Arthur C. Clarke is dead

In a thread on the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, I wrote:

I've spent an awful lot of my life -- in retrospect -- pondering Clarke's speculations and meanderings: wonderful stuff. "9 Billion Names" is one of the most perfect short stories ever written: efficient (his writing was almost always efficient), complex, funny, striking and emotional.

I mentioned Clarke's death to my World History students yesterday, noting that SF like Clarke's is a kind of historical speculation (this is one of my favorite themes) and that the best way to not be surprised about the future is to spend some time thinking seriously about it. I quoted Clarke's Laws and pointed out that the present is the best possible time for us to live in, and the future is our natural destination. An odd position, if you think historians are nostalgists, but most of us aren't; we know the past too well to idolize it.

Ozarque notes that you can read the story here.

Comment elsewhere: Presidential romance

Over at Terry's place, in response to a discussion of presidential remarks to troops in which he said

"I must say, I’m a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

I wrote

[teacher hat] Romance actually used to mean something else entirely: if you look at "the Romantics" in literature and music, there’s actually a very powerful range of emotions going on, many of them very unromantic. The essence of Romanticism was a connection to nature and to our primal, emotional selves, and a rejection of rationality as the core human experience. There is often a fascination with violence in romanticism, as an expression of emotion and as a primal experience. So there’s a very natural connection between adventure/danger and Romanticism.

There’s also a connection between that same fascination with violence (and hyper-masculinity) and fascist aesthetics, which draw much more heavily on Romanticism ("Blood and Soil", etc.) than most people realize. Romanticism is a component of modern nationalism, though the extent of it varies. [/teacher hat]

The implications of this reading of "romantic" are pretty troubling, actually. I’d love to know if these were unscripted comments, because when he goes off script he does put his real self out there sometimes. As someone else said about the same speech, fodder for generations of psych students….

Thursday Lyric: The Last Chance

The portions in italics are spoken, not sung.
The transcription is my own, and I am guessing about punctuation and line breaks.

The Last chance
by Leon Rosselson

It was The Last Chance.
It was a nightclub in the desert called the Last Chance
a cluttered dive of stones and wheels,
it was a refuge for the rootless of the world washed up
like driftwood on the sand
And we were there.
it seemed so long ago.

They came from nowhere.
The lost the broken and the mad, as if from nowhere
they blundered in like blind invaders
while Mahalia boomed a gospel song
and candles blurred the gloom,
they drank and argued till the dawn
had drained the night away.

Among the seekers after oil or truth or a home;
Among the businessmen, the pickpockets and whores,
among the soldiers and the tourists, Some had names, and histories
Meier, with his stone bald head built like a butcher, which he was
He made his money dealing in pork, though not on the Sabbath
They said his parents were killed in Belsen
They said he saw his sister raped
but no one really knew.
Stories swirled about like dust on the desert wind.
You never knew what was true.
but in the end it didn't really matter. There he was.
And Sam, with his mournful expression
and his mobile face like crumpled leather,
there he was, a dancer. Light, light on his feet.
Theirs was a needle match, each trying to outscore the other
Sam out of mischief
Meier out of a desire for victory.
so they came out of opposite corners of the ring in every argument --
everything was an argument.
like the Sinai campaign.
For Meier that was the time of glory.
"That was when we found out we were strong," he said.
"Strong?" shrugged Sam. "Who needs it?"
So Meier pinned his arm behind his back
and forced him to his knees.
"You do, Jew," he said.
The general opinion was that Meier won that round.

They came from nowhere.
The lost the broken and the mad, as if from nowhere.
they blundered in like blind invaders
while Mahalia boomed a gospel song
and candles blurred the gloom
they drank and argued till the dawn
had drained the night away

Do you remember?
the day the Bedouins came to town
I still remember
the women waiting still as stone
their silent shapes cocooned in black against the whitewashed walls
that echoed back the sun to blind the eyes
ghosts from another world

"You know what's wrong with Israel?" said Meier one night.
"I know," said Sam, dancing in grinning. "Too many Arabs, right?"
"Wrong," said Meier, "too many Jews. Look at them.
Rabble. They don't speak Hebrew, half of them. Rabble.
Take the Yemenis: donkey riders.
Never set foot in a bus before they came here.
And their women? all whores."
"What about Rumanians?" Sam threw in obligingly.
"All thieves," said Meier.
"They say all Hungarians are bald", said Sam,
and raised his eyes to the heavens.
Meier ignored him.
"We must forge one nation," he said.
"We must weld the youth into one nation."
"Why?" said Sam. "How?" said Sam.
"In the fire," Meier went on.
"In the heat of battle, we will become one nation.
Under King Solomon, Israel was a great nation,
rich and powerful. One day she will be so again."
Sam sighed. "We are Jews," he said.
"Why should our children turn into Israelis?"
"History loves a winner," said Meier.
"No more guilt. No more fear.
No more being strangers.
No more being different."
"I like being different," Sam said, throwing his arms out.
"I want to be different."
Meier stood up and pointed a thick finger and yelled,
"He thinks he's funny. This Jew thinks he's funny.
No wonder they fed you into the gas ovens."

Do you remember?
the day the Bedouins came to town
I still remember
the women waiting still as stone
their silent shapes cocooned in black
against the whitewashed walls that echoed back the sun
to blind the eyes
ghosts from another world

across the desert,
the road carved southward to the Red Sea through the desert
a cratered moonscape made of sand.
we saw the burning fists of rock
and felt the wind that sucked us dry
and heard those urging, stirring songs:
always new lands to tame

Meier like telling stories of how,
in the War of Independence, he blew up Arab houses.
He knew Sam would become agitated.
It would turn Sam inside out.
"It was not true," he said, "you did not do that."
"Why not?" said Meier, "Facts.
Now there's nothing left for them to return to.
only stones. Let them find homes with their own kind."
"I want nothing to do with such facts," said Sam.
"Where would you be without them?" sneered Meier.
"we made this country," he said. "Before us, what was there?
Marshland, desert.
The promise was to us: the desert shall blossom like a rose."
"They were people," said Sam, "like us, with hopes and dreams."
"Hopes, dreams." Meier spat the words out.
"You think you can buy the future with dreams?"
And he took a pile of notes from his pocket
and threw them on the table.
"There," he said. "Facts, Money. Don't give me your dreams."
Sam turned away and began to find a dance with his feet,
like a child taking its first steps
while Mahalia sang on,
her voice intense with the joy and pain of believing.
But Meier wasn't finished.
"This man is full of dreams," he taunted, "full of could-have-beens:
a dancer he could have been. A mime artist he could have been."
"It's true," said Sam, as he moved and swayed to the music.
"I could have been a great mime artist."
and slowly, his mournful face upturned and his hands outstreched,
he wove a strange shuffling dance,
around the pillers and the wheels and the homemade stools,
round the stolen signpost indicatingRumna 45 kilometers away,
round the lacquered stones and pieces of driftwood
twisted, gnarled and desolated by the wind and the waves.
Meier's stone bald head seemed to swell with fury.
"Displaying himself," he said contemptously. "Where's the dignity?"
And he pushed aside his congac and pulled himself to his feet
and picked up a stone and gripped it in his bunched fist
and in his eyes was a peculiar sort of hatred.
And suddenly, the jangle of noise, the chattering, the shouting,
the laughing, fell away to a whisper; everyone turned to watch.
There was only the sound of Mahalia singing
and the shuffling steps of Sam's dance.
Could we have guessed then how it would be?
Could we have seen then in Meier's eyes those certainties,
Facts: the houses torn apart, the torture, the weeping,
the children burning, the fragmentation bombs, the phosphorous bombs.
Facts: The shortest distance between the past and the future.
But we saw only Meier, stone in his fist,
and waited in silence for what he would do.
"Sit down," he said in a low voice, "sit down."
Then he hurled the stone with all his force,
not at Sam exactly, but still, at him
It smashed against a pillar and clattered to the floor.
Sam froze, stopped dancing.
A silent shake in the candle gloom.
his mournful face crumpled and yellow
It seemed to us he was about to cry,
then he put his arms about his head as if to protect himself,
turning in on himself.
"I want to go home," he said. "I want to go home."

They came from nowhere.
The lost the broken and the mad, as if from nowhere
they blundered in like blind invaders
while Mahalia boomed a gospel song and candles blurred the gloom.
they drank and argued till the dawn had drained the night away.

It was The Last Chance.
It was a nightclub in the desert called The Last Chance
a cluttered dive of stones and wheels
it was a refuge for the rootless of the world
washed up like driftwood on the sand
And we were there.
it was so long ago.

Three Kinds of Politicians

In a Progressive Historians discussion on primary revotes I wrote:

There are three kinds of politicians: those who will sell out their own party to get elected, those who will sell out their own party after they get elected, and party hacks. It's possible to span categories, but not to transcend them.....

Quotations from Tosh #2: For History's Sake

"Because its materials are necessarily partial , and the products emerging from individual minds more partial still, history always has posed and always will pose the sort of problems which give rise to dispute, acrimony, and the writing of hostile reviews. Why, at the very beginning of our science stands the prototype of all these arguments: history had barely begun when Thucydides attacked the methods and purposes of Herodotus. Debates among historians are coeval with the writings of history, and like the heresies of Christianity all the possible positions were worked out quite early, to be repeated in resounding counterpoint through ages of controversy." -- G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 27.

"Historical writings can do harm; they have done so; and any thoughtful historian must at times ask himself whether he has a purpose beyond his own satisfaction." -- G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 27.

"Montaigne pondered on this way of feeling, in the sixteenth century: `Is it nature, or by some error of fantasy, that the seeing of places that we know to have been, frequented or inhabited by men whose memory is esteemed or mentioned in stories doth in some sort move and stir us up as much or more than hearing their noble deeds?'" -- C.V. Wedgwood, "The Sense of the Past," (1957), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 35.

"The exact scientists are a kind of pre-Reformation clergy, and their function is to perform their miracles, to continue their Church, not to make themselves intelligible to laymen: for their control of the means of salvation and damnation makes the lay world so dependent on them that it will tolerate and subsidise them even without understanding. But the humane subjects are quite different from this. They have no direct scientific use; they owe their title to existence to the interest and comprehension of the laity; they exist primarily not for the training of professionals but for the education of laymen; and therefore if they once lose touch with the lay mind, they are rightly condemned to perish." -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, 'History: professional and lay' (1957), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 328-329.

"Lorsque, dans le silence de l’abjection, l’on n’entend plus retentir que la chane de l’esclave et la voix du dlateur; lorsque tout tremble devant le tyran, et qu’il est aussi dangereux d’encourir sa faveur que de mriter sa disgrce, l’historien parat, charg de la vengeance des peuples. [When, in the silence of abjection, one no longer hears the clanking of the chain of slavery or the voice of the informant; when everyone trembles before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to earn his displeasure, the historian appears, responsible for the people’s revenge.]" -- Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Memoires.

Last Night's Debate: a comment (and a change in hiatus policy)

I want to go back to the roots of weblogging a bit. While I'm on hiatus here, I'm still reading and commenting at a number of other blogs. Some of those comments are -- if I may say so myself -- substantial, and I want to keep them in my own space. So I'll be, periodically, possibly even rarely, reproducing a comment I make elsewhere, with a link to the original post as a way of broadening the discussions and keeping track of my own writing.

In an open thread at Ozarque on the lastest Obama-Clinton debate, I wrote this:

I read the transcript (it's faster, for me, and body language doesn't do that much for me, most of the time), and -- aside from sharing the apparently common desire that we find people who are actually serious about politics and policy to serve as moderators -- I was unimpressed. I don't think either of them said anything suprising. I think the Clinton campaign is struggling for results, and the candidate reflects that with complaints about process, fairness, tactics. I think the Obama campaign is trying hard to find a comfortable zone in the uncomfortable gray area between taking a high road and effectively attacking, and some of that struggle was clearly on display.

My concern, at this point, is a strategic one: I want a Democrat to win in November. I'm actually uncommitted to either Clinton or Obama: neither one really has a resume or proposals that are decisively better (and proposals are rarely enacted as-is anyway; if there's one thing I haven't seen in politics in a long time it's realistic discussions of how platforms might become reality), and both are likely to lead moderate and effective administrations. Both camps need to realize that there's a possibility that they might lose, and both camps need to realize that there will be a merging of the campaigns into the general election, and both camps need to know, and act like they know, that one of them will have to stand up and support the other one (and I'm not even talking about the possibility of a VP deal!). Both of them make some noises like they understand this, but they also are maneuvering in ways which make this less likely to work out. Clinton, in particular, has been disturbing me with her much more of a scorched-earth style.

You can comment here, or join the discussion over there. (Ozarque has a large and very smart commentariat: I recommend going over there, frankly. My commenters are brilliant, of course, but few....)

Colors and Textures, discoveries offered without explanation

Quotations from Tosh #1: V. H. Gailbraith

One book I've been using in my senior Historiography course is John Tosh, ed., Historians on History, a reader on major trends and debates. I'm going to continue my quotations series with some material from that. Some of the posts will be from a single chapter; others will collect quotations from multiple chapters. As before, I'll highlight lines I really like.

---

"History is, or ought to be, the least authoritarian of the sciences (if that is the right word). Its essential value lies in the shock and excitement aroused by the impact of the very ways and thought of the past upon the mind, and it is for this reason that actual original documents - themselves a physical survival of that past - exercise such fascination upon those who have caught something of its secret." -- V.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (1964), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 20.

"The lectures and the textbooks are a necessary preliminary, a grammar of the subject; but the purpose of all this grammar is to lead the student himself to the sources, from the study of which whatever power our writing and talking has is derived. Where this object is not achieved, we have failed." -- V.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (1964), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 20.

"To live in any period of the past is to be so overwhelmed with the sense of difference as to confess oneself unable to conceive how the present has become what it is: it is, above all, to regard the study of the original sources not as a preliminary drudgery to the making of 'history' but as its most significant function. Such an attitude, it must be allowed, is not likely to produce a Gibbon even a Macaulay. But if it makes the writing of history far more difficult, it informs the teaching of history with a new life and reality." -- V.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (1964), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 24.

"At present our governors, though well meaning, are still museum-bound and millionaire-minded. At best they are collectors who can be induced to buy, but only to buy exhibition pieces, whose value is a scarcity value. The purchase of old pictures, medieval psalters, original signatures, first editions, and the maintenance of derelict castles and abbeys are a sign of goodwill. But this sub-literate interest in the past, excellent in itself, should be the beginning rather than the end of governmental generosity. ... Not less important than the immediate physical preservation of the original sources of history is the task of putting them into print." -- V.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (1964), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 25.

What you notice.....

Just got back from the American Historical Association meeting and thought I'd share one or two images from the trip. First is a "trying to be subtle" picture of the Gates of Hell... no, actually, it's the mass interview room known as the "Job Register." I think the blur reflects much more accurately how people feel in there than a crisp, sharp shot would have.

I don't think it was deliberate, but can you think of a better name for historians' toiletries?

Speaking of historic, did any of you catch that conjunction of Mars and the Moon on the Full Moon at Christmas? We had a great view, but the pictures weren't what I wanted.

Speaking of natural wonders, I did like the way this travel shot came out.

Starting the New Year with Beauty