Spoken Word

The core session on the role of translation began today. The keynote speech was given by Esther Allen of PEN World Voices New York, who hazarded several challenges about the current state and future of translation. I have virtually no experience in the subject at the moment, but the speech was extremely interesting for its first allusion. In order to tease out the genesis of the problem of translation, Allen called upon the story of Nimrod, whose frustrated appearance in Inferno rouses a harsh scold from Virgil the intellectual. Nimrod is the giant who conceptualized the Tower of Babel, a mutiny which, as the legend goes, rendered the world pluralingual. The punishment that he suffers in hell is noncommunicability; he is unable to understand anybody, is likewise unable to be understood, and rails against his misfortune by belting thunderclap blasts on a tremendous horn. Allen's relation illustrated the lesson that often, this is the very dilemma-turned-paradox that many linguists constantly face: some pieces, for all their nuance and organic beauty, are impossible to translate properly, and still others are so vivid and common to the human experience that they do not require any translation at all.

This dichotomy underscores a principle point, as far as I can tell, about the objection many might have about the nature of translation. Allen notes that an enduring feeling amongst the academic community is that the new work is necessarily of a different, perhaps lesser quality or merit than the original, because it is impossible to put the original author's whole meaning into equivalent foreign words. Additionally, the translator's interpretation of the content of the text is just as prone to misunderstanding at it would be if any reader attempted the original, and it is difficult establish definitively whether a particular translator or reader has provided a version which is more convincing than another. But this idea seems to be more incomplete, the more correct it is. If it is so that language, experience, worldview, and other aspects of culture are so ingrained in the translator and his language that even so skilled a wordsmith loses the original beauty of the text, it cannot be too far of a step to imagine that an average reader in the original language also experiences a novel, an essay, a piece of poetry, or indeed a speech, song, movie or sitcom through this same sort of corrupting lens; it is a non sequitur to condemn translation, because this problem of misunderstanding is common to anyone's experience of any piece of art. If we extrapolate this point, then each great piece of literature has a qualitative deficiency that is proportionate to the amount of diversity in the society which reads it: the more differences between the author and the readership, the higher the likelihood that the piece is going to be misunderstood. Thus, it appears as if literary translators would not necessarily introduce anything corrupt by way of their art that an average reader would not introduce anyway; the specific problem that a translator might contribute seems to be a slightly different one.

At this point, it should be mentioned that the entire argument I am making is inextricable from my belief that in many pieces of literature, the author intends to present a specific message or set of messages; this is an easily disputable issue, and I would imagine that especially among literary translators, the opinion that literature is made even more vibrant with every new reading of the work is equally contended. The problem here is semantic: if literary translation is an art, then it must be referred to as a science just as well, at least in terms of the words used to describe it qualitatively. Regarding a poem or a mathematical proof or a touchdown pass, one could use any one of the synonyms of beauty; but for a translation, this is not so. If a translation is called something like beautiful, it seems to me that this is either a misnomer or a bad thing. When a reader calls a translation beautiful, he could actually mean that the text he is reading is beautiful, or, in other words, that if the translation is accurate (a tenuous word in itself), then the original work is beautiful, and that the translation reflects the quality of the original work. To be reductionist, we might instead say that the translation is good, and that the original work is the one that is beautiful. Alternatively, if the reader truly means to deem the translation itself beautiful, it seems to me that that adjective might support the charge that translation is an intrinsically flawed practice: if beautiful is accurate, that one word represents the dissolution of the original author's voice by highlighting the presence and skill of the translator. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does act as sort of an asterisk for the new piece, which is to say that it should be read as a translation which is additionally a commentary, which may very likely be intentional.

Perhaps we should rather abide by the vocabulary that is more commonly associated with science, not art, both in terms of a goal and an evaluative metric. Of course it is possible for a translation project to look more like a work of art, because these projects seem to be more exercises than assignments. We learned today that there is an author in the States who is taking all the English versions of Comedia, and making a unified English translation of all of those first translations. There was a similarly playful work published in the recent past, in which the dialect was that of rural 19th century Australia. Examples such as these are clearly in a different category from traditional translations, and they more easily fit into the artistic category: the voice of the translator, or some distinct skill that he possesses, is unmistakable. But to bring this same voice to all translated works would, I think, be a tremendous disservice to the canon of second-language works. There is something to be said for those types of creative productions; but also worthy of merit are the translations which intentionally pursue a very precise translation of the words contained in the original text, which may allow a foreign reader insight into the literary technique of the place and period; and further still, equally valuable are the productions which are not necessarily word-for-word transcriptions, but instead are themeatically identical, and would therefore consider a sort of cultural translation as well as a lingual one. If the practice of performing only beautiful translations is instituted, it is plain to see how quickly the closest version of the original work would be a forgotten pursuit; we would be incalculably worse off for it.

The Great Shift

Below is the content that I have imported from another blog to which I regularly contribute. If you have the time or the inclination, please do visit it, and make absolutely as many comments as you wish. It is very important and interesting work that is being done, there, and one of my greatest hopes is that more people are apprised of it.

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The first plenary session of ISP 29 provided some background information about education theory, and about university responses to the shifts in economics and social stressors. I did not know much about higher education as a field of study before arriving in Salzburg, but given my five-year career as a citizen of the California State University system, I considered myself to be qualified to speak about it experientially, and to analyze the lag between producing a problem and identifying it, between identifying it and lumbering to fix it; and moreover, the synapse between the theory and the application is sometimes so incredibly wide, that it rivals the gorge between recognition and rectification. During my term at San Jose State University, I had the fortunate opportunity to participate on a very few faculty-strong panels, to work closely with individual faculty members on academic pursuits, and to provoke some conversation regarding the often unseen bits of university politics: the committees. But I never got to flick on the light and peer around the pedagogical room. I wonder--and wonder is the only verb whose meaning I might pick, because we undergrads are not allowed to know how most decisions on campus are made--how often professors and deans stay static on their theories of higher education simply because choosing to change would be too much work. Certainly, there is a bounty of examples evident to students which make us say to each other, Why does no one address this? How can it be that they cannot see this imbalance or the other, this deficiency, that flaw? And if they can hear, why don't they listen?

Tish Emerson, who lectured on the nature of university politics, mentioned quite poignantly that "moving from the edges to the center doesn't just change you, it changes the center." In context, Emerson seemed to be charging the university faculty in attendance with actively engaging the groups who currently rest on the "fringes" of the institution. As the conversation around developing this archetype of "student as global citizen" begins to build momentum and to take a discernible shape, this mandate is an important one to keep in mind. After all, it seems to me that if there is a fringe, we must infer that there is some group that is less welcome and perhaps included less often than others. And if we exclude some types some of the time, how, then, can we consider ourselves to be global citizens? This prescription seems to be self-evident to me, and it met with general affirmation from each of the audience members; it was certainly worth making public, so that the idea remains in the forefront and acts as a lens through which to scrutinize the projects that each university will produce.

But surely, when the term "fringe" comes about, we cannot settle for thinking that this is a reference to one economic class or religious sect or cultural background; it is not a term that necessarily recalls an academic discipline or sexual orientation, a language or belief or a custom or any other political stripe. I fall into the traditionally empowered set of virtually every classification, so I am certainly not in a position to complain about personal disenfranchisement. But in my experience, when the university is the setting, sometimes the "fringe" group is the students themselves.

The awkward part for students, I feel, is that much of the important activity takes place behind a sort of administrative curtain, which shrouds from student input all of those decisions which will result in drastic changes to student life. It was my tiny experience that I had a voice, that its use was encouraged, and that its quality was nurtured. But many of my peers, who eventually became frustrated by the confusing maze that can be university bureaucratic procedure, simply grew tired of using that voice to affect any sort of change on our own behalf. I very often felt that I could raise a concern, but that it was as if I was talking into a pillow: the hum of my concern was inaudible, and it went unheeded. I realize that as struggling undergraduates, we may not be able to provide sharp and critical commentary on the university's current or proposed pedagogy, but we are certainly able to tell how the decisions that the faculty make are affecting our days on campus, the quality of our degrees, and our general satisfaction with the institution. It is manifest that we, the students, have neither the training nor the experience to be able to make high-level decisions, but should we not have input? If the administrators are to take Emerson's advice, perhaps the first step would be something of an inventory of all major panels to whom it is charged to make influential policy decisions, and to then examine how much input students are able to offer to the panels; or alternatively, take account of how many of the staple committees in academic affairs or student affairs are chaired by faculty who are champions of student affection, instead of an administrator with whom no student can identify? I just loved my experience at San Jose State. The degree of diversity that I experienced there, culturally and ideologically, was fantastic. My most fervent wish for that institution--and any like it--is that future students will be able to reflect on their tenures, and feel that they were mixed into the center, a part of what the university was.

How to Empathize

The plenary session today was one that I had heard before: Reinhold Wagnleitner, one of the more eccentric and beloved friends of the Seminar, performed his staple lecture "America and The World: Visions at a Distance". This was the third time that I had heard an iteration of this presentation, and each time I internalize a larger portion of the slides that he shows, a number which easily exceeds 130. The paramount tenet of Reinhold's lecture is that perception, not fact, is a preeminent factor in creating an environment in which global citizenship is possible. This position makes immediate sense. Ironically, the problem of perception seems to be just as present intra-nationally in the United States as it is internationally about the United States.

Here is where we enter the problem of empathy that I want to address. In the discussion after the presentation, a predictable amount of self-gratifying noble liberalism hung thick in the room, while any shrewd or cutting analysis of the way in which we go about changing this negative perception was simply eschewed from the dialogue. Luckily, I have this blog, so the pressure to speak about my ideas (which seem to be decidedly radical, and stand in juxtaposition even more prominently in a mildly conservative demographic such as this one) never becomes so much that my head collapses in on itself like a dying star. The pervasive attitude of many of the speakers seemed to be that in order to fix many problems related to persecution and suffering and human rights violations and greed, these themes must be underscored in the school system. Okay, maybe: but I think that faculty forget sometimes that school matters far less than visual media, in terms of mass education. But I'll concede the point, because my objection about that premise leads nowhere interesting to discuss. From this premise, the room forwarded their next assertion that the best--and perhaps only--way to ensure that these themes are enduring is to demonstrate them in person; for instance, to do service trips and language studies and study abroad would be the best--and again, perhaps only--way to ingrain a lasting impression in students that caring for one another is of vital importance.

Well.

I immediately and fervently objected, and I like the idea! My position is this, and it is simple: I am saddened by the notion, if it is true, that we have become a nation or a people who cannot learn except by doing. There are some things, I think, which a desirable version of a human being is able to intuit, facts about the world which must be true in order to the world to function properly, ethically: to believe otherwise is to deny our soft power of intellect. One of these principles, for example, is that, in any complex society, there must be some meta-ethics that are necessarily true, full stop. I cannot imagine to be satisfied with the notion that in order to understand that slavery or misogyny or racism are wrong, we must directly experience them, or meet with people who might "tell us their stories" of how terrible those things are. Can we not discern that these and other certain acts and attitudes are wrong, a priori, and that the experience is indeed the way that we might change the situations which we have identified as unsatisfactory, rather than the way that we learn about it in the first place? Action as activism, I say; not action as education. And by extension, the message is extremely upsetting: we cannot acquire genuine knowledge of a thing by thinking about it, we must have it happen to us. This assertion implies that certain terrible acts must occur first, before we can determine that they are unwanted. Is that the sort of world that we wish to create, or worse, to encourage?

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Kyle Brown, gentleman and scholar that he is, has written a lovely rumination on the subject of involvement and belonging (but also on the informal subject of San Francisco antics). I have thought a great deal about that subject, as we all are compelled to do. To contradict the point I have just made above, I do believe that it is a necessary pre-condition of self-actualization that a person has felt that, in fact, he does not belong.

Sponsorship

My pioneer post on the Seminar's blog has just been published. I know that my readership must linger in the mid-to-high single digits, but I would be incredibly thankful if each of you would please check out the catalog held by the Salzburg Global Seminar. I will do my best to publicize through this blog whenever I post on the Seminar's site, such that you all might be charitable enough to pay a visit to my benefactor. There is some fantastic content to be found there, and it is written by some major world players, such that the articles that are contained on that blog are good lenses through which the generally secretive processes of international NGOs and the UN can be seen with fantastic acuity.

My first entry, which simply takes the form of an introduction of my role on the blog, can be found here. Other links to my Seminar articles will follow in individual entries on this blog, but again, please do visit the Salzburg Global Seminar blog in its entirety. It would be a great service to me, to appear as if I am making a difference which is measurable; everything else I am doing here, it seems, is intrinsically positive, but has no metric. And sometimes, in cases such as these two connected blogs, the tangible evidence is just so satisfying!

The Interim

It has been very difficult recently to break away enough quality time to constuct a post that merits posting, so I figured that a small update and then a chronicle of impending posts would be sufficient. It can be hard sometimes to maintain the motivation to visit this blog, because whenever I am on the computer at work, I am usually very methodical and I try to be very precise so as not to waste any paper in the machine or space on the page; this blog is antithetical to those constraints, and to add to that, I am sometimes so exhausted after a day at the Seminar that casual writing does not quite seem to fit into my plans. Sleeping wins out, or at least the idea that I should sleep. Alright, then. Here it goes: a quick update, and then an unorganized list of the longer posts I'm currently developing, most of which have a philosophical bent because they were almost categorically inspired by conversations or plenary sessions that took place last week.

First, I have received some exciting news, regarding a special project for next month. Unfortunately, IHJR, which I was looking forward to tremendously, has lost funding sufficient to support an intern; thus, that opportunity has been lost, but as sometimes happens in life, it has been supplanted by another one. David has put to me the idea of organizing and, in some capacity, running the blog for the Salzburg Global Seminar. It is my impression that most of the writing that is currently contained on that blog is conceived of by higher administration, including our president Steven Salyer; because of their status, their presence at the actual sessions in Salzburg is necessarily infrequent, and while the prominent sessions--ones run in partnership with the UN or high government, for example--certainly warrant their presence, they simply cannot record their thoughts about every session that we run. Thus, the job for which I had been highered initially has disappeared, and a job for which I am more appropriately equipped has materialized. Tangentially, it is likely that I will inherit some responsibility to run a social network for ISP alums, with particular emphasis on student outreach. This will very likely mean a facebook account: I am excited about this prospect in an entirely different way. While both of these opportunities will afford me the chance to develop my skills at writing and analysis, and will be supported in purpose by the academic sector of the Seminar, I will also get the chance to practice my research and communication skills, and to exercise a bit of creativity both intellectually and socially.

Last week was extraordinarily busy, requiring a totally different work schematic than I am used to. Instead of last nights and quick bursts of action, the intern office--now a bit lonelier for the absence of Daniel, who has returned to university--ground out some long hours and saw some early mornings. I feel a bit like a man playing a marionette, who works intricately behind the scenes but does not participate with his audience. I am learning a great deal about the manner of office business, about planning and organization for large conferences, and about the way in which university pedagogy really tends to burden the faculty who are the most interested in making a positive change in a holistic fashion. Obviously, there are tremendous financial constraints to be considered, especially these days, and doubly so for small schools, so the breakout group sessions are a great forum for discussing in great detail the creative ways in which the university higher administration must be provoked to part with its funds. It is important to remember, as Jochen wisely interjected, that when we say resources, we should caution not to think of solely financial prospects. Instead, we should remember to consider less material supplies, like effort, energy, time, support, and so on.

There are, as in most university proceedings, frequent mentions of certain ubiquitous key words, which seem to be terms that the faculty use as tools, and yet which have become terms that create some obfuscation to any acute discussion of theory. For example, I heard the words "stakeholder," and "inclusion" many times, but each of these seemed to be references to "those persons which must be involved so that our project is not shut down by those same people"; "broadening horizons" and "matriculation" seemed to be code for "make sure that we have a study abroad program"; "heritage" sometimes as a replacement for "non-white culture" or "non-rich experience". I do not see the way in which this sort of flowery language is helpful: if you mean disenfranchised, just say it. If you mean unacceptable, don't say "challenging" or "unaddressed". To suggest that something is "a new focus for us" is not the same as admitting the truth that is has been, until now, "at least a moderate failure". I know that ego is necessarily involved in this sort of terminology, and I am equally aware that my abrasive criticism of these terms are examples of my own stain of psychological egoism. So, in order to return my focus to addressing a problem instead of simple ranting, let us re-examine the purpose of having these sorts of seminars in the first place: creating a new and better system.

Large amounts of university politics seem to be a game concerning who to please and who to excise, which to attend and which to ignore, when to praise and when to correct. I think that each of these activities is necessary, obviously, but I'm not sure that the best way to reach definite decisions or to execute orders is to link that process to the best way to please the people who control the funds or who run your department; what if, for instance, that those administrators have aims that are otherwise concerned, and are not truly and ardently fixed on producing well-rounded, quality students? Moreover, if an institution endeavors to instill in its students some particular outlook or persuasion--social justice, for example--then how can it be said that this goal is realized and is in fact achieved, if the wording of the message is itself unclear? How is the inclusion of buzzwords in a plan or a slogan or a project sufficient evidence that what you have created is good, or useful?

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Another one of these words which seemed to obscure the conversation around global citizenship is the term itself. I think that it may be that we have considered the nature of the issue incorrectly, in the first place. Instead, I suggest that there should be two terms, each of which will subdivide the term which is now used, and will then occupy its respective field of academia and of social programming. For more speculation on this, see my post entitled "Global Citizenship as a Misnomer".

I have begun to give consideration to the role that historical accounts play in our intercultural narrative. Over the past week, many esteemed professors and scholars who visited the Seminar referenced events from the past that somehow created a schism, or animosity, or otherwise disrupted the fabric of social communication. But something began to twitch in my mind about the import of retelling stories of a traumatic shared past. I have come up with a nascent version of what I believe to be a dissonance between the intent of education about legacy, and the actual outcome of that sort of conversation; I have labored to construct an idea of historicism which I have outlned in the entry "A New Approach to History".

A project which I have been pouring myself into since early summer is a thought experiment about the way in which prayer and worry are connected. There is a passage in Philippians which commends the power of Jesus to relieve a believer of his anxiety, by simply investing oneself in a practice of prayer and ritual. This advice is antithetical to me, so I started to sketch a draft of a playful essay that would outline the link between the existence of prayer and the existence of worry, which I have, without much inspiration, called "On the Interrelatedness of Prayer and Worry".

Finally, during a plenary session held last week, I started to toss around the issue of how ethical theory can be gracefully applied trans-communitively, that is, between different "sovereign" groups of people in the United States. While this too will be a bit of a playful submission, I am genuinely interested in the decline of deontological morality except in very politically conservative constructs, such as fundamentalist churches. There seems to be some link between anti-intellectualism and anti-relativism, but there also seems to be a growing persuasion among the very liberal to condemn an idea of objectivism. That is, it seems as if neither the very conservative nor the very liberal are willing to accept that normative ethics can be categorically perscriptive, and yet moderate and easy to accept and apply. I have titled this entry "Regarding Morality in the Modern Communitarian Archetype".

Thanks for reading, now and in the future.

Thoughts by the Fire

"...and so we beat on, boats against the current,

borne ceaselessly back into the past..."

--F.S. Fitzgerald

After the welcome reception, a group of the academic insomniacs at the Seminar gathered near the fireplace in the Great Hall. A welcome break from the usual grind which mostly takes place in front of a computer, this chat, which turned into a four-hour demi-debate mostly about international politics. I wish I had a more exact means of recording the content so that my review of the event would have some context, but burying my face in a computer or a moleskin would have sort of an effect opposite from the one I was glad to have achieved.

For the majority of the night, I was the only recent undergraduate student; a few of my colleagues are currently pursuing masters degrees in Europe, so their extended insight stood as a pleasant supplement to my own. Others, who had been or are currently professors, have such a comprehensive knowledge of world events and global political stressors that they seem to speak in a unique language. Interestingly, I heard a great deal of recollection and criticism of historical circumstance, which was often mitigated by an analysis of the way in which those events--and even people, mirrored, and in some cases--foreshadowed, ones that we currently face.

One idea, presented originally by my direct boss and brilliantly creative thinker David Goldman, kept resurfacing. It sounded Orwellian to me, but the scrutiny that the ardent student historian provided proved the archetype to be historically tenable, and hardly just a literary device. Whereas in the past the United States (and to some extent, Europe) had an enemy with a illuminable visage--that is, that it has generally been the case that we could point to a picture of who our enemy is, what he looks like, those issues which he holds to be important and true--the current administration and indeed world now face several respective enemies which are either intangible or or undefinable. An attempt to describe exactly which sorts of things we are fighting politically, for example, seems to be like trying to capture a morning fog with a butterfly net. This is to say nothing of our often maligned military pursuits, our confusing--and for me, virtually incomprehensible!--economic peril, and more broadly, our philosophical positions as ethical agents who must lead as well as apologize.

Another of the men in our group, Reinhold Wagnleitner, who is a perennial ISP faculty, American studies scholar, prime historian, and native Austrian, talked a great deal about the difference between the culture in the United States regarding voting for an issues or a candidate versus the idea that "the Europeans" have of how Americans actually think about those things. For example, he recalled, that even in a conservative Austria, there was a great deal of shock--followed closely by terror, I would imagine--in 2004 when Bush was re-elected. Reinhold outlined that the European electorate would never imagine that an American electorate would consider issues such as abortion rights, gay rights, and so-called "family values" when voting for a commander-in-chief. These are, conversely, the exact issues on which Bush ran his moderately successful platform for re-election; unimportant were his failure in Iraq and largely with any international government relations, his ignorance regarding climate control and environmental concerns, and his confounding stubbornness around the area of rational intellectual process versus stark religious adherence.

Another of the men and perhaps one of my chief mentors academically was Jochen Fried, a scholar whose repute exceeds even my aspiration. The words that the man chooses to use seem to be selected without effort but with great exactitude, and one of these words was "boldness". Jochen used the term to describe a hypothetical strategy which he and I, lone vocal islands in a group of eight, believed Obama may pursue: drop the wars in the Middle East, adopt a bit of an conscious isolationist strategy, and effectively declare to those unsettled and restless nations, "Fine, then: you deal with it, and consider us now left out". In my thinking, our interest in the countries with which we do not currently enjoy very diplomatic relations would now be fundamentally reactionary, in terms of foreign policy: we are willing when they are, any aggression will be addressed post hoc, and otherwise, we are now otherwise occupied with issues which are more likely to benefit from our concern with them (considering further that our isolation is also an acknowledgement that we are not wanted, and that we should therefore refrain from interference where we are not welcome).

I followed with a speculation that was categorized as radical, a term which is generally a good check that I've made a comment worth making. Jochen, I saw, smiled at several points during offerings such as these. In considering the breadth of challenges that face us, I suggested that we might have fallen victim to an iteration of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. In other words, whereas a traditional false dilemma fallacy posits that there are only two solutions to a problem which has many, and then condemns one of the solutions so that the speaker's alternative is portrayed as the only favorable course, this manifestation of the pesky fallacy creates the illusion that there are two alternatives which are pursuable and result-bearing, when in fact there is only one: to address one of the many impending issues that affects human beings categorically. These, which I suggested we might think of as meta-issues, would have a greater potential to yield results, or, conceived differently, absolutely must yield a result lest some sort of drastic and devastating change come about. Upon pursuing a solution to one of these meta-issues, we might, through our posture or our rhetoric, demonstrate: do you see the way in which we, the superpowers in this small world, are working on your behalf as well as ours? And we may challenge: now, what is it that you are protesting? Against whom do you now fight, and should you? It is this sort of realignment of the nexus of goals and ideology that will necessarily undermine any Nietzschean slave mentality aimed at tearing down the nations which control world processes, and similarly, will embolden any country or people whatsoever to achieve something which has not before been conceived: to fight alongside one another out of need, to imagine self-defense as confederacy with present enemies, because the goal has been changed.

Poetry Exchange

True, we do work hard here at the Salzburg Global Seminar. But most of us, being dedicated and fervent academics, get understandably restless when we work in front of a computer screen all day, producing not essays and research, but spreadsheets and biographies. I think it was waiting to happen for a few days, and finally the dam broke. Our dedicated vice president, Edward Mortimer, wrote a response poem to a clumsy poem written by Roger Angell; the rest is a thread of what followed over the course of the afternoon. Needless to say, the day passed more quickly when this bit of entertainment lightened intensity of the work load.



Rebuke of Roger Angell
...
Is this what you call ein Gedicht?
It reads to me like something sick'd
Up by a cat whose latest meal
Comprised more names than I could reel
Off in a month of zealous dropping,
Trimmed with a rich and creamy topping
Of facile rhymes that make you wince
And certainly do not convince.
Who are these people? Half at least
I know not if they're man or beast,
But hope that one within my range'll
Say WHO THE HELL IS ROGER ANGELL?

--Edward Mortimer

A Defense of Roger Angell

...
Ah, Roger Angell is a scribe
Of baseball, sports and various jibe
He spits a rhyme of games and men
And is published in mags and rags like when

He wrote his famous The Summer Game,

Five Seasons, Late Innings, and other frames

That describe the diamonds, bases, and bleachers

All part of the most American features.
Strike one, strike two, strike three you’re out!
But we must Once More Around the Park, no doubt,

From left to right and up the middle

The catcher and pitcher must end this riddle.
Who’s on First then you ask in rhyme?
Oh, just the writer of note for our ole pastime!

--Ben Glahn

A Criticism of A National Sport

...

Baseball? Of course. I might have guessed –
The sort of man whose every jest
Comes “out of left field” or, or declineth
To reach the “bottom of the ninth”.
But in a real game like cricket
He’ll score no run, nor take no wicket…

--Edward Mortimer

Hating the Game

...

Sir, do forgive me my impudence
But I must display true prudence
In defense of Ben and of our sport
Vis-à-vis this quick retort:
Baseball’s lasting kind appeal
Will, to the cunning eye, reveal,
A deep tradition, wrought in pride,
Mark’d by a graceful, measured stride.
Never has a sport conceived
By man or god been thus received
As baseball has, in our great nation
Which showers it with adoration:
I’ll pay no mind to that persuasion
Which sharply scorns this occupation.

--Travis Campbell

An Encouragement and a Challenge to Ben Glahn

...

The poet’s work, I’m sure you know,
Goes without praise, quite often; though
Nary should he end that craft
By which his truths inform the daft,
Lest men (whose stripes of ignorance
Pay each of us poor consequence)
Are let to run with idle minds
Whilst Time her fragile thread unwinds.
Speak then, of baseball, and Sport, at length
Restore the mighty Man his strength
Relax our minds and ease our stress:
Let your pen to paper press.

--Travis Campbell

A New Battle

...

I wonder how you can brag and boast
About the sports your nations host.
As foreign as your language is to me,
Are you rumblings about the sporting spree.
My origins, as all you know, gave rise poets and philosophers
Compared to which my wit just greatly suffers.
Alas, the aesthetes, to whom I can not aspire,
Unable to withhold all guns and fire,
Give me reason to believe,
The only cure to this enduring beef
Is shots and bangs that pierce even the Great Hall
Borne on neutral ground in a game of proper foosball.

--Daniel Sip

A Tip to Baseball, A Wag to Bonds

...
Excellent idea you have done thrown
Into the chance of electronic drone
But lest it not slip down forgot
I answer here to fill the lot.
You speak of ball and sport and Man,
Yet I know not which your thoughts demand.
My presumption yells The Babe, for sure!
Alas, I fear you mean that one, so poor,

That from his heart wrought green for fame

Swatted 73, but will not be bronzed with filthy name.
Now tis done my renounce o’ him,
I say not sorry nor sing no hymn.
Instead suggest I do the Game
Of which we speak must not go lame.
Come clean good men and hit your stride,

With dreams of spring and much yuletide!

--Ben Glahn

No Need for Name Calling

...
I’d advise you, sir, to tread on soft
For men, by words, I have slain oft
And lesser crimes did they transgress
Than to tarnish the great and strange success

Of players gone (though surely, here

I can admit my secret fear:
There was afoot some cheating scheme
Which tarnished up my oldest dreams)
Nonetheless, the paramount
Conclusion of our poet’s bout
Should be the union of our skills
To trump the rhymes of those whose ills
Condemn our sport, for we both call
Supreme the game of base-and-ball.

--Travis Campbell

A Truce Accord

...
Indeed my friend I can accept
the path on which your verse has stepped

I am advised to chart my course

to keep the choir from remorse

by treading soft with poets strength

but not to cross that dangerous length

where mortals trip and break apart

'neath the weight of tainted hearts.
A union fast of clever tongue,
Ah! never a song was better sung.
To the game itself I do not retort,
for the 60 nights til pitchers report
are better spent on prose on wit,
in the icy calm that winter does emit.

--Ben Glahn

Onwards and Upwards

...
Well pleased am I, upon this news
That poets skilled have called a truce
And now turn wits to pleasures fine:
To conversation, and to wine
To politics, and global cause
Stopping only yet to pause,
And give reflection to our squads,
Who, in March, will stretch their quads,

And trot to first, to short, and right

And against the other clubs, shall fight

To claim that treasured, vaulted prize:
Above the other teams, to rise.
How like our lives, this sport does seem--

That often too, each man does dream

To scamper out amongst the crowd

His noble voice to trumpet loud,

And silence doubt, to turn it back,

To brave maleficent attack,

To test his merit 'gainst the rest

In order to discern the best,

Bring calm to old, and hope to youth

With but one line of regal truth.

--Travis Campbell

The New Year

Streets of Vienna on New Year's Eve.

Concert in a Viennese square, New Year's Eve. They did not play Wham, contrary to our fervent demands.

The lake in front of the schloss, frozen over. The carves are from ice skates. Other than those, the surface is glassy to the point of see-through. The geese have to be ticked.

The Schloss, Daniel in the foreground. A day later, we got about 25cm of snow. Look at the sky: idyllic blue, and then by night, snow everywhere. Alps, you cruel temptress..

In the bierstube, last night of the Winter Festival 2008. This photo sort of reminds me of how presidents look when they're younger. Except we're way less rich. And Daniel is german, so he kinda can't be president.

Fireworks at midnight over the Wienfluss. Happy New Year, everybody.

Winter Festival Photos

Old Town Salzburg, seen from the Festung


Sweet mountain house in Bischofshofen. Two gnarly german retrievers out front.


Our horses. Sleigh ride through Filzmoos to Restaurant Oberhofalm.


Ian Brown, me, and Daniel Sip. St. Bartholomew, across the lake from Konigssee, in Bavaria.


Gothic steeple and town below, Bischofshofen.


Super long exposure, evening mass. Chapel, Schloss Leopoldskron. Christmas eve, 2008.


Ski jumps, Bischofshofen. Scary steep.


Nifty streetlamps in the alley towards the lake in Konigssee.

Photographs (or, Snapshots)

Photography is becoming and increasingly present element of my life in Austria. Sometimes I shift through an album or a few pages on the facebook, or I'll browse a week of college on my macbook. Then again, there are ever more photos to be added to my computer, as a rare opportunity would be missed if I were to neglect my camera for these next four months. Photos, then, are a product and also a constant task, and moreover one on which I should begin to focus a bit more ardently. A more professional manifestation of this theme is the work with which my colleague Daniel and I are presently preoccupied: the Winter Festival photo board, which displays small headshots and dense biographies of all of the participants for our weeklong program. Daniel has worked exquisitely hard on the festival as a whole, and has been a brilliant role model in terms of work ethic and drive in order to complete the tasks which are assigned to the office. 

This photo board, it seems to me, is a bit of a microcosm of my struggle between my present opportunity and desire to travel versus my desire to have a swarm of kids and a goodly wife. The people on this board are all past attendants of some session that has been hosted by SGS: this is a prerequisite for invitation. And most of them are families. The union of these two qualities is something that I hope to foster in my own future, also in general I perceive that constant travel and a maintenance of a cogent family life is a stellar challenge. So I shall learn from the masters, then. Let us see if I can sit here in front of the photo board and discern that which is common, and then I will decide to what extent these incarnations are tolerable.

Actually, a lot of the guys seem to share something in common. I have never met any of them, and I have only read a very few things about them, so my conception cannot be totally correct: this is more playful than anything. But, into the fray. First, in every one of their pictures, they wear a variation of virtually the same exact thing: collared shirt, layering piece, chinos, and a belt. Everyone combs his hair to the side, categorically shaped in that sort of smooth, airy, Yale debate team-style flop-over. But there must be a couple other mitigating factors that have nothing to do with clothing, because otherwise every person who attends a Thanksgiving dinner would be a Salzburg Fellow. And it seems as if a very large percentage of the people who send in group pictures have a field by their house, or at the very least have densely-leaved trees in their yards; every picture with a group, save one, shows the family crouching in a veritable thicket with a novelty-size leaf pile. Alternatively, they all read the same photography tips magazine, and not one of them has a lick of sovereign creativity. Each of them perhaps comes from money, or at least garners a great deal of it now.  But after simply reading their biographies, which are scribed by the individuals themselves originally, it is plain to notice a sort of affect that indicates propriety: it is refined in a way that is not express education, and it is sometimes haughty in a way that shows unnoticed and enduring pride. And finally, yet most adversely, no one mentions affection for any sports teams. Where is the appreciation for things that they cannot control? Where is the devotion to something that break your heart, mends it together again? Where is the adherence to a code that unites people of like mind all over the nation and world, and which governs a relationship that fosters pride, and joy, and misery, and heights-then-depths that are lasting and wonderful and bitter and new every brilliant season?

Well then, no, I should not like a life like this. Give me the shirts and the leaves, in the end, and keep the rest. And so onwards, men of like mind: to change the world again, the way we would have it.

Snow is Falling

We were graced today with the lightest dusting of snow, about two hours after the sun slunk behind the alps. The ground looks like a weather-affected version of toast, when the butter melts and sinks into the bread, and the stairs to my penthouse have become slick enough to think twice about skipping the even ones. Two movie nights in a row have accented very long work days. Another two assignments today, to go along with an extremely long list of biographies for visiting schools, professors, and academics who will arrive in early January for ISP 29. I am also in charge of organizing some documents, reading through reviews of past sessions, assimilating the common data that the schools have reported on, and sifting it into an accessible document in order to improve the effective and efficiency of an upcoming ISP session. One of my on-going, probably interminable projects is to research past session lecturers and attendees, discern missing information in their biographies, verify and update contact information, professional progress, and publications made in the interim. The void in our record goes back about 40 years, so this project will be my Everest.

As a de facto timeline for my two-ish readers, I will be preparing for and facilitating the winter festival until the end of December, two International Student Panels in January, the Institute for Historic Justice and Reconciliation in February, and one final session in early March, just before I leave for Dublin.

One other bit of news that is worth noting: today at lunch, the topic of zombies came up. Apparently, there are no less than four people here, all male, who are pretty into zombies, both in pop-culture references and in classical mythology. We tossed around a few thoughts on the matter, and I mentioned to my colleague Daniel--a man who, by the way, had recently ordered ten books on zombies from Amazon, arrival pending shortly--that we might want to come up with some common identity traits that all zombies seem to share. I have assigned this set a preliminary name: the Unified Selenti Theory (thesis concerning all of the dead). He and I discussed many, many different variables, parameters, and pitfalls to this potential theory, including the ways in which it accesses present and past iterations of the zombie, verses other undead and otherwise horror field archetypes. It occurs to me that philosophy must somehow be connected to this subject, as it generally is to all things both critical and trivial, and for my part, I will do some work playing around with this connection. A website on the subject will be launched soon, as a way to pass our time creatively, and surprisingly, several various publication mediums, even this early in our thought process, are currently being pursued. This is a fantastic success for day two, and one certainly befitting the stirring minds that occupy the intern office at the SGS.

The Welcome Party

The pioneer post in this new catalog is fittingly dedicated to my arrival in Austria. The length of my stay, which will last until the middle of March, will be occupied by work as an intern for the Salzburg Global Seminar. I have only been here for a day, but the whirlwind has begun: there are a tremendous amount of people working for the Seminar, including my two officemates, Daniel and Adam. Daniel is a 27-year old masters student from Hamburg, who is working on a degree in political science; Adam is a 24-year old Missouri boy going after an MBA, and he is on the cusp of redheadedness, seen only in his traffic lane dash of facial hair. Both men are extremely pleasant and great to work with, have been quite helpful and thoroughly accomodating, and will unfortunately be in company for only a short while.

Today, I got the grand brushstrokes of my training session. As far as ISPs go, there is a fantastic amount of preparation that takes place revolving around each student who visits the Seminar. Most of my day was consumed by learning about the servers and databases that the Seminar features, and further, about how it is that I extract information from those manifests, crunch it down, and produce other documents (biographies and summaries, etc.) that will be used for the duration of the ISP sessions. I can see that there will be a fair amount of office work that will be requisite for all of the interesting matters to take place, so I've sort of resigned myself to getting as much done as quickly as possible so that I might enjoy the lectures and the like when they begin--this should be the first week of January. Until then, we are also preparing to host a winter festival, which will basically feature a huge amount of skiing, sleigh rides, and other more charming versions of the common Christmas in the bay area.

I get the impression that the non-session days here are much more loosely organized than my other jobs have been, which I love. In my limited experience, there is no boss hovering over me to make sure that my job is being completed; no one harasses me for things that they just assigned, nor do they offer constant correction and advice and reprimand; no one "checks in". Instead, I received an assignment yesterday, and I turned it in when I was done; two assignments today went the same way, and this style more properly befits my productivity. In general, the castle is very lovely, things are going smoothly (if quickly) and I am tremendously happy. And so ends the first and simple post.