Following the Ascension of Jesus, the apostle Judas “burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18).
Peter needed a replacement for the apostleship. Someone else had to take up Judas’ share of the ministry and his position as overseer. In Jerusalem, speaking to a crowd of about 120 believers, Peter explains the main qualification for the job:
“So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us – one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.”
Acts 1:21-22
There are only two candidates among the believers, only two men who were present during Jesus’ life: Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus; and Matthias.
Joseph and Matthias, the alternate jurors to the original 12 apostles.
Lots are drawn, Matthias is selected. The random outcome divinely ordained, Matthias becomes overseer and takes Judas’ share of the ministry.
What happened to the loser?
Who is this Joseph “Justus” Barsabbas?
Barsabbas means “son of Sabbas.” Was Joseph’s father’s name Sabbas? Or is “Sabbas” a cognate of “Sabbath”?
Or is “Barsabbas” a play on Barabbas? Recall Pilate’s choice between two men named Jesus: “Who do you want me to release for you, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” (Matt. 27:17)
Barabbas, not chosen for crucifixion.
Barsabbas, not chosen as an apostle.
There’s another Barsabbas.
The church apostles and elders send, with a letter of introduction, a delegation to Antioch consisting of Paul, Barnabas, Judas (called Barsabbas), and Silas.
Judas (called Barsabbas) and Silas spend some time with the believers in Antioch, and then “they were sent off in peace by the believers to those who had sent them” (15:33). At this point, it seems that Judas (called Barsabbas) and Silas are going back to Jerusalem.
From Antioch, Paul and Barnabas decide to revisit the cities in which they had already preached (15:36). But Paul and Barnabas disagree over whether to take with them John called Mark (15:37-38). They go their separate ways.
Barnabas and John (called Mark) go to Cyprus. Meanwhile, Paul goes to Syria and Cilicia with Silas, who it appears hadn’t left the city after all. A footnote in the NSRV shows how ancient authorities solved the problem of the reappearance of Silas by adding to 15:34: “But it seemed good to Silas to remain there.”
But what happened to Judas called Barsabbas? He was last seen with Silas in Antioch. Is he back in Jerusalem? Is he still in Antioch? Did he walk the earth for hundreds or thousands of years? Who knows? And why do I care?
Detail from The Map Room, Vatican Museum
Joseph called Barsabbas: He’s been around since John the Baptist was baptized. He follows Jesus for the entire ride and sticks around even after the crucifixion. He gets a shot at a leadership position, and then what? He loses a coin flip and falls into obscurity.
Judas called Barsabbas: People like the guy, so they send him on the road with the chief. After the first stop on the tour, by all accounts a success, he disappears from the face of the earth.
Barsabbas: Patron saint of the alternate juror, the honorable mention, the footnote to history, the ghostwriter.
I bought my first Christian Bible at a used bookstore. It felt like buying porn.
It was difficult to overcome my reluctance to read the New Testament, almost a superstitious avoidance of a bunch of words on the page. I was only willing to confront the text through the prophylactic of an academic experience, done furtively in incognito mode. No classroom, no church, no discussion, an individual rather than communal experience. Can you catch the Holy Spirit from an Open Yale Course? What’s the epidemiology of faith?
We’re watching an Italian TV show. Priest-on-a-bicycle Don Matteo quotes from Mark, the woman grasping Jesus’ garment. And I’m nodding my head, yeah I know that story.
Wedding at Cana: The miracle wasn’t the point. It’s that the bridegroom saved the good wine for later. New wine, old skins.
Studying religion and classical history as “view source” for Western culture.
Paul’s theology demands not only faith, but adherence to monastic practices — a fixation on sexuality, the idea of the body as a temple that cannot be defiled by sexual urges. Here we have the point where the religion turned from the gospel to the keepers of the faith.
Today’s orthodoxy is just one of many interpretations, the interpretation that won out, a form of religious Darwinism.
Early Christianity and early Judaism would be equally unrecognizable to today’s practitioners. Both are subject to the survivor effect, which makes today’s practices seem normal, yesterday’s practices unusual and heretical. The inevitable, near-impregnable response is that the providential hand of the Lord picks the winners.
Vatican, March 2015
Deep appreciation for my Christian friends who welcomed me into their fold without ever making it about religion.
Ivan Schneider. “The young Robert Moses” (PITT artist pens, 2016)
Yesterday, I posted a book review from six years ago on Mitchell Duneier’s Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea.
Reading old work can be, as the kids say, cringe. And I expect this very post will make me cringe in 2028.
My cringeworthy book review contains hip-hop lyrics, extended digressions into supplementary readings, a confusing conceit involving movie plots based on each chapter of the book, an imaginary comic-book franchise, and a concluding review-within-a-review containing a bullet-point summary of Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker.
So extra.
I joined Twitter in December 2008. For a polythematic reader, it was a good run. But it’s not the best place for a polythematic writer. I never quite figured out how to maintain a consistent theme, a consistent presence, or gain an active following. Au revoir.
Still, I’m not happy about how the site is getting Gawkered out of existence. The ongoing collapse will disrupt the lives of so many people who depended upon the site for jobs, for audiences, for a sense a community, for the slightest chance of resolving a consumer complaint, for drawing attention to political corruption and state violence and war.
Recently the Twitter algorithm has honed my attention on urbanism—zoning regulations, bike paths, high-speed rail, public transportation, and walkable cities. It’s exciting to see the unmistakable momentum in the urbanist movement, and I believe that the movement will outlast the platform that nurtured it.
I look forward to living in a city that has freed itself from the automobile. In the meantime, here’s an edited selection of circa-2015 journal entries about cars.
Cars and liberty. The historic connection between the automobile and the American ideas of liberty and freedom no longer resonates in a world with license-plate readers, on-board computers, location tracking devices, dependence on foreign oil and foreign rare earth metals, anthropogenic global warming, networks of smart-city traffic enforcement, and city planners committed to maintaining auto primacy at the expense of all other modes of transportation.
And now a word from your sponsor. Unlike private vehicles or public transport, self-driving cars offer advertisers the potential to control the entire experience with messaging, personalization, and upselling.
Skins for cars. If we move away from car ownership to car-sharing services, you’ll be able to add a digital “skin” to your vehicle. When you summon a car, it will arrive pre-loaded with your preferred video social networks, digital bumper-stickers advertising your preferred causes, and 3D-printed hood ornaments.
Engine ringtones. As a safety measure, quiet electric cars will have to signal their presence with a steady noise. You’ll get to choose what sound it makes, whether a nostalgic motor hum or a chugging steam engine. On the budget plan, your whip will sound like a flock of honking geese. Or pay the ringtone price for the sexy purr of a fine luxury sportscar.
Behavior-based license-plate signaling. Much more than self-driving cars, I’d really like to see driver augmentation technology. The vehicle itself should enforce good behavior, such as stopping at crosswalks for pedestrians and using turn signals. If any of these good behaviors are ignored or overridden, the vehicle should immediately activate the programmable LED lighting on the license plate. Green for following the augmentation; and progressively brighter shades of red to indicate: “Caution! Bad driver.” These signals should follow the driver whenever they drive.
The self-driving commute. A day in the life: from the home office to the mobile self-driving office to the classic office; and back again. Driving those in the knowledge-worker classes farther away from each other and from everyone else.
The wheels on the self-driving school bus go round and round. What’s going to be the new excuse for segregated schools if the bus drives itself and can take kids anywhere?
Self-driving car races. Very, very fast.
Self-driving. What they call it when the “self” is no longer in control of “driving.”
The plot against cities. How might a self-driving transportation network come about in a country that lacks both inter-city and intra-city infrastructure?
Step 1: Inflict pain upon drivers, commuters, bikers, walkers, everybody that moves. Keep cars stuck in traffic. Cut bus service. Make it dangerous for bikes and pedestrians.
Step 2: Introduce the solution, a technology-driven automated transportation network using driverless cars.
Step 3: Expand and export the business model to other cities.
This would be a replay of what happened when the automobile companies ripped out the trolley networks, except this time, the driverless car companies would hobble the alternatives to driverless cars.
Resistance. During the 1905 Hibiya riots, streetcars were set fire, as they “threatened the livelihood of the city’s many thousands of rickshaw pullers, who were numerous among the rioters and those arrested” (link). Note: This is not a prescription, merely an observation.
How technology works. Radical thought leads to new technology, which is then coopted by reactionary forces in the established order to crush radicals, leading to radical thought and so on. Examples: guns, bitcoin, writing, agriculture, democracy, internet, IoT, automobiles, religion in general, the Enlightenments.
If you ain’t ever been to the ghetto Don’t ever come to the ghetto ’Cause you wouldn’t understand the ghetto And stay the **** out of the ghetto
“Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” (1991), Naughty by Nature
Mitchell Duneier’s Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea uses the stories of prominent sociologists to trace the etymology and usage of a single word: “ghetto.”
If you don’t understand the ghetto, Duneier’s book might not be your best starting point. Even though Ghetto is written for a general audience, the author nevertheless assumes a certain level of knowledge about zoning ordinances, redlining policies and federal public housing programs.
Duneier traces an intellectual history of attempts to answer the question of what should be done about the ghetto. In doing so, the narrative recaps the major battles of the culture wars as they were fought on the op-ed pages of major national newspapers, conservatives blaming welfare and liberals blaming discriminatory policies.
What’s missing is a detailed explanation of the specific mechanisms by which the ghettos were created. Since that’s reasonably out of scope for Duneier’s book, I’d recommend as prerequisites two classics of urban planning: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, anniversary edition: 2011) by Jane Jacobs, a general theory of the factors that go into making a neighborhood succeed or fail, and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1975) by Robert A. Caro, an extended case study of systemic failures in governance.
The first part of Ghetto is essentially an extended version of an OED entry. In 1516, a new law instructed refugee Jews in Venice to live on a gated and guarded island, from which they were not permitted to leave at night. The island was known for its copper foundry, and in Italian, the verb for casting something in metal is “gettare,” making “il ghetto” a place where metal casting occurs. For Jewish wordsmiths, there’s also an embedded pun with the word “get,” as in a bill of divorce. Get it?
The story continues with the Jewish ghetto in Rome, formed in 1555 and abolished only in 1870 just prior to the Risorgimento, the founding of Italy as a nation the following year. In these ghettos, the minority was forcibly separated from the majority in a way that nevertheless allowed its inhabitants to survive and maintain their own traditions and customs.
Along came Hitler. The Nazis transformed the concept of “ghetto” into being a guarded urban prison and waystation to the death camps.
Duneier points to the first reference to the ghetto in an African-American context with a 1917 usage by W.E.B. DuBois. For the most part, the term prior to WWII referred to Jewish immigrant neighborhoods in cities in the U.S. and around the world. It was only after the war, with conditions worsening in African-American communities, when appropriation of the term “ghetto” connoted a sense of hopelessness, oppression and external containment.
Beyond the etymology, Duneier tells the stories of four people who dedicated their professional lives to understanding the problems of the African-American ghetto. And as far as I’m concerned, each mini-biography is ready for the full adulatory biopic treatment.
Black Metropolis
Horace Cayton Jr. was raised in Capitol Hill in a house near 19th and Madison. His parents were the founders ofTheSeattle Republican, an outspoken voice against discrimination. But then, in 1913, the paper shut down.
Cayton became Seattle’s first black police officer. Then, he enrolled in a sociology doctorate program at University of Chicago in 1931. He conducted extensive research on the community life of Chicago’s black neighborhoods. Racial restrictive covenants in white neighborhoods prevented homeowners from selling a home to a non-white buyer, and these covenants were enforced by law and with torches.
Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal is hired by the Carnegie Corporation to write an objective study of racial problems in the United States. Myrdal pressures Cayton to share his field notes and interview transcripts, but he won’t offer Cayton a full-time staff position nor help him to get an advance for his own book. Cayton holds out for a better deal, but none is forthcoming.
Without Cayton’s help, Myrdal completes his widely-praised yet myopic “An American Dilemma” (1944), which portrays good-natured whites as being against economic discrimination in principle. As such, the enlightened populace should be primed to welcome black labor into the workforce.
Cayton and anthropologist co-author St. Clair Drake publish a form of response in “Black Metropolis” (1945). In their research, they observed a vast gulf between whites’ lofty stated ideals and their visible behavior. They quote white people forcefully maintaining their privileges in the housing and labor markets, and they document the lived experience of black people struggling to find homes and jobs.
In the end, Myrdal and Cayton come to terms to co-write a fully documented and fully funded expose on race in America. Together, they puncture the myth of an American public ready for integration, leading to rapid racial reconciliation and the adoption of enlightened policies toward racial harmony in the postwar era. Their pioneering work ensures that 70 years later, racial harmony was fully achieved. (Yeah, I’m borrowing the “false happy ending” trick from The Big Short. This paragraph never happened.)
Benedict Cumberbatch will play the parts of both Myrdal and Cayton.
Dark Ghetto
Kenneth Clark, a Howard University senior, leads a protest against segregation at the U.S. Capitol in 1934. The protest makes the papers. There’s a disciplinary hearing. The university president wants him suspended. Ardent speeches are made. Hotshot poly-sci professor Ralph Bunche stands up for Clark and his friends: “If they go, I go.” The gambit works.
Kenneth and his brilliant love interest, Mamie Phipps, graduate together and go to Columbia to get doctorates in psychology. Kenneth lands a teaching job at CCNY, but nobody’s hiring black women to teach. And so Mamie starts her own thing, a mental health facility for troubled youth in Harlem. They also hope to advocate for better schools and housing, but this broader approach soon causes conflict with their wealthy donors.
Kenneth thrives at CCNY, ending up as the school’s first African-American full professor. His research is cited by Brown v. Board (1954). This elevates his social standing into new social circles, and he gets a TV gig on a PBS affiliate conducting extended interviews with James Baldwin, Malcom X and Martin Luther King.
Then, the big boss battle: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a professional politician and amateur social scientist, comes to prominence. In “The Negro Family” (1965), Moynihan argues that broken families have caused such lasting structural damage to the black community that nothing else would help until that is addressed first.
Professor Clark counters with “Dark Ghetto” (1965), a summation of his studies of the psychological effects of segregation along with his hands-on work with Harlem youth. He describes Harlem as a powerless colony of New York City. He sees the city as being subject to external control, only nominally led by incompetent politicians unable to get a significant piece of the action on any of the big construction projects. Based on his understanding of the psychological interactions between drug addiction, crime and lack of jobs, Clark prescribes as a first step greater investment in public schools.
Later, in 1975, Clark gets a teaching job at Stanford. Moynihan is to speak at the commencement ceremony. Protests ensue, and Clark makes an impassioned statement criticizing Moynihan’s scholarship. The commencement goes ahead as planned.
Roll credits over footage of the wanton destruction of affordable New York City housing taken by eminent domain in the Robert Moses era (1924-1968).
Gas Panic
We’ll get back to Robert Moses. But first, we still have two more sociologists left in Duneier’s Ghetto. Quickly, the loglines:
The TrulyDisadvantaged: In a world of suburban jobs and out-of-state company poachers, one man has a plan to promote full employment. Because for William Julius Wilson, the economic and technological trends that affect black workers also affect everyone else. Yet the new conservative champion Charles Murray says that it was welfare itself that destroyed the incentive to work. Will the majority go along with race-blind job assistance? Will they shoot down programs just because black people will benefit? Find out in this holiday blockbuster that will play over and over and over again.
O, Canada: Growing up in the projects, Geoffrey Canada knows violence and fear. He also understands the dreams and potential of youth. That’s why he founds Harlem Children’s Zone to put kids on the right path. Wacky misadventures ensue. False happy ending: President Obama says, “Let’s open Children’s Zones across the entire United States!” Cliffhanger ending: A financial crisis distracts Obama, and his Secretary of Education is frozen in carbonite by a bounty hunter working for crime boss “Congress,” a corpulent and immobile ball of snot.
Now we have everything we need to put a franchise together. Meet your new favorite superhero team from “Marable Comics”.
G.A.S. (PITT artist pens, 2016)
The Ghetto All-Stars: Special guest star W.E.B. DuBois assembles a mighty team of superstar sociologists to fight poverty and oppression. When faulty circular arguments appear, mild-mannered sociologists Horace Cayton, Jr., Kenneth Clark, William Julius Wilson and Geoffrey Canada transform themselves into…well, actually, they retain their impeccable manners throughout, very politely but firmly refuting faulty arguments while describing practical courses of action based on a rational, evidence-based models drawing from interdisciplinary research and well-documented fieldwork.
And with a team of superstars like that, who’s a villain big enough to put up a fight?
It has to be Robert Moses and the Triborough Authority. In case you’re not familiar with Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker, here are some of Moses’s greatest hits:
Highways plowed through vibrant New York City neighborhoods without regard for the inhabitants.
Blacks actively discouraged from using public facilities intended for whites.
New parks and public pools built for white neighborhoods; utilitarian barriers and unbroken concrete for the black neighborhoods.
Slum clearances run by politically connected crony companies that give little notice and even less money to the economically marginalized people being displaced.
Families moved from one condemned building to the next, with displaced people overcrowding into the remaining tenement housing stock owned by abusive slumlords, leading to severe and shameful breakdowns of public health, sanitation and safety.
City mayors forced to prioritize roadbuilding over schools, hospitals, police and fire departments.
A forty-year standstill on investment in public transit leaves subways jammed and unsafe, and commuter trains slow and packed.
Low-clearance bridges on key highways prevent buses from establishing travel to nearby suburbs.
New highways are built without the option to add rail in the future, locking in the automobile as the only way to get around.
Planners from all over the country visit New York to see how it’s done, and they find plenty of money available from auto, energy and construction interests to follow similar blueprints in building a car-dependent America.
Oh, and this egomaniacal New York builder responded to any perceived slight or challenge to his authority or ambition by attacking the questioner’s motives, personality and looks. He knew how to play the media. He figured out how to gain power in unconventional ways that had never been done before. And his lasting ambition was to put his name on big works.
“In Smokey and the Bandit (1977), the overweight southern cop – so long an image of racialized abuse and white supremacy, and played brilliantly by Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night (1967) – became a comic figure who pursued white bandits, not black men or civil rights workers.”
Deborah Barker & Kathryn McKee, American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary
“Bandit” (charcoal pencil, 2018)
The Bandit: A Black woman accompanies the pregnant “Frog” across state lines to the East Coast’s only remaining abortion clinic.
Sheriff Buford Q. Justice: A conspiracy-addled lawman is held back by an indifferent bureaucracy, an adversarial public, and an accident-prone son with a propensity (whoopsie!) to murder innocent bystanders with military-grade weapons.
Snowman: The big bad. The human trafficking kingpin behind Big Infant Supply Corporation (“BISCO”).
It’s all high-speed rail for the first half of the movie. Bandit and Frog are riding incognito in the Meta-Amtrak VR-CAR™ trying to blend in with cross-country gamers.
(Backstory: The 2025 bankruptcy of the U.S. passenger rail system conveyed Amtrak’s rolling stock and rights-of-way to Meta, which upgrades all trains with immersive virtual reality headsets and life-size humanoid thermoplastic elaster companions. Then, the airline industry collapses after a worldwide fossil fuel embargo. Wars for rare earth metals make electric vehicles unaffordable. The interstate highway system falls apart. Commercial travel options are now limited to either Meta-Amtrak or virtual travel in the Metaverse.)
In the thrilling big-city conclusion, Bandit and Frog escape using light rail, underground metro, e-bikes, and scooters. Sheriff Buford Q. Justice cannot figure out how to work the sumbitch app.
Ivan Schneider. Still life with percolator (oil), 2015
“Cast down your bucket where you are.”
– Booker T. Washington, 1895.
Borrowing a stack of books on African American History. The university librarian at the desk turns deliberately and carefully through all the pages, annotating existing marks. The unspoken message: If you damage these pages, it’s on you.
The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the rebel states. Essentially a dead letter. Political theater with a purpose.
As difficult as the Introduction to Theory of Literature readings were to understand, the African American History readings are difficult to internalize. We did this as a country.
“Strange Fruit.” Festival advertisements and flyers for hangings, burnings, mutilation while alive, abuse to the body when dead, body parts kept and sold as souvenirs. Photographers selling postcards. Ida B. Wells-Barnett speaking against lynching in England.
“Manly self respect is worth more than lands and houses.”
W.E.B. Du Bois
Reading Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 by William Tuttle. What it would be like to run from an angry mob? Fuck zombies, humans are much scarier alive.
I was largely uneducated about these issues. I knew about lynchings, but on an individual level – this happened, that happened. But I didn’t get the scale of it. These are major moments in American history.
J. Edgar Hoover’s early surveillance of Marcus Garvey. Back to Africa movement. Father Divine. Countee Cullen poem Heritage. Gwendolyn Bennett. Albert Barnes, art collector. Depression. Scottsboro Boys. The Communist Party. The NAACP. The New Deal, whites helped first. Pullman porters.
Where I am today, the advantages I’ve had – would they have been possible if I were born Black? Lackluster grades, smoking pot, getting drunk. Would I have found technology mentors and learned a trade? Would I have been a legacy admit, then an MBA student, followed by the carefree option to forego a salary, study Japanese, and live in Tokyo? If I had been a banking magazine writer, would I have been readily accepted by that community? Would a Seattle landlord have rented to me?
Brown vs. Board. Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, Little Rock Nine. MLK. Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker.
During various points in history, would you have been on the side of the angels? Are you on that side today?
We shall overcome. Bull Connor. Bombingham, Ala. Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Killing of Medgar Evers. March on Washington, Aug 1963; WEB DuBois died the day before the march. Nina Simone.
Malcolm X
Love all of Paul Beatty’s novels. The Sellout. Slumberland. Tuff. The White Boy Shuffle.
Dr. Cornel West “The Musical Vocation in our Bleak Times” 2022 UC Regents’ Lecture
Marvin Gaye
At different times, Gil Scott-Heron and I both lived on the same “Supernatural Corner” at One Logan Circle in Washington, D.C. He cut an album. I worked on strategic projects for MCI. The place had a “haunted vibe” (per Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man by Marcus Baram).
David Dennis at the funeral of James Chaney. Fannie Lou Hamer and the MFDP. MLK Nobel Peace Prize. Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma. MLK made a side deal on the second crossing of the Edmund Pettus. That’s not seen in the movie. LBJ as the civil rights president. Voting Rights Act of 1965 gives federal government authority to protect the right to vote.
Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls, a documentary movie about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Incredibly sad.
Selma in a theater full of white people, one African American working at the concession stand. The movie was fine for a historical film, but could I say that it was great? No, not as good as Four Little Girls. If a movie depicts great people doing great things, does that make the movie great?
Watts: CHiPs vs Marquette Frye. Riots, “soul brother” Passover. Black Panther Party. Viola Liuzzo assassinated, drive-by shotgun. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC. James Meredith and Ole Miss, shot during March Against Fear. Stokely Carmichael popularizes Black Power. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information. Panther Patrols. COINTELPR
Can’t sleep. Atlantic article about Jews leaving Europe. Pondering the inability to check your privilege if that privilege is your only tenuous grip upon security in a hostile world.
Moynihan report, 1963 “tangle of pathology.” Johnnie Tillman, spokeswoman of National Welfare org NWRO. “Unity without uniformity.” – National Black Political Convention, 1972. Amiri Baraka. Richard Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Indiana. Shirley Chisholm, first woman to represent NY State in Congress. National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), short-lived. Combahee River Collective.
Conservative pundits go after rappers who say outrageous things. Cable news: rap for white people.
Chuck D.
Jesse Jackson. Carter and Reagan. Willie Horton, Rodney King, Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill. The 90s. California propositions, Lani Gunier (Goo-NEAR); Supreme Court cases on affirmative action. Theodore Landsmark. Angela Oh vs. John Hope Franklin on Clinton’s conversation on race.
Instead of Starbucks #RaceTogether, how about AT&T? “Press ‘1’ to complete your call or stay on the line for a conversation about race with a random AT&T customer.”
“Post-racial.” Obama’s A More Perfect Union. U Wisconsin brochures Photoshop in Black student. Race tourism.
This course teaches history that our country avoids, fears, suppresses.
I consider it no small fortune to have been a citizen of the township of Montclair. (It costs a small fortune to live there.)
But look at me now, in a white enclave in one of the whitest cities in America.
“That which is hateful to you do not do to others. All the rest is commentary. Now go and learn.”
Hillel
The Casio Digital Watch
Two months into first grade, our family moved from northeastern Pennsylvania to Montclair, N.J., which had just integrated the school system with busing and magnet schools. I had never met a Black person before.
We moved to a stately, spacious home in a mostly white neighborhood, directly across the street from Edgemont, the “basic skills” elementary school. At the other end of town was the “gifted and talented” elementary school, Nishuane. I started school across the street at Edgemont.
At recess, I point out my house to a friendly kid. We climb the hill through the trees to get a better look. My new friend admires my watch, a new Casio digital watch that Dad gave me. He asks if he can see it, and I say sure. He asks if he can hold it, and I take it off and let him hold it. He wants to show it to someone else and he’ll be right back, and he’s gone for a minute and then he comes back and tells me he fell down and lost it. We look for the watch but cannot find it. I go home without the watch. Dad notices that I’m not wearing the watch. He asks what happened to the watch.
—I lost it.
—How did you lose a watch?
—I took it off to show someone and I slipped and it fell into the leaves and we couldn’t find it.
—Why would you take your watch off to show someone?
Dad acts it out, flailing and jerking his arms around with an imaginary watch in his hand. —Look at my watch! I have a new watch! Oh no, it’s gone!
I stuck to my story.
Devil Dog
Lunchroom, Hillside Elementary School, 4th grade. Unprovoked, a 5th-grade bully smushes a Twinkie in my face. He lumbers on to another target. He doesn’t expect retaliation from the likes of me. I run over and smush my Devil Dog in his face. He chases me. We’re circling around tables, I exit to the playfields. I run past the courts and a group of kids come to my rescue. They grab him by the arms. They’re holding him back. “Hit him!” I hit him. “Hit him in the face!” I hit him in the face, over and over. A groundskeeper comes over and breaks it up. “This isn’t a fair fight.”
It’s near the end of freshman year of high school. I’m heading to the movies with a childhood friend and a few of his private school classmates. We’re walking through Anderson Park. Someone puts his arm on my shoulders. It’s the 5th-grade bully, now even bigger. He’s been drinking. He wants to talk with me, alone. He pulls me away from the pack. I don’t make a fuss. He’s got a tight grip. “You remember what happened at Hillside?” I remember. I break free, run home, and burst into the house. My parents want to know what’s going on. I tell them. My dad calls the kid’s mom, they have a nice chat. He’s not a bad kid, just going through a rough patch, she says. There wasn’t any more trouble.
My private-school friend asks me what happened the night I disappeared, and I tell him. He’s disappointed with me. He and his school pals were more than ready for a fight. It wouldn’t have been fair. I’m glad I ran.
Reader questions
Did you imagine the race of: (a) the Edgemont kid? (b) the Hillside bully? (c) the kids at the courts? (d) my private-school friend?
How would the stories read differently if you imagined the races differently?
How would the stories have turned out differently if: (a) instead of the idyllic, integrated suburb of Montclair, we were in a NYC high school? A yeshiva school in northeastern Pennsylvania? A public school in Pennsylvania? (b) If the schools and parks had been heavily policed? (c) If any of the kids involved had access to weapons? (d) If video of any of the incidents had been shared on social media?
What kind of child was I? (a) A simple child, easily fooled, easily manipulated (b) A silent child, trying to avoid embarrassment (c) A wicked child, seeking revenge and indulging anger (d) A wise child, ready to run (e) All of the above (f) None of the above
We drove from Pittsburgh to Mazatlan for Spring Break. Four college sophomores in a Jeepster. 7,800 miles in 10 days. Adventure, danger, romance, comedy, la tequila, las drogas, una pistola. No arrests, no fatalities.
You want a story? Oh, we’ve got a story. But not yet.
What’s your major?
I started Carnegie Mellon intending to major in Computer Science. I aced the intro course, but then dropped the weed-out course twice in a row. I was weeded out. (So much weed.)
Sophomore year, I took a Shakespeare class taught by a young graduate student, Craig Dionne. He brought the latest literary theory into the classroom – Edward Said, Jonathan Culler. Boom, I wanted to major in English.
The English department had three concentrations: Creative Writing, Professional Writing, and Dionne’s field of Literary and Cultural Studies. I had no interest in Professional Writing (oh, the irony). As for Creative Writing, I figured that if I ever wanted to write creatively, why not start by learning theory? To write without theory would be like using databases without knowing how to build a compiler from scratch; or trying to play the guitar without a thorough understanding the physics of musical sound; or trying to walk without knowing kinesthetics. Inconceivable! First, I’d get my degree in Literary and Cultural Studies, and only then would I write in earnest.
The plan fell apart the next semester. Victorian Literature was taught by the Distinguished Professor who usually taught Shakespeare, and who always taught the old-fashioned way. No newfangled theories. Droning lectures on “Fra Lippo Lippi” and freres. Quote identification quizzes. Stick to the text. Here we see the influence of I.A. Richards and the New Criticism, a formalist movement of “close reading.” I ripped a poem out of the Norton and brought it to Mexico. The pale, crumpled page never once held my attention. I made it back for my presentation but didn’t have much to say. Nothing I wanted to say.
My fallback was Information Systems. I had been working with databases all through high school, so this would be easy for me. It wasn’t. I had learned the database trade as a cowboy, a just-make-it-work wrangler. The junior-year curriculum felt like a machine built to mold information workers for the military-industry complex. We wrote extensive documents detailing every planned design element before being permitted to write a single line of code. I did the absolute minimum.
I spent the last year of college taking guitar lessons and several other classes in the Music department. This was refuge, not sanctuary. My presence was tolerated, not welcomed. In the world of the conservatory, it was already too late to become a musician.
What do you do?
I got my first job working in the city for a company that needed a wrangler.
Then I went back to school a few times and became a writer.
Here I am, now a blogger.
What’s the plan for the blog?
The initial concept for “My Yale Years” was to write something about each of 33 classes in the Open Yale Courses curriculum in the precise order that I experienced them. About one week and 10 posts later, I still like the idea.
Before the end of 2022 2023, I want to make at least one loop around the curriculum.
Do I flit around randomly from one topic to the next? No, that’s too jarring.
Do I follow a terza rima structure {aba bcb cdc…} that alternates between topics? Great idea for the book, but not for now.
Here’s the plan: I’ll go in order, with at least one post per class.
I can’t guarantee balance. With some topics, like Don Quixote, I can go on and on. Other topics, not so much.
I may move ahead before covering an entire topic, and I may return to a topic I’ve already introduced. But I’ll avoid jumping ahead out of sequence.
You’ll see, it’ll make sense.
(left-to-right) Ivan and Scotty at Ivan’s 20-year reunion
How do you enter the conversation among generations of Continental philosophers? Learn the lingo — and bring a bodyguard.
In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet depicts the big names in 1980s literary theory — Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Bernard-Henri Lévy — as hedonistic, ego-driven monsters who would not hesitate to kill or maim to demonstrate their intellectual superiority.
Binet’s novel weaponizes literary theory, a central conceit that brings to mind the Monty Python skit “The funniest joke in the world.”
A battle of wits brings two literary theories into opposition: On offense, there’s rhetoric; Roman Jakobson’s functions of language have the power to turn an ordinary speaker into a rhetorician with hypnotic abilities. On defense, we have semiotics, the study of signs and signifiers.
Binet’s protagonist, Simon Herzog — a semiotician and, like the author, a Parisian professor — explains the interaction: “With semiology, you decode your opponent’s rhetoric, you grasp his things, and you rub his nose in it.”
Early in the novel, Binet reveals his own alignment with Team Semiology:
“It’s no accident that Umberto Eco, the wise man of Bologna, one of the last great semiologists, referred often to the key, decisive inventions in the history of humanity: the wheel, the spoon, the book . . . perfect tools, he said, unimprovable in their effectiveness. And indeed, everything suggests that in reality semiology is one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity, and one of the most powerful tools ever forged by man. But as with fire or the atom, people don’t know what the point of it is to begin with, or how to use it.”
Binet’s narrator extols the virtues of semiology, his protagonist is a semiotician, and the only way to stop the powerful from controlling the world with manipulative rhetoric is — you guessed it — semiology.
The action starts in 1980. Famed semiotician Roland Barthes has been hit and killed by a laundry van (a true story, reimagined here) — but was it an accident? In the search for a motive, regular-guy detective Jacques Bayard visits a university in the throes of popular adoration for the gnomic Foucault. Bayard’s commonsense, pragmatic reaction: “No one comes here to learn how to do a job.”
Unable to hack through the jargon, Bayard enlists Herzog to help him understand all this academic nonsense. Herzog’s practice of semiotics resembles detective work, conveying the ability to look at someone and decode their secrets. Herzog demonstrates his skill upon meeting Bayard: “Your shoes are badly scuffed, and you came here in a car, which signifies that you are not deskbound — you are out and about in your job.” Semiotics turns you into Sherlock Holmes.
Rhetoric, on the other hand, turns you into an unstoppable debater, and it is here that the plot is more ridiculous than nefarious. Herzog lectures to his students using the example of James Bond movies, and it is ultimately 007 that provides the template for the novel. The MacGuffin is the literary theory equivalent of a mind-control beam from outer space, and the final boss battle takes place inside a volcano.
The characters don’t act like people, and Binet seems to take delight in this. In one scene, Bayard and Herzog find Umberto Eco in a bar lecturing to his students. Bayard goes outside. Eco soon follows, and witnesses Bayard sticking a spoon in the eye socket of a potential informant. The nonplussed Eco, instead of showing repulsion for this violent act, launches into a convenient exposition about the Athenian roots of a secret society called the Logos Club, a debate-team version of Fight Club. And then all the drunk students from the bar join Inspector Spoonman for the evening’s exciting adventures. Nobody parties like a cop who learned interrogation tactics in Algeria.
As in Binet’s earlier HHhH, the disembodied authorial voice draws attention to the writing process. When Herzog visits a café, the author gives the Gallic shrug when establishing scene: “I would situate the café on Rue de la Montagne-Saite-Geneviève, but again, you can put him wherever you like, it doesn’t really matter.” Or: “I’ll spare you the now obligatory copy-and-paste of the Wikipedia page: the private mansion designed by such-and-such Italian architect for such-and-such Breton bishop, and so on.”
With this reflexive, self-aware trickery, Binet combines an intentionally clumsy imitation of a Ludlum-style genre thriller with a depiction of semiology in action:
As they cross Place Saint-Sulpice, the two men pass a blue Fuego and Bayard says, with the air of an expert: “That’s the new Renault. It’s only just gone on sale.” Simon Herzog thinks automatically that the workers who built this car wouldn’t be able to afford it even if ten of them got together. And, lost in his Marxist thoughts, doesn’t pay attention to the two Japanese men inside the car.
Bayard sees a status symbol; Herzog unpacks the capitalist exploitation of labor. Neither notices that they are being followed.
The literati are figures of ridicule, as in a Tom Wolfe satire. In salacious detail, we see the smug Foucault being fellated in a bathhouse. We see the self-important BHL pushing his way into the room whenever he appears. We see the enraged Althusser strangling his wife. (As in other instances, Binet ascribes fictional motives to actual events, but it was unsettling for Althusser’s violence to be explained away as a plot point, simplifying the horrible reality of an unknowable act.)
With these depictions, Binet punctures the hero worship of superstar intellectuals, leaving only rhetoric and semiotics, the “useful” bits of theory, intact. This is a tacit concession to the Bayards of the world that, yes, much of theory is useless rambling, but here, if nowhere else, are gems of enormous value. With rhetoric, you can engage in one-to-one combat with an opponent; with semiotics, you can extract hidden meaning from otherwise unnoticeable signs — and act on it.
In debate, it’s not just winning that’s important, but winning in front of a crowd, and the bigger the crowd, the more power you can amass — especially in a democratic republic. Binet’s narrator explains how Tzvetan Todorov, whom Bayard meets during the investigation, makes the connection between rhetoric and democracy:
“ . . . [Todorov] believes that rhetoric can truly blossom only in a democracy, because it requires a venue for debate that, by definition, neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship can offer. As proof, he cites the fact that in imperial Rome, and later, in feudal Europe, the science of discourse abandoned its objective of persuasion, focusing not on the receiver’s interpretation but on the spoken word itself. Speeches were no longer expected to be effective, simply beautiful.”
If there’s no attempt to persuade, that’s not rhetoric. And if we’ve lost rhetoric, we’ve lost the republic. And without semiotics, in Binet’s telling, democracies lay defenseless against the violence of unchecked rhetoric having compulsory power.
Binet depicts politics as the largest theater of battle for a rhetorical war — a war fought using new tools based on the most useful theories. It’s an arms race for transformative technologies of discourse. Powerful right-wing figures attempt to suppress these technologies; meanwhile, left-wing fixers devise tactics for the selling of the president in smoke-filled rooms. Mais bien sûr, times have changed since the 1980s — you can’t smoke inside anymore.
Behind the parody of literary personalities, The Seventh Function of Language holds in esteem only those theoretical concepts with profitable applications. If you can’t monetize theory, if you can’t catch a killer with theory, if you can’t win a debate with theory, if you can’t control the masses with theory, what’s the point?
The answer is that literary theory has the power to change your perspective. You may struggle to comprehend theory. You may lament the haphazard way in which it’s taught. On reflection, following intense study, you may reject postmodern literary theory in its entirety. Even so, the process of learning theory helps us to question our most basic assumptions about how we interact with the world.
In pondering the possibility of our survival as a species, more important than “How can I use language to assert power over others?” is the question of “How should we relate to one another?” — and this question is answered not by rhetoric or semiotics, but by feminist theory, postcolonial studies, queer theory, ecocriticism, and (my own specialty) animal narratology.
Percival Everett, in a recent interview in The Paris Review, gave his take on literary theory and philosophy: “It’s fun. It should be fun,” he said. “The whole thing about literary theory, Barthes and Derrida, is when American and British academics get ahold of it, they’re so damn earnest. They stop having fun with it and actually think they’re going to uncover some truth”
Fun and truth — can’t we have both? In theory, yes.
February 7, 2018 Seattle Review of Books Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet Farrar, Straus and Giroux August 01, 2017 368 pages
