August 2008 Archives
T. Walter Herbert, Jr. begins his marvelously insightful study Moby-Dick and Calvinism (1977) with an apologia for producing yet another book about Herman Melville:
The raison d'être for Herbert's study is to make known "a major aspect of Melville's creative achievement" by providing "a biographical account of Melville's inner struggle with the theological ideas that were losing authority during his time" and investigating "his way of handling those ideas in Moby-Dick" (ix). Noting that "Melville's religious perplexities were shaped by the fact that he absorbed in childhood the opposing theories of Unitarianism and the most conservative orthodoxy," Herbert concedes that in the early nineteenth century, the debates between the proponents of these theories had come "to seem intractable and were denounced increasingly as a waste of motion" (5-6), and he suggests that Melville's "preoccupation with outdated religious questions was a source of dismay to his most intimate literary associates" (11).
And if these questions were outdated in Melville's time, how much more out-of-date would they seem to readers nearly a century-and-a-half-later? Somewhat defensively, Herbert writes that "Melville deals with historic theological issues that may seem quite remote to us, scarcely worth the energies of a great genius" and admits that "the need to review the historical context of his work" might be construed to be "antiquarian." Herbert argues, however, that such an interest is anything but antiquarian, because religion was part of "the structure of ideas that molded [Melville's] consciousness."
As Herbert presents it, the interest of Moby-Dick and Calvinism rests not on the particular religious ideas and theories with which Melville engaged (though Herbert does an excellent job of elucidating them for his reader) but rather on something more abstract: it is, finally, a study of the ways in which "masters of literary art" like Melville take "command of certain basic conventions of thought" that "dominate the meditations of [their] contemporaries" (5). Melville, Herbert argues, "lived in a world very different from our own, and thought in the idiom that his world provided," but he "addresses us directly" because he dramatizes "the historical finitude" of all the "basic conceptual frameworks in which men articulate their negotiations with experience" (5, 19).
Reading Herbert's study some thirty years after it was published, I am struck by the ways in which it seems simultaneously current and out-dated. In 1977, it was ahead of its time, an example of what Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen would refer to, nine years later, as "ideological literary criticism." Herbert doesn't use the term ideology, but like those critics in Bercovitch and Jehlen's influential anthology Ideology and Classic American Literature (1986), he draws on work from the social sciences to illuminate his account of literary creation: "Lines of research in sociology, anthropology, and psychology have converged upon the recognition that individual persons, as well as communities, render experience intelligible by employing conceptions of the world" (3). Although he feels duty-bound to invoke psychoanalytic theory in his discussion of "intellectual conflict" (12-15), Herbert's approach owes more to the work of Clifford Geertz and Thomas Kuhn, two of the most frequently invoked theorists among subsequent practitioners of ideological literary criticism. "Personality within a culture," Herbert writes, "coalesces about the scheme of basic attitudes which the culture mediates to every newborn in making him a member of his society. . . . Accepted conventions of thought and action reach into the individual and establish the terms on which he must achieve whatever individuality is to be distinctively his own" (3-4). Herbert's study is animated by a sense of the reciprocality of text and context that has now become de rigeur in the aftermath of the New Historicism.
And yet, one of the lessons of ideological literary criticism is that every act of reading or writing must be contextualized, and I am struck, reading Moby-Dick and Calvinisim in 2008 about the difference between its cultural context and my own. Indeed, I wonder whether the meaning of Herbert's suggestion that Melville "addresses us directly" hasn't changed in the thirty years since Herbert wrote those words: is it possible that the United States circa 2007 has more in common with Melville's time than it did in 1978?
In 1977, there was a Democratic president in office and social scientists fretted about what Christopher Lasch called the "culture of narcissism." Herbert writes with the implicit understanding that "the theocentric interpretation of moral experience has been superseded," but urges his reader not to underestimate the importance of religious thought.
Three decades later, however, theocentrism seems to be enjoying a renaissance in the United States, with a Republican president in office who counts himself among the ranks of born-again Christians. By all accounts, George W. Bush was able to win re-election in 2004 because he managed to turn out a sufficient number of voters from the religious right to make the difference. In the aftermath of the election, the Economist, observing American politics from across the Atlantic, wrote that "the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote has captured America. A plurality of voters, emerging from poll booths, said that the most important issue in the campaign had been 'moral values'. It was not, it seemed, Iraq or the economy. And eight out of ten of these moralists voted for George Bush" ("The triumph of the religious right," 13 November 2004). Ten weeks later, U.S. News and World Report would call Bush's second inauguration "a day for the true believers -- the social conservatives, Christian activists, foreign-policy hawks, and, of course, George W. Bush himself" (20 January 2005).
Reading Herbert's monograph in this cultural context reinforces my sense that Moby-Dick was an emergent text in 1851 and is an emergent text today in 2008 -- in both cases because of its links to cosmopolitanism.
It has been true for some time that by writing one reasonably intelligible book on Melville a man could secure a better living in America than Melville managed to win by writing the whole body of his work. It is possible that this period is now drawing to a close; but while it has lasted his writings have received such an immense volume of commentary that yet another article on Melville, to say nothing of a scholarly book, should be obliged to present reasons for its existence. (ix)
The raison d'être for Herbert's study is to make known "a major aspect of Melville's creative achievement" by providing "a biographical account of Melville's inner struggle with the theological ideas that were losing authority during his time" and investigating "his way of handling those ideas in Moby-Dick" (ix). Noting that "Melville's religious perplexities were shaped by the fact that he absorbed in childhood the opposing theories of Unitarianism and the most conservative orthodoxy," Herbert concedes that in the early nineteenth century, the debates between the proponents of these theories had come "to seem intractable and were denounced increasingly as a waste of motion" (5-6), and he suggests that Melville's "preoccupation with outdated religious questions was a source of dismay to his most intimate literary associates" (11).
And if these questions were outdated in Melville's time, how much more out-of-date would they seem to readers nearly a century-and-a-half-later? Somewhat defensively, Herbert writes that "Melville deals with historic theological issues that may seem quite remote to us, scarcely worth the energies of a great genius" and admits that "the need to review the historical context of his work" might be construed to be "antiquarian." Herbert argues, however, that such an interest is anything but antiquarian, because religion was part of "the structure of ideas that molded [Melville's] consciousness."
As Herbert presents it, the interest of Moby-Dick and Calvinism rests not on the particular religious ideas and theories with which Melville engaged (though Herbert does an excellent job of elucidating them for his reader) but rather on something more abstract: it is, finally, a study of the ways in which "masters of literary art" like Melville take "command of certain basic conventions of thought" that "dominate the meditations of [their] contemporaries" (5). Melville, Herbert argues, "lived in a world very different from our own, and thought in the idiom that his world provided," but he "addresses us directly" because he dramatizes "the historical finitude" of all the "basic conceptual frameworks in which men articulate their negotiations with experience" (5, 19).
Reading Herbert's study some thirty years after it was published, I am struck by the ways in which it seems simultaneously current and out-dated. In 1977, it was ahead of its time, an example of what Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen would refer to, nine years later, as "ideological literary criticism." Herbert doesn't use the term ideology, but like those critics in Bercovitch and Jehlen's influential anthology Ideology and Classic American Literature (1986), he draws on work from the social sciences to illuminate his account of literary creation: "Lines of research in sociology, anthropology, and psychology have converged upon the recognition that individual persons, as well as communities, render experience intelligible by employing conceptions of the world" (3). Although he feels duty-bound to invoke psychoanalytic theory in his discussion of "intellectual conflict" (12-15), Herbert's approach owes more to the work of Clifford Geertz and Thomas Kuhn, two of the most frequently invoked theorists among subsequent practitioners of ideological literary criticism. "Personality within a culture," Herbert writes, "coalesces about the scheme of basic attitudes which the culture mediates to every newborn in making him a member of his society. . . . Accepted conventions of thought and action reach into the individual and establish the terms on which he must achieve whatever individuality is to be distinctively his own" (3-4). Herbert's study is animated by a sense of the reciprocality of text and context that has now become de rigeur in the aftermath of the New Historicism.
And yet, one of the lessons of ideological literary criticism is that every act of reading or writing must be contextualized, and I am struck, reading Moby-Dick and Calvinisim in 2008 about the difference between its cultural context and my own. Indeed, I wonder whether the meaning of Herbert's suggestion that Melville "addresses us directly" hasn't changed in the thirty years since Herbert wrote those words: is it possible that the United States circa 2007 has more in common with Melville's time than it did in 1978?
In 1977, there was a Democratic president in office and social scientists fretted about what Christopher Lasch called the "culture of narcissism." Herbert writes with the implicit understanding that "the theocentric interpretation of moral experience has been superseded," but urges his reader not to underestimate the importance of religious thought.
Three decades later, however, theocentrism seems to be enjoying a renaissance in the United States, with a Republican president in office who counts himself among the ranks of born-again Christians. By all accounts, George W. Bush was able to win re-election in 2004 because he managed to turn out a sufficient number of voters from the religious right to make the difference. In the aftermath of the election, the Economist, observing American politics from across the Atlantic, wrote that "the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote has captured America. A plurality of voters, emerging from poll booths, said that the most important issue in the campaign had been 'moral values'. It was not, it seemed, Iraq or the economy. And eight out of ten of these moralists voted for George Bush" ("The triumph of the religious right," 13 November 2004). Ten weeks later, U.S. News and World Report would call Bush's second inauguration "a day for the true believers -- the social conservatives, Christian activists, foreign-policy hawks, and, of course, George W. Bush himself" (20 January 2005).
Reading Herbert's monograph in this cultural context reinforces my sense that Moby-Dick was an emergent text in 1851 and is an emergent text today in 2008 -- in both cases because of its links to cosmopolitanism.
When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Sacvan Bercovitch,
used to say proudly that he counted among his students one from the
oldest religion in the world (Zoroastrianism) and one from the newest
(Mormonism) . Full disclosure: my father is a Parsi, and I had a navjote ceremony when I was in the third grade, making me -- officially -- a Zoroastrian.
We had trouble finding someone from the priest class to perform the navjote ceremony, however, because my mother was a Filipino and a Christian -- a Protestant, oddly enough, my grandmother having converted to a Pentecostal sect before my mother's birth. My parents met at the International House at Columbia University, my father coming from Pakistan to study mathematical statistics, my mother from the Philippines to study literature and drama.
We weren't religious at home, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well. It was always assumed that I would become a Zoroastrian, as my mother explained it, so that I could keep my options open. I could convert to Christianity but not to Zoroastrianism later, because Zoroastrianism didn't accept converts.
But, when the time came during third grade for the ceremony to be performed, we couldn't find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of "I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned." Finally, we managed to secure the services of a priest from Bombay who was traveling in the U.S. and spending some time in New York. Four years later, we had to go to London to have my sister's ceremony done.
It was an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it would take me years to recognize it: my parents' marriage was an emblem of cosmopolitan cultural mixing, while the priests' belief in the importance of cultural purity might serve as an emblem of all the forces that are arrayed against cosmopolitanism.
When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, "Where are you from?" and I'd say, "New York" or "the upper West Side." They'd look vaguely disappointed and then say, "No, I meant what's your background." I wasn't really being disingenuous, though I was well aware what the first question really meant. It's just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents' cultural traditions. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in the mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another. To my Parsi relatives, I looked Filipino; to my Filipino relatives, I looked "bumbai"; and to my classmates -- well, on the rare occasions when someone wanted to launch a racial slur, the result was usually a lame attempt to insult me as if I were Puerto Rican.
So I suppose it's somewhat predictable that in recent years I have chosen to work on what I call "emergent literatures" -- literatures that express marginalized cultural identities -- and found myself increasingly interested in theories of cosmopolitanism. And that I've been fascinated for the past fifteen years with a text that combines the Zoroastrian and Christian traditions -- Moby-Dick.
I'll be writing a lot about Moby-Dick here in the coming months, as I teach my Conversations of the West class again this fall and serve as an adviser for Ric Burns's new documentary, Into the Deep: America, Whaling, and the World.
[The image above is called The Voyage of the Pequod from the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1956) by Everett Henry (1893-1961). Courtesy of the Geography & Map Division of the Library of Congress. Click here to see their page about it.]
In my post on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, I wondered what Schlesinger would have thought about the meaning of Barack's candidacy. Is
it possible, I asked, that the election of Barack would have a similar effect on
the self-esteem of Africans Americans that the election of Kennedy had
on Catholics?The lead story by Matt Bai in today's New York Times Magazine offers some thoughts on precisely that question. Bai, a white reporter, interviewers a number of black politicians, both veterans of the Civil Rights movement like House majority whip James Clyburn and Representative Charles Rangel, and younger politicians like Cory Booker, the 39-year-old mayor of Newark, and Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter. The article registers the discomfort of being a white reporter asking black politicians why they did or did not feel drawn to Obama's candidacy.
Bai is particularly interested in why older politicians like Clyburn and Rangel supported Hillary Clinton. Bai writes:
For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama's candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle -- to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream.This is precisely what Schlesinger's analysis of ethnicity would suggest about the fate of African-American cultural identity, assuming that the dynamics of race in the United States are more similar to the dynamics of ethnicity than not. For Michael Nutter, who supported Clinton, "not supporting Obama's candidacy marked a kind of progress, too." According to Bai, "you could argue that it was Nutter -- and not those black politicians who embraced Obama because they so closely identified with his racial experience -- who represented the truest embodiment of Obama-ism" -- a post-racial politics.
Bai suggests that there is another way that Obama's election might spell the end of Black politics as we have known them. According to Bai, some black leaders worry that an Obama presidency might mean "the precipitous decline of black influence," because he would be "closely watched for signs of parochialism or racial resentment" and might therefore "have less maneuvering room to champion spending on the urban poor, say, or to challenge racial injustice."
Only time will tell, but I persist in thinking that the election of Obama would be the sign of a new era in American politics, the new beginning that I and so many others hoped would arrive with Bill Clinton's presidency but that failed to materialize.
The symbolism may be heavy handed, but I think it's grand that Obama will officially become the Democratic nominee on August 28, the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
With the help of Bill over at the LivingDot helpdesk, I have managed to fix the problem with the feed from ahistoryofnewyork.com.
Bill reported that when he tried to access the feed, he received an error message: "An invalid character was found in text content."
At first, I didn't know how to reproduce the error, so I scanned the entries since August 8 for anything that might look like an invalid character. I made a few changes, but nothing helped. Then I tried to recreate the feed widget with Feeds.App Lite, and the process failed. I was sent over to feedvalidator.org, which identified the word in the entry "FringeNYC" that was causing the problem. It turned out to be the word "Tuesday," which must have contained some kind of hidden character that wasn't showing up on my screen. So I deleted "Tuesday," rewrote "Tuesday," saved the post and -- voila! -- everything is working again.
So if you're having trouble with illegal content in your feeds, use feedvalidator.org to isolate the problem. Thanks again, Bill!
Bill reported that when he tried to access the feed, he received an error message: "An invalid character was found in text content."
At first, I didn't know how to reproduce the error, so I scanned the entries since August 8 for anything that might look like an invalid character. I made a few changes, but nothing helped. Then I tried to recreate the feed widget with Feeds.App Lite, and the process failed. I was sent over to feedvalidator.org, which identified the word in the entry "FringeNYC" that was causing the problem. It turned out to be the word "Tuesday," which must have contained some kind of hidden character that wasn't showing up on my screen. So I deleted "Tuesday," rewrote "Tuesday," saved the post and -- voila! -- everything is working again.
So if you're having trouble with illegal content in your feeds, use feedvalidator.org to isolate the problem. Thanks again, Bill!
For reasons that remain mysterious, the listing of recent posts from "Patell and Waterman's History of New York" (ahistoryofnewyork.com) disappeared from my sidebar after I republished some pages last night. The listing was created using the plugin Feeds.App Lite, which comes with installations of Movable Type 4. I'd been thinking of upgrading to a paid version of Feeds.App so that I can list the authors of each post, but I don't think I'll do that until I figure out what's wrong with the widget I created.
With luck or perhaps a flash of insight, I'll be able to get it working again soon. In the meantime, I'll just note that the last post concerned Herman Melville and his father's description of him as "n honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker."
With luck or perhaps a flash of insight, I'll be able to get it working again soon. In the meantime, I'll just note that the last post concerned Herman Melville and his father's description of him as "n honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker."
Here is a project that brings together two of my hobbies: building computers and assembling Lego creations. Well, Lego assembly is really my sons' interest, but I seem to spend an awful lot of time doing it with my older son and for my younger son. I found the project via Engadget.com. It's a mini-ITX computer with a case built exclusively of Lego parts!This Lego Computer is the brainchild of Luke Anderson, a computer science major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has thoughtfully provided both an account of the project and complete instructions under a Creative Commons license on his blog. He used the MLCAD program to design the case and order the parts from various sellers at Bricklink.com.
Here's a YouTube video of Luke assembling the case. It's fun to watch even if you have no interest in either building computers or building with Legos.
My father has Verizon DSL service and an Actiontec GT704-WGV DSL Wireless Gateway, a modem/router customized for Verizon. The setup recently gave him some trouble. Read on if you have a similar setup and want to know how the problems were solved.
Continue reading Verizon DSL and Actiontec Modem/Router.
Let's hope not, Mets fans. But the past three days bode ill for the future of the season.On the field, the Mets had a fabulous month of July. They went 18-8, including a 10-game winning streak from July 5th to July 17th that vaulted them back into contention and put them, briefly, into first place. The streak was their longest in 17 years, the longest this year in the NL, and tied with Minnesota for the longest this year in the majors. Jose Reyes tied for the major-league lead in hits for the month with 39 and was tied for the most triples with 4. Fernando Tatis, given the chance to play regularly with the injuries to Moises Alou and Ryan Church, led the majors with a .397 batting average for the month. Carlos Delgado went on a tear at the plate and returned to the clean-up spot. Oliver Perez led the majors with a 1.38 ERA for the month. More details about the Mets' performance for the month are available in the the MLB "Gameday Press Pass" for August 1.
Off the field, however, things didn't go so well. Ryan Church continued to suffer from the effects of post-concussion syndrome. Moises Alou tore a hamstring and was lost for the season, with retirement a stron possibility. Pedro Martinez's father passed away. And Omar Minaya failed to make any deals by the non-waiver trading deadline of July 31 to bolster some of the team's weakenesses.
The first three days of August have borne out the seriousness of those weaknesses. Minaya was in the market for a corner outfielder but failed to land ex-Met Xavier Nady, who went to the Yankees from the Pirates. Now the mets are platooning two rookies, Nick Evans and Daniel Murphy, in left field, with Endy Chavez returning to his role as the fourth outfielder and lead bench player.
Probably more significantly, Minaya was interested in upgrading his bullpen, after closer Billy Wagner had an MRI and had to miss a day and Duaner Sanchez failed miserably as his understudy, in what turned out to be a waste of eight superb innings from Johan Santana and a come-from-behind Phillies win in the ninth inning (July 22). But July 31 came and went with no help for the bullpen.
And so what happens? The bullpen blows the first two games in August, both of the losses charged to Aaron Heilman, the second occurring after Wagner fails to hold a two-run lead in the ninth. And then, on August 3, the offense hints that it might have been playing over its head during the previous month and fails to score any runs. All this to the Houston Astros, who -- even with the sweep of the Mets -- are four games under .500 and 13 games behind the Cubs. Meanwhile, John Maine has been put on the disabled list, and Wagner may follow him, pending the results of another MRI.
Just when when we were ready to think that the team had finally put last year's choke behind them . . .
