Our Trip to New England!

 Directions: Begin by filling in the form on this page with one of each word for the type of word requested.  Then, enter the word into the paragraphs below according to the number requested.  Read the paragraph aloud and ENJOY!!!

1. [a first name] __________________________________________________
2. [proper noun] ________________________________________________
3. [city] ________________________________________________________
4. [person of significance] _______________________________________
5. [past participle] _____________________________________________
6. [body of water] ______________________________________________
7. [family surname] ____________________________________________
8. [U.S. State] _________________________________________________
9. [type of baked good] ___________________________________________
10. [geographic feature] ____________________________________________
11. [city feature] ___________________________________________________
12. [landmark] _____________________________________________________
13. [a number] ___________________________
14. [weather phenomenon] _________________________________________
15. [famous author] ________________________________________________
16. [noun] _________________________________________________________
17. [sinful substance] ______________________________________________
18. [Title of an Important Person] _____________________________________
19. [Home Ec Term] _________________________________________________
20. [adjective] _______________________________________________________
21. [type of water body] _______________________________________________
22. [verb] ____________________________________________________________
23. [popular acronym] _________________________________________________
24. [wet foodstuff] _____________________________________________________

Our Trip to New England!

 

Ah, I remember it like it was 23 or so years ago...  

We three (Mom, Papa, and (1)__________) headed off on (2)_______________ Airlines to fly from Chicago to (3)_________________.  (This would eventually become my first of four trips {so far!} through Boston's Logan Airport - once in 2013 for a Haitian Studies conference at Harvard and later in 2015 and 2019 on Peter Mahler's dime to meet with Carmella Kletijian and (4)______________________________).

We collected our rental car (possibly my first time ever driving a (5)_______________ car!), and were off to drive north up the coast of the (6)______________________.  Our first landmark was passing Kennebunkport, Mass. where the (7)______________________ Family famously had their summer compound.

Further up the coast we stopped in Portland, (8)___________________ and tried their world famous lobster (9)__________________s.  I don't remember quite where we stayed that first night, but I think we continued up and around the Atlantic (10)__________________________.

Our first full day (or one of the days, I don't really remember the timeline), we visited Acadia National Park in Bar (11)______________________, Maine.  Driving into the park (I think), Don & Hope, having recently reached retirement age, bought lifetime passes to any (12)_____________________________ in the entire country, which they have gone on to use (13) ____________ times since that trip in 2001.  

Before leaving Acadia, we saw the famous (14)________________ Hole, and stopped at Bar Harbor Brewing Company before heading north to Bangor, home of famous author. (15)__________________________________.  I recall we stopped at a (16)____________________ shop in Bangor, asking about the whereabouts of Mr. King, but it was before we all had the internet in our pocket, and the book store owner said he liked to be left alone, so I think that's about all we did in Bangor.

We drove west, through New Hampshire (where we learned that the only place you can buy (17)_____________________ in New Hampshire is at designated State (**17**)__________________ stores!  Arriving in Vermont, we stopped at one of (18)________________ Jim Jefford's campaign offices, who in 2001 was the only Independent Senator serving in the US Senate, after he had left the Republican Party earlier that spring!  (Jeffords retired in 2007, and was replaced by Bernie Sanders, who has continued serving as an Independent from Vermont).

One of our nights (or our one night?!?!) in Montpelier, Vermont, we had dinner at NECI, The New England (19)_______________ Institute, and had what has to have been the (20)______________meal I had ever had up to that point!  Fine dining / haute cuisine - what a meal!

We drove west from there to Burlington, on the shores of (21)________________ Champlain, which at the time was (22)_____________-ing to become an additional Great Lake, so that school kids across the country would have to remember C.H.O.M.E.S. as a mnemonic for the Great Lakes, instead of the much easier (23)_____________________. (I'm pretty sure there's VHS footage somewhere in the Seeger House of Joel throwing some serious shade at Lake Champlain, where he's shooting footage of a big puddle, and calling it Lake Champlain... classic!).

We also drove into Canada, and to Montreal (which was not so many kilometers farther), where we ate the great Canadian cuisine, Poutine (french fries with (24)__________________ on it), and Joel drove the wrong way down a one way street.  Whooopsy-Daisy!

Sorry, this is all I really remember about our trip all those years ago... Half of my life ago just now.  I do remember that it was a lot more fun than I was expecting - seeing all the things we saw, and being with you both right when you'd retired and had such freedom to travel and see all the things you hadn't gotten around to yet!

 

 

Happy Syttende Mai! - Happy Every Day!

Today is Syttende Mai (17 May), which is the founding day of modern, constitutional Norway (officially Constitution Day).  It feels like a super-arbitrary day most everywhere in the world except, perhaps, Scandinavia and Northern Minnesota where my people hail from.

Every country has their day - as I started this post, it occurred to me that Haiti's Independence Day is January 1st (1 January 1804), the official end of the Haitian Revolution.  Starting on January 1st, I figured I would start another perpetual post* which would function as a calendar outlining founding dates of the countries of the world.  I'll start with the one's I know and think of off-hand (which is these two, plus the 4th of July^), and build from here (I'll appreciate anyone's input in the comments section!, or I'll add as I notice them going about my daily life):

January

1 - Haitian Independence Day

May

17 - Syttende Mai (Norway's Constitution Day)

July

1 - Somalia's Independence Day

1 - Canada Day (formerly Dominion Day until 1982 - which sounds much more bad-ass, Canada and you may want to consider switching back)**

4 - United States of America's Independence Day

September

16 - Mexican Independence Day (Celebration of the Mexican War of Independence with this date marking the start of the Hidalgo Revolt in 1810)

December

1 - Romania's Great Union Day (marking the 1918 unification of Transylvania, Bessarabia, Bukovina & The Romanian Kingdom)

* a perpetual post is one on Roman Numeral J that gets updated over the course of months & years, and may never truly be finished, but is a work in progress toward some declared end goal (e.g. the Lost Last Fives, the Vodka Ranking, and the Star Trek Chronology).

^July 4th feels significant - until you spend an American Independence Day outside of the United States.  America does a pretty good job of lampooning itself most of the time, but that's nothing until you experience a bunch of people from all over the world throwing you and your American friends a party that is heavily sarcastic (and always features a sparkler, which i think is the only firework that is partly legal in most sensible countries)

** it's a small sample size thus far, but on discovering that both Canada Day & Somalia's Independence Day both occur on the same day, I wonder if we will come to discover that a disproportionate amount of founding days will be on the first of the month.  Like the start of a month feels like a good 'reset button' when you're starting up a new country (as opposed to most countries "happening" on some random date).

Game, Seth, Match

I watched the surprisingly fun The Mummy reboot (or sequel?, i couldn't quite tell...).  It was pretty immediately forgettable, but harmless.  I'm surprised to read that it was so actively hated (except perhaps because it stars Tom Cruise).

Most notable to me was the inclusion of Set (or Seth) as a major player.  Seth was nearly my first name, I'm told - being my father's preference. 

Names have always been of interest to me.  Ever since I read A Wizard of Earthsea, and contemplated the importance of the true name of a thing (or being or person).  In the world of Earthsea, knowing a true name gives you the power over a thing. 

When i was young, i was disappointed in my middle name, Seth...  I kept it a secret when i could (in the reasonless way that kids tend to do).  Joel was a handle I was proud of - rare enough so i only knew a few of them.  It was biblical, meaning "Yaweh is God" (Jo-el), and had a short, simple, and somewhat interesting prophet narrative in there beside Amos.  Seth, on the other hand, was born - seemed like a replacement for his dead brother.  Other than a whole lot of begetting, which led to Noah, his role seemed pretty insignificant in life.

But then i learned that Seth was also Set - Egyptian, exotic... and he was a god of chaos, perhaps not of mischief, but he seems like he would probably get on well with Vodou's Gede (i didn't necessarily know all that when i first learned who my namesake could be).  

The eclipse, Hegel, and the American Road

I logged 2400 miles of American roads, 14 hours of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 3 full Brewers game broadcasts (all the enemy radio feed on XM), and 1 total eclipse as seen from Glendo State Park in Wyoming.

I woke up on Sunday morning and decided to forgo my Midwestern eclipse experience plans because the weather looked uncertain for optimal viewing.  En route to Deadwood, SD, I listened through the Preface (very familiar!), the Introduction and the early parts of A. Consciousness. 

My copy of Phenomenology was safely at home on my bookshelf, sitting right next to Susan Buck-Morss' excellent Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (which I have read in its entirety!).  I bought a used copy (originally Elizabeth Trejack's it seems) at a book shop in Minnesota.  It was highlighted and underlined in a few very specific sections (it opens automatically to Lordship and Bondage), and otherwise appears largely untouched.

I first learned of the existence of a fellow called Hegel and his friend "Geist" on my first day of classes at the University of Chicago.  I read the greatest hits from Hegel's masterwork, and nodded knowingly when his influence on later theorists was discussed.  On arrival to UW-M, I heard less about Hegel (though there was quite a lot more mention of Foucault, who I only heard come up once at UChicago, and that was in a joke from a Zadie Smith reading about introducing someone at an academic party as "... she likes Michel Foucault and costume jewelry"), but dutifully put Phenomenology and Buck-Morss' book on my prelim reading list.

Naturally, like most good reading lists, I did not read most of most of the books on the list, but excel at the academic art of talking about books you have not read.  I have also not read that book, though I've held it in my hands, and skimmed through bits, and I know people who have read it.

During my long drives of the last several days, I've read through the first 513 paragraphs of Hegel's work, starting and stopping and occasionally paying more and less attention as one is wont to do when reading or listening or existing at all, I suppose.  I think this might be the best way to read Phenomenology, not as one's only or deep reading of the text, but as a way to have read through it all.  As I drove, I would make notes of paragraphs I wanted to return to (don't worry, the highways of South Dakota and Wyoming are sparsely populated, even when there's an eclipse on!).  When I was first reading Shakespeare (or first reading it in college, I can't remember which), someone (either Jerry Davis or Mary Hull Mohr) gave me the advice to "just keep going" when you're reading it and not sure you're absorbing.  It's reading as muscle memory, and the deep read of certain sections can come later (or earlier!). 

Hearing "of Lordship and Bondage" after reading through the entirety of Consciousness changes the focus of the passage.  It makes the easy reading of Hegel as writing the heroic history of Haiti less easy and fancy free.  I've come to trust Buck-Morss, and don't think her reading is at all off the mark.  That said, I think it is important to remain aware of our academic practice of the use of texts to suggest meaning and significance.

*.  *.  *

I first learned of the Great American Eclipse earlier this year, and almost in the same moment committed in my mind that I would be there to see it.  I took a few days vacation, but made few other plans, except to choose Beatrice, Nebraska as my viewing sight.  Tim & Jen & the kids live in Omaha, and actually lived in Beatrice shortly after they got married.  When the day got close, weather across the Midwest started looking dicey, and I headed west.

A total eclipse is an awe-inspiring sight, truly an opportunity to see the most awesome, magnificent vision available on earth.  An eclipse is also a random conflation of events - a new moon that aligns with the earth and sun; a sun for a planet that is about 400 times larger than the planet's moon, which is about 400 times closer than that same sun (so they take up about the same amount of sky space).  Also, we also happen to be in the small window of time, cosmically speaking, that allows this confluence.

I've been struggling to describe what I saw, or what the experience was like, or why it was worth the trip.  Finding significance in the random confluence of hunks of rock hurtling through the galaxy is what we do as humans.  Making meaning from bringing texts, histories, moments - that's what humanists do.  We live in a strange confluence of psychology, philosophy, astronomy, physics, history, sociology, geology, chronology and on and ology.

My thoughts of late have been turning back toward the super-modern, and the importance of the small.  I'm still working at making meaning from the experience of the eclipse, and from reading Hegel on the way to and from seeing the eclipse, and the observations and thoughts I had about Americans and Trump and Mt. Rushmore and history on the way to and from seeing the eclipse.  I expect that I will continue to try to build this meaning for quite some time.

What I learned or have built or have decided for now is that my phenomenology of totality has provided me some perspective on our present American experiment.  We are a strange and strained people, but I still think this is all just crazy enough to work. 

Another, Better Four-Year

It's been four years since the massive earthquake destroyed much of the capital city of Haiti.  News outlets love anniversaries and there have been plenty of retrospective 'where are they four years after' and 'where did the money go' articles popping up over the last few days, so I don't want to spend a lot of space here railing against the injustices the West has done to Haitians since goudou-goudou (and the injustices Haitians themselves continue carrying out against other, poorer, Haitians).

My Sunday started off strangely, with my wife's clock radio going off at the usual early weekday time, and hearing the voice of my friend and mentor, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, speaking to me from the darkness.  He had been interviewed on the show On Being some years ago and was rebroadcast this morning.  The interview is fascinating and a useful primer on Haitian Vodou, but hearing the words spoken pre-earthquake

Resilience is not always a virtue...

*   *   *

9/20/2017
Returning to this post some years later, I don't quite know what it was meant to be about, but I had tagged it "travel", and had been to Haiti in late 2013.  I think i thought to provide some commentary on the progress (or lack thereof) from the time of the disaster, and a bit of the socio-economic and political superstructure that contributed to the depth and complexity of a "natural" disaster like this one...

Here's a video of me driving around Haiti!

Ayiti e poblem a pale

text here


*   *   *
October 2018

This post was a title, and that's it, but there was a lot here.  Written not so long after I had studied Haitian (Creole) and 2 years after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince.  The title is a pun - a joke - but also a sad truth.

Pale in Haitian Creole (or what i like to call Haitian, because it is the language of Haiti) means language.  It also means speaking or conversation.

Haitian is a language of double and triple (and more) entendre.  Haitians love to speak in adages, cliches, old knowledge.

Haiti's (Ayiti) problem (poblem) is largely a problem of language.  Haitians speak Haitian (Creole or kreyol).  Rich Haitians are taught French at school when they are young, and hold it against the rest of the population.

This was going to be a post about this central reality of Haiti, but also that Haiti's central problem is honest conversation.  

Bitter Salt

I love summer tent pole movies as much as anyone.  I enjoy it when I'm blown away by one (say, Dark Knight), pleasantly surprised by them (Iron Man), or even when I just get what I expect out of it

*   *   * 

December 2017
Gosh, i do vaguely recall this summer that i spent in Miami while studying at FIU.  I saw a lot of movies.  Salt which i honestly recall not at all except that i think it was a movie that Angelina Jolie was in...

I remember telling my Haitian Creole class the following day during some Q&A exercises that i had gone to see Salt, and everyone thought it was pretty funny, because it was presumed i'd just gone to see Angelina Jolie in the movie... I think i went to see the random action flick because i'd seen pretty much all the movies that summer living alone in West Miami.

Also, i presume Salt was going to be the movie that i got what i expected out of it... If not, this was poised to be a much more complicated post than i originally thought.

In a Sunburned Land

Hello faithful readers!

I am arrived in Miami, living in a condo near Florida International University where I am spending the next 6 weeks studying Haitian Creole.


*   *   *


February 2019
Wow, i seemed so positive and upbeat at the outset here.

On my first night in Miami, i broke the bed.  I was sub-renting an apartment off West Flagler Street near 97th, and staying inamongst the stuff of a Chinese professor who'd left for the summer.  It was minimally furnished, and the bed was a cheaper-than-IKEA structure.  When i first lay down on the bed uncarefully, it cracked, but didn't break.  The rest of the summer i slept sorta spread-eagle hoping to balance the weight so it wouldn't fully collapse.

That summer i saw every movie in theatres.  I ate Papa John's pizza so often that the crew knew me by name.  I ate at Denny's, because they had free wifi.  I had Netflix DVDs delivered to me in Miami nearly every day - because i was on a 3-Disc plan and i was finishing one or more almost every day.  I took the bus (and waited for the bus in the heat, my god, the heat) and got a used bike cheap, which i eventually abandoned for broken next to a gas station. 

But i didn't know all of this when i started this post.  I spent a summer learning Haitian Creole - and learned it well.  To this day i can read and write and understand and speak Haitian.  On my return to Milwaukee, i was asked to return to Mahler, almost magically, and things began, slowly, to turn around.

This was an important summer in my life i think - i still think.  I wrote my dissertation in my head over the course of this summer.  It's every bit as good as it was when i first came across it in the ether.

"Building a New Country"

*Note: Obviously, first and foremost, when talking about Haiti today, we need to think first about what we can do to help. Please go to www.clintonbushhaitifund.org or the American Red Cross to help...

In an interview this morning on Meet the Press, Bill Clinton (alongside W.) stated that what our project (or perhaps 'their project') in Haiti really is, is not so much "rebuilding their nation" after this most recent disaster, but more about "building a new nation". This distinction gets washed out in parsing out the term 'nation-building'. Given Haiti's unique history, from its founding, its early isolation, the crippling "debt" it incurred for revolting against French Slavery the idea of the United States imposing on Haiti any kind of political plan for moving forward is at best problematic. I'm not sure Haiti can fit into traditional models of 'development', 'democratizing', or 'nation-building' and attempts to apply cookie-cutter methods have resulted in (and will continue to result in) an undermining (an erosion, I suppose) of what is essentially Haitian.

It seems what's troubling, perhaps moreso in Haiti than elsewhere, is the familiar post-colonial critique of developing determinism, that is, the idea of a developed nation helping a less developed nation become more like the developed nation. With critiques of Haiti's very culture (from both the certifiably insane & purportedly credible) coming swiftly on the heels of unimaginable devastation,

During the interview, Bush was smiling way too much. And he used the word "Scheister"... He said that the advice that he'd pass on to the Obama is to not be discouraged by the fact that you can't always get aid moving quickly.

Meet the Press' historical setup of the U.S.' relationship with Haiti started in 1934, at the end of the U.S. occupation. It then goes on to 1994 when Clinton sent troops in to Haiti to re-instate Jean Bertrand-Aristide to power, skipping over 60 years of intentional ignorance - most of which involved the Pop & Jr. Duvalier regimes, which the US allowed to exist because it generally allowed us to institute our contemporary agricultural bill, which created favorable tariffs (for us, not them, natch) and convinced Haiti that its future was in 1) tourism 2) sugar cane (i.e. rum) 3) coffee or cotton or some crop that the US doesn't want to grow and sell you and heavily inflated prices (i.e. rice).

Untold Richness: A Knee-Jerk Review of Alan Lomax in Haiti

Even on picking up this 10-disc, 2-book boxed set of the music of Haiti recorded in 1936-7 by folklorist Alan Lomax you are impressed by its weight (both literally and figuratively). The front cover sports the statement "Recordings for the Library of Congress". On the back, a sticker on the shrink wrap is the promise of the box' contents, books, music discs, a map with Lomax' original travel notes, and film footage of their visit.

But as with all good boxed sets, it is in the actual opening and exploring that you get most of your value. The first thing you notice opening the over-sized cigar box is the smell. There is a scent of sweet tobacco (already, unfortunately fading in mine) as if the box had been found and repurposed by Lomax himself and sent straight to you from 1937. The Notebook: Haiti 1936-1937 is attached to the cover, in a separate sleeve. The title is handwritten and the book looks like a bound notebook. It is a collection of letters, notes, and commentaries written by (and to) Lomax during his travels.

The second book contains the liner notes, written by Gage Averill and consists of lyrics (translated and in the original Creole), notes and pictures. A foreword is written by Lomax' daughter (?), Anna Lomax Wood and the entire project is impressively intricate and rigorous. The map (as well as two mini-photos, which seem tossed in as an afterthought) provide an oddly exciting tactility to the experience of listening to the lo-fi recordings.

On the whole, the set is an invitation to a lost time, just a few years after the U.S. Occupation ended (1934), and in being transported, you're also given the opportunity to understand that world thanks to the copious notes and commentaries.