April 26, 2006
This Day In History
Tags: Baby, baby, baby. (Just one baby, but it bears repeating.)
I don’t normally post much real life personal stuff on this weblog, but this is an event of Great Historical Import: Please meet my daughter Yuki, born yesterday morning and shown here at about 30 minutes of age, looking dubious about the whole proposition. As I might have mentioned on my other weblog and in a whole bunch of emails, she is perfect and healthy and beautiful and awesome and so is her mother.
If you’re holding your breath for my reply to Cliopatria’s symposium on transnational history or the sequel to my Superman post (tentatively titled Superman II: What’s the (Anti) Matter With Kansas?*)—not a wise tactic at the best of times given my blogging habits—I’d advise you to take in some air. I have a lot of gazing in awe at this little one to do. (It’s like checking my email, only fulfilling!)
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April 22, 2006
The Top Five Most Boss Names of U.S. Secretaries of State
Tags: Sorry, Bainbridge Colby.
The top five most boss names of U.S. Secretaries of State:
5. Abel Parker Upshur (1843-1844)
4. Condoleezza Rice (2005-)
3. Elihu Root (1905-1909)
2. Hamilton Fish (1869-1877)
1. Philander C. Knox (1909-1913)
Honorable Mention: Lawrence Eagleburger (1992-1993), who as my friend Ned points out, sounds like something you’d be served at Ted Nugent’s ranch.
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April 18, 2006
Earthquake Weather
Tags: April 18, 1906; birds and snakes and aeroplanes; the uses of disaster.
Caleb McDaniel and others remind me that today is the 100th anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Caleb quotes from the autobiography of the journalist / social activist Dorothy Day, who witnessed the quake:
What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward. … While the crisis lasted, people loved each other. They realized their own helplessness while nature ‘travaileth and groaneth.’ It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity. It makes one think of how people could, if they would, care for each other in times of stress, unjudgingly, with pity and with love.
This idea, and I think that very quotation, were at the heart of an essay in Harper’s last October by San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit, about the relationship between disasters, authority, and human nature. A short excerpt, along with a post-Katrina postscript that did not appear in the magazine, are available at the Harper’s site.
People routinely remark on the âsurprisingâ emergence of bravery and human kindness in the wake of a terrible disaster. The aftermath of a disaster is “often peculiarly hopeful,” Solnit says. Traumas shake us out of our ordinary lives and preoccupations, revealing our common humanity. And the grunt work of rebuilding and repairing after calamity is, apparently, some of the most fulfilling work we are ever given an opportunity to do. Solnit, a journalist / activist herself I think, even sees political possibility in disaster:
In the rupture of the ordinary, real change often emerges. … Disaster threatens not only bodies, buildings, and property but also the status quo. Disaster recovery is not just a rescue of the needy but also a scramble for power and legitimacy, one that the status quo usually—but not always—wins. … Disaster makes it clear that our interdependence is not only an inescapable fact but a fact worth celebrating—that the production of civil society is a work of love, indeed the work that many of us desire most.
Solnit’s article was written just before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last summer but published immediately after, and her optimistic view of the possibilities of disaster seemed a little kooky at a time when the news was all shootings and lootings and horror at the Superdome. The article reads much better now, I think, and I’m glad the anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake led me to give it another look. Check it out if you didn’t see it last September, or even if you did.
Formatting note: What is the deal with the formatting of this entry? Why do some of my paragraphs insist on centering themselves? Why is it inconsistent depending on which browser I’m using? Could it be that I bashed this site together with virtually zero knowledge of CSS? Advice welcomed. Formatting seems to be fixed, thanks to a simple suggestion from the excellent Matt Norwood. Do let me know if anything still looks wonky.
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April 14, 2006
For Completists Only
Tags: TransAmerica, but not that TransAmerica; grading papers; the most useful six hours of grad school.
Completists take note: There’s a conversation going on at Cliopatria and elsewhere on globalization and transnational history. I wrote a little something on the subjectâTransAmerica, which went up last Sundayâand there will be a symposium on transnational American history at Cliopatria next Monday. I’ll try to get something more written for that, but marks are due Monday and I have a pile of papers to read and grade. So don’t plan your week around it.
If you’re really a completist, you can also read my advice to graduate teaching assistants on responding to student writing. Tis the season after all, and if you’re in the thick of grading papers like I am, you may find some useful advice or at least moral support there. Most of what’s written therein comes from a terrific workshop I took on teaching student writing at Harvard’s Derek Bok Centerâpossibly the most useful six or seven hours I experienced in all of graduate school.
That handout I link to had to be watered down a little by revisions, though, before it could be given my department’s official stamp of approval. For instance, where I say “Grammar is not the only problem,” what I originally wrote, and actually meant, was “Grammar is not the problem.” Because I don’t think that it is. I’m a big believer in grading and interacting with student ideas as much as possible rather than trying to correct mechanical errors of spelling, grammar, and the like. And it’s been my experience that when students really know what they are doing in a paper, when they truly understand what they are arguing and why it matters, the great bulk of the fuzzleness and muddification in their writing drops away. (Now if only that worked for us professional academics.) Not everybody subscribes to this view of things, and that’s fine. Some people are skeptical about the top-down approach to teaching writing, or that it can work with students who aren’t, say, Harvard students. I think it does work, but I can certainly see why my department can’t just tell our TAs, “don’t bother marking for spelling or grammar.” (Which isn’t what I’m saying, of course, but I can see how it could come out like that.) So, opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of my employer, etc. etc.
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April 04, 2006
The World is Bound By Secret Knots
Tags: The Coolest Guy Ever; Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development; âIf this is anybody but Athanaius Kircher, you’re stealing Charles Fort’s bit.â
There are a number of reasons why I donât add to this weblog or post to Cliopatria as often as Iâd like to or ought to. Two pretty good reasons why I don’t are wrapping up in the next few weeks, but a bouncing new reason is due (gulp!) by the end of this month. One not so good reason for not blogging is my own paralysing sense that everything I might care to write about has been exhaustively covered by other blogs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve set out to write something, Googled for a little information, and found so many pages on the topic that I just couldn’t bear to add to the bloviage of the blogosphere. I realize this is a lame excuse for not posting. Surely everything that can be written about has been written about somewhere. But there it is.
That’s a bit of neurotic throat-clearing before saying that I really don’t know what to make of this: The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century Jesuit polymath and collector of oddities. Charles Fort owns my heart in such matters, callow Americanist that I am, but I could hardly disagree with Scott McLemee when he dubbed Kircher “Just About the Coolest Guy Ever” way back in 2002. The Society’s interests, according to its mission statement, extend to “the wondrous, the singular, the esoteric, the obsessive, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible â anything that Father Kircher might find cool if he were alive today.” In practice, the topics covered on the Society’s marvelous weblog run towards historical automata, bizarre musical instruments, unworkable inventions, and other wrong turns and cul de sacs in the histories of science of technology. So you can guess why I’m interested in the site.
There’s just one thing that’s troubling me about this wonderful font of weirdness. Take a look at the layout and color scheme of their site. Does it remind you of anything? Anything at all?
The Society’s archives only go back to February 2006, but they’ve posted about ten times as much material in two months as I have in two years. Now, I don’t own the colors beige and brown, and I’m not claiming that anybody is stealing my bit. Fra Kircher would no doubt endorse some theory of parallel weblog development a la Star Trek’s Hodgkin’s Law to explain the phenomena. I just feel so awfully redundant, like one of those Philip K. Dick characters who gets replaced by a clone or doppelganger that proves to be his superior in nearly every respect.
