Wherever you go, there you are . . . but where is that?

From top: A "T-in-O" map from a 1472 edition of the Etymologies of St. Isidore (7th cen., Seville) (image found here; a map created by Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi from the 12th century (image found here; a copperplate facsimile of the Western Hemisphere of a globe by Johann Schöner, 1520 (Image found here); a Tom-Tom One XI (image found here)

As I blogged about at this same time last year, I'm interested in the relationship between technology and my students: to put it a bit crudely, whether they really use it or it seduces them into thinking they're really using it. And during our in-service this week this issue got raised for some of us, this time from the faculty/administration side of things. In the past couple of years we've made enormous investments in that big thing called "computers"--not just new hardware and software, but in the "meta" side of things: course and equipment intended to teach students how to set up and manage databases and servers, and how to keep them secure. We've also spent a lot of money acquiring technology for classrooms that teachers can use when presenting material.

So, there was this gee-whiz haze that my English department colleagues and I walked through on Tuesday as the entire college's faculty took a morning tour of all that. But in our department meeting that afternoon, one of us spoke to something I'd been thinking about that day and yesterday, too: There for a little while, Wichita seemed to have escaped the worst effects of the recession, but this week Cessna announced that it would be laying off 3,000 workers in March at all salary levels (for some perspective, the metropolitan area has around half a million people). Given the general downturn in aircraft manufacturing, other layoffs or work slowdowns are sure to come. And as goes aircraft, so goes this town. So my colleague's question was, in effect, how do we in the very un-sexy English department make or keep ourselves relevant to our students, many of whom are already living at or below the poverty level?

Good questions. And here's my answer: On the first day, I think I'm gonna talk about really old maps and GPS units.

I got to musing about GPS units during that tour, for some reason, and it struck me that at some essential level the user doesn't have to know where s/he is relative to anything else. If you can turn left and right when told to do so, that's all you need to know. There's no assertion of the user's will on the device once the coordinates are entered--you don't get to choose from multiple routes; you get The Way, the One True Route ("No one comes to the Grocery Store (or wherever) but by me"). Most of the time, that's not a problem, but we've all heard of instances when one of these devices has given directions that don't correspond to the physical world: "You can't get there from here!" Also, I've already mentioned that the device doesn't propose alternative routes. In either case, if something goes awry and you truly don't know where you are in physical space and you either don't have a conventional map or can't locate where you are on it, well, as I am fond of saying, You can only know what you know.

Enter the old maps. As I wrote about this past summer, the top two maps' depictions of space are determined at least as much by ideology--specifically, religion--as by a desire to represent the earth's surface in a useful manner. It's easy enough to see that these competing ideologies produce two very different maps of the same geographical space. But, at least for the pre-Renaissance Christian, there was no distinction between between sacred and secular knowledge. The Bible did more than reveal God's Will for His people; it was also the one accepted source of knowledge about the world--"world" in those days referring specifically and only to the then-known landmasses referred to in the Bible. That which was not in some way accounted for in Scripture either could not be or was in error or simply dismissed because of its (pagan) provenance.

That was the cultural world Columbus lived in and under whose assumptions he undertook his voyage to Asia in 1492. Add to that the complicating factor that he thought the world's circumference was actually 1/3 that of what most people estimated it was, and it's easy to understand why he died, in 1506, insisting he had found Asia, even though by that time most people realized that he had found something else instead. In a sense, the presence of these landmasses was no problem for Columbus: he simply said that what he had found a part of Asia that no one had known about before. But for the growing number of people who realized otherwise, they had a very real problem: how to talk about this Something Else--something clearly NOT accounted for in the Bible--without calling the Bible's accuracy into question? Simply saying the Bible was mistaken was not an option--these were the days of the Inquisition, recall. And consider that the problem created by this other land mass was simple compared to the problem posed by the people found there: Who were they? What were they?--that is, they appeared to be humans, but were they fully human? (read: Did they have souls?)

This was a problem that neither simple observation nor technology could solve--indeed, technology (here, the ability to sail across an ocean) had created this problem. The problem was more than one of simple ignorance. It was a problem of conceptualization, of coming up with a new way of thinking about not just this new place but about the place we had come from (something often forgotten is how Columbus' voyages changed Europe's understanding of itself, too). In other words, this was a problem that only language could solve.

Language is a tool, too. The work it performs is the most important work of all: the work of explaining and making sense of our life and our place in the world--and, if we're both good and lucky with language, shaping and influencing our respective corners of the world. Seen in this way, the term New World, coined by Peter Martyr, is one of the most powerful tools ever made.

Mastery of machines is a crucial skill to have. But more important, if we don't want to feel like people who knows no more about where we are than the fact that our GPS unit has guided us there, is looking up from our machines and seeing how what we do fits with the world beyond our machines. A map is (still) pretty useful for doing that sort of thing, and writing--another sort of map-making--is, too. In Comp I, we'll work on learning how to make better maps than the ones we're making now.

Read More...

Summary only...

Unknowing the world

Some comments inspired by chapter one of Mignolo's The Idea of Latin America, first mentioned here.

UPDATE: Now, a bit more readable (I hope).

A "T-in-O" map from a 1472 edition of the Etymologies of St. Isidore (7th cen., Seville), oriented to East. The "O" is the "mare oceanum" (more familiar to us as the phrase "Ocean Sea," which, recall, Columbus would be designated as Admiral of. The crossbar of the "T" is formed by the Don, the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Nile. Older versions of this map would have located Jerusalem in the center of the map. The "T"'s vertical is the Mediterranean. Underneath "Asia," "Africa" and "Europe" are written, respectively, "Shem," "Ham" and "Japeth," the sons of Noah, consigned to those spaces by Augustine in his City of God. Image found here.

A map created by Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi from the 12th century. The map is oriented to South; Mecca is at its center. What we now call Africa dominates the upper half; "Europe" is in the lower-right; "Asia" is in the lower left. Image found here.

Maps are fascinating texts. We have become so accustomed to accepting their renderings of the earth's surface as truthful, if not Truth, that we forget that their makers determine their "narratives," which is to say, everything from their form (such as the various projection methods for depicting the planet's curved surface on a 2-dimensional surface) to their contents. When looking at maps, who among us has not felt some surprise at one time or another by what has been included in or excluded from one and wondered why that information is or is not there? Map-making is far from a value-neutral activity, therefore--or, as these ancient maps indicate, a culture-neutral one. The fact that modern maps are far more accurate in their renderings of the outlines of landmasses does not mean they have become any less value- or culture-neutral. That we here in the West rarely wonder about our maps' objectivity means only one thing: The West's way of framing the world, of thinking about it conceptually (which is what a map represents), won out over all those other culturally-specific ways.

Or, to put it another way:

"But don't African people know they live in Africa, and Asian people in Asia?"

Well--now they do."

More below the fold.

Mignolo's task is that of swimming against 1500 years or so of culture to get his reader to see the cultural construct beneath our accustomed way of picturing the world. The T-in-O map above is his starting point. According to Mignolo, thinking about the world's landmasses in terms of continents was peculiar to Europeans; other peoples thought in terms of regions distinct from each other, both topographically and culturally. Moreover, Europeans saw the world much more overtly through the lens of the Bible--in the case of the T-in-O map, through the story of Noah's three sons and where each went to live. Shem's line settled in Asia; Jesus, a descendant of Shem, was born there (or, as Augustine puts it in City of God, was first revealed there). Japheth ("enlargement") and his descendants lived in what came to be called Europe--as Augustine notes, the home of Christ's church. Ham, though, "was included neither in the first fruits of Israel nor in the full harvest of the Gentiles. He could only stand for the hot breed of heretics" (Augustine, in Mignolo 28).

It is no blasphemy, nor is it politically-correct, to say that to read the world and its peoples through such a reductive lens as this was, to put it very charitably, problematic. Most of us would agree with that statement. It was because of this frame, after all, that for most of the 16th century there were actual debates regarding just how human were the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere were: they didn't fit this paradigm--Noah had three sons, yet these are clearly a fourth people. Mignolo's larger point, despite his at times hectoring tone, thus becomes clear: it is to recognize that thinking of the history of the past 500 years--in particular, re his book, the history of the Americas--not only has determined how the West thinks of that history but also how we in the Americas think of it: as having originated in/emanated from Europe. That is a legitimate narrative, to be sure, but it's not the only one or, for that matter, the one that most truly relates the Americas' full history, the one that begins prior to and is its own history--not a negation or rebuttal of European history's version of American history. That we now recognize the absurdity, not to say the offensiveness, of those debates regarding the Indians' humanity is a sign that that paradigm is no longer so in force; but what are 100 years in comparison to the 1400 before then?

By contrast, the Islamic map is quite literally Islamo-centric--its center is Mecca, after all, no more strange a thing to do for a Muslim mapmaker than for a Christian mapmaker to center his map on Jerusalem. But the Islamic has no names for the continents it depicts, much less some implicit categorizing of the peoples therein--even though Noah and his sons appear in the Qu'ran as well.

So, which map is truer? If your impulse is to say that it no longer matters, Mignolo would say that that is precisely his point in this chapter: that once upon a time, competing maps, competing ways of describing the world, did exist, and the fact that the Western depiction of space won out has not been necessarily all to the good. Except for Westerners, of course. The modern world's eventual acquiescence to that depiction is not like acknowledging that the earth orbits the sun; it's a genuflecting before the West's economic and cultural power.

So, on the one hand, we have become so accustomed to thinking of the history of this hemisphere in Eurocentric terms that it becomes hard for us to conceive of that history in some other manner. On the other, those familiar grand historical narratives--even the ones indigenous to a place--can also obscure other, just-as-valuable narratives. That second point reminded me of Edward P. Jones' masterful first novel, The Known World, which I posted about here. Though set in the antebellum world of northern Virginia, a place and a time we think we know, we realize fairly quickly that the story Jones is going to tell us--one based on fact--is one that we may never have heard before: in part, it's the story of a black man whose parents had worked to buy his freedom and who then buys slaves to work his land and who sees nothing wrong with doing that. What is the frame of that world, after all, but the preeminence of the Peculiar Institution? Everything, from law to social relations, exists to affirm and maintain that frame. So where, then, is the inconsistency if a newly-freed slave chooses to participate in the affirming and maintaining of that frame? The power of Jones's novel is in not telling us but showing us slavery's warping of human relationships in a way that the old, familiar, no-less-true narratives can never quite do on their own.

In a similar way, Mignolo has to make his reader see the Eurocentricity of the history of the Americas before he can begin to show what alternate histories of this part of the world would look like. The familiar has to be made to look strange before we can see and come to accept the familiarity of the strange.

Read More...

Summary only...

A stretch of river XXXVI: On good old Corot, and Places to Go

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Ville-d'Avray, 1870

It's a misty, grey morning here in Wichita, and/but today there is something about today's light that reminds me of the Corot that hangs at the Nelson-Atkins (NB: the one you see here hangs in the Met but is quite similar in terms of both the scene depicted and, in particular, the quality of its light). Over the years, I've grown more and more appreciative of the Nelson's collection of 19th-century French paintings--it's taught me, for example, that Pisarro's work, more than others', is better appreciated in person. Even so--even though I know those other painters are "better"--it's the Corot I linger and linger in front of, every visit, and for the same reason I wanted to linger this morning and gaze across the river even as Scruffy wanted to chase the squirrel on the fence--a dog's catnip--separating the path from the apartment's pool: not anything remarkable in the scene itself, but the pearlescence of the light illuminating it--no, more like glazing it.

John Berger, whose socialist's sense that art and its appreciation can and should be something that you don't have to wear black and stroke your chin significantly in order to do, writes about Corot with a combination of, on the one hand, disappointment in what Corot might have accomplished but chose not to and, on the other, the value in what he most assuredly does accomplish, for me at least, whenever I stand in front of that landscape in Kansas City:

Corot remained a petit-bourgeois. Matching, pinning, sewing, he was never quite able to shake off the effect of his father's drapery business and his mother's dress-shop.

[snip]

[But h]e was a petit-bourgeois only in his refusal to speculate on how the world could be changed. This explains why he was timid without being a coward. Instead of questioning, he set out to make his own peace, to avoid all contradictions. He knew it himself: 'Delacroix is an eagle and I'm only a lark. I sing little songs in my grey clouds.' He reveals it unconsciously when he says: 'Charity is a still more beautiful thing than talent. Besides, one benefits the other. If you have a kind heart, your work will show it.' How comfortably without contradictions that 'Besides' is!

[snip]

Corot was a lovable man. At his best he was an artist of minor genius, comparable to, say, Manet. And let me add--with the due modesty that ought to precede such a statement--that Corot has contributed to many people's happiness. (208-209)

Yes indeed. The Nelson's Van Goghs, the early (and late) Monets, the Manet, they challenge me in various ways with their assertiveness. The Corot "just" makes me happy.

In the meantime, though, Scruffy is tugging at his leash . . . which brings me to the "Places to Go" part of this post. We're on the cusp of finals week here, which means that I can't say when my next post here will appear. So, below the fold, I want to recommend some places worth your visits--assuming, that is, that you have plenty of time, as several of these places will require that of you.

(Aside: I can't decide just now, as the duties of finals week command my attention, whether the blog is analogous to Corot or to the squirrel Scruffy wants to chase. Both are pleasurable, so that doesn't enter into deciding.)

Anyway:

For better or for worse, many of the blogs I visit are kept by people with lots of things to say and who are not shy about taking their time in saying them. I'm as appreciative of the pithy observation as the next guy, but I know as well that some things simply take a longer time to say in order to say them well . . . and I am just as appreciative of that.

Gawain of Heaven Tree, whose blog's post's leisurely pace on leisurely subjects exudes "Man of Leisure," has a wonderful post on one of my very favorite American painters, John Singer Sargent, that is ostensibly about an exhibition of Sargent's paintings done in Venice or on Venetian subjects currently on exhibit in Venice. But it turns into, as well, meditations on technique, on seeking out the proper viewing distance for paintings, "and, as always, love." Reading it, it occurred to me that I like Sargent for the same reason I like Corot: he makes me happy.

Gawain meditates; Hank of A Lake County Point of View does not meditate so much as forays. Hank writes like he's in a hurry, but you can't be when you read him. The title of his most recent post, "Lupins, Wolves, Chinese Romans, Peaches and the Unforgettable Cream," does not quite cover everything that he ends up writing on. It starts out as simple homesickness for Texas Bluebonnets, which, I can attest to, are especially abundant this spring and so are deserving of being homesick over; like Proust's madeleine, though, that homesickness leads to, um, all sorts of other things, places, people, across time and space and cultures. Fully referenced and complete with footnotes-within-footnotes (which are as much a part of the show as the rest of the post and thus are not to be missed), reading this post (and others . . . it's interesting how the color blue seems to inspire these posts of his . . . ) is like reading some hyper-texted cross of Montaigne, the afore-mentioned Proust, David Foster Wallace, and a coy Henry Miller. No one else I've yet run across is doing what Hank is doing--which is a very good thing, seeing as I have enough to read as it is . . . but sad in its way, too.

Also: I gotta get me some sort of footnotes-within-footnotes hack for Blogger . . . or move to Typepad . . .

Hank's longer posts are strange knowledge-maps that reveal the sometimes-odd and -unexpected interconnectedness of things; in a recent post, though, Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience writes about another kind of map: ones all but unreadable except by the person who made it. We tend to think of maps as being objective visual descriptions of places that anyone is able to use with success. But these maps are expressions of a kind of knowledge, as I noted in comments over there, that cannot be taught but only learned.

My long-time blogging compadre Raminagrobis, over at his eponymously-named blog, has up "In Praise of Bathos," a patient discussion of meter and its connection to whatever "bad poetry" might be.

Finally, Randall of Musings from the Hinterland has initiated what this reader, at least, fervently hopes will be an ongoing series called "You Be the Jury" (a more interactive take on The People's Court--or like a "Take Your Blog's Audience to Court" kind of thing). Judging from this first installment, it promises to be both a celebration of the Weird Stuff that People Sue Over and the extent to which the law helps (or hinders) us in thinking about said Weird Stuff.

Still not enough? Then be sure to have a look at the other folks in the "Daily (B)reads" section of the right gutter. They too are worthy of your attention.

As always, thanks for visiting and reading and deigning to come back every once in a while. I'll see you around.

UPDATE: As a bonus to those of you who read this far, I give you the (two) last word(s) in gloriously-vulgar but dead-on movie reviewing, Neil Cumpston.

Read More...

Summary only...