Take a Ride on the Meme Train

Posted on June 24, 2005 by Timothy Burke

Ok, so Laura inflicted this one on me.

Do you ever read those stuffy book lists you see circulating, like ‘List your five most important books,’ and think to yourself- no wonder these people are so damned boring. Some of the titles give me a damned headache, they are so dull. Knowing things is great, but fiction makes life bigger and better and in color.

So, in the proud spirit of anti-intellectualism (just kidding), I am going to offer… the five books I liked enough as a teen/young adult to read again as an adult.

There are way more than five I could mention. My sister and I were both notoriously avid readers, often disappearing to some remote corner of the house and shutting out all attempts to summon us for dinner and so on. I’ve re-read a great many of the books I liked as a kid. I’m not going to mention some of the obvious ones, like Lord of the Rings, though.

I can’t help myself. I’m going to list six.

Ok:

The Once and Future King
Frankly, as a teenager, I didn’t get some of the stuff about Lancelot and Guinevere (not so much the sexual part as the parts about ambition, aging and so on). But I loved the first book, especially for Merlin’s speech about knowledge. I still find the first book enthralling, and now some of the stuff on Gawain and his brothers I also like a great deal.

Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series
Would someone please, please make these into movies? Disney’s Black Cauldron offended me so much because it was such a hack adaptation of these books. I think this series is just about the best children’s series I know. If they’re going to make films of Narnia, Pullman’s Dark Materials, Harry Potter, and so on, surely someone must want to film this series. The final book, The High King, is as nuanced a description of what it means to become a responsible adult as you’ll ever find. Reading it as a kid, I found myself able to imagine what it would mean to grow up, and accept adulthood as a burden and a form of grace. I re-read this series regularly.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
I read all the Oz books avidly when I was a kid, and I’ve read them again since, but only three of them have been really enjoyable to re-read (pretty much the same three I liked best when I was young). The Lost Princess of Oz I liked because it had actual conflict and suspense, a competent antagonist named Ugu the Shoemaker who kidnaps Ozma and steals all the major magical artifacts of Oz. Rinkitink in Oz I liked again because there’s actual suspense and difficulty for the protagonists, and some memorable characters. But Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (the fourth book) is interesting because it’s a sort of detour into a much darker, more sinister set of magical fairylands underneath the earth. It’s actually quite scary in a few places, though Baum sort of wrote himself into a corner and uses an actual deus ex machina to get the characters back to the safe havens of Oz.

The Great Brain
I used to think about these books a lot. The historical setting was one of the pleasures of the series, but there were others. The title character was interesting to me. I identified with his intelligence, but I envied the fact that he was physically powerful, able to win fights with any kid who gave him guff. Plus he was so totally amoral, mostly using his intelligence to con kids and adults out of their money. Still fun to read.

On Beyond Zebra
This is one of the more obscure Seuss classics but it was my personal favorite, and I really enjoyed re-reading it again recently. As a kid, I just found the concept of letters in the alphabet that came after Z really mind-blowing. Reading some Seuss to my daughter, I find that I like Yertle the Turtle and other stories more now than I did then, but On Beyond is also still very cool.

D’Aulaires Norse Gods and Giants.
I have no idea why their Greek mythology book is still in print and this one isn’t. The consequence is that I had to drop a pretty serious amount of money on Alibris to get a copy, but I really, really wanted it. Both books are compelling reads even for an adult: they don’t avoid some of the violent or morally ambivalent content in either mythology though they obviously soften it in various ways. Still, I always found the Norse volume the most amazing of the two, perhaps simply because the essential grimness and fatalism of the mythology itself was so interesting to me as a kid.

I’ll mention one more book that I’ve looked for on Alibris from time to time, and never found. It’s possible I’m remembering the title wrong. I remember it as being called Diary of a Teenage Herpetologist. I was fascinated by reptiles and amphibians as a kid–I had a rosy boa for many years, and for a shorter time, also a ribbon snake. I’m still really good at finding snakes, frogs, salamanders and so on when I go for hikes, which is a valuable dad-skill to have. I’d love to find this book again, though I’m sure it’s nothing particularly special.

Posted in Blogging, Books | 9 Comments

I’m So Old-Fashioned

Posted on June 24, 2005 by Timothy Burke

It’s quaint of me. While I normally wouldn’t spare a thought about Tom Cruise, the fact that he’s going around claiming to know the history of psychology and psychiatry, and that said knowledge appears to consist of bullshit distortions straight out of the Scientology catalog, gets my attention just long enough to annoy the hell out of me. It’s not even as if I’m particularly a fan of contemporary professional psychiatry or its pharmacological practices.

Posted in Miscellany, Popular Culture | 1 Comment

Batman Begins

Posted on June 23, 2005 by Timothy Burke

The only bad thing about seeing Batman Begins in Vancouver before the DiGRA conference was reading the silly assholes in some Canadian newspaper do some dialogue thing about the film where they talked about how insanely great the Burton films were and how boring and lousy the new one was by comparison.

Yeah, right, the great Burton films which happen to be missing little frills like a plot. And which seem basically disinterested in the title character. Which, I know, is a problem with the genre: the villains are usually more interesting. But not with Batman, for god’s sake.

Anyway, Batman Begins is just great. See it. I’ll probably go on a geekfest about it here soon. What I especially liked it that they weren’t so scared of the mythos that didn’t do some smart rewriting of various things, but also not so contemptuous of the mythos or the character that they ignored decades of work, either.

P.S. don’t even dream of taking the kids. Not only is the Scarecrow actually scary, so is Batman. There’s actually one sequence where for the first time they successfully convince the viewer that a criminal would break down and confess things to Batman.

Posted in Popular Culture | 1 Comment

African-American History and the Philadelphia Schools

Posted on June 23, 2005 by Timothy Burke

[cross-posted at Cliopatria]

Back from a long trip, I read with interest in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer of a debate over the plan to make African-American history a requirement in Philadelphia’s high school curriculum. The debate has been particularly ignited by the release of criticism from the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House, who observes, “most of these kids will never go to Africa”.

The year-long course is supposed to begin with African history, which is one of the things that is creating a somewhat confused discussion about the requirement. I’ve been looking for the details on the course itself and haven’t found them yet: I don’t know if the entire first semester is a survey of African history, or if that’s just a small part of the course. I don’t know if the focus of that part is continental or if it’s concentrated on West and Central Africa. Some of my professional assessment of the specifics depends on these choices a bit.

You might think I’d be enthusiastic about the proposal. All the Africanists in the region could certainly contribute a lot of pro bono assistance in the development and implementation of the program, and if they go ahead with the plan, I’d certainly be willing to pitch in.

But I have some real misgivings. Anthony Appiah made an important observation yesterday in the Inquirer: the relationship between any history requirement and actual learning outcomes is pretty hazy at best. It’s not very clear that the courses which are commonly required in high schools produce a great deal of historical literacy or understanding of the uses and importance of historical knowledge. Just stacking another requirement on as if it will produce useful consequences, whatever those might be, seems to skip some major necessary steps in reform. You could argue that such literacy will best be achieved with courses that are more focused than the generic survey of US history, and more relevant or sharply drawn. That’s possible. But I already sense that this course is so freighted down with competing and contradictory missions from consciousness-raising to self-esteem improvement, to being a subject aimed at producing critical thought in all students to being a subject intended to do identity work for only the African-American students, that I suspect this justification won’t play out in practice.

Beyond that, I wonder on a practical level if another requirement is a good idea in a crowded curriculum, and if African-American or African history is a wise choice to occupy a very limited number of possible requirement slots. Obviously the subject has a particular pertinence to Philadelphia’s history, not just because of the demography of the present city, but the particularity of its past. But is that what we want city high schools across the country to require? A course that is particularly aimed at local historical knowledge? If so, then a course on Philadelphia’s history shouldn’t be bounded by African-American history, but be something either bigger and broader like Atlantic history, or something even more peculiarly local (the history of Philadelphia or Pennsylvania itself).

You could say it’s got nothing to do with Philadelphia per se, that this is a topic that every educated American should know something about. I agree, bu the overly casual or less thoughtful kinds of celebrations of the proposal leave themselves little room for saying why African-American history ought to occupy a year of high school but Latino or Native American history doesn’t qualify. There’s only two clear ways to make that cut: privileging the history of the local or arguing that African-American history is just plain more important to understanding what it means to be American and to be a modern person. I might venture a ways out onto that plank and at least contemplate diving off it, but I doubt Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson and the other familiar figures to celebrate the decision would.

There’s also the older and more familiar question of whether it’s better to study African-American history in the context of US history in general, to integrate rather than separate the topics. I’m agnostic on that point: you can’t give a principled answer to it, since lumping and splitting are simply heuristic strategies for managing research and teaching. It all depends on the particular purpose and style of any given approach, on the questions you intend to ask.

Good intentions, definitely. A subject I think is important, no doubt. But I wonder if this is the wisest way to deal with it.

Posted in Academia, Africa | Comments Off on African-American History and the Philadelphia Schools

Cool Pizza!

Posted on June 23, 2005 by Timothy Burke

There was a brief item in the NY Times food section this week about Waldy Malouf’s new pizza joint in Chelsea. Sounds fantastic: the two toppings they mentioned in the article were:

1) Braised lamb, roasted lemon
2) Arugula, garlic, cheese and fried egg.

I decided to try making the latter last night, using gruyere and goat cheese. (Gruyere for base, then arugula and finely chopped garlic, then four fried eggs over easy with yolks as liquid as I could get them, goat cheese on top.)

Insanely good, even without a wood-fired oven.

Just curious about the best unusual pizza topping various people have encountered.

Posted in Food | 4 Comments

Now I Guess I Have to Buy a Sports Car

Posted on June 23, 2005 by Timothy Burke

Well, that was a good trip: two interesting conferences, some fun in between, family and friends along the way. I loved most of the places we visited, both cities and wilder areas.

Try as I might to feel otherwise, the landscape of this part of the eastern US is just never going to make me feel the way that the west does.

It’s an old, old observation, but this is one of the bigger kick in the teeth you can give to liberal or contractual ideas about personhood, or to conventional formulations of rational choice theory, even the “bounded rationalities” form. At 22, I knew some of the general things I needed to know about my own personality and preferences. So I chose to pursue graduate study: that was a pretty sound choice, a good understanding of my own nature and likely skills. I didn’t understand how graduate school actually was, but in the longer term academia, with all its faults, has been as good a place as any for me. I understood enough about my relationship with my wife to commit to her, and that too has been a great choice. Though even there, a good relationship thrives not because the two people in it stay the same as they were when they first met, but because they change in relationship to one another.

But there are things you can’t know. You can’t know how some choices unforeseeably preclude others, or how the stars of your desire are going to align. Your younger self makes choices for your older self, even when they’re choices the older self wouldn’t necessarily make. This is not a big deal when it comes to being in a mild state of middle-aged funk while roaming around the mountains of Oregon or in a Portland neighborhood, comparing your own lived environment unfavorably to them, and knowing that the comparison is one that you’re powerless to do anything about. It’s worth a mumble or two and then back to the everyday business of a satisfying life. (But: while I agree with some of the comments in an earlier thread that Philadelphia has good farmer’s markets, really, the big farmer’s market in the old ferry building near the Embarcadero in San Francisco puts them all to shame.)

However, it is a big deal when we’re talking about living wills or other profound statements we make about the disposition of our lives: this was one of the legitimate subsurface questions that burbled up during the Schiavo fracas. Then you really have to acknowledge that our conception of a continuous individual is a powerful but possibly untrustworthy fiction in some ways.

Posted in Miscellany | 6 Comments

Don’t Pet the Hyena

Posted on June 23, 2005 by Timothy Burke

The main question with Zimbabwe now is the question we used to ask about Sani Abacha’s regime in Nigeria: namely, how bad can it get? As low as Zimbabwe has sunk lately, there are still further depths to mine. It is depressingly possible, even plausible, that events will continue to that point: mass starvation of the people lately forced out of the cities is conceivable. At the very least, many of them will redefine the standard of rural wretchedness if they are compelled to remain in rural areas.

One of my major jobs for this summer is to finish work on the chapter of my manuscript that deals with African nationalism and sovereignty in Zimbabwe. As I write, I continue to be haunted by the foreseeable nature of the current disaster. The mass evictions of recent weeks are no surprise at all to anyone familiar with Zimbabwe: they are neither a sudden or unanticipated development. Since the mid-1980s, before important international events, including the state visit of Queen Elizabeth II, the government has evicted or harassed squatters in Harare’s townships. Traders active in the informal sector have often been the target of arbitrary police action and confiscation of their property.

When I was working at the National Archives of Zimbabwe in 1990, another researcher asked me why maize was growing wild in so many parts of the city. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes and replied that it wasn’t growing wild, that people were cultivating it in open fields and vacant areas as a cash crop or for food. The other scholar vehemently objected: “That can’t be: I’ve seen city workers burning the corn! Why would they do that?”

At the time, I just thought that response was an individually naïve one—and that the abusive actions of officials in the case of maize burnings or squatter harassment were largely idiosyncratic activities of brutal, inefficient or rule-bound bureaucrats. I should have known better, not just because there was already ample evidence of the nature of the ruling elite of Zimbabwe but also because government mistreatment of urban populations and informal sector traders was a part of life in other postcolonial African nations.

The truly depressing thing is watching individual men and women who have previously simulated some degree of decency or political conviction sell that away so easily: people like former academic Jonathan Moyo, who sold away his soul so he could declare that a free press is undesired in Zimbabwean society and otherwise act the fool in his shameless pursuit of power. Now the scales have fallen from his eyes after he was cast aside for showing his political ambition openly. Mugabe pegged Moyo pretty well in a mocking speech after the minister’s fall: “Jonathan, you are clever, but you lack wisdom”. That sums up not just Moyo, but almost all of the scholars who wrote about the nationalist struggle and ZANU-PF in the 1970s and 1980s. Norma Kriger and a precious few others come out looking like they understood what was going on: the rest of us clever, not wise.

As something of an aside, this is what some (not all) of the current leadership of the US government didn’t seem to understand about Iraq from the outset: that in a situation where you’re trying to cultivate friends among the powerful and influential of a particular society but where your own activities are widely perceived as intrusive or unjust, the people who flock to your side most willingly are exactly the ones you don’t want a close association with. The people you want on your side are the ones who will be badly compromised if they associate with you. You want to ally with them, you’ll have to make concessions, promises, guarantees, be constrained by scruple and principle–and you’ll have to keep your word.

For the same reason, playing the guessing game about whether one of the prominent leaders of ZANU-PF might be a secret reformer biding time until Mugabe dies is foolish. If there is a reformer with the will and skill to seize the reins of political leadership, it’s going to be someone fairly obscure that almost none of us know, someone smart and principled enough to discreetly refuse to compromise himself with public stupidities or responsibility for disastrous policies. Anyone close enough to the inner circle of power to be known is going to have a lifetime of practice at repression, is going to have signed in blood on the top elite’s suicide pact. If any of them take over as the next leader, the best one could hope for is a momentary interruption of the slide into the abyss.

Posted in Africa | 1 Comment

It’s a Good Good (Bad Bad) World

Posted on June 6, 2005 by Timothy Burke

A quick thought that I may try to rework more thoroughly later. Boulette’s Larder pleased me partially because the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food influences there were so deep and so obviously the product of thorough study and understanding. The more typical way that different food traditions appear in urban, cosmopolitan life around the globe is eclectic but shallow. A taco here, a blini there. I don’t mind that either: that’s what my own cooking and eating is governed by. It’s part of the great cultural smorgasbord of contemporary middle-class existence.

I am struck though at the dichotomy of how the two major political cultures in America consume or envision the world. Liberal, affluent, multiculti enthusiastically listen to music from around the globe, eat the cuisines of a hundred societies, read translated novels, watch the local national cinema from around the planet. At least some of this activity is surrounded by tropes and slogans that celebrate it as building a peaceful, enlightened world, though in my experience most of the real-life multiculti simply go about listening, eating, consuming in a global frame without rehearsing the more vapid self-congratulatory formulae that pop up in marketing or p.r. of various kinds. We sample the world with simpler ideas of pleasure and curiosity in mind.

That’s not confined to political liberals, of course: this is the dominant cultural modality for many middle to upper-middle class Americans. Cosmopolitanism isn’t as politically narrow as some might claim. But there is a conservative view of the world as threat, the world as a place which departs or deviates from American values or commitments, the world as a dark and dangerous backdrop to the American dream. It’s customary to mock that vision and see it as the causal force behind our current disastrous foreign policy, which to a significant extent it is.

But I do think it’s a bit odd that we can sup on pleasingly exotic spices and unfamiliar cuisines, on novel musical forms, on the cultural and human heritage of a hundred localities, and not “consume” at the same time a sense of the life of the world as it unfolds in all those places too. I suppose some multiculti do that when they buy photos of well-staged and colorful ethnics, or campaign for fair trade coffee. I don’t mean to mock either thing: fair trade coffee is a meaningful change to a production regime that we are intimately involved in through our consumption of coffee, and beauty is beauty whatever its form or focus. But for example, if someone wanted to buy Zimbabwean coffee or read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions or listen to mbira music, I’d want them also to think not just about the question of US policy towards Zimbabwe but also about the ferocity of the struggle within Zimbabwe for liberty and justice–and the very real way in which the Mugabe government is a kind of threat to the values we hold dear. Not because they threaten us within our world, but because they mock and degrade the things that matter most, and that not all of that derives purely from the top, but also from some of the deep structures of Zimbabwean society and its political culture.

So I don’t quite want to run down that sense that the world is also threat, that sampling the world is about more than its pleasures. And not only the usual self-flagellating understanding of ourselves as guilty violators of the world, but the possibility that the richness of global culture contains also its darkness, that folkways that produce spices and music and fabrics and philosophies produce locally painful ideas and repressive practices. That if you sample the good things you should not look away from the bad ones.

Posted in Africa, Food, Politics | 9 Comments

The Good Stuff: Details

Posted on June 6, 2005 by Timothy Burke

This morning we had breakfast at Boulette’s Larder. Scrambled eggs with buttery fried bread crumbs on top, an idea I’ve never seen before that works really well. I bought some really interesting spice mixes–one of them a barbecue rub with a bunch of Australian spices I’ve never seen or used before. I’d buy the confit and a bunch of other things but I’d have to buy a pan and a hot plate and cook in my hotel room if I did. Just an amazing place with a very consistent food aesthetic.

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The Good Stuff

Posted on June 5, 2005 by Timothy Burke

A quick stop in Vegas to be part of a roundtable of very cool people on virtual worlds. Played limit hold’em for about four hours–first time I’ve done that outside of home games, and I did pretty well, though I would have done better if I’d had the good sense to cash in when I was $120.00 up. Then off to San Francisco.

The Farmer’s Market here depresses me. It depresses me because it’s so so so good and because there’s no reason why it’s goodness shouldn’t be imitated more broadly. It’s good because the food is in many cases unpretentiously good, just good because the people buying know what’s good and what’s not. That’s all. It’s not what sometimes is entailed in “gourmet” food shopping (like in our neck of the woods) where the potato chips that cost $2.00 per chip are preferred simply because they’re $2.00 per chip.

The smell in the market at noon. Meat fat dripping on a hot surface, the faint scent of cheeses, somewhere the aroma of warm corn tortillas, a drift of cut herbs and roasting vegetables, chickens with rosemary on a rotisserie. That’s the distilled ambrosia of human civilization for me: the buildings, the art, the busy or happy, sad or lost crowds wandering the streets, that’s something but it’s not what matters most to me. It’s what people cook and brew when they come together that matters most.

It’s what I sometimes wish the public sphere was: a market where everyone put out their best wares, a thousand tastes. Some universally loved, others odd and for the quirky palate, but all there to feed and nourish and please.

Posted in Food | 7 Comments