2 comments about Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject (Great Barrington Books).

1. I thought reality TV would be a fad for a season or two -- boy, was I wrong. When I tune into The Apprentice or American Idol, I am faced the immense and lasting allure, but also the banality, of these shows: we want to see how other people behave, think, deal with success and embarrassment, how they make love and how they fail. What disappoints me about these shows is that, except in rare moments, we rarely actually get to see this. What we see, instead, are real people acting out plot lines as tired as old sitcoms and presenting themselves as flat, stereotypical characters--much less interesting than they real people (whom I presume) they are.
   
   Derek Sayer's Going Down for Air presents, in all its voyeuristic glory, the memories of a middle-aged, heterosexual English university professor. Sound boring? It's not. Sayer digs deep, and looks at his life and past squarely in the eye, and in doing so, he ends up asking the enthralling, sometimes disturbing question of how much we can ever know about ourselves, how we remember and forget. My favorite images in the book include a five-year old Sayer on his tricycle, unwittingly causing what might have been a fatal motorcycle accident, unabashedly homoerotic memories of being caned as a schoolboy, and a stark recollection of a hospital visit to Sayer's aging father--a hilarious and malicious character--that is ironic and deeply touching. This is reality TV better than as seen on television.
   
   The book is in two parts, with the memoir followed by a more conventional and scholarly essay exploring the processes and functions of memory. While not as thoroughly engrossing and addictive a read as the memoir, Sayer deftly incorporates the viewpoints of philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, writers and artists from Durkheim and Lacan to Baudelaire and Edward Hopper into an argument about why we can't take our personal and collective memories for granted.
   
   The whole book is illustrated with Sayer's own pleasing and provocative photographs of places around the world and from his childhood, which would form a striking photo-essay in themselves but here go a long way in bringing both texts to life in a manner which is distinctly Sayer's own, highly personal, ironic and communicative.



2. I thought reality TV would be a fad for a season or two -- boy, was I wrong. When I tune into The Apprentice or American Idol, I am faced the immense and lasting allure, but also the banality, of these shows: we want to see how other people behave, think, deal with success and embarrassment, how they make love and how they fail. What disappoints me about these shows is that, except in rare moments, we rarely actually get to see this. What we see, instead, are real people acting out plot lines as tired as old sitcoms and presenting themselves as flat, stereotypical characters--much less interesting than they real people (whom I presume) they are.
   
   Derek Sayer's Going Down for Air presents, in all its voyeuristic glory, the memories of a middle-aged, heterosexual English university professor. Sound boring? It's not. Sayer digs deep, and looks at his life and past squarely in the eye, and in doing so, he ends up asking the enthralling, sometimes disturbing question of how much we can ever know about ourselves, how we remember and forget. My favorite images in the book include a five-year old Sayer on his tricycle, unwittingly causing what might have been a fatal motorcycle accident, unabashedly homoerotic memories of being caned as a schoolboy, and a stark recollection of a hospital visit to Sayer's aging father--a hilarious and malicious character--that is ironic and deeply touching. This is reality TV better than as seen on television.
   
   The book is in two parts, with the memoir followed by a more conventional and scholarly essay exploring the processes and functions of memory. While not as thoroughly engrossing and addictive a read as the memoir, Sayer deftly incorporates the viewpoints of philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, writers and artists from Durkheim and Lacan to Baudelaire and Edward Hopper into an argument about why we can't take our personal and collective memories for granted.
   
   The whole book is illustrated with Sayer's own pleasing and provocative photographs of places around the world and from his childhood, which would form a striking photo-essay in themselves but here go a long way in bringing both texts to life in a manner which is distinctly Sayer's own, highly personal, ironic and communicative.

1 comments about From Dawn to Dusk: Autobiography of Judith Hubback.

1. This is an autobiography of an early and prominent analytical psychologist in the U.K. Her life spanned much of the 20th century, and she emerged through the various changes that women went through during that century to become a well known analytical psychologist, poet,wife, mother, grandmother, and writer.
   The autobiography is very well written, and will interest those interested in analytical psychology and the emergence of the feminist movement in England.

No comments about Durkheim's Suicide (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, Number 28).

No comments about The Correspondence of William James: 1878-1884 (Correspondence of William James).

No comments about Max Weber: A Comprehensive Bibliography.

No comments about The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey (Bross Lecture).

No comments about Life of Adam Smith.

1 comments about Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology).

1. To many of us who were anthropology students in Berkeley in the 60s, Jaime de Angulo was a mythic ancestor figure. He not only did excellent linguistic ethnography; he was also a leading candidate for the original Berkeley hippie. He lived a wild and erratic life, on the fringes of anthropology and literature; among other things, he was probably the main figure in the discovery of Big Sur and its development as a countercultural center. At the same time, he was helping to save Native American languages from extinction.
   This book focuses on his linguistic research in the context of institutionalizing (a more accurate word than "professionalization" here) anthropology and linguistics in early 20th century America. De Angulo worked with or for the great figures in this movement: Franz Boas, A. L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir. All recognized de Angulo's genius and erratic ways. They provided him with money for research, and worked mightily to pry manuscripts out of him. In the end, he published an amazing amount (including novels and poetry) for someone who never had a regular academic appointment, and he left in manuscript a far vaster store. A tragic accident that took his son's life and almost took his as well interrupted de Angulo's career; he never quite rallied. In the end, he was part of a large number of gifted non-academics or para-academics ("amateurs" doesn't get it) who contributed mightily to anthropology.
   Boas, Kroeber, Sapir and their group lived primarily to save what they could of Native American languages and cultures, before these disappeared. Many have tragically died out now; most Native Californian languages are extinct, and what we know of them is what those scholars recorded. Other languages survive, thanks partly to the ongoing efforts of scholars in the Boasian tradition. One of Boas' most important agendas was training Native American linguists and anthropologists, and this continues.
   What animated all these diverse individuals was a tremendous concern for real people, and thus for the most important productions of the human spirit--language, literature, music, ritual, culture in all its wonderful and beautiful ways.
   Today, anthropology has been taken over by a different breed. Far too much contemporary ethnography consists of narcissistic self-storying, arid elitist wordgames based loosely on misunderstood French philosophy, and denunciation of a whole range of vague, poorly defined evils ranging from "globalization" to "the touristic gaze." Concern for real people and their finest creations is not only rare--it is actually condemned in some quarters as "exoticism" or "salvage ethnography." A noble but sadly inadequate effort is devoted to saving languages--now dying out, worldwide, so fast that the world's 6800 languages may be reduced to a few hundred in the 22nd century.
   Reading this book, with its portrayal of heroic efforts, may inspire a few souls to carry on the work.
   The book is a solid scholarly work in its own right, but is marred by some repetition and dryness, and by perhaps an excessive tendency to avoid judgement. The goal of remaining nonjudgmental is desirable, given the above, but surely it is carried to extremes when we are given no real evaluation of the quality of de Angulo's work. Even his debate with Paul Radin over the phonemicization of Patwin is left unresolved here, though someone must have decided long ago who was right (if either was). Even so, de Angulo emerges powerfully from the book, a more-than-life-sized figure, totemic and mythic in an age of heroes that now seems as remote and Powerful (with a capital P) as the time of Coyote Himself.

No comments about The Correspondance of William James: April 1908-August 1910 (Correspondence of William James).

No comments about Woman with Demons: The Life of Kamiya Mieko.