This is our sixth year of two-person book club known as the Gravity’s Rainbow Support Group (GRSG) which began with our first book Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon during the Pandemic. Our notes are filled with observations, sidebars, anecdotes and conclude with Francis’ insightful Amazon Review,
Links to Murray’s online bookshop (Destination: Books) have been provided in case visitors want to purchase the book and support Murray’s addiction to blogging.
Patina: A Profane Archaeology by Shannon Lee Dawdy
This book came about when Murray visited New Orleans last fall to catch up his daughter Cynthia who was in the Crescent City for an anthropology conference. Dawdy who is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago was a speaker and the conference. Cynthia thought I would like the book and sent it to me afterwards.
Published in 2016, Patina is centered in New Orleans where Dawdy has done much archeological work digging through layers of New Orleans history and then combining her findings with her academic musings. Here’s some of main areas of the book, which is a relatively short work (150 pages) but it is chocked full of revelations and speculations depending on your point of view. Either way it is a challenging and thought provoking work.
Patina and Pastness Defined
In the first chapter, Dawdy defines patina in contemporary English as:
(1) ” a surface appearance of something grown beautiful esp. with age or use” (2) “an appearance or aura that is derived from association, habit or established character” and (3) “superficial covering or exterior” Patina thus has an aesthetic quality with connotations of age, is a signifier of certain social habits, and can be artificially created or fakes.”…’it is these three meanings that imply some ambivalence”
It is ambivalence and connotations about patina that acts as starting point that gives Dawdy a license to riff.
One particularly redolent phrase, “Katrina Patina,” referred to the multihued encrustation that water and mold left in horizontal strata upon houses, possessions, and even the people sullied by the hard work of cleanup.” (Chapter 1)
Ruins and Heterogenous Time
IF you’re going to talk about ‘pastness’ you cannot due so without talking about time. Dawdy writes, “Time for him (Walter Benjamin) was not a series of linear strings laid end to end but a twisted knot.” She defines ‘pastness” as a quality that is sensed (not remembered not narrated) and experience filter through the flux of time.” (page 25 – page numbers represent the University of Chicago Press print edition)
Of course, some of these passages can be described–Francis put it–as doosies:
Edmund Husserl argued that time understood as a steady sequence of linear events is a highly abstracted representation of what our consciousness experiences as a sensual flux of echoes, cycles, and retentions, akin to multipart music. In the phenomenological view, the content of experience matters more than the form of timekeeping (seconds, days, years). The phenomenological intervention of the early twentieth century marked a radical break with Western beliefs in objective and progressive time, or what Walter Benjamin called empty, homogeneous time. (Page 29)
As you can gather, Dawdy synthesizes from many sources, which is not always clear but they worth trying to comprehend. One of the more straightforward sections of this chapter is her deep dive into the House of the Rising Sun.
Certainly, all of us at a certain age can remember the Animals version of the song but did you know that the song descended from an English ballad and was recorded by folksingers in teh 1830.a century earlier in Appalachia.
The hotel or house of the Rising Sun is a much sought after location for New Orleans visitors.
…the well-known folk song “House of the Rising Sun,” popularly interpreted as the lament of a fallen woman who surrendered to fate in a New Orleans bawdy house. (It’s been the ruin, of many a poor boy….don’t spend your time in sin and misery, in the house of the Risin’ Sun). This is a case of a beloved old story in search of a material home—of the satisfying verification provided by tactility. It was a yearning shared by many of my archaeological colleagues, who were disappointed with my hesitancy to authenticate the site as the House of the Rising Sun. Page 69 (She makes a good point here, it applies to myth or song and why people wanted to find the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the lost city of Atlantis, and of course Noah’s Ark – Francis).
Page 73: The hotel closed between 1838 and 1840 to make substantial repairs. Given the youth of the building, but also the great weight of its four stories of brick, we can infer that the building suffered considerable subsidence due to the instability of the rotting Rising Sun Hotel debris and the soft soils upon which it was built. This would have led to sloping floors, bent door and window frames, and cracking plaster, among other problems.
The song fits perfectly with the dens of inequity we associate with New Orleans.
Haunted House
We learn about why the ghost of Walt Disney and others remain a part of the city and its numerus ghost tours.
Antique Fetishes
Mardi Gras
murraybrowne.org 