Weekly Varia no. 23, 04/22/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The antepenultimate week of classes this semester passed in something of a blur, and I found myself working late into Thursday night grading and prepping for Friday’s class as the semester rushes toward its grand finale. I thus went to bed Thursday night suspecting that this intro would be another meditation on the rhythm of academic life.

On Friday morning I woke up early, planning to sit down at my computer, finish the last couple of essays, put the final touches on the slide deck for my afternoon class, and start sending my usual slate of reminders that I send to my students heading into the weekend.

Only I couldn’t log into Blackboard. Or email.

Both were annoying, but I could still access the slide deck, so continued working on the presentation and went to campus…where Blackboard and email were still out. I taught my first class, which went well enough for a Friday morning. By the time my morning office hours were set to start the presentation was done, but Blackboard and email were still out. Then a staff member stopped by my office to tell me that there was a cybersecurity issue and all computers on the school network had to be shut down. Which meant that the class slides I had stayed up putting together were totally useless, on top of still being unable to grade anything.

So I took office hours to a bench on a quad, leaving a note on my door about where I could be found.

Nothing had changed by the start of my afternoon class. Not only could I not use the slides that double as the outline for my presentation (I don’t script my lectures), but also the activities I had come up with for today required access to the readings distributed through Blackboard that, even had my students diligently read them before today, they could no longer access. And on a day when I was already short of sleep. Now, there are topics about which I can give a reasonably coherent presentation without visual aids, and I once did 75 minutes on the Persian Wars as an emergency fill-in with only about an hour’s notice. I even probably could have offered a reasonable approximation of today’s presentation despite not being one of my stronger topics, but it would have been harder to follow and I wouldn’t have been able to do one of my staple activities in class where I put evidence on the board and solicit interpretations.

Walking toward class, I thought about which parts of today’s discussion needed to stand alone and which parts I could distribute and repurpose for next week’s classes—both and easier and harder because conceive of my classes in terms of narrative arcs on the level of the week, unit. By the time I started talking today, I had a good sense of today’s talking points and where they fit into the larger trajectory of the course, which allowed me to release my students for the weekend after only about 20 minutes.

At the time I’m writing this on Friday night, the university system is still out and I don’t know when it is going to come back online. The whole day left me reflecting on the centrality of devices to our workflows. I use these tools because they are convenient and offer an enormous amount of flexibility for when students can turn in their work, but I don’t need them to teach. However, they they have also become such default expectations that suddenly losing access creates a serious disruption. Ditto for communication. Leaving a note on my office door announcing that all work due today has received an automatic extension until Sunday or whenever Blackboard is back (whichever is later) is a poor substitute for direct communication, but it is also what I had at my disposal without access to email or Blackboard. I might have found this disruption annoying and mildly inconvenient because it creates a backlog that still needs, but it also meant a day or more when I could not grade. By contrast, I found myself trying to give reassuring answers to students trying to turn in assignments to other professors who weren’t in the office and couldn’t be reached by email. The students were quite anxious, understandably at this time of the semester.

This week’s varia:

  • Excavations south of Rome have revealed a large, luxurious winery that included dining rooms with a view of fountains that gushed with the recently-pressed wine. The story in The Guardian is reporting on a new open-access article by Emlyn Dodd and others.
  • Excavations in France have revealed a Roman temple that might have been dedicated to Mars.
  • In addition to the usual roundup this week in Pasts Imperfect, Shelley Haley writes about her experience working on the Netflix DocuSeries Queen Cleopatra. I have primarily followed news around this series through people on social media complaining that the series conflates African with Subsaharan African in the casting, but I appreciated Haley’s comments about what she hoped to achieve with her involvement and would recommend also Katherine Blouin’s comments on this (and past) decisions on how to represent Cleopatra on the screen.
  • Carlos Noreña has a long essay in Aeon on the work of French historian Paul Veyne, focusing on how Veyne’s commitment to the alienness of the ancient world led to inventive arguments. The piece reminds me that I should read more of Veyne’s oeuvre.
  • Dimitri Nakassis has some worthwhile notes on a state of the field conference on Mediterranean Archaeology.
  • Modern Medieval has a piece debunking the dishy historical claim recently in the news that Leonardo Da Vinci was Jewish.
  • The University of Michigan is planning to withhold pay from striking graduate students after a judge sided with the school. The graduate students are striking for livable wages, and arguing that the university is negotiating in bad faith. The union has created a strike fund.
  • BuzzFeed laid off 15% of its staff and shut down BuzzFeed News in a pivot to AI. Again for everyone in the back: AI isn’t actually replacing human workers, but it is being used as a reason to fire them. Count me among the chorus who think that this will have a profound negative effect on society.
  • Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg write in The New Republic about meat as a front in the Culture War, despite the numerous ways that the industrial meat industry does demonstrable harm to the very communities buying into the rhetoric. They write: “People once wondered whether an openly gay Republican could ever win major office; today the better question is whether an openly vegan Republican could.”
  • From Vox, another piece on the Colorado River water crisis, with infographics that show where most of the water goes. Spoiler: most of it goes to crop irrigation, and most of that crop irrigation goes to alfalfa to feed livestock, especially beef.
  • A reporter in Southeast Oklahoma left a recording device in the room of a county commissioner’s meeting because he suspected that business continued after the formal end, in violation of Oklahoma law. On the recording, the sheriff and other people present talk about killing journalists (including the man who left the device and his son) and lament that they can’t hang black people who now “got more rights than we got.” The sheriff’s department made a statement in which they claim the recording was made illegally and that felony charges will be filed. The Republican governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, has called on the county officials to resign, though a cynical reading of this might be that this is yet another instance where actions wholly in keeping with the direction of the Republican party have become so extreme that they are detrimental to electoral politics.
  • Kids asking for a society that doesn’t shoot them seems like a reasonable ask, and yet. In Kansas City, 16-year old Ralph Yarl was shot by an 84 year old white man after he rang the doorbell of the wrong house when picking up his siblings; in Texas, two cheerleaders were shot by a man in an HEB parking lot when one of them went to the wrong car after practice; in North Carolina a man shot a six-year old girl and her parents because a basketball rolled into his yard; and in rural New York, in a part of the state I have driven through on a number of occasions to and from Vermont, a man shot and killed a teen who drove down the wrong driveway to turn around. The trigger-happy paranoia is really jarring to see, and lethality of modern firearms make it all the easier for the paranoia to turn into homicide.
  • A bystander tried to get a passing Chicago police car to stop and intervene in a violent assault taking place over the weekend. The police did not stop and the bystander says that a desk sergeant told her that it was because Brandon Johnson (the leftist candidate) was elected mayor. Actions like this and the unaccountability of law enforcement are among the strongest arguments in favor of defunding law enforcement.
  • As Supreme Court watchers anticipated, the justices voted to stay the ban on Mifepristone, with dissents coming from (at least) Alito and Thomas. Elie Mystal with an analysis of the decision, as well as the Alito dissent that criticizes the other justices for making this decision using the shadow docket…by citing their opposition to his use of the same procedure.
  • Donald Trump, the twice-impeached ex-president and likely Republican nominee for 2024, is back on the campaign trail and is touting an ever-more dystopian and authoritarian vision for his second term, including using the military for police action, patriotic education, and planned “freedom cities.” This sort of rhetoric makes for a bleak-looking future.
  • Missouri’s Attorney General’s office launched a tip-line for “transgender concerns” this week, but the site lacked a CAPTCHA, which allowed internet users to use bots to spam the portal with nonsense submissions until they took it offline.
  • David Choe, the star of the Netflix show Beef, appears to be using copyright law to suppress people talking about an episode his podcast in which he talked about coercing a masseuse into sexual activity and, when the porn actress on the podcast with him called him out for raping the woman, acknowledged it as “rapey behavior.” Choe is attempting to do damage control.

Album of the week: Brett Dennen, Smoke and Mirrors (2013)

Currently reading: Robert Graves, I, Claudius; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity

Weekly Varia no. 19, 03/25/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This was the first week back from Spring Break, which means that the semester kicked back into gear. My bracket is truly busted, the NBA playoffs are right around the corner, and I have been spending a few minutes most evenings getting ready for my fantasy baseball draft next week.

But between the usual run of activities, I also found myself thinking about a line from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

I am perpetually enamored of the idea of book clubs, but I don’t usually participate in them, probably because I don’t like relinquishing the control over what I read and I find that either I love a book enough that I want to pace my reading or I dislike it enough that I don’t want to finish. However, a few weeks ago my wife and I decided to start a paired read where we read an agreed upon amount over the course of the week, which we can then discuss over a bottle of wine on the weekend. Our first read is Midnight’s Children. A line from this week’s section struck a chord with some of the other topics I’ve been thinking about recently, which meant that we spent a few minutes mulling its meaning:

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all of the time.

The sentiment holds even truer in this age of social media. This is not to denigrate context or perspective, but I also find it easy to get overwhelmed. Too easy. Context and perspective is important, but everyone needs to remember to close their eyes from time to time, too.

This week’s varia:

  • Pasts Imperfect features ancient marijuana (and other psychoactive substances) this week.
  • Charles Kenneth Roberts has a blog post highlighting how “quiet quitting” in an academic context is better defined as faculty burnout because the old academic social contract are being broken. Where, before, academics traded relatively low and periods of extreme work for perks like job security, control over their work, and respect (for instance), those perks are rapidly retreating.
  • Studies Weekly has revised school materials to comply with new Florida laws. The new materials strip all reference to race from lesson plans on Rosa Parks, rendering the episode toothless. Rosa Parks was told to move (for no particular reason) and she should be honored because “she did what she believed was right.” Removing any mention of Jim Crow laws and racial animus that sparked the confrontation is bad enough, but it almost bothers me more to see the latter sentiment being taught. She ought to be held up as an exemplar because her act of civil disobedience was part of a long struggle for equity in a deeply unequal society. The fact that she believed it right is true enough, but it also elevates the virtue of the individual actor following their beliefs to the highest order of good. Not only does this obscure the boycott that lasted for more than a year after Parks’s arrest (and the expansion of the White Citizens Council and violence that accompanied that boycott), but if all you have to praise Parks with is this sort of anodyne pablum, one might deploy the same argument about belief in what one believes is right about any number of genocidal sociopaths. This is in fact one of the exact examples I give my students about the importance of specificity in writing.
  • A public charter school (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) in Florida (checks out) popular with Christian Conservatives removed its principal after sixth grade students were shown a picture of Michelangelo’s David, on the grounds that the image was “pornographic.” I think the teacher also made a pedagogical mistake because she felt compelled to tell the students that the image was “not-pornographic,” which only drew attention to the nudity and accelerated the snowball—especially in the current political environment. (Speaking from experience: I assign material with nudity and sex in it in a college setting, but don’t usually focus on those aspects, except one semester a couple years back when I fumbled my discussion of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break in class, which led a disgruntled student to accuse me of assigning “pornography” to the class in the course evaluations.) Dan Kois in Slate has an interview with the chair of the school’s board in which he admits that the problem is that Michelangelo included the naught bits, in so many words. It is almost as though the people most interested in “Classical Education” want nothing of the sort, but use it to give cover for a desire to impose their own small-minded world view on everyone else.
  • Frustrated with book bans, a Utah parent challenged school libraries including the bible, not on separation of church and state grounds, but because the book contains numerous lewd and “pornographic” episodes. Which, yes.
  • Ibram X. Kendi has a piece in The Atlantic about how “intellectual” (like “academic”) is a term often coded traditional and conservative in ways that support the white status quo, writing “Intellectual neutrality of the sort pushed by those wishing to create a veil of historical amnesia that allows bigotry to endure.” I have seen some fair critiques of this piece that Kendi is creating something of a straw man that casts him as the first “non-neutral” public intellectual (Howard Zinn’s autobiography is titled You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train, for crying out loud), but I think there is something deeper to the issues that he’s pointing at, both in the sense that his antiracism is a re-articulation of Zinn’s thesis and because the age of social media is creating a crisis of identity for the public intellectual. I’m not entirely satisfied with Kendi’s answer, but he’s asking an important question.
  • The Guardian has a piece focusing on the Met Museum’s acquisition practice and their ties to looting. The article uses the Met as a jumping-off point to a larger conversation about ethical museum collecting and the repatriation of artifacts.
  • Jason Kehe in Wired has a curious profile of Brandon Sanderson in which he profiles the author seemingly determined to answer the questions of whether Sanderson is a “good writer” and if the answer is “no” (as Kehe seems pre-determined to answer) why is he so dang successful without being a household name. The profile is strange for a bunch of reasons, not only because he seems disappointed by the lack of story that he found in reporting the piece (as Sanderson pointed out on Reddit), but also because the essay is laced with belittling commentary about Utah food, some Mormon cracks, and befuddlement at the people who like Sanderson’s books. I (and, frankly, Sanderson) will be happy to tell you that the strength of his books is not the style of his prose, but the books often contain thematic elements (Mormon, yes, but also more broadly human) with more heft than Kehe credits and given that best-seller lists are always filled with lists of reliable and entertaining books that are not lyrically-crafted makes the framing of the article about whether Sanderson baffling choice in its own right.
  • In Politico, a piece profiling The Federalist Society, detailing a worrying trend that I have also seen floating around online: skepticism about democracy. In this case it is not only Democratic victories, but also a disdain for Trumpism that drives the shift.
  • Ron DeSantis asked state lawmakers to allocate $100 million to the budget for the “State Guard,” a unit supplemental to the State National Guard for use at the discretion of governor. But he is also proposing to arm this force and grant them police authority beyond how other states use equivalent units.
  • The latest in strong-arm political tactics, an Indian court sentenced Rahul Gandhi, an MP and opposition leader, to two years in prison for defamation, based on a speech at a political rally in which he quipped that there are many corrupt Modis in India, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The case was brought by another politician from the ruling party, Purnesh Modi, who claimed that the statement defamed the “Modi community” (there is no community named Modi).
  • A piece from NPR about how Silicon Valley Bank’s reliance on the usually-secure Federal Bonds to cover its assets became a liability over the last year.
  • Starting April 1, Twitter is phasing out legacy verified status, while also allowing subscribers to hide their blue check marks of shame.

Album of the Week: Dessa, Parts of Speech (2014)

Currently Reading: S.A. Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Emma Southon, Agrippina, Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

It has been a long week.
My wife informs me that this picture captures our respective personalities. I look tired and resigned, while Merlin is taking up as much space as possible in an attempt to be cute.

Elder Race

Posted on by Josh Nudell

It’s always a shock, when I look on them the first time after waking. I forget how their stock and mine have diverged since the first colony ships left Earth. She is closer to baseline than I, but then the second great rise of Earth culture was one of grandiose ambitions and a refusal to accept limits, even the limits of human form. I am much altered from my ancestors, within and without, and these post-colonial natives have changed little.

Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race belongs to a long tradition of Science Fiction that doubles as speculative anthropology, and this book would be right at home among the Hainish novels by this sub-genre’s master, Ursula Le Guin.

The book opens with a chapter told from the point of view of Lynesse Fourth Daughter, the younger daughter from the ruling house of the small kingdom of Lannesite who has taken it upon herself to seek out the sorcerer Nyrgoth Elder in his isolated tower in order to invoke an ancient compact that he would help in a moment of need. Her mother might not be moved to act, but a threat is indeed upon the world.

The second chapter introduces the central conceit of the novel.

The ancient being Lynesse calls Nyrgoth Elder is a man named Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist and the last remaining member of Earth’s Explorer Corps on Sophos 4, part of a mission to study how the first wave of human colonists had evolved in the thousands of years since their departure from earth. As a good* anthropologist, Nyr commits himself to non-intervention, but that line becomes harder and harder to hold to through the lonely centuries, even with his Dissociative Cognition System—a technological device that allows him to set his feelings aside to deal with later—activited.

Both characters undergo the same set of developments, but their experience diverges quite dramatically, since, as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law goes, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Nyr cannot explain his scientific understanding of the universe without Lynesse interpreting it as magic. Tchaikovsky’s achievement in the novel is to represent both the wonder and bafflement coming from both sides, especially in the chapter in the middle of the novel where both narrators relate the epic tale of the last time Nyr ventured from the tower, riding to war with Lynesse’s ancestor, at least in the version the Lynesse tells.

But where Lynesse is driven by her quest reminiscent of traditional fantasy stories with a young, naive protagonist, Nyr’s struggle is an interior one, against both the feelings of being an inadequate anthropologist since he is now intervening in the evolution of the subject population and the crushing loneliness of centuries isolated from every other human being.

“Forgive me, Elder. If not the monster, then there is some other foe in the world that causes you concern?” The thought was dire, and yet there was something weighing on him, and surely one did not become a great sorcerer without making great enemies.

And so she wanted to know why I looked sad, and I explained that it was basically a long-term mental state and that it was all under control, but that didn’t seem to be what she heard. And of course they don’t have a precise word for “clinical depression” or anything like that.

In contrast to these themes, the plot of Elder Race is quite simple. A quest pulls Nyr from his castle to investigate the rumors of an insidious plague that threatens life on the planet. He isn’t really supposed to intervene, but nevertheless agrees to help Lynesse. But the origin and nature of that threat, let alone any question of whether they are going to triumph, are not the focus of the book. It it is a perfectly competent plot, but one that does not go much for subtlety or misdirection. Instead, Tchaikovsky layers these two dissonant perspectives atop this simple narrative in order to explore more fundamental themes of human experience.

Elder Race is a short read (about 200 pages), and I loved every bit of it, enough so that I suspect that I will be seeking out his other work in the not-so-distant future.

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My reading remains ahead of my writing about books. Since my last review post, I finished three books other than this one: Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction, a manifesto about the importance of biological diversity, Lee Child’s Tripwire, which is a perfectly competent thriller that shows every sign of Child’s formulaic process, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, which was thoroughgoing Nobel fare: a family story that traces the consequences of colonialism in Tanzania before and after World War 1. Inspired by a run of recommendation requests (four in the past two weeks), I also just re-read Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members.

Adaptation and Authority: Some Thoughts on Amazon’s Wheel of Time

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I only managed to watch a handful of episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones when it initially aired and have since seen a handful of partial episodes when my partner puts it on around the house.

This may come as a surprise given my affection for all things fantasy. While I can appreciate that the show is well-done, with good acting and investment in scenery, too much of what appeared on screen jarred with the story as it appeared in my head. In this sense, my deep investment in the books, which goes back more than a decade when the show came out (I started reading them in middle school), served as a barrier to my enjoyment of the show.

Of course, it didn’t help that I was what one might call hasty at that stage of my life and the adaptation lay in part behind a three-part rant about Hollywood that I posted to this blog.

In the aftermath of that experience I vowed that I simply wouldn’t watch adaptations of books I like. I don’t bear the projects any ill-will, but watching them made me unhappy and made the experience less pleasant for those around me.

Live and let live, I figured.

In the years since then, I have largely avoided such adaptations. I enjoyed the recent Dune film, but I read the book relatively late and so don’t have the same realtionship with it. Further, it is a story that is heavy on setting, atmosphere, and ideas and relatively light on plot and character. (For what it is worth, I also thought that the weakest point of the film was the characterization of the side characters who are the ones I gravitated toward in the book.) I suspect, for similar reasons, that I would enjoy the Foundation adaptation on Apple TV+ that I haven’t watched becuase I don’t have an account. Likewise, I have enjoyed the Expanse series on Amazon, but, since I watched the series before reading the books, I am getting to appreciate the world of the series expanding in complexity rather than collapsing.

If there is any post-Tolkien fantasy series that has been part of my life longer than Game of Thrones, it is Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. I read the first book in fifth grade, at an age when I found a lot of scenes terrifying. Eight books had been published in the series when I started reading it; by time the ninth book was released I was someone who would reread the entire series in anticipation.

I had a lot more spare time when I was younger.

All of this is to say that I mostly ignored buildup to the Amazon adaptation of The Wheel of Time. Then I started to hear buzz and I gave in.

I approached this adaptation with more of an open mind than I did Game of Thrones. This series has thirteen books that expand quite dramatically in the middle in a way that I love but that generally consensus found distracting, so of course the material would need to be reworked for length and to fit into the structure of a television show. And, to the show runners’ credit, the cityscapes are stunning, the casting works across the board, and there are numerous small touches, some suggested by Brandon Sanderson, that capture the atmosphere of the world.

And, despite it all, I haven’t managed to finish the first season. In the end, there were just too many disjunctures between the books and the series for me to overcome.

Some of these were small changes that I understand but did not love. For instance, Emonds Field in the books is a fairly bucolic place with small-town concerns, only to see that peace broken by the Trolloc attack. This allowed Jordan to complicate it later in the series when the now-worldly heroes (mostly Perrin) return to find their village not as they remembered it. By contrast, the show turned Emonds Field grittier and accelerated “character development” by giving Mat a broken family and Perrin a wife to kill (literally, unfortunately).

Other small changes were fine, but seemed superfluous to me. Hiding the identity of the Dragon Reborn, for instance didn’t add anything in my opinion (calling all of the main characters ta’averen was fine, though). Likewise, I didn’t understand what was gained by moving the introduction of Min Farshaw from Baerlon to Shienar.

Then there were bigger changes. Most notable was the decision to have the people go directly to Tar Valon (which doesn’t happen for some of the characters until book 2, others until book 3, and not at all for others) in place of going to Caemlyn. I have some sympathy for the show runners: introducing the White Tower and the Amyrlin Seat in the first season makes them concrete players from the start.

But this is also where my long familiarity with the books threw up a barrier for me. The Eye of the World is hardly a perfect novel, but it impressively well set up to 1) follow a single coherent adventure from beginning to end and 2) plant seeds that develop as the series goes along. No show can, or should, film a book shot for shot, but I became increasingly frustrated to see these seeds moved or, in some cases, ignored. So, when the show seemed to make a big change involving Mat near the end of Season One, I gave up.

I hope the show finds its audience. The scenery is gorgeous and if people can enjoy what it has to offer, then I wish them well. I just won’t be among them. I could do a point-by-point discussion of what Wheel of Time gets wrong and right, but that misses the point of adaptation and I have little interest in doing such an exercises even if someone wanted to pay me for the time and effort (please don’t).

In short, I find myself back where I started. These shows just aren’t for me. I will enjoy my books, other people can appreciate their adaptations, and that is just fine. These stories don’t belong to me.

My 2021: Best* Posts

Posted on by Josh Nudell

It is time again for my end-of-year series. Previously: Writing Wrap 2021. Next up: my Best* posts from 2021.

I have published 68 posts so far in 2021, totalling more than 62,000 words (average length 921 words), and including some of the most popular posts ever to go up here. The list below consists of posts I look back on fondly and think are worth revisiting.

This year’s selection is eclectic. It includes reflections on pain of the academic job market, expectations, and writing, two entries on teaching, one post about ancient bread, one post about recent media about Anthony Bourdain, and five that directly or indirectly touch on contemporary politics.

Previously: 2020; 2019; 2018; 2017; 2016

What is Making Me Happy: Sea Shanty TikTok

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Following the model of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and, to a lesser extent, the Make Me Smart daily podcast, I want to remind myself that there are things that bring me joy. These posts are meant to be quick hits that identify and/or recommend things—usually artistic or cultural, sometimes culinary—that are making me happy in a given week. I am making this quick format a semi-regular Friday/Saturday feature.

This week: sea shanty TikTok

I might need to get TikTok. I am not kidding. Although I test-drive a lot of social media apps, I’ve long thought of TikTok as a platforms for teenagers dancing, which always struck me as a) creepy and b) not really my thing. Then this morning I saw videos of people singing “Soon May the Wellerman Come.”

It started with the artist Nathan Evanss throwing the song up:

Soon, there were entire chains of people accompanying him:

But as great as the male chorus is, my favorite version (so far) was when the musician Mia Asano added her violin to mixed group of singers:

I am not exaggerating when I say I have listened to this version more than a dozen times already today. In the purest expression of what is making me happy, sea shanty TikTok is the best thing I have seen to this point in 2021.

Update: there are more!

Black Leopard Red Wolf

Posted on by Josh Nudell

“What is evil anyway, a sad soul infected with devils who take his will, or a man thinking that of all his mother’s children he loves himself best?

Sometimes when I am reading a book the words of a review start writing themselves. Other times the author has strung out the significance of the book in such a way that the meaning of that book doesn’t become clear until the final word. (A sign of a great novel, according to Orhan Pamuk.) And then there are books where I look back and think “what was that?”

Marlon James’ new novel Black Leopard Red Wolf belongs in the last category.

Set in a fantastical world of African history and mythology, Black Leopard Red Wolf is the story of Tracker, as told in his words under question by an inquisitor. As he says, Tracker’s preternaturally gifted nose caused certain agents to employ him to track down a missing boy, presumed dead, for purposes that were originally unknown to him. Along with a motley cast that includes the Sadogo, a giant brawler with a morose demeanor, the centuries-old witch Sogolon, and Mossi, a prefect soldier from the far North East, Tracker follows the boy’s scent from city to city, belatedly realizing the complexity of the task. Not only has the boy been taken by the demon Impundulu, being turned effectively into a zombie and employing a series of magic pathways that criss-cross the land, but also his employers are playing a dangerous game: trying depose the mad king by restoring succession of kings through the female line.

This story comes out in fits and starts, unfolding in a non-linear fashion that defies identifying anything––with the possible exception of sexual attraction––as true.

Distilling Black Leopard Red Wolf to the narrative arc that explains the circumstances of Tracker’s interrogation, however, installs limits that James defies. Instead, this is a novel about setting, character, and mythology. Tracker tells the inquisitor of his childhood and background, how he rescued Mingi children and became lovers with the shapeshifter Leopard, with whom he killed the demon Asanbosam.

Only belatedly does he get to the hunt for the boy and the cities he visited along the way. The political intrigue and imminent war that forms the backdrop enter the tale slowly, coming only as Tracker begins to realize what he is caught up in.

There is a lot to like in Black Leopard Red Wolf. James brilliantly undermines the political ambitions on both sides of the conflict. The boy simultaneously serves as an existential threat to one political order, the final hope of another, and MacGuffin for our narrator. And still, James manages to in some ways undermine all three, revealing the threat to be greater, the hope to be hollow, and the catch to be more personally important than originally acknowledged.

This is a grotesquely beautiful novel, with James’ prose creating a hallucinogenic effect that heightens the unfamiliarity of the African setting. James doesn’t shy away from the sexual and the shocking, including unexpected, if not out of place, discussion of female genital mutilation.

All together, though, I found Black Leopard Red Wolf difficult to follow and Tracker an alien narrator. The end result is a novel that I found more frustrating than satisfying. I am left wondering whether returning to this world a second time when the next book in the proposed trilogy appears will be worth the investment. The prospect leaves me cold, but I also feel like I was only beginning to scratch the surface of the world by the time I reached the end.

Putting these thoughts together was a challenge, so I’ve been reading other reviews. This one from Amar El-Mohtar on NPR states many of my thoughts, only better:

“like if Toni Morrison had written Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Painful and strange, full of bodies shifting from personhood into meat, and somehow, always, still, upsettingly beautiful…Reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf was like being slowly eaten by a bear, one inviting me to feel every pressure of tooth and claw tearing into me, asking me to contemplate the intimacy of violation and occasionally cracking a joke.” 

I also liked this review at the NY Times Book Review.

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I also recently finished reading Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor, and have since begun Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone. The last few weeks of the semester have been exceptionally busy, so I am looking forward to a short break coming up soon.

Skepticism and Historical Authority

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Reading student work elicits all manner of emotions, but given time and support to do it properly I like it. I had better, given that my basic goal is to deliver a continuous stream of feedback to my students while having them write and revise as much as I can genuinely respond to in a semester.

This cycle offers two advantages. First, having students write regularly gives them opportunities to develop transferrable communication skills that people often use to justify teaching fields like history, but then don’t always actually teach. I like to put substance behind my words. Second, picking up on John Warner’s dictum that writing is thinking, having my students write gives me a good sense of what they are picking up and where I can help.

Today, for instance, I opened a class with discussion of one of their quiz questions from last week where many people uncritically repeated a claim found in ancient sources that one of the Ptolemaic pharaohs started the decline of the dynasty in part because his insatiable lust let him be ruled by his mistress. I pointed out that the way in which the sources (and more than one historian, let alone the students) talk about this make it sound like the problem is that he listened to what a woman had to say, rather than that she and her brother were (perhaps) using her relationship to get wealthy. Thus the entire episode, should we accept it, is about corruption at court, not that a woman was involved in making decisions.

This is a fine distinction, perhaps, but an important one that offers opportunities to inspect our own biases. Moments like this happen quite frequently, and regular written assignments give opportunities to catch and talk about issues that would otherwise slip right by.

Today’s example comes from an upper-level class with a lot of history majors and other interested folks, meaning that there is a relatively high baseline for basic skills and skepticisms, though there still remains a tendency that is more common to intro classes: deference to historical authority.

Students in my lower-level survey courses struggle with source analyses. In part they lack sufficient context, but I think that deference is a more pernicious and deeper-rooted problem, and the only remedy is “more history” (delivered in the voice of Christopher Walken, of course). Students weren’t there, so to speak, and the source was, at least in theory, so the source must be right. So too when they read history books they often default to reading for “how it was” than “what argument is being made,” and then to the professor and down the line. When students are coming from history testing regimes in high school that prioritize factual knowledge and at best the facsimile of an argument, then they have to be taught skepticism with regard to history that might come instinctively to other parts of life. This credulity is a matter of conditioning and experience, not intellect.

I don’t have statistical evidence support this observation, let alone answers, but it strikes me as curious that in an age seemingly defined by conspiracy theories and a resurgence of skepticism of things that can be tested, there is nevertheless a deference to history, a topic that by definition cannot. Even more curious is when “research” begins and ends with Wikipedia, or perhaps worse, when it entails carefully triangulating internet sites that echo each other as sources of legitimacy.

Learning to question historical sources––not to mention claims of historical authority––critically and carefully therefore not an idle pastime, but a critical life skill. Just because someone “was there” doesn’t mean that what he or she produced is accurate. Nor does an appeal to history automatically lend authority to a position, particularly if it is based on shoddy use of evidence. There is only so much that can be done in one class and no school is going to re-write its curriculum around history any time soon, but learning to think this way (skeptically, critically, carefully) is the most important skill a student can take away from any history class.

Form and Content: a note on writing

Posted on by Josh Nudell

“Do I have to write in paragraphs?”

I used to receive variations of this question every semester, and I’m sure that I will hear it again from students, often first years, who are deeply concerned about the expectations of an academic essay.

“Yes,” I answer, not because I’m against creative presentation, but because giving the option of using a bullet-point list undermines the hard work of stitching a series of thoughts into a single argument.

Echoes of this frantic question have come back to me in recent weeks, first while reading John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write, and then again when I saw a lament on Twitter about the encroaching tyranny of the listicle as a medium of discourse.

Every format has strengths and weaknesses.

The essay, a medium for which I have a great deal of affection, lays out an argument or tells a story by leading the reader from one point to the next. In the hands of a master the essay is a lyrical medium, but it is not only hard, but also unsuited to all tasks.

A list, for instance, conveys information simply and concisely in the face of tumult and complexity. There is comfort in lists, but they belie fluidity. An example: I have kept one of my favorite novels for years, but between the fogginess of memory and whims of a given day the novel that belongs in the ninth spot of the list changes.

An outline gives the structure of an argument, even if the actual order, at least in my experience, is liable to change in the execution.

The listicle, by contrast, is a cross between the list and the essay. It takes the argument and points of an essay and meshes it with the order and structure of a list. Meatier than a list and more easily digested than an essay, it is perfect for consumption on a mobile device, matched for a fast-paced world.

Good writing is good writing, and the same holds here, but the very efficiency of the listicle also contributes to its forgettability. Where I can rattle off a dozen or more essays that I recommend to people, there is not a single listicle I can say the same about unless I thought to do so while reading it. But I’m also busy, and therefore generally happy to skim through a listicle on any number of topics where I might decide that reading and processing an essay is too much of a commitment.

In the classroom there are any number of ways to cut corners and grade more quickly, but my objective is not speed. Outlines are a nice tool, whether to help students organize their thoughts, prepare a long written piece, or (my preference) part of the revision process, but it is not the same thing as learning how to pull together a complete piece of writing.

Hewing to John Warner’s mantra that writing is thinking, the ability to lead your reader from one point to another is a learned skill that requires repetition, feedback, and revision. In this sense, the very trepidation that my students exhibit about writing is validation for having them write fully-formed essays.

One Nation Under God

Posted on by Josh Nudell

In their struggle against the New Deal, the business lobbies of the Depression era had allied themselves with conservative religious and cultural leaders and, in so doing, set in motion a new dynamic in American politics.

One of the things I like about teaching American history, and particularly twentieth century US history, is that it is fairly easy for students to see its relevance on contemporary society, which is a reliable way to turn up student engagement. One activity I like to do with students is to establish a broad premise, talk with the students to establish what preconceived ideas are floating around in the zeitgeist, and then work with them to understand how these ideas came from.

For instance, I do this with students when it comes to American religion in the twentieth century. I begin by asking them whether the United States is, broadly speaking, a religious country in general and a Christian country in particular. Some students will bring up the establishment clause in the Constitution, but eventually students say yes. I then ask how we know this, and, among a variety of answers, some student will inevitably point to “In God We Trust” printed on currency. I then work the students through some of the midcentury religious revivals and particularly the emergence of organized religion into the political sphere in the 1950s out of which public declarations of faith in the pledge of allegiance and US currency developed. My point with this activity isn’t to challenge anyone’s faith or even to explicitly reject the idea that most Americans in any given year considered themselves Christian, but rather to encourage students to see how, when and why these symbols came into being and therefore to think critically about what they mean.

I mention this example because I recently had a chance to read prominent #twitterstorian Kevin Kruse’s book One Nation Under God. The elevator pitch for this book is that Kruse goes looking for how the phrase “one nation under god” made its way into the pledge of allegiance of the 1950s. I was aware of the religious revivals in the 1950s and had always interpreted it as the realization of Cold War branding of the United States as distinct from “godless” communism, though, in retrospect, that was a lazy assumption.

Kruse traces the origin of these revivals and the first steps to bring religion from the realm of the personal to public life further back into the 1930s, when, he says, corporate leaders looked to religion to rehabilitate their brands from the stigma of the depression. In turn, and from a combination of personal piety and cynical self-interest, they helped sponsor events that sparked the 1950s revivals. The wave of religion encouraged and manipulated by President Eisenhower changed the nature of public religion in America and created an alliance between capitalism and christianity that dovetailed with American Cold War propaganda. In addition to the changes implemented to the pledge of allegiance and the face of currency, it was in this same period presidents began hosting the National Prayer Breakfast that has since become an annual event.

Where Americans once blanched at bringing the church and the state too close together because of the risk of corrupting the church, Kruse documents how in some of the early controversies over children reciting non-denominational prayers and the pledge of allegiance in schools, the ACLU was hesitant to take up the case on behalf of the parents.

Even though it took me longer to read than I would have liked (a combination of a busy schedule and a lot of detail meant that this was a slow read for me), I really liked On Nation Under God. I knew most of the broad outlines of this story, but the virtue of this book is that Kruse presents a mountain of evidence rather than relying as I was on general impressions. And within that evidence there are unexpected developments.

Two of my takeaways both came from his discussion of issues of religious faith in schools, which was taken to the Supreme Court.

One was the way in which the religion that made its way into public life was light on doctrine as a way to circumvent theological disputes and generate broad support. Nowhere was this more true than in the attempts to establish a non-denominational prayer to be recited daily in schools in New York. Critics thought its “vague theism” was so diluted as to be meaningless, but it strikes me that this pervasively felt, doctrinally ambivalent Christianity remains a legacy in American public life.

The other was an insight into the composition of the court in the 1950s and early 1960s when it passed down rulings on whether students should recite a prayer (no, it is not inherently patriotic) and the pledge of allegiance with the added language of “one nation under god” (yes, it is a declaration of patriotism, not a prayer). Kruse documents how some of the staunchest defenders of these decisions were themselves deeply religious and active in their churches, but that they believed that this was an unconstitutional act of establishing a religion.

As an outsider to both the field of American history and mainstream American Christianity, I am sure that there are facets of this book and its ramifications that I missed, but the broad strokes of this evolution in American political discourse was supremely enlightening for where they came from and thinking about how this relationship between business, religion, and government has developed in the decades since.

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I finished reading Drago Jančar’s I Saw Her Last Night, a fascinating Slovenian novel about the disappearance of a woman in the last years of World War 2, told through the memories of five people who knew her. I’m between books at the moment, but leaning toward next reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer.