Greetings, friends & fellow Romans,
I hope this finds you well, and for those of you connected with the academy, bon courage and my condolences.
Substack bills itself as a newsletter, and there certainly has been a lot of news. As good citizens of the republic, we are duty bound to engage the issues of the day. But there are so many important things on which to comment, myriad weighty topics to discuss, I’m tired already, considering the weight of what I know, what you know, for that matter don’t know, the burden of opinions sloshing like fish in the belly of an overloaded trawler, wallowing in heavy seas. Whither [Ukraine, England, technology, inflation, midterms, the U.S., Russia, China, what publishing contracts so charmingly call ROW (Rest of World) the university, and on and on], the mind wearies, the eyes glaze, the tongue halts . . .
Instead, here are some moose from a couple of weeks ago, with something straightforward on their minds:
This is a family newsletter, though that’s how we get . . . anyway, sometimes you have to put the news aside and stick to your knitting, or whatever it is you stick to. So, after weeks of pretty much 24/7 struggle, I finished a book draft that I found excruciatingly difficult. I was so wigged out I couldn’t stop: I stayed up most of the night, writing short essays about cooking and a poem about a certain kind of insecurity, for want of a better word. Ideally, it should be read by Christopher Walken.
* * *
On Finishing a Draft
Maybe Sartre, on finishing
something really big
that he thought was big
Wondered if his mother
would like it, she was
pretty smart
Or maybe one of the girls
but they would say it was
because he was supposed to
be brilliant, that is why they
hung out with him, and, more
Though it wouldn’t have to be
Sartre, it’s just funnier that
way
Everywriter would do fine.
* * *
Maybe the book will be great. Maybe not — that’s the heartbreaking part — but what are you going to do? I’m already thinking about the rewrite, as soon as I recover and find the time.
* * *
Here is the latest installment in an ongoing project, turning my books, including Welcome to New Country: Music for Today’s America, into audiobooks. Welcome to New Country Part II (audiobook podcast).
* * *
In July, my friend, interlocutor, sometime coauthor, and SUNY University Professor Douglas Holmes and I had a nice exchange on some problems in doing ethnographies of present situations. Doug has done pathbreaking work on neo-fascism and central banks, and we have been talking theory for a couple of decades now. The setting is the "Sonic Lab” at Queens University, Belfast. The lab allows you to create an aural backdrop, an ambiance. So that’s the weird noise in the background. I had wanted Notre Dame (not really, but they can do that, and it is very cool), but we are supposed to be in a coffee shop in a mall or something similar. The film isn’t perfect, but kind of works, thanks to Mark Maguire’s editing.
Douglas Holmes & David A. Westbrook Discuss Ethnography
One of the things Doug, Mark and I have been discussing is curiosity. It is worth remembering that it is a big world, and not just in the way mediated by this screen, or others. Out here, farms are measured in sections. A section is 640 acres, a square mile, almost exactly 259 hectares. Huge. One of the first things the new nation did was start to survey the territory . . . the curvature of the earth is a problem, especially as one moves west and north, and small errors, some unavoidable (a sphere is not a plane) compound.
It is all, somehow, worth sitting back and appreciating. Not quite the same thing as thinking.
As always, please tell your friends and networks about “Intermittent Signal,” both this newsletter and the podcast. It’s free, and, you know, intermittent.
Until next time, be well.
David A. Westbrook