When I was 16 or 17, I played ultimate frisbee every saturday afternoon at a field several miles from my house. I would drive there on my motorbike and on the way home would often stop at the local market to buy dinner. One night I was going home, it must have been later in the year because it was getting dark early, and I bought fried chicken and sticky rice. Back on the highway, I stopped at a roundabout to turn around to go home. As I was waiting for an opening in the traffic I heard a crashing sound and looked behind me to see people and a motorbike flying through the air, and then skidding along the road at high speed.
I immediately pulled off the road and went over to the first woman, who was mostly delirious and scratched up, but probably not very hurt. I carried her to a roadside restaurant where some people cleaned her off with rags. She'd bled on my bag, and I think I had some on my hand, and thought about AIDS. In hindsight, it may not have been smart for someone like me (totally without medical training) to move her, but I don't think it did any real harm. I dont remember if there was a little girl, too, but I think there may have been. I left the woman with some of the Thais and went over to the second woman. By this time, there were plenty of people crowding around on the road and it was starting to rain. The second woman was bleeding from her head (none of them were wearing helmets), and there was a puddle as thick as ketchup around her head.
I must have had a cloth, because I remember I was going to hold it to her head to staunch the blood flow, but the Thais nearby stopped me, and I couldn't understand how we could all stand there and watch her bleed out of her head, and no one would touch her or help. I still don't know why, if it was fear of disease, or of touching a dying person, or of liability, or some medical reason, but I still feel ashamed that I didnt do more to help. Eventually an ambulance came and took them away, and I went home.
A week or two later I took some friends by and showed them where it had happened, and there was still a blood stain on the road where the woman's head had been. I haven't told this story to many people, not when it happened or since. I'm not sure why. I don't think of it very often, but I was thinking about it today for some reason.
Another night, after a school dance, I was driving to a friend's house when up ahead I saw several motorbikes and a group of men on the roadside. When i drove past, I saw them dragging someone into the ditch by the side of the road. I stopped a little ways up the road, and they looked at me, but I didn't know what to do, and I was scared for myself, so I kept driving. On the way home, I went back and shone my light into the overgrown ditch, and looked around, but didn't see any bodies or any one. I still don't know what happened, whether they were helping their drunk friend throw up, or if someone was seriously injured or killed, and I witnessed them hiding a body.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
a short history of (my) money
1 (0-12): the earliest memory I have of money is getting a 2 dollar allowance per week. My brother spent a lot of money on nachos, we both spent money on baseball cards. Mostly, I spent money on books, legos, and playmobile, or I just threw everything in a chest that I had. When I counted up my change, it was $30. Apparently for quite a bit of this time my family was pretty bad off financially. I never felt it or felt stressed about money.
2 (12-14): When we moved back to Thailand, my parents gave us (weekly) our age with a 10x multipler (12 years old meant 120 baht a week). Once again, I have no idea what I bought with my money. I went to LAN shops sometimes, bought some snacks, but I also saved a lot of my lunch/snack money. I always had money, never had to think about it.
3 (15-19): Saved even more money, but never felt like I couldnt spend. There just wasnt that much to buy. Kept buying books, fried chicken. Parents reimbursed me for gas. Took bus rides to other towns, went to movies, went to LAN shops till all hours of the night, gave money to strangers. I always had more money than all my friends, and never understood how they could be short when I felt like I wasn't careful at all but I always had money. Never bought clothes, if I did my parents paid me back.
4 (19-20): Moved to the states and got a job. Made $5-6000 in 2 months working at a JanSport warehouse. Became extremely conservative with money, especially because of college, when I barely had enough to make my spring quarter payment. Never went out to eat, rarely bought books except for school, never went out to eat, didnt go to the doctor at times I probably should have. Before this time, I never had to consider the cost of anything. Worked in the cafeteria. Over the summer, made $2500 working for a Lutheran parish that gave me free rent. Gave money to friends for things they cared about.
5 (20-21): No job, started going to coffee shops. My friends kept me in the dorms spring quarter by giving me $2000. Went out to a lot of coffee shops, sometimes out to meals.
6 (21-22): Started going to bars, eating out more, paying monthly rather than quarterly rent and food costs. Worked at the library over summer and school year, went out places a lot, bought books I wanted, went to Oxford (where my plane tickets were paid for me by strangers, $1000+ of tuition was given to me by strangers, received $7000 in scholarships I wasnt expecting and hadnt applied for). Still feel guilty every time I dont give money to those who ask for it and those in need: "Whatever you have done for the least of these..."
I generally live my life assuming that if something is good, the money will be provided. So far, that's turned out to be true, and I don't regret giving away any amount of money, no matter how ridiculous, to anyone, whatever they spent it on. I also think I've been damn lucky, or blessed, or whatever you want to call it.
2 (12-14): When we moved back to Thailand, my parents gave us (weekly) our age with a 10x multipler (12 years old meant 120 baht a week). Once again, I have no idea what I bought with my money. I went to LAN shops sometimes, bought some snacks, but I also saved a lot of my lunch/snack money. I always had money, never had to think about it.
3 (15-19): Saved even more money, but never felt like I couldnt spend. There just wasnt that much to buy. Kept buying books, fried chicken. Parents reimbursed me for gas. Took bus rides to other towns, went to movies, went to LAN shops till all hours of the night, gave money to strangers. I always had more money than all my friends, and never understood how they could be short when I felt like I wasn't careful at all but I always had money. Never bought clothes, if I did my parents paid me back.
4 (19-20): Moved to the states and got a job. Made $5-6000 in 2 months working at a JanSport warehouse. Became extremely conservative with money, especially because of college, when I barely had enough to make my spring quarter payment. Never went out to eat, rarely bought books except for school, never went out to eat, didnt go to the doctor at times I probably should have. Before this time, I never had to consider the cost of anything. Worked in the cafeteria. Over the summer, made $2500 working for a Lutheran parish that gave me free rent. Gave money to friends for things they cared about.
5 (20-21): No job, started going to coffee shops. My friends kept me in the dorms spring quarter by giving me $2000. Went out to a lot of coffee shops, sometimes out to meals.
6 (21-22): Started going to bars, eating out more, paying monthly rather than quarterly rent and food costs. Worked at the library over summer and school year, went out places a lot, bought books I wanted, went to Oxford (where my plane tickets were paid for me by strangers, $1000+ of tuition was given to me by strangers, received $7000 in scholarships I wasnt expecting and hadnt applied for). Still feel guilty every time I dont give money to those who ask for it and those in need: "Whatever you have done for the least of these..."
I generally live my life assuming that if something is good, the money will be provided. So far, that's turned out to be true, and I don't regret giving away any amount of money, no matter how ridiculous, to anyone, whatever they spent it on. I also think I've been damn lucky, or blessed, or whatever you want to call it.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
travel writing
In which I start talking about travel writing and end up talking about how no one actually cares about what pictures are taken of.
I started reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle the other day, and was surprised by how little of Darwin there is in it. The Voyage is a memoir of five years of travel and research that he did aboard a ship (although he spent about 3 of those years on land), and in these memoirs he dives into biology, anthropology, history, and geology (and who-knows-what-else in what I haven't read yet). I'm interested in this on two fronts: first, how little there is of Darwin; second, how much this would fail if attempted today.
First: by reading the Voyage we would know very little about Darwin. He doesn't include anecdotes of his past or his own history, even though he is willing to talk about the lives of the people he meets. He subjects everything in his narrative to a level of observation that he never extends to himself. Darwin is in some ways the center of the text, everything is written by him and more or less about his experiences, but we learn about him not through anything he says about himself but by what he writes about everything else and the methods he employs to discover.
Here is where I swim a little into the deep end where I mostly have speculation without data.
Second: any travel writer today that attempted to make observations that are disciplinary in nature would not be taken seriously by academics or researchers. Biology, anthropology, geology, and history have solidified enough that there are acceptable methods and necessary bodies of knowledge to be able to enter into those discourses as someone who was something new and legitimate to say. So the plight of the travel writer is that someone else has studied much more in depth and systematically the things they are experiencing and observing, so that for a travel writer to make claims about social structures and customs doesnt have much weight. What's left then? The self and the experience that the self has. Without the ability to talk about what is outside, all that's left is the inside.
I'm also interested in this in correlation with photography and the development of the camera as a popular, affordable product. Most people (that I know) aren't good at writing about their traveling, and dont do it very much. Instead, they take a lot of pictures. But what is the point and what is the subject of these pictures?
One option is to use them as social commentary, but I think that just falls into sentimentality and essentialization. For instance, I show you all a picture of a Latvian man sitting on the sidewalk from my recent travels to Latvia, captioned with this: "Unemployment and poverty are sky-rocketing in Latvia." This sort of social commentary with photography is, I think, pretty useless unless it's backed up by actual research or by interacting with the subject of the photo, because what do I really know about that man, who am I to make him stand in for Latvian poverty?
So what is the point of photography? The dismal side of it is that most pictures are not unique. By that, I mean that anyone could reproduce the same picture by standing where I stood and pointing their camera at the angle I pointed. There is some level of personality in what is selected and edited, but it could still be reproduced easily. Not to mention (like someone was saying to Brent, Nate, and I the other day)...I don't know what I'm seeing. I can take a picture of hundreds of interesting buildings and alleyways and streets, but I don't know anything about them, so my selection might be informed aesthetically, but ultimately uninformed socially, culturally, politically. And the aesthetic is what most people compliment about other peoples pictures, the texture, definition, color, angle, balancing, etc. But noone would care about these pictures of the same objects if they were low resolution, pixellated, unbalanced, blown out. That is why I think that few people actually care about the subject/object of their own photography or other peoples photography.
In this sense, I think photography mostly points to the self, the one who took the picture, rather than the subject/object of the photo. Photo albums have very little to do with what is in the photos (stonehenge? who cares? there's a million better pictures out there). The function of photo albums and photography is to point to the experiences of the self: I went to Stonehenge, or Riga, and took this photo and edited it, even if I know nothing about what I'm photographing, and if the object doesn't matter to those who are viewing it. After all? Wouldn't people have the same level of appreciation of my pictures of Latvia if I claimed they were pictures of Lithuania, Estonia, Czech republic? Very few people would know enough to say that I was wrong, and no one would care in their aesthetic appreciation of it.
Perhaps this is the reason that I take absurd photographs and don't really care to put up photo albums, or to take pictures very often. The only pictures that are really interesting to me are pictures of human interactions and processes, pictures that couldn't be reproduced because no one could go back to the time/even/location of where it happened. Too bad my camera can't replicate those moments very well. And, I suppose it's really a false distinction to make between pictures of processes and pictures of still life: there is no still life, everything is a part of ongoing social, chemical, biological, economical processes, and is always changing. The idea of still life has to be scrapped!
But it's not all glass-half-empty, who says any of this is a bad thing? I suppose my instinct is to be angry about it, but I don't know that I have good reason to be.
I started reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle the other day, and was surprised by how little of Darwin there is in it. The Voyage is a memoir of five years of travel and research that he did aboard a ship (although he spent about 3 of those years on land), and in these memoirs he dives into biology, anthropology, history, and geology (and who-knows-what-else in what I haven't read yet). I'm interested in this on two fronts: first, how little there is of Darwin; second, how much this would fail if attempted today.
First: by reading the Voyage we would know very little about Darwin. He doesn't include anecdotes of his past or his own history, even though he is willing to talk about the lives of the people he meets. He subjects everything in his narrative to a level of observation that he never extends to himself. Darwin is in some ways the center of the text, everything is written by him and more or less about his experiences, but we learn about him not through anything he says about himself but by what he writes about everything else and the methods he employs to discover.
Here is where I swim a little into the deep end where I mostly have speculation without data.
Second: any travel writer today that attempted to make observations that are disciplinary in nature would not be taken seriously by academics or researchers. Biology, anthropology, geology, and history have solidified enough that there are acceptable methods and necessary bodies of knowledge to be able to enter into those discourses as someone who was something new and legitimate to say. So the plight of the travel writer is that someone else has studied much more in depth and systematically the things they are experiencing and observing, so that for a travel writer to make claims about social structures and customs doesnt have much weight. What's left then? The self and the experience that the self has. Without the ability to talk about what is outside, all that's left is the inside.
I'm also interested in this in correlation with photography and the development of the camera as a popular, affordable product. Most people (that I know) aren't good at writing about their traveling, and dont do it very much. Instead, they take a lot of pictures. But what is the point and what is the subject of these pictures?
One option is to use them as social commentary, but I think that just falls into sentimentality and essentialization. For instance, I show you all a picture of a Latvian man sitting on the sidewalk from my recent travels to Latvia, captioned with this: "Unemployment and poverty are sky-rocketing in Latvia." This sort of social commentary with photography is, I think, pretty useless unless it's backed up by actual research or by interacting with the subject of the photo, because what do I really know about that man, who am I to make him stand in for Latvian poverty?
So what is the point of photography? The dismal side of it is that most pictures are not unique. By that, I mean that anyone could reproduce the same picture by standing where I stood and pointing their camera at the angle I pointed. There is some level of personality in what is selected and edited, but it could still be reproduced easily. Not to mention (like someone was saying to Brent, Nate, and I the other day)...I don't know what I'm seeing. I can take a picture of hundreds of interesting buildings and alleyways and streets, but I don't know anything about them, so my selection might be informed aesthetically, but ultimately uninformed socially, culturally, politically. And the aesthetic is what most people compliment about other peoples pictures, the texture, definition, color, angle, balancing, etc. But noone would care about these pictures of the same objects if they were low resolution, pixellated, unbalanced, blown out. That is why I think that few people actually care about the subject/object of their own photography or other peoples photography.
In this sense, I think photography mostly points to the self, the one who took the picture, rather than the subject/object of the photo. Photo albums have very little to do with what is in the photos (stonehenge? who cares? there's a million better pictures out there). The function of photo albums and photography is to point to the experiences of the self: I went to Stonehenge, or Riga, and took this photo and edited it, even if I know nothing about what I'm photographing, and if the object doesn't matter to those who are viewing it. After all? Wouldn't people have the same level of appreciation of my pictures of Latvia if I claimed they were pictures of Lithuania, Estonia, Czech republic? Very few people would know enough to say that I was wrong, and no one would care in their aesthetic appreciation of it.
Perhaps this is the reason that I take absurd photographs and don't really care to put up photo albums, or to take pictures very often. The only pictures that are really interesting to me are pictures of human interactions and processes, pictures that couldn't be reproduced because no one could go back to the time/even/location of where it happened. Too bad my camera can't replicate those moments very well. And, I suppose it's really a false distinction to make between pictures of processes and pictures of still life: there is no still life, everything is a part of ongoing social, chemical, biological, economical processes, and is always changing. The idea of still life has to be scrapped!
But it's not all glass-half-empty, who says any of this is a bad thing? I suppose my instinct is to be angry about it, but I don't know that I have good reason to be.
Monday, September 28, 2009
thoughts on scholarship
In the last few weeks I've had to read (or skim) quite a lot of academic books written on various historical topics. What brings most of them together thematically is how poorly they're written. Most are composed of long paragraphs that argue nothing but quote extensively (sometimes multiple blocked quotes in a single paragraph) and list list list different things. They read like extensively annotated bibliographies, and often that's the most interesting thing about them: the primary sources they point to and, occasionally, other secondary sources. I've been surprised by how unconscious many of the writers are about their own methodology, the theory undergirding what they're doing, and how sparse their arguments are. Some of that might be surprising because most academic work I've read has been literary criticism or theory, and the argument is much more central there, theory much more common. Anyway, I suppose the quick retort is that I haven't accomplished anything good, so I should be quiet. Maybe so.
I did read an article by F.R. Ankersmit the other day, where Ankersmit was talking about over-production in history, and how historians need to stop investigating the past and start thinking about it. That's very appealing to me, even though uncovering new sources or discovering obscure sources also has its appeal.
I did read an article by F.R. Ankersmit the other day, where Ankersmit was talking about over-production in history, and how historians need to stop investigating the past and start thinking about it. That's very appealing to me, even though uncovering new sources or discovering obscure sources also has its appeal.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
other countries
First things first: due to demand, I've created an email address for my biographers. If you'd like to contribute to their efforts, please send images, stories, and memories to apm.biography@gmail.com. Your work will not go unnoticed.
I was reading earlier in an article on the heritage industry by Robert Hewison: "Steam is now safely part of the industrial heritage, let nuclear power adopt the same camouflage." This is something that's been on my mind lately, not so much energy, but the ways in which commodifying history hides the present, so that going on tours of 18th century prisons hides the presence of incarceration in our present states; touring Victorian warships disguises the ways in which the British (or American) military is being deployed around the world; displays of dead states hide the real and present states. This isn't my feeling about history as a discipline, not at all, but I do feel that way about the different exhibits I've gone to here. And I am really blind to the present, I have no idea about prisons and the justices or injustices that are taking place in them.
And yet I wonder if that's a fair dichotomy to make, between commodified and uncommodified history. If there's a history article, journal, or book that I'm reading, it's because its publication was considered to be economically beneficial. This isn't to say that the writers are making a ton of money, because they are certainly not except in rare cases, or even that publishers are necessarily making a ton of money (I'm guessing, but not sure, that academic presses make less profits than popular presses). But, I would be shocked if anyone published what they thought wouldn't sell, and what would have no demand (hence, books go out of print). History, like everything else, has to be juicy and commodified, or it will never become public (unless the blogosphere erupts with historians). I'm not necessarily comfortable with thinking about everything in these terms, but I am becoming much more fascinated at the intersections between money, power, and knowledge, in all areas of knowledge (replace 'history' with 'science' in this last paragraph, and it would probably be able to stand up unrevised, for instance). Maybe for that reason, I'm becoming really interested in the publishing industry throughout its existence. even before the publishing industry, what has been considered to be worthy of replication and dissemination.
I was reading earlier in an article on the heritage industry by Robert Hewison: "Steam is now safely part of the industrial heritage, let nuclear power adopt the same camouflage." This is something that's been on my mind lately, not so much energy, but the ways in which commodifying history hides the present, so that going on tours of 18th century prisons hides the presence of incarceration in our present states; touring Victorian warships disguises the ways in which the British (or American) military is being deployed around the world; displays of dead states hide the real and present states. This isn't my feeling about history as a discipline, not at all, but I do feel that way about the different exhibits I've gone to here. And I am really blind to the present, I have no idea about prisons and the justices or injustices that are taking place in them.
And yet I wonder if that's a fair dichotomy to make, between commodified and uncommodified history. If there's a history article, journal, or book that I'm reading, it's because its publication was considered to be economically beneficial. This isn't to say that the writers are making a ton of money, because they are certainly not except in rare cases, or even that publishers are necessarily making a ton of money (I'm guessing, but not sure, that academic presses make less profits than popular presses). But, I would be shocked if anyone published what they thought wouldn't sell, and what would have no demand (hence, books go out of print). History, like everything else, has to be juicy and commodified, or it will never become public (unless the blogosphere erupts with historians). I'm not necessarily comfortable with thinking about everything in these terms, but I am becoming much more fascinated at the intersections between money, power, and knowledge, in all areas of knowledge (replace 'history' with 'science' in this last paragraph, and it would probably be able to stand up unrevised, for instance). Maybe for that reason, I'm becoming really interested in the publishing industry throughout its existence. even before the publishing industry, what has been considered to be worthy of replication and dissemination.
Monday, September 21, 2009
time is on my side
If I were to become a historian, and I almost certainly won't, I would be interested in writing history totally without references to dates or years, or calculated divisions of time. From there, I would refuse to call anyone by their 'name,' although this would lead to even bigger problems of reference and narrative. I'm more interested in time, and in writing history in this way as an experiment, to find how substantially different it is. Hundred Years War? Never happened.
Ironically, I have an acute sense of time and narrative in regards to my own life, and perhaps organize events primarily according to the year in which they happened. It always startles me when other people don't. I have no idea how other people organize memories.
In other news, I've been thinking lately of how disconnected I feel from 'the news' or world events at large, even more so than I did in the states. Over there, I may have only rarely read the papers, but I at least processed them at work, saw the headlines, heard other people talking about things. Here, I never even see newspapers, or anyone reading them. In London, they were more common, but it all looked like more tabloid news than news I'm interested in. It's not something I'm entirely comfortable with, but the chances are slim that I'll do anything to change it anytime soon.
Ironically, I have an acute sense of time and narrative in regards to my own life, and perhaps organize events primarily according to the year in which they happened. It always startles me when other people don't. I have no idea how other people organize memories.
In other news, I've been thinking lately of how disconnected I feel from 'the news' or world events at large, even more so than I did in the states. Over there, I may have only rarely read the papers, but I at least processed them at work, saw the headlines, heard other people talking about things. Here, I never even see newspapers, or anyone reading them. In London, they were more common, but it all looked like more tabloid news than news I'm interested in. It's not something I'm entirely comfortable with, but the chances are slim that I'll do anything to change it anytime soon.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Herman Melville wrote this in a letter to Hawthorne after finishing Moby Dick: "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."
I never feel more at peace with God than when I am blaspheming him.
I have been meeting a lot of new people lately, and making a lot of jokes, which is pretty typical for me. It's always interesting to see which people get when and why I'm joking. Generally comments I make about the nature of reality, truth, identity, language, and knowledge are thrown out as jokes, to make people laugh, but are pretty serious. Ditto when I make jokes about being Jesus. This has been my habit for years and years.
Apparently I essentialize the self as a joke.
I never feel more at peace with God than when I am blaspheming him.
I have been meeting a lot of new people lately, and making a lot of jokes, which is pretty typical for me. It's always interesting to see which people get when and why I'm joking. Generally comments I make about the nature of reality, truth, identity, language, and knowledge are thrown out as jokes, to make people laugh, but are pretty serious. Ditto when I make jokes about being Jesus. This has been my habit for years and years.
Apparently I essentialize the self as a joke.
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