cincinnatus_c (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cincinnatus_c) wrote2024-02-01 04:35 pm
cincinnatus_c) wrote2024-02-01 04:35 pm
Howard Adelman
Completely by accident I discovered yesterday that Howard Adelman had died... a bit over six months ago. I was taken aback that I didn't know for so long, but not very surprised at the news itself. One of his more recent returns to blogging was from a hiatus due to a cardiac arrest. Howard was not immortal even if he was the most godlike (not to say Godlike, and no doubt Howard could speak to the difference better than anyone) person I have ever personally experienced. Here's something I wrote sitting in a class of Howard's in I guess 2000 or so (it's you know not a great thing but gives you some flavour):
You are my Nightmare (Inspired by Howard Adelman)
I consume you with my eyes. I take you into my mind. You are mine and you are at my mercy. We do not need to meet because we are already one.
I will make you three inches tall in the theatre of my mind. I will attach mind-strings to you and make you dance for my entertainment.
Who speaks? Your mouth moves, sound emerges, you wave your hand as if it had something to do with it. Where am I? I am the words you speak to me. You are the words I hear. I am you and you are me. We both disappear and we both are here.
You are my nightmare. If you frighten me it is because I frighten myself.
Howard was a funny combination of inspiring and demoralizing as a teacher, and exemplar more generally. He was demoralizing insofar as you felt that you should be like him and realized you couldn't be. (I'm sure I've mentioned in here before his great story about overcoming demoralization (which he told in the same class where I wrote that poem thing): when he arrived at U of T he thought the library in his college was the library for the whole school, and he set about to read every one of the books in it; when he discovered the vastly larger university library and realized he could never remotely come close to reading all the books he was so demoralized he couldn't do anything at all for a week or two; and then he got over it by realizing it's fine, no one person needs to do it all, you just need to delegate. (He told this story as preamble to delegating his undergrad students to us grad students as research assistants for our term papers. (I would not say that the experiment supported his hypothesis, such as it was. (To be fair I would not have been a particularly willing subject in it.))) You should be like him in that you should simply do every good thing it occurred to you to do (in this way he was so much like my grandfather, who was so very different on the surface, but who watched Howard's ("your professor's") TV show every week), and you couldn't because... well, no doubt Howard would tell you that he couldn't, either, no one can, and the trouble is believing (like, he would tell you, actual genocide rescuers, who were too busy rescuing people to wallow in the angst of fictional ones) that that's actually fine, so what, just get on with as much as you can. (And his shortcomings were evidently more evident to himself than they were to those of us who knew him less than intimately: one of the things that has stuck in my mind that Howard said--and the way he said it!--was of someone who I guess was a junior colleague at the time: "I hurt him." The way he said it was so representative of Howard--he was reporting on this surprising discovery he had made about himself which reflected poorly on him and which led him to resolve to do better in ways that the episode had enabled him to identify. (And you can see in this how it could be said that one way Howard's Jewishness has tempered my basic Christianity involves his dim view of shame, as opposed to guilt.)) Trying to be helpful in this way Howard told one of his seminars I was in that you should just throw yourself into things without fear of looking foolish because "nobody ever died of embarrassment"; I don't think I ever got around to telling him that Rollo May, who I was reading at about the time he said it, provided references to the contrary. Actually Howard almost killed me with embarrassment the first time I met him in person--have I ever told this story here? He happened to be the guy you were supposed to go talk to about how to get through your first year as a PhD student in philosophy when I arrived at York, so I did that, and told him that my MA thesis defence had been kind of a disaster, and that Sam Ajzenstat had been on my committee--so Howard immediately reached for the phone to call his (unbeknownst to me) old friend (going back to highschool!) Sam (who would die, fifteen years later, less than two months after his not-quite-so-old-but-still friend Sam Mallin) to ask for his view on what had happened. No answer, so I lived to tell about it.
I've documented Howard's inspiration here over the years, I suspect sometimes to the extent that at some points a reader might--Sam Mallin had this effect on people, too--have not only assumed that he'd been my PhD supervisor but also thought that I remained a little uncomfortably over-under his influence. Come to think of it I guess the last time I talked to Howard in person was at the memorial get-together at Sam's house on Ward's Island. [ETA: re-reading Howard's obit now I'm reminded that it wasn't actually at Sam's house, which would have been too small, but another place on the island.] As Howard says in his obit he was late and walked from the ferry in the rain, so when he arrived he was wet and flustered. It was the first time I'd seen him in a number of years and I felt compelled to try to tell him how much he meant to me and... he was wet and flustered. (Which reminds me of another funny bit with Howard back around 1999 or so: he'd given me a B or B+ (next to failing, in context) on my final paper for one of his seminars and had offered me the chance to re-write it; after class I was in the midst of thanking him for the opportunity when I looked up and found that he had walked away.) "I tell people about you all the time," is the thing I remember saying. Which is true.
It's too bad Howard isn't around now to comment on Israel-Gaza. I'd venture fairly confidently that no one in the world is more able than Howard would have been to comment on the genocide case brought to the ICJ. (I think now of the first paper I wrote for Howard, in 1998, four years after he'd been to Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide there (as I started to write that I wasn't sure how soon he'd got there but then I remembered he wrote of the stench), about Hegel and genocide, which pretty audaciously claimed to show how to identify a people likely to become genocidal--crudely, they identify as weak and threatened but they are strong--and how Israel so obviously fits.) And probably no one in the world would be more able than Howard to comment on the posture of the current Israeli regime toward Gaza in the wider context of the question of Palestine in light of Hebrew scripture, Jewish tradition, and political and strategic practicalities.
Anyway... I didn't expect to write this much, because I've referred so much to Howard here in the past... and, OK, I don't know what I was going to say next after that, because I went off looking through e-mails, I'm not even sure what for anymore... I'm going to just leave off here with this e-mail I sent to Howard on his 80th birthday, in 2018:
Happy birthday, Howard! Your birthdate has stuck easily in my mind since I first noticed it on Wikipedia some time ago, as you happen to have been born four years to the day before my father. I had been thinking that I would sit on the longer letter I mentioned before for a while and send it to you as a birthday greeting--it ended up veering too much into navel-gazing, but I thought this seemed like an appropriate time to pass along the more flattering-sounding but absolutely sincere things it began with.
Your amazingly quick and detailed response to my long letter didn't come as a surprise. Over the years I've thought often of an occasion when I e-mailed you after a talk I heard you give--as I recall, the talk was about the American response to September 11th; I remember you talking about the importance of the image of bin Laden holed up in caves, relating that to Plato, and talking about the Republicans having traditionally been the party of civic virtue and the Democrats the party of appetite, but since civic virtue had come to be conceived as the pursuit of appetite the characters of the two parties had blurred together. In some connection to that you happened to talk about the kid in American Beauty who makes the video of the plastic bag as an example of Epicureanism. I e-mailed you saying that I saw him more as a Stoic--and you quickly e-mailed me back with a lengthy explanation of why he was an Epicurean and not a Stoic. That was an example I always kept in mind and tried to follow as a teacher--not to put off replying to students' e-mails when they raised substantive issues, not to regard it as a chore but an opportunity. More generally I have used the example of all that you do to remind myself that I'm rarely actually too busy to do something that's worth doing.
Of course on the other hand I don't have your ability (as far as I can tell!) to sleep three hours a night and still function at a high level! Which is something I tell people about when I am trying to explain the phenomenon of Howard Adelman. I also sometimes tell them that you remind me of my grandfather, the one who built the cottage I lived in for a couple of years, and who also built his house and another cottage and several boats, who was a carpenter and electrician and plumber and mechanic--you remind me of him in that it seems that both of you, in your different ways, don't hesitate to do a thing that you see ought to be done; you both concern yourselves with how to do the thing rather than worrying too much about possible reasons that it can't be done, and you are both willing to work out how to do it along the way. That didn't always turn out well for my grandfather, but it usually turned out well enough, and extremely well on the whole.
You and my grandfather are two of my biggest role models--honestly, I can't think of any others in the same league; you might be amazed how often the words "Howard Adelman" have pass my lips over the last twenty years--in large part because you are both so different in ways that I admire than I am by "nature", but also because of some basic similarities, too. For instance, I am also inclined to plunge right into things before I know what I'm doing and figure them out along the way, but I am (as far as I can tell) far more anxious about it than either of you, and so it helps to have both of your examples of that way of doing things working out all right.
Something that I have always admired about you that seems to me quite different from me is your facility for interpretation. (I wonder whether your criticism of Joseph is, consciously or not, in some part self-criticism--since you are, like him, such a great interpreter, and you always say you are a terrible prophet! (though maybe in a different sense of "prophet", since Joseph's predictions do actually come true)--and whether that's maybe in some part why you're so hard on him.) Frankly, twenty years ago, I was simply in awe of it, too much in awe of it to really try to figure out how it works, as I am now doing. I think of my reticence to interpret (even to summarize, which I always had trouble with as a student, because to summarize is to interpret) with reference to a story in Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar. Mr. Palomar is visiting some Mexican ruins with a friend who gives elaborate allegorical interpretations of the artworks. Meanwhile, a teacher leading a group of students tells them some facts about each of the artworks and then concludes, "We don't know what it means." Finally the friend overhears the teacher say this about one of the artworks and says, no, we do know what it means! And he launches passionately into one of his interpretations. And then, after he's finished, the teacher says to his students, "No es verdad, it is not true, what the senor said. We don't know what it means." My inclinations are more like the teacher's but I admire the friend, and I am still in the process of learning from you how to be more like the friend while remaining true to the genuine skeptical spirit of the teacher. My attempts at biblical interpretation that I mentioned having run into a dead end with before were actually directly inspired by the Torah commentaries on your blog; that was last winter, in my off-season from most other things, so now I'm ready hopefully to try again in this year's new light.
So, thanks again, Howard, and all the best birthday wishes!
You are my Nightmare (Inspired by Howard Adelman)
I consume you with my eyes. I take you into my mind. You are mine and you are at my mercy. We do not need to meet because we are already one.
I will make you three inches tall in the theatre of my mind. I will attach mind-strings to you and make you dance for my entertainment.
Who speaks? Your mouth moves, sound emerges, you wave your hand as if it had something to do with it. Where am I? I am the words you speak to me. You are the words I hear. I am you and you are me. We both disappear and we both are here.
You are my nightmare. If you frighten me it is because I frighten myself.
Howard was a funny combination of inspiring and demoralizing as a teacher, and exemplar more generally. He was demoralizing insofar as you felt that you should be like him and realized you couldn't be. (I'm sure I've mentioned in here before his great story about overcoming demoralization (which he told in the same class where I wrote that poem thing): when he arrived at U of T he thought the library in his college was the library for the whole school, and he set about to read every one of the books in it; when he discovered the vastly larger university library and realized he could never remotely come close to reading all the books he was so demoralized he couldn't do anything at all for a week or two; and then he got over it by realizing it's fine, no one person needs to do it all, you just need to delegate. (He told this story as preamble to delegating his undergrad students to us grad students as research assistants for our term papers. (I would not say that the experiment supported his hypothesis, such as it was. (To be fair I would not have been a particularly willing subject in it.))) You should be like him in that you should simply do every good thing it occurred to you to do (in this way he was so much like my grandfather, who was so very different on the surface, but who watched Howard's ("your professor's") TV show every week), and you couldn't because... well, no doubt Howard would tell you that he couldn't, either, no one can, and the trouble is believing (like, he would tell you, actual genocide rescuers, who were too busy rescuing people to wallow in the angst of fictional ones) that that's actually fine, so what, just get on with as much as you can. (And his shortcomings were evidently more evident to himself than they were to those of us who knew him less than intimately: one of the things that has stuck in my mind that Howard said--and the way he said it!--was of someone who I guess was a junior colleague at the time: "I hurt him." The way he said it was so representative of Howard--he was reporting on this surprising discovery he had made about himself which reflected poorly on him and which led him to resolve to do better in ways that the episode had enabled him to identify. (And you can see in this how it could be said that one way Howard's Jewishness has tempered my basic Christianity involves his dim view of shame, as opposed to guilt.)) Trying to be helpful in this way Howard told one of his seminars I was in that you should just throw yourself into things without fear of looking foolish because "nobody ever died of embarrassment"; I don't think I ever got around to telling him that Rollo May, who I was reading at about the time he said it, provided references to the contrary. Actually Howard almost killed me with embarrassment the first time I met him in person--have I ever told this story here? He happened to be the guy you were supposed to go talk to about how to get through your first year as a PhD student in philosophy when I arrived at York, so I did that, and told him that my MA thesis defence had been kind of a disaster, and that Sam Ajzenstat had been on my committee--so Howard immediately reached for the phone to call his (unbeknownst to me) old friend (going back to highschool!) Sam (who would die, fifteen years later, less than two months after his not-quite-so-old-but-still friend Sam Mallin) to ask for his view on what had happened. No answer, so I lived to tell about it.
I've documented Howard's inspiration here over the years, I suspect sometimes to the extent that at some points a reader might--Sam Mallin had this effect on people, too--have not only assumed that he'd been my PhD supervisor but also thought that I remained a little uncomfortably over-under his influence. Come to think of it I guess the last time I talked to Howard in person was at the memorial get-together at Sam's house on Ward's Island. [ETA: re-reading Howard's obit now I'm reminded that it wasn't actually at Sam's house, which would have been too small, but another place on the island.] As Howard says in his obit he was late and walked from the ferry in the rain, so when he arrived he was wet and flustered. It was the first time I'd seen him in a number of years and I felt compelled to try to tell him how much he meant to me and... he was wet and flustered. (Which reminds me of another funny bit with Howard back around 1999 or so: he'd given me a B or B+ (next to failing, in context) on my final paper for one of his seminars and had offered me the chance to re-write it; after class I was in the midst of thanking him for the opportunity when I looked up and found that he had walked away.) "I tell people about you all the time," is the thing I remember saying. Which is true.
It's too bad Howard isn't around now to comment on Israel-Gaza. I'd venture fairly confidently that no one in the world is more able than Howard would have been to comment on the genocide case brought to the ICJ. (I think now of the first paper I wrote for Howard, in 1998, four years after he'd been to Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide there (as I started to write that I wasn't sure how soon he'd got there but then I remembered he wrote of the stench), about Hegel and genocide, which pretty audaciously claimed to show how to identify a people likely to become genocidal--crudely, they identify as weak and threatened but they are strong--and how Israel so obviously fits.) And probably no one in the world would be more able than Howard to comment on the posture of the current Israeli regime toward Gaza in the wider context of the question of Palestine in light of Hebrew scripture, Jewish tradition, and political and strategic practicalities.
Anyway... I didn't expect to write this much, because I've referred so much to Howard here in the past... and, OK, I don't know what I was going to say next after that, because I went off looking through e-mails, I'm not even sure what for anymore... I'm going to just leave off here with this e-mail I sent to Howard on his 80th birthday, in 2018:
Happy birthday, Howard! Your birthdate has stuck easily in my mind since I first noticed it on Wikipedia some time ago, as you happen to have been born four years to the day before my father. I had been thinking that I would sit on the longer letter I mentioned before for a while and send it to you as a birthday greeting--it ended up veering too much into navel-gazing, but I thought this seemed like an appropriate time to pass along the more flattering-sounding but absolutely sincere things it began with.
Your amazingly quick and detailed response to my long letter didn't come as a surprise. Over the years I've thought often of an occasion when I e-mailed you after a talk I heard you give--as I recall, the talk was about the American response to September 11th; I remember you talking about the importance of the image of bin Laden holed up in caves, relating that to Plato, and talking about the Republicans having traditionally been the party of civic virtue and the Democrats the party of appetite, but since civic virtue had come to be conceived as the pursuit of appetite the characters of the two parties had blurred together. In some connection to that you happened to talk about the kid in American Beauty who makes the video of the plastic bag as an example of Epicureanism. I e-mailed you saying that I saw him more as a Stoic--and you quickly e-mailed me back with a lengthy explanation of why he was an Epicurean and not a Stoic. That was an example I always kept in mind and tried to follow as a teacher--not to put off replying to students' e-mails when they raised substantive issues, not to regard it as a chore but an opportunity. More generally I have used the example of all that you do to remind myself that I'm rarely actually too busy to do something that's worth doing.
Of course on the other hand I don't have your ability (as far as I can tell!) to sleep three hours a night and still function at a high level! Which is something I tell people about when I am trying to explain the phenomenon of Howard Adelman. I also sometimes tell them that you remind me of my grandfather, the one who built the cottage I lived in for a couple of years, and who also built his house and another cottage and several boats, who was a carpenter and electrician and plumber and mechanic--you remind me of him in that it seems that both of you, in your different ways, don't hesitate to do a thing that you see ought to be done; you both concern yourselves with how to do the thing rather than worrying too much about possible reasons that it can't be done, and you are both willing to work out how to do it along the way. That didn't always turn out well for my grandfather, but it usually turned out well enough, and extremely well on the whole.
You and my grandfather are two of my biggest role models--honestly, I can't think of any others in the same league; you might be amazed how often the words "Howard Adelman" have pass my lips over the last twenty years--in large part because you are both so different in ways that I admire than I am by "nature", but also because of some basic similarities, too. For instance, I am also inclined to plunge right into things before I know what I'm doing and figure them out along the way, but I am (as far as I can tell) far more anxious about it than either of you, and so it helps to have both of your examples of that way of doing things working out all right.
Something that I have always admired about you that seems to me quite different from me is your facility for interpretation. (I wonder whether your criticism of Joseph is, consciously or not, in some part self-criticism--since you are, like him, such a great interpreter, and you always say you are a terrible prophet! (though maybe in a different sense of "prophet", since Joseph's predictions do actually come true)--and whether that's maybe in some part why you're so hard on him.) Frankly, twenty years ago, I was simply in awe of it, too much in awe of it to really try to figure out how it works, as I am now doing. I think of my reticence to interpret (even to summarize, which I always had trouble with as a student, because to summarize is to interpret) with reference to a story in Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar. Mr. Palomar is visiting some Mexican ruins with a friend who gives elaborate allegorical interpretations of the artworks. Meanwhile, a teacher leading a group of students tells them some facts about each of the artworks and then concludes, "We don't know what it means." Finally the friend overhears the teacher say this about one of the artworks and says, no, we do know what it means! And he launches passionately into one of his interpretations. And then, after he's finished, the teacher says to his students, "No es verdad, it is not true, what the senor said. We don't know what it means." My inclinations are more like the teacher's but I admire the friend, and I am still in the process of learning from you how to be more like the friend while remaining true to the genuine skeptical spirit of the teacher. My attempts at biblical interpretation that I mentioned having run into a dead end with before were actually directly inspired by the Torah commentaries on your blog; that was last winter, in my off-season from most other things, so now I'm ready hopefully to try again in this year's new light.
So, thanks again, Howard, and all the best birthday wishes!