Gods and gulls

 

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

O Tannenbaum

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

Bali hai

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

While you were out

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

A month away

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

Mourning rituals

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 on the block

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

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

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!

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.

How deliciously New York. A gingerbread subway car!

Student's eye view

fashionable religion

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

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

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.

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

Tapahonso

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

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!

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

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 I 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

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

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!)

We've started something

The course J and I will be teaching on the history of The New School ("The New School Century") is garnering quite a bit of interest and enthusiasm. The editor of the school paper's become obsessed with the question why we never created an archive, and is collecting images of materials on his own. Here are two of his trouvailles, 1930 and 1956.

BBG

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden promised foliage at this late date. I should have known it would be on the ground! Even the bonsai trees are in winter mode. That made the enormous tiger orchid in the Aquatic House - its first blooming since 2005 - a that much more welcome discovery.

"Conflict and fury"

Remember that essay my colleague H challenged me to write about the Aboriginal Australia course this past June? Well, he's invited me to read from it at this month's meeting of the Writing Progam's Faculty Reading Series (next week!). Exciting, but more than a little terrifying. I don't think of myself as a writer, and, while I've given papers and lectures, I have never given a reading. On the other hand, I did think this essay - a "personal narrative" more akin to my voice here in this blog than in the academic things I occasionally joylessly write - was close to ready for prime time.

Think again! H and I met this afternoon, and, more and less gently, he made clear that my attempt not to sound like an academic paper sounded like - an academic paper. In order to succeed for a general audience and especially as something personal and autobiographical, many changes are needed. These came in all sizes, from word choices and tenses to the relative proportions of different sections. (I was foolish to think the main thing was shorter sentences, though they'll help too.) The main thing, however, was that in my first version I was not "self-dramatizing."

My first reaction was that this was as it should be. "Self-dramatizing" sounds like a criticism of self-involved and self-indulgent writing. But H's use of the term was different. Part of the task of writing in the autobiographical mode is bringing the self clearly, precisely, convincingly to the fore. Academic writing does the opposite. Even as we often sense axes being ground, the voice is almost pathologically lacking in "self-dramatization." In any case, mine here was. At best I described feeling but didn't convey it. Even places where I thought I'd cannily let some emotion through - like when I said that "I was not happy" about a student's bringing Elizabeth Durack into my class - seemed to him lifeless and untrue. Judging from the way I'd described it to him, H suggested, I should have written "I was full of conflict and fury."

More than style is at issue here. Am I the sort of person who feels conflict and fury? (Actually, yes, I am.) Can I admit this - first to myself, then to my readers? It could definitely make for a more interesting read.

H's criticisms filled me with, er, fury and conflict. Didn't he see that it was me he was attacking, my voice? But the fury soon ceded place to conflict, as his precise and pitch-perfect insights into particular word choices made clear that I had not, in fact, allowed a voice - a real voice, not a bemused, detached academic one - into my essay at all! And then came gratitude, even a little pride. As he taught me to scratch the polished surface of my text, deeper, more interesting things came out. He wasn't attacking me but rescuing me. There is a deeper voice, deeper than the careful academic calibrations and modest suggestions, knowing colloquialisms and superficial ironies. I can't remember the last time anyone paid such close attention to my writing or use of language.

One example. In a passage where I worry that I have merely been projecting my own preconceptions and desires on to Aboriginal materials, I write: "But I persist in feeling that this wasn't just projection." I thought this was bold. It's really the opposite. Instead of owning my conviction, taking a risk, I disown it by attributing it to some obscure "persistence" from some "I" who isn't quite me. (It could be even worse than that, since it can seem the wilfulness of the intrepid colonizer.) It takes me another paragraph to get to the limp "This is a point where I feel I may have learned something new from Aboriginal traditions," But I've already lost the battle, and the interest of the reader/listener. What I need to be saying is something like "Projection or no, I feel I have learned something new."

So it's back to the drawing board. I must in any case omit or compress a good third of the essay. But H has inspired me to try to name and own the emotions and desires which course beneath the surface of the text. For a personal narrative they are the very heart of the matter, but I can see that greater clarity about them might help my academic writing, too. I'm not sure where I'll end up this time. It may not be conflict and fury I admit to, but I promise it'll be truer than the empty "not happy."

An education in occupation

You might have heard that students have once again occupied a building at New School. It happened the day I flew to San Francisco for AAR, when police blocked the flow of a march of students from around the city which had intended to go from Union Square to Foley Square. The student study space at Fifth Ave and 14th Street (itself a victory of the last student occupation, one of whose demands was student space) became the center of a "Citywide All Student Occupation." Apparently it became quite an exciting space of meetings, discussions, etc., a mini-Zuccotti with flashbacks to Italian anarchism and other student movements around the world. Our university president announced he would let them stay, as vigorous discussion of issues of the day is what The New School is all about - so long as everyone stayed safe.

But it was also in a rented space, and the building owner and the fire marshal lodged complaints. The president offered the occupiers another space (a gallery in a building the university owns) and after a long and apparently very contentious debate, most of a General Assembly agreed to move. A remnant, insisting that you can't occupy a place someone offers you, held out in the student study center. They weren't going to leave, they announced on their website, and barricaded themselves in in anticipation of a police raid. On Thanksgiving I was one of several faculty invited by deans to a meeting Friday morning - perhaps we could talk to the occupiers? But by the time we showed up, the occupations had ended. The study center was empty, and five non-New School students sleeping in the gallery left too. Both spaces had been graffiti'd,the gallery in an angry hurry (this picture), the former in more organic and often witty ways (the rest). (We were taken on a tour of the spaces, where I took these pictures, there being no other reason for our gathering, besides worrying about the inevitable "next occupation" with anxiety and also desire.) And that, amazingly, was that. Both spaces are returned to their usual use, and the occupation has - at least for now - evaporated. Meanwhile, a university which made headlines for the NYPD-involved overreactions to earlier occupations is being praised for achieving a peaceful resolution - in the same week as Occupy evictions across the land and the UC Davis pepper-spraying seen around the world, no less. Peaceful discussion continues! And someone's proposed we print a t-shirt: We Promise You an Education and an Occupation.

December!

But the Japanese maples on West 12th Street are still in glorious color.