Archives: briefs

29 Apr 2023

[Capehart] I can’t help but think of Nikole Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project when reading your book The Rediscovery of America. You and she not only argue for, and present, a fuller telling of our history, in the process, you’re challenging how we as a nation view ourselves. This is just my view. I’m wondering, is that a stretch for me to say?

[Blackhawk] Well, I really was intrigued by your kind of general thematic emphasis on race in America. We do kind of live in a historical environment in which multi-racial paradigms have yet to fully dislodge the kind of binaries of black-white racial formation or studies that are at the heart of much recent American historical inquiry. So, I’d like to think that The 1619 Project and The Rediscovery of America are both moving us towards a point where we can have more interrelated, rather than segmented, multi-racial histories. And I was insufficiently able to fully engage some of the classic and really recent kind of canonical works in African-American history, some of which have really helped expose things like the hybridity of Native-American communities in the American South, who incorporated generations of African-American runaways, slaves and later freedmen. And we hopefully can reach a point in the not-too-distant future where we’re not talking about racial histories in isolation but in relationship. . . .

[Capehart] I think we might be around the same age. I’m old enough to remember, you know, those encyclopedias or biology books where you’ve got the main page and then you’ve got those plastic overlays, that — you lay one down, you see one set of organs, you lay another one down, you see more, but you see them all together. And looking at The Rediscovery of America and having looked at 1619 Project, that’s what it felt like to me. . . .

[Blackhawk] You know, that’s a great kind of visual and even pedagogical metaphor to think about . . . .

From (about the last third of) a not-very-long conversation between Jonathan Capehart and Ned Blackhawk on Capehart’s Washington Post show, which I confess I’m only listening to for the first time here. Occasioned by a thread by High Country News writer B. Oaster this week.

28 Mar 2023

Not all the media-biz news out there is terrible. (Most of it by far is, yeah, okay.)

This I’m a bit slow to learn of — partly perhaps because my own audio consumption doesn’t lean so much to entertainment-style general-audiences podcast fare. But if you’ve followed me here for a while, chances are that you’ll have a sense already of my interests in cooperative organization and in smaller-scale media and publishing.

Useful comparisons with the reorganized Maximum Fun are Defector, more text- than audio-content and entirely employee-owned, and Nebula, video / audio only and creator- (rather than employee) owned in significant part.

26 Mar 2023

I’ve listened several times to the Anne Conway episode, below, of Justin Sledge’s Esoterica series. My education from youth well into adulthood (owing heavily to church community I chose for myself), no doubt conventionally like that of many North Americans in the broad strokes at least, established an idea of the British 17th century dominated by Puritans. (Who did, after all, literally dominate for a good stretch there.) That’s had by extension lasting implications for my picture of N.-Atlantic-world modernity and, really, of the whole course of western-Christian cultural evolution. Certain aspects of the wider historical reality that tend to be obscured in such a picture are captured nicely in a snapshot way, it seems to me, in Sledge’s short presentation here.

Especially would like to be more tuned in on connections between the secondary-stream, theology-inclining (and more or less heterodox) strands of early modern turns in Christian-society intellectual culture and what’s going on in the 19th century rolling over into the 20th with figures like Bergson. I’d also like to be more attuned to the knock-on effects of Inquisition and Iberian expulsions of Jewish populace around turn of the 16th century, with impacts in e.g. Amsterdam, on those early modern currents in northern Europe & Britain.

24 Mar 2023

18 Mar 2023(3 Comments)

Judith Butler isn’t new to me, but neither am I acquainted in any real depth with the ideas they’ve developed or been attached to. I listened to the recorded conversation of a couple of years ago, below, last weekend, and thought the closing comment on the problem of nonviolence — problem I think about a good deal and am far from having an idea of straightforward resolution to — worth bookmarking here.

Now I think if we’re to be nonviolent, we include everyone as important relationships, as constitutive of who we are, even those who live very far away from us or whose names we do not know and whose languages we do not speak. And to say that I value those relationships is to say that . . . to do violence to another is actually to break that relationship. And to break that relationship, even if I don’t know them — I still have an ethical obligation to them, we live in an interdependent world and my ethical obligation is based upon that interdependency, so if I do violence to somebody, I break my tie . . . . But I also attack myself. Because I am not just this person over here, I’m also my relationship to that person. I have refused to acknowledge that I am as a living creature bound to this other living creature. And if I attack that creature, I attack the bond between us, the relationship between us.

That very likely isn’t the clearest expression Butler’s given to this thought. It’s good for some reflection nevertheless. I’m not sure it holds up in entirety. Discussion’s warranted, certainly, but will have to be for elsewhere.

Quote above is part of the brief treatment of the first point, about relationship and obligation. The remainder of this bears listening to, as does the the second point, touching the question of violence and pursuit of a better world.

6 Mar 2023

The National Library of Israel has a YouTube channel, still relatively new but rich in good listening. This crossed my desk (for reasons I suggest in a recent longer post) after I’d taken in a good handful of lectures by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, hosted elsehwere, on Talmud and early Christianity. For this institution Bar-Asher Siegal coordinated a ‘What Is Talmud?’ series last year that I’m still in the middle of.

The video I’m highlighting, though, is the first posted on the channel, January 2022. This is a talk by New York comics scholar Tahneer Oksman about (mainly) graphic novels by Jewish women. She draws in especially on some of the memoir-like fiction of Israeli Rutu Modan. Modan’s major work isn’t at all new, but I was unaware of her, I confess, until I watched this over the weekend. The Chicago library system has a number of her books, happily. I’ve got several on hold as of last night.

26 Feb 2023

With their episode on Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic of two weeks ago, Know Your Enemy guys Matt & Sam have done three Freud- or Freudians-themed shows now. Let’s call it a trilogy. That one I’ve listened to several times already, and this eventually (today) turned me back to the earlier two.

The second, on Lasch, I’ve mentioned before, in a longer post last year. For my money, it remains the most fun to listen to of these. But each is really good.

[UPDATE: The Lasch episode is of the three also the least directly concerned with 20th-century Freudian currents. A decent supplement here might be James de Llis’ (James Ellis) 2020 conversation with Lasch biographer Eric Miller.]

20 Feb 2023

Listening to James Tabor’s new video chat, below, a one-hour overview of the Bible’s Hebrew prophets treated as single body of literature, led me back for a second listen to Zeb Larson’s conversation with Gene Zubovich, recorded last year for the New Books Network, about Zubovich’s book on Liberal Protestants ascendant in the middle of the N. American 20th century. The Evangelicalism I was brought up in in the ’70s and ’80s was reaction to the Liberal Protestants and rejection of their Bible. The Bible they loved and were energized by was for people like me something rendered effectively foreign. I like this talk from Tabor as among other things a glimpse of their Old Testament and of the religious-political passions it sustained.

6 Feb 2023

Late last month, the U. of Oxford’s Reuters Institute held a video-conference session on current tech-biz topics and the broad problem of doing journalism, concerned to great extent with social media and Mastodon’s answer to Twitter’s Musk turn. Seems to me worth a note here. It happens to have come a day after my longer post about these things. I’m not sure I would have addressed it directly had I listened to it before I wrote that, but it strikes me as good, in any case, for informing reflections on whether social media as large factor in 21st-century global commerce and culture might or might not have today reached a stage of exhaustion.

On many points, you can be sure, this session’s featured expert Dave Lee and I aren’t on the same page. I certainly don’t endorse the tech-boosterism of his comments, toward end, about ‘A.I.’ tools now being pushed in media-industry and consumer applications — ChatGPT &c. (on which). About assumed progress-tending capitalist inevitability underlying in his views throughout, I’d say, we ought to be much in doubt in a general way. With those caveats, I recommend giving him a listen.

There’s a ‘takeaways’ digest provided by the Reuters Institute, by the way, that it may be useful to have a glance at — but only secondarily, in my judgment. I’d be wary of it as synopsis merely.

31 Jan 2023

I’ve found myself drawn into a good deal of Bible and ancient-near-east listening this first month of the year. The greater part of that has been to talks given only a few weeks ago at a conference organized at the University of Haifa in memory of Shaul Shaked, late leading light on Persia and Judeo-Persian culture. (Came across this, I should say, not via any past exposure to Shaked but rather by way of paying a little attention to Yonatan Adler, now busily book-touring his new The Origins of Judaism, whose own talk closes the event.)

These are people at top of their field, old hands, engaging each other as professionals. For most of us, by no means easy listening. Presentations are in English, at least! Wonderful stuff to encounter on YouTube, nevertheless, and it deserves noting. You don’t have to understand everything said, you know, to be able to learn quite a lot. I’ve picked one session, University of Bologna religion scholar Antonio Panaino’s, to include here, below, as suggestion of the scope of the whole — in part because his topic crosses over into early-Christianity territory.

That conference’s people have helpfully thrown up a YouTube channel just (apparently) to house the lecture recordings — link below. It happens, meanwhile, that another channel begun last year is covering similar ground in a more general way and for wider audience, and a lot of the invited lecturers of this December event in Haifa can be heard in conversation there, too. This is an English-language project, Kedem (qedem, קדם), from energetic Russian-Israeli media producer Alex Tseitlin. Very new to me, but I’m already a fan, I think. [UPDATE 1: Some of the Kedem channel’s more appealing stuff is actually re-posting of a series of chats with Israel Finkelstein recorded for the Albright Institute, whose own channel still has the whole thing up for viewing. I’ve added a link to that in the list below.] [UPDATE 2 (22 Mar ’23): Adding one more link below, a seminar conducted by Finkelstein at Uni Zürich in 2018, aimed at scholars but offering snapshot of a lot of current issues in the field, more compressed than the Haifa conference, to anybody interested.]