Change and Continuity 03/05/2010
Add Comment In Defence of Nostalgia 12/30/2009
"... Nostalgia is often condemned as an idealizing sentiment. Frankly, next to genealogy itself, nostalgia is the inclination historians most love to hate. Considered trivializing, escapist, the font of all things anachronistic, and, at one time, an actual fatal disease, nostalgia has long been scorned. Genealogists hide nostalgic leanings in the closet, while letting loose all the other skeletons: they uncover court records of Great-Aunt Lou's arrest for disturbing the peace, or they find their forebear's cousin, Buck, spending the census year in jail. And when your research proves the not-so-funny bigamy of your third great-grandfather or confirms the awkward wedding date of your nana and pop a few months shy of your uncle's birth, you know family history braces you against romanticizing the past... " The tide of opinion regarding nostalgia is turning, however. Recently psychologists have begun to discover its positive dimensions. Experiments in China have showed that engaging in nostalgia heightens a person's sense of connectedness and social support. An American researcher, Krystine Batcho, has reached similar conclusions. Nostalgia, rather than signaling a pathetic, trapped-in-the-past neurosis, blends "cognitive and affective" strands and "serves a unifying function." " Nostalgia thus, is "bittersweet," a cocktail of the past with emotions of loss and appreciation. It smoothes our path as we shift between yesterday and today. You might say even that it celebrates our connections while anchoring us in the now." --- Excerpt from A Brooklyn of My Mind by Linda McMeniman in LOST Magazine, Oct 2009, No. 36: Read Nostalgia: Past, Present and Future by Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, Jamie Arndt and Clay Routledge here. The authors propose that: "Traditionally, nostalgia has been conceptualized as a medical disease and a psychiatric disorder. Instead, we argue that nostalgia is a predominantly positive, self-relevant, and social emotion serving key psychological functions. Nostalgic narratives reflect more positive than negative affect, feature the self as the protagonist, and are embedded in a social context. Nostalgia is triggered by dysphoric states such as negative mood and loneliness. Finally, nostalgia generates positive affect, increases self-esteem, fosters social connectedness, and alleviates existential threat." Home- the Movie 12/26/2009
Young Dubliner Alan Cooke reflects on recently immigrating to New York City. Exploring such universal themes as nostalgia, the journey and the concept of home, the film includes interviews with immigrants, native New Yorkers, and a host of prominent New Yorkers. David Amram, Armand DiMele, Pete Hamill, Elaine Kaufman, Fran Lebowitz, Frank and Malachy McCourt, Alfred Molina, Mike Myers, Liam Neeson, Drew Nieporent, Rosie Perez, Colin Quinn, and Susan Sarandon all share their great love for the city they call home. Home is a timely film that reaches the heart of the city and its people today. Memory, Place, Being 12/23/2009
Excerpts from Memory, place, being by Joseph Wilder and Elizabeth Wilder in Journal of the Southwest, Winter 2008, Vol 50, Issue 4 " I live in a city that is forgetting itself, forgetting itself even as it constantly remakes itself into new impermanent shapes. A city driven by change, but not renewal, which might suggest an idea, a civic principle seeking expression. A city ordered, if at all, only by its changing, by its ever-expanding rivers of traffic coursing ever-widening channels. As it forgets itself, I lose myself. "We are relational beings, our ontology predicated on our ties to each other and to the places we inhabit. " I live in a city increasingly defined, for me, by its absences. In one of his "City Life" essays for the New York Times earlier this year, Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote that we carry with us "footprints of vanished places," leaving us in our daily navigation "the strange sense of knowing our way around a world that can no longer be found." Klinkenborg's expression locates exactly a peculiarly American alienation--or perhaps as well the estrangement experienced by victims of total war or natural devastation: the routine loss of particular place imbued with memory and meaning and, thereby, being. " Not so very long ago I visited another city of my youth--Amsterdam--with my young teenaged daughter, arriving just as the American bombing and destruction of Baghdad commenced, shock and awe, a weird example of an American impulse more commonly associated with the Mongol horde when faced with urbanism and structures of memory: lay waste to it. For my then-eighth grade daughter it was a great trip to a foreign land, a chance to see first hand reactions to our country, to see ourselves as other in a time of crisis and discomfort. For me it was that and more: a return to a potent place of memory and recall where my younger traces were not effaced, were intact, at least for me. I remember walking with Elizabeth on the Prinsengracht, returning from dinner with old friends on the Lindengracht, a dinner we had hosted together. And the Prinsengracht was beautiful, it was a soft spring evening, and I still smoked cigarettes, pensive drags as I strolled along under the still-bare, towering elm and lime trees, a rich man with a beautiful daughter. Some 35 years previous I had walked the same Prinsengracht, the long are back to Leidseplein where I would pick up my tram to the working class ring of apartments where most people, in fact, lived. Then I was impoverished, lonely and excited by it all; now I was joined together, my life whole and full, found and reflected in the ancient integrity of a place by which to measure my meager span and rejoice in a temporality that can transcend itself in the permanence of place. " Place, memory, being. We are at once lens, image refracted, and receptive soul imprinted upon--and then layered by time as memory. We are this refractory collection, a community of place embodied, remembered, felt, imagined, and focused in our own singular particularity. And shared. We take up each other's narratives, connecting them to place, expanding and re-telling them, changing them and making them our own. It is the notion that we exist in complicated and dialogical networks--husband and wife, lover and lover, father and mother and daughter and son, friend to friend and foe to foe--bands or ties that coil almost infinitely, crossing and layering what we apprehend as ourselves and our world, and this almost unfathomable network of relations is set into place, always in a particular place, conditioning the relation while drawing it into its own foundation. We become, so to speak, layers upon the earth, the dust upon the ground, that from which we come and that to which we go, beings in transit, not separated. We begin to suspect that the world we encounter is a lattice-work of hallowed ground--always bearing someone's history--and thereby sacred in its entirety. The persistence of place sustains a continuity of meaning, a community, a chain of being maintained through the literal touch of memory-drenched ground. We inscribe our histories in our places, joining together in complex, overlapping narratives, making our places ever more deeply human, soulful, and hallowed. These are the places that, even if strange or new to us, are felt as intelligible and oddly familiar, that are recognizable to us. They constitute our ground of being, from which we constantly depart to elaborate our lives and to which we return, seeking our memory, our selves, our home." City of Memory- a Story Map of New York 12/13/2009
“... We came to think of cityofmemory.org as a giant brain, encompassing memory and humanity in ways that constantly surprise its creators—and the stories and memories are accessed in multiple ways, like synapses in the brain… Throughout its creation, Jake [Barton, the map’s designer] and I talked about trying to capture the cognitive maps of the city each of us carries in our brain, so we envisioned stories being linked together as “tours,” connected by a dotted line on the site… “ "Our greatest desire, greater even than the desire for happiness, is that our lives mean something,” writes psychologist Daniel Taylor. “This desire for meaning is the originating impulse of story.” In this world, we develop relationships as we come to share memories and experiences and traditions... City of Memory creates a series of interlocking memories, chronicling the city’s innerlife. Place-based, it links stories and memories in ways that transcend chronology and time, sparking connections and enabling visitors to rediscover the city through the memories of others. Our hope is that New Yorkers from many walks of life and cultural backgrounds will be able to find themselves on the map and garner a deeper appreciation of the shared experience of urban life." -- Excerpts from City of Memory by Steve Zeitlin in Voices Vol 34, Fall-Winter 2008 http://www.nyfolklore.org/pubs/voic34-3-4/downstate.html The Memory Project- a portrait of kindness 12/12/2009
 Those who advocate for orphans work to give them a future. Now, the Memory Project seeks to give them a past. "It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Memory Project is addressing an area that has long been overlooked by other organizations, a component of development that many of us with parents take for granted: a sense of personal history." -- from A Portrait of Hope: Lessons from the Memory Project. The Memory Project is the brainchild of Ben Schumaker, who spent time as a volunteer in a Guatemalan orphanage in 2003. During his time there, he met a young man who spent his childhood in an orphanage, who shared how his childhood was a blank slate- he had no belongings, no toys or photographs that served as artifacts of his early years, no one to remember or share his growing up. The man suggested that Ben help this new generation of orphans by collecting special items to give them a sense of personal heritage and identity, to make sure their formative years did not pass by as if they'd never happened. Ben decided to do this by having art students paint portraits of, and for, the orphans. According to the Memory Project's website, to date art students from the US, Canada and the UK have created more than 20 000 portraits for children in 30 countries. Letters to My Future Self 12/11/2009
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In Defence of Nostalgia
Home- the Movie Memory, place, being City of Memory-- a Story Map of New York The Memory Project- a portrait of kindness Letters to My Future Self
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