I came to know David as a singularly skilled teacher and mentor with a fathomless knowledge of history. He was also a remarkably imaginative and divergent thinker who also always managed to bring his ideas to a re-convergence, but only after they had meandered far afield and gathered lots of pollen. Examples abound. Here are some things I remember.<\/p>\n
He wrote a novel I had the pleasure of reading\u2013The Shiva Battery\u2013that premised the invention of a battery cell that never lost its charge: a sort of 21st century reincarnation of a 17th century perpetual motion machine. The mysterious inventor of the battery lived somewhere in remote, mountainous northern India and his altogether too terse press release explaining how the battery worked\u2014indeed it did work!\u2013involved a cryptic interplay of Hindu cosmology and particle physics. It was a fascinating book. It took the reader from behind closed doors at Fox newsroom headquarters\u2014they weren\u2019t at all happy about what this meant for BP and Exxon Mobil\u2014to the cities and hinterlands of the Indian subcontinent, where the protagonist\u2013an intrepid US journalist\u2013quested in hope of interviewing the reclusive inventor and shedding more light on the inner-workings of this remarkable new technology. As you can see, it\u2019s a story that goes in all manner of directions, and all over the globe in the process. And doesn\u2019t it sound fascinating? That was David.<\/p>\n
I had the great fortune to TA for a course he taught in Integrative Social Sciences. This was a history of social science in the 20th century US that also combined\u2013improbably but incredibly effectively\u2013a history of contemporary social movements and a history of American music. If there was anyone equipped to teach such a course, it was David. I learned a tremendous amount about history and music from this class, and so did the undergrads. The students adored him.<\/p>\n
I remember one lecture, David was set on showing that music, like anything else, has a history. It might sound like it had descended from the Spheres, but in fact its whole relational system of tones and tempos is built. People made it. There was a piano in the lecture hall. David played a major scale, and explained there was a long and gradual process of consensus that led to the acceptance of the intervals that we now know as this timeless scale. Then he played\u2014to himself, noodling around\u2013the major scale of chords. This became an impromptu version of Bill Withers\u2019 \u201cLean on Me\u201d (which is built on this scale of chords). The students loved it\u2014lots started clapping on the beat, a few started singing.<\/p>\n
There was another lecture he gave on George Lakoff\u2019s \u2018cognitive framing\u2019 and the power of negative presences (i.e. \u201cdon\u2019t think of an elephant!\u201d). He stressed how this feature of thought and language could work as a powerful rhetorical tool in the hands of politicians and policy makers. \u2018How can you not think of an elephant, once I\u2019ve told you not to?\u2019 David said to the class. We all tried very hard not to. This then led him to muse extemporaneously on elephants themselves\u2014their remarkable memory, their gentleness, their peregrinations, their lovably ambling disheveled-ness as they made their way together, wherever they were going. When I think of David now, I do not think of an elephant.<\/p>\n
David pointed me in all sorts of different directions that ended up being invaluable to my research. But these were directions I simply could not have known would be useful at the outset. This is the hindsight of history. Yet, it was a hindsight that David\u2013over his long experience studying history\u2013had cultivated as a kind of foresight. He knew I\u2019d have to meander. I\u2019d stop by his office, lost in the leaves of my project, and in a rush to get out of the thicket. He\u2019d slow me down. \u2018Sit down, sit down,\u2019 he\u2019d say. And I\u2019d plop into the arm chair he kept for visitors in the corner\u2014it was very hard to get out of once you were in it\u2014and I\u2019d recount what little trails I had come across recently in my reading and I\u2019d ask him where he thought they led.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I came to know David as a singularly skilled teacher and mentor with a fathomless knowledge of history. He was also a remarkably imaginative and divergent thinker who also always managed to bring his ideas to a re-convergence, but only after they had meandered far afield and gathered lots of pollen. Examples abound. Here are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95,"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bailey.history.msu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}