The most fascinating portfolio of pictures I've seen recently isn't art. It's called "Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects," and unfortunately it's behind a paywall. [UPDATE: Many readers are reporting that the content isn't walled off for them. So give it a try! —Ed.] Absolutely mind-boggling.
Solar energy is a significant fascination. The best short primer on energy I've ever read (not all I've read on the subject, of course) is the first 98 pages or so of a book called American Theocracy by the late Kevin Phillips. The section, Part I, was called "Oil and American Supremacy." It is in essence a long essay. As with other Phillips books, its connection to the rest of the book is rather loose—some of his volumes are redolent of collections rather than concerted, coherent, through-going argument. So the essay can stand alone. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall too—you'd have to buy the whole book in order to read that one little section. In the late 2000s, ever a Don Quixote, I wrote a letter to Mr. Phillips and Penguin, his publisher, suggesting that "Oil and American Supremacy" really should be issued as a separate small volume at modest cost. Penguin at the time had a series of pamphlet-style semi-miniature books that featured important short-form writing from the past and present. Here's one of them:
I also have the translation of Ecclesiastes from the same series and one or two others, but I can't find them. Frustratingly, the books, which I saw in a bookstore display and which all had similar-but-varied form, format, typography, and cover design, don't seem to have been given a series name, and I can't find a page for them among Penguin's far-flung constellation of imprints, house names, and web pages. (There are only five major publishers in the USA, of which Penguin/Random House is the largest.) It's possible they simply under-performed and were unceremoniously dumped. Doesn't matter. Long and short, I thought "Oil and American Supremacy" would fit perfectly in the series, and it's one of those things—you know how it is with those things—that I urgently felt every citizen ought to read. But by now, Penguin's had 20 years to get back to me, which kinda makes my hope for a reply grow dim. (I'm joking.) And Kevin Phillips died in 2023.
Kevin Phillips was an interesting fellow, by the way. He was one of the founding theorists of Movement Conservatism and post-Goldwater Republican strategy—usually credited with originating the Southern Strategy—who later moved toward independence and became an outspoken critic of the Republican Party. In other words, he actually thought for himself, which would make him stick out like a sore thumb today. I went on a deep dive into politics during the Bush II years—I probably read 150 books, all of them except one now slumbering in boxes in the attic of the barn. Kevin Phillips, the essence of an iconoclast, was the best find. (Well, Thomas Frank too.)
Anyway, one of the points Phillips makes in "Oil and American Supremacy" is that rich and powerful national economies have historically had trouble moving away from the energy sources that made them rich and powerful in the first place. The Netherlands and wind power, Britain and coal. The Dutch windmills peaked in the 1600s and 1700s—yet there were still 9,000(!) windmills in The Netherlands in the nineteenth century! (There are some 1,200 left today—believe it or not, only partially for tourism.)
Assuming the pattern plays out, America is going to have a very hard time moving away from oil. We have long been the global powerhouse. We tend to think of the Middle East when we think of oil production now, but on this very day (and for years now) the United States is the world's largest producer of oil. Our big problem is not that we don't produce huge amounts of oil, it's just that we use even more than we produce—that's what gives Saudi Arabia such pull over us, and it's why we have willingly gone along with the largest transfer of wealth in the history of Planet Earth—American wealth shifted to the countries that make up for our oil shortfall. It's why our military budget is so huge—to protect the shipping lanes for oil coming from the Middle East. (If the military cost of protecting global oil extraction and importation were passed along directly to the pump, a gallon of gasoline in America would cost somewhere roughly between $13 and $18. That's including the offset for supplementary biofuels.) It's why we fought the Gulf War—by historical accident, Iraq has the largest and least exploited oil reserves left on Earth, and, consequently, America now has a dozen huge military bases in Iraq, all of them strategically "protecting" oil fields, oil production facilities, and oil shipping hubs. Of course that it is not their stated purpose, but it is their purpose. Never mind a wholesale switchover—it would make incredibly good sense for us to make it our national purpose to simply gain enough alternative energy production to attain energy independence. It would solve a large number of complications and eliminate vast expenditures of national resources.
Meanwhile, China has no such sentimental, historical, and institutional attachment to the energy sources of the 20th century, and the Chinese are killing us in the race to harness and develop solar. We've allowed them to get way, way out ahead of us. Photographs aren't proof, and photographs aren't argument, but what they certainly are is illustration, and I've never seen a more stunning illustration of China's emerging supremacy in what will surely be the dominant 21st-century energy source. No one sees the future, least of all me, but oil will not be the world's major source of energy in 2100—that much is easy to predict, simply because there's not enough of it left. With its electric cars improving by leaps and bounds (BYD just passed Tesla as the world largest EV producer), its battery research lapping us, and its solar power technology, implementation, and deployment crushing ours, China is setting itself up to rule the future. (Germany and Brazil are also well ahead of us in alternative and renewable energy.) One word describes the U.S.: behind.
I wish I could link to this set of set of pictures. The most symbolic one is captioned "Floating solar panels stretch across an aquatic farm built on land that subsided after extensive coal mining, in Suixi County, Anhui province, China, on April 28, 2025." But oh well. For those of you who subscribe to The Atlantic, be sure not to miss it.
Mike
P.S. I'm watching this morning what are indisputably the two greatest tennis players alive on our planet. Back to the tennis!
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
John Shriver: "Dan Yergin's book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is also a great treatise on how the whole western world is wrapped around oil. I was half way through the book when my mother died in 2020, and had just gotten to the end of the Second World War. The Allies won that war much because of their control of oil. The Allies starved both Germany and Japan of oil. I took a course from Dan Yergin at the Kennedy School of Government on this topic about 1980, before he wrote the book. (Cross-registered from 'the small trade school down the river.') Very interesting; an enormous amount of reading. There's also a PBS multi-part series based on the book, which is accessible online. Here's the first part."
Mike replies: The Prize is now a trilogy: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (2008); The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2012); and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2021). The trouble is, their combined 2,336 pages (six and a half pounds of paper in the print versions, according to Amazon) isn't bathroom reading. I put a high value on primers (the word is properly pronounced to rhyme with trimmer) because they might actually be read, which is why I like Kevin Phillips' entertaining backgrounder. However, all you have to do is read the first page or two of the sample of The Prize at Amazon to realize that you're in the hands of a compelling and capable writer in Mr. Yergin. History well written is the only true page-turner. Like you, I read a lot of The Prize when it was more or less new, before ultimately being defeated. (I tend not to like histories as they butt up against the present, because they get less and less authoritative the closer they get to now. I learned that reading histories of photography.)
Jan-Peter Onstwedder: "I think you need to fact-check some of your post. The US imports crude oil, true, despite producing a lot. But it also is a net exporter of refined products. So imports + domestic production is greater than domestic demand, the balance being exported as fuels, plastics and other petrochemical products. It used to be true that OPEC had significant influence over prices and therefore US economics, but that influence is much smaller since US production has gone up so much. And the US now uses far less energy per unit of GDP than 20–30 years ago. All in all, oil is still important but no longer an excuse for meddling in other producing countries’ affairs."
Mike replies: And yet we still do. Oil imports have hardly abated. I admit I'm not up on "the Shale Gale," but the go-to book on it is for those who are interested is probably this one. Bear in mind that fracking in general might well be a sort of financial shell game: it succeeds by attracting huge amounts of speculative investment from the excess amount of capital "sloshing around the world" (a consequence of wealth hoarding) and has yet to prove that it's actually sustainably economically viable. At any rate, I'm not interested, because when the world is burning the last thing we need is more fire.
ASW: "Bill McKibben has a concise (online) article about recent and future growth of renewable energy sources, how China is in the driver's seat to dominate the space, and how our (America's) energy policies are both backwards and self-defeating, in The New Yorker. It's called '4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.' It's well worth a few minutes of your time if you have access."
Mike adds: Here's a brief clip: "...Even though we’ve got used to seeing solar panels and wind turbines across the landscape in the intervening fifty years, we continue to think of what they produce as 'alternative energy,' a supplement to the fossil-fuelled power that has run Western economies for more than two centuries. In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world."
I just read it. It's an incredibly hopeful article. And from Bill McKibben! (Who at times has sounded like the most pessimistic person on the planet.)
"I've shipped the prints to everyone who's paid me. Everyone who has paid should have either received their prints or a tracking number from the USPS. Anyone who hasn't received one or the other should get in touch with me at ctein@pobox.com ."
We've heard from several people who have already received their prints and they were glowing in their praise and satisfaction. Our print sales over the years have been a lot of fun and very gratifying. Thanks again to all.
Large-format printer for sale: Ctein, as you know, is moving to Montana soon; he's gonna be a dental floss tycoon. Er, no, I mean he's moving Ireland soon, and it has nothing to do with dental floss. I lifted this from his most recent newsletter: "I am still looking for someone who is interested in buying my 44-inch Epson P9000 printer. I'd like to keep it until shortly before I leave. It should be someone local (this is not shippable!) and I'm offering it at an extremely good price, like less than half what a new one would cost, with over a grand worth of ink and paper."
[He means it when he says it's not shippable. It weighs in excess of 300 lbs. and it's huge—when Epson ships these to trade shows, the reusable crate they use costs as much as the printer itself. For this reason, the sale would have to be local in the San Francisco area. —Mike the Ed.]
"I've also got a 17-inch Epson P800 printer for sale. Available for immediate pick-up with a decent ink supply, and I think you'll agree the price is right at $500."
Same email address as above.
Mike
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Real quick—just wanted to mention that yesterday, not long after the post about weird stuff you use your phone camera for, I went to the local mechanic's shop, Marbles, to see if I could get an estimate. My car has some rust at either end of the rocker panels, and I wanted to see if it could be fixed, and, if so, how much it would cost. The guy who does the body shop estimates is the owner, Paulie Marbles. I thought he had retired but he assured me he hasn't, although his son now occupies the big office. Anyway we're standing there discussing rust and rocker panels, and Paulie apologized for not being able to get down and look up under the car, saying he isn't as nimble as he used to be, or words to that effect.
So I got the phone out, reversed the camera, and stuck the phone under the car. We were able to see the extent of the rust just fine, with me on one knee and him standing up. I just thought it was funny that this happened right after we were talking about it here.
The verdict, by the way—he doesn't really do rust. He says no matter how good a job you do, it can still keep coming back. Reminds me of my friend Jim, who kept a favorite Subaru station wagon for 11 years through the snowy, salty Vermont winters. He would have kept it for longer but rust got the better of it. That was a while back—cars are much more rustproof now. But still, you know what Neil Young said:
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
(I'll hold off a while before posting the answer, to allow more people time to guess.)
Mike
ANSWER: As many of you guessed, it's Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, supposedly taken two months before he was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (called the Battle of the Greasy Grass by the Lakota [Sioux], the Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes. Greasy Grass was their name for the Little Bighorn and the surrounding area). Custer earned the temporary rank of Major General of Volunteers in the Civil War, and also the brevet rank of Major General in the regular Army; "brevet rank," sometimes called a battlefield promotion, was usually awarded for bravery, valor, and combat leadership, and also as a way of filling vacant leadership posts without incurring the cost of permanent promotions—recipients were paid at their regular Army rates. At the end of the War, Custer reverted to his full regular Army rank of Captain. He was then promptly promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1866, and that was his rank when he was in command of the 7th Cavalry (several readers picked up on the "7" on his epaulet) and when he was killed in 1876.
There isn't much good information about this particular picture online. Most of it comes from a January 2014 "Collector's Edition" of True West magazine called "100 Best Historical Photos of the American West." The contents are online. The TW title was "Custer’s Last Photograph" and the full caption was, "A vain man, George Armstrong Custer posed for more than 150 photographs in his lifetime, including this last photo, taken of him two months before the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn that would end his life." The same caption accompanies most other appearances of the same picture online. It is most likely a carte de visite (CDV in auction listings) or cabinet card (the difference is only size, cabinet cards being larger), probably produced in volume to be sold as souvenirs after his demise.
The interesting thing about it is that his hair is cut short. He was a notorious dandy, and wore his dark blonde hair long and scented with cinnamon oil—the Indians' nickname for him, one of them, was "Long Hair." Here is the image that is perhaps the most iconic. It's not known why he cut it: some claim it was because he had premonitions of his death; other sources claim his wife Libbie had been urging him to cut it because she was afraid his long hair would make him more conspicuous as a target for scalping or mutilation; some say that maybe he just decided to. Or perhaps Thomas Berger, the author of Little Big Man, was correct when he had his fictional protagonist Jack Crabbe say that the 36-year-old Custer was beginning to go bald. No one knows for sure.
The print is identified as having come from the Robert G. McCubbin Western Photographs Collection, which was broken up at auction in 2019.
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Charlie Dunton wrote, yesterday: "Now that I am in the middle of my 7th decade, I've found another good use for my iPhone. When I find myself standing in front of a food vendor and his menu is too far away, or otherwise too difficult to read, I pull out my iPhone and snap a picture of the menu. I can then quickly zoom in and read it with ease."
Mike replies: I wonder what a list of "all the things we use cellphone cameras for that aren't photography" would look like. I recall years ago seeing a young woman behaving strangely. She was waving her phone high in the air and posing like a model, her free hand flicking at her hair. It turned out she had the camera on her phone reversed and was using the phone like a mirror, fixing her hair.
I use the phone to read very small text, especially when the text is molded into same-color plastic, which I have difficulty seeing. The "magnifier" mode is accessed by clicking the on/off button three times quickly. In the past I've used it to see things I can't get my head in position to see, for instance the back panel of my computer. Lately, when I suspect that a cashier might dispute the price of a sale item, I snap a quick picture of the shelf label so the clerk doesn't have to "go check" when I tell them what the item was supposed to cost.
Sometimes things sitting right above a pricetag of $39.98 have
morphed to $48.98 by the time they get to the cashier.
And of course I use it for copies—I sent in a water testing sample this afternoon and snapped pictures of the documents before I enclosed them in the package. I use it for notes, like ads, phone numbers, cards on community bulletin boards, etc. But I'd guess we all do that. Around here, I actually find tradesmen by noting the names on the doors and side panels of trucks, which I'll then snap a picture of.
What else do you use your phone camera for that isn't pictorial photography? Anything else you can think of?
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Mike Plews: "My bank app lets me deposit checks with my phone camera. Handy."
Dave Hsberman: "Frequent use for iPhone: Taking photos of books so I remember to see if our library has them."
Marc (partial comment): "I live on 300 acres of mostly bushland, and use my phone's camera for GPS coordinates of maintenance jobs. For example, I'll note holes for repair along the western fenceline, where the electric deer fence runs, where deer, wallaby, kangaroo and wombats have found a way to push through to avoid the zap. Also, for summer weed spraying, I'll note small outbreaks of St. John's Wort for attention (or horehound, or mullein, or thistle, or...but mostly wort)—it's as easy as just taking a photo.
"(Nothing stops wombats—they are the D9 tractor of the marsupial world. But I persist.)"
Ken Royce: "When at the market and am unsure exactly which brand or size or a product my wife requested, sending a quick text with a photo of the choices quickly resolves the matter...."
Rick Popham (partial comment): "I work in hospital maintenance. When we go into an office for painting, new carpet, etc., I take a picture of the walls so all the pictures and diplomas are put back in the right spot and any books are put back on the shelves in the right order."
Ilkka (partial comment): "The later model iPhones can see in the dark. It can be helpful if for example planning to make repairs in a dark place. I remember taking some pictures of a false ceiling to see how the wires and pipes went."
Henry White (partial comment): "Many younger travelers use their phones, in conjunction with Google Translate, to read signs in other languages with a quick conversion to English. Very helpful when visiting places like Japan and South Korea."
hugh crawford (partial comment): "Back in 1996 I bought my first digital camera, an Olympus D300L with a whopping 780,000-pixel sensor. Among other things, I used it to take pictures of expense receipts for a project at IBM that I was a freelance contractor on. It took about a week for them to figure out how to deal with them. I may have been the first person to submit digital photos of receipts at IBM. It hadn’t really occurred to me until now."
Albert Smith: "Parking space recall: in large lots or multi story garages, you can avoid an entire episode of Seinfeld by snapping a photo of Orange 43. Unless you like carrying a heavy air conditioner for 23 minutes. 😉 "
Bob Keeferdoes the same thing with trail photos, to help him find the way home again. —Ed.
Kodachromeguy (partial comment): "I use the phone camera to document parts of the house before going to the lumber yard or building store. It helps me explain a repair or project."
Sean (partial comment): "I travel internationally. Instead of carrying my passport, which I can safely leave in a hotel safe, I take shots of the current visa and other pertinent pages."
Here are the five things about my camera I don't like:
You have to look through the viewfinder to make any settings, check the battery, etc. The chimney finder just magnifies the viewing screen. So you have to turn the camera on and look through the VF to set or change most things.
There's a cover for the huge eyepiece (illustrated below) that has to be snapped on when you're not using the camera. The problem is that direct sunlight through the magnifier could damage the viewing screen. Although it's not something I've ever had to do before on any other camera, I actually don't mind it in practice. Cameras are quirky; you get used to the ones you use.
Electronic shutter only. As far as I know rolling shutter is possible. I haven't experienced any problems with it yet. I might have to do some tests.
The conversion probably spoiled its resale value—I'll never get my money back out of it. I don't currently want to; but still, if I wanted to, I probably couldn't.
The worst problem by far is also no problem at all: the crucial difference is that you have to know about it. Here it is. If you're reviewing a picture and you enlarge the review image as much as possible to check focus, it will look unsharp. That does not mean it is unsharp: when you get the file back to the computer it will be razor sharp. But if you don't know about it it will throw you for a loop when you first encounter it. I've actually read of people returning this camera after purchasing it because they are convinced it won't focus and everything is unsharp at the level of fine detail. That's an illusion. Of course, once you know about it, this is not a problem. [UPDATE: See Henry White's Featured Comment below.]
The eyepiece cover. Remove for use and replace when you're done.
There's actually one more problem, which is that some people give me a hard time for having/wanting a monochrome camera. But that's not the camera's fault. And I don't mind it, to be honest. I yam what I yam.
Do I recommend this camera? Probably not. Not as a monochrome conversion anyway. I'd recommend getting a factory Pentax K3 III Monochrome or a Leica Monochrom to preserve resale value, or getting an older camera converted, one you already own (although conversion is expensive, so don't convert one with tons of shutter actuations or lots of wear already on it).
As a color stills camera? Hmm. Obviously I've never used one that way. But it has a cult following, and supposedly there's magic in Sigma's color science, and as far as the form factor is concerned you'll either love it or hate it, which means some people will love it. So maybe.
Reducing friction After yesterday's post, Rob L. mentioned, "Barely comes up, but reducing friction makes life more fun." He's gone down to one lensmount and configured his cameras to make them easier to use—that's what he means by reducing friction. That's probably the main thing I'm experiencing with my FP-m: I've got it set up so sweetly for my uses that it really reduces friction.
There might be one problem I haven't mentioned—now that I'm happy, I don't really look around at new cameras any more. And that leaves a void where GAS used to be. But you know what they say—oh well!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Henry White: "Workaround for camera finder unsharp imaging on review: The camera, when shooting in raw, creates a very, very small JPEG from the raw file to show for review. If you want a big, sharp review file, then shoot with the camera set to raw+large JPEG. Upon review the camera will show the large JPEG.
"This is the case not just with the Sigma camera but across other brands as well. It's an easy fix and if you are so disposed you can just toss the JPEGs when you download the files to your computer."
Mike replies: So that's it. I figured it was because the review JPEG was too small, but I didn't know the correction. Thanks.
robert e (partial comment): "These two posts were really interesting. It's much more enlightening to read how a person gets along with a thing while they do what they want to do than to read about how the thing is designed to work for generic uses."
Erwin Frank-Schultz: "This comment is somewhat cheeky on this post as it refers more to the Phone post than this one...but one thing I don't like about my (phone) camera is that it is an internet connected computer. I recently finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (highly recommended)—one of his ten recommendations at the end is to use single use devices, to not get distracted. This struck a chord; whenever I use my phone to take a photo, there is a temptation to look at that e-mail or WhatsApp that just came in. Not a problem on my XE-3 and certainly not on my FM2."
I have a Sigma FP-m, which is an FP with a monochrome sensor. It's not factory; I had it modified. Also, I have just one lens for it, a slow 45mm ƒ/2.8 normal lens (I notice the price on that has gone way up recently).
Here are 15 things I like about my camera:
It isn't like any other camera I've ever used. The one it most resembles in feel and what Erwin called "haptics" is a Bronica 645, though of course it's arranged differently.
It's manual focus. I had no thought of using it that way when I got it, and even when I first tried it I had no intention of leaving it set that way. I just like it. Since I started using it that way I just never went back. I occasionally set it back to AF, but not very often. Well, I think it's happened twice.
Focus ring is on the traditional position on the lens. Despite being focus-by-wire it's very smooth and feels great.
Traditional aperture ring is on the lens.
It's B&W only. I've written about this till the cows came home, went back out, and came home again. Briefly: I tend to see like a camera sees, and adapt my thinking to what I know the camera's going to give me. So it's actually freeing for me to have a camera that has a stable configuration, that sees only one way. Some people don't even understand this, so to say "their mileage may vary" is an understatement. But that's OK. We're all different. This is what I like, even if you just have to take my word for it.
The viewfinder is B&W-only too. That's all the camera can see, so there's no color option anywhere in the process.
The viewfinder is huge. About 1.5x linearly and 2.25x the area of the virtual size of my Fujifilm X-T4 mirrorless viewfinder. That's thanks to Sigma's odd arrangement of a vertical magnifying "stovepipe"-type finder mounted horizontally so that it magnifies the rear viewing screen. The viewfinder gives me a more immersive and immediate sense of the scene the camera is seeing. You know that feeling you get when you can't see everything on the back of a phone when you're trying to shoot in sunlight? It's like the opposite of that.
When I take images, there's minimal informational clutter in the viewfinder. When I review, I see nothing but the image.
I keep it in aperture-priority mode always.
I have it set up so that the index-finger front dial always controls exposure compensation, which is how I prefer to tweak exposure.
ISO is one button push away, and is then adjusted with the same front dial that controls the exposure comp. One touch of the shutter button and I'm out of that menu and back to the ready state.
It's silent.
I can do everything I do on the camera by feel. Don't need to look at the camera for anything.
The image quality is great. It's not naturally my kind of tonality, but I've a.) learned to modify it toward my tastes and b.) I'm getting more and more accustomed to the way it naturally wants to look. As I mentioned, I tend to learn to see the way the camera sees. I take slightly different kinds of pictures with this camera that I would have taken with, say, a medium-format camera and Tri-X in D-76, but then, it's a different beast. This is about as close as I've been able to come to the look of Plus-X / K2 filter / D-76 1+1. This is more like the files want to look, with depressed mid-tones. Of course digital is fundamentally different from B&W film, because you have to mind the highlights. With B&W film you always had to mind the shadows. From the film world (in my experience, which was pretty extensive) the results from this camera most closely resemble the look of 4x5-inch Ilford HP-5 Plus. Nothing wrong with that.
The bag I have for it fits it like a glove and is easy to use. It's perfect for the camera. Never underestimate a good bag!
That's pretty much it. Apart from setup, which never changes, those are the only controls I use. Very basic, pretty much like all the autoexposure 35mm film cameras I used to use. Weird that the camera I've found that is the most "film-camera-like" is one designed to be mainly a video camera. But oh well. The only other thing I do when shooting with this camera is that in some circumstances I take the yellow filter off the lens and stash it in my shirt pocket.
Maybe I should add "simplicity" to the list of things I like.
Roads not traveled My "road not traveled" was that the Pentax Monochrome came out shortly after I committed to getting the FP modified. I do sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if I had gone that way. I would certainly just buy the Pentax if I were doing it now—it's cheaper than my FP-m, for one thing. Leica also makes factory monochrome cameras. I would have gotten the Q3-43 Monochrom*, but I balk at Leica prices. That's just me.
As I sit situated as I am, if you will, with my gear, I would love to pare my kit down to just an iPhone and the FP-m. I'm kind of antsy to do it. The things I need the Fuji for are wide-angle shots with the 14mm lens, and portraits with the 56mm lens. I really can't yet rely on the iPhone for those two things. Although I've gotten some very nice portraits with the iPhone, I've never had one printed, so I don't know how it would do. My next phone is probably the upcoming iPhone 17 Pro Max or equivalent, and I'll be eager to see how it does in those use-cases.
The other day in the "Dedicated Camera" post, Josh Hawkins and several others mentioned that having their big/real/dedicated ILC with them makes them happy and improves the whole experience of where they're going and what they're doing. That's definitely the way it is for me. The dedicated camera makes life better. I really like getting out with the FP-m and doing nothing but hunting for pictures. It gets me into a whole different mindset. And the results can be uniquely gratifying. I wouldn't like to forfeit that.
No way would I be as happy just shooting with the phone...much as I like shooting with the phone.
Mike
*Oh, wait, they don't make that.
P.S. One very important thing I use my iPhone for is reading books. I probably split my reading about equally between the iPad and the iPhone. Having the phone with me when I'm out an about, it's not so important that I have a phone with me, not so important that I have access to the internet, not so important that I have the phone cameras with me. What's important is 1. driving directions, on the relatively infrequent occasions when I need them, and 2. that I have my current book with me. And that I can get and receive texts, but that's a lesser need. Of everything, book reading is No. 1.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Tom Burke: "15 things I like about my camera:
It’s pretty much the same as all the other Canon cameras I’ve used over the last 30+ years. It’s an old familiar friend who’s learned some new tricks.
I press this button and it focuses!—which is good, because my eyesight is poor.
I don’t need to worry about the focus ring…
…Or the aperture ring.
Its images are in full, glorious Technicolor!—just like the world, in fact.
And of course the viewfinder shows me all that colour. Who wants to look at a monochrome version of our beautiful world?
The viewfinder is big enough to show what I’m shooting, without being awkward.
Both when I’m shooting or reviewing I can either see just the image or as much extra information as I want—my choice, with a single button.
I can leave it aperture-priority if I want to (and generally do) but it’s easy to switch to a different mode—just twist a dial.
I have it set up so exposure compensation is always available on the same dial.
I don’t change ISO on the fly. Instead, I have specific modes in which ISO behaves differently, and which I use for different types of shot.
It can be silent if I want it, or I can wake the neighbours with it! My choice, either way.
The menus are comprehensive and easy to use, and are grouped logically. And the ones I use most are available to me as a separate group of actions.
I’m happy with the image quality; indeed, on the occasions when I’m not it’ll be my fault.
Ah, rats: still looking for the right bag!"
Ken Ford: "I never realized the Sigma stovepipe finder worked on the FP—mine came with my DP0. I agree, it’s an immersive shooting experience to the point that I have to be sure I’m not anywhere near where I’ll get clobbered by an unnoticed vehicle. An 'FP-m' is something I would definitely pursue if I didn’t already have two other dedicated monochrome digital cameras. I’ve considered seeing if my old X100s can be converted, though. I’ve found having dedicated monochrome cameras inspire me to shoot more."
MikeR: "I'm tempted to write, 'What I like about each of my 15 cameras.' Except, it wouldn't be honest. Otherwise, why would I have set aside about a half dozen to sell?"
Mike replies: Ah, but do you really want to sell them?
ugo: "You should have seen the jalopy of a camera used by Giacomelli; a Kobell (you never heard of that brand, uh?) kept together with iron wire and black tape; let's say that image quality was not his paramount concern. There is a photograph of Giacomelli sitting on a bench with a woman; as the legend goes, she was a witch who removed a curse from his camera. Did you ever need a witch for your camera? Anyhow, he had a second Kobell for replacement, but he kept it behind a piece of furniture because 'If my camera knew I have a replacement, she would make a tantrum.'"
A sporting post, in honor of Summer—but first, Happy 4th of July to my fellow Americans. Formally called Independence Day, it commemorates the ratification of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, establishing the United States of America. Three Founding Father Presidents died on this day—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both signers of the Declaration, died on the same day, the country's 50th birthday in 1826, and James Monroe, the fifth President, died five years to the day later. Curious coincidence.
Is it just here, or are celebrations muted elsewhere? I haven't heard a single firecracker yet. Formerly the cacophony started in June, though it's been more subdued in recent years. But on to tennis.
Jack Draper. Photo by si.robi.
Upsets and surprises Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book on outliers. Outliers are by definition atypical, and rare.
The UK's top-ranked male tennis player, Jack Draper, the No. 4 seed at Wimbledon in the men's draw, lost yesterday, to Marin Čilić, an unseeded player from Croatia. Čilić is a former major winner, but he won his single major more than ten years ago, in 2014; and he peaked at No. 3 in the rankings, but that was seven and a half years ago. His win over Draper was the first time he had beaten a top-10 player at a major in three years, and, at 36, he became the third-oldest player ever to beat a top-10 player at Wimbledon. It was, in other words, quite an upset.
Draper, however, joined 18 other seeded players in the men's draw (among 32 seeded players total) who are now out of the tournament. The same thing has happened on the women's side—17 seeded players are out, for a total of 36 in both draws. More than half of all seeds, men and women.
In the first two rounds, more seeded men lost in 2002: 20, compared to this year's 19; and the same number of seeded women, 17, fell in 2013 and 2016. But the total of 36 seeds losing across both draws makes this year the absolute outlier. More seeded players lost in the first two rounds of Wimbledon this year than ever before at Wimbledon, and indeed ever before at any major* tennis tournament.
The wily Djokovic, ranked and seeded sixth, now sees this as his best opportunity to add a 25th major to his record 24—even though no player, male or female, has ever won a major at his age, which is 38.** But the top two seeds in the men's draw are still alive. No. 2 seed Carlos Alcaraz of Spain (pronounced as though the "z" is a "th," despite what you hear constantly on English-speaking media), who almost fell during a five-set scare in the first round against Fabio Fognini, and Jannik Sinner, of Italy, the No. 1 seed, are both still in it. Sinner is 23 years old, Alcaraz 22. Both are in their prime: between them they've won all six of the last six majors.
Despite a recent three-month suspension, Sinner is by far the World's No. 1-ranked player, with 10,430 ranking points vs. 9,300 for the second-ranked Alcaraz. The amazingly consistent Sinner has put some awe-inspiring beat-downs on lesser players, for example his lopsided 6-1, 6-1, 6-3 thumping of Aleksander Vukic yesterday (Sinner seemed to apologize for his weak showing in the third set at his press conference), but he seems unable to beat Alcaraz, who has already won Wimbledon twice. Alcaraz is ahead 8-4 against Sinner in their lifetime head-to-head score, and has won all five of their last five meetings.
So it's going to be a very interesting Wimbledon. But whatever happens, it's already an outlier. Outliers are by definition atypical, and rare—but then, they have to happen sometime.
Mike
*Now despicably called "grand slams," which they are not. A Grand Slam means winning all four majors in one calendar year. Only two male tennis players have ever won a real Grand Slam: Don Budge, during the amateur era in 1938, and Rod Laver. Laver did it twice, once in 1962 as an amateur and again in 1969 as a professional. Laver wasn't allowed to compete in major tournaments in the intervening years, because he turned professional and the majors were amateur-only until the Open Era began in 1968. The major tournaments are the Australian Open; the French Open, now called "Roland-Garros" [sic] after its venue; Wimbledon; and the U.S. Open. Tennis has taken to calling all the majors "grand slams" for marketing reasons. It's a sleazy swindle, which steals valor from those who have actually accomplished that ultimate feat. Among women players, Maureen Connolly (in the amateur era), Margaret Court, and Steffi Graf have won the real Grand Slam—Graf's is called "the Golden Slam" because she won an Olympic Gold Medal in the same year. Jack Crawford, Serena Williams, and Novak Djokovic all came within one match of winning the real Grand Slam, but failed.
Credit: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive
Curiously, Roland Garros the man was not a tennis player but an aviator. He was the first man to fly across the Mediterranean, and became a French flying ace in WWI. He was shot down and killed over the Ardennes in 1918, only one month before the end of the war, one day shy of his 30th birthday. Garros was also a close friend of the legendary automobile maker Ettore Bugatti, and an early Bugatti was also named for him. Why the odd hyphen in the tournament name? Beats me. [UPDATE: See Yves Papillon's Featured Comment below.]
**Ken Rosewall won the 1972 Australian Open at 37 years, 2 months, and 1 day, which has been the record ever since. He reached the finals of Wimbledon and the U.S. Open two and a half years later, in 1974, at the age of 39, but was shellacked in both tournament finals by Jimmy Connors. Connors, for his part, was dominant enough that he might have won a real Grand Slam—but he was banned from the French Open during his best years because of his affiliation with a now-forgotten league called World Team Tennis.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Lisa s. Gorrell: "As much as I enjoy watching some of the seeded players, I also like it when an underdog upsets them. These underdogs could become tomorrow's winners."
Yves Papillon: "About hyphens in French. If it is a name, no hyphen. If it is a place, building or else named to honor a person, it takes an hyphen. Sorry for my frenchglish."
Mike replies: That's all right, it's better than my Englench. And merci for explaining that.
The batt'ry in my iPhone 13 seems to be getting hinky—a long stint on the charger sometimes doesn't get it to 100%, and it's draining faster—and I'm wondering about replacing it. Replacing the phone, I mean, although I could be talking about replacing just the battery. I've replaced the battery in a phone before, but that just tends to encourage me to keep the phone until there's no trade-in value left in it. Replacing phones generally is the same kind of conundrum as when to sell stock or deciding when to take Social Security—it's a game, but there's no gaming it. When to do any of these things is an insoluble puzzle. Anyway the reason I replace phones is for the cameras, pretty much exclusively. And in researching the newest cameras vs. the one I have, I've happened across the phrase "so good" several times now.
As in, the camera in the phone is "so good" you might not even need a "dedicated" camera any more.
"Dedicated camera" is only the latest modification of "camera" that I've encountered over my lengthening journey. It distinguishes a camera from a phone camera, which is what "camera" most often means now. "Stills camera" was another that popped up, a bit further back, to distinguish that from a camera that shot video as well, although that's basically everything now, including the phones. Before that, 25–30 years ago, it was "film camera," to distinguish those from digital cameras; before that, "manual focus cameras," to distinguish those from the autofocus cameras coming on strong; way back, before my time,"manual camera" helped distinguish cameras without autoexposure or just cameras that didn't have built-in light meters. Now, if you say to somebody that their camera has a light meter in it, you're likely to get the response, "what's a light meter?" But I suppose it's always been this way: in the 1890s there was "hand camera," to distinguish those from "stand cameras" and cameras on tripods. Whereas, in the 1860s, maybe, every camera was a stand- or tripod camera.
It's tough being a camera—you're never just a plain ol' camera. Each time, the new term acknowledges that something has changed to make it so that all cameras are lately not what the newer term describes. No one would have said "film camera" in 1960 or "stills camera" when the only way for consumers to shoot video was with a camcorder. Remember when those were a hot thing and all the rage? Time was if you had said "dedicated camera" and explained that it meant a device that was just for taking pictures, you would have gotten funny looks.
But I digress. So anyway, now there are dedicated cameras as well as cameras, which are assumed to be in your phone. So do you even need a dedicated camera any more?"
Oooh! Oooh! I have my hand up. My answer: absolutely I need a dedicated ILC. (ILC = interchangeable lens camera.) The phone cameras that are so good now aren't that good yet.
My response actually tilts the other way altogether. That is, I sometimes wonder if it's bad for me to even have a phone with a camera in it at all. What it does is to encourage me not to have my "real" camera with me. What happens then is that I take a picture with the phone that I wish I had taken with a better camera. I've discussed this before.
A personal memory. Wex has Butters' discus toy, which Butters considers a violation of the proper order of the Universe. Wex would tease Butters by keeping it, and Butters would stalk Wex patiently until he got it back. I called it a "Wexican standoff." I could wish this were shot with the Fuji, but in all likelihood the picture wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the iPhone.
I think, however—I hope—that I have fully embraced iPhoneography. It's freeing and fun to be able to "take notes" with the iPhone, and to almost always have a camera with me (I still leave my phone at home sometimes—I didn't grow up with them; that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it), and to be able to take a meaningless picture just for myself and just for the pure joy of it. There's another advantage: it has meant that I get out on purpose to do "dedicated photography" more often, with my real camera. Since my dog died I've been lonely and depressed, and my old "mindless compensating" activity—pool—is (temporarily I hope) not comforting, because he was always with me in the pool shed. But when I get out with the camera it's been working as a refuge, a relief. Driving around looking for pictures is still relaxing and comforting. He was never with me on those trips. It's a nice way to get away. Also, I enjoy concentrating on photography.
Should I happen to get a good shot, I would much rather it have been taken with my Sigma FP-monochrome or Fujifilm X-T4.
Do you make any effort to keep a dedicated camera on you at all times, or most of the time? Because that's one solution to avoid getting stuck with just your phone—to always have a real camera close at hand. I would think that would be the great advantage of the new Fujifilm X-E5 and its pancake lens, or any small, pocketable larger-sensor camera.
But here's what would be the real test of dedication to dedicated photography: if you could buy a phone without a camera in it, would you?
I'm actually glad I can't (I'm in the Apple ecosystem, and Apple doesn't make a cameraless iPhone). I'd like to think that that's exactly what I would do if I could—reserve photography for the tools that do it best; force myself to carry a dedicated camera; never get stuck with an iPhone file for something I'd love to print.
But in reality I guess I'm glad I don't have to make that decision. For all I think I'd like to be uncompromising, I actually like my phone. I've gotten used to it.
Cameras, after all, are useful for other things than just making "dedicated photographs"!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Roger Bradbury: "I have a dedicated camera on me nearly all the time. It's in a canvas shoulder bag which is part camera bag, part old boy on an old British motorcycle's bag. The camera is a Sony A6000 with the okayish-quality and tiny 16–50mm kit lens. As it's protected by being inside a strong 1960s British Army ammo pouch inside the main bag and hardly weighs anything, I hardly have to take any notice of it at all. It goes everywhere I go when I don't have another camera, and only gets left in the car or bike if I'm in the pub or supermarket. I essentially already have a mobile phone without a camera, as the best the camera in my phone can do is little better than a potato print."
Vijay: "I always carry a dedicated camera with me. It’s a Ricoh GRIII in my front left pocket. My back left pocket always has my iPhone. I wouldn’t buy a phone without a camera because I use the iPhone for videos, and the GRIII for stills. My videos aren’t long, usually about six seconds, and their primary purpose is to capture audio. Sounds (especially of nature) are so representative of many places for me."
Henry White: "Hmm. I leave my phone at home more often than I do my camera. I can't remember the last time I left home without a dedicated camera. I was at a doctor's appointment this morning, Leica D-Lux 8 over one shoulder...as comforting as a warm blanket."
Josh Hawkins "Eight to 10 years ago I was going camping with the kids a lot. Every other weekend, every third weekend. It gave my then-undergrad wife time to study. The kids were three and five, in that range, at that time. I decided to make my life easier and just take my phone with for photos. The photos were just fine from it. What I found was camping just wasn't as much fun. Part of the joy was from having a 'real' camera with me. It wasn't that I just had more fun taking photos, I had more fun camping, overall, all around, because I was using a 'real' camera. It's been a valuable discovery. Sometimes I take my camera to things not because I need it, but because it's just more fun that way. "
Kye Wood: "You carry a dedicated camera for the fun factor. Just like you drive the convertible on the weekend. If you're wired that way, and it floats your boat, a dedicated camera will get the superior shot every time, because you will be engaged and not just passively prodding a button drawn on a glass screen."
Herjulfr: "No. The more I use my phone for photography, the less I like photography. I now prefer to leave the phone or at home or in the car and bring my X-Pro1 or my old Canon FTb. Holding them sets me in the mood, I am more aware of my surroundings and, at the end of the day, I have enjoyed taking photographs."
Edward Taylor: "What no one seems to discuss much isn’t whether a phone camera can replace a dedicated camera, but whether a dedicated camera could ever replace a phone camera. My phone captures decent photos in challenging lighting conditions that my $4,000 dedicated camera simply can’t, especially handheld. And I can share those photos instantly. I often use both cameras for the same shot, and frequently the phone is the only one that produces a usable image. At some point, I believe dedicated cameras will need all the computational power and connectivity of phones to stay competitive, or to replace phones entirely. Cameras should have cellular plans and appropriate software. Is a $20/month data plan really prohibitive when you’ve spent thousands on the camera?"
James Coleman: "I carry a 'dedicated' camera everywhere. I never leave the house without one unless it's raining cat and dogs or I'm headed somewhere 'dedicated' cameras aren't allowed (never mind everyone's got a phone...). My Pixel 6a does a great job but I've taken too many phone photos over the years when I'd wished I'd had my dedicated with me."
In publishing there are two kinds of deadline—the deadline, which usually has a bit of margin built in for safety; and the drop-deadline, which is the absolute last second something can be done. One's The Eleventh Hour and the other is 11:59:59, you might say.
So, new deadline: The "Dogs" Baker's Dozen will appear on Wednesday, July 16th. The reason is, I've backed myself into a corner where I'm feeling pressured. I can't work when I'm under pressure. Which you might consider immature or even obnoxious, and you'd be right, but it's one reason I'm a blogger: if I could handle pressure and deadlines like a normal grownup, I'd have a more responsible position for an actual employer and you wouldn't be reading this. So it's a situation of get some, give some.
I'm sorry about this, by the way. But I know myself.
July 16th is the day after I've promised to report on the biphasic sleep experiment.
Clocks ticking Speaking of which: In the middle of the night, with a yellow bulb in the table lamp, the screen brightness on my monitor turned down, and night-mode warmth (yellowishness) turned all the way up, I find I can't easily see the tiny little numerals for the date and time in the far upper-right-hand corner of my monitor. So I was pleased when the Internet answered my question about enlarging it by leading me to this new clock-face widget:
In case this might help anyone else, on the Mac you right-click on the desktop with your mouse (or maybe left-click, depending on how you have your mouse set up) until a menu appears, select "Edit Widgets...", then find the clock widgets and manually move one to the desktop. Then, go to System Settings > Desktop and Dock > Widgets (you might have to scroll down to find it) > Widget Style, and select "Full-color."
I chose "Clock I" because it reminded me of the round clocks high on the wall at the front of every classroom I ever sat in during elementary and high school. (This would be a good illustration to put here.) I learned of the variability of time staring at clocks that looked like that: the last five minutes of French class before lunch took forever to go by, and I swear slowed down progressively as time crept with agonizing slowness toward the bell; but the same kind of clock keeping track of the 55 minutes you could sign up for on the racquetball court let that time slip past like it was water poured out of a bucket. (I came in second in the school racquetball tournament my sophomore year, and I still want life points for that). Time can be measured, but the perception of time cannot.
More soon, for a variable value of soon,
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Kye Wood: "Ctein's article on Time ['What Is Time?' December 27th, 2013 —Ed.], and how it cannot be defined, that appeared in your blog, is one of the most thought-provoking things I've ever read."
B.J.Scharp: "Have you considered just getting a classic clock and hanging it on the wall? I've always been in the habit of removing all clocks from the interface of my PCs. I wear a watch, and I generally have a classic clock somewhere in the room, so to me it's just a waste of screen real-estate. (This is less of an issue with the bigger screens we have nowadays, but wasteful things are still wasteful. Just like our much faster devices are slowed down by less efficient software.) And an 'offline' clock has the advantage that it also works if the computer is off...."
Mike replies: Your comment made me realize that I don't use all of my 'screen real-estate' anyway. I have a 27-inch monitor but work in a window with a 23-inch diagonal:
Richard Alton: "Be gentle on yourself, Mike. With Butters having died, you couldn't have chosen a more emotional subject for the Baker's Dozen."
Gary Merken: "I know those clocks, from my public-school K–12 years outside Boston. My ninth-grade social-studies teacher, Mr. Penn, had a handwritten sign over the clock in his classroom. Mr. Penn's sign read, 'TIME WILL PASS. WILL YOU?' In other words, pay attention to the lessons! Don't watch the clock."
Who says you can't take pictures of birds with a phone?
This fellow (I assume he's the male) came right over to me and and perched there motionless for quite a while, checking me out. So I cooed to him in what I hope was a friendly tone. This is the first year I've had doves in the yard so I don't know their habits. There are lots of robins around, but no nests within view.
I'm very tempted to buy image-stabilized birding binoculars, or an IS monocular (is there such a thing?), but more expenses I do not need.
Mike
*"Love the One You're With," Stephen Stills, 1970
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Roger Bradbury: "I dunno why (and no criticism implied), but this bird photo has a 'Far Side' feel about it. Maybe the caption is, 'After a night on the tiles, Orville woke up in the gutter.'"
Nous vous donnons rendez-vous le jeudi 17 juillet à partir de 18h30 au bar Chez Jean-Claude, 9 rue Vandamme (site internet : https://www.chezjeanclaudeleretour.fr/).
Des autocollants wallabag seront disponibles :) Vous aurez l'occasion de croiser presque toute l'équipe qui maintient le projet, alors aucune raison d'éviter ce rendez-vous.
Si jamais le lieu devait changer (parce que nous serions trop de personnes ou pour toute autre raison), nous mettrions à jour ce billet de blog et nous communiquerions sur notre compte mastodon https://fosstodon.org/@wallabag.
As I wrote Prophetic Maharaja, I often recalled that libraries cull their collections. This common practice is called ‘weeding,’ which, as the American Library Association has it, “is critical to collection maintenance and involves the removal of resources from the collection. All materials are considered for weeding based on accuracy, currency, and relevancy.” The task has become more onerous as budget cuts, the promise of the digital, limited space—the need for open student study spaces—and the overall destruction of the university further extends weeding. Publish and (eventually) perish, unless one can remain accurate, current, and relevant—a laborious task—especially so since destruction “can always happen faster than any creation, production, construction” to borrow from Gil Anidjar.
And yet creation, production, construction continue even as we witness continuous destruction in Gaza. The questions academics can ask then seem obscene: How does one remain adequate to the accumulation of knowledge over time? What does it mean to introduce time, as currency, into a community? What to make of the (in)sufficiency of narration in a historical moment, as Basit asks in this forum? For academic books, journals, and articles, we have a system in place that saves one from weeding: the prestige of the publisher, the number and substance of reviews, institutional affiliation, awards and, more concretely, the number of citations, neatly measured by the h-index. It is, perhaps, a professionalism that allows for ideological reproduction; a restricted economy emerges within the promises of the dwindling library. We can then say that to keep—and now even find—its place on the shelf, a book must be generative both in and of time, but certainly not wastefully so. One must overcome the remains and rubble, which, as Samera Esmeir writes, the colonial state can only look to conquer: a “progressive conquest” (49).
The three professional requirements articulated by the ALA are quite essential to the discipline of History, which struggles to accurately—today, objectively, rather than carefully—capture the past to retain the past’s currency and ascertain its relevance. It is a question of success. As Amaryah reflects: “That historical form so often serves as a way of resolving the knots that undermine colonial logics is reflected in the pressures of history that attempt to measure the ‘success’ of an idea, a movement, a cultural product, in terms of its historical accuracy or faithfulness to a historical form.” Whether one wants it or not, History offers redemption—accuracy, currency, and relevance—in the unfolding of an elevating historical process, which can then lead to a successful book. One must bend to History; know time to periodize—elevate—effectively. The demand is clear, one Nietzsche articulated long ago: “If every success is a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or the ‘idea’ then down on your knees quickly and do reverence to the whole stepladder of ‘success’” (105)! Of course, some do not revere that particular ladder and so, to follow Basit, “the sufficiency of a narration for the rabbis, for Sikhs, and for me (each inhabiting our losses, which touch one another, not least in language) may not be redemptive for the professional historian.”
Such success also evades me, although the ladder is a tantalizing one. Yet perhaps such a failure allows the book to exist without such anxieties about accuracy, currency, and relevance. My book, Anthony says, “moves with a kind of beloved ambivalence between concepts of European origin and those of Sikh tradition. He passes across these borders seemingly without anxiety, precisely because this ambiguous relationship to loss undermines claims that some final or complete knowledge of Duleep Singh will be found anywhere.” But ‘too irreverent and undisciplined’ are the accusations of those with authority especially as they want to see the knee bend. To give one example, when I asked to enter the rotation to teach the core course in the History MA Program, “Historical Thinking and the Discipline of History,” I was told I was not “good enough.” So, I will not arrive. I lack the requisite Historical Thinking (though I am grateful for Anthony’s reminder “that the colonial borders repeated in the university between academic disciplines are not real, even if they are deadly (sometimes for our bodies, sometimes for our spirits)”).
I mention this all to say that I am grateful to the readers in this space, organized by my friend Marika, for allowing me to take their time, which has let my book do something else in the world, albeit only for a moment. They have allowed for a departure to learn with care, without end, without relevance—a more wandering, aimless, conversation that I am delighted to have.
But it is not so easy to reject direction and redemption, especially for those who feel lost. As Robert Meister has queried: “And what about those victims who feel lost? Such victims might recover by being found or saved.” This is possible if the past sufferings are “valorized and made meaningful.” Or, to heed Elizabeth Povinelli’s lesson: “suffering and dying can always be referred to a horizon of time where they are transformed into thriving and birthing” (184-5). Yet, as Basit declares in this forum, loss “does not make you special or confer some kind of election.” So, we are left with another question, one that Meister continues to go on to ask: “But is it redemption that lost victims always want?” (216). For Saidiya Hartman, the answer is ‘no’ especially in the “time of slavery,” which “negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead” (759). So then one can be, should be, ungrateful toward one’s redeemers; it might be a mistake “to take everything objectively, to grow angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything” as Nietzsche diagnosed in his untimely meditations (105). But if one is ungrateful, one can be called childish, especially if one stubbornly stays in the same spot, refusing to proceed, and remaining “coeval with the dead.”
Satbir Singh rightly focuses on loss and the child in his rich and astute analysis of the book to question the status of the child as an original or prototype for a community in time. We learn from Singh that the famous portrait of Duleep Singh, painted by Franz Winterhalter, and narrated by a mother, Queen Victoria, in her journal entry, can become a maternal phallus and offer an imaginary completion that relieves castration anxiety (although it cannot overcome it); recall, it is the obsessive that refuses to accept the mother’s castration, which leads to a masturbatory jouissance that represents “the crushing of desire” (433). Sikhs are often enough presented as obsessive by academics in their need for control: too worried about “who owns religion?” as Laurie Patton examines. As the underlying structure of the argument goes, Sikhs have been smothered and deny lack because of the anxiety the Other’s desire elicits. Therefore, they can only present their history as fully formed, fixed, their own, without lack. Satbir presses upon this point and asks about the Real: “Does he (for the Sikh at least) not evoke the lost, absent mother, to whom his gaze poses the Freudian dilemma, ‘father, don’t you see I am burning?’” In presenting us this dream-scene with the famous question, Singh offers another view in which Duleep Singh is linked with jouissance, an encounter with the Lacanian Real that fantasy—reality—then makes bearable (Žižek, Sublime Object, 44-45). For such a gaze is not “clear or penetrating,” but presents a dilemma: it does not realize a possibility, but “it is rather an impossibility that is crucial to the constitution of the subject–the impossibility, precisely, of any ultimate confirmation from the Other” (Copjec, Read My Desire, 36). Desire then is without content as it drives after an impossibility—essential to my own reading practice in Prophetic Maharaja.
Duleep Singh himself did not remain under the thrall of Queen Victoria as we see in the expansion of the maternal function as Satbir Singh theorizes it in relation to Thakur Singh Sindhanwalia. The maternal function, Elissa Marder demonstrates, can also emerge as “an uncanny, ambiguous vessel that contains uncontainable events, ideas, temporalities, and that paradoxically creates a space for the birth of futures that may have otherwise remained unimaginable” (8). It is what Amaryah, too, reads in Du Bois’ novel: “this unstable and open sense of possibility.” But the expansion of the maternal function, the refusal of Queen Victoria, as well as reading beyond standard narrations became a sign of “adolescent storm and stress” to British colonial officials. As Sara Pursley demonstrates, in her magnificent Familiar Futures, anticolonial insurgencies were indeed “read as symptoms of the emotional adolescent stage of development and of the psychological pathology of precocity.” What then to make of “development along native lines”? Perhaps such a development that looks to teach the native how to mourn properly must be rethought; we must, to use Satbir’s words, “conceive beyond major notions of successful mourning or melancholic entrapment, to ways of becoming and belonging that exceed the psychoanalytic canon’s parameters.”
In his beautifully written essay, Anthony gestures toward such a reading by turning to ‘rumor’ and ‘gossip’ in Agamben’s The Time That Remains. As Anthony recounts, “Gossip does not have to be accurate in order for it to be closer to truth than fact is. Yet, the truth gossip is close to is still far from being information.” Exceeding the economy of accuracy, currency, and relevance, gossip reveals an unrestrained expenditure (recall Freud’s close connection between melancholia and mania in relation to the question of economy). But perhaps here we can simply say that gossip is a “subaltern borrowing”—then and now—which reveals a complicity and connection that does not allow for a singular and known transaction in its anonymity. Therefore, rumors have, Mladen Dolar proclaims, “the capacity to inform the community by spreading not information, but the elusive substance of jouissance” (71). Dolar’s conclusion follows from his understanding that the shadow, symptom, of the big Other—“the epistemological foundation of proper knowledge” (logos)—is rumors, hearsay, and slander; the big Other is Janus-faced (11). It is an ambiguous constellation in which the beneficial slides into the detrimental as logos is complicit with its shadows (83). Dolar offers a similar conclusion as Anthony, who observes, “ambivalence becomes a powerful stance here.” Ambivalence is full of tensions, the difficulty of maintaining one’s movements in rhythm because we are overclose to the world. We can trip. And then we can get embarrassed and angry. Ambivalence, that is, is also about discord, which is itself a question of the heart. “When I say ‘I love you,’ it means that I want to be near the feeling of ambivalence our relation induces and hope that what’s negative, aggressive or just hard about it doesn’t defeat what’s great about it really—or in my fantasies of it, anyway,” is the way Lauren Berlant framed it. It is to return to Anthony’s question: what indeed does it mean to make it?
Marika, in her fantastic close reading of the text, asks a series of important and daunting—what she terms ‘vulgarly Marxist’—questions about gender and sexuality, property relations, and communication technologies. For example, how did gender order the distinction between public and private? What is the role of sugar in pahul ceremony, especially considering the role of sugar in imperial expansion and capitalism? How do we see this interplay between community, exchange, and the household especially with changes of property and production? And, finally, what to make of the communicative technologies at play? My response here will be inadequate, and I will only answer a few of them, since these questions themselves evoke a vast historiography to which I respond in the book.
Consider the question of the public/private divide, which Partha Chatterjee has famously investigated. He argues that a nationalist Indian public was premised on a constitutive split between outer and inner realms in contrast to Europe. Within Europe, although distinguished from each other, the public and private were still unified and consistent in a single political domain. In colonial society, however, “the political domain was under alien control and the colonized excluded from its decisive zones by a rule of colonial difference”(75). Therefore, as Chatterjee writes, “a neat separation between a private sphere of diverse individuals residing in bourgeois patriarchal families and a public sphere inhabited by homogeneous citizens was not available to Indian nationalism” (147). This exclusion meant that the private, spiritual, and inner domain became the place where nationalism fashioned its authority through cultural difference and resisting the sway of colonial institutions. As Chatterjee posits, “the home was the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of national culture, and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality.” Chatterjee contends the home—the site of particularity and difference—then, is where “the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched” (147). And so, Chatterjee concludes that there existed two political domains in tense relation to each other: civil society and community—the latter that provided opportunity to resist the universalizing tendencies of modern disciplinary power and capitalist rule (237-238). It is space in which “(primarily male) nationalist elites undertook to establish their own spheres of sovereignty and originality and sought to reject a colonially scripted secondariness”, if we work with Parama Roy’s formulation (3). In the struggle for the Khalsa Raj at the end of the nineteenth century, we also do see the desire for a masculine sovereign in the figure of Duleep Singh for many.
We can consider communication technologies similarly. The argument about communication technologies and Punjab is made by Harjot Oberoi. Oberoi states that “The transformation in communication made possible a new phase in the Sikh Panth: as old divisions slackened, new ties were effected through innovations like the printing press” (45). The rise of new elites, rather than colonial rule, thus leads to the conclusion that the Sikhs had become modern: a new cohesion emerged for Sikhs as a Sikh intelligentsia reconstructed the Sikh tradition into a Protestant form, a uniform identity, which led to the loss of a previous form, an enchanted universe (141). For Oberoi, then, the revolt around Duleep Singh is simply farce, the last gasp of “a rapidly dissolving” world (375). We can then make perhaps an easy diagnosis, turning to Marx. “Historical tradition produced the French [Punjabi] peasants’ belief that a miracle would occur, that a man called Napoleon [Deep Singh] would restore all their glory.” Oberoi says as much since he reduces the narrative of Duleep Singh to a question of transition and the fight for a “lost cause” by conservative peasants (even though re-readings of the 18th Brumaire by Spivak call into question such a rote analysis by instead highlighting the emergence of a constative and performative subaltern and suggesting a translation that offers “a condition of being elsewhere within oneself” as Michael Allan formulates it).
Needless to say, the critiques and revisions of such works are numerous in the colony and metropole—the complexity of gender, family, and nationalism in imperial societies especially in relation to time, for example. Still, Marika’s questions are so important because I think the typical response to them have left us with the promise of historical difference: the promise of a better, more inclusive, Indian nation or culture in its opposition to the forces that come to constitute European modernity. In South Asian Studies, such a promise often facilitates the discovery of alternative historical forms that can provide an antidote to a politics of community in the present—the Hindu Right. As SherAli mentions in the Introduction to this forum, the problem is particularly pronounced in Punjab Studies as recovery and repair have taken root. In contrast to this more typical move, I asked: what if this division, between public and private, also fails without recourse to an alternative behind it? Are communication technologies—the entry into modernity—constituted by a closure? What do we make of the tendency to periodize—which is a sovereign decision, let’s say, covering the absent foundation of sovereignty itself? In pondering these questions, it is important to remember that ideological critique is a two-part process as Slavoj Žižek maintains. So, yes, we need to “discern in an apparently universal, unchangeable limitation the ideological ‘reification’ and absolutization of a certain contingent historical constellation,” but we also need to consider the very failure of this absolutization: that there remains something that “cannot be interpreted away as the outcome of ideological manipulation, of the ‘false consciousness’ due to the social situation of the subject.”
Such a shift is what Joan Copjec has recently termed the “art of subtraction,” in which the task is double: “It must not only put an end to the obscurantist agenda of covering up the unconscious, of a recalcitrant wanting to know nothing about it, while avoiding the foolish error of trying to expose it.” This art of subtraction might be the work of the drive—a lesson I learned from Marika herself, who has written: “Linear, teleological desire, aiming consciously at the reintegration of the lost object and unconsciously at its endless deferral, is associated with time and with historical progress; circular, repetitious drive, which simply circles around the hole at the center of being is associated with eternity” (65). This is a reading practice that Amaryah too highlights, one in which there is “the impression of a vision, almost a fever dream, and a sense of possibility that could never be foreseen in advance or fully articulated and encapsulated in words.” And, indeed, LL Hodges brilliantly conjures this art of subtraction in their reading of the book. As they evocatively write, “From one window an arm swings a string with a bouquet of flowers tied at the end. The waiting hand of the next window over tries to grasp the bouquet. He misses. Again, the bouquet pendulum swings, again a miss. Loss becomes continuous.” It is this practice, this fever dream, this art of subtraction, I attempted to embody in my own book against the typical narratives that simply look to expose or reintegrate lost objects. It was to ask the question that Marika ends with: “what do we want?”
For Copjec, Stefania Pandolfo, and Omnia El Shakry the art of subtraction is also a question of the Divine. Consider theorizations of barzakh, which Samaah also draws upon in her important and necessary essay on historicity, destruction, and Palestine. For Copjec, “Triebe, drive is like barzakh, both a limit and a zone of linkage” (44). This liminal space between life and death is, El Shakry writes, “a place the living may travel to, if only they would allow themselves the necromantic reverie” (19). Such a place is foreclosed by Christianity: God’s incarnation as Christ, which congealed the One, as Copjec and others have written about (19). Perhaps then the search for a historical Jesus—which was also a search for a historical Israel and a historical India—is a bit different in that the solution came to reside in historicity itself, in the promise of what Amos Funkenstein calls “contextual reasoning.” In contrast to Incarnation and the closure of context, a maintenance of the gap allows for travels that provide a different relation to history-writing, El Shakry argues, as it reorients the mode of communication with the past from discovery and knowledge to the dream and Al-ghayb, the unseen (18). In my own book, drawing on the Sikh tradition, I centered hukam, which is an inscrutable order within this world, invisible command, that is not a congealed or restricted form central to historicity today. Such is oneness in the Sikh tradition: a non-totalizing force. Indeed, hukam troubles the very distinctions between inner/outer, transcendence/immanence, mind/body, relevance/irrelevance that we traffic in.
Samaah, too, takes us to a tradition—Karbala—in which “historicity is not the point.” She draws on the work of Talal Asad and his interlocutors, as did I in my book, to “consider the possibilities of relating to, learning with, and caring for those unjustly buried in the past—inconclusively and without closure.” Part of the difficulty is, as Samaah notes, a certain kind of questioning that is inevitable when writing about a tradition: what is the precise meaning of Karbala, for instance? Yet such questioning is quite stale as Muneeza Rizvi has told us and, in turn, she has asked: what other forms of reasoning and moral criticism are there to consider a different type of enquiring (498)? This might be a question of genre—a question that my book sidesteps by conceding tragedy to the authors who equated it with failure. Yet genre, especially tragedy, is not so simple as we know. Just consider what the numerous readings of Antigone teach us. And yet tragedy might be inadequate to think about discursive tradition. Basit has rigorously paid attention to this point and shown that the anthropology of secularism is not informed by tragedy, but by Trauerspiel. This conclusion leads Basit to Asad’s antihistoricism, one which “allows the anthropologist to perceive the temporal work of modern reconfigurations without requiring the sovereign cut of periodization (secular/religious, modernity/tradition—and whether narrated as tragedy or comedy)” (89). It was this notion of tradition that I sought to highlight in my book.
But, as Samaah and Basit both query: are we also in the midst of a withdrawal of a tradition? What happens when a tradition is possibly rendered counterfeit, as Basit asks, following Aaron Eldridge’s forthcoming translation of Spiro Jabbour? Perhaps, it is the case that we are then traitors (the etymology of tradition has been discussed enough). Gil Anidjar has suggested that the only responsible assertion for the revolutionary actor is “we are traitors,” but, then, as he continues, “that assertion, spoken or not (for silence might remain golden) does not help, justify, or guarantee anything…’We are traitors,’ then, because we do not decide, nor can we know, the meaning of our actions, the nature or worth of our fame, nor can we ask, therefore, for an unambiguous, or risk-less, recognition, for instantaneous and righteous (?) fame” especially so since most traitors “are locked away somewhere dark and damp or worse” (102).
In Palestine, this question of tradition—of traitors—too is locked and perhaps encounters withdrawal in, what Abdaljawad Omar calls, a “temporal chasm, wherein the durée—essential to the rites of mourning—is systematically arrogated and denied.” Mourning, a recuperation of cathectic investments in an object for a future to come, is no longer possible; there is no retreat—a detachment from the world—possible in Palestine to make gains for a future. In contrast, our Christian world always promises more time: the day of judgment is deferred; one can supersede the losses that accumulate today. The unequal and unjust starting points themselves, it is assumed, can also be overcome by time especially since we live in a time “after evil,” but before justice as Meister describes it. It is thus a world without risk and loss—one, instead, of unlimited growth and accumulation—because its end is deferred, a temporal chasm of its own.
Freud, on the other hand, understood that there was risk inherent in investments–a question of desire and object-cathexis (Betsetzung, occupation), which is why there is a thin line between mourning, melancholia, and mania (and also introjection and incorporation). It is as Hartman has said: “the work of mourning is not without its perils, chief among these are the slippage between responsibility and assimilation and witnessing and incorporation” (771). It is for such reasons that Christopher Bracken ends his article on the graves of 215 children found in Kamloops Indian Residential School with a series of questions: “What feeling goes with losing your family’s history? Is it mourning? Melancholy? Mania?” (300)
So, there is a risk, that Freud centers, that comes with object-cathexis because losses can produce, in one’s investment and occupation, narcissistic identifications, self-abjection, internalized aggression, and more, all of which are a question of economics. But a libidinal economy is neither liberatory nor damning—a point I aimed to make in my book. Ambivalence, as Anthony alludes to, comes out in the open as investments are called into question by loss. There is much to be said about Freud’s speculations—the risk of losing all value—as Derrida has done. But I wanted to simply say that today, many, including our institutions (the university, to give one prominent example), do not want to take the risk that comes with their investment, their occupation, for their trade in volatility.
Theirs is a world governed by a destruction of loss, for Palestinians but also for themselves. To return to an earlier discussion, it is an obsessional neurosis—which, in all forms, is bound to destruction—that refuses loss and, therefore, risk. Consider the Zionist fantasy: an occupation without the risk entailed in desire; recall desire is bound to a lost object that arises with separation, which creates the enigmatic desire of the Other. In contrast, obsessives cannot accept loss and, instead, take the place of the Other. Cleverly, “the obsessive takes the object for himself and refuses to recognize the Other’s existence, much less the Other’s desire,” writes Bruce Fink (119). It is a position that is masturbatory—a self-generating desire (in a genealogical science, we can say)—as the Other is annihilated and annulled, reduced to an object (Fink, 128). Israel, Esmeir reminds us, is “obsessed…with colonizing [the land’s] surface and granting it new historic meaning” (41). This is, moreover, a position that is both imperious yet marked with remarkable weakness—one speaks constantly about one’s doubts, fears, impediments—as the obsessive refuses risk, the possibility of his own disappearance; one need only explore, here, the language of anti-anti-Semitism (Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, 389).
The obsessive has frenzied activity and compulsive rituals—compulsive murder, too—governed by the ultimatum: “’If I don’t do this (the compulsive ritual), some unspeakably horrible X will take place;’” desire covered by demand (Žižek, Looking Awry, 25, Lacan, Anxiety, 293). Lacan discusses this minimization of risk by the obsessive in Formations of the Unconscious and elsewhere, particularly in the way the obsessional becomes bound to the need to obtain permission from the big Other: a question of the superego (395). Yet, as Lacan claims, “ultimately, this other with whom he is playing is only ever an other who is he himself and who, already, will in any case leave him with the laurels, from whichever side he approaches things;” there is “no kind of essential risk” (396). It is not then possible to be a traitor, to be in a tradition, to learn in such a subject position because there is no risk. There are numerous nuances and movements bound to the obsessional. But the question I want to ask from this analysis is simple enough: How do we make them—Zionists and the institutions that support the Zionist project—own the risk that comes with their investments, their occupations, (even if these investments are not a matter of choice)?
I end with this long tangent on obsession because my book wanted to foreground loss and desire—castration and drive are two sides of the same coin—to offer space for risk and, therefore, failure—a failure to be accurate, current, and relevant. How to allow for such failure within the production of knowledge today without offering oneself up for weeding? How to interrupt such decisions especially when “there are those who do not learn, ‘those who refuse to hear’”? We might need a certain kind of patience to hear an interruption—a question central to Subaltern Studies. “It is the subaltern, the fisher and the grass-roots peasant, who produces a constant interruption for the full telos of Reason and capitalism, for those who have the patience to learn,” as Spivak insists. But this is also a lesson that Talal Asad has repeatedly taught: “a living discursive tradition aims at mutual interrogation and continuous learning” (411). It is what Amaryah too ends with as well by stating my book “offers a lesson in learning to stay with the uncertainty as a way of staying with the singularity and totality of what is at once a tradition and a dynamic and open-ended effect of communities in, across, and against time.” I am grateful to have learned from these readings hosted in An und für sich and I hope I have responded adequately here, especially because of all the time I have taken from my friends who have read and written about my book. But perhaps one need not give back what had been originally given since it is in that gap that learning within a community, always a risky endeavor, can take place.
Friends of the blog will definitely be interested to read this article by long-time contributor (and now independent blogger) Beatrice Marovich, drawing on interviews with an astonishingly wide range of contemporary theologians reflecting on the possible death of their field.
1. One of the things for which I have come to rely on Rajbir over the years is his unfailing attentiveness to the dynamics of loss: one that is unsentimental and non-indulgent. (Against the empire of trauma and the weaponization of victimhood, to say nothing of wounded attachments and left melancholia.) Of course, this is not to say that one can stand apart from loss, either; simply that the language of loss is ubiquitous: it does not make you special or confer some kind of election. And this despite the manifold claims of loss today, when the political and media classes run breathless about identity politics, however “for” or “against”. These claims are everywhere; they populate the discourse of the institutions that shape our lives, even into the methodologies that now promise epistemological emancipation (“autoethnography” and “lived experience,” ad nauseum).
Talal Asad had argued decades ago that “it is not the origin of given theories, methods, or explanations which will tell us whether they are more suitable” (an argument of his I now keep repeating, since it strikes a discordant tone against how he is widely read today). (Yet, as I hear from progressive and traditionist colleagues and graduate students alike, the origin of theory and method do indicate what is suitable. Postcolonial nativism as decolonial voice, back to the things themselves. Here we run into an impasse, for it turns out that, despite my self-styled pessimism, I do affirm the possibilities of translation — mono-lingualism of the other — precisely through the proliferating losses — including of translation. Hmm.) More recently, in some reflections after October 7, 2023, Asad comments that the “power of the victim is capable of accommodating a variety of motives and experiences in all of which the desire for self-affirmation is central.” Claims to loss directly become a means for self-affirmation, for justification, for immunization: for sovereignty. Is this claim successful or frustrated? How is it to be measured? Is there an outside to its ambition? Does its justification admit another? (Is that admittance a name for “ethics”? Or is that also a liberal ruse?) In another register, how can one adjudicate between “competing narratives”? Holocaust and nakba, together (!)? (To be clear, that is another feint, a desperate pacification of the antagonism Rajbir has already alerted us to.) Is there no outside to which one can recourse, in order to sort out the history of loss, which is never one?
Instead of a history of Sikh loss, bounded and secured, Prophetic Maharaja opens onto the problematic of loss: where loss itself can be lost, along with the historical horizon. Or loss is destroyed, as in the big project Rajbir and I worked on during the pandemic years. But Rajbir’s attention to the prospect of losing loss does not veer into a kind of nihilism. (That would be too easy.) Instead he carefully shows how what is at stake in every gesture, expressed in the Sikh tradition, is the relationship between loss and sovereignty. Vah!
2. “Rather than centering the loss of a prior sovereignty,” Rajbir writes, “this book asks: what do we make of loss and sovereignty?” (11). The former construction is surely more familiar (not least in a work of history), however much I expected it to be complicated by an insistence on the double genitive (loss of sovereignty / sovereignty of loss), perhaps also with a comment on how each formulation implicates the other. But the shift from of to and does something else: it opens each of these terms to question. Rajbir cites the first page of “Force of Law” on this “and”, where Derrida comments that “the conjunction ‘and’ brings together words, concepts, perhaps things that do not belong to the same category. A conjunction such as and dares to defy order, taxonomy, and classificatory logic, no matter how it operates – by analogy, distinction, or opposition.” What even was sovereignty? And what loss? “And so loss and sovereignty become a problem for and of history” (11). The answer is not to ground loss in sovereignty or the other way around. Instead to embrace the ambivalence: “affirming and denying it, resisting it and acknowledging it, working through it and against it, and interrogating its nature, its ground or presuppositions, its form and its failures” (13). Not to “provide a theorization of loss” but to dwell “in the various rhythms of loss.” The shape of these rhythms, it seems, is key, but following them (elaborating their poetics) remains foreclosed when either sovereignty or loss is a stable object of history or narration. Rajbir’s insistence on the conjunction (loss and sovereignty) is what allows for this ambivalence through his reading; this ambivalence is what allows, as on the final page, for “a learning without closure” (185). What more can one ask? The book is so instructive, on so many fronts (its formidable readings of psychoanalysis, Subaltern Studies, historiography, deconstruction, and more); among others, this turn from the genitive to the conjunction is one of the methodological commitments I will take with me to other readings.
3. We are given on the very first page the leading question: “What happens when a tradition encounters the possibility of its loss, especially when that loss – not unlike the present-day losses that mount in the wake of environmental, political, and social disaster – exceeds the very possibility of narration, reflection, and redemption?” (1). Perhaps a tradition is then withdrawn, surpassed in the disaster (per Jalal Toufic); perhaps it is rendered counterfeit. Or perhaps, as Rajbir writes precisely, people may “respond to loss not solely by seeking to recover the past but also by seeking to remake the past and create change” (2). Not simply to recover the past given in knowledge, or to repair it, but to remake the past and create change; what loss asks is something other than reproduction of the same (and not only because it puts that knowledge in question).
A dozen years ago, encountering al-Juwayni’s Ghiyath al-umam in a reading seminar at the University of Toronto, I was stunned by his unsentimental propounding of the loss of the living sharia. What if the scholars all passed away and the historical age were emptied? If there were no mujtahid in the community who could discover god’s law? Other Islamic theological schools refused to countenance this prospect but he is forthright about its possibility. I tried to understand this as one of the questions by which Islamic juridical theology confronted its limit, but here I remember how Juwayni’s account of the fatigue of the sharia prefigures the Hasidic story Scholem relays at the end of his book on Jewish mysticism, the story which Agamben reads as “an allegory of literature,” where “what remains of mystery is literature” (2): across the generations, knowledge of a prayer was lost, then the fire which was lit with it, then the place in the forest where it was recited—but knowledge of these losses itself is sufficient, say the rabbis. If each tale is a “memory of the loss of the fire” (3), if Scholem cannot access “the mystical kernel of tradition” except through “the wall of history,” or if variously with Koselleck and Hayden White there is no history without narrative, then we can only follow Agamben when he underscores the enigma of the rabbis’ smile: knowledge of the loss or its tale is sufficient to what??
The question of sufficiency cannot be answered in advance, not even by the historian. Certainly not with his given repertoire. (This question spools outward, into other registers: for example, it resonates with what I’m translating now as the Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s inquiry into the “ruination of form” (takharrub al-shakl) in the destruction of Syria and what he calls the production of the atrocious, namely, how to engage violence when it scathes the frame of representation.) And yet, as Rajbir says directly, “one must narrate” (25). Here I remember a lengthy discussion with my late advisor Saba Mahmood on Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I had argued that if Lear read more deconstructively (let alone more politically), then he would understand that a tradition is always exposed to its outside and so it encounters the possibility of its loss. She had corrected my reading, noting that what is at stake is not only the possibility of its loss but how those inhabiting a form of life encounter its dissolution. What comes through Rajbir’s narration is thus not only the encounter with the possibility of loss but encounters with its shifting form (in and of community, in and of public, in and of conversion, in and of rumor, in and of reform). And a reminder that, given its shifting forms, sufficiency is only conjunctively related to redemption. The sufficiency of a narration for the rabbis, for Sikhs, and for me (each inhabiting our losses, which touch one another, not least in language) may not be redemptive for the professional historian.
I am grateful to have learned from Rajbir articulating a non-redemptive knowledge of the fire and the tale.
Back in 2013, Google decided to kill one of its most famous product, Google Reader. As a Pocket user at that time, Nicolas asked himself what would happen to his data and all these saved articles if Pocket decided to do the same. Then, wallabag was born. Well, it was known under the name "poche" in its early days, which means "pocket" in French, and for the fun fact, the change of name is a result of a trademark issue with... Pocket's company, Read It Later, Inc. Therefore, poche became wallabag in early 2014.
Here are some articles if you want to read more about this backstory:
In 2017 Mozilla Corporation announced the acquisition of Pocket and planned to open-source the server part, which was never fully done.
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, Pocket; Or we should say: thanks for pushing us to change our name and thanks for streamlining read-it-later apps.
Surviving the web by being open
It's always bittersweet to watch a service shutting down, especially when this one was widely known and used. Omnivore is another read-it-later service that was shut down in late 2024. In both cases it was the decision of a for-profit corporation killing a product they bought. Mozilla explained that their decision was made because "the web and the way we are using it changed a lot". Even though this statement is true, we still strongly believe in giving power to people and helping them to keep control of their data and privacy.
That's why we still continue to develop wallabag, 12 years after its creation.
Now that Pocket is expected to close this year, what to do if you are a user?
The most important thing is to ask an export of your data, ideally an export that could include the content that has been fetched with the links. This will at least let you keep the list of links you've saved over time.
Then if you are seeking for an alternative to Pocket to continue saving articles, here are some ideas:
You can also find other wallabag instances through CHATONS
wallabag is not the only read-it-later app available, you can also take a look at Readeck and Raindrop, to name a few.
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This summer, I’m trying to get a reading group on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics going. I chose this book for a few reasons. Adorno has been a continuous presence for me, but I’ve never really dug into his work systematically. More broadly, I am interested in dialectical thought and am especially seeking to recapture the magic of the reading group on Hegel’s Science of Logic I participated in during the pandemic — so this seems like the other main “big book” of dialectics. Even more broadly, I think that having a serious, extended discussion seminar with my intellectual peers would be refreshing to me, so to that extent, the specific text we choose may not be super-important.
And part of me wonders whether we will wind up switching texts, because Negative Dialectics is, in a sense, not fully available in English. The official published translation by A.B. Ashton is sloppy at best, to the point that Ashton was panned by Jameson in his book on Adorno as being “innocent of the philosophical tradition.” A widely circulated alternate translation by Dennis Redmond is significantly better, but still sloppy — as a translator myself, I’m shocked to see so many definite article errors, for instance. Finally, Christian Thorne and Matthius Menda have produced a positively good translation — of the first 43 pages of this 400-page book. Even in the Ashton, one gets the broad strokes, but it’s disappointing not to be able to do the kind of close reading that makes a discussion seminar really sing.
Hence I have turned to the German, which, to be fair to the translators, is genuinely very idiosyncratic and difficult — much harder than Agamben’s prose, for instance, and my translations of his work do unfortunately include some errors despite the greater accessibility of his texts. Adorno leans heavily on the case and gender endings in German to create densely woven prose. It can be very satisfying to read, but also makes unique demands on the reader. Normally in my German reading I can mostly handwave gender and case, which is treated as a somewhat vestigial structure by most authors I’ve read. Adorno is forcing me to finally whip myself into shape and master it, much like reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit forced me to master roots and prefixes. Thorne and Menda show that Adorno’s near self-dialect of German can be rendered into stylish English prose, but it’s hard.
It’s also hard for me simply to read. I have dipped into many languages for reading knowledge over the years, including Qur’anic Arabic, and somehow German is the one that most resists my advances. Through consistent work over the last couple years, I’ve gotten to the point where I can sit down and read standard scholarly German without getting overly bogged down in the dictionary — a skill I will need since my next major research project is on Goethe’s Faust — but to feel like I’m really understanding Adorno, I need to study every word, every pronoun, every ending, every particle. The result is that, in a typical session of an hour or so, I wind up getting through a page and a half. There is no way I can get through the German text quickly enough to keep up with any reasonable pace for a reading group. In fact, at this pace, I’ll be lucky to get through the introduction by the time next semester rolls around.
This observation raises the question of why I am even bothering. The only immediate use of this exercise is to assess the translations, but even there my ranking corresponds to what anyone would suspect after simply reading the translations in English with no reference to the German. For the broader purpose of sharpening my skill in German, Adorno may also be overboard — after all, I have managed to work my way through Part 1 of Faust in the original without undue difficulty. For the latter, I had the alibi of planning a research project and, more immediately, regularly teaching a course centered on the text, but even there my level of study was excessive. My scholarship would focus on the broad themes and influence of the Faust legend, not the nitty-gritty of the text, and in the context a student-centered discussion class, injecting my German tidbits is more likely to be distracting than helpful for students who are often struggling to get their minds around reading a great literary work in English.
One could say the same for other language projects. All of them have some kind of tangential justification, some relationship to my teaching and research. I do often teach the Bible, so gaining a familiarity with biblical Hebrew makes sense. The Qur’an, which I also often teach, is often regarded as both untranslatable into any other language and incomparably beautiful in its original Arabic, so making some effort to check that out for myself makes sense. Similar arguments could be lodged in favor of my attempts (less recent, sadly) to keep my Latin and Greek fresh — I am a professor in a Great Books program, after all! And yet, and yet…
There is a devotional quality to my language routine. Of course it’s not lost on me that many of the texts I’ve studied have been scriptural or devotional works (e.g., Augustine’s Confessions, 1 and 2 Samuel, the Qur’an). I can even trace my attention to linguistic detail back to my efforts to memorize long chunks of the New Testament for the sake of Bible quizzing — efforts that usually petered out, but that forced me to be attentive to every nuance of the (translated) text. What a stange passage I came across that day as I tried to memorize the opening verses of 1 Corinthians:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24, quoted in the New International Version that I studied for quizzing)
That second “Christ,” seemingly redundant and definitely syntactically awkward, becomes a stumbling block within the text itself. I remember struggling with it, asking myself — maybe for the first time ever — whether there could be a misprint or a mistake in the Bible. I’ve studied the passage in the original Greek; it doesn’t help. It’s irreducibly weird, just like so many of the things Paul struggles to express. If I had passively listened to the passage read out before a sermon or even read through it at a more normal pace, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But to this day I can remember puzzling over that phrase, remember the texture of the pages, the weight of the print, the church van I was riding in (my memorization efforts usually began immediately after completely bombing out at the regional Bible quizzing level in late spring), even the faint nausea I experienced from reading in the car. I was physically uncomfortable and my efforts were motivated by frustration (how could I blow away the competition at the district level but be destroyed at the regional level?!), but it is a happy memory — perhaps my first memory of pure intellectual contemplation.
Similarly, if I reflect on my experience of reading Adorno each morning, or my experience of getting into a regular reading routine with many other texts over the years, I can only report that I find the work uniquely satisfying. A good morning foreign-language session makes me feel energized, in a way I now recognize as parallel to my feeling when I get done with a session on the rowing machine. I love entering that intellectual flow state, and I love seeing the structure and nuances of the other language. I love pondering what resists translation. And above all, I love encountering the thing itself, the original text, dwelling in it, meditating on it — simply for its own sake.
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