Flying carpet

Not quite sure what's what on this map, the welcome mat of a carpet import shop on Fifth Avenue. Is the white blog at lower left Australia, or it it the red thing at middle right? The Iberian peninsula has floated free of Europe, Asia, Africa and North America are shriveled, but Argentina is in the running for biggest land on the planet.

Keep the pot boiling

You might think my head is full of summer plans, but Christmas has snuck in. It's not because I'll be spending winter break with my Australian family, though I will be. (Christmas is in summer down there, remember!) Rather, the Kellen gallery at Parsons is putting together an exhibition called "Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story" for the summer months, and solicited ideas from faculty, who were to think about objects that might resonate with our areas of specialty. After considering cleaners' window Buddhas and eruv wires, I wound up proposing a Salvation Army red kettle with bell, an idea the curator welcomed. It will be strange if not salutory to encounter it indoors, in mid-summer, as an object in a museum - and silent! But as the curator goes about trying to locate one (and fifty other objects), I had to write a longish caption for it. Here's what I wound up with:

SALVATION ARMY RED KETTLE AND BELL

Silver bells,

Silver bells,

It’s Christmas time in the City…

The carol “Silver Bells,” composed by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans and famously crooned by Bing Crosby and Carol Richards, was one of the first songs to bring Christmas culture into line with the urbanization of American life. Livingston and Evans’s song has long been associated with the sound of Salvation Army bellringers, soliciting donations in their signature red kettles for the down and out. The song assimilates the ring-a-ling of Salvation Army bells with the lights and sounds of prosperous shoppers, stepping into the busy streets only to load up on treasures for cozy family scenes back home, but the Salvation Army’s red kettles invite us to a deeper reckoning with American religion’s ambivalent relationship with the city, with public space, and with the recipients of its charity.

Although it has come to be associated with the City, the red kettle wasn’t a New York invention. The Salvation Army grew out of English Methodism in the second half of the 19^th century. A sailors’ tradition from Liverpool inspired the first kettle soliciting donations for a Christmas meal for the indigent: suspended from a tripod, a kettle appeared on the Oakland Ferry landing in San Francisco in 1891 with the caption “Keep the pot boiling!” Within a few years, red kettle campaigns had spread throughout American cities. In New York, 1901 saw the first of many red kettle-funded sit-down Christmas dinners for the poor held in Madison Square Garden. A half century later, the musical and film “Guys and Dolls” led Americans to associate New York especially with the social problems organizations like the Salvation Army were called to address.

It’s no accident that the Salvation Army should be the most publicly visible and audible of religious organizations around Christmas, even disguised in the innocuous-seeming figure of Santa Claus. The “Army” had from the start steered clear of the trappings, titles and temples of traditional religion. Its mission was reclaiming the streets from sin, most conspicuously in the street corner meetings it called “chapels” or even “cathedrals of the open air.” It represented a challenge to what scholars call the privatization of religion and the concomitant secularization of public space.

Few who donate to the red kettle campaigns know of this history. Many don’t even know that the Salvation Army is a Christian denomination, indeed a politically very conservative one. What they see and hear is an opportunity to help the less fortunate: a street donation for those who, sadly, live on the streets. Do the kettle and its tripod recall the homeless of the past, huddled together against the cold? Many of the paid bell-ringers, in their jolly Santa suits, are themselves homeless.

Momiji

Somehow, despite my giddy oohing and aahing at Spring greens and Autumn scarlets, I never noticed that the reddish Japanese maples on 12th Street - presumably like Japanese maples everywhere - have seeds.

Jivin'

If you're familiar with the history of jazz, this picture will look familiar to you - until you look closer. "A Great Day in Harlem," the greatest photo-shoot of jazzmen ever, took place on this stoop on 126th Street in 1958. Only one person from that shoot is in this picture, taken half a century (to the day!) later. The great Marian McPartland, one of only two women in the 1958 shoot, is here surrounded by several generations of women jazz musicians. You can get to know many of them and their work in the terrific new documentary "The Girls in the Band," which I saw tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in the presence of director Judy Chaikin. Several other women jazz musicians were at the Q&A, thanked Chaikin for telling their story, and for correcting the androcentric bias of Ken Burns' "Jazz" series, but even they were unaware of most of this history. Glad the story's finally being told - and time for me to get a stack of new recordings for the collection!

Itinerary

As the countdown to my intemperate summer begins (I swear, I went to the travel agent hoping he'd tell me it was unmanageable to do all this in one trip), dates have come into focus. Perhaps I'll see you along the way?

May 24 - to San Diego

June 21 - to Melbourne (arriving June 23)

July 16 - to Kathmandu

(Kailash trip July 29 - Aug 9)

Aug 10 - to Paris (arrive Aug 11)

Aug 17 - home to New York

Trackwork

Because of weekend trackwork on the red lines, I accidentally got on a 1 after church and wound up at Rector Street. Thoroughly disoriented I took the first exit I could find, a good thing, as it deposited me right in front of an exhibition I'd forgotten I wanted to check out, Little Syria, NY: An Immigrant Community's Life and Legacy. The area around Washington Street used to be full of Ottoman immigrants from what are now Lebanon and Syria; it was referred to as "the mother colony of all the Arab settlements in the United States." The building of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel led to the destruction of most of the tenements; by the time World Trade Center was built on top of the north end, everyone had left. It's a fun little show with photos, music, a film, and some great maps. Here are two: a peddlar's map of the US from 1921, and an undated map of the ethnic neighborhoods of Manhattan, which also shows a second Little Syria just across the East River in Brooklyn.

Sunday's children

Behold the original Sunday dinner crew! My now Minneapolis-based friends J and A (top left, bottom right) are in town so we met for dinner at their place on West 90th St., as if nothing had changed. (Top right is J's sister S; a fifth, C, is taking the picture.) The biggest change isn't in any of our lives, although there are plenty, but in the vacant apartment down the hall from them, where Neighbor lived.

Summer stage

Today felt like summer. Every public space was full of people! Look closely and you'll see bands of people in summery colors behind the Washington Square Arch and in front of and on the balcony of the Met. I was at Lincoln Center not for the opera, but for New York City Ballet. To be precise, some of my dearest friends are in town tomorrow so I've given my ticket to the Met's "legendary" production of "Dialogues des Carmelites" away; as a consolation prize I got myself a ticket to the ballet tonight. And what a night it was! Part of the American Music Festival, we saw Balanchine's sublime 1954 cowboy and saloon girl ballet "Western Symphony" and two by Jerome Robbins - the groovy West Side Story-like teenagers of 1958's "N. Y. Export: Opus Jazz" (set by Ben Shahn!) and the lucid postmodern iterations of 1983's "Glass Pieces" to, yes, Philip Glass. They're as different from each other as they could be, but each a joy! Long live the dance, and viva América!

Spring comes to the city

and just like that, the flowers are gone, fresh greens are everywhere.

Hand-off

So today was the last official meeting of the Buddhism and Liberal Arts tutorial advising group. I invited them over for 手巻き寿司 temaki sushi... I suppose I went a little bit overboard, but I have no regrets! An excuse to make my own kimpira gobô, and my first rolled omelette. As you can see it's a jolly group and we've had a truly wonderful experience. I think we'll be seeing each other again, perhaps even as a group. (Actually two are signed up for courses with me next semester.) The plan's for a repeat of tonight in the Fall - with them cooking!

PS Is it just me, or does this remind you too of Brueghel's "Großer Blumenstrauß" (1606/7) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum?

More Springing trees, these on 12th Street

Hidden vegetarians

We tried to discuss Christian responsibilities to animals in "Exploring Religious Ethics" yesterday. The reading, Stanley Hauerwas and John Berkman's 1992 essay "The Chief End of All Flesh," builds an argument for Christian vegetarianism on analogy with an argument for Christian pacifism. Our discussion was lively but didn't get far off the ground as nobody admitted to finding pacifism compelling, convincing or even interesting. ("I wish I was more peaceful" was the extent of it.)

And vegetarianism? Two students owned that they were long-standing vegetarians but strenuously assured us that they told nobody. People had all sorts of reasons for being vegetarian, one said, just as other people had all sorts of reasons for what they did, and that was perfectly okay, everyone should do what they thought right - she would never judge. A fitful vegetarian myself I wondered that she was so willing to let others eat animals - but then I do, too. (I don't cook them or order them in restaurants, but I patronize meat-serving restaurants and willingly, indeed gratefully, partake when friends invite me over and serve meat. I have my reasons; it's not quite as weak-kneed as it sounds.)

I recalled a famous footnote in the essay:

Can one seriously discuss these questions with someone who is in the midst of eating a hamburger? We take this to be a serious question.

Theology Today 49/2 (July 1992), 197

The point is similar to the one made by William Pietz in an essay I use in "Theorizing Religion," which examines the emergence of concepts of fetishism out of the African slave trade, concepts he describes as "ideological" in the modern sense of "how you have to think in order to feel morally good about yourself given what you actually do." In that class I stress the counterintuitive understanding of the relationship of belief and action here posited. Structures of unjust action, unchosen and difficult to opt out of, shape and indeed force thought - but the thought which emerges tends to naturalize the contingent and soothe the troubled conscience. Hauerwas isn't tapping Marxist sources, as Pietz is, and in place of revolution he champions the witness of church. But that, too, is something you'd have to taste and see - or at least see?

Is there no point in discussing vegetarianism with animal-eaters, then? Hauerwas' thought has this cul de sac danger, particularly perilous in the relativism-infested waters of a liberal arts college, but we'll find a way out of it - if not, I fear, to an ethical encounter with "the other animals" in creation.

Oman what an itinerary!

Finalized my summer travel plans today, at least the flying parts. It's around the world! Thank goodness for STA Travel, my travel agents of choice since my Oxford days, who have all sorts of discounts for students and quite a few also for teachers. So after a month in California it's off to Melbourne via Auckland, from there to Kathmandu (and Kailash) via Kuala Lumpur, from there to Paris via Muscat, and home. This'll take me almost exactly the whole summer.

Skyline

What a spell of beautiful Spring days we've had! My visitors from the UK, who claim not to have seen the sun in months, were adamant about getting on the roof and soaking up some rays, even helped me finally work out a pulley system for getting refreshments up there. It is an impressive view, it must be said!

New friends

Queer Christianities 2 was another success, a worthy successor to last year's book-generating (we hope!) conference. This was a bare-bones operation, but I think that's part of what made it so genial. Nobody was getting an honorarium. (Our two out of town speakers got their travel paid but not accommodation; the one from Britain is staying, with her husband, on my queen size aerobed!) And the program? Stellar - really! The magic seems to be our freedom to bring things together that other institutions wouldn't or couldn't. So we had four amazingly strong papers by students, an undergraduate and three seminarians (two of whom are alums), a performance piece (to lunch), incisive talks by a cutting edge queer theologian and a leading sociologist of the body in American religion... And then a panel discussion gaily bringing everyone together.

On a clear day

An old friend from France is visiting New York with two of her kids - and eight other residents of the village where she lives. On a whim I invited them up to our Brooklyn roof as the sun was setting. We found a predictably grand vista and some fresh new graffiti. Rhode Island?!

Spring overhead

More zenned against than zenning?

I made this flower in class today. It was the second of our two sessions on Zen Buddhism in "Exploring Religious Ethics," and I tried something new. Last class I started by saying that it was kind of ridiculous to be trying to talk through Zen, but let's try anyway. The reading was from Tom Kasulis' Zen Action / Zen Person, a phenomenological account of Zen ethics, which goes almost word-by-word through some important lines of the 13th century Japanese Dôgen 道元, suggesting how we can only stop "producing evil" if we stop "producing" distinctions like good/evil. I also gave the class two comics from Tsai Chih Chung's Zen Speaks: Shouts of Nothingness (Anchor, 1994). Here's one of them:

So things were all set for me, today, to write our class timetable on the board and say "I'd like to teach you about Zen but right now I need to go relieve myself." I didn't actually leave the room, but the message was clear. They were on their own! And I set to my origami, an homage to the origin myth of the Zen tradition - the Buddha's disciples sat around waiting for a sermon more and more impatiently but he just held up a flower; only Kasyapa understood, and so he received the wordless transmission. My only other intervention, 35 minutes in, was quietly to call up a brief nature video (title blanked out and sound muted, projected in a rather ghostly way directly on our blackboard), which someone eventually thought it might be helpful to watch.

The reason for that was that today's reading was about the Zen of samurai warriors, a most troubling turn of events for Buddhist ethics. Suddenly the non-duality which we had thought made people more attentive to and compassionate toward others was showing up in explanation of beautifully lethal swordsmanship - the enlightened swordsman merely acts, his weapon a "sword that gives life," the enemy killing himself on it. Is Zen the poised perfection of human ethics or its nihilistic nadir? The egret filmlet was because we again spent time last class analyzing a poem by Dôgen:

世の中は

何にたとえん

水鳥の

はしふる露に

やどる月影

Being-in-the-world:

To what might it be compared?

Dwelling in the dewdrop

Fallen from a waterfowl's beak,

The image of the moon.

The scenes we had imagined - I invited students to draw them on the board - were romantic and calm, focusing on the evanescent image of the moon. The dewdrop was certainly not falling from a beak which had just taken life! The class took the bait. Was the enlightened samurai's prereflective spontaneity not like this egret's expert movement? After some discussion about whether animals think, etc., they came just short of the discovery that the egret, too, has the Buddha nature, and that the moon might dwell in the drop from a samurai's katana as well. Although it had fits and starts and awkward pauses, their discussion didn't need me at all! I kept waiting for someone to ask me to join the conversation, with words or a look; no such luck. Or: so much luck! Did we get somewhere? Who knows! I leave you with our other Zen comic.

Beckett!

Haven't been to the theater in yonks. I'm very glad I broke my fast and went to see "Fragments," a program of short pieces by Samuel Beckett at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a rather complex co-production of two directors and two theater companies with three actors in five pieces. It all managed to be spare and full and hilarious and pure and a little heartbreaking. This actor, Marcello Magni, did nothing in this piece but

 

labor through everyday activities, capping each one with a word-transcending shrug and a wheezing sigh that had the audience weeping with laughter. (In the heavier sack is his partner actor, Jos Houben.) The actress Kathryn Hunter has about the most remarkable throaty voice I've ever heard. We tend to forget that there is a sparkle to the absurdism of Beckett, and a deep humanity. See it if you can!

Monkey do

Found out by this gargoyle on 1879 Hall at Princeton Saturday.