20/3/2018
Seeking the Transfiguration of the World, Fifteen Years After the Invasion of Iraq
In Gods Go Begging, one of my favorite novels (and one of the three best pieces of Vietnam War fiction), Alfredo Véa paints an exchange between a Creole sergeant and a chaplain:
“Hey, padre, let’s play us a game of suppose,” said the sergeant, wanting to distract himself from the memories of his wife and the horror at hand. He knew that the chaplain had long, outrageous conversations with some of the men in which they collectively rearranged history, and the world and its laws.
“Let’s you and me talk about a different kind of world. You might call it philosophizing, but with these boys, it’s called supposing. Let’s suppose this. Let’s suppose that. Suppose you tell me what you and Jesse and them were supposing yesterday.”
“Cornelius wondered what America would be like if there had never been any African slaves,” answered the chaplain after closing his eyes and inhaling slowly to collect himself and his thoughts.
The sergeant laughed. “That’s some supposin’! What answer did they come up with for that one?”
“They had some remarkable ideas. They supposed that there would be no jazz in America, which also means that the blues and rock-and-roll would never have happened in the States. Jesse and Cornelius supposed that jazz would have been born in Morocco, where French, Spanish, and African rhythms would have collided. Billie Holiday, under another name, would’ve sung her songs in French.”
“Alors!” cried the sergeant. “Mademoiselle Billie Jourde Fête. She would have sounded good in French!”
“They further extrapolated that the collision of African music and Welsh-Irish that became rock music would have taken place on the Normandy coast, where Celtic roots are still very strong. Jesse supposed that because of the immense popularity of Moroccan jazz and Afro-Celtic rock-and-roll, French would be the predominant language in the world today rather than English. French ballet, not yet set in its ways, would have been transformed by Africans into improvisational and fusion ballet. They would be tap-dancing in Calais. It seems that everything turns on jazz.”
“That Jesse’s got some strange notions. C’est vrai. Il est original,” mused the sergeant, who realized in the same instant that he seldom lapsed into French these days. “Everything turns on jazz, eh? I kinda like that one. Everything turns on jazz.”
The old Montagnard corporal down below echoed the phrase, “Moì thú dêù lên nhac jazz.”
I didn’t know of Véa’s novel in 2002, the year I enlisted in the Marine Corps, spurred (truthfully, just in part) by a sense that this was the thing to do to protect my country, my family, a duty I shared with my elders in their own day. Had I known Véa’s book, I’m unconvinced I would’ve heard his message. Perhaps the lived experience of what was to follow as the Bush administration whipped much of the world into a frenzy about Saddam Hussein’s notional weapons of mass destruction was necessary for me to understand.
Fifteen years ago the invasion of Iraq began. How the Iraq-centered phase of the Global War on Terror has turned out is devoid of even a shred of ambiguity. Millions of Iraqi dead, thousands upon thousands more displaced, thousands of dead & thousands more permanently wounded American volunteers, trillions of wasted dollars.
In the first years after I left Iraq, and then the Marines, I lacked a mental model that pushed me to engage with my experience in the Iraq War in a way that transcended a well-warranted, yet limited, reactive criticism. Training to become a historian introduced me to the practice of counterfactual thinking, evaluating pivotal moments in history in a way that explores their potential for rendering an alternate history. The most famous work in this genre is If It Had Happened Otherwise, a collection of essays that includes Winston Churchill’s speculation, in the guise of a alternate-timeline Southern historian, on the implications of a Confederate victory at the Battle of Gettysburg.
I eventually came across Véa’s book in a cultural history of the Vietnam War I took, then later co-taught for several semesters, with two men who became my closest friends. One is a Vietnam veteran, and the other says he finds himself in the odd position of having Richard Nixon to thank for sparing him the unknown outcome of service in Vietnam. As I absorbed Véa’s message, I eventually developed my own portion of our final lecture, which has become a guiding principle for my entire life:
Consider Other Possibilities.
As with Véa, jazz provides the artistic model for this approach, inviting the listener to engage in a journey from a known point (a standard, a stated riff, a quoted chorus) to an uncertain outcome that circles in expanding trajectory around the world-as-it-is, seeking enough distance or altitude to see the world-as-it-could be. To consider other possibilities is to perceive the potential of a world transfigured.
Sometimes, when I think about personal anniversaries related to my participation the Iraq War, I get trapped into thinking about my world-as-it-has-become. On a day like today, fifteen years after the American-led invasion of Iraq began, I first think of the world-as-it-could-have-been. But, if I remain there too long, I forget to think of the world-as-it-could-be-tomorrow.
Professional historians mostly have little patience for counterfactuals, preferring to concern themselves with sharpening understanding of what actually transpired. But as a model for exploring the implications of decisions we make in the present (that is always becoming the past), considering what possibilities are foreclosed in the future (that is always becoming the present) is useful. So, when we read Véa, I tell my students to consider other possibilities in their own world, and I try to model it when we talk one-on-one.
And I tell myself, “You can never atone for the things you believed & the decision you made in 2002, for the things you participated in on that deployment in 2004. But maybe you can avoid adding to that. Maybe you can show that you’ve learned something. Maybe, by learning to consider other possibilites, you can do something to bring them into being. Maybe, if you can live this way of thinking faithfully, you can project it into others’ lives. Maybe, if enough of us consider other possibilities, those possibilities could come into being. Maybe, just maybe, this broken world can be transfigured.”
That won’t happen if I don’t consider other possibilities. It’s the best I can do to expiate my past. It’s the best I can do to help transfigure the future.
Iraq
Iraq War
jazz
26/2/2018
1 + Area Code + Seven Stages of Grief
Can you grieve a phone number?
There was a time when I had dozens memorized — both sets of parents’ homes, home numbers for all four sets of grandparents, school friends, police & fire department, numbers from radio & TV jingles, even the time & temp number at the local bank. (Is it 50ºF? Then school won’t make us wear coats!) Back then, giving out your phone number was inviting someone into your home. Looking up a number in the phone book was a way of assuring yourself someone was there, on the other end:
Last Name, First Name Address, Phone Number.
The advent of speed dial and, later, contact cards in my smartphone, has eliminated the necessity of relying on memory for many phone numbers. My institution recently retired its old Centrex system for Cisco’s VoIP system, and with the march of technology went the convenience of five-digit dialing. Even though my number didn’t change, the mandatory addition of the first two numbers of my exchange means that, when I try to give it out, I don’t even remember my office number with 100% accuracy anymore. I have to think about it.
My dad got his home phone number when he moved to his river village in the mid-Eighties. When it is disconnected today, one of the very last phone numbers I have memorized goes dead. Dad’s been gone for almost seven years, of course, and nobody calls that number much anymore. Most folks prefer to text or call my stepmom on her mobile number. My grandfather has avoided calling my dad’s home number for years because his voice was, until quite recently, still on the answering machine. And yet, I called it one last time this morning, dialing it manually from memory, number by number:
1 + Area Code + Exchange + Dad.
So now, apart from my own mobile number, I’m down to four others still memorized:
- my mom’s “home” number,
- my maternal grandmother’s home number,
- my wife’s mobile number,
- and — somehow — that bank’s time & temp number.
I dialed that last one again, for old times’ sake. It’ll only reach 40ºF in my hometown today. Better wear a coat.
grief
12/2/2018
Making Podcast Recommendations
I have the hardest time recommending podcasts to folks who don’t already listen to podcasts. I think I can trace this to two primary factors:
- This is perhaps counterintuitive, but podcasts strike me as one of the more intimate media platforms. Ostensibly there’s nothing different about a podcast than a radio show, except everything is different. Turn on a radio, and you get what you can pull in within signal range. Podcasts are opt-in, and thus, very personal. My Overcast playlist is bespoke “radio,” and I can’t imagine anyone else would select exactly the same podcasts as me.
- I don’t listen to any of the truly big podcasts anymore. I listened to This American Life and Pop Culture Happy Hour years ago, but drifted away as the shows became more predictable and the hosts more, well, grating. One or two of the shows named below might still fit on the big podcast list, but I’m guessing the rest are comfortably middle-range.
So, when podcasts come up in conversation with someone and I’m asked what I listen to (or would recommend they listen to), I struggle a bit to explain my preferences (which seem clear to me without any real examination ) or to think of something that would be widely enjoyed. (As much as I love Roderick on the Line and Reconcilable Differences, neither of those are podcasts I’m about to suggest to someone new to the medium.) After the most recent instance of this situation, here, for future reference, is my default podcast recommendation list:
A linguistics podcast hosted by a British comedy writer? Yup — and it’s good. It’s released on a (mostly?) biweekly basis. I should get to it more often than I do, because every time I listen I’m reminded of how much I like it.
Hundreds of episodes about really nerdy (geeky?) pop culture & books. There’s something here for almost everyone. I might start someone with a draft episode if I don’t have a good sense of what they like, or recommend one of the more focused topics if I know they enjoy something in particular (Roald Dahl, superheroes, sci-fi cinema/TV, etc.). I’ve been listening for a very long time, but I’m not a completionist with this one.
Primarily investigative reporting on wide-ranging legal issues all over the topical map, intermixed with studio interviews & occasional live events. Fascinating stuff, particularly the work they do with folks in prison. My listen rate is probably 75% for this one, skirting the live events and some subjects where I have less interest.
The host calls this a “storytelling podcast,” and there really isn’t a better way to describe it. He centers his monthly stories around little, significant moments & figures in history. This is one of my longstanding personal favorites.
- Omnibus (John Roderick & Ken Jennings)
This is the newest podcast on this list; the first episode was released in December 2017. John Roderick is a Seattle rock musician; Ken Jennings holds the record for longest winning streak on Jeopardy!. The show is zany, premised around creating a time capsule of esoterica & historical flotsam for posterity. Pretty amusing stuff. (The ads for other podcasts on the HowStuffWorks network get old really fast, though.)
- On Being (Krista Tippett)
The podcast version of a public radio show by the same name, devoted to examining the “animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live?.” I don’t listen to every episode, but for someone interested in Big Picture issues, this might be a good fit.
- Radiolab (Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich, et alii.)
Because this is the podcast version of a radio program produced by WNYC, I’m guessing it’s the biggest one on this list. It covers topics all across the spectrum, so it’s easy to recommend. I think I found this one initially through an interview with Oliver Sacks, but I might be conflating that with a later episode. Abumrad & Krulwich host, but there’s an assortment of voices in the mix. Abumrad’s a MacArthur recipient.
Biweekly deep dives into recorded music. Hrishikesh invites musicians to deconstruct one of their songs into its various elements. A sample of past guests: Butch Vig & Shirley Manson of Garbage, Michael Stipe & Mike Mills of R.E.M., Iggy Pop, Björk, Aimee Mann, Andrew Bird. My musical tastes don’t overlap with most others’ particularly well, so I dip into this one depending on what song is featured.
- Top 4 (Marco & Tiff Arment)
Yes, a podcast with Marco Arment, but not one of the two he’s best known for recording. Tiff & Marco’s chemistry is delightful (no wonder they’re married), and the concept keeps things fresh. I think episode 24, “Vegetables,” is the place to start, because who doesn’t have opinions about veggies?
This is pretty well known among podcast aficionados, but I don’t think a single aspiring podcast listener I’ve met has heard of it. Focused on design & architecture, but from an aesthetic & experiential perspective. The show’s premised on the Buckminster Fuller observation that 99% of us is invisible, but applies that to the built environment all around us.
Like I said, this list is intended for general recommendation. My personal top ten is going to be a bit different, but not everyone is interested in baseball, Merlin Mann’s weekly conversation with Johns Roderick & Siracusa, or technology — and that’s okay.
podcasts
5/2/2018
Thinking On Tyranny: A Review
Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is an ambitious book. Given the publication date and the events that likely inspired it, Snyder distilled in a narrow interval a series of lessons gleaned from his scholarship and that of prominent European minds, namely the late Tony Judt. An eminent historian of France, Judt co-authored Thinking the Twentieth Century, a far-ranging, yet taut intellectual history with his junior Central/Eastern Europeanist colleague Snyder. (That book has an unconventional structure for a work of history, quite successfully presented as a series of dialogues between the two men; at the time Judt was afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s disease. The book was not published during Judt’s lifetime.) Discussed among the many other subjects covered in the book — liberalism, socialism, Keynes’ & Hayek’s economic visions, Zionism, etc. — are the near-simultaneous European developments of authoritarian fascism & totalitarian communism.
Which brings us to On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
One might very well consider On Tyranny a further epilogue of a creeping distopia foreseen in the dim outlook that concludes Thinking the Twentieth Century. Without once using the name of the gimcrack northeastern megalomaniac-racist living in the White House today, Snyder presents his readers with guidance for an era of emboldened, social media-steroid-injected, no-longer-creeping authoritarian fascism. The lessons are briefly contextualized or developed, once in as few as two pages (“Make eye contact and small talk” — a meditation on small gestures as canaries in the social mine.) Most of Snyder’s examples are drawn from Europe, no surprise given his specialization and previous work, with occasional gestures toward the US, and still fewer to the rest of the world outside those regions. The breadth of example is disappointing for anyone hoping for a more diverse mosaic of political philosophy, modern history, & dissident example. There’s nothing substantial to quibble with in the lessons themselves; they’re fine lessons for all eras, not simply the dumpster fire of the early twenty-first century.
The book concludes with an epilogue, “History and Liberty,” concerned with two strains of antihistorical thinking Snyder classifies as the “politics of inevitability” and the “politics of eternity.” In describing the first, Snyder notes that in the many decades leading up to our present moment, Americans have indulged themselves in a “sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.” One need only be passingly familiar with the ever-popular City upon a Hill narrative of American history (in both its conservative & liberal expressions) and the political marketing machines that associate candidates with these feel-good fantasies to see what he’s driving at. Snyder diagnoses this teleology as “a self-induced intellectual coma.” He claims that, “by embracing a politics of inevitability, we have raised a generation without history.” This late-Gen Xer notes plenty of older Americans seem to have forgotten or dismissed their own historical learning as confirmation bias allowed them to throw their shoulders out of joint patting themselves on the back for their roles in real-yet-precarious historic advances. As one might expect, this leaves many Americans vulnerable to the the second strain, the politics of eternity, a “seduction by a mythologized past [that prevents us from thinking about possible futures.” Snyder worries this is the direction America is headed.
The question I’m left with is: who is Snyder’s audience for this book? I read it, of course, but needn’t have; I read plenty of Václav Havel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Hannah Arendt in college. I expect a fair number of liberally-educated folks have read some work by political dissidents (in the US or elsewhere) at one point or another, though I may be disappointed in that belief in reality. At best, Snyder’s lessons serve as a primer for young folks whose humanistic education has been sacrificed on the altar of STEM, or as helpful reminders for established people in STEM fields who may not have received much humanistic education but have some benefit of lived experience.
I think this is where Snyder’s European examples reveal themselves as well-chosen to the task at hand. They are aligned both with both Snyder’s own specialization & with what history of authoritarianism & totalitarianism Americans are likely to know or at least percieve a familiarity. What history Americans know is frequently sketchy & often misinformed or poorly developed thanks to the mercantilist priorities of America’s education system, but the scaffolding is likely sound enough for Snyder to drape these lessons around it. This book could have particular success if assigned as a semester-concluding meditation following a deeper dive into twentieth-century history in a university classroom. (Ideally, these lessons would be fleshed out by readings that engage dissidents like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Liu Xiaobo, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Anna Politkovskaya.) But this audience is not enough — the lessons of Snyder’s book demand transmission to those without access to university classrooms. If we are to remain a viable democracy, no longer can we begin civics education in college.
For Americans hung over from indulging in triumphalist popular narratives of their own history, Snyder’s book might be an opportunity for them to apply some new (or forgotten, for us older folks) understanding to a moment very much in need of thoughtful action. It’s a first step in that direction, and even with its blind spots and constraints from brevity, it merits 3.5 stars. In respect to its connection to Thinking the Twentieth Century and Judt’s well-justified concerns, I’ll round up to 4 stars.
book review
political philosophy
26/1/2018
Commonplace Poetry & Academic Jargon
Samuel Matlack, in a piece for The New Atlantis titled “Quantum Poetics,” considers how commonplace, descriptive language bridges understanding between academics & the broader world:
It is a modern conceit that we have advanced from the poetic imaginations of the ancients to clear scientific description, leaving behind the quaint and parochial ways of speaking about the physical world. Poetic imagery, after all, is the kind of language that is the most parochial, most personal, and most dependent on our everyday experience. Its use in writing about physics is not simply a mark of ancient ignorance, nor mere embellishment in popular writing, nor just a sign of the bemused writer’s amazement at the world as physicists know it; rather, those aspects of physics that touch on the fundamental nature of the universe can’t always get squeezed into descriptive terms. This means that the widely shared ideal of describing ultimate reality purely in terms of physics is futile, at least if we mean verbal, not mathematical, description. And if poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality, this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude the more personal, parochial, poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality.
This is a significant problem in academic writing across disciplines — not just those within the hard sciences. One of the most frustrating trends within the humanities has been the erosion of common ground between academics and anyone outside the narrowest parochial alleys of most recently-published scholarship. While one might claim that the influence of the social sciences has pushed those in the humanities toward greater complexity in their questions & methods, I think an equal or greater problem is the deliberate insularity of the academy and its preference for jargon-laden discourse.
Academic jargon is perfectly fine within the confines of a graduate seminar, and perhaps even within academic journals, but as a matter of practice for public scholarship, it is both haughty & intellectually lazy. No matter whether one’s book is to be published by an university/academic press or (God forbid?) a trade press, the language should be inviting and straightforward. Readability need not be sacrificed at the altar of conceptual complexity. Writing with a clear voice that welcomes a non-specialist reader into the knotty discourse on a topic — cultural, historical, or scientific — yet does not compromise on the quality of the analysis is a sign of a scholar’s ingenuity.
The other day, a colleague mentioned participating in a disssertation defense during which the dissertator was told by a faculty member on the defense committee that the dissertator’s writing made their scholarship seem “too simple.” This was not meant as a compliment. It also says a great deal about what some in the academy perceive as “scholarly writing,” and the privileged few whom they should be welcomed into — or excluded from — the circles that discuss it.
language
poetry
10/1/2018
Emoji Resistance
Micro.blog’s adoption of emoji as a way of organizing conversations across the service prompted me to reconsider my longstanding resistance to using emoji. For some time it’s been convenient to write off my aversion to emoji as a disinclination shaped by my age, professional & social circles, & a personality that gravitates toward the contrarian. So when Manton Reece announced that he was introducing search collections organized around emoji, my initial response was a mixture of reflexive opposition & hesitation calculated to provide me with some space to actually examine the idea.
Manton did not initiate this without careful deliberation. At every step of his development of the service, he’s been thoughtful about how potential features align with the core ethos of Micro.blog, which I’ll shorthand as respect for individual ownership of content and expectation of respectful treatment of others across the spectrum of Micro.blog’s user base. I admire & appreciate that deliberation. I can disagree with this particular implementation and still use Micro.blog. I will find myself surprised if I wind up using this feature, though, because I think I’ve finally arrived at what truly bothers me about emoji.
I am not a linguist or psychologist, so it would be inappropriate for me to make claims about how emoji are affecting language acquisition, fluency in native languages, and so on. My entire educational, professional, & artistic development has been fueled by the written word & alphabet-based language. Much of my current work relies on my ability to interpret words that represent the ideas & spirit informing my institution’s academic policies & the curricula of a variety of degrees, all in order to help others understand these structures and how to navigate them toward particular goals. My training in history cultivated a deep love for words, along with a very deliberate mindset in how best to deploy them to convey an argument. I think studying Russian in college gave me a firmer grasp on the grammatical conventions of English than I ever received in school. Learning Russian simultaneously opened my mind to new perspectives on how the expression of a common idea can yet carry a vast array of organically shaded meaning, additional context, or other ideas incorporated into one word. One of my favorite examples is “dog” in English and “собака” in Russian. In addition to the “dog” idea that represents Canis lupus familiaris, in Russian the word encompasses not only a pejorative (“bastard” or “mongrel”), but the Russian term for the @ sign. Think of a Siberian Husky curled up in the snow, tail over its nose.
Most essentially, my artistic life revolves around words. The poetry I write conveys ideas & experiences to readers who may not have intimate familiarity with war, or loss, or the beauty of a specific place in the world, and it can create a sense of shared community with those who do know these things from their own lives. Editing poetry published in The Deadly Writers Patrol only reinforces the significance of words for me, placing me in the position of both reader (seeking understanding or connection), trusted collaborator (seeking to help the poet facilitate understanding or create connection with their reader), and arbiter of the big picture illustrated by the poetry in a given issue. Words and their organic natures are the medium of my art.
So, what my emoji resistance comes down to, in the end, is a deep aversion to language shaped not just by cultural trends that have largely passed me by & my personal irascibility, but by something more fundamental:
I am resistant to a language I perceive to be initially mediated by a pay-to-play body that decides what a “word” is within an iconographic medium, and then further mediated by a variety of platform vendors’ decisions about how to represent that “word” or idea via its own proprietary display of the emoji. True languages are democratic — words originate with its speakers and gain cultural currency (or not) based on utility, beauty, cross-pollination with other languages, and other factors privileged by the speakers. Speakers are also free to add new definitions, freighted meanings, and other characteristics to words already in circulation, or finding their options limited, in turn invent new terms organically or borrow them from other existing languages.
Emoji is a language of borrowed “words” “curated” by technocrats (experts, presumably of technology, at the Unicode Consortium), who release those new “words” to platform vendors like Apple, Google, Facebook, & Twitter, who then decide how their users can express these “words” by altering their visual representation. (See Emojipedia for myriad examples ranging from humorous differences in artistic taste to clear differences in meaning.) The only control in this arrangement that remains for the actual users of emoji are which symbols are used, and whether additional meanings are assigned to them within a specific sub-set of the wider emoji-using culture. (All languages likely are capable of this aspect of use; it’s just that this appears to me to be the full extent of agency for “speakers” of emoji.) In a sense, emoji are to language what Twitter & Facebook are to the web — a proprietary platform created & controlled by technocrats that limits the agency of its users — who once exclusively expressed themselves through a messy, but wide-open & democratic platform instead.
I think Manton experienced some of the downside of emoji already, as users opted or advocated for other emoji representation of the idea of “book” rather than Manton’s designated “books” emoji. (I wish there was a good way of linking to the entire conversation inspired by Manton’s announcement of the feature, but I can’t discern where to get a link to a collected thread of all replies, and Manton’s blog doesn’t include those replies as comments on the post.) I particularly appreciated the complexity of emoji use for organizing conversations in this manner that Chris Aldrich highlighted, which give a sense of some of the energy around this announcement. None of this is insurmountable for the platform if Manton decides to continue with this method of organization, but in the end I’m not sure it will be less messy when reading (or any less of a hassle for organizing conversations) than a system like hashtags.
editing
language
technology
The Deadly Writers Patrol
Driftless Meditations