A fellow grad student that I follow on Twitter said that Roger Ebert retweets (that is, he basically shows tweets he likes to his own followers verbatim) writers, artists, poets, and the like whose writing is like "bad high school poetry." To which I replied the following:
It's like being able to listen in on someone's echo chamber, or looking over his shoulder and seeing what he sees in the mirror.
Essentially, retweets do two things. One, they carry news like a virus, spreading from one person to another until almost every person on Twitter has at least seen whatever tiny piece of information has caught fire. The other is what I've hinted above - it creates a perfect reflection of a person outside of herself. It is a portrait created through negative space. When Ebert retweets writing, he is showing what he is drawn to and what speaks to him. A rapt follower can hear echoes of Ebert in his retweets. Regardless of whether the echoes are of his heart, his sense of irony, or his own brand of wishful thinking, they are significant.
But there is a danger to the echo chamber, and it's not just a Twitter phenomenon. It's the same phenomenon that populates the local sections of newspapers, and it's the same phenomenon that has kept television news so gossipy and literally incredible. Retweeting becomes a metaphor: the information, or the "tweet," comes from pundits and editors. The retweeters are other pundits and editors. Just as Ebert, a writer and critic by trade, retweets fellow writers and critics, Fox News "retweets" The Drudge Report and Olbermann "retweets" the Huffington Post, and vice versa.
These echoes are dangerous because they have a tendency to become louder than their source. When two phones are put on speaker phone and made to face one another, and then someone utters a single sound, the phones will echo back and forth into each other, becoming so loud they are a single undulating scream. This scream, when translated into words, slanted viewpoints, agendas, misunderstandings (in other words, when it is translated into "human"), is misleading and corrosive.
I used to be just as much a victim of this as anyone else. I mainly stick to Twitter for my news now, but there was a time when I only read blogs. They would report on each other as if the thoughts of other men and women in their living rooms "interpreting" AP press releases was worth something more than the key presses it took to blurt it out. Because what I read mostly aligned with my political beliefs (and if it didn't, I tried to read with an open mind but I often read opposing viewpoints ironically), I stopped reading so critically. I became a bit hollow, and that hollowness was filled with other people's echoes. Yet their echoes were only echoes of others, and those others' echoes were echoes of yet others, and so on and so forth until all that was left was a single, undulating scream. If this is what I was reading, then with what kind of corrosion was I filling myself? I stopped reading political and news blogs more because they were taking up too much time than that I had some sort of epiphany regarding their effect on me. That doesn't mean, loyal Twitterer that I am, that I don't fall into the trap again every once in a while. But whenever I see a political blog or see pundits on TV, I try to remind myself that, almost always no matter who they are, the words they say come from a hollowness filled with echoes.
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*
__
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.
__
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.
__
“I want nap options.”
-Hannah
__
“I still can’t believe that those are free.”
-Jeremy after a kiss from Lauren.
__
“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
__
“Don’t judge me for licking my hamburger.”
-Ash
__
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!
__
“I loved her too… But what man can compete with a god?”
-Maferath, DA:O
__
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.
__
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.
