This is not a book.

The glee of seeing such book-minded Arabic on a billboard foregrounding the New York skyline is tempered somewhat by realizing that it describes a freighted situation.

Voir Dire

I’ve been summoned to jury duty next month.

I know that nobody ever wants to do jury service (with one serious, fabulous exception I can think of), but the idea of having to go down there and get empaneled (because the City and County of New York, unlike the City and County of San Francisco, does seem to empanel most people) while I’m on research leave seemed to me like a special sort of dreadful. It got me thinking about the absolute extent to which being on the tenure track skews one’s priorities. I know jury service is important. I know that smart people are exactly the ones who shouldn’t try to get out of it. I know that the obligation of women to serve on juries is barely older than I am, from a constitutional-legal perspective (Duren v. Missouri, 1979), and that women serving is tremendously important in ensuring trial by peer. But all of that logic keeps circling back to: But, while I’m on research leave? For my first book? My tenure book? Now? Trying to finish up my book manuscript has turned me into an incredibly tedious person. I'm not proud or happy about the fact that I care less about a lofty ideal of justice for the people who breathe the same air that I do than about some kind of historical-narrative justice for their 800-years-dead familiars. There's a lot of talk about justice and the academy these days — not in these terms, but I think it's another manifestation of the bigger problem. 

I’m looking forward to having my head and a slighter wider horizon back. But for now, in my current frame of mind, this is how the voir dire, the jury selection process, played itself out in my head last night:

— Have you served on a jury before?

--- Yes, sir.

— Did you think the outcome was fair?

--- Hard to say, in the end.

— Did you think the process was fair?

--- No, sir, I didn’t. It was a civil case. We were determining damages for a personal injury case that had already been decided. We weren’t even talking about orders of magnitude of difference and we just didn’t have a frame of reference for what might have been the right decision. It seemed like the sort of thing that a judge or an arbiter could have decided faster and probably more fairly. It wasn’t fair and it was a colossal waste of time.

— The plaintiff was entitled to have a jury decide.

--- Yes she was, sir.

— Do you think the criminal justice system has the capacity to be fair?

--- I think it has the capacity to be fair, sir, but most of the time it isn’t. That’s what I think, anyway. I think that if you’re not white, it’s hard to get justice and hard to be treated fairly.

--- I think that the current jury system brings out the worst in people. It incentivizes acting like a nut in this setting. The last time I was called for jury duty, there was a woman who was either acting nuts or only pretending to be a nurse, or the Mount Zion HIV/AIDS clinic has a real problem because she claimed to be a nurse for them. And I’m not proud, but you are talking to someone, you are about to empanel someone who cares more about her career right now than about justice.

— What is your career?

--- I’m a college professor, sir.

— What days do you teach this semester?

--- I’m on sabbatical, sir, so I don’t have regular classes that I’ll miss, but actually, that would be easier. I could ask a colleague to fill in or reschedule two, or even three meetings with my students for later in the semester. But if you take me away from my research for two weeks now, that’s two weeks that I’m not going to get back. I’m at a point where two weeks matters, where it could make the difference between finishing my book in time to submit it for tenure or not finishing in time. I know jury duty is important but I don’t want to lose my job.

— You can’t be fired for serving on a jury.

--- That’s not how tenure cases work, sir.

— You don’t want to be here, then.

--- It might be that I don’t give a damn anymore, but it might also be that I don’t give a damn again yet. I hope that’s all it is. Let me postpone to 2017 and we’ll see.

God Sayve All The Rowte!*

(*Or, way to quote Chaucer totally out of context...)

I visited the Cloisters today for the final day of the exhibition of stained glass panels from the Canterbury Cathedral, which are traveling while restoration work is underway at the cathedral. With the caveat that tripods are allowed only on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, here are some images of the panels:

Book-Finishing Marathon (Intermission)

Once I got to the point of posting Muppet videos and off-brand angry bird office supplies by way of book manuscript situation reports, I realized that five weeks of non-stop book work had perhaps not been an unqualifiedly good idea. So I braved the drizzle and the line and went to see the Dutch masters' paintings on loan to the Frick Collection from Mauritshuis.

The place was a madhuis! (Ahem.)

The line, regardless of whether you wanted to purchase same-day or advance tickets, was out the building, down 70th St., around the corner up to 5th Ave., and around the corner and halfway down the block on 71st. The Israeli couple behind me in line were having an adorable conversation that began with a review of the plot of the Tracy Chevalier novel that takes its name from one of the Vermeers on display and then wound its way around to a discussion of whether Frick is a strange name for a museum and — doesn't that mean something bad in English?  —Yes, but I think it's the name of the founder of the museum all the same.

Normally the length of the wait would have been a source of irritation, but for head-clearing purposes, there's almost nothing better than some fresh air and drizzly-fogggy-San Francisco-style weather.

The Rembrandts and the Vermeers didn't hurt too much, either.

I was expecting the Girl with a Pearl Earring to be a huge visual cliche, but it really was an authentic work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction moment the likes of which I've only ever really had once before, the first time I saw Las Meninas in the Prado. I wish I had something really incisive and lit-critty to say about that, but that's all there is.

Back to the book!

The Poet in New York in New York

I visited the "Poet in New York" exhibition at the New York Public Library this weekend. It contained a variety of his letters, drafts, and personal effects, such as his passport and his Columbia University library card.

A number of his drawings were on display, and the exhibition served to set those into the history of Spanish visual culture.

Bodleian MSS, This Time with the Atlantic Ocean on the Right

I had to be back in New York this week for a Humanities Initiative meeting, so I took the opportunity to visit two museum exhibitions: Crossing Borders at the Jewish Museum and Doris Duke's Shangri-La at the Museum of Art and Design.

While the objects on display were exquisite — they are, after all, the treasures of the Bodleian collection and a real contrast with what I'd just spent time looking at, the ugly and the messy and the practical — the exhibition itself was something of a disappointment.

This exhibition comes on the heels of (or echoes or piggy-backs upon or rides on the coat-tails of) two other fairly recent exhibitions on medieval manuscripts of the three faith and three major linguistic traditions, Sacred at the British Library and The Three Faiths, the exhibition that the New York Public Library put together from its own collections when the BL pulled permission at the last minute for Sacred to travel to the US. On the one hand, it's amazing that these manuscripts are getting exposure with the wider public; on the other hand, it seems like the Abrahamic faiths has just become the trendy framework through which library collections can exhibit some of their finest works.

It was the second trend that really obtained in this exhibition; the theoretical framework was very poorly articulated and the didactic materials were seriously wanting. I don't think that a non-expert would be able to walk into these gallery rooms and really understand, even at a cursory level, what is going on. (To be fair, I didn't use the audio guide since those tend to drive me up a wall, and there may have been some very good narrative and information there.) I also overheard a docent giving seriously incorrect basic information to a group ("The cartographer is the person who writes the manuscripts by hand" — and no, she wasn't standing in front of a hand-drawn map).

They did make some use of technology, though nothing really cutting edge or innovating, putting iPads in the gallery so that people could "page" through the manuscripts and see images of other pages beyond the ones that the books were open to in the cases.

Coincidentally, I'm in the process of writing a review of the exhibition catalogue for one of the medieval studies journals. There's a real gulf between the value of the catalogue for both lay and specialist audiences and the inattention to those same standards in the actual exhibition materials.

I'm glad I went. I might even go back the next time I"m in New York. But I was also quite disappointed. These manuscripts deserved a lot better.

***

The Shangri-La exhibition was a swing of the pendulum apart. It was small, occupying just one gallery room, but the conception of the exhibition was as sharp as the objects were fine.

The exhibition offers the viewer much information about the architecture and architectural history of the Shangri-La site, contextualizes the objects both within Islamic art and within the Duke collection, and also contains several new works by contemporary Muslim artists who were responding to the Shangri-La collection as resident fellows there. This last aspect of the exhibition also very neatly echoed what seemed to be Doris Duke's collecting ethic: I don't know if this was representative of the collection as a whole, but I was really surprised to see that most of the pieces were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which means that when Duke was buying them up, she was really purchasing contemporary Islamic art rather than pursuing older pieces.

Photography wasn't allowed, so I can't offer a preview, but if you are in New York and have time to see one museum exhibition that's vaguely three-faiths/Near East-related, make it this one.

Farewell, New York

"On his bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily... He strolled out of the square and across the level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering cafe where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm, and the protoplasm."

— "The Cop and the Anthem," O. Henry

'Aṭlāl (Weeping over the Ruins)

I'm feeling very nostalgic for New York, and am trying to cram in all the things I've neglected to do in the last two years before I head out to Philadelphia for my fellowship year. One of those things was a visit to the Renwick Ruin on Roosevelt Island. It used to be a smallpox sanitarium and later became a mental asylum, the one where Nelly Bly got herself committed to write her famous expose.

The first time I visited Spain, one of the graduate students in the residence where I was staying asked me whether it was true that Americans have a complex about not having history. I assured him that we do. In truth, I can't speak for anyone but myself. And it's not so much that I have a complex about not having history as much as I have a complex about not having really good ruins. It's amazing, then, that it's taken me this long to go visit. Going out there today was part of beginning to restore my work-life balance, which has been seriously out of kilter in the work direction basically since I started graduate school, but even more intensely so in the last two years.

I'm not pleased with the photography I did today. I could blame it on the light — I went about ninety minutes too early because I didn't really know where I was going and didn't want to get caught in some random park on some random island with random ruins that I didn't know my way around and potentially get lost in the dark — and I could blame it on the fact that there is a huge fence about five yards away from the façade — that I thought about hopping but decided that I've not been vaccinated against enough things to risk it — but the fact of the matter is that I'm out of practice and getting used to new equipment (finally switching to digital from film). And I made rookie mistakes too, like misjudging the light and using a polarizing filter when I shouldn't have, and was lazy about bringing a tripod, when this kind of work clearly calls for it.  But part of what I wanted to do today was to start getting myself back into the habit of grabbing my camera and going out with it. I wasn't shooting for great today. And anyway, the apartment where I'll be living in Philly is down the street from another very unusual ruin, so I'll have lots of chance to practice.

Roosevelt Island is really different from Manhattan, even though it is technically a part of it. It's quieter and feels like a small town in the way that people are comfortable in just striking up a conversation with a stranger. I met a woman named Olga, who moved to Roosevelt Island four years ago and who was out walking her dog. It was her first time in four years on the Island visiting the ruins at its southern tip. She just came over and, after checking that this ruin did used to be the hospital, that her memory of the space was correct, told me about her history with the place:

"My sister and I used to come visit my aunt here. She wasnt okay in her head. Well, she was, really. Just that — I dont know if you believe in this but — the spirits got to her. We used to take a boat from — my mother used to live, still lives in — the Lower East Side."

z         "What do you remember it being like?" I asked her.

"I was afraid," she said. "My aunt always used to say, 'You look so pretty today.' And then the other people would say, 'Come here.'" 

She squinted up her eyes and beckoned with her hand, in memory and imitation.

"And I was always afraid. There were a lot of doctors in white watching. My elder sister, she used to come all the time and bring my aunt apples. She wasn't afraid. My aunt, she died three years ago. Rest in peace, wherever she is. She took her last breath with us. We took care of her, three sisters. She didn't want us, but we took care of her in the end. I guess life's like that."