Marcus' World

Putting Down Roots?--My California Drivers License

One of the first things we did upon arriving was to get a California drivers license.  After graduating from college near Chicago I lived on the Ohio license for a long time before finally switching to Illinois; we never got a Washington DC license for two years; and, although we did get one in New York City, it took several months of living there before we got around to it.

Here we have a stronger incentive--drivers licenses are one proof of state residency, which will make a significant difference in next year's business school tuition. We also registered to vote in Alameda County, and got our Berkeley library cards on our first day here.

But despite knowing the practical reason for these actions, somehow it still feels symbolic of putting down roots on the West Coast (even if people here don't jaywalk to my satisfaction.)  This picture, taken by Helen and lightened by Picasa, reveals my proud ownership of a California drivers license.

On Second Thought, Berkeley is Not New York West

It appears that I was too glib in equating Berkeley with Gotham City. Sure, there are many cultural opportunities and abundant chances to display leftist credentials--those aspects feel just like home.

But the two cities diverge on a most crucial matter: jaywalking. 

Shockingly, people in Berkeley stand on the sidewalk (rather than at the edge of the street itself), and wait for the light to change before they cross the road.  Breaking this ex-New Yorker's heart, this is true even when no cars are in sight for either direction. Can you believe it?

Case in point: On Friday I volunteered for the Craig's List Foundation Non-Profit Boot Camp, which took place yesterday on the UC Berkeley campus. I was running a few minutes late to my shift, so I hustled down Telegraph Avenue to get to campus. When I arrived at Durant/Telegraph, the light was against me but no cars were in sight. So--obviously--it made sense to keep on walking.  I had somewhere to be!!

Halfway through this jaywalking experience, I looked up and saw that at least 10 people  were waiting  patiently on the opposite side of the street. Suddenly I felt self-conscious, and that's when I knew: we're not in Kansas anymore.

Postscript--Salad Bar Religion

H. Allen Orr's  excellent review of Philip Kitcher's new book  Living with Darwin:  Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith raises the interesting question of how much "spiritual religion" (i.e., religion not grounded in literal interpretations of sacred texts) overlaps with "secular humanism."  I'm talking about secular humanism in its best sense, which argues that you don't need to believe in God to do good things and care about other people.  Lately secular humanism has been hijacked by militant atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins--spiritual religion has nothing in common with their perspectives.

The review costs $3.00 to read in full, unless you subscribe to the New York Review of Books. Here is a choice excerpt:  "Over the years, many have worried about humanism's ability to long survive, independent of its historical roots in religion...We must 'make secular humanism responsive to our deepest impulses and needs, or to find, if you like, a cosmopolitan version of spiritual religion that will not collapse back into parochial supernaturalism.'" 

The embedded quote is from Kitcher's book, and it sums up the challenge well.

Scene on a BART Train

Heading home to Berkeley I saw her across the aisle
Not more than 25 years old--maybe an art student in the City
Sitting across from her were a middle-aged man and woman
Her parents, I assumed.

They'd never been to San Francisco before, it seemed
Looked like Midwesterners.
They didn't get this whole public transportation thing.
Why not ride around in your own car and listen to the radio?
Why not pay a reasonable mortgage for a nice house in a comfortable suburb?
"You pay how much for this?!" I imagined her mother asking in disbelief.

Here they were despite all misgivings, in this over-priced and over-hyped city
Trying to understand their daughter's choices.
I couldn't hear the conversation
But did notice that the daughter was positioned uncomfortably,
Looking at her fingernails rather than her parents.
At one point, though, she exclaimed,
"I'm not going back to Columbus."

Me either.

Around Montgomery St., the daughter announced,
"It's the next stop. We're the last stop in the city."
But when they reached Embarcadero,
She didn't give a reminder
Just stood up abruptly
And headed for the train door.
Dad reacted faster, then Mom stood up too.
They made it on time, but it was close.

I wished that she had given her parents a break
Let them know once again that they needed to exit at Embarcadero
Even if she had said it ten times already.
I used to wish the same thing about myself at the 4/5/6 stop in 86th St in New York City
That's another place where kids from Columbus go
With no plans to return.

Road Trip Photo Album

The photo album from our cross-country trip is now up on Shutterfly.  It's at the top of the page; just click "View pictures" and then "View as a slideshow." There are 39 pictures, complete with Helen's informative captions.

Enjoy!

Salad Bar Religion

Since we moved to Berkeley, some dormant religious impulses have manifested themselves. I grew up attending a very conservative Christian church, which I would not attend today. My soft spot for the much vilified "religious right"--whose tactics often drive me crazy too--comes from those days.

Here in Berkeley, as is no surprise, the churches are much more liberal.  So this opened an opportunity, I thought, to enjoy the positive parts of church life--the community, the music, the sermons--without getting shunted down uncomfortable political paths.

This morning I attended the early service at St. Mark's Episcopal Church.  It was an intimate gathering in the chapel, with no music. I listened to the readings, shook my neighbor's hand, and pondered the sermon. But I did not take Communion, because in the end I do not believe that Christianity is the only valid spiritual path or that Jesus died on a cross to redeem humanity's sins.

One perspective is "Take what you want and leave the rest."  Maybe the sermon will have a few lessons you can apply later; perhaps you'll meet friendly and interesting people. But you can freely ignore whatever makes you uncomfortable--pick and choose, just like you would at the salad bar. [I can't take credit for the salad bar analogy--keep reading.]

This strikes me as way too easy. The rector at St. Mark's believes wholeheartedly in the Christian faith, as she should. It's an entire body of belief that has to hang together in order to mean anything at all. That's absolutist, I know, but  it's also much more intellectually honest than salad bar religion.

So I won't be going back to St. Mark's, not because it's a bad place but because I have different beliefs (whatever those might be). If I church-hopped throughout Berkeley, this would always be the result.

After returning from St. Mark's, I put Google through the test to learn a bit about syncretism,  "the combination of different forms of belief or practice."  If Christianity is not the only valid spiritual path, then is a blending of the all the great religions the better way to go? Should I just become a Baha'i and be done with it?  Or is this thinking just a magnified version of salad bar religion? I don't know the answers to these questions, except for a sneaking suspicion that my answer to the last  question is "yes."

Through my Googling I learned that Erasmus is one of the forefathers of syncretic thought. From here it was just a few clicks away to the 2001 Erasmus Prize Essay by Claudio Magris, a contemporary giant of Italian literature. At first the essay seemed too dense; I tried to skim it, but soon realized that it deserved to be read in full.

Magris hits upon the core problem--How to live by firm convictions (such as those you would hold as an Episcopalian minister), while recognizing that other firm convictions are equally valid. What are the limits of tolerance in a pluralistic world? This is the question, and each of us must arrive at our own answers and draw our own lines.  As a society, we have to do the same thing--to take just one example, this is why discussions about when "free speech" crosses the line "hate speech" become so vexed.

Here is Magris on salad bar religion: "What a philosophy or faith stands for is an organic unity, not a salad each of whose individual ingredients is an optional, something which one can add or not as one pleases."

I picked up a new word from Magris--laicality, "the state or quality of being laic; the state or condition of a layman." 

Magris: "Laicality is not a philosophical subject but rather a mental habit,  the ability to distinguish that which is rationally demonstrable from that which is, instead, the object of faith..."  On that score, and in conclusion, here is Magris on the potential tyranny of rationalism (as evidenced, I would add, by the surge of fundamentalist atheist tracts that have appeared in recent years): "[R]eason runs the risk of degenerating into mere calculating rationality, a power-technique which recognises no values beyond facts." 

I have no quarrels with making data-driven decisions, except that we have seduced yourselves into thinking that data to support every decision we make exists.  Sometimes you have to take life on faith, even if that faith has nothing to do with church.

QuestionCopyright.org

Tonight I ventured into San Francisco for the first time since we moved here, to attend a Creative Commons Salon. Although making the transition to fully open access journals is not as simple as I'd like it to be, the goal of maximizing access to scholarly literature remains important.  On a broader scale, the Creative Commons seeks to liberalize access to many cultural products, which are often protected by draconian copyright laws.  Both the open access and commons movements strive to invigorate the public domain.

At the salon I met Karl Fogel, the founder of QuestionCopyright.org. QuestionCopyright's mission is this: "Promoting public understanding of the history and effects of copyright, and encouraging the development of alternatives to information monopolies." To that end, Karl founded his organization in January of this year and is currently developing a board of directors.

One thing I've noticed among librarians is a tendency to be overly concerned about whether our actions are facilitating violations of copyright law.  In Nigeria this summer, for example, librarians were very reluctant to give out HINARI passwords for fear that their patrons would abuse the privilege. This reluctance maintains the status quo in terms of journal access in developing countries, even though HINARI was created for the express purpose of overturning it.

Of course we must follow the law in everything we do, and exercise due diligence in informing our patrons about what the laws are.  But once we've done all this, it is perfectly acceptable to point out to anyone who will listen that the length of copyright protection afforded to new works under US copyright law--sometimes as long as 95 years!--is absurd. QuestionCopyight.org is a laudable effort to challenge such excessive copyright protection.

Challenging copyright law is a Sisyphean task, of course. But someone--many someones, actually--has to do it.

Missing New York

I'm not sure why a horrible morning commute makes me miss living in New York City, but it does. 

Berkeley is Just New York West

Tonight I attended a reading at Moe's Books, a legendary Berkeley store founded by an actor that couldn't make it in New York City (Moe) who moved west.

This is one of several examples that Berkeley is really New York West.

Others: 

1. One of the readers tonight, Marina Sitrin, recently moved to the Bay Area from New York City. In her remarks, she talked about riding the subway and gatherings at Union Square.

2. Very famous New York author Jonathan Lethem once worked at Moe's Books.

3. At the farmers market Saturday, I overheard someone say, "Did you see  that article in the New Yorker?"

4. It's very easy to buy the Times at any convenience store.

Sure, we moved 3,000 miles away.  But in a very real sense, we haven't moved far away at all.

First Days in Berkeley

It's only been five days since we arrived in Berkeley, and we've already been to two farmers markets and three grocery stores. Apparently we are focused on food as a key aspect of settling in.  Today we helped another business school student and his wife move in, and yesterday we attended a rooftop party with several business school students in north Berkeley. Socializing matters too.

Liberal virtue is on display everywhere here, from the compost bins at the farmers markets to the universal availability of fair trade, organic coffee. We've already purchased fair trade java from Peet's, and it looks like we'll make coffee at home much more than we've ever done before. We haven't quite gotten into the Berkeley groove of bringing our own bag to the farmers market yet, but that will come in time.  Earlier today we bought four books for a dollar; they were lying on the sidewalk. It was the honor system--nobody was there to take the money, so we placed it in a cup sitting on a table.

We live just south of campus, between two major avenues (Shattuck and Telegraph). Walking to places in our neighborhood is no problem, even at significant distances that make non-New Yorkers blanch.  But many students live in the Berkeley Hills to the east, up roads that require automobiles or strong bicyclist's legs.  It's not as simple as getting around Manhattan, but there's still no reason to own a car.

It's August, which is not so warm in the Bay Area. Today is downright grim, but everyone promises a glorious October. Helen is bitter about the weather, but I'm trying to keep an open mind.

Here are three pictures of our apartment--A view of the Bay and San Francisco, another of the main room of the apartment, and a final take from the kitchen (which has become a shrine to our years in New York.)

As I write this, in fact, I'm listening to "Selected Shorts"--which originates at Symphony Space, at 95th/Broadway in NYC--on the radio.  Letting go won't be easy.