How Should We Plan for the Library of the Future? Try Not To.

Colleagues, please do not plan for the future library. Instead, realize that it is planning OUR future, that of human culture. It will grow organically, as did the current library: a library with a brick and mortar manifestation and an emergent property of information, just as each of us has in addition to our bodies. The library will grow and integrate its manifestations, using the tools of memory and communication available. The texts, images, scrolls, codices, internet pages, databases and networks will continue to emerge, seem chaotic and scattered at first, and then our ordered intelligence will organize it.

For each human inquiry, the more we understand about a field of knowledge, the easier it will be to organize. This has all happened before. Justinian's Code was produced with less understanding of how to outline, or mark legal principles and procedures. Little thought and less technique was devoted to how to retrieve it all. Later, more ordered strategies and tools emerged in the Napoleonic Code and, for common law systems, the West Key Number Digest, edited citators, and so on.

Perhaps I am too optimistic, but human minds, with a consciousness that may or may not be an emergent property of our neurological system and the farthest point in our biological evolution, seem to resist entropy in the collective. Only individual brains deteriorate; it seems that collective knowledge persists even if pared down by tragedies such as wars and their cultural destructiveness.

Both of these statements, the first being the famous original assertion by Daniel Dennett and the second my inversion of it, seem to have the potential to be true:

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.

A library is just a scholar's way of making another scholar.

                                     

..And Ladies of the Club (but no houseboat dwellers, please)

This past winter I did something I always said I would never do- I joined a book club. I already knew about a third of the members, and altogether this is a most insightful and engaged group of intelligent readers who are accomplished women, each in her own right. There is at least one writer in the mix as well. These are my notes on our first few selections as well as my experience of the club, which I've shared with them because, when we read each book, of course we discuss and rate it. In fact, we rate it twice on our 1-10 scale (once before and once after discussion) and keep the history of those numbers. I'll catch upon our readings in this one long post and then blog books separately in the future.

First we read two light comedies, the second a sequel to the first, by Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect. These were fun explorations of first person narration (mainly) by a scientist afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome, or at least, so we are told and so he occasionally observes in himself. He is "lovable/annoying" (on the analogy of cute/ugly) and his journey into a capacity for relationship is touching and the humor used to spin out the tale saves it from sentimentality partly because the hero and narrator, Don Tillman, eschews the emotional side of life and presents a more authentic version of himself than most of the other characters.However, we first see Rosie in the gender-biased mode of many of his fellow scientists and so her scientific career comes to us as a surprise in spite or ourselves. However, she is not all heart and he all head and this at least avoids the stereotypes of some romantic comedy and has a touch of the Beatrice and Benedick about it and perhaps even Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy.

For the next book I suggested Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore. This book left most of the group cold, and yet I still regard it as a brilliant novel, its narrative a metaphor for the mental version of wandering, of being lost, and a microcosm both of British post-colonial society in the years after the war and of the mental state of women at that time. However, the favorite book of the group up to now was Tolstory's Anna Karenina, so it may be that with a few Russian ex-pats in our group, the level of knowledge about that society must be greater than knowledge of Britain. In any case, Americans, for their part, often seem not at all happy with tales of those who are seeming failures or passive in the face of overwhelming rejection and hardship, even if they later on regain their footing. That was Fitzgerald's life when she lived on a houseboat and was not living up to her literary promise as she cared for children alone while her husband careened about and drank. This autobiographical component made a great difference to me and I would want my own story to end with the kind of quiet triumph that Penelope Knox Fitzgerald realized in her real life.

Next for the book club was Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. This was a good choice, although the constantly shifting narrative perspectives and time periods out of sequence bothered some in our group. The prose is luminous. There is a wealth of detail, thought the eyes of children about the German invasion of France in WWII. We follow two sets of families in alternate story lines- a blind girl who is French and a boy who builds radios, a natural engineer. The blind girl likes nature and he likes mechanics. Their stories do not come together for quite some while. Themes of light and dark- the visible and invisible, the natural creation and destruction- in short, the human world of art and war (mining, diamonds- there is a search for a lost one by Nazis and with which the girl's father, a gem curator, is involved) move throughout the descriptions. We do not now if these characters can create ripples of change in a chaotic world. Some may object to the plight of a young German whose conscience troubles him as he watches Jewish friends mistreated and then "disappeared" -but not enough to desert the army. However,such a fate would end with as much death all around as we know resulted. Marie-Laure knows this about her German friend as well as her Uncle Étienne: she realizes that light bursts over foxholes in WWI caused his PTSD:

                                   This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light
                                   you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to 
                                   its mark.

Next up in a separate post: Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Notes on Peter Brown Lecture "Alms, Work,and the Holy Poor: Early Monasticism, Syria and Egypt"

Georgetown University, Depts. Of Theology
Inaugural Costan Lecture series on Early Christianity: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? December 4, 2014,
Professor Peter Brown, “Alms, Work and the Holy Poor: Early Monasticism between Syria and Egypt.”
Introduction, Brian Daley, S. J.
How did Peter Brown change studies in late antiquity?
1. This period is no longer seen merely as a decline from the classical golden age, Tacitus or Pliny
2. Many after Edward Gibbon saw Christianity as a source of corruption of classical culture but Peter Brown has focused on its vitality.
Note: works of Brown to find: 1988, The Body and Society re sexuality in the ancient world; article on “The Holy Man in Late Antiquity.”
Peter Brown begins:
I Social World of the Poor and Monasticism:  key to social world of the poor IS monasticism. One cannot take a chance in how to treat the poor or a cripple- the person may be a freeloader or…an angel of God.
A. Monks of Syria and Egypt have been relatively neglected in early antiquity and Christian studies since Gibbon and the Enlightenment.
i) Monks were seen as fanatics and dropouts; Gibbon had contempt for them.
ii) No! They were catalysts of the social activity of an age.
A. Like St. Francis at a later time, even early monks were in revolt against economic crises and their results in the 3rd to 6th centuries as well; they were part of life in the Middle East and seismographs of changes in the society.
B. To study the east we must move away from the “decline and fall” world of western Europe and look at Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic papyri and documents recently unearthed from eastern churches.
II. The nature of wealth, labor and the poor in the 3rd and 4th centuries
A. From Iraq wit he southern and western part of the empire- wealth and care of the poor – but who were “the poor”? In the 3rd and 4th centuries there was no simple answer.
B. Many thought Christians should give to the holy poor, as in Paul’s letter to the Romans; the poor are among the saints: the holy poor of Jerusalem (the holy poor were the only ones who counted)
C. However, the original world of the monastics who spoke of the poor was not Graeco-Roman. They wrote in Syriac (a final form derived ultimately from Aramaic, spoken by Jesus) and Syriac was a major language of religion and comers. By 600 the speakers of Syriac stretched from Antioch to China. This was a true Third World of Christians
III. There were three groups of middle eastern monks and missionaries:
• Wandering monks of Syria
• Missionaries of the Manicheans (Mani saw himself as a reformer of Christianity and his movement extended into Central Asia)
• Monks of Egypt
A. The 270’s in the fertile crescent one could find many extreme groups of Christian origin.
1. Mani- c. 300 in Syria: the Manichean Elect were cultivating extreme poverty and yet had mobility. Mani died 277.
2.   They were like mendicant monks; hungry and voluntarily poor, this Elect were loved for the Lord’s namesake.
B.  These met up with the monks of Egypt, c. 270 and such was Antony in Egypt- the Gospel of Matthew had converted Antony.
1.  Unlike the Syrian wanderers or Manicheans, the Egyptian Desert monks just stayed in their hermitages.  The first hermit gave alms and then sold his house and all his clothes and gave the cash to the poor.
2.  Such a monk refused alms for himself but believed that one must work to eat. Antony died in 356.
3. Debate: which was the true way of monasticism? Now not just a question of WHO received the help, like only the holy poor, but what about a true local indigent, a beggar?
C. How was human society defined- by obligation to work for a living?
D. What claims do those not working have on those who support them with alms?
IV. The answers of the three groups under our study to the questions above reveals different perspectives on the meaning of work in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries.
A. The Manicheans’ answer
1. Irene, a lay disciple of the Manicheans, put her treasure in for the Elect. In the western desert of Egypt, in a villa, were found letters of the Elect to their hearers, 600 miles south of The Fayum, and the letters refer to the sun and the moon with imagery showing the writer was a Manichean.
         2.     This is how treasure became Treasure in Heaven- at stake for them was a view of the material world, and that world was hopelessly corrupt.
a. These alms went only to the Elect because they were being purified by abstaining from sex, manual labor, or immoderate food.
b. Stopping work stopped the demonic processes of the material world, in their belief system. Pale hands showed they were already somewhat “not of this world.”
B. Syrian monastic answer:      Also there was deep pondering of the burden of work in 4th-6th century Syria as well. Syria was lush and abundant at this time.
1. Adam and the myth of the curse of labor had spread to influence non-Jewish writers such as Hesiod.
2. The gods wanted to be without toil and so that is why they burdened humans.
3. This reflects the social trauma of the agrarian revolution- there was a myth of a golden age of no toil before the fall of Adam and Eve.
4. BUT…the Syrian Christians did not believe that the material universe was corrupted but human society had fallen from a state of leisure.
a. In this literature about the fall of Adam and Eve, it did not bring about a weaker will, but the fall was from the work-free world. Work is the true curse in the Syriac literature.
b. Only toil that was for a  spiritual and angelic purpose was good and this was why Syriac monks were supported by lay people;
c. Wandering angelic monks of Syria were entitled to alms to further the weightless labor of the spirit.
C. Egyptian monks’ answer:    
1. They were posed between two wings of the ascetic movement:
a. Syria rose above labor
b.Manichees despised the world
2. In Egypt, ferocious self-sufficiency! Monks were expected to support themselves by their own labor: anticipates the Pelagian perspective: work of the hands.
3. Work was embraced by the Egyptian monks because in Egypt work denoted the monks’ abiding humanity in contrast to the ethereal non-materiality of the Manicheans.
       D. By 400, a battle of the social imagination regarding work was won in Egypt by workers.
V. Implications of all this: in the west, we are used to seeing the monastery as a kind of holy kibbutz and this work as worship had an effect on the later Rule of St. Benedict.
A.  Syrian could have created a monasticism more similar to Buddhism in that the lay would work to support the monks; in late 4th century there is the legend that  (Fa Sien??) Bodhidharma? Walked from India to China and was from the lands of the begging bowl.
B. Division of rich and poor seemed less disturbing to the Manicheans and the Syrians so they tolerated it
C. Instead, the monks of Egypt were human and linked by labor to the sufferings of society. The monks of Egypt support the real poor and not just the Holy Poor.
CONCLUSION
The model of society that emerges for Christians is that of the rich and the poor with serious obligations placed on the rich.
[Italics indicate this was the real take-away of the lecture, at least in my interpretation.]

Re-posting What is Time from Farnam Street...

Always good to remember not what time it is but what time is....if we know.
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/10/what-is-time/

The Future of Libraries, homage to Borges...

How should we plan for the library of the future? Please try not to.

Colleagues, please do not plan for the future library. Instead, realize that it is planning your future and that of human culture. It will grow organically as did the current library, using all tools of communication available. The texts, images, scrolls, codices, internet pages, databases and networks will emerge, seem chaotic at first, and then our collective ordered intelligence will organize it.

For each human inquiry, the more we understand of our universe, world, culture and discipline, the easier it will be to organize it. Gaining this understanding will take a lifetime of serendipity, of discovery. This will never occur with "buy on demand" because then we will know only what most people know by sharing. We need to find the un-shared.

Justinian's Code shows less order in so many ways, and to our modern eyes- it still seems difficult to outline, mark and retrieve statements of law in this particular codex. By the time of the Napoleonic Code, the outline has improved and is simpler. Orderly. The West Key Number Digest improved the way we create a library of cases.

It is not easy. Our tags in Zotero and on LibraryThing  already show inconsistencies in our libraries of research. Each of us has, and is, a library. Daniel C. Dennett's Mandel Lecure quotation is now itself a meme (the original quotation is one you can see if you have access to JSTOR; one should not trust alone in memes yet, of which more below). He was not that happy with his slogan:

"A scholar is just a library's way of making
another library." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 127-135 at 128.

Is it not just as true that

"A library is just a scholar's way of making another scholar."?

Scholars share their libraries through their footnotes and bibliographies and blogs and hypertext.

Who picks the random items that may be stumbled upon in stacks or searches? Librarians.

As our links rot and our paper struggles against the warming climate, we have only our memes and memories. For centuries, only our stories survived. Each librarian should, as in Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, memorize a book. The time may come when they will need us and our progeny.

The library of the future? Librarians: Replicate.

The Great Code*: Please Include the Personal Journal on the Table

 The Bible in particular is one grand story of Family. In this autobiographical play, Cain tells his own family story of Bill Cain: growing up.  The Cain family- his mother Mary, father Pete, and brother Paul- are presented to us in a simple format with carefully choreographed stagecraft.  Bill speaks directly to the audience to introduce scenes, give context to the many funny or infuriating moments in the family’s life, and to share his insights. From childhood through each parent’s untimely death from cancer, we learn about how a family functions. He makes it clear that there is no need to apologize for it as dysfunctional, the embarrassed description many of us offer to hide what hurts and comforts us most about family memories.

The scenes of the play move back and forth deftly from the present, in which adult Bill cares for his dying mother, back into episodes from the past to illuminate family “scripture”- his parents’ imperfect but ultimately solid relationship and his brother’s brave determination as a teenage athlete, a student, and later, a soldier who volunteered to serve in Vietnam. The adult actors play their earlier selves; this discloses in a wonderful way the necessary task Bill has undertaken: to befriend the child in himself. At one point the adult actor portrays an early childhood tantrum over a smashed Hallowe’en pumpkin he dropped after his older brother cast aspersions on his ability to carry it, and then steps out of that portrayal to reflect on his loving father’s reassembly of the pumpkin. He reads his “family-as-Bible” to us right onstage to unveil his own revelation: the determination we have all had, and have, even as adults, to stay wedded to our own unhappiness out of sheer pride. Parents will recognize so many scenes that convey poignancy and humor.  In a wonderful interfaith image, he describes his father carrying him as a rabbi carries the Torah, and anyone who has been present for the Torah service in a Jewish congregation knows that the great scroll does in fact rest on the rabbi’s shoulder just like a sleeping child being carried to bed with love, from a car seat or living room sofa.

The weary tasks of eldercare feature prominently in many exchanges Bill has with his mother that resonate well, the playright surely knows, with many in the theater’s audience. It is a chance to laugh at oneself in these scenes of repetitive scripts when we know that they know that we know, about everything, from sneaking cigarettes to avoiding any talk of the dreaded diagnosis until it can no longer be put aside. 

The audience is caught a little off guard when, just as casually as we later learn that the older brother Paul became an award-winning high school teacher, we also learn that Bill became a priest.  This aspect of the tradition and culture are employed in visually meaningful ways to the attentive onlooker.  Vesting onstage for funerals and blessings, son Bill enacts both familiar Catholic rituals as well as everyday sacraments, and he hallows actions we all recognize.  He raises his mother’s dish of applesauce mixed with crushed meds in the Eucharistic gesture of consecration before handing it over to her to try to get down with a spoon in her increasingly weakened state. 

Another indication of deliberate and subtle detail in the production is the open notebook that remains on a table; the table is re-purposed throughout the production, featuring the actors’ use of the minimal props and spare décor of the living room that is the principal set for the entire play. Whether the table becomes a medical examination table in one flashback scene, or takes on the nature of a desk with an invisible phone connecting the family spread apart in later years, the notebook remains open for the entire play, a pen resting in the crease of the open pages. This touch keeps narrative itself ever present, and enables the kind of externalization of a writer’s thoughts that is often done more easily by voiceover in film, but that is most effective onstage using props as deep symbols of creative presence.

In the end, despite the length of some less important scenes, both the Playbill and American University Radio critics have distilled very well Bill Cain’s truth about the family: it is a “crucible to turn passion into love.”  (WAMU 88.5, Metro Connection, Rebecca Sheir, “Playwright-Priest Pens Play about Faith and Family,” April 5, 2013). The onstage actor playing “Bill Cain” makes it clear that we are adding new books to the Bible throughout our lives, passionately resisting or pursuing our many goals, suffering along the way, and a human life-in-family lives out (as stated by theologian Edward Farley) “the inherited symbols and narratives of one’s faith,” such that “one is embodying or incorporating oneself into a living tradition. That’s a creative act and an interpretive act, an act of theological understanding.”

Amen. With applause.

*Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.  C++ and Java all good: not that kind of code, but another language just the same.

New Year's Resolution: blog at least once a week

While many of my posts will be book and film reviews in the form of critical articles, my reading program this year will be based again on books about the Self as a phenomenon. Interest exists in how we experience ourselves and how we might articulate that more precisely. To say how we might articulate it objectively poses already the usual questions about objective truth and the likelihood that we are sufficiently aware of our biases, so I hope to disclose mine.

I'll start with holiday reading over my winter break for Christmas and New Year's- my reading of books given to me by my children, in this case. I also worked on a chapter for an edited book but I'll let the chapter speak for itself, eventually.

I read Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998). The story of Dr. William Minor, a major contributor to the dictionary during his confinement as a mental patient, mainly in the U.K and then in the U.S., is told through anecdotes about his correspondence during the long editorship of James Murray in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the eventual diagnosis of dementia praecox, aspects of the mental illness suffered by the American, starting most apparently after his service as a Civil War surgeon with the Union Army, remained mysterious. He had many paranoid episodes and a disordered sexual preoccupation that gave rise to self-loathing. None of this prevented him from amassing a large library in his mental institution using his independent wealth and the assistance of relatives. He focused with fierce concentration on creating well-organized lists of word definitions and their occurrences from tireless perusal and analysis of his book collection. The final product, the OED, is certainly indebted to him.

However, and here I disclose my own bias and background, it seems that the real fascination of the story would have been better exploited by more focus on his method and on the full reaction of Murray, if such was recorded, upon learning that this contributor by post was confined as mad after committing a murder under a delusion of persecution by Irish nationals because of his order to brand a prisoner of war with a hot iron while serving as the battlefield doctor. Otherwise, for me as a psychiatrist's daughter and perhaps for many others in this post-Freudian age, the book comes off more as a case history. We know much more on a popular level about mental illness, but Murray and others did not. However,  I kept forgetting that the main focus of the book  was supposedly Murray's relationship with Minor. What did he do with his astonishment and curiosity? A story is told but the psychological and scientific context felt thin.

A major and disturbing flaw of the book was the lack of footnotes or endnotes, at least in the Harper Perennial paperback reissue of 2005 I received and read. I honestly have no way to know how accurate Winchester's research was, although he thanks many people and describes all his hard work. It is not a scholarly book and not meant to be, but still...if we are to be astonished by an odd set of circumstances, we need to know a great deal about its factual details and the sources of same. HE wrote a 2003 book on the same topic of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary and at Amazon it also shows no notes but does have an extensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading section.

Anyone with a serious interest in the topic should seek a work published by the rival Cambridge University Press, and new for 2013, namely Sarah Ogilvie's Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary. The preview shows an extraordinary bibliography but also a list of letters and other sources that for me, at least, make the entire treatment look more worthy of its painstakingly researched subject, which is after all, another work of research. I have not read it but have it now listed in my books to read on LibraryThing.  

American Beauty, a film, 1999

[spoiler alert: do not read if you have not seen the film!]

American Beauty 1999

Director: Sam Mendes

This is a disturbing film for an American audience, a ten-years-later evocation of the kind of confrontation with unease and the possibility of psychopathological manifestations that viewers might have remembered from Steven Sonderbergh’s  Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989),  and feeling disturbed was exactly my reaction to reading its partial plot summary. I’m thankful that after more than ten years I finally rented and actually saw the film.  It is a superb film about film, about cinema as art and theater, and the satiric darkness framed by the protagonist’s voiceover actually reaches tragedy.  These are just my immediate and uninformed impressions, but I hope to convince others to re-visit it.

We are told early on, by the disembodied voice of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey),  that within some near time of the narrative he will be dead.  We are positioned as audience much like the audience of Greek tragedy: we sense that we may know this story but it has a strange effect, our hearing this: are humans or the gods of fate in control? We know this place as well: American suburbia and its nuclear families, each one, it turns out, a House of Atreus ( or Laius, more likely).

Excellent camera work, with the scenes of the tense non-marriage of Lester and his wife (with his daughter at meals filmed from a distance), frames the dining room of the perfected McMansion, and reveals the selves that they perform over and over again. Brilliantly, Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) is overtly wearing her mask as drama queen- in this case a perfect phrase- and continues to insert near-comic parodies of the toxic American blend of a thirst for success and self-improvement with deep insecurity. The prescience of the film is somewhat uncanny in that it was made before either 9/11 or the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of nearly ten years later. But the ingredients are all there: greed and a materialism that has no idea what the actual world might convey if one stopped and looked. American beauty here is a projected mask.

Lester’s adolescent self and the constructed identities of the ex-Marine neighbor who abuses his own son- all of these unconscious enactments are arranged to play out as unrecognized theater. Only the abused boy next door, Ricky, and the naïve but wide-eyed Jane, Lester’s  daughter, start to see the possibility of framing life as art- not to escape, but better to understand  the pathologies of their parents and friends and, most importantly, of themselves.

Mendes uses windows and mirrors in a brilliant way. They are framed paintings. They reveal and conceal crucial information that brings down the world of fantasy on the head of Lester, quite literally. Ricky’s video camera focuses on Jane in a circle of her mirrored image through the bedroom window, moving past and ignoring the dominant image of her friend; it is a focus that is reminiscent of paintings by Petrus Christus or van Eyck. Mendes’s circles enclose so many social themes of American pathology, familiar from Dr. Strangelove (the covertly gay military homophobe) and from the many real manifestations of manic hedonism: drugs, guns, child abuse and a ghastly satire of self –help and business management coaching. Don’t be a victim: get a gun!  Have an affair with the Real Estate King. Of course wife Carolyn is a real estate salesperson and Lester is in advertising. The latter blurs the lines between cinema and desire, and our hero’s  life comes to depend on the ability to separate them so that real beauty can be revealed.

Ricky becomes a boyfriend of Jane and he is revealed to be a video maker, and one who finally sees the unseen side of objects, the beauty he can capture in cinema, the falling and swirling leaves with a plastic bag:

Ricky Fitts: It was one of those days when it's a minute away from

snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. Right?

And this bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it.

For fifteen minutes. That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things,

and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know

there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember...

I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world,

I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.

 Lester’s daughter Jane sees her fantasies of hatred and revenge on video and can in fact see that she does not really want to enact them. “You know I’m kidding, right?” is how she takes off quickly the mask of contract murder.

Tragically, her newly, or perhaps always, adolescent father moves, as many a tragic hero, closer to his fate, but just as he does,  we do in fact pity him and see someone  else behind the irresponsible and cynical jerk. That he allows ex-Marine Fitts to hug him, accepting his humanity and need for comfort even though he does not know until seconds later the reason for his distress, marks him as having a source of that same ability, like Ricky’s,  to perceive something as it really is. His reaction to the kiss is not even one of anger but of gentle correction.

The crisis, the critical scene of enacting his sexual fantasy of making love at last to the teenage girl and friend of his daughter’s, is surely what sealed Spacey’s Oscar: we finally see the scared little girl behind the masked, pretend siren that the audience – but not Lester- has been rolling its eyes at, perhaps, in amused disgust. His recognition, classically his true  anagnorisis, is to move from projection at last to perception, to see her as she really is: a little girl like his own daughter, needing protection and not exploitation.  But the Fates have wound the threads already tightly around his life, and the other revelation by the self-hating Fitts will not be redemptive but instead an engine of death.  His voiceover even repeats  a truth about our not knowing who is fortunate until after death, an ancient Greek maxim repeated in Herodotus, Histories, Book I, 32.(Loeb, Godley, 1975 p. 39).

Lester recalls at death, at the seconds of his murder, his own real perceptions of childhood before adolescence itself became his mask. He also could see the unseen side of things, and this is what Mendes seems to me to suggest cinematic art can reveal if we can see it through a film like this, a series of still photographs, not unlike the one that seems to radiate for the first time an unseen joy in the seconds before he is shot. And this brings us inevitably to the other tale of nymphet obsession and reductive objectification, Nabokov’s Lolita. She is back, but this time, fiction is not the danger. It is rather the means to revelation of what was false. Lester sees the photograph and, too late, his real situation in an adult life. Too late, he finds it not only true, but beautiful.

Habermas at Georgetown- a brief take

Jürgen Habermas came to Georgetown on October 19, 2011 to deliver a paper on Myth and Ritual. The lecture was sponsored by Georgetown's  Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.  He explored the relationship between myth and ritual, part of his most recent set of concern,s which involve, controversially no doubt for many, an engagement with the public role of religion, including  dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.  He identified myth and ritual as a sacred complex of narrative and action, and then proceeded to disentangle them for the purpose of pursuing a discussion of ritual and rites as gestures and actions which became part of the semiotics of social cohesion. He also drew upon his own theory of communication and its anthropological origins and variations as well as making gestures part of the world of speech and speech acts that become the shared sphere of consensus. Presumably his previous rejection of "top down" semiotic images by rulers to dazzle the masses a la Louis XIV or via corporate mass media consumerism, about which I need to learn more by reading much more of his work, is not repudiated. Rather, he brings the originally pre-rational religious rites and also (I think, not clear to me from the essay he read) their successors in "liturgical practices of world-wide religious communities" into the public sphere as "a source of solidarity" in society and, more importantly in my own view, "access to an archaic experience."

Under questioning from the audience, which I sensed was made up more of those interested in the political science implications of his theories than religious or semiotic contexts per se, he readily assured his listeners there that human rights are, in his view, a secular source of meaning and value. He also returned to known themes such as whether modernity can reproduce itself out of its own resources, such that  religiously originating communication vestiges might prove valuable (but how exactly not made clear there) and he continued to defend Enlightenment principles of rationality, presumably the same principles that caused him to find Derrida's discourse so hermetic and less open to the shared dialogue in the healthy critique society requires to avoid extremism and oppression.

My questions, upon later reflection, are as follows: he mentioned but glossed over the Axial Age religions and their transformative aspects in relation to primitive religions based on fear and the desire to control nature (and which may have grown out of the primate world of our prehistoric ancestors). That is, to quote the traditions mentioned in the essay, "Zoroastrianism in Iran [sic], monotheism in Israel, Confucianism  and Daoism in China, Buddhism in India [why not Hinduism in Brahmanic form?], and even Platonism [!- mentions it "lacked  roots in the cult of the polis"]"  introduced holy books and sophisticated traditions. But he points out that rituals and rites "survived" these developments. True, but what one might argue is that indeed the rites themselves came to have spiritual meaning within those traditions when the magical and sacrificial meanings were either rejected, as in Buddhism and the Chinese traditions, or tamed in important ways in Judaism and Christianity (whose relationship both to Judaism and Platonism were not explored).  Acquiring spiritual meaning may have involved a process akin to, and I believe in many cases one with, the development of art. Nowhere did he consider Greek tragedy, a major complex of religious ritual and mythic narrative that brought together gesture, dance, poetry, music, dance, and rich visual effects. One would think this is precisely the narrow meaning of rites that he referred to when he reminded the audience that he was using rite in a narrow sense. He also must have thought of the deep meanings of good rituals or ritual phenomena as being unavailable to create new rituals of ideology such as were attempted in the French Revolution (about which he has written much but that I've not read).So my interest is now in his perspective on that. Examples today of cohesive ritual might be sacraments and tea ceremonies. These seem to provide access to archaic sensibilities that are non-violent and not fear-based.

Through ritual, access to an invisible world became the goal, as opposed to control of the natural world (to appease storms and their gods, for example). Any cohesive function in the larger society might well be related to ritual's origins in biological survival and its development subsequently through the emergence of shared beliefs. Finally, he did not mention the effect of the re-entry of narrative with the Axial Age religions' particular emphasis on scriptures and sacred texts. I myself would like to use the identity creation project I'm engaged in to explore the relationship between rule and ritual, where rule refers to a rule of life and a mechanism of self-governance that may have implications for the  larger collectivities in which human beings need to learn to work and live in peace.

Added to my Library Thing for review and reception:


Jürgen Habermas:

The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol1)Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason Jürgen Habermas 1985.

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) Jurgen Habermas 1998. l

The Derrida-Habermas Reader Lasse Thomassen 2006.

Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought).

Spring and summer reading 2011

The past several months of work crunch, together with watching the U.S. slide toward banana republic status (with apologies to those developing Latin American jurisdictions exploited by American agricultural exporters), caused me to read randomly as well as toward my work on technology and the notion of the human "self." (see earlier post).  However, to give even brief review of all, and longer for some, will take time, obviously, so for now I am just listing the reading and will select those about which I've done some reflection. Bibliographic citation standards have been case aside in favor of links to Amazon; I agree that WorldCat would be better but has no "search inside the book" features to keep me honest or the curious engaged.

On CD (driving Bryant to school): S. Collins, The Hunger Games, (trilogy 2008-2010); I. Caldwell, D. Thomason, The Rule of Four (2005).

Codex format: F. Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order (part I) (2011); R. Yates, Revolutionary Road (1961); M. Barbery (trans. A. Anderson)[ L'élégance du hérisson, 2006], The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008);  C. McCarthy, The Road (2007),  J. Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet (2010); B.D.Ehrman, Lost Scriptures (2003); A. Carson, Nox (2010); A. Carson, trans. and ed., An Oresteia (2009); N. Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (1998), J.-F.Lyotard (trans. R. Harvey), Soundproof Room: Malraux's Anti-Aesthetics (2001); Xu Gan (trans. John Makeham), Balanced Discourses (2002) ;  assorted Buddhist spiritual texts.

Re-read: Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912; Simon & Brown 2011)); J. Salamaga, Death, With Interruptions trans.(M.J.Costa);  Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (revised Scott Moncrieff translation, Enright), A la recherche du temps perdu (Swann’s Way); and for fun, Simon Critchley's The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008).
  
In progress:  Smith, Griffin, Fischer, [Clemens] The Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol 1 (2010, portions under various copyrights since 1917).

Brief reviews to follow of some of these texts. Ah, summer. If only work did not interfere with our work.....

Great Minds Think Alike...in the LIbrary

As a great and pleasantly surprising discovery to follow along after the Harvard future of law libraries conference, I enjoyed this piece from The Atlantic, "What Big Media Can Learn from the New York Public Library." Great stuff as I forge ahead on my book project on identity creation in times of technological change. I wonder what a book with a focus on Carlyle and McLuhan may say to the crowdsource world?

Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now? Harvard conference 6/16/11

The conference organized by John Palfrey at Harvard Law has been summarized by John himself on his blog and also reflected upon by Joe Hodnicki of Law Librarian Blog ; I sat above where John did his blogging in real time. I had attended on the previous day a follow-up session on collaboration in managing foreign law resources in larger legal research libraries across the United States. As Carl Malamud's Law.gov evolves and the imaginings (and first steps) emerge in projects such as the World Legal Information Institute or perhaps LC's vision of a One World Law Library (OWLL), we were prepared in many ways for Robert Darnton's presentation on the Digital Public Law Library of America (DPLA) and Siva Vaidhyanathan's Human Knowledge Project (HKP).

As one who works as a kind of outlier, as many of us FCIL librarians do, on the fringe of the American law library world (despite discussions and scenarios about "globalization"), I am just as worried about the knowledge that people don't want as about the knowledge everyone wants.  The exciting thing about Darnton's project, and its eventual merger perhaps with Europeana, is that for me it creates a space within cyberspace (as does Facebook, after all) but of a different kind such that we can balance mediated with unmediated access to knowledge. In other words, the digitized library of books and other resources, and eventually art and other realia, represents selected and vetted materials that will be discoverable alongside everything from everywhere. Why is this important? Well, I agree with Bob Berring in his conference opening keynote talk when he alluded to crowds being smart, the bottom-up flow of knowledge. But pace Cass Sunstein and others, I am not sure that crowds are always wise. They can produce clever solutions but not wisdom, and even the wisdom of the wise has to be challenged somehow (see the definitions and this very notion as taken by Merriam-Webster from Robert Darnton's work!). 

An example from the world of foreign (to Americans) and indeed not-so-foreign law: civil law codes are intended to be succinct and transparent in Napoleon's original vision. However, to apply them to facts requires commentary. Likewise in common law, even if all cases are on Law.gov, how do many cases add up to a solid sense of the law, a statement of it, without some training? I think this is the greatest barrier pro se patrons in our system face. They still have to add up the decisions within a jurisdiction to get an answer, separating dicta out from holdings, etc. I agree that we are now way too far over on the side of privatization and commercialization of aids to this process, but some part of  this world of commentary still needs to be there and organized through free hyperlinks between that and primary law. Cyberspace is the ideal place to do it, through two of the themes at this conference, open law and open access in general.

Finally, the digitized library will need to be nurtured in perpetuity, not as to formats and accessibility only but as to its content. If we are only Buy on Demand, we cannot educate. If we only own what people somehow thing they already want, how will they ever learn what they do not want to know? We could be headed for global groupthink despite the seemingly disruptive and subversive qualities of the internet (as recently on display in the Middle East).

Congratulations to John Palfrey and his great staff of librarians, both for a terrific meeting and a tour of their charette devoted to designing parts of this new knowledge database. If law libraries have been called the "lawyers' laboratory" (as recalled by Dick Danner), then he and his staff have undertaken a new and exciting realization of this concept in the world of digital innovation.

Identity, Self, Non-self: Beginner's Mind

Starting anew and beginning again, as with this blog and my resolution to post regularly, fit well with S. Suzuki's notion of the beginner's Mind. It is strange that despite my readings in Buddhism and philosophy I had not yet read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind until seeing the 40th anniversary edition and buying it. As I begin my book project on identity construction in biography and on the internet, this notion of beginner's mind and its emergence for many Americans in the early 1970's world of discovering eastern thought appears at a fortuitous time.

The Buddhist notion of no-self and the illusion of a changing core identity is one of the notions that emerges from that world view that is most unlike any western notion of the individual. Uniqueness is part of their changing world, but the illusion of the ego is not. In this Shambhala 2010 anniversary edition, the presentation of the transcriptions of Suzuki's dharma talks brings out much that I will need to work with as I explore the world of self-creation: for him and the practice, "when we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door,..." (14).

As I outline and work through setting up this project of the coming years- and it will take that long, in all probability- this view will confront theories of biography and self-development that have been strengths and limits in the west: I plan to focus on biographers at times of technological change, such as Thomas Carlyle; historians of our mind and media as personified by Marchall McLuhan, and finally the illusions of Facebook and even blogs such as this one: we must, after all, take it to the "meta" level to reflect the kind of awareness that Suzuki stimulated in the simple, everyday message he conveyed to us to just sit. We can become aware in that way of awareness itself.

Tony Morrison's Beloved (1987)- a non-critical reflection

Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved was like watching a documentary that focused on the origins of a major phenomenon in the world around me. Never a slave and not even of true Southern white lineage, I trace my first awareness that something was very wrong with the way some people were viewed and treated to my own experience looking out a school bus window at the consequences of mischief taking place inside. I must have been in third or fourth grade at the time when a boy on the bus one or two years older opened the bus window and threw a rock at a small group of black schoolgirls as we waited at a stop light in New Orleans. He hit one on the side of the head and she wailed and put her hand to the side of her face. The boys on the bus, perpetrator and friends, just laughed. So her novel was kind of an answer to me as a little girl as I sat there and wondered: how can anyone act that way toward another person for no reason?

But of course I knew then that most white people in New Orleans looked down on “colored” people, and until I was some way on in grade school, there were separate restrooms, water fountains, and theatre sections, even a separate waiting room in the train station, for black and white people. And by the time I went to college in Massachusetts I knew I wanted to get away from the world of racism and segregation and the anti-intellectual environment in which it thrived. New England was a Mecca for me as a place of enlightenment and liberalism. And I was prone to equate every area north of a line drawn at the Mason Dixon. I was not sufficiently aware at that time of racism outside the south.

Beloved tells part of that story and the story of the horrific effects of slavery and how it degrades and changes a society. The injustice, cruelty, loss, poverty and frustration of Sethe and her family as well as their rich love of life and ability to cope somehow- the characters are touching, fun, and realized so that they feel like family to most readers, I should think.

After reading the psychologically complex and sophisticated story of mother love and regret, one is changed and enriched, even if saddened, by another layer of decay in the infrastructure of the American soul. I see it every day now in DC and experience frustration over the health care debate and the plight of the poor. I’m optimistic that there can be change, and the election of Barack Obama proved that. But the sense of threat, and the superhuman standard to which he will be held in dealing with the aftermath of an incompetent previous administration – one which in my view damaged our commitment to the rule of law- are palpable.

Sethe and the former slaves lived with a much more serious and physical threat, the constant threat of violence. Morrison shows in the glowing and poetic rhythm of language in the community of general terror how the semiotics of terror can be fraught with strange beauty in the words of the hunkered down and in the random acts of their tormentors. Law is a sign or order for me more than a form of narrative- it contains stories but much more: categories and abstractions as well, and so can be abstract as well as concrete and relates to both. Narrative and story has a sequence or pattern of events at its core and resists abstraction, consigning categories to allegory and systematic philosophy. Or to library catalogues.

Beloved, both the character and the novel- is a sleepy afternoon in which one remembers something terrible, and then it comes to stay with you for awhile as your houseguest,. But horrifically, as if in a dream, you know the terror of your own mistake is not a stranger; it’s family. You gave it being, and it lives here. Help us to love it back into innocence despite our primitive ways.

Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980): the legal film as history and art

A docu-drama such as Breaker Morant, like most works of art, can be viewed through the lens of the time it portrays, the time it was made, and the time in which any viewer views it. This film contains additional layers of cultural, political, and legal perspectives that reflect upon a cloudy historical record, a strained British Empire and its restive colonial outposts, and the legal/philosophical issues surrounding the essentially transnational character of the laws of war their intersection with national military justice systems. I would like to begin with some brief and necessarily superficial background concerning the legal systems portrayed, and move on to consider how some of the factual vagueness, both in the film and surrounding the continuing investigation of the historical events, find reflection in how the film is put together. In the end, the stage play or the film can serve only to underscore the inherent state of dehumanization that constitutes guerilla warfare, suggesting that law cannot fix it and art cannot control its interpretation or impact. That the film somewhat subverts itself continues to fascinate audiences and critics living in various states of war.

South Africa, Australia, Great Britain and its colonies; comparative military justice and war

The colonization of the southern tip of Africa by the British was via the Cape Colony. The Dutch and their colonies of the East India Company carried a form of civil law, so-called Roman-Dutch law, to their colonies such as the Transvaal, established in 1858 but annexation was attempted by the British in 1877. The British would have allowed the private law to be kept under this system. The Boers resistant in an earlier war well enough to retain a kind of independence under a British protectorate. The last Dutch territory, the Orange Free State, is the entity depicted in the film and undergoing a messy and horrific defeat in this “ Boer War” of 1898–1900. The Australians, like other colonies, were given a form of parliamentary representative government in the 1850’s and became the Commonwealth of Australia in on January 1, 1901. In the film, Harry Morant refers in his court-martial to having joined the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC) on April Fool’s Day, 1901 and conveys his sense, perhaps sincere, of irony. But a sense of separate Australian identity was becoming possible. As James J. Kirschke of Villanova University points out in a recent essay in the journal Film & History, “Say Who Made Her So: Breaker Morant and British Empire” (38:2, 2008), there was concern in the 1970’s about Australian identity, and perhaps in the run-up to the 1986 Australia Act, which terminated almost all of the constitutional connections with Great Britain, this was a way to get the George Witton story and the many other accounts of the Morant group’s court-martial into a different framework:

The characterization, then, of the Australian soldiers is as important as the historical presentation of the court martial. There is little doubt in the film that they shot the prisoners, and the film remains vague on the existence of orders from superiors to do so. Beresford is neither damning nor absolving the soldiers. His target, rather, is the way the event has been used to delineate a civilized Britain from a barbarous Australia. The B.V.C. soldiers are shown to be loyal and determined. Even at their execution, they comply with each military protocol, neither running nor ranting. Their conduct is as British as the empire could expect. (Kirschke, 48).

However, the legal and constitutional changes within the Empire, and the necessity of fighting a brutal war against small farmers using guerilla tactics to create a formidable insurgency, are perhaps the issues of most lasting relevance today, and with an imperial Germany lurking in the background of this story (they had a foothold north of the Orange River), we start to see a familiar pattern of civilian combatants, spies, and secret orders. The emergence of gold and other precious resources set the stage for maximum barbarity on all sides. By the late 1970's, regardless of the accuracy of the film, Australians and Americans would also remember Vietnam and the My Lai massacre.

Laws of War- late Nineteenth Century

Despite several rounds of conferences and codifications, such as the earlier Lieber Code (1863), and the Hague Conferences (1899-1907) that were contemporaneous with the events of the film, there was nothing like the idea in the treaty establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that would have rejected superior orders as a defense. The international instruments did consider the situation of civilians and “rebels” and the ambiguity of civil wars and civilian combatants in some respects, but reciprocity was required to be mutual and could be negatively interpreted for retaliation. (Watts, S. Reciprocity and the Law of War, 50 Harv. J. Intl L. 365, 397-398(2009).

In Prof. Kirschke’s article, cited above, there are several interesting notes citing several works on the event and comparing Kitchener’s take on the Boer insurgents with the aim of the court martial to begin to repair relations with the Boer’s and Germany for the limited purpose of peace (and territorial) negotiations.

The film and Perceptions of War and Law

An academic and philosophical debate took place in the journal Critical Arts (Johannesburg, South Africa: Critical Arts Study Group], 1980- ) from its first volume with a monographic essay and into vol. 2 no. 3 (1981-1982) and vol. 3 no. 3 (1985) about the themes of imperialism, racism and the role of cinema and whether the social character of art is subverted in such a successful film, and so forth. These debates were part of a debate about the role of art in cultural struggle, and at that time South Africa’s struggle in particular was still going on in an earlier post-colonial phase. The critique of the subversion of art and law through myths, and debates over how much this film really condemns imperialism, do not seem nearly as relevant to a current viewing of a film with several sub-texts that appear now after the American adventure in Iraq.

One subtext is that of the need to situate blame, and post-Nuremberg, the entire chain of command is seen as morally culpable, and the legal defense now pulled out from under the accused (we were just obeying orders). But the nature of the BVC as an “irregular” counter-insurgency group with no real orders has already undermined its legitimacy as a kind of vigilante group with inchoate state approval, not unlike the police juries and nightriders of the American south in the century after the civil war. The rapid cuts from past to present and toned down to faded memory enliven the court-martial visually but do not add much to the now rather obvious hypocrisy.

Another anchor for the film is the role of poetry and rhetoric: Morant is a conventional cynical poet on the make, using language to capture that obvious hypocrisy, but it establishes him mainly as having a persona that he has built through war and daring deeds. The zeal of Major Thomas, his lawyer, has somehow more honesty and a more faithful allegiance to the power of accurate language and eloquent but logical reasoning. He is less a sophist and more honest with language than those eager to have a bit of adventure, promote a newly emerging country (“Australia forever”), and in the end show what a good soldier one can be. Thomas does not “defend” so much as represent the rule of law, and the incredible audacity of applying that rule to situations where the descriptive language is crucial: is it a crime, a war, or terror? Beresford’s camera cannot hide the human toll taken by the words.
************
Cited or reviewed in law reviews:
Graber, Doris Appel .The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation 1863-1914 (1949).
Neff, Stephen C., War and the law of Nations: A General History. Cambridge, 2005.
Wiener, Frederick Bernays , Civilians Under Military Justice: The British Practice Since 1689 Especially in North America (1967.

The Popular and historical accounts are listed at the Widipedia article, Court-Martial of Breaker Morant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_martial_of_Breaker_Morant and pasted below:

Bleszynski, Nick (2002), 'Shoot Straight, You Bastards': The True Story Behind The Killing of 'Breaker' Morant. Random House Australia. ISBN 1-74051-081-X.
Davey, Arthur; "Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers" (Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town 1987) ISBN 0620124857 and 9780620124850
Denton, K. (1973). The Breaker. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-12691-7. But see Denton, Kit, Closed File: the True Story Behind the Execution of Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock. Adelaide: Rigby, 1983.
Pakenham, Thomas (1979). The Boer War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-77395-X.
Pollock, John (1998). Kitchener. Constable. ISBN 0-09-480340-4.
Ross, K.G., Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts, Edward Arnold, (Melbourne), 1979. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Ross, Kenneth G. (1990). Breaker Morant, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Wallace, J.W. (1976). The Australians At The Boer War. Australian War Memorial/Australian Government Publishing Service.
Witton, George (1982). Scapegoats of the Empire. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-14666-7.
Woolmore, William (Bill) The Bushveldt Carbineers and the Pietersburg Light Horse (2002, Slouch Hat Publications Australia) ISBN 0-9579752-0-1

Summer reading II: Noise

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

The end of the 19th century and its fin de siѐcle foreboding set the stage for all of the scandalous performances and “rioting audiences” with which the history of 20th century music unfolds. I had heard before in my own music history studies of the performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprѐs-midi d’un faune as each roused a tonally lazy and satisfied bourgeoisie out of its collective conformity. Ross builds the story slowly and concentrates on the artistic and personal biographies of the major composers, inserting where necessary the descriptions and music theory to make the story comprehensible.

The main theme of the book is one of the rise of diverse conceptions of tonality, including atonality and its several versions, as part of serious music in a legacy of “art for art’s sake” that he implies has served the cause of serious music poorly over the century (I prefer the term “serious” to “classical” since I reserve the latter term for Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries). To other versions of tonality that were explored, one would add those derived from Far Eastern and indigenous cultural traditions, and these emerged as western musicians discovered other musical systems.

I enjoyed reading about Berg, Schoenberg, and the arrival of so many later on in California and Los Angeles. The rise of minimalism and Philip Glass, one of my favorites, could have been more thoroughly explored. Finally, the end of the book ,with its rather superficial coverage of those “serious -music- or jazz-influenced “ musicians in the pop, rock, and folk categories, made me wish that at the outset he had covered only the fate of serious music rather strictly. However, he was right to include the evolution of jazz improvisation into its cool phase, and the ordered noise of John Cage. The impassioned narrative of how each successive set of composers try to take the musical trends to the next level, and the readable character of the book, both served, I’m sure, to win it the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2007.

What does twentieth century music say to us about that century and its violent upheavals, wars, and ideological shifts? It would be easy to speak of fragmentation and globalization; those are heard in the rise of percussion and the Babel of new instruments and tonalities as well as new amplification. But so much hatred is covered by the false sweet sounds; now in the twenty-first century we can hear sweet hymns of Christian fundamentalism and detect nothing of the insecurity and racial fears of a new right wing. Perhaps I am just an aging 1960’s person as I long for music that is not just angry and eager to shock; we need the music of peace at a deeper level. This may be where Philip Glass and his zen minimalism as well as the themes of Kundun and Satyagraha come in.

Postscript: A real benefit to the book is its web site audio files, and while some are very short (owing to permissions and the length of the book), for students it would be essential to listen to the excerpts; music survey courses of course include CDs and databases which provide more extensive coverage, but –this is, after all, free.

Summer reading I: Weimar

Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Having thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate encounter with a course entitled “Central Europe Since 1815, “ I entertained the possibility of moving on to this professor’s other excellent course, “The Culture of Europe between the Two World Wars. “ I read a good deal of the literature from the period out of interest and upon the recommendations of students who did take the course. This kind of cultural history, exploring all aspects of a period (however brief, in this case) in politics, arts, and technological innovation invites a real participation in its spirit and sometimes real concern that certain attitudes and dangerous tendencies may be surfacing in one’s own contemporary situation. Reading Weitz’s very readable and compelling history of what has long been regarded as a pivotal moment, one that could have been a golden moment in German history after a devastating war, does rekindle in one’s mind all the debates about the Allies’ treatment of Germany and of course, whether Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have been avoided.

Weitz covers the political situation in detail, and this was useful to me because this was my area of least knowledge; I know more about literary developments and about the art history of the period. He also emphasizes architecture and again, speaking selfishly, this helped me fill in some gaps about early modernism, one of my strong interests.

The subtitle “promise and tragedy” certainly employs the right key words to bring up the relevant ethos of the time. Glimmers of our current financial dilemma and our silence as an American people in the face of a war that went forward in violation of international law flash across the scene and make me feel uncomfortable. While the equation of Jews with internationalism etc. is born of an anti-Semitism that we left behind, one hopes, with Richard Nixon (who appropriated internationalism to himself, nonetheless, with better than expected results) , other aspects of nationalism, “nativism” and such ghosts of the Twenties of the Twentieth Century have ghostly cousins at present in the form of Sarah Palin’s McCarthyism of lies and distortions regarding modest attempts to reform and humanize our health care market. There is anger, and it is dangerous.

Where is the serious art to hold its image up to our collective face that we might see it for what it is? (see review of The Rest Is Noise for more reflection on this question).

Summer reading; back to August post, the follow-up

As I begin my fall list of "outside" reading (that is, not related to anything I'm writing at the moment)I realize that I need to enter my selection of top books I read this summer. These were my favorites or the more unusual offerings which made me think about issues or literary theory in a new way. So here come several posts under this heading!

The Free and the Brave under a director's lens

Last night at Georgetown Law the the library sponsored the first in a series of screenings of films under the series heading "Law at the Movies." The series has been organized by my colleague Kumar Jayasuriya and sponsored by the Friends of the Law Library. Last night's inaugural film was introduced by two of the faculty who have joined an informal group interested in providing law students with some encounters between law and the film medium. Our first offering was John Ford's Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

I recalled almost nothing of the film after seeing it on television at some point in my much earlier life. Television negates any real experience of many films, but even more so back in the days when cropped versions were built around commercial advertising. So this was a treat for me, and I reflect upon it in connection with my continuing media studies (and a new project I'll announce soon via this blog).

Naomi Mezey of our faculty pointed out many features of the largest, zoomed out facets of the film: the juxtaposition of "talk and force" as well as the feminizing of the Jimmy Stewart character, the young lawyer Ransom Stoddard during his rocky start in the dusty town of Shinbone, rendered more/less "wide open" as a territory settlement by having a comic non-entity for a federal marshal. The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon, was the kind of ambivalent hero that she described well: we watch as he and Ransom compete, in the minds of the audience, for first and second chair in this orchestration of philosophical tunes. Randy Barnett agreed generally with her remarks, which included some mention of how the coming of law, government, and civilization to this partly Hobbesian world had "costs" that are alluded to in the name of the horrific outlaw Liberty Valance and in the world of the ranchers, of which Tom is one (though he is interestingly neutral on issues that they represent in the film).

I agree partly with these remarks and offer just a few observations of my own. A student in the audience before the show stated that the film was shown in a European philosophy class, and indeed John Ford has inspired many European filmmakers artistically and in the themes of some of his many historic and great films. True, there is much here to spark further discussion of Plato and Hobbes, to name only two.

But for me a film is often foremost about the time in which it was made, in this case, 1962. Tom Doniphon represents in so many ways the plain integrity of the American myth of the West, the anti-intellectual American who still controls most of our culture, but who has a point about knowing when to back up words with action. And a handgun, of course. But who knew, in the continuing struggle of a post-war world living in an almost continuous post-colonial state of perceived emergency, that the path to be steered carefully between tribalism and the rule of law leads to suburbia? (Yes, Tom's life and plans are centered on that first house, no mortgage!) That must have been most comforting to audiences in 1962; but three cheers for Ford when the sole black resident of the town (albeit a servant) is encouraged to step up to the lunch counter- in this case, the saloon bar.

So while the town is busy becoming consumers, and the ranchers are busy becoming producers who resent regulation (don't fence me in), the deeper issue of the bully/victim is explored in the encounter between Ransom and Liberty Valance. Long before our recent school shootings, it may have become clear to some that every victim is a bully and every bully, a victim- well, perhaps. Psychopaths are an exception, as in this case. The sheer brutality of Valance and the disturbing mix of distant outrage but near tolerance of his torture techniques on the part of the townfolk, even if we consider it a tolerance engendered by fear, is done wonderfully by Ford and at time when the myth of the West was always one of sanitized violence. The silver-tipped whip hints at what most of Hollywood then would not show: that terrorism was a very real part of living in and settling the American West, even leaving aside native peoples. (The Mexicans in the film are left to be picturesque and benign, not yet a threat).

Fear of the Other and also the need to build a state solution to random, private violence indeed has a trade-off in the film as Ransom learns that government is also a tool of the tribes. He also learns that he was paradoxically both brave and a coward. So was Tom: mostly selfless in his love for Hallie, he still got his best, safest shot while Valance was distracted by Ransom in his momentary role as decoy.
Let's face it: none of us is perfectly brave or perfectly free. We are only as free as the least free person in our community, local or global.

As a final footnote it is interesting to look at the names of the characters and the principals of the film. Director John Martin Feeney (John Ford) and actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) left the traces of Irish tribe in their birth names aside for the commodification of Hollywood, though Ford may have recanted somewhat later on. And that odd Doniphon, which sounds like Donovan: even the massive Wikipedia reveals only one other of note: Alexander William Doniphan, a soldier in the Mexican-American war who was lawyer and author of a legal code (the Kearny code) that was to have been used in an annexed Mexico and New Mexico, a kind of hybrid code, "an amalgam of Mexican, Texan and Coahuilan statutes" [with some Livingston Code of Louisiana, Missouri law mixed in](Roger D. Launius, Alexander William Doniphon, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, 1997)at 115. But I digress- fulfilling here the codex theme of the blog as well as asking, in the end, whether we can leave the little house and garden of our minds and embrace the Other, at least by the study of comparative law? (Okay, like Ransom, I am forever the nerd).

So here is a paradoxically joyful "ouch" as we embrace John Ford's violent, beautiful film, a real "cactus rose."

Summer reading; first, in summary

Reading for pleasure does not for me mean "non-serious" reading. Since I enjoy serious topics, philosophy and such, and since I am usually writing some sort of publication for which I have research-driven reading, my leisure reading covers a wide range of materials I am reading for no particular reason other than intellectual curiosity. My list of books I am lining up to read are on LibraryThing.

This summer, in addition to working on a book chapter for an edited collection of essays about the core sources for international legal research, I went through a few titles of which the following are just highlights. I like to wander back to fiction, as well as cultural history and philosophy. I am giving each a brief review in my next blog post.

Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions (2008)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2009)

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913)