Heroic MOOCs At Harvard (Hubris)

It’s embarrassing to read Gregory Nagy in the recent New Yorker article by Nathan Heller. The article is one of the best bits on MOOCs that I’ve come across. What’s new here is not the news about attempts to strip down the university system as much as what it says about the motives of the elite University professors such as Nagy or Michael Sandel brought into this educational scheme. Kudos to our colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere who will have nothing to do with it.

Nagy is a distinguished and charming a classicist famous at Harvard for the popular course “Concepts of the Hero,” soon to be relaunced as “CB22x: The Ancient Greek Hero.” It would seem that the MOOC appears to the professor’s inner Achilles. Is this at bottom the appeal of Massive Open Online Courses, to the professoriate at elite Ivy League institutions, this quest for immortal glory in the form of an online lecture, inscribed into the ethernet for all time?

In the Web lecture, Nagy talks about the scene from the Iliad in which Achilles is told of his forked destiny: “You have two choices, Achilles. Either you stay at Troy and fight, and then die young, and then get a glory that is imperishable. Or you go home. And then you don’t die young. You live to a ripe old age, presumably, and you could even be happy. But you’re not going to get the glory. And this glory—I use the word ‘glory’ to translate kleos—is not just glory. It’s the glory that comes from being featured in the medium of Homeric poetry.

 

 

New York Corporate Bike Share Program

I suppose if I have a problem with the soon to be launched NYC bike share program, it’s not the intrusion of contemporary design elements into pristine downtown neighborhoods. I’m sure they will blend in over time, as most things tend to do in New York. What I don’t like at all is the  blatant corporate branding of a public interest. But I guess, we’ve gotten used to that too.

Esoteric-Exoteric Mystical Vision (Ezekiel 1) (Shavuot)

This cannot be the first time I’ve ever been to synagogue for the first day of Shavuot, but there is no other way to explain my surprise at finding that the first chapter of Ezekiel, perhaps the enigmatic and esoteric of biblical texts, the one that, according to the rabbis, almost didn’t make it into the canon of Hebrew Scripture, a text which the rabbis in Mishnah Haggigah expressly warn us about, is read aloud in the synagogue as the day’s haftarah reading. Apart from cheesecake and an all-night study session for the most intrepid, the holiday that commemorates the giving of Torah at Sinai, has almost nothing to distinguish it. The actual day of the holiday is one of the dullest, with no special ritual curiosities, except for this little bit, tucked discretely into the special order of scriptural readings designated for the holiday.

The main reading for the day is Exodus 19. The familiar and hackneyed scene in Exodus 19, where God gives the Torah to Moses to Israel at Sinai, it pales in comparison to Ezekiel’s vision of the wraithlike chariot figures, those four head creatures, the wheels within wheels, the din, electric dazzle, amber colors, and their rider, the burning power of the enthroned divine anthropos, “the appearance of a semblance of the glory of YHWH.” Are you supposed to see such spectacle? or even hear about it in the synagogue?

The public reading of this mystical text scrambles what I thought I understood about the esoteric and exoteric in Judaism. Viewed historically, perhaps the rabbis, or at least those rabbis who were uncomfortable with the revelations in Ezekiel, were not the people who assembled the order of additional scriptural readings in the synagogue. Once again, we see how little influence the early rabbis had on ancient synagogue practice? Or perhaps this particular text, the one that was always thought to be the most enigmatic of esoteric texts, is not an esoteric text, or was not always considered to be so. More philosophically, perhaps the firewall between esotericism and exotericism is not always a hot one. The line between esoteric and exoteric is contingent and labile, meaning that it is configured in different ways by different textual communities at different historical times and in different geographical places. Or more to the point, perhaps the esoteric and the exoteric always collapse into each other, are always on the verge of doing so; a meta-commentary to the relationship between the revealed and the concealed tout court.

In the text itself, there is no direct vision. The sense of God’s presence has been mediated by “appearance,” “semblance,” and “glory.” In the synagogue, perhaps “textual space,” “liturgical space” and “synagogue space” provide additional frame-sets with which to mediate the event of revelation, to bring one close to it at a distance. Every year, I teach this strange text in my Introduction to Judaism. So I guess this book, for all its strangeness, is kind of familiar. But this was the first time I ever encountered it liturgically in the synagogue, and that made it strange. You see and hear the words at the same time, while the plastic frame of ritual space lends the text an additional level of illumination.

Translucent Cross (East Harlem)

I like this modest, translucent cross with the blue neon border at Iglesia Cristiana, a small Pentecostal joint at E. 104 at Park Avenue in East Harlem. It’s hangs out off the built structure and over the street, right under the commuter rail tracks. Catching the eye is the simple, cheap construction and the very sophisticated see-through effect. Instead of blocking the natural view, it absorbs the surrounding and framing treescape into its own frame-configuration. An interesting way to think about “religion,” the natural environment, and urban space. I walked past it on the way to a doctor’s appointment after lunch with a friend down in the Village. Posting multiple shots vertically here at the blogsite creates the impression of descent. The translucent cross comes down to earth. I don’t think the pictures would have come out as nearly as well in the winter. These shots required spring foliage, while  the grey sky gives a nice, matted effect to its subject.

From Umm Kulthum to Rachid Taha (Cosmopolitanism)

Something new to listen to. What a thought! In the little world of twentieth century philosophy and thought that I inhabit, sometimes sadly, cosmopolitanism means Germany and German Jews and maybe, just maybe German modernism. But isn’t that all a little stale by now, even philosophically? More and more, a larger Jewish cosmos today might, under the right conditions, place itself in a broader Middle Eastern-Mediterranean arc. At least in Israel. I really liked this piece by Amos Noy. It appeared first in Hebrew at Café Gibraltar and was then translated at +972.

Noy’s article reflects a genuine openness and curiosity about the world around him, travelling to new places, listening to new things, refusing the friend/enemy distinction. And the music is very good. Posted by Noy, the clip of Rachid Taha’s cover of Rock El Casbah is particularly awesome.  I like Taha’s not so-young-anymore, secular Paris-based Algerian hipster look, and how the video intercuts fast between the street and concert venue. I’ve never seen an oud do this. And then I read  this article in yesterday’s  New York Times about the new, oppositional music scene in post-revolutionary, Muslim Brotherhood Egypt. I went online and found this bit of Egyptian “mahraganat.”

All this Levantinism, which for me remains mostly virtual, recommends itself to Jewish philosophy for more broad  minded, less Eurocentric sounds, sights, and perspectives. I won’t worry about Orientalism and cultural imperialism if the music’s any good. By this, I would like to assume that one can enjoy hybrids like these on their own sovereign terms, not as some putative Other or with some constant reference back to the Same. I think that was part of Noy’s point. Either you like the stuff or you don’t. Can’t it be that simple, even if and especially because it is not always that?

Affective Community (Habonim Dror) Nostalgia

I probably shouldn’t be posting this. It’s a little too personal, and probably self-serving. But folk have been posting scads of old photos from Habonim Camp Moshava from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and I’ve been wanting to comment in a more formal sort of way. So please excuse the conceit. If it weren’t for this  picture from 1965 I might not have bothered. I like the  upper quadrant, in particular. It reminds me of Rodchenko’s avant-garde photography from the Soviet Union in the 1920s; and the fact that you can’t, at least in this picture, identify the figures milling about at the bottom. While I’m not uncritical of nostalgia, it’s also true to say that I love the rush of recognition and recollection, when you spot as if out of nowhere old pictures of yourself, your friends, old places, and old objects.

Looking at these pictures online, what interests me “professionally” are two things: [1] how they might contribute to an understanding of “affective community,” small, closely knit groups  organized around, generated by and generating all at the same time, affective ties bonding its members to each other and to a common purpose perceived to be just and true, [2] the historical archive that they now constitute. They propagate what legal theorist Robert Cover called “paideic nomos,” super-crytalized value systems set off apart from the larger social order, or “imperial nomos,” in which they are embedded.

These could include ideological schools and summer camps, youth groups, church and synagogue groups, unions, lobbies, arts collectives, etc.

For me, it was Habonim, a Labor Zionist youth movement organized around Jewish democratic socialism and the kibbutz-socialist idea mixed up with rump end 1960s youth culture. Habonim, which later merged with the Dror youth movement, ran summer camps and youth activities during the year, whose professed ideological purpose was to move us all to Israel to live on kibbutzim. Many of us went to kibbutz for the gap year after high school, before resuming our pre-ordained lives as solid, bourgeois college students, soon to be liberal U.S. citizens. Some of us moved to Israel and to kibbutz, and a very small few of us actually stayed. But for most of us who spent significant time “in the movement,” the experience was profound, stamping the idiosyncratic ways by which we have come to think about and articulate ourselves vis-à-vis culture, politics, and religion.

Looking back at these pictures, especially from the 1970s, what strikes me is the almost naïve and open self-giving of ourselves to a camera. I’m probably imagining it, but the faces seem more relaxed, less anxious, and happier than the way people appear in pictures today, when the relationship to cameras and other types of imaging technologies is more knowing and critical.

The Habonim summer camps were organized as self-governing, youth-led organization. While there was always a token adult presence on site, the highest authority was usually the director, a 22 year old kid. It’s a testament to the trust, or lack of worry and concern, our parents put in us back then, to let kids out of the house, to spend summers under the supervision of 18, 19, 20 year olds with effectively no or little experience of the world.

Like I said, these photographs belong to an archive. They are already historical documents of postwar American Jewish culture. In 1975, we were closer to 1945, to the end of World War 2 and to the Holocaust, than we are today, in 2013 to 1975. And closer still to the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Six Day War.

Things looked differently back then. Israel looked different, America looked different, we looked different. I won’t say better. Worlds were smaller back then, perhaps less self-critical and self-aware than today, less cynical, but less wise also. For those on the inside, it was great. For those on the outside, it must have been terribly cliquish. But I think it’s true to say that we were better bonded back then, to each other, to history, and to ideological ideas. The notion that none of this was “genuine,” that it was, indeed, all posed, represents a little bit of postmodern wisdom, which may be true, if not in an absolute sense, then at least more or less, but in a way that is probably beside the point.

Syracuse Creekwalk (Urban Greenspace)

 

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Syracuse Creekwalk is a relatively new green trail, meant to re-purpose badly blighted  urban spaces. It meanders you through postwar urban architectural crud, under the elevated highways bridges that slice up the guts of the city, past and into sites of new urbanism, through post industrial deleterious, into and out of the Syracuse inner harbor, past the mall, “Destiny USA,” which I neglected to photograph, and then finally out to beautiful Lake Onondoga, once (and still?) the most polluted lake in North America. It’s  a two mile walk from downtown Armory Square out to the Lake . Eventually the walk will loop all around Onondoga Lake and connect up to the Eerie Canal Trailway, creating a corridor from Albany to Buffalo.

Liberal urban development projects, including green spaces, make capitalism bearable, almost. I like the rough wildness of these urban and urban-green spaces. Its  roughness is emblematic of Syracuse as a whole. The Creekwalk is similar to the way the Highline in New York City got re-purposed as part of the new destination culture, a term I take from Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett. But the added plus is that in Syracuse it has not  been overrun by rich art dealers, their minions, models, and tourists. There is a much more democratic feel to the place –old people, young people, families, “native born” and immigrant, middle class and working class. The place has been carefully designed, but lacks a certain design-preciousness that would be more common in larger and more prosperous metropolitan centers.

The creekwalk is a rough masterpiece of new urban planning. Its point is to stretch a green lung along the creek and through the city, and, in doing so, to heal the blight that has come to constitute downtown Syracuse over the last four decades or so. There’s that magical effect, generated by the green space. There’s a sense of surprise, excitement and possibility as you enter into and make your way forward into and through it. But on your walk back, you re-emerge back into city proper, confronted once again by the sad, hard face of desiccated downtown Syracuse. So the  Creekwalk remains a curious amalgam of re-purposed green space and post-industrial blight. About the latter, I don’t think there’s only so much that can be done without demolition, starting with the elevated highways that deface the city and including  any government and corporate building erected since, what, 1960?

Syracuse Creekwalk is a happy place wending through unhappy space. For all that, it reflects great charm and optimism, a bold initiative in the face of an inordinate social and urban challenge, a place worthy of genuine civic pride, it is still very much a work in progress, and up against enormous odds. Much like the City itself.