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Webblog: April 16, 2007, New Brunswick, NJ
a rainy day here in New Brunswick, the third of three cold and rainy days. The schools remain closed today, some of the roads are under water, cellars in manz of the houses are flooded. Hillary Clinton was supposed to speak at Rutgers this afternoon and has cancelled her visit, which I regret – yet it wil give me a moment to continue this blog.
The breakfast table at Martin’s house – Martin Mulsow, professor of intellectual history here at Rutgers, to whom I owe the invitation. Karin, Martin’s wife has left the house to bring little Jonathan to the kindergarten, Martin is answering his e-mail in his study downstairs, the two girls sit in their rooms and waste the boring day. I drink a cup of tea, skip through the The Star Ledger, the local newspaper. The United States remain a peculiar and somewhat frightening country – for a nation involved so deeply in world politics this is nothing you note when reading your local newspaper or listening to the radio news (Martins and Karin’s hose is without TV).
American News
Last week we began with Don Imus, the radio host who made some racist remarks in his morning show – levelled against the predominantly Afro-American basketball team of Rutgers University. His show was suspended the day after, his apologies were the news of the following day. On Wednesday we received a broad coverage of the hurt feelings of the girls. On Thursday evening he met with the team to openly apologise and set things right – he was fired on Friday after it had become clear that CBS or who owned the sender was about to loose its main sponsors if he were to continue. New Jersey’s governor Corzine was supposed to join that meeting on Thursday night yet got involved in a car crash which filled the papers on Friday – we got a full coverage of his wounds on Saturday: 12 broken ribs, his leg broken with an open wound. “It was not immediately clear whether he had fastened his seat belt”, we read on Friday which told us that he had not. The juicier papers made this their point of a new scandal on Saturday.
Crime is the other big topic – with the case of the woman who killed and mutilated her husband earlier this year. He was found in plastic bags and it was hard to get the full story as she hardly spoke. I had seen the court-room-TV bus in front of the local court building on my first walk through New Brunswick before I got the first bits of the story in the papers. The world’s curiosity had entered the scene to hear and see the lady who had had sex with the man about a year ago, casual sex between colleagues who had then met at work. She was asked to give details, as this could shed light into the question whether his marriage was happy or not. There was thirdly the story of the babysitter, a black girl who had killed a pregnant mother and cut the embryo out of her womb, before she drowned the three girls of the household.
The war in Iraq is a continuous topic – yet it does not really evolve into a story to be told, and that seems to be the fundamental problem of any such news. South America, Europe and Asia are beyond the horizon. One has to follow CBS TV News and to read the New York Times to get informed, yet this will already be information of interest to a special audience.
Academia
Is it worth living in the US? This was the continuous topic among those I met – Europeans who enjoy the freedom the academic world can offer to those who made it to the top. University professors are doomed to become bureaucrats in Germany. American professors remain teachers and researchers, so it seems. The meetings I joined were extremely interesting. On Monday it was an informal top level seminar – something like the Oberseminar we are trying to establish in Oldenburg, yet far more open. This semester’s topic was “Circulation” – a simple and broad topic. The guest who spoke on Tuesday, Steve Johnson, answered questions about the book he had just published on the cholera in London in the 1860s. The audience consisted of teachers and post grad students. The questions had nothing of the typical German test trial, where you ask a question only to show your erudition or to side with so and so also present in the room. It was rather curiosity of people who are about to write new books themselves. The second half of the three hour meeting was most fascinating: Our guest was involved in an web project in which they used Google Earth to give access to the world’s sphere of local bloggers. If you have a blog with a local perspective you enter it into the new web space they created. Your news will then be digested so that people can take look at a quarter of a city they are interested in to find out more about, let us say, crimes that recently happened around this street in Brooklyn. The Global Village is on its way and it cost just some 40.000 Dollars to produce the interface and to get the project going.
I gave my talk on Thursday in a series of book history events at Rutgers Library, on Friday I joined Martin on a trip to Princeton where we visited a conference on Renaissance Hellenism. On Sunday Martin had invited scholars interested in the question of the Sacred and the Profane. The morning was immensely interesting with a group of Jewish scholars getting back into the era of the Babylonian Talmud. Jacov Elmann compared Zoroastrian religious laws with Talmudian traditions and reconstructed cultural life in Persia around 900 AD. The old bearded man was particularly interested in the young audience – “I should be”, he later said, “do you think I can teach my colleagues the old and forgotten languages? – it takes half a life to learn the languages and read the texts before you can dive into the debates of this period. This is something only the next generation can do, and I have about twelve students who I have educated to go into this field.”
The conference moved from antiquity into the early modern period and focussed on interpretations of sacred texts. Martin gave his talk on Huet’s attempts to prove bridges between biblical and pagan mythologies. Back home I should write an article on Huet’s efforts to move his art of theological interpretation into the worldly sphere of novels and romances, a topic you will have to deal with this semester.
It is time to end this bit of my blog. I feel I am not a good blogger. We should try to find an American student who just arrived this month in Oldenburg and ask him or her to keep an open diary for the next week. Noon here in New Brunswick, about late afternoon in Oldenburg, Germany. The rain has ceased. My plane is scheduled for 23.00 tonight, the train connection to New York is said to operate. May be I should pack and leave. I’ll be tired as a stone by tomorrow, and I am already looking forward to the new semester.
--Olaf Simons 20:18, 16 April 2007 (CEST)
