Last April, I posted a poem that Stephen Dunn wrote about the home in which I was raised–a home most remarkable for the 30,000 books that my Dad has collected and used for his scholarship. People liked the post, presumably because of Dunn’s fine poem rather than my short commentary; and several readers requested pictures. On our latest visit to Syracuse, I took some photos and turned them into a short movie segment (below). It starts outside, works its way through the house to the attic, and ends in the basement, where most of the books are kept in library stacks.

I’m not satisfied with the aesthetics. You’re looking at the house under a pretty harsh direct flash, which turns dark-blue walls pale-blue, whitens the pine shelves, and reveals the wood behind the books. But at least I’ve documented the objects that Dunn wrote about, including the chairs that his ghosts sat on and the “startling print” upstairs.

Here’s our mapping class, a bunch of kids between the ages of 13 and 15 who are interviewing a former chair of the County Council about how to improve their public school system. (I show a photo because we are taking lots of pictures to build a multimedia website.) They have come to the campus of the University of Maryland for the interview. An hour earlier, I was in the adjacent building for a dissertation defense. The (successful) candidate, a philosophy PhD student, had written her thesis on empowerment in international development, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

Despite tremendous differences in vocabulary and methodology, there were some common themes in the two discussions. Both the middle-schoolers and the professors wanted to know how to reform institutions to enhance human development.

I have plenty of insecurities as an academic. I don’t do technically complex work; I don’t have field position within a major discipline. I don’t publish in distinguished venues, and I haven’t synthesized whatever I’ve learned in original, ambitious ways. I don’t know whether I’ll ever make substantial progress on those fronts. But on days like this, I am deeply grateful for the richness and diversity of the conversations I have the privilege to join.

(Flying to Albuquerque, NM) I was in Atlanta over the weekend. A panel discussion at the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies was devoted to my father’s work. It seemed fairly miraculous that he could attend the session, since he has had major surgery five times within the last year and was still in the hospital only one month ago. But the prognosis is good, and he was able to participate actively in the discussion. Seven peers and former students gave short papers about aspects of his work.

My dad’s colleagues and students described an empirical historian, a painstaking scholar with a very concrete, pragmatic bent. His field is intellectual history (also known as the “history of ideas”), with a focus on the history of historical thought in England. His job is to interpret books, letters, speeches, and works of art. Many of his readers are literary critics and art historians who are interested in these texts and objects. Dad treats the works that he studies as events–akin to battles, expeditions, trials, or legislation. In other words, he understands cultural products as intentional human acts, occurring for specific, traceable reasons in particular contexts. That assumption drives him to consider local and specific historical circumstances. Unlike the “new historicists,’ who often understand books as examples of periods, “discourses,” cultures, or traditions, my father tends to see texts as acts performed for specific purposes under specific conditions–for example, to counter something that another author has said. That was how he was taught to practice history even before he decided to specialize in the history of ideas.

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Russell Arben Fox has tagged me in a game that is going around the blogosphere. I’m supposed to write “five things you don’t know about me.” Here goes:

1. I used to live with Marcel. Marcel was once a beloved baby elephant at the Paris Zoo. During the Prussian siege of 1870-1871, the famished Parisians were forced, much to their sorrow, to eat Marcel. They retained his skin, which was stuffed with a beer barrel and straw. After some years of posthumous service in a Paris bar (beer came out of his trunk), Marcel was moved to London. He belonged to the owners of an apartment near Victoria Station that my family rented in 1979-81.

2. My 7-year-old daughter and I have constructed what we call our “mosque.” It is about 14 inches high. It isn’t really a mosque, because it lacks a mihrab (to orient people for prayer) or a minbar (the Islamic equivalent of a pulpit). That’s probably just as well; it might seem disrespectful for two unbelievers to build a mosque for play. Our motives were the opposite of disrespectful. We (or at least I) love Islamic architecture and wanted to figure out how to construct a public building–which could be a bath, a school, or a library–in the 16th-century Ottoman style.

3. In the 1990s, I used to play the clavichord. It is one of the two quietest instruments I know, the other one being the lute. If an air-conditioner is running in the same room with our clavichord, you can’t hear a note from more than three feet away. Its low volume was an attraction for me, because we live in a small apartment. So was the fact that J.S. Bach would have used a clavichord in his home. Tuning it, however, is so time-consuming that I have mostly given it up. (I did receive a didgeridoo for Christmas last year, but that’s mostly for looking at.)

4. I basically identify as a Jewish American, a grandchild of immigrants. But it turns out that my oldest American ancestor, by way of my mother, was one Isaac Learnard, who died in Chelmsford, Mass. anno domini 1657.

5. I am color-blind and can hardly sing a note. (Or, even worse, I can only sing one note.) Yet I love music and painting. Would I enjoy these arts less if I could actually perceive them?

I tap phronesisaical.