in my own good time

Christmas cookies

2011-12-24T13:46:00.000-08:00

This is the first year that I am reporting on cookie baking progress in real time, posting updates on the successes, failures, and unintended consequences of steps taken by mistake.

As a result, I find myself reflecting far more than I might otherwise on this annual ritual, which is the primary way I connect to family tradition. I say that I am making my mother's cookies. I have never been interested, as others are, in finding new recipes or in changing the recipes I received. Christmas is mom's cookies, and I am intent on re-making Christmas.

But it is more than just making the same kind of cookies as she did. When I make my mother's Christmas cookies, I repeat embodied gestures, the memories of how she did things, of how we did things together. I re-embody her. Now that, every time I look in a mirror, I have a slight shock of recognition, seeing her hair turned white surrounding my face, this sense of bringing back to life a shared experience is ever stronger.

Yesterday, when the Russian tea cakes were in the oven and I began to set up the cooling rack and confectioner's sugar for when they came out, I reached without thinking for a brown paper bag, cutting it open and laying it down on the counter to rest the cookies on, collecting the excess sugar. This is nothing I thought of; it is something I have forgotten to do in previous years; it was simply something that, in a state of exhaustion, came from somewhere deep in my being.

Similarly today, rolling walnut-sized balls of kipfel dough to return to the fridge for two or more hours, I ripped off a piece of waxed paper before I remembered that I use a plastic bag to hold the layer of balls and keep them from adhering. Finding no plastic bags left, I self-consciously pulled out the waxed paper sheet I had folded and put back, and began to line it with the kipfel cookie dough balls.

I learned these things without intent. Baking was the one thing that I did with my mother that I didn't share with other siblings. Why, I don't know. Growing up, cooking was not something I was expected to do: if there was a meal needing help, my job was to run to the store for a loaf of bread or something else needed at the last minute. I think it was when I was in high school that I began staying with Mom in the kitchen when she began to make her cookies.

The memories, like all memories, are unreliable, layered, cannot be sorted into a timeline. They are episodes. Some are funny: the year that we realized too late that weevils had infested the oats, and faced the decision: throw that entire batch of gumdrop cookies away? or keep silent and let them be consumed with a little extra protein? I associate this memory with something read as an archaeology undergrad, a similar joke made by an archaeologist studying early agriculture, and maybe that means this time was on a vacation from Cornell, because I know that after I left home, returning to make Christmas cookies became even more important.

Even when everything else changed, this did not. There were the tools: the sifter (she sifted her flour; I twitch with guilt as I do not); the pastry cutter with wires and a wood handle (now I have my own, found after a brief flirtation with a supposedly superior all-metal, bladed type); wooden spoons for creaming butter, the technique I learned from her and continue to practice, except for one batch this year when my injured elbow punished me for trying (and even so, I am not sure I will resort to the mixer again next year).

Not that nothing ever changed in her repertoire. I do not know when I realized that the big, sugar iced cut cookies we decorated as children were really not all that interesting to her. It seems she had made them so we could be part of the cooking, and once we were grown, there was no special attraction there, even though when she did decorate the reindeer, Santas, bells, and stars, she placed each sprinkle of sugar or silvery ball with perfect care.

But it was the other cookies she loved to make. And unlike me, she experimented with new varieties every year. Kipfels were one of these experiments, from a recipe printed in the newspaper. We made the rich short pastry, rolled out the circles on 10x sugar, and prepared to fill the crescents, before we reached the filling instructions calling for a combination of apricot jam, chopped walnuts, and beaten egg whites. Odd, but still, we combined these ingredients as best we could, and they were delicious. Then the paper printed a correction: there were two fillings, one apricot alone, the other a walnut mixture. After careful consideration, next year, she made her mixed filling again, walnuts and apricot jam-- and I make her version of kipfels every year, aware that it is not Lottie Ketter's recipe anymore, but mom's.

We would work for hours. This year, forced by my recalcitrant arm to delay some cookies for days, I realize that I have taken on not just the responsibility to reproduce her cookies, but the need to make them all at once, in an intense burst of effort over two or three days. It is not as hard to make the cookies this way, spaced out over a week. But there was something about the intensity of baking Christmas cookies with mom that meant this was a special time.

I have recipes for almost all the Christmas baking we did year after year. The Hello Dollies, which I think may originally have been made by an aunt (Virginia? or am I confusing this with her famous Rocky Roads?). The spectacular, universally beloved gum drop cookies (for which I scour stores in these days of Sour Gummi Worms and Fish, pushing the old traditional gum drops off the shelves). The Russian tea cakes, always my favorites, but finicky, ready to break into a million crumbs if I make the slightest mistake in assembly. (I remember the disastrous year when she experimented with an alternative way to cover them with sugar, putting them in a bag and shaking it, opening it to find crumbs and broken cookies-- why would she try that? with my own fingers beginning to show the effects of arthritis, I wonder if this was an attempt to lessen the fine work that becomes harder as my hands become clumsier, or rather, if hers became clumsier as mine are?)

And then there is Stollen. I do not have this recipe. I wonder if it is one she actually wrote down, or simply committed to memory. The German fruit bread with its white sugar icing was often the last thing she prepared. I do not remember the kids liking it; the citrons and citrus zest that accompanied the raisins in her version did not necessarily appeal to the tastes of children. I have not tried to recreate Stollen, because with one exception, it was not something I made with her, not something for which the skill is in my fingers and arms.

But there was one Christmas when I made Stollen. I don't remember when, if it was before I left home or when I returned, as I did for as long as I could, to make mom's cookies. What I do know is that timing did not work that day; we were late into Christmas morning before we wrapped up the last cookies, and she decided not to stay up to make the Stollen. I said I would clear up, and she went to bed. And then I made a Stollen. All by myself, I recreated her steps, ending with the icing, leaving the Stollen for her to see when she came downstairs next morning. My gift to her; the only gift I remember giving her in my life.

So how could I make Stollen now? I gave it to her, as she gave me these other things: the gumdrop cookies, the Russian tea cakes, the kipfels. Her hair, her despair and hope, her magical thinking. Belief. Love. Ferocious love.

Poetry, Flowers, and Other Beautiful Things

2011-11-24T09:34:00.001-08:00

Let thought burst into flame...

Two nights ago we saw an extraordinary performance of La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera. The production was glorious, the singing was beautiful, and the acting was entirely committed.

Because this was not the first time I saw this story of early nineteenth-century artists living in Parisian attics, I noticed things that I would not have previously.

At the beginning of the play, the artist Marcello is painting, and the poet Rodolfo is shivering. The scene unfolds as an interplay of the materiality of the painting and manuscripts, and the reality of the images they represent. Marcello sings

This Red Sea passage
makes me shiver,
I feel as if it were flowing right over me
droplet by droplet.

The image he is painting is so real that Marcello feels what he is painting. Materialization links the artist with the scene.

This interplay between things and the things that represent them continues as, inspired, the pair feed his manuscript to the flames of the stove in their garret:

Let thought burst into flame...
the paper will crackle and turn to ashes,
then the poetry will rise to Heaven...
I find it really sparkling!...
Within that languid blue flickering
flame, an ardent tale of love fades!
A page crackles.
There are kisses in there!

The play burns, and the poetry sparkles, kisses crackle, the emotions become things-- active, moving, burning ardently...

Once my attention was caught by the place things play in this opera, by the interplay of poetry and things, it became impossible to ignore.

Specific items of clothing play active roles, they act independently of the intentions of the humans they connect in a network of humans and non-humans: the bonnet that Rodolfo buys for Mimi, which she leaves him as a memento when they part; the shoes that Musetta claims are too tight to wear, so that she can rid herself of her rich patron and reclaim Marcello; the fur muff Musetta buys to warm the hands of the dying Mimi; and most of all, the overcoat that Colline sells to buy comforts for Mimi.

There is a particular interplay between the images of poetry and flowers that links and yet divides Rodolfo, the poet, and Mimi, the young woman he loves. Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimi, describing what he does:

In my dreams and reveries,
I build castles in the air,
where in spirit I am a millionaire...

Mimi, in turn, describes her own work, echoing the interplay between the materiality of the canvas and paper that Marcello and Rodolfo discussed burning, and their service as media to represent things of beauty:

On linen and silk I embroider,
at my home or away...
I have a quiet, but happy life,
and my pastime
is making lilies and roses....
These things have such sweet charm,
they speak of love, of Spring,
of dreams and visions and
the things that have poetic names.

Mimi is more aware of the difference between the flowers she embroiders and those that bloom in April than Rodolfo comprehends the distance between his dramatic scenes and real life:

In a vase a Rosebud blooms,
I watch as petal by petal unfolds,
with its delicate fragrance of a flower!
But the flowers that I sew,
alas, have no fragrance.

The events that unfold between them will, however, teach Rodolfo what Mimi already knows.

In the second act, things establish the scene:

Oranges, dates, hot chestnuts!
Trinkets, crosses, nougat!
Whipped cream!
Toffees!
Fruit pies!
Finches, Sparrows!
Flowers for pretty girls!

Flowers for pretty girls... flowers like the ones that Mimi embroiders. But what Mimi asks for, and Rodolfo buys her, is not the flower, but one of the items of clothing that circulate through the opera as extensions of the characters:

A pink bonnet, trimmed
with lace, and prettily embroidered.

Embroidered with what? we are not told. But with Mimi's description of her work so recently echoing, and the vendor's repeated cry of "Flowers for pretty girls", I imagine the bonnet embroidered with spring flowers.

When, in Act Three, Mimi resolves to leave Rodolfo to spare him the pain he feels about their poverty endangering her health, she says she

must return
there all alone, to make
imitation flowers of silk.

She describes to Rodolfo where her few possessions are, and leaves the pink bonnet as the remembrance of their love. In a long exchange, interrupted by the arguing of their friends Marcello and Musetta, Rodolfo says

One can speak with Lilies and roses.

Mimi answers

Gentle twittering can be
heard from birds' nests...

And together they sing,

When the flowers bloom in Spring,
we'll have the sun as our companion!...
We'll part when it's the
season for flowers again!

Poetry and embroidered flowers compete here, each a visualization of beauty. But it is the items of clothing that take on active roles in the final act. Rodolfo speaks to the bonnet which is all that remains of his lost Mimi:

And you, soft bonnet,
that she left concealed under the pillow,
you know all our happiness.

The bonnet is invested with a capacity to know, to actively remember.

Also reintroduced is the overcoat worn by Colline, the prime example of an object invested with agency in this opera. We first meet the overcoat in Act Two, as Colline buys it:

It's rather worn...
...but it's dignified and it's a good price.

It returns at the end of the opera, when Colline determines to sell it for the benefit of Mimi:

Faithful old garment, listen,
I'll rest down here,
you however, must climb
the sacred mount of piety.
My thanks you must receive.
Never has your poor worn back
bowed before the rich and powerful.
Deep in your calm cavernous pockets,
you have protected
philosophers and poets.
Now that our happy days
have fled, I must bid you farewell,
faithful friend of mine.
Farewell, farewell.

This faithful friend takes one last action, leaving Colline, the philosopher, to produce funds for Mimi.

Once I began to watch what things did in this opera, if became a different play for me: one where art doesn't just imitate reality, it invokes blooming flowers; where clothing, instead of passively submitting to people, remembers, protects, and takes on the burdens of the people it lives among.

Tracking missions over time

2011-01-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

Spanish missions are a visible reminder of a deeper history in states like California.

Many missions are still in use as parish churches, while simultaneously offering a more-or-less sanitized history of Spanish colonization. Yet the historicity of many of these missions-as-heritage-sites is questionable: often they were reconstructed by groups less concerned with questions of authenticity than with creating concrete visible symbols of a romanticized "Spanish" history. Think Zorro, with its oddly baroque clothing and seemingly infinite number of wealthy hidalgo families.

I wasn't aware of the number of missions that existed in other states of the Southwest (or the Southeast, for that matter). A trip to Tucson a few years ago gave me the opportunity to visit San Xavier Bac, probably the most beautiful mission church in the entire Southwest, and started me on an ongoing mission hunt. Now, everywhere we go in the Southwest, I check to see if there are missions and push to find a way to visit them.

San Antonio, it turns out, was the center of an unusually dense cluster of missions. The Alamo (which, ironically, we did not succeed in visiting) was originally one of them, San Antonio Valero. South along the San Antonio river are four more. The National Park Service administers them, with local parishes continuing to use three of the intact churches.

Mission Concepcion was founded in 1731. The church that was completed in 1755 still stands, and is beautiful. Remnants of original paint are preserved in the rooms of the convento. The interior of the church preserves a section cut through to the original paint at one point, as an evident warrant for the contemporary painting of the church interior.

It is these mixtures of contemporary use-- here and elsewhere including refreshing of the paint in the church-- and a kind of bow to historical preservation that makes missions temporally complicated. I need a word here like Foucault's heterotopia: heterotempora? for a place that contains, not many places, but many times.

Even the name "Concepcion" has interesting temporal dimensions. It is a reference to the Immaculate Conception, the feast day that falls on December 8. It was not until 1854 that the Roman Catholic church declared as official dogma that Mary herself was born without original sin, so the question for me is, what did it mean to dedicate a church to Concepcion in 1731?

Among other things, it leads to a consideration of the differences between different orders of missionary priests. The three main orders responsible for missions in Latin America, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits, were competitors, and differed fiercely in how they understood theology. These differences led to approaches to missionization that could be dramatic. (The movie The Mission represented some of the difference between Jesuits and Franciscans through the history of missionization of Paraguay's Guaraní).

(A less well known order, the Mercedarians, who were responsible for missions in Honduras in the 16th and 17th century, provide another, even better example. Unlike the dominant model in the US, which is associated with the Franciscans, Mercedarians did not bring the native people into a centralized settlement. Instead, they established a central church, and daughter churches in Indian towns, which they visited to administer sacraments.)

Reportedly, St Francis of Assisi, founder of the order, designated the Virgin Mary as "Advocate of the Order":

the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis is placed under the protection of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, its heavenly patron.

The Dominican Order also had an early history of Marian devotion. But the two orders differed on specific aspects of Marian practice; as one Dominican source says

The two Marian devotions represent in the minds of the faithful two different floods of light.

The Dominicans promoted the Rosary as a means of devotion to Mary. Veneration of the Virgin Mary as conceived without sin was advocated by the Franciscans; the Dominicans did not observe this feast until it was made universal dogma of the Roman Catholic church.

Approved as a "pious belief" in the early 15th century, the doctrine of "immaculate conception" was long debated. The feast day was officially recognized as a holy day of obligation only in 1708-- less than two decades before the establishment of the mission of that name south of San Antonio by the Franciscan order.

A second Franciscan mission dedicated to the same manifestation of the Virgin Mary exists in central California, named in full Mission La Purísima Concepción, although founded much later (1787).

Dedicating these mission churches to the "pure conception of Mary" served as a way to advance the doctrinal argument. At the same time, the Franciscans were advancing, knowingly or otherwise, veneration of the only American manifestation of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared to Juan Diego on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception in 1531. According to tradition, the apparition declared herself “the ever virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God”.

Although the story of the vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe outside Mexico City dates to 1531, it is precisely during the period when the missionization of the Southwest began that piety directed at this American manifestation of the Virgin Mary was promoted.

And as if to underline this convergence of histories, inside the church of Mission Concepcion today there are two paintings: one, a European-style image of Mary as a young, almost androgynous girl dressed in a pink gown with a blue mantle; the other the familiar image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that is the American version of the Immaculate Conception.

Layers of time and histories converging in this one place.

Writing, reading, and time

2011-01-02T07:09:00.000-08:00

I spend too little time reading.

Every night, I manage to read at least a few pages before I fall asleep, usually of a novel, rarely of some general nonfiction (The Botany of Desire most recently). But that's not the place or way to read the books and articles that are being written in my field (with rare exceptions, and those are usually actually outside the discipline: Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power was bedtime reading...).

For those, I need to be upright, sitting at a desk or in a chair. I read a fair amount of professional literature prepping for classes. If I banish novels from my carry-on, I can read books in my field on airplanes. But more of what I read is simultaneous with writing.

Because in preference to reading something someone else in my field has written, I like to write. I think I write too much; although I also am always painfully aware of what I haven't written, or haven't finished writing.

I feel guilty about what I haven't written, but oddly, I don't feel guilty about what I am not reading. I used to, so this is something that has changed over time. I used to feel a tyranny of the need to read everything by everyone else. But as my interests kept broadening, my ability to read "everything" receded into the distance.

So now I read in motivated ways. When I write, I gather together towers of books, and folders of PDFs of articles, and chains of Google Books links. I like the excuse writing gives me to use article databases and do open-ended searches, to find things I would otherwise never have known existed.

And even though I think of my reading habits as having changed utterly since graduate school days, I recognize these computer-aided searches as the descendants of the way I worked throughout my dissertation writing phase. At Illinois, we could have a locked carrel in the stacks, and I would go there and make neat 3 x 5 cards of notes (all of which I still have) of books I hunted down on my own. Walking to the place on the shelf that was my selected destination, I would read the titles along the way. Of course, this was nowhere near as complete a search as I can do today: for one thing, it tended to be limited to the shelves at my eye-level, just above and just below. But I found things that I would never have in the deliberate way.

So I read a lot, then. And I probably read a lot, now. But I feel like there is some scholarly standard that I am failing to achieve. Nonetheless, any time I read those texts that either are submitted for review or somehow make it into print larded with citations, I hate them. I want your ideas, not a rehash of those of anyone else. And the one thing I can guarantee is that my writing presents my own ideas.

I have stopped agreeing to review papers and manuscripts-- it takes away my own time to write, which means my own time to read. I used to take inordinate time and write long, detailed, thoughtful reviews. At one juncture, my old doctoral advisor told me an editor of a major journal had described me as his "ideal reviewer" and said my reviews would be publishable papers. I was cured of this by the author of the worst book ever written on Honduran archaeology: I kept receiving it, unchanged, from different presses even though I had tried to suggest ways to bring it up to barely publishable status. So I realized that I was wasting my time and decided to stop.

(Nor was my opinion of this wretched book unique; here's what another colleague said in a review on Amazon.com-- a signed review:

Riddled with errors, this gives a highly distorted view of the region. Relies heavily on secondary sources. How in heaven's name does the author dare to claim that "Jorge de Olancho" was the name of a conquistador? Shoddy scholarship abounds in this disappointing work.

Ouch.)

So, I will go back to my office surrounded by books, writing a few pages and then seeking the parts that I know from teaching are buried in the specifics of the author's case study. I will browse my way through article databases in search of the serendipity of a new author, new journal, new interdisciplinary dialogue.

But I read too little. And write too much. Except that I am not writing what I should write. And I will still wake up in the middle of the night thinking that and despairing of ever satisfying that internal critic.

Unexpected beauty and the shock of recognition

2010-12-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

You may think you know Gauguin well. You may think Gauguin is not worth knowing. But Gauguin at the Tate Modern makes the kind of impression that is not common. The reassembly in one place of works scattered in museums around the world, and the choice not to tell a predictable biographical story, made this a source of constant surprises.

One of these was the shock of recognition. In a room halfway through the gallery space, dedicated to exploring the sacred in Gauguin's work, "The Yellow Christ" met me with a shock of recognition. I grew up with this painting, even if my memory of it was half submerged, as it comes from the Albright Knox Art Museum. But the painting next to it, "The Green Christ", from the Belgian national museum, I had never seen. Its alternate title, "Breton Calvary", throws new light on its close companion. In the "Breton Calvary", what looks at first like the moment following the crucifixion, is revealed as a weathered sculpture, a pieta. Yet the "Yellow Christ" seems to show the Breton woman praying, not around a statue, but around a crucified man.

Then I turn, and see "Vision of the Sermon", this one from the National Galleries of Scotland. Breton women praying in the foreground frame a semicircular area delineated in solid red, where on one side of a tree a cow stands. On the other Jacob wrestles with the angel. The curatorial suggestion that what we see is the externalization of the women's perception of the sermon transforms how I can see any other work by Gauguin: as a kind of visual magical realism, so far from the false primitivism that he seemed to exemplify before.

Time in London

2010-12-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

Staying in the heart of the City of London was a pragmatic decision, because it put us on the Northern subway line that took us within a 20 minute walk of the British Museum's collections storage.

But it was also a sentimental decision. Looking at a map of this part of London, today the financial center (and thus never until now a place we had stayed) the first striking thing is the map of the old city surrounded, but not erased, by the new. London Wall Street literally traces the arc of the great wall of the old Roman city of Londinium. The main streets in the City run out like rays from a center point.

Somewhere here, I knew, a Temple of Mithras had been found during construction work. I wanted to find that piece of physical memory, whose location was somewhat hazy in the various sources I read. And eventually, we found it, but along the way we found much more.

I was taken by the street names, references to the crafts that once were practiced, and my eye was drawn to the London Guildhall. I walked us past it, expecting nothing, and found a massive ornate building that looked as if generations of earlier buildings had been gradually covered up. I guessed that it had survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, and guessed that the oldest part might have 16th century roots. In fact, it was started in 1411.

Buried beneath the Guildhall, open for visits through its art museum, I found my dose of Roman materiality: the east gate of the original Roman amphitheater. Once we knew it existed, we were able to see a blue arc of pavement in the courtyard of the Guildhall, showing the outline of the amphitheater. The Temple of Mithras was anticlimatic, standing rebuilt and open to rainfall, covered in green moss, next to the building called Temple Court on Queen Victoria Street. But what they brought to our walk through the City of 2010 was a sense of thousands of years of history.

This would have been enough to make the City come alive for me. But there was more. As we walked through the abandoned streets on Saturday, devoid of the bankers and businessmen who crowded the sidewalks during the week, a Song Cycle of early modern music flowed out of corners and byways. "Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, John Dowland, 1604" occupied the corner of Milk Street and Russia Row as we wandered down toward the banks of the Thames, following the echoes of time in London.

Thoughts on Karaoke

2010-11-04T08:42:00.000-07:00

Yes. Karaoke.

Not something I expected to ever have experience in, and therefore not something I ever thought about (except that I loved Bill Murray's Lost in Translation).

So it was somewhat surprising to be annoyed when, at what turned out to be midnight, the staff of the UC Presidential Postdoc retreat at UCLA's Lake Arrowhead conference center turned on a sound system, thereby ending karaoke night.

Beginning at the beginning: my third UCOP Postdoc is currently in his second (and last) year. One of the commitments in these mentored fellowships has been to come to two events a year: a day-long conference held at the Oakland Airport Hilton; and this weekend retreat.

I hate things that are scheduled by my job that assume I am available evenings or weekends. So it has not bothered me that in the previous four years (the most recent postdocs overlapped for one year) I have not made it to the weekend retreat. My reason was a good one: it has traditionally been held in spring, coinciding with the archaeology professional meetings. Not just me, but at times my postdocs, were better occupied being at that meeting.

But with the budget crisis, last year the program held only the fall meeting in Oakland, and this year, they moved the retreat into the fall term and dropped the fall meeting. (So effectively, the current postdocs participate in the same two events over the course of a two year period, although not in a uniform order as before.)

So, with the weekend retreat in fall, and my latest postdoc at the point where we need another campus to consider hiring him (one of the goals of the program is to diversify the faculty at UC by keeping promising young PhDs in the system as new professors), I gritted my teeth and let myself be kidnapped and held prisoner.

Excuse me. I mean I went to spend two days in intimate, all day forced contact with strangers.

Let's try again. I journeyed with a group of like-minded people to a rousing revival meeting in which we reaffirmed our common commitments to teaching, mentoring, and research.

And remarkably, that last one seems to be true. There are unexpected beauties to being in the company of like-minded strangers. I hate eating breakfast in public with people I don't know (I do not wake up well). But I met wonderful people, even at breakfast.

So by the evening, when I came to the room for our keynote address by a former postdoc, I happily signed on the karaoke list: after all, why come to an event like this and try to avoid the artificial bonding opportunity? And at least this wasn't any artificial trust exercise involving blindfolds.

(The speaker's current research is looking at murders in the Phillipines that are attributed to disputes about signing "My Way" in karaoke bars, which she relates to masculinity and power. Not sure I quite buy the arguments...)

After the talk and discussion, it turned out I was one of only two brave souls to have volunteered. I played it cautious, and went for Willy Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (which has a vocal range of about 3 notes).

The set up was not ideal: we were using the speaker's computer as the karaoke machine, with the words projected on a screen in front of the room, so you had to stand either with your back to the room or sideways (I chose sideways).

And as someone who had never done this weird thing before, I have to say I found the way the words were projected confusing: two lines were posted, highlighted word by word; as you finished the top line, and went on to line 2, the top line was replaced by the third line. This really, really confused me: linear order is apparently important in my lyrics, if nothing else. (I think it was especially confusing because the screen changed from lines 1-2 to lines 3-2 to lines 3-4, 5-4, 5-6 etc. Can you tell I have been dwelling on this?)

But even worse: there was a score at the top of the screen! and I only scored 74!

UNLEASH THE OVER-ACHIEVER!!!

When the next (and only other) volunteer went ahead, with polish, panache, and a good voice (and, I intuit, experience) and registered a 94, I had to return to the scene of the crime.

I will spare you a song by song narrative. (I couldn't do it, anyway; that's an indication of how enthusiastically I threw myself into the game.) I analyzed what others were doing as the score went up and down, and deduced that being on key mattered not a bit; even singing the right words seemed to be unimportant. But making sounds at the same rate as the words were highlighted-- now that, the karaoke machine liked.

The culmination of my night was not, alas, "My Way". That would have made this a perfect story. (And to be honest, I thought about it but then they turned off the machine...) Personally, I enjoyed "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" the most; others enjoyed a song I can no longer remember the title of but let's just say was a tad more suggestive than I remembered.

Only about half a dozen of us participated in any way. Both of my postdocs in attendance-- one in her first year as assistant professor, and the afore-mentioned second-year postdoc-- made token efforts, singing back-up to avoid what they clearly feared would be my insistence on them singing alone. (I wouldn't actually have forced them to sing, and it is illuminating how they assumed that, even after knowing me for more than a year each.)

Karaoke in a pine lodge seems sort of exotic. Karaoke at all fascinates me: I can sing, but I do not think that my singing in this context was at all good. You cannot choose a key, so you are stuck with what the machine does; loud gets better scores than style; and I found myself semi-shouting and alternating between a falsetto and my increasingly deep natural voice.

And it did not create any kind of community. There was a bar at the end of the room, and the fellows (and a few brave faculty) surged back there and hovered in the semi-darkness in apparent desire to avoid being noticed. (Clarification: my drink of choice all night was ice water.) Most of the faculty slipped out after the talk. The director of the program kept explaining to me and anyone who was listening that last time (two years ago) people were happy to participate, and that they had a lot of people who were part of bands then. So I think this was a failure as a bonding exercise.

But: I got a lot better idea of what motivates people to spend hours pretending to sing old standards to a pre-recorded music track. And I think I could even understand coming to violence, say, if someone else sang "My Way" her way, and the machine, in its infinite detachment, gave it a higher score.

I, by the way, ended the night with a 96 score on my best effort-- and yes, that was the high score.

Dining in the 18th century

2010-06-07T05:12:00.000-07:00

Gotland Island.

Here the medieval walled city of Visby persists as a fragment from the 13th century, its narrow streets winding past half-timbered houses whose upper stories I could reach up and touch.

Along the streets we pass the skeletons of churches, St. Karin's, St. Lars, St. Per and St. Hans, St. Clement and more-- so many that we could not pass them all in our two days of wandering. The northern Gothic buildings, so much more austere than the more familiar churches of France and Italy that dominate our imagination, also beg the question: in this tightly packed town, what called for the preservation of these precincts, unused after the churches were burned in 1525 by Germans from Lübeck?

Clearly, Visby is a city that has prized the material traces of its own history long before the modern period of nostalgic longing for ruins that led to its designation as a World Heritage site.

This is what that the archaeology of "picture stones" on the island done by my friend Alexander tells us as well: erected from the 5th to 12th centuries, picture stones were marked points on the landscape of farmsteads. There a few remain today, while others were removed when the network of Christian parishes was established.

I am used to seeing layers of history on the landscape. Driving the southwest coast of the island, we marvel at stone foundations revealed at a medieval dig site, only inches below the surface of green fields encircled by still-visible traces of earthworks, and a "stone ship" setting from the Bronze Age conjures even deeper history.

So it is surprising to me that the experience that most imposed the sense of continuity and history on me during our visit to this dense knot of built time, was dinner in a countryside farmhouse preserved by Alexander's mother and step-father, in the process of restoration.

To say "in the process of restoration" brings up entirely the wrong kind of imagery: this was a building where university students exploring historical architecture had stripped away sections of wall board, where peeling strips of layers of hand-printed wall-paper were visible everywhere. A building where no water or electricity can be added, and where the boards on the stairs maintain an unevenness that speaks to country craftsmanship.

Dinner was served on the second floor of this ravished beauty, lit by the long northern summer evening light streaming through large mullioned windows located on three sides of the room. Candles on the table added a golden glow to a long table set with porcelain that suggested the luxury of a prosperous past.

At one end of the room, a built-in glazed tile stove that had been rebuilt was given its first trial for our dinner party. The small fire heated the tile surface so much that we could barely touch the surface, adding a warm glow on a summer evening, but making me wonder what winter would be like.

As conversation and wine flowed equally, despite the reality of dining in a restoration work-in-progress, I gradually felt the reality of past lives pressing in on me. This is the paradox of ruins and life: preserved in collapse, stone boats, medieval churches, and picture stone emplacements distance us, beckoning toward a past we cannot touch. But history is a work in process, connected to us by dwelling, restored by being in place.

35 Years of Equinoxes

2010-03-21T00:18:00.000-07:00

Memory works in strange ways.

Spring of 1975 was my second semester at Cornell, and I started taking the courses I had planned as steps toward the major. One of these was introduction to geology, which I remember as being taught by a Professor Swan, although in fact his name was (and is, I have just found out) Cisne; which of course means swan in Spanish, a language I did not know in 1975.

So I should approach my memories of spring 1975 with some degree of skepticism: clearly, my later knowledge of Spanish transformed what I knew that Spring into something I could not have known for at least three more years.

But some things about that spring are very memorable, and even if they have been transformed, the sensibility they convey is, I am sure, true to that first Cornell spring.

To return to geology: the lecture I was enrolled in met at eight or nine in the morning. My inability to make it to calculus sections scheduled at 8 AM for the entire fall semester had impressed on me the need to solve the intractable contradiction between Cornell's optimism and my reality, which even then dictated late nights and delayed mornings. So instead of attending my assigned lecture, I went to the second lecture of the same material, which I remember as meeting at 11 AM.

Associated with the course was a laboratory section, and here again, I took the approach of seeking a time I would absolutely be able to attend, signing up for what seemed to be a relatively unpopular Saturday lab.

Which, it then transpired, secretly met on Tuesday evenings. Why secretly? because Cornell had set aside two nights a week-- Tuesdays and Thursdays-- for exams held during the semester, called prelims, not midterms. So meeting on one of these evenings created the possibility that two things would happen at once. So every historical record says I attended lab on Saturday, but that was true only on the rare occasions when we went on a field trip that required daylight.

For me, the evening lab was even better than my Saturday goal. By evening I was awake and just beginning the long night, and so I expected a semester of success. Geology promised to be my favorite course.

And it didn't disappoint me, not just because of all this, but because it was where I met Rus. My memory of meeting him is one of the details I am suspicious of; while I know the entire story, I am not certain I have located it at the right point in the semester. In my memory, the first lab session, while we were all meeting each other, was when another woman in anthropology and I decided to follow up the class by going off to College Avenue for coffee. Rus, already a year ahead of us in anthropology, walked with us down the path that led from the engineering quad across the creek and down to College Avenue.

Where we found that so many people had the idea of a late night coffee that a line wound out the door and down the block. As we paused to think about what to do, Rus issued his famous invitation to come to his apartment down the block, where, he told us, there should be chocolate chip cookies he had made that day, if his room-mates had left them. After a few moments hesitation, we headed over (and yes, there were cookies).

I cannot be sure what week this was. I remember walking across a campus glazed with ice from a sudden storm; weeks of early spring warmth, dinner with Rus and his room-mates, the shared pain of studying for archaeology prelims in what surprisingly turned out to be the class I enjoyed least, and probably in consequence, did worst in.

By March 21, when we both returned from spring break, we had spent enough time talking about music, archaeology, and life around the Great Lakes. We count our first anniversary from March 21, 1975. And so as I write this we have spent 35 years engaged in a long conversation that still is threaded through with talk about music, and archaeology, and places we both have been.

I have no trouble remembering this anniversary, because it comes on the day when the day finally catches up with the length of the night. From here on, light grows at the expense of dark and the days grow warmer, the evenings start later, and I am able to work in harmony with the rest of the world.

What a long strange trip it's been...

2010-03-05T22:39:00.000-08:00

to borrow a line from one of the songs that runs through my head whenever I am on the road.

Driving California takes a lot of time. I don't actually know how long the state is in miles; but in hours, from here north you can drive more than six hours without running out of state, and the same six hours won't get you to the Mexican border on the south. The state is more than fourteen hours long; in the time it would take to go from end to end, I could have driven from Boston to Chicago.

Which I realize doesn't mean that these two distances are the same. The size of a space measured in time has no direct relationship to the length that might be measured by a surveyor.

That was especially obvious as we rambled in a loose circuit from here to Santa Barbara and back. The Salinas valley stretches out forever, seeming an endless succession of fields nestling in the loops of the river. As we drive through here, the 70 mile an hour speed limit apparently the minimum for locals and truckers, we can see bands of rain and sunlight for miles ahead. Driving north through this slow terrain, we decided to leave our normal route through the Santa Cruz mountains and instead followed the Carmel valley northwest.

In truth, the time it took to reach Carmel along this route was far less than the Santa Cruz way would have taken, especially since we would doubtless have run into the ironically named rush-hour traffic, falling into lanes of cars inching forward painfully slowly. But as the miles rolled by on what at times was a one-lane road, deserted for tens of miles not just by other cars, but even any livestock, the fifty plus miles of this diagonal line taken at 30 miles per hour seemed to last for most of the afternoon. Around each new bend, live oaks covered in California's version of Spanish moss, fields of native chaparral and grassy pastures succeeded one after another. Where the road cut through the rocky hillside, thin beds of sandstone folded over themselves, or standing tipped almost vertical, gave way to cobbles and pebbles eroding out from loosely consolidated clay. More than any part of our journey, this new segment of road seemed vast and the possibility that it might simply go on and on hovered over us.

In contrast, driving across the hills from Half Moon Bay to San Mateo as the sun went down behind us over the Pacific Ocean seemed to take no time at all: charging back into the Bay Area traffic maelstrom erasing the sense of peace that the Pacific, grey and churning, nonetheless created. As the sun sank low each evening we spent on the ocean-- Half Moon Bay, Carmel, Cambria, Santa Barbara-- the most distant edge of the water turned glossy and silver. After the rain swept through, clearing the air of all dust, whitecaps were clear across the entire width of these bays, striking distant cliffs and rocks offshore.

One ocean, the same everywhere, yet constantly different. In the moonlight deep indigo blue crested in whitecaps as stylized as a Japanese print. In the honey light of the setting sun, where San Gregorio Creek stained the Pacific with a perfect semi-circle of brown sediment, rings of pure turquoise and aqua led out to the grey edge of the sky. With the full sun briefly shining from an almost artificial blue sky dotted with white puffs of clouds, ocean reflecting blue and white and grey and pink and yellow as the morning sun streamed down over the mountains to the east.

What remains: a line of whelks, most bone white, one showing flecks of brown. A banded stone, washed by the ocean. A piece of coral, tumbled so long in the surf that the facets made where branches broke off are glassy to the touch. The sound of the ocean, not trapped in the shells but in my memory. Rain in sheets joining sky and ocean. The spectrum of color briefly shimmering on the right. And everywhere green.

Travel, maps, and memory

2010-01-05T22:42:00.000-08:00

As Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, a place I had visited enough times to no longer count them as individual visits, I was wandering around Amsterdam for the first time in my life. Back at the hotel room overlooking a canal, watching TV images of canals breaking and floodwaters rising in the French Quarter, I found myself remembering not the images of places in the city, but the map of the streets criss-crossing the areas I knew first hand.

It occurred to me then that the way I remember places I've been was peculiar. Planning the next trip to another new place, Amelia Island, has me thinking again about travel, maps, and memory.

I love travel. Not just new places, but the journey itself. Being in motion, going somewhere.

My reaction to travel is independent of the length of the trip or the distance to be covered. What makes travel so enjoyable for me is the possibility of something new and unforeseen happening. Something that will set one day off from another so well that even years later, I will remember another time and place.

Of course, there is a curious contradiction here: the more I travel, the more difficult it is to reconstruct with precision when I had a memorable day.

The airports and their procedures blur together (even as they become ever-more baroque in a doomed attempt at perfect security). Over the years, I have lost the nervous feeling that used to hit on take-off and landing. Recently, I have found myself developing more anxiety just before I travel, as I worry that something critical will be left undone. But travel itself is routinized and I am living each trip as a repetition of something now basically familiar.

The experiences of place that follow routine voyages still stand out in memory. But they are set free from their moorings. They stand out like isolated gems, or strings of pearls. Yet, they are not without anchors in time and space.

I sometimes spend time with maps, retracing itineraries. Seeing the map reminds me of the place. Seeing the place made the map memorable for me originally. Where other people use photos, I use maps.

And even though I no longer can count on remembering what year I visited each place, the sequence of voyages seems to remain clear. (I have to say "seems": absent something like my experience of New Orleans' drowning as I first committed the map of Amsterdam to memory, how can I be sure my sense of sequence is right?)

I find myself committing each new place to memory in part through contrasts and connections to previous places. Places I love are connected by the trees-- individual trees-- I saw, or the rocks cut through along the highway. Places I remember are layered on each other with these features tying them into bundles.

And over all of them are the maps, and the itineraries traced like lines across their surface. The whole a globe with scribbles dense in spots, empty in others.

Off to draw some new memories of place.

Angkor Wat, January 1, 2000

2009-12-31T15:31:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago I was in the middle of a transition. Today I am in the middle of a transition. I don't believe there is any necessary rhythm to decades, but this coincidence made me want to recall my personal antidote to fears no one was quite sure were unfounded about technological collapse as 1999 turned to 2000.

Traveling to someplace far away seemed like something I might not have much more time to do. So I decided New Year's Eve 1999 I would be at Angkor Wat. If the world's computer networks were going to stop working for a while, where better to be than someplace where reliable electricity was not a given?

Spending New Year in Southeast Asia was in some ways an odd choice. While every cyclical calendar has a new year's day, not all calendars begin on the same date. The Buddhist calendar used in Cambodia starts in April.

The reversal of the movement of the sun on the horizon that the winter solstice marks, and that the Gregorian New Year is tied to, is universal. So it might seem it would still be celebrated even by people who started their year after the spring equinox, when days start being longer than nights.

But Angkor Wat is tropical; close to the latitude of San Salvador, El Salvador. The closer you get to the equator, the less seasonal variation there is in the length of day and night. The drama that people living in northern latitudes experience when the unrelenting darkness finally is put to flight, and the promise of sunlight is renewed, is not inherent in life in the tropics. One of the things I lost every summer in Honduras was the long evenings I grew up with, as the sun continued to set before 7 PM even at the June solstice, and the sense of time passing that comes with visibly shortening days.

Yet there are scholars who argue that Angkor Wat was built to frame winter solstice sunset, so perhaps it was not so odd to spend the first days after solstice there. And it was beautiful: sprawling, almost every surface ornamented, buildings rising behind pools joined by bridges lined with sculptures of serpents and demons.

Even though 30,000 people reportedly were present at the midnight celebration, travel in Cambodia had only become possible in spring of that year. For most of our visit, we were not in crowds, certainly, not in crowds of Europeans or Americans.

The Buddhist religious stood out, in their orange and white robes. At some points in the site, Buddhist ceremonies were being held in buildings constructed by Hindu rulers who commemorated the mythic Churning of the Sea of Milk. Places like this never have simple stories to tell; their pasts reach like filaments to connect with the present.

For me, one of those filaments is the indelible image of sky lanterns, lit and released one at a time by Buddhist monks, 2000 of them to mark the 2000 years of the western millennium-- or 2000 prayers, or 2000 wishes carried away into the intense black sky over Siem Reap that night.

Seasons in different colors

2009-11-14T15:11:00.000-08:00

When we moved to California, our friends in the northeast almost all at some point said something like, "won't you miss the seasons?".

As I said then, spending time in Central America I realized that the passage of time over the year always was evident, even when there was no time when the temperature dipped low and the leaves on trees turned red and orange like the maples that I still find breathtaking in New York and New England. In Honduras, the dry months of late spring were at first glance as green as the rainy months of September and October, but then, against that ever-green background I would note the tallest of the leafless tropical trees bursting into vivid flowering color, orange or pink or yellow.

For us now here, while the leaves are falling from trees, the sign of the season is less the baring of trunks than the first timid prospect of rain, and what follows from it: the greening of the hillsides that had turned steadily golden and then brown. Today I looked out and realized that a shrub I had last seen as a green vertical is now a solid purple mass entirely obscuring the foliage that still remains on the plant, while in the foreground, a camellia prepares to add a second wave of flowers to what already appears to be a solid dense layer of white over deep green.

It is with that understanding of seasons as less about some specific signal, more a sense of changing colors, including the way the blue of the sky shifts as rain clears the air, that I look at the two paintings here, one a winter scene in New Mexico, the other an impression of blossoming trees in spring. The lavender of the hills in winter gives way to the vivid blue sky of spring.

The onset of autumn in New York, now past, I know was red, and orange, and yellow; here, the ever-present flowers are again accompanied by a general green background. And in the hills of New Mexico, snow blanketing in the ground is lit pink and purple. And in each of these places, and others, as the colors change and the sun's light varies, seasons pass.

Strange times

2009-09-25T01:35:00.000-07:00

I am feeling dislocated today. I literally was; the university-wide walkout/teach-in/general strike induced me to find an alternative for my once-a-week one hour seminar, now desperately off schedule. So I invited the participants, if they wished, to be my guests for lunch off campus.

Waiting for them at the coffee shop across from campus, I let the chanting of slogans fade into the background and began to read the pages of a dissertation about a Neolithic site in Taiwan, where groups of post holes signify the ghostly presence of houses long gone. Something about the task, the time, and the place made me realize how oddly we write about once-inhabited places. Because my student is not a native English speaker, I am editing as I go, not simply reading and commenting. And so I am thinking about every sentence and clause in a way I only ever do with my own writing (and far too rarely there, really).

The post holes, my student says, "are" dwellings. Which of course they are not, and never even were.

I have written about post holes myself; about the concept of them, using them as my example of a trace in contrast to a monument. I admire the work of two other colleagues, who also write about this most humble of traces of everyday life. But I have never quite had the reaction I had today: the post holes are not even holes, of course; they are color contrasts in soil (my contribution to this meditation); they are where there once was a post set in a pit (my colleagues' far more important contribution); and we take these long-vanished posts as structural beams that used to support walls and lintels and through these cross-beams, roofs. (I want to write rooves, it is what I say...)

Ghost houses. Not-dwellings. But what made me so self-conscious about this today was the comment I found myself writing, which was about post holes of different diameters: be sure, I said, to explain why there are post holes of different diameters-- the larger structural, the smaller to support walls, furniture, or other fixtures.

The post hole isn't even really a trace for me. It is an index that points towards something that once existed, but that left no physical trace: the rooves, the benches, the shelves and lofts I imagine were there. The dwellings.

And so ancient Taiwan was there with me today.

Back to School: What is a week?

2009-09-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

The university changed our starting dates last year, so our first day of classes was on a Wednesday (instead of a Monday). My graduate seminar, held on Tuesday, has consequently met once; while the sophomore seminar has met twice.

In other words, I am facing week 2 in my graduate course and week 3 in my undergraduate course.

Weeks were already hard enough to keep straight as it is. I tend to prepare syllabi with one column that is labeled "week" and another with specific dates, but group readings by the week (not the day). In spring, I never know whether spring break should be a week or be like the 13th floor in buildings where superstition reigns. In fall, Thanksgiving "week" (when I can count on almost no class being full) seems like it should be labele demi-week.

Then there is the "this week" problem. When does "this week" start? For me, it is usually (maybe always) the week coming; for Rus, it is often (maybe always) the week that includes the current day. So sometimes his "this week" is my "last week" and sometimes it is my "next week" (which is usually-- perhaps always!-- "this week").

Weekends are when our weeks diverge the most. I appear to really be cutting the weekend out as a separate time/space, whereas Rus-- like a calendar-- includes the weekend in the week.

So on Saturday, I will talk about "this week" meaning the coming Monday through Friday, but he will think I mean the previous Monday through Friday since Saturday is still part of the week.

And it may be, although we cannot clarify this, that Sunday begins his week while it ends my weekend.

So. I have to live this entire semester in two weeks at once. My course plans are all framed in terms of weeks. But I am only about to do week 2 for the graduate seminar, while the undergrads on Thursday are already to week 3.

And that matters to me because I believe that week 3 is a conversion point, when we reach a situation of common purpose. Which I will now have to reach after Tuesday and on or before Thursday.

I suppose I could simply decide that my weeks now end on Wednesday. But that seems a bit extreme.

Oh, and then there is the end of the semester. When the powers that be decided to make the semester start on Wednesday, they compensated by ending the semester on a Wednesday. (Somehow that worked.)

But with no warning, the university decided to implement a three day "reading period" at the end of this semester. We are not allowed to lecture or indeed ask students to come to class at all now the last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

(A colleague more on top of things than me had to have her daughter help black out those days on already-printed syllabi.)

But this means my final Tuesday seminar is actually gone. My graduate students will have one week less on both ends of the semester.

So what is a week? how much of this temporal distortion can I stand? I will see what happens as the week goes on: already, I panicked because my online folder for readings for week 3 is empty (this is week 2...)

Time to return to schedules and calendars

2009-08-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Less than two weeks are left before my first class meeting of the fall. As always, I find that I cannot quite account for all the unstructured time of the middle of summer.

Although more than most years, I think I have reason to find that whole period problematic in 2009, it is still hard to know what to think about how six weeks can slip away without leaving any traces. But of course, there are traces, all kinds.

I am compulsive about calendaring things, so I do have a variety of marked dates to serve as prompts. My iCal pages for June-July are packed, in all the colors I use to separate my life into threads (although the pink of teaching is most subdued) so obviously I didn't simply fall asleep waiting for something to break the spell in my summer castle.

But the iCal pages for July and August feel different than the calendar I am rapidly filling in as people send notices of meetings for the upcoming year, and as I enter class sessions for fall and spring. Concretely, the structures of the calendar I am building going forward require different actions: I can set most of these as "repeat" meetings, and then simply find the exceptions and delete them.

Summer is in this sense anti-structure. Everything on the schedule for the last weeks is an event, unique, each had to be entered on its own, even if the person I was meeting was someone I saw every so often.

I like the every-so-often-ness of summer. I used to feel that living that way was wasteful, or-- my old favorite term-- "self-indulgent". Which of course it literally is: in summer I can indulge my self, in the sense of realizing something that during the routinization of the rest of the year, all-too-easily gets buried.

So it turns out that it isn't really that I feel as if nothing happened this summer. Instead, all the things that happen stand out as individual events or self-contained sequences, and I can remember each of them but cannot subsume them in the kind of measured pattern that will inevitably take up the remaining days of the year once term begins.

Which leads me to realize one of the reasons I am so susceptible to invitations to go away during the academic term-- anywhere. I am happy to come and talk to any group about anything anytime. Because those are events, and cutting into the pattern of the academic year, they help me realize myself. They are intense bursts of experience and I treasure every one. I actually tell real time this way: it was before I went to Binghamton, it was while I was coming back from New Orleans, it was while I was in Barcelona...

All of the above was sparked by something quite different: along with calendaring, the other discipline that says I am on a transition to term-time is answering emails that are not from friends or related to existing academic commitments. Like most people, I get too much email to read. I figured it out one week and that was literal: I had over 200 messages in one day, so that if all I did for eight hours straight was read email, I would have been able to spend a whole two and a half minutes each and do nothing else.

But in this caesura of the year, I rapidly reply to some of the unsolicited email I feel no responsibility about. Today, that included pointing someone to podcasts of lectures from a course I teach every year.

The podcast experiment was forced on me in 2007 by a zealous graduate assistant (who was right, I know!). I usually say she persuaded me, or shamed me, into it. I have not found it necessary since then to try it again; we post the weblink for the 2007 lectures and students do listen to them, and I remain amused by the idea that me today may well be contradicting me then-- and I am not sure which of me a student now finds more convincing.

What interested me then, and what I was reminded of again when I checked that the resource still existed, was that the podcasters for the university could not actually accommodate what I do in a classroom.

(Hence the need to be persuaded: most of my class time is interactive discussion. I do what are called minilectures, but they tend to break out as if spontaneous, although I have the ideas all racked up like billiard balls waiting for my chance to break. Sometimes, as in pool, someone else runs out the table and I never get my chance. Which, unlike pool, is a good outcome; it means the students had enough to say that we filled up a class by dialogue.)

Anyway, the first day we used the "automatic" podcast production system, when my grad assistant went to listen to it, there was... nothing. Silence. Many minutes of it.

Turns out the system was not waiting for an audio signal, but simply turned on at the start of class and "recorded" the sound of silence, picked up by a microphone we left turned off while we discussed things for the first 60 minutes.

So my stubborn grad assistant changed the system, manually uploading lectures captured on her ipod. We still ran into problems because the webcast posting system assumed a lecture per class session, and we had many sessions without them. So the material trace of the spring 2007 course is a wonderful illustration of the failure of structured time in the face of the unique performative event.

On the webcast site, each podcast has a title, which we had to provide in advance to the webcast production staff. God knows whether the titles track with the actual content. I know when I teach naturally that as often as not, I say something like "you seem to actually be interested in something else, so I am going to set aside what I was planning to talk about...". I am intrigued, knowing how historical research works, at the notion that someone might think the course I taught was somehow delimited by these named podcasts. The real thing was something else. But because these artifacts exist and form an archive available for others, they can become the "record" used by others as if it were what I taught.

(You can find the podcasts here but don't blame me for them-- I just said the words, I never listened to them. Well, I suppose technically while I was saying them, but still, that is the linear production of speech where as we hear our own words we adjust what comes next in the hope of steering our ideas on to a conclusion. Not listening as such.)

Rainbows VISIBLY unfolding...

2009-08-10T01:22:00.000-07:00

This post was supposed to be written around photos, but I have not managed the download/upload business yet so those will have to come later. [Which is now.]

On the way out to the Santa Fe Opera, just as the van we were riding in turned off the road, a rainbow began to appear. It stretched up from northeast of the Opera, and almost immediately, a second rainbow began to grow above it.

By the time we reached the top of the hill where the Opera house stands, the northern ends of the two rainbows were arching up across the sky. Meanwhile, to the southeast, matching paired rainbows were growing, reaching up to ultimately meet their counterparts above a sky melting gold with light dispersed through a fine rain shower.

Everyone moved to take photographs of the rainbow(s). As I also did so, not at all immune to this, I couldn't help thinking that the photographs would be the antithesis of the thing itself. The photos show bands of color, it is true, but they cannot show the way the whole thing grew from the ground up.

Nor can they show the final act of the performance of rainbowness: as the inner of the now fully-developed pair of rainbows visibly deepened in color intensity, the separate bands of color becoming differentiated so that for once I could see violet and indigo.

The whole thing was not what was visible at any moment, even if we were to ignore the partial perspectives that were always being blocked by other people. The rainbow as a whole was not even simply something I could have trapped with a video camera.

These rainbows were a process of being in place, and the tokens I captured are less than fragments of that being; rather, they serve to index my having been there along with the growth of the rainbow itself.

The rainbows, the photos, and the sense of common purpose they created among a group of strangers ("Look, take a picture from here", someone told me as I was looking at the final shimmering indigo band appear) are inseparable from the span of time that the rainbow took to develop and fade, and in turn from the place from which this unfolding was briefly visible.

Under the volcano

2009-07-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

Arenal or "sand source": the most active volcano in Costa Rica. Where thousands of houses were destroyed by lava, today there are countless hotels and hot spring resorts for avid volcano watchers.

The discovery that volcanos fascinate me is one concrete outcome of my month- long stay here two years ago. Retracing my steps to the volcano was the one thing I wanted to do personally, since the volcano has become active since my last view of the cone from the pools at Tabacón.

Time has a way of expanding in the presence of running water. Two years ago, I spent three hours watching as fog moved up the slopes of the volcano, revealing the scars of lava, occasionally rising high enough that brown drifts of volcanic ash were visible above the mouth of the volcano.

But time also changes things. Since we were here last, an earthquake changed some of the other volcanos we visited. At Tabacón, the difference of time was most obvious in the growth of trees, making it harder than before to see the volcano itself. And the pool that I spent so much time in before is gone; replaced by two smaller pools placed almost as if purposely so that sight lines no longer allow glimpses of the volcano.

So I moved to a different pool, one I avoided last time because it was crowded with swimmers buying drinks at a pool-level bar, and children and some adults using a water slide. But from one corner, the volcano was visible, and I watched as drifts of clouds moved past, as the entire layer of clouds rose up, never quite revealing the peak of the cone.

As I waited there, I noticed another woman stationary in the middle of the same area of the pool. In the middle of a crowd unaware of the threat of eruption, only the two of us and our companions waited, and waited, hoping to see the red glow of lava.

The different tempos of what happens: on not being in Honduras

2009-07-16T19:11:00.000-07:00

Continental Airlines, bless them, extended a no-fee rescheduling of existing reservations only through the end of July, so when I reluctantly accepted the fact that our June 11 reservation would have to be cancelled, I rescheduled one week later. Now, two days out, it is clear that will not happen either; while I have yet to consult Continental's website, I assume there has been no change that would expand the time to reschedule dramatically.

But time has literally run out for me. I was only able to plan this trip, proposed in late May, because I had left the first two weeks in July untouched. That in turn was the outcome of deferring a jury duty call from January to July, and hoping that the claim that the average trial was a few days would be true. Now, after next week, each week has events and duties to carry out, so there is no time to return until the end of this year.

The strands weave in and out; jury duty flows seven months into the future; Honduras could fit in at the end of one possible week of trial, optimistically predicated on possibly deferring yet again into mid-August; flying to Honduras receded one week, and now, like an ocean wave, I see it moving all the way back to December.

My sense of time has become distorted these last three weeks, but at different scales. I spend a few minutes reading news, and six hours later straighten up with a pain in my neck. I wake up at 5:30 feeling alert, despite having less than four hours sleep, and then realize in mid-afternoon that I overlooked the intervening hours entirely. The week goes by and feels like many weeks, dotted with incidents, but with nothing real (meaning here, immediate) that I can recall happening.

And the most extraordinary: I read mail sent by a friend in Honduras working in resistance to the authoritarian regime. I worry, because increasingly the things she is sending, written in Spanish by scholars and activitists, bitterly examine the failure of the US to act, dissect the silences in State Department briefings, and propose that maybe this coup was not unwelcome, maybe it was even planned.

But I don't feel it is my place to argue with her; I am not, after all, living through this, it is not, after all, my country or my history at stake.

So when another of those copied, a Honduran historian, replies with a reminder that his work argues against Honduran history being solely the outcome of US decisions, I feel I can respond.

And so begins a three way exchange between us and a second historian, also a friend of long standing, in which as emails come in, it is sometimes hard to tell who is being challenged or reassured. In Spanish: amiga, that one is for me, reassurance that the frustration does not mean a friendship broken. In English: love you, that one is for whom?

And each message time-stamped individually, to the second. A conversation, but in counterpoint, and I cannot say who is addressing which of us.

Being in Omoa

2009-07-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was supposed to return to Omoa, but with the situation there, I am instead still in California. I deferred the trip for a week and hope that by then I will be able to follow through.

But not being in Omoa has me thinking about what it was like throughout June. Omoa is small, so that we walked to the site every morning. Because of the earthquake, our original plan for where to stay was delayed. So for the first two weeks, we were in the only hotel in town that was not located directly on the Caribbean beach.

Instead of a beach-front view, our first hotel was on a dirt road that once was quiet, until around 2003. That was when a natural gas depot was built, illegally, at the end of the road. So every morning and far into the evening, parades of natural gas trucks went back and forth down the road.

The gas depot involved construction of breakwaters that have destroyed the beaches I remember from my first visit in 1977 to the Omoa coast. The speed of the damage is evident when you talk to people who own the businesses along the beach. Some of these are now half in the water-- restaurants that literally have one post offshore.

The place we moved for our last two weeks, after water service was restored in the wake of the earthquake, is a modern small bed and breakfast right on the beach. If there were beach. Instead, the owners have put in place a stone retaining wall to try to keep more erosion from happening. They pointed out that when they bought the property, there was a street in front of it and the beach on the other side. Now all this is gone.

But as we discovered, there is still a way to go into the ocean, down masonry steps the owner put in place. Once in the caribbean, the water is clear as glass, and small fish nibble at your toes. Floating is by far the best way to experience these waters.

On a clear day, you can see the distant point of Manabique, today over the Guatemala border. For us, the names along this coast are redolent of history: Manabique guards the bay of Amatique, and between Omoa and Manabique is the town of Masca. These are all places mentioned in colonial documents as pueblos de indios.

When I walk through Omoa's streets, I see histories glittering in the heat of the sun on concrete. The indigenous past comes through in naming; the colonial period asserts itself in the bulk of the 18th century fort, but also more subtly persists in the layout of the main streets.

More elusive is the nineteenth century, the early republican period. Reportedly graves enclosed within the walls of the original Spanish fort, El Real, built in the 1750s, commemorate people from that period, poorly documented in archives and almost ignored in contemporary presentations of the Fortaleza. But the fortress itself actually is a testament as much to that period as to the colonial one that gave it birth, as it was rebuilt to house prisoners of the new republic.

Most occluded today is the modern history, when banana companies thrived for fifty years. But much of this history persists in the memories of the people whose families came to Omoa then, or later, when the Fort became a notorious jail holding prisoners of a dictator.

Being in Omoa confounds the idea that time passes. Time persists. The traces of its accrual are everywhere, they have not gone away. The fort, built originally on the edge of the sea, today faces a soccer field, beyond which is the mangrove swamp that promotes the advance of the shore away from the fort itself. Between the mangrove and the walls of the fort time is literally sedimented.

Independence Day with fireworks

2009-07-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

I have often been out of the country on July 4, so I have developed a mixed relationship toward the holiday. On the one hand, I would like to imagine being part of a crowd watching fireworks as the evening grows darker. On the other hand, I hate crowds.

So normally, if we are in the US, I think about going somewhere where I might be able to glimpse fireworks. Last year, on the spur of the moment, we tried to find somewhere high enough in the hills to look out over the bay and catch sight, perhaps, of fireworks from the east bay and San Francisco. My first thought turned out to be everyone else's destination, so eventually we ended up in a crowd of people waiting in a park with very poor lines of sight. But paradoxically, that made each thing we managed to spot seem somehow more of an event.

This year, I had thought we might go to the waterfront in town, since at worst all 20,000 residents might show up. Then earlier in the week we saw the signs up saying the fireworks had been cancelled. Not really a surprise; the fire danger is all-too-real.

So I probably should have expected it, when last night the sounds of fireworks started to be heard. Apparently, somewhere along the way, the cancellation was cancelled.

There is something very different about fireworks experienced as a series of sounds instead of light effects. (I know from experience that we cannot see anything from our yard; the hill blocks the view to the waterfront, even though there is some acoustic anomaly that makes sound carry across it perfectly.)

I imagined the sounds as green and gold firebursts. Happy Independence Day.

Summertime and the living is easy...

2009-06-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

So, the reason we came back on Friday instead of being the last out of the field was music: on Saturday, we had tickets to the last performance of "Porgy and Bess" by the San Francisco Opera.

From the first chords of "Summertime" to the very end, there was a sense of familiarity and difference about this performance. Listening to the comments of people around me (why is it that people in public events think their conversations are private?), I was struck by how many people were uncomfortable with what they saw as the production's departure from the authentic version. I can only assume that these listeners were comparing the opera to the movie from 1959.

But of course, what we were watching was the original operatic version, which program notes told me had rapidly been reworked during the original run in 1935 and never performed intact again until 1976. As an opera, the story moved entirely through musical vocalization, interrupted only when the few white characters-- the police, the coroner-- entered the scene and spoke without song.

For me, beyond the beauty and power of this performance, the problem of authenticity and memory posed by "Porgy and Bess" might be exemplary of a broader cultural process. What is seen as legitimate and authentic is what we remember a work to have been. The version that reached the most people outweighed the original intentions of the creators, and made the revival of the full opera something that must struggle to replace the movie's iconography in the minds of viewers and listeners. Unusually for opera, at this performance, at each break I heard voices-- all women's voices-- singing well-remembered lyrics in cadences that clearly came from the movie, not the opera we were seeing. Summertime echoed and hummed throughout the building, but it was not, in the end, a single unified experience we shared, but instead the layering of what we heard and saw over what we each had seen, heard, and yes, sung before.

Come for the earthquake, stay for the revolution: Honduras, June 2009

2009-06-28T15:07:00.000-07:00

That was supposed to be a joke, a line my husband came up with on Thursday as we walked back to our hotel after the last day of work in June, knowing the next day we would be out of the country. The day before we were slated to come down in May, the 7.3 earthquake hit, providentially sparing most people's lives. While some people questioned our decision to come down anyway, and we spent two weeks living with aftershocks and water problems, our field season was extremely productive and the collegial relations we established with universities and scholars throughout the country deepened in significant ways.

So it was with a sense of the surreal that we were confronting the developments happening as we prepared to leave. Wednesday night, at 10:30, the Honduran cell phone rang, several hours after we were asleep, and by the time I answered, was in voice mail. The message was disturbing: the civil conflict between the President and Congress over a proposed national poll to be held today had led to the dismissal of the Secretary of Defense and the head of the armed forces. But, my caller said, there was no need to accelerate leaving: just watch news, read the papers.

So for hours starting that evening, the next morning, and the last evening we did that. Of course, there was no coverage on international networks, what with the governor of South Carolina admitting to an Argentine affair, and then Michael Jackson's death eating up the airwaves.

Switching between multiple Honduran stations showed the President surrounded by union members, indigenous people, cab drivers, and oh yes, politicians and political activists from a number of Honduras many parties, holding almost a vigil in the Presidential Palace waiting for a military coup.

Which was averted; and so we left the country on Friday, with plans to return in two weeks, and again two weeks later. But the coup was merely delayed, rescheduled (as one online commentator said) until the country was quiet on the weekend, resulting early this morning in the kidnapping of the democratically elected Honduran president and his forcible removal to Costa Rica. Reportedly, his cabinet is under arrest or at least ordered arrested. The head of the Honduran Congress has been declared the interim president, and we are told the November presidential election will take place as scheduled.

What was the reason for this action? if you read US media, you will be told the vote today was to allow President Zelaya to remain in office. To be sure, I think in the long-term, the goal of his call for constitutional reform may have been to allow him or others in sympathy with him to serve more than a single four-year term. But in the short run, the poll would simply have registered how many people were in favor of constitutional reform. Even though Zelaya was elected in 2005 with less than 50% majority (Honduras has multiple viable parties); even though his popularity in April was at 25% and in May at 30% according to international polls; and thus even though one would not expect a groundswell of support, this was too threatening for the Honduran powers that be.

English language media also all qualify Zelaya as "leftist President". So let's be clear here as well: elected in 2005 as a neoliberal candidate from the centrist, pro-business Liberal party, Zelaya describes his own journey toward alliance with Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro as one of realizing that the rich in Honduras would never support economic equity. His support now comes almost exclusively from union members, rural farmers, indigenous groups, and others who have been the focus of his more recent policy moves, including a huge percentage increase (60%) in the minimum wage-- bringing it all the way up to $289 a month.

God bless Honduras. Take care of my friends and colleagues. Please, if you read this, keep pressure on the US government to condemn this unlawful action. Argue with anyone who simplifies this into Hugo Chavez vs. the US. Read widely, read the European papers, learn Spanish, be a citizen of the world.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/profile/HondurasExpert?action=comments&display=news&sort=newest

A time for change

2008-11-05T07:13:00.001-08:00

The circumstances were unusual, to say the least. Because the university scheduled the departmental review for election day, I was hosting a dinner for five visitors, each of whom had given up the opportunity to be with friends and family on this historic night. And because of the bad timing coinciding with equally bad timing of a conference, Rus was in Santa Fe.

So beginning with the first results coming in from the east coast as polls closed, we received a series of text messages, phone calls, and even reports via the waiter from the kitchen, where the staff in the almost-deserted restaurant were apparently listening to the election results on the radio. One of my visitors had his iphone tracking results via the CNN website.

It made for an incoherent discussion, but paradoxically, may have been a very good way for me to pass this night. When George W. Bush won in 2004, my pottery teacher could not imagine why, because no one she knew voted for him. So despite the fact that here in California I have not heard anyone arguing against Obama since-- well, I don't know when-- I have been brittle and on edge, sure that somehow there would be a flood of losses and this election would go, not just towards a ticket that is profoundly unqualified (McCain for his judgment in selecting Palin, and Palin, well, for general ignorance and divisiveness), but away from historical change.

When the text messages started coming-- CBS called it for Obama, then a steady string-- culminating in the news that McCain was conceding (so early! the one thing I expected was a long night...) we erupted, and I knew that no one wanted to stay in the restaurant. So I sent my committee off to the bar of their hotel while I paid, then joined them, and a crowd of university students, including some I have taught, all listening to the speeches, many of us weeping.

I cannot remember the last time I have listened to a political speech and heard the kind of inspiration we had last night. The echoes, deliberate echoes, of great speakers and figures in our history. Last year, the university sent all of the freshman and faculty Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg, and I read it-- an entire book about a single short speech. So I really heard those echoes, but I also heard Wills' comments about how the speech was transformative. I think we heard the same last night.

Operatic times

2008-11-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon, in the middle of an astonishing performance of "Boris Godunov", I realized that this was the second opera this season that concerned an illegitimate ruler and his fate. In the earlier part of the season in "Simon Bocanegra" the ruler was a tragic figure and the end of his reign and life led to renewal through a rediscovered daughter.

But Russian opera is not, in general, optimistic. So Boris Godunov ended with a tableau: the young son of Boris, who was elected when the previous Tsar's 10-year-old son was murdered, sits on the throne, his father dead in front of him, and the menacing figure of one of the senior lords approaching. What happens next?

In this political season, of course, everything seems to resonate. So I was left wondering, "What happens next?" not just in the safety of the stage, but in our own places? I particularly wonder how whoever we elect can possibly govern, given the ways that political campaigns seek, not just to offer clear alternatives, but to delegitimate the opposition. Electoral systems actually rest on the trust that people have that those elected have majority support, and the last two presidential elections here damaged that, if not destroyed it. Beyond that, those elected have to be seen as competent and capable of governing even if policy differences mean we would like a different set of actors. Where legitimacy is lost, globally, violence is a common reaction to the election of those with whom you do not agree. In my worst moments, I worry whether the exceptionalism of the United States-- which is not, pace Sarah Palin, that God loves the US more than other countries-- can survive.

The friend who accompanied us to the opera, also an anthropologist, observed that when Barack Obama made his famous comments in Marin County about some people in the US clinging to guns and religion, she thought "you can see he is the son of an anthropologist". What she meant is that this was not a judgement or even a negative characterization-- quite the contrary, it was the product of the kind of empathy ethnographers develop from familiarity, while ideally retaining enough distance to comment on the people they want to understand. His comment was analytic, perhaps subject to the critique of being too "professorial" (I wince every time being "professorial" is offered as a clear liability in public life). Even at the time, I thought it was in fact correct: when people are not offered the support they need by their government, they hold firmly to the things of value in their life that they can control.

There are many dimensions of this election that are historic, that already have been historic: the first serious female candidate for the presidency; the first candidate of diverse racial background (and can we have that conversation about race, sometime? why is Barack Obama black? what does happen in this country as it moves more toward what I already see here commonly in California, which is an uncategorizable mixture of social, ethnic, and racial positioning?).

I do not accept the argument that the nomination of Sarah Palin is a first-- we already had the first token nomination of a woman as Vice President, and so it should have been an avoidable error this campaign season, and if the Republican party was serious about women in politics, they had an amazing group of qualified and experienced Republican women politicians to nominate. But it is worth noting that, after two or three weeks of silliness --is it sexist to question the qualifications of a woman with less than two years of relevant experience? no-- nor, in my opinion, would it be sexist to hold her and her party accountable for the contradiction between their policies on sex education and the outcomes in their own families, or between their policies towards working mothers and the exceptional support given this one working mother-- it became possible to discuss Palin's unbelievable lack of basic knowledge, naive understandings of global politics, and total ideological commitment untempered by any evidence of policy expertise or interest.

So, there are many historic dimensions to this election. But I wonder if the most historic may be what happens after the election, regardless of who wins: have we reached a point where our national government has been so damaged that it no longer seems able to exercise legitimate leadership?

In my own good time,

2008-11-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

it has finally seemed to me that this new medium might be someplace to be.

So, welcome. Is there anyone listening? there was a time when email was green and rare that the lines of words that glowed across the screen were a promise that at the other end of the machine there was another human presence. I am not nostalgic for unmediated presence; no one who spends their days studying the depth of time and the ways that humans always have deferred meaning through representation could be. But this will be the experiment here: is this medium public, a form of personal newsletter, an electronic broadsheet? or private, a diary without a key, open to anyone passing by?

I promise opinions, notes on travel, notes on books. The kind of things that we would say to each other face to face if we were characters in a particular kind of book or play.

Today here in northern California, where I once claimed "the streets are paved in gold", the rainy season has finally begun. This other form of seasons seems so foreign cast against the four seasons of the northeast, this oscillation between drought-striken grass full of flowers and rain-soaked leaves surrounded by green. It is a time for nostalgia, no matter what I claim, but perhaps also a time to connect. So welcome.