On not being an island

Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

— John Donne, Meditation 17, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

This post started out as a furious rant about the people who run this country inhabiting a moral universe where everyone is an island, nobody has any obligation to help anyone else, and the poor, the sick, the down on their luck, and the elderly are expected to fend for themselves. I was going to rail against the myth of total self-made independence and the worldview that dictates that if you’re in trouble, you don’t
deserve help because you must have brought it on yourself. I was going to make a case for there being such a thing as the public good. And I was going to ask who else thinks we can’t do without each other, can’t abandon each other, no man is an island and all that (hence the John Donne).

But who am I to say that? The accounts of people who’ve been in New Orleans speak for themselves. Read this, and then tell me we couldn’t have done better.

(And if this story is true, something is terribly wrong with us. Can we please, please get past the "every man for himself" philosophy? For once I agree with David Brooks: this has been a Hobbesian decade, and something’s got to give.)

Blog for Relief Day

Terry Teachout and Our Girl in Chicago have amassed a huge number of information related to Hurricane Katrina over at About Last Night. Meanwhile, I’m a late entrant in the Blog for Relief Day effort, but the need isn’t going away any time soon. More information about Blog for Relief Day can be found at Instapundit. If you have a blog and want to join the effort, instructions are here.

I’m recommending the Louisiana Library Association’s Disaster Relief fund, set up "to assist school, public, and academic library restoration efforts in southeastern Louisiana." The LLA’s home page with contact information is here. If you donate to them, log your contribution at TTLB.

On a related note, check out the ALA’s page of updates from Louisiana libraries to see what librarians in the area are doing to help. This gives me hope for humanity (and a lot of mad love for my new profession, too):

Linda Fox reports: “West Feliciana Parish Library in St. Francisville
is A-OK and welcoming lots and lots of folks who have lost everything
in the New Orleans area. We are giving away books, temp-loaning
children’s books, printing out FEMA and LA Works packets, offering
crayons and coloring books, and running a quiet children’s video for
the little guys whose parents are on the internet. We’ve set up one
library card to check out some materials temporarily. Losing a few
books won’t be much of a loss after what we’ve heard. We just try to
keep thinking of things to do to help.”

Beth Vandersteen reports: “Central Louisiana is bursting with evacuees
in every possible location with more streaming in even as I type.
People are pouring into the libraries to use the computers; we’ve
waived print fees for FEMA forms, etc., and stretched the time limits
whenever possible. … Rapides Parish Library in Alexandria
began delivering reading material to shelters yesterday, along with
coloring sheets, crayons, and library information flyers. We’ve put out
library information on flyers as well as through the local media, set
up collection boxes for toiletries and items needed in the shelters,
broadcast news and movies on our TVs, and issued temporary library
cards for those who want to check out materials.”

Whatever you do, please do something, no matter how small, to help the people whose lives have been wrecked.

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This too shall pass. I hope.

Rana puts her finger on the jittery anxiety that’s been in the air this week. It’s not just Hurricane Katrina, the unnerving reports about bird flu, the price of gas and the thought of how people are going to cope with it, the surreality of most of the news out of Washington; it’s everything all at once.

When I remind myself that things were demonstrably much worse in, e.g., the fourteenth century, and that people are always predicting the end of civilization as we know it, and that the apocalypse has never yet shown up when predicted, and that any historian worth his or her salt can tell you that things have always gone badly and people have always muddled through somehow — that’s reassuring, sort of. I think of how everyone freaked out over Y2K, and how I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 with my friend in New York, and how we were sitting in a bar when midnight struck, the power didn’t go out, planes didn’t fall from the sky, and the world didn’t plunge into chaos. I remind myself that it’s probably human nature to panic and, in the process, to seek out other panicky people and panic some more.

And yet: that disaster that didn’t happen was just a potential disaster. It didn’t actually wreck the Gulf Coast, kill poultry in Asia, make the cost of fuel go through the roof, or leave the poor behind to drown.

I fear for us all, sometimes. There seems like so little that any one person can do, though there are always ways to help. Right now I’m concentrating on remembering the way my dad used to say "This too shall pass."

Huzzah!

Sarah Waters has a new book coming out! And there was much rejoicing.

In praise of the dijalog

Things I love about living in the 21st century (a partial list):

  • The way the advent of blogs and social tagging services (del.icio.us, Flickr, and the like) has created so many wonderfully geeky conversations about low-tech tools like pens and paper and notebooks.
  • That I can share bookmarks pertaining to the kinds of obscure topics I wrote my dissertation about, and that I can see who else is interested in them.
  • The way the language of information technology has filtered into the way we talk about the non-digital world. E.g.: "life hacks"; "I have to defrag my brain" (tm Michelle); this discussion of metadata for Moleskines; and my first thought on seeing this site on how to make your own lava lamp was "Wow! Open source lava lamps!"
  • "That’s the curious space I and others like me inhabit today: Digital,
    but not purely digital; analog, but not only analog. We live in the
    space between these two, in the space carved out by their now
    haphazard, now principled mixture. It is a space worthy, or so I like
    to think, of its own name. I have taken to calling it ‘dijalog’, that
    is, ‘digital plus analog’. We’re all — at least all of us of a
    certain age — dijaloggers now." (Kendall Clark, "Geeks and the Dijalog Lifestyle," xml.com, 2/18/04) [yes, the article’s a year and a half old, but I’ve been wanting to quote it for a while]

Sunday opera matinee live

Feel like listening to the Sunday Opera Matinee on WTJU with me? You can now listen to live streaming audio. If you tune in right now, you can catch the second act of Rigoletto with Placido Domingo and Ileana Cotrubas. It’s nice to know that wherever I end up after this, I’ll still be able to keep up my Sunday afternoon radio ritual.

Personal anthology: Paul Verlaine

Fall semester starts here next week (yes, even though it’s before Labor Day, and even though it’s still August). It’s been one of those workweeks where my planner has been pretty much solidly filled with appointments and meetings. And this weekend, I’ve got to work on an article I promised to contribute to an essay collection. My scholarly-writing muscles feel unflexed and flabby after all this time, and I’m rather looking forward to making myself sit down and write the thing, but it does make for minimal blogging. My brain is already tired.

So I’ll leave you with a poem by Verlaine I read in a bilingual anthology at least a decade ago, and liked so much (something about the upward movement of the voices in stanza 1 and the slow descent, through all those short lines, of the "apaisement" at the end: "calm" isn’t quite the right word) that it still comes back to me.

La Lune Blanche

La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois;
De chaque branche
Part une voix
Sous la ramée…

O bien-aimée.

L’étang reflète,
Profond miroir,
La silhouette
Du saule noir
Où le vent pleure…

Rêvons, c’est l’heure.

Un vaste et tendre
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
Que l’astre irise…

C’est l’heure exquise.

The White Moon

The white moon
shines in the woods.
From each branch
springs a voice
beneath the arbor.
Oh my beloved…

Like a deep mirror
the pond reflects
the silhouette
of the black willow
where the wind weeps.
Let us dream! It is the hour…

A vast and tender
calm
seems to descend
from a sky
made iridescent by the moon.
It is the exquisite hour!

I got the French text from Project Gutenberg and the translation  — which is fairly literal, except astre is "star," not "moon" — from the Lied and Art Song Texts Page. I’m not surprised so many composers have set it to music.

Hey, I remember those steps!

Even though I’ve just marked the two-year anniversary of the completion of my dissertation, I can’t resist quoting Mike’s post on The Dissertation Flail, because it made me laugh out loud:

As should be evident from the name, it’s a dance best done to slow, angsty, navel-gazing music.

The Dissertation Flail

  1. Go around in tiny circles.
  2. Hold your hands to your head like it hurts, thumbs at temples.
  3. Go around in tiny circles.
  4. Throw your hands into the air, as if in desperation. Do not, under any circumstances, wave them like you just don’t care.
  5. Go around in tiny circles.
  6. Bang your head, old school Metallica-style, but as if against a brick wall.
  7. Go around in tiny circles.
  8. Twitch spastically.

Hee! I suggest adding another step: Strike the heel of your hand against your forehead rhythmically while rocking back and forth. Wailing, ululating, and gnashing of teeth are optional.

And this is also by way of wishing good luck to my friend T., who’s completed her own dissertation flail and whose defense is coming up this week. Congratulations, sweetie!

I always secretly wanted to be a glam rocker.

eno
You’re Brian Eno.
You’re a little reclusive maybe, a little quieter than most people…
But man, who needs outside entertainment when your brain is like KABOOM all the time? You are innovative, creative, and intelligent. You dress flamboyantly, gravitating towards large feathers and tinsel. Everyone respects you, and looks up to you. We are not worthy, we are not worthy…

Which rad old school 70’s glam icon are you? (with pics)
brought to you by Quizilla

Awesome. Come to think of it, my wardrobe could use some tinsel and feathers. (Via Feministe.)

Remember, only you can prevent…small harmless wisps of steam.

I would like to track down the following people:

1. The person or persons who designed the smoke detector in my apartment, a smoke detector so horrifically loud and strident that every time it goes off I jump like I’ve been shot, my hands shake, and I get the ominous feeling that my lifespan has been shortened by at least a couple of weeks. Said person or persons thought it would be a great idea to make the smoke detector sensitive enough that the smallest puff of steam (as in: normal byproduct of a person boiling water for pasta, or taking a shower, or even cleaning the bathtub) is enough to set it off unless preventative steam-venting measures are undertaken. And on top of that, they designed it with no visible override switch for when there’s no fire and the beleaguered tenant just wants it to shut the #%$@! up before she develops a bad case of what the Victorians would have called "nervous prostration."

2. The person or persons who selected this particular smoke detector and installed it in my apartment next to the bathroom door, in a prime steam-detection location.

Once I’ve located the perpetrators, I’m going to tie them to chairs directly underneath the Smoke Detector From Hell, turn on the shower, and let the steam billow out into the hallway. And then I am going to demand a different model that at least has an "off" switch.