Category: Literature

A Fleeting Thought on Interdisciplinarity

Mark Sample3 Comments

Interdisciplinarity is one of the enduring keywords of academia in the past decade. I’ve been hearing it praised for so long now and seeing so little actual evidence of it, that I’m beginning to think all the praise is simply wish-fulfillment. And like most wishes, the wisher probably wouldn’t know what to do with it if it ever came true.

In the humanities, the closest we come to interdisciplinarity is arranging a panel which brings together a literary scholar, a historian, and maybe an artist, all talking about something entirely different. But they’re all on the same panel. And that’s interdisciplinarity.

It seems to me that if interdisciplinarity is happening at all at the university level, it is in the sciences. Chemists, physicists, and biologists have a lot more to say to each other–and work to produce together–than we in the humanities will ever admit to ourselves.

I wonder, what true interdisciplinary projects could bring together scholars and researchers from different fields in the humanities? What would such a project look like?

KOAN: A professor of poststructuralist literary theory, 17th century Armenian history, and Greek epic poetry walk into a bar. The bartender looks at the three and says, what is this, some kind of joke?

Tarzan, Africa, and Cellphones

Mark Sample2 Comments

After writing Thursday’s post about the August 25, 2005 NYT article on soaring cellphone use in Africa, I got the urge to reread Tarzan. It must have been this memorable line from journalist Sharon LaFraniere’s article:

On a continent where some remote villages still communicate by beating drums, cellphones are a technological revolution akin to television in the 1940’s in the United States.

Beating drums. Beating drums. Now where had I seen that before?

Oh, here, in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original Tarzan of the Apes, when he describes the fictional “Dum-Dum” ritual. This ritual “marked important events in the life of the tribe–a victory, the capture of a prisoner, the killing of some large fierce denizen of the jungle, the death or accession of a king, and were conducted with set ceremonialism” (page 52 in my worn and tattered 1982 edition of the novel, featuring cover art by former DC Comics illustrator Neal Adams). (Cover art, I should add, that my tweenage self in 1982 found, uh, titillating, to say the least, with that half-naked Jane lying on the jungle floor.)

The kicker with the Dum-Dum ceremony is that the “tribe” Burroughs writes about is an ape tribe. During this particular Dum-Dum dance, celebrating the slaying of another tribe’s ape, female apes beat drums while males dance and attack the dead enemy gorilla. The Dum-Dum culminates with the apes devouring the mutilated dead ape.

Now, there is a human tribe in Tarzan as well. What’s disturbing in Burroughs’ imagination is that their human rituals closely resemble the ape rituals. In one celebration, women sit in a large circle, “yelling and beating upon drums” (81), while warriors dance around their still-alive prisoner, piercing his “eyes, ears, arms, and legs” with spears (81). The dance ends with the women “preparing the prisoner for their cooking pots” (82).

The only significant difference between the two rituals is that the apes’ victim is already dead, while the cannibals’ victim is alive during the ritual. This detail makes the Blacks seem all the more savage, for the ethics of other jungle creatures “meted a quick and merciful death to their victims” (80).

The black Africans are nothing more than jungle animals in Burroughs’ classic work, with “bestial faces, …yellow teeth, … [and] demon eyes” (176).

It doesn’t take a genius to know that Burroughs was writing from a racist viewpoint, playing upon the ignorant stereotypes of the time (1912). Sadly, with the NYT‘s allusion to “beating drums,” this Newspaper of Record rearticulates the same stereotypes, albeit disguised as a liberal self-congratulatory note on the progress of the continent.

Harry Potter, the first 100 pages

Mark Sample

Okay, I admit it, I advance-ordered Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from Amazon, and, as promised, Amazon had UPS deliver my copy first thing Saturday morning, the day of the long-awaited novel’s release.

I have serious mixed feelings about the Potter series. I’ve read all the books–twice, even–so it’s obvious that they bring me pleasure. Yet, the books are definitely flawed. The first several had too rigid a structure, the narrative lines following the school schedule of Hogwarts: beginning in the late summer with the predictably awful Dursleys torturing Harry, ending the following summer with Harry’s return to their wretched house, and in between there are midterms, Christmas breaks, and finals. As a result, the first three books seemed to me a bit repetitive.

I’ve read the first hundred pages or so of the new novel, and I have to say that so far, it’s moving along at a slow crawl. Unlike The Order of the Phoenix, in which Harry was tormented by Dementors very early in the novel, even before he left the Dursleys, nothing dangerous has happened yet–at least to Harry and his friends. Just a lot of hints of danger, happening on the sidelines.

I know that all the headlines are saying this is the darkest book yet, so I should suspend judgment until I get farther in the book.

Which brings me to another point. In the past, I’ve essentially devoured the novels. They’re easy reads and I usually finished them within 48 hours. In the past I couldn’t make any claims about my impression of the first hundred pages, simply because I read them so quickly that by the time I stopped to assess things, I was already deep, deep, deep, into the novel, maybe even finished. Now, because of work and family and other circumstances, I’m going to have to dip in and out The Half-Blood Prince. So I’ll have much more time between readings to reflect on what’s going on. And in this case, what’s going on, so far, is almost nothing.

In Time of the Plague

Mark Sample

plague_detail.gifI’m nearly finished with Neal Stephenson’s mammoth novel Quicksilver. Quicksilver is the first novel in Stephenson’s so-called Baroque Cycle (the second, The Confusion, was published in May and the third book is due in September). The Baroque Cycle is about, in no particular order, banking, cryptography, alchemy, puritanism, the Stuart kings of England, Versailles, calculus, piracy, Sir Isaac Newton, the Great Fire of London, the Black Plague, and just about any other facet of late 17th century Western Europe you can think of.

Some of the most gripping scenes of the novel occur in London in 1665, when the city was ravaged by the bubonic plague. Over 100,000 Londoners died that year (6,000 deaths a week at the plague’s peak). To the right is a detail from the frontispiece of a book published in London a year later, called “A Help for the Poor Who Are Visited with the Plague.” Written by a clergy, Thomas Willes, the book captures the full horror of the plague: I spare none, says the skeleton Death (whose dyslexia only adds to the eeriness of the image).

I’ve always been fascinated by plague narratives, and to judge from popular culture, so is everybody else. Plague–which could be any deadly, contagious biological epidemic–makes for good disaster films (28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead), as well as fiction (going back to the 14th century and Boccaccio’s The Decameron and up to and through Stanley Kim Robinson’s alternative history of the world The Years of Rice and Salt). Even our international policy is guided by the plague; what is biowarfare if not an updated version of the Black Death, engineered by humans, in which a missile or the mail becomes the vector instead of a flea?

Below is the rest of the woodcut from the frontispiece of Willes’ plague work (click the image for a larger version). From the illustration you can see something else about plagues: so often they are imbued with religious meaning. Salvation, redemption, sanctification–these are the counterweights to destruction, disease, and death. And this is as true today as it was in the days of the Black Death of England. Just listen to the prevailing rhetoric of war…

On my desk

Mark Sample

I’m experimenting with a Movable Type plugin called BookQueue. This tools lets you scan a book’s UPC symbol with a barcode reader, and then it fetches information about the book from Amazon.com, storing the info in a server database which you can then reference from a blog entry.

So, for example, I’ve used a Cue:Cat barcode reader to scan all the books currently sitting on my desk (I’ve got a big desk). These are all books that in one way or another I’m using for a chapter in my dissertation. They are:

  • Listmania” list I created at Amazon, which I sucked onto this site.

    [UPDATE: THESE TOOLS ARE NO LONGER WORKING ON THIS BLOG 01:10:07)