Stonehenge. Also, Woodhenge.

Went to see archeologist Mike Parker Pearson speak last night at the National Geographic headquarters here in DC. Pearson supervised one of the two digs that took place at the site last summer (Geoff Wainwright directed the other).

To an auditorium filled with about two hundred people he delivered news from the field, stressing how archeologists now see Stonehenge as one among many interconnected sites along the River Avon. Pearson argues that Stonehenge must analyzed as a counterpart to Woodhenge. The perdurable stone was a place for the dead (so far sixty cremation interments have been discovered there, mainly in or near the Aubrey holes that used to house megaliths), and the rot-prone but enormous tree-derived structure was a place for the living. He showed us slides of what remains of the plaster floors of wattle and daub houses from the period. The hearth often endures as a kind of ghost image. In one dig an imprint left by two knees is discernible just in front of where the fire would have been, an impression left by years of careful tending.

Pearson stressed the importance of discovering antlers fashioned into the digging tools that were used to transform the earth. When these remnants survive, they enable fairly precise carbon dating of the structures nearby. He also emphasized the tediousness of using stone tools to dress the megaliths, and the price paid in the body by those who employed them (osteoarthritis especially). In an aside, he also mentioned that a ribbon-like band of rock unearthed near Stonehenge naturally points towards the winter solstice (the ribbon effect the product of glacial runoff). He ventured that this stone band may have rendered the place sacred, triggering Stonehenge's solar alignment (an alignment unique among henge monuments).

I left the auditorium full of admiration that human lives could be imagined from such scanty leavings. My son Alex came with me, and was even ready to ask a question (though they never got to him). He fills me with wonder as well: that someone at age eleven can sit through an archeology lecture on a day that also included homework, Hebrew school and piano practice ... and love it.

From my brother's blog

This from the Minnesota Lawyer blog:

My brother Jeffrey, a Medievalist who chairs the English Department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is a co-author of his own blog. Since that blog, “In the Middle,” specializes in Medieval literature, I rarely have occasion to mention it here. However, recently he posted an interesting tidbit that I thought might be of interest to our readership. The story centers on his taking my nephew Alex to fencing lessons. Make sure to read it through to the end to see the relevance. Here’s Jeff’s post:

***

Given the profession of his dad, perhaps you will find no surprise in the fact that my son Alexander’s sport is fencing. Prodding at an opponent with an epée? What could be more medieval?

Fencing was not Alex’s first sport. We tried soccer, swimming, baseball … you name it. If they gave

My nephew Alex: Lord of the sword

Olympic medals for reading interminable series of fantasy novels, Alex would get the gold, but in the ordinary games of mere mortals he is, well, rather mediocre (and that makes him far more athletic than his dad, already). Yet fencing is not perfect just for its workouts (strenuous) or its violence (patent). The type of kid fencing attracts is also one of its selling points: quirky children, often with an offbeat sense of humor, dedicated, smart, a good sense of fun. Alex, in other words, has finally found a peer group as odd as he is.

As did I, in the parents who observe the workouts and matches. Among these parents I’ve had the chance to chat with casually is a man whose son Eric is passionate about fencing. Eric’s a great kid; he and Alex have hit off. And Eric’s dad is also a great guy. His name? Also Eric. Eric Holder.

***

Zoiks! I hope my nephew is careful flailing a sharp object around the son of the U.S. Attorney General nominee. I could see that getting ugly really fast.

File this one under: “It’s a small world after all.”

At least my Leeds plenary has a title

"Between Christian and Jew: Orthodoxy, Violence and Living Together in Medieval England."

Now all it needs is some content and I am good to go.

Indian Jewry

Most of what I know about Jews in India I learned from reading Amitav Ghosh's genre-bending time-warping affective history, In an Antique Land: History in the Form of a Traveler's Tale. A small post from Jewschool on the subject led me to a longer piece in the New Republic. An excerpt from the latter, written by Naresh Fernandes:

Despite the significance of the contributions of the Baghdadis or the European exiles, the Jewish community that has left the deepest impression on the city are the Bene Israelis, who believe their ancestors were shipwrecked just south of Mumbai in 175 B.C.E. For most Westerners, the Bene Israelis defy conventional images of being Jewish: They speak the western Indian language of Marathi, the women dress in saris and they eat rice and spicy fish curry. In those early days, many Bene Israelis worked as oil pressers and they've even been incorporated into the local caste structure as "shanivar telis"--the Saturday oil pressers, in acknowledgement of the day they kept the Sabbath. Centuries later, many of them migrated to Mumbai city, where they built a synagogue in 1796.

The Bene Israeli community has produced a mayor, a musician who led an early rock band, a clutch of Bollywood actors, and a member of the central bank board of governors. Perhaps the best-known member of the community was Nissim Ezekiel, one of the pioneers of Indian poetry in English. My favorite of his poems is "Island," a tribute to my home city. The first stanza says, "Unsuitable for song as well as sense/ the island flowers into slums/ and skyscrapers, reflecting/ precisely the growth of my mind./ I am here to find my way in it" ....

When I spoke to Robin David* on the phone on Friday [after the terrorist attacks in Mumbia, which targeted among other sites a Chabad House there], he was still trying to make sense of it all. "The Indian Jewish identity is the only one that hasn't been created by persecution," he said. "We've never felt scared. This is the first time we've been made to feel like Jews." That, to me, has been among the most tragic casualties of this terrorist attack. In a barrage of grenades and bullets, a part of the Indian dream that's 2,500 years old has now been buried in a pile of bloody concrete shards.

[*friend of Fernandes and "author of City of Fear, a gem of a memoir that describes the horrors he witnessed as a reporter during the bloody pogrom against Muslims that was unleashed in his home state of Gujarat in 2002"]

Quirky students

Although I am fond of most of my students, I've always felt a special affection for the quirky ones: those with an odd sense of humor, irreverent, unpredictable, smart but not docile, those who are their own work of unfinished and peculiar art.

I am especially grateful for their unexpected gifts: poems composed by those I did not know to be poets; dramas written about the books we examined in class, now enlivened in ways that the classroom does not invite; weird acts of fiction. Two students have just left me a present, a Dada inspired piece with a grand original title scratched out to be replaced by a diminutive one: An The Great American Story. It contains lines like "Have you heard the news concerning our friend Cheyenne?," "forsooth woohoo (and again),"strings of profanity, odd objects inserted into various body parts, anaphoric strings of theorists and their terms (Foucault, panopticon, surveillance, Nietzsche), a disarticulation of the narrative into streams of sound, an ending that is in no way a termination. It's dadaist, it's terrible and beautiful at the same time, it reminds me of the kind of writing I did while drunk in college.

I am so grateful that I have quirky students who stay up all night to compose such things so that they can present them to me in person when I arrive at the office at 7:30 AM.