that-a-way notebook

The professor mumbled to himself and wondered how far away he would need to travel before his voice could be recognized for speaking Chioacihag (the Comanche language he heard) as opposed to gibberish. “Pretty far,” he thought. In another time, but probably not in another place, the extensive knowledge he possessed about one particular place, one particular people, another entire system of language, without verification by even one other person in town, at his place of work, or in this entire country, would have been enough to lock him up indefinitely. He’d have to be crazy (“Or at least,” he conceded, “no friends”).

Even still, someone might notice him from across the street he walked beside - Dunlap Lane - and call the professor peculiar, but no longer could no they charge the man as a criminal.

Fifty years ago, he might have been state executed.


The department was unhappy with his complete lack of interest in the more "visible” anthropological discoveries that had taken place during his tenure. Bingham in Peru, etc. To the professor, however, the meeting was doubly confused. First of all, his interest, at least as it pertained to the lectures – the somewhat embarrassing virtue of his professorship to some – was to remain silent about these celebrity discover-ables of the day.

“In all due respect, what I treasure in this field, and what I teach my students to treasure, cannot possibly be found underground.” This is what he said now, under review by the department heads. “It is in the movement of persons walking and talking above the surface that we find the object of anthropological inquiry.” This is what he said sitting down.

And anyway, it had begun fifty years back (he not even a young man) with Charles Thomas Newton, a land speculator who wore sheepskin and went around calling himself an archaeologist – so then again it must be true. It was Newton, a Londoner on payroll at the British Museum who spent one year as a spy for that Empire of his, accumulating statistics from so-called new friends and neighbors only of course to calculate which poor Halicarnassian (but really not – really a Turk) he needed to buyout and push out of the way so that he could dig up the Mausoleum of Maussollos, retire from the stage of espionage and live out the rest of his life as a pickpocket.

“What’s wrong with the Mausoleum of Massollos?” sounded the thick-skinned head of Dr. Harr. Only the thousands of gray hairs above his remarkably beady eyes were as unrestrained and visible from far distances as his present outrage for both the professor and his position in the department.

But believe it or not, the professor would have proffered not to get coiled into an argument. At times like these, he recognized that the Aristotelian model of friendship as defined by a mutual respect for propriety and functionality (the second of three modes delineated in the Nichomachean Ethics), allowed for his survival amidst such violent university games as “question and answer.” It was a shield, the other option being the spear. He would have made it out to the other side far sooner, however…

“The Mausoloem of Maussollos isn’t a great wonder,” he answered. “It’s just a booth.”

“A booth? It’s a marvel of civilization, of human organization ”

“It’s the product of industrial oppression. Humanity is the only thing that had nothing to do with that pile of dust.”

“Dust?!”

“Junk.”

“Junk!?”

Dr. Morris, the Department Chair had to intercede. “Now, now.”

At this point, most colleagues in his department, as well as most archaeologists lecturing or excavating worldwide, followed the Lewis Henry Morgan schematic for anthropological discovery: “Nothing out there means anything unless you can identify it in relation to what you’re already doing.” At least, that’s the way he explained it now in his classes. “Horse shit.”