This is Ste. Chapelle. And that is all that needs to be said:
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Paris on a Sunday (Part I)
I was really excited to visit Notre Dame for the first time since reading Michael Camille's Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity, a book that argues for a basically Victorian interpretation of the gargoyle program on the building, set into motion by the nineteenth-century restorers. It's a brilliant book and I highly recommend it, although it's hard to get one's hands on a print copy anymore (as I discovered while futiley trying to get it for my mom for her birthday), but my conclusion, having been in the space, was that the scale of the building limits the force of Camille's argument to a certain extent: His thinking is totally sound and innovative and brilliant for the gargoyles and chimeras to which it applies; but there are loads that don't fit into his categories.
In any event, it was Sunday when I visited, which was interesting anthropologically as much as architecturally.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Sacre Coeur, Montmartre
I liked this gargoyle on the façade of Sacre Coeur because you can see really clearly how it is actually a rainwater runoff spout.
Neo-Mudéjar Paris
The Great Mosque of Paris was built in the 1920s in a style variously described as Neo-Mudéjar, Islamic-Byzantine Revival, and Hispano-Moresque. It's a style in the register of some of the Islamic(ate) architecture in Spain and North Africa.
Adventures in Not Speaking French
I ate lunch at the café at the Great Mosque this afternoon and could not for the life of me explain to the waiter that I could read the French menu perfectly well and didn't need an English one despite the fact that I didn't understand a word of what he had told me about why I couldn't eat lunch on the patio but had to eat indoors even though other people were eating lunch on the patio. It was a little bit "Excuse me, does anyone here speak English? Or even ancient Greek?" Vestiges of Oriental Studies and all. Frankly, I think I'd have an easier time getting around in 1930s Cairo.
***
A guy in his early 20s came up to me and started to ask me something in French, and I stopped him and said, "I'm sorry. I don't speak French." And he said, "Oh, you speak English. That's a relief." He was obviously an American college student, and asked me if I knew where something was. I didn't. And he said, totally innocently: "So what are you doing here if you don't speak French?" If that's the attitude that American college students are developing about travel and language study, maybe we're not in such bad shape after all.
***
On my way home, I stopped to buy a baguette. There were two Korean kids in the bakery, obviously tourists (their parents were standing outside) trying to buy macarons in very halting English, and the baker either did not speak English or was feigning not doing. And he turned to me, and I could understand the gist of what he was saying, which was a huge complaint about why people can't just learn to speak French. I figured that wasn't the moment to mention that I haven't either. I managed to buy my baguette without incident.
Friday, July 18, 2014
Liberté, Egalité, Laicité (not necessarily in that order)
I. Laicité
I accidentally (because this kind of thing seems to happen to me) wandered into a celebration of Vespers by nuns and priests who belong to the Monastic Orders of Jerusalem at the church of San Gervais.
This was my one shot at a surreptitious photo; it's not great:
I'm always moved by the ceremony of high church activities, but what really struck me, especially after watching a woman walk in with her young daughter was how hollow the French calls for laicité really are. If you are a French Catholic and can just wander in off the street to your own religious service because that's just what the very fabric of your society looks like — if as a kid you simply know you belong — then what you're calling for when you ask your society to be secular is for you to be able to continue on in your life, religious unmarked rather than secular, while placing a burden of invisibility on people whose religious lives are not quite so literally built into the shape of the city.
II. Egalité
III. Liberté
I like this and think it's clever — don't get me wrong. Somebody seems to be turning traffic signs into stations of the cross.
Andalusi Textiles at the Institut du Monde Arabe
On loan from the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.
Granada, Nasrid, 13th and 14th centuries:
Post-1492 Almería:
Textiles that are being described as specifically Andalusi from north Africa post 1492:
A video at the end of the exhibition followed a day in the work life of a man who took over his family textile workshop in Chouen from his father, and demonstrated some of the techniques described and shown throughout:
And the self-indulgent yet obligatory selfie from the panoramic roof garden with Notre Dame in the background:
Friday, July 4, 2014
Freedom From Expression in Higher Education
This one isn't about the Middle Ages, but rather about current trends in higher education:
Remember in elementary school when you'd divide up teams for Jeopardy in social sutdies or for flag football in physical education? And at some point, somebody would invariably shout: "Let's do boys versus girls!" Winning gender got bragging rights and sometimes Reece's cups or pencil erasers shaped like little animals as a prize. Those are fair stakes for boys-versus-girls competitions.
This week the Supreme Court divided up as the boys' team and the girls' team. At stake were the credibility of the institution and women's access to health care. The boys' team won.
The Supreme Court ruled that private corporations with sincere religious beliefs (!) against contraception can sign a waiver that allows them not to pay for insurance policies that cover contraception; the federal government will provide that coverage for employees. Only a few days later, in a 6-3 decision, boys-versus-girls, it gave a special exception Wheaton College, which claimed that it was against its institutional religious beliefs to even sign the waiver because then it would be complicit in its female employees getting birth control.
In essence the court has allowed Wheaton college to trap its female employees in a no-man's land, with their health care not covered by an employer that does not pay for contraception and not covered by a federal government whose participation in the matter has not been triggered by a declaration of faith.
I think that the real problem with the Wheaton College decision is that the college is requesting special treatment not because of its religious beliefs but rather because it refuses to stand up and be counted for them. The institution is not asserting that because it is a Christian college it will not pay for women's coverage of contraception. It is asking for a right not to cover women's health care without stating a reason why.
It's so twisted around that it's almost hard to define the problem. The college wants to exercise its freedom of religion without exercising freedom of religion. It wants to say that it can't say that it can't do something because of its faith. It does not want freedom of religious expression. It wants freedom from religious expression while still reaping the benefits of the freedom to exercise religion and act upon religious belief. It does not want freedom of religion. It wants freedom of religion and freedom from the rest of the world continuing to function around the wide berth carved out for that freedom.
Wheaton College is no longer asserting its right to the free exercise of its religion. Rather, it is asserting a right ripped unsensibly from another context: a right to remain silent. It is the paradoxial reductio ad absurdum of Christian colleges that do not believe that their academic missions include the freedom of expression and the freedom to question and to investigate and research and form conclusions. It has gone so far that they no longer believe in the expression of their own beliefs. Wheaton College's religious expression is not the problem. Its assertion of its right to remain silent, and to wield its religious beliefs over women's lives sheltered by that cloak of silence that is the problem.
And to borrow a slogan from another campaign and another period in the history of sexual health: silence kills.
"Regard us then as Beings..."
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
When the Storm Starts Stopping the Drops Stop Dropping
I'd been inside all day working on a translation for the book, so when the storm that is currently rampaging through the northeast and promises to continue doing so well into the weekend broke for a little bit, I went out to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. The break didn't last long and I got caught out when it started to rain again. As is customary, some enterprising musicians were serenading the people trapped under Washington's arch. I like that the Empire State Building is visible through the trees in this photo (which pride dictates I mention is an actual photograph and not a still taken from the video below, which illustrates one last-ditch effort by the musicians before they, too, give in to the rain. You main have to turn the volume up to hear over the din of the rain.)
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Grave Situation
Above: Frost Cemetery, New Castle, New Hampshire
Below: Point of Graves Cemetery, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Library of Babel, Exeter
I'm not sure that the photos really capture how labyrinthine the Phillips Exeter library feels in reality. Click any one to enlarge.
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Book Review: Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language
For a book on translation out of Arabic, the irony of Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language is that the English translation distracts and detracts from the work.
I'm not crazy about the work itself: The discussion of Jahiz is useful if unoriginal and uninspired. Much of the framework appears to draw heavily upon an odd couple of the author's making: Schoeler and Derrida. The book simply doesn't add any line of inquiry or analysis that is new to anyone already well-read in the history and theory of Arabic translation. Even as he reports on Jahiz's criticism of the translation of philosophy as inherently poor because the translator can never understand the idea as well as the philosopher, the voice of Kilito the narrator reads as an inexpert guide through the material though Kilito the author and critic surely is not.
From his wonder at the writings of Hrsowitha to the concept directed to uneducated European audiences for his work, self-regard is the unifying element to these chapters in Arabic literature in translation. It is this perspective that accounts for the thoughtless and pervasive littering of the book with intentionalist fallacies of every scale. Kilito, in his authorial voice, is convinced of the importance of his own intentions; and so the intentions of other authors are also up for discussion and validation.
The sense that one gets of this being a book in which the author is addressing himself, writing himself, and spinning out his own internal monologue is reinforced throughout. For example, the discussion of al-Hariri's maqamat is lacking where it tries to ground itself historically. The discussion of Ibn Battuta hints at a variety of issues that might have been very interesting had they been drawn out and developed. The final two chapters, which present themselves as the heart of the matter, give the impression of being a pale imprint of the ideas being presented: they are probably very interesting, but Kilito does not deign to take us all the way through them, instead leaving us with lengths of description and the hint an argument made largely by juxtaposition. Again, the central importance of the author is reified. Surely he knows what he is talking about. Why don't we?
An evocative passage at the beginning of the final chapter ought to have been the starting point, not the ending one.
For a work that announces itself as an heir to Said's criticism ("I have learned from bitter experience that the other does not care about me unless I reached out to him" (7)), Kilito easily adopts a variety of Orientalist fallacies. Rather than giving voice to all that we have learned in the intervening century since Ernest Renan about the performance of poetry in dramatic settings and even authors we might call playwrights, such as Ibn Rushd's near-if-younger contemporary, Ibn Daniyal, Kilito instead reads completely with Renan. It is as if he recognizes what he is doing — with an explicit nod to Borges he writes: "I feel embarrassed as I write these lines, for despite myself I speak of Ibn Rushd with a certain amount of condescension. I am embarrassed because I know what he did not!" (44-5) — but despite this self-consciousness, he seems powerless to do otherwise.
And then there is the matter of the translation: The translator is irritatingly interventionist, adding a litany of footnotes defining basic terms and offering recourse to introductory readings. Some of this may have been moderated by a different typographical decision; in other words, endnotes would have been less distracting in this instance than footnotes, available to the uninitiated but unobtrusive. The overall effect is to remind the reader that this is a translated book, to remind her that it is transmitted through many hands. In reading, I wanted to shout: This is not your book! Restrain yourself! An apparatus or a bibliographic essay or a critical article should have been a separate undertaking. I suppose it serves me right: I could have read it in the original Arabic and I should have. Or, perhaps a book that adopts slices of a Derridian monolingualism, resists the idea of translation and speculates about the extent to which authors appreciated that their works might be translated should never have appeared in translation, and serves us all right for asking it to try.
More gravely, a book that largely deals with medieval Arabic translation, even in a postcolonial mode, needed to have been edited and translated by a medievalist. If the translator is overbearing in adding footnotes to explain basic concepts and introduce basic bibliography, he is also frustratingly incomplete; where he cites Roger Allen, he glaringly neglects to cite James Monroe, perhaps because he did not recognize a key idea from one of Monroe's early books which Kilito cites quite completely but (in good medieval mode) without attribution, a reference that a specialist in the field would have recognized. The makers of this book appear to have conceived of the translator's role as coterminal with that of the editor of the text and the creator of the critical apparatus, and in those duties, Wail Hassan has fallen down.
Even though it is an essayistic work of criticism, both author and translator are far too present.
Ultimately, book is a nice if unnecessary reminder of that passage from Jahiz, but otherwise is one of those texts that tragically makes its point by being the exception and the counterpoint to all of its own rules.
I'm not crazy about the work itself: The discussion of Jahiz is useful if unoriginal and uninspired. Much of the framework appears to draw heavily upon an odd couple of the author's making: Schoeler and Derrida. The book simply doesn't add any line of inquiry or analysis that is new to anyone already well-read in the history and theory of Arabic translation. Even as he reports on Jahiz's criticism of the translation of philosophy as inherently poor because the translator can never understand the idea as well as the philosopher, the voice of Kilito the narrator reads as an inexpert guide through the material though Kilito the author and critic surely is not.
From his wonder at the writings of Hrsowitha to the concept directed to uneducated European audiences for his work, self-regard is the unifying element to these chapters in Arabic literature in translation. It is this perspective that accounts for the thoughtless and pervasive littering of the book with intentionalist fallacies of every scale. Kilito, in his authorial voice, is convinced of the importance of his own intentions; and so the intentions of other authors are also up for discussion and validation.
The sense that one gets of this being a book in which the author is addressing himself, writing himself, and spinning out his own internal monologue is reinforced throughout. For example, the discussion of al-Hariri's maqamat is lacking where it tries to ground itself historically. The discussion of Ibn Battuta hints at a variety of issues that might have been very interesting had they been drawn out and developed. The final two chapters, which present themselves as the heart of the matter, give the impression of being a pale imprint of the ideas being presented: they are probably very interesting, but Kilito does not deign to take us all the way through them, instead leaving us with lengths of description and the hint an argument made largely by juxtaposition. Again, the central importance of the author is reified. Surely he knows what he is talking about. Why don't we?
An evocative passage at the beginning of the final chapter ought to have been the starting point, not the ending one.
For a work that announces itself as an heir to Said's criticism ("I have learned from bitter experience that the other does not care about me unless I reached out to him" (7)), Kilito easily adopts a variety of Orientalist fallacies. Rather than giving voice to all that we have learned in the intervening century since Ernest Renan about the performance of poetry in dramatic settings and even authors we might call playwrights, such as Ibn Rushd's near-if-younger contemporary, Ibn Daniyal, Kilito instead reads completely with Renan. It is as if he recognizes what he is doing — with an explicit nod to Borges he writes: "I feel embarrassed as I write these lines, for despite myself I speak of Ibn Rushd with a certain amount of condescension. I am embarrassed because I know what he did not!" (44-5) — but despite this self-consciousness, he seems powerless to do otherwise.
And then there is the matter of the translation: The translator is irritatingly interventionist, adding a litany of footnotes defining basic terms and offering recourse to introductory readings. Some of this may have been moderated by a different typographical decision; in other words, endnotes would have been less distracting in this instance than footnotes, available to the uninitiated but unobtrusive. The overall effect is to remind the reader that this is a translated book, to remind her that it is transmitted through many hands. In reading, I wanted to shout: This is not your book! Restrain yourself! An apparatus or a bibliographic essay or a critical article should have been a separate undertaking. I suppose it serves me right: I could have read it in the original Arabic and I should have. Or, perhaps a book that adopts slices of a Derridian monolingualism, resists the idea of translation and speculates about the extent to which authors appreciated that their works might be translated should never have appeared in translation, and serves us all right for asking it to try.
More gravely, a book that largely deals with medieval Arabic translation, even in a postcolonial mode, needed to have been edited and translated by a medievalist. If the translator is overbearing in adding footnotes to explain basic concepts and introduce basic bibliography, he is also frustratingly incomplete; where he cites Roger Allen, he glaringly neglects to cite James Monroe, perhaps because he did not recognize a key idea from one of Monroe's early books which Kilito cites quite completely but (in good medieval mode) without attribution, a reference that a specialist in the field would have recognized. The makers of this book appear to have conceived of the translator's role as coterminal with that of the editor of the text and the creator of the critical apparatus, and in those duties, Wail Hassan has fallen down.
Even though it is an essayistic work of criticism, both author and translator are far too present.
Ultimately, book is a nice if unnecessary reminder of that passage from Jahiz, but otherwise is one of those texts that tragically makes its point by being the exception and the counterpoint to all of its own rules.
Friday, June 6, 2014
Week in Links (Another Dairy-Based Edition)
It cannot be in compliance with the health code to put Beatles in the meat balls.
This is about politics, but it's also about the culture of monolingualism in the US that treats anyone who seems foreign, broadly defined, as suspect: It's clear that the GOP machine is working the trade of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl hard for political points. It's also clear that there's a lot of unhappiness in the ranks over how the whole situation was handled from the beginning. (One retired officer, on the other hand, retorted by saying that even if he had wandered off alone when he was captured, it doesn't matter: "We rescue guys who have done stupid stuff all the time.") But somehow, getting other soldiers from his platoon to say that he was strange and didn't deserve to be rescued because he was studying critical languages doesn't strike me as being the right move. Really? You're trying to sell this as not being a monolingual, xenophobic, imperial war on Islam and you're going with: God, what a weirdo, trying to learn the local languages. He must have been a communist Muslim terrorist traitor?
“'He wouldn’t drink beer or eat barbecue and hang out with the other 20-year-olds,' Cody Full, another member of Sergeant Bergdahl’s platoon, said in an interview on Monday also arranged by Republican strategists. 'He was always in his bunk. He ordered Rosetta Stone for all the languages there, learning Dari and Arabic and Pashto.'”
Bergdahl's Vanishing Before His Capture Angered His Unit
< / political rant >
The blogger-train wreck I regularly read as though I needed some regular dose of aesthetic and cultural disgust — now that, and not the Chronicles of Narnia, is a reading choice to be ashamed of! — has finally written a post that gives some psychological insight into why the punchline of so many of her anecdotes is some variant on: "It's like an old Jew!" I still wish she would lay off it, though. A choice to become as offensive and artlessly bigoted as an oppressor makes the victim the same thing and to do so under the rhetorical guise of academic authority is gross:
Jews
***
This is bad news for academic publishing, which is already not nearly as streamlined or good at its gatekeeping function as it would like to think itself to be. And frankly, I'd think that T&F might embrace the editors' suggestion of adopting an iTunes-type model for academic articles.
If academic publishing smells bad, at least books still smell good. Here is a chemical explanation of why:
The back-and-forth about whether the binding of Harvard Houghton FC8.H8177.879dc (could they use a more inscrutable system for their shelfmarks?) does, in fact, represent an example of anthropodermic bibliopegy appears to have swung back:
And a lovely tribute to independent bookstores of New York.
Literary prescriptivists are just about as bad as linguistic ones. While I agree with a premise that adults should be reading a wide variety of sophisticated books (and even this is not a hard and fast rule — ultimately, people should read what they like), I cannot abide an article that includes the sentences "Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this" and "Books like The Westing Game and Tuck Everlasting provided some of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I have no urge to go back and re-read them, but those books helped turn me into the reader I am today. It’s just that today, I am a different reader." I reread the Westing Game a few years ago for the same reason I periodically reread the apparently more respectable Tender is the Night, and for the same reason that this author gives for not rereading young adult lit: because those are the books that made me the reader I am now. When I reread The Phantom Tollbooth as an adult, I realized how much of its raucous humor went straight over my head as a kid. Condemning adults reading children's literature doesn't only make you sound snobbish, joyless, and old; it makes you sound like a dreadful, unimaginative reader.
Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Children's Books
Literary prescriptivists are just about as bad as linguistic ones. While I agree with a premise that adults should be reading a wide variety of sophisticated books (and even this is not a hard and fast rule — ultimately, people should read what they like), I cannot abide an article that includes the sentences "Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this" and "Books like The Westing Game and Tuck Everlasting provided some of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I have no urge to go back and re-read them, but those books helped turn me into the reader I am today. It’s just that today, I am a different reader." I reread the Westing Game a few years ago for the same reason I periodically reread the apparently more respectable Tender is the Night, and for the same reason that this author gives for not rereading young adult lit: because those are the books that made me the reader I am now. When I reread The Phantom Tollbooth as an adult, I realized how much of its raucous humor went straight over my head as a kid. Condemning adults reading children's literature doesn't only make you sound snobbish, joyless, and old; it makes you sound like a dreadful, unimaginative reader.
Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Children's Books
***
In Finland, PhD graduands receive a top hat and a cane. (Of course, what this means is that beyond just being a snappy dresser, Moomin Papa has a PhD!)
Eight reasons why medievalists should use Twitter. I disagree pretty strongly with #2. On the tweeter's end, I've live-tweeted a couple of talks, and I find it to be a very distracting form of note-taking. When you're trying to edit down your tweet to 140 characters or figure out where to break a longer thought into two or three tweets, the talk keeps going on and you're not giving it your full attention. On the reader's end, I've only ever seen one live-tweeted talk that I thought was helpful. The person basically gave a topic sentence for each paragraph and didn't use a lot of abbreviations and jargon. Most live-tweeting, I find, is too stream-of-consciousness, too much like the tweeter's personal notes, to be useful to others; and it's awful clutter in a timeline. I've started muting or temporarily unfollowing people as they live tweet conferences. On the other hand, I'm completely on board with #5. That's my primary motivation for being a medievalist on Twitter.
***
This is about politics, but it's also about the culture of monolingualism in the US that treats anyone who seems foreign, broadly defined, as suspect: It's clear that the GOP machine is working the trade of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl hard for political points. It's also clear that there's a lot of unhappiness in the ranks over how the whole situation was handled from the beginning. (One retired officer, on the other hand, retorted by saying that even if he had wandered off alone when he was captured, it doesn't matter: "We rescue guys who have done stupid stuff all the time.") But somehow, getting other soldiers from his platoon to say that he was strange and didn't deserve to be rescued because he was studying critical languages doesn't strike me as being the right move. Really? You're trying to sell this as not being a monolingual, xenophobic, imperial war on Islam and you're going with: God, what a weirdo, trying to learn the local languages. He must have been a communist Muslim terrorist traitor?
“'He wouldn’t drink beer or eat barbecue and hang out with the other 20-year-olds,' Cody Full, another member of Sergeant Bergdahl’s platoon, said in an interview on Monday also arranged by Republican strategists. 'He was always in his bunk. He ordered Rosetta Stone for all the languages there, learning Dari and Arabic and Pashto.'”
Bergdahl's Vanishing Before His Capture Angered His Unit
< / political rant >
The blogger-train wreck I regularly read as though I needed some regular dose of aesthetic and cultural disgust — now that, and not the Chronicles of Narnia, is a reading choice to be ashamed of! — has finally written a post that gives some psychological insight into why the punchline of so many of her anecdotes is some variant on: "It's like an old Jew!" I still wish she would lay off it, though. A choice to become as offensive and artlessly bigoted as an oppressor makes the victim the same thing and to do so under the rhetorical guise of academic authority is gross:
Jews
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Professor of Symbology
I have to assume that if, upon reading the first sentence of a proper academic article, one's first thought is: "Huh. Maybe Dan Brown was on to something," somebody has done something horribly wrong; I'm just not sure if it's the author or the reader.
When the DaVinci Code first came out, there were all kinds of discussions in the popular press about whether Brown's fictional Professor Langdon really could hold a professorial chair in symbology at Harvard. General consensus was no:
Harvard: No Symbology Here
Can You Really Be a Professor of Symbology?
Apparently this is one more instance of the popular press misunderstanding the lengths to which we academics sometimes go to make sure we are very precise in our distinctions between terms and fields of study. To wit, while reading Michael Camille's Image on the Edge, I came across a reference to the following article:
Turner is (was?), the biographical information in the article explains, a professor of social thought and anthropology at the University of Chicago. So in keeping with the need to be very precise about this sort of thing, no, one cannot be a professor of Symbology. But that certainly shouldn't stop anyone from writing about it.
When the DaVinci Code first came out, there were all kinds of discussions in the popular press about whether Brown's fictional Professor Langdon really could hold a professorial chair in symbology at Harvard. General consensus was no:
Harvard: No Symbology Here
Can You Really Be a Professor of Symbology?
Apparently this is one more instance of the popular press misunderstanding the lengths to which we academics sometimes go to make sure we are very precise in our distinctions between terms and fields of study. To wit, while reading Michael Camille's Image on the Edge, I came across a reference to the following article:
Turner, Victor. "Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology." Rice University Studies 60:3 (1974). 53-92.
Turner is (was?), the biographical information in the article explains, a professor of social thought and anthropology at the University of Chicago. So in keeping with the need to be very precise about this sort of thing, no, one cannot be a professor of Symbology. But that certainly shouldn't stop anyone from writing about it.
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