Comrades,
As I said, the signal is intermittent. I haven’t put out a newsletter in a bit. This is no way to build a personal brand, I’m told. Slacker. Sorry about that. I should probably also publish one item at a time. Higher touch. Ah well.
I’ve been rather productive in other ways. The first draft of a perhaps unpublishable book, The Gift of Conversation, is done. The family, especially the big dog, has needed attention – Amy and I have done a lot of fence building. Out here on the frontier.
Also with Amy, I am working through a law review article. Really! Like a law professor!
Last month’s podcasts were rather dark. The first was on assassination. The second was on the US adventure in Afghanistan, and the failure to learn from the Vietnam War.
There are quite a few dark things I am thinking but not writing about, notably the war in Ukraine. So much is being said already, as we all discover our inner strategists, that I’m not sure how much value I could add. I’ll straighten everything out next month. Right.
This past Saturday, here in the idyllic college town of Lawrence, Kansas, a 9 year old girl was killed in a hit and run on a freeway known for fatalities. She was on the back of a motorcycle driven by her 54 year old grandfather. Wearing a helmet, though. Sunday passed without major incident, but on Monday, some guy murdered his young wife, who graduated from KU just a couple of years ago. She was a goalie for the soccer team. He said God told him to kill her. Tuesday evening, two men disagreed while driving, pulled over into the parking lot of our second grocery store, and shot one another to death. Saves the bother of a trial. Just picture them facing off and drawing, like movie cowboys. Taking out the trash that evening, I wondered what all the sirens were for. Minutes later a big windy thunderstorm swept in, as they often do round here in the spring, sometimes with tornadoes but not this time. The cops got drenched trying to clean up. Madness.
I’m also not writing about the Tops shootings in Buffalo, though I just finished a book, with Mark Maguire, which is largely occasioned by such “Marauding Terrorist Attacks,” a guy with a gun, MTA or “Active Shooter” in the jargon. And how do we think about that? Well, in the US we buy more weapons, issue bureaucratic pablum, offer therapy, and if at all plausible, blame racism . . . and there’s a logic for all of that, it’s just pretty pathetic. Our rituals are thin and banal, without beauty or power, and that’s part of the problem, I suspect. Anyway, the book is Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern. Quite a lot on race as a language rather than an implacable evil force, and the predicaments of the bureaucratic state confronted with the challenge of unpredictable, and politically freighted, violence. Even if you don’t like the theory, the stories are fantastic.
While I was trying to get this out, my friend and coauthor Mark Maguire put together a short film, Scene 1. It’s the beginning of a multimedia, multiparticipant presentation we are doing in Belfast in July. I think it is fantastic. Even as a draft, Scene 1 is a great introduction to Mark’s ethnographic work on counterterrorism, and to our book on security and modernity. But really, Scene 1 very subtly yet clearly introduces some of the possibilities that a refunctioned ethnography – a new approach to cultural anthropology – affords for engaging the contemporary, even contemporary horrors such as MTAs. It’s exciting. And, en passant, Mark has provided a rather good introduction to what I do, and I’ve never managed that.
I’m very much not responding fully to a story I read by accident, on a coffee shop countertop, in passing while pacing, taking a break from writing too hard. My armor off. Wichita, Black kid, 16 and 135 lbs, dies in custody, abandonment, foster care, mental health/drugs/petty crime, trust betrayed, impatience, incompetence, bad luck, and not nearly enough love. “You’re here to protect me, right?” said to the police. I’m not going to tell the story here, but “My God why hast thou forsaken me?” For a few moments, as a father and a man who could do nothing, I lost hope – the sin of despair – and found myself weeping in a coffee shop, unaware that the Buffalo shootings were going down at the same time. Perfect.
Can I write about this? Yes. Should I? Unclear. The child is dead, and he was a stranger to me. I’m in no position to mourn or even witness in fact, instead haunted by the image of a child left alone on a concrete floor, tightly bound, with covid. But we as a culture are grievously failing, and I can write about that, although there is something wrong, unholy, about translating the intensity of tragedy into the relatively flaccid logics of political thought – tragedy meant seriously, thinking not only of Easter but also of Medea, a situation from which there is no escape, and blame becomes banal and beside the point. I’m not ready for that fight now, may never be.
And before I got this out, the Uvalde killings. Years ago, I did some serious road biking in the Texas hill country north of Uvalde, near Leakey, Texas, where my in laws had a ranch. At least race was not at issue in Uvalde, so we ran the gun control tapes.
Strength. Struggles await, and lighter is, on some days, more difficult, and as important.
So, for right now, two podcasts about good things, happy thoughts, feasting and photography.
Episode 6 Keeping the Feast in Lawrence, Kansas is about situation, specifically my situation in Lawrence, Kansas, for Easter. En route, there is a lot of chat about local history, local businesses and cooking, as an effort to think about being situated, anywhere. Recipes, of a sort, which some of you like, and the beginnings of a defense of bourgeois suburbia.
Episode 7 Form, Subject: Photo Essay, Globalization tries to express two different things with complicated relationships. First, the photo essay as a form. I’m very excited about this, because pictures and words do things that are somewhat contradictory, and therein lie the form’s limitations, but also a great deal of suggestion. The energy is not exactly intellectual, nor merely aesthetic . . . Second, some of this thinking about the photo essay as a form was done while working on two photo essays I found difficult, “Vivid, Fragile, Global: 2008-2020” and “Pictures Without Subjects.” I’ve linked to them in prior newsletters. Both pieces are, in large part, efforts to articulate, or at least suggest, the strange subjectivity of a high modern moment that seems to have passed.
If you want, you can read these essays on photography, and see the photo essays, at DAW Photography.
As always, if you like this stuff please share it. Please join the podcast channel. Etc., etc., as a friend of mine says.
Be well, and I hope the springtime has been as beautiful where you are as it has been here.
Cheers,
David A. Westbrook