Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

One of the great pleasures in my life is having gone to grad school but having not pursued an academic career. I would love to be sure an academic gig, but only if I could jump the ten years plus that I’m striving for tenure (or however long it might be, less or more) and go straight to the part where I’m so tenured I only have to worry about showing up for the few classes I’m asked to teach. That way, I could read whatever I want and have a ton of time to do it. As it stands, I have summer vacations, and for my entire teaching career I have read what I pleased, as I pleased to. No need to keep up with ever little detail in my field.

That said, I studied history in school because I liked it, and I can say that I like reading academic history more than histories intended for the general public, most of the time. I say this not to sound elitist, but because the best academic history operates on a much greater level of detail than popular histories, and I find that detail interesting. One of my big questions as a person is that of the relationship between general and specific.

A number of years ago a friend TA’d for a course in which the prof had assigned Carlo Ginzburg‘s The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, which on my friend’s recommendation I purchased. I began reading it, liked it, got distracted, and gave it away with the rest of my library when I moved to Senegal. In the intervening years, however, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and for my birthday I asked my parents each to get me some Ginsburg books. This one, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, I actually bought myself to round out the set, breaking my rule about not buying books any more. The library didn’t have it, I say in my defense.

The book is a series of articles, the contents of which I checked out before buying it, which seemed most interesting to me when they focus on what Ginsburg is justly famous for: documenting popular culture, witchcraft particularly, using sources hostile to the subject. One title explains the basic point: “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.” We might actually as a general rule reverse the two and note the Anthropologist as Inquisitor, had not Vine Deloria already done so so beautifully. Ginzburg, however, is dealing with an extreme example of the basic methodological question in history, which is that of source material. Ginsburg uses inquisitorial records of heresy to examine popular religious belief. To do this, he needs to compensate for the inherent bias of the source material, in particular the tendency of inquisitors to understand statements of the accused as recitations of the Church’s notions of heresy–everything leads up to the Witches’ Sabbat–rather than as statements in and of themselves. Nor are the accused speaking freely. Everything the accused says is an attempt to on the one hand be credible to the inquisitor and at the same time innocent of capital crime.

This to me is a fascinating inquiry. As such, the most interesting–and without question, my primary concern to me in reading anything is whether or not I happen to find it interesting–articles in the book are the ones that deal with popular religion and methodology. Codification of eros in Titian is of abstract interest to me, but I’d rather have been told the point in conversation with someone over pints than have taken the time to read the article. I did so as a point of principle, having paid for the book.

Definitely not a starting point for Ginzburg’s work. The Night Battles or, I am told, The Worms and the Cheese are certainly worth anyone’s time. I have those both waiting near my bed to finish by summer’s end.

Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

My wife had raved about Edwidge Danticat‘s writing for years, and finally, on a couch on Maui, I read Krik? Krak! in a couple days.  Again, I am confirmed in my decision not to do a doctorate: the freedom to read widely is a real help to my understanding of the world and one which I would not have were I a specialist.  The book is a collection of short stories, most of which take place in Haiti, the country of Danticat’s birth.  She emigrated to New York City (a city about which I have had numerous dreams recently, for some reason), and writes in English, interestingly.  I had assumed, picking up the book, that I would read a translation.

All of Danticat’s subjects are working-class.  I have a feeling–forgive the lack of citations: this piece is not that kind of project–that much of the critical response to this book in the United States viewed the stories in an essentially, if veiled, racialized view of the developing world and patterns of immigration.  I myself have been guilty of seeing some fundamental unity among people in developing countries: somehow, before moving to Senegal, I had felt like “the Senegalese” was actually a meaningful concept.  When I lived there, I came to realize that we had a) the Senegalese people, and b) the Senegalese elite, and possibly a c) Senegalese trying to enter the elite.  I had never been in such a classist society, or at least not for a long enough time to really notice.

Danticat focuses to my memory (I finished the book nearly a month ago now) almost no attention on race, despite the fact, of which she is certainly aware, that her work in this country is categorized racially.  I suppose this helps one understand the destructive absurdity of race in the United States.  Almost entirely focused on class (and gender, one could suggest, though I wouldn’t), she inevitably is categorized racially.  This isn’t to suggest that her book is not fundamentally reflective of a particular aspect of the Black diaspora–Haitian revolutionary consciousness plays a fairly significant role in at least one of the stories–but that white critical types tend to think that the Black diaspora is always about race.

The back cover stresses that Danticat’s protagonists tend to be woman, and in the last, longest story she covers one woman’s marriage, a rite of passage to be sure, from a sister’s perspective.  All this is marketing.  In my writing I tend toward male protagonists, and this is certainly a flaw.  I do this because I’m male and in my life I live as a man.  It’s not a surprise that I tend to write male characters.  Danticat tends to write about women.  None of this is to suggest that Danticat is not entirely conscious of the political implications of writing about women: she obviously is.  That said, were I to point to a particular theme throughout the stories, their class analysis comes to the fore, not at the expense of anything else to be sure.  I am sure, however, that Danticat gets very little attention for documenting the lives of working-class Haitians, and quite a lot for documenting the lives of Haitian women.  The two of course are the same people, just complex as all people are.

There are two points.  The first is that Danticat, because of who she is, cannot avoid in the market place the various labels that are inevitably applied to her.  Given the context, I assume that she embraces them as well she should.  A corollary to this point is that, just as sure as Danticat can’t avoid labels, they won’t be applied to me in terms of my identity.  Rather, I am labeled by what I do: “singer-songwriter,” which is basically factual.  That said, the second point: neither Danticat nor myself can avoid the political implications of who and what we write about.  Writing about anything has political consequences, and the start to dealing with this well is to be conscious of it.

New Tune, “High Finance”

“High Finance,” from “Garageband Demos 2009-2010.”

Sometimes I feel the need to fall down from high finance
I call sick and start driving until I hit Baton Rouge
Where the hotels are cheap and the liquor is cheaper
I’ve never been a sound sleeper so I might as well cut loose

I got a pint of rye through my arteries pulsing
Soon my stomach’s convulsing in the bushes outside
I hit it again and that seller keeps selling
There’s no telling how many that stream down my throat

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

The parking lot’s all but empty and the insects are singing
With the moonlight ringing as it lights up the clouds
But I’m too drunk to deal.  I put my head on the wheel.
I’m surrounded by steel and the radio‘s too loud

Someday I’ll get transferred back to New York City
And when that call comes I don’t know what I will do
I might accept it politely or I might lose it completely
And cash out my trust fund until my trust fund runs through

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

I put on my rubber gloves and I light me a cigarette
I flick the butt on the bedsheets and I whisper my name
I burn down the highway.  There’s the radio reporting:
Half a city block in Baton Rouge gone this morning in flames.

This is one of four tunes I wrote in Autichamp, France, in draft form, in Summer 2008.  I then let them all sit on the shelf for a year as I worked on Adieu, False, Heart in 2009.  Following that, I began revisions as the spirit moved me, which as it turned out was nearly two years later.

This is probably the least sympathetic protagonist I’ve had in a tune for some time, which all the more necessitates the need for a sweet melody in a tune, which this one has.  One of the advantages of song is that a writer works with two media rather than one, which for example a prose writer works with.  Instrumental music operates, because it is non-verbal, at a deep level with people.  I play instrumental music in my classroom when I am not directly teaching (exclusively good jazz from Ellington and Basie at the earliest through Dexter Gordon‘s Blue Note recordings from the 1960′s–basically, if Rudy Van Gelder engineered it, I want to play it) and despite the number of students who scream that they want a song with words, the music does the trick.

The fundamental experience a listerner has to a song comes from the instrumental music.  Indeed, as many people have observed, at some basic level what the lyrics themselves are saying doesn’t matter: people respond the the sound of the words rather than their literal meaning.  This leads to an obvious problem: because people can have a wonderful musical experience listening to a song with words that are of little literary value but which are unobtrusive, writers don’t invest much attention in writing their words well.

I would qualify the observation above that other people have made (I can’t remember where most recently I read someone who made the point) that the actual meaning of words doesn’t matter in song, but rather the musicality of the words.  What I would say is that the meaning doesn’t immediately matter.  This is the trick.  In an industry that wants to sell a lot of stuff and quickly, the goal of the product is immediate impact.  Immediately, the words don’t matter, as long as you have them so people don’t confuse your product for something like, God forbid, instrumental jazz.  What happens, though, is that at some point, if you have words, people are going to start to think about them.  At that point, if they mean something, it gives another layer of meaning to the song, people stick with the song, and the song in its turn sticks with people.  Writing good lyrics is an investment in a song’s future rather than its immediate present.

As usual, I don’t make any particular claims about this particular tune at this point.  It’s still fresh.  That said, I’m pretty pleased about it.  Any tune that deals with the fundamental anti-social criminality of financial capitalism is OK in my book, even for just trying.

A note on my musical progress as I close: I’m off today (in three hours’ time) to Riverside for over a month.  I’m bringing my guitar, mandola, and laptop on which I record demos.  I expect to have few distractions and am cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to devote some serious time to writing.  I haven’t made any decisions about a next record, but depending on circumstances it will be either recorded in a semi-live setting with other musicians (that is to say, we’ll record basic live tracks to ProTools and then overdub) or I’ll do the one-man-band thing.  The tunes I have so far seem pretty good so I’m optimistic.

C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution

Get to a good library, get this book, and read it.

I was at a friend’s house and by my habit was looking at his bookshelf.  I grabbed  Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution as well as a copy of Nkrumah’s autobiography, and he told me to take them home, on the condition that I report back to him on the quality of the books: he had bought them but not yet read them, as many bookworms will do.  C.L.R. James passes the test.  The book is out of print, unfortumately, so get right and get a library card, which is my new modus vivendi as I’ve noted before.

Very briefly, the edition I read was originally published in 1977, the bulk of which was published as a fairly lengthy pamphlet in (according to the copyright) 1962, while Nkrumah was still in power, with additions from the period as he was, in James’ analysis, losing his footing.  James’ dedication of the text, to Nkrumah, whom he called Francis, is quite beautiful:

To FRANCIS

in never-to-be forgotten memory.  Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a régime in decay — a tremendous achievement; but like them, he failed to create the new society.

James is among other things one of a tiny few of true stylists of 20th century English prose.  He is most famous for The Black Jacobins for perfectly good reasons–i.e., you won’t read a better book–but, truly, should be required reading for anyone trying to get their prose in shape, myself included.  He’s also one of those examples of the colonially educated who mastered the language of the oppressor to a greater extent than any of the oppressors themselves.  I can’t imagine too many writers today, again including myself, who would bother using the correctly-accented “régime” rather than the lazy man’s “regime,” much less know that there is actually a difference.  James, of course knows that both history and language matter, and thus could not but acknowledge the history of the word as he wrote it.

James writes against an entire literature that posits decolonization as something that Europeans did.  Put so, it’s, I hope, obvious how idiotic an idea that is.  I’d note, however, that there is an analogous trend in US historiography that sees the end of slavery as the work of white people (witness California History Standard 10.3.4, which places the end of the slave trade in the unit on the industrial revolution) or the Civil Rights Act as Johnson’s achievment (witness Hillary Clinton’s campaign).  James begins his text with a discussion of “the Myth,” capitalized.  That is, the notion that there’s no way that Black people could actually make history for themselves.  His book, in addition to an analysis of revolutionary process and a very convincing defense from a Marxist perspective of non-violence, is an illustration of the truth that Black people and indeed all people make their own history, even if as Marx famously noted in the Eighteenth Brumaire that

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

In any event, James amply demonstrates that it was the mass movement in Ghana that required the British to leave.  Nkrumah’s role was to understand this and give it focus.  James’ dedication above places Nkrumah on par with Cromwell (interesting choice, and certainly not one expected by this US-educated reader) and Lenin, and his book absolutely justifies that assessment.  Truly, Ghana’s independence movement was in fact a revolution–not a term one finds in American textbooks in this context–and Nkrumah both a theoretician and practitioner of revolution on par with a Lenin.

I have to think that the broad denial of the term “revolution” to Ghana in our textbooks is part of a general tendency of the propertied classes to erase the idea of revolutionary change from the list of possible futures we face.  The materials we as teachers get to work with, textbooks and such, subtly categorize “revolutions” into two categories: the good and the bad.  The “good” ones are those of anglophonic whites: those of England such as it was and the United States.  Reports of revolutionary violence are minimized in textbook treatments of these subjects or dismissed as aberrations.  That both merely confirmed already-existing elites rather than replaced them exposes the agenda of the textbook writers: convince young people, the ones who might actually change things, that change is at minimum not desirable, more likely not actually possible.  The “bad” revolutions are portrayed as inevitable descents into bloodbaths: we see the French and Russian examples at their worst.  Students who because of their decent nature–that is to say, the very people who under capitalism are most likely to want to overthrow it–would gravitate toward thoroughgoing social revolutions are instead taught to revile the very notion of revolution, because they are taught to mistake revolutionary violence for revolution itself.  Ghana’s counter-example gives lie to this.

A worthwhile video, in two parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

As a postscript, I would note that I will get back to blogging about music on my next post.  Summer started, I relaxed and read quite a bit (have three more book blog posts to go until I’m caught up), and only just put the finishing touches on a new tune I hope to record tomorrow.  I’ll be in Riverside for over a month, and the focus there will be songwriting, as well as getting back into shape.