An article about my neighbor, Sergio Olaya, whose mother Clara and I had many a talk about botany and Latin America. She died in her own home after months of hospice care ... and Sergio is left with the terrible aftermath. He recently sold the family house to some other neighbors due to the financial pincers that have caught him.

un bon coin pour mourir

My neighbor, a beloved family friend, just died after long suffering. I was searching for some words I vaguely remembered from Deleuze where he speaks about death -- seeking, I think, for some consolation from his philosophy. Via Google I found this excerpt from the Abécedaire, where Gilles Deleuze talks about animals and knowing the good corner in which to die. Previously I'd only seen this as a transcript; it's more powerful to hear it delivered in interview with Claire Parnet.




I was thinking of this particular exchange because our neighbor, R., had been under hospice care at his home for the past few weeks. As his kidneys failed and his body became unable to process food, his wife (G.) began a constant bedside vigil. R. died during the ten minutes G. was away, as she stepped outside to watch my daughter depart for a karate-pirate party. Knowing R., that would seem to have been his choice rather than a trick of fate: to spare his wife the pain of being present as he breathed his last, to choose to die alone in the belief that it would be a more endurable death for those left after his death.

We stopped by G.'s house this morning with bagels and cakes and orange juice, knowing that many others would be visiting as the day progressed and wishing to honor the tradition that the house should be a place for remembrance, food, stories.

As my kids and R. and G.'s grandchildren watched cartoons, I told G. the following, which has always stayed with me. When my wife and I bought our house across the street from theirs, in the Friendship Heights area of DC, we felt like pioneers. The neighborhood had an empty, quiet vibe, since it was rapidly aging and younger buyers had not yet discovered its modest scale and urban convenience. One day as we were breaking our backs pulling weeds and straightening brick walks, my wife and I were musing that we didn't have good role models for how to be a couple. We had both been experiencing difficulties with our parents, and the still of the neighborhood seemed to be answering some ache we felt for this reason. Just then R. and G. returned home from their walk to the grocery. They didn't see us laboring in our yard. As they ascended the two small steps before their house, we watched as each hand sought for and found a partner hand. R. and G. did not look at each other; they did not have to think of the act of joining; their hands simply sought and found, secure in the knowledge that another hand was seeking, and would be found.

That's the kind of love I want always to have, I thought.

"I was angry," Cohen said

From today's GW Hatchet, an apparent description of how the space-time continuum tore and swallowed my laptop into a "gaping hole":

When Jeffrey Cohen, the chair of the English department, returned to his office after making some photocopies, what he found astonished him. His desk was arranged as usual, but there was a gaping hole where his laptop computer had been 30 minutes earlier. Also its chain lock cable was slashed.

"I was angry," Cohen said. "Someone was in my office suite and didn't see anything except heard my door shut and thought it was me. Clearly, the thief was a person who had scoped out my office and was ready to move."

Cohen left the door to his office open, which is a part of the English department suite. There was another person in the suite at the time, but as she had her back turned, she did not notice that Cohen was not the one who had entered the office.

There were a total of 122 burglaries on campus in 2006, 72 of which were non-forcible - meaning the crime's location was unsecured or open and accessible, University Police Chief Dolores Stafford said. The police should not take the blame for non-forcible thefts, she said.

Metropolitan Police Department told Cohen that stealing computers in office buildings is a common occurrence in downtown Washington.

Waiting for "The Weight of the Past" to be Past

My Holloway lecture draws near. I think I'd be less nervous about the event if it weren't for the fact that a past lecture in this series was given by Steven Knapp, the literary theorist and new president of GW (who says a PhD in English won't get you places?). Just before Knapp was Jerome McGann. Jane Tompkins and John Barth have given the Holloway, too.

I've even made it into the Carroll County Times News Briefs, just under "2 flown to shock trauma after crash" and just above "Contestants sought for Miss Carroll pageant."

Here, for those who are interested, are some of the questions I will be addressing on Tuesday. If you can't make the road trip to Westminster, MD, you'll have a second chance: I'll be giving a more theory-heavy version of the talk at the University of Pennsylvania in March, sponsored by Theorizing. Though in the past I have been a relentlessly low tech lecturer, this talk is image heavy ... another worry, as I attempt to re-master my forgotten skills at PowerPoint.

The landscape of medieval Britain included, just as it does today, intrusions of the ancient past: the fossilized remains of prehistoric animals, Neolithic architectures like Avebury and Stonehenge, barrows and graves, the ruins of forgotten habitations. I'd like to explore the stories medieval people dreamed to give meaning to these remnants of lost worlds. I will raise and attempt to answer a series of related questions: How did medieval people understand the inhuman gap of time that separated them from fossils, megaliths, and their own moment in history? Can the distant past communicate in a language of its own? Or can it be heard only as translated into a contemporary language, an impoverished kind of listening? Can we know what structures like Avebury or stories like tales of the prophet Merlin meant to their authors? How do we treat time capsules like stone circles, burial mounds, or bodies recovered in bogs? As holy? As quarries for ordinary uses? As museum exhibits? What is sacred about the past, or does reverence impede understanding? Is a body buried with artifacts a message to the future, a letter to an uncertain receiver, or a gift sent to lost gods never to be opened by human hands? What of a text describing a vanished life? An imagined life? Can the past speak to us directly, or does it require a mediator, a necromancer, a Merlin? Must that which is history end as Merlin does: entombed forever in silent stone, the victim of his own inability to comprehend the workings of the world he inhabited? Can the distant past retain a vitality that is something more than a revenant's graveyard existence?

(cross-posted from In the Middle)

Man in Suit

Something about Philip Kennicott's WashPost meditation on an image from the turmoil in Pakistan does not seem quite right. Though reading the semiotics of a photograph is a hallowed tradition in cultural studies (Barthes, Sontag), this particular analysis attempted to make a Grand Statement about the power of the image without much specific historical context. Isn't part of the photograph's ability to jar dependent upon not only the dictum pronounced by Kennicott that "Men in suits don't throw things," but that when the US media presents us with a photo of a man with brown skin hurling something, tear gas erupting all around, that man is usually poor and Muslim and dressed in clothing that does not also appear on Wall Street? Kennicott writes:

Images of political strife fall into two basic categories. There are crowd images, which emphasize the magnitude and collectivity of the sentiment; and images of individuals, which emphasize the personal drama of the events. Very often, in American magazines and newspapers, both categories of images amount to the same thing: a study in anger without context. Crowds seethe with terrifying and inexplicable rage. Individual faces are distorted by anger into masks that don't always seem human.

Man in Suit confounds the usual revolution images. In one photograph he is wearing glasses, his jacket is buttoned, he has something pinned to his lapel, and his cuffs peek out from his sleeves. These details make him an individual, even as a crowd is barely visible through the haze behind him. That individuality puts his anger on a different plane, it requires an interrogation of the image that we might not otherwise make.

Does Man in Suit become an individual because of his western garb? Is Brooks Brothers the catalyst that propels him out of generic Muslim male otherness?

What we expect from protest pictures featuring people with brown skin, hurling objects while surrounded by tear gas haze, has been largely set from images of the Palestinian Intifada. Do those images contain people who are not individuals, because we cannot glimpse cuffs and lapels, signifiers of the west? Is Man in Suit individualized because, despite the signs of his difference, he is sartorially American? Is it his suit -- the costume of conformity, the de-individualizing cloak of invisibility that businessmen wear to discern their brethren -- is it that suit that allows him for Kennicott to become, paradoxically, something more than a member of a group? "Individual" then means nothing more than "like us" or "like our lawyers."

(for some background on why the lawyers in Pakistan are so angry, this article provides a good overview).

Can a house be a member of an indie-folk band?

On the rain soaked commute to my office this morning, just as I pulled past the news crews camped out to report on the swastika story, I heard a piece on NPR about indie-folk (I had no idea that was a genre) musicians Grizzly Bear. The reporter stated that on the group's latest work, Yellow House, the home in which they recorded the project had been a full participant in the music making. The songs are full of melodies and percussions generated with objects found within the house's walls. Creaks and groans created by the domicile intrude into and become part of the songs. The soundscape invites into its densities the inhuman but somehow sympathetic noises of the environment within which it finds shelter. The music is rich with pulsations from life that traverse and play with human voices, human desires.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the alliances we make with the inhuman. Partly this rumination has been spurred by the theft of my laptop a few weeks ago, an event that made me realize how much I trust a hard drive to externalize my memory and be the keeper of my labors. Friday another technology bereavement occurred: I left my cell phone in the back pocket of my jeans as I put them through the wash. I initially suspected that the device had been swiped by Kid #1, who likes to change the ringtone to all kinds of embarrassing sounds. When, not knowing what else to do, I called my cell from our home phone, I heard it ringing forlornly from deep within the rinse cycle. The cellphone emitted an anguished fizzle as I removed it from the machine, and then died in my arms. It took with it the thirty or so numbers stored inside, and cut me off for a day from electronic intrusion. I felt lonely and adrift. (When my laptop was stolen, I didn't know what to do in my office without access to email and the internet. After sitting quietly at my desk for about ten minutes, I ate an apple. I was that lost.)

Without my tools, I am nothing.

43

An experiment.

Today I turned forty-three. My son advises me that I now have 1.25 feet in the grave. With my mortality in mind, I set up this small site as a personal counterpart to the venerable (by blog standards) medievalist spot In The Middle. That blog has become a professional organ of sorts, and I've become increasingly hesitant to post personal ruminations. Also, with three co-bloggers, I don't want to crowd that space with my own effusions.

So I offer a snapshot from life as this new and possibly abortive blog instigates: breakfast atop the Cohen kitchen counter, 6:50 AM on Sunday November 4 2007. You will notice three bowls: Kid #1 has Yogurt Os, Kid #2 has Clifford Crunch (I'll bet they got a lot of cereal when Cascadian Farm ground that big red dog up to feed the kiddies), and I mixed the two together to form a hybrid. Ordinarily there would have been a fourth bowl, probably with oatmeal, but the spouse is in transit from a business meeting in NYC this morning.

An absolutely ordinary day that has so far included petit déjeuner, milk, a disquisition from my three year old on why dogs don't need vaginas, a serious discussion of a book I failed to comprehend but that my son understood completely (Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist), and a pillow fight. What could make for a better birthday?

Welcome to the blog.