If future historians are well designed and supplied with sufficient training data, including facial recognition data, they might catch the error in this human-generated UNC Press Centennial Recollection, The 1990 Brooks Hall Fire and 1993 Rededication. They may know enough, for example, to recognize and call upon the young man, second from the left, for help, if it can remember his name.
This is the caption under the photo:
UNC Press staff, such as former Managing Editor Ron Maner (right), celebrating the rededication of Brooks Hall, 1993.
Hint: That is not Ron Maner on the right. Corporate memory can be so fleeting.
J’ai pensé à ce passage du livre « La septième fonction du langage » de Laurent Binet
Pour aucune raison particulière, je me suis souvenu hier d’un scene qui ma fait rigoler:
À l’université de Vincennes, pour accéder aux salles de cours, [l’inspecteur Bayard] doit traverser une sorte de souk peuplé d’Africains, enjamber des drogués comateux affalés par terre, passer devant un bassin sans eau rempli de détritus, longer des murs lépreux recouverts d’affiches et de graffitis sur lesquels il peut lire: « Professeurs, étudiants, recteurs, personnel ATOS: crevez, salopes ! » ; « Non à la fermeture du souk alimentaire » ; « Non au déménagement de Vincennes à Nogent »; « Non au déménagement de Vincennes à Marne-la-Vallée » ; « Non au déménagement de Vincennes à Savigny sur Orge » ; « Non au déménagement de Vincennes à Saint-Denis » ; « Vive la révolution prolétarienne » ; « Vive la révolution iranienne » ; « maos fachos »; « trostkystes - staliniens » ; « Lacan = flic »; « Badiou nazi »; « Althusser = assassin »; « Deleuze baise ta mère » ; « Cixous = baise-moi » ; « Foucault = pute de Khomeiny » ; « Barthes = social-traître prochinois » ; « Callicles SS »; « Il est interdit d’interdire d’interdire »; « Union de la gauche = dans ton cul » ; « Viens chez moi, on va lire Le Capital! signé: Balibar »…
Des étudiants puant la marijuana l’accostent avec agressivité en lui fourguant des tonnes de tracts: « Camarade, tu sais ce qui se passe au Chili? Au Salvador? Tu te sens concerné par l’Argentine ? Et le Mozambique ? Tu t’en fous, du Mozambique? Tu sais où c’est? Tu veux que je te parle du Timor? Sinon, on fait une collecte pour l’alphabétisation au Nicaragua. Tu me paies un café ? » Là, il se sent moins dépaysé. Quand il avait sa carte à Jeune Nation, il en a pété, de ces petites gueules de gauchistes crasseux. Il jette les tracts dans le bassin sans eau qui sert de poubelle.
Thanks for sending these two articles, George. It’s nice to hear that people in the Tunis medina are organizing to save its traditional crafts, arts, and businesses. Furthermore, the story about Sufism in Tunisia was a real surprise to me. I had no idea Sufism was so widespread in Tunisia. The only time i encountered Sufism was in the tiny town of Nefta. Up until I read this article, I thought that Nefta was pretty much the only place where Sufism was practiced. I taught in Tunis both years, and, of course, knew of Sidi Bou Said and the big Sida Mahrez mosque in Tunis, but at no point did I know there was any connection to Sufism with either. Nor do I think that I am the only volunteer who didn’t know about these long established roots of Sufism in Tunisia…. Thanks again,…Phil Jones
Mondher’s 1st reply
Definitely, there are saints (or Sidi or waly in Arabic) in every town and city in Tunisia, and many villages are centered around the saint’s mausoleum and would bear the saint’s name, like the all famous village of Sidi Bou Said north of Tunis or the city of Sidi Bouzid where the 2010 revolution started.
Many towns/cities have a number of these, usually one would be the most famous one, such as Sidi Mehrez in Tunis, with many other saints sprinkled around various neighborhoods.
My paternal grandma was the resident curator of a saint, Sidi Bouaziz, in the heart of the medina of Sousse. She actually resided in the mausoleum after my grand father passed. In addition to people visiting and praying for benediction, there were all kinds of events, such as engagements, circumcisions, etc., that where my brother and I had ours done. Most importantly, there were musical and chanting events periodic or specific to certain days in Ramadan and other religious commemorations. Each one had a different type band, sufi, , hadhra, yissaouya, suleymya, stombali, or other bands. One type of band was called El-Banga, which has Saharian/Berber origins, where women would dance until they get to a trance and end up fainting. Men stood in the center courtyard and boys watched from the adjacent room, where the saint’s tomb was located, through a see-through wooden wall. That was fun.
Here is a YouTube link clip about a performance hosted in the Tunis Municipal Theater celebrating Sufi tradition… It’s called El Ziara, which means “the visit”, referring to a visit one makes to a saint for benediction.
Below is a Guardian report with video of one of those Banga ceremonies, but not like the one I described above.
In Gafsa, I loved going to the 3asawiya (sp?), where people went into trances and stuck nails through their cheeks or ate cactus. It was amazing. Do you know about this? Is it Sufi?
ge
Mondher’s 2nd reply
Hi George,
The trance, yes. When I was a kid, my dad took us to this village near Sousse, called Sidi Amer (another Sidi😊), where 3yssawyya shows took place; I don’t remember whether it happened frequently or it was an annual event linked to some holyday. All what you said happened in these exhibitions, sticking long big nails through their cheeks, eating cactus, walking on burning charcoal or laying on broken glass with a person standing on their body, swallowing shaving blades, etc. All of this being done as the music gets to a climax and people dance to it until they get into a trance to varying degrees.
As if these “practices” are Sufi, I think those who believe in Sufism take it very seriously. I also think that these are few. So the majority that carry-on these practices do so as traditions and culture. But I may be wrong. I saw a few documentaries on Sufism and Sufis; so that’s a good place to learn more. The youtube video is a good source to watch and check out comments…
[ge: this is a fabulous video that explains a lot about Sufism.]
Some Youtube Sufi videos
I can’t find a video of people in trances sticking nails through their cheeks, etc. These videos show scenes somewhat like what I saw in Gafsa. The music seems similar.
This video briefly shows a man in a trance at the beginning.
This video from Tozeur, a town just South of Gafsa, shows a woman apparently in a trance.
Here are some other videos of similar scenes. Nothing exactly like my experience crowded into the courtyard of a house in Gafsa at night.
This scene from Paris looks like fun but is definitely not Southern Tunisia.
I grew up on Walnut Street in Berkeley, about a block and a half up a hill from the flatlands where Live Oak Park was located.
Halfway up the hill, where Eunice crossed Walnut, there was a large white house on the NE corner where a teenage JD lived. He had a black 50 Ford hotrod that he worked on and drove around, scaring us littler kids with his leather jacket, red face, blond duck’s ass haircut and disdainful look. It’s important to remember that Berkeley was not completely filled with gentile, academic families.
Mark’s family moved into the JD’s house probably in 1955. One day, probably in the summer, Mark stopped me and asked if I could show him how to get to Garfield Junior High School, where I was starting the 8th grade. Mark was starting the 7th. Of course I agreed and soon we were walking to school together and usually back home as well.
We spent most days after school together, either outdoors playing, hiking, biking or at his house. My mother had died a few years earlier and I spent a lot of time away from my evil Danish stepmother, as did my sister Mary Hugh and my brothers, Rich and Don.
One day, Mark greeted me by saying, “Hello, Georgeous!”. I responded by saying, “Hello, Gruesome!” and those remained our nicknames for each other ever since.
Mark’s mother Anita welcomed me into her home and heart.
Anita
Mark was so lucky. I didn’t feel comfortable around his father who we called “Old Wrinkle Head” because his scalp, visible under his Marine flattop, was indeed wrinkled. In one of our last conversations by phone, Mark filled me in on his family’s history and I was amazed to discover that his father’s life had been upended by WWII. I wish I’d understood him better and had talked to him as an adult.
Mark and I wandered around Berkeley together, visiting Tilden Park, UC Berkeley, Treasure Island (Mark had a military ID that would get us through security) and the Berkeley Pier, where we caught sharks:
Sharks
My family was more academically oriented and my world was the Ivory Tower; I loved going to the UC-Berkeley campus to see the lab animals and special engineering museums. Mark was more interested than me in popular culture, introducing me to the Kingston Trio, Elvis, etc. It was through him that I started listening to non-classical music. It couldn’t have been hard for him to get me interested in cars. We both loved their family’s 57 Chevy, which we drove around in. I remember once, driving down from Tilden park at the top of the Berkeley hills on Euclid. Mark saw a kid walking in the street and aimed the car at him, terrifying him into moving spasmodically. I felt a little ashamed but of course laughed along with Mark. (He wasn’t usually like that.)
During my time at college (1960-64), I saw Mark during breaks. We spent one summer driving around the Sierras, looking for jobs fighting fires.
We spent another summer picking peaches on a farm owned by a friend of his father’s. We lived in our own bunkhouse separate from the Braçeros, Mexicans on temporary work visas, and from the American alcoholics picked up on a street corner in Marysville by Boss Tweed in his Edsel station wagon. We wandered up over the levee of the Russian River and found an actual hermit living in a tiny “house” with a garden and rabbit traps. The Mexicans taught us how to steal table grapes that were allowed to ripen on the vine for making wine. We all ate together in a mess hall right out of the Grapes of Wrath.
One summer, Mark took me down to a garage on Grove St, where he was working on the second fastest VW Beetle in California: I’ll never forget that experience. We rebuilt the engine on my Beetle twice (when I went to Tunisia after graduating, my brother Rich destroyed the car by flying over a railroad crossing and landing so hard, the wheels were flattened outwards!)
After I graduated in 1964 and moved back to Berkeley, my evil stepmother got my father to tell me that I couldn’t live at home over the summer, so I moved into an apartment with Mark in downtown Berkeley while working in a VW garage.
Mark solarized
At the end of the summer I left for the Peace Corps, graduate school, etc., and never lived near Mark again.
The wonderful thing about a childhood friendship such as ours was how easily we understood each other when we did meet or talk with each other by phone or email.
Over the many years since I moved away from California, I was able to visit Mark as he and Xandra moved to the country and thrived. I so admired Mark for planting a beautiful vineyard near Healdsburg. That felt so exotic, especially their beautiful house that they had to move away from sometime later. Mark’s stories - he always told stories - stories of driving fire trucks, of being such a good friend to a woman in Geyserberg that he was able to buy her house after she passed away; the friends he made at the Cloverdale Senior Center.
Mark told stories because his life was filled with drama. There was his wonderful marriage to Xandra. I was able to visit his mother with him on one trip to the Bay Area. I never managed to see his sisters again but Mark’s stories about them were always amazing. I’ll never forget our visit to see his daughter, Rebecca, while she was still in school in San Francisco: what a wonderful young woman she had become!
I’ve been thinking about how difficult it is, certainly for me, to obtain and organize resources for my OLLI courses. For people like me, who like to download articles and resources, the present system is terribly inefficient and time-consuming.
When I saw this webpage, my impulse was to download the PDFs and store them in folders matching her titles. Then I can annotate the PDFs, highlighting passages and adding notes, to help me go back and review the articles before class.
In my file system I create folders for each of Claire’s topics and put its corresponding PDF file in it. Then I highlight and annotate it. Finally I open the enclosing folder in Obsidian, a newish technology that is making waves these days. I’d be glad to discuss it with you if it interests you. Here’s what it looks like:
The left panel shows the folders and files, the middle one shows an annotated PDF and the right panel shows notes based on the annotations, written in markdown, a widespread technology that already underlies much of today’s web.
Back to my point: It is very tedious for me to download each PDF or other document, create folders for them, etc.
What annoys me is that the solution should be relatively simple for the instructors:
Get your documents ready.
make folders for each topic
place the PDF, PPT, etc. file in the folder
Zip the whole mess up and make it available for downloading.
That’s it!
Here’s an example.
I’ve zipped up the folder shown above and made it available for download here.
(If you look at the unzipped folder, you will see a file, lessons.rb, my desperate attempt to automate the downloading of data from Claire’s website. I eventually gave up.)
There are of course some problems I haven’t addressed. For example, some references are to web pages in HTML, not to PDF files. An HTML file can be downloaded, of course, as long as images, etc., are downloaded in the right place for them to find. It would be far better to turn HTML pages into PDFs for students to read.
I turned to PDFPenPro, which can convert HTML into PDF, but that costs money. Pandoc can do it, I believe, but it requires installing MacTex, which is huge. I would hope that some of Duke’s crack programmers (and that’s serious, not a crack) could whip a converter together for instructors to use to make PDFs before zipping everything up.
The reason that I’m writing to you, Howard, is that I’m having a very hard time downloading and organizing the materials in the syllabus for Intergenerational Ethics. The people who organized this course surely have these materials already downloaded and organized as they prepare the syllabus. Why make each student redo work that has already been done? (BTW I tried to parse the syllabus with a Ruby script, but the formatting was so inconsistent that I couldn’t find any useful patterns.)
I realize that lots of people are content to read articles online or they print them onto paper, etc., but some of us aren’t, and I for one am wasting a lot of time with busy work.
