Moving past our time-based posts so far this year, we were going to write about names and roles today. We were specifically intent on contrasting Trump’s infantile name-calling of ex-FBI Director James Comey (“Showboat” “Nut job”, “Slime ball”), with the latter’s focus, in his new book A Higher Loyalty and his recent interviews, not on names, but on roles, comparing Trump to a mob boss (with his ‘transactional, ego-driven’ approach) and his basic failings as a president (‘morally unfit’). We intended to connect this recent contrast between names and roles with some reflections on the posts from our two week period from 2016-17 (July 20-Aug 10). Building up to our visit to the Kassel leg of documenta 14, we would have discussed the historical and fictional names of Agrippa (July 20), Rosa Luxemburg (July 22) and Alyce Kaplan (July 24), and the role-playing of Prinz Gholam (after Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden) (July 21) and Rodney Graham (after Manet) (July 23).
As we transitioned to recollecting our time in Kassel, revisiting the sites of dOCUMENTA (13) (immortalized by Enrique Vila Matas) amid the works extending from Athens of documenta 14 (July 25, July 26, July 27, July 28, July 29), we were going to compare Trump and Comey to the pivotal place of names and roles in potlatch ceremonies celebrated by the first nations of the Pacific Northwest coast, which among other life-events with their communities and neighbors, included name-changes and shifting of roles within the tribal structure. (We were especially interested in the Tsimshian tale of Asdi-wâ’l, who became the Potlatch-Giver (Waxayê’0k), in light of the work of documenta 14 curator Candice Hopkins and a talk by Daniel Barbu) We were going to hold forth on why we Classicists always think we are invited? Whatever topic is chosen, there we are, weighing in, setting the agenda, dictating terms. Sure, we are more than often late to the game, but that doesn’t stop us strong-arming our way to a place at the table. (We would have, blushing, realized that Minus Plato has a history of doing this, but were trying to change, reprocessing our daily posts from 2016-17 so as to visibly shed our Classicist affiliations, to stand outside of the discipline, to better critique it, realign it and, perhaps more accurately, decolonize it.) All this we were ready to do when, as it started to snow, we lost ourselves in the playful drama of our fanciful sitcom Three Athenians in Kassel. So, put your cares aside, pull up a chair and come along with us back to Kassel and relive the mundane lives and extraordinary adventures Bia, Alexis and Nina, and their friends:
