QOTD (2010-05-03), Pete Seeger’s Birthday Edition

Bruce Springsteen at Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday Concert, at Madison Square Garden one year ago:

As Pete and I traveled to Washington for President Obama’s Inaugural Celebration, he told me the entire story of “We Shall Overcome”. How it moved from a labor movement song and with Pete’s inspiration had been adapted by the civil rights movement. That day as we sang “This Land Is Your Land” I looked at Pete, the first black president of the United States was seated to his right, and I thought of the incredible journey that Pete had taken. My own growing up in the sixties in towns scarred by race rioting made that moment nearly unbelievable and Pete had thirty extra years of struggle and real activism on his belt. He was ao happy that day, it was like, Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man!…It was so nice. At rehearsals the day before, it was freezing, like fifteen degrees and Pete was there; he had his flannel shirt on. I said, man, you better wear something besides that flannel shirt! He says, yeah, I got my longjohns on under this thing.

And I asked him how he wanted to approach “This Land Is Your Land”. It would be near the end of the show and all he said was, “Well, I know I want to sing all the verses, I want to sing all the ones that Woody wrote, especially the two that get left out, about private property and the relief office.” I thought, of course, that’s what Pete’s done his whole life. He sings all the verses all the time, especially the ones that we’d like to leave out of our history as a people. At some point Pete Seeger decided he’d be a walking, singing reminder of all of America’s history. He’d be a living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends. He would have the audacity and the courage to sing in the voice of the people, and despite Pete’s somewhat benign, grandfatherly appearance, he is a creature of a stubborn, defiant, and nasty optimism. Inside him he carries a steely toughness that belies that grandfatherly facade and it won’t let him take a step back from the things he believes in. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures as well as shining a light toward our better angels and the horizon where the country we’ve imagined and hold dear we hope awaits us.

Pete Seeger turns 91 years old today, and he’s still alive and well and singing up in Beacon, NY. I am shy of superlatives, but he is at least one of the greatest living Americans today. He is also one of the most patriotic, with a love for an idea(l) of America that surely transcends any “Country First” shouting or Tea Party mania. Pete Seeger taught me that it is possible to be a left-wing American and not be permanently ashamed to call this country home—because he has taught me that there are things like the First Amendment that we can still have faith in as sacred text, even when much else is disillusioning and dispiriting and depressing and disastrous. Pete Seeger got me through a summer in Washington; he gets me through every day in Princeton.

Now I must return to writing about Gothic literature in French and about the historiography of the Salem witch trials in English, because I don’t have as much time as I once did to write on this blog about my heroes. But if you know a Pete Seeger song, sing it today; if you think you don’t, you probably do. (You might find some in a little book called Rise Up Singing.) I’ll leave you with one of my recently-rediscovered favorite Seeger songs, “Tomorrow Is a Highway“:

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair,
And we are the many who’ll travel there.
Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair,
And we are the workers who’ll build it there;
And we will build it there!

Come, let us build a way for all mankind,
A way to leave this evil year behind,
To travel onward to a better year
Where love is, and there will be no fear,
Where love is and no fear!

Now is the shadowed year when evil men,
When men of evil thunder war again.
Shall tyrants once again be free to tread,
Above our most brave and honored dead?
Our brave and honored dead!

O, comrades, come and travel on with me,
We’ll go to our new year of liberty.
Come, walk upright, along the people’s way,
From darkness, unto the people’s day;
From dark, to sunlit day!

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair
And hate and greed shall never travel there
But only they who’ve learned the peaceful way
Of brotherhood, to greet the coming day;
We hail the coming day!

QOTD (2010-04-23)

Whoa new WordPress Dashboard layout. And now, from “The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad:

“You must be a good swimmer.”

“Yes. I’ve been in the water practically since nine o’clock. The question for me now is whether I am to let go this ladder and go on swimming till I sink from exhaustion, or—to come on board here.”

I felt this was no mere formula of desperate speech, but a real alternative in the view of a strong soul. I should have gathered from this that he was young; indeed, it is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues.

The paragraph continues, but I’m so very struck by this statement. “[I]t is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues”—as one of “the young,” myself, it leads me to wonder if I really think in binaries that extreme, and whether to me dilemmas are so unremittingly black-and-white.

QOTD (2010-04-21)

Not that I have a one-track mind or anything, but non-western representations of sexual deviance are very interesting. The following is from a translation of the travel narrative of a 10th-century Arab missionary named Ibn Fadlan:

The Turks count the custom of pederasty as a terrible sin. There once came a man of the inhabitants of Khwarazm to stay with the clan of the Kudarkin, the viceroy of the Turkish king. He stayed with his host for a time to buy sheep. The Turk had a beardless on, and the Khwarazmian sought unceasingly to lead him astray until he got him to consent to his will. In the meantime the Turk came in and caught them in flagrante delicto. Then the Turk brought up the matter before the Kudarkin and said to him: “Assemble the Turks.” The Kudarkin assembled them; once they had gathered he said to the Turk: “Does thou wish that I pass a just or unjust sentence?” The Turk said: “According to justice.” He said: “Bring thy son here.” He brought him. He said: “The verdict is he and the merchant should be killed together.” The Turk was appalled because of this and said: “I will not ive up my son.” Thereupon the Kudarkin said: “Then the merchant may ransom himself.” He did it and paid the Turk for what he had done to his son with sheep and presented the Kudarkin with 400 sheep because he had saved him, and left the land of the Turks.

I don’t know whether I’m reading too much into this anecdote, but it seems interesting that Ibn Fadlan starts it by specifying that the Turks regard pederasty as a sin. It seems to suggest that the practice is not regarded as harshly in the Arab world, which is interesting. I mean, decadent Ottoman Empire, yes, but 10th-century Iraq is rather a different world. It would be interesting to know more about Ibn Fadlan’s society and to what exactly he’s comparing the Turkish value system.

QOTD (2010-04-12)

From The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Flemish ambassador to Istanbul in the 16th century. Busbecq is writing here about the public baths of Istanbul:

The great mass of women use the public baths for females, and assemble there in large numbers. Among them are found many girls of exquisite beauty, who have been brought together from different quarters of the globe by various chances of fortune; so cases occur of women falling in love with one another at these baths, in much the same fasion as young men fall in love with maidens in our own country. Thus you see a Turk’s precautions are sometimes of no avail, and when he has succeeded in keeping his wives from a male lover, he is still in danger from a female rival! The women become deeply attached to each other, and the baths supply them with opportunities of meeting. Some therefore keep their women away from them as much as possible, but they cannot do so altogether, as the law allows them to go there. This evil affects only the common people; the richer classes bathe at home, as I mentioned.

It happened that in a gathering of this kind, an elderly woman fell in love with a girl, the daughter of an inhabitant of Constantinople, a man of small means. When her courtship and flatteries were not attended with the success her mad passion demanded, she ventured on a course, which to our notions appears almost incredible. Changing her dress, she pretended she was a man, and hired a house near where the girl’s father lived, representing herself as one of the slaves of the Sultan, belonging to the class of cavasses; and it was not long before she took advantage of her position as a neighbour, cultivated the father’s acquaintance, and asked for his daughter in marriage. Need I say more? The proposal appearing to be satisfactory, the father readily consents, and promises a dowry proportionate to his means. The wedding-day was fixed, and then this charming bridegroom enters the chamber of the bride, takes off her veil, and begins to chat with her. She recognises at once her old acquaintance, screams out, and calls back her father and mother, who discover that they have given their daughter in marriage to a woman instead of a man. The next day they bring her before the Aga of the Janissaries, who was governing the city in the Sultan’s absence. He tells her that an old woman like her ought to know better than to attempt so mad a freak, and asks, if she is not ashamed of herself? She replies, ‘Tush! you know not the might of love, and God grant that you may never experience its power.’ At this the Aga could not restrain his laguther; and ordered her to be carried off at once, and drowned in the sea. Thus the strange passion of this old woman brought her to a bad end.

The Turks do not inquire very closely into secret vices, that they may not give an opportunity for false charges, but they punish severely open profligacy and crimes that are detected.

Firstly, poor old woman; secondly, I’m thrilled for obvious reasons that this story turned up by chance in my reading for my Islamic history class. There are obvious references to male homosexual activity everywhere in the standard Western discussion of travels in the East, which subsequently get lots of attention in late 19th- and 20th-century gay cultures, but I feel like it’s rare that we get a good look at female same-sex eroticism like this. It’s fascinating, and there’s a lot I don’t have time to pick apart here, but it’s firstly interesting that it’s pretty clear that the old woman only dresses up as a man as a ruse—it’s not that the social narrative entails a sort of Shakespearean gender inversion in which she must be disguised as a man in order to pay suit to another woman. She falls in love while dressed as a woman, and she reveals herself to be one as soon as she logistically can. Indeed, given that Busbecq is a rough contemporary of Shakespeare, this is particularly interesting: take the concern in Twelfth Night, for instance, about what Viola is wearing that leads the “wrong” people fall in love with her, and compare it to this situation. And finally, that last sentence in the passage above is so fascinating: the implication here is that “secret vices” are going on all the time, which makes sense given what we get from other Western sources with which I’m more familiar about the differing sexual mores of the Middle East, but I like what that says about the performance of female modesty in Ottoman Islamic culture, and of course the promise that there’s more where this came from.

QOTD (2010-04-10); or, A Story of Emotional Poles

My last despatch from the valley of trainee scholarship marked a particularly low point in traversing that, so to speak, lonesome valley; today, I seem to have reached instead the highest mountain, and in the course of doing so I finally at long last read these important paragraphs which conclude the Conclusion of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance:

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness o the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

Last November my side lost an election, and so I took a rare trip to New York and regarded objets d’art. I came home that night and I wrote in black marker on white paper in block capitals two words: “SEEK BEAUTY.” I masking-taped the paper to the wall above my desk and I withdrew into the practice of intellectual engagement. I told myself that henceforth I would achieve the heights and depths of my usual emotional rollercoaster by virtue of texts and paintings and recordings and the appearance and existence of nature around me. I resolved to be thrown neither to despair nor to exultation by the vagaries of Washington; I resolved to close myself off to the angst of adolescence. I notched off another milestone—I began my third decade—and I continued to tell myself daily that, inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph read or written, I am becoming a scholar.

I have grown up and continue to reside in an academic milieu; for all my life I have heard discussed the most canonical of texts in my field(s) before I actually assign myself to encounter them. In many cases it took a college class for me to finally return to the texts my parents have been teaching my entire life. In the case of the Pater, I have read and heard much about these paragraphs from my academic mentors and idols and from my own background reading before I’ve had occasion to at long last read them myself. The background (from mentors and idols, from my own sophomoric scholarship) has led me to believe that all critically and emotionally does not sit well with Pater, but nevertheless I see in these two paragraphs a vindication: of inward-looking living; of high-strung, high-stakes emotion; of shelves and desks and windowsills piled in books; of the life of a circumscribed campus; of dollars spent predominantly on books and caffeine; of the exultation with which I have come to greet a new day’s sunshine. Perhaps this isn’t what Pater meant, precisely—but we make all such influential texts our own, and even if I must eventually read Pater correctly in order to cite him in a putative senior thesis, I still am inclined to believe that if misreading Pater leads me to believe I may do as much good for my own soul and others’ by turning to texts as by travelling to Washington, well: what harm can there be in putting all I have into the search for beauty?

QOTD (2010-04-05)

Today, a piece of overheard dialogue from the McCosh/Dickinson/Chapel quad:

Mother to two small children: “We’re going to spend just a little time in the philosophy department, and then we can go get ice cream.”
Small child: “Philosophy, then ice cream!”
Mother: “That’s right, philosophy first, then ice cream.”

I obviously identified very strongly with the child—even though everyone knows philosophy always comes before ice cream.

QOTD (2010-04-03)

From Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth:

“You must never feel badly about making mistakes,” explained Reason quietly, “as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”

“But there’s so much to learn,” [Milo] said with a thoughtful frown.

“Yes, that’s true,” admitted Rhyme; “but it’s not just learning things that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters…. what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”

Amen.

QOTD (2010-03-30)

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
Economics and Statistics Administration
U.S. Census Bureau
Washington, DC 20233-0001
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR

March 17, 2010

A message from the Director, U.S. Census Bureau…

This is your official 2010 Census form. We need your help to count everyone in the United States. It is important that everyone be counted, regardless of where they may be living at the time of the census. This Individual Census Report is to be used to count people who are currently living or staying in group quarters, such as college or university dormitories, nursing homes, group homes, emergency and transitional shelters for people experiencing homelessness, and other such locations. Please follow the instructions you were given when you received this form for returning it to the appropriate person.

Your answers are important. Census results are used to decide the number of representatives each state has in the U.S. Congress. The amount of government money received also depends on these answers. That money is used for services for children and the elderly, roads, and many other local needs. As allowed by law, your census data becomes public after 72 years. This information can be used for family history and other types of historical research.

Your answers are confidential. This means the Census Bureau cannot give out information that identifies you. Your answers will only be used for statistical purposes, and no other purpose. Please visit our Web site at &lgt;www.census.gov/2010census&rgt; and click on “Protecting Your Answers” to learn more about our privacy policy and data protection.

Thank you for completing your official 2010 Census form.

This is the most patriotic I’ve felt since November 2008, when I cast my first ballot. Sometimes it’s great to feel that, as a young citizen of this country, you’re part of this enormous bureaucratic project that is Being These States.

QOTD (2010-03-27)

Today’s Quote of the Day is doing double duty as the Lesson from History of the Day, because it comes from a November 7, 1958 article in the Arkansas Gazette, about the Little Rock school integration conflict:

A prize-winning Negro reporter said Thursday the election defeat of Representative Brooks Hays (Dem., Ark.) was an indication of “the tragic extent to which racial passions and frustrations of Little Rock white citizens have been whipped.”

Hays, a moderate in the integration dispute, lost his congressional seat from Arkansas’s Fifth District Tuesday to Dr. Dale Alford, a Little Rock physician and outspoken segregationist member of the Little Rock School Board.

The reporter, Carl T. Rowan of the Minneapolis Tribune, made his remarks in an interview before addressing the Arkansas Teachers Association, a Negro group.

Rowan said:

“I regard it not only as a tragedy that Arkansas will lose the leadership and prestige of a man like Brooks Hays in Washington. But it is really an even greater tragedy that an already distraught people have seen fit to plunge even deeper into a pit of defiance that can only lead to chaos and ultimate loss for all peoples of the state and nation.”

He added:

“Perhaps there may be one blessing in disguise: That men like Brooks Hays will now realize that the White Citizens Councils and Ku Klux Klansmen know no compromise and have no substantial regard for the larger welfare of the people or the nation.”

I really believe that there are more patterns in American history than there are deviations from the patterns, and that’s particularly true where the cultural conflict of North versus South is concerned. In this one episode, there are not only echoes of the antebellum period, there are echoes of today’s racial and otherwise prejudicial violence from the extreme right in the wake of the health care vote. Earlier this week, watching Rachel Maddow on death threats sent to members of Congress from the same extreme right, I found my heart rate accelerating, thinking the country had finally gone off the deep end. But the fact is that the country is no crazier now than it was during the McCarthy hearings, or during this Little Rock crisis I’m learning about in my historiography class, or during the whole long upheaval of the mid-19th century. Of course, we don’t want to have another Civil War on our hands, but I don’t think there is any measure by which our discourse is as insane now as it was then—and that, at least, is a calming thought. The fact that inviting comparison to the Civil War period allows us to reject that comparison immediately is in some sense a relief.

This is not to say that there are not differences between our century and previous ones. The Internet, for example, has completely changed the way that extremist screeds can be circulated, meaning that—as we’ve seen in recent weeks—an extremist in one state can incite extremists in other states to break the windows of Congressional district offices or to shout “nigger” at African-American Congressmen or any number of other very scary things. Perhaps I’m wrong in believing that it is easier for national networks of extremists to spring up now than it was before the Internet—perhaps, now, their communications are simply more accessible to the rest of us—but it is nevertheless a wrinkle that gives me pause.

QOTD (2010-03-15)

Pete Seeger in concert at Sanders Theater, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1983:

We can sing all sorts of militant songs, but if we can’t bridge that ocean of misunderstanding, we’re not gonna get this world together.

Amen, oh, amen.