a certain amount of flexibility is required in order to become a good historian. this flexibility is particularly important because you will inevitably end up studying the one thing that you promised yourself you would not touch with a 10 foot pole. indeed, you should refrain from making these sorts of promises to yourself. the path to a ph.d. is replete with far more dramatic opportunities to let yourself down.
ayn rand never quite fell into the category of refuse-to-read or refuse-to-study, but i certainly always assumed that i'd have little to no use for her books, given the absolute uselessness of the people i knew who really enjoyed rand.
i am now reading ayn rand. a lot of ayn rand. starting with anthem and working my way forward, i am currently nearing the end of the fountainhead. and i'm finding that ido have little use for rand's books, though not for the reasons i thought i would.
they are pure, unadulterated camp. sure, heavy-handed libertarian moralism infuses the actions, personalities, and personages of every character, but the overall tenor of the fountainhead is that of a politically-charged teen novel - full of melodrama and (forcibly) stolen kisses and clingy dresses and evil geniuses and love triangles.
a definition of camp would include something about an affectation or appreciation of manners and tastes commonly thought to be artificial, vulgar, or banal. this is a fairly broad definition. more specifically, the use of the word "camp" often indicates an appropriation of "high culture" (or what was previously regarded as "high culture") in pursuit of "low culture" ends. there is good camp and bad camp but, as susan sontag notes, the line is fine, and there is nothing worse than camp done poorly: "when something is just bad (rather than camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. the artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish."
camp often involves referencing - a signal that the author knows the history of his or her medium and is deliberately choosing to denigrate it, looking to induce either laughs or discomfort (and often both). sontag observes that "camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. it is the love of the exaggerated, the 'off,' of things-being-what-they-are-not." camp is a stylized form of exaggeration.
in this sense, rand is campy without recognizing the fact. she would hardly lower herself to acknowledging that she has learned anything useful from anyone, though her novels obviously model themselves somewhat on her beloved victor hugo, both in dark tenor and saga-like chapter layout. rand novels are supposed to be gothic novels for the modern (and i mean modern in the early twentieth century asceticist sense) reader.
unfortunately for rand and, perhaps, fortunate for her reader, the careful avoidance of reference or response actually serves to heighten the campiness of the fountainhead and its siblings. and this, i suspect, is what makes them so popular. without reference, one has a much harder time creating depth, and literary depth is the enemy of the uninformed and poorly read pupil. readers work their way up to joyce's ulysses. rand's books, by contrast, sit at the very bottom of the nuance pile. they are accessible in a way that few 700 page books are, and the sheer length of the novels, alongside rand's insistence that they are philosophical treatises, lends an academic aura to writing that would otherwise be considered extremely subpar.
i remember when i first discovered that books had subtexts. i was eight years old, lying in a motel bed en route to my grandmother's house in albany, ny. i was reading a wrinkle in timeand, about 1/3 through, realized that the book was a critique of centralized authority, alongside a liberal religiosity. i remember this moment as sudden, ecstatic illumination, the sense that people kept telling me i was supposed to feel in church but never experienced. if you are aware that you are learning something, you can be actively exhilarated by the process and the fact.
i suspect that ayn rand functions in much the same way for the average reader. there is nothing challenging about her books and they feel vaguely taboo, independent,and - for those who misunderstand the term - intellectual. rand's subtexts and philosophical bent floats just under the surface, and the surface is made of saran wrap. you can see her points coming before they reach you, and her heavy-handed application of lessons is never mitigated by allusions to other writers or references to other philosophies. the historian in me is appalled at the lack of literary and ideological contextualization.
but for many readers - and the ayn rand institute's subsidization of purchase of her novels for classroom use inflates their numbers - reading the fountainhead must be akin to my experience reading a wrinkle in time.
reading ayn rand does not necessarily a libertarian make. one must be predisposed through upbringing or rebellion against that upbringing to embrace her flat set of teachings. but the book's ability to spark a recognition of one's own intellectual capabilities is a powerful tool in the libertarian arsenal, because this approach produces incestuous, cult-like followings. reading madeleine l'engle was part of a continual process that i became aware of in a short moment in a bed that wasn't mine along i90. and i go back to it, reading it every year and finding something new to love each year. i have turned into a socialist feminist who does not believe in or trust institutionalized religion, but i reread this anti-authoritarian, nuclear family-oriented, and occasionally heavy-handed liberal catholic on a yearly basis, with wide-eyed, uncritical wonder.
every person cherishes the book that facilitated the recognition of their personal, individual intellect. i suspect that rand's popularity stems from her ability to spark that recognition. books don't have to be complicated or even well-written in order to play this role. sometimes - too often - nuance is the enemy of influence. and perhaps we should look more seriously at rand's demand that every philosopher be forced to encapsulate his or her philosophy in a work of fiction. the caveat, of course, being that the lessons lying under the storyline ought to be clearly visible through all those words.in other words, your book might garner a devoted readership with the inclusion of a little campiness.
as for me, in my post-eight-year-old life i prefer to stick with the resolutely difficult. a wrinkle in time is a benchmark rather than an endpoint. onwards into the abyss!
david lynch has begun an interview project. his carefully detached delivery maintained throughout, lynch somehow manages to convey a certain sense of caring in this clip - something he generally has a difficult time doing, probably hinged at least in part on the fact that he has spent a career fucking with our collective need to identify linearity in . . . well, everything, including movie plot lines.
and a large part of that queasy removal is strung through these interviews as well. lynch is committed to ambiguity though, so even his most sincere introductory clip has elevator music lilting through the background, and the interview project website hawks a david lynch coffee collection alongside his films.
but this project feels like lynch moving backwards to a movie-making style and approach to humanity more in line with the elephant man, after all these years of twin peaks variations, spin-offs, and shorthands. something like compassion for his subjects lurks underneath lynch's little speeches, and the various clips of interviewees manage to walk the fine, ever-wavering line between voyeurism and genuine curiosity.
not that the very idea of documenting the "real" america by asking questions like "what would you like to do before you die?" and highlighting the little old man who avows that "when i was young, we didn't have toys." pieces of lives that feel like pieces rather than windows into something larger. a distorted real life puzzle resulting not in a whole, but in the amplification of the pieced quality of life and the fact that none of it fits together properly anyway.
but the interview project is not about these backcountry people anyway. this is lynch once again making it known that he is interested in these sorts of stories and people, and the interviews result in a self-deprecating look at who david lynch is, rather than a pastiche of american faces and stories designed to enhance and enlarge the meaning of american life. and david lynch has no interest in helping you to understand him. though he has compared his work (termed "american surrealist" by dennis hopper) to edward hopper's art, for me, francis bacon is always the artist who springs to mind.
lynch is film noir, but the menacing central committee and its shadowed agents and informants have been replaced with something more amorphous and yet personal. an ultimate goal - achieving worldwide communism - has been replaced with a question mark. as a result, you often get the sense that you are in fact to blame, you might be the evil in the world. there is an imperceptible line between waking and dreaming, there is an imperceptible line between sanity and insanity, and there is an imperceptible line between good and evil. so what are you and where are you anyway? even the most accessible of lynch's films explicitly blur these distinctions. lynch is democratic in application as well, for second-rate actresses, midwestern farmers, detectives, and insurance men are all similarly afflicted with realities rife with unreality.
this observation about observing is perhaps more revealing than it is meant to be. lynch films, art, and absurdist commentary are all designed to merge art, money-making, entertainment, voyeurism, philosophy, and social commentary into one impenetrable mass. short films about death, long red and blue dreams, surrealist serials, and realist parables are all, in lynch's world, predictably impenetrable. everyone falls down the rabbit hole together. good thing lynch makes sure we're all properly caffeinated beforehand.
star wars has, indeed, colonized everything. including burlesque.
i imagine that the audience is a bunch of adolescent boys with large red glasses. much like this guy:
quite frankly, i don't entirely understand the obsession with star wars. but then again, i put fried eggs on everything and have an unnatural fear of orchids, so i shouldn't be one to talk.
apparently, the ny times concurs with my negative assessment and makes the very pertinent point that latisse is made by the very same people who brought women the equally beneficial botox treatment.
“There is a very large demand for eyelash enhancement. Eyelashes are a very important part of a woman’s beauty regimen.”
this post is about lists. i am obsessed with lists. a minor case of obsessive-compulsive disorder will get you only so far in life. lists allow you to not only act upon your disorder, but comprehensively catalog its various contours and enshrine these contours in documents, which can be saved and archived and added to over the course of days, weeks, years.
graduate school does not help me fight my addiction. graduate school is an enabler. syllabi are lists. comprehensive exams require lists. dissertations demand that one be able to cross-reference across ever-growing items within lists, creating linear lines of thought through the linking of book after article after speech after book that apparently ought to lead the reader through some sort of argument if you could only put that argument into something explicable.
now there are programs for the list-making addicts. i, up until now, have carefully maintained word documents with lists of books, while remaining devoted to my first list medium, the little red leather notebook. i have a decade of notes on modern art, books, quotes, recipes, and album information, as well as fairly vapid personal thoughts carefully stored away in that little notebook. the handwriting is very neat.
but i occasionally wonder whether my little notebook is obsolete. have i created so many other forms of list that i've effectively listed-over my written notes. redundancies abound. entries cancel one another out.
zotero may effectively replace all my other forms of list-making, condensing, formatting, and expanding data within whatever magical ether aura comprises the internet, which mysteriously extends outwards from my computer(s) into the great beyond.
my knowledge of the internet and technology is so fundamentally underdeveloped that these lists are simply less tangible and real to me, somehow. i still print articles and papers out and write on them. i am a committed book-buyer. i like paper and shelves and boxes. i write too many notes on everything, including napkins and my palms.
in some ways, zotero is too easy to use. because i like lists so much, i find myself essentially shopping for books to read via worldcat, carefully creating new folders and filing away authors and titles. i am collecting. whether the collecting has an end purpose is far less clear and far more important, yet the process is addictive, as are most networking tools on the web. seemingly inexhaustible amounts of information are fed to your computer one manageable piece at a time, obscuring (at least temporarily) the vast network of which the one book title on your screen is a small part.
and people just keep publishing things. this inescapable fact is one of the most infuriating things about academia. there is nothing you can do. people's careers depend upon an apparently limitless production of books that seem absolutely necessary to "the field." your career depends upon the apparently limitless production of books that seem absolutely necessary. suck it up. read the books. write your book. force people to add it to their lists. do a little dance. repeat the process.
not to make the academic process seem overly repetitive. i am a great believer in the infinite nature of interest. i am interested in almost everything, and it's difficult to bore me, so long as you seem like you're mildly interested yourself. a liberal arts education ought to buy you this committed lack of focus. as far as i'm concerned, i can force almost anything to at least relate to something i'm directly interested in, and if it seems like i can't, than the failure can only be chalked up to a lack of imagination on my part.
but this relates to my possible problem with online cataloging systems like zotero - they force you to create linear lists. now, i suppose that i could do the cross-referencing work myself, and i certainly am not naive enough to believe that tech designers far more intelligent than myself will never come up with a handy, easy-to-use, possibly voice-activated system which cross-references my reading lists, folds my laundry, and tucks me in at night. but that, too, involves a loss of control and the need for creative accounting and documentation on my part.
to be entirely truthful, the little red notebook was ordered and out of order at the same time. entries are arranged in the order they were received. they are not alphabetical, they are not organized by topic. topics proceed in a stream-of-consciousness fashion entirely determined by whimsy, which i may possess in over-abundance. like my purposefully never-made bed (an island of unkemptness in an otherwise angular room arrangement), i kept the notebook because itdidn't conform to my unbendingly neat predisposition. that notebook is my form of anarchy. it hardly seems fair that a program like zotero is capable of stripping away one of my few sources of disarray, especially given its ease of use. i added about 300 books to my personal list in just one week. articles have pdf files attached. citation data can be exported into endnotes. placing a book in your queue is almost like having read it.
in my head, the topic-specific folders are color-coded, like this totally bizarre real-life example:
the library appears to be more a fashion statement than an organizational approach. then again, simply sitting in that room is probably like going to see the wizard of oz, sans flying monkey encounters.
perhaps my paranoia about losing a lack of organization is premature, though. i have a sneaking suspicion that i'm absorbing ideologies propagated by the libertarian women i'm currently researching, a tendency to identify with anyone i'm reading canceling out reason.
and to be fair, i have read a great number of the books i filed away. many are titles of books i have sitting on my shelves, the books that are spilling onto the floor because there is no more room on my shelves and they have begun to stack themselves upon one another in a book-made bookshelf for more books. i often compare them to a disease.
i have a feeling that this is my new form of intentional disarray. unfortunately, book collecting is a far more expensive method of staving off ocd than is . . . writing in a notebook. but hey, i take what i can get.
i do wonder though - does anyone else ever feel like organization is closing in around you?
at least my sense of humor accords with some list-making, organizing tendencies. the initial photo is the first to appear in a google image search for "lists."
i really hate phones. well, not phones, specifically. conversations employing phones. there's something creepy and disconnected and fuzzily fake about phone conversations, and consequently, i feel like i'm being creepy and disconnected and fuzzily fake when talking on the phone. and i probably am, just like how i am at parties with people whom i kind of know but not well enough to feel comfortable, impelling me inexorably towards awkward half-comments that land on the ground and just sit there, staring back up at me, unwilling to be entertaining or insightful or even what i meant in the first place.
although sometimes i think that phones are actually an instance in which people become more like themselves than they are normally? do you feel more acutely like you when you talk on the phone? do all of your insecurities and confidences become larger and more inescapable the nearer a phone gets to your face?
perhaps phone conversations are a chance to watch yourself, third-person-like, demonstrate what a caricature of yourself might look and act like. apparently, i am a terrified bunny. this is not a reassuring realization. i will store said realization in the back of my head and hope to god that it gets pushed off the edge of my memory precipice, which i conceive of much like the cliff in far side cartoon of lemmings leaping to their death. let us pray that this particular memory is not the "prepared" lemming with the inner tube.
at least my thoughts are adorable, if not brilliant, right?
this fear of phone calls would not be so problematic if i did not have to call people i don't know very well, as part of my (chosen) career. right now, i'm conducting a series of interviews for a panel paper i'm writing on women in congress. in order to collect information on the inner workings of congress, i have to phone women who worked as secretaries and staffers and interview them while furiously transcribing as much as i possibly can on my laptop writing writing writing and hoping to god that i don't miss anything really excellent amidst nervous overworked shakiness.
i begin to wish that i had learned to type properly approximately 30 seconds into each interview. the wishing takes more time and brain energy than one might expect, immediately setting my transcriptions back and launching me into a panic that generally does not subside until the interview is well past 30 minutes.
i am not trained to do oral histories. i verbally flail around for information at least once each interview, and i generally feel as if i have somehow insulted the person at least twice by the time i'm wrapping up. wrapping up almost always involves an apology.
after each interview, i write a follow-up email that is calm and composed and thankful. it does not resemble the person on the phone at all. the interviewee in all liklihood wishes that the person writing the email had been the person conducting the interview, but all of that is done and over and there is nothing anyone can do about the preceding awkwardness except shove it gently towards the memory precipice. until i go present the information at a conference.
are these two people - writing and talking rachel - actually entirely different individuals? would the world implode if they ever met?
i am coming to realize that my writing and wildly enthusiastic embrace of any and every piece of information i can get my hands on are simultaneously my two greatest strengths and also the qualities that render me potentially volatile amidst the day-to-day interactions that fill my pre-abd graduate years. especially classes. at least once every semester, i nearly break down into a tearful, angry mess in class. it is because i care. it is because i care, and am incapable of controlling myself. conferences are going to be a blast.
so i guess that these two qualities i have are not entirely irreconcilable. they're just generally at odds with one another within the context of daily interactions. i have arranged and cultivated my innate qualities so that i am more at home in and amenable to academic life than daily life with friendly couples get-togethers and coffee shop run-ins and idle chitchat. i only get along easily with those i know very, very well and those i don't know at all and can deal with directly, rather than through some handheld device that will possibly suck my soul out through my ear.
at least interviews are onetime shots in the dark. they are not extensive enough to allow me to launch into anything intensely personal and my role is one of formal listener, rather than talker. i do not talk if i can help it. i have been told that i am a very good listener.
if only i could figure out how to translate that skill to my everyday interactions. exempt from speaking! of course, given an imposed silence, i would immediately want to talk all the time. because being a contrarian is an academically useful quality as well.
a certain amount of flexibility is required in order to become a good historian. this flexibility is particularly important because you will inevitably end up studying the one thing that you promised yourself you would not touch with a 10 foot pole. indeed, you should refrain from making these sorts of promises to yourself. the path to a ph.d. is replete with far more dramatic opportunities to let yourself down.
i suspect that ayn rand functions in much the same way for the average reader. there is nothing challenging about her books and they feel vaguely taboo, independent, and - for those who misunderstand the term - intellectual. rand's subtexts and philosophical bent floats just under the surface, and the surface is made of saran wrap. you can see her points coming before they reach you, and her heavy-handed application of lessons is never mitigated by allusions to other writers or references to other philosophies. the historian in me is appalled at the lack of literary and ideological contextualization.
david lynch has begun an interview project. his carefully detached delivery maintained throughout, lynch somehow manages to convey a certain sense of caring in this clip - something he generally has a difficult time doing, probably hinged at least in part on the fact that he has spent a career fucking with our collective need to identify linearity in . . . well, everything, including movie plot lines.
quite frankly, i don't entirely understand the obsession with star wars. but then again, i put fried eggs on everything and have an unnatural fear of orchids, so i shouldn't be one to talk.
this post is about lists. i am obsessed with lists. a minor case of obsessive-compulsive disorder will get you only so far in life. lists allow you to not only act upon your disorder, but comprehensively catalog its various contours and enshrine these contours in documents, which can be saved and archived and added to over the course of days, weeks, years.
the library appears to be more a fashion statement than an organizational approach. then again, simply sitting in that room is probably like going to see the wizard of oz, sans flying monkey encounters.
i really hate phones. well, not phones, specifically. conversations employing phones. there's something creepy and disconnected and fuzzily fake about phone conversations, and consequently, i feel like i'm being creepy and disconnected and fuzzily fake when talking on the phone. and i probably am, just like how i am at parties with people whom i kind of know but not well enough to feel comfortable, impelling me inexorably towards awkward half-comments that land on the ground and just sit there, staring back up at me, unwilling to be entertaining or insightful or even what i meant in the first place.
at least my thoughts are adorable, if not brilliant, right?
