nobody but the baby

delta / highway 61 / memphis (world gon' change)

i took these last summer in memphis and the mississippi delta.

all images copyright caleb maskell, 2008.

James Baldwin / Fire Next Time

I have been reading The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin this week. A stunning, profound, essential work. I have written some thoughts and questions on it which I will be happy to email to the truly brave, bored, and inclined.

For my esteemed readers with a normal human schedule, I post this video for your consideration.

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The Irony of American History

Some very smart publisher at the University of Chicago press has re-released Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History with an endorsement by Barack Obama, and references on the back cover to the book's influence on Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Could this become the religion book of the next election?

from the blurb:

Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.

“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—Senator Barack Obama

Check it out here.

(thanks to bro. mch for the tip.)

brooks on obama

so sad. but i can't help but agree a bit.

so now we know definitely that obama is not the messiah. nonetheless, we gotta have him. he's the best out there. also, he can start talking back to the persnickety fools who keep dogging him about dumb stuff and then scaring him into playing the game.

david brooks on how obama fell to earth

stock exchange of visions

lots here.

http://www.stockexchangeofvisions.org/

the incomplete manifesto

Bruce Mau is a designer and a culture visionary. He is also Canadian, which is a major plus (cf. Sacvan Bercovitch, Feist, Blue Rodeo, Propagandhi, David and Charmaine Hicks, Frank Curry, etc.)

Ten years ago, he wrote something called the Incomplete Manifesto. It is series of proposals and challenges for creative thinkers and innovators. Some of it could be mistaken for positive-thinking liberal cant, but most of his ideas are really, really helpful and provocative.

Check it out here.

the great frozen sea

One of these men is my great-great-grandfather, William Maskell.

His ship, the HMS Alert, is icebound here, on an expedition to try to reach the North Pole in 1875. His party, captained by Sir George Stronge Nares, reached 83°20′26" N., the highest latitude ever reached at that time. He set out north from the icebound ship with a sledge party led by Sir Albert Hastings Markham. He was one of three men to come back walking. They never reached the pole, but they went further than anyone ever had.

William Maskell was an able-seaman, a man of low rank. He came home to a medal from Queen Victoria and some local fanfare but quickly receded into obscurity. Though there are no records of his personal beliefs, he became an avid church musician after the voyage, playing the organ in the local Anglican church for the rest of his life. He was a surrogate father to my grandfather, who had no father.

His entry in the index of The Great Frozen Sea, the book of the adventure by Sir Albert Hastings Markham, reads as follows:

Maskell, William, HMS "Alert,"
songs by, 169, 216;
parts taken by, 174;
sledge crew, N. division, holds out to the end, 317, 318 (n.). ...

DuBois on Alexander Crummell

Here are the last two paragraphs of W.E.B. DuBois' telling of the life of Alexander Crummell, an Episcopal priest and abolitionist whose efforts encountered huge resistance from the racist establishment.
This rocked me. What poetry, and what a picture of Jesus Christ. (Read the whole thing here.)

He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled and said, “The gate is rusty on the hinges.” That night at star-rise a wind came moaning out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I loved fled like a flame across the Seas, and in its seat sat Death.	22
I wonder where he is to-day? I wonder if in that dim world beyond, as he came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a King,—a dark and pierced Jew, who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as he laid those heart-wrung talents down, “Well done!” while round about the morning stars sat singing.

trial and error (more from taleb)

a snip from taleb's article in forbes:

America's primary export, it appears, is trial-and-error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way. Trial-and-error has error in it; and most top-down traditional rational and academic environments do not like the fallibility of "error" and the embarrassment of not quite knowing where they're going. The U.S. fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam-takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional studies is where his or her very strength may lie. The American system of trial and error produces doers: Black Swan-hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, with a tolerance for a certain class of risk-taking and for making plenty of small errors on the road to success or knowledge. This environment also attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners like this author.

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas--that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation. By exporting jobs, the U.S. has outsourced the less scalable and more linear components of production, assigning them to the citizens of more mathematical and culturally rigid states, who are happy to be paid by the hour to work on other people's ideas.

Let us go one step further. It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don't know it. We truly live under the illusion of order believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past--but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future.

there is some significant commentary here for contemporary american humanities scholarship. on the one hand, scholars are quite good these days at trying to amplify the perspective from the margins for the sake of hearing fresher, more perceptive insights into the often very significant blind spots in culture. on the other hand, it is often the case that the very disciplines that are wisely trying to complicate the dominant narratives and amplify the voices on the margin become so circumscribed in their own boundaries of what can be discussed and in what language and with what philosophical assumptions it must be discussed that they often set themselves up to fail in their stated goals. disciplinary boundaries are often themselves disciplinary blindspots, prohibitions against the emergence of synthetic crystallization of human truth.

taleb's "uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering" is rare in scholarly communities, because the risks (political and publication/tenure-related) are so high. it is interesting to see that eminent cultural critics in the academy are often not authorized to be such until they have proven their scholarly  chops for the first 10-20 years of their careers. many of the best graduate students resist the impulse to tinker at the margins, and are advised against writing the boundary-pushing book that they actually want to write, lest it be considered disciplinarily inappropriate and cut against their (ever-slimming) chances at getting a job, much less getting tenure.

bravery. and time. is what we need.

information vs. knowledge in the black swan

a snip from rod dreher's beliefnet blogpost on the black swan by nassim nicholas taleb:

Taleb identifies an interesting Information Age paradox: the more information an individual takes in, the less he knows. To be precise, the less he knows about what he needs to know. That is, he doesn't appreciate the difference between information and knowledge. Information thus becomes "toxic," in Taleb's view, because it causes us to make poor choices based on a false picture of the world, a picture informed by "noise" -- that is, information that has not been properly processed, weighed, measured, and placed in context. Taleb:

"The more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see the noise (i.e., the anecdote) and mistake it for actual information. Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit."

(read more from taleb himself here)