Slow news day at the Post-Gazette?

For this I have an RSS feed to the local paper?

Important breaking news here.

Bloomsday post redux

One of my favorite postings--in honor of Bloomsday 2006--here.

Given the Steelers and Penguins victories and the upcoming G20 summit, I am sure that Pittsburgh is the omphalos.

More misc. frivolity

I jotted this down on a scrap of paper about a year ago and it turned up at the bottom of a pile of unfiled papers today. I think it may be my favorite sentence ever to appear in a movie review:

"Let me blunt: 'You Don't Mess with the Zohan' is the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen."
--A.O. Scott in the New York Times, June 6, 2008.

In which I feel the urge to write a bad poem about a current news story...

On the contretemps over the Oxford Professorship of Poetry.

An unusual academic event; the press looks for a handle.
Trading in gossip; electioneering run amok; a scandal.
One is out for [alleged] impropriety.
The other resigns for the good of society.
I myself feel a distinct lack of piety.
The post is open again.
I nominate Gervase Fen.

Re-use, fix... if you have an in-home service plan

A few weeks ago, the screen on the Dell notebook I am currently typing on went a little crazy (wavy lines) and then blank. (A computer's version of a migraine?) I panicked. Then I turned on my wife's computer, went on-line, and followed the suggestion of someone on some website to plug the computer into an external monitor. I dragged the monitor from our old desktop to my desk, plugged in the computer and all seemed well, or at least, I could stop panicking because it clearly wasn't my hard drive dying.

Of course, I still had no screen. I was too busy then, in the middle of the semester, to deal with it, so I just worked on the external monitor for a few days until--out of the blue--the screen came back. So when it died again last week, I didn't panic. Instead I hooked up the trusty CRT and fiddled with the screen a little. And it came back soon enough. But when the screen did cut out again a day later, I did call Dell.

First pleasant surprise: I was on hold for about 5 minutes and the first human I spoke to could handle the whole call.

Second pleasant surprise: I figured that I would be told that the cost of fixing all this on a two-year-old laptop would be more than the cost of a new computer.

But I had forgotten that I had an extended in-home service plan. Today, my daughter and I watched a man take apart the entire computer at our dining room table, install a new motherboard and a new screen, and unscrew and screw about 6000 tiny screws in the process. Toward the end of this, he turned to me and said, I guess you have an extended service plan, huh? Yep, I said. Yes, he said, because if you didn't, this would be costing you somewhere around a $1000 for parts and labor.

Given that a new notebook costs somewhere around half of that, nobody without the service plan is going to repair the old computer. My guess is that Dell makes a good deal of money off the service plans. And I know that these service plans are usually a bad idea. But I have to say that I liked having the problem fixed without having to transfer all of my files to a new computer. Plus it was interesting to see the inside of the computer.

New Urbanism meet Old Suburbanism

In keeping with my late May tradition on this blog (see here for 2005 and here for 2007), I offer a few comments on urban planning and design.

I live not far from a new housing development called Summerset that bills itself as a "new traditional neighborhood." It's being built on a former slag heap, on the southern edge of Squirrel Hill, an old traditional neighborhood here in the East End of Pittsburgh. At the moment, it's accessible through only one entrance which is a short drive but a longish walk from the main routes through the neighborhood. One bus route runs into the development. The plan is to build out the main road of the development, Parkview Blvd, to a larger road, Brown's Hill Road, which has more bus routes, and is a short walk from shopping at the Waterfront (across the river in Homestead) and shopping in Greenfield, an adjoining neighborhood.

In addition, a new shopping complex, called Walnut Place, has recently been built at the future intersection of Brown's Hill Rd and Parkview Blvd and just a few yards from Old Brown's Hill Road where there is a larger senior-citizen housing complex. And construction work will begin soon on pedestrian and road improvements on Brown's Hill Road. See here for the Post-Gazette story.

Residents of Summerset will soon be able to walk out Parkview Blvd to Brown's Hill Road, catch a bus or walk into a Dunkin Donuts, a hair place, an IHOP, a fitness center, etc. Likewise, residents of southern part of Squirrel Hill and some parts of Greenfield will be able to walk down the hill to the same stores. And the more active seniors on Old Brown's Hill Road will be able to walk a short distance to those same stores and restaurants.

So far so good, right?

I decided the other day to take the short walk down the hill and see the new development and the pre-improvement streetscape. And I noticed one thing that disturbed: so far there is no clear pedestrian access to the Walnut Place shopping center from Brown's Hill Road. The only clear way in to both sides of the center is on an access road into the parking lots with no sidewalks. Now maybe, just maybe, the next phase of the plan will include pedestrian access from the adjoining streets--Brown's Hill Rd, Parkview Blvd, and Saline St (behind the complex). But I saw no evidence of this and the landscaping didn't give any indication that this is on tap.

In other words, residents of the "new traditional neighborhood" and the old traditional neighborhoods nearby will be able to walk to a traditional suburban shopping center and will have to walk through shrubbery or on a parking lot access road to approach the new stores and restaurants.

Information Literacy and the Nation

Lately, I've been trying to get students to appreciate the difference between gathering information and doing historical research that involves not only information gathering, but also interpretation.

This new book looks like it might help and it's on my reading list for the summer.

But one thing I might do next time I teach is start a conversation by asking students to comment on this brief exchange in the "Letters" section of this week's Nation (May 4, 2009, pp. 2,24--good luck finding it on-line):

A reader in New York writes:
"Christine Smallwood states that Elaine Showalter's book A Jury of Her Peers is the first literary history of American female authors... Frederick Ungar published American Womean Writers... [in the early 1980s]."

Elaine Showalter's response, quoted by Christine Smallwood:
"Jury of Her Peers is a narrative literary history, covering 350 years in twenty chapters and told by a single author with a point of view. The Ungar volumes, on the other hand, are critical reference guides comprising brief entries on many women writers, written by a range of contributors and arranged alphabetically."

Pittsburgh Symphony Rachmaninoff Festival Advisor Also Excellent Sales Rep

Saturday night, on our way to the finale of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Rachmaninoff Festival, my wife and I ate dinner at Christos, an excellent Greek restaurant in downtown Pittsburgh. The food is good (try the Jackie Onassis cake for dessert), but the most interesting part of the place in my view is how close the tables are to each other. At the beginning of our meal, two men sitting at the next table were having a lively and seemingly informed conversation about Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers of the twentieth century. Since we were nearly sitting in their laps, I couldn't help but overhear the conversation and wondered who they were. As one got up to pay the bill, I casually asked the one sitting down whether they were on their way to the concert.

It turns out that our (near) table companions were the artistic consultant and curator for the festival, Joseph Horowitz, and the classical music reviewer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Mark Kanny.

Joseph Horowitz asked us--innocently and out of curiosity, I suppose--whether we were subscribers. We responded with guffaws. In fact, as we explained, we are subscribers, but have been debating whether to renew our subscription for next year. I pushed us to subscribe this year because I love orchestral music and despite our best intentions we just weren't getting organized to go to individual concerts. Three Fiddlesticks concerts (for kids) and two weekends at Tanglewood just wasn't enough for me. My wife--who has a much deeper classical music background than I do, by the way--likes orchestral music but prefers chamber music and also has felt that 6 or 7 classical concerts will crowd out other cultural events given our limited babysitting budget (she has been correct, actually). And we haven't even made it to all the concerts this year--we missed one because of a last-minute babysitter cancellation, another because of a last-minute kid illness. So in the last few weeks we have been close to a decision not to renew.

Then Joseph Horowitz, formerly of the New York Times and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and leading American musicologist, asked another simple and presumably innocent question: how much were subscriptions? Well, we answered, our 7-concert series in the Heinz Hall bleachers (excuse me, the gallery) is about 200 for two tickets. It was at that moment that we realized that each concert was about $14 a person.

After Messrs. Horowitz and Kanny left us for the pre-concert talk and we dug into our spanakopita and stuffed peppers, we revisited the matter and concluded that a) we can spend $200 on a single shopping trip at Costco, Target, or Giant Eagle; and b) that even if we don't make it to every concert we can donate the unused tickets to the orchestra. We could also relieve my guilt feelings about not renewing the subscription during a recession.

Dear reader: on Monday I sent in the renewal form.

In other words, Joseph Horowitz not only put together an excellent Rachmaninoff Festival for the PSO and its audience, but also convinced at least two subscribers to renew.

Difdafti in mid-late February

What caught my eye on the new book shelf from roughly February 10 to earlier this week:

John Haldon, ed. A Social History of Byzantium (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Hardly any mention of Jews except for a brief mention of 12th-century Jewish silk weavers in one essay.

I've been interested in Margaret Mead for a while since I learned she was friendly with the founders of the progressive private school I went to as a kid and that she designed my fifth-grade social science curriculum, "MACOS" i.e. "Man a Course of Study," but we were in fifth grade so of course we called it "Mucus." So it was interesting to page through Nancy Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton UP, 2008) which is not a biography of Mead (there are plenty of those) but an exploration of the history of (biography of) Mead's public image. No mention of my fifth-grade social studies curriculum, however.

I've noticed a lot of books on J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter lately. The one on the new book shelf a couple of weeks ago was Dedria Bryfonski, ed. Political Issues in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series (Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2009). Some of the essays criticize Rowling for portraying racism or classism which I find odd in that the authors seem to assume that representations of social inequality in literature represent an endorsement of such inequality. Perhaps one can make a case that we ought to avoid such representatons in children's literature, but I find the premise odd. Was Dickens in favor of "Dickensian" social conditions? In the case of the Harry Potter books, one of the most compelling aspects to my mind is the deftness with which Rowling portrays the magical world as very much like our own. The wizards and witches have to contend with bureaucracy, elitism, family squabbles, etc--just as we muggles do. One might say that the magical world seems behind our own in race relations (e.g. the treatment of the house elves; the notion of half-bloods) and social hierarchies--indeed much of the books' political atmosphere and major conflicts put me in mind of the politics of the 1930s and not the 1990s--but perhaps Rowling's implicit point is that the magicians are behind the muggles.... recall Mr. Weasly's fascination with muggle technology.

Leaving that aside (because I can't make a seamless transition), I also ran across:

Naftali Rothenberg, Wisdom of Love: Man, Woman, and God in Jewish Canonical Literature from the relatively new Academic Studies Press in Boston.

Nurit Stadler, Yeshiva Fundamentialism: Piety, Gender, and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World (NYU Press, 2009) which my quick skim suggests is a remarkable ethnography. N.B. she means the "Ultra-Orthodox World" in Israel.

Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, eds. The Golden Rule: The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religion (Continuum, 2008). The collection of essays includes contributions on Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Greco-Roman religion, in addition to biblical Israel, rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

Carla Mazzio's The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (UPenn Press, 2009) goes on my pile for later reading, especially ch. 1 with its intriguing title "The Renaissance of Mumbling." N. B. Mazzio means "The Inarticulate [English] Renaissance."

Still in the LC "PR" range: Ruth Mack, Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, 2009) suggests a rethinking of the development of historical consciousness.

A quick look at Tracy Davis, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge UP, 2008) to see if it would offer insight into the popularity of "performance" as a concept in the humanities right now. The introduction has some comment on this.

Dan Diner's Lost in the Sacred: Why The Muslim World Stood Still now translated to English and out from Princeton UP (2009) is likely to be controversial and is something that I will return to for a more thorough reading later. The chapter on "Text and Speech" deals with the important (to my mind) question of orality and textuality.

Finally, there seems to be a renaissance of interest in the intellectual world of Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem between the world wars. In the space of two weeks, three books have appeared:

Benjamin Lazier's God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton UP, 2008).

A new English translation of Stephane Moses (I can't make the accents work in Blogspot), The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Stanford UP, 2009). This was originally published in French in 1992.

And Asher D. Biemann, Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism

And very soon, I understand, we will have Mara Benjamin's new assessment of Rosenzweig's Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge, 2009, forthcoming)

With the publication of David Myers' assessment of "historicism and its discontents in German-Jewish thought" a few years ago (Reisisting History, Princeton, 2003) and with the Rosenzweig and Benjamin-Scholem industries experiencing no slowdown in production, our understanding of the interesting intellectual reflections by European Jews in the 1920s and 1930s has been enriched quite a lot in the last decade. The question of why this period is so fascinating is also of interest, but I'll save that for another day. (I should point out that Myers and Biemann are also interested in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. I think there is a good case to be made for considering this longer time span in order to really assess the impact of WW1.)