Re Michelle Marsh NPR Interview re Cuba and Race

Old Post:

Eye on the NBC Olympics' Coverage -- Part I -- Cubans are Again Revealed to be Black People

It is so fortunate that we get to call call them "Cubans," since, "some black people descended from the field slaves in sugar esates" is not as nice. And wouldn't it seem odder than even it does now, were we to rename them thus, when their Olympic teams come and kick our a** ?

Wikipedia

The fear, the fear to say anything against the collective wisdom! Our modern God!

Way before Nicholson Baker it was not cool to talk against Wikipedia as a researching scholar.

So I'll do it.

How often do I encounter the student gaze that says: Why is your particular selection of material, stories, illustrations, and texts, being given to me instead of the story I find elsewhere, like on Wikipedia?

The God of Democratic Knowledge!

Because we dabble in knowledge according to a more ancient formula than popular acclaim. Alright, a medieval formula.

If you look up Harar, on Wikipedia, you learn about an ancient crossroads town in Ethiopia still with its city wall or "jubal," and you learn that they throw meat to the hyenas outside the city walls for sport.

All in all I like the entry. I don't know whether it is really all so, but I suspect it is.

You look up Ndebele, on the other hand . . .

There is a serious problem here. It's asinine.  Way behind the basic research that's gone on for two decades, etc. So is the answer a GoogleBooks search?

All Hail Google!

From the students, the question is, If your story is better than the common story, Dr Whoever you are, why hasn't it been distilled and made available to me already in one set of copy-able texts or texts and images (aka "the internet"), -- -- why, in short, is what you are selling not already popular enough to be bought wholesale and be published and accessible at the touch of a button?

As part of "the knowledge out there," the objective facts about so many things that just "are"?Because isn't that the way things work? No? Does that mean you are an elitist?

Dr. Landau, isn't what everyone thinks happened more important than what you think happened?

Dr. Landau, isn't what everyone else thinks happened what I should be learning, because that's what the rest of the world is going to "test" me on? -- and what do you mean by speaking about subversive knowledge?

Really the virtual reality of consensus information is extremely vulnerable to being "twisted" or "bent," as Roland Barthes said about complex packages of already-known symbols which "depoliticize" the world.

Oh, did I say Wikipedia?  Their short and clear analysis of Barthes's book somehow misses this point.

The Democracy of Right! Ionesco, come back.

"The real story" is . . .

How far ahead of the curve can a University history lecture course on Africa take us, for understanding the history of the continent in some meaningful way? -- That a website or a website "slide and lecture" web course can't do better? In a world of immediate "information" without provenance, without speakers, without implications for speech, without any requirement to read to the end of the page?

We are based on text. Wikipedia is a post-print age concept: a palimpsest of a 360 degree bubble lens wrapping the earth in words.  It is not a text.

So there it is now.  Robert Darnton, they bought you out with that library.  I'm selling harder than ever, and I still refer to our "library," but I hear the roar getting louder, the police boats are catching up.

Pit stop number one: Publish book.

Pit stop number two: Stop caring.

On Board the Banville with the Barbary Pirate 1609/2009

They said to the Barbary pirate, We are not going to let you go.

Isn't it pretty obvious, that the answer to why things got tense, is, the man who came aboard the US boat to "negotiate" was told, "You are not going anywhere."

Meaning, "We are not going to negotiate: you are to be treated like a common criminal in the midst of a criminal act."

No wonder the "situation got noticeably worse," as the admiral said earlier, when it did.

The situation got bad because it became clear to the pirates with the captain in the lifeboat and the man on the Banville that they were not going to be offered safe passage away from the flotilla, to which, even then, they were under tow.  On a line, like a fish.

Immediately the captain's life was correctly adjudged to be in danger and they killed the three pirates.

Y

After Y, another part of the day begins.  I glance at my watch: 5:00 pm.  Y came about quite because a martini or two in the evening proved insupportable.  I am a migraine headache target with any kind of alkool (p. 44), it turns out, even the Reservoral or whatever it is in it.  Unless I absorb an Advil (Pain Free Living!) and a two tall glasses of water, and then . . .

Y offers no panacea, but then there are no panaceas.  On the other hand, you can't be a champion swimmer who drinks, not really; and you can't be a functioning white collar creative pedagogic scholar father husband homeowner if you are depressed or (see above) sleep deprived.  Sadly for me, virtually a nondrinker, they say, yes they do, that up to three drinks per night boosts your memory and wards off Alzheimer's Disease. Or maybe not.

A neurophysics person once told me that it is still not entirely clear how alcohol affects human cells, or exactly what it is doing.  I was surprised.  Isn't it well known if f*cks you up?

No one who treasures the necktie and the right to have people in central Africa killed in the name of commodity imports, is going to be pleased with the anti-bullshit factor in a little Y.  They would much, much rather that the men drank, drank to forget, forget, forget.

Yes, investigate

And, solve the Kashmir crisis by pressuring India, so we can stop Nuclear Pakistan from backing the Taliban and simultaneously drawing Indian aggression leading to another major war.  Then, investigate and prosecute the criminals in our government who ordered torture so we can get this behind us.

My state of mind

Every day, actually, since 9/11, but more as I get older: that the world could turn to shit in a blurry, fire-filled instant, and I would not even have enough time to give it meaning.

Nelson Mandela is still alive because . . .

Perhaps because he was in good shape, and then, just when his fighter's muscles would have begun to turn to fat, were he to have led his country as a free man, he was forced to live for 27 years as an adult with a low-protein, low-calorie diet, and daily physical labor. Notwithstanding the evil of it, Madiba's resulting TB, etc.  One cannot imagine President Zuma living into his 90s.

Writing about Van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies for the South African Historical Journal

The third time, may be the last. After a very friendly review I wrote as part of a collective of reviewers, about John Iliffe's book, Honour in African History, among whom was Clifton Crais, who wrote a distinctly less plaudit-laden review, I was asked to review The Fox and the Flies, by van Onselen, either alone in a review essay or as part of a group. I said I would be pleased to do it as a review essay. I am sure the idea was to send the review of this book out to a person disposed in a kindly fashion toward Van Onselen. I was indeed friendly in my disposition, and one can check my blog below. But as I read the book in question, it became clear to me that something was not working very well. The same plodding rhythm that gave a quotidian feeling to The Seed Is Mine, the biography of Kas Maine, was irksome in this biography of Joe Silver, the South African kidnapper, pimp and thug.  His life was not leading anywhere.  The scenery was great, but the character in it was strangely dead.  The reason for this was, Van Onselen had become convinced that the true identity of Silver (i.e. that of Joseph Lis, of Kielce, Poland) was "Jack the Ripper," that, in fact, it was Lis who had done the Ripper killings.  So he intuited a psychopathology for Silver's later life, thereupon. 

I wrote about the book, and the effect on the action and focus of the book of Van Onselen's understanding that Silver was the Ripper; and then, I evaluated that evidence, and refrained from any unnecessary criticism beyond that. I did however compare his previous treatments of the same material. And I asked questions any social historian would ask, about the "vice trade" and the parameters of "whiteness" in turn of the century Johannesburg, and so on.

When I'd first submitted a draft, a somewhat inferior and less careful version of what the South African Historical Journal ended up publishing, I was presented with a commentary from an unknown reader who appeared to me to be gate-keeping in a really obvious way. I was pushed to clarify that I was not accusing Van Onselen of anti-semitism, which I duly did. (CvO is not an anti-semite.) I was pushed toward some unknown rhetorical point about "global" connections and other matters, voiced as if to suggest I entirely recast the argument and structure of my review-essay. I made a few more changes and clarifications, and then said (e-mailed) something like, "Look. It appears someone over there does not want to publish my essay but it is not going to change that much. Maybe he or she should write their own review."

So yesterday I got the journal issue in the mail (they sent two copies), with a thank you note from Cynthia Kros.  In the journal, the review essay is there, followed by Jonathan Hyslop's first "book review," which is of the same book, CvO's Fox and the Flies. My essay is twelve pages long. Hyslop's is four. I wonder, did Hyslop see my review essay in advance, over there in the University of Witwatersrand, and indeed comment to me under the cloak of anonymity, asking for more than I could deliver, before drafting his review?  And if so, would that be why Hyslop's essay reads as if it were a response to my essay?

Hyslop's argument is for the importance of the book insofar as it is a portrait of Joseph Silver and his milieu over an extended period of time.  My essay addressed the evidence for thinking Silver a psychopath, for thinking him befuddled (tertiary syphilis), for thinking him The Ripper. Most of all my essay was about what happens to the framework and the interpretation when Silver's actions are made reflective of an unarticulated young manhood spent in the alleys of Whitechapel, London town, cutting and hacking at women in the coal fog.

Hyslop also suggests Silver may not be the Ripper by the evidence van Onselen presents and makes his own criticism (of the book's length and style) that (at least in the finished version of the essay) I did not.

The chair's secretary called me to ask for the link that would take one to the essay.  I told her I did not think the University of Maryland subscribed to the South African Historical Journal electronically.  It is a Taylor and Francis journal we pay to collect in print form.  I then sat down in my office and did a search and found that I had "Open Access," a green light, to journals published by Taylor and Francis as a UMD user, according to what I could see on screen, and so I opened up the most recent issue, issue 61, 1 (2009), and I could indeed open Eric  Worby's essay and others in the issue.  Only my own essay was "not available" for Pdf. or any other viewing outside the abstract.

The chair's secretary then e-mailed me with a link that indeed did deposit my essay on the screen, followed by a banner proclaiming the UMD right of way.  I couldn't figure out how she navigated there.

Today that link no longer brings the article, just the blocked abstract page.  One has to get onto the site after signing in as a registering user, and then search the journal for Landau, and then toggle on that.  Otherwise my essay is off limits.  Again, this link works only if you are all signed in:

Here for Landau essay on Jack the Ripper.

Even if we did subscribe to Taylor and Francis journals, the electronic reader can only see Hyslop's response, not my provocation.  Fix that, hey, SAHJ?  In all fairness, after letting Hyslop re-proclaim Van Onselen's importance, don't bury the point of view you found obnoxious but somehow fundamentally sound on factual and interpretive grounds.

Thanks, SAHJ!

Win Ben Stein

Very nice man.  As usual, generous, interested in others, one forgets even to say, "how are your family doing?" etc. as he is usually asking the questions.  Has zero confidence in the TARP expenditures, says (on TV, in the NYT, also) that eliminating mark-to-market rules would have accomplished just as much with no cost to the taxpayer.  How sad, if this is so. 

Oh, you, bearded man on the Glenn Beck program

You will look very outmoded in your video footage you saying one world government is not possible not in our constitution not lawful, when, in about two hundred years, we finally figure it all out and get serious