1. no updates = I started trying to write my dissertation.
2. I clocked another 4 months in Paris since my last post, and I'm leaving for another two month stay on wednesday. Most notable observation: as far as I can tell, the most difficult word for a native french speaker to pronounce is "blueberry."
3. I'll probably be over there for the academic year too...
Monday, June 7, 2010
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Philadelphia to toronto: 55 minutes.
"People who are short and tall," by the couple seated behind me, in seats 4 E and 4F:
"sarkozy, now he's short."
"Yes, but he's married to a beautiful woman. She's tall."
-I fall asleep. 50 minutes later when I wake up:--
"The youngest one is also the tallest one, however."
fin.
"sarkozy, now he's short."
"Yes, but he's married to a beautiful woman. She's tall."
-I fall asleep. 50 minutes later when I wake up:--
"The youngest one is also the tallest one, however."
fin.
Monday, September 7, 2009
paris, from the beginning
As for many travelers, Paris for me was an idea before becoming a site of personal memories. Some people--superficial tourists, afraid of and segregated from 'the natives'--never make the transition from the first to the second, from the place they knew about and could recognize in famous landmarks to the place where part of their lives unraveled in the monuments' shadows, quite apart from them. It took me a very short period of time--one day--to make the transition, and because most of my memories of Paris are therefore personal, my observations lingered less on difference than on a sense of discovery. Moreover, I was not inclined to compare Paris--the new, foreign place--with home--the baseline of 'normalcy' for most people who go abroad--but rather with the Paris of history books and films, the platonic ideal. I never fully fit in at home anyway, which might explain why it never occurred to me to make those sharp observations that render national borders meaningful and which I find interesting to study academically. For me, Paris was first a disappointment before it became better than I could have ever imagined. So, while I personally find descriptions of cultural difference, miscommunicaiton, and surprise endlessly fascinating, I produced few of my own. The following is what I can remember of that small lag between Paris the idea and the Paris I love and miss, the one I lived in; and decent evidence for the proposition that if you expect books to be sufficient mirrors of reality, you will either find only what you have prepared yourself to look for (ie, tourists who miss the city for the Louvre) or find none of it, either way setting yourself up for an unnecessary disappointment. Nothwithstanding the myriad of publications on French culture, there is a reason that the phrase "it had a certain...je ne sais quoi" is of French provenance and remains, even in America, untranslated, recognizable, and indefinable by definition.
I first went to Paris in July of 2008. My roommates and I had rented a flat on Boulevard St. Germain, right next to the Rue des Bernardins. Anticipation made my memories crisp: sunrise over the atlantic--I don't see sunrises very often--a fox spotted in the distance as the plane landed, the complete lack of american-style customs (lacking the paranoia of american customs procedures, mostly).
Lesson 1: Xenophobia. Attention to borders isn't ever the full measure of a nation's insularity, but it sometimes gives you a good idea. In the US, you have to fill out forms and have a chat with an official and stand in two different screening lines. In France, you hand your passport to some guy who looks at it for maybe a quarter of a second, and you're off.
I took a cab, and therefore was immediately introduced to Paris's ugly side: the run-down suburbs and then--the horror--Mexico City-caliber traffic jams. The traffic was awful, but worse, it was in the way of post-card and history-book Paris, tainting my first impressions of the seine and the place de la concorde in particular. I got to the apartment, armed with my funny-shaped key and the digicode (all keys in France, it appears, are different varieties of funny-shaped) to find a similarly jet-lagged, uncharacteristically un-coiffed Will Derringer waiting for me at the adjacent cafe. We went in.
The apartment was big by Parisian standards, but unpredictably complicated. The woman who lives there had left us a gift: a piece of cheese that probably smelled like death when it was purchased, that had been steeping in the refrigerator for two weeks and emmitted a smell capable of driving one to suicide. She had turned the gas off before leaving, and left instructions for how to turn it back on. "turn the nobs". we turned the nobs, and found that we had no hot water. it took days, and several retrospectively scary experiments with a lighter (the pilot light had gone out) to remedy the situation (by 'nobs,' it turns out, she had only meant one of them, the one on the left). all of the floorboards creeked. the woman upstairs, like clockwork, woke up at 3 am to cough the cough of a wicked witch. for the next month, I was convinced that someone in the building owned a rooster, as I heard one--a loud one--every morning. It turned out to be Will's alarm.
Sleep was for the weak; I went out for a walk. I turned up the first street I saw, and ran directly into Notre Dame. Walking along the Seine, I stumbled into a situation I was entirely unprepared for, for which I blame French textbooks. In class, you learn impractical French--I remember, clearly, learning the words for 'unemployed' and 'strike' in my first semester of French, but never the infinitely useful expressions one uses to excuse oneself politely from unpleasant company.
Lesson 2: Learn how to say "I need to go now" before venturing the streets again. Being hit on provides a wonderful chance to practice your french, but it gets weird after about a minute, and the sudden realization that your vocabulary has not developed enough to do what one would do in english ("Listen, it's been great, but I'm running late...") makes for a fun, high-stakes, racking of the brain for improvisation. In the end, I mustered an "I'm leaving." I fished it out of Manu Chao lyrics that I remembered ("Si tu devais partir"...ok. got it: "Je dois partir maintenant...") Not as polite as I would have hoped, but graciousness comes as a nuanced shade of language acquisition that I had not yet cultivated.
I went home, took a nap, then set off boldly in search of dinner with Will. We found a Croque Monsieur near the Sorbonne. It was fantastic. We then decided to try to walk to the Eiffel Tower (it looked so close on the map). we weaved from left bank to right, passed the Louvre and walked through the Tuileries, across to the National Assembly--a detour mandated by what looked like a film crew or official business--lingered on Pont Alexandre III, and exhausted, turned around. Paris seemed cluttered to us then--too many monuments seemingly piled on one another, each individually stunning but collectively straining to remain important, inundated by traffic. And the dust! Why are Parisian parks paved (wrong word, I know) with dust?
On the way home we stopped at a cafe for a glass of wine, and met a group of traveling lawyers from Texas. All of us took another bottle of wine to the Pont des Arts, and like magic, Paris became something else. It became a city of life and light, where twentysomethings get together at night to enjoy wine, play music, and pass their evenings in the middle of that historic city and--the key--despite it.
The best thing about Parisian life is that it could exist anywhere--there could be safe public spaces anywhere in the world, and people could go make their own fun there instead of going to clubs or sequestering themselves in apartments--but they DON'T exist anywhere else. The culture of enjoying oneself--very different, by the way, from the American cult of indulgence--is what the city is all about. Quality of life matters there, and is measured by far different standards from what quality of life means in the states, the contrast being that of intangible versus tangible. In the states, we value that which can be measured--material possessions, careers, vacations that allow you to come home and rattle off the list of important things seen, work. There, emphasis is placed on precisely the opposite, the ephemeral: lived experience trumping the tourist's checklist, time pleasantly spent, long dinners with good wine, time away from work--appropriately, such things are difficult to put in list form. Small, un-listable experiences and discoveries occupied most of my time thereafter. They're harder to write about.
I first went to Paris in July of 2008. My roommates and I had rented a flat on Boulevard St. Germain, right next to the Rue des Bernardins. Anticipation made my memories crisp: sunrise over the atlantic--I don't see sunrises very often--a fox spotted in the distance as the plane landed, the complete lack of american-style customs (lacking the paranoia of american customs procedures, mostly).
Lesson 1: Xenophobia. Attention to borders isn't ever the full measure of a nation's insularity, but it sometimes gives you a good idea. In the US, you have to fill out forms and have a chat with an official and stand in two different screening lines. In France, you hand your passport to some guy who looks at it for maybe a quarter of a second, and you're off.
I took a cab, and therefore was immediately introduced to Paris's ugly side: the run-down suburbs and then--the horror--Mexico City-caliber traffic jams. The traffic was awful, but worse, it was in the way of post-card and history-book Paris, tainting my first impressions of the seine and the place de la concorde in particular. I got to the apartment, armed with my funny-shaped key and the digicode (all keys in France, it appears, are different varieties of funny-shaped) to find a similarly jet-lagged, uncharacteristically un-coiffed Will Derringer waiting for me at the adjacent cafe. We went in.
The apartment was big by Parisian standards, but unpredictably complicated. The woman who lives there had left us a gift: a piece of cheese that probably smelled like death when it was purchased, that had been steeping in the refrigerator for two weeks and emmitted a smell capable of driving one to suicide. She had turned the gas off before leaving, and left instructions for how to turn it back on. "turn the nobs". we turned the nobs, and found that we had no hot water. it took days, and several retrospectively scary experiments with a lighter (the pilot light had gone out) to remedy the situation (by 'nobs,' it turns out, she had only meant one of them, the one on the left). all of the floorboards creeked. the woman upstairs, like clockwork, woke up at 3 am to cough the cough of a wicked witch. for the next month, I was convinced that someone in the building owned a rooster, as I heard one--a loud one--every morning. It turned out to be Will's alarm.
Sleep was for the weak; I went out for a walk. I turned up the first street I saw, and ran directly into Notre Dame. Walking along the Seine, I stumbled into a situation I was entirely unprepared for, for which I blame French textbooks. In class, you learn impractical French--I remember, clearly, learning the words for 'unemployed' and 'strike' in my first semester of French, but never the infinitely useful expressions one uses to excuse oneself politely from unpleasant company.
Lesson 2: Learn how to say "I need to go now" before venturing the streets again. Being hit on provides a wonderful chance to practice your french, but it gets weird after about a minute, and the sudden realization that your vocabulary has not developed enough to do what one would do in english ("Listen, it's been great, but I'm running late...") makes for a fun, high-stakes, racking of the brain for improvisation. In the end, I mustered an "I'm leaving." I fished it out of Manu Chao lyrics that I remembered ("Si tu devais partir"...ok. got it: "Je dois partir maintenant...") Not as polite as I would have hoped, but graciousness comes as a nuanced shade of language acquisition that I had not yet cultivated.
I went home, took a nap, then set off boldly in search of dinner with Will. We found a Croque Monsieur near the Sorbonne. It was fantastic. We then decided to try to walk to the Eiffel Tower (it looked so close on the map). we weaved from left bank to right, passed the Louvre and walked through the Tuileries, across to the National Assembly--a detour mandated by what looked like a film crew or official business--lingered on Pont Alexandre III, and exhausted, turned around. Paris seemed cluttered to us then--too many monuments seemingly piled on one another, each individually stunning but collectively straining to remain important, inundated by traffic. And the dust! Why are Parisian parks paved (wrong word, I know) with dust?
On the way home we stopped at a cafe for a glass of wine, and met a group of traveling lawyers from Texas. All of us took another bottle of wine to the Pont des Arts, and like magic, Paris became something else. It became a city of life and light, where twentysomethings get together at night to enjoy wine, play music, and pass their evenings in the middle of that historic city and--the key--despite it.
The best thing about Parisian life is that it could exist anywhere--there could be safe public spaces anywhere in the world, and people could go make their own fun there instead of going to clubs or sequestering themselves in apartments--but they DON'T exist anywhere else. The culture of enjoying oneself--very different, by the way, from the American cult of indulgence--is what the city is all about. Quality of life matters there, and is measured by far different standards from what quality of life means in the states, the contrast being that of intangible versus tangible. In the states, we value that which can be measured--material possessions, careers, vacations that allow you to come home and rattle off the list of important things seen, work. There, emphasis is placed on precisely the opposite, the ephemeral: lived experience trumping the tourist's checklist, time pleasantly spent, long dinners with good wine, time away from work--appropriately, such things are difficult to put in list form. Small, un-listable experiences and discoveries occupied most of my time thereafter. They're harder to write about.
paris, in anecdotes
I've now spent, collectively, three months in Paris over the last year; three months and a week in France (I went to Lyon for a week last October), and am preparing to add another month to the counter shortly. Writing coherently about the experience has proven impossible, but I've found that the small observations I've made have come to mean a lot to me personally, and in the interest of not losing them all in the abyss of facebook status updates, where most of them are now, I'd reflect a bit in a random, rapid-gunfire way here.
1. gun metaphors are very american, and I had no idea how often that imagery is the first place my mind goes to, even though I've never actually even touched one of the damned things. riding shotgun. shotgun wedding. shotgunning (as in, a joint). rapid-gunfire expressions. etcetera. the french don't ride shotgun: they ride "helper".
2. 15 august, 2009: I saw a shooting star while picnicing with some friends on the tip of Ile St. Louis. It passed from the east, and disappeared behind the Hotel de Ville. I'd never seen one before.
3. Language becomes endlessly interesting when your dignity becomes dependent on one you're shaky in. In movies in Paris, when they're in English, I read the subtitles while I watch. Often, that's the interesting bit about movies to me, the point of going becomes comparing what is said with what is translated. I went to the Parc de la Villette for the Ciné en plein air this summer to watch Mulholland Drive, a movie that I don't fully understand even in English. The translation for "that's a lot of baloney" is "that's a lot of flan." and "little dawgie", as in "Git along little dowgie" translates to "get along, Calamity Jane".
4. Understanding books or discussions in French about history or science is way easier than understanding anything else. Nuclear reactors, for example. My friend told me all about them one morning, and now I know how they work.
5. things I never expected to find dubbed on french tv: cops, jerry springer, cops, the steve erkle (I don't remember the show's real name or the guy's spelling) show, and a variety of soft-core porn from somewhere in non-latin-based-language europe (as far as I can tell). also, the porn comes on at like 8pm on sundays.
6. French refuses to allow itself to be forced, at least from me. The second it becomes unnatural to speak in French, say to an American friend who I meet in Paris, the verbs refuse to conjugate themselves in my head before they come out of my mouth, the pronouns become jumbled and out of order, and I become an idiot. Language is personal. I can speak french to person X, because I've only ever known them in French. Not with person Y, whom I have known in English.
7. The reason for this, as Hannah (French, but with the same relationship with New York that I have with Paris) recently explained to me, is that one becomes a different person in a different language. It's true, and it's no less an authentic part of onesself than the original version, but it means that different Natalies interact with people depending on whether they know me in French or English. Switching feels artificial, though existing as both does not. It also explains why missing a place can feel as intense as missing a person--a little bit of me stays behind when I come home, and only a handful of people ever know that bit. In English, I'm funny in a caustic kind of way, and fairly cynical; in French, I'm optimistic in a detached kind of way and when I succeed in being amusing it usually comes without the wit.
8. Americans curse in casual conversation way more than the French. It has become mildly embarrassing to me. But I never do it in French.
9. The historical geography of Paris is almost universally lost on the people who are lucky enough to live there. I wonder how they see their city.
10. Douche (as in, 'that guy's such a douche') and Sleazy are the most difficult words to explain in French. Douche, mostly because the connection between their word for shower and a person who's intrinsically, and therefore unintentionally, an asshole is hard to explain; sleazy because, well, when in France...
11. The French are not rude. Not by a New York standard, at any rate.
12. French books print the table of contents in the back, rather than the front, and the titles printed on the spine of books face the opposite direction from Anglo-American ones.
13. Dogs in Paris do not seem to require leashes to behave.
14. milk, chicken, vagina, sandwich, hermaphrodite: masculine nouns.
15. army, masculinity, indecisiveness: feminine nouns.
1. gun metaphors are very american, and I had no idea how often that imagery is the first place my mind goes to, even though I've never actually even touched one of the damned things. riding shotgun. shotgun wedding. shotgunning (as in, a joint). rapid-gunfire expressions. etcetera. the french don't ride shotgun: they ride "helper".
2. 15 august, 2009: I saw a shooting star while picnicing with some friends on the tip of Ile St. Louis. It passed from the east, and disappeared behind the Hotel de Ville. I'd never seen one before.
3. Language becomes endlessly interesting when your dignity becomes dependent on one you're shaky in. In movies in Paris, when they're in English, I read the subtitles while I watch. Often, that's the interesting bit about movies to me, the point of going becomes comparing what is said with what is translated. I went to the Parc de la Villette for the Ciné en plein air this summer to watch Mulholland Drive, a movie that I don't fully understand even in English. The translation for "that's a lot of baloney" is "that's a lot of flan." and "little dawgie", as in "Git along little dowgie" translates to "get along, Calamity Jane".
4. Understanding books or discussions in French about history or science is way easier than understanding anything else. Nuclear reactors, for example. My friend told me all about them one morning, and now I know how they work.
5. things I never expected to find dubbed on french tv: cops, jerry springer, cops, the steve erkle (I don't remember the show's real name or the guy's spelling) show, and a variety of soft-core porn from somewhere in non-latin-based-language europe (as far as I can tell). also, the porn comes on at like 8pm on sundays.
6. French refuses to allow itself to be forced, at least from me. The second it becomes unnatural to speak in French, say to an American friend who I meet in Paris, the verbs refuse to conjugate themselves in my head before they come out of my mouth, the pronouns become jumbled and out of order, and I become an idiot. Language is personal. I can speak french to person X, because I've only ever known them in French. Not with person Y, whom I have known in English.
7. The reason for this, as Hannah (French, but with the same relationship with New York that I have with Paris) recently explained to me, is that one becomes a different person in a different language. It's true, and it's no less an authentic part of onesself than the original version, but it means that different Natalies interact with people depending on whether they know me in French or English. Switching feels artificial, though existing as both does not. It also explains why missing a place can feel as intense as missing a person--a little bit of me stays behind when I come home, and only a handful of people ever know that bit. In English, I'm funny in a caustic kind of way, and fairly cynical; in French, I'm optimistic in a detached kind of way and when I succeed in being amusing it usually comes without the wit.
8. Americans curse in casual conversation way more than the French. It has become mildly embarrassing to me. But I never do it in French.
9. The historical geography of Paris is almost universally lost on the people who are lucky enough to live there. I wonder how they see their city.
10. Douche (as in, 'that guy's such a douche') and Sleazy are the most difficult words to explain in French. Douche, mostly because the connection between their word for shower and a person who's intrinsically, and therefore unintentionally, an asshole is hard to explain; sleazy because, well, when in France...
11. The French are not rude. Not by a New York standard, at any rate.
12. French books print the table of contents in the back, rather than the front, and the titles printed on the spine of books face the opposite direction from Anglo-American ones.
13. Dogs in Paris do not seem to require leashes to behave.
14. milk, chicken, vagina, sandwich, hermaphrodite: masculine nouns.
15. army, masculinity, indecisiveness: feminine nouns.
Friday, February 6, 2009
I've come crawling back
The pressures of a blank page...
...weigh particularly heavy when that blank page is the first of 80 that one is expected to produce for a class, for professors whose opinions matter a great deal to me. Those 80 pages (2 separate papers) are now done, my writer's block went away, and an articulate friend nicely pointed out that the blog is my friend. So I've returned. Luckily, blogs can't feel resentment for being scorned. And here's what I've been thinking about (to be developed, hopefully, in future posts):
1. professional ethics. In the first European history class I took in college, taught by a professor to whom I owe my present academic career, said professor once made the off-the-cuff remark that cultural studies is "history without the footnotes." One can learn so much from the digressions of smart people; unfortunately, cultural studies has crept into history, along with the disregard for footnotes (read: empiricism, care for facts, acknowledgment that facts do, in fact, exist). This is to be discouraged.
2. The First World War was really complicated (an understatement loaded with meaning).
3. France is like a giant historical echo-chamber, which makes it really easy to feel self-important when writing its history; people there care about it and leverage it more than in other places. That makes it pretty, and makes writing history more poetic than other subjects allow for.
4. British historians write French history--this might get me in trouble--better than French historians. My explanation might take some of the sting out of that observation. For a British historian to be interested in France usually requires some degree of affection (usually being the operative word--Thomas Carlyle obviously did not feel the love). It's like writing about a crush. French historians aren't so enamored, (again, a generalization that elides over some of the best of them) because they grew up knowing French history differently. Say France was a girl. If you have a crush on her, you see the good, and try to understand the bad, and don't have the psychological approach bred by familiarity to be really damning. If that girl is family, maybe a big sister whose bad habits are intimately known by the observer, one sees different things, and lingers on old, specific, internal questions. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but it's nicer to read the "you're amazing" version than the "you decapitated my barbie when I was 8 and I'm still kind of angry but I have to like you because you're family" version of events.
5.Israel needs to chill the hell out with its guns.
...more to come.
...weigh particularly heavy when that blank page is the first of 80 that one is expected to produce for a class, for professors whose opinions matter a great deal to me. Those 80 pages (2 separate papers) are now done, my writer's block went away, and an articulate friend nicely pointed out that the blog is my friend. So I've returned. Luckily, blogs can't feel resentment for being scorned. And here's what I've been thinking about (to be developed, hopefully, in future posts):
1. professional ethics. In the first European history class I took in college, taught by a professor to whom I owe my present academic career, said professor once made the off-the-cuff remark that cultural studies is "history without the footnotes." One can learn so much from the digressions of smart people; unfortunately, cultural studies has crept into history, along with the disregard for footnotes (read: empiricism, care for facts, acknowledgment that facts do, in fact, exist). This is to be discouraged.
2. The First World War was really complicated (an understatement loaded with meaning).
3. France is like a giant historical echo-chamber, which makes it really easy to feel self-important when writing its history; people there care about it and leverage it more than in other places. That makes it pretty, and makes writing history more poetic than other subjects allow for.
4. British historians write French history--this might get me in trouble--better than French historians. My explanation might take some of the sting out of that observation. For a British historian to be interested in France usually requires some degree of affection (usually being the operative word--Thomas Carlyle obviously did not feel the love). It's like writing about a crush. French historians aren't so enamored, (again, a generalization that elides over some of the best of them) because they grew up knowing French history differently. Say France was a girl. If you have a crush on her, you see the good, and try to understand the bad, and don't have the psychological approach bred by familiarity to be really damning. If that girl is family, maybe a big sister whose bad habits are intimately known by the observer, one sees different things, and lingers on old, specific, internal questions. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but it's nicer to read the "you're amazing" version than the "you decapitated my barbie when I was 8 and I'm still kind of angry but I have to like you because you're family" version of events.
5.Israel needs to chill the hell out with its guns.
...more to come.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
ugh
I haven't written in a long time, and probably will not on this blog in the future, for the following reasons:
1. France was too amazing to write about
2. that thing happened when, since I'm in grad school, all the stuff I wrote last year now seems awfully naïve, and I pretty much skipped this semester because I'm actually too busy for blog-maintenance this year, so the fluidity with which my opinions and observations were to become more informed and sharp is pretty much wrecked
3. aside from the papers that I haven't written yet, next semester will look like this: (insert really long reading list.) so, in short, don't hold your breath.
1. France was too amazing to write about
2. that thing happened when, since I'm in grad school, all the stuff I wrote last year now seems awfully naïve, and I pretty much skipped this semester because I'm actually too busy for blog-maintenance this year, so the fluidity with which my opinions and observations were to become more informed and sharp is pretty much wrecked
3. aside from the papers that I haven't written yet, next semester will look like this: (insert really long reading list.) so, in short, don't hold your breath.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
on the bookshelves
As many of my colleagues and I have learned, a large determinant of who people think they are (individually and nationally) is captured in which parts of their history they tend to remember. Today, I walked down the Boulevard Saint Germaine, and went into almost every bookstore I came across. In the history sections, in each of these stores, there was a shelf for medieval France, a shelf for the ancien regime, two shelves for the Revolution, a section of "the world wars" that was dominated by the second, in particular the resistance (though Paxton's "Vichy France" was in every store too), and then a large section on 1968. Some had sections for Jewish French history, others subsumed that into the "world wars" and the Shoah, but the two dates that dominated were 1789 and 1968--the revolution that changed the world, and the revolution that never quite came to pass...
Thursday, June 5, 2008
My dad has used the same stationary for letter-writing for at least the past twenty years: lavender, heavy. His letters smell like cigar boxes, and he writes, as he always did, with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. When I was little, he used to draw on my brown lunch sacks with that fountain pen--the only design I remember clearly was of a clown with balloons of different colors, that spelled out "Natasha." There were others too, though, I just can't remember them.
My dad was always selfishly unselfish, if that makes sense. He never took care of himself, so from a young age, I thought that that was my job. He was busy taking care of me instead, in his own way. He's the 1970s intellectual preserved in amber, the absent minded professor who grew old in the wrong time, and who forgot to keep someone practical around to take care of him.
Moving is conducive to this kind of reflection--I'll be back to romanticizing other people's pasts soon enough.
My dad was always selfishly unselfish, if that makes sense. He never took care of himself, so from a young age, I thought that that was my job. He was busy taking care of me instead, in his own way. He's the 1970s intellectual preserved in amber, the absent minded professor who grew old in the wrong time, and who forgot to keep someone practical around to take care of him.
Moving is conducive to this kind of reflection--I'll be back to romanticizing other people's pasts soon enough.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
not so sure about democracy
You know that slightly ill feeling you get when you're at the movies, and an incredibly stupid preview comes on and to your horror, your fellow movie-goers laugh, or applaud, or make other laugh-track-conditioned responses? I was watching John McCain give his "contrasting with Obama" speech this evening--he's a terrible speaker--and when his audience responded with the desired "boooo" or "yeeeeeah" or whatever, I thought to myself what a shame it is that they can vote.
(here's the speech I was talking about. The movie, as I recall, was "You don't mess with the Zohan.")
(here's the speech I was talking about. The movie, as I recall, was "You don't mess with the Zohan.")
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Nordisms: or, funny things my advisor has said
do you see how our undergraduates look here? Are women supposed to dress that way? You don’t need millions, you just need a few floating around to feel that the world is going to hell in a handbag.
Surrealists, Dadaists, and they put on a big public show. “They’re the kind of I piss on jesus kind of people. They’re real provocative—what will offend people”
Charlie mayer story-humpty dumpty sat on a wall, then wwi happened, and you put it back together again, and you can’t do it through parliament.
“why this would be a subject of interest to anyone is beyond me”
soldiers descended into the shadow of the valley of foucaultian despair (that’s bad)
Masses. The masses have changed a lot. That sounds like an undergraduate statement. It has that sort of bluntness that one sometimes encounters: the industrial revolution happened, you know. Let me invite you to elaborate.
Surrealists, Dadaists, and they put on a big public show. “They’re the kind of I piss on jesus kind of people. They’re real provocative—what will offend people”
Charlie mayer story-humpty dumpty sat on a wall, then wwi happened, and you put it back together again, and you can’t do it through parliament.
“why this would be a subject of interest to anyone is beyond me”
soldiers descended into the shadow of the valley of foucaultian despair (that’s bad)
Masses. The masses have changed a lot. That sounds like an undergraduate statement. It has that sort of bluntness that one sometimes encounters: the industrial revolution happened, you know. Let me invite you to elaborate.
Book review 2, intro/conclusion
editor's note-you can't transfer footnotes to blog postings. I assure you, the paper I handed in contained a-plenty.
Between Lightness and Weight; or, Why Some Historians Ignore Certain Victims of the Nazi Genocide, and Why We Should Stop Doing So.
Natalia Holstein
Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds onto its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.
-Milan Kundera
Only by means of the power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into a history once more—does the human being become a human being; but in an excess of history the human being ceases once again, and without that mantle of the ahistorical he would never have begun and would never have dared to being.
-Nietzsche
Reviewed Works:
Omer Bartov, ed., The Holocaust. Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (Routledge: London, New York, 2000)
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)
Raoul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: an Intimate conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry & Holt co., 1986)
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: an Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film (1985).
(Intro)
Milan Kundera opens the most beautiful twentieth-century novel with a rumination on Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return and the duality of lightness and weight. “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.” Because history bows to Chronos in his linear form, the actions of man are light. If time were recurrent, on the other hand, “the weight of unbearable responsibility” would burden our every move. To illustrate the point, Kundera argues that history might be viewed differently if actions recurred:
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
Philosophy, though, is best appreciated when it influences fiction, not history; philosophy tells Kundera that “history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow,” but those of us who have benefited from the scholastic outpouring of the “memory boom” in historical writing know this to be false. Robespierre did return to chop off French heads throughout the nineteenth century by way of French memory of his precedent. Memory of historical events gives them weight, and in the historical record, weight bestows legitimacy. Both individual and historical memory contain, necessarily, lightness and weight at different times, and the historian’s job is not to choose between the virtues of either, but to balance the scales.
Through all of Kundera’s adult life, memory of the Holocaust has structured international politics and international notions of human rights, and has given Europe a historical burden that she still struggles to carry. Memory has been a well-studied problem in the wake of the Second World War, after which the intellectual marketplace became saturated with individual remembrances, usually through its surviving victims. When given a public voice, these testimonies reveal the unbearable weight of experience; for those who survived the death camps while others, millions of others, were not so fortunate, telling their stories has indeed been “the heaviest of burdens.” In their voices, we can identify a past that recurs, a past that haunts. These survivors have bequeathed historians a copious record of witness-accounts of the experience of genocide. Historians, in turn, have honored their memories by tirelessly researching the death camps; the moral force of this work, and the fact that Israel has made the Holocaust central to its national identity, has ensured the continuing importance of this moment.
Most of these remembrances and thus the thrust of historical research has centered on the Jewish experience of genocide, and the anti-Semitic motivations of the perpetrators. Identifying weight, however, is the easy part; the historian’s duty is the rather trickier business of plumping the gaps in the historical record. As regards the Holocaust, this task is to be completed in a political minefield in which histories have been appropriated as nation-building, in which victimhood has legitimized otherwise inexcusable aggression, and threats to the premier and perhaps exclusive status of one kind of victim are met with hostility and reflexive defensiveness. Ideally, good historians are slaves to the truth as best it can be recovered, not to the more selective truths illuminated by nationalism. Thus, at risk of offending the Israeli interpretation of the Holocaust, I would like to point to a fundamental way in which it has been misunderstood. Others who suffered under the hatred of the Nazis and the indifference of their neighbors remain in a state of historical lightness. Non-Semitic victims of a genocide predicated on racial hierarchy are being forgotten by history. Since questions of agency and complicity are contingent on the kinds of victims generated by the Third Reich, and the consequent lessons drawn from the Holocaust are based on both considerations, the implications of this singular focus, of the discrepancy between the weight and lightness in the historiography of the genocide, is significant. In this review, I will point to the limitations of conceptualizing the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish story predicated on anti-Semitism by highlighting the story of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis, and speculate what results change if the Gypsies were more readily included in Holocaust scholarship. The victim narrative has bequeathed the legacy of the Second World War its universalizing moral imperative. “Never Again,” it tells us; but as time has shown, this warning only applies to some.
Asking Better Questions (conclusion)
An overview of the trends in the historiography of the Final Solution will demonstrate the difficulty with which the present has been able to conceptualize its relationship to its not-so-distant past, and which classifications might change with a turn away from the anti-Semitic explanations for the Holocaust. The major problems that surround Nazi historiography stem from modes of classification—intentionalism, structuralism, totalitarianism, fascism, modernity, technology, bureaucratic politics, racial-biological thinking, anti-Semitism, German character, and so forth. Each of these trends has produced historical analyses with distinct political benefits or challenges. By focusing on the will of Hitler, intentionalsits were able to put the guilt for the atrocities on his shoulders. By focusing on bureaucratic structure, structuralists were able to weave a narrative of the Third Reich that seemed self-propelling and predestined. Scholars disagree about the centrality of Hitler in orchestrating the Final Solution, or the extent to which it evolved through what might perversely be called practical solutions to structural problems faced by the Nazis as the war unfolded. The latter view is supported by Raoul Hilberg in Perpetrators, Bystanders, Victims, in which his narrative, while underscoring the indispensability of Hitler, interprets the Final Solution as a response to the policies of relocating the Jews being limited with the outbreak of war and the economic strain of maintaining the Ghettos. Similarly, Michael Burleigh writes about the T4 program as germinating from the need to cut costs during war and to alleviate the racial burden on Germany by people in the medical profession.
The scale of the Final Solution demands answers that extend beyond the organizations that implemented it, which gets us into the abstract business of measuring attitudes of “ordinary Germans,” or bystanders. This is the problem that Christopher Browning tries to unravel in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, in which he shifts the focus from the trained killers of the SS, to a more “ordinary” swath of the population that nonetheless killed brutally. His subjects are middle aged and working class men who were either ineligible for the army or chose to join to avoid the draft—though the extent to which his Germans were actually “ordinary” is debatable. This theme is also Bartov’s in “German soldiers and the holocaust: historiography, research and implications,” in which he debunks the purity of arms myth, just as Burleigh debunked the purity of science idea. Attitudes of bystanders are analyzed in relation to their victims, in hopes that in understanding their motivations we might prevent similar catastrophes.
Often, the complicity of bystanders where it can be traced is attributed to a culture of anti-Semitism; this begs the question: do scholars assume the logic of complicity in sending communists, homosexuals, and Gypsies to concentration camps publicly is self-evident? Though surely not the intention of any one scholar who writes on anti-Semitism, the silence in the historiography can be read to imply even some tacit approval of the desire to at least remove these groups from sight. Anti-Semitism is an insufficient explanation for the atrocities of the Third Reich, and in expanding the definition of victim, we might be able to do away with the totalizing arguments of anti-Semitic culture, in favor of an analysis that includes that factor along with others.
This view is supported by Henry Friedlander, whose essay in Bartov’s compilation, The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, argues that the emphasis on the history of anti-Semitism to explain an event that hoped to eliminate non-Semitic groups is inadequate. Friedlander submits that the Nazi euthanasia program should be seen as part of the Holocaust because it was carried out by the same motivations; the definition of the Holocaust should therefore be expanded to include all groups of people who were killed under the banner of racial purity, including the handicapped and the Gypsies. Unlike Burleigh’s structural interpretation of T4, Friedlander interprets the euthanasia program as part of the history of genocide, motivated by the need to cleanse Germany of certain racially defined groups. Put differently, the same ideology motivated T4, the murder of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped alike, and to the same end. While conceding that anti-Semitism was a major element in Nazi ideology and that Jews were “high on the list of priorities,” Friedman argues that “anti-Semitism was only part of a larger worldview, which divided mankind into worthy and unworthy populations.” Enemies of the race were the “degenerates” and “alien races,” the un-assimilatable Jews and Gypsies. This observation should lead to a richer historiography that moves beyond “The usual interpretation [that] assigns the role of racial victim exclusively to the Jews, and sees anti-Semitism as the only ideological basis for mass murder.”
Friedlander’s was a convincing, well documented, and long-overdue intervention; yet, in his introduction to the piece, the only essay in his volume that strays from the topic of anti-Semitism, Omer Bartov feels the need to criticize it for leaving out an explanation for why the Nazis were especially obsessed with killing Jews, which theoretically elevates its importance above the kind of ideological commitment levied to do away with Gypsies. Friedlander suggests that it might not have been a special obsession, but a project that needed more public defense and justification than the removal of the Gypsies. While it is true that the anti-Semitic programs were legitimized differently, and the Jewish thread was conceived of differently than that posed by the other victims, characterizing these distinctions on a scale of strong or weak obsessions minimizes the contribution of Friedlander’s piece, and indeed the experience of the Gypsies, handicapped, asocial, communist, homosexual, and alcoholic victims. The insistence that the Jewish victims be the center of focus, always, in discussions of the Holocaust is ideological, not scholarly, and has impeded a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust as a tragedy of human prejudice generally, not just of one sort.
Bartov’s criticism of Henry Friedlander raises the issue of distinguishing between motivations to exterminate, a distinction that is usually absent in most explorations of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but which elevates the caliber of scholarly work when it is made. In The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer focuses exclusively on the Jewish victims of Nazism, though he is careful to qualify this choice: “While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, ‘asocials’ and homosexuals, ‘inferior’ racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as the Slavs, for example, were not led by the Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and maneuvered to subdue all of humanity.” In other words, the Nazis viewed the Jews as an active threat and mobilized them as a symbol in a way that was different from their public posturing relating to the other victims. This is a crucial distinction that indeed spells out why anti-Semitism needs to be studied to understand the Nazi state. Few historians, however, bother to make such a necessary point of contrast.
The specifically Jewish experience of genocide should be studied, and indeed can be studied without being subsumed in a general discussion of Nazi crimes. The problem is the un-contextualized focus on the Jewish victims, the tendency to talk about Jews as though they were the only group affected by genocide. This is not only distortion by omission, but affects the entirety of how we understand the Holocaust. We are left with a vision of a perpetrator with a single, explicit hatred that directed action. What we miss by leaving out non-Semitic victims of the Holocaust is the full lesson learned from tragedy. Rather than absorbing more Goldhagen-like arguments into the historiography, we can view the conflict as directed against humanity, not just the humanity of some. And if we really are to “never forget,” then the lesson from the war should include upholding the rights of man regardless of his racial or ethnic classifications. Strict insistence on racial distinctions culminated in the Holocaust—we should not perpetuate it in the record when the evidence calls for us to expand our field of vision.
Omer Bartov writes that the Holocaust, “one of whose most devastating consequences was a vast erasure of memory, accompanied by widespread trauma and repression, has now come to be seen as an event whose personal ramifications can be understood only by means of a sensitive and subtle analysis of survivors’ oral testimonies.” Like Kundera with the French Revolution, Bartov only gets it half right. It is true that part of the tragedy of the Holocaust includes a vast erasure of memory. However, this erasure cannot be rectified merely by analysis of survivor testimony—not all survivors have a voice. To understand the Holocaust, the record needs a more careful balance between lightness and weight, a challenge that commands the historian to write an inclusive, comprehensive history that may have to rely less on oral testimony and more on traditional tools of the trade. There are limitations to every man’s genius: Kundera underestimated the importance of memory. Most scholars of the Holocaust forget that what isn’t said is often as important as what is publicly remembered.
Between Lightness and Weight; or, Why Some Historians Ignore Certain Victims of the Nazi Genocide, and Why We Should Stop Doing So.
Natalia Holstein
Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds onto its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.
-Milan Kundera
Only by means of the power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into a history once more—does the human being become a human being; but in an excess of history the human being ceases once again, and without that mantle of the ahistorical he would never have begun and would never have dared to being.
-Nietzsche
Reviewed Works:
Omer Bartov, ed., The Holocaust. Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (Routledge: London, New York, 2000)
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)
Raoul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: an Intimate conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry & Holt co., 1986)
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: an Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film (1985).
(Intro)
Milan Kundera opens the most beautiful twentieth-century novel with a rumination on Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return and the duality of lightness and weight. “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.” Because history bows to Chronos in his linear form, the actions of man are light. If time were recurrent, on the other hand, “the weight of unbearable responsibility” would burden our every move. To illustrate the point, Kundera argues that history might be viewed differently if actions recurred:
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
Philosophy, though, is best appreciated when it influences fiction, not history; philosophy tells Kundera that “history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow,” but those of us who have benefited from the scholastic outpouring of the “memory boom” in historical writing know this to be false. Robespierre did return to chop off French heads throughout the nineteenth century by way of French memory of his precedent. Memory of historical events gives them weight, and in the historical record, weight bestows legitimacy. Both individual and historical memory contain, necessarily, lightness and weight at different times, and the historian’s job is not to choose between the virtues of either, but to balance the scales.
Through all of Kundera’s adult life, memory of the Holocaust has structured international politics and international notions of human rights, and has given Europe a historical burden that she still struggles to carry. Memory has been a well-studied problem in the wake of the Second World War, after which the intellectual marketplace became saturated with individual remembrances, usually through its surviving victims. When given a public voice, these testimonies reveal the unbearable weight of experience; for those who survived the death camps while others, millions of others, were not so fortunate, telling their stories has indeed been “the heaviest of burdens.” In their voices, we can identify a past that recurs, a past that haunts. These survivors have bequeathed historians a copious record of witness-accounts of the experience of genocide. Historians, in turn, have honored their memories by tirelessly researching the death camps; the moral force of this work, and the fact that Israel has made the Holocaust central to its national identity, has ensured the continuing importance of this moment.
Most of these remembrances and thus the thrust of historical research has centered on the Jewish experience of genocide, and the anti-Semitic motivations of the perpetrators. Identifying weight, however, is the easy part; the historian’s duty is the rather trickier business of plumping the gaps in the historical record. As regards the Holocaust, this task is to be completed in a political minefield in which histories have been appropriated as nation-building, in which victimhood has legitimized otherwise inexcusable aggression, and threats to the premier and perhaps exclusive status of one kind of victim are met with hostility and reflexive defensiveness. Ideally, good historians are slaves to the truth as best it can be recovered, not to the more selective truths illuminated by nationalism. Thus, at risk of offending the Israeli interpretation of the Holocaust, I would like to point to a fundamental way in which it has been misunderstood. Others who suffered under the hatred of the Nazis and the indifference of their neighbors remain in a state of historical lightness. Non-Semitic victims of a genocide predicated on racial hierarchy are being forgotten by history. Since questions of agency and complicity are contingent on the kinds of victims generated by the Third Reich, and the consequent lessons drawn from the Holocaust are based on both considerations, the implications of this singular focus, of the discrepancy between the weight and lightness in the historiography of the genocide, is significant. In this review, I will point to the limitations of conceptualizing the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish story predicated on anti-Semitism by highlighting the story of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis, and speculate what results change if the Gypsies were more readily included in Holocaust scholarship. The victim narrative has bequeathed the legacy of the Second World War its universalizing moral imperative. “Never Again,” it tells us; but as time has shown, this warning only applies to some.
Asking Better Questions (conclusion)
An overview of the trends in the historiography of the Final Solution will demonstrate the difficulty with which the present has been able to conceptualize its relationship to its not-so-distant past, and which classifications might change with a turn away from the anti-Semitic explanations for the Holocaust. The major problems that surround Nazi historiography stem from modes of classification—intentionalism, structuralism, totalitarianism, fascism, modernity, technology, bureaucratic politics, racial-biological thinking, anti-Semitism, German character, and so forth. Each of these trends has produced historical analyses with distinct political benefits or challenges. By focusing on the will of Hitler, intentionalsits were able to put the guilt for the atrocities on his shoulders. By focusing on bureaucratic structure, structuralists were able to weave a narrative of the Third Reich that seemed self-propelling and predestined. Scholars disagree about the centrality of Hitler in orchestrating the Final Solution, or the extent to which it evolved through what might perversely be called practical solutions to structural problems faced by the Nazis as the war unfolded. The latter view is supported by Raoul Hilberg in Perpetrators, Bystanders, Victims, in which his narrative, while underscoring the indispensability of Hitler, interprets the Final Solution as a response to the policies of relocating the Jews being limited with the outbreak of war and the economic strain of maintaining the Ghettos. Similarly, Michael Burleigh writes about the T4 program as germinating from the need to cut costs during war and to alleviate the racial burden on Germany by people in the medical profession.
The scale of the Final Solution demands answers that extend beyond the organizations that implemented it, which gets us into the abstract business of measuring attitudes of “ordinary Germans,” or bystanders. This is the problem that Christopher Browning tries to unravel in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, in which he shifts the focus from the trained killers of the SS, to a more “ordinary” swath of the population that nonetheless killed brutally. His subjects are middle aged and working class men who were either ineligible for the army or chose to join to avoid the draft—though the extent to which his Germans were actually “ordinary” is debatable. This theme is also Bartov’s in “German soldiers and the holocaust: historiography, research and implications,” in which he debunks the purity of arms myth, just as Burleigh debunked the purity of science idea. Attitudes of bystanders are analyzed in relation to their victims, in hopes that in understanding their motivations we might prevent similar catastrophes.
Often, the complicity of bystanders where it can be traced is attributed to a culture of anti-Semitism; this begs the question: do scholars assume the logic of complicity in sending communists, homosexuals, and Gypsies to concentration camps publicly is self-evident? Though surely not the intention of any one scholar who writes on anti-Semitism, the silence in the historiography can be read to imply even some tacit approval of the desire to at least remove these groups from sight. Anti-Semitism is an insufficient explanation for the atrocities of the Third Reich, and in expanding the definition of victim, we might be able to do away with the totalizing arguments of anti-Semitic culture, in favor of an analysis that includes that factor along with others.
This view is supported by Henry Friedlander, whose essay in Bartov’s compilation, The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, argues that the emphasis on the history of anti-Semitism to explain an event that hoped to eliminate non-Semitic groups is inadequate. Friedlander submits that the Nazi euthanasia program should be seen as part of the Holocaust because it was carried out by the same motivations; the definition of the Holocaust should therefore be expanded to include all groups of people who were killed under the banner of racial purity, including the handicapped and the Gypsies. Unlike Burleigh’s structural interpretation of T4, Friedlander interprets the euthanasia program as part of the history of genocide, motivated by the need to cleanse Germany of certain racially defined groups. Put differently, the same ideology motivated T4, the murder of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped alike, and to the same end. While conceding that anti-Semitism was a major element in Nazi ideology and that Jews were “high on the list of priorities,” Friedman argues that “anti-Semitism was only part of a larger worldview, which divided mankind into worthy and unworthy populations.” Enemies of the race were the “degenerates” and “alien races,” the un-assimilatable Jews and Gypsies. This observation should lead to a richer historiography that moves beyond “The usual interpretation [that] assigns the role of racial victim exclusively to the Jews, and sees anti-Semitism as the only ideological basis for mass murder.”
Friedlander’s was a convincing, well documented, and long-overdue intervention; yet, in his introduction to the piece, the only essay in his volume that strays from the topic of anti-Semitism, Omer Bartov feels the need to criticize it for leaving out an explanation for why the Nazis were especially obsessed with killing Jews, which theoretically elevates its importance above the kind of ideological commitment levied to do away with Gypsies. Friedlander suggests that it might not have been a special obsession, but a project that needed more public defense and justification than the removal of the Gypsies. While it is true that the anti-Semitic programs were legitimized differently, and the Jewish thread was conceived of differently than that posed by the other victims, characterizing these distinctions on a scale of strong or weak obsessions minimizes the contribution of Friedlander’s piece, and indeed the experience of the Gypsies, handicapped, asocial, communist, homosexual, and alcoholic victims. The insistence that the Jewish victims be the center of focus, always, in discussions of the Holocaust is ideological, not scholarly, and has impeded a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust as a tragedy of human prejudice generally, not just of one sort.
Bartov’s criticism of Henry Friedlander raises the issue of distinguishing between motivations to exterminate, a distinction that is usually absent in most explorations of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but which elevates the caliber of scholarly work when it is made. In The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer focuses exclusively on the Jewish victims of Nazism, though he is careful to qualify this choice: “While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, ‘asocials’ and homosexuals, ‘inferior’ racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as the Slavs, for example, were not led by the Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and maneuvered to subdue all of humanity.” In other words, the Nazis viewed the Jews as an active threat and mobilized them as a symbol in a way that was different from their public posturing relating to the other victims. This is a crucial distinction that indeed spells out why anti-Semitism needs to be studied to understand the Nazi state. Few historians, however, bother to make such a necessary point of contrast.
The specifically Jewish experience of genocide should be studied, and indeed can be studied without being subsumed in a general discussion of Nazi crimes. The problem is the un-contextualized focus on the Jewish victims, the tendency to talk about Jews as though they were the only group affected by genocide. This is not only distortion by omission, but affects the entirety of how we understand the Holocaust. We are left with a vision of a perpetrator with a single, explicit hatred that directed action. What we miss by leaving out non-Semitic victims of the Holocaust is the full lesson learned from tragedy. Rather than absorbing more Goldhagen-like arguments into the historiography, we can view the conflict as directed against humanity, not just the humanity of some. And if we really are to “never forget,” then the lesson from the war should include upholding the rights of man regardless of his racial or ethnic classifications. Strict insistence on racial distinctions culminated in the Holocaust—we should not perpetuate it in the record when the evidence calls for us to expand our field of vision.
Omer Bartov writes that the Holocaust, “one of whose most devastating consequences was a vast erasure of memory, accompanied by widespread trauma and repression, has now come to be seen as an event whose personal ramifications can be understood only by means of a sensitive and subtle analysis of survivors’ oral testimonies.” Like Kundera with the French Revolution, Bartov only gets it half right. It is true that part of the tragedy of the Holocaust includes a vast erasure of memory. However, this erasure cannot be rectified merely by analysis of survivor testimony—not all survivors have a voice. To understand the Holocaust, the record needs a more careful balance between lightness and weight, a challenge that commands the historian to write an inclusive, comprehensive history that may have to rely less on oral testimony and more on traditional tools of the trade. There are limitations to every man’s genius: Kundera underestimated the importance of memory. Most scholars of the Holocaust forget that what isn’t said is often as important as what is publicly remembered.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
things no one told me a year ago (I'm a better person than you are)
One year down (classes only, assignments pending). Here's what I learned.
1. You can speak more intelligently about a book that you've only read the introduction and conclusion of than one that you read closely, all the way through.
2. Professors don't write how they talk.
3. Professors know the people whose books they assign like 85% of the time, and they're friends with those people about half the time-so read the acknowledgments and make sure your professor isn't in it before you rip a book to shreds in class. Similarly, before tearing into a historical conceit, such as the phrase "the rebirth of europe," be sure the person you're talking to hasn't written a book called "europe reborn."
4. No one reads everything that's assigned, but bragging about how much work you didn't do is no longer cool.
5. Beware of students who think that they're actually doing important work. They're insane. Make friends that share your vices. And your gripes.
6. Understatement opens doors--when you say something small confidently, be it in class, or especially in a paper, people who are smarter than you tend to read in whatever they wanted to hear, and then you get credit for other people's ideas.
7. Presentations: I hate them. The strategy I've adopted involves taking the 5-15 minutes as a way to steer the conversation the way I want it to go--it's the only time people, even the professor, have to sit quietly and listen to your opinions. And half the goal is entertainment, so the bolder the opinions, the better. And, if you've established the reputation of having an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor, if you say something completely incorrect, it's usually attributed to that, and not idiocy.
8. You will learn the most about everything any time you can catch a professor on like their second glass of wine.
9. Papers: no one does groundbreaking research in their first couple of years of grad school, especially in work for classes. It will not be brilliant, and given all the readers know about everything, it may even be trite. Therefore, it absolutely must be entertaining. It's not what you write, it's how you write it.
10. notable quotations from some of my classes forthcoming.
1. You can speak more intelligently about a book that you've only read the introduction and conclusion of than one that you read closely, all the way through.
2. Professors don't write how they talk.
3. Professors know the people whose books they assign like 85% of the time, and they're friends with those people about half the time-so read the acknowledgments and make sure your professor isn't in it before you rip a book to shreds in class. Similarly, before tearing into a historical conceit, such as the phrase "the rebirth of europe," be sure the person you're talking to hasn't written a book called "europe reborn."
4. No one reads everything that's assigned, but bragging about how much work you didn't do is no longer cool.
5. Beware of students who think that they're actually doing important work. They're insane. Make friends that share your vices. And your gripes.
6. Understatement opens doors--when you say something small confidently, be it in class, or especially in a paper, people who are smarter than you tend to read in whatever they wanted to hear, and then you get credit for other people's ideas.
7. Presentations: I hate them. The strategy I've adopted involves taking the 5-15 minutes as a way to steer the conversation the way I want it to go--it's the only time people, even the professor, have to sit quietly and listen to your opinions. And half the goal is entertainment, so the bolder the opinions, the better. And, if you've established the reputation of having an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor, if you say something completely incorrect, it's usually attributed to that, and not idiocy.
8. You will learn the most about everything any time you can catch a professor on like their second glass of wine.
9. Papers: no one does groundbreaking research in their first couple of years of grad school, especially in work for classes. It will not be brilliant, and given all the readers know about everything, it may even be trite. Therefore, it absolutely must be entertaining. It's not what you write, it's how you write it.
10. notable quotations from some of my classes forthcoming.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
I <3 NY?
It's a sunny, colder-than-expected April Saturday. In New York, these factors alone would have determined how my day would be spent--it would be the kind of day for walking, and seeing what the city had in store. On good days, this would lead to an experience with the city in the spirit of Woody Allen's Manhattan, where everyone you meet is interesting, everyone you see is worth commenting on, and the city itself, that marvelous backdrop, deserves a love song at the end for having provided such bounty.
I'm convinced that this is all weather dependent; I've never had a bad day in the city when it's 60 degrees and sunny. Add twenty degrees, and you're likely to get the New York of the 25th Hour--that is, where every variation of crazy and ignorant seems to overtake that city, that breeding ground for bitterness and insanity. On those days, you get yelled at by beggars, propositioned by vulgar puerto rican teenagers, and find yourself wondering, "where are their parents?" On those days, the subway stops being an opportunity to people-watch, and becomes a potential death-trap, because on those days the strain under which most people spend most of their time becomes painfully visible, and you find yourself realizing that it might take something quite insignificant to make them snap and shove you on the subway tracks. Or, without braving the subway, you find yourself looking up as you walk past buildings, only to see about 15 window air conditioning units--having installed one yourself, you know how easily one of them could just fall from their place and squish you.
I miss my 60 degree dates with the city, though. There's no going out to seek your fortune in Princeton, no running into long lost friends, no days up in the air. Today, I'm going to the library. Usually I miss New York, and all that living there entailed. Some days, though, the creeping, insular comforts of suburbia find their way into my assessment of my lifestyle, and on those days, I like living in a place where I can see foxes, deer, bunnies, and groundhogs without going out of my way, where I can leave my bike unlocked in front of my house, and where I can take the dog running without worrying about running into an off-leash pitbull. My impression of Philly has been that it's a smaller, cleaner, New York City--we'll see whether that holds up on days like today.
I'm convinced that this is all weather dependent; I've never had a bad day in the city when it's 60 degrees and sunny. Add twenty degrees, and you're likely to get the New York of the 25th Hour--that is, where every variation of crazy and ignorant seems to overtake that city, that breeding ground for bitterness and insanity. On those days, you get yelled at by beggars, propositioned by vulgar puerto rican teenagers, and find yourself wondering, "where are their parents?" On those days, the subway stops being an opportunity to people-watch, and becomes a potential death-trap, because on those days the strain under which most people spend most of their time becomes painfully visible, and you find yourself realizing that it might take something quite insignificant to make them snap and shove you on the subway tracks. Or, without braving the subway, you find yourself looking up as you walk past buildings, only to see about 15 window air conditioning units--having installed one yourself, you know how easily one of them could just fall from their place and squish you.
I miss my 60 degree dates with the city, though. There's no going out to seek your fortune in Princeton, no running into long lost friends, no days up in the air. Today, I'm going to the library. Usually I miss New York, and all that living there entailed. Some days, though, the creeping, insular comforts of suburbia find their way into my assessment of my lifestyle, and on those days, I like living in a place where I can see foxes, deer, bunnies, and groundhogs without going out of my way, where I can leave my bike unlocked in front of my house, and where I can take the dog running without worrying about running into an off-leash pitbull. My impression of Philly has been that it's a smaller, cleaner, New York City--we'll see whether that holds up on days like today.
Friday, April 25, 2008
no, it's not new, but it's called the New School.
Someone asked me yesterday if I would send my (fictitious) children to the New School, which is where I got my BA. The answer is no, and here's why: The New School's heavy emphasis on deconstruction and post-modernism means that its students spend four years learning about what knowledge isn't, rather than what knowledge is. And, students like me (ones who think that the only thing more annoying than relativism is a gang of 18-year-olds convinced of its merits) develop the uncontrollable urge to roll their eyes at the mention of Foucault, et al. It's too much thoughtless counter-culture. My kids would probably go to Brown.
Monday, April 14, 2008
a story of two books; or, how I found profundity through pure superficiality
1.You were lying on a side-table at my father’s house, closed, no sleeve. I was 8; the height of that little table, near the front door, put your title at eye-level. “What’s this book?”
“You’re too young to read it, but it’s the story of your life.”
Stubborn, I took you with me, and barely made it through the first sentence before giving up. That was my little secret though, and you remained on my shelf for another decade, when I tried again. Dating an ostentatious intellectual can lead one to do things like carry around War and Peace, and eventually even read it. And it was my life, as it has been each time I’ve poured over the same pages (4 times in 7 years), carefully annotating what my older and wiser self has reflected on, but careful not to disrupt the little hearts and smiley-faces that first featured in the margins.
2. I bought you at half-price books in Houston, Tx, for between 2 and 5 dollars, I don’t remember. A friend of mine, the deep, cool, creative, smart one, had been carrying you around for days, and I wanted to be profound too. I didn’t read my life in you as I did with Tolstoy, but if there’s some lofty ideal for what life is like, if it’s possible to capture its music and poetry in a translated work of prose, and do it all in a story about sex and a dog, Monsieur Kundera, you have done it. I annotated you madly, quoted you in coffee houses.
A friend of mine, in turn, saw me carrying you around, and notes and all, I let her read my copy. Careless, she left you callously lying in the backseat of her convertible, which she left open through a storm. She talked about her ruined car; the real tragedy, though, I knew to be the destruction of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, complete with my seventeen-year old thoughts neatly penned in the margins, which inch-for-inch had been loved infinitely more than her car’s ugly upholstery (despite what her reputation might have had you believe--but that's a crass joke).
“You’re too young to read it, but it’s the story of your life.”
Stubborn, I took you with me, and barely made it through the first sentence before giving up. That was my little secret though, and you remained on my shelf for another decade, when I tried again. Dating an ostentatious intellectual can lead one to do things like carry around War and Peace, and eventually even read it. And it was my life, as it has been each time I’ve poured over the same pages (4 times in 7 years), carefully annotating what my older and wiser self has reflected on, but careful not to disrupt the little hearts and smiley-faces that first featured in the margins.
2. I bought you at half-price books in Houston, Tx, for between 2 and 5 dollars, I don’t remember. A friend of mine, the deep, cool, creative, smart one, had been carrying you around for days, and I wanted to be profound too. I didn’t read my life in you as I did with Tolstoy, but if there’s some lofty ideal for what life is like, if it’s possible to capture its music and poetry in a translated work of prose, and do it all in a story about sex and a dog, Monsieur Kundera, you have done it. I annotated you madly, quoted you in coffee houses.
A friend of mine, in turn, saw me carrying you around, and notes and all, I let her read my copy. Careless, she left you callously lying in the backseat of her convertible, which she left open through a storm. She talked about her ruined car; the real tragedy, though, I knew to be the destruction of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, complete with my seventeen-year old thoughts neatly penned in the margins, which inch-for-inch had been loved infinitely more than her car’s ugly upholstery (despite what her reputation might have had you believe--but that's a crass joke).
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Kundera ususally says most things best.
"Man cannot do without feelings, but the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening. The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love."
-Milan Kundera, The Introduction to a Variation, NYTBook Review, 6.I.1985
-Milan Kundera, The Introduction to a Variation, NYTBook Review, 6.I.1985
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Intro and Conclusion from my most bad-ass book review
Introduction
"A percentage! Nice little words they have, really: so reassuring, so scientific. A certain percentage, they say, meaning there's nothing to worry about. Now, if it was some other word . . . well, then maybe it would be more worrisome."
The quotation above was taken from a book published in 1866 in Russia, by an observer who, witnessing the growing hegemony of scientific knowledge and precision over all other ways of knowing the human condition, penned this portent of the pitfalls of over-calculation. It is a warning that echoes through time to the present, in which it seems particularly resonant given the tragic effects of social Darwinism and positivism run amok in the twentieth century. In studying the pinnacles of tragedy produced by such mentalities, historians would be advised to take care not to echo the coldness that attending singularly to the statistics generated by an event can perpetuate in the historical record. Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin was no stranger to millions of deaths; if he indeed articulated this method of obscuring the visceral reality of violence, we should pay attention not to repeat his calculation.
The European “short twentieth-century” has been variously conceptualized into a coherent period as an age of ideology, a century of the nation-state for better or worse (and often for worse), and an unfortunate blip in the radar of nineteenth-century ideals. Another lens through which to understand it has been advanced by Jay Winter, who proposes the twentieth century as one of historical memory, in that historical memory became a chief characteristic of the self-understanding of societies. Winter writes of two generations of memory, corresponding to each of the World Wars. The first, spanning the 1890s to the 1920s, engaged memory to shape personal and national identity. The second came in the 1960s in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, which introduced more subjective memories of witness and survivor to the field of remembrances as moral symbols.
All of the afore-mentioned approaches agree that the Second World War has been key to shaping the contours of post-war Europe, but Winter’s emphasis on legacy is critical. Whatever else we can say, each nation that emerged from the war crafted a narrative of it, defining themselves in the process—de Gaulle famously spoke of France as “a nation of resisters,” while the West conceptualized the conflict as a war for democracy, conveniently minimizing the role played by the USSR in enabling that success. German historians developed a Führer-centric interpretation of the Third Reich, thus mitigating whatever responsibility its citizens played in the most grisly elements of the war. Stalin made certain that the war was remembered as the great patriotic war, in which the sacrifices it demanded would be redeemed by the utopian vision offered by communism; a vision that was subsequently and magnanimously extended from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe. The history of the Second World War has been a nation-building story, a factor which makes the historian’s imperative to remain as true to the record as possible all the more acute and difficult.
In processing the meaning of this period, numbers matter more than they used to—so much of what happened between 1933-45 seems to defy rational explanation, and in confronting the prospect of being unable to explain the most dramatic event of the century, some historians cling to what they can know for certain. Historical events can be made intelligible through the statistics they produce—and can sometimes become eclipsed by them. The scale of the war is often invoked in these terms--72 million dead. $288 Billion (in 1940s dollars) spent. While these factors are defining characteristics of the conflict, how much do they tell us about the war’s legacy, and of the way people then made their decisions? To what extent can a quantitative look at history tease out the qualitative significance of events?
The following review will demonstrate that the materialist and mathematic approach to big historical questions are critical—that cannot be emphasized enough—to establish the parameters of what was possible at a given time. Economic factors and indeed any statistical measurement available relating to the catastrophe of the Second World War (indeed, for any conflict) are absolutely necessary to any grounded historical understanding of a time. Yet, when relied upon exclusively to answer larger questions—why did the Allies win the war? How pervasive was the French Résistance? Who were the victims of this catastrophe?—this strictly quantifiable approach to history crumbles in the face of the untidiness of human affairs. Intangible factors—complicity or resistance of citizens without official affiliations, moral purpose of troops that fought, attitudes that permitted setting aside the humanity of various peoples are important. Scientific method will not give us all the answers.
Conclusions
Total War demands a comprehensive perspective, including decisions made by masses of people, not just organizations and institutions. While empiricism is invaluable to good history, great history moves beyond it when the sources cannot measure the scope of its subject. The legacy of the Second World War was moral; its moral aspects have structured politics and policies, and new nationalisms that emerged in its wake; while hard numbers and facts remain the best way to understand the scope of the war and the material constraints against which humans made choices, the political dynamic of the conflict cannot be understood in those terms.
In each examined work, scholars are locked into a debate about how much the statistics produced by society can reveal about its nature. The conclusion I wish to draw here is an argument for synthesis, for inclusion of a broad range of factors into any analysis of the War. Admittedly, this is a tall order. Scholars that focus on victims tend to ignore structural determinants; economic historians tend to ignore the victims. In the end, the Second World War was so complex, it may well be true that as Ian Kershaw has suggested in his survey of the field, one can only hope to contribute to an explanation of the event in scholarly writing, and all contributions should be welcomed regardless of what they are unable to include. Yet, we should listen to our elders. Raskolnikov tried to live by reason alone, and wound up in Siberia as a result; the dynamics of human life continue to defy strict calculation. Any appreciation of historical change absolutely must keep this in mind.
"A percentage! Nice little words they have, really: so reassuring, so scientific. A certain percentage, they say, meaning there's nothing to worry about. Now, if it was some other word . . . well, then maybe it would be more worrisome."
The quotation above was taken from a book published in 1866 in Russia, by an observer who, witnessing the growing hegemony of scientific knowledge and precision over all other ways of knowing the human condition, penned this portent of the pitfalls of over-calculation. It is a warning that echoes through time to the present, in which it seems particularly resonant given the tragic effects of social Darwinism and positivism run amok in the twentieth century. In studying the pinnacles of tragedy produced by such mentalities, historians would be advised to take care not to echo the coldness that attending singularly to the statistics generated by an event can perpetuate in the historical record. Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin was no stranger to millions of deaths; if he indeed articulated this method of obscuring the visceral reality of violence, we should pay attention not to repeat his calculation.
The European “short twentieth-century” has been variously conceptualized into a coherent period as an age of ideology, a century of the nation-state for better or worse (and often for worse), and an unfortunate blip in the radar of nineteenth-century ideals. Another lens through which to understand it has been advanced by Jay Winter, who proposes the twentieth century as one of historical memory, in that historical memory became a chief characteristic of the self-understanding of societies. Winter writes of two generations of memory, corresponding to each of the World Wars. The first, spanning the 1890s to the 1920s, engaged memory to shape personal and national identity. The second came in the 1960s in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, which introduced more subjective memories of witness and survivor to the field of remembrances as moral symbols.
All of the afore-mentioned approaches agree that the Second World War has been key to shaping the contours of post-war Europe, but Winter’s emphasis on legacy is critical. Whatever else we can say, each nation that emerged from the war crafted a narrative of it, defining themselves in the process—de Gaulle famously spoke of France as “a nation of resisters,” while the West conceptualized the conflict as a war for democracy, conveniently minimizing the role played by the USSR in enabling that success. German historians developed a Führer-centric interpretation of the Third Reich, thus mitigating whatever responsibility its citizens played in the most grisly elements of the war. Stalin made certain that the war was remembered as the great patriotic war, in which the sacrifices it demanded would be redeemed by the utopian vision offered by communism; a vision that was subsequently and magnanimously extended from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe. The history of the Second World War has been a nation-building story, a factor which makes the historian’s imperative to remain as true to the record as possible all the more acute and difficult.
In processing the meaning of this period, numbers matter more than they used to—so much of what happened between 1933-45 seems to defy rational explanation, and in confronting the prospect of being unable to explain the most dramatic event of the century, some historians cling to what they can know for certain. Historical events can be made intelligible through the statistics they produce—and can sometimes become eclipsed by them. The scale of the war is often invoked in these terms--72 million dead. $288 Billion (in 1940s dollars) spent. While these factors are defining characteristics of the conflict, how much do they tell us about the war’s legacy, and of the way people then made their decisions? To what extent can a quantitative look at history tease out the qualitative significance of events?
The following review will demonstrate that the materialist and mathematic approach to big historical questions are critical—that cannot be emphasized enough—to establish the parameters of what was possible at a given time. Economic factors and indeed any statistical measurement available relating to the catastrophe of the Second World War (indeed, for any conflict) are absolutely necessary to any grounded historical understanding of a time. Yet, when relied upon exclusively to answer larger questions—why did the Allies win the war? How pervasive was the French Résistance? Who were the victims of this catastrophe?—this strictly quantifiable approach to history crumbles in the face of the untidiness of human affairs. Intangible factors—complicity or resistance of citizens without official affiliations, moral purpose of troops that fought, attitudes that permitted setting aside the humanity of various peoples are important. Scientific method will not give us all the answers.
Conclusions
Total War demands a comprehensive perspective, including decisions made by masses of people, not just organizations and institutions. While empiricism is invaluable to good history, great history moves beyond it when the sources cannot measure the scope of its subject. The legacy of the Second World War was moral; its moral aspects have structured politics and policies, and new nationalisms that emerged in its wake; while hard numbers and facts remain the best way to understand the scope of the war and the material constraints against which humans made choices, the political dynamic of the conflict cannot be understood in those terms.
In each examined work, scholars are locked into a debate about how much the statistics produced by society can reveal about its nature. The conclusion I wish to draw here is an argument for synthesis, for inclusion of a broad range of factors into any analysis of the War. Admittedly, this is a tall order. Scholars that focus on victims tend to ignore structural determinants; economic historians tend to ignore the victims. In the end, the Second World War was so complex, it may well be true that as Ian Kershaw has suggested in his survey of the field, one can only hope to contribute to an explanation of the event in scholarly writing, and all contributions should be welcomed regardless of what they are unable to include. Yet, we should listen to our elders. Raskolnikov tried to live by reason alone, and wound up in Siberia as a result; the dynamics of human life continue to defy strict calculation. Any appreciation of historical change absolutely must keep this in mind.
vocabulary
grad school changes the tone of acceptable quotidian discourse; here's a list of words I use now and wouldn't have a year ago:
prolegomena
epistemologically
discourse
metanarrative
revisionist
reductionist
as a corrective to
baudelairian
sui generis
ad hoc
ex post facto
historical and dialectical materialism
historical myopia
antinomy (twice found in books about France in the 20s!)
hermeneutic
intra-archipelagic
stochastic
fungible
somnolence
Braudelian
synecdochical
prolegomena
epistemologically
discourse
metanarrative
revisionist
reductionist
as a corrective to
baudelairian
sui generis
ad hoc
ex post facto
historical and dialectical materialism
historical myopia
antinomy (twice found in books about France in the 20s!)
hermeneutic
intra-archipelagic
stochastic
fungible
somnolence
Braudelian
synecdochical
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
learn from my mistakes. plus a few editorials.
Future graduate students:
1. One of the double-edged swords of being at an institution like Princeton has been the frequency with which I have completely accidentally and sometimes unknowingly interacted with really famous academics. There was a day-long conference hosted here on the topic of "Historical Memory of Violence and Catastrophe," with a changing panel of speakers throughout the day. During the lunch break, a few classmates and I found ourselves at a table with a man we didn't recognize, but who volunteered that he was teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School as a guest for the year. So we chatted about trivialities, comparing our experiences with Princeton undergraduates. The conference resumed, and we discovered that we'd wasted 30 minutes talking about 18 year-old New Jersey residents with a man who had been a human rights lawyer in Chile during the years of Pinochet, who had risen to be Chile's Foreign Minister after that regime was brought to an end, and who has been instrumental in instituting reconciliation after that particular catastrophe of human rights, but also has assisted in the rebuilding of other societies after traumatic changes, notably post-apartheid South Africa. Lesson Learned, and I'll share it with you: when attending a conference, a quick google-image search of the participants is strongly recommended.
2. Reading something you never wanted to read to begin with on the couch is a bad idea:
3. You will not make it through the year without cracking and using the phrase "a useful heuristic" at least once. Don't fight it.
4. I'm starting to think that Foucault is infinitely more irritating and problematic than Marx. Or maybe he's the Marx for post-modern history. Usually, you can know everything you need to know about an author's argument if they cite Foucault in the first three pages of their introduction, or worse, (and this happens a lot), if they thank him or dedicate their book to him. I'm happy to debate the point, but for now, Foucault is the new Marx, and he needs to simmer down in the historiography.
5. My adviser wrote the following in a published essay, and it's only one of many reasons why he's awesome: "Retarded France turns out not to have been so retarded after all..."
6. Getting the flu sucks, but in keeping with the theme of sleeping on the couch, and in appreciation for the magic of NyQuil, I'll show you what I looked like for most of last week (also to counter what you've undoubtedly been told, the lie that sleep stops when you get into grad school):
1. One of the double-edged swords of being at an institution like Princeton has been the frequency with which I have completely accidentally and sometimes unknowingly interacted with really famous academics. There was a day-long conference hosted here on the topic of "Historical Memory of Violence and Catastrophe," with a changing panel of speakers throughout the day. During the lunch break, a few classmates and I found ourselves at a table with a man we didn't recognize, but who volunteered that he was teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School as a guest for the year. So we chatted about trivialities, comparing our experiences with Princeton undergraduates. The conference resumed, and we discovered that we'd wasted 30 minutes talking about 18 year-old New Jersey residents with a man who had been a human rights lawyer in Chile during the years of Pinochet, who had risen to be Chile's Foreign Minister after that regime was brought to an end, and who has been instrumental in instituting reconciliation after that particular catastrophe of human rights, but also has assisted in the rebuilding of other societies after traumatic changes, notably post-apartheid South Africa. Lesson Learned, and I'll share it with you: when attending a conference, a quick google-image search of the participants is strongly recommended.
2. Reading something you never wanted to read to begin with on the couch is a bad idea:
3. You will not make it through the year without cracking and using the phrase "a useful heuristic" at least once. Don't fight it.
4. I'm starting to think that Foucault is infinitely more irritating and problematic than Marx. Or maybe he's the Marx for post-modern history. Usually, you can know everything you need to know about an author's argument if they cite Foucault in the first three pages of their introduction, or worse, (and this happens a lot), if they thank him or dedicate their book to him. I'm happy to debate the point, but for now, Foucault is the new Marx, and he needs to simmer down in the historiography.
5. My adviser wrote the following in a published essay, and it's only one of many reasons why he's awesome: "Retarded France turns out not to have been so retarded after all..."
6. Getting the flu sucks, but in keeping with the theme of sleeping on the couch, and in appreciation for the magic of NyQuil, I'll show you what I looked like for most of last week (also to counter what you've undoubtedly been told, the lie that sleep stops when you get into grad school):
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
nationalism hangover
A few years ago, while discussing his recently-published book (that he was gracious enough to assign the class), a professor of mine made an aside about how after writing the book, he realized that he'd been preoccupied with the same issue for his entire academic career, but not having named it as such, he didn't recognize his own theme until 20 years into it. His theme was the causes and results of freedom of speech. Mine, I've realized of late, is nationalism.
I have always been uncomfortable with nationalistic ritual, even before my distaste for religion had blossomed. By always, I mean ever since I was old enough to pledge allegiance to the flag, in my case, a flag that I knew, and was continuously made aware, was not my own. It was a ritual that I had to perform, like everyone else, but because I was aware that my flag had green and an eagle on it while this one did not, I learned a lesson really early on about ritual--that it is meant to engender certain feelings, rather than to confirm feelings that are there naturally. I didn't belong, but I watched my peers learn to. And watching the process of indoctrination is unsettling, even to a six year old who doesn't quite know what to call it.
The way I grew up, I was neither Mexican nor American. I was born in Mexico City, yes, but my parents moved to the states in 1987. Both of them, come to think of it, had checkered pasts with the idea of the nation. My dad came from a long line of men who had attended Virginia Military Academy, and much to his father's chagrin, he refused to go. His ethnic background includes ancestors from Kansas, Ireland, Germany, Peru, and even San Martin, "liberator" of South America from Spain. Instead of going to VMI, he went to UNAM (in Mexico City), and when the Vietnam War came around, he made it a point to renounce his US citizenship. My mom's case is more straight-forward. She was born in Mexico to a fair-skinned mother and a VERY Indian (that is to say, native, indigenous, pick whichever is more tasteful) looking father. So her issue was never directly a conflict with patriotism, but was rather a class-conflict, which in Mexico can become an issue of patriotism.
I digress. We moved in the late 80s, just before I turned three years old. My parent's cosmopolitanism ensured that I spoke and understood english as well as spanish, and a little russian when we moved. I didn't have much trouble (compared with other immigrant studies) switching to just english for school, and reading was easy. Still, assimilation is hard when you know you're different. And school is almost entirely about assimilation.
One of the greatest joys of being a teenager is in finding creative ways to call your elders liars. Being able to claim moral high ground on your captors, as it were, never got old. And so it was that in high school, I began to look more critically at our history books for what was missing and what was there. It was obvious pretty quickly that what we were being told was not in fact history, but the national narrative from which our identities were to be formed. We associate with this country because it has done x, y, and z. We choose to forget the rest of the alphabet. This so profoundly offended my sensibilities as to guide my every intellectual interest since sophomore year, whether I knew it or not.
And in fact I couldn't quite put my finger on it until monday afternoon. Even as I wrote the following proposal for summer research, I didn't know quite what I was getting at:
"I am interested in the shaping of national identity through retellings of history. As the First World War is generally seen as a watershed event that ushered in the worst the twentieth century had to offer, a transformative moment in which the degree of change was visible on the ground at the time, I am interested in discovering the ways in which the War's significance and lessons were reprocessed for French and British children—both nations came out of the war nominally as victors, but both sustained immense human and economic losses. In this comparative approach, I am interested to find how the war fostered or reinforced their differing national identities—identities which, it has been argued, were forged in opposition to one another."
But Monday morning, I had my interview for citizenship, I was sworn in that afternoon, and spent the rest of the day in a profoundly ambivalent mood about what I had just done.
Here's my confession: After waiting in line at the Mexican consulate for 8 hours just to renew a passport, the conveniences of attaining citizenship in the place I'd always lived started to look practical, if not intellectually appealing. A few months later, it was announced that the cost to apply would almost double. My rational self prevailed, and I applied. This included swearing that I wasn't and am not a communist or a terrorist (that prompt is part of the same segment, implying that either association is equivalent to the other), that I would go to war for the country if required (I would certainly not), and that I swore I'd tell the truth "so help me god" (Clearly, I didn't, and anyway I'm an atheist.). I had my swearing in yesterday, which included more offensive questions and lies (are you mentally or physically disabled? Are you sure you're not a communist? Do you support the US foreign and domestic policy? Etc.), an announcement of "welcome" from "president" George W. Bush, and saying the oath, which I mouthed but didn't speak.
As a student of history, I find it deeply disturbing to have associated myself by choice, when I'm old enough to know better, with a country whose policies have generally been disgraceful for the last few centuries. On principle, I don't like answering a question about the virtues of the constitution with the words "freedom of speech," and then being asked to confine my worldview to "not communist." I don't like being shown a video for the army and being reminded that the men on the tape "died for my freedom," when this country hasn't fought a defensive war in over a hundred years (we can argue about wwii later). I don't like the way the government uses its past to draw the entirely wrong lessons. I sold out.
I have always been uncomfortable with nationalistic ritual, even before my distaste for religion had blossomed. By always, I mean ever since I was old enough to pledge allegiance to the flag, in my case, a flag that I knew, and was continuously made aware, was not my own. It was a ritual that I had to perform, like everyone else, but because I was aware that my flag had green and an eagle on it while this one did not, I learned a lesson really early on about ritual--that it is meant to engender certain feelings, rather than to confirm feelings that are there naturally. I didn't belong, but I watched my peers learn to. And watching the process of indoctrination is unsettling, even to a six year old who doesn't quite know what to call it.
The way I grew up, I was neither Mexican nor American. I was born in Mexico City, yes, but my parents moved to the states in 1987. Both of them, come to think of it, had checkered pasts with the idea of the nation. My dad came from a long line of men who had attended Virginia Military Academy, and much to his father's chagrin, he refused to go. His ethnic background includes ancestors from Kansas, Ireland, Germany, Peru, and even San Martin, "liberator" of South America from Spain. Instead of going to VMI, he went to UNAM (in Mexico City), and when the Vietnam War came around, he made it a point to renounce his US citizenship. My mom's case is more straight-forward. She was born in Mexico to a fair-skinned mother and a VERY Indian (that is to say, native, indigenous, pick whichever is more tasteful) looking father. So her issue was never directly a conflict with patriotism, but was rather a class-conflict, which in Mexico can become an issue of patriotism.
I digress. We moved in the late 80s, just before I turned three years old. My parent's cosmopolitanism ensured that I spoke and understood english as well as spanish, and a little russian when we moved. I didn't have much trouble (compared with other immigrant studies) switching to just english for school, and reading was easy. Still, assimilation is hard when you know you're different. And school is almost entirely about assimilation.
One of the greatest joys of being a teenager is in finding creative ways to call your elders liars. Being able to claim moral high ground on your captors, as it were, never got old. And so it was that in high school, I began to look more critically at our history books for what was missing and what was there. It was obvious pretty quickly that what we were being told was not in fact history, but the national narrative from which our identities were to be formed. We associate with this country because it has done x, y, and z. We choose to forget the rest of the alphabet. This so profoundly offended my sensibilities as to guide my every intellectual interest since sophomore year, whether I knew it or not.
And in fact I couldn't quite put my finger on it until monday afternoon. Even as I wrote the following proposal for summer research, I didn't know quite what I was getting at:
"I am interested in the shaping of national identity through retellings of history. As the First World War is generally seen as a watershed event that ushered in the worst the twentieth century had to offer, a transformative moment in which the degree of change was visible on the ground at the time, I am interested in discovering the ways in which the War's significance and lessons were reprocessed for French and British children—both nations came out of the war nominally as victors, but both sustained immense human and economic losses. In this comparative approach, I am interested to find how the war fostered or reinforced their differing national identities—identities which, it has been argued, were forged in opposition to one another."
But Monday morning, I had my interview for citizenship, I was sworn in that afternoon, and spent the rest of the day in a profoundly ambivalent mood about what I had just done.
Here's my confession: After waiting in line at the Mexican consulate for 8 hours just to renew a passport, the conveniences of attaining citizenship in the place I'd always lived started to look practical, if not intellectually appealing. A few months later, it was announced that the cost to apply would almost double. My rational self prevailed, and I applied. This included swearing that I wasn't and am not a communist or a terrorist (that prompt is part of the same segment, implying that either association is equivalent to the other), that I would go to war for the country if required (I would certainly not), and that I swore I'd tell the truth "so help me god" (Clearly, I didn't, and anyway I'm an atheist.). I had my swearing in yesterday, which included more offensive questions and lies (are you mentally or physically disabled? Are you sure you're not a communist? Do you support the US foreign and domestic policy? Etc.), an announcement of "welcome" from "president" George W. Bush, and saying the oath, which I mouthed but didn't speak.
As a student of history, I find it deeply disturbing to have associated myself by choice, when I'm old enough to know better, with a country whose policies have generally been disgraceful for the last few centuries. On principle, I don't like answering a question about the virtues of the constitution with the words "freedom of speech," and then being asked to confine my worldview to "not communist." I don't like being shown a video for the army and being reminded that the men on the tape "died for my freedom," when this country hasn't fought a defensive war in over a hundred years (we can argue about wwii later). I don't like the way the government uses its past to draw the entirely wrong lessons. I sold out.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
I like a bit of poetry in my politics.
Until recently, I was convinced that inspirational politics, in the sense of a leader rising up and inspiring citizens to aspire to greater heights, was the stuff of history, if it ever really existed at all. I find it hard to imagine generations past who actually had to fight to effect change--what could compel them to forget themselves for long enough to storm the Bastille? What nobility there must have been in the souls of the Mexican peasants who, at the dawn of the past century, decided that they'd had enough. Those who have been as fortunate as I grew up a bit jaded; we saw what happened to the generations of the '60s and '70s. We've watched them decay in suburbs. It never occurred to me that it might take a special kind of inspiration to act as a catalyst for self-investment in political life, or that that inspiration could come from a politician.
Barack Obama's candidacy has had me reflecting on a lot of different issues, but the theme that emerges the strongest, which my recent training may have given me the ability to see more easily than others might, is that some times are simply more able to effect change than others--Obama knows this; this is why he quotes Dr. King's masterfully phrased line: "the fierce urgency of now." He also knows that his candidacy is not entirely about himself, but largely about what hopes and aspirations people my age project onto the newness he offers. This feels like a turning point in history; those of us who are hopeful will either be vindicated, or disillusioned, and soon. Obviously, I hope for vindication; but even in disillusionment's, I will have learned something valuable about what it is like to be profoundly affected by the charisma of a time, place, and person, and if nothing else, my scholarship will be better for it.
Maybe it'll get you too, at least a little. Here's part of his concession speech from New Hampshire-- you'll see what i mean:
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.
...
Together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.
Barack Obama's candidacy has had me reflecting on a lot of different issues, but the theme that emerges the strongest, which my recent training may have given me the ability to see more easily than others might, is that some times are simply more able to effect change than others--Obama knows this; this is why he quotes Dr. King's masterfully phrased line: "the fierce urgency of now." He also knows that his candidacy is not entirely about himself, but largely about what hopes and aspirations people my age project onto the newness he offers. This feels like a turning point in history; those of us who are hopeful will either be vindicated, or disillusioned, and soon. Obviously, I hope for vindication; but even in disillusionment's, I will have learned something valuable about what it is like to be profoundly affected by the charisma of a time, place, and person, and if nothing else, my scholarship will be better for it.
Maybe it'll get you too, at least a little. Here's part of his concession speech from New Hampshire-- you'll see what i mean:
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.
...
Together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Hillary Clinton: irritating
On January 7th, Hillary Clinton said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Outstanding issues:
1. She's an idiot.
2. Even if we are to accept her logic, it only presents a more powerful argument to elect someone like Barack Obama--hope personified--into office. Here she argues about the futility of idealism, but the fact that her target is the idealism of a fellow presidential hopeful presents a powerful case to elect the MLK figure into office, and to leave the Lyndon Johnson figure behind.
1. She's an idiot.
2. Even if we are to accept her logic, it only presents a more powerful argument to elect someone like Barack Obama--hope personified--into office. Here she argues about the futility of idealism, but the fact that her target is the idealism of a fellow presidential hopeful presents a powerful case to elect the MLK figure into office, and to leave the Lyndon Johnson figure behind.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
san antonio
I've survived another trip to the "alamo city," only a little scathed. I was greeted with a "welcome home" from my dad, but the words had something of an ominous effect. The unlikely Luddite has walled himself off in a house full of dusty books which he'll never read again, tied himself down with five dogs that provide him with an excuse not to change his life (a role I've come to realize that I once filled), and has stubbornly clung to eating habits that would be appropriate only for someone who didn't know when his next meal would be. Welcome home. Don't become this. Very unsettling.
I've decided that the transition to adulthood comes in unglamorous stages: the day you learn how expensive standard household items are (several HUNDRED dollars for a dresser? really? fifty for a cooler?); the day you look in your closet, find nothing that would look "appropriate" at any real job, and find that you have no idea where or how to buy "appropriate" clothing; the day you realize an unexpected pregnancy would no longer completely ruin your life; and, the day you visit home, survey the landscape, and decide to spring for a hotel room. check and mate.
My hotel, paid for by me, who can actually afford it, was a block away from the famous alamo, the pride and joy of san antonio, symbol of freedom--freedom to own slaves, that is. It's an appropriate metaphor. This town has a huge mexican population, visible everywhere, and a small white population that's very concerned with the borders. not that mexicans are quite slaves here, but people seem generally happy to pay them nothing to do their cleaning and other nasty work, while talking about them as being sub-human. freedom, indeed. This picture mostly captures the gist. Anyway, ignoring my better judgment, I thought I'd take a stroll through the shrine to freedomland, in the hopes that maybe this little historical nothing of a fact (the specificity of the freedoms sought) might make an appearance. No such luck. It's a shrine to self-righteous xenophobia now. I made a scene and got kicked out. fin.
I've decided that the transition to adulthood comes in unglamorous stages: the day you learn how expensive standard household items are (several HUNDRED dollars for a dresser? really? fifty for a cooler?); the day you look in your closet, find nothing that would look "appropriate" at any real job, and find that you have no idea where or how to buy "appropriate" clothing; the day you realize an unexpected pregnancy would no longer completely ruin your life; and, the day you visit home, survey the landscape, and decide to spring for a hotel room. check and mate.
My hotel, paid for by me, who can actually afford it, was a block away from the famous alamo, the pride and joy of san antonio, symbol of freedom--freedom to own slaves, that is. It's an appropriate metaphor. This town has a huge mexican population, visible everywhere, and a small white population that's very concerned with the borders. not that mexicans are quite slaves here, but people seem generally happy to pay them nothing to do their cleaning and other nasty work, while talking about them as being sub-human. freedom, indeed. This picture mostly captures the gist. Anyway, ignoring my better judgment, I thought I'd take a stroll through the shrine to freedomland, in the hopes that maybe this little historical nothing of a fact (the specificity of the freedoms sought) might make an appearance. No such luck. It's a shrine to self-righteous xenophobia now. I made a scene and got kicked out. fin.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
what I've learned
1. Parties advertised as "Sleazy Grad Student Party" actually do contain a number of sleazy grad students. Most of them in finance.
2. It is important to gather the men in one's cohort BEFORE arriving at such a party, as our boys are more protective than they are sleazy.
2. It is important to gather the men in one's cohort BEFORE arriving at such a party, as our boys are more protective than they are sleazy.
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