In a Los Angeles garage, "a hoarder with a vision"

"[P]robably the finest collection of African American literature, manuscripts, film and ephemera in private hands" was amassed by a librarian in Los Angeles. Her son is in the process of finding a better home for it than a musty old garage.

Upcoming exhibit on student protest in Chapel Hill

UNC's Southern Historical Collection and University Archives are sponsoring an upcoming exhibit called "I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Student Protests in 1960s Chapel Hill." The exhibit, which will be in the Manuscripts Department of Wilson Library, opens Tuesday, January 23, with a talk by history professor Peter Filene. On three subsequent Tuesday evenings, panel discussions are planned: on the desegregation sit-ins of 1963-64, the speaker ban controversy, and the foodworkers' strike of 1969.

When Tim West asked me to moderate the first of these panels, the one on the sit-ins, it was very clear to me why he should think of a Town Council member. In the tumultuous period before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, the demonstrators had the audacity to ask the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. At a crucial public meeting that followed much back-and-forth among members of the Board, alderman Adelaide Walters gave a passionate explanation of her intention to vote in favor of the ordinance:

The underlying idea of a Public Accommodations Law is so simple that it was expressed in one sentence by the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, in his State of the Union message on January 9 [1964]: "all members of the public should be given equal access to facilities open to the public." This statement seems reasonable to most people in Chapel Hill, since this is a university town where freedom flavors the spirit of a great university.

It is likewise not surprising that Chapel Hillians are concerned that our Negro citizens often suffer personal embarrassment and shame from treatment in some public places here.

We are aware that some 90 percent of our merchants subscribe to the principle of public accommodation. Indeed, the Merchants Association itself has gone on record in favor of open business for all citizens.

Why, then, is a Public Accommodations Law necessary? Why was the commandment "Thou shall not kill" ever put into law? It seems regrettable that we need legislation to enforce a plain truth. But because the bigotry of a few is poisoning the peace and harmony of community relationships, we are impelled to take action.

The Human Relations Committee set up by the Board of Aldermen and appointed by the Mayor, the Ministerial Association, as well as many individuals, have urged us to pass a Public Accommodations ordinance.

Some say that such an ordinance is an invasion of private property rights. Others point out that such rights have always been subject to the laws of the land--laws of ownership, sale, inheritance, zoning, sanitation, eminent domain.

For these reasons and many more, it is my hope that the Board of Aldermen will pass a Public Accommodations ordinance and thus in part restore the damaged public image of what I believe is an enlightened community.

The ordinance was not even voted upon. Rather, alderman Roland Giduz made a substitute motion to set up a group of community leaders "to serve as a mediation committee to resolve racial differences that currently beset this town and to which complaints of racial discrimination could be brought." That motion carried 6-2, with Hubert Robinson (Chapel Hill's first black alderman) joining Walters in opposing it. Mayor Sandy McClamroch, who had no vote under the system in place (except as a tie-breaker), went out of his way to express his opposition to the passing of an ordinance.*

The town's leaders, in other words, did not lead.

This exhibit will provide a welcome opportunity to revisit that period. It'll be my honor to moderate a panel that includes three people who were among the student activists--Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, Braxton Foushee--and a current UNC student political leader, Erika Stallings.

*All of this information comes from John Ehle's invaluable 1965 book The Free Men, a book that ought to be required reading in Chapel Hill public schools. It is out of print.

Bright ideas

We already knew that our neighbor Maeda's son Adam Galinsky was a bright guy, but it's nice to see it confirmed in today's New York Times Magazine.

Low Starting Prices Lead to High Auction Sales.

Why does this happen? For starters, as the researchers explained in the June 2006 issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, low starting prices reduce barriers to entry, tempting even idle browsers to place bids. The increased traffic then generates higher final prices as more buyers bid against one another. Psychological forces play into it as well. Low starting prices entice bidders to invest time and energy in the auction, and while every M.B.A. student knows it’s dumb to base decisions on sunk costs, the eBay bidders did just that, escalating their commitments to their previous bids.

More eBay advice from Adam: look for misspellings, and don't assume you have to see a photo.

Imagine

Jeralyn Merrit, the brains behind the ever useful TalkLeft blog, has a son who turns 26 today. She writes about how closely linked the son's birth was to the death of John Lennon--and how Lennon's spirit presides over them still.

Uncommon Carrboro

December 4 marked the debut of the Carrboro Commons, an online newspaper blog for the town to the left of Chapel Hill. Writes journalism professor and adviser Jock Lauterer,

[T]he Carrboro Commons will be a bi-weekly, interactive “e-zine” or Web newspaper, a “lab newspaper,” if you will, (meaning that this news and information site is an experiential learning project and an integral part of the required classwork for JOMC 459 Community Journalism.) What you are looking at today is our prototype edition — the result of a flash of inspiration in class earlier this fall, days of brainstorming, many sleepless nights, more of what the Buddhists call “auspicious coincidences,” and a nearly vertical learning curve for all of us — plus a lot just plain old-fashioned journalism shoe-leather.

I particularly like the in-depth story on Bruce Thomas and the Weaver Street lawn controversy; it details his experience with the Human Kindness Foundation, run by Bo Lozoff and his wife Stia. If you don't know about what goes on out there in rural Orange County, it's worth asking for a tour. It's no wonder Mr. Rogers called Bo one of his "personal heros."

Congratulations and best wishes to the staff of the Carrboro Commons. No doubt about it: It's Carrboro.




RELATED: Kirk Ross' Carrboro blog The Mill.

The Barbie conundrum

Anne Fernald, a Virginia Woolf friend and, long ago, a contributor to my book, is facing the holiday season with a daughter entering an impressionable age: the Barbie years.

Barbie, a doll that used to be for eight- and nine-year-olds, is mostly for three- to six-year-olds now. My older daughter will be four in two weeks. Christmas is in three. All she wants is Barbie.

I almost caved.

Hold your ground, Anne. Take it from Barbie herself:

"Go climb trees," she said. "You don't want to be like me, pinched and pointed and curled."

"Don't envy me my ornaments, Barbie said. Forget matching luggage, the sports car, and Ken. Travel light, little sister, why gild a lily? Try white ankle socks and some sensible shoes."

"Don't you mention my martyred hair. I denounce this lacquered, preternatural lid. Wear goofy bangs, get a crewcut, devolve."

"And spread out, Barbie said. Why go through life shaped like a railroad spike? Use your elbows, make shade, take up space."

"I'm sad, Barbie said, sad and smiling, smiling and sad. I'm a mental-health squeeze play, don't try this at home."

"It's too late for me, but you, you're still young, play Hamlet, bet the farm, tell the truth."

From Laura Costas, "Experience," in Mondo Barbie.

Around town

In a discussion on Orange Politics of the Lot 5 proposal etc., Laura Shmania posted a link to her photographs of East and West Franklin Street. Is this where I live? came the thought more than once. These remarkable pictures are collected in a gallery she calls "A Sense of Place." See her "Southern Part of Heaven" for two more equally beautiful tours of Chapel Hill.

The question she raises is a fair one: now that downtown Chapel Hill is growing up, as the Daily Tar Heel aptly noted, is it in danger of losing its character? The surest answer is that time will tell. The best way to make certain that doesn't happen is to be conscious of the question as we work to shape the development proposals that are already upon us.

I don't think height in downtown Chapel Hill has to be inconsistent with "character" or good design. Rather, I think increased density is a responsible and logical next step in a town that is steadly growing while it is also committed to an urban services boundary and to other principles of sustainablity. Last night I watched the Planning Board's first hearing of the Greenbridge proposal, a high-density mixed-use project that, perhaps even more than Lot 5, raises difficult questions not just of scale but of equity: the project, while so admirably green--with William McDonough himself at the helm, they're aiming for a LEED gold certification--is going to be very high-end, right there in the face of Northside. Without a doubt, it will change the neighborhood dramatically. But as my colleague Cam Hill has said, unless we take drastic measures to keep people from wanting to move to Chapel Hill, it's not a question of whether to grow but how.

Here's what Sen. Ellie Kinnaird said about the Greenbridge proposal in the Chapel Hill News:

As a newcomer in 1964, I was amazed to see the unified colonial style of commercial buildings. I was amused to see colonial gas stations, bus stations and grocery stores in the 20th century. Eventually the style became the semi-official vocabulary of the town.
But just as historic is the expression of each generation's aspirations reflected in their architecture. We are fortunate to have an expression today that reflects our great love for and stewardship of our environment.
Our goal of preservation now is our planet's preservation. What could better epitomize this than a completely green building, and one of magnificent architectural design? Even if one were concerned over mimicking late 20th century architectural design, Rosemary Street has never had distinctive buildings. Greenbridge is a rare opportunity to show the world we are serious about our leadership in carbon reduction through building and living our ideals.

There will be lots of questions asked about Greenbridge, ultimately by the Council. A particular concern I will have will be their plans to include affordable housing. In principle, though, Sen. Kinnaird has it right: "preservation," to our generation, has to have a new meaning.

But back to the present moment, and the past: Much of Chapel Hill's historic "character" is to be discovered in the new book The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1795-1975, by Ruth Little, published by UNC Press for the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill. One of the neat things about the book is the amount of attention the town's distinctive mid-century modern architecture gets. Chapel Hill experienced a major growth spurt after World War II, part of which involved the founding of the four-year medical school. The homes these newcomers built reflected some of the best architecture of the period.

Among the buildings featured is the old Chapel Hill Library building, now the Chapel Hill Museum. Here's an update on where the town is in the effort, which I initiated, to give an easement on that property to Preservation North Carolina: tentative dates, public hearing February 12, consideration of approval March 5.

The old library building is one of the stops on the Preservation Society's 2006 "Holiday House Tour" coming up this weekend.

Lot 5 development agreement

Last night the Town Council took a bold step in authorizing negotiation of a development agreement with Ram Corp. for the Lot 5 project. I'm grateful to everyone who has participated in the public discourse about it, even my dissenting colleague Jim Ward. As a member of the negotiating team, I continue to believe that this project is going to bring great, positive changes to downtown Chapel Hill, and that the town's investment is reasonable in light of the return. I believe we've worked hard and carefully in the public's interest to leverage significant public benefits out of this project. I'm looking forward to seeing the agreement finalized and brought back to the Council on February 12.

Brick (by golly!) by brick

I suppose every community has a right to self-determination, but this decision by the town of Lawrenceville, Georgia, near Atlanta, to limit virtually all development to brick structures seems a bit much. It sets up barricades against all manner of things, like the Katrina Cottage and Modular Lifestyles' affordable units and Ikea's new kit house.

Unfathomable

The EPA argues that it doesn't have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Yet on another subject (as a result of a court order) it is extending its jurisdiction a million years into the future: planning and warning, for whoever might be hanging around by then, about the danger of the nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain.


A winning design in the Desert Space Foundation's competition for warning signs at Yucca Mountain. How do we think Earthlings in a future we cannot imagine would interpret this image?

Closer in time, a 2,000-year-old computer is discovered fathoms deep in the ocean. "One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years."

Gobbledygook (in Durham, one of a series)

From an ad in this week's Independent Weekly:

NOTICE OF INTENT TO PREPARE A MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT FOR TIP No. U-3308
WIDEN NC 55 (ALSTON AVENUE) BETWEEN NC 147 AND US 70 BUSINESS/NC 98 (HOLLOWAY STREET)
DURHAM COUNTY, NC
FEDERAL AID No. STP-55(20)

The above-referenced project is subject to compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, and implemented by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation's regulations for compliance codified as 36 CFR Part 800. Section 106 requires Federal Agencies to take into account the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) conducted a survey of the historic architecture within the project area and concluded that the Golden Belt Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. After consultation with the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office (HPO), it was determined that the proposed project would have an adverse effect on the historic property present. In discussions between NCDOT and HPO, both parties agreed that as a part of the project planning, NCDOT will develop stipulations to mitigate the adverse effects of the transportation improvement project on the historic property.

What can this be understood to mean? That a road widening is scheduled to happen that will have some effect on one of Durham's national historic districts. That the effects will be "mitigated." Will the buildings stand or fall? Will all but one come down? Will they all be preserved? What choices remain at this point?

Sounds like so much else that has happened to endangered Durham.

The word "gobbledygook," however, was coined by a maverick Texan.

Congratulations, Tim

Congratulations to Chapel Hill's own Tim Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name, for winning the 2007 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, a prestigious award that went last year to Marilynne Robinson for Gilead (a novel I found to be just beautiful).

From virtual Tibet to real basmati

Paul has a lovely write-up of his trip to India in the latest Red Hat Magazine.

On video: 8 minutes of Paul with the Software Freedom Law Center's lawyer Eben Moglen.

Superheros young and old

In Durham, a four-year-old "snuck into his bedroom, dressed himself in a Power Ranger costume and armed himself with a plastic sword," police said. "The child then exited his room and approached the armed suspect, in an attempt to protect his family." He succeeded. "He fully believed he morphed," said his aunt.

Meanwhile in Columbia, S.C., a 63-year-old comic book illustrator died wearing Superman pajamas.

Unadulterated

One hundred percent pure delight. (Via Paul.)

Go take a hike.

Researchers say (as if we didn't know), "Our bodies are not designed to be so sedentary." But if you must sit for 10 hours a day, through lunch and all, lean back.

Of course for some, standing isn't such a great option either.

The $1.95 death sentence, and other neglected stories

Via Eric Muller: new Legal History Blog by Mary Dudziak, author of the great book Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. She's posted a link to her own recent essay "The Case of 'Death for a Dollar Ninety-Five': Finding America in American Injustice," which is beautifully written and worth reading.

This is a story about a case long forgotten. It was a case that needed to be forgotten, to safeguard the meaning of American justice. The case of "Death for a Dollar Ninety-Five" began one July night in Marion, Alabama, in 1957, and soon captured the attention of the world. It involved an African American man, a white woman, and the robbery of a small amount of change late in the evening. The conviction was swift and the penalty was death. International criticism soon rained down on the Alabama Governor and the American Secretary of State, leading to clemency and a life sentence. For $1.95. And the case was forgotten. This story helps us to see the way narratives of American justice and injustice are managed. The United States identifies itself with the rule of law, and so miscarriages of justice are often perceived as breaches in that identity, violations of the nation's own core principles. Resolutions of miscarriages of injustice, this paper will argue, are often about repairing a breach in American identity, making America whole again. What happens to the person at the center of the story is, at best, secondary. For the story to turn out right, the nation is restored, and the person is forgotten.

Sounds a little like John Grisham's new book, a nonfiction story that came out of a New York Times obit he read of a man who faced a combination of negligent prosecution and incompetent defense counsel, then thanks to better lawyers and DNA evidence was spared the death penalty and walked out of prison a free man. After that, he drank himself to death.

Related, as Dudziak notes: the Triangle Legal History Seminar. Eric is speaking this Friday.

A test of trust

Would you trust your fellow drivers to obey the rules of the road with nary a sign or a signpost?

European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren -- by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs.

. . .

Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.

. . .

The new traffic model's advocates believe the only way out of this vicious circle is to give drivers more liberty and encourage them to take responsibility for themselves. They demand streets like those during the Middle Ages, when horse-drawn chariots, handcarts and people scurried about in a completely unregulated fashion. The new model's proponents envision today's drivers and pedestrians blending into a colorful and peaceful traffic stream.

Airport to MLK: one for the books

Back during the long deliberations over the change of the name of Airport Road to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, I found the work of cultural geographer Derek Alderman, who has made a scholarly specialty out of studying MLK road name changes, useful in putting the request into a larger context. Latest on his list of publications now is an essay (.pdf) in the collection Landscape and Race in the United States, edited by Richard Schein. In the essay, "Naming Streets for Martin Luther King Jr.: No Easy Road," he discusses the Chapel Hill process:

In representing the street-naming issue as divisive, some whites have suggested that King--because of his legacy as a peacemaker--would not have wanted his commemoration characterized by racial conflict. For example, street-naming opponents in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, argued this point when they called on black leaders to rename a park, library, or school for King rather than the controversial Airport Road. Black supporters such as Michele Laws countered with King's own words: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy." These attempts by some whites to represent the civil rights leader's image as nonconfrontational is, according to Michael Eric Dyson, part of a larger national amnesia about King's true legacy. According to Dyson, most of America chooses to remember King as the "moral guardian of racial harmony" rather than as a radical challenger of the racial and economic order. In this respect, the politics of street naming are not just about black Americans establishing the legitimacy and resonancy of King's achievements but also about wrestling away control of his historical legacy from conservative whites, who have appropriated his image to maintain the status quo rather than redefine it.

Later in discussing specifically why the King commemoration has come to focus on roads, and not, say, libraries or parks or schools, Alderman quotes yours truly:

Under Jim Crow laws, blacks had a hard time just making a road trip. They had to pack their own food, even their own toilet paper, for they didn't know if they would find a restaurant that would serve them or even a gas station where they could use the bathroom. . . . Mobility, the freedom to travel the public roads without fear and with assurance that you got what you needed--these were the basic goals for King. Thus I can't think of a better way to honor Dr. King than with a road naming.

It's been a year and a half since we dedicated our own Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It's going to be longer than that before we see his values thoroughly reflected in Chapel Hill. But it was a significant step with more than token meaning.

Speaking of King, the sixth volume of his collected papers will be out this spring. Writes Ralph Luker, "This volume is of special interest because it includes material – many sermons and speeches, some letters -- that Coretta Scott King long delayed making available to the King Project. It is a large part of what was recently purchased for $32 million by an Atlanta trust. . . . Until now, much of the material in this volume has never been closely read by King scholars."

On this day

When we think of him, he is without a hat, standing in the wind and the weather. He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to confront and to enjoy the cold and the wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger. He died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for--in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting him and shooting at him. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.

E.B. White, The New Yorker, November 30, 1963

Going nowhere

First it was the Hatteras to Ocracoke ferry that was cancelled, after 8 a.m. today, then later all of them. No ferries to Ocracoke till probably Thursday morning. We were planning to head out tomorrow morning for our annual pilgrimage. But the rain is pretty steady here too, so we might as well make a fire in the fireplace and settle in.

UPDATE 11/23: Landfall at noon today. Happy Thanksgiving.

"Rewind"

In February 2005, I saw, and blogged about, a most amazing performance given by members of the North Carolina Women's Prison Repertory Company. One of them was Regina Walters. She has completed her prison sentence, and her story is the subject of a new performance, set for December 1, at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro.

Hindsight beyond 20/20. "Rewind" traces the steps and missteps that led an enthusiastic cheerleader and talented ballerina to life as North Carolina prison inmate #0423358. Recently released from prison, this former member of the N.C. Women's Prison Repertory Ensemble was incarcerated for 12 years. Now Regina looks frankly at the personal traumas and choices that landed her at 17 in an alley beside a man with a gun and at the challenges and uncertainties of her new life outside.

The question that the 2005 performance raised for me was this: what are prisons for, punishment or rehabilitation? It seemed that the state was not so interested in rehabilitation. Yet these women, dreadfully sorry for dreadful things they had done, were searching desperately for a way back: to wholeness, to some promise of life after they had paid their proverbial dues. The state was not offering that; but at least this program was. Still I wonder what the state has to offer to Regina Walters and others on their return to society. One of the issues that keeps surfacing in our discussions about homelessness in Orange County is the critical lack of planning and transitional services available to people discharged from prison. (Ex-cons aren't exactly welcomed by employers either.)

Regina Walters will be at the performance for discussion afterward. I hope to be there too.

The march of the mantises

Praying mantises are on the march. Check the "best shot" in today's Chapel Hill News against this picture taken last weekend. (Zoom in for close-ups!)



Since this one was hanging out in the North Carolina Botanical Garden, we assume it was a Carolina mantid.

AE caught a cool one earlier in the season.

:-) / :-(

Is your glass half full or half empty?

Stumbling on Happiness, by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert (son of Larry Gilbert of Chapel Hill), explores the phenomenon of happiness, with results that promise to be surprising. From the excerpt at Amazon:

Yours [your brain] is nexting right now. For example, at this moment you may be consciously thinking about the sentence you just read, or about the key ring in your pocket that is jammed uncomfortably against your thigh, or about whether the War of 1812 really deserves its own overture. Whatever you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the word with which this sentence will end. But even as you hear these very words echoing in your very head, and think whatever thoughts they inspire, your brain is using the word it is reading right now and the words it read just before to make a reasonable guess about the identity of the word it will read next, which is what allows you to read so fluently. Any brain that has been raised on a steady diet of film noir and cheap detective novels fully expects the word night to follow the phrase It was a dark and stormy, and thus when it does encounter the word night, it is especially well prepared to digest it. As long as your brain’s guess about the next word turns out to be right, you cruise along happily, left to right, left to right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting brain is predicting the future of the sentence at a fantastic rate. It is only when your brain predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.

So happiness and optimism are more complicated than we might think. Turns out, so is pessimism, we learn in Scott McLemee's review of Pessimism: Philsophy, Ethic, Spirit, by Joshua Foa Dienstag.

"Optimism," writes Dienstag, "makes us perpetual enemies of those future moments that do not meet our expectations, which means all future moments. It is when we expect nothing from the future that we are free to experience it as it will be, rather than as a disappointment.

Related: Paul comes down in favor of happiness, while Kristina in the comments demonstrates that a good gripe can help you get a grip.

"The ghosts of 1898"

The report of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, produced at the direction of the North Carolina General Assembly, is a milstone in the state's history, as I wrote at the time it was published last December. Following the report, in late May, the Commission submitted to the General Assembly a set of recommended compensatory actions. Among them:

The commission recommended that several newspapers - including the Star-News - which reported on the event as it happened, to work with the North Carolina black press association to prepare a summary of the commission report, study the effects of 1898 and impact of Jim Crow on the state's black press and endow scholarships for black journalists.

The Star-News itself pledged to "work with other state media to address the commission's recommendations."

The special section published today jointly by the Raleigh News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer, and included in today's Wilmington Star-News, responds to this recommendation by bringing the highlights of the report to a broad audience. Wisely, the two papers chose Tim Tyson to write the narrative--not only because he's a great writer and ideally qualified, but also because, as editor Melanie Sill points out, the Raleigh and Charlotte papers were active participants in this sorry history.

UPDATE 11/19: Today's N&O includes interviews with four descendants of players in the event, two white and two black: George Rountree III, Anne Russell, Lewin Manly, and Faye Chaplin. These are important contributions to the story.

Lot 5 plans go public

After long negotiations, the Town Council is ready to present the proposed contract with Ram Development Corp. for the public's consideration. A public forum will be held at our regular meeting this coming Monday. As a member of the negotiating team, I'm very happy about where we are. We've remained true to our core principles: we are seeking through a private partner to make the downtown a great place to live--in turn enlivening the Franklin Street corridor for everyone's benefit. The proposal includes significant public space, as we've insisted on, as well as commercial space; Ram will contribute $200,000 toward programming that space. The project's design has been molded into an attractive "soft modernism" through peer review sessions with Marvin Malecha, dean of the College of Design at North Carolina State. Ram promises to invest $671,000 in public art, engaging distinguished artist Mikyoung Kim to lead that effort. The construction will be LEED-certified. Twenty-one of the 137 condo units, or 15 percent, will be permanently affordable, controlled by the Orange Community Housing and Land Trust.

The scope and terms of the proposal have changed over the course of the negotiations--largely due to rising costs to the developer, a real concern not unique to this developer. We are disappointed that the Wallace Deck component is no longer part of the proposal (though we hope that the addition of residential units above the deck can happen someday). We are also disappointed that the Town's initial proposed outlay of $500,000 to pay for underground parking for the affordable condos has grown to a maximum of $7.2 million to buy one entire level--the public level--of the two-level underground parking garage. This money would not be due until the certificate of occupancy for the garage is issued; in other words it would not be advanced with risk that the facility would somehow not be built. Within the context of a development totalling some $75 million, we believe this is a justifiable public investment in a public good.

The redevelopment of this town-owned property (which will continue to be town-owned) in a way that will contribute substantially to the revitalization of the downtown business district has been a Council priority for a number of years. We've been actively working on it for the three years that I've been on the Council. It's an accomplishment to be able to bring the project this far, and all of us look forward to hearing the public's response.

Not unrelated: Also on Monday night the Council will receive the final report of the Inclusionary Zoning Task Force, which I have chaired for the past year, with help from colleagues Cam Hill and Mark Kleinschmidt.

The onetime future of flight

A 1960s-era commercial for the Braniff SST . . . plus promos with two colorful fellows (Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali).

Commentary from Boing Boing.


High Fashion Quick Change
"Braniff International airline hostesses are outfitted in a couture collection by Emilio Pucci. They can make four changes in a single flight." (From the Greene collection of vintage post cards.)

Jefferson's slaves

A data base documenting over six hundred people owned, at one time or another, by Thomas Jefferson.

Chapel Hill's own Charles Irons contributed to this project.

November: focus on homelessness

For the National City Network, November's turn toward winter weather prompts a focus on homelessness.


Photo by Lisa Scheer of a homeless woman's camp in Greensboro.

At a downtown safety forum yesterday morning, sponsored by the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, I gave an overview of the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness. I cited data from the National City Network indicating the broad diversity of the estimated 600,000 people who are homeless in the richest country on the planet:

34 percent of homeless service users are members of homeless families
28 percent of homeless persons state that they sometimes or often do not get enough to eat
66 percent of homeless report indicators of alcohol, drug abuse and mental health problems
44 percent of homeless individuals did paid work in the last month
49 percent of homeless individuals are in their first episode of homelessness

As I always try to do, I encouraged folks at the forum to think about homelessness from the point of view of being homeless--for I myself find it really a challenge to imagine. When you don't have a home, you essentially don't have a position from which to be heard in the civic sphere, I pointed out, citing, as I have before, the philosopher David Schrader. For Aristotle, the state was made up of households (not roving individuals). The home affords privacy, which is essential to autonomy: "autonomy against the authority of society." The homeless have no defenses and few advocates.

But what people wanted to talk about was not homelessness but its near cousin, panhandling, and the blight it contributes to downtown. Can't we outlaw it even further? some asked. Legally we probably could was my reponse, but that would not make it right. Glad to see the that downtown outreach committee agrees and is choosing instead to work on education and . . . outreach.

UPDATE 11/21: Editorials in the Chapel Hill Herald and the Daily Tar Heel register concern about overregulation of panhandling.

Shearon Harris: NRC hearing

Carrboro alderman Dan Coleman has a brief report of the NRC meeting in Washington yesterday in which NC WARN, SURGE, et al. were allowed to make the case why their petition under sec. 2.206 of the applicable federal regs should be heard. He and I and others were there via conference call. I think what we heard from the NRC hearing board was at least a tacit (if not more) admission that the Shearon Harris facility is out of compliance with the regulations, but that the agency is giving them a pass, for essentially as long as they need, on the promise that they will come into compliance eventually. When the petitioners' attorney John Runkle pointedly accused the NRC of letting Progress Energy call the shots, there was no response. Throughout, Progress had very little to say. "In all, it was not a reassuring hearing," concluded Pete McDowell of NC WARN. It will be interesting to review the transcript (promised by Thanksgiving) in order to follow all the subtle leaps of logic that the board engaged in.

The only encouraging moment was when they said they would consider holding an information meeting here in the Triangle.

The Kelo backlash and the poor

Back in January, while writing about the devastating effects of the so-called "urban renewal" program on Durham's Hayti neighborhood, it occurred to me that the outrage that we already were witnessing (culminating in last week's elections) in response to the Kelo decision was conspicuously missing in the aftermath of Kelo's key precedent: Berman v. Parker, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that authorized cities to enter into wholesale displacement and destruction for the sake of cleaning up "blighted" neighborhoods. (Pointedly, this decision said that non-"blighted" buildings could justifiably be torn down if they were within a "blighted" area. In Durham, this analysis played out in the demolition of a fine old church where Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken.) The ultimate outcome of the "urban renewal" projects that followed this decision was supposed to be improved housing options for the people who were displaced. But as Fitz Brundage writes in his narrative of Hayti, that wasn't what happened in Durham--a story that was repeated many times in other places. Where was the outrage then? I asked in January.

In a new online legal journal/weblog, Northwestern Colloquy (noticed via Balkinization), I find an article that addresses this question in very smart ways:

This Essay provides a review of the changes in state law following Kelo v. City of New London, and in particular focuses on the dominant reform: the prohibition of economic development condemnations in non-poor areas (which Kelo allows, as a matter of federal constitutional law) coupled with continued allowance for blight condemnations in poor areas. This dominant reform, the Essay argues, privileges the stability of middle-class households over the stability of poor ones, and thus expressively devalues poor people and poor communities in legal and political discourse.

Clyde Jonescoming

On UNC Homecoming weekend, evidence that Clyde Jones was here.

Many more examples of Jones' art. Still more.

The Jonesfest continues at Crook's Corner, where for the month of November his one-dimensional art is on display (along with the few critters that remain in the restaurant's permanent collection).

Last night Paul, Tucker, and I took Dan Gillmor to Crook's. Director of the Center for Citizen Media and author of We the Media, he's in town to speak tomorrow on citizen journalism (sponsored by ibiblio).

Dan and I snagged the last two helpings of Bill Smith's Green Tabasco Chicken, which is included in Food & Wine magazine's 2006 Best of the Best: The Best Recipes from the Best 25 Cookbooks of the Year. (From Smith's Seasoned in the South.) Topped it off with persimmon pudding.

FEMA: "temporary" insanity

The Katrina Cottage was an inspired idea, "a more dignified version of the FEMA trailer." Recently it won a People's Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. This month, Lowe's is set to begin selling Katrina kits.

But its original mission was foiled. According to FEMA, it's "semi-permanent" housing, and they'll only pay for "temporary" shelter.

Wasn't it also FEMA's position that they wouldn't pay for "temporary" hotel/motel stays because they wanted to transition folks to more stable, indeed "permanent," housing?

UPDATE: Tucker, while doing webmaster duty, noted that this is my 1,000th blog post! Oh dear.

James Boyle unplugged

Jamie Boyle is a brilliant academic, the kind that can take a tedious subject and make it intelligible, interesting, and fun for a popular audience while not sacrificing a whit of rigor. It's all there, worn as lightly as an Elizabethan courtier's sprezzatura performance.

But the truth is that he's missed his calling. He's simply a brilliant satirist. Others will note his use of Lulu and the Creative Commons license as a way to practice what he teaches--but that's not the real news. Skip straight to chapter one of his novel-in-progress, The Shakespeare Chronicles, and meet Professor Stanley Quandary.

Good bridges make good neighbors.

On a nice night last January, while taking a healthful walk toward the Dean Smith Center for a UNC basketball game, our friend and neighbor David Galinsky was killed as he tried to cross Fordham Boulevard, an unlighted, un-crosswalked, six-lane barrier between our neighborhood and the campus. His widow, Maeda, in her grief, channeled her energy into demanding that improvements be made to this important intersection so that such a thing need never happen again.

Hence the Fordham Boulevard Safety Committee, which made its final report to the Town Council last night. These folks deserve a lot of thanks for such a thoughtful and thorough set of recommendations. I don't have a copy of Nancy Tripoli's collection of images of beautiful pedestrian bridges in university towns across the country, but if you take a peek here you'll get a sense of what is possible. Not easy, especially not when the road in question is controlled by the state DOT, but: not impossible. Says Nancy: "The bridge is for pedestrians. Nothing else about it needs to be pedestrian."

UPDATE: Nancy's presentation.

Civil war memory

Congratulations to high school history teacher Kevin Levin, whose Civil War Memory site celebrated its first blogiversary yesterday. How lucky his students are to have a teacher who's so engaged with the complex contemporary understandings, academic and popular, of the Civil War era. For example, he recently asked his students to take the WPA slave narratives and compare two interviews with the same person conducted by different interviewers. Today before breakfast he has already weighed in on the Confederate flag as fashion statement. Levin is teaching history as critical thinking, and the rest of us are fortunate to get to tag along.

Related: You are there at an interdisciplinary conference on October 13 at Arizona State University, captured on video: "Slavery and Antislavery: A New Research and Teaching Workshop." Aren't the internets great? (Useful quote from Timothy McCarthy: "To be interdisciplinary is to be thorough.")

I met Jacy Farrow.

No, not Cybill Shepherd--not the blonde "teen queen" straight out of the Last Picture Show, but the real woman McMurtry modeled her on: Ceil Cleveland. I loved Cleveland's own memoir, Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow?, the first-person story of growing up smart and pretty in a time and place when pretty seemed to trump all--but using her smarts to make her way in the world as university profesor and writer. From the prologue:

My mother played the patriarchal game, as did the girls of Jacy's era, because it was the only game in town. Some of us are still playing it. I finally got fed up with it after a few decades, caused pain and angst to everyone who loved me, and turned my life around.

How ghastly that was; how sweet it is.

Perhaps it is, as author and scholar Carolyn Heilbrun has suggested, that only women who played the men's game and won a self anyway have the courage to face the pain bought by telling their own stories straight. And maybe only women of a certain age, say, in their fifties, can stop being what she calls "female impersonators" and can now do what they might have done much earlier had they not been born hostages to their gender.

In 1997 when the book was published she was vice president for university affairs at SUNY Stony Brook.

It was a thrill to meet her at a book reading at the Regulator in Durham yesterday, not to mention a surprise. We both were there to hear journalist Maya McPherson talk about her book All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, which was fascinating. But I would have driven at least to Durham to meet Ceil Cleveland. She and her husband moved to Durham a couple of years ago.

Lawn order

On the scale of plantmanship, I am somewhere between Jessica and Kelly: I do know what zone I'm in. My newly tilled beds are like blank pages to fill. My fantasies are of trips to Niche Gardens and UPS persons delivering orders from Woodlanders. In reality, the Lady in Red hydrangea is wilting, the heirloom azaleas that the contractors mistakenly pulled up might not survive, and the cover of leaves in just the past couple of days has obscured the new beds almost completely. The first killing frost will not entirely disappoint: in winter come nursery catalogues.


"Inland Sea," by Virginia Gibbons, North Carolina Botanical Garden, Sculpture Show 2006

Jeff Sharlet: Haggard reconsidered

I learned a great deal about Ted Haggard from Jeff Sharlet's excellent piece in Harper's describing his "free-market theology," which I blogged about. In the wake of recent events, Sharlet has done some interesting rethinking:

If [Mike Jones'] story is true, Ted is a hypocrite of the worst kind; then again, he's also another victim of the very closet over which he publicly stands guard, as are all the New Life church members he's led into it. That story may not make the mainstream media. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Ted's downfall will be reported with any more nuance than that of Mark Foley's political collapse. Sex, it seems, blinds the press to politics.

Sound the alarums

The latest from NC WARN on the continuing Shearon Harris/Progress Energy story:

Tough Week for Progress Nuclear Plants

Monday: Sirens at Shearon Harris: All 81 emergency sirens in the Harris 10-mile emergency zone were reported to NRC as being inoperable for at least two hours. Progress Energy says the cause was failure of a device that signals the sirens via a communications tower. Progress said that in an emergency, operators could manually override the device and activate the sirens.

Tuesday: Harris siren system fails again – all sirens were inoperable for several hours due to the same equipment failure. The tower, located on the Owner Controlled Area, is apparently the same one that an intruder hung a large flag on a year ago, when Progress downplayed the tower's importance.

Wednesday: Emergency declared at Brunswick Unit II due to an “unusual event” caused by a transformer failure that caused loss of offsite power and primary cooling to the reactor, located south of Wilmington. Most safety systems responded correctly (two required operator help), including the emergency diesel generators.

Thursday: Brunswick Unit I powers down. When one of the emergency generators malfunctioned, the Unit I reactor was required by regulations to be powered down for 12 hours until another generator was connected to the backup cooling system.

NOTE: Although this week’s siren malfunctions apparently happened for a different reason, Harris and Brunswick have suffered multiple siren failures in recent years due to loss of power associated with severe weather – higher risk occasions when sirens could be needed. Sometimes a large number of sirens have been inoperable for many hours. Since mid-2005, Progress has been saying it plans to install backup power for the sirens. After a quarter of the Harris sirens failed in June, the company said it will be late 2007 before backup power is installed at the plant.

Homefront: quantifying the obvious

From Ecomagazine:

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average new single-family home was 983 square feet in 1950, 1,500 square feet in 1970, and 2,434 square feet in 2005. This occurred even as the average household shrunk from 3.4 to 2.6 people.

The Energy Information Administration reports that "households with 3,000 or more square feet use 40 percent more energy than those with 2,000 to 2,400 square feet."

A McMansion with an Energy Star rating is still a McMansion.

Rosie the Riveter: Isaiah, with lipstick

Norman Rockwell's cover for the Memorial Day 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post is rarely seen because it is vigilantly copyright-protected (but you can see it here, with a story about the auction of the original for almost $5 million). More familiar is the 1942 "We Can Do It!" poster created by J. Howard Miller for the War Production Co-Ordinating Committee and therefore in the public domain.

For the Library of Congress, Sheridan Harvey examines the myth of Rose the Riveter as it played out across various media and in real life. By the time Rockwell got around to his task, she notes, "Rosie" had been popularized in song:

All the day long,
Whether rain or shine,
She's a part of the assembly line.
She's making history,
Working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.
Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage,
Sitting up there on the fuselage.
That little girl will do more than a male will do.

Interpreting Rockwell's image, Harvey writes,

I was first struck by the fact that she is big and dirty. She's oversized, with working-class brawn. She wears goggles and a shield. In reality, it's unlikely that she would have worn both.
The leather arm-band provides protection on the job.
She has no wedding ring.
On her lapel you can see various pins--for blood donation, victory, her security badge.
She's wearing overalls. Women didn't wear pants in public much before World War II; but during the war it became common to see women on the way to and from work in overalls or trousers.
She's wearing loafers. Only after July 1943 were safety shoes with metal toes produced for women. There had been no need to manufacture these shoes in women's sizes before because women didn't customarily work in dangerous jobs where such shoes were needed. Most women wore their own shoes.
She cradles a very large riveting gun in her lap, and it links visually to Adolf Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, beneath her feet. The implication is clear: through her defense job, she will help to crush Hitler.
The American flag background, red, white, and blue, adds to the patriotism of the cover.
Rosie is powerful, competent, and womanly.

Womanly and manly, Harvey continues: Rosie has huge arms, a heavy gun, and she's wearing overalls. But she's also wearing makeup, which was "essential to women's mental health, according to some articles of the time."

At the time, Harvey notes, people caught the resemblance of this Rosie to Michaelangelo's Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel. She applauds the way Rockwell gives this this Isaiah a ham sandwich. Read more about Rosie in myth and reality at the Library of Congress site. What a different time it was.

William Styron

1925-2006.

Sophie ceased looking at the pictures - all became a blur - and her eyes sought instead the window flung open against the October sky where the evening star hung, astonishingly, as bright as a blob of crystal. An agitation in the air, a sudden thickening of the light around the planet, heralded the onset of smoke, borne earthward by the circulation of cool night wind. For the first time since the morning Sophie smelled, ineluctable as a smotherer's hand, the odor of burning human beings.

--Sophie's Choice (1979)

Spring and fall

It's been about the most beautiful fall I can remember in almost 20 years in Chapel Hill, the leaves so bright that they demand attention--distracting, really, liable to induce all kinds of thoughts. Michael Pollan, on the other hand, suggests that spring is the season for thoughtful intimations of mortality, that the coming of new flowers every year is "deeply drenched in our sense of time."

Maybe there's a good reason why we find their fleetingness so piercing, can scarcely look at a flower in bloom without thinking ahead, whether in hope or regret. We might share with certain insects a tropism inclining us toward flowers, but presumably insects can look at a blossom without entertaining thoughts of the past and future--complicated human thoughts that may once have been anything but idle. Flowers have always had important things to teach us about time.

The poets, of course, tend to dwell on spring and the fleeting nature of time, none more movingly than Housman in "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now." It wasn't until I was living in Washington, with its annual glory of cherry trees, that I understood viscerally what the poem was saying: Among the many questions you can ask about your life, ponder this one: How many more spring flowerings will it be your luck to see? And so, for a time, my "favorite season" (a ridiculous idea) became spring.

But fall has its poetry and its poets too. On this All Souls Day it seems fitting to repost this post from a couple of years ago.

Fall Morning, Pisgah National Forest


Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

--G.M. Hopkins

Boo!

Thomas Hardy's short story The Withered Arm is just one of the Victorian ghost stories you might take a few minutes to enjoy today. These and more Halloween treats at Cliopatria.

Mixed message in Mississippi

In Philadelphia, Mississippi, a little over a year after the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter in the cases of the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodwin, Neshoba County celebrates the return of a restored Confederate monument to the courthouse lawn.

Sounds like teen spirit

The Daily Tar Heel has the story on the Smith Middle School Radio Club.

Panhandling and community values

What to do about panhandlers? A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting of what started out as the Downtown Chapel Hill Partnership Kiosk Giving Task Force and has evolved into the Downtown Outreach Work Group. The kiosk task force had arisen in response to the offer of an anonymous donor to fund a "giving kiosk" on Franklin Street where people could deposit money that went directly to social service organizations--as an alternative to giving directly to panhandlers. After a thorough discussion at a meeting I missed, the task force decided that the kiosk would not be an effective way to address the panhandling problem. Rather, they decided, and confirmed at the Oct. 13 meeting I did participate in, that it would be more effective to engage in educational campaigns aimed at citizens (especially students) and in direct social service intervention with the panhandlers, something like the way they do in Madison, Wisconsin, which some who went on the Chamber's trip to Madison had a chance to observe. Efforts will go into an educational campaign something like the Give a Better Way campaign in Denver.

At the Oct. 13 meeting, the topic of panhandling ordinances was raised again. Effective May 1, 2003, Chapel Hill enacted a ban on panhandling in certain places and at certain times. Although the reach was broader than "aggressive panhandling" (which is why I would have opposed it, had I been on the Town Council), its purpose was to provide a more effective means of controlling aggressive panhandling. Controlling aggressive behavior of any kind, including the panhandling kind, is a valid public purpose. But there's a tendency to want to do more than that: to want to shove the panhandlers out of sight, so that they do not make others feel uncomfortable. (That's what the Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale ordinances are explicitly about.) At the Oct. 13 meeting, we took a look at Madison's ordinance. Here's how it defines "aggressive panhandling":

Behavior shall be construed as "aggressive" or "intimidating" if a reasonably prudent individual could be deterred from passing through or remaining in or near any thoroughfare, or place open to the public because of fear, concern, or apprehension.

"could be deterred . . . because of fear, concern, or apprehension." What kind of standard is that? It's a good deal looser than the sample definition offered on the League of Wisconsin Municipalities site (see ordinance #88).

106-1.1. Aggressive Panhandling.
1. DEFINITIONS. a. "Aggressive behavior" means engaging in any conduct with the intention of intimidating another person into giving away money or goods, including but not limited to, intentionally approaching, speaking to or following a person in a manner that would cause a reasonable person to fear imminent physical injury or the imminent commission of a criminal act upon the person or upon the property in the person's immediate possession; intentionally touching another person without consent; or intentionally blocking or interfering with the free passage of a person.

At the Oct. 13 meeting I discouraged the task force from going in the direction of Madison's ordinance, and others there, including UNC grad student Barbie Schalmo, understood the point. My complaint is not so much about the legal implications--in the conservative Fourth Circuit such a law might well pass constitutional scrutiny under the relevant set of questions. My complaint echoes that of moral philosopher Uma Narayan in The Ethics of Homelessness. When you begin to regulate panhandling according to people's perceptions of the panhandlers, as opposed to specifically "aggressive" behavioral characteristics, you have just about said that panhandling itself is "inherently harassing." She continues,

I believe that justifying a ban on begging on the basis of morally problematic public sensibilities, on stereotypes, prejudiced antipathies, and misplaced resentment, violates what [philosopher] Richard Mohr calls the Dreyfus Principle. The principle says "[s]tigmas that are entirely socially induced shall not play a part in our rational moral deliberation," and rules out using discriminatory sentiments held by people as a good reason for institutionalizing further discrimination.

Narayan thus argues, and I agree, that a concern that the presence of panhandlers in a downtown district discourages foot-traffic and therefore undermines the economic health of downtown is not a morally valid reason for the further regulation of panhandling.

On the other hand, the impulse behind the idea of the giving kiosk had much to recommend itself. I think it represented a genuine wish to be helpful, to reach out as a community to help those in need. The trouble is that we don't have natural connections with panhandlers; they appear to us as strangers, one at a time, seemingly cut off from the community. We really don't know what a pandhandler will do with the dollar we give him, and we have reason to fear the worst. The initiatives that the Downtown Outreach Work Group is about to embark on are potentially good ones--as long as they include a recognition that in the end we cannot control the lives or wills of others, that not every panhandler is dishonest or deceitful, that there is genuine need staring us in the face. (The Denver program's home page is pretty harsh: a picture of an upturned palm, inscribed, "Please help. Don't give.")

Edwin Lanier, for example, son of a former mayor of Chapel Hill, is a recovering alcoholic and a panhandler who is homeless--by his own choice.

Gone underground

A week without a blog post may be a record for GreeneSpace. My apologies for a violation of Martin Kuhn's sensible blog-ethical rule to post regularly. Alas, RL intervened. Three years ago my friend and talented landscape architect Laura Moore designed a patio and garden for us. We got the patio built a couple of years ago. Last week, it was the garden. Landscapers working fast and furious, leaving me with a sense of complete inadequacy for not knowing a lick of Spanish: should have bought the Spanish for landscaping book I saw in the university bookstore at Iowa State last spring. Crucial instructions were lost in translation as much "mulcha" was spread. The result is not 100 percent as anticipated, but largely the mistakes were felix culpa, and overall the vistas are pleasing and full of potential (for the filling up of these new beds is a long-term project to put it positively).

This project happened to come when I was reading the last chapter of Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire: on his experience growing Monsanto's genetically engineered NewLeaf potato. About "the satisfactions of the ordered earth" he writes,

The experience of the sublime is all about nature having her way with us, about the sensation of awe before her power--about feeling small. what I'm talking about is the opposite, and admittedly more dubious, satisfaction of having our way with nature: the pleasure of beholding the reflection of our labor and intelligence in the land. In the same way that Niagara or Everest stirs the first impulse, the farmer's methodolical roes stitiching the hills, or the allees of pollarded trees ordering a garden like Versailles, excite the second, filling us with a sense of our power.

These days the sublime is mostly a kind of vacation, in both a literal and a moral sense. After all, who has a bad word to say about wilderness anymore? By comparison, this other impulse, the desire to exert our control over nature's wilderness, bristles with amgibuity. We're unsure about our power in nature, its legitimacy, and its reality, and rightly so. Perhaps more than most, the farmer or the gardener understands that his control is always something of a fiction, depending as it does on luck and weather and much else that is beyond his control. It is only the suspension of disbelief that allows him to plant again every spring, to wade out into the season's uncertainties. Before long the pests will come, the storms and droughts and blights, as if to remind him just how imperfect the human power implied by those pristine rows really is.

The ivy and microstegium have gone underground. Not for good but for a season, and that will have to be good enough.

Beyond our control

Tucker and I were part of the packed house at the Barn at Fearrington tonight waiting for Elizabeth Edwards to speak about her book, Saving Graces. Keebe Fitch, the mistress of ceremonies, came on stage early--about 15 minutes early. A good sign? No. Mrs. Edwards' plane had been "turned back" at LaGuardia, and she would not be with us after all. Keebe put her cell phone up to a microphone and we were able to hear Mrs. Edwards herself say she was sorry and she'd reschedule as soon as could. Meanwhile, she said, do the southern church thing and get to know the person next to you. Which we did, sort of.

So it goes.

An abandoned farmhouse caving in under the pressure of kudzu is only a taste, but a pretty good first taste, of planet Earth without people.

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.
[. . .]

Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF₄, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it.
But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

Meanwhile on our occupied planet, there are better and worse places to have a baby.

From age to age

As birthday season approaches, there's nothing funny about this photoshop experiment. (Via kottke.org.)

Near and far

Our neighbor Scott Madry makes the front page of the Raleigh N&O today for his sophisticated archaeological uses of Google Earth.

We didn't make it to Greensboro for ConvergeSouth. But it sounds like a big success.

Deconstructing Dennis

Tucker was not amused by a cartoon in today's paper. "It takes antiintellectualism and wraps it up in color, packaging it up for kids who can barely read. It reinforces stereotypes like, for example, that everybody hates the smart girl (depicted wth glasses and buck teeth), and that boys like football." (Click image to enlarge.)

Revisionist history at UNC

Today is University Day at UNC--a birthday celebration. The afternoon event was the official launching of a new "virtual museum" of UNC history. Created by Annette Cox with the support of the Center for the Study of the American South and the University Library, it is meant to begin to address glaring omissions in the story the university has told about its own history--including, notably, its active participation in the institution of slavery and, after the war, the political movement for white supremacy. Chancellor Moeser initiated this project after the conversations a couple of years ago about Cornelia Phillips Spencer and her place in university history.

"This is not revisionist history," proclaimed the chancellor by way of introduction. He meant (he went on to say) that it wasn't glossing things over or leaving things out. I wondered if any of the historians next up on the panel would challenge this assertion. In fact, Harry Watson was quick to do so. "Normally, historians make progress by a process of revision and revisionism," he said. "I hope this is an example of good revisionism in process." Historians know that all history is revisionist history.

The web site is pretty great. Take a look around.

Langston Hughes with Chapel Hill bookstore owner Tony Buttitta, 1932.

Hakluyt and Woolf: a rare combination

I always get a kick out of the Bauman Rare Books ad on the back of the NYT book review, but this week it's more in the nature of the pleasure of finding a message hidden in plain sight; which I will share.

The featured book is a truly rare first edition of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries (1599), offered for $60,000. Its publication is described as a crucial step toward the founding of the British Empire:

While serving in Paris as a member of Queen Elizabeth I's embassy to France, Richard Hakluyt repeatedly heard the English derided for their comparative lack of accomplishment on the sea compared to other nations. But Her Majesty's Sailing Ships had passed through the Strait of Magellan, traversed the Pacific, established trade with sultans and czars, and, most triumphantly, circumnavigated the globe under the bold and brazen leadership of Francis Drake. Determined that England be accorded her rightful place as first among sea-going nations, he undertook what no one had done before: to collect in one book and present to the world the most comprehensive collection of England's accomplishments of geographical exploration and discovery. Much was at stake, as the race to claim predominance in the New World was on, and Hakluyt, with his peers Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, worked tirelessly to promote the cause. The inclusion by Hakluyt of hundreds of accounts of discovery by other nations spurred Elizabeth's ambitions and helped lay the foundations of empire.

On the same page, a first edition of A Room of One's Own (1929) is offered for $9,500, "signed by Woolf in purple ink."

It wasn't a first edition of Hakluyt that Virginia Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, brought home to her from the library; as she tells us, it was "those five cumbrous volumes in which the printers of 1811 had thought good to entomb" him. As she recalled in her diary in December 1929, her father "must have been 65; I 15 or 16, then; & why I don't know, but I became enraptured, though not exactly interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I used to read it & dream of those obscure adventurers, & no doubt practised their style in my copy books." By the time she comes to write a review of a study of Hakluyt by the early 20th century scholar Walter Raleigh, she understands that the volume is "founded on hard truth, that the voyagers were substantial English seamen, and that the whole makes a consecutive chapter of English history"; yet still, what she finds most compelling is the poetry and imagery of discovery, as in this passage from (the original) Sir Walter Raleigh on reaching Guiana:

I never saw a more beautifull countrey, nor more lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plaines adjoyning without bush or stubble, all faire greene grasse, the ground of hard sand easie to march on, either for horse or foote, the deere crossing in every path, the birdes towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand severall tunes, cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation pearching in the rivers side, the aire fresh with a gentle Easterly winde, and every stone that we stouped to take up, promised either golde or silver by his complexion.

As Alice Fox was the first to notice, the sense of imagination that Woolf gathered from Hakluyt's Voyages launched her upon a lifetime of reading and reinterpreting the Renaissance in inventive, productive, even progressive ways: not as the Renaissance of Burckhardt and Empire, but more as an imagined site for personal and, potentially, cultural reinvnention. In stark contrast to T.S. Eliot, who, reading and writing at the same time, drew from the Renaissance a notion of "order" from which the modern world was in the steady process of deteriorating, Woolf relished in the moment of discovery when nothing was fixed and all worlds could be new. No doubt mistakenly--but with a compelling optimism--she persisted in seeing the Renaissance as a time "far more elastic" than her own--even finding within it the roots of an unfulfilled promise of democratic equality.

Luckily for me, just as I was starting to write my dissertation on Woolf and the Renaissance, a microfilm copy of her voluminous papers held by the New York Public Library was issued. It wasn't hard to talk the UNC library into buying it, and it was great fun to be the first to use it. It saved me a trip or several to New York; but on the other hand, I still have never seen the originals, which are written in various colors of ink, including purple. A whole layer of interpreation flattened by the microfilm camera!

A copy of A Room of One's Own "signed by Woolf in purple ink" would be quite a thing to discover.

Thoughts of war, and more

Just in time, I hope, for the Robert Frost edition, the mail brings an offer of a free issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. As everybody knows, a grad student at U.Va. recently found an unpublished poem of Frost's called "War Thoughts at Home." Though the Frost estate won't let the poem be published in full, you can read some interesting essays about it in the VQR online, including a fascinating one by Robert Stilling, the grad student. See also Scott McLemee's response to the discovery.

VQR bonus: a moving essay by Chapel Hill's own Alan Shapiro on his troubled, talented son.

UPDATE: Following Garth's tracks, here's the Frost poem.

Eyes and ears on the prize

"Eyes on the Prize," the first two episodes of which aired on PBS last night, seems more and more remarkable as time goes on--if only for the inevitable reason that its principals keep dying, making the stories they told all the more valuable. Take just the first episode, which included the Montgomery bus boycott: Georgia Gilmore died in 1990; Constance Baker Motley died a year ago. And so on.

The web site that goes along with the series add considerable value: listen to the freedom songs yourself.

Par for the parking deck

In the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, it's been a long time since you could play miniature golf. That may change soon.

THE ARLINGTON PARKS and recreation division is currently identifying the level of interest of private companies to develop and operate a miniature golf facility next to the Ballston Common Mall. The course would be located on a one-acre parcel of land at the intersection of Glebe Road and Randolph Street, in front of the mall's parking garage.

. . .

The course will be "integrated into the fabric of Ballston," and "will not look like a mini-golf facility on the side of a highway with a 300-foot T. Rex" on the grounds, McPartlin said — adding that county officials have "yet to broach" the subject of whether the course will include a windmill.