Musings on the Mundane and Not So Mundane

The Power and Privilege of Naming

2007-04-17T15:56:00.000-05:00

I was reminded Sunday afternoon of the power that the act of naming and remembering can have. Paulo Friere, a Latin American educator, eloquently wrote about that power associated with naming things. In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere mused, "To exist, humanly, is to NAME the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of the a new naming, Men (sic) are not built in silence, but in word...in action-reflection." It's that act of naming, labeling, qualifying, categorizing that is uniquely human. We seldom stop to think about it, but I dare say it is the one common strand that is woven throughout each of our days. We call others by their names. We refer to ourselves by our names. We worry about how others will remember us or if they even will remember us. Names become a shorthand for our entire identity. To some extent they give us permanence beyond our physical presence. They link us with both the past and the present and the future.

As a historian I am uniquely aware of the power of names. My job is to help recover names, to tell the stories behind those names, and try to create a structure out of which we can understand and examine the names and stories. It's usually a pretty hard sale since our society is so fixated on the transitory present. But this weekend I was reminded in a visceral way about the power of naming and remembering. Sunday marked the Jewish observation of Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for those lost in the Holocaust. It's hard to fathom a tragedy of that size. Scholars estimate that over 6 million people were killed during the Holocaust. In an effort to try to help people comprehend the destruction, an organization at the University of Texas, The White Rose Society, distributed 10,000 white roses on the University of Texas campus one day last week. Each rose represented one life lost in a mere half day at Auschwitz. 10,000 white roses. As I rode the bus around town that day, there were roses everywhere I looked. I was surrounded by nameless death.

Which brings me to the names. As a way of observing Yom HaShoah a group of Austinites met in the outdoor rotunda at the Texas capital. Each person received several pages of names of Holocaust victims and each person stood and began to quietly read those names aloud. When I walked out into the rotunda to join the reading I was overwhelmed by the sounds of the names. Name were layered upon each other as they intermingled and entwined themselves into an unceasing symphony that seemed to surround you. Every now and then an individual name would work its way above the din and hang in the air for a moment until it faded and became a part of that larger ocean of names again. As I stood there it was so easy to become lost among the names, to become overwhelmed at the seemingly unending recitation. Name after name, page after page. Children, parents, brothers, sisters, grandfathers, grandmothers, wives. The names never stopped. Readers came and went, but the names never stopped. And each name, for at least that brief moment that it was spoken and hung in the air, came alive again. The child, the parent, the wife, the brother, the sister walked the earth for just a moment more. Their suffering and fear not forgotten. Their lives remembered and honored. Their existence reaffirmed. It was the very least that we the living could do. And for that brief moment, I remembered what it means to be a historian, to name and through the act of naming to remember the past. May each of us be so lucky as to be named during our lives. It seems appropriate to end with the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer said in remembrance of the souls.

Yis'ga'dal v'yis'kadash sh'may ra'bbo, b'olmo dee'vro chir'usay v'yamlich malchu'say, b'chayaychon uv'yomay'chon uv'chayay d'chol bais Yisroel, ba'agolo u'viz'man koriv; v'imru Omein.
Y'hay shmay rabbo m'vorach l'olam ul'olmay olmayo.
Yisborach v'yishtabach v'yispoar v'yisromam v'yismasay, v'yishador v'yis'aleh v'yisalal, shmay d'kudsho, brich hu, l'aylo min kl birchoso v'sheeroso, tush'bechoso v'nechemoso, da,ameeran b'olmo; vimru Omein.
Y'hay shlomo rabbo min sh'mayo, v'chayim alaynu v'al kol Yisroel; v'imru Omein.
Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya'aseh sholom olaynu, v'al kol yisroel; vimru Omein.

May the great Name of God be exalted and sanctified, throughout the world, which he has created according to his will. May his Kingship be established in your lifetime and in your days, and in the lifetime of the entire household of Israel, swiftly and in the near future; and say, Amen.

May his great name be blessed, forever and ever.

Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, honored elevated and lauded be the Name of the holy one, Blessed is he- above and beyond any blessings and hymns, Praises and consolations which are uttered in the world; and say Amen. May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and life, upon us and upon all Israel; and say, Amen.

Where Has Austin Gone, and Am I Part of the Problem?

2007-03-31T16:53:00.000-05:00

It's been raining here in Austin on and off for the last several days. Besides fairly constant tornado and thunderstorm watches, drivers who don't quite understand the concept of hydroplaning, and students that will use getting a little wet as a convenient excuse to not come to class, this means that everyone is out and about on this first day of cloudless sky. People with dogs, people with multiple small children in tow, yuppies, hipsters, everyone. And an awful lot of these folks seem to be roaming the city's newish 2nd Street District. For those not in the know, this is an area just west of Congress Ave. and lies in between the Children's Museum on the east and the City Hall on the west. The 2nd Street District is one of those experiments in urban planning that is supposed to blend living and commercial space. There are lots of high end lofts and apartments coupled with lots of high end shops that seem to mostly sell uber-hip clothes. I'm not exactly sure how any of these stores are staying in business since I have never actually seen anyone buy anything in them, but they line the block with their doors wide open.

Maybe it's the West Texan crumudgeon in me, but any store named "Cowboy Cool" is going to automatically raise a whole bunch of red flags. You see, where I'm from, there's nothing that "cool" about being a cowboy. Cowboys wear their hats out of necessity as protection from the sun. Their boots protect against the cacti and bites of rattlesnakes hidden among those same cacti. And any cowboy or oil hand worth his salt wouldn't ever think of paying more than $30 for a pair of jeans. However, if I was to wander into Cowboy Cool (and I admit that a sick curiousity has led me in there), I would find $400 and $500 boots, $100 jeans, and all sorts of "vintage" snap shirts. None, of course, in any size larger than a 10 and none designed to see anything more rugged than an evening of faux honky-tonk music at the Continental Club. This, my friends, is the "new" Austin.

But in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to come clean. I'm writing this blog entry as I sit smack-dab in the middle of the Second Street District in front of one of my most regular haunts, Jo's Hot Coffee. On one side of me is a wine bar and on the other side an Italian cafe. My rear end is firmly planted in it own orange, nuevo-modern plastic chair pulled up to a faux-marble cafe table. I'm typing this entry on my new MacBook Pro with its Creative Commons and Austin Film Society stickers that I carry in a Timbuk2 bag. I sport multiple tattoos and have a piercing or two. I play with new media, read Lifehacker and Gizmodo and Austinist, and I even have a Twitter account (though I never use it).

You see, whether I like it or not, I am very much a part of this "new Austin" that I would like so much to mock. I may hate the fact that as I sit here the plastic, look-at-me-I'm-so-hip crowd is out in force, but the fact remains that I am seated someplace where you could expect them to be. I am on their turf and am frequently on their turf. I call Jo's on 2nd Street a home away from home and come by almost everyday (and sometimes more than once). I'm seldom without my iPod even if I am usually listening to public radio. I go to the fru-fru fancy spa around the corner from Cowboy Cool and get pedicures (NO nail polish-- I still have to maintain some butchness) and get my hair cut at a salon on South Congress aka SoCo. Hell, I even went to Love on the Lawn for music the other night and was surrounded by the we are hip and creative and young with our shaggy cuts and retro t-shirt and bermuda shorts lesbian crowd. I shop at Whole Foods and Central Market more than HEB and Fiesta. I even secretly covet a scooter.

So, what does that make me? Part of the problem in my adopted home? Is it a problem that Ausin is expanding and growing in the ways that it is? Everything changes, and gods know, as a historian I have spent my life studying change. I know it is inevitable; I know it seldom happens without turmoil and angst and the gnashing of teeth. So here's to Austin and change. May there always be an Alamo Drafthouse with cold Shiner on tap. May there always be out of the way unique corners to be explored. May there always be little madre and padre breakfast taco restaurants. May there always be the chance for a dawn morning dip in the icy waters of Barton Springs. May there always live music at places that don't charge a cover because they know the band isn't good enough to do that yet. May the uniqueness never give completely away to the damn west coasters from LA. May there always be a place for the Leslies, the Willies, the Annes, and the Mollys. Forever and ever, Amen.

Reclaiming Austin

2007-03-21T18:35:00.000-05:00

It looks like Austin has survived yet another South By Southwest, and all of Austinites that are a bit light in the hip quotient can once again go out in public without having to worry about running into those uber-hip La-La Land film and music biz folks. Yes, folks, the badge people have left the city. One of my friends suggested (only half in jest) that the city convert all roads leading to and from Bergstrom Airport into east-bound roads so as to facilitate the hipsters' departure from our fair city. All in all, maybe not that bad of an idea.

Actually, I can't complain as much this year as I finally joined the hordes of people wearing badges and waiting in what seemed to be endless lines to pick up goody bags at the Convention Center. Yes, after about a decade back in central Texas, I finally went to SXSW. But lest you think less of me, let me hasten to say that it was not the film or music portions of this annual celebration of all things audio and video. No, folks, I decided to spend my SXSW experience hanging out with the nerds of the Interactive Festival.

And, what you might ask, did I get for my registration fee to the Interactive Festival? Well, for starters I got one of those nifty bags gracing the Convention Center floor in the above photo. My bag came complete with all sorts of sample magazines like Wired (which I do actually subscribe to) and a bunch of others about code development and gaming that might as well have been written in Greek. There were also numerous cards announcing various parties, a set of stickers that one could use to decorate your badge and claim affinity for all sorts of groups (mostly things like Mac, PC, Linux, coder, etc.), some little doohikie that I still haven't figured out its purpose, and a miniature Sharpie that you could use to color and decorate your nifty canvas bag. In past years, the Interactive Festival bags also evidently included snacks and condoms. According to the scuttlebut around the Convention Center, condoms were included in the Film and Music bags this year but left out of the Interactive Festival bags. Evidently the assumption was that the nerds aren't going to be having wild, drunken sex like the film and movie folks so why waste good condoms! I also got a card that was good for one free beer a night at the hospitality tent.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I went. I got to go hear some great panels on the role of social networking software among teenagers and the role of serious gaming in the e-learning community. I also went to a couple of really interesting panels on web accessibility and spirituality and the internet. It was refreshing to listen to bright folks who spend the better part of their days thinking about the social impact of all of this new technology that we have become so fascinated with. And it was a bit of a relief to discover that I even understood what these folks were talking about most of the time. But what was really interesting was the people watching. There were the hip, new media, I'm from the west coast and have already made and lost a fortune in the dot com boom nerds and then there were the guys (and these were mostly guys) that try as they might just screamed high school AV club. My people! We didn't have an AV Club at Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas, but if we had, I would probably have been a part of it.

You see, I come by my own geekiness naturally. My father, who never learned how to type and didn't know what the internet was until two years ago, decided that his only child would not grow up to be a Luddite. So good old Dad decided that we should purchase the very first Macintosh produced by Apple Computers. We're talking old school, 1984, brown box with no hard drive and only a small disc drive, black and white screen, keyboard, and a mouse. And in 1984, I thought I was the cutting edge to have such a machine that I could use for my English papers!! It had a whopping 128 kilobites built in memory. To put that in perspective, the iPod Shuffle has 1 gigabyte of memory, and the average song in iTunes takes 128 kilobites of memory! But none of that mattered in 1984. In 1988 we upgraded to a MacPlus with a whopping 1 megabyte of RAM. Now I could store my word processing program on the hard drive and just store my papers on the discs! I was, at least technologically speaking, hot shit that just got even hotter when I bought a PowerBook 145 in 1993. Now I was the proud owner of a laptop-- a 7 pound hunk of dark gray plastic with a 9 inch monochramatic screen and a built-in trackball instead of a mouse. I lugged that thing all over the US while I was doing research for my dissertation. It ran Microsoft Word and an early version of Filemaker so I could organize my dissertation notes but that was about all it did.

So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that I felt at home amongst some of the nerds of SXSW. It was (and still is) a bit disconcerting to think about how much has changed in the last 20+years. I couldn't help but think about Miranda's line in The Tempest that Aldous Huxley stole for dystopian novel Brave New World. "Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!" Such people, indeed. I might feel a kinship with the nerds, but I'm glad all of those people have left Austin and we can get back to our normal state of weirdness. At least I know Leslie isn't going to run me down while talking on his/her cell phone....... (photo courtesy of Austin Experience.com)

Well, Hello There Sailor.....

2007-03-18T16:04:00.000-05:00

Howdy! Okay, yes, I realize that the title and the opening line are mixing metaphors a bit, but if you are going to read more than one entry, you might as well get used to my odd sense of humor.

First things first, that quintessential philosophical question.... Who am I? Just another over-educated, Austin liberal who is fast approaching middle age. Well, maybe I am a bit more than that. I make my home (by choice) in Austin, Texas, a little spot of blue in an otherwise fairly red place. I grew up out in the deserts of West Texas but fell in love with the Hill Country during college and spent 8 years trying to figure out how to get back here. My politics do lean more towards the left than the right, and I do have a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Vanderbilt University. And I am beginning to reach that middle age mark.

Which is partially why I decided to start keeping this blog. I am now reaching a point in my life where I want to slow down a bit, become more observant about the world around me, and push myself to be a bit more creative and a bit less, well, staid. So, maybe this little blog will give me the creative outlet to do some of that stuff. And my therapist has been after me to start writing more.....

Part of the problem, though, is that as a historian, I tend to be rather self-critical about this type of writing. Even though I have no illusions that anyone will ever be reading this 50 years from now, or even 50 seconds from now, I can't help but shake this idea that what I write should somehow be noteworthy and erudite. And then there is also that part of me that is less than a bit confident in my own writing abilities. I just keep thinking about that comment scrawled across one of my Southern History papers in grad school that read, "Much like your fellow Texan Roger Staubach, you at least hit the mark more than miss it." Amazing how those things stay with you.

So here's to a small act of faith. Let me know if anyone is out there reading this.