The title caught your attention. Was it the borrowed bit of Springsteen lyric coupled with that odd word in the subtitle, or the danger of taking a messianic name in vain? I do hope that such in-vanity is venal compared to the scarletude of the mortal sins that follow, but whatever may be the divine judgment, voila, you turned right to this chapter, so you’re no better off than the other sinners. I know you’re eager to hit the road and see who’s in the sidecar, but you’ll have to cool your twin-cams until the next chapter. Right now our trusty steed is up on blocks in the living room, so be patient. We have work to do first, but you won’t be disappointed.
We need some tools, and tools are not very exciting. Here’s something boring to consider: Philosophical discussions really need to begin with an explicit “ontology,” that is, an explicit specification of what entities, processes, and modes of existence will be under discussion. Not only does good ontology inhibit needless verbal disputes later, but it also forces us into a reflective frame of mind, a frame of mind in which we ask ourselves what Martin Heidegger called “the Question.”1
In the coffee houses they would say it in German—die Frage, or die Seinsfrage, if they are feeling especially full of themselves.2 One rule of the coffee house is that one should never say anything in English that could be expressed with greater gravitas in a dead language; failing that, use German for the ominous ideas, French for the dismissive ideas, and while Italian is only for the posers too gauche to realize that Italian is not chic, at least it isn’t English.
Returning to “the Question,” it is a way of launching a sneak attack on things we already vaguely understand (and presume in our thinking), but which we have failed to make explicit. When we have slunk quietly behind our quarry (the quarry is our own vague awareness), we pop up, say “boo!” and then wait to see what comes running our way. But there are lots of ways to sneak and slink, lots of ways to say “boo!” and still more ways to list and count the things we catch sight of as we flush out the truthy little frightened quails.
In the case of the splendid Dr. Heidegger, he did something he called “fundamental ontology,” which outlines the bare essentials one must assume in approaching the Question of Being, oh, wait, I mean die Seinsfrage. He transforms that venerable question from “why is there something rather than nothing?” into the slightly less obvious “what sort of being asks such an impossible question?” It turns out, after much hand wringing, that the answer is, “well, the sort of being who asks that question is one that has a problem with its own being—and that would be me, and maybe also you, but definitely me.”
But according to Heidegger’s zealous and numerous followers, none but the Master himself is deep enough or smart enough to carry out the weighty task of Fundamental Ontology (the capital letters are my own, but I think I can hear them in their tone of voice when I am in the presence of such self-importance, all of them driving BMW cages in blissful ignorance of the fact that Bayerische Motoren Werke ever even made a motorcycle). I am inclined to let the snobs have their Fundamental Ontologies (and if you are one of them, you are not welcome to ride with me, let alone work on my bike) while I go after something more suited to their estimation of my depth, or lack thereof (estimation, I mean, not depth).
As William Blake noted, it is a better testament to your character to count some kinds of people among your critics than among your admirers.3 I think Blake would have fared poorly at a Harley rally, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. His trouble was that he whined about his critics all the time and made enemies needlessly. Perhaps the Blake scholars (and there are many more of these than the world really needs) would be offended, but sometimes I just want to shake some sense into the odd little guy: “Just do the pictures, Bill, write the words. Don’t waste your energy on the idiots who don’t get it.” But no, he couldn’t let it go, and so he immortalized his own enemies, none of whose names would even remain to us but for his whining. So I won’t bother calling the Heideggerians by name; let history swallow them if it wants to, or me, or both.
Ontologies of the sort I want you to consider are motivated by questions. Whenever you find a question that you know the answer to, but you don’t know why you are so sure of yourself, you have the makings of an ontology. But there are so many questions and so little time. We should choose our questions carefully. I have thought about various possibilities for a guiding question in this chapter. I must have settled on a question or you wouldn’t be reading this. I think most people will quickly see that this question has a lot of torque; it is indirect, but it will take us far if we can free ourselves for the trip.
My guiding question is: “Would Bruce Springsteen ride a Honda?”
First off, I don’t mean “Has Bruce ever ridden a Honda?” Maybe he has, but ours is not a factual question about Springsteen’s biography, it is about two cultural icons, Springsteen and Honda, icons that press upon us an immediate contrast. Our imaginations try to place Bruce on the Honda, and we have a sense of what Walt Disney called the “plausible impossible.”4 We feel we are imagining a fiction when we try to place Bruce on the Honda. We all know Bruce would not “ride a Honda” in the intended iconic sense, even if curiosity or circumstance might have led him actually to try one out at some point. But how do we know the answer to this question with such confidence? It seems like a Hog of a question, and everyone knows that taking ownership of a Harley means a commitment to learning how to work on it, but even lesser bikes have maintenance issues. I mean, you don’t want to be at the mercy of the guy who owns the repair shop, right? The quality of his mercy is pretty strained, nay, it fairly tears a ligament in giving you what you deserve.
In what follows we will first explore this answer to our principal question and collect our insights like needed parts (and I do not mean cheap after-market knock-offs; let the shade-tree mechanics use those—we work only with parts that would make Milwaukee raise a glass—or at least Tokyo), and one by one install them. Eventually we will have a question that purrs, and later we may take it out for a ride, but what more did you really expect? You want the meaning of life? Go see the Dalai Lama.
Would Bruce ride a Honda? No. But before we can get to the stuff that is so boss about the answer, we need to spend some time tinkering with the question while we’re still in the ontological living room (yes, we work on this bike in the living room, not in the garage; if you are worried about the mess, go read a different chapter). Put on some old clothes in case you get substances on yourself.
We learn much about the value of the question when we imagine variations. Ontologists always imagine variations.5 I think the question needs to be formulated just as it is, and not, for example, “would Bruce ride a Harley?” to which the answer is “duh.” That question leads us nowhere we have not already been, many times, although maybe we could have an interesting chat about what model Harley Bruce should ride, if you only knew more about it. The question also cannot be “would Woody Guthrie ride a Honda?” which is a jarring enough question, but I fear it is too great a project for any but Heidegger and his most profound followers. Indeed, that Woody Guthrie question is just one short step away from the Seinsfrage.
A much more predictable conversation could be had if we asked “would Jesus ride a Honda or a Harley?” To this one, we can all agree he wouldn’t ride a Honda (see below), but I fear we would be split over the Harley question, with a small minority insisting not only that Jesus would ride a Harley, but that he actually did enter Jerusalem on a Hog (which may explain why things soon started looking like Glen Hanson’s demise in Easy Rider—am I the only one who has noticed the similarity between that scene and Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ?). This is my own view, in fact; not that Jesus would ride a Harley, but that he actually did. But let’s keep it light. I think we can easily agree on the Bruce part of the question. Maybe Jesus on a Harley, definitely Bruce, no Honda for either one.
The “Honda” part of the question is equally crucial. It’s an uncomfortable truth that there are two manufacturers of real motorcycles in the world today. One is Harley-Davidson, the other is Honda. The rest are wanna-be’s. I am not saying Suzuki and Yamaha have made no real bikes. They made and make inferior Hondas.6 I am not saying BSA, Triumph, Norton, and Indian never made real bikes. They made and make inferior Harleys.7 Here is another uncomfortable truth: Honda knows how to make a motorcycle.8 Hondas are fast, they are efficient, they last forever, they require very little maintenance, and yes, they even look good (to the middle-class, suburban eye). After some initial experiments, Harley-Davidson made the decision soon after Hondas appeared in the U.S. market not even to compete, and Honda reciprocated (initially at least).9 It was a sign of mutual respect, and while Harley-Davidson learned some lessons from Japan, and taught Japan as many, H-D also showed a great awareness of what makes a Harley a Harley, that ineffable something (that je ne sais quoi, if you need a phrase to go with your cappuccino) that would be lost if certain paths were followed. Harley-Davidson was unwilling to make McMotorcycles. It is worth noting that Honda also makes the best cages in the world. Harley-Davidson will not be trying to compete there either. Our first needed parts in this rebuild project: most battles are won or lost in the choosing, and there is no dishonor in letting someone else make a buck you never needed anyway. How different corporate America would be if it grasped this lesson!
Thus, I claim, we ask “would Springsteen ride a Honda?” precisely because it’s the most informative contrast available to us. Honda makes an outstanding bike and they always did. The question is about a profound relation between, on the one side, very defensible, conservative, thrifty middle-class values and on the other side, well, a somewhat impractical craving for freedom from those same values (not to reject them wholesale, but to take or leave them, as conscience and the sense of self may demand).
So what does Honda mean? Again, we seek contrast. By way of illustration, for instance, we intuitively recognize the ridiculousness of a Honda with extended forks. There are some things that just ought not be tricked out, like June Cleaver in a thong and pasties or a Honda 750 with extended forks (the 750 is still the “manliest” bike Honda ever made, but even it is something that could be respectably featured in an article for Redbook). The Honda as an icon helps us understand that this is a contrast not just of values, but of fundamental—even existential—relations. The truth is that Bruce could never love a Honda with all the madness in his soul, and the reason can be summed up in this phrase: Honda cannot make a suicide machine.
Honda cannot make a suicide machine because that would contradict every value they have poured into their bikes from the first. In fact, this is part of the reason we all know Jesus wouldn’t have ridden a Honda. He had no use for middle-class values of this sort. What we may disagree on is whether he went into Jerusalem in a final act of defiance and there committed suicide willingly by the hands of others. But if he did that, he did it on a Harley, because a Harley is not first and foremost a bike or even a machine. A Harley is a decision about life and what makes it valuable, and how it needs to be lived. When that decision comes to be embodied and epitomized in a machine, we call it a Harley. Here we have another needful part: Harley-Davidson, as cultural icon, represents not a machine first or foremost, but an existential decision and the life that follows upon it. We will seek to understand that decision and the philosophies that accompany it in the next chapter, when we hit the road, but we are not quite finished tinkering with this question. We have seen “it’s not just a bike, it’s a choice,” but have we understood it?
A narrative may help to bring this point into greater relief. With your indulgence, I want to rehearse a scene from my own youth that has been replayed tens of millions of times in other lives in the last forty years, with incidental variations. Many of you will recognize the story. My father, like so many men of his generation, rose to become a successful professional from a humble background. He capitulated in 1975 (after much cajoling, maybe even a little whining) to my adolescent pleas for a motorcycle. Like any father of that day and age, he would “make this a learning process” for me. I would learn about all the different motorcycles available, within a determined price and power range, and then we would make an informed purchase. After reading the available materials, a Wednesday was designated during which we would visit each dealership, but we would not be buying a motorcycle that day—this was made perfectly clear. We would narrow our choices and return to the dealers whose offerings impressed us, and we would pay a fair price, and we would know what a fair price was. Such were the preordained values. And while the best trade plans of micely men can sometimes turn askew, sometimes they don’t.
Now, there are two types of fathers in such situations: there are those who take their sons to the Harley-Davidson dealership, and then there are fathers who are willing to be taken there. No father who consents to having an adolescent son of his on a bike at all is likely to rule out the Harley in advance. Those Harley-less fathers and the ones who simply say “no” to their sons’ pleas for a bike are the same class of fathers. Their sons, on account of the fathers’ restrictions, will eventually learn on their own (or spend the rest of life wishing they had), that it takes a minimum of two men to bring a boy to manhood, and that the boy chooses the second man, not the father. Saying “no” to a son who is serious about his request for a bike is a fast way to insure that the boy will choose a mentor whose values are quite unlike his father’s; he will certainly choose a mentor whom his father would reject, perhaps for the very reason that his father would reject such a spirit guide. Fathers reading this, be advised: If the boy wants a bike, you will do well to make that possible for him. If your girl wants a bike, best of luck. I have no advice for you. Girls on bikes and girls on horses are all quite appealing—even unappealing women become strangely intriguing astride a great beast or a great machine, for reasons I would do better not to investigate too closely, but I have the sense that it is for the girl and her mother to work out the wherefores.
My own father was willing to be taken to the Harley dealership. The one quirk in my personal narrative is that the episode occurred during the one year that H-D offered a 90cc bike.10 In some ways, 1975 was the pivotal year not only for me, but for Harley-Davidson and Honda, because the territory of the imaginations of American mass culture was being divvied up at just that moment, and my own decision about a bike illustrated the moment pretty nicely. A few years before, Honda had introduced its SL 70cc enduro bike (street legal, but suitable for trail riding, which was then a growing craze), and Harley had entered the fray with the 90cc enduro bike made by Aermacchi. The latter bore the Harley name, however, and the name already meant what it still means today.
I will return to my narrative in a moment, but we have a bolt stuck here and we need an impact wrench. Peter Fonda’s “Captain America” seems to have clinched the iconic standing of the Harley, which had long been associated with a certain conception of freedom and individualism, but in the wake of Easy Rider, the popular imagination had crystallized around this idea. Part of the genius of Captain America was its symbolic insistence upon the association of patriotism with this very notion of freedom and individualism—this bike gave us permission to think for ourselves about what devotion and loyalty to the ideals of America really means, and the irony that this bike conveyed its rider towards making a drug deal (outside of the current laws) is also a source of creative tension. Brilliant. It’s worth pausing to consider how Dennis Hopper’s film and its impact would have been different if Fonda had ridden any other bike (not just a non-Harley, but even any Harley other than Captain America). It is dangerous to make assertions about “might-have-beens,” or what analytic philosophers like to call “counterfactuals,” because no evidence can exist that fully demonstrates the falseness of such assertions. But with that disclaimer noted, I want to suggest that the film becomes close to meaningless without the rolling American flag. That bike is the iconic key to the kingdom, not only of that one film, but to the kingdom of America the Paradoxical. It is not an accident that our celluloid sacrificial lamb, Glen Hanson, is a rogue lawyer incognito, and that, symbolically, it is precisely the law that suffers a brutal death at the hands of those who believe themselves to be defending it and its ideals, because, after all, the letter kills the spirit, according to Jesus, just as surely as the rednecks kill Glen Hanson.
Predictably, the Honda and the Harley were the finalists in my father’s version of bowling-for-buddy-pegs. The Wednesday for purchasing arrived, about as slowly as Christmas (another notion we wouldn’t have without Jesus, not so much Christmas, but the idea that it is slow—he sure took his sweet time showing up, what with Babylonians and Assyrians running amuck, and all those depressing lamentations, I mean, incarnate already, would ya? Christ in a sidecar!).
We went to the Honda dealership first. Immediately the salesman (wrongly) guessed that the decision would actually rest with my father. He proceeded to explain the practicality of the (new) XL 70, its four-stroke engine, its low maintenance requirements, its reliability, its lower price, its superior resale value, its safety features (he even dared to offer my father the optional governor for the carburetor that would keep me below 35 mph). Upon learning that the Harley was his competitor in our case, he freely trashed it. “That Dago junker? . . .” he said, after checking my dad’s card to make sure our name wasn’t Delvecchio or Altabello. The Honda dealer had an impressive command of the factors bearing upon WASPish middle-class values, and an equally impressive set of prejudices to back them up. But he also had a pretty good little bike.
At the Harley dealership, the salesman was a biker. He correctly surmised within two or three minutes of observing me and my father that the decision was actually mine to make, although my father had never said as much to me—I guess dad was watching to see what I would do, and the biker recognized it. My Harley salesman was therefore speaking to a fourteen-year-old kid. He never had a bad word to say about the Honda XL 70. He was asking me what I wanted without making comparisons. I learned that the Harley was quite powerful, had a much higher top-end speed, and I already knew it was cooler by far. Without saying so, the Harley salesman helped me understand that this decision was about who I was and wanted to be. The Harley had a two-stroke engine, requiring me to mix the oil and gas. It sat higher off the ground. It was very cool. I still want a Z90.
I chose the Honda (without the governor, thank you very much, top speed of 50 m.p.h.). I apologize to the readers who would have wished for the opposite choice. If I had chosen the Harley, someone else would be writing this chapter, or maybe no one would write it. I would be doing something else, or be dead. To make matters worse, I subsequently chose five or six more Hondas over the next thirty years (more about that in the next chapter). My father would have allowed the Harley choice and supported it, but his personal values had been imparted to me without being forced on me, and he was pleased with my choice. I could tell.
And I was actually honest with myself—in the sense that I realized I could not self-honestly ride a Harley. I already liked Peter, Paul and Mary and Don McLean better than Led Zeppelin and the Stones, and I secretly thought Steppenwolf was very noisy. Would I compensate for my own sentimentality with a big bike, or just confess it? I belong on a Honda. I am pleased that I look just as comfortable on a ratty Honda as on a sleek new one, but a Honda it must be. I always admired the guys who belonged on the Harleys and I wanted their friendship. And I detested the guys who chose Harleys and did not deserve to ride them.11 It quickly became evident to me that there is room in the world of loyal bikers for a guy who belongs on a Honda, so long as he knows who he is and does not pose or make a fool of himself by lying to others or to himself about it. This is the part we need to get our bike running, that and our metric ontological tools, for, as you can see, we’ve been working on a Honda. I just put it in the living room to scare you.
But that Harley dealer could see that I did not care how the motorcycle really worked, I just wanted the ride. He did not say “buy the Honda,” but he knew I would. I was headed for the coffee house already. I can easily recall that the reason I gave myself at the time was that the Harley sat a little too high off the ground (in retrospect, the symbolism of that seems right), and that the two-stroke engine would be a hassle. What kind of kid is deterred from buying his first Harley by a two-stroke engine? The sort of kid who needs to be riding a Honda and buying Don McLean records. This is not merely about convenience or predilection, it is about identity, sense of self, core values.
It’s true that some choose to serve appearances in making such decisions, some chasing after what they believe others will see as “cool,” others attempting to please the expectations of a parent. Such persons will have more complicated journeys to self-understanding than those who confront the decision for what it truly is. The ones who choose their rides based on appearances have been consumed in what Heidegger calls the “they self,” or in German (since this is a very ominous idea) das Man, which is the self that conceals its own fundamental modes of existing in order to live inauthentically, caught up in the world of images and slogans and RVs. Bikers have more straightforward terms for such people, such as “assholes,” but the nomenclature isn’t crucial here. We will leave such persons to the things they believe are important. But in the domain of those who confront existential issues more directly, Robert Frost would have appreciated the depth of the choice between a Harley and a Honda and would have been able to summarize it better. For me, the road more traveled was the right call, but it still leaves one many delightful miles to go before one sleeps.
Yes, this seems to be the spare part we needed to get our question running. I might be too lazy to mix gas and oil, but there is more than one kind of laziness. We haven’t been lazy about our question. Let’s check it over, see if this beast will start before we take it on the open road. We asked: would Bruce ride a Honda? We knew he would not. We considered variations on the question. We discovered that Bruce and Jesus have something in common, which can be summarized as: “live free or die,” as they say in New Hampshire. Both Jesus and Bruce have a passion, meaning they are open to the world, a certain intense ontological longing, they “want to know love is wild” and “want to know if love is real.” That mode of existing, the “passion of the Boss,” is compatible with mounting a suicide machine, whether it takes one to the “mansions of glory,” or Highway 9, or Sturgis, or Golgotha. The cultural ontology of the suicide machine shows us something about identity and the moment of decision. It has shown us America the Paradoxical and the ambiguous relationship between freedom and self-knowledge.12
__________
1 Many trees have given their lives in service of discussing the Question of Being, but the first trees to offer themselves in sacrifice probably came from the Black Forest in about 1926, since Heidegger’s book, Sein und Zeit, first appeared in 1927. The two-part introduction to this work sets out Heidegger’s phenomenological method and raises the Question of Being. For a recent translation, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), Sections 1–8, 12–36.
2 Of course, one question leads to another, so if you are very adventurous and would like to investigate the Question surrounding the Question, see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
3 Blake had lots of ways of saying this, but one of my favorite is: “Thy friendship has oft made my heart to ake: / Do be my Enemy—for Friendship’s sake” (Rosetti MS, LXXXIV). Another nice one is “To H[ayley]: You think Fuseli is not a Great Painter. I’m Glad./ This is one of the best compliments he ever had.” One may find tasty little epigrams like these scattered in Blake’s manuscripts that immortalize names such as Flaxman, Cromek, Stothard, Macklin, Boydel, Bowyer, and Hayley that we surely would have lost but for Blake’s scribbling complaints. See John Sampson, The Poetical Works of William Blake (Williamstown: Corner House, 1978 [1905]), 204–210, 212–16 (Rosetti MS, L–LXX, LXXVI–LXXXV). In Blake’s defense, he never published these remarks, but he did set them to the page. As for whining, I guess I should go easier on Bill—after all, I was never tried for High Treason. I am confident that it is a drag, and I might whine a little bit myself about that.
4 Walt Disney explained the principle of “the plausible impossible” in Episode 55 of The Wonderful World of Disney, originally aired on ABC (31st October, 1956)—the series moved to NBC in 1961); it is part two of a trilogy called “The Art of Animation,” and is currently available as part of the Walt Disney Treasures DVD set called Behind the Scenes at the Walt Disney Studios (dir. A.L. Werker, J. Handley, December 2002), ASIN B00006II6P. For the phenomenological basis of Disney’s principle, see Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Humanities Press, 1931), §23, pp. 90–92.
5 For an explanation of the method of imaginative variation, see Husserl, ibid., §§68–70, pp. 195–201. For an explanation of the explanation (trust me, you’ll need it), see Erazim Kohák, Idea and Experience: Edmund Husserl’s Project of Phenomenology in Ideas I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 143–47.
6 I use the word “inferior” advisedly, being well aware of the excellence of some other bikes, especially Yamahas. Honda and Yamaha fought it out for world pre-eminence among the Japanese manufacturers in a war that nearly buried Harley-Davidson in the early 1980s, but I speak here not of the specific history but of the battle for supremacy in the public mind, for the status of “cultural icon.” If this were a matter of history rather than philosophy we might pursue these issues, but my claim has to do with things everyone knows, which is that history has proclaimed Honda the victor, regardless of whether there may be some Yamahas that were in some sense superior. That’s why “Yamaha” is a friggin’ piano in the mind of John Q. Much has been written on this historic battle between Honda and Yamaha, but for something suitably compact, see Greg Field’s short essay “H-D vs. Japan,” in The Harley-Davidson Century, edited by Darwin Holstrom (St. Paul: MBI, 2004), pp. 206–07. I certainly confess that Suzuki, Kawasaki, and Yamaha have made some impressive crotch-rockets, but the later agreements with Erik Buell have lifted Harley into a position of great respect even among the sport-bike enthusiasts. Buell and Harley certainly are of a feather, even if H-D was slower to recognize Buell’s genius as an engineer than they should have been.
7 As above, this is a matter of the historical outcome in the battle for cultural supremacy, not a judgment about technical achievement or actual history, regarding which more subtlety of argument is needed.
8 I do not deny that a wealth of literature and judgment exists from Harley partisans that trashes the quality of Hondas, but there is a more balanced and sober literature that recognizes in the words of Greg Field, “Soichiro Honda’s genius,” and while Field specifically had in mind the electric starter in saying this, he adds that Honda knew “motorcycles would never appeal to the masses until they were just . . . as reliable as a car” (The Harley-Davidson Century, p. 127).
9 The history is complicated, but again, please refer to Greg Field, “H-D vs. Japan” in The Harley-Davidson Century, pp. 206–07.
10 This bike, the Z90, was actually made by Aermacchi, an Italian manufacturer with which H-D collaborated for a number of years after 1960. It was quickly apparent that competing with the Japanese on smaller models was a losing proposition in many senses for H-D, and the 90cc bike was never offered again, nor was there anything else smaller than 54ci until after 1995. See The Encyclopedia of the Harley-Davidson by Peter Henshaw and Ian Kerr (Edison: Chartwell Books, 2004), p. 172.
11 So I wrote this essay mainly while camping at the Kerrville Folk Festival in May and June of 2005 (which should be pretty telling, I mean, it’s not exactly Daytona), and parked down in the recently added RV lots is this guy with the biggest RV I have ever seen, and I walk by one day and he’s got this tricked out purple Harley parked by his home-away-from-home (I am well aware of this practice at the actual rallies, but hear me out). So I pause as he is lounging by his rolling Biltmore, drinking a pretty pricey pinot noir: “Nice RV,” I say, with ascending intonation. A pause. “Thanks,” said he. Another pause. “Nice Harley,” descending intonation, just a hint of a sigh. I walk on. I’m thinking, “I wonder how he pulls that RV with 54ci. . . .” Enough said.
12 It’s difficult to believe that there really could be another essay by an academic philosopher on this subject, but there is. For a very different take on almost exactly the same subjects, see Douglas R. Anderson, “Born to Run: Male Mysticism on the Road,” in his book Philosophy Americana (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).