration for his poetry is not spoiled by Brecht's politics (personal and otherwise).  Poetry is sometimes more compelling, the less we know about the author.  


You can find a fine sample of O'Driscoll and his comrades in an anthology entitled,  Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry 1 

You can hear McCann reading the opening to his novel after a nice five-minute introduction on this video: