Sunny Side Up

Trump!

2012-03-04T17:37:00.000-05:00

My very clever nephew has amplified the offerings of his deck of cards with a diamond-heart Emperor and a club-spade Prince.

Local glyphs

2012-03-03T20:53:00.002-05:00

At an exhibition on the Photo League at the Jewish Museum I happened on a 1950 picture by Arthur Leibzig called "Chalk Games, Prospect Place." My street! The street where "The Wiz"'s Auntie Em lives, too!

Not sure how long I'll stay here, though. Burglars broke into the third floor kitchen on Tuesday - that window's accessible from the fire escape, as mine on the fourth floor is not - and in response the landlady is having bars put on all our garden-facing windows. (They call them "gates" to make them seem less oppressive.) Can I live without the uninterrupted views of sky and Manhattan to which I've become accustomed? I know, loads of New Yorkers live with gates on their windows, and better safe than sorry. Still... at least until I find another housemate I may dream of flying away.

Wood art

2012-03-02T21:44:00.001-05:00

Dropped in on my editor in Princeton today (he was very encouraging), and then convinced a friend to go with me to the woods by Terhune Orchards. There's no sign of Spring here, but beautiful nonetheless.

Three weeks to go

2012-03-01T23:33:00.000-05:00

2012-02-29T22:31:00.001-05:00

We haven't had a political cartoon here for a while...

Picturing The New School

2012-02-28T23:24:00.027-05:00

I opened today's session of New School Century a 1931 snibbet from a newspaper in Danish (or is it Norwegian?). (See leaf 19 of scrapbool 4.) On my first skim of the scrapbooks I exulted in our being important enough to be written about in Europe, but attention to the ads makes clear that this is a New York newspaper (the name is lost), a reminder of what a polyglot city this has always been. It confirms also that The New School was of interest not just to one or two communities in the City.
The list of classes being offered at The New School is pretty awesome too - and this snibbet includes only Torsdag and Fredag! Robert Frost on poetry, Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture, Sidney Hook and Horace Kallen on philosophy, Doris Humphrey and John Martin on dance, among others, and one Thomas H. Benton on "Craftsmanship and Art." That Benton is, of course, the muralist of my favorite lost New School space. Here's the Benton muraled conference room on the 5th floor in 1931.

You've seen the colors of the murals, but I've learned that the overall effect was brighter still, with a varnished walnut floor, black-lacquer furniture and walls, a russet-red ceiling surrounded by subtle lights, and curtains in cerulian blue. In any case, I argued, along with a few other spaces like the Orozco Room two floors up, this room was the most distinctive of The New School and its engaged worldly ethos, and so came to represent the distinctiveness of The New School experience.

It certainly will have produced an enveloping experience whether for discussions or lectures (more so than the Orozco-muraled cafeteria, whose figures are not life-size and in your space, but abstracted and located at eye level and above). It was the ideal setting for showing that the refugee intellectuals of the University in Exile were indeed in America. And in promotional materials for the BA program and the Institute of Retired Professionals from the early 1960s, the Benton Room showed that this was no ordinary school, with ordinary rooms. Later, in the Seminar College and early Eugene Lang College, the Benton Room was where the life- and community-defining orientation (later called "tally") happened - here copies of catalogs from each of them.

When the murals were sold (mainly to raise money, but also for conservationist reasons, as they were suffering from scuffing as people leaned chairs back against them, and suffused with cigarette smoke), part of New School identity went with it.

One of the readings for class was from Berenice Abbott's A Guide to Better Photography, yet another important popularizing book which grew out of a course at The New School. Abbott is, indeed, credited with creating the country's first photography program at The New School, starting in 1935. Abbott is encouraging to her readers - anyone can be a photographer - but doesn't downplay the hard work of taking better photographs. A good photographer works with what she knows, and composes her shot to let the truth of the object show. She illustrated this with two pictures she took of the NY Stock Exchange.
The first was taken on a weekend, since traffic made setting up a tripod hard on a weekday, but the building was in shadow and the street deserted. She returned and returned to the spot until she found out when the light was on the facade just right - just twenty minutes each day! - and when the flag was hoisted - only holidays. In the end she persuaded the president of the Stock Exchange to have it hoisted just for her, since on holidays the street is deserted, too. For the bigger problem was people: when there was too much traffic she couldn't take a picture, but an empty street won't work, for two reasons.

Human activity, flow of crowds in the narrow street, was needed to offset that static neoclassic facade ... Most of all, of course, the Stock Market without feverish human movement is totally uncharacteristic. (25)

The characteristic feverish movement takes place inside the building, but a photo even of the outside has to convey it somehow if it is to be an effective portrait of the Stock Exchange! The resulting image shows a concatenation of light, people, cars, flag which, in fact, never happens, but it became iconic because it shows the true life of the building.

We asked the students what picture they would take to show what's characteristic of The New School... You can see why the Benton Room was so much photographed to represent us: it brought the busy world into the classroom - sort of the obverse of what Abbott did in her Stock Market portrait. I'll let you know what they come up with!

A clean well-lighted place

2012-02-27T23:12:00.002-05:00

In the New School scrapbooks there's an article from Lighting Magazine in 1931, featuring the advanced lighting of the new building. Included are pictures not only of my crush, the Benton Room (above) but the lecture hall where The New School Century is happening 81 years later!

Scientific credo

2012-02-26T18:10:00.000-05:00

In an article I was reading for the New School History course, I found a reference to a novel of Sinclair Lewis' called Arrowsmith, which apparently perfectly exemplifies the philosemitism of mid-20th century understandings of the purity of the scientific project. One can't trust film adaptations, I know, but it's a long novel and the 1931 film is directed by John Ford. Here's the protagonist (played by Ronald Colman), who at one point offers a scientific prayer:

God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste.

God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretence and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.

God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error.

God give me strength not to trust to God!

I don't know if Arrowsmith learned this from his tall gaunt Jewish mentor Dr. Gottlieb, nor am I competent to judge its relation to philosemitism. In any case, the secular but not Jewish Arrowsmith fails to live up to the creed, at least in the part of his life narrated in the film. One's wife's' death of a disease one had a serum to cure would addle most minds, surely. But there is hope yet. At the novel's end Arrowsmith leaves his cushy Bell Labs-like set-up in New York City for the woods of Vermont, where a manly fellow researcher invites him to a life of boy scout-like adventure and research.

A usable past

2012-02-25T23:07:00.001-05:00

The "new historian" founders of The New School James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard were opponents of antiquarian, institutional and nostalgic histories. The encounter with the past should be helpful to the present, not in justifying it but in letting us understand how we got this far and how much farther we might yet be able to go; it might well also show where we have lost our way. Here's a good recent illustration:

As you know, we were able to digitize a number of scrapbooks The New School maintained in its first decades, and then left to moulder in boxes in a back room. Students in our class were each given a 12-page section of the scrapbooks to explore. We haven't had a chance to work through all the scrapbooks ourselves, so students have encountered primary material it's possible nobody has read in the better part of a century! We didn't know what students would find, or think of what else they might do with it besides write it up for us.

Well, several members of the staff of the New School Free Press are in the class, and, through one of them the editorial above got its most compelling argument for the inclusion of students in the university's Board of Trustees: we did it once before, indeed, in the glory of our founding moments. We've "tragically fallen to a state unrecognizable to those who created it"! Scrapbook evidence follows:

In 1921, the Evening Post reported that two members of [The New School's] Student Council were elected as representatives to the trustees’ meetings, where faculty members also had representation. The meetings “[were] far from the cut-and-dried performance, being rather a clearing house for ideas from the three points of view,” wrote the Post.

Before concluding that we have broken faith with our founders, the editorial makes some other pretty convincing arguments. The founders (even those who left before students like Clara Mayer were given positions on the Board of Trustees) would be proud!

Nationwide, many public and private universities elect student representatives to the board of trustees. In New York State, all boards in the SUNY system have at least one student with full voting privileges, Bard College has two, and Rockland Community College’s tenth board member is always a voting student.

The New School should act swiftly to do the same and enact the recommendation brought forth to the board three years ago. Student tuition and housing fees accounted for roughly 90 percent of The New School’s operating budget in 2010, according to the most recent figures provided by the university’s website. The student body of The New School does their part for this university by almost single-handedly supporting it financially, and it’s about time the university gives something back: fair representation at the highest level of the decision-making process.

2012-02-24T22:58:00.001-05:00

It's still winter at farmer's markets, but that doesn't mean there aren't
lovely surprises, like these side-splittingly gorgeous German kohlrabi.

God in the details

2012-02-24T09:05:00.002-05:00

Went with my Japanese friend H to see the revival of Margaret Edson's sublime play "Wit" on Broadway last night. I was lucky enough to see the original production with Kathleen Chalfant, its final scene indelible in my memory, her character too, and it's a different story with the younger-seeming Cynthia Nixon (I'm also closer than I was then to the age of the protagonist, who's forty-seven). It's none the less amazing as a piece of theater, as my friend's profoundly appreciative reaction attests. (She's a theater person but her English is shaky; what compelled her wasn't verbal ingenuity but the show's theatricality.) If you've seen the play - and if you haven't, you should - you might know what The Runaway Bunny is doing here. Amazingly, I'd forgotten the scene, and was tearfully grateful to be reminded of it. Awash in tears.

Live action

2012-02-23T11:48:00.000-05:00

Today's round table discussion of lived religion was a blast! We had promised discussion of "Buddhist environ- mentalism, Jewish humor and queer Christians," and delivered on every front. B, a Canadian scholar I heard at a conference last year, spoke about her research with Wind Horse Farm, a Shambhala forest village. J, a colleague who teaches Jewish history spoke about how "A priest, a minister and a rabbi ..." jokes record a subtle refusal of Jews to be classed as a religious group. And I spoke about the icons of Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, reproductions of some of which are important parts of American queer Christianity.

The unifying theme was "lived religion," and we explored its methodology and fruits in different and complementary ways. B's work is ethnographic, J is working with materials from folklorists, and I was engaging with material culture. In another way we generated a cohesive discussion as all of us are trained as text people, philosophers and ethicists, and have come to the study of lived experience for many of the same reasons. I don't have time to summarize all our arguments, but I'll give you one of the takeaways of B's talk, one of the jokes from J's, and the itinerary of my talk.

B's work is in what has sometimes been called "empirical ethics," and as a result of five years' regular visits to Wind Horse Farm she has been able to document how the intentionally Buddhist community has worked through a number of different understandings of their life sustaining community and working the forest. Some of the Buddhist concepts which Buddhist ecology scholars say should be important are - especially interdependence and ahimsa. But you can't understand their role in the life of the WHF community without also grasping the Shambhala understanding of Buddha nature ("basic goodnesss," "nothing missing"), and the importance of meditation in the forest ("forest mind"). Attention to the lived experience of life with the forest can "complement, challenge and transform" philosophical understandings of the meaning of Buddhism, she concluded.

J used collections of jokes to suggest that the promotion of Judaism as part of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" underlying American values, promoted by the National Conference of Christians and Jews in the 1930s (they sent "tolerance trios" of Protestants, Catholics and Jews across the land, the airwaves and newsreels) and given official presidential imprimatur by Eisenhower in 1952, was not unproblematically accepted by Jews, who started telling jokes like this (I paraphrase, except for the punchline):

A priest, a minister and a rabbi are asked what they hope people will say of them after they die. "I hope people say I faithfully presented the mysteries of the Trinity," said the priest. "I hope people say I saved many souls for Christ," said the minister. And you, the rabbi was asked, what do you hope people say after you die? "Look, he's breathing!"

J suggested that in this and kindred jokes the Jewish voice, presented as down to earth and a bit crass, conveys a "deep ambivalence," an angry refusal even, of Christian understandings of religion, a rejection under the surface acceptance of the idea that Protestant, Catholic and Jew are in fact the same kind of thing. The jokes also represent a vindication of the everyday, making them doubly interesting as an object of reflection in "lived religion."

My remarks, finally, were an extended infomercial for the Queer Christianities conference, which is exactly one month away! I drew on William James and Robert Orsi to suggest that lived experience is the most creative part of religious life (systems, etc., are what James calls "second-hand religion"), and that the discovery and veneration of saints is a good example. I proposed that every age or group finds the saints it needs, including queer Christians today, and worked my way through six icons by Brother Robert, allowing them to accumulate in the screen above our heads like an ikonostasis. Icons are figures that you don't so much look at as looked at by, doing a little more than just representing a Christianity in which you can live. Behold (and be held):

St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes (and also, Orsi argued, of a generic American Catholicism); Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker and not a canonized saint (and someone whose most devoted followers would hate to see her coopted by the church); Mychal Judge, the gay Franciscan FDNY Chaplain who died on 9/11 (also not likely to be canonized, although a campaign is underway and miracles claimed); two icons of early Christian martyrs, Polyeuct and Nearchus, and Perpetua and Felicity, both presented as couples; and as a final provocation, since he wasn't any kind of Christin, Harvey Milk. Images of these and other icons of Brother Robert circulate widely. A lived religion study of them would look at who uses them and how, and what they think they are doing, both to understand this particular community now, but also to understand better what must have been happening for all Christian communities at all times.

Together the three presentations, with the rather exciting discussion which followed, made for a very satisfying afternoon, with lots of interesting new perspectives on various religions, and useful methodological and ethical reflection, too. In particular, do we think that "lived religion" can escape being a corrective, a reaction to older tradition-based understandings of religion? (Yes, for various reasons, hopefully... but it's a good question!) Thanks, everyone!

Artful

2012-02-22T00:06:00.021-05:00

Today's session of New School Century was about the arts and/as social research. We started class in the Orozco Room, and, back in our classroom, did a little dancing. The arts have arrived in our class!

The Orozco Room was originally a public cafeteria but is now used only for special events (ostensibly for preservation reasons). Created by José Clemente Orozco for the New School's first building in 1931, it plays an important and distorting role in our collective memory. Most people know that a yellow curtain was drawn across the Lenin-Stalin mural in 1953 to student protest, but not that the internationalist peasant-revolutionary Orozco murals had from the start a pendant in the American modernist and industrialization-high murals by Thomas Hart Benton two floors below: sold in the 1980s, they've vanished from collective memory. You've heard me natter on about this before.

But it's time to face the music: what were the arts doing at The New School? The original proposal for a "New School of Social Science for Men and Women" makes no mention of the arts in discussing its mission and intended curriculum. Horace Kallen started lecturing on aesthetics already in 1920, it's true, but there was no indication that by the later 1920s The New School would mainly be offering courses in arts and psychology. This was as or after most of its founders had drifted away, too. What happened? How to tell the story?

One version of the story is that after the seven-semester itch The New School lost focus, and offered lectures in whatever students would pay for just to keep from going under. Had students wanted courses in craniology or motorcycle repair we would have offered that. Only with the University in Exile a decade later could it return to itself, a research institute in social sciences. This brutal form of the story appears only by implication, but you hear it a lot. The arts at The New School were an accident, a distraction, if not an embarrassment. Who takes the arts as seriously as social sciences, after all?

A slightly nicer version of the story is that offering courses students would pay for was consistent with at least part of the school's mission, educating adults in new fields, student demand confirming relevance - even if James Harvey Robinson et al didn't imagine that what students would demand would be literature and psychoanalysis and the modern dance. This fits with the Clara Mayer story, too, since it was apparently at her suggestion that courses in psychology and the arts were first introduced.

There's some truth to this "in the meantime we'll offer courses in the arts" story, probably more than I'd like to concede. But the story I'd like to be able to tell (you've heard it already) denies there's any mission drift at all. Surely "social research," what the school was named after, was a broader and more pliable category than "social science," and included in its scope efforts by artists to grapple with the challenge and promise of modern life! Dewey and Kallen were talking about art all the time (Kallen even at The New School!). In support or corroboration of this view one might also consider the way modernists in the arts took on the spirit and terminology of the sciences (laboratory, experimental, method, etc.).

I say I'd like to be able to tell this story because it feels, still, sadly, like a a bit of a stretch. But slightly less stretchy and in its way at least as satisfying would be to say that, whatever the reason for the move to arts lectures, the result of offering courses in social sciences and arts together at The New School, especially in the close quarters of the original site in Chelsea, was the discovery of affinities. If the writers of the "Proposal..." didn't see the arts as social research, that's because there wasn't a New School around yet to show them! As you know I sought support for my view in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which included the arts among the areas it covered (admittedly mentioned last among a dozen areas), but that's 1930. I'm willing to consider that the arts wouldn't have been mentioned in 1920, but had demonstrated their relevance by 1930 - especially if the place where that relevance was demonstrated was The New School!

But I'm sure you want to hear about the dancing. One of the new arts introduced at The New School was modern dance, on which the New York Times' John Martin, the first dedicated dance critic in the country, gave "lecture demonstrations" at The New School. He was a critic, not a dancer, so he did the lecturing while dancers (including Martha Graham) did the demonstrating. But my co-teacher J is a dancer as well as a historian, and we're all a little high on Dewey, so we let the students do the demonstrating!

Asking half of the class to line up along each of the walls flanking the lecture hall, J told students they were to notice their bodies as they moved, as well as those of the students facing them across the room. First we all spread our feet (first position), arched our hands over our heads, and rose to our toes. This was the feel of ballet, dignified, straight, solid-torso, elevated. Then we placed our feet parallel, bent our knees and contracted as if someone had hit us in the stomach. The modern dance, grounded, rounded, twisting the torso, expressive...

Martin's lectures-demonstrations were both an explanation of the modern dance and advocacy for it. Many thought it ugly and too serious - wasn't dance supposed to be beautiful and lighthearted? - but in his lectures (and the book which grew out of them (The Modern Dance, 1933) he suggested that dance expresses things we cannot put in words, some of them among the most important things. In modern life dance has become a mere pastime, and we have forgotten its true significance.

In his lectures as also in his article on Dance for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (...yes of course!) Martin discussed the role of dance in "savage" societies, and suggested that, in the face of the discoveries of modern time (think Robinson's Mind in the Making, etc.), serious dance was becoming necessary again.

Whenever the primitive mind came into contact with something that happened without his having had anything to do with it, something with the element of mystery and supernaturalism, he danced. ... As time went on these dances in many cases became traditional, and if we were astute enough and perceptive enough (which we are not) we could find in these rituals an incomparable treasure, for they are really the record of man's discovery of nature. Few of them survive to-day, however, and those that do have become too stereotyped to offer us sufficient clue to work upon. ... Nevertheless, this spirit is the animating spirit of the modern dance. ... Civilisation has taken the mystery out of ordinary life to a great extent and consequently has mitigated the necessity for expressing, as the primitive dancer did, the things one's understanding cannot grasp. But to-day we are reaching farther and farther ahead into uncharted regions of thought, which, though not alarming to us as nature was to the savage, are just as far from being reducible to rational terms. And it is these grasped but intangible emotional and mental experiences that the dancer of to-day finds himself forced to express through the irrational medium of bodily movement. (The Modern Dance, 9-10)

One of the legends of The New School is that Martha Graham was important here, indeed that she and Aaron Copland developed "Appalachian Spring" here. Not true - they'd both moved on from The New School by that time. But another modern dancer was much more important to the New School's experiments in art as social research: Doris Humphrey, whose work J introduced us to (and whose pictures I've posting here, including her Shaker-inspired piece). There are interesting tie-ins to social questions, too, as, J suggested, Graham's work is about the individual vs. society, but Humphrey's is always about relating to others; even where there is a leader she emerges from and returns to the group. The body expresses itself but seeks harmony with others.

Movement research as social research! If the social scientists didn't experience the importance of this, I say so much the worse for them!

2K

2012-02-20T16:01:00.000-05:00

Can you believe it? This is my two-thousandth blog post! Wow!

Ask not for whom the bell tolls

2012-02-19T18:59:00.005-05:00

In preparation for our conference upcoming next month - more urgently, for the teaser for the conference I'm giving in five days - I've been reading up on "queer theology." It's a pretty heady thing, especially if you pass from the genial digest in Patrick Cheng's Radical Love (2011) to the brain-zapping anthology edited by Gerald Loughlin, Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (2007). Loughlin starts his introduction with the image above, from the 15th-century Upper-Rhine Libellus for John the Evangelist now in the university library in Basel. It's the wedding at Cana. But who's getting married? The gospel doesn't say, and after rehearsing some suggestions interpreters have made over the years, Loughlin finds that here it is John, and he's marrying - Jesus!

Loughlin's point in starting here is that non-heteronormative thinking isn't something new (let alone modern or postmodern!), but something close to the heart of traditional Christianity. And you might think "marriage equality" is the issue of the day. That's not the half of it! Loughlin wants to show that once you start looking, you'll see nuptial imagery all over the early and medieval church - but not much of it is about marriages between human women and men. As Loughlin tells the story, heterosexual unions are belatedly granted a sacramental status in the Church only by a kind of courtesy, by a metaphorical extension from spiritual bonds which are rarely between one man and one woman.

Loughlin and many of his co-writer are working from the theological movement called "radical orthodoxy," and in its challenge to modernity and secular thought "radical orthodoxy" doesn't do retail; it's a wholesale turning of the tables they're after. Everything you thought you knew about Christianity and sexuality is false, they insist, everything! They want your soul, and your body too. Cheng's "radical love" is a teddybear's picnic by comparison.

Happily I don't have to discuss this on Thursday - it's a round-table on "lived religion," and I'll focus on the lives of queer icons by Franciscan Robert Lentz - but chances are good issues like those raised by Loughlin et al will come up in the conference in March. Excitement ahead!

Haru!

2012-02-18T22:49:00.002-05:00

Although the Grand Army Plaza Farmer's Market still has only last year's apples and most of the other visitors to the Met were still in dark wintry colors, my visiting friend H and I distinctly felt today that Spring is near.

À la recherche des écrans perdus

2012-02-17T00:40:00.002-05:00

I'm moving to a new computer - a MacBook Air that's so light it sometimes seems like it's not really there. The trusty MacBook which has been my companion for the last four years is exhausted and ready to move to the happy hunting grounds. I don't even know how many computers I've been through since my first, a hand-me-down Apple desktop in 1987, but I have kept a file of all the desktop images I've used - and here they all are! They're all photos I took, all Del Mar except a Fontgombault glade, a Paris arcade, and a riverscape in Orchha.

This image has made the move to the new computer with me.

Salvation army

2012-02-16T23:02:00.001-05:00

We had the first of our four meetings of the "Religion-Fashion Seminars" at Parsons yesterday evening. The religious studies contingent was small compared to the exploratory meeting last December, but that made room for a squad of bona fide pilgrims, fashion students from Belgium in NYC because of Fashion Week. (I suggested they were pilgrims in jest, but they took on the moniker immediately and even gratefully.) I'd brought along books to spark discussion - you may be able to guess what I was thinking in assembling this set - but they were hardly needed.We discussed cult followings, Sunday best, brand revivals and resurrections, the congregations sitting on pews along runways at fashion shows, the monk-like life of Bill Cunningham, mortification and rebirth through fashion, Karl Lagerfeld as a kind of exorcist, the kind of fashion penance demanded by wardrobe consultants. All very playful, in one way. But in another, it was exciting - and they were really in earnest. One of the Belgian pilgrims said that fashion needed new ways of thinking and religion seemed really helpful because it's "something real." It's not often a religious studies scholar hears something like that!

(The picture above's from a little pamphlet my co-facilitator O designed two years ago in Istanbul.)

Editor in chief

2012-02-15T15:28:00.127-05:00

In New School Century, we have entered the Johnson years - the years after the jouissance of an administration-less school collapsed in acrimony in 1922 (I call it the "seven semester itch"), and the school was saved by the expert diplomacy, administrative skill and vision of an agrarian economist from the Midwest named Alvin Johnson. Well, not directly from the Midwest; he'd done doctoral work at Columbia and was working as an associate editor at The New Republic, in many ways the matrix of The New School.

(The picture above is from one of the scrapbooks, all our digitizations of which are now up on a web page hosted by the Parsons Kellen Archive, and, best of all, are accessible to anyone anywhere with an internet connection: check it out! This is on leaf 13 of the first scrapbook.)

My co-teacher J told the class about Johnson, framing it as an example of what historians call the "great man" approach to history. In the last weeks we've been reflecting on various ways to telling the story of the origin of The New School, and Johnson offers a great example of the genre. Like Solomon building the temple, or Francis Bacon initiating the scientific revolution, a good protagonist makes for a good story, even as everything else becomes background or, perhaps, chaotic forces the hero struggles against. Johnson plays a role rather like this in our spotty collective memory.

And then J complicated the story by introducing Clara Mayer: "Behind every great man," she said, "there is a great woman." (You got a promise of Mayer's story a while back which I haven't kept; sorry! Daughter of a wealthy German Jewish family, she studied with James Harvey Robinson at Barnard/Columbia and followed him to The New School. He left but she stayed, instrumental in a student group which helped the school survive in 1922, and the indispensable working partner of Johnson on everything from expanding the curriculum to include the arts to arranging logistics for the refugee scholars of the University in Exile, as well as an increasingly important figure in New School administration until 1962, when a new president fired her, only to be himself fired by a Board of Trustees which knew how vital she was to the school's life. Once you know to look for her, you find Clara everywhere in The New School (including the account of the New School years in Johnson's memoir Pioneer's Progress), but she's fallen out of all the school's narratives. Were it not for the efforts of stalwart librarian-archivist C, her memory would have disappeared completely.)

But my task yesterday was to talk about the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, a monumental fifteen-volume work which came out of The New School in 1930-35. (The image above is from the first volume, albeit an eighth reprint in 1949. Look: Clara's there, too!) This first ever encyclopedia of social sciences was proposed by New School anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser in the early 1920s, and, while the eminent man he persuaded to be Editor in Chief (and fundraiser in chief) Edwin Seligman was at Columbia, the actual work of planning, commissioning and editing the thousands of entries was directed by Alvin Johnson. Until the complementary International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences appeared in 1968 (with a preface by Johnson), the ESS was indispensable.

I wanted students to think about how the ESS defined the project and scope of the social sciences, and to understand that this definition was consonant with if not indeed an expression of the ongoing experiment of The New School, even in the supposedly lean years between the 1919-22 honeymoon and the arrival of the University in Exile in 1933. Goldenweiser had had in mind not an alphabetical encyclopedia with a myriad entries, but a German-style handbook with book-length introductions to the various social sciences, each by a single distinguished author; these could even be published and sold separately.

Seligman and Johnson came up with something entirely different. They wanted to show the connections between the various social sciences - and, relatedly, to show that an understanding of the social dimensions of human life illuminated and required awareness of many other sciences too (including even the arts!). To encourage ease of use but also serendipitous discovery, articles are alphabetical. The editors also wanted to make manifest in this single work the vast community of researchers in social questions, and so there are articles by every scholar they could contact (articles are signed) and cross-referenced. To make the range, antecedents and variety of social research clear, fully a fifth of the ESS was given over to biographies.

But it wasn't only intended for scholars. It hoped also to reach the "intelligentsia," and to contribute to an educated public opinion around the world. Copies of the Encyclopaedia appeared in every public library and most high school libraries across the United States; I imagine many copies were sold internationally, too, as Seligman and Johnson had forged alliances not only with professional societies but with European universities and research institutes "from Florence to Oslo." (Japanese scholarship is represented, too.) The social sciences were not yet a monopoly of university researchers; written (or edited) in a deliberately jargon-free style, the ESS was conceived to make social research accessible for anyone - and not just as something scholars do.

Still, this is an encyclopedia we're talking about. How to make it engaging to students, especially in the age of Wikipedia? I think I found a way. Imagine you're a high school student in Fresno in 1949, I told the class, and stumble on the Encyclopaedia in your school or public library. What world does it open up for you? You won't be interested in the editor's programmatic introductions, but will dive right into the work.

Perhaps you'll start by looking up Francis Bacon, often cited as the father of the scientific revolution and the modern technical world. (In our class we've seen Bacon invoked in the founding "Proposal for a New School of Social Science for Men and Women," in Dewey's Democracy and Education and in Robinson's Mind in the Making.) This writer, one Roland G. Usher, thinks Bacon's influence exaggerated. Bacon's preeminence in natural science and philosophy has always raised the presumption that he had ideas of equal value upon the the social sciences, if only they could be found. Usher finds that Bacon's influence, while great, has been only indirect, in emphasizing the importance of experience. His actual, and limited, contributions to economics and political theory are more problematic than helpful.

Well!, you might think, having perhaps expected a great man account of Bacon's eternal legacies; these people are serious, and honest. And the author's name is right there, taking responsibility for his view, not like anonymous encyclopedias where peons speak like oracles.

After this article comes a shorter biography of one Roger Bacon, whom you may never have heard of or, perhaps, have (Mind in the Making's chapter on the scientific revolution starts with a Latin epigraph from him) but thought must be the same person.

Or maybe your eye will have been caught by the list of words a few lines above the start of the Bacon article. CIVILIZATION, COLONIES, IMPERIALISM, RAW MATERIALS, CONCESSIONS, SPHERES OF INFLUENCE, PROTECTORATE, MANDATE, FORCED LABOR, INVESTMENT, MISSIONS, INTERVENTION, DIPLOMATIC PROTECTION. What could this be about? You go back a page; it's "Backward Countries." What's that? You read it (the article doesn't endorse the term), you read the recommended articles, and before you know it you're getting an education. The article before this one, in turn, "Back to the Land Movement" opens new worlds, too...

Or perhaps you flick through that first volume and come on this.

Art? In an encyclopedia of social science? You start reading, and before you know it you're thinking about art in a whole new way, but also civilization, and intelligence. And science. Perhaps this inspires you to look at that long disquisition on the social sciences at the start of the volume. Sure enough, at the very end of his account of "social sciences" (political science, economics, sociology, etc.) "semi-social sciences" (ethics, education) and "sciences with social implications" (philosophy, geography, medicine, linguistics, etc.), an Edwin R. A. Seligman mentions art. It goes without saying that art as a creative activity stands in contrast with science, he writes, whose objective is analysis and understanding. But artistic creation is dominated by values and these are, at least in part, of social origin. Indeed, he concludes No one who wishes to understand the operation of social laws in the modern world can afford to overlook the evidence offered by the arts. (I.7)

This is surprising, and intriguing! After digesting the proffered mini-course in world art history (had you even heard of Primitive, Chinese, Medieval Art before, let alone thought about them socially?), you check the index to see what other articles in art are included.
Not so many, but still. "Dance," for instance, will no longer get an entry in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences thirty-three years later (though it returns in the 2008 second edition: topic for a term paper on the changing nature of the social sciences!). Our encyclopedia preserves a moment when the social sciences had different, perhaps greater, ambitions than in later years - and perhaps more interesting ones. Read more! (My colleague J, a former dancer, was disappointed by the "Dance" article, by John Martin, the dance critic whose lectures at The New School became the much more interesting and field-grounding text The Modern Dance in 1933. But perhaps you'll follow up his name, and find his book...)

And maybe, finally, as you're looking for the author or topic indices at the end of volume XV (where you might discover that Erwin Edman, the author of the lead article on "Art," was also charged with the article "Naturalism" - gotta check that out!), you'll happen on this spread:

A fifteenth-century Spanish ecclesiastic, a an early-twentieth century Japanese statesman, a fourth-century Chinese philosopher, a nineteenth-century Russian statistician? This is getting very interesting, and nothing like what you thought you were getting into... And if these people were leading lives of social relevance and interest, why not you, whether you ever set foot in a university or not?

Having played out this serendipitous way one proceeds through an encyclopedia (I used overhead slides of the page spreads above), I hope the students realized that it's not by accident that someone might discover a world in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. That's precisely what Seligman, Johnson, Mayer and the several dozen assistant editors wanted to happen. Alphabetization, signed articles, cross-references and indices, a generous understanding of socially relevant sciences, and attention through biography to the individual human lives which generate social knowledge and practice: it couldn't be more different from an authoritative handbook from on high, and couldn't be more inviting.

Closing question: If you were to put the world of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in a building, what would it look like? Stay tuned!

Lived religion

2012-02-13T20:14:00.000-05:00

New, revised and final poster/flyer for next week's roundtable...

the talented young designer Kaushal has outdone himself!

Divine images

2012-02-12T22:49:00.004-05:00

My little camera continues to amaze me! Went up to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine this afternoon to get a photo of Keith Haring's "Life

of Christ" altar, which we have permission to use for our upcoming Queer Christianities conference. It was in an unlit closed-off chapel, glowing.

Wiener Blut

2012-02-11T22:45:00.007-05:00

I should have known better than to think a 2011 ballet setting of Brecht and Weil's "Seven Deadly Sins" costarring Patty LuPone would be good, but I'm glad I didn't. The piece I went for was banal for variously uninteresting reasons, but the rest of the New York City Ballet program at Lincoln Center this afternoon was all Balanchine, and all joy. Especially transporting was the closer, "Vienna Waltzes" from 1977. Before ending with the first dance suite from "Der Rosenkavalier" it's all older Strausses and Léhar, starting with "Geschichten vom Wienerwald." Indeed, the marvelous set starts as the Wienerwald, changing gradually into a grand ballroom by way of a Jugendstil studio which seems to grow out of the roots of the trees as their scrim rises. (I'm not describing it well; it was magic.) And the sheer pleasure in movement of the dances!

After the faux profundity of the blandly unpretty "Sins" (Brecht would have wept), the joy in beauty of these dances was a revelation (Brecht would have sighed and said he told you so). For me it was also a trip back to Vienna, which for a long time was an important part of my view of the world. In the sooty years of Austria's political neutrality before the cold war ended and Austria joined the EU, I was a sort of spiritual Mitteleuropäer, proud to know where every scene of "The Third Man" was filmed. Waltzing imperial Vienna was a fata morgana for tourists. I was oriented by the world depicted in the the k.-u.-k., occupation and Austrian stamps I bought at a shop in the Opernpassage, the giddy interwar movies at the Bellaria Kino and the blunt and ineffective efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung at the Burgtheater, and Greene's world was mine. Funny how much that's fallen into disuse, but nice that it's still there. The moment the zither twanged in "Geshichten vom Wienerwald," I was lost, and found. [pic]

Once upon a time

2012-02-10T20:44:00.002-05:00

Thirty years ago this August (can that be true?) I left home to go to the United World College of the American West, an international baccalaureate college in Montezuma, New Mexico. It was the inaugural year for the school, the sixth member of the United World College family, and we were a hundred students from forty-six countries. An amazing experience all around! I went back for the tenth and twentieth graduation reunions in 1994 and 2004 but missed the twenty-fifth in 2009. Nobody wants to wait until the thirtieth, however, so we're having a reunion in New York this May for our class and the two classes which came after us. Lots of folks are coming, and people have started posting photos from back in the day. Here's one I'm delighted to see again, the cast of a movie shot during "Project Week" in Spring of 1983, a historical drama of forbidden love, class differences and murder. The cast hailed from France, England, the Netherlands, Venezuela, New Zealand, France, Ecuador, Jamaica, Belgium and the US. I wrote the script, full of heavy-handed metaphors, but happily nobody had time to learn it!

See the islands!

2012-02-09T08:25:00.000-05:00

Remember those islands you can sometimes see from my parents' place in California, here in this image from the Guardian's great "Satellite eye on earth" series of you can see them from space. Evidently the blurs are windstorms from the mainland, whose sediment attracts phytoplankton out in the Pacific which, in turn, attracts our friends the whales!

Living color

2012-02-08T23:04:00.001-05:00

Coming soon! The India China Institute is paying for a Canadian scholar to join what was just a religious studies event, so we get the benefit of their immensely talented flyer-designer, too. Thanks, Kaushal!

On the make

2012-02-07T23:10:00.003-05:00

Thus H. G. Wells about James Harvey Robinson's 1921 The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform, the first important book to come out of The New School for Social Research. Robinson was the leader of the "New History" and in 1921 he was The New School's first "director." The book was based on Robinson's popular lecture course on "The History of the Human Mind" and intended initially to be part of a Worker's Bookshelf series of inexpensive, accessible works of critical thought conceived by the new Worker's Educational Bureau of America, which was housed at The New School.

Mind in the Making was a best-seller, and put The New School on the map nationally. But the Worker's Bookshelf series was nixed by the head of the American Federation of Labor who feared it was communist. And in 1922 Robinson, together with his fellow New Historian (and fellow Columbia refugee) Charles Beard, had given up on the fledgling school. How to tell this story? And, the shades of the New Historians ask, why?

The New History argued that history should be useful. It should teach not lists of names and dates but what Robinson in his 1912 The New History called "the technique of progress." In Mind in the Making, he promised that "history, by revealing the origin of our current fundamental beliefs, will tend to free our minds so as to permit honest thinking" (14). Traditional forms of history teaching were disempowering not only because they focused on a distant past presented for genuflection but because they didn't explain how history worked. "[T]he present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past," Robinson and Beard wrote in 1916; "the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interests of advance."

Mind in the Making calls in particular for a "scientific" view of history. It begins with an account of how three centuries of scientific discovery and invention have changed the human understanding of nature and expanded our powers to control and use it. The study of human phenomena, meanwhile, remains "medieval," blinded by ancient abstractions and religious prohibitions. To truly understand ourselves, and reform ourselves, we need not only to focus on recorded history but to acknowledge the ongoing legacies of a half million year history.

To understand the four layers - that is, to learn to rule them rather than be ruled by them - we need to acquaint ourselves with the findings of four new scientific fields: animal or comparative psychology; genetic and analytic psychology; anthropology, ethnology and comparative religion; and the history of philosophy, science, theology and literature.

It's a tall order, but makes for an exciting course. One wonders what the equivalents in the human sciences of organic chemistry, electricity and flying machines will be, and hopes against hope that they will prevent another Great War. But Robinson's optimism was faltering already by 1921. The carnage of the war should have shown the world the need for a new age, an end to nationalism and ideology, but responses to the war were just more of the same. Mind in the Making ends with a discussion of the "repressive" nature of most human institutions (especially religion), and by 1930 Robinson was writing "man is by nature not an open-minded progressive creature, but, in general, one which distrusts innovation..." Mind in the Making's call for more intelligence shows both why we and how we must grow, and why we will likely fail.

I don't think Robinson left The New School for world-historical reasons. It's certainly not a story of world-historical importance! Many of the other founders left, too. (Dewey even returned to Columbia.) Maybe it was a despondency at the souring historical moment. Maybe it was conflict between deeply different visions of The New School as a center for research or for teaching, for workers or for experts or for the middle class. Maybe it was the difficulty of fleshing out the dream of a new kind of institution - an institution, indeed, that wasn't supposed to function like an institution! Maybe it was personalities. Continuing in 1922 with a first president (The New Republic's Alvin Johnson) and a changed list of trustees, The New School continued to teach all those new sciences Robinson thought necessary (along with the social sciences he didn't - economics, sociology, political science) but the focus inevitably evolved.

It's hard to tell this story, but including the New History and the role of leading New Historians in the brief first efflorescence of The New School makes it easier. The question isn't the Rankian question of what "really occurred" but how (whether!) the story can be told in a way useful to us in the present. That doesn't allow us to make things up - Robinson and Beard understood themselves as social scientists, not spinners of tales - but it does both permit and require us to be "presentist." Although there's no question that we're telling the story differently than would people outside the school, or in different places within it, or a decade or two ago, or to a different audience (I'm always aware of the many Parsons students in the room), the aim is still "honest thinking."

A usable past, Robinson and Dewey and others would surely agree, should focus on processes rather than only on abstractions - or founders! But, and here they might not follow, a usable past also has to be past - if not a "foreign country" at least a place different enough from the present to enable us to imagine beyond the present and its problems. Or, to split the difference, a place with present problems of its own, some of the initially most useless-seeming of which might enable us to ask new questions of the present.

Brrr

2012-02-06T19:25:00.003-05:00

Winter's been gentle here, but in other parts of the world it's clearly a very very different picture. Hundreds have frozen to death in eastern Europe in recent weeks, and millions are affected in Mexico. Geneva is better equipped for cold (though someone still froze to death in a homeless camp), but this image from the Times blew me away - look at that tree! From the Tribune de Genève, more fantastical images still.

漬けっぱなし

2012-02-04T19:29:00.002-05:00

My Japanese housemate has completed his New York sojourn, and left me with this surprise - a fermenting pot for making nukazuke pickles 糠漬け. (He was using it for the bento he brought each day to the Metropolitan Opera, where the Japanese Culture Ministry paid for him to be a "creative content intern" - he got to watch "The Enchanted Island" from conception to completion, lucky bastard, along with a dozen other old and new productions.) Nukamiso is a mix of rice bran with kombu and fermenting bacteria (perhaps introduced with vegetable peels early on, but then self-sustaining). Once started you can apparently keep using it to pickle vegetables forever, like a sourdough starter. As you can see he left some cucumbers and daikon as models. A gift that keeps on giving! The only catch is that the nukamiso should be mixed each day, preferably with bare hands...!

Exciting semester at LREL

2012-02-03T16:55:00.001-05:00

This program has really got its groove on in 2012!

RIP Wislawa

2012-02-03T08:17:00.001-05:00

Just heard that Wislawa Symborska, the Polish poet, has died. Here's a poem of hers I've presented here before (in January '07) which still seems to me... miraculous.

Miracle Fair
Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable is thinkable.

Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska,

trans. Joanna Trzeciak (NY & London: W. W. Norton, 2001), 119-20 [Pic]

Is the best good enough?

2012-02-02T23:23:00.003-05:00

A question which came up in Delhi with my friend S, only fully explored today in New York with his wife L: S took me to the divey but delicious Karim, "the best Mughlai food in Delhi," and apparently one of the best restaurants in all of Asia - or so did Time Magazine declare in 1985. (As this sign indicated, it has the same problems with imitators as the One and Only Original Ray's Pizza.) Supposing it were indeed the world's best Mughlai food, should I be taken there for my first experience of the cuisine? Would I even be able to appreciate what made it good, let alone the best? And wouldn't it in any case condemn me to disappointment in all future Mughlai food-eating experiences? They may sound snarky, not to mention ungrateful, but they were serious questions.

Skyward

2012-02-01T23:09:00.001-05:00

Rising swiftly at 14th and Fifth, the new University Center -
10 stories to go!

Historical wrinkles

2012-01-31T23:01:00.004-05:00

Second week of "The New School Century," and we have to start telling a story about The New School! I'm better at taking stories apart - and, sometimes, then putting them back together. So, for instance, we need to challenge the "crisis at Columbia" story about The New School's origins. Columbia's importance is quite different.

The "crisis at Columbia" story

With the US's entry into World War I, Columbia's president Nicholas Murray Butler announced that the university would not tolerate any professors' objecting to the war. Two did and were fired. In 1919 historians Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson resigned in protest, and, together with their buddies Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey, started a "new school" founded in academic freedom, a kind of anti-university that was truer to the ideal of the university than craven Columbia. (Some versions of this story make Beard and Robinson pacifists, too.)

A nice story, but unsupportable on the facts, most significant among which is that discussions about setting up a new school, involving Beard, Robinson and others, date back at least to 1916, well before the US entered the war. (Beard and Robinson both supported the war, by the way.) Butler's firing of Catell and Dana may have been the trigger, but plans for a new kind of school were already afoot. As a matter of fact, Robinson, Beard and Veblen had all published books criticizing American universities. Columbia and Butler were not the problem, universities were. Indeed, it was on Columbia's dime that Robinson and Beard were able to develop and publish their critiques of universities. Columbia (which Dewey never left) wasn't a terrible place but as good as a university could be. It was not Columbia's failure as a university which was the problem, but that even as accomplished a university as Columbia had shown it could not be trusted.

There are at least three problems with the "crisis of Columbia" story, beyond its inaccuracy. First, it suggests that New School developed as a reaction to Columbia - without Butler's patriotic persecution of pacifist and socialist faculty, there would have been no New School. But a new school was on its way to happening; the hub of discussion was The New Republic, which published the proposal for a new school a year before the Columbia resignations. Second, seeing a New School founded to protect true academic freedom under fire at Columbia makes it seem that the founders were concerned to form a truer, better university. In fact, they were suspicious of universities as a whole for all sorts of structural reasons, and exploring alternative structures.

Finally and a little more subtly, seeing the New School founded on "academic freedom" risks making the New School project sound like just what it was rejecting. When we think of "academic freedom" these days we tend to think of debates about tenure, which it is argued allow scholars not only to do politically unpopular work but also to devote themselves to the kind of specialized and often arcane scholarly projects which worldly trustees cannot understand. The university is a blessed space which allows the more otherworldly values of pure scholarship to survive, safe from the pressures of publication and popularity. Well, the founders certainly were all for academic freedom - understood primarily as academic self-government free of the intrusions of deans and trustees, who were seen as suppressing work critical of the Establishment to which they belonged. But they had no interest in unworldly scholarship; Beard, Robinson and Dewey criticized universities for being unworldly spaces which rejected knowledge of the real world, and accountability to it.

So yes, New School was founded by people, some of whom had resigned from Columbia because of Butler's firing of war-objectors - but others stayed on, and yet others had no connection to Columbia at all. Columbia had not stifled these founders' critiques of universities but made them possible, and productive relationships with Columbia characterized the New School's early years, from the large number of Columbia faculty who taught there to the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, whose editor-in-chief Edwin Seligman was at Columbia and associate editor was New School president Alvin Johnson. Columbia was friend, not foe. But New School wasn't trying to out-university Columbia; it wasn't trying to be a university at all. Already before the War, the founders had been involved in different institutions for "social research," from the Institute of Municipal Research to The New Republic. The discussions about a "New School of Social Science" begun already in 1916 were not about forming a better, truer university, but imagining something radically different than a university. "Academic freedom" was part of it but nearly anti-academic conceptions of social relevance and accountability were, too.

Does this make a better story, or a story at all? It does, I think, and a story even more relevant in this moment when, for old and new reasons, universities are under fire. But to tell the story well we really need to explore the alternative institutions of the progressive era and see The New School in the context of them, not just among universities. That's just where the class is going next week! Stay tuned!

Scaffolding off!

2012-01-31T21:08:00.001-05:00

After more than a year shrouded by scaffolding, Jefferson Market Public Library is back!

Profound pastiche

2012-01-30T23:31:00.005-05:00

Caught the final performance of "The Echanted Island," the Metropolitan Opera's revival of the baroque form pastiche, where bits and pieces of various operas as cobbled together to accommodate a particular constellation of stars and resources. Librettist Jeremy Sams and Arts Florissant director William Christie ranged widely in their borrowing, from Handel and Vivaldi and Rameau to a host of lesser-known baroque composers, and from operas to sacred cantatas and even some coronation anthems. It was a hoot! And divine sung by a stellar cast, notably Joyce DiDonato, Danielle de Niese (Melbourne-born!) and, stepping in for an indisposed David Daniels, Anthony Roth Costanzo.

I knew some of the music (from "Semele," "Ariodante," "Les Indes Galantes" and "Griselda") but could actually place only one at the time, the finale of "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato." But that was enough, as I could feel the appropriation, and approve of it. Here as in the original work, it comes at a moment of resolution, and feeling the pathos of the other work (one of my favorite pieces in music) flow into this one deepened the experience.

For most of the viewers, most if not all of the music will have been delightful new discoveries. (For instance there's some amazing nearly atonal work from one of Handel's Marian cantatas - who knew there were such!) The pastiche-y part will have been felt and approved instead in the storyline, which weaves together Shakespeare's "Tempest" and "Midsummer Night's Dream." How can you do that, you ask? And yet they did, and it didn't feel cheap or tacky but like spending more time with old friends, learning more about them. Pastiche, because of its postmodern uses, sounds frivolous, but "Enchanted Island" shows it can be profound play.

The performance was sold out (and not just, I think, because you could hear what my Japanese housemate called なまドミンゴ namadomingo - Placido Domingo live - in the part of Neptune). I hope it enters the repertoire, spawns imitations, and maybe even a revival of some of these old operas, like Vivaldi's "Griselda."

Kallen to the rescue!

2012-01-30T09:18:00.000-05:00

The first course on religion taught at The New School, Spring 1920.

Dewey eyed

2012-01-29T22:09:00.003-05:00

Reading Dewey's Democracy and Education for Tuesday's class, I'm finding myself thrilled. It's been a while since I've spent time with Dewey's boldness in challenging all our lazy pieties and providing charged alternatives. There are no small ideas here!

From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive to his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone — an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.

John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction

to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 52

Gee, darling

2012-01-28T14:13:00.000-05:00

Isn't it delicious! A whole day at home, doing nothing in particular...

Karma chameleon

2012-01-27T21:23:00.002-05:00

It's one of the truisms of religious studies that "Hinduism" was a foreign invention. Before the Brits, indeed before the Mughals, there was no such thing - no unified -ism, no religion. I stumbled on a rather cheeky variant of this in a pulp novel while in India called The Immortals of Meluha, the first book in a trilogy about Shiva. (The second volume, The Secret of the Nagas, is out, too.) Even the story of the book is exciting: outsider writer braves rejection by publishing business to achieve greatest success. The writer Amish Tripathi is not a subaltern, however, but a financial sector star from one of India's top management institutes, who used knowledge from the world of marketing unheard of in Indian English-language publishing to create a sensation. But in its way that makes it even more interesting! Amish is creating a usable past for India's new technocratic elite, supported by but still in some ways alienated from family religious traditions (most are brahmins). What he is able to imagine is that the great god Shiva was not, in fact, a god at all, but a man of a kind of all-around splendor which Indians know to be possible - or at least knew, before foreigners' judgments corrupted their understanding - before the invention of "Hinduism," I might add! I picked up a copy for the flight home, and, slow reader that I am, only just finished it. (It's a cliff-hanger, and I've ordered the sequel!) Well-written it is not, but fascinating nonetheless. In Amish's imagined 1900 BCE world, the prosperous and righteous Suryavanshi kingdom (founded by the great scientist Brahma and statesman Ram) faces an existential threat from its evil neighbors the Chandravanshi, who overflow with slums and decadent opulence and are trying to kill the Saraswati River whose waters scientists have used to keep the Suryavanshi forever young. Both are waiting for a savior, the Neelkanth, an outsider who will be known by a luminous blue throat. Our hero Shiva, who comes from near Mount Kailash in Tibet, doesn't believe in chosen ones or in faith in redeemers, but steps up to the plate when terrorists nearly kill his love Sati and destroy the central research compound of the Suryavanshi. The Suryavanshi unite behind him as their divine savior, but he knows that anyone can be divine.

Yet it's not quite the euhemerist story I was expecting. In one way it is a secularization of a religious tradition (and a secular vindication of it). In the system set up by Ram there are varna (castes), for instance, but they are meritocratically filled out in each generation - children are raised communally far from most adults, as in Plato's Republic, and in time choose the status which best suits them. Only the bending of these rules to allow the rich to raise their own children has corrupted what is essentially a perfect system. Other problems are also the result of deviation from the rationality of Ram's view. Shiva teaches them to reject the idea that misfortune is a consequence of crimes in a past life, and nearly shows them that faith in a supernatural savior is a superstition which hides their own capacities from them. (Feuerbach would approve!) And yet we've not quite demythologized everything. Shiva became godlike because of his karma...

Perino

2012-01-26T22:25:00.000-05:00

Went to the Met today to catch some exhibitions closing soon (including Heroic Africans, which I wanted to see a second time), and learned about an Italian mannerist painter named Perino del Vaga (the Met has recently acquired two works of his), including two striking representations of Christ. In "Holy Family with the Infant John the Baptist" (1524-26) he's a deliciously believable baby. (Perino's model may have been his own baby daughter.) And in a "Conversion of Saint Paul" (sorry, my camera does poorly with oils, and there's no image available online), he's middle-aged! And... it's the same face, too!

Floating in air

2012-01-26T08:57:00.003-05:00

Ever heard of Gaga dance? No, nothing to do with the inescapable pop diva. It's a modern dance language created by Ohad Naharin with the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. I saw them perform at BAM a few years ago and was captivated. While the dancers were clearly professionals with the poise and agility of trained dancers, the movements spoke in a language akin to the movements of non-dancers. It wasn't beautiful in conventional or even unconventional ways but there was something very appealing about it. It really seemed like dance in another language, unrelated to all the others, at once entirely novel and familiar. And it rippled with joy.

When I learned that gaga is also for non-professionals, indeed even for people with no dance experience at all, I wondered if it might be taught in New York some day... Well, now it is, at the Mark Morris Dance Center next to BAM no less - three subway stops from my house - every Wednesday night, 8-9. So I gave it a try!

In the big studio on the top floor, the mirrors covered, we were about a score of people - many seem to be dancers, not all. The instructor had a sound track which was she often turned off, and never loud enough to be more than background sound. I can't describe (or remember) all we did, but what particularly got me was the starting exercise, which I continued exploring the whole time. "Float is if in water," said the instructor. "Your arms might as well fall up as down." We found each part of our bodies, starting with the head, floating loose from the other. We moved like seaweed, sometimes a pulse from the head leading down, sometimes pushed by horizontal currents from several directions. When we'd reached our feet we started building back up, the feet now putting down roots, becoming "thick and juicy," filling out our emptied floating form part by part with a kind of effort, back up to our necks. And then she told us to pull the bones out, the way you pull the bones from a perfectly cooked chicken... Later we law still on the floor as a small animal started twitching in our pelvis, getting more agitated until our legs moved like spaghetti in boiling water, and, standing again, rolled invisible balls from the joints of our wrists up and down our arms, then into the hollow of our ribcages, and then a second ball was rolling, a third, a fourth.

This sounds insane, I'm sure. But more insane yet is that we did all those things, that they can be done. We actually floated. The balls rolled. It's nothing short of astonishing how your experience of your body (and so of everything else) can be changed so easily, becoming heavy, light, loose, tight, airy, juicy, full, empty. Mind can do that, with body, or body with mind. Dancers - and athletes, too - know this. But the rest of us trudge along as though the body is a fixed, stable, one-channel experience.

I'm going again next week. It's good to be modern dancing again!

Student centered

2012-01-25T10:41:00.006-05:00

Our course on the history and significance of the spiritual adventure of The New School began today, with a bang! We're committed to a course which celebrates "learning by doing" so we had students help draft a mission statement for the school (we're, um, between mission statements at the moment!). What they came up with is quite inspiring. A community of forward- and free-thinking artists and academics from all backgrounds and ages, attentive to the contemporary moment and with a broad view of what it means to be successful, empowering students to take responsibility for their own education through heavily interactive class structures where all meet as equals.

Good stuff! There is one striking gap, though. Well, not that striking, since I needed my co-teacher J to notice it! There is no mention of faculty. (The parenthetical insertion at lower right was made by me.) Which, J suggested, is just as it should be - and just as the founders wished, in their protest against universities of the day, which offered obsolete and reactionary knowledge chosen by faded professors, philistine trustees and progress-fearing alumni.

If "spiritual adventure" seems overweening language to you, it's not mine. Consider this, the last paragraph of the 1918 "Proposal for an Independent School for Social Science" - our founding document! - which we offered the students as fodder for their mission statementing.

Life goes on

2012-01-24T11:09:00.000-05:00

Back to more familiar scenery...

Before it fades

2012-01-23T08:32:00.206-05:00

Quick, before the new academic semester which starts today pushes aside all in its path, some synthesizing thoughts about my India trip. It's a little hard to pull together into a single narrative, and not just (if also) because it's India, which challenges and charms a person on every level at once. I've been to India only once before, about five years ago (you saw it here), and left the last time thinking India was a necessary place but also that I didn't want to come back right away, because of that all-around challenging bit. I'm glad to have had a chance to reconnect.

This trip happened as a sort of jumble of accidents. The "Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya" project (ERSEH), whose dedicated religion-person I am, is a result of such bizarre serendipity it seems like cosmic carelessness. (I felt the thinness of the project when I tried to describe it at the high-power Center for the Study of Developing Societies on Friday; it seemed down-right amateur, which of course is what I am in relation to this subject matter...) Darjeeling and Sikkim are sites for the ERSEH project because of prior and unrelated collaborations with New School. And I decided to go this January less because it will impress the foundation supporting the project ("See? It has deflected the research trajectory of our religious studies professor...!") than because a friend recently-arrived in Delhi seemed so depressed a visit was in order - and because I wanted to give myself a deadline to finish the Job manuscript.

But then, there I was, and it didn't matter how I'd come to find myself there. I guess the professional aims of the trip were two: for me to spend time with the research teams in Darjeeling and in Gangtok as they put together their research methodologies, and for me to get some first-hand experience of the rich and varied religious landscape of the Indian Himalaya. It was successful on both fronts, especially as I was able to arrange semi-public discussions of the topic in both places.

Indeed, recalling the woman in a novel of E. M. Forster's who said "how can I know what I think until I hear what I say?" I got some extremely useful thought-work done on the strange concept "everyday religion" which I inherited here. My shpiel? At the Good Will Center in Darjeeling, Rachna Books in Darjeeling and then at CSDS I laid out three increasingly ambitious briefs for the study of everyday religion.

(1) Ordinary people are the arbiters of what succeeds and persists in the history of religion, so focusing only on prophets, central sites and texts and hierarchies, distorts the history of religion - and, indeed, sneaks in a theological account of this history.

(2) Ordinary people are themselves religious creators: making creative and serious use of what's available to them in response to the joys and challenges of human existence they provide a better model for religion's place in human life, and perhaps of the lives of religious specialists, too.

(3) Ordinary people's religious creations are the truest, because most grounded. As liberation theology, feminism and pragmatism (among other schools) suggest, it is when thought meets real problems that it is most fertile, and when it doesn't need to justify hierarchy that it is most universal and potentially liberating.

I'm still thinking this through. (3), in particular, seems polemical in ways which may not be appropriate to this project. (Indeed, if (1) is correct, then we should expect ordinary people to be among the supporters of the idea of religious expertise concentrated in special canons and castes.) On the other hand, ERSEH's particular concern is the way religious practices cultivate or destroy environments, so a focus on the practical at the expense of whatever non-material things religions also cultivate or destroy seems OK. I'll keep working this out, as generating a theoretical appraisal of the study of "lived religion" or "everyday religion" is becoming my new research project.

But you don't to hear about this, do you? Nor do I: this will keep. What might not is experiences I had that won't fit into the narrative that emerges of the project. So here are some of them - those which have recommended themselves by coming up in conversations already - in no particular order. (The photos in this post are unrelated to the text, though in chronological order.)

• I won't forget the stillness of that drive in the shared jeep in the starless night above the Teesta River, from Rangpo down to Siliguri, a good dozen of us crammed into a car navigating often treacherous roads as pedestrians emerged from the shadows and returned again as we drove past. I don't know what my presence in the car will have meant to the others there.

• At Rumtek Monastery, across a valley from Gangtok, a young monk practiced his English on me. Five years into an eight-year program of study I suspect he'd really like to end up leading a meditation center in America. He encouraged me to read "A Precious Garland of the Supreme Path." I had already looked through it before he approached me, though, and rather naughtily asked his clarification for 5.3: Since thoughts are the play of the dharmata, do not abandon them. I gather "Precious Garland" is on the syllabus for next year.

• A young Swiss social anthropologist who's been studying Lepcha shamanism for five years was indignant at efforts to establish this indigenous tradition as a religion by transcribing what shamans say (missing the point entirely!). Worse still, they're calling the monster they're creating by a name from an old anthropological study "Boonthingism." With my bookstore host and another friend of his, we had a wonderful dinner of flaming-hot Bhutanese food which ended up with a long discussion of the sincerity of the public mourning at the funeral of Kim Jong Il - and the next day he sent us a link to an article reporting that people in North Korea were being punished for having insufficiently mourned.

• One of my Darjeeling hosts had just become a father the day before I arrived. In an old British bungalow I had the pleasure of meeting his daughter (at that point still unnamed), her mother, and all four of her grandparents - including two who'd flown in from Ireland (their daughter's a human rights lawyer who'd been working of a child labor NGO in Darjeeling). I've never met people as Irish as these, and now they have an Indian granddaughter, and a son-in-law who beamed with a face like a young Dalai Lama.

• A group of Bengali economists, unhappily stuck in Delhi at a promising new university that's stumbling, crammed into the car I'd been given use of parsed their different reactions to Delhi - "I hate it," "I dislike it," "I hate it with a vengeance!" - and the queasy uncertainties of their formless place of employment. We coined the phrase "psychoerotics of uncertainty" to name the sly and shifting terms they used to describe meetings which went nowhere (if they were indeed meetings), discussions which weren't about what they seemed, all framed by an anomalous innovation in status, "resident NRIs" (which I pronounced ornery). They took me to a restaurant called "Oh! Calcutta" (!) so I might savor the fabled hilsa fish, and marveled that a cooking tradition they associate only with homes, not restaurants, could so successfully be a cuisine - though it took someone in Mumbai to think of it.

• At a restaurant I stumbled into 5 hours into a 6-hour trek around Gangtok, I enjoyed delicious kauri - "Sikkimese macaroni," the menu explained, in vegetable broth (non-meat food was a rarity on this trip), even as American Evangelical Christian praise music played in the background (an annoying song presumptuously called "You are wooooorthy!" I heard once when visiting Saddleback!). Turns out the gnocchi-shaped noodles are named after cowrie shells - up here in the mountains, miles from any sea? Aha: Sikkim straddles a trade route...

• About half of Sikkim borders China - to north and east - and Indian domestic tourists apparently all go visit one of the borders to shake hands with the Chinese border guards and pose for pictures with them. Foreign tourists need special permission to go there, so I contented myself with a bazaar of Chinese stuff on the Mahatma Gandhi Marg in Gangtok, which offered plexiglass idols of every religious tradition, Buddhist and Hindu and even, weirdly, Native American.

• A Bihari developer, whom I met at an India China Institute lunch at the Indian International Center in Delhi, described how he was selling a green development to religious Biharis. Each of his towers will have a shallow pool of water on its roof. This will do all sorts of good environmental work but is being sold as a place for an important annual ritual where one greets the sun waist-deep in a pool! They're also making all sorts of vastu calculations - a neglected Hindu tradition of architectural energies recently revived in response to middle-class Indian enthusiasm for feng-shui, India-China relations in action.

• The world's-first Bollywood-meets-Vegas musical "Zangoora: The Gypsy Prince," in a world's fair-like theme park called Kingdom of Dreams in space-agey Gurgaon, was a surprise hit, even with my dejected Bengali economist friend. I'd not appreciated what stamina Bollywood dance requires, on top of remarkable athleticism. Not a great story, but a new genre being born, bringing together Bollywood dance and song with Cirque du Soleil-like aerial acrobatics and luminous Japanese anime=like LED sets - I won't be surprised to see something like it reaching these shores in a few years. In "Culture Gully," the food court next door, with the cuisines and replicas of monuments of most Indian states, my friend asked a bartender if they had wine. Yes, red, he was told. What kind of wine? It's wine, was the reply. But what kind? Wine is wine, said the exasperated bartender, you know, grape alcohol: wine. (I had beer.)

• Next to St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic church, perched along the road just above the Sikkim University Guest House, is a fiberglass model of Mount Kangchenjunga with a grotto of the Virgin Mary inside. Before I dismiss it (it's positioned so you see the actual Kangchenjunga just beyond it - can one compete with that and win?) I need to think of all the Lepchas (descended from the snows of their mother-creator Kangchenjunga) who have become Christian over the years. Everyday religion par exellence, no? Besides, religious doubling and cooptation are defining features of the landscape here. Like in Darjeeling:

• The highest point of Darjeeling town is now called Observatory Hill, but once was the site of a Buddhist monastery (Dorje Ling). Now a Hindu-Buddhist temple complex sits atop it, called Mahakal, at whose center a Hindu pandit and a Buddhist monk sit in a tiny room facing each other, chanting texts each from his own traditions. They flank a statue (in Indian English they actually call them "idols") of Shiva so covered in garlands of marigolds as to be unrecognizable, and devotees of both traditions come to make offerings. The two traditions aren't just practiced side-by-side here, in silent parallel, but face-to-face!

• I figured out that badminton, apparently a common winter sport here, is the perfect sport for hill cities (think about it). Maybe I'll find a way to make it an image of religion in these parts!

• At the security check at Indira Gandhi International Airport on my way home, agents asked me to show them what was in my backpack. "It's a metal statue," I said, unwrapping the yellow silk shawl around the bronze Saraswati I received from the Gangtok book store. An agent held it in her cupped hand and said, reverently, smilingly, "It's a god!"

(Okay, I'll identify the pictures. In the plane, Heathrow-Delhi. Autorickshaw in Delhi traffic.Public library and other buildings of representative build in Darjeeling. A student's imagining of the Darjeeling of the future. A well in the poorer parts of Darjeeling. World cup chart. Sweets celebrating my colleague's wife's safe delivery. Frozen dew near Bhutia Busty monastery. A dog and Kangchenjunga. Top-end tea shop in Darjeeling. Sign in Gangtok. Prayer flags. Tibetan monks in the bowels of a monastery which looked like a public housing project. A monastery I wasn't supposed to take a picture of. Prayer missal of an Evangelical group. Prize-winning fenugreek at Rorathang. View from makeshift restaurant at Rorathang. Representative truck. Tea garden near Bagdogra. Roadside flower by tea garden. Jama Masjid in Delhi. Rehearsal for national day celebrations at Rashtrapati Bhawan, Delhi - notice the camels! Quwwali singing at Nizamuddin.)

70 litres of loot

2012-01-22T09:08:00.001-05:00

Back home in Brooklyn, and what do I have to show for my sixteen days in India? Seventy liters worth of stuff! Well not quite, since there was the sleeping bag and clothing too. But my new 70l backpack was packed to the gills. I didn't have a chance to go to Cottage Industries for crafts, but otherwise I think I did alright. Better than these variously serious variously religiony books, the Chinese-made solar-powered dashboard prayer wheel and the acres of tea (ready for distribution!), is the Buddhist-looking statue of goddess of knowledge Saraswati, a gift from the bookstore in Gangtok, and what it stands for: new friends.

2012-01-21T08:45:00.004-05:00

From today's paper (The Hindu) - some Islamic seminary vice chancellor decided that the presence of Salman Rushdie at the Jaipur Literary Festival would be anathema and he should be denied a visa. He pointed out he didn't near a visa, but organizers gently caved. The invitation stood, they said, but Rushdie was not coming. For his part Rushdie sent a statement saying that there was credible information that assassins were being sent his way, and that it would be irresponsible to come.
But then this happened: several other participants read from The Satanic Verses, a book India banned even before the Iranian fatwa. Good for them!

[Update:
the "credible information" seems to have been made up by the police!]

Mannequins

2012-01-20T12:46:00.000-05:00

I feel bad taking pictures of people, but not mannequins. Or gods.

Chandni Chowk

2012-01-19T22:26:00.002-05:00

It's almost impossible to take an uninteresting picture in Chandni Chowk.

Avian Delhi

2012-01-18T05:29:00.003-05:00

A pigeon at Old Delhi's Red Fort, as scores of hawks circled overhead.

Reunions

2012-01-17T05:31:00.005-05:00

Back in Delhi, reunions with old friends, colleagues, family of friends. At their house in Gurgaon the parents of my graduate pal P, now quite an important person, remember that when I stayed with them last, almost five years ago, I'd been in the pilgrimage site Chitrakoot (something I'd forgotten; all credit goes to Intrepid Tours). At a coffee shop in Khan Market and then the India International Center, I met colleagues and friends of our school's India China Institute, from economists to urban designers, green developers to university-planters (I'll have to tell you some time about the explosion of institutions of higher education of every shape and form in these parts)... a family which now has a religious studies branch, too! At the Center for Policy Research, P opined that the US' problem is not the 1% but a class of people who have made it to the top of newly open and meritocratic institutions and believe they deserve their wealth - old-style conservatives like Hayek and Friedman, he said, warned against ethicizing the results of capitalism: "you can shame an aristocracy, but not a meritocracy." And then at a restaurant in Hauz Khas my Bengali friend S who took particular pleasure in upending my previously unenthusiastic view of South Indian cuisine: Gun Powder's Andhra-style sweet and sour pumpkin is to die for!

Durga puja prep

2012-01-16T12:43:00.005-05:00

I spotted this workshop in Bagdogra the day I headed for Darjeeling. At that point the Durga figures were headless. Before returning to Delhi today I found that all now have heads and at least two have faces.

Highway to heaven?

2012-01-16T01:51:00.006-05:00

Because of a threatened strike today, my Gangtok hosts suggested I head down to the plains where the airport is already on Sunday, directly after our excursion. It was an adventure. I sat in the front of a shared jeep, only slowly becoming aware that besides the three of us in the front seat, there were another dozen people behind us, four each in seats and four more (plus a baby) in the hold behind the last row. For all I know we were even more - I saw similar jeeps with up to six people sitting on top and another three or four hanging off the back. One van I saw must have been transporting twenty people, half inside, half outside!

However many we were, agile driving and near continuous use of the horn helped us make good time, arriving in Siliguri from Rangpo in just two and a half hours, in the dark. We followed the grand windy Teesta River, sometimes in broad valleys (two with big dams in the works, I think) and as often high above narrow S-shaped gorges. It's a stunningly beautiful region, and watching night fall around it (don't suppose anyone lives here to puncture the scene with lights except us cars) was like a dream, all of us in the jeep silent (praying or snoozing?) ... at least until something triggered the driver's clear plastic Ganesh dashboard charm to start blinking in alternate blue-white and red-green.

There had been people walking along the road the whole way - shadows emerging briefly into color as we drove beeping by - but come Siliguri the road was full of conveyances of every size and speed, and most of them without lights. That we didn't run over several pedestrians and many cyclists and knock a few cycle rickshaws and an auto-rickshaws off the road before ourselves slamming into the back of a larger jeep seems a miracle. Some calves trotting through the traffic towards us nearly had our hide, too. But arrive safely we did, and an auto-rickshaw (they're called tuktuks in other places) festooned with Jesus stickers took me the rest of the way to my hotel in the airport town of Bagdogra.

So my Himalayan foothill adventure has ended. (Four days in Delhi remain.) I'm not entirely sure what it all adds up to, beyond the connections I made to research partners of our project ERSEH (Everyday religion and sustainable environments in the Himalaya). I did lots of interesting things, but this is a bad time to visit if you're hoping to meet people. In Gangtok in particular, where the university is in recess and many people have headed to the plains for various reasons, there was an off-season deadness to it - even as, of course, the "everyday religion" is concerned with hummed along, in and out of view. (Thank goodness a New School colleague hooked me up with the wonderful world of Rachna Books, Gangtok's nascent public sphere.)

What I take from my time in Darj, Gangtok and Rorathang is that these mountain cultures are complex composites which found ways of accepting and even perhaps embracing the plurality of languages, cultures, and religions, both at the lived and at the governance level. They are under great strain now, though, because of demographic changes including galloping urbanization (Gangtok's population tripled between the census of 2001 and 2011) and the arrival of new purity-focused religious and political groups.

For instance, I'm told old-style Nepali Christians received the tika on their forehead from their priests, and didn't observe Christmas when in mourning, but the newer missionaries insist on strict separation from other practices. I understand Hindu fundamentalists are making similar claims. Lepchas, the indigenous(ish) people of this area, most of whom have in recent centuries assimilated more or less with Buddhist and Christian traditions, are now asserting a distinct religious identity. Meanwhile there are all sorts of new religions (in Darjeeling prominently the followers of the recently deceased Sai Baba), most of which preach the mantra of love and the unity of all religions, which can mean all sorts of things in practice...!

And then there's Kangchenjunga, tea, millet beer, vestigial Brits and trans-territorial Tibetans, tourists and dam-builders, and whatever it is that inspired a Beatles-themed lodge in Darjeeling and let the Sikkimese death metal band I heard at the rooftop bar Little Italy in Gangtok do a pitch-perfect cover of "Highway to Hell" on Saturday night. I suppose it's a sign of success when you start to understand that you really don't understand a place, but that there's plenty to understand!

Mountain fair

2012-01-15T11:28:00.003-05:00

For my last day in Sikkim, my two Sikkim University colleagues took me with them to a mela (religious fair) on a river called Rorathang: lovely country, rugged roads, crazy driver... we even had a puncture!

This was one of several groups' model sacrifices for the day: the ram was alive yesterday. Dignitaries (they tried to recruit me to the dais!) were treated to an endless dignified dances by brahman/chetriya maidens balancing flames on their heads - after a rather more dynamic Limboo dance, traditional moves to a contemporary dance house mix. A tombola was one of many gambling opportunities. And then the rides -

traditional, and Mickey Mousey globalization-standard too. Everything from ministers to merry-go-rounds came up that road!

Kangchenjunga

2012-01-14T13:02:00.002-05:00

Have I mentioned that Kangchenjunga overlooks Gangtok, too? Darjeeling gets to see more of it, but Gangtok is closer, and the angle makes its peaks peakier. It shines long before sunlight hits Gangtok - above and below the view from Development Area, where I'm staying.

From the Mahatma-Gandhi Marg you get a slightly different view.

And from Enchey Monastery of an afternoon, a different one again.

Bonus: from the Bagdogra-Delhi flight:

Gangtok & environs

2012-01-13T09:29:00.000-05:00

Gangtok from Rumtek monastery; poinsettia tree; two scenes near Rumtek (where photography is prohibited, though I could probably have taken a picture of all the Red Bull on sale in the monks' commissary); Enchey monastery; orchids; a tree fern; posters for sale off M.-G. Marg.

First impressions of Sikkim

2012-01-12T13:58:00.012-05:00

Gangtok, capital of the once independent kingdom of Sikkim, makes for a fascinating contrast with nearby Darjeeling. The drive up yesterday - almost four and a half bumpy hours, rarely at faster than 30km/hour - was steep mountains followed by landslide-rutted roads along a cold green river and finally back up into gentler hills etched with rice terraces past huge power stations, institutes and factories, all freshly painted. The road along the Teesta River is the only road in. After the mountain vertigo and the barren wilds of the first two hours a landscape so prosperous it was reminding me of Japan or Switzerland and then, when we arrived in the bright lights of Gangtok proper in the late afternoon, Dubai or, considering the verticality of it all, something out of Miyazaki Hayao, perhaps Laputa. (The prosperity is the result of Indian government support of its newest state.) Darjeeling's got three times the population, but seemed three times smaller and poorer: a country town, not a city. [Correction: I learn that in the past decade Gangtok, too, has tripled in population, reaching one lakh, 100,000.]

And where Darjeeling's history is quite recent, Sikkim's is a bit older. The dozen people who came to our discussion of everyday religion at Sikkim's one literary bookstore were all aware that an originally animist tradition had Buddhist and later Hindu and Christian frameworks grafted on to it in ways outside and more recently arrived forms of "world religions" can't abide let alone appreciate. I know I shouldn't draw any conclusions from a comparison of two small events organized in the off-season in quite different contexts (community activist non-profit, bookstore), but I was struck that the Darjeeling discussion seemed haunted by the loss of traditions, practiced ironically and honored humanistically in others, while the Gangtok discussion conveyed a sense of vibrant practices abandoned at one's peril and led to a trading of stories of family traditions and angry spirits appeased by shamanistic rituals. My unrepresentative little Darjeeling group spoke of religion as love, ethics, family tradition, while the unrepresentative little Gangtok society was all about rituals and the occult realities that demand them.

Coming soon to a bookstore not so near to you

2012-01-11T01:31:00.000-05:00

Going down

2012-01-10T12:55:00.003-05:00

A beautiful day, and warm. (I peeled off two of my five layers at one point!) Best of all, Kangchenjunga (third-highest peak in the world, at 8586m) hovered above us all day, as I was taken down from the ridge, where the colonial Hill Station was, past busy streets and new and older borderline settlements to "the chute," where all Darjeeling's waste ends up, flanked by crematoria and an abattoir (which I won't show here).
Prayer flags at Buddhist-Hindu shrine Mahakali (Observatory Hill).

Street scene in the busy market below the touristy/Hill Station area.

Interfaith(ish) shrine at a spring in a slum below the railway station.

Newest, poorest settlement of Darjeeling, with tip of Kangchenjunga.

Letting the cat out of the basket

2012-01-09T21:42:00.001-05:00

At a discussion this afternoon about everyday religion in Darjeeling, with a religiously diverse group of workers in environmental activism, journalism, etc., I learned of a very special culture here, defined by funerals and humor.

Already yesterday my host told me that a distinctive feature of Darjeeling, where Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and indigenous people live cheek by jowl, is that everyone attends their friends' funerals, even if of a different religious tradition. Today the same point was made by several people. I learned that it's said that you don't have to go when invited to a marriage, but if you even hear of a funeral you must attend. That community coops, geographically rather than ethnically based, share the costs of funerals. And that Darjeelingers who leave dream of dying in Darjeeling, as there'll be lots of people at their funerals. Seems like funerals are the place to be - and evidently people have a good time, lots of laughter.

I don't know if people in other areas are really more humorless than this group, but we had a rollicking good time, especially once the one religious leader present had to go. Discussion of humor arose at the same time as discussion of loss - Lepcha (indigenous people of this area) told how his religion, a nature religion, could not be practiced in the city, and a Hindu described the lengths one had to go to to get ritually required materials - though bathing before a ritual had gone by the wayside, as Darjeeling is perennially short on water. Then a Rai told this story and we all laughed and laughed. Apparentlyeh heard it from his younger brother:

There was a family which had a ritual involving milk and fish. Whenever he performed it, the grandfather, knowing it would likely interfere, took the cat and put it in a basket. His grandson, a child, thought that putting a cat in a basket was the ritual, and a generation later people were looking for and wide for a cat every time the ritual had to be performed.

What wisdom is there in that story, and irony, and loss.

2012-01-09T10:01:00.003-05:00

Cold, you might think (I think it's actually got milder since this reading), but not cold enough to make Darjeeling folk close their windows!

(Houses built to stay cool in the summer can actually be chillier than the outdoors, I'm told.) And it's cleared up, so no snow, at least not tonight. There's also something fishy about this - the actual temp listed at time of writing was -3. The temp measure is at a place called Pagri, but even in the Himalaya a dew point below freezing seems unlikely.

Himalayan critters

2012-01-08T06:18:00.003-05:00

At the world's highest zoo, saw several of the endangered Himalayan animals they are saving: the adorable red panda, father and child langurs, an Asian black bear and Tibetan wolves... while a leopard and a Bengal tiger were up and about (another tiger was making terrifying roars from inside a curtained enclosure). I was sorry the civet, barking deer, the snow and the clouded leopard weren't receiving visitors.

Magellan?

2012-01-08T05:19:00.003-05:00

It being a Sunday, I popped into a church this morning - Union Chapel, right next to Revolver. A small Nepali-language congregation - seven - but there's another church two houses down with a later service, which was hopping when I walked by later. Both are Church of North India, a union of Protestant churches (including Anglican/Episcopal) consolidated 40 years ago, whose mission statement, according to their website, is:

The Church of North India as a United and Uniting together is committed to announce the Good News of the reign of God inaugurated through death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in proclamation and to demonstrate in actions to restore the integrity of Gods creation through continuous struggle against the demonic powers by breaking down the barriers of caste, class, gender, economic inequality and exploitation of the nature.

Hmmm, those are certainly powers worth struggling against, and the bits of today's sermon which the priest sent my way in English were all about addressing the material as well as spiritual hunger of the world. What does "demonic" add in the context of the experience of Indian Christians? Also on their website was something even harder to scan:

What? Which church says the world is flat? A websearch reveals that the quote - presumably being challenged, not endorsed, here - is apparently from Ferdinand Magellan, and popular among t-shirt atheists. Is it so well known, in this connection or another, in India that it can be offered without commentary? What are we supposed to take from this "quote of the day"? Seems like a slogan for lived religion to me...

Steep

2012-01-07T09:31:00.001-05:00

Greetings from Darjeeling, 2000 meters above the plain where the Bagdogra airport lies, a three-hour drive (it can take four) despite the fact that a landslide had closed off the main road. Even when we joined the main road it was generally barely a lane wide and went steeply up up up in hairpins like I've never seen before. A steady stream of SUVs going up and down, many packed with eleven people inside and more on top or standing on the back fender, passed within centimeters of each other every minute or so. But it got me to Darjeeling, which is on terrain no less steep, and which I look forward to exploring tomorrow.

Delhi day

2012-01-06T13:27:00.018-05:00

A full day in Delhi, visiting an old friend - the 800 year old Qutub Minar, built at the establish- ment of Muslim rule - and the temples of two 19th century religions: Akshardam, the Swaminarayan sect's theme park-like fantasy of a Vedic India (no cameras allowed), and the Baha'i's friendlier international style Lotus Temple (yes, that's the sun). Tomorrow I head for the hills!

2012-01-05T13:41:00.004-05:00

Thirty+ hours from Solana Beach to LAX to Heathrow to Delhi to my hotel in Green Park, departing Tuesday and arriving Thursday! I staggered around for a few hours on arrival and called it a day.

California adieu!

2012-01-03T17:03:00.001-05:00

New worlds

2012-01-02T23:51:00.002-05:00

The Maritime Museum of San Diego is reconstructing the San Salvador, lead ship of the fleet of Juan Cabrillo, who arrived in San Diego in 1542, long before Jamestown! Apparently it's a more demanding task than expected, but I expect much progress before I next see it, when I return to California this summer. Sebastian Münster's trippy 1552 map "Die Nüw Welt" (no wonder Japan feels so close!) is part of their display.

Job done, well...

2012-01-02T15:13:00.001-05:00

Did I really just send off a filled-in if still ragged manuscript of a whole biography of the Book of Job?

2012-01-01T18:43:00.004-05:00

May your voyage through 2012 be accompanied by dolphins!

Happy new year!

2012-01-01T03:13:00.002-05:00

Budding pine cones

2011-12-30T20:37:00.000-05:00

Brand new Torrey Pines conelets, and one year old...

Patience of Job

2011-12-30T13:06:00.001-05:00

Patching holes and smoothing out my Job discussions is slow work!
Maerten de Heemskerck, Job's Triumph (1559), National Gallery of Art, Washington

Engulfed

2011-12-29T19:57:00.001-05:00

The rogue fog bank came barreling in today just as the sun was setting.

New year approaches

2011-12-28T20:48:00.003-05:00

Knock knock

2011-12-28T18:09:00.002-05:00

I could have posted this a few days ago, but home for the holidays is a sort of limbo; time pools, like a tidal river shifting from flowing upstream to downstream. (And the week after Christmas is shapeless and unmotivated on top of that.) Anyway, I went to church with my mother on Christmas, and had my first experience of the new-old Catholic liturgy. We didn't do all of it: no striking here, for instance:

I guess California has faults enough already! Elsewhere the new wording (conveniently in bold on a laminated worship aid) seemed more of a joke, albeit one everyone was in on, but throughout there is a stronger emphasis on human sinfulness and divine mercy. The only disruption came in the sung prayers, the new wording not having the same number of syllables as the earlier words for which the melodies were crafted.

Company man

2011-12-27T21:42:00.001-05:00

Realized the other day with some shock that my next semester will be All New School, All The time. On top of the lecture course my friend J and I are teaching on the history of the school, "The New School Century," I'm part of the Middle States review process (surveying the curricula of all divisions, with particular attention to "general education") and also seconded to a university-wide review committee which will look over at least forty cases from across the university... I foolishly put my name in for the strategic planning process on which our college's new dean wants to embark, too. Past, present and future, but all New School. Whew!

Where's the religious studies in all this? Good question! I'm looking forward to ferreting out religious and religious studies elements to New School history - early Presbyterian supporters! Horace Kallen's views on the religion of art! Alvin Johnson's pro-Christian opposition to fascism! Leo Strauss' medievalism! Reinhold Niebuhr's lectures in the 1950s! Hans Jonas' views on gnosticism! our powerhouse sociologists of religion! Talal Asad! Queer Christianities! - though they probably won't find their way into the course. It's not, I assure you, that New School has become my religion! But it does seem to be pretty common for religious studies professors to be good university citizens... mea culpa.

Not that any of this seems very real, one week from departure for India!

2011-12-26T21:27:00.000-05:00

Gods and gulls

2011-12-25T22:36:00.001-05:00

Dusk at very low tide at Torrey Pines State Beach brings wonders.

O Tannenbaum

2011-12-25T16:29:00.000-05:00

Wise Christmas wishes from some of my German cousins. Rough translation: A happy Christmas, a few days' peace, time to go for a walk and let one's thoughts roam, time for oneself, for the family, for friends. Time to gather strength for the new year. A year without fear and big worries, with just as much success as one needs to be content, and only as much stress as one can bear to remain healthy, with as little anger as possible and as much joy as needed to be happy for 365 days. This Christmas tree of good wishes is sent with warm greetings by...

And to all a good night

2011-12-23T23:10:00.000-05:00

Bali hai

2011-12-23T20:20:00.004-05:00

You don't often see Catalina from Del Mar, let alone as clearly as this.

While you were out

2011-12-22T20:27:00.003-05:00

Cliff-fall at TPSB. Here's what's gone, in a picture from five years ago:

A month away

2011-12-20T23:44:00.002-05:00

I fly tomorrow, and don't return for a month! Be well, dear NYC!

Mourning rituals

2011-12-20T20:44:00.004-05:00

I find I'm absolutely fascinated by the images of mass mourning we've been getting from North Korea. These are all from the New York Times; the one above appeared in the paper the day the news broke.

I'm not saying I doubt the genuineness of the emotion shown here - especially as a crowd phenomenon it makes sense. But I also don't doubt that these displays are organized. I don't see a contradiction here. Seen from religious studies, true performance of correct feeling is a familiar phenomenon - but still in its way a baffling one. I take as confirmation of the intentionalness of the desired emotion North Korean

TV's including this scene of students at an acting school weeping. They're actors! Are we to think this is involuntary? I doubt it. Something beyond spontaneous expression of "genuine" emotion is at play here.

New kids of the block

2011-12-19T12:38:00.003-05:00

The baby tree stork passed through Prospect Place today, and left a new

tree where the one destroyed by last year's tornado stood!

A Japanese pagoda tree!

Holiday pageant

2011-12-18T15:32:00.002-05:00

Went to a church on the Upper West Side today with some friends, and attended the wonderful and witty Christmas pageant put on by children from different Sunday school age groups. The kindergarteners appeared as a line of angels in home-made costumes singing "Go tell it on the mountain." First and second graders imagined Joseph at the census trying to explain that he was not the biological father of his son Jesus.
This group here did a kind of numerological catechism (four evangelists, ten commandments, etc.), with a key to its often obscure references offered by the boy on the end; this was for the number five. Young teens did a Harry Potter-themed skit (the one who cannot be named is tricked into zombiehood by the choir director). High schoolers had a skit about not being able to agree on a script for their skit. Wonders of youth!

Hole in one

2011-12-17T14:01:00.003-05:00

The Tri-Faith Initiative in Omaha is planning a synagogue, a church (Episcopal) and a mosque on the same "campus," a converted country club, together with a shared "Tri-Faith Center" for functions. It takes the emerging interreligious landscape of America and makes it intentional.
They already have a shared children's program called "Interplay," and a prayer: "Our vision is to build bridges of respect, acceptance and trust, to challenge stereotypes, to learn from each other and to counter the influence of fear and misunderstanding." Possibilities ... endless!

Jesus!

2011-12-16T12:41:00.005-05:00

Recognize this chap? It's our old friend Job, of course! The (unattributed) image is from a prayer card a friend found in the church of San Giobbe in Venice.The tradition seeing Job as a "type" of Christ is evidently alive and well. This Job hasn't torn his clothes or shorn his hair in mourning for his lost children, and his skin is rash- and boil-free. Indeed, tho' his wife looks old, he looks about, well, thirty-three.

2011-12-16T11:41:00.003-05:00

How deliciously New York. A gingerbread subway car!

Student's eye view

2011-12-15T21:39:00.001-05:00

fashionable religion

2011-12-14T23:07:00.005-05:00

In the welter of end-of-year activities we started something new this week, too. A Swedish fashion designer who has recently joined the Parsons School of Design Strategies contacted our religious studies program to propose some sort of collaboration. In Gothenberg he had attended several seminars in the Theology Faculty. Apparently his dissertation explored the applicability of the liberation theological concept of "base communities" to innovative fashion production, although he seems more interested now in talking about heresy. In any case, I invited him to class a few times, and then, Monday night, we had a first official gathering on the religion-fashion connection, in a studio at Parsons - half a dozen faculty and students from each program attended. I thought I might end up with something wearable by the end of the event but that will come later. For now it was just a free- wheeling discussion exploring affinities, metaphors, synergies, of which there are more than a few. It turns out that the Integrated Design Program explains its relationship to design and design studies more generally much the way lived religion relates to "institutional" religion. "Capital F fasion" is, he says, like organized religion, with its authorities, sacred texts and practices, but what they're interested in is more fluid, more egalitarian, spunkier - and integrated with all of life. Everyone gets dressed, his Dutch colleague P said, there's no reason fashion (small f) shouldn't be part of everyone's everyday life. (She doesn't seem to think the same about religion.) We have much to teach each other and learn from each other. We reconvene in February - join us? If not wearables we'll at least be producing a few pamphlets on the subject!

Darjeeling local

2011-12-13T23:46:00.001-05:00

In three and a half weeks I'll be in the Himalayan foothills of northeast India. Apparently it takes between two and four hours by car (taxi) to get from Bagdogra Airport (A, 1243m) to Darjeeling (B, 2050m), and about as long again to get to Gangtok in Sikkim (C, 1437m).

The customer was king

2011-12-12T15:40:00.003-05:00

Latest casualty of restless New York real estate, the Japanese-run cafe Thé Adoré on 13th. It was like an oasis of calm. Gochisousama deshita.

2011-12-11T22:28:00.000-05:00

Wish I were convinced this revision will do the trick...

Tapahonso

2011-12-10T09:40:00.004-05:00

Remember that Navajo nativity poem I heard about at AAR? Here it is.

The poet is Luci Tapahonso. Another poem takes me back to the deep comfort of driving - being driven - at night among New Mexico mesas.

Luci Tapahonso, A Breeze Swept Through (Albuquerque: West End Press, 1987), 18-19, 4

Just in time

2011-12-09T23:07:00.000-05:00

You'll know by now that one thing I particularly enjoy is belatedly learning to appreciate something of greatness which originally didn't move me. (In some cases it's doubtless the pendant to an earlier, less generous-spirited pleasure: finding highly praised things overrated.) Tonight I had the chance to see what the fuss about Merce Cunningham was all about - and just in time, as it was the penultimate performance of his dance company, which ends its 58-year run tomorrow night. (Cunningham himself died in 2009, at ninety.) The program was Pond

Way (1998), Rainforest (1968), and Split Sides, premiered in this very space, the BAM Opera House, in 2003. Each was lovely in its own way, every movement a delightful surprise. The last piece, which will also close tomorrow's final performance, has a sly game built into it. It starts with five rolls of a die, to determine in which order the two dances, costumes, soundtracks, lighting designs and sets should be performed. There are 2⁵ = 32 possibilities. But although you see only one - the one we saw was exquisite - you also see them all. Nothing is missing.

Duck, here comes Christmas!

2011-12-08T22:45:00.005-05:00

Someone sent me the link to someone's collection of the "worst nativity sets." Some of them are pretty awful, but as a set they raise some rather interesting "lived religion" questions. Is this religion? Isn't it? Something like this awful-wonderful zombie nativity must be a gag, as is the bacon and sausage nativity you'll have to look up on his site. But cupcake topper nativity seems like it could be an expression of some

kind of piety. And what about dog nativity? While I'm not a dog person I can see how this might be more than dog-worship, might be its own tender expression of "O come let us adore him." Celebrate the coming of Christ into your life by expressing something of yourself: isn't that the sort of thing "lived religion" takes seriously? But wasn't Jesus' human form sort of central? Maybe not. WWJD? Better a moose than a zombie.

The twain meets

2011-12-08T22:21:00.001-05:00

One of the great myths of the world of publishing is that some nobody gives a talk somewhere, perhaps her first, and afterward the editor of a distinguished press or journal comes up and enthsuses "I loved it! Can I publish it?" Well, something a little like that happened to me yesterday at my colleague Henry's reading series. I was of course reading from the "personal essay" H challenged me to write about my experience teaching the Aboriginal Australia course, an essay spent a lot of time on but didn't imagine or expect would ever have a career beyond this blog. It was my first "reading," that is, the first time I'd shared something as a piece of writing rather than an argument, analysis or research - it came after reading of a short story and some poems - and I was both relieved and disappointed that the audience was small; only one other colleague came, N, a loyal trooper who attends all student and faculty work. I'm not sure my reading was very good - I hurried, and stumbled, and got lost in my text. But it is interesting material, and I'd worked on my "self-dramatization." N said he liked it, which I was grateful for. But then it turns out that he edits a journal! A journal on Australian and New Zealand literature, no less, Antipodes! And they're going to publish it!
(This map is someone's effort to show what antipodes means.)

I could use a hand or two or three

2011-12-07T11:48:00.001-05:00

Past, present and future converge at this time of year, but this week is a more than usually all-over-the-place. At the end of Fall semester there's always the whiplash of wrapping up this semester's classes, preparing for next semester's classes, and planning the curricula for Religious Studies and the First Year Program for the two semesters after that. But this time I'm also planning a roundtable and a big conference for the Spring (Lived Religion, 2/23 and Queer Christianities 3/23-24), making arrangements for a trip to India, and finishing a book manuscript - oh, and this afternoon reading a revised excerpt of my essay on a course from last semester. So Spring '11, Fall '11, Spring '12, Fall '12 and Spring '13, all at once...

Traveling papers

2011-12-06T22:13:00.003-05:00

A new page in my passport! As long as I leave intervals of two months between visits, I can go and go to India without another visit to the visa

agency until my passport expires! Feels like a commitment - in any case an opening... (A month from now I'll be getting ready for Darjeeling!)