This Blog Sits at the

Coming in the Fall: Transformations

Here's the cover of my new book, to be published in the fall.  (You may have to click on the image to see it clearly.)

It's about, um, Transformations.  It's an anthropological account of how we cultivate any self, how we make the transformation from self to self, and how we cultivate several selves at once. 

It has taken about a decade to bring to the light of day.  But, finally, here it is. 

As I say, it won't be available till the fall, but it can be preordered from Amazon now.  See the link below. 

Whew!

References

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  Available for preorder at Amazon here. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Pam, my wife, for designing the cover.  Thanks to Richard Shear and Joe Melchione for producing it.  Good, eh?

All Clear

My apologies.  This Blogs was down over the holidays.  I think we are back to business as usual.  Happy new year!

Home for the holidays with Stalin's Ghost

Everyone needs a novel close by for the holidays.  It's our respite in the event of family hostilities, sensory overload, caloric excess, or the horror of being away from work. 

Of course, a religious holiday doesn't mean a mental holiday.  We need a novel that's soaked through with good choices, from theme to setting to event to dialog to character to drama to every...last...word.  We want a book in which all these choices build orchestrally to an "away" experience so intense that we look up from our novel to discover...we were reading a novel. 

My recommendation is Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith.  It is a catalog of brilliantly successful choices.  It's thoroughly excursive, if that's a word.  You travel well and far, well protected from the perils of Christmas, Hanuka (still lingering in its effects), Kwanzaa, and time away from work. 

You can buy Stalin's Ghost from Amazon.com here. 

My favorite Martian

In the late 1980s, I was, for a year, installed at Massey College.  For exercise, I would play catch on a field near the college with a Massey student called Mathew.

One day Mathew's girl friend came out to watch us play.  After awhile, the dreaded question:

"Can I try?" she asked.

Mathew and I didn't mind showing off while a woman watched us with rapt admiration.  But having to share the game with someone who probably thought throwing a football badly was somehow "cute," this was annoying.

Gallantly, we obliged her.  After about 12
throws, Julie had mastered throwing a football with her right hand so well that her mechanics were perfect.  And I mean flawless.  She started at zero.  The first throws were abysmally bad.  She was, in the language of the traditional childhood taunt, throwing "like a girl."  By throw "6," her form was dramatically better.  By throw "12," it was, as I say, perfect.  She was now throwing like she had never not thrown a football.

This was a little daunting for Mathew and me.  We had spend our childhoods learning to throw.  And it took months (years, actually) to be good enough to escape the taunt that we threw "like a girl."  Manfully, we played on, but it was now clear we'd be very lucky to throw like this girl.

Well, it got worse.  Julie wondered if she could throw with her left hand, and sure enough, in a dozen throws, she was once more perfect.  By this time, Mathew and I were  bordering on humiliation.  Julie had managed to reproduce the key accomplishment of our childhood in about 15 minutes.

Julie was a student at Massey too.  Occasionally, she would sit down at the College grand piano and favor us with a little well formed Mozart.  This was when she wasn't taking classes in electrical engineering, I think it was.  Julie was just good at everything.

I wasn't surprised a few years later that she had been chosen to be part of the Canadian space program.  She flew on Space Shuttle Discovery from May 27 to June 6, 1999 as a crew member of STS-96.  The crew performed the first manual docking of the Shuttle to the International Space Station.

Are Canadians proud of her?  You might say.  Ms. Payette has honorary degrees from Queen's University (1999); University of Ottawa (1999); Simon Fraser University (2000); Université Laval (2000); University of Regina (2001); Royal Roads University (2001); University of Toronto (2001); University of Victoria (2002); Nipissing University (2002); McGill University (2003); Mount Saint Vincent University (2004); McMaster University (2004); University of Lethbridge (2005); Mount Allison University (2005).

But there's another side to the story.  There is, who knew, a Canadian government agency dedicated to protecting nation's self esteem.  It took a long look at Julie and decided that the nation had a choice.  It could suffer the presence of someone who was going to make everyone look bad all the time, or it could get her off planet as soon as possible.  I believe, there was a small minority who felt that Ms. Payette was perhaps not human at all, and the wisest course was to "send her back where she came from."

As it turned out, Ms. Payette was only off planet for 9 days, 19 hours and 13 minutes, but everyone, especially Mathew and me, breathed a sigh of relief.

Still fishing

The manuscript is toddling along.  It's at 15,000 words, which if you assumed I started on August 6, is about 1000 words a day. 

This is way too slow.  And occasionally it looks as if what I'm really working on is a procrastination laboratory.  My favorite new device is noodling over paragraphs I finished days ago.  I find myself staring at one of them, wondering fitfully if I shouldn't change this word or rearrange these sentences.

The good thing about blogging is that we are forced to work at pace.  The bad thing about writing is that dithering goes unpunished...at least in the short term. 

Today, I actually started a spreadsheet which I hope will force me to stay at it.  Plus, it proved to be a good way to blow 15 minutes that I would otherwise have spent writing.  Well, the spreadsheet only actually took a minute to create.  I spend the other 14 wondering what it says about me as a writer that I am using a spreadsheet.  I decided Dickens would definitely have had a spreadsheet.  Proust, maybe not so much. 

It's be a while before I am back to blogging but in the meantime I have a problem.  I need an agent.  Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated.  Please let me know: grant27[@]gmail[dot]com.

Thanks, Grant

Gone Fishing

I have a manuscript that's proving unexpectedly cooperative, and while these results are forthcoming, I am going to keep my head down, and type as fast as I can.

I bet there will be moments when I am driven to blog, but for the moment I am off for August.

Thanks for reading and supporting This Blog.  And thanks for your patience while I see if I can't put some of this reflection between hard covers.  Hope you have a wonderful August. 

Best, Grant

Can we talk?

Deep summer is probably not a good time to address a weighty topic, but I can't leave this one till fall. 

I am waiting for my speaker's agency to find me more speaking gigs, and they are not forthcoming.  Of course, this may reflect the market's assessment of my value as a speaker.  And I bow before this assessment. 

On the other hand, I used to talk all the time, and sometimes the crowd seemed to love me, especially when I did my mechanical hand trick (eyes right).  It rotates all the way around.  Kidding, I'm kidding.

So I am thinking about going out on my own.  This may be a good idea.  It may be a bad idea.  I welcome thoughts, suggestions and advice from my readers.  As your comments demonstrate, you're almost always smarter than me.

There are a couple of issues worth thinking through:

1) speaker's agencies are subject to new competitive pressure.  The worst of these is those "conferences" that draw people from industry, pay them nothing but the honor of this 15 minutes of celebrity.  These ventures can drop their prices because there costs are so low.  And this floods the market with supply. 

I like the peer to peer notion that's happening here.  On the whole, it is probably more interesting to listen to your peers than a pompous would-be guru who thinks too well of himself.  On the other hand, we might be looking at a race to the commodity basement here and that's not a market I want any part of. 

2) when you are represented by an agency, you stop looking for gigs on your own.  You leave it to the professionals.  And if they have more potent speakers, they organize the competition arrayed against us. 

3) the speaker's bureau charges a lot.  I am happy to work for single digit thousands.  They like to charge in the double digits.  I am being priced out of my market.

4) on the other hand, the bureau does beat the publicity drum.  They are the place that people go to look for candidates.  Visibility is everything and this is where it is, er, this is where it's at.

5) Going on my own would force me to look for myself, and it would allow me to charge less.  Is this benefit worth the risk of diminished visibility?

Thoughts and suggestions, and illuminations from your own experience would be appreciated. 

My summer so far

 

Mystery in a Polish graveyard

Who was Nat Litinger?  And when did he die? 

The second question should be easy.  We are looking at his grave stone.  (Click on the image.)

   N A T  L I T I N G E R
           OF NEW YORK
PASSED AWAY IN WARSAW
                        POLAND
      ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
          HE IS RESTING NOW

But look again at the year.  It can be read as

1939

or as

1932.

Here's the date close up:

Something happened.  Either the 9 got changed to a 2, or the 2 became a 9.  My guess is that the number began as a 2.  Notice that its barrel (right term?) is much smaller than that of the unambiguous 9 in the series.  It began as a 2, I think, and someone closed the upper line on itself. 

Mr. Litinger's date of death was first given as September 1, 1932, and someone made it September 1, 1939.

Who?  My guess is that the stone cutter forgot himself.  The year is 1939, but he makes a mistake and he wishes on Mr. Litinger an early death.  This is a benign slip, and in the historical circumstances,  a compassionate one. 

September 1, 1939 marks the official beginning of the German invasion of Poland and World War II.  Warsaw was subject to bombardment from this day onwards.  (The attack on the city began September 9, and a siege was imposed September 14.)  Nat Litinger died on the day that the war started and Warsaw was first attacked. 

For all we know, Mr. Litinger was a victim of the bombardment.  The stone cutter wishes on him another end, another date, another death.  He does this, of course, accidentally, at the very moment that a stone cutter must be most careful.  And now contemplating this record  of his misery, he has to stop and put it right.  Forget the professional embarrassment, and this is of course considerable, this is a man observing the most concrete evidence of what he really feels...at close to the very moment, the start of the Nazi invasion, he's trying hardest not to feel it. 

I found Mr. Litinger's headstone today in a cemetery on the south side of Warsaw.  This cemetery doesn't actually look like a cemetery.  Not now.  It looks this (image right).  (Click on the image if it's hard to see.)

There are no grave stones in this cemetery. 

This because the Nazis took them.  It is one of the aspects of Nazi Warsaw from which head and heart scramble away in a sheer animal panic.   You hear what the Nazis did.  In this case, you can see what the Nazis did.  But this is a serial holocaust, an effort to exterminate not only the living but the dead. You can't imagine soldiers (prisoners?) coming here and knocking down thousands upon thousands of grave stones.  And what if you did imagine it?  You'd be trapped and you couldn't ever get back.  You would have tipped into their insanity or your own.   

A little further on, we find some of the headstones reduced to a virtual rubble (image right).  Apparently, headstones were used by the Nazis to pave roads, so we may be looking at the ones that were assembled but not yet used.  (The "concentration camp" principle at work even here: things brought together for eventual "relocation.")  Or, it is possible that these are stones discovered in and around Warsaw and then brought back to cemetery, only to be, shockingly, dumped.  We expect barbarism from the Nazis, this is what they were, but not from those who follow them. 

In fact, these stones, now some 60 years after the war, might as well be warehoused.  There is one small corner of the cemetery where it looks as if someone attempted to return some 30 stones to a circle.  Here and there, stones have been propped up as they might have been in the pre-Nazi era.  Mostly, these stones are as if stockpiled. 

Mr. Litinger's is one of these.  Just lying there.  Next to the path.  You see the date.  As you pass by, out of the corner of your eye, you try to fix it.  It's a 2.  It's a 9.  It's a 2.  It's a 9.  Keep walking.  Lots of things in this world make no sense.  Just keep going.  Because there's a vicious undertow here, and the moment you dwell on it, you can kiss your sanity good bye. 

But this headstone is in English and most others of course in Hebrew.  Clumsy, Scottish, Canadian, Protestant, needy, Anglophone, here's a stone that speaks to me!  And Nat Litinger, that's a name I feel I've seen before.  (And why is it in English, anyhow? Only because Mr. Litinger was born in New York?)  So you stick on the 2 that's a 9 that's a 2.  (How apt that what I can read should read dyslexicly, when, surely, the Hebrew would be limpid.) No, that's not why I stick on it.  I stick on it for the same reason the stone cutter did.  Because if the 9 is a 2, well, if only the 9 were a 2.  If only time and stone were the same.

References

See the Wikipedia entry on the invasion of Poland here. 

A wee hiatus

I didn't think it was possible to get this tired, but after several weeks of ethnographic interviews in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterey, I have discovered my limit. 

I have a couple more weeks of interviews coming up  (in Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow), and I think a small break in blogging is called for. 

If I can post from Poland, I will. 

London in June

Today is going to be hectic with interviews and travel. 

I hope to post but it will be late, and it might not happen at all. 

In the meantime, I hope I will see you in London on June 16th at Russell Davies'  interesting2007 conference.

The speaker list is here. 

The Wiki for the conference is here.

I thank Russell for the chance to speak.   He's encouraging me to talk about the time I was on Oprah.  This would  oblige me to talk about the time I nearly lost control of my bladder on national television.  I don't know.  I'm ambivalent.  I'll think of something.  Hope to see you there.

References

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  On Oprah.  In Culture and Consumption II.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

We are 800

Today marks the 800th post for This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.

Shareholders should know that growth is "trending upwards." According to Technorati, there are 3,750 links from 436 blogs.  We have a couple of thousand page views on most days.  We have 4400 comments  and 388 trackbacks.  We broke 1 million words, finally. 

Mrs. Burton, I regret to say, is no longer with us.  (Normally, Mrs. Burton sees to the celebration, carbonated soft drinks, fireworks, that sort of thing.)  Under the stage name, Flirtin' Burton, she is now managing a roller derby league in Des Moines.  "Not very different from managing things at This Blog Sits At," she tells me. 

To those who read and those who comment, my devout thanks.   We are nothing without you. 

Please help II

I leave tonight for 3 or 4 weeks in Europe and am hoping to recruit 9 readers of this blog as expert respondents. 

What I am looking for are people who can tell me about food, culture, Europe, home life, cooking, meal time, the family, and the present state of consumer taste, preference and inclination. 

The interview will take a couple of hours.  The fee is $200.oo American.  And it should be an opportunity for a rousing conversation.  Interviews will be conducted in Germany (week 1), Belgium (week 2) and France (week 3). 

Generally speaking, I am looking for account planners, social scientists, bloggers, journalists, trend watchers...that kind of person.

So if you are expert on these matters, please let me know.   I only have 3 slots for each country, so please forgive if I am unable to include you in the research project. 

Other readers:

It's going to be a busy time.  Please accept my apologies if blogging proves intermittent. 

A Valentine 30 days late

My new ThinkPad arrived today, and in stolen moments, I've been configuring it.  It really is a joy.  It's slipper light, the key board is perfect, the screen is miraculous, the hard drive, finally, capacious, the configuration software intelligent, the battery trans-Atlantic. I know this is irrational, but I feel about ThinkPad the way people used to feel about their Fords, their Coca-Cola, and their Levi's.  I'm telling you, I am this far from burning a logo into my arm.

Reading Week(s)

I am going off line for a couple of weeks. 

I have a couple of books that need finishing and a trip to India in the works. 

I will be back on line December 18, 2006. 

May I take this opportunity to thank people who have left comments? These comments are, many of them, wonderfully good, much better than the posts they adorn. 

Thanks!

Grant (McCracken)

We are 700!

This is the 700th post for This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.

Thank you very much to TBSA readers for their 3729 comments and many off line encouragements.  I once heard someone say that TBSA had the smartest readers in the blogosphere.  I believe this is true. 

Other stats:

There are now around 800,000 words in 700 posts.

According to Technorati, there are 2328 links from 368 blogs. 

Thanks very much to everyone who has participated with great comments, questions, and challenges. 

Normally, when TBSA reaches a milestone, I ask visitors to keep their ticket stubs and claim a free beverage (medium) of their choice in the lobby.   Mrs. Burton has been rethinking the "whole idea" of "sugary drinks" and Pomegranate juice will be served instead.  We are deeply sorry. 

Oh, and thanks to BusinessWeek Online for their attention and these kind words:

WHY READ IT
Because Grant McCracken -- an anthropologist and corporate ethnography consultant -- is witty, opinionated, and razor sharp. "This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics," he announces to his readers. And it does. His posts filter marketing and commerce through a cultural lens and vice versa. In the process, he offers smart takes on everything from "chunky" markets (the growth in the audience that lies between mass consumers and "long tail" niches) to the branding quandary Apple (AAPL ) faced when it put Intel (INTC ) chips into its Macs.

References

McGregor, Jena.  2006.  Why Read It.  BusinessWeek Online.  October 2, 2006. 

On the Guangzhou - Portland express

I am leaving China today and I'll be in Portland for the weekend if anyone wants to get together for coffee.

Ethnography fans, please come to the EPIC conference being staged by Intel in Portland.  You can get the full details here.  If you can make it, I'm speaking Monday morning. 

Speaking of ethnography, this was a bruising trip.  I am not sure my ethnography will ever be the same. 

The art of ethnography includes two very different kinds of questions (at a minimum). 

The first class of question ask for detail, lots of detail, sometimes excrutiating detail.  These are "beater questions."  Their job is to flush out opportunities to ask the second class of questions.   These are opportunities to gather not detail but the stuff of culture: categories, rules, assumptions, conventions, concepts, notions, and so on.

One member of the team got swept up in the detail questions...and so preempted the interview with them that it was no longer possible to capture the hidden world from which these details spring.  Anthropology believes in thoroughgoing specifications of ethnographic detail, but this was a brute, unrelieved empiricism and really bad methodology.

The image:

My tribute to bean counters.  Things for sale in a "wet-market."  (Click on the image if you want, yes, more detail.)

Blogging mechanics

Every post is a bet.  We have only so much time to write the thing.  So we want to choose our topic carefully. 

Today, I invested in a topic that did not pay out, that I could not "bring home."  Bad luck.  I have 9 minutes before I do my next interview. 

This means I am out of luck unless I am prepared to lower my standards and that phony post modern strategy, writing about the difficulty of posting.  Novelists and film makers are shameless when it comes to this strategy.  And with this post, I  join their shameful ranks.

The other strategy, and this one is ancient and well tested: pictures of kittens!  This one shows a kitten that lives at the bottom of my sister's garden in Vancouver Island.  She tells me that the Pig has been awarded honorary kittenness and is included in most play activities. 

Ok, have to go. 

What I did on my summer vacation (or, "may I have your passport, please?")

On my summer vacation, I went looking for Erna Schonwald. 

I've wanted to collect for some time now.  My father collected Inuit carvings.  Will Straw, a friend in Montreal, turned eBay into a collecting machine, making one brilliant acquistion after another.  The two of them made it look like fun. 

I especially liked the idea  of collecting, the solitary pleasure, the little universe you build purchase by purchase, the way things you never knew or cared about suddenly assume "must have" status.  But what to collect?  Rugs, watches, wine, movie posters, motel coasters, first edition noir?  Nothing appealed to me. 

Then I came across Erna's passport on eBay.  This, I thought, this I would like to have.  It came in the mail, paper in paper.  The passports of 1920s Austria were delicate things, green ink on beige paper, filled now with forms, stamps, signatures, and of course Erna's photograph, from which she looks out at us steadily, apparently thinking something funny and kind.

My German isn't very good.  So the passport didn't give away very much.  Erna was born in late October in 1894.  The passport was issued in 1922.  In between, what?  It looks as if Erna gives her profession as a private beautician, but I could be wrong.

Lots of questions.  Why did she leave?  Where did she go?  How did she fund her trip?  What happened next?

My sister said, "look at the Ellis Island website," and this says Erna arrived in the US in 1923.  She was sponsored by her brother Philippe who arrived the year before.  Philippe is described as "Dr." Schonwald and he had been sponsored by his cousin, A.F. Low in Seattle.  Ah, so that's where the money came from. 

But more questions.  Why was a doctor leaving his homeland in 1922...at 47 no less?  The early twenties seems a little early to be escaping anti-semitism, but then my German history isn't much better than my German. 

Then my sister discovered a reference to a Dr. Schonwald, President of the East Point Oysters Company of Stanwood Washington.  What are the chances, she asked me, that there were two Dr. Schonwald's in the area in the period?  So, what, Dr. Schonwald was a biologist?

And then I discovered that someone has digitized the Seattle phone book for 1923.  (I mean, is the Internet not the greatest thing in the history of the universe?)  This calls "Philipp" a physician.  And it says that his office was at 227 Cobb building.  Using these key words in Google, we learn that the Cobb was built in 1910 with the purpose of offering "200 of Seattle's best doctors and finest dentists the choicest office possible."   Ok, so he's a not just a doctor but a man of substance.  (So what about the oyster thing again?)

If we consult the 1930 census, we discover that Philippe has a wife, Peggie, and two daughters, Lurlie, 15, and Rose, 12 and a Norwegian servant called Matilda.  These means, among other things, that when Philippe came to America, he was travelling with two children under the age of 10.

The census also gives us a glimpse of Erna (mistransliterated as "Ema") as a boarder.  Oh, my heart sank a little.  Erna would now have been 35.  The census says that she was a bookkeeper.  Finally, it gives her birthplace as "Vatican City State."  My heart rose.   There is no way that this is a misprint.  There's no way the census taker misunderstood.  This is either an extravagant act of the imagination or the truth.   

The 1930 census says that Erna was boarding with Ariston Wchwertner, but it is clear that this too is a misprint.  Erna was boarding with a "Schwertner," with whom she shared German as a first language.  Also, it turns out that Schwertner was working as a nurse in a doctor's office, and now of course we wonder whether Erna's might have been a bookkeeper in same.

While I was searching for Schwerter, a familiar name popped up: Philipp Schonwald.  This is the man who sponsored her journey from Guafenstein, Tchecho Slowakei, via Surabaya, Indonesia to San Francisco and then Seattle. 

This means that Erna is merely listed as a boarder.  She is in fact living with a woman who is almost certainly a relative.  And chances are now good that she works with this woman as well, which suggests that she is working for her brother.  Ah, Erna safe in the bossom of her family.

After that, the trail goes cold.  I can't find any more about her.   Thoughts, speculations, more information, any of this would be most appreciated.  Does anyone have an idea why Dr. Schonwald left in 1922 or Erna left in 1923?  What little I know tells me that the Jewish community had been leaving since the 1860s.  But what would have persuaded a physican to move his family and two small children across first an ocean and then a continent?   But most of all, was Erna born in the Vatican City?  Or was this a brilliant lie? 

I ran out of vacation.  It's up to you. 

Sanya, the wonder cat

Sanya is a short haired domestic who lives in a high rise on the far southern edge of Moscow with a lovely women in her 30s, her husband and a couple of kids, two boys, 3 and 5. 

Sanya is now 15.  This is his triumph against the odds.

When Sanya was 5, he fell from the balcony and 15 stories to the ground.  He is completely deaf and breaths with difficulty.  Otherwise, he is fine.  Actually, he is much better than fine.  He comes right up to you, and looks into your eyes the way we will stand in front of a refrigerator with the door open, taking a catalogue, interested in some things, dubious about others, curious in a dispassionate way that is a little unnerving.  We don't expect that the refrigator will notice or care about our examination.  Neither does Sanya.  He's just looking around, seeing who's home. 

At 15, Sanya is roughly the same age as post Soviet Russia.  Not that he's a metaphor or anything.  None of that Orwellian nonsense for Sanya. Well, unless you take the fact that he survived an event that would have killed any other cat in the universe.  Or the fact that he perseveres in spite of the injuries inflicted upon him.  And the fact that he remains implacably interested in the world whether or not the world welcomes or returns that curiosity.  Ok, now that you mention it, there are a couple of similarities.

American soldier

What is the best way to honor Memorial Day?  For me, it's to honor sacrifice. 

Here is a passage from the blog American Soldier.  It's written by a man who has returned from service and is now struggling to restore his life.

Where does one begin to recoup from a war? So many people say that by going to a counselor and talking about it that you will be ok.

“It’s going to take time.”

I cannot put it all into words. I am having trouble with normalcy.  I try very hard to occupy myself.  Heck I even got myself a few hobbies now.  However, I feel out of place.  I have flashbacks and can’t sleep at night.  When I finally get to sleep I am immersed in a nightmare.  The memory’s of the environment that nearly killed me more than once haunts me now that I am home and safe.  The nights are the worst for me.  I am alone and who can I really talk to when its 2am and I’m wide awake?  I mean I could wake my wife up but it’s not fair to her if I did this every night.  So I just waste away afraid to go to sleep.

What in the hell did I do to deserve this?  I nearly died for my country and I’m left to endure this post traumatic stress disorder.  I am stronger than this but I cannot defeat it, there is not operation order for this.

Some of the things that suck are as simple as leaving my house.  Why? I feel like I might get blown apart from an incoming mortar round.  All stemming from when I was in Iraq and the constant incoming we would receive.  Going to take a shower was dangerous.  And yes, people did get killed while taking showers from incoming.

One way to help honor American service man and women is to support Fisher House, an organization that aids families as they gather to comfort wounded soldiers.  You may make contributions to Fisher House here. 

References

Anonymous.  2006.  Welcome to the Real Suck.  American Soldier.  April 19, 2006.  here.

 

Mysteries for Martians

Preparing Transformation for publication, I am having to make painful decisions.  In particular, I have to jettison the opening essay, "More Mysteries for Martians."  I read it now and it just feels ostentatiously 90s, a little self indulgent, uncompromisingly vague. 

So it has to go.  It's not a piece of crap or anything.  In fact, I like the way its written, but it does not capture the reader's attention with the "short, sharp shock" now called for in a "signal rich" world.  Oh, let's face it.  I was trying to be a Mr. Smarty Pants at the very point in a book when you are supposed to be unmistakeably clear.

Here is the offending, now orphaned, essay.  See what you think.

More Mysteries for Martians

It’s a dark and stormy night.  Leaves spin in little circles.  Light fills the sky.  A ship sets down beside us.  We are in the carefully modulated company of an interplanetary other.[i]   

The holograms shimmer.  After careful investigation, our Martian visitors have 3 questions:  Why was Whitney Houston chosen as the Statue of Liberty?  Why was a man from 20th century California living in 18th century England? Why are living rooms being driven around Shanghai on the back of flat bed trucks?

The Martians have been reviewing the rededication of the Statue of Liberty on July 4th, 1986.  At the high point of the occasion, Whitney Houston sang The Greatest Love of All.  The festival was, the Martians could tell, important.  It was a chance to refurbish a national icon and the values it stood for. “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”   

The Martians thought Ms. Houston made a stunning Lady Liberty.  There was no disagreement there.  But The Greatest Love of All they found puzzling.  Is this really, they wanted to know, a song for immigrants?   

I decided long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow
If I fail, if I succeed, at least I lived as I believed
No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all is happening to me.
I found the greatest love of all inside of me.[ii]

The Martians aren’t judgmental.  (They are, they understand, from Mars.)  They are prepared to accept the Houstonian proposition, that the greatest love is self love.  But they couldn’t help wondering whether this was the right choice for the occasion?   America celebrates nationhood with a song about individualism?  Lady Liberty sings a song…to herself? 

We make the usual spectacle of our ignorance.  “What Whitney was saying, really, was…umm…Lee Iacocca organized the thing, that’s important…probably…and basically, you see, basically…” 

“Thank you,” interrupts a hologram, “that was scintillating.  We have a second question.  What was Dennis Severs doing living in 18th century London?”

Dennis Severs lived, until his death in 2000, in London’s east-end.  His house had no running water, no electricity, no toilet, no shower, no toaster, no TV, no modern conveniences of any kind.  Mr. Severs lived with his butler in a stone house and, for most intents and purposes, the 18th century.[iii] 

The Martian wants to know why a man would forsake the conveniences of the present day for a London of perpetual semi-darkness, coal fires, resentful servants, and none of the communication marvels of the moment, no telephone, no fax machine, no computer, no vivaphone…never mind that last one.  Why would a man give up his age for a vastly cruder one?  “Besides,” says a hologram, “he was from Escondido.  We looked it up.”    

Mysterious, indeed.  The obvious answer, “Escondido can do strange things to a man,” doesn’t help very much.  If Dennis were mad, it was a disciplined madness.  And if it was merely a sustained form of dress-up, surely it would’ve ended years ago.  To the Martian eye, Mr. Severs had reconstructed the 18th century thoroughly and thoughtfully, and lived in it with no obvious signs of distress. 

As usual, we’re flabbergasted.  We would like to make ourselves useful…but, well, Mr. Severs is a mystery to us, too.  “And … you … er … what was the third question, again?”

Since they talked to us last, the Martians have been to Shanghai.  (If they can pick a Dennis Severs out of London, they’re bound to notice, like, China.)  They went to the Bund, that great wall of banks built some 70 years ago by Western powers on the city’s harbor.  Carefully disguised (as Dutch tourists), they climbed the semaphore tower (pictured) that used to warn ships of the approach of the deadly typhoon.   

And they looked down. They looked into the traffic that courses ceaselessly below the tower.  And they saw something they hadn’t seen before.  They saw open trucks filled with furniture.  And not furniture higgledy-piggledy but carefully laid out: a sofa against one wall of the truck bed, a card table in one corner.  Still more interestingly, the furniture was occupied.  A man was reading a magazine on the sofa.  At the table, men played cards. 

The Dutch tourists saw truckload after truckload of men living the good life at 40 m.p.h., apparently at home and at leisure when actually at work and at large.  A Martian inquisitor asks us, “go figure.”  (They know how much we like metaphor.)

Silence falls on our leaf swept corner.  Time passes.  We figure.  Nothing happens, really.  No, we don’t know what the Chinese are doing.  We don’t know why Lady Liberty sang a song to herself.  We haven’t a clue what Dennis Severs was up to.  Dusk draws down.  We stare at one another.  Something flickers on. 

Footnotes:

[i] Readers of The Culture by Commotion series will recognize the Martian theme.  I gave a public lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum on the publication of the first volume, and afterwards a pleasant looking middle aged man approached me and said, “I was glad to hear you mention them.”  “Yes, well.” I murmured, desperately trying to think who “them” might be.  “Perhaps you’d like to join us,” he said significantly, “we go out to wait for them.  I’m sure they’d like to meet you.”   

[ii] Masser, Michael and Linda Creed.  1985. The Greatest Love of All on the album Whitney Houston, copyright Golden Torch Music Corp (ASCAP)/Gold Horizon Music Corp (BMI).

[iii] Dennis Severs’ house was at 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields, London, E1 6BX.  He received visitors the first Sunday and Monday of every month until his death in January of 2000.  Martin, Douglas. 31 January 2000. Dennis Severs, Who Lodged London’s Ghosts, Dies at 51. New York Times. sec. A, col. 1,2, p. 25.  A similar experiment for Britain’s Channel 4 television, when “the Bowlers, a thoroughly modern 1999 family, were transported back to 1900 to live in a house restored to the exact specifications of the late Victorian era.  They lived there for three months with no central heating, no refrigeration, no detergent and no penicillin, exposed to every detail of turn-of-the-century living from cleaning the cutlery with brick dust to shaving with a cut-throat razor.”  http://www.channel4.com/1900house/home.htm.  Thanks to Leora Kornfeld for alerting me to the program and the website.

We are 600!

This is the 600th post for This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.

Thank you very much to TBSA readers for their 3130 comments and many off line encouragements.  I once heard someone say that TBSA had the smartest readers in the blogosphere.  I believe this is true. 

Other stats:

There are now over 700,000 words in 600 posts.

According to Technorati, there are 1009 links from 290 blogs. 

Thanks very much to everyone who has participated with great comments, questions, and challenges. 

Normally, when TBSA reaches a milestone, I ask visitors to keep their ticket stubs and claim a free beverage (medium) of their choice in the lobby.  But Mrs. Burton is sick today and the confection stand is closed.  We are deeply sorry. 

Ok, enough self (and reader) congratulation.

Here are the three pieces of software without which TBSA could not be written.  I pass them along as a way of reciprocating for the contributions of fellow bloggers.  (More probably, and as usual, I will find that many of you are way ahead of me, and I will be learning about new software shortly!)

Clipmate 7.  This is a great little program for gathering materials as you move through an article or post.  It spares me  the laborious copy-move-paste, copy-move-paste regime that is otherwise required. It clips images well, which is sometimes useful.  The software is cheap and downloadable here.

MindManager's MindJet: This is a great way of capturing ideas quickly and getting them into a visual array that makes it easier to think about them all at once.  It's expensive but worth every penny.  I now use it for everything.  The Mindmanager website is here.

Post2Blog: This is a little word processor for blog posts.  I use it only because the TypePad word processor is so squished, so "letter box."  Post2Blog is not perfect and if anyone knows of a better one, I would love to hear of it.  See the website here.

Vacation notice

Pam and I are going on vacation and I will be out of range and not posting again until January 10. 

Everyone here at This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics wishes you and yours happy holidays and a wonderful new year.  Please accept our best wishes! 

Oh oh.  The boys in the lab have found a stack of 45s and it sounds like they're breaking out the beakers.  I better go.  Best, Grant

Elizabeth I: long has she ruled over us

Today is the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1558. For Elizabethans, November 17th became an opportunity for bonfires and fireworks. Towards the end of her reign, they thanked God for their monarch. Things were not quite so promising in 1558.

Elizabeth I was a woman confronted by presumptuous male aristocrats happy to relieve her of her power. She was a teenager confronted by commoners deeply skeptical of her ability to rule. She did not have a standing army, and she was still plagued by the "over mighty subject" and the "masterless man." That English taste for disobedience was flourishing.   Sir Thomas Elyot warned, "men's hartes [hearts] be free and they will love whom they liste [like]."

Elizabeth was the beneficiary of her grandfather (Henry VII) and his brutal strategies for clearing the kingdom of people with a competitive claim to the throne. But she was also heir to the religious complications created by her father (Henry VIII). England was now the Protestant upstart, and a beacon for those people in every continental country who wished to break with Rome. The Pope declared that the man who killed Elizabeth would commit no sin. Spain believed that a destruction of the English court would be God's work. Thanks, Dad!

There a lots of historical reasons to revive the celebration. Elizabeth represents the triumph of cunning over stupidity, intelligence over mere cunning, genius over mere intelligence. She was the triumph of will over skepticism, a Renaissance education over the domestic arts, and theatre of power over realpolitik.

But there are also lots of contemporary reasons to celebrate Elizabeth and to remember her. As I will argue tomorrow, there are some interesting similarities between her time and our own.

We remember

How do we honor our war dead?

We remember them.

How do we remember them?

Most years I have a good cry, sometimes in the presence of a Cenotaph, sometimes not. This year I wanted something more precise. I wanted to see sacrifice through the eyes of a soldier.

Finding someone's story in the days of metal cabinets and cardboard boxes would have taken weeks. But now we are as ghosts. No archive is closed to us. Suddenly, we drop into a diary, and, through the diary, into the trenches of France in World War I:

Round the line at night. Some of the Huns' dead still unburied (killed in October!). We had not had time to look after them. (1917.01.05)

Into line again. Ground heavy with snow. Atmosphere thick with haze. Strange quietness all around. It was odd to walk for mile after mile along a staked path or on duckboards in the snow. Shell holes all covered up, so we often went in up to the knees. Held up fairly often. Shelled outside Bn. H.Q. and had four or five beside me wounded, not very seriously. (1917.01.18)

Little doing in the morning. After tea Beattie, Farquharson and I went out for a short stroll. After a bit we found ourselves at the cross roads at Feuchy Chapel on the Cambrai Road. Suddenly a shell dropped less than 20 yards from us and covered us all over with mud. I stepped into a deep puddle of mud in addition. We got pelted the whole road back, as the Boche began to fire at some of our guns coming up the road behind us. This was quite a nice walk. Lovely evening. Only we would have been safer on the other side of Arras. We had even forgotten our gas helmets and tin hats! (1917.04.19)

Our attack was a failure. The barrage was too fast and of the wrong nature and our men were mown down by guns and by M.G. fire. All the officers except Tobermory, A.G.Cameron and G.H.Mitchell were either killed or wounded. A.G. got 500 yards forward and into a gun pit with a few men, where I found him next morning. The Boche counter barrage was down as soon as ours. They had even been practising during the night and had given us a lot of trouble. (1917.04.23)

A second attack took place at 8 a.m., but it was useless. Our form of barrage was to make up for the irregularities of our line. It proved impracticable. Our lot suffered tremendous casualties from M.G. fire in the outhouses of Guémappe. Camerons and Seaforths were in the same position. Royal Scots did well but suffered severely. They were in a more favourable position. Many soldiers lost direction too. Beattie, Farquharson and Willie Wilson killed. Southey and Padre Miller both mortally wounded. Padre Healy wounded, also Ferguson and MacIntyre, all officers. Tyson, our mess waiter, was also killed, poor kid. (1917.04.23)

Waited for the dawn, and then roamed around, looking for A.G. and Mitchell. Found them with Bateman, well forward, the latter seriously wounded. (1917.04.24)

Battlefield in a terrible mess. Boche used sulphurous and incendiary shells which made things indescribably bad. 46th. Brigade got Blue Line. Our Bn. and Brigade sent back to Brown Line. Trudged back with A.G. Cameron and Mitchell. Very hungry and tired. Sorley, J.G.Mitchell, and Capt. Leitch came up as reinforcements. Expect Battalion casualties to be about 300 all told. The Royal Scots hadn't an officer left. Took things easy, trying to sleep in an old Boche dugout. Pretty cold. No word of relief. Felt rather dirty. 3rd. Division said to be coming up. (1917.04.24)

These entries are from the diary of Robert Lindsay Mackay (1896-1981), OBE, MC, MB, CHB, MD, DPH, of the 11th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

References

Mackay, Robert Lindsay. Memoirs and Diaries. here.

Note to American readers: Some of you will be thinking, "I think he's mixed up Veteran's Day with Memorial Day." Actually, I think of November 11 as Remembrance Day, after the Canadian and British convention. This is the day Canadians mourn the war dead.

Launched!

The launch of Culture and Consumption II went well, considering.

We pushed the book into the east river and then had it tugged out into the harbor.  Everything was fine till we moved  out of cell phone range and everyone said we had to turn around and come home. 

We were boarded by the Coast Guard who said that our citation style didn't conform to the new Homeland Security code and that there were, in the words of one officer, "Way too many footnotes and other intellectual affectations.  Just get over yourself." 

Still, I believe this book is the only entry in the field of marketing and branding that manages to talk about the economics of Drew Bledsoe's home, the fins on the cars of the 1950s, how people turn houses into homes, how museum's mistake the consumer, the mechanics of celebrity endorsement, how marketers make meanings for the brand, and other breathlessly interesting topics. 

I have a hang-over the size of...something really large.  So "light blogging" only today, doctor's orders.

Medical hiatus

I am undergoing surgery tomorrow.  Nothing serious, I don't think.

But if my output slows or stops, you may assume they have inadvertantly performed a blogoscopy. 

I'll get back to business as soon as corrective surgery can be arranged. 

Shared sacrifice

Bob Herbert of the Times tells the tragic story of Bobby Rosendahl, a 24-year-old Army corporal from Tacoma, Washington.  Corporal Rosendahl was injured on March 12 in Iraq.  He has lost one leg to amputation and is struggling to keep the other, not least, his mother says, because he is a passionate golfer.  Corporal Rosendahl has now had 36 surgeries.

Herbert makes this important point

Families forced to absorb the blow of a loved one getting wounded frequently watch other pillars of their lives topple like dominoes. What is unusual with regard to this war is the absence of a sense of shared sacrifice. While families like Ms. Olson's are losing almost everything, most of us are making no sacrifice at all.

One way to share in the sacrifice is to support Fisher House Foundation.  Fisher House donates "comfort homes," built on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers. These homes enable family members to be close to a loved one at the most stressful times - during the hospitalization for an unexpected illnes, disease, or injury.

There is at least one Fisher House™ at every major military medical center to assist families in need and to ensure that they are provided with the comforts of home in a supportive environment.

Annually, the Fisher House™ program serves more than 8,500 families, and have made available more than 1,500,000 days of lodging to family members since the program originated in 1990.

[I]t is estimated that families have saved nearly $60 million by staying at a Fisher House™ since the program began.

To learn more about Fisher House: here

To give online: here

References

Herbert, Rob.  2005.  Lives Blown Apart.  New York Times. August 15, 2005. here.

Transitioning to TypePad

In the next few hours, I will be taking down the www.cultureby.com website. 

This is because Indiana University Press will be publishing in hard cover, and then soft, the several books I had lodged there for downloading.

The blog itself moves to TypePad.

There are a couple of things that fall between the stools, neither books nor blog, and I want to reproduce one of them here, not least because it is the reason I am doing the WGBH show tomorrow. 

Here's then is a little essay about the contemporary relevance of Samuel Pepys, the man Leora Kornfeld calls the Blogfather. 

The Pepys Now project:
how to write a blog they’ll read in 100 years

Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) kept a diary for ten years, 1660-1669 (http://www.pepys.info/index.html ). He helps us understand the great fire of London, some of the plague years, the aftermath of the English civil war, and the English navy.   

 

Equally important, he helps us see what life was like. We hear him kicking himself for “carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o'clock it is one hundred times.” A man fretting.   

 

For recording the great and little events of the day, Pepys has been given immortality. We read him still.   

 

There is no shortage of diarists these days, not with billions of blogs on line. But will bloggers find immortality? No. This is not just because there are so many of us. The trouble is we assume the things readers will want to know in 100 years.   

 

There are, for instance, countless blog entries from people experiencing the flu.   But what history will care about are all the details that struck us as too obvious or banal to mention.   

 

What the “flu” was like, what we took as “medicine.” The "pharmacy" we got the medicine in. The conversation we had with that man in the lab coat. The advice we got from friends. What we wore while recuperating. What we watched on TV. What was illuminated by that faint light in the “refrigerator.”   The idea, for instance, of “comfort food.” (What was it?  What comfort did it give?) What we talked about on the “phone.” What “emails” we wrote. What happened to personhood?   What was it like to be us, as we lost momentum, as our affairs went into suspension, as our life began slowing to come undone. Where did the mind turn in this rare inactive moment. What fretting did we do?

In 100 years, the flu will be an exotic experience.   (We read Pepys for his accounts of the plague; we know longer know what this was like.)   Historians will hold conferences on the experience of sickness and curing.   And they will consult our blogs mostly with unhappiness.   

A conference paper in the year 2103:

 

We have 3.74 million references to “flu” in the blogs of the early 21 st century.   We have the medical accounts of what it was and what curing was.   But we do not know what it was like as an experience.  

 

These bloggers were talking to one another.   They were not talking to us.   

 

But I am happy to report that I have discovered one web log that offers a meticulous record, one might even say Pepysian account, of one flu in one life.   

 

Using the weblog entries of one Sarah Zupko , I intend to show how the “flu” worked as a social, cultural, emotional, physiological and medical event in the life.  

 

With this as my platform, I will seek, then, to illuminate key aspects of everyday life.   Sarah Zupko ’s account of the flu she suffered in the 14 th week of their year 2003, in conjunction with other records we have at our disposal, help us to see how the “self” was constructed, maintained and, in a word, lived.

 

In an odd way, we owe this now vanished virus a debt of thanks.   Under its duress, Zupko was moved, meticulously and with rare sensitivity, to reveal not just what it was to be “sick” but what it was like to be a creature of this historical and cultural moment.   

 

Blogs for their time

 

There are two strategies here.   

 

The first is simply to document everything we can and let history do the sorting.   In the case of “blanket documentation,” we don’t need to choose because we seek to capture everything.   

 

1. The blanket documentation: a week’s regime

 

(do this once a year)

 

Monday: 

Recording place:

Photo documentation:

Home, work, neighborhood, local store(s), other places we go,

Do 5 level of documentation from broad to the individual object

(e.g., our neighbourhood, house/apt., rooms, objects, contents)

 

Tuesday: 

Recording time:

Prose documentation

Structure of the last week

Things that were scheduled

Things that were spontaneous

Who, what, where, when, and why of each event

 

Wednesday: 

Recording things:

(Clothing, furniture, art, fridge magnets & other possessions)

Photo documentation

Prose documentation

Link the two, prop a photograph of your favorite sweater in front of the computer and describe where it comes from, where you found it, things that happened as you wore it, what it means to you know, how it interacts with other articles of clothing, the last time you wore it and anything else it brings to mind

 

Thursday:

Recording media:

Music, movies, television, websites

The regulars

The occasionals

The discoveries

Prose documentation of and for each.   

 

Friday: 

Recording people:

Diary entries:

Video documentation

Do interviews with everyone who will put up with one.   Set up your video camera (if you have one) and leave it standing in the living room (if you have one).   When someone comes over, sit them down and ask them these questions… and anything else that occurs to you, and capture anything else that occurs to them.   

 

Saturday: 

Review, reflect, spot holes, capture the things we’ve missed

 

Sunday:

Review, voice over commentary on each of your bodies of evidence.   There are two imperatives here:1) capturing the assumptions that did not get onto film and that do not normally get into blogs; 2) showing the interrelationships of all the pieces we have know documents. What are the wholes that organized the parts? What was the lived experience of this world

 

There will be moments when you’ll think to yourself, “Oh, what’s the point, this is so obvious.” But think about what you would give to have account like this from your life, say, 20 years ago.  If would be a dear possession.  Think about what you would give to have this account of your father’s life when he was the age you are now.   Think about what you give for an account of your great, great grandfather’s life.   By this time, you have materials that historians would be pestering you to have a look at.   

 

 

The “as if from a glass bottom boat” documentation

 

This is the second strategy. This is the documentation of a single thing, person, place, object, event. It could, for instance, be the flu. Now the trick is to tear ourselves away from the familiarity that, blessedly, makes so much of our experience intelligible and manageable. Only thus can we deliver what historians want (and what we will be pleased to have in 20 years).

 

There are a couple of aids here. One is surprise. Surprise occurs when assumptions are violated and it represents an opportunity to capture what these assumptions are. I was standing in Grand Central Station last week and a man passed me wearing a burgundy red fedora. It was too stylish to be a prank, too odd to be a simple act of style.   It forced me to think about hats and to see the conventions that govern them.

 

Another is humor. This too depends on violated assumptions. Victorian jokes now strike us as not very funny. And this is because we no longer share the cultural assumptions they assumed and on which they operated. Take a moment of humor and supply the archeology on which they rested.   

 

A third is what the Russians called deformalization. The banal example here is repeating a word over and over until it becomes strange to the ear. (Try saying, “saying” thirty times and see if it continues to deliver meaning as it once did.).   The trick here seems to be just concentrating on something for long enough that its “taken-for-grantedness” begins to fall away. Think long enough about a kitchen and this begins to happen with surprising ease. (CxC assumes no responsibility for the dislocation that will follow.)

 

A fourth might be called the Goffman effect. Erving Goffman sought out the company of people who had forgotten or misremembered the rules of everyday life. They stood too close to him.(Ah, so there is a rule that says we must remain 12 to 16 inches from a conversational partner.) They gave too little eye contact or too much. (Ah, so there’s a rule…) They shouted or whispered. And so on. The trick here is to treat social error as an indicator of social convention.   

 

(A fifth is the alienating effects of drugs and alcohol, but CxC is forbidden from recommending this path to illumination.)

 

What we really need here are pen pals in mainland China , correspondents who read our accounts and say, “sorry, I still don’t see how this person, place, event, or thing made sense to you.”   

 

Storage

 

Once you have performed your Pepys scrutiny, burn it on a CD or DVD and send one copy to the youngest responsible member of your family, with careful instructions that they are to do the same in 20 years. Send the other to the Smithsonian. CxC will attempt to encourage them to take receipt of it and put it in an archive somewhere. Congratulations, you are now immortal.

Fisher House: families in need

Fisher House™ Foundation donates "comfort homes," built on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers. These homes enable family members to be close to a loved one at the most stressful times - during the hospitalization for an unexpected illnes, disease, or injury.

There is at least one Fisher House™ at every major military medical center to assist families in need and to ensure that they are provided with the comforts of home in a supportive environment.

Annually, the Fisher House™ program serves more than 8,500 families, and have made available more than 1,500,000 days of lodging to family members since the program originated in 1990.

[I]t is estimated that families have saved nearly $60 million by staying at a Fisher House™ since the program began.

To learn more about Fisher House: here

To give online: here