Paying It Forward

It's that time of year again: MaxFunDrive! Jesse Thorn and his gaggle of podcast hosts, producers, and editors are asking for listener donations to keep their whole thing going.  I listen to at least three or so of their products a week (Jordan, Jesse, Go!, Bullseye, Judge John Hodgeman, and might stick with with new arrival International Waters) and will swear on the lives of Abed and Troy that each of them does, indeed, bring maximum fun.  I haven't decided yet at what level, but I will definite be joining the increasingly massive maxfun funding family.

The first time a podcaster asked me to straight up transfer funds to keep it going, I found it jarring. It seemed crass and too transactional. I did end up donating and am glad that I did, as the project, Marc Maron's WTF,  kept on keeping on and has become something of a source of stability in my life. Moreover, I'm really warming to the idea of paying producers for "content" directly.  It's a wonderfully pure exchange, eschewing middle men and late-capitalist overhead - "you make something that I consume and enjoy, let me directly send you some money to keep it going" - and, to be honest, there's something of a warm and fuzzy feeling that comes from connecting directly and concretely to usually disembodied voices that consistently make me laugh.

Contact Conundrums

           Let's be honest,  the idea of bands of uncontacted hunter-gatherers roaming the dense foliage of the Amazon fascinates inherently. Erudition, insight and elegant prose are hardly necessary. All the same, John Terbrogh brings all three to the latest edition (April 5) of the New York Review of Books.  His review of Scott Wallace's The Unconquered offers a pleasant excursion through the work, his own experiences in, near, and around the Brazil’s “exclusion zone” (areas akin to First Nations reservations – federal land set aside for indigenous peoples, though in this case, those peoples remain unaware of the deal), and through the history of uncontacted peoples policy in Brazil.

            Lucidly structured and informative, the piece reads smoothly, at least until its final section, where he ponders how we ought to proceed with regards to the 4 500 or so human beings who’ve had no introduction to modernity.  Despite a deep history of disease and disaster for their predecessors – a story he tells himself so well, just paragraphs earlier – Terbrogh stands firmly on the side of some kind of assimilation or integration.  Although he admits the complexity of the question in terms of practicality, he comes down in a straightforward manner. The case, he says is a moral one:

This is a question of values and some of my anthropologist colleagues would say yes. But the morality of this question has to be considered in the light of our own cultural origins. Once upon a time, the ancestors of each and every one of us lived in a premodern culture. Those cultural origins have now been completely erased from our collective memory. Do any of us regret the loss of this memory? Would any of us prefer to return to our ancestral condition, rather than to live in the modern world? Few, if any, would say yes. To live in isolation is to live a short, hard life in the absence of modern medicine and in complete ignorance of history, geography, science, and art. 

To my admittedly biased way of thinking, the modern world offers a vastly richer existence—intellectually, culturally, physically. Not only do we live nearly twice as long on average, but we are able to travel, to experience the accomplishments of a cultural history that goes back three thousand years, and to savor the best creations of a highly diverse global cuisine. 

            It’s easy to see the truths of his argument, particularly when he asks us to compare our own lives to those of our ancestors.  Of course we have clean running water, sanitation, and the ability to step into a metal tube and cross oceans through the air, among many other things all of which certainly feel better than their opposites probably would. But I get a little queasy when he equates those physical comforts with a "richer" existence.  Yes, it's sort of wonderful that I can digitally hit "publish" on the top of this screen and have these words potentially read by strangers in Iceland and that I can have the food of India brought to my door by simply switching tabs and hitting another digital button.  

             The wonder of those feats comes couched in a set of languages and experiences (the kinds of narratives he notes) that offer meaning to those who can place themselves within them. Making sense of "hitting publish" or "switching tabs" would barely make sense to computer users from twenty years ago, let alone to those without a sense of the computer, or electricity, or written language. Our lives feel richer than theirs because they are ours.  We'd be in a tough spot if we were to concede otherwise; argue against narratives in history all you want, but at the end of the day we make sense of our world by placing ourselves at the end of them. 

           Which is why it strikes me that the moral case can't be so simple, that in fact it is as complicated as the practical questions would be. The people Terbrogh and Wallace describe live existences of near total paranoia; everything outside is total enemy, to be fought or fled as needed, always to the fullest extent.  Even if (a huge "if" itself) we might protect their bodies from our germs, how might we justify the jar to their psyches we'd impose? What moral case must be made for robbing men of all meaning?  How ought we balance those costs against the seemingly obvious physical benefits of modern life? How much does it matter that less conflicted farmers or developers might get there first?

           A correct answer, in moral, practical, and political terms seems unfathomable, far more complicated than the three paragraphs Terbrogh offers. One gets the sense that by the time we've hashed it all out, the 4 500 will either all be gone or living next door.

In principio

            When I chose to begin this endeavor, I had a choice of two recent obsessions around which to center my first post.  Although I’ve been toying with a lengthy Believer style appreciation of Monk for some weeks now, I decided ultimately to enact my personal rites of spring for “The History of Rome” podcast.  The show is a simpler pleasure, really not much more than its title implies, and, more importantly, a shorter write-up.  Having not let my thoughts linger on it too much, my mind can’t over-step my hands or my intestinal fortitude.  Deciding to write this morning, and to start and finish on the same afternoon means (one would hope) avoiding the (my) common pitfalls of overly ambitious abstraction and endless chains of connection.

            “The History of Rome” podcast isn’t much more than its title implies, an episodic narration of the history of the Eternal City and its empire.  In most releases host, producer, and writer Mike Duncan recounts with some detail the action and motivation of high politics of Roman history.  On occasion, he will take breaks from the story to offer listeners topics of social and cultural historical importance – dedicating whole episodes to religious practice for example, or what the structures of daily life looked like for the non-elites usually left out of the podcast. Ultimately, however, one can think of the project (still on going at nearly two hundred episodes) as a massive aural textbook history of Rome.

            Which is not to call it boring. I’ve just listened to a bit comparing Commodus’ gladiatorial dabbling to the “finding the President in a crackhouse.”  It’s the first time I’ve laughed out loud at one his jabs, but hardly the first occasion to prompt a snicker or a bursting grin.  For the most part, Duncan uses punch lines and tags judiciously.  There might be an occasional clumsy extra reference to Russell Crowe or Kirk Douglas, but the man tends to pick his moments carefully for extra-curricular commentary. 

             Carefulness describes endeavor as a whole.  It’s almost clear from the content alone that each week’s content derives from any number of primary and secondary sources.   The host confirms the observation in his hundredth episode, a half-hour dedicated to questions from listeners.  Asked how the show came together week after week, Duncan described a process wherein he spent much of the week reviewing a life’s time worth of reading on the days of Rome or perusing something new but relevant for that week’s topic, then two days drafting and re-drafting a three-thousand word script, then twenty minutes reading it into separately recording tracks on his computer, before editing and uploading the whole thing.  When all is said and done, he drinks a beer to celebrate, then gets back to work for the next week’s show.

            Even granting some understandable exaggeration, it sounds more like a calling or a career than a hobby.  All the more so when one considers that it is almost purely hobby.  Until audible.com stepped in to sponsor episodes – as it seems to be required by law to do for all podcasts - a year into its run, Duncan did it entirely for free.  Even when offered what little money or technical support the sponsor offered, the host deferred to his audience, asking the listeners if he should take the money or not. To take it – to essentially not have to worry about paying for all of that research, server space and software – might somehow have corrupted the endeavor.  If the audience thought lucre might taint their appreciation of Roman history, he would not take it. To the credit of his fans, they offered no resistance and the sponsorship went forward. 

            One wonders at the heart and dedication of a man who would spend so much time and life on a project and balk at the prospect of accepting pay for it. It might make sense were he a graduate student or professor using the platform to practice his game or make his name.  As far as public information offers, however, Duncan lives outside of the ivory tower, and mightn’t have even majored in Classics or History in college.  It appears that when the podcast began he worked as a fishmonger or in some other retail food capacity in Portland, Oregon.  He did marry and move to Austin for school during the show’s run, but to study domestic Public Policy not the tribunate of the Gracchi.

            “The History of Rome” runs on pure enthusiasm.  Clearly, its fans are nerds, but none as much as its creator.  But it’s a realer, purer, nerdiness than the “nerd culture” that drives much of the Internet and pop culture today.  This isn’t a blockbuster comic book movie, or Sheldon Cooper getting in better shape each season, or a drive for all to wear Abed-inspired t-shirts or plastic glasses.  Duncan doesn’t nerd out over the Roman era as an expression of any kind of zeitgeist. As a little boy, he found himself obsessed with the physical aura of his grandfather’s leather-bound volumes of Gibbon.  He opened them up on a busy holiday, and lost himself in the story, then spent much of his free cultural consumption (and later production) to finding out more.  An eight year old falling obsessively into enlightenment scholarship and prose defines nerd in its older, non-cool sense.

            It makes one appreciate the podcast all the more.  There are moments when “the History of Rome” drags.  All things - especially those dealing with the past which are never as exciting as we’d like it to be – will drag.   That the project is so clearly a labour of deep love pushes the listener to carry on through when it does.  It’s as if, in a world that worries constantly about collaboration and mediatisation in cultural production, we’ve found something of an artisanal work.  Here is the product of a deep dedication to craft and energetic apprenticeship.  In a world where it feels like a crowd of individuals seeking to become brands rushes to the podcast mic or blogger for “exposure,” Mike Duncan plods on for the Republic, then the Empire, and ultimately for himself.             

            Which is why, ultimately, he might provide fodder for an ideal inaugural post for this blog at least.  I don’t expect readership for this thing to reach into to the tens, let alone twenties.  I do hope that I will continue to churn out posts and the like even when it doesn’t, and that I’ll get better at it as I do.  It’s easy to let these things fall by the wayside, or to get caught up in AdSense, or catching the right links or readers, especially for me.  Mike Duncan took to the internet not worrying a damn about those things, worried only about Romulus and Remus and continuing the feat for however long it took until he arrived at Romulus Augustus.  As a project, it educates and entertains.  As a symbol, for me at least, it does a hell of a lot more.