Notes about researching and teaching philosophy…
Many Windows on Private Lives
“Gail Albert Halaban began looking into other people’s windows six years ago, soon after moving to New York. She was living across the street from a 24-hour flower shop, waking up at all hours with a newborn baby, and the shop was the most reliable show in town. Then, when the store changed owners and hours, she said, she needed something else to watch... The photographs here come from her continuing project/obsession, ‘Out My Window,’ taken from the apartments of people who like to look into their neighbors’ lives. Fifty images from the series will be published in book form by powerHouse on Sept. 18.”
- "They Know They Are Being Watched?" - http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=118320
The Footnote
Just saw a brilliant film which links the academic rivalry of two Talmudic scholars to questions about contemporary Israeli national identity. The Footnote was a Best Foreign Film, Academy Award Nominee and winner of Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival this year. It portrays a father who has been passed over for the Israel Prize, which had been awarded to his son. Through an erroneous twist of fate the son decides to give up his prize, but fails to conceal his sacrifice from the philological prowess of his father. At the heart of the rivalry between them are a series of inside hermeneutic jokes, biting depictions of academic culture, and subtle reminders about the political romanticism which underwrites the quest to reconstruct the Talmud (and other sacred scripture). It's a clever and touching film, but a particular must see for scholars of ancient near eastern literature and Israeli nationalism alike. One of the most poignant quotes from the film comes from a scene where the son, Prof. Uriel Schkolnik begs the chair of the prize committee to let his father receive the award:
Yehuda Grossman: Uriel, there is no greater betrayal of your father and his principles than what you are asking of me. In spite of all my criticism of him your father never validated a mistake because it was convenient. You know that.
Uriel Shkolnik: Yes, but he won't.
Yehuda: We will.
Uriel: So what? So what?
Yehuda: It turns the whole system into a circus.
Uriel: No. It means that there are things more important than the truth.
Yehuda: Like what? Family? Like your father, I do know something about cutting corners... about abandoning the truth.
Uriel: Enough! Enough with this truth! So much aggression and violence you hide under the word 'truth'? I don't believe in this romanticism. You don't seek the truth. You seek honours just like other mortals. Such a terrible thing you're doing in the name of truth. It's just a prize. A prize, that's all. It's not a betrayal of anything.It's just a small nice thing you can do for a colleague, if only you'd be a little flexible. Just a tiny bit. That's all I ask of you. That's all.
The Footnote (He'arat Shulayim), 2011, Dir. Joseph Cedar (Interestingly, the Hebrew root, shul of the title He'arat Shulayim, can refer both to the seams on the robes of a priest, as well as to the flabby nether regions of the body; a further cut, it seems to me, at the 'power' of scholarship, HALOT, pg. 1442).
Messiaen by the ACO
This past Thursday, my wife and I attended the Australian Chamber Orchestra's performance of Olivier Messiaen's (1908-1992) Quatour pour le fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) at Newcastle's Civic Hall theatre. It was written during the winter of 1941 near Görlitz, Silesia in the easternmost part of Germany while Messiaen was a prisoner of war there. As the performance program notes, "Messiaen found himself having to work with the instruments and musicians available to him in camp: violinist Jean le Boulaire, Henri Akoka, clarinetist, and Etienne Pasquier, a cellist." A guard knew of Messiaen's genius and provided materials and space for him to compose.
"In the confines of a prisoner of war camp in the depths of the winter of 1941, Messiaen might well have believed that the end of time - and indeed his own end - were imminent. He signals his grander intentions by heading the score with a lengthy quotation from the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine: 'And I saw another mighty angel descend from heaven clothed with a could: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire... and he said... there should be time no longer' (Rev 10.1-7, KJV)"
So often I find that my life is haunted by limits and a lack of time, space, and resources. This Quartet for the End of Time, reminded me that the heart of creative genius is to make something out of nothing. Malnourished musicians, damaged instruments and imminent death were the context for Messiaen to create one of the most acclaimed (and derided) quartets ever written.
I have to admit, I often find modernist composers to be something akin to a man caught in a sensory deprivation tank. Near insanity, he bites his own tongue just to feel something and taste the salt from his own blood. The dissonance, discordant in-temporality, disharmonies, and counterintuitive melodies were trying. It was as if Messiaen forced his audience, and indeed his captors who were as obligated to guard him, to feel what he felt. Despair and utter hopelessness dominate in most of the eight movements. Indeed, a few souls walked out of the hall last Thursday night, and those that stayed shifted uncomfortably in their seats towards the end of the sixth and seventh movements. The pain of the clarinet and piano jarring against the violin and cello was near unbearable at times. It seemed to me, however, that this pain was the profound contrast to a modern world of soul numbing complacency. Messiaen seemed intent on raising to the surface, feelings we usually bury deep within us.
However, Messiaen's attempt to disorient his audience's temporality in this Quartet for the End of Time, was not without its contrasts in some of the most hauntingly beautiful moments. I can only agree that when this "Quartet was premiered in Barracks 27 of Stalag VIII on the frozen night of 15 January 1941 with meters of snow piled outside... [that] the 400 or so inmates and guards shivered as they listened, enraptured, to the end of time in Messiaen's vision of an eternity of hope and love." The entire quartet seemed to hang upon a cross between the fifth and final eighth movement. The fifth, Paean to the Eternity of Jesus, was a duet between the cello and piano. It was echoed by the eighth, Paean to the Immortality of Jesus, where the violinist stood for her own duet. Both movements held the possibility of harmony ever in front of them, never quite resolving themselves, nonetheless refusing any other hope but that such full harmony would emerge.
What does eternity feel like? Is it a permanently sustained harmony? Or is it, as Messiaen suggests, the ability to include the dissonance and disjunctions in time together with what faith teaches is already a unity. I suppose I heard a Hegelian note here, a sublation which takes up all things into a higher relational whole. Or, maybe, given Messian's overtly theological themes, St. Paul is more appropriate: "He has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." (NRSV, Ephesians 1.9-10).
Although winter nights in Newcastle are not nearly so cold, many a novocastrian spine nonetheless felt a shiver this past Thursday night.
On Wikipedia at University
"Well certainly when people copy and paste from Wikipedia that is a very stupid thing to do because your professors also read Wikipedia and they'll recognise it immediately. In term s of using Wikipedia as a source or not that's something I'm not too worried about. Certainly at the university level I think it would be silly to use Britannica as a source. Use it for background reading. Use it to get yourself oriented. Use it to point yourself in the right direction. But at the university level it's time to grow up and start to do some real research on your own." Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Chairman Emeritus and Founder, PBS NewsHour Interview, 10 July 2012 - http://to.pbs.org/ShxqW8
Gideon's Kindle
"The Hotel Indigo in Newcastle, England, is replacing the once-ubiquitious Gideon's Bible with Kindles -- in every one of its 148 rooms -- starting July 16. Travelers looking forward to finding the Bible in the hotel's dresser drawer need not worry, however: The Bible is pre-loaded onto the e-readers from Amazon." - "Rocky Raccoon checked into his room, only to find a Kindle?" http://lat.ms/N8at6h
Did Darwin Kill God? on ABC
Conor Cunningham's documentary "Did Darwin Kill God?" will play on Australia's ABC 1 on Saturday, 30 June at 2pm. It played on the BBC some years ago, and now out in more substantial book form, Darwin's Pious Idea.
For to be social is to be forgiving...
"But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of."
-"The Star-Splitter" Robert Frost, in The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 177-78
Why Google Isn't Making Us Stupid…Or Smart
"The more pressing, if more complex, task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world. In order to understand how our lives are already deeply formed by technology, we need to consider information not only in the abstract terms of terrabytes and zettabytes, but also in more cultural terms. How do the technologies that humans form to engage the world come in turn to form us? What do these technologies that are of our own making and irreducible elements of our own being do to us? The analytical task lies in identifying and embracing forms of human agency particular to our digital age, without reducing technology to a mere mechanical extension of the human, to a mere tool. In short, asking whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable." - "Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart," Chad Wellman, Hedgehog Review.
iReligion?
“At The Washington Post, Lisa Miller argues that, contrary to the beliefs of religious figures and political pundits, technology is good for religion.” http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=33318