Some of you might not be acquainted with film critic Armond White, but it only takes a simple search at Rotten Tomatoes to get a snapshot of the kind of critic he is. He agrees with the Tomatometer (the aggregate rating for any film on Rotten Tomatoes based on positive and negative reviews from individual critics) only 52% of the time. Not that critics should submit to groupthink, but White's reviews are almost always deliberately contrarian. Famously, he lauded Transformers 2 for visuals and attacked Toy Story 3 for its commercialism. He praised Clash of the Titans (don't even get me started) by saying that it showed "a better sense of meaningful, economic narrative than the mess that Peter Jackson made of the interminable, incoherent Lord of the Rings trilogy."
For once, instead of being forced to look at White as an inaccessible contrarian who gets page views from his dissent, we can finally hear his reasons for his rather heretofore inexplicable role in professional criticism. Whether his reasons are good or not is not really the point. How he answered is the actual wonder. While he says that Roger Ebert, one of the most internationally famous, well-written, and prolific critics, "destroyed film criticism," and while, when asked what other critics he would suggest others read, he could offer no one but himself, it seems obvious that White answered with his ego rather than his heart. Regardless, the interview is worth reading, if only because it is of a professional who seems eternally disgusted with his profession.
After a plea for a makeover and a wave from MundaneJane, Monda over at NoTelling took pity on me and made my blog look amazing. I cannot thank her enough for working her magic.
I told myself that if my blog didn't look like it had been beaten with ugly sticks, stones, bricks, etc., that I would write more often. It looks like I have no excuse now, because the blog redesign looks absolutely stunning.
I am formally leaving VDCC as a headstone, a marker of a format that is dead but a passion that is not. Whatever cultural criticism I have, whenever I find my voice in the coil, it will go here. I still have my Tumblr account, but its future is unknown. I am not interesting enough to have multiple blogs and zero redundancy, so it's back to training wheels with one blog, at least for a while.
For those who can’t see my Facebook, this is how the current quote section looks.
Me: I went to France!
Matt: Fun! How’d it go?
Me: It was a lot of fun. The food is good, if expensive.
Matt: Trust the French to take it out of you for sustenance.
Me: Funnily enough, I didn’t have cake.
Matt: Hah! That’ll show the oft misquoted aristocracy!
Me: Indeed! *adjusts monocle*
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Building a desk in my room:
Me: And here’s the part where I’d need a hammer. Dammit.
Anthony: Do you have anything heavy?
Me: My head. I can just hit all of the nails in that way.
Anthony *completely serious*: Well, we can wrap it in a blanket.
Me: …What? Well, I don’t… what?
Anthony: What? Oh, I didn’t mean that. I meant whatever you used.
Me: I was hoping that wasn’t our only option.
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Walking past a Tyler Perry movie poster:
Me: On my list that I’m making of a hundred things to do before I die, one of them is to see a Madea movie.
Grad School Drew: Well, one, I hope you really are making a list, and two, I hope that that’s not on it. Because we shouldn’t be talking.
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“I want nap options.”
-Hannah
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“I still can’t believe that those are free.”
-Jeremy after a kiss from Lauren.
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“I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to open [the .wps file extension] these days. He might as well have sent us the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
-Jonathan
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“Don’t judge me for licking my hamburger.”
-Ash
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Lauren: I’ve enjoyed getting to know you while you’ve been here!
Me: And becoming best friends!
Lauren: Totally!
[At the same time]
Me: Best friends forever, best friends forever, ring!
Lauren: We’re the two best friends that anyone could have!
Me: [pause] We’re singing different songs, but they have the same sentiment!
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“I loved her too… But what man can compete with a god?”
-Maferath, DA:O
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Hannah: Magical Realism always makes me think crazy. ‘And then Hannah watered the garden with tears. Even now when the roses bloom everyone weeps. Hannah touched the doorknob and smelled lemons. And she knew that Pedro had died. So she made a quilt out of her own hair.’ I smelled lemons because everyone in the village said that Pedro’s heart was a lemon. He was mean and could never love anyone. I was the only person in the whole world who really knew him and loved him. When he died I was his only mourner. His daguerrotype fell down off the wall and broke into four equal pieces when he died. So I made a quilt that would be a part of my body and would never break and would never die. It would keep people I loved warm. And it was so big that when I folded it it was 5 feet tall! The end.
Jonathan: I rate your story 3 cuils. Highly recommended. Would read again. A++
Hannah: Thanks… It only happens when I pretend I am Spanish.
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There is always the rain, always the winter, always the shadows. The body vanishes, only the mind remains, watching and enduring; a little flame flickering in the shadows. So it will go on until dawn slowly casts its light through the rain onto these heroes, these pale faces and frozen bodies.
-L’Argonaute [French WWI trench newspaper], 6-15-1916
Dream opens and it’s Thanksgiving with the family. We are in what seems like the windowed basement of a HUGE cathedral. The basement itself looks something like a hobbit home. Something happens (I think we didn’t have a lot of food), and the meal’s basically over as soon as its begun, and we’re all still hungry. I hear something above us and go to see what it is. I go up stairs that take me to one of the towers in the church. I see four or five women just outside of the tower. I know I’m several stories up, so this should be impossible. Then I realize that they’re flying. I know they’re magical, so I asked them to help feed my family. One of them immediately scowls and curses me. I beg the other women to please bless us and help us eat. The lead one takes pity on me, and reverses the curse and points towards the stairs. I scramble back down the stairs to see that the table was now covered in delicious food. I tell my family to come see, and they can’t believe it. They ask me what happened, and I flat-out tell them, “It was a coven of witches.”
I think this is where that dream ended, but it cut away to the whole family being in church. The preacher tells us to start a hymn, but things get out of control really fast somehow. Apparently, everyone wanted to do a solo…? Which is just ke-ray-zay. So all of the sudden it becomes Interminable Singing Sunday, and people are singing for hours and hours. One of my grandmother’s piano students gets up to play the piano, and starts talking about how she can play the clarinet and the saxophone, and that she will play those next (I have no idea if she plays these instruments). Then my mom, who never goes to church and rarely plays the piano, gets up and goes to play the piano while my grandmother’s piano student looks bewildered and then tries to sing. I’m pacing up and down the aisle, ready to get out, pondering whether or not I’m a pagan since I’ve seen a pagan miracle, but no one seems to take any notice. Finally the preacher regains control and says that the service highlighted two of the reasons why she left – disrespect and disorganization. The service ends, and we go into the sanctuary. I hear some of the younger kids talking about how someone has sold their drugs, and that they should make a pretty good profit. I fly off the handle about how they shouldn’t be selling drugs. I asked them whom they were selling drugs to and they said, “Young kids and older people,” which made me even madder. I told them they were going to ruin kids’ lives and this wasn’t a win-win situation.
Then I went out in the parking lot and people I knew from high school were there. I started talking about a good friend from high school who had dropped out and I had lost contact with, and immediately people began telling me awful lies that he had told them about me, and how I was an awful person. I kept telling them that the things they were talking about never happened, but they wouldn’t listen. I was starting to cry and yell at them when I woke up.
Why History? What was so appealing about it to you that you decided to get a graduate degree in it?
I've responded to this in a more general and idealistic way on both Tumblr and BlogSpot, but I cannot say my reasons were entirely general or idealistic. It's easy to look at my graduate degree as a natural extension of my B.A. in History. Even though I had more options than most other history majors straight out of college, grad school seemed like the most logical next step. So for a leap in logic, to get to the root of the manner, we must look not to the grad applications of October through December 2008, but to the Fall and Spring semesters of my 2005-2006 freshman year.
I came in the door of the advising center thinking that I was going to be a Religious Studies and, if I remember correctly, psychology double major. I had enjoyed psychology in high school, and religious studies was something that had fascinated me on a personal level, as I had begun losing my faith in high school. Between the two, perhaps I would have studied the effect of religion on people.
But after I took a history course and had been bombarded by religious and philosophical studies in my first semester of Honors, I realized that studying religion and philosophy was not a goal in and of itself for me, but could be a means to understanding other things.
I was definitely a liberal arts kind of person, and the one study that could envelop every single other liberal art, whether wholly or in part, was history. It's the all-purpose major. I think in the end, that's why I majored in it. I wanted to do a science or math-based major, but I saw my limits before I committed to something that would have ultimately been foolhardy for me.
Anyway, I am in grad school for history because I realized, as most people do either when they're applying for grad school or the moment they step through the door, that I had learned just enough to know I knew nothing. And I cannot stand knowing nothing.
A thread on my old Honors forum asked a question about the most important/least important subject. My answer may seem obvious to those that know anything about me. My feelings are by no means set in stone, and while I describe history as a noble profession, I don't think most noble professional historians are, to paraphrase Voltaire, professional, noble, or really even historians.
My answer:
Alright. I promised that when I cared enough I'd get involved with this, so here I go.
History is the most important discipline. It is also the most interdisciplinary.
At one point, history was simply narrative. Establishing the narrative was the most important part of it all. History, which, when a part of the Trivium, was taught as part of Grammar, is the oldest discipline on Earth. Religion is history. Legends are history. Stories are history. These are all narratives of the human journey.
History only became professionalized as recently as the 19th century, and mostly started in Germany. We didn't really start having professional historians in America until the 20th century. So the history that we study in universities is a relatively new invention. But the discipline itself - with its specialists and its experts - has roots in something much older.
History is the story of the connections between human beings and the events that change them. It is the historian's profession to be more connected to the human condition than any other profession. Biologists look at the components that make us human. Historians look at the components of memory, which is arguably what makes us more human than our DNA.
Today, we can say, without too much argument, that the narrative has been established. The information that would be able to turn the narrative over is mostly lost, or will be discovered by armies of historians from around the world, scouring every archive, or will be declassified by some state agency. But rest assured that children in classrooms will not be learning that William the Conquerer wasn't actually the Battle of Hastings, or that John Wilkes Boothe actually shot a decoy. Nothing so drastic will come about in our lifetimes, I suspect.
So history isn't self sustainable by looking at old documents anymore. The untapped history that remains is not just in documents no one cared to look at before (like the writings of women or immigrants), but in the ground and in numbers. History is now the combination of many satellite disciplines - psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, religious studies, political science, literature, journalism, folklore, and even philosophy - all set to compliment, strengthen, or destroy the prevailing narrative.
Arguments that English and writing are better because they came first are moot, because history is rooted in language, which was at one point only spoken. Arguments for language as the most important discipline because it came first is moot for the exact same reason - history is rooted in the very language we use to tell its story, and the study of language is so modern that it never touched these roots. I am partial to the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), but even they are embodied within history to a certain extent - the discoveries and inventions contained within each are also contained with a historical context. The Quadrivium does not provide the same context for history.
Feel free to challenge me, but I have thought about this a lot and I will take on any challenge without much hesitation. I'll close with this: history is the most important discipline because it is so intertwined with the human condition. No human being can be expected to know all of history. But with historians in the world, they keep the richness of the human experience close to the surface instead of forgotten in the passage of time.
This all according to the history grad student. Take it for what you will.
So much has happened since the last post, and there's no way to explain it all. So I'll just cover the main things that have happened.
I finally started grad school. They weren't kidding when they told me it would be hard. Mamas, don't raise your sons and daughters to be grad students. I spend so much time reading, as I should, but I spend even more time avoiding reading, which I definitely shouldn't. I've already been to the library here in two months than I did in the entire four years I was at UCA, and I now have a primary place of residence where I actually sleep night after night. It has been an extremely long time since my head only hit one pillow night after night (though I still switch between my bed at the couch). This - being locked between the apartment walls, forcing myself to read things I know I'll forget - is what the title references. There are days that I don't go outside. And that is very strange.
A lot of things came along with grad school, including a cat named Tonks. She eats like a goat but looks like an arctic fox from behind and a lab rat from the front. She doesn't look so much like a lab rat now that she's gotten bigger, but when I first got her at the end of August, she was definitely a little mewing rat. As much trouble as she's been at times, she's been a comfort to me. She's in my face every morning, and she purrs on cue when I call her name. In a world where I wasn't sure what to expect at first, she was the first thing that made me feel like I had an obligation to be here - if it was only to dote on her like she was my only child (which we all know she is).
I'm obsessed with Glee, but I'm even more obsessed with avoiding work, and it's disturbing the limits I can take it to sometimes. Well, I take that back. The problems I've had have been more external than me, but this weekend it's been really bad - but even that's been because I'm scared. I have two term papers of 20 pages or more due at the end of the semester, and one of them is quite literally impossible. Even worse, I'm the one who let out enough rope to hang myself, no one else. It's crazy how that's happened twice with the two of the most important papers of my entire academic career - one of them being my Honors thesis. A professor won't give me a limitation, and then I go and try to write an impossible dissertation that even people with twenty years more training with me wouldn't try because they understand the nuances that make such far-reaching arguments impossible. In other words, I'm in an inescapable situation, I've got to bullshit my way out of this one, and I don't even know how to begin to cheat my limitations. My goal is to actually put pen to paper today (read: when I wake up this afternoon), so I'll be sure to report my plan of action, however nuts it may be.
Having an apartment has been interesting, but I don't know what else to say about that other than paying rent's alright, but utilities suck because it feels like gambling until the damn bill actually comes in. Is there a utilities god? I need a shrine to him.
I'm planning on starting a Glee series on VDCC.net, so watch out for that. Otherwise, I'll try to post here more often. If nothing else, it will certainly give me a constructive outlet, which I need. Playing video games and watching TV are not constructive, but writing? Writing is good.
Well, I'm back. Sort of. I've thought about posting osmething on here many times, but then I get lazy and go to sleep. Or something.
Anyway, a lot has happen since last we met. Obama became the prez, the world collapsed under the weight of its own greed, and I graduated, amongst many many other things. Also, did you know Michael Jackson died? Haha, just kidding.
Ahhh, graduation - one of the few things that came so close to going right. Then again, the fact that I did graduate should be enough of a good thing to mean that it all went right, but I can't bring my critical self to get over the fact that things could have been different. Magna cum laude is good, right? Sure. The fact that my professor lost the assignment that would have given me an A, thus summa cum laude is just tough, right? Sure. Okay. I'll get over that when I die, eventually.
It went well for everyone else, though. After all, my physics/math major friends can no longer do simple addition. My English major friends either read James Patterson novels or comic books, or don't read at all. My history major friends watch the increasingly screechy oh-shit-it's-the-apocalypse-zomg History Channel, and, of course, Adult Swim, the ol' standby. My fifth year senior friends are still in an exhausted coma after their five-year college marathon. This is all as it should be, as this is the natural order of things after one is educated.
Oh yeah, I'm going to grad school soon. OleMiss, ho! I'm honestly not very excited about it now, but I am excited about the deals I'm getting on my books. I got $170 worth of books for $56! With shipping! THIS DESERVES EXCLAMATORY PUNCTUATION.
I'm also a bit Twitter Happy (tm), and I think I'm going to revive Adamant's Fire as a way to let up on the poor servers, the Fail Whale, etc. I'm almost positive I'm responsible for half of the times it breaks. As of this post, I will have 3043 twitter updates. But I also have over 200 followers! Yay, right? Sure.
I've partially revived VDCC.net, which is now only brain dead instead of completely flatlining. I'll have to do some more massaging (I'm waggling my eyebrows, oh yes) to get that heart pumping. Ifyaknawhatuhmean.
My post important accomplishment, above graduating, is the fact that I finished all of Beast Wars on YouTube. Man, what a great show. I'm contemplating doing a podcast review of the entire show, but I'm not sure I'm ready to do something so hardcore. I've got Season II of Beast Machines to go, and then I've got the whole show in the bag. Woot woot! As for the original Transformers... I can only take so much. Fifteen minutes of that show is literally like three hours in normal time (pardon, three megacycles - everything I know about Cybertronian time I learned from Rhinox).
Otherwise, I'm working. As always.
My question to you, friends and (Twitter) followers: anything you'd like to see on Adamant's Fire?
