Army of lovers

The New York Public Library has a very sweet lavender-walled exhibition on called "Love and Resistance: Stonewall 50" - almost too sweet. Along with all sorts of publications from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, there are lovely photos, mostly of couples, which warm the heart. How extra- aordinary to live in a time when one doesn't have to hide one's love,

 

where it can be known as love! But the gay liberation movement was about wilder couplings, too, shaking off pathologizing prejudices, embracing desire as part of a revolutionary counterculture and, like the women's movement, suspicious of marriage. Still, in our time of recrudescent hate and fear, preach it: An army of lovers will not lose!

Chinese boxes

One of the nice things about summer is that one isn't racing from one thing to another, juggling classes and meetings and student work. One can sit down with a book or article, follow its references, popping into libraries themselves enjoying blissful summer calm. Or one can sit down with a box of uncatalogued files from the Archives and find things nobody remembers, which link to others, and on and on, back to the library, etc.! Following tangents is the name of the game!

So, for instance, one can wander beyond the folders on Horace Kallen in Dean Clara Mayer's files to learn about other faculty. One of them might have a Chinese name, and turn out to have been planning a New School-like institution in Guangzhou, before the revolution made such a venture impossible. He might turn out to have become a member of the faculty, although racist immigration policies required that he be officially enrolled as a student. Or one might find a letter of Kallen's to a school president concerned at the appearance of a memoir by a past dean, which long-forgotten memoir the library of a neighboring university kindly gets for you from off-site, which sheds light on a whole bunch of open questions about the New School of the early 1960s...

Primary colors

 Since it was just a block away from where we were staying in Kingston, we worshipped with a Methodist congregation overshadowed by a giant window. Since it is Pentecost, the church's abundant blues and greens were complemented by the red balloons of a parade of children celebrating the birthday of the church.

Hudsonward

Perfect weekend for an outing! We spent it in the environs of Kingston, NY. The peonies are at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, "where

American art was born." The bluestone quarry is in little trafficked Sloan Gorge Reserve. And the 300-year-old stone house is where we stayed!

Disruptive freedom

 

Latest installment in our newer truer history of the New School is out, making use of a panoply of archival sources to show that our mantra academic freedom has meant quite different things to different people.

Future calling

One of the joys of early summer at the New School is that our galleries play host to an annual exhibition of art works by impossibly gifted teenagers, called Art.Write.Now. This amazing show never fails to overwhelm me. Would that all those whose economic and ecological recklessness is destroying the world for future generations could see it.

Augmented!

This is "Pride Month," and a special one too - the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. Every museum and gallery has something for it, none of which I've yet seen. But the predictably unpredictable New York subway had me at Christopher Street today, so I had a chance to check out the augmented reality monument you can access through your cellphone in the little commemorative park. It wasn't quite working smoothly yet; I'll come back, and with headphones - I'm sure it has a fabulous soundtrack!

Land of the religion-free

Well, Horace Kallen's quite the character. Given the chance to write something about him. I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed. The man was beyond prolific - forty books and countless articles, in all kinds of different venues and fora. I've found my Virgil, though, a scholar who's just completed a biography of Kallen (coming out end of this month!), with whom I've been exchanging passionate e-mails. He's helped me understand many things, not least how Hebraism - a term Kallen wrested from Matthew Arnold's pejorative usage - comes to define modernity and all its values: science, justice, democracy, internationalism. The "Hellenism" Arnold praised has been refuted by Darwin, who has shown concern with unchanging essences to be not just untrue to the world we live in but a refusal to accept and engage it.

We've persuaded the biographer to write a piece for the New School histories vertical, and it's been fun to watch it take shape. While New School was a center for Kallenism, most Kallen scholarship focuses on work he wrote before he came here, and on his participation in secular Jewish movements which crossed paths only implicitly with the New School. For each story, it turns out, Kallen left a not inconsiderable archive of works. For the moment I'm trying to find a way to characterize his engagement on multiple fronts simultaneously, to audiences which might have been distinct - but might also have overlapped. Was the Jewishness of Kallen's understanding of American democracy (Hebrew prophets by way of the Puritans, but especially by way of the proto-secularist Job) an open secret, an accepted open secret? Was Kallen operating in discrete worlds or linking them?

Today's discovery: at the very time Kallen was giving the talk on toleration at the New School which it's my task to contextualize, he had just published a poem in a journal called The Humanist. Another tussle with Arnold, this does "Dover Beach" one better (well, not perhaps poetically better), evoking the desolation someone might feel on a shore ever assailed by waves of gods called forth by human fear! A taste:

There's a denouement, which rather scrambles the metaphor. After a lampoon of assorted religious rituals (Catholic litany and Buddhist/Hindu Om) appears a lighthouse promising safe harbor - at Sankety, which a note explains is the easternmost point in the United States. America, refuge from the dull booming roar of old world religion!

Land ho! Strange prophet.

Horace M. Kallen, "Dr. Freud Says It's Compensation,"

The Humanist vol 10 (1 Jan 1950): 54-57, 55

Full monty

Some Chinese American friends took us to an Armenian restaurant in Patterson, NJ today. It seemed a long way to go but once we got to this frothy homemade yogurt, to be mixed with the "monty" beef dumpling soup at right, it was clear why it vaut le yoyage.

Terrible teeth

Jill Lepore's political history of the United States makes fascinating reading, brilliantly weaving personal stories with social and cultural ones, and allowing them to coalesce around central political questions: by what right does anyone rule over others, and how? The tale's in the telling but there are bits that I keep remembering on their own, each an education, or a reuducation. Here's a macro- one and a micro-.

Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas;they carried twelve million Africans there by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. Europe is spread over about four million square miles, the Americas over about twenty million square miles. For centuries, geography had constrained Europe's demographic and economic growth; that era came to a close when Europeans claimed lands five time the size of Europe. Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth, growth without precedent, growth many Europeans understood as evidence of the grace of God. (16-17)

[At the 1787 Constitutional Convention George] Washington, almost as striking at fifty-five as he'd been as a young man, was unanimously elected president. (His beauty was marred only by his terrible teeth, which had rotted and been replaced by dentures made from ivory and from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.) (120)

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

 

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,

The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,

The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, 

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 

It's the two hundredth birthday of Walt Whitman - did you recognize him in that engraving, before he had the John Muir beard? You should really take this occasion - as I did - to reread "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." You'll find yourself there, as I did, his arm around your shoulder, with all of nature and humanity ebbing and flowing in glory around you.

Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!

Kulilaya

Lovely linkage of heartbreaks from down under, these two canvases were painted by Pitjantjatjara women in the community of Amata (near Uluru) who heard about the massacre of Muslims in Christchurch. One was given to an Islamic community in Adelaide, the other sent to New Zealand. This is Nyunmiti Burton, whose idea it was. "For us when we lose someone, we go to the families and we go to the communities and we grieve, and we grieve and we grieve," Ms Burton told the ABC through an interpreter." Many Aboriginal paintings live in the strange habitat of the international art market, but these seem connected to original life of these motifs in the ritual lives of anangu communities.

Post-post-truth

Summer means time to read more widely! Top of my pile, Jill Lepore's political history of the US. Nobody's dared to write a large scale history like this in decades, but now seems the time, since different Americans seem to inhabit such different understandings of the nation and its past. (I haven't done American history since high school!) To study the past, she promises, is to unlock the prison of the present (xvi).

Desert painters

Aboriginal Australian art is hard to find in New York, so it was a special pleasure to spend time with a baker's dozen of impressive works from the Kluge-Ruhe Collection and the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield at Gagosian Gallery this morning. More than a pleasure, I was overwhelmed by turns with with joy, with grief, with wonder. Photos were permitted, so here are glimpses of works by Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri (Rockholes and Country Near the Olgas, 2007), Willy Tjungurrayi (Untitled, 2001), and Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Hungry Emus, 1990 and Kame Yam Awelye, 1996).

Fruit season

Strawberries are unusually early this year. A friend celebrated by making a delectable strawberry rhubarb crisp for us!

 

Personal history

A day of podcast interviews with folks who have intimate investments in New School history in different ways veritably overflowed with insights. We asked them to reflect on who tells the history of the New School (and which stories they tell), when, where and to whom...  but our conversations gravitated to the deeper question of why.

Nobody thinks there is or can be a single story, but that's all for the good. Deweyan progressivism, university in exile, arts and design, adult education, creativity, protest? Each of us sees the same things differently because of who we are, said an archivist. The gap between the New School ideal which brings a person here and the more complicated reality they encounter (the neoliberal university, for instance) is what makes creative responses possible, said a recently minted Phd in political science. The histories of the New School are lived, an artist alumnus reminded us, in the contingent but indispensable networks of support and struggle which allow each embodied individual to make the place their own; New School becomes part of their story, and they part of its.

Our questions may have sounded academic but the answers were anything but. New School history is existential! It is part of who people are. We tell the stories to name the ancestors. We hold on to the history to remember scenes of protest and progress, and to reground ourselves in the identities the school willy nilly helped us discover. We try to preserve the stuff of these life-affirming stories because the future terrifies us.

(Images from the Archives)

再说一下

Hey, I'm back at studying Mandarin! After a shockingly long time of just fiddling with Mandarin language apps (which, however, seem to have been effective in what they do, but only kept my passive skills in shape) I'm back to more active learning! Two or three times a week I chat for a full hour with a teacher from Datong, a city in Shanxi I visited a few years ago! She's not actually in Datong - but she's not here either. 她住在奥斯陆 She lives in Oslo! We talk via Skype, through a service called iTalki. I was delighted (and more than a little astonished) to discover that after years of avoiding speaking I can still talk about all sorts of things - admittedly with a skilled and patient teacher who knows what learners are likely to know and understand. After we finish, I've taken to summarizing our discussions in written Chinese, at which point I avail myself of another online language helper - Google translate. When my intended meaning doesn't come through, I tweak until it does. 加油！

In contract

When we turned the page in our Metropolitan Museum of Art engagement calendar of New York in art two Sundays ago to find a detail of this picture by Rackstraw Downes, our hearts skipped a beat. This unbeautiful neighborhood is the one in which we'd found a beautiful apartment we wanted to bid on! Was it a sign? Had anyone else noticed? Fifteen days later, we're in contract! More news as it happens; it'll take months even if all goes well and smoothly.

Hyphen-nation!

Had a blast today looking through some of the things left when Horace Kallen gave his papers to other archives. Nobody's quite sure where these were found, but they include random correspond-ence, articles he read (meticulously underlined), reviews and prefaces he wrote, notes for some of his lecture courses ... and some very old things, like the notes above from his undergraduate years at Harvard! I was excited to find drafts from the earliest version of his The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, as well as a 1959 new edition - and the script from a version of his "Euripidean" arrangement of Job performed at a Synagogue House in 1926.

But what I was there for was the context of a talk he gave in 1950, "Are there limits to toleration in a free society?" at a symposium dedicated to Alvin Johnson entitled "One Globe - Two Worlds." The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal is publishing the talk as part of its centennial commemoration and I've promised to write an introduction for it. The talk in itself is not
that interesting - the tolerant must tolerate the intolerance of the intolerant - but will have meant more interesting things coming from someone who had dedicated a career to understanding the "American idea" in terms of cultural pluralism. Here's something which, judging from its placement in the files, might have been the introduction of Kallen at that symposium.

Liberal education, Kallen points out, cannot be truly liberal unless it is intercultural. It must assume the parity of every people's culture in dignity and worth and seek untrammeled communication between them on equal terms. ... Education, says Dr. Kallen, is hyphenation and hyphenation is civilisation. All totalitarianisms, whether political, religious, economic, or cultural, are anti-hyphen and therefore anti-education.