"Letters are things, not pictures of things."

A video interview with John Kristensen of Firefly Press, Somerville Mass., on the art and craft of letterpress printing.

Via kottke.org.

Related.

Pictorial revisionism

Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite of the University of Virginia show in painstaking detail how a photograph of a group of black Civil War soldiers in the command of a white Union officer is transformed to represent the 1st Louisiana Native Guard of the Confederate Army.

You can buy a copy from The Rebel Store.

To Daffodils

(Photo: Jeroen Wijnands.)

Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

--Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

Acts of memory

A fascinating article at yesterday's Cognitive Daily (new to my blogroll, a neat psychology blog by a psychology professor and her writer spouse out of Davidson): memories are triggered by body positions.

That's right: just holding your body in the right position means you'll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you're quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose.

One of the test questions: "Please, stand up and wave. Now, tell me a memory of one particular time you waved at someone."

Sorry, doesn't work as intended for me. Standing up and waving, or even thinking about it, all I can think of is Stevie Smith's wonderful poem, "Not Waving but Drowning."

Dedication of Morgan Creek Preserve

Today at 1 p.m., the Town of Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Botanical Garden will celebrate the creation of the Morgan Creek Preserve, a 92-acre natural area in town along Morgan Creek, beginning at Smith Level Road and extending downstream to include Merritt's Pasture. The town retains ownership of the land, but it is being placed under permanent conservation easement to be managed by the Garden. Join us for the ceremony, which will take place at the top of the pasture. It was an honor and a pleasure to be on the Council committee that worked to make preserving this greenspace possible.

Poverty Awareness Week at UNC

The Campus Y's annual week of social awareness, this year focusing on poverty, ends today with a speech by NAACP President William Barber, 11 a.m., Campus Y building (which I wish I could hear!). Last night, I participated in a panel in the Pit that focused on homelessness. It was moderated by Mayor Kevin Foy; other panelists were Chris Moran of the IFC and Stephen Kirton, a formerly homeless former Marine who now works at the men's shelter. Sen. Ellie Kinnaird capped the panel with a brief address.

This event was the beginning of the "box-out," meaning that later on students would hole up in cardboard boxes and spend the night there in the Pit. I don't know how many stayed to do that, but a good crowd turned out for the panel and discussion. It's just a small sampling, but I had a feeling that these were students really working to understand the complex issues that surround poverty and homelessness and are wanting to help.

Earlier, two students spent the night in the men's shelter and up the road at Homestart, the shelter for women and children.

For Charlie McGeehan, used to quiet nights, the noise associated with sharing the floor with a crowd of other men--the lack of privacy--was disconcerting. The food was terrible, and morning came too soon. But he did not fear for his safety, as friends had warned him he should. He left as early as possible, feeling both drained and a little guilty. "Although I spent the night at the shelter, I still have the safety net of my life at the University. Beyond that, I have the safety net of my parents." He left early, but he came away with a new insight: "I look up to the men who stay there daily and still have the energy and the mental toughness to work all day because it would be very difficult for me. When you think of the homeless, think of these men."

For Elizabeth Szypulski, the women at Homestart seemed more familiar than she would have predicted. What she heard from them "made the problem of homelessness far more real than statistics or anti-poverty campaigns ever have for me."

I realize now that the worries I had about the difference between me and the women I met are not as serious as I'd thought, in large part because there aren't actually too many differences to speak of.

None grew up expecting to find themselves in their current situation; when I keep that in mind that it's not far-fetched to think that I, or someone I'm close to, could find themselves in similar need sometime in the future.

I know that much of life comes down to choice and decision-making, but a lot of our choices are limited by where we start out, which is left up to chance. No one chooses where or to whom they're born, and none of us are able to control the amount of money or education our parents have, the health concerns we're likely to inherit, or the prejudices and discrimination we will or won't face because of race, sex, or socio-economic status.

While I probably can't go back and work at [Homestart] this semester - some of the same women will be there - I plan on going back and helping next year, and telling everyone I know interested in that type of work about the shelter and how to get involved. It's not that I think the women need me, specifically, or that I can make more of a difference than anyone else could. I'll do it with the hope someone else will do the same for me if I ever need it.

On our panel, all of us encouraged the students to make a point to get to know homeless people, to help us to continue to challenge the stereotypes, to volunteer when they could, to prepare to live their lives in ways that recognize that the privileges they'll enjoy as UNC grads come with responsibilities to others. Thanks to Mike Tarrant and the other organizers of Poverty Awareness Week 2007 for bringing this message home.

Sending good wishes to Elizabeth Edwards

Having met Elizabeth Edwards twice, I've been as impressed with her as Paul is, and I second his warm wishes for her and her family. They all have amazing courage.

Slaves in the attic: how many is too many?

It looks like the State of Maryland is on its way to apologizing for slavery. The Senate has unanimously done so, and it seems the House is poised to pass its version.

I can't find a second source on what's up at the University of Maryland, but according to Mark Graber, who teaches there,

The University of Maryland is debating whether to apologize for slavery. An only slight exaggeration of the state of the debate is that the University will apologize if the evidence demonstrates more than one-hundred slaves toiled on campus, are undecided about an apology if the number was between ten and a hundred, and will not apologize if the number was less than ten.

Can this be serious? Like Yale, which insists, as if it's terribly relevant, that Elihu Yale didn't actually own slaves and so his portrait with a slave must come down, it seems a bit literalistic. It seems to assume that only the people who owned or employed slaves reaped the benefits. I suppose it's the same kind of thinking that resists modern-day apologies of any kind: we didn't own slaves, so what is there to say?

I'm not entirely sure what I think of apologizing for slavery. It could ring hollow. But I think Graber is right about what it might be able to do:

I do not know whether all of this warrants an apology or reparations. On the one hand, neither resolves an extraordinarily deeply rooted problem. On the other hand, no better immediate solution exists. Perhaps the best we can do is convert demands for apologies for slavery and investigations into the direct presence of slavery into investigations of the pervasive influence of slavery and race on all aspects of American social, political, and life. Slavery and race were not the sort of warts on the American polity that could be easily excised by the 13th Amendment or Civil Rights Act of 1964. They are cancers that are so entwined with normal practices as to resist almost all efforts at social, legal and political eradication. Our students need to be aware of just how pervasive slavery and racism were and are, and this knowledge cannot be gained by limiting the debate to whether or not a specified number of slaves worked in specific places in specific times.

More on the subject of the indirect but pervasive legacy of slavery in Graber's review of Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery--"a powerful contribution to the now dominant view among scholars that slavery was such a significant, even a foundational institution in the early United States that it affected almost everything that happened in the political arena.'"

The Bluest Eye

If you haven't seen the Playmakers' fine production of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's novel set to stage by Lydia R. Diamond, you have five days left. The paring down it takes to turn a novel into a play can sometimes end up cutting out its the very soul. But this one works. It works in an odd way. There's a lot of comedy in the play, to the point of slapstick. I don't think of this as a comic novel--nobody could--but on the other hand, these lines are not made up. I did remember them as they happened, remembered that they were funny in the book. Once you put the book down, though, it's the overwhelming arc of Pecola's tragedy that stays.

So it's good that the play covers the whole range, gives you the whole dimension of these characters, which is not only comic and tragic but also something else: too wise. Little girls too wise beyond their years. Byron Woods in his Independent review picks up on this point:

It's one of the eeriest moments we've seen this year. Two young girls (Allison Reeves and Georgia Southern), dressed identically alike, are relating the gruesome details of another girl's partially interrupted dive into sheer madness—and they are doing so with all the matter-of-factness of a discussion of tomorrow's weather.

Whether or not director Trezana Beverley actually saw The Shining is immaterial at this point. When her taut production of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye puts the unspeakable in the mouths of babes, the chills flow from the Playmakers Rep stage like an electric current. The cruelty of distance in Morrison's ground-breaking novel and this production underlines our inability to intervene. So we watch, as the thin props keeping Danika Williams' poignant Pecola just above the waves of darkness are slowly pulled away, one by one.

Morrison starting writing this, her first novel in the early 1960s, while the ripples of Brown v. Board of Education were still being felt. So it's appropriate to connect the theme--a little black girl who adores Shirley Temple and Mary Janes and wants blue eyes more than anything--to the "doll study" cited in Brown to support the proposition that separate schools were by definition not and could not be equal. But Morrison tells us in an afterword that she knew a girl like this in her own childhood.

We had just started elementary school. She said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The sorrow in her voice seemed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I "got mad" at her instead.

"Who told her?" Morrison wondered. "Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her."

Pictures and more from the production.

Friending

Ralph Luker of Cliopatria writes to put my complaint about the verb "to friend" into perspective.

I stand (be)friended.

Bérubé back to the blogosphere

Thanks to reader "kingless" for letting me know: Michael Bérubé returns! He'll be posting at Crooked Timber. He says in the comments there that he'll start on Thursday.

I've missed him. For example when Jean Baudrillard died. I'm not smart enough to explain Baudrillard, but I knew the obits I was reading weren't doing it. Scott McLemee's essay was thoughtful and helpful. Another I found from wood s lot was even better. But Michael Bérubé would have taken the discussion to a whole new plane. Maybe there's still time.

Black Seminoles

For a couple of years on the H-Net Slavery listserv I've been following the work of J.B. Bird, an amateur historian, as he's built his web site on the Black Seminole rebellion in 1830s Florida, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. I'm glad to see it getting the credit it deserves.

What is perhaps most amazing about this story is how it has been overlooked so consistently, not just by filmmakers and popular audiences but by almost every historian of slavery. Now a nonprofessional historian--J.B. Bird, an administrator at the University of Texas--has written and produced an engrossing multimedia Web documentary, Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles, the First Black Rebels to Beat American Slavery. (To see it for yourself, go to johnhorse.com.) In the process, Bird has illustrated not just an important part of the American past but also one of the ways cyberspace is changing how history is studied and taught.

A mistake was made (again).

Mark Kleinschmidt speaks for me and, I trust, the whole Council in deploring the recent action of our police in detaining an immigrant with a civil violation--and thanking our police chief for stepping in so quickly with corrective action.

The secret sits.

I don't know why reading Eric Muller's unsettling report of his latest archival find in his quest to recover the story of his great-uncle, who, having lost his arm fighting for Germany in Word War I, was killed in Poland in 1942 along with many other Jews, sent me to Paul Auster, to his beautiful little book The Invention of Solitude. The book begins with the death of his father, a mysterious and opaque man, then proceeds to reveal perhaps why his father was so reclusive: a murder in the family. Then the narrative turns in surprising ways back to Auster, to his own fatherhood, and to the art of writing and remembering.

The circumstances of Eric's uncle's death are not mysterious. Only the why it happened: that's unfathomable.

Possibly the common link is the archives, the physical evidence that floats up across time, that had been waiting there all the time. For Eric, it was the discovery of a tangible thing, his uncle's WWI decoration. For Auster, it was coming face to face with old newspapers:

The facts themselves do not disturb me any more than might be expected. The difficult thing is to see them in print--unburied, so to speak, from the realm of secrets and turned into a public event. There are more than twenty articles, most of them long, all of them from the Kenosha Evening News. Even in this barely legible state, almost totally obscured by age and the hazards of photocopying, they still have the ability to shock.

Auster's book begins with a sentence from Heraclitus: "In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it."

Robert Frost had the same idea.

Language weirds.

My family has been trying and trying to drag me into instant messaging. They almost have me. But some things I will resist to the end, like making verbs out of "message" and "friend." I know I'm against the tide, and the descriptivist in me knows better. I know, for example, that once upon a time, "to edit" was considered a weird verb. It's what linguists call a back-formation from the noun "editor." (Why then did "monitor" not give us "to monit"? Why did not "editor," like "monitor," become a verb? Because English is not logical; because it is hostage to its users.)

But if I were to give in, I'd go whole hog. I'd ditch the label "back-formation." I'd favor the verve of "verbing."

It was the great philosophers Calvin & Hobbes who astutely noted that "verbing weirds language." But this is true, linguistics professor John Lawler adds, "only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way." The larger truth is that "Language Weirds."

Steering toward home

Last night the steering committee for the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness finalized the draft of the Orange County Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. With a few minor changes, which the staff work group will make today, it will be ready to publish and present to Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, and the county for adoption. This is a tremendous accomplishment. I'm proud of everyone who has taken part of it and proud to have been a part of it. Here's the vision statement:

Through the combined effort of elected officials, service providers, business leaders, government agencies, and the citizens of Orange County, chronic homelessness in Orange County will end within 10 years. Current and future efforts to serve the needs of all homeless individuals and homeless families will continue to be supported toward the goal of permanent housing.

That's a tall order, and it's going to take sustained commitment. So the work is not over. It's more like it's just beginning.

State action

Resolved: the North Carolina House of Representatives recognizes ibiblio and the ibiblio community as "cultural treasures," citing their advocacy of the "free and open sharing of digital information." Congratulations to all!

Bittersweet

For fans of Ze Frank (and I've counted myself one for not long enough), it's a bittersweet week: the last week of "The Show," the video blog he's been doing five days a week for a year. Winding down, he's unusually reflective, as in Monday's episode. It's called "bittersweet," but it's about creativity and how to believe you have it.

Benjamin and the Arcades

Walter Benjamin's giant book of fragments, The Arcades Project, was an attempt to read the history of the 19th century through the lens of the Paris Arcades. "Part of Benjamin's purpose," write Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, his English translators,

was to document as concretely as possible, and thus lend a "heightened graphicness" to, the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century. At issue was what he called "the commodification of things." He was interested in the unsettling effects of incipient high capitalism on the most intimate areas of life and work--especially as reflected in the work of art (its composition, its dissemination, its reception). In this "projection of the historical into the intimate," it was a matter not of demonstrating any straightforward cultural "decline," but rather of bringing to light an uncanny sense of crisis and of security, of crisis in security. Particularly from the perspective of the nineteenth-century domestic interior, which Benjamin likens to the inside of a mollusk's shell, things were coming to seem more entirely material than ever and, at the same time, more spectral and estranged.

"Whether you translate Russian fairy tales, Swedish family sagas, or English picaresque novels--you will always come back in the end, when it is a question of setting the tone for the masses, to France, not because it is always the truth but because it will always be the fashion." Gutzkow, Brief Aus Paris, vol. 2 , pp. 227-228. Each time, what sets the tone is without doubt the newest, but only where it emerges in the medium of the oldest, the longest past, the most ingrained. This spectacle, the unique self-construction of the newest in the medium of what has been, makes for the true dialectical theater of fashion. Only as such, as the grandiose representation of this dialectic, can one appreciate the singular books of Grandville, which created a sensation toward the middle of the century. When Grandville presents a new fan as the "fan of Iris" and his drawing suggests a rainbow, or when the Milky Way appears as an avenue illuminated at night by gaslamps, or when "the moon (a self-portrait)" reposes on fashionable velvet cushions instead of on clouds--at such moments we first come to see that it is precisely in this century, the most parched and imagination-starved, that the collective dream energy of a society has taken refuge with redoubled vehemence in the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion, where the understanding cannot follow. Fashion is the predecessor--no, the eternal deputy--of Surrealism.

--The Arcades Project (Harvard ed. 1999), pp. 64-65.

And today, the Paris Arcades--that is, what's left of them--are enjoying a renaissance. According to the Times, Benjamin "is as responsible as any urban planner for their present adoration and recovery. In an irony that he might not have appreciated, and that could perhaps only have happened in Paris, this fierce Marxist critic of the bourgeoisie has made shopping here an intellectual pursuit and unquestionably fashionable again." Behold.

Housing first

In a column in yesterday's Chapel Hill News, Mark Zimmerman discusses the housing first initiative and considers its potential contribution to Chapel Hill's plan to end chronic homelessness in 10 years.

Wednesday night, the steering committee for the Partnership to End Homelessness in Orange County will meet to discuss the latest draft of the plan.