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So, I’ve switched over to wordpress…. but because most days I only half know what I’m doing, I installed the stuff in a new directory.  So, the address of this blog is changing.  Come visit the shiny new site http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sharon/bracket/, and update your RSS feeds.

So, I know… I know… It’s been a while since I paid attention to this particular outlet, but things have been busy this summer. Furious work has been done on Object of History and on Historical Thinking Matters–some of it has even been done by me. But, more importantly, my manuscript went in the mail to the University of Chicago Press last week. Now, we’ll just wait and see……

But, since that is off my plate, I should be moving on to new projects. I’m teaching a course at Georgetown in American Studies this fall, which should take a good chunk of time. Around the edges, I’m beginning to plumb the depths to unearth some stuff on U.S. Catholics and their relationship to the Holocaust.

When I started this less-than-frequent blog in the Spring, I mentioned that my reasons arose in part from a desire to refocus my attention on my writing. I had/have a dissertation manuscript that is creeping toward a submission date that passed in September.

In the meantime, many things have been afoot. I bought a condo and moved. I participated in yet a few more grant applications. I helped usher one CHNM project to a conclusion, pushed and pulled another one slowly into being, and am in the midst of envisioning yet another one. On top of that, I’ve had the great pleasure of teaching a wonderful small cohort of undergraduates at Georgetown. Needless to say all of these activities have run some interference in my blogging activities…. and my editing. (Excuses, excuses….)

But, finally, in the last week, I really feel like I’ve made some progress on this manuscript. The end chapters are tightening — to the tune of almost 12,000 words in the garbage bin. Every once in a while I have a pang of panic about what is being left on the cutting room floor, but in the end it will make for a better book. All of this smoothing and slimming and choice making has led me to want to actually do some real writing, and I think that my chance is coming soon. The whole mess of stuff needs a good solid tie-together, and I’m hoping that I’ll manage to fit that in sometime in the next week or so.

So, better late than never; I’m getting closer.

My very first literature course as an undergraduate was with a man named Paul Betz in the fall of 1993. Now, Prof. Betz’s life work was the study of the British romantic poets, in particular William Wordsworth. That first semester of my college experience, we read a lot of things — Coleridge, Hardy, Hopkins, Strindberg, Kate Chopin, but Wordsworth more than anything else. And, I have to say, even though I wasn’t very good at English literature (I know that this is a totally relative statement, but I didn’t feel like I was any good at it), I loved it. The Prelude just held me transfixed through that fall. We’d go sit on the lawn in small groups and discuss Wordsworth’s coming of age in the Lake District–for something like 4 hours a week. Bizarre, I know, but I truly loved it.

So, our friend Wordsworth describes these instances that he calls “spots of time” in which all of the elements of experience and sense and memory come together to take a person back through their lives. (All of you English lit scholars out there, sorry if I’ve butchered this in the shorthand….) At anyrate, spots of time show up in Book XI of The Prelude:

There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating Virtue, whence, … our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired

Pretty great, right? I thought so, and I had to wonder whether he was secretly friends with Proust and really liked cookies (think time-travel). But, that’s beside the point.

The Point. Right. So, lately I’ve been consciously spending more time with my music collection than usual — not just letting it float in the background as I usually do, but really listening. In part, I’m doing this to try to pull out some iconic pop culture from the 80s and 90s for a friend. But, really, it’s been a tremendously interesting autobiographical journey. I know exactly where all 3000 songs came from and why I bought them. More importantly, I keep having these crazy sensory experiences that are the closest thing I’ve ever known to spots of time. If Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” can put me in a beat-up Mustang on a country road at 14, and The Cure’s “Pictures of You” can put me in a convertable Rabbit a little more than 10 years later, what would Wordsworth have done with an ipod?

On a less serious note, I seemed to have missed the fact that Waterford/Wedgewood bought All-Clad in 1999. Now, not that I can afford either of these things, but it warms my heart that an Irish company owns the best cookware manufacturer in the United States–in fact, cookware that is manufactured in Canonsburg PA (which is about fifteen minutes from where I grew up).

So, according the the NYTimes, Waterford hasn’t been doing so hot lately. When the Irish CEO stepped down recently, the head of All-Clad took over. Here’s hoping they lower their prices on all counts…..
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Reading the newspapers lately, and Sheila’s posting the other day, about the tragedy on the gulf coast reminded me of something that seemed worth relaying….

Just about a month ago, Fr. McFadden (the voice of Hoyas basketball, and the man who taught me my first formal theology) gave a pretty great homily about water. Now, Fr. McFadden can tell a story, and he usually does. On this Sunday the gospel was about Peter walking out to meet Jesus on the water, and then getting scared, and starting to sink.

Rather than starting here, Fr. McF. began with the wonderful imagery from Gilead, where John Ames is recalling walking to his church one morning when he comes up behind some young lovers out for a walk. He sees the young man jump up and shake a tree branch, showering the young woman with glistening drops of water from the leaves. Rev. Ames is overwhelmed with the pure joy of this interaction, and comments that, “it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.” It’s this infusion of the holy into the mundane that makes Gilead such a great book.

But, Fr. McF’s point was altogether different–though he loved the imagery–we know, as Peter knew and the folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas know, water can be a tremendously dangerous and scary thing. It’s hard to see how this water could be a blessing. But, I suppose, it’s our chance to pony up some serious support, ’cause these folks are sinking.

• American Red Cross — (800) HELP-NOW
• America’s Second Harvest — (877) 817-2307
• Catholic Charities USA — (800) 919-9338
• United Jewish Communities

So, I finished reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday about two weeks ago, but I haven’t had time to get down my reflections on it. Like his last book, Atonement, this is a very quiet, but very good book. Ordinary people with ordinary lives, who sometimes find themselves spinning slowly out of control. Saturday is an explicitly post-9/11 book, and it was more than a little eerie to being reading the opening scenes, in which the main character rises from bed in the middle of the night, walks over to the window and sees a flaming airplane heading toward Heathrow–particularly because my reading corresponded with the London bombings.

For the most part, the text is an exploration of how we live our everyday lives in the post-9/11 era. It’s about our assumptions and fears. And, it’s about our ambivalence concerning US interventions in Iraq. These larger geopolitical concerns float around the periphery of Henry Perowne’s not so typical Saturday in February 2003. For me, there is always a haunting possibility that the next time I turn on the radio or the TV or the computer and see something tragic and intentional. The feeling of subtle vulnerability is pervasive. And, so it is for Perowne.

Perowne is a neuro-surgeon who is making his way through the day. He is anticipating a dinner marking the arrival from France of his daughter and his father-in-law, both of whom are poets. His involvement in a minor traffic accident early in the day–caused in part by his efforts to circumnavigate an enormous anti-war protest–provides an infusion of drama for the story. By the evening hours, this brief altercation has put his entire family in a great deal of danger.

Such a normal day, but really not….

So, on Monday as I was driving back to DC from a weekend in Pittsburgh, I spent some time listening to some low-on-the-dial radio as I made my way through Western Maryland. At first I thought I was listening to an all news network, but eventually it became apparent that I was listening to an evangelical station. I usually skip over the Christian rock when I drive, but often I stop to listen to the Christian talk material–it’s sort of an anthropological exercise.

So, this time I ended up with a broadcast from Focus on the Family Radio. Very interesting stuff. The main broadcast, aptly titled “From Jihad to Jesus,” was a testimony, given shortly after September 11 by a Dean from Liberty Theological Seminary (Jerry Fallwell’s institution), Ergun Caner. Though this fellow teaches systematic theology and church history, he isn’t your average evangelical Christian. Rather, he was raised as a Muslim and his father was a prominent mwazien. So, he addressed a Texas congregations in an effort to explain to them how the 9-11 terrorists, and other suicide bombers, could do what they did. Of course, he was also testifying about his conversion.
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This has to be the best story I’ve seen in a really long time. Imagine the revolution that this stuff can make in famine situations. Fortified peanut butter. What could be better than this?

Interesting how this article managed to coincide with the arrival of a solicitation for donations from Doctors Without Borders in my mailbox today. I just might send them a check.

Hope for Hungry Children, Arriving in a Foil Packet
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: August 8, 2005
New York Times

MARADI, Niger, Aug. 7 – In the crowd of riotously dressed mothers clasping wailing, naked infants at a Doctors Without Borders feeding center just west of here, Taorey Asama, at 27 months, stands out for a heart-rending reason: she looks like a normal baby.

A mother feeding the food supplement Plumpy’nut to her child in Tibiri, Niger. It is distributed to mothers of severely malnourished children.

Many of the others have the skeletal frames and baggy skin of children with severe malnutrition. The good news is that a month ago, so did Taorey.

“When she came here, she was all small and curled up,” said her mother, Henda, 30. “It’s Plumpy’nut that’s made her like this. She’s immense!”
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The mortgage documents are signed, copied, and on their way back to the loan officer via FedEx.

I, on the otherhand, am trundling headlong into a disconcerting sea of debt five miles further into the Commonwealth of Virginia, a place that cultural critic Lisa Duggan has repeatedly referred to as the “vortex of hell”.

Closing: August 30.