My review of the iPad was not unabashedly positive — I think it makes a great PDF reader, but that it hardly eclipses the laptop for most of the jobs that academics do. That said, I wanted to make a few comments about the iPad and the role it plays in the other major job in my life — raising my twin infant boys.

For raising small kids, the iPad is incredible. It’s small size means you can plop it down next to you anywhere, and you can work the thing with a single finger, leaving the rest of you free to burp an infant. When a good portion of your life is passively consuming media while juggling a bottle and a kid, the iPad is perfect for checking email, or reading the news. The speaker is big enough to be audible but small enough not to wake up people asleep in the next room, which means podcasts (wrapped up in fancy BBC or NPR apps, but still basically podcasts) of news are an option even if you were crashed out during the normal news time.

The iPad has turned me on to casual gaming — an area that I’ve ben trying to find time to explore for some time. I’m a little underwhelmed by the lack of tactile feedback on the glass screen, but with kids you don’t really have a lot of time to play real-time games. Turn-based stuff is ubiquitous on the iPad (including many cherished favorites like Rogue) and great to play in those half hour periods between when The Feeding Ends and They Fall Asleep, time that in the past, when I was less sleep deprived, I had the concentration to read.

What is so weird about the iPad + iNfant combination is the strange serendipities. The iPad isn’t just a netbook manque, it’s also become our photo album: we haven’t printed a single digital photo, nor had to view them on the strangely-ratio’d screen of our laptop. Instead the iPad lets us look through (and show others) baby pictures — and at a much larger size than most prints. We use the thing as a friggin’ nightlight when changing diapers at 3 a.m. in the morning. The white noise app helps the kids fall asleep, even if it doesn’t have the now-ubiquitous ‘womb sounds’ that seem to emanate from all childcare products these days. Just the fact that it doesn’t have to boot up and is on instantaneously makes it much easier to use than a laptop in situations where you need it up and running quickly.

There are a lot of apps that still need to be ironed out on the iPad (like a Mafia Wars client that connects with the actual Mafia Wars install on Facebook), but I will say that everyone in my household who is able to hold their own head up is glad that we spent the money on the device, despite the fact in the beginning that we worried it would be little more than an expensive frippery. No excuse me, I have a little boy who needs some supervised tummy time I’ve got to go see….

And so they look upon one another and make love, drawn into the genital “labyrinth of desire” that God created specially for them and obeying the “tacit commandments” engraved as a benediction in their very bodies, men and women avenge themselves upon their enemy, death. For to leave behind one’s own image — “drawn to the life in one’s child”  – is not to die

-Stephen Greenblatt, Fiction and Friction

[pause]

Scarily Erudite Beloved: You mean that “World’s Happiest Baby” DVD?

Me: Isn’t that what I said?

This conflation of body and identity is particularly troubling to the more rabid versions of American protestantism obsessed with ‘individualism’. Indeed, so troubling to them is this the deep connection between mother and child that they define the origins of individual life so early in a fetus’s career that they consider day-after pills to be murder. On this account the mother is, as Luther once said of the virgin Mary, ‘a mere container’.

But not Jews. We know that new entities are all occasions on which special care must be taken. We also know that new entities are made through separation, mavdil. Our duty to cut the world at its divinely-defined joints is what ennobles us and makes us co-participants in god’s ongoing construction of the universe, a universe that otherwise would be tohu v’vohu — all mixed up. By naming children, as we have today, we make them individuals – sons of and daughters of someone. Not, any longer, parts of them.

But as Maurice Godelier reminds us, a man and a woman do not make a child — they make a fetus. The actual kid is made by the community it is part of.  One of the great insights of people living in Melanesia, where Godelier and I both have lived, is that people are made up out of other people and objects: blood, semen, breastmilk and, in our case, bagels, lox, and the occasional musubi. Christian culture oscillates endlessly between its self-imposed paradox of insisting on individual autonomy while longing for communion with the group (a paradox resolved in their central religious ritual). But for Papua New Guineans there isn’t really ‘society’ and ‘individual’, there are just people grown out of other people, bodies that relationships pass through. Where I used to live in Papua New Guinea, when a woman becomes elderly, her children give pigs and money to their mother’s side of the family, to compensate them for using up the woman’s body which was grown by her parents. When a man dies the killers give pigs and money to his family, who in turn distribute it to everyone has a claim on the deceased — anyone who ever fed him. It is these constant exchanges of food, wealth, and human bodies (and occasionally body parts) which human life is all about. People are not connected by being the same in Melanesia, they are connected by being different — by take roles in rituals that establish who they are to one another.

This is true of Jewish life here in Honolulu as well. Since the kids have come home we’ve had a steady stream of visitors filing into our apartment and filling our refrigerator with food. Our kids are already being grown by the community, and the community, in turn, is being elicited by their bodies. This circumcision and the seudat mitzvah to follow is creating not just two new people, but new relationships amongst all of us. We separate ourselves into new people — giver, receiver, father, son, the person willing to make the last-minute costco run. Lador vador — as one friend of mine emailed me, generations are passing through us.

Finally, people in Papua New Guinea have something else in common with us — they realize that making people is the most serious and important work one can do in life, and they aren’t afraid to mark that seriousness on the surface of the body. Circumcision is a hard thing for parents to do to their kids even if, today, there are various surgical means to keep it from being painful and even — in the long run — permanent. Many people ask: why continue with such a traumatic custom? The answer is that we do it because it is hard, because it is irrevocable, and because it is permanent — just like our commitment to Judaism. Our globalized world is chock-full of people who think it is a good thing to be completely free to chose which cultural tradition you will embrace, like searchers for ‘spirituality’ who flit between religious traditions on a weekly basis. Too often today ‘tradition’ means a colorful ethnic outfit worn once or twice a year or a  small menu of ‘heritage’ foods. Against this backdrop of single-serving heritage we continue to insist that Judaism is an identity that is inscribed on our bodies and cannot be taken off. It can not be worn only when convenient, or cast off lightly when one tires of it. Today we’ve made a very, very serious decision for our children without their consent, knowledge, or understanding. We have written that decision on their body in a way that will cause them physical pain and doom them to life as a tiny minority group that few people in the islands know about or understand. We have done this because their bodies, like ours, are not our own, but something that Judaism passes through. We have made this intervention in their lives serious in order to signal how seriously we believe that Judaism is the best possible and most important decision we could make for our children. Eventually Dan and Sam will be able to decide for themselves whether or not to chose Judaism. But in order for that to happen Judaism must chose them first. And is what we have done today.

This is crazy talk, I know, but P has a bizarrely awesome depth with call numbers that stretch away into infinity in the same way that L does. P is like the jungle — you don’t really go in there without hacking your way through and looking for a very particular thing. PC, PF, PR — what is that all about? Occasionally I cut my way through various thickets to reach small clearings of the works of Russel Soaba or Ursula K. LeGuin, and I know there are communities of cultural studies and literary critics who have been hidden away from the rest of us in P, developing on a parallel track and worth a visit to see their exotic visions of social life, so similar to and yet so different from our own. Mostly, I stay away. Since P takes up so much space this means that there is usually at least a quarter of a floor I don’t have to mess with.

Recently the Ps in Hamilton have been declared a no-go zone because of mold that has gotten into the building as a result of the flood and other various dilapidation. They covered large sections of the stack in opaque plastic X Files “I want to believe” sheeting of the sort usually used to hide alien autopsies or deliver things to Area 53 and blocked off the aisles with tape. To get novels from this area you had to go down stairs, give the call number to a student worker, and then like one designated guy would go up — presumably in a biohazard suit — and get the book for you. When he was on shift. I was like: I am too hard core to be denied my Ursula K. LeGuin. I just stepped through the tape and got the book and I’ve not, to date, developed any strange off-world infections. So that made me feel pretty butch. Which is sorta sad.

The beginning of P is, of course, linguistics. This is a topic that I have a sort of love-hate relationship with. There is a lot of good stuff in linguistics that obviously dovetails with anthropology, but man then there is all the other stuff: the books of diagrams that look like they are diagrams for circuit boards but are actually what happens when you let impressionable young grad students read Godel, Escher, Bach at an early age. I think I secretly have linguist envy — a desire to understand their obscure and formalistic prose, their elaborately numbered and hierarchicalized lists. I am not sure that I really want to be a linguist, but I would like at least to understand the secret code language they use in the clubhouse. But as it is the last time I ventured into P was for a paper in an edited volume comparing how Brits, the French, and people from Brittany shake hands. Published in 1982, it was an analysis of the ‘semiotic system’ of handshaking. Ah, the days when people still thought human beings lived lives in code, before the pragmatics craze trended way up. There was a certain innocence of experience back then.

As many of you know, the modernization of the Library of Congress occurred in the early 1880s as a consequence of the provisions of the Great Compromise of 1877 which secured the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the creation of the solid south. While the Great Compromise is remembered largely for the creation of Jim Crow, a key component was also democrat concessions for Northern internal improvements in exchange for Republican patronage. Obviously, most of this took the form of northern capital and managerial experience for the Texas Pacific railroad, key to spurring industrial development in the south. Less well known, however, was the padding of the staff of the Library of Congress with Democratic ‘patronage-men’.

It was the result of this agreement that saw Julius B. Dintwoodie — Samuel Tilden’s cousin — installed as official cataloguer of the Library of Congress. Prior to Dintwoodie’s appointment the Library of Congress was essentially staffed by low-paid volunteers, typically eccentric Boston Brahmins who attempted to piece together what was left of Jefferson’s original founding bequest after its destruction in the War of 1812. These former librarians of congress also served as ersatz acquisitions specialists but, of course, had no comprehensive plans for developing the library’s collections.

Dintwoodie’s position as cataloguer was meant purely as a sinecure, with no actual responsibilities besides enjoying life in the capital and collecting his paycheck. Sickly and affected with a slight hunchback, Dintwoodie was too young to participate in the civil war and was widely regarded as a shut-in by his family. Tilden’s remembrance of his cousin was meant, apparently, largely to assuage the nagging of his aunt.

It was to the great surprise of everyone who knew him, therefore, when Dintwoodie courted and then successfully married Eliza M. Cantwell, the youngest daughter of one of Maryland’s oldest and most established families. Stout unionists, the Cantwells epitomized the Victorian bourgeoisie and Cantwell,  a sort of proto-Jane Addams, met Dintwoodie at the theater and apparently recognized him immediately as a ‘fixer-uper’. A regiment of the usual bizarre Gilded Age remedies followed — hydrotherapy, various diets of raw vegetables and milk, and so forth.

As a result Dintwoodie’s health improved enormously and he also spent increasing time at work, fleeing the tender and yet controlling embrace of his spouse. Active and improving work was the only excuse Cantwell would accept for Dintwoodie’s time away from home. While Dintwoodie’s famous flask of whiskey – originally concealed from his wife in a hidden compartment in his desk — is now on display in the Library of Congress rotunda as a beloved piece of naughty-librarianship, it appears that on the whole he proved remarkably active rationalizing the library’s holdings, slowly creating the system we know and love today.

Or at least this is the official story. Many historians have seen Cantwell’s hand at work in the organization in the LOC — for instance in her stout organization of C, and the subtopics relating to kitchen science in T. O, the most obvious of Cantwell’s impositions, however, is O, which reflects first wave feminism’s concern with rational mastery of the home and bourgeois internalization of Protestant concerns with order and cleanliness. Increasingly today, however, postmodern scholars of archival science have argued that O might have served as a baited trap for Cantwell, distracting her in order to allow Dintwoodie to have his way with the Ps. Even more audacious authors, inspired by De Landa’s rationalization of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages, have argued that Cantwell had no hand in creating the LOC and that O was an ironic countergesture by Dintwoodie meant to mimic and hence displace the hegemonic voice of his wife, which he had internalized.

And that, boys and girls, is the completely true story of the origin of O.