Lost in Conversation, Episode 3. On the Decline of Historical Study in America with historian Richard Drake.

Show notes:

In this episode Leland Buck talks to Richard Drake about the decline in historical study at American universities and explores the broader ramifications of the decline in the humanities in American society and politics.

For more information about Richard Drake, visit his website http://www.richardrdrake.com

Books by Richard Drake:

1. Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, 1878-1900 (1980)

2. The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (1989)

3. The Aldo Moro Murder Case (1995)

4. Apostles and Agitators: Italy’s Marxist Revolutionary Tradition (2003)

5. The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion (2013)

6. Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism (2018)

7. New book on William Appleman Williams coming soon

Here is a list of all the books referenced in this conversation:

Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9788027343997

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780394703176

John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780615952093

George Orwell, 1984 https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780451524935

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780063068445

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, et al., The Federalist Papers https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780451528810

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780393079791

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780199552368

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780393356175

Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics https://bookshop.org/a/81130/9780393307955

James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition https://www.amazon.com/Revisionist-Viewpoints-Dissident-Historical-Tradition/dp/0879260084

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In this, the second episode of Lost in Conversation, I talk with my friend Kim Yaged about being creative and finding and audience in our complicated world.

Kim is a writer with many credits in film, television, and theater. She has also published photo essays, poetry, and written for animated shorts. Her recent dramatic works include the one-woman show Hypocrites and Strippers, The Suicide Blog, un-Motherhood and America. Her writing is rich with social dynamics, often exposing cultural landmarks of identity and community. She has an impressive ability to summon new voices and new perspectives to express ideas of social justice in complex societal circumstances. And even in casual conversation, Kim wastes no time uncovering thoughtful perceptions on the state of modern discourse. This is an important conversation about sharing creative work in a challenged and challenging world, and I can think of no better perspective on that topic than Kim Yaged.

You can learn more about Kim on her websites:

http://www.kimyaged.com

http://www.kimyaged.net

and on her podcast Kim’s Spot

Also Instagram and Linkedin.

If you are not familiar with my Substack, Lost in America, you can read that at https://lelandbuck.substack.com

I’ve already recorded and edited the next episode, which will drop on July 4. Until then, be well.

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Episode 1 - A short conversation with Eric about “wandering”.

Lost in America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Eric is a film photographer who lives in Seattle. He’s known online as Eric J. Meow, and Conspiracy of Cartographers. He was the co-host of the podcast All Through A Lens.

You can find Eric in a variety of places, perhaps the best place to start is on his Substack

Eric is active on a variety of social media sites, all of which can be found on his Linktree as well as links to his recent books and zines.

If you’re curious about such things, he makes and sells a great ECN-2 development kit. I’ve bought a couple of these and they are great. I highly recommend them.

Thanks for reading Lost in America! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Please note: If you prefer to listen to podcasts on a different platform than Substack, this podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts, PocketCasts, and Overcast

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Here’s just a little audio I recorded on January 27, 2023.

I spent the month of January in Seattle working on a few projects. As my main reason to be there involved doing large-format photography and writing about the Salish Sea, it goes without saying that I spent quite a lot of time on Washington State Ferries. On this particular day, my wife had joined me for a long weekend, and we got up early one morning and caught the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. We explored the Bainbridge Japanese Exclusion Memorial (I’ll share more about that in a future post) and then drove from Bainbridge across the Agate Passage Bridge onto the Kitsap Peninsula, along the Hood Canal to the little towns of Seabeck and Holly.

It was a long, full day of driving in the constant winter rain, so by the time we got back on the ferry in Bainbridge, I was eager to put the cameras away and just enjoy the ferry crossing back across Elliott Bay to Seattle.

I have always loved catching the evening ferry back to Seattle. From the water, the city looks so dramatic and impressive. From most vantage points, the city just looks like a mass that skirts the edge of the water, but from a boat, the city seems to climb up out of the sound to an impressive height. At night, it is always a spectacular cityscape.

The Salish Sea is a relatively recent name for the entire basin that includes Puget Sound, the Hood Canal, the Strait of Juan de Fuca (the main waterway that connects the sea to the Pacific Ocean), and the Strait of Georgia which extends up into British Columbia between the mainland and Vancouver Island. As with many large bodies of water, the lines drawn to distinguish its constituent parts can seem somewhat arbitrary and are largely the result of a history that benefitted from dividing this large inland sea into a variety of distinct segments in two countries. It is a body of water famous for salmon and herring spawns, a great variety of whales, seals, and sea lions not to mention an amazing diversity of bird species. This abundance comes from its unique position on the continental edge, with great rivers flowing down from coastal ranges into its waters and tidal flows mixing seawater in from the Pacific. From an ecological perspective, it represents one of the most fertile and diverse natural areas in North America. And in the 21st Century, it is home to roughly 8.7 million people — a number estimated to grow to 10.5 million by 2040.

I spent an entire month exploring and photographing, and I only began to scratch at the surface. I anticipate at least three more trips before this project is complete. My next trip will focus on the eastern edge of Vancouver Island from Victoria to Campbell River and Vancouver and the mighty Fraser River which reaches the sea in that city.

I hope this little clip of audio on a short ferry ride at the end of a long day transports you to this amazing place in a way that my words and photographs cannot.

Until next time, be well.

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Thank you for listening Neutral Density. This post is public so feel free to share it.

This week, I’m on the Oregon Coast, and I must say, it feels amazing to be near the ocean again.

The rocky beaches at the base of Tillamook Head can be treacherous to walk on, but everywhere you look there is something extraordinary. At high tide, the waves crash, and water surges between the rocks. I recorded this with a boom pole held just inches from the water, so the rocks would shield the microphone from the concussive gusts of wind. As a result, the waves sound distant, but the rushing of water through the rocks is very close and clear.

Just feet from where this was recorded, we’ve spotted dolphins, bald eagles, and a variety of shorebirds, and we’ve watched many neoprene-clad surfers wait patiently for the next wave.

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The last couple of weeks have been tough. My thoughts have been far away with an old friend who has been in an accident. I have often had to pull my thoughts back to the here-and-now so I can focus on simple tasks. Most of the time, my thoughts are in a distant past with my old friend.

I will be releasing these little audio meditations every other week from now on. For inexplicable reasons, I decided at the last minute that this week’s selection would be new rather than something I’ve been sitting on for a while. So this was recorded on Thursday afternoon while I was walking along the banks of a swollen Clark Fork River near the confluence with the Bitterroot River. This area is known as Kelly’s Island and it’s a place that I have photographed many times. But taking photos and recording audio are not the same. Often when I’ve tried to record in this spot I find the noises of town are just too near and too invasive. This recording is by no means free of extraneous noise, but the jet taking off from Missoula Airport in this recording seemed for some reason to add an element of departure or journey that I could appreciate.

It takes me back to my childhood when I would lie in the grass of our backyard and look up at vapor trails in the blue sky. I imagined all the places the people on those planes we coming from and going to. As happens in dreamy minds like mine, these flights, which were always adventures on a par with Saint-Exupérys flights in the Sahara, were in reality mundane commuter flights from Reno to Omaha or Boise to Oklahoma City traversing a Colorado summer sky.

A daydreamer, you might say: then and now.

I should say that the normal rushing sounds of the river as it fights its way over rocks and deadwood are somewhat muted in this recording because the river this time of year runs high with spring runoff. Much of the rocky ground where I set up and photograph in fall and winter is now submerged under several feet of water. The river looks much wider and more formidable now, but it is also much quieter. The first bit of this recording is mostly the birds in the cottonwoods along the banks. Then the jet takes off and as it does, I turn slowly to the river which you can hear as the jet engines disappear in the distance.

Again, this is a simple field recording of a peaceful place in western Montana in late spring/early summer. May it bring you a moment of welcome solace in which to daydream for yourselves.

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This is another post in which I share audio recorded in a forest near my home in Montana. In it, you hear a variety of birds including two pileated woodpeckers who hammered their rhythms back and forth across the forest in a strange call-and-response. This is field audio recording: just me, with a shotgun microphone and a boom pole in a forest, listening to the sounds of the world, and recording it so that it may be shared with you. It is quiet, and I hope it adds a moment of texture and relaxation to your day.

For the last few years, I have used photography to guide me out into the world at a time when the world has tried very hard to keep me sequestered at home. Through the pandemic, photography has lured me from my comfortable chair in my sheltered house and pushed me to drive all over the American West and most of New England.

Without my cameras, I would never have gotten out the door. I must admit that the writing has been secondary, and while I do write a great deal while traveling, most of what people read has been reworked later. What gets written on the road is always the start of something, rarely the end.

In recent months, recording audio has become as much a motivator as photography.

Recording audio was something I started doing while working as a digital journalist. For well over 10 years, it has been a tool I use for story gathering. In my newspaper days, I would record interviews because neither my memory nor my note-taking skills were reliable and I could always pull accurate quotes from recordings. Very quickly, as I was the digital news person in mostly traditional print news environments, I started pushing for audio as a supplemental or even standalone product. I started adding audio and video to print stories for online editions and pushing reporters to release podcasts instead of simply blogging.

In my time at Mamalode Magazine, I launched and produced a podcast in which I even took to the microphone (not something I had ever been interested in) and I interviewed a bunch of fascinating people; filmmakers, writers, musicians, and business people. I never stopped hating the sound of my own voice, but I loved the conversations I was able to have.

I’ve since done much more of this but without a specific home. Some of my audio interviews are easy enough to find. Others have mysteriously disappeared.

Recently, I participated in a conversation with other Substack users about podcasting on the platform and I very quickly realized that what I wanted to do with field audio recordings was somewhat unique on the platform. That’s both good and bad. Doing something unique means you are more able to distinguish yourself and what you do. But doing something unique is often bad because it is so much harder for people to figure out what you are doing. Fortunately for me, I’m doing what my interest and instincts tell me is the best way to present the world, and at this point in my life, with the world in the state it is in, I’m very comfortable presenting the world as I find it. No need for intro or outro music or lots of fancy sound design and editorial sculpting. I just try to select what I share with some care. (If you are interested in that sort of thing, check out some of the more narrative audio experiments I’ve been doing with “found audio” on Soundcloud.)

This is the third field audio recording I’m posting to this newsletter, and with it, I am ready to make it a much more regular thing. If you like it, please let me know. If you don’t, you are welcome to let me know as well. So far, the audio I’ve posted has gotten more attention than what I write. I’ll take that as a sign of interest.

You may not have noticed, but I’ve always disabled comments on my posts except to paid subscribers. I’m going to open comments to all on these publicly shared audio posts. Let me know what you think.

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Today is Earth Day, so I’m releasing this little soundscape to everyone. Back in December, I posted some audio in which I boldly stated that there was more audio in the works. Well, it’s been a long winter. Just yesterday morning we awoke to a new dusting of snow. But the Red-Winged Blackbirds are nesting in the cattails near my house, so this morning, I sat and listened/recorded.

The birds quickly took notice of my microphone (which is covered in a furry “dead cat” to reduce wind noise.) They didn’t like the microphone, so I tried to hold it low to the ground where it would be less intrusive. This resulted in a bit of pole noise. There were a couple brief (but noticeable) gusts of wind as well. That’s the name of the game this time of year in Montana.

This recording was made on April 21, 2022, with a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic with a Rycote dead cat on a boom pole. Recorded on a Zoom H4N recorder.

As with any field recording, I recommend listening with headphones if you have them. I hope you enjoy.

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Photo: Deux petits escargots, Ménerbes, Provence, July 2018

“HopeSmiles from the threshold of the year to come,Whispering 'it will be happier'...”

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

Welcome to a short audio post in which I wish you all a very happy New Year, and take you to a warm summer evening in 2018 in the south of France to hear the evening chorus of the cicadas.

Happy New Year!

— Leland

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