| Thinking through Cronkite |
[Aug. 4th, 2009|09:35 am] |
As ever, I am behind the times. So I got back from a media history conference, a few weeks ago, only to discover that media history happened (as it does every day...) in my absence. Walter Cronkite died.
His death did not hit me emotionally in the way that Jim Henson's did. He was not for me the everyday personality that he was for many a generation older than me, though I certainly remember him. I associate him wih the 19" b/w TV screen in our house in Rochester, NY. Along with Captain Kangaroo, the Sesame Street and Electric Company casts and Gerald Ford, he is one of the few TV personalities I remember from my TV socialization. I don't remember him from any of the famous broadcasts that are now being quoted, nor even his final performance, though we probably did watch them.
I remember Walter Cronkite more than anything as maybe my first conscious encounter with suited-greying-white-man authority. I remember mostly because it was not readily intelligible to a 3 or 4 year old as what it was meant to be. My dad did not dress that way, nor did anyone I knew. Besides his foursquare appearance, he had the voice and delivery of a TV newscaster, which he helped to define for the US: deep, square, slightly sharp-edged - not entirely a bad thing when trying to get through the fuzz of not-great TV reception. More than the face (which I still have a hard time retaining) I remember this voice, which I experienced almost as a sort of a low-grade barking. "Avuncular trustworthiness" was not exactly the impression I had from him. But I didn't watch him enough to learn it.
What the trust of Cronkite seems to have been built on, and what people in the retrospectives have stressed, is his 'objectivity' as a journalist. The idea is that Cronkite put aside whatever his opinion was (rationally or emotionally based) on a matter was to tell you what was important. What slips more subtly through the cracks in this story is the extent to which this objective 'trust' was built on the knowledge that he did have an opinion, emotional investment. The moments that people remember were three points at which his 'objectivity' cracked: the moon landings, the Kennedy assassination, and his assessment of the Vietnam war. As very often, Keith Olbermann gets to the heart of how Cronkite really worked, and takes apart the 'objectivity' narrative. It's worth reading in full, but the key of it is:
'Therefore what I remember and appreciate him most for, was the kind of perspective and interpretation that he often provided, or at least enabled from others, in what was a direct precursor to the very kind of newscasting that has succeeded the "that's the way it is" approach. [...] Walter Cronkite was not a dispassionate statue on air. When the risk of living up to the phrase "and that's the way it is" was far greater than it is now, he choked up when Kennedy died, laughed and beamed when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, and defined objectivity by not worshipping the false god of fair and balanced when he reached the stalemate conclusion about Vietnam in the 1968 newscasts that provided Lyndon Johnson with his cue to exit the stage.'
Think about this. It wasn't the suit that made Cronkite - it was being 'suit' and 'not-suit' simultaneously The undertone of a lot of the retrospectives is not so much a lament for the loss of 'obejctivity' but for the days when a greying, suited white guy was the figure of trust and authority. Nobody, so goes the lament, now could hold the title of the 'most trusted man in America'. That may be true - in a narrow sense. For many years the 'most-trusted in America' title has most often fallen to Oprah Winfrey. With Oprah, it is the 'suit' aspects of her TV personality that most people try not to speak of when discussing their trust in her.
This makes it all the more important to understand Oprah and Walter into the same frame. It opens up how we think about public speech and personalities of all kinds. Consider the current crap surrounding the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, in particular her suggestion that somebody with the varied experiences (and associated emotional reactions/subjective positions) of a Latina woman might approach a number of cases with more wisdom when it comes to making people equal before the law than a white man, who would be likely to view his own more privileged treatment and experience.
But when you read it right, if you lose Sotomayor, you lose Cronkite. And of course, if you lose Cronkite, you lose America. |
|
|
| emotions, misplaced |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|11:26 am] |
Some days I feel like a motherless R A G E
So goes a line from Night Driving by David Thomas and Two Pale Boys. To me it echoes not with Jonathan Lethem, but Marian Anderson, her voice shaping that hole precisely and methodically, like a sharp chisel in soft wood.
My instruments are blunter.
It has been a frustrating couple of weeks. My job talk in Amsterdam was a debacle - I was badly prepared, because I was freaked out about the preparation, so did badly and lost the job I probably should have got. Having started this hesitating, it nevertheless feels like I have come across my old demon transience - just enough fear of permanence to make sure I am not capable of grasping it when it is in sight. Especially as it makes my current situation feel a lot less stable than it did before this whole mularkey started. Here I am, five years after completing my PhD, still lowest possible rung on the employment totem pole, not able to convince a search committee I am more qualified than somebody who has not yet submitted.
Above all, it feels like after all these years I have still not grown up. Not in the fun sort of I don't match my socks or act respectable sense (we've pretty much all gleefully missed that boat) but in the I can't bloody well take care of myself (or anyone else) sense. There is no way shape or form in which that is fun. It is a frustration that sits deep and echoes with other 'out' spots where it felt like life was coming derailed, due in part to qualities I lacked and beyond my ability to fix them. It is a stomp-around-the-house-kick-thngs level frustration that seems to be sitting just below the surface, like, all the time.
I am taking concrete steps to address some of these issues. Trying to make time for the things that matter, and also to develop some fo the skills that seem to be missing (teaching; theoretical background), even learning to drive - the lack of which has long been a frustrating handicap, especially when visiting the states - also trying to take some concrete time off to regather and recoup. That is, go on holiday.
So, what am I trying to do with my holiday? Plan a trip to see my mother.
My mother, gentle readers, currently resides in a mental institution in the middle of Montana. Up until this year, you could not get there from here without a car. Now you can get there from Denver, so I am going. Mom hates where she lives but has refused for the better part of the last decade to take the steps that would let her live anywhere else. Her argument runs along the lines of: 'if I get out, they'll just put me back in again.' She prefers the certainty of being in a place she hates to the uncertainty of maybe having to go back to a place she hates, and I rather suspect that she actually now needs the regularity of institutional routine, plus being able to see herself in perpetual limbo means not facing up to any permanent situation that would feel far from ideal. Bascially, she now needs somebody to take care of her, and there is nobody who will do it. Traditionally, one would have her move in or nearby - but that is a non-starter when one lives on the other side of the Atlantic. Plus I have some confidence that living with or near my mother would not be healthy for my marriage.
In short, dealing with my mother is a double exercise in precisely the sort of feelings of helplessness and frustration that is colouring everything else. A reminder that there are just some things that I cannot hold together; that when you live scattered, some things just stay scattered. Maybe that's what adulthood actually is, these days: that knowledge.
|
|
|
| Reconciliation and truth. |
[Nov. 8th, 2008|01:13 am] |
One of the multiple paradoxes of America is that this nation in which church and state are officially separated, its political culture is more religious than any other place I have been. Our best - and worst - political oratory stems directly from traditions perfected in the pulpit. It seems almost fitting that the current rhetoric is all about forgiveness and reconciliation.
This administration - and the party it belongs to - has presided over some of the most corrupt behavior and devisive actions in recent memory, including stomping on a number of laws. Now that they have beocme politically irrelevant, they are all for bi-partisan action and letting bygones be bygones. I can't help but think that Bush is making such a big show of a co-operative transition so that he can avoid prosecution for himself or his aides. That won't do.
Such reconciliation may have advantages in the short term; but consequences for the longer term. If the principles that have been damaged are not repaired, they will, well, stay damaged. We do need to know what happened.
As part of dealing with the mess we are in, I would be delighted if something like a truth and reconciliation program could be established. In which we find out what actually happened in all those memos we were not allowed to see. Where members of the party that is now out of power - as well as the one that has come to power - tell the story of the last eight years. Perhaps even at the galling prospect of granting immunity.
I am happy to forgive, but it is hard to do if folks they dont' think they have done anything wrong. |
|
|
| With a whimper |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|07:22 pm] |
Today was my last class with the group of Dutch students. I will see them one more time, and some of them will come to see me in office hours, but this was the last 'teaching' I will do for them. Like every other time, it did not go well. I got a few points across, others went by the wayside between my inability to ask more concrete questions for discussion and explain anything in bloody Dutch. Productive things like engaging them with the actually quite interesting material of the course, or the interesting work they are doing on it did not happen. I lost them two weeks ago, and most of what I am doing now is damage control. They will probably all pass, but I can honestly say they have learned little or nothing from me.
What worries me most is that the next quarter starts soon, and though the burden will be less I am anything but confident in my ability to do better this time. I will only be teaching one class, so there will be less prep, but I will be teaching 3 (three) sessions of it, so it will be a lot of work. Also, it is a subject I know less well, so the prep work needs to be meticulous.
I have learned a few important things, which are particularly different when teaching undergraduates as opposed to Masters students:
1) you need to drink the cool-aid with regard to the course requirements and regulations, as stupid as you might think they are. Being vague or half-assed with them only leads to confusion.
2) study and writing skills are as important as the reading material. They need to be informed of what the expectations are and how to improve at every step of the way. Having a better idea of what those skills are myself and how to explain them is vital.
3) an arsenal of concrete examples is necessary to keep them engaged with the material. As well as an arsenal of discussion methods in reserve in case one fails, as it so often does.
4) Don't be so bloody scared that even getting the most basic sentence out of your mouth is difficult. It only goes downhill from there.
5) Response - and response time - is important, yea, vital. They need to know their stuff is being read.
Most of these things I have actually known, in principle, for weeks. I have simply been unable to turn them around in the classroom. It will come, with time, but I still wonder how many bad classes I will have to give before it does. I am so sick of this already. |
|
|
| Heavy Rotation |
[Oct. 16th, 2008|10:08 am] |
My compadre Raymond (also known as David) just posted on his blog his top 5 albums at the moment. In an excercise in trying to gain my life back (I do not remember the last time I took a day off from work. I think it might have been a Saturday about 4-5 weeks ago. I won't do it today, either, though I have wasted much of the morning) I thought I would follow suit.
I have always been a 'heavy rotation' kind of guy. Sad but true. I have obsessions that I play to death, bands I collect everything everything of, and then sometimes lose a taste for. There's not been a lot of input of new these days, which means rotation is even heavier. There's a lot of grit here: harsh voices, weird places. So here's what the listeners would be complaining about if they weren't only me
Return to the Valley of the Go-Gos. My Belinda Carlisle obsession goes way back, and only gets more complex as time goes on. But recently I went ahead and went back and bought the big anthology. So it's not 'an album' in the auteur sense of the word, but the retrospective actually gives a sense of the constant brilliance they could muster: all of the anarchy that pop can provide is there. Take the beautiful mess that is "Vacation" a song that is actually only held together by its lopsided forward momentum, bubblegum combined with a streak of anger that throws both into new light (imagine Bob Mould singing the chorus and you see what I mean)
Little by Vic Chesnutt. Another album I used to have on cassette, and its echoes came up through my mind strongly enough that I had to buy it . There is something about most great albums that is about stepping into another place, that is in part the studio and part the mental space of the album. The opening gesture has to wipe away this world and get you into that one. Here it is creepy rambling guitar, harmonica and dreaming about dancing with Isadora Duncan - and off you go into a strange, lonely world cluttered with knick-knacks that he steadfastly refuses to sepia-tint.
Clear Spot/ Spotlight Kid by Captain Beefheart. Anything you need to know about the modern art of singing you can learn from this album. I remember reading a review of a Nabokov novel that said something to the effect of 'he writes prose the way it ought to be written: ecstatically'. Same applies here: every single syllable is meaningful and musical. Each song is a hyper-version of its genre. Blabber and smoke in the finest possible way.
Learn to Sing Like a Star by Kristin Hersh Her latest effort which I just picked up a few weeks ago. Still not sure I quite get it all - hers always take me a while. Much more lush than her last one, but also harder Her voice has a new roughness to it, disconcertingly without losing its childlike quality - in fact that seems to have increased as well. There are actually cheerful songs this time ('you make the gypsy in me horny for a flower garden...' is a line that just went floating by) but the song 'The Thin Man' was the seller for me - a gritty lovely sort of stock-taking song. Relentlessly beautiful.
Descended Like Vultures by Rogue Wave. Gift from David - well spotted. Big, lush, melodic AND lo-fi and tight in a way that manages to keep an urgency that it by rights should not have.
Soon to be added is Pete Townshend's All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, again on a mention from David. I bought it on vinyl when I was like 12 and loved it to death. HAve just got it again through iTunes. Funny how it still know it in a way I don't know the stuff I listen to more often. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 3rd, 2008|05:42 pm] |
We will return to regularly scheduled angst soon enough, but here, in the meantime is the latest video in the Wobbe Index and Bonsai Tree collaboration.
I like the video's autumnal light, combined with the sense of staring uncomprehendingly at the familiar.
The poem is "The Starlings in George Square" by Edwin Morgan, read by She-For-Whom.
The soundbyte has something slightly more personally journal-like: the sound of one of the classrooms that are the cause of so much pleasure and fear, the poem from a book that She For Whom received for her birthday (Collected Poems of Edwin Morgan. My God, they are great), and of course, for weeks, we had a big flock of starlings nesting in the tree outside out house. Every evening, we could watch them swirl and disappear into the foliage, changing from sight to sound. They've moved to a different tree.
One of the best lines in the poem is "I wonder if we really deserve starlings?" |
|
|
| dreams recurring |
[Sep. 25th, 2008|03:39 pm] |
I don't often remember my dreams, and when I do, I am usually embarrassed by how totally cornball melodramatic they are. But every now and then I have a doozy that I remember (or rather I suspect I remember remembering it). Many years ago, when I was studying in hamburg for a year I had a bizarre and horrible series of dreams, all of which involved being detached from reality.
One of them involved going to see a movie and then forgetting to watch the movie, and instead paying attention to everything else: the people, the decor, the exit signs. Then when leaving the cinema, I realised when walking through the snow that I had left my shoes behind. Two others involved having friends who died (both of whom are actually still alive and well to this day). That was not the distressing part, however. In both cases, what happened was that I phoned their house looking for them only to be not just told, but *reminded* they had gone. That I had forgotten I knew that particular vital piece of information.
These dreams had a lot to do with the fact that I was spending a lot of time by myself in my squalid little room reading and thinking, punctuated by going out with friends and drinking too much, and not really having anything resembling a daily or weekly rhythm.
I mention this because I had a dream of the latter variety last night. And worryingly, it was my folks I had forgotten about this time (I will take the hint from my unconscious and phone this weekend). I am pretty sure that this has come from my sense of floundering at teaching, researching and writing, whilst not being able to do basic things like answer emails.
What bothers me is the repetition of it, somehow. Like I needed to be *reminded* of what I am afraid of: not of bad events, or uncomfortable knowledge but rather that they won't get through, or that they will slip through the wide cracks in my attention/involvement with the world. It's the cracks that scare me.
Thanks a lot, big brain. |
|
|
| No apples for me |
[Sep. 22nd, 2008|06:56 pm] |
When it goes well, teaching is a buzz. When the faces light up, even one or two, or when things get a bit heated even. Few things are better.
When it goes badly, it is horrible.
Everytime I think I am prepared, I realise I am not. All this time, I have been happily discussing issues with my colleagues in Dutch, planning sessions and the points we want to get across, but it's never enough. As soon as I walk into class, the plan I have prepared flies out the window because I simply cannot keep the plan, the language and the material in my head. 15 minutes into my class today it was clear I had lost my way and lost the class. And this was the week on gender studies and TV studies (yes, introduction to two academic disciplines in a week) where I supposedly have some idea what I am doing. The students were unhappy, I was unhappy. The best that could be said of today's class is that everyone was relieved when it ended.
I am someone who prides himself on being relatively articulate and approachable, and occasionally intelligent. I simply come across as an idiot. That I could cope with, but the students aren't learning. At least not from me.
And thank god I am behind on all of my other tasks for the privelege of doing something I am patently sucking at.
I assume I will get better at this, but for the moment it is truly awful. |
|
|
| Lost songs of the 80s, Euro edition. |
[Sep. 14th, 2008|12:50 am] |
|
Youtube is a wonderful thing. All those songs you never thought you would hear again? they're there. Except "Pam's Purple Spirograph" . Don't know who it was by, even though I used to have it on tape (not that it was good) but both tape and apparently song, are gone. Well and truly gone.
But here is one did not get lost via the usual '1-hit-wonder" route: it just never crossed the (north) Atlantic. It was a hit in Europe in 1987, where it is still around, probably. But for me, it's a rediscovery. It's like one last bit of summer, peeking around the corner. Ladies and gentlemen, Gianna Nannini:
|
|
|
| Pork Pies |
[Sep. 11th, 2008|06:32 pm] |
As a scholar of media and cultural studies, (as ill-informed a one as I sometimes am) I buy the line that comes out of my discipline that media have a large number of positive uses and apects. One of the things I find quite positive is how quickly the footage can be found of people contradicting themselves (of course by decontextualizing, they can also be made to sound like they are contradicting themselves), or in fact, that concerned citizens everywhere can and do routinely dig up counter-information and get it into news circulation.
One thing that I have begun to wonder, as the left-wing blogs and cable commentators (Olbermann and Maddow particularly) are increasingly successful in pointing out the number of blatant outright lies that are coming out of the Republican campaign, is: why doesn't it matter? Because it is pretty clear that it doesn't. If a politician, particularly on the campaign trail, gets caught in a lie (unless, oddly, it is about who they happen to be diddling) it doesn't help them - but it does not seem to hurt them. Usually they don't retract statements, they just issue fuzz and slowly change the subject, occasionally even playing victim when they are called out on it, talking about 'gotcha' journalism.
A few days ago Rachel Maddow (who makes me want to stand up and cheer) introduced the word and offered instructions in its use, using examples from a speech that a large number of Americans described as very good indeed.
But still, by and large, the rule seems to be: lying is okay; calling someone a liar is out of bounds. Did anybody watch Obama squirm on Olbermann so as not to actually use the word 'lie'?
This is, in part, the product of a media culture enabled by the intimate address of radio and television. It imposes a measure of civility on those who speak through it, which I think is, by and large, a good thing. But why is that televised sincerity not undercut by the knowledge of outright calumny or plain old mendacity (except in the people who were largely ill-disposed in the first place)? I honestly don't get it. Why doesn't that matter?
Most of you will have heard me hoot and holler about the Gulf War I, about the number of times I pointed out how many blantant pork pies (for you non-brits, that's cockney rhyming slang that has become mainstream British idiom) our elected officials were spewing out. Nobody said, "no, they are telling the truth", they either said "so?" or "but he means well" or "they have to do that".
There has to be a way to reconnect standards of mediated sincerity with probity. Sadly, I don't think it can be done by yelling, but it has to be done.
I refuse to be called a wide-eyed idealist over this. On every single job application I have ever filled out, there has been a clause reserving the right to fire my ass if I lied on it. If it applies to the bloody shoe department at JC Penney, it should damn well apply to people asking to be hired for a hell of a lot more authority and a higher paycheck to boot.
|
|
|
| First day teaching |
[Sep. 9th, 2008|08:17 pm] |
Back, exhausted (did not sleep well last night) after my first day teaching on the new job. (I taught there last term - my own course - but this is a bit different. They are undergraduates. You can screw 'em up).
Was a bit of a whirlwind. I only found out about a week ago that I was going to be teaching this particular course - it's all seminar teaching (i.e. no lectures) and I know a lot of the material, but still, it has a very involved structure and a specific sort of approach that I am still getting used to myself. About half of them were signed up late to the course, did not receive the materials, and so had no idea what the course was about, had not even seen the reading, let alone had a chance to do the assignment that they were supposed to do for today. About 1/3 of the studnts that were on my list did not show up - one of the rules is that if you miss twice, you fail (though we gave today as a freebie). This course (unlike the one I start teaching next week) is taught in English, largely because it is made up of international students - which does not mean many of them are native speakers. In fact, I discovered today, several of them are having trouble understanding the reading, as well as me, when I speak even slowly.
Lesson plan out the window.
I have heard worse experiences (friend of mine told me a story of a student who walked in late to her class, sat down, put his feet up and proceeded to pull out a banana and begin to eat it. What she asked him - after requesting that he put the banana away - if he had anything he wished to say, he responded 'nice tits, miss'.) but this was not a great start.
(Re) learned a few things myself today:
1) prepare better for contingencies. Have small problems/questions the students can do to get them actively participating. Instead, it was 90 minutes of me asking questions and making statements and them looking scared. Only at the very end did they start to see the point.
2) No matter if it IS a disaster (and it certainly felt like it)(in retrospect, I think I did manage to get them at least to understand what the course was about) do not leave your students see that you think it was a disaster. Nothing discourages a student more than feeling that they have failed to learn what they were supposed to, no matter whose fault it is.
By next week, this should be sorted, but it was a very inauspicious start. Sigh. |
|
|
| Why do I watch this stuff? |
[Aug. 31st, 2008|09:03 pm] |
Okay, so I've been ignoring the election mostly for the last few weeks, but admit to having tuned in. I'm a sucker for a good speech, and there have been a few at the Democratic convention. I have mixed feelings about the return of eloquence to US politics - the last time we had it, Bill Clinton got elected, and look where that got us.
The whole McCain's running mate thing confuses me, too. Is it really that hard for anyone to explain why the choice of Sarah Palin is not a feminist choice? Really? Everybody is saying that it is to woo Clinton voters, but are they (either McCain or the Clinton voters, take your pick) really that dumb? For the Clinton voters, I doubt it. Sincerely. For the McCain campaign, I am not sure. I have a sneaking suspicion that what they are banking on is someone from Obama's campaign saying something that about her that will piss off the Clinton voters.
Seems to me ignoring her would be the way forward. Or maybe a series of freudian slips where people say "Monica Goodling" or 'Harriet Myers" instead of "Sarah Palin" and watch McCain folks fall apart trying to explain the difference. If they can. |
|
|
| warm yet autumnal |
[Aug. 30th, 2008|11:28 pm] |
Have just come home from having dinner with friends in town, whom we have not seen since the summer began. A lovely, low-key evening full of catching up, good food and a good tipple or two, followed by a cycle ride home. It is a warm sweet evening - feels like summer but smells like autumn.
This is the best time of the year - the fruits of summer are still apparent, the nesting of autumn is starting. The adventures of the new school year. New subjects to learn, new work to begin, but it is still warm enough for a late-night dip in Lake Cheston (or it would be, if Lake Cheston were in the Netherlands...). The individual sensations are wonderful, but it is the in-between-ness that makes it paradise.
Some years, I almost forget to notice, so it's nice to have at least one evening this year to stop and bask in it. |
|
|
| Blessings, check |
[Aug. 24th, 2008|04:55 pm] |
So, as celebrated over lobster a few nights ago, it is two days and three years since She for Whom the Dervish Cooks and I were wed in a big ol' knees-up (literally: I was in a kilt). It was a great occasion, and we have been having a good time going through the photos, remembering just how much time we spent laughing. As it should be.
On one level, it did not change much: we came home to the same house we had been sharing, the same jobs and insecurities about them, the same country we did not feel quite at home in (and sadly still don't). Only the shocking realization that we had also united two families (who had never actually met until that occasion) and the gentler, but nevertheless transforming sense that, as we had just officially told Everyone, this was now For Keeps.
Setting aside my enduring uneasiness and therefore feelings of guilt in a world that tends to view single people generally as substandard (take one look at particularly tax codes, if you can be bothered) and seems hell-bent on denying a gay couples any similar recognition (nearly did not get married in the UK because of this. Made a pragmatic decision faced with the realization that we would not get She for Whom's grandmother over here), I gotta say that that decision is one of the few things I have gotten pretty much unreservedly Right. That I have embarked upon a work that is good and important and is continuing to teach me a lot, if now much more slowly and imperceptibly. About loving, yes, but even moreso about being loved and what it means and how it works.
I have had the pleasure over the last year and more of watching two of my dearest friends (in totally unrelated incidents) have similar experiences begin. It does indeed feel much more like growing up (in a good way) than the various other forms of life changes that come with increasing job/academic success (about which I still feel insecure). So I'm just saying.
This is thrown a bit in perspective that I am still steadfastly unable to really grasp what it means that my book is out. There are copies of it lying around my living room now, and I can only say that on the cover of a book, my name does not look like my name. Even though I sweated bullets - in most cases twice - over every single word between those covers. Even though it still reads to me like a shitty first draft and I want to fix sentences even now. It's not that I am not very very happy to see this happen, and very excited that people are interested (and yea, buying it for their university libraries) It's just that I kinda don't get it.
Does that make any sense? |
|
|
| Who else believes in the devil? |
[Aug. 21st, 2008|01:09 pm] |
Saw this in today's Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/20/uksecurity.terrorism1 Lo and behold, there is no one path to terrorism. How could this be? (this is meant sarcastically, by the way.)
Decades ago, at the height of concern over 'satanic' heavy metal lyrics, i remember reading an article in my local paper about crimes associated with devil worship. The police honcho they interviewed pointed out that it was mostly kids of fundamentalist/evangelical christians. 'Who else believes in the Devil?' he said simply. At the time, it seemed a revelation; that's why I remember it.
The lack of clear demographic patterns would seem to defy that bygone cop's ideas in this case. But what if what this is actually showing is that the demographics of one's home and more immediate background/surroundings are generally less important than they once were? What if the only common denominator about terrorists in Britain is Britain itself (whatever that means); and for any number of individual reasons people started to worship the devil Britain believes in?
Not a terribly original or helpful thought, but a thought.
|
|
|
| Book out |
[Aug. 15th, 2008|06:02 pm] |
When I returned from holiday, there was a very kind email from my PhD supervisor (who is now retired), saying that he had seen my PhD advisor, who had a brand-spanking new copy of my book, and he was jealous and could he please have a copy.
So this is typical and the latest example of my feeling/being totally inadequate in dealing with either supervisor (who, in addition to being very clever is an amazingly nice man, and who with his wife were like ersatz parents to me throughout my PhD) or advisor (who is brilliant, encyclopedic and for me totally unreadable). I have never known where I stand with the latter, so am bad about keeping in touch, even though he has alwasy been very kind and helpful. He wrote very kind blurb on book - which is why publisher sent him copy - hence wonderment on my supervisor's part that advisor had copy of book. (Should I have asked supervisor to write blurb, too? I just thought it was somehow too obvious to have your supervisor write the blurb for your book. Besides, I thought it was good to target the film studies audience, all of whom know advisor but not supervisor).
Turns out the book has been out for a few weeks, and the publisher sent my copies to my work address at the TU Mutterwitz, where I never go and was on holiday when they arrived anyway.
Upshot is: Advisor has book, but has never been thanked by me for doing what he did to help it along. Supervisor does not have book, and is being decent about it, but I think is feeling slightly dissed.
I do not have book. I was not expecting it for another few months, and am caught totally off guard by it running around in the world out of my control, making people feel funny without my being able to do much about it. I have to start telling people, to maybe bring it a little bit under my control.
BUT: my book is out. I am alternating between feeling elated and terrified. |
|
|
| Back from away |
[Aug. 14th, 2008|12:54 pm] |
Returned last night from 2-1/2 weeks holiday in Scotland. First stop was She-For Whom's grandmother's 96th birthday (both of us have one living grandparent.). SfW'sG is mentally all there, but 96 years have made her physically immobile, which is source of great frustration, and one for which there is no repsonse, other than to agree that it is frustrating, and try to keep her as engaged and involved in the world around her.
In many ways, it is similarly frustrating dealing with my own mother, who is not mentally all there (or rather, she is there, but not 100% here, in our world).
This was followed by a vacation in Orkney, which was an amazingly beautiful and fascinating place. Though it seems geographically like the back of beyond, 1000, 3000, 5000 years ago, it was one of the most bustling places, and now it also seems to have some of that quality. not like the fringes but its own centre. The islands are all close in, the land is clearly fertile and generally it is a remarkably pleasant place. Back in Viking days, there was even a series of beacons that could send warnings all the way from the Shetlands, probably in a matter of hours. My hunch is that the new era of connectivity is rendering it all the more vibrant - and is in many ways a geography more familiar to those living on islands than it is to many of us.
So the space was wonderful - still takes me a while to deal with the time. Having worked shit jobs with no vacation (but evenings and weekends emphatically free) and then jobs where the time was so flexible that work/not work has become a fluid boundary, I still don't quite know how to cope with holidays. I find I get very impatient with large blocks of unstructured time. Not sure what to do - my solution is to want to take long energetic walks, but I still have trouble stopping and taking things in. Or reading with any concentration. i always think I should think deep thoughts on holiday, write poems or somehow be creative once there is finally the time for it and mostly I just eat walk and sleep. And worry about not thinking deep thoughts, or being otherwise personally (as opposed to professionally) productive.
With that said, I did get 2-1/2 books read: Atonement by Ian MacEwan, which really is all that and a bag of crisps. there is much more thought to be done on several themes. The Orkneyinga Saga (memo to self: temperament not suitable for viking; seek other career options). I have also embarked on Luisa Passerini's Autobiography of a Generation, which is a remarkable book that seeks to understand the interactions between the personal and the political. While she herself is undergoing psychoanalysis, she is also interviewing members of the student movement in Italy, trying to understand the patterns and motivations for their behaviour. The two stories are presented in dialogue, two pasts being created.
For years i have wondered what a similar project for my generation would look like. I refuse to call them/us GenX, though that was part of it. It's part of the difference I note: the 1968 generation has no trouble embracing the title, embracing themselves as a generation - seems to me that part of the dynamic of GenX was wondering: are we really? who says? yeah, right. we're a generation. Reagan children, is the term I use to myself when thinking about it (borrowed from the exasperated sigh of a college-age debate coach, upon hearing the reaction in a room full of high-school students when he talked about socialist counterplans as a debate strategy). I think the phrase captures, among other things, the nation-specific nature of the phenomenon. I could be wrong, but I don't think GenX happened in the same way elsewhere. But i do have a hunch that there are relatively consistent ways in which a lot of us who spent our early 20s after 1989 are wacked. A specific relationship with consumer society, with politics, and with ourselves.
Or is ti just me, and am I looking for a way of explaining my own general passivity? One that would make me historically relevant after all.
As ever, not sure where to start, how to get to it. I thought for a while about writing an essay/indictment explaining Curtis le May 's role as an accomplice in the death of Kurt Cobain, but that sounded a wee bit too shrill dispatching of the elders. (Though fun as a mental excercise, no?). I might start by finally writing down why I think the film Marie Antoinette is a poignant and ambivalent farewell to the Reagan years.
Or I might just dither and never get around to it. Happy Holidays.
|
|
|
| Glory, reflected |
[Jul. 24th, 2008|09:28 am] |
This is very silly, and yet I am quite geeked about this.
Yesterday, I received a package in the post from a friend of mine in Hamburg, who is leading a project on the history of broadcasting in Germany. It contained the latest volume that he had edited. This alone I thought was cool: it is the part of the academic trade I find most rewarding (besides the whole 'free book' aspect of it): books by people you know and like. Cooler yet: within its pages, in two different chapters were, yes, the very first citations of my work in an actual print source.
So I do realise that this is icky that I am so excited by this. In my meagre defense, I can say that while my work has been relatively well-received in anglophone circles, the Germans have been remarkably quiet about it up to now, so it is nice to know that they were at least reading. (In the case at hand, none of the citations dealt with my deeper theoretical arguments, but no matter).
But really, it's just a big 'lookit meeee!'
Sad. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dervishjones's journal