Talk:Harvey Sacks/Archive 1

There seems to be an edit war going on here. One wonders who it is that is deleting David Sudnow's additions. Please identify yourself. (This should not be read as an endorsement of Sudnow or said additions.) In defense 20:35, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

NPOV Dispute, On Sudnow edits
130.182.30.251 02:21, 9 May 2007 (UTC) Sudnow you are right on the money but whats worse is that the ill treatment you'v experienced is going on in so many parts of society. These marginalized individuals need some one with your insight and intelect to articulate this topic through research for the masses. This topic of labeling someone who is JUSTIFIABLY angry as a reactionalry method as mentally ill. However you and I both know that this is a diversion tactic simply put into action to discredit the victim.

I removed the passages that are completely irrelevant to the encylopedic entry, including

Because this "Wikipedia" is a most strange website (to put it politely), where literally 'anyone' can, willy nilly, edit postings that are made here (so it's far from an "Encyclopedia" in any historical senses of that term), prior postings about matters referred to here have been deleted.

This posting is not to be edited.

So the pathetic situation of suppression and potential plagiarism has not substantially changed.

I didn't go through the rest of the additions, but I believe it needs to be checked for NPOV and accuracy, the latter due to the lack of any wiki links or citations. Nobi 09:18, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Additional thoughts on Sudnow's POV
Everything after the "Further reading" list is clearly a POV anti-Schegloff screed by someone whose shoulder carries a large chip. In defense 16:29, 17 February 2006 (UT

Like all of us, I stand certainly on the shoulders of giants (e.g., Goffman, Merleau Ponty, Wittgenstein, Husserl), and if anyone had a large chip on his shoulder it was Sacks himself. He was in nearly every respect as egocentric as anyone you'd know. He thought of himself as a reincarnated Freud, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons, not to mention Jesus, Moses and David. He was nearly classifiably psychotic in his estimates of his own import. There were few things about him one could actually like in daily interactions. He was unbearably abrupt towards those whom he didn't respect, and he didn't respect many at all. He made himself the center of every conversation with a host of childish academic mannerisms, borrowed from tales about the styles of his heroes, that manipulated every scene he was involved in. He could hardly tolerate being amongst others and not being "well known".

Despite all this, his work, in its full entirety, in the abbreviations the world has scene from the hands of Jefferson and Schegloff, is clearly brilliant beyond description. While I disagree with all the presuppositions of conversation analysis and most of those of 'ethnomethodology' (scarcely more than set of graduate student papers illustrating Schutzian concepts; not to mention Garfinkel's thoroughgoing dishonesty, in every respect (e.g., the notion, e.g., that he and I "studied" chemistry lectures - we sat, once, through a half hour of a chemistry lecture and then had a half hour conversation afterwards, and this becomes a 'jointly published' article_ - while I disagree with the work of both of these characters, their work, at least Sacks's, is important, and deserves to see the full light of day. Schegloff, whose delusional self concept as the ultimate source of acadmic morality, has 's done Sacks the greatest injustice, and I venture the guess, and it's only that but one strongly felt, that a very close examination of the full corpus of Sacks's writings would reveal sources for many ideas Schegloff every had (I wrote most of his PHD dissertation for him, a fact his office mate at Columbia, Allan Blum, will verify). Schegloff always held himself out as a rabbinical jurisprudent, whose own decisions about how Sacks would have wanted his work developed fortunately coincided so nicely with those ways Schegloff was able to develop it, however meagerly.

I left academia because the head of a department, Sid Aronson, then head of the sociology department at Brooklyn College, bribed two students with A's if they'd testify against the validity of my sociology course because I was using a piano in the classroom (as I was, and a typewriter, talking about the social organization of social conduct). I've stayed away from academia because it strikes me as more hideous, in every respect, than that corporate world of greed and personal selfishness that the academics so readily recognize in their studies of 'the society' but never reflect upon as a feature of their own daily lives. Better the streets and cafes. Better an independent gig of some kind, like teaching the piano, and the freedom to write and think outside the confines of departments, that force us all into artificial labels, too quickly: Conversation Analysis; Ethnomethodology? Only in a meager discipline, with little to deliver on its promises to be rigorous, certainly not alongside the technological achievements elsewhere on campus - only in a meager discipline would a whole field hinge on the work of a couple of guys, who could actually "invent disciplines". In a true science of the full range of social life, Sacks will turn out to be a footnote, on turntaking in talk, and Garfinkel will be reckoned as the American version of Schutz, and, of all twentieth century sociologists, it'll still be Parsons, Merton and Goffman who remain the important intellectual figures, as they indeed were.

It's a pathetic field, and one I was very much in love with. If there's any chip on David Sudnow's shoulder that's your misreading: I escaped the shit you've all had to live through. Because I gained some other skills. I'm a good piano player, and I know how to teach music. But I'm still a "sociologist", and still an "ethnomethodologist", and still a "phenomenologist". Soon you'll be seeing more from me. I'm doing writing on the sociology of the major scale, have a good deal to say about the social shaping of skills and ambiguous relations between teaching and learning, have an enormous corpus of genuine phenomenological writings on the organization of musical melody making, and I'm about to start writing again.

In light of that, I think the past of this whole CA/Ethno thing needs a shake up.

Schegloff really does need to release the full corpus of Sacks writings - every last scrap, and I mean to pester him and others, in every way I can, and I'm happy to write to anyone who's interested in learning more about Sacks' work - I mean to persist to do what is right- get a man's work out in the form he would have completely insisted it be made available; freely, with no ownership, and full and complete access to every last Zettel.

Come across, Schegloff. You have a responsibility to lots of younger people who need full unfettered access to all this work.

PS. The suggestion I've seen in certain places that I, David Sudnow, am somehow 'stalking' Schegloff, and even a suggestion that I suffer from some mental illness wherein this 'stalking' is symptomatic of things to come - I've seen and laugh at such bunk. I'm a person who is angry over the treatment of a past colleague's work, just as has everywhere happened throughout the history of all disciplines. That expressions of anger in that context, about that issue - not only with respect to Sacks' work, but in respect to any and all possible instances wherein a person's writings aren't accorded treatment in accordance with what other know would have been their desires - that expressions of anger about that, in particular, are taken to suggest that I have any desire to harm Schegloff physically - why that's simply absurd.

What a shame that standards of "etiquette" in narrow minded academic disciplines so often involve safeguarding worlds from even imaginary threats, constructing imaginary images - e.g., Sudnow as 'terrorist' - treating justifiable anger as the sign of a mental illness - the very things sociologists are to study, not DO - sad that this emerges in borderline "fields" as a way of bolstering their narrow grasp on the world and entitlement to speak so definitely on the basis of no historical or personal understandings!

It's nice to get older, nice not to be in the halls of academe, where cordial relations between colleagues are the sine qua non of 'adulthood', and where expressions of anger are taken as symptomatic, in this calm and peaceful liberal world of ours, of serious trouble, instead of simple signs of frustration with efforts to bring attention to a lousy situation as regards the availability of Sacks' work.


 * Please note well Wikipedia's policy on contentious matters. We are not averse to reporting the existence of controversy. We are bound, under policy, to take a strictly neutral line. Partisan points of view canot be allowed to stand here. Feelings may run high, but all Wikipedia can contain is an impartial account. Charles Matthews 10:10, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

are you the Sudnow?

My memories of Harvey
I was a student of Harvey's in the early '60s at UCLA. At the same time I was also taking courses from Harold Garfinkel. And that was an some intellectual conflict.

Harvey was a incredible lecturer. I can see and hear him now as he presented his material. He was a thinker on his feet in classes. You had the feeling he was doing his reseach anaylysis as he talked.

I found him to be a wonderful person. I knew little of his personal life but he was always a friendly person to me. He sometimes turned on his tape recorder when I asked him questions. That is not a testament to my questions. That is an example of how much he valued his thought.

His death was a shock to all of us. His mind lives on.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.197.207.7 (talk • contribs)