This corner is for quilt panels that have not yet been combined with others to make the enormous quilt squares (composed of eight panels, each of which is 3 feet by 6 feet). The squares are about as tall, when complete, as the height of two tall adults. They also have posters, photographs, exhibition panels, and other wonderful memorabilia of the Quilt’s many displays and journeys over the years, since 1987.

The collection of fire-proof filing cabinets forms the archives of the NAMES Project, as these contain the paperwork, letters, and any other items that family members, friends, and lovers have sent in along with their quilt panels over the years. I would love to work on the collection. Love.

You can also see the collection of vintage sewing machines that have been given to the woman who designs, compiles, and sews all of the panels into larger squares (I can’t remember her name at the moment). She has been with the Quilt since its inception–25 years now. Those tables are the exact size of the panel measurements, for ease in combining and working on them.

This one is blurry, unfortunately, but there is the main hall back into the shelves where the Quilt is stored. Squares are stacked and folded (by the way, not the best preservation technique) so that all 50,000+ can fit in this fairly limited warehouse space. A log is kept indicating when a square has been “checked out” of its place on the shelves, or when it is sent off as part of a display or exhibition. I can’t believe that what stretches for acres and acres when it is unfurled is all being stored down these modest aisles.

That’s us. I am also regularly floored when I think my image and our family’s words to Craig and his mom and sister have been in this collection for more than a decade already.  Our small, meaningful contribution to this important memorial is stored and shared along with the countless–millions–of other stories, memories, prayers, and words shared over the years.

The statement below our pictures reads:

Thank you Craig, Sharon, and Kim for your real-life lessons in courage, strength and family love. Our kids witnessed understanding and deep compassion through our friendship – a valuable lesson for life, for all.

]]> http://betheink.com/2012/01/where-the-quilt-is-kept/feed/ 0 http://betheink.com/2012/01/visiting-the-aids-memorial-quilt/ http://betheink.com/2012/01/visiting-the-aids-memorial-quilt/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:14:35 +0000 Jcedens http://betheink.com/?p=1760 The squares are bigger than you could even imagine. They command the room, the space.

What a powerful source of memory, of honoring those who we have lost to AIDS.

As I have written about a few times already , I have been exploring the many squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and have been remembering especially two men who were important to my Mom, to our community, and to my perception and experience with the death tolls from AIDS. Almost as soon as I learned, via their website, that the Quilt is stored and the foundation headquartered here in Atlanta, I called, left a message, and asked to visit–especially to see the two squares I had been pouring over, Craig’s and Parnell’s.

Photos on Craig's quilt square, of Parnell Peterson (left) and Craig Koller, from Parnell's family

Richie, a veteran of the NAMES Project Foundation, called me back after the MLK holiday weekend, and I planned a visit for today. This morning I spent some time crying, touching the quilt, reading the many lovely words, poems, thoughts contributed to each of their squares, and learned more about these two men via the wonderful memorial that this Quilt provides. It provides a way to remember, in a very communal and large-scale way, yet allowing for quite private and personal time with those who are being remembered. Richie pulled up the information on these two squares, 2744 (Parnell’s) and 5508 (Craig’s), so I could see where they had traveled, where they had been requested, and where and when they were each on display.

I learned that the demographic who has been contributing the most new squares–they receive on average about 400 new squares each year–are nieces. Girls my age, who have memories, however clear or unclear, of their uncles who died while we were young, and who have now reached the age in which remembering them properly has been an important part of grieving, or becoming an adult, of understanding how this illness has devastated families. I am exactly that generation, that demographic, though I have to consider myself an honorary niece only.

I made a donation in honor of my parents, who have been caring, compassionate examples for my brothers and me, and in honor of Craig and Parnell, obviously, and for each of their families. The wonderful (small) staff gave me a book of some quilt squares, and a calendar I have already poured over several times. I felt so welcomed, and depending on how much longer I am in Atlanta, I want to help quilt squares together as they need me. Seeing a modest and hard-working organization and staff like that also reminds me that I am in the right field; non-profits, working to educate and engage the public, and ensuring that life has been well-spent by taking care of the issues that matter most.

Take a moment to drink in how enormous each panel of this quilt is. Each square is intentionally 3 feet by 6 feet, about the size of a human grave. I was not prepared for the commanding presence, and for how much more meaningful seeing each component up-close truly is.

That's me next to Craig's square

The portion my family contributed to Craig's square, which is on the bottom, in the very middle

Parnell McKenna Peterson's square (double-sized, like Craig's). The entire bottom is littered with lovely messages to him.

I especially enjoyed seeing all of the contributions made by people who loved each of them. Their lives and memories matter to many.

My mom, Craig, and some other of their high school friends here, also part of Craig's square. Craig is on the bottom left.

Parnell

Craig

Craig, in the center of his beautiful square. (Hazard of storing thousands of quilt squares, creases.)

The modest headquarters of the largest piece of community folk art in the world. The Quilt weighs 54 tons. They're all stored here.

Take-home goodies: book, calendar. There are very generous, wonderful people taking care of this quilt.

My family's little square on Craig's quilt square

I bring these up now because I have been thinking so much about the illness, the virus, the stigma, the massive too-little-too-late effort to stem its spread, and the continued work by scientists, doctors, activists, and others to find long-term resolution (if not a cure). I bring up these memories because it is curious to me why I should remember them both so clearly, I can picture the rooms, and where I was sitting. I don’t have similar memories learning about cancer (several types having affected my grandparents), or my mother’s heart rhythm disturbance, both of which affected my own life in much more direct ways.

There is just something that hurts so deeply when I think about it. Yet it is a feeling I have embraced, it is important to feel deeply on this earth, in this life, especially when I have my health and so many do not.

Two of my Mom’s high school friends, Craig Koller and Parnell Peterson, died of AIDS. Parnell, who I do not remember, died in 1991, at age 33. Craig died in 1997, at age 40. I remember visiting Craig and his mother and sister’s family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in spring of 1997, and I knew at that point that he was sick (though I’m unsure if I knew what was making him sick).

It’s strange what I’ve been feeling recently, since finding the images of each Parnell and Craig’s quilt squares on the NAMES Project Foundation AIDS Memorial Quilt. I am going to see the quilt next week, and they have pulled these two squares for me to see. My family, my Mom, Dad and siblings, contributed a tiny portion to Craig’s square, at the request of his mother, and so we are part of a collage of love surrounding Craig’s image on his doubly-large square. I did not know this until very recently, as that is one part in my saga that I do not recall.

Square 05508, Craig Koller's portion is the bottom, middle. My family's photo-transfer contribution is third down on the right side panel along his square.

But since seeing these fuzzy images online, and trying desperately and ineffectively to zoom in enough to see both of their faces clearly, I have been experiencing what I can only say is deep grief– to the extent that I can understand it, which I know I cannot fully. I have not lost a parent, or a sibling, or a spouse or lover or very close friend to this illness– or even to any illness. I have not had, as a deep-feeling adult, any such loss from any tragedy or illness. And yet, I think of lives gone too early, of what Parnell might have liked to do in his life, and I sob. I cry, I get angry, I am sad. It’s usually in the car rides home, during my commutes. Certain songs, or lyrics, and thoughts, and prayers, and images either on the road or in my brain, and I am heaving again. I do not remember crying so deeply about something so big, over which I have no control, except when I read The Kite Runner, and spent a few nights in my room, on my bed, reading and sobbing for Afghanistan. (The whole thing, the whole place, every person in that country, which has seen so much. If you’ve read it, you understand the injustice and the pain and the violence that cannot be escaped, and the hatred that runs deep along ethnic lines.) Other than that, I have not cried so much over people I remember so little about, or in fact, if we look at the larger loss, of millions of lives taken by HIV/AIDS, of people whose stories I don’t know.

I find myself wishing deeply, searching in futility, to learn more about their lives–Parnell and Craig. I search for anything I can find on the internet, time and again, on Parnell. On Craig. I’ve looked at the cold, simple statement of their deaths on Ancestry.com’s death index about a hundred times. I long to know what Craig did for a living, what he liked to eat and watch, things beyond his illness and pain. I wonder what Parnell was doing in the 1980s, as a twenty-something as I am now, so sure that he has his whole life before him, as I feel now. Thirty-three is not so far away. Did he know anything about the disease, as it was spreading? The things I’ve been reading about, the “gay cancer” and the doctor’s fears, and the devastation it would bring to the huge steps the gay community had made in those years before, what did he think of it? Who were his friends, how did he share his diagnosis with them, with his family? I do know that his mother, Mary Peterson, seemed like an amazing, talented woman. My Mom vouched that it was so. I wish I could talk to her now.

How long did Craig live with HIV before it became AIDS? Where was he in the 1980s? I know he and Parnell both lived near San Francisco; were they the kind of high school friends who made sure to keep in touch? Who did he lose to this epidemic before he succumbed to it? One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the story of AIDS is the proximity, the high number of friends some people lost in those first decades, to the disease, as the latency period was so long and the specific communities affected were so defined. It breaks my heart, truly, to imagine the young men who died alone, and who were not given memorial services by their families because of a denial or unacceptable of their son’s sexuality. Doctors and nurses tell of miserable, terribly painful deaths some endured alone. No one to comfort them.

That is what makes me so happy about the AIDS memorial quilt. I pour into it so many hopes, that unknown names, that the memories of countless people who are remembered no where else have been stitched lovingly into these 91,000+ squares. The squares are all shaped to resemble coffins, which is a stark and essential reminder that these are lives, lost. People loved them, people rejected or hated some of them, but they all had lives, beliefs, love, careers and causes, before HIV/AIDS. Randy Shilts, in his book And the Band Played On, talks about how there was a very clear line, for every gay man, in their lives and experiences: there was life Before HIV/AIDS, and there was After. I was born into the world of After, the world as we know it from now on With AIDS. And as Stevie Nicks so eloquently says in “Landslide”–a song it is impossible to not cry to–time makes you older, children get older, I’m getting older too. Time makes us older, literally, but also, it makes us older with the heavy things it lays on our hearts. As an adult, I am brave and I accept uncertainty, but man, does the world scare me, overwhelm me.

I cannot on my own find a cure for HIV and AIDS. I am sad every day that I do not know more about the lives of the two men who were loving, caring friends of my Mom’s, whose generation (all three of them were born in 1957) was most directly hit with this unimaginably unforgivable and deadly disease. But I can love others, love those around me who might be different, but who are people all the same, like me, trying to survive in this big world, that has so much hate. I can also keep Craig and Parnell in my heart, grieve the loss of their lives, and keep their memory alive. I wish I could tell them I love them; I hope they know somehow that I do. 

And here I shall stop; I am sobbing again.

Photos by Yeondo Jung, in Seoul, South Korea

 Last weekend I watched Contagion, a recent Hollywood rendition of what would happen to the planet and its people if there was a massive, contagious disease that wreaked devastation and death, spreading so quickly and aggressively that its MO was “figuring us out faster than we can figure it out.” Characters race against time in the film, doctors at the CDC (including Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard), and other health institutes around the world, traveling and researching to find out what caused this outbreak and how to solve it, immunize against it.

And what do we learn about humanity? We are not nearly as orderly and respective to each other during crisis as the model Japanese refugees were during last year’s triple-crisis earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. In fact, we panic, we flee, we become violent and kill each other to find food, to secure our own families. The scenes that play out as the epidemic spreads (and as fear spreads even more quickly) are terrifying and thought-provoking. What if this actually happened? Would many of us fall not by the hand of the disease that threatens, but by the hands of our own neighbors, in the spirit of the outrageous moment in which we find ourselves?

It’s not Oscar-worthy, per se, but I found the theoretical situation enthralling–precisely because it was also horrifying. I would not want to live through this kind of awful moment for humanity. Us at our very worst.

It also made me think about the structure of our world, and a recent article in National Geographic about the future of our planet, and how cities can save us. I agree wholeheartedly, that, rather than the festering dirty urban spaces they have often been perceived as (and actualized as) in history, cities offer us a sustainable option for the survival of seven billion people (and an estimated nine billion by 2050), as people living in cities tread lightly on the earth: “Their roads, sewers, and power lines are shorter. Their apartments take less energy to heat and cool. Most important: they drive less.” Denser populations in cities have the added effect of lessening our use of remaining green space, forests, and natural areas and reservations. Humans and the earth alike need these green spaces an essential survival components–for our human psyche, and for the earth, literal survival.

As cities become more and more the agent of our sustainable survival, they should not all expand as Atlanta did. Sprawl and the massive expansion of suburbs have not helped or lowered our dependency on large amounts of energy. James Howard Kunstler, a critic of suburbia, called Atlanta “a pulsating slime mold,” a quotation that did manage to be included in the Nat Geo article, luckily for us Atlantans. But Atlanta is a perfect example of terrible teamwork among metropolitan counties, who could not agree on a transit system that stretched throughout the area, and so we are heavily, begrudgingly, seemingly irreversibly dependent on our clogged highways.

Theorists have had ideas and arguments for and against how we should design our cities for hundreds of years. Greenbelts surrounding cities were one proposed plan for stopping city growth, when it was perceived that urban centers that were too big would eat up all remaining space outside their centers. But as this set definitive borders to what would be considered the city, “greenbelts had the effect of pushing people farther out, sometimes absurdly far,” says Peter Hall in the article, a planner and historian at University College London.

Brisilia, the planned capital of Brazil, was designed for 500,000 people; two million more now live beyond the lake and park that were supposed to block the city’s expansion. When you  try to stop urban growth, it seems, you just amplify sprawl.

…Other government policies, such as subsidies for highways and home ownership, have [also] coaxed the suburbs outward.

The argument then, and the solution as well, is that you don’t try to stop city growth. You try to stop the suburban sprawl, and have your citizens living closer to where they work and play. What has been happening with more and more use and dependency on oil to fuel our cars and big, suburban houses in the United States is happening on an ever-greater level as China and India develop, and their citizens want the same ideas of the affluent, consumer life. As this trend quickens its pace, a solution becomes more important than ever. History has not always favored the teeming urban center. It has been seen as corrupting of the mind, dirty, disease-ridden, and a slew of other things. Which are valid claims, especially, rightfully, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But there’s a valid twenty-first century reevaluation and outlook:

Developing cities will inevitably expand, says [Shlomo Angel, an urban planning professor at New York University and Princeton]. Somewhere between the anarchy that prevails in many today and the utopianism that has often characterized urban planning lies a modest kind of planning that could make a big difference. It requires looking ahead decades, Angel says, and reserving land, before the city grows over it, for parks and a dense grid of public transit corridors. It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way–not as diseases, but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped. 

So we need to begin thinking about our cities as our saviors, and thinking about it seriously, even if, as I began this cheery post, we also risk the same things that have always been risky about cities: we’re all really close together, sharing buses, subways, hallways, all manner of public spaces. An event like the one in Contagion isn’t impossible, and cities are not the best places to stay if that did occur, as I was brutally reminded during the film. But Hollywood has not convinced me that the argument for cities isn’t worth our investment of time, thought, money, and lifestyle.

It was my first time out of the country (besides an hour in Canada), and I was beyond excited. I had gotten my passport for this trip, and paid half of the $800 cost (split with my parents) with babysitting money. What I didn’t spend much money on was my digital camera, which would later be rejected by the student newspaper I worked for in college as being far too low of quality (at a whopping 3 mega pixels) to grace the pages of student-produced media. I bought the camera for the trip actually, and proceeded to play with the features, like sepia tone, which overran my France photo collection. Ben points out to me frequently (I know, Ben, I get it) that this is a dumb move, because you can always edit your photos to any kind of old sepia tone later, where as you cannot change it back to color after the fact. So, years later, many of these pictures exist, even in my memory, in their singular, sepia form.

But recently I went back and adjusted the white balance on many of them, which transformed them, becoming images of my journey that took on entirely new life, more than I had thought would be salvageable from these usually murky, low-resolution shots. I secretly love them all the more for being so low-tech. It’s like I was trying to edit them into vintage, when in fact, they already look that way.

These are some of my favorites from Paris. Gerardmer and Colmar posts to follow.

This is the abandoned carnival bit set up right across from the Eiffel Tower viewing point. It felt old.

I stayed on the bus to see the Tower, so my camera’s reflection in the window remains forevermore.

People-watching outside the Louvre, including the miles of park between it and the Champs-Élysées. Ladies, babies, boats, boys, and a wedding.

Paris from almost-the-top of the Eiffel Tower, and the graffiti-ed “Beware Pickpockets” sign in the elevator.

This was me, in Paris, only a few weeks after my 18th birthday

Chic lady and a Vogue Homme in Charles de Gaule Airport. I feel no one else likes this photo, but I do.

In this first piece, “You Say You Want a Devolution,” the main crux is that in the last twenty years, we have remained in a stagnant state of cultural development. “In the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so feels like an end of cultural history.” Kurt Andersen points to our nostalgic gaze towards the past, and the way our architecture and automobiles have remained looking mostly the same since 1991. We also dress nearly the same. Hip-hop, the last genuinely new form of music, makes an unapologetic use of old music through sampling. Fine art, which recognizably depicted people for every century before the 20th, is back to respectably representing human forms again. “It’s the rare ‘new’ cultural artifact that dosen’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes,” he writes. “In our Ben There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good.” There are two major reasons, he argues, for this stagnated cultural state:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out.

…The other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. It blue jeans become unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

He goes on to ponder what this cultural moment–frozen mostly for the last 20 years–means for western civilizations as a whole, for their existence and sustainability in the future. I am not convinced it spells anything like the end for the West. But, he has a compelling overall theory, and when you consider the photographs and comparisons through the years of our cultural changes–buildings, clothing, cars–you see he is absolutely spot-on.

Illustration by James Taylor, accompanying the piece in Vanity Fair

I ear-marked the article and set the magazine in my current pile, and excitedly picked up Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, which features, for 2011, The Protestor as the Person of the Year. Absolutely the right call–that’s the only “Person” we could choose to represent this amazing, tumultuous year.

And wouldn’t you know, the lead article begins its discussion, its explanation of this 2011, with the exact same Fukuyama theory, explained in The End of History, this “end” theoretically beginning around 1990. Then, only as I went to write about both of these articles and t he impact they’ve had on me as I reflect back over this year and its events, did I realize both are written by the same man, Kurt Andersen. Of course, that explains the similar thought process, and the similar sources of influence as Andersen himself was reflecting back over the year 2011.

The Time article has a more optimistic overture, even while explaining that there is no saying where the future will lead, after this year of tumult and protesting, and voices exploding over the things wrong with the world, all over the world. He points out several things that never occurred to me, things that make 2011 distinct from any other year in the last twenty, since the theoretical “end of history,” and that make it distinct from any other year since 1968, and–he argues–even farther back in history.

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strcitly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protestors were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news.–vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America, they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

Then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay… The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows–obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of calvary to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

It is stunning that I had never thought of this before, because in my history classes and even in simple living in this world, I have often thought of the protests of old as exactly that, as relics of eras gone past, a people, a group, a generation more connected, more concerned, and more committed to bringing change and making a difference than anything my generation could or would ever see. It seemed complacency had replaced this spirit of fighting, caring, standing up against The Man.

And then 2011 came out of nowhere. Spontaneous protests, beginning with a fruit vendor in Tunisia last December, and his death on January 4, 2011, snowballed around the globe, North Africa and the Middle East, in Europe, Asia, North America. But, historically, it was right on time:

In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989–but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in ’89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968–but more consequential because more protestors have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a counterculture pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then–within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses)–inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as huge peaceful demonstrations of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in the unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.

That’s an extraordinary paragraph to consider. How 2011 is unlike anything we’ve seen in many, many dozens of years–arguably since 1848! Also, I finally had to look up the root of the word zeitgeist, as too many intellectuals and writers have been brandishing that thing around, and it means, “the spirit of the day.” In fact, 2011 has a very distinct spirit, changing the course of what all the years to follow might hold.

Mannoubia Bouazizi, the mother of Mohamed, the street vendor who set fire to himself after being fed up with corruption among city officials, last December, in Tunisia

I think what Andersen has done best, with both of these pieces in separate magazines, has been to show how we are simultaneously experiencing everything the same and nothing the same. And for some reason, this contradiction makes perfect sense. Reading these two articles almost back-to-back (absolutely unintentionally), one reads as a cautionary tale of a western culture gone a bit stale, the other as a means by which to rediscover ourselves, our values, and what is important in this life. And this year has been the perfect one in which to discover both these truths about ourselves, and to seek to bring them together harmoniously, using them for renewal, reaction, redemption, reward in years to come.

This week I have finally been able to open my October and November issues of National Geographic and I was awestruck by the November story on the Sami people of northern Sweden. Their wardrobe and striking faces radiate against the harsh landscape of the region where they live–blanketed all in white snow. Even the reindeer they keep lend themselves to the grey and white backdrop.

They are a fascinating group, and the photographer who has been living among them for the last few years captured them spectacularly. I had just been pondering not renewing my subscription, as a glanced over an archeological dig and ancient treasure story, and then flipped to this story, just after it. That always happens. The stunning cultural pieces remind me why I always find something worthwhile in the pages. I just skip the ancient treasure stories. See the photo gallery here.

Sven Skaltje eats a meal of dried reindeer meat, homemade bread, and coffee in Gallivare, Sweden

A photo of a calf marking hangs in a home. I adore the images in this entire story.

In public history classes, though, it is a simple truth that the regular person goes to museums not to read lots of label text and long passages that, though their stories may be astonishing, do involve more words. No, they most often go to see the things that make history come to life for them. Artifacts, small and large, can often be so powerful, say so much with no words. And this is where my classes are taking me. The emphasis in Material Culture is obvious: the objects, created or altered somehow by man, that offer insight into customs, social patterns, lifestyles, foodways, and larger culture of the people of our past.

So too do I find this in Oral History, the other aforementioned class, where our discussions, readings, and projects revolve around the spoken word, in a historical context, and using a proper methodology that puts it far beyond casual conversation. In conducting oral histories, we are formally and methodically documenting the past, in ways that effect immensely both the narrator (the subject) and the interviewer (me).

On a class tour, we looked at some of the other art exhibits that they have at the airport, to get a feel for their whole program, Airport Art.

I find both of these mediums so powerful. I conducted two oral histories earlier this year, after a one-class-period crash course in one of my other classes, and while they were on two very different topics, I discovered the many nuances that oral historians have been raving about since the 1960s; one of the most significant to me was the unexpected paths the interview can take, and also the candidness of my narrators. By asking very simple questions and then shutting my damn mouth, it was astonishing what stories they would tell me, without my ever having to ask them something provocative or controversial. Not that the primary goal is provocative information, not at all. But, for example, I was interviewing a couple in the late forties who have a young daughter they adopted from Guatemala, and there were a lot of delicate and sensitive subjects I wanted to broach with them, like whether or not they would someday tell her about her half-siblings that they knew she had back in Guatemala, or whether they would help her in finding her biological roots, if she ever wanted to know more about them. These were things I didn’t think I would have the guts to ask. But I never needed to: the family was so welcoming and so willing to explore their complicated emotions on those subjects, via other more basic questions I had asked within the larger subject of their family and their relationship to Guatemala right now. I know this won’t always be the case, and this is a topic I am continuing to work with, but it was an extraordinary first dive into the process, and into the revelations of what oral histories are, and what they do for larger historical projects you are producing.

The exhibit currently on display is a series of dresses and women's fashion, all made with recycled materials--trash, essentially.

Museum staffs, and so, museum exhibits, have as their goal the interpretation of the past, in a way that makes people look at their own lives and relate the past to them, to where they live, to those around them. This can be done very well with historical documents, presented in a cohesive manner, that tell a wonderful story. But, as soon as you add the human voice, and the objects created by men and women in that same story, you have brought the exhibit to life. You have succeeded in a more successful, effective way, in relating the story to your audience, and they will leave remembering it more clearly, and hopefully in a way that connects them to the past, to its utter humanity and enormity.

Henry Glassie, in his book Material Culture, describes our relationship to things in our everyday life, and inspires us to think about them in more significant ways, as pieces that connect us to the larger humanity of the world. After all, if it as not us personally, someone created every single thing in our lives. That is a powerful thought. I leave you with the passion of his words, so inspiring and clearly telling, as he has spent his life studying the Things of People.

Among the new things, the most important, I believe, is the collection: the assembly of gifts, souvenirs, and commodities into a home–the domestic environment in contradistinction to the house. The collection represents a victory over disorder in industrial times, when the flood of goods threatens to sweep us to madness in a rising tide of irrelevant trash, just as the house of stone represented a victory over disorder in the days when people lived close to nature, when the lean wolves came down from the heath and the night winds wailed. But we should not be confused. Today, while we create things out of things made by other people, all across the globe, people in no way less real or alive are going up into the woods and down to the riverside. They are chopping out chunks of nature and fashioning artifacts that display their spirit and serve the serious needs of their neighbors.

Art commissioned by UGA on animals, big and small. I'm very excited about the exhibit we are doing for them.

This happened to me when I read The Kite Runner. I would find myself laying on my bed, engrossed in the story of two young boys whose lives were forever impacted by the wars, conflicts, and tragedies that have befallen Afghanistan, and I would suddenly weep thinking of its enormity. I would literally cry for Afghanistan, big and small. It happened as well in the movie True Grit–which still kind of mystifies even me. I mean in the last sixty seconds, when the little whippersnapper girl, all grown up, visits a ruff and tumble landscape and inquires about her old travel partner, Rooster Cogburn, and it is established that he has since passed away. Their whole story culminated in my mind, and I was overcome, to tears.

I guess this is why, from a young age and with a big imagination, I have always been drawn to good stories, and long wanted to create them myself as well. I adamantly wanted to make movies–write, direct, etc.–that was what I told people in high school. I also wanted to be a journalist. I now have a history degree and want to tell stories in museums, and hopefully in books of my own. These are all careers, ways of storytelling, coming from this same spout of emotion that rests inside me, ready to well up anytime some sort of meaningful conclusion, resolution, decision, gesture, or tragedy has been proffered in a story. And in the grand tradition of learning, we discover more of the world that we just can’t begin to fathom; we know that in fact, the more we learn, the less we can really ever know. I claim to know a little bit about a few things, but man, the world is big.

I just finished reading a perfect summer book. I have referenced it several times lately, because it is about a 22-year-old fresh college graduate who takes off for China in 1986, and discovers a lot of things about herself–and many of those things mirrored in stark and hilarious ways insights I had about myself when I traveled to China as well (but in 2007, to a vastly different country). Susan Jane Gilman has gone on to do a lot of awesome things since her mid-eighties escapades, working as a journalist and living abroad now.

But her recounting of the life of a Chinese woman that she met on her memorable trek, and reunited with on a visit in 2005, brought the tears. She writes about how even when they bonded in the ’80s, she knew (she assumed) that Lisa, this young woman the same age as her, would have a very linear life, one that had almost none of the potential that her own, Gilman’s, could have, because of where she lived in the world. As it turns out, Lisa grew her small restaurant into a series of businesses in Yangshuo, China, and is now referred to as “an institution” in Lonely Planet guidebooks on China. She had coffee with President Clinton when he visited her restaurant and served on a delegation that welcomed him to China in the late nineties. She has gone farther than Gilman ever expected or could have dreamed. But she has still not the opportunities as this visiting American; as of 2005, she still cannot travel independently abroad, say, perhaps to visit her friend Gilman in Switzerland. Her whole story brings me to tears. And what makes me the most emotional, I think, is our own assumptions, the things an American might think or assume about anyone else. Assuming that a 22-year old Chinese woman would be destined to live out her life in servitude to her husband, with one child, cooking pancakes for foreigners and backpackers in Yangshuo with no foreseeable economic or lifestyle opportunities beyond that.

In the whole book, there is so much drama, so many insane travel antics that occur, yet here I am bawling at the very end over a small reunion of two fleeting friends, and over the complicated and sometimes tragic things we assume, learn, and discover about one another in this wide world. The larger plot line of her time in China, actually, has not ended in resolution, and is rather bittersweet. But in this little subplot, here, we can rejoice in the wonder, in the sadness, in the immense emotion that real, raw, and meaningful stories provide us.

I believe they are the lifeblood of our existence as humans, propelling us forward, reminding us to believe that we can be part of incredible things. Incredible stories.

(Even if, sometimes, they are made up inside out brains. Fiction has such enormous ability to transport us. I am jealous of people who can write it.)

But I hadn’t looked at it in a while, and so recently I checked back on it, and found a new publication. Susan Jane Gilman’s memoir and travelogue of her travels in China, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven was there, in which she divulges the post-college culture and travel shock that she and her college buddy received when they headed off to China in 1986–then basically still a closed state, for all intents and purposes, and relatively untraveled by the modern American. I immediately loved her candid, honest descriptions of the way travel on your own, for the first time, really feels. (“Not at all triumphant.”)

A Nanjing street through my own camera, 2007

I read two chapters while sitting in the bookstore, ignoring the books I should have been using to do research for summer classes. Of course, as soon as I need to read about Cuba, I want to read about China. But Gilman’s narrative has been absolutely engaging, and very funny.

I wanted to share one bit, that rings so true, on the hubris, the adventure-seeking, and the irony behind The Backpacker. That timeless first-world traveler who seeks the true thrills in life. She muses on this very thought (an irony I think about often) while describing the bar scene she has found in Beijing. After three weeks of travel through southern China, Gilman and her friend arrive in Beijing and head out on their first night to toast the kind strangers who have helped them during the day, when their bicycles broke down a number of times while traversing the city. To celebrate, they wind up at the same bar as many of the other backpackers in the city, all of whom begin a story-telling competition to determine, without actually saying so, who is the most hardcore, who has traveled in the worst conditions, so as to win some sort of invented (but totally real, to them) honor among the crowd.

Soon we were all vying to establish our backpacker’ street cred, to prove how intrepidly we’d been traveling, how much discomfort we’d incurred at how little expense. The irony of this was wholly lost on us. We were too young and myopic to recognize the perversity of a logic that equates voluntary deprivation with authentic experience. We thought that by wearing burlap pajamas, contracting intestinal parasites, and opting to ride in third class with “the people,” we were somehow being less Western and more Asian. It never seemed to occur to us that only privileged Westerners travel to developing countries in the first place, then use them as playgrounds and laboratories for their own enrichment. Only privileged Westerners consider it a badge of honor to forsake modern amenities for a two-dollar-a-night roach-infested guesthouse. Only privileged Westerners sit around drinking beers at prices the natives can’t afford while sentimentalizing the nation’s lower standard of living and adopting it as a lifestyle.

The Asians we were seeing, of course, didn’t live famished agrarian lives due to some sort of Eastern spirituality or enlightenment. Give most of the world’s population our money and opportunity, and they weren’t going slumming at all. They were booking a Club Med vacation in Cancun and drinking a mai tai.

Granted, it was good, even admirable, that we young backpackers at least attempted to break through the barriers of culture and class to experience firsthand how people in Southeast Asia really lived. But we were kidding ourselves in thinking that we were somehow transcending our Western privileges by doing this.

She gets exactly at some of the complicated feelings I have about being a Westerner traveling in developing countries. All the same, I find them far more interesting than places like France or Greece. (Not dissing those places, by any means.) I just find so much irony in the whole thing, escaping lives we are so lucky to have, to feel something real. But then, I am so fortunate to have been given a life, a nationality, that allows me to explore far beyond my borders. So, I need to use this blessing, right? Being careful not to Orientalize anyone I encounter, along the way.