We had a throwback 4th of July with our cousins by a small lake about an 1 hour north of New York City.
There was swimming …
… not to mention grilled cheeseburgers, sausages, and hot dogs with yellow mustard. And sparklers — lots of sparklers.
And some fireworks from the platforms on the lake. Not airborne, but the kids deemed them “awesome” anyway.
A grand time was had by all!
Old-fashioned photos courtesy of newfangled software: Hipstamatic for iPhone.
[Settings: Lake, Lifeguard Chair, and Sparklers 2-5 -- lens: John S.; film: Ina's 1969; flash: off. Sparklers 1, Fireworks, and I Love New York -- lesn: Kaimal Mark II; film Ina's 1969; flash off.]
The first NYUAD Candidate Weekend that I attended was last November. Erin Meekhof, one of the candidates who flew in that weekend and is now a member of NYU Abu Dhabi’s inaugural class, made an eight-minute video about her experience. She does a marvelous job of capturing the sense of wonder that many of the candidates felt as they came together from near and far — and that I remember feeling that weekend as well. Watching it will give you a sense of the excitement that all of us — faculty, administrators, staff, and students — feel about the project. Those of us who are working to build the institutions want nothing more than to make sure that students like Erin graduate with the same sense of wonder and possibility that they felt when the saw NYU Abu Dhabi for the first time.
The Dallas Opera moved into its new home at the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House last fall. The building, which is part of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, still has that new-building smell (the NYU Abu Dhabi downtown campus building has it too). It’s surrounded by lots of construction, as the Dallas Arts District takes shape around it.
The opera house itself is a red circle in a square (though in fact it’s shaped more like a horseshoe than a circle). It has a sixty-foot glass facade, with an interior that features brushed steel, metallic grey paint, reflective curved red panels. Every portion of it seems to have been given a sponsor’s name, as you can see from this description on the Dallas Opera’s website:
A 21st century reinterpretation of the traditional opera house, the 2,200-seat Winspear Opera House’s principal performance space, the Margaret McDermott Performance Hall, is designed to be the environmentally conscious, state-of-the-art standard against which future opera houses will be measured.
The opera house’s principal entrance, known as Rosemary and Roger Enrico Family Gateway, features the Annette and Harold Simmons Signature Glass Façade that ascends to the full 60-foot height of the building, creating a seamless flow between the opera house and the surrounding park. The transparent façade provides dramatic views of McDermott Performance Hall, which will be clad in vibrant red glass panels, in addition to the Grand Lobby, the staircase and the Mary Anne and Richard Cree Box Circle and Grand Tier levels. From within the Winspear Opera House, the Simmons Glass Façade will provide a sweeping view of downtown Dallas and portions of Uptown.
One of the ways in which the hall is a “reinterpretation of the traditional opera house” is in it use of the chandelier. When you walk in, the auditorium is dominated by a chandelier that is made of illuminated rods hanging down from the ceiling. In an homage to the Metropolitan Opera’s rising chandeliers, this chandelier also rises: each rod is fully retracted into the ceiling, leaving a starfield pattern on the ceiling — which then twinkles as the house lights go down completely.
I liked the acoustics from where I was sitting in the dress circle, and the hall seemed quite cozy compared to the Met. My one complaint: I don’t think I’ve ever sat in a more aggressively air-conditioned venue.
This is an amazing video portrait of Dubai made by the time-lapse photography wizard Philip Bloom.
Click here to read Bloom’s account of the photo shoot and here for a more detailed account of Bloom’s timelapse techniques (with additional material about Dubai).
NYU students who have been to Prague (or who are thinking of spending a semester there) might enjoy his tribute to the city:
Prague: Canon 1DMKIV from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
And fellow Star Wars fans might enjoy his peek at the Skywalker Ranch:
I often ask my students to look for what I call exemplary moments in the texts that they are reading, by which I mean a moment — it can be a word, a phrase, sentence, a passage, a stanza, a scene — that captures something crucial, whether it be formal or thematic, about the larger text from which it is drawn. But you can find such exempla not simply in texts but all around you.
Here is an exemplum that captures, for me, many of the paradoxes, difficulties, and opportunities that NYU Abu Dhabi presents.
It’s the physical address of NYUAD:
New York University Abu Dhabi
Behind the ADIA Building & Across Al Nasr Street from the Cultural Foundation
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
The building is so new that it doesn’t have a proper address yet (or maybe the address above is simply going to be the proper address). In any case, the city’s addressing system is in flux. Here’s an explanation of Abu Dhabi’s street addresses from wikitravel.org
Street addresses in Abu Dhabi are simultaneously very logical and hopelessly confusing. Many roads have traditional names, like “Airport Rd”, which may not correspond to the official names, like “Maktoum St”, and the city is divided into traditional districts like “Khalidiyya”. However, by recent decree, the city has been split up into numbered “zones” and “sectors”, with all roads in each sector numbered, First St, Second St, etc, and the vast majority of street signs only refer to these. The system of main streets is straight forward enough once you realize that the odd numbered streets run across the island and the even numbers run along it. So First St is in fact the Corniche, and the odd numbers continue out of town to 31st St which is near the new Khalifa Park. Airport Rd is Second St and the even numbers continue to the east through to 10th St by Abu Dhabi Mall. On the west side of Airport Rd, the numbers go from 22nd Street to 32nd St by the new Bateem Marina. Alas, confusion is caused by the local streets, which are on green signs (main streets are on blue signs) and are also called First, Second etc. Most locals opt to ignore the system entirely, and the best way to give instructions is thus navigating by landmarks, if taking a taxi, odds are you will get to “behind the Hilton Baynunah” much faster than “Fifth Street, Sector 2″.
10:00 AM
Eid Mubarak! Back home it’s Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the first day of the Christmas shopping season, but here, in Abu Dhabi, it’s the Eid Holiday, which commemorates the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) to sacrifice his son Ismail for God”s sake. Despite the fact that I hate traveling over Thanksgiving weekend, I find myself here in the new downtown campus building of NYU Abu Dhabi, awaiting a group of applicants who have been flown here from all parts of the globe as part of the “November Candidate Weekend.”
Outside, it’s summer weather: a lovely 85 Farenheit, though rain is predicted for Sunday night! As we walked into the building, we passed a group of men who were finishing up the ritual sacrifice of what looked like a lamb (which is one way that Eid is celebrated here). That was upsetting one of my colleagues, who’s an animal rights activist, and I suspect the candidates will be taken around the other side of the building, in case any of them are not quite ready for that aspect of Islamic culture.
I’m thrilled to be here. After my last visit I was trying to figure out a way to get myself invited back sometime next term, so when the invitation came to take part in the Candidate Weekend, it seemed like too good an offer to pass up. (Luckily, my wife agreed!) The past year’s work has been about building a curriculum and a faculty, but my colleagues on the Arts and Humanities Coordinating Group haven’t had a chance to get a sense of what the students are actually going to be like. I’ve observed them, last night and at breakfast this morning, and they are indeed an amazing bunch. So I’m looking forward to watching them think like cultural critics from 75 minutes. Our subject? What else, but cosmopolitanism!
I picked up the first two seasons of the television show Freej at one of the duty-free shops in the Abu Dhabi airport. Freej is a 3D animated cartoon produced in Dubai, which has been a big hit in the Emirates since it debuted in 2006. The series depicts the lives of four friends — Um Saeed, Um Allawi, Um Salood, and Um Khammas — older women living in one of the more traditional neighborhoods in Dubai (freej means “neighborhood” in Emirati Arabic). They gather each day in Um Saeed’s house to drink coffee and chat about their lives, and periodically they go off on little adventures. Each of the characters has distinctive traits (as well as color coding) and wears a niqab (veil). Um Saeed is short and highly educated and generally intiates the conversation; Um Allawi is tall and constantly trading stocks via laptop and cell phone; Um Saloom is forgetful and narcoleptic; and Um Khammas, a North African, is an acid-tongued singer and caterer who specializes in weddings.
The show and its creator Mohammed Saeed Harib (pictured below), were profiled in September in the New York Times. The 31-year-old attended Northeastern University, where he and his peers watched episodes of South Park. Freej has something of South Park’s irreverence, though it embodies Emirati values and foibles rather than North American. The ladies’ talk isn’t obscene, but it is colorful (at least as far as I can tell from the subtitles). A third season was shown, but the series is now on hiatus due largely to the global financial downturn.
I hadn’t expected my children to take to the show. My nine-year-old can read the subtitles, but my five-year-old can’t. I secretly hope that they would though, because it would be a way of exposing them to the culture of the Emirates and the Islamic world.
As an experiment, I put on the first episode, entitled “Ramadan,” and began reading the subtitles aloud. The 15-minute show features the ladies sitting in Um Saeed’s house moaning about how hungry they are, anticipating the feast that will come with nightfall, and clicking through television channels in search of something to watch. All they find, however, are shows promoting Islamic values, game shows, and sitcoms with titles like “Pain” or “Suffering.” Finally, they break their fast and, stuffed, figure that there must finally be something enjoyable to watch on t.v. But all they find is that new show Freej. “Overhyped,” Um Saeed complains, “just four old hags sitting around complaining. And that Um Khammas really brings the show down!” So Um Allawi faces the viewer, points the remote, clicks it, and the episode ends.
My kids were captivated and we’ve been watching it together for the past few days, daddy voicing the subtitles. We’re almost done with season one. My younger son can’t wait to start season two, because he’s already figured out that it features Um Saeed’s grandson and his hijinks.
My older son and I were out for a walk last Sunday, and I was telling him a little bit about my trip to Abu Dhabi. It’d be really fun place to spend a year, I told him, because it’s summer there all the time, and we could travel to really interesting places like Egypt and India. And you could even learn a little Arabic.
He looked at me and said: “And then I could understand Freej without the subtitles!”
[Image of Mohammed Saeed Harib from the New York Times.]
The Al Mezyad Fort in Al AinThursday morning, we headed out to the oasis city of Al Ain, about two hours east of Abu Dhabi, near the border with Oman. There we were met by Brian, an ex-pat who heads up the Emirates Natural History Group, which is interested in both the archeology and ecology of the Emirates. Brian was an incredibly knowledgeable guide to these aspects of the region, and he had suggested that, rather than take the typical museum and oasis tour of the city, we focus on the Al Mezyad Fort and the Hafit tombs, which (as he’d written to us in advance) “may be inaccessible soon as development plans for the area proceed.” Our time was limited, because we had a 2:00 meeting with Deans and faculty from the United Arab Emirates University. Looking at those two sites proved to be an ideal excursion, because they were satisfyingly off-the-beaten track and got us out into the desert, away from tall, ultra-modern buildings.
To get to the Mezyad fort, we turned off the main road and drove up to a closed gate. Visiting the site, while not exactly discouraged, is apparently not exactly encouraged. The fort itself is an early 19th-century structure in the Portuguese style (blocky, with three round towers and one square one) that has been extensively restored — it’ll be torn down and redone at some point, if they can get the Afghan builders who know how to do mud brick properly and if the site isn’t turned into a luxury bed-and-breakfast.
Meanwhile, some pieces of the restoration were carried and used to finish the restoration of the larger Al Jahili fort, built in 1898 by Sheikh Zayed the First (“the Great”) and the venue this weekend for the New York Philharmonic’s concert. We walked into the small living quarters, similar to the one in which the founding president of the UAE, King Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyam, lived as a child. Not exactly the lap of luxury. Brian stressed for us how recently it was that the population of Abu Dhabi lived in conditions that were primitive and how historically the population was always in danger of starvation due to the scarcity of food and water. Standing on the ramparts we could see the distant hills that made the location of the fort a chokepoint: the old camel route had to come between these two sets of mountains meaning that those who possessed the fort could levy taxes on trade.
Reaching the Hafit tombs at the foot of Jawal Hafit took a little bit of off-roading (we borrowed the 4×4 that belonged to the Associate Dean for Humanities at UAEU, who would be our host later in the afternoon). A the foot of the mountain, we saw three reconstructed tombs — the ones you see in brochures and guidebooks. Also, apparently, incorrectly reconstructed.
Reconstructed Hafit TombsBrian showed us what an unexcavated tomb looks like: basically a pile of rocks, due to the fact that the tombs had been looted in antiquity and subjected to the sands of time (literally). No wonder then that so many were bulldozed during the search for oil in the area. Nevertheless, at other similar sites, there are apparently a multitude of unexcavated tombs — and they’re likely to remain so until someone is willing to spend the money to excavate a past that doesn’t produce golden treasures.
Unreconstructed Hafit TombStanding amidst these tombs, probably 3,500 to 4,000 years old, we were vividly struck by a sense of the region’s past. These are the kinds of experiences we hope that NYUAD students will be able to have — indeed, we’re hoping that some of the will actually be able to work on archeological sites and help the region recover its ancient history.
We saw some camels too. Our guide had a lot to say about the state of the camel farming industry: apparently, unless your a fast, and therefore prized, racing camel, it’s not much fun to be a camel. The ones we saw weren’t the most regal specimens, and their feet were bound to prevent them from taking long strides and running away. My French Department colleague tried to make friends, but since we weren’t giving them food or water, the camels weren’t much interested in us.
We had lunch with colleagues from United Arab Emirates University, which is funded by the federal government and is a research institution. One of the things that we realized in the course of meeting with faculty from American University of Sharjah, Zayed University, and UAEU is that these institutions have something that will be in relatively short supply at NYUAD: Emirati students. It’s our hope that we’ll be able to partner with these institutions so that their students and ours can interact in educational settings, thereby providing the students at NYUAD a chance to make local, as well as “global,” connections.
We didn’t make it to the famous Al Ain Oasis. Next trip.
By all accounts, the lecture that I gave for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute on Wednesday night went well. The title of the talk was “Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism, and the Promise of Literature.” Like Joanna’s lecture on the Silk Road, it took place at the Al Mamoura Auditorium in the building that houses the Abu Dhabi Education Council, which is the group that serves as our sponsor in Abu Dhabi. Here’s the blurb that I’d given them about the lecture:
Originating in the idea of the world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a way of building community by embracing rather than avoiding difference. This lecture will explore the ways in which a cosmopolitan perspective responds to problems posed by contemporary Western multiculturalism. It will also suggest that literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.
In the lecture, which owes much to the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and David Hollinger, I tried to tie together a number of elements from my recent scholarship and thinking: the problems posed by overly pluralist conceptions of multiculturalism; the problems posed by the desire for “cultural purity,” the power of “emergent writing,” Zoroastrianism, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. In addition to serving as a way of tying together these strands, Moby-Dick was intended to offer a case study in the ways that a text can mobilize cosmopolitan perspectives and finally as an entree to the idea that “literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.”
That idea is the least developed in my current work, but potentially the most intriguing. I wanted to get at the idea that great literature promotes a cosmopolitan embrace of difference because it often asks you to do precisely that: embrace a different consciousness than your own. In the case, for example, of reading a novel, what you do if you become immersed in it is to let the consciousness of another take over your own.
If you’re interested, you can download the script that formed the basis of the lecture here.
The talk was also accompanied by PowerPoint that I hoped would make the lecture a little more vivid by presenting images and also the block quotes that I was using. I confess that I was worried that I had included too much material about Moby-Dick, a text that I’d assumed my audience had heard of but not read. I tried to solve the problem by telling stories about the text and anecdotes related to the text (in particular, the sinking of the whaleship Essex in the South Seas and Melville’s reaction to reading Owen Chase’s account of it). I tried to survey the audience: only one or two seemed to be asleep, and I really couldn’t complain about that since I myself had succumbed to jet lag during my colleague Joanna’s talk: apparently at precisely the moment that she made a reference to Zoroastrianism! (Whoops!)
The question and answer session was gratifyingly lively and gave me many things to think about. Indeed, I expect to be meditating on some of these questions more here in the days to come.
I had a question from a colleague at Zayed University about language differences, translation, and whether cosmopolitan conversation was predicated on a shared language. I tried to suggest that language was yet another gulf that the cosmopolitan tried to cross by whatever means he or she could and that one of the opportunities presented by the present moment is the fact that texts were so quickly translated and disseminated. And I suggested that one of the goals of the NYUAD literature program would be to make students aware of both the limitations and opportunities accompany the translation of any text.
Another colleague from Zayed asked whether my suggestion that literature offers an opportunity for cosmopolitan experience was limited to texts that don’t themselves adopt a counter-cosmopolitan or fundamentalist attitude. I tried to suggest that in fact it would have been much more challenging to use exactly such a text as my case study, because I would like to be able to argue that even a counter-cosmopolitan text, insofar as it forces the reader to confront difference of perspective and consciousness, can encourage cosmopolitan thinking. And I talked a little about the way in which learning from the fundamentalist or from the provincial is the hardest thing for cosmopolitans to do today.
NYUAD Vice Chancellor Al Bloom gave me the opportunity to talk a little more about the interplay of sameness and difference, and I had the chance to talk a little about Anthony Appiah’s slogan version of cosmopolitanism — “universality plus difference” — which I’d chosen to omit from the lecture and about my take on the recent history of cosmopolitan theory, including ideas about “rooted cosmopolitanism.” I suggested that what can save cosmopolitanism from being simply another Western idea imposed on everyone else is the idea that it is a “weak” conception of the good from a philosophical point of view. (Actually, in the event I didn’t use the phrase “W of the good” when responding; I wish I had.) It’s a structure, a container into which different ideas can be poured, so long as the ideas are compatible with the ideas of embracing difference and being willing to engage in dialogue across boundaries. A cosmopolitanism rooted in Abu Dhabi will have structural affinities with cosmopolitanism rooted in New York, but also salient differences that enhance the cosmopolitan experience!
They put out a nice spread afterward, but I only had one nibble of it because so many people from the audience came up to ask questions and offer insights. I was particularly gratified to meet Alia Yunis, a novelist whose first book, The Night Counter, has been on my list of texts to add to read as part of my final revisions on the NYU Press book on emergent literatures. Now that I’ve met her, I’ve moved it to the top of my list. (She’ll be reading at the conference on the 1001 Nights that Philip Kennedy has organized for the NYUAD Institute this December. Check out her website and you’ll see why.)
With any luck, a number of the people who said that they would e-mail me with further thoughts actually will! Meanwhile, i recorded the entire session and hopefully will have the courage to listen to the Q & A again soon. (You’re never quite as good as you thought you were when you listen to the actual tape!) I’d like to keep the conversation that I started at Al Mamoura going, even if only (for now) here in the ether.
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