Music, Unbought Stuffed Dogs, Phil Collins & Ernest Hemingway

This week came more proof of the importance of music to how my mind works….many of you may know that I have no ability to memorize anything…mean anything…I have never been able to memorize addition or subtraction facts, multiplication tables, spellings, dates, or…or anything…I could never memorize prose sections or poetry…If I understand the system that things work in I can remember them, but I have never been able to learn anything by rote memorization…the BIG exception to this block is music…I can hear a song twice and I will remember the words of that song forever…In fact, the only multiplication table I know, I know because my father realized this quirk in my memorization skills.  When I was in the 4th grade, he wrote a song about multiplying by 4s…I remember almost every word to this day.

These days, Lydia has gotten me into listening to fiction during my long work-related road trips instead of music…This week I had a 8 hour journey up to the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute (and back) to give a talk about the Arkansas Archeological Society’s “Summer Dig.”  I had just finished The Paris Wife, a novel about Hadley Richardson–Ernest Hemmingway’s first wife–so I chose to listen to Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises…I chose this book 1) because it was about 7 hours long ; 2) I had not read this novel since high school and 3) I wanted to see what insights The Paris Wife might offer to a reading of the novel.

I got back to Magnolia about mid-day on Wed…I intended to go to the office after a quick lunch…but I made the mistake of laying down for a nap…As I drifted off to sleep, I fumbled with my iPod to find some music to listen to while I snoozed…to my surprise I chose–of all things–Phil Collin’s first solo album Face Value (1981).

As I listened to the infinitely overdubbed horns and drum machines, I began to realize, through the foggy haze of my road-weariness, that there were some obtuse resonances between a couple of the songs and some of the plot points in The Sun Also Rises…next came the realization that I had made these connections before…then came the shock–I knew why I had chosen Face Value…I had been listening to this album when I originally read The Sun Also Rises back in like 1986-87…my subconscious still linked these two works…crazy.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite, random, surrealistic exchanges in The Sun Also Rises (presaging Henry Miller–one of my favorites):

“Here’s a taxidermist’s,” Bill said. “Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?”
“Come on,” I said. “You’re pie-eyed.”
“Pretty nice stuffed dogs,” Bill said. “Certainly brighten up your flat.”
“Come on.”
“Just one stuffed dog. I can take ‘em or leave ‘em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog.”
“Come on.”
“Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.”
“We’ll get one on the way back.”
“All right. Have it your way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

“Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

Bobby Joe Hand & Antonio Gramsci: An Obituary

Bobby Joe Hand in the late 1980s.

My great-uncle Bobby Joe Hand, age 71, is being buried today at Flatwoods Methodist Church near Eva, Tennessee.  I am in Magnolia, Arkansas, and I wish I was there.

I am an academic, so I deal with things in academic ways…in this case writing.  This blog post is about mourning (or paying tribute to) a family member, and (more selfishly), about being away from your family in times of need.

Bob Hand was my mother’s mother’s brother.  This might not seem like a particularly close connection in some families.  However, as both of my parents are only children I have no uncles or aunts.  If you put this together with how young my parents were when they gave birth to me, you have a recipe for great-uncles feeling like uncles (in fact, some of my cousins feel like uncles, too).

Bobby was very dear  to my grandmother–Billie Jean (Hand) Deason.  He was her “little brother,” and, more importantly, he was a quick-witted joker.  You almost never left an encounter with Bob when you did not smirk, smile or chuckle a little. My grandmother always told me that his given name was “Bobby Joe”–not “Robert Joseph.”  As someone who is named “Jamie” (not  short for “James”), this is something I could appreciate.

Now that I sit down to write, I realize that I know surprisingly little about Bob’s early life.  I know that he was a part of a large family deeply rooted in south Georgia peanut farming.  I know that he served in the US Army, that he once lived in San Antonio and that he worked in the construction industry in the Atlanta area.  Bobby and his wife Madge really came into my life sometime in the 1980s when they bought some land and built a “cabin” near my grandparents in Eva, Tennessee.  Bob must have done well in the Atlanta construction business (they are always building in Atlanta, right?), because he and Madge soon came to Tennessee permanently… in a sort of “semi-retirement.”  I say “semi” because they immediately started farming (cows, corn and soybeans) and Bob soon ended up running the local Farmer’s Co-op. When my Grandfather Deason passed away, Bob and Madge came to not only farm their own land, but the 300 acres that my grandparents had farmed before (this is sounding less, and less like retirement, eh?).

Bob Hand was smart and resourceful.  He would challenge whatever platitude you put forth…he was a great debater.  He did not accept received truths.  He loved to hold forth on world affairs, politics, business, and ….well…anything.  We even had a conversation once about how some anthropologists thought that Leviticus was against pigs because they competed against people for food while other animals turned inedible stuff (grass) into edible stuff (meat and milk)…Bob quickly said: “well if that’s it, they’re fine to eat now…they all eat corn these days.”

This is why I want to talk about Bobby Joe Hand and Antonio Gramsci (an unlikely pairing in most regards).

Antonio Gramsci

Every good anthropology graduate student knows a little about Antonio Gramsci…unfortunately, they often know only a little.  Mostly, they read a couple snippets of his work and then attempt to talk with an air of great authority on the subject.  For those of you not chained up in the ivory tower, however, I will say that Gramsci was one of the most influential social theorists of the 20th century.  He was a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime (his “prison notebooks” are his most cited work).  Gramsci’s writings were heavily concerned with culture and the nature of political leadership.

What does an Italian Marxist convict have to do with a Georgia/Tennessee farmer?  Well…I’ll tell you (the anthropologists in the audience already have a clue where I am going…I hope).

Gramsci thought that we had been hoodwinked into thinking that intellectuals were only “men of letters,” professors, and learned clerics.  He thought that there were men who were “organic intellectuals”–folks who did not have “book learnin” but, nevertheless could be important critical thinkers.  “All men are intellectuals,” wrote Gramaci, “…each man..carries some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is to bring into being new modes of thought.” (Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 1997, p.9).

In this light Booby Joe Hand was a real intellectual–an organic intellectual.  I have a Ph.D., but Uncle Bobby was one of the best critical thinkers I have ever met.  I wish I could bottle the way he thought and make my students drink it (but, then again, they would constantly argue with me after that….I’d better think about this).

I hope the folks at the funeral are making the occasional straight-faced, snarky comment…in honor of Bob.

A more recent photo of the Hand clan: Bobby Joe, his wife Madge & their daughter Leanne.

Thought for the day….

I just saw this posted by my friend and colleague Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste…and the quote speaks to many aspects of my life at the moment…both my work and my personal life…

“…there is no agony like bearing an untold story…”– Zora Neale Hurston

A Message from the Ninth Circle…

Marvel's Tomb of Dracula

When I was a kid my mother introduced me to some pretty dark (and cool) comics…one of those was Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula...mid-to-late 70s dark, atmospheric comic books with heavy-handed storylines and great art–odd-angled panels thick with mood and menace. The star of this comic was, of course, Dracula–an anti-hero masquerading as a villain. One blogger says he was “…a pontificating killer with an out-of-control ego and equal parts misogyny and misanthropy, but Wolfman imbued him with charisma.”

One of the story lines I remember most was about Janus, the son of Dracula and Domini, who was possessed by an angel. In one issue, Janus took Dracula back to a Dante-like hell and (in a moment that would have made Freud proud) bested him in an arena-style match in front of an audience of demons.  Later in my childhood comic education I encountered hell again… in the fourth Uncanny X-men Annual, “Nightcrawler’s Inferno.” That was a great comic that chronicles the descent of Dr. Strange (another HUGE favorite of mine) and the X-Men into a facsimile of Hell based on Dante’s Inferno.  All of this peaked my interest in Dante and the Inferno…luckily, my grandfather had a set of Harvard Classics (which I still own) on his bookshelves, so I could pull them down and figure out a bit more about this set of ideas…Dante’s Inferno was fascinating to me.  Although, as a version of hell, it was familiar…because it was written in another place, in another time by someone of a distinctly different culture, it also was very strange and foreign feeling.

One thing that intrigued me from the beginning (well, since that X-Men annual pointed it out) is that the last circle of hell was reserved for traitors…specifically those who have betrayed a particular trust.  The Ninth Circle is ringed by classical and Biblical giants, who perhaps symbolize the pride and other spiritual flaws lying behind acts of treachery. The traitors are distinguished from the “merely” fraudulent in that their acts involve betraying a special relationship of some kind. There are four concentric zones of traitors, corresponding, in order of seriousness, to betrayal of family ties, betrayal of community ties, betrayal of guests, and betrayal of liege lords.

Illustration 32 of Divine Comedy:Inferno by Paul Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

As a person (and future  anthropologist) who lives his life with special attention to the intricate web of social relationships that make me who I am, I was very attracted to this idea…this was a new concept (the traditional protestant stuff I got at church emphasized murder, adultery, theft, etc.), but it was a concept that intuitively made sense to me as a “social person”–the worse thing you could do is transgress the bonds of a social relationship of a family member, the community or a guest (I do not think we hold “liege lords” in as high a esteem as they did in Dante’s day)…lately The Inferno has been on my mind for two reasons…first, I’ve been getting into Dorothy Sayers novels (I’m going to use them in a future Anthropology of Popular  Culture class)…I knew she was a popular detective novelist in the 1920s, but I did not know (until recently) that she is also responsible for an important translation of Dante’s Inferno.

The second reason is much more sad…and serious…that is that I have recently betrayed a special relationship… In which I was both a close friend and a house guest…thus assuring myself a place in Dante’s Ninth Circle (should such a place prove to exist).  This fact, however has made me philosophical and acutely aware that the tangled web of social relationships we weave sometimes cannot help but be upset.  I used to do this on a regular basis when my second wife would get angry because I chose a colleague’s needs over hers (she was strong, he was not…that was my faulty reasoning then)…and now, I have committed a grave betrayal…But I didn’t do it simply because I could, or because I wanted to–on the contrary I did not want to betray that trust.  I did it because my needs (and wants) were greater than the ties that held that relationship together.  I wish that I did not have to sever that tie…but I would still make that same decision again, if given the opportunity…and I would make it again and again.  I am sorry that a relationship is over…I am sorry that the act was a betrayal…but I cannot be sorry for the act itself.

Life is complicated…

A Day That Will Live in Infamy

http://www.audrey-kawasaki.com/index.php

Last Man On Earth

Since the holidays I’ve been been getting used to some major life changes…and, like it always has during important segments of my life, music is playing an important role…You might recall that I had been channeling my angst about living alone through Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky album back in October 2007.  Now I cast about my iPod for some music to capture my many, changing, contradictory emotions…To my surprise there is an album that nicely helps me vent many of my feelings….

The Last Man on Earth (2001) is the sixteenth studio album by singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, released on September 24, 2001 on Red House Records. According to his own liner notes, Wainwright entered a period of deep depression following a romantic break up and the death of his mother in 1997 …he believed he could never write again. Retreating to his mother’s cabin in the woods, he underwent therapy and gradually recovered, eventually recording the soul-baring Last Man on Earth album.

What I like about Last Man on Earth is its complexity…it is not just an angry album…or a sad album…or a hopeful album…but Wainwright captures the crazy cocktail of thoughts, ideas and emotions that someone wrestles with during a grieving process…for me, it’s grieving about losing a relationship and a way of life…as one reviewer puts it:

Granted, most albums about loss tend towards being grave, dark, and solitary affairs. However, Wainwright surrounds his lyrics with music that is subtly buoyant and uplifting, not to mention that at his best, he has a unique way of making his songs simultaneously heartbreaking and amusing.– http://www.musicbox-online.com/low-last.html#ixzz0m9RZWvDK

The albums working title was “Missing you”…the name of the first track…I’m feeling its lyrics at the moment, so I’ll post some of them here:

He don’t stay out anymore
No more coming in past four
Most nights he turns in ’round ten
He’s way too tired to pretend

Sure, you might find him up at three
But if he is it’s just to pee
Sometimes he’s awake ’till two
But that’s just ’cause he’s missing you
He’s lying there and missing you

Guess he’s just set in his ways
He does the same damn thing most days
And there’s seven twenty-fours a week
With lots of down time so to speak
But he hardly glances at a clock
Since his routine is carved in rock
Man’s a machine, what can he do
Keep going on just missing you
Keep right on going missing you

And his teeth falls out, so does his hair
But in his dreams you’re always there
A jewel in his unconscious mind
A miracle, a precious find
But in the end he’s all alone
He wakes up and his jewel is gone
There’s a heaven and he knows it’s true
But he’s back on earth just missing you
And it’s hell on earth
Missing you
Back where he started
Missing you

Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room

Long time, no see.

I love my job, but I find that one of the hardest things to do as a Research Station Archeologist is to find time to write…that obviously includes blogging. But I plan on returning to blogging this year for therapeutic reasons.

Last month—March 17th to be exact­–was my 15th anniversary of being married to my wife. However, it is a bittersweet day.

TJV and I have been living 5 hours apart for the last 4 years as I have taken up my post in southwest Arkansas, and her job keeps her in northwest Arkansas. This fall I could tell that we were no longer connecting in the way we once did…over the holidays, we spent some time together (instead of visiting our families) and it came out that TJ no longer wanted to be with me. Although one might say we’ve been geographically separated for some time, we have now officially “separated.” I am very sad at our parting.

This is not for any of the reasons that many people might think…but, in truth, I do not really understand the reasons completely…I’m one of those guys that need to talk everything out, but, unfortunately (for me), TJ is not one of those folks…so we talk…but we don’t talk about why we are where we are. But what I can say is this:

TJ has spent her entire life fighting for her independence. It is something she holds very dear. In truth, her independence is one of the things that I love about TJ…although I did often wish she seemed to need me just a little bit, it was the strong-willed, assertive TJ that I was in love with…In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that she would rather be alone.

I have known the Waylon Jennings song “Just Because You Asked Me To” all of my life—I cannot remember ever not knowing the tune. One of the lines of that song is:

“I’d even walk away from you/
Just because you asked me to/
Lord, I hope you never do.”

…I have sung this song about a million times to TJ…Although a big part of me does not want to make this easy–wants to fight tooth an nail to keep TJ–if I am going to be true to how we have always talked about our relationship being…I have to let TJ go…

We had a great run…and times that I will always remember. I will always treasure my time with TJV…I will always love her…I am deeply hurt, but I sincerely hope she has a wonderful life and finds what she is looking for…

As the name of my blog implies…further along we’ll know more about it, further along we’ll understand why…

I Hate It Here (When You’re Gone) 4:10

I love my job…I have a busy, challenging mix of teaching and research. I have 11 counties of cool archaeological sites wide open for my investigation. I have had (so far) good support from the main office of my organization when it comes to getting equipment, project support, and such…The only fly in the ointment is that my wife lives 5 hours away.

Now I am not in the worse situation…I have colleagues who live much further apart from their spouses–Arkansas to Florida, Baton Rouge to Berkeley, and (for awhile) I had a friend who taught in Virginia while her spouse worked in the UK. Hey, the new SAU Africanist historian’s wife is still in Senegal. However, those who know me well, know that I am not built to live alone…enter my new favorite song.

Sky Blue Sky is the sixth studio album by Chicago rock band Wilco, released on May 15, 2007 by Nonesuch Records. I bought it in May while I was in Florida working on the Kingsley Plantation project…but over the summer the album began to sink in. Many of you are familiar with Sky Blue Sky whether you know it or not–Wilco licensed six songs from the Sky Blue Sky sessions to a Volkswagen advertisement campaign, a move that generated criticism from fans and the media. But, to my knowledge, “I Hate it Here” was not one of the six (or maybe I have not caught that one yet). It has become my new “theme song” of sorts…

Let me set the record straight, however…I like Magnolia…the song is not about hating where you live…the song is about hating being without someone…Below are the lyricsto “I Hate it Here”…anyone who knows me will recognize me in “I try to stay busy…I do the dishes, I mow the lawn.”

I try to stay busy

I do the dishes, I mow the lawn

I try to keep myself occupied

Even though I know you’re not coming home

I try to keep the house nice and neat

I make my bed I change the sheets

I even learned how to use the washing machine

But keeping things clean doesn’t change anything

What am I gonna do when I run out of shirts to fold?

What am I gonna do when I run out of lawn to mow?

What am I gonna do if you never come home?

Tell me, what am I gonna do?

I hate it

I hate it here

When you’re gone

I caught myself thinking

I caught myself thinking once again

Have to try to keep my mind out of this

Try not to pretend

I’ll check the phone

I’ll check the mail

I’ll check the phone again and I call your mom

She says you’re not there and I should take care

I hate it here

When you’re gone

I try to stay busy

I take out the trash, I sweep the floor

Try to keep myself occupied

Cause I know you don’t live here anymore

PS: We are working on getting my wife a bit closer to southwest Arkansas and she has been able to telecommute for a week every month…so we’re working on it.

More Changing Identities…

While I’m talking about identities…I’ve just returned from my second trip back to Fayetteville since I became the AAS-SAU Station Archeologist. Interestingly, I did not feel like a Station Archeologist until I returned to the main AAS office on the UofA Agricultural Campus…

I drove the 5 hours up to Northwest Arkansas, parked in the parking lot, walked in the door, said my “hellos” and gave my supply order to Barbara Scott, our office administrator and….BAM!…it hit me that I was a Station Archeologist.

I thought, “that’s odd, why now?”…the answer is simple…Although I’ve worked for the AAS on and off since 1997, I rarely saw Station Archeologists actually at their stations…I typically saw them rolling into the “Coordinating Office” (the C.O., to us at the AAS) for visits…I was now doing just that…so…BAM!

That made me do some thinking about how I was running my station…why when I wanted things a certain way, or assumed I had access to certain types of data, my station assistant and volunteers sort of looked at me like I was crazy…my only model was the CO…I am attempting to run my station like a little version of the CO…

Is that a bad thing? I’m not sure yet, it probably has good points and bad points…but at least I’m aware of it now.

A Change of Identities…

My friend Peggy Brunache is a Miami girl now living in Perth, Scotland…As she is struggling with being Haitian-American urbanite in a predominately rural, white country, I’m facing a different challenge in Magnolia, Arkansas…

As I alluded to in my previous post (Call To Home), I’m from a small southern town myself….Hell, the county seat of Benton County, Tennessee, is three-times smaller than Magnolia. So when I moved to Memphis, I was the token “hick-town kid.”….even while I was completing my Ph.D. in the “oh-so hip” town of Austin, Texas, my colleagues reinforced my rural, southern identity….I frequently spoke for rural, poor, southern America even though I had not been a part of that world for more than a decade…At one point, a good friend and classmate even referred to me playfully as “a reject from the Charlie Daniels Band”….I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I assumed it had to do with my long, one-length hair, my scraggly beard and my frequently worn black Harley-Davidson T-Shirts.

Now that I have returned to a rural southern town, I find that I am not allowed to claim the identities that I have worn for fourteen years. I am constantly referred to as being from the city as in: “You city folks are always going home n’ checkin’ on your dogs…we just let ours run wild.”

Even more perplexing, I am often not allowed to claim the South as my own…three different people have commented on the fact that they thought I was from California…WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?!?!? Others, echoing the words of my old friend Mary Evelyn Starr, comment off-handedly that Tennessee is not really very southern. I understand that I have lost most of my southern accent during my higher education, but–by God–I still listen to country music, dip snuff and say “Yes, Mam’.” The accusation that I am not very rural, or very southern at all wounds me to the very core of who I have become very comfortable being…

I have spent a great deal of time attempting to parse the cutltural meanings behind these statements…One thing is certain….To most folks in Magnolia, I am clearly not from here.

Today on an NPR segment about Muslims in America, two young Chicago-born girls were asked which they most identified with–being Muslim or being American….Their reply was very perceptive…they cliamed that they felt more Muslim in America and more American in other Muslim countries….You are whatever makes you different…

Silly me….Any anthropologist should understand that.

Of course, it’ll probably take me another 14 years to get comfortable being a token urban, urbane, left-wing intellectual in Magnolia….but it looks like I got no choice.